They say there’s no business like show business. Maybe one day we’ll find out.

The story begins back in September 2022, when Aviation History’s editorial offices received an email from an employee at HBO Max (since renamed simply Max). Would Aviation History give HBO permission to use the cover of the magazine’s Autumn 2022 issue in an episode of the fourth and final season of its series “Succession”?

Our answer: Yes.

For those not aware of “Succession,” the acclaimed series focuses on the Roy family, led by patriarch Logan Roy (Brian Cox), the ill-tempered and foul-mouthed founder of a global media empire called Waystar Royco. As ill health forces Logan to contemplate his own mortality, his children begin jostling to take over once he steps down. Kendall (Jeremy Strong) seems in the best position to assume the crown, but siblings Shiv (Sarah Snook) and Roman (Kieran Culkin) also have ambitions, while their half-brother Connor (Alan Ruck) aims at running for president of the U.S. Through the show’s four seasons, the Roys engage in back-stabbing, skullduggery and scheming to gain control of the family business. And they do some of that on aircraft, especially private jets and helicopters. Why not make Aviation History part of the cast?

Well, when the season ended with the series finale on May 28, none of us here managed to pick out the cover. Turns out, it made its very tiny cameo appearance in episode three, “Connor’s Wedding.” Look closely at the back wall in the airport during the Roy children’s press conference and you can see it on the magazine rack. (Take our word for it.)

We think Aviation History acquitted itself well onscreen, and don’t blame us if viewers found their attention straying from the activity in the foreground as they wondered, “How can I get my hands on that magazine?” To quote “the father of modern acting,” Konstantin Stanislavski, “There are no small roles, only small actors.”

We just hope that if “Succession” ever returns to the screen, it will tell the story of how the new owners of Waystar Royco try to gain control of a group of history magazines that fights against its acquisition.

Now, that’s a show we would watch.  

Canyon de Chelly, in the Four Corners region of northeastern Arizona, is among the most spectacular natural wonders of the American Southwest. It is also one of the longest continuously inhabited places in North America. Archaeologists estimate humans have lived in the canyon for more than four millennia. By the late 17th century Navajos had made their home there, and in the 19th century they waged two battles in Canyon de Chelly central to tribal history.

The canyon floor is anywhere from 100 to 300 yards wide and flanked by sheer red rock walls up to 1,000 feet high. About 3 miles from its east entrance the canyon splits into two main branches, with Canyon del Muerto running off to the northeast. Five miles up Canyon del Muerto is another junction at a prominence called Fortress Rock. Black Rock Canyon splits off due east, while Canyon del Muerto courses another 15 miles northeast.

In January 1805 a force of 500 Spanish soldiers under the command of Lieutenant Antonio Narbona entered Canyon de Chelly in response to a Navajo raid against the Spanish military post at Cebolletta. In the resulting battle near the northeast end of Canyon del Muerto the Spanish claimed to have killed 115 Navajos, including 90 warriors, while taking 33 women and children as slaves. Navajo tradition relates a different story—that most of the warriors were away hunting that day, and almost all of those killed were women and children. As the Spanish troops approached, the Navajos sheltered in a cliff dwelling high on the canyon wall, where they were trapped and picked off by Narbona’s marksmen. The only Spanish casualty was a soldier tackled by a Navajo woman while he was scaling the cliff. Both fell to their deaths. Narbona ended his career as the fifth Mexican governor of New Mexico.

Fifty-nine years later the Navajo fought another battle in Canyon de Chelly, this time against the United States. While the Civil War was raging east of the Mississippi, the U.S. government sent troops to the Southwest to put an end to persistent raids by emboldened Navajos. In 1864 Brig. Gen. James H. Carleton, commander of the military Department of New Mexico (which spanned what today comprises New Mexico and Arizona), ordered Lt. Col. Kit Carson of the 1st New Mexico Volunteer Cavalry to clear the canyon of Navajos and relocate them to a reservation at Bosque Redondo, nearly 400 miles southeast at Fort Sumner, New Mexico Territory.

That January 12, in the face of a blinding snowstorm, Carson led 389 troopers into Canyon de Chelly. The Navajos, under the leadership of Chiefs Barboncito and Manuelito, skillfully used skirmishing parties to fight delaying actions while their main body withdrew into Canyon del Muerto. On reaching the junction with Black Rock Canyon, they scaled Fortress Rock with the help of ladders prepared ahead of time. By the time Carson’s force reached the far end of Canyon del Muerto, it had destroyed the tribe’s camps, crops and supplies and taken more than 200 captives. But more than 1,000 Navajos had evaded to the top of Fortress Rock, where they had stockpiled food. It wouldn’t be enough.

Biding his time, Carson withdrew from the canyon to wait out the Navajos, who were bereft of the necessities to survive winter. The strategy worked. By that summer Carson had accepted the surrender of some 8,000 Navajos, the largest such capitulation in American Indian history. In its wake the Navajos were forced to make what they recall as the “Long Walk” to Bosque Redondo. But the tactical success for the U.S. government turned out to be a strategic failure in the end. Some 3,000 Navajos died at the meagerly supplied reservation before they were finally allowed in 1868 to return to their homeland in the Four Corners region.

Present-day Canyon de Chelly (pronounced “de SHAY”) National Monument lies entirely within the boundaries of the Navajo Nation, thus all visitors to the canyon floor must be accompanied by a licensed Navajo guide. Its sheer walls are pocked with the ruins of centuries-old cliff dwellings and etched with pictographs. A particularly striking 200-year-old pictograph on the wall below Massacre Cave depicts the invading Spanish cavalry force, replete with lances and cross-bearing tunics. The North Rim Drive provides a number of spectacular overlooks, including Antelope House Overlook (directly across from Fortress Rock) and Massacre Cave Overlook, while the South Rim Drive ends at an overlook of the 750-foot sandstone spire known as Spider Rock. There is just no substitute, however, for exploring the canyon floor with a knowledgeable guide, one for whom it is especially personal hallowed ground.

This story appeared in the 2023 Summer issue of Military History magazine.

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Many a doughnut legend begins with the story of the lassies during World War I, who, realizing that the soldiers might want a taste of America, began serving up the fried pastry in France.

And while this particular event made the holey treat popular, the breakfast item as we know it actually traces its roots to 1847.

“The idea of frying a chunk of dough is ancient,” a Washington Post piece from 2002 reads. “The Romans did it. So did just about every other long-lived European culture, from the Dutch to the Spanish to the Germans.”

It is a teenage sailor from Maine, however, who is credited with poking a hole in his mother’s pastry to produce the definitive American doughnut.

The teen’s mother was “Elizabeth Gregory, a New England ship captain’s mother who made a wicked deep-fried dough that cleverly used her son’s spice cargo of nutmeg and cinnamon, along with lemon rind,” according to the Smithsonian. “Some say she made it so son Hanson and his crew could store a pastry on long voyages, one that might help ward off scurvy and colds.”

As such, Hanson Gregory’s treat was named a “dough-nut” — given that it was literally a piece of fried dough and nutmeg.

As for the hole, the Smithsonian report floats several intriguing theories. One suggests that Gregory added it because it required less dough. Another theory posits that the shape is optimized for gripping the treat on a rocking boat. More boringly, there is a theory that the edges of the round cakes baked hard while the inside remained uncooked and soggy, and so the hole was a matter of consistency.

“I took the cover off the ship’s tin pepper box, and — I cut into the middle of that donut the first hole ever seen by mortal eyes!” Gregory himself is quoted as telling the Boston Post.

While the validity of these tales remains hazy, what isn’t is that sailors, Marines, soldiers and airmen — like all Americans — have fallen in love with the hallowed, hollowed treat, and it has become inextricably linked to the U.S. military.

The Salvation Army’s doughnut lassies got their start in 1917 when Ensign Helen Purviance was assigned to the 1st Army Division during World War I.

Purviance began serving them to bring cheer to soldiers stationed abroad. Her cohort, Ensign Margaret Sheldon, said she rolled over 300 of these perforated pastries in one day, according to the book “American Women in World War I.”

Now, the first Friday of June each year is dedicated to America’s favorite pastry.

By life’s end Sarah Creath McSherry Hibbins Stinnett Howard could claim five surnames, one from her birth and one each from her four husbands. Along the way she had suffered more hardship on the Texas frontier than most pioneers, man or woman. Described in her youth as “a beautiful blonde…graceful in manner and pure of heart,” she had watched as two of her husbands, her only brother and one of her children were killed in front of her and had lost a third husband in mysterious circumstances. She herself had been captured by Comanches and escaped, making a perilous and painful journey before stumbling bruised and bleeding into a camp of Texas Rangers.

But she had survived.

Originally from the vicinity of Brownsville, Ill., where she was born Sarah Creath around 1810, Sarah married John McSherry while still a teenager. In 1828 the newlyweds moved south, settling in DeWitt’s Colony, along the Guadalupe River in south Texas, then a Mexican province. In 1829 a son was born to them. Then tragedy struck.

On an otherwise pleasant day that year, around noon, John left the cabin to fetch water from a nearby spring. Moments later Sarah heard yelling and opened the cabin door to the sight of Indians killing and scalping her husband. She quickly slammed and barred the door, locking herself and the baby inside, then grabbed John’s rifle, determined to defend herself and the baby as best she could. While she waited in the still cabin, the Indians slipped away as quietly as they had come.

Around twilight a man named John McCrabb happened by. Seeing what had happened and hearing Sarah’s story, he placed her and the baby on his horse and led them through the darkness to the home of the McSherrys’ nearest neighbors, Andrew Lockhart and family, some 10 miles upriver. Mother and child remained with the Lockharts several months until Sarah remarried, to a well-off Guadalupe Valley man named John Hibbins (also given as Hibbons or Hibben). In 1835, after having given birth to a second child, Sarah returned to Illinois with her two children to visit relatives. In early 1836 they returned to Texas by way of New Orleans, accompanied by Sarah’s only brother, George Creath. In February the four met up with John Hibbins at Columbia, Texas (present-day West Columbia) on the Brazos River, setting out from there by ox cart bound west for the Guadalupe Valley. They never made it. Fifteen miles from home, they were attacked by a band of 13 Comanches who killed Sarah’s husband and brother, took her and the children prisoner, and rode north. 

“They traveled slowly up through the timbered country,” John Henry Brown wrote in his 1880 book Indian Wars and Pioneers of Texas, “securely tying Mrs. Hibbins at night and lying encircled around her.”The next day one warrior, weary of listening to the cries of Sarah’s infant, killed it by smashing its head against a tree as Sarah helplessly watched. Days later the party crossed the Colorado River deep in Comancheria and relaxed the security in which they held their captives.

Sarah faced a crossroads. Though she realized there was a chance to escape, she knew she could not make it away safely with her young son, so she made the heartrending decision to leave him. Wrapping him in a buffalo robe, she quietly slipped out of the Indian camp and into the darkness. 

“Daylight found her but a short distance from camp, not over a mile or two,” Brown wrote, “and she secreted herself in a thicket from which she soon saw and heard the Indians in pursuit. The savages compelled the little boy to call aloud, ‘Mama! Mama!’ But she knew that her only hope for herself and child was in escape and remained silent.”

When Sarah was certain the Comanches had given up their search, she pressed on through the heavy brush and down the Colorado, eventually stumbling across a riverside cabin in which 18 Texas Rangers had just settled down to their evening meal. Though she’d walked only 10 miles, it had taken her 24 hours. “She was so torn with thorns and briars, so nearly without raiment and so bruised about the face that her condition was pitiable,” Brown wrote. 

The Rangers, under the command of Captain John J. Tumlinson Jr., quickly saddled up and went after the Comanches. The next morning, after a brief but hard fight, they rescued Sarah’s child.

Sarah and son next went to live among the families Harrell and Hornsby, near the site of present-day Austin, and fled with them as the Mexican army that had taken the Alamo in March moved north. They eventually found refuge with former Dewitt’s Colony neighbor Claiborne Stinnett, and in the spring of 1837 Sarah and Claiborne married. In 1838 Stinnett was elected sheriff of Gonzales County. That fall the sheriff disappeared while returning north to Gonzales from Linnville, on Lavaca Bay. He was thought to have been killed, either by Indians or, as Brown believed, by two runaway slaves. Regardless, Sarah was again a widow. 

By then, though still shy of 30 years old, she had been widowed three times and seen her brother, one child and two husbands killed before her eyes. On May 29, 1839, she married her fourth and final husband, Phillip Howard. In June 1840 the couple left the Guadalupe Valley and moved west to the San Juan Capistrano Mission south of San Antonio. On arrival they were subjected to an Indian raid, Sarah’s son barely escaping capture a second time. The Howards later moved farther down the San Antonio River to southern Goliad County. There they experienced more Indian raids and again fled, this time to the vicinity of present-day Hallettsville, in Lavaca County. Finally finding peace there, Sarah gave birth to three daughters, and her husband was named a county judge. In their later years the Howards moved once more, settling in Bosque County, where Sarah died on March 28, 1870, of natural causes. She had been with Phillip for more than half of her 60 years—her reward after long years of hardship.

this article first appeared in wild west magazine

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Maj. Samuel Woodfill’s Army career is the stuff of legend. It’s no surprise that, as a result, the Association of the United States Army released a graphic novel detailing the acts of heroism that earned him his Medal of Honor.

“General John Pershing recognized Samuel Woodfill as the most outstanding soldier of the First World War,” according to AUSA.

On Oct. 12, 1918, in the midst of the Meuse-Argonne offensive, then-1st Lt. Woodfill was with the 60th Infantry near the town of Cunel, France, when their advance came under heavy fire.

“Followed by two soldiers at 25 yards, this officer went out ahead of his first line toward a machine-gun nest and worked his way around its flank, leaving the two soldiers in front,” his citation reads.

As Woodfill approached, the machine gun firing stopped and four German soldiers attacked. Woodfill shot three and “attempted to club the officer with his rifle.”

After a struggle, Woodfill shot the soldier with his pistol.

His unit continued the advance until it was met with yet another machine gun barrage.

“Woodfill rushed ahead of his line in the face of heavy fire from the nest, and when several of the enemy appeared above the nest, he shot them, capturing three other members of the crew and silencing the gun,” according to the citation.

The unit then encountered a third machine gun nest manned by five German soldiers, which Woodfill took out with his rifle. He tried but failed to subdue two additional troops with his revolver. Instead, he took up a pick-axe in the trench and engaged them in close-quarters combat.

“Inspired by the exceptional courage displayed by this officer, his men pressed on to their objective under severe shell and machine-gun fire,” the citation notes.

For these acts of valor, Pershing presented the Medal of Honor to Woodfill on Feb. 9, 1919.

But Woodfill’s story started much earlier in his hometown of Madison, Indiana, where he attempted to join the Army at age 15 to fight in the Spanish-American War. Turned down, he joined in 1901 when he was 18.

In 1917, he was made and officer and promoted to the rank of second lieutenant.

Woodfill served in the Army until retiring in 1923, but was recalled in 1942 at the outset of World War II.

“He was given special clearance to serve and, at 59, was still an excellent marksman,” according to the Defense Department archives. “But he hit the mandatory retirement age of 60 in 1943, so his third bout of service was short-lived.”

Woodfill died in 1951 and was buried in Indiana, however, in 1955, his remains were reinterred at Arlington National Cemetery — next to Pershing.

You can download a free copy of this graphic novel here.

Originally published by Military Times, our sister publication.

On a brisk morning, Chuck Byrn and I plop ourselves on a bench that often serves as his refuge from the 21st century. During the Battle of Franklin, Tenn., on November 30, 1864, the ground before us became a hellscape of bloody and broken bodies and shattered lives. A decade ago, two pizza restaurants and other urban schlock stood here. Now it’s a small park thanks to remarkable work by battlefield preservationists.

As two American flags flutter nearby, Byrn and I swap Civil War stories and a few fibs. He’s proud of his Jewish heritage as well as the Algonquin, Cherokee, Creek, Welsh, Scotch Irish, and Spanish in his blood. The 68-year-old Tennessee native—a retired history teacher, Grateful Dead and Doors fan, and docent at the historic Lotz House nearby—is also 100 percent character. I relish character, characters, and beards like Byrn’s milky-white extravaganza.

And Civil War stories, too. Byrn dispenses his in shotgun-like bursts.

In between tokes of house blend whiskey tobacco from his epic, carved Richard Nixon meerschaum pipe, he tells me about another character, Franklin’s own “Miss Annie.” Annie May Gatlin was her full name—her home once stood across Columbia Pike near the Fountain Carter House, vortex of the battle. She liked to remind Byrn that her grandaddy fought at Franklin and Confederate Brig. Gen. Otho F. Strahl died in her backyard.

In the late 1970s, Byrn served as a docent at the Carter farmhouse, which remains a popular battlefield attraction today. The bullet-riddled farm office yards away served as the de facto battlefield visitors center. Byrn remembers bullets from the battle filling a large terra cotta bowl there. Before he began his Sunday shift, Byrn would visit “Miss Annie,” who served him mai tais.

“And this woman could pour one,” Byrn says while a cloud of smoke from his pipe drifts into the cool Tennessee air.

Good gawd, we all need a “Miss Annie” in our lives.

Besides a mai tai buzz, Byrn’s docent shift sometimes included a surprise or two. A man once beckoned him to his car and opened the trunk, revealing a bayonet wrapped in a near-pristine Goodyear rubber blanket from the war. The edged weapon, the man insisted, lay atop the belly of his 20th Tennessee ancestor, Colonel Bill Shy, who died at the Battle of Nashville. The blanket, he said, wrapped Shy’s body.

“Mind-blowing,” Byrn says.

Byrn recalls another visitor, a man in his late 90s, who said he had lived in the Carter House in the early 1900s.

“We couldn’t walk barefoot out in the yard without stepping on bone fragments and teeth,” the old man told Byrn.

On Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, Byrn works at the Lotz House astride the Columbia Pike. During the battle, the frightened Lotz and Carter families and others huddled in the Carters’ basement while the gates of hell opened outside. In a pivotal moment of the battle, Colonel Emerson Opdycke’s brigade charged past the Lotz House to plug a hole in the U.S. Army line.

About 70 minutes before his shift starts, Byrn readies the Lotz House for visitors. Then, carrying a bacon cheeseburger, coffee, and his ornate cane, he walks the short distance for a respite in the park. Yards away from his bench are foundation stones of the old Carter cotton gin, all that remains from the landmark that stood only yards behind Union lines. After parking himself on the bench, Byrn envisions a beautiful Indian summer day in November 1864. 

For a few minutes, Byrn blots out the sound of all modern intrusions. Then he imagines the thunderous roar of gunfire of this often-overlooked Western Theater battle. The five-hour brawl resulted in roughly 8,500 casualties—2,300 for the U.S. Army, 6,200 for John Bell Hood’s Army of Tennessee. It was one of the rare Civil War battles fought almost entirely at night.

“Thousands of screaming Confederates were rushing toward us right here,” Byrn says, pointing his cane toward a modern, residential neighborhood. Behind their earthworks, Union soldiers five and six deep fired into the charging mass.

Often alone and deep in thought during these park visits, Byrn occasionally hears a strange rustling behind him. But no one’s ever there. Sometimes he even smells sweaty horses. We both marvel at the humanity lost in this small park.

Near us, in front of the 6th Ohio Light Battery position that’s marked today by two cannons, the “ground was literally covered with human bodies,” a 104th Ohio soldier remembered.

Another Union soldier said he “could scarcely walk without stepping on a body.”

Near U.S. Army earthworks, a Union soldier recalled a poor Confederate soldier begging “for the love of Christ” to have a pile of corpses pulled off him.

Another Ohioan recalled the dead “laid in every position imaginable.”

On this cloudless, deep-blue sky morning, a couple walks their dog over the same ground, near a gravel pathway that marks the line of Union earthworks. It is surreal.

If we expand our scope just a little beyond the park, tragic stories lurk everywhere.

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To our right, across Columbia Pike, 20th Tennessee officer Tod Carter fell near his boyhood home. The 24-year-old soldier died in the house where he was born.

Across Cleburne Street in front of us, near a monument of faux cannonballs forming a pyramid, Irish-born division commander Patrick Cleburne suffered a mortal wound. Confederate soldiers  found the general the next morning, his kepi partly covering his eyes.

In the far distance to our left, in the heart of what today is another modern, residential neighborhood, bullets riddled Brig. Gen. John Adams. He charged the Federals’ line astride his white steed, “Old Charley.” Strahl, Adams, and Cleburne—the “Stonewall of the West”—were three of the six Confederate generals to suffer mortal wounds at Franklin. All of them have streets named after them near where we sit.

Byrn especially admires Tod Carter, Adams, and Cleburne—“good God what balls he had,” he says of the Irishman—but prefers to focus on the “Willies and Joes.” That’s his term for the common soldiers who often reside in the shadows of history. 

“I can feel their presence everywhere here,” he says of them.

One of those “Willies and Joes” is Henry Walters Cowman, a private in the 175th Ohio. The bushy-haired Cowman was just a kid, eight months shy of 17, when he enlisted in September 1864. He apparently lied about his age. Mom was a widow. Henry’s older brother, John, served with the 2nd Ohio Heavy Artillery.

At Franklin, the 175th Ohio’s first battle of the war, a bullet crashed into Cowman’s right arm —“over where the Bunganut Pig is today,” says Byrn. It’s a popular restaurant/beer joint about 50 yards behind us. Perhaps Cowman suffered the wound in his regiment’s desperate charge to the front.

 “I tell you papa, that was a trying time for new men but I thought there was a chance for a new laurel so I started and so did all the rest,” a 175th Ohio soldier recalled of the charge. “Papa, I went mad, I did not think of danger.”

Cowman’s sister helped care for Henry in a hospital in Jeffersonville, Ind., where the teen died from a gangrene infection on January 24, 1865.

Day Elmore of the 36th Illinois is another of Byrn’s boys. A farmer, he enlisted as a drummer in August 1861. Like Cowman, he was just a kid, only 17 when he joined the army. Elmore stood 5-foot-4 and had dark complexion with brown eyes and brown hair. In a wartime image, he posed with a Colt New Model Revolving rifle that was nearly as tall as he was.

At Chickamauga in September 1863, he suffered a serious lung wound. At Franklin, he suffered another wound, this time fatal. Elmore died a little more than a week after the battle. He was 20.

George W. Heckman of the 104th Ohio was in the fight at the cotton gin. The private is one of Byrn’s guys, too.

Heckman’s son, Walter, served in the U.S. Army during World War I. Decades after the war, he became a liaison for WWI veterans for the VA in Nashville. In 1970, Walter—who grew up in a Grand Army of the Republic orphans’ home—told stories about his dad to Byrn and his mother.

“Brother Heckman,” Byrn calls his fellow Mason.

That’s how close we are to the Civil War.

Before we depart his refuge, Byrn points to a photo on a historical marker. 

“Don’t forget about him,” he says.

The image is of a bull terrier named Harvey, the beloved mascot of the 104th Ohio—“The Barking Dog Regiment.” The unit had several dogs, raccoons, and at least two squirrels as pets.

Despite the 104th Ohio’s precarious position at Franklin, Harvey somehow survived. So did his master. It was a rare glimmer of sunshine amid the gloom of late November 1864.

“I love Harvey,” Byrn says.

Then, pipe in his mouth and cane in hand, he returns to the Lotz House. For now, Byrn leaves his haven and the spirits of the “Willies and Joes” behind but never forgotten.

John Banks is author of three Civil War books. Check out his latest, A Civil War Road Trip of a Lifetime (Gettysburg Publishing). Banks frequently posts to his Civil War Facebook page, John Banks’ Civil War blog.

this article first appeared in civil war times magazine

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The following press report appeared in the Melbourne Argus on May 26, 1948: “This Australian-built CA-15 fight­er in a test flight yesterday flew at 502.2 mph—believed to be the highest speed ever attained in Australia by a single-engined aircraft. It was piloted by Flight-Lieut. J.A. Lee Archer in a twofold test and exhibition flight over Melbourne. It reached top speed after pulling out of a 4,000-foot dive. In ordinary level flying it flew at 450 mph—20 mph more than the Mustang’s top speed.”

For a piston-engine airplane to exceed 500 mph, however briefly, was no mean feat. Not until 1969 would American pilot Darryl Greenamyer, flying a heavily modified Grumman F8F Bearcat from Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., establish an official piston-engine speed record of 482.46 mph. Moreover, any fighter with performance superior to the North Amer­ican P-51D Mustang was not to be taken lightly. That such an airplane was built by a relative newcomer to designing high-performance aircraft, Australia’s Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation (CAC), was without doubt an impressive achieve­ment. Just as significant, however, is the date on which the plane made that news-making flight. On October 14, 1947, the rocket-powered Bell XS-1 had broken the sound barrier at a speed of 700 mph. By 1948, jet fighters were already approaching that speed. Whatever its merits, the CA-15 fighter was obsolete before it left the runway.

For Australia, the formidable task of designing a fighter was a case of necessity’s being the mother of invention. In the first few weeks of December 1941, the Japanese effectively crippled the striking power of the United States and Britain, leaving Australia isolated, vulnerable and very threatened. On December 21, CAC began improvising a home-built single-seat fighter from the airframe of its CA-3 Wirraway trainer (a license-built version of the North American NA-33, predecessor of the famous AT-6). The result, completed on May 29, 1942, was the CA-12 Boomerang, of which 250 would be built by 1943.

The Boomerang’s performance did not quite match that of its principal opponent, the Mitsubishi A6M2 Zero, but by the summer of 1942 the Japanese onslaught had abated somewhat, and Allied fighters like the Curtiss P-40E and Super­marine Spitfire were being made available to the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF). The Boomerang was used to provide ground support in New Guinea, a role in which the agile little plane excelled. A CA-12 was always a welcome sight to Australian troops, and its tactic of jinking about over the jungle at a low level, goading Japanese troops to fire and give away their position (with dire consequences to them if they did), earned it the nickname “Boomer,” Aussie slang for a young male kangaroo.

The Boomerang was developed in a remarkably short time, to the great credit of CAC’s design staff. It also inspired the RAAF to formulate a more ambitious pro­ject for the company—a high-performance, long-range, medium-altitude warplane. CAC initially considered simply upgrading the Boomerang, but it soon became clear that its airframe would not be able to accommodate the increases in weight and power involved.

Any further work on the new airplane, however, had to be shelved in the face of a more immediate commitment. In 1943, CAC sent the first of a series of engineering teams to North American Aviation in the United States to prepare to license-produce the Rolls-Royce Merlin-engine variant of the P-51 at the CAC factory at Fishermen’s Bend, Victoria. Meanwhile, the CAC design team began reassessing the RAAF’s 1942 specification, with the revised goal of fulfilling it by creating a successor to the Mustang.

Numerous conferences were held between CAC and the RAAF to finalize the details of the CA-15, as the new fighter was designated. The Mustang’s excellent performance caused the RAAF to con­tinually upgrade its requirements, so it was not until 1944 that a specification was finally agreed upon. Emulating the P-51’s features, the CA-15 was to be an all-metal, stressed-skin aircraft with a semimonocoque fuselage and a wing employing a laminar-flow airfoil section.

Unlike the Mustang, however, the Australian fighter was designed around an 18-cylinder, twin-row Pratt & Whitney R-2800-10W Double Wasp fan-cooled radi­al engine, with a military rating of 2,000 hp that could be upgraded to 2,300 hp with water injection. A turbosupercharger and intercooler were to be mounted be­hind the engine. Exhaust gases from the turbo, combined with cooling air from the fan, would be ejected from an efflux duct below the fuselage, thus providing a measure of supplementary thrust. 

Shortly after construction finally began on the new design, the CAC team was told that for some inexplicable reason the Pratt & Whitney engine would not be available. After considering alternate power plants, the designers decided to install a Rolls-Royce Griffon 61 liquid-cooled V-12 engine. The designers envisioned using a three-speed supercharger, but until that state-of-the-art feature could be obtained, a two-speed, two-state supercharger was installed as an interim measure.

Changing from an air-cooled radial to an in-line water-cooled engine made it necessary to completely redesign the forward part of the fuselage. In addition, the CAC designers and the RAAF took some time deciding on what sort of armament the new fighter should have. After examining several combinations of 20mm cannons and .50-caliber machine guns, CAC decided to install six .50-caliber guns in the wings, with 280 rounds per gun. The plane was also expected to carry 10 rockets or two 1,000-pound bombs under the wings.

The war in the Pacific was over by the time construction of the CA-15 resumed. Finally, early in 1946, the CA-15 prototype (A62-1001) was wheeled out of CAC’s factory at Fishermen’s Bend. Aside from a somewhat corpulent profile, it did not look bad for a plane that had gone through a radical redesign. It bore a superficial resemblance to the P-51D from some angles. The low-drag, laminar-flow wing, with a maximum thickness of 45 percent chord, was a two-piece structure joined on the fuselage centerline and consisted of formed sheet-metal spars and ribs, with flush-riveted metal skin. The metal-skinned ailerons had shrouded nose balances with fabric seals. The hydraulically operated underwing flaps had a 20-degree setting for takeoff and a 50-degree setting for landing. Fuel was carried in wing tanks accommodating 220 imperial gallons and a fuselage tank containing 40 imperial gallons, which could be supplemented by two 100-imperial-gallon drop tanks under the wings to provide a maximum range of 1,150 miles. The inward-retracting main landing gear used a Dowty Live-Line hydraulic system. The clearest departure from the Mustang’s silhouette could be seen in the horizontal surfaces of the CA-15’s flush-riveted all-metal tail assembly, which were set at a 9-degree dihedral angle.

The Griffon engine, which was supported by sheet-metal bearers, drove a 12-foot, 6-inch-diameter Rotol constant-speed propeller with compressed wooden blades. The cooling system consisted of a Morris-type, single-row intercooler with a liquid-cooled heat exchanger for the oil system, followed by a three-row main radiator and thermostatically controlled variable efflux. The cooling system was housed under the fuselage in what looked like an exaggerated version of the Mustang’s underside, which probably accounted for the CA-15’s strictly unofficial nickname of “Kangaroo.” The pilot enjoyed an excellent all-around view inside an aft-sliding bubble canopy. Provision was made for the canopy, headrest and rear armor to be jettisoned in an emergency. The wingspan of the CA-15 was 36 feet, with a wing area of 253 square feet. The length was 36 feet 21⁄2 inches, and the height was 14 feet 23⁄4 inches.

When CAC test pilot Jim Schofield took the CA-15 up for its maiden flight at Fishermen’s Bend on March 4, 1946, he made history of a dubious sort—his plane was the last piston-engine fighter prototype of original design to fly. The Soviet La­vochkin La-11 flew somewhat later, but it was no more than a refinement of the La-9. Although CAC already knew that jet turbines were eclipsing its creation, the manufacturer’s trials continued until June 27, 1946. The plane was then passed on to No.1 Air Performance Unit (APU) at Point Cook, Victoria, for calibration and performance trials, which started on July 27. The test pilots involved were Wing Commanders J.H. Harper and G.D. Marshall, Squadron Leaders D.R. Cuming, G.C. Brunner, C.W. Stark and G.H. Shields, and Flt. Lt. J.A. Lee Archer.

Official tests yielded a maximum climb rate of 4,900 feet per minute from sea level to 7,600 feet, flying without guns or ammunition. Range with the normal 220-gallon fuel supply was 1,150 miles. The Griffon 61 engine was rated at 2,305 hp at 7,000 feet.

this article first appeared in AVIATION HISTORY magazine

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All of the CA-15’s controls were found to be powerful and positive. In level flight, the ailerons were light at normal speeds, becoming firmer at higher speeds. Elevators were firm at all speeds. The rud­der’s handling was firm at normal speeds, but be­came heavy at higher speeds. Stall tests revealed that there was little warning of the stall, which took the form of buffeting over the tail surfaces at about 97 mph with flaps and undercarriage up, and 90 mph with them lowered, after which the left wing and nose tended to drop slowly. Recovery was quick and normal.

The CA-15 crash-landed on December 10 after a failure in a pressure gauge allowed all the fluid to drain out of both the main and emergency hydraulic systems. Since the RAAF already had a perfectly competent piston-engine fighter in the Mustang and was planning to replace it with jets in the future, the RAAF was in no hurry to proceed with testing the indigenously built CA-15. Consequently, the damaged plane was not returned to CAC for repairs until June 1947.

Meanwhile, the RAAF presented the results of its test flights on May 27, 1947. Its conclusion was: “In general the CA-15 is a very pleasant, straight forward aeroplane, easy to fly and with no apparent vices. The view in flight is very good, particularly over the nose. At present handling is marred by the excessive change of rudder trim with variation of power and/or speed. When this is cured a very pleasant aeroplane should result.” What the report neglected to mention was that no amount of improvements at that point would be likely to earn the CA-15 a production contract.

The repaired CA-15 was delivered to No.1 Aircraft Depot at Laverton, Victoria, for the chief technical officer’s inspection on May 19, 1948. On May 20, it was transferred to the Aircraft Research and Development Unit (ARDU), RAAF Laverton, and on May 25 Flt. Lt. Lee Archer made his eyebrow-raising flight over Melbourne. But that news-making flight marked the climax of a design whose promise had been lost years be­fore. A limited test program continued until 1950, during which an official maximum speed of 448 mph was attained at 26,400 feet. The service ceiling was 34,000 feet. What the plane could have done had it received the Griffon with the three-speed supercharger would never be known—and in any case was a moot point.

The end came on February 7, 1950, when Air Board Agendum No. 9530 recommended that flying of the CA-15 cease because a lack of spare parts made it uneconomical to maintain the airplane. Also, the Department of Supply and Development requested that the two Griffon engines, which had been supplied on loan from Great Britain, be returned. Finally, on May 1, 1950, the CA-15 was trans­ferred from ARDU to No. 1 Aircraft Depot for conversion to components.

Had it been completed in 1943 or even 1944, the CAC CA-15 would undoubtedly have been one of the outstanding aircraft of World War II. Instead, an ironic combination of immediate wartime need, followed by the lack thereof, so delayed its gestation that by the time it finally did take to the sky, it had become no more than a footnote in the epilogue of piston-engine fighter aircraft. 

Q: I am in my 80s and have read numerous books on World War II—but in all my years I have never seen who came up with the names of the five beaches on D-Day. Can you help?
—Robert Palmer, Pass Christian, Mississippi

A: The code names for the Normandy landing beaches are well known, but their exact origins are murky at best. In theory, World War II code names were randomly assigned from existing code books and were frequently changed due to concerns over security or appearance. Hence the three British/Canadian beaches were originally designated after species of fish: Gold, Jelly, and Sword. However, according to legend, no less a personage than Winston Churchill himself objected to the term “Jelly Beach”—he considered it too frivolous for the site where Canadian forces would kill and die, and suggested Juno in its place. (Churchill also objected to early code names for the entire invasion: “Roundup,” “Sledgehammer,” and the melded term “Roundhammer.” Churchill insisted on the more magisterial sounding “Overlord.”) Lesser known is “Band Beach,” proposed in a swampy area east of Sword. Considered for a possible landing, it was eventually deemed unnecessary and unsuitable. Presumably the term came from the bandfish species. 

The origin of the American beach names is also uncertain. One anecdote, recorded by British historian Peter Caddick-Adams, recounts that two American soldiers were assigned to perform carpentry work at the headquarters of U.S. general Omar Bradley in London as the invasion plans were being developed. Chatting with the soldiers, Bradley discovered one was from Omaha, Nebraska, and the other from Provo, Utah. Soon, “Omaha” and “Utah” beaches appeared on Bradley’s planning maps to replace the code names “X-Ray” and “Yoke.” Caddick-Adams calls this an “intriguing addendum to history, but impossible to verify.” 

Regardless of the origins, the names Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno, and Sword have made the transition from top-secret terms to common geographic usage in ways no other code names ever have.

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The Desert Fox walked its steps. German officers prepared their defense of the Normandy coast in its hallways. Paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne fought on the terrain nearby, not far from D-Day’s Utah Beach. 

Now the nonprofit Normandy Institute wants to convert the Chateau de Bernaville and its 50 surrounding acres into a nonprofit campus and conference center, where students, scholars, policymakers, and military leaders can come to bask in the French countryside and consider the bloody history that unfolded there—and ways to prevent a recurrence.

The institute, incorporated in 2016, is raising money (normandyinstitute.org/support-us) for a planned $25-million makeover of the property, including the construction of a 60-room residence hall. Much of the work will involve restoring the chateau into an 11-room guesthouse, putting 30 guest rooms in the estate’s carriage house, and transforming the conservatory into a dining room and conference hall that can hold 350. A small chapel is also available for weddings and other gatherings. 

Dorothea de La Houssaye, chair of the institute, says the location is perfect for conferences and educational retreats—beautiful countryside with a deep history. But the surrounding area is bereft of significant hotel capacity. So the Normandy Institute hopes to fill the gap and attract conference goers from, say, NATO headquarters in Brussels, 360 miles to the north, to discuss military strategy and diplomacy. “We want to leave something behind that future generations can forever use and enjoy,” she said.

Occupying German forces used the chat-eau as a headquarters as they braced for the Allied invasion that would come on June 6, 1944; there’s a photograph of German general Erwin Rommel, the Desert Fox, descending the steps of the chateau three weeks before D-Day. (Rommel wasn’t around when the fighting started, having returned to Germany for his wife’s birthday.)

The Normandy Institute has long pursued D-Day-related projects. It’s raising money for a documentary about retired U.S. Army Colonel Keith Nightingale’s Normandy tours with D-Day veterans, and last year it released a short film about the 2005 reunion in Normandy, the Netherlands, and Belgium of the Band of Brothers—the men of Easy Company, 2nd Battalion of the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division, whose story was told in Stephen Ambrose’s 1992 book and HBO’s 2001 miniseries.

The Chateau de Bernaville is a three-hour drive from Paris and can be reached by train on the Paris-Cherbourg line.

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Robert W. Wood, an American studying chemistry and physics at the University of Berlin, received a letter from Otto Lilienthal on August 8, 1896. Lilienthal was the German experimenter who had become known as the “Flying Man” after gaining international attention with his glider flights over the previous five years. His letter was an invitation for Wood to join him the following day in the hills north of Berlin, where Wood said the engineer “was in the habit of exercising every Sunday with his flying machine.”

Wood, 28, had watched Lilienthal make several successful flights with his glider the previous Sunday. He had even attempted two glider flights himself, with mixed results. Lilienthal’s glider exercise “produces an impression that can never be forgotten,” Wood wrote. But the American was busy preparing for a trip to Siberia, so he was unable to join his friend this time. As a result, he was “spared the ordeal of witnessing the dreadful accident which caused his death, the news of which reached Berlin the following evening.” 

Wood wrote those words from London on October 16, 1896, part of a lengthy description of the flights Lilienthal had made the week before his fatal crash. The story, published later that month in the Boston Evening Transcript newspaper, provides one of the most detailed accounts of Lilienthal and his glider flights, and is a reminder of how the German’s work and the hundreds of test flights he made helped advance the science of aeronautics. 

Lilienthal’s life and his death inspired Wilbur and Orville Wright to make history a few years later. “My own active interest in aeronautical problems dates back to the death of Lilienthal in 1896,” Wilbur Wright said, adding Lilienthal had “accomplished so much.”

Otto Lilienthal was born in 1848 in Anklam, a town in what was then Prussia. As a child he became transfixed by the flight of birds, mesmerized by and jealous of their ability to glide effortlessly across the sky. His fascination with the shape of different birds’ wings would later help him design the wings of his gliders. 

After graduating from Berlin’s Royal Technical Academy in 1870 with a degree in mechanical engineering, Lilienthal volunteered for military service and fought in the Franco-Prussian War. Even before that he had started working with his brother, Gustav (born in 1849), to study and build gliders. These early studies dated as far back as 1867.

Lilienthal made his living as a mechanical and construction engineer but remained committed to the study of aeronautics. “My brother and I, who were then young and wholly without means, used to spare from our breakfast, penny by penny, the money to prosecute our investigations; and often the struggle for life compelled us to interrupt them indefinitely,” he said. The brothers became members of the Aeronautical Society of Great Britain in 1873 and Otto gave his first public lecture that same year on bird flight. 

In 1883 the elder Lilienthal founded a successful company in Berlin that manufactured boilers and steam engines. He later used the factory to build his gliders. In 1889 he published Birdflight as the Basis of Aviation, one of the first scientific studies of aeronautics. The Wright brothers would later use calculations from the book as a guide for their early glider designs.

By the 1890s, hot-air balloons were all the rage, with inventors working on bigger, better airships that could fly faster and farther. Lilienthal was not one of them. “I have always regarded the balloon, and the exclusive attention which it so attracted, as a hinderance rather than a help to the development of the art of flight,” he said in an 1894 story in the New York Herald. “If it had never been invented, it is probable that more serious investigations would have been prosecuted toward other solutions of the problem.”

Unlike Lilienthal, many leading scientists of the day remained skeptical about the art of flight. “While we were devoting every moment of our spare time to the solution of the problem, almost everyone in Germany regarded the man who would waste his energies in such unproductive labor as a fool,” Lilienthal told the Herald. Years earlier, a distinguished professor of mathematics at the Berlin Industrial Academy told Lilienthal it would “do no harm” to amuse himself with his glider experiments, “but warned me earnestly against putting any money into them.” 

Lilienthal continued to believe that understanding the curved, tapered shape of the wings of flying birds would provide the key to success for manned flight. In Birdflight as the Basis of Aviation, Lilienthal wrote that it is “unmistakable that the wide portion of the wing close to the body, which does little work and has little movement, is intended for sustaining, whilst the narrower tips, with their much greater amplitude of movement, have to furnish the tractive power necessary to compensate for the resistance of the bird’s body and for any possible restraining component.”

Never satisfied with theory alone, Lilienthal constructed his first piloted glider in 1891. He called it the Derwitzer Glider. It had curved wings with a span of 23 feet and weighed about 40 pounds. The design was similar to modern hang gliders. 

Lilienthal was able to glide about 80 feet in the Derwitzer. Encouraged by this early success, Otto and Gustav built a succession of gliders over the next few years, tinkering with the shape and length of the wings and the materials they used in the quest to make them lighter. They designed nine different models, including a biplane glider and even a version with flapping wings. Early in their experiments, Lilienthal said, he “gave up all efforts toward propulsion, and applied myself to the discovery of the simplest form of wing that would enable me to sail steadily through the air on a gentle incline, and by practice to master the wind, that hereditary foe of all aeronauts.” He later tinkered with a powered glider, hoping to mimic the flapping of the wings of a bird. From 1893 to 1896 he experimented with a small engine powered by carbonic acid. According to a newspaper story from 1894, the motor “acted with such unexpected vigor that the wings were broken, and the modifications thus shown to be necessary will require some time for their completion.”

Lilienthal made more than 2,000 glider test flights and eventually was flying up to 300 yards on a regular basis. Newspaper accounts from around the world described his experiments. “He flies stretches of several hundred yards, and feels as much at home sixty feet above ground as he does six feet,” wrote Britain’s Guardian on December 30, 1893. “He can also guide the machine.” An 1894 headline in the Chicago Tribune declared, “He Flies as a Bird.”

The Flying Man described his latest glider model and the art of flying in a newspaper story published in several American newspapers in 1894. By this point his glider was composed primarily of woven muslin stretched over ribs of willow. In addition to the two muslin-covered wings, this glider had rudders for additional stability; a vertical rudder in the back shaped like a palm leaf and a flat, horizontal rudder in front of the wings. Lilienthal sat on a narrow support seat suspended beneath the apparatus, with his head sticking up above the wings. On some gliders Lilienthal could swing each wing forward as he took to the air to maximize lift. He began a flight at the top of a hill, running against the wind. At the edge of the hill he would leap into the air, spreading his wings as wide as possible, and sail majestically across the sky. 

Mastering wind currents was a delicate balancing act. “The operator must be able in a moment to transfer the center of gravity so far to the rear as to overcome the action of the air, which might otherwise tend to throw him forward and precipitate him to the earth,” Lilienthal said. “It is not easy to realize in practice at first, but after a short experience the movement becomes almost involuntary.”

Lilienthal sold at least two of his gliders in 1896. One was to the New York Journal, owned by media mogul William Randolph Hearst, who never turned down an opportunity for publicity. The newspaper recruited a local athlete, Harry Bodine, who attempted to fly the glider on April 24, 1896, “a date which will hereafter occupy a permanent place in the history of aeronautics,” the Journal proclaimed.

Bodine made several attempts to run, jump and glide, but “the wind struck the wings with such force as to almost throw machine and operator over backward.” Someone then suggested flying the glider as a manned kite. Local illustrator Frank Ver Beck was on hand and he volunteered to pilot the machine. Three strong men were recruited to pull the 50-foot rope attached to the glider. When they started running, “man and machine shot twenty feet into the air. The rope was torn from the hands of the men with lightning velocity, taking particles of flesh from one hand as it went.” Ver Beck remained aloft for a few seconds before returning to earth, “not very slowly or yet very gracefully.” The right wing hit the ground first, breaking a few of the wooden ribs. Had Ver Beck known how to pilot the glider, the Journal story surmised, he could have flown at least 300 yards.

The glider was repaired the next day and the wind was a bit calmer. Bodine made several untethered test flights, gliding only 10 to 15 feet at a time. A day later he soared 75 yards. The new pilot was smitten. “There is an overwhelming ambition to reach the clouds,” Bodine said. “Strangely enough, too, after you leave the earth there is not the least bit of fear.”

Octave Chanute, a French American engineer and aviation pioneer, also purchased a Lilienthal glider. Chanute and three others—one of them an early researcher into manned flight named Augustus M. Herring—assembled the glider on the banks of a lake about 30 miles south of Chicago in June 1896, drawing a crowd as they worked. “The natives waited patiently for the boat to be brought out, thinking a sail on the lake was in prospect,” wrote the Chicago Tribune. “A panic struck them when they saw Mr. Herring mount the odd-shaped affair and sail through the air.” Herring made several flights, once gliding as far as 80 feet. According to the Tribune, Lilienthal’s machines “have found their way to almost every country in Europe and to the United States, but few except the inventor have been able to master the problems of their manipulation.”

Wood visited Lilienthal’s factory in Berlin later that summer and “it was here that I first became really acquainted with him,” he wrote. In a small corner of the boiler and engine factory he saw the Flug Apparat, or flight apparatus department, where several men were assembling a new glider with enormous wings. Lilienthal “explained every detail of its construction, little realizing that he was destined never to put it to actual test.” A week later Wood accompanied Lilienthal, his 14-year-old son and a “manservant” on an expedition to the hills north of Berlin. First they took a train to Neustadt and from there a horse-drawn cart carried the party the 20 miles to Rhinow. Storks flew above and Lilienthal told Wood they were “his teachers.” The party had lunch at an inn in Rhinow where, Wood wrote, Lilienthal’s “arrival always causes a hum of excitement among the peasants.” They loaded a glider, which Lilienthal kept in a local barn, onto the wagon, and drove to the base of the hills. “A more ideal spot for flying could hardly be conceived,” Wood wrote.

There they assembled the glider, and “so perfectly was the machine fitted together that it was impossible to find a loose cord or brace, and the cloth everywhere under such tension that the whole machine rang like a drum when rapped with the knuckles.” They carried the glider up a hill, and then to the top of a 30-foot tower Lilienthal had built. The pilot wore a flannel shirt and knee-length breeches with thickly padded knees. The padding was in case of a hard landing “for in such an emergency he had learned to drop instantly to his knees after striking with his feet….” Over hundreds of flights he had made over the past few years Lilienthal had survived several emergency landings with only minor injuries. 

Wood watched from below, camera ready, as Lilienthal took three quick steps forward and was immediately airborne. “He went over my head at a terrific pace, at an elevation of about fifty feet, the wind playing wild tunes on the tense cordage of the machine….” It happened so fast that Wood didn’t have time to take a photograph. And then, in what Wood called a forerunner of the disaster to come, the glider tipped sideways. Lilienthal twisted his body violently in the opposite direction and “brought the machine once more on even keel, and sailed away below me across the fields at the bottom, kicking at the tops of the haycocks as he passed over them.” Wood ran over to Lilienthal, who was out of breath. “Did you see that?” Lilienthal said. “I thought for a moment it was all up with me. I tipped so, then so, and I threw out my legs thus and righted it.”

Wood was very impressed by what he had witnessed. “I have seen high dives and parachute jumps from balloons, and many other feats of skill and daring, but I have never witnessed anything that strung the nerves to such a pitch of excitement or awakened such a feeling of enthusiasm and admiration as the wild fearless rush of Otto Lilienthal through the air,” he wrote.

Undaunted by his near accident, Lilienthal climbed back up the hill again and again to take off and glide down to the grassy pastures below while Wood took photographs. Late in the afternoon, Wood “managed to screw up enough courage to try the machine.” He found it difficult even to hold the 40-pound machine steady as the wind battered the wings. “The first feeling is one of utter helplessness,” Wood wrote.

He stood on the side of the hill far below where Lilienthal had started his flights, trying to get a feel for the glider. “I ran slowly against the wind, the weight of the machine lightening with each step, and presently felt the lifting force. The next instant my feet were off the ground…the apparatus tipped from side to side a good deal, but I managed to land safely, much to my satisfaction, and immediately determined to order a machine for myself and learn to fly.” Wood’s second attempt was less successful, as one of the wings dragged across the ground and he could not get airborne.

On the trip back to Berlin, Lilienthal discussed his plans with Wood. He hoped someday to construct a flying rink in Berlin “with an artificial slope which could be turned so as to always face the wind. Here people could come and hire machines and learn to use them, commencing with small elevations and gradually going higher up the slope, as practice gave them skill.” The proposed flying rink would serve as a laboratory of sorts, as Lilienthal would learn from the visitors and improve his gliders. He compared the development of the glider to that of the bicycle, saying that since no single person was responsible for the design of the bicycle, it “must be the same with the flying machine.”

A week later, Lilienthal made the trek to Rhinow to continue his weekly test flights. According to newspaper reports, he was about 50 feet in the air on one flight when disaster struck. “Suddenly his machine stopped and Lilienthal threw himself toward the rear,” newspapers reported. “The apparatus turned several somersaults and finally shot down like a rocket, Lilienthal striking the ground head first.” He died a day later, leaving behind a wife and four children. According to legend, his final words were: “Mine is the true inventor’s death; I am satisfied to die in the interest of science.” Another version is: “Sacrifices must be made.” It’s doubtful he said either.

Wood believed his friend had begun work that would ultimately lead to powered flight. He wrote, “If the unfortunate death of the pioneer does not deter others from experimenting along these lines, and it does not seem to me that it should, the results accumulated by him will not be lost and he will not have given up his life in a vain cause.”

Chanute remained as the thread that would connect Lilienthal to the Wright brothers. After his experiments with Lilienthal’s glider, Chanute went on to build gliders of his own design, and eventually met and advised the Wrights in the years leading up to their first successful flights. “Of all the men who attacked the flying problem in the 19th century, Otto Lilienthal was easily the most important,” wrote Wilbur Wright in a posthumous article that appeared in the September 1912 issue of the Aero Club of America Bulletin a few months after his death. “His greatness appeared in every phase of the problem.”

Augustus Herring continued his own research in aviation and on October 22, 1898, supposedly flew a powered glider he had designed. Later he partnered with aviation pioneer Glenn Curtiss to form the Herring-Curtiss Company.

Gustav Lilienthal continued to work on their concept for a wing-flapping aircraft. It was never successful. The “other Lilienthal” did find success in the housing industry as one of the pioneers of prefabricated housing. He died in 1933.

Wood had a long and successful career as a physics professor at Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins University. He was one of the inventors of tear gas, became a pioneer in the field of ultraviolet and infrared rays and served as a consultant on the Manhattan Project. Wood never forgot his time with Lilienthal and gave lectures over the years on the man and his machines. In 1907, perhaps inspired by Lilienthal, he tried, unsuccessfully, to build a steam-powered helicopter. Wood died in 1955 after living long enough to see the airplane advance far beyond anything Otto Lilienthal could have imagined. 

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Sampans glide silently in the darkness over an inland waterway in North Vietnam’s Red River Delta. Five Frenchmen and 120 Vietnamese commandos are on their way to make a deep behind-the-lines raid on Ho Chi Minh’s communist Viet Minh guerrillas. Their mission involves collecting intelligence, seizing prisoners for interrogation, and sowing confusion behind enemy lines. Among these nocturnal predators are many former Viet Minh fighters captured by the French. The lone French officer and his NCOs operate in the knowledge that they may be killed by their own men at any time. This was life for the French commandos in North Vietnam from 1951 to 1954, predecessors of the American Green Berets.

When Gen. Jean de Lattre de Tassigny became commander-in-chief of the French Far East Expeditionary Corps in December 1950, French forces had been struggling for nearly six years to reestablish control over the Indochina colonies. Japanese forces had destroyed the French occupation army in 1945, leaving a postwar power void exploited by Ho Chi Minh’s Viet Minh. The arrival of de Lattre, a legendary French soldier known to his men as “King Jean,” reinvigorated the badly demoralized Expeditionary Corps.

Realizing the futility of following the old rules of combat, de Lattre cleared out incompetent officers and introduced new ideas, weapons, and tactics, including a plan to create a series of new commando groups for use in northern Vietnam. Composed almost entirely of Vietnamese troops with a few French officers or NCOs in command, these units took the war to the Viet Minh using ruthless methods and intimate knowledge of the terrain. It was a war of no quarter, fought almost exclusively at night with knives as much as submachine guns by men disguised as the enemy—men with a special gift for killing in the dark.

Even before the World War II liberation of Paris, Free French leader Gen. Charles de Gaulle planned to reestablish French control of the Indochina colonies of Laos, Cambodia, and the three regions of Vietnam—Cochin-China in the south, the central region of Annam, and the northern region of Tonkin. In 1944, the first Free French commando groups, known as Gaurs (wild buffalo), were dropped into Japanese-occupied Laos. Torture was inevitable in cases of capture, and cyanide pills were issued regularly. Some commandos were highly trained veterans of the Free French companies of the British Special Air Service (SAS) and continued to wear the regiment’s berets.

On March 9, 1945, the Japanese Army deposed the French Vichy government in Indochina, slaughtering entire garrisons in surprise attacks. Two French Gaur groups were dropped into Tonkin by British planes to assist the withdrawal of a column of starving and bloodied French colonial troops. Few Gaurs survived, most dying in suicidal attempts to delay the Japanese.

These early commandos were reliant on British training, transport, and equipment, as the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS, the predecessor to the CIA) initially supported Ho Chi Minh’s nationalist guerrillas over the French. This preference was in line with President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s vision of a postwar world where national self-determination would replace European imperialism.

After years of bitter fighting in Vietnam’s jungles and mountains, the performance of mixed groups of French and Vietnamese commandos at the May-June 1951 Battle of Ninh Binh, also known as the Battle of the Day River, convinced de Lattre to make the commandos a formal part of the French Expeditionary Corps. When the Viet Minh’s 320th Division launched an offensive along the Day River, they were opposed by small French units holding two limestone crags at Ninh Binh. One of the peaks was held by “King Jean’s” son, Bernard de Lattre, following his father’s order to hold the French position at all costs. A mostly Vietnamese commando team led by a burly young NCO, Roger Vandenberghe, was called upon to reinforce the young lieutenant’s position by climbing the crag under heavy fire. Machine gun fire sent climbers plummeting down the cliff. Vandenberghe was eventually hit. Wounded, he signaled his second-in-command, Sgt. Tran Dinh Vy, to finish the assault. The slight but formidable Vietnamese sergeant was a former seminarian who had become a master of guerrilla tactics.

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During the attack, the bleeding Vandenberghe retrieved the body of his friend, Bernard, who had become a victim of Viet Minh mortar fire. This deed endeared him to de Lattre, who was deeply grieved by the loss of his only child. From then onward de Lattre acted as a patron to Vandenberghe, whose savage way of warfare nearly got him dismissed by French commanders who were alarmed by his methods. Days later, “King Jean,” who would later declare Vandenberghe “the greatest soldier in Indochina,” authorized the creation of formal French Army commando units. The French commandos fought brutal, no-quarter battles in a tropical darkness where the normal conventions of war held no sway.

Responsibility for organizing the commandos was handed to Louis Fourcade, commander of the 1st Battalion of Colonial Paratroopers. Fourcade spent World War II as an officer in the Vichy colonial army in Indochina, with secret contacts to Free French agents working across the border in China. He was involved in fighting the Japanese in the last months of the war. The new commando units normally included 120 Vietnamese under a European officer or senior NCO, aided by four other NCOs and at least one European radio operator. Captured Viet Minh prisoners were given the chance to avoid heavy labor by volunteering to join the new commando groups. This was a highly dangerous practice. While it recruited men intimately familiar with the enemy’s methods, it also handed arms to soldiers who might suddenly turn on their leaders at any time. Sleeping became as precarious for commando leaders as firefights with the enemy. To let one’s guard down for a minute was to invite death.

Training was carried out at the Vat Chay commando school by SAS veteran Capt. Michel Le-grand. Later training of the commandos was undertaken by one of the hardest men in the French Army—Yvan Tomassi, an officer of the Colonial Paratroops and a Free French veteran of fighting in Africa and Europe. In 1950, he lost his right hand while seizing a bomb from the hands of a trainee who had mistakenly set it to explode. Rather than retire, Tomassi continued to jump. He was appointed trainer of the commandos in February 1952. Captured leading a raid in January 1953, Tomassi spent six months in a Viet Minh prison camp. Once interned he was singled out by French communist turncoat Georges Boudarel, who tried to break him by forcing him to dig all the graves for the camp with his left arm and the stump of the right. Tomassi was kept busy as 85 percent of the prisoners in Camp 113 died from torture and mistreatment while being forced to sing the praises of Ho Chi Minh. The resilient Tomassi survived and continued to serve as a paratrooper until 1966. Amazingly, the unrepentant Boudarel was hired as a professor by a Paris university after the war.

The commandos learned to fight at night. As Capt. Jean-Louis Delayen of 13 Commando recalled: “After having overcome the visceral fear of the night, and the completion of special training requiring the greatest discipline, the [Vietnamese] auxiliaries were convinced that, lightly armed as they were, only night action could allow them to dominate an adversary unaccustomed to not be the only ones operating at night.” Internal cohesion was achieved by recovering commando families living in Viet Minh-occupied zones, building schools, pagodas, and married quarters beside the commando base, and forming a “big family” atmosphere through the cultivation of vegetables and the raising of chickens and pigs. The commandos did not perform normal military duties such as routine patrols or guarding military posts. When necessary, they operated in conjunction with regular troops on larger military operations.

The commandos used weapons captured from the Viet Minh, including Thompson submachine guns and World War II-era Sten guns. Grenade launchers and small 50- or 60mm mortars completed the light armament of these highly mobile units. Many commandos disguised themselves in the black cotton uniform of the Viet Minh, complete with sneakers, palm helmets, and a Red Star insignia.

To gather intelligence, the commandos ventured deep into enemy territory to observe movements, take prisoners, and disrupt communist political networks. Attendees at Viet Minh meetings lived in fear of French commandos bursting in and firing their Thompson submachine guns from the waist. The commandos were taught to aim at the feet of their targets in close combat, as the Thompsons tended to jump upward with recoil when fired. In his memoir, Sgt. Bernard Gaudin of 25 Commando described a 1952 night ambush during a deep raid on the Viet Minh. Ambushes meant hours of silent misery, with uniforms soaked by an endless drizzle. The raiders’ nerves were on a razor’s edge as their eyes strained to detect movement in the inky darkness. The torment of mosquitoes was unrelenting but had to be endured noiselessly. “Canh, my faithful corporal, whispers in my ear: ‘Chief, there are a lot of Viets.’ … Here we go, all the Commandos who are waiting for this break loose. We can finally cough, yell—it’s recommended. The bursts and explosions of grenades tear the night apart. Immediately, there is a pack of Viets on the mat. We hear them shouting orders to try a maneuver but we shoot at everything that moves.”

With prisoners taken and the Viet Minh column destroyed, Gaudin led his men back by a different route. The waiting Viet Minh began to rain down grenades as the commandos crossed a rice paddy. Two of Gaudin’s men were killed before fire raked the commandos from sharpshooters in the trees. A Dinassaut (armored landing craft squadron) made a welcome appearance on the river and laid down heavy fire until the shooting stopped.

Tiger Badge

This cap badge, featuring the image of a gaping tiger and an anchor, was the emblem of Roger Vandenberghe’s 24 Commando unit, who were known as “The Black Tigers.”  The inscription is the motto, “Rather death than shame,” or alternatively “Death before dishonor,” written in Vietnamese. Each commando unit had its own distinctive badge.

The Dinassaut were squadrons of surplus American shallow-draft LCMs (Landing Craft Mechanized), modified to bring heavy firepower to support infantry and commando operations in the shallow waterways of the Red River Delta. For this, the Dinassaut deployed heavy machine guns, 81mm mortars, and even tank turrets welded onto the crafts. They saved more than one commando group and were effective enough to serve as a model for later American river operations in the south.

The commandos returned to camp, where a blazing fire enabled the start of “Operation Leech,” as the men burned off blood-engorged parasites with a cigarette, dropping them to sizzle in the flames. Gaudin’s raid yielded a treasure trove of intelligence documents, including the cipher to the Viet Minh code. At other times, however, commandos were the victims. When Commando 34 operated in support of the besieged French garrison at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, Sgt. Müller led it into a devastating ambush, losing 68 of its 107 men.

Despite the challenges, it was necessary for commando leaders to continually demonstrate physical and mental strength or risk losing the men under them. For officers of the French regular army, this dirty, stressful, and highly dangerous work was commonly viewed as more likely to lead to an early death than promotion. Leadership roles were thus open to audacious individuals who may not have graduated from the French Saint-Cyr military academy, but were capable of innovation, independent action, and, most of all, killing Viet Minh. Contrary to expectations, the experience of the surviving commando leaders propelled them rapidly through the ranks after the French withdrawal from Indochina. Men who understood this “new warfare” would be needed in Algeria.

In response to the pressure of the commandos, the ever-adaptive Viet Minh created their own counter-commando force, the Dich Van, in 1947. This covert unit was assigned the task of infiltrating native troop formations aligned with the French Expeditionary Corps, often by intimidating the families of pro-French fighters. Dich Van propaganda teams recruited Foreign Legion deserters to persuade French Expeditionary Corps prisoners in French, German, and other European languages to adopt Marxist ideology and take up arms against their former comrades.

Several French commanders achieved fame in this highly unconventional form of combat, where merciless hand-to-hand fighting was the norm. One of these was a solid, thick-set Corsican lieutenant, Charles Alphonse Rusconi. For his ferocious fighting style, the Corsican was known as Le Sanglier, “the wild boar.” Rusconi began his military career in 1936 by joining the Colonial Army’s 10th Regiment of Senegalese Riflemen. He led several daring commando raids behind German lines in 1940 before being wounded and captured. Escaping two months later, he joined the French forces in Indochina in 1948, forming a commando group from Viet Minh prisoners and Black Colonial Army troops from Mali. The latter described their commander as “small, but cunning.” Through unrelenting attacks that shattered Viet Minh morale, his group battered down communist activity into a significant decline in his zone of operations. The 33-year-old Rusconi, survivor of four wounds, was killed in February 1952 when a former Viet Minh commando, influenced by the Dich Van, opened a way into the camp for a company of Viet Minh. Rusconi and most of his troops fell in vicious hand-to-hand fighting, knives, fists, and boots flailing to the last.

The most well-known commando was Roger Vandenberghe. Childhood for Roger and his younger brother, Albert, was extremely difficult. Born in a Paris slum, their father died from tuberculosis in 1939. Their mother, a Spanish Jew, was sent by Vichy authorities to a Nazi death camp. With little education, the boys joined the French Resistance as mere teenagers and later became commandos in de Lattre’s First French Army in Alsace and Germany. Vandenberghe and his brother arrived in Vietnam as part of the 6th Colonial Infantry Regiment. He was immediately taken with the country, a place far different from the crowded tenements of Paris. Already decorated with the Croix de Guerre for his Resistance work, Vandenberghe quickly made sergeant in command of a unit of Vietnamese auxiliaries that became 24 Commando, “The Black Tigers.”

Vandenberghe’s nemesis was Chapuis, a former French paratrooper who deserted to the communists. In June 1948, Chapuis killed Albert, Vandenberghe’s only family in the world. The deserter was captured by Vandenberghe in 1951 and sent to the French post at Nam Dinh, where he escaped.

Vandenberghe’s most famous exploit came when one of his turned commandos revealed the location of a Viet Minh command post. Vandenberghe allowed himself to be bound as a prisoner and carried along by his men in Viet Minh uniform, passing through checkpoints by insisting they were going to collect the reward on Vandenberghe’s head. Once inside the command post, Vandenberghe was released. He and his men slaughtered everyone there, seizing a valuable cache of documents and weapons.

This fearsome NCO had little use for the officers of the French army but was impressed by the leadership of de Lattre, his former commander in France. He led his men 12 miles through enemy territory to see the general at a gathering in Phu Ly. The general was astonished to see this towering European in a Viet Minh uniform and helmet. Vandenberghe explained his appearance as necessary while he operated almost exclusively behind enemy lines. De Lattre was taken by this odd but unforgettable warrior, remarking a few days later: “It’s a bit as if a tiger, in addition to its fangs and claws, received a hunting license…”

Even in these conditions, Vandenberghe stood out for waging a vicious and pitiless war using methods the French command found disturbing. He drove his men hard—but any complaints were met with a reminder that, without him, his turncoat troops “would be in jail or eaten by maggots.” Desertions were frequent. Vandenberghe was shot in the back by one of his own men in 1949. After returning from medical treatment in France he became even more unrestrained. His NCOs struggled to keep him in check, especially in his dealings with the civilian population. Vandenberghe paid little heed to the criticism of his methods by French officers, insisting that war was about killing so they were best to leave him to it. This remark showed his disdain for his superiors.

On Jan. 6, 1952, at a time when most of 24 Commando was on leave, traitorous sentries allowed a Viet Minh team to enter the camp. The assassins moved silently and Vandenberghe was butchered in his sleep by a former Viet Minh officer under his command. Ten others were killed. The few wounded who survived included Sgt. Tran Dinh Vy, who went on to serve in the army of South Vietnam. Arriving in France after the collapse of South Vietnam in 1975, Vy joined the French Foreign Legion, attaining the rank of colonel.

Wounded seven times by bullets, grenades, and mines before his death, Vandenberghe became the most highly decorated French NCO of the 20th century. An obituary in a leading Paris newspaper noted that the war enabled Vandenberghe to “find in the combats of the jungle the blossoming of his barbaric personality.” Only five days after Vandenberghe’s death, de Lattre died of cancer in Paris and was laid to rest alongside his son, Bernard, marking the end of the short but eventful friendship between the king, his prince, and the tiger who defended them.

After the fall of Dien Bien Phu in May 1954, the French command decided to evacuate the southern half of the Red River Delta. Hundreds of Vietnamese began deserting the French forces. Two sections of 35 Commando murdered their French commanders and two French NCOs before joining the enemy.

With the French war over, the native remnants of the commando groups assembled at Haiphong and headed to South Vietnam to form the 1st Marching Commando Battalion (BMC). Their French officers and NCOs were sent to Algeria to continue French experiments in counterinsurgency. Capt. Delayen of 13 Commando formed the Yatagan Commando in Algeria, a mixed unit of French and Algerians operating along the lines established by the North Vietnam commandos. Vandenberghe’s remains were repatriated to France from the Nam Dinh cemetery in 1989, where they were interred in a monument honoring the “Black Tiger” at the National NCO Academy outside Pau.

Dr. Andrew McGregor is director of Aberfoyle International Security, a Toronto-based consultancy specializing in military and security issues.

This story appeared in the 2023 Summer issue of Vietnam magazine.

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An illegal Chinese salvage operation is suspected to have raided two iconic World War II wrecks, USNI first reported.

Malaysian authorities discovered scrap steel, aluminum and brass fittings aboard the Chinese cargo ship Chuan Hong 68. The ship was boarded and searched after Malaysian authorities found that the ship was not authorized to anchor in the waters under Malaysian jurisdiction, according to CNN.

The British ships, HMS Prince of Wales and the HMS Repulse, are designated war graves, with Professor Dominic Tweddle, Director General of The National Museum of the Royal Navy, writing in a statement:

“We are distressed and concerned at the apparent vandalism for personal profit of HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse… We are upset at the loss of naval heritage and the impact this has on the understanding of our Royal Navy history.”

Sunk just three days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, on Dec. 10, 1941, the Royal Navy ships were attacked and, having no aerial defense, sunk by Imperial Japanese Navy aircraft. The strike killed some 842 sailors and is considered one of the worst disasters in British naval history.

The loss shocked the nation, forcing the navy to re-evaluate how it had fought for centuries — moving it away from the Mahanian notion that “Big ships with big guns, concentrated into a single, undivided battle fleet, and infused with an overriding purpose to wipe the enemy off the face of the sea” was the way to rule the waves, writes Ian Toll in “The Pacific Crucible”.

Carrier strike groups were in. Antiquated battleship tactics were out.

Of the loss, Prime Minister Winston Churchill recalled in his postwar memoirs:
 
“In all the war, I never received a more direct shock… As I turned over and twisted in bed the full horror of the news sank in upon me. There were no British or American ships in the Indian Ocean or the Pacific except the American survivors of Pearl Harbour, who were hastening back to California. Across this vast expanse of waters, Japan was supreme, and we everywhere were weak and naked.” 

Today, the battleship HMS Prince of Wales rests upside down 223 feet underwater near Kuantan in the South China Sea. The battlecruiser HMS Repulse lies several miles away from its sister ship.

The Chinese looting sparked outrage and concern from both the British and their American, Dutch and Australian allies.  

According to USNI News, the looting has become common in the past several years, with more than 40 Australian, Dutch and Japanese warships and merchantmen in the same waters off Indonesia and Singapore already destroyed.

Old shipwrecks are increasingly targeted by scavengers “for their rare low-background steel, also known as ‘pre-war steel’. The low radiation in the steel makes it a rare and valuable resource for use in medical and scientific equipment,” writes the BBC.

For the United States, the U.S. Navy has expressed concern over the safety of cruiser the USS Houston, which was sunk just south of the same area during the Battle of Sunda Strait on March 1, 1942. More than 650 U.S. sailors and Marines died when the Houston sank.

While the wrecks remain a key part of World War II history, most importantly, they are the watery gravesites for sailors and Marines alike entombed within.

“A strategy is vital to determine how to assess and manage these wrecks in the most efficient and effective manner,” Tweddle stated. “Above all, we must remember the crews who served on these lost ships and all too often gave their lives in the service of their country.”

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The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and the United States’ subsequent entry into World War II affected every corner of American life. That included the Walt Disney Studios. On the day of the attack, army troops arrived at the Disney lot in Burbank, California, to set up an anti-aircraft battery.

Walt Disney and his staff pledged their support to the war effort, with the studio devoting over 90 percent of its wartime output to producing training, propaganda, entertainment, and public-service films, starting with a short for Lockheed titled Four Methods of Flush Riveting. Disney also produced publicity and print campaigns—almost all without profit. Even the animated members of Disney’s entourage supported the war effort, appearing in advertisements, stamp books, magazines, and government posters to promote war bond sales, food recycling, and more. (When government officials objected to Donald Duck appearing in a short for the Internal Revenue Bureau about the importance of paying taxes, Walt pointed out that getting the duck was equivalent to MGM loaning out Clark Gable.)

In March 2023 the National WWII Museum opened a special traveling exhibit, The Walt Disney Studios and World War II, which explores how the beloved entertainment company supported the war. Organized by the Walt Disney Family Museum in San Francisco, California, the exhibit features more than 500 rare historical artifacts and film clips and includes profiles of Disney employees who left the studio to join the armed forces.

Located in the heart of New Orleans, the National WWII Museum tells the story of the American experience in the war that changed the world—why it was fought, how it was won, and what it means today—so that future generations will know the price of freedom and be inspired by what they learn. The Walt Disney Studios and World War II will be at the museum through September 24, 2023. 

this article first appeared in world war II magazine

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Poor Kamala Harris. The vice president took office in January 2021 trailing a cloud of firsts: first woman to hold the job, first African American (thanks to her Jamaican father), first Asian-American (thanks to her Indian mother). But the job itself has been a cavalcade of vexations. President Joe Biden saddled her with an unattractive assignment—managing and explaining the migrant mess at the southern border. She is reputed to be hard on her staff in private, and she is often tongue-tied in public. Even media outlets friendly to the administration have run hit pieces on her. According to The New York Times, “dozens of Democrats in the White House, on Capitol Hill, and around the nation” said (anonymously) that “she had not risen to the challenge of proving herself as a future leader of the party, much less the country.”

The office of vice president was devised in the home stretch of the Constitutional Convention as a flywheel in the machinery for picking an executive, and a successor in case the president died or was removed from office. Along the way, Elbridge Gerry worried that veeps would be too closely allied to the presidents alongside whom they served, which provoked a snort from Gouverneur Morris: “the vice president will then be the first heir apparent that ever loved his father.” Initially the vice presidency went to the runner-up in the Electoral College’s vote for president; the 12th amendment (1804) ensured that the veep would be the running mate of the winning presidential candidate.

The office got off to a rough start. John Adams, first vice president under George Washington, was the first (though not the last) to feel that he had nothing to do. Thomas Jefferson, second vice president under Adams, spent his term undermining his old friend and plotting to supplant him. Aaron Burr, third vice president under Jefferson, was shut out of all patronage, denied renomination when Jefferson ran again, and spent his post–vice presidential years plotting to break up the United States.

Most modern vice presidents, beginning with Walter Mondale, Jimmy Carter’s number two, have been given substantive responsibilities, and have worked well with their number ones. Four of them—Mondale, George H.W. Bush, Al Gore, Joe Biden—have run for president themselves, two—Bush and Biden—successfully. But two vice presidents of an earlier era anticipated the problems bedeviling Harris today.

this article first appeared in American history magazine

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Henry Wallace was the scion of an Iowa family of farmer/journalists (they published a magazine called Wallace’s Farmer). His father served as secretary of Agriculture under Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge; Henry, crossing party lines, held the same job for FDR. In addition to his interests in crop cycles and new plant strains, Wallace had a passion for oddball religions. In the 1920s he came under the spell of Nicholas Roerich, a Russian émigré painter and seer who dressed in Tibetan robes and claimed to be the reincarnation of a Chinese emperor. Wallace and Roerich exchanged hundreds of letters, in which they referred to each other and to famous acquaintances in mystical code: Roerich was the Guru, Wallace was Parsifal or Galahad, FDR was the Flaming One, or the Wavering One, whenever Wallace felt disappointed in him.

In 1934 Wallace got Roerich attached to an Agriculture Department expedition to Mongolia seeking drought-resistant grasses. Roerich was also seeking the Holy Grail on the side. American diplomats reported that he was traveling the steppes with a bodyguard of White Russian Cossacks, trying to set up a Central Asian Buddhist kingdom. Wallace, embarrassed, cut ties with him.

The Flaming One, tired of his crusty Texan veep John Nance Garner, tapped Wallace to be his running mate when he sought a third term in 1940. FDR wanted a man of liberal views, and Wallace fit the bill. One potential landmine threatened the new ticket. The Republican National Committee had procured copies of 120 Guru letters. The GOP candidate Wendell Willkie nixed using them, however, afraid that the Democrats would expose his long-running extramarital affair with a prominent New York journalist. Roosevelt and Wallace cruised to victory.

Wallace found new soul mates post-Roerich—American Communists, whose designs he naively failed to penetrate. The Soviet Union was a wartime ally, and Communists were billing themselves as liberals in a hurry. Alarmed Democratic bosses told FDR in 1944 that he must dump Wallace, so the nod for his fourth run went to Missouri Senator Harry Truman, who became president when Roosevelt died three months into his last term. When Wallace ran for president himself in 1948 as candidate of the left-wing Progressive Party, the Guru letters finally hit the papers. Wallace won a meager 2.4 percent of the popular vote, and carried no states. Repenting of his pro-Soviet backers, he lived until 1965.

Richard Nixon was tied to Dwight Eisenhower politically and personally. He served as Eisenhower’s veep for two terms, 1953–1961. After Nixon won the White House himself in 1968, his daughter Julie married Ike’s grandson, David Eisenhower. Yet his relationship with Ike was always fraught.

Nixon had been put on the ticket in 1952 as a sop to the conservative wing of the GOP that Ike had defeated in winning the nomination. The two barely knew each other, however. There was a 23-year age gap between them. In September, the press revealed that Nixon had a campaign expense account, characterized in headlines as SECRET RICH MEN’S TRUST FUND. Ike’s advisers, fearful of any taint on the war-winning hero, pressured Nixon to resign from the ticket. Instead he made a half-hour television speech, defending his innocence (the account was legal), attacking Democrats (Ike’s rival, Adlai Stevenson, had his own campaign account), and pledging to keep Checkers, a cocker spaniel that a supporter had given Nixon’s daughters. The Republican National Committee got millions of letters, telegrams, and phone calls praising the put-upon Nixon. Ike embraced his feisty running mate.

But their relations never warmed. Nixon was intelligent and hard-working, but too political and ambitious for his old boss. In August 1960, at the end of Eisenhower’s second term and the start of Nixon’s first presidential run, against Sen. John F. Kennedy, the president was asked at a press conference what role Nixon had played in his administration. Had the vice president offered any “major idea” that Ike had subsequently adopted? “If you give me a week,” Eisenhower answered, “I might think of one. I don’t remember.” The Kennedy campaign gleefully used the line in an attack ad. Had Ike meant it as a flat-out diss? Probably not. But he hadn’t made a ringing endorsement either. The 1960 race was razor thin. Could a love-bombing Eisenhower have pulled Nixon over the line? Nixon would have to wait eight more years for a second shot.

The Vice President is a constitutional fixture and a political anomaly—a high official with hardly any defined role; a successor whom the president picks but cannot fire until and unless he runs again. Wallace was a deficient veep whom the president—and almost only the president—liked. Nixon was a work horse the president never truly admired. Kamala Harris seems to enjoy the worst of both worlds: low achievement, low esteem. With Biden determined to run again, will she be replaced a la Wallace, or retained a la Nixon? All the political termites of D.C. will be gnawing on that question.

This story appeared in the 2023 Summer issue of American History magazine.

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As he waited for Phil Sheridan at his headquarters tent, Army of the Potomac commander George G. Meade knew an argument with “Little Phil” was inevitable. It was May 8, 1864, early afternoon, and the fiery generals were meeting to discuss that morning’s travesty at Snell’s Bridge, on the road to Spotsylvania. An unexpected convergence of infantry and Sheridan’s cavalry at the key river crossing had essentially grounded the Union army’s effort to outflank Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia in the wake of three days of bloodshed at the Wilderness. The delay helped Lee outrace the Federals to Spotsylvania, setting the stage for l2 days of further slaughter there in what would be the Overland Campaign’s longest battle.

Although Meade and Sheridan’s meeting was perhaps always doomed to take a nasty turn, it nevertheless was breathtaking how quickly it occurred. Staff members clustered around the headquarters tent and listened in unabashedly to the bickering generals’ antics. “When Sheridan appeared,” recounted Horace Porter, Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s personal secretary, “[Meade] went at him hammer and tong.” The “Old Snapping Turtle” would live up to his reputation. In no uncertain terms, he accused Sheridan of myriad blunders, not the least of which was Sheridan’s failure to leave the Snell’s Bridge crossing open for the advance of Maj. Gen. Gouverneur Warren’s 5th Corps. Meade claimed he had sent Sheridan orders to keep the road clear for the infantry, a directive Sheridan vehemently denied ever receiving.

Bordering on insubordination, Sheridan upbraided Meade for interfering in the inner workings of his command. “His language throughout,” Porter wrote, “was highly spiced and conspicuously italicized with expletives.” The wrathful Sheridan asserted he “could see nothing to oppose the advance of the V Corps…” and that the infantry’s behavior had been “disgraceful, etc., etc.”

“One word brought on another,” Sheridan would write, “until, finally, I told him that I could whip [J.E.B.] Stuart if he would only let me.” At the end of the “acrimonious interview,” Meade went directly to Grant to inform him of the belligerent Irishman’s declaration, drawing only a simple response from the phlegmatic Grant: “Did he say so? Then let him go out and do it.”

Preparing to Ride

Given the go-ahead, Sheridan wasted little time in preparation. At 3 a.m. May 9, 12,000 troopers—three divisions under Brig. Gens. Wesley Merritt, David Gregg, and the relatively untested James Wilson—crossed at Ely’s Ford heading for Richmond. Over the next 15 days, while the Union and Confederate armies clashed in wood-tangled fields around Spotsylvania Court House, Sheridan kept his Confederate counterpart’s vaunted horsemen at bay, reaching the outskirts of the capital city before reversing course and returning toward Spotsylvania. “We will give [Stuart] a fair, square fight,” Little Phil told his subordinates. “[W]e are strong, and I know we can beat him….I shall expect nothing but success.”

Stuart, of course, was one general whom Lee never needed to prod into battle. From the minute the Yankees began moving, he was on them—engaged, according to a Confederate staff officer, “in joyful combat…already fighting back every step of the Federal advance.”

Sheridan’s marching column was as lightly encumbered as possible. The men were issued three-day rations. It would be a different matter, however, for the horses, whose forage was cut to the bone, allowing for only one-half of one day’s ration of grain and meaning the animals would have to depend on whatever they were able to scrounge.

“The night was clear and quiet; the air was soft and refreshing,” recalled James H. Kidd, at the time a major in the 6th Michigan, part of Brig. Gen. George Armstrong Custer’s 1st Brigade in Merritt’s 1st Division. Sweeping past the left of the infantry line, the cavalry turned southeast where the Telegraph Road crossed Massaponax Creek.

To Custer, “the bright, particular star in that constellation of heroes who rode with Sheridan,” fell the honor of leading the advance through springtime Virginia. Eager for the fray, Custer, accompanied by his staff and escort, pressed up close to Kidd’s 6th Michigan—“in the van at the outset of that historic expedition.” Stretched out behind him came the rest of the Michigan Brigade, followed successively by Colonels Thomas Devin’s and Alfred Gibbs’ brigades, then those of Colonels George H. Chapman, John B. McIntosh and J. Irvin Gregg, and finally stalwart Brig. Gen. Henry E. Davies, guarding the rear.

It might seem surprising that Sheridan, as Kidd recalled, “…went out with the utmost deliberation. [His] movement was at a slow walk, deliberate and by easy stages. So leisurely was it that it did not tax the endurance of men or horses.” Sheridan had a reason, however, as he was baiting Stuart to make a move.

One river crossing seemed to blend into another. In quick succession, Merritt’s division rode through “the Massaponax creek and swamp, and…the Ni, Po and Ta rivers without opposition,” recounted Major Louis H. Carpenter, “in which we were favored by fortune, as they afforded many advantageous positions where the enemy could have given us trouble.”

Confederate cavalry under Brig. Gen. Williams Carter Wickham, commanding a brigade in Maj. Gen. Fitzhugh Lee’s Division, had been riding desperately through blinding dust to catch the tail end of Sheridan’s ambling column. Rebel progress would be hampered when the Yankees set fire to the fences that lined the road. Marching through the blazing fence line, the resultant dust and smoke was so bad, recalled a 4th Virginia trooper, that it became impossible to see the set of fours to their front.

As reports of Sheridan’s advance gradually increased, Stuart began marshaling his forces. Wickham’s Brigade finally caught up with Davies at Jerrell’s Mill. During Wickham’s opening attack, Sheridan chose to spur back to supervise the rearguard’s deployment, leaving Custer at the head of the column to act at his own discretion. Determined to take advantage of this opportunity, Custer ordered the pace of the march to quicken. His target was Beaver Dam Station on the Virginia Central Railroad.

Even a sudden rainstorm failed to slow Custer. As the thunder rolled across the fields, Major Melvin Brewer and a battalion of the 1st Michigan pushed ahead, encountering short of the station a Rebel force guarding 400 Union prisoners headed for Richmond. “Major Brewer gallantly charged the enemy and succeeded in recapturing all our men and quite a number of their captors,” reported 2nd Lt. Charles Henry Veil.

Custer’s men found three trains and two locomotives at Beaver Dam Station, “heavily laden with supplies for the [Rebel] army.” That included “bacon, flour, meal, sugar, molasses, liquors, and medical stores,” reported Custer, “…amounting to several millions of dollars’ worth.”

The newly freed prisoners pitched in gleefully as Custer’s men torched the cars. The next day, Noble Preston of the 10th New York passed the scene of the action and saw “buildings, cars, wagons, etc….still smouldering [sic] as we passed the place. More than 200,000 pounds of bacon was consigned to the flames here, from which the grease flowed in rivulets.”

Merritt was not amused, however, for he felt that with the cavalry living off the land, Custer should have distributed the supplies to other commands. Destruction of the captured trains led to Custer’s first major confrontation with Merritt. The latter was a stickler for march discipline, and he surely addressed in detail the issue of forage and sustenance while living off enemy territory the night before the movement.

There can be little doubt that Custer and Merritt had harsh words for each other. Neither had the adage “back down from a fight” in his lexicon. The stilted phraseology of Merritt’s official report makes clear that an open argument ensued, and Kidd’s eventual memoir, released in 1908, did contain a spirited defense of Custer’s actions at Beaver Dam Station.

Merritt stated in his report that he had ordered the 1st Brigade, leading the division’s advance along the Telegraph Road, to cross the North Anna, and had then instructed the Michigan Brigade to move on to Beaver Dam Station. Merritt implied that he directed Custer’s movement, but he did not specifically mention any order to keep moving. One must wonder if it was Custer who took the initiative to keep his fatigued horses moving just a little longer and his men alert and eager for the fight.

In reprimanding Custer, Merritt offered a rather mundane criticism that “by lighting fires after the capture of the station the enemy, were informed of our position”—a disingenuous assessment perhaps, given that the approach of Stuart’s cavalry was exactly what was desired and expected. According to Major H.B. McClellan of Stuart’s staff, three brigades of Southern cavalry (4,000–5,000 men) were already descending on Beaver Dam Station.

Despite Merritt’s umbrage, the success of the destruction left him powerless to act. No one—least of all Sheridan, he decried—took notice of Custer’s “gaucherie.” Evaluating these results strictly from a military point of view, Sheridan was ecstatic: “[Custer] destroyed the station, 2 locomotives, 3 trains, 100 cars, 90 wagons, from 8 to 10 miles telegraph wire and railroad, 200,000 pounds bacon, and other supplies, amounting in all to about 1,500,000 rations, and nearly all the medical stores of General Lee’s army.”

Merritt had countered that Custer’s destruction had “lost us some of the fruits of a hard day’s march.” It must have pained him, in light of Sheridan’s glowing words, to preface his report with “a misconception of orders given or some other cause marred the success that might have attended this day’s work.”

Kidd, whose fellow Michiganders were all the while unaware of Merritt’s foul mood apparently, offered another apt defense of Custer in his memoir: “It is…quite certain that the only way to have saved the supplies for issue to the corps would have been to move the division to Beaver Dam that night, “for Stuart was concentrating his force at that point and might have been able to reclaim a portion of them if they had not been destroyed.”

At any rate, Kidd concluded, the argument was moot. “Custer was on the ground and Merritt was not,” he asserted. “Custer’s action must have been approved by his judgment.”

Racing Into Position

On May 10, the Federal cavalry resumed its advance toward Richmond. Relentlessly, though at a moderate pace, the vast column remained on the road, both sides protected by a file of vigilant flankers stationed 500 yards on either side. A thick sheaf of skirmishers covered the front of Sheridan’s van, which would allow a quick response to any sudden movement by pursuing Rebel cavalry.

Union Lieutenant George B. Sanford was one to applaud the prudence, for “as we moved out in the direction of Richmond, we could see occasionally through openings in the woods the long columns of their cavalry evidently straining every nerve to get ahead of us in the race and take up some position of defense in our front.”

Stuart had planned a multi-layered response. Wickham’s Brigade was to continue to snap at Sheridan’s heels as the unwieldy column tried to cross the North Anna River. The other two Confederate brigades, those of Brig. Gens. Lunsford Lomax and James B. Gordon, would cross farther to the west, at the Davenport Bridge, before turning back east to hit Sheridan’s flank. Davies was tasked with holding Wickham in check, but Lomax’s and Gordon’s surprise flanking maneuver nearly succeeded.

Now down to what seemed a final option, Stuart decided to race around the far-flung reaches of Sheridan’s column, pass through Hanover Junction, and ride expeditiously down the Telegraph Road to place himself athwart Sheridan’s line of advance—preferably at Yellow Tavern, a mere six miles north of Richmond’s outer defenses.

Pushing his men hard—as he was prepared to “prosecute his march without a stop”—Stuart reached Hanover at 9 p.m. As Stuart readied to move onto the Telegraph Road heading south, Fitzhugh Lee pleaded for a break, worried that Stuart was asking for the impossible from his command. Although Lee’s men and horses were “thoroughly worn out” from the pursuit, Stuart granted only a four-hour reprieve.

The Rebel troopers were back on the road by 1 a.m. When the leading elements of Lomax’s Brigade arrived at Yellow Tavern before dawn, they found no Yankees in sight.

The Federal troopers had gone into camp at 4:30 p.m. May 10. The day, Merritt reported, “was very hot, and the march, a long one, was made with but little water or rest for our animals.” An early camp was quite welcome. Cooking fires were soon burning, and the unsaddled horses grazed to the limit of their picket line.

Amid this tranquility, Sheridan devised his countermoves. While Gregg would stay back to check any threat from the rear, Merritt and Wilson were to continue advancing down the Mountain Road. Davies, meanwhile, was to cut across the rolling farm country to the railhead at Ashland. (In doing that, Davies reported, his men had “fired the warehouse and destroyed large quantities of stores, tore up six miles of railroad, three culverts, two trestle bridges, and destroyed a locomotive and three trains of cars.” Oddly, that earned no censure from Merritt, who clearly had been unsuccessful in ensuring that “the hasty burning and looting was never repeated.”)

On May 11, it was time for Gibbs’ Reserve Brigade to lead. The booming of artillery was audible as Grant and Lee crashed into each other at Spotsylvania far to the north. The 6th Pennsylvania went first, moving with caution down the Mountain Road, past the Ashland Road intersection, and then along the face of an ominous looking ridgeline to its left.

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At Yellow Tavern, Lomax’s men spread westward from the Telegraph Road into a hilly, wooded area—the 6th Virginia anchoring the left, the 5th Virginia the center and the 15th Virginia the right. Cresting a high ridge, the Rebels crossed the upper reaches of Turner’s Run and concealed themselves just uphill of the Mountain Road. Fitzhugh Lee placed a battery on a little knob of high ground just to the cavalry’s rear. Establishing his headquarters behind the guns, Lomax turned operational command of the line over to Colonel Henry Pate of the 5th Virginia, who moved the regiments closer to the Mountain Road. “Our position was a good one,” gloated one Rebel, “with a deep ditch on each side, making an excellent fortification. Here we laid waiting for the enemy.”

First contact occurred in an open field just to the west of where the Mountain and Telegraph roads intersected. The snarl of carbines from the front of the column was soon joined by the increasing clamor from its rear, where Gordon was trying to cross Ground Squirrel Bridge, which had been burned.

Now aware of the Rebel presence along the Ashland Road, Merritt and the Reserve Brigade spurred ahead to catch up with the 6th Pennsylvania. Gibbs deployed his men on to open ground, swinging his column into line parallel to the Mountain Road. Realizing he couldn’t ignore possible help for Stuart from the defense forces in Richmond, Sheridan ordered Merritt to cover the road with Devin’s force. The 6th New York succeeded in chasing enemy soldiers over the bridge crossing the Chickahominy River and “into the outer works of Richmond.”

Although Devin’s attacking squadrons lost their impetus at the first line of organized resistance, the colonel committed the rest of the 6th New York. His men were suddenly so tantalizingly close, “bells could be heard ringing, locomotives whistling, and general alarm and bustling seemed to prevail in Richmond.”

Dismounting a portion of Gibbs’ and Devin’s brigades, Merritt began to feel out Stuart’s defenses. The Confederate commander had finally inserted Wickham’s Brigade, which moved perpendicularly off the Telegraph Road onto a heavily wooded ridgeline. From this east-west axis, Wickham’s men could fire on the exposed flank of any enemy advancing on Lomax’s position. Stuart himself was out among “the skirmishers, directing their fire, and making his dispositions for the coming battle.”

Custer and Merritt Advance

As Custer’s men arrived on the field, Merritt placed them to Gibbs’ left, covering the Mountain Road’s intersection with the Ashland Road. They were the only part of the command to remain mounted—and would pay the price. The Rebel guns, Custer reported, “concealed from our view by the woods…had obtained perfect range of my position.” Custer’s exposed lines endured a round of heavy fire, and Kidd was convinced that with Merritt and Custer already up with the skirmishers it was going to get only hotter.

The Reserve Brigade made no headway dismounted, and the view from Custer’s side of the line wasn’t much better. A quick survey revealed to him the strong disposition of the Southerners posted on a bluff protruding above a thin stand of trees. Devin swung behind the Reserve Brigade to face north along the Telegraph Road and advanced the 17th Pennsylvania Cavalry through the screening woods on the right.

At Merritt’s command, the 5th and 6th Michigan began their advance, through a maelstrom of bullets, across an open field to a fence line. Stands of timber studded the area, beyond which the Rebel cavalry awaited. Gibbs’ stubborn grind across the field drove Pate’s Virginians from the gully and back to another defensible position on the ridgeline. “Fitzhugh Lee’s sharpshooters were posted in a very strong position indeed,” remembered Kidd.

It helped that Gibbs’ men carried Spencer carbines, and with a hearty yell they began pumping lead from these deadly seven-shot repeaters. The incredible rate of fire soon had the Rebels scrambling back “like a flock of sheep.”

Custer, meanwhile, struck the 15th Virginia hard, doing so again after a brief Southern rally. In the center, the 5th Virginia struggled to stem the onrush, and when Pate was killed the spirited defense went with him. Pressing forward with his advancing troopers, Merritt noted, “The enemy fought with much desperation…but finally his line was cut.”

Like a sandcastle in the grip of a high tide, the Confederate defenses began to crumble with a series of retreats all along the front. Custer’s Michiganders, however, were not prepared for a sudden volley of fire from Wickham on the left. Custer moved in and restored order, driving the enemy back through and out the woods in front.

The Michiganders faced a ruthless blast of cannon fire and musketry as they exited the woods and were quickly withdrawn by Custer. At about 2 p.m., an eerie silence fell over the field. In the lull, the two Michigan regiments began creeping steadily forward. Chapman’s brigade, of Wilson’s division, moved into position to the left of the 6th Michigan, extending the line and providing needed protection to the much exposed flank.

After a couple of hours, Sheridan decided it was time to press the issue and ordered a mounted charge, to be supported by dismounted troopers. He naturally turned to Custer, who examined the ground and decided that, by keeping well to the right, he could successfully charge the Rebel guns. Informing Merritt of his decision, Custer trotted to the front of his command. On his cue, the band struck up “Yankee Doodle,” the sheer belligerence of the tune serving as a tonic to nerves frayed by the incessant booming of the Confederate guns.

“Go back! Go back!”

Custer deployed three regiments on the Telegraph Road, his tried-and-true 1st Michigan in front, a clear indicator of the gravity of the moment. Despite the very vocal objections of fellow brigade commander, Chapman, Custer had also obtained the services of the 1st Vermont—aided, in fact, by Sheridan’s direct intervention.

Before the charge, Sheridan had ridden onto the field. Kidd was among the first to notice his approach. “As they came opposite the regiment, the officer at the head looked back and saw that the flag was hanging limp around the staff…and said to the color bearer, ‘Shake out those colors so they can be seen.’” Kidd saluted and announced, “Men, General Sheridan,” drawing a rousing cheer. Told of Custer’s plan, Sheridan exclaimed, “Bully for Custer, I’ll wait and see it.”

With Sheridan’s eyes upon him, Custer made his dispositions carefully. The 5th and 6th Michigan, already dismounted, were to advance against the Rebel left, laying down a wall of fire with their Spencers and pinning down the enemy. To reach the Confederate positions, Custer would have to cross a creek, which, lined with marshy ground, would force him to take his mounted charge across a small bridge. On the enemy side, two pieces of artillery covered the approach, and as Custer’s men appeared they were met with vigorous fire.

At 4 p.m., the 1st Michigan rode out at a smart trot from the woods it had used for cover. High on the ridge, 1st Lt. TheodoreGarnett of Stuart’s staff had a sweeping view of the terrain and had the Baltimore Light Battery unleash shell and canister as soon as the Wolverines appeared.

Needing to funnel into lines of three to cross the Turner’s Run bridge, the Federal troopers withstood repeated blasts of canister at close range, as well as musketry from the 6th Virginia crested on a ridge. The column staggered and reeled before quickly renewing the attack.

There was never a doubt Custer would personally lead the 1st into the hail of bullets and artillery fire. Once over the span, he reformed the command for a continuance of the charge. With his golden locks and red cravat streaming behind him, Custer sabered his way into the Confederate lines, seemingly disappearing in a cloud of dust and battle smoke. Exultant cheers broke forth from the men following his lead.

The 1st Michigan’s surge galvanized the rest of the cavalry line. Elements of Wilson’s division rushed the 2nd and 4th Virginia on Stuart’s right flank, and Devin moved to outflank the remnants of Lomax’s Brigade on the left. As dusk fell over the area, a heavy rain began to pour. One minute it had been clear and the next the Michiganders were soaking wet, their ponchos still strapped to their saddles. The low rumble of thunder served as an ominous background to the thrumming of hooves and the sharp sounds of combat.

Stuart’s troopers began scrambling off the ridge, some seeking a defensive position in a ravine 500 yards to the rear, and two Confederate cannons were captured. That left only the 1st Virginia clustered around Stuart.

Calmly straddling his horse, Stuart watched the 1st Michigan closing in and began blasting away at the enemy troopers with his famed LeMat revolver. Suddenly, in the murderous swirl of the mêlée, the meaty thwack of a bullet hitting flesh was heard and Stuart staggered from what turned out to be a mortal wound. Even as he was carried off the field, the commander exhorted his retreating troops to rally: “Go back! Go back! And do your duty, as I have done mine, and our country will be safe. Go back! Go back! I had rather die than be whipped.”

Fitzhugh Lee assumed command, but, conceding the hopelessness of the situation, ordered Wickham to pull out, handing Custer and Chapman possession of the ridge. Sitting astride his horse at the top of the hill, his faced flushed with joy, Custer asked the 7th Michigan to administer a coup de grâce. Pointing his saber toward the road at the base of the hill, he ordered Major Henry Granger to charge.” The 7th struck like a thunderbolt, forcing another Confederate retreat. Granger would fall, however, struck by three bullets and killed instantly.

Sheridan praised Custer in his report, calling the charge “brilliantly executed.” It had been a tactically flawless operation, for by this time the brigade had mastered the one-two punch of dismounted troopers keeping the Rebels occupied in front while Custer led the rest of the brigade in a mounted attack. 

James Wilson, however, took umbrage at Custer’s Yellow Tavern report, sneering, “While my men were pressing the enemy Custer halted to gather up the spoils and to sound pæans of victory.” Reading the newspaper accounts, Wilson groused, it seemed as if “Custer’s brigade did all the fighting and was entitled to all the credit.”

Wilson was quick to laud the actions of his own command, and especially praised the part played by “the modest Chapman,” whom he felt was not given his full share of the credit for the success. Wilson’s opinion was shared by others, among them the regimental historian of the 1st New York Dragoons. Scathingly, he wrote for posterity, “Custer was a brave fighter, as were also his splendid Michigan brigade….That he bore the brunt of the fighting, and drove the enemy from the field, is an unwarranted stretching of the truth. He did his part well, and so did the others.” 

This article first appeared in America’s Civil War magazine

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The U.S. Navy has identified a sunken ship off the coast of Okinawa, Japan, as the Sumner-class destroyer Mannert L. Abele, the first U.S. warship to sink on April 12, 1945, after it was hit with a Japanese suicide rocket bomb, according to the Naval History and Heritage Command.

“Mannert L. Abele is the final resting place for 84 American sailors who made the ultimate sacrifice in defense of their country,” NHHC Director Samuel Cox said in a statement. “Its discovery allows some closure to the families of those lost, and provides us all another opportunity to remember and honor them.”

The day of its sinking, the destroyer came in contact with Japanese aircraft about 75 miles off the coast of Okinawa. Although the warship damaged multiple enemy planes, one Japanese kamikaze pilot managed to cut through the anti-aircraft fire and crashed into the starboard side of the ship, according to the release.

The ship was then hit at the water line by a rocket-powered human-guided kamikaze bomb — a Yokosuka MXY-7 Ohka, also called the Cherry Blossom — that caused the bow and stern of the ship to buckle, dooming the vessel.

The wreck of Mannert L. Abele is protected and falls under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Navy, the statement noted.

“The wreck represents the final resting place of sailors that gave their life in defense of the nation and should be respected by all parties as a war grave,” the NHHC release states.

Naval History and Heritage Command traces its history back to 1794, according to the command’s website. The Navy Department Library was established under the Naval Bureau within the War Department. In 1800, President John Adams asked the first secretary of the Navy to prepare a list of books suited for a Navy library.

The command now includes 10 museums across the country and a detachment that contributes to the upkeep of the service’s oldest ship, the USS Constitution.

Originally published by Military Times, our sister publication.

In October 1907 U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt set out on a hunting trip in the northern Louisiana canebrake country near Tensas Bayou. There was nothing particularly remarkable about the president’s love of “manly sport” with rifle. He was among the most celebrated hunters in North America. Local politicians and press reporters vied with one another for the opportunity to meet and accompany the nation’s chief executive on his outdoor excursions. One member of the hunting party, however, was quite remarkable. Roosevelt’s handlers had specifically sent word they wanted the services of a legendary big-game hunter known for his personal idiosyncrasies as much as for his peerless tracking and hunting abilities.

In appearance the man looked somewhere between 30 and 40 years old, though in fact he was over 50. A long beard covered the lower half of his face, and his luminous but sorrowful blue eyes coolly appraised all wildlife sign in his path. In an article about the hunt Roosevelt wrote for the newspapers, he shared this vivid description of his tireless guide:

“Ben Lilley [sic], the hunter, [was] a spare, full-bearded man with mild, gentle blue eyes and a frame of steel and whipcord. I never met any other man so indifferent to fatigue and hardship. He equaled Cooper’s Deerslayer in woodcraft, in hardihood, in simplicity—and also in loquacity. The morning he joined us in camp, he had come on foot through thick woods, followed by his two dogs, and had neither eaten nor drunk for 24 hours; for he did not like to drink the swamp water. It had rained hard throughout the night, and he had no shelter, no rubber coat, nothing but the clothes he was wearing, and the ground was too wet for him to lie on; so he perched in a crooked tree in the beating rain, much as if he had been a wild turkey. But he was not in the least tired when he struck camp; and, though he slept an hour after breakfast, it was chiefly because he had nothing else to do, inasmuch as it was Sunday, on which day he never hunted nor labored. He could run through the woods like a buck, was far more enduring and quite as indifferent to weather, though he was over 50 years old. He had trapped and hunted throughout almost all the half century of his life, and on trail of game he was as sure as his own hounds. His observations on wild creatures were singularly close and accurate. He was particularly fond of the chase of the bear, which he followed by himself with one or two dogs; often he would be on the trail of his quarry for days at a time, lying down to sleep wherever night overtook him; and he had killed over 120 bears.”

The man’s name was Ben Lilly, and he may have been the greatest big-game hunter ever to have lived in North America.

According to biographer J. Frank Dobie, Lilly was born on New Year’s Eve 1856 in Wilcox County, Ala., of Scottish ancestry. At a time when education for females was almost unheard of, Lilly’s mother was a graduate of Mississippi’s Nicholson Female College and later taught astronomy there as a faculty member. Lilly’s six siblings included a college professor and a pipe organist. Ben gravitated toward the inclinations of his male ancestors, who had fought in the American Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 and were skilled blacksmiths. Lilly himself gained renown as an expert knifesmith, forging and tempering his own blades (his favorite liquid for cooling steel was panther oil, which he claimed made his blades stronger).

Despite his mother’s best efforts to give him a proper education, Lilly drifted away from the military academy in Jackson, Miss., to which he’d been sent and lost touch with his family for a time. Ben’s Uncle Vernon Lilly eventually stumbled across his truant nephew running a blacksmith shop in Memphis, Tenn. He convinced Ben to move in with him on his cotton farm in Morehouse Parish, La., promising that if the young man did so and helped with the chores, he would inherit everything on the uncle’s death. Within a year Uncle Vernon kept his promise.

The Lilly farm centered on 300 acres of fenced cropland, outside of which sprawled great swaths of untilled swamp and canebrake. Ben never showed any particular enthusiasm for cotton farming, and the surrounding wilderness increasingly drew him away from his work. He quickly mastered the geography, demonstrating a unique ability to find his way through the most tangled and seemingly inaccessible areas. Acquaintances from that period of his life shared many stories of the young man’s nascent trail-finding and tracking abilities.

Lilly married in 1880, but the union was strained from the beginning. The death of the couple’s young son ended any hope of marital bliss, and they split up. Ben remarried in 1891, but by then he’d begun to spend more and more time away from home, penetrating ever deeper into the wild woods and swamps and seldom returning home unless to reprovision or repair gear. He kept his family—which grew to include two daughters and a son—fed and sheltered with profits from cattle trading, but he refused to be tied to a particular place. He resolved always to be available if the urge to hunt came over him, and he would often stop whatever he might be engaged in at the time to answer the call. Hunting, to him, was almost a religious vocation.

Unlike contemporary bear hunter turned bear conservationist William H. Wright, Lilly never seemed to lose his appetite for hunting and killing bears, mountain lions and other apex predators. While such a position runs counter to present-day politically correct sensibilities regarding game and trophy hunting, Lilly couldn’t be bothered. For one, the opinions others held of him didn’t keep him up at night. For another, he never saw wild animals in any other light than as a challenge for his tracking abilities or an enemy to be exterminated. He was,
for better or worse, a man of his time.

Lilly was also a devout Christian who would never work on a Sunday. If the Sabbath arrived in the midst of a hunt, he would cease all activity and make camp wherever he was. On such occasions, if he lacked fresh meat, Lilly would reach into his provisions bag and pull out an ear of corn for roasting. Such simple fare comprised his diet for weeks at a time. He was also a noted teetotaler, did not smoke and would not even drink coffee, presumably because of the caffeine. The hunter always had a Bible at hand and was well versed in Scripture.

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Various witnesses attested to Lilly’s strict adherence to his beliefs. New Mexico rancher Bela Birmingham recalled one especially memorable encounter with the peripatetic hunter. One brisk fall evening while moving horses between pastures in preparation for winter, Birmingham and his brother-in-law made camp, built a fire and set about preparing dinner. They became aware of Lilly’s presence when his pack of hounds sounded close by, apparently hot on the trail of game. Lilly soon hove into view. He was tracking a mountain lion, the hunter explained, but since it was late on a Saturday evening, he would postpone the hunt till Monday, as he never hunted on Sundays.

The ranchers were well supplied with beef, and after Lilly volunteered he hadn’t eaten in two days, they made him supper. He promptly wolfed down three big steaks and six or seven sourdough biscuits. Rising early on Sunday morning, the scruffy hunter cut a hole in a nearby ice-covered pond and jumped in wearing his long underwear—the outdoorsman’s version of a bath.

Bright and early Monday morning, Lilly resumed his pursuit of the mountain lion. By the time the ranchers caught up with him later that day, the hunter had bagged two large lions, including the one he’d been after on Saturday. When Birmingham mentioned having lost his watch somewhere along the trail that morning, Lilly offered to backtrack, locate the missing timepiece and bring it by the ranch house that evening. Birmingham’s route home was long and circuitous. By the time he arrived, he found Lilly and his brother-in-law eating dinner and his watch waiting on the table. Lilly said he’d found it a few feet from the tracks of Birmingham’s horse soon after setting back. His remarkable 48-hour display of hunting, discipline, tracking and route-finding duly impressed both ranchers.

Throughout his eccentric life Lilly honed his knifesmithing skills, earning repute as much for the creations of the forge as for the trophies of the hunt. A good knife remains an important tool when hunting in the oft tangled wilderness where big-game animals dwell. According to biographer Dobie, Lilly took pleasure in presenting well-made knives to friends or people he admired. One peculiarity of his knives was that both sides had a sharpened edge. Lilly had come to close grips with bears and believed it of utmost importance that a knife be able to cut in any direction. He also corkscrewed the blades of some knives for easy removal.

The hunter owed his life to one such specially crafted knife. In April 1913 in Arizona’s snowbound White Mountains 56-year-old Lilly ran across sign of a large grizzly. Setting out with a rifle, light gear, no food and a hound tied off on his waist, he tracked the bear for three days, managing to hit it several times with distant rifle shots, but unable to make a killing shot. He continued to follow its tracks and blood trail in deep snow until the bear suddenly appeared, almost ending Lilly’s career on the spot. “Then, right in front of my body, 15 feet away, the bear popped out, charging me,” the hunter recalled. “My first shot hit him center in the breast; that checked him. My second shot was under the eye, about 3 feet away. He fell against my side. I was bogged in snow waist deep. I couldn’t see the bear’s head. He seemed to be drawing deep breaths. I fired another shot for his heart. I was wearing a knife 18 inches long. I drove it for the heart. That finished him.”

In addition to his famed service as a guide for President Roosevelt, Lilly made headlines guiding a 1921 bear-hunting excursion for Oklahoma oil tycoon W.H. McFadden. McFadden spared no expense for his elaborate, monthslong hunt through the Rocky Mountains from Mexico to Canada. Regardless, Lilly avoided the well-equipped camp and its accompanying creature comforts, preferring his usual ascetic ways. He tried his best to corner a trophy grizzly for his client to shoot, but McFadden’s frequent absences from the party for business reasons sidelined him from the pursuit at several key junctures. The bear ultimately went into hibernation, Lilly left the party, and McFadden came up empty. The failed excursion represents perhaps the only bear that ever escaped the relentless efforts of the master tracker and hunter. Not that Lilly was to blame; McFadden was simply not as dedicated to the pursuit as his 64-year-old guide.

Lilly seemed to find his greatest personal satisfaction hunting down and killing apex predators (bears, wolves, mountain lions, etc.) on behalf of various ranchers in the Southwest and, later, for the U.S. Biological Survey and U.S. Forest Service. Western ranchers and stock growers had complained to the U.S. government for decades about the losses such predators inflicted on their cattle herds and sheep flocks. The government responded by offering generous bounties for the skulls and hides of these animals. State and local officials and private ranchers often supplemented such bounties with their own monetary awards. Lilly, of course, wasn’t the only hunter to exploit such opportunities to cash in on wildlife. In fact, around the same time frame two of this writer’s great-uncles were credited with having almost single-handedly cleared out the wolves and coyotes from Monona and Woodbury counties in far western Iowa.

The money Lilly earned by turning in skulls and hides supplemented the fixed salary the government paid him for his services. During his time as a hunter in the federal service he killed 55 mountain lions and a dozen bears—at least those were the ones he reported to his supervisors. He no doubt killed others for the privately offered rewards from Western ranchers. Some sources estimate Lilly killed as many as 1,000 mountain lions over his lifetime.

While the hunt itself was the driving passion and purpose of Lilly’s chosen career, the physical challenges he encountered and overcame were also an important part of his pathos. He seemed to relish reducing himself almost to the level of the animals he pursued. Lilly never carried a tent or sleeping bag, preferring to sleep in the open beneath little more than a length of canvas and a blanket. When the mercury dropped, he would employ various tried-and-true mountain man methods to build a fire, often siting them beside large rocks to better reflect the heat and keep him warm. On some occasions he would build a fire, let it burn down and then scoop out a sleeping berth where the coals had rested. On especially cold nights he would make his bed between two fires. He is not known to have sought treatment for or complained of damage from exposure or frostbite.

Lilly is known to have carried two lever-action rifles—a Winchester .30-30 for hunting mountain lions and smaller game, and a .33 Winchester for downing bears. True to form, the old hunter carried his shells in a tobacco sack. On his back he bore a large pack containing flour and other provisions, a knife, an ax and his bedding. He relied on his hunting skills to supply him with meat. Like the mountain men of old, Lilly savored “panther steak” and bear meat.

Lilly was also famed for his pack of devoted hunting hounds, which he trained to track and corner bears and mountain lions. Needless to say, he wouldn’t win the approval of present-day dog lovers. The hunter wouldn’t tolerate a hound that failed to demonstrate the killer instinct with which he himself was endowed. If one failed to meet his standards, Lilly would bring the offender before the other members of the pack, explain the dog’s failings and then kill the errant hound with a gunshot or club.

On the other hand, he was extremely loyal to the dogs that met his high standards. If he couldn’t feed his hounds, he would refrain from eating, and he always fed them from the kills he made with their help. The dogs would often tree lions and corner bears before Lilly delivered the coup de grace with rifle or knife. If they got far ahead of Lilly, they would surround their quarry and then work in relays to get nourishment without leaving the bear or mountain lion unguarded. Lilly took note of those that performed especially well, as did other hunters, who clamored for the pick of the litter of Lilly’s best hounds. He usually struck a hard bargain. Once when offered $300 for a hound descended from a particularly excellent tracker, Lilly would accept no less than $1,000.

Hunting aside, Lilly believed everyone should spend regular time in the great outdoors. “Every man and woman ought to get out and be alone with the elements every day, even if only for five minutes,” he said. “I can’t think at all except when I am out.”

As Lilly advanced in years, the tremendous physical exertions his hunts required began to tell on his previously iron constitution. Though he’d seldom been sick in his youth, in his later years he suffered pneumonia and stomach troubles, the latter brought on, warned a doctor, by overreliance on a mostly meat diet. Lilly’s mental acuity also went into decline. Among other signs, he would while away his time drawing cartoonlike pictures of bears and other game and then clumsily attempt to paint the pictures with watercolors. A rancher friend finally managed to persuade Lilly to room with him, but it soon became apparent the waning hunter needed full-time care. Lilly’s daughters were still living, as was a sister, but they couldn’t or wouldn’t take him in. Instead, he was sent to a county farm for indigent residents. Thus penned up, Lilly deteriorated rapidly, eventually hallucinating about hunting mountain lions and bears while wasting away in bed. He died of natural causes just shy of his 80th birthday on Dec. 17, 1936, near Silver City, N.M., and is buried in that city’s Memory Lane Cemetery. In many ways Lilly was the last of that intrepid breed of American frontiersmen who helped tame the West, though he’d remained wild as long as he could. Such independence was an enduring part of his legacy. 

this article first appeared in wild west magazine

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On April 14, 2023, a new museum about Amelia Earhart opened in Atchison, Kansas, the town where the aviator was born in 1897. The Amelia Earhart Hangar Museum features interactive exhibits intended to celebrate the legacy of the first woman to fly across the Atlantic (as a passenger in 1928 and solo in 1932) and inspire young people to perhaps follow in her footsteps. “We want people to take away the fact that she truly is relevant today,” says Karen Seaberg, the museum director and the founder and president of the Atchison Amelia Earhart Foundation.

The museum’s centerpiece is the last remaining Lockheed Electra 10-E, the same type of aircraft Earhart was flying on an attempted round-the-world flight when she disappeared over the Pacific in July 1937. In other exhibits, visitors can get a sense of what it was like to rivet an airplane, experience how aviators from Earhart’s time navigated by the stars and explore the Pratt & Whitney Wasp engines that powered the Electra. They can also hear recordings of Earhart’s voice and climb into a life-size reproduction of the Lockheed’s cockpit.

Listen to Seaberg talk about the museum and take a look at the facility in this video.

A revolver worn by Confederate States of America President Jefferson Davis on the day of his surrender fetched a pretty penny at an auction Saturday, which, by the time the final item sold, brought in a whopping $22 million in revenue.

On its own, the silver-plated pistol — and a slew of authenticating paperwork, including military records, first-hand accounts, newspaper articles, family letters and chain-of-ownership records — settled for an astounding $470,000.

The weapon’s primary significance dates back to May 10, 1865, when Davis was captured by U.S. Cavalry troops in Irwin County, Georgia. Present for Davis’ surrender, which came approximately one month after Robert E. Lee surrendered to Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant in Appomattox, Virginia, was Michigan 4th Cavalry Cpl. John Hines, who took possession of the revolver but would claim ownership of the item for an unusually brief period, according to the pistol’s records.

Moments after Davis presented Hines with the pistol, friendly fire erupted just up the road as troops from Wisconsin and Ohio confused the Michigan detachment for enemy personnel.

“Just as we got into the road bang, bang went the guns … and they kept a going all excited,” recalled 4th Michigan soldier William Linsley in an 1886 eyewitness account published in the Michigan-based Alma Record.

“I fell in behind a pine tree,” Linsley continued. “I had fired two shots and was putting a load in my gun when they hollered, ‘Cease firing. You are firing on your own men.’ We had two killed and three wounded.”

One of the deceased was John Hines.

“He was shot in the mouth, come right out the back of his head,” recalled Linsley. “Captain Hudson just rode up and he says take out what things he has in his pockets. We took out Jeff Davis’ revolver, the one Jeff gave him when he surrendered, and his pocket book and some other trinkets.”

Select reports note that Davis, who was accompanied by family, attempted to escape during the commotion, with some of the more sensationalized accounts suggesting he took flight disguised in women’s clothing.

“The story was heavily embellished in the press, with some going so far as to suggest Davis was actually wearing a woman’s bonnet and a full hoop dress,” the auction documents note.

Linsley’s first-hand account corroborates elements of those stories.

“Mrs. Davis stepped out of the tent [and] asked if they would allow her mother to go down to the brook and get a pail of water. … As he (Jeff) walked out he had on a riding dress and shawl over his head, he looked like an old woman. [But] his spurs picked up his dress behind him and showed his boots and the guard stopped him and made him back to the tent.”

Davis’ revolver, meanwhile, which had briefly been in the possession of John Hines, was taken by the deceased soldier’s brother, Edwin, and passed down through subsequent generations of the Hines family — most recently by Edwin’s great granddaughter Linda Lee Hines Inman — until its May 20 auction.

“This revolver is one of the most historic and important American artifacts ever offered at public sale and is perhaps the most important Confederate artifact known to be privately held,” the auction note accompanying the pistol reads. “It was his personal revolver of choice under the most dire conditions and is similar in historical scope to The War Pistols of Hamilton, The Bull Moose Colt of Theodore Roosevelt and the President U. S. Grant Remington Revolvers, all previously sold by Rock Island Auction.”

Also among the most profitable items auctioned Saturday was a World War II German Krieghoff FG42 Type I paratrooper rifle, which sold for $411,250.

Originally published by Military Times, our sister publication.

Howard Lambert was maybe 10 or 11 when, while riding his bike near his home in Culpeper, Va., he happened upon a group of Civil War cavalry reenactors engaged in a mock battle in the middle of a field. Lambert had some knowledge of the war living in Culpeper, a still-segregated community in the heart of central Virginia in the 1960s, but the reality of the moment had an immediate effect on him. The reenactors, dressed in both Confederate and Union uniforms, “had guns and were shooting at each other,” he recalled recently. “The smoke was real.”

It would be a watershed moment for Lambert, who recalls reading books about the nation’s eternal struggle that he had, as a teenager, checked out from a local library, as well as occasional glimpses through a car window of the Chancellorsville and Wilderness battlefields as his family drove toward Fredericksburg. He was likewise captivated by the respective Civil War miniseries “North and South” and “The Blue and the Gray,” and in the late 1980s turned a role as an extra in the Oscar-winning film “Glory” into a reenacting passion of his own.

Now in his late 60s, Lambert’s life continues to revolve around the war. In August 2022, he was named the first African American president of the Brandy Station Foundation, where he is extensively involved in the preservation and remembrance of one of the Civil War’s most important historical sites: Brandy Station—in particular the June 9, 1863, battle there, recognized as the Gettysburg Campaign’s opening clash.

The Civil War, you have said, is in your DNA. Why exactly?

I mean this both figuratively and literally. Born in Culpeper, I was exposed to Civil War history from a very early age. More than 100 battles, skirmishes, and incidents took place on Culpeper soil during the war. During my family’s travels, we would frequently pass by Civil War battlefields, including the Wilderness, Chancellorsville, Spotsylvania, and Brandy Station. I always found them of great interest and was drawn to everything Civil War—“The Blue and the Gray” and “North and South,” for example, and whatever books that I could get to read.

But I also have a connection to a Civil War soldier. The brother of my great-great-grandfather, Lewis Turner, served. His name was Fielding Turner. He was born in Culpeper and served in the 20th New York [Infantry]. He returned there after the war.

You were the co-founder of the African American Heritage Alliance and founder of the Freedom Foundation, and now as president of the Brandy Station Foundation you have an incredible opportunity to help preserve the legacy of one of the war’s most important sites. Are you at all in awe of this responsibility?

Not at all. I believe that my many years of experience, both personally and professionally, has prepared me for this moment in time. I embrace each day and never lose sight of the fact that I do this for all men who served during the Civil War. I reflect on them each and every day. As is often said, “All gave some; same gave all.”

What is in the works for Brandy Station’s 160th anniversary in June?

The Foundation has a number of events planned. We are working with Culpeper Battlefield Tours to put on tours, reenactments, living history events, and guest speakers, including acclaimed author Gary W. Gallagher.

What other significant changes are taking place at the site?

My number one priority is the Graffiti House, which dates back to 1858. Both Union and Confederate soldiers stayed there and wrote on the walls. It is a real treasure of historic significance. We have plans to do repairs to the exterior and improve our visitor experience during tours of the interior. In addition, we are making improvements to the grounds.

As you say, the Graffiti House is such an important symbol of the history made at Brandy Station, yet the danger it might be lost to development and time without intervention remains a threat. What can the Foundation do to make sure that will never happen?

In the short term, we have plans to make improvements to the exterior and also make the tours more dynamic for our visitors through the use of electronic means. Of course, we also have to be aware of what’s happening in the community and the possible impact of that to the Graffiti House. It is important that our voice be heard and engaged in any situation which might potentially impact the Graffiti House and the surrounding area.

We have fostered a great relationship with our neighbors and elected officials and look forward to working with them on any future issues and concerns. In addition, as part of the Culpeper Battlefields State Park, we continue to look forward to working with the Commonwealth of Virginia on the best ways to maintain the Graffiti House and to enhance the overall experience our visitors receive. We are always looking for volunteers to help us in our mission. Volunteer help is so critical to our success.

Tell us about your deep friendship with Clark “Bud” Hall, who probably knows more about Brandy Station than anyone and, poignantly, is one of the original triumvirate behind the modern, still-thriving battlefield preservation movement.

I have known Bud for many years and consider him a friend and mentor. As you may know, Bud served in our Armed Forces and is a fellow graduate of American University. He is the first person, to my knowledge, to tell the story of U.S. Colored Troops in Culpeper and as part of the Overland Campaign. I have literally spent hours with Bud traveling to various Civil War sites in Culpeper. He once told me, “It is up to us to tell the story.” Those words served, in part, as my inspiration to form the Freedom Foundation of Virginia.

We first met many years ago at the site of the 1862 Battle of Ox Hill, Virginia, during a gathering to recognize two Union generals killed during the battle, Philip Kearny and Isaac Stevens, and the preservation of what is now a Fairfax County Park. I gave testimony before the Fairfax Board [of Supervisors] to preserve the site and was an early member of a group that today is known as the American Battlefield Trust [formerly the APCWS and the Civil War Trust].

I am still working with Bud on several projects and in bringing greater recognition to the USCTs.

this article first appeared in civil war times magazine

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What inspired you to become a reenactor? In your experience, how much has this “pasttime” changed from when you started to now?

It was the movie “Glory.” I had read an article in The Washington Post about the Battle of Antietam. In the article, the reporter interviewed Civil War expert Brian Pohanka. Brian mentioned in the article that he was involved in a project about the 54th Massachusetts and was recruiting African Americans to portray the historic regiment. I called Brian and joined the group and went off in early 1989 to be in the movie. The group of guys was mostly from the Washington, D.C., area and we decided to stay together after the movie. Over the years, we literally have done hundreds of events, including several more movies, living history events, reenactments, etc.

What has changed for me is that I have moved from living history events, reenactments, and such to starting or being part of other organizations, including Friends of the Wilderness Battlefield; the 23rd USCT; the Freedom Foundation of Virginia [as founder and president]; the John Brown Farm advisory board; and the Brandy Station Foundation, as a longtime member before I became president.

While working on “Glory,” could you tell it would have the incredible influence it has had in informing mass audiences of the contributions of Black soldiers to the Civil War?

Frankly, I did not at the time think it would have the lasting influence over the years. I was a communications major in college (radio, television, and film) and looked forward to the opportunity of being in a feature film. I knew that the story of the 54th would be compelling and should be told, but I never thought it would end with five Oscar nominations (it won three) and educate thousands of students on African Americans’ service during the war. Over the years, I have spoken countless times to organizations regarding the role of USCT soldiers during the war.

How much screen time did you manage? Can we find you in a freeze frame at some point?

I took part in three weeks of filming and was part of the James Island (Savannah, Ga.) and Fort Wagner (Jekyll Island) filming. I was in various scenes with the principal actors. If you did a freeze frame for a split second, I can barely be seen when Kevin Jarr says, “Give them hell 54th,” and when Matthew Broderick says before attacking Fort Wagner, “If this man should fall, who will pick up the flag and carry it forward?” It was an ensemble cast. Most of the screen time—rightfully so—was on Matthew, Morgan, Denzel, and the other up-and-coming actors.

I would also like to add, the movie won an Oscar for Best Sound. It was our group that was used for much of what was called the “Wild Track” of soldiers marching and such at the polo field at Jekyll Island. Russell Williams II, a fellow American University graduate, received his first Oscar for Best Sound—he later won another for the 1990 movie “Dances With Wolves.”

The contributions USCT soldiers made to the Wilderness Campaign often get downplayed or overlooked. How are you trying to change that?

I am a member of the 23rd USCT which, as you are aware, saw action in the Wilderness Campaign. Ed Gantt is the president of the 23rd and a member of the Freedom Foundation. The two groups work closely together supporting various events. In fact, for the first time, the 23rd USCT will be doing a living history event at the Graffiti House in early May. More Culpeper-born USCTs served in the 23rd than any other regiment during the Civil War: 12. We try to tell the story of the 23rd at every opportunity. The 23rd has a full calendar of events, and we are pleased to host them at the Graffiti House.

Madden’s Tavern, on May 8, 1864, was a tragic moment in Culpeper’s Civil War History. You led a drive to have a marker placed there—the Maddensville Historic Site—in 2021. Tell us more about that effort.

The project was years in the making. I have known the Madden family for many years. It was after reading the book “Seasons of War” by Dan Sutherland that I learned of the killing of USCTs near Madden’s Tavern. I later went to the Library of Virginia and looked at the actual diary of Byrd Charles Willis, 9th Virginia Cavalry, in which he writes about killing USCTs that May. I felt lead to bring recognition to this incident by putting up a memorial in their honor. I was able to work with the Madden family and later with the current owners [Crystal and George Tingler] to secure the land and create the memorial site. Of course, there were many other individuals who helped make it a reality. A marker to honor these individuals is scheduled to be in place by this Memorial Day.