The last we had heard from Luke was that at six o’clock on the night of September 28th he left the French field where he had spent the night, and flying low over one of the American Balloon Headquarters he circled over their heads until he had attracted the attention of the officers, then dropped them a brief note which he had written in his aeroplane. As may well be imagined, Luke was a prime favorite with our Balloon Staff. All the officers of that organization worshiped the boy for his daring and his wonderful successes against the balloon department of their foes. They appreciated the value of balloon observation to the enemy and knew the difficulties and dangers in attacking these well-defended posts.
Running out and picking up the streamer and sheet of paper which fell near their office they unfolded the latter and read:
“Look out for enemy balloon at D-2 and D-4 positions.—Luke.”
Already Luke’s machine was disappearing in the direction of the first balloon which lay just beyond the Meuse. It was too dark to make out its dim outline at this distance, but as they all gathered about the front of their “office” they glued their eyes to the spot where they knew it hung. For Luke had notified them several times previously as to his intended victims and every time they had been rewarded for their watching.
Two minutes later a great read glow lit up the northwestern horizon and before the last of it died away the second German balloon had likewise burst into flames! Their intrepid hero had again fulfilled his promise! They hastened into their headquarters and called up our operations officer and announced Frank Luke’s last two victories. Then we waited for Luke to make his dramatic appearance.
But Luke never came! That night and the next day we rather maligned him for his continued absence, supposing naturally enough that he had returned to his French friends for the night. But when no news of him came to us, when repeated inquiries elicited no information as to his movements after he had brought down his last balloon, every man in the Group became aware that we had lost the greatest airman in our army. From that day to this not one word of reliable information has reached us concerning Luke’s disappearance. Not a single clue to his death and burial was ever obtained from the Germans! Like Guynemer, the miraculous airman of France, Frank Luke was swallowed by the skies and no mortal traces of him remain!
Chapter Fifteen
Nathan Hale
By James Parton
Like your editor, you probably have been hearing about Nathan Hale and his courage since your earliest school years. Here James Parton provides details you may not know about the man whose picture should be beside the word “patriot” in the dictionary.
—Lamar Underwood
General Washington wanted a man. It was in September, 1776, at the City of New York, a few days after the battle of Long Island. The swift and deep East River flowed between the two hostile armies, and General Washington had as yet no system established for getting information of the enemy’s movements and intentions. He never needed such information so much as at that crisis.
What would General Howe do next? If he crossed at Hell Gate, the American army, too small in numbers, and defeated the week before, might be caught on Manhattan Island as in a trap, and the issue of the contest might be made to depend upon a single battle; for in such circumstances defeat would involve the capture of the whole army. And yet General Washington was compelled to confess:
“We cannot learn, nor have we been able to procure the least information of late.”
Therefore he wanted a man. He wanted an intelligent man, cool-headed, skillful, brave, to cross the East River to Long Island, enter the enemy’s camp, and get information as to his strength and intentions. He went to Colonel Knowlton, commanding a remarkably efficient regiment from Connecticut, and requested him to ascertain if this man, so sorely needed, could be found in his command. Colonel Knowlton called his officers together, stated the wishes of General Washington, and, without urging the enterprise upon any individual, left the matter to their reflections.
Captain Nathan Hale, a brilliant youth of twenty-one, recently graduated from Yale College, was one of those who reflected upon the subject. He soon reached a conclusion. He was of the very flower of the young men of New England, and one of the best of the younger soldiers of the patriot army. He had been educated for the ministry, and his motive in adopting for a time the profession of arms was purely patriotic. This we know from the familiar records of his life at the time when the call to arms was first heard.
In addition to his other gifts and graces, he was handsome, vigorous, and athletic, all in an extraordinary degree. If he had lived in our day he might have pulled the stroke-oar at New London, or pitched for the college nine.
The officers were conversing in a group. No one had as yet spoken the decisive word. Colonel Knowlton appealed to a French sergeant, an old soldier of former wars, and asked him to volunteer.
“No, no,” said he. “I am ready to fight the British at any place and time, but I do not feel willing to go among them to be hung up like a dog.”
Captain Hale joined the group of officers. He said to Colonel Knowlton:
“I will undertake it.”
Some of his best friends remonstrated. One of them, afterwards the famous general William Hull, then a captain in Washington’s army, has recorded Hale’s reply to his own attempt to dissuade him.
“I think,” said Hale, “I owe to my country the accomplishment of an object so important. I am fully sensible of the consequences of discovery and capture in such a situation. But for a year I have been attached to the army, and have not rendered any material service, while receiving a compensation for which I make no return. I wish to be useful, and every kind of service necessary for the public good becomes honorable by being necessary.”
He spoke, as General Hull remembered, with earnestness and decision, as one who had considered the matter well, and had made up his mind.
Having received his instructions, he traveled fifty miles along the Sound as far as Norwalk in Connecticut. One who saw him there made a very wise remark upon him, to the effect that he was “too good-looking” to go as a spy. He could not deceive. “Some scrubby fellow ought to have gone.” At Norwalk he assumed the disguise of a Dutch schoolmaster, putting on a suit of plain brown clothes, and a round, broad-brimmed hat. He had no difficulty in crossing the Sound, since he bore an order from General Washington which placed at his disposal all the vessels belonging to Congress. For several days everything appears to have gone well with him, and there is reason to believe that he passed through the entire British army without detection or even exciting suspicion.
Finding the British had crossed to New York, he followed them. He made his way back to Long Island, and nearly reached the point opposite Norwalk where he had originally landed. Rendered perhaps too bold by success, he went into a well-known and popular tavern, entered into conversation with the guests, and made himself very agreeable. The tradition is that he made himself too agreeable. A man present suspecting or knowing that he was not the character he had assumed, quietly left the room, communicated his suspicions to the captain of a British ship anchored near, who dispatched a boat’s crew to capture and bring on board the agreeable stranger. His true character was immediately revealed. Drawings of some of the British works, with notes in Latin, were found hidden in the soles of his shoes. Nor did he attempt to deceive his captors, and the English captain, lamenting, as he said, that “so fine a fellow had fallen into his power,” sent him to New York in one of his boats, and with him the fatal proofs that he was a spy.
September twenty-first was the day on which he reached New York—the day of the great fire which laid one-third of the little city in ashes. From the time of his departure from General Washington’s camp to that of his return to New York was about fourteen days. He was taken to General Howe’s headquarters at the Beekman mansion, on the East River, near the corner of the present Fifty-f
irst Street and First Avenue. It is a strange coincidence that this house to which he was brought to be tried as a spy was the very one from which Major Andre departed when he went to West Point. Tradition says that Captain Hale was examined in a greenhouse which then stood in the garden of the Beekman mansion.
Short was his trial, for he avowed at once his true character. The British general signed an order to his provost-marshal directing him to receive into his custody the prisoner convicted as a spy, and to see him hanged by the neck “to-morrow morning at daybreak.”
Terrible things are reported of the manner in which this noble prisoner, this admirable gentleman and hero, was treated by his jailer and executioner. There are savages in every large army, and it is possible that this provost-marshal was one of them. It is said that he refused him writing-materials, and afterwards, when Captain Hale had been furnished them by others, destroyed before his face his last letters to his mother and to the young lady to whom he was engaged to be married. As those letters were never received this statement may be true. The other alleged horrors of the execution it is safe to disregard, because we know that it was conducted in the usual form and in the presence of many spectators and a considerable body of troops. One fact shines out from the distracting confusion of that morning, which will be cherished to the latest posterity as a precious ingot of the moral treasure of the American people. When asked if he had anything to say, Captain Hale replied:
“I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.”
The scene of his execution was probably an old graveyard in Chambers Street, which was then called Barrack Street. General Howe formally notified General Washington of his execution. In recent years, through the industry of investigators, the pathos and sublimity of these events have been in part revealed.
In 1887 a bronze statue of the young hero was unveiled in the State House at Hartford. Mr. Charles Dudley Warner delivered a beautiful address suitable to the occasion, and Governor Lounsberry worthily accepted the statue on behalf of the State. It is greatly to be regretted that our knowledge of this noble martyr is so slight; but we know enough to be sure that he merits the veneration of his countrymen.
Chapter Sixteen
Okinawa: The Fight for Sugar Loaf Hill
By George Feifer
In the summer of 1945, more people died in the battle of Okinawa than in both the Hiroshima and Nagaski atomic bomb attacks combined. That stunning loss of Okinawa civilians, Japanese military, and American military may surprise many people, knowing as we do now that the end of the war would come in August 1945. The Okinawa campaign has inspired many books, but none surpass George Feifer’s The Battle of Okinawa: The Blood and the Bomb. The critically acclaimed, highly detailed and voluminous account of the savage fighting on the island closest to the Japanese mainland is a masterpiece of living military history. This excerpt from one of the most savage fights of the battle is typical of the reader reward in the full book. The leading Marine in the fighting is Platoon Sergeant Edmund De Mar, called “Mommy” by fellow Marines in G Company, 2nd Battalion, 22nd Regiment.
—Lamar Underwood
The “prominent hill,” as the Americans referred to it, stood beyond a slight draw that formed a corridor leading up to it. A similar rise called Charlie Hill had fallen the day before to the 1st Battalion, after a day and a half of tank and infantry assault supported by naval gunfire. There was no reason to expect the new hill, barren except for a few scrubby trees, would be more difficult. De Mar, studying it again from a few hundred yards north, saw it as “just another lump, a brownish incline with a little knoll on top.”
G Company’s return to combat had been hard. After suffering only two battle-fatigue casualties during its weeks in the north, it lost nine men to exceptionally heavy artillery, mortar, and small-arms fire in just two days in the south, including five killed on the first day alone. De Mar’s 3rd Platoon had escaped from one action only with the aid of a smoke screen. But the company would soon look back to those two days pushing south to here as almost easy going. At least everyone could still keep track of the killed and wounded.
Actually, De Mar was reassigning the functions of the missing men in his weakened platoon when the runner arrived with the order to meet with Lieutenant Bair for coordination. De Mar had twenty-eight men left of a full complement of forty. According to the plan, they would be joined by nineteen men still fit for action from dead Ed Ruess’s 1st Platoon and be supported by the tank platoon. The hill had to be taken quickly, because its machine guns and mortars were badly chewing up everything in sight, including other companies.
The tanks were waiting in a depression not visible from the hill. When Lieutenant Bair gave platoon Sergeant De Mar and the replacement for Ed Ruess the plan of attack, they took the usual precaution of squatting far enough apart so that one mortar round couldn’t hit them all. They were eager to learn one another’s names to avoid calling out “Lieutenant!” or “Sergeant!”—another way of making themselves priority targets for snipers. The plan was straightforward: De Mar and his men on the left, Bair and the reduced 1st Platoon on the right, and the tanks moving out at the same time, while a machine-gun section would give additional fire support as they advanced.
The tank commander wanted assurance that he wouldn’t be left “high and dry.” Tanks were a great advantage to the infantry they supported, and the American 10th Army had vastly more of them than the Japanese 32nd Army. But enemy fire of such intensity and accuracy turned even the best American Shermans into a danger too, as targets for concentrated salvos. Veterans learned to control their first instinct to crouch behind them for protection and to mistrust the false sense of security they provided. Especially when antitank guns and other armament zeroed in on their whistling and clanking, the instinct of troops at their sides was to scramble as far from them as quickly as possible, leaving them vulnerable to dreaded Japanese infantrymen with satchel charges.
Against powerful defenses, therefore, tanks needed the protection of infantrymen as much as infantrymen needed the extra punch from tanks. De Mar urged the lieutenant in command of those four Shermans not to worry: “We’ll stick to you like flies on shit.” They synchronized watches. Jump-off time would be 1600 hours on a signal from Lieutenant Bair.
De Mar returned to his platoon and gave the word. Final preparations were made for the attack. Waiting was a miniature prelanding limbo, the men hoping the moment would come soon and that it never would. De Mar worried about them, about the steady Japanese fire from both flanks, and about communications because his radio had been knocked out. It would be nice, he mused, to be somewhere else. At 1600 hours, the lead Sherman’s hatch cover closed and it started off with the 3rd Platoon.
It was only minutes to the hill. Starting the climb, De Mar and the others suddenly saw it was thick with guns. Tank fire had ripped down camouflage, exposing dozens, maybe hundreds, of emplacements now showing gun barrels and muzzle flashes. They didn’t yet know that some of the most damaging fire pouring down on them was from other hills. De Mar had no time to look at anything other than his men, some of whom were already down. The tanks were being hit just as fast by concealed, expertly placed mines and antitank guns. Two were put out of action almost immediately.
The crest was only a few hundred yards away. Hoping audacity would compensate for their lack of deception, the two platoons charged straight up and reached it, but with a much-reduced complement. Bair spread his remaining dozen-odd men into shell holes, but the Japanese fire was so intense and the American already so diminished that the lieutenant, his radio communications also out, sent a man back to report that G needed help to hold the summit. Racing and dodging down, that messenger could see little movement among De Mar’s group, which was “getting the hell beaten out of them.”
Nothing De Mar had seen in combat, let alone in films, had prepared him for such concentration of incoming fire. It very quickly killed m
any of his men and left others unable to function as fire teams. Soon only a handful remained unhit, most prominently Bair. The big, burly first lieutenant was a man of few words who, like Ed Ruess, had been among the noncommissioned officers selected for officer training as the Marines’ need for more officers to replace casualties grew. He presented a fine target—but also served as an inspiration to the men—as he tried to see to the wounded and rally the others. He motioned to De Mar: something about one of the disabled tanks. Then he was violently spun around and De Mar saw a large chunk had been ripped from his upper leg. But powerful Bair picked up a .30-caliber light machine gun from alongside its two dead operators, threw a belt of ammunition over his shoulder, and, like a John Wayne character, laid out lead in the enemy’s direction—one of the directions. It wasn’t long before he took a second hit, this time in the arm cradling his machine gun. The lieutenant continued producing covering fire so that some men could crawl to help others who’d been wounded going up the hill until his third hit, in the buttocks, sent him spinning out of sight.
De Mar quickly threw some grenades and started crawling toward Bair. Then he felt as if someone had taken a log from a fire and slammed it with all his might into his leg. He went down flat and couldn’t get up. Still down, he saw one of his 3rd Platoon men spring up and bang on a disabled tank with his rifle, after which the crew fired furiously for a moment—against what looked like “thousands of Japanese coming at us,” as a crew member would later put it—until they ran out of ammunition and escaped through the tank’s emergency hatch. Other tank crews continued firing although their vehicles were burning, then leaped out to help wounded riflemen.
There was no place anywhere to make a stand. Much later, in the sweet luxury of being alive to remember, De Mar would quip it was a situation from which General Custer would have cut and run. Dirt had jammed his rifle. He had no cover or protection. Knowing a sniper was poised somewhere on his left, maybe the one who’d already hit him, all he could do was hug the ground for all he was worth. He heard cries—from about ten yards away, he guessed—from a private named James Davis, whose size had earned him the nickname “Little Bit.” Strong and tough nevertheless, Davis was only eighteen years old and his wounds were obviously very bad; he was crying for his parents to come get him. De Mar grunted for him to shut up: Any noise there would probably be a fatal noise. When Davis eventually did fall silent, De Mar hoped it was because he’d heard him.
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