Artemisia absinthium is a green, leafy plant native to Europe, but one that has since migrated to North America. Commonly called the wormwood plant, its flowers and leaves are the main ingredient of absinthe, one of the world’s most unusual liquors that was first distilled in Switzerland. Absinthe is naturally green in color, and potent, usually 90 to 148 proof.

That potency led many to believe absinthe had hallucinogenic powers, and controversy has plagued the drink since it was first distilled. Before coming to America, it was extremely popular in France. And then, Jean Lanfray killed his family after imbibing the “Green Demon.”

The Lanfray killings happened in Commugny, a small agricultural village in southwest Switzerland, nestled along the border with France. Lanfray was a tall, brawny vineyard worker and day laborer. Like many in the area, he was a born Frenchman; he had served three years in the French Army. At 31 years old, he lived in a two-story farmhouse with his family: his wife and two daughters living upstairs, and his parents and brother, with rooms downstairs.

On August 28, 1905, he woke at 4:30 in the morning. He started the day with a shot of absinthe diluted in water—not uncommon for him or for many Europeans at the time. He let the cows out to pasture, had some harsh words with his wife, and set off to a nearby vineyard to work. Along the way, he stopped for more alcohol: a creme de menthe with water, followed by a cognac and soda. By then it was 5:30 a.m.

Investigating the killings, Swiss authorities established a careful timeline of Lanfray’s prodigious drinking, learning that he would sometimes drink five liters of wine a day. Around noon, he lunched on bread, cheese, and sausage. He also had six glasses of strong wine over his lunch and afternoon break. And another glass before leaving work about 4:30 p.m.

At a cafe on his way home, he had black coffee with brandy. Back at the farmhouse, he and his father each polished off another liter of wine while Lanfray bickered with his wife. Their long-simmering grievances came to a head, and he rose from his seat, took down his rifle from the wall, and shot his wife through the forehead, killing her instantly.

As Lanfray’s father ran from the house seeking help, his daughter Rose came into the room—Lanfray shot her in the chest. He then went to the crib of his younger daughter, Blanche, and killed her, as well. He struggled to kill himself with the rifle, but it was too long to easily aim at himself and still reach the trigger. Using a piece of string, he finally pulled the trigger but succeeded only in shooting himself in the jaw. With blood running down his face, he picked up Blanche and carried her to the barn, where he lost consciousness. Police found him minutes later.

It was a senseless tragedy, the kind that leaves bystanders helplessly grasping at explanations. The fact that a man could get drunk, kill his entire family, and have no memory of it—that may have struck too close to home for Lanfray’s neighbors, who worked in vineyards and drank beside him. No, there had to be something else, something other.

At a public meeting soon after, the people of Commugny railed against the supposedly corrupting power of absinthe. Lanfray was known regularly to drink it (as did many, many others), and had drunk two glasses on the day of the murders (along with liters of wine). A story began to form, an explanation. Lanfray wasn’t simply an angry drunkard; he was an Absintheur.

this article first appeared in American history magazine

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It was a story many were ready to hear. Absinthe already had a dangerous reputation, despite its widespread use throughout Europe. Even aficionados cautioned that “absinthe is a spark that explodes the gunpowder of wine.”

Lanfray’s killings provided potent fuel for a moral panic around absinthe that had been growing for decades. Politicians now had a scapegoat—and a crusade. The press feverishly covered “the Absinthe Murder,” putting it on front pages throughout Europe. One Swiss newspaper called absinthe “the premier cause of bloodthirsty crime in this century,” a sentiment echoed by Commugny’s mayor, who declared, “Absinthe is the principal cause of a series of bloody crimes in our country.”

In the region, a petition to outlaw the drink gathered 82,000 signatures within weeks. After an absinthe drinker in Geneva, Switzerland, killed his wife with a hatchet and a revolver, an anti-absinthe petition quickly gained 34,702 signatures. The public, too, had found a villain.

The following February, Lanfray went on trial. His defense hinged on proving him absinthe-mad, consumed by his addiction to that foul drink whose demonic grip had driven him to murder. If absinthe had made him do it, he couldn’t be held completely responsible for his actions.

The argument leaned on a folk understanding of “absinthism,” a collection of maladies supposedly known to afflict the chronic absinthe drinker, including seizures, speech impairment, disordered sleep, and auditory and visual hallucinations. Absinthism was the road to insanity and death; even as millions of people from every walk of life enjoyed absinthe, medical professionals and the press warned of asylums rapidly filling with former Absintheurs, now lost in the throes of madness.

It was known as “une correspondance pour Charenton,” a ticket to Charenton, the insane asylum outside Paris. (It’s unclear whether absinthism actually existed as a syndrome at all, rather than arising from misunderstandings about alcoholism and mental health more generally.)

Not every doctor gave credence to the more lurid claims about absinthism. In Lanfray’s case, however, Albert Mahaim, a professor at the University of Geneva and the head of the regional insane asylum in Vaud, examined the defendant in jail and later testified that “without a doubt, it is the absinthe he drank daily and for a long time that gave Lanfray the ferociousness of temper and blind rages that made him shoot his wife for nothing and his two poor children, whom he loved.” The prosecution, naturally, disagreed.

Whatever the public sentiment toward absinthe, Lanfray was found guilty on four counts of murder—his wife, it turned out, had been pregnant with a son. Three days later, Lanfray hanged himself in his cell.

Less than a month after his death, Vaud, the canton containing Commugny, succeeded in banning absinthe, with the canton of Geneva quickly following. Then it was banned nationwide. Belgium had already banned absinthe in 1905; the Netherlands in 1909. Even France, which consumed more absinthe than the rest of the world, and where it was, as historian P.E. Prestwich put it, “inspiration of French poets and the consolation of French workers,” banned the drink in 1914.

The Green Fairy to its advocates and the Green Demon to its detractors, absinthe was exiled from much of Europe. (The United Kingdom and the Czech Republic were notable exceptions.) While anti-alcohol movements had agitated in countries around the world for decades, absinthe was the first alcoholic drink singled out for a ban. Its outsized, bewitching reputation had been turned against it.

Before the exile, absinthe had a long history in Europe, particularly in France. In its modern form, it likely began as a patent remedy concocted by a French doctor living in Switzerland in the late 1700s. Its name derives from the Greek absinthion, an ancient medicinal drink made by soaking wormwood leaves (Artemisia absinthium) in wine or spirits. It was said to aid in childbirth, and the Greek physician Hippocrates, known as the father of medicine, recommended it for menstrual pain, jaundice, anemia, and rheumatism.

Wormwood persisted as a folk remedy through the ages; when the bubonic plague ravaged England in the 17th and 18th centuries, desperate villagers burned wormwood to cleanse their houses. Wormwood drinks were likewise medicinal—including that early patent remedy.

In 1830, France conquered Algeria and began to expand its empire into North Africa. Soon 100,000 French troops were stationed in the country, where the heat and bad water led to sickness tearing through the occupiers. Wormwood helped stave off insects, calm fevers, and prevent dysentery, and soldiers started adding it to their wine. When they returned home, they brought with them “une verte”—the potent drink with the unique green color.

Absinthe quickly became intertwined with French society, first as a harmless vice of the upper and middle classes. As its reputation (exotic, revelatory) grew, so did its popularity; even among those not looking for a hallucinogenic experience, the high alcohol content proved a key selling point, as you could easily dilute absinthe and still get a great bargain, proof-wise. Everywhere in France seemed to celebrate l’heure verte, the “green hour” of the early evening devoted to absinthe.

Absinthe became intricately connected to French culture and identity. So it is no surprise that when the drink found its way to the United States, the most famous venue for absinthe indulgence would be in a city with a distinctly French flavor: New Orleans, “the little Paris of North America.”

The French sold Louisiana to the United States in 1803, and the region’s uniquely French culture became a point of pride. As absinthe took off in France, it also appeared in New Orleans, though without the same fanfare and popularity. In a town already famous for carousing, absinthe was one drink among many.

Following the Civil War, a barman named Cayetano Ferrer, formerly of the Paris Opera House, began serving absinthe in what some clever marketing called “the Parisian manner.” A glass of the emerald drink would be placed on the bar beneath a pair of fountains, and water would slowly drip, creating a milky opalescence in a glass—a process called the “louche.”

Ferrer’s ritual proved a compelling spectacle for the tourists who flocked to the city of sin. The building became the Old Absinthe House. Thought to be the city’s first saloon, it hosted famous luminaries from Mark Twain and Walt Whitman to O. Henry and William Makepeace Thackeray. Oscar Wilde, of course, attended. No visit to New Orleans, by then “the Absinthe capital of the world,” could be complete without a round at the Old Absinthe House.

While Europeans of all classes drank absinthe, in the United States it remained a cosmopolitan indulgence little known outside the city. New York had its own Absinthe House, and large metropolitan areas such as Chicago and San Francisco catered to the artists, bohemians, and wealthy, gilded-age poseurs who wanted to associate themselves with absinthe’s dark allure.

Absinthe’s relative obscurity in America didn’t prevent the press from warning of its fearsome reputation, however. Against the backdrop of a growing temperance movement, in 1879, a Dr. Richardson offered his perspective on absinthe to The New York Times. “I cannot report so favorably on the use of Absinthe as I have on the use of opium,” he began, describing rising absinthe use in “closely-packed towns and cities.” He warned that the drink was commonly adulterated, and that frequent imbibers could become addicted. “In the worst examples of poisoning from Absinthe,” he wrote, “the person becomes a confirmed epileptic.”

Later that year, the Times reiterated: “The dangerous, often deadly, habit of drinking Absinthe is said to be steadily growing in this country, not among foreigners merely, but among the native population.” It ascribed “a good many deaths in different parts of the country” to a drink “much more perilous, as well as more deleterious, than any ordinary kind of liquor.”

Absinthe, the writer claimed, had a subtlety lacking in other alcohol; addiction could sneak up quickly. “The more intellectual a man is,” the Times cautioned, “the more readily the habit fastens itself upon him.” It had already taken its toll in Europe: “Some of the most brilliant authors and artists of Paris have killed themselves with absinthe, and many more are doing so.” The Times closed by warning that absinthe, previously found only in large cities, had permeated everywhere, “and it is called for with alarming frequency.”

Much of absinthe’s mythology came from an accumulation of confusions, misunderstandings, and motivated lies. Some, though, did try to cut through the green fog and get to the truth—at least as best they could. Valentin Magnan, physician-in-chief at Sainte-Anne, France’s main asylum, saw rising numbers of insane people as a sign of his country’s social decay. (More likely, the increase resulted from improved diagnostic techniques.) Like many, he saw absinthe as the culprit, and set out to prove his case.

In 1869 he published his results. He had arranged an experiment. One guinea pig was placed in a glass case with a saucer of pure alcohol; another was placed in a glass case with a saucer of wormwood oil. A cat and a rabbit also got their own cases and their own saucers of wormwood oil. The animals breathing wormwood fumes were wracked with seizures, while the sole alcohol-breathing guinea pig just got drunk.

This and other experiments convinced Magnan (if he hadn’t been already) that absinthe was uniquely toxic. He extrapolated his results to humans, and claimed that “absinthistes” in his asylum displayed seizures, violent fits, and amnesia. He pushed for banning the Green Demon.

Fellow authorities disagreed, pointing out that guinea pigs inhaling high doses of distilled wormwood couldn’t be compared to humans consuming tiny amounts of diluted wormwood. They suggested that wormwood likely had little effect, and whatever damage absinthe wrought was no different from typical alcoholism. Rhetorically, however, Magnan’s support for the concept of “absinthism,” separate from alcoholism, enabled those concerned citizens who wanted to ban absinthe without committing to full prohibition. Absinthe, after all, posed a unique medical danger, while other alcohol (including France’s beloved wine) was surely fine for responsible adults.

In the United States, absinthe never became the burning social question it was in Europe. The media took occasional potshots, reflecting a general sense of absinthe’s depravity, without ever raising banning it to the height of a moral crusade.

An 1883 cartoon in Harper’s Weekly, for example, had the caption, “Absinthe Drinking—The Fast Prevailing Vice Among Our Gilded Youth.” The picture above featured a strapping young man on the left, and on the right a broken, aged specter of dissolution, “after two years’ indulgence, three times a day.” An earlier article in the magazine declared: “Many deaths are directly traceable to the excessive use of absinthe. The encroachments of this habit are scarcely perceptible. A regular absinthe drinker seldom perceives that he is dominated by its baleful influence until it is too late. All of a sudden he breaks down; his nervous system is destroyed, his brain is inoperative, his will is paralyzed, he is a mere wreck; there is no hope of his recovery.”

In the early 1900s, public opinion in Europe began to turn against absinthe, generally as part of the long-simmering temperance movement, and more specifically because of the Lanfray murders. As countries began to ban the drink, Harper’s Weekly reported in 1907 that the U.S. Department of Agriculture had begun to investigate “the green curse of France.” Four years later, with little fanfare at the end of 1911, the department’s Pure Food Board announced starting January 1, 1912, importing absinthe into the United States would be prohibited.

Give it a shot!

Tenth Ward distilling in Frederick, Md., is one American distiller now
producing absinthe. Check them out at (tenthwarddistilling.com).

The head of the board told the Times that “Absinthe is one of the worst enemies of man, and if we can keep the people of the United States from becoming slaves to this demon, we will do it.” (The board also announced new restrictions on opium, morphine, and cocaine.)

News reports from the time show that, unsurprisingly, Americans didn’t immediately cease drinking absinthe. In a preview of the Prohibition era, authorities particularly in California seized caches of the emerald beverage. British mystic and provocateur Aleister Crowley wrote his famous paean to the Old Absinthe House, “The Green Goddess,” in 1916, well after the ban. “Art is the soul of life and the Old Absinthe House is heart and soul of the old quarter of New Orleans,” he wrote. And he struck a familiar note about the bewitching, destructive power of the Green Fairy: “What is there in Absinthe that makes it a separate cult? The effects of its abuse are totally different from those of other stimulants. Even in ruin and in degradation it remains a thing apart: its victims wear a ghastly aureole all their own, and in their peculiar hell yet gloat with a sinister perversion of pride that they are not as other men.”

Crowley’s line evoked a demimonde particular to that time and place, but in 1920 the arrival of Prohibition blunted much of absinthe’s mystique in the United States. Jad Adams writes: “The surreptitious nature of drinking in the prohibition era—serving alcohol from hip flasks, barmen squirting a syringe of pure alcohol into soft drinks they were serving—was not conducive to absinthe, which was a drink of display and provocation.”

New Orleans continued imbibing and became known as “the liquor capital of America.” The Old Absinthe House was closed by federal agents in 1925 and again in 1926, the 100-year anniversary of its opening. Yet it outlasted prohibition and remains a fixture of New Orleans culture to this day.

Absinthe, too, persevered. It went further underground, particularly in America, and that burnished its appeal among bohemians and the counterculture. Ernest Hemingway and Jack London fondly recalled their absinthe experiences beyond the reach of U.S. law; Hemingway’s cocktail, Death in the Afternoon, is likely the country’s most lasting and well-known contribution to absinthe culture.

And eventually, like green shoots emerging after a long and punishing winter, the Green Fairy rose again. After nearly 100 years of targeted prohibition, in 2007 the United States once again allowed absinthe to be imported and consumed. The green hour had come back around again, at last.

Jesse Hicks writes about science, technology, and politics. Based in Detroit, his work has appeared in Harper’s, Politico, The New Republic, and elsewhere.

How Do You Drink Absinthe?

(Ask Hemingway)

Well, it requires a fancy slotted spoon, for one thing. The following is the most traditional and common method for preparing the drink. You place a sugar cube on the spoon, and then place the spoon over a glass of absinthe. Pour iced water over the sugar cube so you end up with about 1 part absinthe and 3–5 parts water.

The water brings out the anise, which gives absinthe a licorice taste, and fennel that are also distilled with the leaves and flowers of the wormwood plant. If the mix is correct, the liquid will turn milky and opalescent in appearance.

Ernest Hemingway was a fan of absinthe—why is that not surprising? His favorite way to drink it was a simple cocktail he called “Death in the Afternoon,” the same name as his 1932 book about Spanish bullfighting.

Death in the Afternoon ingredients:

1½ ounces Absinthe

4 ounces chilled Champagne

Hemingway published the recipe in a 1935 book, So Red the Nose, or Breath in the Afternoon, which featured 30 drink concoctions from celebrities. He explained, “Pour one jigger Absinthe into a Champagne glass. Add iced Champagne until it attains the proper opalescent milkiness. Drink three to five of these slowly.” Yes. Very slowly.

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

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One of the nation’s foremost authorities on firepower and land warfare, Robert H. Scales retired from the Army in 2001 after more than three decades in uniform, much of it influenced by his service in Vietnam. A 1966 graduate of the United States Military Academy, Scales initially served in Germany before joining the 2nd Battalion, 319th Artillery in Vietnam. Scales commanded a howitzer battery in the battalion and earned a Silver Star in 1969. He would later lead artillery units in Korea, command the Field Artillery Center at Fort Sill, and serve as the Commandant of the U.S. Army War College.

Scales holds a doctorate in history from Duke University and has written a number of critically acclaimed books, including Firepower in Limited War, Certain Victory, and Yellow Smoke: The Future of Land Warfare for America’s Military. In an interview with Vietnam contributor Warren Wilkins, he discusses his experiences in Vietnam, the role of firepower in that conflict, and the defining characteristics of American war-making.

On the night of June 14, 1969, you were in command of a 105mm howitzer battery at Firebase Berchtesgaden, located on a hill on the eastern side of the A Shau Valley, when a force of approximately 100 North Vietnamese sappers attacked the base. You received a Silver Star for your actions during the battle. Tell us about that night.

My four guns and two 155mm howitzers were clustered together on this mountaintop. In May 1969, the NVA [North Vietnamese Army] attacked my sister battalion on Firebase Airborne. They destroyed guns, killed 13 soldiers, and completely eviscerated that unit. One month later, they attacked us. They attacked early in the morning, and the hole that I lived in was right on the edge of the perimeter. My battery was the first thing they attacked. The goddamn infantry that protected us had decided that they were going to be in charge of illumination. The key to defeating a night attack is illumination. So the infantry said that they would handle it, but I didn’t believe them. If you look at Berchtesgaden on Google, you will see this one lone gun at the very top of the firebase with the tube sticking up almost vertically. Well, that was my gun. I kept that gun at 1100 mils [milliradians], one-and-a-half second delay on an illumination round, pointed straight up.

We got involved in this horrendous fight, and I had to get to that gun because the infantry never fired a round of illumination. The first sergeant and I fought like hell to get to that damn gun. Finally we got to it, and I pulled the lanyard. When that illumination round went off, it changed the whole complexion of the battle. All of the sudden, the light went on and the troops started killing those guys. They [the NVA] were literally caught in the open. We fought like hell, beat them back, and killed a whole bunch of them. Our main mission as artillerymen was to shoot artillery, but an equally important mission for young gunners is to be able to defend your position. That was a lesson I learned.

Prior to the sapper attack, your battery had provided artillery support for the 101st Airborne Division during the battle for Hill 937, better known as “Hamburger Hill.” How did the employment of artillery in Vietnam compare to other American wars?

You can almost draw a graph, starting with the 25th Infantry Division at Guadalcanal, that traces the density of supporting fires dedicated to the maneuver mission up through the Pacific battles, the Battle of the Bulge and the push into Germany, and then forward to Korea. That graph or curve goes way up in terms of the ratio of firepower expended versus the maneuver forces employed. Entire ships full of ammunition were expended in 1951-52 to preserve American lives.

By the time we got to Vietnam, this idea of trading firepower for manpower really started to take hold. So when I was there, no infantry unit was allowed to maneuver outside the artillery fan. The infantry in Vietnam would literally maneuver by fire. Artillery was also used as a navigation aid, to recon by fire and clear the way as units moved through the jungle, and to fire defensive concentrations.

Speaking of “Hamburger Hill,” you’ve noted that your battery hammered that hill with thousands of 105mm rounds, air strikes blasted its slopes and summit, and yet the enemy continued to fight. Did this cause you to reconsider the efficacy of firepower on the battlefield?

When I was at Berchtesgaden, I was higher than Hamburger Hill and could look down on it through my scope. By the time our infantry had conducted their fifth or sixth assault, the top of that mountain was completely denuded. I would sit there with my scope, and we’d fire and fire and fire. If our troops got down, behind a log or something, we could shoot within 40 meters [of them] if we were very careful.

I would look through that scope, and as soon as we lifted our fires, I could see those little guys [the NVA] come out from those underground bunkers and take up positions and start shooting back. I remember saying to myself—and this has been kind of a thesis of all the books I’ve written about firepower—that firepower has a limitation. We saw this in the First World War when artillery was shocking to both sides early in the war. By 1917, there were images of the British “Tommy” [soldier] brewing tea in the middle of a barrage.

In the age of “imprecision”—before what we now call “precision” munitions—the primary impact of artillery was psychological and not physical. It’s what’s called the palliative effect of artillery. By the time I got to Vietnam [in 1968] the psychological effects of artillery had dropped off considerably, and the enemy was no longer as intimidated by our killing power as he was in 1965. Two things always amazed me about artillery—one is the enormous pyrotechnic effect of artillery going off over the enemy, and the other is the remarkably few enemy it actually kills.

So from my experience at Hamburger Hill, I learned that there is a crossover point in the use of artillery and firepower at which its ability to influence the maneuver battle diminishes considerably. If a soldier is warm and protected—in other words, if he’s down or better yet under cover—it takes an awful lot of rounds to kill him. And no matter how much artillery and firepower you pile onto that—again I’m talking about “dumb” artillery and “dumb” firepower—its ability to influence the battle diminishes with time. That was reinforced in Korea and Vietnam.

The U.S. military—particularly the Army—clearly favored firepower over maneuver in Vietnam. Was this emphasis on firepower unique to that conflict, or was it merely a reflection of what some have called the “American way of war”?

We do emphasize firepower, but the Russians do the same. Although the Russians are far more willing to sacrifice human lives than we are, they have a very similar doctrine…. In Vietnam it was a career ender if your maneuver force was caught outside the reach of your artillery. And that psychology continued all the way into Desert Storm. As late as Desert Storm, one of the cardinal tenets of the American way of war was to never exceed the limits of your artillery.

The American army was caught in a dilemma in Vietnam. We had reached the limit, before the point where we could achieve our maneuver objectives, when artillery was no longer all that helpful. So what do you do? Do you start expending more human lives to achieve your objectives because you are no longer protected by firepower? Or do you fall back under the protective arcs of your artillery and refuse to maneuver beyond that and give the enemy the advantage? And until the “precision” revolution in 1972, that’s sort of where we were.

In retrospect, do you believe that a firepower-first approach in Vietnam was justified, given the operating environment and the existing political climate, or do you agree with critics who argue that the military’s overreliance on heavy supporting fires undermined American pacification efforts and failed to address the true nature of the enemy threat?

I argue in my book [Firepower in Limited War] that in a counter-insurgency campaign, firepower has its limits. But I failed to mention the psychological impact of firepower on the civilian population and the deadening effect it has on the innocent. That is particularly important when you’re fighting a war seeking popular support. So the presence of innocents on the battlefield greatly diminishes your ability to apply overwhelming firepower. The second thing we learned in Vietnam was that, after a while, firepower becomes an inhibitor rather than a facilitator of your ability to maneuver. So the days of using light infantry as a find, fix, and finish force were greatly diminished because of its inability to move outside the arc of artillery.

The Army was on the horns of a dilemma. The center of gravity of the American military in Vietnam was dead Americans, and the NVA knew it. In World War II, Col. [Hiromichi] Yahara, who served with the Japanese army on Okinawa, wrote a series of missives in which he said, essentially, the only way you can beat America is to kill Americans. We lost in Vietnam not because we were not able to defeat the enemy in battle, or that we had too little or too much firepower, but because too many Americans died and we tired of it first, just as Ho Chi Minh predicted the French would do before us. The only way to save lives in the close fight in Vietnam was through the use of protective fires. But firepower became a millstone around our necks in terms of our ability to maneuver. It also had a debilitating effect on our ability to maintain the “hearts and minds” of the people.

So we reached a plateau in our use of firepower, beyond which we could not go, and for which we had no alternative by 1970. Anytime you put maneuver forces forward in close contact with the enemy, soldiers are going to die. Yet we got to a point by 1970-71 where, anytime an American soldier died, it would end up on the front page of the New York Times. So you have two choices to keep those soldiers safe: lock them in firebases and let the enemy run amok in the countryside and control the population, or put them out there under the protective umbrella of firepower but greatly limit their ability to maneuver. It was that juxtaposition between keeping soldiers safe—our vulnerable center of gravity—or being able to maneuver and control territory, and we were never able to reconcile that.

The traditional role of the infantry has always been to close with and destroy the enemy. American infantry units in Vietnam, however, typically sought to find the enemy so that firepower could destroy him. Did this change in tactics occur organically within individual platoons and companies in the field, or was it mandated by some higher headquarters and then codified by formal regulations?

Actually, it was both. One of the amazing things about the American way of war—and we saw this in World War II, particularly as American soldiers became more literate and as the American army became more egalitarian—is that tactical innovation in the American army, beginning in North Africa, really came from the bottom up, not the top down. That’s different than the Russian army, which is ruled by norms driven by the general staff. The American soldier, when he learns something that will keep him alive, will embrace it and proliferate it very quickly. You build a firepower system around what the soldiers are telling you makes it most effective.

In his book Firepower in Limited War, Scales examines the advantages and limitations of firepower by analyzing its effects in several pivotal recent conflicts. The book was placed on the Marine Corps Commandant’s Reading List.

Part of the reason that we rely so heavily on the artillery was that the revolution at Fort Sill [home of U.S. field artillery] was such that we came up with by far the best artillery firepower system in the world. We just were never really able to embed it into the Army’s system until our experiences in North Africa taught us how to do it and how to provide close support. But we just hit the wall in terms of our ability to do that, because the enemy has a vote.

What did the Japanese do at Okinawa? What did the Chinese and North Koreans do? What did the NVA do? They learned how to effectively counter American firepower dominance by maneuvering outside of the [firepower] range fan, hugging maneuver units so that they couldn’t bring in heavy close supporting fires, using camouflage, and going to ground.

To reduce the destructive effects of American firepower, the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese would frequently “hug” American infantry units in battle. How effective was that tactic?

It was very effective. I saw that firsthand. They were literally willing to die under our artillery fan to stay in their holes, frankly longer than we ever would, in order to continue to kill us. Remember, their purpose was not to hold ground. Their purpose was to kill us.

Gen. Vuong Thua Vu, former deputy chief of the North Vietnamese Army General Staff, characterized the American practice of generating contact with enemy troops and then calling in artillery and air strikes to destroy them as an “outmoded fighting method of a cowardly but aggressive army.” Similarly, some of our Australian and South Korean allies have suggested that the American infantryman, while certainly not “cowardly,” nevertheless relied too much on firepower. How did American soldiers and Marines perform in infantry combat?

For a drafted army and to some extent a [drafted] Marine Corps, they performed remarkably well. Whenever the U.S. Army got involved in what [retired Marine Corps general and former U.S. Secretary of Defense] Jim Mattis and I call “intimate killing,” they did it remarkably well, considering what was at stake. The critics have this wrong, because I suspect if you were South Korean, or Australian, or whomever and had that firepower available to you, you would fight precisely the same way. The problem is that you want to avoid intimate killing, and in that sense the American army had it right. But the limits of technology precluded the American army from avoiding intimate contact without the cost of logistics being so great that it was no longer effective.

So I have no problem whatsoever with the tactics that the American close combat forces used in Vietnam. My critique has always been with the firepower system that supported them. I have no problem whatsoever with finding, fixing, and finishing—the three words we used to describe Vietnam combat. I do have a problem with the technology that we used in our firepower system to do the finishing part. It was always inefficient, logistically burdensome, and reached a point of diminishing returns. What the “precision” revolution has allowed us to do is reverse that.

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

this article first appeared in vietnam magazine

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It’s easy to take the World War II Allied victory on D-Day for granted somewhat—the concept of an invincible wave of Allied soldiers trampling over desperate troops of defending Germans is steadily becoming embedded in popular history. We are now so far removed from those events that victory may seem to us to have been a foregone conclusion. But can we truly appreciate the human cost of that victory—the horrors that Allied troops had to overcome to secure those beaches, the savagery of the battle against strong and tenacious defenders, and the staggering loss of life that ensued?

Those are the questions that Ernie Pyle, speaking to us from the annals of history, seems to ask us in this heartrending account of his impressions of the D-Day invasion. He described the following scenes because, he wrote, “I want you to know so that you can know and appreciate and forever be humbly grateful to those both dead and alive who did it for you.” As those who fought in World War II pass on, let us take his words to heart. We can reflect on what Allied soldiers fought and died for as we envision the grim reality he describes below. 

Who Was Ernie Pyle?

World War II Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent, Ernie Pyle (1900-1945), was America’s most famous combat reporter of the war, his columns carried in 700 daily and weekly newspapers across the U.S. Universally beloved by the G.I.s whose stories he faithfully reported to the folks back home, Pyle lived amongst them, sharing their meager rations, dodging enemy bullets and shellfire, and enduring the troops’ collective misery. 

After a stint in London covering the Battle of Britain in 1940, Pyle returned to the European Theater in 1942 as a Scripps-Howard newspaper correspondent when the Allies invaded North Africa. He accompanied G.I.s as they fought to capture Sicily in 1943 and then slogged with them up the rugged terrain in Italy in 1944. Pyle’s most famous column, written during the Italian campaign, is “This One is Captain Waskow,” a poignant account published Jan. 10, 1944 of infantrymen’s reactions to the Dec. 14, 1943 death of their much-admired company commander, Capt. Henry T. Waskow, during the Battle of San Pietro. In April 1944, Pyle left Italy for England as one of 28 war correspondents to accompany American forces in the Normandy invasion. In January 1945, Pyle went to the Pacific Theater to report the war against Japan that America’s soldiers, sailors and Marines had been fighting since December 1941. By then, Pyle was on the verge of being emotionally exhausted from the strain of combat but persevered, covering the invasion of Okinawa. On April 18, 1945, while accompanying the Army infantrymen of the 305th Infantry Regiment, 77th Infantry Division as they cleared the tiny island of Ie Shima (today Iejima) just off the northwestern coast of Okinawa, the jeep carrying Pyle came under Japanese machine gun fire. After taking cover in a ditch, Pyle raised his head slightly as another burst of Japanese fire raked the road. Ernie was hit in the left temple, dying instantly. As a tribute to Pyle, the division’s soldiers erected a monument at the spot which reads: “At this spot, the 77th Infantry Division lost a buddy, Ernie Pyle.” He was eventually buried in Hawaii’s National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific at Punchbowl Crater in Honolulu. 

A Walk Across Omaha Beach

Ten months before his death on Ie Shima, however, on the night of June 5-6, 1944, Pyle crossed the English Channel amidst the vast Allied Normandy Invasion fleet, arriving off Omaha Beach on D-Day. Due to the intense struggle to capture the beachhead, Pyle and his fellow war correspondents had to wait offshore until permitted to land on Omaha on June 7, 1944—D-Day plus 1. His account here of what he saw there is taken from his 1944 book, Brave Men. 

While you might think that Pyle’s late arrival on Omaha Beach was a drawback, it resulted in one of the most powerful passages describing World War II. Pyle tells the story of the thunderous clash of nations that occurred on D-Day by revealing objects that he saw on the beach—enemy obstacles and fortifications, equipment and soldiers’ personal belongings.

Even after all these years, Pyle’s writing allows us to hear the sheer silence of Omaha Beach. We can feel the magnitude of devastation—and witness the quiet heartbreak of many thousands of people embodied in the personal effects of men whose lives were extinguished as they came ashore. 

“And Yet We Got On…”

Owing to a last-minute alteration in the arrangements, I didn’t arrive on the beachhead until the morning after D-Day, after our first wave of assault troops had hit the shore…After it was over it seemed to me a pure miracle that we ever took the beach at all…

I want to tell you what the opening of the Second Front in one sector entailed, so that you can know and appreciate and forever be humbly grateful to those both dead and alive who did it for you. Ashore, facing us, were more enemy troops than we had in our assault waves.

The advantages were all theirs, the disadvantages all ours. The Germans were dug into positions they had been working on for months… They could shoot parallel with the shore and cover every foot of it for miles with artillery fire. Then they had hidden machine-gun nests on the forward slopes, with crossfire taking in every inch of the beach… 

Our only exits from the beach were several swales or valleys… The Germans made the most of those funnellike traps, sowing them with buried mines… All this was on the shore. But our men had to go through a maze nearly as deadly before they even got ashore. Underwater obstacles were terrific. Under the water the Germans had whole fields of evil devices to catch our boats. Several days after the landing we had cleared only channels through them and still could not approach the whole length of the beach with our ships…

The Germans had masses of great six-pronged spiders—made of railroad iron and standing shoulder-high—just beneath the surface of the water, for our landing craft to run into. They had huge logs buried in the sand, pointing upward and outward, their tops just below the water. Attached to the logs were mines. In addition to these obstacles, they had floating mines offshore, land mines buried in the sand of the beach, and more mines in the checkerboard rows in the tall grass beyond the sand…And yet we got on.

I took a walk along the historic coast of Normandy in the country of France. It was a lovely day for strolling along the seashore. Men were sleeping on the sand, some of them sleeping forever. Men were floating in the water, but they didn’t know they were in the water, for they were dead…

I walked for a mile and a half along the water’s edge of our many-miled invasion beach. I walked slowly, for the detail on that beach was infinite. The wreckage was vast and startling. The awful waste and destruction of war, even aside from the loss of human life, has always been one of its outstanding features to those who are in it… For a mile out from the beach there were scores of tanks and trucks and boats that were not visible, for they were at the bottom of the water—swamped by overloading, or hit by shells, or sunk by mines. Most of their crews were lost. There were trucks tipped half over and swamped, partly sunken barges, and the angled-up corners of jeeps, and the small landing craft half submerged. And at low tide you could still see those vicious six-pronged iron snares that helped snag and wreck them.

The Things They Left In the Sand

On the beach itself, high and dry, were all kinds of wrecked vehicles. There were tanks that had only just made the beach before being knocked out… In this shoreline museum of carnage there were abandoned rolls of barbed wire and smashed bulldozers and big stacks of thrown-away life belts and piles of shells still waiting to be moved. In the water floated empty life rafts and soldiers’ packs and ration boxes, and mysterious oranges… On the beach lay, expended, sufficient men and mechanism for a small war. They were gone forever now. And yet we could afford it. We could afford it because we were on, we had our toehold, and behind us there were such enormous replacements for this wreckage on the beach that you could hardly conceive of the sum total. 

Men and equipment were flowing from England in such a gigantic stream that it made the waste on the beachhead seem like nothing at all, really nothing at all.

But there was another and more human litter. It extended in a thin little line, just like a high-water mark, for miles along the beach. This was the strewn personal gear, gear that would never be needed again by those who fought and died to give us our entrance into Europe.

There in a jumbled row for mile on mile were soldiers’ packs. There were socks and shoe polish, sewing kits, diaries, Bibles, hand grenades. There were the latest letters from home, with the address on each one neatly razored out—one of the security precautions enforced before the boys embarked.

There were toothbrushes and razors, and snapshots of families back home staring up at you from the sand. There were pocketbooks, metal mirrors, extra trousers, and bloody, abandoned shoes…There were torn pistol belts and canvas water buckets, first-aid kits, and jumbled heaps of life belts. I picked up a pocket Bible with a soldier’s name in it, and put it in my jacket. I carried it half a mile or so and then put it back down on the beach. I don’t know why I picked it up, or why I put it down again. 

Soldiers carry strange things ashore with them… The most ironic piece of equipment marking our beach—this beach first of despair, then of victory—was a tennis racket that some soldier had brought along. It lay lonesomely on the sand, clamped in a press, not a string broken. 

Two of the most dominant items in the beach refuse were cigarettes and writing paper. Each soldier was issued a carton of cigarettes just before he started. That day those cartons by the thousand, water-soaked and spilled out, marked the line of our first savage blow.

From Brave Men by Ernie Pyle, published by Penguin Classics, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 1943, 1944 by Scripps-Howard Newspaper Alliance. Copyright © 1944 by Henry Holt & Company, Inc. Copyright renewed 1972 by Holt, Rinehart & Winston, Inc.”

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William Sidney Mount, one of America’s finest 19th-century genre, or scene, painters, created glorious portraits of Black and multiracial people, among others. In politics, he was a Jacksonian Democrat, who favored states’ rights to choose slavery as America’s borders expanded westward. Later on, he would vote against Lincoln. And yet, unlike most White artists of the mid-1800s, who portrayed Black people in demeaning caricatures, Mount painted his subjects with humanity, realism, and psychological depth. Before the Civil War, photography wasn’t common and Black individuals were rarely portrayed in fine art. Mount’s paintings are extremely valuable to the historical record both because of their rarity and their quality. Out of several hundred paintings Mount made in his lifetime, his dozen works that feature Black and multiracial individuals are among his best.

Mount lived his whole life on the rural North Shore of Long Island, N.Y., aside from several years in Manhattan. He never married. From the local farming homesteads, held by his siblings, extended family, and their neighbors, he chose his models, both Black and White. He was also a fiddler, and he liked to illustrate country folk, both Black and White, making music. Due to New York’s partial manumission acts beginning in 1799 and the state’s abolition of slavery in 1827, all Mount’s Black models were free.

Wealthy, White, urban, East Coast businessmen, such as Henry Breevort Jr., Edward L. Carey, Gouverneur Kemble, and Luman Reed purchased Mount’s rural scenes of the 1830s and 1840s. “Yankee” themed artwork became popular in America during Andrew Jackson’s presidency, from 1829 to 1837, which Jackson billed as the “era of the common man.” Mount’s farming scenes won him accolades at the National Academy of Design exhibitions in Manhattan. Racial diversity added to the marketability of such paintings, but with one caveat—that Black and White individuals be segregated within the illustration. As art historian Elizabeth Johns points out, White American buyers were not interested in artwork that challenged the existing segregated and hierarchical social order.

In the 1850s, Mount created three large portraits of Black and multiracial musicians for an entirely different clientele: European buyers of lithographic prints. Mount’s New York agent for the Paris-based international art dealership, Goupil, Vibert & Co. (later Goupil and Co.), commissioned paintings that put Black people front and center in the composition. Europeans were apparently more open-minded about portraying Black people than were their American counterparts.

This portfolio is adapted from The Art of William Sidney Mount: Long Island People of Color on Canvas, The History Press, 2022, $23.99

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The National Portrait Gallery in February unveiled a rare portrait of President Abraham Lincoln. The nine-foot-tall portrait, painted by W.F.K. Travers in 1865, is one of only three known full-length renderings of the 16th president and will be on loan to the Smithsonian gallery in Washington, D.C., for the next five years.

The painting, which hung for decades in a municipal building in a small New Jersey town, has been restored and is now part of the “America’s Presidents” gallery.

Lincoln sat for Travers in 1864 and Travers completed the oil painting in Germany shortly after Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865. Travers then sold the painting to an American diplomat living in Frankfurt. In 1876, the painting was displayed at an exposition in Philadelphia, where Mary Todd Lincoln was reportedly, “so overcome by its lifelike appearance that she fainted and was carried out of the hall.”

For years, it hung in the U.S. Capitol while Congress considered whether to purchase it, but it was ultimately sold to the Rockefeller family. In the 1930s, Geraldine Rockefeller Dodge—daughter of William Jr. and niece of John D.—built the Hartley Dodge Memorial Building in memory of her deceased son and filled it with art, including the Lincoln portrait.

In 2017, an archivist discovered that a marble bust of Napoleon sitting in the corner of the council room of the Hartley Dodge Memorial Building had been sculpted by Auguste Rodin, prompting the foundation to reassess all of the art in its collection. The loan of the Lincoln portrait to the National Portrait Gallery is part of that reassessment.

In addition to Lincoln’s likeness, the painting is filled with symbols noting the president’s place in history. He stands in front of a bust of George Washington and a rendering of the painting “Washington Crossing the Delaware” by Emanuel Leutze. Lincoln’s hand rests on a bound copy of the Constitution, next to a scroll bearing a draft of the 13th Amendment. Behind the scroll is a small statue of an African American man rising as he pulls the chains from his body.

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

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World War II movies and shows often focus on conflicts on the battlefield, but every once in a while, a piece of film captures the struggles of civilians mired in war’s grey areas — the spaces between decision makers and troops. “A Small Light” does just that.

While most Americans may be familiar with story of Anne Frank, whose diary shed light on the deplorable treatment of Jewish people under Nazi rule, the story of the brave woman who hid Frank and her family is lesser known. Miep Gies, an ordinary woman, performed an extraordinary act of courage in hiding the Frank family from the Gestapo.

The eight-part series, produced by National Geographic, tells the story of Gies (Bel Powley) and her husband Jan (Joe Cole), who worked quietly to resist the Nazis in Amsterdam.

Gies, who was not Jewish, is unemployed and living with her adoptive Dutch family as the series begins. That is until Otto Frank, played by Liev Schreiber, hires her as a secretary.

At the outset of the show, Holland appears to be a bastion, but as the Nazis seize control, Jewish life in Amsterdam becomes tenuous seemingly overnight. As a result, Gies works to hide her boss’ family in a hideaway known famously as the annex in their former office.

For two years, the Frank family, Van Pels family and a man named Fritz Pfeffer survived there. Nazis eventually raided the building in August 1944 and sent the eight residents to concentration camps.

Gies, meanwhile, was left with the wreckage from the raid, picking up remnants of what the families left behind, including the renowned diary of Anne Frank, which she returned to Otto — the sole surviving member of the Frank family — after Allied Forces liberated the concentration camps.

The series is a testament to the increasing danger Gies and her husband put themselves through to protect their wards following the swift Nazi takeover. The show derives its title from a quote from Gies, which said, “Even a regular secretary, a housewife or a teenager can turn on a small light in a dark room,” according to the New York Times.

Gies published her own memoir in 1987.

“I am not a hero,” she wrote. “I stand at the end of the long, long line of good Dutch people who did what I did and more — much more — during those dark and terrible times years ago, but always like yesterday in the heart of those of us who bear witness. Never a day goes by that I do not think of what happened then.”

The first two episodes of “A Small Light” are available to stream on Disney+ and Hulu.

Originally published by Military Times, our sister publication.

Photographer Robert Hanley “Bob” Willoughby parlayed his beloved boyhood hobby into a kaleidoscopic career as a maker of indelible images. He was born in 1927 in Los Angeles, Calif., shortly after his parents, Cyril and Antoinette, divorced. Nettie Willoughby raised her son in West Hollywood. Cyril, a doctor, was not much present, but for the boy’s 12th birthday he gave his son a 35mm Argus C-3 rangefinder camera that quickly became a prominent fixture in Bob’s life. A neighbor taught the youth darkroom basics in exchange for babysitting. The sole class at school to hold his interest was art. When he was in junior high, a stroke disabled his mother, who never relented in her support for her son’s photographic ambitions. He converted the home garage on Marvin Avenue into a darkroom functional only at night owing to light leaks. He processed film and made prints to the tune of jazz broadcast by a San Francisco radio station whose AM signal reached southern California after sunset. Upon graduating from Louis Pasteur High in 1946 he apprenticed with a series of Hollywood photographers, earning $5 a week sharpening and expanding his skills. In night classes at USC, he studied under film designers and artists Saul Bass, Slavko Vorkapich, and William Cameron Menzies. He dove into LA’s vibrant music scene, photographing jazz and R&B performers. Dance magazine ran his pictures. He was 22 when his portrait of model Ann Baker graced the cover of the January 1950 US Camera; later that year eclectic label Fantasy Records recruited him to provide LP cover art. In 1951 he signed with Globe Photo, which wrangled assignments from feature and fashion periodicals. To analyze and absorb clients’ unique styles, he haunted used periodicals stores, assembling an archive in which to steep himself in technical and aesthetic nuance. Mixing faith and commerce, he shot for Catholic magazine Jubilee; it would be easier to list the mainstream publications he did not work for than those he did. Under the spell of master magazine photojournalists Henri Cartier-Bresson, W. Eugene Smith, and Irving Penn, he took on ever more fashion and feature work, at the same time establishing a toehold in and eventually a remarkably strong and creative grip on the arcane and demanding specialty of photographing Hollywood productions as they were being made, recording candid moments and scenes as shot. He first worked on contract with magazines seeking to illustrate stories about actors and coming attractions and eventually came to be relied on by studios for his unobtrusive expertise. To facilitate these efforts, he developed innovative camera brackets and electronically controlled flash systems. His facility at documenting decisive moment upon decisive moment led a commentator to label him “the man who virtually invented the photojournalistic motion-picture still.” In 1957 he visited Ireland for the first time, forging a connection that lasted all his life. Through work he and Audrey Hepburn became long-time friends. At Elizabeth Taylor’s request, he photographed her and Eddie Fisher’s wedding in 1959. Soon after, he met Scottish flight attendant Dorothy Quigley aboard a transcontinental flight she was working. They fell for one another, wed, and raised three sons and a daughter, sometimes traveling and living abroad en famille thanks to Bob’s movie work. Over the decades, he photographed 100-some feature films on sets and at locations around the world. In 1973, he retired. Seeking a pastoral routine away from the high life, the Willoughbys relocated to County Cork, Ireland, where they bought a castle and began a 17-year stay during which Willoughby produced books of verse and photos, including a 2001 memoir. Bob Willoughby was 82 when he died in 2009 in Vence, France. His work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the National Portrait Gallery, London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, among many others. Now, with an introduction by son Christopher, Chronicle Books has published a rich and varied survey of his oeuvre titled Bob Willoughby: A Cinematic Life. —Michael Dolan

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This portfolio is excerpted from the new, comprehensive monograph of Bob Willoughby’s work, Bob Willoughby: A Cinematic Life published by Chronicle Books in November 2022.

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“You have heard from a great many people who did something in the war; is it not fair and right that you listen a little moment to one who started out to do something in it but didn’t?” wrote Mark Twain in his semi-fictionalized wartime account, titled “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed.”

“Thousands entered the war, got just a taste of it, and then stepped out again, permanently,” he continued. “These, by their very numbers, are respectable and therefore entitled to a sort of voice, — not a loud one, but a modest one; not a boastful one but an apologetic one. …”

In the summer of 1861, the former riverboat pilot went to war, according to the St. Louis Magazine, on a small yellow mule carrying a valise, a carpetbag, two gray blankets, a homemade quilt, a squirrel rifle, 20 yards of rope, a frying pan and, perhaps most importantly of all, an umbrella.

The 25-year-old Missourian, alongside 14 other idealistic young men, answered Gov. Claiborne Fox Jackson’s call of 50,000 militia to defend their home state.

The few, the band of brothers, called themselves the Marion Rangers, with Twain entering their ranks as a second lieutenant.

Twain, whose real name was Samuel Clemens, had grown up amid slavery in the South. His father had owned slaves. So had his neighbors. In 1860 Twain had voted for John Bell in the presidential election, who, although a Tennessee slaveholder, had opposed secession. 

Twain’s vote was seemingly a vote for the status quo he had grown up around.

But as the war approached Missouri, Twain decided to take a stand — albeit a brief one.

In all, the famed author’s two-week stint as a soldier in the Civil War largely amounted to him larping as a Confederate.

“The first hour was all fun, all idle nonsense and laughter. But that could not be kept up,” Twain wrote in “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed.”

“The steady trudging came to be like work; the play had somehow oozed out of it; the stillness of the woods and the somberness of the night began to throw a depressing influence over the spirits of the boys…”

As the men slogged farther into the woods around Hannibal, Marion County — seemingly with no real plan of action or direction — the men began to quibble over whose job it was to cook. No one seriously took orders from their “chain of command,” as most didn’t even know what the ranking structure consisted of.

After Twain ordered a subordinate to feed his mule the man retorted that he didn’t reckon “he went to war to be a dry-nurse to a mule.” Twain himself mused that he “believed that this was insubordination, but [he] was full of uncertainties about everything military, and so [he] let the thing pass.”

To make matters worse, it rained continuously, according to accounts, adding to the malaise of the already downtrodden men.

Cosplaying at war, the Marion Rangers would retreat at the merest mention or sign of Union troops in the area. 

“I knew more about retreating than the man that invented retreating,” Twain quipped of his experience.

The men tried to retreat, “only to realize that they had no idea how to retreat,” according to a report by The Great Falls Tribune. “Their paper command structure collapsed, and for two weeks they stumbled and bumbled their way around the area, until at last they were threatened by a real Yankee military force commanded, as they later learned, by colonel and soon to be general Ulysses S. Grant.”

By then, the 25-year-old had had it with his little war and slipped away to his sister Pam’s home in St. Louis. Soon after, Twain’s brother, Orion Clemens, offered him an opportunity to go west that summer to Nevada. Twain readily accepted, summarily ending his war.

Ironically, 20 years after Twain’s brush with the Confederacy, it was he who suggested to the ailing Grant that the former Union general-turned-president write his memoirs.

Grant, who was slowly dying of throat cancer, had watched as his entire nest egg disappeared after the collapse of Grant & Ward, the investment firm into which Grant had put his entire life’s savings.

Motivated to provide for his beloved wife, Julia, as his inevitable death loomed, Grant got to writing.

Twain had been instrumental in the formation of Charles L. Webster & Company in 1884. Though it bore the name of his nephew through marriage, Twain was its de facto head, and in February 1885 the company made Grant an offer — Grant should get as much as a 20 percent royalty, or alternatively, 70 per­­cent of the net profits, according to historian John Vacha.

Julia was to be well taken care of and, thanks to one former Marion Ranger, the “Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant” became, next to the Bible and “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” the most visible volumes in 19th-century American homes — at least, writes Vacha, those outside the South

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On October 28, 1943, photographer Ansel Adams drove through the front gate of the Manzanar War Relocation Center. Set in the inhospitable desert of Owens Valley, California, Manzanar housed 10,000 American citizens of Japanese ancestry forcibly “evacuated” from the western states after Pearl Harbor and interned at Manzanar. Barbed-wire fences enclosed the 814-acre camp, and the rifles in the guard towers were pointing in.

Over the next two months, Adams—known then as now for dramatic black and white landscape images—photographed the camp’s residents. In 1944, he published Born Free and Equal, a book about Manzanar. In its pages, Adams tacitly offered a perspective opposed to the anti-Japanese hysteria that had brought on the internment of loyal Americans. He celebrated the resiliency of the men, women, and children who endured this unwarranted hardship. Born Free and Equal, which never attained the stature of Adams’s many other books, demonstrated his great humanistic spirit and willingness to stand with the disenfranchised during a time of severe national stress.

Besides plunging THE UNITED STATES into World War II, Japan’s raid on Pearl Harbor crystallized hostility against the Japanese abroad and at home. As shocked West Coast residents were reading and hearing initial news reports about the sneak attack, California deputy sheriffs and agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation were already rounding up “Japanese suspected of subversive activities.”

On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, authorizing the Secretary of War to designate geographical areas from which “any or all persons may be excluded.” Suspect individuals would be “evacuated” to residential camps where they were to receive “food, shelter, and other accommodation”—and be kept under guard. The order, a mandate separate from those stipulating controls on foreign enemy aliens, who also were to be interned, specified no nationality, but there was no doubt about its target. Anti-Japanese hysteria had exploded, fed by rumors starring insurgents and saboteurs. Investigators testifying before the House Committee on Un-American Activities claimed that on the West Coast Japanese agents were strapping cameras to homing pigeons and setting the birds loose to fly over and document restricted areas. The Committee recommended that anyone in the United States of Japanese ancestry be moved 500 miles inland from the Pacific. (See “Days of Infamy”).

Three days after Roosevelt signed Order 9066, the FBI swept up 500 “enemy aliens” who, the Los Angeles Times reported, had “guns and ammunition, cameras, binoculars, flashlights, radios and alien flags.”

These “first triumphs of the war in the Pacific Coast States” were arrested in Los Angeles, Long Beach, and San Diego. Similar raids snared suspected saboteurs in Seattle and along the Oregon coast. The need for incarceration facilities spurred construction of “local detention centers” and “inland concentration camps.” In 1988, a congressional commission concluded that these arrests “were carried out without adequate security reasons and without any acts of espionage or sabotage documented by the Commission.”

Japanese victories in the Pacific theater heightened concern about a West Coast invasion. On February 24, 1942, the Los Angeles Times shocked readers with a story about a Japanese attack on oil fields at Ellwood, California, a coastal town 12 miles north of Santa Barbara. Japanese submarine I-17 lobbed 16 poorly aimed rounds into the facility, causing minimal damage. Witnesses swore that they had observed Japanese on the beach at Ellwood using signal lights to direct the barrage. Frightened Angelenos clamored for the removal of all people of Japanese descent, fearing they comprised a fifth column. “We must move the Japanese in this country into a concentration camp somewhere, some place, and do it damn quickly,” Representative Alfred J. Elliott (D-California), who represented Tulare in the San Joaquin Valley, told Congress.

On March 3, 1942, Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt, head of the Western Defense Command, announced plans to relocate thousands of “enemy aliens.” As Java was falling to the Japanese, American officials were hastening to secure Pacific Coast states. The army listed three categories of people to be removed from exclusion zones: individuals suspected of espionage, immigrants born in Japan (issei), and second- or third-generation Japanese Americans whose parents or grandparents had been born in Japan (nisei). All parties in these categories were to relocate to one of 10 camps being readied in the American interior. Two weeks later General DeWitt announced the first “voluntary” relocation, set for March 23. The government was to ship 1,000 people of Japanese descent from Los Angeles to the Owens Valley, 224 miles northeast. DeWitt warned those affected to settle their affairs quickly. “I want it made unmistakably clear,” he told the Los Angeles Times, “that evacuation will be continued with or without cooperation.”

Archie Miyatake remembered internment unfolding quickly. “We heard rumors that our government was going to start evacuating everyone of Japanese ancestry,” he wrote later. Miyatake was 16, a student at East Los Angeles High School. The son of Toyo Miyatake, Manzanar’s unofficial photographer, he chronicled his experience in an edition of Born Free and Equal. “I remember thinking, ‘Oh no, how can they do that?’ I just couldn’t believe that they would do such a thing.”

By the end of March relocation was under way. The government forced affected citizens to sell their residences and businesses, pack, and move to relocation centers. To document the operation, the Wartime Relocation Authority, a civilian agency created to oversee the project, hired photographer Dorothea Lange, a star of the Depression-era Farm Security Administration photo unit. The wartime agency seemed to be expecting Lange’s work to complement favorable propaganda run in West Coast newspapers. Los Angeles Times stories went on about how smoothly the roundup was going, and how grateful those being displaced were for their government’s lenience: “The evacuees spoke highly of the government policy of keeping families together at Manzanar, explaining that such procedure [sic] meant the least possible interruption in their daily routine.” Coverage painted soldiers as kindly: “May I carry your bag, ma’am?” a Times staffer reported hearing an army lieutenant ask an older Japanese woman.

Lange was supposed to illustrate the benevolent treatment of happy internees, but the reality of the government action and her role in it horrified the photographer. “In contrast to her earlier work for a government social program to aid the poor, Lange now found herself photographing the execution of a government order to incarcerate American citizens based on their ancestry,” historian Jasmine Alinder writes. Lange rebelled, pointing her camera at scenes of dislocation and hardship: piles of luggage, “For Sale” signs in windows of abruptly closed stores, hand-lettered placards in shop windows announcing “I am an American”—disturbing parallels to increasingly familiar images from Europe of Nazi anti-Semitism.

Disheartened, the photographer left the WRA in July 1942. The agency locked away her photos until after the war. “I fear that intolerance and prejudice is constantly growing,” she wrote to Adams in November 1943. “We have a disease. It’s Jap-baiting and hatred. You have a job on your hands to do to make a dent in it—but I don’t know a more challenging nor more important one. I went through an experience I’ll never forget when I was working on it and learned a lot, even if I accomplished nothing.” In a 1961 interview Lange said the WRA had “impounded” and classified her negatives and prints from her days with the agency.

A San Francisco native, Ansel Adams, 41, found wartime frustrating. Though successful starting in the early 1920s with a balance of commercial, editorial, and personal work, he yearned to focus on artistic projects, particularly landscapes. In the 1930s, he had founded the f/64 group with kindred spirits Imogen Cunningham and Edward Weston. He published books, had museum and gallery shows, and worked for corporate clients. World War II interrupted his burgeoning career. The market for his landscape photography dried up; buyers were not interested in beautiful pictures. He was too old to enlist or serve as a combat photographer. In a letter to Nancy Newhall, acting curator of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, he described his wartime contribution as “photographing Army convoys that visit Yosemite,” training military photographers at Fort Ord, California, and taking “Navy patients out for photographic sessions here in the valley….I have tried unsuccessfully to get into some work relating to the war effort…I certainly would like to be of use. So many things are at stake.”

In autumn 1943, Ralph Palmer Merritt, Manzanar’s new director, contacted Adams. The men had met as members of the Sierra Club. Merritt asked if Adams would be interested in photographing Manzanar residents. The idea, Adams wrote Nancy Newhall, was “to clarify the distinction of the loyal citizens of Japanese ancestry and the dis-loyal Japanese citizens and aliens (I might say Japanese-loyal aliens) that are stationed mostly in internment camps.”

Both categories, noted Adams, faced intense hostility on the West Coast. The project was an opportunity to remind people that America was not at war with all people of Japanese descent—just those who supported Japan’s belligerence. Merritt’s putative project had no funding—Adams would not be working for the WRA. “I cannot pay you a cent,” Merritt told Adams. “But I can put you up and feed you.”

Adams also would have to get to and from Manzanar. Rationing regulations sharply curtailed civilian driving by limiting access to fuel and tires. Once his local rations board authorized Adams to obtain “ample fuel and adequate tires for the hundreds of miles of driving between Yosemite and Manzanar,” he arrived at the camp late in October 1943.

“My first impression of Manzanar was of a dry plain on which appeared a flat rectangular layout of shacks, ringed with towering mountains,” Adams wrote in an autobiography. “Under a low overhang of gray clouds, the row upon row of black tar shacks were only somewhat softened by occasional greenery.” Barbed wire fencing enclosed the camp, and a gatehouse garrisoned by armed guards emphasized its prison-like nature. First glances showed him much of what he had imagined when previsualizing the project, a process he had developed early in his career to enhance his literal and figurative focus no matter what the assignment.

Meeting with Merritt, Adams requested to talk to camp representatives to ask permission for his undertaking. “The world famous photographer,” wrote the Manazanar Free Press, the camp newspaper, “expressed deep interest in doing an accurately representative pictorial of the evacuees, with particular emphasis on the loyalty of the niseis in the center.”

Warmly welcomed by internees, Adams unpacked his camera, a Graflex 4×5—so called because it took a single 4” by 5” sheet of film—and set to work. “He is the man you see wearing jeans and a windbreaker,” the Free Press wrote, “setting up his tripod and camera anywhere and anytime he finds a good subject to snap—be it at the hospital, nursery, mess hall, potato field or baseball field.” Adams was impressed with the center, continued the newspaper, and “his impression of the place far exceeded anything he expected.”

Adams quickly saw past the externals. Yes, those tarpaper shacks signaled “concentration camp,” but within them life was blooming. “The interiors of the shacks, most softened with flowers and the inimitable taste of the Japanese for simple decoration, revealed not only the family living spaces but all manner of small enterprises,” he wrote. “A printing press that issued the Manzanar Free Press, music and art studios, a library, several churches (Christian, Buddhist, and Shinto), a clinic-hospital, business offices, and so on.”

Adams had imagined possible photographic themes: unjust oppression by a government of its citizens, or possibly a propaganda piece illustrating the fine job the WRA was doing. He realized neither of these matched the complex reality of what he was seeing in the camp. The story was the people, and their resilience, a characteristic that allowed a despised and feared minority to adapt to unjust treatment and amid difficult circumstances get on with life. “With admirable strength of spirit, the Nisei rose above despondency and made a life for themselves, a unique macro-civilization under difficult conditions,” Adams wrote. “This was the mood and character I determined to apply to the project.” His subjects were so intent on making the best of their situation that Adams had difficulty documenting life as internees were living it; residents insisted on straightening up any setting he proposed to photograph.

After several sessions photographing at the camp, Ansel returned to Yosemite, processed his sheet film, and made 80 prints examining community life at Manzanar. The first exhibition of this work took place at the camp, where the prints were up for a week in January 1944. “Adams’s interest in the problem of minority racial groups,” wrote the Free Press, “and his desire to present an accurate story of the residents have produced results which depict Manzanar as it exists.” The work and the photographer’s commitment to it touched residents. “For a person like Ansel Adams to come to an internment camp to photograph camp life, where people are pretty bitter for being there, I thought, my gosh, this man is sympathetic to this situation, to the Japanese American people,” wrote Archie Miyatake. “I thought he was quite a man to be doing what he did at the time.”

Angry letters, some from parents of sons lost in the Pacific theater of operations, accused Adams of disloyalty.

After the Manzanar show, the photographs moved east. Nancy Newhall, of the Museum of Modern Art, agreed to exhibit the portfolio. On November 10, 1944, a 61-image series, Manzanar: Photographs by Ansel Adams of [the] Loyal Japanese-American Relocation Center, opened at the gallery and ran until Christmas Eve—but without enjoying pride of place. The museum, bowing to anti-Japanese hostility, barred use of the main exhibition space. The photographs were relegated to the museum’s auditorium galleries.

In a press release, Newhall endorsed documentary photography as a tool for healing racial divides: “With the coming of peace, photographers will undoubtedly play an increasingly significant role interpreting the problems of races and nations one to another all over the postwar world.” Adams, she wrote, had taken on that task and was avoiding “the formulas that have developed in documentary and reportage photography… has approached his subject with freshness and spontaneity.”

In time, Newhall was proven correct, but in the short term an America at war was not ready to reconcile with anyone. The exhibition received little media attention. The New York Times buried a short paragraph about the opening on page 17 of a Friday edition but ran no review.

As Adams was preparing for his MOMA show, Tom Maloney, publisher of the U.S. Camera magazine, offered to publish the Manzanar portfolio as a book. Debuting on the exhibition’s heels, Born Free and Equal developed the show’s theme; namely, that those behind the wire at Manzanar and other relocation camps were American citizens, legally indistinguishable from counterparts going about their lives. The book—“the story of loyal Japanese-Americans”—invoked the 14th Amendment’s declaration that all persons born or naturalized in the United States are citizens and shall not be deprived of “life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” Adams also quoted Abraham Lincoln: “As a nation we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal, except Negroes.’ When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ‘all men are created equal, except Negroes and foreigners and Catholics.’ When it comes to this, I shall prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty.” His choice of Lincoln’s remarks suggest Adams regarded the internment of Japanese American citizens as a threat to democracy and a refutation of American ideals.

A turn of the page revealed Manzanar resident Yuri Yamazaki, grinning into the camera, her portrait cropped so that her face fills the frame. She could be any reader’s daughter. Adams captioned the image, “An American School Girl.” There followed a portrayal in words and pictures of a cross-section of American life—newspaper editors, farmers, soldiers, doctors and nurses, accountants and electricians. Subtract the guards and barbed wire, and the reader would find a community that, in nearly every way, was indistinguishable from any American town. To hate this population was as irrational as hating your own neighbors. “Americanism is a matter of mind and heart,” Adams wrote beneath one of his photographs.

Other than his opening references, Adams refrained from commenting directly on the relocation action, though he also quoted Manzanar director Ralph Merritt: “I have not said that the evacuation was JUST, but that it was JUSTIFIED.” Adams chose not to litigate. “Our problem now is not to justify those things which have occurred, but to establish a new and civilized rationale in regard to these citizens and loyal supporters of America,” he wrote. “To do this we must strive to understand the Japanese-Americans, not as an abstract group, but as individuals of fine mental, moral and civic capacities, in other words, people such as you and I…I want the reader to feel that he has been with me in Manzanar, has met some of the people, and has known the mood of the Center and its environment.”

Born Free and Equal was not a success. “It was poorly printed, publicized, and distributed, perhaps to be expected in wartime,” Adams wrote. Distribution was spotty; Ansel accused his publisher of printing too few copies. Even so, the book attracted admirers. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt praised it in her newspaper column: “In case you have not seen it, there is a publication by the United States Camera Publishing Corp. which is worth your looking through…it is one of the publications designed to temper one of our prejudices, and I think it does it very successfully.” Copies of the first edition regularly appear on offer online, some selling for hundreds, even thousands of dollars.

After the Supreme Court ruled detention of loyal Japanese American citizens illegal (In re Mitsuye Endo, December 18, 1944), the Pittsburgh Press published a full-page montage of Adams’s Manzanar photos and captions. “The recent order permitting the return of loyal Japanese-Americans to the West Coast brings to an end an unprecedented and poignant chapter in American History,” the afternoon daily declared in an editorial. “After many months of adjusting themselves to camp life, the Nisei must now try as best as they can to shuffle their way back into the stream of American life.”

Adams’s advocacy enraged many countrymen; reports circulated of bookstore customers buying copies of Born Free and Equal in order to burn them. Angry letters accused him of disloyalty, some sent by parents of sons lost in the Pacific theater of operations.

“They were bitter and incapable of making objective distinctions between the Nisei and Japanese nationals,” wrote Adams. “How can you adequately reply to a couple who lost their three sons in the Pacific War?”

Adams also drew fire from friendly quarters. Dorothea Lange derided his project as a whitewash, softening the horror of unjust incarceration with beautiful pictures. In a 1961 interview, Lange faulted Ansel for being ignorant when it came to social justice issues, although she admitted that Born Free and Equal had been a big step for him.

Modern historians tend to echo Lange’s critique, categorizing Ansel’s effort as little more than government propaganda and accusing him of doing far too little for the residents of Manzanar.

These anachronistic readings overlook two points. Although scholars applaud Lange’s adversarial stand against the government, her intransigence resulted in the censorship of her photography. Her work was not published until after the war ended. As an advocate for an oppressed minority, Lange was a failure. Adams’s images enjoyed a MOMA show, were printed in newspapers, and circulated in a book. It was Adams, not Lange, who shaped opinion and won sympathy for Manzanar’s residents.

Adams had little to gain and much to lose by inserting himself into the relocation debate. Wartime America remained virulently hostile toward the Japanese. It took great moral courage to wade into the hysteria and align with the supposed “enemies” interned at Manzanar, a choice that could have blighted the rest of his career. Knowing his unpopular stand threatened both reputation and livelihood, Ansel Adams still took the difficult path, striking a blow against injustice and irrational prejudice.

This article appeared in the Winter 2023 issue of American History magazine.

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Most people with even a sliver of English literature education recognize Edgar Allen Poe as perhaps the greatest illustrator of the macabre in literary history.

What you probably don’t know is that before Poe penned such morose metrical compositions as “Annabel Lee” or “The Raven,” he did a brief stint in 1830 as a cadet at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

In 1831, however, Poe, averse to the rigidity of military life, would quit attending classes and get himself kicked out of the fabled institution by way of a court-martial.

Not much is known about his social life at the Army’s academy, so author Louis Bayard took it upon himself to fill in those biographical gaps and pen a fictional tale titled “The Pale Blue Eye” — a West Point murder mystery that essentially serves as a Poe origin story.

That story now forms the basis of a movie set to debut in select theaters and on Netflix.

From director Scott Cooper (“Black Mass,” “Hostiles,” “Antlers”) comes “The Pale Blue Eye,” a dark, mystical exploration of Poe’s fascination with the funereal, fueled by a murder mystery he is attempting to solve alongside depressed detective Augustus Landor, played by Christian Bale.

Poe is portrayed by Harry Melling (”Queen’s Gambit,” “Harry Potter”), who breathes a sort of awkward earnestness into the passionately perturbed poet.

Set in the winter at New York’s West Point campus, the movie begins with the death of a cadet initially believed to have been a suicide by hanging. However, when the young soldier’s body is desecrated in the morgue — his heart is removed — it becomes apparent that there are more sinister forces at work.

Called upon to solve the case by none other than Superintendent Sylvanus Thayer, Landor reveals the deceased cadet was not only maimed after death but actually the victim of murder.

After a brief encounter searching the snowy grounds, and a run-in at a local Hudson River pub where Poe suggests the murderer must also be a poet, Landor enlists the young cadet to help suss out who, among the students, might be responsible.

An impenetrable sense of gloom, references to the occult and cinematography that pits the grays of winter against piercing cobalt — a scheme particularly noteworthy on the West Point uniforms — creates a viewer experience best described as chilling.

Many encounters between fictional characters contain allusions to future works that Poe would produce in his real-life writing career, but none are so present as the “Tell-Tale Heart,” the poem in which an anonymous narrator plots to murder and then kills his housemate, an elderly man, after being driven mad by his evil “pale blue eye.”

The murderer of that tale slowly unravels while hearing what he believes to be the sound of the beating heart of the dead man, whose body he has hidden beneath his floorboards. His guilt later forces him to confess.

This reference, among many, plays into the secrets behind this West Point murder mystery. Much like “Tell-Tale Heart,” it ends with both a plot twist and an unexpected expression of guilt — no doubt befitting of a macabre Poe epic.

“The Pale Blue Eye” premieres on Dec. 23 and lands on Netflix Jan. 6.

Originally published by Military Times, our sister publication.

Taos, New Mexico, got its name from a phrase in the indigenous Tiwa language meaning “place of the red willows.” In 1540, Spanish explorers searching for the fabled “Seven Cities of Gold” came upon Taos Pueblo, a cluster of adobe dwellings, some five stories tall, that have housed the Tiwa for more than 1,100 years and constitute the oldest continuously inhabited community in the United States. Following Spanish conquest, a settlement grew; the mission church of St. Francis of Assisi still stands. At first amicable, relations between the Spanish and Natives deteriorated, leading to a 1680 revolt and continuing tensions. Adobe fortifications erected at the town’s center in 1796 are now known as Taos Plaza. American acquisition of New Mexico in 1847 triggered another insurrection at Taos. The region achieved territorial status in 1850, with Taos becoming known as the home of western scout Kit Carson. At the turn of the 19th century the town’s blend of native pageantry and Spanish tradition began attracting artists and writers, including D.H. Lawrence, Willa Cather, and Georgia O’Keeffe. Taos remains a vibrant center of creative expression and cultural diversity (taosgov.com). —Deborah Archuleta-Moreno writes in Roswell, New Mexico.

This article appeared in the Winter 2023 issue of American History magazine.

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Art has chronicled wars about as long as they have been fought. Usually created by the winners, war art generally focused on the genius of the country’s military leaders or the heroism of its fighting men. Accuracy in depicting the experience of war has tended to take second place to propaganda inspiring the masses; but by the 1800s a degree of authenticity in uniforms, weaponry and mise-en-scène became the preferred norm.

The horrific battlefield reality of World War I changed that. As individual valor became a struggle for survival under a deluge of industrialized mass destruction, the twentieth century’s surrealism cultural movement in art, literature and other media—an attempt to portray reality via the unconscious mind’s “super-truth” (surreality) using bizarre, fantastic and grotesque dreamlike or nightmarish images—became just as relevant and acceptable a means of capturing war’s true nature as the best researched and most meticulously “realistic” artwork of the nineteenth. Arguably, the most famous example of surrealist painting depicting war is Guernica, Pablo Picasso’s cubist-influenced summation-in-metaphor of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939).

Yet another example of art capturing a surreal vision of war is the prodigious body of work chronicling two world wars by the English artistic polymath Paul Nash.

An Artistic Career Changed By War

Nash was born in Kensington, London on May 11, 1889, the son of barrister William Harry Nash and Caroline Maude, the daughter of a Royal Navy captain. When his mother began showing signs of mental illness, in 1902 the family moved to Iver Heath, Buckinghamshire, hoping the rustic atmosphere would improve her condition.

It didn’t—Caroline died at age 49 in a mental institution in 1910—but it was in Buckinghamshire that Paul began his love affair with landscapes, particularly the iron age hill forts atop Wittenham Clumps, an early inspiration to which he would frequently return. 

Nash initially tried to follow his maternal grandfather’s profession, but failed the Naval Entrance Examination and instead pursued art at several schools, including St. Paul’s School, the London Council School of Photo-Engraving and Lithography, and the Slade School of Arts. He was poor at drawing figures, but developed an enthusiast’s flair for landscapes, especially those with an ancient background. As he once put it, “My love of the monstrous and magical led me beyond the confines of natural appearances into unreal worlds.” Nash also wrote poetry and plays, and gave shows of his paintings in 1912 and 1913 before achieving wide public success with his Tree Topped Hills in the summer of 1914.

That same summer, however, was to set his budding artistic career down a different path as the June 1914 assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo followed by a succession of declarations of war set Austria-Hungary, Serbia, Russia, France, Germany, Belgium and Britain on the road to mutual Armageddon.

Saved By Falling Into A Trench

On September 10, 1914, Nash enlisted in the Home Service, as a private in 2nd Battalion, the Artists’ Rifles, 28th London Regiment of Territorials. His initial duty was primarily to guard the Tower of London and in December he married writer and women’s suffragist Margaret Odeh. Aside from the occasional Zeppelin raid on London, the war seemed a distant Channel away, but that sheltered soldier’s life changed again in August 1916, when he underwent officer training, and after earning his commission, in February 1917 Second Lieutenant Nash got his first front-line deployment with the Hampshire Regiment at St. Eloi in the Ypres salient. 

The Flanders sector was between offensives when Nash arrived and although he knew of the past carnage inflicted on the area, he wrote that with the spring the land seemed to be slowly healing itself. On May 25, however, Nash fell into a trench and broke a rib, necessitating his hospitalization in London on June 1.

A few days later his regiment took part in an assault on Hill 60—and was slaughtered. Nash fully realized that an arbitrary twist of fate—his accidental injury—had saved his life. While in hospital, he worked up 20 sketches he’d made, most of which were spring landscapes, into more polished works in ink, chalk and watercolors.

November 1917 saw Nash back in Ypres, now with an assigned batman and chauffeur, and an official commission to create propagandistic art. The British offensive around Passchendaele (July–November 1917) had been going on for three months and the landscape that he had earlier viewed with such hopeful optimism now showed the effects of incessant rain, flooding, and devastating artillery fire. 

“I Am A Messenger”

Although Nash’s abstract depictions of what he saw were well received, they betrayed an ambiguity toward the ordeal that the soldiers on both sides had to endure. His landscapes, once a celebration of nature, now constituted an accusation of what he regarded as the war’s desecration of nature.

On November 16, he intimated to his wife: “It is unspeakable, godless, hopeless. I am no longer an artist interested and curious. I am a messenger who will bring back word from the men who are fighting for those who want the war to go on forever. Feeble, inarticulate, will be my message, but it will have a bitter truth, and may it burn their lousy souls.” 

Disillusionment notwithstanding, Nash, like his combatant brother officers, carried on with his front-line artist’s duties right to the end of the war, and after being discharged he and his wife moved to Dymchurch in 1919. In that same year The Menin Road went on a delayed public exhibition.

Commissioned by the Ministry of Information in 1918 as a tribute to the heroism and sacrifice of the British soldiers for the “Hall of Remembrance”—a memorial that ended up never being built—the painting’s human subjects were, typically, all but lost in the landscape, which artist-critic Wyndham Lewis described as “an epic of mud.” 

In 1921, Nash collapsed and underwent a week of drifting in and out of consciousness, a condition that the doctors classed as “emotional shock.” His asthma and the death in June 1921 of one of his best friends, Claud Lovat Fraser, may well have contributed to his condition. He sought recovery in the natural world, his output including overviews of the coasts of Kent and Dorset, Chiltern and Sussex downs, Romney Marsh and the ancient sites in Avebury, Wiltshire. In the process, they reflected his increasingly surreal approach. 

Nash and his wife had to scramble for their living throughout the interwar years, but Nash was helped considerably by his talent and education in design, and his versatility in its use. Besides its being a fundamental part of his abstract, surrealist artistic style, he applied it profitably to such practical items as book jackets, book plates, ceramics, fabrics, posters and even a complete bathroom. Another application was inspired by another friend and colleague, actor, director and theater designer Gordon Scott, who got Nash to adapt his style to the stage. During the 1930s he was a contributing art critic for The Listener. Although he never called himself a modernist, Nash established himself in abstraction and surrealism by 1933, when he became a driving force in the formation of the British modernist group Unit One. 

Painting the Battle of Britain

After a second world war broke out in 1939, Nash was appointed by the War Artists’ Advisory Committee to resume his work as a full salaried artist, this time attached to the Royal Air Force. Nash created a great number of paintings during the war’s first year, several of which depicted shot down German aircraft, his subjects ranging from recovered shot-down Messerschmitt Me-109s to the more abstract Battle of Britain, contrasting the free contrails of British fighters with the more orderly German formations, and Totes Meer (dead sea), in which a Channel seascape is encrusted with the carcasses of German aircraft.

Although his works were well-received by the public, the Air Ministry did not take approvingly to Nash’s modernist style, nor to his unwillingness to concentrate on portraits of aircrewmen. In December 1940 the WAAC canceled his full-time contract; but its chairman, Kenneth Clark, appreciated Nash’s talents enough to be left aghast at his own committee’s decision. In January 1941 Clark persuaded the WAAC to lay aside five hundred pounds for his work in aerial combat, starting with two series of watercolors, Raiders and Aerial Creatures. 

By 1944 the fortunes of war had turned in the Allies’ favor, and Nash marked the occasion with one of his most abstract works, Battle of Germany. Contrasting with the faraway, inviolable moon—a stabilizing, natural presence in many of his landscapes dating back to World War I—a German factory is subjected many times over to the man-made horrors that the Luftwaffe had previously visited on British cities.  

The last 18 months of Nash’s life were spent in Dorset in what he called “reclusing melancholy.” Although his asthma prevented him from flying in aircraft, he had been coming to terms with death using aerial metaphors, stating that souls of the dead were “winged creatures…not unlike the ghost moth.” Paul Nash died aged 57, of heart failure related to his years of asthma at Boscombe, Dorset on July 11, 1946.

On September 17, 2022, Historic Congressional Cemetery dedicated The Mathew Brady Memorial, near the famed photographer’s final resting place in the cemetery. The memorial, spearheaded by historian Larry West, celebrates Brady’s work as a photographer, but also reflects the diversity of his subjects and the Washington community. The memorial includes life-sized bronze statues of President Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, along with a life-sized porcelain photo of Mathew Brady and a bronze replica of his camera.This year, 2022, marks the 200th anniversary of Mathew Brady’s birthday. Brady might fairly be called the father of American war photography.

Although his exact birthday is unknown, Brady is estimated to have been born between 1822 and 1824. This year marks a starting point for recollecting the 200th anniversary of his birth.

Born to Irish immigrants in New York, Brady experienced a meteoric rise in fame thanks to his skill at producing daguerreotype photography, the first publicly accessible form of photography, which was then in high demand. Acclaimed for his remarkably crisp and striking style of photography, he created portraits of many notable people.

Brady’s skills had arguably the most significant impact when applied to war photojournalism. After the Civil War broke out in 1861, Brady became determined to capture the war in photos. Rallying his staff and other photographers, Brady doggedly followed the troops. Alongside the soldiers, Brady experienced the hardships of military life and was even forced to retreat with Union troops to Washington in the wake of the First Battle of Bull Run.

The most haunting wartime images associated with Brady were taken at Antietam. Brady’s associates Alexander Gardner and James F. Gibson photographed the carnage left behind from the battle, emphasizing the bodies of dead soldiers left twisted and scattered across the lonely battlefield. Brady shocked — and deeply moved — members of the public when he chose to show these images in an exhibit called “The Dead of Antietam” in his New York gallery in 1862.Brady’s exhibition marked the first time that photographs of war dead on the battlefield were shown to the American public. This changed the way the public viewed the ongoing struggle and arguably altered their perceptions of war and its consequences.“These pictures have a terrible distinctness,” wrote a New York Times correspondent on Oct. 20, 1862. “By the aid of the magnifying-glass, the very features of the slain may be distinguished.”

A pioneer of war photojournalism, Brady died in 1896 in New York and is buried in the Congressional Cemetery in Washington, D.C. The National Archives has digitized over 6,000 images taken by Brady and his staff during the Civil War, which continue to provide vivid glimpses into the history of war and conflict.

In 1887, an adventure novel written by a 27-year-old for a little extra cash was published in the Christmas edition of a British paperback magazine. It would forever change the face of popular culture and usher in a whole new genre of story.

The story, called “A Study in Scarlet,” was the first appearance of the immortal Sherlock Holmes and his colleague Dr. Watson, a pair now so colossally influential that subsequent detectives have yet to emerge from under their massive shadows.

The Inspirations for Sherlock Holmes 

Holmes didn’t spring fully formed from the mind of Arthur Conan Doyle, of course. He was largely modeled on Dr. Joseph Bell, a Scottish medical professor whose ability to diagnose patient’s complaints through minute observations and brilliant deductions made a lasting impression on Conan Doyle when he was a young medical student. 

When Doyle took up his pen to write, the detective genre as we now know it had few examples to draw from, but one notable pre-Holmes character that served as an inspiration was the 1841 Edgar Allan Poe detective C. Auguste Dupin, who was an early prototype of the model Doyle would now popularize: a brilliant amateur detective gifted with both a narrator sidekick and an ability to observe and infer. Dupin’s perceptive talents allowed him to solve mysteries by scientifically analyzing the facts of a case and shedding light on problems insurmountable to the official police force. 

Sherlock Holmes Becomes a Sensation — and a Curse

“A Study in Scarlet” didn’t make major waves at the time of publication, but it did well enough to allow Doyle to sell his second Holmes novel, “The Sign of Four.” But it wasn’t until the format of his stories went from serially published novels to single-serve short stories that the popularity of his characters exploded. The Sherlock Holmes short stories became the must-see TV of the day, and the public appetite for this abrasive, drug-addicted detective and his long suffering friend and sometimes roommate, Watson, was insatiable. 

But Doyle quickly found himself locked in a pair of golden handcuffs: He now earned enough money to abandon his medical practice, but it was at the cost of having to write stories about characters he really didn’t want to write about. As early as 1891, he was plotting various ways to kill Holmes off so he could focus on his other work, but the paychecks were difficult to resist. Drastically raising his rates to discourage publishers from the Holmes stories did nothing to cool demand, and he became one of the highest-paid writers of his time.

Killing Sherlock Holmes

Doyle published 24 short stories in The Strand Magazine between 1892 and 1893 before deciding he couldn’t stomach it any longer. He sent Holmes tumbling off the side of a waterfall while locked in combat with hastily written archnemesis Prof. James Moriarty. 

To say that the public reaction was bad would be an understatement. Hate mail poured in, Doyle was verbally abused, and tens of thousands of readers canceled their subscriptions to The Strand Magazine. Sherlock Holmes fans were intense, and they weren’t about to let this outrage stand unchallenged: Readers formed groups like Let’s Keep Holmes Alive, demanding that Doyle reverse his decision. 

Activism of this kind was previously unheard of. Until this moment, audiences generally accepted whatever fictional event happened in their medium of choice and moved on. When Holmes died, though, his fans took it personally, and their gatherings, protests and letter-writing campaigns were some of the earliest examples of what we now know and recognize as fandom.

Doyle was understandably shocked, but he stood his ground for nearly a decade. Finally, in 1902, after nine years of pressure from his publishers and the public, while remaining careful to let people know Holmes was still dead, Doyle published “The Hound of the Baskervilles” as a sort of prequel, with the events of the novel having occurred in the years prior to Holmes’ death. 

Doyle had known selling the story as a Holmes novel would guarantee its success, but it also ended up reminding him how much money was to be made off of Sherlock Holmes. One year later, after negotiating a fat paycheck to bring his character back for real this time, Doyle published “The Adventure of the Empty House,” revealing that Holmes had faked his own death and was now back in London, ready to pick up again with Dr. Watson (whose wife had conveniently died while Holmes was away). Once again ensconced in their lodgings at Baker Street, Holmes and Watson continued to consult and detect and bring order to London and beyond until the last Sherlock Holmes case penned by Doyle, “His Last Bow,” was published in 1917, featuring a retired Holmes on an undercover spy mission against the Germans.

Sherlock Takes the Stage — and Adopts That Cap and Pipe

Happening in parallel to the Holmes stories Doyle was publishing were the first Sherlock Holmes stage productions, which started around 1893. 

One actor in particular had a huge influence on the character and his future portrayals, and introduced many of the Holmes tropes we have all come to recognize. American actor William Gillette’s career as a star of the stage was already well established, but it was his portrayal of Sherlock Holmes for which he is the most well-known. 

Doyle never mentioned a deerstalker cap in the stories, for example, but Holmes was depicted wearing one in an early Sidney Paget illustration. The deerstalker was a flat cloth cap worn during country expeditions, which made it appropriate for the rural setting of the case Holmes was on in the story the illustration accompanied. Once it became part of William Gillette’s regular onstage costume, though, the deerstalker was always seen atop Holmes’ head whether he was in the country or in town. 

And while Holmes enjoyed tobacco in many different forms, he never smoked from a curved calabash pipe. The calabash is now synonymous with Sherlock Holmes thanks to Gillette, who found it easier to speak his lines with a curved pipe rather than a straight stem. 

You can watch William Gillette as Holmes in a film version of his stage play below. The film was recorded in 1916, but he dubbed his voice 20 years later, when Gillette was 83.

But why change Doyle’s written word? Holmes spent most of his time in the stories rather unremarkably dressed: either in suits or, when circumstances required him to go undercover, in an appropriate disguise. The fashions he is most commonly known for today were either setting-specific, like the deerstalker and Inverness cape, or related to the time of day or night, like the dressing gowns. 

But when you’re taking a character from the page to a stage, it’s natural to empasize the more visually interesting components of the source material. A brilliant consulting detective in a suit is all very well and good, but a brilliant consulting detective in a suit with a gorgeous, silky, quilted, purple dressing gown on top of it? Now we’re talking! Give him a few additional props like a magnifying glass and a violin and a hypodermic syringe and you’ve got the makings of an instantly recognizable character based on the accoutrement alone.

Gillette first brought Holmes to the stage in 1899 with a play creatively titled “Sherlock Holmes” that he’d co-written with Doyle, who once again was in need of money. It was a rehash of the plot points of several previous stories, with original characters and content provided by Gillette. He introduced a love interest for Holmes named Alice Faulkner, and gave the unnamed pageboy previously mentioned in a story a name (Billy) and a larger role. In a nice bit of reciprocity, Doyle stuck with the name Billy when the page boy appeared in subsequent stories.

Doyle Ignores Sherlock Holmes for Fairies

The distaste Doyle had for Holmes was always an interesting dynamic. On the one hand, his detective allowed him to live a very comfortable life, free to pursue his highly varied passions. But his lack of appreciation for his own characters in favor of what he felt were more serious efforts were probably his biggest blind spot. Holmes the logician certainly represented some aspects of Doyle’s own character, but there was one area in particular where the divide between man and creation could not have been greater: Sherlock Holmes outright dismissed the possibility of the supernatural, while Doyle was a devout spiritualist. 

His interest in the supernatural started early, as he was already giving spiritualist lectures by 1917. But his obsession started to grow after a number of family tragedies. His son Kingsley died in 1918, his younger brother Innes a year later in 1919, followed by his mother in 1920 and two sisters in 1924 and 1927. Doyle not only hoped to communicate with his dead loved ones, he also wanted to prove to the world that there was more to it than what the eye could see. 

“This agency stands flat-footed upon the ground, and there it must remain,” Holmes said in ‘The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire.’ “The world is big enough for us. No ghosts need apply.” 

His spiritually minded creator, on the other hand, was taken in by fake photographs of fairies in a garden. In 1922, he even wrote an earnest book about the supposed proof of the supernatural, “The Coming of the Fairies.” The elfin creatures, however, were simply cutouts from children’s magazines. The creator of literature’s greatest detective had been hoodwinked by bored girls — one of them only 9.

Sherlock Holmes Goes to the Movies

The late 1800s saw the birth of film as a new medium, and it took little time for Sherlock Holmes to make his first motion picture appearance. The 1900 film “Sherlock Holmes Baffled,” a 30-second drama, features a recognizable Holmes in a dressing gown and smoking a cigar, being robbed by a mysterious, disappearing burglar. 

Watch Sherlock Holmes’s first film appearance for yourself here:

Several other motion pictures of varying quality were released in the 1900s. Would you be surprised to learn that the canon Sherlock Holmes never said, “Elementary, my dear Watson”? The credit for that quote goes to Clive Brook from an early talkie. But it wasn’t until Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce made their debut in the 1939 adaptation of “The Hound of the Baskervilles” that film finally had its first iconic Holmes. And while Basil Rathbone gave us a highly respectable if campy Holmes, Nigel Bruce introduced the world to Dr Watson: Certified Clown. 

The damage that Bruce’s Watson did to the reputation of the poor doctor was both profound and long-lasting. As the portrayal seen in the most popular Holmes films of the day, Bruce became the definitive Watson to the generations that were introduced to the character for the first time through those films. For a long time after that, Watsons veered strongly toward dimwitted comic relief rather than capable sidekicks. 

To followers of the literary Holmes, the idea that a man as intelligent and short-tempered as Holmes would willingly suffer the foolishness of a man as incompetent as Bruce’s Watson is unimaginable. While Watson is no Holmes, the strengths he brought to their partnership were considerable: Watson’s medical experience, military service, loyalty and bravery made him a welcome and necessary companion. He was also crucially a much better shot with a gun than Holmes, so he could be relied on for backup during their more dangerous outings. 

The Nigel Bruce portrayal started an unfortunate trend that now seems to have run its course. More recent adaptations have restored Watson back to a place of respectability, with Martin Freeman, Jude Law and Lucy Liu all doing much to make amends.

Watch Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce’s first turns as Holmes and Watson in the full version of “The Hound of the Baskervilles” here:

Small-Screen Sherlock Holmes

In the realm of serial television, the detective story makes for interesting, entertaining and predictable storytelling highly suitable for an hour-length program. A new mystery introduced once a week keeps the plot fresh, and the audience doesn’t need to have watched every prior episode to come in and quickly understand what’s going on and follow along. And every television detective still owes something to Holmes. Some are more obvious with their homage than others (House and Wilson from “House” being a prime example), but there are very recognizable Sherlockian traits to be seen in characters as varied as Adrian Monk, Gil Grissom and John Luther, to name just a few.

Are Sherlock Holmes Real Detective Stories?

So why has Holmes endured? It’s been argued that the original tales aren’t even real detective stories, since they fail to give the reader the information required to solve them independently. Later detective stories, like those featuring Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, have delved much deeper into the clues, details and complex plots surrounding their respective mysteries than the Sherlock Holmes canon ever did. 

Perhaps it’s more accurate to think of Doyle’s work as adventures rather than whodunits. The Sherlock Holmes canon is more about the friendship between Holmes and Watson, an ongoing character study of the two men and the incredible circumstances they find themselves in. The stories lend themselves to endless re-reading despite you knowing how the mysteries unravel, and they delight the reader not with the thrill of how it ends but the journey along the way. Doyle may have grown to hate the character, but there are frequent moments of artistry and delight to be found within these pages. There is also something very comforting in knowing that no matter how tangled your problem might be or how dark the current situation might seem, there is a man out there with the singular power to shed light where it’s most needed and restore order from chaos (“Sherlock Holmes Baffled” notwithstanding). 

Modern Sherlock Holmes Fandom

Holmes fans haven’t gone away, either, if anything they’re more fanatical than they were since the early days of organized harassment of Doyle. Arguably one of the best-known fan societies is the Baker Street Irregulars, founded in 1934, which is still going strong with regular meetings, publications and events. New societies and more informal groups continue to form regularly, whether in person or online, and every depiction of Holmes and Watson builds a brand-new on-ramp for a nascent fan to fall in love with the characters and seek out like-minded enthusiasts. 

The characters have also proven themselves to be extremely adaptable, and because of this Holmes is the most portrayed fictional character of all time. The mention of Sherlock Holmes initially conjures up images of gaslight and hansom cabs, but the adventures themselves took place over a long period of time when the world was rapidly changing. Telephones, gramophones, submarines and automobiles all made their appearance while Holmes was still active, and he was able to seamlessly incorporate the possibilities of every new technology into his own skill set. A modern-day Sherlock Holmes would know his way around the internet and a smartphone just as well as the original would have made use of his magnifying glass, and as we have all seen firsthand, just because information is accessible doesn’t mean you don’t need a sharp mind to sift through that all that data and draw the correct conclusions from it. 

Holmes has always been a man that is in touch with the times, and as criminals evolve, he’s still going to be hot on their trails.

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Honoring the 60th anniversary of the James Bond movie franchise, as well as the 70th of the novels, there has been an outflow of books studying author Ian Fleming and the influence his World War II experiences had on his iconic character. No one is better equipped for this than Simmons, a British military veteran and author of “Ian Fleming and Operation Golden Eye: Keeping Spain Out of World War II” (2018). A similar book previously reviewed in the print edition of Military History, Edward Abel Smith’s “Ian Fleming’s Inspiration: The Truth Behind the Books” (2020), was marred by factual errors absent from Simmons’ volume.

Simmons convincingly argues that agent James Bond, the famous 007, with the iconic license to kill and whose adventures (14 books published 1953-1966) were clearly set in the Cold War era, was firmly rooted, as was Fleming, in World War II. Bond is somewhat out of place in the Cold War and operates more like a clandestine saboteur of Churchill’s wartime Special Operations Executive rather than a postwar operative of the British Secret Intelligence Service. The author, like many of us, lost interest in the movie Bond as he has been further transmogrified into a more politically correct 21st century paladin. Fleming himself is on record as stating Bond is more of a blunt instrument than a hero.

Simmons examines the usual questions regarding possible models for Bond, his curmudgeonly boss “M,” and elements of the classic stories. Bond, not surprisingly, has Fleming’s own tastes and proclivities for fast cars, beautiful women and fine dining. These are amalgamated with several operatives Fleming knew, such as naval diver Kenneth Crab, members of Fleming’s 30 Assault Unit Royal Marine commandos, and the celebrated World War I-era Sydney Reilly, whom Fleming never met. “M” was clearly a combination of SOE director Colin Gubbins and Admiral John H. Godfrey, the head of Britain’s Naval Intelligence Division and Fleming’s direct superior during World War II.

Impressively, Simmons details which wartime ideas and operations relate to specific novels and short stories. For example, Plan Midas, which bilked German Intelligence of money via a Portuguese casino, surfaces in “Casino Royale,” while the aborted Operation Ruthless, in which a crashed bomber was used to obtain German code books, is reworked for “Thunderball.” Finally, another appendix very expertly lists and rates the post Fleming Bond novels, especially those of John Gardner and Anthony Horowitz.

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In this seemingly ordinary Civil War photograph, Maj. Gen. Robert Brown Potter (center) of the Union Army stands among his staff — yet, if you look closely, you will notice a mysterious figure leaning against a tree on the right who appears somewhat out of place among the military men. This is none other than Mathew Brady, who might fairly be called the father of American war photography.

Although his exact birthday is unknown, Brady is estimated to have been born between 1822 and 1824. This year marks a starting point for recollecting the 200^th anniversary of his birth.

Born to Irish immigrants in New York, Brady experienced a meteoric rise in fame thanks to his skill at producing daguerreotype photography, the first publicly accessible form of photography, which was then in high demand. Acclaimed for his remarkably crisp and striking style of photography, he created portraits of many notable people.  

Brady’s skills had arguably the most significant impact when applied to war photojournalism. After the Civil War broke out in 1861, Brady became determined to capture the war in photos. Rallying his staff and other photographers, Brady doggedly followed the troops. Alongside the soldiers, Brady experienced the hardships of military life and was even forced to retreat with Union troops to Washington in the wake of the First Battle of Bull Run. 

The most haunting wartime images associated with Brady were taken at Antietam. Brady’s associates Alexander Gardner and James F. Gibson photographed the carnage left behind from the battle, emphasizing the bodies of dead soldiers left twisted and scattered across the lonely battlefield. Brady shocked — and deeply moved — members of the public when he chose to show these images in an exhibit called “The Dead of Antietam” in his New York gallery in 1862.

Brady’s exhibition marked the first time that photographs of war dead on the battlefield were shown to the American public. This changed the way the public viewed the ongoing struggle and arguably altered their perceptions of war and its consequences.

“These pictures have a terrible distinctness,” wrote a New York Times correspondent on Oct. 20, 1862. “By the aid of the magnifying-glass, the very features of the slain may be distinguished.”

A pioneer of war photojournalism, Brady died in 1896 in New York and is buried in the Congressional Cemetery in Washington, D.C. The National Archives has digitized over 6,000 images taken by Brady and his staff during the Civil War, which continue to provide vivid glimpses into the history of war and conflict.     

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One of the Italian Campaign’s most noteworthy warriors remained anonymous for decades — partly because his mission was top-secret, and partly due to him being already dead at the time.

Sicily was, as Winston Churchill described it, Europe’s “soft underbelly”: pivotal for taking Italy, reclaiming the Mediterranean and driving north into the Continent. But how to throw the Nazis off the scent? “Operation Mincemeat,” a 2022 film by “Shakespeare in Love” director John Madden, recounts the eponymous British intelligence ruse that fooled Germany into girding defenses in Greece, Corsica and Sardinia, unaware that by mid-June 1943 Sicily’s beaches would swarm with Allied troops in Operation Husky, one of history’s largest amphibious invasions.

English actors Colin Firth and Matthew Macfadyen play real-life members of England’s top-secret Twenty (XX) Committee in the adaptation of Ben Macintyre’s 2010 book. It’s early 1943 in London, and Ewen Montagu (Firth), a judge turned naval intelligence officer, and Charles Cholmondeley (Macfadyen), a desk-bound Royal Air Force lieutenant seconded to M15, are the key executioners of Operation Mincemeat. Their unsavory job involves planting a corpse clad in a British Royal Marines officer uniform in Spanish waters. Fascist sympathizers in Spain might find and search the “drowned” body, read the faked military correspondence planted on it and pass along word of a presumed assault.

It’s an audacious plot, not to mention one of questionable ethics (the corpse in question, dubbed “William Martin,” belonged to an unclaimed poisoning victim, much later revealed as Welsh vagrant Glyndwr Michael). But with schemers behind the scenes including future James Bond novelist Ian Fleming (Johnny Flynn) — a young officer in the Royal Navy’s Naval Intelligence Department who pulled Mincemeat’s premise from a potboiler novel — it was bound to be one for the books.

We spoke with Madden about his English roots, translating Macintyre’s story to screen and why Operation Mincemeat — and, by extension, Glyndwr Michael — were so important in winning the war.

You were born in Portsmouth. There’s the obvious D-Day connection there, and a World War II legacy. Can you tell me more about that?

All I really remember — I was not around in those days — but all I really remember was the city being absolutely bombed to smithereens. Not quite Mariupol level, but certainly pretty close, since it was then the port of the Royal Navy’s Home Fleet; it could be entirely accommodated in Portsmouth Harbor.

I was curious because obviously you grew up in Britain, and the war still seems to be still present there in a way it doesn’t in America.

Yes. Well, we were on the front line, I suppose. I mean, it definitely cast a long shadow. I was born four years after Armistice Day, and even though I was not a part of it, rationing and the stories about who was where in the year before the war ended and that kind of thing were common parlance in the family. Everybody used to talk about it. And the long tail of that war went on for a long time, and certainly informed me growing up.

Has it informed your work as well? You’ve had several projects that have in some scope dealt with World War II: “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin” (2001), “The Debt” (2010), and now “Operation Mincemeat.”

I can’t say I was targeting those, but they inevitably were of interest to me. You know, Mincemeat, for example, I would characterize as being in the realm of urban myth when I was growing up. Most people would not have known the mission’s name. But if you mentioned to anybody a dead body floating up then people would have known that.

What drew you to this story?

My screenwriter whom I’d been working with on another project, Michelle Ashford, stumbled on Malcom Gladwell’s article about Ben Macintyre’s book about Operation Mincemeat in The New Yorker. She read the book and gave it to me, and I read the book and was simultaneously delighted and amazed. It’s such an extraordinary story and has the added factor of not being that well-known. And it turned out to be a piece that kept on giving, actually; there’s so much richness in it. It’s such an emotional story at the same time as being a historical one, and it touches so many different areas of things going on at that time.

How true is the movie to actual events?

In all significant details it’s true. But you do need to shape the narrative to maximize its impact. There are some elements we shifted around. That was actually true of the story’s first iteration: Ewen Montagu, the man who was in the middle of the whole thing, later wrote his own account, “The Man Who Never Was” (1953), which was heavily vetted by intelligence services and was in itself what amounted to a work of fiction because one of the key elements was they didn’t own up to whose body they were using — a very, very sensitive subject.

I was impressed by the attention to detail British intelligence paid while creating Glyndwr Michael’s fake identity as Royal Marine officer “Major William Martin”: a whole backstory, complete with a photo of an imaginary fiancé and purchase receipts planted on him.

One of the things that was extraordinary about Operation Mincemeat was the degree of obsessive attention that was paid by the people putting the plan together to make sure it all held together.  Ben’s book details it minutely. That’s because he had access to the actual Operation Mincemeat files, which were declassified in 1996. Which is when, of course, Glyndwr Michael’s identity became known. Those were files that were never intended to be read. So there is an absolute enormous tranche of information and detail about Operation Mincemeat, and so we had the advantage of being able to tell that story very honestly.

The relationship between wartime intelligence schemes and detective fiction is an intriguing one. Can you outline how the genre inspired Operation Mincemeat?

It’s worth remembering that when we think about spies now, we think about professional spies, people who do it as a living. And wartime espionage was really focused essentially on the idea of managing disinformation or collecting information about what the enemy was doing and managing disinformation that was being sent in the direction of the enemy to try and confuse them about Allied intentions. What tended to happen in those situations was that a lot of people gravitated towards that effort or were headhunted and become part of it.

Montagu was a barrister, a King’s Counsel. Cholmondeley was in active service, but not built right in the eye department. He couldn’t fly an aircraft even though that’s what he wanted to do. But they had particular kinds of brains. A lot of the people who ended up working on Operation Mincemeat were people who were, for some reason, would-be novelists and writers.

Some were published novelists. John Masterman, chairman of the Twenty Committee, was a published novelist. And James Bond creator Ian Fleming was an assistant to Admiral John Godfrey, though not a published novelist at that point; this was 10 years before “Casino Royale.” So these were people who spent their time solving crossword puzzles, sometimes creating  crossword puzzles, and they were all very interested in the literary world, and particularly the genre that was very popular at the time, which was detective fiction, with the “twist” — you know: the revelation at the end of the story about why it happened and how it happened.

I think of the so-called “Trout Memo” — the document that Godfrey and Fleming initially put together proposing, among other schemes, the plan for Operation Mincemeat — as a sort of “Boy’s Own” manual about what you could do to throw the enemy off the scent. It contained some very idiotic ideas — or apparently idiotic ideas, in some instances—including one or two that, in the case of Mincemeat, were literally borrowed from a 1937 detective book called “The Milliner’s Hat” by Basil Thomson, who had a series of books based on a police detective.

British intelligence needed people with what Winston Churchill, I think, called “corkscrew thinking”: you could think around corners, you could think the unobvious. There’s this part in the film where Churchill says about Mincemeat, “It is preposterous and extremely far-fetched, but the idea is just about unbelievable enough that the Germans might believe it’s true.” Which is sort of a paradoxical construction that summarizes exactly the way they were thinking and how they were doing things.

What was at stake if the plan had gone awry?

I think the outcome well could have been a massacre, and that’s exactly what plunged the team that created Operation Mincemeat into a state of existential dread. Because if the Germans caught on to the ruse, they would have sent indications that they thought Mincemeat was true. In other words, the bluff would have come back; that’s exactly what went on in espionage and counterespionage during the war.

They would give the impression that something had been swallowed, and then send out signals, for example, that the troop movements that appeared to be happening might not have been real troop movements — while actually massively reinforcing Sicily because they were convinced that’s where the attack would come from. So I think that the stakes were incredibly high, and I think that’s what would have happened. And then we’d all know about that event.

Winston Churchill in the film also says at one point, “I applaud the fantastic. It has many advantages over the mundane.” Agree or disagree?

I totally agree with that. I think he was a risk-taker, Churchill. That’s one of the reasons why he was such an outstanding leader.

Who’s interested in a mundane story as a filmmaker? One’s not interested in a mundane story; you’re interested in a bizarre one, an outlandish one, one that possibly pushes the limits of credibility but nevertheless has a truth of its own.

Operation Mincemeat. Directed by John Madden; written by Michelle Ashford. 128 min. Warner Bros. Pictures, 2022. Now streaming on Netflix. Adapted from Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory (2010) by Ben Macintyre. 

this article first appeared in world war II magazine

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No matter where you served in Vietnam in the 1960s, the slashing rock ’n’ roll guitar of James “Jimi” Hendrix was heard on radios, record players and eight-track tape decks. Electric Ladyland, the critically acclaimed album released by Hendrix in 1968, sold millions of copies and showcased Hendrix’s incredible talents.

More than a few GIs soon came to think that “All Along the Watchtower” was really Hendrix’s tune—and not a cover of a song by Bob Dylan. “Purple Haze” and “The Wind Cries Mary” also were played over and over. Rolling Stone magazine considers Hendrix to be the greatest guitar player of all time.

But many who served in Vietnam and admire Hendrix’s skill with a guitar do not know that he was a paratrooper in the 101st Airborne Division. They also do not know that Hendrix figured out how to cut short his three-year enlistment to launch his career as a musician by exploiting prejudices against homosexuality.

Trouble with the law

Hendrix, born in Seattle the day after Thanksgiving 1942, grew up poor and dropped out of high school. Some of his African American male friends, who like him had few job opportunities, joined the armed forces. Hendrix also considered enlisting, especially after he was arrested by the local police for riding in a stolen car.

After being arrested again just four days later for riding in another stolen car, Hendrix knew he would be prosecuted this time and could go to jail for 10 years. Yet he also knew that prosecutors in Seattle often were willing to make a deal—a plea bargain—with a young male defendant if he would leave town and join the Army. Hendrix went to an Army recruiter in Seattle and asked if it was possible to join the 101st Airborne Division. He had read about the “Screaming Eagles,” as the division’s soldiers were called, and wanted to be a paratrooper.

this article first appeared in vietnam magazine

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On May 16, 1961, a public defender representing Hendrix struck a plea bargain with the local district attorney. Hendrix received a two-year suspended prison sentence on the condition that he enlist in the Army. The following day, he enlisted for three years as a supply clerk and shipped out to Fort Ord, California, for basic training.

At first, the young private liked military life. After two months at Fort Ord, he received orders for Fort Campbell, Kentucky. He arrived there on Nov. 8, 1961, and immediately began airborne training. “Here I am,” he wrote to his father, “exactly where I wanted to go. I’m in the 101st Airborne . . . [it’s] pretty rough, but I can’t complain, and I don’t regret it . . . so far.”

Becoming a Screaming Eagle

Hendrix made his first jump out of an airplane that winter. “The first jump was really outta sight,” he later told a friend. Like many paratroopers, Hendrix feared that his parachute might fail. He overcame it, made five jumps and earned his parachutist badge, along with the extra $55 a month that came with being on jump status. Hendrix was promoted to private first class in January 1962 and completed the requirements to wear the Screaming Eagle patch. He was so proud of that patch that he bought extra ones to send to his family.

Only a few months later, however, Hendrix decided that he liked the Army—and soldiering—less and less. The military was interfering with his true love: rock ’n’ roll music. Hendrix had his guitar with him and recruited friends for a band that got weekend gigs in Nashville and at military bases as far away as Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

Hendrix knew that he could not simply quit the Army, and if he went AWOL he might be court-martialed and sent to prison. In April 1962, having finished just 10 months of his 36-month enlistment, Hendrix spoke to an Army psychiatrist at Fort Campbell and told him that “he had developed homosexual tendencies and had begun fantasizing about his [male] bunkmates.” On a subsequent visit, Hendrix told the doctor that he was “in love” with a male member of his squad.

Those were fabricated claims about his sexuality that Hendrix knew could get him out of uniform. Under Army regulations then in force, a gay soldier was subject to separation because his presence in the Army was thought to impair morale and discipline.

Being Gay Meant Being ‘Unfit’

According to the regulation, this “unfitness to serve” was attributed to the Army’s then-reasoning that “homosexuality is a manifestation of a severe personality defect which appreciably limits the ability of such individuals to function effectively in society.”

In practice, that meant a soldier who demonstrated “by behavior a preference for sexual activity with persons of the same sex” could be discharged with a general or an undesirable discharge—although an honorable discharge might be given in exceptional cases. Hendrix was sufficiently familiar with the regulation. He knew what he needed to say.

In May 1962, Capt. John Halbert, a doctor, gave Hendrix a comprehensive medical examination. Halbert concluded that Hendrix suffered from “homosexuality” and recommended he be discharged because of his “homosexual tendencies.” He was discharged for “unsuitability” on July 2, 1962.

Hendrix must have received at least a general discharge under honorable conditions, as his final paycheck included “a bonus for twenty-one days of unused leave.” Had he received a discharge under “Other Than Honorable” conditions, there would have been no bonus.

After his discharge, Hendrix embarked on a red-hot career as a musician. He never admitted how he had used his knowledge of Army regulations to obtain an “early-out” and return to civilian life. Instead, he told his friends that he had broken his ankle on his 26th jump and was discharged for that physical disability. However, his Army record contains no evidence that Hendrix was discharged due to an injury.

Dying a rock star at 27

Had he lived longer, Hendrix likely would have been surprised at the changing attitudes about the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community in America—and in the U.S. Army. Unfortunately for Hendrix, his “reckless mixing of drugs and alcohol,” as Charles R. Cross described it in his 2005 biography Room Full of Mirrors, resulted in his death in London on Sept. 18, 1970. He was 27 years old.

Hendrix is not the only musician or celebrity from that era who served in the armed forces. Johnny Cash served in the Air Force from 1950 to 1954, and Elvis Presley was in the Army from 1958 to 1960. Only Jimi Hendrix had the distinction of being a paratrooper, and it seems his knowledge of law and regulations got him back into civilian life earlier than might have otherwise been expected.

Fred L. Borch is a retired judge advocate colonel who serves as the regimental historian for the Army Judge Advocate General’s Corps. He is the president of the Orders and Medals Society of America and the author of several books on American military decorations.

This article appeared in the June 2022 issue of Vietnam magazine.

Former U.S. naval aviator Don Purdy flew the A-4 Skyhawk attack jet on 218 combat missions over North Vietnam from July 1967 to February 1969. He was a member of Attack Squadron VA-164, the “Ghostriders.” Purdy’s book, Where the High Winds Sing: A Naval Aviator’s Poetry of War and Reflection, won a gold medal for poetry presented by the Military Writers Society of America in 2021.

In the book Purdy recalls his difficult Vietnam experiences, including combat and its aftermath, through poetry and artwork. His squadron was part of Carrier Air Wing 16 aboard the USS Oriskany and Carrier Air Wing 21 on the USS Hancock. Air Wing 16 suffered the highest loss rate of any Navy air wing during the Vietnam War, Purdy says.

Purdy’s poetry is resonating with other Vietnam veterans and inspiring them to write about their own battle experiences. Purdy spoke with Vietnam magazine about his writing and artwork and how they give form to the echoes of warfare that might seem impossible to express.

What introduced you to writing poetry?

I read some World War I poetry, and I was impressed that these young guys in the most god-awful circumstances you could imagine were writing poetry about it that was more evocative of the horror than some longtime pros than I had read—guys like Wilfred Owen, [Rudyard] Kipling. That kind of gave me the start.

The other thing is that I wouldn’t have the focus to sit down and write either a novel or a memoir. Poetry is more suited to my limited focus.

To tell you the truth it kind of surprised me when I first sat down and tried to write some poetry. As I was writing this stuff down, it was like, “Geez, where did that come from?” Sometimes when you’re writing the line just comes to you.

What inspired you to write the book?

I guess things had been rolling around in my head for a long time—because it’s been a long time since Vietnam. I really hadn’t gotten into poetry until the last 10 years. I just started writing things down.

It was to my own amazement that some of this stuff came out. I think poetry comes from someplace down deep where there aren’t any words for it—it’s more like feelings and the process of putting words to that. That’s what I tried to do.

I would say that I am not a good painter nor a good poet, but I know what good paintings look like and I know what good writing sounds like, so I just put down stuff and start getting rid of what doesn’t sound good. I do a lot of revising.

Another factor in my writing was that I did not keep any sort of a journal or diary during Vietnam. I therefore lost a lot of details over the years, but I did not lose the feelings and deep impressions that can still lend themselves to being expressed in poetry.

How long have you been painting, and how did you start?

A long time. Probably 20 to 30 years off and on. It was mostly just a hobby. I like to paint everything. I went to the Coast Guard Academy before I went over to the Navy when Vietnam started. I started out with maritime themes and branched out. Of course, I painted aviation, but I did a whole series on rodeo stuff. It evolved over the years.

I have work in the Navy test pilot center in Maryland and one at the naval air station in Fallon [Nevada]. They [the paintings] are scattered here and there.

Did you create all the illustrations for your book?

Yes. I did all of them, including the one for the cover.

How long was the book in the making?

I’d say it was about a year. I already had a few poems, like maybe five or six. Then things started to coalesce into the fact that maybe I could put enough of them together and get something into a book.

I think the real impetus was when I went to a poetry workshop. You can’t put things off when you need to have something done the next week and everybody critiques it. That really helped.

Are there any particular military writers you admire?

Primarily writers from World War I. I got an anthology book from the library, and it really impressed me how these guys could write about that so graphically. I think some of that came through in a long poem in my book, “Songs of War,” about a guy getting shot down.

There’s a naval aviation magazine called The Hook, and a guy there reviewed it for me. He said he had to put the book down when he was reading that poem because he couldn’t get through it in one sitting—he had to go back to it. I guess it was that powerful for him. It’s amazing to hear somebody say something like that.

Can you share some background on some of the poems?

The poem called “The Debt” was the first one I wrote. I was told by a writing professor at Berkeley [University of California] that she thought it was the heart of the book, and that is what it’s all about—the loss of other guys and what that means.

There’s another one called “Matryoshka Doll.” That was based on a Marine I met who was in the barracks in Lebanon that got blown up. Hundreds of guys got killed in that thing—and he was actually buried under a whole bunch of other guys. He was one of the only ones alive. That was rolling around in my head for years. I thought, “I really would like to write something about that.” I got the idea of a Matryoshka doll with personalities one inside the other. He’s a multilayered kind of guy.

About the poem “Duel with a Flak Site”—that was the first time in Vietnam I knew I had probably killed somebody. There was like a 90 percent chance. That was another thing that was good for me to get out.

Another poem is called “Knockin’ on Hell’s Door.” If you read anything about Vietnam, you’ll know the futility of the way targeting was done during the Rolling Thunder operation. It was just going back to the same targets day after day. The whole concept of micromanaging it from the White House was absurd. There was no targeting discretion left to the people on scene. It was all directed from Washington. It was stupid. We lost a lot of guys out of the sheer stupidity of the way it was run.

The last poem in the book was written for Lady Jessie. She [Jessie Beck] owned a casino in Reno. One of the pilots in the squadron worked for her when he was going through college. She started sending care packages and stuff to all the guys. She sent so much that we started giving it to our sister squadrons and all the other squadrons on the ship, and then even giving it to other ships! She branched out and gave stuff to the Army and Air Force. At that time it was getting to be a rather unpopular war. We were kind of out there on our own—it wasn’t like World War II when the whole nation mobilized. She was an amazing lady.

We had one airplane that had “Lady Jessie” written on the side. That was at a time when there wasn’t supposed to be any nose art on Navy airplanes. The CO [commanding officer] of the squadron said, “Well, we’ll just do it, and not ask for permission.”

Then Dick Perry, the guy who worked for her, got shot down and killed in Haiphong. She continued. PBS did a documentary on Lady Jessie and Dick Perry—it’s called, Lady Jessie: A Vietnam Story. They [the filmmakers] did a really good job.

Did you get a lot of support from family while writing the book, or was it a private project for you?

My wife’s very supportive. But the process for me—the first part of it, getting going—is really tough. I’ll keep at it, and finally some stuff will start to gel. Then I get to the stage of obsessing, and that’s not too good because I can’t stand to be interrupted when I’m in that stage! She [my wife] knows now to leave me alone once I’m in “obsession mode”!

Can you tell us about some of the feedback you’ve received?

I did get some good feedback. I’m in a Vietnam veterans group in Oakland and was able to share it with them. It prompted some of the guys to start writing. I was really happy with that aspect of it.

I think the overarching thing was guys saying they thought it probably took a lot of guts for me to lay it out like that. Especially in naval aviation—you don’t admit to any frailties, it’s all bravado. But to admit you were affected by loss, by survivor guilt—I had several people say it was good to hear somebody say it.

For me personally one of the amazing things was a letter I got from my sister. She’s 18 years younger than I am. She knew I was over there but had absolutely no concept of what it entailed. I got this really nice letter from her.

Would you recommend writing poetry to Vietnam veterans?

Any kind of writing is cathartic. I’ve been amazed at the feedback that I have gotten from guys.

I think it’s because our biggest fear is fear of the unknown. If you can pull things up, name them, identify them, write about them, then you’ve taken a pretty big step of overcoming that and moving on. I think that’s what writing does. It helps you to start facing things—at least identifying them.

I really believe that everyone, particularly vets in this instance, has a story to tell. And if I can put my thoughts into an article or book, anyone can. V

“He says it was covered in bloody gauze

Yet he can see that youthful face unblemished now

He says they were lost in the din of battle

Yet he hears those last words clearly now

He says a chopper lifted the lifeless body away

Yet he still feels the weight somehow

He says the time and place don’t matter now

Yet he cannot forget

1968, Tet

5 klicks northwest of Vung Tau.”

—”He Says,” by Don Purdy in Where the High Winds Sing: A Naval Aviator’s Poetry of War and Reflection

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This article appeared in the December 2021 issue of Vietnam magazine. For more stories from Vietnam magazine, subscribe and visit us on Facebook.