The Rape of Europa

by Lynn H. Nicholas

  All these plans were fine on paper, but not practical in a theater of war. The civilian agencies, top-heavy with executives and planners, had few operatives on the scene, and were utterly dependent on the Army for such amenities as intelligence, shipping space, and ground transportation. But the feeling seemed to be that when things did not work, the addition of another committee would help. The War Department was not represented on any of these committees, though it was essentially the conduit through which they all had to function. The solution to this was often to send VIPs to the theater to deal directly with headquarters, as Francis Henry Taylor had in mind, a process which consumed Eisenhower’s precious time and would later make him reluctant to have any nonmilitary functionaries at all in his theater.

  Roosevelt and Churchill met in Casablanca in the third week of January 1943. There they decided, not without some friction, that Sicily rather than northern France would be the next Allied objective. The invasion was set for July. This would be the first time that British and American forces would jointly occupy an enemy nation. War Department officials concerned with civil affairs saw immediately that their efforts of liaison and planning would have to be greatly improved if they were to deal with expansion into another theater. All such activities were quickly centralized in a new Civil Affairs Division (CAD) under the Secretary of War, which officially came into being on March 1, 1943.

  Only days after the heads of state had left Casablanca, planning was begun for Sicily. Officers were sent off to study the British occupation already set up in Tripolitania, where they would find an informal monuments protection program already in place. The resulting proposal called for the then staggering number of four hundred officers for all Civil Affairs functions. By April a training facility had been set up near Algiers, and by May 1 the top secret plan for HUSKY, as the Sicilian invasion was code-named, was virtually complete. The idea of civilian participation was still accepted as part of the immediate postcombat occupation by both nations; the only trouble was that the total secrecy surrounding HUSKY prevented any concrete civilian planning.

  If progress toward an official government body to ensure the safety of works of art had been slow in the United States, in London, where the British and various Allied governments-in-exile planned their return to the Continent, it was positively snail-like. This was in great part due to the European attitude that civilians could and should not interfere with the workings of armies in combat. George Stout and W. G. Constable in their early 1943 campaigns had written colleagues such as Kenneth Clark and Eric Maclagan, director of the Victoria and Albert, to inform them of their efforts to establish an official protection committee and ask if any similar action was contemplated in England. Both gentlemen seemed surprised at the very idea. “I find it hard to believe that any machinery could be set up which would carry out the suggestions contained in your petition; e.g., even supposing it were possible for an archaeologist to accompany each invading force, I cannot help feeling that he would have great difficulty in restraining a commanding officer from shelling an important military objective simply because it contained some fine historical monuments,” wrote Clark.20

  Maclagan agreed and was, if anything, even less encouraging: “In violent fighting damage will happen anyway … I do not think it would be the faintest use to have an official archaeologist at GHQ.”21 As for looting, he was not worried: “Now that there is no market outside Europe … only the internal looting subsists,” about which nothing could be done until the “time of the Peace Treaty.” Both correspondents felt that British and American troops would not damage anything on purpose, and that the admonitions to them contained in the field manuals would suffice.

  There were some other signs of interest, but these concentrated almost entirely on the recovery of looted objects after the war. A Conference of Allied Ministers of Education had been formed in October 1942 to plan the cultural rehabilitation of the Continent and by midsummer 1943 was studying the thorny problem of restitution. The representatives of the occupied countries, who dominated the organization, were naturally more interested in this than the British; by far the most active of them was Karol Estreicher, the Polish representative, whose reports and letters to Francis Henry Taylor had greatly encouraged the latter’s efforts.

  In January 1943 the United Nations, which at that time consisted of the U.S., the occupied countries, the British Commonwealth, China, and the USSR, had also issued a declaration calling invalid all “forced transfers of property in enemy-controlled territory.”22 Another group, the Comité Interallié pour l’Etude de G Armistice, trying to draft a law for restitution of looted property, had been bogged down for some months by its inability to agree on the exact meaning of the key word spolié (looted), and as yet had produced nothing. But as the invasion of the Continent still seemed to be far off, all these initiatives remained in the realm of theory, and the physical protection of monuments was hardly mentioned.

  Clark and Maclagan were correct in thinking that the British Army would handle any monuments problems by itself. But in pooh-poohing the usefulness of “an official archaeologist at GHQ” they proved less than clairvoyant, for it was none other than the famous archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley, excavator of the tombs of the Sumerian kings at Ur in Iraq, who would eventually be appointed Archaeological Adviser to the War Office—but not until October 1943. The evolution of this post took some years, and was in the best British tradition of muddling through.

  British forces had occupied Cyrene, on the coast of Libya, for several months in early 1941. At the time Libya was one of the jewels of Mussolini’s new Roman Empire. The Duce had spent a great deal to restore classical ruins at Leptis Magna, Cyrene, Sabratha, and other sites all along the Mediterranean. This was not always done with archaeological accuracy in mind. Woolley later commented that “scientific research was throughout made subordinate to, or more often was altogether abandoned in favor of, theatrical display; but no visitor could fail to be struck by the imposing effect of the excavations, and to the Italian Fascist they did indeed symbolise the glories of his traditional ancestry.”

  The Italians retook the area late in the spring of 1941, and by summer had produced a pamphlet with the accusatory title What the English Did in Cyrenaica, illustrated with pictures of smashed statues, empty pedestals, and rude Anglo-Saxon graffiti, all allegedly the work of Commonwealth troops. These later turned out to be falsifications—the statues were in the Italians’ own repair shops, and the graffiti, though authentic, were not on monuments. But the propaganda effects were unpleasant, and resulted in an “anxious interchange of messages between the War Office in London and GHQ, Middle East.” After the nearest available archaeologist—who happened to be Woolley, stationed at the War Office on quite unrelated duty—was consulted, orders were sent to Montgomery’s forces, just beginning the campaign for El Alamein, to preserve “any archaeological monuments which might come into their possession.”

  How exactly this was to be done, and where the monuments were located, was not specified. Taking this to heart, British soldiers quickly secured the museums and sites in Cyrene when it was recaptured. But control was more difficult at remoter sites, where, as soon as the fighting stopped, off-duty troops began carving their names in the stones, chipping away at bas-reliefs for souvenirs, and obliterating fragile mosaics by driving vehicles across them.

  Italian propaganda photograph showing alleged Allied vandalism in Cyrene: Only the graffiti is genuine.

  Fortunately for posterity, one of the first officers on the scene was Lieutenant Colonel Mortimer Wheeler, archaeologist and director of the London Museum, who reported these problems to his superiors and was immediately put in charge of protection. Equally lucky was the presence of another former London Museum curator, Major J. B. Ward-Perkins, who was able to help Wheeler supervise this enormous area. Totally in their element, the two officers soon had the Italian custodians and Arab guards, who had been found hiding in the museum at Sabratha, back at work
under the watchful eye of a British NCO.

  A little guidebook was printed up and both informative and warning signs were posted in the ruins. There were lectures and tours. Woolley wrote that this educational effort had been so successful that “when troops digging a gun position in the sandhills east of Leptis came upon a Roman villa with well preserved frescoes they carefully cleared out the ruins, made a plan of the building, photographed the frescoes and filled the site in with sand, to secure its protection, before shifting their gun pit to a new position.” The archaeologists surveyed all the sites and straightened out the Italian photo archives. For their own later use they carefully saved the aerial photographs utilized by Intelligence officers. All this activity was formalized in the ex post facto tradition of occupying armies by a “Proclamation on Preservation of Antiquities” issued on November 24, 1943, which defined the rights over antiquities vested in the British Military Administration, and forbade “the excavation, removal, sale, concealment or destruction of antiquities without license.” A British Monuments officer remained in North Africa until occupation troops departed.23

  Woolley at home and the officers in the field were supported in these activities by consultations with the private sector. Experts from such institutions as the Greco-Roman Museum in Alexandria and the Institute of Archaeology in London were called in to inspect sites or offer advice. There seemed no need for anything more, and American urgings for a high-level commission met with little enthusiasm. Indeed, the “establishment strength” of the Archaeological Adviser’s branch consisted, rather cosily, of “the Adviser himself, Lady Woolley, and a clerk.” Its motto, suitably classical, was taken from Pericles’ funeral oration, and, roughly translated, read, “We protect the arts at the lowest possible cost.” Woolley soon learned to avoid Army channels: “The Adviser might have his own views as to how something ought to be done and though aware that those views might not be well adapted to local conditions, wished that they might at least be taken into consideration; or he might require information not contained in the reports sent to him. For the most part, this could only be done by an interchange of demi-official letters, and whereas official communications passed through regular channels were relatively few, the ‘D.O.’ letter file was voluminous.”24

  The need for a detailed scenario for Sicily, the establishment of an office specifically designed to respond to civil affairs initiatives, the lobbying efforts of all parties, and the actual example of a British operation, all suddenly combined in the spring of 1943 to make the idea of the protection of monuments and works of art acceptable on the American home front. The problem would now be to weave the strands together into a single line of action; the lack of communication among the interested parties would make this unbelievably difficult and contrast vividly with the German confiscation effort so carefully directed from the pinnacles of Nazi power.

  The first spark of response on art protection in Washington came on March 10, 1943, when Colonel James H. Shoemaker wrote to American Defense Harvard that he could guarantee that “information covering this area will be included in the data to be used by Military Administrative officials in occupied areas.” He would, “therefore, appreciate the cooperation of Dr. G. L. Stout in providing us with information covering this matter. It would be helpful if, in the more important cases, we could have a paragraph indicating the significance of the item in question to the local population. Without this it would be difficult to exercise judgment in respect to the importance of action in any given case.”25 What this innocuous-sounding request meant to art historians was a series of lists of every important church, statue, building, and work of art for each country likely to be occupied, with justifications for the preservation of same. And it was wanted by July.

  Within days the gap between academe and the military began to show. Colonel Shoemaker, responding to a rather flowery draft for the introduction of the proposed manual and lists, diplomatically suggested that “long range concepts” might be “pushed into the background” by “the pressure of immediate considerations.” The Army, in other words, was not interested in art for art’s sake.

  In the same letter he wrote that research laboratories might be included in the lists of museums and libraries, as it “would focus attention on this subject more sharply if all of these items could be presented together in a well integrated way.” Shoemaker had clearly foreseen that the U.S. government would make great efforts to obtain and preserve technology and research which might be of future use. Personnel officers, he indicated, would also respond more easily to assigning men with special expertise to such work if “research laboratories” were included—he could not very well say that most of the federal government did not give a hoot about art. This hint of cooperation with the scientific community was ignored by the art group, a bit of chauvinism which would cost them dearly.

  As to the exact areas to be covered by the monuments lists, the wily Colonel, following Combined Chiefs of Staff orders to keep plans very general, merely said that he did not think the committee should feel “any restrictions,” as “we wish to avoid arousing any critical reactions on the part of friendly governments in exile.” The material should be “in distinctly separate units by countries.” Anything which might reveal where the armies were headed next would be disastrous.26

  In early April, Shoemaker again wrote to American Defense Harvard to say that approval had been given for “the commissioning of a few men with special competence in this field for training in military government.”27 By now the technical manual compiled with the collaboration of Stout was virtually complete, and work had begun on the lists of monuments and collections and general cultural background material for the handbooks on each country, which were to be given to units in the field.

  Within days of receiving Shoemaker’s first letter, American Defense Harvard had sent out a barrage of letters asking for such information from prominent exiles living in the United States. Among them were Sigrid Undset, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist, for Norway; Jakob Rosenberg, the eminent Rembrandt scholar, for Holland and Belgium; and Georges Wildenstein for France. Paul Sachs was not pleased at the last choice, but Wildenstein so strongly resisted efforts to limit him to making lists only of art-oriented refugees—not objects—that Sachs discreetly dropped his objections. Now letters were sent to institutions all over the country asking the whereabouts of already drafted personnel suited to “monuments” training. Shoemaker, perhaps unsettled by the speed of these efforts, wrote to warn that “very few persons will be needed in this field. The number would necessarily be limited. To overdo the matter would cause it to boomerang.”28

  Another, parallel approach, on March 15, by Taylor and Archibald MacLeish to Secretary of War Stimson had also fallen on fertile ground. Their memoranda had been referred to Colonel John Haskell, the acting director of the brand-new Civil Affairs Division, who considered the idea important enough to recommend that it immediately be studied by the Operations Division, the highest-level planning group of the War Department.29 He was supported in this by General Wickersham, chief of the School of Military Government, who recommended on April 1 that “the Civil Affairs section of each theater commander include one or two experts to assist and advise in the matter of protecting and preserving historical monuments, art treasures and similar objects.” Haskell also recommended that a pool of thirty specialists and technicians in the field be formed to be available when needed, and that language on art protection be included in the Army field manual. On April 19 he met with the officers of the National Gallery, who also agreed to provide names of qualified experts. The Civil Affairs Division heard for the first time at this meeting of the proposal for a Presidential commission, and thought it sound. Four days later, over Marshall’s signature, a cable went to Eisenhower to ask if he would agree to the addition of two staff advisers on fine arts, one British and one American, to the table of organization for HUSKY. His affirmative reply was received on April 25.30

  By May the
material for the handbooks had begun to reach Colonel Shoemaker. Sachs’s doubts about Wildenstein’s contribution were now confirmed. Shoemaker, with the utmost delicacy, pointed out that there was a certain amount of talking down in the tone of the reports. In the French draft, for example, it appeared superfluous to say:

  Occupying authorities should respect, and make their men respect, the classé buildings. They will almost invariably find a local savant willing to explain and arrange excursions to visit these buildings; and such visits can only have a good effect, by making the old buildings more interesting to officers and troops. Attackers should, if possible, avoid obliterating entire towns. The French naturally resent the German habit of destroying everything when they leave. They will equally resent any American habit of destroying everything before arrival, if such a habit develops.

  With American armies massing in North Africa for the invasion of Sicily after the grueling campaign in the desert, Shoemaker dryly noted that there would doubtless come a time for sightseeing, but that under present conditions “instructions in respect to this will appear rather ironic to officers … the advice in the remainder of the paragraph will also appear gratuitous to them.” He concluded, with some irritation, “A line should also be drawn between practical instructions for the conservation of objects and general instructions regarding the conduct of the Army (which should be excluded).”31 Stout gleefully reported that he had heard rumors that “the [art] historians have been going a little pedagogical with the U.S. Army. That of course is a waste of time.”32 The Cambridge Committee quickly sent off a firm set of rules urging moderation on its compilers, hoping to soothe any ruffled academic feathers with the comment that “the Committee is sure you will understand that the preparation of this material is in some degree experimental.”33