THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL

OF MILITARY HISTORY

The brazen British mission that could have

changed the course of the Revolutionary War

The Battle for Baikal

Germanys Trojan
Horse U-Boat SUMMER 2017
 MIAMI, FL/EAST COAST JEWELRY BOCA RATON, FL/ECJ LUXE CHARLOTTE, NC/DIAMOND DIRECT BEVERLY HILLS, CA/DAVID ORGELL SAN FRANCISCO, CA/SHAPUR
MENLO PARK, CA/CECI WONG JEWELERS LOS ANGELES, CA/FELDMAR COSTA MESA, CA/WATCH CONNECTION NEW YORK NY/KENJO COLTS NECK, NJ/J. VINCENT
ENGLEWOOD, NJ/TIMEPIECE COLLECTION GAMBRILLS, MD/LITTLE TREASURE CHICAGO, IL/NEW YORK JEWELERS DENVER, CO/RIGHT TIME HOUSTON, TX/STYLE JEWELERS
TORONTO, ON/MYLES MINDHAM VANCOUVER, BC/TIME & GOLD ST THOMAS, USVI/TRIDENT JAMAICA, WI/HOUSE OF DIAMONDS ST MARTEEN, DWI/BALLERINA
 TURBINE PILOT
Manufacture caliber. Turbine Technology.
48 mm stainless steel case. Screw-down crown at 3 oclock.
Bidirectional inner dial ring, circular aviation slide rule.
Black 12-blades revolving Turbine. Black calfskin strap.

Ref. A1085/1A
 68
Soldiers with the U.S. 2nd Naval
Beach Battalion inspect radio-operated
German beetle tanks captured by
Allied forces on Utah Beach during the
D-Day invasion of Normandy.
FEATURES
30 The Plot
to Kidnap
Volume 29, Number 4
Washington
by Christian McBurney
Summer 2017
In 1780 Lieutenant Colonel
John Graves Simcoe and
another British military
officer in the American
colonies planned a daring
mission that could have
changed the course of history.
2 MHQ Summer 2017
40 A U-Boats
U-Turn
by Warren Bernard
In 1916 a German merchant
submarine floated up the
Chesapeake Bay and into
Baltimore Harbor. The
blockade-breaking U-boat
the largest ever built
would go on to sink 43 Allied
ships in World War I.
50 Shadows
of War
PORTFOLIO
Leslie Starobins still-life
montages venerate the
keepsakes of veterans.
58 Germanys Lion
of the Defensive
by David T. Zabecki
As the Allies battled Germany
in World War I, Colonel Fritz
von Lossberg was one of their
most fearsome adversaries.
30
50
58 76
68 D-Day Through DEPARTMENTS
a German Lens 4 Flashback
by Robert M. Citino
In 1944, as the Allies prepared
for the Normandy invasion,
what was the enemy thinking?
76 The Battle
for Baikal
by Kevin J. McNamara
In 1918 the Czecho-Slovak
Legion fought the Red Army
in Siberia for control of the
worlds deepest lake.
40
27 Weapons Check
The Ranken dart
28 Letter From MHQ
10 Comments
13 At the Front 85 Culture of War
86 Artist
14 Laws of War Goyas Disasters of War
A reporters court-martial
17 War List 89 Poetry
The Long War, by Li Bai
Rejected!
20 Experience 90 Classic Dispatches
Eleanor Franklin Egan
William F. Buffalo Bill Cody
22 Battle Schemes 92 Reviews
Pershings Crusaders and more
24 Behind the Lines 96 Drawn & Quartered
Shirl Herrs underground idea
On the Cover
Gilbert Stuart might never have
painted this iconic portrait of George
Washington in 1796 had a British
mission to kidnap Washington during
the Revolutionary War succeeded.
The plot: to march by secret ways to
the American commander in chief s
headquarters near Morristown, New
Jersey, to tie up his horses in a
swamp,...storm the quarters, and
attack his guard on foot.
COVER: GILBERT STUART VIA CLARK ART
INSTITUTE OPPOSITE: CORBIS HISTORICAL VIA
GETTY IMAGES; THIS PAGE, CLOCKWISE FROM
TOP: JEAN LAURENT MOSNIER/BRIDGEMAN
IMAGES; BAIN NEWS SERVICE/LIBRARY OF
CONGRESS; GOTHICSTAMPS.COM; BRITISH
NATIONAL ARMY MUSEUM; LESLIE STAROBIN
MHQ Summer 2017 3
 BEERSHEBA, PALESTINE, 1917
FLASHBACK Defending against the British drive to seize Palestine during the First
World War, Turkish forces under the command of German general Erich
von Falkenhayn patrol the heavily fortied front from Beersheba to Gaza.
TODAY: Competing territorial claims in the region traditionally known
as Palestine not only fuel the seemingly intractable Israeli-Palestinian
conict but also keep the Middle East a hotbed of political instability.

4 MHQ Summer 2017 JOHN D. WHITING/LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

MHQ Summer 2017 5
 FLASHBACK
CIUDAD JUREZ, CHIHUAHA, MEXICO, 1916
Walter H. Horne of El Paso, Texas, photographs the execution of a
Mexican convicted of stealing military supplies and memorializes the
gruesome image on postcards that his company prints by the thousands.
TODAY: Locals fear theyre seeing a resurgence of the violence that made
Ciudad Jurez known as the most dangerous place on Earth as drug
cartels battle it out for control of a gateway to the lucrative U.S. market.

WALTER H. HORNE/SMU CENTRAL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY MHQ Summer 2017 7

 PAINTING THE BATTLE OF ATLANTA, MILWAUKEE, 1886
FLASHBACK More than a dozen German panorama artists pose for a group portrait in a
Milwaukee studio with their mammoth painting, The Battle of Atlanta, as a
backdrop. It would remain the largest oil painting in the world until 1894.
TODAY: The Atlanta Cyclorama, as the painting of the 1864 Civil War battle
has come to be known, is moved to the Atlanta History Center with the help of
an army of experts, two cranes, and two atbed trucks. It will reopen in 2018.

8 MHQ Summer 2017

WISCONSIN HISTORICAL SOCIETY MHQ Summer 2017 9
 COMMENTS
BELOW AND ABOVE
This World War II aerial photograph is of a U.S.not a
Japaneseaireld on Attu in Alaskas Aleutian Islands.
Chain Letter
Having spent three years
flying the Aleutian chain
during my time in the U.S.
Coast Guard, I enjoyed the
Dashiell Hammett article in
the Spring 2017 issue of
MHQ (Showdown in the
Aleutians).
Id like to suggest one
slight correction: The aerial
10 MHQ Summer 2017
photograph on page 59,
identified as a reconnais-
sance photo of the Japanese
airfield under construction
on Attu Island, is actually a
photo of one of two airfields
adjacent to Massacre Bay
built by the Seabees (work-
ers in the Naval Construc-
tion Battalions) and the
Army Corps of Engineers.
It is now called Casco Cove
the Great War. But Mitch-
CGS (Coast Guard Station)
Airfield, though the Coast
Guard left in 2010 when the
LORAN-C station at Mas-
sacre Bay was decommis-
sioned. The other, at Alexai
Point, was primarily an
army airfield. The Japanese
airfield was near Holtz Bay,
some distance away.
I landed at Casco Cove
many times, and it was
often very challenging. Ev-
erything at Attu is now
abandonedkind of sad
but it was pretty tough duty
for those who spent a life-
time there in one year!
Greg Westrup, Lieutenant
Commander, U.S. Coast
Guard (retired)
Greensburg, Indiana
Mr. Prescient
I read with interest Marc
G. DeSantiss article The
Court-Martial of Colonel
Billy Mitchell, 1925, in
the Autumn 2016 issue of
MHQ. Ironically, and illus-
trating the law of unin-
tended consequences, Billy
Mitchells histrionics actu-
ally aided rather than hin-
dered the development of
aviation in the U.S. Navy.
There were other propo-
nents of aviation within the
fleet, many swayed by the
achievements of the Royal
Navys shipborne aircraft in
ells public pronouncement
in early 1920 that air attack
will render surface craft in-
capable of operating to the
same extent that they have
heretofore, if it does not en-
tirely drive them off the
surface of the water scared
the U.S. Navy leadership.
Naval aviators and senior
FLIGHT PLAN/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
nonaviator flag leaders
grew increasingly con-
cerned that if the navy did
not aggressively develop its
own aviation capability,
Mitchells concept of an air
 service would steal it from
them and result in a land-
only American air force
orientation.
Battleship admirals may
have been unsure about the
use of aircraft at sea, but
they knew what they did
not want: an air service
owning naval aircraft and
controlling the career pros-
pects of naval aviators. In
early 1921 the Department
of the Navy asked Congress
for authorization to create
a naval aviation bureau.
With only the secretary of
the navy in the chain of
command between the
chief of the bureau and the
president, it was felt, naval
aviation would be protected
from any machinations
concocted in the War De-
partment. In August 1921
Congress passed legislation
creating the navys Bureau
of Aeronautics. Rear Admi-
ral William A. Moffett, by
background a cruiser and
battleship sailor, was put in
charge, a position he would
hold for 12 years.
In 1923 and 1924, follow-
ing Mitchells sinking of
Ostfriesland in the summer
of 1921, the navy conducted
several additional aerial
bombing tests, some with
Mitchells army bombers.
The tests demonstrated the
difficulty of sinking a
BOSLEYS MILITARY AUCTIONEERS
modern battleshipin this
case the unfinished 32,500-
ton Washington, which was
being scrapped under the
terms of the 1922 Washing-
ton Naval Treaty, which
limited the construction of
battleships, battlecruisers,
and aircraft carriers. Bombs,
torpedoes, shaped charges,
and naval gunfire finally put
the hulk beneath the waves.
Reviewing the results of the
Washington test, a navy
board concluded that while
a modern battleship was
not invulnerable to air-
plane attack, the exercise
results did not substantiate
Mitchells assertion that air
attack has rendered the bat-
tleship obsolete.
Mitchells self-destruction
in 1925 coincided with the
navys first aircraft carrier,
USS Langley, being trans-
ferred to the West Coast,
and the beginning of its
routine participation in the
navys fleet problem exer-
cises. The navy was clearly
embracing naval aviation,
and the addition two years
later of USS Lexington and
USS Saratoga, the largest
and fastest ships in the fleet,
was further proof that air-
craft carriers and sea-based
combat aviation would be
major components of the
navy of the 1930san evo-
lution hastened by Briga-
dier General Billy Mitchell
a decade earlier.
Richard Wright
Captain, U.S. Navy
(retired)
Burke, Virginia
ASK MHQ
Whats the Point?
What was the point of the
point (or spike) on the hel-
mets that German soldiers
wore up through World War
I? Could it be used to impale
the enemy or did it serve
some other useful purpose?
Emily Scammell
Washington, D.C.
The pickel (point or pickax)
on the pickelhaube was
strictly decorative. It was
conceived and standardized
for all Prussian infantry on
October 23, 1842, by King
Friedrich Wilhelm IV,
although it remains unclear
as to whether he thought of
it on his own or was inspired
by the spikes on French
Napoleonic cuirassier
helmets or Russian Yaroslav
Mudry helmets, both of
which used the spike to
support a feathery pompom
or a horsehair plume. The
basic pickelhaube used the
spike alone, although in
some units it supported
plumes like its Russian
contemporary. Its use spread
gradually through all the
German states, the last being
Bavaria, which stubbornly
held onto its own raupen-
helm (caterpillar helmet)
until 1887. By the time
World War I broke out in
1914 the pickelhaube had
become an essential element
of the stereotypical German
(especially Prussian) soldier,
but in 1916 it rapidly gave
way to the more protective
and practical stahlhelm
(steel helmet).
Jon Guttman, MHQs
research director, is the
author of many military
history books, including,
most recently, Grim
Reapers: French Escadrille
94 in World War I (Aero-
naut Books, 2016)
Something about military
history youve always
wanted to know? Send your
questions to MHQeditor@
historynet.com
MHQ Summer 2017 11
 MICHAEL A. REINSTEIN CHAIRMAN & PUBLISHER
DAVID STEINHAFEL ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER

ALEX NEILL EDITOR IN CHIEF

THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL

OF MILITARY HISTORY
SUMMER 2017 VOL. 29, NO. 4

BILL HOGAN EDITOR

ELIZABETH G. HOWARD CONSULTING EDITOR
CLAIRE BARRETT, BRANDON QUINTIN EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS
JON GUTTMAN RESEARCH DIRECTOR

JOIN THE DAVID T. ZABECKI CHIEF MILITARY HISTORIAN

STEPHEN KAMIFUJI CREATIVE DIRECTOR

DISCUSSION AT BRIAN WALKER GROUP ART DIRECTOR

PAUL FISHER ART DIRECTOR
DREW FRITZ SENIOR PHOTO EDITOR

MHQMAG.COM CONTRIBUTORS
WARREN BERNARD, ROBERT M. CITINO, JOHN A. HAYMOND,
K. M. KOSTYAL, CHRISTIAN McBURNEY, CHRIS McNAB,
KEVIN J. McNAMARA, MICHAEL W. ROBBINS,
>

Churchills Army PAMELA D. TOLER, BETH UNDERWOOD, WILLIAM WALKER

The men of the Royal Naval
Division fought as infantry in
some of the fiercest battles of
World War I.
By John A. Haymond
CORPORATE
ROB WILKINS Director of Partnership Marketing
ROXANNA SASSANIAN Finance
TOM GRIFFITHS Corporate Development
GRAYDON SHEINBERG Corporate Development
ADVERTISING
COURTNEY FORTUNE Advertising Services cfortune@historynet.com
RICK GOWER Regional Sales Manager rick@rickgower.com

Search Online TERRY JENKINS Regional Sales Manager tjenkins@historynet.com

RICHARD VINCENT Regional Sales Manager rvincent@historynet.com

Visit HistoryNet.com, with more DIRECT RESPONSE ADVERTISING

than 13,000 articles and exclusives RUSSELL JOHNS ASSOCIATES 800.649.9800 mhq@russelljohns.com

SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION: SHOP.HISTORYNET.com

MHQ Subscriptions U.S./Canada: 800.435.0715, Foreign Subscribers: 386.447.6318

E-mail: mhq@emailcustomerservice.com

PRINT, TABLETS, and READERS
Shop at SHOP.HISTORYNET.com
KINDLE AMAZON.com
NOOK BARNESANDNOBLE.com
ZINIO ZINIO.com
MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History (ISSN 1040-5992) is published quarterly
by HistoryNet, LLC, 1919 Gallows Road, Suite 400, Vienna, VA 22182-4038, 703-771-9400.
Periodical postage paid at Vienna, VA, and additional mailing ofces.
Postmaster: Send subscription information and address changes to:
MHQ, P.O. Box 422224, Palm Coast, FL 32142-2224. Single copies: $19.95.
Yearly subscriptions in U.S.: $74.95; Canada: $99.95; Foreign: $99.95 (in U.S. funds only).
JUHANI SIERLA COLLECTION

Canadian Publications Mail Agreement No. 41342519, Canadian GST No. 821371408RT0001

Follow MHQ 2017 HistoryNet, LLC, all rights reserved

The contents of this magazine may not be reproduced in whole
or in part without the written consent of HistoryNet, LLC
FACEBOOK FACEBOOK.com/MHQMAG
TWITTER TWITTER.com/MHQMAGAZINE PROUDLY MADE IN THE USA

12 MHQ Summer 2017

 AT THE FRONT
LAWS OF WAR 14
WAR LIST 17
EXPERIENCE 20
BATTLE SCHEMES 22
BEHIND THE LINES 24
WEAPONS CHECK 27

DOGGED PURSUIT
Venus, the pet bulldog of the
LT. H. W. TOMLIN/BRITISH ROYAL NAVY VIA IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUM

captain of the British destroyer

HMS Vansittart, achieved a small
measure of fame when Lieutenant
H. W. Tomlin, one of the Royal Navys
ofcial photographers during World
War II, made several pictures of
him, including this one, in 1941.
Though Vansittart did stellar service
in World War IIit sank the German
submarine U-102 on its rst patrol
in 1940it was sold to be broken
up for scrap after the war.

MHQ Summer 2017 13

 LAWS OF WAR
THE TRIAL OF THOMAS KNOX
In 1863 a veteran newspaper correspondent deed a Union
generals order. He was court-martialed for the transgression.
By John A. Haymond
In late December 1862, Major General William T. Sherman
opened the campaign to capture the fortified Confederate
city of Vicksburg, Mississippi, by landing troops in the
swamps to the north. The rebels strong defensive positions
repulsed every one of Shermans assaults, and after three
days of frustrated battle, he withdrew his divisions. The
Battle of Chickasaw Bayou was a small foretaste of the diffi-
culties that Union forces would face in capturing Vicks-
burg. It also provided the backdrop to a precedent-setting
case of American military law.
Before embarking on the expedition, Sherman had issued
General Order No. 8, which expressly prohibited reporters
from accompanying his forces or sending dispatches for pub-
lication from his area of operations. Any correspondents
sending out news that might
Knoxs give the enemy information
and comfort, the order stated,
dispatch will be arrested and treated
as spies. Shermans dislike of
denounced newspaper reporters was al-
ready well known; the most
Sherman in contemptible race of men that
scathing exist was one of his more
polite descriptions of them.
terms. Thomas W. Knox, a corre-
spondent for the New York
Herald, defied General Order No. 8, bringing down on
himself the full force of Shermans dislike for the press. For
whatever reasoneither because he was unaware of Sher-
mans order or because he assumed it did not apply to
himKnox had attached himself to the expedition and
written a dispatch in which he denounced Sherman in
scathing terms. One of Shermans staff officers found
Knoxs report in the outgoing mail, read it, and called it to
Shermans attention. Undeterred by the confiscation of his
draft, Knox wrote his story a second time and carried it by
hand upriver to Cairo, Illinoissome 400 miles away
where he mailed it to the Herald.
In his article, Knox said there is little doubt that Vicks-
burg would, ere this, have been in Union hands, if only
someone other than Sherman were in command. General
14 MHQ Summer 2017
Sherman was so exceedingly erratic, he wrote, that the
discussion of the past twelve months with respect to his
sanity, was revived with much earnestness. He accused
Sherman of refusing proper medical care for wounded sol-
diers in an attempt to keep the failure of his assault from
becoming public knowledge and of ordering the destruc-
tion of 50,000 rations in his haste to leave the field.
Knox hadnt witnessed most of the events he described,
instead compiling his report from dubious secondhand
sources, but still he assured the Heralds readers that the
battle of Chickasaw Bayou has been a repetition on a smaller
scale of the great battle of Fredericksburg, a month ago. The
publics horror over the carnage from Union general Am-
brose Burnsides repeated frontal assaults on Fredericks-
burgs Maryes Heights on December 13, 1862, was still pain-
fully fresh. Knoxs claim was wildly inaccurate: The Union
army suffered more than 12,000 casualties at Fredericks-
burg, compared with 1,776 total losses at Chickasaw Bayou.
Knoxs hyperbole was stubbornly impervious to such facts.
Shermans failure has dashed the hopes of the nation, he
wrote; insanity and inefficiency have brought their result.
He declared that the only hope of capturing Vicksburg was
Shermans immediate removal from command.
Knox was not the only correspondent who made slan-
derous statements about Shermans mental state. The New
York Times ran an article maintaining that Shermans oper-
ational plans were proof of his madness; another news-
paper printed a story declaring that during the fighting at
Chickasaw Bayou, Sherman was confined to his stateroom
perfectly insane. What made Knox different, though, was
that he was physically within the reach of Shermans mili-
tary authority, a fact the journalist perhaps overlooked
when he figuratively threw his gauntlet at the generals feet
and all but dared him to pick it up. He did not have to wait
long for Shermans response.
On February 3 Sherman received a copy of the Herald with
Knoxs dispatch. The next day he wrote: I am going to have
the correspondent of the New York Herald tried by a
court-martial as a spy, not that I want the fellow shot, but
because I want to establish the principle that such people

cannot attend our armies, in violation of orders, and defy
us, publishing their garbled statements and defaming offi-
cers who are doing their best. Reporters such as Knox,
MATHEW BRADY COLLECTION/NATIONAL ARCHIVES
Sherman believed, were undermining the war effort with
their limited and tainted observations as the history of
events they neither see nor comprehend.
On February 5 Sherman issued General Order No. 13,
convening a general court-martial at Youngs Point, Louisi-
ana. Thomas Knox was charged with giving intelligence to
the enemy, directly or indirectly, being a spy, and dis-
obedience of orders. The first two charges were the most
Union major general
William T. Shermans
dislike of newspaper
reporters was well known.
He once called them
the most contemptible
race of men that exist.
serious, invoking the possibility of a death sentence if Knox
were to be convicted. But the court found Knox guilty only
of the third charge, disobeying orders. The sentence of the
court-martial was that he be sent without the lines of the
army, and not to return under penalty of imprisonment.
Sherman might have thought he had seen the last of Knox,
but the newspaperman had influential friends, who ap-
pealed to President Abraham Lincoln to override the
court-martial verdict and allow Knox back into Shermans
theater of operations. Lincoln, mindful of the need to avoid
MHQ Summer 2017 15
 THE COURT-MARTIAL OF THOMAS KNOX
In defying Union General William T. Shermans order,
Thomas W. Knox of the New York Herald brought down
on himself the full force of Shermans dislike for the press.
antagonizing the New York newspapers and his generals in
the field, agreed only to allow Knox to put his request to
Major General Ulysses S. Grant, Shermans commander.
Grant gave the petition short shrift. You came here first
in positive violation of an order from General Sherman, he
wrote in his reply to Knox. You made insinuations against
his sanity, and said many things which were untrue.Gen-
eral Sherman is one of the ablest soldiers and purest men in
the country. He would allow Knox to return, Grant added,
only if Sherman first gives his consent. Since Knox still
had not apologized or published a retraction, such consent
was unlikely.
When the matter reached Sherman, he reminded Knox
that the reporter had earlier tried to excuse his conduct with
the explanation that you had to supply the public demand
for news; true if possible, but false if your interest demanded
it. Sherman said that he would welcome Knox if he came as
a soldier, but his presence as a reporter was intolerable.
Come as you do nowas a representative of the press,
16 MHQ Summer 2017
which you yourself say makes so slight a difference between
truth and falsehood, Sherman wrote, and my answer is,
Never. He would not relent.
Sherman had actually overstepped his bounds by haul-
ing Knox before a court-martial. It was not that he didnt
have the authority to charge a civilian with criminal activi-
ties and bring him to trialhe did. The problem was that
he tried Knox before the wrong kind of court. As a civilian,
Knox was not subject to the conventional military law rep-
resented by a court-martial. And since Sherman was cam-
paigning in Confederate territory, where no U.S. civil
courts had jurisdiction, there was no recourse to a civilian
court. With court-martial or civil court out of the question,
the only legal option was a trial by military commission.
In the aftermath of the Mexican-American War of 1847,
Major General Winfield Scott had created military com-
missions so that the U.S. Army would have a way to handle
cases that fell outside the reach of courts-martial. An un-
orthodox and slightly field-expedient idea at first, military
commissions gained a new legitimacy and codified struc-
ture in the first year of the Civil War. In 1862, just a few
months before Knox ran afoul of Sherman, the U.S. govern-
ment legislatively recognized them as courts of law. Major
General Henry Halleck, the foremost legal scholar of the
Union army during the Civil War, pointed out at the time
that many classes of people cannot be arraigned before
[courts-martial] for any offense whatsoever, and many
crimes committed cannot be tried under the Rules and Ar-
ticles of War. Military commissions must be resorted to for
such cases. The Knox case clearly fit that definition.
More important than the question of jurisdiction and
venue, however, was the fact that Shermans decision to
prosecute a newspaper correspondent raised troubling
questions about the line between the armys legitimate
need to control operationally sensitive information and the
vital constitutional protections that guaranteed freedom of
the press, even in time of war. It was understandable that
inaccurate and distorted newspaper reports infuriated
Shermanespecially accounts that impugned him person-
allyand he would have been well within his rights if he
had decided to sue those papers for slander. As the com-
mander of an army in the field, however, he established a
dangerous precedent when he ordered Knoxs arrest and
trial. To date, it remains a precedent without repetition:
Thomas W. Knox is still the only credentialed representa-
tive of the American press ever tried and convicted by a
A.D. WORTHINGTON & CO., PUBLISHERS
U.S. Army court-martial for his reporting. MHQ
John A. Haymond, a conflict historian, is the author
of The Infamous Dakota War Trials of 1862: Revenge,
Military Law, and the Judgment of History (McFarland
& Company, 2016).
WAR LIST
REJECTED!
These famous people wanted to serve in the military but for
one reason or another were turned downat least at rst.
By Claire Barrett

Ray Bradbury Walt Disney

Author, short-story writer, screenwriter (19202012) Film producer, entrepreneur (19011966)
During World War II Bradburys vision problems caused his A year after the United States entered World War I, Disney
local draft board to deem him ineligible for military service, tried to enlist in the U.S. Navy but was turned down for
but he went on to write radio spots for the Red Cross and being too young (he was 16). He then volunteered for the
scripts for the Los Angeles Department of Civil Defense. Red Cross Ambulance Corps, but by the time he arrived in
France the armistice had already been signed.
Charlie Chaplin
Actor, director, writer, composer (18991977) William Faulkner
Throughout World War I Chaplin was harassed by British Author (18971962)
journalists and citizens, who assumed that he hadnt at- In 1918, after the U.S. Army rejected him for being under-
tempted to enlist in the British Army. Chaplin had, in fact, weight and too short (he was five feet five), Faulkner en-
registered for military service in the United States but was listed in the Royal Flying Corpsand later in Britains
rejected for being undersized and underweight. This didnt Royal Air Forcebut saw no action in World War I.
appease his critics, however, and he continued to receive
white feathersmeant to shame men as cowardsfor Errol Flynn
years after the war. Actor (19091959)
The Australian-born Flynn became a U.S. citizen in 1942
Julia Child and tried to enlist in every branch of the service during
Cook, author, television personality (19122004) World War II. He was rejected by all of them on medical
During World War II Child tried to enlist in the U.S. Navys grounds, including, reportedly, heart problems, recurrent
WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Ser- bouts of malaria, chronic back pain, chronic tuberculosis,
vice) and the Womens Army Corps, but she was rejected and various venereal diseases.
by both of them for being too tall (she was six feet two).
Undaunted, Child instead joined the Office of Strategic Ernest Hemingway
Services, the forerunner of the CIA, and soon rose to Novelist, short-story writer, journalist (18991961)
become a top-secret researcher for Major General William Hemingway tried to enlist in the U.S. Army in 1918 but
J. Wild Bill Donovan, the chief of the OSS. was rejected because of a defective eye. He then volun-
teered to serve in Italy as an ambulance driver with
Benjamin O. Davis Jr. the American Red Cross, and in 1918, while running a
U.S. Army general (19122002) mobile canteen dispensing chocolate and cigarettes for sol-
In 1934, at the start of his junior year at the U.S. Military diers, he was wounded by Austrian mortar fire. Despite his
Academy in West Point, Davis applied for the Army Air injuries, Hemingway carried a wounded Italian soldier to
Corps but was rejected because it did not accept blacks. He safety and was injured again by machine-gun fire.
was instead assigned to the all-black 24th Infantry Regi-
ment at Fort Benning, Georgia. In 1942, after President Sir Alfred Hitchcock
Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered the War Department to Film director, producer (18991980)
create a black flying unit, Davis became the first black offi- Hitchcock was called up to serve in the British Army
cer to solo an Army Air Corps aircraft. during World War I but was ultimately excused from mili-

MHQ Summer 2017 17

 REJECTED!

tary service because of his weight. In 1917 Hitchcock man- Norman Rockwell
aged to join a cadet regiment of the Royal Engineers (hed Artist, illustrator, author (18941978)
left a Jesuit boarding school some years earlier to study In 1918, with World War I raging in Europe, Rockwell
marine engineering and navigation). tried to enlist in the U.S. Navy but was turned down be-
cause, at 140 pounds, he was deemed eight pounds under-
John F. Kennedy weight for someone six feet tall. The night of his rejection
U.S. president (19171963) Rockwell gorged on bananas, doughnuts, and liquids until
In 1940, following his graduation from Harvard Univer- hed put on enough weight to be able to enlist the next day.
sity, Kennedy tried to enter the U.S. Armys Officer Candi-
date School but was rejected on medical grounds, including Mickey Rooney
ulcers, asthma, venereal disease, and chronic back prob- Actor (19202014)
lems. His father, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., then persuaded Rooney, drafted for military service in World War II, was
Captain Alan Goodrich Kirk, the head of the Office of initially classified as 4-F for high blood pressure. But in
Naval Intelligence, to allow a private doctor to certify his 1944 he was drafted into the U.S. Army; he spent the next
sons health so that JFK could enlist in the U.S. Navy. 21 months entertaining troops and was awarded a Bronze
Star for performing in combat zones.
D. H. Lawrence
Novelist, journalist, poet, playwright (18851930) Frank Sinatra
Lawrence, who had chronic tuberculosis throughout his Singer, actor, producer (19151998)
adult life, was seriously ill early in 1916 and was rejected In 1943 Sinatra was officially classified 4-F by his draft board
for military service on health grounds in June of that year. because of a perforated eardrum. But Sinatras FBI files, made
public after his death, disclosed that was he deemed not ac-
Bruce Lee ceptable material from a psychiatric viewpoint and that his
Actor, martial artist (19401973) emotional instability was hidden to avoid undue unpleas-
Lee was drafted by the U.S. Army in 1963 but reportedly antness for both the selectee and the induction service.
failed his pre-induction physical and was classified as 4-F Toward the end of World War II Sinatra entertained troops
because of an undescended testicle, poor eyesight (he wore during several successful overseas USO tours.
contact lenses), and a sinus disorder. He had already been
wearing a uniform as a member of the ROTC squad at the Jimmy Stewart
University of Washington in Seattle, where he was a stu- Actor (19081997)
dent from 1961 to 1964. In 1940 Stewart was drafted by the U.S. Army but was re-
jected for being five pounds under the weight requirement
Audie Murphy for new recruits of his height. To get up to 143 pounds, he
Soldier, actor (19251971) sought the help of Don Loomis, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayers
In 1942, seeking an escape from poverty, Murphy tried to muscleman and trainer, who was legendary for helping

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: THEHITCHCOCKZONE.COM; WIKIMEDIA COMMONS (2); NATIONAL ARCHIVES
enlist in the Marines by lying about his age (he was 16). As stars add or subtract pounds in his studio gymnasium.
it turned out, though, he was rejected for being too short Stewart then attempted to enlist in the Army Air Corps,
(he was five feet five). The U.S. Army Airborne and the U.S. but he still came in underweight. After persuading the en-
Navy also rejected Murphy because of his height. On his listment officer to run new tests, he passed the weigh-in
17th birthday his older sister falsified his birth certificate to and on March 22, 1941, was inducted into the army, be-
show that Murphy was 18; he was then able to enlist in the coming the first major American movie star to wear a mil-
U.S. Army. Murphy went on to receive every available itary uniform in World War II.
combat award for valor.
Orson Welles
Paul Newman Director, producer, actor, writer (19151985)
Actor (19252008) During World War II Welles was initially classified 1-B
Newman had dreams of becoming a pilot in the U.S. Army (unfit for active duty but available for limited duty), but in
Air Force during World War II but was ultimately rejected February 1943 his status was changed to 1-A (available for
because he was color blind. In 1943 he managed to join the immediate duty). Shortly after that, following an army phys-
U.S. Navy and became a rear-seat radioman and gunner for ical examination, Welles was reclassified as 4-F for medical
torpedo bombers, and by 1944 he was posted as a turret reasonswhich it was later disclosed, included myoditis,
gunner on a TBM Avenger torpedo bomber. bronchial asthma, arthritis, and inverted flat feet. MHQ

18 MHQ Summer 2017

Clockwise from top left: Alfred Hitchcock, Charlie
Chaplin, Ernest Hemingway, and Julia Child.

MHQ Summer 2017 19

 EXPERIENCE
ON THE TRAIL OF THE INDIANS
I was soon alongside of the chap who had wounded me.
Raising myself in the strirrups, I shot him through the head.
Years before he would be known to millions of Americans
simply as Buffalo Bill, William F. Cody (18461917)
dreamed of making a name for himself in the military. After
trying unsuccessfully at the outset of the Civil War to enlist
in the Union army (he was rejected as being too young),
Cody went on, in the last years of the war, to serve as a scout
for the 7th Kansas Cavalry. In 1868 he went to work for the
U.S. Army, operating out of Fort Ellsworth, Kansas, as a
civilian scout and guide for the 5th Cavalry. During the
Plains Wars he fought in 16 battles, including the Cheyenne
defeat at Summit Springs, Colorado, in 1869.
On April 26, 1872, Cody became one of only four civilian
scouts to be awarded the Medal of Honor for valor in action
during the Indian Wars. But his medal was revoked in 1917
on the grounds that he hadnt been a regular member of the
armed forces. (It was reinstated in 1989 by the Army Board
for Correction of Military Records.)
In 1883 Cody created what would become Buffalo Bills
Wild West, a touring extravaganza that over the next three
decades would propel him to worldwide fame.
pon reaching Fort McPherson, I found that the 3rd
U Cavalry, commanded by General [Colonel Joseph
J.] Reynolds, had arrived from Arizona, in which
Territory they had been on duty for some time, and
where they had acquired quite a reputation on ac-
count of their Indian fighting qualities. Shortly after
my return, a small party of Indians made a dash on McPher-
son station, about five miles from the fort, killing two or three
men and running off quite a large number of horses. Captain
[Charles] Meinhold and Lieutenant [Laurin L.] Lawson with
their company were ordered out to pursue and punish the
Indians if possible. I was the guide of the expedition and had
an assistant, T. B. Omohundro, better known as Texas Jack,
and who was a scout at the post.
Finding the trail, I followed it for two days, although it
was difficult trailing because the red-skins had taken every
possible precaution to conceal their tracks. On the second
day Captain Meinhold went into camp on the South fork of
the Loupe, at a point where the trail was badly scattered.
Six men were detailed to accompany me on a scout in
search of the camp of the fugitives. We had gone but a short
20 MHQ Summer 2017
distance when we discovered Indians camped, not more
than a mile away, with horses grazing near by. They were
only a small party, and I determined to charge upon them
with my six men, rather than return to the command, be-
cause I feared they would see us as we went back and then
they would get away from us entirely. I asked the men if
they were willing to attempt it, and they replied that they
would follow me wherever I would lead them. That was the
kind of spirit that pleased me, and we immediately moved
forward on the enemy, getting as close to them as possible
without being seen.
I finally gave the signal to charge, and we dashed into the
little camp with a yell. Five Indians sprang out of a willow
tepee, and greeted us with a volley, and we returned the fire.
I was riding Buckskin Joe, who with a few jumps brought
me up to the tepee, followed by my men. We nearly ran over
the Indians who were endeavoring to reach their horses on
the opposite side of the creek. Just as one was jumping the
narrow stream a bullet from my old Lucretia overtook
him. He never reached the other bank, but dropped dead in
the water. Those of the Indians who were guarding the
horses, seeing what was going on at the camp, came rushing
to the rescue of their friends. I now counted 13 braves, but
as we had already disposed of two, we had only 11 to take
care of. The odds were nearly two to one against us.
While the Indian re-enforcements were approaching the
camp I jumped the creek with Buckskin Joe to meet them,
expecting our party would follow me; but as they could not
induce their horses to make the leap, I was the only one
who got over. I ordered the sergeant to dismount his men,
leaving one to hold the horses, and come over with the rest
and help me drive the Indians off. Before they could do
this, two mounted warriors closed in on me and were
shooting at short range. I returned their fire and had the
satisfaction of seeing one of them fall from his horse. At
this moment I felt blood trickling down my forehead, and
hastily running my hand through my hair I discovered that
I had received a scalp wound. The Indian, who had shot
me, was not more than 10 yards away, and when he saw his
partner tumble from his saddle he turned to run.
By this time the soldiers had crossed the creek to assist
 In 1872 William F. Buffalo Bill Cody became one of only four U.S. Army scouts to be
awarded the Medal of Honor for valor in action during the Indian Wars.

me, and were blazing away at the other Indians. Urging
Buckskin Joe forward, I was soon alongside of the chap
who had wounded me, when raising myself in the stirrups
I shot him through the head.
The reports of our guns had been heard by Captain
Meinhold, who at once started with his company up the
YELLOWSTONECOUNTRY.ORG
stock. Our loss was one man killed, and anothermyself
slightly wounded. One of our horses was killed, and Buck-
skin Joe was wounded, but I didnt discover the fact until
some time afterwards, as he had been shot in the breast and
showed no signs of having received a scratch of any kind.
Securing the scalps of the dead Indians and other trophies

creek to our aid, and when the remaining Indians, whom
we were still fighting, saw these re-enforcements coming,
they whirled their horses and fled; as their steeds were
quite fresh they made their escape. However, we killed six
out of the 13 Indians, and captured most of their stolen
we returned to the fort. MHQ
Excerpted from W. F. Cody (Buffalo Bill) and William
Lightfoot Visscher, Buffalo Bills Own Story of His Life and
Deeds (Homewood Press, 1917).

MHQ Summer 2017 21

22 MHQ Summer 2017
 BATTLE SCHEMES
ARMS RACE
Maurice Neumont (18681930) knew
from an early age that he wanted to be
an artist and, after studying at the
Academy of Fine Arts in Paris, he made
a name for himself as an illustrator,
painter, and affichiste (poster designer).
With the outbreak of World War I
Neumont and his wife opened their
home in Montmartre to help feed
artists, actors, and singers who were left
without work in Paris. At the same
time, he emerged as a leading propo-
nent of French patriotic propaganda.
In 1916 Neumont became involved
in La Confrence au Village, a newly
established French propaganda group,
and the following year, with its backing,
he produced this stylized poster, La
guerre est lindustrie nationale de la
Prusse (War is the national industry of
Prussia). Neumonts poster, an early
form of infographic, marries quotations
from French leaders Honor Mirabeau
and Philippe Ptain with a depiction of
a menacing, pickelhaube-wearing
octopus grasping the entire European
continent with his arms.
An allegorical bar graph on the right
side of the poster depicts the expansion
of Prussias armed forces from 1715 to
1914the latter date dramatized by a
giant Prussian soldier. Captions detail
every instance of Prussias blood and
iron expansion during the German
Wars of Unification, and at the bottom
of the poster, in large red type, Neu-
mont highlights an incendiary prewar
declaration from a German nationalist
organization: The German people
must rise as masters above the inferior
peoples of Europe. MHQ

DAVID RUMSEY HISTORICAL MAP COLLECTION MHQ Summer 2017 23

 BEHIND THE LINES
THE RELIC HUNTER
Shirl Herrs hidden-metal detector paved the way for the
development of mine detectors used by the worlds militaries.
By Beth Underwood
It was late August 1929 when the black limousine pulled to
the front of an Italian hotel to retrieve Shirl Herr. An
American businessman, inventor, and self-educated histo-
rian, Herr had offered his assistance to the Italian govern-
ment in uncovering centuries-old relics of Caligula, the
third Roman emperor. While the emperors bargesonce
luxurious floating pleasure palaceshad recently poked
through the surface of Lake
For Herr, life Nemi, just south of Rome,
during a four-year project to
was about lower its water level, many
priceless artifacts were still
nding buried deep within the volca-
nic lakes mucky floor. Herr
possibilities was confident that the
in improbable hidden-metal detector he
had invented would serve the
situations. Italians well, helping them to
locate and recover the arti-
facts efficiently. Without hesitation, the elder Herr and his
son entered the limo bound for the excavation site. Waiting
for them inside was the Italian dictator, Benito Mussolini.
That the fascist authority should accompany the visiting
Americans may seem unlikely. It wasnt for Shirl Herr. For
him, life was about finding possibilities in improbable situ-
ations. The Indiana native was a problem solver, whether in
spite ofor thanks tolittle more than an eighth-grade
education, most of which had taken place in a one-room
Hoosier schoolhouse.
Higher learning would not have been good for me,
Herr once said. Ive been told, too often, by physicists and
engineers that certain things couldnt be done and could be
proved impossible by the books. Only I found that those
things sometimes could be done.
Always undeterred by naysayers, Herr was a man of
ideas. For some of those ideaslike the color-changing
screen for theater lights, railway signals, and the like, for
which he received his first patent, and his theory of fluores-
cent light technology (cold light, he called it)the time
had come. Other ideas, such as his invention of air soles for
athletic shoes, were perhaps ahead of their time. The air
24 MHQ Summer 2017
sole design, which incorporated pneumatic tubes, was
heartily supported by the athletes who had tried his proto-
types. But without money to underwrite his efforts, Herr
was unable to pursue the project.
Among his subjects of experimentation, Herr was particu-
larly drawn to the science of agriculture, and he developed
a process to remove weed seeds from clover seeds. Shortly
after he received the patent for his color-changing device,
he received another patent for his seed-cleaning machine.
The idea was well received in Indiana, where manufactur-
ing and industry were developing rapidly in the early 20th
century. After seeing the machine in action, a seed com-
pany in Crawfordsville, Indiana, hired him as its foreman.
He also replicated the machine for companies in Chicago,
New York, and Toronto.
In 1910 Herr married Sallie Remley, the daughter of Am-
brose Remley, a well-to-do Civil War veteran. At least one
Crawfordsville store summarily canceled her credit account
on hearing the news, fearing that Sallies marriage to an in-
ventor who had no affluent family members or apparent for-
tune would mean certain financial failure. Whether or not
his bride had taken issue with the stores decision, Herr read-
ily dismissed the judgment. He was fixated far more on solv-
ing problems than on dollar signs.
Herrs seed-separating machine and patented improve-
ments continued to earn him professional accolades and
financial gains, perhaps to the surprise of at least one local
business. By 1914 he had founded his own seed company
with a partner and was well on his way to financial security.
His successes in the agricultural world had given him the
freedom to invent and the luxury of remaining unattached
to the financial outcomes of those inventions. This inde-
pendence allowed him to move from project to project as
BOONE COUNTY (IND.) HISTORICAL SOCIETY
he wished, investigating theories for no other reason than
to appease his own curiosity. One of those projects was his
work on magnetic balance and the hidden-metal detector.
The idea of detecting metal wasnt a new one. In fact, Alex-
ander Graham Bell had developed and used a similar device
after the attempted assassination of President James Gar-
Inventor Shirl Herr poses
with an early model of
what in all likelihood was
the worlds rst portable
metal detector.
 METAL DETECTOR
field in 1881. Bell hoped to locate the bullet that remained
lodged in Garfields body weeks after Charles J. Guiteau had
shot him. Unfortunately, the magnetic balance was thrown
off by the metal coils in Garfields mattress.
Herr set out to improve and simplify the older, often un-
reliable invention by having it use radio frequencies to locate
the metal. Describing his intentions in his patent application,
dated February 4, 1924, Herr said his primary objective was
to provide portable means of locating submerged, buried, or
hidden metallic objects by the
Herrs production of sound waves ef-
fected through distortion of a
hidden-metal magnetic field.
Although Herr was first to
detector was apply for a patent on the device,
his request wasnt granted until
effective to 1928, three years after another
a depth of man, Gerhard Fischer, applied
forand receiveda patent
eight feet. for a metal detector. The rea-
sons for the four-year delay
remain unknown. Nevertheless, Herr was credited with nu-
merous underground discoveries during this period, includ-
ing the exact site near West Lafayette, Indiana, of Fort
Ouiatenon, a French trading post built in 1717. Sometimes
partnering with others, he retrieved battleground artifacts
from Yorktown and Jamestown, Virginia, and from a camp
used by Major General Edward Braddock during his 1755
retreat from Fort Duquesne in western Pennsylvania. During
this time, his seed-separating machines provided increasing
financial security while Herr pursued his love of perpetual
discovery, regardless of where it took him. And that is how he
found himself in the boot of Europe, more specifically in the
back of a limo with a dictator.
Under Mussolinis orders, the Italian government was two
years into a project to recover Caligulas barges. Adorned
with gold and silver, alabaster and bronze, marble and
mosaic, the floating palaces are thought to have served the
emperor in all his excess. Mussolinis English was broken at
best, but his outward excitement evidenced his thirst for
unearthing ancient treasures, effectively bridging any lan-
guage barrier as he interacted with his American guests.
While the ride gave the men time to conjure visions of a
utopian site, all notions of glamour were dashed when the
Herrs arrived. Herrs son, Remley, recalled the scene to be
no more romantic than a pig pile of heavily-creosoted
railroad ties dumped like jackstraw on the mud floor of an
out-sized gravel pit. Unappealing aesthetics aside, their
work was rewarded, as the men helped retrieve a number
of artifacts, including iron and lead fountain pieces and a
solid gold figurehead.
26 MHQ Summer 2017
Over here! Herr would periodically yell as he walked
on the planking. A particularly strong buzz pulled Herr to
the edge of the planking, where he lost his balance, fell into
the mud, and emerged covered in large black leeches.
The incident rendered the magnetic balance temporar-
ily useless and ended the Americans field study in Italy.
But Herr continued to influence world exploration, ulti-
mately sending his metal detector to the southernmost
reaches of the globe.
Herr met physics professor Thomas Poulter in 1932
when both men were in Arizona. A year later Admiral
Richard E. Byrd named Poulter his second in command for
his second Antarctic expedition. Remembering the mag-
netic balance, Poulter approached Herr about taking the
device on the journeybrutally cold temperatures would
provide a rare test of durability. Herr readily agreed.
Poulters letters to Herr during the expedition confirmed
that the balance, altered to be both water- and snowproof
even in extreme weather conditions, was performing as ex-
pected. With the help of the detector, the men had been able
to locate Byrds original base camp, Little America, and its
still usable provisions left behind after the first expedition
ended in 1930. The device proved effective to a depth of
eight feet. In 1935 Byrd sent a personal letter of thanks to
Herr, attaching a piece of insulation from the base.
In 1936, a year after the second expedition had ended,
Shirl Herr died of heart disease. Still, the refined applica-
tions of his magnetic balance continued to shape the world
and its militaries. In the early years of World War II, Jzef
Kosacki, a Polish soldier, advanced the design. Used as a
mine detector and produced by the hundreds, the device
allowed Allied forces to pass through German minefields.
It was used in several Allied invasions and was still opera-
tional through the 1991 Gulf War.
Modern metal detectors have both military and com-
mercial applications. They continue to play a significant
role in battlefield archaeology and have been used success-
fully at both Revolutionary and Civil War era battle-
grounds, including Little Bighorn (Montana); Wilsons
Creek (Missouri); Pea Ridge (Arkansas); Monmouth (New
Jersey), and Kings Mountain (South Carolina). While the
artifacts they unearth can help to recreate past events, their
application in active theaters of war can mean the differ-
ence between life and death.
As metal detectors and their applications continue to
evolve, they will serve as a reminder that Shirl Herrs ad-
vances in the field of magnetic detection were as significant
as the history he worked so hard to unearth. MHQ
Beth Underwood, a journalist whose work has appeared
in many newspapers, magazines, and anthologies, is the
author of Gravity (Red Engine Press, 2015).
 WEAPONS CHECK
ANTI-ZEPPELIN DART
By Chris McNab

On the night of January 19, 1915, two

Rubber parachute
German Zeppelin airships ponderously
dropped their small bomb-loads on Great
Yarmouth and Kings Lynn on the eastern Black powder
coast of England, beginning what was, in grains
effect, the first sustained strategic bombing
campaign in history. The British military im-
mediately started looking for ways to bring
down the new threat. Focusing on the dirigi-
bles highly flammable hydrogen gas filling,
Engineer Lieutenant Commander Francis
Ranken of the Royal Navy invented the
Ranken dartessentially a hand-deployed
anti-Zeppelin incendiary device. The dart
consisted of a 13-inch-long tinplate tube
capped with a penetrating tip and filled with Arms (3) High explosive
a combustible mixture. The intention was to
drop the darts, loaded in 24-round boxes, Igniter rod
from an airplane flying above the Zeppelin.
As each dart pierced the airships skin, its
three spring-loaded metal arms would open,
pulling up an igniter rod inside the dart and Coated red
phosphorus
detonating the explosives inside (in much
Igniter tube
the same way as dragging a match head
across a rough surface causes it to ignite).
The engineering was ingenious, but the de-
vices were not popular with pilots in the
Royal Naval Air Service and the Royal Flying
Corps (nor with the civilians on whom they Cast-iron point
might inadvertently fall). The Ranken darts
were also inaccurateso much so, in fact,
that they may never have been solely respon-
sible for downing an airship. MHQ

Chris McNab is a military historian based

in the United Kingdom. His most recent
book is The FN Minimi Light Machine Gun:
M249, L108A1, L110A2, and Other Variants
(Osprey, 2017).
IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUM

MHQ Summer 2017 27

 THAT SINKING FEELING
n his day, H. L. Mencken (18801956) was as caustic,
I and controversial, as any journalist in America. In
1920, for example, surveying the Gamalian plural-
ity that had swept Warren Gamaliel Harding into
the White House, Mencken wrote: One gapes at it as
a yokel gapes at a blood-sweating hippopotamus; its
astounding vastness makes it seem somehow indecent, as a
very fat man always seems somehow indecent. Mencken
never really bothered with politeness or political correct-
ness, and the more he got a rise out of his own detractors the
higher he seemed to sail in public estimation. Mencken, in
fact, clearly took delight in standing above those who
hurled disparagements at himso much so that in 1928 he
arranged for Alfred A. Knopf to publish Menckeniana: A
Schimpflexicon, a compilation of awful things people had
said or written about him. (Example: Mencken, with his
filthy verbal hemorrhages, is so low down on the moral
scale, so damnably dirty, so vile and degenerate, that when
his time comes to die it will take a special dispensation
from Heaven to get him into the bottom-most pit of Hell.)
Throughout his life, Mencken kept notebooks that hed
routinely plumb for ideas and inspiration. Before his death
in 1956, he read through them in search of material for
what turned out to be his last book, and the exercise un-
earthed such semiprecious stones as this:
The military caste did not originate as a party of pa-
triots, but as a party of bandits. The primeval bandit
chiefs eventually became kings. Something of the
bandit character still attaches to the military profes-
sional. He may fight bravely and unselfishly, but so do
gamecocks. He may seek no material rewards, but
neither do hunting dogs. His general attitude of mind
is stupid and anti-social. It was a sound instinct in the
Founding Fathers that made them subordinate the
military establishment to the civil power. To be sure,
the civil power consists largely of political scoundrels,
but they at least differ in outlook and purpose from
the military, and to some extent at least, they are su-
WARRELICS.COM (3)
perior. A country dominated by the military is always
backward, and frequently almost savage.
Menckens journalistic home was the Baltimore Eve-
ning Sun, which he helped to found in 1910 and where he
had made a name for himself within just a few years. And
so when the German merchant submarine Deutschland
suddenly appeared in Baltimore Harbor in 1916, as World
War I raged overseas, naturally the entire nation waited to
hear from Mencken, who was fluent in German and,
moreover, had made clear his pro-German sentiments.
Mencken, however, refused to even show up at the wel-
coming reception for Deutschland, much less write about
it. That welcome was in the charge of Paul Hilken, son of
old Henry G. Hilken, for many years the Baltimore agent
of the North German Lloyd, Mencken wrote some 25
years later. I was well acquainted with his father, and had
a high esteem for him, but the son always seemed to me a
suspicious character.
Paul Hilken, Mencken recalled, later came to him with a
potentially lucrative proposition: that he travel aboard
Deutschland on its return trip to Bremen, Germany, with
the promise that he would have an exclusive and be free to
sell his reports to the highest bidder. (A New York newspa-
per reportedly had already offered $50,000 to put a corre-
spondent on board.)
There seemed to be something fishy about this, and I
refused at once, Mencken wrote. Indeed, Id have refused
if there had not been anything fishy, for I knew that a large
British fleet was waiting for the Deutschland, outside the
Chesapeake capes, and the chances of its getting though
seemed very slim.
Deutschland did get back to Germany unharmed,
though, as Warren Bernard recounts in telling the story of
the stealth submarine in this issue. Deutschlands debut in
the United States spawned souvenirs and commemorative
pieces of all kinds, including those shown on the opposite
page. But in the end, Menckens instincts on the something
fishy front were well founded. On its return to Germany,
Deutschland was converted into a marauding U-cruiser
that ultimately took down dozens of Allied ships in the
North Atlantic Ocean.
Bill Hogan
MHQeditor@historynet.com
MHQ Summer 2017 29
 THE PLOT
TO KIDNAP
WASHINGTON
In 1780 two British military ofcers
planned a mission that could have
changed the course of history.
By Christian McBurney
FROM LEFT: PETER NEWARK/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES; GILBERT STUART/CLARK ART INSTITUTE; PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BRIAN WALKER

The idea of kidnapping George Washington was

the brainchild of Lieutenant Colonel John Graves
Simcoe, a courageous British cavalry ofcer who
had been a captive of the Americans.

MHQ Summer 2017 31

 KIDNAPPING WASHINGTON
I
n February 1780 Lieutenant General Wilhelm von
Knyphausen, the interim commander in chief of
British forces in the New York area, and Captain
George Beckwith, Londons spymaster in the Amer-
ican colonies, planned and attempted a mission
that could have changed the course of the Revolu-
tionary War: the capture of General George Washington,
then quartered near Morristown, New Jersey. The auda-
cious idea was the brainchild of Lieutenant Colonel John
Graves Simcoe, an exceptionally courageous British cav-
alry officer who only a few weeks earlier had returned from
three months as a captive of the Americans.
Simcoe, the commander of the Queens Rangers, an elite
legionary corps made up of loyalist cavalry and infantry
then stationed on Staten Island, aimed to lead a party of his
mounted hussars across the iced-over Hudson River and
make off with the American commander in chief, who, ac-
cording to Simcoe, was quartered at a considerable dis-
tance from his army, or any corps of it. With the assistance
of a loyalist sympathizer whod once lived near where
Washington was staying, Simcoe soon had a very minute
and perfect map of the country, as he described it in his
journal. He planned to select 80 of his cavalrymen and
march by secret ways, made the more so by the inclement
season, and to arrive near General Washingtons quarters
by day-break, to tie up his horses in a swamp, and to storm
the quarters, and attack his guard on foot.
Simcoe likely would not have even considered the idea
of a raid to capture Washington but for the fact that the
Hudson River had iced over.
It may seem odd that Simcoe would choose to attack on
foot, when on horseback his men would have the advan-
tage of speed, but perhaps he thought that the mounted
approach would be more likely to create an alarm. He did
not plan to kill Washington, though he worried how he
could prevent the death of the American commander in
chief should he personally resist.
Since December 1, 1779, Washingtons headquarters
had been outside Morristown, in the areas finest house.
Built by Colonel Jacob Ford Jr., who had died of pneumo-
nia in January 1777, the mansion was occupied by his
widow, Theodosia, and their four young children. Lying
roughly a half mile east of the main part of Morristown and
three miles northeast of the main American encampments
at Jockey Hollow, the mansion was vulnerable; all the more
so because Washington was spending nights there away
from the main body of his troops.
Still, to get there Simcoes cavalry would have to ride
some 30 miles through the foothills of the Watchung
32 MHQ Summer 2017
Mountains and then across rough back roads regularly
watched by local militia and Continental troops. Moreover,
the raiders exceedingly long escape route to New York
would provide many opportunities for enemy attacks. The
weather was also unpredictable and potentially dangerous.
That winter more than 20 snowstorms would pound the
Morristown area, sometimes blocking roads with six-foot
drifts. Simcoes plan was indeed a daring one.
In addition, soldiers whose specific job was to protect
Washington lurked in the vicinity of the mansion. Unlike
British commanders, Washington had established his own
security detail, commonly known as Washingtons Life
Guard. Its purpose was not only to provide personal secu-
rity for Washington but also to handle the baggage of his
headquarters and the money and official papers of the Con-
tinental Army. The unit, led by Major Caleb Gibbs, had 110
men, although not all of them would be available to defend
against a raid: six of them worked as servants for Washing-
ton and several more as stable hands and messengers.
Two sentinels paraded in front and two [patrolled] in
the rear constantly, day and night, John W. Barber and
Henry Howe wrote in an 1846 history of New Jersey that
included veterans accounts of the war. Several times in the
course of the winter false alarms were given of the approach
of the enemy.Immediately, the Life Guard would rush
from their huts into the [Ford] house, barricade the doors,
open the windows, and about five men would place them-
selves at each window, with their muskets brought to a
charge, loaded and cocked ready for defense. There they
would remain until the troops from camp were seen march-
ing, with music, at quick-step down towards the mansion.
These occasions were annoying to the ladies of the
household, Benson J. Lossing wrote in his 1851 history of
the Revolutionary War, for both Mrs. Washington and
Mrs. Ford were obliged to lie in bed, sometimes for hours,
with their rooms full of soldiers, and the keen winter air
from the open windows piercing through their drawn cur-
tains. (Martha Washington had arrived to stay at the man-
sion on December 31.)
Washington and his staff, according to one of his aides,
occupied two rooms below, all the upper floor, the kitchen,
cellar and stable. Nonetheless, the Ford mansion, though
spacious, was packed with bodies. On January 22, 1780,
Washington complained in a letter to Major General Na-
thanael Greene that eighteen belonging to my family
[meaning his staff] and all Mrs. Fords are crowded to-
gether in her kitchen.
On January 31, Brigadier General Thomas Stirling, the
commander of the British 42nd Regiment (the famous
 Beginning in December 1779, Washington made his headquarters at this mansion,
now a National Park Service museum, outside Morristown, New Jersey.

Black Watch), approved Simcoes plan, noting, Your
ideas are great, and would be of importance if fulfilled.
That same day Silas Condict, a member of New Jerseys
executive council, wrote Washington expressing his con-
cern: I take the liberty to suggest my apprehension re-
specting Your Excellencys situation, which I do not think
so secure as I would wish, while the frost [ice] makes firm
passing into Jersey from every part of the enemys lines.
The prescient councilman advised Washington that the
GENE AHRENS/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
that he had already taken precautions that would be effec-
tual in preventing a surprise cavalry raid on the mansion.
As he waited for scouts to confirm Washingtons contin-
ued presence at the mansion, Simcoe was surprised to learn
that the spymaster Beckwith had come up with his own
plan to kidnap Washington. Knyphausen agreed that a raid
on Morristown was feasible. General Washington having
taken up his quarters at a distance from his army, under the
protection of a small corps of infantry, Knyphausen wrote,

solid ice could make possible a bold attempt to surprise
him and allow a party of cavalry to reach Morristown un-
detected. The importance of the object may induce them
to hazard an attempt, Condict warned, and it will fully
justify every means to be ready to receive them.
But Washington seemed unconcerned. He told Condict
it appeared practicable to surprise that body with cavalry
and to penetrate to the neighborhood of Morristown.
Knyphausen preferred Beckwiths plan, since it called
for the deployment of many more troops, resulting in less
risk. Beckwith proposed staging various diversions in New
Jersey. This force of mounted men would consist of about

MHQ Summer 2017 33

 KIDNAPPING WASHINGTON
60 cavalrymen each from the British 17th Light Dragoons
and from Simcoes Queens Rangers. Beckwith ordered a
disappointed Simcoe to send him the mounted troops of
the Queens Rangers for the operation.
In late January and early February, Knyphausen made
his preparations for Beckwiths planned raids. The German
general assigned a regiment of infantry to Paulus Hook to
await the return of his mounted men from Morristown.
The core of the mounted attack force poised to ride to
Morristown and capture Washington was the British 17th
Light Dragoons, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel
Samuel Birch. This regiment had sailed from Ireland in
1775 and landed in Boston just before the Battle of Bunker
Hill. Some of them had infamously ridden their mounts
inside Bostons Old South Meeting House. Since then the
regiment had participated in most of the significant en-
gagements in the north, including those of Long Island,
White Plains, and Monmouth, as well as dozens of small
skirmishes in New Jersey and
The core of around Philadelphia and
New York City. After the
the mounted British evacuation of Phila-
delphia in 1778, the 16th
attack force Light Dragoons, the only
was the British other British regular cavalry
regiment used in the Revolu-
17th Light tionary War and whose dra-
goons had captured Major
Dragoons. General Charles Lee, trans-
ferred many of its men and
horses to the 17th and sent its officers back to England.
After arriving in the New York City region, its headquarters
was usually at Hempstead, on Long Island, but its men con-
stantly patrolled the lines around New York City.
The uniform of the 17th Dragoons included a red jacket
with white facings, buckskin breeches, black-top boots,
and a leather helmet with a skull-and-crossbones above the
words or glory. The helmet was topped with a red, flow-
ing crest of dyed horsehair. The dragoons were armed with
a single-bladed straight saber and a light carbine. They
were trained to fire from the saddle.
The Black Hussars were mostly escaped German pris-
oners of war who had accompanied Major General John
Burgoynes army to Saratoga. After they had gathered in
New York City and had acquired a reputation for being
Clockwise from upper left: Major General Arthur St. Clair, the commander of American
outposts in New Jersey; Captain George Beckwith, Londons spymaster in the colonies;
Brigadier General Thomas Stirling, who approved the abduction plan; Lieutenant General
Wilhelm von Knyphausen, commander of British troops in New York; Lieutenant Colonel
Samuel Birch, the commander of the British 17th Light Dragoons; and (center) Simcoe.
34 MHQ Summer 2017
unruly, they were formed into a hussar outfit in 1779. The
men wore a hussar cap and black coat and short boots with
blue trousers tucked inthe hussar style. Simcoes Queens
Rangers were similarly attired, wearing a hussar-type cap,
with the crescent or half-moon insignia of the Rangers on
the front, a green wool jacket, green trousers tucked into
short boots, and a sword belt over the right shoulder.
It is not known who commanded the expedition, but it
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: PICTORIAL PRESS LTD/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; ANNE S.K. BROWN MILITARY COLLECTION/BROWN UNIVERSITY LIBRARY; VALENTINE ART REPRODUCTIONS; CHRONICLE/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; THE BRITISH LIBRARY; NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY
was probably Birch, since he was the senior commander
of the only regular British Army cavalry regiment in the
attack force. Birch had not yet made much of an impres-
sion as a military leader. As commander of his dragoons
on Long Island and later as a brigadier general and com-
mandant of New York City, hed gained a reputation for
corruption, stealing the houses and possessions of loyal-
ists, allowing his soldiers to plunder the churches of loy-
alists, and even ordering the tearing down of a Quaker
meetinghouse on British-held Long Island and personally
selling the wood.
Knyphausen augmented the Elizabethtown-bound force
with additional troops and a second senior officer, Briga-
dier General Cortland Skinner, the former attorney general
of New Jersey. Stirling commanded two regiments of Brit-
ish regulars and Skinner probably commanded the 1st and
4th Battalions of New Jersey Volunteers, a loyalist outfit, for
a total of about 1,200 men.
The British seized sleds from civilians. At least 86 were
used on February 6 to carry munitions, provisions, and
other military supplies to British posts at Paulus Hook and
Staten Island. The ice on Newark Bay was so firm that
24-pounder cannons hauled across it to Paulus Hook on
February 8 and 13 made no impression on the frozen
surface, an event unknown in the memory of man, wrote
Major General James Pattison, the commander of the Brit-
ish Armys New York City garrison.
On February 7 the mounted men of Simcoes Queens
Rangers and the Black Hussars rode on the ice from Staten
Island to New York City, and by the next day the 17th Reg-
iment of Light Dragoons had joined them, after departing
from their base at Jamaica in Queens County (then con-
sidered part of Long Island). The British also called on
prominent New York City loyalists to make maps detailing
the network of roads between Elizabethtown and Wash-
ingtons headquarters and the more distant Continental
camps at Morristown.
MHQ Summer 2017 35
 KIDNAPPING WASHINGTON
While Knyphausen completed plans for his move
against Washington at Morristown, much of the British ac-
tivity related to efforts to increase New York Citys and
Staten Islands defenses. The American army could just as
easily cross the ice to attack them. The Royal Navy, having
departed Upper New York Bay for the winter to avoid
being iced in, could not protect army outposts. In despera-
tion, Pattison buttressed his force by drafting more than
2,500 loyalist militiamen in a single week.
News of the British preparations was speedily conveyed
to Washington and his commander of American outposts
in northern New Jersey, Major General Arthur St. Clair.
Washington believed he would be safe with Continentals
and local militia manning
Washington guard posts at various key
points. Our main body cannot
had no idea be surprised he wrote to St.
Clair on January 30, adding
that he was that he thought the main
the primary object of a raid would be his
armys magazines of hay. He
target of the had no idea that he was the
primary target of the raid, and
British raid. that the British planned to
have him on his way to Paulus
Hook well before Continental troops could interfere.
According to historian Benjamin Huggins, Washington
kept two brigades of his main army stationed west of Eliz-
abethtown to guard against raids from Staten Island. Arriv-
ing to take command of these brigades on January 27, St.
Clair ordered his commanders to post guards at Rahway,
Cranes Mills, Connecticut Farms, Elizabethtown, and
Newark. In addition, the New Jersey militia could be called
into the field on an alarm. Washington also kept a detach-
ment of about 200 infantry at Paramus.
Washington and St. Clair had also put another force in
place that would prove critical in deflecting one of the raid-
ing parties. With few Continental cavalry to patrol the areas
between his guard posts, St. Clair asked the New Jersey au-
thorities to raise a company of light cavalry at Continental
expense to patrol the coast roads between Newark and
Amboy. The company numbered 45 light cavalry raised
from militia volunteers. St. Clair stationed these light cav-
alry at Rahway, Newark, and Woodbridge, with 15 at each
town. They would prove their worth in the coming fights.
The mission to kidnap Washington was scheduled for
February 8 but called off when a fierce snowstorm inter-
vened. Knyphausen, however, was unwilling to wait much
longer. On February 10, with no new snowfall, he ordered
the Morristown raid and diversionary attacks to begin the
next evening. During the night of February 1112, more
than a hundred cavalrymen (accounts range from 120 to
36 MHQ Summer 2017
300), all probably commanded by Birch, and an infantry
regiment crossed the ice-sheeted Hudson River and
Newark Bay to Paulus Hook, on the New Jersey mainland.
Meanwhile, Simcoe and Stirling ventured out to create
their diversions. At the head of 200 infantrymen, Simcoe
passed over the ice at 1 a.m. on February 11. Stirlings orders
called for Simcoe to send a party to surprise the enemy post
at Woodbridge or Rahway and to give a general alarm. To
cover his return, Simcoe posted Major Richard Armstrong
with some of the regiments infantry, his remaining cavalry,
and some cannons at the heights overlooking the Old Blaz-
ing Star Ferry, which connected Staten Island with New
Jersey. He then took the rest of the Rangers and headed
toward Woodbridge, but he was forced to march on the
beaten road because of the deep snows around them.
When Simcoe and his men arrived at Woodbridge, they
found the enemy guard post abandoned. Still, Simcoe was
determined to beat up some of the enemys quarters, or fall
in with their patrols to create a diversion that would give
every assistance in his power to his friend Beckwith.
As they marched on from Perth Amboy to Elizabeth-
town, Simcoes troops were challenged at a crossroads by
patriot sentries. All of Simcoes men, shielded by the dark-
ness and deep snowdrifts, stood still in profound silence.
The sentinels, talking among themselves, thought they
were mistaken in spotting the enemy. But soon one of the
New Jersey militia on horseback rode up on the flanks of
Simcoes unit and yelled an alarm. The sentries opened fire.
Simcoe ordered his men to retreat. As they did, one of
them was struck and killed.
The patriots took time to gather and organize their forces.
Then they set out after Simcoe and his men, using the same
path. Finally, at 8 a.m., after crossing Woodbridge Creek, the
Americans caught up with the raiders. But the deep snow
prevented the Americans from attacking the British flanks.
As Simcoe approached the road to the Old Blazing Star Ferry,
he dispatched a man to ride over the ice to alert Armstrong to
prepare his cannons, and he ordered Captain David Shank to
cover his retreat by manning a ridge with a small detach-
ment. That done, Simcoe suddenly ordered the rest of his
DETROIT PUBLISHING CO./LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; MAP: BRIAN WALKER
men to turn around and charge the pursuing Americans.
The surprised Americans immediately fled. As they passed
over a hill, Shanks men rose and fired on them, driving
them farther back, and Armstrong opened up his cannons
on ferry buildings sheltering some of the other American
soldiers. This dispirited the Americans and allowed Simcoe
and his men to return over the ice to Long Island.
Simcoe had carried out his mission of skirmishing with
local militia and St. Clairs horse patrols. He later wrote that
he had lost just one man and suffered a few wounded,
adding that he thought the enemys loss to have been much
greater. St. Clair, though, reported only one man wounded.
 The more punishing blow was struck at Elizabethtown.
St. Clair informed Washington that his 50 men were
timely apprised of the enemys approach and quickly re-
treated in the face of Stirlings and Skinners overwhelming
force. Skinners advance raiders did manage to take some
shots at a rear guard, wounding one man. With the town
now unprotected, the soldiers resorted to lootingas was
sometimes done by victorious loyalists, whose property
had often been seized by patriots. There is no indication
that Skinner tried to stop it. A number of houses in the
town have been stripped of everything, St. Clair informed
Washington the next day, and ten or twelve of the inhabi-
tants carried off. The Pennsylvania Packet reported sarcas-
tically of the raiders, After terrifying the women and
HUDSON RIVER children, they heroically marched off with their plunder
WATCHUNG and five or six prisoners.
MOUNTAINS Hackensack As Stirlings and Skinners troops began to evacuate
Elizabethtown, St. Clairs guards and the local horse patrols
Morristown reclaimed it, taking two stragglers, but they turned out to
be civilians from Staten Island whod followed Skinners
Ford troops in order to plunder. The guards, horse patrols, and
Mansion Lower
Manhattan some local militia pursued Skinners retreating raiders and
Newark claimed to have wounded several, but no report of the ca-

Paulus
NEW sualties survives in British or loyalist records.
A small, third force of British or loyalist soldiers (their
Elizabethtown Hook YORK identity is not known) raided Rahway. The next day St.
Rahway Clair reported to Washington that enemy troops landed at
Staten Rahway, in a very obscure place, plundered two houses and
Island carried off two men, and seem to have had no other object.
Woodbridge As for the main object, Birchs cavalrymen, accompa-
Perth Amboy ATLANTIC nied by Beckwith, rode north to Hackensack and regrouped
OCEAN there as planned. But after setting out from Hackensack for
Morristown, the mounted troops were stymied by the
M I L E S harsh weather. A body of cavalry passed into Jersey, but
was obliged to return after a march of between five and six
0 4
NEW JERSEY miles; the snow which fell on the 7th and 8th instant having
rendered the roads impassable, Knyphausen reported.
Simcoe wrote that Beckwith had found it impracticable to
Simcoes Path carry his attempt into execution, from an uncommon fall
to Morristown of rain, which encrusting the top of the snow, cut the fet-
locks of his horses, and rendered it absolutely impossible
for him to succeed. Judge Thomas Jones railed in frustra-
The British forces set out from New York City by crossing tion about the failed attempt: The guides got frightened,
the iced-over Hudson River and Newark Bay to Paulus the party bewildered, they lost the road, and after a cold,
Hook, on the New Jersey mainland. They would avoid the tedious and fatiguing excursion of twenty-four hours,
main road to Morristown through Newark and instead
without ever seeing a Rebel, returned to New York, all
take the less traveled and guarded roads north of
frost-bitten.
Morristown and, moving southwest, attack Washingtons
vulnerable headquarters at the Ford mansion (top). Before turning back, the commander of the main body
of dragoons had five rockets fired into the night sky to
signal Stirling to call off his raid of Elizabethtown. In turn,
Stirling had five rockets fired to signal Simcoe to call off his
raid and turn back to Staten Island.

MHQ Summer 2017 37

 KIDNAPPING WASHINGTON
Loyalists in New York City quickly learned the true pur-
pose of the raid. The dragoons went out last night with an
intent to take Washington, newspaper printer Hugh Gaine
wrote in his journal, but the roads were so bad they could
not proceed, so returnedah well. William Smith, with
fair accuracy, wrote in his diary for February 11: There
went over the river last evening a party of 4 or 500 and 200
more from Staten Island, but they all returned on account of
the depth of the snow. I suspect Washington was the chief
object and the sallies from Staten Island feints.
The smothering February 78 snowstorm had spoiled
the British mission to kidnap Washington. While the bit-
terly cold winter that had iced over the Hudson River made
the raid against Morristown possible, it had also ruined
Beckwiths plan. The Ameri-
Loyalists in can commander in chief
surely could not have re-
New York City vealed the significance of the
following entry in his diary
quickly for February 8: A fall of nine
learned the or ten inches of snow in the
night from the northeast.
true purpose Ironically, the inability of
Washingtons Continentals
of the raid. to quickly clear the road of
snow between Hackensack
and Morristown had prevented the raid.
On February 11 St. Clair sent Washington an account
of the unsuccessful British raids. Somehow, St. Clair had
planted a spythe guide for Birchs dragoons. This man
was likely a trader who plied his goods between New Jersey
and Manhattan, supplying British-held New York. The spy
reported to St. Clair, who explained to Washington:
The party from Paulus Hook consisted of about three
hundred horse, and landed at Hackensack.They
proceeded some distance into the country, and from
the route they pursued, he [the spy] thinks, intended to
have passed the Cedar Swamp, and were very particu-
lar in their inquiries about the situation of your quar-
ters, and where I was quartered, and the guards that
were posted between Hackensack and Morristown. He
says particularly that, after marching some ways into
the country, he heard an officer ask the commandant
where they were going. He replied he could not tell
him, but they had more than thirty miles to march
that night. In a short time after this, finding the snow
very deep and the roads not broken, they returned,
and he [the spy] was dismissed.
St. Clair then laid out a warning. If their design was an
attempt on your Excellencys quarters, he told Washing-
38 MHQ Summer 2017
ton, I hope you will pardon me for hinting that there is not
a sufficient body of troops near enough to render you
secure. Had they designed to have fallen upon our rear,
which they might have done, they had troops enough to
have given us full occupation, and them the opportunity.
Washington responded to St. Clair the next day, noting
that he had just taken precautions to guard against an at-
tempt, by such a party as might be reasonably supposed to
be able to reach [his Morristown headquarters] in the
course of a night. One precaution was to increase his
guard around and inside the mansion.
In his response to St. Clair, Washington added, I hope
that a short continuance of this weather will make the ice
impassable by horse; from foot there is no danger at this
distance. To increase security against another raid on Mor-
ristown, he advised St. Clair to extend his horse patrols
north, at least until the ice across remained firm. As tem-
peratures warmed in late February, the ice in the bays
melted, and the British shelved any further plans to kidnap
Washington.
While the warmer weather melted the ice on the Hudson
River, it also made the roads to Morristown passable by
British dragoons. But Washington must have doubted that
the British would plan a complicated amphibious opera-
tion, involving shipping dragoons and their horses across
the Hudson, to mount another raid against him at Morris-
town. He also realized that a raid by infantry was not a true
threat to his personal safety. Still, he took no chances.
In March, Beckwith kept himself informed of the Amer-
ican commanders security precautions through his own in-
telligence sources in and around Morristown. On March 3
Beckwith received word that General Washingtons body-
guard at the mansion was augmented to 350 men.One-
third of them lodge every night in the lower part of the
house. On March 9 the intelligence captain received further
information that General Washingtons guard is augmented
to 400 men. The caution against being surprised is sentinels
being posted on every road leading to headquarters.
On March 16 a new storm dumped nine inches of snow
in and around Morristown. Three days later, perhaps feel-
ing vulnerable to another raid attempt over the ice on the
Hudson River, Washington ordered two soldiers from each
regiment and one sergeant from each brigade to join his
Life Guard at the mansion.
Though he was frustrated by Washingtons increased vig-
ilance, Beckwith continued to seek and receive reports of
Washingtons quarters, hoping to see another opportunity to
try to kidnap him. In July and August of 1781, for example,
Washingtons headquarters was sometimes at Joseph Apple-
bys house, on the crossroad from Dobbs Ferry to White
Plains in New York, about three and a half miles from the
ferry. On July 28 a Hessian intelligence officer forwarded to
 A smothering blizzardone of more than 20 snowstorms that pounded the Morristown
area in the winter of 17791980spoiled the British mission to kidnap Washington.
Beckwith information obtained from a female spy who had
gained access to Washingtons headquarters, probably by
performing chores such as laundry or cooking. The woman
is returned from Washingtons quarters, wrote Lieutenant
Carl Levin Marquard. She saw him herself and says that
Washington sleeps in the back bedroom; that there were two
French sentries yesterday at his door; that his guard consists
of French and Rebels, which she judged to be about 30 or 40
men; that she saw no horsemen there; that there was no
camp in the rear of his quarters;that Applebys was about
half a mile back of the Rebel camps. On August 11 Beckwith
WASHINGTON, JEFFERSON & MADISON INSTITUTE
received information from a Continental Army deserter:
Washingtons house is about a quarter of a mile in the rear
of the army at Applebys house.He has a guard of eighty
men with him constantly.
Other than Simcoe, none of the major participants on
the British side wrote about the attempt to capture the Con-
tinental Armys commander in chief. It may have been that
they were too embarrassed to admit their role in kidnap-
ping a man who had become revered in republican circles
and elected to two terms as president of the United States.
Surprisingly, perhaps, Washington himself favored the
idea of kidnapping the enemy. He twice ordered plans
made to abduct his counterpart, British commander in
chief Henry Clinton, at his headquarters in New York City,
and he even ordered plans made to kidnap 17-year-old
Prince William Henry, the first member of the British royal
family to visit North America, in 1782, after the great vic-
tory at Yorktown. Referring to a bid to capture Clinton in
1778, he wrote, I think it one of themost desirable and
honorable things imaginable. MHQ
Christian McBurney is a partner in the law firm
Arent Fox in Washington, D.C. He is the author of four
books on the Revolutionary War, including Abductions
in the American Revolution: Attempts to Kidnap George
Washington, Benedict Arnold, and Other Military and
Civilian Leaders (McFarland, 2016).
MHQ Summer 2017 39
 A U-BOAT'S
U-TURN
In 1916 a German merchant
submarine suddenly popped up in
Baltimore. It went on to sink 43
Allied ships during World War I.
By Warren Bernard

WARREN BERNARD COLLECTION

Hailing Freedom of the Seas, a German cartoon magazine

celebrates the blockade-blocking submarines maiden voyage
by asking, Hello, America, what do you say now?
President Woodrow Wilson, bug-eyed and slack-jawed,
looks on helplessly from the mouth of Baltimore Harbor.

40 MHQ Summer 2017

 THE STEALTH SUB
s the fog lifted just after dawn on July 9, 1916,
A people along the shores of the Chesapeake Bay in
Virginia and Maryland witnessed something
never before seenor even imaginedin the
United States: a German U-boat slowly making
its way into an American port. At 213 feet long
and 30 feet high, Deutschland was the largest submarine
ever built. It had but one aim: to break the British naval
blockade preventing undersea trade between Germany
and the United States.
Americans who had read newspaper accounts of Ger-
manys death-dealing U-boats during the first two years of
the war stood at the shoreline watching the worlds first
unarmed merchant submarine proudly flying the German
flag as it cruised up the Chesapeake and into Baltimore.
Newspaper reporters, newsreel crews, and thrill seekers
boarded small boats to get a closer look at the slow-
moving Deutschland. Captain Paul Knig, who spoke En-
glish, stood with his crew on the submarines conning
tower and answered questions about their historic trip,
shouting over the din of Deutschlands engines. A sudden,
late-afternoon thunderstorm
scattered the observers and
Even before inquisitors, allowing the
it had arrived, massive submarine to com-
plete its trip to Baltimore in
Deutschland relative peace and the re-
porters to file their stories in
was a full- time to be printed in the eve-
blown media ning papers.
Even before it had arrived,
sensation. Deutschland was a full-blown
media sensation. The July 9
evening edition of the Washington Times devoted its entire
front page to the story, under these headlines:
U-BOAT LINER ARRIVES; IS NOW COMING UP BAY
German Submarine Reaches Virginia Capes Early Today
After Escaping From French and British Warships.
Bringing Valuable Chemical Cargo to Baltimore
Deutschland carried more than 1,000 tons of dyes sorely
needed by U.S. textile manufacturers. Before the war, Ger-
many had enjoyed a worldwide monopoly on high-quality
dyes used in textiles, with the United States one of its larg-
est customers. But by 1916 the fabrics in American cloth-
42 MHQ Summer 2017
ing, draperies, tablecloths, and other goods had become
noticeably less vibrant as the British shipping blockade
took hold and stocks of dyes imported from Germany
before the war were exhausted. U.S. textile makers were
anxiously awaiting the arrival of the Deutschlands very
valuable cargo.
After weeks dodging British warships and maneuver-
ing through rough seas, with temperatures inside some-
times reaching 120 degrees, Deutschland finally settled
peacefully into a berth at Locust Point in Baltimore
Harbor. Its crewmen found their new, spacious quarters
on the German passenger ship Neckar, docked next to
Deutschland.
On the rainy morning of July 10, hundreds of people
gathered just outside the gates of the high fence surround-
ing the dock, hoping to get a glimpse of Deutschland or its
crew. Later that day, reporters and photographers were in-
vited to get their first close look at everything, and soon
newspapers everywhere had pictures of Deutschlands
crewmen smiling and waving their hats for the cameras.
Baltimore enthusiastically welcomed Knig and his
men. The city had one of the nations largest concentrations
of Germans (some 20 percent of its population in 1914), as
it had been a prime destination for German immigrants
since the 1880s. Many of Baltimores public schools taught
German, and the city had a German-language daily news-
paper and a multitude of social clubs and activities for its
German-speaking community.
Knig and other members of Deutschlands crew were
treated like celebrities, with newspaper interviews, dinner
with Mayor James H. Preston, a visit from German ambas-
sador Johann Heinrich von Bernstorff, and banquets and
other festivities organized by Baltimores German-
American community. Knig responded effusively: Only
those who know American hospitality and American en-
thusiasm can form an idea of the hearty reception we were
given everywhere, he told reporters. Peoples heads were
quite turned. It did one good to see with how much open
and honest sympathy our voyage and safe arrival were re-
garded by the Americans, and how this sympathy was ex-
pressed with the most unrestrained rapture.
Such was the mystique of Deutschland that people in-
quired about booking passage to Germany on the subma-
rines return voyage. Some 200 members of Congress asked
to see Deutschland, it being a political and technological
curiosity, but Knig said no, citing security reasons. Ger-
 Captain Paul Knig and the crew of Deutschland pose for photographers in Baltimore
with Paul Hilken, the front man for the German operation in the United States.
many further burnished the triumphal image of the voyage
by announcing that it was building 25 more Deutschland-
class submarines to sail under the British blockade, not
only to the United States but also to Spain and South
America. Postcards featuring Deutschland were published
in the United States in both English and German. Movie
theaters in Baltimore, New York, and other cities showed
film shorts of its arrival. Scientific American, Colliers, and
other magazines featured stories about the technical won-
ders of the massive submarine, though editorials in the na-
tions newspapers reflected conflicting attitudes:
BAIN NEWS SERVICE/LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
The Deutschlands feat is notable and if it is found
to pay, it will doubtless be repeated. But the notion
that it proves that the English blockade amounts to
nothing [a German agents assertion] is delusional,
as the Germans themselves are quite aware.
New York Herald, July 12, 1916
The world will not withhold warm admiration for
the initiative and daring that adapted this type of
marine construction to the purposes of commerce
and the navigation that solved all of the problems of
its record-breaking trip and caused the longest
voyage ever made by a submarine to be a voyage of
peace rather than war.
In this brilliant exploit the German merchant
marine has matched the resourcefulness of the
German navy. And no higher commendation
drawn from the analogies of the present war could
be framed.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 10, 1916
The giddiness of some of the American press and the
people of Baltimore over the arrival of Deutschland wasnt
shared by the other Allies, and the event caused some con-
sternation in Washington, D.C. In the early years of World
MHQ Summer 2017 43
 THE STEALTH SUB
War I, the United States and the Allies had sharply diver-
gent views of the British blockade. The British were intent
on cutting off shipments of any material that could aid
Germanys war effort. The foodstuffs, coal, metals, arma-
ments, and even cotton on American merchant ships were
considered contraband, and regardless of their final desti-
nation, ships found carrying those items had their cargoes
impounded. Further dampening American trade, the Brit-
ish put quotas on what could be sent to Denmark, Norway,
Sweden, and the Netherlands, as it was found those neutral
European countries were being used as conduits for goods
bound for Germany. The British also boarded more than
2,000 American ships sailing between the United States
and Canadian ports, confiscating cargoes worth millions
of dollars. Britains allies, France and Russia, supported the
blockade as a way to choke off Germanys access to war
materials and foodstuffs.
Little wonder, then, that when the Allied powers, joined
by Japan, filed a formal protest with the U.S. State Depart-
ment to impound Deutschland as a weapon of war, the
United States was less than sympathetic. As the submarine
was purportedly owned by a private company, Deutsch
Ozean Reederei, and the crew held papers showing that
they were German merchantmen and not from the German
navy, the U.S. government could not justify impounding it.
It did, however, send Navy and Treasury Department rep-
resentatives to inspect the submarine. They reported that it
was unarmed and saw no way
that it could be turned into an
The British armed U-boat. Based on these
aimed to cut findings, the Joint State and
Navy Neutrality Board de-
off shipments clared Deutschland to be a
merchant vessel. But it added
that could aid an important caveat: that the
Germanys status of any Deutschland-type
merchant submarine be reas-
war effort. sessed with each visit to a U.S.
port. That left open the door to
a future reversal in policy based on German-American re-
lations and Germanys conduct of the war.
In Washington, the British and French embassies not
only objected to the provisioning of the submarine while it
was in Baltimore Harbor but also protested the U.S. gov-
ernments decision to classify Deutschland as a merchant
ship. The British immediately made it clear that Deutsch-
land or any submarine like it would be treated as a warship
Members of Deutschlands crew wave their caps for the cameras at McLean Pier in
Baltimore on July 10, 1916. A city quarantine tug, E. Clay Timanus, helps to pilot the
submarine into the harbor, shielding it from accidental ramming by British vessels.
44 MHQ Summer 2017
by its Royal Navy, shelled at sight, and given no quarter.
Meanwhile, Deutschlands cargo of dyestuffs was unloaded
into a warehouse. The cargo for its return trip376 tons of
nickel, needed to reinforce steel for Germanys arms indus-
try, and about 500 tons of rubber for gaskets, bushings,
tires, and other products needed for its war effortwas
loaded into the ship shortly thereafter. Repairs were also
undertaken. Engine parts made from German steel were
replaced with U.S.-made brass parts, as the German parts
were inferior and prone to failure. Deutschland topped off
its tanks with as much high-quality American fuel as it
could hold, which triggered another international protest,
as the British and French pointed out that the extra fuel
could be used to resupply armed U-boats.
As reports circulated that British and French ships were
waiting for Deutschland in international waters off the
mouth of the Chesapeake, newspapers ran stories suggest-
ing that the submarines trip back to its home port of
Bremen might not be as safe or easy as the trip to Balti-
more. American fishing boats whose operators supported
the British cause were said to be readying huge nets to try
to snare the sub. Ambassador Bernsdorff, sensing danger,
asked the U.S. government for an escort for Deutschlands
three-mile voyage to international waters, but the State De-
partment rebuffed his request.
On August 1, Deutschland eased out of its berth in Balti-
more andjoined by boats jammed with reporters, pho-
tographers, and onlookersfloated back down the Patapsco
River. The next morning it reached international waters,
submerged, and began the long trip back to Germany.
On August 25, after three weeks at sea without incident,
Deutschland entered the Weser River. Thousands of people
lined its banks to celebrate the heroic submarine, which for
the occasion was decked with various flags, including the
Stars and Stripes. Bremens mayor and other dignitaries
greeted Knig and his crew. Banquets, toasts, and tributes
for the blockade-running heroes followed. German newspa-
pers and magazines, such as Der Brummer and Lustig Blt-
ter, ran articles and cartoons extolling Deutschlands success.
With little to show from mounting battlefield casualties and
worsening food shortages, the German people desperately
needed good news, and the exploits of Deutschland gave
them some hope, however fleeting.
HARRIS & EWING COLLECTION/LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (2)
Deutschland was conceived out of the dire situation in
which Germany found itself as a result of the British block-
ade, which by early 1915 was already constricting the flow
 XXXXXXXXXX

MHQ Summer 2017 45

 THE STEALTH SUB

Fritz Stoltenberg (18551922), a German landscape

and marine painter, produced this longitudinal cutaway
of The Underwater Cargo Ship Deutschland for
reproduction in poster form. The schematic shows the
cargo holds of the submarine lled with the nickel and
other metals it came to retrieve in the United States.

of raw materials needed for its war effort. German arms

makers, for example, needed nickel, saltpeter, iron ore,
coal, and other materials to manufacture guns, artillery,
and ammunition. The largest such company was Friedrich
Krupp AG. In addition to submarines, Krupp manufac-
tured most of Germanys artillery (including the renowned
Big Bertha) as well as other weapons and war matriel. It
did the same for Germanys allies, the Austro-Hungarians
and Ottomans.
In August 1914, with the onset of war, Krupp had pur-
chased stores of U.S. nickel to strengthen the steel used in
U-boats, ships, artillery barrels, and other armaments. But
the British blockade kept Krupp from obtaining this valuable
metal, so in late 1915 the company assigned its engineers to
design a merchant submarine that could travel under the
British fleet to retrieve the nickel warehoused in America.
At about the same time, Karl Helfferich, Germanys fi-
nance minister (and one of its leading financiers), brought
the same idea to the German navy. With Alfred Lohmann,
a Bremen-based businessman, Helfferich developed a plan
not only to build the submarine but also to construct an
intricate deception that would make it appear as if the sub-
marine were a strictly private initiative.
To do this Helfferich and
Lohmann set up a civilian front
In 1915 Krupp company, Deutsche Ozean
assigned its Reederei, that was nominally
owned by Norddeutscher
engineers to Lloyd, a well-respected concern
that for more than 30 years had
design a transported immigrants from
merchant its base in Bremen to Baltimore
and handled shipments of
submarine. goods between Germany and
the United States. But behind
the scenes, the Imperial German Navys design bureau would
draw up the construction plans in consultation with Krupp,
which would actually build Deutschland and be paid by the
navy. The ships engines had been designed for the German
navys heavy cruisers, and its crew was selected from experi-
enced U-boat personnel. In every way Deutschland was a cre-
ation of the German navy, under the civilian veneers of
Deutsche Ozean Reederei and Norddeutscher Lloyd.
With the German government paying for Deutschlands
construction, Deutsche Ozean Reederei turned to ware-
housing, supplies, and other needs in the United States. It
hired Paul Hilken, an MIT graduate and pillar of Balti-
mores German-American community, who in 1915 was
working as a German spy while running the operations of
the Norddeutscher Lloyd Steamship Company. Hilken ar-
ranged for the dock, warehouse, and other facilities the
Deutschland would use while it was in Baltimore. Hilken
also arranged to bring the raw materials to Baltimore that
Deutschland would take back to Germany, with the prio-
rity on the nickel that Krupp had previously purchased.
In December 1915 the keels were laid for Deutschland
and a sister merchant submarine, Bremen. Weeks later
Knig was chosen as Deutschlands commander because he
spoke fluent English, was an experienced captain, and had
previously navigated the route to Baltimore while with
Norddeutscher Lloyd. Like much of the crew, Knig was a
member of the German navy, but to maintain the facade of
Deutschland being strictly a merchant vessel, all of the crew
would carry papers attesting to their status as merchant
sailors. In truth, Deutschland was an unarmed Imperial
German Navy U-boat manned by an Imperial German
Navy crew.
Given the success of Deutschlands first voyageit got the
much-needed nickel to Krupp and the rubber to other
German companiesthe massive submarine left Bremen
again on October 1, 1916, for New London, Connecticut, as
that destination shaved about a week from the round trip.
This time, in addition to dyes, Deutschlands cargo in-
cluded German pharmaceuticals, diamonds and other pre-

46 MHQ Summer 2017

 cious stones, and securitiesall for the purchase of American
goods. As it was with the dyes, the German pharmaceuticals
had a large market in the United States, which was now cut
off by the British blockade.
After fighting its way through a three-day storm in the
Atlantic, Deutschland finally pulled into New London on
November 8. But things didnt go as well as they had in Bal-
timore. For starters, there was the surprise arrival on Octo-
ber 7 of U-53 at the Naval Station in Newport, Rhode Island.
Undetected until it surfaced at the mouth of Narragansett
Bay, the U-boats appearance proved that the U.S. Navy was
vulnerable to submarines at one of its largest bases. After a
courteous visit of six hours, U-53 left Newport and, over the
next six days, sank six Allied vessels as it cruised the Atlantic.
Under the Sussex Pledge, issued in May 1916 in an
effort to appease the United States after a German subma-
rine torpedoed a French passenger ferry without warning,
Germany had promised that its U-boats would allow mer-
chant ships enough time to load crews and passengers on
lifeboats before attempting to sink them. It was then left to
the United States to send out ships to rescue those adrift at
sea. The attacks moved public opinion further against Ger-
many, and American business leaders quickly came to fear
that all shipping on the East Coast would soon be under
attack by U-boats.
With bad press from the U-53 episode already coloring
the reception of Deutschland on its second voyage, things
didnt get much better on the public relations front. In New
London there was a total news blackout on the dock where
WARRELICS.EU
Deutschland was berthed. No one could even see the sub-
marine, much less have any interaction with the crew.
Once again navy inspectors were sent to make sure
Deutschland wasnt armed. This set of inspectors, however,
saw things in a different, decidedly negative light. They con-
cluded that Deutschland could easily be retrofitted into a sur-
face raider or mine-laying submarine and could be armed
with torpedoes. They also noted that the large cargo holds
would make it easy for Deutschland to serve as a submarine
tender, providing fuel and spare parts to other U-boats.
Just after midnight on November 17, Deutschland left
New London loaded with a cargo of nickel, rubber, tin, and
silver. As it was being escorted out to sea by the tugboat
T. A. Scott Jr., the tug suddenly turned into its path and
collided with the giant submarine. The tugboat sank im-
mediately; all five members of its crew died.
Deutschland returned to New London for repairs. In
short order, more than $200,000 in claims were filed
against its owners. Although a trial was scheduled for De-
cember 18, Knig received clearance to leave, and on No-
vember 21 Deutschland headed home. As there had been
no public relations bonanza from its second trip, no digni-
taries, adoring crowds, or banquets greeted the submarine
and its crew on their return to Bremen.
Though Deutschland had two successful trips transporting
goods to and from the United States, events unfolding in
Germany would soon change its fate.
Germany began rationing bread in January 1915. The
rest of the year saw rising prices for bread, milk, meat, and
other basic foodstuffs. Before long, shortages of these foods
led to riots. As other productsincluding fats, flour, and
potatoesbecame subject to rationing the following year,
MHQ Summer 2017 47
 THE STEALTH SUB
civil disturbances over food broke out in cities all across
Germany. On the battlefront, German troops suffered large
losses at the Somme and Verdun, among other places, with
little to show in terms of either military or political advan-
tage over the Allies. The situation for Germany was becom-
ing increasingly dire.
As 1916 wore on, Germanys grim position once again
brought the idea of unrestricted submarine warfare into
play at the highest levels of the German government.
Having built a much larger U-boat fleet since 1915, the
Germans hoped to force Britain out of the war by cutting
off the supplies it was importing from the United States
and other countries. With the approval of Kaiser
Wilhelm II, Germany declared that its unrestricted subma-
rine attacks would resume on February 1, 1917.
In December 1916 the German government ordered all
Deutschland-class submarines to be transferred to the juris-
diction of the German navy so that they could be converted
into U-cruiserslarger U-boats designed to stay at sea for
months at a time. On February 27, 1917, Deutschland, now
assigned the name U-155, was sent to the North Sea naval
base at Wilhelmshaven, where it began its retrofitting as a
U-cruiser. The interior was reconfigured for a larger crew
and stockpile of ammunition, and the old narrow walkway
from the conning tower was
replaced by a larger, elevated
Deutschland deck. Two 150mm deck guns
was, without were installed on the new
deck, and six torpedo tubes,
doubt, the all taken from the old battle-
ship Zhringen, were installed
most famous fore and aft of the guns.
German U-boat The retrofit, however, left
U-155 with two disadvan-
of World War I. tages at sea. First, its external
torpedo tubes were con-
stantly exposed to seawater, increasing the need for mainte-
nance and making them prone to mechanical issues, and
the sub had to surface to reload them. Second, it was slow.
Deutschland could make only 10 knots or so on the surface
and was significantly slower when submerged. It couldnt
chase fast ships, and its slow dive time meant that it was
much more vulnerable to depth charges and surface fire
from Allied vessels. As a result, Deutschlands captain had to
be especially cautious in his attack tactics.
With Deutschlands conversion to a U-cruiser, Knig
returned to the navy to serve in its personnel office, select-
ing merchant seamen for U-boat duty. Two of Deutsch-
lands officers stayed with U-155, serving under its new
captain, Karl Meusel, who had trained as a U-boat com-
mander and previously served as a watch commander. A
48 MHQ Summer 2017
new crew was brought aboard U-155 and on May 23, 1917,
after a series of sea trials, it left Kiel for patrol in the Azores.
Only a day out to sea, one of U-155s compressors failed
and had to be repaired. This was just the beginning of a long
list of mechanical failures that plagued the U-boat during its
first patrol. But Meusel pushed tenaciously on as his me-
chanics overcame the technical difficulties by cannibalizing
parts and using the onboard machine shop. To make up
speed while maximizing the firepower of his deck guns,
Meusel, using the naval tactic of crossing the T, would sur-
face U-155 in the path of an oncoming ship to bring both of
his deck guns to bear on the target. He reasoned that no ship
would be willing to ram the large submarine. None did.
Meusels patrol took him up the Norwegian coast,
around the northern tip of Ireland, and then down to the
Azores. From May 23 to August 8, U-155 sank or damaged
21 ships, mostly by using its 150mm deck-mounted guns to
force them to stop and then boarding them to set charges.
Only once did U-155 use its torpedoes to sink a ship.
But combat exposed further issues with Deutschlands
conversion. Most of its torpedoes were damaged from
being stowed improperly and getting jostled in rough seas.
Heavy use of the large deck guns loosened them from their
mountings and wore out their traversing gears, ruining
their accuracy.
U-155 spent the next month making its way back to
Kiel, arriving on September 7. It was immediately sent to
the dockyards for repairs, and Meusel was reassigned to
another U-boat. Commander Erich Eckelman took over
U-155. It was his first combat assignment.
After being outfitted with new deck guns and an on-
board torpedo room as well as getting a general overhaul,
U-155 undertook a new series of sea trials in December
1917. On January 14, 1918, it once again headed south of
the Azores, charged with intercepting ships heading to and
from the Mediterranean Sea via the Straits of Gibraltar. On
the way there and once in position, Eckelman had trouble
finding suitable targets, as the Allies had begun using de-
fensive convoys to reduce losses to their merchant ship
fleet. As a result, Eckelman began going after sailing ships.
He sank 17 of them. After returning to Kiel on May 4, 1918,
U-155 underwent three months of overhaul and was outfit-
ted with mine-laying equipment. A new captain, Ferdi-
nand Studt, was assigned. Like Eckelman, he had no
U-boat experience.
On August 11, U-155 left Kiel for what turned out to be
its last patrol, along the Eastern Seaboard from Canada to
New York City. Before being called home with the rest of
the U-boat fleet on October 21, Studt managed to sink only
four fishing vessels and four other ships. U-155 arrived
back in Kiel on November 14, three days after the signing
of the armistice.

Baltimore
NATION OF ORIGIN
Deutschlands maiden voyage under the British naval blockade was fodder for
cartoonists (left). After the submarine was converted into U-155 by the German navy
in 1917, it sank 43 Allied ships as it relentlessly patrolled the North Atlantic Ocean.
The saga of Deutschland/U-155 did not close quietly or
quickly with the end of World War I. Under the terms of
the armistice, the German navy had 14 days to turn over all
of its submarines to the Allies. And so, on November 24,
1918, the last of the operational German U-boats surren-
dered to British rear admiral Reginald Tyrwitt, the com-
mander of the Harwich Force, which during the war had
helped hunt down U-boats and aided in the blockade
against Germany. With Sir Eric Geddes, the First Lord of
the Admiralty, looking on from the bridge of one of Tyr-
witts destroyers, Germanys remaining 28 U-boats, led by
U-155, were handed over to the Royal Navy.
The British did not miss any opportunities to flaunt the
captured U-boats as war trophies. Five of them, including
Deutschland, were sent from Harwich to London. On De-
cember 14 the mighty Deutschland, moored at St. Kather-
ines Dock near Tower Bridge, was opened to the public,
and people by the hundreds lined up to get a peek inside.
After its return to Harwich in early 1919, Deutschland
WARREN BERNARD COLLECTION; MAP BY BRIAN WALKER
was sold to financier Horatio Bottomley, a former member
of Parliament and owner of the patriotic magazine John
Bull. The submarine was put on display around England to
help sell more than 100,000 in Victory Bonds, with profits
from admissions and souvenirs earmarked for the King
Georges Fund for Sailors, a charity formed in 1917. More
than 150,000 people reportedly saw Deutschland when it
was displayed at various English ports from May 1919 to
September 1920.
Ships Sunk
by U-155
NORTH
ATLANTIC
OCEAN
United States Portugal Canada
United Kingdom Norway Greece
Italy France Spain
But the whole enterprise turned out to be a scam engi-
neered by Bottomley, who was arrested and convicted in
1922 for fraud involving the purchase and commercializa-
tion of Deutschland and for using the money from the Vic-
tory Bonds for his own benefit.
Deutschlands final chapter was tragic. In June 1921 it
was brought to Birkenhead, near Liverpool, to be disas-
sembled. Three months later, as the submarine was being
taken apart, an explosion ripped through its engine room.
Five young apprentices died and one was seriously injured
when the torches they were using ignited tanks of hydro-
gen gas where they were working. Shortly thereafter, what
was left of the submarine was sold for scrap.
Deutschland was, without doubt, the most famous
German U-boat of World War I. It was a symbol of German
resolve, and of the innovative thinking of the German navy
and German industry. Germany, faced with the crippling
consequences of the British naval blockade, saw merchant
submarines as a possible solution. But the Germans des-
peration caused them to overlook the obviousnamely,
that the Deutschland-class submarines were too small, too
slow, and too few to appreciably affect the outcome of the
war. Ultimately, Deutschland was as much folly as it was
famous. MHQ
Warren Bernard is the author of Cartoons for Victory
(Fantagraphics Books, 2015). He has lectured at the
Library of Congress on various historical topics.
MHQ Summer 2017 49
 SHADOWS
OF WAR
An artists still-life montages
venerate the keepsakes of veterans.

n 2012 artist Leslie Starobin learned of her father-in-laws British Army book and

I journal from World War II, newly discovered and filled with snapshots, secret
correspondence, and other items that helped to illuminate the part of his life
devoted to military service. Starobin, a professor of communication arts at
Framingham State University in Framingham, Massachusetts, soon launched her
own search for collections of objectsphotographs, letters, articles of clothing,
and other keepsakesthat, as she puts it, stir the visual imagination. The 18 multi-
layered, textural photomontages that make up her recent exhibition, Dear Dearest
Mother, speak to such universal themes as love, longing, fear, loss, and remembrance.
The exhibition, which spans military conflicts from the Civil War to the present,
powerfully venerates classic photography, the lost art of letter writing, and the relic of the
battlefield. Its proof, as the saying goes, that every picture tells a story.

50 MHQ Summer 2017

SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, FRAMINGTON HISTORY CENTER

If This Be Glory It Is Enough of It

Dear Dearest Mother, I have been homesick, George H. Gordon, a cadet in the U.S.
Military Academy, began a letter home in 1846. On graduating he would send his family
a daguerreotype of himself, and in 1847 he would write home to describe the atrocities
he had witnessed as a lieutenant in the Mexican-American War: My heart bled for one
poor little fellow of my regiment. His arm was shattered by a cannon balland the
surgeon had taken his arm off at the shoulder. I turned away and thought if this be glory
it is enough of it. During the Civil War, Gordon, who would rise to the rank of brigadier
general in the Union army, led troops against Thomas H. Stonewall Jackson (a West
Point classmate) in the Battle of Antietam and at the Siege of Charleston.

MHQ Summer 2017 51

 I Love You Always
John T. Mac McEntegart saved the photo of his high school sweetheart (and future
wife) Judy that he carried with him to Vietnam as a sergeant in the U.S. Marine Corps,
along with a telegram that she sent to him in 1967 and the South Vietnamese flag that
his men inscribed and presented to him when he left Vietnam the following year. In a
letter to Judy dated September 28, 1967, McEntegart wrote: We are in a new area [Con
Thien, a Marine Corps fire support base]...up [near] the DMZ. We were mortared last
night. The mortars hit eight of my men. They were all casualties. As I was writing this
letter to you, the round hit your picture. Later everyone joked that none of us was hurt,
but Mac, your wife got killed.

52 MHQ Summer 2017

I Want to Show the Germans That I Am Still Here
Andr Scheinmann, whose family had emigrated from Dsseldorf to Bruay, France,
when he was a teenager, joined the French army in 1939. After the Germans invaded
France he became a prisoner of war. Scheinmann managed to escape and join the
French underground resistance movement. In 1943 the Nazis arrested Scheinmann and
sent him to the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp, and in 1944 he was deported to
Dachau, where he remained until the U.S. Army liberated it on April 29, 1945. At age 80,
despite his poor health, Scheinmann insisted on returning to Germany for ceremonies
marking the 50th anniversary of Dachaus liberation. I want to show the Germans that
I am still here, he explained to his son, and that the thousand-year Reich is not.

MHQ Summer 2017 53

 He Was Carrying in His Heart His Familys Tragedy
Meir Sheracoviak of d, Poland, was 26 when he reported for military duty after
Germany invaded Poland in 1939. Months later Sheracoviak, a Jew, was forced to flee
across the border to the Soviet Union, leaving his wife and infant daughter behind. He
spent two years foraging to survive and in 1942 made it to Tel Aviv, where he eventually
joined the Jewish Brigade of the British Army. More than 60,000 Jews had perished in
the Nazi-created hell of the d ghetto, including his parents and extended family; his
wife and daughter, he later learned, had died in the Nazi extermination camps at
Auschwitz in 1944. Like most of his comrades, one of Sheracoviaks sons from his
second marriage would later say, he was carrying in his heart his familys tragedy.

54 MHQ Summer 2017

SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, FRAMINGTON HISTORY CENTER

You Have to Wear a Silk Scarf

Gilbert C. Burns never washed the sweat out of the white scarf that he wore while
flying more than a hundred combat missions over Nazi Germany as an American fighter
pilot. Over here when we fly we have to keep twisting our neck and looking around
you can probably guess why, Burns told his mother in a letter. And you have to wear a
silk scarf, or your neck will chafe from your collar. Late in life, Burns revealed that his
scarf had been given to him by a Parisian girl who had made it with the fabric from a
German parachute that she had found in the woods near her home. When American
pilots were captured, the German captors would invariably take these as souvenirs,
Burns later wrote. I managed to bring mine home at wars end.

MHQ Summer 2017 55

 Wooden Ships With Iron Men
John A. Halfrey enlisted in the U.S. Navy on July 29, 1902, in Boston, Massachusetts.
While in the navy, Halfrey kept a little leather-covered journal that he filled with
handwritten notes. On board the USS Atlanta, Halfrey logged in various notations about
the atmospheric conditions in deep-sea waters, noting in an entry about the velocity
of wind that a zero meant calm and that the numeral 5 denoted stiff breezes. On
subsequent pages he described the caliber of a gun on the ship. Halfrey also copied
poems, including A Psalm of Life and The Wreck of the Hesperus, by Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow. When I was in the navy, the sailors son, John C. Halfrey,
recalls his father saying, they had wooden ships with iron men.

56 MHQ Summer 2017

If Death Be My Portion
In July 1862, the Reverend Basil L. DeShetler of the 7th Michigan Infantry, Company D,
noting that he was a soldier of the cross and in arm for my country, penned this entry
in his Civil War diary: If death be my portion, I hope to hear, a voice above the roar
of cannon and din of battle, full of sweetness and majesty, in which are blended the
sympathy of man with the omnipotence of God saying to the poor Soul, Thy sins are
forgiven thee: be of Good Cheer. The man who is willing that the Union should be
divided by the sword of treason may have been been born in America, but he cannot See all of the photomontages
in Leslie Starobins Dear
have an American heart. Later that year, DeShetler, the married father of eight children, Dearest Mother exhibition at
wrote a final entry in his diary after he was mortally wounded in the Battle of Antietam. www.starobinartworks.com.

MHQ Summer 2017 57

 GERMANYS
LION OF THE
DEFENSIVE
As the Allies battled Germany during
World War I, Colonel Fritz von Lossberg
emerged as one of their most formidable
and fearsomeadversaries.
By David T. Zabecki

Colonel Fritz von Lossberg, known

WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

throughout the German army as der

Abwehrlwe, was sent in whenever
things got bad on the Western Front.

58 MHQ Summer 2017

MHQ Summer 2017 59
 LOSSBERG
T
o his contemporaries in the German army during
World War I, Colonel Fritz von Lossberg was der
Abwehrlwethe Lion of the Defensive. To some,
Lossberg was Ludendorff s Fireman, as he was
one of the first officers General Erich Ludendorff
summoned whenever things got really bad on the
Western Front. Few officers in the 20th century have had as
much influence on the development of modern military
tactics. Lossberg played a key role in developing and prov-
ing on the battlefield many of the principles and techniques
modern armies apply to the conduct of defensive opera-
tions, including defense in depth, flexible defense, and re-
verse-slope defense.
Lossberg didnt command anything from 1914 to 1918,
but he was the chief of staff of one corps, five different field
armies, and two army groups. Under the German General
Staff system of the time, a chief of staff was almost a
co-commander and in many cases had more direct influ-
ence on the conduct of operations than the commander
himself. From 1915 to late 1917 the German army was on
the overall defensive on the Western Frontwith the nota-
ble exception of the 1916 Verdun Offensiveand Lossberg
directed virtually all of its major defensive battles.
Friedrich Karl von Lossberg was born in 1868 at Bad
Homberg to an old Thuringian military family. In 1886 he
joined the elite 2nd Foot Guards Regiment as an officer
candidate. He was commissioned in 1887, and in 1894,
while still a second lieutenant, he entered the vaunted
Kriegsakademie, the Prussian
To some, war academy that was the pri-
mary training institution for
Lossberg was German General Staff officers.
After graduating from the
Ludendorffs three-year course, Lossberg
Fireman on served an additional two-year
probationary period, finally
the Western achieving full qualification as
a general staff officer in 1900.
Front. His career then followed the
standard pattern, alternating
between general staff and line assignments, including com-
pany and battalion command. Lossberg returned to the
Kriegsakademie as an instructor from 1907 to 1910.
When World War I broke out, Lossberg was the chief of
staff of the XIII Army Corps, which took part in the early
fighting around Ypres, Belgium. In November 1914 the
XIII Army Corps was redeployed to the Eastern Front.
Three months later Lossberg was reassigned to the High
Command of the German Field Army (Oberste Heereslei-
60 MHQ Summer 2017
tung, or OHL) as deputy chief of the Operations Depart-
ment. He hated his time at OHL, much preferring to be
serving with combat troops. He got his chance to go back
to the front when the French launched a major offensive in
Champagne on September 25, 1915. The German Third
Army in that sector immediately requested permission to
pull back. Lossberg didnt agree with its proposed course of
action. Neither did General Erich von Falkenhayn, the
chief of OHL. Falkenhayn immediately relieved the Third
Armys chief of staff, replacing him with Lossberg, who had
specific orders to restore the tactical situation.
Lossberg was only a newly promoted colonel, but as soon
as he reported, he requested and received vollmacht from his
new commander. Vollmacht was a command-and-control
concept unique to the German army. In the civilian context
the word is translated as power of attorney, but there is no
real English equivalent for the military application. Through
the end of World War I, a senior general staff officer given
vollmacht had the specific authority in emergency situations
to issue direct orders to subordinate commanders in the
name of the senior commander, even without having first
checked with that commander. The technique was used very
sparingly, but for the rest of the war Lossberg was entrusted
with vollmacht on many occasions.
By early November the Germans had won the Second
Battle of Champagne, inflicting some 450,000 casualties on
the French in six weeks. Lossbergs reputation as the master
of the defensive was firmly established. In February 1916
Falkenhayn launched Germanys offensive at Verdun. What
turned into a massive battle of attrition failed in the end, but
for 10 months the French army was under intense stress and
came close to breaking. On July 1, to relieve the pressure on
Verdun, the British and the French launched their great of-
fensive at the Somme. Two days later OHL posted Lossberg
to the Second Army as its chief of staff, again with orders to
restore the situation. On July 19 OHL split General of Infan-
try Fritz von Belows Second Army into the First and Second
Armies. The Second Army was to deal with the French in
the south, and the First Army was to defend against the
more dangerous British in the north. Lossberg and Below
went with the half that became the First Army.
The Battle of the Somme lasted until November 18 and
was one of the worst bloodbaths in a war that was never
short of carnage. It was a resounding operational defeat for
the Allies. Fifty German divisions fought 51 British and 48
French divisions to a standstill. The British and French suf-
fered an estimated 620,000 casualties, the Germans about
450,000. Lossberg was awarded the prestigious Orden
Pour le Mrite (the order of merit also known as The Blue
Max) for his role in the battle.
 A German stormtrooper cuts through Allied barbed-wire defenses in 1918. By the nal
year of the war the Allies had adopted most of Germanys defensive techniques.
During the Battle of the Somme, Lossberg calculated
that it took eight to 10 hours for a message to travel in either
direction between a divisional headquarters and the front
line, and far longer back to corps and army. Most telephone
lines were cut as soon as the artillery started firing. From
then on, almost everything depended on runnersassum-
ing they even survived. The tactical situation always
changed drastically during the time that it took informa-
tion to flow up the chain of command and the correspond-
ing orders to flow back down. Lossberg concluded that the
only practical way to speed up tactical responsiveness was
to give the frontline battalion commanders total control of
their own sectors. That meant that the higher headquarters
would have to support the decisions of the frontline com-
manders, who best knew the terrain and the situation.
For such a system to work, the frontline battalion com-
manders also had to have operational control of any re-
inforcements committed to their sectorsregardless of the
size of the reinforcing unit or its commanders rankto
ensure continuity of command. A frontline battalion com-
NATIONAL ARMY MUSEUM (U.K.)
mander would thus have the authority to withdraw from
forward positions under pressure as the tactical situation
demanded. More significantly, he would have the authority
to commit his regiments remaining battalions to the coun-
terattack when he judged the timing right.
On the Somme the three battalions of a regiment were
typically deployed echeloned in column. The Forward Bat-
talion held the first defensive positionactually a series of
usually three or more roughly parallel and mutually sup-
porting trench lines. The Immediate Reserve Battalion held
the second defensive position. Farther to the rear, and gen-
erally beyond the range of the enemys artillery, was the
Deep Reserve Battalion. Lossbergs system effectively short-
ened the chain of command, with the regimental com-
mander now managing the logistical support of his forward
deployed battalions.
Although Lossberg initially was a proponent of rigid, for-
ward defense, by the end of 1916 he was experimenting with
emerging innovations in defensive techniques. Reverse-slope
defense was something of a counterintuitive concept. With
the main line of resistance sited just down from the ridge-
line, away from the enemy, defenders had a much shorter
field of fire. But they were screened rather effectively from
enemy observation and masked from small-arms and artil-
lery fire. Observers and defensive strongpoints on the front
side of the slope provided early warning and called in targets
for the German artillery positioned farther back. Attacking
enemy forces were completely exposed when they arrived
on the crest, and once they started down the defenders side
they were masked from their own artillery support.
MHQ Summer 2017 61
 In April 1918, during the rst of General Erich Ludendorffs great spring offensives,
German troops advance through smoke and re past the body of a fallen French soldier
on the edge of a shell hole at Villers-Bretonneux.

The main idea was to trade space, where necessary, for
time and especially enemy lives. The forwardmost ground
was held by fire, not by men. Once the enemy attack cul-
minated, the attacker would be subjected to an almost im-
mediate counterattack before he could set his defense or
ever possible, a German force pushed out of its initial de-
fensive positions was expected to launch a gegenstoss
before the enemy could consolidate or bring up enough
forces and artillery to continue the attack.
In situations where the attacking force was just too
BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES

bring his supporting elements forward. German doctrine strong or too well supported by its own artillery or air
recognized two basic types of counterattack: gegenstoss cover, such a hasty counterattack would only lead to more
and gegenangriff. These are best translated into English as casualties. The commander of the forward battalion was
hasty counterattack and deliberate counterattack. When- given wide latitude in deciding whether a gegenstoss was

62 MHQ Summer 2017

FROM TOP: NICOLA PERSCHEID/STAATSBIBLIOTHEK ZU BERLIN; UNIVERSITAET OSNABRUCK

General Erich von Falkenhayn (lower right), who in February 1916 had launched
Germanys stalled offensive at Verdun, was sacked as chief of the German General Staff
in July. He was replaced by Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg (upper right).

feasible. If not, the standard procedure was to prepare to
launch a deliberate counterattack, based on careful plan-
ning and the commitment of sufficient reinforcements
and artillery. While the Allied command and control of
attacks and counterattacks became increasingly central-
ized at ever-higher levels as the war progressed, the
German lower-level commanders were gaining unprece-
dented autonomy and freedom of initiative.
Falkenhayn was sacked as chief of the general staff in
July 1916. He was replaced by Field Marshal Paul von Hin-
denburg, with General Erich Ludendorff as his first quar-
termaster general (vice chief of staff). Ludendorff initiated
a complete overhaul of German tactical doctrine on the
Western Front, adopting many of Lossbergs defensive in-
novations.
On December 1, 1916, OHL published the new doctri-
nal manual, Principles of Command in the Defensive Battle
in Position Warfare. The primary principles underlying

MHQ Summer 2017 63

 German emperor Wilhelm II confers with Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg and
General Erich Ludendorff at the German General Headquarters in January 1917.

the new defensive techniques were flexibility, decentral- The British launched a major offensive at Arras on
ized control, and counterattack. April 1, 1917. The German Sixth Army operating in that
Despite his own contributions to the new doctrine, Loss- sector was supposed to be defending on the new principles
berg thought the Principles went too far in permitting front- of flexible defense. The Germans, however, committed
line unit commanders to yield ground in the face of a strong their reserves too late, allowing the attackers to penetrate
attack. He believed that a rigid into the German front on a wide sector. The British and
forward defense was the best Canadians captured the commanding high ground of
If anyone can course of action whenever Vimy Ridge, significantly pushing back the German lines.
straighten out possible, with the flexible de-
fense in depth reserved for
The defenders were facing a disaster in the making when
Ludendorff telephoned Lossberg on April 3 to tell him he
this tangle, crisis situations. And so Loss-
berg responded with his own
was being transferred immediately to the Sixth Army as its
chief of staff.
von Kuhl said analysis, Experiences of the Lossberg immediately asked Ludendorff for vollmachta
of Lossberg,
LORELEI ROCKWELL COLLECTION/NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND

First Army in the Somme Bat-
tles, which rebutted much of
he will. what was in the new Princi-
ples. Most military historians
strongly criticize Ludendorff s overall performance on the
Western Front, particularly at the operational and strategic
levels of warfare. On the tactical level, however, Ludendorff
receives relatively high marks for encouraging healthy pro-
fessional debate over tactical doctrine in the best traditions
of the German General Staff. Ludendorff ordered OHL to
reprint and widely distribute Lossbergs pamphlet. The Brit-
ish later captured a copy, translated it, and printed 2,800
copies to distribute to their commanders.
significant departure from accepted practice, since the chief
of staff was supposed to be granted vollmacht directly from
his immediate commander. Lossberg was presuming to
bypass both the commander of the Sixth Army, Colonel
General Erich von Falkenhausen, and the commander of
Army Group Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria. Lossberg,
still only a colonel, in effect was asking Ludendorff to desig-
nate him as the de facto commander of the Sixth Army. Not
completely trusting the efficacy of the flexible defense doc-
trine, Lossberg believed that he needed almost unlimited
command authority to rescue the situation. Ludendorff ap-
proved vollmacht without hesitation, and then informed the
army and army group headquarters while Lossberg was en

64 MHQ Summer 2017

 German infantry attack with amethrowers and hand grenades during the Battle of
Verdun. Lossbergs counterattack forces used identical tactics to restore lost positions.
route. On getting word that Lossberg was on the way, Rup-
prechts chief of staff, General Hermann von Kuhl, said, If
anyone can straighten out this tangle, he will.
Despite Lossbergs serious reservations about the new de-
fensive doctrine, Ludendorff had complete confidence that
he would be able to stabilize the situation. Before Lossberg
even reported to the Sixth Army headquarters, he went di-
rectly to the front lines, talked with the key commanders
on the ground, and formulated his own assessment of the
situation. He recognized immediately that by holding
Vimy Ridge, the British had an overwhelming tactical ad-
vantage in artillery observation that made a German rigid
forward defense completely impossible. In response, Loss-
berg started to establish a flexible defense in great depth,
with the German forwardmost positions lightly manned.
Lossberg estimated that it would take the British at least
three days to move their artillery forward over the ground
they had recently captured. Until then, the British guns
wouldnt have the range necessary to support any contin-
ued advance. Lossberg used that time to reorganize and
INTERFOTO/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
reinforce the Sixth Armys new rearward main position
and to establish a flexible defensive zone 18 miles wide and
10 miles deep, manned by 150,000 troops in 15 divisions.
The British resumed their offensive on April 14 with the
goal of conducting a limited objective attack to expand the
salients they had pushed into the German lines five days
earlier. When a more formal attack went in on the 14th it
was very roughly handled, Richard Holmes, the late Brit-
ish military historian, wrote. The long ridges and shallow
valleys enabled the Germans to employ elastic defense at
its best, giving ground before the attack. The British troops
crossed their line of departure at 5:30 a.m., but the deeper
they penetrated into the German positions, the more they
encountered unanticipated resistance. By 8 a.m. most of
the attackers were back in their own trenches, having taken
up to 60 percent casualties in their lead units.
Thus, at Arras, one of the German armys strongest crit-
ics of the widespread use of flexible defense in depth
became the first to make it work in a large-scale battle.
Lossberg later admitted that his defensive system at the
Sixth Army ran counter to almost everything he had writ-
ten in his Experiences pamphlet. Ironically, the heavy
German casualties on the first day at Arras initially caused
Ludendorff and others at OHL to doubt the efficacy of the
new doctrine. But once Lossberg made the system work, it
was clear that the tactics were sound. Errors in application
on April 1 had been the problem. On April 24, 1917, Loss-
berg was awarded the Orden Pour le Mrite with Oak
Leaves, a high honor given only 122 times during World
War I. That August he was promoted to major general.
In early June 1917 German intelligence collected strong
MHQ Summer 2017 65
 LOSSBERG
indicators of an imminent major British attack in the Ypres
sector. Once again, Ludendorff sent Lossberg to the threat-
ened Fourth Army, to take over as chief of staff. For once,
Lossberg had sufficient time before the start of a battle to
organize a defense. The British attacked on July 31. The
Third Battle of Ypres, more commonly known as Bloody
Passchendaele, raged on until November 20. By the time it
was over, the British had managed to capture the key Pass-
chendaele Ridge, but they had little besides some 300,000
casualties to show for it.
Now it was time for the Germans to go over to the of-
fensive on the Western Front. Lossberg played no direct
role in Operation Michael (March 21April 4, 1918), the
first of the five great Ludendorff Offensives of 1918.
During the follow-on Operation Georgette (April 929),
Lossbergs Fourth Army attacked the British in support of
the German Sixth Army, capturing Mount Kemmel on
April 25, though the offensive failed overall. The Fourth
Army played no role in the subsequent three German of-
fensives, Blcher (May 27June 5), Gneisenau (June 913),
and Marneschutz-Reims (July 1518). Following Marne-
schutz-Reims, which was a feint toward Paris to draw
French reserves away from the British in Flanders, the
Fourth Army was supposed to follow through with
the long-planned and frequently postponed Operation
Hagenthe final blow against the Allies intended to push
the British off the Continent. The plan called for the Fourth
Army to deliver the main effort with five corps and 29
divisions, supported on the left by Sixth Army with two
corps and seven divisions.
The Hagen attack date was
In April 1917 set for August 1, but Marne-
Lossberg schutz-Reims failed and the
Allies launched a robust coun-
was awarded terattack into the German
positions west of Reims on July
the Pour le 18. The German lines crum-
Mrite with bled because they hadnt had
time to establish their own de-
Oak Leaves. fenses after halting their fifth
offensive. On July 19 Lossberg
strongly recommended to Ludendorff that the Germans
withdraw immediately to the Siegfried Line, their starting
position for the offensives in March. A badly shaken Lu-
dendorff refused to consider it. The following day Luden-
dorff summoned Lossberg to OHL. His nerves shattered,
Ludendorff talked about resigning immediately. Lossberg
talked him out of it, but later regretted doing so. Luden-
dorff then sent the German armys defensive expert to
the Soissons sector to assess the situation. By the time
Lossberg returned to OHL on July 25, the overall situation
had deteriorated further, and he was shocked to find that
66 MHQ Summer 2017
Ludendorff had not acted on any of his recommendations
to shore up the German defensive lines.
In August 1918 Lossberg became the chief of staff of Army
Group von Boehn. By that point, however, the Germans no
longer had any chance of winning World War I on the bat-
tlefield, or even of fending off inevitable defeat for much
longer. Lossberg ended the war as the chief of staff of Army
Group Duke Albrecht von Wrttemberg.
Following the war, Lossberg remained in the new
Reichswehr, as the German army was known between the
wars, and contributed to the tactical and organizational
reforms of General Hans von Seeckt. In late August 1919
he was assigned to serve as the chief of staff of General
Kommando II, one of only two corps-level formations in
the 100,000-man Reichswehr. One of his subordinate staff
officers was a young Captain Erich von Manstein, who
during the Battle of the Somme in July 1916 had served
under Lossberg as a First Army General Staff officer.
Manstein would go on to become a field marshal and the
Wehrmachts greatest general of World War II.
During the interwar years there was a great deal of
debate, first within the Reichswehr and then the Wehr-
macht, over the tactical and operational lessons of World
War I. Since at least the days of Helmuth von Moltke the
Elder, the offensive had been the overriding mantra of the
German army. It was ironic, then, that the Germans proved
to be the most effective defenders in World War I. In the
1920s and 30s many German officers argued that trench
warfare conditions of 19151918 had been an anomaly,
and they pushed for a return to an overwhelming emphasis
on the attack. Not all, however, agreed. In his influential
1938 book, Die Abwehr (The Defense), General (later Field
Marshal) Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb warned against any
overly doctrinaire and exclusive focus on offensive opera-
tions. In his discussion of the historical background of
German defensive operations, he reviewed the major
Western Front battles of 1915 to 1917 in which Lossberg
had played so significant a role.
Leeb argued that Germanys geographic position in cen-
tral Europe, surrounded by potential enemies, combined
with its comparative industrial and economic inferiority
made it essential that Germany master defensive as well as
offensive operations. Pursuing a directly opposite tack to
many of the operational theorists of the day, Leeb argued
that the dramatic improvements in mobility and weapons
effects since 1918 made defensive capabilities even more
necessary and at the same time opened up new operational
and tactical possibilities for combat operations, both defen-
sive and offensive. A pure defense, of course, could never
produce decisive results in war. But offensive operations
had to be focused on a concentrated objective, and an effec-
 Dazed German soldiers surrender to British soldiers on Pilkem Ridge during the Battle
of Passchendaele. The three-day ght for Pilkem Ridge cost the British 31,820 casualties.
tive defense, therefore, was essential in all other sectors to
facilitate massing the required forces for an attack.
To this day, the Wehrmacht is remembered primarily for
its many stunningly successful offensive operations of World
War II. Nonetheless, some German commanders during
that war also conducted brilliant defensive operations
against overwhelming numerical odds. Among them were
Field Marshal Albert Kesselring in Italy, Field Marshal Erich
von Manstein and General Hermann Balck on the Eastern
Front, and Field Marshal Walther Model on both fronts.
CHRONICLE/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
In 1925 Lossberg assumed command of the Reichswehrs
General Kommando I, and the following year he was pro-
moted to the three-star rank of general of infantry. He re-
tired in January 1927. During World War II, his son Bernhard
was a major general on the Wehrmachts Command Staff
(Fhrungsstab). Lossberg died in Lbeck on May 14, 1942.
During his 41-year military career Lossberg was the
quintessential German General Staff officer, and he was
recognized as such by his peers. He was arguably the best
chief of staff the Germans had during World War I. In Jan-
uary 1918 OHL issued its official after-action analysis of
the 1917 Battle of Arras. Citing Lossbergs contribution,
the report credited the outcome of the battle to the prodi-
gious creative mental energy of this exceptional man. MHQ
David T. Zabecki is MHQs chief military historian. He
and Dieter J. Biedekarken have edited and translated Fritz
von Lossbergs World War I memoirs (published in Berlin
in 1939 as Meine Ttigkeit im Weltkriege 19141918) into
English. Their book, Lossbergs War: The World War I
Memoirs of a German Chief of Staff, is to be published this
year by the University Press of Kentucky.
MHQ Summer 2017 67
68 MHQ Summer 2017
D-DAY THROUGH
A GERMAN LENS
As the Allies prepared for the Normandy
invasion, what was the enemy thinking?
By Robert M. Citino
German ofcers scope the Normandy beaches near the towns of Granville
and Saint-Pair-sur-Mer shortly before the Allied invasion in 1944.

REGIONAL COUNCIL OF BASSE-NORMANDIE/NATIONAL ARCHIVES MHQ Summer 2017 69

 THROUGH A GERMAN LENS
Weve all had the unhappy experience: the guests who
wouldnt leave. They show up unexpectedly and you scramble
to respond, whipping together whatever food and drink you
have on hand. Meanwhile, your surprise arrivals plop
themselves down on the sofa, chatting away, eating your food,
and drinking their way through your liquor cabinet like they
own the place. The minutes become hours; day merges into
night. Theyre still there. You didnt invite them in the first
place, and now youre not sure if theyre ever going to leave.
So it was for the German Wehrmacht in 1944. Germa-
nys armed forces had carved out a home for themselves in
France: a position that its commanders insisted was
impregnable, a great fortress of concrete and steel called the
Atlantic Wall that would repel any Allied landing. They had
spent years preparing for the invasion, doing everything
that human ingenuity, military engineering, and slave labor
could achieve. But when the visitors finally arrived, showing
up suddenly one fine morning in the late spring of 1944, all
those carefully laid plans fell apart.
On D-Day, June 6, 1944, the German hosts botched the
reception. They failed to show their unwanted guests the
door, and, in the end, the invaders moved in permanently.
he Germans seemed to be holding some high de-
T fensive cards as they prepared to fight the Allied
invasion in 1944. Field Marshal Gerd von Rund-
stedt, the High Commander West (Oberbefehls-
haber West, or OB-West), had Army Group B in
northern France, under famed field marshal
Erwin Rommel, and Army Group G in the south, com-
manded by General Johannes Blaskowitz. Each army
group contained two constituent armies, for a total of four
armies in all: Seventh and Fifteenth in the north, First and
Nineteenth in the south. Take an average strength for a
German army of about 225,000 soldiers, throw in indepen-
dent units and support personnel, and call it an even mil-
lionenough to man 58 divisions.
As impressive as these numbers sound, Rundstedt had
to spread them over 2,000 miles of European coastline.
Many of his troops were so-called Eastern battalions (Ost-
bataillonen)poor-quality units formed from former
Soviet prisoners of warand about half his divisions were
static, lacking any form of trucks or transport. Plunked
down on the beach, their mission was to resist the initial
landing, fire at any force that happened to land in front of
them, and then, presumably, die at their posts. Without
transport, retreat wasnt an option.
But what about the famous Atlantic Wall? An impres-
sive project on paper, it was made of 17 million cubic yards
of concrete and 1.3 million short tons of steel, enough of
70 MHQ Summer 2017
the former to build 270 Empire State Buildings and enough
of the latter to construct the Eiffel Tower 160 times over.
German propaganda delighted in showing images of im-
mense gun emplacements, guarded by grim Aryan-looking
soldiers straight out of central casting. In fact, though,
German newsreels often showed the same shot again and
again: the Lindemann Battery at Cap Gris Nez on the coast,
with its three 406mm guns.
Elsewhere? Not so much. Rommel, taking command of
the coastal defenses in late 1943, was appalled at the slip-
shod work he inspected. He did the job with his usual zeal,
sowing millions of mines, building bunkers for the static
divisions, and placing anti-boat obstacles at all the likely
landing sites. His work was so good that the Allies had to
change their plans to land at low tide instead of high tide.
But in June even Rommel recognized that much needed to
be done. Since the Allies had their choice of landing sites,
the Germans needed to fortify every inch of beach in
France. They never came close.
In truth, the task of defending France came down to a
handful of panzer divisions. There were only 10 of them, and
so their placement became the topic of a major tussle within
the German High Command. Rommel knew how hard it
was to operate under Allied air attack and wanted the pan-
zers close to the water, where they could hit the Allies as they
were slogging ashore. Rundstedt argued for a more ortho-
dox posture, grouping the panzers into a strong, centrally
located reserve, ready to smash the Allies as they advanced
inland. The compromise reached in the end satisfied no one.
The two army groups each got three panzer divisions to
deploy as they wished; Panzer Group West, a central reserve
under the command of General Leo Geyr von Schweppen-
burg, got the other four. The authority to send them into
action, however, lay with the High Command of the Armed
Forces (Oberkommando der Werhmacht, or OKW)that
is, with Adolf Hitler himself. With their limited resources,
the Germans had tied themselves in knots.
The D-Day landings have become one of our great histori-
cal epics, filled with grand and glorious exploits of hero-
ism. Seen from the German perspective, however, the
romance vanishes, leaving the uninspiring spectacle of a
once proud military force no longer up to the challenge.
For years the Germans had been formulating plans for re-
pelling an Allied landing in the west. But when it was time
to act they found themselves aimlessly scrambling back
and forth across Normandy, trying to put out whichever
fire seemed most threatening.
The Allies came ashore at five invasion beaches along a
50-mile stretch of the Norman coast. Facing the landings
 A massive agglomeration of Allied forces hits the beaches of Normandy on D-Day,
June 6, 1944, in what will be the largest land, sea, and air invasion in history.
containing the spearheads of two complete Allied armies
was a single, understrength German corps, the LXXXIV,
under General Erich Marcks. He had a mere three divi-
sions, two of which were static. Unsurprisingly, all five
landings succeeded. Three of themUtah, Gold, and
Sword Beacheswere easy, with minimal casualties. An-
other, the Canadian landing at Juno Beach, was difficult.
And, of course, the fifth, the U.S. landing at Omaha Beach,
nearly ended in disaster for the Americans.
On Omaha, a landing by the U.S. 1st and 29th Infantry
Divisions had the misfortune of running into the one regular
German infantry division in the invasion sector, the 352nd.
The divisions 916th Grenadier Regiment, under Colonel
Ernest Goth, held a naturally strong position, a semicurved
BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES
amphitheater with steep bluffs looming over the beach, and
hulking concrete fortifications like Widerstandsnest 62,
which stood about 100 yards from the water. From the
moment the Americans hit the beach at 6:30 a.m., machine-
gun fire erupted from the resistance nests. Mowing down the
first wave, it shredded the dense mass of U.S. infantry desper-
ately trying to find cover behind the tiny rocky ledge at the
waterline, the shingle. Within 10 minutes, the beach was
littered with dead and dying Americans. Lieutenant General
Omar Bradley, floating offshore on the heavy cruiser USS
Augusta, actually considered evacuating the beach.
But even with fate apparently handing them the U.S.
Army on a platter, the Germans failed. Their soldiers spent
the morning shooting, and they shot quite well, inflicting
punishing casualties. But the Germans had no maneuver
component, no counterattacking force, no tanks, no air-
craftnothing that could have driven a rattled U.S. land-
ing force into the sea. The Germans had bunkers aplenty,
but what they needed were more soldiers.
Things got no better for the Wehrmacht as the day wore on.
The landing had come as a complete surprise, and many
MHQ Summer 2017 71
 A Douglas A-20 Havoc of the U.S. Ninth Air Force drops bombs in Normandy on D-Day
to cut off German telecommunication lines. German eld marshal Gerd von Runstedt.
German commanders were away from their posts. Rommel
was spending a day back at home, celebrating his wifes
birthday. Hitler, as was his wont, was sleeping in. General
Friedrich Dollmann, the Seventh Army commander, had
scheduled a planning war game in Rennes, testing responses
to an Allied landing. His division commanders were on the
road to Rennes, got the recall en route, and spent the morn-
ing scurrying back to their command posts. General Wil-
helm Falley of the 91st Air-Landing Infantry Division could
clearly hear the roar of thousands of Allied aircraft engines
in the night sky. He turned his car around and raced back to
his headquarters near Bernaville. As he pulled onto the
grounds, however, Falley ran into a blaze of gunfire from
U.S. paratroops of the 82nd
Airborne Division. He became
On D-Day, the first German general to die
the German in Normandy.
With the commanders dri-
situation at ving to and fro, the situation
at the front descended into
the front chaos. Consider the case of
descended the 915th Regiment, under
Colonel Ernest Meyer (and
into chaos. thus known as Kampfgruppe
Meyer). Deployed inland in
the Bayeux sector, the heart of the Normandy landings,
Kampfgruppe Meyer was the sole reserve force for the
LXXXIV Corps. Responding to reports just after midnight
that Allied paratroops had landed south of the key cross-
roads town of Carentan, General Marcks ordered Meyer to
clear up the problem. Meyer quickly assembled his grena-
diers and was on the road by 3 a.m. But navigating Nor-
mandys narrow country lanes in the middle of the night
was no easy task, and the battle group was still on the road
72 MHQ Summer 2017
at 6 a.m., when the sun came up and the vast Allied invasion
fleet came into view off the coast. Soon Marckss corps was
under attack everywhere: the 709th Division in the Coten-
tin, the 352nd Division between Vierville and Coleville-
sur-Mer, and the 716th Division on the long stretch from
Arromanches in the west to Ouistreham in the east.
Around 7 a.m., as Marcks was trying to process the
threats, a new report came in: There had been no airborne
drops south of Carentan, after all. It had been a mistake of
some sorta rumor, a jumpy patrol, a typo on the report. A
reconnaissance flight could have clarified the situation in 10
minutes, but no German aircraft were in the sky. Marcks
was operating in the unknown. The U.S. landing at Omaha
had been smashed, that much seemed clear. On his right,
however, the British had come ashore on a broad front, sup-
ported by tanks. They had penetrated the beach defenses of
the 726th Regiment and were heading inland. With trouble
clearly brewing on his right, Marcks ordered Meyer to turn
around, head east at speed, and counterattack the British.
But even this simple job proved impossible. Meyer had
to turn his units around and get them back into a march
column. That process took an hour. Since Allied naval gun-
fire was ranging deep, the battle group had to loop south of
Bayeux rather than head directly up the main road. Then
FROM LEFT: PHOTO12/UIG/GETTY IMAGES; BUNDESARCHIV
the weather suddenly changed. As the skies cleared, they
filled again with Allied fighter-bombers (jagdbomber;
German soldiers called them jabos). Often thought of as
killers, the fighter-bombers were in fact best at hampering
German movement. The clock slipped past 11 a.m. and on
to noon, and Meyer decided to postpone his counterattack
until 2 p.m. That deadline, too, came and went. Much of the
battle group was now strung out along the road, either
pinned to the ground or taking cover from the rain of
Allied bombs and strafing. By 3 p.m. it was too late. Ele-
 German soldiers surrender to Allied forces in Quinville, France, on June 9, 1944.
A German soldier lies dead outside the pillbox that he vainly defended on Utah Beach.
ments of the British 50th Division now went over to the
attack, Sherman tanks in the lead, jabos screaming over-
head. The 50th easily overran the German assembly area,
killing Colonel Meyer in the process, and soon the bulk of
the regiment was in a hurried retreat to the west. Calling
Kampfgruppe Meyers counterattack a failure isnt quite ac-
curate. It never even got started.
The Germans did manage one counterattack that day. On
June 6 the 21st Panzer Division under Lieutenant General
Edgar Feuchtinger was deployed 20 miles southeast of Caen
(although the general, like so many others, was away from
the front at the moment). Nevertheless, the men of the divi-
sion reacted quickly to the Allied airdrops, fighting a series
of sharp nighttime scraps with British paratroops who were
dropping all around them. As dawn broke and the Allies
landed on the beaches north of Caen, Marcks wanted the
FROM LEFT: U.S. ARMY/THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES; PHOTOQUEST/GETTY IMAGES
division to disengage and head for the beaches. The 21st
Panzer was under Army Group B, however, so Marcks first
had to get Rommels permission. But Rommel wasnt there,
either, and that meant a wearying series of radio messages
with Colonel Hans Speidel, Rommels chief of staff.
Marcks finally got command of the 21st at noon. He im-
mediately ordered it to cross the Orne River, wheel north
through Caen, and drive to the sea. But as always for the
Germans on June 6, slow motion was the order of the day.
The division took three full hours to move the 10 miles
from Ranville to (and through) Caen. Every man and vehi-
cle had to squeeze over the few remaining undestroyed
bridges in Caen, the sky was teeming with jabos the whole
way, and losses in machines and men were heavy.
Not until 4:20 p.m. did it happen: a panzer attack on
the Allied D-Day beachhead. The German battle array had
the 22nd Panzer Regiment (Colonel Hermann Oppeln-
Bronikowski) on the right, paired with elements of the
92nd Panzergrenadier Regiment (Colonel Joseph Rauch)
on the left. Confidence was high. Oppeln was a skilled
panzer commander with a reputation for hard drink and
for dodging the reaper; his swagger and his luck were leg-
endary with his men. Three times he had survived direct
hits on his tank and walked away without a scratch.
The assault opened with Oppelns tanks rolling north
toward Priers Ridge. His panzers were mainly Mark IVs,
older models now upgraded with a high-velocity 75mm
gun, though in most of the other relevant metricsspeed,
armor, opticsthe state of the art had long passed them by.
Trundling along behind came the infantry on halftracks,
along with self-propelled guns of various calibers mounted
on the reliable French Lorraine 37L tracked chassis. The
regiment moved out with gusto and was, as always, an im-
pressive sight: the army that had invented mechanized,
combined arms warfare once again on the prowl, appar-
ently irresistible in the advance.
But appearances, as the saying goes, can be deceiving.
Holding the ridge was a full British battalion, the Shrop-
shire Light Infantry. Dug in, with well-hidden positions, it
had a full complement of heavy weapons: 6-pounder anti-
tank guns, Firefly tanks (a Sherman variant with a power-
ful, high-velocity 17-pounder gun), and self-propelled
artillery. The Shropshires held their fire until the Germans
came to the foot of the ridge and then opened up with the
full spectrum. Six Mark IVs on the German right went up
in flames in the opening minutes of the engagement, fol-
lowed by nine more on the left near the village of Mathieu.
Ten minutes later, the surviving German tanks were scram-
bling toward any gully, copse, or farmhouse they could find,
desperately seeking cover. British fire had broken the mo-
mentum of the attack. Oppelns luck had run out.
MHQ Summer 2017 73
 This is dummy copy please write for here they use when more for point here ne desk line
more yes his is dummy copy please write for here they use wore for point

German prisoners of war are held under guard on the beaches of Normandy during the
rst hours of the D-Day landings; many will later be taken to POW camps in England.

The attack had greater success on the left, where the 1st
Battalion of Rauchs regiment managed to hit the seam
between the British and Canadian landing forces. Forward
they came against little enemy opposition or fire, their path
eased by the attention being devoted to Oppelns abortive
panzer attack to their right. In an hour they reached the
sea at Lion-sur-Mer and Luc-sur-Mer, splitting the Allied
beachhead, separating Juno Beach from Sword, and linking
up with joyful elements of the 716th Static Divisionstill
hanging tough in their bunkers on the coastwho had
thought they were goners.
Rauch had reached the sea, traditionally a marker of
victory. But to what end? He was now crammed in a tight
gets. Allied naval commanders would have been licking
their chops and adding up their kills.
The coup de grce, fittingly, came from the air. At 9 p.m.,
with Rauch still holding his position at waters edge and
Feuchtinger still deciding what to do, a great force of aircraft
passed overhead. The British were reinforcing their air-
borne bridgehead east of the Orne with an immense glider
drop, some 250 craft, their tow planes, and dozens more
fighters flying escort. Fearing an Allied airdrop into the rear
of the division, Feuchtinger ordered Rauch to retreat and
rejoin the main body of the 21st Panzer Division along Pri-
ers Ridge. Rauchs regiment ended this day of drama slink-
ing back to the south and, incidentally, leaving the remnants
PHOTO12/UIG/GETTY IMAGES

spot between two powerful Allied forces pouring fire into
his position from both flanks. A follow-up drive to the
right or left was unthinkable, since it required a flank
march along the shore, where any German assault column
would have presented a perfectly silhouetted parade of tar-
of the 716th Static Division to their unhappy fate after all.
June 6, 1944, was the longest day, all rightfor the Ger-
mans. Indeed, it was a disaster. The bedrocks of the Wehr-
machts defensive strategy in the West, the Atlantic Wall

74 MHQ Summer 2017

 American paratroops who took part in the successful Allied landings on D-Day pose
with a Nazi ag captured during the liberation of a French village in Normandy.
and the panzer divisions, were both abject failures. The
Allies pierced the wall within the opening minutes of the
landing, and only a single panzer division managed to
head toward the beach and launch an attack.
Many factors fueled the catastrophe. Some historians
blame German blundering (Hitler sleeping in, Rommel
being out of reach) or the cleverness of the Allies in launch-
ing deception operations that fooled the Germans as to the
time and place of the landings. And, of course, the popular
imagination continues to focus on Allied heroism, espe-
cially those young American boys who landed under with-
ering enemy fire and stormed the bluffs of Omaha.
While all these factors were important, the real reason
PHOTO12/UIG/GETTY IMAGES
for the Wehrmachts failure was much more basic: the
sheer, raw power of its adversaries. The Allies had finally
learned how to translate their wealth and industrial might
into combat power at the front. Thousands of ships, tens of
thousands of aircraft sorties, and the elements of nine divi-
sions were in play on the Allied side that morning, while
millions of men waited in the wings as a follow-on force.
To resist this onslaught, the Wehrmacht fielded just three
divisionstwo low-grade static formations and a single
infantry divisionwith no navy or air force. Whether
Hitler slept in or not wasnt going to change the balance of
forces in Normandy.
As night fell on June 6, World War II had entered its
final phase. Unexpected visitors had crossed the water with
impunity, cracked the wall of Germanys Fortress Europe
at five places, and decided to stay. MHQ
Robert M. Citino is senior historian at the National
World War II Museum in New Orleans and the author of
eight books, including The German Way of War: From the
Thirty Years War to the Third Reich; Death of the Wehr-
macht: The German Campaigns of 1942; and The Wehr-
macht Retreats: Fighting a Lost War, 1943.
MHQ Summer 2017 75
 ROBERT HUNT LIBRARY/CHRONICLE/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

The Czecho-Slovak Legion

used this armored train,
captured from the Red Army,
to seize and control the
Trans-Siberian Railway.

76 MHQ Summer 2017

THE BATTLE
FOR BAIKAL
In 1918 the Czecho-Slovak Legion found
itself ghting the Red Army in Siberia
for control of the worlds deepest lake.
By Kevin J. McNamara

MHQ Summer 2017 77

 O
ne of the most spectacular yet little-known sto-
ries of World War I and the Russian Revolution is
the epic journey of the Czecho-Slovak Legion,
whose exploits burst out of Siberia and onto the
world stage almost 100 years ago. Subsequently
lost in the multiple histories of a tumultuous
time, the episode began as the final horrors of the war
melted into chaos. In Russia, the revolution gave way to the
birth of the Soviet Union, and the United States and its
allies bungled a half-hearted attempt to overthrow its new
Communist regime. In Europe, a fragile peace was de-
clared, the fate of four empires hung in the balance, and the
map of a continent was redrawn.
The legion emerged from an undistinguished array of
shopkeepers, dentists, farmers, professors, factory hands,
and bank clerks who were plucked from the obscurity of
the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the heart of Europe and
plunged into World War I. After fighting on the Eastern
78 MHQ Summer 2017
Frontthe unknown war, Winston Churchill called it
more than two million of these Austro-Hungarian soldiers
were taken prisoner by tsarist armies and scattered across
Russia and Siberia in some 300 prisoner-of-war camps.
When tsarist Russia collapsed amid revolution, Tomas G.
Masaryk, an elderly professor and fugitive from Prague,
traveled to Russia with a vision involving outright sedition,
a global trek, and great personal risk: to recruit thousands
of Czechs and Slovaks for an ad hoc unit of the French
army, their former enemy.
Masaryks plan was breathtakingly audacious: The men
would cross Siberia to Vladivostok, the largest Russian port
on the Pacific Ocean, where they would board ships, circle
the globe, land in France, and fight on the Western Front
all to gain Allied support for the independence of the Czechs
GOTHICSTAMPS.COM
and Slovaks from Austria-Hungary. But defecting to the
Allies meant committing treason. They would have no
country they could call home, no recognized or experienced
 Left: Soldiers in the Czecho-Slovak Legion fought with the Allies during World War I in
the hopes of winning independence from Austria-Hungary. Above: Legionnaires man
their machine gun stations atop a camouaged troop train in the Siberian city of Ufa.

military leaders, no evident means of support, few supplies,
uncertain legal status, questionable loyalties, and too few
weapons. Many were still nursing combat wounds or ill-
nesses. Remarkably, given the risks associated with such an
audacious plan, the promise of renewed harsh combat, and
Masaryks blue-sky ambitions, 50,000 to 65,000 of the men
said yes. With the explicit approval of Vladimir Lenin and
Josef Stalin, the men of the Czecho-Slovak Legion com-
menced a perilous journey across Siberiawhere they had
an unexpected encounter with history.
It began on May 14, 1918, with an altercation between two
men at the Trans-Siberian Railway station at Chelyabinsk,
more than 1,000 miles east of Moscow. A still-loyal Austro-
Hungarian soldier, angered by the legionnaires betrayal of
their common homeland, hurled a chunk of metal at one of
TATRANCI.SK
arrests by the Communists in charge of Chelyabinsk, the
legionnaires took matters into their own hands and liber-
ated their comrades from the local jail. Having done so,
they prepared to resume their journey. In response to this
direct challenge, Leon Trotsky, the leader of the Red Army,
telegraphed dire threats that his soldiers would shoot any
armed legionnaires on sight and imprison the rest.
Already feeling imperiled amid the violence and rising
tensions of an emerging Russian Civil War, and acting en-
tirely in self-defense, 50,000 legionnaires revolted en masse.
Strung out along 5,000 miles of the Trans-Siberian, the le-
gionnaires were isolated in three major formations. From
west to east, there were about 8,000 legionnaires marooned
on the European side of the Ural Mountains near Penza;
8,800 in the vicinity of Chelyabinsk; about 18,000 east of
Omsk; and 15,000 in and around Vladivostok. Yet between

the defecting Czechs, killing him. The soldier was quickly Irkutsk and Vladivostok, tens of thousands of Red Army
apprehended and killed in retaliation. Subject to repeated soldiers, likewise trapped, lay in wait and prepared to fight.

MHQ Summer 2017 79

 BATTLE FOR BAIKAL
The Czechs first priority was to link all of the legion-
naires in a single chainespecially those around Penza,
who were farthest from Vladivostok and the most vulner-
able. From Chelyabinsk, Novosibirsk, and Penza, trains
headed east and west under full steam to rescue their
brothers and defeat the Red Army forces all along the
Trans-Siberian Railway. Eager to surprise and quickly
defeat the enemy, the legionnaires sometimes encoun-
tered forces that were far larger and better armed. Initially,
without sufficient small arms, the legionnaires rushed Red
Army units, throwing hand grenades and, in at least one
battle, hurling rocks. They captured machine guns, rifles,
artillery, and even entire trains and quickly deployed them
against the enemy.
Day by day, week by week, one Siberian city after an-
other fell to the Czecho-Slovaks: Novosibirsk on May 26,
Chelyabinsk on May 27, Penza and Syzran on May 29,
Tomsk on June 4, Omsk on June 7, Samara on June 8, Kras-
noyarsk on June 20, Nizhneudinsk on June 24, Vladivostok
on June 29, Ufa on July 4, Ussuriysk on July 5, and Irkutsk
on July 11.
While about 15,000 of the legionnaires had reached
Vladivostok by April, there were large Red Army units
between that port city and Irkutsk, a major city just west
of Lake Baikal, especially in the vicinity of Chita, and
Khabarovsk. When the rebels finally entered Irkutsk on
July 11 they were greeted with pealing church bells and cel-
ebrating Russians.
Having taken control of
Spooked by the Bolshevik strongholds
the legions of Irkutsk and Vladivostok,
as many as 50,000 legion-
rapid advance, naires nonetheless remained
stretched out behind Irkutsk,
the Red Army cut off from their comrades
abandoned in Vladivostok. Good intelli-
gence quickly taught them
Irkutsk. that they faced a dangerous
gantlet and a harrowing chal-
lenge: the 39 tunnels that sheltered the Trans-Siberian
through the sheer cliffs along the southern shores of Lake
Baikal, whose surface is larger than Belgium and whose
depths hold a fifth of the worlds fresh water.
A 25-million-year-old scar on Russias backside, Baikals
400-mile, crescent-shaped gash in the tectonic plates holds
a lake so large that locals call it a sea. Baikal drains the Rus-
sian heartland, swallowing the 336 rivers and streams that
run to it; only the Angara River sends Baikals waters roar-
ing west into the interior. Raw and unspoiled, the lakes
placid surface hides enormous depths. While transparent as
a fishbowl in summer, in winter it can freeze to a depth of
six feet. Razor-sharp rock lines the sheer cliffs that wall in
80 MHQ Summer 2017
the southern rim of the lake, sweeping toward the sky and
plummeting deeply into the seemingly bottomless lake.
The opening of the Chinese Eastern Railway through
Manchuria in 1903 completed the original Trans-Siberian
Railway, but it avoided the mountainous 162 miles around
the southern tip of the lake. When the builders of the rail-
way finally tackled these mountain cliffs, which are bisected
by the streams and river gorges feeding the lake, they had to
dynamite cuttings into the sides of the rock walls; build
more than 200 bridges and trestles to span river gorges,
inlets, and tributaries; shore up miles of embankments; and
bore through rock to create the 39 tunnels, the longest of
them spanning a half mile. When this final link was opened
in 1904more than 13 years after ground was broken for
the Trans-Siberianthe Atlantic and Pacific Oceans were
finally linked by the Trans-Siberian, through adjacent seas.
Spooked by the Czecho-Slovak Legions rapid advance in
their direction, Soviet armed forces abandoned Irkutsk.
The legionnaires soon learned that the retreating Bolshe-
viks had taken with them an entire train loaded with ex-
plosives, planning to blow up one or more of the tunnels,
thereby trapping all the legionnaires west of Lake Baikal.
Still, the boldness and energy of the legions commander at
the front in Irkutsk, Captain Radola Gajda, gave his men
confidence. Gajda was a leader whose belief it was to
strike at once, to strike often, and with determination, re-
called Sergeant Gustav Becvar. In those days, he seemed
never to hesitate in his course of action. Gajda realized
that he and his men had to reach and clear the tunnels as
soon as possible to prevent their destruction.
Yet events in Irkutsk exposed the political weakness of
the Czecho-Slovak Legions position in Russia, even as the
world marveled at its military prowess. As if by magic, law
and order were established, Ernest Harris, the American
consul general in Irkutsk said, and the streets became
crowded with every class of society exceedingly happy at
having been rescued from Bolshevik rule.
The residents of Irkutsk warmly welcomed the legion-
naires. At a celebratory dinner, Becvar recalled, I began by
thanking the people for the wonderful reception they had
given us, saying how much we appreciated their goodwill.
These remarks went down well, but when I proceeded to
warn them that we had no intention of interfering in any
way in the internal affairs of their country, that any fighting
we had done had been undertaken solely to secure our pas-
sage to Vladivostok, and that therefore we could not be
relied upon to stay in the neighborhood of Irkutsk, they
were less pleased. After this announcement, much of the
joy occasioned by our arrival evaporated. The Allies would
also need to be taught that the Czecho-Slovaks did not ac-
tually want to fight Russians.
 Clockwise from top: Legionnaires make their way across one of the rivers owing into
Lake Baikal; Tomas G. Masaryk organized the legion and aligned it with the Allied
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: WIKIMEDIA COMMONS; TANTRANCI.SK (2)

powers; the ice-breaker SS Baikal was later armed with machine guns and cannons.

At Irkutsk, the Trans-Siberian was built on the opposite
side of the Angara River from the main center of the city,
and the tracks originally ran east along the Angara for
about 40 miles until they reached Lake Baikal at the village
of Port Baikal. The ice-breaking ferries Baikal and Angara
shuttled passengers, trains, and freight from Port Baikal
across the lake to Babushkin until 1904, when the missing
link was completed, with two tracks running 162 miles
around the southern tip of the lake from Port Baikal to Ba-
bushkin on the lakes eastern shore. It was at Port Baikal,
the legionnaires learned, that the Bolsheviks had parked
their explosives-laden train. The station and its tracks sat
between the steep cliffs above Port Baikal and the mouth of
the Angara River at the lake.

MHQ Summer 2017 81

 The Circum-Baikal Railway, one of the original seven sections of the Trans-Siberian
Railway, had 39 tunnels that ran through nearly six miles of mountain. Captain
Radola Gajdas decisive leadership earned him the nickname the Siberian Tiger.

On July 15, 1918, Gajda dispatched three parties in the troops who scrambled aboard two steamers that vanished
direction of the enemy. One unit of 500 men hiked cross- across the lake. As they crept forward cautiously, the first
country and quietly approached another lakeside village, legionnaires to reach Port Baikal saw buildings leveled,
Kultuk, south of Port Baikal. A second party followed the tracks twisted, coaches shattered, rockslides, and body parts
Trans-Siberian down the Angara valley toward Baikal but everywhere. Their comrades who had earlier reached the
kept to the hills above the valley to avoid detection; an ar- cliffs above the station confessed that when they fired on the
mored train the legionnaires had captured from the Red enemy train, some of their rounds probably hit dynamite.
Army followed slowly behind and to the left of these men. Gajda appeared and ordered most of the men to pursue
On the opposite side of the Angara valley, a third unit fol- the Bolsheviks through the tunnels on foot. A small de-
lowed the old Moscow post road from Irkutsk to the lake- tachment remained behind to repair the tracks and allow
side village of Listvyanka, opposite Port Baikal at the mouth the legions armored train through. Early the next morn-
of the Angara. This third unit turned left off the road as it ing, troop trains began moving through the tunnels toward
approached Listvyanka and Kultuk; other troops were dispatched into the hills above
climbed into the hills above the tunnels. After five days of fighting, the combined three
We stared the village. After a few hours, units of legionnaires took Kultuk. The soldiers then ad-
silently at the a ridge appeared and the men
crawled to its edge and looked
vanced toward Slyudyanka, a town on the southern tip of
Lake Baikal, beyond which lay the last of the 39 tunnels.
indescribable below them in wonder at the Then came another booming explosion that echoed
enormous sparkling lake through the tunnels and across the lake to their left. The
loveliness of spread out beneath them. Off men ran ahead until the tracks in front of them disap-
the view, to their right in the distance
sat Baikal station, where the
peared under a pile of stone and earth.
It took the legionnaires three weeks, working day and
Becvar wrote. lake emptied into the Angara. night, to clear the massive stones and earth from the
We stared silently at the in- tracks. Yet they used the time well. Planning to hit the Bol-
FROM LEFT: ETOSIBIR.RU; TANTRANCI.SK

describable loveliness of the view, Becvar recalled. Men
drew their breath quickly, but few broke the silence.
Suddenly, from the direction of the Baikal station, came
the sound of a huge explosion. A column of thick, black
smoke rose into the air. Assuming this signaled their attack,
Becvar and his men ran toward Listvyanka, firing at enemy
sheviks simultaneously from three sides, they boarded
their one armored train and several passenger trains and
rounded the southern cone of Lake Baikal, heading toward
Tankhoy, a town on the eastern shore.
The Bolsheviks were entrenched strongly in front of
this station, and not even our newly arrived armored train

82 MHQ Summer 2017


Moscow
URAL
RUSSIA
MOUNTAINS TRANS-SIBERIAN Nizhneudinsk
Penza Syzran RAILWAY Krasnoyarsk
Tomsk
Enlarged Area
Chelyabinsk Omsk
Chita
Novosibirsk
Ufa
KAZAKHSTAN
MONGOLIA
Soldiers in the Czecho-Slovak Legion moved along the 5,000 miles of the Trans-Siberian
Railway in armored trains like the one above, photographed east of Omsk. They drove
the Red Army around the southern cone of Lake Baikal from Listvyanka to Posolska.
could shell them out of their fortified nests, Becvar later
wrote. Scouts spotted about 60 Red Army troop trains
crowding the line between Tankhoy and the station at Ba-
bushkin, which was farther north along the shore. Gajda
briefed the men: legionnaires left behind at Listvyanka on
the opposite side of the lake had acquired simple barges
that they fortified with timber, as well as steamboats that
could tow the barges. The boats would start across the lake
that night, landing at yet another lakeside village, Posolska,
north of Babushkin, behind the Red Army forces. At the
same time, another battalion would march east into the
taiga and, in a wide flanking move, approach the enemy
from the east. The remainder of the troops would advance
along the tracks behind the legions armored train.
The Red Army soldiers fought hard. By about noon,
however, they began bolting from their lines, and soon the
whole front was in retreat, undoubtedly having gotten wind
MAPS: BRIAN WALKER; ROBERT HUNT LIBRARY/CHRONICLE/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
of the legionnaires approaching from their rear. Then the
retreat turned into a positive rout, Becvar later wrote. The
Bolsheviks were given no time or opportunity to use their
trains. They were driven in a panic-stricken mass along the
line towards Posolska. What awaited them was a massacre.
Rifle and machine-gun fire raked the driven mob until
they scattered into the hills. Red Army casualties num-
bered in the hundreds; the legion gained countless trains
and a larger arsenal. The legionnaires also set ablaze the
Baikal, ending its career at the dock at Babushkin.
The Red Army forces did not soon recover from these de-
feats. With Lake Baikals 39 tunnels behind them, dozens of
M I L E S
SEA OF
OKHOTSK
ANGARA
50
RIVER
Khabarovsk
Ussuriysk
CHINA
Vladivostok
LAKE BAIKAL
Angarsk
Irkutsk
Posolska
Baikal Listvyanka Ulan-Ude
Babushkin
Kultuk
Tankhoy
TRANS-SIBERIAN
RAILWAY
the legions heavily armed trains started west again. On
August 24 they reached Ulan-Ude, a city about 60 miles east
of the lake. The men who had been trapped west of Lake
Baikal finally saw their brothers from Vladivostok when,
on September 1, the legionnaires celebrated their final junc-
ture in Olovyannaya, meeting legionnaires from Vladivo-
stok, who had fought their way along the Chinese Eastern
Railway to this small town south of Chita.
That same day, in an ironic coincidence, U.S. Army
major general William S. Graves came ashore at Vladivo-
stok with orders to rescue the legionnairesbut to do
nothing more than facilitate their retreat to Vladivostok
and evacuation. Yet the legionnaires had already facilitated
their own free movement toward Vladivostok, leaving
Graves and his troops with little to do. On top of that, the
Allies by now had abandoned their faint hopes of provid-
ing ships to take the legionnaires from Vladivostok, and
the French and British began lobbying for the legionnaires
to remain in Russia to support the anti-Bolshevik forces
under attack by the Red Army, and even to advance on
Moscow. Thus began the confused and ill-fated Allied
intervention in the Russian Civil War. Afterward Graves
nicely summed up his experience this way: I was in com-
mand of the United States troops sent to Siberia, and, I
must admit, I do not know what the United States was
trying to accomplish by military intervention.
Still, in little more than three months, the legion had
seized the entire Trans-Siberian Railway and, with it, all of
Siberia from the Ural Mountains to the Sea of Japan
about the distance from Honolulu to New York. Siberias
MHQ Summer 2017 83
 BATTLE FOR BAIKAL
five million square miles account for a tenth of the worlds
land surface. While their feat astonished many, those who
had come to know the men were less surprised. The British
writer, W. Somerset Maugham, who worked with the
Czechs and Slovaks inside Russia as a British spy, warned,
They are organized like a department store, disciplined
like a Prussian regiment.
Roughly 15,000 more Czech and Slovak POWs joined
the legion after the revolt began, leading Trotsky and Lenin
to see it as a threat to Soviet rule. Speaking to an extraordi-
nary joint session of Soviet leaders on July 28, Lenin said
that crushing the Czecho-Slovaks and their counterrevolu-
tionary partisans was the
For a brief most urgent task of the Rus-
sian Revolution. Speaking to
time, the the same assembly the next
day, Trotsky conceded: What
legionnaires is now happening on the
held the power Volga, in the shape of the
Czecho-Slovak mutiny, puts
to depose the Soviet Russia in danger and
therefore also endangers the
Soviet regime. international revolution. At
first sight it seems incompre-
hensible that some Czecho-Slovak Corps, which has found
itself here in Russia through the tortuous ways of the world
war, should at the given moment prove to be almost the
chief factor in deciding the questions of the Russian revolu-
tion. Nevertheless, that is the case.
The Czecho-Slovak legionnaires briefly held the power to
depose the Soviet regime, an outcome that would have dra-
matically changed the course of the 20th century. Their
revolt also had many unintended consequences. Their ad-
vance against Red Army forces in the city where the Roma-
nov family was held in July 1918 directly precipitated
Lenins order to murder Tsar Nicholas II and his family.
The legion hastened the development of the Soviet gulag
with the founding of the first concentration camps, and it
also spurred the early buildup and configuration of the Red
Army. Their rebellion was the main reason that President
Woodrow Wilson sent U.S. troops to Russia, deployed ex-
plicitly to aid the Czechs and Slovaks.
Yet the legions willingness to fight for the Allies helped
to undermine the Habsburg dynasty and enabled Masaryk
and his associates to secure Allied recognition for the re-
public of Czechoslovakia. Winston Churchill, who served
as British war minister during the revolt, concluded, The
pages of history recall scarcely any parallel episode at once
so romantic in character and so extensive in scale. In rare
agreement with Churchill, British prime minister David
Lloyd George said, The story of the adventures and tri-
84 MHQ Summer 2017
umphs of this small army is indeed one of the greatest epics
of history. Former U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt,
long out of office and grieving the death of his son in the
war, was inspired by reports of the legions achievements in
Russia. He donated $1,000 of the cash award he had re-
ceived from his 1906 Nobel Peace Prize to the legionnaires,
the extraordinary nature of whose great and heroic feat,
he said, is literally unparalleled, so far as I know, in ancient
or modern warfare. His mortal enemy, Woodrow Wilson,
agreed, later welcoming legionnaires to the White House.
The pages of history, however, have not done much
justice to these men. This tale of the founding of Czechoslo-
vakia was suppressed after 1938, when Germanys Nazi
regime occupied the small nation, where anti-German sen-
timent had long walked hand in hand with Czech national-
ism, and again after 1948, when Czechoslovakia became a
Soviet satellite. Pragues Russian occupiers buried the
memory of the founders of Czechoslovakia, who had
fought and defeated, albeit briefly, the Red Army and
threatened the very survival of the Russian Revolution. It
was not until after the communist regimes of the Soviet
Union and Eastern Europe collapsed that this story could
be told using original source material.
Fighting against the Red Army in the Russian Civil War
had the unfortunate effect of characterizing the Czecho-
Slovak Legion, at least in some quarters, as a reactionary,
pro-tsarist army. Yet the men risked their lives to oppose a
monarchy in Vienna, not to support one in Russia. All avail-
able evidence confirms that most of the men, as well as their
leaders, were socialists, and about 10,000 Czech and Slovak
POWs volunteered for the Red Army. Finally, they despised
and openly opposed the leading White commander, Admi-
ral Aleksandr V. Kolchak, even turning him over to a neu-
tral revolutionary tribunal in Irkutsk in January 1920. The
origins and aims of these Czech and Slovak legionnaires,
the youngest sons of Europes last medieval empire, would
more appropriately characterize them as the last revolution-
aries of the ancien rgime. Only novel political concepts
and categories then emerging from Soviet Russia could
classify these revolutionaries as the first counterrevolution-
aries of a new era, when the exuberant mood of the last in-
nocent age of nationalism collided with the dawn of
international socialism and Soviet communism. MHQ
Kevin J. McNamara is an associate scholar of the
Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia, and a
former contributing editor of its quarterly journal, Orbis.
He is the author of Dreams of a Great Small Nation: The
Mutinous Army that Threatened a Revolution, Destroyed
an Empire, Founded a Republic, and Remade the Map of
Europe (Public Affairs, 2016), from which this article is
adapted. Copyright 2017 by Kevin J. McNamara.
 CULTURE OF WAR
Artist Charles Edward Chambers (18831941)
designed this striking World War I poster for
the U.S. Food Administration, which, aiming
to reach recent immigrants, produced it in at

ARTISTS 86 least five languages. The Yiddish version

shown here is featured in the exhibition 1917:

POETRY 89 How One Year Changed the World. The caption:

Food will win the war. You came here seeking

CLASSIC DISPATCHES 90 freedom. Now you must help preserve it. Wheat
is needed for the Allies. Waste nothing.
National Museum of American Jewish History,
REVIEWS 92 Philadelphia, through July 16, 2017

DRAWN &
QUARTERED 96
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
 ARTISTS
EYEWITNESS TO HORROR
Published 35 years after his death, Goyas The Disasters of War
has etched the cruel suffering of war into our collective memory.
By Pamela D. Toler
When French emperor Napoleon Bonapartes troops in-
vaded Spain in December 1807, Francisco Jos de Goya y
Lucientes (17461828) had been First Court Painter to
King Carlos IV for more than three decades. Goya was
famous not only for his portraits of the Spanish aristocracy
but also for his satirical etchings.
During six years of French occupation and guerrilla
warfare by Spanish patriots, Goya continued his public
career as a court artist, accepting commissions to paint
portraits of French generals and other officials connected
with the new Bonapartist regime. In private, he created a
very different type of work: 85 etchings that depicted the
cruelty of war. He titled the series Fatal Consequences of
Spains Bloody War With Bonaparte. We know it as The Di-
sasters of War.
The French invaded at a time when the Spanish govern-
ment was in crisis. Long-simmering tensions between
King Carlos and his son Ferdinand had come to a head in
1807. Fearing that his father intended to remove him from
the succession, Ferdinand negotiated with Napoleon for
help in deposing his father.
A popular uprising in March 1808 forced Carlos to ab-
dicate in favor of his son. The new king arrived in Madrid
on March 24, the day after the French commander Joachim
Murat had entered the city at the head of the French army.
Popular resentment against Carloss corrupt government
was so strong that many Spaniards greeted Murat and the
French troops as liberators.
In short order, however, the Spanish people realized
that France had come to conquer, not to liberate. Held cap-
tive in the French city of Bayonne, both Carlos and Ferdi-
nand were forced to give the reins of power to Napoleon,
who proclaimed his brother Joseph king of Spain.
On May 2 violent demonstrations erupted in Madrid as
a result of rumors that the French planned to forcibly
remove the remaining members of the royal family to Bay-
onne. A Mamluk cavalry unit that Napoleon had brought
back from Egypt charged into the protesters, who were
armed with little more than cudgels and knives. Once the
86 MHQ Summer 2017
riot was subdued, Murats men rounded up everyone they
could find who was armed and executed them. There were
so many of them that the executions lasted through the
night and well into the following morning.
The brutal repression of the May 2 protest did not end
Spanish resistance. For six years Spanish patriots waged
guerrilla warfare against the French occupiers, providing
critical support to the British Army in the Peninsular War
against France.
Aside from the fact that Goya lived in Madrid during
Frances initial invasion and may well have witnessed the
May 2 uprising, not much is known about his direct war-
time experiences.
We know from his letters that Goya visited his child-
hood home of Zaragoza after the first siege of the city. Don
Jos de Palafox y Melzi, the Spanish general who led the
defense against the attackers, summoned Goya to see and
examine the ruins of the city so as to paint the heroic deeds
of its inhabitants. He arrived in late October and left
shortly before the French began their second, more suc-
cessful assault on the city in December. By May 1809 at the
latest, Goya was back in Madrid, where he would spend the
rest of the war and witness the famine it wrought on
Madrid in 1811 and 1812a famine so devastating that
20,000 of its residents died of starvation.
Goya began etching the plates that make up The Disas-
ters of War in 1810, and he appears to have worked on
them through the end of the war. When his supplies ran
low, he cut in two the copperplates for two landscapes he
had etched before the war and created his scenes of war on
the reverse sides.
The series can be divided into three rough parts. The
MUSEO NACIONAL DEL PRADO, MADRID (3)
first part deals with scenes of war. The second depicts the
sufferings of famine. The thirdcomprising 16 etchings
consists of biting political satires aimed at those who bene-
fited under the French occupation.
Goya used a wide range of etching techniques. Drawing
on figures and compositions from classical antiquity and Re-
naissance masters, he created images that combine beauty
Francisco Goya began etching the 85 plates that make up The Disasters of War in 1810.
Many of the etchings depict such shockingly gruesome scenes as the mutilated torsos and
limbs of civilian victims mounted onor bound totree stumps after a massacre (top,
lower left) and grisly decapitations by ax-wielding soldiers (lower right).

MHQ Summer 2017 87

 FRANCISCO GOYA
In 1819 Goya (shown here in an 1815 self-portrait) gave
his 85 original etchings and a full set of working proofs,
which hed completed some years earlier, to a friend and
fellow artist. They werent published until 1863.
with horror. In what appear to be earlier plates (based on
stylistic similarities to the few plates dated 1810), Goya cre-
ated delicate effects of line and washtechniques that con-
trast with the gruesome scenes they portray. These plates
display complex scenes in which many small figures are
crowded into compositions that often subvert the heroic
conventions of traditional battle scenes. Other plates, gener-
ally considered to date from later in the war, are less finished
in style, with larger-scale figures set against simplified back-
grounds that bring greater clarity to the horrors they depict.
Both sides in the war were merciless, and Goya is im-
partial in his depiction of their cruelties. He treats the
atrocities that French soldiers suffered at the hands of his
countrymen and those that French soldiers inflicted on or-
dinary Spanish citizens with the same sense of pity and
condemnation; there is no difference between combatants
and noncombatants. Men are shot, hanged, tortured, and
dismembered. Women fight to defend themselves, some-
times with children in their arms. The wounded are pressed
88 MHQ Summer 2017
into service despite their pain. Children weep for dead
mothers. Even the dead receive no respect: Soldiers strip
corpses before throwing them into a common grave.
Some plates bear titles such as Yo lo vi (I saw it) and As
sucedi (This is how it happened) that suggest Goya saw at
least some of the events he depicts. But while many of the
plates offer the immediacy of an eyewitness account,
others, such as Esto es peor (This is worse), combine fantas-
tical atrocities with painstaking realism.
Only one plate, titled Que valor! (What courage!), refers
to an identifiable event. It is the only heroic image in the
series. In it, a young woman, seen from behind, climbs
over the bodies of her fallen countrymen and fires a cannon
at an unseen foea clear reference to the actions of Augus-
tine Domnech, who stepped into a defensive breach and
fired a cannon during the first siege of Zaragoza.
After the war King Ferdinand VII returned to his throne,
and Goya regained his title and salary as first court painter,
thanks to friends who testified that he had not supported
Joseph Bonapartes brief rule. He kept his head down, creat-
ing portraits of the court and a series of etchings depicting
the history of bullfighting in Spain. Meanwhile, he prepared
his wartime etchings for future publication. In 1819 he gave
fellow artist and writer Juan Agustn Cen Bermdez his
original etchings and a full set of working proofs, with each
sheet numbered and captionedpresumably intending to
publish the plates as a series.
But Goyas The Disasters of War remained unpublished
until 1863a half century after its creation and a year after
Mathew Brady displayed his photographs of the bloody
battlefield at Antietam on the door of his New York pho-
tography studio. In the years since their publication, Goyas
prints have been acclaimed for what photographer Susan
Sontag described in Regarding the Pain of Others as a new
standard for responsiveness for suffering. After the First
World War, German Expressionist artist Otto Dix modeled
his own print series Der Krieg on Goyas work. Photojour-
nalists assigned to cover modern wars have pointed to
Goyas war etchings as precursors of their reportage from
the battlefront.
As immediate as a snapshot and as artificial as many of
the earliest examples of war photography, The Disasters of
War demands that the viewer share Goyas horror. In
Goyas hands, war is anything but glorious and heroes are
in short supply. MHQ
MUSEO NACIONAL DEL PRADO, MADRID
Pamela D. Toler writes frequently about history and the
arts. She is the author of Heroines of Mercy Street: The Real
Nurses of the Civil War (Little, Brown and Company,
2016) and is currently working on a global history of
women warriors.
 POETRY
OF SOLDIERS AND GENERALS
Li Bai

THE LONG WAR

They fought last year by the upper valley of Son-Kan,
This year by the high ranges of the Leek Mountains,
They are still fightingfighting!
They wash their swords and armor in the cold waves
of the Tiao-Chih Sea;
Their horses, turning loose over the Tien Mountains,
Seek the meagre grasses in the white snow.

Long, long have they been fighting, full ten thousand

li away from home;
Their armor is worn out, the soldiers grown old.

Oh, the warlike Tatars!

To them manslaughter is their plowing,
Plowing, oh from ancient times, in the fields of white bones
and yellow sands!

It was in vain that the Emperor of Chin built the Great Wall,
Hoping to shut out those fiery hordes.
Where the wall stands, down to the Han Dynasty,
The beacon fires are still burning.

The beacon fires keep on burning;

The war will never cease!

The soldiers fight and die in death-grapple on the battlefield,

While their wounded horses howl in lamentation,
Throwing up their heads at the desolate sky;
Li Bai (701762) is widely regarded as Chinas greatest poet. The gray ravens and hungry vultures tear,
In 756 he became unofficial poet laureate to Prince Li Lin, And carry away the long bowels of the dead,
the 16th of Emperor Xuanzongs 30 sons, who tried to seize Hanging them on the twigs of lifeless trees.
power in an unsuccessful uprising against the Tang dynasty.
The prince, accused of trying to establish an independent O soldiers who fight long
kingdom, was executed; Li Bai was arrested for treason and Their blood varnishes the desert weeds!
imprisoned at Jiujiang. His death sentence was commuted to But the generals who lead them on
exile in Yelang, in China's remote southwest interior. In 759, They have accomplished nothing!
as he made his way to Yelang, Li Bai received notice that he
had been granted an imperial pardon. He wandered the
Yangtze Valley until his death in 762.
Some 1,100 of Li Bais poems have survived, including
the one printed here. They are known for their clear
LI BAI FOUNDATION

imagery and conversational tone and have influenced a

number of 20th-century poets, including Ezra Pound and
James Wright.

MHQ Summer 2017 89

 CLASSIC DISPATCHES
TORPEDOED!
By Eleanor Franklin Egan
Eleanor Franklin Egan, born Bertha Eleanor Pedigo in 1877,
was placed in the Rose Orphan Home in Terre Haute,
Indiana, following the death of her mother. She was later
adopted and raised in Martinsville, Illinois, and Kansas City,
Missouri. She moved to New York City in 1898 in search of
an acting career but ended up in journalism instead.
Egan covered the Russo-Japanese War and the Russian
Revolution for Leslies Weekly and World War I and its
aftermath for the Saturday Evening Post. She died in New
York in 1925, at age 45, from pneumonia.
In 1915 Egan made headlines all over the world when she
survived a deadly submarine attack on the British passenger
ship Barulos. She wrote about the experience for the Saturday
Evening Post, from which this account is excerpted.
I was leaving Greece.
The war I had run from in Serbia, in Bulgaria, and in
Turkey snarled at my heels in Athens. Greece was mobiliz-
ing; everything was in the utmost confusion, and I knew I
must get away, my objective then being my own homeland,
where there was no war.
Sailings of the Italian ships to Brindisi had not been sus-
pended; but in that direction
the greatest danger lay. There
I was were rumors of Austrian sub-
standing by marines, and one was made to
believe that to the westward
the rail, Egan they were as thick as fishes
in an aquarium. Very well; I
wrote,when would go down to Egypt, and
the submarine from Egypt I would go to
Malta, from Malta to Palermo,
came up. and thence across to Naples.
There was a promise of British
and Italian convoy on this route, and the sensible idea is
always to seek the safest possible avenue.
It was the Barulos or nothing, everything else afloat
being engaged in service connected with either Greek mo-
bilization and the transportation of troops to Macedonia
or with the battle of Gallipolli, which was then wallowing
along to its end.
The Barulos it had to be. I was the only English-speaking
passenger aboard. The three-hundred-odd other passen-
gers suggested nothing but nomadic tribes.
90 MHQ Summer 2017
I was standing by the rail when the submarine came
upall by myself. I was restless, and I was tremendously
interested in the surface of the sea. I always shall be after
this. Never again shall I be able to sweep a bright horizon
from a ships deck without seeing that black hulk rising like
a whale coming up to blow.
Your mind at such a moment is like a film in a camera. It
captures and fixes every minutest detail. I remember the
white wash of the sea off the submarine decks, though it
rose halfway between us and the sky line. I remember the
instantaneous of the flash of fire and the reverberating
boom which caught up just in time to mingle with the
crack of an exploding shell and the loud swish of a geyser
that it threw into the air. It was the explosion of that shell
that settled our fate. If the submarine could have used
some other kind of signal the panic would not have been so
instantaneous and complete. But the concussion shook the
ship; and all those buried in the bowels of the shipfire-
men, engineers, sailors, steerage passengers, everybody,
thought just one thing, and that thing was Torpedoed!
I had to clutch the rail to steady myself.
Goodness knows how long I stood there. I dont. More-
over, I have no idea how the first impulse of the crowd ex-
pressed itself. I suppose there must have been a momentary
hesitation of unbelief before a scream was uttered; but
when the sobbing sounds of fear did penetrate my daze
they curdled my bloodand that I know.
I turned finally and started aimlessly for the gangway
that led below to the cabins. Then I got caught in the crush
at the gangway, I being seriously bent on going down when
everyone else was in frantic haste to come up. I remember
blackened firemen and uniformed officers and sailors
fighting women and children and other men in a way that
chilled my heart and closed the very shutters of my mind.
It was toward the Englishmens lifeboats that the crowd
stampeded. They were the only lifeboats instantly available,
and more than 300 persons had gone insane with a deter-
mination to get into them.
There was a Greek sailor standing in the bow of the boat
toward which I had been rushed by the mob, and I turned
in time to see him cutting away like a madman at the rope
that held it. I had just sense enough to observe instantly
that nobody was doing anything at all to the ropes at the

In 1915 Eleanor Franklin Egan, a correspondent for the
Saturday Evening Post, made headlines when she survived
a deadly submarine attack on a British passenger ship.
other end; and then it was, I think, that I lost my reason
too. The boat was already overloaded and people were still
crowding into it, and I got a swift, terrible vision of its
being loosed at one end only, and of the whole struggling,
screaming lot of them being plunged into the sea. I reached
out and caught the sailors arms; but
I think I went over just as the boat fell. How? I wish I
knew. There was a clutch of hands behind me, a sudden lift,
a long, sickening dropand I was looking wide-eyed
through the blue seethe of the sea. Some noble soul, of
course, had tried to lift me into the lifeboat and had caught
me off my balance as I struggled with the sailor. When I
came up and caught my breath in the air, and began me-
chanically to keep my head above water, I was still thinking
that I must go to my cabin and get a life belt. I had been
thinking this subconsciously all the time; and that shows
how quickly it all happened.
PIERPONT MORGAN LIBRARY
By the time I had adjusted myself and had stroked my way
out into a space by myselfaway from the clutching hands
and the struggling othersour submarine had come up
and was lying under our bows, with two 1,200-pound guns
trained on our water line. It was the English captain who
told me afterward that they were 12-pounders, else I should
not have known. Hereafter, though, I think I shall always
know a 12-pounder when I see one, because I looked
straight into their muzzle from where I floated in the sea.
My eyes ran down the gleam of them, seeing photo-
graphically their every detail. Behind them stood two gun-
ners, as straight and still as statues of men. They were
awaiting the order to fire, and I had a sort of frantic feeling
that I was exactly in range and was likely to be blown to bits.
The commander of our submarine was an Austrian; and
if the German idea is right he should have been court-
martialed and shot for being weakand merely human. I
imagine that he was once a proud, upstanding navy man,
with swashbuckling thoughts, perhaps, and dreams of brave
fights with fighting ships. But he was not fitted to command
a submarine under orders to be ruthless. He wept!
They got me. I was picked up by one of the lifeboats. I sank
into it, exhausted. Do you know anything about the blessed
feel of one when it is the only thing between you and the il-
limitable awfulness of black sea depths?
I am going to skip all the particulars about how my life-
boat was filled with sailors and firemen mostly; how we
rowed round afterward and picked up others, until the big
chief steward, who was in command, decided we had all we
could take care of; how three lifeboats were stampeded as
they were launched and swamped as soon as they touched
the water; how one woman after another threw her chil-
dren into the sea, screaming to God to let them be saved by
someone, somehow; and how the long swells caught little
bodies and swept them far out beyond the reach of rescue.
Yet I would, if I could, make you see the pitiful ship
drifting aimlessly and dejectedly there under the guns; and
I would, if I could, make you see how the sunset bathed all
the horrors in a marvelous light. I would, if I could, make
you hear the feeble wails of the little Arab baby I picked up
and tucked away under my wet coat, and feel the weight of
the dead woman they dragged in and threw across my
knees. I would, if I could, call up before you all the 25
drowned14 of them children, and only three of them
menand have you listen to their stories. But these are de-
tails, only details.
Two weeks later I crossed that spot on a Dutch ship, which
I boarded at Port Said for Genoa; within a month I had
crossed to the English Channel and was on an American
Line ship bound for New York. I can only add that, until I
came within sight of the Statue of Liberty, I was subject to
occasional heart contractions which felt exactly the way
you do when you are dropped suddenly in an elevator.
I went back before the Germans completed their ar-
rangements for unrestrained ruthlessness. MHQ
MHQ Summer 2017 91
 REVIEWS
MEN O WAR
Pershings
Crusaders:
The American
Soldier in
World War I
By Richard S.
Faulkner. 784 pages.
University Press
of Kansas, 2017.
$39.95. Reviewed
by William Walker
Pershings Crusaders, Richard
S. Faulkners encyclopedic
look at the 4,178,172 dough-
boys who served in the U.S.
Army during World War I, is
a magnificent overview of the
great national experiment
represented by the American
Expeditionary Forces. Com-
bining the best methods of
military history with interest-
ing statistics and sociological
techniques, Faulkner covers
virtually every conceivable
aspect of the doughboys ex-
perience, from their motiva-
tion for military service to
their experiences in battle to
their unbridled exhilaration
on seeing the Statue of Lib-
erty on their return to New
York Harbor.
Faulkner, a professor of
military history at the U.S.
Army Command and Gen-
eral Staff College at Fort
Leavenworth, devoted 20
years to gathering the little-
known facts, soldiers letters,
surveys, and veterans recol-
92 MHQ Summer 2017
lections that he has woven
into a compelling narrative.
We learn, for example, that
the pay earned by a U.S. pri-
vate far exceeded that of his
compatriots in French and
British armies, that the me-
tallic sound of the German
MG 08 machine gun was
particularly cruel and fiend-
ish, and that there was no
way that a soldier could stay
warm and dry using his over-
coat on a wet, cold battlefield.
To his credit, Faulkner
does not shy away from con-
troversial subjects. He faith-
fully reports, for example, the
number of Americans who
committed murder during
the war (2 officers and 88 sol-
diers), the rampant discrimi-
nation against immigrants
and African Americans, the
stiff penalty imposed for con-
tracting venereal disease
(three months confinement
at hard labor), and the excep-
tionally high illiteracy rate
among recruits (30 percent).
The illiteracy figure should
not be surprising, as the aver-
age white enlisted man had
completed just 7.7 years of
school and his black counter-
part just 4.6 years.
While many military his-
torians avoid writing about
American atrocities, Faulk-
ner devotes a long section of
his book to the subject. It is
not difficult to find instances
where doughboys chose not
to take prisoners in letters
and diaries from the period
and in postwar accounts, he
writes. This is not to say that
the killing of German prison-
ers or potential prisoners was
widespread; rather, it is to ac-
knowledge that such acts do
happen in war and that the
Americans were not immune
to this fact. In an honest at-
tempt to assess the impact
that battle stress had on
young Americans, he cites
several examples of the exe-
cution of prisoners and
quotes one doughboy con-
fessing that a sniper was
never taken prisoner.
According to Faulkner, re-
turning veterans evidenced a
wide range of emotions.
Some had grown cynical:
Only those who do not
know, one veteran said, talk
about the accomplishments
of the army. Others experi-
enced a sense of relief tem-
pered by the recognition that
the experience had irrevoca-
bly changed them. As one
put it, I am out of the army,
but I have a feeling it will be a
long time before the army is
out of me.
There is much to celebrate
in Faulkners superb portrait
of doughboy life. And fortu-
nately, other than a skimpy
index that limits the books
usefulness as a reference, it
has precious few shortcom-
ings to bemoan.
William Walker is the
author of Betrayal at Little
Gibraltar: A German
Fortress, a Treacherous
American General, and the
Battle to End World War I
(Scribner, 2016).
The Locomotive
of War: Money,
Empire, Power,
and Guilt
By Peter Clarke.
432 pages.
Bloomsbury, 2017.
$30. Reviewed by
K. M. Kostyal
Using Leon Trotskys famous
axiom as a starting point
(War, Trotsky said, is the
locomotive of history), his-
torian Peter Clarke aims to
examine how the locomo-
tive of war transformed the
role of government and the
workings of the economic
system in the years sur-
rounding the world wars.
While that examination is
certainly woven into his
narrative, much of Clarkes
book focuses on what he
calls Anglo-American liber-
alismmostly the Anglo
side of the equationand
the large personalities driv-
ing it in the first 40 years of
the 20th century.
Clarke traces that liberal-
ism to William Ewart Glad-
stone, the Grand Old Man of
HARRIS & EWING COLLECTION/LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
the previous century. Four
times British prime minister,
Gladstone preached a moral
populism and a virtuous
passion in the political deal-
ings of a nation. Gladstones
ideas would echo through
the regimes of his liberal-
imperialist successors: Her-
General John J. Pershing
was the commander of the
American Expeditionary
Force in Europe during
World War I.

MHQ Summer 2017 93

 REVIEWS
bert Henry Asquith (an
affected patrician despite his
middle-class background),
David Lloyd George (the
quintessential man of the
people), and Winston Chur-
chill (whose iconoclastic bril-
liance defies categorization).
All three men were part of
the feuding, intricate, and in-
terconnected oligarchy that
ultimately drove the British
Empire into and through
World War I and toward a
second world war. Clarke fol-
lows each of their life trajec-
tories, showing how they
intersected and shaped not
only government policy but
also the British zeitgeist of the
early 20th century.
Also included among the
prominent zeitgeist-shapers
is economist John Maynard
Keynes, who believed that
the only way to influence the
hidden currents, flowing
continually below the surface
of political history was to set
in motion those forces of
instruction and imagination
which change opinion.
Keynes indicted the profi-
teers of war for humbugging
the public away from liberal
values and, in so doing,
ending an extraordinary ep-
isode in the economic prog-
ress of man during which
the upper and middle classes
had enjoyed conveniences,
comforts, and amenities
beyond the compass of the
richest and most powerful
monarchs of other ages. Yet
Churchill had seen that era in
an entirely a different light,
predicting in 1901 that the
wars of peoples will be more
terrible than those of Kings.
What led the British peo-
ples into that first great war
94 MHQ Summer 2017
was a Gladstonian moral out-
rage at Germanys invasion of
neutral Belgium. But peace,
when it finally came, was
hardly the moralistic peace
without a victor that U.S.
President Woodrow Wilson
preached. As with the other
liberals he covers, Clarke
finds fault with Wilson, criti-
cizing his naivet. He simply
does not know the modern
Machiavellianism, Ameri-
can journalist Ray Stannard
Baker said of Wilson. And
yet, as Clarke acknowledges,
the war boosted not only
Americas economic fortunes
at home but also its standing
as a world power.
While the Locomotive of
War covers all the obvious
complications of that time of
upheaval in British poli-
ticsthe issue of Irish Home
Rule, the initial reluctance to
go to war, the consequences
of the great battles, the pros
and cons of maintaining a
worldwide empire in time of
war, the push for German
reparations at wars endits warfare. He reaches as far
sometimes hard to follow
exactly what point Clarke is
attempting to make. His
overarching theme seems to
be the time-tested truism
that politicians and public
sentiment can be ambigu-
ous, self-serving, even hypo-
criticalparticularly when
it comes to waging war.
K. M. Kostyal is the
author of Founding Fathers:
The Fight for Freedom and
the Birth of American
Liberty (National Geo-
graphic, 2014).
Waging War:
Conict,
Culture, and
Innovation in
World History
By Wayne E. Lee.
560 pages. Oxford
University Press,
2016. $44.95
(paper). Reviewed by
Michael W. Robbins
In this wide-ranging and
ambitious work, Wayne E.
Lee, a professor of history at
the University of North
Carolina, does not seek to
explain war. Nor does he
attempt to answer whether
warfare is an inevitable prod-
uct of human nature.
Instead, Lee draws on
such disciplines as anthro-
pology, archaeology, biology,
human evolution, sociology,
andof coursehistory, to countermeasures as shields,
trace the development of
back as 12,000 BCE for evi-
dence of mass burials of vic-
tims of violent conflict, and
to the earliest signs of forti-
fied settlements to trace the
many innovations that have
shaped human conflict and
cooperation. Lee contends
that coordinated lethal con-
flict among human groups
evidently existed at all times
and in all places, but not all
the time (authors emphasis).
He suggests that conflicts
arose as groups competed for
available resources and that
such conflicts gave rise to co-
operation and to the organi-
zation of larger social groups,
from chiefdoms to states.
In examining the long de-
velopmental arc from early
Neolithic conflicts to the
more familiar warfare among
states, Lee highlights many
examples of innovations in
weaponry and other technol-
ogies, social organization, lo-
gistics, transportation, and
the exploitation of natural
resources. Beginning with
the domestication of horses
and the development of the
chariot in the Pontic-Caspian
and Central Asian Steppe,
Lee moves through the use of
bows and arrows and slings;
then through spear-wielding
phalanxes, swords, heavy Eu-
ropean armor, and cavalry;
and, finally, to the advent of
gunpowder and the effects of
industrialization. Lee also an-
alyzes the parallel develop-
ments of craft, weapons, and
tactics of warfare on water.
For each innovation in weap-
onry, he explains the devel-
opment of such defensive
armor, and fortifications.
Throughout the course of
warfare development all the
way to contemporary insur-
gency, nonstate conflicts, and
terror, Lee is as attentive to
changes in social, political,
and military ideas and orga-
nization as he is to techno-
logical change.
Lee augments every chap-
ter of the book with a useful
timeline and detailed, expan-
sive notes.
Waging War is a compre-
hensive and welcome survey
of the development of war-
farean indispensable guide
to military history.
Michael W. Robbins is a
former editor of MHQ.
 American Sieges
India vs. Pakistan
Crimean Images
Antonys Intrigues
WWI Railways
Pontiacs War
HistoryNet.com

Ilse Hirschs innocent

schoolgirl looks made

NAZI
her an ideal assassin

KILLER
ANGELS
IN 1945 WEREWOLVES PROWLED
THE RUINS OF AACHEN
JULY 2017

MIHP-170700-COVER-DIGITAL.indd 1 3/23/17 11:02 AM

...the latest issue of

Military History features
Nazi Werewolves in Aachen,
India vs. Pakistan, and more!
Now available at
SHOP.HISTORYNET.COM
and your local newsstand

HistoryNet.com
 DRAWN & QUARTERED

HAIR OF THE REPUBLIC

Early in his career John
Cawse (17781862), the
noted English painter,
worked as a caricaturist for ANNE S.K. BROWN MILITARY COLLECTION/BROWN UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

Samuel William Fores, a

prominent London printseller
who at one time operated his
own Caricature Museum.
In this satirical print,
published in 1800, Cawse
skewers Napoleon Bonaparte
(furious and long-locked),
who wears a bicorne with
ridiculous plumage and is
attended by two goggle-eyed
lackeys, at least one of whom
wears a jesters collar.

96 MHQ Summer 2017

I WAS SOON
ALONGSIDE
OF THE CHAP
WHO HAD
WOUNDED ME.
RAISING
MYSELF IN THE
STRIRRUPS,
I SHOT HIM
THROUGH
THE HEAD.
William F.
Buffalo Bill
Cody
page 20

SUMMER 2017
VOLUME 29, NUMBER 4