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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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.

(Watch an interview with author John C. McManus here.)

Major General Albert Wedemeyer was a difficult man to surprise, but he knew that war often confounded the predictable. Born to German American parents in Nebraska, fluent in the tongue of his ancestors, and one of the U.S. Army’s few graduates of the Kriegsakademie, Germany’s war college, he did not expect to succeed General Joseph Stilwell in China. The news of this had come to Wedemeyer in the form of an urgent message from Army Chief of Staff General George Marshall on the evening of October 27, 1944, just as Wedemeyer drifted off to sleep in his bunk at Kandy on the island of Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka). At the time, Wedemeyer served as deputy chief of staff to Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, the British commander of South East Asia Command, the polyglot theater that included Burma and India. 

Tall, stately, impeccably groomed and neatly coiffed, Wedemeyer’s pleasing physical appearance accurately suggested a man more at ease in a boardroom than a foxhole. A 1919 West Point graduate with two and a half decades of loyal service, he had no combat experience, little command time, and almost nothing in common with the average soldier. Clever, diplomatic, and adept at under-the-radar self-promotion, Wedemeyer counted himself among George Marshall’s many protégés. He also found an influential sponsor in Lieutenant General Stanley Embick, whose daughter Elizabeth he had married in 1925. Wedemeyer clearly lacked the inspirational characteristics of a frontline commander.

Much more a manager than a leader, Wedemeyer’s understanding of modern combat tended more toward the intellectual than the experiential. But he possessed an incisive strategic mind, one that marked him as an insightful military thinker who was blessed with a strong understanding of geopolitics. On the eve of the war, when Wedemeyer was only an overaged major in the War Plans Division at the Pentagon, an organization his father-in-law had recently commanded, Marshall had chosen him to work on a team to produce a comprehensive plan for mobilization and victory when the United States entered the conflict. Wedemeyer’s significant contributions to this so called “Victory Plan” had circuited his career in a relentlessly upward direction, with a rapid two-year rise from major to major general, and led historical posterity, with his gentle prodding, to afford him a bit too much credit for the plan’s success. For the first two years of the war, Wedemeyer had remained part of the War Plans Division, functioning as a roving planner and consummate military insider, and an intimate participant in high-level conferences from London to Casablanca and Washington, D.C., helping to craft Allied grand strategy. He emerged as one of the army’s leading experts on German military capabilities, a skill set that he expected—incorrectly, as things turned out—would lead him to spend the war in Europe. He argued passionately for a cross-channel invasion of France in 1942 and 1943, butting heads with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who advocated successfully for Mediterranean operations. Wedemeyer’s strategic views were so adamantly opposed to those of Churchill that it was said in high command circles—and Wedemeyer came to believe—the prime minister himself orchestrated his assignment to Mountbatten’s headquarters in October 1943 just to prevent him from having any influence on European grand strategy.

If Wedemeyer was something of a map board and typewriter officer, his appointment to China did make some sense in a theater bereft of U.S. ground combat units and where the American military presence never rose above 60,000 soldiers, over half of whom belonged to the Army Air Forces. The situation called for a strategy-savvy military diplomat, not necessarily a warrior. As Wedemeyer served Mountbatten ably for a year, he had observed China’s many problems and Stilwell’s demise, albeit from a distance. Wedemeyer respected Stilwell’s extensive experience on the ground in China and his obvious expertise about the country and its people. But he could not fathom Stilwell’s inability to get along with Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek when the success of his mission, and American strategic aims, so conspicuously depended upon it. Honest and upright, yet prone to small-minded pettiness, Stilwell loved China and its people, but he had grown to detest, in equal measure, Chiang as little more than a third-rate despot and his government as a corrupt, repressive oligarchy with little inclination to fight the Japanese, at least in a manner he thought appropriate. Stilwell’s unvarnished contempt for Chiang finally, in October 1944, exhausted Stilwell’s welcome in China when the Chinese leader demanded his relief after an especially stormy meeting.

These elemental ideas belied the complex realities that actually confronted Wedemeyer when he arrived in China at the end of October. After eight terrible years of war, and the loss of millions of lives, three main power brokers besides the Japanese continued to vie for dominance over a country in which one out of every five people had, at some point, become a refugee. In Japanese-occupied China, the Reorganized National Government of the Republic of China under Ching-wei Wang, an ardent follower of the great Chinese nationalist Dr. Sun Yat-sen, saw itself as the best hope to salvage an autonomous China from the ashes of Japanese continental dominance. The Americans and their Chinese allies dismissed this regime as little more than a Japanese puppet (similar to the Allied view of Vichy France). In Yan’an province and nearby portions of northern China, Mao Zedong’s communist shadow government continued to grow in power and influence. Mao now controlled an army of 900,000 soldiers augmented by a similar number of militia and guerrilla fighters. Communist propaganda perpetuated the notion that Mao’s troops were fighting stubbornly and effectively against the Japanese. In reality, they were doing little besides observing mutual back-scratching truces with the Japanese, though communist military formations, by their very existence, did function as an impediment to Japanese influence and expansion in northern China. Instead of fighting, Mao focused on enhancing the political position of his movement and preserving his military strength to fight Chiang and the Nationalists. Both leaders saw the other as the main adversary, far more dangerous than the Japanese and Wang’s so-called puppets; both knew they must one day either destroy or neutralize the other in order to establish real control over China.

Chiang once opined that the Japanese were like a skin disease, the communists like heart disease. Colloquially known as the “Generalissimo” in acknowledgment of his days as the army’s commander in chief, he remained the face of legitimate public government in China, a flawed but respectable, patriotic figure who had managed to preserve the notion of an independent, modern China through nearly a decade of war. He nominally controlled southern and western China. But his armies were hollow, his government was still plagued by corruption and sapped by the disloyalty of all too many local officials who pursued their own personal agendas, often to the point of defying Chiang’s orders or observing backhanded cease-fire arrangements with the Japanese. The hated foreigners remained in control of Manchuria, the entire coastline, major cities such as Canton and Shanghai, and much of the Chinese heartland. Their ongoing Ichi-go offensive, a massive effort that the Japanese had launched in April 1944, now menaced the eastern frontiers of Nationalist-controlled China, placing the key transit point town of Kweilin in danger as well as perhaps even the Generalissimo’s capital city of Chungking 480 miles to the northwest and the Chinese city of Kunming, a vital supply hub and the location of air bases for American Major General Claire Chennault’s Fourteenth Air Force. Newly established B-29 bases at Chengtu, located some 240 miles northwest of Chungking, were probably well beyond the reach of the invaders, but these fields would inevitably become compromised logistically if the Japanese succeeded in taking any of the other objectives.

Wedemeyer received a multipoint directive from the Joint Chiefs stipulating that his “primary mission with respect to Chinese Forces is to advise and assist the Generalissimo in the conduct of military operations against the Japanese.” He would command all American military forces in the country and serve as Chiang’s chief of staff, as Stilwell had done before him. No doubt with an eye on the looming death struggle for power between Chiang and Mao, the chiefs cautioned Wedemeyer not to let his troops become embroiled in Chinese domestic strife “except insofar as necessary to protect United States lives and property.”

Wedemeyer believed that the key to accomplishing his mission hinged on establishing a good relationship with Chiang. Though Wedemeyer lacked Stilwell’s Chinese linguistic skills, he understood many nuances of Chinese culture, especially the notion of saving face. He had served in China with the 15th Infantry Regiment in the early 1930s and of course learned much during his year on Mountbatten’s staff. He had already met Chiang on several occasions, so he simply built upon the existing relationship. Constitutionally even tempered, the tactful Wedemeyer spoke nary a sharp word to the Generalissimo. He unfailingly treated Chiang with courtesy and respect and the Chinese leader responded in kind. The two men got on well. They met nearly every day, often to discuss the long, thoughtful daily memos that Wedemeyer composed for Chiang.

Wedemeyer sympathetically recognized that Chiang was surrounded by a poisonous coterie of scheming family members, political advisers, and generals who usurped his power and often served as a negative influence. In viewing Chiang as an unrepentant advocate of freedom, though, the American seemed not to grasp the repressive nature of the Nationalist government, at least in the eyes of many Chinese who resented the regime’s confiscatory taxation, its heavy-handed conscription, its wasteful neglect of public health, its inflationary currency, and the tyrannical police state run by the odious but fanatically loyal Lieutenant General Dai Li, Chiang’s right-hand man and intelligence chief. Or perhaps Wedemeyer understood all this well, but diplomatically decided that he must overlook the regime’s flaws in pursuit of a greater good.

Without question the new commander’s genial relationship with Chiang defused some of the tension that had accumulated, like clogged arteries, during the Stilwell years. But Wedemeyer, with his bird’s-eye approach to military life, tended erroneously to equate this with success. “[He] is the kind of man who sees only the great picture, strategy on a global scale,” one of his public affairs officers analyzed confidentially, “but he seems utterly incapable of adjusting his grandiose ideas to practicable conditions and facts. This situation is probably the result of being a ‘book soldier’ with little practical experience.” As General Wedemeyer soon discovered, a nicer work environment could not paper over ugly ground-level realities. An in-depth assessment he sent to General Marshall nearly mirrored many of Stilwell’s reports. “They are not organized, equipped, and trained for modern war,” Wedemeyer wrote of the Nationalist government. “Psychologically they are not prepared to cope with the situation because of political intrigue, false pride, and mistrust of leaders’ honesty and motives. Frankly, I think that the Chinese officials surrounding the Generalissimo are actually afraid to report accurately conditions for two reasons, their stupidity and inefficiency are revealed, and further the Generalissimo might order them to take positive action and they are incompetent to issue directives, make plans, and fail completely in obtaining execution by field commanders.”

Chiang’s underfed, overmatched armies reeled under the weight of a new phase of the Ichi-go offensive, launched by the Japanese in response to China-based raids by American B-29 Superfortresses against southern Japan. The Japanese took Kweilin on November 10, 1944. “The Chinese are not fighting,” a dejected Wedemeyer confided to Major General J. Edwin Hull in one gloomy missive. “It is indeed disconcerting to take over under [these]…depressing circumstances.” For several weeks thereafter, it seemed that the enemy might actually capture Kunming and Chungking, a nightmare scenario that would have compromised the American position in China and might well have destroyed the Nationalist government. “It was highly discouraging when even the highly touted divisions which at great effort we have moved by air or motor transport to the Kweilin-Liuchow area also fell back,” Wedemeyer later wrote.

He found himself in crisis mode, wondering if the military situation was so dire that the Allies might have to choose between hanging on to the cities of Chungking or Kunming. To Army Air Forces Major General Larry Kuter, an old friend, he confided his deep concerns in colorful terms. “I feel that the War Department has made me Captain of a Chinese junk whose hull is full of holes, in stormy weather, and on an uncharted course. If I leave the navigator’s room to caulk up the holes, the junk will end up on the reef and if I remain in the navigator’s seat, the junk will sink.” With admirable resolve, Chiang vowed to stay in Chungking and, if necessary, die there. Wedemeyer made it clear to the Generalissimo that he had no such intentions. Secretly, he and his staff prepared evacuation plans to Chengtu and Kunming, the latter of which he viewed as an irreplaceable supply node whose military value far exceeded the threadbare Nationalist capital.

In 1943 Chiang had agreed to send his best troops to fight with Stilwell in northern Burma as part of the American general’s attempt to open a supply line from India, through northern Burma, and into China. During the spring and early summer of 1944, at the dawn of Ichi-go, Chiang understandably chafed at having those troops in Burma while the Japanese threatened to overrun his country. Once again in the late fall he pushed for their return to defend Chinese soil. A supplicating Wedemeyer managed to persuade his old boss Mountbatten to agree to airlift two divisions, the 14th and the 22nd, back to China throughout December. American transport planes managed to move 25,105 soldiers and 1,596 horses and mules, plus weapons and equipment, into western China. Fortunately, the crisis passed, more due to Japanese limitations than the intervention of these divisions. Had the Allies understood more about enemy intentions, they might not have even gone to the trouble of airlifting these troops home. As always seemed to be the case in China, the Japanese could take territory, inflict tactical defeats on Nationalist forces, and unleash untold horrors upon the population. But they seldom possessed the manpower and logistical heft to establish real control over large swaths of territory, especially the farther inland they advanced from their coastal bases. They had no intention, nor really the capability, of pushing for Kunming and Chungking, both of which remained firmly under Allied control.

Promoted to lieutenant general on January 1, 1945, Wedemeyer focused on reforming the Chinese Army, just as Stilwell had before him. “Sometimes I feel like I am living in a world of fantasy, a never never land, but we are going to continue our efforts…despite discouraging experiences along the way,” Wedemeyer confided in a private letter to Hull. For all of Wedemeyer’s famous tact, he laid out the army’s many deficiencies for Chiang in frank terms, especially in relation to the paucity of food for the soldiers and the tyrannical nature of the draft system in which men were forcibly taken into custody, sometimes bound and tied like prisoners. “Conscription comes to the Chinese peasant like famine or flood, only more regularly—every year twice—and claims its victims,” he wrote to Chiang in a detailed memo urging immediate reform. “Famine, flood and drought compare with conscription like chicken-pox with plague.” While poor and illiterate people were brutally forced into service, the educated and the wealthy could evade the draft by hiring a substitute or paying an official. “One can readily see that it was the poor, weak, and those with insufficient money who were forced to defend their more fortunate countrymen against the Japanese invader,” one of Wedemeyer’s staff reports bemoaned.

To improve the treatment, care, training, and effectiveness of the average soldier, and thus the army as a whole, Wedemeyer urged sweeping reforms and reorganization. He proposed the creation of a new fighting force, known as Alpha, comprising between 36 and 39 divisions of 10,000 soldiers apiece, plus supporting troops. They were to be entirely trained, equipped, armed, and advised by the Americans. The plan bore an almost uncanny resemblance to one that Stilwell had proposed, in vain, to the Generalissimo a year and a half earlier. The only major difference was that Stilwell envisioned a 60-division force. Thanks to the Ichi-go scare, and perhaps owing to Wedemeyer’s more nimble diplomacy, Chiang agreed this time. The core of Wedemeyer’s strategy centered around launching an offensive with the Alpha Force in the latter half of 1945 designed to advance to the coast to reclaim the port cities of Hong Kong and Canton. This would achieve the dual objective of opening up another supply route for China and providing staging bases for the invasion of Japan. He spent most of his 1945 time and energy preparing to fulfill this objective.

Chiang’s newfound tractability might well have owed just as much to his looming showdown with the communists as to any other factor. The Generalissimo continued to walk a perilous tightrope. The difficulties of holding together his own government, dependent as it partially was on alliances with corrupt, exploitive local leaders, while also pursuing reforms that inevitably diminished their power, would have challenged the acumen of even the most skilled political practitioner. Nor could Chiang afford to alienate the Americans on whom he depended for crucial Lend-Lease economic and military aid, not to mention the international prestige he received from their political support. For nearly four years, they had helped him stave off the Japanese; in turn he had played a crucial role for the Americans by absorbing, at terrible human cost, substantial Japanese manpower and resources.

As the power of the enemy now receded, and serious conflict with the communists bubbled, Chiang could not afford any deterioration in relations with the Americans, though they continued to prod him to consummate some sort of power sharing agreement with Mao. But Mao had no intention of submitting his troops to Nationalist authority, and Chiang knew that recognizing the political legitimacy of the communists could prove mortal to his own government. Mao and his Chinese Communist Party (CCP) envisioned no real endgame that did not include the triumph of their revolution, inevitably at Chiang’s expense. Chiang well understood, perhaps better than did his allies, that any attempt to share power with such zealots was like trying to divvy up freshly killed meat with a hungry lion—by its nature it tended toward a zero-sum game. Wedemeyer could make all the plans he wanted to hasten the demise of the Japanese in China. But, with each passing day, this mattered less compared to the burgeoning brawl that loomed between the Nationalists and the CCP, a conflict of world historical importance. In truth, neither Wedemeyer nor any other American truly had the power to prevent this civil war, one that ironically grew likelier and nearer as the war’s end finally came into view.  

this article first appeared in world war II magazine

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As U.S. Army private Tony Vaccaro’s boat sailed for Normandy on D-Day+12 in June 1944, he kept his M-1 rifle at the ready but had a very different tool hidden beneath his coat—his Argus C3 35mm camera. Defying army regulations that forbid combat photography except by Signal Corps personnel, Vaccaro used his camera to take surreptitious pictures of Allied forces in the English Channel. Those were the first of more than 8,000 images he snapped during his 272 days with the 83rd Infantry Division as it battled through France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Germany. Vaccaro and his camera became unique witnesses to World War II, capturing intimate moments—sometimes celebratory, other times brutal and raw—that bypassed the military censors and recorded the U.S. Army’s fight east across Europe.

Vaccaro, an Italian American who was raised in Italy but relocated to the U.S. at the outbreak of World War II, was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1943 at age 21. He tried convincing the army to let him join the Signal Corps so he could pursue his passion for photography, but Uncle Sam rejected his request on account of his youth and lack of photography experience. He ended up in the infantry instead. Camera always at the ready, he took it upon himself to chronicle the daily struggles of the soldiers in his unit with an honesty and immediacy that often eluded those in the Signal Corps, whose heavy cameras limited their mobility. Eventually, the army loosened its regulations and allowed Vaccaro to take photographs openly, but made it clear he was a soldier first and a photographer second.

Vaccaro’s images range from happy scenes in liberated French villages to the harsher truths of war. Once, when shying away from an ugly scene, he reminded himself, “Tony, what kind of witness to this war are you? You go back there and take this picture.” Two of his most famous images chronicle the deaths of two men in his unit, both taken in Belgium on January 11, 1945, during the Battle of the Bulge.

After the war, Vaccaro became a renowned fashion and celebrity photographer, but his experiences in Europe remained with him. He remembered, years later, “You are in the grip of these nightmares. The faces of the people you’ve killed. They just don’t leave you alone. I’m not the same man.”

Tony Vaccaro died at his New York home at age 100 in December 2022.

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The Wehrmacht jarred the Allies into action when it introduced gliders to the fight for Belgium in 1940 and Crete in 1941. By 1942, the U.S. had developed its own glider prototype, the Waco CG-4A, to deliver men and materiel to the front or behind enemy lines and supplement the transport aircraft that dropped paratroopers and supplies. The high-wing monoplane, made primarily of fabric and plywood over steel tubing, could carry up to 13 fully equipped troops or an array of heavy machinery—7,500 pounds in total. Ford and several other companies built nearly 14,000 wartime gliders.  The engineless CG-4A had to be tethered and towed to its destination, a job most often performed by Douglas C-47 Skytrains. The gliders saw extensive service in the invasion of Sicily in July 1943 and during the 1944 campaigns in France and the Netherlands. But it wasn’t a refined system. Once released, pilots in mass operations often had to complete for viable landing spots, and quite a few gliders crashed. One American private recalled the scene on the ground: “We thought it was incoming artillery when they began crashing in, and we began looking for cover.” In theory, the gliders could be retrieved by C-47s via a tail hook and pick-up cord, but this proved difficult in real-life situations, and most CG-4As were abandoned or destroyed after landing. Despite this, after D-Day Allied Supreme Headquarters reported “sober satisfaction” with the gliders’ performance. After the war, most CG-4As were sold for parts. Some, their wings and tails detached, saw second lives as trailer homes or vacation cabins.

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In the spring of 1940, Nazi officials launched AB-Aktion (Ausserordentliche Befriedungsaktion, or “Extraordinary Pacification Action”), the second phase of a systematic campaign to eliminate intellectuals, politicians, clergy, and other influential leaders in German-occupied Poland. Those the Nazis targeted were either placed in concentration camps or murdered by paramilitary death squads at secret locations. One series of mass executions took place in a secluded forest near the small village of Palmiry. The dead included Janusz Kusociński—an Olympic hero, decorated soldier, and national icon.

Janusz Tadeusz Kusociński was born on January 15, 1907, in Warsaw. Armed conflict would take a heavy toll on his family, beginning with his oldest brother, Zygmunt, who was killed in France during World War I. Another brother died in the Polish-Bolshevik War in 1920. Young Janusz showed early potential on the football pitch and also excelled at palant, a popular bat-and-ball sport similar to baseball. His athleticism continued to develop after he joined the sports club RKS Sarmata, where he picked up the nickname “Kusy,” but after falling behind in school, his father sent him to the State Secondary School of Horticulture so he could learn a trade as a gardener. 

The chances of Kusociński becoming an Olympian runner, let alone a gold medalist and world record holder, appeared slim. But as fate would have it, after being pulled from the grandstands as a last-minute replacement at a track meet in 1925, the feisty 18-year-old, who stood 5′ 5″ with a modest build, responded with an impressive performance, propelling his club to victory and setting in motion an improbable path to glory. 

Kusy soon attracted the attention of Estonian decathlete Aleksander Klumberg, who had recently been named head coach of Polish national athletics. Klumberg, a bronze medalist at the 1924 Olympic Games in Paris, recognized the young man’s raw potential and encouraged him to embrace a more rigorous workload involving gymnastics and intense interval training, similar to the training elite Finnish runners of the day employed. The plan worked. Beginning in 1928, Kusociński won the first of 10 Polish titles in events ranging from 800 to 10,000 meters while setting 25 national records. 

Kusociński had to place his running career on hold while he completed two years of compulsory military duty in the Polish Army. As a member of the 36th Legion Infantry Regiment, he achieved the rank of corporal before completing his service in 1930. He then resumed his winning ways, capturing national titles for 800, 1,500, and 5,000 meters and cross country. His grueling training regimen saw him work out twice a day, which he scheduled around his job as a gardener at Łazienki Park, the largest open-air grounds in Warsaw. He understood that unwavering dedication and discipline were vital if he wanted to beat the world’s best athletes. In his biography, he described the austere training he undertook: “Regardless of snow or rain, gale or frost, dressed as warmly as possible, in a few sweaters, I run Lazinki Park.” 

Throughout the 1920s, Finland’s Paavo Nurmi domi-nated middle- and long-distance running, winning nine Olympic gold medals. But his iron grip on the sport had begun to slip, and even Finnish newspapers were now hailing Kusociński as the “Polish Nurmi.” In June 1932, Kusy broke the world record for 3,000 meters with a time of 8:18.8. Less than two weeks later, he shaved 13 seconds off the four-mile all-time best, clocking 19:02.6. Both records had previously belonged to Nurmi. The Warsaw runner then set his sights on representing his country that summer at the Olympic Games in Los Angeles—and a showdown with the “Flying Finns.” 

Some runners effortlessly bound down the track with the grace of a gazelle. Not Kusy. He ran ugly—more like a charging rhino—working hard every step of the way. This contrast set the stage for the Olympic 10,000-meter final, featuring a clash between the Pole and two Finnish runners, Volmari Iso-Hollo and Lasse Virtanen (Nurmi didn’t compete after being disqualified on allegations of violating the amateur code). Adding to the drama, a new pair of track spikes gave Kusociński cuts and blisters on both feet and he ran the last eight laps in excruciating pain. Entering the bell lap, he trailed Iso-Hollo before kicking past his rival on the final curve en route to a new Olympic record. Poland now had its first-ever male Olympic champion. 

His elation, however, was short-lived. The deep lacerations on his feet forced him to withdraw from the 1,500-meter and 5,000-meter events—races in which he was expected to medal. Although disappointed, Kusociński returned home a conquering hero, regaling people with stories of his 10k triumph and how he met Hollywood stars Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, and Tom Mix. Kusy’s own celebrity led to packed stadiums whenever he competed, and his races were often broadcast on the radio. But his relentless drive for success had become a double-edged sword. An innate stubbornness and high pain threshold eventually led to multiple surgeries to repair the degenerative menisci on his knees. While recovering, Kusociński utilized the downtime to explore some new avenues, including coaching, pursuing a degree in physical education, and becoming editor-in-chief of Poland’s oldest daily sports newspaper, Kurier Sportowy.

Lingering injuries prevented him from defending his Olympic title in 1936. Nonetheless, he attended the Games in Berlin as a reporter and technical adviser to the Polish athletics team. At the German capital, which featured the largest Olympiad to date, the world witnessed Adolf Hitler blatantly propagandize his master race ideology. The heroics of American Jessie Owens aside, the home team ruled the podium, hauling in a total of 101 medals. 

In 1939, Kusy made a triumphant return to the track, winning the 10,000-meter event at the Polish championships. He capped the season by breaking the national record twice for 5,000 meters and looked forward to taking another crack at the Olympics the following year, with an eye on the marathon. The Games of the XI Olympiad had been originally awarded to Tokyo, but a confluence of factors, including Japan’s war with China, resulted in Olympic organizers naming Helsinki as the replacement host city. Such details, however, are now a trivial footnote in history. Both the 1940 and 1944 Games were canceled because of World War II—hostilities that were sparked by Germany’s invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939.

Hitler attempted to justify the attack by falsely claiming German forces had acted in self-defense, stemming from “false flag” incidents staged along the Polish border. The deceit included a fake assault on a radio station in Gleiwitz—a ruse involving murder victims dressed in Polish Army uniforms. The Wehrmacht wasted little time before unleashing more than 2,000 tanks supported by massive air cover from the Luftwaffe.

The offensive also introduced a new term to describe the Nazis’ fast-moving tactic: blitzkrieg (“lightning war”). Created in response to Germany’s failures in WWI and the need to overcome trench warfare deadlock, blitzkrieg hinged on the ability to penetrate a weak point in an enemy’s line while launching unprecedented speed of movement on the battlefield. 

The battleship Schleswig-Holstein fired the opening shots of World War II when it unleashed its guns from the port of Danzig (Gdańsk) on the Polish garrison at Westerplatte. German ground forces, spearheaded by 11 Panzer divisions, rolled into Poland on several fronts, closely supported by Junkers Ju-87 Stuka dive bombers. Army Group North, under General Fedor von Bock, launched a two-pronged attack with the Third Army advancing south from East Prussia and the Fourth Army pushing east across the Polish Corridor to seize Danzig. Meanwhile, General Gerd von Rundstedt’s Army Group South attacked from southeastern Germany and Slovakia. 

At the outbreak of war, Kusociński attempted to enlist in the army, but his previous surgeries rendered him “category D” (incapable of active military service). Nonetheless, he volunteered with the 360th Infantry Regiment, 2nd Battalion, and posted to Czerniakowski (IX) Fort, a section of the outer ring that formed the Twierdza War-szawa (Warsaw Fortress). Built in the late 19th century under Russian Tsarist rule, the large, pentagon-shaped garrison secured the city from the south and featured a deep and wide moat. Kusociński, armed with a heavy machine gun and FB Vis 9mm pistol, commanded a platoon responsible for defending a bridge spanning the Vistula River.

German troops reached the southwestern suburbs of Warsaw by September 8. The undermanned and outgunned Poles managed to repel the initial attack before coming under siege as relentless artillery and aerial bombardment pounded the bustling, cosmopolitan city of 1.3 million. Making matters worse, the Soviet Union entered the war on September 17, having signed a secret pact with Germany to divide Poland in half. The lack of support from Western Allies further exacerbated the hopeless situation.

As enemy troops closed in on the fortress, Kusy was shot in the thigh but refused to leave his post. According to fellow soldier Józef Korolkiewicz, “At some point, Janusz Kusociński’s machine gun jammed. While the servicemen struggled with dismantling and cleaning the seized parts…he leaned out of his position and shot his Vis pistol towards the crawling Germans. A moment later, the machine gun re-launched. Almost simultaneously, Kusociński is wounded again. Despite being injured for the second time, he does not want to leave his position. Both his legs are now injured.”

Warsaw fell on September 28, 1939. For Kusociński’s actions, the Polish government-in-exile awarded him the Cross of Valor, a military citation awarded for “deeds of valor and courage on the field of battle.” He spent several weeks in a hospital, where nurse Zofia Biernacka treated his wounds. Years later, she recalled her encounter with the famous Olympian: “I remember that during dressing changes, looking at his small and slim legs, I wondered how he could achieve such world-class success. I even made a note about it during the dressing. Then I heard the answer: ‘At the stadium, I was driven by ambition and love for my homeland.’”

After recovering, Kusy became involved with the Polish Resistance, joining an underground military organization called “Wolves.” He adopted the pseudonym “Prawdzic” (“True”) and took a job as a waiter in the Pod Cockem, a popular bar that allowed him to pass along critical information. The position also him put under surveillance by the Gestapo, who arrested him on March 28, 1940, in front of the house he shared with his mother and sister. Over the next three months, the Nazi secret police carried out lengthy interrogations marked by routine beatings and torture. Most of the abuse took place at Pawiak Prison, which more or less served as an inner-city concentration camp for political prisoners or anyone considered a threat to the Third Reich. The Nazis used a variety of methods to extract information, such as starvation, dog attacks, and ripping out fingernails. Kusy gave them nothing. 

Mass executions had been taking place in Poland since the start of the German occupation. Although early campaigns specifically targeted Polish leadership from academic, political, and cultural circles, the massacres served as a prelude to genocide throughout Europe that culminated with the Holocaust. Executions during AB-Aktion were usually carried out by SS units and the Ordnungspolizei (“Order Police”). In an effort to maintain secrecy, the Nazis shifted the killings to the Kampinos Forest, located near the village of Palmiry, about 19 miles northwest of Warsaw. There, Nazi officials undertook several precautions to carry out their plans. Forestry crews cut down trees to enlarge a clearing; the Arbeitsdienst (Reich Labor Service) dug graves in the shape of long ditches, assisted by members of Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth) who camped nearby; and German police undertook intensive patrolling to secure the area.

Transport trucks departed Pawiak at dawn to give prisoners the impression they were going to another prison or labor camp. Nazi officials reinforced the subterfuge by allowing them to take their documents and luggage. Some victims who saw through the ruse tossed out hastily written letters and personal items from the trucks. Upon arrival at the murder site, the condemned men and women were forced to line up along the edge of the pits, blindfolded. The Nazis shot them with machine guns, then killed anyone still alive with pistols. After filling in the ditches, work crews added a layer of moss and planted pine trees over the graves. 

From 1939 to 1941, the Nazis murdered more than 1,700 Poles in the massacres at Palmiry. Records show that 358 victims, including Kusociński, were murdered in a single operation on June 20-21, 1940. According to eyewitness accounts, Kusociński had been severely beaten and could barely stand. Two other Olympians died with him: sprinter Feliks Żuber and cyclist Tomasz Stankiewicz.

Although the perpetrators went to great lengths to carefully cover up their crimes, the deaths at Palmiry would eventually be exposed. Local residents and Polish forest service workers knew about the executions and had marked the location of the graves. After the war, Poles exhumed hundreds of bodies, including the remains of Kusociński, found with fragments of a striped suit, a comb he received from his sister while in prison, and a figure of St. Anthony. Polish authorities later transformed the area into a war cemetery and established the Palmiry Museum-Memorial Site. Among the long rows of burial plots, Kusy’s gravestone stands tallest.

Those directly involved in the murders were never held responsible, except for SS-Standartenführer Josef Albert Meisinger. Known as the “Butcher of Warsaw,” Meisinger had authorized the killings at Palmiry while serving as commander of the Security Police in the Warsaw District. After the war, Meisinger was tried by Polish authorities and hanged at Mokotów Prison in March 1947.

The legacy of Janusz Kusociński remains a source of immeasurable national pride in Poland. There are several schools, streets, athletic facilities, a Polish Ocean Lines ship, and an airplane of LOT Polish Airlines that have been named after him. In 2009, the Polish government posthumously awarded Kusociński the Commander’s Cross with Star of the Order of Polonia Restituta “for outstanding contribution to the independence of the Polish Republic, and for sporting achievements in the field of athletics.”

this article first appeared in world war II magazine

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Some years ago, the notable American literary and cultural scholar Paul Fussell wrote an essay for the New Yorker called “My War,” in which he outlined his experiences as a junior infantry officer fighting through the Northwest Europe campaign in late 1944 and into 1945. Like most men unfortunate enough to find themselves in the frontline infantry, his experiences were brutally tough and scarred him for life, both mentally and physically. Fussell was wounded on March 15, 1945, in woods near Ingwiller in Alsace, when German shells pummelled his F Company and shrapnel hit him in the legs and back. In his time at the front, he’d repeatedly risked his life, seen men shot and blown to pieces, and witnessed unspeakable levels of violence and slaughter, but at least he had known that he was helping to liberate Europe. Yet, despite the sacrifices made by his company and regiment, he later discovered that the attack in which he was wounded was not mentioned at all in Sir Basil Liddell Hart’s magisterial History of the Second World War, nor was his 103rd Infantry Division named in any capacity at any point in the book.

Reading Fussell’s essay made me think of the very skewed way in which we look at the war, viewing it mostly through the prism of the major ink spots that very rarely seem to meet on the blotting paper of history. We hear about Pearl Harbor, Midway, disjointed exploits of the Mighty Eighth Air Force, then D-Day, the Bulge, and perhaps Iwo Jima. Or, if you’re a Brit like me, you might care to throw in Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain, and El Alamein. Of course, these events are decisive ones—the points at which the progress of the war lurched forward dramatically—and so, after all the fighting was over, people wrote books about these moments, then made movies, and because these proved so popular, more books were written about them, and more documentaries made, and then perhaps a TV series. A kind of vicious circle had been created. We all now know about the 101st Airborne Division thanks to Band of Brothers, but who has ever heard of the 11th Airborne Division? Do they deserve to be forgotten just because they operated—brilliantly and bravely—in the Philippines rather than in the hedgerows of Normandy? [Editor’s note: One person who has not forgotten the 11th Airborne is James M. Fenelon.]

I’m guilty of this blinkered view as much as the next man. After all, I’ve written and made TV programs about D-Day and Normandy, as well as the Battle of Britain. Maybe, though, change is in the air. Perhaps historians have finally exhausted the narrative of D-Day or the Dam Busters raid after all this time, and it might just be that there’s no longer anything especially fresh to say about the U.S. Marine Corps in the Pacific. I’ve been recording a World War II podcast for the past four years called We Have Ways of Making You Talk, and we’ve now amassed more than 600 episodes—certainly enough to take us well beyond the “Ds,” as my co-presenter, Al Murray, calls Dunkirk and D-Day. We’ve discovered there really is an appetite to learn more, and it’s been fascinating to record podcasts, write essays such as these, and now, start to write books too, about those more overlooked episodes of the war. For example, we’ll be recording an episode soon on General Joseph Swing and the 11th Airborne (with James Fenelon as our guest), while I’ve recently finished a book about the Italian campaign in 1943. It covers Salerno, the Volturno, and San Pietro, but also Ortona, that terrible battle between the Canadians and the Germans on the other side of Italy, known as the “Stalingrad of the Adriatic.” Whoever knew? I can tell you this: it’s one of the most brutal episodes of the war I’ve ever written about. I’ve become quite obsessed about it.

I’m also determined to do my bit for the late, great Paul Fussell, too, because around the corner is a project I’m calling Endgame, about the war in Northwest Europe after Normandy, and I’ve vowed to make sure the exploits of the heroic 103rd Infantry get their deserved write-up. The time has come, 80 years on, for the forgotten heroes to get their voices heard.

this article first appeared in world war II magazine

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Soon-to-be centenarian John G. (“Brad”) Bradley Jr. grew up in Hartford, Connecticut, where his dad patented a welding technique for assembling Royal Typewriter Company portable typewriters. During World II, as John Sr. redirected his expertise to weld steel frames for U.S. Army troop transport gliders, Brad became a U.S. Navy aviator. On May 5, 1945, just three days shy of V-E day, Bradley was piloting his Grumman Avenger torpedo-bomber on a training mission off the coast of Rhode Island when he spotted—and promptly reported—a German U-boat. Brad is still haunted by what followed.

What was growing up in Hartford like?  Were you an athlete? 

As a freshman at Bulk High [Morgan Gardner Bulkeley High School], I broke the school record in the mile in my second meet. They nicknamed me “Legs Bradley.” 

When and how did you join the Navy? 

In 1942. I was trying to become a V-5 Aviation Cadet. A sailor gave me the exam at the post office in Hartford. Those were pretty tough questions, but he said, “You passed everything fine.”  I waited, that was the summer of ’42. And then I received orders to go to 120 Broadway, the Equitable Life Building in New York City. And sitting behind the desk was a naval officer. He was from a family we knew. And he said, “How’s your mom and dad, your brother?” I about fell over. He told me, “We want you mentally and physically fit, but we have to have a good character as well. I don’t have to ask you much about your character.”

Is that when you were sworn in?

December 12, 1942. I learned later that future president George [H.W.] Bush was sworn in the 12th of December 1942 on Lower Broadway. There were only a dozen of us that day, so he must have been there. He and I were sworn in together, and I didn’t realize it.

When did you first get a chance to fly? 

After I went through pre-flight. In Texas I learned to fly the Taylorcraft, a little single-engine plane; instead of a stick to fly it, it was a wheel. Next I had to go to the naval air station north of Memphis. That’s when I flew the biplane [the N3N, nicknamed the “Yellow Peril” because of its paint scheme and its use by student pilots]. Oh, I love that plane. Flying came easy to me. I got my wings in October ’44. They sent me [next] to Pensacola to get checked out in the Texan, the SNJ. 

Then you qualified to fly the Avenger torpedo-bomber in Fort Lauderdale. 

A very forgiving airplane.

What was the next destination?

Norfolk, Virginia, assigned to a composite training squadron, VC-15. In May 1945, the Avenger component, maybe four or five TBFs, went up to the Naval Air Station in Quonset Point, Rhode Island.

Your plane had a regular crew.

Yeah, a radioman and a gunner. My radioman was from Philadelphia. The gunner was a boy from Atlanta. He was a nut, had tattoos on his chest. A tattoo over one nipple said “sour.” And the other one had a tattoo saying “sweet.”

But you didn’t fly with either of them on May 5.

One night after reaching Quonset we went to Providence. One of the guys knew the night watchman at a brewery there. He said: “Listen, if we promise not to make noise, the watchman will let us have free ale.” Clifford Brinson [another pilot’s radioman] didn’t drink, and I didn’t drink. At 3:30 in the morning, we finally took a cab back to Quonset Point. And when it came time for assignments, we were the only two not hungover. So, Brinson wound up as my crewman. Just he and I took off from Quonset. 

What was your mission?

We were going to be a “target” for submarines out of Groton, Connecticut. To train their lookouts to spot aircraft. But the weather was spotty. Scuddy, low clouds and patchy fog. So, our submarine blinkered: returning to port. We made a wide turn south of Westerly, Rhode Island, heading to Block Island. And Brinson said, “Mr. Bradley, I can’t believe there’s a submarine on the surface, just east of Montauk Point [Long Island].” It was about 10:15 a.m. when we spotted it. There was a navigation buoy southwest of Block Island. I estimated him doing about 10 knots heading for that buoy. But what were we gonna do? And I said, “Let’s hope he doesn’t see us. We don’t have anything but fuel in our tank. Let’s get back to Quonset.” 

What happened after you landed?

We went immediately to the base administration building. And there was a lieutenant commander who debriefed us in a separate room outside the base admiral’s office. He must have asked us the same questions over and over for about three hours. He kept running back and forth, back and forth to the admiral’s office. “You sure? You sure?”  And we said, “We know what we saw from what they taught us in the recognition courses.” Recognition of not just the enemy ships, but all foreign ships and planes.

It was foggy by the time they finished debriefing and we were excused. Since my hometown was Hartford, I drove back there and spent the night at my home.

Subsequent events indicate that the German U-boat you and Brinson spotted was U-853. About seven hours later, U-853 torpedoed and sank Black Point,a coal freighter, north of Block Island—the last U.S. merchant vessel sunk by a German U-boat. When did you first learn of it?     

That evening. I loved going dancing, so I went to the Knights of Columbus in downtown Hartford. And during intermission of the dance, I went outside. The Hartford Times newspaper building was right next door. And the newsboys were running out the front door with their newspapers. “Extra, extra, German submarine sinks coal vessel. 12 lives were lost.” I remember standing there and I shook my head. At first I said to myself, “Oh my God, there goes my Air Medal.” Then I realized, “This isn’t funny. 12 lives were lost.”

Hours after Black Point sank, U-853 was cornered and sunk by U.S. Navy and Coast Guard ships. The sighting you made could possibly have changed history. After you returned to Quonset from Hartford, was there any feedback or follow-up on what you’d reported?

No, I was a youngster, 21 years old. And you’re always taking orders and you’re not much in command of anything. My God, if I were more senior or more mature, I would’ve really gone on after that.

this article first appeared in world war II magazine

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In August 1943 members of the highly classified Wright Project departed Virginia’s Langley Field for service in the South Pacific. Ten Consolidated B-24D Liberator bombers—equipped with an untried combat electronics system and designated SB-24s—and their handpicked crews were off to join the Thirteenth Air Force, then battling the Japanese in the Solomon and Bismarck Islands. The project’s leader, Colonel Stuart “Stud” Wright, had a letter in his breast pocket with the letterhead of U.S. Army Air Forces Headquarters, signed by no less a person than Commanding General Henry “Hap” Arnold. The Arnold letter instructed all commands to help the unit deploy as soon as possible and provide all necessary support.

Wright and his team touched down at Guadalcanal’s Carney Field on August 23, 1943, and, initially designated as the 394th Bombardment Squadron (Heavy) of the 5th Bomb Group, flew their first combat missions three days later. Before long the Wright group became known as “the Snoopers.”

The project’s ten crews—100 officers and men—and aircraft intended to prove the combat effectiveness of an electronics system devised by Radiation Laboratory, a research and development team of civilian scientists and engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. Working closely with the 1st Sea Search Attack Group at Langley Field, the lab’s technology would allow an aircraft to fly into to the blackness of night, spend 10 or more hours hunting over large swatches of enemy-dominated ocean, detect targets at great distances, and home in on them with precision low-level attacks. A single nightstalking aircraft could seek prey from 5,000 feet or more, then drop to a thousand feet or less to strike, unseen by the target vessel until the bomb blasts lit up the night. The attacking aircraft would then speed away to return home safely at daybreak.

While good intelligence frequently suggested where the SB-24s should look for its targets, just as frequently an aircraft’s advanced microwave search radar detected enemy ships from distances of 50 to 70 miles. A competent operator could use the SCR-717-B radar to position the attacking aircraft for an out-of-the-night run, catching a moving target with a bomb spread triggered by the onboard APQ-5 computer that allowed a precision release of a string of 500-pound bombs. 

But these low-level attacks took their toll on the unit as the enemy fought back. And while Colonel Wright had warned his men that many would not return, the loss of two of the 10 original crews within a few weeks would be sobering. 

Although Wright’s men had been attacking targets almost every night from the day of their arrival, the first really “big show” occurred on the night of September 28-29, 1943. The U.S. Naval Intelligence Group alerted ComAirSols, the Guadalcanal-based command that coordinated and directed all air operations in the South Pacific at the time, that a Japanese resupply convoy, comprising a bevy of fast transports escorted by a half-dozen destroyers, would be making a supply run down “The Slot,” the nickname for the sea passage from Bougainville Island through New Georgia Sound and on to Guadalcanal. ComAirSols tagged Wright and his SB-24s to find, track, and attack the convoy.

Captain Franklin T.E. Reynolds and his crew took the lead in the SB-24 Coral Princess, found the targets, and determined the convoy’s position, course, and speed. Reynolds’ radar operator identified 11 ships and he selected the largest, a cargo vessel, for his attack. The system performed with perfection. Reynolds made a beam-on run at 1,000 feet altitude and 135 knots indicated air speed, and the computer toggled a string of six bombs spaced at 75-foot intervals. The bombs walked across the ship, delivering two direct hits and four near misses. Fires were soon raging out of control, with the flames visible for 20 miles. 

Reynolds summoned other SB-24s out that night to join in his attack and they used the fire as a beacon when they arrived. Captain John Zinn and the crew of Uncle’s Fury were next but failed to make any hits as anti-aircraft fire increased. Major Leo Foster, who would take over command when Wright went home to report on the unit’s success, led the second wave into the convoy. Flying in Devil’s Delight with Wright as copilot, he and his crew dropped bombs that just missed a frantically maneuvering destroyer, then climbed atop the action to direct more incoming aircraft. Bums Away, piloted by Lieutenant Bob Lehti, was next into the fight. The SB-24 found a target and started a low-altitude bombing (LAB) run, but Lehti banked away moments before release when the identification-friend-or-foe (IFF) system malfunctioned and signaled that the ship he was attacking was a U.S. Navy vessel. Lieutenant Ken Brown in Ramp Tramp, hearing Lehti communicate that his IFF was sending confusing signals, checked his IFF and also elected not to attack out of concern that the ships were American.

Two other SB-24s soon arrived, delayed because they had to recruit airmen from other aircraft to fill out their crews. Lieutenants George Tillinghast and Fred Martus, each in the aircraft they had brought over from Langley Field, The Lady Margaret and Gremlins’ Haven, rolled in last on the now scattered ships. By this time the Japanese had shaken off the shock of the attack and responded with a heavy volume of fire. Although darkness did hide the SB-24s’ approach, the Japanese were able to pick up the attackers as they made the final run to their bomb release points, making the aircraft highly vulnerable as they passed over their targets.

Martus selected his ship, took the lead, and radioed to Tillinghast, “This is Martus. Have them in sight. We’re going in.” Tillinghast followed Martus into the fight but selected a different ship, which he just missed. He then climbed to 10,000 feet and circled the fires below to establish contact with the Martus crew, these two being the last of the attackers to depart for home. But there was no trace of Martus and the crew of Gremlins’ Haven.

The loss of the Martus crew came in the wake of the crash of Lieutenant Bob Easterling’s Princess Slipp a few weeks earlier. In the early morning of August 31, that SB-24 had reached base badly shot up while attacking Japanese vessels and it had crashed while attempting to land at Carney Field, killing all 10 men on board. The losses hit the project hard. As one veteran remarked some 35 years later, “Now it was personal, the easy times were over.”

As October moved into November, and Admiral William Halsey’s forces fought their way up the Solomon Island chain, the Wright Project SB-24s found themselves not only hunting Japanese shipping but also directly supporting the U.S. Navy cruiser-destroyer task groups that combated Japanese forces determined to disrupt Allied landings in the advance toward Rabaul, Japan’s main naval and air base on New Britain Island.

One such decisive black-of-night encounter between speeding warships was the Battle of Empress Augusta Bay. In this case a powerful Japanese cruiser-led task force attempted to wreak havoc an Allied amphibious landing at Cape Torokina on Bougainville Island. On the night of November 1-2, 1943, the strike force, under Admiral Sentaro Omori, left Simpson Harbor at Rabaul. Its two heavy cruisers, two light cruisers, and brace of destroyers intended to attack the 14,000 men of the U.S. 3rd Marine Division who had splashed ashore earlier that day. Opposing this strike force was a U.S. task group comprising four light cruisers and eight destroyers under the command of Rear Admiral Aaron S. “Tip” Merrill. Every sailor in Merrill’s command knew the Japanese were coming hard at them, steaming for a fight. But they did not know from where they were coming, when they planned to attack, or how many vessels they had. 

That evening the XIII Bomber Command sent the SB-24s of Lieutenants Vince Splane and Duward Sumner into the night to patrol separate sectors of New Britain Island’s St. George’s Channel, the most likely path of the Japanese approach. Sumner in Ramp Tramp found Omori first, his SCR-717-B radar detecting the Japanese from 35 miles out. Sumner positioned his plane overhead as his radar operator fine-tuned his scope so he could count the ships, allowing Sumner to radio an alert to provide course, speed, and number of vessels to Merrill’s task group. Sumner alerted Splane’s crew, aboard their favorite squadron aircraft, Devil’s Delight, and Splane closed to back up Sumner. Splane’s radar was performing exceptionally well that night and picked up Omori’s task force at 75 miles. With Splane now joined overhead to continue the tracking mission, Sumner sought and received permission from ComAirSols to attack. Over a two-hour period, Sumner made several LAB attacks, one of which near-missed the light cruiser Sendai. He then turned over the tracking of Omori’s strike force to Splane and Devil’s Delight. In his after-action mission report Sumner noted that issues with his bomb release mechanism affected his attacks. But even Sumner’s failed attempts impacted Japanese plans. Omori, his battle flag flying from the veteran heavy cruiser Haguro, realized he was being tracked. Recognizing they had lost the element of surprise and faced an alerted Allied force, Omori and his headquarters elected to forgo one element of the attack, causing a group of troop-laden destroyers to abort their mission and turn back to Rabaul.

Splane tracked Omori for an hour, radioing updated details to Merrill, who maneuvered his task group to intercept the Japanese. At this point, well after midnight, Devil’s Delight received permission to mount its own LAB run. Splane had his radar operator pick out the strongest radar signature and homed in to deliver “six five-hundred-pound bombs in a 30-foot interval release sequence that walked right up to the side of the ship.” Banking away, Splane knew he had damaged the flagship and rattled its bridge crew. The attack had caught the cruiser by surprise and Splane received no fire from the Haguro on this run nor on a follow-up attack up the wake that just missed the cruiser.

Omori was flustered and confused. He changed course, then reduced speed to assess the damage to his ship and determine the overall situation. He had damage to his hull and, as rain pelted his bridge and scout planes delivered reports of sighting Merrill’s ships, Omori’s tight formation lost needed cohesion. The Japanese soon encountered Merrill’s radar-equipped task group, well-organized and waiting for their enemy. Merrill’s destroyers leaped to the battle and released their torpedoes, as the light cruisers, their radar tracking the Japanese and directing gunfire, maneuvered to gain best advantage.

By four in the morning, it was over. Omori limped back to Rabaul with the light cruiser Sendai sunk, a destroyer rammed and sunk in the battle’s confusion, two other destroyers badly damaged, and Haguro and sister ship Myokodamaged. In the morning, Merrill’s superior, Admiral Thomas Kinkaid, dispatched a special thank you to Halsey at ComAirSols at Guadalcanal for a “splendid night tracking mission.”

The following night, three more SB-24s lifted off into the darkness, this time into the face of a rain squall, to begin the hunt anew. Operating independently of any bomb group and mostly flying single-aircraft missions, these specialized airplanes and their crews continued their fight against Japan for the next 22 months as the unit moved forward across the Pacific. Over time, the 868th Bombardment Squadron, as they would soon be formally designated, increasingly fought during the day, not just at night.

U.S. Army Air Forces Lieutenant Walter N. Low was 21 years old when he took his crew of 10 young men to war in the Pacific in the spring of 1945. They joined the 868thin April when it was based at Morotai, an island in the Moluccas in the Dutch East Indies. 

Major Baylis Harriss had been recently appointed squadron commander. A Texan with years of combat experience, he was rebuilding the squadron with additional crews and new aircraft, while pushing his men to undertake longer missions designed to build unit cohesion and confidence.

Lieutenant Low’s first mission occurred on May 6. He and his crew received their baptism of fire attacking the Japanese airdrome at Mandai in the Dutch East Indies. Three days later they hit the Samarinda shipyards on Borneo with the bomber’s normal load of six 500-pound bombs, and three days after that they struck Kendari airfield to crater the runways and keep it unserviceable. They flew five more missions in May, all attacks against shipping facilities, airdromes, and vessels in this same area. 

In early June the Low crew kept up this pace, flying missions against many of the same targets in the Dutch East Indies. On June 12, Low and his crew flew to the Flores Sea on a daylight search for shipping, where they found and attacked a collection of small cargo vessels. And on June 18 Low and crew flew as a two-ship mission to hit Oelin Airdrome. Both planes came home with feathered props, having nearly run dry on fuel. On that mission Low had drawn the B-24 Lady Luck II as his airplane. The airplane had arrived in the squadron a few weeks before, already had a dozen missions to her credit, and was regarded by all who flew her as a “solid airplane.” 

Late July found the squadron preparing to relocate to Okinawa to join the air campaign against the Japanese home islands in preparation for the planned invasion of Kyushu. The landing on Kyushu, the first of two such operations designed to force a surrender on the ground in Japan, was scheduled to occur sometime in late October or early November of that year. It was assumed that the period of August to November 1945 would be one of intense combat for the 868th above and around the four home islands, where Japanese resistance would be fierce. But as the ground elements of the squadron packed their equipment to head north in July, the combat crews of the 868th still operated in the Dutch East Indies. 

That third week in July, higher authorities directed the squadron to strike farther west to hit targets in French Indochina. Their mission was to search and destroy Japanese shipping along that coast to block the flow of any oil or military supplies to the home islands. Lieutenant Low, in the company of three other squadron aircraft commanded by Lieutenants Mel Jensen, Hensen Sprawls, and George Koonsman, hunted at low level on July 21. The mission was a long one, with the four aircraft departing home base at Morotai before daylight and staging through an advanced airfield on Palawan Island in the Philippines to extend their range. Reaching the French Indochina coast at midday, they discovered shipping targets aplenty, most sheltering in the harbors or slightly upstream in the rivers. This was virgin territory, at least for the far-ranging 868th SB-24 Liberators, and the four hunters made the best of it, bombing and strafing several small merchant ships. One of the mission crews flew inland and destroyed a railroad bridge. The four aircraft returned safely to home base, holed by ground fire but suffering no casualties.

On this day, Low and his crew followed an 868th tradition of attacking at a very low level, bombing from 500 feet or below, then following up with multiple gun runs at 200 feet or less, skimming the water to fire into the sides of vessels with sustained bursts from their .50-caliber weapons. Unlike the dark-of-night LAB missions that had placed the 868th in a league of its own, and to which the unit would soon return in the campaign over the Home Islands, these missions were all by daylight. The hunting Liberators were seen by the vessels they attacked and the result was often a ship-to-airplane shootout. 

Two days later Low reprised his visit to the French Indochina coast on his twentieth combat mission, on this occasion in aircraft 808. When he spotted a large tug dragging two oil barges on the Bassac River, Low rolled in to make a bombing run, pushing his luck at a mere 200 feet in altitude. Three 500-pound bombs hit dead center and the barges exploded in a massive fireball, with orange flames shooting into the sky and a dense plume of smoke rising in a mushroom cloud to 1,500 feet. Although his bombs were fused to delay for four seconds to allow an attacker to drop at low altitude, the detonation of the bombs and their target rocked the aircraft. As it came off the target, veteran squadron ship 808 had its waist windows blown out and the airframe twisted. Low was thrown from his seat and landed on the flight deck.

Low reclaimed his seat and he and copilot Don McDermott struggled to regain control of their crippled plane. But serious damage had been done and the aircraft was doomed. A few miles out, over open waters and headed home, number two engine burst into flames and had to be feathered. A fuel leak made it clear that the aircraft could not make it to Palawan, and a decision was made for the crew to bail out. Koonsman flew alongside Low and maintained communications with him, while managing to contact a U.S. submarine in the area. After confirming an emergency rendezvous with the rescue sub, the 10-man crew of Low’s airplane prepared to bail out. Low reached the pick-up point and made three runs over the location as all crew members safely parachuted. Low was the last to jump.

The following day, Lieutenant Sprawls set out on the same course, staging again from Palawan, to search for the missing crew. By then it had become certain that the submarine had not picked up the missing airmen and that Low and his men were adrift somewhere in the South China Sea. Three of the crewmembers managed to survive and were rescued after several days in the water. The other seven perished. Walter Low one of those who survived. 

In July 1945, the squadron lost a total of 21 officers and men missing in action and saw its roster reduced to 13 combat-qualified crews and 12 aircraft. But new crews were reporting in, and new aircraft were arriving to replace losses. Importantly, the increased operational tempo established by Major Harriss was the highest ever reached by the unit and this achievement was recognized by the Far East Air Forces leaders. The squadron was now primed to complete its move north to join the final campaign of the war and was ordered to relocate to Okinawa in the final days of the month. The 868th would begin operations over the home islands in early August 1945, well prepared for a war that all assumed would extend into the summer of the following year, if not longer.

this article first appeared in world war II magazine

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On a clear April morning, I drive California State Route 62 west into the Mojave Desert searching for traces of what was once the world’s largest military training ground. More than one million soldiers passed through the Desert Training Center (DTC) between April 1942 and April 1944. Most had already completed basic training and welcomed the call to California. When they disembarked at the long-gone depots of the Santa Fe Railroad spur that parallels this highway, any fantasies of Pacific beaches and Hollywood stars were vanquished by the reality of a bleak, arid expanse fenced by distant sawtooth mountains.

By the time the United States entered World War II, British troops had been battling German and Italian advances in Libya and Egypt for 15 months. While none of the belligerents in North Africa proved ready to fight effectively in the sand and extreme heat, the Germans adapted faster than the Allies. As the United States prepared to join the campaign, it recognized the need to modify armored strategies and tactics and prepare its soldiers and equipment for the harsh desert climate. Army Ground Forces assigned Major General George S. Patton Jr., then commanding the I Armored Corps, to scout a suitable training ground.

Patton wanted his men hardened for the realities of the theater. Having been born and raised in the Los Angeles suburbs, he knew just the place to do it. “The California desert can kill quicker than the enemy,” he announced at a staff meeting. In March 1942, the army acquired more than 10 million acres of mostly public land in southeastern California, western Arizona, and southern Nevada. The DTC spanned parts of the Mojave and Sonoran Deserts but offered fresh water from the Colorado River and its aqueducts, as well as access to three railroads for moving troops and equipment.

Soldiers were billeted in 12 temporary division-size camps spread throughout the DTC, with a total capacity of nearly 200,000 people. Pulling to the side of the highway some 30 miles west of Vidal Junction and the last food and gas I’ll see for hours, I peer to the northwest for signs of the best-preserved camp. Iron Mountain was laid out in a three-by-one-mile grid of dirt-floor pyramidical tents that could house well over 15,000 men, but its only remaining vertical structures are a pair of altars that served as outdoor chapels. From this distance, any vestiges of the camp are hidden in a thick carpet of sage brush and yellow-flowering creosote bushes.

After a helpful call to the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which manages most of the former DTC area, I locate the single-lane road that runs from the highway to the southern end of the camp. Judging the sand too soft for my two-wheel-drive rental car, I lace up my hiking boots and grab a water bottle as the temperature climbs into the 80s. After a mile and a half, the monotony of the desert shrubbery is broken by the neat lines of rocks that DTC soldiers placed to landscape their camps and outline tents, field kitchens, latrines, and other features of their spartan yet sprawling temporary cities. There are no interpretive signs. An uninformed wanderer might think she had stumbled upon a rocky, quadrilateral version of a crop circle.

Strolling the deserted avenues, I spot the arched top of the Catholic altar. Handmade with stones surrounding a white quartz cross, it stands twice my height. I sit for a moment in the bare patches of sand where soldiers once prayed, enjoying absolute quiet until the wind whips up, swirling sand that instantly blurs the skyline. “Sand in your bed. Sand in your shoes. We had to live with sand. We got to where we hated sand,” remembered Wiley Milford Thornton, veteran of the 95th Infantry Division, in Sands of War, a BLM-sponsored documentary on life at the DTC.

The average soldier trained at the DTC for 14 weeks, participating in a series of exercises that advanced from small unit to division level and included marches as long as 200 miles, live-fire drills, and multi-day maneuvers. To condition troops for the limited resources of North Africa, men were typically restricted to one canteen of water per day. According to California State Parks historian Matt Bischoff, many of the roughly 1,000 soldiers who died in training at the DTC succumbed to dehydration. In the summer, temperatures in what the 773rd Tank Destroyer Battalion dubbed in its official journal “a desert designed for hell” could reach 130 degrees in the shadeless afternoon—and 160 degrees inside a tank.

Patton, who often roamed the desert with a rented loudspeaker so he could chide or applaud his soldiers, was recalled to Washington, D.C., in July 1942 to plan Operation Torch, the Allied invasion of French North Africa. Six other corps commanders would follow him to the DTC in succession, each taking advantage of the open, unoccupied terrain to experiment with task force composition and supply lines and rehearse coordination among infantry, armored, and air divisions. Fighter and bomber groups trained at five DTC air fields, including Rice Army Airfield, 20 miles east of Camp Iron Mountain. 

I backtrack east on Route 62 until I spy a dark gray obelisk on the south side, marking the remains of the airfield. A faint dirt road takes me a few hundred yards to the crumbling foundations of old storage buildings. The eclectic mix of artifacts I find signals that most of the people who venture out here these days are not drawn by the history. Wartime ration containers mingle in the blond sand with modern beer cans and the discarded shell casings from shotguns that have riddled the rusty insides of a piano and the frame of an old car abandoned on Rice Army Airfield’s broad concrete parking apron. Eighty years ago, Bell P-39 Airacobras and Curtiss P-40 Warhawks waited here for the call to strafe mock enemy targets and cover ground forces marching into the tangle of mountains rising to the south, including Palen Pass.

To reach the pass, the final maneuver area for many of the 60 armored, infantry, and artillery divisions that trained at the DTC, I drive west then south around the mountains, passing two more division camps before heading east on Interstate 10 through the Chuckwalla Valley. Known in the DTC as “Little Libya” for its environmental similarities to North Africa, this was a proving ground for desert warfare enhancements that included vented combat boots, weapon lubricants, and new vehicle cooling systems. The Chuckwalla’s climate continues to inspire innovation. The valley is home to some of the country’s first and largest solar energy farms, whose dark blue rectangular panels stretch for miles in blinding contrast to the otherwise sepia-toned landscape.

After the Allies declared victory in North Africa in May 1943, the U.S. Army no longer needed desert training. Yet field commanders valued the rigor and realism of exercises in the DTC, which had grown to more than 18,000 square miles. In October, the training center was renamed the California-Arizona Maneuver Area (CAMA). 

I exit the freeway at Blythe, a sleepy town three miles shy of the Arizona border, and wind my way up a series of mountain roads into the heart of Palen Pass. I explore on foot the narrow valley where whole divisions faced off in mock combat. The descending sun casts a golden glow over the network of shallow gullies where tens of thousands of soldiers dug in for starry desert nights as the dust and smoke settled from daytime battles. The only clues I find of their presence are occasional corroding bits of metal and faint parallel tank tracks in the gravely dirt.

The increasing demand for soldiers overseas led Army Ground Forces to scale back on the personnel necessary to support the CAMA. It was decommissioned in April 1944 and after the war the army returned the land to the Department of the Interior. The training center is memorialized in the General Patton Memorial Museum at Chiriaco Summit, California, which I visit the next morning. Open since 1988, the museum lies within the boundaries of Camp Young, the DTC/CAMA headquarters. In addition to historic tanks and an illustrated timeline of Patton’s life, the museum houses training center artifacts that range from mailboxes and tattered unit pendants to pianos that likely accompanied Saturday night dances with “The Desert Battalion,” a group of young women bused in from southern California cities to boost the morale of sun-bronzed, war-bound soldiers.

City dwellers are still drawn to the desert for entertainment. The annual Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival has summoned 120,000 visitors to nearby Indio this weekend. Local lodging is limited and as I navigate a potholed road through Camp Young, I pass a desert tortoise and a few revelers boondocking among the rows of rocks outlining the former location of the camp’s 3,200 tents. Tuning out their modern music, I take one last, slow walk through the timeless heat of the desert.

this article first appeared in world war II magazine

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Military history has given us some great teams of commanders and their chiefs of staff. Napoleon had Marshal Louis-Alexandre Berthier; Dwight D. Eisenhower had Walter Bedell Smith; and Bernard Law Montgomery had Francis Wilfred de Guingand. Fortunately for the Allies in World War II, Bedell Smith and de Guingand served not only in that same war, but also in the same theater starting in 1943. Together they forged a personal and professional partnership that was a vital element in the unprecedented success of the Grand Alliance. “Beetle” Smith is fairly well remembered today, but “Freddie” de Guingand remains largely forgotten outside of British circles.

He deserves better. The ultimate team player, de Guingand was the most-respected and best-liked British officer among the Americans. After the war Smith wrote of him: “General de Guingand is the best staff officer I have ever seen regardless of nationality… and I do not know of any man in whom I have more confidence and for whom I have greater affection.” In his book A Soldier’s Story, General Omar Bradley wrote of de Guingand’s “patience, modesty, and understanding which helped to forge the Allied armies into a single fighting machine. Somewhere in almost every critical Allied decision of the war in Europe, you will find the anonymous but masterful handiwork of this British soldier.” 

During the war, Field Marshal Sir Bernard Law Montgomery wrote of de Guingand to General Sir Alan Brooke (later Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke), Britain’s Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS). He said, “I do not know what I should do without him as he is quite 1st class.” And after the war Montgomery wrote, “Anything I have been able to achieve during the late war could not have been done if he had not been at my side.” Unfortunately, Montgomery’s fine words all too often failed to live up to his treatment of his former chief of staff, especially after the war ended.

De Guingand was born  in Acton, west London, in 1900. His mother was from a family of Yorkshire bankers; his father was the son of a man who left France for England after the overthrow of King Louis Philippe in 1848. In 1918 Francis had planned to enter the Royal Navy as a midshipman, but he was medically rejected for color blindness. Instead, he entered the Royal Military College at Sandhurst as a gentleman cadet, where his French surname earned him the lifelong sobriquet of “Freddie.” (Despite his family’s Gallic background, he was never completely comfortable speaking French.) Although he was exceptionally bright, the fun-loving Freddie’s record at Sandhurst was less than impressive. 

 Commissioned into the West Yorkshire Regiment in December 1919, de Guingand served briefly in India and then in Ireland during the Irish War of Independence. In 1924 he was posted to his regiment’s depot in York, where he met Major Bernard Montgomery, who was then a general staff officer assigned to the 49th (West Riding) Division. As bachelor officers, they both lived in the same mess, shared common enthusiasms for golf and bridge, and become fast friends. It was an odd-couple relationship on several levels. Montgomery was 13 years older than de Guingand, and was austere, arrogant, blunt, and utterly lacking in diplomacy and tact. De Guingand had a buoyant and charming personality, and was passionate about wine, women, and gambling. Nonetheless, Montgomery, recognizing de Guingand’s intellect and the value of his organizational and diplomatic skills, became his mentor.

With Montgomery’s endorsement, de Guingand was accepted at the highly competitive Staff College at Camberley, graduating in 1935. In 1939 he was assigned as the military aide to Leslie Hore-Belisha, Britain’s reformist but controversial secretary of state for war. While serving as Hore-Belisha’s close confidant, de Guingand honed his negotiating and diplomatic skills as he dealt personally with most of the senior officers in the British Army. A month after Hore-Belisha was fired from the War Office in January 1940, de Guingand was posted as an instructor to the Middle East Command’s new staff college at Haifa in Palestine. The commandant of the college was Brigadier Eric Dorman-Smith, who had been one of de Guingand’s instructors at Camberley. De Guingand quickly became the chief instructor of the college. 

That December he was reassigned to the Middle East Command’s Joint Planning Staff in Cairo. Now a major-general, Dorman-Smith had become the Middle East Command’s Deputy Chief of the General Staff, and he recommended de Guingand for the post of Director of Military Intelligence, Middle East, with the rank of brigadier. Although he had no previous training or experience in the intelligence field, de Guingand proved very skillful at the job. He used the famous Long Range Desert Group to analyze the many differing reports that came in from various sources. When the intelligence indicated that Axis troops under Generalleutnant Erwin Rommel were massing to attack at Gazala in Libya in May 1942, de Guingand was able to issue an advanced warning. He also correctly forecast the Axis capture of Tobruk in June 1942. That July, after the First Battle of El Alamein (also known as the Battle of Ruweisat Ridge), de Guingand was reassigned as the Eighth Army’s Brigadier, General Staff (Operations). 

When Montgomery assumed command of the Eighth Army the following month, he broke with British military tradition by completely but unofficially changing the organization of his staff. Without seeking approval from London, he consolidated responsibility by making his chief of staff his primary adviser and the absolute master of all staff work, much as the Americans and French did, instead of separating it across three different branches (the general staff for planning, operations, and intelligence; the adjutant general’s staff for personnel and administration; and the quartermaster general’s staff for supply and transportation). As Montgomery wrote in his post-war memoirs: “The magnitude of the task in front of me was beginning to be apparent. I must have someone to help me, a man with a quick and clear brain, who would accept responsibility, and who would work out the details and leave me free to concentrate on the major issues—in fact, a Chief of Staff who could handle all the details and the intricate staff side of the business and leave me free to command…. Before we arrived at Eighth Army HQ I had decided that de Guingand was the man; I would make him chief of staff with full powers and together we would do the job…. I never regretted the decision.”

Freddie de Guingand thus became the British Army’s first modern, comprehensive chief of staff. Montgomery made his intentions crystal clear when he told his assembled senior officers, “I want to tell you that I work on the Chief-of-Staff system. I have nominated Brigadier de Guingand as Chief-of-Staff Eighth Army. I will issue orders through him. Whatever he says will be taken as coming from me and will be acted on at once.” Thus, once Montgomery made his decisions, he left de Guingand with a free hand to manage the staff to work out all the details necessary to execute the commander’s intent. De Guingand functioned in all but name as Montgomery’s deputy commander. 

Once Montgomery assumed command,  he started strengthening the British defences on Alam el Halfa ridge in Egypt. He also pulled the Eighth Army’s main command post to Borg el Arab on the Mediterranean coast from its location on Ruweisat Ridge. There the Eighth Army co-located with the headquarters of the Western Desert Air Force, commanded by Air Vice Marshal Sir Arthur Coningham. One of the RAF’s most brilliant tactical air commanders, Coningham had a highly competitive personality that clashed with Montgomery’s. De Guingand quickly became the primary operations coordinator between the RAF and the Eighth Army. The synchronization of close air support for Montgomery’s ground forces remained one of de Guingand’s key responsibilities for the remainder of the war.

Rommel attacked at Alam el Halfa on August 30. When the British defences held, the Axis finally lost the initiative in Africa. De Guingand recommended an immediate counterattack, but Montgomery decided to reconstitute his forces in preparation for a set-piece break-out battle.

De Guingand’s usual practice was to operate from the main command post, while Montgomery directed the battle from a forward tactical command post—“Tac CP”—with his chief of staff making daily visits to Montgomery. Just before the British started their breakout at El Alamein on October 23, de Guingand established a forward satellite of the Main CP on the coast close to Montgomery’s Tac CP and the CPs of the two attacking corps. 

By the early hours of October 25, reports indicated that the southern arm of the British attack was faltering. After assessing the situation, de Guingand concluded that the situation was reaching a crisis that only the army commander could resolve. He asked the commanders of X and XXX Corps to meet him at the Tac CP at 3:30 a.m. He then drove to the Tac CP, woke Montgomery, and briefed him on the situation. After the meeting with the corps commanders, Montgomery agreed with his chief of staff’s recommendation to suspend the attack along the southern corridor and to shift the effort to the northern thrust. That, however, required de Guingand to make a complete revision of the battle plan on the fly. He later received the Distinguished Service Order (DSO) for his role at El Alamein. 

After El Alamein, Rommel withdrew 1,300 miles westward along the Mediterranean coast of Africa, eventually linking up with Axis forces in Tunisia. Montgomery followed in what can only be termed a “slack pursuit.” On March 29, 1943, the Eighth Army breached the Mareth Line in southern Tunisia, bringing it under control of General Sir Harold Alexander’s 18th Army Group. The Allied theatre commander was General Dwight D. Eisenhower, with whom Montgomery already had a strained relationship. When they met for the first time in England at the end of May 1942, Montgomery had brusquely told Eisenhower to put out his cigarette. “I don’t permit smoking in my office,” he said. Ike complied but was quietly furious. Montgomery later told de Guingand his impression of Eisenhower: “Nice chap. No soldier.” However, when de Guingand and Walter Bedell Smith met for the first time, they hit it off immediately, and the relationship would help de Guingand navigate the contentious Eisenhower-Montgomery relationship for the rest of the war.

In mid-April Montgomery sent de Guingand, now promoted to the temporary wartime rank of major-general, to Cairo as his deputy to take over the planning for Operation Husky, the invasion of Sicily. Several days later, while flying back to Algiers for a planning conference, de Guingand’s plane crashed at El Adem in Libya and he was forced to spend several weeks in the hospital with a concussion and multiple fractures. Nonetheless, he was back in action on July 10, sorting out landing operation problems in Sicily. 

In late 1943 Eisenhower and Montgomery both relinquished their commands in the Mediterranean and transferred to London to assume their new positions for the invasion of Europe—Operation Overlord. Eisenhower was Supreme Allied Commander, Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF), and Montgomery became commander of the 21st Army Group, and also overall commander of land forces during initial operations in Normandy. Both of their chiefs of staff came with them. Bedell Smith and de Guingand continued to build on the solid professional relationship they already had established. De Guingand retained his temporary wartime rank of major-general, although the position was really authorized for a lieutenant-general. Montgomery asked him to accept the lower rank on the odd rationale that many of the brigadiers assigned to the staff would then push for promotions to major-general. De Guingand acquiesced to his boss’s wishes, but that would come back to haunt him in just a few years. 

The staff of Lieutenant-General Sir Frederick Morgan, the designated chief of staff to the Supreme Allied Commander, had already done a great amount of detail work on the invasion plan, but when Beetle and Freddie got their first look at the plan in January 1944, they quickly recognized that the invasion sector was too narrow and the assigned troops too few. Together, they briefed Montgomery, who agreed with them immediately. Then they convinced Eisenhower, who finally persuaded the Combined Chiefs of Staff to allocate more forces. From that point on they had only 22 weeks to re-work the basic plan and all the detail work to support it. Montgomery, as usual, gave de Guingand a free hand. 

Once the Allies landed in France on D-Day, the friction between Eisenhower and Montgomery only grew worse. But it was not only Americans that Montgomery alienated. Many of his fellow British senior officers also considered him insufferable, especially Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder, Eisenhower’s Deputy Supreme Commander at SHAEF. De Guingand increasingly found himself intervening with his fellow countrymen on Montgomery’s behalf. More and more Montgomery refused to participate in meetings at SHAEF headquarters, sending de Guingand as his representative instead. Although de Guingand always supported his boss’s positions on operational matters, he also managed to serve as an effective peacemaker and intermediary. 

The running Ike-Monty feud took a turn for the worse on September 1, 1944, when Eisenhower assumed the role of combined ground forces commander. Montgomery, who believed he should retain that position, took it personally and continued to agitate for the role until the end of the war. Another source of friction was Ike’s strategy of attacking Germany across a broad front; Montgomery insisted they should put all the Allied weight into a single rapier-like thrust into northern Germany—commanded by himself, of course. At one point, Eisenhower partially gave in, authorizing Montgomery to launch Operation Market Garden in September 1944 to push through the Netherlands into Germany and seize the Rhine bridges. De Guingand, however, had serious reservations about the operation and tried to convince Montgomery that the Germans would almost certainly be able to defeat it. Montgomery dismissed the concerns, but subsequent events proved de Guingand all too right when the Germans blocked the British advance at the Rhine.

The final crisis between Ike and Monty came in late December 1944, during Germany’s offensive in the Ardennes, the Battle of the Bulge. True to form, Montgomery refused to attend Eisenhower’s senior leaders’ emergency meeting at Verdun on December 19, 1944. Tedder, Omar Bradley, Third Army commander George S. Patton, Bedell Smith, and 6th Army Group commander Lt. Gen. Jacob L. Devers were all there. Montgomery sent de Guingand. Eisenhower made the correct decision to place U.S. First and Ninth Armies temporarily under the operational control of Montgomery’s 21st Army Group to fight the German penetration north of the Bulge shoulder. Montgomery, however, became openly very critical of American performance during the battle. The British press echoed the criticisms, suggesting that Montgomery had “saved the bacon” for the Americans, and demanding that Monty be made overall land forces commander for the rest of the war. 

That was the final straw for Eisenhower. On December 30 Ike decided to tell British prime minister Winston Churchill and the Combined Chiefs of Staff that either he or Montgomery had to go. When de Guingand saw the draft of Eisenhower’s letter, he had no doubt which way the decision would fall. But he persuaded Eisenhower to postpone sending the letter until he could talk to Montgomery. At first, Montgomery refused to accept the seriousness of the situation, believing that there was no other British general who could replace him. He was shocked when de Guingand told him that Eisenhower was prepared to recommend Sir Harold Alexander, now a field marshal, as the replacement. 

Montgomery finally understood the gravity of his position. He asked de Guingand to draft an abject letter of apology to Eisenhower in an effort to defuse the situation. A very uncharacteristically humble-sounding Montgomery wrote, “Have seen Freddie and understand you are greatly worried by many considerations in these difficult days.” And, “Whatever your decision may be, you can rely upon me one hundred percent to make it work.” He signed the letter, “Your very devoted subordinate, Monty.” It worked. Eisenhower was mollified. But of course, after the war and to the end of his life Montgomery never missed an opportunity to snipe at Ike.

In 1946 MONTGOMERY was selected to succeed Alanbrooke as CIGS, the professional head of the British Army. Monty had already told de Guingand that he wanted him as his vice chief, and he arranged his assignment as Director of Military Intelligence at the War Office in London as a preparatory position. At the last minute, however, the outgoing Alanbrooke raised objections, citing de Guingand’s health as the reason. Almost as soon as he took office, Montgomery summarily told de Guingand, “I’ve decided not to have you for my Vice.” Stunned, de Guingand asked why, Montgomery callously answered, “Because it would not do me any good.” End of discussion. 

De Guingand realized he no longer had a role in the British Army. His only option was to retire, but he was still only a temporary wartime major-general. He could not afford to retire at his substantive rank of colonel. De Guingand appealed to his old boss for help, but Montgomery declined to get involved in what he considered a petty administrative detail far beneath the level of a great commander. Bedell Smith, however, was outraged by de Guingand’s situation and he brought it to Ike’s attention. After Eisenhower intervened personally at the highest levels of the British government, de Guingand finally received promotion to the substantive rank of major-general on September 10, 1946. He retired five months later. 

The United States recognized de Giungand’s value. In April 1945 the U.S. awarded him the Legion of Merit in the degree of Commander, and in January 1948 the U.S. Army presented him with the Distinguished Service Medal. After the war de Guingand became a successful businessman in South Africa. But as Montgomery’s vitriolic pot shots at Eisenhower continued throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s, de Guingand increasingly leaned toward sympathizing with Ike, who cited him no fewer than 15 times in the endnotes of his 1948 book, Crusade in Europe. That book infuriated Montgomery, which naturally increased the growing separation between de Guingand and his former boss. Nonetheless, de Guingand was one of the eight official pallbearers at Montgomery’s state funeral on April 1, 1976.

Sir Francis Wilfred de Guingand died at Cannes, France, on June 29, 1979. His place in the history of World War II is best summed up by what Eisenhower wrote in Crusade in Europe about the chief of staff of the 21st Army Group: “He was Major-General Francis de Guingand, ‘Freddy’ to all his associates in SHAEF and in other high headquarters. He lived the code of the Allies and his tremendous capacity, ability, and energy were devoted to the co-ordination of plan and detail that was absolutely essential to victory.”

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Director John Ford went on inactive status from the navy in 1944 to film an adaptation of They Were Expendable, William Lindsay White’s book about PT boats during the opening months of the war in the Philippines. The movie starred Robert Montgomery, who had joined the navy after Pearl Harbor and, like the character he plays, commanded a PT boat. John Wayne, who had not served in the war, was billed second. Back on a film set, Ford remained the same cantankerous needler he had been before the war and he zeroed in on “Duke” Wayne, one of his favorite targets. In Print the Legend, his Ford biography, author Scott Eyman relates how Montgomery watched the director rake Wayne over the coals. “Can’t you manage a salute that at least looks like you’ve been in the service?” Ford asked in front of the cast and crew. Eyman related what happened next. “Finally, Robert Montgomery walked over, placed his hands on both sides of the director’s chair and said, ‘Don’t ever talk to Duke like that. You ought to be ashamed.’ The set fell silent. A break was ordered, and Ford ended up in tears.”

Despite the turmoil on set, They Were Expendable ended up being one of Ford’s finest films, a melancholic love letter to PT boats and to the navy in general. 

When the film opens in Manila on the eve of war in 1941, Lieutenant John “Brick” Brickley (Montgomery) wants to demonstrate the potential of the PT boats he commands. His admiral is dismissive (“In wartime, I prefer something more substantial,” he says). So is his second in command, Lt. (j.g.) Rusty Ryan (Wayne). Rusty wants a transfer to destroyers. 

Then the war comes. 

In one early scene, Rusty receives a finger wound that becomes infected and Brick orders him to the hospital on Corregidor. There he strikes up a brief romance with nurse Sandy Davyss (Donna Reed). Like everything else in the movie, the romance is realistic and understated. Rusty invites Sandy for dinner at the hut serving as the officers’ club, where sailors hidden in the crawl space beneath the building serenade them. It’s a touching scene, but Ford understands that romance is impossible under these conditions. The last time the two speak is over a field telephone as Rusty prepares to depart on a mission and Sandy remains on Corregidor as the Japanese move closer. The conversation gets cut off abruptly when higher-ups commandeer the line. Rusty—and the audience—never learn Sandy’s fate. 

Ford uses his own naval experience to create a sense of authenticity. There’s no place for cinematic heroics. Earlier in the film, as Brick chafes at the limited role his boats have been given, the admiral compares the situation to a baseball game. If the manager tells you to hit a sacrifice bunt, that’s what you do. “You and I are professionals,” he says. At the end, when Rusty decides to give up his seat on the last plane out to Australia so he can join the guerrilla fight against the Japanese, Brick calmly reminds him that they have their orders. Rusty sits back down. 

Brick’s PT boats do see combat and those who like watching these speedy plywood craft in action will enjoy those sequences. They also get one vital mission when they spirit “the General” out of the war zone so he can continue the fight from Australia. Although the General remains nameless, audiences certainly recognized him as Douglas MacArthur. In real life, John D. Bulkeley, the Medal of Honor recipient on whom Montgomery’s character is based, did transport MacArthur and his family south to safety on Mindanao, where B-17s then flew them to Australia. 

One of the movie’s greatest strengths is its eye for detail—when Brickley grabs a pair of scissors to estimate the distance on map; the terrified faces of wounded soldiers on Corregidor as Japanese bombs fall; the cook’s instructions to use a pinch of salt in the pancake batter; the way Sandy brushes her hair and puts on a string of pearls before sitting down to dinner with the officers; the fact that Rusty demands aviation fuel (PT boats used Packard engines adapted from airplanes). It is also beautifully filmed, with haunting shots of the shadowy and wet tunnels of Corregidor and some pulse-pounding sequences of PT boats dodging shell bursts. 

They Were Expendable turned out to be one of John Ford’s best films, but it was not a huge box office success when it was released at the end of 1945. It is a war movie in a minor key—subdued and somewhat melancholy. It matches the film’s subject matter: the American experience in the Philippines at the start of the war did not go well, either. No doubt, audiences who had just seen the terrible war come to an end were not eager to relive its grim early days, no matter how beautifully photographed.

this article first appeared in world war II magazine

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I’m writing concerning Lilland Hamilton, former PFC U.S. Army, affectionately referred to as “Puppy” by his family. My understanding is that Puppy served as a medic in the Pacific, ending his enlistment in occupied Japan. While digging through his old stuff I found this picture book printed in Japanese and English. What is this?

—Jerry Loudermilk, Spencer, Oklahoma 

A peculiar offshoot of war is the vast preponderance of souvenirs. While the idea of dismal and constant combat seems all-consuming, there was always plenty of downtime for soldiers and sailors. The collections at The National WWII Museum are filled with donated objects, such as a lavish booklet created for a walking tour of Rome, tiny photographs of Pacific islanders, and dozens of scalloped-edge postcards of the Eiffel Tower, each picked up by men and women visiting parts of the world they had never seen before.

This Japanese album is a similar memento of military service in a foreign land. However, it decidedly does not revel in the wonder of exploring new places. This propaganda piece, printed in Tokyo for Japanese civilians and victorious soldiers, commemorates the violent takeover of an ancient and vital port city in China.

In the years before the attack on Pearl Harbor brought the United States into World War II, Japan and China were embroiled in battles that many historians argue mark the true beginning of the war. The military leadership of Japan had the commercial and financial center of Shanghai in its sights since 1932. In 1937, the Battle of Shanghai represented the first of what would become 22 major battles between China’s National Revolutionary Army and the invading Imperial Japanese Army. 

The brutal urban fighting, which took place from August to November, is illustrated for the victors in this 64-page booklet entitled, Sino-Japanese Incident of 1937. Wholly uninterested in the city or its people, the images in the album celebrate only Japanese militarism and triumph, highlighting generals, showcasing achievement after achievement, its captions depicting “gallant” Japanese soldiers “at work” as they burn, blast, and bludgeon their way through the crumbling metropolis. While accurate numbers are difficult to confirm, well over 200,000 people died in the fighting, along with tens of thousands more who were wounded before the Japanese army finally routed the Chinese defenders. 

This Japanese photo tour of Shanghai is markedly different than any “tourist” publication kept by American servicemen. While the piece does feature photographs of the ruined city’s battered temples, rail stations, government buildings, monuments, airfields, and neighborhoods, there is usually a cadre of victorious Japanese soldiers in the foreground—excitedly cheering for the camera.

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James M. Fenelon’s second book is “Angels Against the Sun: A WWII Saga of Grunts, Grit, and Brotherhood.” It tells the story of the 11th Airborne Division. Nicknamed the “Angels,” it was the only airborne division the United States sent to the Pacific Theater, but ironically it fought largely as infantry as it battled its way through the Philippines and participated in the bloody battle for Manila. Fenelon is a former paratrooper himself, have served for 12 years in the military, and he is a graduate of the U.S. Army’s Airborne, Jumpmaster, and Pathfinder schools. His first book was “Four Hours of Fury,” an account of the U.S. 17th Airborne Division and its combat jump over the Rhine River in March 1945.

In this interview, Fenelon talks to World War II magazine editor Tom Huntington about “Angels Against the Sun.”

The “dam busters” mission has gone down in history as a legendary feat by the Royal Air Force. On the night of May 16, 1943, 19 Avro Lancasters of the recently created 617 Squadron took off from their base at RAF Scampton. Their mission: to breach three dams in Germany’s Ruhr Valley and deal a major blow to the enemy’s industrial capability. Led by Wing Commander Guy Gibson, the airplanes of Operation Chastise carried a specially designed “bouncing bomb” developed by inventor Barnes Wallis. The dam busters managed to breach two of the dams, but at great cost. Eight Lancasters were lost, and 53 airmen were killed and three captured. The Germans were able to repair the damage relatively quickly. Despite the losses and the Germans’ quick recovery, the feat captured the British imagination as an example of the bravery and innovation that was needed to win the war. 

The Dam Busters, the 1955 film about the mission, is based on the 1951 book of the same name by Paul Brickhill and Gibson’s own account, Enemy Coast Ahead (published posthumously in 1946). The movie opens as Wallis (Michael Redgrave) experiments at his home trying to bounce marbles across the water in a tin basin. It’s part of his scheme to design a bomb that can destroy German dams. Conventional weapons don’t work because the water dissipates the force of their explosions. Wallis theorizes that a bomb skipping across the surface would hit a dam and sink before exploding at the base, where the water pressure behind it would amplify the explosion’s effect. Officials are skeptical, and their doubts only increase following failure after failure. Finally, Wallis achieves success, and the mission moves forward.

Playing Gibson, who had a reputation for not suffering fools gladly, is actor Richard Todd, a World War II veteran himself. Gibson finds that the mission will be no piece of cake. The four-engine Lancasters will have to go in very low—60 feet above the water on their final approaches—and the bomb drops need to be precise. The film embraces one dam busters legend by asserting that Gibson got the idea of how to determine proper altitude when he noticed the spotlights at a theatrical performance. He is inspired to mount two downward pointing spotlights on each bomber, adjusted so the beams will converge on the water at 60 feet. To determine range, the bombardiers use a simple wooden hand-held sight. 

Director Michael Anderson opted to shoot the film in black and white to give it a grittier, documentary feel. It also allowed him to incorporate actual footage from the bomb testing, but with one drawback: aspects of the weapon remained classified at the time, so the filmmakers had to paint over the test footage frame by frame to hide the bombs’ shapes and the fact that they spun backwards (which allowed them to “crawl” down the side of the dams before exploding). The end result may have preserved secrecy, but the alterations are obvious. 

The special effects in general have not aged well. Ground fire is clearly an animated effect and some of the model work doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. The filmmakers might have been aware of this. The first aerial shot of one of the dams is clearly a model, but then the camera pans back to show that it is, in fact, a model, one constructed for the aviators’ training. What remains timeless are the sequences of the Lancasters. The production was able to procure four of them for the shoot—only 10 years after the war’s end the bombers were already in short supply—and the sight and sound of these mighty Merlin-powered beasts roaring by at low altitude will please aviation aficionados. The attack sequences remain exciting, models notwithstanding.

Those battle scenes inspired George Lucas when he was creating the final attack on the Death Star in 1977’s Star Wars, and a comparison of the two films will show some startling similarities and even some shared dialogue. (They also shared the talent of Gilbert Taylor, who did special effects photography on Dam Busters and was the cinematographer for Star Wars.) The attacks are not the only thing that might have inspired Star Wars. The hairstyle worn by Wallis’s movie wife (Ursula Jeans) has more than a passing similarity to the “cinnamon buns” sported by Carrie Fisher’s Princess Leia in Lucas’s movie.  

The special effects, however, are not the only thing about The Dam Busters that has aged badly. There’s also the matter of Gibson’s dog, whose name is a racial slur that would have been, at the very least, offensive in 1955 and has since become completely unacceptable, and it’s a word that is woven throughout the movie (the dog’s name provides one of the code words the busters use to signal a dam breach). American distributors considered overdubbing to change the name to “Blackie,” but did not. Although the dog’s name is historically correct, modern audiences will find it jarring, or may think they stumbled into a bit of pointed Blazing Saddles-style social satire by mistake. No doubt this aspect of the film is the reason why The Dam Busters is impossible to find on any streaming services; a 2021 Blu-ray release, though, offers a restored print of the film and plenty of extras.

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It wasn’t until February 23, 1945, that the Turkish Grand National Assembly voted—unanimously—to declare war on Germany and Japan. This was only six weeks after Turkey severed links with Japan, six months since ending diplomatic relations with longtime trading partner Germany, and less than three months before the German surrender. The declaration of war was mostly a formality to join the postwar United Nations—Turkey would remain a non-belligerent—but it was still an unexpected act from a country that for years had stubbornly refused to be drawn into choosing a side in the war. In the words of one Turkish minister, Turkey “was determined to maintain her neutrality to the end.” While the rights of neutrals were rarely respected by the warring countries, Turkey had dug in its heels.  

It was a fine and dangerous line on which Turkey balanced. The country was terrified by the threat of Luftwaffe bombers in occupied Greece, which could level Turkish cities overnight. But Turkey feared a victorious Soviet Union even more than a victorious Germany, as the Soviets had been eyeing Turkish ports and waterways for years. This animosity was nothing new: beginning in 1568 Turkey and Russia had fought 17 wars, the majority of which resulted in Russian victories. As Ottavio De Peppo, the Italian ambassador to Turkey during the war, phrased it, “the Turkish idea is that the last German soldier should fall upon the last Russian corpse.”  

Beginning in 1939, war had consumed the region around Turkey, the nation that served as the literal bridge between Europe and Asia. Along with Nazi-occupied Greece directly to the west, the Germans also controlled the former Ottoman Balkan territories of Bulgaria, Bosnia, and Serbia to the northwest. Turkey’s southern neighbors, the British and French colonial empires occupying Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon, had quickly been drafted into battle for the Allies and, after 1941, Turkey’s longtime enemy, the Soviet Union, joined the fight against Germany—meaning Turkey had become encircled by belligerents. Yet Turkey, with crucial shipping routes connecting the Black Sea to the Mediterranean and possessing the major land passage to the oil-rich Caucasus, maintained its neutrality and independence throughout nearly all of World War II. This was not evidence of indecision or cowardice, but rather a sign of a carefully tended strategy—one created, as Turkey saw it, out of pure necessity. And one that allowed it to preserve its economy as well as avoid the physical ravages of battle.

Neutrality had been a cornerstone of the Republic of Turkey since it had been created in 1923 by founding father and president Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the soldier-turned-leader-turned-national hero. Atatürk had built his country from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire, the 600-year Islamic imperial realm that had once ruled much of the Middle East, but which in its last decades had been reduced to a puppet state for more powerful European nations. After the Ottoman defeat in World War I, Atatürk’s forces fought off the French and British as well as Turkey’s millennium-old enemies of Greece and Armenia in the 1919-1923 Turkish War of Independence. Atatürk’s subsequent reforms transformed Turkey into a secular, modern nation, putting the new country on the path to peace and prosperity. Atatürk believed the young republic needed to look inward to develop fully, coining the phrase “Peace at home, peace in the world” to explain the new isolationist policies he advanced. But this position had become increasingly untenable as fascist governments began forming across Europe, inching ever closer to Turkey’s borders. 

Atatürk died of cirrhosis of the liver on the morning of November 10, 1938, only hours after Nazis had shattered the windows of Jewish businesses and synagogues across Germany and Austria on Kristallnacht. The two stories dominated the evening editions of newspapers around the world. Atatürk’s successor, the unassuming İsmet İnönü, had been the equivalent of a colonel during World War I, fighting on the Caucasus and Palestinian fronts, where he became Atatürk’s confidante. He later rose to the equivalent of brigadier general during the Turkish War of Independence, winning two major battles against the Greeks and serving as commander at the final Turkish victory in 1922. 

Slim and shy in contrast to the charismatic and forceful Atatürk, 54-year-old İnönü was committed to continuing Atatürk’s policy of international neutrality, even once World War II began. İnönü believed neutrality was about more than just preserving economic and political relations with the Axis and the Allies; he saw it as a matter of survival for his young country, necessary to avoid takeover by its larger and more established neighbors like Italy, Germany, or—worst of all—the Soviet Union.

İnönü’s view was part of a larger cultural stance, explains Murat Önsoy, a professor in War Studies and German Studies at Turkey’s Hacettepe University: “Turkish elites came from a generation that had witnessed the destruction of the Ottoman Empire…. They had seen how the Balkans had faded away out of their hands and how Turkey had been slighted in World War I, and they witnessed how hard the Republic was achieved.” 

Even though the country had signed the Tripartite Alliance treaty in October 1939 with France and Britain, a 15-year agreement of collaboration in the interests of national security, İnönü officially declared Turkey’s non-belligerence on June 26, 1940. This was a tough blow for the British. Prime Minister Winston Churchill complained that Turkey was “shirking her responsibilities.”  

While the British would still have access to Turkey’s strategic shipping ports, they were more interested in seeing Germany lose such rights, knowing the loss would hit Germany harder, since after its defeat in World War I it had no colonies and few trading partners. Churchill also wanted a base in the area from which to launch his desired Mediterranean attacks on what he called Europe’s “soft underbelly.” But as the war advanced, the Allies believed that, if they were patient, Turkey would join their side soon enough. The British ambassador to Turkey, Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen, recommended “keeping the pot boiling”—meaning that Allied leaders should continue their pressure campaign on the Turks.

In late September 1939, the German ambassador to Turkey, Franz von Papen, had stated that “in no circumstances did Germany intend to start a war in the Mediterranean.” But rival Italy entered the war in June 1940, and Germany had completed its takeover of both Greece and the Balkans by 1941. Hitler immediately sent an official letter to İnönü confirming German respect of Turkish neutrality, declaring that he did not start the war, that he was not “intending to attack Turkey,” and that he had “ordered troops in Bulgaria to stay far from the Turkish border in order not to make out a false impression of their presence.”  

Turkey initially looked the other way as both Germany and Britain infringed its neutrality. The Turkish government chose a very loose interpretation of its agreement at the 1936 Montreux Convention, which confirmed Turkey’s control over the Turkish Straits—the Bosphorus and Dardanelles waterways—but also required the country to prohibit the passage of belligerent naval ships in any conflict in which Turkey was neutral. Yet Allied and Axis warships were regular presences in both during the war. 

There were many reasons why Germany didn’t simply invade Turkey. Even though several foreign diplomats estimated that it would only take them 48 hours to conquer Istanbul, Turkey’s largest city, the ghost of Gallipoli—when Ottoman forces had fought off the better-supplied British, Australian, and New Zealand militaries for eight months in World War I—still haunted the memories of the European powers, and the Germans kept their distance. In addition, Turkey was larger than all European countries except the Soviet Union, with a difficult terrain and a sizeable—though unmodernized and undersupplied—standing military, making quick and easy victory anything
but certain.

But Germany’s  primary reason for hesitating to invade Turkey was economic. Throughout the 1930s, more than half of Turkey’s trade was with Nazi Germany. German banks had also taken advantage of the high prices in the Turkish precious metals market to sell their looted gold. Deutsche Bank ledgers recovered by the Allies after the war showed that more than 2,200 pounds of gold stolen from German’s Holocaust victims had been sold to Turkey. 

İnönü understood early that none of the Allies could replace Germany as a primary trading partner. Britain, France, and the United States had their own sources for the country’s cotton and tobacco, in contrast to the Germans, whose lack of colonies limited their access to such products. In return, Germany remained the most ardent supporter of Turkish neutrality since a neutral Turkey was a guarantee of a ready supply of raw materials. 

The most important raw material that Turkey supplied was chromium. This was manufactured into chrome, an essential material for making stainless steel since it provides resistance to rust, and was used to make gun barrels, tanks, aircraft engines, ball bearings, shells, and submarine parts. In 1939, Turkish chrome output was about 200,000 tons per year, about a fifth of the world’s total, of which Germany bought half. This was the only non-Allied source of quality chrome. There were some mines in Greece and the Balkans, but the deposits didn’t have the more preferred chromium-to-iron ratio of Turkish chrome. 

The British were keeping a close eye on all this. British ambassador to Turkey Knatchbull-Hugessen sent a report in 1941 to the Ministry of Economic Warfare noting that “Chrome ore is very high on the list of commodities which were believed to be of critical importance to Germany.” He estimated that “stocks are believed to be equivalent to about seven months’ supply.”

He hadn’t exaggerated. Albert Speer, Germany’s Minister of Armaments and War Production, wrote in a memorandum to Hitler on November 10, 1943, that “should supplies from Turkey be cut off, the stockpile of chromium is sufficient for only five to six months…almost the entire gamut of artillery would have to cease from one to three months after this deadline.” Germany also understood that if it invaded Turkey, the Turks would quickly destroy the mines, as the Greeks had done in their country.

Fully aware of this dynamic, the Allies remained less concerned about Turkey’s declared neutrality than with its material boost to the German war machine. But İnönü was elusive with the Allies when pressured on the topic and sidestepped both British and American proposals to cease exports to Germany, though Turkish diplomats promised that they were employing various subterfuge to delay shipments.

The British kept up diplomatic pressure, but Turkey became more and more distant as Germany consolidated its power around the Mediterranean. Turkey and Germany signed a 10-year mutual non-aggression pact on June 18, 1941, just four days before Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union.  

But, at the same time, as the full extent of the damage from France’s collapse the year before became apparent and alongside new threats to Britain’s Middle Eastern colonies, Turkey’s value to the Allies increased. And the country had plenty of concerns about the goals of the Axis Powers. While Turkey had a historically close relationship with Germany, the same could not be said for the Axis power of Italy. Mussolini’s cries of “mare nostrum,” or “our sea”—a term popular with Italian fascists to encourage domination of the Mediterranean Sea—combined with Italy’s construction of military bases on the Italian-controlled Dodecanese Islands only miles off Turkey’s southwest shore, had always made İnönü hesitant to join the Axis, as well as grateful for the British naval presence in the area. As the war completed its third year, it seemed Turkey’s resolve to remain a non-belligerent was finally beginning to waver.

In late January 1943, Churchill and İnönü met in a Turkish railcar for the Adana Conference, where Churchill yet again tried and failed to convince İnönü to join the Allies. The details of the 90-minute discussion weren’t recorded, but rumor has it that at one point an exasperated Churchill asked how the Turks couldn’t hear the German guns right over their border. İnönü reportedly in-formed Churchill that, since he had been a gunner in his earlier military days, he couldn’t hear very well. 

Önsoy, the Turkish professor in War Studies, calls this İnönü’s “wait and see mentality.” This attitude led one of the participants at the Second Cairo Conference, attended by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Churchill, and İnönü in December 1943, to remark that the Turkish delegation “wore hearing devices so perfectly tuned to one another that they all went out of order at the same instant whenever there were mentions of the possibility of Turkey entering the war.”

İnönü would remind his cabinet of the Turkish proverb, “There is always safety in patience.” By the end of 1943, though, İnönü’s patience was becoming a source of danger. The Germans openly threatened to bomb Turkish cities if the country abandoned its neutrality to join the Allies. German ambassador von Papen calculated that since the majority of Istanbul was composed of wooden structures, one air raid by the Bulgaria-based Luftwaffe could easily have the entire city up in flames.

Yet İnönü also knew that if he did not declare war against Germany, he would have no say in the postwar plans already being negotiated among the Allies. Relations with Britain had deteriorated as Britain tired of the Turkish delegation’s stalling tactics. Even the ever hopeful and tenacious Churchill wrote in his journal that he was “becoming resigned to Turkish neutrality.”

At dinner with Roosevelt and Stalin during the Tehran Conference in November 1943, Churchill suggested that a country as large as the Soviet Union “deserved access to warm water ports.” Joseph Stalin was less subtle, announcing, “We ought to take [Turkey] by the scruff of the neck if necessary.” Churchill had earlier warned İnönü that he would not stop the Soviets from taking control of the Dardanelles waterway if Turkey refused to join the Allies. Such statements confirmed Turkey’s worst fears about postwar realignments. 

İnönü took note of Germany’s losses on nearly every front by that next spring, particularly at Stalingrad. In April 1944, Britain and the United States threatened Turkey with an embargo unless Turkey stopped sending strategic materials, most notably chrome, to Germany. Turkey ceased all shipments on April 21. Churchill told the British Parliament that Turkey had provided “good service” by halting chrome exports, despite what he characterized as the country’s “exaggerated attitude of caution.”

Turkey officially declared war in February 1945. Never as liberal-minded as his predecessor, İnönü used this as an excuse to crack down on dissidents and exert further control over the country’s media. The once commonplace pro-German editorials disappeared from the pages of all major Turkish newspapers.

The war declaration didn’t involve any active fighting on the part of Turkey or its large military and there were no casualties. However, the American ambassador to Turkey, Edwin C. Wilson, noted that the Turks “expect treatment identical to that which has been given to the other United Nations which have not been occupied by the enemy and they do not consider themselves in the same category as neutrals.”

Turkey’s strategic importance, once its greatest vulnerability, now became its strength, as its location was integral to the emerging Western focus on containing the USSR. The Soviet threat came at the right time for Turkey, dissipating any Allied resentment over its previous neutrality. Roosevelt said he did not blame the Turkish leaders for not wanting to get caught “with their pants down.” Great Britain quickly forgot any grudge it might have held, as the two countries stood together against Soviet expansionism. 

President Harry Truman announced in his Truman Doctrine in 1947 that any attack on Turkey would be an attack on the United States, and he signed an aid agreement with Turkey worth $150 million. Five years later, Turkey was made a full member state of NATO, the only Muslim-majority country to do so until Albania joined in 2009.

While İnönü does not carry the mystique or fame of his predecessor Atatürk, his calculating negotiations ensured his country avoided seizure by the Soviets, either through invasion or as war reparations for having aligned themselves commercially with the losing Axis. And Turkey didn’t have to rebuild itself physically or economically like so many of its European neighbors in the aftermath of the war.

İnönü later defended his country’s initial adoption of neutrality by asking, “With what right could anyone expect us to do anything else at the time, when the Germans were at the gates of Istanbul, Britain feared invasion of the British Isles, Russia had a Non-Aggression Pact with Germany, and the United States was not in the war?” 

The middle course—that Atatürk had originally envisioned and İnönü had maintained—allowed the country uninterrupted development and modernization while simultaneously preserving its independence. There hadn’t been peace in the world, but İnönü had managed some semblance of peace at home, achieving his stated goal to be “at the table but not on the menu.”

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It wasn’t long after the advent of flying war machines before militaries developed weapons to shoot them down. Germany experimented with anti-aircraft guns in World War I and, despite post-Versailles restrictions that ostensibly limited German war industry, in the 1930s they designed the Flak 18, an accurate, high-muzzle-velocity, 88mm anti-aircraft gun. It proved its worth during the Spanish Civil War and became one of the best known and most feared weapons of World War II. 

As an anti-aircraft weapon the Flak was lethally effective. The gun’s high velocity and rapid firing rate allowed synchronized German batteries of four to accurately hurl massive 17-pound shells thousands of feet into the air, where they would explode into 1,500 fragments or more, leaving tell-tale black puffs of smoke. Any aircraft within 200 yards were at risk from the scything shards of metal. Tens of thousands of Allied airplanes fell victim to 88mm Flaks during the course of the war. 

While the Wehrmacht initially thought the gun too large and heavy to serve in the field, its effectiveness in Spain made them revise their tactics. The improved Flak 36, introduced in 1939, had the flexibility to shoot at low angles, and its variety of both high-explosive and armor-piercing shells were effective against Allied tanks and fortified positions from more than 1.5 miles. The gun was eventually adapted for use on tanks, but the Germans deployed the majority of the Flaks in its original anti-aircraft role for home defense. 

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Everyone needs some good luck in life, but that that was especially true for those who lived and fought through World War II. I recently opened a diary of a German frontline soldier and found, carefully taped to the first page, a dried four-leaf clover. I’m glad to report the soldier survived, because his letters and diaries made him seem like a decent fellow. It got me thinking about the nature of luck in war. Some years ago, I went to Wolfsburg in Germany, home of the Volkswagen, but also of Jupp Klein, a former Fallschirmjäger (paratrooper) and veteran of long years in the war in Russia, Sicily, and Italy. Did he remember his first time in combat, I asked? Yes, he replied. He’d just arrived at the front and immediately came under fire from heavy mortar shelling by the Red Army. He was in a slit trench with two other men, he in the middle. When it was over, he discovered both his comrades were dead, but he had not suffered a scratch. “I was lucky,” he told me.

Later he was standing in the ruins of Cassino in Italy. “Suddenly, something made me hit the ground,” he said. “A sixth sense. A split-second later, a shell hurtled right over my head.” That sixth sense, he reckoned, had only come from experience. That had not been luck.

Statistics don’t lie, and infantrymen had a bum deal, make no mistake. Allied infantry in northwest Europe, for example, statistically had no chance of getting through unscathed, although, of course, plenty did. Ray Saidel was the only man of some 40 frontline servicemen I talked to about their experiences in Italy who came out without a scratch. He’d been in the 1st Armored Infantry Regiment. Eugene Sledge was one of eight men who was still standing in his company after going through Peleliu and Okinawa. Why him? And why did Ray survive unblemished when statistically he had no right to do so? Was it a sixth sense for self-preservation? Or pure luck?

A little while ago, at the wonderful National World War II Museum in New Orleans, I caught up with Ken Beckman, aged 100. He had been a bomber navigator in the Eighth Air Force. Not any old navigator either, because Ken was so good at his job, he’d become the youngest major in the Eighth and by the war’s end had chalked up 48 combat missions, which certainly defied the statistics of survivability. “When people ask me how I’ve made it to a hundred,” he said with a grin, “I always say it’s down to pure luck.”

Hmm, I wondered. Ken had joined the Eighth in the fall of 1943, literally the worst possible time. The air force was suffering such terrible casualties that statistically it was impossible to complete even 25 missions. When Ken’s squadron went out on the second Schweinfurt raid on October 14, 1943, his ship was one of only two to make it back. He told me the story of how one time they’d been due to bomb an airfield in Holland. As lead navigator, he got them to the target all right, but the lead bombardier dropped too early and so they missed completely. Later, on his second tour in the latter half of 1944, Ken’s aircraft had been badly shot up and urgently needed a place to land. “We came down on the very same airfield in Holland we’d been due to smash up six months earlier,” he said, chuckling. “Quite by chance. As I said, I was lucky.”

Surely, though, I suggested, experience must have helped him? He shrugged. He wasn’t the pilot. And not many survived two tours. “It was luck, that’s all.” Maybe he’s right. Or maybe a combination of good fortune and experience saw him through. Clearly, a four-leaf clover cannot save anyone, but the other statistics don’t lie either; many did defy the odds and survive. Maybe some people simply are born lucky and that’s all there is to it.

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The German vessel Komet lay dead in the water, immobilized by Arctic ice. Captain Robert Eyssen watched from the wheelhouse as a large Soviet icebreaker crunched through the icepack toward him. The steel-reinforced bow of the 11,000-ton icebreaker Stalin could crush the Komet’s hull like an eggshell. 

It was August 1940. The Nazi blitzkrieg was storming through western Europe, where the German Wehrmacht seemed unstoppable. But the war at sea was a different matter. Although German U-boats ravaged the Atlantic, the British Navy kept Germany’s few major surface warships mostly bottled up in their ports. Komet aimed to thwart the Royal Navy’s blockade and strike at vital sea lanes that sustained Britain’s war effort.

The shipwas no defenseless merchantman. In 1939, the German Navy commandeered the 7,500-ton passenger-cargo ship Ems and transformed it into an auxiliary cruiser, renamed KMS(Kriegsmarine Schiff) Komet. It was to be a commerce raider, designed to attack enemy vessels while disguised as a merchant ship sailing under a neutral false flag. Hinged steel deck plates concealed the ship’s main armament, six 5.9-inch guns. Captain Eyssen, however, did not lower the concealing deck plates and train Komet’s guns on the approaching icebreaker…because it was secretly an accomplice. Stalin was coming to free his vessel and clear a path through the ice so the German warship could transit the Russian Northern Passage, skirting the Arctic Circle and avoiding the Royal Navy, to emerge in the Pacific to plunder British and Allied shipping,

Komet’s mission was an unlikely offshoot of the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact—a cynical deal between Hitler and Stalin that triggered the outbreak of World War II. The pact, which stunned the diplomatic world on August 23, 1939, was much more than a pledge of mutual nonaggression. Secret clauses and side agreements amounted to a temporary limited partnership between the Nazi and Soviet dictators. At the outset, each got most of what he wanted. 

For Hitler, the pact was a green light to invade Poland, now that he could be confident that the Soviets would not join Britain and France in the war against Germany. In a follow-on trade agreement, Moscow promised to supply Germany with vital raw materials, especially oil and grain—a hedge against a possible British naval blockade of Germany. The quid pro quo for Soviet raw materials was the promise of German military technology, particularly naval technology.

Stalin had grandiose plans for building a blue-water navy with enormous warships. In May 1936 he approved a naval construction program that featured an astounding 24 battleships and 20 heavy cruisers. The Sovetsky Soyuz-class battleships were to be 30 percent larger than the massive German battleship Bismarck. Construction had started on four of them before the plan was scuttled after the Germans invaded in June 1941. But it is estimated that Stalin’s battleship program consumed about one third of the defense budget in 1940.

In October 1939, while Berlin tried to get Moscow to agree to deliver the promised raw materials, Soviet officials arrived in Berlin with lists of German equipment they wanted. The Russians presented a 48-page list of requests, half of which were naval and included an entire heavy cruiser and destroyer, blueprints for the Bismarck, naval heavy guns, mines, torpedoes, and enormous amounts of construction equipment and precision machinery for shipbuilding. Not surprisingly, the Germans balked at the “voluminous and unreasonable” Soviet demands.

Eventually, Moscow began shipping large amounts of oil, grain, rubber, and other goods to Germany, although never in the quantity Berlin demanded. The Germans understood that in order to keep the Soviet supplies flowing, they would have to make good on some of their promises. At the top of the Soviet wish list was a heavy cruiser. Berlin decided to hand over the not-yet-completed cruiser Lützow, the newest of the Admiral Hipper-class. These were formidable warships, displacing more than 16,000 tons and mounting eight 8-inch guns in four turrets. The saga of the Lützow illustrates the promise—and the frustrations—of German-Soviet naval cooperation. 

The Lützow was fitting out in a shipyard in Bremen in February 1940 when the transfer agreement was concluded. None of the 8-inch guns and only two turrets had been installed. Lützow eventually received four of the big guns in the fore and aft turrets. German tugs towed the ship through coastal waters and handed it over to Soviet tugs that towed the vessel the rest of the way to Leningrad. The Soviets renamed the cruiser Petropavlovsk. 

The ship was still incomplete when it arrived. Besides missing half the main and all the secondary armament (twelve 5.9-inch guns), it had only a skeleton bridge, almost no superstructure above the first deck, and incomplete propulsion and mechanical elements. Over the next 12 months Germany was obliged to provide all these materials, plus detailed operating manuals and training for Soviet officers and crew. Even with the best of intentions on both sides, preparing the ship for sea was a daunting task and the project proceeded slowly. 

The Soviets were eager in principle to get on with it, despite misgivings about sending enlisted men to Germany or allowing numerous German officers in Leningrad. But unknown to them, in December 1940 Hitler approved Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union. From then on, German authorities went through the motions of preparing the training and completing the ship’s fitting out but dragged their feet at every turn. 

In other areas, however, the prospects for naval cooperation seemed more promising. As early as October 1939, Moscow signaled its willingness to provide a harbor for German naval operations in northwest Russia in exchange for military technology. German Naval Warfare Command (Seekriegsleitung, orSKL) leaped at the possibility, since a base on the northwest Soviet coast would let German submarines and surface warships bypass the North Sea choke points patrolled by the Royal Navy. On October 17, the Soviets offered Zapadnaya Litsa, a remote harbor northwest of Murmansk in the Motovsky Gulf, the westernmost point of the Kola
Peninsula. 

This harbor afforded good security as it was closed to both foreign and Soviet domestic shipping and its entrance could not be observed from the open sea. The German naval attaché in Moscow enthusiastically filled in SKL on the Soviet offer: “In this bay, Germany may do whatever she wishes; she may carry out whatever projects she should consider necessary. Any type of vessel may be permitted to call there (heavy cruisers, submarines, supply ships)…during any season of the year.” Despite some disadvantages—the harbor was totally undeveloped and isolated, with no naval facilities at all and no rail or road connections to the interior—SKL quickly accepted the offer and gave Zapadnaya Litsa the sensible code name Basis Nord (North Base).

Basis Nord was to have three principal missions: as a logistics base for German warships, a safe harbor, and a repair base. Admiral Karl Dönitz, head of Germany’s submarine fleet, was especially interested, even though he anticipated being able to operate only one U-boat there at a time. Any possibility of Germany fortifying the base was out of the question. Security for Basis Nord would be entirely in the hands of the Soviet Navy. 

Before making the base operational, Dönitz sent two submarines to evaluate the proposed base and the state of Soviet preparedness. This mission began inauspiciously, as the British submarine Salmon torpedoed and sank U-36 in the Norwegian Sea. Its sister ship, U-38, fared better. Its captain made a clandestine reconnaissance and reported that Soviet security and anti-submarine measures were excellent—so good, in fact, that he dared not attempt to follow a Soviet steamer through the anti-submarine nets in Kola Bay, a common tactic for German submariners.

SKL ordered several German merchant ships then trapped in Murmansk by the British blockade to proceed to Basis Nord, stocked with supplies to service German surface warships and submarines. Operationally, however, little was accomplished. Not only was the winter of 1940 exceptionally harsh, which hampered all naval activity in that northern region, but the Kriegsmarine was also stretched thin and had few vessels to spare for that theater, and Germany’s successes in Norway in April 1940 and a few months later in France provided the Kriegsmarine with bases that made Basis Nord totally unnecessary. Berlin ordered the base closed in August 1940.

But just as the book on Basis Nord was closing, a new chapter on naval cooperation between the not-quite allies was opening. In August 1940, the German auxiliary cruiser Komet was making its way through Russia’s ice-choked Northern Passage. 

Komet began its journey, with Soviet permission, by steaming up the Norwegian coast disguised as a Soviet vessel. In early August, it took on two Soviet pilots to navigate the Arctic ice. The Soviet icebreaker Lenin guided Komet through several western Arctic Ocean passages. Using Soviet navigation and ice charts, Captain Eyssen and the pilots steered the ship through the Kara Sea and into the East Siberian Sea, where Komet encountered very thick ice that damaged and temporarily immobilized it. That’s where the icebreaker Stalin came to the rescue and led Komet far enough eastward that Eyssen, after disembarking the pilots, was able to complete the last few hundred miles of the voyage on his own. On September 6, Komet passed through the narrow Bering Strait separating Siberia from Alaska, and into the North Pacific. Eyssen had traversed the northern sea route in 23 days, the fastest crossing of the Northern Passage ever, up to that time.

Eyssen’s instructions were to hunt for enemy merchantmen in the southern waters of the Pacific and Indian Oceans, to lay mines in the approaches to Australian, New Zealand, and South African ports, and to seek out the Antarctic whaling fleets. SKL’s objectives were to disrupt enemy, especially British, shipping, and by so doing, tie down British naval forces in remote areas, relieving some of the Royal Navy’s pressure on German home waters.

After refueling and topping off its supplies in Japan, Komet headed south. It reached the Caroline Islands without sighting a single enemy vessel. There, Eyssen rendezvoused with the auxiliary cruiser Orion and the unarmed freighter Kulmerland, a supply ship for the two raiders. All three took on the false identities of Japanese ships. Eyssen had the name Manyo Maru painted on Komet’sstern and likenesses of the Rising Sun flag emblazoned on the ship’s sides. No one on the Orion knew how to write its false identity in Japanese characters, so they copied some words from Japanese packaging found onboard and painted them on the ship’s side. Any observer who could read Japanese would have been surprised to find the ship operating under the unusual name Not Suitable for the Tropics.

Eyssen, the senior officer among the three captains, took his “Far Eastern Squadron” southeastward, cruising the sea lanes between New Zealand and Panama. On November 25, he found his first victim, the small New Zealand coaster Holmwood, which Komet sank with gunfire after first conveying its passengers and crew safely to Kulmerland and carrying off as many of the coaster’s cargo of sheep as the raiders could conveniently carry. At first the Germans were delighted with the fresh meat, but eventually they came to detest the taste of mutton. 

Two days later, Komet and Orion caught a really big fish, the 16,700-ton New Zealand passenger liner Rangitane, bound from Auckland to Liverpool via the Panama Canal with 302 passengers and crew and large quantities of dairy and frozen meat as well as 45 bars of silver. The ship was relatively well-armed, with a 127mm and 75mm gun astern and several anti-aircraft guns on the bridge. It was also faster than the German ships. But the raiders hemmed Rangitane in before the crew knew they were enemy warships. After suffering a short, deadly crossfire at close range, the captain surrendered—but not before sending out an emergency radio signal that he was being attacked by German raiders. Captain Eyssen wanted a prize crew to sail the liner to Germany, not least because it would have been the largest prize ship ever taken by a German raider. But the distress signal Rangitane managed to send out had been picked up and re-transmitted to Australian and New Zealand naval units. Radio intercepts revealed that enemy warships and aircraft were on the way. The Germans hurriedly brought the passengers and crew aboard, sent the liner and its valuable cargo to the bottom, and fled northeast at top speed toward the island of Nauru. Two long-range New Zealand flying boats reached the scene later that day but found only floating debris.

 Nauru lies roughly mid-way between Australia and Hawaii and is composed mainly of phosphate rock, a key ingredient in fertilizer. A joint British-Australian-New Zealand operation mined and exported that valuable commodity and Eyssen guessed correctly that he would find good hunting there. On December 6-7, Komet and Orion sank five freighters, four British and one Norwegian, in Nauru’s harbor and nearby waters. Several of the victims tried to flee, but a few well-aimed salvos compelled surrender, not without some loss of life on the freighters. Aside from that, all crew and passengers were brought on board the German vessels before their ships were destroyed. The captains of two of the British vessels thanked Eyssen in writing for “the way we have been treated on board your ship as prisoners. Everything possible has been done for us in the circumstances and…everything was done for the sick and wounded.” As acoup de grâce, after warning the civilians ashore of his intentions, Komet shelled the phosphate loading facilities on Nauru, putting them out of operation for months. Nauru did not resume full production until after the war. 

The Nauru operation was the most successful and economically consequential action of Komet’s war cruise. In recognition, SKL promoted Eyssen to Konteradmiral (rear admiral). His new orders were to head south in hopes of catching the Anglo-Norwegian whaling fleet near Antarctica, and then to proceed into the Indian Ocean. Komet sailed alone, as Orion was slower even when not plagued with engine trouble, as it often was. Finding no sign of the whalers, Komet proceeded north again in March 1941 to patrol the waters between Australia and Africa. However, due to the high level of raider activity in the Indian Ocean, merchant shipping increasingly traveled in convoys under British naval escort. The following months were unproductive and frustrating for Komet. During this lull, Eyssen received the electrifying news that the Wehrmacht had invaded the Soviet Union in June. There would be no more transits of the Northern Passage for him—at least not until Russia was completely subdued. 

SKL instructed Eyssen to return to Germany by October so Komet could be re-fit for its next war cruise. The new admiral was determined to score a few more victories on his way home and he was not disappointed. Near the Galapagos Islands on August 14, Komet’screw sighted the first enemy ship they had seen in seven and a half months. Still disguised as a Japanese vessel, the raider drew close before Eyssen had the Kriegsmarine ensign and his admiral’s pennant run up and he fired two warning shots. The 5,000-ton British freighter Australind, en route to England by way of the Panama Canal, refused to stop and its crew manned the 4-inch gun on the stern. At a range of only 3,000 yards, Komet rapidly put seven salvos into the British ship, severely damaging the bridge and killing the captain and another officer. The wounded ship stopped and lowered its boats. Eyssen brought the survivors aboard and, finding the cargo uninteresting, scuttled the ship. 

Three days later, Komet intercepted the 7,300-ton Dutch freighter Kota Nopan, bound for New York. It was in good condition and carried a very valuable cargo of rubber, tin, and manganese. Eyssen put a prize crew aboard and, after a rendezvous with a supply ship to refuel Komet and his prize, he sent Kota Nopan toward home. It reached Bordeaux in November. Just two days after subduing Kota Nopan, another victim steamed into Komet’s view: the 9,000-ton British freighter Devon, bound for New Zealand with a “miscellaneous” cargo. Neither the ship nor its cargo was deemed worth saving, so after taking the crew aboard, Komet sunk the freighter with gunfire.

Komet rounded Cape Horn on October 14 and set a course for the French coast, taking on the identity of a neutral Portuguese freighter. It rendezvoused with two U-boats in mid-November and the submarines saw the raider safely into the Bay of Biscay. Komet anchored briefly at Cherbourg and Le Havre before making the dangerous dash up the English Channel, escorted by German torpedo boats and minesweepers. British torpedo boats and bombers attacked; a bomb caused minor damage but no casualties. Spending a day in Dunkirk, Komet continued up the coast of Holland and, at 6:00 p.m. on November 30, 1941, tied up at Hamburg. Komet had been at sea for 516 days, sailed over 87,000 miles, crossed the equator eight times, sank seven ships and sent one home as a prize, and wrecked the phosphate operations at Nauru. It had been an epic voyage.

Komet laid up for almost a year for a complete re-fit that included overhauling the engines and receiving new guns and upgraded communications gear in preparation for a second war cruise. This time there would be no Northern Passage; Komet would have to get past the Royal Navy to reach the Atlantic. Admiral Eyssen was ashore in Norway as chief of the Oslo Naval Depot. Komet was now commanded by Captain Ulrich Brocksien, who took the raider out offriendly waters on October 7, 1942, and docked in Dunkirk that night. On October 12, Brocksien made his break for the open sea, escorted by four torpedo boats. But the Royal Navy, forewarned perhaps by an Enigma radio decrypt, was ready and had two British battle groups, composed of eight destroyers and eight torpedo boats, waiting. 

An RAF patrol plane spotted Komet around midnight and dropped flares. The British ships attacked. In the melee that followed, Komet was hit and set afire. The flames spread rapidly and minutes later a massive explosion sent a fireball hundreds of feet into the night sky and literally blew the ship apart. Komet sank immediately, taking all 251 officers and men with it. In after-action reports, the British attributed Komet’sdestruction to one or two torpedo hits. German torpedo boat officers saw no torpedo wakes near Komet and believed gunfire from the destroyers must have scored a direct hit on one of the ammunition magazines.

While Komet was dying, Petropavlovsk, the former German heavy cruiser Lützow, lived on. When the Wehrmacht stormed into the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, Petropavlovsk was not seaworthy but could serve as a deadly floating artillery battery. Tied up at the coal wharves in Leningrad harbor in early September, the cruiser poured some 700 rounds from its 8-inch guns into German forces closing in on the city. German troops attested to the fearsome impact of those shells. On September 17, German heavy artillery scored multiple hits on the ship, which sank bow first. Soviet salvage crews managed to raise it sufficiently to get its guns back in action a year later. The Soviets renamed the ship Tallinn in September 1944 when an old Tsarist-era battleship received the name Petropavlovsk. Tallinn hit the Germans again during the breakout from Leningrad’s encirclement in 1944. The fighting soon passed beyond the range of its guns, which finally fell silent. 

After the war, the Soviets used the battle-scarred hulk as a floating barracks until it was broken up for scrap in the 1950s. That ended the last physical remnant of wartime German-Soviet naval cooperation.

this article first appeared in world war II magazine

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By February 1942, the 74 men of Station Cast on the Philippine island of Corregidor had become some of the most important sailors in the U.S. Navy. These radio operators, linguists, and cryptanalysts were eavesdropping on enemy radio transmissions and had made steady progress deciphering the Japanese naval code. The U.S. military hoped this top-secret project would soon give the United States advance notice of the Imperial Japanese Navy’s plans. 

Station Cast’s problem was its location. The Japanese had invaded the Philippines two months earlier and were pushing the American and Filipino defenders back toward a last-ditch stand on the Bataan peninsula on the island of Luzon. Corregidor, a small fortified island in Manila Bay, lay only two miles off Bataan. If Bataan fell, which seemed inevitable, Corregidor would soon follow. 

The navy couldn’t let Station Cast’s personnel fall into enemy hands. The Japanese knew what these men were doing and would torture them to learn American codebreaking secrets. If that happened, the enemy would change its codes, and that would force the navy to start the tedious, time-consuming process of figuring out the enemy ciphers from the beginning. 

Evacuating the sailors posed monumental challenges. The Japanese had clamped a tight naval and air blockade on Bataan and Corregidor, making rescue by airplane or surface ship next to impossible. Submarines offered the only alternative, but they would have to dodge Japanese destroyers on the lookout for them. 

The men of Station Cast knew this and the knowledge gnawed at them. They wondered if the navy could rescue them and worried that their superiors had something far more drastic and final in mind. They feared that, one way or another, they wouldn’t get out of
Corregidor alive.

By the time the United States entered the war in December 1941, the U.S. Navy had made codebreaking a high priority. The Japanese relied heavily on radio signals to send information to their bases and warships across the Pacific, and their communication system was modern and efficient. The Japanese wrapped their messages in a dense code they believed to be unbreakable, but the U.S. Navy thought otherwise. 

The American codebreakers were making significant strides. They had figured out the Japanese diplomatic code, which they nicknamed Purple, and the U.S. government could now read the top-secret dispatches Tokyo sent to its embassies. The juicier prize was the Japanese Navy’s operational code, dubbed JN-25. This code, adopted in 1939 and in use since 1940, was complex and sophisticated. It used about 45,000 five-digit combinations, each representing a different word or phrase. Random numbers, known only to the sender and recipient, were added to complicate things even further. 

Still, the navy codebreakers were making headway. In December 1941, for example, Station Cast scored a breakthrough when it intercepted a message mistakenly sent in both code and plain text. By comparing the two, analysts began to better understand how JN-25 worked. Nevertheless, progress was slow: just a word here and a phrase there, but each deciphered word or phrase became a building block for further discoveries. 

The headquarters of the navy codebreaking operation was Station Hypo in Hawaii. Station Cast served as an advance outpost and operated from the Navy Intercept Tunnel in an area of Corregidor called Monkey Point, located on the tail of the three-mile-long, tadpole-shaped island. More than 10,000 American and Filipino soldiers, sailors, and Marines were stationed on Corregidor, and General Douglas MacArthur directed the defense of the Philippines from his headquarters there. 

Corregidor offered an ideal spot for interception work because radio reception there was remarkably clear. It was also, pre-war navy planners believed, “well protected and can be held for several months after the outbreak of war.”

The Navy Intercept Tunnel had been built before the war, ironically with cement imported from Japan. It was 12 feet wide and 220 feet long, with two lateral tunnels branching off to the sides. It was stocked with high-tech equipment that included 11 National model RAO shortwave radio receivers, 21 specially built Underwood typewriters to translate Morse code into the Japanese alphabet, various IBM machines that were precursors of modern computers, and direction-finding equipment to determine the origin of enemy radio transmissions. It also housed a so-called Purple machine, which decrypted Japanese diplomatic messages and was one of the fewer than a dozen such machines in existence. 

Station Cast was a hush-hush operation, and security was tight. A double iron gate blocked the tunnel’s entrance. Classified documents were stored in a vault protected by a triple-combination lock, and a Marine sentry stood guard at the tunnel entrance 24 hours a day. To disguise the outfit’s true purpose, it was called the Emergency Radio Station, with a cover story that it was merely a back-up communications system for the U.S. Asiatic Fleet. 

The station had two components: a general unit, which did the interception work, and a special unit, which analyzed the intercepted messages. The cryptanalysts were a special breed. Their work required a high IQ, an abundance of curiosity, and painstaking attention to detail. They were dedicated to their craft. “I have never seen a more devoted group of workers. Many of us often worked two shifts a day,” said Ensign Laurance L. MacKallor, one of the codebreakers. “The work was too challenging to put down as long as one could keep his eyes open.”

The tunnel protected the men from the frequent bombing raids, but the war hit home in other ways. Lieutenant Rudolph J. Fabian, a cryptanalyst, had stockpiled crates of food for Station Cast, but the army confiscated these rations and put them into the communal pot for the entire Corregidor garrison. After that, said Chief Yeoman John E. “Vince” Chamberlin, Station Cast’s personnel ate only two sparse meals a day, mostly spaghetti and soggy rice. The skimpy fare wasn’t enough for active men in a tropical climate, and all lost weight. In four months, for example, Chief Radioman Sidney A. Burnett dropped 53 pounds, and Chamberlin lost 40. Occasionally, the chow contained meat, and when it did, Radioman James B. Capron Jr. worried that Monkey Point had gotten its name for a reason. 

Corregidor was a likely target for a Japanese landing, so all troops, regardless of specialty or assignment, trained to defend its beaches. This posed a problem for Station Cast, whose arsenal consisted of only two .45-caliber pistols and one .22-caliber rifle, but an enterprising chief petty officer found a sunken barge in shallow water nearby and salvaged several crates of .30-caliber Enfield rifles. The men cleaned these weapons and practiced infantry drills, calling themselves the Monkey Point Militia. 

The Japanese blockade isolated Corregidor from the outside world, and the men were on their own. No mail could get through from home, so their only contact with the United States came when they tuned in KGEI, a shortwave radio station in San Francisco. The codebreakers knew that Corregidor was doomed and in January 1942 they began burning sensitive documents, including used carbon paper, and destroyed any equipment they didn’t need for daily operations.

The navy high command pondered Station Cast’s future. It realized it couldn’t let these men fall into Japanese hands. “Their loss would represent a severe setback to our Communication Intelligence activities,” the brass noted on January 23. It recommended evacuation, but that presented daunting problems. Dodging the Japanese blockade to get out of the Philippines would be risky, and the loss of these men would eliminate nearly half of the American codebreakers in the Pacific theater. A mass evacuation was out of the question because, even if it succeeded, it would put Station Cast out of business for weeks as the men traveled to Australia and set up shop there. At this critical juncture in the war the codebreaking activities were essential. “Communication Intelligence organization…is of such importance to successful prosecution of war in Far East that special effort should be made to preserve continuity,” insisted Admiral Ernest J. King, commander-in-chief of the U.S. Fleet and, beginning in March 1942,  chief of naval operations.

King ordered the men to be taken out in stages so Station Cast could keep operating on Corregidor for as long as possible. He knew the Japanese would eventually capture the island, but he couldn’t predict how much longer Bataan or Corregidor could hold out. He believed a staged evacuation was worth the risk.

While the high command pondered its options, the codebreakers learned there was a far more drastic plan in play. One evening, Radioman Duane L. Whitlock saw two officers in the tunnel sitting at their desks and cleaning their .45-caliber pistols. He jokingly asked if they were expecting a visit from the Japanese that night, but they didn’t smile. “No, these are for you and the others,” one of them explained. “We have discussed it between us and have decided we will not let a single one of you fall into their hands. When the time comes, we are going to shoot every one of you, then shoot ourselves.” Whitlock knew the officers weren’t kidding around. The general feeling, Radioman Burnett said, was that if “any of us got off the place alive, it would be a miracle.”

The evacuations began on February 5, 1942, at 7:31 p.m., when the submarine USS Seadragon (SS-194) surfaced off the coast of Corregidor. It left 15 minutes later, carrying four officers and 13 en-listed men from Station Cast. The submarine took them to the Netherland East Indies (now Indonesia). From there, they went to Australia to begin setting up a new Station Cast. The evacuation happened unexpectedly and on short notice, leaving the 57 men left behind startled to find their 17 colleagues gone so quickly that they had to leave all their worldly goods behind. Their clothing went into a “lucky bag” for communal use, and Chief Machinist’s Mate J.W. “Pappy” Lowery received their cigarettes for rationing. Station Cast remained in business. The navy had made sure that enough linguists, cryptanalysts, and radiomen stayed behind to do the work. 

By March, the Japanese continued to push the Allied defenders farther back on Bataan. The navy high command realized that Bataan and Corregidor could fall at any time. “Evacuate personnel of Radio Intelligence Unit soon as possible…. Take all steps possible to prevent loss of personnel of Radio Intelligence Unit,” Admiral King ordered on March 5.  

The evacuation would take time. While they waited, the men continued their daily work, and on March 16 they made a discovery, seemingly routine at the time, that justified King’s insistence on keeping the station open. The cryptanalysts determined that “AF” was the coded designation that the Japanese used for the Pacific atoll of Midway, a vital U.S. base 1,100 miles northwest of Pearl Harbor. Station Cast relayed this information to Station Hypo in Hawaii. 

That same day, the submarine USS Permit (SS-178) docked off Corregidor. It had originally been sent to evacuate General MacArthur and his staff, but MacArthur had left by PT boat five days earlier, a method of escape deemed impractical for the much larger number of Station Cast personnel and their equipment. Instead, the Permit took on board four officers and 32 enlisted men from Station Cast, as well as other assorted evacuees. The Permit now carried 111 men, nearly double its normal complement. Its mission was to get the codebreakers safely to Australia, but the submarine received orders to make a detour to hunt Japanese warships. It was a puzzling directive, since the men from Station Cast would be lost if the Permit were sunk. 

That almost happened the next day. At 8:10 p.m., skipper G. “Moon” Chapple spotted three enemy destroyers near Tayabas Bay, southeast of Corregidor. Within minutes he fired two torpedoes from a range of 2,000 yards. The torpedoes missed but attracted the destroyers’ undivided attention. At 8:22 p.m., the Permit dove and the enemy ships attacked, dropping 12 depth charges that rattled the submarine, shaking bunks loose from bulkheads and light bulbs from their sockets. The persistent destroyers continued to hunt for the Permit with depth charges. With 111 men aboard the submerged submarine, the air soon became foul. There wasn’t even enough oxygen to light a match, Radioman Whitlock said, and Chapple took emergency steps to prevent suffocation. The Permit finally surfaced at 6:55 p.m. on March 18 after having been submerged for a harrowing 22 hours and 33 minutes. Ensign MacKallor called the episode “the most terrifying experience that I have ever undergone.” The Permit reached Australia on April 7.

Now only 21 men, including station commander Lieutenant John M. “Honest John” Lietwiler, remained behind to run Station Cast. They continued their interception and decryption work, usually toiling for 16-18 hours a day, but they knew that time was running out. 

Of special concern was the Purple machine used to read diplomatic messages and the specialized IBM equipment used for decryption. The navy didn’t want these items to be captured because they might tip the Japanese off to American codebreaking secrets.

The men chopped up the Purple machine and dumped the pieces into deep water in Manila Bay. They saved the IBM equipment because Lietwiler wanted to use it in Australia. He assigned Ensign Ralph E. Cook, a former IBM engineer, to disassemble the equipment and pack it in crates so they could take it with them on a submarine. In case the Japanese ended up capturing the machines, Cook decided to create “a complex puzzle” for anyone trying to reassemble the equipment. He cut the devices’ cables and labeled their dozens of wires in a distinctive way that only he understood. To create further confusion, he threw some random parts into the crates.  

On April 3, the Japanese launched a final offensive on Bataan, slicing through the American and Philippine lines. By April 8, Bataan’s commander, Major General Edward P. King Jr., decided he had no alternative but to surrender the next day. Once Bataan surrendered, Corregidor’s days would be numbered. 

On the evening of April 8, Radioman Burnett answered the phone in the tunnel. “Sid, run like hell,” the caller said. “We are loading out in a few minutes.” The last 21 men of Station Cast scrambled onto a waiting truck and rode to the dock. 

Yeoman Chamberlin described the scene that awaited them as “Dante’s Inferno PLUS.” Explosions rocked the ground and lit the night sky as the Bataan garrison destroyed its fuel and ammunition dumps in anticipation of surrender. In an attempt to give the defenders some breathing room, Corregidor’s artillery roared at Bataan, with muzzle flashes leaping 100 feet into the sky. Even nature got involved, as an earthquake shook the area. 

When Chamberlin looked at his comrades, he saw a “ragtag bunch in worn, torn dungarees or khakis, underweight from malnutrition….” The accumulated stress showed, he said, and the men’s faces bore the “spectral look we came to call ‘The Corregidor Stare.’”

The men boarded a waiting submarine, the Seadragon, but there wasn’t enough time to load the crated IBM equipment before the submarine shoved off at 9:57 p.m. Once underway, the sub’s crew treated the codebreakers like royalty, showering them with cigars, candy, and cookies, delicacies that were unknown on Corregidor. They even let the evacuees use their bunks, and the men got their first good night’s sleep in months. There was also one unexpected passenger. In the chaos of the evacuation, a machinist’s mate from Corregidor had snuck onto the submarine as a stowaway, preferring a stay in the brig to a Japanese prison camp.

As with the Permit three weeks earlier, the Seadragon received orders to seek targets in Philippine waters after picking up the codebreakers. At 4:49 p.m. on April 11, skipper W.E. “Pete” Ferrall spotted a Japanese destroyer near Subic Bay, north of Corregidor, and fired three torpedoes from a range of 1,800 yards. All missed, and the destroyer dropped six depth charges near the submarine. “[N]one very close,” Ferrall noted in his patrol log. He asked the evacuees if the attack had frightened them. “Hell, no,” Burnett answered. He knew that sweating out depth charges was better than the fate that had awaited him on Corregidor. 

The Seadragon reached Australia on April 26. All the passengers, including the stowaway, were “most happy to walk ashore in a friendly port,” Ensign Cook said. 

The enemy invaded Corregidor on May 5, less than a month after the last codebreakers had departed, and the American and Filipino defenders surrendered the next day. Naval intelligence suspected that the Japanese had a complete roster of Station Cast personnel, possibly seized when they overran the Cavite naval yard near Manila four months earlier. The enemy made diligent efforts to find the Station Cast personnel among the Corregidor prisoners, but by this time they were all safely in Australia, continuing their interception and decryption work in Melbourne under the name FRUMEL (Fleet Radio Unit, Melbourne). The Japanese did find the crated IBM machines that had been left behind and realized their importance. They took the equipment to Tokyo so they could get it working and study American codebreaking technology. Ensign Cook, however, had done his job well and the Japanese never figured out his idiosyncratic wiring system. 

Station Cast’s discovery that “AF” was the Japanese designation for Midway paid huge dividends. In early May 1942, Station Hypo determined that Japanese forces were gathering for a major operation but didn’t know where they would strike. Days later, it intercepted messages referring to “invasion force AF” and the “AF occupation force.” Now it knew that Midway was the target. Forewarned, the heavily outnumbered Pacific Fleet ambushed the Japanese forces advancing toward Midway on June 4, 1942, sinking four enemy carriers and winning a stunning victory that changed the course of the Pacific war.

The Intercept Tunnel, home to Station Cast, didn’t survive the war intact. On February 16, 1945, U.S. forces landed on Corregidor to retake the island. Ten days later, as they mopped up resistance near Monkey Point, a large cache of Japanese explosives stored in the tunnel detonated. The blast was so powerful that it tossed a 34-ton M4 Sherman tank 50 yards through the air, killing most of the crew, and threw debris so far that some hit a destroyer 2,000 yards offshore. The explosion killed 50 G.I.s and wounded 150 more.

It was an ignominious end for the place where only three years earlier, a small band of dedicated and ingenious codebreakers had helped turn the tide of the Pacific war and put the United States on the road to victory.

this article first appeared in world war II magazine

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