Category Archives: U.S.

by | 18 December 2024 · 2:15 am

U.S. Navy in Wartime Honolulu

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. 56-57:

Hawaii had occupied a special place in the American popular consciousness since the 1930s. Even during the darkest days of the Depression, as much as half of the US population saw a movie every week, and “Hawaii Hollywood-style” was a staple of the films of the era. A string of blockbusters romanticized it as a tropical paradise with a hula girl under every palm tree. The islands’ exclusiveness also added to their popular mystique. In the prewar era, a Hawaiian vacation was well out of reach of the vast bulk of American society, affordable only for the very affluent.

Once servicemen arrived in Honolulu, it was difficult to reconcile the popular image of the place with reality. Rather than an idyllic paradise, Honolulu was just another crowded Navy town, “full of sunlight and sailors and bad liquor.” Pearl Harbor was a major shipyard, supply center, and way station for the Pacific Fleet, and from 1941 to 1945 more than a million servicemen and defense workers passed through it on their way to or from the war. Sam Sommers commented that with the huge volume of men, equipment, and supplies pouring into Hawaii, “the island could have fought a pretty good war by itself.”

Few servicemen said much good about it, however, dubbing it “the rock.” Some of this was just a case of unrealistic expectations, although there were also plenty of legitimate gripes. These included overcrowding by fellow servicemen, high prices, a male-to-female ratio that most men swore was at least several hundred to one, and the seedy industries that sprung up to separate the sailors from their $50-a-month salary. The complaint that there were just too many servicemen was the most common. The men waited in line for everything—restaurant, movie theater, bar, or brothel. The crowds would reach their peak in December 1944, when 137,200 soldiers, sailors, and Marines were ashore, more than half of Honolulu’s 1940 population. The islands had a tradition of hospitality, but many residents felt they had avoided a Japanese invasion only to suffer through a Navy one.

Cowpens had six days at anchor in Pearl Harbor before putting out to sea for exercises, and during that time McConnell released the crew for liberty in rotating shifts. While the officers enjoyed time in the O clubs or playing golf and tennis, some of the sailors went sightseeing, or swam or sunbathed on Waikiki Beach, seeing for the first time that the iconic beach was marred with double lines of barbed wire and patrolled by sentries. Other popular destinations were the USO clubs, the largest being the Army-Navy YMCA in downtown Honolulu. At these clubs, A-list celebrities such as Bob Hope and Jack Benny put on lavish musical variety shows, which interspersed big band music with stand-up or dance routines. The Navy had its recreation center, the Breakers Club, on Waikiki Beach—Artie Shaw and his Navy band made it famous, and up to 4,400 men visited every day.

The Army’s Maluhia Club, at the other end of Waikiki, had the best dance floor on the island. Many soldiers and sailors went there in hopes of meeting women, but the odds were skewed against them. Paraphrasing Winston Churchill, the men joked that “never have so many pursued so few, with so much, and obtained so little.” The Maluhia was staffed by a cadre of volunteer USO girls, many of them the daughters of socially prominent Hawaiian families, each accompanied by a watchful chaperone. Perhaps 250 or so were there on any given night to dance with 3,500 or so men. There was no cutting in until the whistle blew, which it did every 2.5 minutes. The female volunteers danced for three or four hours at a stretch just to make sure each of the lonely servicemen got their turn. One such group of patriotic women volunteers called themselves the “Flying Squadron,” and in twelve months from 1942 to 1943 they attended 127 dances with more than sixty thousand men.

The most popular destination for the enlisted men in Honolulu was Hotel Street, the city’s vice district—where they went to get “stewed, screwed, and tattooed.” While the men had arrived looking for the Hawaii they had seen in the movies, on Hotel Street they found the Hawaii later depicted in From Here to Eternity. James Jones’s iconic 1951 novel detailed the intersection between the island’s servicemen and its seedy side, what one scholar of the period called “a small world of rough men and prostitutes, of drinking, gambling, sex, violence, and despair.”

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Filed under democracy, economics, Hawai'i, labor, migration, military, Pacific, U.S., war

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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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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by | 14 December 2024 · 2:27 pm

Rising Nationalist Communism, 1960s

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 619-621:

Romania asserted itself more boldly in the international sphere. From late 1958, its trade expanded with the West and contracted with the Soviet Union. In the Soviet Bloc’s equivalent to West Europe’s Common Market, the Council of Mutual Economic Assistance (or COMECON), Romania opposed the plans of its allies to make it the agricultural base for their more developed economies. In the eyes of Romania’s leaders, such a scheme would have condemned the country to backwardness; yet it also aggravated long-festering inferiority complexes among them toward other, better established Communist parties, but also toward their own population. The Six-Year Plan that commenced in 1960 provided for sharp increases in Romania’s rate of industrialization, and Marxism-Leninism became a tool for Romanian national development. In 1963 Ceaușescu accompanied Foreign Minister Ion Gheorghe Maurer on a trip to China, North Korea, and the Soviet Union, meeting with Mao, Kim Il Sung, and Khrushchev.

Ceaușescu became the party leader after Gheorghiu-Dej’s death in 1965 and built his popularity on defiance of Moscow. Neither legitimation through Marxian utopianism nor recourse to crude violence was enough to stabilize rule in an intensely anticommunist population, and Ceaușescu evolved into a nationalist extremist, whose personal power increased as did his personal identification with the nation. Romania was surrounded by hostile countries, Ceaușescu claimed, and he was the only force that could protect the people. A younger generation joined him in the Romanian Communist Party leadership, and together they promoted a collective identity based on cults of Romanian historical heroes as well as anti-Russian and anti-Semitic insinuations. They eschewed violent strategies of maintaining power. In the post-Stalinist period, these were not only inappropriate, they were no longer necessary. Earlier mass repression had smashed hostile social groups.

Marxism-Leninism tinged with nationalism thus permitted Romania’s Communists to develop a sense of their political legitimacy for the first time in their history, and also to make appeals to the population and tap “dormant social energies,” among workers and among intellectuals. While firming his grip on power, Ceaușescu permitted the publication of works of previously forbidden authors and fostered collusion with intellectuals that was not entirely new but was greatly intensified. The turn against the Soviet Union was a rupture with previous practice, however, and endeared Ceaușescu to the West. The French leader Charles De Gaulle visited Romania in May 1968, just as workers and students were testing his own regime. He found much to admire in a country that maintained independence against the superpowers and seemed so orderly. “For you such a regime is useful because it gets people moving and gets things done,” he told the Romanian dictator. In 1969, Richard Nixon became the first US president to visit Romania, and nine years later, Ceaușescu touched down in Washington, DC, as neither the first nor last repressive dictator to be accorded full state honors. What seems unusual in retrospect is that Jimmy Carter would celebrate Ceaușescu as a champion of human rights.

Such was the topsy-turvy world of East Central Europe after Stalin, where strategies of national legitimation brought Hungary toward economic reform but took Poland to the center of a very old and toxic nationalism, on a backdrop of slow economic disintegration. Bulgaria as well as Romania retained important facets of Stalinist control under strong party leaders and pervasive security apparatuses, yet one was inseparable in foreign policy from the Soviet Union, while the other treated Moscow almost as a hostile power. East Germany behind the Berlin Wall was modeling itself as Moscow’s most loyal student, but also building pride as the strongest economy in the East Bloc, pride that would evolve into a kind of minor nationalism, “socialist in the colors of the GDR,” black, red, and gold. In 1962 the Soviet Union would force Czechoslovakia to destalinize, and after that, this country also went on its own path, toward something called “socialism with a human face,” which, as it turned out, was initially a detour back to the 1930s, connecting with native traditions of democracy and Masaryk’s idea that truth will prevail.

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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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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 | 9 November 2024 · 9:36 am

“Imperialist” Founding of Czechoslovakia

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 346-347:

Basic agreements were made about Czechoslovakia during the war years, far away from the would-be country’s territory or population, by Czechs and Slovaks in exile, but also by Western statesmen. In 1915 representatives of Czechs and Slovaks in Cleveland agreed to form a common state, and in May 1918, Czechs, Slovaks, and Ruthenians gathered in Pittsburgh and agreed on the formation of the state of Czecho-Slovakia. The agreement said that Slovakia would have its own administration, parliament, and courts, and some Slovaks believed that implied autonomy. In October 1918, Tomáš G. Masaryk proclaimed Czechoslovakia’s existence from Independence Hall in Philadelphia, and neither he nor his followers doubted that the state would be governed from Prague, just as France was governed from Paris.

Czech statesmen and their Slovak supporters were resolute on this point because they feared that anything short of unanimity might cost them support in Western capitals. They also worried about the dangerous examples that would be set by any talk of autonomy or regionalism. If Prague accorded the Slovaks self-rule, then demands for the same would pour in from Germans, Magyars, and Ruthenians. Slovakia itself was highly heterogeneous, with Magyars dominating cities and the southern edge, and three large German “islands” in the west, center, and northeast. Some Slovak politicians hoped there might be a chance at a later date to negotiate the details of local rule, but in the meantime, they had to act to counter demands from Hungary. A new ideology of Czechoslovakism (of one people in two tribes) papered over doubts, and the constitution of 1920 referred to “a Czechoslovak” language. In practice, that meant that Czech administrators in Slovakia felt free to use Czech, which Slovaks understood almost perfectly. Yet by doing so they began grating on local sensitivities, creating a sense of differences that had never before existed, because the two peoples did not know each other.

Yet there was also a practical side to this “Czech imperialism.” Because the Hungarian administration had stifled the development of Slovak elites for generations—in 1910, of 6,185 state officials at all levels in Slovakia, only 154 were Slovaks—educated and skilled Czechs were needed to build schools, create jobs, form the networks of cultural institutions, and simply run the state. For example, in the capital city of Bratislava (called Pozsony in Hungarian, Pressburg in German), as late as 1925 there were 420 Czechs to 281 Slovaks in the police directorate. But the Czechs also exported condescension. Slovaks were a small population, foreign minister Beneš said, “insufficient to create a national culture on their own.” Tomáš G. Masaryk, though his father was Slovak, insisted that

there is no Slovak nation. That is the invention of Magyar propaganda. The Czechs and Slovaks are brothers.… Only cultural level separates them—the Czechs are more developed than the Slovaks, for the Magyars held them in systematic unawareness. We are founding Slovak schools.

Uncomfortable facts were swept under the rug. Masaryk had attended the Pittsburgh agreement promising Slovaks some kind of autonomy, yet he failed to regard it as binding. And when the constitution was drafted, representatives of the German, Polish, Magyar, and Ruthene communities—one-third of the new state’s population—had no part in it. The Slovak delegates in the assembly were not elected but chosen by Vávro Šrobár, the Slovak chairman of the Czechoslovak National Council, a physician active in Slovak politics who happened to know Masaryk. Šrobár and the Slovak delegates came from the Protestant minority, which was more enthusiastic about union with the Czechs than was the Slovak Catholic majority. They assented to a centralized state because the largely illiterate Slovak population was not “mature” enough for local autonomy and also because the threat of a return of Magyar power seemed to necessitate close cooperation with the Czechs.

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by | 7 September 2024 · 5:46 am

Capt. Cook’s Americans

From The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2024), Kindle p. 345-347:

WHILE IN MACAU, Captain Gore learned the distressing news that not only was the American Revolution going badly for the English, but both France and Spain had declared war on Britain. Consequently, for the voyage home, facing the danger of seizure or attack, his two ships would remain on a war footing. The Resolution and the Discovery left Macau in January 1780, stopping briefly south of Vietnam and then in the Sunda Strait, between Sumatra and Java, not far from the seething volcano on Krakatoa. By April, the vessels were anchored in False Bay, near Cape Town. In early August, as the two ships approached England, contrary winds forced them far to the west. Gore had to make a long, awkward circuit around Ireland and over Scotland’s Orkney Islands. The vessels plied down the east coast of Britain, finally arriving in London on October 7, 1780. The Resolution had been gone from England for 1,548 days. At the time, it was believed to be the longest exploratory voyage—in terms of both miles and duration—ever undertaken on the high seas. And yet, despite the odyssey’s historic length, once again, not a single person on either ship had died of scurvy.

…

AFTER RETURNING TO London, the Americans on board the ships had to face the difficult decision whether to cast their loyalties with Britain or find their way back to their native-born colonies and take up the cause against the mother country under whose flag they had been sailing for the past four years. Because he was still a member of the Royal Marines, John Ledyard was promptly sent to Canada to fight for the British in the waning actions of the American Revolution. He deserted, returned to his native New England, and in 1783 published an unauthorized account of his travels with Cook that became the first written work protected by copyright in the United States. In 1786, not done with epic traveling, Ledyard embarked on a trek of more than six thousand miles, mostly on foot, across Europe and Russia in an attempt to reach Alaska, but he was arrested in Siberia under orders from Catherine the Great. Ledyard died in Cairo in 1788, aged thirty-seven, while preparing an expedition to search for the source of the Niger River.

Ledyard’s fellow countryman John Gore, on the other hand, had no interest in returning to the land of his birth. The Admiralty appointed him as one of the captains of the Greenwich Hospital, the same position Cook had vacated when he embarked on his final voyage. Gore served ten years at Greenwich. He was a popular figure among the old salts and died there in 1790.

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by | 3 September 2024 · 9:02 am

Capt. Cook & the Americans, 1778

From The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2024), Kindle pp. 226-227:

On the other side of North America, the revolt against England had deepened into a bitter war that showed no signs of abating. At that very moment, British troops were occupying Philadelphia, while George Washington’s bedraggled army was beginning to stir from its winter quarters at Valley Forge. The war was taking on an international flavor. Shortly after the Resolution and the Discovery left the Hawaiian Islands, Benjamin Franklin and two other American commissioners had signed a treaty in Paris that intimately bound France to the rebellious colonies. With the stroke of a pen, France became the first nation to recognize the United States as a sovereign country. An outraged Britain would soon declare war on France, thus fully bringing the French into the American conflict.

Despite all of this, Benjamin Franklin would later make a point of lobbying among his colleagues for Captain Cook and the Resolution to be granted special immunity not afforded to other British ships. Should American vessels encounter Cook anywhere on the high seas, they were to give him leeway and clemency. Cook was on an assignment of transcendent importance for humanity, Franklin’s proclamation asserted, one too important to be detained by squabbles between nations. Franklin made his remarks in what he called a “passport” addressed to the captains and commanders of all American ships. In case Cook’s vessel should “happen to fall into your hands,” Franklin advised, “you should not consider her as an enemy, nor suffer any plunder to be made of the effects contained in her, nor obstruct her immediate return to England.” Americans, he said, should “treat the said Captain Cook and his people with all civility and kindness, affording them as common friends to mankind, all the assistance in your power which they may happen to stand in need of.”

The Spanish, who would soon be joining France in declaring war against England, were already well aware that Captain Cook was supposed to be somewhere in the Pacific, headed for the northwest coast of America—and they were highly displeased with England’s encroachments upon the region. They had informed officials in Mexico to keep a lookout for Cook and, if possible, to intercept and arrest him. Spanish shipwrights were constructing two new vessels—one in Mexico, another in Peru—for a voyage that aimed to halt and overtake Cook while reasserting Spanish claims in the Pacific Northwest.

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