On the last day of the project, September 6, the teams of workers undertook a new project: they installed exterior protections for the cathedral’s main west portal and for its north and south portals, to protect their centuries-old collections of sculptures. For that work, they used the same steel tubing that had comprised the scaffolding. With it they built three large protective structures, also using flooring and battens and cable and sandbags in the construction. Workers then put the cathedral back in order for religious use, permitting services to resume during the week ending September 8.
The entire operation had been completed in eight days. By the time war had been declared, thirty-two thousand square feet of stained glass had been removed without notable accident or injury to personnel or the glass—despite the large number of workers and the immense scope of the construction site, with men working high on lightweight scaffolding. The only mishap was that some of the modern, clear glass of the borders of some windows had been damaged, having been previously sealed with cement rather than soft putty.
And this project was only a portion of the larger effort that had also encompassed the stained-glass windows at Sainte-Chapelle and the cathedrals of Bourges, Amiens, and Metz. At all sites combined, workers had removed and placed in safe storage—within two weeks—over 193,000 square feet of stained glass and had replaced many of the windows with temporary enclosures (mostly vitrex and Plexiglas), which they hoped would enable churches to continue to accommodate worshippers during the war.
Immediately afterward, on September 13, Jean Zay resigned from his post as minister and volunteered to reenter the French Army—perhaps drawn by the same “passion and action” he’d seen in the workmen rushing to save the windows and artworks of the Paris churches and Chartres Cathedral. Although Zay had likely been mobilized as a second lieutenant prior to September 13, the following year, in June 1940 he would embark from Marseille on the SS Massilia to Africa with other members of parliament and soldiers seeking to continue the government in exile. But upon arrival in Casablanca, he would be treated as a suspect and in August arrested by French gendarmes. In October, he would be sentenced by a military court for desertion and then deported to successive military prisons, where he would write letters and a memoir. In June 1944, right-wing militiamen would pick him up from prison and murder him in a forest. In 1945, a court of appeals would quash his conviction and rehabilitate Zay posthumously. Ultimately, in May 2015, Jean Zay’s ashes would be permanently installed in the same underground cemetery of the Paris Panthéon of which he had written following his 1939 visits.
But for the time being, Chartres’ windows rested in the crypt of the cathedral. Within months, three glassmaking workshops were installed in the cathedral’s crypt. Glassmakers went to work to repair a portion of the stained glass—to restore the borders of windows that had been damaged during removal—an operation that would be halted by events in May 1940. Otherwise, most of the windows—excluding the three roses—were in good condition, many having been restored during their earlier removal in 1918.
In the context of the centuries-long life of the cathedral, as of the end of 1939, it appeared that the removal of the windows would perhaps be among the most important events of preservation in the cathedral’s nine-hundred-year history. But would the windows be safe in the crypt? One direct hit from a bomb could collapse the cathedral and destroy the windows, and any number of triggers short of that could ignite a fire, destroying the entire collection of windows—as had occurred during the last war, both at Reims, by artillery and fire, and at Amiens, where boxes of stained-glass windows had been incinerated when the warehouse there had caught fire.
Jean Trouvelot and his team had been unable to find a suitable hiding place for the Chartres windows, so they would remain in their crates in the crypt as the risks of war continued to mount. The windows of the other cathedrals had been hidden in safe places. What other solution could be found to safeguard the windows of Chartres?
PART III
WORLD WAR II
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Fort Hood and Leavenworth Faculty, with Nell: Texas, Kansas, and California, Fall 1940–1942
BY MID-1940, SOLDIERS IN ARMORED UNITS LIKE GRIFF’S WERE FOLlowing reports that German armor had ripped through Czechoslovakia and Poland seven months earlier and were now doing the same in France. With signs of possible American intervention in Europe looming, opportunities for Griff to see action were improving, and this time he stood a chance of getting into the fight. After years of frustration and soul-searching, he was recommitting to his military career. Yet, like hundreds of thousands of other Americans at the time, he may not have favored American involvement in the European war.
President Roosevelt was struggling to obtain congressional approval to assist the English, but the US isolationists were still firmly in control of Congress, opposing intervention, and they had passed the Neutrality Acts in 1936 and 1937, under which Americans were prohibited from sailing on ships flying the flag of, or trading arms with, belligerent nations. Roosevelt, however, had been fighting back in two phases: In the first, he successfully pressed for the 1939 passage of the Fourth Neutrality Act, which permitted the United States to trade arms with belligerent nations as long as these nations came to the United States to retrieve the arms and pay for them in cash. In the second, he pressed for the Lend-Lease Act, which was passed in early 1941, permitting the president to lend, lease, sell, or barter arms, ammunition, food, or any “defense article” or any “defense information” to “the government of any country whose defense the President deems vital to the defense of the United States.”
Many Americans felt at the time that US technology was superior to European, but the Germans took them by surprise with significant advances in their military technology and, more significantly, with superior tactics, combining arms and close air support. German weapons proved in many respects to be superior, the German infantry proving able to inflict casualties at a 50 percent greater rate than Allied infantry—whether attacking or defending, and usually when outnumbered—and the United States would prove to have far fewer high-quality, trained career leaders than would be needed in the military, which had been rapidly expanded from 190,000 to more than eight million.
Griff’s sister Tiny and her husband, Count, were still in Paris in June 1940. She left Paris on the last train before the Nazis took control of that open city. Count stayed on for another two months attached to the US State Department. So Griff had plenty of reason to feel a connection to the conflict. Tiny and Count soon landed back in Washington, D.C., together, before Count took on a new Pacific Navy assignment in Honolulu.
That month, at Fort Benning, the Army disbanded the Thirty-Fourth Infantry Division and from its Second Battalion formed a new unit, called the Ninety-Third Antitank Battalion. The Ninety-Third was assigned to develop tactics and techniques for a new class of weapons called tank destroyers, to prepare to counter German mobile armored units of the type that had already proved difficult to combat with existing weapons in Dutch, Belgian, and French hands. General Lesley J. McNair led the tank-destroyer-development effort, and the prototype tank destroyers featured a three-inch turret-mounted antitank gun on an armored halftrack or special tank and a distinctive shape resembling a duckbill that resulted from their carrying two large counterweights on the rear of the turret. They carried fifty-four of the three-inch rounds and a .50-caliber rear machine gun. The Ninety-Third, which was redesignated the 893rd Tank Destroyer Battalion, eventually became a recognized part of the US Army. It was the first unit to arrive at the new Camp Hood, near Killeen, Texas, which would become the Tank Destroyer Tactical and Firing Center.
In mid-1940, Griff took a reassignment to Camp Hood, halfway between Austin and Waco, about twenty-five miles northwest of Salado, familiar territory for Griff. Salado had been the town in which his grandfather Alonzo Griffith had lived and the place where a ten-year-old Griff had met so many of his relatives back in 1911, including his
Griffith grandparents on both sides, in his first big Griffith family reunion.
Tank-destroyer testing and training called for wide-open space, in good supply at Camp Hood—which would be renamed Fort Hood in April 1950. Griff employed his substantial prior tank and field officer’s training as part of the team that defined doctrine, tactics, and techniques for deployment of the new tank destroyers. Soon General George C. Marshall would activate the tank-destroyer force, to be headed by General A. D. Bruce at Camp Hood. Tank destroyers would eventually perform an important function in World War II in Normandy and throughout France and Germany.
In January 1941, Griff was promoted to major and soon thereafter to a faculty post at Fort Leavenworth school, in the rapid wartime scale-up of training in the US Army’s effort to catch up after decades of Congress’s minimal military funding. The faculty post would position Griff’s skills as teacher and operations commander to be recognized by top brass in the run-up to the war in France.
By about this time, Griff had met Nell Haller Humphrey, a twenty-seven-year-old woman living in Brooklyn, originally from Greensboro, North Carolina. They probably met at Fort Benning or Camp Hood when Nell had paid a visit to her sister, Virginia Lane Humphrey Griffin, who was married to Thomas Griffin, an Army officer. Nell was different from Griff’s ex-wife, Alice—in a homespun way—and she was bright. She had been first in her graduating class at Salem Academy in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Mr. and Mrs. Clen Simmons Humphrey were Nell and Virginia’s parents. Mr. Simmons’s company had invented Hope Denture Powder. He had sold the company to a large consumer-products company—perhaps the Colgate-Palmolive Company—and moved his family to a home in Brooklyn to run the company from an office in Manhattan. Nell was also an attractive brunette and in New York worked as a model for the Conover Agency, known to have coined the term cover girl. A slogan repeated by Harry Conover, the agency’s founder, was that Con-over Girls are “the kind of natural, well-scrubbed girl you used to take to the junior prom.”
When Griff reached Leavenworth, he became part of the school’s influential G-3 Section, focused on military operations and training. He wrote to Tiny that he was proud of his new job as professor, that he expected it to be a first-class stepping-stone in his Army career, and that he viewed the G-3 Section as the “cream” assignment, in which he would learn much and make valuable contacts. It seemed, therefore, to put Griff back in a mindset for pursuing professional advancement in the Army.
Starting in September 1940, the majority of Americans shifted their attitude about the conflict in Europe as a result of the German blitz bombing of London, which would continue until May 10 of the following year, and by the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor, more than two-thirds of Americans had come to think that America’s most important task was to defeat the Nazis and that doing so was more important than staying out of a European war.
The importance of the Leavenworth school to the Army is difficult to overstate. It was, and today remains, a graduate school for officers of the Army and other military services, interagency representatives, and international military invitees. Historically, its mission had been to train general staff officers and their commanders. Staff officers assist the commander of a division or larger unit by formulating and disseminating the commander’s policies, transmitting the commander’s orders, and overseeing their execution.
However, in the lead-up to World War II, it had become clear that the US Army had suffered from an acute shortage of general staff officers. By December 1940, the Army reorganized the Leavenworth school to reduce that shortage. It changed the school’s mission to concentrate on training general staff officers and to forego training commanders. It did so by changing its basic course from a length of nine months down to ten weeks. The shorter course permitted the school to bring in many more waves of student officers. The school also reorganized the faculty to fit within the four traditional sections of a military general staff: G-1, personnel; G-2, intelligence; G-3, operations and training; and G-4, supply and evacuation. Below those, the school created twelve subsections, including infantry, cavalry, field artillery, armored force, coast artillery, air corps, and others. Griff taught in the Armored Force Subsection of the G-3 Section.
One man under whom Griff served was General Edmund L. “Snitz” Gruber, a man of relentless drive who exhibited the same impatience with inefficiency that would later characterize Griff. The general had taken over as commandant by November 1940 and had overseen the conversion of the school to its wartime mission, but he died in June 1941. Griff would have attended the funeral in which Gruber was interred at Leavenworth National Cemetery.
Griff had already been teaching at Leavenworth when his uncle Tex Harrison, still a principal in the Sanderson & Porter engineering firm, also became involved in the war effort. Tex assumed the role of resident partner in charge of the Elwood Ordnance Plant in Joliet, Illinois, a major manufacturer of TNT, whose campus covered an area of twenty-four square miles. The plant commenced production in July 1941, following an opening celebration in the form of a Texas-style barbecue that Tex had inspired. We don’t know what impact Tex’s position may have had on Griff’s thinking, but it possibly opened his eyes to how his military experience could be of value in a career in civilian-defense procurement. Or it might have been a boost to his military ambitions to see that even Tex was getting involved in defense-related business.
By mid-1941, Griff had decided to try marriage again, and in August, he and Nell were married at the home of her parents. Also attending were Tiny and Count DeKay. Nell was twelve years younger than Griff. The Humphreys’ three-story Brooklyn home stood along a tree-lined street with a shaded yard ringed by a white picket fence between stone columns. The house featured a double front door below a central balcony with white wood trim, and on the third floor was an ornately trimmed oval dormer window with leaded glass below a brick chimney. For the wedding, Nell wore a long-sleeved white-on-white dress with puffed sleeves and long train, along with a pearl necklace and a vintage-lace crown bridal veil. Her father, wearing a tuxedo with tails, white vest, and white tie, exhibited pride next to his new son-in-law. Griff wore his formal white dress uniform, and Count DeKay wore his dark Navy dress uniform.
If Griff had been planning to re-up with his military career, why did he remarry? If it was family life that interested him, what drove him to continue, and even pick up the pace of, his military career?
He enjoyed family life and probably wanted to find a normal pattern to life after years of a certain amount of hardship and uncertainty, but he wanted more than just domestic tranquility: he wanted a chance to do something impactful and, perhaps, a chance to show his ex-wife’s blue-blooded family that he had what it takes. He perhaps had came to an understanding that it wasn’t his going it alone that had killed his first marriage, or perhaps he had just decided to try again because he really liked being a father, even if his relationship with little Alice had been at times somewhat awkward. But most significantly, it looked as though war was coming, and he would get his crack if he kept up his top-tier military work.
After the wedding, Nell joined Griff at Leavenworth, where they lived in a house with a white column–framed wooden porch on a lawn-covered lot shaded by flowering trees, probably with plenty of room for Miss Peggy, Nell’s small, white, long-haired dog. There, at Leavenworth, Griff could finally again enjoy family life close to his work, this time with a wife who would perhaps understand and accept her role as a military spouse.
On December 7, 1941, Tiny and Count were at Pearl Harbor, where Count had been stationed. They were at breakfast when the attack struck. Count rushed to his ship, and Tiny hurried to the Red Cross. Fortunately, they were safe, and they informed their families of this fact via shortwave radio, followed by a letter from Tiny describing what had happened, in which she struggled to comply with military secrecy. Soon Count would be stationed on a cruiser in San Francisco for repairs before becoming involved in the first surface battle of the P
acific theater; for her part, Tiny would return to Washington to work with the Red Cross.
Uncle Tex, meanwhile, was continuing his own work with the war effort at the Elwood Plant in Illinois. But in early June 1942, part of the plant suffered a large explosion on the assembly line where antitank mines were being loaded into railroad boxcars for shipment, resulting in forty-eight dead and another forty-six injured, leaving a twelve-foot-deep crater at the explosion site. The exact cause was never determined. It was the greatest loss of civilian life at a munitions plant during the war. The explosion was felt sixty miles away.
That same month, Griff was promoted to the rank of lieutenant colonel, and by Labor Day that year, he’d left Leavenworth for a new mission while Nell headed back East to live with her parents in Brooklyn for the duration of the deployment. Griff’s reputation and years of training—and his blend of experience—had led top brass to select him from among hundreds for the position of corps headquarters’ deputy chief of staff and G-3 operations officer, charged with planning and training in the Fourth Armored Corps that was to be activated in September. Training would take place at Camp Young in the California desert. The new corps’ headquarters—in which Griff would be a key player—would oversee and direct armored divisions under a single command. General Walton H. Walker, another Texan from the Temple area and also a West Point and Leavenworth graduate, was appointed by General George S. Patton to command the corps. It would later be renamed the Twentieth Corps within Patton’s Third Army. General Walker would ultimately write to Nell that he had hand-picked Griff to be his number three man because of Griff’s’ superior record and ideals.
Shortly after Labor Day, Griff stepped off the train at Indio in an expanse of sand and rock in wind under beaming sun. He boarded a six-by-six truck for the thirty-mile trip to the camp, passing from the Coachella Valley, with its lengthy, linear stands of date palm trees, into desert dotted with low shrubs and sporadic Joshua trees, rising to low mountain ridges. The camp’s rows of five-man wood-floored tents stood between wooden sidewalks joined to form streets. Each tent contained cots surrounding a stove whose smokestack poked through a hole at the top. The camp’s administration buildings and mess hall, located partly up the slope from the highway toward the mountains, consisted of wood frames covered with tar paper. All ground surrounding the living areas and buildings was saturated with oil to control scorpions, tarantulas, and snakes. The desert, with its natural predators, sandstorms, cacti, and summer heat up to 125 degrees, was to condition (and put to the test) not only the men but also the machines and other matériel.
Saving the Light at Chartres Page 15
