The Greatest War Stories Never Told

by Rick Beyer

  Not content to sit idly by, Patton abruptly summoned one of his officers and told him what he wanted:

  A prayer for good weather.

  The officer he called on was Third Army chaplain James O’Neill. “I’m tired of having to fight mud and floods as well as Germans,” Patton told him. “See if we can’t get God to work on our side.” O’Neill got right to work. The prayer he wrote beseeched the Almighty to “restrain these immoderate rains” and “grant us fair weather for battle.”

  When he brought it back to Patton, the general told him he wanted 250,000 copies printed up. “We’ve got to get every man in the Third Army to pray,” Patton said. The soldiers received the prayer card on December 22, the very day they were supposed to launch a desperate counterattack in the Battle of the Bulge. As if by magic, the rain and fog disappeared. Six days of perfect weather followed, during which the Third Army handed the Germans a crushing defeat.

  Patton called O’Neill into his office. “Chaplain, you’re the most popular man in this headquarters. You sure stand in good with the Lord and the soldiers.” Then he pinned a Bronze Star on O’Neill . . . a medal for a prayer that worked wonders.

  “WE MUST ASK GOD TO STOP THESE RAINS!”

  — GENERAL GEORGE S. PATTON

  This copy of the prayer card was saved by PFC Edward H. Ormsby, who was wounded in the ensuing battle.

  1944

  FU-GO ATTACK

  The intercontinental weapons used to attack America.

  Four months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, sixteen bombers took off from the deck of the aircraft carrier Hornet to conduct a daring bombing raid on Tokyo.

  While the attack did little damage, it was a psychological blow. Eager to strike back, Japanese war planners searched for a way to hit the American mainland. After two years of intensive top-secret preparation, Japan unleashed the world’s first intercontinental weapon on the United States in 1944:

  Bomb-carrying balloons.

  It may sound funny, but it was anything but. Over a period of months, the Japanese launched more than six thousand of the so-called “FuGo” weapons against the United States. The balloons were designed to catch the jet stream for a quick crossing of the Pacific, then drop down on America’s cities, forests, and farmlands. Each one carried four incendiary bombs for starting fires, and a shrapnel bomb for sowing terror.

  An estimated one thousand of the balloons came down in the U.S. Some reached as far as Michigan, but most came down in the Pacific Northwest. One killed six picnickers in Oregon, while another temporarily shut down a plant in Hanford, Washington, that was part of the atomic bomb project.

  The damage was minimal, but the threat was real. The government’s response was to censor all news of the attacks. This “defense of silence” convinced the Japanese High Command that the program was a failure, and they discontinued it before their new weapon of terror could reach its full potential.

  The three hundred–pound payload included navigation instruments, fuse mechanism, and incendiary bombs, three of which can be seen hanging from the bottom ring.

  The spherical balloons were thirty-three feet across. Because of the high winds in the jet stream, the journey across the Pacific took only about four days.

  “WINDSHIP WEAPON”

  — TRANSLATION OF FU-GO, THE NAME GIVEN TO THE BALLOON BOMBS

  Had the Japanese continued the program in the spring and summer of 1945, the balloons would have hit the U.S. at the height of forest-fire season, with a potential for creating chaos in the western states. But the news blackout succeeded in ending the program prematurely.

  1945

  FLAG DAY

  Second time’s the charm.

  AP photographer Joe Rosenthal was having a bad day. Coming ashore on Iwo Jima to cover the fighting there, he slipped on a ladder and fell from the boat into the ocean. Once ashore, he heard about a flag-raising on Mount Suribachi—a great opportunity for a picture—but was frustrated to learn he was probably too late to catch it.

  Still, he joined some soldiers hiking up the mountain. They came under heavy fire. When they were halfway up, soldiers coming down brought Rosenthal the disappointing news that the flag was already up. He thought about heading back, but decided to keep going. Good call.

  At the top, he saw that a flag had already been raised. But he also saw a group of Marines getting ready to raise another flag. It turned out that a Marine colonel had ordered a second flag-raising so that the first flag could be kept for posterity.

  Rosenthal almost missed the shot. He was trying to get his bulky camera set up on a pile of rocks as the flag started going up, and he wasn’t even looking in the viewfinder when he pressed the button. He had no idea if he had snapped a decent picture. When the film was developed, it turned out that frames 9 and 11 were ruined by light leaks.

  But frame 10, the picture snapped that day, turned out bold and beautiful. “Here’s one for all time,” said the photo editor who first saw it. Printed on front pages across the country, it won a Pulitzer Prize and soon became one of the most famous war photographs in history.

  Not bad for a bad day.

  “IT IS A PICTURE OF A MIRACLE. NO MAN WHO SURVIVED THAT BEACH CAN TELL YOU HOW HE DID IT.”

  — JOE ROSENTHAL

  This was the first flag-raising, photographed by Marine Corps staff sergeant Louis Lowery. This flag was carefully preserved, but the second flag, the one in the famous photo, flew for three weeks, until winds chewed it up. No one thought to save it—it was just the replacement flag, after all.

  The six men who raised the flag were Ira Hayes, Frank Sousley, Harlan Block, Michael Strank, John Bradley, and Rene Gagnon. Three of them, Sousley, Block, and Strank, were killed within days.

  The Battle of Iwo Jima claimed the lives of 6,821 American soldiers.

  1945

  SHADES OF GRAY

  A wartime replacement who was an inspiration to millions.

  On Sunday, May 20, 1945, the St. Louis Browns trounced the New York Yankees in both games of a doubleheader. Browns outfielder Pete Gray was the star of the day. In the first game he had three hits, driving in two runs and scoring a third. In the second game he scored the go-ahead run, and made a spectacular catch in the outfield.

  Pretty spectacular for a guy with one arm.

  During World War II, large numbers of baseball players joined the military, so teams had to look for replacements. One of those called up was Pete Gray.

  When Gray was six, he fell off a farm wagon and his right arm got caught in the spokes. It had to be amputated at the elbow. A natural right-hander, Gray learned to throw and bat using only his left hand. His passion for baseball led him to spend untold hours perfecting a way to catch a ball, tuck his glove under his stump, then roll the ball across his chest to his throwing hand in one quick motion.

  Eventually he quit school to pursue a baseball career. He joined the pennant-contending St. Louis team in 1945 after a stellar year in the minors, where he batted .333 and hit 6 home runs. His major league numbers were nowhere near as strong—he played in only 77 games and batted .211. When the year was out, and the regulars returned, he was gone from the majors for good.

  But to many he was a hero. Pete Gray: a man unwilling to let adversity get in the way of a dream.

  Gray was asked how good he might have been if he had never lost his arm. “Who knows?” he said. “Maybe I wouldn’t have done as well. I probably wouldn’t have been as determined.”

  Newspaper reporters referred to Gray as “Wonder Boy.” Some of Gray’s teammates resented him because they thought he was signed as a gimmick, to put fans in the seats.

  1945

  ABOUT FACE

  Imagine saving the life of an ally . . . who winds up becoming your bitterest foe.

  In the 1920s, Ho worked as a busboy at the Parker House Hotel in Boston. By 1954 he had become president of an independent North Vietnam. By the 1960s, the onetime U.S. ally was America’s Public Enemy No. 1.
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  In 1945, an American intelligence team code-named “Deer” parachuted into the jungles of Asia to help a band of guerrillas fighting the Japanese. They found the leader of the guerrillas, Nguyen Ai Quoc, seriously ill from malaria and dysentery. “This man doesn’t have long for this world,” exclaimed the team medic, but he successfully nursed him back to health. The grateful leader agreed to provide intelligence and rescue downed American pilots in return for ammunition and weapons.

  The team suggested that the U.S. continue to support Nguyen after the war, but the recommendation was considered too controversial, and it was ignored. The following year, the guerrilla leader pleaded with President Truman to support his movement to gain independence from the French, but the U.S. government decided they didn’t like his politics.

  Nguyen Ai Quoc was also known by another name: “He Who Enlightens.” In Vietamese: Ho Chi Minh. Sixty thousand Americans died in the Vietnam War, battling a former ally whose life the U.S. once fought to save.

  Ho Chi Minh (third from right) with members of the OSS “Deer” team that saved his life. In the white suit at left is Vo Nguyen Giap, who later became Ho’s military commander and masterminded military efforts against French and U.S. forces.

  1946

  FLOOR IT

  The wartime shortage that turned leftovers into legend.

  In the days following World War II, good lumber was in short supply and usually had a high price attached to it. So when Anthony DiNatale got an order in 1946 for a large wooden floor, to be built at the lowest possible cost, he had to use some imagination. He located some scraps of wood left over from the construction of army barracks. Although it was sturdy hard-wood from Tennessee, all the pieces were short.

  The workmen at DiNatale Flooring in Boston then fitted the scraps together in an alternating pattern, and constructed a series of five-foot-square panels that could be bolted together to form the entire floor.

  In doing so, they constructed what may be the single most famous floor in the world—in the sports world, that is.

  It became known the world over as the famous parquet floor of Boston Garden. The floor on which the Boston Celtics won an unsurpassed sixteen championships. A floor unlike that of any other basketball court on earth, trod by the likes of Bill Russell, Bob Cousy, Larry Bird, and Kevin McHale.

  DiNatale charged the Celtics $11,000 for the now famous floor. After it was replaced by a new parquet floor in 1999, autographed pieces of the original sold for as much as $300,000 each. A few pieces of the old floor were integrated into the new one to keep the memory of the old floor alive.

  Fans and players alike have speculated that the Celtics had a special home advantage on the parquet because they knew where it’s “dead spots” were. But Celtic great Bob Cousy says flatly: “The idea of dead spots is pure, unadulterated crap.”

  The 264 pieces of the floor were fitted together with 988 bolts. The Boston Garden “bull gang” could assemble the floor and lay it down for a game in two and a half hours.

  1961

  BOMBS AWAY!

  A nuclear nightmare that was all too close to coming true.

  Just after midnight, on January 24, 1961, the U.S. Air Force dropped two nuclear bombs on Goldsboro, North Carolina. It was an accident, of course. A fuel leak aboard a Strategic Air Command B-52 Stratofortress caused an explosion that ripped the bombs from the plane and sent them hurtling toward earth. The plane itself crashed shortly thereafter.

  One bomb parachuted to earth with little damage. The other slammed into a farmer’s field. Neither exploded.

  The Defense Department announced at the time that the bombs were not armed and were in no danger of exploding. But later evidence suggested that the truth was far more chilling.

  It was subsequently discovered that the bombs had partially armed themselves on the way down, the force of the fuel-leak explosion having triggered the arming mechanisms—all but one, that is. Detonation required the bombs to go through a sequence of six steps, and these bombs went through all but the last. Only a single switch prevented them from detonating.

  The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute concluded this may have been the closest the world has ever come to an accidental nuclear catastrophe.

  Air force officers trying to find the bombs in the wreckage from the crash told one reporter they were looking for an ejection seat. Portions of one bomb still remain buried in a boggy farm field today. The air force has an easement on the land to prevent anyone from digging deeper than five feet into it.

  The MK 39 bombs dropped on Goldsboro were each more than 250 times as powerful as the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. President Kennedy, who had been in office just four days when this accident occurred, ordered more elaborate arming mechanisms to be installed on nuclear weapons to prevent accidental detonation.

  An atomic bomb accidentally dropped off the coast of Georgia in 1947 is still there, believed to be buried in ten to fifteen feet of mud. The air force says there is no danger of it going off because it doesn’t contain the plutonium capsule needed to detonate it.

  1964

  G.I. JOE

  The story of an American fighting man.

  The president of the Hasbro toy company wanted to make a splash at the 1964 New York Toy Fair. The question was: Which product to go with? It was a choice between a miniature grocery store . . . and a doll for boys.

  Hasbro president Merrill Hassenfeld decided to go with the doll.

  Of course no one wanted to call it a doll. What red-blooded American boy would play with dolls? So the design team coined a new phrase for their product, calling it an “action figure,” and put it into production.

  That’s how it came about that G.I. Joe reported for duty on February 9, 1964. His body was inspired by a twelve-inch-tall wooden sculptor’s mannequin that could bend at every joint. His face had a scar on the right cheek so that he looked tougher than Barbie’s boyfriend, Ken. (It also made him easier to copyright!)

  The U.S. was still mourning President Kennedy’s death, the Beatles were taking the country by storm, and Vietnam was not yet part of the national consciousness. G.I. Joe was the right toy at the right time. Soon an army of Joes began to invade American homes.

  Joe was retired in 1978, a victim of disillusionment over Vietnam and the OPEC oil embargo, which sent the price of plastic through the roof. A three-and-three-quarter-inch Joe came out in the 1980s, but the original foot-high soldier didn’t return to active duty until his thirtieth anniversary, in 1994. He’s been going strong since. Sales skyrocketed after 9/11, and it looks like this is one soldier with a long career ahead of him.

  Hasbro announced that the face of G.I. Joe was a composite of twenty Medal of Honor winners, but that was just a marketing ploy. Sculptor Phil Kraczhowski, paid $600 to sculpt Joe’s head, was instructed to make him a rugged American male. Kraczhowski had done numerous busts of JFK, and many on the design team felt that he incorporated a lot of the president’s features in Joe’s face.

  The unwitting catalyst for the creation of G.I. Joe was TV producer Gene Roddenberry. The man who would go on to create Star Trek was producing a TV show called The Lieutenant. Marketing consultant Stan Weston approached Hasbro with the idea of creating some kind of toy to tie in with the show. The tie-in idea eventually died, as did the series, but G.I. Joe was on his way. Weston was offered $100,000 in cash or 1 percent of sales. He took the cash, thus losing out on more than $20 million worth of royalties.

  1966

  ACOUSTIC KITTY

  High-tech cats fight the Cold War.

  In the 1960s, the Cold War pitted intelligence agents of East against West—CIA versus KGB—in a high-stakes game of espionage cat and mouse. Then somebody decided that an actual cat might be an effective weapon.

  Recently declassified documents show that during the sixties, the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology tried to turn cats into bugs—walking eavesdropping devices for listening in on Soviet diplomats in public pl
aces. Project “Acoustic Kitty” reportedly involved five years of design and the expenditure of millions of dollars.

  Miniaturized transmitting devices were surgically implanted inside a cat. “They slit the cat open,” says one former CIA operative, “put batteries in him, wired him up. The tail was used as an antenna.”

  Problems were many. The CIA apparently discovered what cat owners have always known: cats are hard to train. They tended to walk off the job when they got hungry or distracted, which was distressingly often. Still, the CIA persisted. One document, parts of which are still classified, praises the patience of those who worked with the feisty felines: “The work done on this projects over the years reflects great credit on the personnel who guided it.”

  When the wired-up cat was deemed ready for a full-scale test, it was taken to a park and let out of a van. Then disaster struck—in the form of a taxi, which promptly ran over the feline operative. “There they were,” said the former agent, “sitting in the van with all those dials, and the cat was dead.”

  And so was Project Acoustic Kitty.

  The idea of a chicken-powered nuke sounds fanciful, but British scientists in the 1960s proposed using chickens as a heating device inside a nuclear landmine. The bomb was designed to be left in the path of attacking Soviet troops, and one top-secret report suggested that enclosing a live chicken inside (with some food) would provide enough body heat to keep the delicate triggering mechanism from freezing in winter weather.