World War II Archives - Ramblin' with Roger

D-Day + 80 years

National WWII Museum

Today is D-Day +80 years. Since someone asked, D-Day stands for Day-Day. “D-Day and H-Hour are used for the day and hour on which a combat attack or operation is to be initiated.” June 6, 1944, “was so iconic that it came to be used solely when referring to the beginning of Operation Overlord.”

This year, I learned about the National WWII Museum in New Orleans. The site has several articles about the anniversary.

Surprisingly, the number of the war dead from that day is still in dispute. “Of the 4,414 Allied deaths on June 6th, 2,501 were Americans and 1,913 were Allies. If the figure sounds low…, it’s probably because we’re used to seeing estimates of the total number of D-Day casualties, which includes fatalities, the wounded, and the missing.

“While casualty figures are notoriously difficult to verify… the accepted estimate is that the Allies suffered 10,000 total casualties on D-Day itself. The highest casualties occurred on Omaha Beach, where 2,000 U.S. troops were killed, wounded, or went missing; at Sword Beach and Gold Beach, where 2,000 British troops were killed, wounded, or went missing; and at Juno Beach, where 340 Canadian soldiers were killed and another 574 wounded.

“The vast majority of the men who died perished in the very first waves of the attack. The first soldiers out of the landing craft were gunned down by German artillery. Once those pillboxes were destroyed and the machine guns silenced, the later waves of troops faced far better odds.”

There was a disastrous dry run 40 days earlier, so the success of the actual invasion was remarkable.

Albany is represented

From the Albany City School District website: “The Albany Marching Falcons officially kicked off their trip to France on Tuesday morning, loading their luggage, their instruments, and themselves onto two chartered buses bound for an evening flight from JFK International Airport to Paris.

“The group – some 50 City School District of Albany students from grades 6-12” -at least two of whom I know– “will be part of France’s official commemoration of the 80th anniversary of D-Day. They were accompanied by marching arts director Brian Cady and numerous chaperones and family members.

“Take a look at a Facebook photo album of the sendoff.

“Led by director Bryan Cady, the Marching Falcons will be one of only two bands from the U.S. invited to perform on Omaha Beach in Normandy. [The other is from the University of Florida.] The Marching Falcons will also perform at D-Day memorial concerts in Falaise, Saint Laurent-sur-Mer, and Paris before heading back to Albany on June 11.”

Pass

I watched this CBS News story about the WWII museum. A 99-year-old vet told the story of his deployment to kids eight decades his junior.

In the narrative, one teen asked his father to watch the movie Saving Private Ryan. That caught my attention because I decided in 1998 that I would not see the film. I saw previews in the movie theater and a brief clip during the Oscars.

Esquire magazine ran a story in 2023: 25 Years on, Saving Private Ryan’s Opening Scene Remains Cinema’s Most Brutal Depiction of War. Steven Spielberg’s Omaha Beach landings are not for the faint of heart. And that’s the point.

I guess I’m of the faint of heart.

“The 24-minute sequence captures war in a way that we hadn’t seen before, and hasn’t been matched since. It’s the nervous shakes that possess [Tom] Hanks’ hands. The vomit. The desperate surprise of soldiers drowning in the shallows, dragged down by their gear. The indiscriminate German bullets landing with a ‘puft’ in American chests. The relentless machine gun fire and explosions. The arms blown off, the guts hanging out, all of it captured by a cameraman running alongside the actors, instructed to pan to whatever part of the horror caught his attention.”

Some extremely small part of me says that I ought to watch it. Then the “hell, no” part of me wins out. Still, I’m glad it exists.

“To watch this opening salvo is to witness this veteran’s story transposed directly onto the screen. It’s a guttural, terrifying sequence that plays like something from a horror film. As it should; so realistic was this beach assault that it was reported to have triggered PTSD in veterans.”

Rather like war itself, no matter the cause.

Knowing the Star-Spangled Banner lyrics

Oliver Wendell Holmes

I have heard this story multiple times over many years. But I’ve never been able to verify it to my satisfaction. I’ve been told that knowing the Star-Spangled Banner lyrics beyond the first verse could get one killed.

This is, specifically, a World War II tale. When a presumed fellow American soldier came through the terrain, the guards wanted to know if they were truly Yanks as claimed. If they knew the latter verses of the national anthem, they would be summarily shot. The theory was that NO one knows those except a spy feigning to be from the USA.

Good thing I wasn’t there because I would be dead. In fact, in our elementary school, Daniel S. Dickinson, our music teacher had us singing a panoply of patriotic songs, such as Columbia, The Gem Of The Ocean. Plus the standard fare: America, America The Beautiful, Yankee Doodle, and The Battle Hymn Of The Republic.

So I know the second and fourth verses. Yeah, that last one IS rather Manifest Destiny. “Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just, And this be our motto – ‘In God is our trust.'”

The hireling and slave?

But to the best of my recollection, our songbook did not include that third verse, so I didn’t know it, though I was aware of its existence:

And where is that band who so vauntingly swore,
That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion
A home and a Country should leave us no more?
Their blood has wash’d out their foul footstep’s pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave,
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

What the heck does THAT all mean? A conversation in the Washington Post may enlighten.

Scorn

“These lyrics are a clear reference to the Colonial Marines, according to Jefferson Morley, author of ‘Snow-Storm in August: Washington City, Francis Scott Key, and the Forgotten Race Riot of 1835.’ They are clearly meant to scorn and threaten the African Americans who took the British up on their offer, he wrote in a recent essay for The Washington Post. Key surely knew about the Colonial Marines, and it’s even possible he saw them among the contingent of British ships that sailed into Baltimore Harbor.

“But Mark Clague, a musicologist at the University of Michigan and an expert on the anthem, disagrees. In 2016, he told the New York Times: ‘The reference to slaves is about the use, and in some sense the manipulation, of Black Americans to fight for the British, with the promise of freedom.’ He also noted that Black people fought on the American side of the war as well.

“Whether manipulation or not, the British kept their word to Colonial Marines after the war, refusing the United States’ demand that they be returned and providing them land in Trinidad and Tobago to resettle with their families. Their descendants, called ‘Merikins,’ still live there today.”

FSK

As for the writer of the poem, “And even if these lyrics aren’t meant to be explicitly racist, Key clearly was. He descended from a wealthy plantation family and enslaved people. He spoke of Black people as ‘a distinct and inferior race’ and supported emancipating the enslaved only if they were immediately shipped to Africa, according to Morley.”

Oh, it gets worse. “During the Andrew Jackson administration, Key served as the district attorney for Washington, D.C., where he spent much of his time shoring up enslavers’ power. He strictly enforced slave laws and prosecuted abolitionists who passed out pamphlets mocking his jurisdiction as the ‘land of the free, home of the oppressed.’

“He also influenced Jackson to appoint his brother-in-law chief justice of the United States. You may have heard of him; Roger B. Taney is infamous for writing the Dred Scott decision [1857] that decreed Black people “had no rights which the White man was bound to respect.'”

Confederate victory

It’s interesting that Key’s “overt racism” prevented the famous song from becoming the national anthem during Key’s lifetime. There was no official anthem. People sang various other songs such as the ones I referenced earlier.

“Key’s anthem gained popularity over time, particularly among post-Reconstruction White Southerners and the military…
After the misery of World War I, the lyrics were again controversial for their violence. But groups like the United Daughters of the Confederacy fought back, pushing for the song to be made the official national anthem. In 1931, President Herbert Hoover made it so.

“‘The elevation of the banner from popular song to official national anthem was a neo-Confederate political victory, and it was celebrated as such,’ Morley wrote. ‘When supporters threw a victory parade in Baltimore in June 1931, the march was led by a color guard hoisting the Confederate flag.'”

Civil War reply

A little-known, unofficial fifth verse was written a half-century later by poet Oliver Wendell Holmes, clearly a response to the American Civil War. It was new to me.

When our land is illum’d with Liberty’s smile,
If a foe from within strike a blow at her glory,
Down, down, with the traitor that dares to defile
The flag of her stars and the page of her story!
By the millions unchain’d who our birthright have gained
We will keep her bright blazon forever unstained!
And the Star-Spangled Banner in triumph shall wave
While the land of the free is the home of the brave.

Josephine Baker: I knew so little

Genius in France

I knew that Josephine Baker was a famous black entertainer starting in the 1920s. Yes, I was aware that she left the United States because of its open segregation laws. She was a big star in France. That’s about it.

That is until I was watching CBS Sunday Morning while waiting for my train to arrive. This segment is rightly titled The legacy of Josephine Baker.

First a bit of biography. “She was born Freda Josephine McDonald in St. Louis, Missouri, on June 3, 1906, to washerwoman Carrie McDonald and vaudeville drummer Eddie Carson. Eddie abandoned them shortly afterward, and Carrie married a kind but a perpetually unemployed man named Arthur Martin.” After a brief and difficult career in the US, her career thrived in Paris.

I’m fascinated by how France has been perceived as this sanctuary, at least for a little while. Some of the notable transplants, at least for a time, included James Baldwin and Lenny Kravitz. My noted activist cousin Frances Beal lived there for a few years. And American soldier Henry Johnson, for years, got a lot more recognition for his World War I exploits by the French than by his home country, the US.

A star over there, but…

For Josephine Baker, a “1936 return to the United States to star in the Ziegfeld Follies proved disastrous, despite the fact that she was a major celebrity in Europe. American audiences rejected the idea of a black woman with so much sophistication and power, newspaper reviews were equally cruel (The New York Times called her a ‘Negro wench’), and Josephine returned to Europe heartbroken.”

She was active in the French resistance during World War II. “She performed for the troops” and… smuggled “secret messages written on her music sheets.” The French government later awarded her medals for her valor.

In the 1950s, “she began adopting children, forming a family she often referred to as ‘The Rainbow Tribe.’ aided by her third husband, composer Joe Bouillon. Josephine wanted her to prove that ‘children of different ethnicities and religions could still be brothers.’ She often took the children with her cross-country.” She raised two daughters, from France and Morocco, and 10 sons, from Korea, Japan, Colombia, Finland, Algeria, Ivory Coast, Venezuela, and three from France.

Civil rights advocate

But she did make it back to the United States again. I was struck by this dialogue in the CBS piece.
Reporter: “How long are you going to stay?”
Baker: “You want me to stay, don’t you?”
Reporter: “I’d like you to stay. I think you could help the Negro movement in the United States.”
Baker: “Oh, don’t say that.”
Reporter: “Why not?”
Baker: “Because it’s not a Negro movement. It’s an American movement.”
True enough.

She spoke at the historic March on Washington in August 1963. “You know, friends, that I do not lie to you when I tell you I have walked into the palaces of kings and queens and into the houses of presidents, and much more. But I could not walk into a hotel in America and get a cup of coffee, and that made me mad. And when I get mad, you know that I open my big mouth. And then look out, ’cause when Josephine opens her mouth, they hear it all over the world.”

Triumphant return

Josephine Baker “agreed to perform at New York’s Carnegie Hall” in 1973. “Due to previous experience, she was nervous about how the audience and critics would receive her. This time, however, cultural and racial growth was evident. Josephine received a standing ovation before the concert even began. The enthusiastic welcome was so touching that she wept onstage.

“On April 8, 1975, Josephine premiered at the Bobino Theater in Paris. Celebrities such as Princess Grace of Monaco and Sophia Loren were in attendance to see 68-year-old Josephine perform a medley of routines from her 50-year career. The reviews were among her best ever. Days later, however, Josephine slipped into a coma. She died from a cerebral hemorrhage at 5 a.m. on April 12.”

And in 2021, she has been inducted into France’s Pantheon, the first black woman, the first performing artist, and the first American so honored. She joins Voltaire, Victor Hugo, and Marie Curie among the 80 so honored.

Does Pearl Harbor still “live in infamy”?

You’re not entitled to your opinion

I asked a not-so-random teenager if she happened to know what December 7, 1941, signified. No, but she did know the magnitude of the bombing of Pearl Harbor as the entry of the United States into World War II.

I’m constantly reminded why some folks keep chanting, “Never forget.” And as the generations pass, people WILL forget. I mean, these may be events that are marked in the history books, but it just won’t have the same resonance to another generation. 1776 and 1861 and 1941 all signify ancient history.

Born a little over a decade after Pearl Harbor, I can still hear in my mind’s ear not only the words of FDR’s address to Congress on December 8 but his speaking pattern. But I was learning this a mere quarter-century after the consequential event, as opposed to 75 or 80 years later. December 7, 1941, for many, I surmise, will not always be “a date which will live in infamy.”

What Holocaust?

It is inevitable that elements of history fall through the cracks. But it troubles me that history can be so distorted. I’m thinking of the Holocaust both-sides-ing debacle, in Texas, unsurprisingly.

One can analyze the Why. For instance, the Germans could not accept they had been defeated in World War I. They needed convenient scapegoats. The Holocaust was partly a result of that.

Surely, one may analyze what other countries, such as the United States, could have done to avert some of the slaughter. But what IS the “other side” that suggests that the events did not take place at all?

Always learning

This is not to say that ‘history” is inviolate. In my lifetime, I’ve learned a great deal, from the NASA women immortalized in the movie Hidden Figures to Tulsa 1921. These were not stories that were in my history books growing up. Invariably we will recontextualize what we learn.

But denial of facts troubles me greatly. I came across this article from 2012. “No, you’re not entitled to your opinion,” a philosophy professor wrote. “No one can stop you saying that vaccines cause autism, no matter how many times that claim has been disproven. But if ‘entitled to an opinion’ means ‘entitled to have your views treated as serious candidates for the truth’ then it’s pretty clearly false. And this… is a distinction that tends to get blurred.”

Holocaust Remembrance Day

National Archives

International Holocaust Remembrance Day is a memorial day designated by the United Nations to mark the anniversary of the January 27, 1945 liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi concentration and death camp.

“The National Archives is the international epicenter of Holocaust-related research. NARA holds millions of records created or received by the U.S. Government during and after World War II that document Nazi war crimes, wartime refugee issues, and activities and investigations of U.S. Government agencies involved in the identification and recovery of looted assets (including gold, art, and cultural property)—as well as captured German records used as evidence at the Nuremberg International Military Tribunals.”

So I was… appalled is far too weak a word… when I saw one of the January 6 insurrectionists. He was wearing a Camp Auschwitz T-shirt. Did he not know the awful history of the place? Or did he approve of it?

“By the end of World War II, the Holocaust had claimed the lives of over 6 million Jewish people—nearly two out of every three in Europe.” Was he a Holocaust denier? If he believed the Big Lie about the “stolen election,” maybe he had drunk that Lool-Aid too.

Nuremberg

I no longer remember the first time I watched a film of emaciated people walking out of the camps. It was at least half a lifetime ago. The survivors reminded me of sentient skeletons. Seeing them on film was far more awful than looking at still photos.

With the clear growth of a white supremacist movement in the United States and elsewhere, perhaps you should view Investigating the Holocaust. It is a series of short videos that “trace the history of the Nazi Party from its inception through World War II… The videos feature original film footage used as evidence by the International Military Tribunal at the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg, Germany — the most famous courtroom drama in modern times, and the first to make extensive use of film as evidence.

“The FDR Presidential Library and Museum has also produced an accompanying Curriculum Guide to introduce students to the Holocaust through historical materials drawn from the FDR Library’s archives and the recently remastered documentary, ‘ Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today.'”

Also, check out the ADL website.