Category Archives: military

by | 17 December 2024 · 12:14 pm

U.S. Navy Segregation, 1943

From The Mighty Moo: The USS Cowpens and Her Epic World War II Journey from Jinx Ship to the Navy’s First Carrier into Tokyo Bay, by Nathan Canestaro (Grand Central, 2024), Kindle pp. 27-29:

At the bottom of the ship’s social hierarchy was the ship’s contingent of African American mess attendants, known after 1943 as steward’s mates. The Navy—and the Cowpens—was a microcosm of 1940s America, demonstrating its injustices as well as its virtues. One such injustice was the Navy’s policy on racial integration. Since 1932, African Americans had only been able to serve as enlisted men on Navy combat vessels, and only as steward’s mates, where they were effectively domestic servants. They did a variety of menial tasks, including cooking, waiting on officers’ tables at meals, and doing their cleaning and laundry.

It had not always been this way. The Navy was integrated throughout much of the nineteenth century, and during the Civil War as much as 20 percent of its sailors were Black. But in 1919, [Woodrow Wilson’s] Navy Secretary Josephus Daniels closed the door to any recruitment of African Americans. FDR had served under Daniels as assistant secretary of the Navy, and as president he sought to strike a middle ground between the demands of White segregationists and civil rights activists. Under his watch, the Navy allowed African Americans in only noncombat roles such as messmen, shore workers, dockhands, and in construction battalions, and like the other armed services it remained racially segregated.

It was not until 1944, when James Forrestal became secretary of the Navy, that the service began shifting toward integration. But in the meantime, the Navy came down hard on any resistance to segregation. In the so-called Philadelphia Mutiny of 1940, fifteen African American messmen aboard the cruiser Philadelphia wrote to one of the leading Black newspapers—then a powerful voice in the fight for racial equality—warning other African Americans not to join the Navy, for they were little more than “sea-going bell hops, chambermaids, and dishwashers.” All fifteen were dismissed from the service, which denied them any veterans’ benefits.

Cowpens had a contingent of twenty-eight steward’s mates aboard under the supervision of a White officer, but unfortunately no account of their experience survives. The account of one messman on Independence gives us some idea of what their life aboard the Moo might have been like, however. Willie Thomas was an eighteen-year old from Cincinnati, Ohio, who volunteered for the Navy because he saw little opportunity to contribute to the war at home. Willie’s primary responsibility was taking care of the pilots’ ready rooms and officers’ quarters, making sure coffee and donuts were available after every mission. But like many steward’s mates across the Navy, he also volunteered for additional tasks that pushed the boundaries of the racial restrictions that prohibited him from combat duty. When the ship was under attack, he carried clips of 40mm ammunition from the ship’s magazines to its antiaircraft guns so they could maintain a steady rate of fire. Despite working in a system that was biased against him, Willie was upbeat about the relationship of the steward’s mates with the majority-White crew, saying that “we were all on this big ship together.”

While Willie was charitable about the state of race relations aboard, George Terrell thought there was some room for improvement. He wrote in his journal about how shocked he was to encounter overt segregation and racism for the first time. “I was young and impressionable and terribly innocent about these things,” he recalled years after the war. “Many of the older career officers on the ship were natives of the Deep South… they really believed that these black boys were inferior human beings.” Terrell gradually learned that the prejudice was not universal, saying how it was “not shared by all the officers, not even by all the southern officers. And it was certainly less prevalent among the lower ranks.” For example, the enlisted Marines’ berthing compartment was right next to the steward’s mates, and the two groups got to know each other and often socialized. Getting to know each other, Terrell concluded, taught him how “screwed up” segregation really was.

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by | 16 December 2024 · 6:14 am

Green U.S. Navy Crews, 1942

From The Mighty Moo: The USS Cowpens and Her Epic World War II Journey from Jinx Ship to the Navy’s First Carrier into Tokyo Bay, by Nathan Canestaro (Grand Central, 2024), Kindle pp. 21-23:

The greenness of Cowpens’ personnel presented a major challenge for Captain McConnell. Teaching any crew to operate and maintain a complex and untried ship is a difficult task, and in Cowpens’ case these problems were compounded by the fact that most aboard were as new to the Navy as the ship itself. Men who had already served at sea were few and far between; most had only the basic skills taught in the Navy’s boot camps and training centers. Only weeks before, they had been civilians from all walks of life—countless Americans from small towns and big cities, factory workers and farmhands, or kids fresh out of high school. This was not unique to Cowpens; each one of the CVLs [light aircraft carriers] departed for the Pacific with more than 70 percent of their complement having no seagoing experience. The old Navy saying was that it took six years to make a sailor, but McConnell had only a matter of months to take this green mob of men and forge them into a combat-ready team.

Youth was one thing that the officers and men of Cowpens had in common. The bulk of the enlisted men were only seventeen or eighteen years old, while most of the ship’s junior officers were only slightly older, with two to four years of college under their belt. There were only a few men aboard who were in their thirties or forties, mostly Captain McConnell and his senior staff. One of the ship’s newly arrived Marines, George Terrell, was seventeen and described his shipmates as “just a bunch of green kids.” In his estimation, 90 percent of the crew was as young as he was. “A man got to be twenty-one [and] he was looked up to as a senior citizen,” Terrell explained. “Even the pilots that flew these hot fighter planes were kids. By the time they got to be twenty-five they were veterans… most of them were between twenty-one and twenty-two.”

…

Only a handful of the Moo’s complement of 107 officers had prewar experience or Naval Academy degrees. Instead, most were reservists—fresh out of college or civilian employment, and recent graduates of the Navy’s three-month crash course officer training program, earning them the moniker of “ninety-day wonders.” The number of reservists so significantly outnumbered the career officers that it sometimes seemed to them that they were strangers in their own Navy. More officers were in training in 1943—120,472—than there were total personnel in the Navy in 1938.

One of the few trade school boys assigned to the Moo was Lt. Frank Griffin “Grif” Scarborough. He graduated in the Academy’s class of 1942 and served one cruise aboard Enterprise as an ensign. He was a rarity aboard the Moo, as he was one of the few who had actually fired a weapon in combat. Although Scarborough started the cruise commanding a gun crew, the Cowpens’ senior assistant engineer was suddenly reassigned, leaving a position that needed to be filled. This wasn’t just a matter of a gap in the organizational table. The ship’s senior engineer was a thermodynamics professor from Penn State with no experience operating a ship’s power plant. McConnell and his executive officer, Cmdr. Hugh Nieman, wanted a seasoned officer to help him grow into the role. Given Scarborough had a degree in engineering, and the bulk of his fellow officers were either aviators or ninety-day wonders, Grif recalled, “Suddenly I was the man of the hour—I became senior assistant engineer of the Cowpens by default!”

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Filed under education, Japan, military, Pacific, U.S., war

by | 15 December 2024 · 4:48 pm

A Mustang in the Asiatic Fleet

From The Mighty Moo: The USS Cowpens and Her Epic World War II Journey from Jinx Ship to the Navy’s First Carrier into Tokyo Bay, by Nathan Canestaro (Grand Central, 2024), Kindle pp. 12-13:

Robert P. McConnell was one of many US and Allied officers who narrowly escaped the initial Japanese offensive that followed Pearl Harbor. The handsome, silver-haired McConnell was forty-six years old and a rarity in the prewar Navy—a “mustang,” an officer who started his career as an enlisted man. McConnell studied mining engineering at the University of California at Berkeley before dropping out to join the Navy in 1917. Although the 1918 armistice ended World War I before McConnell saw action in Europe, the practical and conscientious young man secured a commission, starting a Navy career in 1920 as a lieutenant.

McConnell’s unconventional background and lack of a Naval Academy degree nearly hamstrung his career before it began. Amid the draconian personnel cuts that followed the war, the Navy became more parochial, with an officer’s professional pedigree just as important in determining advancement as his performance. Through sheer determination and persistence, McConnell managed to survive and advance in rank in this unforgiving environment. But it wasn’t easy. His daughter Doreen McConnell Johnson recalled how her father had to work harder than the Naval Academy graduates who surrounded him, and he was constantly nettled by reminders that he would always be an outsider in the service’s old boys’ network. Even among the families, Doreen recalled the first question asked in any social engagement was “Oh, what Academy class was your father in?”

McConnell was assigned to the Asiatic Fleet in the Philippines, where he briefly served as the executive officer (second in command) of seaplane tender Langley before assuming command of that ship in early 1942. While every naval officer dreamed of commanding a ship, the Langley was no prize and neither was the Asiatic Fleet. In fact, the assignment was likely the Navy’s way of telling Commander McConnell that his career advancement had come to an end. Despite its grandiose name, the Asiatic Fleet was a ragtag collection of obsolete ships primarily intended to “show the flag” in East Asia rather than do much fighting. It was a place of exile, where the Navy shipped its over-the-hill or incapable officers to wait out their retirement. Similarly, the Langley was exactly the sort of misfit that ended up in the Asiatic Fleet. She’d started life as a humble collier (coal ship), but in 1920 was rebuilt into the Navy’s first aircraft carrier. Langley was more of a test bed for naval aviation than a warship, never really intended to go into harm’s way. She was desperately vulnerable—slow, unmaneuverable, and with little in the way of antiaircraft defenses. Deemed no longer useful as an aircraft carrier, in 1936 she suffered through a conversion to a seaplane tender that cost her almost half her flight deck. Langley lost the ability to launch and land planes in return for the space to winch aboard one of her flock of long-range PBY Catalina seaplanes for maintenance.

Although the Asiatic Fleet had been bracing for the outbreak of hostilities, news of the attack on Pearl Harbor arrived like a bolt out of the blue in the predawn hours of December 8. It caught Commander McConnell and his crew entirely by surprise. Langley received her orders to raise steam and head south as fast as she could, only barely keeping ahead of Japanese air strikes on her home port of Cavite, Manila. They escaped to Australia, where Langley and McConnell had a two-month reprieve patrolling its northern coast before being called back to the war.

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Filed under education, Japan, military, Pacific, Philippines, U.S., war

by | 7 December 2024 · 3:01 pm

Contempt for Old Elites, 1945

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 510-512:

Contempt for old elites derived not only from blunders of international politics, however. Beyond failing to protect their countries from the onslaught of well-armed and rapacious neighbors, the prewar leaders had neglected grievous social problems, instead monopolizing and reproducing privilege for themselves. They had made limited investments in modern industries and introduced few educational reforms, and therefore the overwhelming majorities of the populations were cut off from hopes of social advancement. Now leading intellectuals sought to expiate their guilt for the rampant injustices of the interwar regimes by siding with people’s democracy, understanding that those governing them were of lower class background and had to learn to behave “culturally” through educational advancement that only the intelligentsia could provide.

Few leaders of the interwar years remained to face the consequences. In 1945, Admiral Miklós Horthy was a prisoner in Nuremberg, and after release went into exile in Switzerland and Portugal. Polish foreign minister Józef Beck escaped to Romania, only to die there. Peasant Party leader Stanislaw Mikołajczyk returned to Poland, but the rest of the London government did not. Yugoslav King Peter had fled at war’s outbreak, never to return. Boris III of Bulgaria died in 1943 and his nine-year-old son, Simeon, went into exile in 1946. In February 1945, as the result of a decision of a Communist-controlled “people’s court,” virtually the entire surviving government of Bulgaria was executed, including three regents, twenty-two ministers, and sixty-seven parliamentarians. The popular King Michael of Romania was forced to abdicate at gunpoint in December 1947 and left for exile in Switzerland the following month.

The devastations of war had also weakened the governing classes, especially in Poland. There Nazi and Soviet occupiers had acted as co-conspirators in genocide by deporting and killing Poland’s national elite, most egregiously at the forests near Katyn in early 1940, when the NKVD shot more than 22,000 reserve officers, who in civilian life were leading figures in politics, culture, and the economy. When Soviet authorities sent four transports of more than one million Polish citizens from eastern Poland to central Asia and Siberia in 1940/1941, they targeted persons with higher education and means; and from the moment German armed units crossed Poland’s borders, SS units followed with lists of Polish intellectuals to kill. The physical and human destruction overlapped most dramatically in Warsaw, which had served as the political but also as the cultural and economic locus of power. Of the city’s 1.2 million inhabitants, historians estimate that 800,000 lost their lives during the war. The municipality was still more than 80 percent ruins as late as 1948. Those elites who survived staggered from the blows received and were unable to mount serious resistance to people’s democracy.

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by | 5 December 2024 · 7:45 am

Romania Between Nazis and Soviets

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 487-490:

In early July, the Romanian army, assisted by local populations, shot the Jewish inhabitants of villages in southern Bukovina and then extended the killing eastward. In the regional metropolis Czernowitz/Cernăuţi/Chernivtsi, until recently a center of Habsburg Jewish cultural life, German regular soldiers as well as SS troops joined with Romanian forces in rounding up and murdering much of the town’s Jewish population. German units claimed to be shocked by their allies’ brutality, and SS mobile killing units (Einsatzgruppe D) received orders to entice Romanians into “a more planned procedure in this direction.” They objected that the Romanians failed to bury victims, took bribes, or engaged in rape and plunder (for example, taking gold from corpses).

Jews who survived were driven toward the river Dniester, where many were shot into the waters while others were kept in unspeakable conditions in newly established “ghettos” on Bessarabian territory. Next, after occupying and then annexing territory of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic on the other side of the Dniester—called “Transnistria”—the Romanians set up camps there, where unknown numbers of Jews were killed. They permitted no regular food distribution, and some inmates attempted to eat grass. In the infamous camp at Bodganovka, the bakery sold bread for gold, but when the gold ran out, the commandant ordered mass shootings. Romanian forces shot some 40,000 Jews over a precipice into the Bug River, and then took a break for the Christmas holiday. They had seized the regional capital Odessa after stiff resistance in October, yet after a bomb exploded killing Romanian officers, Antonescu ordered reprisals; in one of the cruelest mass murders of the Holocaust, 18,000 Jews lost their lives. By the spring of 1942, this human-made hell had consumed the lives of at least 100,000 Jews.

If the Germans were shocked by the brutality of Romanian policies against Jews, they were also impressed by the apparent peace and prosperity of Ukraine under Romanian rule. After the violence against Jews subsided in the fall of 1941, the city of Odessa recovered quickly. The venal Romanian administration took its cut, but then stood back and watched as individual enterprise flourished, with new hairdressers, cafes, shops, taverns, and movie theaters. Rather than terrorize the local population, Romanian authorities allowed each village in Transnistria to vote on the language it wished to be taught to its children and set up a Ukrainian auxiliary police force.

The Antonescu regime’s eagerness to kill Jews in Bessarabia and Transnistria had left the Germans convinced that it would follow through with the complete destruction of Jewry in the Romanian heartlands. Indeed, Antonescu had wanted to deport the Jews there to Bessarabia, but the Germans stopped him in August 1941, afraid of overburdening SS Einsatzgruppe D. Romanian authorities constricted the rights of Jews in the Regat [the Old Kingdom] as well as Transylvania: seizing their property, forcing them into labor brigades, and expelling them from the professions. The process was called “Romaniazation.” If Romania had behaved like Germany, the next step would have been mass murder, and in fact plans surfaced to transport Romanian Jews to killing camps in occupied Poland. The German railways had even set aside cars and drawn up routes. Yet in the summer of 1942, Romania stopped cooperating.

Explanations vary. Radu Lecca, Romanian commissar for Jewish affairs, a man already wealthy from bribes, supposedly took offence at being snubbed during a visit to Berlin in August 1942. He and his colleagues had become tired of being treated as representatives of a second-class power and being told what to do with “their” Jews. But the moment for a shift also seemed apt. The Romanian government had sent more troops to the eastern front than anyone else, and vividly sensed the coming catastrophe of the Third Reich. Two desperately undersupplied Romanian armies were just taking up positions near Stalingrad in the fall of 1942 when Antonescu requested new weapons from Hitler. This and all other requests were rebuffed.

The leadership also grew hypersensitive to warnings coming from the West about its mistreatments of Jews. President Franklin D. Roosevelt told the World Jewish Congress in New York that “punishment of countries which had persecuted Jews represented one of the aims of the war,” and he promised “fearful retribution” for those who perpetrated “barbaric crimes” against civilian populations in Axis-occupied countries. With the legacies of Versailles and Trianon in mind, Romanian elites knew that punishment meant loss of territory.

That same month, Romanian university professors, writers, and schoolteachers signed a memorandum to the Palace linking deportations of Jews to the postwar territorial settlement: “We must bring ourselves in line with international law and guarantee the right to life and legal protection of every Jew of the territories which we claim.” Ringing through this declaration was the ethnic perspective according to which human life, especially of aliens, was of secondary importance to the nation’s territory. But now the fear of losing territory kindled concern for the fate of aliens, as well as some contrition. Deportations of Jews were in fact a “methodical and persistent act of extermination.” The authors acknowledged that “we have been at the forefront of the states which persecute the Jews.” “I have said it once and will go on saying it,” Romanian Peasant Party leader Iuliu Maniu added in September, “we will pay dearly for the maltreatment of the Jews.”

Rumors of planned deportations to Poland had leaked that summer, panicking Jews in Transylvania, and Maniu and others in the Romanian Peasant Party intervened to put a stop to them. In December, Roosevelt and now Churchill reiterated the threats. “Those responsible for these crimes,” they declared, “shall not escape retribution.” Warning voices also came from the Red Cross, the Turkish Government, the Orthodox Metropolitan of Transylvania, the Papal Nuncio, as well as the Romanian Jewish community (led by Alexandru Safran, the youngest chief rabbi in the world, who had worked closely with members of the royal family as well as the dictator’s wife). Thanks to the insistence of several women active in social welfare, the Romanian Jewish community also mobilized to rescue some 2,000 orphans who had survived the punishing camps in Transnistria.

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Filed under Germany, migration, military, nationalism, religion, Romania, U.S., Ukraine, USSR, war

by | 4 December 2024 · 4:47 pm

Bulgaria Between Nazis and Soviets

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 484-485:

What had made the deportations from Thrace and Macedonia take place without resistance was that the Jews there were not Bulgarian citizens. Yet the conditions of their sojourn on Bulgarian territory on the way to Poland became known and shocked the public conscience. They had had been denied food, water, and sanitation and been subject to wanton violence. Now no one doubted the meaning of further deportations: they would be the first steps to total destruction. Subranie [National Assembly] Vice President Dimitar Peshev, supported by forty deputies, censured the government and a “hint from the highest quarters” followed (presumably from Boris), ordering the stop of all deportations planned from Old Bulgaria.

Yet the Germans continued to apply pressure. Foreign Minister Ribbentrop complained personally to King Boris during his visit to Berlin in April 1943 about his government’s failure to honor an agreement from January to deport 6,000 Jews. Boris explained that he needed them for road building. German observers on the ground reported other methods of deception: rather than prepare Sofia’s Jews for the promised deportations to Poland, Bulgarian authorities were planning to settle them in the countryside. Even the fanatic Beckerle felt there was no hope in prodding the Bulgarians to further action. They had been living so long with other peoples, like the Armenians, Greeks, and Gypsies, he wrote to the Foreign Office, that Bulgarians did not see the Jews as a special enemy. Indeed, within Bulgarian society, the plans to remove Jews from Sofia was seen as a threat and an outrage, and were preceded by street demonstrations and interventions of Jews with Christian acquaintances, including members of the Orthodox Synod, as well as the Dunovist Christian sect. The Dunovists, who incorporated worship of the rising sun in their Christian beliefs, were strong at the royal court and included Princess Eudoxia, Boris’s advisors, and perhaps Boris himself. One rabbi, Daniel Tsion, a mystic and student of comparative theology, managed to deliver a note to the king with what he claimed was a warning from God against persecuting Jews.

Despite this unusual engagement of Bulgarian politicians and church leaders in saving their Jewish neighbors, the resistance had its limits. King Boris still thought Jews were a serious problem that had to be dealt with. In April 1943, he told members of the Orthodox Synod that Jews and their “profiteering spirit,” were in large measure responsible for the present “global cataclysm.” Like politicians throughout the region, he was primarily interested in strengthening his nation-state, and that is why he had subjected Jews and other non-ethnic Bulgarians to a demeaning status, depriving them of civil rights. King Boris may well have approved deportations of Jews to the death camps had Germany prevailed against the Soviet Union. And if Jews had not lost their lives in virtually every other European state, Bulgaria would be remembered as a hell for Jews.

Yet Boris and other influential Bulgarians could not ignore the fact that Germany was losing the war, and they feared allied retribution. When US bombers attacked the oil fields at Ploieşti in Romania, Boris rejected German requests for assistance in turning them back. He also refused to alienate the Soviets and never permitted anti-Soviet propaganda in the Bulgarian press that was routine everywhere else. The only thing that might have changed the Bulgarian position, German diplomats wrote, would be “new activation of the German war effort,” that is, evidence that Germany could win. Yet as Soviet forces pushed ever closer to Berlin, anti-German forces in Bulgaria showed greater courage, carrying out attacks on right-wing leaders, like General Hristo Lukov in February 1943. The assassinations lasted into the spring, showing that the war was “coming home” to the streets of Sofia. In August, the king died of heart failure, shortly after a meeting with Hitler in East Prussia, his third of the year. Perhaps he had been poisoned, but more likely he was worn out from the stress of navigating among a plethora of competing demands.

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by | 22 November 2024 · 3:36 pm

East Central Europe Under the Nazis

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 463-464:

By 1941, three zones of influence had emerged in Nazi-dominated East Central Europe. The first included areas where Germany destroyed states and left no native administration, itself taking rudimentary control. The second comprised areas where it destroyed states and replaced them with its own political entities, misleadingly called “independent states.” In the third zone, states remained under control of native political elites, but they came under irresistible pressure to become German allies. Only Poland belonged to the first category.

The Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia fit between the first and second zones: it was occupied and destined for absorption into Germany but valued as a place that produced high-quality industrial goods. Its population was thought to be racially valuable (50 percent of the Czechs were considered assimilable; only 10 percent of the Poles) and was permitted its own heavily supervised government, with a Czech cabinet and ministries, and even a tiny armed force. Serbia was similar, a rump, embodying nothing a Serb nationalist could be proud of, with a Serb head of state who had been a Royal Yugoslav general but was under direct Nazi oversight. As we have seen, in contrast to Bohemia, a desperate underground struggle raged, extending from Serbia across Yugoslav territory, pitting German, Italian, and Croat forces against Serb nationalists and Communist internationalists.

The second zone was made up of the “independent” states of Slovakia and Croatia, called into life by Berlin with the expectation they would be loyal, co-fascist regimes; and they matched expectations, to say the least. Their ultranationalist leaders were eager to demonstrate—above all to themselves—their personal achievements for “the nation” by becoming even more racist than the state that had created them. In 1941, a Slovak newspaper boasted that the strictest racial laws in Europe were Slovak; at the same time, the brutality of the Ustasha anti-Serb actions shocked even the SS.

The final zone consisted of states that technically remained sovereign members of the international community, yet whose leaders could see from the fate of Yugoslavia and Poland the consequences of defiance. Still, unlike the puppets Croatia or Slovakia, the Hungarian, Bulgarian, and Romanian states did not owe their existence to Nazi Germany, and everything Germany wanted from them had to be negotiated. The lever for Germany in gaining compliance was territory: though less rapacious than Nazi leaders, East European elites also hungered for Lebensraum. Bulgaria hoped to recover ground lost at Neuilly-sur-Seine and wrench away disputed lands from Greece and Yugoslavia. Hungary wanted back everything it had lost at Trianon. Romania desired the return of lands it had lost in 1940, when parts of northern Transylvania went to Hungary in the second Vienna award (at the insistence of Hitler and Mussolini), and Bessarabia and Bukovina fell to the Soviet Union. These three states knew that Germany as the regional hegemon could make their aspirations become a reality.

Yet from 1941, German diplomats increasingly insisted that the governments of East Central Europe must fulfill a prime wish of their state. They should identify and segregate their Jewish populations, place them under racial laws, and deport them to German-controlled territories in Poland for a fate loosely described as “work in the east.”

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Filed under Bulgaria, Czechia, Germany, Hungary, Italy, labor, migration, military, nationalism, philosophy, Poland, religion, Romania, Slovakia, USSR, war, Yugoslavia

by | 20 November 2024 · 5:43 pm

Antifascists in 1930s Bulgaria

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 428-430:

Fascists in Bulgaria faced a distilled concentration of all the problems that handicapped counterparts in Yugoslavia or Poland: a native strongman, a native national movement that valued democracy, and an agricultural societal structure. In Bulgaria, fascism lacked the disorientated and enraged middle- and working-class constituencies that allowed it to flourish farther west. Still, like everywhere else, a native version did emerge, and it did so from the top of the political elite. After Stamboliiski’s murder in 1923, the economics professor Aleksandar Tsankov became prime minister and vigorously suppressed the Bulgarian left. He fell from power in 1926 because his rule involved brutalities that shocked European opinion, causing London bankers to threaten the withholding of loans. After that, a moderate government took office under the centrist Andrey Lyapchev (1866–1933), and the country again managed to secure international financing.

Tsankov did not fade from the scene entirely, however, and became increasingly attracted to fascist politics. In May 1934 he called for a rally ahead of Nazi leader Hermann Goering’s visit to Sofia. Some 50,000 supporters were expected. Yet three days before Goering’s visit, the Bulgarian military (“Military League”) stepped in and seized power from a weak assemblage of mainstream parties. The army officers were supported by the civilian association Zveno (“The Link”), which held that Bulgaria must be modernized from above by the enlightened few because parliaments were a thing of the past. Under Zveno’s rule, Bulgaria conformed to regional patterns: increasing dependence on the German economy, nationalist chauvinism—reflected, for example, in the changing of Turkish to Bulgarian place names—and central rule. Zveno believed the state bureaucracy had to be streamlined and rationalized, and it reduced the ranks of the civil service by one-third.

Zveno is yet another case of the terminological confusion of that period surrounding the word fascism. Although Zveno was not a paramilitary, radical nationalist, or a mass mobilization regime, the US newsweekly Time called it “fascist.” In fact Zveno was moderate in foreign policy and sought better relations with Belgrade rather than a violent seizure of disputed territory. As in Marshall Piłsudski’s Sanacja, prominent leaders were military men (Damyan Velchev, Pencho Zlatev, Kimon Georgiev), and like Sanacja, they vowed to undo the corruption of public life. Yet unlike Polish counterparts, they did not establish a government party (like BBWR) or mass movement (like OZON), although they did abolish the political parties. The National Parliament (subranie) and local governments continued, but candidates had to run as individuals. Still, most successful candidates for office had belonged to the old parties and were recognized as such. Subranie elections in early 1938 netted the opposition one-third of the votes despite the sort of harassment and manipulation seen in Poland, Romania, Hungary, and Yugoslavia.

In early 1935, King Boris III, concerned about republican sentiment in the government, disbanded the Military League and appointed a civilian prime minister loyal to himself (he maintained the ban on parties). From that moment until his death in 1943, the king controlled Bulgarian politics, appointing prime ministers as he saw fit, yet acting as a benign dictator, maintaining peace with totalitarian Germany and Russia while trying to associate Bulgaria with democratic France. As far as possible, he suppressed the terrorist IMRO. Calling himself a “democratic monarch,” Boris stayed in touch with Bulgarians by touring the country in his own locomotive, occasionally stopping to visit with villagers, to whom he dispensed trinkets and other small gifts. Several right-wing associations emerged in the late 1930s that admired Nazism, but Boris kept them in check.

Yet he also adopted certain popular fascist appearances. Given his impressive record as field commander in World War I, Boris wore a uniform with some justification, and his regime formed corporatist organizations like a state-run “patriotic” union, through which, one Communist asserted, the “fascists buried the class struggle.” Again we see the period’s flexible understanding of “fascist.” For Communists, the authoritarian antisocialist regimes were fascist by definition. In 1936 Zveno created a “Bulgarian Workers’ Union” that attempted to usurp the workers’ cause in order to strengthen the state (again very reminiscent of Italy). May Day parades continued, but red flags were replaced by Bulgarian tricolors that were blessed by priests. As we will see in Chapter 17, Boris supported the rescue of Bulgaria’s Jews when they were threatened by Germany.

Like Hungarian and Romanian authoritarians, Boris suppressed fascism yet expended much less energy for similar results. His country, even more rural and with rampant illiteracy, featured few large towns in which people might be mobilized for fascist causes. In addition, Bulgarian politics offered other options to absorb radical energies. There was Stamboliiski’s mass agrarian movement in the 1920s as well as a potent military ultra-right, and there was IMRO, the Macedonian separatist movement, which featured a strong Bulgarian irredentist faction. All of this meant that Tsankov’s followers had little chance in the urban spaces where fascism thrives. And much more successfully than Horthy or Carol, Boris III, a popular and uniformed war hero, appeared to embody the national cause. It was easy for his police to identify and arrest the relatively few fascists, especially at the universities, which served as hothouses for radical ideologies.

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by | 2 November 2024 · 11:13 am

Down the Danube: Serbia

For two weeks in September-October this year, the Far Outliers took a Viking cruise down the Danube River from Budapest to Bucharest. Here are some impressions from each of the countries we visited. A photo album from the trip (Danube 2024) is on Flickr.

Our first stop in Serbia was the capital city, Belgrade. It wasn’t Budapest, but it was a very pleasant surprise: lively, bustling, and well supplied. We opted for the Viking “included” (at no extra cost) excursion that focused on three attractions: the white limestone-walled Fortress that gave the city its name; the spectacular Church of St. Sava on the pattern of Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia (without the minarets); and the Bohemian quarter of the Old Town (with break dancers). The Fortress, now a city park, housed two unusual displays: a dinosaur park and a display of artillery. Our group’s guide was the best of our whole trip: a onetime professional singer who was now a professor of art history and a wonderfully wry storyteller. He demonstrated the acoustics in St. Sava by chanting liturgy at a central spot. On the church grounds was a statue of Nikola Tesla, born in what’s now Croatia and buried in what’s now Serbia.

Our fondest memories of Belgrade were not the architecture, the food, or the shopping, but the music. Later that Friday afternoon, when we climbed up the steep steps to the Old Town on our own, we chanced upon a crowd waiting outside a church for the wedding party to emerge. We stayed around long enough to enjoy the music and take video. In our ship’s lounge that evening, we enjoyed a Serbian troupe performing Balkan folkloric music and dance.

When we woke up the next morning, we were at Golubac, site of an old castle on a steep hillside protecting the Danube border. After touring it and slowly climbing to the top, we boarded a bus for a hillside overlooking the Iron Gates, the site of the sunken Turkish fortress island of Ada Kaleh, and Romania across the river. On the sun deck in late afternoon, we listened to the cruise director’s narration as we navigated through the narrow gorges and past the huge Decebal statue. We passed through the locks of the hydroelectric dams after dark.

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Filed under economics, language, military, music, nationalism, Romania, travel, Turkey, Yugoslavia

by | 21 September 2024 · 5:45 am

1848: Nationalism’s Icarus Moment

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 157-158:

Never before or since have Europeans seen common hopes smashed so rapidly as in 1848, the year of democratic revolutions. In February and March, after a disguised King of France escaped the wrath of his people, populations across the continent rose up against princes and kings, unified as never before, seeming to act according to one script. Divisions of nation or religion that had caused countless wars no longer seemed to matter, and even terms like “east” and “west” became secondary. The watchword was self-rule. Crowds demanding rights and democracy forced divine-right rulers to retreat and negotiate, from Italy and France through central Germany and into Bohemia, Prussian as well as Austrian Poland, all of Hungary (including Transylvania), and even farther east, into the principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia (the heart of today’s Romania), still under nominal Ottoman rule. Everywhere in this vast space, Europeans were telling the same story: they were leaving feudalism behind for better lives under democracy. If kings or princes survived, they would be bound to constitutions, as was the norm in Britain or the Netherlands.

But as early as April, the push for democracy was exposing divides among populations that few had imagined existed, and the stunned princes began surging back, making use of resources, some old (like a well-trained military), others new and unexpected. For the Habsburgs, virtually every national group turned out to be a potential ally against German and Magyar democrats, but they also exploited class divisions, playing peasants off against urban liberals, and urban liberals off against suburban proletarians. When pogroms broke out across Central Europe in 1848, the House of Habsburg also revealed itself as the defender of Jews and their property against urban mobs, who claimed that Jews stood with their ethnic enemies. That house was not only a bastion of the old order but also a defense of life and liberty against an emerging new order, of liberalism and national self-determination, but also of seemingly intractable interethnic feuding.

By the fall of 1848, the Habsburgs and other monarchs were rebounding, even if the final victories were not scored until the spring and summer of 1849, when imperial authorities closed down the elected parliament in Austria and crushed the democratic revolution in Hungary, with the assistance of Croat, Austro-German, Serb, and Romanian forces recruited from within Habsburg territories. The fighting between Hungary’s democrats trying to establish their national state and these nationalities became so intense that the region became a staging ground for ethnic cleansing: Magyar, Serb, and Romanian forces staked claims for territory by expelling ethnic others and burning their villages.

The difficulties of making a transition from feudalism to freedom were shocking because Habsburg subjects had not known the full extent of the realm’s complexity. The historian Joseph Redlich wrote much later that censorship and poor internal communications had kept the various parts of the monarchy ignorant of one another. There was little critical higher education, and for the elites, the “state almost completely coincided with German Austria,” and they assumed it would govern from Vienna with no concern for the “nationally foreign” inhabitants of the Sudeten and Alpine countries. Little was known about Czechs and South Slavs, and few anticipated that people speaking in their names might demand independence.1 Inhabitants of Central and Eastern European were neighbors who got to know one another only after they had to deal with one another as free human beings for the first time.

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Filed under democracy, Eastern Europe, education, France, Germany, language, military, nationalism, religion, war