The Greatest War Stories Never Told
Page 11
Charles “Lucky” Luciano.
Luciano was serving a thirty-year jail term, but he agreed to cooperate. He “encouraged” his gangland associates to work with the navy. Mob capos passed the word to hundreds of dockworkers and fishermen that they should report any suspicious activity . . . or else. When the U.S. was getting ready to invade Sicily, Luciano put them in touch with people who had connections to the Sicilian underworld.
After the war, the navy tried to cover up its wartime marriage to the mob. All records were destroyed, and the navy officially denied that they had gotten much in the way of substantial help from Luciano. To this day it is unclear exactly how useful he was.
But consider this: despite a huge public outcry, Luciano was released from prison and deported to Sicily less than six months after the war was over, though he was years away from completing his sentence. A reward, perhaps, to a man whose contribution the government could never afford to officially recognize.
“THE GREATER PART OF THE INTELLIGENCE DEVELOPED IN THE SICILIAN CAMPAIGN WAS . . . FROM THE CHARLIE ‘LUCKY’ CONTACT.”
— LIEUTENANT COMMANDER CHARLES HAFFENDEN, NAVAL INTELLIGENCE, AFTER THE WAR (HE WAS LATER DISCIPLINED BY THE NAVY FOR MAKING THOSE COMMENTS)
Late in life, Luciano claimed that he had ordered his men to set the fire that sunk the Normandie, as a way of shaking down the navy. But the elderly Luciano was famous for making wildly exaggerated claims about his earlier days, and a navy investigation showed no evidence of sabotage.
Luciano volunteered to parachute into Sicily in order to gather information prior to the Allied invasion. The navy turned him down.
A parade of big-name mobsters got into the act. Meyer Lansky (seen here), Bugsy Siegel, and Frank Costello were all involved in gathering information for the navy. Lansky in particular hated Hitler for his actions against European Jews.
1942
THE YOUNGEST HERO
A boy determined to do a man’s job.
In August of 1942, Calvin Graham walked into a recruiting station in Fort Worth, Texas. He was shipped out to the Pacific, where he joined the crew of the USS South Dakota as a gunner.
It wasn’t long before Graham found himself in harm’s way. First came the Battle of Santa Cruz in October. Two weeks later it was the Battle of Guadalcanal, in which the battleship took forty-seven hits in a desperate night action. Graham was knocked down a stairway by an explosion that peppered his jaw with shrapnel. Though seriously wounded, he worked through the night, fighting fires and pulling fellow crewmen to safety.
And how did the navy reward Calvin Graham’s heroism in battle? They shipped him stateside, put him in the brig for three months, stripped him of his veteran’s benefits, and gave him a dishonorable discharge. It seems that after the battle, Graham carelessly let slip that he had lied on his enlistment papers. Specifically, he had lied about his age.
Calvin Graham was twelve years old.
He is believed to be the youngest of the thousands of under-age servicemen who fought for the United States in World War II.
The navy didn’t quite know what to do with Graham. Eventually his sister got him sprung by threatening to go to the papers. Two days after his thirteenth birthday, he rejoined his Fort Worth classmates in the seventh grade—undoubtedly the only veteran in
Graham’s gunnery officer on the South Dakota (and the man to whom he admitted his true age) was Sargent Shriver, who later married JFK’s sister, Eunice Kennedy, headed the Peace Corps, and ran for president in 1976.
Calvin Graham joined the navy to flee a broken home and an abusive stepfather. He said the recruiting officer knew he was underage but had no idea that he was only twelve. A navy dentist who noticed his twelve-year molars weren’t in tried to have him discharged, but Graham managed to slip his file into the “approved” pile when the dentist wasn’t looking.
Graham never stopped fighting to have his navy service recognized. In 1978, President Jimmy Carter ordered the navy to grant him an honorable discharge. And in 1994, the navy finally agreed to give him a Purple Heart for his injuries suffered off Guadalcanal. Graham didn’t live to see it, having died two years before.
1943
THE WRIGHT STUFF
A wartime shortage that led to something silly.
During World War II, Japanese armies in the Far East cut off America’s access to its rubber supply. The country faced a shortage so severe that the government implemented gasoline rationing, even though there was plenty of gas, in order to conserve the rubber used in car tires.
Scientists got busy searching for a synthetic rubber substitute. At General Electric, engineer James Wright tried to find a way to make a rubber-like substance out of silicone. One day in 1943 he poured boric acid into a test tube filled with silicone oil, hoping they would combine to make hard rubber. Instead, the mixture turned into a soft, gooey putty. Pulling some out of the test tube, he dropped it on the table.
It bounced.
GE sent samples of the new substance to scientists around the world to see if anyone could figure out a use for the stuff. Nobody could, although they certainly enjoyed playing with it. The new substance was put on the shelf as a failure.
In 1950, a marketing consultant in Connecticut named Peter Hodgson got his hands on some of the stuff from a chemist friend and saw a gold mine in it. He knew right away that while scientists might regard it as useless, kids would love it. He packed the putty into plastic eggs and gave it a name we all know today:
Silly Putty.
More than 300 million eggs containing 4,500 tons of silly putty have been sold since 1950. On its fiftieth birthday, in 2000, Silly Putty was enshrined in the Smithsonian Institution, right next to the hula-hoop.
Numerous newspapers, magazines, and websites claim that the astronauts of Apollo 8 took Silly Putty to the moon, and used it to alleviate boredom and affix tools to the walls of the spacecraft. Sad to say, that’s an urban myth. NASA, the makers of Silly Putty, and Apollo 8 astronaut Jim Lovell all say it’s not true.
1943
PIGEONS IN A PELICAN
The weapons system controlled by a birdbrain.
During World War II, the U.S. Navy began work on a rocket-propelled guided missile, but prototypes of the so-called “Pelican” missile were not performing up to expectations. Then stepped forward a scientist who had an unusual idea for how to steer the missile to its target.
A pigeon would control the guidance system.
Famed behaviorist B. F. Skinner believed he could use positive reinforcement to train the pigeons to guide missiles to the target—although the outcome might not be too positive for the bird. He convinced the Pentagon to provide funding for the idea.
Thus began “Project Pigeon.”
A lens and mirror system projected an image of the distant target on a screen directly in front of the pigeon. The bird was trained to peck at the target, activating a mechanism that would turn the missile in that direction.
As outlandish as that might sound, Skinner and his team succeeded in training the pigeons and building a prototype homing device. They were able to demonstrate that it was both highly effective and easy to manufacture. But in the end, the pigeons never got off the ground. Neither scientists nor generals were able to take the project seriously enough to actually put the homing device in a missile and test it.
And so it was that a missile with a birdbrain was shot down for good.
“HELL, THAT’S BETTER THAN RADAR.”
— MIT EXPERT, REVIEWING PIGEON GUIDANCE TEST RESULTS
Skinner never lost enthusiasm for Project Pigeon. Fifteen years after the war, he was still defending it, suggesting that pigeons could guide a rocket to the moon.
The “Pelican” was more a radio-controlled rocket plane than it was a guided missile. It never saw action, but its development led to the “Bat” guided missile (no bats were involved) which was used to sink several Japanese ships in the closing days of the war.
The propotype of
the missile nose cone held three pigeons—redundant guidance systems, just like NASA would later use in the space program.
1943
ONE-SIDED BATTLE
The consequences of fighting blind.
In 1942, the Japanese invaded and occupied the Aleutian islands of Attu and Kiska. It was the first time American soil had been occupied by an enemy since the War of 1812, and the United States was determined to throw them out.
The Americans retook the island of Attu in May of 1943, suffering heavy casualties. Then, in August, came the invasion of Kiska.
A joint American-Canadian force of thirty-five thousand hit the beaches, backed up by a massive naval fleet. The initial landings were unopposed, but the soldiers knew from experience that the Japanese would want to lure them in before answering their fire. The battle soon turned into a nightmare. Heavy gunfire could be heard, but thick fog made it impossible to see the enemy. Reports of casualties started filtering in, and wounded men were taken to the rear. Soldiers moved slowly forward, clambering up tough mountain ridges, firing as they went.
After two days of heavy fighting, with thirty-two soldiers dead and more than fifty wounded, the Allies made a stunning discovery:
There was no enemy.
The Japanese, it turned out, had staged a cunning evacuation three weeks before, pulling six thousand men off the island without American blockaders even having a clue. The battle deaths were all from friendly fire. Americans and Canadians had fought with great bravery. But, as it turned out, they were shooting at each other.
“SURPRISE WAS ACHIEVED, BUT IT WAS NOT THE JAPANESE WHO WERE SURPRISED.”
— ARMY REPORT ON THE BATTLE
The invasion, code-named Cottage, was later referred to by Time magazine as a JANFU: Joint Army Navy Foul-Up.
1943
A COUNRTY OF HEROES
How the citizens of tiny Denmark stood up to Adolf Hitler.
In September of 1943, Adolf Hitler signed an order for Denmark’s Jewish population, as yet largely untouched by the Holocaust, to be deported to the death camps.
Nazi officials planned to begin the roundup on the night of October 1. More than a thousand German police and Gestapo officers came to Denmark to handle the action. Ships and trains were readied to whisk the Jews away.
The response of the citizens of Denmark deserves to be remembered for all time.
The Danish government, tipped off about the roundup, warned Jewish families to go into hiding. Many non-Jewish Danes risked their lives to hide and protect their Jewish neighbors. That led to a spontaneous nationwide effort to smuggle Denmark’s Jews to safety in Sweden—“a conspiracy of decency,” one author has called it. Haphazard at first, the rescue mission soon became an organized effort of the Danish underground. Churches and hospitals were used as gathering points. Universities closed down for a week—and students worked side by side with resistance fighters to get the Jews secretly to the coast.
From there, more than three hundred fishing boats ferried Denmark’s Jews to Sweden, which welcomed them with open arms. More than 90 percent of Denmark’s seven thousand Jews managed to escape the German sweep.
There was no one hero. There was a country of heroes. Which is why Israel’s Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem honors the entire Danish people as “Righteous Among Nations” for risking the wrath of Germany to help their Jewish countrymen in their hour of need.
It is worth noting that Denmark’s Jews might never have been saved but for a German diplomat, George Duckwitz, who tipped off the Danish government to the impending roundup. And many German military officers in Denmark—perhaps seeing which way the war was going—turned a blind eye to what was going on.
The crossing to Sweden was not free—Danish fishermen demanded steep fees for the potentially dangerous passage. But many Danes opened their purses to total strangers so that no family would be unable to cross for lack of funds.
When the Swedish government publicly offered Danish Jews asylum, an official German communiqué referred to the Swedes as “Swine in dinner jackets.”
1944
THE GREATEST HOAX IN HISTORY
To make the invasion of Normandy a success required deception on a grand scale.
In the spring of 1944, Allied commander Dwight Eisenhower gave General George Patton a mighty army to spearhead the invasion of France. The First U.S. Army Group consisted of eleven divisions assembled near the White Cliffs of Dover, readying to cross the English Channel at its narrowest point and invade France at Pas-de-Calais.
But it wasn’t a real army—it was a giant con job.
The Allies wanted to convince Hitler that the planned invasion was just a diversion, that the real invasion was going to come more than one hundred miles away, near Cherbourg. So began Operation Quicksilver.
Set designers from London’s famous Shepperton Studios were brought in to create the illusion of a massive army where there was none. They created battalions of rubber tanks, and regiments of wooden soldiers. Canvas airplanes were parked on fake runways, harbors filled with dummy landing craft. Radio operators sent huge amounts of bogus traffic, orders to and from units that didn’t exist.
A professor of architecture from Britain’s Royal Academy used broken sewage pipes and rusty old oil tanks to create a fake refinery. Movie studio wind machines blew clouds of dust over the scene, making it look as if construction was proceeding at a furious rate.
The deceptions fooled Hitler completely. Even after the Allies stormed ashore in Normandy on June 6, the Germans held their Panzer divisions in reserve, waiting for a phantom invasion from a ghost army that was purely the product of Allied imagination. That gave the Allies the time they needed to secure the beachhead and make possible the triumph of D-Day.
General Patton was discouraged not to be leading the real invasion, but he warmed to his role as commander of a nonexistent army, racing around the south of England making fighting speeches and maintaining a high profile. “I’m a natural-born ham,” he said.
The Americans had another ghost army, the Twenty-third Headquarters Special Troops, which practiced similar deceptions throughout the war. Artists and designers were in great demand to create the illusions needed to fool the enemy. One soldier who served in the unit was a yet unknown fashion designer named Bill Blass.
Numerous other ruses were also employed to mislead the Germans. Actor M. E. Clifton-James, seen here, impersonated British general Bernard Montgomery, and traveled to Gibraltar and Algiers shortly before D-Day to convince Germans that something was cooking there.
1944
IS PARIS BURNING?
Paris on the eve of destruction . . . and the only man who can save the city has orders to destroy it.
Allied armies were rolling through France in August of 1944, but Adolf Hitler was determined they would never get to Paris. He handpicked General Dietrich von Choltitz to take command of the city. Von Choltitz was a hero of the Russian front, but he had never had an assignment like this one. “I received orders,” he said, “to turn Paris into a mass of ruins and to fight and die amidst its wreckage.”
Von Choltitz prepared to do his duty. He ordered explosives planted in landmarks such as Notre-Dame Cathedral and Les Invalides. He told his superiors that he was ready to blow up the Arc de Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower.
Hitler had chosen von Choltitz because of his unswerving loyalty. But the monocled general was troubled by his orders. He couldn’t bear to go down in history as the man who destroyed Paris.
So he made a decision that could have earned him an execution. As pressure grew on him to begin destruction of the city, he secretly agreed to a truce with the Resistance, and got a message to the Allies begging them to invade . . . but quickly. They needed to enter Paris within forty-eight hours; otherwise, he would be forced to carry out his orders.
The Allies had been planning to bypass Paris, but when General Omar Bradley got the message, he acted fast. “Have the French Division hurry the hell in there,” he
ordered.
In his Berlin bunker, Hitler screamed: “Is Paris burning?” But thanks to von Choltitz . . . the City of Light was saved.
Von Choltitz surrendered the city after a brief fight, forgoing the destructive house-to-house battle that Hitler had ordered. The German High Command considered von Choltitz a traitor, and he was ostracized by fellow German veterans after the war.
Though Hitler’s armies conquered Paris and occupied it for more than fifteen hundred days, the Führer himself spent only a few hours there in June 1940, and never returned.
As he awaited the Allies, von Choltitz feared he would be deprived of his command for disobeying destruction orders. But the German ambassador, Otto Abetz, agreed to help by sending a telegram to Berlin protesting von Choltitz’s “brutality.” That convinced Berlin he was being tough, and bought him the extra few days he needed.
“PARIS MUST NOT FALL INTO THE HANDS OF THE ENEMY, OR IF IT DOES, HE MUST FIND THERE NOTHING BUT A FIELD OF RUINS.”
— HITLER’S ORDERS TO VON CHOLTITZ, AUGUST 23, 1944
1944
PATTON’S PRAYER
Everybody talks about the weather, but one general decided to take action.
In December of 1944, General George Patton’s Third Army found itself bogged down in Belgium. The Germans were only part of the problem. Patton’s army was also hampered by terrible weather: rain, fog, and floods were making advance nearly impossible.