I First Saw the Ruins of Dunkerque

John Fisher
From Reporting World War II: American Journalism 1938–1944

Interesting Links
“German Invasion of Western Europe, May 1940” (U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum)

“Richard Eurich's Dunkirk” (Royal Museums Greenwich)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “The Worst News That I Have Encountered in the Last 20 Years,” Robert Hagy
• “Damn the Torpedoes!” Helen Lawrenson
• “The Longest Day Dawns,” Cornelius Ryan

Buy the books
Reporting World War II: American Journalism 1938–1946
Two volumes • 1,770 pages
64 pages of photos
Martha Gellhorn, Ernie Pyle, John Hersey, A. J. Liebling, Edward R. Murrow, many others
List price: $80.00
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Dunkirk ruins after British retreat, early June 1940. (Hugo Jaeger / Timepix — The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images).

To the Germans, the Battle of Dunkirk was a tremendous victory heralding the ascendancy of the Third Reich. To the French, it was a devastating loss presaging the end of the Third Republic. To the British, however, it was a miracle.

On May 10, 1940—the day Winston Churchill became the British prime minister, replacing Neville Chamberlain—the German army invaded Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg (all neutral countries) and launched heavy air attacks against France. The Allied command sent troops into Belgium and Holland to establish a defensive perimeter but failed to detect the movement of German forces through the Ardennes Forest. The Germans broke through the French positions along the Meuse River on May 13.

By May 20, German forces reached the English Channel near Abbeville, completing the encirclement of British and French armies in Belgium. After attempts to break through the cordon failed, the British began evacuating troops from Dunkirk. Writing for the 1941 edition of Britannica Book of the Year, retired U.S. Army officer George Fielding Eliot described the flotilla of more than eight hundred vessels. “One of the most motley fleets of history—ships, transports, merchantmen, fishing boats, pleasure craft—took men off from the very few ports left, from the open beaches themselves, for German air attacks had virtually destroyed most port facilities.”

The day the British ended the evacuation, June 4, Churchill delivered his famous “We Shall Fight on the Beaches” speech and called the rescue “a miracle of deliverance, achieved by valor, by perseverance, by perfect discipline, by faultless service, by resource, by skill, by unconquerable fidelity.” Approximately 225,000 British and 110,000 French troops had been rescued—abandoning all of their heavy weapons and equipment. Unfortunately, as many as 40,000 French and 40,000 British soldiers were left behind to become prisoners of war and—if they survived—to suffer from brutal treatment in German work camps for the next five years.

“Wars are not won by evacuations,” Churchill reminded his listeners. While the British were giving thanks for the “miracle” of their army’s deliverance, the Germans were cleaning up after their conquest of Dunkirk. John Fisher, identified only as Life’s correspondent in Berlin (not much else is known about him), was one of a small group of foreign journalists to be allowed into the city. “Leaving Berlin on May 31,” the headnote to his account in the magazine explains, “he travelled through The Netherlands and Belgium into France . . . and then circled north along the Channel, arriving outside Dunkerque [as it was then often spelled] while the German bombardment was still going on.” He entered the city only hours after the last Allied troops surrendered, and we reprint below his fascinating account, which was published later that month.

The German army entered Paris on June 14. The new French government headed by Marshal Philippe Pétain requested an armistice on June 17, which was signed five days later and became the first step toward the establishment of the collaborationist Vichy regime. Yet the war in western Europe, seemingly over, had barely begun.

Notes: Fisher incorrectly states that he and his companions “drove through the Maginot Line,” but the fortifications around Maubeuge were not part of the Maginot Line, which, for financial and diplomatic reasons, stopped short of the Belgian border. The Lancasters were British soldiers from a Lancashire regiment.

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Our party was whipped into shape with German precision and we set out from Cologne in seven high-powered Mercedes-Benz staff cars. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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The Longest Day Dawns

Cornelius Ryan (1920–1974)
From Cornelius Ryan: The Longest Day, A Bridge Too Far

Interesting Links
“The Reporter Whom Time Forgot: How Cornelius Ryan’s The Longest Day changed journalism” (Michael Shapiro, Columbia Journalism Review)

“Moments in U.S. Diplomatic History: The Longest Day—Tales from D-Day, 1944” (Association for Diplomatic Studies & Training)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Three Americans,” George Strock & the editors of Life
• “Death of Carrier Described,” Peggy Hull Deuell
• “War Stories,” Harvey Shapiro

Buy the book
Cornelius Ryan: The Longest Day, A Bridge Too Far
1000 pages, plus 88 pages of photographs
List price: $45.00
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Members of an Army Engineer Special Brigade (identifiable by the insignias on their helmets) assist troops whose landing craft was sunk by enemy fire off Omaha Beach, near Colleville-sur-Mer, on June 6, 1944. Photograph by Louis Weintraub, Army Signal Corps. (National Archives)

On D-Day, June 6, 1944, Daily Telegraph reporter Cornelius Ryan watched the invasion of Normandy from the relative safety of an American bomber. “I was the last correspondent to fly over the Allied Beachhead this evening,” he wrote in his dispatch for the London newspaper. Ryan had hoped to see the attack eight hours earlier, but the first plane he took had to turn back when it experienced mechanical difficulties five miles off the coast. “Unlike the earlier missions, we had excellent visibility and could see up and down the Channel for many miles. . . . The whole sky as far as one could see in any direction was just one mass of aircraft of every type.”

He and a group of former war correspondents returned to France in 1949 for the fifth anniversary of D-Day. Ryan later recalled how he walked along one of the invasion beaches and “began to look at the flotsam and jetsam of war still there: burned-out vehicles, weapons.” The experience of the visit inspired him to consider writing a book, and he began his research by reading more than two hundred published accounts of the invasion. He continued to work on the book while employed as an editor at Collier’s and turned to it full-time after the magazine ceased publication in December 1956. With financial and research assistance from Reader’s Digest, Ryan sent out thousands of questionnaires to D-Day veterans and conducted, either in person or through his assistants, several hundred interviews. “I have no less than 7,000 books on every aspect of World War II,” he explained later in his career. “My files contain some 16,000 different interviews with Germans, British, French, etc. Then there is the chronology of each battle, 5x7 cards, detailing each movement by hour for the particular work I’m engaged in. You may think this is all a kind of madness, an obsession. I suppose it is.”

Excerpts from the book appeared in Reader’s Digest in June and July 1959 and Simon & Schuster published The Longest Day: June 6, 1944 in November with a first printing of 85,000 copies. The book was reprinted numerous times as it spent twenty-two weeks on The New York Times Best Sellers list. The French film producer Raoul Levy bought the film rights for $100,000 and hired Ryan to write the screenplay. When Levy was unable to secure enough financing for the project, he sold the rights to Hollywood producer Darryl F. Zanuck, who retained Ryan as the screenwriter. Ryan’s insistence on historical accuracy clashed with Zanuck’s flair for dramatic license, and the producer eventually enlisted the help of associate producer Elmo Williams and several other writers to clean up the script and to write additional scenes. After the Writers Guild was brought in for arbitration, Ryan received the sole screenwriting credit, but “additional episodes” were credited to the novelists Romain Gary and James Jones, as well as David Pursall and Jack Seddon. The movie, featuring an all-star cast that included John Wayne, Henry Fonda, and Robert Mitchum, became the second-highest-grossing release of 1962.

In the decades after the book was published Ryan received over 20,000 letters from veterans and their relatives and friends, and he incorporated some of their anecdotes in two magazine articles. (Both pieces are included in the just-published Library of America volume reprinting The Longest Day alongside his 1974 masterpiece A Bridge Too Far.) Ryan singled out one “heartwarming” letter that alone justified his ten years of research; a young woman who read the book at last came to terms with the death of the father she never knew: “Thank you for giving me my father after all these years.” One particularly memorable and haunting vision had been described by several eyewitnesses. At the height of the invasion of Omaha Beach, a French civilian and his young son were seen placidly maneuvering a boat off the coastline, “surrounded by small-arms fire,” while pulling aboard the dead and rescuing wounded soldiers from the sea. Major Elmore Swenson told Ryan, “Who they were or where they came from we never found out.”

For our Story of the Week selection, we present in its entirety the chapter detailing the experiences of troops and officers, both Allied and German, as dawn broke on the morning of June 6, 1944.

Notes: The five invasion beaches were code-named Omaha, Utah, Gold, Juno, and Sword. “The Shooting of Dan McGrew” is a poem written in 1907 by the British Canadian writer Robert W. Service, known as “the Bard of the Yukon.”

Many of the details about The Longest Day’s publication history and movie adaptation have been abridged from “The Note on the Texts” and “Chronology” sections of the Library of America edition.

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Never had there been a dawn like this. In the murky, gray light, in majestic, fearful grandeur, the great Allied fleet lay off Normandy’s five invasion beaches. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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Working at the Navy Yard

Susan B. Anthony II (1916–1991)
From Reporting World War II: American Journalism 1944–1946

Interesting Links
“Rosie the Riveter” (Jack Doyle, The Pop History Dig)

Teacher resources: Women in the Work Force during World War II (National Archives)

Interview by Studs Terkel with Susan Brownell Anthony II (Veteran Feminists of America)

Previous Story of the Week selections
⦁ “Damn the Torpedoes!,” Helen Lawrenson
⦁ “Democracy?,” Rupert Trimmingham, with others

Buy the books
Reporting World War II: American Journalism 1938–1946
Two volumes • 1,770 pages
64 pages of photos
Martha Gellhorn, Ernie Pyle, John Hersey, A. J. Liebling, Edward R. Murrow, many others
List price: $80.00
Save 25%, free shipping
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Chippers removing excess metal from welded seams in a shipyard, 1942. National Archives.

During World War II, package designer Josephine B. von Miklos answered the call to patriotic duty (it felt wrong “to continue designing pretty things during the war”) and applied for a job in a munitions plant. After a year of working on the assembly line, she published the memoir I Took a War Job, in which she described the dreariness of her new occupation:

The number of bombers and of shells is so enormous that it doesn't really mean anything to the average man, except, somehow, that there is a great deal of excitement and glamour in these numbers. Maybe there is. But there isn't any glamour and excitement in making bombers and shells. That is just a job, a job to be done day after day, carefully and deliberately, with every person doing a certain thing, doing it exactly the same way, maybe a hundred times a day, or a thousand times, or five thousand times. Doing it over and over and over each day. There is no excitement in doing a thing over and over. There is no glamour in pressing a lever five thousand times a day.

Von Miklos was one of millions of women ordnance workers (WOWs) who found employment in the defense industries, the best known of whom is the fictitious Rosie the Riveter. Not yet famous was nineteen-year-old Norma Jeane Dougherty. Her husband away at the war, she had been hired to spray fire retardant on radio planes ten hours a day in a factory in Van Nuys, California, “The work isn’t easy at all,” she wrote in a letter, in which she also complained about the “wolves” who worked at the plant and in the Army. During the last year of the war, she posed for a photographer assigned by Capt. Ronald Reagan to get pictures of working women for a feature in Yank, The Army Weekly. Although none of the photos were never used, she would later credit the photographer, David Conover, for launching her modeling and acting career nearly two years before she took the stage name Marilyn Monroe.

The selling of the WOW image—the “excitement and glamour” scornfully dismissed by von Miklos—became an important part of the recruitment and retention of women into wartime industries, including munitions factories, shipyards, and aircraft and tank manufacturers. Both the government and several of the largest companies created print ads, including Westinghouse’s famous “We Can Do It!” poster and Adolph Treidler’s “My Girl’s a WOW” and “She’s a WOW” series. The red-and-white bandana seen in these images, worn as a simplified turban, was adopted by women working for the Ordnance Department; “Every woman in your plant will want one—it’s a ‘WOW’ for morale,” exclaimed one advertisement. WOW clubs were encouraged by personnel managers at some—but certainly not all—workplaces; the chapters hosted picnics, parties, and other recreational activities. Only a small percentage of workers ever joined one of the local organizations—a May 1943 Business Week article estimates 33,000 members at various plants—and there was no official structure or association that organized WOWs nationally.*

Formerly a reporter for the Washington Star, Susan B. Anthony II—the great-niece of the famous suffragist—also became an ordnance worker. The drastic changes in the labor force inspired her to write her first book, Out of the Kitchen—Into the War: Women’s Winning Role in the Nation’s Drama (1943). “The actual key to Victory in this war,” she argued, “is the extrication of women—all women—from the relative unproductivity of the kitchen, and the enrolling of them in the high productivity of factory, office and field.” She was particularly critical of the government’s emphasis on nutrition and food preparation in an era of wartime shortages: “For three years, various officials in the Department of Agriculture, the Federal Security Agency and other agencies have advised on ‘war time nutrition.’ For three years, they have obtusely ignored the fact that working women and their families need more than mere advice on how to feed themselves. They need a network of low-cost cafeterias such as the British have.”

During the war, she also collaborated with Mildred Fairchild and Ann Wentworth Shyne, both of Bryn Mawr College, to publish the tract Women During the War and After (1945), a summary of a 600-page report they compiled in 1944. While she worked on the report, she wrote an essay for The New Republic describing her own experience as an employee at the Washington Navy Yard, and we present her account as our Story of the Week selection.

* Some of the information about WOWs is from Doris Weatherford’s American Women During World War II: An Encyclopedia (2009).

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My first night on the midnight shift day at Washington Navy Yard, I met Esther, a fellow ordnance worker, who ran the machine next to mine. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

Three Americans

George Strock (1911–1977) and the editors of Life
From Reporting World War II: American Journalism 1938–1944

Interesting Links

“The Photo That Won World War II: 'Dead Americans at Buna Beach,' 1943” (Ben Cosgove, Time)

“Photo That Was Hard to Get Published, but Even Harder to Get” (David W. Dunlap, The New York Times)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Democracy?” Rupert Trimmingham and others
• “Damn the Torpedoes!” Helen Lawrenson
• “War Stories,” Harvey Shapiro

Buy the books
Reporting World War II: American Journalism 1938–1946
Two volumes | 1,770 pages
64 pages of photos
Martha Gellhorn, Ernie Pyle, John Hersey, A. J. Liebling, Edward R. Murrow, many others
List price: $80.00
Web Store price: $60.00

International News Photos wire copy for photograph by George Strock of three dead Americans lying on Buna Beach, September 17, 1943, attached to the back of a gelatin print of the photo in the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The text reads, “PART OF THE PRICE FOR BUNA VICTORY / New Guinea. . . . Three dead Americans lie on the beach at Buna, New Guinea, after the Battle of Buna Gona in January, 1943. The picture had been held up in Washington and has just been released under the new ruling of showing American dead. The Japs hid in the wrecked landing barge and used rifles and grenades on the American as they were mopping up on the last day of battle. The barge and beach action was the bloodiest and wildest of any Buna fighting.” Strock’s famous photo is included in the PDF for this week’s selection.

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“Your Picture of the Week is a terrible thing but I’m glad there is one American magazine that had the courage to print it.”

The editors of Life magazine received the above message from an Illinois reader reacting to their decision, in September 1943, to publish a photograph by George Strock—the first photo depicting dead U.S. troops on the battlefield to appear in an American publication during World War II. The image shows three dead soldiers lying on the Buna beach during the Battle of Buna-Gona, which lasted from mid-November 1942 until January 22, 1943. “When I took pictures, I wanted to bring the viewer into the scene,” he told one interviewer. Not all his colleagues were as tenacious. As he joked in a letter he sent at the time, “Two photographers left after their first taste of fire, and as far as I know they are still going.” Strock himself escaped death or serious injury at least twice in New Guinea; he narrowly missed falling victim to a grenade attack by a Japanese soldier he believed was dead, and his departing plane crash-landed after failing to clear a tree on takeoff.

That the photograph was published at all was due in large part to the efforts of Life’s 25-year-old Washington correspondent, Cal Whipple. The New York Times obituary for Whipple summarizes his doggedness:

Mr. Whipple and his colleagues at Life believed that Mr. Strock’s photograph would provide a badly needed dose of reality for those on the home front who were growing complacent about the war effort. “I went from Army captain to major to colonel to general,” he recalled in a memoir written for his family, “until I wound up in the office of an assistant secretary of the Air Corps, who decided, ‘This has to go to the White House.’”

Whipple gained the support of Elmer Davis, director of the Office of War Information and a former CBS radio newscaster, who expressed to President Roosevelt concern over polls indicating that the public believed the war was going better than it was. Among the administration’s worries were a notable decline in the sales of war bonds and increased absenteeism in wartime industries. Roosevelt reluctantly agreed to a change in policy, and the photo appeared as a full page in the magazine, opposite an editorial that carried the subtitle: “Where these boys fell, a part of freedom fell: We must resurrect it in their name.”

The reaction to the image and the accompanying essay (both of which are presented below as our Story of the Week selection) was immediate and overwhelming. The editors were inundated with letters, and they published six of them; the response from the troops was especially positive. “Every soldier has fears and anxieties he admits only to himself, and he doesn’t quite realize what he is fighting for,” wrote one Army private from Mississippi. “The ordinary propaganda only makes him more cynical. This editorial is the first thing I have read that gives real meaning to our struggle.” Another reader tacked the photo on the company bulletin board and reported that “the number of employes participating in the payroll deductions for War Bonds has increased from fifty-five per cent to one hundred per cent.” Not all the responses were favorable, however; one letter writer sent in a “strong protest” stating that “pictures of mutilated corpses make a mockery of sacrifice. The War Department has made a grave mistake in permitting death to be held so cheap.” Weeks later, when Roosevelt wondered if he should expand the policy to war footage, the journalist Robert L. Sherrod told him, “That’s the way the war is out there, and I think people are going to have to get used to that idea.”

Strock’s photograph was reprinted in the November 5, 1943, issue of Yank: The Army Weekly, the popular magazine published by active duty soldiers from the enlisted ranks and read by virtually all members of the American forces. The magazine strenuously supported the decision to publish it, and printed a poem submitted by Keith B. Campbell, an Army private from Orlando, Florida:

Perhaps they struggled with geography
When they were boys, lisping the sinewy names
Of far-off lands they never hoped to see,
With thoughts intent upon their outdoor games;
The wind halloos and shouts of after-school,
A rag-tailed kite against a gray March sky,
And boyish laughter ringing “April Fool”
When someone took their bait.

Well, there they lie,
Three lads on Buna Beach, grotesquely laid
In the informal pose of sudden death;
While we, who live secure because they paid
In currency compounded of their breath,
Would hesitate and ponder on a scheme
To bargain interest to perverse their dream.

Text of poem courtesy of Old Magazine Articles.

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Here lie three Americans.
         What shall we say of them? Shall we say that this is a noble sight? . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

Democracy?

Rupert Trimmingham (1899–1985), with others
From Reporting World War II: American Journalism 1944–1946

Interesting Links
“Yank magazine energized Soldiers, reminding them of the reasons for fighting” (Renita Foster, U.S. Army website)

Documents: “Opinions About Negro Infantry Platoons in White Companies of 7 Divisions,” July 3, 1945 (Harry S. Truman Presidential Library)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Thurgood Marshall and the 14th Amendment,” James Poling
• “Damn the Torpedoes!” Helen Lawrenson

Buy the books
Reporting World War II: American Journalism 1938–1946
Two volumes • 1,770 pages
64 pages of photos
Martha Gellhorn, Ernie Pyle, John Hersey, A. J. Liebling, Edward R. Murrow, many others
List price: $80.00
Save 25%, free shipping
Web Store price: $60.00

“Easter Eggs for Hitler.” Technical Sergeant William E. Thomas and Private First Class Joseph Jackson, March 10, 1945, during the Battle of Remagen. (Image courtesy of the National Archives.)

During World War II the Army published Yank: The Army Weekly, a magazine that quickly became the most widely read military publication in U.S. history. The debut issue appeared in June 1942, and each week the magazine featured stories and news about the war, irreverent humor pieces mocking Army life (such as the comic strip “Sad Sack,” depicting the daily humiliations of a forlorn private), and a full-page photo of a “pin-up girl,” including such stars as Lauren Bacall, Susan Hayward, Rita Hayworth, Lucille Ball, Ingrid Bergman, and Lena Horne. Originally tailored for boots on the ground, the magazine was universally read by servicemen in all three branches of the military—and by a good many officers as well. All members of the magazine’s staff, numbering 127 near the end of its run, were active duty soldiers from the enlisted ranks. At its peak 2,600,000 copies of each issue (with a total readership estimated at ten million) were printed in more than twenty local editions on presses as far flung as Honolulu, Cairo, Rome, Trinidad, and Saipan. The magazine’s raison d'être ceased once GIs began returning home and the last issue was published in December 1945, three months after the Japanese surrender.

In spite of Yank’s generally cheeky content and its sneakily disgruntled criticisms of officers and authority, the magazine was nevertheless an official military publication. So it almost certainly came as a surprise to its audience when in April 1944 the editors had “the courage to print” (to quote one reader) a letter from Corporal Rupert Trimmingham, an immigrant born in Trinidad, about his disheartening and maddening experience as a black soldier in an American railroad station under “Old Man Jim Crow rules.” Both he and the editors were amazed by the response: hundreds of letters, virtually all of them denouncing Trimmingham’s treatment and supporting Yank’s decision to publish the letter.

The letter, along with the reactions to it, was one of many incidents that helped pave the way to the eventual end of segregation in the U.S. military. A year later the Army secretly conducted a survey of white officers who had served with black platoons: although 64% admitted to initial skepticism or hostility toward having to serve with African Americans, 77% had a more favorable view after having done so—and not a single officer indicated a less favorable opinion. In addition, virtually all of the officers reported “white and colored soldiers [had] gotten along together” either fairly well or very well. “Actual friction between white and colored soldiers is said to have been confined to isolated cases involving white solders from ‘outside’ units who did not know the combat record of the colored troops,” noted the report’s authors. And, significantly, if the army were to pursue integration, an overwhelming majority of the officers were opposed to isolating black soldiers in separate battalions or companies (although only a handful recommended that black and white soldiers serve within the same platoon).

A second survey was conducted among white combat veterans who had not served alongside black soldiers. Over 60 percent responded that they “would dislike it very much” if there were both black and white platoons serving within their companies. “The implications of the survey were clear,” summarizes Alan Gropman, a retired Air Force colonel who published a history of integration in the military. “White opposition to integration decreased once men had been integrated.”

Finally, on July 26, 1948, Harry S. Truman signed Executive Order 9981, which ordered steps taken “as rapidly as possible” to achieve “equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion or national origin.” The president established a Committee on Equality of Treatment and Opportunity to implement the order, but the effects of the new policy were slow in coming. Gropman notes that, while the Air Force proposed and instituted its own policy (with the committee’s approval) in January 1949, “the Army tied the committee in semantic knots, claiming even after the committee had disbanded that segregation and Truman’s order were harmonious. . . . The Navy continued a policy of tokenism into the 1960s.”

For this week’s Story of the Week selection, we present the letter by Rupert Trimmingham that caused such a stir among Yank readers, as well as the reactions from soldiers and Trimmingham’s final response.

Note: As mentioned in the last paragraph, Trimmingham’s letter inspired a short story that appeared in The New Yorker. “A Short Wait between Trains,” by Robert E. McLaughlin, was published in the June 14, 1944, issue, has since been included in several anthologies, and was adapted for a short film that aired on Showtime in 1999.

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Dear YANK:
Here is a question each Negro soldier is asking. What is the Negro soldier fighting for? On whose team are we playing? . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

“The Worst News That I Have Encountered in the Last 20 Years”

Robert Hagy (1914–1992)
From Reporting World War II: American Journalism 1938–1944

Interesting Links
“The First 24 Hours–Pearl Harbor” (Carl Zebrowski, America in WWII)

“Charles Lindbergh’s Des Moines Speech” (James M. Lindsay, Council on Foreign Relations)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Aufenthalt in Rosenheim,” Vincent Sheean
• “Damn the Torpedoes!” Helen Lawrenson

Buy the books
Reporting World War II: American Journalism 1938–1946
Two volumes • 1,770 pages
64 pages of photos
Martha Gellhorn, Ernie Pyle, John Hersey, A. J. Liebling, Edward R. Murrow, many others
List price: $80.00
Save 25%, free shipping
Web Store price: $60.00

The U.S. Navy battleships USS West Virginia (sunken at left) and USS Tennessee shrouded in smoke following the Japanese air raid on Pearl Harbor. (National Archives and Records Administration, via Wikimedia Commons).

By the fall of 1941 the America First Committee, founded the previous year to oppose American involvement in the war in Europe, was in disarray. At its height, the organization had more than four hundred chapters and several hundred thousand members, with its most fervent base centered in the Midwest. Yet, on September 11, the Committee’s most prominent spokesperson, Charles A. Lindbergh, delivered a speech that included the following lines:

It is not difficult to understand why Jewish people desire the overthrow of Nazi Germany. The persecution they suffered in Germany would be sufficient to make bitter enemies of any race. No person with a sense of the dignity of mankind can condone the persecution the Jewish race suffered in Germany. . . . Instead of agitating for war the Jewish groups in this country should be opposing it in every possible way, for they will be among the first to feel its consequences. Tolerance is a virtue that depends upon peace and strength. History shows that it cannot survive war and devastation. A few farsighted Jewish people realize this and stand opposed to intervention. But the majority still do not. Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government.

Beforehand, Anne Lindbergh had tried to convince her husband to remove the section singling out American Jews, but she was able only to convince him to incorporate the language sympathizing with their plight. Her frustration is apparent in her diary: “segregating them as a group, setting the ground for anti-Semitism . . . is a match lit near a pile of excelsior.”

Lindbergh’s speech was universally attacked by the media and politicians. The White House issued a statement noting the similarities between Lindbergh’s language and “the outpourings of Berlin in the last few days”; the 1940 Republican presidential candidate, Wendell Willkie, called it “the most un-American talk made in my time by any person of national reputation”; the Des Moines Register thundered “that it disqualifies Lindbergh from any pretensions of leadership”; and the Texas legislature passing a resolution demanding that Lindbergh stay away from the state. Several prominent members of America First abandoned the organization, and others defected to the competing Keep America Out of the War Committee.

When they first heard of the speech, members of America First’s executive committee were initially alarmed, although they ultimately voted 10 to 1 to continue to support him and issued a statement defending their popular speaker and deploring “the injection of the race issue into the discussion of war or peace. It is the interventionists who have done this.” Various far right organizations expressed their support, and the anti-Semitic newspaper affiliated with Father Charles Coughlin’s radio program applauded the speech. Above all, Lindbergh remained immensely popular with the membership, and his rallies continued to attract huge crowds, including 20,000 in Madison Square Garden on October 30.

In November the America First Committee began a new line of attack, questioning the Roosevelt administration’s “sabre-rattling with Japan.” And then, on the morning of December 7, 1941, Japanese forces attacked Pearl Harbor.

Hours after the attack, an America First rally was held in Pittsburgh, and Robert Hagy was there to cover it for the Post Gazette. Among the speakers was the famous dancer Irene Castle McLaughlin, who—with her first husband, Vernon, an Englishman killed during the First World War—had launched an American dance craze and whose life story had been the subject of a recent Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers film. Other speakers included local politicians and the organization’s leaders. As word began to trickle in about the attacks, the rally took on the surreal aspect that Hagy captures in the following report.

Four days later, the national leadership of America First agreed to dissolve its operations.

Notes: When the rally’s leaders first hear of the attacks in Hawaii, they immediately recall the Greer incident. On September 4, the American destroyer Greer was carrying mail to American troops in Iceland when a British aircraft alerted it to the presence of a German U-boat. In response, the Greer used sonar to report the U-boat’s position to the British aircraft, which attacked the U-boat with depth charges. The Germans fired a torpedo at the Greer, and the destroyer then joined the battle by launching its own depth charges. When Roosevelt first reported the incident a week later in his radio address he didn’t mention the existence of the British aircraft and accused the Germans of having “fired first,” but the British involvement was revealed to the public a month later during congressional hearings.

One of the speakers mentions “50 ships” the president had “given away,” a reference to fifty destroyers Roosevelt sent to Britain in September 1940, in exchange for the right to use British bases in the Western Hemisphere.

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The strangest development here involved America Firsters assembled in Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Memorial Hall in Oakland Civic Center, three miles from downtown Pittsburgh. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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Death of Carrier Described

Peggy Hull Deuell (1889–1967)
From Reporting World War II: American Journalism 1944–1946

Interesting Links
“The Death of the Japanese Empire: Remembering the Battle of Leyte Gulf” (James Holmes, The National Interest)

Photo Gallery: Loss of USS Princeton—Battle of Leyte Gulf

Previous Story of the Week selections
“Damn the Torpedoes!” 
Helen Lawrenson
“This One Is Captain Waskow,” 
Ernie Pyle

Buy the book
Reporting World War II: American Journalism 1944–1946
45 writers report on the events from the Italian campaign and D-Day to the surrender of Japan • Includes in full Bill Mauldin's Up Front and John Hersey's Hiroshima • 858 pages + 32 pages of photos
List price: $40.00
Web store price: $32.00

One of the few photographs of the initial bomb damage as seen from USS Princeton’s own flight deck. Photo by Ernest John Schirmer (1919–1962), photographer's mate aboard the ship, courtesy of NavSource Naval History Online Photo Archive.

During the months after the United States entered World War II, Japanese forces quickly surrounded and captured strategic locations in and around the Philippines. On March 11, 1942, General Douglas MacArthur, commander of U.S. Army Forces in the Far East, abandoned the American headquarters on Corregidor Island (at the entrance of Manila Bay) and, with his family and selected staff members on four PT boats, broke through the Japanese blockade and escaped to Australia. It was there he gave a brief speech which ended in the famous phrase, “I shall return.”

Thirty-one months would pass before MacArthur was able to fulfill his promise. On October 17, 1944, a force of over two hundred American warships appeared off the Philippines; in response, the Japanese readied sixty-four ships—virtually its entire fleet. The U.S. began its invasion on October 20 with a landing on Leyte, an island in the center of the Philippine archipelago. Over the next week forces prepared for and waged the complex series of air, submarine, and surface engagements known collectively as the Battle of Leyte Gulf (or the Second Battle of the Philippine Sea). Japanese losses were heavy—at least 12,000 dead and twenty-five vessels—while the American forces lost six ships and suffered nearly 3,000 casualties. During this battle, on October 25, the Japanese employed for the first time mass suicide attacks (“kamikaze”) by aircraft, a lethal but ultimately futile tactic that continued in the months ahead.

“The Battle of Leyte Gulf drove a stake into the empire, splitting off Tokyo’s Southeast Asian holdings from Japan proper,” concludes the writer of a recent magazine article. “And it furnished U.S. commanders a launching pad for sea and air assaults against the Ryukyu Islands and the Japanese home islands.” Not only was the multi-day engagement one of the last major naval battles of the war, but it is universally regarded as the largest naval battle in history.

One of the American ships sunk during the battle was the aircraft carrier USS Princeton; 108 men aboard lost their lives, and the secondary explosions killed another 233 on the nearby Birmingham, which had been putting out the fires. Peggy Hull Deuell interviewed survivors and filed her story on the tragedy from an unidentified naval base.

Deuell was a veteran journalist whose first war report, nearly three decades earlier, detailed the pursuit of Pancho Villa by U.S. troops in Mexico. She went to France to cover World War I, but was forced to leave when the United States refused to accredit her—or any other woman—as a war correspondent. Upon returning to Washington, she persisted, using connections from her days in Mexico, and was allowed to report on American military intervention in Siberia in 1918. Fourteen years later she filed eyewitness accounts of the brutal Japanese attack on Shanghai. She returned to Asia in 1943 to cover the Pacific theater of the war for the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Her dispatches were celebrated for featuring the heroic and tragic stories of individual soldiers and officers. “You will never realize what those yarns of yours did to this gang,” wrote one G.I. at the time. “You made them know they weren't forgotten.”

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FROM A NAVAL BASE—They may be home now—the several hundred survivors of the light carrier Princeton sunk in the second battle of the Philippine Sea. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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Aufenthalt in Rosenheim

Vincent Sheean (1899–1975)
From Reporting World War II: American Journalism 1938–1944

Interesting Links
Kristallnacht (The Holocaust Encyclopedia, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)

Kristallnacht in the writings of Arthur Miller and Philip Roth (Reader’s Almanac)

Refuge: Stories of the Selfhelp Home, a documentary about six immigrants in Chicago who fled 1930s Germany

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “This One Is Captain Waskow,” Ernie Pyle
• “War Stories,” Harvey Shapiro

A burning synagogue in Hanover, November 9–10, 1938. [DPA Archiv via Basische-Zeitung]

This month [November 2013] marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of Kristallnacht—literally “Night of Crystal,” but more often “Night of Broken Glass.” On November 9–10, 1938, the German Nazi Party carried out a pogrom, during which ninety-one Jews were killed, 26,000 men were sent to concentration camps, and the confiscation of Jewish property was accelerated. Over 250 synagogues were destroyed, many burned to the ground. The name of the tragedy came from the shattered glass from homes and Jewish-owned businesses that littered city streets.

Ostensibly in response to the assassination of a German official in Paris, the attacks were launched by Joseph Goebbels when he announced the news during a speech at a dinner commemorating the anniversary of the Beer Hall Putsch (Hitler’s first and unsuccessful attempt to seize power in 1923). Party leaders understood Goebbels’s message as a command: “Comrades, we cannot allow this attack by international Jewry to go unchallenged. . . . The Führer has decided that such demonstrations are not to be prepared or organized by the Party; but so far as they originate spontaneously, they are not to be interfered with either.” *

Although Kristallnacht is regarded as the most dramatic turning point yet toward the horrors to come, the carnage was long in the making. One American observer, the journalist Vincent Sheean, was in Europe when France, the United Kingdom, and Italy agreed to the September 29 Munich Pact, ceding to Germany the Sudetenland, the name for the Czechoslovakian borderlands inhabited primarily by German-speaking residents. During the month that followed—but before Kristallnacht—Sheean traveled around by train and car and wrote “Aufenthalt [Delay] in Rosenheim,” describing the dismay he felt as a witness to the increasing persecution of Jewish residents throughout German-occupied territories.

The following year, Sheean published his moderately successful book Not Peace But a Sword, in which he anticipated Europe’s unstoppable march to another world war. One chapter warned that “the whole machinery of a mighty state is thus set in motion to crush its Jewish subjects not because of anything they have thought, said or done, but simply because they are Jews,” and he remained baffled about how—and why—so many Germans had rallied so readily behind such animosity:

Somewhere in the mystery of mass suggestion the answer could be found, and can someday be analyzed upon dead material by the psychologists of the future. Now that the material is living, it is almost impossible to trace the process of transformation.

*   *   *

* Nuremberg Document 3063-PS (Walter Buch, Nazi Party Supreme Court chief, to Hermann Göring, February 13, 1939).

Notes: On page 11, Sheean summarizes from memory passages from the memoirs of Bernhard von Bülow, the German imperial chancellor under Kaiser Wilhelm II, 1900–09. On the last page, he recalls a day in early October, after the Reichswehr (the word used until 1935 for the German armed forces) had occupied the “third zone”—one of four zones in the Sudetenland ceded to Germany by the Munich Pact.

*   *   *

The car broke down not far beyond Siegsdorf on the Reichsautobahn to Munich—the great Reichsautobahn which is the most beautiful of all German motor roads, since it leads to the home of the Führer. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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War Stories

Harvey Shapiro (1924–2013)
From Poets of World War II

Interesting Links
Harvey Shapiro, poet and New York Times editor, 1924–2013 (Reader’s Almanac)

Audio: Harvey Shapiro discusses Poets of World War II (Fresh Air, NPR)

Previous Story of the Week selections about World War II
• “World War II,” Edward Field
• “Damn the Torpedoes!” Helen Lawrenson
• “This One Is Captain Waskow,” Ernie Pyle

Buy the book
Poets of World War II
62 poets • 120 poems • 262 pages
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Harvey Shapiro standing next to his plane in April 1945. Courtesy of the author.

Earlier this year, on January 7, poet and newspaperman Harvey Shapiro died at the age of 88. For forty years, until he retired in 1995, he worked for The New York Times, and he was editor of the Book Review section from 1975 to 1983.

During World War II, Shapiro flew thirty-five missions over central Europe as a B-17 radio gunner based in Italy, and he edited Poets of World War II for the American Poets Project series (published by The Library of America). The anthology was both a critical and commercial success, and there are nearly 18,000 copies in print. In the introduction, he explained the collection’s underlying purpose:

. . . to demonstrate that the American poets of this war produced a body of work that has not yet been recognized for its clean and powerful eloquence. Comparisons can be odious, but common wisdom has it that the poets of World War I—Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, Edmund Blunden, Isaac Rosenberg—left us a monument and the poets of World War II did not. My hope is that readers of this book will come away convinced that is not the case.

In an interview with Maggie Paley for BOMB Magazine, he elucidated his selection criteria for the anthology: “What I really wanted were poems from soldiers who had actually seen combat, men and women who had served in one way or another, and from civilians who had actually experienced something.”

The anthology includes Shapiro’s own poem “War Stories.” In The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of World War II, literary scholar Margot Norris discusses the poem at length, noting that the opening scene portrays how a “loss of innocence precedes war experience.” The reader follows the narrator to Italy and then on bombing runs in the skies of Germany. The poem’s closing lines, “with its evocation of modern media, returns to the beginning with its newspapers, comics, and radio programs. A double reversal has occurred.” After the war, the experiences of combat will be “seemingly restored to the innocence of media representations, the movies and television of civilian life, and the grandiose rhetoric of postwar history books.” Yet the reality is the “antithesis” of these “war stories.”

Note: Westbrook Pegler was a popular American columnist in the 1930s and 1940s, famous for his criticisms of the Roosevelt administration.

*   *   *

Audio: Click here to listen to an audio recording of Harvey Shapiro reading “War Stories” in 2005.
The MP3 file will begin playing in a new browser window.
© 2008 Norman Finkelstein and Harvey Shapiro; courtesy of PennSound

*   *   *

My father read the World Telegram & Sun.
Sometimes he agreed with Westbrook Pegler. . . .
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“Damn the Torpedoes!”

Helen Lawrenson (1907–1982)
From Reporting World War II: American Journalism 1938–1944

Interesting Links
U.S. Merchant Marine in World War II (www.usmm.org)

“Merchant Marine veterans of World War II still waiting for full compensation decades later,” (The Oregonian)

Previous Story of the Week selections for Memorial Day
• “This One Is Captain Waskow,” Ernie Pyle
• “World War II,” Edward Field

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Martha Gellhorn, Ernie Pyle, John Hersey, A. J. Liebling, Edward R. Murrow, many others
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Courtesy Camden, NJ, World War II
Merchant Marine Memorial.

During the first year of World War II, American citizens working the largely unarmed commercial ships carrying cargo and passengers across the Atlantic experienced many casualties, especially from attacks by German submarines. Sailors in the Merchant Marine were employees of private companies and they were largely free to quit their jobs after a voyage, but the work was just as dangerous as military combat (and often more so). Upwards of 250,000 civilians worked on these ships during the war, and various counts place the number of those killed between 6,000 and 9,000—at least twice the fatality rate among military personnel. Torpedoes, bombs, kamikazes, and other attacks sunk over 700 ocean-faring ships, and hundreds of smaller vessels were lost near the shore. Prior to the Normandy invasion, General Dwight Eisenhower acknowledged, “When final victory is ours, there is no organization that will share its credit more deservedly than the Merchant Marine.”

Yet, after the war, the service of these veterans was largely forgotten and none of them qualified for benefits. It wasn’t until a federal ruling in 1988, following a decade-long court battle, when some finally qualified for limited services from Department of Veterans Affairs. Still, nearly seven decades later, a good number of the estimated 10,000 remaining survivors have never possessed the onerous documentation required to receive these belated benefits.

The New York journalist Helen Brown was well placed to record the heroism of these seafarers; her second husband, Jack Lawrenson, whom she married in 1939, had shipped from Ireland as a merchant seaman and upon his arrival in New York in 1937 he became a cofounder and leader of the National Maritime Union. When the couple met, Helen had already established her credentials as a writer, serving as an editor of Vanity Fair before becoming Esquire’s first woman contributor. The year of her and Jack’s marriage she collected some of her journalism in the provocatively titled The Hussy’s Handbook. Almost exactly seventy years ago, during the first year of American participation in the war, she wrote her account of the Merchant Marine based on information and anecdotes gleaned from her husband’s associates.

Jack Lawrenson was eventually forced out of the NMU in 1949, during a period of violent political upheavals and intense red-baiting within the union, and he died in 1957. His wife lived for another quarter century and enjoyed a brief period of notoriety in the mid-1970s (as noted by a profile in People) when she published Stranger at the Party, a memoir of her bohemian life in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village during the 1930s, and revealed details of her four-year affair with Condé Montrose Nast, her former boss and the founder and publisher of Vanity Fair.

*   *   *

A group of sailors are drinking beer at a bar called George’s in Greenwich Village. The juke box is playing “Deep in the Heart of Texas,” and every time it stops someone puts another nickel in and it starts up again. . . . If you don't see the full story below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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“This One Is Captain Waskow”

Ernie Pyle (1900–1945)
From Reporting World War II: American Journalism 1938–1944

Interesting Links
Owen V. Johnson, “Ernie Pyle: 60 years after his death” (Indian University School of Journalism)

“Ernie Pyle still sets the style,” (Reader's Almanac)

Previous Story of the Week selection
“World War II,” Edward Field

Buy the books
Reporting World War II: American Journalism 1938–1946
Two volumes • 1,770 pages
List price: $40.00 each
Volume 1: $31.50
Volume 2: $32.00

Captain Henry T. Waskow

Indiana native Ernie Pyle was one of World War II’s most famous reporters, in an era when journalists covering combat were as celebrated as movie stars. One of his best-known dispatches concerned the death of Captain Henry T. Waskow on December 14, 1943, during the Battle of San Pietro Infine in Italy. The officer was twenty-five years old.

Pyle himself would live only sixteen months after the death of the “beloved” Capt. Waskow. On April 18, 1945, the forty-four-year-old journalist was traveling in a Jeep with Colonel Joseph B. Coolidge and other soldiers on Ie Shima, a small island near Okinawa, when a burst of machine-gun fire strafed the procession of vehicles. When the barrage of bullets finally stopped, Pyle asked Coolidge, “Are you all right?” before the sniper fire started up again, killing the reporter instantly. Hours after the tragedy, a “visibly shaken” Coolidge tearfully told a New York Times reporter, "I was so impressed with Pyle's coolness, calmness and his deep interest in enlisted men. They have lost their best friend."

The legacy of Capt. Waskow endures seven decades after his death. Lieutenant Bill Walker, the fictional hero played by Robert Mitchum in the 1945 movie The Story of G. I. Joe, was based in part on Waskow (and the death scene in the movie is notably faithful to Pyle’s dispatch). The high school at which Waskow was student council president bears his name. And, most poignantly, Capt. Waskow had written a widely quoted letter intended for his family on the event of his death. The opening and closing passages offer advice for those of us still living.

If you get to read this, I will have died in defense of my country and all that it stands for—the most honorable and distinguished death a man can die. It was not because I was willing to die for my country, however—I wanted to live for it—just as any other person wants to do. It is foolish and foolhardy to want to die for one’s country, but to live for it is something else.

To live for one’s country is, to my mind, to live a life of service; to—in a small way—help a fellow man occasionally along the way, and generally to be useful and to serve. It also means to me to rise up in all our wrath and with overwhelming power to crush any oppressor of human rights. . . .

Try to live a life of service—to help someone where you are or whatever you may be—take it from me; you can get happiness out of that, more than anything in life.

*   *   *

AT THE FRONT LINES IN ITALY, Jan. 10 — (by wireless) — In this war I have known a lot of officers who were loved and respected by the soldiers under them. But never have I crossed the trail of any man as beloved as Capt. Henry T. Waskow of Belton, Tex. . . . If you don't see the full story below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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World War II

Edward Field (b. 1924)
From Poets of World War II

Also of Interest
“Poet Edward Field Still Standing ‘After the Fall’” (Stephen Wolf, The Villager)

“Edward Field Writes His Own History” (OutHistory)

Editor and poet Harvey Shapiro discuss Poets of World War II (NPR's Fresh Air)

Buy this book:
Poets of World War II
(free shipping)
62 poets • 120 poems • 262 pages

Also available:
Edward Field: After the Fall: Poems Old and New
(University of Pittsburgh Press)

This Memorial Day, as we remember Americans who died while in military service, we call upon an eyewitness to one of the many tragedies (“a minor accident of war”) during World War II.

A second lieutenant in the 8th Air Force, Edward Field served in Europe as a navigator for heavy bombers. During the period he was flying missions over Germany, he frequented the Officers’ Club in the evenings to relax and there met Coman Leavenworth, his “first poet ever,” and he soon began writing poetry himself. After the war, Field’s first published poem appeared in London’s Poetry Quarterly, but he never saw the issue containing it until a friend tracked down a copy for him almost six decades later. It was not until 1963 that his first collection of poetry, Stand Up, Friend, With Me, was published and was chosen as the year’s Lamont Poetry Selection.

“World War II,” which appeared in 1967, looks back a quarter of a century, remembering those who died and recalling the “time I believed in being heroic, in saving the world, / even if, when opportunity knocked, / I instinctively chose survival.” In a recent interview, Field summarized the background of the poem:

The European war ended just before I completed my tour of duty. On twenty-five missions, I'd helped bomb numerous historic cities. I had five planes destroyed by flak under me. That meant forced landings at any airport we could get to, but once, we had to ditch our plane in the North Sea, as I've described in a poem called, “World War II.”

*   *   *

It was over Target Berlin the flak shot up our plane
just as we were dumping bombs on the already smoking city
on signal from the lead bomber in the squadron. . . .
If you don't see the full poem below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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