Among the bitter lessons learned during the costly American seizure of Japanese-occupied Tarawa in November 1943 was the need for ship-based close support in the interval between bombardment and a landing. Using the hull of the LCI (landing craft infantry) as a basis, the Navy devised the Landing Craft Support (Large) (Mark 3), or simply LCS. Entering service in 1944 and combat at Iwo Jima in February 1945, it packed the heaviest armament per ton of any warship, earning the sobriquet “Mighty Midget”. British Commonwealth forces also used it in Borneo, at Tarakan and Balikpapan.  

Of the 130 built, only five were lost—three sunk by Japanese Shinyo suicide motorboats in the Philippines and two falling victim to kamikaze aircraft off Okinawa. After supporting the Okinawa landings, the LCSs were fitted with radar and joined destroyers on picket duty against kamikaze attacks. It was while so engaged that Lieutenant Richard Miles McCool Jr., commander of LCS-122, saw the destroyer William D. Porter mortally stricken on June 10, 1945, by an Aichi D3A2, yet managed to rescue its crew without loss. The next evening two D3As hit LCS-122, but the seriously wounded McCool rallied his men to save their vessel and was subsequently awarded the Medal of Honor.   In 1949 the LCS was reclassified the LSSL (landing ship support large), and it continued to serve in Korea, Vietnam and other conflicts in foreign hands until 2007. One of two survivors discovered in Thailand is undergoing restoration to its World War II configuration at the Landing Craft Support Museum [usslcs102.org] in Vallejo, Calif.  

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

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The American arsenal of democracy delivered a huge number and variety of bombers during World War II. Among them were Boeing’s B-17 Flying Fortress and B-29 Superfortress; Consolidated’s B-24 Liberator series; North American’s B-25 Mitchell; and Martin’s B-26 Marauder. Excepting the B-29, all flew against every Axis power, from the Pacific and Aleutians to North Africa and Europe. But one latecomer barely got off the bench to play just before the final whistle: Consolidated’s little-known B-32 Dominator. If it’s remembered much at all it might be because of an unfortunate fact: a crewmember aboard a B-32 became the last United States combat fatality of the war.

Consolidated already had become a prominent factor in World War II aviation, producing not only the Army B-24 and Navy PB4Y series, but also the classic PBY Catalina and PB2Y Coronado flying boats. So when the Army Air Forces (AAF) sought another heavy bomber to fight alongside the B-29, it gave the San Diego firm the nod over four other contenders, giving the company the XB-32 order in September 1940. The planned aircraft would use the same 2,200-hp Wright R-3350 engines developed for the B-29 and share the concepts of a pressurized fuselage and remote-controlled gun turrets. The Army inspected the mockups and gave the go-ahead for prototypes in January 1941.

Showing some Liberator influence, the first XB-32 sported the same high-aspect-ratio Davis wing and twin tails. The inboard engines had reversible propellers to shorten the landing distance. However, the B-32’s rounded fuselage was aerodynamically sleeker than the B-24’s slab-sided airframe. Despite its similarity to the “very heavy” B-29, the Consolidated was designated a heavy bomber with an ultimate gross weight of 100,800 pounds versus 133,500 for the Boeing.

Dubbed the Dominator, the prototype XB-32 made its first flight on September 7, 1942, two years after Consolidated signed the contract. It crashed in May 1943, but the second prototype flew in July and the third in November. By then the configuration had seen some changes. It now had more of a “stepped” canopy, and the B-24-type twin tail had transformed into a high single tail similar to that of the Consolidated PB4Y-2 Privateer.

The program saw more changes as it progressed. Consolidated eliminated the pressurization and replaced the unreliable remote-controlled gun turrets with five manual twin mounts and the original three-blade props gave way to the B-29’s four. During flight tests in October 1944, Colonels Mark E. Bradley and Osmond J. Ritland reported a mixed impression of the aircraft, but noted, “Although the B-32 is a comparatively easy airplane to fly, it is not considered a pleasant airplane because of poor ‘feel,’ noise and vibration, excessive trim change with use of flaps, high landing and takeoff speeds.” They said that the Dominator “will not be a popular airplane with the services.”

Meanwhile, the B-32’s development had overlapped the 1943 merger between Consolidated and Vultee that led to the emergence of a new company, Convair. However, the corporate amalgam exerted little if any influence upon the Dominator program as the bombers began to roll off the production line at the company’s new plant in Fort Worth, Texas. 

In all, the AAF ordered 1,500 Dominators. Convair delivered the first production model in September 1944, but it soon suffered a nose wheel collapse on landing. Other bombers were delivered in November with unit-size introduction in late January 1945. By then it had become clear that the B-29 did not require a backup, so the Army directed that 40 B-32s be delivered as unarmed transition trainers. One detachment received orders to the Philippines for operational evaluation, though it was clear that the Dominator would see little combat. In the U.S. that summer, B-32s averaged a mere three hours flying time per month.

The Pacific-bound Dominators set out on an 8,300-mile global trek in May 1944, leaving Fort Worth for Mather Field, California, then flying on to Hickam Field, Hawaii, and from there to Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands, Guam in the Marianas, and on to Clark Field, Luzon. There the B-32 crews joined the 386th Bombardment Squadron of 312th Bombardment Group. The group was a Pacific old-timer under Lt. Col. Selmon Wells that had been flying Douglas A-20 Havocs. Just 25, Wells had flown with the group since late 1942 and had a wealth of combat experience.

The Dominator became the designated hitter for the 312th and took on a heavy bombardment role that was quite different from the light attack duties the squadron had been flying with its A-20s. One of the crewmembers making the transition to the Dominator was Staff Sgt. Julius Kossor, who noted in his diary that he was glad to leave the Havocs behind: “really had some close calls these last few missions,” he wrote.

In May the squadron’s commanding officer, Major “Pinky” Wilson, received his orders to return to the States. An original member from the squadron’s inception in October 1942, Wilson had flown 109 missions and amassed 320 hours, one of the group’s most notable records. Captain Ferdinand L. Svore replaced Wilson as new CO. He had arrived in July 1944 and served as squadron and group operations officer before taking command. On May 30, shortly after Svore’s promotion, the squadron ceased Havoc operations to begin B-32 missions. To prepare, ground staff visited the B-24-equipped 43rd Bomb Group to learn heavy bombardment organization and procedures. New personnel “began to trickle in” from the first of June, Kossor noted.

In that period Kossor wrote, “Our A-20s, with their pilots and gunners, were transferred out and assigned to the other three squadrons in the group. New crews, factory representatives and specialists joined the squadron, and preparations were under way to convert the 386th Bomb Squadron (Light) into a very heavy bomb squadron.”

The day before it ended all Havoc missions, the squadron flew the first B-32 raid of the war, an attack north of the Philippine capital of Manila. In a display of unit pride, the squadron report noted, “The outstanding raid of the month, and probably the most notable in this theatre, was the B-32 strike on May 29th. Two of three B-32s assigned to the 386th were sent on a mission to Antatet in the Cagayan Valley. If the Japs below took time to peek out of their foxholes, they must have been amazed to see eighteen 1,000 pounders dropped from only two planes. Bombing from 10,000 feet was excellent. All bombs were 100 percent on the target, scoring direct hits on a house and damaging a large tin-roofed warehouse.

“This, the first B-32 raid in the world, was the forerunner of future operations in the Pacific,” the report concluded, not quite accurately.

After addressing engine problems and deferred maintenance, in June the squadron’s three Dominators flew ten two-plane missions to drop 135 tons of bombs, mostly on Formosa (today Taiwan). Kossor flew his first heavy bomber mission on June 13 in one of two Dominators that struck a Formosa airfield. From the ball turret Kossor had “a perfect view of the target. Three bombs made direct hits on the runway. Others all around the field—no fighter interception and no damage to our two planes.” He judged the Dominator to be “a good fast ship.” 

By the end of June, the squadron, now equipped with three B-32s and a C-47B for miscellaneous duties, had logged ten missions (20 sorties) for 105 combat hours. The combat tests ended in July and other crews began making the transition to the new bomber. Then on July 30 the advance echelon began moving to Okinawa while the rest waited for a fourth B-32 to arrive. The unit diary noted, “All we had was the promise that more were on the way.” And there were: five B-32s headed overseas in July, and nine more in August. Still, that meant there were only 10 to 16 Dominator crews overseas between June and August, versus 1,200 or so B-29 crews.

The squadron properly noted that August 1945 was “an eventful month in world history resulting in a month of impatient waiting” for the 55 officers, 370 enlisted men and nine civilian technicians on the roster. On August 8 the bombers and supporting transports left Clark Field in the Philippines for Okinawa and landed with bombs aboard at Yontan. Shortly afterward the unit moved to nearby Kadena Airfield, already home to three bomb groups and a fighter group. The support staff’s “water echelon” sailed by ship and learned about the atomic bombs dropped on Japan along the way. A squadron officer wrote, “Despite the fact that the war was unofficially over, the 386th carried on a private war with the Empire of Japan.” On August 15 anti-shipping strikes were recalled upon Tokyo’s surrender announcement.

However, the new arrivals still had work to do. On the 16th, reconnaissance missions scouted possible landing fields in Japan for the airborne troops who were due to arrive shortly. One Dominator turned back with engine problems but the other, Hobo Queen II, completed the flight.

On August 17 the 386th launched four photo sorties around Tokyo under the youthful Colonel Wells. During the two hours over Japan the individual bombers were harassed and attacked by flak and Japanese Navy pilots who ignored the surrender announcement that had gone out two days before. Sergeant Kossor said it was the “roughest mission I ever had.” He was flying with Wells, who had told him to leave his ball turret up because it created too much drag when lowered. Then Japanese fighters attacked and Kossor had to scramble to get the turret down. “They attacked us from each wing, and then flew under my ball as they passed,” he noted. “A perfect target, but because I obeyed orders we may have crashed in Tokio. Then we got hit with flak. It was heavy and damn accurate.” Anti-aircraft fire put shrapnel into a wing, but Wells proceeded to Yokosuka where he found the flak was even thicker but experienced little threat from fighters.

That wasn’t the case with two other Dominators. In the Yokosuka area they aborted their photo runs due to cloud cover but conducted shootouts at 20,000 feet. The gunners claimed one fighter destroyed and another damaged before heading seaward with gunfire damage to a wing.

The fourth bomber had an even rougher time. In a 15-minute set-to, several Japanese ganged up on the Dominator from six o’clock. An upper turret gunner set his sights on the closest and watched his tracers sparkle on the green airframe. Obviously stricken and streaming smoke, the assailant dropped into the undercast. But the tail turret failed and the Japanese noticed the weakness. They renewed their attacks from astern although the bomber escaped without serious damage and landed with the others about four hours later. The unit diarist recorded, “Approximately ten fighter planes attacked the formation, resulting in two probables for our side.”

Of greater concern to Far East air forces was what Japanese fighter opposition meant. Presumably the interim agreement made before the formal surrender allowed Allied aircraft full access to Japanese airspace. Did the violent responses indicate a change in Tokyo policy or were the intercepts flown by dissidents who refused to surrender?

The latter proved the case. Years later a prominent Japanese Navy ace, Lieutenant (j.g.) Saburo Sakai, explained his rationale for opposing the B-32 flights. His commanding officer had stated that if any pilots wanted to intercept the Americans, he would look the other way. When the B-32s came into sight that day, Sakai and his fellow pilots decided to attack them. “While Japan did agree to the surrender, we were still a sovereign nation, and every nation has the right to protect itself,” Sakai asserted. He claimed that the Japanese did not know the B-32s’ intentions and that the Americans should have waited before sending more airplanes over Japan. “They should have waited and let things cool down.”

The next day, the squadron flew two more photo sorties over Tokyo. The Dominators flew with extra observers and photographers to verify the situations at major airfields. The planes had completed their routes when crewmen noticed fighters airborne from the Atsugi airfield. “Fourteen Jap fighters engaged our bombers in twenty minutes of aerial combat,” the unit diary noted. “Two enemy planes were shot down and two probably destroyed. Gunners Houston and Smart were the sharpshooters.”

Lieutenant James Klein’s Hobo Queen II held an altitude advantage over Lieutenant John Anderson’s unnamed bomber, which was some 10,000 feet below. Anderson’s tail and top forward gunners put dozens of .50-caliber rounds on target, seeing two dark green fighters gush flames or explode. The nose gunner swapped gunfire with Lieutenant Sadamu Komachi, survivor of the Darwinian winnowing Japanese pilots had experienced since Pearl Harbor. The veteran shot out the Dominator’s port inboard engine, blew the plexiglass off the top rear turret, and damaged the rudder.

During the shootout one of the photographers, Staff Sgt. Joseph Lacharite, received wounds in both legs, so Sergeant Anthony J. Marchione, a young Pennsylvanian on his first B-32 mission, laid him on a cot and took over the first-aid effort. Moments later a 20mm shell exploded in the fuselage, inflicting a massive chest wound on Marchione. Five of his fellow crewmen tried to keep him alive, applying pressure while administering plasma and oxygen.

Attended by his friends, Tony Marchione died at age 19, high over Japan and far from his home in Pennsylvania. The two bombers landed at Kadena that evening, Anderson’s making it on three engines.

Anthony Marchione almost certainly was the last American killed in combat during the Second World War. Historian Stephen Harding wrote a bittersweet account of the young sergeant’s life, death and family in his book, Last to Die. It remains the definitive account of Marchione’s death. “

The War was supposed to be over Aug. 15, but our men are still gettin’ killed,” Kossor griped in his diary. “To us it isn’t over for some time yet. Nobody’s celebratin’ ‘The End’ over here. Because the war is supposed to be over, we do not get combat time for these missions. We got the rotten deal of flyin’ ’em ‘on the house!’” 

Ten days later the unit diary noted, “August 28 was probably the saddest day in the history of the 312th Group.” In two disastrous crashes, 15 officers and men were killed. One plane was taking off when it crashed at the end of the runway. There were no survivors. The other B-32, after completing a recon mission, developed engine trouble and flew to within 175 miles of Okinawa on two engines. Two crewmembers died in the bailout but the rest survived and “spent a pleasant cruise on two destroyers and returned a week later.”

After the signing of the peace treaty on September 2, a bomber from the 386th Squadron departed for the States, representing the first airplane from Fifth Air Force to return from Japan. The unit diarist closed, “So ended the glorious history of the 386th Bomb Squadron; activated three years ago in Savannah as a dive bomb outfit; flew fighter patrols over New Guinea in P-40s; bombed and strafed New Guinea and the Philippines in A-20s; received a Presidential Citation for operations against Formosa; flew the first B-32s in combat and participated in the last aerial combat of World War II.”

The war’s finish also spelled the end to the B-32. The Army Air Forces no longer needed the Dominator. Only 114 had rolled out of the Fort Worth Consolidated-Vultee plant by the time production ceased—a far cry from the 1,500 originally planned. Today not a single B-32 remains. 

this article first appeared in AVIATION HISTORY magazine

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My great-uncle, Captain Everal Anthony Guimond, was a bombardier in the 566th Bombardment Squadron, 389th Bombardment Group, Heavy, of the U.S. Army Air Forces. He was killed on D-Day and his military records were destroyed in the 1973 St. Louis Archives fire. What can you tell me about my great-uncle’s service and his unit’s history?

—Laura Guimond, Henderson, Nevada  

The 566th was one of the four original squadrons of the 389th Bombardment Group of the Eighth Air Force, whose B-17 and B-24 bombers famously took the air war to Germany.

Constituted on December 19, 1942, the 389th was activated a week later at Davis-Monthan Air Field in Arizona before moving to Biggs Field, Texas, and Lowry Field, Colorado. Between mid-April and June 1, 1943, the 389th received final flight training at Lowry on the Consolidated B-24 Liberators they would fly throughout the war. President Franklin D. Roosevelt formally reviewed the unit at Lowry during a late-April visit, an event the Rocky Mountain News wrote was “believed to be the sole occasion when a USAAF bomb group was so honored.”

The 389th’s ground echelon left Colorado on June 5 for the Camp Kilmer staging base in New Jersey. Three weeks later the unit joined 17,000 other troops on the Cunard ship RMS Queen Elizabeth to sail to England. Along with the thousands of other Americans servicemen, on board was the famed CBS radio commentator Edward R. Murrow, who gave airmen an idea of what sort of life awaited them at a USAAF air base in England. The unit arrived at their new home base at RAF Hethel, in Norfolk, England, in mid-June. The air echelon left Lowry on June 21, hopscotching across the U.S. before making transatlantic flights to Prestwick, Scotland. The B-24s then convoyed south to join the rest of the 389th at Hethel.

Under the command of Colonel Jack W. Wood, the 389th settled into its new digs. The group’s airmen were soon perplexed when, after having trained in the U.S. for standard high-altitude bombing missions, their training in England suddenly turned exclusively to low-altitude runs. As Lieutenant Andrew Opsata of the 93rd Bomb Group said regarding the Americans’ buzzing of the English countryside, “We terrorized the livestock, and I’m certain that egg and milk production must have taken a precipitous drop.” What the American airmen didn’t know was that they were preparing for the top-secret Operation Tidal Wave, the planned attack on Nazi Germany’s oil refineries in Ploesti, Romania. Since the B-24s couldn’t reach Ploesti from England, on July 1, 1943, the 389th departed to join the 44th and 93rd Bomb Groups of the Ninth Air Force in Benghazi, Libya. Low-level flight training continued there amid the stifling desert heat and a plague of locusts and flies numbering in the millions. Another local troublemaker inspired the 389th to adopt the nickname that would serve them until the end of the war: the Sky Scorpions. From Benghazi, the 389th flew their first missions from July 9-19, attacking Axis airfields on Crete and as well as targets in support of Operation Husky, the Allied invasion of Sicily. The group flew additional missions from Libya against ports and rail yards in Italy and Austria, but the big event was August 1, 1943—the attack on Ploesti.

The mission launched at 4:00 a.m., when 179 B-24s headed north from Benghazi over Corfu and northeast to Romania. The 566th Squadron’s target was Campina, the most distant of the refineries, as their B-24s were the latest models and had the longest range of the air groups. While the refineries took their hits, so too did the attackers. Of the 179 airplanes that took off, 43 planes were shot down, 532 men died, and 110 men survived bail outs to become POWs. Despite these sobering figures, the Ploesti raid succeeded in damaging the refineries and disrupting—temporarily, at least—the German war machine. The Sky Scorpions received a Distinguished Unit Citation for their efforts that day.

The 389th returned to England on August 25 and soon began a 21-month slog to bomb the Germans into submission. Meanwhile, the crews settled into everyday life at Hethel. A joint 389th/RAF rugby team played a full season of matches, and the airmen joined the war-long chorus railing against the Spam, powdered eggs, and chipped beef that seemed omnipresent in the chow lines. On Christmas of 1943, the 389th received a visit from an old friend: Edward R. Murrow dropped by to conduct interviews for his radio report home to the U.S. and ended up having his Christmas meal with Hethel’s enlisted men.

From August 1943 until the end of the war, the group flew hundreds of missions against airfields, marshaling yards, V-1 rocket sites, and numerous other targets in occupied Europe and Germany. In February 1944, the 389th was at the forefront of Big Week, the Allies’ intense bombing campaign against the ball-bearing, engine, and aircraft factories of the German aviation industry. The overall effort was not as successful as at first thought or hoped, but it was another strike in the war of attrition against Germany. But it was a war of attrition for both sides—Allied losses from German fighters and 88mm flak batteries were painfully significant.

Your great-uncle, Captain Everal Guimond, enlisted in the U.S. Army on April 4, 1942, and traveled to England with the rest of the 389th in June1943. A bombardier on Lieutenant Gregory Perron’s crew for 10 missions starting in November 1943, Captain Guimond transferred to a B-24 commanded by Lieutenant William Wambold in February 1944. His first run with the new crew was a bombing mission over Braunschweig, Germany, on February 20, the first day of Big Week. 

On April 1, 1944, USAAF brass raised from 25 to 30 the number of missions required for airmen to complete their tour. A sliding scale was put in place, so your great-uncle’s tour was scheduled to end after 29 missions. As D-Day approached, Captain Guimond’s tally stood at 28. Tragically, his final mission, on D-Day, would have been the last of his tour.

On June 6, the Liberators of the 389th flew numerous bombing missions in support of the Normandy landings. Captain Guimond was assigned to replace the regular bombardier on a B-24J-4 called Shoot Fritz, You’ve Had It under the command of Lieutenant Marcus Courtney. Taking off from Hethel at 2:00 a.m., the airplane, for reasons that were never determined, crashed and exploded 20 minutes later near the village of Trimingham on the Norfolk coast. All ten crewmembers perished.

The 389th continued to punish the German rail system, submarine pens, and shipping yards as the Allied invasion pushed on. The Sky Scorpions flew numerous missions during Operation Market Garden in September 1944—though the weather was so bad during the Battle of the Bulge that the group was unable to provide much material help. In February and March 1945, bombers switched from dropping explosives to airdropping food and other needed supplies to the advancing Allied armies. Their final mission, the last of 321 before the war in Europe ended in May, came over Germany on April 25. The 389th returned to the United States in late May and the unit was deactivated on September 13, 1945.

Everal Anthony Guimond was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross with Oak Leaf Cluster, the Air Medal with 3 Oak Leaf Clusters, and the Purple Heart, and he is buried in Plot E, Row 5, Grave 16 in England’s Cambridge American Cemetery. Your great-uncle’s service and sacrifice are also remembered at the National D-Day Memorial in Bedford, Virginia, where his name is enshrined on the Wall of Remembrance. Captain Guimond’s plaque, number W-99, resides next to those of 4,414 other servicemen who gave their lives on June 6, 1944, day one of the liberation of Europe.

this article first appeared in world war II magazine

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It may seem strange that the outbreak of hostilities between warring factions in the Middle East would bring to mind the peaceful, idyllic fields of south-central Pennsylvania, but it is difficult to watch the news coming out of Israel and Palestine these days without recalling the important role that Gettysburg played in 1978 to bring an unlikely peace to that region.

Seldom is there something happening in the world that does not in some way connect to or a least remind one of Gettysburg. I don’t just mean the battle by that name, but the famous address that Lincoln gave there, the decades of struggle over the memory of the place, the evolution of the park into a national park, and much more that falls under the general subject heading of Gettysburg.

In the last century and a half, numerous U.S. presidents have made use of Gettysburg symbolism to further some larger political goal with varying degrees of success. Woodrow Wilson used a speech at the 50th anniversary of the battle to promote his hope for peace. Months later, the world erupted into the War to End All Wars. At the 75th anniversary, President Franklin Roosevelt spoke to an estimated 200,000 people at the dedication of the Eternal Light Peace Memorial, while another 100,000 clogged the roads unable to reach the field. Months later, the world exploded into World War II.

In 1979, however, quite unexpectedly, Gettysburg and a president played a key role in bringing about the end of millennia of hostilities between two long-warring peoples.

carter’s peaceful plan

Jimmy Carter had long been a Civil War buff, and its greatest battle was seldom far from his thoughts. One of his ancestors had fought at Gettysburg, and in 1976, while he watched the results of the Democratic primary in Pennsylvania come in, candidate Carter noticed that he had won the vote in the electoral district that included the battlefield. To his delight, he remarked, “We ought to tell the Georgians that we finally won in Gettysburg.”

Two years later, while sitting at the presidential retreat at Camp David just a few miles southwest of the famous battlefield, his thoughts drifted there again. He was in the fourth day of intense negotiations designed to bring peace between Egypt and Israel — a conflict that predated Moses.

The leaders of both nations were there with him (Anwar Sadat of Egypt and Menachem Begin of Israel), but their views could scarcely have been farther apart. On one key negotiating point, Begin had declared, “My right eye will fall out, my right hand will fall off before I ever agree.”

In Carter’s view the two leaders were thinking in the wrong direction. “I tried for three days to get them to talk about the future,” Carter said. “But all they would talk about was the past.” Faced with the standoff and searching for some way to bring the parties to a different level of thought, Carter first kept them apart for a while, then proposed an excursion. “We went to the Civil War battlefield at Gettysburg one day,” he later recalled, “and I made them both agree not to talk about the Middle East or about anything that happened since 1865.”

Thanks to the meaning and mythology attached to the Gettysburg story since 1863 (much of it carved in stone in more than a thousand monuments and markers), Carter’s choice of destination was a fertile place for symbolic demonstration and persuasion. Two powers of the same region, grown from the same land but with differing cultural histories, once differed so greatly from each other that they engaged in the bloodiest war the continent had ever known. The worst of the fighting happened on the ground they were touring.

When the war was over, the two powers became one again, healed their wounds, set aside many of their differences, and went on to form the most powerful nation on earth. If North and South could accomplish this, then Egypt and Israel had a chance as well. As he admitted later in his memoirs, Carter wanted to demonstrate the high cost of war and persuade the two leaders to sign the first-ever peace agreement between Israel and an Arab nation.

The Egyptian took to the field right away. As a military student, Egypt’s Sadat had studied Gettysburg in detail and recognized it as the turning point in the Civil War. Israel’s Begin, however, was slower to the mark as he knew nothing about the battle. When the group passed the monument commemorating Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, however, Begin recited it from memory in a thick Yiddish accent, probably adding an Israeli emphasis to the line “that this nation…shall not perish from the earth.”

It took many more hours of negotiating, but less than a week later the three leaders took part in a historic signing ceremony for an agreement that brought peace between the two long-warring nations. Menachem Begin even gave in on his sticking point without losing an eye or his right hand.

lessons from gettysburg

To be sure, many factors helped bring about the Egyptian–Israeli peace in 1978, most of them having nothing to do with Gettysburg. But years after they signed the accords, the participants expressed a belief that the trip to America’s hallowed ground had meant a great deal. Carter said as much in a speech long afterward.

Sadat made one interesting observation. Since our visit to Gettysburg, he had been thinking that Carter, as a Southerner, could understand what it meant to be involved in a terrible war, and also knew how difficult it was to rebuild both the material things and the spirit of the people after a recognized defeat.

For Carter, Gettysburg was a reminder of the high cost of war and an example of reconciliation among adversaries. Sadat, lured by the military aspect of the field, felt the hope and healing in the post–Vietnam era ideas it elicited. Begin was taken with the ideas embodied in Lincoln’s immortal address.

Though perhaps not in the way he intended, Carter’s idea had worked. Both negotiating parties found meaning in the Gettysburg story that, though different from the other, helped inspire their thoughts and actions toward peace.

With war in the Middle East again the lead news story, one wonders if there might not be some magic left in the meaning of Gettysburg and whether a trip to the battlefield might someday encourage opposing leaders to find common ground, even if that ground lies in south-central Pennsylvania.

This essay was adapted from Thomas A. Desjardin’s book These Honored Dead: How the Story of Gettysburg Shaped American Memory (DaCapo, 2003).

“Texas Charlie” Bigelow, a U.S. Army scout, was patrolling Indian Territory when he contracted a fever that left him so weak he could barely open his eyelids. An Indian chief took pity on Bigelow and nursed him back to health using a mysterious medicine he called sagwa. When Bigelow begged for the recipe of this wonder drug, the chief sent five tribal medicine men to accompany the scout to the East Coast, where they created “Kickapoo Sagwa,” the magic elixir sold in medicine shows that traveled America from 1881 to 1912.  

Or so the story goes, as recounted in countless Kickapoo Indian Medicine Company advertisements. But the story—like the medicine itself—was totally bogus.  

Bigelow was never an Army scout and never healed by an Indian chief. He grew up on a Texas farm in the 1850s, then fled the rigors of the plow for a life peddling patent medicines across the West and on the streets of Baltimore. In 1881, Bigelow teamed up with John “Doc” Healy, a former Union Army drummer boy, shoe salesman, proprietor of a traveling theatrical troupe called “Healy’s Hibernian Minstrels,” and the inventor and chief pitchman of a bogus liver medicine and a dubious liniment he dubbed “King of Pain.” When he joined forces with Bigelow, Healy concocted a new product, a fake “Indian” medicine he called “Kickapoo Sagwa.” And he proposed a brilliant idea for promoting it.  

“His plan was to hire a few Indians, rent a storeroom, and have the medicine simmering like a witch’s brew in a great iron pot inside a tepee,” recalled “Nevada Ned” Oliver, a veteran pitchman hired by Healy and Bigelow.  

Healy set up his first Kickapoo showroom in Providence, R.I., then moved to Manhattan before settling in New Haven in 1887. In a huge warehouse decorated with tepees, shields, spears, and other Native American curios, Healy hired Indians—none of them from the Kickapoo tribe—to entertain audiences with songs and dances while stirring huge pots of fake medicine. He advertised his Sagwa as a secret Indian recipe consisting of “Roots, Herbs, Barks, Gums and Leaves,” but it was actually a completely Caucasian concoction containing sugar, a mild laxative, and a dollop of alcohol.  

From their headquarters, Healy and Bigelow dispatched teams of real and ersatz Indians, plus vaudeville performers, and pitchmen posing as doctors to stage shows across America. The shows proved popular and the “doctors” sold oceans of Kickapoo Sagwa, as well as spinoff products—Kickapoo Buffalo Salve, Kickapoo Indian Cough Cure, and Kickapoo Indian Worm Killer. Healy and Bigelow became, as historian Stewart Holbrook wrote in his classic 1959 book, The Golden Age of Quackery, “the Barnum and Bailey of the medicine show business.”  

this article first appeared in American history magazine

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The two partners didn’t invent the traveling medicine show: For decades, patent medicine pitchmen roamed rural America, attracting crowds with musicians and other entertainers. Nor did Healy and Bigelow invent the notion that Native Americans were “children of nature” who possessed a mystical knowledge of healing plants. Throughout the 19th century, Americans bought books purporting to reveal the secrets of Indian medicine—The Indian Guide to Health and The Indian Doctor’s Dispensary, among others. What made Healy and Bigelow rich was their ingenious combination of the age-old appeal of miracle cures with the whiz-bang theatricality of Barnum’s circus and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show.    

Early in the 1880s, Kickapoo shows were modest affairs—a few Indians performing dubious native dances, a few White singers and acrobats and a fake doctor, who sold Sagwa and served as master of ceremonies. One of those “doctors” was Nevada Ned Oliver, who described the shows decades later in a magazine article.  

“The show customarily began with the introduction of each of the Indians by name, together with some personal history,” Oliver recalled. “Five of the six would grunt acknowlegements; the sixth would make an impassioned speech in Kickapoo, interpreted by me….It was a most edifying oration as I translated it. What the brave actually said, I never knew, but I had reason to fear that it was not the noble discourse of my translation, for even the poker faces of his fellow savages sometimes were convulsed.”  

By the 1890s, Healy and Bigelow were dispatching more than a dozen Kickapoo shows across America every summer. The larger troupes played for weeks in big cities, staging elaborate spectacles in tents that held 3,000 seats. Admission cost a dime and shows included a dozen performances, interrupted by three or four pitches for Kickapoo cure-alls. The shows were wildly eclectic. The Indians performed war dances and an “Indian Marriage Ceremony,” and sometimes staged brutal attacks on wagon trains. The White performers included singers, acrobats, contortionists, comedians, and fire-eaters. Occasionally, Texas Charlie Bigelow himself appeared, a cowboy hat perched theatrically atop his shoulder-length hair. Billed as the world champion rifle shooter, Texas Charlie demonstrated feats of marksmanship and told dubious tales of his adventures.  

“Later, there were aerial acts, a great deal of Irish and blackface comedy, and such exotic novelties as a midget Dutch comic, the ‘Skatorial Songsters,’ who performed while gliding around the stage on roller skates, and Jackley, ‘the only table performer on earth’ who turned somersaults on a pile of tables that extended 25 feet in the air,” Brooks McNamara wrote in Step Right Up, his 1975 history of medicine shows.  

“If the combination of burning wagon trains and blackface minstrel routines was somewhat eccentric, “ McNamara continued, “no one seems to have cared or even noticed—especially not Healy and Bigelow, who refused to trouble themselves about complex artistic questions so long as the Kickapoo shows continued to attract crowds and sell medicine.”  

The crowds kept coming, and kept buying Kickapoo potions, into the 20th century, enabling Healy and Bigelow to purchase expansive mansions near Kickapoo’s Connecticut headquarters.  

In 1906, Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act, regulating the contents and the advertising of medicines—which put a damper on the more…um…poetic claims of Kickapoo’s pitchmen.  

By then, Healy had sold his half of the operation to Bigelow and moved to Australia. In 1912, Bigelow sold the company for $250,000 to a corporation that continued selling Kickapoo Sagwa in drugstores but ended the traveling medicine shows.  

Texas Charlie moved to England, where he manufactured a potion much like Sagwa. He called it “Kimco,” a tip of his cowboy hat to the scheme that made him rich—the Kickapoo Indian Medicine Company.  

Decades later, the hillbilly characters in Al Capp’s “Li’l Abner” comic strip drank a potent moonshine called “Kickapoo Joy Juice.” In 1965, the Monarch Beverage Company introduced a citrus-flavored soft drink called “Kickapoo Joy Juice.” It’s still around, and quite popular in Southeast Asia. The company never claimed the soda cures ailments, but it does brag that it contains enough caffeine “to give you the kick you crave.”  

This story appeared in the 2024 Winter issue of American History magazine.

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In his new book Duel in the Deep (Naval Institute Press), author David Sears tells a story that he subtitles “The Hunters, the Hunted, and a High Seas Fight to the Finish.” The central incident is the tale of an outmoded four-stack destroyer, the USS Borie, and its intense fight with the German U-405 on October 31, 1943, a “swashbuckling, no-holds-barred brawl of cannons, machine guns, small arms, and even knives and spent shell casings.” Sears builds up to that that epic struggle by outlining the ebbs and flows of the Battle of the Atlantic, when Germany’s submersible craft attempted to starve Britain into submission and keep the Allies reeling by sinking the ships carrying necessary food and supplies across the Atlantic. In a high-stakes game of technological cat and mouse, both sides attempted to gain the upper hand in the contest with advanced technology and, on the Allied side, intensive codebreaking work.

Sears, who served in the U.S. Navy aboard a destroyer himself, uses diaries, letters, and contemporary newspaper interviews to bring his story to life. In this interview with World War II editor Tom Huntington, Sears talks about his book.

No, technically, it’s not over, though overt hostilities stopped 70 years ago.  

On June 25, 1950, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, or North Korea) invaded the Republic of Korea (ROK, or South Korea), sparking the first hot conflict of the Cold War—a proxy war between China and the Soviet Union in support of the north, and the United States and its United Nations allies in the south. Crossing the 38th parallel, the DPRK’s Korean People’s Army (KPA) pushed ROK and U.S. forces south, trapping them behind the 140-mile Pusan Perimeter. In response, the U.N. sent troops, 21 nations ultimately contributing to the effort.  

Assuming command of U.N. forces, General Douglas MacArthur turned the tide with Operation Chromite, the amphibious landing of troops at Inchon, southwest of Seoul. Reinforced U.N. forces also broke out of the Pusan Perimeter, pushing the KPA back across the 38th parallel. Coalition forces then invaded North Korea, aiming to reunify the Korean Peninsula, with leading elements reaching the Yalu River border with China.  

At that imminent threat, Chinese troops poured into North Korea and launched a series of offensives against ROK and U.N. forces. The fighting was fierce as combatant forces seesawed back and forth. Notable battles included those on the Chosin Reservoir and the Chongchon River. Eventually, the front lines stabilized along the 38th parallel and a long stalemate ensued, though where fighting broke out, such as the three Battles of the Hook, it proved especially bitter.  

this article first appeared in Military History magazine

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Peace talks began in July 1951, but disagreement over the repatriation of POWs led to protracted negotiations. The conflict dragged on, claiming the lives of as many as 5 million civilians and military personnel, until the signing of the Korean Armistice Agreement at Panmunjom on July 27, 1953. Tensions remain.  

In the mid to late 1960s a series of incidents threatened the armistice, including armed clashes along the DMZ separating north and south, the attempted assassination of South Korean President Park Chung Hee (amid the January 1968 Blue House Raid), the capture of the U.S. spy ship Pueblo that same month and North Korea’s 1969 shootdown of a U.S. Lockheed EC-121M Warning Star spy plane over the Sea of Japan, killing 31 crewmen.  

North Korea has become increasingly isolated on the world stage, particularly in the wake of the Cold War. In 1994 President Bill Clinton, on receiving intel that North Korea was developing nuclear weapons, weighed bombing its nuclear reactor at Nyongbyon. In 2002, in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, President George W. Bush included North Korea in his “axis of evil” list of states sponsoring terrorism. In June 2019 Donald Trump tried a different tack, becoming the first sitting U.S. president to set foot in North Korea when he stepped into the DMZ to shake hands with North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un. Despite such overtures, Kim has recently stepped up the rhetoric and since resumed the missile tests.    

Lessons

Beware short-term commitments: The United States occupied South Korea at war’s end in 1945 and withdrew three years later, leaving South Korea weak and ill prepared to resist a North Korean invasion, once again necessitating military intervention.

Ignore intelligence at your own peril: In October 1950 MacArthur dismissed information regarding Chinese troop movements and assured Washington that Beijing would not intervene.
Chinese troops crossed the Yalu on the 19th and attacked on the 25th.

Sometimes divorce is inevitable: Today South Korea is a thriving, modern republic, while North Korea remains a communist backwater. Reconciliation seems unlikely.

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

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Those of us who still build the occasional model airplane on a rainy weekend have noticed that the small hobby shops that filled their shelves with colorful boxes of airplanes, tanks and the occasional 1967 Chevy Camaro have been disappearing from the American landscape. The classic model companies of our youth—Comet, Hawk and Lindberg—have also gone away. Even 1970s and ’80s stalwarts like Revell and Monogram combined forces at one point but have since been bought by a German business group.

Over time tastes also changed and the older, less-detailed kits became a bit passé. Modelers wanted more accurate scale models that they could build into “museum quality” reproductions. We wanted to build the P-51D, not the B version, and have a better choice of bombs or rockets and at least three different choices of markings. The heavy steel molds that produced those earlier kits wound up on warehouse shelves, waiting to be melted down.

Or maybe not.

In 2009 Atlantis Hobbies, based on Long Island just outside of New York City, began looking for some of those older out-of-production molds. Their mission was to produce nostalgia by bringing back the classic kits that got us all started. They quickly amassed a veritable museum of plastic model history, nostalgic items that can fill important spots in any collection. They range from rare aircraft like the P6M Seamaster and Convair 990 airliner to the Creature from the Black Lagoon and the “Rat Fink” hot rods of the 1960s. For me, Atlantis brought back memories of building kits while trying desperately to keep glue from getting on the kitchen table. I’m looking forward to the next addition to their collection and a few more memories on some rainy weekend.

One of Atlantis’s classic kits is the 1/48th-scale Curtiss JN-4D Jenny, originally produced by Lindberg in 1955. Lindberg was an early plastic scale-model company in the United States, producing a wide range of imitation boats and automobiles in the 1940s. Their line of airplane kits ranged from early Cold War fighters to the classic biplanes of World War I. Light on detail, which is typical of the time, the Lindberg Jenny is simple to put together and reasonably accurate. Perhaps skills learned over the years will help you make a more detailed version this time around.

The model is molded in a deep green color. After cleaning up the parts in a solution of water and dish soap, adding a coat of a light-colored primer is good idea. Now it’s time to get down to business.

Like the real thing, the cockpit is a simple affair—two seats, control sticks, rudder bars and a pair of shapes that double as control panels. Paint the cockpit floor and the control panels a light tan, then lightly streak with a darker color to imitate wood grain. Paint the inside of the cockpit area a slightly darker tan. A pair of after-market resin seats with a period wicker look will take the place of the kit parts. Add a pair of simple seat belts to give cockpit some extra interest. The kit provides a couple of decals that represent the few cockpit instruments.  

It’s time to finish the fuselage. The two halves fit well, but here’s here where the kit shows a little of its age. Minor flash and sink marks from the original molds are unavoidable and need a little care. Filling and sanding these flaws will require a bit of putty and a fair amount of patience. They are most noticeable across the lower wing. Once everything is smooth, you’re ready to get painting. For this military version of the airplane, the fabric part of the fuselage (to the rear of the cockpit) should be a pale tan color. The forward section was made of metal and should be masked off and painted olive green. The edge of each cockpit was lined with leather, so paint that area a reddish-brown color and set aside the finished fuselage to dry.

Next, paint the wings, rudder and horizontal stabilizer the same light tan color as the fuselage. The struts should be a darker wood brown. Landing gear struts and the tail skid should also have that wooden look.

Cement the lower wings, horizontal stabilizer and rudder to the fuselage. Give the assembly a coat of clear gloss and you can begin to add the airplane’s markings. Decals are a simple affair, and the kit has a nice set replicating the original version that came with the old Lindberg kit. Markings for a post-war Barnstormer and a color guide that shows a more historically accurate U.S. Army Air Service color scheme are provided with the instructions.

It’s time to attach the upper wing, always a part of the build I found tricky when I was younger. Take your time as you place the struts into their positions. Carefully add the landing gear and tail skid and the Jenny starts to look like the classic trainer it is. Give the airplane another coat of clear varnish to seal the decals.

The JN-4D is a web of rigging, wires and cables that control ailerons and stabilizers and supporting struts that hold the whole thing together. It has a spindly, fragile look that belies the stable airplane that it was. Pay close attention to your research in order to accurately rig the airplane. Open up that big box of patience; you’ll need it and probably spend more time here than you did actually building the airplane. The results will be well worth the effort.

Start rigging from the center and work out toward the wingtips. A number of companies produce a thin thread that is easy to use with a bit of superglue. “Old School” modelers might opt for thinly stretched sprue, a time-consuming technique to master. Tackle the back half of the airplane with the cables connecting the horizontal stabilizer and rudder. Remember to step back from time to time in order to let the cement cure and not get too far ahead of yourself. Patience.

With the complex rigging complete, it’s time to add the engine, radiator and propeller. Paint the engine aluminum with a dark wash to pick out details. Paint the radiator a metallic color and the area around the outside copper. The propeller should be painted a brown “oak” and you can drybrush a darker color to simulate streaks of wood grain. The hub is steel. Many props were fitted with metal tips and a leading edge. A touch of brass colored paint does the trick.

The kit comes with two tiny clear windscreen parts. While you might want to use them, cutting two pieces from a sheet of clear plastic looks a bit more to scale.

With the windscreens attached and the Jenny fully rigged, it’s time to find it a prime spot among your collection of early biplanes.

Atlantis gave me a couple of nostalgic weekends, and I appreciate the reminiscing and the chance to add a classic airplane to my display shelf. I look forward to getting another taste of nostalgia soon.

Bullets zipped by him like a thunderstorm gone frenetic, whistling past his ears and slamming into the crumbling walls overhead. Minutes earlier the young Hispanic had bolted across the plaza to hole up in the tiny wood-and-adobe jacal—meager refuge from the coming hail of lead. Over the next 36 hours more than 4,000 rounds of ammunition would riddle the structure, tearing away parts of the house. Eight slugs were later pried from a broom handle.

Yet through it all the teen survived unscathed.

In late October 1884, in a dramatic display of skill, spunk and luck, unimposing 5-foot-7 19-year-old Elfego Baca instigated and prevailed in what was likely the most unequal civilian gunfight in the history of the American West. Certainly, it was the most unusual ever recorded.

Elfego’s Early Life

Many legends surround Elfego Baca, but a few facts are certain. On Feb. 27, 1865, he was born in Socorro, New Mexico Territory, to Francisco and Juana María Baca. The first legend has it his mother was playing las Iglesias, the Mexican version of softball, when her son emerged into the world right there on the field. Another legend claims Elfego was kidnapped in early childhood by Indians who immediately returned the toddler to his family after his screaming disturbed the serenity of the abductors’ camp.

A year after Baca’s birth his parents relocated the family to Topeka, Kan. There, surrounded by Anglos, Elfego grew up learning English and how to defend himself—using his wits before resorting to fists or gunplay, but never backing down. 

Then, in early 1872 an unrecorded illness struck the family, claiming the lives of Baca’s mother, two sisters and a brother. Deciding to return to New Mexico Territory, Elfego’s father, Francisco, brought along eldest son Abdenago but left Elfego in the care of an orphanage. Settling in the small town of Belen, in Valencia County some 40 miles north of Socorro, the senior Baca was soon appointed marshal.

In 1880 15-year-old Elfego left the orphanage and made his way to Socorro, some 75 miles south of Albuquerque. There he reunited with brother Abdenago and other members of the Baca clan, later reconnecting with father Francisco. But it was to be a brief reunion for Elfego and his father. That December in the line of duty Marshal Baca shot into the midst of a drunken brawl in Belen, killing a man. Tried for murder the following spring, he was convicted of involuntary manslaughter. Francisco was being held in the Valencia County Jail, in Los Lunas, awaiting transfer to the Kansas State Penitentiary, in Lansing, when he and three other prisoners were “liberated” by Elfego and 15-year-old accomplice identified only as Chavez.

Newspapers reported details of the jailbreak, but only a few people knew of Elfego’s involvement. After escorting his father to El Paso, Texas, where Francisco could slip across the international border should need arise, Elfego returned to New Mexico Territory. Young Baca worked on his uncle’s isolated Socorro cattle ranch and then for a time in the Albuquerque area, where he transported meat by wagon to Santa Fe Railroad workers. But he always returned home to Socorro.

“Not Afraid”

From the 1880s into the ’90s Socorro was besieged by more than 3,000 miners without benefit of much law enforcement. Sheriffs were stretched thin, thus the town ran wide open 24 hours a day. One day in January 1883 liquored-up Texas cowboys staggered out of a Socorro saloon and rode through the Hispanic neighborhoods in a cloud of dust and bullets. County Sheriff Pete Simpson was in pursuit when he happened across Baca. Mounted and armed, Elfego, weeks shy of his 18th birthday, joined the chase at Simpson’s request. In an interview years later Baca claimed to have shot one of the fleeing horsemen from the saddle at better than 300 yards. Newspapers at the time reported that Simpson had made the shot, but Elfego remained cocky about the encounter. When asked if he knew the name of the dead cowboy, he replied flippantly, “He wasn’t able to tell me by the time I caught up with him.”

Though still wild and reckless in many respects, Elfego took a desk job at age 19 as a mercantile clerk for onetime Socorro judge and mayor Juan José Baca (not a relative), where the teen’s ability to speak both Spanish and English served him well. Though hardly as exciting as being a posse member, it beat being punching cows. Still, Elfego harbored ambitions of being a lawman.

In October 1884 Pedro Sarracino, a county sheriff and saloon owner from San Francisco Plaza, aka Frisco (present-day Reserve, N.M.), rode to Socorro to visit storeowner Baca, his brother-in-law. While there Sarracino mentioned to Elfego that several cattle ranches had sprung up in the Frisco area, and that their hands, mostly rowdy Texans, were running roughshod over local Hispanics. The chaos had recently come to a head when cowboys tortured and maimed a local man in Sarracino’s cantina. Outraged and full of teenage braggadocio, an outraged Elfego declared, “I will show the Texans there is at least one Mexican in the county who is not afraid of an American cowboy.” According to a 1924 autobiographical pamphlet, Baca volunteered on the spot to be Sarracino’s deputy. “I told him that if he would take me back to Frisco with him, that I would make myself a self-made deputy.” Elfego later claimed to have made his own badge. With that, the pair headed to Frisco, 110 miles west as the crow flies in far west-central New Mexico Territory. 

The Legendary Fight

For two centuries before Anglo miners and trappers explored the region that today comprises western New Mexico and eastern Arizona the land supported several hundred Hispanic families. Farming, fishing and hunting kept the people well fed. Long before that, of course, the region had supported various sedentary Indian tribes.

In the 1880s cattlemen arrived from Texas and Oklahoma, daily swelling the population of sprawling San Francisco Plaza, a string of three settlements along the namesake river, which by 1884 had become a staging ground for cross-cultural sparring. Anglos sparred with Hispanics who sparred with Indians, and around it went. Adding fuel to the flames were heated arguments between the various cattle outfits—men who “rode for the brand” and took offense when someone from a competing ranch made an offhand comment. On the heels of the influx of rash young men more than a dozen saloons and bordellos sprang up in Middle and Lower Frisco. The valley was rife with tension.

Soon after Sarracino and young Baca arrived in town, Elfego stepped forward to make his first official arrest. On Oct. 29, 1884, inside the popular Milligan’s Whiskey Bar, drunken cowboy Charlie McCarty brandished his pistol at Hispanic patrons, ordering them to dance, then shot off Baca’s hat. Standing his ground, Baca flashed his badge at McCarty, who hailed from the John Bunyan Slaughter ranch, a notoriously rough Socorro County outfit. Somehow Elfego managed to take the man’s gun. 

Cowboys gathered outside were unhappy to hear that this swaggering, self-deputized Hispanic hero had snagged their partner. Liquored up and ready to fight, the Slaughter cowboys leveled their Winchesters at the saloon, cocked at the ready. As angry shouts, curses and threats from the street resounded off the interior walls, Baca barricaded the saloon doors and windows.

The leader of the mob, Slaughter ranch foreman Young Parham, demanded McCarty’s release even while testing the doors and windows with his shoulders. Parham vowed he and his men would take their friend by force if necessary. Elfego hollered back from inside, threatening to shoot if the cowboys weren’t “out of there by the count of three.” The story goes that the ranch hands had begun to crack jokes about Elfego’s race being unable to count, when they heard him call out in a single quick breath, “One-two-three!” Baca and his “deputies”—friends who’d joined him inside—then fired several warning shots through the door.

In the resulting fusillade Parham had his horse shot out from under him, and as it collapsed, the horse crushed and killed him. Another cowboy caught a bullet through his knee. Out of ammunition and focused on caring for Parham, his horse and the wounded man, the ranch hands retreated, swearing vengeance against Baca and his deputies, who remained holed up at Milligan’s. Early the next morning Slaughter’s hands offered a compromise, vowing to leave be those inside the saloon if Baca would allow McCarty to be tried at a neighboring house. Elfego warily agreed and strolled next door with his ward.

At the speedy trial the justice of the peace fined the sobered-up McCarty $5 and ordered his release. By then, however, rumors had spread among the hands on surrounding ranches that Hispanics in Frisco had gone on a murderous rampage, killing and dismembering Anglo citizens. Seeking to mollify the gathering mob, the justice moved to detain Baca for questioning in Parham’s death.

Unwilling to be arrested, mobbed and undoubtedly lynched, Baca slipped out the “courtroom’s” side door and dashed across the plaza to a crude little jacal whose walls of mesquite sticks and dried mud would almost certainly not stop bullets. Evicting owner Geronimo Armijo and family, Elfego settled in for a siege. While much of the populace fled into the overlooking hills to watch the unfolding drama, some 80 vengeance-seeking ranch hands, using the adobe buttresses of a local church as cover, emptied their weapons into the jacal, reloaded and kept firing until its walls were full of holes. 

Incredibly, none of the bullets struck Baca. All attempts to dislodge the teen were unsuccessful. He refused to come out. In frustration Burt Hearne, of the Spur outfit, rode up to the jacal, leapt from his horse and tried to force the door. Immediately, shots from inside struck Hearne in the stomach. He died within moments. The cowboy soon had company. In the long gunplay four of the vigilantes were killed, eight wounded. Late that evening someone lit a stick of dynamite and tossed it at the jacal. The resulting explosion collapsed the roof and one wall. To spectators and Baca’s attackers alike it seemed no one could have survived the blast. But none of the cowboys was willing to investigate in the darkness. They wisely decided to wait and sift the ruins soberly in the light of day. 

As the morning sun peaked over the Mogollon Rim, the hands who’d spent the night sleeping on the cold ground around Baca’s hideout awoke to the aroma of steeping coffee and fresh tortillas—from inside the jacal. After a hearty breakfast the very much alive Baca resumed his watch. One hungry and enraged cowboy charged forward using a cast-iron shield pirated from a cookstove, only to flee and drop the armor after a slug creased his hairline.

At 6 that evening, a day and a half after the first shots were fired, the battle ended when a bona fide Socorro County deputy sheriff, Frank Rose, persuaded Baca to surrender. Before doing so, Elfego insisted on two conditions: to stand trial in Socorro, and to retain his two pistols (one was McCarty’s). The next morning he rode in the back of a buckboard on the return trip to his hometown. Trailing cowboys were warned not to approach.

Back in Frisco curious onlookers pored over the jacal. Inside, they were astonished to find an intact plaster statue of Nuestra Señora Doña Ana. That Baca had survived was also considered a miracle—until his secret was revealed. The jacal’s floor was recessed 18 inches belowground, enough to have screened Elfego from the incoming barrage. 

Yet Baca did seem to lead a charmed life, for an ambush planned for him on the road to Socorro also failed. Two separate groups of would-be assassins each mistakenly thought the other had carried out the attack. Meanwhile, the lawman arrived safely in custody in Socorro.

Charged with murder in the shooting of Hearne, Baca remained in jail until his trial in Albuquerque in May 1885. Among the items entered into evidence was the door of the jacal, bearing nearly 400 bullet holes. That and Sarracino’s testimony convinced the jury Elfego had indeed killed in self-defense. Subsequently tried and acquitted of murder in the death of Parham, Baca was immediately thrust into the status of folk hero to the local Hispanics.

A Colorful Career

Exploiting his notoriety from the Frisco shootout, Baca officially resumed his career as a deputy sheriff in Socorro. He was later elected county sheriff, with the power to secure indictments for the arrest of local lawbreakers. Instead of having his deputies risk life and limb in pursuit of the wanted men, he sent each of the accused a letter: 

“I have a warrant here for your arrest. Please come in by [fill in date] and give yourself up. If you don’t, I’ll know you intend to resist arrest, and I will feel justified in shooting you on sight when I come after you.”

Most fugitives turned themselves in.

Shortly after his acquittal in 1885 Baca married 16-year-old Francisquita Pohmer. Despite alleged dalliances by Elfego, the couple remained together 60 years and raised two sons and four daughters. 

In 1888 Baca was appointed a U.S. marshal and served two years. He then studied law and in 1894 was admitted to the bar. After working for respected jurist Alfred Alexander Freeman’s law firm in Socorro in 1895, Elfego operated his own practice on San Antonio Street in El Paso from 1902 to ’04.

Around 1910 he moved to Albuquerque, where he worked as both a lawyer and private detective. “Dressed in a flowing cape and trailed by a bodyguard, he stalked the downtown streets handing out business cards,” historian Marc Simmons writes. On the front of the card was printed Elfego Baca, Attorney-at-Law, Fees Moderate, on the reverse Private Detective, Divorce Investigations Our Specialty, Discreet Shadowing Done. As if being a private detective wasn’t exciting enough, Baca also worked a stint as a bouncer in a gambling house south of the border in Juárez, Chihuahua.

That period of his life spawned another legend. One day Baca received a telegram from a client in El Paso. “Need you at once,” it read. “Have just been charged with murder.” Attorney Baca supposedly responded with a tongue-in-cheek telegram reading, “Leaving at once with three eyewitnesses.”

When New Mexico achieved statehood in 1912, Baca ran for Congress as a Republican. Though unsuccessful, he remained a valued political figure for his ability to turn out the Hispanic vote. He held several other public offices in succession, including Socorro County clerk, Socorro County school superintendent, mayor of Socorro, and district attorney for Socorro and Sierra counties. “Most reports say he was the best peace officer Socorro ever had,” Leon Metz writes of Baca in his 1996 book The Shooters.

Still more adventures, with revolutionary overtones, awaited Elfego.

Another Escape

In February 1913, after a period of unremitting turmoil amid the Mexican Revolution, President Victoriano Huerta wrested control of the republic, though he continued to face challenges from guerrilla leaders in the northern provinces. Chief among them was Francisco “Pancho” Villa, who controlled much of the state of Chihuahua, bordering New Mexico.

In early January 1914, hotly pursued by Villa’s army, Huerta-allied General José Inés Salazar crossed into Presidio, Texas. Almost at once he was arrested and charged with having violated American neutrality laws. Placed in military custody at Fort Bliss, outside El Paso, the general was later moved to Fort Wingate, near Gallup, New Mexico Territory.

President Huerta in particular wanted Salazar out of jail, and agents of the Mexican government sought the legal services of Baca, whose reputation had spread across the border. Baca traveled to Washington but failed to gain the general’s release. He then engaged in a series of legal shenanigans that garnered his client an additional perjury charge. On November 16 Salazar was transferred to the Bernalillo County Jail, in Baca’s hometown of Albuquerque, to face the charge. Four days later two masked men entered the jail, overpowered and bound the sheriff and sped off in a car with Salazar. He was last spotted in El Paso, headed south.

Word about town had it Huerta’s accomplices had arrived in Albuquerque beforehand and quietly contacted certain influential residents, providing them with substantial funds to arrange Salazar’s freedom. Some suspected Baca had been the ringleader. Yet Elfego had an ironclad alibi for his whereabouts on the night of the escape; he’d been drinking at the crowded Graham Bar in downtown Albuquerque and had even overtly asked a friend for the exact time so he could set his watch.

Regardless, in April 1915 a federal grand jury handed down indictments charging Baca and three other officials with conspiracy in Salazar’s escape. At their December trial all four were acquitted. Elfego’s reputation only soared among Hispanic admirers.

On Feb. 26, 1940, the day before Baca’s 75th birthday, he boasted to The Albuquerque Tribune that of the 30 people he had defended on charges of murder, only one was sent to the penitentiary. In later years Baca worked closely with longtime New Mexico Senator Bronson M. Cutting as a political investigator and wrote a weekly newspaper column in Spanish praising the senator’s work on behalf of local Hispanics. He even switched parties with Cutting in support of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1944, despite poor health, 79-year-old Baca considered running for governor, but that year he failed even to secure the Democratic Party’s nomination for district attorney. 

“I Made ’em Believe it”

For more than six decades Baca remained a lively part of New Mexico’s cultural landscape, relating spirited memories of comely señoritas and political intrigues past. His miraculous deliverance from the 1884 Frisco shootout had earned this man of many facets a reputation as one tough hombre. That reputation followed him throughout his years as a lawman, criminal lawyer, district attorney, private detective, chief bouncer of a Prohibition gambling house and American agent for President Huerta.

On July 13, 1936, Janet Smith of the Federal Writers’ Project, part of the Roosevelt-era Works Progress Administration, conducted an interview with Baca, the notes from which are preserved in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress. “I never wanted to kill anybody,” Baca told Smith, “but if a man had it in his mind to kill me, I made it my business to get him first.” Full of self-confidence throughout his life, Baca added, “In those days I was a self-made deputy. I had a badge I made for myself, and if they didn’t believe I was a deputy, they’d better believe it, because I made ’em believe it.” 

As befitting a legend, New Mexico lawman Elfego Baca, who’d been born near the close of the Civil War in 1865, died at age 80 on Aug. 27, 1945, near the close of World War II. He is buried at Sunset Memorial Park in Albuquerque. 

this article first appeared in wild west magazine

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For further reading on this topic author Melody Groves recommends Memoirs: Episodes in New Mexico History, 1892–1969, by William A. Keleher; Incredible Elfego Baca: Good Man, Bad Man of the Old West, by Howard Bryan; and The Lost Frontier, by Rod Miller.

Land mines were used by all sides during the Vietnam War and caused significant casualties. In 1965 alone, more than one-third of U.S. Marine Corps casualties were caused by mines and explosive booby traps. A modern land mine is a concealed explosive device emplaced under, on, or even above the ground to kill or wound enemy troops, or destroy or disable vehicles.

The land mines of the Vietnam era were triggered by direct contact or command-detonated by wire. The most common contact triggers were pressure or pull (tripwire). Anti-personnel mines used a combination of blast and fragmentation effects. Most anti-vehicular mines used blast effect. Land mines are most effectively used in fixed defenses or for “area denial.” Rather than serving as a barrier to enemy movement, the purpose of a defensive minefield is to disrupt and slow an enemy’s advance and channelize him into pre-planned fields of fire and kill-zones.  

Why Land Mines?

Land mines were used by both sides in contested and remote areas. The U.S. deployed millions of air-dropped small anti-personnel “button mines” as part of the McNamara Line strategy to deter NVA infiltration into South Vietnam from North Vietnam and Laos. The explosive charge in the button mines decomposed quickly. Only slightly more effective were the BLU-43/B and BLU-44/B “Dragontooth” mines. The VC made extensive use of anti-personnel mines and booby traps in likely American/ARVN assembly areas, high ground, hedgerows, tree lines, shady areas, trail junctions, and fence lines and gates.

The VC normally did not have enough material to mine an entire fence line. U.S. troops quickly learned to bypass the gates and batter down the fence at some distance from the gate. Yet all too often a later patrol would assume that an already battered-down section of the fence was clear.

The VC, however, were highly disciplined about keeping their mines under surveillance. As soon as one patrol passed through a cleared area, the VC would move in and mine the gap. The VC were methodical about marking their mines so that their troops or local villagers would not walk into them. The markers were cleverly concealed, but known to locals. American and South Vietnamese patrols generally tried to secure cooperation of one or more locals before initiating an area sweep. That was not easy. Villagers might be VC sympathizers or intimidated by other sympathizers who would hold them accountable later.  

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Types of Land Mines

Command-detonated anti-personnel directional mines were widely used. The U.S. M-18 “Claymore” mine blasted 700 steel balls in a 60-degree arc, 6-feet high, out to a range of about 150 feet. The Claymore was triggered by an electrical blasting cap via a wire with a hand generator.

The VC used any Claymore they captured. The VC and NVA were also supplied with the Chinese-made DH-10 Directional Mine, known as the “ChiCom Claymore.” Crudely made but larger and more powerful than the U.S. M-18, it was devastatingly effective when emplaced in a tree, pointed down a jungle trail. The VC also used the DH-10 to mine anticipated helicopter landing zones.  

The standard U.S. anti-personnel mines were the M-14 and M-16. Called the “Toe Popper,” the M-14 was a pressure-triggered blast mine with a relatively small charge. The M-16 was a fragmentation mine designed after the World War II German S-mine, called a “Bouncing Betty.” When triggered, either by stepping on one of the exposed pressure prongs or pulling a tripwire, a short delay fuze detonated a secondary charge which blew the main body of the mine 5 to 6 feet into the air. A second, slightly longer-delayed fuze then detonated the main charge, spraying fragmentation out to 25 meters.  

An Enduring Menace

Anti-vehicular mines were used to destroy or disable trucks, armored personnel carriers, and sometimes tanks. They were either pressure- or command-detonated by wire. Road-clearing became an almost daily ritual, especially around major bases. Sweep teams of combat engineers with mine detectors worked the roads each morning, while flank security teams screened both sides of the roads looking for evidence of digging, detonating wires, and even ambushes. It was slow and tedious.  

Although North Vietnam manufactured mines and some were supplied by China, the majority of mines used by communist forces in Vietnam were improvised. Enemy forces in Vietnam were exceptionally innovative at turning anything into a mine—including captured or unexploded ordnance such as hand grenades and mortar and artillery shells; ammunition cans; oil drums; beer and soda cans; and even bicycle frames. Triggering devices included flashlight batteries, wristwatches, field telephone hand cranks, and mousetraps.

This story appeared in the 2024 Winter issue of Vietnam magazine.

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The Boeing Stratocruiser was the largest and most luxurious airliner of its time. Passengers loved it, but it still failed as a commercial transport. Its mainline service career lasted only a decade, thanks to the one-two punch of eye-watering operating costs and the arrival of the more efficient Boeing 707. It didn’t help that the Stratocruisers’ high-tech propellers often tore themselves loose from the engines, leaving the worldwide fleet with a stupefying accident record. Of the 56 Stratocruisers Boeing built, Pan American Airways alone lost seven—almost one a year between 1952 and 1959. United, Northwest Orient and BOAC each crashed one. Surviving Strats ended up being sold for scrapyard prices. But those junked airplanes led to the development of a remarkable new category of aircraft known as volumetric transports—or, more familiarly, Guppies.

Boeing called the Stratocruiser the Model 377, and its lineage led from…well, nits are painstakingly picked over this issue. Many say that the roots of its family tree were fertilized by the B-29 Superfortress, or at least the later B-50 version, which used the R-4360 engines that would power the Stratocruiser. Others point to Boeing’s double-deck C-97 Stratofreighter and its aerial-refueling tanker version, the KC-97. (To Boeing, these two B-50 derivatives were called Model 367s.) Conventional 1940s aeronautical engineering theory held that there was a limit to an airplane’s fuselage diameter relative to wingspan and powerplants, so most aircraft were designed with a small fuselage and large wings. The porcine Douglas C-124 Globemaster II, the first big postwar transport, pushed fuselage diameter to the max that convention would allow. The C-97, however, pushed things even further.

Some Boeing nerds nominate a single modified Model 367 as the Stratocruiser’s daddy. It was a C-97 that had been fitted out as a passenger-carrying VIP transport, with 80 seats and multiple windows on two levels, called the YC-97B and later designated the C-97B. Boeing built only one.

Its mechanical antecedents notwithstanding, the Stratocruiser came into being thanks largely to one man: Pan Am founder and CEO Juan Terry Trippe. Some assumed from Trippe’s first name that he was Latino. Others accused him of adopting the name to make himself attractive to the South American market where Pan Am originally flew. The truth is that Trippe was a whitebread Yalie who had been named after a distant Venezuelan relative, Juanita Terry. After graduating from Yale, Trippe had worked as a Wall Street financier until he decided to enter the aviation business in 1922, first with a company called Long Island Airways and later with a Florida-based company that evolved into Pan American World Airways. In the years leading up to World War II, Trippe made Pan American Airways synonymous with luxury, grace and prestige by operating a fleet of four-engine Boeing and Martin flying boats over Atlantic and Pacific routes, particularly from San Francisco to Hawaii. These airplanes were the most opulent of their time, and they flew for a coterie of wealthy travelers who had survived the Great Depression. After the war, Trippe wanted to lure this clique back to the Pan Am, but the long runways constructed during the war could now support landplanes like the Lockheed Constellation and the Douglas DC-4 and -6, effectively putting the fancy flying boats out of business.

Pan Am had been operating a small fleet of Boeing 307 Stratoliners—a pressurized derivative of the B-17 Flying Fortress—but the “Stratoclipper,” as Pan Am dubbed it, was not a success. It didn’t have the range to either cross the Atlantic or fly nonstop across the U.S. The Constellation blew it away, and the Constellation was being operated by Howard Hughes’ TWA. This infuriated Trippe, who hated Hughes, and it had a lot to do with Trippe’s motivation as the Model 377’s launch customer.

Trippe wanted to offer luxury travel with a new semi-double deck airliner that Boeing president William Allen proposed in 1945 and called the Model 377 Stratocruiser. It had a distinctive stepless, glazed-beachball nose and a 14-seat “downstairs” cocktail lounge, accessed via a tight spiral staircase. (Not until the 747 would there be another such extravagance, though the lounge was upstairs rather than down and was quickly turned into revenue space with rows of first-class seats.) Boeing suggested a high-density, 95-seat version of the 377 to be called the Stratocoach, but Trippe recoiled. He wanted a luxury liner, not a cattle car—an airplane to compete with sumptuous ocean liners. 

Trippe ordered 20 Stratocruisers (and later purchased the prototype) with the proviso that Boeing supply none to any airline before Pan Am had at least six. Pan Am paid $1,304,390 each, not including spares, and the airline took delivery of that batch in Oregon instead of Boeing’s home state of Washington, to avoid paying the latter state’s sales tax. At the time, Constellations sold for $1,200,000 and DC-6s went for under a million. After Pan Am, Northwest Orient became the second-biggest Stratocruiser operator by purchasing ten. American Overseas Airlines ordered eight and United bought seven. Swedish Intercontinental Airlines (SILA), soon to become the core of the Scandinavian SAS consortium, bought four, and Britain’s BOAC ordered six to use until the de Havilland Comet jet became operational.

For its Stratocruisers, Pan Am hired the modernist industrial designer Walter Dorwin Teague to lay out the interiors. Teague used muted colors and simple patterns—no busy floral prints, just gentle lines to match the horizon, so passengers wouldn’t be jarred by looking out a window and then back into the cabin. Everything was done to make the cabin seem wider and taller and to avoid designs that might encourage motion sickness.

At Pan Am’s request, Boeing installed air conditioning that could run independently of other aircraft systems, so that passengers who wished to stay asleep in their berths after the Stratocruiser landed could do so in comfort. Some sleeping berths were wide enough for two, encouraging membership in the four-mile-high club, and an aft compartment was even dubbed the Honeymoon Suite, since Hawaii was a popular destination for newlyweds. Unfortunately, it could turn into a rough ride, since the Stratocruiser was prone to porpoising in turbulent conditions.

The Stratocruiser was originally intended to have four 2,200-hp Wright R-3350 engines—the B-29’s powerplant—but it was Trippe who suggested using the R-4360s that had been developed for the B-50. They were the most advanced and powerful piston radials to go into production, but Trippe would come to regret his choice. It quickly became apparent that the bleeding-edge technology of the R-4360 and its huge four-blade propeller was not synonymous with reliability or safety. The Pratt & Whitney Corncobs (so named because their 28 cylinder heads resembled rows of kernels) were remarkable engines, putting out 3,500 water-injected horsepower on takeoff, but they pushed the materials and technology of the time beyond reasonable limits. They were a-bridge-too-far engines. Hawaii passengers on 377s would later routinely boast that they’d made it to Honolulu on three engines, occasionally two.

Boeing claimed that the 80-seat 377 would provide luxury, speed and range for just a penny per passenger mile, though this was almost certainly before the true specific fuel consumption of the R-4360 became apparent. Although R-4360s powered all of the super-large postwar airlifters—C-97, C-124 and XC-99—the engine had poor fuel specifics. It burned .43 gallons of gasoline per hour per horsepower while the ubiquitous Pratt & Whitney R-2800 used .38. DC-6s powered by R-2800s soldiered on well after the Stratocruiser was put out to pasture. 

The Strat was the first airliner with turbochargers, though they weren’t used to provide takeoff power. The advanced General Electric turbos joined the chorus during climb and cruise, to turbo-normalize the engines’ rated power. In fact, they doubled the R-4360’s output at altitude, which allowed it to cruise at over 300 mph at 25,000 feet. (Top speed was 340 mph.) The Stratocruiser was also the first American commercial aircraft to employ water injection, which boosted takeoff power from 3,000 to 3,500 horsepower. And it was the first airliner to use the more efficient underwing pressure fueling instead of above-wing gravity-fed fueling, but it still took about two and a half hours to top up the airplane’s standard 7,790-gallon nylon wing bladders. (Pan Am added capacity for an additional 360 gallons to 10 of its Strats, so they could make the New York-to-London trip nonstop. They called them Super Stratocruisers.) Northwest Orient claims to have used its Stratocruisers to become the first airline to serve liquor in U.S. airspace, in August 1959.

At one point Trippe asked Boeing to engineer a six-engine version of the Model 377. He wanted two Wright R-1820s outboard of the number-one and -four R-4360s. It’s not clear why Pan Am dreamed up this impractical mix. Perhaps because it knew how prone to failure the Pratts were? Or was Trippe simply fond of the classy six-engine airliner concept?  He was, after all, the only airline executive to express interest in a commercial version of the six-engine Convair B-36 bomber. Convair had proposed an airliner version of its XC-99, essentially a double-deck B-36, which Trippe saw as a 400-passenger leviathan that could support transcontinental ticket prices equivalent to bus fare. But feeding six ravenous R-4360s exceeded what any airline could afford. 

One of the secrets of the 377’s speed and range was the famous high-aspect-ratio “Boeing wing,” with its proprietary 117 airfoil. Originally designed for the B-29, it was particularly light yet efficient. The Model 377’s wing was 16 percent stronger, 650 pounds lighter and 26 percent more efficient than the original B-29 wing.  

Stratocruisers began coming apart within nine months of entering service. In January 1950 a Pan Am Strat dropped an engine into the Pacific en route to Tokyo. A day later, a Northwest Orient 377 had the number-one engine separate from the wing near Chicago. Pan Am suffered its first 377 passenger fatalities in April 1952, when a prop blade separated from the number-two engine over Brazil and the airplane shook itself to death, the pieces falling into the Amazon jungle. The wreckage was finally spotted three days later, but there were no survivors among the 50 passengers and crew. Nor was the number-two engine and prop ever found.

Investigators were initially baffled by the crashes, but it soon became apparent that the props were the airplane’s Achilles’ heel. Some Stratocruisers had Curtiss electric propellers, usually looked upon warily because of electric-gremlin-induced overspeeds and sudden in-flight prop reversals, but the Curtisses proved docile on the Stratocruiser. However, the typically reliable hydromatic Hamilton-Standard airscrews were not. That’s because the propeller company had lightened the big steel blades for the Stratocruiser by hollowing them and filling the voids with rubbery neoprene. The filler, glued in place, would break loose and quickly stuff itself into the outer extremity of the hollow space, flung outward by the prop’s rotation. The sudden imbalance would cause the prop tip and even the entire blade to break loose. The hollow blades were also prone to cracking or simply breaking.

The most notorious Stratocruiser accident occurred in October 1956, when a Pan Am Strat flying between Honolulu and San Francisco, on the last leg of a round-the-world trip, had a runaway number-one prop that the crew was unable to stop or feather. They oil-starved the engine, which seized, but the prop continued to windmill. The drag was massive. And then the number-four engine decided to ignore its throttle.

Barely aloft on two good engines in the middle of the night, the crew headed for the Coast Guard cutter Pontchartrain, which was on ocean-station duty just 40 miles away. The airplane orbited the cutter until daylight, and then the crew skillfully ditched alongside the ship. All 24 passengers and crew were rescued. Not until pilot Chesley Sullenberger and first officer Jeff Skiles ditched their Airbus in the Hudson River in January 2009 was a water landing so celebrated, or so fully documented.

On November 8, 1957, another Pan Am Stratocruiser plunged into the Pacific somewhere between Hawaii and San Francisco. Thirty-eight passengers and six crew were lost, and the cause of the accident remains a mystery. Both the FBI and Pan Am were convinced that foul play was involved. Conspiracy theories revolved around the fact that there were a number of important French businessmen aboard, including a vice-president of automaker Renault, as well as a U.S. Air Force major supposedly involved in a clandestine operation of some sort and a former Navy frogman and demolition expert. Nor did it help that the flight’s purser was known to be an unhappy employee who owned a handful of blasting-cap detonators. 

In late 1958, 12 years after the 377 had first flown, the Civil Aeronautics Board finally issued an airworthiness directive requiring the removal of its hollow-core props. By that time, disintegrating props had resulted in the loss of a quarter of Pan Am’s Stratocruiser fleet, but federal bureaucracy ensured that the airplane’s propeller problems were dealt with somewhere between slowly and not at all.

The 56 Stratocruisers that Boeing built, including the prototype, were just a small portion of the 888 Model 367s and 377s Boeing manufactured, the vast majority of them C-97s and KC-97s. But the Stratocruiser was the airplane that established Boeing as an airliner builder. (The Model 314 Clipper flying boat was a small-run specialty airplane—just 12 built—not a mainline airliner.) But by the late 1950s, their luxury cachet meant little when the real jet set had turned to the 707. Low-cost airlines still flying props were looking for airplanes that were cheap to fly, not Stratocruisers. Transocean, an off-brand carrier that had amassed a fleet of 14 Stratocruisers, sold them all for $7,500 apiece—well less than the cost of a new Aston Martin DB-4 sports car.

The Stratocruiser’s rebirth as a family of super-sized Guppies was initially the work of two men: Jack Conroy and Leo Mansdorf. Conroy was a former B-17 pilot who had become a POW after being shot down over Germany. After the war he was an airline captain, California Air Guard weekend warrior and coast-to-coast record setter in an F-86A Sabre. Mansdorf was an obscure aircraft broker. Yet Mansdorf had bought up almost the entire surviving Stratocruiser fleet at literally a dime on the dollar. He had no idea what to do with them, but he couldn’t resist the bargain.

Mansdorf initially had the idea of grossly inflating Stratocruiser fuselages so they could transport rocket components for NASA. The space agency had been shipping rockets by barge from Texas to Florida’s Cape Canaveral, and the voyage took 25 days, with sea-air corrosion always a problem. Transport by air would cut shipping time to 18 hours, including loading and unloading, and every hour counted during the space race. For his part, Conroy had wanted the airplanes to start a California-to-Hawaii VIP airline, but he bought into Mansdorf’s concept after a well-lubricated lunch with Mansdorf and a bunch of airplane buddies who tossed around preposterous suggestions of what they could build to snare a NASA contract. 

NASA didn’t have the budget to develop the needed heavy lifter itself, and it would have been wildly expensive for Boeing, Douglas or Lockheed to design and engineer such a limited-use craft. Conroy, however, decided to develop a volumetric transport from surplus aircraft—Mansdorf’s Stratocruisers—using private funds from speculators. Conroy himself poured almost a million dollars into the project, under the company name of Aero Spacelines, Inc.

It was an enormous leap of faith. No established aeronautical engineer would buy into the concept of trying to fly an airplane with so extreme a fuselage diameter. But Conroy took the design beyond those assumed limitations. It was hard to imagine anybody developing a successful cargo carrier from the husks of so unsuccessful an airliner. And husks they were, for intact Stratocruisers weren’t used to build Guppies; instead, mix-and-match major components—cockpit sections, empennages, fuselages, wings—were patched together. Many of them were from C-97s, not Strats.

German rocketeer Wernher von Braun, who had become the director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, in 1960, had been a pilot since the mid-1930s and had flown everything from Messerschmitt Me-109s to helicopters. He involved himself substantially in the Guppy program. The initial idea had been to carry rocket loads externally, atop Douglas C-133s, but von Braun quickly nixed that scheme. He was also a big help when the Federal Aviation Administration became antsy about granting Conroy’s monsters the supplemental type certificate required for a modified aircraft. Von Braun leaned on the FAA to get with the program.

The first of the bloated Stratocruisers was called the Pregnant Guppy and in 1963 it transported components of the Titan rocket used for the Gemini program and went on to fly parts of Apollo’s Saturn. The Super Guppy, next in line, replaced the PG’s R-4350 engines with either Pratt & Whitney or Allison turboprops (five were built). The Mini Guppy reverted to R-4360s and was built to carry conventional oversize commercial cargo. It was the only version to be fully FAA-certificated.

And here the Stratocruiser line dies out, with just one Super Guppy still being operated by NASA. Not a single Stratocruiser survives, not even as a static museum exhibit. The jets arrived just in time. Had anybody tried to push the Stratocruiser’s 1930s technology just one level further, it would have been a disaster. 

this article first appeared in AVIATION HISTORY magazine

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The year 1873 saw the introduction of two game-changing firearms—the Winchester Model 1873 lever-action rifle and the Colt M1873 Single Action Army (aka “Peacemaker”) revolver. What set them apart from the array of available arms was that they were among the first chambered for center-fire metallic cartridges to be used in tandem.

Each firearm initially used its own proprietary round. The Model 1873 was chambered for the .44-40 Winchester cartridge, which went on to become one of the most popular rounds in firearms history. Purpose-built for the U.S. Cavalry, the Peacemaker was initially designed with a 7½-inch barrel, for accuracy at longer ranges, and chambered for use with the hard-hitting .45 Colt round. Not to rest on its own laurels, Colt then offered civilian versions of its revolver chambered for Winchester’s increasingly popular .44-40 cartridge, as well as the latter’s .38-40 and .32-20 rounds, thus sparing anyone who owned both firearms from having to carry two different calibers of ammunition. As attested by the images on the following pages, everyone from lawmen and outlaws to everyday cowhands and shepherds to headline entertainers were soon snapping up both manufacturers’ Model 1873s.

Another aspect that set apart the 1873s was shrewd marketing, including testimonials from famed Westerners of the era. Winchester and Colt each advertised its guns through such motivated Western dealers as E.C. Meacham, of St. Louis, and Carlos Gove, of Denver. Winchester’s 1875 catalog featured praise from Wild West showman Buffalo Bill Cody, who wrote the company on behalf of prospective buyers, “For hunting, I pronounce your improved Winchester the boss.” Writer Ned Buntline, whose florid dime novels birthed many of the legends associated with Buffalo Bill, tirelessly hyped both the Winchester ’73 and the Colt Single Action Army. For much of his career Texas Ranger Frank Hamer, the man who in 1934 brought outlaws Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow to ground, carried a Colt Peacemaker he dubbed “Old Lucky.” Bill Tilghman, the famed U.S. marshal out of Oklahoma, was known to carry both a Winchester ’73 and a Peacemaker, as did notorious outlaws Billy the Kid and Pearl Hart, though clearly not to either manufacturer’s detriment. 

Winchester produced a whopping 720,000 Model 1873 rifles through 1923, while Colt rolled out more than 357,000 first-generation Single Action Army revolvers through 1940. By then both companies had claimed the title “The Gun That Won the West” for their respective Models 1873. The Peacemaker is still in production, and modern-day replicas of both firearms remain popular among present-day cowboy action shooters. They’ve certainly earned their reputation. 

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There was a time when Harris & Ewing was the nation’s largest photo agency. Based on F Street in downtown Washington, D.C. (the agency’s main studio building still stands and is on the National Register of Historic Places), the agency expanded into multiple studios, had up to 120 employees and used a legion of freelance photographers. Many of those photographers turned their lenses on the airplanes and pilots who passed through the nation’s capital, providing a unique snapshot of the golden age of aviation.

George W. Harris was born in Wales, emigrated to the United States in 1881 and had worked in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Arkansas before finding work as a photographer in San Francisco. There he met Martha Ewing, who had her own studio. The two became partners. Supposedly President Theodore Roosevelt himself talked Harris into relocating to Washington, which he did in 1905. He became the White House photographer and oversaw the steadily increasing business of Harris & Ewing. Harris bought Ewing out in 1915 and he sold the business 30 years later. Before he died in 1964, Harris donated some 70,000 of the agency’s photographs to the Library of Congress.

Many of those images depict the aviation comings and goings in Washington. They include some famous pilots—Amelia Earhart and Charles Lindbergh—as well as politicians, socialites and more obscure figures whose names are lost to history, often photographed standing somewhat stiffly in front of an airplane. The menagerie of aircraft captured by the agency’s photographers run the gamut from navy flying boats to the tiny Verville-Sperry M-1 Messenger that Lawrence Sperry used to land at the U.S. Capitol. Presidents, cabinet officials, military figures make their appearances, as do inventors eager to promote their latest contributions to the science of aviation. 

This was a time when flight had captured the public imagination—and Harris & Ewing photographers were on hand to capture aviation history with their cameras. 

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It was Shakespeare who wrote, “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.” The Bard was obviously unfamiliar with our brand of Western history, which inverted that truism. Consider the epitaph of famed Texas Ranger Captain Bill McDonald: No man in the wrong can stand up against a fellow that’s in the right and keeps on a-comin’. In a similar vein popular culture tends to paint every Western lawman as a Marshal Matt Dillon, that radio and television paragon of virtue who kept the peace in Dodge City, Kan.

Historian Jay Robert Nash, among others, has debunked the stereotypical image of the Western outlaw-gunman as the sociopathic product of a broken home who despises all authority figures. But few writers have debunked the idealistic stereotype of the Western lawman. Indeed, certain hagiographic historians universally laud them for their courage, dedication to duty and strong family ties. Even Nash refers to such officers “the few good men” who cleaned up the West.

A closer examination reveals a more nuanced view, for many, if not most, officers in the Old West worked both sides of the law, either out of necessity to supplement their meager pay or simply because they were bent that way. It is virtually impossible to name one notable lawman who did not have a few stains on his record. Such men didn’t go through the background checks that are standard today, and their records did not follow them around. Thus, a man could commit bank robbery or murder in New Mexico Territory, yet get hired on as marshal of a small Texas town. Big cities like Dodge did conduct careful searches for their marshals. Regardless, the kind of tough hombre needed to clean up a wild and woolly cow town didn’t figure to be a straight arrow. Just the opposite. The more dangerous reputation a man bore, the more likely he was to be hired for the job. Wild Bill Hickok didn’t earn his reputation with a gun by shooting tin cans.

Nor was it especially difficult to get away with working both sides of the street. The outlaw became a lawman simply by putting on a badge, and the lawman could operate a quiet side business in cattle rustling, extortion or gun-for-hire escapades without anyone being the wiser. The only recognizable difference between them was the badge, and any old body could slap on a tin star and cop an attitude. That became a serious enough concern in Fort Worth that in 1889 the City Council passed an ordinance making it a crime to impersonate an officer. The ordinance is known to have been enforced in only two instances—that fall when a couple of young bravos were fined $10 and $5 respectively in city court for “personating [sic] policemen.”

Lawmen and outlaws had a natural simpatico, derived oftentimes from having been brothers-in-arms in the recent Civil War, or perhaps from having driven longhorns up the Chisholm Trail together. Others were blood relations. Jesse James had no trouble cobbling a gang together from his brother and fellow Confederate bushwhackers after the Civil War. Of course, Jesse never felt moved to put on a badge. He kept to his side of the street. But for so many others the line between good guy and bad guy remained hazy. One wag said the only way to distinguish one from the other after a gunfight was to turn over the corpse and see if it was wearing a badge.

Those who knew such men personally saw past their dime-novel personas. Interviewed in 1931, Kansan Annie Anderson, a former dance hall girl who knew Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson and pals, insisted, “They were a bunch of cowards.” Though their actions certainly don’t bear out such an assertion, neither were they regarded as upstanding citizens by much of the population.

Men of Action

The familiarity between lawmen and outlaws was also due in part to the fact both groups comprised men of action. Thus, they had a rough, mutual respect for each other—that is, when not shooting at one another. Hired gun and sometime lawman Jim McIntire, for example, was always welcome in the home of Fort Worth Marshal Ed Terrell. Texas Rangers showed similar courtesy to Fort Worth marshal turned gun for hire Jim Courtright in 1884 when arresting him on a murder warrant out of New Mexico Territory. Tarrant County Sheriff Walter Maddox and Fort Worth Marshal Bill Rea treated the jailed fugitive more like an honored guest than a wanted man, thus it’s no surprise Courtright managed to escape with little trouble. When Fort Worth private detective Heck Thomas brought the body of murderer Jim Lee through Gainesville, Texas, in September 1885, he told a reception party admiringly, “He died game, fighting as long as there was breath in his body.” High praise indeed from the man tasked with bringing in the notorious Lee brothers, dead or alive.

Earlier that year, when U.S. Marshal Harrington Lee “Hal” Gosling was escorting two men to prison, a friend remarked the marshal treated them “more like friends than a brace of the most villainous desperadoes ever consigned to the keeping of an officer.” Gosling’s failure to take routine precautions enabled his prisoners to arm themselves and escape, killing the marshal and two others in the process. A lesson learned the hard way.

Even the worst of outlaws could count friends in law enforcement. An 1892 petition to pardon cold-blooded killer John Wesley Hardin, then serving time at the Texas State Penitentiary in Huntsville, bore the signatures of Tarrant County Sheriff John C. Richardson and former Tarrant County Sheriffs Walter Maddox and Ben Shipp. Ironically, the man Hardin had been convicted of murdering was a deputy sheriff.

Conversely, a hard-boiled outlaw might tip his hat to an honest lawman like Sheriff Tom Bell, of Hill County, Texas. In 1898 convicted murderer John B. Shaw wrote to Bell from his Cleburne death cell:

“Tom, [I knew] if I was caught, you would do it or cause it. It makes me love a man for him to rustle hard. I believe if a man is an officer, he ought to be an officer; if he is a thief, he ought to be a thief. I think more of [Johnson County Sheriff] Bill Stewart for rustling hard for me.” 

Shaw signed the note “respectfully” and even invited Bell to come see him before his date with the gallows. 

It didn’t hurt a lawman’s reputation to have a few formidable gunfighting friends he could call on if needed. While sheriff of Ford County, Kan., Bat Masterson benefited from his close relationship to the Earp brothers, Doc Holliday and Luke Short, not to mention brother Ed, a Dodge City policeman. The street ran both ways. When Short ran afoul of Dodge City’s powers that be in 1883, he called on Wyatt, Bat and other pals to back his play. They went down in history as the ironically named “Dodge City Peace Commission.”

The fact is some of the most notorious killers in Old West history wore a badge at one time or another. Edward Capehart O’Kelley is remembered today as the man who in Creede, Colo., on June 8, 1892, shotgunned Bob Ford to avenge the latter’s assassination of Jesse James a decade earlier. A certifiable sociopath, O’Kelley—nicknamed “Red” for his hair color and not his bloodthirsty nature—also happened to be a town marshal in nearby Bachelor, Colo.

Another Jekyll-and-Hyde type was Ben Thompson, who drank, gambled and shot his way across Texas before being elected city marshal of Austin in 1880. Wearing a badge did nothing to moderate the marshal’s violent ways, and he spent more time at the gambling tables than patrolling the streets. In 1882 Thompson killed San Antonio saloonman Jack Harris. Though the marshal was acquitted of all charges, Austin’s city fathers forced him to resign. Thompson’s closest pal, rustler-gunslinger King Fisher, also worked the other side of the law as a Uvalde County deputy sheriff. On March 11, 1884, the two were gunned down in Harris’ San Antonio saloon in a revenge killing. The Austin newspaper Texas Siftings recalled Thompson as “the best city marshal in Texas.” Not all his constituents would have agreed.

Henry Newton Brown was another well-known gunman with several notches on his pistol grips when serving as a lawman in Tascosa, Texas, and later as town marshal of Caldwell, Kan. While wearing the badge in Caldwell, he organized a failed bank robbery at Medicine Lodge, Kan., that got him lynched.

The good people of El Paso and the surrounding county had the bad judgment to make sociopathic killer Mannie Clements Jr. a constable and deputy sheriff. On being booted after his acquittal for armed robbery, he was assassinated in a city saloon in 1908.

David Kemp killed his first man in 1879 when he was but 15. Sentenced to hang, he was granted a pardon by the governor of Texas. In 1890 he relocated to Eddy County, New Mexico Territory, where he served as sheriff before killing his successor, Sheriff Les Dow, on Feb. 18, 1897. Found not guilty, Kemp settled into domestic life as a (thrice) married saloonkeeper.

The appropriately named Baz Outlaw was a member of the vaunted Texas Rangers with a predilection for gunplay when he drank too much, which was often. Though the fed-up Rangers ultimately discharged him, Outlaw parlayed his credentials into an appointment as a deputy U.S. marshal. On April 5, 1894, while on a bender in El Paso, he shot and killed a Texas Ranger before being gunned down by Constable John Selman.

Selman himself was no monument to justice. Before being elected constable of El Paso, he’d rustled cattle and terrorized citizens in Shackelford County as a deputy under crooked Sheriff John M. Larn. In addition to killing Outlaw, the corrupt constable back-shot Hardin, killing him, and engaged in repeated drunken quarrels. One such quarrel, with Deputy U.S. Marshal George Scarborough on April 2, 1896, got Selman killed. Despite his checkered career, his headstone bears the simple inscription John Henry Selman… El Paso Constable.

Another El Paso lawman of questionable virtue was Dallas Stoudenmire. Appointed city marshal in 1881, he spent a year doing a commendable job, which included gun battles with a host of ne’er-do-wells. Unfortunately, Stoudenmire too exhibited a weakness for alcohol, which made him belligerent and quarrelsome and led city fathers to fire him. Months later, on Sept. 18, 1882, he died as so many lawman-outlaws did, in a saloon gunfight.

Best known as a gun for hire, “Killin’ Jim” Miller served at various times as a deputy sheriff, town marshal and Texas Ranger. On Sept. 13, 1896, then Pecos Marshal Miller publicly gunned down former county sheriff and longtime nemesis Bud Frazer in a Toyah, Texas, saloon. It says something about Frazer’s reputation that a jury acquitted Miller. Later advertising his services as a paid assassin, Miller offered to kill anyone for $150.

By his early 30s “Mysterious Dave” Mather had spent much of his young life behind bars in Texas, Kansas and New Mexico Territory. Between jail stints the adept gunhand had no trouble finding work as a lawman. The difference in opinion regarding Mather’s reputation in Dodge City and Dallas, respectively, is mysterious indeed. In 1885 the Dodge City Times hailed him as a “good officer,” while the Dallas Daily Herald deemed him “a notorious horse thief, stage robber and murderer.”

Yet another lawman with a checkered reputation and colorful moniker was Fort Worth’s “Longhair Jim” Courtright, who served three terms as city marshal in the mid- to late 1870s. Depending on one’s perspective, he either tamed the town or tolerated a disgraceful degree of lawlessness. On losing his fourth run for office, he went wholly over to the dark side as a hired gun and extortionist. Courtright, too, died in a shootout, on Feb. 8, 1887—only it was in front of a saloon (Fort Worth’s White Elephant), as the fallen marshal had been gentlemanly enough to call out rival Luke Short for a proper showdown.

A Higher Standard

Not all bad behavior by badge wearers ended in death. On April 3, 1889, Fort Worth officers Jim Rushing and John W. Coker were tying one on in the red-light district known as Hell’s Half Acre when fellow officer Pat Stevens stepped in to arrest the raucous duo. When they resisted, all three men drew their weapons. Stevens fired a shot before terrified onlookers disarmed him, and cooler heads prevailed. It was only dumb luck no one was hit, let alone killed. Initially charged with “assault to murder,” Rushing and Coker were let off with a reprimand. After all, they were officers, and no one had been injured.

Rules governing officers’ behavior came late to Western law enforcement. In 1882 Dodge City Mayor Alonzo B. Webster drew up one of the first such set of rules for a department West of the Mississippi. Borrowed from similar codes back East, it called for officers to be “quiet, civil and orderly” and to maintain “decorum, command of temper, patience and discretion.” A year later the Galveston City Council laid down rules that included this challenge: “Policemen shall not become offended at any harsh or abusive language that may be applied to them, and they will not make arrests in their own quarrels or those of their own families.”

But it took Sam Farmer, who served two stints as Fort Worth marshal (1879–83 and 1887–91), to lay down the law in Texas with regard to using deadly force. Prior to his tenure it was common practice for officers to use whatever force they deemed necessary to do the job. Farmer set a higher standard for his force with 11 rules, including these notable few:

No. 3—Use no more force than absolutely necessary to make an arrest.

No. 4—Never make an arrest merely because someone is saucy toward you.

No. 10—Wear six-shooters out of sight and only use them in self-defense; anything more than that is illegal.

Of course, setting down rules on paper meant nothing if not enforced. And in Fort Worth at least, they must not have been, as the general run of lawmen didn’t noticeably improve after the turn of the century. Things still operated pretty much the same as they had in frontier days. Consider, for example, Captain Tom McClure. For much of his seven years on the force, the captain turned a blind eye to bootlegging and illegal gambling, presumably for a price. Not until 1922 did the police department get wind of things and force McClure into retirement. The city declined to prosecute, likely weighing the public embarrassment certain revelations would have caused. 

Passage of both the 1914 Harrison Narcotics Act and the 1919 National Prohibition Act actually spawned new temptations for officers. Recall that many virtually lived in saloons when not on duty—and sometimes while on duty—and more than a few died in gun battles in those same haunts. Others had moonlighted as bouncers or bartenders. It couldn’t have been easy for them to turn their backs on that part of their lives. Likewise, drug dealing had been another way for men forced to make do on the piecework “fees-and-fines” system to supplement their meager income. By 1922 the rumor mill in Fort Worth was rife with reports of “persons in police uniform” peddling illegal whiskey and narcotics. Investigating federal agents found the rumors to be true. The kingpin behind most of the illicit trade turned out to be not some drug lord or bootlegger but a special county policeman.

Sheriff departments also had their share of bad apples. The 1903 year-end report of the Fort Worth Police Department recorded the arrests of four of Tarrant County Sheriff John T. Honea’s deputies on various offenses. None of the cases made it into the newspaper. 

The Power of the Dark Side

Trying to delve into the psyches of men who lived a century or more ago is a challenge. What forces drove lawmen to the dark side? Money issues are only part of the equation. Inner demons? Drink? A thirst for power? Entitlement? Some combination of the above? Forensic psychiatrist R. Gregory Lande argues that the dehumanizing effect of the Civil War, particularly the horrors men had witnessed, was the biggest single reason for the postwar crime wave. Such a rationale also explains a related rise in alcoholism and drug use over the same period.

That said, no one answer fits all. The reasons certain high-profile lawmen went bad are less speculative. For instance, Deputy U.S. Marshals Bob and Grat Dalton decided there was more money to be made robbing trains than preserving law and order, while Mather associate Milt Yarberry, Albuquerque’s first town marshal, was simply a vicious bully who preferred a life of crime to living peacefully. On Feb. 9, 1883, after one of his victims showed up dead with a bullet in the back, Yarberry was marched to the gallows.

Men of Yarberry’s ilk treated the badge as a license to do whatever they pleased, and reform was slow to come. In 1908 Fort Worth mounted officer Hugh Glosson placed his horse in the path of two cars preparing to drag race down Hemphill Street. When their drivers sped past the officer on either side, Glosson yanked and leveled his sidearm at them before ordering the drivers out of their cars. As they were unarmed and had their lady friends with them, the drivers objected to Glosson’s threatening manner and filed a complaint with the police department. At the subsequent hearing Glosson said the cars had scared his horse, and he would only have shot out a tire had the drivers not pulled over. No surprise, the department sided with Glosson, who went on to a long and feisty career in uniform in Fort Worth.

Despite what one reads in today’s headlines, law enforcement has come a long way from the days when a “cowboy culture” prevailed in many departments out West. Professional standards are higher, rules are in place, and the public is less tolerant of official misbehavior. Only when we view Western law enforcement through the nostalgic prism of “the good ol’ days” do we risk buying into the dime-novel version of history. 

this article first appeared in wild west magazine

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For further reading on the topic author Richard Selcer recommends Texas Gunslingers, by Bill O’Neal, and Encyclopedia of Western Lawmen & Outlaws, by Jay Robert Nash.

Monica Mohindra On July 27, 1953, the Korean War ended with an armistice but no official treaty, technically meaning a state of war still exists between the combatant nations. Among the multinational participants in that significant flare-up in the Cold War were nearly 7 million U.S. military service personnel, of whom more than 1 million are still living. The 70th anniversary of the armistice spurred the Library of Congress’ Veterans History Project to redouble its efforts to record for posterity the memories of those participants while it still can. Military History recently interviewed Veterans History Project director Monica Mohindra about its collection, the pressure of time and ongoing initiatives to honor veterans of that “Forgotten War” and all other American conflicts.

What is the central mission of the Veterans History Project?

Our mission is to collect, preserve and make accessible the first-person remembrances of U.S. veterans who served from World War I through the more recent conflicts. We want all stories, not just those from the foxhole or the battlefronts, but from all veterans who served the United States in uniform. The idea, developed by Congress in October 2000, was to ensure we would all be able to hear directly from veterans about their lived experience, their service, their sacrifice and what they felt on a human scale about their participation in service and/or conflict.  

Is your recent emphasis on the ‘forgotten’ Korean War mainly due to the anniversary?

Correct. But there is so much to share from the history of the Korean War that is relevant. We’re also marking the 75th anniversary of the desegregation of the U.S. military, and researchers have been using our collections to understand, for instance, nurses’ perspectives on what it was like to serve in a desegregated military. Our collection speaks to what it was like prior to and after desegregation.  

To what extent do memories tied to both anniversaries overlap?

One of the real strengths of the Veterans History Project, and of oral history projects in general, is that one can pull generalized opinions from a multiplicity of voices. For example, there’s a story about a veteran named James Allen who “escaped” racially charged Florida to join the military. Serving in Korea in various administrative tasks, he experienced a taste of what life could be like under desegregation. When he returned to the United States, he moved back to Florida, the very place he’d escaped, to help veterans and advance such notions.  

this article first appeared in Military History magazine

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You’re the spouse of a Navy veteran. Does that shape your perspective on history overall and the project you’ve taken up?

It absolutely adds another layer to the Veterans History Project and what it means on a human scale. This is personal. My husband’s experience, just like each veteran’s, is unique. He’s not ready to share his story—maybe not with me ever. His father, who also served, is not ready to share his story—maybe not with me, maybe not ever. Both of his grandfathers served. My grandfather served, too. So, I feel a personal imperative to help those veterans who are ready to share their stories.

It’s that seriousness of purpose, to create a private resource for future use, the Veterans History Project offers individuals around the country. We already have more than 115,000 such individual perspectives, and that gives us the opportunity to share the wealth of these collections.  

How does the project handle contributions?

Individuals may want to start by conversing with the veterans in their lives or by finding the collection of a veteran.  

To what use does the project put such memories?

People use the Veterans History Project—often online and sometimes in person here at the Folklife Center Reading Room—for a variety of reasons. More than 70 percent of our materials (letters, photographs, audio and video interviews, etc.) are digitized, and more than 3 million annual visitors come to the website. They’re using our materials for everything from school projects to enlivening curricula. Recently researchers have conducted postdoctoral research on desegregation during the Korean War. The project is also useful for beginning deeper conversations among friends and family members.

In this time of AI [artificial intelligence], the collection is a primary resource from those who had the lived experience. What did they hear? What did they see? How did they keep in touch with loved ones? These are the kind of questions we pose.  

What was unique about the Korean War experience?

Perhaps the extraordinary scope of injuries service members suffered because of the cold. Consider the Borinqueneers [65th U.S. Infantry Regiment], out of Puerto Rico, many of whom had never seen snow. On crossing the seas, they arrived in these extreme conditions, and it’s all so foreign. They received the Congressional Gold Medal in 2014, and we are fortunate to have memories from 20 Borinqueneers in our collection.  

Recently, the last American fighter ace of the Korean War died. Are you concerned about the time constraints you face?

Yes. The weight of that actuarial reality was quite heavy on World War I veterans. We had the pleasure to work with Frank Buckles [see “Frank Buckles, 110, Last of the Doughboys,” by David Lauterborn, on HistoryNet.com] several times, and he became sort of an emblem of his cohort, if you will. That was a heavy weight on him, one that he did not shy from.

The burden now is on people like me, you, your readers, to make sure we do sit down with the veterans in our lives. We want people 15 and up to think about doing that.  

What about the memories of U.N. personnel from other nations who served in Korea?

The legislation for the Veterans History Project is very clear. It limits our mission to those who served the U.S. military in uniform. That does include commissioned officers of the U.S. Public Health Service, an often forgotten uniformed service. We cannot accept the collections of Allies who served alongside U.S. troops. However, we do collaborate with other organizations within our sphere. For instance, in cooperation with the Korean Library Association we held an adjunct activity at the Library of Congress, a two-day symposium.  

Do you accept contributions from Gold Star families?

We do. The legislation for the Veterans History Project was amended in 2016 with a new piece of legislation called the Gold Star Families Voices Act. Before that we accepted collections of certain deceased members, including photographs or a journal, diary or unpublished memoir that could capture the first-person perspective.

However, the 2016 legislation put a fine point on a definition for Gold Star families to contribute. Under the Gold Star Family Voices Act, those participating as either interviewers or interviewees must be 18 or older, as one is speaking about a situation that involves trauma. Our definition calls for collections of 10 or more photographs or 20 or more pages of letters or a journal or unpublished memoir. The other way to start a collection is to submit 30 or more minutes of audio or video interviews. This enables us to gain a full perspective of a veterans’ experience, whether they are living or deceased.  

Where can an interested veteran or family member get more information?

There is all sorts of information on our website [loc.gov/vets]. They should also feel free to come to our information center at the Library of Congress [101 Independence Ave. SW, Washington, D.C.], with extended hours on Thursdays until 8 p.m.

This interview appeared in the Winter 2024 issue of Military History magazine.

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To this day the U.S. Naval Airship USS ZMC-2 remains unique in the history of lighter-than-air craft. Most airships fall under one of three basic construction formats: rigid, non-rigid or semi-rigid. However, the ZMC-2 employed a completely different construction method with a rigid, metal-covered envelope. 

The most common airship type is the non-rigid, epitomized by today’s Goodyear blimps. These airships have a control car supported beneath a fabric-covered gas envelope, the shape of which is maintained by air-filled “ballonets.” The much larger rigid airships had a metal or wooden framework covered with fabric that enclosed a number of separate, individual internal gas bags. German Zeppelins like the doomed Hindenburg were rigid airships. A semi-rigid airship had a gas envelope supported by a rigid wooden or metallic keel. The best-known examples were the Norge and Italia, constructed in Italy during the 1920s and employed for Arctic exploration.  

However, the U.S. Navy’s USS ZMC-2, which was designed and built by the Aircraft Development Corporation of Detroit at the Naval Air Station at Grosse Ile, Michigan, embodied a unique approach to airship design that has never been replicated since. The ZMC-2 had a lightweight aluminum interior framework, but instead of fabric its outer covering consisted of thin sheets of Alclad, a lightweight metal of duralumin alloy coated with a layer of pure aluminum to prevent corrosion. The Alclad plates were riveted together by means of a special process developed expressly to render the envelope airtight and prevent gas leakage. In effect, the outer covering of the ZMC-2’s envelope was an Alclad-covered monocoque pressure vessel similar to the fuselages later used on pressurized high-altitude airliners. Unlike rigid airships, the ZMC-2 had no individual internal gas bags—the helium lifting gas was contained entirely within the metal envelope itself. Inside, a pair of flexible air-filled ballonets regulated internal pressure at various altitudes and states of atmospheric pressure, similar to the arrangement employed in non-rigid airships. The ballonets occupied 25% of the internal volume.

The ZMC-2’s envelope was solid, so it did not collapse when deflated. For that reason, the envelope was normally full of air and could not be filled directly with helium because that lifting gas mixes with, rather than displaces, air. As a result, the creators of the ZMC-2 came up with a technique where they first replaced the air inside the envelope with carbon dioxide, a gas that is heavier than, and does not mix with, helium. They then added helium through the top of the envelope while siphoning off the heavier CO2 from the bottom.   

The ZMC-2’s designer was Ralph Hazlett Upson, who had previously worked for the Goodyear Corporation developing airships and had won the Gordon Bennett Cup for an international balloon race in 1913. In 1922 Upson established the Aircraft Development Corporation (renamed the Detroit Aircraft Corporation in 1929) with financial backing from a number of Detroit industrialists, including Henry and Edsel Ford, William Stout (creator of the Ford Tri-Motor) and Charles Kettering of General Motors. By 1929 the company had expanded to include controlling interests in other aviation assets such as the Ryan Aircraft, Lockheed and Blackburn Aircraft companies and the Grosse Ile Airport near Detroit.

First flown on August 19, 1929, the ZMC-2 was relatively small because Upson intended it only as an experimental test bed for its revolutionary construction technique. The airship’s naval designation of “ZMC” stood for “Lighter-Than-Air Ship, Metal Clad.” 

With a length of 149 feet and a diameter of 53 feet, the ZMC-2 had an internal capacity of 202,200 cubic feet (apparently the “2” in its name referred to this figure) and a useful lift of 750 pounds. (Compare this to the Hindenburg’s internal capacity of more than seven million cubic feet and its lifting capacity of 511,500 pounds.) The ZMC-2  was powered by a pair of 220-hp Wright J-5 Whirlwind radial engines and had a top speed of 62 mph, a cruising speed of 50 mph and a range of 680 miles. There were three crewmembers. (The Hindenburg had 40.)An unusual and distinctive feature of the ZMC-2’s design was that it had eight stabilizing fins arranged radially around the tail, four of which incorporated control surfaces.  

Many in the Navy expressed skepticism at the idea of “Tin Blimps.” Even the ZMC-2’s first commanding officer, Lt. (j.g.) Hammond J. Dugan, expressed reluctance to fly in the metal-clad airship. Nonetheless, ZMC-2 confounded the skeptics by completing 752 flights for a total of 2,265 flying hours before being grounded in 1939 and scrapped in 1941. Ironically, the ZMC-2 outlived Dugan, who died in the crash of the USS Akron in 1933.

The ZMC-2’s successful flight record notwithstanding, the Navy remained uninterested in the concept, believing it too small and short-ranged to be useful for the anti-submarine work for which it was intended. In any case the Navy preferred to spend its lighter-than-air budget on the huge, expensive and ultimately disastrous rigid airships USS Akron and USS Macon and later on smaller but more useful and cost-effective non-rigid blimps. The historical record includes no specific explanation of the Navy’s reasoning. Perhaps it considered the metal-clad airship too heavy or too expensive. Maybe it had something to do with the influence of the Goodyear Corporation over the Navy’s lighter-than-air aviation program. It was Goodyear that ended up manufacturing all of the Navy’s other airships, including the rigid behemoths as well as its blimps. Whatever the reasons, it seems a shame since, by airship standards, the ZMC-2 appears to have been one of the more successful examples of the type. But it never received much publicity, and it remains far more obscure than the less successful but more conspicuous Akron and Macon. 

Its parent company fared no better. Depression hit the Detroit Aircraft Corporation hard, and it went into receivership in 1931, divesting its heavier-than-air assets to Lockheed and what remained of its lighter-than-air assets under the Metalclad Airship Corporation. Once the Navy expressed no further interest in the concept and no further orders were forthcoming, the Metalclad Airship Corporation soon ceased to exist. 

this article first appeared in AVIATION HISTORY magazine

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In the hills 6 miles north of Three Forks, in south-central Montana, the Emerson Mining District had all the potential of being highly productive, but it never quite got going. Ironically, as the adjacent valley contains the headwaters of the Missouri River, the main obstacle it faced was a dearth of water. In the mid-1860s, when placer mining for gold was in style, local rancher and sometime prospector Al Nichols found promising quartz samples in a dry stream bed in these hills. He hauled a sackful of the rocks 4 miles to the Jefferson River just so he could crush them and sift the scree in his pan. The net result was about $4 worth of ore. Given the effort it took, he abandoned the idea as worthless.

Sometime in the early 1870s partners John Emerson, James Aplin, Frank Akin and Samuel Seaman were prospecting the same hills and sank a shaft to a vein of copper quartz they named the Green Eagle mine. The find attracted a cluster of hopeful prospectors, who registered several mines. But as the owners awaited financing from “Eastern moneymen” that never materialized, their claims amounted to little more than holes in the ground. Meanwhile, Green Eagle’s owners came to the realization that to develop a copper mine miles from any railroad or town would require a vast amount of capital, which none of them possessed, and at the time copper was not a valuable commodity. So, they too abandoned their claim. Asher Paul and George Lea had been working a nearby silver mine, though it promised only a small income, given the low grade of ore they found. The devaluation of silver in 1883 killed that operation. 

In 1885 Jacob Hopping took a renewed interest in the Green Eagle and deepened the shaft to 65 feet before the ore petered out. Partnering with Green Eagle co-founder Seaman, he then sank a nearby shaft the pair named the Burlington. Reportedly offered $100,000 for their mines, the partners declined. Given the nationwide financial panic and bank failures in the headlines, they replied tongue in cheek that they preferred to invest their money in the ground. Shortly thereafter they hit a massive fault and lost the ore seam again.

Also in the district, Josh Parker and Al Shedd operated a mine called the Crystal Canon, while Perry Parks and a partner recorded only as Campbell mined low-grade iron ore for a time. They shipped it as flux to a smelter recently built in nearby Toston to handle gold from the Radersburg Mining District. Other less-productive mines frequently changed ownership, either by sale or through relocation (i.e., jumping).

All this mining activity at the tail end of the 19th century gave rise to a settlement residents named Copper City, though the hamlet never amounted to more than a few homes, and there’s no record of a post office. Call it the ghost town that never was.

Finally, in 1905 investors made inquiries toward establishing a paying mine in the district. A year later Herbert G. Dunbar, a prosperous sheep rancher from Logan, and other wealthy partners from the Twin Forks/Bozeman region organized the Three Forks Mining Co. and consolidated a half dozen claims they renamed the Copper Star. “[The company] own six claims in one of the greatest undeveloped copper districts in the world,” the Three Forks Herald reported optimistically, “this being the opinion of several copper experts.” Sure enough, the ledge of ore running through the Copper Star was soon providing 2 to 60 ounces of copper per ton, with trace silver and gold. But then came the financial Panic of 1907, when investment money dried up, and work on the company shafts ground to a halt.

By 1916 Dunbar had a new partner, Jacob Hopping’s son, Carl, and the two of them reopened the Copper Star adits. That April 24 The Butte Miner interviewed Dunbar. “Well, we’ve got it at last,” the mine owner enthused. “We have cut into a vein about 4 feet in width and very high in its percentage of mineral. The assays run between 30 and 40 percent [copper]. We got this below the 350-foot level. Our hoist is good for a depth of 500 feet.” By June the partners had deepened the shaft from 300 to 400 feet, retimbered the original section of the shaft and replaced the old gallows frame with a modern hoist capable of extending to 1,000 feet.

At the outset of World War I the demand for copper had surged to astronomical heights, thus the partners seemed set. But the war and their prospects wouldn’t last. By 1920 the price of copper had plummeted. The downturn made only a small dent in copper production among the Butte mines, but it was enough to close the Copper Star. Around this time an English company took an interest in the district’s iron ore mine, purchased it and then sold it to the massive Anaconda Copper Mining Co., sparking a rumor Anaconda would reopen the district and build a large smelter in Three Forks. Nothing came of it.

All that remains of Copper City today is the concrete pad of the Three Forks Mining Co. building, rusty mining equipment and the dilapidated hulks of what a century ago must have been three substantial homes. Completed in 2019, the 22-mile Copper City singletrack mountain bike trail zigzags across hills potentially still laden with riches. 

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As Germany crumbled in fire and rubble in the final months of World War II, Adolf Hitler issued orders for four famous Germans to be held hostage—not living Germans, but dead ones. All of them had died before the war had even started; two, in fact, had died in the 1700s. 

The unlikely quartet of corpses consisted of two Prussian warrior kings—Frederick William I and Frederick the Great—plus the late German Weimar Republic President Paul von Hindenburg and his unassuming wife Gertrud. The bodies would be hauled cross country, transported by sea, dragged up mountains, carted through forests and eventually entrenched in darkness, where bewildered American soldiers accidentally stumbled upon them in April 1945.

Yet the story of the kidnapped corpses did not end there. The U.S. Army would soon discover that the dead could be just as troublesome as the living. 

Kidnapping Hindenburg

In view of Germany’s catastrophic military situation, most logical people would not have seen much point in the Third Reich’s focus on famous corpses. Yet Nazi officials placed uncanny emphasis on the dead. Deaths, funerals and memorial events were used for propaganda from the earliest days of the Nazi regime. The Nazis showed a total lack of respect for dead individuals as well as a perverse interest in human remains. Bodies of famous historical figures were frequently dug up, analyzed, poked at, made into centerpieces for speeches and heaped with swastika wreaths. One of the chief tomb violators was Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, whose minions became expert grave robbers in pursuit of famous bones and artifacts. Hitler and Goebbels became masters of funeral ceremonies, creating spectacles for dead compatriots that were less memorial services than political rallies.

Two famous Germans treated to funerary theatrics were the Hindenburgs. Mustachioed Prussian Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg went down in history as the lackluster second President of the Weimar Republic who appointed Hitler as Germany’s Chancellor and opened the door to one of the darkest chapters in world history. Little could he have known that the “Bohemian corporal” he infamously shook hands with would someday uproot his remains—and those of his late wife, Gertrud, who lay buried at the family estate.

When Hindenburg died, Hitler decided that the old man needed to go out in style—preferably with a boom of propaganda to impress the living. Therefore the deceased Field Marshal—along with Frau Hindenburg, unceremoniously dug up to come along for the ride—was hauled to the Tannenberg Memorial, a gargantuan stone temple in the plains of East Prussia partially designed to commemorate a 1914 battle and mostly designed to make Germans forget that the Teutonic knights had lost the first Battle of Tannenberg centuries earlier in 1410.

The memorial sported no less than eight towers and enough space in the middle for a large crowd and probably several orchestras. In 1934, during a long and elaborate ceremony in which the memorial brimmed with wreaths and glittering uniforms enough to make one’s eyes water, the Hindenburg couple were buried in their very own tower. It was complete with a statue of Hindenburg himself, who had expressly wished to be buried with his wife at home. For the pair to end up entombed in the wilderness of East Prussia was similar to being buried at a frontier outpost like Fort Apache.

The Hindenburgs weren’t the only dignitaries whose last wishes would be ignored. Destined to accompany them in a posthumous adventure were two famous kings of Prussia’s Hohenzollern dynasty—Frederick William I and his son Frederick II, known as Frederick the Great. Both kings had attained fame for extraordinary military achievements. Neither king had intended to keep traveling after death. Frederick the Great left instructions in 1769: “Bury me in Sans Souci [Potsdam]…in a tomb which I have had prepared for myself…” Yet the two royals were not destined to rest in peace.

A Salt Mine…and Red Crayon

As the Allies closed in across Germany in 1945, all four bodies ended up taking a wild ride to avoid being captured by combatants in a conflict they had taken no part in during their lifetimes. On Hitler’s orders, both Hindenburgs were pried out of the tower at the Tannenberg Memorial and shoved onto a ship; it was assumed that the Russians wouldn’t react well upon finding the memorial and realizing the fiercely anti-Russian Field Marshal was stuffed into its walls.

The cruiser Emden hauled the Hindenburg coffins to Berlin, where they were joined by the coffins of the royal Fredericks Senior and Junior. From there, the coffins were packed off cross-country to the rugged mountainous region of Thuringia, where they were intended to remain hidden underground until the time was appropriate for an underground Nazi resistance movement to bring them to the surface.

On April 27, 1945, men of the U.S. Army Ordnance Corps shuffled wearily through the formidable Thuringian Forest and set to work clearing out a wickedly deep salt mine near the town of Bernterode. Navigating a network of tunnels stretching on for about 14 miles, they came across not only hidden ammunition reserves but a passageway sealed with rubble. Digging through six feet of debris, they found a secret chamber containing tapestries and valuable paintings. They also discovered four giant coffins staring back at them.

The soldiers were baffled. Thankfully the Germans had seen fit to label the coffins by writing the names of the dead on them in red crayon.

A Delicate Problem

Moving the coffins proved a hellish task. European dignitaries were often buried in sarcophagi forged of metal alloys. This process would seal the body in an airtight vacuum and prevent rapid decomposition, instead prompting a process of natural mummification. Such sarcophagi weren’t intended to be mobile—in fact they were, quite reasonably, built to stay in one place. It took the Americans an hour to get Frederick the Great’s casket, which weighed no less than 1,200 pounds, into an elevator for removal.

The U.S. Army trucked the bodies to a castle at Marburg, where the dead dignitaries were kept under guard in a cellar and stared at by wary soldiers for a year until the U.S. State Department, who classified the corpses as “political personages,” arrived at a decision about what to do with them. Lt. Gen. Lucius Clay, deputy U.S. governor in occupied Germany, was told to bury the dead in a dignified manner and delegated the task to Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Section Unit (MFAA), also known as the Monuments Men.

It turned out to be what the Monuments Men considered one of their strangest duties. They found that entombing the dead German dignitaries was almost as complicated as trying to make hotel arrangements for them. To bury these characters required navigating European history, international diplomacy and the wishes of next of kin—who were awkward political personages themselves.

No Room For Dead Militarists

The first version of the plan entailed that the Americans would take the two King Fredericks and their British cousins would relieve them of the Hindenburgs. A little bit of research would be required to decide appropriate locations—which would not become rally spots for any stray Nazis. After the logistics were settled, local German authorities were supposed to do the actual burying. The burials had to be kept secret.

Things went downhill quickly. The British were shocked to learn of the corpse problem and were “quite distressed” by the idea of having to put on a funeral for the infamously warlike Paul von Hindenburg, according to a 1950 article in Life magazine. After consultations in London, the British made it clear that Mr. and Mrs. von Hindenburg were not welcome to even set one skeletal foot in their zone, much less be buried in it. The U.S. Army scouted around for suitable old family castles to bury the two Prussian King Fredericks but inevitably found the properties in the possession of the French. The French, understandably, had no desire to do any favors for the two Hohenzollern kings.

Fourteen months later, the hapless Americans were still the unwilling guardians of four famous dead Germans and hoped to bury them like any other dead people. Debates were held about whether to bury the lot together or separate them. Many churches had been bombed so available real estate for private funeral services was scarce. Castles bustled with billeted troops and jazz orchestras.

The Americans eventually agreed not to split the lot but instead to bury the bunch together in St. Elizabeth’s church in Marburg, an ancient local church down the road from where the bodies were already being kept in a cellar. Before the burials took place, the Monuments Men decided to share the news with living relatives and ask for their approval as a kind gesture.

A Wedding or a Funeral?

The Americans had no trouble contacting the son of the Hindenburg couple, Maj. Gen. Oskar von Hindenburg, but matters got complicated when the proud Prussian signed his military title on a hotel registry and, to his great indignation, was promptly arrested. The Monuments Men secured his release. Unsurprisingly, he was fully supportive of his parents being given a normal funeral after the posthumous misadventures they had endured.  

Things got off to an awkward start with Crown Prince Wilhelm, the son of Kaiser Wilhelm II who had become infamous during the First World War. The Crown Prince, then age 64, was the head of the Hohenzollern family and thus the closest relative of the two King Fredericks. He found himself in the French zone, where the French guarded him peevishly and wouldn’t let him leave their sight. To clear the matter up while maintaining official secrecy, the Monuments Men sent the prince a message telling him that an American officer would come visit to discuss an important family matter, accompanied by the prince’s youngest daughter, Cecilia.

The Crown Prince assumed that the private family matter was something rather intimate when he saw Cecilia appear with U.S. Army Capt. Everett Parker Lesley Jr., known as Bill, of the Monuments Men. When Lesley broached the topic of holding the ceremony in a church, the suspicious father refused to give his permission.

“We are acting under orders from the Secretary of War!” rejoined Lesley. “What on earth has the Secretary of War to do with you marrying Cecilia?” demanded the prince. Lesley, astounded, explained he wasn’t there for marriage but for a funeral. The stern prince was overcome by laughter.

The Last Stop

After some problems digging in the church to clear room for the coffins, and some wandering tomb lids that almost got shipped to the Russian zone, the top-secret funerals were ready to happen. The Monuments Men expected it all to go quietly with nobody the wiser. Family members would attend but nobody else was supposed to know. However, on the day of the private burial ceremony, the Americans were mildly horrified to find about 500 Germans gathered around the church to watch.

The unlikely quartet of German dignitaries were buried together in Marburg, where they remained unobtrusively until the Hohenzollern family plucked their two King Fredericks out in 1952 and hustled them into a family castle. In August 1991, the two kings’ bodies were carted out again—this time they came full circle, returning to the starting point of their adventure at their original resting place in Potsdam. Their (hopefully) final reburial took place with a lavish televised ceremony following German Reunification.

The Hindenburgs remain in Marburg in a dignified but inconspicuous place, as the Monuments Men intended. Locals find the presence of Paul von Hindenburg a little bit awkward—even if the church pastor has expressed sympathy for the deceased’s overlooked wife.  

But, like them or not, nobody can think of a better solution than the Americans did in 1946. Local mayor Thomas Spies told Hessenschau news: “From the city’s viewpoint, there is no reason why Hindenburg should rest here, but of course the man has to be buried someplace.” 

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

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

Insurmountable Obstacles

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

this article first appeared in vietnam magazine

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

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

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

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

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

A Daunting Task

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

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

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

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

Inexperienced Operations

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vietnamization

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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While many aviation museums may display a Boeing B-29 Superfortress or B-17 Flying Fortress or even a Consolidated B-24 Liberator, very few possess a Douglas B-18 (Bolo) bomber. In fact, many aviation enthusiasts have never even heard of, let alone seen, a B-18. There are good reasons for this. Douglas built only 350, and few of those saw active service in World War II. Only six B-18 airframes still exist (and one of those is from a Bolo that crashed in 1941 in Hawaii, where its wreckage remains to this day, exposed to the elements).

The B-18 was based on Douglas’s DC-2 commercial transport and the Army named it the Bolo after the famed curved knife. The prototype made its first flight in April 1935. Manned by a crew of six and with an operational range of 2,100 miles, the twin-engine Bolo could carry up to 4,500 pounds of bombs and had a top speed of 215 mph. Already obsolete by the start of World War II, many B-18s that flew in combat were equipped with magnetic anomaly detectors and used for anti-submarine warfare. 

One B-18A, currently on display at the Wings Over the Rockies Air and Space Museum in Denver, Colorado, has undergone a remarkable restoration after a lifetime of literal and metaphorical ups and downs. The aircraft, serial number 39-025, rolled off the Douglas assembly line in 1940, the second-to-last B-18 ever constructed. Delivered to the United States Army Air Corps on February 20 of that year, the Bolo started its operational life as a training airplane at Chanute Field in Illinois. Subsequent stints as a trainer followed in Louisiana, New Mexico, Texas, Utah, Ohio and California. 

In November 1944, 39-025 was removed from the government’s inventory and wound up with the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC). The RFC focused on supporting local economies through loans and the support of banks, but it also became known during and after World War II for its role in handling surplus military aircraft. At one point the RFC owned more than 100,000 aircraft, including thousands of fighters and bombers.  

The B-18 then passed through several civilian hands after the RFC sold it for $3,000, and it became a workhorse for various owners throughout the 1940s, serving as a cargo aircraft, aerial photography platform, agricultural sprayer and forest firefighter. A veterinarian who owned it may have used the airplane to transport animals. The original Wright 1820-53 engines were replaced several times with the same or similar models. The 1950s again saw the airplane change hands repeatedly and it flew as a cargo hauler, magnetic field mapper and sprayer in Oregon, Alaska, Florida and Cuba. 

This particular B-18 is perhaps best known for its (brief) role in Fidel Castro’s Communist revolution in Cuba. In 1958, the U.S. Border Patrol impounded the aircraft in Florida after its then-owner flew it to an abandoned airfield near Fort Lauderdale and loaded it with guns, ammunition and other equipment in packages marked “Fidel.” The border patrol turned the airplane over to U.S. Customs, which eventually returned it to the U.S. Air Force at its request and from 1961 to 1974 it was on display at the Air Force’s museum. After that it received some limited restoration at New Mexico’s Cannon Air Force Base in the late 1970s, and finally made its way to the Lowry Heritage Museum in Colorado in 1988. The aircraft arrived on flatbed trucks in several pieces. Their reassembly officially kicked off the current restoration. 

The venerable airplane required extensive cleaning, since innumerable birds had made it their home over the years. Work continued as the 1980s gave way to the 1990s, Lowry Air Force Base shut down and the Lowry Heritage Museum became Wings Over the Rockies Air and Space Museum. Progress was slow, mostly due to limited funds and other competing restoration efforts. 

The original nose had long since been re- placed with an enclosed fiberglass one, but the restorers wanted to return the aircraft to a configuration that was correct for the 1930s and 1940s. Helpful individuals at McDonnell Douglas provided plans and specifications and the Raytheon corporation offered assistance to create a new nose from scratch. Local expertise in sheet metal working and aircraft fabrication were also critical to the restoration effort. Key restoration team members included Helen “Jaymes” Bond, Tom Thayer, Bob Kohler, Steve Groth, David Tomecek and Mike Smaling, but many more individuals were involved in the project over the years.

The aircraft arrived with a dark green paint scheme, but by the late 1990s and early 2000s it was painted light green with a blue/gray patch on the belly (to mimic wartime camouflage coloring). This paint, and other layers below it, was eventually stripped away to reveal the underlying aluminum skin and rivets, much as the airplane would have appeared when it first rolled off the factory floor.

To give a sense of just how labor intensive the restoration has been, each individual bolt on the wings was removed and cleaned before being put back into place. The engine cowlings that the aircraft arrived with were not original, having been fabricated at Cannon AFB, and have since been removed. Last year the restorers replaced one of the cowlings, using 3D printing to replace the forward three inches with plastic. “We’ve accomplished what we can without correcting some major external items,” says museum curator Chuck Stout. Items that were replaced over the years included the rear cargo door, bomb bay and lower turret.

The B-18, which is officially on loan from the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force (which has its own B-18 on display), now provides a centerpiece for the museum’s collections. Visitors to the museum will find it impossible not to notice, and be a bit awed by, the B-18 and its shiny aluminum skin. “Our [B-18] has seen a lot in its lifetime,” says Tomecek. “The restoration is a testament to the dedication of Wings Over the Rockies and the Restorations team to a combination of this specific aircraft, the local area and the more unique aspects of its 80-year history.”

this article first appeared in AVIATION HISTORY magazine

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