The War Magician
I was well into David Fisher’s The War Magician: How an Illusionist Changed the Course of World War II before I realized that it was a novel based on a true story rather than a work of historical non-fiction. The confusion was mine. The cover clearly states that the story is “based on an extraordinary true story,” which would have given me a clue if I hadn’t been reading it on my Kindle.* My bad.
That said, The War Magician is a fascinating story based on the experiences of Jasper Maskelyne, a famous British stage magician who used his talents at building illusions on behalf of the British army in North Africa. He was the commander of the small “Camouflage Experimental Section,” more popularly known as “the Magic Gang.” Fisher describes how they created the illusion of tanks (and submarines) where there were none and camouflaged naval vessels as pleasure boats and fishing scows. On one occasion, they concealed the entire city of Alexandria from German bombers. On another, their tour de force, they convinced German Field Marshal Rommel that the British planned to attack from the south when in fact they planned to attack from the north, contributing to the British victory at Alamein. I’m not going to give you details, because half the fun of the book is following along as Maskelyne plans his illusions and his crew scrapes together material to create them.
Once I realized that I was reading a novel, I spend some time down the rabbit hole trying to decide just how accurate Fisher’s account is. It isn’t clear. Fisher doesn’t provide a reader’s note discussing his sources.** Ever since the publication of Maskelyne’s 1949 memoir, Magic ,Top Secret, critics have suggested that he exaggerated his importance, though that is hard to prove either way. Exaggerated or not, there is no doubt that Maskelyne and the Magic Gang played a role in the war in North Africa.
The War Magician is worth a read if you’re interested in World War II or stage magicians.
*I seldom read narrative non-fiction on my Kindle because it doesn’t allow me to hold a conversation with the author in the margins and it is difficult to go back and forth between the text and the notes. (Another clue I should have caught: no notes. )
**Or at least he doesn’t in the edition I read, which was released in 2023. The book originally came out in 1983.
“Farmerettes” Fed the Nation at War
In the fall of 1917, manpower was short in the fields of America. When the United States entered the Great War, millions of men had left farm work to join the army or do other war-related jobs. Even with farm labor wages skyrocketing, farmers faced difficulties hiring men to harvest the crops that were needed at home and in a starving Europe. The federal government did not help when it ignored farmers’ pleas to exempt farm workers from the draft.
While federal and state governments dithered to find solutions, a consortium of women’s organizations—including garden clubs, women’s colleges, civic groups, the YWCA, the DAR, women’s trade unionists, the Girl Scouts and suffrage societies—stepped up to form the Women’s Land Army of America (WLAA), inspired by Britain’s “Land Girls.” More than 20,000 women from American cities and towns, most of whom had never worked on a farm before, learned to tend and harvest crops in training programs organized by the WLAA . Known as “farmerettes,” a term intended to evoke the suffragist movement, they were paid the same wages as male farm workers and were protected by an eight-hour workday—an unknown luxury on many farms then and now. They wore practical uniforms featuring pants (or at least bloomers), initially shocking to the rural communities in which they worked.
Farmers were at first wary about hiring the women. Some of the reasons will sound familiar. Farmers claimed women didn’t have the strength to do the job and didn’t have the necessary skills. One concern was particular to the farmerettes. Farm hands typically were housed on the farm and fed by the farmer’s wife. Farmers were afraid that housing and feeding strange young women would cause domestic upsets. The WLAA solved the problem by housing and feeding “units” of farmerettes in communal camps away from individual farms and transporting them to their jobs each morning.
Wary farmers, and a watching public, were soon convinced as the young women leaned into the work. By the summer of 1918, farmerettes were on the job in thirty-three states, and the subject of poetry, songs, cinema news reels, and acts in the Ziegfield follies.
The organization was resurrected during World War II, this time as an official government effort under the auspices of the US Department of Agriculture’s United States Crop Corps.
Mrs. Laura Birkhead and the French Medal of Honor
Back in June, I was poking around in newspapers.com* looking for examples of May Birkhead’s war reporting in World War I. In the process, I stumbled across a fascinating story about her mother, Laura Birkhead (1858-1938)
Mrs. Birkhead was visiting her daughter in Paris when Germany declared war on France on August 3, 1914. Despite the fact that her brother ordered her to come immediately,** she chose to stay and devoted herself to the welfare of first French soldiers, and later French orphans. She founded and ran an American ambulance organization. When the strain of running the ambulance organization became too much for her, she turned it over to others and took charge of a hospital in Paris which treated wounded French soldiers. After the United States entered the war, she also searched for information about missing soldiers at the request of their families.
When thousands of French war orphans began to pour into Paris, she organized an organization called American Volunteer Workers to provide them with housing and clothing. As part of her work, she also organized relief societies back home in Missouri. These groups sent money and millions of pieces of clothing to France for the benefit of French war victims, all of which were shipped directly to Mrs. Birkhead for distribution.***
The fact that Mrs. Birkhead went to school with General John Pershing, head of the American Expeditionary Forces in Europe, may have made her endeavors a little easier. We know she was in touch with him: she received a ham from home that was intended for the general’s Thanksgiving dinner, delivered via a new Red Cross volunteer.
In her own way, Mrs. Birkhead was a much of a war correspondent as her daughter. One of the many small town paper in Missouri which printed her appeals stated that “the description of conditions met with by Mrs. Birkhead is probably the most vivid that has come out of the war zone.” Without the constraints of journalistic ethics, she pulled no punches. In one letter home she told her friends that subscribing to the Red Cross wasn’t enough: “..we may consider ourselves as coming out well by being able to pay out with money…our country will never be devastates, our homes destroyed and polluted, our women violated and our children mutilated. It is impossible to grasp the situation by reading about it. Only seeing is believing. I have seen hundreds of children that have been rescued from destroyed towns that have no idea who they are or where they came from.”**** In another letter, she stated “It is terrible to see the mutilated soldiers, but it is worse to see the almost naked and staved children, with bedraggled and have crazed mothers, with no place to lay their heads…The Germans evidently reasoned ‘If we killed the women and children, France will not have to feed them, but if we leave them naked and hungry she will have them to care for.’ " Inspired by such accounts, the women of Missouri sewed clothing and collected money for the children's relief.
When the Germans neared Paris, American citizens were warned to leave the city. Mrs. Birkhead refused to abandon her work. The St. Louis Republic gave her credentials as a special correspondent, which allowed her to stay in the city.
In 1919, before she sailed home, Mrs. Birkhead received what American newspapers called the Medal of Honor from the French government for her relief efforts on behalf of French soldiers. I’m not sure whether they meant the Croix de Guerre or the Legion of Honor.
So many women, so many unexpected stories.
*A very useful site for historical research that is a nightmare to use in my opinion.
**Why he thought that would work is a mystery to me.
***Shades of Clara Barton,who developed a personal supply network to support her work among wounded soldiers in the American Civil War!
****It is worth pointing out that Mrs. Birkhead and her contemporaries who grew up in Missouri would have been children during the American Civil War. They might well have had memories of war horrors. The only state that experienced more battles in the Civil War than Missouri was Virginia.