Category Archives: Second World War
Second World War fight to protect Monte Cassino Abbey was a battle over Europe’s history
(Wikimedia Commons/The Imperial War Museum)
Kriston R. Rennie, The University of Queensland
The Allied bombing of Monte Cassino Abbey in Italy on Feb. 15, 1944, was a mistake.
Hundreds of civilians reportedly died, and the Allies soon learned that the Germans, believed to be hunkered inside, were not there.
Military historians have written tirelessly about the strategic errors during this critical phase of the “Italian campaign,” which reduced the abbey to a “mass of ruins.”
Situated on the Germans’ defensive “Gustav Line,” which connected the Tyrrhenian and Adriatic Seas, the abbey stood in the way of the Allies’ march towards Rome. But was its destruction really necessary?
(Wikimedia Commons/Archives New Zealand)
Many of the campaign’s closest participants didn’t think so. Writing after the war, American army General Mark W. Clark considered the attack an unnecessary measure.
A senior British army officer, Major-General J.F.C. Fuller, called it “an act of sheer tactical stupidity.” Even Winston Churchill questioned whether Monte Cassino, “which several times in previous wars had been pillaged, destroyed and rebuilt … should have been destroyed once again.”
Yet all was not lost. Pre-emptive measures fuelled by a growing trans-Atlantic concern for the protection of its ancient library, archive and treasures spared the abbey an even greater disaster: the complete loss of its cultural identity and heritage.
Both Allied and Axis forces, engaged in a larger war against each other, scrambled to protect Monte Cassino’s library and artifacts. A politicized struggle emerged in the process, with both sides wanting to be seen and remembered as guardians of Europe’s cultural and religious inheritance.
Rise to prominence
Monte Cassino was the fountainhead of the western monastic tradition.
Established by Saints Benedict and Scholastica around the year 529, the abbey grew throughout the Middle Ages into one of the most important religious, political, cultural and intellectual centres in western Europe.
It acquired this reputation in part thanks to the basic instructions for monks’ religious life first developed at the abbey known as The Rule of Saint Benedict. Benedict’s “rule” offered organizing principles and regulations on obedience, work and prayer that inspired a community of devoted followers, and is today considered a classic text of Christian spirituality.
(Wikimedia Commons)
The abbey’s library and archive were especially famous. The collection was already substantial by the third quarter of the eighth century, and grew significantly in the 10th and 11th centuries.
Under Abbot Desiderius (1058-87), who physically expanded the abbey’s scriptorium and its scribal activity, Monte Cassino assumed a prominent place in the annals of western history, culture and learning.
The abbey’s so-called “Golden Age” didn’t last forever. Yet the achievements of this era furnished a rich historical legacy.
More than just bricks and mortar
Saving the abbey from wartime destruction became a priority for both Allied and Axis forces.
The former archbishop of both York and Canterbury, Lord Cosmo Lang of Lambeth, argued that the abbey’s “monuments of the great past, its architecture, its sculptures, its pictures are among the noblest expressions of the human spirit.”
(Wikimedia Commons)
According to the Allied Supreme Commander in Europe, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Italy’s monuments and cultural centres demanded great respect; they symbolized “to the world all that we are fighting to preserve.”
Appealing to the Italian people by radio, leaflets “and any other means available,” American army General George Marshall sought to remove all movable works of art from harm’s way. The destruction of immovable works was also to be avoided, “insofar as possible without handicapping military operations.”
Italy’s cultural inheritance was at stake.
Practical limits to protection
There were practical limits to the protection available. The lives of fighting men, military strategists repeatedly argued, should take precedence over ancient buildings.
But as Eisenhower admitted, “the choice is not always so clear-cut as that.” He recognized
there were times when “military necessity” could justify the complete annihilation of “some honoured site.” But it was the imperative of high commanders, he contended, to “spare without any detriment to operational needs” whatever monuments could be saved.
The British House of Lords reached a similar conclusion. Knowing that the abbey’s priceless treasures were “subject to the swaying tides of battle,” the House called on the “Germans occupying the place to remove them to safety as soon as they were in real danger.…”
When the Germans did so, Viscount Herbert Samuel called the act “a great relief to all who care for the interests of history.”
Evacuating library, treasures
In October 1943, an Austrian officer, Lieutenant Colonel Julius Schlegel, commander of the Divisional Maintenance Section — together with a German officer, Captain Maximilian Johannes Becker — convinced Abbot Gregorio Diamare to move the abbey’s literary, artistic and cultural treasures to safety.
In a series of newspaper articles written for the Austrian newspaper Die Österreichische Furche in 1951, Schlegel recounted the sequence of events.
Together with the abbot and community of monks, they forged a plan to evacuate Monte Cassino’s archive and library collections. According to Schlegel, the former consisted of some 80,000 documents while the latter contained around 70,000 volumes.
(German federal archives/Wikimedia Commons)
Added to this list of artifacts were priceless artistic works by Titian, Raphael, Bruegel and da Vinci, among others, as well as various ancient vases, tapestries, sculptures, reliquaries (containers for holy relics) and crucifixes.
Beyond its own library and treasures, contents from two museums in Naples, the convent of Montevergine near Avellino, and the Keats-Shelley house in Rome, had already been relocated there.
Over three short weeks, the remaining Cassinese monks, Italian refugees and German soldiers transported some 700 crates by 100 trucks — some to the neutral territory of the Vatican (Castel Sant’Angelo) and its library for safekeeping, others to a castle in Spoleto, about 100 kilometres north of Rome.
Improbable salvage operation
The whole salvage operation was an improbable feat in diplomacy, secular and ecclesiastical collaboration and logistics in the midst of war. But there are lingering questions about the Germans’ intervention — how both they and Allied forces sought to represent it in historical records.
Was it a genuine humanitarian effort to safeguard Monte Cassino’s heritage ordered by German High Command?
Was it a personal initiative spearheaded by Schlegel, “against the order of his German army superiors,” as the New York Times reported in 1958?
Or was it part of a larger propaganda campaign intended to disparage the Allies’ military actions against the defenceless Benedictine house?
Whatever the answer, the Italian Director General of the Fine Arts, writing on Dec. 31, 1943, thanked German military and political authorities for their collaborative efforts in safeguarding the “national artistic patrimony.”
The monks singled out Schlegel for his deeds, thanking him for saving them and their abbey’s possessions.
The national German newspaper, Die Welt, published a commemorative story in 1998 about Schlegel’s efforts, which it claimed Italy “has not forgotten.”
(Wikimedia Commons)
Preserving the abbey’s heritage was considered a moral and necessary good. Re-consecrating it in 1964, after almost two decades of reconstruction, Pope Paul VI marvelled at its capacity for regeneration. He celebrated peace “after whirlwinds of war had blown out the holy and benevolent flame.…”
Today, global pilgrims and tourists visit the restored abbey every day to experience its spiritual, historical and artistic treasures.
Kriston R. Rennie, Associate Professor in Medieval History, The University of Queensland
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Dunkirk: how British newspapers helped to turn defeat into a miracle
Official War Office photographer, Imperial War Museum, CC BY-SA
Tim Luckhurst, Durham University
Modern Britons associate The Great Escape with the 1963 film of that name starring Steve McQueen, reffering to, of course, a mass escape by Allied prisoners during the second world war. But this title might more appropriately be applied to the rescue of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) from Dunkirk between May 27 and June 4 1940.
As the UK marks the 80th anniversary of that escape, we shall hear much of the author JB Priestley’s first “postscript” for BBC Radio on Wednesday June 5. That broadcast coined the phrase “Little Ships” and even acknowledged Priestley’s own part in shaping understanding of Dunkirk. He asked listeners: “Doesn’t it seem to you to have an inevitable air about it – as if we had turned a page in the history of Britain and seen a chapter headed ‘Dunkirk’?”
But there was nothing inevitable about it.
Before pledging to “fight them on the beaches”, Winston Churchill himself reminded the House of Commons in the same speech that “wars are not won by evacuations”. He acknowledged that the BEF had courted disaster before depicting its escape as “a miracle of deliverance”. That the British public regards it as a triumph owes much to the work of British newspaper journalists and the Royal Navy press officers who briefed them.
How the ‘miracle’ came about
Dunkirk was not reported in eyewitness accounts from the beaches. The few war correspondents who struggled back with the retreating armies had no means by which to communicate. Reports, such as Evelyn Montague’s The Miracle of the BEF’s Return for the Manchester Guardian of Saturday June 1 1940, were penned by journalists invited to witness the Royal Navy’s delivery of evacuated soldiers to the ports of south-east England. There, they were briefed with patriotic fervour and naval pride as well as facts.
The first sentence of Montague’s piece gives a flavour of the mood that was inspired:
In the grey chill dawn today in a south-eastern port, war correspondents watched with incredulous joy the happening of a miracle.
The reporter – a grandson of the famous Guardian editor and owner C.P. Scott – did not fail to give the Royal Navy credit. Having described a waterfront hotel in which “every armchair held its sleeping soldier or sailor, huddled beneath overcoat or ground sheet”, Montague turned to the scene in the port:
As the rising sun was turning the grey clouds to burnished copper the first destroyer of the day slid swiftly into the harbour, its silhouette bristling with the heads of the men who stood packed shoulder to shoulder on its decks.
Back in 1940, the Times did not award reporters bylines. Its report of the BEF’s return on June 1 was by “Our Special Correspondent”. He too witnessed the scenes in a south-eastern port (security censorship forbade more precise identification). The men, he wrote, were “weary but undaunted”. Protected by “the ceaseless patrol maintained by British warships and aeroplanes in the English Channel”, men who had displayed “steadiness under a cruel test” were “pouring onto the quays”.
War Office official photographer, Imperial War Museum, CC BY
The Daily Mirror’s Bernard Gray, writing in its stablemate, the Sunday Pictorial, gave his verdict in a column on June 2 headlined simply “The Whole Magnificent Story”. “There have been many glorious episodes in the history of Britain”, he opined, “but, if that great English historian Macaulay were able to select from 2,000 years the most glorious week in the annals of the British Empire, this last seven days would surely be the week he would have chosen.”
Gray did not hesitate to offer comparisons:
Never mind the defeat of the Armada. Forget even the Battle of Waterloo, the epic of Trafalgar. For this week has seen the British Empire at its mightiest – in defeat.
Standing “in the streets of an English Channel Port”, G. Ward Price of the Daily Mail was similarly enthralled in his front-page piece, Rearguard Battles On, on June 1: “It is a picture of staggering heroism, fighting spirit and determination that never weakened in the face of overwhelming odds in men and material.”
A defeat, however ‘glorious’
It took Hilaire Belloc, the Anglo-French author of Cautionary Tales for Children, to recognise in his column for the Sunday Times (The Evacuation and After, June 2) that the withdrawal from Belgium and the collapse of Britain’s key ally, France, constituted a “catastrophe”.
In his defining examination of the elements that comprise Britain’s “received story” of 1940, The Myth of the Blitz, Scottish historian and poet Angus Calder noted that elements of the way the story was reported were misleading. However, Calder agreed that “Dunkirk was indeed a great escape”.
I celebrate the work British newspapers did to stiffen resolve and sustain morale at this time of grave national peril. In a democracy fighting totalitarianism, newspapers must balance their obligation to hold power to account and their duty to the national cause. The newspapers surveyed here certainly colluded in the creation of myths about Dunkirk, but their readers might not have welcomed any efforts to report Dunkirk any other way.
After all, myths are not lies and this one was studded with harsh facts. In Bernard Gray’s words for the Sunday Pictorial, Dunkirk was glorious despite the truth that: “The British Army has not won a battle. The British Army has retreated. The British Army has had to leave the Battlefield.”
For me, David Low captured the prevailing mood in his famous “Very Well, Alone” cartoon for the Evening Standard just a few weeks later on June 18. It depicts a British soldier alone before a raging sea and gesturing with a raised fist towards the Nazi-occupied continent from which German troops were expected to arrive at any moment.
Tim Luckhurst, Principal of South College, Durham University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Auschwitz: Women used different survival and sabotage strategies than men at Nazi death camp
ullstein bild via Getty Images
Judy Baumel-Schwartz, Bar-Ilan University
Nearly all the 1.3 million people sent to Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp in occupied Poland, were murdered – either sent to the gas chambers or worked to death. Life expectancy in many of these camps was between six weeks and three months.
Over a million of the Auschwitz dead were Jews, and scholars have concluded that more than half of them were women.
While male and female slave laborers in Auschwitz faced the same ultimate fate, my research on gender and the Holocaust finds that some of their behaviors and responses to captivity differed.
Methods of sabotage
Gender has been long overlooked in Holocaust research. Writing in the late 1970s and early 1980s, early scholars such as Joan Ringelheim and Sybil Milton had to fight for their legitimacy in a field that insisted that separating stories of Jewish men and women under the Nazi regime was a blow to their joint fate or to Jewish solidarity.
Today, however, the topic is being explored in depth, allowing us to better understand not only how Jews died during the Holocaust, but also how they lived.
API/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images
During the late 1980s, I conducted a study of Jewish men and women who had been part of Auschwitz’s “Canada Commando,” the forced labor detail responsible for sorting through the possessions inmates had brought with them to the camp and preparing those items for reshipment back to Germany for civilian use.
Since the barracks were the only place in the camp where one could find almost unlimited food and clothing, this forced labor troop was named after Canada – a country seen as a symbol of wealth.
Examining the behavior of the men and women of the Canada Commando, I noted an interesting difference. Among the items of clothing sorted there were fur coats. While both male and female prisoners in the Canada Commando tried to sabotage this work, acts punishable by death, their methods differed.
Male prisoners would usually rip the lining and seams of the coat to shreds, keeping only the outer shell intact. At first use, the coat would come apart, leaving the German who wore it coatless in the winter.
The few surviving women in the commando whom I interviewed did not use this tactic. Rather, they told me, they decided together to insert handwritten notes into the coat’s pockets that read something along the lines of: “German women, know that you are wearing a coat that belonged to a woman who has been gassed to death in Auschwitz.”
The women, in other words, chose psychological sabotage. The men, physical.
Coping with hunger
One of the most central experiences of all camp prisoners during the Holocaust was hunger. While both men and women suffered from hunger during incarceration, male and female prisoners used disparate coping methods.
Peter Toth/Pixabay, CC BY-SA
While men would regale each other with tales of the fantastic meals they would enjoy once liberated, women would often discuss how they had cooked they various dishes they loved before the war, from baking fluffy cakes to preparing traditional Jewish blintzes. Cara de Silva’s 1996 book, “In Memory’s Kitchen,” movingly documents how this phenomenon played out among women prisoners in the Terezin camp.
The differences between men’s and women’s coping methods may have derived from the gendered behavior in their lives before the war, in which men ate and women cooked – at least in the middle and lower classes.
In the case of women, this may also have been a female socialization process meant to solve two dilemmas simultaneously: the psychological need to engage – at least verbally – with food, and the educational need to prepare the young girls in the camp for culinary and household tasks after the war.
Under normal circumstances, mothers would have taught their daughters by example – not story.
Motherhood under Nazi rule
Various historical studies make mention of motherly sacrifices during the Holocaust, such as women who chose to accompany their children to death so that they would not be alone during their last moments on Earth.
Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Some mothers, however, acted otherwise, as documented by the Polish non-Jewish Auschwitz survivor Tadeusz Borowsky in his book “This Way to the Gas Ladies and Gentlemen.”
During the “selections” at Auschwitz – when prisoners were sent either to live or die – prisoners arriving were usually divided by sex, with the elderly, mothers and small children being separated from men and older boys. The mothers with small children, along with the elderly, were automatically sent to death.
Borowsky writes about a number of young mothers who hid from their children during the selection, in an attempt to buy themselves a few additional days or possible hours of life.
If a German soldier found a small child alone at a “selection,” Borowsky writes, he would take the child up and down the rows of prisoners while screaming, “This is how a mother abandons her child?” until he tracked down the hapless woman and condemned them both to the gas chambers.
At first, the female Auschwitz survivors I’ve interviewed said they’d never heard of any such thing. Eventually, however, after I returned to the question several times via different topics, a few women admitted to hearing that a handful mothers who arrived in Auschwitz with small children did indeed try to hide to save their own lives.
Historians are not judges. I do not mention the actions made in mortal fear to condemn these women but rather to contribute, 75 years later, to our understanding of Jewish life and death under Nazi terror. Doing requires relinquishing preconceived notions about both men and women, mapping out a broader canvas of the grim reality at Auschwitz.
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Judy Baumel-Schwartz, Director, the Finkler Institute of Holocaust Research, Bar-Ilan University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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