My father brought this aerial photograph back from France in 1919. I had seen it when I was a boy, but only recently had it been passed along to me. Since its story was not passed along, this is my reconstruction. As I remember, Dad said he found it in a downed German aircraft. The pilot was dead, but his body had not yet been removed. My father assumed the pilot had been using it to navigate the battlefield. The question is: Where is this?
Monday, November 18, 2024
The aerial photograph from WWI
Friday, November 15, 2024
Butte Vauquois
A number of my posts mention Butte Vauquois. It was a high hill in the Meuse-Argonne region. Before the war, the village of Vauquois was on top of the hill. But after the war started, the Germans invaded France, and half the hill was occupied by the German Army and half by the French. Villagers obviously evacuated, so that today, the village is at the bottom of the hill.
Each side tunneled into the hill to get under the other side's trenches, planting explosives to blow up the trenches and open a gap in the line. This deadly nonsense continued to the point where one side would listen for the other side's tunneling and then tunnel under the tunnels.
By the time my father's machine-gun crew began firing at the butte on September 26, 1918, the Germans had taken possession of the entire hill. The emplacements on the hill could hold a large German force, but the garrison was greatly reduced by the time of the attack. The defenders surrendered to the Americans rather quickly.
Among the things my father brought back and passed down to me is an aerial photograph of Butte Vauquois as it looked in 1918. I don't know how my father acquired this photograph. You can see the big craters left by tunneling explosions. Trenches are also visible to the left and right of the craters. I believe that this was taken from an airplane west of the hill, so east is at the top of the image.
Sunday, November 11, 2018
Why It Is Still Armistice Day to Me
Roman road to Charpentry today |
Cemetery at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where my father is buried. The 35th Division is headquartered at the fort. |
Sunday, October 14, 2018
Reflections
wanted to see France through my father’s eyes. I wanted to do what he had wanted to do but had
not been able: to return to Cheppy.
lazy-rolling hills, waves on a gentle ocean, bounded by tree-filled ravines. When I was there, the
harvest was over and the fields plowed. The bare soil was black, gray, brown, and light tan. It is like
central Kansas where my father grew up but not as flat nor as treeless. There are notable differences.
Most are man-made. The roads in all of rural Kansas are laid out in mile-square grids, called
“sections,” as stipulated when the state was settled in the latter part of the 19th century. The roads in
France display no such mathematical precision but instead wind across the countryside along
seemingly natural footpaths. The only long, straight road I traveled was the old Roman road between
Varennes and Charpentry. It is tree-lined and arrow-straight on a ridge between the two villages.
Farm on the road to Cheppy |
remote parts of Kansas have, to this day, rusted Burma Shave signs and sometimes in the distance the
Golden Arches of a MacDonald’s. The farms in Kansas are usually large, one-crop affairs whereas
those in France are smaller and grain shares the land with pasture for the ubiquitous “les vaches,” the
typically-white, dairy cows. Rural Kansas looks like the agricultural factory it is whereas rural France is
pastoral in every sense of that word.
Les vaches |
Restaurant at inn near Cheppy |
Varennes |
Vauquois |
Kansas standards. That is not true today. Except for the old buildings and bucolic feel, rural France is
as up-to-date as Kansas City, indeed more so. It is a case in point that modernization doesn’t need to
come at the cost of charm.
of explosions. It hears whistling and exploding shells, the rattle of machine guns, and the cries of
thousands of wounded and dying men. It sees destroyed farm houses and burning fields pock-marked
with shell craters. And it feels almost uncontrollable fear. It is not a place to which I would necessarily
want to return, yet my father did.
I was visiting a World War I area in the Meuse-Argonne region and a World War II area at Normandy.
But war stalked me on the whole trip. I went to Reims expecting to see a beautiful cathedral, but the
first thing I noticed upon getting there were obvious shell holes in the exterior walls. I thought the
arms missing from the statues were caused by time and weather, but they were shot off. The Roman
forum seemed peaceful enough but the “Field of Mars” obviously wan’t. In Trier, the ominous black
gate is a vestige of a 6 km wall the Romans built to protect the city from marauding Germans. In
Verdun, I wanted to visit the same WWI fortifications my father did, and so when I saw a huge wall in
the city, I assumed that was the one my father visited. However, men there told me the in-town
fortifications dated from the 17th or 18th century. The 20th century ones were several miles out of
town. The dramatic Rodin victory statue in Verdun commemorates Parisian resistance to the
German invasion in 1870. Throughout Europe, statues, even in and around churches, such as Joan
of Arc, have weapons in their hands. Richard-the-Lion-Hearted outside Parliament in London carries
a sword. While tourists gawk at the various monuments in Paris, the fact is a great many of them
commemorate victory in war or, like the Champs Elysees, the Elysian fields of dead. The Bayeux
tapestry celebrates the Normans conquest of England. True enough Washington D.C. has war
memorials, and I've written about them, but I know of no statue in the city of a military leader with
weapon in hand. The major memorials, such as the Washington Monument and the Lincoln,
Jefferson, and MLK Memorials, are for political not military accomplishments. Europe today is
peaceable, but its history wasn’t.
Rodin in Verdun |
Richard the Lion-Hearted outside Parliament |
was awakened to what he and the WWI generation of Americans stood for. Decency, honor,
principle, idealism, and pragmatism. Visiting Normandy brought home to me that this was repeated
in WWII. Tom Brokaw entitled his book on WWII “The Greatest Generation.” They were Ronald
Reagan’s “Boys of Point du Hoc,” the men who selflessly fought and died to free Europe from the
evils of Nazism.
done. They said the United States had saved them when France was defeated then, but now they
stand alone. The people of Cheppy remembered what the United States did for them in both wars
just like the women from Caen remembered June 6, 1944, when the Allies came to Normandy. To an
American visiting Europe, the slogan Make America Great Again rings hollow. America was made
great by our fathers and mothers, grandfathers and grandmothers, and by their parents, not by
retreating from the world or by asking for a quid pro quo for each element of our foreign policy, but
rather by the realization that decency, honor, principles, idealism, and pragmatism are what made
America great. It is why this country is respected around the world. Returning to Cheppy made me
see how far the current administration strays from what really made America great.
from home before joining the army and seeing the world. The world would never be the same.
I learned the same lesson in Cheppy.
Saturday, October 13, 2018
Cemeteries and memorials
American Argonne Cemetery |
sons of France in WWI under the Arch de Triumphe.
Second Division Monument |
Assyrian sphinx in the British Museum |
Friday, October 12, 2018
Return From Cheppy
Dad's ship home |
Dad at Yorktown |
Me at Yorktown |
Thursday, October 11, 2018
My father's equipment
Hotchkiss Machine gun in museum in Reims, France |
Dad's diary |
Inside of German kitchen |
1916 electrical wiring |
Wednesday, October 10, 2018
The 35th Division's collapse
The 300 holding the line |
After the war, a memorial to the Meuse-Argonne campaign was erected on the top of Montfaucon, a hill an estimated ten miles north of where the campaign started on September 26. The circular staircase inside the memorial appears in an earlier post. A plaque in the building has the map below of the Meuse-Argonne campaign. At the bottom of the map, you can see where the 35th stopped and the 1st took over.
When relieved on the morning of October 1, only 4,700 men of the 28,000 in the 35th Division answered muster. A picture in the Division's history book of the demoralized troops that morning is captioned, "Surely you remember that day."
Surely you remember that day |
Memorial on Montfaucon |
Meuse-Argonne campaign |
From Balny looked east toward Charpentry in that depression |
Monday, October 8, 2018
National Portrait Galleries
Richard III |
Henry VIII |
Elizabeth I |
Diallo was a Fulani Muslim who was brought as a slave to Maryland in 1731. I write about him in my book From Slave Ship to Harvard. Indeed, I have a black and white image of him in the book. When I wrote the book in 2012, his portrait was at the NPG but owned by the Qatar Museum, which had recently purchased it but agreed to leave it with the NPG in England. I know this because I had to obtain the image and permission from the Qatar Museum. After arriving as a slave in Maryland at age 16, Diallo was put to work on a tobacco plantation on the Eastern Shore. Literate and terribly unhappy, he did a surprising thing. He wrote a letter to his father in Africa, saying essentially "get me out of here." Of course, the letter didn't reach his father, but men in England read it and arranged for his passage to London where he was feted and painted by William Hoare, a student of the great portrait painter Thomas Gainsborough.
As I was looking at Diallo's portrait, two different school groups came by, one composed mainly of descendants from India or Pakistan and the other of descendants from Africa. I am not shy about sharing stories from my book, so I gave each a short talk on African Muslims in America, showing a photo of Peale’s portrait of Yarrow on my cell phone. Both groups as well as their teachers seemed quite appreciative. One of the people with me said, “That is one of the few faces in the National Portrait Gallery that is the same color as theirs,” as you can see from the photograph below.
This brings me to the difference between the NPG in London and the NPG in Washington DC with respect to racial sensitivity. At the Washington gallery, former curator Asma Naeem arranged to borrow the James Alexander Simpson portrait of Yarrow from the Georgetown Library and placed it prominently among those of Yarrow’s white contemporaries to make the point that white males weren't the only founders of the country. Diallo isn't given such treatment in England.
Jim and Diallo |
Diallo in Room 11 |
Impromptu lecture |
Saturday, October 6, 2018
Timelines
The town of Greenwich and the Old Royal Naval College from the Observatory |
Friday, October 5, 2018
Video of my return to Cheppy
Returning to Cheppy on September 26
Sunday, September 30, 2018
miles. Afternoon found us on the Champs Elysees, and we decided to stop for coffee. By
random chance, we picked the chic Fourquet, where two glasses of champagne, two patisseries,
and a bottle of mineral water ran to 64 Euros. Seated next to us was a distinguished man--imagine Charles De Gaulle, wonderfully dressed in a tweedy sports coat, red sweater, starched
white shirt, and red, striped tie. I asked him what the thin red thread on this lapel signified. It
was the Legion of Honor, awarded since the time of Napoleon to military and civil service for
distinguished service. In his case it was his years as ambassador to a former French colony in
Africa. Ever so slowly, I elicited his story. He lives near Metz in eastern France and is in Paris
visiting his adult children. Since retiring, he stays busy overseeing the family’s castle and a
thousand acres of land. He doesn’t live in the castle because, although an historic site, it’s run
down with a leaking roof. During WWII, it was a headquarters for both German and American
armies, at different times of course. There was much more to his story, but those parts were too
personal for telling on the Internet. We tarried, talking to him, before setting off for another two
hours of walking and dinner.
Saturday, September 29, 2018
I have skipped a day, giving both the reader and myself a rest. I thought we had finished with war with the visit to the Normandy beaches, but that proved not to be the case because we went to Bayeux Thursday morning to see the tapestry. It is not truly a tapestry, I learned, but rather an embroidered cloth scroll. Frankly that was a disappointment because I was expecting to see a wall covered with a beautiful wool tapestry. It tells the story of the Norman conquest of England in pictures over perhaps a hundred feet or more of a two-foot high scroll protected by glass. Viewing it is an exasperating experience for someone like me who wants to tour at my own pace. The visitor is handed a cell phone-size listening device which narrates the story at a fixed pace, designed to keep the visitor moving along the scroll. But we were behind a large group of grade school students who moved at a slower pace, so the narrative that I listened to generally talked about a section of the scroll that was two or three feet ahead of where I was. So about all I got out of it was that because Harold broke his oath to William (spelled Willelm on the scroll), William conquered England. Adding to my frustration was the fact that the visitor does not see the explanatory exhibits until after he sees the scroll.
From Bayeux, we drove to Paris where I had the dubious pleasure of driving through Paris traffic. Remembering the scene from European family vacation, I successfully avoided getting stuck in the traffic circles before getting to the hotel near the Place de Concorde and then to the rental car drop-off which oddly did not have a sign and which required the driver to take the car to a parking lot nearby.
Friday, I gave Yarrow book talks at two university preparatory schools. Although these were explained to me, I am not sure I am correctly explaining the system, but my understanding is that these students are in a two-year program designed to prepare them for testing and admission to the elite universities. No matter, I gave my talks in English. The students were attentive and asked great questions at the end. Getting questions required some prodding on my part since, I was warned, French students tend to be shy about doing that. But once the ice was broken, the questions flowed. These talks were sponsored and arranged by the U.S. embassy in French as part of long-established State Department programs to provide cultural programs in foreign countries. I may have learned as much about French culture as the students learned from me about Yarrow Mamout’s experiences in America. Traveling to and from the two schools by taxi also gave me a chance to see most of Paris, obviating the need to do that today. Of course, it was an “oh there is the Eiffel Tower” experience. Still, it means the next two days can be spent exploring the sites we want to see.