Reference question on WW II

A patron came into Peninsula Library looking for information on two topics:

1. Jewish soldiers in the Finnish Army who participated in the siege of Leningrad

2. Ukranian soldiers who served in the German Army.

He knew about both, yet wanted printed information so that he could prove the points to someone. He said he served in the US Army and was at D-Day; when US soldiers captured Nazi soldiers at Normandy, it turned out that they were not speaking German, and that they were Ukranian. He also knew about Jewish Finnish soldiers, and related to me a story of Finnish Army Marshal Mannerheim: requested by a German officer to not have Jews serving alongside Germans, he told the German that said soldiers were Finnish, and that he would not be told who could serve in his Army.

I did find material on the web, including a link to an article in the Jewish Quarterly, and information at Yad Vashem.

Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim was a soldier and a politician, became president of Finland.

14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Ukrainian)

A list of books

This quiet, gray afternoon, a patron came in with quite a list of books; most were out, but she did find a handful to take with her; the others I put on hold. Quite an interesting selection:

Zeitoun, Dave Eggers (2009).

A ticket to the circus: a memoir. Norris Church Mailer (2010).

The house at Riverton, Kate Morton (2009).

Hannah's list, Debbie Macomber (2010).

Bombay time, Thrity Umrigar (2001).

Day after night, Anita Diamant (2009).

Welcome to Utopia: notes from a small town, Karen Valby (2010).

The cleanest race: how North Koreans see themselves and why it matters, B.R. Myers.

Somewhere inside: one sister's captivity in North Korea and the other's fight to bring her home, Laura Ling and Lisa Ling (2010).

Tears in the darkness

American and Filipino troops in April 1942 on the Bataan Death March, a 66-mile ordeal that remains a hallmark of brutality.

An authoritative history of the Bataan Death March that seamlessly blends a wide-angle view with the stories of individual American, Filipino and Japanese participants.

• Excerpt

The Bataan Death March has been written about before, and well, by a number of historians. Memoirs alone about Bataan fill a long, harrowing shelf. Their titles cry out in silent pain, bitterness and defiance: “My Hitch in Hell,” “No Uncle Sam,” “We Refused to Die.”

No aspect of this battle or the infamous march that followed seems to have been overlooked. It is possible to buy volumes devoted to Bataan’s nurses, its military chaplains and, in Hampton Sides’s best-selling 2001 book, “Ghost Soldiers,” the men who rescued its survivors.

“Tears in the Darkness” is authoritative history. Ten years in the making, it is based on hundreds of interviews with American, Filipino and Japanese combatants. But it is also a narrative achievement. The book seamlessly blends a wide-angle view with the stories of many individual participants. And at this book’s beating emotional heart is the tale of just one American soldier, a young cowboy and aspiring artist out of Montana named Ben Steele.

Tears in the darkness: The Story of the Bataan Death March and Its Aftermath. Michael Norman and Elizabeth M. Norman. Illustrated. 464 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux.



Two weeks after Pearl Harbor Japan invaded the Philippines. The poorly trained and untested American and Filipino forces were overmatched; they eventually retreated into the mountainous jungles of Bataan for a brutal last stand, one that the Normans, who are husband and wife, describe as “a modern Thermopylae.”

The authors are sympathetic toward Ned King, the surrendering American major general, who was beloved by his men. (General King made it clear to his soldiers that he had surrendered, not they.) Mr. and Ms. Norman reserve their scorn for the initial Allied general overseeing Bataan, Douglas MacArthur, whom they accuse of not leading from the field and later abandoning his men there.

MacArthur was always busy becoming a great man.

There are many Japanese voices in “Tears in the Darkness.” Mr. and Ms. Norman don’t excuse Japan’s actions, but place them in careful context. Japanese soldiers, they write, were the products of “a closed world of violence where men were subjected to the most brutal system of army discipline in the world.” These soldiers “had been savaged to produce an army of savage intent.”

What are the physics of suffocation? How does a bomb blast actually kill a person? What exactly does lack of water do to a human body? “Tears in the Darkness” is a grim and comprehensive catalog of man’s inhumanity to man.

In the end, though, “Tears in the Darkness” is a book about heroism and survival. All along you are glued, out of the corner of your eye, to one story, Ben Steele’s. If you aren’t weeping openly by the book’s final scenes, when he is at last able to call home and let his family know that he is still alive after more than three years “missing in action,” during which time this thin young man lost 50 pounds, then you have a hard crust of salt around your soul.

Today's questions

Where to file tax forms 1040, and 1041 (Estate taxes)

The 8th Confession, James Patterson; not yet out.

Levittown called about a CD that only HWPL owns. Checked the shelf; not there. In transit. Levittown placed the hold, and the librarian had seen the OPAC message in transit, yet still asked me to check the shelf. Huh?

The seniora began to arrive, as usual, around 1.30, for today's film. Some come over to Information Desk to reserve books.

A Library Friend asked for The madonnas of Leningrad: a novel, by Debra Dean.

A patron wanted the New York Times

Mrs. Ochman (one of our regular callers, who often wants movie reviews from Newsday read to her) called for Brain surgeon: a doctor's inspiring encounters with mortality and miracles, by Keith Black with Arnold Mann. She said she saw him on Channel 13.


A senior asked for Safe passage: the remarkable true story of two sisters who rescued Jews from the Nazis / Ida Cook.

A senior who moves and talks really slowly asked about Sunday's movie, a special program sponsored by the National Council of Jewish Women; it will be A walk to beautiful. She asked to reserve it.

Right behind her a woman asked for tickets for Sunday's movie. "All out," I told her. "They're all gone?" she asked. "Yes," I answered. "No tickets left?" she asked. I nodded.

Tax forms: "do you have instructions books?" "Yes, one for 150, a handful for 203." "Do you think you'll have them later in the afternoon?" "I can't predict; I'm not good at forecasting." "Do you think other libraries have them?" "I have no way of knowing." Hesitating, he said thank you and hung up.

Tickets? No, to three people.

A patron asked for Jhumpa Lahiri's new book, Unaccustomed earth; it's out. Then asked for People of the book, by Geraldine Brooks (which has been very popular and in high demand, a welcome antidote to all the requests for Patterson, Roberts and Steel); it's out. Asked for The brief wondrous life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Díaz; it's out. Asked for Netherland, by Joseph O'Neill; here, took it. Asked for Dangerous laughter : thirteen stories, by Steven Millhauser; in, took it.

A patron asked for Before the Sabbath / Eric Hoffer.

It is now 2pm.

At 6.35 a young lady came in asking for materials on Fred Korematsu. A mother was in yesterday researching the same name for her daughter (8th grade). We have a book on WW 2 biographies, and electronic databases can provide additional materials.

A Stimulus Deal for Writers

Soul of a People
by David A. Taylor
Wiley, 260 pages, $27.95)

Writers and artists have "got to eat, just like other people," Harry Hopkins, director of the New Deal's Works Progress Administration, observed during the middle of the Depression. The statement was true enough, of course, but Hopkins offered it defensively. With about 20% of the labor force unemployed in 1935, the WPA aimed to provide jobs to the millions of employable people on relief – including writers, artists, musicians and actors. The chief purpose of the Federal Writers' Project, as with the other WPA programs for the artistic downtrodden, was to sustain the individuals and, by giving them paid work, keep up their morale and their skills. Secondary was the hope of the Writers' Project's director, Henry Alsberg, and other idealists that the ultimate result of their work – principally, comprehensive guidebooks for each of the 48 states and Washington, D.C., as well as New York and other cities – would be an honest and even ennobling portrait of America.

My copy of the WPA Guide to New York is a treasure.

Alfred Kazin, in his 1942 masterwork, "On Native Grounds," hailed the WPA guides as not merely "a super-Baedeker" but "a repository as well as a symbol of the reawakened American sense of its own history."

The guidebooks "made up America's first self-portrait," says Mr. Taylor. He takes his title from a claim by Mark Twain that "when a thousand able novels have been written" about a people, then "there you have the soul of the people." Though the guidebooks were not novels and did not number 1,000, the enthusiastic Mr. Taylor fancies that the WPA writers engaged in "the kind of experiment" that Twain had in mind.

"one of the serious deficiencies" in the Federal Writers' Project (which at its peak in 1936 employed nearly 6,700 people) was "the sharply uneven distribution of literary talent throughout its forty-nine offices," noted Jerre Mangione in "The Dream and the Deal" (1972), which remains by far the best account of the Project. Not surprisingly, he said, "the ablest writers on the Project were to be found in New York, Boston, Chicago and San Francisco – those traditional incubating centers of literary talent." There were, of course, exceptions, a notable one being Vardis Fisher, who wrote most of the Idaho guidebook and managed to get it published first of all the guidebooks – and to enthusiastic reviews from around the country. Mr. Taylor's chapter on Fisher and the Idaho Project is one of his most interesting.

... politics – communism in particular – played a big role in many of these writers' lives. Mr. Taylor acknowledges the often divisive Communist presence in the Project but says hardly a critical word about it. He devotes much ink to Richard Wright but fails to tell, as Wright himself did in his memoir "Black Boy," how after he broke with the Communist Party and joined the Writers' Project in Chicago, the many Party members in the Project ostracized him and tried to get him fired as an incompetent.

I read about that in Hazel Rowley's biography of Richard Wright.

as Jerre Mangione observed, the reawakening of Americans' interest in their own history that Alfred Kazin perceived in the guidebooks had to be postponed, because of World War II: "The guidebooks were virtually forgotten as a symbol and largely ignored for their practical value." But, as he and Mr. Taylor make clear, readers, especially writers and editors, who have discovered the somewhat outdated volumes in recent decades have found them useful and illuminating, and even inspiring.

Sahara

A Bogart film; pretty much what I expected: minimalist sets, gritty acting, a bit (nay, more) propaganda; fun.

Collaborative Artists

The Shameful Peace
By Frederic Spotts
Yale, 283 pages, $35

A shameful chapter in French history, in some cases the coexistence, in others the collaboration, with Nazis when they conquered and occupied France in June, 1940, is exemplified by this quote attributed to novelist Jean Giono: "I prefer being a living German to a dead Frenchman."

France has not gone through the process of examining its national and individual behaviors during WW2. The national myth is that of resistance, and even when facts clash against that mythology (as when it came out that Francois Mitterand himself had collaborated) the French manage to squirm out of examining their actions and behavior properly.


The La Place Blanche café (in 1940) across from the Moulin Rouge cabaret was reserved for the exclusive use of German soldiers during the occupation of Paris.

One would expect such things as the reserving of restaurants for soldiers of the occupying army.

After the collapse of the Third Republic in June 1940, armistice agreements signed at Compiègne parceled France into two halves more or less along an east-west axis. A supposedly independent (but collaborationist) French government headed by the aged Marshal Philippe Pétain was based in the spa town of Vichy, while Paris and its northern hinterland were placed under direct German military rule.

Why Hitler left half of a conquered land purportedly independent is a fascinating topic; I wonder if he did that with any other conquered nation.

The first effect of the armistice was to convert the French capital into a kind of vacation paradise for the German occupier. Nazi flags draped Garnier's opera house; German officers went on shopping sprees; some of the capital's leading hostesses vied for the privilege of entertaining the new authorities. Representatives of leading Nazi figures, notably Hermann Goering, sacked the homes of wealthy Jews for masterpieces of art – an expedition in which some of the city's grandest art dealers were pleased to assist.

Collaboration took different forms; punishing, and steraling from, Jews was obviously something some French were all too happy to do.

In defeated France, Hitler pursued two quite different objectives. One was to extract resources and manpower to wage war against Britain and later the Soviet Union; the other was to integrate France into a subordinate role within a European confederation ruled from Berlin. This was a complicated task that the Germans did not always pursue coherently, since the two objectives were often antagonistic – it is difficult to pretend, while pillaging a country, that it has even the slightest autonomy. One area where the Germans completely understood what they were about, however, was in the co-opting of the French cultural establishment.

France had long been the preeminent cultural force in Europe; conquering it broke that.

What made the French experience of German occupation so different from that of, say, Poland or Czechoslovakia or Greece was that Hitler, far from trying to eradicate French national culture, chose to nourish it as a distraction from his other demands. During the years of occupation the German authorities positively encouraged literature, theater and the arts – as long as Jews, Freemasons or (after June 1941) communists were excluded. The country was also subjected to an inundation of high German culture. German orchestras, musicians, artists and writers were constantly on furlough in the French capital. The German Institute in Paris became the center of cultural and social activities. And, it must be said, there was considerable traffic in the opposite direction, with French musicians, writers and artists making the pilgrimage to Berlin or other German cities.

Perhaps even Hitler was something of a Francophile.

German officers among the customers at the Café de la Paix on the Place de l'Opéra in late 1940.

Seeing this picture makes it difficult to deny that some French not just made do with the German occupation, but lived in it. Of course, not all did so. The French Resistance was very real.

After the Liberation in July 1944 there was, obviously, an attempt to settle scores, but in a haphazard fashion that left no one satisfied. The only writer tried and executed for his role during the occupation was Robert Brasillach. Drieu La Rochelle avoided that fate by committing suicide. Denoël was gunned down on the street. Cortot, Céline and Morand lay low outside France until things cooled down.

The need to nourish the myth of la France combattante – the cornerstone of Gaullist ideology – required far fewer collaborators than actually existed. The myth was also necessary to wrest the nimbus of Resistance from the communists, who claimed exclusive rights to it. Then, almost before anyone knew it, anti-Americanism became the ideology of choice for French intellectuals and artists, bringing both left and right happily together. Carefully and authoritatively written, "The Shameful Peace" peels back the pages of history and reminds us of events that many would still prefer to forget.

Pigeon Trainer in World War II, Dies at 84

Obituaries can be great research tools. I learn a great deal from reading them. This is a particularly interesting one.

In January 1942, barely a month after Pearl Harbor, the United States War Department sounded a call to enlist. It wasn’t men they wanted — not this time. The Army was looking for pigeons.

To the thousands of American men and boys who raced homing pigeons, a popular sport in the early 20th century and afterward, the government’s message was clear: Uncle Sam Wants Your Birds.

Richard Topus was one of those boys.

Now, I might have known about Army pigeons (should they have been Air Force pigeons? I wonder), but I do not remember so.

World War II saw the last wide-scale use of pigeons as agents of combat intelligence. Mr. Topus, just 18 when he enlisted in the Army, was among the last of the several thousand pigeoneers, as military handlers of the birds were known, who served the United States in the war. A lifelong pigeon enthusiast who became a successful executive in the food industry, Mr. Topus died on Dec. 5 in Scottsdale, Ariz., at the age of 84. The cause was kidney failure, his son Andrew said.

Richard Topus was born in Brooklyn on March 15, 1924, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants. Growing up in Flatbush, he fell in love with the pigeons his neighbors kept on their rooftops in spacious coops known as lofts. His parents would not let him have a loft of his own — they feared it would interfere with schoolwork, Andrew Topus said — but he befriended several local men who taught him to handle their birds. Two of them had been pigeoneers in World War I, when the United States Army Pigeon Service was formally established.

Of course his parents wouldn't let him have pigeons; they were Jewish.

Pigeoneers. What an interesting word - and concept.

Pigeons have been used as wartime messengers at least since antiquity. Before the advent of radio communications, the birds were routinely used as airborne couriers, carrying messages in tiny capsules strapped to their legs. A homing pigeon can find its way back to its loft from nearly a thousand miles away. Over short distances, it can fly a mile a minute. It can go where human couriers often cannot, flying over rough terrain and behind enemy lines.

By the early 20th century, advances in communications technology seemed to herald the end of combat pigeoneering. In 1903, a headline in The New York Times confidently declared, “No Further Need of Army Pigeons: They Have Been Superseded by the Adoption of Wireless Telegraph Systems.”

Never say never, no?

In all, more than 50,000 pigeons served the United States in the war. Many were shot down. Others were set upon by falcons released by the Nazis to intercept them. (The British countered by releasing their own falcons to pursue German messenger pigeons. But since falcons found Allied and Axis birds equally delicious, their deployment as defensive weapons was soon abandoned by both sides.)

Now, who figured that British falcons would only eat German pigeons?

But many American pigeons did reach their destinations safely, relaying vital messages from soldiers in the field to Allied commanders. The information they carried — including reports on troop movements and tiny hand-sketched maps — has been widely credited with saving thousands of lives during the war.

Incoming pigeon, colonel. No, seriously, sir. Orders from HQ. No, I am not being sarcastic, sir.

Mr. Topus enlisted in early 1942 and was assigned to the Army Signal Corps, which included the Pigeon Service. He was eventually stationed at Camp Ritchie in Maryland, one of several installations around the country at which Army pigeons were raised and trained. There, he joined a small group of pigeoneers, not much bigger than a dozen men.

Camp Ritchie specialized in intelligence training, and Mr. Topus and his colleagues schooled men and birds in the art of war. They taught the men to feed and care for the birds; to fasten on the tiny capsules containing messages written on lightweight paper; to drop pigeons from airplanes; and to jump out of airplanes themselves, with pigeons tucked against their chests. The Army had the Maidenform Brassiere Company make paratroopers’ vests with special pigeon pockets.

American industry contributed to the Allied effort in many ways. Maidenform did more than make bras for Betty Grable. Patriotism takes all forms, and shapes.

After the war, Mr. Topus earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in business from Hofstra University. While he was a student, he earned money selling eggs — chicken eggs — door to door and afterward started a wholesale egg business. In the late 1950s, Mr. Topus became the first salesman at Friendship Food Products, a dairy company then based in Maspeth, Queens; he retired as executive vice president for sales and marketing. (The company, today based in Jericho, N.Y. and a subsidiary of Dean Foods, is now known as Friendship Dairies.)

I know Friendship cottage cheese.

Though the Army phased out pigeons in the late 1950s, Mr. Topus raced them avidly till nearly the end of his life. He left a covert, enduring legacy of his hobby at Friendship, for which he oversaw the design of the highly recognizable company logo, a graceful bird in flight, in the early 1960s.

From that day to this, the bird has adorned cartons of the company’s cottage cheese, sour cream, buttermilk and other products. To legions of unsuspecting consumers, Andrew Topus said last week, the bird looks like a dove. But to anyone who really knew his father, it is a pigeon, plain as day.

Nice touch.