One of the most contentious debates pertaining to World War II deals with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s role in trying to mitigate the horrors of the Holocaust. Many argue that Roosevelt was a political animal who based his position on the plight of world Jewry on political calculation and did little to offset Nazi terror; others argue that FDR did as much as possible based on conditions domestically and abroad. In the new book, FDR AND THE JEWS, Richard Breitman and Allan J. Lichtman address all aspects of FDR’s policies during the Holocaust synthesizing most if not all the relevant secondary and primary sources with a layer of new material. The authors reach the conclusion that FDR’s views were consistent throughout the war and he was “politically and emotionally stingy when it came to the plight of the Jews-even given that he had no easy remedies for a specific Jewish tragedy in Europe.” (210) The authors argue that “FDR avoided positions that might put at risk his broader goals of mobilizing anti-Nazi opposition and gaining freedom to act in foreign affairs,” (151) for example dealing with the refugee crisis, the issue of Palestine, immigration, and organizing the defeat of Nazi Germany. The authors describe in detail the fear of domestic anti-Semitism, especially in the State Department; the inability of American Jews to present a united front; the role of the War Department; and presidential politics. Overall, the reader is presented a picture of a president who had a great deal on his plate during the war and did as much as he could given the political and military situation in Europe in trying to bring to an end the horrors that beset the Jews during the Second World War. Overall, the book is an exceptionally detailed work that is worthy of an academic as well as a general audience as it centers in on the important issue that remains with us today; what is the “appropriate response of an American president to humanitarian crises abroad?” (327)
World War II
DUNKIRK: THE MEN THEY LEFT BEHIND by Sean Longden
Last July I found myself looking out from the white cliffs of Dover peering across the English Channel at France. After touring the tunnel caves carved out during Napoleon’s time and put to use by the British during World War II I began to wonder what it was like for the soldiers who were not rescued by the “mythical British flotilla” that saved so many at Dunkirk. While browsing in the main bookstore for the historical replication of the tunnel caves I came across Sean Longden’s DUNKIRK: THE MEN THEY LEFT BEHIND. What unfolds in Longden’s narrative is the horrific experience of the 40,000 British soldiers who were not rescued as the Germans marched through France and threatened the channel coast. These were the men who performed a rearguard action that allowed the hundreds of thousands of British soldiers to escape. The story of the rearguard soldiers who would spend five years as prisoners of war was not publicized by the British government as they sought to translate the Dunkirk evacuation not as a defeat, but as a victory. Therefore, the plight of the POWs was kept hidden from the British public for years. According to the author it took until the publication of Richard Collier’s THE SANDS OF DUNKIRK for the true story of the evacuation to be told. Longden has resurrected the story of these men through numerous personal interviews and mining the vast historical documentation. What emerges is the application of the survivor’s descriptions and emotions from their experiences interspersed through a well written and extremely thoughtful narrative.
Longden begins the book with a history of the Dunkirk evacuation and explores how the British found themselves in such dire straits in May, 1940. The author describes the lack of training given to recruits and the equipment that was World War I vintage. The German advance through Belgium and France that fostered thousands of refugees is described as is allied military incompetence. The resulting carnage of the British retreat is described with stunning images. Once the order to fall back was given a rearguard action was instituted to allow as many British soldiers as possible to escape across the channel. The British government highlighted the evacuation and purposely forgot about the men who were left behind. Many of these men felt abandoned, though there were other rescue attempts that did not come to light until sixty years later.
The author takes the reader along on the odyssey that befell the remaining British Expeditionary Force who were not fortunate enough to reach Dunkirk. The reader witnesses all aspects of what the soldiers experienced. The poignant and difficult stories abound as some soldiers tried to escape through other venues; while others were captured by the Germans and turned into POWs who were marched across Western Europe to their destination in camps in eastern Germany. The detailed descriptions of the horrors the POWs experienced as they marched including daily humiliations, malnutrition, shootings, and exhaustion by their German captors leaves nothing to the imagination. The Germans did their best to foster hatred between British and French captives, and singled out the English soldiers for “systematic inhumanity” as reported by a later government investigation. (369) Longden description on p. 373 summarizes the plight of these men well, “For so many of the marchers it was a lonely existence. They were surrounded by thousands of men. All were sharing the same hideous experiences, all had known the horrors of battle and seen their friends slaughtered, yet they had no emotions to share. Instead each man became wrapped up in his own small world – a world that revolved around the desperate desire for food and rest.”
The plight of the POWs continued over the next five years of captivity. The narrative employs the words of the survivors to recreate their experiences. The Germans were totally unprepared to house the massive influx of POWs, particularly as it related to their medical condition. What resulted were years of depravity, continued malnutrition, dysentery, gastro-intestinal issues, lice and a host of other problems. Emotions were shattered as they witnessed the shootings of their comrades and the total disregard for humanity exhibited by their German guards. The lives of the prisoners “revolved around forced labor, inadequate food, disease, violence and death.” (456) Not only does the author describe daily life but he accurately explores the physical, and especially the mental state of the prisoners during captivity.
After five years in POW camps the prisoners were finally liberated in April, 1945. The liberation created a confusing situation as to whom to surrender, which direction they should follow, how to gain enough sustenance to make their way west, and how to deal with their own physical condition. The earlier march east was endured by heat; however the march west was so cold that frostbite was a regular occurrence. As they left the camps they continued to witness the horrors of war. Soviet vengeance against the Germans was ever present, contact with Holocaust survivors, performing what seemed to be barbaric medical procedures on their “mates” to save them, starvation leading to eating and drinking the foulest things just to survive, are all difficult to imagine.
The stories of liberation are heartwarming, but repatriation and homecoming could not possibly go smoothly based on the condition of the men and what they had experienced. Post traumatic stress disorder was very common, but in 1945 it was not a diagnostic category with recommended treatment. Longden correctly points out that the mindset of the returning soldiers centered on the failures of the British army in France in 1940 as they felt they were trained as a 1918 force to go up against a mechanized German machine. “They had witnessed the superiority, in both numbers and quality, of German tanks and aircraft….and seen allied armies outmaneuvered by advancing Germans…..they had been let down by a government that had sent them to France in 1940 ill-prepared for modern warfare.” (525-526) “As the prisoners returned home there was a general lack of understanding of what they had endured…..Whether it was the soldiers surrounded at St. Valery, the men who received disabling wounds during battles, or the men who had been plucked from the sea following the sinking of the Lancastria, the plight of those left behind at Dunkirk seemed like a footnote to history.” (528) The story of the miracle of Dunkirk seems to have passed these men by and they felt it upon their return home and for many years to follow. What separates Longden’s book from others is the use of the words of the captives describing their emotions and what had they had experienced. It leads to a powerful narrative for anyone interested in reading a work of history that sets the records straight.
AGENT GARBO by Stefan Talty
Stephan Talty has written a work of non-fiction dealing with the allied strategy of misinformation as it relates to the onset of D Day. The book reads like a novel as the author follows the life of Juan Pujol as he transformed himself into one of, or possibly the most important spy the allies developed during World War II. Even though the reader is fully aware of the outcome of wartime events, the author keeps you on the edge of your seat as operations are planned and executed. If you want a wonderful biography written in the context of the nether world of espionage during World War II, this book will be very satisfying.
A QUESTION OF HONOR by Lynne Olson and Stanley Cloud
A QUESTION OF HONOR by Lynne Olson and Stanley Cloud contains a subtitle; The Kosciuszko Squadron: Forgotten Heroes of World War II. The book itself is more than raising the reader’s consciousness as to the heroic work of Polish pilots during the war. It is a wonderful narrative that encompasses the plight of Poland that historically has been in the crosshairs of Germany and Russia resulting in its disappearance as a nation in 1795, only to reappear after World War I. The authors develop the poignant story of the Polish flyers in the context of Polish history. They tell the personal stories of these men and their role in saving the British during the Battle of Britain. They emerge as heroes until Poland became an obstacle of “Big Three” diplomacy during the war and its conclusion. There is really nothing new in terms of the duplicitous and disingenuous behavior of Franklin D. Roosevelt during the war as he tried to implement his vision of a postwar Europe by playing into the hands of Joseph Stalin. Winston Churchill emerges as a willing, if at times, reluctant cohort in FDR’s game. All the familiar topics are discussed in detail including the murder of Polish officers by the Soviet Union at the Katyn forest, the failure to assist the Polish Home Army in its attempt to throw off the Nazi yoke in Warsaw in 1944, and the failure of the British to honor and support those who had assisted them when they were in dire straits in 1940. The book is well researched and brings to its pages a story that during the war and well into the Cold War was buried for fear of upsetting the Soviet Union. This is a story that needs to be told and the truth about the plight of Poland during and after the Second World War provides insights into the behavior of the major personalities who were responsible for events.
THE MONUMENTS MEN by Robert M. Edsel
One of the hidden stories of World War II was the work of a group of American soldiers and their allies who worked tirelessly to save, track down, and recover the cultural treasures stolen by the Nazis. Most of these individuals were a part of the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives section (MFAA) of the United States Army during the war. At a time when Hollywood is releasing a major film on their work in a few weeks I can only hope that the portrayal of these unselfish and hard working people measures up to Robert M. Edsel’s THE MONUMENTS MEN, which chronicles their amazing accomplishments. Edsel tells the story of nine individuals who are representative of the 350 Monument Men who were part of the American effort to save the world’s cultural heritage from the Nazis. These individuals include their recognized leader Lieutenant George Stout, Second Lieutenant James J. Rorimer who was able to locate massive amounts of seized works of art, Rose Valland, a French woman who worked with the resistance whose knowledge of what was seized in France was encyclopedic, Captain Robert Posey, Captain Walter Hancock, and Jacques Jaujard, the director of the French National Museum. Obviously there are many other heroes, but Edsel concentrates on those mentioned. As the war progressed the Germans would steal massive amounts of art as they conquered each nation. They looted museums, archives, churches, homes, in the name of the Thousand Year Reich. By the end of the war the Allies “discovered over 1000 repositories in southern Germany alone, containing millions of works of art and other cultural treasures.” The members of the MFAA worked diligently to locate, preserve, and return their findings to their countries of origin. These included “church bells, stained glass, religious items, municipal records, manuscripts, books, libraries, wine, gold, diamonds, and even insect collections.” (400) Nazi theft was based on Adolf Hitler’s dream to make Berlin, the new Rome; and his birthplace, Linz, Austria the new Aachen of European culture. The goal of his minions was to build and stock his Fuhrermuseum by pillaging the museums and private art collections throughout Europe.
Edsel tells the story of the Monument Men by interspersing Nazi documents and letters from these men home to their families throughout the narrative. What we learn early on is that Nazi leaders from Hitler on down, especially Hermann Goring and Alfred Rosenberg issued orders, not only for entire collections, but specific paintings that they wanted for themselves. These men were in charge of the ransacking of Europe and were in competition with each other and other Nazi officials to acquire as much of Europe’s cultural heritage as they could. The chapter that describes the German seizure of Michelangelo’s Madonna provides insight into how the Nazis operated as they continued to steal and loot art treasures even after the war had turned against them.
Edsel does an excellent job personalizing the stories of each of the Monument Men he writes about. The MFAA were not an army unit, but groups of individuals who worked together on a daily basis. These men were scattered throughout the American army, with individuals being attached to different army groups, i.e.; Robert Posey, from rural Alabama was attached to Patton’s Third Army; James Rorimer, a rising curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, was attached to the United States Seventh Army. These men were given a broad mission to locate and preserve as much of Europe’s treasures as they could as they fanned out into France, Belgium, Holland, and Germany. When Walker Hancock, a sculptor from St. Louis entered Chartres he found the cathedral almost destroyed by the Germans. Hancock and a demolitions expert were able to locate twenty-two sets of explosives and defuse them to save as much of the cathedral as possible. We follow George Stout, an expert in the then obscure field of art restoration as he helps locate a Dutch mountainside tunnel at Maastricht that served as a Nazi Repository for the Rijksmuseum of Amsterdam. Included in this repository was Rembrandt’s Night Watch. Edsel provides an interesting description how the Louvre Museum was emptied before the war by French officials. The Mona Lisa was taken out on a stretcher and transported by ambulance. However once the Germans took Paris in June, 1940, Hitler who believed he was entitled to the spoils of war, and his henchmen went to “great lengths to establish new laws and procedures to ‘legalize’ the looting activities that would follow.” (117) the Germans took whatever treasure they desired and Hitler wanted to use these art objects as collateral in negotiations.
Edsel recounts the difficulties the Monument Men faced in carrying out their mission. They had no central office to report to and a structure in place to supply them. They did not possess any useful communications equipment and seemed at times to operate in a vacuum. Cameras would seem to have been a necessity, but very few were available and none were new. Transportation was a nightmare as no vehicles were assigned to them, though one of them was able to abscond with a Volkswagen mini-bus, whose engine was shot and did not have a windshield! When the landing at Normandy took place it took weeks and sometimes few months for all of them to cross the English Channel into France. Their work was not considered a priority for many officers and they had no one in the rear echelon to plead their case. Despite these challenges they were able to do a remarkable job that Edsel describes in detail.
Perhaps the most interesting relationship that existed was between Rose Vallard and James Rorimer. Vallard was a curator at the Louvre who was in charge of the Jeu de Paume, a structure that was built as an indoor tennis court by Napoleon III, but had been converted to exhibition space for foreign contemporary art. During the war the Nazis used the Jeu de Paume “as their clearinghouse for the spoils of France. For four years, the private collections of French citizens, especially Jews, moved through its galleries like water flowing downhill to the Reich.” (177) It was a very efficient operation and Vallard observed it all. She made copious notes about what was taken, where things were stored, and how objects were transported, including their destination. Vallard had ties to the French Resistance, particularly her friend and compatriot, Jacques Jaujard. James Rorimer was assigned to Paris and developed a relationship with Vallard. It took time to build trust between the two, as Vallard who was the key to recovering vast amounts of art, was suspicious of everyone. Once they were able to gain respect for each other Vallard’s work enabled Rorimer to locate 175 repositories alone in the territory of the Seventh Army, as well as numerous others, including the cache at Mad Ludwig II of Bavaria’s castle at Neuschwanstein.
The stories that Edsel tells in many cases are unbelievable. When Robert Posey suffers from an impacted wisdom tooth a little boy in Trier refers him to a dentist. The dentist takes care of the tooth but tells him about his son, an art scholar. He brings Posey and his partner PVT 1st Class Lincoln Kistein, a legendary cultural impresario from New York, to meet his son who turns out to be Dr. Hermann Bunjes one of Goring’s top art officials. The information they glean eventually brings them to Altaussee salt mines outside Saltzburg that stored more than 1,687 paintings in addition to Michelangelo’s Bruges Madonna. The stories are endless as Edsel follows these men on their recovery missions, brings the reader inside the American command under Eisenhower as they come across the Buchenwald concentration camp, and describes how paintings by Rembrandt, Raphael, and Van Eyck etc. are recovered.
Despite the superb work of the Monument Men during and after the war many examples of Europe’s cultural heritage, whether from museums or taken from private collections, remain lost. In the 1990s there was a renewed interest in this subject and periodically we hear about paintings found in attics or basements, and law suits to adjudicate these findings determining the rightful owners after fifty years or more. It took a long time for these men to gain recognition from the American military and public for their work. Edsel’s research along with the upcoming film should foster this process even further. Though most of these men have been recognized posthumously, Edsel deserves a tremendous amount of credit for bringing their work to our attention.
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