14 June (1777): Flag Day--and a salute to both Betsy Ross and Marla Miller

Today is Flag Day, which, as the Christian Science Monitor explains, is not an official federal holiday, but marks the date in 1777 on which the Continental Congress adopted the national flag.

I cannot fail to note that, as the article goes on to explain, the holiday originated in my native midwest:

The idea of celebrating the adoption of the American flag came around in the late 1800s, when Wisconsin school teacher B.J. Cigrand organized a “Flag Birthday” or “Flag Day” for his students.

The celebration became more widespread with each year, leading to the first national observance of Flag Day on June 14, 1877, the centennial of the original flag resolution.

But it was not until Aug. 3, 1949, that President Truman signed an Act of Congress designating June 14 of each year as National Flag Day.

The article also discusses some of the history and etiquette surrounding the flag. It was all familiar to me because, when I was a child, I had one of the famous "Little Golden Books" (recently celebrated at our local Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art), on Our Flag (# 388 in the series), which explained everything from its evolution to the rules for proper handling and display. It's probably not the sort of thing kids would read nowadays. Still, it is interesting to think about how we sometimes obtain lasting memories and information from strange sources.

Of course the article also notes the debate over the creation of the first flag: "The designer of the first American flag is still unknown, although historians believe it was either New Jersey Congressman Francis Hopkinson or Betsy Ross, a Philadelphia seamstress." Interestingly, I think, we all grew up learning both that Betsy Ross was said to have designed the American flag and that this legend was perhaps just that. We never got much further in the schools. Strangely enough, neither did the scholars—until now.

This provides me with an opportunity to congratulate my University of Massachusetts colleague, Director of Public History Marla Miller, who recently brought out a very well-received new book on Besty Ross and the Making of America (Macmillan, 2010). As scholars have noted, the legend arose only a century after the fact in remarks of Ross's grandson. Interviewed last year, Marla speculated that his mother created the story when interest in Colonial and Revolutionary women was on the rise. The truth turns out to be complex. As reporter Diane Lederman explains:

When she first took on the project of writing about the life of Betsy Ross, historian Marla R. Miller said “I thought I would be dismantling the legend altogether.”

But the author of “Betsy Ross And the Making of America” said while there is no proof that Ross stitched the first American flag of 13 stars and stripes, “somebody had to do it first.” And as she said, “the truth is somewhere in between (those who claim she did and those who deny it.)”

As Lederman explains,

Miller was surprised no one else had written a scholarly biography when she decided to write one. She thinks nothing was written in part because there was little to document her life. “No papers had been saved; that’s a deterrent to biography. People in the past failed to anticipate my needs,’ she joked.

And during the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s when her life might have been examined, Ross had been “a subject of derision. “No scholar would have taken it on as a project; it would have been too risky.”

While Miller didn’t have Ross’ documents she did have much other material about Ross’ family - material about her siblings, three husbands and children. There were seven born but five lived into adulthood. She was able to construct Ross’ life through those windows.

“The big challenge is (that Ross) is not a strong presence all the way through.” But what she did was put “her in context of what women like her must have been doing.”

Marla has always been intensely interested in both material culture and the lives of people who made things. The story of Betsy Ross thus provides a window into the lives of women and working people. The fact that is not always explicitly and extensively documented is a challenge, but also an advantage to the extent that if offers an opportunity to teach the public how historians really work. Even when the documentation is rich, the "facts" do not speak for themselves; they always need to be interpreted. Historians have to work inferentially, read between the lines, and make the most of circumstantial evidence, especially in the case of the lower classes and marginalized groups who did not leave their own documentary record.

As Marla puts it, “I feel so privileged to be the person to have written this. I was the right person in the right place to appreciate her real story.” Thanks to her, she's not the only one to appreciate it: the book has been a huge success with critics— the Wall Street Journal praised it, the New York Times listed it as an Editor's Choice, and Publisher's Weekly gave it a starred review. (listen to an interview with the author)

How to Deal With Infantile Leftists (a lesson from history)

Lenin famously denounced ultra-radical pseudo-leftism as an "infantile disorder." Although he had something very specific in mind, namely a doctrinaire adherence to forms or slogans and an inability to see changing content or conditions, the general problem is in a certain political sense timeless. There have always been "radicals" and "activists" who lay great stress on symbolic gestures but either don't think them through or haven't the will to follow through.

Writing up the posts on the Heydrich assassination prompted me to go back to one of my favorite historical sources, the recollections of the former head of Czechoslovak military intelligence, František Moravec. (J. C. Masterman called it, "the best book on espionage and counterespionage which I have read since the war ended.") I was therefore amused to read again his account of how he dealt with this challenge. In the closing phase of the Second World War, the Soviets and their domestic allies were pressuring his government-in-exile to undertake largely symbolic resistance operations even though logistical conditions were unfavorable and the actions would have brought about vicious retaliation without corresponding military gain:

At the request of the President I made a public speech in London explaining this. The hall was full, but the audience consisted primarily of Communists who, when I was finished, screamed their disagreement. However, it was not difficult to quieten them. They were mainly youngish office workers whose comfortable jobs provided them deferment from military service. I made them a proposal: those who wished could be immediately enrolled for a special course, trained as parachutists and dropped into occupied territory. There they could put into practice what they were now so fiercely advocating in theory. The hall swiftly emptied.

Master of Spies: The Memoirs of General Frantisek Moravec (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1975), 225

Problem solved.

9-10 June 1942: Nazis Destroy the Czech Village of Lidice (Heydrichiade)

The assassination of the Nazi “Reichsprotektor” of Bohemia and Moravia, Reinhard Heydrich, by Czechoslovak paratroopers on 27 May 1942 was an unprecedented blow against the Nazi regime. The commemoration of his death and the revenge were equally unprecedented.

Nazi postage stamp for occupied

Bohemia and Moravia,

commemorating Heydrich

Heydrich succumbed to his wounds on 4 June. From 5 to 7 June, the coffin lay in state in the Hradčany castle, after which it was paraded through Prague and then sent by train to Berlin, where it was again ceremonially displayed. Himmler, who had been moved to tears at the news of the attack, delivered the eulogy at the funeral on the 9th. A shaken Hitler, who had considered Heydrich indispensable, posthumously bestowed upon him the highest German military decoration, the second and final such act in the course of the war.

That day witnessed the most infamous of the reprisals. Beginning on the night of 9-10 June, German forces wiped out the Czech village of Lidice, near Prague, which, they wrongly charged, had sheltered the parachutists. Of the 503 inhabitants, 173 adult males and several women were shot, and some 200 women were deported to concentration camps (143 survived). A handful of the nearly 100 children were given to “Aryan” families to be Germanized, and the rest were deported and later gassed at Chelmno (17 adoptees could be located by 1947). The entire town was then burned and obliterated, a process estimated to have consumed some 20,000 man-hours of labor by 100 workers, and lasting until July 3.

photos from: Napsal Cyril Merbout, Lidice (Prague: Ministry of Information, 1945)

Rather than attempting to conceal the crime, as in the case of the extermination of the Jews, the Nazis brazenly publicized it as a warning. A detailed communiqué concluded,

Because the citizens of this community by their actions and support of the murderers of the SS Obergruppenführer Heydrich broke proclaimed laws in the grossest manner, the grown men were put to death by shooting, the women were transported into concentration camps, and the children were taken to be appropriately raised. The buildings in the village were razed to the ground and the name of the village erased.

Indeed, as I noted in last year’s brief post, the retaliation is, ironically, better known than the “crime” that ostensibly provoked it.

The reprisals had in fact begun almost immediately after the assassination attempt, as Heydrich fought for life in a Prague hospital. Berlin at first demanded the execution of all current Czech prisoners and the arrest of 10,000 more, but acting Protektor Hans Frank and his security staff argued that such a move would be counterproductive, the more so as they correctly surmised that the perpetrators were regular forces of the Czechoslovak government-in-exile rather than local resisters. The vengeance was nonetheless terrible. Already by the date of Heydrich’s death, there were 157 executions, targeting the nation’s elites and leadership.

Among the first to suffer were the Jews. Whether any of the Nazi leadership actually believed in a specifically Jewish role in the incident is in a sense irrelevant, for in their racial-political worldview, the Jewish conspiracy pulled the strings of the puppets in the great world theater and was ultimately responsible for every hostile action. Hundreds of Jewish prisoners in Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin paid for this delusion with their lives in the immediate wake of the attack. Then, on 9 June, the date of the funeral and the assault on Lidice, 1000 Prague Jews were deported to the death camps in a train designated, “Assassination of Heydrich.” Two more deportations of equal size from the nearby Terezín ghetto followed in quick succession. The Nazis, who had begun the extermination of Jews in the “General Government” area of Poland in the fall of the preceding year, now christened the action, “Operation Reinhard” in honor of the SS martyr who had done so much to bring about the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question.” Historians refer to the three extermination centers (distinct from mere “concentration camps”) of Belzec, Sobibor, and the new Treblinka II facility as the “Operation Reinhard Camps.”

Leaving the deportations of the Jews aside, there were over 1,300 executions in the Protectorate between the attack and July 4. Other villages besides Lidice suffered. At Ležaký, on 24 June, all the adult males were executed. Retaliations continued into the fall. All told, former head of Czechoslovak military intelligence František Moravec estimated, some 5,000 of his compatriots died in the retributions. Although the death toll at Lidice pales in comparison to this total, the episode stood out as emblematic because of its sheer brutality and comprehensiveness.

It was a typical fault of the totalitarian Nazi regime to believe that one could not only rewrite but also erase history. Far from erasing the memory of Lidice, the terror immortalized it. Several towns in far-flung regions of the globe adopted its name in place of their own (ever wonder what a “Lidice” is doing in Illinois or Panama, of all places? it’s not French or Spanish), and others subsequently bestowed the name on streets, districts, parks, and organizations, so that it would never vanish.

The incident found its cultural resonance, too. The best-known tribute in the west was the book-length poem, “The Murder of Lidice,” by then-popular Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950).

The poem also features prominently as a literary frame in Douglas Sirk’s moving but historically inaccurate “Hitler’s Madman” (1943), which imagines the assassination as having taken place in Lidice rather than Prague. As the men go to their death, they sing the Czech national anthem, after which a voiceover recites verses from the poem. Both poet and poem have largely faded from our collective cultural memory today.

The commemorations were musical as well as literary. Already in the summer of 1942 there appeared an album of “Songs of Lidice,” by soprano Jarmila Novotná, with an introduction by the Czechoslovak Minster of Foreign Affairs of the government-in-exile Jan Masaryk. The most enduring cultural tribute is, however, Bohuslav Martinů’s “Memorial to Lidice” (Památnik Lidicím) commissioned by the American League of Composers and completed in August 1943, and premiered by the New York Philharmonic on 28 October, the anniversary of Czechoslovak independence. Just under 8 minutes in length, the complex three-movement piece progresses from tragedy and loss to peace and optimism. The Adagio opens by juxtaposing C minor and C-sharp minor chords, and includes reference to the oft-cited historical “Saint Wenceslas Chorale” as national motif. The Andante develops this more confident mood of resistance and nascent optimism. The final Adagio culminates in a somber rendition of the “V-for victory”-motif, derived from the opening of Beethoven’s Symphony no. 5 in C minor, before resolving to a C major in the final half-minute.

One of the few surviving children sent for Germanization recalled,

The Czechoslovak authorities did not find me until 1947, and I went home nearly two years after the end of the war. Home, to my own country.

It was only then that they told me the Nazis had killed eighty of the children of Lidice. No more than a few survived. My fair hair and blue eyes had saved my life. And I had to begin learning to speak Czech again.

Here I heard that my father had been shot that first morning with all the men of Lidice. All that was left of our village was a flat place with thick grass growing over it. How sad it was looking at that plain. At one end there had been a school, then a little farther on the village square. And then the church and our houses. Everything had vanished.

Miroslav Ivanov, Target: Heydrich (NY: Macmillan, 1974), 229-30

Rebuilt a few hundred meters away from the original site after the war, Lidice today is both a living town and a memorial to the dead one, dedicated to the task of peace and reconciliation. A prominent feature is the vast rose garden of remembrance (1955 ff.), founded by British patrons, and containing contributions from some 30 countries.

At the dedication of the monument to the assassins of Heydrich last year, an interviewer spoke with Jiří Navrátil, a teenager during the occupation, and today, vice-chairman of the Czech Boy Scouts:

“Actually I think that it is the most important day, because all the world could see that the Czech people – in spite of all the old history – were against Nazism and would be free.”

But you paid a terrible price for killing Heydrich – the razing of Lidice and the thousands sent to concentration camps and so on. Was it worth it?

“Well, yes. That was war, you see. It’s necessary in war to fight.”

New Clues as to Amelia Earhart's Fate?

Discovery News reports:

Tantalizing new clues are surfacing in the Amelia Earhart mystery, according to researchers scouring a remote South Pacific island believed to be the final resting place of the legendary aviatrix.

Three pieces of a pocket knife and fragments of what might be a broken cosmetic glass jar are adding new evidence that Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan landed and eventually died as castaways on Nikumaroro, an uninhabited tropical island in the southwestern Pacific republic of Kiribati. The island was some 300 miles southeast of their target destination, Howland Island.

"These objects have the potential to yield DNA, specifically what is known as 'touch DNA','" Ric Gillespie, executive director of The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR), told Discovery News in an email interview from Nikumaroro. (read the rest)

The article, noting the 1940 discovery of skeletal remains (since lost) "attributed to a white female of northern European extraction, about 5 feet 7 inches tall," goes on to detail circumstantial evidence of a castaway campsite, based on the artifacts.

The suggestion of hard evidence from "touch DNA" sounds intriguing but strikes me, at first thought, as a bit of a stretch.  Although the relatively new technique is able to identify samples from only a handful of cells (rather than, as earlier more extensive amounts of tissue, bodily fluid, or other human material), I would tend to suspect that any samples here—given that we seem to be dealing with exposed objects (the plane, if present, is assumed to be deep under water) would be badly degraded.  The report notes, for example, how quickly bones aged and broke down in the island environment.  Still, it is possible, I suppose, that genetic material might have adhered to a protected interior surface of one of the objects such as the knife and somehow survived.

The disappearance of the "aviatrix" (a whole etymological and social history in that antiquated word) has fascinated the public for over seven decades, and, like other mysteries, led to much speculation, much of that wild.  At the one end of the spectrum are suggestions that she was on a secret spy mission for the US government.  At the other:  the demythologizing explanation of poor piloting and navigational skills, or at least preparations wholly inadequate for a trip of such magnitude. Both allow for the possibility of a forced landing in an area made more dangerous by the proximity of Japanese forces as tensions in the Pacific mounted.  Sometimes the most mundane truth proves to be the most tragic.

June 7 1862: Political Invective in Amherst in the Old Days vs. Today

Radical students invite controversial speaker to Amherst. Surprise. Controversy ensues: another surprise.

As we've noted here (and many already knew), Amherst has in recent decades acquired a reputation as a contentious, cantankerous place, which spawns or even thrives on controversy (some justified, some not). In recent years, in particular, there have been growing expressions of concern about the tone of political debate, for example in the blogosphere.  Sometimes the controversy has revolved around outside speakers being allowed (or forbidden) to speak. 

This example, from nearly 160 years ago, shows that these concerns about civility are nothing new.  Amherst residents will be familiar with the work of Daniel Lombardo, former curator of Special Collections at the Jones Library, for his compilations of oddments and anecdotes from our history.  Others should get to know it.

On June 7, 1862, as the Civil War raged, the "Fighting Parson" and passionate anti-slavery activist William G. Brownlow came to town.  Here is an excerpt from Lombardo's account:

  Rev. Brownlow was invited to speak by the students of Amherst College, who sympathized with the persecuted Unionists of Eastern Tennessee, of whom Brownlow was a leader. Their invitation to him emphasized the "noble stand which you, though menaced and exiled by traitors, have maintained against the Rebellion."

He called the rebellion "the most wicked vile and devilish the world ever saw . . . instituted by men who are low and vile . . . the dregs of the streets and gutters."

  In a speech that was enthusiastically received with bursts of applause, Brownlow turned his wrath to certain Southern leaders.  He called Senator Mason of Virginia "a miserable, corrupt, whiskey-rotted, brandy-bloated, beef-headed scavenger . . . a miserable lying, pompous dog."  In a rather shocking opinion for a man of the cloth, Rev. Brownlow proclaimed that Mason "ought to have had a grind-stone tied about his neck, and sunk in the waters of Boston Harbor, as Adams and his comrades served the British Tea."

Mason left for Europe with John Slidell, whom Brownlow described as "a hideous Orang Outang."  For all senators who joined the rebel congress, Brownlow recommended that their "lying tongues ought to be plucked out of their mouths, and fed to mean dogs, and their bodies suspended by grass ropes to trees."

  It is evidence of the extremes of human emotions, and the breakdown of morality during war, that Amherst so warmly responded to a man who shouted, in a foreshadowing of Naziism, "I am an advocate of exterminating and wiping off from the face of the earth the whole infernal race of traitors and peopling the country with a better race of men if the rebellion continues."

  William Brownlow went on to become the governor of Tennessee in 1865, and a U.S. Senator in 1869.

—Daniel Lombardo, A Hedge Away:  The Other Side of Emily Dickinson's Amherst (Northampton:  Daily Hampshire Gazette, 1997), 25-26 

Strong stuff. Admittedly, likening it to Nazism is just stupid and sloppy, but one gets Lombardo's point.  Moral outrage is a double-edged sword, and when passion flares, we don't always wield it as wisely as we should.  Anyway, it's good to keep this account in mind whenever we worry about the current state of political debate here, just for a sense of perspective.

7 June 1892: Edith Wharton Begins to Build "The Mount"

From Mass Moments:

...in 1902, the writer Edith Wharton wrote to a friend about a visit to the site of her new home, The Mount, under construction in Lenox: "Lenox has had its usual tonic effect on me, & I feel like a new edition, revised and corrected." Once considered desolate wilderness, the beautiful Berkshire Hills and the quaint village of Lenox drew writers, artists, and intellectuals throughout the nineteenth century. By 1900 Lenox had become the summer place of choice for many of New York's wealthiest families. Like Wharton, they built magnificent houses — which they called "cottages" — with extensive grounds. When the Gilded Age ended, so did the "Berkshire Cottage" era. A few estates survive. Edith Wharton's The Mount is one of them. (read the rest)

It's a wonderful place in the sense of house and landscape. It's also been a great venue for cultural events (we've enjoyed seeing Shakespeare performed there).

And now, as the saying goes, the rest of the story.

What Mass Moments did not mention was that, by 2008, The Mount—by now, a historic site dedicated to the legacy of Edith Wharton—was facing foreclosure and begging for emergency public donations.  Speaking in favor of saving The Wharton Restoration (that's the official name), the Boston Globe—cleverly, it no doubt thought (admittedly, the Globe thinks everything it does is clever)—entitled its editorial, "Edith Wharton's House of Worth." However, there is another, more critical or ironic way to read that punning tag, for this is really a story of overvaluation: inflated sense of worth and impunity.  To be fair, the Globe also avuncularly declares that board members "must ask themselves tough questions about whether the organization overextended itself," and correctly concludes, "The evidence suggests that it did."  This is what we refer to as genteel understatement. The Wharton Restoration ran into trouble because of a series of shockingly ill-considered decisions, first and foremost, reckless reliance on debt in the absence of a sustainable strategic plan.

One final and near-fatal blow was the entirely understandable but dubiously justifiable decision to purchase Wharton's library from a British bookdealer. In the first place, although the importance for Wharton scholarship is obvious, the connection to the site is more tenuous. Wharton lived there for less than a decade, so the library actually comes in large part from her European expat digs. In the second place, as my book-history and book-trade colleagues agree, the collection was vastly overvalued at a price of 2.6 million dollars for 2,600 volumes (you do the math; even few "association copies" belonging to famous authors have that kind of intrinsic average value). Better management would have gotten a better deal or called the dealer's bluff. What is even more shocking—indeed, stupefyingly stupid—was the decision to purchase the books on the vague assumption that individual donors would later step forward and finance the deal by "adopting" individual books. Finally, one can question whether the books belonged at a site that was not yet properly equipped to house them and manage their use.  The Wharton papers are at Yale, and a large institution with deep pockets and proper facilities and staffing might have been a far more appropriate purchaser.  It's always tempting to try to acquire collections that are generally germane to the focus of a historic site, but one needs to ask the tough questions about core mission, support and sustainability.

The current Executive Director (and Vice President of Operations at the time of the débâcle) tells the story of the crisis in the most sanitized fashion and paints its prospects in the rosiest light.  (the editor of the interview calls these remarks "open and precise." LOL) We know all too well what happened. As for the future ("pragmatic about facing ongoing challenges"), we shall see.

Everyone who cares about culture, book history, and historic preservation should be glad that The Mount has been saved. But we should all hope and pray that the new management will be wiser.  Recent years have seen a trend (and need) for better planning and assessment at historic sites. The recent financial crisis and changing cultural market make that planning and accountability all the more important.

Lesson:  True, if you build it, they will come, but you then need to preserve it, endow it, and manage it efficiently!

6 June 1944: D-Day

One wonders what has become of the D-Day anniversary. Formerly marked by numerous events, it seems to be fading from consciousness as the date recedes and surviving veterans disappear.  (Not even many war movies or documentaries on tv here anymore.)

I doubt whether our students could even identify the date; I think many might know the date of Pearl Harbor, but not the year.  (NB: if they hadn't taken a class with me, of course.)  Here, for their benefit—or that of anyone else who wants to learn or needs a refresher course— is the overview for students from the National World War II Museum, which lists key players, goals, and scenes of combat, details the course of the fighting at key locations, and provides eyewitness testimony. And for everyone, a sample of the latter:

"... the craft gave a sudden lurch as it hit an obstacle and in an instant an explosion erupted.... Before I knew it I was in the water.... Only six out of 30 in my craft escaped unharmed. Looking around, all I could see was a scene of havoc and destruction. Abandoned vehicles and tanks, equipment strung all over the beach, medics attending the wounded, chaplains seeking the dead."

--Pvt. Albert Mominee, 16th Infantry Regiment, U.S. 1st Division

"When you talk about combat leadership under fire on the beach at Normandy, I don't see how the credit can go to anyone other than the company-grade officers and senior NCOs who led the way. It is good to be reminded that there are such men, that there always have been, and always will be. We sometimes forget, I think, that you can manufacture weapons, and you can purchase ammunition, but you can't buy valor and you can't pull heroes off an assembly line."

--Sgt. John Ellery, 16th Infantry Regiment, U.S. 1st Division

"It looked like a Hollywood scene in a way, but it wasn't. People were being killed all around us."

--Pfc. Walter Rosenblum

"He suddenly raised his body and let out an awful yell. He had realized that his right leg was missing. I pushed him back down and I remember him saying, 'What am I gonna do? My leg, I'm a farmer.'"

--Pharmacist's Mate Frank Feduik, administering morphine to a GI on the deck of an LST

And finally, one view from the top and one from outside:

"This operation is not being planned with any alternatives. This operation is planned as a victory, and that's the way it's going to be. We're going down there, and we're throwing everything we have into it, and we're going to make it a success."

--General Dwight D. Eisenhower

"'This is D-Day,' the BBC announced at 12 o'clock. 'This is the day.' The invasion has begun!... Is this really the beginning of the long-awaited liberation? The liberation we've all talked so much about, which still seems too good, too much of a fairy tale ever to come true?... the best part of the invasion is that I have the feeling that friends are on the way. Those terrible Germans have oppressed and threatened us for so long that the thought of friends and salvation means everything to us!"

-- Anne Frank, diary entry, June 6, 1944

They don't talk like that anymore. (Of course, we don't have wars like that anymore, either.)

Here in the Northeast, the Boston Globe ran a nice editorial, along with dozens of historic photos. The New York Times apparently couldn't be bothered.  Meanwhile, many conservatives took up the charge that President Obama ignored the holiday by failing to post anything on the White House website and attending a gala at Ford's Theatre, where, conveniently for the editorialists ("And, he said this on the anniversary of D-Day?"), honoree Desmond Tutu turned a fabled communist saying on its head by declaring, "Security is not something that comes from the barrel of a gun." (Wait, does this mean that conservatives and Chairman Mao agree? Actually, that's not as strange as it sounds: only a peculiar breed of liberal or pseudo-leftist is unable to comprehend the realities of politics and force.) Whether presidents should mark the D-Day anniversary is an interesting question (I'd prefer they would). But to what extent they have done so and whether there are partisan patterns, I can't say (haven't had the time to check; perhaps someone else would undertake this task). What I can say is that the critics quickly forgot President Obama's participation in the 65th anniversary events—in France—last year. (On that occasion, the Times also ran a piece and photo essay on the 320th Antiaircraft Barrage Balloon Battalion, "the only all-black unit in the D-Day landings on Omaha and Utah.")  On the left, a heartfelt post on the Daily Kos paid tribute to the event and the men, and generated appreciative comments. It would be nice to think that we could all at least come together in appreciating what General Eisenhower called the "Great Crusade" (unfortunate choice of words) to "bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world."

4 June 1942: Death of Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich; reflections on the new monument at the assassination site

On 27 May 1942 (last year’s post), Czechoslovak parachutists ambushed and mortally wounded SS Obergruppenführer (Major General) Reinhard Heydrich, the Nazi ruler of the “Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.” The attack, and his death on 4 June, provoked a wave of vicious retaliation and generated controversy that has scarcely abated concerning the calculus of political violence and the price in reprisals occasioned by resistance to tyranny.

Killing the head of the Reich Main Security Service—the principal architect of Nazi terror, including the rapidly evolving persecution of the Jews—and a brutal ruler of an occupied homeland was by any measure an understandable goal for Czechoslovak military intelligence, but there were also more complex motivations on the part of the political echelon: Czechoslovakia, betrayed by its nominal British and French allies, had been forced to cede its western borderlands (including crucial fortifications) to Germany at the Munich Conference in September 1938 (Hungary and Poland also took their share, it is often forgotten). Thereafter, resistance became psychologically as well as practically almost impossible, and the Germans seized the remainder of the country in March 1939 without a fight, dividing it into the “Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia” and a clerico-fascist Slovak puppet state. War broke out in September, of course, making a mockery of the “appeasement” policy that had sacrificed the only functioning democracy in Central Europe in the vain hope of avoiding the inevitable showdown with fascism.

The Czechoslovak government-in-exile hoped that the assassination would accomplish multiple goals: to demonstrate resistance and national will in the face of Heydrich’s increasingly and embarrassingly successful attempts to pacify the country; to damage the German war effort; to rally the people to further resistance (in that it failed), and to ensure that, despite the dismemberment at Munich, the republic would be fully restored after an Allied victory. The assassination of Heydrich was not only an act of resistance and revenge, but also a bid to restore national honor during the conflagration and a marker laid down for the postwar bargaining table.

At the end of December 1941, Czechoslovak military intelligence in London, working with British Special Operations Executive (SOE), dropped three teams of parachutists into Bohemia (Silver A and B, and Anthropoid) followed by two more (Out Distance and Zinc) in March. After no little hardship (beginning with missed drop zones), the teams reassembled and eventually carried out their operation. The members of Anthropoid carefully planned the assassination to take advantage of Heydrich’s casual approach to security: He recklessly traveled from his country villa in Panenské Břežany to the castle in Prague in an open car, by a regular route, and without accompanying guards in a separate vehicle. Where his route took a sharp right-hand turn toward the River Vltava, the paratroopers took up their positions on the morning of May 27.

Sergeant Josef Valčik stood, apparently loitering, on a street corner. When the car approached, he signaled with a pocket mirror to Warant Officers Jan Kubiš and Josef Gabčík, farther down the street. As the car slowed to round the corner, Gabčík stepped forward, drew a Sten gun from under his raincoat, and fired—or tried to: the gun jammed. As he stood there, paralyzed, and Heydrich drew a pistol, Kubiš threw a modified anti-tank grenade, which exploded against the rear left side of the car. Kubiš escaped quickly, while Gabčík had to endure first gunfire from Heydrich and then pursuit by his chauffeur. The paratroopers instantly became the subject of an unprecedented manhunt.

the type of bomb used in the attack, adapted 

from a British anti-tank grenade

the car after the attack

Although Heydrich’s wounds at first appeared non-critical (for the kidneys and spine were untouched), the bomb had in fact driven fragments of horsehair and springs from the car’s seat into the pleura, diaphragm, and region of the spleen. After suffering for days in agony, the Reichsprotektor (treated only by German doctors) succumbed to complications from his wounds—usually described as septicaemia—on 4 June.

The story of the assassination long remained shrouded in both ignorance and distortion. Two wartime movies—Fritz Lang’s classic “Hangmen Also Die,” and Douglas Sirk’s less well-known “Hitler’s Madman” (both 1943)—paid ample tribute to the heroism of the resisters and suffering of the innocent victims of reprisals but bore no resemblance to the actual historical events. In part because of the horrible reprisals, the government-in-exile may have been reluctant to claim explicit and detailed credit for the action. President Edvard Beneš—who had capitulated at Munich, went into exile in England, and then returned briefly to his country after the war, only to be manipulated out of power by the communists—never openly acknowledged his role in the plan. At the time, his public statements attributed the act to homegrown patriots; he omitted any mention of it in his later memoirs. Only in the 1960s did the former head of Czechoslovak military intelligence, František Moravec, publicly confirm that he had carried out the operation with the full awareness and approval of the President. Although Czechoslovak communist leader Klement Gottwald had immediately praised the act from his exile in Moscow, the postwar communist government (it is often said) had little desire to call attention to the fact that the greatest act of wartime resistance had been accomplished by the western exile Czechs with assistance from imperial Britain. In 2007, Czech citizens, impatient at the absence of any commemoration on the spot, announced plans to put up their own, unauthorized memorial.  Only last spring, while I was in Prague, was a monument finally erected, 67 years after the event. (coverage from Radio Praha, with audio).

 new historical marker

Soon after Heydrich’s death, the Nazis installed a shrine at the scene of the attack, where a round-the-clock SS honor guard stood vigilant beside a bust of the Reichsprotektor. Unsurprisingly, the Czechs destroyed the offending structure in 1945. In subsequent decades, the assassination site was largely forgotten.

When I made my pilgrimage to a location only rarely mentioned in guidebooks, I decided to see as much as possible on foot.  After emerging from the Kobylisy metro station, I walked down Zenklova, though diverging along the way to explore the side streets now named after the parachutists.

 yellow arrows:  streets named after the parachutists who took part in the attack;

red arrow: assassination site

sign in street named after Jan Kubiš

sign in street named after Josef Gabčík

As in so many cases, the site of a great historical event is today a stark and unprepossessing place, transformed almost beyond recognition by modern development. Although one can still ride the line of the tram that nearly disrupted the ambush, what was once a quasi-rural intersection has become a modern roadway interchange reconfigured for high-speed, high-volume traffic. The site therefore poses multiple aesthetic and practical challenges for preservationist and artist alike.

interpretive sign:  the topography then and now

the yellow lines denote the former layout of roads and structures; the red arrow, the assassination site

When I rounded the corner of V Holešovičkách, I was at first, if not exactly disappointed, at least more puzzled and less moved than I had expected. I spent quite some time there—listening to Bohuslav Martinů's "Památník Lidicím" and "Polní Mše" on the iPod or just sitting in silence—contemplating both the historical event and the decisions made in commemorating it.

 then

now

The monument (Pomník Operaci Anthropoid), a triangular 11-meter column surmounted by a trio of bronze human figures, sits on a narrow, irregularly shaped plaza of concrete pavers and sand, wedged in between a clumsy concrete pedestrian underpass and unruly vegetation on one side, and the sharp edge of the roadway, on the other.

One could moreover almost imagine two very different monuments—the abstract and the representational—uneasily coexisting, as if a strange head had been grafted onto an altogether different body. To put it another way: It’s almost as if someone had tried to combine in one work, on a vertical plane rather than the horizontal, Maya Lin’s celebrated abstract Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1, 2) and Frederick Hart’s ultrarealistic "Three Servicemen" (also known as: "Three Soldiers") which stands nearby.

Upon reflection, though, I found the solution to the challenge of both message and topography more satisfying. Given the constraints of the site, the monument at times seems to compete for air space with the host of utilitarian highway light poles, while, at ground level, the viewscape is cluttered with traffic signs and a bus stop with advertising displays.

Both the volume and the color of the column allow it to assert itself, particularly when the warm afternoon light brings it into rich contrast with a deep blue sky.

And above all (no pun intended), the height is the crucial factor. In a crowded urban environment characterized mainly by high-speed automobile circulation and public transportation rather than calm pedestrian traffic, a lower monument would have been lost, and there’s no room for a piece with a large footprint anyway. The well-proportioned column holds its own: it’s easily visible from some distance, even to someone traveling in a vehicle, but does not dominate the scene. And directing the eye upwards allows it to communicate its message, as well.

That brings us (literally and figuratively), to the three sculptures. The realistic figures at first seem not just incongruous in the context of the column, but an odd choice in and of themselves: two men in the less than flattering British military uniforms of the day, and another in civilian dress (complete with even more incongruous fedora), stand poised at the points of the triangle, leaning forward, arms outstretched. The pose subtly suggests paratroopers about to jump. Yet it also suggested to me a heroic literal and figurative leap of faith.

General Moravec was brutally frank with the men that he handpicked for the mission, and recalled:

They knew that in all probability they would die with Heydrich and if there was any glory for them afterward they would not live to enjoy it. They accepted this knowledge with heroic calm and determination.  They made me think of that Roman fortitude about which I had read in the Latin classics.

[ Master of Spies: The Memoirs of General Frantisek Moravec (Garden City:  Doubleday & Co., 1975), 202 ]

The figures are realistic in an unrealistic setting. (Do men ever stand at the top of a triangular shaft? No.  But at least since the days of the stylites, we don't perch atop pillars, either.  And yet the sensibility and pose are different, for example, from the—in another sense equally "unrealistic"—Vendôme or Nelson columns.)  These figures are realistic in a just slightly stylized manner, and heroic in an understated, quotidian one. Unlike Hart’s (skillfully rendered but utterly banal) Vietnam soldiers, they bear no weapons, and neither their clothes nor their bodies show any of the physical or psychological scars of combat. Perhaps this also has to do with the difference between wars and causes: Vietnam was the bad war in which good men fought and struggled with themselves and their compatriots at home as well as the enemy. World War II remains “the good war.” Nonetheless, we are here far removed from the grandiose heroism of traditional, monumental representationalism in the spirit of, “dulce et decorum est pro patria mori,” whether the Marine Corps or Warsaw Ghetto memorials.

The figures portrayed here, in uniform or otherwise, are in a sense all profoundly civilian, ordinary men: They are human and humane, a sort of everyman, very much like the Slovak locksmith Gabčík and the Czech brickyard worker Kubiš. We see them at the moment of anticipation and commitment, before the horrors of combat. The outstretched arms are as much an embrace of both nation and universal humanity as they are limbs flexed for the jump from the plane. In other words, we see idealists, humble patriots. And contemplating this idealism and innocence only more powerfully brings home the magnitude of their achievement and the tragic end that they met.

5 June 1967: Outbreak of the "Six Day War" in the Middle East

On this day, the Six Day War (as it is known in the west) broke out when Israel Defense Forces (IDF) launched air attacks against Egypt in response to a series of mounting military provocations. It was a doctrine that Israel's socialist politician and military leader Yigal Allon called the pre-emptive counterattack:  When the enemy's hostile intentions are clear, the smaller power, lacking large forces and strategic depth, needs to maximize its qualitative edge and the element of surprise, strike first, and carry the war onto enemy territory. Tensions had been rising with Syria (allied with Egypt in a military pact since 1966) over shelling of Israel's northern agricultural settlements and disputes over the demilitarized zone.  Egypt's movement of troops into the Sinai (following the expulsion of UN observers stationed there in the wake of the 1956 war) was a further provocation, and its closing of the Straits of Tiran—an international waterway—to Israei shipping constituted a clear act of war.

Although both politicians and scholars now agree that Israel struck first, the thesis that it did so as part of an aggressive and premeditated plan of expansion is, as historian (and current Israel ambassador to the US) Michael Oren has shown, a chimera.  All the evidence suggests that the war was the result of a miscalculation on the part of Egypt and Syria, goaded on by their Soviet patrons who wanted to stoke the tensions for geopolitical reasons of their own but not precipitate full-scale armed conflict (intercourse without orgasm, as one analyst of the period trenchantly put it).  And, far from being the masters of some comprehensive plan of aggression, the Israel leadership was shaken at the prospect of what many considered a new existential threat.

The result is well-known: Israel captured the Gaza Strip and Sinai peninsula from Egypt, the Golan Heights from Syria, and the territory between the 1949 armistice lines and the Jordan River (so-called "West Bank") from Jordan. Ironically, of course, Jordan attacked even though Israel had urged it to stay out of the war, and thus, today's most contentious issues—the issues of "borders," "settlements," and "refugees," and the "question of Jerusalem"—all in a sense arose from this fateful decision. It is tempting to speculate as to what would have happened absent this colossal blunder on the part of the diminutive Hashemite monarch:  would the result have been a relatively simple negotiation over territory, leading to peace, or rather, would the conflict have festered even longer? One likewise wonders what would have happened, had the Arab states, when presented with an Israeli offer of peace, had not responded with the "three no's" of Khartoum. Or, for that matter, what would have happened had the Israel government heeded the advice of some of its own intelligence and security staff and established a Palestinian state on its own without waiting for the Arab states to negotiate. For better or worse, historians generally confine themselves to what was and why, rather than what might have been.  It is among the great ironies that what did happen was that the great Israeli victory and subsequent occupation of the captured territories (lasting longer than many of the parties perhaps dreamed) was perhaps the greatest impetus to a new Palestinian nationalism and a seemingly interminable rather than definitively resolved conflict.

The fighting in June 1967 was in many ways the last "classic" modern war:  a swift war of movement, fought by regular forces of recognized states, with traditional weapons.  Although air-to-air missiles played their role, planes still relied on cannon in close combat. Some of the tanks (e.g, the British Centurion and Soviet T-34) dated from World War II.  The popular music of the conflict, no less than much of the political rhetoric, was of a type that would not return. It was the end of an era in the sense of both an older, more straightforward form of war, and more generally, a kind of moral, military, and political innocence.

31 May: Memorial Day in Amherst. Honoring those who served; reversing the vandalism of veterans' graves

"War feels to me an oblique place"

     —Emily Dickinson

Although I've lived in Amherst for a good many years now and have witnessed many of our local festivities, this was the first time that I took part in the annual Memorial Day parade.  Ours is a small affair. I remember these events as being much grander when I was a child, though whether that was because it was a different era or because I lived in a much larger town, or both, is hard to say (the eternal problem of historical evidence and analysis). Certainly, some of our neighboring small towns have much larger celebrations. The difference may also have to do with the general Amherst distaste for things military and "patriotic" (though it was not always that way).

Still, like other New England towns, we decorate the graves of veterans with flags on the eve of the holiday—thus originally known as "Decoration Day" (it began to be called Memorial Day only from 1882 on), a practice commemorated in the second movement of Charles Ives's "A Symphony:  New England Holidays").



We also hold a small procession (we call it a "parade," but that almost feels like an exaggeration) from the Town Common to War Memorial Pool (ironically, closed for the second year due to budget constraints).


I marched (or walked at a dignified pace), along with my four of my five fellow Select Board members (one was out of town at another holiday program), as official representatives of the Town, behind the lead veterans and flag-bearer, and we returned the waves of the scattered observers (interestingly:  mostly either middle-aged people, or young couples with children).

preparing the flags

As we turned south from Pleasant Street onto Triangle Street and approached the site of the memorial ceremony, two F-15 fighter jets roared over our heads in salute (I can imagine how well that will go over with some people here), at once a striking contrast to the smallness of our enterprise and an affirmation of its importance.

The traditional ceremony took place beneath the flagstaff: placement of floral tributes on behalf of Town, veterans, and scouts, a few brief remarks by a representative of Veterans Services, reading of the names of the deceased, gunfire salute, playing of the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" and the national anthem.

Of particular interest to me was the news that veterans' service markers had been restored in time for the holiday.  It's traditional here to denote the graves of veterans with metal emblems that are both markers (indicating the war or nature of service) and flagholders, for occasions such as this. 

This past winter, a number of western Massachusetts towns suffered from a revolting wave of vandalism by thieves who stole some 200 of the markers, hoping to sell the valuable bronze. It's not the first such occasion in the Northeast, and at a time when thieves will steal copper from not only ornaments, but even the wires and pipes at construction sites, it's another sign of desperation as well as greed.The only cemeteries of ours targeted here were the 1818 North Cemetery and St. Brigid's cemetery in neighboring Hadley (though belonging to our local Catholic church). 

Now, if there are two groups you don't want to piss off, it's veterans and police, so these thieves, evidently a few bullets short of a full clip, were easily caught a few weeks later when an informant ratted them out.  They had sold the markers, readily identifiable as such, to area metal recyclers whom the authorities had alerted and soon questioned.  When, in a similar incident in New York several years ago, the thieves faced only petty larceny, outraged veterans and other citizens demanded that the penalty be raised to a felony.  Our local vandals have been "charged with felony larceny and larceny from a grave."  

The good news was that the bronzes were recovered. The bad news was that, although all were still recognizable as markers, some had been broken, and repair was prohibitively expensive.  We are still pondering how best to treat these artifacts. In the meantime, though, they have been replaced with new markers of bronze-washed aluminum, which is more durable and attractive than plastic but  much cheaper than bronze and therefore less valuable and attractive to any potential future thieves.  Normally, Veterans' Services purchases the markers as needed, but because of the unprecedented number and the expense of replacing the missing markers all at once, additional resources were required to set things right in time for the holiday. Soon after the thefts came to light, Ronald Lashway, owner of Douglas Funeral Home in Amherst, and a relative of veterans whose graves at St. Brigids's were desecrated, established a fund with People's Bank to reward anyone coming forth with information and/or pay for replacement markers.

On the way back to the center of town, I walked through historic 1730 West Cemetery, to see the flags and old markers.  (It was also one of my periodic visits to see how our landscape restoration was progressing; more on that in another post soon.)

grave of a Revolutionary War veteran

Because my route to and from home every day takes me past North Cemetery, I stopped there, as well, to view the decorated graves, and in particular, the replacement markers.

It is of course a mixed blessing that Memorial Day has come to mark the social if not astronomical start of the summer vacation season. It highlights the date while at the same time diminishing its historical and cultural rationale.  In her remarks at the ceremony, Veterans' Services representative Kathleen Pollard urged us to "put the memorial back in Memorial Day," and to observe a moment of rest and silence at 3:00 p.m.

I duly paused from my afternoon labors in the garden, but it was the midday walk through the cemeteries that most powerfully brought home the meaning of the occasion for me.  I've always been struck by the fact that American Memorial Day, a time when we remember life cut short, occurs in spring, the season of rebirth in nature (in many western countries, of course, the association with the christological imagery of days of national mourning or military commemoration was quite deliberate).

In any case, the contrast spurs contemplation as we living mark the sacrifice of the fallen, and also our universal mortality:

The possibility to pass
Without a Moment’s Bell—
Into Conjecture’s presence--
Is like a face of steel

Emily Dickinson