January 2011

About eleven o’clock on the night of February 18 or 19, he never could remember which, in the year of our Lord 1807, a backwoods lawyer named Nicholas Perkins who headed the federal land office in Mississippi Territory left the group around the fire in Sheriff Theodore Brightwell’s log tavern and went to the door for a breath of fresh air. It was a night of clear frosty moonlight. Perkins could see far clown the rutted road. Though he was described as a fearless giant of a man, and a major in the territorial militia, Perkins was startled to see two horsemen come riding up out of the forest.

The smaller of the horsemen rode right past. He was a shabby-looking little fellow lost under a broad-brimmed beaver hat. His companion reined in his horse and asked Perkins the way to Major Hinson’s. His name, it turned out, was Major Robert Ashley.

The cost of victory on Guadalcanal would have been far higher but for an organization with the unwarlike code name of Ferdinand. Ferdinand’s contribution was military intelligence, collected under the noses of the Japanese by British and Australian coast-watchers.

Coastwatching was the brain child of the Royal Australian Navy. The Bismarck and Solomon archipelagoes and New Guinea were the logical stepping stones for an enemy intent on attacking Australia, so after war broke out in Europe in 1939, Commander Eric Feldt, R.A.N., set out to expand and supervise an intelligence network in these islands. By December of 1941, Feldt had too strategically placed observers reporting to him, by radio.

Fans were known to the ancients, and kept the flies off Pharaoh. The Japanese, clever as always, devised the folding variety, and they became enormously popular in the Western world. Whether the thing was made of feathers, silk, or paper, the idea at first was simply to cool the person. But there was something exquisitely graceful about a beautiful lady waving her fan and, as women will, they discovered it. It was a new way to say yes, no, or maybe. Americans naturally systematized codes of fan signals, and we print one such code, dated 1879, below. This magazine takes no responsibility for any problems our readers may incur by using it. Like Colt, we merely sell the weapon.

One of the satisfactions of history is the pleasure of nostalgia. All of us have moments when it seems as if things were better when we were younger; and from that it’s only a step to the feeling that some earlier period in our history was somehow better in most if not all respects than the present. It was something of this feeling, we admit, that gave rise to the special issue of A MERICAN H ERITAGE on the Twenties, last August; and we have received a gratifying number of letters showing that the feeling was shared by many of our readers. Among them was one from Mr. Frederic B. Leach, of Nutley, New Jersey, who was reminded of a parody he once heard of Edward Arlington Robinson’s famous poem, “Miniver Cheevy.” The parody, called “Miniver Cheevy, Junior,” ends:

Dead men, of course, tell no tales, either in defense of their lives or in explanation of how and why they died. Many of our readers found Gene Smith’s article about the dead of World War I, “Still Quiet on the Western Front”—also in our October issue—very moving. One of the most eloquent letters we received came from Thomas J. Cummins, of Oakland, California.

“Even now,” Mr. Cummins writes, “the trumpets are sounding once again.… And the harvest of white crosses and Stars of David, and the boatloads of flag-draped coffins will testify to the endless capacity of man to kill. The swivel-chair patriots and the street-corner heroes don’t die in these wars they extol so vehemently.… How comfortable it must be, to demand that someone else go out and die for your ‘honor.’ How glorious, the knowledge that your bones will be animated to a safe old age, rather than fertilizing a patch of muddy turf on a ‘field of glory!’ And the only ones who really know, have their mouths stopped with that same mud. On behalf of them, I thank you.…”

—The Editors