The Monuments Men

by Robert M. Edsel

  But what a black eye the whole episode had caused the War Office: For almost two years, the British had to defend themselves against charges they had no way to confirm or deny. They had no archeologists in North Africa, and no one had examined the site while it was in British hands. In fact, no one in the army had considered the historic and cultural value, and therefore propaganda value, of Cyrene at all.

  Now Wheeler stood in the center of Leptis Magna, watching in amazement as the British army repeated that mistake. To his left, equipment trucks were grinding over the ancient Roman paving stones. To his right, troops were climbing on fallen walls. An Arab guard, Wheeler noticed, could do nothing more than wave his arms as a tank drove right past him and into the temple. The gunner popped out and started waving. His mate snapped a picture. Perfect day in North Africa, Mum, wish you were here. Had the British army learned nothing from the debacle of Cyrenaica? At this rate, they really were going to give the Italians something to complain about.

  “Can’t we do something, sir?” Wheeler asked the deputy chief Civil Affairs officer (CAO). Civil Affairs was assigned to administer a captured area once the fighting had stopped. It kept the peace, as it were, even if that peace was only a mile or two from the front line.

  The officer shrugged. “Just soldiers being soldiers,” he said.

  “But this is Leptis Magna,” Wheeler protested. “The great city of the Roman emperor Lucius Septimius Severus. The most complete Roman ruin in all of Africa.”

  The man just looked at him. “Never heard of it,” he said.

  Wheeler shook his head. Every officer had been told about Cyrenaica. But a CAO of the British North African Army had never been briefed on Leptis Magna, even though the army was sure to be fighting there. Why? Because they hadn’t yet been accused of desecrating it? Was the whole war an exercise in understanding mistakes only after they had been made?

  “Are they important?” the officer asked.

  “What?”

  “The broken buildings.”

  “They’re classical ruins, sir. And yes, they’re important.”

  “Why?”

  “They’re irreplaceable. They’re history. They’re… It’s our duty as soldiers to protect them, sir. If we don’t, the enemy will use that against us.”

  “Are you a historian, Lieutenant?”

  “I’m an archeologist. Director of the London Museum.” 1

  The Civil Affairs officer nodded. “Then do something about it, Director.”

  When Wheeler realized the CAO was serious, he swung into action. By good fortune, he soon discovered that an archeological colleague from the London Museum, Lieutenant Colonel John Bryan Ward-Perkins, happened to be serving as an artillery captain in a unit near Leptis Magna. With the support of the CAO, the two men rerouted traffic, photographed damage, posted guards, and organized repair efforts at the ruined city. If nothing else, they thought, it keeps the troops busy.

  In London, their reports met with a quizzical stare. Leptis Magna? Preservation? “Send it to Woolley,” someone finally said. “He’ll know what to do.”

  Woolley was Sir Charles Leonard Woolley, a world-famous archeologist who in the years before World War I had been a close companion of Sir Thomas Edward Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia. Now in his sixties, he was serving in the British War Office in a completely unrelated capacity. Woolley did indeed care about the world’s ancient treasures, and by the spring of 1943, the three men had found time around their regular duties to prepare preservation plans for all three of Libya’s ancient sites.

  It was Wheeler and Ward-Perkins who insisted that, in addition to being protected, “the ancient sites and the Museums [of Greek and Roman North Africa] should be made accessible to troops and the interest of the antiquities be brought home to them.” 2 An informed army, in other words, is a respectful and disciplined army. And a respectful and disciplined army is much less likely to cause cultural harm. Without realizing it, the British were inching their way toward the goal George Stout was pushing so earnestly back in the United States: the world’s first front line monuments protection program.

  CHAPTER 6

  The First Campaign

  Sicily

  Summer 1943

  In January 1943, as Wheeler and Ward-Perkins formalized their plans for Leptis Magna and George Stout reported for naval duty in Maryland, U.S. President Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill met for a secret summit in Casablanca, Morocco. (Soviet premier Joseph Stalin would join them a few days later.) North Africa lay in Allied hands, the Italians having been routed by Free French and British forces in Algeria, but Fortress Europe remained unbreached. Churchill wanted to attack immediately across the English Channel; Roosevelt, under the advice of his military commanders, in particular generals George C. Marshall and Dwight D. “Ike” Eisenhower, argued that the Allies weren’t ready. After ten days of meetings, the two powers agreed on an invasion of Europe, but not across the English Channel. They would go in through the back door: the island of Sicily, just off the toe of the Italian mainland.

  The Sicilian campaign would be a joint operation, unprecedented in history, with the United States and Great Britain sharing command on everything from air combat missions to laundry duty at the preparations base in Algiers. Needless to say, it was not going to be easy to integrate two independent armies. Almost immediately, the troops in North Africa noticed the home powers had gotten a few assignments muddled: The food was British and the toilets French, when it should have been the other way around. It was a harbinger of things to come.

  Among the thousands of responsibilities that became “allied” between the two powers that spring was the nascent conservation program begun by Wheeler and Ward-Perkins in the ruins of Leptis Magna. In late April 1943, it was decided that two officers, one American and one British, should be sent to Sicily to inspect all monuments in the occupied territories “as soon as practicable after occupation.” 1 Paul Sachs and the museum directors got their first crack at policy when the U.S. Army asked them to recommend someone to become the American Advisor on Fine Arts and Monuments. They suggested one of their own, Francis Henry Taylor, the Met director and maker of “big schemes” so derided by George Stout, but he was rejected for military duty because he was… well, too fat. Pressed for time, and needing someone already enlisted in the military, the directors chose Captain Mason Hammond, a Harvard classics professor working in Army Air Forces Intelligence.

  Unfortunately, nobody told Hammond, who arrived in Algiers for his mysterious new assignment knowing only that he would be working on conservation issues. His first days were filled with more shocks than just terrible food and despicable toilets.

  He arrived in June. He was told the invasion was set for early July.

  Invasion? He had assumed he would be serving in North Africa. No, he was told, he was going to Sicily.

  Then he better get to the library in Algiers and brush up on his knowledge. Sicily was not his area of expertise. Sorry, he was told, no public research. It could tip German spies to the army’s next destination.

  Then he would study the army’s research on Sicily. None was available, for the same reason.

  Then could he study the lists and descriptions of the monuments he was supposed to protect? Unfortunately, the lists were still being worked on by Paul Sachs and his colleagues in New York. They might not be finished for weeks. And even if they arrived before the invasion, they would be off-limits, too. Same reason: German spies. The lists would be shipped to Sicily and given to commanders after the landing.

  Then he needed to speak to his fellow art officers immediately.

  Art officers? There was only one. And he was British. And he… wasn’t there. Lord Woolley, who was running the British side, had wanted Wheeler or Ward-Perkins, but both had been reassigned since Leptis Magna. Once he found out they weren’t available, he had begun to drag his feet on assigning his officer.

  Dragged his feet?

 
There wasn’t another officer. At least not yet.

  Then what about staff for the deployment?

  No staff.

  Transportation?

  None assigned.

  Typewriters? Radios? Lanterns? Maps? Scratch paper? Pencils?

  No supplies assigned either.

  What about orders?

  Didn’t have any. He was free to go where he chose.

  Hammond, confronted with the reality on the ground, realized that in essence there was no mission at all. Freedom, it seemed, was another word for nothing important to do. Which didn’t bother Hammond. “I doubt if there is need for any large specialist staff for this work,” he wrote from North Africa to a friend, “since it is at best a luxury and the military will not look kindly on a lot of art experts running around trying to tell them what not to hit.” 2 Even the first “Monuments Man,” as the conservation experts came to be known, initially thought the manner in which the army was going about the mission was utterly foolish and a waste of time.

  The Allies landed in Sicily on the night of July 9–10, 1943. Hammond, low on the priority list for transportation and considered part of the occupation force, didn’t arrive until July 29, long after the troops had left the beachhead. In Syracuse, his first headquarters, the weather was warm but pleasantly breezy. Local cultural officials greeted him enthusiastically—the mainland Italians and Germans had treated them terribly, they were happy to be free of them—and took him on a sightseeing tour of the local monuments. Despite being in the path of the army, they had received little damage. The southern coast, his next destination, was tranquil, nothing but hills sloping quietly to the sea. As he looked over the great Roman ruins at Agrigento a few days later, striped with shadow in the relentless Sicilian sun, he saw plenty of damage, but none that had been done in the last thousand years. His prediction seemed prescient; other than consult with a few local Sicilian experts, there wasn’t much for a Monuments Man to do.

  The walls of reality came crashing in at Palermo, the Sicilian capital. The Allies had bombed the city relentlessly as part of a diversionary air campaign, destroying the old harbor section, numerous churches and cathedrals, the state library, state archives, and the botanical gardens. Every official in the area, it seemed, was demanding action from the Allied Military Government (AMG), and everyone was directed to the one poor captain sitting in a folding chair in a threadbare corner of a shared office. The Sicilians were willing to help, but they needed explanations, assessments, financing for repairs, equipment, supplies, and skilled craftsmen for emergency work on buildings in danger of collapse. The archbishop wanted special attention paid to the churches… and to his personal palazzo. General Patton, whose U.S. Seventh Army troops had taken the city, wanted money to redecorate his barracks, the former palace of the king of Sicily.

  Hammond didn’t have time to listen to all the questions, much less answer them. For more than a month, he wasn’t able to get out of the office to inspect any sites. Using his personal typewriter he had carried with him from home, he sent reports to the War Department, and long letters home, begging for information and reinforcements. Nothing came until September, when the British Monuments officer Captain F. H. J. Maxse finally arrived. But by then it was too late. When the Allies leapt from the toe of Sicily to mainland Italy on September 3, 1943, Hammond was still frustrated, confused, and hopelessly mired hundreds of miles away in Palermo. Even small, mostly rural Sicily had proven too much for the initial MFAA effort.

  On September 10, 1943, a week after the Allied landing in mainland Italy, a jubilant Paul Sachs wrote to George Stout: “I should have written to you some time ago to tell you that your ‘brain child’ has finally taken shape in an official kind of way and, as you know, the President has appointed an American Commission for the Protection and Salvage of Artistic and Historic Monuments in Europe with Mr. [Supreme Court] Justice Roberts as Chairman, and I have been asked to be a member of that Commission and I have accepted…. It seemed to me… that I ought to post you at once because not only is this commission the result of your great thinking and clear statements at the time of the Metropolitan meeting just after Pearl Harbor, but in a very true sense you seem to me the real father of the whole show… it is my deliberate opinion that the appointment of this Commission is due to your initiative, imagination and energy.” 3

  Stout must have read the announcement with bemusement. Sure, he was the father, but what exactly had he birthed? Not the frontline, specialist force he had envisioned, but another layer of bureaucracy? Paul Sachs and the museum directors had, after more than two years of effort, pushed through their vision, not his.

  On September 13, as U.S. Fifth Army fought desperately to hold on to its Italian beachhead at Salerno, Stout sent Sachs a reply. “I congratulate the U.S. Government and the chairman of the American commission on getting you to serve,” he told Sachs in his usual self-deprecating, biting, and slyly humorous style. “You are kind to give me so much credit in getting this work under way, but you magnify it one hell of a lot. Something far below the average set of brains is needed to figure out what ought to be done. Getting it done is what counts.” 4

  March 20, 1941

  Report to the Führer by Alfred Rosenberg, head of the main Nazi looting organization, known as the ERR

  I report the arrival of the principal shipment of ownerless Jewish “cultural property” [Kulturgut] in the salvage location Neuschwanstein by special train on Saturday the 15th of this month. It was secured by my staff for Special Purposes [Einsatzstab] in Paris. The especial train, arranged for by Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, comprised 25 express baggage cars filled with the most valuable paintings, furniture, Gobelins, works of artistic craftsmanship and ornaments. The shipment consisted chiefly of the most important parts of the collections Rothschild, Seligmann, Bernheim-Jeune, Halphen, Kann, Weil-Picard, Wildenstein, David-Weill, Levy-Benzion.

  My Staff for Special Purposes started the confiscatory action in Paris during October 1940 on the basis of your order, my Führer. With the help of the Security Service (SD) and the Secret Field Police [Geheime Feldpolizei] all storage—and hiding—places of art possessions belonging to the fugitive Jewish emigrants were systematically ascertained. These possessions were then collected in the locations provided for by the Louvre in Paris. The art historians of my staff have itemized scientifically the complete art-material and have photographed all works of value. Thus, after completion, I shall be able to submit to you shortly a conclusive catalogue of all confiscated works with exact data about origin plus scientific evaluation and description. At this time the inventory includes more than 4000 individual pieces of art, partly of the highest artistic value. Besides this special train the masterpieces selected by the Reichsmarschall—mainly from the Rothschild collection—have been forwarded in two special cars to Munich already some time ago. They have been deposited there in the air raid shelters of the Führer-building.…

  Over and above the main shipment there are secured in Paris a large number of additional abandoned Jewish art possessions. These are being processed in the same sense and prepared for shipment to Germany. Exact accounts about the extent of this remaining shipment are at the moment not available. However, it is estimated that the work in the Western areas will be finished entirely within two to three months. Then a second transport can be brought to Germany.

  Berlin, 20 March 1941 A. Rosenberg

  CHAPTER 7

  Monte Cassino

  Southern Italy

  Winter 1943–1944

  U.S. Fifth Army landed on mainland Italy near Salerno on September 9, 1943. It was supposed to be a surprise landing, with no air or naval support, but as the troop carriers approached the shore near Salerno the Germans shouted out over a loudspeaker in English, “Come on in and surrender. We have you covered.” The Americans came in firing anyway, and the battle was one of the bloodiest of the war. The campaign hadn’t been much easier since. The battle for the major airfields at Foggia was s
o intense, for instance, that afterward the decimated 82nd Airborne Division had to be merged with the British X (Tenth) Corps.

  Nonetheless, Fifth Army took its primary objective, the southern port city of Naples, on October 1. They pushed on immediately, taking the high ground south of the Volturno River on October 6. Before them stretched several hundred miles of rugged, mountainous terrain, dug through with fortifications and strung with four major defensive lines. The Italian surrender, offered on September 3, the day of the first Allied landing on the mainland, had been announced on September 8, but Hitler had not been caught off guard. He had anticipated Italy’s lack of resolve and stationed German troops throughout the country. As the Italian soldiers laid down their weapons, hardened German troops had swarmed in to take their place. They were well-trained, battle-tested, determined… and everywhere. The weather deteriorated. Drenching rain turned the mud roads into bogs, then freezing cold turned those bogs into ice. Rivers skipped their banks; troop bivouacs flooded. The treacherous mountain terrain north of the Volturno allowed the Germans to engage and retreat with deadly efficiency. German observers on the mountain peaks called in nearly continuous artillery fire. Allied commanders had hoped to be in Rome before the onset of winter. When the sleet started falling, they weren’t even halfway there.

  On December 1, Fifth Army entered the Liri Valley. Flanking units fought the Germans on the snowy peaks, while the main body of troops moved through the valley in a driving rain, mostly under cover of darkness, always under fire. Forty-five days later, they finally reached the other end of what was already being referred to as Purple Heart Valley, because of the vast number of soldiers wounded or killed in action there. Before them lay the town of Cassino, the anchor of the Gustav Line, the Germans’ main defensive entrenchment south of Rome. The mountain ridge above the town offered a commanding view of the valley, allowing the Germans to turn back an Allied assault on January 17, 1944. For weeks, the rain pounded the huddled men, and the temperature froze them in their boots. Another Allied assault was turned back, with high casualties, and still the shells poured down as steady as the rain.