Eyewitness to Pearl Harbor
Tomorrow is the 75th anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Commemorative posts have already begun to fill the parts of the internet where history buffs hang out. I suspect that you know the story. I'm sure you know the historical consequences. I'm not going to rehash the big picture. Instead I'd like to share a smaller story.
Cornelia Fort was a certified civilian flight instructor who worked for the Andrews Flying Service in Honolulu, a Nashville debutante who had kicked her way into the male dominated world of general aviation. * She was only 22 and already an experienced pilot with hundreds of flight hours to her credit.
On December 7, 1941, Fort was in the air with a student pilot, a defense worker named Suomala who was practicing landings prior to taking his first solo flight. As was typical at the time, they had no radio, so the only way to avoid other aircraft coming and going at Honolulu's John Rodgers Airport was to scan the sky around them
Prior to what was scheduled to be Suomala's final landing before soloing, Fort scanned the sky. She saw a military plane heading in from the ocean. She was so accustomed to military traffic from the nearby military bases that she nodded to Suomala to turn into the first leg of his landing pattern. She looked again and saw another military aircraft headed right for them. She grabbed the controls away from her student, jammed the throttle open, and pulled above the oncoming plane. The plane passed under them so close that their celluloid windows rattled in the plane.**
Fort glanced down to see what kind of plane it was. Instead of the star and bar of the US Army Air Corps, painted red balls on the wings shone in the morning sun: the "rising sun" emblem of the Japanese. With a chill tingling down her spine, she looked west to Pearl Harbor, where she saw billowing black smoke and formations of silver bombers headed toward the harbor. Something detached itself from one of the planes and she watched as a bomb fell and exploded.
She landed the plane at John Rodgers as quickly as she could, surrounded by machine gun fire. As they touched down, Suomola asked "When am I going to solo?" (Fort later said she wasn't sure whether he didn't understand what was happening or trying to lighten the situation with humor.) A contemporary newspaper account reported her answer as "Not today, brother." A few seconds later, the shadow of a plane passed overhead and bullets spattered around them. Pilot and student sprinted for the cover of the hanger.
Once inside, Fort tried to warn her co-workers that the Japanese were attacking. She was met with disbelief and laughter. The men she worked with tried to pass it off as some sort of maneuvers that she had misunderstood. Fort was "damn good and mad."*** She was about to tell them off when a mechanic from another hanger ran in and told them that strafing planes had just killed another pilot and his student as they ran for cover.
As scores of Zeros roared by, some of them no more than fifty feet off the ground, Fort and her companions took shelter in the hangar. When she examined her plane the next day, she found it riddled with bullets.
Newspapers soon picked up the story of Fort's encounter with the Japanese--it would have been a good story no matter who was involved. But a pretty young female aviator gave it an additional human interest element. For a time, she was part of the speaking tour that sold war bonds. But she was determined to use her flying skills for the war effort. Lamenting the fact that she she couldn't be a fighter pilot and face the Japanese in the air again, she was the second woman to volunteer for the Women's Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron (WAFS).
For several months she delivered training planes**** up and down the east coast. In February, 1943, Fort and several other WAFS was assigned to Long Beach California to deliver the much larger BT-13s. They were thrilled with the "promotion" to larger planes, but some of them were frustrated by the fact that they were not allowed to become fighter pilots. Determined to acquire some of the skills needed, Fort and a few of her companions began to experiment with formation flying, an activity that was forbidden during delivery flights. On March 21, 1943, while participating in a forbidden stint of formation flying on a delivery, Fort's plane was destroyed when she hit another plane mid-air, making her the first WAFS pilot to die while on duty.
What a waste.
*Her father made her brothers promise never to fly. He never thought to ask for the promise from his daughter. Her brothers were royally pissed off when they found out she had been taking flying lessons in secret.
** Fort's written account of the incident claims that at this point she felt "a distinct feeling of annoyance that the Army plane had disrupted our traffic pattern and violated our safety zone." My guess is that she swore like a fighter pilot--or at least gave vent to a string of the "dangs" and "sssssss--sugars" that passed for profanity among women of the Middle South at the time.
***And can you blame her?
****PT-19s, for the propeller heads among the Marginalia.
Game of Queens
Several years ago, historian Sarah Gristwood's Blood Sisters held me enrapt. She described the well-known events of the Wars of the Roses and the rise of the Tudor dynasty through the lives of the Plantagenet women. It was women's history at its best* in that it not only told the story of often forgotten or marginalized women** but enlarged the historical framework in the process.***
When Basic Books offered me a review copy of Gristwood's newest book I said "yes, please."****
Game of Queens: The Women Who Made Sixteenth Century Europe considers the unprecedented explosion of powerful women in sixteenth century Europe that stretches from Isabella of Spain****** through Elizabeth I of England. Many of the women she discusses are not familiar to even well-read readers of the English-speaking world, because we tend to learn the history of Great Britain and its colonial descendants and not much else. The book would be interesting if all Gristwood did was tell the stories of women like Louise of Savoy, Marguerite of Navarre, Catherine de Medici, Margaret of Austria, et al.******* But in fact, she does more. She unravels the relationships that linked women across kingdoms and time. Mother and daughter, mentor and protégée, rival and ally, aunt and niece, sister and sister-in-law--linked by blood and marriage, separated by politics and the religious divides of the Reformation. An old girls' network fueled, as such networks always are, by power.
The web of relationships she considers is complicated, made worse by the fact that several women were named Mary and various forms of Margaret. I tried to map them, first on the sheet of paper I was using as a book mark and later using mind mapping software. (Why yes, I am a nerd.) When my multi-family tree began to look more like a ball of yarn that a kitten had played with than an organizational chart, I abandoned it and decided to trust Griswold to keep me on top of who was who and where and when. I will admit that I confused Marguerite of Navarre (1492-1549) with Marguerite of Valois (1553-1615), who became the queen consort of Navarre and the earlier Marquerite's granddaughter-in-law. But that was my fault, not Gristwood's. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
The resulting book, like Blood Sisters, enlarges our view of history. By looking at sixteenth century queens as a group, rather focusing on the individual stories of one or two powerful women, Gristwod is able to explore the nature of female power and the ways in which women were able to exercise power in a period in which that power was circumscribed by law and tradition. (The Habsburgs, in particular, relied on powerful women to serve as regents and local governors in the name of distant emperors.)
If you like historical tough broads, you're going to love Game of Queens.
*A subject that I have more than a casual interest in these days.
**And you thought History in the Margins was just a clever title.
***It should go without saying that the picture gets bigger when you re-introduce half the population into the story. But it doesn't always happen.
****It's been a while since I've written a statement about the books I review. This seems as good a time as any. Shelf Awareness for Readers pays me to write reviews, which I occasionally re-post here--often in a modified form. I receive review copies from publishers for some of the books I write about. Other books I pull off my shelf or buy from my local independent bookstore. ***** No matter where the book comes from, I don't review books I don't like. (Just because I don't review a book that I received a copy for doesn't mean I don't like it. It just means I receive more books in a given month than I can hope to read.--Have I mentioned how much I love this job?) In no case does a publisher pay me directly to write a review. Any questions?
*****A practice I strongly endorse.
******The book's title is derived from a change in the rules of chess that occurred in Spain during Isabella's reign. Prior to the fifteenth century, the queen could only move one diagonal square at a time. Under Spain's warrior queen, the chess piece became the most powerful piece on the board. Coincidence? (Yes, Isabella was a warrior queen. It's easy to underestimate her if the only thing you know about her is that she underwrote Christopher Columbus's first voyage. Note to self: it's time for a blog post on Isabella. And on chess.)
******* For example, I had never heard of the Ladies' Peace, brokered in 1529 by Margaret of Austria, the Habsburg emperor's aunt/regent and Louise of Savoy, mother to the King of France. Not my period and all that.
Mr. Eiffel Built More Than a Tower
Alexandre-Gustave Eiffel, the engineer who designed the Eiffel Tower, reportedly said "I ought to be jealous of the tower. It is more famous than I am."
It's probably true. Eiffel was a world-famous engineer before he made the tower that bears his name, but not for the kind of things that make a man a household name. He built his reputation as a bridge designer, though his company also designed and fabricated metal frameworks for buildings like train stations and exhibitions halls.* By the 1880s, Eiffel was the man you called when you had a technical challenge that needed a metals expert. He designed the railroad station in Budapest, the Bon March department stores in Paris, covered markets, gasworks, iron framing for Notre Dame Cathedral, and prefabricated mobile campaign bridges for the French army. Not to mention bridges and train stations throughout Europe, Asia and South America. His work as a whole was known for its lightness, grace and strength--qualities that would come to define the Eiffel Tower.
His most famous project prior to the tower was designing the internal armature for the Statue of Liberty. Sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi wasn't sure how to translate his beautiful plaster model of Lady Liberty into a finished statue. Not only was the proposed statue enormous,** but it had to be constructed in such a way that it could be disassembled for transport to New York and reassembled on arrival. Eiffel was the man for the job. He proposed the construction of a weigh-bearing iron frame to which thin sheets of copper could be attached, making a lighter, stronger statue.**** 
Eiffel brought that same sense of innovative technique and creative problem solving to the creation of the Eiffel Tower.
The tower was intended to be a temporary installation, built as part of the Paris World's Fair of 1889, which celebrated the one-hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution. More than one hundred artists submitted plans to build a monument on the Champs-de-Mars at the entrance to the exhibition. Eiffel won the commission with his design for a soaring wrought iron tower.
The plan called for more than 18,000 wrought iron pieces and 2.5 millions rivets to be assembled in an open-latticework tower on a four-acre base of reinforced concrete. Four piers tapered upward and converged at the top, punctuated by two platforms that provided the tower with structural stability and gave exhibition-goers a spot from which to view the city below them. Despite its lacy appearance, the only elements of the tower that do not contribute to its structural integrity are the grillwork arches that link the bases together, which Eiffel added to reassure visitors that the structure was safe. 
It took two years, two months and five days to build. On March 31, 1889, with the last rivet in place, Eiffel climbed the 1,710 steps to the top and unfurled an enormous French flag.***** When complete, Eiffel's tower rose 986 feet into the sky--making it the tallest structure of its time, a distinction it would hold until the completion of the 1,046-foot Chrysler Building in 1930. The tower was the most popular attraction at the exhibition. People waited in line for hours for the opportunity to go up.
The tower earned Eiffel the nickname "magician of iron. It also shaped his future career. As a result of his experience in building the tower, Eiffel became interested in questions of the impact of wind resistance on buildings. He installed thermometers, barometers and anemometers on the third platform of the tower, which allowed him to monitor weather patterns. He mounted a radio antenna on the building, which he later used to develop his own radio network. He built a small wind tunnel on the second platform, which he used to experiment with air resistance, including the creation of an equation for propeller design that helped French engineers make improvements to the new flying machines. When people began to complain about the noise, he built the first aerodynamics lab outside the city, with a bigger wind tunnel, where he worked though the end of the first World War.
Busy guy.
*A new-fangled technique made popular in 1851 by the the "Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry if All Nations" in London, AKA the Crystal Palace.
**111 feet six inches tall. Not including the pedestal, which brings the total height to 305 feet (plus that pesky six inches). I was led to check this by one writer's claim that when it was built the Statute of Liberty was the tallest statue ever made. My immediate instinct was to check the size of the ancient Colossus of Rhodes, which was famous for being well, colossal. The Colossus of Rhodes reportedly stood 110 feet, not counting its 50 foot pedestal.*** The two statues were related by more than just size. The Colossus of Rhodes was also built as a symbol of liberty at the end of a long painful war between Rhodes and Egypt in 292 BCE. Bartholdi's statue echoes the presumed pose of the Colossus. Since the Statue of Liberty was also known at the time as the "Modern Colossus", I can't help but feel that last eighteen inches was deliberate. But I digress.
***Though I'm not sure how we know this, since the statue was destroyed in an earthquake in 226 BCE.
****The Colossus of Rhodes was built with bronze plates over an iron frame. Just saying.
*****15 feet by 25 feet, since we're measuring things today.