by Rick Beyer
In the years before World War I, Bell traveled extensively throughout the Middle East. Crisscrossing the Syrian and Arabian deserts, she developed an encyclopedic knowledge of the tribes and their chieftains, and wrote of her travels in widely acclaimed books.
When war broke out she was recruited by British intelligence to obtain the loyalty of Arab sheiks throughout the Middle East. Bell boldly ventured behind enemy lines to gather information. When T. E. Lawrence set out to spark an Arab revolt, he relied on invaluable research and intelligence supplied by the indefatigable Miss Bell. It was remarked that she was the brains behind Lawrence’s brawn.
The headstrong Bell sometimes found herself frozen out by British military officers resentful that a woman was telling them what to do. But her knowledge of the Arab world was too great to ignore. She proved indispensable to military and diplomatic efforts in the Middle East.
After the war, in 1921, British colonial secretary Winston Churchill asked Bell to create the borders of modern Iraq. She pushed to unite Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds in one country despite their mutual hostility, thereby setting the scene for much of the turmoil that has since plagued that troubled country.
Gertrude Bell: a woman determined to make her mark in a man’s world. Which she undoubtedly did.
Influential sheiks and Islamic leaders, men who never had looked on a woman unveiled, would smoke cigarettes and drink coffee with Bell, seeking her advice or help. She became known as “El Khatun” . . . “The Lady.”
Gertrude Bell flanked by Winston Churchill and T. E. Lawrence. For her efforts in World War I, she was honored as a Commander of the British Empire.
“EVERY ARAB IN THE PENINSULA KNOWS HER. WHEN YOU SPEAK OF ‘GERTRUDE,’ EVERY ENGLISHMAN FROM CAIRO TO TEHERAN KNOWS WHOM YOU MEAN.”
— NEW YORK HERALD, 1926
1929
ENIGMA
How the Poles helped win World War II before it even began.
On a Saturday in January 1929, a crate shipped from Berlin arrived at the customs office in Warsaw, Poland. It was soon followed by a German official explaining that it had been shipped there by accident, and demanding it be returned to Germany before going through customs.
This aroused the suspicion of customs officers. Forcing open the crate, they took photos and made diagrams of the odd-looking device inside before returning it to the Germans.
This was Poland’s first introduction to the famous Enigma coding machine.
No one had been able to break Germany’s Enigma code, but the Poles were determined to try. A team of brilliant young cryptographers, led by Marian Rejewski, attacked Enigma with innovative mathematical techniques. By 1932 they had built a working model of the machine and were decoding German military messages. But it was a constant struggle for code breakers to keep up.
In 1938 the Germans created a new and improved Enigma machine. The Poles could no longer decipher German messages. Knowing that war was on the way, they shared their information with the French and British, just weeks before the Germans invaded.
It was a priceless gift.
The Poles were decades ahead of other countries in breaking Enigma. Their efforts paved the way for the now famous code-breaking effort that eventually allowed the Allies to read the Germans’ most secret messages, which proved instrumental in winning the war.
The role played by the massive Allied decipherment project wasn’t revealed until 1974. One of those most surprised was Marian Rejewski, who never knew until then just how critical his prewar code-breaking efforts were to eventual Allied victory.
“UNE MOMENT DE STUPEUR.”
— A FRENCH INTELLIGENCE OFFICER, DESCRIBING THE MOMENT THAT THE POLES UNVEILED THEIR RECONSTRUCTED ENIGMA MACHINES TO THE ALLIES IN JULY OF 1939.
An Enigma machine in the command vehicle of German general Heinz Guderian. The Germans believed Enigma was unbreakable, and trusted their most important messages to it.
The Poles gave their reconstructed Enigma machines to France and Britain. One of the machines was smuggled to London in the baggage of playwright Sacha Guitry and his wife, actress Yvonne Printemps, so as not to raise the suspicion of German spies. Two weeks later, Germany invaded Poland.
1937
THE GOOD MAN OF NANKING
The Nazi businessman who became a savior for thousands.
Japanese forces sweeping through China reached the capital city of Nanking on December 13, 1937. After taking control, they began to execute Chinese POWs. The killing quickly spiraled out of control. Men were rounded up for bayonet practice. Women were raped by the tens of thousands. People were beheaded for sport. Snapshots taken by Japanese soldiers captured the frenzy of violence known to history as the Rape of Nanking.
A surprising hero emerged during this reign of terror: an unassuming German businessman named John Rabe.
The small group of westerners still in Nanking created a “Safety Zone,” hoping to make it a safe haven for refugees of war. They elected Rabe their leader in the belief that his Nazi Party membership would afford him influence with the Japanese.
Desperate Chinese began to flood the Safety Zone to escape the massacre. When Japanese soldiers pursued them even there, Rabe assumed the role of protector. He fearlessly confronted Japanese commanders, demanding that they control their soldiers. He threw his own property open to refugees. He began patrolling the Safety Zone himself, pulling Japanese soldiers off of rape victims, and chasing them away without weapons. His only defense: an armband sporting a Nazi swastika. “They don’t want to tangle with a German,” he wrote in his diary. “Usually all I have to do is shout ‘Deutsch’ and ‘Hitler’ and they turn polite.”
Japanese troops went on an eight-week orgy of murder and violence in Nanking, killing an estimated three hundred thousand men, women, and children in what some have called the forgotten holocaust. But more than two hundred fifty thousand crowded into the Safety Zone were spared . . . thanks in no small part to a good man named John Rabe.
Rabe, in center, with other members of the Safety Committee. After returning to Germany, Rabe wrote a letter to Hitler about the atrocities in Nanking, expecting the Führer to be outraged over his Japanese allies. Instead he was arrested by the Gestapo and ordered never to speak about his experiences in China. “I don’t think he thought so much of Hitler after that,” said his granddaughter, Ursula Reinhardt.
To this day, the Japanese government and Japanese textbooks downplay the Rape of Nanking, saying that the death toll has been greatly exaggerated.
“YOU HEAR OF NOTHING BUT RAPE. IF HUSBANDS OR BROTHERS INTERVENE, THEY’RE SHOT.”
— JOHN RABE
1940
THE RESCUER
Fate offered him a second chance . . . and he took it.
It’s called the Miracle of Dunkirk. In May of 1940, German forces advancing through France were on the verge of capturing an entire Allied army. Nearly surrounded, British and French soldiers fought their way to the coastal town of Dunkirk in a desperate bid to escape.
The British Admiralty put out the call for every small craft it could find to help stage an emergency evacuation. Yachts, fishing boats, motor launches, tug-boats, any vessel that could pull men off the beaches. Despite constant attack by German bombers, this motley fleet managed to rescue more than three hundred thousand men and bring them back to England. Winston Churchill called it a “miracle of deliverance.”
One of the legion of heroic rescuers was a sixty-six-year-old retiree named Charles Lightoller. Determined to bring home every man he could, he crammed more than 120 soldiers on his small motor yacht. Then he piloted the dangerously overloaded vessel back across the English Channel, dodging bombs and bullets all the way.
Perhaps his zeal to rescue as many men as possible was driven in part by memories of a harrowing night at sea nearly thirty years before. It was a night be could never forget: lifeboats being launched only half full . . . cries of distress in the water . . . despair at not being able to do more. An April ni
ght in 1912 when more than nine hundred people perished in the icy North Atlantic, despite the best efforts of Charles Lightoller.
Second officer on the RMS Titanic.
The evacuation effort was called Operation Dynamo. At the start, no one expected that more than a handful of soldiers could be saved—but over ten days, 338,000 men were rescued so they could fight again.
1940
THE MAN WHO SAVED BUCKINGHAM PALACE
A royal rescue of the first order.
The air-raid sirens sounded at nine-thirty that Sunday morning. As Big Ben struck noon, the skies over London began filling up with war-planes.
It was September 15, now remembered as the fiercest day of the Battle of Britain. More than four hundred German bombers attacked London. Adolf Hitler was determined to destroy Britain’s will to fight, and Buckingham Palace was a prime target. The official residence of the royal family had been hit twice in recent days, suffering minor damage. It seemed only a matter of time before it suffered a direct hit.
RAF fighter pilots battled desperately all day to protect the city. Toward the end of the battle, Sergeant Ray Holmes shot down one bomber and then saw another German plane making an unobstructed run straight toward the palace. Holmes was out of ammunition. But he didn’t hesitate.
He flew his Hurricane fighter directly into the German plane, slicing off its tail and sending it hurtling to the ground below. Then he managed to parachute out of his own plane before it crashed on Buckingham Palace Road.
Street crews later paved over the remnants of Holmes’s plane, which remained buried for more than sixty years, until archaeologists recovered the engine and some other parts in 2004. The dig was broadcast live on television. Eighty-nine-year-old Ray Holmes looked on with interest.
“What goes through a young pilot’s mind as he confronts the Germans?” he was asked. “Nothing particularly,” answered the man who saved the palace. “Except he just has to go and have a bash at him. That’s all.”
Starting in August of 1940, German bombers attacked Britain for eighty-four straight days. They failed to break the British spirit and lost an estimated 2,765 planes in the process. “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few” said Winston Churchill in praise of the RAF pilots who ultimately repulsed the German attack.
1940
THE LADY IS A SPY
From banana dancer to decorated hero.
Josephine Baker was a dancer, a singer, and a daring sex symbol. She was also a highly successful intelligence operative. The American-born Baker came to Paris in the 1920s, and her provocative dancing took the town by storm. In 1940, when war broke out, she offered her services to the French Resistance. “France has made me what I am,” she told a Free French leader. “Parisians have given me everything, especially their hearts. Now I will give them mine.”
One of her superiors was skeptical: “I was afraid she was one of those shallow show-business personalities who would shatter like glass if exposed to danger.” But she proved cool as a cucumber.
When the Germans invaded Paris, she let members of the Resistance hide out in her remote château. Dispatched to neutral Lisbon to establish contact with the Free French, she set up concerts as a cover story, and carried vital information written with invisible ink on her sheet music. “The destiny of the Free French,” said her boss, Colonel Paolle, “was written in part on the pages of ‘Two Loves Have I.’ ”
Invited to diplomatic parties, she acted the part of a ditzy dancer, and then wrote down everything she heard. “My notes would have been compromising if discovered,” she said later, “but who would dare search Josephine Baker to the skin.”
After the war Charles de Gaulle awarded her the Légion d’Honneur and the Medaille de la Résistance for her efforts. When she died, the sensation who had once shocked Paris with her banana dance became the only woman ever to receive a twenty-one-gun salute in France.
The citation on Baker’s Légion d’Honneur noted that she possessed “un sang-froid remarquable.”
“C’EST UNE FEMME COURAGEUSE.”
— DANIEL MAOURANI, LE DEUXIEME BUREAU, THE FRENCH EQUIVALENT OF THE CIA
Baker joined the Follies Bergere in 1926. Just twenty years old, she became one of the highest-paid performers in France. Her famous banana dance, performed topless in a skirt of rhinestone-studded bananas, drove audiences crazy.
1942
HEROES O’HARE
Chicago’s O’Hare Airport is named after a hero. But which one?
Butch O’Hare was America’s first flying ace of World War II. On February 20, 1942, he spotted a formation of Japanese bombers preparing to attack the carrier USS Lexington in the waters off New Guinea. Diving into their midst, he shot down six of them single-handedly, saving the ship and the lives of thousands aboard. This action won him the Congressional Medal of Honor.
Butch died in combat the following year. In 1949 the citizens of Chicago honored Butch O’Hare by naming their airport after him.
That’s not all there is to the story, however.
Butch’s father was a lawyer and racetrack owner named Eddie O’Hare. “Artful Eddie,” as he was known, got involved with Chicago mob boss Al Capone in the 1920s. That connection made him a ton of money, but he was worried about the impact on his teenage son. O’Hare was dead set on his Butch getting into the U.S. Naval Academy, and he figured he would have to break away from Capone before that could happen.
So “Artful Eddie” cut a deal with the feds. For the sake of his son’s future, he volunteered to risk his life and inform on Capone. He detailed the mobster’s operations for IRS agents, and led them to a bookkeeper who could testify about Capone’s illegal income. As a result, prosecutors were able to convict Capone on charges of tax evasion and send him to prison in 1931. Butch O’Hare got an appointment to the Naval Academy a year later.
So while O’Hare Airport bears the name of a World War II hero, it also commemorates a father willing to do anything for his son, and the man who helped prosecutors win their war against Al Capone.
“ONE OF THE MOST DARING, IF NOT THE MOST DARING, SINGLE ACTION IN THE HISTORY OF COMBAT AVIATION.”
— FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT, AWARDING BUTCH O’HARE THE CONGRESSIONAL MEDAL OF HONOR
Eddie O’Hare also played a critical role in the trial of Capone. He revealed to prosecutors that the fix was in—that Capone’s henchmen had bribed or coerced everyone in the jury pool. Acting on that information, Judge James Wilkerson switched jury panels with another judge on the first day of the trial. The jury selected from that panel went on to convict Capone and send him to Alcatraz.
Eddie O’Hare paid the ultimate price for informing on Capone. In 1939, shortly before Capone was released from prison, he was gunned down on the orders of Chicago gangster Frank Nitti.
1942
GADZOOKS!
Jazz, the Marines, radio, and the weapon that helped win World War II.
Sergeant Bob Burns was a championship rifleman in the Marine Corps during World War I. But as good a marksman as he was, he was a better musician. Burns organized a Marine Corps Jazz Band that was a favorite of General John Pershing and played to troops across Europe.
Burns was especially well known for playing an instrument that he invented himself. It was made out of two pieces of gas pipe and a whiskey funnel. It was sort of a combination of a trombone and a slide whistle, and it became Burns’s trademark. He even coined a funny name for it.
After World War I, Burns became a radio entertainer and a movie star. He was known around the country as the “Arkansas Traveler,” casting himself as a homespun rube telling tales of the Ozarks. But the cornerstone of his success was that wacky instrument of his. In the late 1930s and early ’40s, at the height of his popularity, thousands of toy versions were manufactured and sold to kids across America.
Burns’s instrument is forgotten today, but the name he dreamed up for it lives on—with a very different meaning.
In
the early days of World War II the army was testing a new shoulder-mounted antitank gun called the M1A1 at the Aberdeen Proving Ground. The soldiers trying it out thought that it bore a remarkable resemblance to the odd contraption Burns had made famous. And so it got the nickname by which it is still remembered.
The bazooka.
Burns’s bazooka sounded like a low-toned saxophone with a range of about six notes. Burns was equally adept at playing the instrument for laughs or turning in virtuoso jazz performances with it.
The United States manufactured nearly half a million bazookas during World War II, along with 15 million of the antitank rockets it fired. The bazooka proved so successful at stopping enemy tanks that the Germans copied it outright. They did, however, give it another name, calling it the Panzerschreck, or “tank terror.”
Where did Burns get the name? He said once that he took it from the now-obsolete slang word “bazoo,” meaning mouth, as in “he blows his bazoo” (he talks too much). He told other people that the name mimicked the sound the strange instrument made.
1942
AN OFFER HE COULDN’T REFUSE
How a notorious mobster played a part in America’s war effort.
War can make for some strange bedfellows. None stranger, perhaps, than when U.S. Naval Intelligence hooked up with the Mafia during World War II.
It began when the SS Normandie, a former French ocean liner being converted into a troop ship, rolled over and burned at its New York City moorings in February of 1942. The navy thought it might be sabotage. Concerned about dockside security, and always looking for ways to gather information, Naval Intelligence decided to seek help from New York’s most powerful mobster:
