by Noah Charney
In October 1943 the British established a division of the War Office, the Archaeological Adviser’s Branch, that would deal with the recovery and protection of art objects in newly liberated territories. It was originally a one-man operation, run by renowned archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley, with his wife as his only assistant. Woolley liked it that way, rejecting the offer of staff. He liked to think that his uncluttered judgment was far superior to what a committee could produce, and he wanted to be able to boast of the triumphs he’d achieved ostensibly alone. In truth, he was a brilliant archaeologist and politician. The son of a clergyman, Woolley was a curator at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum and was best known for leading archaeological excavations at Ur in present-day Iraq, but he had also worked alongside T. E. Lawrence in Syria in 1913. The budding novelist Agatha Christie was a great admirer of Woolley’s, particularly noting his capacity to galvanize listeners about the wonders of archaeology. (Christie spent a lot of time with Woolley—she married Woolley’s assistant from his Ur excavation in 1930.) She wrote, “Leonard Woolley saw with the eye of the imagination. . . . Wherever we happened to be, he could make it come alive. . . . It was his reconstruction of the past and he believed it, and anyone who listened believed it also.”
When the war began, Woolley corresponded with art and archaeological institutions to compile lists of artworks and monuments in the path of the fighting. Very much against his will, he eventually began to recruit personnel as it became clear that a field force would be needed to accompany Allied armies. Woolley thought that his role, and therefore the role of anyone working in the sphere of the protection of art and monuments, should be to note sites for the army to avoid and to plan the restitution of art and artifacts after the war—not to send out field officers. He wrote, “The idea that we should leave the most eminent experts who have high artistic or archaeological qualifications to walk about the battlefields for this purpose is really one which I think would not be accepted as at all suitable.” There was an element of classism in this statement—the lives of the highly educated should not be risked in combat zones—in addition to the desire to be the one and only operator in the tiny, newly founded “theater” of art and archaeological protection during war. It would take a strong American push to dislodge Woolley’s hands-off policy and encourage Allied field work in the protection of art and monuments.
Over the course of Woolley’s operations, intelligence established that art, including the art of German citizens, was being confiscated in all Nazi-occupied territories and that stolen art, through barter and sale abroad, provided one of the largest economic assets of the Reich.
On 10 April 1944 a sister division was established, known as the Vaucher Commission or, more fully, the Commission for the Protection and Restitution of Cultural Material. It was run by Professor Paul Vaucher, the cultural attaché of the French embassy in London. Its job was to track down documentation on works that had been seized by the Nazis.
In May 1944 another, larger division was organized by direct command of Winston Churchill. Under the supervision of Lord Hugh Pattison Macmillan, the British Committee on the Preservation and Restitution of Works of Art, Archives, and Other Material in Enemy Hands was established. This rather unwieldy nomenclature was cast aside in favor of the simpler Macmillan Committee. The Macmillan Committee would now be in charge of the planned postwar restitution of looted works of art, with Woolley acting as their civilian leader. Woolley’s motto was “We protect the arts at the lowest possible cost,” an odd banner under which to fight, but one that was, at least initially, politically necessary in order to garner support for a role that was considered of secondary importance by those who simply wanted to win the war.
Meanwhile, the United States was forming its own art protection divisions. In March 1941 the United States had established the Committee on Conservation of Cultural Resources, designed to protect and conserve art in American collections from the perceived impending threat of Japanese invasion, after the December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor.
Early on during the war, certain art organizations, including the American Harvard Defense Group and the American Council of Learned Societies, worked with museums and art historians to identify European monuments and artworks that would require protection. These groups began to lobby for a national organization for the preservation of cultural properties during times of war. Much of this was spearheaded by Paul Sachs, associate director of the Harvard Fogg Museum, and by Francis Henry Taylor, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, who called an emergency meeting of museum directors on 20 December 1941 at the Met to determine wartime and emergency policies. This resulted in the movement of some art from museums into storage facilities. At the same time, many galleries remained open during the war, allowing civilians a respite from the turmoil that filled the newspapers. Paul Sachs’s statement following the resolution of the museum directors is a poetic testament to what art can do for a nation at war:If, in time of peace, our museums and art galleries are important to the community, in time of war they are doubly valuable. For then, when the petty and trivial fall way and we are face to face with final and lasting values, we must summon to our defense all our intellectual and spiritual resources. We must guard jealously all we have inherited from a long past, all we are capable of creating in a trying present, and all we are determined to preserve in a foreseeable future.
Art is the imperishable and dynamic expression of these aims. It is, and always has been, the visible evidence of the activity of free minds. . . . Therefore, be it resolved:1. That American museums are prepared to do their utmost in the service of the people of this country during the present conflict
2. That they will continue to keep open their doors to all who seek refreshment of spirit
3. That they will, with the sustained financial help of their communities, broaden the scope and variety of their work
4. That they will be sources of inspiration, illuminating the past and vivifying the present; that they will fortify the spirit on which victory depends.
With these stirring sentiments in mind, and with the practical concerns of protecting art during war both in the United States, should the war cross the North American threshold, and in Europe, Taylor, Sachs, and others took their concerns to President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
President Roosevelt had made clear his own sympathetic attitude towards art three years earlier, at the dedication ceremony of the newly founded National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. His words encapsulate the capacity for art to inspire, the basic freedom of the mind that it represents, and the need for its preservation.
Whatever these paintings may have been to men who looked at them a generation back, today they are not only works of art. Today they are the symbols of the human spirit, and of the world the freedom of the human spirit made. . . . To accept this work today is to assert the purpose of the people of America that the freedom of the human spirit and human mind which has produced the world’s great art and all its science, shall not be utterly destroyed.
The audience of this speech would have had fresh in their minds the ruthless Nazi censorship and “Degenerate Art Cleansing” of recent years. Whereas art, to the Nazis, was a propagandistic tool to be controlled, censored, stolen, and sold, art for the democratic world was an expression of human freedom and the greatest capability of any civilization.
In the spring of 1943, Francis Henry Taylor and his associates established the world’s first program of study on the protection of monuments. Held in Charlottesville, Virginia, the program, first taught by the director of the Yale University Art Gallery, Theodore Sizer, would train officers in the protection of art and monuments in conflict zones. The program was a great success, even if it began before the U.S. government had determined how best to use the skills taught there. Sizer wrote: “[The government doesn’t] know just how to tackle the problem yet, but it is the sort of thing that the likes of us should be concerned with, if Uncle Sam is to use our services to the utmos
t. . . . They will need all of us as they can lay their hands on. As you can imagine, every half-baked ‘art lover’ is trying to get in. Let’s hope for the best.”
Also in the spring of 1943, the American Council of Learned Societies, led by Francis Taylor and William Dinsmoor, president of the Archaeological Institute of America, began an extensive project to catalogue important cultural heritage sites in possible European war zones and to superimpose these sites on military maps provided by the armed forces. Teams worked in New York’s Frick Art Reference Library and at Harvard to create the maps in time for the Allied invasion of continental Europe. These two initiatives, the academic program and the mapmaking, worked to both draw attention to the problems of the protection of cultural heritage in conflict zones and give the future officers charged with protecting cultural heritage a significant head start. That an impressive committee, consisting of the cream of the American art community, with connections throughout the U.S. government, spearheaded this initiative proved critical in its success.
Roosevelt eventually brought into being the American Commission for the Protection and Salvage of Artistic and Historic Monuments in War Areas, established 23 June 1943. This committee was chaired by Supreme Court Justice Owen J. Roberts and therefore became known as the Roberts Commission. By the summer of 1943, the Roberts Commission had finished 168 maps covering all of Italy, its islands, and even the Dalmatian coast. A total of around 700 maps would be produced, covering all of Europe, including detail maps of the major cities, and a significant number of Asian cities, as well.
The Roberts Commission was further charged with protecting cultural properties in conflict zones, provided that their preservation did not impede active and necessary military operation. The commission’s first project was to compile exhaustive lists of European cultural treasures within current or possible future war zones, in the hope that these objects would be preserved whenever possible. The map project, began at the initiative of Francis Taylor and William Dinsmoor, was absorbed into the Roberts Commission.
The Roberts Commission then established the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives branch of the Civil Affairs and Military Government sections of the Allied army, to act as their agents in the field. Referred to as the MFAA or the Monuments Men, this division consisted of approximately 350 officers, primarily architects, art historians, historians, artists, and conservators in civilian life. Several Monuments Men were assigned to each of the Allied armies. These officers had exceptional knowledge of art or archaeology and fluency in the language of the territory in which they would work; to appease those officials who were dubious of shifting manpower away from the fighting force, these arts officers had to be older than the age for fighting eligibility; most were in their late thirties or older.
The establishment of the MFAA was a significant victory in what had become a tug-of-egos between the laissez-faire Sir Leonard Woolley working alone in England and the huge committee of American art historians and museum directors led by Francis Henry Taylor. Woolley lobbied with the War Office in England not to send out field officers, and at first succeeded—the Macmillan Committee only handled restitution of displaced artworks after the war. But it was not quite as Woolley hoped, as he was obliged to act as British representative to the Roberts Commission, which set up the MFAA for field work.
Monuments Men were charged with following just behind the front line as the Allied army liberated parts of Europe, doing their best to protect all cultural heritage in the wake of warfare. This included conservation of architecture damaged by fighting, preservation of archives, and the protection of libraries, churches, museums, and their artistic content. Though they did not realize it at the time, the Monuments Men would also be charged with the detective work of hunting thousands of stolen masterpieces across bullet-torn Europe.
The central operative figure among the American Monuments Men was an ingenious Fogg Museum conservator called George Stout. He would be the de facto leader of the otherwise largely undersupported MFAA. Stout was a pioneer among art conservators. He had worked with Paul Sachs in envisioning the need for field conservators who might accompany the Allied army and mitigate the damage that was inevitable in the wake of fighting. In the summer of 1942, Stout published a short treatise entitled Protection of Monuments: A Proposal for Consideration During War and Rehabilitation, expressing what he perceived as the greatest concerns for art and monuments during the war effort.
As soldiers of the United Nations fight their way into lands once conquered and held by the enemy, the governments of the United Nations will encounter manifold problems. . . . In areas torn by bombardment and fire are monuments cherished by the people of those countrysides or towns: churches, shrines, statues, pictures, many kinds of works. Some may be destroyed; some damaged. All risk further injury, looting or destruction. . . .
To safeguard these things will not affect the course of battles, but it will affect the relations of invading armies with those peoples and [their] governments. . . . To safeguard these things will show respect for the beliefs and customs of all men and will bear witness that these things belong not only to a particular people but also to the heritage of mankind. To safeguard these things is part of the responsibility that lies on the governments of the United Nations. These monuments are not merely pretty things, not merely valued signs of man’s creative power. They are expressions of faith, and they stand for man’s struggle to relate himself to his past and to his God.
With conviction that the safeguarding of monuments is an element in the right conduct of the war and in the hope for peace, we . . . wish to bring these facts to the attention of the government of the United States of America, and urge that means be sought for dealing with them.
When it came time to nominate MFAA officers, Stout was clearly the man for the job.
The establishment of the MFAA and Eisenhower’s statement about the need to preserve cultural heritage were historic firsts. Sir Leonard Woolley acknowledged this:Prior to this war, no army had thought of protecting the monuments of the country in which and with which it was at war, and there were no precedents to follow. . . . All this was changed by a general order issued by Supreme Commander-in-Chief [General Eisenhower] just before he left Algiers, an order accompanied by a personal letter to all Commanders. . . . The good name of the Army depended in great measure on the respect which it showed to the art heritage of the modern world.
Eisenhower did add a caveat to his original statement: “If we have to choose between destroying a famous building and sacrificing our own men, then our men’s lives count infinitely more and the buildings must go.” He was a pragmatic general, for all his artistic sympathies, but few could argue with this statement, especially from a soldier’s-eye view. A general could not tell his soldiers that he would swap a number of their lives to preserve what many would dismiss as some four-hundred-year-old pigment daubed on canvas.
There was an additional reason for this caveat. At the Italian monastery of Monte Cassino, the Allies spent weeks trying to extract entrenched Germans whom they believed to have been hiding in the ancient cliff-top monastery. Dozens of ground offensives failed to make headway, as German snipers cut down Allied assaults. The weighty decision was finally made to send in an air strike. Allied bombers dropped 1,400 tons of bombs, decimating the monastery that had been founded in 529 by Saint Benedict—shattering the frescoed walls and destroying the masterpieces stored there—only to learn afterwards that the Germans were not in the monastery itself. Further, German paratroopers took up defensive positions in the ruins that resulted from the Allied air attack, and the Battle of Monte Cassino raged on from 15 January until 18 May 1944. The treasures and the monastery had been destroyed for naught.
Eisenhower’s 26 May 1944 general directive to all Allied Expeditionary Forces continued:In some circumstances the success of the military operation may be prejudiced in our reluctance to destroy these revered objects. Then, as at Cassino, where the enemy relied on our emotiona
l attachments to shield his defense, the lives of our men are paramount. So, where military necessity dictates, commanders may order the required action even though it involves destruction to some honored site.
But there are many circumstances in which damage and destruction are not necessary and cannot be justified. In such cases, through the exercise of restraint and discipline, commanders will preserve centers and objects of historical and cultural significance. Civil Affairs Staffs at higher echelons will advise commanders of the locations of historical monuments of this type, both in advance of the frontlines and in occupied areas. This information, together with the necessary instruction, will be passed down through command channels to all echelons.
A world war would inevitably result in unavoidable tragedies like Monte Cassino. But Eisenhower’s conscientious recognition that, whenever possible and even where it seemed impossible, art and monuments should be preserved set an important precedent. For the Allies, this was not a war of obliteration, of pillage, of empire. It was an intervention against the actions of an evil enemy. That enemy army and its leaders would be incapacitated, but its people, its country, and its civilization would be neither plundered nor eradicated.