It has been a long day with another, longer one coming tomorrow but I would be remiss if I did not mention that today is the 80th anniversary of the American invasion of North Africa. One of the Second World War’s great ironies is that American troops’ first major engagement in the Atlantic Theater came largely against . . . the Vichy French. It was all over in seventy-two hours but don’t let the quick timeline fool you. It all could have gone so differently. The truth is we were fortunate things went the way they did. Marshall, Eisenhower and all the others had a steep learning curve.
(image/American troops land near Algiers, 8 November 1942/FDR Library)
Earlier this week I had an early morning dentist appointment in midtown Manhattan and afterward went looking for Chartwell Booksellers, an independent bookstore founded in 1983 dedicated to selling books and ephemera related to Winston Churchill. I was only “vaguely” looking for the shop, knowing it was in the general area but not all that worried should I not see it. It did not appear and so I stopped for a quick coffee & croissant before moving on with my day. I next stopped in the public area of a skyscraper to wash my hands when, lo and behold, there was Chartwell Booksellers in the lobby. I did not buy anything but intend to go back. I took a few photographs of the shop windows and texted them to a friend in another state who has a similar interest in the period. This led to a back-and-forth text discussion of the merits and demerits of Churchill and Roosevelt. Needless to say, both men were extremely gifted and flawed individuals whose successes and failures run parallel and still resonate today. Entirely coincidentally my quick visit to the bookstore fell on the eightieth anniversary of the Placentia Bay conference in Newfoundland at which the president and prime minister discussed the war in Europe. It was less than two months after Germany’s surprise attack on the Soviet Union, their ally of nearly the previous two years. The United States was still technically neutral in the war, though earlier in the year in his January 6 address to Congress Roosevelt had laid out his idea of the Lend-Lease project in what is now known as the Four Freedoms speech.
Leslie MacDonald Gill map / via Cornell University Library
The relationship between the United States and Great Britain during the Second World War was more fraught and complicated than most people realize even today. Hiding the fissures is what good diplomacy does. Churchill, Roosevelt, and scores of military and civilian leaders hashed out various logistics from August 9-12. On August 14 the two leaders issued the Atlantic Charter, a basic framework of principles for what both war and peace might look like. In the coming years the Atlantic Charter was often more honored in the breach than in reality. It’s not that surprising given the complexity and fluidity of a war that took the lives of sixty million people and wounded and displaced millions more. Three quarters of a century later it is still impossible to wrap one’s mind around it. Above is an extraordinary piece of material culture: a 1942 map created by cartographer and graphic designer Leslie MacDonald Gill for the British magazine “Time and Tide” with the text of the Atlantic Charter and a map of the natural resources of the “United Nations” that by then were fighting the Axis Powers. The map struck a chord with the British and American publics, so much so that the London Geographical Institute and Denoyer-Geppert Science Company of Chicago mass produced it in poster form in 1943 and sold it by the thousands. In the ensuing decades the “Time and Tide” map of the Atlantic Charter has appeared in museum exhibitions and at trade shows in London, Miami, and elsewhere. One thing I find striking is how colorful it is. I was talking to someone a few weeks ago about how we interpret the World Wars as having been in black-and-white because almost all of the photographs and moving images are such. The people of the time literally saw it differently.
William L. Shirer at the Conference on Research on the Second World War, June 1971
I was texting someone earlier today about William Shirer’s “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” to ask if he had ever read that large tome. Shirer published his classic history of Nazi Germany in 1960, fifteen short years after the war’s end. The scholarship on the Second World War has inevitably moved on in the six decades since the book’s publication. That’s how it works. You could make a strong case—I would—that the history of the war has not truly been written yet; so much of what we know, or think we know, about the conflict has been filtered through the prism of the events came afterward. Governments and individuals have been using and misusing the history and memory of the war for three quarters of a century now. As I was telling my friend though, despite the inevitable changes in historiography over the past six decades Shirer brought an immediacy to his narrative that cannot be replicated by today’s scholars. Born in 1904, the American journalist moved to Europe in the 1920s to work as a correspondent and to write in the romantic vein of contemporaries like Fitzgerald and Hemingway. It is telling that all three writers were from the American Midwest. In the 1930s Shirer found himself in Germany, where he witnessed, well, the rise of the Third Reich. Among other things Shirer attended one of Hitler’s mass rallies at Nuremberg in 1934 and was in Berlin for the 1936 Olympics. He worked in other European and world capitals as well. It helped that Shirer spoke German, Italian, and French. After the texting back-and-forth with my friend, I ordered a copy of the book online.
I am determined to learn the history and memory of both the war and the Holocaust over the next two years as some colleagues and I move forward on the project I mentioned the other day. I know a fair amount about the 1930s-40s but am working now in a more methodical manner. Shirer’s work began a new phase in Americans’ understanding of the war. In the decade and a half since Hitler’s suicide Europe was rebuilding itself and Americans in their postwar prosperity were in a period of willful forgetting. Essentially everyone was trying to move on and forget. Shirer’s book and the contemporaneous capture, trial, and execution of Otto Adolf Eichmann in the early 1960s began to refocus people’s attention on the terrible events of just two decades ago. “Rise and Fall” won the National Book Award and was a Book of the Month Club selections at a time when that meant more than it does today. In other popular culture of the time the Twilight Zone episode “Deaths-Head Revisited,” about a camp commandant returning to Dachau years after the liberation, premiered on November 10, 1961.
Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin with their staffs at the Yalta Conference, February 1945
I mention all this because today is the 76th anniversary of the start of the Yalta Conference, the gathering of Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin in the Crimea where the three made plans for what the postwar world might look like. Needless to say the three had contrasting visions. I have always been struck at how poor Roosevelt looks; he was failing quickly and would be dead less than ten weeks later. The conference ran from February 4-11, 1945. By the time of V-E Day that spring Truman would be in the White House.
(images/top, National Archives; bottom, Library of Congress)
The surrender of Japanese Forces at Baguio, Luzon in the Philippines, 3 September 1945. This ceremony happened to fall on Labor Day.
One of the most iconic images of the twentieth century is the Japanese surrender aboard the USS Missouri on September 2, 1945, seventy-five years ago this week. Like Robert E. Lee’s surrender to U.S. Grant in April 1865 the Missouri ceremony became known as the end of the conflict, which basically it was. Still, as with Appomattox eighty years previously, there were still armies in the field that had yet to surrender there in the Pacific. Less well known in the popular consciousness is the Japanese surrender the following day in the Philippines at Camp John Hay in Baguio. General Tomoyuki Yamashita and Admiral Denshichi Okochi surrendered just after noon and were then taken to a prison in Manila. That ceremony fell on Monday 3 September 1945, which also happened to be Labor Day.
Everyone understood the historical moment that was the Japanese surrender, but the war’s end was as much a beginning as an ending. The real work, on so many levels, lay ahead; great uncertainty, and even violence, starvation and chaos, remained. In her “My Day” column that appeared the same day as the Japanese surrender in the Philippines, Eleanor Roosevelt averred that “I do not think Labor Day has ever been as important as it is this year. Ordinarily we think of this day as merely a pleasant holiday which gives us a long weekend in which to enjoy our last bit of country air before going back to work in the city. It is a pleasant holiday, but its significance is far greater than that.”
I don’t know if I have anything particularly insightful, new, or especially revelatory to say about it, but I would be remiss if I did not mention that today is the 75th anniversary of the dropping of Little Boy on Hiroshima.
Truman had been in office less than four months at this time. Roosevelt had kept the Manhattan Project a secret from his vice-president, who learned of the race to build the atomic bomb only after Roosevelt’s death in April. Imagine hearing about such a thing for the first time, and knowing you would be the one who would have to make such a decision. The history, creation, and use of the atomic bomb is a story that resonates on the individual and universal level. Very rarely do tipping points in history come so sharply and clearly as they did seventy-five years ago today. There was no turning back or putting the genie back in the bottle for humankind after August 6, 1945. The world had unambiguously entered a new age.
Today is the anniversary of one of the most significant turning points of the twentieth century: June 22, 1941, the date the Germans began Operation Barbarossa. Hitler sent millions of men eastward in Their Reich’s offensive against erstwhile Soviet allies. As the Führer saw it, Barbarrosa would be over by autumn; German infantrymen were not issued winter uniforms because, well, why would they ever need them? The last surviving Germans soldiers, about 5000 of them, did not return until the mid-1950s. Yes, you read that correctly. Stalin kept many German POWs for years after the war’s end; Khrushchev and Eisenhower finally worked it all out during a thaw in the Cold War after Stalin’s death.
It is often lost on us today the extent to which the Germans and Soviets had been allies before Hitler’s surprise attack. For nearly two years, from the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of August 23, 1939 until June 22, 1941 they were allies. That is nearly two years of sharing supplies, intelligence, and more. Stalin was caught totally off guard by the German offensive and thought his aides were there to kill or arrest him when they brought him the news of Barbarossa. If one thinks about it, it is pretty extraordinary that the Soviet leadership could not have known something was up when division after division were lining up facing eastward on the border in the days and weeks beforehand. The military historian Max Hastings once wrote that the war turned Hitler into a fantasist and Stalin into a realist. Stalin was rendered incapacitated for at least several days, if not longer, but recovered quickly. It all seems so long ago and yet the repercussions are still playing out today.
≈ Comments Off on International Holocaust Remembrance Day 2020
Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp railroad entrance
I would be remiss if I did not at least briefly mention that today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Today is also the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Earlier today I had a brief email back-and-forth with a friend who is a Holocaust survivor. He has been speaking out on the road a lot this winter and I believe gets back to the city later in the week. After I got home I checked out some of the news coverage and social media online from around the world. It sounds ridiculous to say but it is often lost on us how global was the Second World War, the extent to which it reached into virtually every house and hamlet across the globe regardless of how large or small. The Second World War seems ironically so long ago and yet as close and relevant as it was in 1945. As the late military historian John Keegan often said, the history of war has not truly been written yet. The consequences and aftereffects are still playing themselves out, and probably willful many decades. In our current moment it is more important than ever to study history across all regions and eras, which is why there are people out there who would take it away from us.
A book they gave us at the training I attended at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum two weeks ago was Michael Dobbs’s “The Unwanted: America, Auschwitz, and a Village Caught in Between,” which I intend to read this coming weekend.
Yesterday I got back from Washington, D.C., where in addition to a little rest and relaxation I attended a two-day training seminar at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on the Mall. There were fifty trainees from across the country all told, and the sessions were led by an extraordinary group of historians, archivists, educators, librarians, and museum professionals. I cannot express what a privilege it was to attend. I won’t go into too much detail as of yet because many details have yet to be worked out, but if all goes as planned this project will lead to several thought-provoking historiographical and interpretive programs. In these challenging, often despairing, times it is more important than ever to understand history properly. The United States’s responses to the rise of fascism, the war, and the Holocaust itself were complicated to say the least. As is the case with all historical events, one must embrace the contradictions and complexity to understand fully. As the sign in the photograph I took at the museum implies, it is up to us not just to provide answers but to ask the right questions.
Going in to the sessions I already had a number programming ideas. In the breakout sessions and group discussions the event organizers and attendees gave me a number of further options and possibilities to explore. Hopefully I gave them some ideas as well. This will be an ongoing endeavor and those conversations will continue. I intend to share more on this in the coming weeks and months as things further develop.
I hope everyone had an enjoyable and restful Thanksgiving. We have spent much of the past few days binge-watching The Crown, which I had never seen before. Apparently the story will follow Queen Elizabeth II from her 1947 marriage through the Thatcher era. The 7-8 episodes we have watched so far have been set in the 1950s. Watching them drives home, among other things, just how much England lost in the Second World War. The two decades after the war’s end were the years of Austerity Britain, with its food rationing, coal gray skies, and declining empire. When the Beatles woodshedded in Hamburg in the early 1960s one of the things that struck them the most was how much farther along was that German port city’s recovery than their native Liverpool’s. While Germany was rebuilding, Liverpool–and even London–were still scarred with roped off bomb craters a full decade and a half after the war.
I suppose the queen’s 1953 coronation was an important reminder to the British people of their heritage, which is why they were so enamored with the twenty-six year old monarch. The nascent media of television helped too, humanizing the young queen and bringing her and her family into people’s homes in a way literally never seen before. The royals are all too human and it is wise not to idealize them too much, or even at all. At its best however the Crown as head of state represents continuity even in the most challenging times. One of the reasons I became interested in philately as a teenager was the manner that French and British stamps evolved in the 1950s & 60s during the transition of their colonies to Independence. Sometimes the nearness and immediacy of these events get driven home even in the course of daily life. Just this past week I had a conversation with someone born in the early 1970s in an island Commonwealth country in a hospital dedicated by the current Prince of Wales earlier that very year. Charles’s mother–Elizabeth II–had herself very publicly visited this same small country herself around this same time. Two decades into the twenty-first century Elizabeth II is still serving.
≈ Comments Off on Remembering the Molotov & Ribbentrop Pact
Today is the 80th anniversary of one of the most significant events of the twentieth century: Molotov and Ribbentrop’s signing of the Non-agression Pact between Germany and the Soviet Union. This newspaper extra pretty much captures the story, which came as a surprise to much of the world. One of the most shaken constituencies was the International Left, many of whom had spent the past two decades unwisely admiring Stalin and Lenin. To them it seemed impossible that Soviet Russia could sign such a deal with Fascist Germany, but there it was. I’ll leave it to you to find the images of the principals signing the agreement, smiling all the while like the cat that ate the canary. There are no heroes in this story. Just a week later the two nations invaded Poland.
It is often lost on us for how long Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union remained allies. Their pact held until late June 1941, almost two years. They shared all kinds of resources while committing all kinds of cruelties, looking the other way at each others’ atrocities. How things might have gone were in not for Operation Barbarossa is one of the great counterfactuals of the Second World War. There are just so many contingencies when it comes to World War 2.
The Strawfoot 