20th Century Archives - Page 18 of 19

Lend-Lease

During World War II the United States shipped an enormous amount of aid to the Soviet Union through the Lend-Lease program. The significance of this aid to the Soviet war effort has long been debated. During the Cold War, the Russians minimized its impact and the West exaggerated it. While it is obviously impossible to know what would have happened without the aid, it is clear that Lend-Lease came too late to be the decisive factor in the Soviet victory. But it is equally clear that when aid began to arrive on a massive scale, it significantly increased the speed with which the German Army was pushed out of the Soviet Union. Without Lend-Lease, the Soviet people would have had to make even greater sacrifices and would have suffered even more deaths.

The American Lend-Lease aid program was passed by the United States Congress in March of 1941 originally to support the war effort in Great Britain. American public and congressional opinion at first resisted the idea of extending the aid to the Soviet Union. Many Americans shared the views of Senator Harry S. Truman of Missouri, who argued, “If we see that Germany is winning, we ought to help Russia. If Russia is winning, we ought to help Germany.” But aid was offered to the Soviet Union in October 1941 and when Hitler incautiously declared war on the United States four days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the de facto American-Soviet alliance became a reality.

Most of the early aid arrived on the dangerous “Murmansk run.” In raging seas and Arctic temperatures, convoys carrying American war materials and basic goods ran a gauntlet of German air and U-boat attacks, from Great Britain to the Soviet Arctic ports of Arkhangelsk and Murmansk. One convoy lost 70 out of 80 ships. Later in the war, the Pacific route, a short voyage across the Bering Straits from Alaska to the Siberian port of Vladivostok, made up nearly half the shipments, and one-third came over the mountains into Soviet Central Asia via the Persian Gulf.

The main American motive was self-interest, not generosity. While remaining suspicious of Stalin and the Soviet leadership, President Roosevelt believed the United States could lose only if Germany emerged victorious on the Eastern Front. With Germany controlling the continent of Europe from the English Channel to Central Russia, it was in the western Allies’ interests to help the Red Army fight the German forces.

Nor did the Russians see Lend-Lease as charity. They saw themselves as carrying the war on their shoulders in its most critical phase. As late as the end of 1942, the Red Army faced 193 German divisions, while Anglo-American forces in Africa faced only four. To Stalin and people in the Soviet Union, the western Allies’ failure to open a second front in Europe until June 6, 1944 was deliberately intended to let the Soviet Union bear the brunt of the fighting and casualties.

Lend-Lease aid was slow to arrive. During the most crucial period of the war on the Eastern Front it remained little more than a trickle. Only following the Battle of Stalingrad (August 19, 1942-February 2, 1943), when the Soviet Union’s eventual victory seemed assured, did American aid began to arrive on a significant scale – 85% of the supplies arrived after the beginning of 1943. Although the vast majority of the Red Army’s best aircraft, tanks, guns and ammunition continued to be manufactured in the Soviet Union, its mobility and communications, in particular, came to rely on Lend-Lease.

The Soviet ability to mount massive and overwhelmingly successful offensives against the still formidable German forces depended on the more than 360,000 trucks, 43,000 jeeps, 32,000 motorcycles, 380,000 field telephones, 2.5 million belts and 14 million boots produced in the United States, as well as large amounts of other equipment. Soldiers also depended on American food supplies, including hundreds of thousands of tons of Spam and other canned meat. Red Army troops advanced into Berlin driving American trucks and wearing American boots. As Stalin told Roosevelt, without Lend-Lease “victory would have been delayed.”

Ironically, although the Soviet Union would have won the war on the Eastern Front without Lend-Lease, American aid facilitated the Red Army’s arrival in Eastern Europe before Anglo-American forces, which set the stage for the beginning of the Cold War.

You may also like:

Russian newsreel video about Lend-Lease on our blog

Transcript of the Lend-Lease Act (1941)

“One for All, All for One: The Story of Lend-Lease,” (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1943)

To read more about the war on the Eastern Front:

Richard Overy, Russia’s War: A History of the Soviet War Effort, 1941-1945 (1997)
Roger Munting, “Lend-Lease and the Soviet War Effort,” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 19 (1984), 495-510
Albert L. Weeks, Russia’s Life Saver: Lend-Lease Aid to the U.S.S.R. (2004)

Photo Credits:
American Douglas A-20 bomber, provided through Lend-Lease, is loaded on to a ship bound for Allied ports, ca. 1943. Photo by Gruber for U.S. Office of War Information, via Wikimedia commons
Graphs from “One for All, All for One: The Story of Lend-Lease”

Scum of the Earth by Arthur Koestler (1941)

Arthur Koestler lived a remarkable life – as dramatic a death-defying tour of twentieth century Europe as you can find. He was born in Budapest (in 1905) and went to school in Vienna. As a young man, he took up any number of political causes, beginning with socialism and Zionism. He went to Palestine as a reporter, but found it too remote, so he repaired to Paris and in 1930 went from there to Berlin — just as the Nazis were making their electoral breakthrough. He became a communist and went as a journalist to visit the Soviet Union. (Langston Hughes visited at the same time; the two men met in Turkestan.) By 1933, the Nazis had taken over Germany, and a Jewish Communist could not return there, so Koestler resumed his writing and political activity in Paris. He was next dispatched to report (and spy) in the Spanish Civil War, working for the Loyalists. (The Loyalists tried to defend the Spanish Republic against General Francisco Franco’s Nationalists and their allies in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. The war, which in ended in 1939 with Franco’s victory, is sometimes called a “dress rehearsal for World War II.”) Koestler was captured by Nationalists in 1937, locked in solitary confinement, and told he would be executed. In Darkness at Noon (his most famous book, a novel about the Soviet terror of the 1930s), the chilling scenes of men being dragged from their cells in the middle of the night to be shot by Stalin’s police are based on Koestler’s own experience of imprisonment in Seville. An international campaign of journalists, the League of Nations, the Red Cross, and others got Koestler released to the British. For the next three years he tacked between France and Britain, writing first Spanish Testament, then Darkness at Noon before being arrested by the French in the fall of 1939. After escaping that ordeal, he worked for the British Ministry of Information, reported on the war and recounted more of his own experiences in Scum of the Earth and Dialogue with Death.

By the late 1940s he was an intellectual celebrity, best known as a disillusioned former Communist with anti-fascist credentials. Koestler also wrote about science, however, flirted with parapsychology, and pursued women, by all accounts treating them very badly. He and his younger, third wife committed suicide together in 1983, about five years after he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. All of this is well chronicled by Michael Scammell in Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic but Koestler tells the political part of his own story with more verve than any biographer.

Scum of the Earth (1941) is the best volume of Koestler’s memoirs – not as well known as Darkness at Noon, but almost as frightening, and not fiction. It begins in August of 1939, in the surreal and depressing quiet on the eve of World War II. Since it is August in Europe, Koestler is the south of France, eating bouillabaisse in St. Tropez. The war would not come to France itself until May of 1940, but even before that, the French Republic began to round up “undesirable” foreigners. One might expect an anti-fascist intellectual who had been condemned to death for fighting in Spain to find asylum in France, which was after all the land of the revolution of 1789, the longest standing republic in Europe, officially anti-Nazi and preparing to fight Hitler. Koestler certainly hoped he could count on the French state’s protection. So did thousands of other political refugees from Nazi Germany and its affiliates, like Hannah Arendt. But he was arrested, held outside of Paris (at the Roland Garros stadium) and then shipped to a remote interment camp, Le Vernet, in the Ariège, near the Spanish border. He managed to escape at the end of the year, and then chronicled the fall of France (“a country which has reached the bottom of humiliation”) and his and others’ desperate search for visas or permits to get off the continent.

Scum of the Earth takes us through Koestler’s fears of being arrested at any moment and his bewilderment in face of the implacable French police. It gives us an excellent feel for France during the war – the more remarkable because it takes place before the collaborationist Vichy government was set up. Koestler offers moving portraits of some of his fellow prisoners: a Jewish socialist refugee from Czechoslovakia; an Italian who had spent nine years in prison and been tortured by Mussolini; two fellow fighters from the Spanish Civil War; and a Polish Jew who had fled the pogroms and worked as a tailor in Paris for decades. “What nearly all of them had in common was being anti-fascist, and having been persecuted in their country of origin.” Koestler doesn’t pretty up their political views or personalities; they are disillusioned, sometimes prejudiced, with odd judgments. But each had resisted the Nazis and plainly would have continued to do so. The French Republic, “their natural ally,” nonetheless “abandoned and betrayed” them. Koestler shows us the psychological effects of internment and how the prisoners’ capacity to resist was destroyed: once courageous dissenters became so demoralized that they were simply “thankful that they were not shot.” Le Vernet was not Dachau, or Auschwitz; it was not at the heart of the Nazi terror. But Koestler and those who were interned there had witnessed ten years of defeats: electoral failure and political terror in Germany, mayhem in Austria, persecution in Poland, military downfall in Spain, and so on. “The essence of politics is hope,” writes Koestler, “and hope had gone.” Scum of the Earth covers only one year, but it makes this larger, sad story of Europe’s surrender to Hitler human and real. Fortunately, we know that 1940 was not the end of the story.

Photo Credits
Arthur Koestler, 1948, by Pinn Hans (www.gpo.gov.il) (Public domain) via Wikimedia Commons
Clandestine photo of Le Vernet, photographer unknown

The Atomic Bombs and the End of World War II: Tracking an Elusive Decision

by Bruce Hunt

In what amounted to the last act of World War II, US forces dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and another on Nagasaki three days later. Ever since, controversy has swirled around the decision to drop those bombs and annihilate those two cities. But exactly who made that decision, and how did it come about? Conventionally, of course, the decision is ascribed to President Harry Truman, but there is in fact very little documentary evidence that he ever made an affirmative decision to drop the bombs. Instead, the most that can be said with certainty is that he did not intervene to stop a process that had already acquired enormous momentum even before he became president on Franklin Roosevelt’s death in April 1945.

Remarkable collections of primary documents, now readily available online, shed substantial light on the story of the development and use of the first atomic bombs. Two of the best collections are those maintained by the National Security Archive and by the Truman Library. On the NSA website, for instance, we find a long report General Leslie Groves, the head of the Manhattan Project, prepared for Secretary of War Stimson. The meeting on April 25, 1945, at which Groves and Secretary of War Henry Stimson delivered the gist of this report to Truman was the first time the new president was given more than the barest hint about the new weapons that had been in development, at enormous expense, for the past three and a half years. Groves’s memo gives a fairly full account of how atomic bombs would work and of the prospects that they would be ready to in less than four months. How much of all this, or of the shorter memo Stimson prepared, Truman really absorbed is not clear, but by the time the first plutonium implosion bomb was detonated in the New Mexico desert on July 16, 1945, Truman had certainly grasped that such bombs might play a pivotal role in ending the war with Japan, as well as in postwar relations with the Soviet Union.

In their effort to find the moment when Truman made “the great decision” to use atomic bombs against Japan, several historians have latched onto a memo (posted on the Truman Library website) that Stimson sent to Truman on July 30, 1945, and have focused in particular on the reply Truman scrawled on its back. “Suggestions approved,” he wrote.”Release when ready but not sooner than August 2. [signed] HST.” In his well known biography Truman (1992), David McCullough declared that “The time had come for Truman to give the final go-ahead for the bomb. This was the moment, the decision only he could make.” But examination of Stimson’s memo shows clearly that it was not about getting approval to release the bombs over Japan, but only about releasing a carefully crafted public statement to the press once the first bomb had been dropped. Approving a press release appears to be the closest President Truman ever came, at least in writing, to making a positive decision concerning the first use of nuclear weapons.

Photo Credits:

At the time this photo was made, smoke billowed 20,000 feet above Hiroshima while smoke from the burst of the first atomic bomb had spread over 10,000 feet on the target at the base of the rising column.Two planes of the 509th Composite Group, part of the 313th Wing of the 20th Air Force, participated in this mission, one to carry the bomb, the other to act as escort, 08/06/1945, Author Unknown, National Archives and Records Administration
President Roosevelt, Vice-President-elect Truman, Vice-President Wallace, by Abbie Rowe, Truman Library
Nagasaki, Japan, before and after the atomic bombing of August 9, 1945, U.S National Archives
All via Wikimedia Commons

The “Einstein Letter” — A Tipping Point in History

by Michael B. Stoff

On a mid-July day in 1939, Albert Einstein, still in his slippers, opened the door of his summer cottage in Peconic on the fishtail end of Long Island. There stood his former student and onetime partner in an electromagnetic refrigerator pump, the Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard, and next to him a fellow Hungarian (and fellow physicist), Eugene Wigner. The two had not come to Long Island for a day at the beach with the most famous scientist in the world but on an urgent mission. Germany had stopped the sale of uranium from mines in Czechoslovakia it now controlled. To Szilard, this could mean only one thing: Germany was developing an atomic bomb.

Szilard wanted Einstein to write a letter to his friend, Queen Mother Elisabeth of Belgium. The Belgian Congo was rich in uranium, and Szilard worried that if the Germans got their hands on the ore, they might have all the material they needed to make a weapon of unprecedented power. First, however, he had to explain to Einstein the theory upon which the weapon rested, a chain reaction. “I never thought of that,” an astonished Einstein said. Nor was he willing to write the Queen Mother. Instead, Wigner convinced him to write a note to one of the Belgian cabinet ministers.

Pen in hand, Wigner recorded what Einstein dictated in German while Szilard listened. The Hungarians returned to New York with the draft, but within days, Szilard received a striking proposal from Alexander Sachs, an advisor to President Franklin Roosevelt. Might Szilard transmit such a letter to Roosevelt? A series of drafts followed, one composed by Szilard as he sat soaking in his bathtub, another after a second visit to Einstein, and two more following discussions with Sachs. Einstein approved the longer version of the last two, dated “August 2, 1939,” and signed it as “A. Einstein” in his tiny scrawl.

The result was the “Einstein Letter,” which historians know as the product not of a single hand but of many hands. Regardless of how it was concocted, the letter remains among the most famous documents in the history of atomic weaponry. It is a model of compression, barely two typewritten, double-spaced pages in length. Its language is so simple even a president could understand it. Its tone is deferential, its assertions authoritative but tentative in the manner of scientists who have yet to prove their hypotheses. Its effect was persuasive enough to initiate the steps that led finally to the Manhattan Project and the development of atomic bombs.

Stripped of all jargon, the letter cited the work of an international array of scientists (“Fermi,” “Joliot,” “Szilard” himself), pointed to a novel generator of power (“the element uranium may be turned into a new and important source of energy”), urged vigilance and more (“aspects of the situation call for watchfulness and, if necessary, quick action”), sounded a warning (“extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed”), made a prediction (“a single bomb of this type, carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port together with the surrounding territory”), and mapped out a plan (“permanent contact between the Administration and the group of physicists working on chain reactions in America . . . and perhaps obtaining the co-operation of industrial laboratories”). A simple conclusion, no less ominous for its understatement, noted what worried the Hungarians in the first place: “Germany has actually stopped the sale of uranium from the Czechoslovakian mines which she has taken over.”

Looking back at the letter, aware of how things actually turned out, we can appreciate its richness. For one thing, it shows us a world about to pass from existence. Where once scientific information flowed freely across national borders through professional journals, personal letters, and the “manuscripts” to which the letter refers in its first sentence, national governments would now impose a clamp of secrecy on any research that might advance weapons technology. The letter also tells us how little even the most renowned scientists knew at the time. No “chain reaction” had yet been achieved and no reaction-sustaining isotope of uranium had been identified. Thus the assumption was that “a large mass of uranium” would be required to set one in motion. No aircraft had been built that could carry what these scientists expected to be a ponderous nuclear core necessary to make up a bomb, so the letter predicts that a “boat” would be needed to transport it.

More than the past, the letter points to the shape of things to come. Most immediately, it shows us that the race for atomic arms would be conducted in competition with Germany, soon to become a hostile foreign power. And in the longer term, of course, the postwar arms race would duplicate that deadly competition as hostility between the United States and the Soviet Union led them to amass more and more nuclear weapons. The letter also presents us with nothing less than a master plan for what became the Manhattan Project, the first “crash program” in the history of science. After the war, other crash programs in science—to develop the hydrogen bomb; to conquer polio; to reach the moon; to cure cancer—would follow. Finally, by stressing the entwining of government, science, and industry in service of the state, the letter foreshadows what Dwight Eisenhower later called “the military-industrial complex.”

In the end, the “Einstein Letter” is a document deservedly famous, but not merely for launching the new atomic age. If we read it closely enough, it gives us a fascinating, Janus-faced look at a tipping point in history, a window on a world just passing and one yet to come, all in two pages.

You can read the letter in its entirety here.

Photo Credits:
Albert Einstein, 1947, by Oren Jack Turner, The Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons
Dr. Norman Hilberry and Dr. Leo Szilard (right) stand beside the site where the world’s first nuclear reactor was built during World War II. Both worked with the late Dr. Enrico Fermi in achieving the first self-sustaining chain reaction in nuclear energy on December 2, 1942, at Stagg Field, University of Chicago. U.S. Department of Energy via Wikimedia Commons

Churchill: A Biography by Roy Jenkins (2002)

After a long career among both politicians and literary lights, Roy Jenkins perhaps found his ideal subject in his last great biography, Churchill. Fans of the reputation-blackening revisionism common to the genre will find little to love in this laudatory account. The political battles and courageous stands that typified Churchill take center stage over more personal details, though his literary achievements provide a constant subtheme. A former Labour Home Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer, Jenkins brings an unparalleled level of Parliamentary knowledge to the recounting of his subject’s long political career. As a result, Churchill stands as not just a biography of an almost mythic figure but also a fascinating account of rough and tumble British politics from the end of the Victorian era to the dawn of the Cold War.

Jenkin’s depiction encompasses the whole of his subject’s extended and exciting life. The author ably navigates the uneven waters of Churchill’s early years, from his daring escape from an enemy prison during the Boer War to his role behind the disastrous Gallipoli raid in World War I. According to Jenkins, the young Member of Parliament (MP) attained high rank in governments under two parties despite repeated blunders because “He was too good a trumpet and too dangerous an adversary” to be omitted. Characteristic energy and outspokenness explain Churchill’s meteoric rise, but his impulsive style and conventional, imperialist sympathies led to marginalization when he failed to adapt to the dynamic politics of interwar England. During these “wilderness years,” Churchill bucked the pro-Chamberlain mood of the nation with calls for a more aggressive response to German rearmament. Such opinions, while contentious at the time, helped position the maverick politician for his return to power at the beginning of World War II. In this congruence of events, Jenkins finds the promise of Churchill’s personality and political career realized. The new prime minister’s strategic mind, Edwardian optimism, disdain for unnecessary slaughter, and enthusiasm for combat made him “the perfect man for 1940 and 1941.” The generous depiction of the wartime years clearly recounts the important political debates that helped define allied strategy, but it also makes room for amusing anecdotes – including Churchill’s use of a golden bathtub after his triumphal arrival in liberated Paris.

The biography examines the Cold War largely as a dénouement after the triumph of the mid-1940s, but Jenkins provides an interesting discussion of the politician’s preoccupation with nuclear weapons and his ambiguous approach to European unification. Thorough and expansive in scope, Churchill serves as a panoramic view of the first half of the twentieth century through the eyes of one of its most famous and colorful figures.

Erudite, astute, and clearly written, Jenkins’ work stands as a model for the epic life story. The biography excludes few details, but even the most complicated and tedious aspects of policymaking– including the balancing of the British budget – appear contentious and exciting in the author’s able hands. Jenkins invests his work with a level of dynamism and historical importance from its very first page, demonstrating how Winston Churchill’s life served to prepare him for the role of wartime leader. The result is a sterling biography of a truly impressive personality, whom Jenkins glowingly describes “as the greatest human being to ever occupy 10 Downing Street.”

Photo credit:

Churchill on the East Bank of the Rhine, south of Wesel, Morris (Sgt), No 5 Army Film & Photographic Unit, Imperial War Museum Collection, via Wikimedia Commons

Gunter Demnig’s “Stumbling Blocks”

by David Crew

“Stumbling blocks” (in German, Stolpersteine) are unobtrusive reminders of the Nazi past.

These small squares of concrete (about 4 x 4 inches), covered with a thin brass plate, are embedded in the sidewalks of Berlin and hundreds of other German cities, as well as locations in other European countries. Each of these stones bears a simple inscription giving the name of an individual victim of the Nazi dictatorship who lived in the house or building in front of which the stone has been set as well as details about this individual’s fate. Most of the victims are Jewish but these stones also draw attention to the fate of Sinti and Roma, gay men and women, mentally or physically handicapped people, Jehovah’s witnesses, political opponents of the Nazis, and German soldiers who deserted at the end of the war.

These “stumbling blocks” are the result of a project started by a Cologne artist, Gunter Demnig, in the 1990s. Demnig wanted to bring the Nazi past out of the museum into the neighborhood and into the everyday lives of Germans and other Europeans. He thought the stones would encourage ordinary citizens to realize that Nazi persecution and terror had begun on their very doorsteps. By “stumbling” over the Nazi past of their own hometowns (metaphorically, not literally; the stones are actually not raised above the level of the surrounding pavement), ordinary citizens would be challenged to think about what it meant to live where victims of the Nazis had once also gone about their everyday lives. Inscriptions are short and can be brutal; one in Berlin reads “Paula Davidsohn (maiden name Katz) lived here. Born in 1905. Deported to Theresienstadt 1943. Murdered in Auschwitz.”

Demnig’s project asks Germans to take an active role in the reconstruction of the Nazi past of their own cities and localities. Demnig sets stumbling stones in the pavement only on the invitation of local organizations or groups of citizens who have developed an interest in his project and who have researched the histories of the victims who are to be remembered with these stones. Placing these stumbling stones has sometimes provoked controversy. Some homeowners argue that a stone in front of their property may lower its value, a few city governments have refused to give the necessary permission, and some Jews have questioned whether stepping on the names of the victims is an appropriate way to remember them. Yet, Demnig’s project is constantly expanding. In a recent YouTube clip, Demnig claims to have now set more than 23,000 stones in over 500 German communities. “Stumbling Blocks” has also become a European project; examples of this “decentralized monument” can now be found not only in Germany, but also in Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland and Ukraine.

Compare the stumbling blocks to other Holocaust memorials:

Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe

Information Portal to European Sites of Remembrance

Photo Credits

Stumbling block commemorating Alfred Wilhelm Algner
James Steakley, via Wikimedia Commons
Students cleaning the stumbling blocks
Sigismund von Dobschütz, via Wikimedia Commons

Changing Course in Vietnam — or Not

by Mark Atwood Lawrence

Democratic governments often have a hard time changing their minds, as recent U.S. decision-making about Iraq and Afghanistan has made clear. Even when the United States encountered monumental frustrations and setbacks, Washington kept fighting, adjusting its strategy and tactics but not its overall goals or the assumptions that underpinned them. To withdraw from either country before achieving stated U.S. objectives would, the Bush and Obama administrations agreed, expose the United States to national-security risks. Both administrations surely also feared the domestic political consequences of failing to achieving U.S. goals after thousands of Americans had already died in the effort.

So it was more than forty years ago, when U.S. officials responded to setbacks in Vietnam not by rethinking their goals or assumptions but by affirming their commitment to the war and, for a time, increasing the number of U.S. troops. Indeed, the vast documentary record of the Vietnam War makes abundantly clear that American leaders rarely revisited the fundamental assumptions that guided their decisions to escalate U.S. involvement.

A rare exception was an extraordinary study written by the Central Intelligence Agency in September 1967. By that time, the United States had encountered virtually all of the problems that would eventually doom its war effort in Vietnam. While Lyndon Johnson and his top advisers remained adamant that the United States would suffer intolerable geostrategic reverses if it failed to press on to victory, the CIA report suggested otherwise.

Nations would not fall to communism like a row of dominos if the North Vietnamese won, it insisted. The U.S. reputation for anticommunist resolve would not be forever destroyed. And the Soviets and Chinese would not go on an anti-U.S. rampage around the globe. In short, the study insisted, “such risks are probably more limited and controllable than most previous argument has indicated.”

It is hardly surprising that President Johnson ignored the CIA’s position and continued to escalate the war. The study, while extraordinary, was just a drop in the ocean of memos and reports that passed through the Oval Office, many of them suggesting that U.S. objectives were still obtainable. And the prospect of winding down the U.S. commitment was no doubt deeply distasteful to a president who had invested a huge amount of his personal and political capital in waging war in Vietnam. Yet the document stands out nevertheless for the clarity and prescience with which it saw beyond preoccupations of the moment and questioned the conventional wisdom that had led the United States to make a gigantic commitment to a small, distant, and impoverished land. It reminds us, at a minimum, of the value of taking the long view and asking whether the expenditure of resources corresponds to U.S. interests broadly conceived.

Read the original study: “Implications of an Unfavorable Outcome in Vietnam,” dated September 11, 1967

Related Reading:

Mark Atwood Lawrence, The Vietnam War: A Concise International History (2010)

Fredrik Logevall, Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and Escalation of War in Vietnam (2001)

Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA (2008)

A longer version of this essay: “The Consequences of Defeat in Vietnam”

Photo Credits:
Paddler: A US. Medic paddles a three-man assault boat down a canal during Operation Tong Thang (1968). By Department of Defense. Department of the Army. Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations. U.S. Army Audiovisual Center. (ca. 1974 – 05/15/1984) (U.S. National Archives, ARC Identifier 530622) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
LBJ: By Yoichi R. Okamoto [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Gunner: A U.S. Navy river patrol boat crewman maintains vigilance at the .50-caliber machine gun during the boat’s day-long patrol on the Go Cong River (1967). By R.D. Moeser, JOC, U.S. Navy [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

The Snows of Yesteryear by Gregor Von Rezzori (2008)

by Tatjana Lichtenstein

A swarm of plump and colorful waxwings are feasting on rowanberries. Suddenly, a shot rings out. “A good dozen of the birds tumble from the fruit clusters down into the snow amidst fallen berries and drops of blood. Who can tell whether the survivors will ever return?” With this scene Gregor von Rezzori begins his memoir of a boyhood in Czernowitz, a city that in the course of the twentieth century was variously located in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Romania, the Soviet Union, and today’s Ukraine. A sense of irretrievable loss and dislocation, amid images of beauty and destruction, are central themes in this intimate story of the disappearance of Habsburg Europe.

Born on the eve of the First World War, Gregor von Rezzori grew up in a family that, much like his hometown, was profoundly shaken by the collapse of Austria-Hungary. Czernowitz, the capital of the region known as Bukovina, was one of the empire’s most eastern outposts. Nevertheless, it was known as “Little Vienna” due to its vibrant cultural life and architecture. This was a city shared by Jews, Orthodox Christians, and Catholics, in which a multiplicity of languages could be heard. A place that, through the eyes of young Gregor, was deeply connected both to the land around it and to the imperial capital Vienna.

Von Rezzori’s parents belonged to the city’s German-speaking elite. His father was an Austrian public servant in charge of inspecting the province’s Orthodox monasteries, a position he used ostensibly to indulge his passion for hunting on the large estates owned by the Church. An inattentive husband living well beyond his means and with little patience for domestic traditions and social norms, he saw his fatherly duties as limited to raising his son as a huntsman. His high spirits and love of life stood in stark contrast to his wife’s demeanor. Von Rezzori’s mother, frustrated by a life that didn’t conform to her sense of stature nor her expectations of domestic bliss, escaped their home in Czernowitz to spas and health resorts as far away as Egypt. If weak health had been a pretext for her earlier absences, as a mother of two, she became obsessed with illnesses, smothering her children, Gregor and his older sister Lisa, with overprotection and anxiety. In von Rezzori’s world, parents set expectations. The nurturing, however, was done by others: his peasant nurse Cassandra, known in the household as “the savage one,” and later by Bunchy, his worldly and cheerful governess.

The memoir is deeply personal, organized around stories of family members rather than chronology. Its locus is Czernowitz in the years following the First World War when the old order has collapsed. Although its inhabitants were now Romanian subjects, life in some ways went on as it had before. However, the gradual crumbling of the world of Austria-Hungary manifested itself in the anxieties that filled his boyhood home. His parents—reduced from social, cultural and political elites to relics of the old order—divorce, thereby adding new layers of uncertainty. Gregor’s mother, for example, seeks to uphold her family’s elite stature even as its social foundations disappear. She does so by quarantining her son in the house and garden, thereby protecting him from the contamination that was sure to result from play with other children or from venturing out into the world beyond the yard fence. His father, whose pension vanishes with the Austrian state, retreats to live and hunt among Transylvanian Saxons, a German-speaking minority in Romania’s north.

Although infused with a sense of dislocation, von Rezzori’s recollections are at the same time intensely rooted in the city’s streets and squares, its sounds and smells, in the landscapes that surrounded it, and in its rich mixture of peoples and cultures.

Gregor von Rezzori eventually left Romania for Austria, Germany, the United States, and Italy. He wrote many works of fiction drawing on his own experiences. He died in 1998. The Snows of Yesteryear is a deeply moving reflection on belonging and displacement and offers a glimpse into a multicultural world that was eventually obliterated in the calamitous Second World War.

Related Reading:

Gregor von Rezzori, Memoirs of an Anti-Semite: A Novel in Five Stories (2007)

Gregor von Rezzori, An Ermine in Czernopol (2011)

Tatjana Lichtenstein elsewhere on Not Even Past: The Shop on Main Street

Family Outing in Austin, Texas

By Madeline Hsu

This photograph captures a 1943 family outing to The University of Texas, in Austin.

Image of an Asian family from July 19, 1943 sitting on the edge of a fountain on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin

The young father, Fred Wong, was a grandson of one of “Pershing’s Chinese“–a group of 527 Chinese who accompanied General John J. Pershing into the United States after the failure of his campaigns against General Francisco “Pancho” Villa in 1917. Villa threatened retaliation against the Chinese for aiding Pershing, who determined to bring them back with him to the United States even though he had to lobby for special federal permission to do so in violation of immigration laws that banned the admission of all Chinese laborers. Many of these refugees settled in San Antonio where they established grocery stores, laundries, and restaurants.

Fred Wong grew up in San Antonio and in 1936 married Rose Chin from Chelsea, Massachusetts. They moved to Austin in 1938 and opened New China Food Market at 714 Red River. Fred served as a Rollingwood Councilman and R.C. became a well-known artist. The couple had three children, Mitchel–reportedly the first Chinese baby born in Austin–and Linda, and Kay. Mitchel went on to attend UT and became a leading ophthalmologist in central Texas, credited with introducing Lasik surgery to the region.

On May 11, 2011, Mitchel Wong was honored with a Legacy Award at the Asian American Community Leadership Awards jointly organized by UT’s Division of Diversity and Community Engagement, the Center for Asian American Studies, and the Texas Exes Asian Alumni Network.

For more information about Chinese in Texas, please visit:
The Institute of Texan Cultures
The University of Texas at Austin’s Asian American Studies website
The Texas State Historical Association online

You can look up materials available at the Austin History Center, here in its finding guide.

More about Asian Americans, in Texas and beyond:
Edward J. M. Rhoads, “The Chinese in Texas,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 81 (July 1977).
Irwin Tang, ed., Asian Texans: Our histories and Our Lives (2008).
Pawan Dhingra, Managing Multicultural Lives: Asian American Professionals and the Challenge of Multiple Identities (2007).

The photograph of the Wong family is posted here with the kind permission of the Austin History Center; AR.2008.005(027), Wong Family Papers, Austin History Center.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918 by Stephen Kern (2003)

by Julia Rahe

The modern individual, living in an era of high-speed technology, international travel and an increasingly worldwide community, may be surprised to learn that there have not always been only four time zones in the continental United States, or that there existed a era when having one’s picture taken was an anomalous, threatening experience. Stephen Kern’s fascinating book, The Culture of Time and Space, investigates these and other radical changes that occurred in people’s temporal and spatial reality at the turn of the twentieth century. Kern calls time and space the universal, “essential” realities through which humans perceive, experience and live life, and he uses them to understand historical change.

According to Kern, the forty years between 1880 and 1918 were a period of unprecedented cultural renovation and refiguring, when changes in perceptions of speed, space, form, distance and direction broke down traditional hierarchies and reconstructed conventional values and understandings. The proliferation of technological advances such as the telephone and the telegraph altered perceptions of time by allowing individuals in one place to experience simultaneous events in another for the first time. The result was a “thickening” of the present as events occurring in different places convened in a single moment. At the same time, advances in transportation created a “cult of speed,” as bicycles, trams and railroads allowed people to travel at faster velocities than ever before.

‘What hath God wrought’?: a map showing the global reach of the Eastern Telegraph Co. System, 1901.

While technological advances altered traditional understanding of time, cultural trends in art and philosophy challenged classical perceptions of space. New artistic movements such as Impressionism and Cubism broke down the illusion of three-dimensional space displayed on the two-dimensional canvas by presenting multiple perspectives to the viewer. These multiple points of view reflected the growing pluralism and confusion of the modern age. New philosophical trends such as Perspectivism also supported ideas about plurality and the subjectivity of personal experience by challenging the notion of an absolute, homogeneous reality.

New art movements such as Futurism, Cubism and Dadaism challenged old notions of perspective and drew inspiration from modern technologies such as the telegraph, the radio and the airplane. This detail from Umberto Boccioni‘s 1911 painting The Noise of the Street Enters the House exemplifies the frenetic energy of this new aesthetics based on speed, urbanism and technological prowess.

Through the juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated cultural and scientific phenomena, Kern successfully draws conclusions about broader social changes occurring across Europe and the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. The Culture of Time and Space is a captivating read for a wide audience. Kern’s broad and sweeping, yet detailed, discussion of new trends in art, philosophy and architecture will thrill lovers of material culture, and science and technology buffs will lose themselves in Kern’s explanation of the profound impact of new technological advances on individuals’ perceptions of the world.

All images in this review were published on Wikimedia Commons under a GNU free documentation license.

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