From the Archives: Walking Hallowed Ground
Recently My Own True Love and I were at dinner with friends and the conversation turned to the Gallipoli campaign in World War I . [1] The next day he requested that I run this post again. It originally ran in 2011, when History in the Margins was brand-new. I think it holds up.
In response to my recent post on the American Civil War, blog reader Karen Eliot talked about her experiences visiting Gettysburg.
Her comments left me thinking about what makes battlefield visits such a powerful experience. I’ve certainly walked my share of Civil War battlefields: Gettysburg, Antietam, Pea Ridge, and my hometown battlefield of Wilson’s Creek. (Not to mention a few Revolutionary War and War of 1812 sites. I’m an equal opportunity history nerd.) My Own True Love will tell you that I tear up at every battlefield I visit. Or at least get a lump in my throat.
But thinking it over, I’m not sure that the experience would be quite so powerful if the National Park Service weren’t there to lead me by the hand. I think it takes a special person to be able to walk into an empty field and see the sweep of a past battle. I’m not that person. I need a guide, an exhibit, or at least a few historical markers. (Have I mentioned how much I love historical markers?)
Which brings me to the battlefield visit that hit me hardest: Gallipoli.
Fought at the Dardanelle Straits, where Turkey has one foot in Europe, the Gallipoli campaign of World War I was the first major amphibious operation in modern warfare. The British and French hoped to drive Turkey out of the war and gain control of the warm water ports of the Black Sea. The campaign started out as a slapdash naval expedition in which the big powers expected to blow Turkey out of the water–so to speak. It turned into the grimmest of trench warfare. Trenches were close enough together that soldiers could toss a live grenade back and forth across the lines several times before it exploded in a horrible parody of the childhood game of Hot Potato. Water was so scarce on the European side that they tanked it in from Egypt. ( That’s a long water run. Look at a map.)
The campaign was a military stalemate paid for by heavy losses on both sides, but it was a formative event for three modern nations: Australia, New Zealand and Turkey. Today the Gallipoli National Historic Park is a pilgrimage site for all three countries.
My Own True Love and I traveled to Gallipoli from Istanbul in a tour bus. Many of our fellow travelers that day were New Zealanders and Australians whose father/uncle/grandfather/great-grandfather had fought at Gallipoli. (ANZAC Day is a national holiday in both Australia and New Zealand commemorating the landing of Australian and New Zealand forces.) Our tour guide was a retired Turkish naval captain for whom Gallipoli was a lifelong passion. The museum was heart-breaking. You could walk the trenches in the battlefield. The memorial honored the soldiers from both sides. The combination was magical.
But the thing I remember most clearly is the end of the day. Every tour of the Gallipoli National Historic Park ends in front of a statue of the oldest Turkish survivor of the battle and his young granddaughter, who holds a bouquet of rosemary for remembrance. He is said to have told his granddaughter that every man who died at Gallipoli is part of Turkey now and should be honored. Visitors add rosemary springs to the granddaughter’s bouquet from bushes that surrounded the memorial. Because My Own True Love held the highest military rank of anyone on our bus, Captain Ali invited me to step forward to add a spring of rosemary to the bouquet on behalf of our group. Did I get all teary? You bet. [2}
Remembrance is, ultimately, why we visit battlefields. Remembrance of those who died and those who survived, of causes lost and causes won, of the reasons we go to war, of greed, honor, bravery and shame. Remembrance of the world we have lost on the road to today.
What battlefield visits made an impact on you?
[1] You take your chances when you go to dinner with us. Between us we are able to geek out about many, many things.
[2] Did I get all teary re-reading this fifteen years later? Yep.
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If there’s a post from the past that you would like to see again, let me know.
Angels of the Underground
Now and then I realize that a book slipped through the cracks, that I read it and never reviewed here on the Margins. My friend Theresa Kaminski’s Angels of the Underground: The American Women Who Resisted the Japanese in the Philippines in World War II is one of those books[1], something I realized only after I watched her excellent interview on WW2TV several weeks ago in preparation for my own appearance in April.[2] It seemed like a good idea to pull it off the shelf and take another look.
Angels of the Underground tells the stories of four American women—Peggy Doolin[3], Yay Panililio, Claire Phillips, and Gladys Savary—who were trapped in the Philippines during the Japanese occupation in World War II. Before the war, Doolin was a nurse, Panililo was a newspaper correspondent and photographer, Clair was a not-entirely-successful entertainer, and Gladys was a very successful restaurateur. Each of them became involved in the loosely coordinated resistance movement, but they were not a unit. In fact, they barely knew each other, which in some ways underlines the breadth of the resistance.
Kaminski skillful establishes what life was like for Americans in the colonial Philippines in the years before the war, and why each of her subjects went there is search of a better life. She sets her subjects’ lives and actions firmly within the context of the military action that led to the Japanese occupation of the Philippines in 1942 and the campaign to regain control of the islands, beginning in 1944. She brings to life the horrors of the Japanese occupation in general, and the specific dangers suffered by these women. She examines how those experiences shaped their lives after the war.
In short, it is an excellent contribution to the growing body of work on the experiences of women in World War II.
[1] Looking at my notes, I realize I read Angels of the Underground in 2017. *dang*
[2] I strongly recommend WW2TV for any of you who are World War II buffs. It is an amazing YouTube channel at airs live interviews related to the war several times a week. The topics vary widely and so do the presenters. Pretty much something for everyone.
[3] aka Margaret Utinsky—a name that might be familiar to you from the war movie The Great Raid. Women’s names are often a tricky issue when you write about historical women. It becomes even trickier when women chose to take on false names as part of their cover.
The Radar Girls, aka the Women’s Air Raid Defense of the Hawaiian Islands
When I visited the Harold C. Deutsch World War II History Round Table in the Twin Cites back in March, one of the members introduced me to a women’s military auxiliary unit. I had never heard of the Women’s Air Raid Defense of the Hawaiian Islands (WARD). It was rabbit hole time!
WARD was formed soon after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Most of the existing staff of the Air Defense Command’s Information and Control Center (ICC) on Oahu were being reassigned throughout the Pacific. The Air Defense Commander, Brigadier General Howard C. Davidson decided the answer was to recruit women to staff the control center. He met with the first group of 20 women on December 26, the day after President Roosevelt signed an executive order allowing one hundred women to be recruited for a military auxiliary unit assigned to the 7th Fighter Wing of the U.S. Army Signal Corps. The young women had been through the trauma of Pearl Harbor and were eager to help defend their homes.
The first group of WARD recruits was inducted into the service on January 1st. Many of the volunteers were military spouses who had been scheduled to be evacuated to the mainland; Davidson was given the authority to remove those who wanted to become WARDs from the evacuation list. As the need for volunteers grew, women were recruited from the mainland, subject to FBI background checks and loyalty tests.
The WARDs’ job was to help defend the islands from further attack by coordinating and tracking airplane movements. They were given a ten-day crash course in plotting airplane positions as they were reported from radar[1] units around the island. Training over, they went to work in a bomb-proof tunnel known as Lizard, which was located under Fort Shafter in Honolulu. Radar units throughout the islands, with the collectively code-name Oscar, sent reports to the ICC, code-named Rascal, giving the location, number, and speed of any aircraft that had been spotted. WARDs plotted the information on a huge table with a map of the islands superimposed with coded grids. Because the information was constantly changing, they marked the locations with colored markers topped with flags that noted identifying details, which could be moved as needed with plotting rake with similar to a shuffleboard stick.[2] (It was perhaps inevitable that they were given the nickname “Shuffleboard Pilots.” ) They compared the reported aircraft with the known flight schedules of military and civilian aviation in the islands. If they noted an anomaly, they passed it up the chain of command
ICC operated 24/7, with the “radar girls” working six hours on, six hours off, with a 32 hour break after eight days.
The Women’s Air Raid Defense unit was disbanded at the end of the war. Over the course of the war, more than 650 women had served as WARDs. Always a small, top secret unit, it was largely forgotten after the war. (Does this surprise anyone?)
[1] Radar was still experimental at the time. In fact it was so new that most people who used it knew the word was an acronym for Radio Air Detection and Ranging. Something I didn’t know until I got into this rabbit hole.
[2] The description of this work reminded me of the British Navy’s use of Wrens and a room-sized board game to create anti-U-boat tactics in the Battle of the Atlantic. More about that here.