The world applauds the scientists who have created vaccines to deliver humanity from Covid-19. One certainty about our future: There will be no funding shortfall for medical research into pandemics.
Now, notice a contradiction. War is also a curse, responsible for untold deaths. Humans should do everything possible to mitigate it. And even if scientists cannot promise a vaccine, the obvious place to start working against future conflicts is by researching the causes and courses of past ones.
Yet in centers of learning across North America, the study of the past in general, and of wars in particular, is in spectacular eclipse. History now accounts for a smaller share of undergraduate degrees than at any time since 1950. Whereas in 1970, 6% of American male and 5% of female students were history majors, the respective percentages are now less than 2% and less than 1%, respectively.
Fredrik Logevall, a distinguished Harvard historian and author of seminal works on Vietnam, along with a new biography of John F. Kennedy, remarked to me on the strangeness of this, given that the US is overwhelmingly the most powerful, biggest-spending military nation on earth. “How this came to be and what it has meant for America and the world is surely of surpassing historical importance,” he said. “Yet it’s not at the forefront of research among academic historians in this country.”
The revulsion from war history may derive not so much from students’ unwillingness to explore the violent past, but from academics’ reluctance to teach, or even allow their universities to host, such courses. Some dub the subject “warnography,” and the aversion can extend to the study of international relations. Less than half of all history departments now employ a diplomatic historian, against 85% in 1975. As for war, as elderly scholars retire from posts in which they have studied it, many are not replaced: the roles are redefined.
An eminent historian recently told me of a young man majoring in science at Harvard who wanted to take humanities on history, including the US Civil War. He was offered only one course — which addressed the history of humans and their pets.
Paul Kennedy of Yale, author of one of the best-selling history books of all time, “The Rise and Fall of The Great Powers,” is among many historians who deplore what is, or rather is not, going on. He observed to me that while some public universities, such as Ohio State and Kansas State, have strong program in the history of war, “It’s in the elite universities that the subject has gone.”
“Can you imagine Chicago, or Berkeley, or Princeton having War Studies departments?” he asked. “Military history is the most noxious of the ‘dead white male’ subjects, and there’s also a great falling away in the teaching of diplomatic, colonial and European political history.”
Kennedy notes that war studies are highly popular with students, alumni and donors, “but the sticking point is with the faculty — where perhaps only a small group are openly hostile, but a larger group don’t think the area is important enough.”
Harvard offers few history courses that principally address the great wars of modern times. Many faculties are prioritizing such subjects as culture, race and ethnicity. Margaret Macmillan, of the University of Toronto and Oxford, observes that war is one of the great cataclysmic events, alongside revolution, famine and financial collapse, that can change history.
As the author of the bestseller “Peacemakers,” an epochal study of the 1919 Versailles conference, she has written about the decline in university courses on conflict: “Our horror at the phenomenon itself has affected the willingness to treat it as a serious subject for scholarship. An interest in war is somehow conflated with approval for it.”
Mindless mudslingers have attacked her as a war-lover for making the observation — commonplace among scholars of the subject — that conflicts can bring scientific or social benefits to mankind.
Tami Davis Biddle, a professor at the US Army War College, has written, “Unfortunately, many in the academic community assume that military history is simply about powerful men — mainly white men —fighting each other and/or oppressing vulnerable groups.”
Universities excuse themselves for shunning history by citing the need to address contemporary subjects such as as emotions, food and climate change. Some also urge that students believe they can better serve their own interests — and justify tuition costs — by choosing vocational majors that will enhance their employability. Yet Logevall’s Vietnam is one of the most popular history courses at Harvard.
History sells prodigiously in the world’s bookstores. I have produced a dozen works about conflict, and my harshest critic would struggle to claim that these reflect an enthusiasm for it. I often quote a Norwegian World War II Resistance hero, who wrote in 1948, “Although wars bring adventures that stir the heart, the true nature of war is composed of innumerable personal tragedies and sacrifices, wholly evil and not redeemed by glory.”
Those words do not represent an argument for pacifism. Our societies must be willing, when necessary, to defend themselves in arms. But our respective presidents and prime ministers might less readily adopt kinetic solutions — start shooting — if they possessed a better understanding of the implications.
Before resorting to force, governments, as well as military commanders, should always ask: “What are our objectives? And are they attainable?” Again and again — in recent memory, in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya — those questions were neither properly asked nor answered, with consequences we know. Governments succumb to what I call gesture strategy.
Part of the trouble lies with the military, sometimes over-eager to demonstrate “the utility of force,” or rather, to justify their stupendous budgets. More often, however, blame lies with politicians ignorant of the difficulties of leveraging F-35s, cruise missiles, drone aircraft and combat infantry to produce a desired political outcome.
It is extraordinary that so many major US universities renounce, for instance, study of the Indochina experience, which might assist a new generation not to do it again. Marine General Walt Boomer, a distinguished Vietnam vet, said to me five years ago, when I was researching that war: “It bothers me that we didn’t learn a lot. If we had, we wouldn’t have invaded Iraq.”
Biddle has written: “The US military does not send itself to war. Choices about war and peace are made by civilians — civilians who, increasingly, have no historical or analytical frameworks to guide them. They know little or nothing about the requirements of the Just War tradition … the logistical, geographical and physical demands of modern military operations.”
North America’s great universities should be ashamed of their pusillanimity. War is no more likely to quit our planet than are pandemics. The academics who spurn its study are playing ostriches. Their heads look no more elegant, buried in the sand.
On December 7, 1941, a Japanese Zero crash-landed on a remote island in the Hawaiian chain. The resulting conflict brought out both the best and worst in the islanders.
Elizabeth McHutcheson was a hearty woman of Scottish descent cursed with a terminal case of wanderlust. She married a ship’s captain named Francis Sinclair and eventually produced six children. Elizabeth moved her family to New Zealand and established a farm. However, her husband and eldest son were later lost at sea along with most of the family’s possessions.
Elizabeth Sinclair was a legendarily tough woman.
Down but not out, Elizabeth relocated to Canada and then Hawaii with the remains of her family. Once settled in she bought the Hawaiian island of Ni’ihau for $10,000. Ten grand was an astronomical sum in 1864, but it turned out to be a fairly prescient investment.
Ni’ihau is the 7th largest of the Hawaiian islands. Elizabeth Sinclair bought the island in 1864 for $10,000. I’d give at least twice that for the place today.
Ni’ihau is the furthest West and second smallest of the primary Hawaiian Islands. Ownership of the island passed down through the family until 1941 when Elizabeth’s great-grandson Aylmer Robinson maintained possession. Aylmer was a Harvard graduate who spoke fluent Hawaiian. He was a benevolent landlord who lived on nearby Kaua’i. His island was accessible by permission only which was seldom granted. Robinson made weekly visits by boat to check on the native islanders who held him in high esteem.
This photo was taken on Ni’ihau in the late 19th century. The modest population of the island remains a repository of traditional Hawaiian language and culture even today.
In 1941 one hundred thirty-six native islanders called Ni’ihau home. Among them were three individuals with Japanese ancestry. Aylmer Robinson administered his idyllic little kingdom free from government interference.
The small island of Ni’ihau was an integral part of the Pearl Harbor attack plan.
In the buildup to the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese naval planners mistakenly assessed Ni’ihau as uninhabited. As a result, they briefed their aviators to divert to Ni’ihau in the event of battle damage preventing return to the carriers. The plan was for downed aircrew to survive on the island until they could be retrieved via submarine.
The Plot Thickens
Petty Officer Shigenori Nishikaichi was an elite Japanese Navy fighter pilot and an ideological zealot.
On the morning of December 7, 1941, Airman First Class Shigenori Nishikaichi launched his A6M2 Zero fighter B11-120 from the carrier Hiryu as part of the second wave. Unlike the first attack that achieved complete tactical and strategic surprise, the second element flew into a hornet’s nest. American fighter resistance was negligible, but the warships anchored at Pearl bristled with antiaircraft guns. .50-caliber, 20mm, 40mm, and 5-inch antiaircraft weapons filled the sky with steel.
Nishikaichi launched that morning from the Japanese aircraft carrier Hiryu. The Hiryu was later lost at the Battle of Midway.
Nishikaichi’s Zero was badly damaged during a strafing run on Wheeler Field and limped away trailing smoke. Realizing that there was no way his nimble Zero was going to make it home, Nishikaichi diverted for Ni’ihau. Crash-landing his crippled fighter in a field near a local named Hawila Kaleohano, Nishikaichi was briefly dazed but otherwise unhurt.
The Chemical Formula for Awkward
Nishikaichi’s Zero crash-landed relatively intact and became an immediate spectacle.
The arrival of Nishikaichi’s Zero was the biggest event on Ni’ihau in collective memory, and the islanders all came out to gawk. They knew that the relationship between the United States and the Empire of Japan was strained. However, the Hawaiians are a naturally friendly people. Hawila Kaleohano relieved the young aviator of his handgun and personal documents, and the rest of the islanders threw the lad a party.
The maps and mission documents that Petty Officer Nishikaichi had in his plane were considered classified and extremely sensitive.
Only the three islanders with a Japanese nexus spoke Japanese, and the rest of the Ni’ihau inhabitants were unable to communicate with their new guest. For ease of explanation we will refer to these three individuals by their first names—Ishimatsu, Yoshio, and Irene. However, the Japanese pilot was becoming ever more agitated about the loss of his maps, weapon, and mission directives.
The unannounced arrival of a Japanese military pilot transformed the pastoral island of Ni’ihau into a war zone.
The island’s residents caught a report of the attack on a battery-powered radio and confronted the Japanese pilot. Their intent was to send him back with Mr. Robinson when he arrived on his next scheduled visit. Their guest now effectively became their prisoner.
Not unlike the ban on aviation after 911, the military placed a moratorium on boat travel in the immediate aftermath of the Pearl Harbor attack.
Aylmer Robinson failed to arrive on his appointed day, and this unsettled the islanders. Robinson was typically quite punctual. However, the military had banned boat traffic, so Ni’ihau was effectively isolated.
The now captive Japanese airman was held in the home of two of the only three people on the island who spoke his language.
Petty Officer Nishikaichi was remanded to the home of Yoshio and Irene, two of the islanders with Japanese connections, to be overseen by four volunteer guards. Unbeknownst to the rest of the island’s inhabitants, Yoshio and his wife were re-evaluating their loyalties. All the while the pilot’s classified documents remained in the possession of Hawila Kaleohano, the man who had originally encountered the pilot.
A Cold War Goes Hot
Irene Harada covered the sounds of the fight by cranking up her phonograph.
These people were not soldiers, and three of the four guards eventually wandered off. Seeing their opportunity Irene turned her phonograph up to cover the sounds of the ensuing struggle, while her husband and the pilot attacked the remaining guard. In short order the two had the man secured in a warehouse and had retrieved Nishikaichi’s pistol as well as a shotgun.
Hawila Kaleohano was fortuitously in the midst of his morning constitutional when the Japanese pilot and his co-conspirator approached.
The two men then proceeded to Kaleohano’s home in search of the attack plans. They arrived during the man’s quality time, so he was serendipitously hidden unseen in his outhouse. When the moment was right Kaleohano fled the privy and ran for his life, shotgun blasts chasing him down the trail. Thusly alerted the islanders retreated to caves, thickets, and distant beaches, unable to believe that these people with whom they had shared the island were now actively firing upon their friend and neighbor.
After harvesting a machinegun from the downed fighter plane the pilot set it ablaze. This is a shot of the plane after the fire burned itself out.
The pilot and his compatriot then stripped a 7.7mm machinegun and ammo from the plane, unsuccessfully attempted to use the radio to contact the Japanese fleet, and set the Zero alight. They then went to Kaleohano’s home and burned it to the ground in a further effort to destroy Nishikaichi’s classified documents.
It Gets Worse…
Petty Officer Nishikaichi was still rabid to retrieve his tactical maps and notes. At this point, he was growing quite desperate.
Kaleohano, his home conflagrated, kept the Japanese military documents in his possession and took to a boat to row to the nearest nearby island. Not realizing he was gone, Nishikaichi and Toshio press-ganged a local couple named Ben Kanahale and his wife Ella into the hunt for Kaleohano. The pair took Ella hostage to motivate her husband to stay on task.
Japanese aviators typically carried a sidearm with them on combat missions. Nishikaichi now decided it was time to use his.
Ben wasted a little time pretended to search and returned to check on his wife. When Nishikaichi realized he was being deceived he pulled his pistol and threatened to kill everyone in the village. At this provocation Ben Kanahale went full Chuck Norris on the man.
The Gun
The Type 14 was a serviceable if underpowered combat handgun for its era.The Type 94 was likely the worst combat pistol ever contrived by mankind. Pressure on the sear bar shown in the middle of the gun will cause it to fire independent of the trigger.The Type 26 revolver was an exquisitely well-executed piece of crap. The cylinder spins freely, so you can never be completely sure there will be a live round underneath the hammer.
For reasons you will find out momentarily, the exact model of the handgun has been lost to history. However, the three most likely candidates are the 8mm Type 14 or Type 94 autoloaders or the Type 26 revolver. Balance of probability suggests that at the beginning of the war in the hands of an elite Japanese Naval Aviator his handgun was likely a Type 14 Nambu.
This Glisenti Model 1910 likely served as inspiration for the Type 14 Nambu.
The Type 14 is a recoil-operated, locked-breech, semiautomatic handgun whose original mechanism dates back to the late 19th century. LTG Kijiro Nambu designed the weapon along with an array of other Japanese military arms. The locked-breech mechanism favors and was likely inspired by that of the Glisenti Model 1910.
The bottlenecked 8mm Nambu round is a nifty looking thing, but it remains a bit underpowered for serious social work.
The Type 14 debuted in 1925 and fires the relatively anemic bottlenecked 8x22mm round common to all Japanese wartime autoloading handguns. Considerably less powerful than the 7.62x25mm, 9mm Parabellum, and .45ACP rounds used by other combatant nations, the 8mm Nambu was marginal at best. The Type 14 fed from an 8-round box magazine, sported a 4.6-inch barrel and weighed about 2 pounds. About 400,000 copies were produced.
Bill Ruger reverse-engineered the Type 14 Nambu to become the familiar Ruger Mk I .22 pistol.
Japanese officers were expected to buy their own handguns, and the Type 14 was a popular souvenir of combat in the Pacific. As the war progressed and B29 attacks strangled the home islands the quality of these weapons declined precipitously. Bill Ruger bought a Type 14 from a returning Marine in 1945 and used it as a basis for his Ruger Standard pistol that eventually morphed into the Mk I, II, III, and IV .22 handguns so common today.
The Climax
Always bring enough gun. It turned out Nishikaichi’s Type 14 Nambu wasn’t quite up to the task.
Seeing an opportunity, Ben Kanahele and his wife Ella jumped the distracted Japanese pilot and his turncoat buddy. Ella grabbed his gun arm, but Yoshio Hamada peeled her off. Nishikaichi then shot Ben three times, striking him in the upper leg, groin, and abdomen. This turned out to be a grave mistake.
Chuck Norris has got nothing on Ben and Ella Kanahele. When the moment was right they got absolutely medieval on Japanese Petty Officer Shigenori Nishikaichi.
Kanahele was a sheep farmer and a powerful man. Despite his grievous injuries he took hold of the Japanese pilot, lifted him bodily, and threw him headlong into a stone wall. Ben and Ella then fell upon the dazed Japanese aviator with a vengeance. Ella smashed his head with a rock, and Ben cut the man’s throat with his hunting knife. Overcome by events, Nishikaichi’s ally Yoshio shot himself in the head with the shotgun.
Petty Officer Nishikaichi’s Type 14 is still buried out on that island someplace.
Ella Kanahele snatched up the shotgun and pistol and ran for help. Along the way she inadvertently dropped the weapons. The pistol was never recovered, but the shotgun washed up in a flood some five years later.
This is all that remains of Nishikaichi’s Zero today. It is currently on display at the Pacific Aviation Museum at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii.
Yoshio’s widow spent the next 31 months in prison and was released in June of 1944 despite never being formally charged with a crime. Ben Kanahele was evacuated to a nearby island with a hospital and ultimately recovered, being awarded the Medal for Merit and Purple Heart for killing the Japanese pilot in close combat. The remains of Nishikaichi’s Zero are on display at the Pacific Aviation Museum at Pearl Harbor today.
On the very first day of American involvement in World War 2, a tragic little conflict played out on an otherwise peaceful remote island in Hawaii.
This .303 British Royal Grade Holland & Holland single-shot, serial No. 26069, was used by the Irish Guards as a sniping rifle during World War I. It is shown here with period trench maps, a German stick grenade, British binoculars and some German 8 mm Mauser cartridges.
Photo by Jonathan Green
It was London, it was September, it was raining.
Outside the Brigade of Guards Museum, near Buckingham Palace, the statue of Field Marshal Earl Alexander of Tunis stands 15′ high—a tribute to Britain’s greatest field commander of the 20th century. His trademark sheepskin is faithfully reproduced in a half-ton of bronze, and even here he manages to wear it like a dinner jacket. England’s greatest combat soldier was also known as the best-dressed man in the regiment.
As the rain pelted harder, plastering the brown beech leaves to the paving stones and forming tiny waterfalls in the creases of the jacket, Alexander—or “Alex,” as he was known to all—took no notice. He kept his eye fixed firmly on the entrance to the museum, and suddenly that seemed like a heck of a good idea as the sky opened up and the cold rain came down in sheets.
The Guards regiments are among Britain’s most famous icons. They are the soldiers in red tunics and black bearskins who mount the guard on Buckingham Palace, among other places. What is less well-known is that they are also elite soldiers who have fought the king’s wars around the world for centuries. The oldest regiment is the Scots Guards, followed by the Grenadiers and the Coldstreams. The Irish Guards—Alexander’s regiment—and the Welsh are the youngest.
Inside the museum, one tableau after another depicts their exploits at Waterloo, Dunkirk, South Africa, Flanders. The displays, colorful at first, turn slowly sodden and muddy as all the gentility was wrung out of warfare, and red tunics were replaced by khaki (in South Africa) and brown service dress in the mud of Flanders. The display from the First World War includes bits of webbing, barbed wire, grenades, a bayonet. The stuff looks muddy even when it isn’t.
There is also a rifle. Not a Lee-Enfield, No. 1 Mk III, as might be expected, but a classic single-shot, break-action rifle of the type favored, before the war, for stalking stag in Scotland. It is of obviously fine pedigree, but has seen much hard use. The bluing is worn to a silver sheen and the stock is scratched and battered.
If you crouch down and peer closely, with the light exactly right, you can still read on the receiver “Holland & Holland.” It is an aristocrat among firearms, a “gentleman’s rifle”—a Royal Grade single-shot stocked in English walnut and finely checkered. At one time, the receiver displayed graceful engraving, although it is now worn almost completely away. Four years of trench warfare will do that.
The story of how H&H rifle No. 26069 journeyed from the Bruton Street showroom to the Guards Museum is really one of convergence of the great names in pre-war England, in the military, in literature and in gunmaking. It involves Harold Alexander, Britain’s greatest soldier of the 20th century, and Field Marshall Lord Roberts, one of its greatest of the 19th; it involves Rudyard Kipling, Poet Laureate of the Empire and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature; and of course Holland & Holland, England’s greatest riflemaker.
The story begins with Lord Roberts in South Africa, fighting the Afrikaners in Britain’s first, and one of its bloodiest, military campaigns of the 20th century. There, Roberts renewed his acquaintance with Rudyard Kipling, an old friend from India.
Roberts was an Ulsterman, a gentleman of Anglo-Irish descent. For reasons no one has adequately explained, Ulster (Northern Ireland) has produced a disproportionate number of great British generals. The Duke of Wellington was an Ulsterman, as was Montgomery, among many others. In the South African campaign, the army’s Irish regiments performed spectacularly. To recognize their contribution, Queen Victoria ordered—on Roberts’ advice—the formation of a regiment of Irish Guards to join the Scots, Grenadiers and Coldstreams.
When he heard the news, Harold Alexander (also from Ulster) was 9 years old. He immediately decided that his future would lie with the Irish Guards. The son of the Earl of Caledon, he attended school at Harrow, went on to the military academy at Sandhurst, and joined his new regiment in London in 1911. He was a 22-year-old first lieutenant when the war broke out in 1914.
One of his fellow officers was the Earl of Kingston, and they shipped off to France together. In the Earl’s kit was the H&H rifle. It came to be there in a rather convoluted way.
As war in Europe approached, many Germans made last-minute visits to London to order rifles from the English gunmakers. One ordered a stalking rifle, and even provided a fine Voigtlander scope to be mounted on it. Ordered in 1913, it was barely finished when the Germans marched into Belgium. H&H could not ship a rifle to an enemy country, so the firm re-barreled the rifle to .303 British and fitted it out as a sniper rifle. A member of Parliament, Colonel Hall Walker, bought it and passed it on to Lieutenant the Earl of Kingston of the Irish Guards.
Recruit No. 26069 was in the quartermaster’s stores when the regiment went into action for the first time and was still there, amid the chaos of retreat, advance and retreat, before the war settled down to the hell of the trenches. By that time, the Earl of Kingston had been wounded and invalided back to England. Alexander fought with the regiment through the Retreat to Mons, was wounded in the First Battle of Ypres and returned home to convalesce. What happened then can be pieced together from scraps of information that have survived.
From the hospital, Kingston wrote to the commander of the battalion, Jack Trefusis, inquiring about his rifle. On January 6, 1915, Trefusis replied:
“My dear K.
It has been in QM Stores for ever so long and I have only just this moment heard of it. It was a thing we have wanted badly for a long time, and if we had only known of it in the last trenches we were in I have no doubt we should have accounted for a platoon of Germans. However we go back into the trenches on Friday and the rifle will be put into the most skillful hands I can find and a careful account of the bag that is made with it which I will report to you occasionally … .”
The war was then barely four months old and Trefusis’s last paragraph is chilling:
“There is no officer here who was here with you except myself and Antrobus, and very few men. Poor Eric Gough was the last and he was killed last week.
“P.S.: I see I have never actually thanked you for letting us have the rifle, but I do enormously, it will put us on a more equal footing with those damned snipers, who are just as bad here as ever they were.”
Photos courtesy of Holland & Holland
As a military art form, sniping goes back several centuries, but it really flowered during the American Civil War. Not by coincidence, this was the first large-scale conflict in which trenches were used; trenches and snipers go together like coffee and cream. In the case of the British Army, through the late 19th century it fought mostly wars of movement until encountering the Boers in South Africa in 1899. Sniping was not a major factor, and while the British Army underwent a drastic reformation as a result, and became the best army of its size in the world, it still paid scant attention to sniping as it went to war in 1914.
Not so the Germans. When the German Army invaded Belgium, it had an estimated 20,000 sniping units ready to go. The Mauser Model 98 made an ideal sniper rifle; as well, when hostilities began the Germans collected thousands more accurate sporting rifles and sent them to the front. The British had but a handful of trained snipers, and few rifles with which to snipe. The German Army very quickly dominated “No Man’s Land” and the forward British trench lines. Trefusis’s rueful letter to the Earl of Kingston gives an idea of the havoc wrought by the German snipers.
When H&H rifle No. 26069 went into service with the Irish Guards and began to take its toll on the Germans, the call went out for more of the same. The War Office in London turned to H&H and the other fine rifle makers with orders for sniper rifles.
At the time, British gunmakers made three types of rifle: doubles, single-shots and bolt-actions. The doubles were mostly big-game rifles for Africa and India; bolt-actions went to the colonies, while single-shots—both break-action and falling block—were the classic stalking rifles for stag in the Scottish Highlands. As such, they were built to be accurate. Since the supply of Oberndorf Mauser actions had dried up for the British, they naturally built their sniping rifles to patterns like No. 26069.
This pre-World War I scope from a Holland & Holland catalog is of German origin. Riflescopes were a problem for the British early in the war, and No. 26069 bears a German Voigtlander supplied by the German customer who ordered the rifle.
A major problem was the supply of telescopic sights, and here the Germans, with their advanced optics industry, had a huge advantage. The War Office went so far as to try to smuggle scopes out of Germany by various underhanded means, but without notable success. This remained a problem until 1916, when British companies, like Aldis (of rangefinder fame), became capable of supplying telescopic sights in reasonable quantities. Until then, the gunmakers made do with whatever they had in inventory or obtained from civilian sportsmen.
The work went slowly at first, and by July 1915, H&H had fitted out only 10 more sniper rifles. Gradually, however, the pace picked up.
Another problem facing troops on the Western Front was the fact that German snipers concealed themselves behind pieces of armor plate. Early in the war there was little in the way of armor-piercing ammunition for standard rifles, and, again, the War Office turned to the London gunmakers. Figuring that any gun that could handle a Cape buffalo would punch through armor plate, Holland’s and the others shipped over 2,000 so-called “elephant guns.” These were a mixed blessing. While they demolished the armor well enough, the loud report combined with the smoke and belching flame revealed the shooter’s position to the enemy and brought down a rain of return fire.
Meanwhile, as H&H et al worked behind the scenes, rifle No. 26069 slogged on, killing Germans. Two weeks after his first letter to the Earl of Kingston, Jack Trefusis wrote again:
“The rifle has been an immense success and every Commander from C-in-C downwards has sent down to ask me about it, with the result that two are to be issued to each battalion.
“The sergeant major uses it and the score of Germans is for certain four killed and eight wounded in three days use … . Those who were killed or wounded were fired at from a range of 800 yards. So it has been a great success.”
In March 1915, recovered from his wound, Lt. Alexander was promoted to captain, helped to form a second battalion of Irish Guards and returned to France commanding its No. 1 company. One of his officers was a subaltern named John Kipling.
Lt. Kipling was Rudyard’s son. Denied a commission because of his poor eyesight, the novelist appealed to his old friend Lord Roberts, who was now Colonel of the Regiment of the Irish Guards. Roberts’ influence was still immense, and he obtained a commission for the boy. Within a month, the battalion went into action at the Battle of Loos, where 800,000 men were ordered to breach a German position after a four-day bombardment by 1,000 guns. Five days and 45,000 casualties later, the attack was called off.
The unit that penetrated deepest into German territory was No. 1 Company of the 2nd Irish Guards under Captain Harold Alexander. When they withdrew, they left the body of Lt. John Kipling, shot through the head. He was one of 10,000 British soldiers whose bodies were never recovered from the all-swallowing mud of that battlefield.
In deep sorrow, and as a memorial for his son, Rudyard Kipling, Britain’s foremost author, agreed to write the official history of the regiment, The Irish Guards in the Great War, and the “telescope rifle” found its way into literature:
“Casualties from small-arm fire had been increasing owing to the sodden state of the parapets; but the Battalion retaliated a little from one ‘telescopic-sighted rifle’ sent up by Lieutenant the Earl of Kingston, with which Drill-Sergeant Bracken ‘certainly’ accounted for three killed and four wounded of the enemy. The Diary, mercifully blind to the dreadful years to come, thinks, ‘There should be many of these rifles used as long as the army is sitting in the trenches.’ Many of them were so used: this, the father of them all, now hangs in the Regimental Mess.”
Alexander and the Irish Guards also saw action at the Somme and Passchendaele, Cambrai, the retreat from Arras and, finally, Hazebrouk. In this battle, Alexander commanded the second battalion and helped save the channel ports from German attack, but the battalion was annihilated as a fighting force.
Rifle No. 26069 soldiered on with the 1st Battalion, accounting for who knows how many German soldiers. It helped win the sniping war, and the men of the Irish Guards came to love the trim little “gentleman’s rifle” because it saved so many of their lives. In 1918, it was retired from active service and given a place of honor in the regimental officers’ mess before being turned over to the Guards Museum.
There, it became part of a permanent display depicting the valor and the unspeakable horror of the war on the Western Front. And there it was, that rainy morning in September, when I took refuge from the London weather by ducking into the museum. When I emerged after a couple of hours, the weather had cleared and it was breezy and cool. Alexander’s statue, so stern in the rain, now appeared to be smiling in the sunshine.
During the Second World War, when he rose to the rank of field marshall and commanded the Allied advance up through Italy, Alex was always cheerful, always a gentleman, no matter how bad things became. When you have men like George Patton under your command, I expect good humor is invaluable. The plaque on the statue describes him as Britain’s finest battle commander of that war. Montgomery would have disagreed, but Alexander would have smiled and shrugged. His tombstone reads merely “Alex”; longer names are for lesser men.
I strolled along Bird Cage Walk, through St. James’s Park and up toward Mayfair. It is a pleasant walk up to Berkeley Square and 31-33 Bruton Street, home of Holland & Holland. The former director of the firm, David Winks, was waiting for me on an upper floor where the company’s own collection of classic guns resides.
Winks was in charge when the curator of the Guards Museum approached H&H in 1992 and asked them if they would take rifle No. 26069, much battered by the war and deteriorated after 75 years of benign neglect, and return it to its former glory.
David Winks agreed to clean it up but flatly refused to return it to pristine condition, although it could easily have been done.
“Those are honorable scars, honorably earned,” Winks told me.
In the late 1880s, the lives of settlers on the Cumberland Plateau of Tennessee had changed little since before the Revolution. Lofty mountains, bridgeless streams, and unpaved roads had isolated the mountain folk from the affairs of the outside world for over a century. Their education and smarts came not from books and “larning,” but from their intimate knowledge of the rugged outdoors. Fiercely independent and self-reliant, they made do with whatever nature and the good Lord provided.
Alvin Cullum York was brought up in these backwoods, where hard work on the homestead made for robust constitutions and where stealth and expert marksmanship in the wilderness were vital for fetching wild game for food sport.
Born on December 13, 1887, Alvin and his ten siblings were raised in a two-room log cabin in Pall Mall, Tennessee, within spitting distance of the Kentucky state line.1 There, in the sun-drenched valley of Three Forks of the Wolf River, the Yorks tended to their seventy-five-acre farm, “part level and part hilly,” where they grew corn and raised chickens, hogs and a few cows for their subsistence.2 To make ends meet, his father, William, worked as a blacksmith, setting up shop in a mountain cave near their home. His mother, Mary, would do chores at neighbor’s homes, sometimes accepting old clothes as payment, which she would mend and alter for the children.3
York family log cabin. From Cowan, Sergeant York and his People, 33.Valley of the Three Forks O’ the Wolf. From Cowan, Sergeant York and his People, 89.
Schools in the remote mountain regions were scarce and poorly funded, not that it mattered much for the older children had to help harvest the crops as a matter of priority. In the winter, keeping school open was impractical as many of the children had to travel long distances and lacked warm clothes and proper shoes. The one-room schoolhouse in Pall Mall was open for only 2 ½ summer months a year; Alvin attended three weeks a year for five years, receiving the equivalent of a second-grade education.4
Alvin picked up hunting skills from his father and his grit from stories of “fightin’ men” like Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, and Andrew Jackson. For Alvin, hunting was not just a skill but an art. A man had to become intimately acquainted with his rifle’s parts, meticulous with its care, and familiar with its “temperament,” whether its fire would lean left or right or if the sun or the wind, dry or damp days would affect its performance. As an experienced hunter, Alvin could read and interpret signs left by wild animals, blend into the woodlands, and remain motionless while stalking his prey. At local shooting matches, with his old muzzle-loading “hog rifle,” he “could bust a turkey’s head at most any distance” and “knock off a lizard’s or a squirrel’s head from that far off that you could scarcely see it.”5
When his father died in 1911, York went “hog wild,” cussing and gambling and drinking moonshine, the latter often in challenges where the winner was the last man standing. He found himself in trouble with the law on more than one occasion.6 Although he never shunned his responsibilities at home, his sinful ways caused his ma many a sleepless night in prayer. In her quiet manner, she begged her son to change. As a Christian woman, she knew that his sins were wasting his life and destroying his chances for salvation. As a mother, she feared for his personal safety each time he went past the front gate.
Alvin, now twenty-seven years old, began to assess his life and often went into the mountains to pray and ask God to help him fight his demons. He started attending the Wolf River Church where a saddlebag preacher’s sermons further enlightened Alvin to a life of righteousness. His growing fondness for Gracie, a local beauty thirteen years his junior and devout Christian, boosted his motivation to change. 7 On January 1, 1915, York swore off his vices and joined the Church of Christ in Christian Union. A fundamentalist sect, it opposed all forms of violence and advocated a strong pacifist philosophy which York adopted. 8 Now a devout Christian, his new-found beliefs were about to be tested.
Hints of War
On April 6, 1917, the United States of America formally declared war on the German Empire when German U-boats attacked U.S. ships in the Atlantic. Word got around Pall Mall about the escalating war, but little was understood about its causes, our involvement, or its objectives. “I knowed big nations were fighting, but I didn’t know for sure how many and which ones…I had no time nohow to bother much about a lot of foreigners quarreling and killing each other over there in Europe.”9
On May 18, the U.S. government enacted a law requiring that all able-bodied men between the ages of twenty-one to thirty-one register for the draft. York reluctantly registered on June 5 but attempted to gain status as a conscientious objector. Three separate requests for exemption from selective service, including one from his pastor and mentor, Rosier Pile, were summarily denied by the local and district boards. Their reasoning was that the church had “no especial [sic] creed except the Bible, which its members interpret for themselves…”10
Fentress County recruits, November 15, 1917. Alvin York is fourth from left.
From Hogue, History of Fentress County, xiii.
Throughout his time at Camp Gordon, York was deeply torn between the pacifist teachings of his church and a moral obligation to serve his country. He received counseling from his superiors, Captain Edward Danforth and Major Gonzalo Edward Buxton.11 They managed to convince York to reconsider his role in the Army by referencing chapters from the Bible regarding war and sacrifice. After spending a few days home while on leave, the young private returned to camp, convinced that serving his country was God’s will.12
York was assigned to Company G, 2nd Battalion, 328th Infantry, 82nd “All American” Division on February 1, 1918, and trained at Camp Gordon in Chamblee, Georgia, just northeast of Atlanta. Not surprisingly, he qualified as a sharpshooter when he was able to hit eight out of ten moving targets at 600 yards.13
Over There
The 328th Infantry shipped out from New York and arrived in Liverpool, England, on May 16, 1918, then moved on to Southampton, England, and Le Havre, France, where they landed on May 21, 1918. At Le Havre, their U.S. model of 1917 .30 cal. rifles were exchanged for British Mark III Lee-Enfield rifles, but they were able to keep their 1911 Colt .45 pistols.14 One month later, an assumption that the 82nd Division would be attached to British troops in the region of Picardy was overturned, and the 82nd was instead ordered to Toul. With that, the Lee-Enfield rifles, along with other armaments, were returned to the British and the U.S. model of 1917 Enfield bolt-action rifles were reissued.15
U.S. rifle cal .30, model of 1917 Enfield most likely used by Alvin York. Manufacturer: Eddystone.
Courtesy Missouri Historical Society.
By then, the war along the Western Front had become a bloody stalemate with heavy fighting along a series of trenches stretching from the English Channel to the Swiss Alps. Reinforced by the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF), the Allies went on the offensive trying to break through German defenses in northern France.
From Le Havre, the 82nd Division traveled east by train and on foot, past idyllic small towns and serene countrysides, a cruel paradox of what was to come. On June 26 near Rambucourt, York heard the first sounds of gunfire “jes like the thunder in the hills at home.” At Mont Sec, bullets whizzed past “like a lot of mad hornets or bumblebees when you rob their nests.” Here he was placed in charge of an automatic weapons squad and shot French Chauchat machine guns, which he described as being heavy, clumsy, inaccurate, and noisy. “They weren’t near as good as the sawed-off shotguns,” he’d say.16 In September, York was promoted to corporal just before his regiment seized the town of Norroy.17
In the Valley of Death
1st Division Meuse-Argonne Offensive map compiled by American Battle
Monuments Commission, 1937. Click map to enlarge.
On October 7, 1918, the 1st Battalion, 328th Infantry was ordered to take Hill 223, a strategic position just three kilometers southeast of their main objective: the Decauville rail line. This mission came during a critical phase of the Meuse-Argonne Offensive as American and French troops attempted to achieve the breakthrough that could end the war.18
On the night of October 7, York and the men of the 2nd Battalion watched and waited from the main road between Varennes and Fléville for their turn to continue the assault beyond Hill 223. At 0300 hours, bogged down by heavy rains and mud, fatigued from a sleepless night, hampered by a trek devoid of light except for the glow of gunfire hailing down around them, the troops slogged towards the hill amid utter chaos.
“Lots of men were killed by the artillery fire. And lots were wounded. The woods were all mussed up and looked as if a terrible cyclone done swept through them. But God would never be cruel enough to create a cyclone as terrible as that Argonne battle. Only man would ever think of doing an awful thing like that.”
At 0610 hours, York’s battalion along with three other companies of the 328th Infantry, pushed off Hill 223 with fixed bayonets. The advance was to be preceded by a rolling barrage of artillery fire that never came.19
As the troops raced downhill and charged across the 500-yard valley, now exposed with the light of dawn, an explosion of gunfire erupted from the heights above. “We had to lie down flat on our faces and dig in. And there we were out there in the valley all mussed up and unable to get any further with no barrage to help us, and that-there machine-gun fire and all sorts of big shells and gas cutting us to pieces.”
Valley just west of hill 223 across which York and the 2nd Battalion attacked on the morning of October 8, 1918.
From Candler, History of Three Hundred Twenty-Eighth Infantry, 60.
The first wave of men had been decimated by the Germans, and now York’s battalion lay pinned down, able to move but a few feet at a time. Something had to be done, but a frontal attack was out of the question.
When platoon sergeant Harry Parsons realized that the thrust of the machine gun fire came from a ridge to the left, he ordered Sergeant Bernard Early to lead Corporals York, Savage, and Cutting and three squads totaling thirteen men, to silence the machine gun nest on the ridge. Seventeen soldiers stealthily climbed up the left flank, concealed by the thick undergrowth, slipped deep into German lines and encircled the enemy gunners from the rear. While chasing the first two enemy soldiers they encountered, the squads stumbled upon a German headquarters with fifteen to twenty unsuspecting soldiers and officers from the 120th Württemberg Landwehr Regiment in conference.20 Caught completely off guard, the Germans surrendered. While the prisoners were being searched, enemy gunners situated on the ridge above the camp turned their machine guns around and swept the open space, instantly killing six American soldiers, including Corporal Savage, and wounding three. Among the wounded were Sergeant Early and Corporal Cutting. Corporal York was now in charge with just seven men under his command.
The onslaught of machine gun fire from above was relentless and destructive. The German prisoners had hit the ground and the Americans had shielded themselves between them, some of the privates managing to get off a shot or two.21 York was caught out in the open about twenty-five yards below the machine gun line near the ridge, his men and the German POWs huddled behind him. Each time a German soldier raised his head, York would “tech him off,” just like he did at the turkey shoots back home.
At some point, York stood up and began to shoot his rifle offhand. His weapon was getting hot and he was running out of ammunition. So when a German officer led a counter-attack with six of his men charging towards York with fixed bayonets, York drew his Colt .45 automatic and, from back to front, shot each one, a practice he picked up at wild turkey shoots in Pall Mall. The idea was to hit the rear soldiers first so that the remainder would not see their comrade fall and fire at him. “It was either them or me and I’m a-telling you I didn’t and don’t want to die nohow if I can live,” he said.
Falling back on his hunting experience in Tennessee, York continued to methodically pick off German soldiers one by one, each time hollering for them to give up. Alarmed by the number of troops being shot dead and their shattered morale, the German commander, Lieutenant Paul Jürgen Vollmer, shouted out in English offering to surrender his troops.22 As the Germans began to emerge from the upper trenches, one fellow hid a grenade in his raised hand, which he threw at York but missed, hitting another prisoner. York reflexively shot him, and there was no further trouble.
York ordered the eighty to ninety prisoners to form two lines and had them carry Sergeant Early on a stretcher. Using them as cover, York placed Vollmer in front of him with his pistol trained on his back and the other two German officers on either side of him. Seeing that York was considering which way to go, Vollmer suggested to turn down a gully, but York quickly figured it was a trap and decided to go in the opposite direction. Since York and his men had captured the rear German line, they inevitably ran into the first line of enemy trenches. He succinctly told Vollmer to order them to surrender or he would blow the commander’s head off, and they did, joining the lines of POWs headed to the command post.23
York and his men marched the prisoners from one command headquarters to another against his men’s better judgement, until the captives were finally accepted at division headquarters in Varennes, a distance of 10 ½ kilometers. Altogether, York killed 20-25 enemy soldiers, neutralized thirty-five machine guns, and captured 132 German soldiers, though he was quick to reject full credit for the extraordinary success of his mission. “There were others in that fight besides me… I’m a-telling you, they’re entitled to a whole heap of credit. It isn’t for me, of course, to decide how much credit…But jes the same, I’m a-telling you, a heap of those boys were heroes, and America ought to be proud of them.”
His actions enabled the 328th Infantry Regiment to advance across the valley and capture the strategic Decauville Railroad. With their Army on the verge of total collapse and the Central Powers facing defeat on all fronts, Germany agreed to an armistice with the Allies on November 11, 1918, bringing the war to an end.
“I jes want to go home.”
Alvin C. York was promoted to the rank of sergeant on November 1, 1918. He received numerous American and foreign awards, including the highest recognition that could be bestowed upon a U.S. soldier, the Congressional Medal of Honor. French General and Supreme Allied Commander, Ferdinand Foch, commented to York, “What you did was the greatest thing accomplished by any private soldier of all the armies of Europe.”
When York returned to the United States, he found that he had become a national celebrity. It was all so overwhelming for the humble hero, but all he really wanted was to go home. He received offers from Hollywood and Broadway to adapt his life story into a movie and numerous endorsement deals and public appearances worth tens of thousands of dollars. York chose not to capitalize on his newfound fame. He once famously stated “This uniform ain’t for sale.” Instead he dedicated himself to his family and a number of charitable causes. He became a proponent for veterans’ rights, education, and economic development for his impoverished community. Seeking to raise money to help build a bible school, York finally gave his blessing for Hollywood to produce a film based on his life story. In 1941, Sergeant York was released in theaters, starring Gary Cooper in the title role that would earn him an Academy Award. It was the highest grossing film of the year, inspiring young Americans across the country to enlist in the U.S. armed forces during World War II.24
On September 2, 1964, Alvin C. York passed away at a veterans’ hospital in Nashville, Tennessee, at the age of 76. He is currently buried at the Wolf River Cemetery in his hometown of Pall Mall, Tennessee, next to his wife, Gracie, who passed away twenty years later.
Alvin C. York has maintained the status of an American folk hero whose story still resonates with Americans to this day. His heroism in battle, his legendary sharpshooting skills, his underprivileged upbringing, his faith in a higher power, his sense of patriotic duty, and his humble nature all contributed to the legend that is Sergeant York. His story is regarded as one of the most inspirational American success stories, and he has been memorialized as one of the greatest heroes in the long history of the United States Army.
Enfield vs Springfield Rifle Debate
Much discussion has centered around whether York used a 1903 Springfield or a 1917 Enfield rifle during the war. WW I munitions data presented by Assistant Secretary of War, Benedict Crowell, concluded that 12-15% of rifles issued were Springfield guns but the vast majority were 1917 Enfields.25
U.S. rifle cal .30, model of 1903 Springfield. Twelve to fifteen percent of rifles issued to WW I soldiers were Springfields. Wikimedia
In his diary, York did not specify the type of rifle he used. Per Colonel Buxton, the 82nd Division was issued 1917 Enfields.26 In 2005, writer Garry James documented a conversation he had with York’s son, Andrew, who stated that his father had somehow switched his 1917 Enfield for a 1903 Springfield because the Enfield “had a peep sight with which York had difficulty leading a target.” Another individual commented on a forum that Andrew York told him that when his father’s unit reached the front, they were given a choice of one of the surplus ’03 Springfields, and that York switched, in part, because “the notched rear sight and post or blade front sight” were virtually the same as on his old muzzleloader. On both occasions, Andrew incorrectly stated that his father trained stateside on the ’03 Springfield and that these were replaced with Eddystones at Le Havre (Woodsrunner 38 second entry). A third forum commentator who also met Andrew York questioned Andrew’s knowledge base on the subject. (See Scott in Indiana). Regardless of which rifle he used, Alvin York’s extraordinary feat is well documented and undeniable.
Video
Words spoken by York voiceover actor are directly from his diary. Great short film with some actual war footage.
Sources
[1] Sam K. Cowan, Sergeant York and his People (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1922), 147. Alvin York, His Own Life Story and War Diary, Tom Skeyhill, ed. (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1930), 18, 122. Albert Ross Hogue, History of Fentress County, Tennessee: The Old Home of Mark Twain’s Ancestors (Nashville: Williams Printing Co., 1916), ix-xiv. Eventually, William York built an addition to the cabin separated from the main living area by a breezeway described as a “dogtrot;” see “York’s Early Life,” Tennessee Virtual Archive, and John Perry, Sergeant York (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2010), 9.
[2] Cowan, Sergeant York, 105-106.
[3] David D. Lee, Sergeant York: An American Hero (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1985), 4. York, His Own Life Story, 125.
[4] Cowan, Sergeant York, 169-170. York, His Own Life Story, 123-124. The one-room schoolhouse held pupils ages six to twenty.
[5] York, His Own Life Story, 133-134.
[6] Ibid., 132.
[7] Ibid., 141-145. Lee, Sergeant York: An American Hero, 8-10. It has been reported that the untimely death of York’s friend, Everett Delk, was one of his prime reasons for changing his life in 1917. However, author Tom Skeyhill, who interviewed York in 1927 for his book, His Own Life Story and War Diary, stated, “…and that was when he [York] learned that I had interviewed Everett Delk, his pal of “hog-wild days” to which Alvin responded, “Everett must’ve told you God plenty.” (York, 33) After he changed his ways and joined the church, York mentions that Everett or Marion would tempt him to join them for parties but he would refuse (York, 146.) On Find a Grave, there is a record of an Elijah Everett Delk from Fentress County, 1894-1928.
[8] Mark Sidwell, “The Churches of Christ in Christian Union: A Fundamentalism File Research Report,” Bob Jones University Mack Library, (Feb. 16, 2004): 1-3.
[9] York, His Own Life Story, 149-150.
[10] Ibid., 156-163.
[11] York erroneously referred to Major Buxton’s first name as George, an understandable assumption since Buxton always used the initial G. See Ned Buxton, “Sergeant York’s Major,” No Greater Calling, July 13, 2006.
[12] “Conscience Plus Red Hair Are Bad for Germans.” Literary Digest 61, no. 11 (June 14, 1919): 46. George Pattullo, “The Second Elder Gives Battle,” Saturday Evening Post 191, no. 43 (April 26, 1919): 3. York, His Own Life Story, 172-176.
[15] Buxton, Official History of 82nd Division, 12.
[16] York, His Own Life Story, 201.
[17] Ibid., 209.
[18] Scott Candler, HistoryThree Hundred Twenty-Eighth Infantry, Eighty-Second Division, American Expeditionary Forces, United States Army, (Atlanta: Foote & Davies Co., 1920), 43-65.
[19] Ibid., 217-220. Buxton, Official History of 82nd Division, 51-59.
[20] York, His Own Life Story, 224. Lee, Sergeant York: An American Hero, 31-33.
[21] York, His Own Life Story: 246, 256, 264.
[22] Lee, Sergeant York: An American Hero, 36.
[23] York, His Own Life Story, 229-231.
[24] Michael E. Birdwell, Celluloid Soldiers: The Warner Bros. Campaign Against Nazism 1934-1941 (NY: NYU Press, 1999), 107-110.
[25] Benedict Crowell, America’s Munitions 1917-1918: Report of Benedict Crowell, the Assistant Secretary of War, Director of Munitions (Washington D.C.: Govt. Printing Office, 1919) 183.
[26] Buxton, Official History of 82nd Division, 3.
It’s really more the truck drivers than the trigger pullers who ultimately decide a proper war.
There are never any war movies about truck drivers. The movies are always about the door kickers, the submariners, or the fighter pilots. However, wars are generally not technically won by such as these. It was the Red Ball Express with its endless lines of 2 and ½-ton trucks that did more to win the Second World War for the Allies than most anything else.
Artificial harbors constructed on the Normandy assault beaches at great expense and effort helped sustain the Allied drive until more permanent solutions could be found.
With the Normandy invasion beaches firmly in Allied hands American and Commonwealth forces fanned out across Western Europe seizing terrain, villages, and populations from the occupying Germans as they went. However, in short order, it became obvious that the logistical demands of these rampaging armies could not be met by the Mulberry ports in Normandy. The answer, among other things, was the Belgian port of Antwerp.
Operation Market Garden was immortalized in the superb movie A Bridge Too Far. This audacious airborne operation was one of the war’s most glaring Allied failures.
The city of Antwerp itself fell to the British 2d Army roughly one month after D-Day. By mid-September, however, the British 21st Army Group was consumed with Operation Market Garden, the ill-fated airborne brainchild of Field Marshal Montgomery. As a result, while British forces held Antwerp, they still did not have control of the seaside approaches, particularly Walcheren Island. This modest island overlooked the Scheldt Estuary and was heavily garrisoned by the German 15th Army. With the Germans entrenched on Walcheren Island and covering the approaches to Antwerp the Allies were unable to use the port to unload supplies for the advancing combat forces. The result was the Battle of the Scheldt.
The Captain of Chaos
The decision to unleash RAF bombers like this Lancaster on the flood control infrastructure of Walcheren Island was a source of bitter controversy.Flooding the island did little to inconvenience the Germans but visited incalculable misery on the civilian population.
The assault to seize Walcheren Island distilled down to a series of complex interrelated operations. RAF Bomber Command, in a profoundly controversial decision, bombed the dikes at Westkapelle, Flushing, and Veere, flooding the island. This move barely inconvenienced the defending Germans who held the high ground but was utterly catastrophic for the civilians who lived there.
The Oranjemolen windmill provided a readily recognizable landmark for invading troops.
At 0545 hours on November 1, 1944, elements of No 4 Commando churned ashore. They landed in the scant light of dawn just east of the Oranjemolen, a prominent windmill on the sea dike at a spot called Flushing. The main force of this combined French and English unit landed around 0630. At that point things got real.
By 1944 LTC Robert Dawson was a seasoned and respected Commando officer.
The commander of No 4 Commando was one LTC Robert W.P. Dawson. LTC Dawson, like so many other combat commanders, was faced with the unfettered chaos of pitiless close quarters combat. The Commandos had the resources and they had a plan. However, the Germans had other ideas.
The LCP became an iconic part of Allied amphibious invasion operations.
Dawson’s small reconnaissance element landed via a pair of LCP (Landing Craft Personnel) boats. The American version of this versatile craft was the legendary Higgins boat. These shallow-draft workhorses featured bow ramps that could drop to disgorge troops on a hostile beach. The experience of riding a Higgins boat into battle against an entrenched enemy would have been unimaginably horrible, but they were tried and proven.
British 3-inch mortars recovered from sunken assault craft helped salvage the assault.
By the time the main body landed at 0630, the Germans were fully activated, raking the landing areas with fire from small arms as well as a fast-firing 20mm antiaircraft cannon. The No 4 Commando LCA (Landing Craft Assault) boats carrying their heavy weapons foundered on stakes placed in the surf and sank some 20 yards from the beach. The Commandos nonetheless salvaged their three-inch mortars and used them to good effect as they rolled up the German defenses.
The arrival of British reinforcements helped turn the tide of the fight.
The Commandos reduced each German strongpoint sequentially. Early in the morning the battle seemed about evenly matched. However, with the arrival of the lead battalion of the British 155thInfantry Brigade, the tide began to turn. As the Commandos seized German prisoners they were sent to the beaches to help unload supplies. Once the Commandos cleared these emplacements they found them to be well-supplied with food and ammunition. However, the German troops were second-rate, many of them suffering from medical maladies after being so long away from proper support.
The Battle for Walcheren Island was a textbook example of British Commando operations.
Throughout it all, LTC Dawson deftly led his men from the front. Dawson peeled off rearguard elements as needed to secure the German defensive positions against subsequent infiltration. By 1600 that day No 4 Commando’s primary objectives had been seized.
The Man
The failed assault on Dieppe in the summer of 1942 served as a proving ground for subsequent Allied amphibious operations.
LTC Robert William Palliser Dawson spent the entire war with No 4 Commando. He joined the unit in 1940 as one of its first subalterns. In August of 1942, Captain Dawson commanded C Troop during the ill-fated raid on Dieppe.
The British Commandos were some legendarily hard warriors.
By 1943, Dawson was promoted to Major and was serving as XO of No 4 Commando. In April of that year, Lord Lovat relinquished command of the unit to Dawson, and they began training in earnest for D-Day. On June 6, 1944, Dawson found himself at Ouistreham as part of Operation Overlord.
Effective combat leadership is a mystical combination of bravery, tactical skill, endurance, charisma, and insanity.
Dawson was wounded twice during this assault but refused medical evacuation. Despite his injuries, he continued to lead his men in combat. The citation for his subsequent decoration states, “It was due to his leadership and direction that the attack was successfully pressed home.”
The Sten gun was cheap, fairly effective, and, most importantly, available. However, its crude design did not inspire confidence.
When LTC Dawson landed at Flushing as part of Operation Infatuate, he carried a unique prototype weapon. After the miraculous evacuation at Dunkirk, the British found themselves with an Army but few firearms. The inexpensive Sten submachine gun helped carry them through the dark days as they desperately rebuilt their military into a viable fighting force. By 1944, however, British industry had crafted an improved replacement.
The Sterling Patchett
The intended replacement for the Sten was the Patchett Machine Carbine Mk 1.
Using the Sten as a starting point, the British General Staff issued the specifications for its replacement in early 1944. The new gun should weigh no more than six pounds and fire 9mm Para ammunition. The rate of fire should be less than 500 rpm, and the gun should be adequately accurate to place five consecutive semiautomatic shots within a one-foot-square block at 100 yards.
The Patchett gun was markedly more refined than the previous Sten. The magazines, though quite dissimilar, were interchangeable between the two weapons.
George William Patchett was the chief designer at the Sterling Armaments Company, and he had his first operational prototype ready for testing in early 1944. Officially known as the Patchett Machine Carbine Mk 1, the Patchett gun fired from the open bolt and fed from the left in the manner of the Sten. Unlike the Sten, however, the Patchett gun had the feed mechanism located over the pistol grip for improved balance.
These helical cuts in the Patchett bolt tended to channel fouling away from the reciprocating parts of the gun.
The Patchett incorporated some novel design features. The bolt featured helical cuts to move debris and fouling clear of the action as it cycled. The underfolding stock, though complicated, collapsed to about nothing yet offered a steady platform for accurate fire when extended. Most importantly, however, the Patchett did away with the Sten’s ghastly double column, single-feed magazine.
The Patchett magazine incorporates roller bearings in its follower and is, in my opinion, the finest SMG magazine ever designed.
The curved double column, double-feed magazine of the Patchett gun featured a novel follower made of roller bearings and was likely the best submachine gun magazine ever devised. These boxes carried 34 rounds and were easy to orient in the dark. As magazine supply could have been an iffy thing in the latter parts of WW2, the Patchett was designed to accept either Sten or Patchett mags seamlessly.
The Sten was optimized for mass production, but the Patchett was a markedly better gun.
The British were impressed with the Patchett and ordered 120 copies for combat trials. A few of these weapons saw limited service with the Paras at Arnhem during Operation Market Garden. LTC Dawson carried one of these first 120 guns during Operation Infatuate. The weapon he wielded during this critical operation, serial number 78, is currently on display with the Imperial War Museum.
Even folks who don’t know guns recognize the Sterling Patchett as the foundation of the iconic Star Wars blaster.
The exigencies of total war hampered the adoption of the Patchett gun, and it was not until 1951 that the decision was made to replace the Sten. The Patchett was rechristened the L2A1 Sterling and issued throughout the British military. The Sterling soldiered on until 1994 when it was replaced by the L85A1 assault rifle. The Sterling saw some of its most widespread exposure as the basis for the BlasTech E-11 Blasters wielded by the Imperial Stormtroopers during the timeless sci-fi epic Star Wars.
The Rest of the Story
The coordinated British assault ultimately overwhelmed German defenses.
Several other Commando units landed around Westkapelle as part of Operation Infatuate, seizing intermediate objectives and reducing enemy strongpoints. One of these, 47 Commando under the command of LTC C.F. Phillips, eventually fought their way around the periphery of the island to link up with Dawson and his Commandos in their consolidated positions.
Heavy naval fire support was critical to the success of Operation Infatuate.Tens of thousands of German soldiers ultimately surrendered to LTC Dawson and his Commandos.
With the support of HMS Warspite, Roberts, and Erebus as well as rocket-firing landing craft and a squadron of Typhoon fighter-bombers the Commandos were ultimately successful. Along the way, they captured some 40,000 Germans. After extensive minesweeping operations to clear the estuary the first Allied cargo vessels unloaded in November of 1944. This efficient port along with its associated transportation arteries served as a critical source of supply for the bloody fighting that was to come.
The British Commandos were some of the world’s earliest true Special Operations Forces.Commando training was grueling if a bit crude.
LTC Dawson was President of the Commando Association after the war and was described as, “Charming, kind, and understanding” by those with whom he served. Dawson was honored as a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) and was awarded the Distinguished Service Order (DSO). He died in 1988 at the age of 74, a hero from a generation of heroes, and one of the first men to carry the Sterling submachine gun in combat.
The British Commandos helped lay the foundation for modern Special Operations.
This disheveled-looking gent was a stone-cold warrior.
Talaiasi Labalaba was born on July 13, 1942, in Vatutu Village in Nawaka, Nadi, on the island of Fiji. Fiji is an island country in Melanesia in the South Pacific roughly 1,100 miles northeast of New Zealand. Fiji is actually an archipelago of more than 330 islands, 220 of which are currently uninhabited. Tourism and sugar-cane are the primary industries. As of 1970, Fiji became a fully independent sovereign state within the British Commonwealth of Nations. Beginning in WW2, Fiji’s relationship with the British Empire meant that native Fijians could serve in the British military.
The 22d SAS wrote the book on modern special operations.
Labalaba spent his childhood on an island and craved adventure. He initially enlisted with the Royal Ulster Rifles and also served with the Royal Irish Rangers. Eventually, Labalaba volunteered for Selection for the 22d Special Air Service.
The Setting
Oman enjoys some of the most desolate terrain on the planet.
In the summer of 1972 Oman was in chaos. Sharing borders with Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Yemen, the Omani Sultanate was allied with the British in a fight for its life against Marxist rebels. A small contingent of nine SAS operators was assigned to assist with Omani security as part of the British Army Training Team at Mirbat. Their year-long deployment was part of Operation Jaguar. This nine-man team was short and was soon to rotate home.
The PFLOAG were the resident Marxist freedom fighters. At the height of the Cold War they were generously supplied by both the Soviets and the Chinese.
Opposing this small contingent was the PFLOAG. This mouthful of word salad stands for the Popular Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arabian Gulf. Locals just called them the Adoo.
The SAS BATT House and surrounding structures were fairly defensible. However, they were remote, primitive, and far from support.
The SAS BATT House stood overlooking the approaches to Jebel Ali, itself a strategically critical piece of dirt leading to the major port of Mirbat. The PFLOAG rebels knew that to take Mirbat they would first have to take Jebel Ali. Before they could get to Jebel Ali they had to neutralize the nine Brits at the SAS BATT House.
The SAS BATT House was a genuine fortress, though of archaic construction and modest dimensions.
The BATT House was itself a fairly impressive fortification. Manning the fort as well as the surrounding encampment were another 25 Omani policemen and some 30 Balochi Askari along with one local firquat irregular. The Balochi Askari were members of the Pakistani diaspora serving in an administrative military capacity. The firqua were members of the Omani loyalist militia.
A single Ma Deuce .50-caliber machine-gun served as the primary heavy weapon atop the SAS BATT House. The M2 can feed from either the right or the left.
Arrayed against this Neapolitan band was some 300-400 heavily-armed and dedicated PFLOAG Marxist fighters. At the BATT House, the SAS troops were armed primarily with L1A1 SLR rifles and a single M2 .50-caliber machinegun along with a 60mm mortar. The Adoo packed AK47 rifles, RPG7’s, and mortars along with ample ammunition courtesy of their Soviet and Chinese benefactors.
This is the interior SAS BATT House. It was ultimately to host an absolutely epic showdown.
July 19, 1972, was the day the Brits were to rotate home. At 0600 that morning, CPT Mike Kealy, the 23-year-old commander of the SAS contingent, observed what he thought to be a deployed patrol of loyal Omanis now returning to base. These Omanis had been picketed to warn of approaching Adoo forces. Once he realized how substantial this force was, however, he appreciated that his patrol had surely been killed. He then ordered his men to open fire. The SAS troops did just that but found that the Adoo forces were infiltrating via gullies beyond the effective range and penetration of their SLRs. At that point, the BATT House began receiving accurate and effective mortar and RPG fire. CPT Kealy contacted his higher headquarters in Um al Quarif and requested reinforcements.
The Fight
Here we see SGT Labalaba seated behind the garrison 25-pounder artillery piece in more peaceful times.
It soon became obvious that the small SAS force was in grave danger of being overwhelmed. However, located some 800 meters distant at a smaller fortification was a single British 25-pounder artillery piece along with an ample supply of ammunition. SGT Talaiasi Labalaba struck out alone across 800 meters of flat open desert to reach the howitzer. The accumulated Adoo insurgents opened up on him with their AK rifles.
The British 25-pounder is a massive crew-served artillery piece. SGT Labalaba proved that it could be run by one man in a pinch.
The typical crew for a 25-pounder is six. This multipurpose Quick-Firing gun fired separate ammunition consisting of a projectile loaded first followed by a cartridge case containing between one and three bags of propellant. Running the gun accurately, efficiently, and well is an art that requires extensive cultivated teamwork and training. On this fateful day, SGT Labalaba was managing the big 3,600-pound gun alone.
This is the control center of the British 25-pounder field gun. Eventually, the PFLOAG guerrillas hit SGT Labalaba despite the splinter shield.
During the course of several hours, SGT Labalaba poured high explosive rounds into the attacking communist guerrillas, frequently averaging one round per minute. However, the sheer force of numbers was overwhelming him. Eventually, the attacking Adoo troops got an AK round past the splinter shield on the gun and struck SGT Labalaba in the face. Now badly wounded, he radioed back to the BATT House with an update. Despite the horrific nature of his injury SGT Labalaba continued firing the howitzer, sighting directly through the bore at the approaching guerillas. However, he was badly hurt and losing blood. SGT Labalaba was now struggling to operate the heavy gun alone.
This is SGT Labalaba and Trooper Takavesi training local forces on the 25-pounder in quieter times. Labalaba is on the left.
CPT Kealy requested a volunteer to assist SGT Labalaba and Trooper Sekonaia Takavesi, a fellow Fijian, answered the call. Under covering fire from the BATT House Takavesi made the long 800-meter run to the artillery emplacement unscathed. Once there he engaged approaching Adoo fighters with his SLR and attempted to address SGT Labalaba’s injury as best he could. Together the two men continued to work the 25-pounder, pouring HE rounds onto the maniacal communist attackers.
The Gun
Early Marks of the British 25-pounder did not have a muzzle brake.
Developed in 1940, the 25-pounder was an 87.6mm multipurpose artillery piece combining both high-angle and direct-fire capabilities. Ultimately produced in six Marks, the 25-pounder was highly mobile for its day despite its nearly two-ton all-up weight. The gun was used throughout the Commonwealth, and ammunition remains in production at the Pakistani Ordnance Factories today.
The combination of separate bagged charges along with a brass cartridge case resulted in a great deal of versatility as well as a prodigious rate of fire.
The 25-pounder used separate bagged charges that could be cut as necessary to produce an accurate fall of shot at various ranges. A subsequent “Super” charge was also developed that required the addition of a muzzle brake to the gun for safe operation. Most British charges for the gun were cordite-based.
The British developed an array of rounds to support their versatile 25-pounder field gun.Here we see British troops loading propaganda leaflets into rounds for their 25-pounder guns in 1945.
In addition to high explosive, smoke, and chemical shells, the 25-pounder could also fire a curious shaped-charge warhead as well as a 20-pound APBC (Armor Piercing Ballistic Cap) round also designed for antitank use. Antitank rounds were employed in the direct-fire mode using Super charge loads. In addition to these conventional applications, the 25-pounder could also fire foil “window” that mimicked the return of an aircraft on radar as well as shells containing propaganda leaflets. These leaflet shells were employed toward the end of WW2 to convince the Germans to surrender.
The Rest of the Story
With the attacking PFLOAG troops now at very close range, SGT Labalaba began to ready a modest Infantry mortar.
Now under dire threat of being overrun, SGT Labalaba retrieved a small Infantry mortar kept at the artillery firing point. This stubby high-angle weapon would be more effective now that the attacking troops were in so close. As he moved to set the mortar up for firing he caught a second round to the neck and bled out.
Throughout the engagement, SAS troopers battled the attacking guerrillas with their SLR individual weapons.
By now Takavesi had also taken a round through the shoulder and was grazed by another across the back of his head. Despite his injuries, he duly reported the situation back by radio and continued to engage the approaching guerillas with his SLR.
The PFLOAG guerrillas were amply supplied with Combloc AKM rifles. They used them to good effect against the beleaguered SAS outpost.
In response, CPT Kealy and another SAS trooper named Thomas Tobin also ran the gauntlet to the artillery firing point. When they arrived they found that Trooper Takavesi had been hit a third time, this time by an AK round through his abdomen. Now having closed to within-hand grenade range, the PFLOAG troops showered the emplacement with grenades, only one of which detonated.
Strikemaster attack jets ultimately stemmed the assault. Subsequent helicopter-borne reinforcement by additional SAS troops stabilized the situation.
During the fight, Trooper Tobin reached across the body of SGT Labalaba and caught an AK round to the face that blew away much of his jaw, leaving him mortally wounded. Just when the situation seemed darkest, a flight of BAC Strikemaster attack jets from the Omani Air Force arrived on station and opened up on the communist rebels. One of the jets suffered battle damage from ground fire and had to return to base, but rocket and cannon fire from the remaining element ultimately broke the back of the assault.
SGT Labalaba was ultimately buried back at Hereford.
When Trooper Toobin was hit he reflexively aspirated a chunk of his own splintered tooth. This fragment subsequently set up a lung infection that later killed him in hospital. Sekonaia Takavesi was medically evacuated and recovered. SGT Talaiasi Labalaba received a posthumous Mention in Dispatches. SGT Labalaba is buried at St Martin’s Church at Hereford in England. He was 30 years old when he was killed.
This is the very gun used by SGT Labalaba now on display at the Royal Artillery Museum.
The 25-pounder gun SGT Labalaba used in Oman is currently on display at the Firepower Museum of the Royal Artillery at the former Royal Arsenal at Woolwich in England. The engagement outside Mirbat was intentionally underreported by the Omani and British governments at the time. SAS involvement in Oman was a sensitive issue, and no one wanted undue official attention. SGT Labalaba’s comrades have lobbied ever since that he should posthumously receive the Victoria Cross for his selfless actions in Oman that day.
SGT Labalaba has since been memorialized both in Fiji as well as in Hereford at SAS headquarters.
In October of 2018 Prince Harry formally dedicated a bronze likeness of SGT Labalaba at the Nadi International Airport in Fiji commemorating his exceptional bravery. Another statue occupies a place of honor at SAS HQ as well. Tom Petch, a British filmmaker and himself a former SAS operator is currently producing a feature movie about SGT Labalaba and the Battle of Mirbat.
SGT Talaiasi Labalaba, shown here along with a pair of local Omani children, was a genuine hero of the highest order.Roger Cole was one of the other SAS troopers fighting alongside SGT Labalaba that day in Oman. Those SAS guys do often sport some of the most epic whiskers.Trooper Cole eventually wrote a book about the Battle of Mirbat titled “SAS Operation Storm: Nine Men Against Four Hundred.” He is seen here holding one of the 25-pounder shells used in the battle.Trooper Takavesi (left) ultimately recovered despite his grievous wounds and returned to the SAS BATT House at Mirbat with his friend and fellow SAS Mirbat veteran Roger Cole shown here.
He’s a senior NCO in the Delta Force. SGM Payne enlisted in 2002, serving as a sniper in the 75th Ranger Regiment until 2007, when he joined the Delta Force.
(SGM Payne in Afghanistan)
In 2015, then-SFC Payne’s unit was deployed to Iraq to help combat ISIS. His unit advised and trained the newly formed Kurdish Counter Terrorist Group. One day, fresh graves are seen outside of a known ISIS prison. The joint team is given the green light.
Payne’s team arrives with the CTG at night time. Upon arrival, they’re hit with volleys of gunfire. The Kurds not having conducted any operations before, are nervous and don’t move forward. The Deltas lead the way, giving their friends courage to press forward. Master Sergeant Joshua Wheeler is killed leading his comrades into battle.
Meanwhile, SFC Payne and his team press into the building. They reach a bolted door that holds in the Iraqi hostages. The team attempts to break it, but there is too much fire coming their way. Payne braves the fire and breaks the bolt. The joint team then starts getting all of the hostages out. As the firefight continues, ISIS terrorists start setting off bomb vests, causing fires which cripple the building’s stability. After securing multiple hostages, they move outside.
(Then-SFC Payne, left or center)
However, plenty of hostages are left. SFC Payne keeps moving back inside to make sure no man is left behind. By doing so, he is risking getting crushed or burnt to death. At one point, a tired hostage believes he is going to die in the fire and can no longer walk to the outside. Payne helps him up and gets him outside.
Overall, due to then-SFC Payne’s actions, over 75 Iraqis are rescued. At first, he is awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, the second highest American military award. However, on September 11, 2020, SGM Payne was awarded the Medal of Honor, the highest military award in the US.
A fairly common thread among incarcerated populations is difficulty controlling one’s emotions.
Most heinous crimes are crimes of passion. Penitentiaries are brimming with folks who suffer from poor impulse control. Whether it is spontaneous road rage or a husband spurned, it is the heat of the moment that drives so many people to do so many things they might later regret. Little is more emotionally heated than modern combat.
Young folks make the best soldiers. They don’t tend to think too deeply about the extraordinary things they’re called upon to do
The most effective soldiers are, with few exceptions, young and impressionable. Lord knows I was. Old guys with a little mileage wouldn’t be willing to do the job. If nothing else we have come to better appreciate the reality of our own mortality. The toxic combination of youth, patriotic fervor, and the very real prospect of imminent violent gory death can be an explosive milieu indeed.
The Waffen SS was a curious elite army within an army during World War 2.
In June of 1944, the entire world was changing. The Allies had a foothold in Normandy, and the Germans were appreciating for the first time what a self-inflicted catastrophe they had created for themselves. Realizing the stakes, Hitler and his general staff mobilized a number of first-rate combat divisions on the Western front to oppose the British, Canadians, and Americans during their breakout from Normandy. Among them was the 12th SS Panzer Division Hitlerjugend.
We modern folk are really not in a position to fully appreciate the depth of depravity implicit in the Holocaust.
Adolf Hitler had a great many repugnant things for which to answer when he finally faced divine judgment in 1945. Right after the cold-blooded murder of six million Jews during the Holocaust, primary among them was the Hitler Youth. The Hitler Youth dates back to 1922. Its formal title was “Hitler-Jugend, Bund deutscher Arbeiterjugend.” That mouthful of kraut-speak translates to “Hitler Youth, League of German Worker Youth.” This paramilitary organization indoctrinated German boys age 14 to 18 to prepare them to become good little Nazis.
The 12th SS Panzer Division was crewed with what were essentially child soldiers.
Your typical fourteen-year-old lacks the sense to pick out his own clothes, much less intelligently assimilate political ideology. As a result, the Hitler Youth did a simply fantastic job of creating fanatical Hitler acolytes. When Hitler’s total war finally caught up with Germany, the 12th SS Panzer was formed from the ranks of the Hitlerjugend. Senior NCOs and officers were typically drawn from other experienced SS divisions, but the rank and file junior enlisted men were products of the Hitler Youth.
The Germans, for all their well-documented moral failings, produced some simply superb combat soldiers. Weapons like the assault rifle, the modern combat submarine, the general purpose machine-gun, and the jet fighter all had their genesis as German wartime projects.
The 12th SS Panzer was a well-equipped and well-trained combat unit that first saw action on June 7, 1944. During defensive operations around Caen they suffered heavy casualities. The stage was set for Something Truly Horrible.
The Setting
Standartenfuhrer Kurt Meyer was a True Believer, a real Nazi’s Nazi.
Waffen-SS Standartenfuhrer Kurt Meyer commanded the 12th SS Panzer Division during this critical time following the Allied landings in Normandy. He was revered by his men. Behind his back they called him “Panzermeyer.”
Standartenfuhrer Kurt Meyer is seen here on the right alongside Fritz Witt, and Max Wunsche.
Meyer’s command post was established in a Premonstratensian monastery in Saint-Germain-la-Blanche-Herb near Caen. The towers of the Abbaye d’Ardenne offered a commanding view of the battlefield. These relatively unbloodied SS troopers were arrayed against Canadian forces moving inland from Juno Beach. Canada was a critical partner with the Allies during the D-Day invasion, providing some 14,000 combat troops to the effort.
Modern war is unimaginably destructive.
By the evening of June 7, the Norman countryside was a battlefield. Battlefields exemplify chaos. Now some 36 hours into the close fight there were eleven Canadian prisoners being held at the Abbey. Five were assigned to the North Nova Scotia Highlanders, while the remaining six hailed from the 27thArmoured Regiment (The Sherbrooke Fusiliers). The 12th SS Panzer was being pressed mightily, and Kurt Meyer felt cornered.
Standartenfuhrer Kurt Meyer felt he had no time for prisoners during the frenetic fight for Normandy. Such stuff was common on the Eastern Front where Meyer had learned his trade.
A Polish-born SS trooper named Jan Jesionek was present for what came next and testified for the prosecution at the war crimes tribunal after the end of hostilities. Jesionek reported that a pair of SS soldiers arrived at the command post with seven Canadian prisoners on June 8. One of the guards queried Jesionek regarding the location of Standartenfuhrer Meyer. Meanwhile the Canadians were remanded to a stall adjacent the Abbey for safekeeping. When informed of the seven prisoners, Meyer reportedly said, “What should we do with these prisoners? They only eat up our rations.”
This happy-looking guy was a stone cold combat leader. His fanatical commitment to his cause and his mission precipitated a massacre.
Meyer then purportedly had a quiet discussion with one of his officers out of earshot of the troops working nearby. He supposedly said, “In the future, no more prisoners are to be taken.”
Political fanaticism in combat is the breeding ground for atrocity.
The officer with whom Meyer had been speaking then questioned each prisoner individually. As each prisoner’s name was called he was led into the garden of the Abbey where this officer subsequently waited. As each Canadian turned into the garden the officer shot him in the back of the head with his machine pistol. All seven prisoners were brutally executed in this manner.
In the heat of the moment very bad things can happen to frightened soldiers in combat. It behooves leaders at all levels to be ever mindful of the more sordid aspects of soldiering to help keep things from getting out of control.
Once the officer and guards departed, Jesionek and three fellow drivers examined the bodies lying in the garden. Jesionek reported that the Canadians realized what was happening, and that each prisoner shook hands with his comrades before walking to the garden to be shot. Jesionek admitted that he never heard Meyer give the order to kill the Canadians, but the calculus of the event was fairly self-evident.
The Gun
The German MP40 became emblematic of the war effort.
The German MP40 was the seminal submachine gun used by German forces during the war. Like the American Thompson and the Russian PPSh, the MP40 became a national icon. Roughly one million copies were produced before the gun was supplanted by the MP44 assault rifle.
In the prototype MP36 you can see the vestiges of what would eventually become a legendary weapon.
The MP40 was a streamlined development of the MP38 that was itself an evolutionary successor to the MP36. The MP36 was developed by Berthold Geipel working at Erma Werke with funding from the German Army. The MP36 never made it past prototype stage but laid the foundation for the profoundly successful guns to come.
The MP38 is most easily differentiated from the later MP40 by the grooves in the receiver and the small holes in the magwell.
The MP38 featured the same familiar layout as the subsequent MP40 but was built around a milled receiver formed from a piece of drawn tubular steel. The MP38 can be identified at a glance by the longitudinal grooves milled into the receiver as well as the dime-sized holes cut in the sides of the magazine well.
The MP40 changed the way the world made weapons.
The definitive MP40 employed a pressed steel receiver and synthetic Bakelite furniture. As a result, the MP40 was the first general issue infantry weapon in the world to eschew wood in its manufacture. The underfolding steel stock was copied almost exactly onto the AKMS folding stocked Kalashnikov rifle.
Though heavy and bulky, the MP40 is one of the most controllable and effective subguns of the war.
The MP40 runs from the open bolt and feeds from a double-column, single-feed 32-round magazine. The rear sight is flip adjustable between 100 and 200 meters. The gun fires full-auto only at a sedate rate of around 550 rounds per minute. While fairly heavy at 8.75 pounds empty, the front-heavy nature of the design makes the MP40 exceptionally controllable in action.
The Rest of the Story
SS formations were some of the most effective units in the German military. A friend who fought them in Europe once told me, “We didn’t take many of those SS men prisoner.”
All totaled, as many as 156 Canadian POWs were executed by members of the 12th SS Panzer during the Normandy Campaign. A few bodies were discovered by members of the Regina Rifle Regiment a month later on July 8 when they liberated the Abbey. The first eleven victims were not discovered until spring of the following year when locals accidentally stumbled across the remains. The forensic analysis demonstrated that, while many had been shot in the head as described by Trooper Jesionek, others had been bludgeoned to death with either rifle butts or entrenching tools.
Kurt Meyer ultimately faced military judgment for his wartime crimes.
In December of 1945, Kurt Meyer was formally charged with murder by the Allied War Crimes Tribunal. Trooper Jesionek along with SS Private Alfred Helzel testified for the prosecution, with Helzel reporting that Meyer had commanded that no prisoners be taken. SGT Stanley Dudka, a Canadian survivor, offered first-person damning testimony as well.
A friend who was there told me that after the war there was a surprising dearth of Nazis. Everybody claimed they had been unaware of the darker, more sordid activities of the regime.
For his part, Kurt Meyer denied all knowledge of the killings. He later claimed that he was aware of the presence of the bodies, but that he had not seen them until two days after the murders. Throughout his trial Meyer denied having issued the order not to take prisoners.
Kurt Meyer went to prison for his role in the massacre of Canadian prisoners during the Normandy campaign.
Meyer was convicted of incitement to commit murder for his role as Division Commander at the time of the atrocities. He was sentenced to death on December 28, 1945, though his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment on January 14, 1946. He served nine years of his sentence before being released on September 7, 1954.
This fun-loving mob is HIAG, a political action group comprised of former SS troopers that was active after the war.Worn with both dress and combat uniforms, the Knight’s Cross was the most coveted combat decoration in the German military. Men vying to earn the award were colloquially described as having a sore throat.
After his release from prison Meyer became an active member of HIAG, a lobbying group formed from high-ranking Waffen SS troops. HIAG stands for “Hilfsgemeinschaft auf Gegenseitigkeit der Angehörigen der ehemaligen Waffen-SS,” which literally translates to “Mutual Aid Association of Former Waffen-SS Members.”
The Waffen SS was a controversial though brilliant military construct. SS troopers developed a reputation for fanatical devotion to der Fuhrer.
Throughout the rest of his life Meyer remained a vocal SS apologist, painting SS troops as non-politically affiliated, profoundly brave fighters who had little to nothing to do with the crimes of the Nazi regime. Historians have since reliably debunked these claims.
Kurt Meyer spent the rest of his life defending the actions of the SS.
In 1957 Meyer published Grenadiere, the memoirs of his time with the Waffen SS. In this book, Meyer condemned the “inhuman suffering” to which Waffen-SS personnel had been subjected”for crimes which they neither committed nor were able to prevent”.Historian Charles W. Sydnor subsequently described Grenadiere as “perhaps the boldest and most truculent of the apologist works” of the post-Nazi era.
Panermeyer lived hard and died young.
Later in life, Kurt Meyer’s health declined precipitously. He suffered from kidney failure and heart disease and required a cane to walk. Meyer died two days before Christmas in 1961 at age 51. 15,000 people attended his funeral.
York family log cabin. From Cowan, Sergeant York and his People, 33.
Valley of the Three Forks O’ the Wolf. From Cowan, Sergeant York and his People, 89.
Fentress County recruits, November 15, 1917. Alvin York is fourth from left.
U.S. rifle cal .30, model of 1917 Enfield most likely used by Alvin York. Manufacturer: Eddystone.
British Mark III Lee-Enfield Rifle. Courtesy 
Valley just west of hill 223 across which York and the 2nd Battalion attacked on the morning of October 8, 1918.
U.S. rifle cal .30, model of 1903 Springfield. Twelve to fifteen percent of rifles issued to WW I soldiers were Springfields. 
Artificial harbors constructed on the Normandy assault beaches at great expense and effort helped sustain the Allied drive until more permanent solutions could be found.
By 1944 LTC Robert Dawson was a seasoned and respected Commando officer.
