Come Vacation In Sunny...WWII

I seem to have developed a penchant for personal summer themes.  Actually, it's more that I obsess about topics. 

 

I get curious about something cultural or historical and then can't leave it alone until I've devoured everything that I can get my hands on about the topic.  And to make matters worse, I then feel compelled to feed my newly acquired subject mastery to family and friends in little tidbits of trivia until they're screaming.  I usually manage to avoid tormenting complete strangers; but heaven help you if you're in a public building standing next to me near an exhibit that I've recently researched.  I do apologize.  I just LOVE knowing things; historical things especially.

 

This summer I've been devouring the WWII section of our local library. 

It's Daughter #1's fault.  She had the temerity to ask me to chaperone her high school history field trip to Fort Snelling - the culmination of her class' WWII unit of study.  On one of the walls was a poster of something called "The Starvation Experiment" conducted at the University of Minnesota during the war.  I'd never heard of it and was fascinated.  (Sorry for the Wikipedia link, but it was the best synopsis.) 

 

D3 and D2 on the basic training obstacle course.

 

Then, the family let me drag them to Fort Snelling's WWII weekend in early June.  Docents in period clothing, authentic machinery, and original vehicles and weaponry...that just added gasoline to the fire.  Touring the fort that weekend brought the Navajo code-talkers and the Nazi Enigma code machine to the forefront of my brain.  There they niggled at me and festered until I ran to my local library, plunked down on the floor in front of the non-fiction WWII shelves and looked carefully through the buffet to choose what to devour.

The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History took me on a break-neck tour through western Europe climbing over rubble and hitching rides with soldiers.  I mourned the loss of historic buildings and hunted down hundreds of thousands of pieces of art and other precious objects that the Nazis stole from conquered towns and the personal possessions of Jewish families no longer allowed to own anything (before being exterminated). 

Did I mention that I get lost in books?  I don't just read them; I enter them.  This is why it's difficult to get my attention while I'm reading.  I only appear as if I'm sitting in the room with you, but I'm not really.  Please shout loudly so I can hear you wherever I am and then give me a moment to apparate back.

This isn't Neuschwanstein, but that castle's rooms were as stuffed full of
stolen artwork and loot as is the church in this picture

Anyway.  Hitler, it seems, had grandiose plans to turn his hometown into an art epicenter to rival the likes of Venice or Florence.  He had this detailed model he'd pour over whenever he needed cheering up.  So while he awaited the opportunity to build this art mecca, he had all the looted art stashed in salt mines, Neuschwanstein, and various other caches.  The allies often arrived just in time to save it from being destroyed; or just after local workers sabotaged official Nazi plans designed to destroy to artwork rather than let it fall into 'barbarian American hands'.



WACs on parade drills.

Our Mother's War took me unto the Women's Army Corps for basic training and made me feel the stress of supporting a husband in his war work (be it fighting in the European or South Pacific theatres or doing highly classified research at Los Almos). It dropped me into Japanese-American internment camps and planted me front-stage in a USO show for horribly wounded men. There were a couple of sections about prostitution in Hawaii and WAC clerical staff who translated documents for the Nuremburg trials, about Nazi concentration camp atrocities against women, that made me both nauseous and incredibly thankful that none of my life's problems ever included things that those women had to experience. I saw how American women’s responses to that war began to shape our modern feminine sensibilities. And, for me, I’d have enlisted as a WAC and hoped to spend the war on some general’s office support staff; OR joined the Red Cross and supported the armies in Europe.

Navajo code talkers worked in pairs to send and receive communications
all throughout the Pacific theatre of action.

Code Talker put me through physically exhausting basic marine training, and then had me work though two weeks of R&R in order to mentally exhaust myself developing a code within a code before pushing me into a muddy foxhole, six inches deep in water on a humid jungle island in the South Pacific as artillery exploded around me and bullets whizzed overhead. I was absolutely amazed at the extreme mental and physical feats performed by the original 32 Navajo code-talkers. These men deserve a national monument at least as large as Lincoln’s. Frankly, they saved more lives, endured more stress and displayed greater intellect than Lincoln did, and for love of a country that had only ever tried to eradicate their way of life until the military suddenly needed that way of life to save us all. And on top of that, because the program was so secret, they themselves were sometimes mistaken for Japanese infiltrators and only narrowly avoided being shot by their own side.  And, no, according to the author, none of the code talkers had 'handlers' with orders to shoot them rather than let them be captured.  They did, after six months when the navy realized that the Japanese still hadn't cracked the code, receive body guards; but no code talker was ever under threat of capture.

British navy Wrens operating Bletchley Park 'bombe' decoding machines,
built to help decode messages encoded by portable table-top German Enigma machines.

After all the excitement of the South Pacific, I transferred to the European theatre again and am taking a little breather in The Secret Lives of Codebreakers.  Bletchley Park estate in England was the home of the British Government Code and Cypher School (or the Golf Club & Chess Society as they were often referred to in code).  School is a misnomer.  The estate housed the offices of thousands of people assigned to decode and translate every last official German communication.  These people cracked the German 'Enigma Machine' codes which were generally thought to be undecipherable.  The decoding machines they created were the forerunners to modern computers.  As you can well understand, the atmosphere's a little uptight, and the work can be a little monotonous, but the people and the effects of the work are fascinating.

After this, I'm off to join the allied landing in Anzio, Italy with a corps of army nurses.  Wish me luck.