January 2011

directed by John Paget, Pacific Communications, 54 minutes.

I read with interest the editor’s comments about being a historical adviser for the film Glory . Obviously his purview did not include the music. I noted a glaring error when I first saw the film: the music in the Yankee camp as the 54th marched back after its first (and successful) combat with Southern troops. The song being played was “The Bonnie Blue Flag!”—about as appropriate as U.S. troops entering Paris to the strains of “Das Horst Wessel Lied”!

I’m not quite sure why Mark C. Carnes included, in his entertaining compendium of historical gaffes in popular films, the fact that Japanese speakers in Tora! Tora! Tora! refer to the attack on Pearl Harbor as taking place on December 8—“a date,” Carnes writes, “that is mistranslated into English, for understandable reasons, as December 7.”

This strikes me not as a mistranslation, but as an acknowledgment of the International Date Line’s existence. It was December 8 in Japan when Pearl Harbor was bombed, and the attack is generally referred to in Japanese books as having taken place “December 8 (December 7 local time).”

In “Hollywood History” (September), Mark C. Carnes writes that “British India did exist, and so did the Light Brigade and Balaklava Heights,” but the rest of 1936’s The Charge of the Light Brigade “was fantasy.”

Not so. In the movie a besieged British garrison is treacherously attacked as it boards boats for what Surat Khan promised would be safe passage down river. Precisely the same thing happened at Cawnpore in 1857, albeit not on the northwest frontier but in the northwestern provinces. The mastermind was Azimullah Khan, the Muslim aide-de-camp of a Hindu prince named Nana Sahib. Hundreds of European men, women, and children were massacred in the river, and those who were spared were massacred two and a half weeks later, so that when the British reoccupied Cawnpore they came upon a scene similar to what the British reinforcements discover in the movie.

Smithsonian Institution Press RD 107 (four CDs)

by Ormonde de Kay, Harvard Club, 490 pages.

While James Tertius de Kay (see directly above) was writing his saga of the Macedonian , his brother Ormonde, a long-time contributor to this magazine, was busy tracing the history of an institution that has so far enjoyed a life span seventeen years longer than that of the frigate. The Harvard Club of New York City was founded in 1865 and, Harvard being Harvard, has had its share of impressive and intriguing members. Ormonde signed up to chronicle their interaction with their school’s club, and soon found himself so absorbed in the story that it took him five and a half years and 1,257 pages of typescript to relate. But just as his brother did with the far-ranging warship, Ormonde has marshaled an immensity of disparate facts into a lively, coherent, and consistently readable narrative.

The works of H. P. Lovecraft, although considered horror classics by critics and devotees, remain hard to get in bookstores. One publisher, Arkham House, has specialized in Lovecraft titles for decades. At the Mountains of Madness and other favorites (not available through American Heritage) can be had by writing to: Arkham House Publishers, Inc., P.O. Box 546, Sauk City, WI 53583.

by James Tertius de Kay, Norton, 336 pages

“In her time,” writes the author in this engrossing biography of a warship, “the Macedonian was recognized the world over as the most important prize of war ever taken by the American Navy—a distinction she holds to this day.” It is all but impossible to imagine the euphoria that overtook the United States when, early in the War of 1812, her tiny, fledgling navy began capturing British frigates; it is equally difficult to appreciate the despair this negligible loss to its fleet precipitated in England. At the war’s outbreak, the London Times described the American navy as “a few fir built frigates with strips of bunting, manned by sons of bitches and outlaws.” A few months later the same paper was wailing, “Oh, what a charm is hereby dissolved! What hopes will be excited in the breasts of our enemies!”

edited by Kenneth T. Jackson, Yale University Press, 1,350 pages.

by Richard Rhodes, Simon & Schuster, 731 pages.

Richard Rhodes’s The Making of the Atomic Bomb combined explication of nuclear physics with sinuous narrative to show the evolution of the Manhattan Project; Dark Sun tells the story of the much more powerful bomb that came later, and follows the growth of the nuclear rivalry on both sides. A recurring figure in Rhodes’s account is Curtis LeMay, who supervised the 1944 Tokyo firebombings and the first atomic tests, watched the hydrogen bomb destroy Bikini Atoll, and recommended pre-emptive strikes on the Soviet Union as head of the Strategic Air Command during the Cuban missile crisis. Rhodes’s history makes much of the recent debate over the Hiroshima bombing seem beside the point: After the more destructive firebombing of Tokyo, he believes, it took Truman five untroubled minutes to decide to use the new weapon.