THE WORDS All Home explain the smiles on the faces of the men of the 96th Bomb Group, gathered for a debriefing session in England, probably after the great March 6, 1944, American air raid on Berlin. That everybody in the 96th made it back was a rare occurrence. Fred Huston, of Tulsa, Oklahoma, sent us this photo and noted that the 96th, his group, suffered more casualties than any other in the entire 8th Air Force. (For a vivid eyewitness account of the same raid, see Lester F. Rentmeester’s story in this issue. ) This fall the 8th Air Force Historical Society is staging a reunion in Texas, for all members who are still around. There, as Fred Huston says, “We’ll get together and lie to each other.”
Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
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January 2011
IN 1951 A BOOK appeared that dealt with American history in a new way—it told its story by fusing pictures and words so that each had equal weight and yet their sum was greater than the parts. Such an ambitious amalgam had never been attempted before, and Life in America by Marshall B. Davidson was an immediate success.
Critics were excited. Bernard De Voto, reviewing it in the New York Herald-Tribune Book Review , explained that “this is not… a collection of pictures arranged like a display of costumes or firearms in a museum. … Neither is it… a history in pictures … for people with reasonably high I.Q.’s. … It is history—historical exposition, interpretation, and comment—which uses pictures to extend and enhance historical realization.”
WAR IS A COUNTRY no traveler ever forgets. It haunts those who survive the journey as no other experience. The memories of war cling to the mind with astonishing tenacity, and sometimes in the dark of night when the glow of your cigarette is a distant fire on an island most people have never heard of, nothing seems to equal their demand for attention. Why? Possibly because the memories raise so many questions about oneself, particularly the unanswerable one: Why am I the one here to remember? Perhaps, however, that’s the point—to remember. Indeed, the ordeal of not forgetting may well be the only heroism of the survivor.
Sometimes these memories assert themselves so strongly that you decide to have it out with them. One way to do that is to go back. In early 1968, after a quarter of a century, I returned to Tarawa in the Gilbert Islands in that vast stretch of the Pacific where islands hump their coral backs out of the ocean like so many whales at rest.
FOR THE SPECIAL World War II section of this issue, we drew on the flood of first-person accounts that arrive in our office each month. It is a seemingly endless flow and endlessly interesting, for each man’s view of the event he witnessed is different from every other man’s. World War II is an old story only if you have read the same version before; it is a brand-new experience in the versions we set before you.
But is there no final, definitive version? Is history so boundless that it can never be told once and for all? Will there always be shifts of opinion and emotion, and even of facts themselves? The answer is obvious to any student of human affairs: there is no conventional wisdom that is not on the brink of turning unconventional and no unconventional interpretation that may not eventually end as a bulwark of convention.
In 1936 the Germans permitted a captain of the U.S. Army to attend their War College as an exchange student. What he learned there helped him develop the master strategy with which the Allies won the war. At eighty-six, one of the last of the commanders looks back.
GEN. ALBERT C. Wedemeyer, a native of Omaha, Nebraska, graduated from West Point in 1919. In 1936 the Army sent Wedemeyer, then a captain, to Berlin as an exchange student at the German War College. The information he brought back from Berlin soon proved useful to our own government. Assigned to the War Department at the request of the Chief of Staff, Gen. George C. Marshall, Wedemeyer was given the task of preparing what came to be known as the Victory Plan. That 1941 document established the strategic framework for American participation in a global war and laid the foundation for war mobilization.
THROUGHOUT MOST of the last century, very few Americans could agree on the time of day. Every town kept its own time. A pocket diary for the year 1873 contains two tables, one showing the difference in time between Boston and other cities, the second giving the time in other cities when it was noon in New York. With a little calculating, a Boston salesman bound for St. Louis could learn from the first table that if he set his watch back one hour, sixteen minutes, and forty-six seconds, it would agree with the timepieces of his prospective customers. And a New Yorker bound for Bangor, Maine, would be late for appointments if he forgot to set his watch ahead by twenty-one minutes.
There were thirty-eight different times in Wisconsin; there were six in Pittsburgh.
Great Britain had taken care of a similar situation by standardizing its time in 1848, and most of Western Europe had followed suit. But Americans could not seem to agree on a solution to the absurd problem.
A certain amount of funded debt … is a national blessing. The creation of a new species of money by this means naturally increases the circulation of cash, and extensively promotes every kind of useful undertaking in agriculture and mechanics. … In short, a debt originating in … patriotism … may thus be converted into a cement that shall strengthen and perpetuate the Union of America.
THE ABOVE pronouncement is not the defense of policy by a New Deal administrator in the 1930s. Nor is it the political platform of a presidential hopeful in the 1980s. It is the text of a creditors’ petition presented to the nation’s First Congress in 1789.