Before the blows began to rain: Walter Reuther (hand in pocket) and Richard Frankensteen (to Reuther’s left). Photo: James Kilpatrick of the Detroit News, Wikimedia Commons

In 1937, Walter Reuther and his United Autoworkers Union had brought General Motors and Chrysler to their knees by staging massive sit-down strikes in pursuit of higher pay, shorter hours and other improvements in workers’ lives. But when Reuther and the UAW set their sights on the Ford Motor Company’s River Rouge complex in Dearborn, Michigan, Henry Ford made it clear that he’d never give in to the union.

On the morning of May 26, 1937, Detroit News photographer James “Scotty” Kilpatrick was among a crowd waiting for the shift change at River Rouge, which employed 90,000 workers.  About 2 p.m. that May 26, Reuther arrived at the Miller Road Overpass at Gate 4 with an entourage of clergymen, representatives from the Senate Committee on Civil Liberties and dozens of women from UAW Local 174, where Reuther was president. The woman wore green berets and carried leaflets reading, “Unionism, not Fordism,” which they intended to hand out to departing workers. At the direction of “Scotty” Kilpatrick, Reuther posed for photographs with UAW organizational director Richard Frankensteen and a few other organizers atop the overpass—public property—with the Ford Motor Company sign in the background.

Then Harry Bennett showed up with his entourage. Bennett, one of Henry Ford’s right-hand men, led the notorious Ford Service Department, a private police force composed of ex-convicts, ex-athletes, ex-cops and gang members.

“You will have to get off here,” one of Bennett’s men told the unionists.

“We’re not doing anything,” Reuther replied.

Frankensteen (with his jacket pulled over his head) said members of the Ford Service Department gave him “the worst licking I’ve ever taken.” Photo: James Kilpatrick, Detroit News, Wikimedia Commons

Like that, what would become infamous as the Battle of the Overpass was on. Forty of Bennett’s men charged the union organizers. Kilpatrick called out a warning, but the security men pounced, beating the union leaders while reporters and clergy looked on. Kilpatrick and the other photographers began snapping away. Reporters accompanying them took notes on what they were seeing.

Reuther was kicked, stomped, lifted into the air, thrown to the ground repeatedly, and tossed down two flights of stairs.  Frankensteen, a 30-year-old, hulking former football player, go it worse because he tried to fight back. Bennett’s men swarmed him, pulled his jacket over his head and beat him senseless.

“It was the worst licking I’ve ever taken,” he later told reporters.  “They bounced us down the concrete steps of an overpass we had climbed. Then they would knock us down, stand us up, and knock us down again.” Another union leader was tossed off the overpass; his fall 30 feet to the pavement below broke his back. The security men even roughed up some of the women.

The battle, such as it was, ended almost as suddenly as it had begun. But then there was the matter of witnesses—especially the journalists on the scene. Some of Bennett’s security men began to tear notebooks from reporters’ hands. Others went after the photographers, confiscating film and smashing cameras to the ground. They chased one fleeing photographer for five miles, until he ducked into a police station for safety.

Scotty Kilpatrick fled, too—and made it to his car in just enough time to hide the glass-plate negatives from his Speed Graphic under the back seat. When some Bennett men stopped him and demanded that he surrender his negatives, he handed them unexposed plates.

Once Reuther, Frankensteen and witnesses began to tell reporters what they had seen in front of the Ford plant, Harry Bennett issued a statement. “The affair was deliberately provoked by union officials,” it said. “They feel, with or without justification, the [Senator] La Follette Civil Liberties Committee sympathizes with their aims and they simply wanted to trump up a charge of Ford brutality that they could take down to Washington and flaunt before the senatorial committee.

“I know definitely no Ford service men or plant police were involved in any way in the fight,” Bennett continued. “As a matter of fact, the service men had issued instructions the union people could come and distribute their pamphlets at the gates so long as they didn’t interfere with employees at work.” The unionists, he said, “were beaten by regular Ford employees who were on their way to work on the afternoon shift. The union men called them scabs and cursed and taunted them.”

Dearborn Police later said the Ford Service Department was “defending public property.”

Meanwhile, Scotty Kilpatrick developed his negatives, and other photographers, after the event, captured on film the injuries to the bloodied Reuther and Frankensteen. “If Mr. Ford thinks this will stop us, he’s got another thing coming,” Frankensteen said. “We’ll go back there with enough men to lick him at his own game.”

Ford security men harassed and beat women from the UAW auxiliary. Photo: James Kilpatrick, Detroit News, Wikimedia Commons.

Reuther was more composed: “Before the UAW gets through with Harry Bennett and Ford’s Service Department, Dearborn will be a part of the United States and the workers will be able to enjoy their constitutional rights.”

Bennett did his best to put his version into news accounts of the Battle of the Overpass, but once Kilpatrick’s photographs were published, it was obvious that the beatings were far more violent than Bennett had described. And they showed Ford security men surrounding and beating UAW men and grabbing UAW women. In all, 16 unionists were injured in the attack, including seven women. Reuther was pictured bloodied and with a swollen skull, and Frankensteen was even worse—his face cut and his shirt torn and bloodstained. Kilpatrick’s photographs quickly turned public opinion toward the notion that the Ford Service Department was a gang of hired thugs.

In a hearing before the National Labor Relations Board in 1937, the Ford Motor Company was called to defend itself from charges that the company was engaging in unfair labor practices in violation of the 1935 Wagner Act, which prohibited employers from interfering with workers’ efforts to organize into unions. During the hearing, Ford workers testified that if their superiors suspected them of showing interest in the UAW, Ford Service Department men would pull them from the assembly lines and escort them to the gate as they were fired on the spot, often without explanation.

The publicity from the Battle of the Overpass and the ensuing labor-board hearing proved to be too much for Henry Ford. He had tried to raise his workers’ pay soon after the incident in Dearborn, but his efforts came too late, and ultimately, like Detroit’s other automotive giants, he had no choice but to sign a contract with the UAW.

The power of Scotty Kilpatrick’s photographs eventually vaulted Walter Reuther into national prominence as a labor leader and prompted the administrators of the Pulitzer Prizes to institute an award for photography. The first Pulitzer for photography would be awarded to Milton Brooks of the Detroit News in 1942—for his image of UAW strikers savagely beating a strikebreaker.

Sources

Articles:

“Union Acts to Prosecute Ford in Beating of Two Organizers,” The Christian Science Monitor, May 27, 1937.  “C.I.O. Leaders Slugged, Driven Off in Attempt to Spread Handbills,” Washington Post, May 27, 1937.  “Ford Men Beat and Rout Lewis Union Organizers,” New York Times, May 27, 1937.  “The Battle of the Overpass, at 75,” by Bryce Hoffman, The Detroit News, May 24, 2012. “Ford Motor Company Chronology,” The Henry Ford, http://www.hfmgv.org/exhibits/fmc/battle.asp

Books: Nelson Lichtenstein, Walter Reuther: The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit, Basic Books, 1995.

Grantland Rice, Gene Sarazen and Craig Wood at the 1935 Augusta National Invitational Tournament. Photo: © Bettmann/CORBIS

There were already whispers that Craig Wood was a bad-luck golfer when, in late March of 1935, he accepted an offer from Bobby Jones to play in his second Augusta National Invitational Tournament in Augusta, Georgia.  Known as the “Blond Bomber,” Wood had literally made a splash at the 1933 British Open at St. Andrews—he had tied Denny Shute for the lead after 72 holes, but lost in a playoff when his booming drive found the famous Swilcan Burn, a thin channel of water that cuts across the first fairway.

At the inaugural “Masters” (as it would later become known), in 1934, Wood had lost to Horton Smith, who inconceivably holed two long putts on the final holes to win by a stroke. Later that year, Wood finished second in the 1934 PGA Championship, losing once again in a playoff to Paul Runyan, who just a few years before had been his assistant pro at Forest Hills Golf Club in White Plains, New York.

Still, Wood, a native of Lake Placid, New York, was a polished and respected player when he arrived in Augusta in April 1935; a reporter described him as someone “who has so often had the door to opportunity slammed in his face.” By the end of the 1935 Augusta National Invitational, however, Craig Wood would be known as the most jinxed golfer the game had ever known. It would happen in a matter of seconds during the final round, when Eugenio Saraceni, the son of an immigrant carpenter and better known as Gene Sarazen, reached into his pocket for a lucky ring, then reached into his bag on the 15^th fairway and made a swing for the ages—the “shot heard ’round the world”—and paved the way to another playoff.

Bobby Jones was already a legend: he had retired from competition in 1930, at the age of 28, having dominated the game like no other American for nearly a decade. But after founding the Augusta National Golf Club in his native Georgia, Jones came out of retirement in 1934 to help boost the new Augusta National Invitational, and he would continue to play the tournament on an exhibition basis for years to come. He was not only the biggest star in golf, but also the biggest and most beloved star in all of sports at the time—the only athlete to receive two ticker-tape parades down Broadway in New York City. Perhaps on the strength of his competitive reputation alone, Bobby Jones was the bookie favorite to win the 1935 Masters.

Sarazen in 1939. Photo: Wikipedia

Wood was among the favorites as well, but the smart money was on Sarazen, who was at the top of his game. Although he was just 33, he was considered a crafty veteran, having already won six major tournaments. He also preferred to wear the traditional plus-fours (so called because they’re four inches longer than traditional knickers) when most golfers had opted, he said, for “sloppy slacks.” Sportswriter Grantland Rice played a practice round with the golfer nicknamed “the Squire” and wrote that he’d “never seen him hit the ball any better.” His 65 in a friendly round tied Bobby Jones’ course record.

In the days leading up to the tournament, Sarazen told Rice that the stars seemed to be lining up for him, even though he’d only just played the new course for the first time. “When I came here, I had three cows at home,” he told Rice. “Now I have three cows and two calves. That’s a hunch, and you know how I like hunches. I’m keen about the course, and I never saw any golf battlefield in better shape. I honestly think I can step along here.”

If Sarazen had dreams of victory the night before the tournament, they were interrupted at 4 a.m. by the sound of his hotel room door opening and the sight of a woman’s silhouette in the door frame. He jumped out of bed, picked up his driver and chased her down the corridor until she disappeared into another room. (“I was thinking of the forty dollars I had left on my dresser,” he said. “These are tough days. I can use that forty dollars to feed my four cows.”)

The episode had little effect on his game; he shot a 68 in the opening round, and it could have been lower had a few close putts dropped. Tommy Armour, who was paired with him, told reporters his partner played “one of the greatest rounds of golf I have ever seen. It matched the greatest golf I have ever seen Harry Vardon or Bobby Jones play. It was a masterpiece of golf art. Gene could have used his foot and kicked the ball in for a 65 or 66. I was hitting the ball quite well. I was only one over par, and yet in this round I felt like a hacker.”

By the end of the first round, the “par-wrecking field” saw Sarazen near the top with a 68 and Wood just one stroke behind. Henry “the Hershey Hurricane” Picard led the field with a 67, but Jones posted a 74, seven strokes off the lead.

Following round three on a stormy Saturday, April 6, Wood had taken the lead at seven under par, followed by Olin Dutra, Picard and Sarazen in fourth place, three strokes back. Wood had played spectacular golf in difficult conditions. Sportswriters marveled at his score, considering that he’d hit into a ditch and a water hazard, and missed a four-foot putt on the ninth. Sarazen had managed only a 73, and Jones could not get into contention. As the players teed off on a cold and rain-soaked course for Sunday’s final round, Wood found himself paired with Picard, while Sarazen played with his friend and rival Walter Hagen, who was out of contention and would spend the round reminiscing about old times and “his women,” Sarazen recalled.

Wood put together another solid round. Picard and Dutra faded, and Jones’ erratic putting (he missed a one-footer) kept him from mounting any challenge. When Wood birdied the 14th, 15th and 18th holes for a 73, he went into the clubhouse at six under par with a three-stroke lead over Sarazen—the only player still on the course who had a chance. (Final-round pairings were not based on scores then, so Wood, despite being the third-round leader, had teed off several groups ahead of Sarazen.)

Sarazen could hear the roar that greeted Wood’s final birdie, and as he approached the 15th tee, he turned to his caddie, Thor “Stovepipe” Nordwall, and asked what he needed to win.

“What do you mean, boss, to beat Craig Wood?” Nordwall asked.

Sarazen nodded. Standing on the tee, Hagen began to titter at the thought of a late round charge.

“Oooh,” the caddie mused, looking at the scorecard. “You need four threes, Mister Gene. Three, three, three, three.”

That would be an eagle, par, birdie and birdie. Picturing the four holes ahead, Sarazen didn’t think much of his chances. Back in the clubhouse, Wood was feeling confident. “I knew then the odds were 1000 to 1 in my favor,” he told a reporter later that night.  “I felt the tournament was over.”

Sarazen blasted his tee shot down the 15th fairway—but “received a sudden jolt when I saw my lie” on the par-five hole, he would say. “It was none too good.” Most of the fans had been following Wood, so the gallery around Sarazen was sparse. Nordwall suggested a three-wood for the second shot into the green. There would be no laying up—not with Wood in the clubhouse, up by three strokes. Sarazen judged the lie to be “sitting down” and he thought he couldn’t lift the ball with a three-wood, so he “went to the bottom of his leather quiver” and grabbed his four-wood—a new model, the Wilson TurfRider.

Bobby Jones, pictured here in 1930, was one of the few people to witness  Sarazen’s “shot heard round the world.” Photo: Wikipedia

Knowing he’d need to carry the ball 235 yards to the pin to give himself a chance at an eagle, he remembered a “lucky ring” that his friend Bob Davis had given him the night before. Davis told Sarazen that the ring had belonged to former Mexican president Benito Juarez. Sarazen thought the gaudy ring was too cumbersome to wear during a round of golf, but the Squire was also superstitious, so he had stuffed the bauble into his pocket that morning. (Davis later confessed that it wasn’t Juarez’s ring; he’d simply bought the trinket in Mexico.)

Now he pulled the ring out of his pocket and walked over to his caddie and began rubbing it on Nordwall’s head for luck. Hagen, who liked to play fast, was eager to finish the round. “Hurry up, will ya?  I’ve got a date tonight,” he said.

Inside the clubhouse, Wood’s name had already been inscribed on the winner’s check, and his wife, Jacqueline, was standing by her husband, accepting congratulations. Wood’s lead looked “safer than a dozen Gibraltars,” one reporter observed. It was the couple’s first wedding anniversary, and Wood was hoping to make a “husbandly effort to present this title to his wife,” as well as the winner’s check for $1,500. (The traditional awarding of the green jacket to the Masters champion did not begin until 1949.)

At the same time, Sarazen, described in newspapers afterward as the “swaggering little Roman,” stepped up to address his ball. He slowly began his backswing, then powered down through the ball, which, one reporter noted, “left the face of the spoon like a rifle shot.”

The shot landed on the front of the green. A cheer went up from the spectators—and then a roar as the ball began to roll, tracking slowly toward the pin. Ever so deliberately, it “spun along its way and finally disappeared in the cup for a double-eagle two,” one reporter wrote. “A two on a 485-yard hold where even an eagle three wouldn’t have helped.”

Jones, who had finished his round, saw Sarazen’s miraculous second shot from the fairway. “That was one golf shot that was beyond all imagining, and golf is largely imagination,” Jones said. “From duffer to star we all dream of impossible shots that might come off. This one was beyond the limit of all dreams when you consider all the surrounding circumstances. I still don’t believe what I saw.”

Another reporter observed, “Had anyone other than Sarazen holed a 230-yard [shot] for a deuce on a 485-yard hole, it could easily be set down as a miracle, but coming from the fighting little Italian, it was a manifestation of superb competitive courage, garnished, of course, with a smattering of luck.”

Later that night, Sarazen told Rice he had been “afraid of the lie I had.” When he saw the ball sailing toward the green, he hoped he’d have a short eagle putt. Then he heard the roar of the crowd and discovered he’d made a double eagle. “Nothing else could have saved me,” he said. “When that wild howl went up, I felt, for just a second, like crying.”

Back in the clubhouse, Jacqueline Wood felt like doing the same. She was spotted standing “anxious, trembling and miserable.” As word of Sarazen’s double eagle spread and electrified the grounds, one of the players’ wives approached her and said, “You’ll get used to this, dear.”

With one swing, Sarazen had made up three strokes on Wood. He parred the last three holes, which left him tied for the lead after four rounds. A 36-hole playoff loomed on Monday—another raw day. A reporter wrote that Wood would try to “beat back destiny,” but the end of the 1935 Augusta National Invitational would be anticlimactic. Wood was “hitting perfect figures all the way, while Sarazen was curing two mistakes with as many birdies,” in one reporter’s account. Sarazen won by five strokes.

Wood didn’t express any bitterness about the defeat. He recalled losing the inaugural tournament to Horton Smith, but said, “It never occurred to me that anyone was going to hole a shot of 230 yards to stop me again.”

He eventually became the first golfer to lose all four major championships in extra holes—a distinction that lasted until Greg Norman came along. Unlike Norman, however, Wood rebounded from his defeats in Augusta; in 1941 he won the tournament in wire-to-wire fashion. He then removed the “jinx” label by winning the very next major—the 45th U.S. Open—in what is widely considered one of the greatest years any golfer has ever had.

Sarazen didn’t win much after the 1935 Augusta National Invitational, but he could be counted on to return to Augusta to hit the ceremonial opening shot, along with Byron Nelson and Sam Snead, right up until his death, at age 97, in 1999. In 1955, the Augusta National Golf Club built the Sarazen Bridge at the edge of the pond in front of the 15th hole in honor of the Squire and his double eagle. “It was the greatest thrill I’ve ever known in golf,” he said just after his 1935 feat, “or ever expect to again.”

Sources

Books: Gene Sarazen and Herbert Warren Wind, Thirty Years of Championship Golf, Prentice-Hall, Inc, 1950. David Owen, The Making of the Masters: Clifford Roberts, Augusta National, and Golf’s Most Prestigious Tournament, Simon & Schuster, 1999. Ken Janke, Firsts, Facts, Feats, & Failures In the World of Golf, John Wiley & Sons, 2007. Robert McCord, Golf Book of Days: Fascinating Facts and Stories for Every Day of the Year, Citadel Press Books, 1995.  Matthew E. Adams, In the Spirit of the Game: Golf’s Greatest Stories, Globe Pequot Press, 2008.  Tim Glover and Peter Higgs, Fairway to Heaven: Victors and Victims of Golf’s Choking Game, Mainstream Publishing Company (Edinburgh) Ltd., 1999. Tom Clavin, One for the Ages: Jack Nicklaus and the 1986 Masters, Chicago Review Press, 2011.  Julian I. Graubart, Golf’s Greatest Championship: The 1960 U. S. Open, Taylor Trade Publications, 2009.  Robert Sommers, Golf Anecdotes: From the Links of Scotland to Tiger Woods, Oxford University Press, 2004.

Articles: “Amazing Accuracy Brings Sarazen Victory Over Wood in Playoff of Masters’ Golf Tournament,” Boston Globe, April 9, 1935. “Sarazen’s 144 Wins Masters Golf Playoff,” by Charles Bartlett, Chicago Daily Tribune, April 9, 1935. “Sarazen Ties Wood for Masters’ Title,” Chicago Daily Tribune, April 8, 1935. “Wood Cards 68 to Top Golfers,” Washington Post, April 7, 1935. “Craig Wood Conquers Elements and Par to Snatch Lead in Augusta Open Golf,” by Grantland Rice, Hartford Courant, April 7, 1935. “Wood Cards 68; Leads Masters’ Tourney,” by Charles Bartlett, Chicago Daily Tribune, April 7, 1935. “Henry Picard Shoots 67 to Lead Par-Wrecking Field in Augusta National Golf,” by Grantland Rice, Hartford Courant, April 5, 1935. “Still Feared by Golf’s Greatest,” by Grantland Rice, Daily Boston Globe, April 3, 1935.  “Jones Prince or Hosts, but Stars Fear Sarazen,” Chicago Daily Tribune, April 3, 1935. “Gene Sarazen Ready to Recreate Famous Double Eagle at Masters,” by Jim Achenbach, Sarasota Herald-Tribune, April 11, 1984. “Mystery Man was a Champ,” by Garry Smits, The Florida Times Union, November 10, 2008.  “Early Decision Set the Stage for Drama,” by John Boyette, The Augusta Chronicle, February 9, 2012.  “Golf Dress Sloppy, Says Gene Sarazen,” by Oscar Fraley, The Tuscaloosa News, February 11, 1965.

She visited with President Franklin Roosevelt, becoming the first Soviet citizen to be welcomed at the White House. Afterward, Eleanor Roosevelt asked the Ukranian-born officer to accompany her on a tour of the country and tell Americans of her experiences as a woman in combat. Pavlichenko was only 25, but she had been wounded four times in battle. She also happened to be the most successful and feared female sniper in history, with 309 confirmed kills to her credit—the majority German soldiers. She readily accepted the first lady’s offer.

Justice Robert Jackson, Lyudmila Pavlichenko and Eleanor Roosevelt in 1942. Photo: Library of Congress

She graciously fielded questions from reporters.  One wanted to know if Russian women could wear makeup at the front. Pavlichenko paused; just months before, she’d survived fighting on the front line during the Siege of Sevastopol, where Soviet forces suffered considerable casualties and were forced to surrender after eight months of fighting. “There is no rule against it,” Pavlichenko said, “but who has time to think of her shiny nose when a battle is going on?”

The New York Times dubbed her the “Girl Sniper,” and other newspapers observed that she “wore no lip rouge, or makeup of any kind,” and that “there isn’t much style to her olive-green uniform.”

In New York, she was greeted by Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia and a representative of the International Fur and Leather Workers Union, C.I.O., who presented her with, as one paper reported, a “full-length raccoon coat of beautifully blended skins, which would be resplendent in an opera setting.” The paper lamented that such a garment would likely “go to the wars on Russia’s bloody steppes when Lyudmila Pavlichenko returns to her homeland.”

But as the tour progressed, Pavlichenko began to bristle at the questions, and her clear, dark eyes found focus. One reporter seemed to criticize the long length of her uniform skirt, implying that it made her look fat. In Boston, another reporter observed that Pavlichenko “attacked her five-course New England breakfast yesterday. American food, she thinks, is O.K.”

Soon, the Soviet sniper had had enough of the press’s sniping. “I wear my uniform with honor,” she told Time magazine. “It has the Order of Lenin on it. It has been covered with blood in battle. It is plain to see that with American women what is important is whether they wear silk underwear under their uniforms. What the uniform stands for, they have yet to learn.”

Still, Malvina Lindsey, “The Gentler Sex” columnist for the Washington Post, wondered why Pavlichenko couldn’t make more of an effort with regard to her style. “Isn’t it a part of military philosophy that an efficient warrior takes pride in his appearance?” Lindsey wrote.  “Isn’t Joan of Arc always pictured in beautiful and shining armor?”

Slowly, Pavlichenko began to find her voice, holding people spellbound with stories of her youth, the devastating effect of the German invasion on her homeland, and her career in combat. In speeches across America and often before thousands, the woman sniper made the case for a U.S. commitment to fighting the Nazis in Europe. And in doing so, she drove home the point that women were not only capable, but essential to the fight.

Lyudmila Mykhailvna Pavlichenko was born in 1916 in Balaya Tserkov, a Ukranian town just outside of Kiev. Her father was a St. Petersburg factory worker father, and her mother was a teacher. Pavlichenko described herself as a tomboy who was “unruly in the class room” but athletically competitive, and who would not allow herself to be outdone by boys “in anything.”

“When a neighbor’s boy boasted of his exploits at a shooting range,” she told the crowds, “I set out to show that a girl could do as well. So I practiced a lot.” After taking a job in an arms plant, she continued to practice her marksmanship, then enrolled at Kiev University in 1937, intent on becoming a scholar and teacher. There, she competed on the track team as a sprinter and pole vaulter, and, she said, “to perfect myself in shooting, I took courses at a sniper’s school.”

She was in Odessa when the war broke out and Romanians and Germans invaded. “They wouldn’t take girls in the army, so I had to resort to all kinds of tricks to get in,” Pavlichenko recalled, noting that officials tried to steer her toward becoming a nurse. To prove that she was as skilled with a rifle as she claimed, a Red Army unit held an impromptu audition at a hill they were defending, handing her a rifle and pointing her toward a pair of Romanians who were working with the Germans. “When I picked off the two, I was accepted,” Pavlichenko said, noting that she did not count the Romanians in her tally of kills “because they were test shots.”

The young private was immediately enlisted in the Red Army’s 25th Chapayev Rifle Division, named for Vasily Chapayev, the celebrated Russian soldier and Red Army Commander during the Russian Civil War.  Pavlichenko wanted to proceed immediately to the front.  “I knew that my task was to shoot human beings,” she said. “In theory that was fine, but I knew that the real thing would be completely different.”

Russian delegates accompany Pavlichenko (right) on her visit to Washington, D.C. in 1942. Photo: Library of Congress

On her first day on the battlefield, she found herself close to the enemy—and paralyzed by fear, unable to raise her weapon, a Mosin-Nagant 7.62 mm rifle with a PE 4x telescope. A young Russian soldier set up his position beside her. But before they had a chance to settle in, a shot rang out and a German bullet took out her comrade. Pavlichenko was shocked into action. “He was such a nice, happy boy,” she recalled. “And he was killed just next to me. After that, nothing could stop me.”

She got the first of her 309 official kills later that day when she picked off two German scouts trying to reconnoiter the area. Pavlichenko fought in both Odessa and Moldavia and racked up the majority of her kills, which included 100 officers, until German advances forced her unit to withdraw, landing them in Sevastopol in the Crimean Peninsula. As her kill count rose, she was given more and more dangerous assignments, including the riskiest of all—countersniping, where she engaged in duels with enemy snipers.  Pavlichenko never lost a single duel, notching 36 enemy sniper kills in hunts that could last all day and night (and, in one case, three days). “That was one of the tensest experiences of my life,” she said, noting the endurance and willpower it took to maintain positions for 15 or 20 hours at a stretch.  “Finally,” she said of her Nazi stalker, “he made one move too many.”

In Sevastopol, German forces badly outnumbered the Russians, and Pavlichenko spent eight months in heavy fighting. “We mowed down Hitlerites like ripe grain,” she said. In May 1942, she was cited in Sevastopol by the War Council of the Southern Red Army for killing 257 of the enemy. Upon receipt of the citation, Pavlichenko, now a sergeant, promised, “I’ll get more.”

She was wounded on four separate occasions, suffered from shell shock, but remained in action until her position was bombed and she took shrapnel in her face. From that point on, the Soviets decided they’d use Pavlichenko to train new snipers. “By that time even the Germans knew of me,” she said. They attempted to bribe her, blaring messages over their radio loudspeakers.“Lyudmila Pavlichenko, come over to us. We will give you plenty of chocolate and make you a German officer.”

When the bribes did not work the Germans resorted to threats, vowing to tear her into 309 pieces—a phrase that delighted the young sniper. “They even knew my score!”

Promoted to lieutenant, Pavlichenko was pulled from combat. Just two months after leaving Sevastopol, the young officer found herself in the United States for the first time in 1942, reading press accounts of her sturdy black boots that “have known the grime and blood of battle,” and giving blunt descriptions of her day-to-day life as a sniper. Killing Nazis, she said, aroused no “complicated emotions” in her. “The only feeling I have is the great satisfaction a hunter feels who has killed a beast of prey.”

To another reporter she reiterated what she had seen in battle, and how it affected her on the front line. “Every German who remains alive will kill women, children and old folks,” she said.“Dead Germans are harmless. Therefore, if I kill a German, I am saving lives.”

Her time with Eleanor Roosevelt clearly emboldened her, and by the time they reached Chicago on their way to the West Coast, Pavlichenko had been able to brush aside the “silly questions” from the women press correspondents about “nail polish and do I curl my hair.” By Chicago, she stood before large crowds, chiding the men to support the second front. “Gentlemen,” she said, “I am 25 years old and I have killed 309 fascist occupants by now. Don’t you think, gentlemen, that you have been hiding behind my back for too long?”  Her words settled on the crowd, then caused a surging roar of support.

Pavlichenko received gifts from dignitaries and admirers wherever she went—mostly rifles and pistols. The American folk singer Woody Guthrie wrote a song, “Miss Pavlichenko,” about her in 1942. She continued to speak out about the lack of a color line or segregation in the Red Army, and of gender equality, which she aimed at the American women in the crowds. “Now I am looked upon a little as a curiosity,” she said, “a subject for newspaper headlines, for anecdotes.  In the Soviet Union I am looked upon as a citizen, as a fighter, as a soldier for my country.”

While women did not regularly serve in the Soviet military, Pavlichenko reminded Americans that “our women were on a basis of complete equality long before the war. From the first day of the Revolution full rights were granted the women of Soviet Russia. One of the most important things is that every woman has her own specialty. That is what actually makes them as independent as men. Soviet women have complete self-respect, because their dignity as human beings is fully recognized. Whatever we do, we are honored not just as women, but as individual personalities, as human beings. That is a very big word. Because we can be fully that, we feel no limitations because of our sex. That is why women have so naturally taken their places beside men in this war.”

USSR Lyudmila Pavlichenko postage stamp from 1943. Photo: Wikipedia

On her way back to Russia, Pavlichenko stopped for a brief tour in Great Britain, where she continued to press for a second front. Back home, she was promoted to major, awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union, her country’s highest distinction, and commemorated on a Soviet postage stamp. Despite her calls for a second European front, she and Stalin would have to wait nearly two years. By then, the Soviets had finally gained the upper hand against the Germans, and Allied forces stormed the beaches of Normandy in June 1944.

Eventually, Pavlichenko finished her education at Kiev University and became a historian. In 1957, 15 years after Eleanor Roosevelt accompanied the young Russian sniper around America, the former first lady was touring Moscow. Because of the Cold War, a Soviet minder restricted Roosevelt’s agenda and watched her every move. Roosevelt persisted until she was granted her wish—a visit with her old friend Lyudmila Pavlichenko. Roosevelt found her living in a two-room apartment in the city, and the two chatted amiably and “with cool formality” for a moment before Pavlichenko made an excuse to pull her guest into the bedroom and shut the door. Out of the minder’s sight, Pavlichenko threw her arms around her visitor, “half-laughing, half-crying, telling her how happy she was to see her.” In whispers, the two old friends recounted their travels together, and the many friends they had met in that unlikeliest of summer tours across America 15 years before.

Sources

Articles: “Girl Sniper Calm Over Killing Nazis,” New York Times, August 29., 1942. “Girl Sniper Gets 3 Gifts in Britain,” New York Times, November 23, 1942.  “Russian Students Roosevelt Guests,” New York Times, August 28, 1942.  “Soviet Girl Sniper Cited For Killing 257 of Foe,” New York Times, June 1, 1942. “Guerilla Heroes Arrive for Rally,” Washington Post, August 28, 1942. Untitled Story by Scott Hart, Washington Post, August 29, 1942.  “’We Must Not Cry But Fight,’ Soviet Woman Sniper Says,” Christian Science Monitor, October 21, 1942.  “Step-Ins for Amazons,” The Gentler Sex by Malvina Lindsay, Washington Post, September 19, 1942.  “No Color Bar in Red Army—Girl Sniper,” Chicago Defender, December 5, 1942.  “Only Dead Germans Harmless, Soviet Woman Sniper Declares,” Atlanta Constitution, August 29, 1942. “Russian Heroine Gets a Fur Coat,” New York Times, September 17, 1942.  “Mrs. Roosevelt, The Russian Sniper, And Me,” by E.M. Tenney, American Heritage, April 1992, Volume 43, Issue 2.  “During WWII, Lyudmila Pavlichenko Sniped a Confirmed 309 Axis Soldiers, Including 36 German Snipers,” By Daven Hiskey, Today I Found Out, June 2, 2012,  http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2012/06/during-wwii-lyudmila-pavlichenko-sniped-a-confirmed-309-axis-soldiers-including-36-german-snipers/ “Lieutenant Liudmila Pavlichenko to the American People,” Soviet Russia Today; volume 11, number 6, October 1942. Marxists Internet Archive, http://www.marxists.org/archive/pavlichenko/1942/10/x01.htm

Books: Henry Sakaida, Heroines of the Soviet Union, 1941-45, Osprey Publishing, Ltd., 2003. Andy Gougan, Through the Crosshairs: A History of Snipers, Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2004.

Adolf Hitler and Albert Speer in 1943. Photo: Wikipedia

On April 30, 1945, as Soviet troops fought toward the Reich Chancellery in Berlin in street-to-street combat, Adolf Hitler put a gun to his head and fired. Berlin quickly surrendered and World War II in Europe was effectively over. Yet Hitler’s chosen successor, Grand Admiral Karl Donitz, decamped with others of the Nazi Party faithful to northern Germany and formed the Flensburg Government.

As Allied troops and the U.N. War Crimes Commission closed in on Flensburg, one Nazi emerged as a man of particular interest: Albert Speer, the brilliant architect, minister of armaments and war production for the Third Reich and a close friend to Hitler. Throughout World War II, Speer had directed an “armaments miracle,” doubling Hitler’s production orders and prolonging the German war effort while under relentless Allied air attacks. He did this through administrative genius and by exploiting millions of slave laborers who were starved and worked to death in his factories.

Speer arrived in Flensburg aware that the Allies were targeting Nazi leaders for war-crimes trials. He—like many other Nazi Party members and SS officers—concluded that he could expect no mercy once captured. Unlike them, he did not commit suicide.

The hunt for Albert Speer was unusual. The U.N. War Crimes Commission was determined to bring him to justice, but a U.S. government official hoped to reach the Nazi technocrat first. A former investment banker named Paul Nitze, who was then vice chairman of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, believed it was imperative to get to Speer. As the war in Europe was winding down, the Americans were hoping that strategic bombing in Japan could end the war in the Pacific. But in order to achieve that, they hoped to learn more about how Germany had maintained its war machine while withstanding heavy bombing. Thus Nitze needed Speer. In May 1945, the race was on to capture and interrogate one of Hitler’s most notorious henchmen.

Speer is arrested along with members of the Flensburg Government in May 1945. Photo: Wikipedia

Just after Hitler’s death, President Donitz and his cabinet took up residence at the Naval Academy at Murwik, overlooking the Flensburg Fjord. On his first evening in power, the new leader gave a nationwide radio address; though he knew German forces could not resist Allied advances, he promised his people that Germany would continue to fight. He also appointed Speer his minister of industry and production.

On May 15, American forces arrived in Flensburg and got to Speer first. Nitze arrived at Glucksburg Castle, where Speer was being held, along with the economist John Kenneth Galbraith, who was also working for the Strategic Bombing Survey, and a team of interpreters and assistants. They interrogated Speer for seven straight days, during which he talked freely with the Americans, taking them through what he termed “bombing high school.” Each morning Speer, dressed in a suit, would pleasantly answer questions with what struck his questioners as remarkable candor—enough candor that Nitze and his associates dared not ask what Speer knew of the Holocaust, out of fear that his mood might change. Speer knew his best chance to survive was to cooperate and seem indispensable to the Americans, and his cooperation had a strange effect on his interrogators. One of them said he “evoked in us a sympathy of which we were all secretly ashamed.”

He demonstrated an unparalleled understanding of the Nazi war machine. He told Nitze how he had reduced the influence of the military and the Nazi Party in decision-making, and how he had followed Henry Ford’s manufacturing principles to run the factories more efficiently. He told his interrogators why certain British and American air attacks had failed and why others had been effective. He explained how he’d traveled around Germany to urge his workers on in speeches he later termed “delusional,” because he already knew the war was lost.

Paul Nitze of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey interrogated Speer in May 1945. Photo: Wikipedia

In March 1945, he said, with the end in sight, Hitler had called for a “scorched earth” plan (his “Nero Decree”) to destroy any industrial facilities, supply depots, military equipment or infrastructure that might be valuable to advancing enemy forces. Speer said he was furious and disobeyed Hitler’s orders, transferring his loyalty from der Fuhrer to the German people and the future of the nation.

After a week, Nitze received a message from a superior: “Paul, if you’ve got any further things you want to find out from Speer you’d better get him tomorrow.”  The Americans were planning on arresting the former minister of armaments and war production, and he would no longer be available for interrogation. Nitze did have something else he wanted to find out from Speer: He wanted to know all about Hitler’s last days in the bunker, since Speer was among the last men to meet with him. According to Nitze, Speer “leaned over backwards” to help, pointing the Americans to where they could find records of his reports to Hitler—many of which were held in a safe in Munich. Nitze said Speer “gave us the keys to the safe and combination, and we sent somebody down to get these records.”  But Speer was evasive, Nitze thought, and not credible when he claimed no knowledge of the Holocaust or war crimes against Jews laboring in his factories.

“It became evident right away that Speer was worried he might be declared a war criminal,” Nitze later said. On May 23, British and American officials called for a meeting with Flensburg government cabinet members aboard the ship Patria and had them all arrested.  Tanks rolled up to Glucksburg Castle, and heavily armed troops burst into Speer’s bedroom to take him away. “So now the end has come,” he said. “That’s good. It was all only kind of an opera anyway.”

Nitze, Galbraith and the men from the bombing survey moved on. In September 1945, Speer was informed that he would be charged with war crimes and incarcerated pending trial at Nuremberg, along with more than 20 other surviving members of the Nazi high command. The series of military tribunals beginning in November 1945 were designed to show the world that the mass crimes against humanity by German leaders would not go unpunished.

As films from concentration camps were shown as evidence, and as witnesses testified to the horrors they endured at the hands of the Nazis, Speer was observed to have tears in his eyes. When he took the stand, he insisted that he had no knowledge of the Holocaust, but the evidence of slave labor in his factories was damning. Speer apologized to the court and claimed responsibility for the slave labor, saying he should have known but did not. He was culpable, he said, but he insisted he had no knowledge of the crimes. Later, to show his credentials as a “good Nazi” and to distance himself from his co-defendants, Speer would claim that he’d planned to kill Hitler two years before by dropping a poison gas canister into an air intake in his bunker. On hearing that, the other defendants laughed in the courtroom.

In the fall of 1946, most of the Nazi elites at Nuremberg were sentenced either to death or to life in prison. Speer received 20 years at Spandau Prison in Berlin, where he was known as prisoner number 5. He read continuously, tended a garden and, against prison rules, wrote the notes for what would become bestselling books, including Inside the Third Reich. There was no question that Speer’s contrition in court, and perhaps his cooperation with Nitze, saved his life.

After serving the full 20 years, Speer was released in 1966. He grew wealthy, lived in a cottage in Heidelberg, West Germany, and cultivated his image as a “good Nazi” who had spoken candidly about his past. But questions about Speer’s truthfulness began to dog him soon after his release. In 1971, Harvard University’s Erich Goldhagen alleged that Speer had been aware of the extermination of Jews, based on evidence that Speer had attended a Nazi conference in 1943 at which Heinrich Himmler, Hitler’s military commander, had spoken openly about “wiping the Jews from the face of the earth.” Speer admitted that he’d attended the conference but said he had left before Himmler gave his infamous “Final Solution” speech.

Speer died in a London hospital in 1981. His legacy as an architect was ephemeral: None of his buildings, including the Reich Chancellery or the Zeppelinfeld stadium, are standing today. Speer’s legacy as a Nazi persists. A quarter-century after his death, a collection of 100 letters emerged from his ten-year correspondence with Helene Jeanty, the widow of a Belgian resistance leader. In one of the letters, Speer admitted that he had indeed heard Himmler’s speech about exterminating the Jews. “There is no doubt—I was present as Himmler announced on October 6 1943 that all Jews would be killed,” Speer wrote. “Who would believe me that I suppressed this, that it would have been easier to have written all of this in my memoirs?”

Sources

Books: Nicholas Thompson, The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War, Henry Holt and Company, 2009. Donald L. Miller, Masters of the Air: America’s Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany, Simon & Schuster, 2006. Dan Van Der Vat, The Good Nazi: The Life and Lies of Albert Speer, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1997.

Articles: “Letter Proves Speer Knew of Holocaust Plan,” By Kate Connolly, The Guardian, March 12, 2007. “Wartime Reports Debunk Speer as the Good Nazi,” By Kate Connolly, The Guardian, May 11, 2005. “Paul Nitze: Master Strategist of the Cold War,” Academy of Achievement, http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/nit0int-5.  ”Speer on the Last Days of the Third Reich,” USSBS Special Document, http://library2.lawschool.cornell.edu/donovan/pdf/Batch_14/Vol_CIV_51_01_03.pdf. “The Long Arm of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey,” by Rebecca Grant, Air Force Magazine, February, 2008.

Film: Nazi Hunters: The Real Hunt for Hitler’s Henchmen, The “Good” Nazi? History Channel, 2010, Hosted by Alisdair Simpson

Calvin Graham, the USS South Dakota‘s 12-year-old gunner, in 1942. Photo: Wikipedia

With powerful engines, extensive firepower and heavy armor, the newly christened battleship USS South Dakota steamed out of Philadelphia in August of 1942 spoiling for a fight. The crew was made up of “green boys”—new recruits who enlisted after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor—who had no qualms about either their destination or the action they were likely to see. Brash and confident, the crew couldn’t get through the Panama Canal fast enough, and their captain, Thomas Gatch, made no secret of the grudge he bore against the Japanese. “No ship more eager to fight ever entered the Pacific,” one naval historian wrote.

In less than four months, the South Dakota would limp back to port in New York for repairs to extensive damage suffered in some of World War II’s most ferocious battles at sea. The ship would become one of the most decorated warships in U.S. Navy history and acquire a new moniker to reflect the secrets it carried. The Japanese, it turned out, were convinced the vessel had been destroyed at sea, and the Navy was only too happy to keep the mystery alive—stripping the South Dakota of identifying markings and avoiding any mention of it in communications and even sailors’ diaries. When newspapers later reported on the ship’s remarkable accomplishments in the Pacific Theater, they referred to it simply as “Battleship X.”

That the vessel was not resting at the bottom of the Pacific was just one of the secrets Battleship X carried through day after day of hellish war at sea. Aboard was a gunner from Texas who would soon become the nation’s youngest decorated war hero. Calvin Graham, the fresh-faced seaman who had set off for battle from the Philadelphia Navy Yard in the summer of 1942, was only 12 years old.

Graham was just 11 and in the sixth grade in Crockett, Texas, when he hatched his plan to lie about his age and join the Navy. One of seven children living at home with an abusive stepfather, he and an older brother moved into a cheap rooming house, and Calvin supported himself by selling newspapers and delivering telegrams on weekends and after school. Even though he moved out, his mother would occasionally visit—sometimes to simply sign his report cards at the end of a semester.  The country was at war, however, and being around newspapers afforded the boy the opportunity to keep up on events overseas.

“I didn’t like Hitler to start with,” Graham later told a reporter. When he learned that some of his cousins had died in battles, he knew what he wanted to do with his life. He wanted to fight. “In those days, you could join up at 16 with your parents’ consent, but they preferred 17,” Graham later said. But he had no intention of waiting five more years. He began to shave at age 11, hoping it would somehow make him look older when he met with military recruiters.  Then he lined up with some buddies (who forged his mother’s signature and stole a notary stamp from a local hotel) and waited to enlist.

At 5-foot-2 and just 125 pounds, Graham dressed in an older brother’s clothes and fedora and practiced “talking deep.” What worried him most was not that an enlistment officer would spot the forged signature. It was the dentist who would peer into the mouths of potential recruits. “I knew he’d know how young I was by my teeth,” Graham recalled. He lined up behind a couple of guys he knew who were already 14 or 15, and “when the dentist kept saying I was 12, I said I was 17.”  At last, Graham played his ace, telling the dentist that he knew for a fact that the boys in front of him weren’t 17 yet, and the dentist had let them through. “Finally,” Graham recalled, “he said he didn’t have time to mess with me and he let me go.” Graham maintained that the Navy knew he and the others on line that day were underage, “but we were losing the war then, so they took six of us.”

It wasn’t uncommon for boys to lie about their age in order to serve. Ray Jackson, who joined the Marines at 16 during World War II, founded the group Veterans of Underage Military Service in 1991, and it listed more than 1,200 active members, including 26 women.  “Some of these guys came from large families and there wasn’t enough food to go around, and this was a way out,” Jackson told a reporter. “Others just had family problems and wanted to get away.”

Calvin Graham told his mother he was going to visit relatives. Instead, he dropped out of the seventh grade and shipped off to San Diego for basic training.  There, he said, the drill instructors were aware of the underage recruits and often made them run extra miles and lug heavier packs.

Just months after her christening in 1942, the USS South Dakota was attacked relentlessly in the Pacific. Photo: Wikipedia

By the time the USS South Dakota made it to the Pacific, it had become part of a task force alongside the legendary carrier USS Enterprise (the “Big E”). By early October 1942, the two ships, along with their escorting cruisers and destroyers, raced to the South Pacific to engage in the fierce fighting in the battle for Guadalcanal. After they reached the Santa Cruz Islands on October 26, the Japanese quickly set their sights on the carrier and launched an air attack that easily penetrated the Enterprise’s own air patrol. The carrier USS Hornet was repeatedly torpedoed and sank off Santa Cruz, but the South Dakota managed to protect Enterprise, destroying 26 enemy planes with a barrage from its antiaircraft guns.

Standing on the bridge, Captain Gatch watched as a 500-pound bomb struck the South Dakota’s main gun turret. The explosion injured 50 men, including the skipper, and killed one. The ship’s armor was so thick, many of the crew were unaware they’d been hit.  But word quickly spread that Gatch had been knocked unconscious. Quick-thinking quartermasters managed to save the captain’s life—his jugular vein had been severed, and the ligaments in his arms suffered permanent damage—but some onboard were aghast that he didn’t hit the deck when he saw the bomb coming. “I consider it beneath the dignity of a captain of an American battleship to flop for a Japanese bomb,” Gatch later said.

The ship’s young crew continued to fire at anything in the air, including American bombers that were low on fuel and trying to land on the Enterprise. The South Dakota was quickly getting a reputation for being wild-eyed and quick to shoot, and Navy pilots were warned not to fly anywhere near it. The South Dakota was fully repaired at Pearl Harbor, and Captain Gatch returned to his ship, wearing a sling and bandages. Seaman Graham quietly became a teenager, turning 13 on November 6, just as Japanese naval forces began shelling an American airfield on Guadalcanal Island. Steaming south with the Enterprise, Task Force 64, with the South Dakota and another battleship, the USS Washington, took four American destroyers on a night search for the enemy near Savo Island. There, on November 14, Japanese ships opened fire, sinking or heavily damaging the American destroyers in a four day engagement that became known as the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal.

Later that evening the South Dakota encountered eight Japanese destroyers; with deadly accurate 16-inch guns, the South Dakota set fire to three of them. “They never knew what sank ‘em,” Gatch would recall. One Japanese ship set its searchlights on the South Dakota, and the ship took 42 enemy hits, temporarily losing power. Graham was manning his gun when shrapnel tore through his jaw and mouth; another hit knocked him down, and he fell through three stories of superstructure. Still, the 13 year-old made it to his feet, dazed and bleeding, and helped pull other crew members to safety while others were thrown by the force of the explosions, their bodies aflame, into the Pacific.

“I took belts off the dead and made tourniquets for the living and gave them cigarettes and encouraged them all night,” Graham later said.  ”It was a long night. It aged me.” The shrapnel had knocked out his front teeth, and he had flash burns from the hot guns, but he was “fixed up with salve and a coupla stitches,” he recalled. “I didn’t do any complaining because half the ship was dead.  It was a while before they worked on my mouth.” In fact, the ship had casualties of 38 men killed and 60 wounded.

Regaining power, and after afflicting heavy damage to the Japanese ships, the South Dakota rapidly disappeared in the smoke. Captain Gatch would later remark of his “green” men, “Not one of the ship’s company flinched from his post or showed the least disaffection.” With the Japanese Imperial Navy under the impression that it had sunk the South Dakota, the legend of Battleship X was born.

After the Japanese Imperial Navy falsely believed it had sunk the South Dakota in November, 1942, the American vessel became known as “Battleship X.” Photo: Wikimedia

In mid-December, the damaged ship returned to the Brooklyn Navy Yard for major repairs, where Gatch and his crew were profiled for their heroic deeds in the Pacific. Calvin Graham received a Bronze Star for distinguishing himself in combat, as well as a Purple Heart for his injuries. But he couldn’t bask in glory with his fellow crewmen while their ship was being repaired. Graham’s mother, reportedly having recognized her son in newsreel footage, wrote the Navy, revealing the gunner’s true age.

Graham returned to Texas and was thrown in a brig at Corpus Christi, Texas, for almost three months.

Battleship X returned to the Pacific and continued to shoot Japanese planes out of the sky. Graham, meanwhile, managed to get a message out to his sister Pearl, who complained to the newspapers that the Navy was mistreating the “Baby Vet.” The Navy eventually ordered Graham’s release, but not before stripping him of his medals for lying about his age and revoking his disability benefits. He was simply tossed from jail with a suit and a few dollars in his pocket—and no honorable discharge.

Back in Houston, though, he was treated as a celebrity. Reporters were eager to write his story, and when the war film Bombadier premiered at a local theater, the film’s star, Pat O’Brien, invited Graham to the stage to be saluted by the audience. The attention quickly faded. At age 13, Graham tried to return to school, but he couldn’t keep pace with students his age and quickly dropped out. He married at age 14, became a father the following year, and found work as a welder in a Houston shipyard. Neither his job nor his marriage lasted long. At 17 years old and divorced, and with no service record, Graham was about to be drafted when he enlisted in the Marine Corps. He soon broke his back in a fall, for which he received a 20 percent service-connected disability. The only work he could find after that was selling magazine subscriptions.

When President Jimmy Carter was elected, in 1976, Graham began writing letters, hoping that Carter, “an old Navy man,” might be sympathetic. All Graham had wanted was an honorable discharge so he could get help with his medical and dental expenses. “I had already given up fighting” for the discharge, Graham said at the time. “But then they came along with this discharge program for [Vietnam-era] deserters. I know they had their reasons for doing what they did, but I figure I damn sure deserved [an honorable discharge] more than they did.”

In 1977, Texas Senators Lloyd Bentsen and John Tower introduced a bill to give Graham his discharge, and in 1978, Carter announced that it had been approved and that Graham’s medals would be restored, with the exception of the Purple Heart.  Ten years later, President Ronald Reagan signed legislation approving disability benefits for Graham.

At the age of 12, Calvin Graham broke the law to serve his country, at a time when the U.S. military might well be accused of having had a “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy with regard to underage enlistees. For fear of losing their benefits or their honorable discharges, many “Baby Vets” never came forward to claim the nation’s gratitude. It wasn’t until 1994, two years after he died, that the military relented and returned the seaman’s last medal—his Purple Heart—to his family.

Sources

Articles: “A Medal of Honor,” by Ron Grossman, Chicago Tribune, June 17, 1994. “Life Aboard ‘Battleship X’: The USS South Dakota in World War II,” by David B. Miller, South Dakota State Historical Society, 1993. “Calvin Graham, 62, Who Fought in War as a 12-Year-Old,” by Eric Pace, New York Times, November 9, 1992. “Congress Votes WWII Benefits For Boy Sailor,” Washington Post, October 23, 1988. “Underage Sailor Wins Recognition,” Hartford Courant, May 9, 1978. “U.S. Battleship’s Green Crew Bags 32 Planes, 4 Warships,” New York Times, January 4, 1943, “Civilian Seeks Navy Discharge,” Hartford Courant, April 12, 1977. “The Navy’s ‘Baby’ Hero Who Won the Bronze Star at 12 Now Wants Justice From the Nation He Served,” by Kent Demaret, People, October 24, 1977. “The USS South Dakota (BB-57) Battleship,” by J.R. Potts, MilitaryFactory.com, http://www.militaryfactory.com/ships/detail.asp?ship_id=USS-South-Dakota-BB57 “USS South Dakota BB 57,” http://www.navysite.de/bb/bb57.htm “Decades Later, Military Veterans Admit Being Underage When They Enlisted,” Associated Press, November 3, 2003. “Second Naval Battle of Guadalcanal: Turning Point in the Pacific War,” by David H. Lippman, World War II Magazine, June 12, 2006. “I’m Twelve, Sir: The Youngest Allied Soldier in World War Two,” by Giles Milton, http://surviving-history.blogspot.com/2012/07/im-twelve-sir-youngest-allied-soldier.html “Sailor Who Enlisted at 12 Seeks Help,” Washington Post, April 20, 1978.

Film: “Battleship X: The USS South Dakota,” Produced by Rich Murphy, 2006, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1mX_K9lFbA

Frederic Villiers, an experienced war artist and pioneer cinematographer, was the first man to attempt to film in battle—with deeply disappointing results.

Who first thought of building a pyramid, or of using gunpowder as a weapon? Who invented the wheel? Who, for that matter, came up with the idea of taking a movie camera into battle and turning a profit from the horrible realities of war? History offers no firm guidance on the first three questions, and is not entirely certain even on the fourth, although the earliest war films cannot have been shot much earlier than 1900. What we can say, fairly definitely, is that most of this pioneer footage tells us little about war as it was actually waged back then, and quite a lot about the enduring ingenuity of filmmakers. That is because almost all of it was either staged or faked, setting a template that was followed for years afterwards with varying degrees of success.

I tried to show in last week’s essay how newsreel cameramen took on the challenge of filming the Mexican Revolution of 1910-20—a challenge they met, at one point, by signing the celebrated rebel leader Pancho Villa to an exclusive contract. What I did not explain, for lack of space, was that the Mutual Film teams embedded with Villa were not the first cinematographers to tussle with the problems of capturing live action with bulky cameras in dangerous situations. Nor were they the first to conclude that it was easier and safer to fake their footage—and that fraud in any case produced far more saleable results. Indeed, the early history of newsreel cinema is replete with examples of cameramen responding in precisely the same way to the same set of challenges. Pretty much the earliest “war” footage ever shot, in fact, was created in circumstances that broadly mirror those prevailing in Mexico.

The few historians to take an interest in the prehistory of war photography seem agreed that the earliest footage secured in a war zone dates to the Greco-Turkish War of 1897, and was shot by a veteran British war correspondent by the name of Frederic Villiers. How well he rose to the occasion is hard to say, because the war is an obscure one, and though Villiers—a notoriously self-aggrandising poseur—wrote about his experiences in sometimes hard-to-believe detail, none of the footage he claimed to have shot survives. What we can say is that the British veteran was an experienced reporter who had covered nearly a dozen conflicts during his two decades as a correspondent, and certainly was in Greece for at least a part of the 30-day conflict. He was a prolific, if limited, war artist as well, so the idea of taking one of the new ciné cameras to war probably came naturally to him.

The Battle of Omdurman, fought between British and Sudanese forces in September 1898, was one of the first to show the disappointing gap between image and reality. Top: an artist’s impression of the charge of the 21st Lancers at the height of the battle. Bottom: a photograph of the real but distant action as captured by an enterprising photographer.

If that’s so, the notion wasn’t too obvious to anyone else in 1897; when Villiers arrived at his base at Volos, in Thessaly, trailing his cinematograph and a bicycle, he discovered he was the only cameraman covering the war. According to his own accounts, he was able to get some real long-distance shots of the fighting, but the results were deeply disappointing, not least because real war bore little resemblance to the romantic visions of conflict held by the audiences of the earliest newsreels. “There was no blare of bugals,” the journalist complained on his return, “or roll of drums; no display of flags or of martial music of any sort… All had changed in this modern warfare; it seemed to me a very cold-blooded, uninspiring way of fighting, and I was mightily depressed for many weeks.”

Villiers yearned to obtain something much more visceral, and he got what he required in typically resourceful fashion, passing through the Turkish lines to secure a private interview with the Ottoman governor, Enver Bay, who granted him a safe passage to the Greek capital, Athens, which was much closer to the fighting. ”Not content with this,” writes Stephen Bottomore, the great authority on the first war films,

Villiers asked the governor for confidential information: “I want to know when and where the next fight will take place. You Turks will take the initiative, for the Greeks can now only be on the defensive.” Not surprisingly, Enver Bey was staggered by his request. Looking at Villiers steadily, he said at last: “You are an Englishman and I can trust you. I will tell you this: Take this steamer… to the port of Domokos, and don’t fail to be at the latter place by Monday noon.”

Georges Méliès, the pioneer filmmaker, shot faked footage of the war of 1897—including the earliest shots of what was claimed to be naval warfare, and some horrific scenes of atrocities in Crete. All were created in his studio or his back yard in Paris.

Armed with this exclusive information (Villiers’s own record of the war continues), he arrived at Domokos “on the exact day and hour to hear the first gun fired by the Greeks at the Moslem infantry advancing across the Pharsala plains.” Some battle scenes were shot. Since the cameraman remained uncharacteristically modest about the results of his labours, though, we may reasonably conclude that whatever footage he was able to obtain showed little if any of the ensuing action. That seems to be implicit in one revealing fragment that does survive: Villiers’s own outraged account of how he found himself out-filmed by an enterprising rival. Notes Bottomore:

The images were accurate, but they lacked cinematic appeal. When he got back to England, he realised that his footage was worth very little in the film market. One day a friend told him that he had seen some wonderful pictures of the Greek war the previous evening. Villiers was surprised since he knew for certain that he had been the only cameraman filming the war. He soon realised from his friend’s account that these were not his pictures:

“Three Albanians [then part of the Ottoman army] came along a very white dusty road toward a cottage on the right of the screen. As they neared it they opened fire; you could see the bullets strike the stucco of he building. then one of the Turks with the butt end of his rifle smashed in the door of the cottage, entered and brought out a lovely Athenian maid in his arms… Presently an old man, evidently the girl’s father, rushed out of the house to her rescue, when the second Albanian whipped out his yataghan from his belt and cut the old gentleman’s head off! Here my friend grew enthusiastic. ‘There was the head,’ said he, ‘rolling in the foreground of the picture. Nothing could be more positive than that.’”

A still from Georges Méliès’s short film “Sea Battle in Greece” (1897), clearly showing the dramatic effects and clever use of a pivoted deck, which the filmmaker pioneered.

Although Villiers probably never knew it, he had been scooped by one of the great geniuses of cinema, Georges Méliès, a Frenchman best remembered today for his special-effects-laden 1902 short “Le voyage dans la lune.” Five years before that triumph, Méliès had, like Villiers, been inspired by the commercial potential of a real war in Europe. Unlike Villiers, he had traveled no closer to the front than his back yard in Paris—but, with his showman’s instinct, the Frenchman triumphed nonetheless over his rival on the spot, even shooting some elaborate footage that purported to show close ups of a dramatic naval battle. The latter scenes, recovered a few years ago by the film historian John Barnes, are especially notable for the innovation of an “articulated set”—a pivoted section of deck designed to make it appear that Méliès’s ship was being tossed about in a rough sea, and which is still in use, barely modified, on film sets today.

Villiers himself good-humoredly admitted how difficult it was for a real newsreel cameraman to compete with an enterprising faker. The problem, he explained to his excited friend, was the unwieldiness of the contemporary camera:

You have to fix it on a tripod… and get everything in focus before you can take a picture. Then you have to turn the handle in a deliberate, coffee-mill sort of way, with no hurry or excitement. It’s not a bit like a snapshot, press-the-button pocket Kodak. Now just think of that scene you have so vividly described to me. Imagine the man who was coffee-milling saying, in a persuasive way, “Now Mr. Albanian, before you take the old gent’s head off come a little nearer; yes, but a little more to the left, please. Thank you. Now, then, look as savage as you can and cut away.” Or, “You, No. 2 Albanian, make that hussy lower her chin a bit and keep her kicking as ladylike as possible.”

D.W. Griffith, a controversial giant of the early cinema, whose undoubted genius is often set against his apparent endorsement of the Ku Klux Klan in Birth of a Nation

Much the same sort of results—”real,” long-distance battle footage trumped in the cinemas by more action-packed and visceral fake footage—were obtained a few years later during the Boxer Rebellion in China and the Boer War, a conflict fought between British forces and Afrikaaner farmers. The South African conflict set a pattern that later war photography would follow for decades (and which was famously repeated in the first feature-length war documentary, the celebrated 1916 production The Battle of the Somme, which mixed genuine footage of the trenches with fake battle scenes shot in the altogether safe environs of a trench mortar school behind the lines. The movie played to packed and uncritically enthusiastic houses for months.) Some of these deceptions were acknowledged; R.W. Paul, who produced a series of shorts depicting the South African conflict, made no claim to have secured his footage in the war zone, merely stating that they had been “arranged under the supervision of an experienced military officer from the front.” Others were not. William Dickson, of the British Mutoscope and Biograph Company, did travel to the Veldt and did produce what Barnes describes as

footage that can legitimately be described as actuality—scenes of troops in camp and on the move—though even so many shots were evidently staged for the camera. British soldiers were dressed in Boer uniforms to reconstruct skirmishes, and it was reported that the British commander-in-chief, Lord Roberts, consented to be Biographed with all his Staff, actually having his table taken out into the sun for the convenience of Mr Dickson.

Telling the fake footage of the earliest years of cinema from the real thing is never very difficult. Reconstructions are typically close-ups and are betrayed, Barnes notes in his study Filming the Boer War, because “action occurs towards and away from the camera in common with certain ‘actuality’ films of the period such as street scenes where pedestrians and traffic approach or recede along the axis of the lens and not across the field of vision like actors on a stage.” This, of course, strongly suggests a deliberate attempt at deception on the part of the filmmakers, but it would be too easy to simply condemn them for this. After all, as D.W. Griffith, another of the greatest early pioneers of film, pointed out, a conflict as vast as the First World War was “too colossal to be dramatic. No one can describe it. You might as well try to describe the ocean or the Milky Way…. No one saw a thousandth part of it.”

Edward Amet stands in front of the pool and painted backdrop used in the filming of his faked war movie The Battle of Matanzas.

Of course, the difficulties that Griffith described, and which Frederic Villiers and the men who followed him in South Africa and China at the turn of the century actually experienced, were as nothing to the problems confronting the ambitious handful of filmmakers who turned their hands to portraying war as it is fought at sea—a notoriously expensive business, even today. Here, while Georges Méliès’s pioneering work on the Greco-Turkish War may have set the standard, the most interesting—and unintentionally humorous—clips that have survived from the earliest days of cinema are those that purport to show victorious American naval actions during the Spanish-American War of 1898.

Once again, the “reconstructed” footage that appeared during this conflict was less a deliberate, malicious fake than it was an imaginative response to the frustration of being unable to secure genuine film of real battles—or, in the case of the crudest but most charming of the two known solutions produced at the time, get closer to the action than a New York tub. This notoriously inadequate short film was produced by a New York film man named Albert Smith, founder of the prolific American Vitagraph studio in Brooklyn—who, according to his own account, did make it to Cuba, only to find his clumsy cameras were not up to the task of securing usable footage at long distance. He returned to the U.S. with little more than background shots to mull over the problem. Soon afterward came news of a great American naval victory over the outmatched Spanish fleet far away in the Philippines. It was the first time an American squadron had fought a significant battle since the Civil War, and Smith and his partner, James Stuart Blackton, realized that there would be huge demand for footage showing the Spaniards’ destruction. Their solution, Smith wrote in his memoirs, was low-tech but ingenious:

A poster advertising a Spanish American war film in typically dramatic–and wildly inaccurate–style.

At this time, vendors were selling large sturdy photographs of ships of the American and Spanish fleets. We bought a sheet of each and cut out the battleships. On a table, topside down, we placed one of Blackton’s large canvas-covered frames and filled it with water an inch deep. In order to stand the cutouts of the ships in the water, we nailed them to lengths of wood about an inch square. In this way a little ‘shelf’ was provided behind each ship, and on this ship we placed pinches of gunpowder–three pinches for each ship–not too many, we felt, for a major sea engagement of this sort….

For a background, Blackton daubed a few white clouds on a blue-tinted cardboard. To each of the ships, now sitting placidly in our shallow ‘bay,’ we attached a fine thread to enable us to pull the ships past the camera at the proper moment and in the correct order.

We needed someone to blow smoke into the scene, but we couldn’t go too far outside our circle if the secret was to be kept. Mrs. Blackton was called in and she volunteered, in this day of non-smoking womanhood, to smoke a cigarette. A friendly office boy said he would try a cigar. This was fine, as we needed the volume.

A piece of cotton was dipped in alcohol and attached to a wire slender enough to escape the eye of the camera. Blackton, concealed behind the side of the table farthermost from the camera, touched off the mounds of gunpowder with his wire taper—and the battle was on. Mrs. Blackton, smoking and coughing, delivered a fine haze. Jim had worked out a timing arrangement with her so that she blew the smoke into the scene at approximately the moment of the explosion…

The film lenses of that day were imperfect enough to conceal the crudities of our miniature, and as the picture ran only two minutes there was no time for anyone to study it critically…. Pastor’s and both Proctor houses played to capacity audiences for several weeks. Jim and I felt less remorse of conscience when we saw how much excitement and enthusiasm was aroused by The Battle of Santiago Bay.

Still from Edward H. Amet’s film of the Battle of Matanzas–an unopposed bombardment of a Cuban port in April 1898.

Perhaps surprisingly, Smith’s film (which has apparently been lost) does seem to have fooled the not-terribly-experienced early cinemagoers who viewed it—or perhaps they were simply too polite to mention its obvious shortcomings. Some rather more convincing scenes of a second battle, however, were faked by a rival filmmaker, Edward Hill Amet of Waukegan, Illinois, who—denied permission to  travel to Cuba—built a set of detailed, 1:70 scale metal models of the combatants and floated them on a 24-foot-long outdoor tank in his yard in Lake County. Unlike Smith’s hurried effort, Amet’s shoot was meticulously planned, and his models were vastly more realistic; they were carefully based on photographs and plans of the real ships, and each was equipped with working smokestacks and guns containing remotely ignited blasting caps, all controlled from an electrical switchboard. The resulting film, which looks unquestionably amateurish to modern eyes, was nonetheless realistic by the standards of the day, and “according to film-history books,” Margarita De Orellana observes, “the Spanish government bought a copy of Amet’s film for the military archives in Madrid, apparently convinced of its authenticity.”

The Sikander Bagh (Secundra Bagh) in Cawnpore, scene of the massacre of Indian rebels, photographed by Felice Beato

The lesson here, surely, is not that the camera can, and often does, lie, but that it has lied ever since it was invented. “Reconstruction” of battle scenes was born with battlefield photography. Matthew Brady did it during the Civil War. And, even earlier, in 1858, during the aftermath of the Indian Mutiny, or  rebellion, or war of independence, the pioneer photographer Felice Beato created dramatized reconstructions, and notoriously scattered the skeletal remains of Indians in the foreground of his photograph of the Sikander Bagh in order to enhance the image.

Most interesting of all, perhaps, is the question is how readily those who viewed such pictures accepted them. For the most part, historians have been very ready to assume that the audiences for “faked” photographs and reconstructed movies were notably naive and accepting. A classic instance, still debated, is the reception of the Lumiere Brothers’ pioneering film short Arrival of the Train at the Station, which showed a railway engine pulling into a French terminus, shot by a camera placed on the platform directly in front of it. In the popular retelling of this story, early cinema audiences were so panicked by the fast-approaching train that—unable to distinguish between image and reality—they imagined it would at any second burst through the screen and crash into the cinema. Recent research has, however, more or less comprehensively debunked this story (it has even been suggested that the reception accorded to the original 1896 short has been conflated with panic caused by viewing, in the 1930s, of early 3D movie images)—though, given the lack of sources, it remains highly doubtful precisely what the real reception of the Brothers’ movie was.

Certainly, what impresses the viewer of the first war films today is how ludicrously unreal, and how contrived, they are. According to Bottomore, even the audiences of 1897 gave Georges Méliès’s 1897 fakes a mixed reception:

 A few people might have believed that some of the films were genuine, especially if, as sometimes happened, the showmen proclaimed that they were so. Other viewers had doubts on the matter…. Perhaps the best comment on the ambiguous nature of Méliès’ films came from a contemporary journalist who, while describing the films as “wonderfully realistic,” also stated that they were artistically made subjects.

Yet while the brutal truth is surely that Méliès’s shorts were just about as realistic than Amet’s 1:70 ship models, in a sense that hardly matters. These early film-makers were developing techniques that their better-equipped successors would go on to use to shoot real footage of real wars—and stoking demand for shocking combat footage that has fueled many a journalistic triumph. Modern news reporting owes a debt to the pioneers of a century ago—and for as long as it does, the shade of Pancho Villa will ride again.

Sources

John Barnes. Filming the Boer War. Tonbridge: Bishopsgate Press, 1992; Stephen Bottomore. “Frederic Villiers: war correspondent.” In Wheeler W. Dixon (ed), Re-viewing British Cinema, 1900-1992: Essays and Interviews. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994; Stephen Bottomore. Filming, Faking and Propaganda: The Origins of the War Film, 1897-1902. Unpublished University of Utrecht PhD thesis, 2007; James Chapman. War and Film. London: Reaktion Books, 2008; Margarita De Orellana. Filming Pancho: How Hollywood Shaped the Mexican Revolution. London: Verso, 2009; Tom Gunning. “An aesthetic of astonishment: early film and the (in)credulous spectator.” In Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (eds), Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999; Kirk Kekatos. “Edward H. Amet and the Spanish-American War film.” Film History 14 (2002); Martin Loiperdinger. “Lumière’s Arrival of the Train: cinema’s founding myth.” The Moving Image: The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists v4n1 (Spring 2004); Albert Smith. Two Reels and a Crank. New York: Doubleday, 1952.

Geronimo as a prisoner of war at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, 1898. Photo: Frank A. Rinehart, Wikipedia

When he was born he had such a sleepy disposition his parents named him Goyahkla—He Who Yawns. He lived the life of an Apache tribesman in relative quiet for three decades, until he led a trading expedition from the Mogollon Mountains south into Mexico in 1858. He left the Apache camp to do some business in Casa Grandes and returned to find that Mexican soldiers had slaughtered the women and children who had been left behind, including his wife, mother and three small children. “I stood until all had passed, hardly knowing what I would do,” he would recall. “I had no weapon, nor did I hardly wish to fight, neither did I contemplate recovering the bodies of my loved ones, for that was forbidden. I did not pray, nor did I resolve to do anything in particular, for I had no purpose left.”

He returned home and burned his tepee and his family’s possessions. Then he led an assault on a group of Mexicans in Sonora. It would be said that after one of his victims screamed for mercy in the name of Saint Jerome—Jeronimo in Spanish—the Apaches had a new name for Goyahkla. Soon the name provoked fear throughout the West. As immigrants encroached on Native American lands, forcing indigenous people onto reservations, the warrior Geronimo refused to yield.

Born and raised in an area along the Gila River that is now on the Arizona-New Mexico border, Geronimo would spend the next quarter-century attacking and evading both Mexican and U.S. troops, vowing to kill as many white men as he could. He targeted immigrants and their trains, and tormented white settlers in the American West were known to frighten their misbehaving children with the threat that Geronimo would come for them.

Geronimo (third from right, in front) and his fellow Apache prisoners en route to POW camp at Fort Pickens in Pensacola, Florida, in 1886. Photo: Wikipedia

By 1874, after white immigrants demanded federal military intervention, the Apaches were forced onto a reservation in Arizona. Geronimo and a band of followers escaped, and U.S. troops tracked him relentlessly across the deserts and mountains of the West. Badly outnumbered and exhausted by a pursuit that had gone on for 3,000 miles—and which included help from Apache scouts—he finally surrendered to General Nelson A. Miles at Skeleton Canyon, Arizona in 1886 and turned over his Winchester rifle and Sheffield Bowie knife. He was “anxious to make the best terms possible,” Miles noted. Geronimo and his “renegades” agreed to a two-year exile and subsequent return to the reservation.

In New York, President Grover Cleveland fretted over the terms. In a telegram to his secretary of war, Cleveland wrote, “I hope nothing will be done with Geronimo which will prevent our treating him as a prisoner of war, if we cannot hang him, which I would much prefer.”

Geronimo avoided execution, but dispute over the terms of surrender ensured that he would spend the rest of his life as a prisoner of the Army, subject to betrayal and indignity. The Apache leader and his men were sent by boxcar, under heavy guard, to Fort Pickens in Pensacola, Florida, where they performed hard labor. In that alien climate, the Washington Post reported, the Apache  died “like flies at frost time.” Businessmen there soon had the idea to have Geronimo serve as a tourist attraction, and hundreds of visitors daily were let into the fort to lay eyes on the “bloodthirsty” Indian in his cell.

While the POWs were in Florida, the government relocated hundreds of their children from their Arizona reservation to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. More than a third of the students quickly perished from tuberculosis, “died as though smitten with the plague,” the Post reported. Apaches lived in constant terror that more of their children would be taken from them and sent east.

Indian students sent to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania died by the hundreds from infectious diseases. Photo: Wikipedia

Geronimo and his fellow POWs were reunited with their families in 1888, when the Chiricahua Apaches were moved to Mount Vernon Barracks in Alabama. But there, too, the Apaches began to perish—a quarter of them from tuberculosis— until Geronimo and more than 300 others were brought to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, in 1894. Though still captive, they were allowed to live in villages around the post. In 1904, Geronimo was given permission to appear at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, which included an “Apache Village” exhibit on the midway.

He was presented as a living museum piece in an exhibit intended as a “monument to the progress of civilization.” Under guard, he made bows and arrows while Pueblo women seated beside him pounded corn and made pottery, and he was a popular draw. He sold autographs and posed for pictures with those willing to part with a few dollars for the privilege.

Geronimo seemed to enjoy the fair. Many of the exhibits fascinated him, such as a magic show during which a woman sat in a basket covered in cloth and a  man proceeded to plunge the swords through the basket. “I would like to know how she was so quickly healed and why the wounds did not kill her,” Geronimo told one writer. He also saw a “white bear” that seemed to be “as intelligent as a man” and could do whatever his keeper instructed. “I am sure that no grizzly bear could be trained to do these things,” he observed. He took his first ride on a Ferris wheel, where the people below “looked no larger than ants.”

In his dictated memoirs, Geronimo said that he was glad he had gone to the fair, and that white people were “a kind and peaceful people.”  He added, “During all the time I was at the fair no one tried to harm me in any way. Had this been among the Mexicans I am sure I should have been compelled to defend myself often.”

After the fair, Pawnee Bill’s Wild West show brokered an agreement with the government to have Geronimo join the show, again under Army guard. The Indians in Pawnee Bill’s show were depicted as “lying, thieving, treacherous, murderous” monsters who had killed hundreds of men, women and children and would think nothing of taking a scalp from any member of the audience, given the chance.  Visitors came to see how the “savage” had been “tamed,” and they paid Geronimo to take a button from the coat of the vicious Apache “chief.” Never mind that he had never been a chief and, in fact, bristled when he was referred to as one.

The shows put a good deal of money in his pockets and allowed him to travel, though never without government guards.  If Pawnee Bill wanted him to shoot a buffalo from a moving car, or bill him as “the Worst Indian That Ever Lived,” Geronimo was willing to play along. “The Indian,” one magazine noted at the time, “will always be a fascinating object.”

In March 1905, Geronimo was invited to President Theodore Roosevelt’s inaugural parade; he and five real Indian chiefs, who wore full headgear and painted faces, rode horses down Pennsylvania Avenue. The intent, one newspaper stated, was to show Americans “that they have buried the hatchet forever.”

Geronimo (second from right, in front) and five Native American chiefs rode in President Theodore Roosevelt’s Inauguration Day Parade in 1905. Photo: Library of Congress

After the parade, Geronimo met with Roosevelt in what the New York Tribune reported was a “pathetic appeal” to allow him to return to Arizona. “Take the ropes from our hands,” Geronimo begged, with tears “running down his bullet-scarred cheeks.” Through an interpreter, Roosevelt told Geronimo that the Indian had a “bad heart.”  “You killed many of my people; you burned villages…and were not good Indians.”  The president would have to wait a while “and see how you and your people act” on their reservation.

Geronimo gesticulated “wildly” and the meeting was cut short. “The Great Father is very busy,” a staff member told him, ushering Roosevelt away and urging Geronimo to put his concerns in writing. Roosevelt was told that the Apache warrior would be safer on the reservation in Oklahoma than in Arizona:  “If he went back there he’d be very likely to find a rope awaiting him, for a great many people in the Territory are spoiling for a chance to kill him.”

Geronimo returned to Fort Sill, where newspapers continued to depict him as a “bloodthirsty Apache chief,” living with the “fierce restlessness of a caged beast.” It had cost Uncle Sam more than a million dollars and hundreds of lives to keep him behind lock and key, the Boston Globe reported. But the Hartford Courant had Geronimo “getting square with the palefaces,” as he was so crafty at poker that he kept the soldiers “broke nearly all the time.” His winnings, the paper noted, were used to help pay the cost of educating Apache children.

Journalists who visited him depicted Geronimo as “crazy,” sometimes chasing sightseers on horseback while drinking to excess. His eighth wife, it was reported, had deserted him, and only a small daughter was watching after him.

In 1903, however, Geronimo converted to Christianity and joined the Dutch Reformed Church—Roosevelt’s church—hoping to please the president and obtain a pardon. “My body is sick and my friends have thrown me away,” Geronimo told church members. “I have been a very wicked man, and my heart is not happy. I see that white people have found a way that makes them good and their hearts happy. I want you to show me that way.” Asked to abandon all Indian “superstitions,” as well as gambling and whiskey, Geronimo agreed and was baptized, but the church would later expel him over his inability to stay away from the card tables.

He thanked Roosevelt (“chief of a great people”) profusely in his memoirs for giving him permission to tell his story, but Geronimo never was permitted to return to his homeland. In February 1909, he was thrown from his horse one night and lay on the cold ground before he was discovered after daybreak. He died of pneumonia on February 17.

Geronimo (center, standing) at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904. Photo: Library of Congress

The Chicago Daily Tribune ran the headline, “Geronimo Now a Good Indian,” alluding to a quote widely and mistakenly attributed to General Philip Sheridan. Roosevelt himself would sum up his feelings this way: “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.”

After a Christian service and a large funeral procession made up of both whites and Native Americans, Geronimo was buried at Fort Sill.  Only then did he cease to be a prisoner of the United States.

Sources 

Articles:  “Geronimo Getting Square With the Palefaces,” The Hartford Courant, June 6, 1900.” “Geronimo Has Cost Uncle Sam $1,000,000,” Boston Daily Globe, April 25, 1900. “Geronimo Has Gone Mad,” New York Times, July 25, 1900. “Geronimo in Prayer,” The Washington Post, November 29. 1903.  “Geronimo Seems Crazy,” New York Tribune, May 19, 1907.  “Geronimo at the World’s Fair,” Scientific American Supplement, August 27, 1904. “Prisoner 18 Years,” Boston Daily Globe, September 18, 1904.  “Chiefs in the Parade,” Washington Post, February 3, 1905.  “Indians at White House,” New York Tribune, March 10, 1905.  “Savage Indian Chiefs,” The Washington Post, March 5, 1905. “Indians on the Inaugural March,” by Jesse Rhodes, Smithsonian, January 14, 2009.  http://www.smithsonianmag.com/specialsections/heritage/Indians-on-the-Inaugural-March.html  “Geronimo Wants His Freedom,” Boston Daily Globe, January 28, 1906. “Geronimo Joins the Church, Hoping to Please Roosevelt,” The Atlanta Constitution, July 10, 1907. “A Bad Indian,” The Washington Post, August 24, 1907.  “Geronimo Now Good Indian,” Chicago Daily Tribune, February 18, 1909.  “Chief Geronimo Buried,” New York Times, February 19, 1909.  “Chief Geronimo Dead,” New York Tribune, February 19, 1909.  “Native America Prisoners of War: Chircahua Apaches 1886-1914, The Museum of the American Indian, http://www.chiricahua-apache.com/ “’A Very Kind and Peaceful People’: Geronimo and the World’s Fair,” by Mark Sample, May 3, 2011, http://www.samplereality.com/2011/05/03/a-very-kind-and-peaceful-people-geronimo-and-the-worlds-fair/ “Geronimo: Finding Peace,” by Alan MacIver, Vision.org, http://www.vision.org/visionmedia/article.aspx?id=12778

Books: Geronimo, Geronimo’s Story of His Life, Taken Down and Edited by S. M. Barrett, Superintendent of Education, Lawton, Oklahoma, Duffield & Company, 1915.

Pancho Villa, seen here in a still taken from Mutual’s exclusive 1914 film footage. But did the Mexican rebel really sign a contract agreeing to fight his battles according to the ideas of a Hollywood director?

The first casualty of war is truth, they say, and nowhere was that  more true than in Mexico during the revolutionary period between 1910 and 1920. In all the blood and chaos that followed the overthrow of Porfirio Diaz, who had been dictator of Mexico since 1876, what was left of the central government in Mexico City found itself fighting several contending rebel forces—most notably the Liberation Army of the South, commanded by Emiliano Zapata, and the Chihuahua-based División del Norte, led by the even more celebrated bandit-rebel Pancho Villa–and the three-cornered civil war that followed was notable for its unrelenting savagery, its unending confusion and (north of the Rio Grande, at least) its unusual film deals. Specifically, it is remembered for the contract Villa was supposed to have signed with a leading American newsreel company in January 1914. Under the terms of this agreement, it is said, the rebels undertook to fight their revolution for the benefit of the movie cameras in exchange for a large advance, payable in gold.

Even at this early date, there was nothing especially surprising about Pancho Villa (or anyone else) inking a deal that allowed cameras access to the areas that they controlled. Newsreels were a coming force. Cinema was growing rapidly in popularity; attendance at nickelodeons had doubled since 1908, and an estimated 49 million tickets were sold each week in the U.S. by 1914. Those customers expected to see some news alongside the melodramas and comedy shorts that were the staples of early cinema. And there were obvious advantages in controlling the way in which the newsreel men chose to portray the Revolution, particularly for Villa, whose main bases were close to the U.S. border.

What made Villa’s contract so odd, though, was its terms, or at least the terms it was said to have contained. Here’s how the agreement he reached with the Mutual Film Company is usually described:

In 1914, a Hollywood motion picture company signed a contract with Mexican revolutionary leader Pancho Villa in which he agreed to fight his revolution according to the studio’s scenario in return for $25,000. The Hollywood crew went down to Mexico and joined Villa’s guerrilla force. The director told Pancho Villa where and how to fight his battles. The cameraman, since he could only shoot in daylight, made Pancho Villa start fighting every day at 9:00 a.m. and stop at 4:00 p.m.—sometimes forcing Villa to cease his real warring until the cameras could be moved to a new angle.

It sounds outlandish—not to say impractical. But the story quickly became common currency, and indeed, the tale of Pancho Villa’s brief Hollywood career has been turned into a movie of its own. Accounts sometimes include elaborations; it is said that Villa agreed that no other film company would be permitted to send representatives to the battlefield, and that, if the cameraman did not secure the shots he needed, the División del Norte would re-enact its battles later. And while the idea that there was a strict ban on fighting outside daylight hours is always mentioned in these secondary accounts, that prohibition is sometimes extended; in another, semi-fictional, re-imagining, recounted by Leslie Bethel, Villa tells Raoul Walsh, the early Hollywood director: “Don’t worry, Don Raúl. If you say the light at four in the morning is not right for your little machine, well, no problem. The executions will take place at six. But no later. Afterward we march and fight. Understand?”

Whatever the variations in accounts of Pancho’s film deal, though, it ends the same way. There’s always this sting in the tale:

When the completed film was brought back to Hollywood, it was found too unbelievable to be released—and most of it had to be reshot on the studio lot.

There was plenty of bias: A contemporary cartoon from the New York Times. Click to view in higher resolution.

Today’s post is an attempt to uncover the truth about this little-known incident–and, as it turns out, it’s a story that is well worth telling, not least because, researching it, I found that tale of Villa and his movie contract informs the broader question how just how accurate other early newsreels were. So this is also a post about the borderlands where truth meets fiction, and the problematic lure of the entertaining story. Finally, it deals in passing with the odd way that fictions can become real, if they are rooted in the truth and enough people believe them.

We should begin by noting that the Mexican Revolution was an early example of a 20th-century “media war”: a conflict in which opposing generals duked it out not only on the battlefield, but also in the newspapers and in cinema “scenarios.” At stake were the hearts and minds of the government and people of the United States—who could, if they wished, intervene decisively on one side or another. Because of this, the Revolution saw propaganda evolve from the crude publication of rival “official” claims into more subtle attempts to control the views of the journalists and cameramen who flooded into Mexico. Most of them were inexperienced, monoglot Americans, and almost all were as interested in making a name for themselves as they were in untangling the half-baked policies and shifting allegiances that distinguished the Federales from the Villistas from the Zapatistas. The result was a rich stew of truth, falsity and reconstruction.

There was plenty of bias, most of it in the form of prejudice against Mexican “greasers.” There were conflicts of interest as well. Several American media owners had extensive commercial interests in Mexico; William Randolph Hearst, who controlled vast tracts in northern Mexico, wasted no time in pressing for U.S. intervention when Villa plundered his estates, appropriating 60,000 head of cattle. And there was eagerness to file ticket-selling, circulation-boosting sensation, too; Villa himself was frequently portrayed as “a monster of brutality and cruelty,” particularly later in the war, when he crossed the border and raided the town of Columbus, New Mexico.

Much was exaggerated. The Literary Digest noted, with a jaundiced eye:

“Battles” innumerable have been fought, scores of armies have been annihilated, wiped out, blown up, massacred and wholly destroyed according to the glowing reports of commanders on either side, but the supply of cannon fodder does not appear to have diminished appreciably…. Never was there a war in which more gunpowder went off with less harm to the opposing forces.

Pancho Villa (seated, in the presidential chair) and Emiliano Zapata (seated, right, behind sombrero) in the national palace in Mexico City, November 1914.

What is certain is that fierce competition for “news” produced a situation ripe for exploitation. All three of the principal leaders of the period—Villa, Zapata and the Federal generalissimo Victoriano Huerta—sold access and eventually themselves to U.S. newsmen, trading inconvenience for the chance to position themselves as worthy recipients of foreign aid.

Huerta got things off and running, compelling the cameramen who filmed his campaigns to screen their footage for him so he could censor it. But Villa was the one who maximized his opportunities. The upshot, four years into the war, was the rebel general’s acceptance of the Mutual Film contract.

The New York Times broke the news on January 7, 1914:

Pancho Villa, General in Command of the Constitutionalist Army in Northern Mexico, will in future carry on his warfare against President Huerta as a full partner in a moving-picture venture with [Mutual's] Harry E. Aitken…. The business of Gen. Villa will be to provide moving picture thrillers in any way that is consistent with his plans to depose and drive Huerta out of Mexico, and the business of Mr. Aitken, the other partner, will be to distribute the resulting films throughout the peaceable sections of Mexico and to the United States and Canada.

Pancho Villa wearing the special general’s uniform provided for him by Mutual Films.

Nothing in this first report suggests that the contract was anything more than a broad agreement guaranteeing privileged access for Mutual’s cameramen. A few weeks later, though, came word of the Battle of Ojinaga, a northern town defended by a force of 5,000 Federales, and for the first time there were hints that the contract included special clauses. Several newspapers reported that Villa had captured Ojinaga only after a short delay while Mutual’s cameramen moved into position.

The rebel was certainly willing to accommodate Mutual in unusual ways. The New York Times reported that, at the film company’s request, he had replaced  his casual battle dress with a custom-made comic opera general’s uniform to make him look more imposing. (The uniform remained the property of Mutual, and Villa was forbidden to wear it in front of any other cameramen.) There is also decent evidence that elements of the División del Norte were pressed into service to stage re-enactments for the cameras. Raoul Walsh recalled Villa gamely doing take after take of a scene “of him coming towards the camera. We’d set up at the head of the street, and he’d hit that horse with a whip and his spurs and go by at ninety miles an hour. I don’t know how many times we said ‘Despacio, despacio,‘—Slow, señor, please!’

But the contract between the rebel leader and Mutual Films proves to have been a good deal less proscriptive than popularly supposed. The only surviving copy, unearthed in a Mexico City archive by Villa’s biographer Friedrich Katz, lacks all the eye-opening clauses that have made it famous: “There was absolutely no mention of reenactment of battle scenes or of Villa providing good lighting,” Katz explained. “What the contract did specify was that the Mutual Film Company was granted exclusive rights to film Villa’s troops in battle, and that Villa would receive 20% of all revenues that the films produced.”

A contemporary newspaper speculates on the likely consequences of the appearance of newsreel cameras at the front. New York Times, January 11, 1914. Click to view in higher resolution.

The notion of a contract that called for war to be fought Hollywood-style, in short, is myth–though the did not stop the New York Times from hazarding, on January 8, 1914, that “if Villa wants to be a good business partner… he will have to make a great effort so that the cameramen can carry out their work successfully. He will have to make sure that the interesting attacks take place when the light is good and the killings are in good focus. This might interfere with military operations that, in theory, have other objectives.”

No such compromises seem to have occurred in practice, and the Mutual contract seems to have outlived its usefulness for both parties within weeks. But what followed suggests other ways in which the facts on the ground were subsumed by the demands of the cinema: As early as the end of February, Mutual switched its attentions from shooting documentary footage to creating a fictional movie about Villa that would incorporate stock shots obtained by the newsreel men. The production of this movie, The Life of General Villa, probably explains how those rumors that Mutual’s newsreel footage “had to be reshot in the studio lot” got started. It premiered in New York in May 1914 and turned out to be a typical melodrama of the period. Villa was given an “acceptable” background for a hero—in real life he and his family had been sharecroppers, but in the Life they were middle-class farmers—and the drama revolved around his quest for revenge on a pair of Federales who had raped his sister, which bore at least some semblance to real events in Villa’s life. The point was that it also came closer to conforming to what its target audience demanded from a movie: close ups, action and a story.

Contemporary sources make it easy to understand why Mutual had this sudden change of heart. Villa had kept his side of the bargain; the company’s cameramen had secured the promised exclusive footage of the Battle of Ojinaga. But when the results of these initial efforts reached New York on January 22, they proved disappointing. The footage was no more dramatic than that filmed earlier in the war without the benefit of any contract. As Moving Picture World reported on January 24:

The pictures do not portray a battle; they show among other things the conditions in and around Ojinaga after the battle which was fought in and about the town…. There was a good view of the police station of Ojinaga and the little Plaza of the stricken town…. Other things shown on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande were the train of captured guns and ammunition wagons, the review of the ‘army’ before General Villa, the captured Federal prisoners, the wretched refugees on their way to the American side.

American filmmaker L.M. Burrud poses for a publicity shot allegedly showing him “filming in action.”

The Mutual contract, in short, had merely served to highlight the limitations of the early filmmakers. Previously, newsreel cameramen had fallen explained their inability to secure sensational action footage by citing specific local difficulties, not least the problem of gaining access to the battlefield. At Ojinaga, granted the best possible conditions to shoot and the active support of one of the commanders, they had failed again, and the reason is obvious. For all Mutual’s boasts, contemporary movie cameras were heavy, clumsy things that could be operated only by setting them up on a tripod and hand cranking the film. Using them anywhere near a real battle would be suicidal. A publicity still purporting to show rival filmmaker L.M. Burrud “filming in action,” protected by two Indian bodyguards armed with rifles and stripped to their loincloths, was as fraudulent as much of the moving footage brought out of Mexico. The only “action” that could safely be obtained consisted of long shots of artillery bombardments and the mass maneuvering of men on distant horizons.

Newsreel men and their bosses in the United States responded to this problem in various ways. Pressure to deliver “hot” footage remained as high as ever, which meant there were really only two possible solutions. Tracy Matthewson, representing Hearst-Vitagraph with an American “punitive expedition” sent to punish Villa’s border raids two years later, returned home to find that publicists had concocted a thrilling tale describing how he had found himself in the middle of a battle, and bravely

turned the handle and began the greatest picture ever filmed.

One of my tripod bearers smiled at my shouting, and as he smiled, he clutched his hands to his abdomen and fell forward, kicking…. “Action,” I cried. “This is what I’ve wanted. Give ‘em hell boys. Wipe out the blinkety blank dashed greasers!

…Then somewhere out of that tangle of guns a bullet cuts its way. “Za-zing!” I heard it whistle. The splinters cut my face as it hit the camera. It ripped the side open and smashed the little wooden magazine. I sprang crazily to stop it with my hands. But out of the box coiled the precious film. Stretching and glistening in the sun, it fell and died.

This “dog ate my homework” excuse could be used only once, however, so for the most part newsmen supplied an altogether neater solution of their own; for most a trip to Mexico meant contenting themselves with creating their own dramatic footage to meet the insatiable demand of audiences at home. Which is to say they carefully “reconstructed” action scenes that they or someone else had witnessed—if they were moderately scrupulous—or simply made scenarios up from scratch, if they were not.

While the practice of faking footage was widespread throughout the Mexican war, and many of the pioneer filmmakers were remarkably open about it in their memoirs, little mention was made of it at the time. Indeed, those who flocked to the cinema to see newsreels of the Mexican war (which the evidence suggests were among the most popular films of the period) were encouraged to believe they were seeing the real thing—the film companies competed vigorously to advertise their latest reels as unprecedentedly realistic. To take only one example, Frank Jones’s early War with Huerta was billed in Moving Picture World as “positively the greatest MEXICAN WAR PICTURE ever made…. Do you realize that it is not a Posed Picture, but taken on the FIELD OF ACTION?”

The reality of the situation was exposed a few months later by Jones’s rival Fritz Arno Wagner, who traveled to Mexico for Pathé and later enjoyed a distinguished film career in Europe:

I have seen four big battles. On each occasion I was threatened with arrest from the Federal general if I took any pictures. He also threatened on one occasion when he saw me turning the crank to smash the camera. He would have done so, too, but for the fact that the rebels came pretty close just then and he had to take it on the run to save his hide.

A tiny handful of cameramen were luckier, and, given precisely the right circumstances, could obtain useful action footage. Another newsreel man who filmed the early stages of the revolution told the film historian Robert Wagner that

street fighting is the easiest to film, for if you can get to a good location on a side street, you have the protection of all the intervening buildings from artillery and rifle fire, while you occasionally get the chance to shoot a few feet of swell film. I got some great stuff in Mexico City, a few days before [Diaz's immediate successor as President, Francisco] Madero was killed. One fellow, not twenty feet from my camera, had his head shot off.

Even then, however, the resultant footage—although suitably dramatic—never made it to the screen. “The darn censors would never let us show the picture in the United States,” the newsreel man said. “What do you suppose they sent us to war for?”

The best solution, as more than one film unit discovered, was to wait for the fighting to die down and then enlist any nearby soldiers to produce a lively but sanitized “reconstruction.” There were sometimes hidden dangers in this, too—one cameraman, who persuaded a group of soldiers to “fight” some invading Americans, only narrowly escaped with his life when the Mexicans realized they were being portrayed as cowards being soundly thrashed by the upstanding Yankees. Feeling “that the honor of their nation was being besmirched,” the historian Margarita De Orellana says, “[they] decided to change the story and defend themselves, firing off a volley of bullets. A real fight then ensued.”

A still from Victor Milner’s wildly successful reconstruction of the U.S. Marines’ assault on the post office at Vera Cruz, April 1914.

Thankfully, there were safer ways of completing an assignment. Victor Milner, a cameraman attached to the U.S. Marine force sent to occupy the Mexican port of Vera Cruz early in the war for reasons too complicated to recount in detail here, made it ashore to discover that the troops had already secured their objectives. Soon afterward, however, he had the luck to run into a friend who, in civilian life, had been “in the public relations business and was anxious to get some good publicity for the Navy and Marines.”

He got together with the local commanders and they staged the greatest replay of the storming of the Post Office that you can imagine. I am sure it was far better than the real thing… The pictures were a newsreel sensation and were shown as a scoop in all the theaters before any of us got back to the States. To this day, I don’t think anyone in the States was aware that they were a replay, and the shots were staged.

Sources

Leslie Bethell (ed.). The Cambridge History of Latin America, vol. 10. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995; Kevin Brownlow. The Parade’s Gone By… Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968; Kevin Brownlow. The War, the West and the Wilderness. London: Secker & Warburg, 1979; James Chapman. War and Film. London: Reaktion Books, 2008; Aurelio De Los Reyes. With Villa in Mexico on Location. Washington DC: Library of Congress, 1986; Margarita De Orellana. Filming Pancho: How Hollywood Shaped the Mexican Revolution. London: Verso, 2009; Friedrich Katz. The Life and Times of Pancho Villa. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998; Zuzana Pick. Constructing the Image of the Mexican Revolution. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010; Gregorio Rocha. “And starring Pancho Villa as himself.” The Moving Image: The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists 6:1 (Spring 2006).

Starfish Prime 0 to 15 seconds after detonation, photographed from Maui Station, July 9, 1962. Photo: Los Alamos National Laboratory

The summer of 2012 will be remembered as a time when people around the world were caught up in events in the skies above Mars, where the rover Curiosity eventually touched down onto the red planet.  Fifty years ago this summer there were strange doings in the skies above earth as well. In July 1962, eight airplanes, including five commercial flights, plummeted to the ground in separate crashes that killed hundreds. In a ninth incident that month, a vulture smashed through the cockpit window of an Indian Airlines cargo plane, killing the co-pilot. Higher in the atmosphere, cameras mounted in U-2 spy planes soaring above the Carribean captured images of Soviet ships that, unbeknownst to the U.S. at the time, were carrying missiles to Cuba.

In gray skies over Cape Cod, a 20-year-old telephone operator named Lois Ann Frotten decided to join her new fiancé in a celebratory jump from an airplane at 2,500 feet. It was her first attempt at skydiving. While her fiancé landed safely, Frotten’s chute got tangled and failed to open fully. She tumbled end over end and landed feet-first in Mystic Lake with a terrific splash—and survived the half-mile free fall with a cut nose and two small cracked vertebrae. “I’ll never jump again,” she told rescuers as she was pulled from the lake.

But of all the things happening in the skies that summer, nothing would be quite as spectacular, surreal and frightening as the military project code-named Starfish Prime. Just five days after Americans across the country witnessed traditional Fourth of July fireworks displays, the Atomic Energy Commission created the greatest man-made light show in history when it launched a thermonuclear warhead on the nose of a Thor rocket, creating a suborbital nuclear detonation 250 miles above the Pacific Ocean.

Starfish Prime 45 to 90 seconds after detonation. Photo: Los Alamos National Laboratory

In the fifty minutes that followed, witnesses from Hawaii to New Zealand were treated to a carnival of color as the sky was illuminated in magnificent rainbow stripes and an artificial aurora borealis. With a yield of 1.45 megatons, the hydrogen bomb was approximately 100 times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima 17 years before. Yet scientists underestimated the effects of the bomb and the resulting radiation.

Knowledge of radiation in space was still fragmentary and new. It was only four years before that James A. Van Allen, a University of Iowa physicist who had been experimenting with Geiger counters on satellites, claimed to have discovered that the planet was encircled by a “deadly band of X-rays,” and that radiation from the sun “hit the satellites so rapidly and furiously” that the devices jammed. Van Allen announced his findings on May 1, 1958, at a joint meeting of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Physical Society, and the following day, the Chicago Tribune bannered the headline, “Radiation Belt Dims Hope of Space Travel.” The story continued: “Death, lurking in a belt of unexpectedly heavy radiation about 700 miles above the earth, today dimmed man’s dreamed of conquering outer space.”

News of the “hot band of peril” immediately cast doubt on whether Laika, the Russian dog, would have been able to survive for a week in space aboard Sputnik II, as the Soviets claimed, in November of 1957. (The Soviets said that after six days, the dog’s oxygen ran out and she was euthanized with poisoned food. It was later learned that Laika, the first live animal to be launched into space, died just hours after the launch from overheating and stress, when a malfunction in the capsule caused the temperature to rise.)

What Van Allen had discovered were the bands of high-energy particles that were held in place by strong magnetic fields, and soon known as the Van Allen Belts. A year later, he appeared on the cover of Time magazine as he opened an entirely new field of research—magnetospheric physics—and catapulted the United States into the race to space with the Soviet Union.

On the same day Van Allen held his press conference in May 1958, he agreed to cooperate with the U.S. military on a top-secret project.  The plan: to send atomic bombs into space in an attempt to blow up the Van Allen Belts, or to at least disrupt them with a massive blast of nuclear energy.

At the height of the Cold War, the thinking may have been, as the science historian James Fleming said recently, that “if we don’t do it, the Russians will.”  In fact, over the next few years, both the United States and the Soviet Union tested atomic bombs in space, with little or no disruption in the Van Allen Belts. Fleming suspects that the U.S. military may have theorized that the Van Allen belts could be used to attack the enemy. But in July 1962, the United States was ready to test a far more powerful nuclear bomb in space

The first Starfish Prime launch, on June 20, 1962, at Johnston Island in the Pacific, had to be aborted when the Thor launch vehicle failed and the missile began to break apart. The nuclear warhead was destroyed mid-flight, and radioactive contamination rained back down on the island.

Telstar, the first telecommunications satellite, was put into orbit on July 10, 1962—and sustained radiation damage from Starfish Prime. Photo: Wikipedia

Despite protests from Tokyo to London to Moscow citing “the world’s violent opposition” to the July 9 test, the Honolulu Advertiser carried no ominous portent with its headline, “N-Blast Tonight May Be Dazzling; Good View Likely,” and hotels in Hawaii held rooftop parties.

The mood on the other side of the planet was somewhat darker. In London, England, 300 British citizens demonstrated outside the United States Embassy, chanting “No More Tests!” and scuffling with police. Canon L. John Collins of St. Paul’s Cathedral called the test “an evil thing,” and said those responsible were “stupid fools.” Izvestia, the Soviet newspaper, carried the headline, “Crime of American Atom-mongers: United States Carries Out Nuclear Explosion in Space.”

Soviet film director Sergei Yutkevich told the paper, “We know with whom we are dealing: yet we hoped, until the last moment, that the conscience, if not the wisdom, of the American atom-mongers would hear the angry voices of millions and millions of ordinary people of the earth, the voices of mothers and scientists of their own country.” (Just eight months before, the Soviets tested the Tsar Bomba, the most powerful nuclear weapon ever detonated—a 50-megaton hydrogen bomb—on an archipelago in the Arctic Ocean in the north of Russia.)

Just after 11 p.m. Honolulu time on July 9, the 1.45-megaton hydrogen bomb was detonated thirteen minutes after launch. Almost immediately, an electromagnetic pulse knocked out electrical service in Hawaii, nearly 1,000 miles away. Telephone service was disrupted, streetlights were down and burglar alarms were set off by a pulse that was much larger than scientists expected.

Suddenly, the sky above the Pacific was illuminated by bright auroral phenomena. “For three minutes after the blast,” one reporter in Honolulu wrote, “the moon was centered in a sky partly blood-red and partly pink. Clouds appeared as dark silhouettes against the lighted sky.” Another witness said, “A brilliant white flash burned through the clouds rapidly changing to an expanding green ball of irradiance extending into the clear sky above the overcast.” Others as far away as the Fiji Islands—2,000 miles from Johnston Island—described the light show as “breathtaking.”

In Maui, a woman observed auroral lights that lasted a half hour in “a steady display, not pulsating or flickering, taking the shape of a gigantic V and shading from yellow at the start to dull red, then to icy blue and finally to white.”

“To our great surprise and dismay, it developed that Starfish added significantly to the electrons in the Van Allen belts,” Atomic Energy Commission Glenn Seaborg wrote in his memoirs. “This result contravened all our predictions.”

More than half a dozen satellites had been victimized by radiation from the blast. Telstar, the AT&T communications satellite launched one day after Starfish, relayed telephone calls, faxes and television signals until its transistors were damaged by Starfish radiation. (The Soviets tested their own high-altitude thermonuclear device in October 1962, which further damaged Telstar’s transistors and rendered it useless.)

Both the Soviets and the United States conducted their last high-altitude nuclear explosions on November 1, 1962. It was also the same day the Soviets began dismantling their missiles in Cuba. Realizing that the two nations had come close to a nuclear war, and prompted by the results of Starfish Prime and continuing atomic tests by the Soviets, President John F. Kennedy and Premier Nikita Khrushchev signed the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty on July 25, 1963, banning atmospheric and exoatmospheric nuclear testing.  And while the U.S. and the Soviet Union would continue their race to space at full throttle, for the time being, the treaty significantly slowed the arms race between the two superpowers.

Sources

Books:  James Clay Moltz, The Politics of Space Security: Strategic Restraint and the Pursuit of National Interests, Stanford University Press, 2008. Rosemary B. Mariner and G. Kurt Piehler, The Atomic Bomb and American Society: New Perspectives, The University of Tennessee Press, 2009.

Articles: “H-Blast Seen 4000 Miles, Triggers Russian Outcry,” Boston Globe, July 10, 1962.  “Britons Protest Outside Embassy,” New York Times, July 10, 1962.  “Pacific Sky Glows After Space Blast,” Hartford Courant, July 10, 1962. “Blackouts Last Only About Hour,” New York Times, July 10, 1962. “How Not to Test in Space” by Michael Krepon, The Stimson Center, November 7, 2011, http://www.stimson.org/summaries/how-not-to-test-in-space-/ “A Very Scary Light Show: Exploding H-Bombs in Space” Krulwich Wonders, NPR, All Things Considered, July 1, 2010, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128170775 “9 July 1962 ‘Starfish Prime’, Outer Space” The Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban-Treaty-Organization Preparatory Commission, http://www.ctbto.org/specials/infamous-anniversaries/9-july-1962starfish-prime-outer-space/ “Nuclear Test Ban Treaty” John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, http://www.jfklibrary.org/JFK/JFK-in-History/Nuclear-Test-Ban-Treaty.aspx

Fanny Blankers-Koen, the “Flying Housewife,” wins the third of her four gold medals at the 1948 Olympics in London. Photo: Bettman/CORBIS

The last time London hosted the Olympics, the scarred city hadn’t yet recovered from the ravages of World War II. In 1948, after a 12-year hiatus from the Games, the sporting world hadn’t recovered, either. Neither Germany nor Japan were invited, and the Soviet Union declined to participate, Stalin believing that sports had no place in communism.

London built no new facilities or stadiums for what were called the “Austerity Games.” Male athletes stayed in Royal Air Force barracks, while women were housed in college dormitories. All were told to bring their own towels. With postwar rationing still in effect, there were immediate complaints about the British food. A Korean weightlifter lost 14 pounds while in England, and the Jamaicans were extremely displeased and “kicking about the poorly seasoned foods.” Rumors of food poisoning ran rampant, as numerous athletes suffered debilitating stomach pains, but British public relations officers ascribed the incidents to “nervousness,” noting that doctors had detected “nothing more than a mild digestive disorder.” Still, English athletes chose to consume unrationed whale meat, and American reporters who arrived in advance hoped Uncle Sam might send enough steaks, eggs, butter and ham for everyone.

A 57-year-old gymnastics official from Czechoslovakia became the first Olympic political defection when she refused to return to her Communist bloc nation following the Games. There was a row when the International Swimming Federation declared that athletes from Northern Ireland could compete only for Great Britain, and the Irish withdrew from the swimming and diving competition in protest. (They’d already lodged a protest when officials declared that the state be designated “Eire” rather than Ireland, as the team had wished.) As it turned out, Eire would win just one medal at the Games, when 69-year-old Letitia Hamilton picked up a bronze medal for her painting of the Meath Hunt Point-to-Point Races in the Olympic art competition.

Still, the London Games managed to set an Olympic attendance record, and an unlikely Olympic star emerged. Fanny Blankers-Koen of Holland, 6 feet tall and 30 years old, was a “shy, towering, drably domesticated” straw-blonde mother of a 7-year-old son and a 2-year-old daughter who talked of how she liked cooking and housekeeping. She also won four gold medals in track and field and became “as well known to Olympic patrons as King George of England.”  Nicknamed the “Flying Housewife,” Blankers-Koen achieved this feat while pregnant with her third child.

Born Francina Elsje Koen on April 26, 1918, in Lage Vuursche, a village in the Dutch province of Utrecht, she demonstrated remarkable athletic abilities as a young child and ultimately settled on track and field after her swim coach advised her that the Netherlands was already loaded with talent in the pools. At 17 years old, Koen began competing in track events and set a national record in the 800-meter run; a year later she qualified in the trials for the 1936 Olympics in Berlin in both the high jump and the 4 x 100 relay. She attended the Games, and although she did not medal in her events, she did manage to meet and get an autograph from her hero, the African-American track star Jesse Owens, whose record four gold medals she would later match in London. The meeting was, she would later say, her most treasured Olympic memory.

Fanny Blankers-Koen was voted female athlete of the century in 1999 by the International Association of the Athletics Federations. Photo: Nederlands Instituut voor Beeld en Geluid / NOS

Fanny was just coming into her prime as a runner when she married her coach, Jan Blankers, in 1940. She’d won European titles and set multiple world records in the 80-meter hurdles, high jump and long jump. But because of the war, the Olympics were canceled that year and again in 1944.  Still, she qualified to return to the Olympics, leaving her children behind in Amsterdam. “I got very many bad letters,” she recalled, “people writing that I must stay home with my children.”

The British team manager, Jack Crump, took one look at Blankers-Koen and said she was “too old to make the grade.” Few knew it at the time, but she was already three months pregnant and training only twice a week in the summer leading up to competition.

The Games began on July 28 under a sweltering heat wave, when King George VI opened the ceremonies at Wembley Stadium before more than 80,000 people. The athletes entered the stadium, nation by nation, and toward the end of the pageant, the American team, dressed in blue coats, white hats, white slacks and striped neckties, received a tremendous and prolonged ovation for their efforts during the war. It was a moment that, one American reporter said, “provided one of the greatest thrills this reporter has had in newspaper work.”

Blankers-Koen got off to a strong start in the 100-meter sprint, blowing away the field to capture her first gold medal, but despite being favored in her next event, the 80-meter hurdles, she was slow out of the blocks, bumped a hurdle and barely held on in a photo finish to win her second gold. Feeling the pressure, she burst into tears after one of her heats in the 200-meter event, complained of homesickness, and told her husband that she wanted to withdraw.

In addition to hyping Blankers-Koen as the “Flying Housewife,” newspaper coverage of her exploits reflected the sexism of the time in other ways. One reporter wrote that she ran “like she was chasing the kids out of the pantry.” Another observed that she “fled through her trial heats as though racing to the kitchen to rescue a batch of burning biscuits.”

Her husband patiently talked to her about continuing, and Blankers-Koen reconsidered, regrouped, then set an Olympic record in the 200 meters on her way to winning her third gold medal of the Games. In her final event, she was to run the anchor leg in the 4 x 100 relay, but the Dutch team was panicked to learn, shortly before the finals, that Blankers-Koen was nowhere to be found. A shopping trip had delayed her arrival at the stadium. She finally made her way down to the muddy track in her bright orange shorts, and by the time she’d received the baton, the Dutch were in fourth place, well behind. But she came roaring toward the finish line, closed a four-meter gap and caught the lead runner to win the gold.

Despite eclipsing Babe Didrikson’s three Olympic medals at the Los Angeles Games in 1932—a performance that vaulted the American athlete into superstardom—Blankers-Koen is mostly forgotten today. As the world record holder in both the high jump and long jump at the time, it’s possible she could have added two more gold medals in 1948, but Olympic rules allowed participation in only three individual events, and the Dutchwoman chose to run rather than jump. When she returned to her country, she received not millions of dollars worth of endorsement contracts, but a new bicycle.

Statue of Fanny Blankers-Koen in Rotterdam. Photo: Ruud Zwart

In 1972, she attended the Munich Games and met Jesse Owens once again. “I still have your autograph,” she told her hero.  “I’m Fanny Blankers-Koen.”

“You don’t have to tell me who you are,” Owens replied. “I know everything about you.”

In 1999, she was voted female athlete of the 20th century by the International Association of Athletics Federations (Carl Lewis was voted the best male athlete). And yet Blankers-Koen was surprised. “You mean it is me who has won?” she asked. Yet despite her modesty and demure giggle, her biographer Kees Kooman portrays her as a deeply competitive athlete. Fanny Blankers-Koen died in 2004 at the age of 85.

In preparation for the 2012 Olympic Games, Transport for London created a commemorative “Olympic Legends Underground Map,” but among the more than 300 athletes listed, Fanny Blankers-Koen’s name was nowhere to be found.  The agency has since acknowledged the “mistake” and promised to add her name on future printings.

Sources

Articles: “Eyes of World on Olympics,” Los Angeles Sentinel, July 29, 1948.  “Seldom Seen London Sun Fells Many, Wilts Others” Washington Post, July 30, 1948.  “No Food Poisoning Among Olympic Stars,” Hartford Courant, August 8 1948.  “Holland’s Fanny Would Have Won 5 Titles With Help From Olympic Schedule-Makers,” Washington Post, August 8, 1948.  “Dutch Woman Wind Third Olympic Title,” Chicago Tribune, August 7, 1948.  “Athletics: Mums on the run: Radcliff can still rule world despite pregnant pause,” by Simon Turnbull, The Independent, October 21 2007. In 1948, “London Olympics provided different challenges,” by Bob Ryan, Boston Globe, July 27, 2012.  “Fanny Blankers-Koen,” The Observer, February 3, 2002. “The 1948 London Olympics,” by Janie Hampton, August 15, 2011, http://www.totalpolitics.com/history/203762/the-1948-london-olympics.thtml

Books: Kees Kooman, Fanny Blankers-Koen: De huisvrouw die kon vliegen, De Boekenmakers, 2012.