Main Line to Front Line

What is a soldier of “cornet” rank, dressed in an 1830s-era uniform with bearskin plumed helmet, doing in the modern, high-tech U.S. Army? Plenty, it turns out, for the cornet is a member of the 1st Troop Philadelphia City Cavalry, a National Guard outfit that may be the oldest military unit in continuous service in the country. Its members love to parade in dress uniforms, but when war breaks out, they shed their antique finery for military fatigues and chemical-warfare suits.

Long a bastion of blue-blooded Main Liners, City Troop drew its first members in 1774 from organizations like the Gloucester Fox Hunting Club, and it often served as George Washington’s bodyguard and escort. Today it still retains the whiff of an exclusive society. In the nation’s only private armory, soldiers have after-work drinks in an oakpaneled bar below a ballroom and a library. Its current roster of 70 members, all male, of whom 30 percent are legacies, draws heavily from Philadelphia’s legal and financial circles. The unit’s calendar includes debutante balls and horse shows along with its monthly drill and maneuvers.

But once you get past these trappings and the $5,000 dress uniforms, the troopers are trained tank crews, scouts, and mortarmen. 1st City Troop drives M1-A1 Abrams tanks, and its men have participated in almost every American conflict, from the Battle of Brandywine in the Revolution to the Meuse-Argonne in World War I in the Persian Gulf.

Until the late 19705, there were several such units in the United States, but 1st City Troop is the final survivor. Can the troop’s antiquated traditions flourish in the twenty-first century? Not surprisingly, today’s young professionals are leery of months-long training commitments and the possibility of being activated in a crisis. But Capt. Eric Guenther says the troop’s very real military mission keeps it from becoming an ossified gentlemen’s club: “Our people come from all different backgrounds, and we’re not there simply to put on re-enactments or just to read about activities that others have done before us. We’re not an anachronism; we’re a very active organization that thrives today."

—Marc Goodman

THE BUYABLE PAST

The first electric toaster, introduced by General Electric in 1909, didn’t look anything like the long-handled tongs that had previously been used to toast bread over fire. GE was best known at the time for making equipment for huge transforming stations, and its D12 looked remarkably like a transforming station sized to a countertop. The entire design consisted of resistance coils and connecting wire, planted on a porcelain base. The industry’s next models generally looked like traps for animals with rectangular feet.

In the early days, though, no electric toaster was considered too ugly and no dining room too elegant to make room for one. People had long been frustrated by stove-made toast, for as Good Housekeeping pointed out in 1935, “By the time it had been made and buttered in the kitchen, piled on a plate, and brought to the table, it was cold, limp, and thoroughly unappetizing.”

Approximately I three minutes after the introduction of the first electric toaster, cold toast was as passé as long-handled tongs.

Despite the disdain of Good Housekeeping, it is hard to think of any toast as being entirely unappetizing—unless it is burned to a crisp. Unfortunately, the first toasters produced more than their share of charcoal. “Breakfast must be ready, I smell the toast burning,” was the joke of the early years. In those days, an electric toaster heated the bread, one side at a time, to the 310 degrees needed for toasting. But it didn’t know when to stop. A person who might understandably be distracted by an article in the newspaper or an argument at the table was supposed to keep watch and remove the toast at just the right time.

The greatest breakthrough in toaster technology came in 1926 with Toastmaster’s automatic model, which shut off the current and “popped” the toast u once it was done. “Pop-down” models, on the other hand, let the toast slide onto a plate. The landmark Toast-O-Lator of 1936 eliminated not only carbonization in bread but boredom in people, taking slices of bread on a walk past the heating elements, while interested observers watched the process through a porthole in the middle.

By 1948 a good toaster had no fewer than 275 parts, up from about 14 in 1909. And more features were on the way, reaching a zenith of sorts in 1962 with the Travl-Toast, which plugged into a car’s cigarette lighter to take care of emergencies between restaurants.

SCREENINGS

To some film goers, Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now is the ultimate Vietnam movie. To many more, it is one of the great disappointments of the 19705. That decade, after all, is regarded by critics today as the moment when American film came of age, and Coppola, with The Godfather and The Conversation, went a long way toward bringing that about. Apocalypse Now, released in 1979, was expected to put a cap on the era while summing up America’s stillfresh horror over the war. Instead, viewers were presented with a rambling, often brilliant, but maddeningly indecisive movie that only deepened the mystery about what happened over there.

But Apocalypse Now is getting a second chance. A restored version is being released theatrically by Miramax, with video and DVD versions to follow shortly. It has been painstakingly assembled by Coppola and the film editor Walter Murch, and if you thought the original was a big gulp at 2 ½ hours, wait until you wade into this 3-hour-and-26-minute version.

Every film fan knows the story of how the most honored and powerful director in Hollywood plunged into a Southeast Asian jungle armed with a John Milius script, a small army of actors and technicians, and a then-unthinkable budget of nearly $13 million. By the time he stumbled out 8 months later, he had nearly killed two actors (Harvey Keitel was worn out and replaced by Martin Sheen, who suffered a heart attack), tacked millions of dollars onto his budget, and produced a truckload of film that offered no logical or even coherent ending. “Emotionally obtuse and intellectually empty,” wrote Frank Rich in Time, and many viewers agreed with perhaps half of that, finding the film emotionally powerful but finally unsatisfying as an explanation of America’s descent into a disastrous war.

The new version is bound to stir up the debate all over again, for though it may offer a much clearer picture of the director’s original concept, it ultimately brings into focus that concept’s faults. Most of the restored 53 minutes deal with Willard’s stop at a French plantation before heading farther upriver to “terminate” the insane Colonel Kurtz (played by Marion Brando). The segment gives Apocalypse Now more historical grounding, contrasting America’s involvement in Vietnam with the French period. But the new footage only points out what should have been obvious upon the film’s initial release: The analogies the movie makes between our war in Vietnam and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness are forced and facile.

However ill-advised the American policy was, it wasn’t inspired by colonial aims but by ideological ones, and Coppola seems no closer to illuminating those now than he did a quarter-century ago. Apocalypse Now is still a great visceral kick, and the staggering energy that went into the doomed project, combined with Coppola’s visual artistry, keep you from seeing through a script that has no real heart, dark or otherwise.

—Allen Barra

THE REVOLUTION FROM THE BOTTOM

If you want to see the American Revolution from a fresh perspective, the book of choice is A Narrative of a Revolutionary Soldier, by Private Joseph Plumb Martin. I am happy to report that his neglected classic is being reissued by New American Library.

George Washington may have heard his share of hissing British bullets, but the general never met the “old enemy” Private Martin encountered in these places —hunger. He never marched in shoes that fell apart, then kept marching through ice and snow in bare, bleeding feet.

Martin’s story has both set-piece battles such as Monmouth and small, savage encounters with marauding Loyalists. His account of the mutiny of the Connecticut Continental Line in 1780 is riveting and amazingly evenhanded. And more than once, he tells of being refused food by hardhearted farmers or their wives. In retaliation, he and his friends felt no compunction about liberating chickens, pies, cheeses, and other eatables and drinkables.

He is equally unillusioned about the Continental Army’s officers. His company commander was so unpopular that several men decided to give him “a bit of a hoist” by slipping a canteen loaded with gunpowder under his cot. Martin saw that the device was likely to hoist the captain “out of time” and persuaded the critics not to light the fuse.

After the British surrendered at Yorktown, in 1781, Virginians paid Continental troops a reward for capturing slaves who had fled to enemy lines. Martin and his friends refused to return a group of runaways unless the owner promised them the blacks would not be punished. Martin’s disgust with slavery is vivid in his account.

The book’s editor at NAL, Cecilia Malkum Oh, says it “deserves to be read and reread for generations.” For once, this was not just prepublication puffery.

—Thomas Fleming

Korea—How Many Died?

The historian Allan R. Millett has taken us to task for stating last year, in Stanley Weintraub’s anniversary essay on the Korean War, that it “cost the United States of America 54,246 lives.” Writes Millett: “the war is unsatisfying enough without making our losses worse than they were.” He then sets the record straight in a condensation of an essay he wrote on the subject for the immense (1,240 pages!), recently published Encyclopedia of the Korean War (Spencer Tucker, editor; ABC-Clio, $275):

“The 54,246 figure, which routinely appears on monuments and in textbooks, became accepted through its use in the Statistical History of the United States, a compilation that has appeared in various editions for decades under the sponsorship of the U.S. Bureau of the Census.

“Battle deaths, as you might expect, have been tabulated very precisely, and the total for the Korean War is well established at 33,686. The difficulty lies in the subcategory ‘other deaths,’ which by 1960 had become fixed at 20,617. Someone should have been suspicious, since this figure was much too close to pre-World War II patterns for the American armed forces, when ‘other deaths’ commonly approached or exceeded battle deaths. Yet the service personnel in the Korean War did not endure a major epidemic (like the Spanish flu of 1918–19), nor did they suffer thousands of deaths, as in Vietnam, from helicopter crashes. When the Department of Defense went back to the Korean Warera records in the 19905, it determined that its ‘other deaths’ were actually 2,133, and that the number including all the other services should be 2,830.

“How does one explain a difference of almost 20,000 lives? It appears that the Department of Defense’s figures for “other deaths” included all noncombat deaths throughout the armed forces, worldwide, during the entire Korean War era (1950–57). The official figure for in-theater casualties for the United States armed forces in the Korean War is now 36,516.”

A complete state-by-state list of the 33,000-plus American battle deaths in the Korean War, maintained by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), can be accessed at www.nara.gov/nara/electronic/korvnsta.html. In addition to the serviceman’s name and hometown, the list gives rank, type of casualty! and date of death or declared death. NARA staff can be consulted for more extensive records. A similar list for the Vietnam War is available at the same site. In addition, the U.S. Army Center of Military History has made available a four-CD set with all its Korean War publications in digital form. The set contains five full-length books, including one about Army medics; shorter monographs, such as Black Soldier/White Army: The 24th Infantry Regiment in Korea; hundreds of pictures and maps; and even printable map posters. The set costs $24.00 and can be ordered from the Superintendent of Documents, P.O. Box 371954, Pittsburgh, PA 15250.