19 Nov 2019

Getting the Story Out

by | posted in: WWII, WWII: Pacific Theater | 0

In 1941, Clark Lee was a reporter for the AP based in Shanghai, where “for more than four years,” he wrote, the city “had been living practically in state of siege, with bombs, bullets, and barbed wire for its daily diet, with its streets stinking of death, starvation, misery, and corruption of war.” But in mid-November of that year, the situation was about to get a whole lot worse for foreign journalists and just about everyone else. A Japanese official tipped Lee off on the coming invasion, and Lee boarded a steamer the next day bound for Manila. From there, Lee intended to continue on to Hawaii, where his wife lived and which he called home.

 

The AP had different ideas. The news bureau knew the action would be following Lee south across the China Sea. They ordered him to remain in the Philippines.

And that’s where he was in the early morning hours of December 8 when his AP colleague Ray Cronin woke him with the news: “The Japs have blasted hell out of Pearl Harbor.” [32] The air raid sirens were sounding in Manila by daybreak, though bombs did not actually fall on the capital for several more days. Instead, the Japanese air force was busy taking out an airfield in the north and protecting an invasion force two days after that.

News was spotty. Rumors ran rampant. No one was sure what exactly was happening.

Newspapermen like Clark Lee needed facts to pass on to their news organizations in the States. Military officials, from Commander Douglas MacArthur on down, needed intelligence to plan their defenses and their attacks. Civilians, both American and Filipino (as well as a sizable population of Japanese expatriates) needed information with which to protect themselves. Getting the truth was no easy matter, but that was exactly what Clark Lee saw as his job–even at the risk of injury or loss of life.

Lee and his cronies would hunker down as the bombs began blasting but when calm resumed, like storm chasers, they would ride out in search of the story buried in the wreckage. The night Nichols Field was hit, he and Cronin got their story from a handful of anti-aircraft men of the 200th New Mexico National Guard. The men had been stationed at Clark Field until the day before and gave an account of the Japanese attack there, too. The journalists learned that, just as at Pearl Harbor, American planes had been caught on the ground lined up in neat rows. The guardsmen reported three hundred and fifty casualties and the destruction of all but a dozen bombers and perhaps half a dozen fighters. [48-50]

Lee wasn’t satisfied. He wanted to see for himself whether an air force still existed to defend the island nation.[80] He “hired” a Filipino university student, Carlos, to drive him (Carlos, wanting to see the action, refused payment), and brought along a Filipino reporter, Juan, to accompany him to Baguio  in the north. Along the way, they passed hundreds of fleeing refugees in rusted trucks, “loaded with beds and chairs and all the people who could crowd aboard.” [83] Still, Lee pressed Carlos on, against Juan’s protests, past the front lines and up the steep climb to Baguio. Lee saw with his own eyes the skeleton force holding the mountain stronghold, heard from their mouths the lack of air protection they had witnessed. The return trip required the utmost resourcefulness to return alive. But Lee had his story, even if it was a dismal one.

Clark Lee made forays to the front lines when he could, but more often he was confined to the capital and relied on official communiques for information. The spokesman for USAFFE, the United States Army Forces in the Far East, generally fed reporters air-brushed versions of events, and the reporters knew it. One morning, told “Lines holding firm on all fronts,” Lee turned to photographer Mel Jacoby and voiced his doubts. “Somehow these communiques don’t sound right to me. Let’s go see for ourselves.” [133]

Thus it was, by driving a car northwest along the coast and turning south into the peninsula, that Lee and Jacoby learned that Bataan would be where MacArthur and his forces would make their stand. At least as Lee writes it in his book of 1943, he did not even know the name of the peninsula that guarded Manila Bay and would become infamous in so short a time. Lee, Cronin, Jacoby and his wife, Annalee, plus two others escaped to Bataan before hiding out on the rock island fortress known as Corregidor. As long as they were able, they would sneak across the strait to Bataan to interview units engaged with the enemy on the front lines.

Even when they did their own fact-finding, Lee and his colleagues would run up against the censors. It was the censors’ job to keep the full story from getting into the wrong hands: the enemy who could use it against American forces, the civilian population who would be induced to panic, the home front who might suffer a drop in morale. The journalists supported the censors’ overall project but fought against specific applications. As they say saw it, Americans back home needed to understand both the desperation of the situation and, in their view, the simplicity of the fix. In short, “without planes the Philippines would be lost.” [39] Getting the story out was their mission to save the Philippines.

They did not succeed. Dispatch after dispatch was killed. Americans were largely ignorant of the fate of their Far East Forces.

Later, on Corregidor, USAFFE spokesman Colonel Harries came clean to Lee about the charade of daily press briefings. He had nothing more to hide, apparently, for he was on his death bed from gangrene. “You know, I felt like hell reading you those lies in a pontifical way every day. But it had to be done. We were trying to deceive the enemy and to conceal the fact that we were withdrawing into Bataan. And we were trying to keep the people of Manila from becoming panic-stricken. …we decided it would be better if the people didn’t have time to worry about it.” [146] Lee probably already had guessed as much, but it must have been satisfying to have the fact confirmed.
Lack of information had its costs, even if it was unavoidable. Those refugees escaping from the north that Lee encountered had first gone to Baguio: “thinking we would be safe,” they said. [83] With a little more information they might have gone straight to Manila. Such is the fog of war.

In Manila itself, citizens had their own difficulties keeping up with a shifting situation. Blackout conditions were introduced by word of mouth and enforced at the point of a gun. “Blackout watchmen” patrolled the streets and fired bullets into any windows showing light. (Lee describes it memorable: “The blackout guards at the hotel discharged their duties–and their guns–conscientiously.” [70]) Then, when Manila was declared an open city (undefended and thus not subject to attack) authorities had to convince (threaten) residents to turn on their lights again. Such is the strange irony of war.

Lee and Cronin and the Jacobys and the others became caught up in the events they were reporting. The day after Christmas they learned that General MacArthur had declared Manila an “open city.” It would not be defended and so should no longer be bombed. The journalists began making plans for the near future if (when?) the Japanese occupied the city. Flight or sit tight? To get the news past the censors to their bureaus back home, they resorted to subterfuge. “Please include Manila staff in any negotiations involving Hill Harris stop we will shortly be same category,” read Lee’s dispatch on the last day of 1941. [158] The meaning would have been clear to the AP office in New York: Manila was about to fall and American journalists faced internment, just as Max Hill, Tokyo bureau chief, and Morris Harris, Shanghai bureau chief had been taken into custody on December 8.

On New Year’s Eve, under cover of a darkness diminished by the dynamiting of nearby gasoline tanks, Lee and the Jacobys slipped across Manila Bay to the tip of the Bataan Peninsula and from there across the narrow strait to Corregidor. A rock island–armed to the teeth with artillery, carved full of subterranean shelters–just the name–Corregidor–denoted the ultimate defensive fortress. “Doubtless, it would have been impregnable,” Lee averred, “if the airplane had never been invented.” [166]

Impregnable or not, it was pummeled daily by explosives dropped from uncontested Japanese bombers. There was no air force of fighters to chase them off. There were no anti-aircraft guns that could reach the bombers when they flew at their highest. There was nothing MacArthur’s forces could do but hunker down and take it. The stress could become unbearable (though the General himself strolled around as if he were taking a walk in the park). Lee’s prose rises to new heights in his description of the aerial assaults:

Then would come the noise of the bombs falling. The bombs didn’t screech or whistle or whine. They sounded like a pile of planks being whirled around in the air by a terrific wind and driven straight to the ground. The bombs took thirty years  to hit. While they were falling they changed the dimension of the world. The noise stripped the eagles from the colonel’s shoulders and left him a little boy, naked and afraid. It drove all intelligence from the nurse’s eyes and left them vacant and staring. It wrapped a steel tourniquet of fear around your head, until your skull felt like bursting….

The kicker comes at the top of the next paragraph: “The roar of the explosions was a relief from  the noise of the falling bombs.” [168]

 

If Corregidor was the island fortress under siege, Bataan was the peninsula where ground forces slugged it out. Lee wanted the story from the front lines and was granted permission to cross the strait and embed himself with different units. On one occasion, when he was attached to a Lieutenant Gonzalez of the Filipino Scouts, Lee spied a convoy of trailers hauling artillery pieces away from the front. He asked for an explanation. “They move every night, Gonzalez explained. “That is to trick the Japs who have spotted their position the previous day.” But then he added, more revealingly, “I have never seen them back this far before. Maybe our line is moving back, or the Japanese are breaking through.” [211] Soldiers pieced together their own understanding of events the best they could, even as they remained Lee’s primary source for information.

Most soldiers could see well enough the gravity of their situation: Japanese bombers uncontested in the skies, the dwindling gasoline supplies and reduced rations for themselves. Did they ever consider that their cause was lost? Not according to Lee. He describes them, to a man, steadfast in their faith in their cause, unshakable in their belief that help was on the way. Said Lee, “They did not know, and would not have believed, that no help was going to be sent.” [240]

And on the home front? Did they understand the desperation their forces faced? Lee believed that the more time passed the more Americans would question the news they had read in the papers. On the other hand, without a real understanding of the facts on the ground they could not clamor for reinforcements to be sent. Cut off by the censors, Lee and his cronies “believed that if we could escape from the Philippines and get to Australia and then fly to the United States, we might be able to persuade authorities the battle was not yet lost. We might convince them that MacArthur’s Army had become a veteran, tough outfit, full of fight and confidence” and, as such, was indispensable. [246-247] If the chiefs of staff would only release a strong air force over Bataan, the tide would shift in their favor.

Lee and Mel and Annalee Jacoby escaped the noose surrounding Bataan with the help of two different ships and no small amount of luck. But by the time they reached Australia, MacArthur was already there, plucked from Corregidor by order of his commander-in-chief. The sacrifice of his men was complete. Bataan fell on April 9, 1942, and Corregidor just shy of a month later. It would take months and years for Americans to understand the the full extent of the tragedy.

Lee was able to get out his story in 1943. They Call It Pacific must have been an eye-opening read for those who chose to pick it up, just a year after the events it related. It might have strengthened the resolve of those home bound Americans on whose support the armed forces ultimately relied–the same Americans Eddie Rickenbacker chided (at the very same time) to make sacrifices in the war effort. “For none of us are doing so much that we cannot do more,” he said over and over. But where Rickenbacker’s words leaned toward jeremiad, Lee’s exhibited true journalism–with just a little advocacy mixed in. His zeal to get the story out was motivated in no small part by his partisanship in what turned out to be, at least initially, a losing cause.

Source:

Lee, Clark. They Call It Pacific: An Eye-witness Story of our War Against Japan from Bataan to the Solomons. NY: Viking Press, 1943.

“Rickenbacker Sets Detroit Goals in Blunt Talk to War Workers,” New York Times, January 23, 1943, 8.

Images from Wikimedia Commons and Amazon

26 Oct 2019

Harold and Viola

by | posted in: WWII, WWII: Pacific Theater | 0

Every once in a while, a trove of source material makes an entire work of nonfiction possible. At least, it can turn a run-of-the-mill narrative into a tale that hums and sparks with energy. I made the related argument in this space last month that Martha Dodd’s activities in Berlin, 1933-1937, gave Erik Larson material (complemented by her father’s more official activities) too intriguing and titillating not to shape into a book.

Now I contend that the letters of Harold Isaacs and Viola Robinson have given Peter Rand a rare historical treasure: not merely a window into a young man’s political conversion, but  into a romantic couple’s ideological give-and-take amid momentous world events, as well as their own sexual awakening. The correspondence forms the backbone not of an entire book (China Hands: The Adventures and Ordeals of the American Journalists Who Joined Forces with the Great Chinese Revolution, 1995) but a crucial part of a lengthy chapter, in a volume of five lengthy chapters. [I have never read a book whose footnotes are so completely filled with unpublished letters, as well as dated communications with the author. It helped that many of the subjects in the book knew the author’s father who was, himself, a “China Hand” and as such the subject of the final chapter of the book.]

Rand tells us that Harold and Viola were both the products of Orthodox Jewish families on the Upper West Side of New York City. They met and began dating in university, he at Columbia, she at Barnard. They chose to save their first sexual encounter for their marriage, which they considered a foregone conclusion, despite Harold’s intent to go to China while Viola finished her degree. It was 1930. China was still emerging from colonial dominance, striving for political unity, dreaming of economic advancement. Harold was a young, idealistic progressive, seeking to make a difference in the world. He would go to China.

“A born reporter,” [81] according to Rand, Harold had no difficult getting hired by two different China dailies, in succession. But tight control by the Kuomintang left his reports highly censored. Frustrated, missing Viola, Harold contemplated leaving the land he had so recently come to.

His early letters home tell the story of a young man intellectually and emotionally adrift: “Sometimes I wish I could work up the emotional drive necessary for me to hurl myself into some cause…to lose myself in it…but i [sic] almost always find myself seeing too much that is incontrovertible on the other side–or else a distorted and unexpected sense of humor intrudes at the wrong moment.” [86] Intellect, schooled into cleverness, impeded action. And Harold felt he should take action,  even if he didn’t know what that action would be. He closed his letter more hopefully telling Viola, “Under your influence I may lead a useful life yet.” [87]

Fortune favors the prepared. In quick succession, Harold met Ch’en Hansheng, Agnes Smedley, and Frank Glass. These three true believers opened his eyes to Communist principles and the possibilities of a life of political commitment. Harold documented his ensuing transformation to Viola: “I am being exposed to newer influences which are stirring something in me which may develop…. Something of the dynamics that is Agnes Smedley has communicated itself to some part of my spirit not yet articulate.” [87] In fact, Agnes grilled him out of his intellectual circumspection and his “distorted…sense of humor”: “What are your motivations? What do you aim to do? Where do you stand?.” Glass recalled later that she called Harold a “wishy washy liberal.” [88]

The action these two “stirred” Harold to take was a boat trip up the Yangtze to Chunking and beyond. It would be on that trip that his full conversion to a man of action, homme engagé, took place.

His traveling companion would be Frank Glass, who explained in retrospect that Harold “had a very sharp mind. Very quick to pick up ideas. Good reporter, good observer. But he didn’t have any principles. Petit bourgeois intellectual college student. Rather callow but with great promise.” [87] He also called him “adventurous,” for it was Harold’s idea to travel into the Chinese interior where few white men dared go.

In June, 1931, through rain then oppressive heat, the two riverboat passengers had long hours to themselves, among the sacks and crates of cargo, tipping bottles of whiskey, talking political theory and action. Harold imbibed many fine points, but it was the heart of Glass’s message that stuck with him most clearly: “You cannot sit on the fence. You cannot remain merely a spectator, on the sidelines.” [93]

From the pier at Hankow, they watched a bedraggle unit of Chiang Kai-Shek‘s Nationalist army, slumped and worn (and distressingly pre-pubescent!) returning from their unsuccessful Bandit Suppression Campaign against the Communists: images to fuel Harold’s awakening political consciousness.

Harold left Glass at Chungking and continued even further into the Heart of Darkness, all the way to the base of the Himalayas. After turning back downstream on his return to Shanghai, Harold experienced the conversion experience he had been preparing for. “I believe, Viola, that I have reached an end to my aimlessness.” He was now a Communist. He was committed in action as well as thought: “I must in other words TAKE SIDES. I must cease being a neutral, a parasite, at the very best a parlor Red.” [94] He admitted that he made it sound “like a religious experience” but that “there has awakened in what now seems stunning force to me this emotional response used to bemoan the lack of.” Like a born-again Christian, Harold felt “for the first time in my young life” the power of a sense of “purpose and direction.” [94]

Back in Shanghai his letters addressed the implications of his conversion. “My activities henceforth shall be devoted to an uncompromising anticapitalistic, communistic program. What has happened is something new in my experience. I have taken sides. I have accepted and adopted a set of convixtions [sic] which eliminates the academic waverings.” [95] He was surprised to report that the strength of his convictions made him feel “strong and cruel and ruthless sometimes.” (Though the old “waverings” showed staying power when he added, “I am still a pitiable excuse for a revolutionary…” [95]

When Agnes Smedley’s communist ardor came under attack, Harold leaped to her defense in a letter to the Shanghai Post. His old friends gave him a wide berth; his new ones congratulated him. All of this exhilarated the new convert: “It’s fun being ‘Red’ in Shanghai.” [97] Viola, absent from all the excitement, could not share his enthusiasm and told him so: “You are consistently absorbed in things which at best are only mildly interesting to me.” To which Harold parried, “If you could see the price of blood being paid at the altar of the oppressors–here in China–no amount of the blood of the oppressors could flow, and flowing, move you to reaction.” [97]

Viola was not a Barnard student for nothing. She gave as good as she got: “I maintain nothing is possible without educated and informed people…, the fundamental change is in institutions and attitudes, not the superficial change of a revolutionary regime.” [98] Her riposte touched a nerve. Harold wrote back, “I am neither  livid nor desirous of tearing you limb from limb because of some of your paragraphs (which incidentally were damn well written, even if somewhat hazy as to content).” If Harold’s words sound patronizing, they can be understood as coming from the zeal of a convert. If the attitude they express appears rooted in sexism, at least his compliment has the ring of sincerity.

Viola had more to say. She preferred to be a “constructive revolutionary, to destroy the evils of the existing social order not by dynamite and leaving in their place nothing but a big hole, but by building up something that will inevitably throttle it, by its very force of foundation on honest recognition of the facts of human nature and of society, it must kill the old.” [98]

Harold was having none of it: “The working class is starving and jobless and at the tether end of its rope within the capitalist system. You don’t have to start making ‘educated and well-informed’ people out of the workers. You can’t. They’re too hungry to be well-informed as to theory and parlor concepts. You have to whip them into competent and efficient organizations–and show them the way.”  [98] Only after reconstructing society on communist principles could the masses be “educated and well-informed.” Positive change required conviction, no fuzzy reformist thinking. “Pink is white. Only red is red.” [116]

What a fascinating epistolary exchange! What a unique window into young minds in the process of formation, confronting one of the momentous events of a momentous century! But what is most amazing is that the exchange did not end the relationship. The two maintained their commitment to each other even while growing independently under radically different circumstances on opposite sides of the globe.

Inevitably, Harold’s political transformation bled over into other aspects of his thinking. He began by rejecting all outward signs of traditional sexual morés. He announced in one letter to Viola, “I think, for my part that every girl should have her hymen removed at the age of puberty.” [117] Ouch. This is male sexual liberation at its most clueless–and abusive. “If you still have yours, it’s the product of considerable stupidity. I don’t know why you still have. I guess I never will know.” Really? Has Harold given up on any possibility of their future together? Then a flash of reason reached his consciousness: “Though it’s really my fault. You should have lost it years ago….” It does take two to lose one’s virginity. Harold’s words don’t translate well into our age of heightened awareness of sexual power, inequity, and abuse. In one ill-conceived outburst, Harold disavowed his chaste pre-marriage stance and was willing to sacrifice Viola to do it. He closed, ostentatiously revealing another side of his new consciousness: “May the non-existent god have mercy on my non-existent soul.” [117]

Against their better judgment, Viola’s parents allowed her to follow Harold to Shanghai and marry him. They hedged their bets by sending her with five hundred dollars toward a return passage. Instead, the money became the couple’s dowry. They were married in the American consulate the day after Viola’s arrival.

Harold and Viola stayed in China for four years. Harold’s political thinking continued to evolve, predictably, toward disillusionment. He was shocked and appalled to discover that Stalin could be no less ruthless than the Generalissimo, Chiang Kai-shek. He documented Stalin’s betrayal in The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution, which he published after returning to the United States. We can assume his views of sex and just about everything else evolved, too. Viola’s views, as far as I know, are less evident in the historical record.

Harold Isaacs went on to write for Newsweek in China during the final years of the world war (but not, I believe, to the end of the civil war). He was middle aged and writing for an establishment American weekly. It was a long way from “I must in other words TAKE SIDES.”

It was Harold who made his name as a war correspondent and so-called China Hand, but in 1930 it was Viola’s views that are the more mature. Only an “honest recognition of the facts of human nature and of society,” and the never-ending work of education and reform can build lasting, positive change.

Today, though, impatience is again in the air. The stink of injustice has become so foul to the woke that only radical action will do. The ugly imperfections of democracy are inadequate to the task. The fear of “seeing too much that is incontrovertible on the other side” impels them to action–any action–no matter how poorly thought out, no matter the consequences.

Harold and Viola can tell them how that worked out in China in the 1930s and 1940s.

Sources:

  • Rand, Peter. China Hands: The Adventures and Ordeals of American Journalists Who Joined Forces with the Great Chinese Revolution. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995.

  • Wikimedia Commons
  • Photo Upper Yangtze River: http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/culture/2016-02/22/content_23589891_9.htm
20 Oct 2019

Roi Ottley’s World War II

by | posted in: WWII, WWII: European Theater | 0

Roi Ottley thought of himself as a Negro. To him, Joe Louis, Paul Robeson, Langston Hughes, as well as the nameless dark-skinned American soldiers he reported on, were Negroes. To us, today, that noun never crosses our minds. If it did, we would shove it out of sight in shame. Ottley and his brethren are African Americans. We use the term proudly, and with self-assurance. We rarely, if ever, examine the term’s problems. Ottley’s observations in Roi Ottley’s World War II (Mark A. Huddle editor) affords us the chance to examine some of our assumptions regarding race and challenge our own complacency.

In July 1944, a month after the invasion of Normandy, Roi Ottley traveled to Europe on assignment for the labor newspaper, PM. Actually, he made clear in his journal/letters that he was given no advance and had none of his expenses paid. He was, in effect, a freelancer. Yet he was also a captain in the Army, commissioned according to regulations so that he could serve as a war correspondent. Officer status provided him many benefits that he would enjoy during his six months abroad. That PM was a “white” paper gave Ottley status, too, especially vis-a-vis his colleagues from the Negro press.

How did Ottley secure a modicum of status at a time when most black Americans hoped mainly for benign neglect? The publication of his book New World A-Coming: Inside Black America the year before surely had a lot to do with it. (In all the writing of Roi Ottley’s WWII, Ottley uses ‘black’ rarely and only as an adjective. He uses ‘Negro’ exclusively as the noun.) Though “a maddeningly uneven work,” according to Huddle, the book was well-received and sold well for attempting “to explain Black America to uncomprehending whites.” [24] New World A-Coming was built on a decade of work and writing experience, mostly confined to New York City: bell hop, soda jerk, railroad porter, social worker, newspaper columnist (theater and sports for Harlem’s Amsterdam News), and supervisor for WPA Federal Writers’ Project. By reading and hanging out with other New York writers and activists, Ottley educated himself on political movements of the day–and there were many.

For his formal education, he had chosen an unlikely setting: St. Bonaventure University, far upstate in Olean, New York. He was among the first black students to attend SBU and received a full scholarship. He competed in track and cross country, wrote for the campus newspaper, read widely, and by all accounts thrived in an environment free from racial prejudice. During these years, he said later, he “forgot he was a Negro.” [11]

Even before college, Ottley’s experience was out of the norm.  His parents were Caribbean immigrants who settled in Harlem at the turn of the century. Hard-working and entrepreneurial, Ottley started as a laborer, saved his wages, took classes, sold insurance, and eventually opened his own business as a real estate broker. By the time Roi (né Vincent) reached adolescence his family were property owners and thoroughly middle class. He counted Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., W.C. Handy, Jr., and Thomas “Fats” Waller as friends. This was the Harlem Renaissance, and Roi Ottley came of age smack in the middle of it.

So it was that Roi Ottley, child of the Harlem Renaissance and West-Indian parents, graduate of a non-segregated university, experienced reporter and author, found himself one of a few Negro war correspondents in Europe, and possibly the only one selling his work to white publications. Ottley resisted the label of Negro correspondent, yet he still focused the bulk of his reporting on the experiences of Negro servicemen. What did it mean to serve in a segregated army while living in an unsegregated country? Ottley quotes one  serviceman saying, “I’m treated so, a man don’t know he’s colored ’til he looks in the mirror.” [96] It was eye-opening stuff for these men who had never “been away from their homes and communities.” [97] And for Ottley, too. He made sure to share these shock, little and large, with every dispatch he sent home for publication.

Eye-opening wasn’t limited to African Americans. In their first day in Liverpool, Ottley reports, “I talked with a white major–from the South–who was amazed that there was no Jim Crow in the England. He said white Southern troops will be very disturbed when they find out. They assume that Jim Crow exists everywhere.” [45] They protested any actions Negroes taking advantage of new rights and freedoms. In Ottley’s eyes these men were “still fighting the Civil War,” only on European soil. [96]

The next day, Ottley chatted with a couple Russian engineers, who “commented on the paradox of Americans fighting for “democracy” and at the same time denying it to their Negro citizens.”[45] They asked how Negroes could fight for such a country. “I tried to explain that the answer to that question was the same as why the Russian peasants loved Russia during the Czarist regime.” [48] Later he expanded on his answer, “For 300 years Negroes have put blood, sweat and tears into the building of the Nation, so they have the love the one has for a personal possession.” [177]

Over and over, Ottley encountered Europeans who expressed both bewilderment and revulsion at American race prejudice. Ottley’s reaction to their reaction was complicated. On the one hand, it was gratifying to learn that the worst abuses of American racism was not universal. On the other hand, he occasionally took offence at their misunderstandings. Some Europeans he encountered believed American Negroes were still slaves and couldn’t even walk on the same sidewalks with whites. To his surprise and bewilderment, Ottley often found himself defending the state of Negro advancement in America. “I’ve been put in the unenviable position of explaining the subtleties of Jim Crow,” he wrote. [111]

Clearly the Europeans were ahead of their American cousins on the sticky issue of race. Or were they?

Ottley observes that the British were not used to seeing large groups of Negroes and so took them as a novelty. The man and woman of the countryside had no preconceptions and were “naturally hospitable” [159] (even if some English children look behind Negroes to see their tails!). Ottley wants to convince us what British racial prejudice that exists is mostly “confined to colonial and military official.” [97] This reader, for one, is not convinced. The distinction between social classes and their views seems a bit too pat, to politically convenient.

Discussing the race issue in France, Ottley is all over the map…in three sentences! “For the average Frenchman is not anti-Negro [he begins, modestly]. Moreover, Negroes are very popular with the French people [he continues more boldly]. Actually, though, Negroes in Paris complain about the lack of sincerity of the Frenchman in racial matters [he ends, contradicting with a hint of evidence, what he merely asserted before].” [122] We are left to make our own determination about where exactly the French reside in their racial consciousness.

Or, perhaps, the enterprise is beside the point. What matters is not that the French are more enlightened than Americans, with their three hundred year history of human bondage, that the French reside outside the strictures of human nature, that a single, simple sentence can describe the complex attitudes of forty million people. What matters is that French history and, thus, French culture is not American history or culture. Conversely, American culture is not universal. The statement seems too banal to be stated, but the particular evidence for it that Ottley provides is crucial.

In every dispatch he sends, Ottley is telling his (mostly white) American readers, Things are different over here. American assumptions about race don’t apply here, or elsewhere. Our thinking need not be limited to our own narrow preconceptions. A black American soldier walking down a lane with a white Englishwoman; a Frenchman kissing a black man, according to custom, on both cheeks; Negro and white soldiers, on the transports to Normandy, sleeping on the deck shoulder to shoulder, Jim Crow-be-damned. These are the images that caught Ottley’s attention and which he shared eagerly with his readers.

There are other images, too, that remind us Europe was far from a racial paradise.  Lest we forget it was Europe that was at war, total war, for the second time in a generation. Genocide of a scale unknown in history was in full swing. Ottley tells us of the French official expressing his love for Negroes while decrying, almost in the same breath, the alleged evils of Jews. Ottley introduces us to Baroness de Haviland, who “seems to be quite a gal,” but, during the four years her husband has been fighting to defeat Hitler, she has been “going with a big bruising Negro wrestler,” and, at the same time, is “violently anti-Semitic and agree[s] with Hitler’s treatment of the Jews.” [132] If Europe was an exception, it also proved the rule of race hatred and discrimination all-too common to humanity.

Today, with France’s ban on facial veils, anti-immigration protests in Brussels, and the rise of far-right political parties across the EU, we Americans are aware that Europe has its own racial history and racial troubles. On the other hand, despite the wide availability of international news, we still tend to be insular in our views. Our understanding (such as it is) of race is so strongly influenced by our own history of slavery that we have difficulty seeing it through other lenses. We American whites might feel inoculated from past racism when using the term “African American.” Yet we become flummoxed when talking about African-descended individuals (or groups) of more complex, or merely different, lineages. Is the Jamaican Canadian race walker also an African American when he competes in a historic foot race across the continental United States? Is the first African American president African American in the same way Toni Morrison is (was)? Is the star soccer player’s African ancestry assumed or ignored when he is called, simply, Brazilian? Does any of this matter?

The issue is emphatically not merely one of nomenclature, though the terms and concepts we use can limit our understanding as much as they can enlighten. And our focus on American history can impede our apprehension of other possibilities. More to the point, awareness other cultures can help us more fully understand our own. (Banality again.) In 1944, as the world was clasped in a struggle to the death, as it were, Roi Ottley was looking ahead to the new world order that would follow what he expected would be an Allied victory. Would Negro soldiers (and their families and kin) enjoy the freedom that they had fought to help preserve–and which they had tasted in bite-sized morsels while behind the lines in England, France, and Italy? Ottley reported what he saw with an eye for upsetting his compatriots’ preconceptions, with the purpose of opening up possibilities and effecting change.

But he wasn’t concerned with his homeland only. As the Belgians celebrated the liberation of their country in mid-September 1944, and made plans for rebuilding their society, Ottley perceived the elephant-sized irony in the room. “But no one apparently is talking about a new deal for the Congo–Belgium’s rich colony and brightest jewel in King Leopold’s crown.” [155] The world, not just America, must change.

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22 Sep 2019

Ernst Udet, Meet Erich Landt

by | posted in: WWII, WWII: European Theater | 0

Erik Larson describes Martha Dodd’s, Sowing the Wind as the tale of “a good-hearted World War I flying ace” being “seduced and degraded” by Nazi brutality. [In the Garden of Beasts 359] Her tale is redolent of W. H. Auden and Igor Stravinsky’s A Rake’s Progress. No, the anti-hero does not sell his soul in the first act to a Shadow figure and spend the rest of the opera in slow descent. In Dodd’s parable, both the soul-selling and the descent (or degradation) take the entire novel to transpire. The final reckoning for Dodd’s Tom Rakewell character is more chilling than even a confinement to Bedlam.

That Tom Rakewell is Erich Landt, heavily based on the actual German aviator, Ernst Udet. Notice the phonetic and graphic similarities between the two names. Clearly, Dodd felt no need to obscure the historical source of her character whom Larson says was one of her “past lovers.” [Ibid] If anything, she was almost at pains to underscore it. The similarities with which she wrote about these two characters, actual and fictional, are striking.

Physically, Dodd described Udet as a “delicate little pudgy penguin of a man with…bright birdlike eyes,” [Through Embassy Eyes 266], while Landt “looked like a little penguin.” [Sowing the Wind 249] Of Udet’s character, Martha wrote, “He lived by and on thrills–he was an adventurer at heart, romantic, reckless, nerveless, honest, with a sense of humor unmatched by any German I have met on personal, informal terms.” [EE 261] Indeed, he was “one of the most interesting men” she met while in Germany. Others have noted Udet’s fast lifestyle and party-boy image. As for Landt, he was “a decent fellow,” according to a secondary character, and “a magnificent flyer, with incredible courage. He drinks like a fish and loves the air as he would a woman. He even has a sense of humor and he has all sorts of friends. That combination makes him quite a man!” [SW 7]

In her memoir, Dodd never says she dated Udet, but she makes clear that they were more than acquaintances when she starts sentences with, “I would sit by the hour watching him….” Elsewhere: “It was a miracle to watch how [Udet] maneuvered his car and one felt intuitively that he could handle any kind of machinery with the same confidence and brilliance of performance. He handled it lovingly and with joy….” [EE 262] And so she described her Landt, too, driving “with furious speed to the hangar. As always the handling of a machine, even a car, quieted his nerves.” [SW 242]

But flying was Udet’s–and Landt’s–true love. Dodd had the privilege of flying with the ace more than once. She described one such occasion at some length in her memoir. “We must have arisen very high because the air was icy and hard to breathe.  He sounded to me a above the roar of the engine and raised both his arms high into the air.  At first I didn’t know what had happened but I soon caught the laughing twitch of his eyes as he indicated to me that I should take the controls. I felt a very calm and not at all excited–and I had been up at this time only once before–and raised my hands too.” [EE 264] She gives her fictional character a similar experience, though related in a more concise passage: “Lina [her Dodd character] had been up with him before but never on such a mad flight in such windy weather. Today he looked bewitched at the control of his plane, his face brilliant and intense, his eyes strangely lighted.” [SW 97]

In life, Ernst Udet brought down sixty-two Allied planes during the war. He barnstormed, performing aerial acrobatics and surviving crashes for at least a dozen years between the wars. Dodd writes in her memoir: “It seemed that his life was charmed in his friends and confreres spoke almost mystically of ‘Udet’s luck.'” [EE 265] In Sowing the Wind, Landt has two brushes with death in his airplane. After the first, the plane’s designer exclaims, “I’ve never seen a man control his plane [after losing a wing] so superbly. By God! You must have a charmed life!” [SW 30] Following the second, a friend tells him, “You’ll kill yourself one of these days.” To which Landt responds, “And what better death could there be for me?” [SW 111]

Ernst Udet was a reluctant Nazi party member. It was a cost of the opportunity to develop planes for the Luftwaffe. Dodd probably did not understand the technical side of flight, but she recalled Udet “once said airplanes should have no propellers” and that he “watched fascinated and envious the flight of a feather or a bird through the air.” [EE 266] In her novel, then, she has Landt proclaim, “Propellers are wrong. They’re against the very theory of flight. A plane flies in spite of them, not because of them….” [SW 219] Was Landt/Udet anticipating the development of jet propulsion? Dodd uses the word “glider” repeatedly, which may describe Udet’s intentions, or perhaps not.

By many accounts, Udet could hold his liquor. In her memoir, Dodd remarks that alcohol, even large amounts, hardly affected Udet’s marksmanship: “His rifle and pistol shooting had an incredible degree of accuracy and even when he had drunk far too many drinks the accuracy was not even slightly impaired.” [EE 263] She alludes to the same quality in Landt in her novel, to dramatic effect: “Though he had drunk more than a pint of whiskey he seemed, as usual, completely sober. He aimed carefully, steadily at the paper target. The report sounded abnormally loud in the stillness of the early dawn. When he stared at the target he saw that his aim was gone.” [SW 206] Why the miss? Landt had just been “approached” by the Gestapo: nerves, not alcohol, affected his aim.

The historical Udet was a patriotic German but not a fervent nationalist. When he did join the party, according to Dodd, “he was forced to accept a fanatic nationalism which could never accord with his international spirit. He often said that the air knew no boundaries, had no limited domain.  He admired and respected many people of enemy countries, he was at home in any society in any nation.  Though he was a deeply patriotic man, he had a thirst for travel in other countries.” [Embassy Eyes 265] He spent most of the interwar years barnstorming in the United States.

Thus, Dodd begins her novel with her Udet character, Landt, making his long-awaited return to Germany. All the principal characters, assembled in a restaurant/bar, eagerly asking him of his plans. The chapter closes with a third-person internal monologue on his friendships, in which Landt demonstrates his open-mindedness. “One was the Frenchman, Jacques Charlot…another was Baron Wolfgang von Richter who used to be in his squadron, and the third, Fritz Wassermann, the good-natured, easy-going Jew…. He was proud of his loyal friendships for such divergent men. He wanted to include Sorokin [of Russia] among them.” (His communist loyalties tested Landt’s liberality.) [SW 11]

While Udet was internationalist in his outlook, he was also “a deeply patriotic man.” [EE 265] Dodd recognized this tension and exploited it in her fiction. As soon as we meet him, Landt says to his barroom interlocutors, “What Germany has done recently is horrible, an outrage to the world. However, she may come to her senses. If not…” [SW 9] Over the next chapters, Landt repeatedly resists calls to join the Nazi party, especially those from his zealous brother, Werner.  “There’s a lot of corruption in the party,” he says by way of justification. [SW 87]  Later he tells Sorokin, the Russian communist he would like to call friend, “I’m still disgusted with my government’s policies. You must understand that I’m not a Nazi. …I’ll never be one.” [SW 193] These words, overheard by the Gestapo through their clandestinely-installed bugs, bring serious consequences to the jovial aviator.

Landt is not a partisan but still a patriot. To his lover, Lina, he says, “I love you with all my heart, more than anything in my life, except perhaps Germany….” [emphasis mine, SW 103] And later he tells her, “You’re incapable of understanding how a German feels. I don’t serve the Nazis. Germany is my home, my country, and it will always be that, Nazis or no Nazis.” [SW 194] But Landt, like Udet before him, does eventually join the Party. It is the only way he–they–can fully serve the country they love in the capacity they have trained for: as aviation specialists.

Generaloberst Ernst Udet

When he did join the Party, Udet was eventually promoted to colonel-general. Dodd didn’t bother with nuances of nomenclature and made Landt a straight general. Both were given the perks of party membership. Udet declined them, as a rule. In Dodd’s telling, “The Nazis tried to get him to live more extravagantly but Udet did not change the mode and habits of his life, still lived in a simple flat and enjoyed his hobbies.” [EE 265] Landt, by contrast, grew “fat” on the perks. He resisted only once, when he felt he was being outright bribed. [SW 252]

“Though he never admitted it,” Martha wrote in Through Embassy Eyes, I thought Udet was miserable the last two years in Germany.” [EE 265] She means her last two years in Germany: 1936-1937. According to the historical record, his misery only increased in the two years after she left, 1938-1939, and again in the two years after she wrote those words, 1940-1941. Udet, playboy and thrill-seeker, was not well-suited to a desk job as an administrator. But O’Brien Browne, in an 1999 Aviation History article, described how the “ambitious and scheming” Erhard Milch continually sought to undercut Udet vis-vis Luftwaffe Commander Hermann Göring. Wikipedia reports that “Göring tried to deflect Hitler’s ire by blaming Udet” for the failure of the Battle of Britain. He fared no better the next year during the stalled invasion of the Soviet Union–though he had warned against the action, in the first place. On November 17, 1941, as German troops dug in for a long Russian winter, Ernst Udet put a gun to his head and ended his life. Propaganda minister Goebbels allowed a different story to be published. While testing a new aircraft for the Nazi cause, “Udet’s luck,” it was reported, finally ran out.

The real life Ernst Udet has all the makings of a tragic figure; Martha Dodd’s Erich Landt does not. He is a Tom Rakewell character, on a “rake’s progress,” a steady descent regardless of the actions he takes. His character is alternately pitied and reviled rather than grieved. In the third act, after “a year and a day,” Rakewell’s bill to Shadow comes due. He loses his sanity and ends up in Bedlam. Landt, likewise, has unwittingly sold his soul to the Nazi devil. At book’s end he is left alone–family, friends, lover have all abandoned him–to face alone “the degradation of his life.” [SW 300] Even the Nazis, like Shadow vis-a-vis Tom, withdraw their conditional protection and cast him aside. A frozen post on the Eastern Front becomes his Bedlam.

Landt is a broken man. All that is left him, at book’s end, is to break other men. Captured Soviet soldier Pyotr Andreyev is presented to Landt but refuses to talk. Landt’s ire rises to an ever higher pitch with Andreyev’s every stalwart refusal to answer his questions. Three times, Landt sends Andreyev out for torture. Each time, he returns more bruised and bloodied than before, but each time he refuses to break. His stalwart intransigence turns Landt “almost insane with rage.” [SW 310] Finally, the man whom we first met being given a hero’s welcome, the man who guarded his independence, nurtured an internationalist spirit, and treasured the freedom of flight, that man, Erich Landt, became the monster he had once so abhorred. He became, not just in name but in brutal spirit, a Nazi.

At the close of the penultimate chapter, Landt declared to his concubine, Käthe, “I don’t kill for killing’s sake. And I never intend to.” [SW 299] Before the end of the page he has brutally beaten her. Before the end of the book, twelve pages later, he has murdered a man merely to satisfy his rage. Thus was Dodd’s stark statement on the fatal attractions and consequences of Nazi party membership on the individual German.

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