Our country has been insulted! Our honor is at stake! Declare war now!
In 1870, the French press howled for a military response to the rise of Prussia. The French feared that they would soon be eclipsed by the economic and military power of Prussia. They believed they still had the best army in the world and could win easily. They fell into the trap of jingoistic nationalism.
At 10:10 am on June 28, 1914, two people were murdered and the world changed forever. The murders of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire and his wife Sophie are considered the spark that started World War I. Their deaths didn’t have to start a war. Their deaths were an excuse used by nations fighting for military superiority.
In 1914, the world looked much like today with a globalized elite controlling most of their nations’ wealth, labor unrest, and unsettling social changes. Nationalism and a belief in racial superiority guided government policies.
On June 6, 1944, more than 130,000 ground troops and 23,000 airborne troops flooded into Normandy on D-Day, but a week later they were behind schedule as the Allies struggled to break out from their beachhead.
The British reached Bayeux on June 7th four miles shy of their D-Day objective, the city of Caen. Whoever controlled Caen also controlled access to the Caen Canal, the northern Orne River and entry into northeastern France, but Caen couldn’t be reached.
George Henry Thomas was born in 1816, near Yorktown, Virginia, into a family of prosperous farmers. At the age of 15, his family narrowly escaped being murdered during Nat Turner’s slave revolt when their farm was attacked. Despite his narrow escape, Thomas never exhibited prejudice, treating everyone equally and fairly.
When Thomas was 19 years old, he received an appointment to West Point Military Academy. One of his roommates was William Tecumseh Sherman and Ulysses S. Grant, arrived as a plebe during his final year. Thomas received his commission in 1840 and was a career officer.
At 10:00 am on July 20, 1944, Graf Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg arrived at Hitler’s headquarters in Ukraine to attend the daily military briefing. On the drive from the airfield, he armed a bomb in his briefcase. It can’t have been easy; Stauffenberg was missing an eye, his right hand and two fingers of his left hand, due to combat injuries.
The military conference took place in a wooden hut. Stauffenberg’s briefcase was propped against a table leg near Hitler. Stauffenberg soon excused himself and left the room. A few minutes later around 12:40 pm the bomb exploded, disintegrating the building and killing several people instantly.
As the Dark Ages faded into the feudal world of the Middle Ages, a new form of popular music developed. The songs told stories about knights and ladies, forbidden love and battles. These pop tunes were known as chansons d’amour (songs of love) and chansons de geste (songs of war).
Songs of love resembled modern “historical romances” (aka bodice-rippers) with heart-broken lovers and cuckolded spouses. Songs of war created an idealized image of knights and often ended in a heroic death, like Song of Roland.
The toilets overflowed. The air reeked of sewage and too many bodies. The ground shook from a constant artillery bombardment that knocked concrete chunks from the ceiling. Some inmates risked death above-ground just to get a breath of less rancid air.
Under the ruined flower beds in the garden of the New Reich Chancellery, diehard loyalists huddled in the Fuhrerbunker. Most stayed drunk, even in the presence of Hitler who was a teetotaler. He didn’t notice because he was higher than a kite on drugs.
The Confederate troops advanced at 4:00 pm on November 30, 1864 as the daylight faded. They were serenaded by military bands as they advanced toward Franklin, Tennessee. They crossed open fields spreading in an arc from the Harpeth River on their right flank to Carter’s Creek Pike on the left flank.
They had marched all the way from Atlanta, Georgia after evading the Union forces commanded by General William T. Sherman. Sherman’s troops laid a 50-mile wide swathe of destruction through Georgia on the way to South Carolina, but managed to lose track of the opposing army. Confederate General John Bell Hood marched back to Tennessee hoping to either draw the Union forces after him or to reclaim Tennessee for the South. Tennessee had been under Union control since 1862.
“What a dear, delightful place is Charleston,” proclaimed Mary Chesnut, in March 1861. Mary loved the nightly dinners and dances while her husband was a delegate to the secession convention. South Carolina became the first state to secede from the U.S.
Mary Boykin Chesnut was born into a South Carolina family that owned plantations in South Carolina and Mississippi. Her father was a prominent Nullifier. Nullifiers argue that the Constitution’s 10th Amendment reserves all powers to the states unless specifically assigned to the federal government; and therefore federal laws don’t apply to a state without the state’s consent.
A polymath is an exceptionally educated person; someone who is an expert in many subjects. Maimonides is the perfect example. He was good at everything.
Maimonides was a scientist who studied mathematics, astronomy, and logic. He was a philosopher who wrote treatises on ethics and politics. He was also a lawyer and a medical doctor, serving as the personal physician to the Muslim caliph in Cairo. In addition to these secular topics, he was a rabbi who still influences Jewish law.
Each generation faces a major political or social upheaval that forever shapes their view of the world. For baby boomers, that event was the Vietnam War. How did we get involved in that mess?
America’s involvement in Vietnam started after World War II, as the Cold War began. Vietnamese nationalists, like Ho Chi Minh, helped the Allies defeat the Japanese occupation in the expectation that Vietnam would become independent. They were wrong.
Fedor von Bock was tall, slim and stood ramrod straight. He was a cultured, educated man who spoke four languages. He believed the highest honor for a soldier is to die in service to his country.
How did such a thoroughly decent man become an enabler of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime? By being an average man.
Each year as Valentine’s Day approaches, thoughts turn to romantic love. Everyone is searching for their perfect match so that they can live happily ever after. Victoria Woodhull’s quest for true love led her to challenge every social convention from marriage vows to prostitution to women’s suffrage.
“Good God! It’s a woman”, exclaimed the young French officer upon meeting Marie-Madeleine Fourcade. He wasn’t the only person surprised upon first meeting her. Marie-Madeleine was a 32-year-old mother with two small children in 1940. Yet she eventually led a Resistance network that operated from Normandy to North Africa.
One of the military innovations of World War I was air warfare. When the war started in 1914, the military establishment in every country dismissed aircraft as a weapon of war, but a few younger officers envisioned the possibilities. One of those young officers was Oswald Boelcke.
Boelcke was born in 1891, the third of six children born to a school headmaster. With his parents’ permission, he joined the Prussian Cadet Corps in 1911. While serving with a communications unit he noticed the nascent air corps, and by 1914 he was a licensed pilot.
In 1914, Oswald and his brother Wilhelm, also a pilot, were flying observation missions over enemy trenches. Oswald quickly realized that planes would be suitable for aerial combat and occasionally disobeyed orders by engaging in dogfights with enemy planes. His aggressive style earned him the Iron Cross (Second Class) in October 1914 and First Class in February 1915.
In April 1915, he was transferred to a unit where he met Max Immelmann. They created tactics for aerial combat which are still studied and used today. Immelmann is best known for the “Immelmann loop” which involves rolling to escape an enemy plane and then turning to counterattack the enemy from the rear.
Boelcke created a list of seven tactical maneuvers known as the “Dicta Boelcke.” The seventh dictum says that “foolish acts of bravery only bring death” and advocates working as a team. It’s one of the earliest examples of the principle of formation flying and massed attacks by aircraft—both now standard procedures.
In January 1916, Boelcke was awarded the Ordre Pour le Merite or Blue Max, the German equivalent of the Congressional Medal of Honor. He was 24 years old. In a letter to his parents, he described wearing the Blue Max as “worse than having a warrant out against you” because everyone stared when seeing such a young man wearing the ultimate military honor.
Boelcke quickly tired of the media attention. To avoid the press, he created a list of answers which he dubbed “Aircraft Defenses Against Troublesome Questioners” which he provided to inquisitive people. The first answer is “sometimes it is dangerous, sometimes it is not.”
In the summer of 1916, the German air corps was reorganized into Jadgstaffeln (called Jastas) and Boelcke was given command of Jasta 2. On October 28, 1916, in an aerial dogfight, Boelcke accidentally touched wings with another pilot from his Jasta. Both planes crashed and Boelcke was killed by the impact.
His Jasta was renamed in his honor and his protégé, Manfred von Richtofen (a/k/a the Red Baron) took command until 1918 when he was killed in a dogfight. When the war ended in 1918, Jasta Boelcke was led by a young flyboy named Herman Goering.
For more information about Oswald Boelcke, see Knight of Germany by Professor Johannes Werner (2009 translation by Claude W. Sykes for Casemate). Professor Werner’s original 1932 text was written at a time of severe social and political turmoil in Germany. His advocacy of patriotism and German nationalism may be a bit jarring for some readers.
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Hollywood movies and TV shows often depict lawyers as opinionated blowhards who snivel with fear when the going gets tough. That stereotype doesn’t apply to a guy named Roger.
Roger J. Bushell was born in South Africa in 1910 to English parents who had moved so that his father could take an engineering job with a mining company. Bushell’s family was financially able to send him to an English public school and then to Cambridge University. Bushell was broad-shouldered, just under six feet tall, and enjoyed sports, particularly skiing.
In 1934, Bushell became a barrister. Litigation attorneys need to think quickly under pressure and argue persuasively. They also need to organize swathes of information into a coherent story. These skills would come in handy when Bushell became a prisoner of war (POW).
Bushell joined the Royal Air Force (RAF) in 1939 when World War II began. On May 23, 1940, his plane crashed near Boulogne, France. Unfortunately, he landed in territory that had already fallen to the Nazi invasion of France and he became a POW.
As a POW, Bushell became a serial escapee. Once, he reached the Swiss border before being caught. On several occasions, his litigation skills enabled him to talk his way out of severe punishment after recapture. Eventually, he ended up at Stammlager (Stalag) Luft III at Sagan, Germany; now Zagan, Poland.
By the time Bushell arrived at the camp, the senior officers had concluded that so many POW’s were trying to escape they were literally tripping over each other, causing all efforts to fail. So the senior POW’s decided to organize all escape attempts in the camp in the hopes this would increase the chances of some of them succeeding.
Bushell was a leader of the escape committee due to his forceful personality and organizational capabilities. He created an “on-boarding” process to assess the skills of each new POW and assign them to an escape team. Teams sewed civilian clothes, made maps and compasses, forged documents, and dug tunnels.
His ability to argue persuasively helped convince the escape committee to support a massive escape. His plan required digging three tunnels simultaneously so that if one tunnel was discovered they could continue with the other two. His plan also envisaged 200 POW’s escaping on the first night with additional escapes on succeeding nights.
During the night of March 23 - 24, 1944, seventy-six men crawled through a tunnel, surfaced beyond the wire, and set off in groups of twos and threes before an alarm sounded. Three eventually made a “home run” to England. The remaining 73 escapees were recaptured and 23 were returned to the Sagan camp.
But 50 were designated for special treatment on the orders of Adolf Hitler who wanted to retaliate against the “terrorfliegers” bombing Berlin and other German cities. Bushell was one of the 50 escapees handed over to the Gestapo to be executed.
Roger Bushell was considered a gifted litigator by his pre-war colleagues. He was also a brave and resourceful fighter during the war.
Today, experienced skiers in St. Moritz can try their luck on the “Bushell Run," a course where he set a pre-war speed record in downhill skiing. Intrepid tourists can visit the camp ruins to see a memorial to the 50 murdered escapees. Another resource is a November 2004 documentary broadcast on the PBS Nova series, which includes an archaeological dig of the tunnel and interviews with survivors.
The most widely read book on Stalag Luft III is The Great Escape by Paul Brickhill (1950). For an in-depth account of the search for the executioners, see The Longest Tunnel by Alan Burgess (1990). Jonathan F. Vance’s A Gallant Company (2000) includes stories of Roger Bushell’s pre-war career as a lawyer and an epilogue with information about the survivors’ post-war lives.
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The sun shone brightly on Christmas morning 1776 as George Washington plotted his next move. The American Revolution was less than a year old and appeared doomed. The situation could scarcely have been worse.
Washington’s army was a defeated mess. In less than a year, the Continental Army and its supporting state militias had been chased out of Boston and New York City. The British chased them across New Jersey and were closing in on Philadelphia. In anticipation of the British attack, the Continental Congress fled Philadelphia sinking the currency backed by the Continental Congress, making it difficult to buy weapons and supplies for the army.
Washington knew he had about one week to save the entire rebellion. At the end of December, most of his army would disappear when their short-term enlistment period expired. Recruitment efforts floundered because few people wanted to enlist in a lost cause.
Success in war depends on luck as much as good leadership, and Washington’s luck was about to change. First, the British decided to call off their advance and settle into winter quarters. Second, the British believed the Americans were inferior fighters compared to their well-trained, well-supplied professional army. As soon as the weather improved, they planned to crush the rebellion.
While the British got warm and comfortable at various fortified encampments in New Jersey, Washington dreamed up a complicated plan to attack them. He chose Trenton because it was isolated from the other British encampments and was close to the Delaware River. Trenton was held by Hessians, the 18th-century mercenaries preferred by any monarch who could afford to hire them.
Washington’s plan was complicated because his troops had to cross the Delaware River at night, then march eight miles to Trenton and simultaneously attack from two directions. Around 2 p.m. on Christmas Day as the Americans marched toward the river, a winter storm blew in. Many of the troops walked barefoot through the freezing rain and snow because they’d worn out their boots on the long marches earlier in the year.
Washington’s genius as a commander was to remain calm and outwardly confident in the most of dire circumstances. He inspired his men to keep going. Somehow they managed to cross the partially frozen Delaware River in wooden boats, taking their cannons along. The event is memorialized in Emanuel Leutze’s 1851 painting, “Washington Crossing the Delaware.”
Across the river, the Americans reformed into their battlegroups and began lugging their cannons toward Trenton. The atrocious weather delayed their arrival from dawn to about 8 a.m. on December 26th.
The popular myth is that the Hessian troops were taken by surprise after having too much to drink during their Christmas celebrations. Actually, the Hessians were sober and had been warned about the attack. But they made the same mistake as the British; they believed the American army was inferior to them and besides, no one would be crazy enough to attack at night in a snowstorm.
At about 8 a.m. on December 26th, the Americans simultaneously attacked Trenton from the north and the south. Trenton was unusual in that it had been built on a grid. The perfectly aligned streets provided an excellent field of fire for the American cannons and sharpshooters.
Some Hessians escaped to the edge of town but were attacked before they could counterattack. During this brief melee, the Hessian commander was mortally wounded and the Hessians surrendered. The Hessians lost 40 killed, 66 wounded and 918 captured. Americans lost 4 killed, 8 wounded, and 5 frozen to death during the march from the river.
The Battle of Trenton is considered the turning point in the American Revolution by many historians. Thanks to this win, American morale soared, recruitment improved and the long grinding war continued until the British surrendered at Yorktown in 1781. Trenton was Washington’s Christmas present for a nation that didn’t yet exist.
For a quick overview of the war, see A Guide to the Battles of the American Revolution, by Theodore P. Savas and J. David Dameron (2006). Of the many biographies of George Washington that I’ve read, my current favorite is Washington: A Life, by Ron Chernow (2010). Chernow also wrote a biography of Alexander Hamilton that inspired Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical.
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