Category Archives: WW2

D-Day plus seventy-five years

06 Thursday Jun 2019

Posted by in Dwight D. Eisenhower, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, George C. Marshall, Harry S. Truman, New York City, WW2

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Rally in New York City’s Madison Square on D-Day, June 6, 1944

Good morning, everyone. I could not let the 75th anniversary of the Normandy Invasion go unnoticed. Anniversaries such as this are an opportunity to pause and reflect on what we have gained and stand to lose in our current troubled times. Coalitions are difficult to build and easy to destroy. We would do well to remember the lessons taught to us by Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, George Marshall, Harry Truman, and the many others who helped create the world we cavalierly take for granted today.

Last night one person did mention to me the 75th anniversary of D-Day. We’ll see how many, if at all, do today. Here is a post I wrote in 2011. The major D-Day anniversaries have followed me over the course of my adult life.

There are many striking images of New York City taken on June 6, 1944. People obviously had a need to be out publicly, anxious as they were for news from England and France. D-Day was a lonely time for Eisenhower himself, who by that time had done all he could and thus spent his hours chain-smoking and waiting for news at his headquarters in England. Here in the States, ball games were cancelled, shops closed, and things in general came to a halt as the fate of the war hung in the balance.

(image/photographed by Howard Hollem, Edward Meyer or MacLaugharie for the Office of War Information; Library of Congress)

V-E Day plus 74 years

08 Wednesday May 2019

Posted by in Franklin Delano Roosevelt, WW2

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Stars and Stripes. V-E Day extra from Paris, 8 May 1945

I don’t have much time this morning to write more than a quick note that today is the 74th anniversary of V-E Day. I’m old enough to remember when the observance of the anniversary of Victory in Europe was still more current event than history. Time moves on. It was ever thus. I attended a symposium in the city last night about the New Deal. One of the most unfortunate aspects of the closing days of the Second World War is that Roosevelt did not live to see it, either the “peace” in Europe that May or the surrender on the Missouri in early September.

In many ways the hard was was just beginning. After the war itself came the immediate crises of feeding the starving, relocating refugees, and creating the international order that ultimately brought peace, stability, and prosperity to much of the world for the next three quarters of a century.

(image/U.S. Army Stars and Stripes)

The Marshall Plan turns 71

03 Wednesday Apr 2019

Posted by in Dean Acheson, Fiorello La Guardia, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, George C. Marshall, Harry S. Truman, Servicemen's Readjustment Act (GI Bill), WW2

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President Harry S. Truman and Secretary of State George C. Marshall shake hands as the chief executive sees Marshall off on the secretary’s way to the London Conference of Foreign Ministers on 20 November 1947. Marshall had given his Harvard commencement speech advocating aid for Europe five months previously and Truman would sign the bill creating the Marshall Plan five months later.

President Harry S. Truman signed the Economic Recovery Act on this date in 1948. Better known as the Marshall Plan after the Secretary of State who helped bring it to fruition, the initiative was one of the great successes of the Cold War. In April 1948 Europe was entering its fourth spring of peace, such as peace was; if you were living in Italy, Greece, Eastern Europe, or many other locales at the time you might have seen things differently. The most immediate crisis after V-E Day was relocating displaced persons and feeding the starving. Much of the latter task fell to Fiorello H. La Guardia, the former mayor of New York City who took the job of Director General of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) in spring 1946 and worked his characteristically indefatigable schedule for nine brutal months until resigning in poor health and passing on in September 1947.

Great as the work of La Guardia and his staff of almost 25,000 workers was, it was apparent that their endeavors were insufficient on their own and that a longer term strategy was necessary. On 5 June 1947, now two full years after the war’s end, Secretary of State George Marshall gave the Harvard University commencement address in which he laid out the case for an assistance plan to aid Europe. He called for a policy not to aid any particular country per se but a policy “against hunger, poverty, desperation, and chaos” more generally. The Soviets themselves could have participated had they wished. Events moved quickly after that, with bipartisan support coming from both houses of Congress. The bill passed 69-17 in the Senate and 329-74 in the House. All that was left was for Truman to sign the measure into law on 3 April 1948.

People often take initiatives such as the Marshall Plan for granted, in large part because they were conceived so well and executed so efficiently that we take their benefits for granted. Men like Truman, Marshall, Dean Acheson, and the late Franklin Roosevelt understood the mistakes of the First World War. They had seen the Bonus Army in Washington and the rise of Hitler and fascism in Europe. That is why they created such measures as the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act (GI Bill) and Economic Recovery Act (Marshall Plan). We would do well to remember just how difficult it is to execute good policy. It is extraordinarily difficult to solve problems well, and all too easy to undo good diplomacy through arrogance, carelessness, and ignorance.

(image/National Archives and Records Administration)

 

The return of the 27th Division

10 Sunday Mar 2019

Posted by in 27th (New York) Division, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Writing, WW2

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The Eagle captured the excitement of the Leviathan’s return while noting signs of the coming difficulty in securing the peace. The Mauretania returned this same day with another 3,500 men from the 27th Division.

A few minutes ago on this rainy Sunday morning I hit send and submitted something that hopefully will appear in an online venue toward the end of the month. I suppose this will give away the topic, but in my research I found these incredible images we see of men from the 27th “New York” Division returning from France 100 years ago this week. Nearly 15,000 of O’Ryan’s Roughnecks returned aboard the Leviathan and Mauretania on March 6, 1919. I always found it extraordinary the way the men packed in to these huge ocean liners by the thousands like this for the voyage home. During the Second World War Dwight Eisenhower and other military officials gave the men the choice of coming home the way the doughboys had a generation earlier, or staggering the launches with more crossings and thus fewer men to make the passage more comfortable. The thing was, that also meant more time in getting everyone back. Eager to get home and move on with their lives, the dogfaces chose the former virtually to a person.

Men of the 27th Division aboard the Leviathan arrive in New York Harbor, March 6, 1919. Arrivals such as this, with ships crammed stem to stern with doughboys, were almost a daily occurrence in winter 1919.

The Leviathan pulls in to New York Harbor on March 6, 1919. Dockworkers returned from strike to ensure the Leviathan and Mauretania’s safe arrival in the city with the men of the 27th.

(bottom images/Library of Congress)

Madame Chiang-Kai-shek’s 1943 charm offensive

22 Friday Feb 2019

Posted by in Eleanor Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, George Washington's Mount Vernon, WW2

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Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt host Madame Chiang-Kai-shek at Mount Vernon on George Washington’s birthday, February 22, 1943. The worldly, charming, and politically shrewd wife of the leader of the Chinese Nationalists was on a good will tour of the United States, officially to gain support for the war effort against the Japanese but also, more surreptitiously, for the Nationalist struggle against Mao’s Communists.

Here is an extraordinary moment in twentieth century.  The image depicts Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt with Madame Chiang Kai-shek at George Washington’s tomb at Mount Vernon on February 22, 1943, seventy-six years ago today. As early as 1943–more than fifteen months before the invasion of Normandy, five months before the Allied offensive on Sicily, with North Africa hanging in the balance and the Japanese still largely in control of the Pacific–President Roosevelt was already thinking of what a post-Second World War world might look like. Roosevelt believed that China would become one of the world’s Great Powers in the years immediately after the war. This was not an unreasonably assumption; then and now China was the world’s most populous nation. That alone made that nation a potent force. Roosevelt had nonetheless convinced himself that he was something of a China expert, basing his belief on the Delano family’s ties to the country dating back nearly a century. His grandfather had been active in what was euphemistically called the China Trade, which in addition to legitimate business activity essentially meant the sale of opium.

Roosevelt’s naïveté led to some unfortunate policy choices but one might forgive the president for his views on China, whose internal and external politics were exceedingly complicated. For one thing the Japanese had committed human rights violations there on an unprecedented scale. The Rape of Nanking, human experiments, and the imposition of slave labor were just some of their depredations. It is no wonder that President Roosevelt extended Lend-Lease aid to China to the extent that he did. Complicating it all however was the internal struggle between Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists and Mao Zedong’s Communists. That was the real struggle playing out there. And that is the reason Madame Chiang Kai-shek visited the United States in early 1943. On February 18 she addressed a joint session of Congress, becoming the first Chinese person and first-ever woman ever to do so. Four days later this photo was taken on George Washington’s birthday at his Mount Vernon tomb, where she placed a wreath at Washington’s tomb.

Six years after this photo was taken Mao’s forces won the Civil War against Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists. Roosevelt by that time had been gone for almost five years. Chiang Kai-shek lived until 1975 and his widow lived to be 106. She died in New York City in 2003.

(image/Mount Vernon)

Sunday morning coffee

25 Sunday Nov 2018

Posted by in Franklin Delano Roosevelt, WW2

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The Blackwelder family observe Thanksgiving on the assembly line, circa 1942

I hope everyone’s Thanksgiving weekend was good. I was more tired than I knew. I slept until 7:20 am on Thanksgiving Day and until 9:30 am on Friday, which is unheard of for me. We had visions of going to the National Gallery of Art the day after Thanksgiving but decided to pass because of the cold. Yesterday I took the bus home. It left Arlington at 12:30 pm and we arrived in New York in a driving rain six hours later safe and sound. The bus drivers who work for the various lines along the Northeast Corridor do an extraordinary job. Unfortunately we saw a few accidents along the way.

When I arrived home I emptied my bag and took a hot shower. I was so keyed up that I stayed up reading and working until 1:30 am. I ordered some library books, explored up a few things in some databases, and moved a few files around. I also went online and bought a 2019 weekly planner, which will arrive Tuesday. I don’t want to go into the details just yet, but I have a strong sense of what my 2019 projects are going to be. I hope they come to fruition.

I thought I would share one more Thanksgiving-related image before putting this holiday in the books. The one above was taken during the Second World War, probably in 1942 although that is not certain. President Roosevelt had given his “Arsenal of Democracy” speech in December 1940 when the United States was still technically neutral. Here we see a father, mother, and daughter pausing for a quick Thanksgiving Day meal before supposedly heading back to their stations on the assembly line. I say “supposedly” because these do not look like workers on the line; they seem too clean and their clothes too well-pressed for that. The Office of War Information’s own Office for Emergency Management originally created the image, which could be a giveaway. Whatever its provenance, it is a striking photograph from a unique moment in our history.

Enjoy your Sunday.

(image/FDR Presidential Library)

The funeral of General Ted Roosevelt, July 14, 1944

14 Saturday Jul 2018

Posted by in Film, Sound, & Photography, Quentin Roosevelt, Theodore (Ted) Roosevelt, WW2

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General Theodore Roosevelt funeral, July 14, 1944

For reasons that I and others have discussed today, July 14 is an important date in Roosevelt family history. Less well-known than the fact that Quentin was killed in France on Bastille Day 1918 is that General Ted Roosevelt was buried on this day in 1944. General Theodore Roosevelt died of a heart attack in France on July 12, five weeks after landing on the beaches of Normandy. I would go more into the story of General Roosevelt’s burial but we already have the narrative as told by the photographer who took the images we see above and below. PFC Sidney Gutelewitz happened to have his camera on his person when he saw Omar Bradley, George Patton and at least four more (other article say at least eight more) generals marching solemnly in the funeral. As Gutelewitz tell it, he did not know it was the funeral of General Roosevelt for another decade. Thankfully the images survived. The photographer turned them over to the United States Army Center of Military History.

General Omar Bradley attends the funeral of General Theodore Roosevelt, July 14, 1944. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle said: “The funeral procession was awe-inspiring for its solemnity and military simplicity.”

One note: many articles discussing Mr. Gutelewitz and his photographs have the funeral as happening in July 13, 1944, To the best of my knowledge–and I researched it pretty closely to check the discrepency–that is almost certainly incorrect. All of the contemporary accounts I read and watched have the funeral as happening on the evening of July 14. It is a lesson in always checking these types of details and not taking them at face value. Apparently twenty-six images of the funeral exist. I have only seen 5-6 online. Maybe next year they will do more with this for the seventy-fifth anniversary of General Roosevelt’s death.

(images/US Army Pfc. Sidney Gutelewitz)

Re-lighting the lamps of civilization

08 Tuesday May 2018

Posted by in Franklin Delano Roosevelt, WW1, WW2

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Adrian Graves, Sir Edward Grey’s great-great nephew, at the Sir Edward Grey and the Outbreak of the First World War conference in London, 7 November 2014

British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey famously remarked on 3 August 1914 as Europe began going to war that the lamps were going out all over Europe and that “we shall not see them lit again in our life-time.” It sounds like a far-fetched thing to say, but Lord Grey was not far off. He died in September 1933, just after Hitler’s assumption of power in Germany began unraveling the tenuous peace that had existed for the previous fifteen years. I say all this because today, May 8, is the anniversary of V-E Day, the end of the Second World War in Europe.

Churchill waves to crowds in Whitehall on the day he broadcast to the nation that the war with Germany had been won, 8 May 1945

Edward Grey was just one of the many men who played a role in both wars, some of whom did and some of whom did not live to see the end of what amounted to Europe’s Second Thirty Year War. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Assistant Secretary of the Navy in the Wilson Administration and later the four-term president, died on 12 April 1945. Hitler, a young enlisted man in the trenches of France before taking over in the wake of the Versailles Treaty and unstable Weimar government, committed suicide on 30 April 1945 as the Soviets were tightening their grip on Berlin. Churchill was First Lord of the Admiralty in the Great War until forced out for his role in the calamitous Gallipoli Campaign. He had a way of returning to the center of things and in the image above we see him on 8 May 1945, 73 years ago today, as the prime minister, seeing the lights finally come back on after so many–tens of millions–of people had died.

(images/top, Foreign and Commonwealth Office; bottom, Imperial War Museum)

Vonnegut in winter

21 Sunday Jan 2018

Posted by in Kurt Vonnegut, Rod Serling, WW1, WW2

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February 2010 image of the slaughterhouse where, sixty-five Februaries previously, Kurt Vonnegut survived the Dresden firebombing

One of my undertakings for this winter is to re-read the Kurt Vonnegut catalog. Like many, I read Vonnegut extensively in high school and college but got away from him over the years, though I did return to Slaughterhouse Five from time to time. Vonnegut is one of those writers one can return to at different points in one’s life, reading him with fresh eyes from the changing perspectives of one’s age. I intend to read both the fiction and non-fiction. I will have to do a literature review before diving in fully, but I am considering some type of project in which I analyze the World Wars on Vonnegut’s family. I know that a fair amount has been done on Vonnegut but I think there are some threads left to untangle. If this happens, it will not be until summer or fall.

Vonnegut in uniform during the Second World War, circa 1943-45

Again it has been a while since I have read him, but I recall him discussing the effect that the anti-German hysteria had on his family in Indiana during the First World War. Vonnegut, born in 1922, was a young enlisted man during the Second World War and famously survived the February 1945 firebombing of Dresden Germany as a prisoner of war. That experience in turn was the basis of Slaughterhouse Five, usually considered his most important work. He often downplayed the role that his Second World War experiences played on his personal life, claiming that people often go through cataclysmic events with little to no impact on their own psyches. That may or may not be true. It is without question true that the Second World War played a huge role in his writings. His mother’s 1944 suicide was also a factor in his worldview.

Right now I am focusing on the early novels. I finished God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater on Friday and started Mother Night yesterday. I am struck by how little science fiction there is in these considering that he is usually put in the Sci Fi/Fantasy genre. Some of those devices, time travel, etc., would come in later works but I would hesitate to put him in that category. A second thing that strikes me on reading these novels today is that, when Vonnegut was writing them, the Second World War was more current events than history. I never saw it that way when I was reading them in the 1970s & 80s because to my perspective the Second World War was already part of Ancient History. My sense and perspective on time has changed entirely now that I am in full blown middle age. So it goes.

If I indeed pursue some type of project on Vonnegut, perhaps a series of articles here on the Strawfoot, I may try to tie it in with Rod Serling. Perhaps it might be a compare and contrast of the two men and how they were influenced by their experiences in the Second World War. In some ways these are still current events: it is striking to see how the problems created by the events of the twentieth century are touching the world we live in today.

(images/top, Keith Gard; bottom United States Army)

Happy Thanksgiving

23 Thursday Nov 2017

Posted by in WW2

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Lt. Colonel William W. Stickney cuts the Thanksgiving cake with a Japanese sword on Guadalcanal seventy-five years ago this week. Stickney served in the Navy during World War 1. Between the wars he received his law degree. Stickney joined the Marines during World War 2 and was promoted to lieutenant colonel, commanding the 2nd Battalion, 1st Regiment, 1st Marine Division–The Old Breed–during the fighting on Guadalcanal. After the war he served several stints in the Marine Corps Reserves and eventually became a major general.

New York Times, 27 November 1942. I would love to know how this turned out. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

(images/top, USMC Archives; bottom, NYT)