U.S. Presidents &#8211; HistoryNet

“Fighting Joe” Hooker Literally Cleaned Up the Army of the Potomac During the Civil War

Rick Britton — Thu, 02 Nov 2023 15:40:49 +0000

For the Union Army of the Potomac and its commander, Maj. Gen. Ambrose E. Burnside, the early winter of 1862-63 proved extremely taxing. First, they suffered through the disastrous Battle of Fredericksburg, fought on Dec. 13. After the army retired back across the Rappahannock River, regimental musters revealed a staggering loss of 12,653 casualties. Nothing had been gained. It had all been for naught. Army morale plummeted, and desertions soared, eventually reaching 200 per day. Tens of thousands of men were listed as “not present”: thousands of others were sick due to inadequate food and the army’s abysmally filthy camps.

Then came Burnside’s infamous “Mud March.” In an attempt to flank the opposing Army of Northern Virginia out of its positions behind the Rappahannock, Burnside ordered an upriver movement via Banks’ Ford. It began on Jan. 20, but that night, the heavens opened up. In the following two-day deluge, small streams became raging torrents. Roads turned into muck-filled quagmires choked with stalled wagons, pontoons, artillery pieces, and hundreds of buried horses and mules. Drenched, freezing, exhausted—feeling as if the very fates were against them—the rank and file dragged themselves back to their encampments at Falmouth. Everyone realized the army was dispirited; many believed it was “all played out.” For the Army of the Potomac, the early winter of 1862-63 was indeed the Valley Forge of the Civil War.

Enter the army’s next head, Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker. Most often remembered as the bombastic commander who lost the subsequent Battle of Chancellorsville (May 1-4), despite outnumbering his opponent two to one, Hooker, nonetheless, possessed admirable administrative and organizational skills. And what’s little remembered is that—in the three months leading up to Chancellorsville—he did a fantastic job restoring the army’s morale and preparing it for the upcoming campaign. Maj. Gen. George Brinton McClellan built the Army of the Potomac, but Maj. Gen. Hooker rehabilitated it.

“The Handsome Captain”

Born in Hadley, Massachusetts, in 1814—the grandson of a Continental Army captain—Hooker graduated from West Point in 1837. Commissioned 2nd Lt. in the 1st U.S. Artillery, he first served brief stints in Florida, on the frontier, and as adjutant at his alma mater. During the Mexican-American War (1846-48), Hooker proved an able and courageous staff officer, winning three brevet promotions. It was in Mexico, too, that the well-proportioned six-foot-tall officer first became known as a ladies’ man: the señoritas there nicknamed him the “handsome captain.”

In California after the war, Hooker served briefly as assistant adjutant general of the Army’s Pacific Division, then, following a leave of absence, resigned his commission to work the land. Unsuccessful as a farmer, he moved to Oregon, where he held the position of superintendent of the territory’s military roads for two years. The last years of the 1850s found Hooker serving as a colonel in the California State Militia. When the Civil War exploded onto center stage in 1861, he raised a regiment of Union volunteers to bring east but was extremely disappointed to learn that California units weren’t eligible for such service. He was determined to travel east and renew his affiliation with the Army, but high living had reduced him to poverty. Thankfully, his friends—among them a San Francisco tavernkeeper—staked him $1,000 and sent him off by steamboat.

In Washington, Hooker presented his credentials to President Abraham Lincoln and 75-year-old Winfield Scott, the Army’s commanding general. But there was a snag. At the termination of the war with Mexico, Hooker had testified in defense of an officer Scott had charged with disloyalty. This had angered Scott, and unfortunately, Scott still remembered. Forced to cool his heels in the War Department anterooms, Hooker nonetheless witnessed the First Battle of Bull Run as a civilian.

Soon thereafter, in an audience with Lincoln, Hooker first complained that, evidently, the Army didn’t want him back. Then he boldly asserted: “I was at Bull Run, the other day, Mr. President, and it is no vanity or boasting in me to say that I am a damned sight better General than you, Sir, had on that field!”

Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside saw the Union Army of the Potomac through the Battle of Fredericksburg before dragging his filthy and dejected troops along on his infamous “Mud March.”

Made a brigadier general on Aug. 3, 1861, his commission backdated to May 17; he was first posted to the fortifications northeast of Washington City, where he drilled his regiments rigorously. In October, Brig. Gen. Hooker was put in charge of a 10,000-man division and charged with defending the lower Potomac River. This exceedingly dull duty involved primarily the interdiction of illicit mail and trade.

The following year, in mid-March, Hooker’s division was assigned to the III Corps of Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan’s Army of the Potomac. Landing on the Virginia Peninsula in April, Hooker’s men dug in opposite the Confederate position at Yorktown.

During the subsequent Peninsula Campaign, Hooker, now a major general, frequently displayed his aggressive and boastful nature—rashly attacking the superior forces of the enemy rearguard at the Battle of Williamsburg on May 5, for example, and later confidently messaging McClellan that he could hold his position in front of Richmond “against 100,000 men.”

Fighting Joe

It was during the Peninsula Campaign that Hooker received his enduring nickname. The standard tale was that a New York newspaper’s compositor accidentally set a telegraphed headline reading “Fighting—Joe Hooker” (meaning it was a continuation of a previous piece) as “Fighting Joe Hooker.” That story now appears apocryphal—several historians have searched archives in vain for said headline. “A reasonable conclusion,” wrote biographer Walter H. Hebert, “is that in some spontaneous manner it was applied to Hooker after Williamsburg.” Perhaps surprisingly, Joseph Hooker was mortified by the name, saying that people would think him “a highwayman or bandit.” (And, to debunk another nickname associated with Hooker: There’s no truth to the story that ladies of the night became known as “hookers” because so many swarmed around Fighting Joe’s encampments. The first known use of “hooker” for prostitute dates to 1845, 16 years before he became a public figure.)

Hooker fought at the Second Battle of Bull Run (August 29-30), and when the Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia crossed the Potomac River into Maryland—Lee’s first invasion of the North—Lincoln and a few of his Cabinet officers considered appointing him to command the Army of the Potomac. Postmaster General Montgomery Blair ended the discussion, however, with the blunt condemnation that Hooker was “too great a friend of John Barleycorn.”

At the beginning of the Maryland Campaign, Hooker was put in charge of the army’s V Corps, a sizeable 15,000-man force. Soon redesignated as the I Corps of Gen. McClellan’s Army of the Potomac, Hooker’s command fought at Turner’s Gap (on Sept.14) and the Battle of Antietam three days later. There, during the desperate fighting in the Miller cornfield, Fighting Joe’s divisions were shattered, the general himself receiving an incapacitating wound to the foot. While convalescing, he was visited by numerous government officials, including President Abraham Lincoln. Hearing rumors that he was again being considered for army command, Hooker—never shy about self-promotion—pressed his case by attacking McClellan’s generalship.

Lincoln’s Choice

Instead, of course, Lincoln replaced McClellan with Maj. Gen. Ambrose E. Burnside, an 1847 West Point graduate with a somewhat checkered battlefield résumé. Taking over in November 1862, Burnside reorganized the Army of the Potomac into four massive “grand divisions,” each comprising two army corps as well as attached artillery and cavalry. Hooker’s Center Grand Division, totaling about 40,000 men, contained Maj. Gen. George Stoneman’s III Corps and the V Corps under Maj. Gen. Daniel Butterfield.

Hooker fought at the Second Battle of Bull Run as well as at Turner’s Gap, but distinguished himself in action during the Battle of Antietam, depicted here. Hooker fought aggressively at Antietam and was wounded in the foot.

During the catastrophic Battle of Fredericksburg, Fighting Joe’s Center Grand Division was at first held in reserve, then sent in piecemeal. One of his divisions suffered twenty-five percent casualties in a useless assault against Marye’s Heights (quite possibly the Civil War’s strongest defensive position). On Dec. 13, the Confederates at Marye’s Heights—infantry sheltered behind a stonewall along the base of the rise, dug-in artillery on top—easily annihilated fourteen separate Federal attacks. Seven thousand Union casualties were needlessly lost on this part of the battlefield.

Angered over Burnside’s mishandling of the army, Hooker attacked him unsparingly, telling the Joint Congressional Committee on the Conduct of the War, for example, that the strength of the Confederate position had been well-known beforehand. There had been no excuse for the bloodletting at Marye’s Heights. Burnside, exasperated by Hooker’s numerous machinations—his denunciations, his flagrant self-promotion, and his call for a dictatorship to save the republic—drafted for Lincoln’s signature an extraordinary document, General Order No. 8.18. It stated in part: “General Joseph Hooker… having been guilty of unjust and unnecessary criticisms of the actions of his superior officers… and having… endeavored to create distrust in the minds of officers who have associated with him, and having… made reports and statements which were calculated to create false impressions… is hereby dismissed from the service of the United States as a man unfit to hold an important commission. …” Additionally, two major generals and five brigadiers, accused of similar military indiscretions, were also to be relieved from duty.

In Washington, Burnside presented General Order No. 8, along with his resignation, to the much-beleaguered Abraham Lincoln, asking him to either approve the order or accept his stepping down. Lincoln replied that he needed time to consult with his advisers. During those deliberations, several officers were considered for the Army of the Potomac’s top slot (although all agreed that Burnside was out). In the end—and despite the strenuous objections of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton and General in Chief Henry Halleck—Lincoln chose Fighting Joe.

On Jan. 25, 1863, news of Hooker’s appointment reached the Army of the Potomac, where it was fairly well received by the rank and file. They saw him as a fighting general. And, thanks to their fondness for Fighting Joe, they were more than willing to overlook his infighting, intemperance, and reportedly low moral character. Many in the army’s highest ranks, however, were not so sanguine. Two of the army’s grand division commanders—major generals Edwin V. Sumner and William B. Franklin—refused to serve under Hooker and were summarily banished from the Army of the Potomac. Burnside was given a leave of absence.

Fresh Veggies

Soon thereafter, Hooker received the famous Jan. 26 letter from President Lincoln. It opened with a listing of the general’s positive qualities—his bravery, his confidence, his ambition. Then the president admonished Hooker for thwarting Burnside at every turn. Next followed an incredible passage: “I have heard, in such way as to believe it,” Honest Abe had written, “of your recently saying that both the Army and the Government needed a Dictator. Of course, it was not for this but in spite of it that I have given you the command. Only those Generals who gain successes, can set up Dictators. What I now ask of you is military success, and I will risk the dictatorship.” The president then promised the government’s utmost support.

On Jan. 28, after a face-to-face with Lincoln in the White House, Hooker returned to his army’s headquarters at Falmouth, just across the Rappahannock from Fredericksburg, to take command. But, as noted above, the Army of the Potomac was in a deplorable state, both physically and mentally. In letters to their families and hometown newspapers, the soldiers grumbled, detailing their woes. One feared they were “fast approaching a mob.” Another, advocating the army’s breakup, wrote that they “may as well abandon this part of Virginia’s bloody soil.”

This image shows Confederate dead along Hagerstown Pike where Hooker’s troops engaged in a bloody battle and Hooker demonstrated his capacity for fierce leadership. When Hooker was wounded, President Lincoln visited him.

Despite the task’s enormity, the 48-year-old Joseph Hooker dove into his new responsibilities with a passion. First, he needed a right-hand man, a chief of staff. In General Order No. 2, dated Jan. 29, Hooker appointed Maj. Gen. Daniel Butterfield. (His first choice for the position, Brig. Gen. Charles P. Stone, was still under suspicion thanks to his bungling of the Battle of Ball’s Bluff in October 1861.)

Although not a West Pointer, New Yorker Butterfield—best known as the supposed composer of “Taps”—had risen quickly through the ranks and was part of Hooker’s inner circle, having led the V Corps in Hooker’s Center Grand Division. He possessed solid organizational skills. Retained as chief of artillery was Brig. Gen. Henry J. Hunt (although he was unfortunately limited to administrative responsibilities). The other staff appointments were adjutants and aides-de-camp from Hooker’s earlier commands.

Early on, Hooker tackled the problem most dear to the men in the ranks—food. Rations for an encamped army were supposed to include fresh vegetables, “desiccated” (or dried) vegetables—derisively called “desecrated” by the soldiers—hardtack, salt pork, and coffee. But much of this good food was being sold for cash by the regimental commissaries to people outside the army. The hungry foot soldiers—even some officers—simply went without. To counteract this profiteering, Hooker ordered that henceforth the men would receive fresh vegetables twice and dried legumes once per week.

Additionally, the new commander ordered the erection of camp bakeries, mandating that his soldiers be issued soft bread, or flour, at least four times a week. Commissary officers who failed to comply were required to file a written explanation. Thanks to this new system of accountability, the men quickly noticed an improvement in both the quality and quantity of their rations. “Whatever they thought of Hooker’s other qualities,” wrote historian Bell Wiley, “soldiers highly approved his competency as a provider.”

Teaching the Men To Bathe?

Orders were also issued to improve the vast camps around Falmouth. When first laid out in early winter, little thought had been given to proper sanitation. The foul odors that emanated from the countless log-and-canvas huts are best left undescribed. Now headquarters required the men to bury their garbage every day and dig drainage ditches around every cabin. Latrines were relocated farther from the company streets. Blankets and bedding were to be aired daily, and the canvas roofs removed often so that the sun, and fresh air, might enter. Unimprovable campsites were abandoned. Attention was also paid to the men’s personal hygiene: They were ordered to cut their hair short, bathe twice a week, and change their underclothing at least once every seven days.

Cleaning up brought about quick and noticeable changes. The army’s medical director, Maj. Jonathan Lettermen, reported that in February, cases of potentially fatal diarrhea dropped 32 percent. Cases of typhoid fever—which had run rampant through the filthy encampments—were down twenty-eight percent. By April, scurvy was almost eliminated. Under Letterman’s direction, army hospitals were aired out and renovated. New hospitals were built. Drunken surgeons were discharged. The ill and the slightly wounded were quickly patched up and returned to the ranks.

As the men’s health improved, Fighting Joe took steps to keep them occupied. A hectic daily regime of drills and inspections was reinstituted. Company, regimental, and brigade officers studied the manuals by candlelight and put their men through the complicated battlefield evolutions the following day. Of course, the men at first complained—one called the drilling “constant and severe”—but they quickly began to take pride in their improved capabilities. The Falmouth drill fields now witnessed large-scale reviews like those once staged by McClellan.

During these special ceremonies, Fighting Joe Hooker would smile approvingly as the infantrymen marched past him in columns of companies—the men in clean uniforms, their rifled muskets bright. “I believe that the army was never in better condition … than it is now,” noted one Bay Stater, “very different from what it was a month ago.”

Personal hygiene was a huge problem for many Union soldiers, as can be seen here in this undated Civil War photo. Like Hooker’s men, these are visibly grimy and slovenly. One man on the far left is using a knife to groom his toenails. Hooker revitalized his troops by ordering them to bathe regularly, change clothes, trim their hair and dispose of garbage.

Hooker went after the horrendous desertion problem with a carrot-and-stick approach. More than anything else, the soldiers wanted to visit their families back home. Now came a new system—the carrot—under which each company was allowed one ten-day furlough at a time. Additionally, President Lincoln issued an order granting amnesty to absentees who returned to the Army of the Potomac by April. Then there was the stick—programs designed to make desertion difficult and more dangerous. Up to this time, homefolks frequently assisted desertion by simply shipping civilian duds to their soldier boys. Now army-bound packages were under the purview of the provost marshals, and none was allowed past without certification from the shipping agent that it was clothing-free.

Under orders from Hooker, the Army of the Potomac now began stringently enforcing army regulations. Groups of soldiers claiming to be telegraph-repair details needed passes, as did wagons headed north to Washington. Each military unit was ordered to name and physically describe every member who was absent without leave. The outlying picket lines were greatly reinforced—the pickets themselves now ordered to shoot individuals refusing to halt when challenged. Men caught deserting were executed in front of their comrades.

Cheerful Spirits in Camp

Formerly called a “mob,” the Army of the Potomac—thanks to Fighting Joe’s improvements—once again resembled an army. “[C]heerfulness, good order, and military discipline,” wrote one soldier, “at once took the place of grumbling, depression, and want of confidence.” One new development that didn’t sit well with the rank and file, however, was the banishing of liquor from the camps. (And naturally, the officers were excluded from this regulation.) Now the regimental sutlers witnessed booming sales of such items as canned “brandied peaches.” At Washington, bridge guards started seizing five hundred dollars’ worth of alcoholic beverages each and every day.

The most significant structural change to the Army of the Potomac under Hooker was the breaking up of Burnside’s “grand division” formations (of two infantry corps each). As noted above, two of the four grand division heads, major generals Sumner and Franklin, had already departed. (Hooker himself had been another.) The fourth, Maj. Gen. Franz Sigel, took leave of the army at this time due to poor health (and dissatisfaction). Now, army headquarters would issue orders directly to seven infantry corps commanders. (The eighth infantry corps, Burnside’s old IX Corps, still fiercely loyal to “Old Burn,” was ordered away under the command of Maj. Gen. William F. “Baldy” Smith, whom Hooker considered a bad influence.)

While historians have called this reordering detrimental to the army’s success—after all, in 1864, the Army of the Potomac would be reorganized into fewer, larger formations—Hooker’s reasoning at the time appears sound. Based on his Fredericksburg experience, Fighting Joe called the grand divisions cumbersome, predicting that the upcoming campaign would prove “adverse to the movement and operations of heavy columns.” Grand divisions also added another layer to the army’s military hierarchy—meaning orders took longer to filter down to the frontlines.

Four of the army’s infantry corps were given new leaders: Maj. Gen. Daniel E. Sickles—another Hooker crony—assumed command of the III Corps; the V Corps head became Maj. Gen. George G. Meade; Maj. Gen. John Sedgwick was transferred from the exiting IX Corps to lead the VI Corps; and Maj. Gen. O. O. Howard eventually took command of the XI Corps. Four new division heads and nineteen new brigade commanders were appointed. Several of these new leaders were controversial, but nobody could deny that Hooker was breathing new life into the Army of the Potomac.

A huge improvement was now made to the cavalry arm. Under previous commanders, the much-maligned Federal horsemen had been frittered away in inappreciable detachments. Outpost duty, dispatch delivery, and the escorting of general officers had been their lot. Consolidated, they now became a powerful Cavalry Corps under the command of Maj. Gen. George Stoneman. Comprising three divisions of two brigades each, supported by a brigade-sized reserve, this force of over 11,000 proved more than equal to the much-vaunted Confederate cavalrymen at the Battle of Brandy Station on June 9. “From the day of its reorganization under Hooker,” noted an appreciative dragoon, “the cavalry of the Army of the Potomac commenced a new life.”

Expanding on an idea first concocted by Maj. Gen. Philip Kearny (who’d had his soldiers wear squares of red cloth), Chief of Staff Butterfield devised a corps badge system that proved immensely popular. Each corps was assigned a unique emblem—a circle, trefoil, diamond, Maltese cross, St. Andrew’s cross, crescent, or star—that the men attached to their caps. Following the colors of the Stars and Stripes, a corps’ first division wore badges in red, the second division white, and the third blue. The system fostered corps pride and was later invaluable for identifying units in combat.

Joseph Hooker’s leadership transformed the Army of the Potomac. Greatly appreciative, the enlisted personnel began cheering him whenever he rode by on his white charger. As one soldier remembered years later: “Ah! the furloughs and vegetables he gave! How he did understand the road to the soldier’s heart! How he made out of defeated, discouraged, and demoralized men a cheerful, plucky, and defiant army, ready to follow him everywhere!”

Rations of meat in barrels are prepared at a Union Army commissary store circa 1863; one man writes while another cuts meat and a third weighs provisions. Hooker sought to vary his men’s diet with vegetables to boost their health.

President Lincoln’s letter of Jan. 26, 1863 had concluded with a brief warning: “Beware of rashness,” Old Abe had written, “but with energy, and sleepless vigilance, go forward, and give us victories.” To Lincoln’s great dismay, however, Fighting Joe went forward and gave the nation the Battle of Chancellorsville, the worst defeat ever suffered by the Army of the Potomac. “My God! My God!” moaned the chief executive, his ashen face filled with sorrow and dread. “What will the country say?”

Under Arrest!

The country had plenty to say—especially when the losses, over 17,000, began to sink in. The New York Herald, for example, worrying about the battle’s “fearful consequences,” blasted Lincoln and his advisers for their “ruinous policy of underrating the enemy. …” And Washington was abuzz with wild rumors: Lee had destroyed Hooker’s army and was advancing on the capital; Fighting Joe was under arrest; McClellan would return to command.

Abraham Lincoln, however, decided to keep Hooker in charge. But when General Lee launched his second invasion of the North and Hooker got into a squabble with the War Department over the status of the Union garrison at Harpers Ferry, Lincoln replaced him with Maj. Gen. George Meade on June 28 (only three days before the commencement of the Battle of Gettysburg).

Despite the career black mark that was Chancellorsville, Hooker was sent west to Chattanooga, Tennessee, in command of the Army of the Potomac’s XI and XII Corps. There he performed admirably at Lookout Mountain on Nov. 24, 1863. The two eastern corps were combined in April 1864 as the XX Corps, Army of the Cumberland, and subsequently, under Hooker’s leadership, participated in the Atlanta Campaign. Passed over for promotion, Hooker submitted his resignation to army head Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman on August 27. “I will not object,” was Sherman’s reaction. “He is not indispensable to our success.”

Hooker sat out the rest of the war in Cincinnati, Ohio, in charge of the army’s Northern Department (which comprised the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan). The boredom of this duty—securing the Ohio River and the northern frontier—Fighting Joe alleviated by making speeches and wooing Olivia Groesbeck of Cincinnati, whom he married once the fighting was over. Hooker led Lincoln’s funeral procession in Springfield, Illinois, on May 4, 1865, and was greatly heartened that same year when the report of the Congressional Committee on the Conduct of the War exonerated him for the devastating defeat at Chancellorsville.

After the war, he oversaw two of the Army’s large administrative districts: the Department of the East and the Department of the Lakes. Retiring on Oct. 15, 1868, he spent his last decade traveling, attending reunions, and threatening to publish his memoirs. Joseph Hooker—the pompous, hard-drinking officer whose leadership, in only three months, completely revitalized the Army of the Potomac—died suddenly on Oct. 31, 1879. He was buried in Cincinnati’s Spring Grove Cemetery.

this article first appeared in military history quarterly

This Signal Operator Witnessed Nixon’s Withdrawals from Vietnam. What He Saw Convinced Him it Wasn’t Working.

David L. Anderson — Wed, 25 Oct 2023 17:32:41 +0000

On June 8, 1969, U.S. President Richard Nixon and Republic of Vietnam (RVN) President Nguyen Van Thieu stood side-by-side at Midway Island and formally launched Vietnamization. The goal was to allow U.S. operational combat forces to depart South Vietnam as quickly as possible before the next U.S. presidential election, leaving South Vietnam able to defend itself. Seven months after this announcement, I arrived in Cam Ranh Bay as a replacement headed for the U.S. Army’s 1st Signal Brigade. I was about to have a front row seat on Vietnamization in practice as a quality assurance NCO. Communication technology is an essential combat support function, which Gen. Creighton Abrams, U.S. commander in South Vietnam, had identified from the beginning as critical if South Vietnam’s Armed Forces were to defend their country on their own.

The short time projected for Vietnamization was inadequate for the South to build an effective national defense force with sufficient training to wage modern warfare effectively. Such a project can require years—especially when the local government’s social, economic, and political foundations have been stunted by a century of colonialism and nearly two decades of violent internal turmoil. From my vantage point in South Vietnam throughout most of 1970, these obstacles to rapid Vietnamization appeared insurmountable.

Insurmountable Obstacles

I reported for induction on Oct. 14, 1968, went through basic training at Fort Bliss, Texas, and received orders for advanced training at the Electronic Warfare School at Fort Huachuca, Ariz. Completing the high frequency radio operator course (MOS 05B) in five weeks, I remained at Fort Huachuca as an instructor. With controversy over the war growing, the Army was having trouble getting junior NCOs to reenlist. Instructors were needed. On Nov. 14, 1969, after only 13 months in service, I was promoted to Sergeant E-5. Near the end of November, the training company’s first sergeant called me into the orderly room, looked across his desk, and said, “Congratulations, Sgt. Anderson, you’re going to Vietnam.”

this article first appeared in vietnam magazine

I landed at Cam Ranh Bay on Jan. 6, 1970, with orders to report to Company C, 43rd Signal Battalion at An Khe in the Central Highlands. The 1st Signal Brigade’s clerk at the 22nd Replacement Battalion, a buck sergeant like me, modified the original orders. I literally went up the hill from the replacement center to the 361st Signal Battalion. I could not believe my luck. Cam Ranh was a large and secure combat base. In the evenings off duty, we wore civilian clothes, and there were a lot of creature comforts with barracks, hot showers, mess halls, snack bars, clubs, a big PX, and a beach just over the hill.

There was a problem, however. My MOS was 05B4H: high frequency radio operator, NCO, instructor. My personnel folder also listed college graduate, high-speed code intercept operator, French linguist (based upon Army testing and six semesters of college French), and a secret-cryptology clearance from my work at Fort Huachuca. The 361st operated tropospheric scatter microwave facilities, and the Table of Organization and Equipment (TOE) of this high technology installation that could transmit almost 200 miles did not include any slots for high-frequency radio operators.

Nixon (left) shakes hands with South Vietnam’s President Nguyen Van Thieu at El Toro Marine Corps Air Station in California in 1973. Nixon’s plan to rapidly decrease the U.S. presence in Vietnam also decreased the training time for the handover to ARVN troops.

The operations sergeant was on his third straight tour in Vietnam, all at the same job. We called him “Grandpa” behind his back, which was a term of respect because it sure looked like he ran the whole battalion. I knew virtually nothing about tropospheric scatter communication, but Grandpa was pleased to have me, mainly because I was a college graduate who could type and compose a complete sentence. I soon discovered that everyone in the office except the sarge were college graduates. He immediately put me to work as the author of various monthly and quarterly reports but soon realized that I had a more valuable skill—French language ability.

Vietnamization had created an urgent need for a linguist. The operations officer was a signal corps major with an ARVN signal captain as a counterpart. The ARVN officer was in the battalion to learn to manage this integrated wideband communication site. The American officer had studied Portuguese at West Point and didn’t know any Vietnamese. The South Vietnamese captain spoke French but little English. With no training as an interpreter and only basic conversational French, it became my job to help the two officers communicate.

In the 361st Signal Battalion, Vietnamization in 1970 hinged on an American officer mentoring an ARVN officer to take command of a highly technical facility through the hand gestures and college French of a sergeant whose expertise was tactical, not long-range communication, and whose French was better suited to translating Molière than to conveying military technology. The mentoring process was slow and not, I am sure, what Washington envisioned Vietnamization to be. As bad as the situation was for efforts to Vietnamize the 361st Signal Battalion across a serious language divide, the ad hoc process received a further setback with my sudden transfer out with no apparent way to bridge the language gap. The commander of the 1st Signal Brigade later acknowledged in his lessons-learned study that the language barrier hampered training.

A Daunting Task

Brigade headquarters at Long Binh refused to issue permanent orders assigning me to the 361st because my MOS was not authorized for that type of unit. It transferred me to 12th Signal Group at Phu Bai for assignment somewhere in I Corps, the five northern provinces of the Republic of Vietnam. On Feb. 9, I got off a C-130 at Phu Bai airport. I waited in the transient hooch at Headquarters, Headquarters Detachment, 12th Signal Group with my duffle bag packed. I could be off to any of the radio telephone/teletype sites the brigade operated in support of the 101st Airborne Division (Airmobile); 1st Brigade, 5th Infantry Division (Mechanized); III Marine Amphibious Force (MAF); 1st ARVN Division; 2nd ARVN Division; or Republic of Korea Marine Brigade. I could expect to spend the next seven months at a division or battalion headquarters, if I was lucky, or a small remote site if I was less fortunate.

As it turned out, I soon learned that I was going to be the group’s quality assurance NCO in charge of a small team of three or four currently being assembled. Col. D.W. Ogden Jr., the group commander, had created the team and its “communication evaluation” mission because, I was told, he was tired of complaints from the combat commanders (termed “customers”) about the quality of signal support from 1st Signal Brigade. The combat commands had their own signal assets, but depended on the 12th Signal Group to link their tactical networks to others in the corps tactical zone and from there to the Integrated Communication System [ICS], Southeast Asia and to worldwide networks operated by the Strategic Communications Command at Fort Huachuca. The technology of this vast system—sometimes referred to as the AT&T of Southeast Asia—was powerful. Through tropospheric scatter, line-of-sight microwave, cable, and other electronic assets, a commander could connect securely by voice, teletype, or data from a combat bunker to anywhere in the world as long as 1st Signal Brigade units in the field kept the complex system up and working.

It was a daunting task for well-educated and thoroughly trained signal soldiers with access to reliable equipment. Would the ARVN be able to manage this critical military infrastructure on its own, especially in the short time that Washington had allowed to accomplish Vietnamization? A new brigade regulation had created Buddies Together (Cung Than-Thien) to train Republic of Vietnam Armed Forces signalmen in highly technical communications skills. Units like ours were also expected to conduct surveys by special teams in each corps tactical zone to determine where American operators could turn over equipment and operations to the South Vietnamese.

My team consisted of an electric generator mechanic (another sergeant), a radio operator (one of my students at Fort Huachuca), and a draftsman. The latter two were SP4s and served as drivers or guards or were assigned other tasks. We usually traveled with the group’s engineering officer and the sergeant major from his office. The colonel had wanted a sergeant first class (E-7) to be the NCO, but senior NCOs were in short supply. He settled for me because of my education and instructor experience, and my rank was at least a hard stripe NCO. There were fewer than 10 E-5 and E-6 NCOs in the group headquarters. The team’s sergeant major (E-9) traveled with us primarily to back me up if the issues at the site turned out to be related to command or personnel problems.

Inexperienced Operations

The U.S. Army history of military communications in Vietnam describes the urgency of the task at hand. The recently completed Automatic Digital Network (AUTODIN) could transmit an average of 1,500 words per minute, but the tactical teletype circuits to which it was connected passed traffic at 60 to 100 words per minute. Signal operators experienced continuous maintenance problems with their overextended machines. In the summer of 1970, the Da Nang tape relay received 20 flash messages (highest precedence) in a 20-minute period from the AUTODIN. This signal company had to relay these messages to the tactical units on its circuits at 100 words per minute, which required about 20 minutes per message. This volume of traffic overheated the recipients’ equipment, requiring transmission to be slowed to 60 words per minute. As the official history records, “Besides such technical problems, tactical operators lacking special training on the operation of the new Automatic Digital Network were bewildered by its formats and procedures. The 1st Signal Brigade had to keep troubleshooting teams constantly on the road to help inexperienced operators.”

Author David L. Anderson stands next to a Bell OH-58 Kiowa helicopter used for light observation at the Phu Bai helipad as Vietnamization was underway. The quality assurance team usually flew to sites in a UH-1 Huey, but occasionally the author flew alone with the engineering officer or sergeant major in a light observation helicopter.

The group’s Operational Report-Lessons Learned (ORLL) for July and October 1970 recorded major emphasis on improved communications through quality assurance inspections. Working seven days a week, we were responsible for maintaining the efficient and effective performance of installations operated by 17 units in 5 provinces. The QA team conducted 57 site inspections in six months to improve equipment maintenance, operator efficiency, site operating procedures, and customer satisfaction. According to the ORLLs, “Partly due to the effort of the Quality Assurance team the high standards of customer service provided by units of the 12th Signal Group were maintained or bettered.”

The smallest detail could become significant when dealing with modern electronics. In northern I Corps the soil was red clay (red mud in the rainy season and red dust other times), which made it extremely difficult to establish a working electrical ground for the system. In some cases, poor signal quality or even interrupted transmission was owing to where and how deep the metal grounding rods were installed. Without this basic setup at a tactical location, all the immense technical power to connect the corps level and global system was of no use. It was a variation on the “for want of a nail” adage. In this case, for want of a ground, the message was lost; for want of a message, the battle was lost.

My job took me to signal sites from the DMZ southward to the Batangan Peninsula. Traveling usually by UH-1 Huey helicopters, we went to Camp Carroll (the 1st ARVN Division’s forward command post just south of the DMZ), Quang Tri, Dong Ha, Tan My, Hai Van Pass, Da Nang, Hoi An, Tam Ky, Chu Lai, Duc Pho, and Quang Ngai. Our work also included small fire bases and landing zones: Hawk Hill (5 miles northwest of Tam Ky), LZ Sharon (between Quang Tri and Dong Ha), and FB Birmingham (southwest of Camp Eagle, headquarters of the 101st Airborne, about 5 miles from Phu Bai). We went by road to sites in Phu Bai, Hue, and Camp Eagle.

The 63rd Signal Battalion operated this line-of-sight microwave relay at Phu Bai.

The Phu Bai combat base was spartan in terms of clubs and post exchange services, but its gate sign proclaimed it “all right” with two L’s for emphasis.

We tried to get into and out of a site (especially remote ones) in one day without having to stay overnight. On one occasion, because helicopters were unavailable and a signal problem at III MAF needed urgent attention, I went from Phu Bai to Da Nang in an open jeep along Route 1 over Hai Van Pass with only one other soldier to ride shotgun. That we could make that drive at all indicated that by 1970 the level of enemy activity along this key road had declined significantly. My sense was that the enemy was not deterred by the growing size of the ARVN but was waiting for U.S. troop withdrawals to continue. Unknown to me was the CIA’s Special National Intelligence Estimate of Feb. 5 that “Hanoi may be waiting until more US units have departed, in the expectation that this will provide better opportunities with lesser risks, and that Communist forces will be better prepared to strike.”

Phu Bai was a large and relatively secure base. It was not Cam Ranh Bay, but there was a sign at the front gate proclaiming, “Phu Bai is Allright.” It received periodic mortar and rocket bombardment, especially aimed at runways, helipads, and signal towers. Signalmen are soldier-communicators who provide specialized skills and defend their installations against enemy attack. Our detachment had responsibility for about five perimeter bunkers and had a quick reaction team in the event of an assault on the base. With the shortage of junior NCOs in the detachment, I drew the duty as sergeant of the guard, reserve force NCO, or staff duty NCO at least one night a week.

Vietnamization

Most nights were uneventful, but occasionally I was NCOIC during probes of the perimeter or other imminent threats. One occurred during my last month in Vietnam. Perhaps Charlie knew I was short, because enemy bombardments and ground probes of Camp Eagle, nearby Camp Evans, and Phu Bai increased markedly in July and August 1970. Actually, the enemy was testing the progress of Vietnamization and not targeting me specifically.

There were ARVN troops at many of our bases, but most of them provided perimeter security, manned artillery pieces, or handled supplies—not operating signal equipment. Similar to what I had witnessed at the 361st Signal Battalion, there were a few ARVN officers and NCOs shadowing American counterparts, but I observed little interaction or hands-on communication activity by Vietnamese.

Aware of Vietnamization goals, I wrote to my parents: “The Vietnamization program is really going on in earnest over here.… Even 12th Sig. Gp. is getting in on the ARVN training program. We have about 20 ARVN at various sites in the Group receiving on-the-job training on a buddy system basis.” In retrospect, my estimate of 20 ARVN signalmen over a five-province area suggests that the number being trained was woefully small. With the exception of Camp Carroll, an ARVN command post, I seldom heard Vietnamese spoken at signal facilities.

An exception came when my team worked at a line-of-sight microwave installation near Chu Lai. A group of American military and civilian officials appeared. There were ARVN signal soldiers at the site. A high-ranking U.S. officer asked the American signal officer escorting them how long it would be before the Vietnamese would be ready to assume operation of this station on their own. After a long pause, he reasonably estimated about eight years. Enlisted ARVN signalmen had an approximately sixth-grade education. It required two years or more of hands-on experience for American soldiers with high school diplomas to develop the technical knowledge and problem-solving skills needed for this military occupation. The Nixon administration’s timetable for Vietnamization and turning over the defense of the RVN to its own military was measured in months—not years.

Lt. Gen. Walter Kerwin, a senior U.S. adviser, had estimated in 1969 that it would take five years for the ARVN to be self-sufficient. Washington’s goal was to have Vietnamization completed by January 1973. My former unit, the 361st Signal Battalion, had been designated as a test of 1st Signal Brigade’s buddy effort to turn over the fixed communication system to the South Vietnamese Signal Directorate. That initiative explains the presence of the ARVN captain in the battalion S-3 while I was there. That unit’s 1969 ORLLs assessed that South Vietnam’s armed forces lacked the “broad scientific and technical education base…to allow takeover of the ICS in [a] short time frame.” This study projected a minimum of four years for the South Vietnamese to take control and more realistically eight to 10 years.

The 1st Signal Brigade trained ARVN soldiers at the RVN signal school at Vung Tau and through the Buddies Together program. Language barriers and education gaps meant that ARVN soldiers required longer training periods than Vietnamization made available.

As Vietnamization ramped up, so did U.S. efforts to provide more training to ARVN troops. Despite the prolonged U.S. presence in Vietnam, some ARVN troops showed dependency on U.S. forces. In this 1969 photo, a U.S. adviser assists a local soldier in adjusting his M-16 rifle front sight.

As my return to the United States neared, entire U.S. combat units were leaving the RVN. The 1st Signal Brigade’s primary mission of support for U.S. forces was narrowing. Gen. Abrams had wanted to keep a residual U.S. combat support element to bolster Vietnamization, but the Pentagon mandated sweeping reductions.

I left Vietnam on Sept. 8, after 1 year, 10 months, and 26 days active duty and 8 months and 5 days in Vietnam. The 12th Signal Group soon afterward relocated to Da Nang, as U.S. commanders consolidated their remaining strength and transferred their signal assets to the ARVN. American aid paid private contractors to operate the network as a stopgap to meet the South’s military communication requirements, but the days were almost gone when the U.S. Congress and public would pay the bill.

In my two assignments as an impromptu interpreter and as a quality assurance NCO, I experienced some of the problems with Vietnamization. Studies of combat support at the time and soon after the war frequently referenced what I personally witnessed—limitations on the effectiveness of Vietnamization because of language hurdles and lack of expertise on the part of the South Vietnamese to support modern combat operations. In an otherwise upbeat report on Vietnamization at the end of 1969, Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird singled out the challenge posed by specialized training as a “serious concern.” “More English language instructors and more trained technicians to man military and civil communications systems are required,” he admitted. He added that there “were simply not enough qualified persons in the Vietnamese manpower pool to fill all the demands for technical skills.”

ARVN perimeter guards stand at the Hoi An signal site in May 1970. As the author prepared to return to the U.S., whole U.S. combat units were leaving Vietnam in accord with demands from Washington, D.C. Responsibility for the South’s military communication network shifted from the U.S. government to private contractors.

The bravery of the ARVN soldiers and their ability to shoot straight were necessary but not sufficient for battlefield success, as Gen. Abrams had perceived when first receiving his marching orders from Washington. As a nation-state, the Republic of Vietnam had major structural weaknesses to overcome before it could field a modern military establishment.

Anderson went directly from Vietnam in September 1970 to a classroom at the University of Virginia, where he later received a Ph.D. in history. After 45 years of teaching American foreign policy, he is now professor of history emeritus at California State University, Monterey Bay, and a former senior lecturer of national security affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School. His twelfth book was Vietnamization: Politics, Strategy, Legacy, published in 2019 by Rowman and Littlefield.

This story appeared in the 2023 Autumn issue of Vietnam magazine.

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As US Troops Withdrew From Vietnam in 1972, This City Refused to Surrender to Communist Invaders

John D. Howard — Mon, 09 Oct 2023 17:30:51 +0000

Easter came early in 1972 and the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) came with it. On March 30, “Holy Thursday,” three NVA divisions stormed out of Laos and across the DMZ. It was the first of multiple assaults that struck not only the northern provinces of South Vietnam but also Kontum in the Central Highlands and An Loc, only 60 miles north of Saigon.

North Vietnam was “going for broke,” committing its entire combat capability—14 divisions and 26 separate regiments, all with attached armor and heavy artillery units. Enemy forces numbered 130,000 troops and 1,200 tracked vehicles, primarily tanks. Aging Communist revolutionaries controlling Hanoi’s Politburo believed the time was right to achieve a decisive military victory, topple South Vietnam’s government, and embarrass the United States.

As U.S. military personnel continued to withdraw, American troop strength was brought down to 69,000. Only two U.S. combat brigades remained—their missions were restricted to guarding airbases and patrolling the surrounding areas. Although the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV) listed 5,300 men as “advisers,” the only Americans fighting on the ground were a handful of men serving with provincial advisory teams and Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) divisions and regiments.

As a result of Vietnamization, battalion advisers were only authorized in the Airborne Division, Marine Division, and selected Ranger units. There were also battalion advisers, mainly NCOs, with the ARVN field artillery battalions.

Americans On The Front Lines

The term “adviser” was a misnomer. By 1972, advice was rarely solicited and when offered, rarely heeded. However, U.S. advisers often cajoled and encouraged their counterparts, particularly in dire situations when spirits were flagging. The presence of even a lone American adviser was a morale booster, as every ARVN soldier knew they would not be abandoned as long as one American was with them.

this article first appeared in vietnam magazine

The advisers’ primary role was employing the massive air assets President Richard M. Nixon had sent to South Vietnam. U.S. air power proved decisive in blunting the 1972 enemy offensive. Advisers routinely exposed themselves to NVA fire while working with USAF forward air controllers, identifying lucrative targets and adjusting air strikes to ensure bombs were “on target.”

Americans who remained on the front lines, especially advisers with airborne and Marine battalions, suffered significant casualties. Adm. Chester Nimitz’s famous quote after World War II’s Battle of Iwo Jima in 1945 was equally applicable to the advisers who helped turn back the NVA offensive 27 years later: “Uncommon valor was a common virtue.”

Early in 1972, allied intelligence personnel were watching NVA build-ups in Laos and Cambodia but had no idea of the timing of a possible offensive. When it occurred, the ARVN Joint General Staff (JGS) and MACV were surprised by its scale and ferocity. With fighting raging in three areas, military officials were unable to determine the communist main attack. The focus of III Corps, the ARVN headquarters responsible for provinces surrounding Saigon, was on enemy attacks in Tay Ninh. These were diversionary operations, masking the movement of three NVA units: 5th VC Division, 9th VC Division, and 7th NVA Division. The 5th and 9th were VC in name only; they were manned and equipped by the North Vietnamese Army.

The situation grew more tenuous on April 5, 1972, when those divisions—36,000 troops organized into combined arms teams of infantry, armor, heavy artillery, and engineers—poured across the Cambodian border into Binh Long Province. The immediate threat to the government in Saigon was clear.

South Vietnamese paratroopers march north along National Route 13 (QL 13), the main road from Saigon, on April 8, 1972. The troops are heading to the provincial capital of An Loc to try to counter the gains made by the communists when they poured over the Cambodian border a few days earlier.

Maj. Gen. James F. Hollingsworth, commander of the Third Regional Assistance Command (TRAC), urged Gen. Nguyen Van Minh, III Corps commander, to reinforce An Loc, the provincial capital. Hollingsworth, a 1940 graduate of Texas A&M University, was one of Gen. George S. Patton’s outstanding tank commanders during World War II. He led from the front and during his service in three wars he was awarded three Distinguished Service Crosses (DSC), the nation’s second highest award for valor, four Silver Stars and six Purple Hearts, plus four Distinguished Service Medals and 38 Air Medals.

Known as “Holly,” he was also a Korean War veteran and had served a previous Vietnam tour as assistant division commander of the famed 1st Infantry Division. Advisers revered him and were grateful for the air support he was able to muster.

A City Under Siege

The district town of Loc Ninh, a few miles from the Cambodian border, fell on April 7 when the NVA overran it, killing or capturing nearly 1,000 soldiers. Two U.S. advisers were killed and seven were listed as missing in action. Only 100 ARVN defenders and one American, Maj. Tom Davidson, managed to escape the battle and make their way to An Loc, which was 15 miles south and obviously the enemy’s next target. The 5th ARVN Division defended An Loc with three infantry regiments, two ranger battalions, and provincial forces.

James F. Hollingsworth.

If An Loc was lost, there were no ARVN troops to stop an enemy move on Saigon. President Nguyen Van Thieu issued a directive that An Loc must be held at all costs. The well-publicized order caught the attention of the communists, challenging them to quickly capture it. The pivotal battle for An Loc and the heroism of U.S. advisers there was a microcosm of the fighting throughout South Vietnam in what the U.S. press now called the Easter Offensive.

On April 7, 1972, President Thieu convened a meeting of his key advisers and corps commanders to assess the military situation; it was a grim session. General Minh outlined his circumstances and requested more troops to reinforce An Loc, surrounded by the 5th and 9th VC Divisions. He also pointed out the 7th NVA Division had cut the main supply route, QL (National Route) 13, into the provincial capital, isolating the defenders.

Because of the enemy’s proximity to Saigon, the president made the unprecedented decision to commit the country’s last reserve, the 1st Airborne Brigade, to III Corps. He also directed the 21st ARVN Division move from the relatively quiet Mekong Delta region and join the battle in Binh Long Province.

By the afternoon of April 8, the 1st Airborne Brigade, augmented by the 81st Airborne Ranger Battalion, was assembled south of An Loc, ready to fight. The 81st was originally activated as a reaction force during the days of cross-border operations into Cambodia, Laos, and North Vietnam. Now, it was employed as an elite infantry battalion. It was teamed with the Airborne Division because its advisers were part of the Airborne Division Assistance Team, also designated MACV Team 162. The brigade’s 2,000-plus paratroopers were tasked to open QL 13 into An Loc. Soldiers of the 7th NVA Division, 8,600 strong, had prepared extensive defensive fortifications along the vital supply route. The NVA easily stopped the 1st Brigade.

A One-Man Operation

With a stalemate occurring, Hollingsworth recommended a mission change: reinforce An Loc with the 1st Airborne Brigade and have the 21st ARVN Division clear QL 13. The paratroopers were needed because on April 13 the NVA kicked off an armor and infantry attack that threatened the town.

Late in the afternoon of April 14, the 6th Airborne Battalion, about 400 paratroopers, conducted a helicopter assault into an LZ near key terrain just south of An Loc. Two American advisers, Maj. Richard J. Morgan and 1st Lt. Ross S. Kelly, accompanied the battalion commander, Lt. Col. Nguyen Van Dinh, in the first lift. The high ground, Hill 169 and an adjacent feature called Windy Hill, was needed for an artillery firebase. It would provide support for the 5th ARVN Division because all its guns had been destroyed by incoming fire.

South Vietnamese tanks move up Route 13, 40 miles north of Saigon, toward besieged province capital of An Loc,.

Initially, the landing was unopposed. Yet the NVA reacted quickly and stopped the paratroopers from gaining the summits of the two hills. The advisers called in air strikes. Kelly, accompanying attacking troops, directed U.S. Army AH-1G Cobra rocket and machine gun fire to within 25 meters of his position, forcing the enemy to withdraw. It was a “danger close” call, but a necessary one.

As the high ground was taken, Morgan, the senior adviser with the battalion commander, suffered a severe leg wound. He needed immediate evacuation or would bleed to death. Fortunately, a U.S. Army Huey helicopter responded to Kelly’s request for a medevac. The pilots braved enemy mortar and artillery fire to rescue Morgan and five ARVN paratroopers who were also seriously wounded.

Kelly, a 1970 graduate of West Point with less than two years in the Army, was now the lone American responsible for the battalion’s desperately needed air support. The old Army expression “operating way above his pay grade” described Kelly’s circumstances.

The remaining battalions, the 5th, 8th, and 81st, plus the brigade headquarters, arrived on April 15-16. CH-47 Chinook helicopters brought in six 105mm howitzers and emplaced them on the high ground, secured by two rifle companies of the 6th Airborne Battalion. Maj. John Peyton, Morgan’s replacement, was in the airlift and joined Kelly on the afternoon of April 16. Peyton was only on the ground two days before he too was badly wounded and evacuated. Again, Kelly was a one-man operation.

The communists controlled much of An Loc in the early days of the offensive, forcing the South Vietnamese defenders into a small southern sector at the top of this aerial photo.

The North Vietnamese commander was not about to allow an ARVN firebase to operate in his area of responsibility. Within 24 hours, NVA artillery fire destroyed all six howitzers and its stockpile of ammunition. The battalions airlifted in on the 15th and 16th were ordered to move into the town and join the 5th ARVN Division defenders who were fending off major NVA attacks. The 6th Airborne Battalion was left on its own. Two NVA regiments with eight tanks began to systematically isolate and destroy the 6th.

Kelly used every air sortie at his disposal to keep the numerically superior foe at bay. The communist commander was determined to annihilate them, regardless of the cost. By April 20, the 6th Battalion had fewer than 150 effective fighters. Seriously injured soldiers died for the lack of medical treatment. U.S. helicopters only flew medevac missions for wounded U.S. advisers—so the evacuation burden fell on the Vietnamese Air Force (VNAF) helicopter pilots, most of whom were sadly lacking fortitude.

Waiting For the NVA

Supply shortages and the VNAF’s reluctance to fly caused morale to plummet. Having grown used to the robust support from the U.S. Army, the failure of the ARVN and VNAF to perform critically needed tasks was a shock to the paratroopers, including the battalion commander. Lt. Col. Dinh was psychologically overwhelmed and stayed in his foxhole, almost in a trance. Remnants of two rifle companies on the hills, less than 50 men, were forced off and escaped to An Loc. Eighty other paratroopers, who were not on the high ground, formed a tight perimeter and waited for the NVA.

Route 13 became a battlefield during the assault when U.S. advisers called in B-52 bombers. Here smoke rises from a bomb strike on May 19, 1972, as South Vietnamese troops fought to reach ARVN units and their American advisers farther north.

Kelly began to work what little magic he had left. He coordinated with the brigade senior adviser, Lt. Col. Art Taylor, and his deputy, Maj. Jack Todd, for assistance to allow them to break out to the south, away from An Loc. Todd called Kelly at 7:30 p.m. and said three B-52 strikes were scheduled just after dark to hit the concentrations of North Vietnamese threatening the 6th Battalion. U.S. intelligence had a good “fix” on enemy locations. The bombers would drop “danger close,” meaning less than 1,000 meters from the friendlies, the minimum safe distance from B-52 bombs.

Kelly’s cajoling and the news of the upcoming bombing strikes snapped Dinh out of his depressed state. He made the difficult decision to leave the seriously wounded soldiers behind and prepared the men to move. When the first 500-pound bombs began to fall, 80 exhausted men headed to the southeast, away from the enemy. Kelly led while Dinh, farther back in the column, kept the troops moving. The shock of three successive B-52 strikes and rapidity of movement gave the bedraggled force some breathing space.

Throughout the night and into the next day, Kelly continued to serve as “point man” for the small group. On more than one occasion, he called in air strikes on pursuing enemy troops. When Kelly found a suitable pickup zone, the adviser used U.S. air strikes to seal off the area and protect the incoming helicopters.

Finally, VNAF helicopters arrived but they only touched down briefly and several hovered a few feet off the ground, making it impossible for the walking wounded to get aboard. They were not taking any enemy fire. Without warning, they “pulled pitch”—taking off with Kelly hanging on to one UH-1’s struts and leaving 40 soldiers on the ground.

Threats from the battalion commander failed to intimidate the pilots, who refused to land again. Fortunately, the corps commander and Hollingsworth forced the VNAF to return the next day, but they only retrieved half of the 40 men left behind. Those 60 rescued paratroopers became the 6th Airborne Battalion’s nucleus as reconstitution began immediately.

On Oct. 17, 1972, Kelly was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for his bravery. Without his personal example, forceful urgings, and timely orchestration of airstrikes, no one would have survived. His actions belied his rank and experience and his professionalism saved the day.

Trial By Fire

During the 6th Battalion’s ordeal, the 81st Airborne Ranger Battalion was undergoing its trial by fire. It was lifted in on April 16, arriving with 450 soldiers and three U.S. advisers: Capt. Charles Huggins, senior adviser; Capt. Albert Brownfield, Huggins’ deputy; and Sgt. First Class Jesse Yearta, light weapons adviser. The unit was detached from the airborne brigade and directed to fight its way into An Loc and occupy positions in the northeastern sector of the town’s perimeter. The NVA had attacked several days earlier and gained a significant lodgment, almost to the center of the town. The communists had nearly reached the east-west thoroughfare that bisected An Loc, leading one American defender to report: “The bastards are almost to Sunset Boulevard.”

As the 81st moved off the LZ, Yearta was hit by artillery shrapnel but refused evacuation. An ARVN medic patched him up. Yearta, a hardcore soldier, continued the mission. At 36, he had come of age in the Cold War army and spent most of his career in airborne units. He was known as a “hard ass,” but the troops held him in high esteem because he was a fighter and genuinely concerned for their welfare. The Airborne Rangers of the 81st had an unbounded affection for Yearta.

On the night of April 22, the battalion was directed to launch a counterattack to eliminate enemy positions. Huggins was provided a Spectre gunship, a USAF AC-130 aircraft equipped with a 105mm cannon and twin 40mm Bofors guns, to assist the attackers. The Spectre had cutting edge technology sensors that allowed it to fire very near friendly forces, almost within the 50- meter bursting radius of the 105mm shells. A rolling barrage was planned with the troops following closely behind it.

A South Vietnamese soldier surveys the damage after the U.S. bombing.

Yearta volunteered to accompany the lead company so he could direct the Spectre’s fire. Not taking a chance that he might become separated from his radio operator, he carried his own AN-PRC 77 radio so he could maintain constant contact with the airplane. To ensure the Spectre gun crew could track the leading friendlies amid battlefield obscuration, Yearta continually fired small pen flares that the aircraft’s sensors easily identified. He adjusted both the 105mm cannon and the Bofor guns by constantly sending corrections, positioning himself almost within the blast area. The fire was so devastating the NVA was pushed back and original defensive positions were restored.

Later, Yearta was asked about the Spectre’s support that night. He replied in typical fashion, “Damn! They are good ol’ boys.” Yearta became a legend among the advisers for the pen flare episode and was later awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for his valor.

The siege of An Loc lasted 66 days and resulted in the destruction of three NVA divisions. It was ironic that the reconstituted 6th Airborne Battalion, still commanded by Lt. Col. Nguyen Van Dinh, broke the enemy’s grip on the town. On June 8, 1972, the 6th Airborne linked with the town’s defenders after fighting its way from the south. In mid-June, President Thieu declared the siege lifted and the 1st Airborne Brigade was sent to the northernmost province of Quang Tri to participate in a counteroffensive.

“The Battle That Saved Saigon”

The 1st Airborne Brigade and the 81st Airborne Ranger Battalion paid a heavy price for their part in what some journalists called the “battle that saved Saigon.” From April 7 thru June 21, the 1st Airborne suffered 346 killed in action (KIA), 1,093 wounded, and 66 missing; the 81st lost 61 KIA and 299 wounded.

The An Loc campaign took its toll on MACV Team 162. Nineteen airborne advisers began the operation in April 1972. Of that number, 10 were wounded and one, Sgt. First Class Alberto Ortiz Jr., died from his wounds. He was the first of five airborne advisers killed during the Easter Offensive. One officer, Capt. Ed Donaldson, was wounded on April 7, evacuated, returned to duty in An Loc, and was wounded again, for which he required extended hospitalization.

Five battalion advisers with the 1st Airborne Brigade and the 81st Airborne Ranger Battalion were awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for their actions in An Loc. In addition to Kelly and Yearta, DSCs were awarded to: Capt. Michael E. McDermott, 5th Airborne Battalion; Capt. Charles R. Huggins, 81st Airborne Rangers; and 1st Lt. Winston A.L. Cover, 8th Airborne Battalion. For McDermott, it was his second DSC, the first being presented in 1967 when he was a lieutenant in the 101st Airborne Division. With two DSCs, a Silver Star, and a Purple Heart, McDermott became one of the most decorated soldiers of the Vietnam conflict.

Amid the rubble of An Loc, a monument to South Vietnamese soldiers stands almost undamaged on June 14, 1972, toward the end of the costly “battle that saved Saigon”—saved for the time being, at least.

An Loc was destroyed in the Easter Offensive. Only rubble and burned-out communist tanks remained. The town was rebuilt and today commerce flourishes. One would not know that a climactic struggle occurred there five decades ago; there is no evidence of the battle. Several cemeteries are located just south of An Loc where the remains of NVA soldiers are interred. At each cemetery, there is a large statue and plaque dedicated to the heroism and sacrifice of the communist “freedom fighters.”

After South Vietnam surrendered in April 1975, NVA soldiers desecrated the 81st Airborne Ranger cemetery in An Loc that the town’s citizens had meticulously tended to when the 1972 battle ended. Like other ARVN cemeteries, there is no trace of it today.

During the 1972 Easter Offensive, John Howard served as senior adviser with the reconstituted 6th Airborne Battalion and 11th Airborne Battalion. On a 2011 trip to Vietnam, he returned to Tan Khai and An Loc. For further reading he recommends James H. Willbanks’ book, The Battle of An Loc and Dale Andradé’s book America’s Last Vietnam Battle.

This story appeared in the 2023 Autumn issue of Vietnam magazine.

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Thomas Jefferson, Grave Digger

Rick Britton — Tue, 03 Oct 2023 13:00:00 +0000

While a number of enslaved African Americans looked on, 40-year-old Thomas Jefferson, shovel in hand, began poking into the side of the large Indian mound. Spherical in shape and 40 feet in diameter, it sat on the flood plain of the gently flowing Rivanna River, six miles north of Monticello, his mountaintop home. Jefferson was standing in a ditch surrounding the “barrow,” as he called it, when he commenced. “I first dug superficially in several parts of it,” he wrote, “and came to collections of human bones, at different depths, from six inches to three feet below the surface. These were lying in the utmost confusion….”

Americans can usually rattle off a few of Thomas Jefferson’s titles and achievements. The principal author of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson, our third president, was the driving force behind the Louisiana Purchase and the wildly successful Meriwether Lewis and William Clark Expedition. But he was much more. Jefferson was a true Renaissance man, a brilliant polymath with an eclectic and dizzying array of interests.

Thomas Jefferson.

VIRGINIA: MONTICELLO. Historic Home With a View. Thomas Jefferson and his family were fortunate to enjoy this splendid view of the Virginia countryside north of Monticello, as captured in a water-color painted about the turn of the 19th century.

Of these, he called science his “passion,” and over the course of his busy life, despite devoting more than 30 years to public service, Jefferson made contributions to botany, paleontology, meteorology, entomology, ethnology, and comparative anatomy. He was also an amateur archaeologist, and in 1783, spurred on by a document sent him by the French government, Thomas Jefferson excavated a Monacan Indian burial mound. It was one of his greatest scientific accomplishments. “In applying his innate sense of order and detail,” wrote science historian Silvio A. Bedini, “he anticipated modern archaeology’s basis and methods by almost a full century.”

Born on April 13, 1743, at Shadwell, his father’s plantation in the Virginia Piedmont—the western edge of European settlement—Thomas Jefferson studied in private schools prior to his 1760 enrollment at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Va. There, as he later wrote, it was his “great good fortune” to study under and befriend, Dr. William Small, a disciple of the Scottish Enlightenment who “probably fixed the destinies” of his life. “[F]rom his conversation,” Jefferson wrote, “I got my first views of the expansion of science & of the system of things in which we are placed.”

It was in Williamsburg, too, that young Jefferson had an encounter that helped foster his fascination with Native Americans. In the spring of 1762, a party of 165 Cherokee from the Holston River Valley accompanied their chief to Williamsburg prior to his journey to London. Called “Ontesseté,” this chieftain delivered a stirring farewell oration the evening before he departed. Enthralled, Jefferson looked on from the edge of the native’s camp. “The moon was in full splendor,” he later wrote, “and to her he seemed to address himself….His sounding voice, distinct articulation, animated action, and the solemn silence of his people…filled me with awe and veneration, although I did not understand a word he uttered.”

Mapping an Embryonic Nation. This map of Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Delaware was first published in 1787. A 1753 map drawn by Joshua Fry and Jefferson’s father, Peter, was used to depict Virginia’s boundaries.

After college, Jefferson practiced law for seven years. Then, following service in the Virginia House of Burgesses, the Continental Congress, and the Virginia House of Delegates, he was elected governor of the Old Dominion in 1779 during the American Revolution. In October 1780, the same year he was reelected governor, Jefferson received a fascinating set of 22 queries—in essence, a questionnaire—from the secretary of the French legation to the United States, François, Marquis de Barbé-Marbois (who in 1803 would play a large role in negotiating the Louisiana Purchase). The questionnaire sought out some of the basic statistical information on the nascent American states, then embroiled in a war with France’s common enemy.

The Virginia copy had been forwarded to Jefferson by a member of the state’s congressional delegation. Query number three, for example, asked for “An exact description of [the state’s] limits and boundaries,” while seven inquired about “The number of its inhabitants.” Others sought out details on the state’s religions, rivers, mountains, flora, seaports, colleges, commercial productions, and military force, as well as customs and manners.

this article first appeared in American history magazine

An inveterate compiler of data, Jefferson was well-prepared to respond. As he later noted in his Autobiography: “I had always made it a practice whenever an opportunity occurred of obtaining any information of our country [Virginia], which might be of use to me in any station public or private, to commit it to writing. These memoranda were on loose papers….I thought this a good occasion to embody their substance, which I did in the order of Mr. Marbois’ queries, so as to answer his wish and to arrange them for my own use.”

Although burdened with the responsibilities of his governorship, Jefferson began working on his reply immediately. Unfortunately, the declining state of military affairs in Virginia for Jefferson’s last seven months as governor meant that he had to set aside the project that so sparked his enthusiasm. During this tumultuous time, he was forced to flee twice from Richmond, the new state capital he had established. And—after Jefferson and the legislature relocated to Charlottesville to escape the enemy—he was compelled to even abandon Monticello when a British raiding party rode up the “little mountain” and captured his neoclassical home.

Although Jefferson later termed this troubling period the very nadir of his public career, the termination of his governorship in early June 1781 did nevertheless give him the time he needed to focus on the French questionnaire. Organizationally, each query became the topic of a chapter. In December 1781, Jefferson had the first version sent to Barbé-Marbois, but he immediately began enlarging the manuscript—indeed, tripling the length—until it was published in Paris in 1785 and then in London two years later by John Stockdale as Notes on the State of Virginia.

An appendix in later editions of Notes on the State of Virginia included this statistical table listing Indian inhabitants of Virginia’s Colonial era.

‘Forty different tribes’. Jefferson began work on his famed Notes on the State of Virginia, in 1781.

Most of the information came from Jefferson’s personal papers, his large library at Monticello, and his numerous learned correspondents. One query, however, animated him to travel afield. It asked for: “A description of the Indians established in the State….An indication of the Indian Monuments discovered in that State.” After writing about Virginia’s “upwards of forty different tribes”—and compiling a table of their numbers, “confederacies and geographical situation”—the former governor tackled the query’s second section. “I know of no such thing existing as an Indian monument…,” he wrote, “unless indeed it be the Barrows, of which many are to be found all over this country.”

Jefferson penned that these were “of considerable notoriety among the Indians,” and that one stood in his neighborhood. He recalled that, in the mid-1750s, a party of Native Americans “went through the woods directly to it…and having staid about it some time, with expressions which were construed to be those of sorrow, they returned to the high road” about six miles distant. (While some writers claim that young Jefferson, then only 10 to 12 years old, witnessed this incident himself, it is much more likely he heard this story secondhand.)

These Native Americans were most certainly Monacans, a Siouan-speaking people who, in the dim past, had journeyed from the Ohio River Valley across the Appalachian Mountains. Up through the late 1600s, the Monacan Nation—a confederacy of like-speaking Native American tribes—controlled a vast region of the fertile Virginia Piedmont, including the valleys of the Rivanna and upper James Rivers. By the time of the arrival of Europeans in the Piedmont in the 1720s, the Monacan had long since removed to the southwest.

Monacan men stalked elk, deer, and small game through the open woods and sometimes pursued bison over the beautiful Blue Ridge into the Shenandoah Valley. Dressed in animal skins, and sporting wildly cut manes, they adorned themselves with necklaces made of copper they had mined. Much prized, the copper they sometimes traded with the Powhatan, an Algonquin people who occupied Tidewater Virginia to the east. The Monacan and the Powhatan also frequently fought.

The Monacan women raised crops of corn, beans, and squash in the fields surrounding their villages. Often comprising scores of bark-covered domed structures, these villages were surrounded by 7-foot-high palisade enclosures (a feature that made them resemble the English-built forts). One such town, Monasukapanough, had once stood near the Rivanna River in close proximity to the “barrow” in Jefferson’s neighborhood. He noted the connection between the two sites when he wrote that the mound was located “opposite to some hills on which had been an Indian town.”

To better answer Marbois’ query and to satisfy his own curiosity, Jefferson determined to “open and examine” this mound thoroughly. Prior to the excavation, however—in anticipation of what was later termed the “scientific method”—he posited questions he hoped to find answers for in the earth. It was obviously a repository of the dead, but when was it constructed? How was it constructed? Was it true that those interred were the casualties of Native American battles fought nearby? Was it the common sepulcher (or tomb) of just one town? This supposition came from a tradition, Jefferson wrote, “handed down from the Aboriginal Indians, that, when they settled in a town, the first person who died was placed erect and earth put about him, so as to cover and support him….”

When another person died, the dirt was removed, he was reclined against the first, and then the earth was replaced. (In this manner, therefore, a burial mound would grow outward from the center.) Another question—inferred but never stated exactly—was this: Rather than being related to just one Indian village, was this barrow a sacred burial place for an entire section of the Monacan Nation?

Interestingly, a theory at the time—popular among members of the nation’s foremost scientific organization, the American Philosophical Society, which Jefferson had been elected to in 1780—claimed that Native Americans were too primitive to have erected the barrows, also called “tumuli,” which had been encountered in numerous states. Instead, they attributed their construction to a much earlier people descended from either Phoenicians, Israelites, or perhaps even Scandinavians (think Vikings). These ancient “Mound Builders,” they theorized, were subsequently driven away by the barbarous ancestors of the Native Americans with whom they were familiar. Some of the Mound Builders journeyed south, they believed, and founded the Aztec civilization. While Jefferson was certainly familiar with this racist hypothesis, it is unknown whether he was considering it as he began his dig.

Unfortunately, too, the exact date of the excavation is not known. Concerning this important detail—and so uncharacteristic of Jefferson, who was normally minutiae-obsessed—his Notes on the State of Virginia is silent. Historian Douglas L. Wilson, however, who studied the original manuscript at the Massachusetts Historical Society, the “setting copy” for the 1785 Paris edition, has concluded that the dig “must have been performed after…the summer or early fall of 1783 and before [Jefferson] left for Philadelphia on 16 October.”

Native American Roots. Moundsville, W.Va., derives its name from the majestic Grave Creek Mound—62 feet high and 240 feet in diameter, erected in 250-150 BC

A restored soapstone vessel, found at the base of Buck Mountain, Va.

A rebuilt Monacan Village now stands at the tribe’s historic home near Natural Bridge, Va.

The circular barrow was large, 40 feet in diameter, encircled by a ditch five feet across and five feet deep. It had been 12 feet high, Jefferson observed, “though now reduced by the plough to seven and a half, having been under cultivation about a dozen years.” Prior to that, it had been covered with a small stand of trees one foot in diameter.

Restored Honor

Finally recognized as an official state tribe by Virginia in 1989, the Monacan Indian Nation has made considerable strides in reestablishing its ancestral legacy. Its headquarters is located on Bear Mountain, Va., not far from Lynchburg. For more information, visit www.monacannation.com.

Monacan Indian nation logo.

Jefferson’s poking around quickly established that the mound contained human bones. They were lying in disarray, “some vertical, some oblique, some horizontal…entangled, and held together in clusters by the earth. Bones of the most distant parts were found together, as, for instance, the small bones of the foot in the hollow of a scull…to give the idea of bones emptied promiscuously from a bag or basket….”

These were “secondary burial features,” wrote University of Virginia anthropology professor Jeffrey L. Hantman, “the comingled remains of numerous individuals” who had been initially buried elsewhere, “then moved collectively at designated ritual moments….”

Jefferson marveled at the number of remains he uncovered; the vast majority being skulls, jaw bones, teeth, and the bones or arms, legs, feet, and hands. Some he extracted intact, but others, such as the skull of an infant, “fell to pieces on being taken out” of the mound.

Next began the most commented-upon aspect of Jefferson’s archaeological endeavor. “I proceeded then,” he wrote, “to make a perpendicular cut through the body of the barrow, that I might examine its internal structure. This… was opened to the former surface of the earth, and was wide enough for a man to walk through and examine its sides.” Typical of Jefferson’s writings, this passage disguises the fact that he alone could not possibly have performed this labor. Surely, the “perpendicular cut” was dug by a rather large number of enslaved African Americans, perhaps as many as 30 or 40, whom he had either transported from Monticello or leased from a nearby plantation owner. These sentences, too, reveal Jefferson’s utter insensitivity to the site’s sacred status.

Now the amateur archaeologist was able to determine how the barrow was constructed. “At the bottom, that is on the level of the circumjacent plain,” he wrote, “I found bones; above these a few stones brought from a cliff a quarter of a mile off…then an interval of earth, then a stratum of bones, and so on.”

At one end of the trench he found four strata of bones; at the other, three. The bones in the strata closest to the surface were the least decayed. Down through the ages, therefore, the barrow had grown taller with recurring layers of bones, stones, and earth. Next, he was able to determine whether any of those interred had fallen in battle. Of the bones he pulled from the mound’s various strata: “No holes were discovered in any of them, as if made with bullets, arrows, or other weapons.”

What of the other questions? Naturally, Jefferson wasn’t able to determine when the Monacan burial mound was initiated, but—thanks to his methods—he was able to answer two others. For the following reasons, he wrote, it was obviously not one town’s common sepulcher: The number of skeletons it contained (he “conjectured” 1,000); None of them were upright; The bones lay in different stratas, with no intermixing; And, the “different states of decay in these strata” seemed to indicate “a difference in the time of inhumation.” This burial mound, therefore, must have appertained to a fairly large region of the Monacan Nation. “Appearances certainly indicate,” he wrote, “that it has derived both origin and growth from the accustomary collection of bones, and deposition of them together….”

Familiar Ground. James Monroe, the nation’s fifth president, was one of Jefferson’s prominent Charlottesville neighbors. Here, archaeologists excavate a section of Monroe’s original Highland plantation.

In the balance of his response to the aborigine-related query, Jefferson briefly mentioned two other barrows (one of which also contained human remains), presciently noted “the resemblance between the Indians of America and the Eastern inhabitants of Asia,” and urged the collection of Native American vocabularies so that those skilled in languages could “construct the best evidence of the derivation of this part of the human race.” He concluded with a seven-page table listing the tribes residing within, and adjacent to, the United States, their names, approximate numbers, and the locations of their tribal lands.

Ambitious in scope, Notes on the State of Virginia—with its double-entendre title—won for Jefferson considerable notoriety. In 1785, the year of its French publication, Secretary of the Continental Congress Charles Thomson, a fellow member of the American Philosophical Society, called it “a most excellent natural history not merely of Virginia but of North America and possibly equal if not superior to that of any country yet published.”

Wrote English professor William Peden, who edited a 1954 edition of the work: “The Notes on Virginia is probably the most important scientific and political book written by an American before 1785; upon it much of Jefferson’s contemporary fame as a philosopher was based.”

And no small amount of that fame was due to the “sage of Monticello’s” archaeological dig (the only such of his lifetime). Unfortunately, other than what was published in Notes on the State of Virginia, there is no other information about the Monacan burial mound. Jefferson left no field notes. Its exact location has never been pinpointed, although many individuals have tried, including professor Hantman and a team of anthropology students from the University of Virginia.

A Museum All Its Own. A collection of keepsakes central to Jefferson’s life is displayed in Monticello’s Entrance Hall, including his father’s map survey of Virginia and the mounted heads and antlers of American fauna.

Unfortunate, too, is the fact that Jefferson never mentioned refilling the trench. If it was indeed left open, the examined remains strewn across the ground, the Rivanna River, which frequently inundates the plain upon which the mound stood, would have washed it away within a few decades. Jefferson obviously believed that the benefits of scientific inquiry greatly trumped the barrow’s importance to the Monacan people.

All that being said, the dig was nonetheless a major scientific achievement. “The importance of Jefferson’s experience and his report of it cannot be overstressed,” wrote science historian Silvio A. Bedini, “for he introduced for the very first time the principle of stratigraphy in archaeological excavation.” With this discipline, examining the layers—“strata,” Jefferson called them—provides a calendar for determining the age of items or human remains contained therein. In his description, Jefferson “not only indicated the basic features of the stratigraphic method, but also virtually named it,” wrote German archaeology writer C.W. Ceram, “although a hundred years were to pass before the term became established in archaeological jargon.”

Most important is the fact that thanks to his excavation of the Monacan Indian burial mound—and the detailed account of his posited questions and scientific methodology—Thomas Jefferson became known as the “father of American archaeology.”

Rick Britton is a historian and cartographer who lives in Charlottesville, Va., in the shadow of Thomas Jefferson’s “Little Mountain.”

This story appeared in the 2023 Autumn issue of American History magazine.

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Tickets Auctioned From the Night of Lincoln’s Murder at Ford’s Theatre

Dana B. Shoaf — Tue, 26 Sep 2023 17:45:57 +0000

Boston auction house RR Auction recently sold two Ford’s Theatre tickets dated 14 April 1865, including handwritten details such as the prime front-row seat assignments. They are believed to have been used the night John Wilkes Booth assassinated President Abraham Lincoln.

On that day, the tickets cost about $0.75 each, but they just sold for $262,500, more than twice the estimate. Call it antique inflation. The tickets are very rare, and Harvard University owns the only known ticket from that evening.

The auctioned tickets are for section D, seats 41 and 42, which meant the seats were in the front row of the theater’s upper level and across from the box occupied by President Lincoln, his wife Mary Todd, Major Henry Rathbone and his fiancée, Clara Harris.

Theatergoers attended that night to see actress Laura Keene starring in the comedy, “Our American Cousin.” Instead, they were witnesses to an American tragedy.

Tweet! Jailbird Politicians, An American Staple

Richard Brookhiser — Wed, 20 Sep 2023 14:38:45 +0000

Donald Trump launched his third campaign for the White House amid a blizzard of legal investigations. In New York City, he was indicted for falsifying business records to conceal hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels. He was also slapped with two civil lawsuits: one for fraudulently overvaluing his assets; a second for defaming advice columnist E. Jean Carroll when he denounced her belated claim that he had raped her in 1996.

In Georgia, a grand jury pondered whether he had violated state election laws by fielding a slate of bogus Trump electors after Joe Biden won the state en route to the presidency in 2020, or by pressuring Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger to “find” the votes he needed for him to win it. The FBI wanted to know why documents labeled “Top Secret” had been squirreled away at his Palm Beach home Mar-a-Lago, while Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith grilled a raft of witnesses to his alleged attempts (not just in Georgia) to overturn his 2020 loss. Smith’s bag included his veep Mike Pence.

Donald Trump likes to define himself in superlatives: biggest, richest, best. But he is not the first politician to seek office under a legal cloud. For example, James Michael Curley, four-time Boston mayor and all-time symbol of the big city Democratic pol, got an early boost from a jail sentence. Curley was the son of poor Irish Catholic immigrants. Throughout his long career, he pitched himself as the champion of his ethno-religious clan and class of origin, steering gifts, jobs and public works to friends and followers (and kickbacks to himself). He proclaimed his good intentions in a rich, rolling voice that one drama critic compared to actress Tallulah Bankhead’s.

At the dawn of the 20th century, Curley won elections to the lower houses of the Boston and Massachusetts legislatures. But in October 1902 he pushed the politics of generosity too far: he took a civil service exam for a would-be letter carrier who doubted he could pass it himself. In September 1903, the impersonator was convicted in federal district court of “conspiring…to defraud the United States,” and sentenced to two months in prison. Nothing daunted, Curley turned the verdict into a campaign slogan. He ran for the Board of Aldermen, the upper house of the Boston legislature, that November, boasting of his bogus test-taking: “[H]e did it for a friend.” Curley was elected and, after his appeals had been exhausted, re-elected in November 1904 while serving his time in the Charles Street jail. “I read…every book in the jail library,” he recalled, “and I made a lot of new friends among the authors.” His flesh and blood friends propelled him, over the following decade, to the U.S. House of Representatives, and his first term as mayor of Boston.

this article first appeared in American history magazine

Another jail house office seeker was Eugene V. Debs, whose fifth presidential race was run behind bars.

Debs’ parents, immigrants to Terre Haute, Ind., from Alsace, named him after French novelists Eugene Sue and Victor Hugo. But Debs’ political idols were all-American: Tom Paine, John Brown, Abraham Lincoln. As a teenager he worked as a fireman, or stoker, on train engines; as an adult he became a labor journalist, a union organizer, and the perennial presidential candidate of the fledgling Socialist Party. Debs ran four times from 1900 to 1912, barnstorming the country.

One listener described the effect of his oratory. “When Debs says ‘comrade’ it is all right. He means it. That old man with the burning eyes actually believes that there can be such a thing as the brotherhood of man….As long as he’s around I believe it myself.” In the 1912 free for all between Woodrow Wilson (D), Theodore Roosevelt (Bull Moose) and William Howard Taft (R), Debs polled 900,000 votes for a respectable six percent.

The overriding issue of the decade became the World War (it was not yet called I). True to socialism’s international spirit, Debs deplored America’s entry: “the master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.” After a speech in Canton, Ohio, he was arrested for encouraging resistance to the draft and sentenced to ten years in prison. Debs’ concluding speech to the court was radical poetry. “While there is a lower class I am in it; while there is a criminal element I am of it; while there is a soul in prison I am not free.” Debs was imprisoned first in Moundville, West Virginia, then in Atlanta. So it was that he ran his last presidential race from the slammer. “It will be much less tiresome,” he joked, “and my managers and opponents can always locate me.”

Although Debs had the sympathy of non-socialists who thought him ill-treated, he polled barely more than he had in 1912, while his percentage of a popular vote broadened by women’s suffrage fell to 3 percent. Americans were tired of causes, foreign and domestic. New president Warren Harding commuted Debs’ sentence to time served on Christmas 1921.

Try and Try Again. Eugene V. Debs exhorts an audience. Debs ran five times as the Socialist Party candidate for president, and was in jail during his last effort.

James Michael Curley, after four decades in and out of office in Massachusetts, had a second stint in jail. This time the crime was mail fraud. During World War II, Curley fronted a firm that claimed to help small businessmen get defense contracts, while in fact it only helped itself to its clients’ retainers. Curley, indicted in September 1943, did not go to trial until November 1945. Late in the interim he was elected to his fourth term as mayor of Boston. “Curley gets things done!” was the winning slogan.

Twelve days after his inauguration in January 1946, a jury in federal district court in Washington, D.C. found him guilty. He appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, but in June 1947 the septuagenarian mayor was taken to Danbury, Conn., to serve a six month sentence. He kept up a brave front. “The guests at this hotel,” he wrote of his fellow inmates, “give me cigars, oranges and razor blades….I am fortunate to have friends everywhere I go.” But the prisoner suffered from diabetes and a heart condition. President Harry Truman knocked a month off his time at Thanksgiving. The recidivist returned to City Hall.

Politicians in humiliating circumstances can retain the loyalty of their supporters, and even win elections, for a variety of reasons. Debs and Curley both spoke for the aggrieved—burdened workers, snubbed ethnics. Their personalities, however different, conferred an aura upon them: Debs the idealist, Curley (in biographer Jack Beatty’s epithet) the rascal king. They were stars. But they sought stardom—or seemed to seek it—in the service of others. The others rewarded them with their votes.

Debs ran no more races after he got out of jail. He died in 1926, age 70, appealing for the convicted anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti. Curley ran for a fifth term as mayor, unsuccessfully, but won something more important: a fictionalized, and sanitized, account of his life as Frank Skeffington in Edwin O’Connor’s best seller The Last Hurrah. His favorite part, he told the author, was “where I die.” He died in 1958, age 83.

At least one of Donald Trump’s legal cases will never land him in jail. In May the jury in E. Jean Carroll’s civil suit found Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation. If their verdict survives appeal, Trump will only be out monetary damages. Even hard time might not end his political career. You can be in the government and a guest of the government at the same time.

This story appeared in the 2023 Autumn issue of American History magazine.

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Most POWs Want to Go Home—But After World War II, Some Faced Death on Arrival

John A. Haymond — Mon, 18 Sep 2023 15:52:49 +0000

When the Second World War in Europe ended in May 1945, the United States military had custody of a staggering number of enemy prisoners of war: 4.3 million total worldwide, with more than 400,000 held in prison camps inside the domestic United States. German personnel represented the single largest group of prisoners. However not every soldier in German uniform who fell into American hands—whether through capture, surrender, or exchange of custody with another ally—was actually a German citizen.

Between 1939 and 1945, tens of thousands of Frenchmen, Poles, Dutchmen, and Norwegians wound up in German uniform, either voluntarily or through coercion. Nearly a million Soviet citizens, ethnic Russians, Ukrainians, and Cossacks had served in the German military for a myriad of reasons, plus many more millions of captured Soviet soldiers held as prisoners of the Germans were now in American or British hands; it was they who would represent one of the thorniest problems among the former allies in the war’s aftermath.

Forced Repatriation?

Prisoner of war issues during WWII were at least notionally governed by the 1929 Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War, but the conduct of Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union demonstrated all too clearly the limitations of international conventions and laws of war. The Soviet Union was not a signatory to the 1929 Convention; Japan signed it but never ratified it; Germany was a full signatory. The legal distinction between them was largely irrelevant, because those three nations were categorically guilty of the worst treatment of prisoners of war of any belligerents during that conflict.

As many as 3 million Soviet soldiers died in German captivity. Japanese treatment of captured Allied soldiers was infamously brutal, with a death rate estimated at 27.1 percent among prisoners of Western armies (the mortality rate for American POWs in Japanese hands was more than 30 percent). Japanese treatment of Chinese prisoners was even worse, with a nearly 100 percent death rate—only 56 Chinese prisoners were officially recorded as being released from Japanese custody at the end of the war, for the grim reason that Imperial Japanese forces killed most Chinese prisoners outright. The Soviets, at the end of the war, held as many as 3,060,000 German POWs. How many of those men died in captivity is debated, but of the 1.3 million German military personnel listed as missing in action, the vast majority of them are assumed to have died as Soviet prisoners. More than 50,000 Japanese POWs perished in Soviet prison work camps after the war was over.

The end of the conflict precipitated one of the most controversial episodes related to international conventions on prisoners of war: the question of forced repatriation.

The 1929 Convention stipulated that “repatriation of prisoners shall be effected as soon as possible after the conclusion of peace.” What it did not account for, or at least did not anticipate, was how a nation should handle prisoners of war who did not want to return to their nation of origin.

At the Yalta Conference in February 1945, the Soviets insisted that all Soviet citizens held as prisoners of war by the Germans or liberated from German custody by the Western Allies were to be repatriated without exception. After Germany invaded the Soviet Union with Operation Barbarossa in 1941, the Soviet government announced a policy that labeled all its soldiers who fell into enemy hands—whether by capture or surrender—as traitors. Order 270 issued August 16 that year, explicitly stated that Soviet soldiers’ only option was to fight to the last. To be taken prisoner, especially if one was a commander or political commissar, would be equated with desertion and defection to the Nazis. Stalin supposedly said, “There are no Soviet prisoners of war, only traitors.” With that attitude in mind, Soviet insistence on repatriation of their captured soldiers did not sound particularly benevolent.

More than 800,000 Soviet soldiers had in fact changed sides once in German hands for a variety of reasons. After the grim years of the Great Terror of the 1930s and Stalin’s purge of the Red Army before the war, there was no shortage of Soviet citizens in the military who loved the Motherland but genuinely hated Stalin and the repressive USSR government. Stalin was especially unpopular among Ukrainians, Cossacks, and other ethnic groups who had suffered in the years following the Bolshevik victory in the 1917-1923 Russian Civil War.

Some senior Red Army officers, such as Lt. Gen. Andrey Vlasov, seem to have become turncoats for self-serving reasons, but led thousands of rank-and-file soldiers into peril. Other Soviet soldiers in German custody, faced with near-certain slow death by starvation and slave labor in prisoner of war camps, chose what seemed to be the lesser of two evils and signed on for what they were told would be labor battalions in German service, only to find out too late that they were deployed as frontline combat formations or as guards in Nazi death camps.

A Promise at Yalta

The problem was that when the Soviets at Yalta extracted the promise from their British and American counterparts to repatriate all Soviet citizens, there was no consensus as to who fit that definition. The Soviets insisted that persons from the Baltic States and eastern Poland, annexed by the USSR in 1939-1940, were Soviet citizens, but neither the U.S. nor Great Britain recognized that claim. Nor had the Allies anticipated the problem of what to do with Soviet prisoners who did not want to return. The 1929 Convention made no provision for that situation, and it did not specifically allow a detaining power to grant asylum to prisoners in its control who asked to not be returned to their country of origin.

As the war drew to its close, British and American officials, in both the civilian governments and military command structures, were confronted by this question: did the uniform a soldier wore determine the nation to which he should be repatriated? If a Soviet citizen fought in a German uniform and was captured as a German soldier, did the Geneva Convention say he was a member of the German armed forces and protected by that service as a prisoner of war, or was he a Soviet combatant who should be returned to his country of origin?

This photo shows a large American camp for German POWs located in Rheinberg, Germany, then holding no less than 89,000 internees. Many German POWs were held and used as forced labor by the Soviets for decades after the war.

Legal specialists in the British Foreign Office argued “it was the uniform that determined a soldier’s allegiance and no government had the right to ‘look behind the uniform’ of any POW.” Part of the thinking behind that decision was a desire to avoid reprisals against British and American prisoners still in German control.

Unfortunately, they also had to worry about the risk their countrymen then in German POW camps faced from their own ally, the USSR. As Soviet forces advanced in the east and began overrunning German prison camps containing American and British prisoners, Britain and the U.S. wanted to do nothing that might cause the Soviets to delay the repatriation of those men. Previous Soviet behavior had repeatedly demonstrated this was no idle concern. Anthony Eden, the British Foreign Secretary, told Churchill, “It is most important that they [British POWs] should be well cared for and returned as soon as possible. For this we must rely to a great extent upon Soviet goodwill and if we make difficulty over returning to them their own nationals I am sure it will reflect adversely upon their willingness to help in restoring to us our own prisoners.”

Even so, some of the language coming out of the Foreign Office in London was starkly coldhearted. As one Foreign Office official stated in an official memo, “This is purely a question for the Soviet authorities and does not concern His Majesty’s Government. In due course all those with whom the Soviet authorities desire to deal must be handed over to them, and we are not concerned with the fact that they may be shot or otherwise more harshly dealt with than they might be under English law.” This attitude did not sit well with many British military officers, but it became the policy of repatriations as the war ground to a halt.

“A Battle of Discourtesy”

The same debate caused problems between civilian and military leaders on the American side. In early 1945 Gen. Dwight Eisenhower grew increasingly frustrated with the lack of good faith cooperation from his Soviet counterparts on POW negotiations—the Soviets demanded much but conceded nothing. It eventually got so bad that Eisenhower suggested to the Chief of the U.S. Military Mission to the USSR in the U.S. embassy in Moscow, Maj. Gen. John R. Deane, that he should simply stop cooperating with the Soviets until they proved more willing to collaborate as allies should. Deane said this would be pointless; there was absolutely no chance, he said, of “winning a battle of discourtesy with Soviet officials.”

Statesmen in Washington also grumbled about the push to give into Soviet demands on the repatriation issue. Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson vehemently opposed the idea of “turning over German prisoners of Russian origin to the Russians.” He put it bluntly: “First thing you know we will be responsible for a big killing by the Russians. … Let the Russians catch their own Russians.” The U.S. Attorney General agreed on grounds of legal precedent. “I gravely question the legal basis or authority for surrendering the objecting individuals to representatives of the Soviet Government….Even if these men should be technically traitors to their own government, I think the time-honored rule of asylum should be applied.”

But like the British, the Americans were most concerned about the fate of their own POWs who fell into Soviet control, which overrode all other issues. Edward Stettinius, the U.S. Secretary of State, expressed this clearly in a communique in February 1945 when he wrote, “The consensus here is that it would be unwise to include questions relative to the protection of the Geneva convention and to Soviet citizens in the U.S. in an agreement which deals primarily with the exchange of prisoners liberated by the Allied armies as they march into Germany… we believe there will be serious delays in the release of our prisoners of war unless we reach prompt agreement on this question.” By “agreement” he meant capitulating to Soviet demands, but there seemed no simple solution.

The Soviets knew very well their British and American allies were vulnerable on this point, and they kept the pressure on in a manner that was nothing less than outright coercion. That January, U.S. Attorney General Francis Biddle glumly told Stimson, “the Russians have already threatened to refuse to turn over to us American prisoners of war whom they may get possession of in German internment camps.” That threat was very much in plain view when Roosevelt and Churchill signed the Repatriation Agreement with Stalin at Yalta the next month.

Asylum Would not be granted

By the end of February nearly 370,000 Soviet POWs were in the custody of British and U.S. forces in Western Europe, and a great many of those were taken while wearing the uniforms of the German military. In accordance with the Geneva Convention, Allied command had at first issued orders that forced repatriation would only apply to POWs and Displaced Persons (DPs) who identified themselves as Soviet citizens. That arrangement did not last long.

On May 23, representatives of the Soviet High Command and Supreme Headquarters Allied European Forces signed the Leipzig Agreement, which specified that, “All former prisoners of war and citizens of the USSR liberated by the Allied Forces and all former prisoners of war and citizens of Allied Nations liberated by the Red Army will be delivered through the Army lines to the corresponding Army Command of each side.” The operative word was “all.” Washington passed instructions on to its military commanders in Europe that they were to hand all Soviet citizens over to the custody of the Red Army “regardless of their individual wishes.”

Asylum would not be granted, not even for persons whose status all but guaranteed that they would be executed as traitors when they were returned to Soviet control. Mass repatriations followed, and by the end of September 1945, 2,034,000 former prisoners identified as Soviet citizens were given over to the Red Army, sometimes by use of military force.

Nothing in the 1929 Geneva Convention provided for the forced repatriation of prisoners who did not want to return to their government’s control, so the American and British decision to comply with Soviet insistence on the matter was not compelled by law or treaty obligation. It was, instead, an unpopular course of action driven by the need to protect their own soldiers from an ally whose brutality was in some cases nearly as bad as that of their common enemy.

Refusal to Release Prisoners

By citing the 1929 Geneva Convention in its insistence that Britain and the U.S. had to repatriate all Soviet prisoners whether they wanted to return or not, the USSR’s position was duplicitous in the extreme. The Soviets had refused to join the Convention themselves, but that did not prevent them, during the Yalta negotiations, from pointing to Article 75 with its requirement that “repatriation of prisoners shall be effected with the least possible delay after the conclusion of peace.”

The diametric contrast between the wording of that article and what the Soviets themselves did in practice was absolutely appalling. The Soviet Union kept nearly 1.5 million German prisoners of war as forced labor for an entire decade after the war ended. The last of them were not repatriated until 1955. “Fragmented archival sources,” as historian Susan Grunewald says, “imply that the Soviets primarily held onto German POWs out of economic necessity caused by the war’s destruction.” As many as 560,000 Japanese prisoners were held by the Soviets until 1950 under the same excuse. The USSR used those men to rebuild a national infrastructure damaged by the war, but such practice was directly contrary to the spirit, if not the actual letter, of the very international convention that the Soviets cited when it suited their purposes.

Soviet refusal to release their prisoners after the end of WWII directly influenced the drafting of the Third Geneva Convention of 1949 when it replaced the 1929 Convention. Article 118 (Release and Repatriation) begins with the sentence, “Prisoners of war shall be released and repatriated without delay after the cessation of active hostilities.” At that time, there was still no end in sight to Soviet delaying tactics.

The 1960 Commentary on the Convention discusses Article 118 in refreshingly simple language: “This is one of the most important Articles in the Convention and is intended to remedy very unsatisfactory situations. As a result of the changed conditions of modern warfare, the belligerents have on two occasions, and without expressly violating the provisions of the existing Conventions [of 1929], been able to keep millions of prisoners of war in captivity for no good reason. In our opinion, it was contrary to the spirit of the Conventions to prolong war captivity in this way.” It then explains in detail that the Geneva Convention (III) is interpreted to mean that forced repatriation is unacceptable, and that a Detaining Power has the right to grant asylum to prisoners it holds in any situation “where the repatriation of a prisoner of war would be manifestly contrary to the general principles of international law for the protection of the human being.”

Both interpretations exist today precisely because of the long shadow cast by Soviet policies on the repatriation of prisoners at the end of the Second World War.

this article first appeared in military history quarterly

Reconstruction Failed. Why?

Carl Zebrowski — Tue, 12 Sep 2023 13:00:00 +0000

Reconstruction is a tough story to tell. The promise was so great and the ending so disappointing. It’s hardly a surprise that it took a century and a half to open a national historical park portraying what happened. In January 2017, a site was established as a national monument and rededicated as Reconstruction Era National Historical Park in 2019. The location is in South Carolina’s Sea Islands, where Reconstruction can be said to have begun and for a long while succeeded. Rich Condon arrived as park ranger a year later, around the start of the COVID-19 lockdown. The temporary closure of the National Park Service site gave him time to acclimate to his new situation and to the touchy subject matter with which he would be dealing.

The attempt to reconstruct the South after the Civil War and the freeing of the slaves didn’t go according to plan. But what was that plan? What were the goals at the start?

Rich Condon.

Here in the South Carolina Sea Islands, U.S. troops arrived in November 1861. They drive out a large portion of Confederate troops and White plantation owners. What’s left are about 10,000 African Americans. They make up 85–90 percent of the population.

A lot of questions start to surface. The U.S. troops are being asked: Am I free? Can I go to school? Can I carry a rifle? There are goals of providing education, building schools. There’s the goal of eventually arming newly freed African American men. You have the start of the 1st South Carolina Volunteer Infantry, the first Black regiment to don the U.S. Army uniform. Things like land ownership and labor reform. All that’s part of Reconstruction.

What’s special about this site is that all that stuff happens here starting in 1862 through the rest of the war, when it isn’t really happening in many other places throughout the South. This becomes what historians have called a rehearsal for Reconstruction. All those goals are outlined here, and they attempt to execute them during the postwar period in many other places across the South. The success rate varies. Here, it’s a massive success. It takes hold and lasts probably the longest of anywhere.

How did the grand designs for Reconstruction go wrong?

For a long time, Reconstruction was portrayed as a failure. It wasn’t a failure. It was defeated. It was dismantled and defeated in large part by groups like the Ku Klux Klan, the Red Shirts, the White League—groups of White supremacists who did not want to see African Americans in U.S. Army uniforms. Seeing them in a position of authority didn’t sit well for people who used to call a lot of these men “property.”

Reconstruction takes root and is doing well for a while. In most places it’s lasting 12-plus years. If you look at most definitions of Reconstruction, people look at it beginning with the end of the Civil War in 1865 and the passing of the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery and ending about 1877, when Rutherford B. Hayes is elected president and pulls U.S. troops from the South.

Here we have a much broader definition. We start in 1861 with the arrival of U.S. troops and we extend it to about 1900, because even in the 1880s and 1890s, there are Black public officials being elected to office. Where it goes wrong is some of these more isolated areas like the South Carolina Upcountry, where you have the Klan presence—White supremacist violence and voter intimidation. In many parts of the North, White Northerners were losing interest in Reconstruction. All these are contributing factors to the process going into a steady decline.

In the end, what were the most significant changes, good and bad?

We see the legacy of Reconstruction in a lot of different places, even into the 20th and 21st century. Some of the good changes: African American land ownership. African American citizenship. “Citizenship” was defined largely by Black U.S. military veterans from the Civil War before 1868. Before the passing of the 14th Amendment in 1868, “citizenship” was not clearly defined.

The bad side is that at the end of Reconstruction, you have the start of the Jim Crow era, which lasts well into the 1960s. Here in South Carolina, the 1868 state constitution was a restructuring of society. It allowed African American men to vote. It extended public education to everybody, regardless of sex or race. Almost 30 years later, in 1895, a new constitution is passed in which segregation is codified, in which African Americans are seen as less than citizens and are largely disenfranchised. This was happening across the South at the end of the 19th century and in the early 20th century, and the ripple effects of that last much longer than people like to remember.

This is one of the newest national historical parks. Can you talk about how it came to be?

There was plenty of interest in the local community of having a park here addressing Reconstruction. Broad and diverse support ranged from community leadership to churches to average citizens. They have a vested interest in this story being told.

This site was established initially as a national monument through an executive order in January 2017, and it becomes a national historical park in March 2019. And really what that did was allow for the expansion of this story. It allowed for the establishment of the Reconstruction Era National Historic Network, which is operated by the park. We have national parks across the country that are part of this network. We also have sites that are not managed by the federal government that have a Reconstruction story to tell. It allows this story to become more familiar to people across the nation.

this article first appeared in American history magazine

How do you manage to maintain a balance in your portrayal of controversial subject matter like this?

We talk about the hopes and successes of Reconstruction, but we also talk about the dismantling, and that includes things like racial violence, attacks on African Americans and their allies in the South. We talk about the reactions to things like African American progress, to moving from the state of enslavement to freedom to working toward equality. I think we give it a fair treatment, which in other places it had not been given in a long time.

I’ll note that we didn’t have a lot of violent push back on the Sea Islands during Reconstruction. That’s because the population remains about 90 percent African American, so you don’t have groups like the Klan or the Red Shirts operating. You also didn’t have bridges that connect these islands to the mainland until the 1920s.

Can you describe briefly what’s most important about each of the distinct sites that make up the park?

We have three, you could say three or four, sites. We have our main visitor center in downtown Beaufort. There is a plethora of things we can cover here, one of them being African American financial autonomy. The Freedman’s Bank, one of the first in the nation, is still standing. We can talk about land ownership and labor reform. The majority of the homes and lots in this area are African American–owned by 1864–1865.

Out on Saint Helena Island, a 15-minute drive from here, we have the Penn Center Historic Landmark District. We operate a site there called Darrah Hall, and we also have an easement agreement with Brick Baptist Church right across the road. At Darrah Hall, education is the big story. The people who attended classes there at Penn School, who were enslaved just a couple of months earlier, were prevented by law from learning to read and write. This is their first opportunity to change that. Knowledge is power. That’s the last thing a plantation owner wants the people he calls “property” to have.

The last one is Camp Saxton, down in Port Royal, about 4 miles south of here. This is the site where the 1st South Carolina was recruited and trained for service, the first Black men to wear the U.S. Army uniform.

You learn, in a larger sense, how military service, especially for African Americans, is kind of this direct pathway toward citizenship. During Reconstruction, when the nation’s trying to figure out who deserves citizenship, 200,000-plus African American veterans raised their hands: we fought for this country and prevented it from falling apart.

Here is also the site where about 5,000 African Americans gathered on January 1, 1863, for an impartation of the Emancipation Proclamation. They’re hearing the words that declare their freedom for the first time.

This story appeared in the 2023 Autumn issue of American History magazine.

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Clothes May Not Make the Man, But These Commanders’ Personal Effects Are Instantly Recognizable

Jon Guttman — Fri, 08 Sep 2023 13:00:00 +0000

Like it or not, war can sometimes be a fashion statement. Among the multivarious uniforms that distinguish one unit from another, senior officers may indulge in the privilege of distinguishing themselves with individual touches—to be identifiable to their own troops, though hopefully not to the enemy. History records Hannibal Barca going to battle dressed as a common soldier, less conspicuous to his Roman enemies but still recognizable to his men. During the Napoléonic wars the namesake French emperor, Prussian Field Marshal Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher and British Field Marshal Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, favored the casual route, confident they’d be recognized by the right people when it counted. For every such low profile, however, there were extroverts who, aided by singular flourishes, went the distance to be unmistakable to all.

By World War II General Douglas MacArthur had his own formula down with this combo of crushed hat, aviator glasses and corncob pipe. These signature personal effects are preserved for posterity in the collection of the MacArthur Memorial in Norfolk, Va.

From 1943 on British Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery made his presence known with this black Royal Tank Regiment beret trimmed with gold braid. The beret is on display at the Imperial War Museum in London.

Reminiscent of the way Roman centurions distinguished themselves with transversely aligned crests on their helmets, Napoléon Bonaparte wore his bicorne hat (like this one in the collection of Berlin’s German Historical Museum) ear to ear across his head.

After being persuaded to quit the field at Mollwitz on April 10, 1741—and almost losing the battle as a result—Prussian King Frederick the Great made a point of always accompanying his men into the fray. At least three of his uniform coats have been preserved, including this one, also in Berlin’s German Historical Museum.

Theodore Roosevelt was already making a name for himself and his pince-nez spectacles by 1898 when he added the headgear of the 1st U.S. Volunteer Cavalry “Rough Riders” to his trappings. This slouch hat of the “Cowboy President” hangs at New York’s Sagamore Hill National Historic Site.

When rendering this 1772 portrait of then Colonel George Washington—the earliest known depiction of the future president—Charles Willson Peale captured the hilt of this sword now preserved at Mount Vernon, Va. Washington is believed to have worn the sword when he resigned his commission as commander in chief in Annapolis, Md., in 1783 and when inaugurated on April 30, 1789.

On May 14, 1916, during Brig. Gen. John J. Pershing’s pursuit of Pancho Villa into Mexico, 2nd Lt. George S. Patton Jr. used this ivory-handled .45-caliber Colt Single Action Army revolver in a gun-fight with three Villistas and claimed two of them. Patton’s “Peacemaker,” with twin notches on the grip, is preserved in the General George Patton Museum of Leadership at Fort Knox, Ken.

Clotheshorse George Armstrong Custer made an impression during the Civil War with his far-from-standard-issue black velvet uniform and continued to dress as he pleased on the frontier as lieutenant colonel of the 7th U.S. Cavalry Regiment. In his wardrobe was this buckskin coat, on display at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.

When assigned to the trenches near Ploegsteert, Belgium, in 1915–16, Lt. Col. Winston Churchill of the 6th Royal Scots Fusiliers took to wearing a French Adrian helmet. When visiting the Western Front as World War II British prime minister, Churchill relied instead on this Mark II Brodie steel helmet (whereabouts unknown).

Free French General Charles de Gaulle’s kepi, preserved in the Musée de l’Ordre de la Libération in Paris, kept him in the Allied public eye from 1941 to ’44.

Major General William Tecumseh Sherman’s campaign hat, also on display at the National Museum of American History, reflects 1858 Army regulations with its gold general’s cord and silver “U.S.” on black velvet.

This story appeared in the 2023 Autumn issue of Military History magazine.

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Emancipation Proclamation, One of America’s Most Important Documents, On Display

Melissa A. Winn — Thu, 31 Aug 2023 12:28:00 +0000

Archivist of the United States Dr. Colleen Shogan announced in June that the National Archives will place the Emancipation Proclamation on permanent display in the Rotunda of the National Archives Building in Washington, D.C.

The intent is for the Emancipation Proclamation to be permanently displayed in the Rotunda along with the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, and the Bill of Rights.

“When President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, he wrote that ‘all persons held as slaves within said designated States, and parts of States, are, and henceforward shall be free,’’’ Shogan quoted. “Although the full privileges of freedom were not immediately bestowed upon all Americans with Lincoln’s order, I am proud that the National Archives will enshrine this seminal document for public display adjacent to our nation’s founding documents. Together, they tell a more comprehensive story of the history of all Americans and document progress in our nation’s continuous growth toward a more perfect Union,” she said.

The National Archives will commence an assessment to determine the best display environment considering the condition and importance of the original document. The current plan for display calls for showing one side of the Emancipation Proclamation, a double-sided five-page document, alongside facsimiles of the reverse pages. The original pages on display will be rotated on a regular basis to limit light exposure.

In 1814 the British Stymied an American Attempt to Invade Canada. They Were Stopped at Lundy’s Lane.

William John Shepherd — Fri, 25 Aug 2023 12:51:00 +0000

The War of 1812 was a hard-fought oddity that formally ended as a tie on Christmas Eve 1814, despite Andrew Jackson’s decisive, reputation-making victory 15 days later at New Orleans. The war witnessed the humiliating burning of Washington by the British, as well as the near miraculous salvation of Baltimore, memorialized in the verses of Francis Scott Key’s “Star-Spangled Banner,” the United States’ future national anthem. But the war’s most sustained fighting played out in three successive, highly contested and largely overshadowed campaigns along the U.S.-Canadian border and major waterways, including the Great Lakes—from Detroit in the west to Plattsburgh, on Lake Champlain, in the east.

A tempting target for the land-hungry new republic, British North America (largely comprising the present-day Canadian provinces of Ontario and Quebec) was the subject of repeated American invasion attempts, the last being the 1814 Niagara campaign. Scarcely a half century earlier the British themselves had invaded north to pluck the region from the French. This latest U.S. attempt to supplant the British was largely decided by the outcome of the Battle of Lundy’s Lane, fought that July 25 near that iconic North American cataract Niagara Falls.

this article first appeared in Military History magazine

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The capture of British North America would represent a powerful bargaining chip in the ongoing war, thus on July 3, 1814, the Americans again invaded, crossing the Niagara River between Lakes Erie and Ontario. After initial successes at Fort Erie and the Battle of Chippawa, American Maj. Gen. Jacob Brown bivouacked his nearly 2,800 men with eight cannons at Queenston, just downstream of the falls, before withdrawing upstream on July 24 to Chippawa to consolidate his forces and supply line. Meanwhile, British Maj. Gen. Phineas Riall, with a mixed force of about 2,200 British and 850 Canadian Regulars supported by 500 or more militia and Indian allies, advanced along Lundy’s Lane, a portage road crossing the farm of the namesake refugee Loyalist from Pennsylvania. It afforded an excellent tactical position, skirting a rise with commanding views and flanked on the east by the river. Riall led from the center of his line, where he deployed his ordnance—two 24-pounders, two 6-pounders and one 5.5-inch howitzer, plus 12-pounder Congreve rockets of the Royal Marines.

The next morning, July 25, Lt. Gen. Gordon Drummond, the lieutenant governor of Upper Canada, arrived to take command of British and Canadian forces. Meanwhile, Brown again advanced north. Riall ordered a withdrawal, but Drummond countermanded his order. Around 6 p.m. the American vanguard arrived on the field, and Brig. Gen. Winfield Scott immediately sent his Regulars against the British center. Though Riall’s artillery gave them a beating, one of Scott’s regiments managed to flank the British left, forcing a retreat and capturing Riall, who’d been wounded. Drummond realigned his troops to meet the threat, but he left his artillery exposed. Though dusk was approaching and Scott had suffered heavy casualties, Brown pressed the attack with the recently arrived main force of two brigades. With the British distracted by action on their right, the Americans captured the British guns and drove the enemy off the rise. Farther down the line Brown’s men also forced back the British and Canadian forces.

Drummond Hill Cemetery in Niagara Falls, Ontario.

As the Americans consolidated the high ground and brought up their own artillery, Drummond—who, like Riall, had been wounded—resolved to recapture his guns. Fresh frontal assaults against the position were repelled with heavy losses on both sides. In the dark and confusion Scott led a charge against the British center, taking heavy fire and being himself wounded. Fighting lasted well into the night, but eventually the badly mauled opponents broke off. By then Brown, too, had been wounded. With water and ammunition running low, he ordered a withdrawal uncontested by the exhausted enemy.

Though tactically a draw, the battle represented a British strategic victory, as Brown withdrew across the border, ending the American invasion of Canada. It cost the British and Canadians 84 killed, 559 wounded, 169 captured and 55 missing, while the Americans tallied 171 killed, 572 wounded and 117 missing or captured. Brown and Scott recovered from their wounds, each in turn becoming the commanding general of the U.S. Army, the latter distinguishing himself in the Mexican War in 1847 and originating the famed Anaconda Plan to strangle the Confederacy in 1861. Drummond and Riall also recovered, ultimately departing for Britain and the Caribbean, respectively. The war itself ended largely status quo, while the three participant nations engaged in no further hostilities, later banding together as allies in two world wars and a cold war through present.

Today the City of Niagara Falls Museum offers walking tours of the battlefield, which is preserved as a national historic site. It centers on Drummond Hill Cemetery, in which many of the dead of both sides rest.

This story appeared in the 2023 Autumn issue of Military History magazine.

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Glamorized by Hollywood, Merrill’s Marauders Faced a Brutal Reality in Burma

Gavin Mortimer — Mon, 21 Aug 2023 16:50:19 +0000

When British Prime Minister Winston Churchill arrived at the Quebec Conference (code-name QUADRANT) in August 1943, he had a special guest with him. He was a small intense, rather odd-looking man, as Gen. Henry H. “Hap” Arnold, commander of the United States Army Air Forces, recalled: “You took one look at that face, like the face of a pale Indian chieftain, topping the uniform still smelling of jungle and sweat and war and you thought ‘Hell, this man is serious’.”

Brig. Orde Wingate had spent the first two months of 1943 in the Burma jungle, leading a guerrilla campaign against the Japanese that achieved little in terms of material damage: a few bridges blown, some railway lines cut and a few dozen enemy soldiers killed. The real significance of what Wingate and his 3,000 Chindits had achieved was psychological: they had attacked the vaunted Japanese army in its own territory.

The exploits of the British Special Forces unit were splashed across American newspapers, with the Ogden Standard-Examiner calling it “one of the greatest epics of the war” and the Waterloo Daily Courier hailing Wingate for his innovation in using aircraft for resupply. “Cuttingan army off from its base and penetrating deep into enemy territory is an exceedingly dangerous maneuver,” said the paper. “But the ability to summon supplies by radio and receive them from the air makes such a maneuver more feasible. It may be that the Wingate expedition in Burma is only the forerunner of a new kind of warfare.”

Going Behind Enemy Lines

Churchill took the 40-year-old Wingate to the Quebec Conference for exactly that reason: to show to his American allies that a new kind of warfare had been launched in Burma, what Wingate called “Long Range Penetration.” The brigadier addressed the American delegation on Aug. 17, and told them in his conclusion that “long range groups should be used as an essential part of the plan of conquest to create a situation leading to the advance of our main forces.”

The next day Wingate had an audience with Churchill and President Franklin D. Roosevelt. FDR was so impressed that he authorized the deployment of American ground troops in Burma for the first time.

Frank Merrill (center) was placed in command of the famous unit; his physical frailty proved problematic, yet he made up for this with mental acuity.

The official telegram of authorization from Washington was sent Aug. 31 to Lt. Gen. Joseph Stilwell. In February 1942 Stilwell had been posted to Burma as head of a small U.S. military mission to help train the Chinese army. It had not gone well. Stilwell and his men had been forced to flee the advancing Japanese on foot, trekking 140 miles north to India. In 1943 he was back in the China Burma India Theater, in charge of Northern Combat Area Command. Stilwell’s instructions were to recruit a total of 2,830 officers and men, all of whom had to be volunteers and “of a high state of physical ruggedness.” The force—codenamed “Galahad”—needed to be ready for combat deployment in February 1944: “Only 3,000, but the entering wedge,” Stilwell wrote in his diary on September 2. “Can we use them! And how!” Stilwell’s triumphalism was short-lived. On learning that Galahad would be under the command of Wingate–a man he considered (as others did), “an exhibitionist”—he raged: “That is enough to discourage Christ.”

On New Year’s Day 1944 General Order Number One redesignated Galahad the 5307th Composite Regiment (Provisional). As one of their officers quipped: “Where’d they ever get such a number? It sounds like a street address in Los Angeles.” That wasn’t the only change afoot.

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The 3,000 Americans had arrived in India by troopship from San Francisco at the end of October 1943. They established a base at Camp Deogarh and that autumn they had been driven hard by their two commanding officers, Lt-Cols. Francis Brink and Charles N. Hunter. They had also benefited from instruction from Wingate’s Chindits, who were camped nearby and training for a second operation behind the lines in Burma.

“The Chindits were really tough guys, they put us through our paces,” recalled Bernard Martin, one of the American volunteers. “We went on these long marches with 50lbs on our back, and sometimes in the middle of the night they would start firing their weapons shouting ‘we’re the enemy, we’re the enemy!’. We had to react. They taught us well.”

Stilwell meanwhile was preoccupied with planning an offensive against the Japanese in Burma. On Dec. 18 Chiang Kai‐shek, China’s Generalissimo, agreed to allow him to command the 22nd and 38th Chinese divisions in the imminent invasion, the first time an American would lead Chinese soldiers into battle.

It was a three-pronged invasion. The Chinese Y [Yoke] Force would push into north-east Burma, and the British IV Corps would attack from the West across the Chindwin River. The third thrust would come from Stilwell’s two Chinese divisions, attacking down the middle. Stilwell’s force would be up against the elite Japanese 18th Division under the command of Lt. Gen. Shinichi Tanaka.

The offensive was launched on Dec. 24, 1943. The fighting was intense. In the first week Stilwell’s two Chinese Divisions lost 750 men killed or wounded, but they pushed back the Japanese. Emboldened by his initial gains, Stilwell demanded of Adm. Lord Louis Mountbatten, Supreme Allied Commander South East Asia Command, that the 3,000 Americans of Galahad be placed under his direct command. Mountbatten gave Stilwell his wish at the Delhi Conference on Dec. 31.

New Leaders

Stilwell wasted no time in stamping his mark on his new force. As well as changing its name, he also changed its command, dismissing Brink and demoting Hunter to the second-in-command. The new C.O was announced on Jan. 4: 40-year-old Brig. Gen. Frank Merrill. It was a contentious decision, not least because Merrill was not physically robust, and Stilwell knew it. Merrill had been part of his military mission to Burma in 1942 and had collapsed with heart trouble during the retreat to India. Hunter was a combat soldier and his own man; Merrill was neither. What he was, however, was a yes-man, which was why Stilwell wanted him in command of the 5307th.

The news of Hunter’s demotion disappointed the men. “It had been our hope all along that Hunter would be the man who would be anointed to command us and carry us into combat,” reflected Lt. Sam Wilson, at 20 the youngest of the 5307th’s officers. “He put the unit together, trained the unit, got us into fighting fettle, and then we became a political football between the British…and Stilwell.”

British commander Orde Wingate (center), known for being a rather eccentric figure, achieved renown as the leader of the Chindits. FDR decided to form a U.S. unit able to carry out similar missions.

Hunter and Merrill had graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y. in 1929; that was about all they had in common. Hunter, born in Oneida, New York, in 1906, was a sinewy man with a temperament to match his tough physique. A contemporary described him as: “Very muscular with no excess fat. His athletic appearance and firm facial features created an aura of authority.” Hunter joined an infantry regiment on leaving West Point and served three years in the Philippines and two and a half in Panama, two postings where he gained valuable jungle training. In 1942 he was appointed Chief of the Rifles and Weapons Platoon Group of the Weapons Sections at Fort Benning, a frustrating role for a man who craved a combat posting. Hunter’s opportunity came with the formation of Galahad. “I had been selected from all other volunteer lieutenant colonels because of my extensive tropical jungle experience,” he recalled.

Merrill, in contrast, was a frail child who grew into a frail young man. He was accepted into West Point on the sixth attempt after the Academy finally agreed to overlook his poor eyesight. His peers at West Point nicknamed him “Pee-Wee” and mocked him in his yearbook entry. “We refuse to make predictions as to Pee-Wee’s future, for it is ever changing,” it ran. “First of all, his goal was to be a lawyer, then a politician, and last a soldier. Even this is slightly uncertain.” Merrill was never cut out to be a combat soldier. He graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1932 with a Bachelor of Science in military engineering and in 1938 he was sent to Tokyo as the Military Attaché. He then joined Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s staff in the Philippines and was appointed to a similar role under Stilwell when he arrived in Burma in March 1942.

But what Merrill lacked in physical strength he made up for in mental agility. Lt. Sam Wilson regarded his new C.O as “brilliant, innovative and probably a better strategic thinker than Hunter.”

Birth of the “Marauder” legend

On Jan. 20, 1944 a posse of American war correspondents were invited to watch the 5307th undergo some training exercises at their Deogarh camp. Frank Hewlett of United Press described them as “the roughest, toughest bunch of infantrymen the U. S. army has ever put together.” His colleague from Life magazine, James Shepley, was just as taken. There was a hitch, however, and that was the name. The 5307th didn’t exactly roll off the tongue. As Merrill gave the correspondents a lift in his jeep to the Betwa River to see how mules carried their supplies across water, Shepley had an idea: why not call the unit “Merrill’s Marauders”?

A week later the Marauders had been reduced through the rigors of training to a strength of 2,600 and began the 1200 mile move east to Assam, in northeast India just across the border with Burma. Eight hundred tons of supplies had already made the journey, including radio equipment, medical supplies, crew-served weapons and 400 mules. These animals were a recommendation from the Chindits, who had found them tough and hardy on their first operation in Burma. Capable of carrying 200 lbs of equipment each, the mules’ biggest advantage over horses was that they ate the bamboo leaves in Burma whereas a horse required a larger amount of daily fodder. A few Marauders had been given a crash course in how to handle the animal from “Mule-skinners” of the 31st QM Pack Troop.

The Marauders didn’t linger long in Assam. Late in the evening of Feb. 7 the 1st Battalion was the first of the three Marauder battalions to hit the trail toward Burma. The men were wearing a dark green cotton herringbone twill uniform and either calf-high rubber-soled canvas boots or standard combat shoes for footwear, some with and others without canvas gaiters. Their backpacks contained essential equipment such as mess gear, blanket, poncho, spare socks and boxed, dried food combat rations.

In the vanguard of the 1st Battalion column was Lt. Sam Wilson’s Intelligence & Reconnaissance platoon (I&R). Each battalion had an I&R platoon, whose job it was to blaze a trail, reconnoitering the dense jungle for the signs of the enemy and also for good bivouac sites and suitable areas for air drops. The men chosen for these platoons had to have initiative, endurance and awareness. Few Marauders possessed these qualities in more abundance than a 25-year-old sergeant from California called Clarence Branscomb, a veteran of the Guadalcanal campaign. Over the course of 11 brutal days in January 1943 the 6 ft Branscomb had shown himself a superb exponent of jungle warfare. “I enjoyed fighting,” he reflected.

Marching Into Burma

The Marauders marched across the Indian border into Burma and bivouacked at Shingbiyang on Feb. 18, enjoying what would be their last proper hot meal for months. Fifteen miles southeast was Stilwell’s HQ at Ningam Sakan, and it was there that Merrill received his orders for the forthcoming operation.

Chinese soldiers allied with American troops load a mule in Burma; mules were prized by the Chindits for their ability to forage as well as carry heavy loads.

The Chinese 22nd and 38th divisions were slowly but steadily pushing the Japanese back from the Hukawng Valley. A pivotal role was being played by the Chinese 1st Provisional Tank Group under the command of Col. Rothwell H. Brown. They were driving south along the Kamaing Road toward Maingkwan, the main Japanese base in the valley. In front of a map at his HQ, Stilwell pointed to the village of Walawbum, 15 miles south of Maingkwan, and told Merrill this would be the site of their attack. The Chinese would launch a frontal assault on Walawbum, while the Marauders would cut their way through the jungle, and hit the enemy on their eastern (right) flank. Before setting off, the Marauders received a resupply by air. The C-47 transport aircraft of the First and Second Carrier Units dropped containers from a height of 400ft or less which were suspended from color-coded parachutes: blue for ammunition, white for rations, and green for medical supplies.

The honor of leading the Marauders as they deployed fell once more to Wilson’s 1st Battalion I&R platoon, which headed south on the morning of Feb. 24 to reconnoiter the villages to the east. The I&R platoons of the 2nd and 3rd Battalions, under the command of Lts. William Grissom and Logan Weston, set out a few hours later on the same trail before turning south and seeking out the enemy’s flank.

A Savage Environment

The terrain in northern Burma was savage: hills carpeted in forest and jungle, and rivers that were wide and powerful. The nights could be cold, giving way to a dawn mist and then intense heat as the sun climbed. The ground was thick with rotting vegetation and the air was damp and humid. The environment was a breeding ground for disease and abundant in menacing wildlife such as tigers, snakes and the creature the Marauders would come to hate most of all: the leech. Leeches, remembered Capt. Fred Lyons, were these “horrifying grayish-brown parasites that bury their heads in your veins and suck till they are bloated several times larger than normal size with your blood.” They were about an inch in length and would suck the blood from victims until dropping off on their own accord. They got everywhere: ears, noses and even testicles.

For Wilson and most men in his I&R platoon, Burma was an overwhelming sensory overload. They had never encountered such an inhospitable environment, nor had they ever met the enemy face to face. Wilson did not have the arrogance of youth, however, and readily tapped into the experience of his veteran sergeant Clarence Branscomb, who told him the average Japanese soldier was “tough, capable and skillful.”

Wilson didn’t have long to wait for his introduction to the enemy. “We were moving along a trail parallel to a river when we came to a kind of open glade,” he recalled. “I saw some horses by the river so I walked toward them. About halfway across the Japanese hiding along the river bank opened up on me. Shot my canteen off my belt and riddled my pack. I fell to the ground stunned.” Wilson recovered his senses and saw a Japanese mount one of the horses. “I opened my full-bore carbine on him and hit him with the first round but kept pumping rounds into him as he was sliding off the horse. Then a grenade came sailing through the air.”

Wilson flicked away the grenade. It exploded in the long grass but the force of the blast knocked him cold for a few seconds. He regained consciousness and saw a Japanese “running at me with his bayonet.” Wilson raised his weapon, squeezed the trigger and heard the click of an empty magazine. “Back to my left rear, maybe 30 or 40 yards away, Sgt. Clarence Branscomb stood up and hit the charging [Japanese] in the chest with three quick rounds,” remembered Wilson. “He practically fell on top of me.”

Race To The River

The Marauders met the Japanese in force for the first time on March 4. The previous evening Lt. Logan Weston had led the 3rd Battalion’s I&R platoon across the Numpyek river with orders from Lt-Col. Charles Beach, the battalion commander, to protect their north flank as they advanced toward Walawbum. Weston and his men were now effectively isolated from the rest of the 3rd battalion deep inside Japanese territory, and the enemy was aware of their presence.

Gen. Tanaka, commander of the 18th Division, ordered the bulk of the 55th and 56th Infantry regiments to move south and “destroy” the Americans threatening their flank. At daylight on March 4 the Japanese approached Weston’s platoon bivouacked close to a swamp. Weston let them advance and then gave the order to fire. “The enemy soldiers hit the ground and fanned out, crawling closer and shooting ferociously,” said Weston. “They chattered among themselves, some seemed to be giving orders.”

Weston called over his Nisei (a Japanese word meaning Second Generation American) interpreter, 23-year-old Henry Gosho from Seattle, one of 14 Japanese-Americans who had volunteered for the Marauders. In between the mortar shells and small arms fire, Gosho heard the orders shouted by the Japanese officer and translated them for Weston. They were attempting to encircle the Americans. Forewarned, Weston began withdrawing his platoon across the Numpyek but not before his radioman had sent a message to the 3rd battalion dug in on the other side of the river, requesting suppressing mortar fire.

The Marauders, with mules in tow, survey the airfield they captured from the Japanese at Myitkyina; a destroyed enemy aircraft is on the ground.

It was now a race to get over the river. The Americans jumped into the water and began wading across, urged on by Weston who stood in the middle of the Numpyek counting his men as they passed. Two had been badly wounded and were being carried on litters constructed from combat jackets and bamboo poles. It took time to get them into the water. The shrieks of the pursuing Japanese got closer. Then a 3rd Battalion platoon under the command of Lt. Victor Weingartner appeared on the far bank and opened fire. PFC Norman Janis, an Oglala Sioux and one of the sharpest shots in the outfit, spotted a Japanese crew setting up a Nambu Type 92 7.7mm machine gun. Janis raised his M1 Garand rifle. “He squatted down behind the gun so I shot for his head,” remembered Janis, who did not miss. “Another one got in his place, I hit him, got him out of the road.” Seven Japanese soldiers tried to pull the the Nambu’s trigger, but Janis killed them all.

Weston and his men got safely across to the eastern bank but the Japanese would not give up the chase. “They just kept coming across and we kept shooting at them,” said Weingartner.

The Japanese launched a fresh assault across the Numpyek early on March 6. It was repulsed with more heavy losses for the attackers; they came again in the afternoon with the same result. “I respected the Japanese very much, or the soldiers I did,” reflected Bernard Martin, a radioman with the 3rd Battalion. “They weren’t afraid. But they had poor commanders. The Japanese always launched frontal attacks. On several occasions they could have outflanked us but their commanders were stupid. On this occasion this officer appeared in shiny boots and pressed pants, waving his sword, and leading a charge across the river.”

“We’re The Marauders!”

The officer was killed along with an estimated 800 of his men in the two days of contacts with the Marauders. American casualties amounted to eight dead and 37 wounded. “Gen. Stilwell has sent a message that he is pleased,” Merrill informed his senior officers at a staff conference on the evening of March 7. “Between us and the Chinese, we have forced the Japanese to withdraw farther in the last three days than they have in the last three months of fighting.”

It was during the fight at the Numpyek River, recalled Martin, that the “Merrill’s Marauders” moniker was adopted by the men. “It was Lt. Col. Beach who told us that the newspapers were calling us Merrill’s Marauders,” he said. “We liked that name…when we were screaming abuse at the [Japanese] across the river we started yelling, ‘We’re the Marauders”.’

The man himself, Merrill, was beginning to feel the strain. He had been lightly admonished by Stilwell for not exploiting the casualties inflicting on the Japanese by the 3rd battalion and allowing them to withdraw south.

The Chinese pursued the Japanese into the Mogaung Valley down the main trail while the Marauders swung east through the jungle to attack them in the rear. Hunter led a mixed force of the 2nd and 3rd battalions to block the enemy retreat when the Chinese launched their assault. They clashed with the Japanese at first light on March 24 between the Kamaing Road and the east bank of the Mogaung River. The first Japanese banzai attack came just after 7:30am and the sixteenth and last was in mid-afternoon. “I had bodies piled up so high in front of my machine guns that I had to get out and kick the bodies out of the way so we could fire our machine guns,” remembered Lt. Phil Piazza. Just before 4:00pm a flight of P-51 fighters attacked the Japanese positions, the cue for the 2nd Battalion to withdraw across the Mogaung. They had lost two men, the Japanese around 200.

Hunter wanted only a temporary withdrawal before counter-attacking his weakened enemy. He radioed Merrill and requested permission to advance south with the 3rd Battalion and capture the lightly-held town of Kamaing. “I was disappointed when instead of getting permission to attack I was told to withdraw,” said Hunter. “This golden opportunity should have been seized and exploited with all resources available.”

To Capture An Airfield

Merrill was a sick man by now, and on March 28 he suffered a heart attack at his HQ in the hilltop village of Nhpum Ga. He was evacuated by air. Hunter assumed command. He led the Marauders for the next six weeks, two of which entailed the besiegement of the 2nd Battalion in Nphum Ga.

When the siege was lifted on April 9, Easter Sunday, all three battalions of the Marauders were exhausted. The final tally for holding Nhpum Ga revealed it had cost the Americans 52 dead and 163 wounded (the Japanese lost 400 men) but by now many of the Marauders were riddled with disease. By April 16, more than 100 soldiers of the 2nd Battalion had been flown out suffering from amoebic dysentery, malnutrition, skin diseases and fevers. For the 1,600 Marauders who remained, there were fresh uniforms, their first mail in two months and the chance to lie in the sun doing nothing. Above all, there was the knowledge that their mission in Burma was over, as they’d been promised by Merrill weeks earlier.

Hunter (right) was well-respected by the Marauders for his abilities in the field.

Stilwell had other ideas. He saw an opportunity to capture the airfield at Myitkyina from the Japanese. This would deny their fighter planes a base from which to attack American cargo aircraft flying over the Himalayas “Hump” to resupply China from India. It would have to be a surprise attack if it were to succeed. He ordered Hunter to lead his men on a 70-mile march up and through the 6,100-ft Naura Myket Pass, which was unguarded by the Japanese because they considered it impassable.

Hunter set out at the head of the 6000-strong Myitkyina Task Force (which also comprised two Chinese infantry regiments) on April 28. “Raining,” wrote Staff Sgt. James McGuire in his diary. “6:30am started hiking, went up 2600 ft, really a tough climb. We have 6000 ft mt to go over and it’s really raining and muddy. Bivouacked at village, water scarce. The path is a 20% incline.” That first day set the pattern for what radioman Bernard Martin described as “a trail of sadness.” It took the Marauders and their Chinese allies nearly three weeks to reach the airstrip at Myitkyina during which time they lost men to combat, disease and exhaustion.

On the evening of May 16, Hunter ordered Wilson’s I&R platoon to recce the airfield. Wilson was too sick with amoebic dysentery to lead the mission so Sgt. Clarence Branscomb selected two men and they set out for the airfield. The intelligence they brought back was described by Hunter as “remarkable” and the next morning he launched a successful assault on Myitkyina airfield.

Broken Promises

Prime Minister Winston Churchill called the capture of Myitkyina “a brilliant feat of arms,” and Mountbatten, Supreme Allied Commander, issued an Order of the Day addressed to Stilwell in which he declared the seizure “a most outstanding success…the crossing of the 6,100-foot Naura Myket Pass is a feat which will live in military history. Please convey my personal congratulations and thanks to all ranks.”

But Stilwell didn’t. Nor did he keep his promise that the Marauders would be evacuated as soon as the airstrip had been captured. Bitterness grew among the Americans, as did the casualty list as more Marauders succumbed to sickness. When they were finally relieved on Aug. 3, few remained of the 2,600 who had marched into Burma six months earlier: 93 had been killed in combat, 30 had died of disease and 301 were wounded or missing. An additional 1,970 Marauders had been hospitalized with sickness. It was claimed only two men from the original 3,000 volunteers went through the whole Burmese campaign untouched by sickness. Master Sgt. Joe Doyer was one and Charles Hunter the other.

Hunter had objected to Stilwell about the broken promises and their general mistreatment—criticism that ultimately harmed his career. He died in 1978 in Cheyenne, Wyoming, largely overlooked by the American public compared to Frank Merrill, whose name is forever associated with the Marauders. Only the men themselves knew the truth. “He got the credit for the thing, got his name in it, but he never did anything,” said Clarence Branscomb of Merrill in 2013. “Hunter was doing the job at Mitch [Myitkyina] that Merrill should have been doing.”

Wilson was more charitable toward Merrill, but shared Branscomb’s view of Hunter. “An excellent tactician, an absolutely super troop leader,” he reflected. “A better name for the outfit would probably have been Hunter’s Harbingers or Hunter’s Hawks, or something like that rather than Merrill’s Marauders. But as you know, history doesn’t always work like that.”

this article first appeared in military history quarterly

Why Did Lincoln’s Right-Hand Men Call Him the ‘Tycoon’?

Gary W. Gallagher — Thu, 17 Aug 2023 12:50:00 +0000

John G. Nicolay, John Hay, and William O. Stoddard served as secretaries to Abraham Lincoln. Nicolay and Hay worked in close proximity to their chief throughout the war, while Stoddard spent significant time in the White House between July 1861 and July 1864. Loyal to “The Tycoon,” as they called the president, the three young men logged endless hours and experienced frustration and exhilaration in generous measure. They also created valuable testimony that Southern Illinois University Press published in a quartet of essential volumes: Michael Burlingame and John R. Turner Ettlinger, eds., Inside Lincoln’s White House: The Complete Civil War Diary of John Hay (1997); Burlingame, ed., At Lincoln’s Side: John Hay’s Civil War Correspondence and Selected Writings (2000); Burlingame, ed., With Lincoln in the White House: Letters, Memoranda, and Other Writings of John G. Nicolay, 1860-1865 (2000); and Harold Holzer, ed., Lincoln’s White House Secretary: The Adventurous Life of William O. Stoddard (2007).

Hay’s observations shed light on innumerable events and personalities. On November 11, 1864, the just re-elected Lincoln spoke to his Cabinet about the famous “Blind Memorandum.” He took the document, written on August 23, 1864, from his desk and said, “Gentlemen do you remember last summer I asked you all to sign your names to the back of a paper of which I did not show you the inside? This is it.”

The president “had pasted it up in so singular style that it required some cutting to get it open” before he could recite the brief text: “This morning, as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that this Administration will not be re-elected. Then it will be my duty to so cooperate with the President elect, as to save the Union between the election and the inauguration; as he will have secured his election on such ground that he cannot possibly save it afterwards.”

Lincoln next explained that in late August he had believed George B. McClellan would receive the Democratic nomination and meant to urge “Little Mac” to “raise as many troops as you possibly can for this final trial, and I will devote all my energies to assisting and finishing the war.” Secretary of State William H. Seward remarked that McClellan would have said, “‘Yes—yes’ & so on forever and would have done nothing at all.’ ‘At least’ added Lincoln ‘I should have done my duty and have stood clear before my own conscience.’”

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Hay’s diary underscores Lincoln’s disappointment in the wake of Gettysburg. On July 11, though “rather impatient with Gen Meade’s slow movements,” the president believed his general “would yet show sufficient activity to inflict the Coup de grace upon the flying rebels.” Three days later “the Prest. seemed depressed by Meade’s dispatches of last night. They were so cautiously & almost timidly worded—talking about reconnoitering to find the enemy’s weak place and other such. He said he feared he would do nothing.”

On July 15, Robert Todd Lincoln, the president’s eldest son, “says the ~~Tycoon~~ President [Hay made the substitution] is grieved silently but deeply about the escape of Lee. He said ‘If I had gone up there I could have whipped them myself.’ I know he had that idea.”

A year earlier, Nicolay described reaction to George B. McClellan’s retreat after the Seven Days’ Battles. President Lincoln recently made a “flying visit” to the Army of the Potomac and seemed to have “returned in better spirits.” For the public, in contrast, it “has been a very blue week here among all classes of society….I don’t think I have ever heard more croaking since the war began than during the past ten days.” Many leaders exhibited “little real faith and courage under difficulties,” commented Nicolay, while the “average public mind is becoming alarmingly sensational. A single reverse or piece of accidental ill-luck is enough to throw them all into horrors of despair.” Although Nicolay played down the significance of McClellan’s failure at Richmond, his letter suggests the degree to which the Seven Days’ countered recent Union success in other military theaters.

On August 25, 1864, Nicolay vented to Hay about the volatile political situation that had prompted Lincoln’s solicitation, two days earlier, of signatures on his blind memorandum. “Hell is to play,” he began, “The N.Y. politicians have got a stampede on that is about to swamp everything.” Moreover, “Weak-kneed d—-d fools like Chas. Sumner are in a movement for a new candidate—to supplant the Tycoon.”

William O. Stoddard wrote memoirs that remain an important source on the Lincoln White House, even if exaggerated at times.

With everything in “darkness and doubt and discouragement,” Nicolay thought the nation had reached “a turning point in our crisis.” He lauded Lincoln’s “patience and pluck” and hoped other Republicans would emulate his example. “If our friends will only rub their eyes and shake themselves,” he concluded, “and become convinced that they themselves are not dead we shall win the fight overwhelmingly.”

William O. Stoddard’s recollections of Lincoln, notes editor Holzer, inspired dismissive comments from both Nicolay and Hay. Historians also have questioned some of Stoddard’s claims, as when he insisted the president asked him to manage the substitution of Andrew Johnson for Hannibal Hamlin as the Republican vice presidential candidate in 1864. Yet his autobiography contains ample material of interest. Charged with sorting the mass of unsolicited daily mail addressed to Lincoln, Stoddard had his pulse on the concerns and attitudes of the loyal citizenry and created excellent snapshots of key moments in the war.

One such moment conveys anticipation of public anger over news of Joseph Hooker’s ignominious defeat at Chancellorsville. Nicolay remembered that “[A] terrible, great, black cloud…came rolling across the Potomac and into the White House from the lost battlefield of Chancellorsville.”

John Hay told him that “Stanton says this is the darkest day of the war. It seems as if the bottom has dropped out.” Stoddard knew on that “awful day,” when it “almost seemed as if the White House itself had been transferred to the battlefield,” what the mail would soon bring. “[T]he wails and the mourning…would quickly come down from the North,” he foresaw, “and, mingled with these, would be the sounds of despair and the unsuppressed curses of the unreasoning people who would surely hold Mr. Lincoln and his administration responsible for this one more lost battle and its dead.”

Best read together, Lincoln’s secretaries afford readers an insider’s glimpse into an administration caught in the crucible of a great war. They also remind us of our debt to scholarly editors and university presses.

this article first appeared in civil war times magazine

With This Union Soldier’s Death the NYT Claimed That ‘some most interesting chapters of the unwritten and secret history of the War’ Had Died With Him

Frank Jastrzembski — Fri, 04 Aug 2023 12:25:00 +0000

When Colonel Ambrose Stevens died in 1880, a correspondent with The New York Times wrote: “[W]ith him have probably died some most interesting chapters of the unwritten and secret history of the War of the Rebellion.” In 1872, when that correspondent met Stevens at a veterans reunion at the Judson House in Lockport, N.Y., the colonel revealed to him “a very curious and rather startling episode of the war,” claiming Confederate agents had planned to assassinate President Abraham Lincoln five months before John Wilkes Booth did in April 1865.

Stevens had no military experience before the war but studied law, was fluent in several languages, and served as a representative in the New York General Assembly. He was also one of the top breeders of fine cattle serving the United States and Europe, praised by The New York Herald as an “authority upon all questions of fine stock raising, and…considered the best informed man in the world on short-horned pedigrees.”

He entered the war on May 7, 1864, joining the 46th New York Infantry as a major just prior to the Battle of Spotsylvania. By the end of the month, he had been promoted to lieutenant colonel and assigned to Maj. Gen. John A. Dix’s staff.

In July, Confederate agents and commissioners tried to arrange a peace conference at the Clifton House on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. Stevens claimed that he received permission from Dix to go undercover and investigate the Southern sympathizers.

Stevens joined the 46th New York just prior to the Battle of Spotsylvania.

When he arrived, he mingled with Confederate agents and Northern Copperheads, passing as one of them, known as a prominent Democrat and for having many acquaintances in the South. Fortunately, none of them was aware he was working for General Dix.

Allegedly, one of the men recognized Stevens and, after a long conversation, invited him to his room. There, under a pledge of secrecy, he revealed to Stevens that some of them planned to assassinate Lincoln the night before the November election. They hoped it would allow George B. McClellan, the Democratic candidate for president, to win the election and end the war.

Stevens rushed back to New York and reported what he had learned to Dix. The general in turn passed the intelligence on to Lincoln. According to Stevens, Lincoln preferred news of the plot not be leaked to the press, believing it would do more harm than good. It would remain a secret.

Finally in 1875, the aforementioned correspondent claimed in his New York Times article: “The story is truly an extraordinary one, but, considering the time, the situation, the position of the narrator, and some of the events the following April [1865], I fully believe it.”

The correspondent wouldn’t reveal Stevens’ identity, however, declaring that he “did not feel at liberty at that time to mention the name of my informant.”

On December 10, 1880, Stevens passed away at the age of 73 and was interred in Batavia Cemetery in Batavia, N.Y. He would take to the grave the truth of that alleged Lincoln assassination plot.

This article first appeared in America’s Civil War magazine

‘Soldier of Destiny’: A Detailed View of Grant as an Evolving Soul

Dave Kindy — Thu, 03 Aug 2023 12:00:18 +0000

On April 11, 1854, under a cloud of suspicion, Captain Ulysses S. Grant resigned his commission in the U.S. Army. Already saddled with debt, the Mexican War hero had no real prospects for supporting his family and his future appeared anything but promising.

Yet, a scant 10 years later, Grant had risen from relative obscurity to the senior most command of the service he had left in near-disgrace. His highly improbable ascendancy to General of the Army was testament to his boldness as a military leader and his incredible luck in surviving recriminations for missteps—as well as narrowly avoiding death in combat.

John Reeves’ Soldier of Destiny examines Grant’s life during that formative decade leading to his promotion in 1864 to lieutenant general, a rank held previously only by George Washington. In those 10 years, he emerged from oblivion ready to face a new arc of history.

This thoroughly researched and detailed book offers keen insight into Grant as an evolving soul attempting to navigate the trials and tribulations of life. It also dispels some of the myths of the future Union general as a wholly unsuited businessman and unstable drunk.

While Grant certainly had failures in the commercial sector, he excelled as a farmer and manager of his father-in-law’s Missouri plantation—complete with slaves. In regard to alcoholism, Reeves offers a balanced view of Grant’s vice, depicting him as a binge drinker who remained sober for long periods.

On the issue of slavery, the book paints Grant as a man of his time. Though he grew up in an abolitionist family, Grant at first was ambivalent of that peculiar institution. In fact, he had decidedly racist views of African Americans—not untypical for his day. By 1863, however, Grant realized “colored troops” were indispensable to the Union cause and even claimed, “They will make good soldiers.”

Of course, it is on the battlefield that the general distinguished himself. Reeves writes with flair about Grant’s boldness and risky decisions at Fort Donelson, Shiloh, Vicksburg, and Chattanooga—and how he remained calm while circumstances crumbled around him. His intuitiveness in combat enabled him to make courageous choices while other commanders tended to waver and wane.

Nowhere more apparent is that aspect of Grant’s personality than in the apocryphal story of when an aide asked him if he was sure of a decision. The general answered, “No, I am not, but in war anything is better than indecision. We must decide. If I am wrong, we shall soon find out, and can do the other thing. But not to decide wastes both time and money, and may ruin everything.”

Soldier of Destiny is a masterful account of the decisive Grant and how he remained resilient while “lost in the wilderness,” only to emerge as a sword of deliverance at the moment his country needed him most.

Soldier of Destiny

Slavery, Secession and the Redemption of Ulysses S. Grant
By John Reeves, Pegasus Books, 2023

get it on amazon

The Texas Civil War Museum Lowers Its Flag

Donald L. Barnhart Jr. — Mon, 24 Jul 2023 12:38:00 +0000

The Texas Civil War Museum in Fort Worth, one of the country’s largest such facilities, will close its doors on December 30. After 16 years of operation, Texas oilman Ray Richey and his wife, Judy, have decided to retire. “It was a hobby that got out of hand,” Richey professed in 2006 when he opened the 15,000-square-foot facility to house his extensive personal artifact collection.

Touted as the largest Civil War Museum west of the Mississippi River, the building has more than 5,000 artifacts on display, valued at $15 million–$20 million. Included are Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s presentation sword, Maj. Gen. J.E.B. Stuart’s saber and personal battle flag, Maj. Gen. Benjamin Butler’s dress uniform, and Maj. Gen. Phil Sheridan’s saber and saddle blanket. The country’s second largest Civil War gun collection is also on display.

The north wall of the exhibit hall features Union artifacts, the south wall Confederate. In addition to the Civil War artifacts, Victorian-era dresses are featured, including one worn by Lady Randolph Spencer Churchill, Winston Churchill’s mother.

The Richey collection will be auctioned off by The Horse Soldier Auctions in Gettysburg, Pa. The Civil War artifacts of the Texas United Daughters of the Confederacy—also displayed at the museum—will be stored at another location, with portions to be occasionally loaned to other museums.

“What a great gift Ray and Judy provided,” says Texas historian Don Frazier. “Ray had an eye for antiques. There’s not another collection like it. It’s the end of an era.”

This article first appeared in America’s Civil War magazine

Berlin Airlift at 75: The Most Remarkable Supply Operation in Human History

Don Smith — Thu, 13 Jul 2023 14:19:00 +0000

On Friday the 13th of August 1948 U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. Sterling P. Bettinger tried to land his Douglas C-54 Skymaster transport at Berlin’s Tempelhof Field. Aboard was a VIP passenger—Maj. Gen. William H. Tunner, the new director of operations for the seven-week-old Berlin Airlift. Unfortunately, recalled Tunner in his memoir Over the Hump, “at that moment everything was going completely to hell in Berlin. The ceiling had suddenly fallen in on Tempelhof. The clouds dropped to the tops of the apartment buildings surrounding the field, and then they suddenly gave way in a cloudburst that obscured the runway from the tower. The radar could not penetrate the sheets of rain.” One aircraft crashed; another blew out its tires braking to avoid the crash.

Any cooperation exhibited at the 1945 Potsdam Conference by erstwhile Allies Joseph Stalin and Harry S. Truman gave way to distrust by 1948.

Bettinger joined a cluster of pilots circling over Tempelhof, waiting as ground controllers tried to sort out the mess. “The pilots filled the air with chatter, calling in constantly in near panic to find out what was going on,” Tunner recalled. “On the ground a traffic jam was building up as planes came off the unloading line…but were refused permission to take off for fear of collision with the planes milling around overhead. ‘This is a hell of a way to run a railroad,’ I snarled.”

Two months earlier the Cold War had heated up dramatically. Unhappy with plans by the Western Allies (France, Britain and the United States) to create a federal government uniting the portions of Germany they occupied, the Soviet Union in retaliation blockaded the American, British and French occupation sectors in isolated West Berlin. On June 19 the Russians blocked automotive and rail passenger service between western Germany and Berlin. On the 24th they halted all barge and rail freight shipments, cutting the primary supply and commerce links for more than 2 million Berliners. The only means left to the Western Allies to sustain the city was by air transport. “Members of the Soviet military administration in Germany celebrated when the blockade began,” wrote U.S. Air Force historian Roger Miller. “None had doubts that the blockade would succeed.” Major General Lucius Clay, military governor of the American occupied zone of Germany, recalled the Russians were “confident that it would be physically impossible for the Western Allies to maintain their position in Berlin.” The chaos Tunner and Bettinger encountered at Tempelhof seemed to validate Soviet confidence the airlift would fail.

In the aftermath of the Soviet blockade British authorities moved to demarcate the boundaries of their occupied sector of West Berlin.

A year later, though, it was the Western Allies who were celebrating. Between June 26, 1948, and Sept. 30, 1949, Allied transport planes completed 277,569 cargo flights, carrying 2,325,509 tons of supplies, into West Berlin. West Berliners had suffered a great deal, but they had endured, and the Western Allies’ position in the divided city had remained strong. On May 12, 1949, the Russians threw in the towel and reopened land and water access to the western sectors—without receiving any concessions regarding the formation of a West German government. (The airlift continued through September to build up emergency supply stocks in Berlin.) The airlift achieved what many thought was impossible: fulfilling the critical needs of a modern city’s population solely through air transport. Allied determination and organization had won the West’s first major victory in the Cold War.

On June 28, four days after the blockade began, the U.S. Departments of State and Defense briefed President Harry S. Truman on the situation. Miller, in his book To Save a City, notes the president quickly quashed any idea of withdrawal. “Abandoning Berlin, [Truman] affirmed, was beyond discussion,” Miller wrote. “The United States was in Berlin by agreement, and the Soviets had no right to push its forces out.”

British Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin agreed. A former truck driver and union official, Bevin was the opposite of the stereotypical sophisticated English diplomat. Bevin had displayed his less-than-genteel manner at the July 1946 Paris Peace Conference. Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov had hurled insults at the British during the meetings and continued the badgering at dinner one night. “Bevin exploded in rage,” wrote Giles Milton in his book Checkmate in Berlin. State Department official Charles Bohlen recalled Bevin “rose to his feet, his hands knotted into fists, and started toward Molotov, saying, ‘I’ve had enough of this, I ’ave.’ For one glorious moment it looked as if the foreign minister of Great Britain and the foreign minister of the Soviet Union were about to come to blows.” (Security intervened, defused the situation and spoiled the moment.) When the Soviets blockaded Berlin, Bevin demanded the Western Allies stand firm. Milton quotes him as saying he “did not want withdrawal to be contemplated in any quarter.” Ordered to stay in Berlin, the American and British military had to figure out how to maintain their position there.

Hardly any Western officials thought an airlift could satisfy Berlin’s needs for an extended period. “Rather it was a stopgap measure,” Miller wrote, “an expedient that enabled Western leaders to buy the time…to negotiate without either the need to give in at some point to Soviet pressure or to escalate the situation beyond control.”

Maj. Gen. William H. Tunner.

A 1945 agreement between the wartime Allies established six corridors for aircraft travel to and from Berlin—three from the Soviet occupation zone, two from the British and one from the American. The Russians, loath to provoke armed conflict, didn’t contest the three western corridors. Anyway, they thought the airlift would fail. Before the blockade Berlin imported approximately 12,000 tons of supplies a day. American, British and French occupation officials calculated that West Berlin’s population, Western Allied personnel and their families would require a minimum of 4,500 tons daily to survive, while at most Royal Air Force and U.S. Air Force transport aircraft in Europe could carry 1,000 tons a day. West Berlin was not wholly sealed off from the outside world. It still received supplies from the Soviet zone, but not nearly enough to survive.

General Jean Ganeval

Clay added his voice to Truman’s and Bevin’s, arguing forcefully for the West to do whatever necessary to stay in Berlin. On June 25 Clay warned Army leadership that the West’s credibility in Germany could be mortally wounded if they abandoned the western sectors. “Thousands of Germans have courageously expressed their opposition to Communism,” he told them. “We must not destroy their confidence by any indication of departure from Berlin.”

During World War II Clay had established a reputation in the Pentagon as a logistical and managerial wizard. When supplies for Allied forces in Europe had backed up in the freshly liberated port at Cherbourg, Clay unsnarled the mess. That gravitas helped Clay convince others the Western Allies could supply all of Berlin’s needs by air. In late July he advised Washington that if it sent larger cargo aircraft, and many more of them, the U.S. and British aircrews could fly enough missions each day to keep West Berlin alive. Air Force leadership had serious doubts, as satisfying Clay’s wishes would leave it with few cargo aircraft for its growing list of missions worldwide. Regardless, Air Force Chief of Staff Hoyt Vandenburg affirmed that if Washington committed itself fully to the mission, Berlin could be supplied by air. Truman gave the go-ahead, and Clay got his resources.

The Americans and British had actually been airlifting cargo into West Berlin since April. That month the Soviets had imposed restrictions on Western Allied rail travel to West Germany. Considering it an omen of traffic disruptions to come, the Western Allies started stockpiling food and coal in West Berlin. Some of those supplies came by air in an operation dubbed the “Little Lift.” When the Soviet blockade started in June, U.S. and British cargo planes ramped up that air operation. But the primary cargo airframe in the European theater was the Douglas C-47 Skytrain. Most were World War II leftovers, some still bearing their black-and-white D-Day invasion stripes. At most the twin-engine C-47 could carry little more than 3 tons.

With the precision of an assembly line, Douglas C-47 Skytrain cargo planes off-load supplies to waiting trucks at U.S.-operated Tempelhof Field.

The scope of Operation Vittles was readily apparent.

Allied Planes Flown in the Berlin Airlift

United States
Boeing C-97 Stratofreighter
Consolidated B-24 Liberator
Consolidated PBY Catalina
Douglas C-47 Skytrain and Douglas DC-3
Douglas C-54 Skymaster and Douglas DC-4
Douglas C-74 Globemaster
Fairchild C-82 Packet
Lockheed C-121A Constellation

Great Britain
Avro Lancaster
Avro Lincoln
Avro York
Avro Tudor
Avro Lancastrian
Bristol Type 170 Freighter
Douglas DC-3 (Dakota)
Handley Page Hastings
Handley Page Halifax
Short Sunderland
Vickers VC.1 Viking

The four-engine C-54 Skymaster, on the other hand, could carry more than 13 tons of cargo. Thus, the Air Force started deploying C-54 squadrons from bases around the world to western Germany. (The Navy also provided two squadrons.) Many flew to Germany with only hours’ notice. Lieutenant Gail Halvorsen, a C-54 pilot deployed from Alabama, recalled landing in Rhein-Main Air Base near Frankfurt with a contingent of Skymaster pilots and crewmen. Within two hours one of those crews was flying a plane to Berlin. Eventually, 225 C-54s were assigned to the airlift.

The airlift received new leadership—Tunner, who arrived in Germany on July 28. He would command the Combined Airlift Task Force (CALTF), an ad-hoc combined command that would coordinate and direct U.S. and British airlift operations. He’d already earned the nickname “Tonnage Tunner” for having led U.S. airlift operations over the Himalayas (the “Hump”) into China during World War II. Renowned as an air transport expert, he helped create the Army Air Forces Ferrying Command. He’d been watching the early stages of the Berlin Airlift from Washington. When Truman resolved to intensify the effort, Tunner got his chance.

The early days of the airlift were dramatic. Newspapers and news broadcasts ran stories of pilots rushing out to cargo aircraft parked haphazardly around their airfields and zooming off with them into the German skies. To readers and viewers worldwide it looked inspiring and dramatic. Yet to Tunner it reeked of inefficiency. (Halvorsen described the early days as a “real cowboy” operation.) “The actual operation of a successful airlift is about as glamorous as drops of water on stone,” said Tunner, in Over the Hump:

There’s no frenzy, no flap, just the inexorable process of getting the job done. In a successful airlift you don’t see planes parked all over the place; they’re either in the air, on loading or unloading ramps, or being worked on. You don’t see personnel milling around; flying crews are either flying or resting up so that they can fly again tomorrow. Ground crews are either working on their assigned planes or resting up so that they can work on them again tomorrow.

West Berliners watch as flour descends from the belly of a Douglas C-74 Globemaster. Such encounters served to dispel any lingering hostilities.

“Under Tunner,” wrote Miller, “the monotony of repetition replaced the romance of flying.” Tunner set out to organize the airlift in exacting detail and refine it into a smooth, efficient operation.

In the first few months of the airlift chaos was not uncommon in the skies directly over Berlin. Aircraft from eight different airfields in Germany converged on just two in Berlin—Tempelhof, in the American sector, and RAF Gatow, in the British sector. When poor weather or problems on the ground made it difficult to land, planes would end up “stacked,” circling at different altitudes as they waited. Tunner ended up in one of those stacks over Tempelhof, in cloudy weather and heavy rains, on that “Black Friday” August 13 flight to Berlin. “A huge, confusing, milling mass of aircraft circled in a stack from 3,000 to 12,000 feet,” wrote Miller, “in danger of collision or of drifting out of the corridors completely.”

Tunner radioed Tempelhof tower: “This is 5549, Tunner talking, and you better listen. Send every plane in the stack back to its home base.” Afterward, Tunner implemented new landing procedures for the Berlin airfields. If an aircraft missed its landing approach, it wouldn’t circle and try again; it would return to western Germany. Such was a far safer and more efficient way to manage landing operations. Air traffic controllers were no longer tasked with inserting stray aircraft back into the landing pattern; they could focus instead on managing a steady stream of incoming planes. “In the same 90 minutes it took to bring in nine aircraft stacked over Berlin,” Miller wrote, “the airlift could land 30 C-54s carrying 300 tons using the straight-in approach and landing at three-minute intervals.”

Airlift controllers closely managed the ways planes flew in the corridors. They used time spacing to separate the aircraft, usually in three- to six-minute intervals. Aircraft announced the times they passed key radio beacons. Each aircraft crew knew the tail numbers of the three aircraft in front of and behind them. When they heard an aircraft announce its position, they would adjust their speed or heading to keep their proper place in the airflow. Any plane that lost radio communications or couldn’t keep its place in the flow had standing orders to fly home.

this article first appeared in Military History magazine

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Pilots flew by instrument flight rules, even if the weather was good. Traffic in the corridors was one-way. The British used six airfields, and all sent their aircraft to Berlin through the northern airlift corridor, which originated north of Hamburg. The Americans flew from bases at Rhein-Main and Wiesbaden through the southern corridor. All aircraft returned to western Germany through the central corridor, which emptied near Hannover.

Tunner realized he couldn’t increase tonnage by adding more aircraft to the airlift. Washington had only so many planes to send, and the traffic patterns in the air corridors and parking aprons at the airfields were already full. So, he looked for other ways to maximize cargo throughput. The northern corridor was shorter than the southern, so planes that used it could fly more round trips per day. The American C-54s could carry more cargo than the C-47s and other aircraft the British were using, so Tunner stationed some American squadrons in the British zone. The USAF stripped unnecessary equipment (such as the LORAN long-range navigation systems) out of the C-54s to enable them to carry more cargo.

Major General Lucius Clay (at left, with Truman), military governor of U.S.-occupied Germany, tasked Maj. Gen. William Tunner with coordinating the airlift. French commandant Jean Ganeval literally blasted the Soviets.

The more time a plane spent on the ground, the less cargo it could carry to Berlin. CALTF planners examined every step in the loading/unloading process, looking for ways to cut time, increase safety margins and improve overall performance. Logistics planners realized that if multiple pieces of equipment were used to load aircraft, that added time to the loading process (and increased chances an errant forklift could damage a plane). CALTF switched to putting a plane’s cargo load on just one truck. The truck driver would shadow the Follow Me jeep that guided a newly landed plane to its parking spot. As the crew shut down its engines, German workers would jump from the truck, ready to load the plane for its return trip to Berlin. In Berlin aircrews were told to stay by their aircraft during loading/unloading, instead of going inside for coffee. Mobile canteens, manned by pretty Fräuleins, carried refreshments out to the flight line. After pilots informed Tunner their planes flew sluggishly when carrying coal, CALTF personnel weighed the coal bags. They found that overzealous German workers were packing as much coal in the bags as they could—more than the bags were supposed to hold—resulting in overloaded planes.

Airlift Medal

Authorized by Congress on July 20, 1949, the Medal for Humane Action recognized any service member who performed at least 120 days of duty in direct support of the Berlin Airlift. It depicts a Douglas C-54 Skymaster over a wheat wreath and the coat of arms of Berlin.

Medal for Humane Action.

The French weren’t part of the CALTF operation. They had few cargo aircraft, and Allied planners were concerned French-speaking pilots might have problems communicating with British and American air traffic controllers. The French did contribute one memorable episode to the airlift story, though. To improve the flow of cargo into Berlin, the Western Allies in November 1948 opened a third airfield, Tegel, in the French occupation zone. Partially obstructing its runway was a broadcast tower used by Soviet-controlled Berliner Rundfunk (Radio Berlin). The French formally asked the Soviets to move the tower, at Allied expense, but were refused. Then one morning that December General Jean Ganeval, the French commandant in Berlin, summoned to his office American personnel working on the airfield. Some minutes into the meeting they heard an explosion outdoors. The Americans rushed to the window of Ganeval’s office in time to watch the tower collapse to the ground. According to several accounts, Ganeval turned to the shocked Americans and said simply, “You will have no more trouble with the tower.” When the angry Soviets asked Ganeval how he could have done something like that, the French commandant reportedly replied, “With dynamite.”

The Berlin Blockade ultimately backfired on the Soviets. It increased support in the American, British and French occupation zones for the planned West German government. “American intelligence analysts reported widespread demoralization and membership loss among Communists in all parts of [Germany],” note Army historians Donald A. Carter and William Stivers. “The Soviet coercive measures against Berlin strengthened the Western position in Germany as a whole.” Alarmed Western European nations became more interested in collective security initiatives, an interest that led to the establishment of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in April 1949.

The airlift, by contrast, proved a public relations bonanza for the Western Allies. In April 1949, on Easter Sunday, the airlift staged a one-day transport blitz during which 1,398 flights carried in 12,941 tons of cargo—the same amount West Berlin had received daily by rail, road and water during peacetime. “I hope that the Communists, who have spent so much time insulting us, will realize that we really aren’t such a soft democracy,” crowed Brig. Gen. Frank L. Howley, the U.S. commandant in Berlin, after the blockade ended. The airlift also improved German-American relations. American newsreels praised West Berliners for their determination to endure the blockade. German children played “airlift” with toy planes. Halvorsen gained headline acclaim as the “Candy Bomber,” dropping candy from handkerchief parachutes to crowds of grateful West Berlin children.

Clay retaliated against the Soviets with his own blockade of raw materials and finished goods that eastern Germany desperately needed from western Germany. For instance, Germany’s best source for coking coal, critical in steel production, were the mines of the Ruhr, in the British occupation zone. Meanwhile, the economy of the Soviet occupation zone, still struggling after World War II, was losing many of its own resources and products to the Russians for their own use. “The eastern zone economy suffered grievously from the counterblockade,” Carter and Stivers wrote. By February Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin, succumbing to a public relations nightmare of his own doing, had signaled American diplomats he was keen to end the crisis.

In 1952 West Berliners gather on Platz der Luftbrücke outside Berlin’s Tempelhof Field to dedicate the Berlin Airlift Memorial. Inscribed on it are the names of 79 Allied pilots and crewmen killed during the airlift.

Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis called the Berlin Airlift “the first clear Soviet defeat in the Cold War.” In hot wars nations inflict defeat on one another using soldiers, armor, airpower and high explosives. The Cold War was a different kind of war, so it’s fitting that its first major victory was won not through violence, but by persistence and excellence in effort. “I don’t have much of a natural sense of rhythm,” Tunner wrote in his memoir. “I’m certainly no threat to Fred Astaire, and a drumstick to me is something that grows on a chicken. But when it comes to airlifts, I want rhythm.” The Americans and British achieved rhythm in the skies over Berlin. They created an airborne conveyor belt that kept a city alive, helped transform the Germans and Americans from wartime enemies into peacetime friends, united Western Europe and inspired freedom-loving people across the globe.

Don Smith is a retired U.S. Army Reserve officer with degrees in history and intelli-gence studies. He’s worked as a defense contractor with various Defense Department agencies for more than 30 years. For further reading he recommends To Save a City, by Roger Miller; Checkmate in Berlin, by Giles Milton; and The City Becomes a Symbol, by William Stivers and Donald A. Carter.

The Irrepressible ‘Candy Bomber’

Gail Halvorsen opening mail ‘Candy Bomber’.

Gail Halvorsen joined the U.S. Army Air Corps in 1942 and trained on fight-ers with the Royal Air Force. Reassigned to military transport service, Halvorsen remained in the service at war’s end. He was flying Douglas C-74 Globemasters and C-54 Skymasters out of Mobile, Ala., when word came in June 1948 that the Soviet Union had blockaded West Berlin. During the 15-month airlift (Operation Vittles), American and British pilots delivered more than 2.3 million tons of supplies to the city. But it was Halvorsen’s decision to airdrop candy to children (Operation Little Vittles) that clinched an ideological battle and earned him the lasting affection of a free West Berlin. The beloved “Candy Bomber” died at age 101 on Feb. 16, 2022.

In 2009 Military History editor David Lauterborn was fortunate enough to interview Halvorsen. Following is an excerpt of their conversation, available in full online at Historynet.com/candy-bomber-gail-halvorsen.

What prompted you to start dropping candy?

At the end of the [Tempelhof] runway, in an open space between the bombed-out buildings and barbed wire, kids were watching the air-planes coming in over the rooftops. They came right up to the barbed wire and spoke to me in English: “Don’t give up on us. If we lose our freedom, we’ll never get it back.” American-style freedom was their dream. Hitler’s past and Stalin’s future was their nightmare. I just flipped. Got so interested, I forgot what time it was.

I looked at my watch and said, “Holy cow, I gotta go! Goodbye. Don’t worry.” I took three steps. Then I realized—these kids had me stopped dead in my tracks for over an hour, and not one of 30 had put out their hand. They were so grateful for flour, to be free, that they wouldn’t be beggars for something extravagant. This was stronger than overt gratitude—this was silent gratitude. How can I reward these kids?

I went back to the fence and pulled out my two sticks of Wrigley’s Doublemint, broke them in half and passed the four pieces through the barbed wire….I told them, “Come back here tomorrow, and when I come in to land, I’ll drop enough gum for all of you.”

One asked, “How do we know what airplane you’re in?”

“I’ll wiggle the wings.”

“Vas ist viggle?” he asked.

How did you work it?

My copilot and engineer gave me their candy rations—big double handfuls of Hershey, Mounds and Baby Ruth bars and Wrigley’s gum. It was heavy, and I thought, Boy, put that in a bundle and hit ’em in the head going 110 miles an hour, it’ll make the wrong impression. So, I made three handkerchief parachutes and tied strings tight around the candy. The next day I came in over the field, and there were those kids in that open space. I wiggled the wings, and they just blew up—I can still see their arms. The crew chief threw the rolled-up parachutes out the flare chute behind the pilot seat.

As your efforts grew in scope, did anyone notice?

[One day] an officer met the airplane and said, “The colonel wants to see you right now.” So I went in, and he says, “Whatcha doing, Halvorsen?”

“Flying like mad, sir.”

“I’m not stupid. What else you been doing?” And he pulled out a newspaper with a big article and a photograph of my plane and the tail number. So I told him. He understood, and airlift commander General William Tunner said, “Keep doing it!”

What kept you going?

Without hope the soul dies. And that was so appropriate for the day. In our own neighborhoods people have lost hope, lost function because they have no outside source of inspiration. The airlift was a symbol that we were going to be there—service before self.

Operation Little Vittles dropped more than 21 tons of candy during the airlift. How does that total strike you?

All from two sticks of gum in 1948—unbelievable!

This story appeared in the 2023 Summer issue of Military History magazine.

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Lincoln in His Own Words: The 16th President’s Musings About ‘negro equality’

Ross E. Heller — Tue, 11 Jul 2023 13:30:00 +0000

Capt. James N. Brown

In 1858, Abraham Lincoln casually and unknowingly created a time capsule of his contemporary mindset on both slavery and race relations—not hidden in a cornerstone but taking the form of a 3.25- by 5.78-inch black campaign notebook shared with Capt. James N. Brown, a longtime friend and fellow campaigner.

It was the waning days of Lincoln’s senatorial campaign against Stephen A. Douglas and Brown was running for Illinois state legislature, partly at Lincoln’s encouragement. Brown, however, was assailed for his ties to Lincoln. Virulent opponents said that Lincoln—and therefore Brown, by association—supported and wanted to bring about social and political Negro equality.

Brown beseeched Lincoln for a clear statement on that Negro equality, what Brown referred to as the “paramount issue” of the day. Lincoln acceded, annotating what he called a “scrapbook” with news clips of his speeches on the subject, and a definitive 8-page letter, transcribed here.

Brown used the notebook from Lincoln during his campaign’s waning days. It didn’t help. He lost the election.

The scrapbook was cherished by Brown and, after his 1868 death, by his sons William and Benjamin. Eventually they sold it to New York rare-book dealer George D. Smith, who found a customer in Philadelphia Lincoln collector William H. Lambert, who believed Lincoln’s words warranted wider distribution and published a version of the notebook in 1901 as Abraham Lincoln: His Book: A Facsimile Reproduction of the Original with an Explanatory Note by J. McCan Davis.

After Lambert’s death the ‘scrapbook’ was auctioned in 1914; and purchased for Henry E. Huntington’s San Marino, California library.

In his career Ross E. Heller, holder of a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Oregon, has been a journalist, U.S. Senatorial press secretary, lobbyist, association executive, entrepreneur, newspaper publisher and now, editor/author. Researching this book, he is also discoverer of new facts of America’s most-storied life; a life about which no one could imagine anything new could ever be found.

This article is an excerpt from By Abraham Lincoln: His 1858 Time Capsule, edited by Ross E. Heller and published by CustomNEWS, Seaside Books.

The Great Debates. Lincoln gained great fame for his deft verbal jousting with Stephen Douglas in their 1858 Illinois debates.

Abraham Lincoln’s note.

this article first appeared in American history magazine

This story appeared in the 2023 Summer issue of American History magazine.

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Our 9 best-selling history titles feature in-depth storytelling and iconic imagery to engage and inform on the people, the wars, and the events that shaped America and the world.