In 1933, this site became America’s first national historical park.
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Senin, 30 April 2018
CWT Review: Railroads Get Their Due in Georgia
The Western & Atlantic Railroad, a vital rail link for both sides during the war, provides the backdrop for three unique museums in northwest Georgia. The largest of the three, the Southern Museum of Civil War and Locomotive History, is reviewed here. The Western & Atlantic connected Tennessee and railroads throughout the Mississippi basin to …
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CWT Book Review: Civil War’s First Blood
The Civil War’s First Blood—Missouri 1854-1861 by James Denny and John Bradbury, Missouri Life, 2007, 138 pages, $29.95. When Rebel forces led by P.G.T. Beauregard opened fire on Fort Sumter in 1861, the Civil War began. Right? Wrong. Try 1854 in Missouri. As James Denny and John Bradbury point out in The Civil War’s First …
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CWT Book Review: First Louisiana Special Battalion
The First Louisiana Special Battalion: Wheat’s Tigers in the Civil War by Gary Schreckengost, McFarland & Company, Inc., Jefferson, N.C., 2008, 371 pages, $45. McFarland & Co. has published an essential collection of Civil War unit histories, and Gary Schreckengost’s The First Louisiana Special Battalion, on the short but eventful history of Wheat’s Tigers, is …
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CWT Book Review: Fighting for Defeat
Fighting for Defeat: Union Military Failure in the East, 1861-1865 By Michael C.C. Adams In December 1862, on the muddy banks of the Rappahannock River, a semi-literate soldier from Indiana became convinced that the Union Army was powerless to end the rebellion. The Army of the Potomac’s shattering defeat at Fredericksburg, the soldier wrote home …
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CWT Book Review: How the South Could Have Won the Civil War
How the South Could Have Won the Civil War: The Fatal Errors That Led to Confederate Defeat by Bevin Alexander, Crown, 336 pages, $25.95. In this fascinating counterfactual chronicle, historian Bevin Alexander contends that because the Confederate military leadership, though deeply divided throughout the war, was markedly superior to the Union’s, it should have been …
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CWT Book Review: Mark Twain’s Civil War
Mark Twain’s Civil War edited by David Rachels, University Press of Kentucky, Lexington, 2007, 232 pages, $30. During 1877, in his first public remarks about his Civil War career, Mark Twain described his early days as a raw second lieutenant from Missouri. His decidedly unmilitary recruits were peppering him with demands for umbrellas and Worcestershire …
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CWT Book Review: Unfurl Those Colors!
Unfurl Those Colors! McClellan, Sumner, & the Second Army Corps in the Antietam Campaign by Marion V. Armstrong Jr., University of Alabama Press, 2008, 362 pages, $39.95. Marion Armstrong’s military background as a U.S. Army reserve officer is evident from the first pages of Unfurl Those Colors! McClellan, Sumner & The Second Army Corps in …
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Lights…Camera… Civil War!
The Silver Screen’s Impact on the Blue and the Gray. Americans began their struggle to define the historical meaning of the Civil War as soon as four years of slaughter ended in the spring of 1865. Their quest frequently took the form of heated debates that continue today despite the passage of nearly 150 years. …
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Cavalier Gunner
The diary entries of one of J.E.B. Stuart’s renowned Horse Artillerymen chronicle the Battle of Brandy Station and the Rebels’ 1863 march into Pennsylvania. The saber-wielding troopers of Confederate Major General J.E.B. Stuart’s cavalry division supplied their dashing chieftain with plenty of daring and headlines. It was the Rebel commander’s horse artillery, however, that added …
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CWT Letter from the Editor- June 2008
Human After All General William N. Pendleton, the Army of Northern Virginia’s artillery chief, does not fit the stereotype for a typical commander of that storied force. He had the courtly part down, and he certainly looked like a general. The problem was, as Bob Krick points out in his profile of Pendleton on P. …
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Interview with Gary Gallagher: Hollywood Interprets the Civil War
Gary W. Gallagher is a professor at the University of Virginia and a noted historian who has authored more than a dozen books, including Lee and His Generals in War and Memory, Chancellorsville and The Confederate War. He has been active in preserving Civil War sites and leads battlefield tours. Since childhood, Gallagher has focused …
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CWT Today- June 2008
Controversial Proposal for Grant Memorial Ask anyone what they think is Washington, D.C.’s most impressive presidential monument and they’re sure to mention Washington, Lincoln or Jefferson. Even though the Grant Memorial is beautifully sited at the foot of the U.S. Capitol, so Ulysses and his horse (below left) have a eyepopping view of the National …
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CWT Letters from Readers- June 2008
Our readers respond to Drew Gilpin Faust’s article “This Republic of Suffering” in the February 2008 issue. On Killing Thank you for a wonderful, diverse magazine. I would like to commend your interview with Drew Gilpin Faust and her insightful article, “This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War.” While reading the interview, …
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Small Planes, Big Thrills: The Mighty Midgets
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CWT Review: Alvarez Kelly
Alvarez Kelly directed by Edward Dmytryk, Sony Pictures. The 1960s Western holds a unique place in the history of American cinema. To succeed against increasing competition from the new medium of television, movies of that era depended largely on widescreen photography, epic action scenes and a good dose of sexual innuendo. Alvarez Kelly is one …
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CWT Book Review: George Thomas
George Thomas: Virginian for the Union (Campaigns and Commanders Series, Vol. 13) by Christopher J. Einolf, University of Oklahoma Press. Although he was successful and highly respected throughout much of his life, Union General George Thomas was eclipsed in death by heroes such as Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman, and he has subsequently …
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CWT Book Review: Seventh Rhode Island Infantry
The Seventh Rhode Island Infantry in the Civil War by Robert Grandchamp, McFarland & Co. Civil War fighting units derived much of their distinctive character from the states or counties from where their soldiers were recruited, but they also reflected the places where they fought, the larger formations to which they were attached and the …
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CWT Book Review: Wolf of the Deep
Wolf of the Deep by Stephen Fox, Alfred A. Knopf. Stephen Fox’s Wolf of the Deep is an enjoyable study of Raphael Semmes, the spectacularly successful captain of the notorious Confederate raider Alabama. Under Semmes, Alabama embarked on a 22- month, 75,000-mile voyage that wrecked Union naval interests around the globe. Semmes’ success in the …
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CWT Book Review: Hardtack & Coffee
Hardtack & Coffee: The Unwritten Story of Army Life By John D. Billings Images of Civil War soldiers in camp usually feature men sitting around a roaring fire, laughing as they tell stories, enjoying the fraternity of fighting men. We are drawn to such scenes. Not only do they take us far away from the …
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CWT Book Review: With the Old Confeds
With the Old Confeds by Samuel D. Buck. Patriotic young Southerners who rallied to the colors in 1861 often gave colorful names to the volunteer companies they formed. These units soon mustered into Confederate service and became lettered companies (usually A through I, and K) in numbered regiments, but the soldiers continued to cherish the …
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CWT Review: The Hidden History of Decatur House
“I felt like the Queen of Sheba when she saw the riches of King Solomon, ‘the half had not been told me,’” wrote Frederick Douglass, describing his first impressions of the Freedmen’s Savings and Trust. The exhibit at Washington, D.C.’s Decatur House, “The Half Had Not Been Told Me: African Americans on Lafayette Square (1795-1965),” …
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CWT Book Review: Intensely Human
Intensely Human: The Health of the Black Soldier in the Civil War by Margaret Humphreys, Johns Hopkins University Press. Although field conditions were seldom amenable to any soldier’s health, the treatment of wounds and disease improved considerably during the war. However, in Margaret Humphreys’ intriguing new book Intensely Human: The Health of the Black Soldier …
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CWT Book Review: The Irish General
The Irish General: Thomas Francis Meagher by Paul R. Wylie, University of Oklahoma Press. Few Civil War commanders have evoked such conflicting assessments as Thomas Francis Meagher. In life the Union general’s supporters were effusive and many, but his detractors were just as numerous and quite damning. His historical reputation has been a source of …
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CWT Book Review: General Lee’s Army
General Lee’s Army: From Victory to Collapse by Joseph T. Glatthaar, Free Press. The Army of Northern Virginia has been the subject of countless books since the end of the Civil War, but finally an author has come forth with a comprehensive study that does more than simply relate the exploits of this most-storied of …
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Jefferson Davis and the Politics of Command
The Southern president’s single-minded commitment to victory undercut the Confederacy’s chance for success. Jefferson Davis’ chief occupation before 1861 was politics. He had other vocations, of course. As a young man he served as an officer in the U.S. Army, and in the mid-1830s he became a cotton planter. But from his selection in 1844 …
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CWT Letter from the Editor- August 2008
Who Done It? When carpenter Lewis Miller of York, Pennsylvania, learned of the capitulation of the Confederate States of America, he broke out his watercolors to create this celebratory painting. Though too old to fight, Miller had witnessed firsthand the upheaval that the Civil War created (story, P. 40), and his folk art rendering captures …
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Interview with Chandra Manning: Common Soldiers and Slavery
Chandra Manning is an assistant professor at Georgetown University whose provocative book What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War earned an honorable mention at this year’s Lincoln Prize contest. Based on wartime letters and accounts by common soldiers, it highlights the centrality of slavery in the views of participants from …
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CWT Today- August 2008
Three Soldiers, Three Ceremonies Veterans get their due nearly a century and a half after the fighting ended. Musician and Sportsman A Union infantryman was honored on May 2 in Wallingford, Mass. William P. Smith served in the famous 54th Massachusetts and returned from the war determined to promote music and sports in his own …
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CWT Letters from Readers- August 2008
Lincoln or Not? The “Lincoln at Gettysburg?” piece in the April issue drew responses from several readers. Here are a few. Bob Zeller’s article on the new Lincoln photograph at the Gettysburg National Cemetery dedication was fascinating. You can count me as one who believes that Lincoln is included in the Alexander Gardner photo in …
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Minggu, 29 April 2018
Daily Quiz for April 30, 2018
Mildred McAfee Horton served as the first director of this organization.
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July 2018 Table of Contents
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July 2018 Readers’ Letters
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Book Review: World War II at Sea
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Book Review: Canadians on the Somme, 1916
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Book Review: The Armies of Ancient Persia
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Book Review: Lexington and Concord
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Book Review: Andrew Jackson and the Miracle of New Orleans
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Book Review: Lützen
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Book Review: ‘I Will Not Surrender the Hair of a Horse’s Tail’
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Shipwreck Hunter David Mearns
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Insect-Class Gunboat
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Sabtu, 28 April 2018
Daily Quiz for April 29, 2018
Recently released book, Fateful Rendezvous, is a biography of this war hero who had a U.S. airport named for him in 1949.
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Jumat, 27 April 2018
CWT Book Review: Voices of the Confederate Navy
Voices of the Confederate Navy: Articles, Letters, Reports and Reminiscences by R. Thomas Campbell, McFarland & Co. Although less well known than their Army colleagues, the officers and crewmen of the Confederate Navy fought arguably greater odds, pitting courage and ingenuity against the superior technology as well as numbers of the Union fleet that blockaded …
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CWT Book Review: Roll Call to Destiny
Roll Call to Destiny: The Soldier’s Eye View of Civil War Battles by Brent Nosworthy, Basic Books Tactics and weaponry specialist Brent Nosworthy, author of Bloody Crucible of Courage, relied on the memoirs of Federals as well as Confederates to uncover hidden aspects of the war in Roll Call to Destiny. Foremost among them is …
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CWT Review: Lew Wallace Study and Museum
Lew Wallace Study and Museum The General Lew Wallace Study and Museum chronicles every aspect of the general’s eventful life. Designed and built by Wallace near his home at Crawfordsville, Ind., between 1895 and 1898 for what was then a lavish $30,000, it combines three types of architecture: Romanesque, Byzantine and Periclean Greek—perhaps reflecting the …
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CWT Book Review: A Volunteer’s Adventures
A Volunteer’s Adventures: A Union Captain’s Record of the Civil War By John William DeForest The diaspora that followed Hurricane Katrina in 2005 was not the first time New Orleans residents have been dislocated. In 1862 a tidal wave of black refugees washed through the Crescent City, too—a cataclysm no one was prepared for, largely …
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CWT Book Review: Co. “Aytch,” First Tennessee Regiment
Co. “Aytch,” First Tennessee Regiment by Sam R. Watkins, edited by Ruth H.F. McAllister, Providence House How do you improve on a classic Civil War memoir? Very carefully and with terrific sensitivity, one would hope. Fortunately, Ruth Hill Fulton McAllister has mastered this approach in her new release of Co. “Aytch,” First Tennessee Regiment, published …
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CWT Book Review: Confederate Daughters
Confederate Daughters: Coming of Age During the Civil War by Victoria E. Ott, Southern Illinois University Press Victoria Ott examines the lives of teenage daughters of Southern slaveholding secessionist families from the late 1850s to the early 1870s, following 85 young women who left written records of their experiences during this transformational period. She explains …
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CWT Book Review: Camp William Penn
Camp William Penn by Donald Scott Sr., Arcadia Publishing The latest release in the Arcadia Publishing series “Images of America,” Camp William Penn explores the fascinating history of the first and largest Federal facility to train black Union troops. Established on May 22, 1863, not far from Philadelphia, the training camp was backed by that …
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CWT Book Review: Cavalryman of the Lost Cause
Cavalryman of the Lost Cause by Jeffry D. Wert, Simon & Schuster Not long after the Civil War, Confederate Brigadier General William H.F. Payne mused on the complex legacy of J.E.B. Stuart, his former commander in the 4th Virginia Cavalry. He was “quick in conception & execution…brave as his sword,” Payne wrote, adding that Stuart …
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The Secret Life of Erich Gimpel
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In His Father’s Shadow
Searching for the real Robert Todd Lincoln. As we celebrate the Lincoln bicentennial, the Great Emancipator—and by extension everyone around him—continues to intrigue us. Countless studies have focused on Abraham Lincoln’s generals, his staff and also his family ties. How is it then that the accomplishments of his eldest son Robert, an American success story …
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At War With the Press
Many generals considered reporters ‘the scum of creation,’ but George Meade ran one out of camp backward on a mule. With some justification, Civil War reporters are typically portrayed as a merry band of boisterous, hard-drinking bohemians, blithely navigating their way through the horrors of combat, always willing to lie, cheat and spy on one …
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Walt Whitman’s Calling Card
A memento inspires a Union soldier’s great-grandson to research an encounter with the poet. For years my family has stored away a collection of Civil War–period images, including cartes de visite (CDVs), daguerreotypes and tintypes. The item that has fascinated me the most is an autographed CDV of Walt Whitman, the American poet who frequently …
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CWT Letter from the Editor- October 2008
‘We Don’t Want the Truth Told!’ Major General George G. Meade clearly did not see eye to eye with reporters (P. 48), but perhaps no Union general loathed newsmen more than the architect of the March to the Sea, William T. Sherman (P. 26), who viewed the press as a hostile Fifth Column. In October …
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CWT Today- October 2008
Cedar Creek Battlefield: Ruined Forever? A serious dispute between the Cedar Creek Battlefield Foundation and nearby Belle Grove Plantation broke out at a May 28 meeting of the Frederick County, Va., Board of Supervisors, where a 4-3 vote was taken to support the application by a Belgium mining conglomerate locally known as Chemstone to expand …
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CWT Letters from Readers- October 2008
Francis the Ripper? The “Ads of the Age” item in the August issue, featuring Dr. Tumblety’s “pimple banishing” cream, drew several letters, including the following. The caption in the “Ads of the Age” for Dr. Tumblety’s pimple banisher poses the question, “Would you trust a doctor named ‘Tumblety’?” I don’t know for certain, but I …
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CWT Review: Andersonville
Andersonville Directed by John Frankenheimer, June 2004 Andersonville, the 1996 Turner Pictures made-for-TV film, gives the notorious Confederate prison in Georgia a gritty treatment not seen in previous cinematic versions. Although this four-hour 2004 film, released on DVD in 2004, is beset by its share of problems, it captures the well-known despair endured by all …
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CWT Book Review: George Stoneman
George Stoneman: A Biography of the Civil War General by Ben Fuller Fordney, McFarland & Co. George Stoneman’s claim to fame is that he led the Army of the Potomac’s first great cavalry raid, at Chancellorsville in May 1863. Al though that raid was successful, the absence of what should have been Maj. Gen. Joseph …
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CWT Book Review: Awaiting the Heavenly Country
Awaiting the Heavenly Country— The Civil War and America’s Culture of Death by Mark S. Schantz, Cornell University Press To 21st-century Americans living active, healthy and fulfilling lives well beyond their allotted “threescore years and ten,” a culture extolling the virtues of a “good death”—one that often seeks its comforts—seemingly confounds rational thinking. But that …
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CWT Book Review: Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War
Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War By Herman Melville Although he never visited the front in person, Herman Melville was virtually shell-shocked by accounts of the Civil War’s human carnage. So when news came of Richmond’s fall in April 1865, the celebrated author’s creative energies were liberated. This time, though, he vented his pent-up emotions …
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CWT Book Review: Immortal Captives
Immortal Captives: The Story of 600 Confederate Officers and the United States Prisoner of War Policy by Mauriel P. Joslyn, Pelican Publishing Co. The horrors faced by Union prisoners of war have been the focus of several Civil War studies, but fewer books have have been devoted to the plight of their often-abused and neglected …
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CWT Book Review: Decision in the Heartland
Decision in the Heartland—The Civil War in the West by Steven E. Woodworth, Praeger Publishing Civil War historiography has been dominated by Eastern theater historians, generals and battles ever since the war ended. Fortunately, there has been a rethinking of such one-sided bias in the past few decades. There is no more important historian in …
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CWT Book Review: Causes Won, Lost & Forgotten
Causes Won, Lost & Forgotten—How Hollywood and Popular Art Shape What We Know About the Civil War by Gary Gallagher, University of North Carolina Press Popular movies and artwork have had a tremendous impact on the general public’s understanding of the war, and their influence—for good or ill—is the subject of Gary Gallagher’s Causes Won, …
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CWT Book Review: The Dark Intrigue
The Dark Intrigue: The True Story of a Civil War Conspiracy by Frank Van Der Linden, Fulcrum Publishing In his acclaimed 1991 study of Abraham Lincoln and civil liberties, Mark Neely Jr. concluded that historical scholarship over the previous 30 years had proved “beyond any reasonable doubt, that no systematic, organized disloyal opposition to the …
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‘The Monitor Is No More’
USS Monitor’s famous clash with CSS Virginia is etched in history. But perhaps its most important battle was the one to save itself. Massive waves pounded across USS Monitor’s deck on December 30, 1862, choking and drowning frantic sailors trying to escape the vessel’s turret and get into rescue boats. Cape Hatteras’ savage seas were …
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Dark Days in the Southland
A reporter’s 1865 trip through the defeated Confederacy revealed a ravaged landscape and bitter people. On a hot day in June 1865, young Harvard graduate John Richard Dennett boarded the steamer Creole for Richmond, Virginia. It was a scant two months since Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox in New York City, bound on April …
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‘General Wheat, Is That You?’
How I came to discover an unidentified ambrotype of a legendary New Orleans warrior. In the fall of 1860, a New York Herald reporter visited a group of American and British adventurers in England preparing to aid Giuseppe Garibaldi in his quest to unite Italy. “And, goodness gracious, can it be?” the newspaperman mused in …
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Incognito in Baltimore
Rumors of an assassination plot forced President-elect Lincoln to sneak through Charm City in 1861. When Abraham Lincoln left Spring- field, Illinois, on February 11 to travel to his inauguration in Washington, he began a journey of unprecedented proportions that took him through seven states and countless towns and villages. En route, he delivered no …
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CWT Letter from the Editor- December 2008
‘Bull Head’ Depending on your source, Major General Edwin V. Sumner went by the nickname of either “Bull Head,” “Bull of the Woods” or just plain “Bull.” He was given that moniker, so the scribes say, because 1) a musket ball bounced off his head during the Mexican War, leading his comrades to joke that …
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Interview with Harold Holzer
Harold Holzer’s latest book, Lincoln President-Elect: Abraham Lincoln and the Great Secession Winter 1860-1861 (Simon & Schuster, 2008), focuses on the unprecedented challenges Lincoln faced as an incoming commander in chief. The co-chairman of the Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, Holzer has authored or co-authored 30 books on Civil War topics, including the Lincoln Prize–winning Lincoln at …
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CWT Today- December 2008
New Museum Celebrates Midwest Soldiers No battles took place in Kenosha, Wis., but the town is centered in a region that dispatched more than 740,000 men to the war effort. Kenosha’s brand-new Civil War Museum focuses on the contributions of six Midwestern states: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin. “This region’s heart was in …
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CWT Letters from Readers- December 2008
Ladies First in Winchester In the August 2008 issue’s “Mail Call,” Robert E. Zaworski pointed out the integral role Southern white women played in creating Confederate cemeteries in the war’s aftermath. He noted that the first Ladies Memorial Association, organized in Columbus, Ga., in April 1866, was followed shortly thereafter by the establishment of an …
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Joshua Sill: The Hero and His Threatened Monument
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Hallowed Ground | Megiddo (Armageddon), Israel
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Kamis, 26 April 2018
What if: the July 20 Bomb Plot Had Succeeded?
At 12:42 p.m. on July 20, 1944, a massive explosion destroyed a conference room at Wolfsschanze (“Wolf ’s Lair”), Adolf Hitler’s headquarters in East Prussia. Hitler’s miraculous survival of the assassination attempt has long been seen as one of the most agonizing near-misses of the war. Many have argued that but for the tiniest quirks …
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WWII Review: Blazing Angels 2- Secret Missions of WWII
As the sequel to the premiere flight-combat action game from earlier this year, Blazing Angels 2: Secret Missions of WWII raises the bar set by its predecessor in graphic detail, historical accuracy of aircraft, and game play innovation. Vast improvements in these areas highlight the progress made by the game’s development team at Ubisoft Romania. …
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WWII Review: Lust, Caution
Lust, Caution (2007) Director: Ang Lee Time: 158 minutes. Color. Subtitles. This aptly titled cautionary tale about the unfathomable mysteries of love and desire transplants the seeds of Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious to World War II China. Beautifully atmospheric and gorgeously shot, as you’d expect from the director of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, it’s subtly acted …
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WWII Book Review: The Forgotten 500
The Forgotten 500: The Untold Story of the Men Who Risked All for the Greatest Rescue Mission of World War II By Gregory Freeman. 305 pp. Caliber Books, 2007. $23.95. Sixty years ago, more than five hundred Allied airmen—starving, frightened, hiding from the Germans—lurked in the hills of Yugoslavia. They’d been shot down during years …
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WWII Book Review: Winifred Wagner
Winifred Wagner: A Life at the Heart of Hitler’s Bayreuth By Brigitte Hamann. Translated from German by Alan Bance. 592 pp. Harcourt, 2006. $35. It’s a Wagnerian scenario no less bizarre than the staged ones. Winifred, the orphan girl with a misty past in England, blossoms after she’s united with her family in the Aryan …
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WWII Book Review: Mussolini and His Generals
Mussolini and His Generals: The Armed Forces and Fascist Foreign Policy, 1922–1940 By John Gooch. 642 pp. Cambridge University Press, 2007. $35. American war correspondent Ernie Pyle once mused that Italy reminded him of a dog that got hit by a truck because it tried to bite the tires. The comment reflected his ground’s-eye observation …
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Martha Gellhorn: A Woman at War
In pursuit of a story, war correspondent Martha Gellhorn pushed the boundaries of her profession, the military, and even common sense. Martha Gellhorn was determined to cover D-Day, and she wasn’t about to let a little thing like the American military stop her. Refused press credentials, she stowed away in the bathroom of a hospital …
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“Wild Bill” Donovan’s Comeuppance
A hapless cloak-and-dagger operation in Lisbon set off a chain of intrigue that was part of “Wild Bill” Donovan’s ultimate downfall. The story that came to be known as the Lisbon affair is one of the most enduring cautionary tales in modern intelligence history. It became a legendary warning of the damage that can be …
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“Our Time in Hell”
The Japanese counterattack in Guadalcanal was a harrowing slog through thirty-five miles of brutal jungle—with all but certain death waiting at the end. Maj. Gen. Masao Maruyama was not a man given to doubts. Soon after arriving on Guadalcanal on October 3, 1942, the general had issued an order declaring that there was “no position” …
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The Best of Willie & Joe
Bill Mauldin’s timeless characters captured the lot of the common soldier of World War II—and every war. In late September 1943, the 45th Infantry Division’s 180th Regiment was in Naples, embroiled in the brutal, soul-deadening fighting typical of Italy at that time. In the midst of it, twenty-one-year-old cartoonist Bill Mauldin, assigned to the regiment’s …
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On the Trail of Washington’s Wartime Secrets
Within weeks of the Pearl Harbor attack, the U.S. Army and U.S. Navy had seized so much property in and around Washington that people joked the war would already be over if America’s armed forces were as good at capturing enemy territory. The expansion of the peacetime military throughout 1941 had already left Washington bursting …
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His Majesty’s Director of Pornography
No one ever had to reproach Sefton Delmer with the admonition “know your enemy.” The son of an Australian professor who taught at Berlin University before World War I, Delmer was fluent in German before he ever spoke English. In the 1930s, as a correspondent for Britain’s Daily Express, he interviewed Hitler, even accompanying the …
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Conversation with Robert Patrick
The Greatest Stories Ever Digitized Col. Robert Patrick, USA (Ret.), is director of the Veterans History Project at the Library of Congress. Part of the library’s American Folklife Center, the project is a national grass-roots initiative to collect oral history interviews, letters, photographs, and other original documents that chronicle the stories of veterans and home …
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WWII Today- February 2008
‘Bomb-Away’: The Enola Gay’s Navigation Log Sold at Auction As he stepped from the Enola Gay into the Tinian sunshine on August 6, 1945, Capt. Theodore Van Kirk felt he had just completed the perfect mission. “Everything went exactly the way it was supposed to, and we were all in a state of euphoria,” the …
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Rabu, 25 April 2018
What if: the Japanese Had Won the Battle of the Coral Sea?
From May 4–8, 1942, American, Australian, and Japanese naval units fought the world’s first engagement decided exclusively by carrier-based air power. Tactically the Japanese could claim a limited success. They sank the carrier Lexington and heavily damaged the carrier Yorktown while losing only the light carrier Shoho. But in strategic terms, the Battle of the …
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WWII Review: The Fuerhrerbunker
The Fuerhrerbunker (1935–1942) Director: Christoph Neubauer Time: 50 minutes. B&W. We all know what Hitler’s Berlin underground lair looked like: dark, narrow corridors winding into dank, dim caverns. But according to Christoph Neubauer, what we all know is wrong once again. Neubauer, an East German relocated to South Africa, has spent the last several years …
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WWII Book Review: Where Have All the Soldiers Gone?
Where Have All the Soldiers Gone?: The Transformation of Modern Europe By James J. Sheehan. 304 pp. Houghton Mifflin, 2008. $26. Renowned historian James J. Sheehan of Stanford University has produced a well-written and informative history of Europe’s twentieth-century cultural transformation. Specifically, Where Have All the Soldiers Gone? examines how European attitudes toward military institutions …
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WWII Book Review: The Zookeeper’s Wife
The Zookeeper’s Wife: A War Story By Diane Ackerman. 368 pp. Norton, 2007. $24.95. In the early 1930s, Jan and Antonina Zabinski ran the Warsaw Zoo and lived on the premises, tending the animals in the collection and laboring, with love, toward a more humane way of preserving wildlife through natural enclosures. The German military …
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WWII Book Review: The Airmen and the Headhunters
The Airmen and the Headhunters: A True Story of Lost Soldiers, Heroic Tribesmen and the Unlikeliest Rescue of World War II By Judith M. Heimann. 304 pp. Harcourt, 2007. $26. During an attack on a formidable group of Imperial Navy warships at Brunei Bay, Borneo, on November 16, 1944, an antiaircraft shell devastated the B-24 …
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WWII Book Reviews: Some of Sir Winston’s Best Friends
Churchill and the Jews: A Lifelong Friendship By Martin Gilbert. 359 pp. Henry Holt & Co., 2007. $30. American Jennie: The Remarkable Life of Lady Randolph Churchill By Anne Sebba. 378 pp. Norton, 2007. $26.95. Churchill, the prolific nonagenarian who is often voted history’s greatest Englishman, sure had a way with words. Think “iron curtain” …
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An American Boy’s World War II Childhood
Too young to serve, the generation that grew up just behind was shaped by war in its own profound, funny, and moving way. The grim headlines from Europe and the Pacific didn’t scare me. I was a mere tadpole of a kid during the early years of World War II, but I had seen enough …
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Secrets of the Nazi Interrogators
The Luftwaffe developed masterful psychological techniques to milk Allied airmen for information. For the American and British troops who fought their way into Germany in 1944 and 1945 it was one of the toughest and bloodiest campaigns of the war. But over forty-five thousand Allied servicemen got there first, entering Germany in the hardest way …
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A Savage Fight for New Guinea
A savage battle on New Guinea was fought by men near the breaking point before it even began. From the safety of Port Moresby, New Guinea, Gen. Douglas MacArthur watched in impotent fury. Offensives on the two fronts flanking Buna, on the opposite coast of the Papuan peninsula, had yielded nothing but bad news. Making …
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Smooth Sailing for an Old Warship
Looking around at many of my seven hundred fellow passengers making their way up the gang plank, I realize they faced decidedly different circumstances the first time they made this walk, some sixty-five years ago. The serene sky and calm Chesapeake Bay on this autumn day are a far cry from what these veterans routinely …
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Eisenhower’s Rabbi, Who Saved the Survivors
Not many lieutenant colonels would have dared blow the whistle on Gen. George S. Patton Jr.—but then not many lieutenant colonels had seen what Judah Nadich had, at least not with eyes that remained so undulled to moral outrage and yet still so alive to hope. It was a half-year after the German surrender, and …
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Conversation with David Stafford
In 2004, British historian David Stafford’s Ten Days to D-Day: Citizens and Soldiers on the Eve of the Invasion tracked Normandy through ten participants, focusing less on leaders and heroics than on the period’s murky uncertainties. Now Endgame, 1945: The Missing Final Chapter of World War II brings a similar approach to the end of …
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WWII Today- March 2008
American Who Infiltrated the Manhattan Project for the Soviets Honored in Russia It could have been a heart- warming American success story. Born and raised in Iowa, George Koval graduated from Sioux City’s Central High School in 1929. Next to his yearbook photo were the words, “A mighty man is he,” and the precocious Midwesterner …
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What if: the British Hadn’t Bombed Hamburg?
During 1943 the RAF’s Bomber Command fought three aerial campaigns in the night skies over Nazi Germany: the Battle of the Ruhr (March through June), the Battle of Hamburg (July 24–25 to August 2–3), and the Battle of Berlin (November 18–19 to March 1944). The Air Staff’s stated target in each case was the same: …
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WWII Review: Company of Heroes- Opposing Fronts
One of the best-reviewed games of 2006, Company of Heroes was destined to become a franchise. With its immersive gameplay, complex intraunit relationships, and innovative supply-line-resource-gathering concept, it was arguably one of the best World War II–era strategy games on the market. The release of Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts, the official standalone expansion pack, …
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WWII Book Review: The Holy See and Hitler’s Germany
The Holy See and Hitler’s Germany By Gerhard Besier. 272 pp. Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. $35. Densely packed and often less-than-elegantly translated, this rewarding exercise in historiography draws extensively on documents held in the Vatican Archives that were only declassified in 2003 (many other relevant materials remain unavailable). With those documents in hand, Besier, a theologian …
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WWII Review: Untold Stories of the Tuskegee Airmen
Untold Stories of the Tuskegee Airmen Director: Tom Rubeck Time: 51 minutes. Color/B&W. In 2007, the surviving members of the famed Tuskegee Airmen, a group of African American aviators and ground personnel who overcame discrimination at home in order to fight for democracy abroad, were belatedly honored with the Congressional Gold Medal. This new DVD, …
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WWII Book Review: Ted Williams at War
Ted Williams at War By Bill Nowlin. 368 pp. Rounder Books, 2007. $24.95. Bill Nowlin may have stepped to the plate once too often. As the author or editor of more than a dozen books on Ted Williams, Nowlin has faced the task of finding the real person in the middle of the anger, confusion, …
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WWII Book Review: The Forger
The Forger: An Extraordinary Story of Survival in Wartime Berlin By Cioma Schönhaus. 220 pp. Da Capo, 2008. $23. If this were fiction, it could be a coming-of-age adventure tale like Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn—with some vicious twists. For this memoir recounts the riveting tale of a quick-witted, almost nonchalant teenaged Jewish hero who …
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WWII Book Review: Stalingrad
Stalingrad: How the Red Army Survived the German Onslaught By Michael K. Jones. Foreword by David M. Glantz. 320 pp. Casemate, 2007. $32.95. A Red Army veteran once told this reviewer, “If you dig down anywhere in Volgograd, just pick a spot at random—you will find human remains.” That macabre revelation, delivered in a matter-of-fact, …
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A Daring Rescue Behind the Lines
Operation Halyard weathered fierce British opposition, communist sabotage, and the threat of Nazi discovery to become one of the most successful rescue missions of World War II. Black flak bursts blossomed in the air around Lt. Thomas Oliver’s B-24 bomber as he flew high above the town of Bor, Yugoslavia. The earlier loss of two …
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Operation Starvation
A brilliant synergy between air and sea came close to defeating Japan even before the atomic bombs. Late on the afternoon of March 27, 1945, 102 four-engine Boeing B-29s clattered aloft from Tinian, rising ponderously from the island and climbing slowly away, bound for another night raid on Japan. Since late November 1944, the Superfortresses …
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Fight to the Finish on Leyte
MacArthur’s strategic blunders in taking Leyte were matched only by the Japanese army’s miscalculations. Gen. Tomoyuki Yamashita had intended to fight his main battle for the defense of the Philippines on Luzon. Yet he found his judgment summarily overruled by his superiors. Field Marshal Hisaichi Terauchi allowed himself to be deceived by the navy, which …
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Lawrence of Morocco
In his memoirs, the anthropologist Carleton Coon wanted to set one thing straight: The explosives his team of Arab saboteurs used to blow up German tanks were not, as Time magazine once erroneously reported, fake camel turds. They were fake mule turds. Few people back then knew what an anthropologist was, much less why one …
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Harsh Winds Shake the Dust from Manzanar’s Past
Back in the early 1950s, when I was a high school student in Oregon, our American history teacher told us a sad story of how the civil rights we take for granted can disappear in time of war. Barely a decade earlier, just after Pearl Harbor, all Japanese Americans on the west coast—citizens and resident …
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Conversation with Pete Hamill
Two Legendary Journalists, a Generation Apart, on the Art of War Reporting Pete Hamill was born to Irish immigrants in Brooklyn in 1935, the oldest of seven children. At age six teen he left school for the Brooklyn Navy Yard and sheet-metal work. Then he joined the navy, finished high school, and went to college …
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WWII Today- May 2008
Long-Forgotten P-38 Reemerges on Welsh Beach When Lt. Robert F. Elliott pulled his P-38F Lightning into the Welsh sky on September 27, 1942, there was trouble ahead. The plane itself wasn’t the problem; his aircraft, a twin-boomed fighter that would become one of the most lethal weapons of World War II, was in pristine condition. …
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WWII Letters from Readers- May 2008
What’s Wrong with This Picture? My question pertains to page 71 of the December 2007 issue. Which general, Eisenhower or Marshall, is wearing his collar insignia reversed? Harry H. Clark Jr. Bedford, PA. According to David S. Stieghan, U.S. Army Infantry Branch Command Historian at Fort Benning, Georgia, they were probably both wrong. Officers of …
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The Athenian Century
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Selasa, 24 April 2018
Looking Back: Days of Future Past
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Sumter’s Stepchild: Overlooked in Charleston Harbor, Castle Pinckney has a few of its own tales to tell
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Musketgate
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Get Everybody Out!
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Senin, 23 April 2018
WWII Review: Battle for the Pacific
From its familiar heads-up display to its combat system and objective-based missions, The History Channel: Battle for the Pacific appears to be a carbon copy of nearly every other World War II–era first-person shooter. And as far as the gameplay itself is concerned, it is. However, the appeal of this game lies not in its …
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WWII Review: Nanking
Nanking Director: Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman Time: 89 minutes. Color/B&W. Think of this flick as a documentary variation on Schindler’s List set in 1937 China. Directed by the pair who helmed Twin Towers, the Oscar-winning documentary short, Nanking is visually textured, haunting, nauseating, and compelling. It melds incredible, if often grotesquely disturbing, archival footage …
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WWII Book Review: The Hellish Vortex
The Hellish Vortex: Between Breakfast and Dinner By Richard M. Baughn. 394 pp. BookSurge, 2006. $20.99. Nonfiction books about air power abound, but there is a serious shortage of good air war novels. The Hunters, James Salter’s classic tale of life in an F-86 fighter interceptor squadron during the Korean War, probably leads the field. …
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WWII Book Review: Killing Rommel
Killing Rommel: A Novel By Steven Pressfield. 320 pp. Doubleday, 2008. $24.95. The author of the best- selling Gates of Fire shifts fictional venues from the ancient world to the modern and scores a winner. Combining the meticulous research and flair for drama and dialogue that mark his best work, Pressfield plucks one of World …
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WWII Book Review: Polish Deportees of World War II
The Polish Deportees of World War II: Recollections of Removal to the Soviet Union and Dispersal Throughout the World Edited by Tadeusz Piotrowski. 256 pp. McFarland, 2008. $39.95. They were awakened at two, three, or four in the morning and given fifteen minutes, a half-hour, or an hour to pack. The younger children were crying, …
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WWII Book Review: Endgame, 1945
Endgame, 1945: The Missing Final Chapter of World War II By David Stafford. 608 pp. Little, Brown and Co., 2007. $26.99. This book is fine narrative history in the tradition of Cornelius Ryan’s The Longest Day, The Last Battle, and A Bridge Too Far. The title is a bit misleading, though: instead of a tale …
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WWII Book Review: Franco and Hitler
Franco and Hitler: Spain, Germany, and World War II By Stanley G. Payne. 336 pp. Yale University Press, 2007. $30. Now a professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin, Stanley Payne remains among the doyens of English-language scholars of European fascism, and especially of Spain’s Franco era. Here, he synergizes a career’s worth of insight …
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Celebrating 100 Years of the Royal Air Force
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What if: the Manhattan Project Had Failed?
On August 6, 1945, the B-29 Enola Gay dropped the world’s first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, killing an estimated one hundred forty thousand civilians. Three days later, the B-29 Bockscar dropped a second bomb on Nagasaki, killing about eighty thou sand civilians. The United States is the only nation ever to have launched an …
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Voices from Iwo Jima
Veterans’ reminiscences recall the fear, courage, and—yes—humor they brought to the legendary battle in the Pacific. February 19, 1945, dawned bleak but manageable. That morning nearly eight hundred American vessels, ranging from battleships, cruisers, and destroyers to transports and LSTs, lay offshore a small island in the far Pacific. Aboard the transports were seventy thousand …
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Seeing Ghosts in a Martyred French Village
France is a pretty country full of pretty little villages. But Oradour- sur-Glane is not pretty. On June 10, 1944, the 2nd Waffen SS Panzer Division Das Reich, 1st Battalion, stormed this village in the Limousin region of southwestern France, sealed off every exit, and then systematically dragged every man, woman, and child to the …
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She Also Served
“What the hell are we supposed to do with them?” thundered one American army major in 1942, an all-too-typical reaction to the unprecedented flood of tens of thousands of women eager to serve their country in wartime. “Young girls away from home for the first time and thrown in here with all these horny enlisted …
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WWII Today- July 2008
‘Lost Fleet’ of U-boats Located in the Black Sea For Rudolf Arendt, captain of the German submarine U-23, the situation must have been unbearable. It was August 1944, and Arendt’s U-boat, along with two others, was enjoying its second year of terrorizing Soviet shipping in the Black Sea. Although Turkish neutrality had denied the boats …
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What if: the Japanese high command had refused to surrender
By the summer of 1945, Japan had, by every reasonable standard, lost the war. The American juggernaut had destroyed its navy, breached its island defenses, choked its economy, and fire bombed its cities. Yet the Japanese government approached the question of surrender with great trepidation, in part because any move to capitulate would likely trigger …
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WWII Review: Pacific Storm- Allies
When it was released in 2006, Pacific Storm was quickly recognized as one of the most challenging and original World War II– themed real-time strategy games of that year. It revolutionized strategy gaming by allowing the player to take a break from managing his forces and experience the action firsthand. This blending of genres—traditional strategy …
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WWII Review: The Counterfeiters
The Counterfeiters (2007) Director: Stefan Ruzowitzky. Time: 98 minutes. Color. Subtitles. Think of The Counterfeiters as a cross between Schindler’s List and Stalag 17 with a dash of Downfall— a twisting noir thriller that counts the costs of survival during the Holocaust. Based on a 1961 memoir, this year’s Oscar winner for Best Foreign Language …
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WWII Book Review: Bradley
Bradley By Alan Axelrod. 224 pp. Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. $21.95. Omar Bradley was the cautious general. He avoided unnecessary risks and always considered logistics before moving forward. This was a far cry from the aggressive, headline-grabbing styles of George Patton and Bernard Montgomery, and one might think Bradley dull and timid in comparison. On the …
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WWII Book Reviews: Pacifist, Pundit Blame Churchill for War
Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization By Nicholson Baker. 576 pp. Simon & Schuster, 2008. $30. Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World By Patrick J. Buchanan. 544 pp. Crown, 2008. $29.95. Talk about the Odd Couple. With these …
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Fallen Vietnam Pilots, Crew Honored with Monument at Arlington National Cemetery
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The Italian Impostor Who Conned FDR
Virgilio Scattolini may not have been the biggest liar ever to walk the face of the earth. But he was certainly the biggest liar ever to have his lies regularly and avidly read by the president of the United States. While he was riding high, Scattolini was pulling in upwards of $1,000 a month— equal …
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The Desert Site That Was Barren, Desolate—and Just Right
When Col. Paul Tibbets flew over Wendover Field in September 1944 in search of a remote, secure place where he could train the B-29 crews he handpicked to drop the atomic bomb, he looked down from thirty thousand feet and declared it “perfect.” Others didn’t quite share his enthusiasm. The comedian Bob Hope came through …
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WWII Today- September 2008
A Wartime Mystery Solved: ‘I Shot Down Saint-Exupéry’ When Antoine de Saint- Exupéry took off from Corsica on July 31, 1944, in an American-made P-38 reconnaissance plane, he was known for many things: as the author of The Little Prince; as an aviation pioneer; and as a French hero who returned to the war voluntarily …
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WWII Letters from Readers- September 2008
The GI with Eight Good Fingers I just received a phone call from a fellow in Lake Park, Georgia, who had an interesting story to tell. It concerns a photo on page 50 of my story about V-Discs in the July/August 2007 issue (“Free Records, 8 Million of ’Em”). The caption reads: “With the Sixth …
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What if: Germany Had Invaded England?
For individuals in countries that have escaped military invasion and occupation, imagining what such an ordeal would have been like can be a popular pastime. In the 1970s, armchair generals could play “Invasion: America,” a board game in which the fictional European Socialist coalition, South American Union, and Pan Asiatic League try to overrun the …
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WWII Book Review: Leningrad
Leningrad: State of Siege By Michael K. Jones. 352 pp. Basic Books, 2008. $27.95. The first thing that registers when one visits St. Petersburg’s (formerly Leningrad’s) Piskarevskoye Memorial Cemetery is its immense size. The second realization is even more sobering— visitors are literally surrounded by a half-million corpses. Perhaps one-third to one-half of all Leningraders …
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WWII Book Review: Bill Mauldin
Bill Mauldin: A Life Up Front By Todd DePastino. 320 pp. W. W. Norton, 2008. $27.95. The two most famous American combat soldiers of World War II never existed. To millions of stateside readers and, most importantly, to GIs in foxholes from Anzio to the Bulge, Willie and Joe, grubby veterans of the Italian campaign …
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WWII Book Reviews: Atomic Controversy
Atomic Tragedy: Henry L. Stimson and the Decision to Use the Bomb Against Japan By Sean L. Malloy. 233 pp. Cornell University Press, 2008. $26.95. Hiroshima: The World’s Bomb By Andrew J. Rotter. 368 pp. Oxford University Press, 2008. $29.95. Taken together, these two very different new works on the end of the Pacific war …
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Rocket Dreaming
Ill-fated efforts to build rocket-powered fighters gave wartime aviation visionaries a humbling lesson in going nowhere fast. On the early afternoon of May 29, 1944, Flight Lt. G. R. Crakanthorp rolled his Spitfire Mk XI reconnaissance fighter into a left bank, turning northwest high over Nazi Germany. At 37,000 feet, flying one of the fastest …
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Babe in Arms
War and life in Hitler’s Germany through the eyes of an eight-year-old. “You, my youth, are our nation’s most precious guarantee for a great future,” Hitler exhorted a crowd of 80,000 children assembled in Nuremberg on September 10, 1938. “And you are destined to be the leaders of a glorious new order under the supremacy …
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Churchill’s Secret Army
Britain’s last resort against a Nazi invasion was a guerrilla force trained to carry out suicidal missions of terror and sabotage. If Adolf Hitler’s threat to invade Great Britain in the summer of 1940 was a bluff, it was a bluff carried through with exhaustive German thoroughness. Even as the German navy began to gather …
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The Code Breaker Who Exposed a Secret German Language
There was no normal way to become a code breaker in World War II; everyone who landed in the job arrived there more or less by accident. Some recruits to Britain’s code-breaking establishment remembered being asked a few haphazard questions about whether they had studied the classics, or played chess, or liked to do crossword …
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Rising From Its Brutal Past, Warsaw Transforms Itself
Outside Warsaw’s Centralna Station I face the grayest day I have ever seen. The fog banks that had accompanied my morning train from Berlin are now a monotonous sheet hanging from the tops of Warsaw’s well-spaced buildings. Across from the station, its heights lost in the mist, the Palace of Culture and Science—an architecturally inappropriate …
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