January 2011

America Unabridged: The Readers Respond America Unabridged: The Readers Respond America Unabridged: The Readers Respond America Unabridged: The Readers Respond America Unabridged: The Readers Respond America Unabridged: The Readers Respond America Unabridged: The Readers Respond America Unabridged: The Readers Respond America Unabridged: The Readers Respond Fortunes Good And Bad Gipp The Great Neglected Hero Dissing Massachusetts Dissing Massachusetts

Hans Bethe

(1906-2005) Physicist, Nobel laureate, head of the Theoretical Division at wartime Los Alamos. His solar research led to speculations on the feasibility of a hydrogen bomb.

Haakon Chevalier

(1901-1985) Professor of French literature at the University of California, Berkeley, Communist, and close friend of Oppenheimer. In 1942 Chevalier asked Oppenheimer to help transfer information about the bomb to the Soviet Union. Oppenheimer refused, but the incident caused him much trouble later.

Albert Einstein

(1879-1955) The letter he addressed to President Roosevelt in 1939 (initiated by Szilard and Teller) ultimately led to the Manhattan Project and the first atomic bombs.

Enrico Fermi

It was not until 2004, 59 years after the end of the war, that a World War II memorial was dedicated in Washington, D.C. The eyewitness accounts of World War II are a different story. They began appearing while the war was going on, and as late as the 1990s they were still being written.

Some of their authors would never write again. Some would never write so well, and some would go on to distinguished literary careers. But whether the writer was a pro or an amateur, a private or a general, was of secondary importance. What defines the best eyewitness accounts of World War II is a preference for detail over abstraction and a deep empathy for the toll the war took on those who waged it.

“It’s ironic,” said Irwin Smoler cheerfully of some long-ago acquaintance, “He joined the Navy, but he got killed anyway.” Irwin Smoler (father of our contributing editor Fredric) was not in the Navy; he was in the infantry and survived the awful Ardennes fighting of late 1944.

My father was in the Navy. In fact, North Atlantic anti-submarine work could sometimes be not all-that-comfy, but to Mr. Smoler’s point, my father readily admitted that he’d never once had to sleep in a hole in the ground during a blizzard.

I do remember, however, standing with him at a party while a neighbor of ours strenuously advocated war in Southeast Asia. This was perhaps 1964—I think it’s the first time I ever heard anybody say the word Hanoi —and my father listened noncommittally while Mr. O’Connor (not his name) called down all the furies of hell on the Republic of North Vietnam.

Afterward, I remarked that Mr. O’Connor had been pretty fierce. “Well, sure,” my father replied equably, “he was on an LMD during the war.”

World War II was ending with more of a whimper than a Waterloo for the Anglo-American forces in Europe. The Battle of Berlin was shaping up just 60 miles to the south of where I stood, but, by design, the American and British forces were to have no part in that carnage. I was unaware that Roosevelt and Churchill had ceded this piece of real estate to Stalin. What I did know was that I was a prisoner of the Germans in an area where three warring armies were converging, that thousands probably would die in the next few days, and that, if I did not want to be counted in that number, it would not hurt to do a little advance planning.

Although the Oder River was 50 miles to the east, the intense shelling of the Russian artillery was deafening and had been for days. It was impossible not to feel sorry for the targets of that fearsome barrage. German survivors later told me that a major purpose of that bombardment had been to make them keep their heads down while the Russian engineers built bridges, during the night, just a few inches below the surface of the recently thawed river.

Millions of people have seen the movie Patton, which begins with a view of the general standing before a giant American flag giving a speech to his troops. The actor George C. Scott gave a superb performance in this film; all who ever saw the general in action will agree that he came as close to being George S. Patton, Jr., as is humanly possible. The script for the movie speech itself was a fair representation of the talks to soldiers that Patton actually gave on several occasions.

But it was not exactly the speech I remember hearing as a member of the 65th Infantry Division, 3rd Army, as we were about to enter combat in the late winter of 1945, standing in the square of a little French town named Ennery. We were 30 or 40 miles west of Saarlautern, where the 65th was soon to attack the Siegfried Line. That speech was probably never reported, and the reason for that may be found on page 231 of General Omar N. Bradley’s book A Soldier’s Story:

All the places mentioned in this article lie within the boundaries of Waldo County in the region known as mid-coast Maine. For more information, plus listings of places to stay and eat and enjoy various diversions, go to www.waldocountymaine.com. Because this area is halfway between two of the state’s most popular tourist centers—the classic seacoast town of Camden and Bar Harbor, on the edge of Acadia National Park— it has in the past felt somewhat overlooked. Waldo County aims to be a destination in itself, where visitors will plan to stay a couple of nights, not just pause to spend an hour in the shops of Belfast or hurry through the Maritime Museum. This is coming to pass, with the most recent official statistics showing an average 2.8 days’ stay in the vicinity, more than double what it was a few years ago.