Armchair Travel
Tuesday, February 28, 2006
  "Our Predicament Was Damned Humiliating"
The battle that Ernie Pyle and his buddy almost drove into, the Battle of Kasserine Pass, was a disaster for the US Army. We were driven back and lost many lives and vast quantities of supplies. Huge stockpiles of gasoline and ammunition that had been transported at great cost from the US had to be destroyed.

This defeat could have had a devastating effect on morale in North Africa and at home. Yet there was no attempt to prevent the press from reporting what had happened.

Here's what Ernie Pyle wrote about it, and as you read, think of the effect this had on morale at home and in the theater. In my opinion his straightforward assessment is a good example of the power of good old-fashioned truth telling.

I think hearing these words from America's friend Ernie Pyle, who lost friends in the battle, was exactly what was needed to motivate everyone on all fronts to buckle down and work even harder to get the job done. I also think that by explaining our defeat in plain terms, he did more than any spinmeister could do to boost confidence in our armed forces.

But see what you think:

"You folks at home must have been disappointed at what happened to our American troops in those Tunisian battles. So were we over here. Our predicament was damned humiliating, as General Joe Stilwell said about getting kicked out of Burma the year before. We lost a great deal of equipment, many American lives, and valuable time and territory -- to say nothing of face.

"The fundamental cause of our trouble over here lay in two things: we had too little to work with, as usual, and we underestimated Rommel's strength and especially his audacity.

"Both military men and correspondents knew we were too thinly spread in our sector to hold if the Germans were really to launch a big-scale attack. Where everybody was wrong was in believing they didn't have the stuff to do it with.

"Personally, I feel that some such setback as that -- tragic though it was for many Americans, for whom it would always be too late -- was not entirely a bad thing. It was all right to have a good opinion of ourselves, but we Americans were so smug with our cockiness. We somehow felt that just because we were Americans we could whip our weight in wildcats. And we had got it into our heads that production alone would win the war.

"There were two things we had still to learn: we would have to spread ourselves thicker on the front lines and we would have to streamline our commands for quick and positive action in emergencies.

"As for our soldiers themselves, you need not have felt any shame or concern about their ability. I saw them in battle and afterward and there was nothing wrong with the American soldier. His fighting spirit was good. His morale was okay. The deeper he got into a fight the more of a fighting man he became.

"I saw crews that had had two tanks shot out from under them but whose only thought was to get a third tank and 'have another crack at those blankety-blanks.'

"It is true they were not such seasoned battle veterans as the British and the Germans. But they had had some battle experience before that last encounter, and I don't believe their so-called greenness was the cause of our defeat. One good man simply can't whip two good men. That's about the only way I know how to put it. Everywhere on every front we needed more stuff before we could start moving forward instead of backward."
 
Monday, February 27, 2006
  "An Experiement I Would Not Particularly Like to Repeat"
It's hard to imagine nowadays, but Ernie Pyle and his fellow correspondents were given jeeps and allowed to go wherever they wanted. Ernie and his buddy nearly drove into the tank battle in the Kasserine Pass.

Ernie traveled with different units sharing all their hardships, listening to their stories, diving into trenches when a plane was spotted, shivering in the rain in a muddy foxhole. While other correspondents rotated out of the battle zones, Ernie would hand his column to the first soldier he found headed back to headquarters.

And all this time he was keeping up his correspondence with the American people, who relied on him to bring them the unvarnished truth about the war. All the press dispatches went through the military censors, as did all the GI mail, but soldiers and reporters alike knew they couldn't tell people where they were or where they were going.

What's even harder to imagine nowadays is Ike's decision, when the Tunisian campaign was concluded, to hold a press conference and tell the press that he was going to invade Sicily.

What?

Ike reckoned that after the victory in Tunisia, there was going to be a delay while they arranged the logistics for the invasion. He knew that would fuel speculation among the journalists, and that one or more of them would be able to conclude from these logistical arrangements what his next move was going to be.

The Nazis, of course, were sure he was going to invade Sardinia because of "The Man Who Never Was," the cunning plan by British intelligence to create a fictional Royal Marine officer and have his body wash up on the coast of Spain (where the Gestapo received active cooperation) with telling details of the Allied plans.

They had to concoct a whole personality complete with theater ticket stubs, keys, pictures of a sweetheart, and, for good measure, a couple of letters dunning him for overdue bills. In the documents he carried, the Allied plans to attack Sardinia are alluded to obliquely, but in such a way that the Nazis would be sure to draw the wrong conclusions.

This is all detailed in the book of that name by Ewen Montagu, who conceived the plan and successfully duped the Nazis and undoubtedly saved tens of thousands of lives. Though it was later eclipsed by the Normandy invasion in size and scope, the Allied force that invaded Sicily was the largest of its kind in the history of warfare.

"The broad outline of the Sicilian campaign was announced to our press representatives one month before it took place," says Ike."This unprecedented step was taken, paradoxically, to preserve secrecy."

"During periods of combat inactivity, reporters have a habit of filling up their stories with speculation," he continues, "and since after some months of experience in a war theater, any newsman acquires considerable skill in interpreting coming events, the danger was increased that soon the enemy would have our plans almost in detail.

"Because of the confidence I had acquired in the integrity of mewsmen in my theater, I decided to take them into my confidence. The experiment was one which I would not particularly like to repeat, because such revelation does place a burden upon the man whose first responsibility is to conceal the secret. But I did succeed in placing upon every reporter in the theater a feeling of the same responsibility that I and my associates bore.

"Success was complete," Ike concludes. "From that moment onward, until after the attack was launched, nothing speculative came out of the theater and no representative of the press attempted to send out anything that could possibly be of any value to the enemy."
 
Friday, February 24, 2006
  Red Pants, That's France!
It doesn't matter which Barbara Tuchman book you start with. You wind up reading them all and you wind up knowing a lot more about world history. Her career took off when John F. Kennedy was spotted reading "The Guns of August."
Here are some of my favorites.

"The First Salute" I discussed in the last entry.

"The Zimmerman Telegram" -- in which the Germans, as World War I is raging, secretly offer the Mexicans a chance to get Arizona, New Mexico and Texas back by coming in on their side. Mighty tempting! The British intercept this telegram (or fabricate it, I wouldn't put it past them) and make it public, causing the American people, neutral up 'til then, to become pissed at the Germans.

"The Guns of August" -- in which a dumb German general named (what else?) von Kluck turns his flank to Paris and all the Franch troops hop on taxicabs and catch the Germans in the rear, so to speak, resulting in a great victory in the Battle of the Marne.

In "The Guns of August," she also explains how von Hindenburg, a German general much smarter than von Kluck, was caught between two Russian armies and defeated one while the other one sat around with their thumbs you know where, and then turned around and defeated the second army, the ones with the stinky thumbs.

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn writes about the same battle, The Battle of Tannenberg, in his book "August 1914." It turns out that the Russian war minister, in charge of military preparedness, had put the emphasis on cavalry, rather than artillery, and that after the war he retired to Germany where he wrote a biography of his hero, Kaiser Wilhelm.

"The Proud Tower" -- in which, among many other things, Mark Twain loses one hundred consecutive poker hands to House Speaker Thomas Reed of Maine. Also the American flag that Johannes de Graff saluted gets planted in conquest for the first time in the Philippines.

"The Distant Mirror" explains the 13th century. "Stilwell and the American Experience in China" explains how "Vinegar Joe" kept trying to get Chiang Kai Shek to fight the Japanese, but Chiang kept giving him the runaround because he was stockpiling all the weapons and supplies and equipment that America was sending to China to use in his post-WWII battle with the communists.

"Japan is a disease of the skin," Chiang was said to have said. "Communism is a disease of the heart." He lost the post-war conflict, of course, but this was no surprise to people familiar with "conditions on the ground," as they say. According to Tuchman, Chiang and the nationalists had never really ruled China. It was more what we now quaintly call a "warlord" type of situation with no real centralized authority.

Some eggheads in the State Department and elsewhere could see that the communists had the only functioning government that was capable of running the country. For this, of course, they were later accused of "losing" China. How careless can you be?

Tuchman gives you these insightful glimpses into the great personalities and the great decisions of history. We find out that when Stilwell left the room, Chiang would tell his aide to open the window "to get rid of the smell of the foreigner."

And when the French Army in WWI wanted to change the color of the soldiers' trousers from red (not too smart in the era of machine guns) to some less visible color, one of the deputies in the assembly rose up and called out, "Les pantalons rouge, c'est la France!" Which, roughly translated, means, "Red pants, that's France!"
 
Thursday, February 23, 2006
  de Graff, de Grasse and the Siege at Yorktown
Back when I worked for the Senate president in New Hampshire, whenever I had to go down to the governor's office, which was pretty often, I went down a stairwell with an imposing portrait of Johannes de Graff, the governor of the Dutch colony of St. Eustatius, without ever wondering who he was or how he came to be commemorated on the walls of the New Hampshire State House.

Turns out he was the first foreigner ever to acknowledge the sovreignty of the United States by ordering a salute to the American flag. It was through his colony that the Continental Army was supplied with most of its weapons and ammunition.

Barbara Tuchman explains all this in "The First Salute," a book which details our country's debt to de Graff and the Dutch and gives many other interesting insights into that last campaign of the American Revolution.

We all learned that Admiral de Grasse brought the French fleet to Virginia, gained mastery of Chesapeake Bay in a naval battle with a British squadron, and bottled up Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown where Cornwallis was beseiged by Washington and Rochambeau.

Then after less than two months in America, de Grasse sailed away. Thank you, masked man!

Shame on those who have maligned France in recent years. Such base ingratitude! Without that French fleet, and those French siege guns, which they brought down from Rhode Island, and without all those French soldiers, who outnumbered the Americans at Yorktown, the rebellion would have been over.

But how was de Grasse able to do this when Britain had two fleets larger than his, one in the Caribbean, that let him sail right by, and another in New York that came out, fought a minor battle and went home?

Well it's pretty complicated, but Barbara Tuchman explains it all so even I could understand it. Turns out that nearly all the officers in the British Navy were Whigs who opposed the war in America, so Lord North, George III's war minister, had to drag all these old royalist cronies out of retirement, like Admiral Howe, who commanded the British Fleet in New York, and this other guy, who commanded the British fleet in the Caribbean.

Now this other guy had a young wife that he wanted to get back to, or else he was sick, or both, I can't quite recall. Or maybe he had to haul all his ships onto shore to have the barnacles scraped off, which you had to do unless your ships were sheathed in copper, which only certain ones were. The whole thing is quite complicated.

Did you ever wonder why they call certain islands in the Caribbean the Windward Islands and the other ones the Leeward Islands? She explains that, too. It has to do with the Trade Winds. It was easy to go with them and hard to tack against them, and that had a lot to do with strategy and stuff.

She also explains how the portrait of Johannes de Graffe wound up in the New Hampshire State House, but I can't recall that either, so if you want to find out, you'll have to read the book.
 
Wednesday, February 22, 2006
  Consider the St. Lawrence Seaway
I've been reading about Ike for the last six months and have been wondering how to introduce him to my blog. We have a personal connection, Ike and I, because I participated in an Easter Egg hunt on the White House lawn during his presidency, when I was two years old.

You probably remember him as the president who played golf all the time and didn't seem to worry too much about governing the country. But this guy, as commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, besides beating Hitler and Mussolini, had to govern all the liberated territory of Europe, had to make arrangements for all the millions of displaced people in the wake of the most devastating war in history, had to provide for the future of all the countries devastated by Nazi occupation, had to deal with allies who were constantly causing problems for him (i.e. the French), and allies who were lots of help but caused a few very significant problems (i.e. the British) etc. etc.

After that job, the presidency of the United States was a piece of cake. He had plenty of time to go golfing and still accomplish more than any president since FDR. Consider the interstate highway system. Consider the St. Lawrence Seaway.

You've probably never considered the St. Lawrence Seaway, and neither had I until I read Ike's books. With a bit of dredging, this channel brought deepwater ocean vessels into the Great Lakes with untold economic benefits all around. And it paid for itself in tolls.

The department of long-term thinking, the people who devise and bring about projects like that, it's not just gone; it's long gone. Long-term thinking? Are you kidding? Our leaders are too busy digging up dirt to smear whoever criticized them in the last news cycle.

Ike didn't give a rat's rear what anybody said about him. He had a genuine commitment to the people of the United States. Late in the 1956 campaign Ike was arbitrating some international conflict and a British diplomat asked him how the election was going.

"Oh that," says Ike. "I guess it will turn out all right." He had forgotten all about it.

Contrast that with a president who starts a needless war on purpose and causes thousands of children to be killed and maimed, not to mention their parents and aunts and uncles and grandparents, all to pump up his prestige and compensate for his obvious inadequacies. It makes me sick, and I believe it would make Ike sick, too.
 
Tuesday, February 21, 2006
  The Emperor and the Transient Preacher
I just got started on Ernie Pyle in my last entry, and I'm getting set to write about Dwight D. Eisenhower and Bill Mauldin and Vinegar Joe Stilwell, but tonight I'd like to write about ancient Rome, that wonderful cesspool of decadence and depravity.

We in America like to think we are decadent with our "Desperate Housewives" and our video visits to the Playboy mansion, but, believe me, decadence is something into which we have barely dipped our toes.

You want decadence? How about this: The chief of state attends a wedding and rapes the bride -- and the groom!

That's Rome, mighty Rome. There's a scene in Spartacus where Laurence Olivier, the Roman patrician, is talking to Tony Curtis (the slave). In that movie the Romans all had British accents and the slaves all had American accents -- nice touch! Anyway Olivier gestures toward the city that stretches out below the balcony and says to to Curtis that Rome is so mighty it cannot be opposed; the only alternative is to submit, and the suggestion is very clear that Curtis is going to have to submit in a very personal way. That's when Tony takes off and joins the gladiator army.

I remember reading somewhere that the Aztecs used to sacrifice as many as 30,000 people in a single day in the name of religion, and I confess I felt this sense that they must be different from me, that people like me would never do such a thing.

So then I read where the Romans slaughtered, or caused to be slaughtered in mutual combat, as many as 70,000 people in a single day. But that was just for entertainment. That's different.

If you want a glimpse of Rome by a master of historical fiction, Quo Vadis by Heinrich Sienckiwicz rises head and shoulders above the rest. James Michener, no slouch himself, once said that Sienckiwicz did more research on ancient Rome than many scholars in the field.

For the quick version, rent the movie. It will be one of the best movies you see this year, or any year. Peter Ustinov plays Nero -- the role of a lifetime -- peering through an emerald that he used as a kind of spyglass. He considered himself a master singer, actor and charioteer. After all he once won a chariot race in the Olympics even though he fell out of his chariot and couldn't finish.

In one classic scene Nero is driving a chariot drawn by lions in an endless procession of soldiers, notables and slaves carrying all the imperial possessions, harps and lamps and furniture and statues, that Nero just can't travel without.

Saint Peter has come to clap eyes on this paragon of evil, and has been given a vantage point by his followers on a box by the side of the road. The procession stops, as all parades must from time to time, and Nero looks through his emerald at Saint Peter. Saint Peter looks back.

One is the ruler of the known world with the power to dispatch legions, to level cities, to tunnel through mountains, etc. etc. One is a Jewish immigrant, little better than a slave, who preaches a strange foreign creed and lives on the generosity of his coreligionists.

Guess who wins? Quess who claims the city as his own for all eternity? For the answer to that, you'll have to read the book.

The wacky premise in Quo Vadis is that Nero wants to write an epic poem about the destruction of Troy -- Homer just didn't do it justice, you see -- but he had never seen a great city burn. His evil henchman Sejanus is all ears and suggests burning a coastal resort town. Nero scoffs at this, of course. It must be a great city. You get the picture.

But then Sienckiwicz begins describing the conflagration in amazing depth and detail. If you've ever wondered what it was like to be in Rome during the great fire, this is the book for you.

I don't want to spoil the book or the movie for you, but I have to say, Nero's end is so appropriate. Abandoned by all, unable to commit suicide himself, he has to find a slave to kill him, lamenting, "What an artist the world has lost in me!"
 
Monday, February 20, 2006
  A Tennis Racket on Omaha Beach
A couple of years ago I went over to the Senior Center in Greenfield to hear my friend Harold play the piano and I got to chatting with a guy there who was in the Merchant Marine in World War II. I asked him where he served and he said mostly on the Murmansk Run. I reached out and shook his hand.

"Thank you," I said. The gentleman passed away not long after that, so I'm glad I had the chance to thank him. I don't remember the exact figures, but at times German submarines were sinking more than half the ships on that run.

Sailing in a giant hunk of iron in an arctic sea, knowing you had a very good chance of being sent to the bottom couldn't have been very pleasant, but these ships were transporting weapons and supplies to the Russians, who were putting them to good use smashing the Nazi war machine.

I like reading Ernie Pyle because he introduces his readers to the individuals like my friend who fought and won the war. He even gives their names and addresses.

And like the people who fought and won the war, Ernie didn't go in for "hero stuff." Some people were exposed to great risk; others were not. Everybody had a job to do. There are many examples of bravery, but it was a collective bravery as when two men in an anti-aircraft gun are shot dead and two men immediately take their places.

Ernie writes about the guys who were responsible for supplying clean water to the troops during the Sicily landings, the staff of the Maryland hospital that was transported lock, stock and barrel to North Africa, the crew that generated smokescreens for the port of Oran and the mule drivers who took supplies to the troops fighting in the mountains of Italy.

Ernie gives you the telling details that you just don't find anywhere else, like the little cemetery where the Germans had buried American soldiers, listing the numbers on their dogtags so they could be identified. On one of the wooden crosses he noticed the mark "T-40," which the Germans thought was part of the GI's serial number. Actually it meant that the soldier had had a tetanus shot in 1940.

I guess the best example of a truly telling tableau is Ernie walking along Omaha Beach the day after the D-Day invasion, the largest armada in the history of the world.

The soldiers had each been given a carton of cigarettes and these were strewn for miles up and down the beach, washing to and fro with the tide. As he walked along the beach, he found, of all things, a tennis racket.

No one would include that in a work of history, or a grand saga of bravery. You only get that kind of detail from a guy on the scene telling you what he saw.
 
Thursday, February 16, 2006
  Kashmir Boatman - photo by David Rich
 
  Journeys Through History and Literature
This is the first entry in my blog, ArmchairTravel. The purpose of this blog is to chronicle my journeys through history and literature in books from yard sales and flea markets so that others may enjoy these books as I have.

I’m the kind of guy who has to go through all the boxes of books at the church rummage sale, and even checks out the books they’re using to keep the card-table legs from sinking into the lawn. I usually pay a quarter, sometimes a dollar. Once in a blue moon I go to The Book Mill in Montague, Mass., and pay twelve dollars for a book about the ancient world.

In recent years, sadly, many of the books that belonged to World War II veterans are appearing for sale as these heroes of yesteryear pass away. Lately I’ve picked up books by Ernie Pyle, whose columns were enormously popular with WWII GIs and with the American public, Bill Mauldin, the equally popular cartoonist for "Stars and Stripes" who depicted the life of the “dogfaces” in the Infantry, Dwight Eisenhower and General “Vinegar Joe” Stillwell, among many others who wrote about their experience in war.

Often I come upon a grouping of books that clearly belonged to one guy, books that all relate to the theater or theaters he was in. There will usually be some staff college textbooks and some secondary works on battles like Midway or Iwo Jima.

Once I came upon a grouping of this kind, clearly the books of a naval officer who served in several important battles in the Pacific Theater – treatises on naval warfare, memoirs of other naval officers, books about the Battle of the Coral Sea, some anti-communist books from after the war -- and there, right next to None Dare Call It Treason, was a copy of Peyton Place.

I collect the works of Grace Metalious -- Peyton Place and Return to Peyton Place and The Tight White Collar and, rarest of all, her last book, No Adam in Eden, which I guess didn't sell very well. She was a breakthrough artist, powered by an indomitable will to tell her story.

Like Harriet Beecher Stowe and J.K. Rowlings, she sat down at her kitchen table and started to write and came up with not just a bestseller, but a work that altered the national consciousness and became part of the American lexicon. If you say some town reminds you of Peyton Place, everybody knows what you’re talking about. And remember, she did this at a time when it was forbidden to say the word 'pregnant' on television.

But why was her work side by side with John Birch and Admiral Mahan? What had possessed this hard-boiled old naval officer to buy a lurid expose of small-town New England?

I found the answer on one of the bookplates. The naval officer whose books these were was from Gilmanton Iron Works, New Hampshire. That’s Grace Metalious’ home town, the model for Peyton Place. He must have bought the book to see if he recognized any of his friends and neighbors. Or maybe he was worried that he might be in there himself. Naughty, naughty!

Coming up: some entries about Ernie Pyle’s two books, This is Your War and Brave Men, Brave Men, Bill Mauldin’s Up Front and Dwight Eisenhower’s Crusade in Europe.
 
Literary gadfly Stephen Hartshorne writes about books that he finds at flea markets and rummage sales.

My Photo
Name:
Location: Sunderland, Massachusetts, United States

Stephen Hartshorne worked in newspapers and magazines around New England for many years and served as Information Officer in the New Hampshire Senate under Senate President Vesta Roy. He worked as a material handler for nine years at the Yankee Candle Company until the company was taken over by corporate weasels. He is currently the associate editor of GoNOMAD.com, an alternative travel website, which gives him the opportunity to correspond with writers and photographers all over the world. He lives in Sunderland, Massachusetts, with his daughter Sarah, a student at Drew University, and their cat, Dwight D. Eisenmeower. This blog is dedicated to his mom, who made him bookish.

ARCHIVES
February 2006 / March 2006 / April 2006 / May 2006 / June 2006 / July 2006 / August 2006 / September 2006 / October 2006 / November 2006 / December 2006 / January 2007 / February 2007 / March 2007 / April 2007 / May 2007 / June 2007 / July 2007 / August 2007 / September 2007 / October 2007 / November 2007 / December 2007 / January 2008 / February 2008 / March 2008 / April 2008 / May 2008 / June 2008 / July 2008 / August 2008 / September 2008 / October 2008 / November 2008 / December 2008 / January 2009 / February 2009 / March 2009 / April 2009 / May 2009 / June 2009 / July 2009 / August 2009 / September 2009 / October 2009 / November 2009 / December 2009 / January 2010 / February 2010 /


MOST RECENT POSTS
Cool Houseguests
Kimball Chen -- Small Steps
Let's Hear It For Snail Mail
House of Cards
New Visitors to the Back Porch
Sunshine, My Mom, and the Goodness of Life
The Bitter Tea of General Yen
The Goodrich Foundation
The Lady Cardinal
The Dearly Departed


MY FAVORITE BLOGS
  • Kent St. John's Be Our Guest
  • Max Hartshorne's Readuponit
  • Mridula's Travel Tales from India
  • Paul Shoul's new Photo Blog Round World Photo
  • GoNOMAD Travel Website Great Travel Writing
  • Sony Stark's Blog "Cross That Bridge"
  • GoNOMAD's Travel Reader Blog Travel Articles
  • Sarah Hartshorne's "Erratic in Heels"
  • Posting comments can be a pain. Email me.




  • Powered by Blogger