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On 7 September 1940, German bombers raided the east London docks area in two waves of devastating attacks. The date has always been taken as the start of the so-called ‘Blitz’ (from the German ‘Blitzkrieg’ or lightning war) when for nine months German bombers raided Britain’s major cities. But the 7 September attack also came at the height of the Battle of Britain.

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During the night, between 3rd and 4th September 1946, things were stirring in the basement of the internal medicine department, at the university hospital of Lund, Southern Sweden. A 47-year-old man had been admitted for treatment. His main problem was uraemia (urea in the blood), but he was also suffering from silicosis (a lung disorder), complicated by pneumonia.

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Willem Kolff is famously the man who first put the developing theory of therapeutic dialysis into successful practice in the most unlikely circumstances: Kampen, in the occupied Netherlands during World War II. Influenced by a patient he had seen die in 1938, and in a remote hospital to avoid Nazi sympathisers put in charge in Groningen, he undertook experiments with cellulose tubing and chemicals and then went straight on to make a machine to treat patients from 1943.

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Antony Beevor’s latest book completes his histories of the Eastern and Western Fronts of the Second World War. Beginning with the award winning Stalingrad then Berlin and concluding with D-Day and now Ardennes, Beevor takes his comprehensive eye for detail to Hitler’s last ditch gamble of the war in what became known as The Battle of […]

World War Two was the most devastating conflict in recorded human history. It was both global in extent and total in character. It has understandably left a long and dark shadow across the decades. Yet it is three generations since hostilities formally ended in 1945 and the conflict is now a lived memory for only a few. And this growing distance in time has allowed historians to think differently about how to describe it, how to explain its course, and what subjects to focus on when considering the wartime experience.

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Review- The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan

Richard Flanagan has been working on this novel for over 12 years, writing other novels in between. He’d gone through countless drafts, reworked the story, started completely over. The reason it troubled him so much was because central to the story are the Australian POWs who worked on the Thai-Burma death railway. An experience shared by his father. He didn’t just want to get the story right, he had to get the story right. And I believe, deep down in my guts, in my heart and with every fibre of my being that he has got the story right.

Richard Flanagan has written a tragic love story, a deconstruction of heroism and mateship, and captured a side of humanity I’ve never read before. Wars, according to our history books, have beginnings and ends but for those who take part in wars, who are swept up in it’s maelstrom, there is no beginning or end. There is only life. And the damage war causes must be endured by those lucky or unlucky enough to survive it.

Dorrigo Evans is a Weary Dunlop type character. Revered by his fellow soldiers/prisoners and mythologized by his country’s media, politicians and people. But Dorrigo’s experience of War and being a POW doesn’t equate to the image his men needed during their imprisonment nor the one thrust upon him later. He battled his role in the POW camp and tried to hide from the one at home. At the expense of family, friends and love. It is not that these images are based on lies, they just don’t ring true to himself. And after surviving the horror of internment he can no longer make sense of the emotions of the life he must now grapple with.

Flanagan structures this novel uniquely. I think he was trying to base his story on a Japanese style but am not 100% sure. We start with Dorrigo’s early years growing up in rural Tasmania and his journey to becoming a surgeon but in between we start to get snippets of his time in the POW camp. We jump to Dorrigo’s later years before jumping back to his time just before the war and an affair that will change Dorrigo irrevocably. When we get to his time at the POW camp the story is contracted around one day, one 24 hour period, but it doesn’t feel like just one day, it feels like many lifetimes. We barely follow Dorrigo through this day as we have already glimpsed bits and pieces and will re-live yet more. Instead we get everyone else’s story. The other prisoners, the guards, the Japanese officers in charge. Flanagan clearly shows us each characters’ motivations, desires, inner turmoil and demons. As the day unfolds we experience the terror, the devastation, the depredation, the hope, the loyalty, the betrayal, the choices of life on the Thai-Burma death railway.

But Flanagan’s novel is not just about what happened on the death railway but also what happened after. How it was explained and justified. How it was hidden and run away from. How justice can be escaped but is also used as revenge. And how it never really ended for anyone involved.

We often talk about the Anzac spirit in Australia but we rarely confront it. War is never altruistic, no matter which side you are on. Survival brings out the best and worst in people as does victory, as does love. Flanagan explores this warts and all. Dorrigo is not a hero, nor is he a bad man, father, husband. He is all of theses things and he is neither. This is a masterwork by one of Australia’s best writers.

Buy the book here…

On the 15^th of February 1944, Allied planes bombed the abbey at Monte Cassino as part of an extended campaign against the Italians. St. Benedict of Nursia established his first monastery, the source of the Benedictine Order, here around 529. Over four months, the Battle of Monte Cassino would inflict some 200,000 causalities and rank as one of the most horrific battles of World War Two. This excerpt from Peter Caddick-Adams’s Monte Cassino: Ten Armies in Hell, recounts the bombing.

On the afternoon of 14 February, Allied artillery shells scattered leaflets containing a printed warning in Italian and English of the abbey’s impending destruction. These were produced by the same US Fifth Army propaganda unit that normally peddled surrender leaflets and devised psychological warfare messages. The monks negotiated a safe passage through the German lines for 16 February — too late, as it turned out. American Harold Bond, of the 36th Texan Division, remembered  the texture of the ‘honey-coloured Travertine stone’ of the abbey that fine Tuesday morning, and how ‘the Germans seemed to sense that something important was about to happen for they were strangely quiet’. Journalist Christopher Buckley wrote of ‘the cold blue on that late winter morning’ as formations of Flying Fortresses ‘flew in perfect formation with that arrogant dignity which distinguishes bomber aircraft as they set out upon a sortie’. John Buckeridge of 1/Royal Sussex, up on Snakeshead, recalled his surprise as the air filled with the drone of engines and waves of silver bombers, the sun glinting off their bellies, hove into view. His surprise turned to concern when he saw their bomb doors open — as far as his battalion was concerned the raid was not due for at least another day.

Brigadier Lovett of 7th Indian Brigade was furious at the lack of warning: ‘I was called on the blower and told that the bombers would be  over in fifteen minutes… even as I spoke the  roar  [of  aircraft] drowned my voice as the first shower of eggs [bombs]  came down.’ At the HQ of the 4/16th Punjabis, the adjutant wrote: ‘We went to the door of the command post and gazed up… There we saw the white trails of many high-level bombers. Our first thought was that they were the enemy. Then somebody said, “Flying Fortresses.” There followed the whistle, swish and blast as the first flights struck at the monastery.’ The first formation released their cargo over the abbey. ‘We could see them fall, looking at this distance like little black stones, and then the ground  all around  us shook with gigantic shocks as they exploded,’ wrote Harold  Bond. ‘Where the abbey had been there was only a huge cloud of smoke and dust which concealed the entire hilltop.’

The aircraft which committed the deed came from the massive resources of the US Fifteenth and Twelfth Air Forces (3,876 planes, including transports and those of the RAF in theatre), whose heavy and medium bombardment wings were based predominantly on two dozen temporary airstrips around Foggia in southern Italy (by comparison, a Luftwaffe return of aircraft numbers in Italy on 31 January revealed 474 fighters, bombers and reconnaissance aircraft in theatre, of which 224 were serviceable). Less than an hour’s flying time from Cassino, the Foggia airfields were primitive, mostly grass affairs, covered with Pierced Steel Planking runways, with all offices, accommodation and other facilities under canvas, or quickly constructed out of wood. In mid-winter the buildings and tents were wet and freezing, and often the runways were swamped with oceans of mud which inhibited  flying. Among the personnel stationed there was Joseph Heller, whose famous novel Catch-22 was based on the surreal no-win-situation chaos of Heller’s 488th Bombardment Squadron, 340th Bomb Group, Twelfth Air Force, with whom he flew sixty combat missions as a bombardier (bomb-aimer) in B-25 Mitchells.

After the first wave of  aircraft struck Cassino monastery, a Sikh company of 4/16th Punjabis fell back, understandably, and a German wireless message was heard to announce: ‘Indian troops  with turbans are retiring’. Bond and his friends were astonished when, ‘now and again, between the waves of bombers, a wind would blow the smoke away, and to our surprise we saw the gigantic walls of the abbey still stood’. Captain Rupert Clarke, Alexander’s ADC, was watching with his boss. ‘Alex and I were lying out on the ground about 3,000 yards from Cassino. As I watched the bombers, I saw bomb doors open and bombs began to fall well short of the target.’ Back at the 4/16th Punjabis, ‘almost before the ground ceased to shake the telephones were ringing. One of our companies was within 300 yards of the target and the others within 800 yards; all had received a plastering and were asking questions with some asperity.’ Later, when a formation of B-25 medium bombers passed over, Buckley noticed, ‘a  bright  flame, such  as a  giant  might have produced by striking titanic matches on the mountain-side, spurted swiftly upwards at half a dozen points. Then a pillar of smoke 500 feet high broke upwards into the blue. For nearly five minutes it hung around the building, thinning gradually upwards.’

Nila Kantan of the Royal Indian Army Service Corps was no longer driving trucks, as no vehicles could get up to the 4th Indian Division’s positions overlooking the abbey, so he found himself portering instead. ‘On our shoulders we carried all the things up the hill; the gradient was one in three, and we had to go almost on all fours. I was watching from our hill as all the bombers went in and unloaded their bombs; soon after, our guns blasted the hill, and ruined the monastery.’ For Harold Bond, the end was the strangest, ‘then nothing happened. The smoke and dust slowly drifted away, showing the crumbled masonry with fragments of walls still standing, and men in their foxholes talked with each other about the show they had just seen, but the battlefield remained relatively quiet.’

The abbey had been literally ruined, not obliterated as Freyberg had required, and was now one vast mountain of rubble with many walls still remaining up to a height of forty or more feet, resembling the ‘dead teeth’ General John K. Cannon of the USAAF wanted to remove; ironically those of the north-west corner (the future target of all ground assaults through the hills) remained intact. These the Germans, sheltering from the smaller bombs, immediately occupied and turned into excellent defensive positions, ready to slaughter the 4th Indian Division when they belatedly attacked. As Brigadier Kippenberger observed: ‘Whatever had been the position before, there was no doubt  that the enemy was now entitled to garrison the ruins, the breaches in the fifteen-foot-thick walls were nowhere complete, and we wondered whether we had gained anything.’

Peter Caddick-Adams is a Lecturer in Military and Security Studies at the United Kingdom’s Defence Academy, and author of Monte Cassino: Ten Armies in Hell and Monty and Rommel: Parallel Lives. He holds the rank of major in the British Territorial Army and has served with U.S. forces in Bosnia, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

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Image credits: (1) Source: U.S. Air Force; (2) Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-2005-0004 / Wittke / CC-BY-SA; (3) Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-J26131 / Enz / CC-BY-SA

The post The bombing of Monte Cassino appeared first on OUPblog.

By David L. Roll

Seventy years ago this month, Americans came to know Casablanca as more than a steamy city on the northwest coast of Africa. On 23 January 1943, the film Casablanca, starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, a tale of doomed love and taking the moral high ground, was released to packed movie houses. The next day, a Sunday, President Franklin Roosevelt ended two weeks of secret World War II meetings in Casablanca with Prime Minister Winston Churchill by announcing at a noon press conference, in a sunlit villa garden fragrant with mimosa and begonia, that “peace can come to the world,” only through the “unconditional surrender by Germany, Italy and Japan.”

The Academy Award-winning movie, of course, became a classic.

Title screen of Casablanca, the Academy-Award winning classic directed by Michael Curtiz and starring Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, and Paul Henreid. Image in the public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Similarly, Roosevelt’s supremely confident proclamation reverberated throughout the world and shortly entered the history books. Choosing just a few words, the president for the first time sought to firmly establish Allied war aims and determine the framework of the peace.

But both the emotional power of the film and the president’s lofty words blurred if not obscured some inconvenient facts. American audiences must have been persuaded that their government, like Bogart’s Rick, would do the right thing by turning its back on the Nazi collaborators (the French puppet government, the Vichy regime) and casting its lot to fight alongside Charles de Gaulle’s Free French. In fact, the Roosevelt administration did not act to cut its ties with Vichy, continued to rely on Nazi sympathizers to run the Moroccan government, and did not officially recognize de Gaulle until October 1944. Like the political and military realities confronting the Obama administration today in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria and Iran, the situation on the ground in North Africa in 1943 was murky, complicated and ambiguous. It did not lend itself to the high-minded moral clarity that Hollywood screenwriters enjoy.

So too the policy of unconditional surrender announced by the US president at Casablanca, and endorsed by the British prime minister, masked some stark realities. Unless and until the Soviet Union decided once and for all to reject German peace-feelers and its Red Army had achieved sufficient size and strength to break the back of Germany’s military machine, “unconditional surrender” could be nothing more than a hollow slogan. Though the president’s confident rhetoric was ostensibly aimed at lifting the morale of the populations of the United States and Great Britain, it was in fact directed at the man who was conspicuously absent from the Casablanca conference—Joseph Stalin. Roosevelt was aware that many would argue that the unconditional surrender policy would prolong the war by encouraging the Nazis to fight to the last man and woman, but he believed that this danger was outweighed by the need to allay Soviet suspicions that the Americans and British would conspire to negotiate a separate armistice with Germany. Roosevelt saw his policy as another way to convince Stalin of his goodwill, a political and psychological substitute for a second front—a phrase that would keep the Soviets in the war, killing German soldiers by the bushel.

President Roosevelt, with Prime Minister Winston Churchill at his side, reading the “unconditional surrender” announcement to the assembled war correspondents. Casablanca, French Morocco, Jan 1943. Image courtesy the Library of Congress.

The policy announced by Roosevelt at Casablanca not only failed to acknowledge the essential role of the Soviets, it also did not have the impact on surrender and peace that he intended. Italy would soon surrender under “conditional” terms. Japan would eventually surrender on condition that her Emperor would be retained. And FDR’s dream that he would turn the page on balance-of-power diplomacy in central Europe and broker the postwar peace would be shattered by the man who could not attend the Casablanca conference in January 1943 because he was busy directing the crucial struggle at Stalingrad.

In the years since Casablanca, experience has shown that presidents would do well to emulate Roosevelt by defining war goals and outlining a framework for peace before engaging the enemy (or at least at an early stage of the conflict). Indeed, the failures of presidents Truman, Johnson, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush to do so in Korea, Vietnam, Panama, Iraq, and Afghanistan seriously soiled their legacies.

Still, the lessons of Casablanca run much deeper and are far more nuanced than the articulation of war aims and peace terms. Casablanca—the movie and the conference—teaches us that human conflict, particularly armed conflict, usually does not end on predictable terms and in conformance with unilateral decrees. Often family, clan, or tribal affiliations trump national loyalties making it difficult if not impossible to distinguish between friends and enemies, neutrals and belligerents. Religious and cultural differences befuddle American peacekeepers. These problems test the mettle of the Obama administration today in places like Benghazi, Waziristan, Damascus, and Teheran.

In Casablanca, Rick was led to believe that he had come to that city because of the healthful waters. Told by Captain Renault that he was in the desert, Rick responded, “I was misinformed.” When it comes to waging wars and structuring peace, US presidents and policymakers should humbly revisit the lessons of Casablanca.

David L. Roll is a partner at Steptoe & Johnson, LLP and founder/director of the Lex Mundi Pro Bono Foundation, a public interest organization that provides pro bono legal services to social entrepreneurs around the world. His latest book is The Hopkins Touch: Harry Hopkins and the Forging of the Alliance to Defeat Hitler.

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By Christopher M. Bell

The steady flow of new books about Winston Churchill should confirm that the famous wartime prime minister is now the best known and most studied figure in modern British history.

Churchill, a tireless self-promoter in his own time, would undoubtedly have taken a great deal of satisfaction from knowing that the legend he helped to craft would endure well into the twenty-first century. Unlike most politicians, he was deeply concerned with how he would be remembered – and judged – by history. And, although the verdict today is by no means universally positive, there is no doubt that he has achieved a level of fame that few can rival.

Academic historians (like me) spend so much time immersed in the study of the past that we cannot help but see it as a crowded place full of familiar faces. And a figure like Churchill is impossible to ignore: his memory, like the man himself, positively demands our attention. But the full-time historian is generally able to tune Churchill out when necessary: for most of us, he remains just one of the many historical actors we must look at to understand the past.

For the public at large, however, the past is a very different place. Most people approach it as they would a party full of strangers: instinctively scanning the crowd as they enter in hopes of spotting a familiar face. But the more time that passes, the more unfamiliar the past becomes – and the fewer faces we are likely to recognize. Our collective historical memory is subject to a natural sort of attrition process. Most of Britain’s leading politicians, statesmen and warriors of the early twentieth-century, many of them household names in their own time, are now barely remembered at all. Lord Kitchener’s famous recruiting poster from the First World War is still instantly recognizable, but every year there are fewer and fewer people who can put a name to the face of a man who in 1914 was better known – and certainly more widely admired – than Churchill.

• Winston Churchill in 1881

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/churchill1.png

• Winston Churchill in 1904

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/churchill2.png

• Winston Churchill in 1943

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/churchill3.png

• Winston Churchill in 1944

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/churchilll4.png

The process has distinctly Darwinian overtones, as the most famous figures of yesteryear gradually displace their lesser-known rivals – and eventually each other – in the competition for a place in our collective memory of the past. Only a handful of famous twentieth-century Britons can share the historical stage with Churchill and demand anything like equal billing. And even they do not seem to share his seeming immunity to the passage of time. Neville Chamberlain, for example, remains an iconic figure, although for many he is not an important historical actor in his own right so much as a supporting figure in a better-known, and implicitly more important, story: Churchill’s triumphant rise to power in 1940.

Britain has good reason to look back on the Second World War as the “People’s War”, but the fact remains that only one of “the people” could be reliably identified today in a police line-up. And he is recognizable precisely because of his role in this great conflict. Churchill’s near-mythical status was ensured by his leadership in the critical months between the army’s evacuation from Dunkirk and the Royal Air Force’s victory in the Battle of Britain. At a time when Britain’s defeat seemed not only possible but imminent, Churchill rallied and inspired the people as no other contemporary politician could have. In Britain’s national mythology, he almost single-handedly changed the course of the war by sustaining the morale of the British people at the height of the Nazi onslaught, and in so doing ensured Hitler’s ultimate downfall.

Even in 1940, there was already a tendency to regard Churchill as the personification of Britain’s collective war effort and the embodiment of the nation’s heroic defiance of Nazi Germany. Churchill himself once attempted to put his role into perspective when he declared that “It was a nation and a race dwelling all round the globe that had the lion heart. I had the luck to be called upon to give the roar.” How far Churchill really believed this is debatable. In his speeches and memoirs he consistently downplayed the doubts and fears that pervaded Britain after the fall of France. But he knew better than anyone how close Britain may have come to a negotiated peace with Hitler in 1940 – and how important was his role in preventing this.

As more and more of Churchill’s contemporaries have receded and then disappeared from public memory, the popular association of Churchill with this defining moment in Britain’s history has only grown stronger. He may soon be, if he isn’t already, the last (recognizable) man standing in the history ofBritainduring the first half of the twentieth century.

Churchill believed that history was made by “great men”, and it is hard to imagine him being troubled by this trend. Historians might lament the public’s disproportionate interest in any one particular individual, but this is not to suggest we don’t need any more books about Churchill. The central place he enjoys in our memory of the twentieth century makes it all the more important that the record is as full and accurate as possible. The challenge is to populate that history with real people, and recognize that Churchill was also a supporting character in their stories.

Christopher M. Bell is Associate Professor of History at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He is the author of The Royal Navy, Seapower and Strategy between the Wars (2000), co-editor of Naval Mutinies of the Twentieth Century: An International Perspective (2003), and author of Churchill and Sea Power (2012).

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Slideshow image credits: all images by British Government [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons (1, 2, 3, 4).

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By Nicholas Rankin

On 27^th June 1941, in Washington D.C., Lt-Commander Ian Fleming RNVR drafted a short ‘Memorandum to Colonel Donovan’ on how to structure and staff the headquarters of his new American intelligence agency, COI, to be set up by Christmas 1941. Fleming suggested taking over a section of the FBI building and liaising closely with the Attorney-General and J. Edgar Hoover; Donovan would need to make friends with both the State Department and the FBI and enlist their full help ‘by cajolery and other means’. As Co-ordinator of Information, Donovan would have to ‘dragoon’ the War and Navy Departments into co-operation and be ‘prepared to take action quickly if they don’t help.’ Fleming recommended that Henry Luce of TIME magazine be asked to run Foreign Intelligence, a good “sapper” or military engineer should run Sabotage (a practical problem where romantics should not be encouraged), and Edgar Hoover should nominate someone to run Counter-espionage.  Ian Fleming, who had a background as a Reuters news agency correspondent, thought Donovan would need a ‘Managing Editor with staff from a news agency foreign desk to receive and disseminate intelligence from a central office at GHQ’. He suggested consulting the head of Associated Press and getting staff from only one news agency to avoid jealousies and friction. There would have to be heads of country sections, liaison officers with other government departments, someone in charge of communications (‘A good Fleet Signals Officer’), someone to run matériel and transport (‘Consult American Express’) and many Field Officers (‘Pool the files of the State Department, Navy and Army, and pick the best. Appoint talent scouts to find more if necessary.’) Whoever recruited personnel should be a ‘thoroughly critical and sceptical man’.  To liaise with the British Secret Service in London, Ian Fleming with his naval background naturally suggested people he knew through the Naval Intelligence Division: Commander Christopher Arnold-Foster and Captain Eddie Hastings. He wanted the closest cooperation between Britain and America: ‘Request CSS [the head of MI6] to allow your men in the field to work closely with ours’, and he advised judicious punishment pour encourager les autres: ‘Make an example of someone at an early date for indiscretion and continue to act ruthlessly where lack of security is concerned.’

Three weeks later, Fleming sent his boss Admiral John Godfrey, now back in London, a MOST SECRET cable about Donovan’s progress to date as Coordinator of Information.

1) Initial grant of ten million dollars placed at his disposal.

2) Washington personnel will be housed in Library of Congress and New York office will be at No. 2, Wall Street.

3) Skeleton staff should be at work by August 15^th.

4) Information from Colonel Donovan will go direct to the President.

5) Emphasis has shifted towards strategical, economic and psychological research work and planning.

6) Propaganda in enemy countries will have a considerable role under ROBERT SHERWOOD, dramatist, working with radio corporations and Federal Communications Committee.

7) Geographical sections containing one naval, one military, one flying officer with civilian experts will be created. They will report to a Joint Intelligence Committee which will include Director of Naval Intelligence, Director of Military Intelligence, State Department. Their sources of information will be Service Intelligence departments supplemented by any fields they may be able to develop. These sections will also nominally repeat nominally be charged with Secret Intelligence Service, Special Operations 1  [propaganda] and Special Operations 2 [active operations] work

By Nicholas Rankin

In May 1941, Ian Fleming and his boss, the Director of Naval Intelligence, Admiral John Godfrey, were touching base in New York City with William Stephenson, the British Secret Service’s representative in North America as head of British Security Co-Ordination, whose headquarters occupied the 34^th and 35^th floors of the Rockefeller Center. The place later went into Fleming’s fiction. In chapter 20 of the very first Bond book, Casino Royale, James Bond confesses to the assassination of a Japanese cipher expert cracking British codes on the 36^th floor of that building – it was the first of the two wartime cold-blooded killings that led to Bond’s Double O number.

On 28 May 1941, Ian Fleming celebrated his 32^nd birthday in New York City with the good news that the Royal Navy had sunk Germany’s greatest battleship, the 42,000-ton Bismarck. Then he and Godfrey travelled by train to Washington DC on their mission to persuade the American authorities that they needed to create a unified American secret service. Intelligent combination in the USA would be an improvement on the system in the UK, which had evolved four different bodies with overlapping functions and competing masters: the blockaders of the Ministry of Economic Warfare (MEW), the propagandists in the Political Warfare Executive (PWE), the saboteurs in the Special Operations Executive (SOE) and the spies of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS or MI6).

Before WW2, the United States of America had similarly left foreign intelligence variously to the diplomats of the State Department, the Military Intelligence Division (or G-2) of the War Department and the Office of Naval Intelligence. No-one below the White House was collating intelligence and no-one was taking the big strategic view. Although Admiral Godfrey found all three US departments polite and friendly towards him, he was surprised to discover how much the US Army and US Navy loathed and detested each other and what a snakepit bureaucratic Washington could be, like Whitehall at its very worst.

The only man who could knock heads together was the Commander-in-Chief, the President of the United States. Admiral Godfrey was invited to dine at the White House on 10^th June 1941, and given an hour with the President afterwards in the Oval Office. According to Godfrey, after watching ‘a rather creepy crawly film of snake worship’, FDR drawlingly recounted his reminiscences of British Admiral Reginald Hall’s brilliance as Director of Naval Intelligence in the Great War, while Godfrey himself reiterated three times the need for the Americans to have ‘one intelligence security boss, not three or four.’

That very same day, 10^th June 1941, William J. Donovan, (the American ‘Bill’ of the previous blog), had submitted a memorandum to the President recommending the establishment of ‘a central enemy intelligence organization’ to analyze and appraise all information on enemy intentions and resources, both military and economic, and to determine the best methods of waging economic and psychological warfare.

A week later, on 18^th June 1941, President Roosevelt accepted Donovan’s proposal and appointed Donovan himself as Coordinator of Information (COI). His job was to ‘collect and analyze all information and data which may bear upon national security: to correlate such information and data, and to make such information and data available to the President…’ Roosevelt scrawled a note on the memo’s coversheet, ‘Please set this up confidentially … Military – not O.E.M. [Office of Emergency Management].’ The CIA historian Thomas F. Troy glosses ‘confidentially’ to mean there would be access to the President’s secret funds and ‘Military’ to denote ‘by virtue of the President’s authority as commander in chief’. William Stephenson, the Canadian ‘Bill’ was jubilant. He cable

By Nicholas Rankin

On 15 May 1941, two Englishmen flew from London to Lisbon, at the start of a ten-day wartime journey to New York City. Though they wore civilian clothes they were, in fact, the Director of Naval Intelligence, Admiral John Godfrey, and his personal assistant, Lieutenant Commander Ian Fleming RNVR, the future author of the James Bond novels. What followed was to change American intelligence forever.

Until December 1941, the United States of America was neutral in the Second World War. In two years of open blitzkrieg, the Nazis had conquered much of Europe; Britain stood alone and broke, summoning aid from its overseas dominions and colonies. The British Prime Minister Winston Churchill remembered well that industrial America’s entry into the Great War in 1917 had assured victory. He needed a repeat, but the US President F.D. Roosevelt proceeded cautiously.

The first American aid to the Allied cause was spun as protecting an isolationist nation. In return for 50 old American destroyers for the Royal Navy, the USA obtained from the British Empire 99-year leases on a chain of strategic Atlantic bases: in Newfoundland, Bermuda, the Bahamas, Antigua, St Lucia, Jamaica, Trinidad and British Guiana. Between January and March 1941, there were also secret military and naval staff talks codenamed ABC – the American-British Conversations. Following these, the Chiefs of Staff and the Joint Intelligence Committee in London sent the two men to Washington DC to help ‘set up a combined intelligence organisation on a 100 per cent co-operative basis’.

The relationship of Admiral John Godfrey to Ian Fleming was like that of ‘M’ and James Bond, but also father/son. Fifty-three-year-old Godfrey had three daughters but no son; thirty-three- year- old Fleming had three brothers but no father. (Major Valentine Fleming DSO had been killed in the Great War just before Ian’s ninth birthday.) Admiral Godfrey had a brilliant mind but a volcanic temper; Ian Fleming was imaginative and imperturbable. He was a good fixer and drafted swift, crisp memos.

The two men flew KLM to Lisbon and then took the Pan Am Boeing 314 seaplane via the Azores to the British colony of Bermuda, 600 miles east of North Carolina, where the first American garrisons were building a base to help protect what President Roosevelt called ‘the Western Hemisphere’. Hamilton, Bermuda was where the British had set up the Imperial Censorship and Contraband Control Office to read the world’s mail, taken off transatlantic ships and planes. Fifteen hundred British ‘examiners’, also known as ‘censorettes’ because most were women, worked in the waterfront Princess Hotel, processing 100 bags of mail a day – around 200,000 letters – and testing 15,000 for microdots and secret ink messages, before sending on the bags on the next plane or ship. At first the USA objected to this infringement of liberty, but the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) soon realised how useful the system was when it began to reveal foreign enemy agents on US soil.

Godfrey and Fleming arrived in New York City on 25 May 1941. They stayed at the St Regis Hotel on 55^th Street and 5^th Avenue in Manhattan and soon went to meet ‘Little Bill’, the Canadian businessman William Stephenson, and his American friend and ally ‘Wild Bill’, Colonel William J. Donovan.

The bullish Bill Donovan (a WW1 Medal of Honor winner and New York lawyer) had twice travelled to the war-zone on unofficial inquiry missions for the US president. All doors had been opened for him: Winston Churchill was eager for American help. Donovan had got on well with Admiral Godfrey in London in July 1940 and had met Fleming in Gibraltar in February 1941.

The other Bill, ‘the quiet Canadian’ Bill Stephenson, had been sent to the USA in June 1940 by the British Secret Service with the mission of improving relations with J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. President Roosevelt recommended ‘t

Tricia Goyer's latest book, Remembering You, was sent to me to review and I was SO impressed with the book that I want to share it with you! This is a book that really hits home - it makes you stop and think about what is really important in life - work or family?? It is the story of Ava Andrews, a prominent tv personality, and how her life seems to be derailed when she has to take her Grandfather on a tour of the battle sites in Europe to relive his past days in World War II. Ava and her grandfather meet up with Dennis, a friend from Ava's past, and his grandfather and they, as a group, learn more about each other and their two dear grandfathers and ultimately, what is most important in life. This was a heart warming read - and it challenges you to think about what is important to you too!

Win a Kindle Touch for YOU and a Friend from Tricia Goyer!
Tricia Goyer is celebrating the release of her novel, Remembering You, with a KINDLE Touch Giveaway for you ... and for the friend of your choice. Then on 11/29 she'll be wrapping up the release of Remembering You with a Book Chat Party!

During the first half of the party Tricia will be chatting, sharing a sneak peek of her next book, and giving away a ton of great stuff. Then she'll head over to her website for a Live Chat! Readers will be able to chat with Tricia via video or text.

Don't miss your chance to win a Kindle Touch for yourself ... and to "remember" a friend this holiday with a Kindle Touch for them!

Read what the reviewers are saying here.

One grand prize winner will receive:

• A Brand New Kindle Touch and a Kindle Touch for a Friend (winner's choice!)


• A copy of Remembering You by Tricia Goyer for each

Enter today by clicking one of the icons below. But hurry, the giveaway ends at noon on November 29th. Winner will be announced at Remembering You Facebook Party on 11/29. Tricia will be hosting an author chat (on Facebook and Live from her website) and giving away copies of her other WWII books and gift certificates to Starbucks and Amazon.com. So grab your copy of Remembering You and join Tricia on the evening of the 29th for an author chat, a trivia contest (How much do you know about WWII?) and lots of giveaways.

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16. The Battle of Midway: a slideshow

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By: Lauren, on 9/26/2011
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There are few moments in American history in which the course of events tipped so suddenly and so dramatically as at the Battle of Midway. At dawn of June 4, 1942, a rampaging Japanese navy ruled the Pacific. By sunset, their vaunted carrier force (the Kido Butai) had been sunk and their grip on the Pacific had been loosened forever.

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17. Unbroken

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By: Beckyb, on 9/3/2011
Blog: In the Pages.... (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
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Per a friend's suggestion - I got a copy of Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand and started reading. Now I'm telling you all - Biography, Non-Fiction, World War Two, Running, Redemption - this book has it all and you NEED to read it. It isn't an easy read - the life of Louie Zamperini is certainly not an pleasant one - an Olympic-hopeful runner, Louie is ready to break records with his incredibly fast mile, but is called to go to war. World War Two breaks into his plans for his running but he goes to war and plays his role as an airman. His plane is shot down over the Pacific Ocean and he and two other airmen are stranded for over a month in the middle of the ocean. Their story is amazing - compelling - and heart-breaking. Make it through the whole book and you will only be inspired by the ending - Zamperini's life is a story of redemption. I am pleased that Random House took this book and published it - worth every page!

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18. "On the Other Side"

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By: Joe Sottile, on 4/4/2010
Blog: Joe Silly Sottile's Blog (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
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I had the pleasure of meeting author Marianne Smith on Oak Island at the Senior Recreation Center.  She gave a wonderful talk about her life and the novel On the Other Side, which she wrote for her grandchildren. Marianne grew up in Germany during World War Two facing the dangers of war, bombings, hunger, and life without a father. The story is based on facts, events, and real life experiences. At the author talk Marianne Smith stated that “Everything in this book is real. I couldn’t write a book like this and imagine these things.”

Marianne admitted that it wasn’t easy putting on paper many of these painful teenage memories, but they defined the person that she became. And they show what it was like to come of age in Germany during war-torn times on the other side. Our teens need to text less and read more books like Marianne’s masterpiece.

After meeting and talking with Marianne, I felt like I made a new friend. As a poet and a essayist, I feel like I can't write about anything unless it's true. All of my poems, stories, and essays are brimming over with real life experiences. I have three books in the works, and whom did I write them for? My grandkids.

 

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19. Six-Legged Soldiers Part Three: Nerve Gases, Then and Now

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By: Kirsty, on 2/6/2009
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This is the last part of Jeffrey Lockwood’s blog on the development of nerve gases from insecticide. The previous installments can be read here and here. Today he looks at nerve gases then and now.

His book, Six-Legged Soldiers: Using Insects and Weapons of War, is out now.

While the nerve gases did not realize their lethal potential in World War II (probably because the Nazis, who had a monopoly on these weapons, mistakenly believed that the Allies could reply in-kind), these chemicals had too much promise to disappear from the military scene. In the closing weeks of the war, the invading Soviet army stole the secret formula of soman and captured the massive production plant for tabun. Ecstatic with these spoils of war, the Russians dismantled, transported, and reassembled the German plant on the banks of the Volga. The machinery was back in operation a year later and by the late 1950s, the Soviets had stockpiled no less than 50,000 tons of nerve gas. While the Red Army was pumping out organophosphates as weapons, the chemists of the West were busy upping the ante.

In 1952, a British chemist synthesized an odorless toxin capable of penetrating the skin. Not only did this organophosphate have a toxicity ten times that of soman, but it was viscous enough to form poisonous puddles that would persist and produce deadly vapors for weeks (the earlier, G-agents were volatile and short-lived on the battlefield). The pinnacle of the new V-agents was VX, which became the golden child of the American chemical warfare community and tens of thousands of tons were produced and loaded into bombs and shells over the next 20 years.

All the while, agrichemical companies searched for organophosphates that were substantially more toxic to pests than they were to humans. And they finally struck insecticidal gold. Today, farmers and homeowners are intimately familiar with the chemical legacy of the nerve gases. An incredible 70 percent of all insecticides applied in the United States are organophosphates—about 73 million pounds per year. Diazinon and malathion of two of the three most commonly used home-and-garden insecticides. Worldwide sales of organophosphate insecticides approaches $3 billion, accounting for nearly 40 percent of the entire market. Malathion, the most widely used of these chemicals, has a human toxicity 15,000-times lower than its nerve gas ancestors, while still being remarkably lethal to insects. However, even the relatively safe forms of these insecticides have been used as murderous weapons.

During the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, organophospate insecticides became the weapon of choice for assassins operating within extremist factions of P.W. Botha’s violent apartheid government. Parathion—a chemical cousin of malathion—was an ideal poison, being readily available and generating a set of indistinct symptoms such as nausea, headache, vomiting, diarrhea, disorientation, confusion, and respiratory arrest. The killers quickly discovered a bizarre but wickedly effective method for delivering the poison to a political enemy: breaking into the victim’s house or hotel room and smearing the odorless, colorless insecticide onto the person’s underwear. The optimal penetration of the chemical was through the body’s largest hair follicles, conveniently located under the arms and in the crotch. If the targets of these insecticidal weapons were limited to victims of demented murderers (and the occasional, incautious farm worker) we might be somewhat relieved, but there is a much darker potential.

In 1975, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute provided a disturbing analysis of the potential for unholy alliances between agrichemical industries and modern militaries: The possibility that chemical plants, especially those producing organophosphorus insecticides, could be converted to the production of nerve agents or other CW [chemical warfare] agents cannot be excluded…So far as plant safety measures are concerned, if a plant were producing very toxic insecticides, the safety measures would possibly differ very little from a plant producing nerve agents.

Indeed, in 1995 we learned just how easy it is to produce the evil progenitors of today’s insecticides. On March 20th, just before the height of rush hour, an apocalyptic cult called “Aleph” released sarin into the Tokyo subway system. The chemical was carried along by five high-speed trains which spread the nerve gas through the teeming subterranean tunnels. The attack was poorly conceived and executed but still managed to kill a dozen people and injure 5,000. Had the mastermind, Shoko Asahara, not been half-blind and entirely crazy, his followers might have murdered thousands.

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20. Six-Legged Soldiers Part Two: The Evil Trinity

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By: Kirsty, on 2/5/2009
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Today sees the second part of Jeffrey A. Lockwood’s three-part account of the creation of nerve gas through the synthesizing of insecticides. Check back tomorrow for the last part.

Jeffrey Lockwood is the author of Six-Legged Soldiers: Using Insects as Weapons of War. You can read the first part of his blog here.

Schrader understood the strategic implications of his discovery. He named the chemical “tabun” and communicated his findings to Army Weapons Office in Berlin. A Nazi decree required that all inventions with military potential be reported, and they were especially keen to find a chemical that would improve on the agents used in World War I. Hitler’s objections notwithstanding, the Germans were fully aware that the Italian dictator, Benito Mussolini, had successfully used mustard gas in his 1935 invasion of Ethiopia and—more importantly—there had been no international repercussions for the week-long chemical bombardment of the African nation. The Axis powers reasonably concluded that the Geneva Protocol was a convention of convenience—and chemical weapons were still viable if used with discretion against the proper opponent.

Schrader was summoned to Berlin to demonstrate the efficacy of his chemical to the military leaders, who were amazed with the power of tabun. They watched in horrified rapture as even a minuscule dose applied to the skin of a dog or a monkey immediately caused the animal’s pupils to shrink to pinpoints, after which it frothed at the mouth, vomited, and collapsed. As the gruesome demonstration progressed, the animal began to defecate uncontrollably, its limbs twitched, its entire body convulsed, and finally it died. The entire ordeal was mercifully completed within 15 minutes, although mercy was the farthest thing from the mind of the military. They were mesmerized by this chemical’s virtues—not only did it kill within minutes (phosgene and mustard gas took hours), but it was lethal though both inhalation and skin contact. Moreover, tabun was practically odorless; the enemy would never know what was coming until the ghastly symptoms took over their bodies.

The German military moved Schrader to a new facility at Elberfeld, providing him with state-of-the-art equipment and an undisturbed setting in which to continue his research on the organophosphates. Their faith in the chemist was well placed. In 1938 he discovered sarin, a compound with what he called an “astonishingly high” toxicity. Although the etymology of tabun seems to have been lost in history, “sarin” was an acronym honoring the key scientists involved in its discovery. The formula was dutifully delivered to the Wehrmacht’s laboratories in Berlin, where tests revealed a toxicity ten times that of tabun.

The deadliest organophosphate, soman, was isolated by Dr. Richard Kuhn, who won a Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work on carotene, a precursor of vitamin A. Kuhn’s work on deadly chemicals came too late in the war for the Nazis to put his nerve gas into production. Discovered in 1944, soman completed the evil trinity of G-agents, so-named for either Germany or Gerhard (Schrader). There were two other G-agents, but these received only cryptic code-names and never became serious contenders for the Nazi’s nerve gas program. By the time of Kuhn’s discovery, the Germans were also beginning to understand why these chemicals were so lethal.

The organophosphates inhibit the enzyme responsible for breaking down acetylcholine. This chemical is the primary neurotransmitter in the human body, carrying impulses between nerve endings. Without the enzyme to deactivate the neurotransmitter, the signals continue unabated. With no way of stopping the nerves from firing, we cannot control our bowels, muscles, or breathing—and a grisly death follows in short order. But the Nazis didn’t need to know how these insecticides-cum-nerve gases worked in order to understand that they had the potential to turn the course of the war.

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21. The Tiger’s Choice: Heroes by Ken Mochizuki and illustrated by Dom Lee

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By: Aline Pereira, on 11/17/2008
Blog: PaperTigers (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
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We don’t often think of picture books when we think of book group titles, but this month the Tiger’s Choice offers a picture book. It’s one that is an ideal selection for adults and children to read and discuss together–created by two men, Ken Mochizuki and Dom Lee,  who have provided a new defintion of what picture books can be.

Heroes follows their stunning debut, Baseball Saved Us, with a story as powerful and as provocative as that examination of the Japanese internment in the United States during World War Two. This time the story looks at peacetime America, and the difficulty of overcoming the vicious stereotyping that is the collateral damage of war.

One of the most moving and heroic stories from World War Two is the history of the Japanese American men who enlisted in the U.S. Army and formed the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, fighting in Europe and becoming  “one of the most highly decorated units in U.S. Army history”–even though many of them had family members confined behind barbed wire fences in desolate internment camps. The strength of these soldiers’ patriotism and the bravery of their military exploits makes my hair stand on end when I read about them–and so does this book.

When Donnie plays war with the other kids, he’s always the enemy because, he’s told, “there wasn’t anybody looking like you on our side.” He knows that isn’t true. He’s heard his father and uncle talk about their time  in the Army ; he’s seen their war medals. Yet he’s told, “Real heroes don’t brag” and “You kids should be playing something else besides war.”

But the war games don’t stop–they become more real and more frightening–and Donnie needs help.

Please read this book and add your comments to our final Tiger’s Choice discussion.

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22. Crossing Hitler: Who Was Hans Litten?

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By: Rebecca, on 10/29/2008
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In the Eden Dance Palace trial of 1931, in which four Nazi storm troopers stood accused of criminal assault and attempted murder, a lawyer for the prosecution requested the presence of Adolf Hitler as a witness.  Who was this fearless lawyer?  Hans Litten.  In Crossing Hitler: The Man Who Put the Nazis on the Witness Stand, Benjamin Carter Hett an Associate Professor of History at Hunter college and a former trial lawyer, tells the story of this historic confrontation, as well as the man who for a brief moment posed a serious threat to the Nazis rise to power.  In the excerpt below we learn a little about who Hans Litten was.

Who was Hans Litten?  Years later his closest friend, Max Fürst, remembered him as “more than a brother…’a part of myself,’” but also as a fanatical warrior who fought with the desperation of “one who fights the last battle.”  Countess Marion Donhoff, editor in chief of the Die Zeit (Time), believed that Litten was “one of those righteous men for whose sake the Lord did not allow the city-the country, the nation-to be entirely ruined.”  Kurt Hiller, a friend from Berlin political circles and later a cellmate in a concentration camp, called him “a true Christian by nature, and also by conviction.”  Another fellow prisoner was more sardonic: “A definite genius, but not easy to live with.”

Photographs show a serious, bespectacled young man, already growing portly and inclined to a double chin, with thinning hair combed back from a widow’s peak and worn unusually long for the time (”Only soldiers and slaves get their hair shorn,” he liked to say).  He was tall: his closest friends’ small daughter remembered him as “the big man with glasses,” and a youth movement friend described him as a “tall, pale young man.”  Beyond his height, the photos do not suggest a man who would be striking or memorable.  Yet people meeting Litten for the first time invariably gained a strong impression.  Rudolf Olden, a distinguished lawyer and journalist, remembered the first time he saw Litten.  It was in 1928 at a meeting of the League for Human Rights (Lifa für Menschenrechte), a very modern kind of political lobby group that had grown out of a left-leaning association called New Fatherland founded during the First World War by Albert Einstein and the future mayor of West Berlin, Ernst Reuter.  Litten asked a question during the discussion.  “The speaker had a striking head, a smooth face, rimless glasses over round bright eyes.  He work his shirt open at the throat, and short pants, below which the knees were bare.”  Olden took the young man for a schoolboy.  After the debate, one of Olden’s friends, smiling, told him that the “boy” was in fact the Assessor, or newly qualified lawyer, Hans Litten.  The next time Olden saw Litten was in a courtroom.  Olden was struck by the contrast between the “childlike face” with the eyes that “gazed pure and clear through the glasses,” and the calm expertise of the lawyer who refused to let anyone intimidate him…

…In her later years his still-grieving mother would remind anyone who listened that “Hitler’s first victims were Germans,” and there were many reasons why, almost from the beginning, the Nazis condemned Litten to imprisonment in a concentration camp, hard labor, prolonged interrogations, beatings, and torture.  To the Nazis Litten was half-Jewish, as he was the product of what Germans in the early twentieth century called a mixed marriage.  In politics he stood far to the left.  And he was a lawyer, a profession for which the Nazis had scant regard.

But above all it was Hitler’s personal fear and hatred that landed Litten in the concentration camps, and this fear and hatred stemmed from the handwritten summons of April 1931.  For when Hitler appeared in court in May 8, Litten subjected him to a withering cross-examination, laying bare the violence at the heart of the Nazi movement.  The Eden Dance Palace trial exposed Hitler to multiple dangers: criminal prosecution, the disintegration of his party, public exposure of the contradictions on which the Nazis’ appeal was based.  It was only through luck that Hitler survived with his political career intact..

…Litten’s resistance to the Nazis went on after the “seizure of power” of January 30, 1933.  Although he was one of the first to be arrested after Hitler was made chancellor, Litten fought back even from the concentration camps.

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Nancy Yates said, on 11/8/2008 11:04:00 PM

He’s fortunate he wasn’t arrested by the Soviet NKVD and sent to Stalin’s gulag instead. He would not have been given a chance to resist from the camps in the USSR. They would have shot him on the spot. Let’s here about Bolshevism and the 400-plus Jewish commissars and administrators who helped Stalin mass murder about 40 million Slavs and other Eastern European and Mongol minorities.

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