The Death Dealer of Kovno March 31, 2011
Posted by Beachcombing in Uncategorized.Tags: Algirda Antana Pavalkis, Chris Hale, Germany, Holocaust, Kovno, Lithuania, Nazism, Soviet Union, WW2
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Call it the month of the massacres: Beachcombing in the past four weeks has gone knee deep in blood ‘that should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o’er’. Even he gets a little queasy thinking about it. There was Queen Victoria drinking blood; then killer ice-cream; followed up by a horrific photo of a Soviet death factory; questions about prehistoric burial mounds and decapitation; Lancashire purring; the difficulty of running around without your head in medieval Germany; and, just two days ago, a massacre of Vikings in peace-loving Dorset. Today, to round off the series Beachcombing will bring in the Death Dealer of Kovno in Lithuania. Then enough with death and killing for at least a month…
Beachcombing came across the Death Dealer in an important new book by British author Chris Hale, Hitler’s Foreign Executioners. This work is due to come out on 1 May, but Beach had the very great honour of reading it some months ago in manuscript form. Chris looks in his work at the collaborators, anti-semites and psychotics who joined in Hitler’s killing spree in eastern and central Europe from 1941 onwards; and each chapter is a revelation as, often for the first time in English, details of a holocaust within a holocaust are laid horrifically bare.
Six months on, for Beach the most memorable description from this most memorable book is that of the Death Dealer alluded to above. The following report comes from a German army photographer Wilhelm Gunsilius, though a German colonel also left an eye-witness report, which agrees with what follows. Gunsilius had arrived in Kovno in Lithuania.
Close to my quarters I noticed a crowd of people in the forecourt of a petrol station, which was surrounded by a wall on three sides. The way to the road was completely blocked by a wall of people. I was confronted by the following scene: in the left corner of the yard there was a group of men aged between thirty and fifty. There must have been forty to fifty of them. They were herded together and kept under guard by some civilians. The civilians were armed with rifles and wore armbands, as can be seen in the pictures I took.
The pictures are out there, but they are too horrific for Beachcombing to post: he got a little antsy about putting up a shot of the Death Dealer himself given what is in the background.
A young man – he must have been a Lithuanian – with rolled-up sleeves was armed with an iron crowbar. He dragged out one man at a time from the group and struck him with the crowbar with one or more blows on the back of his head. Within three quarters of an hour he had beaten to death the entire group of forty-five to fifty people in this way. I took a series of photographs of the victims.
Then after this bloodletting – that is almost Rwandan in method and intensity, the most searing detail of the slaughter: the young man put the crowbar to one side, fetched an accordion and went and stood on the mountain of corpses and played the Lithuanian national anthem. I recognised the tune and was informed by bystanders that this was the national anthem.
WG was shocked by the behaviour of the local population, calling it ‘unbelievable’.
After each man had been killed they began to clap and when the national anthem started up they joined in singing and clapping. In the front row there were women with small children in their arms who stayed there right until the end of the whole proceedings. I found out from some people who knew German what was happening here. They explained to me that the parents of the young man who had killed the other people had been taken from their beds two days earlier and immediately shot, because they were suspected of being nationalists, and this was the young man’s revenge. Not far away there was a large number of dead people who according to the civilians had been killed by the withdrawing Commissars and Communists.
Chris Hale takes up the story from here (111): We now know that the death dealer was Algirdą Antaną Pavalkįs, some of whose family had indeed been deported by the Soviets, as had many thousands of Lithuanian Jews. Later, Pavalkįs served in the Gestapo, but changed sides at the end of the war and became a Soviet agent. We have a photograph of him taken in 1950 when he was working as a rather well-paid doctor – 2,000 roubles a month.
This needs no comment…
For obvious reasons there has long been a tendency to concentrate on the rescuers of persecuted groups in occupied Europe during the war: and rightly so, we need our heroes. Think of Denmark’s successful attempts to evacuate its Jewish population or even ‘paradoxical Italy’, where many thousands of Jews – despite harsh racial laws – found relative safety in 1943 and 1944. The very great value of Hitler’s Foreign Executioners is that it takes us to another Europe where local populations were all too happy to jump in and do the Nazi’s dirty work for them. How Beachcombing wishes that he had had the courage, the industry and the ability to write Chris’s book.
Beachcombing is always on the look out for unusual or groundbreaking works on the Second World War: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
Playing Solitaire in Hitler’s Bunker March 24, 2011
Posted by Beachcombing in Contemporary, Uncategorized.Tags: Germany, Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, Magda Goebbels, Soviet Union, WIBT, WW2
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Crisis in the Beachcombing household tonight. Yesterday it was discovered that every member of the family save Beachcombing himself had been stricken with head lice. And so Beachcombing has spent most of the last six hours combing what look like wood ants from his darling wife’s and elder daughter’s fair locks.
By way of diversion Beachcombing decided that he would, tonight, cross time and space to visit Hitler’s bunker. It is the 1 May 1945 and Hitler and Eva killed themselves only yesterday after a rushed marriage ceremony.
Today it is the turn, instead, of the Goebbels – king and queen of the Reich for a day – and Magda Goebbels is sitting at a table playing patience.
Her face is heavy with tears. She has just killed her five children by dropping cyanide into their mouths – breaking her elder daughter’s jaw in the process. She knows too that in a matter of minutes she and her husband, Joseph Goebbels will climb up to the world above and end their lives with bullets and/or poison. She looks up, Joseph is coming and stumbles to her feet to meet him… They move towards the daylight and death, the screams of Russian infantry just a hundred metres away.
Beachcombing certainly doesn’t want to follow the unhappiest couple in the world up to the terrace and he is particularly glad he did not have to watch Lady Macbeth put an end to the life of Helga, Holde, Hilde, Hedda and Helmut (5-12): snuff movies are not his thing.
(Helmut, by the way, gives one of the most memorable lines of the last days, shouting ‘bull’s eye!’ when he hears Hitler’s suicide shot.)
However, Beachcombing would give an awful lot to have seen Magda slapping out the cards on the table. For some reason this comes, in Beachcombing’s mind, much closer to doing justice to the end of the thousand year Reich than Hitler’s marriage vows or those last moments in the moustached one’s private quarters.
Was she smoking?
Did ice clink in her drink?
Beachcombing prefers to see her without accoutrements. The end is nigh and she keeps dealing hearts and diamonds…
The murder of five children was Joseph’s try at melodrama with Magda drafted in to do the deed. If Goebbels had done the decent thing and got his heirs out a month before they would be of pensionable age today, most likely spread across South America and meeting on a ranch in the Pampas for Christmas. Beachcombing is always looking out for vivid historic moments: drbeachcombing At yahoo DOT com
29 March 2011: JCE writes in with a point that had completely escaped Beachcombing, surely he is right? ‘for the first time as I looked at the pic of the Goebbels family you put up on March 24, I was struck that Magda’s son Harald (by her first husband) does not appear to have been present in the studio when the photo was taken. Rather it appears some other Luftwaffe officer stood in, and Harald’s head was later pasted over the substitute’s. It seems to me obvious that Harald’s head is itself a photo, unlike the body it sits atop. This would not be surprising as I recall Harald was away on active service a good deal during the war. Am I wrong, or just hopelessly slow on the uptake?’ Thanks JCE!
4 April: JCE continues his considerations – someone, somewhere must have definite information on this: ‘I have never seen an assertion that Harald Quandt, Joe Goebbels’ stepson, had his headshot cut-and-pasted in this photo. I base my suspicion on my untrained eye only – I feel there’s a slight sizing problem, the lighting and shadows are different, his face shows much more glare, etc., and I feel his face lacks dimension. The last I’m pretty sure is just my mind trying to find things to confirm my suspicion, since photos can’t really show depth anyway. A cursory – okay, peremptory – internet search turned up nothing but a discussion “behind” the Wikipedia page (I utterly detest Wikipedia, and yet I use it all the time as a launch platform, damn them) on the Goebbels kids, in which it was posited that Harald’s head in the pic was a later insert. So I can’t prove it. I’m sure it’s out there somewhere, but I don’t know if I’ll find it in time for you’re monthly roundup. So, those wishing to remain intellectually pristine and historically blameless might approach the issue as nothing more than supposition or suggestion. Another reason I suspect Harald was not available for the photo is that he was a real frontsoldat, who obviously asked for no consideration based on who his stepfather was. Had it not been so I doubt he would have found himself on several occasions in Der Scheisse, such as when he jumped as a fallschirmjäger into Crete in the horrendously bloody “Operation Mercury” which cost the lives of so many of Hitler’s super-elite paratroopers that he never again used them in a major drop. Instead Oberleutnant Harald Quandt and his comrades were used as firemen, much in the same way as the Waffen SS. He fought in Sicily and Italy and was finally wounded and captured in Italy 1944. He was awarded the Iron Cross 2nd and 1st Class.’ Thanks JCE!!
Image: Cow sheds and massacres January 11, 2011
Posted by Beachcombing in Contemporary, Uncategorized.Tags: Britain, Dunkirk, France, Germany, Image, Wormhoudt Massacre, WW2
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Beachcombing has had the novel experience, in these days of premature babies, of watching lots of history documentaries. It is one of the few things that you can do while syringe feeding a fifteen-day-old tot and hoping that she will sleep. After years of staying away from television, he’s been treated to a lot of sub-standard stuff, but one that did stick in the mind was the BBC’s Dunkirk (2004) and particularly their coverage of the Wormhoudt Massacre of 1940.
For those who don’t know on the 28 May of that year British troops – from the Royal Warwicks, the Royal Artillery and the Cheshires – were holding the approach to Dunkirk against some charming Teutonic sorts in the 1st SS Division Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler. When their lines were overrun by the enemy, the British troops surrendered and a group of about a hundred (including a handful of French POWs) were jammed into a tiny cow shed – see picture – near Wormhoudt. Their captors then threw grenades into the shed and subsequently dragged out several of the survivors who they shot. Luckily, not all the prisoners were killed – in fact, fifteen were to make it through the war that, make no mistake, reflected SS incompetence rather than SS humanity.
Beachcombing should note that all the normal prejudices of the BBC are on hand in this documentary. So those from the upper middle classes and the aristocracy – with the predictable exception of Churchill – are treated as twerps, including a decent if ineffectual British officer at Wormhoudt. There is also a lot of stamping on ‘the guilty men’ of appeasement: the portrayal of Halifax, for example, would be actionable if that good lord was still alive.
The impressions are all the more vivid because the BBC documentary is essentially a re-enactment with actors taking the viewer through various key moments in the campaign: we have a porcine chap who is supposed to be the PM, a moustached man who is Alexander etc etc.
Beachcombing usually objects to renactments, but they just about pull it off though this is no Band of Brothers. The BBC is forever cursed to play Dr Who to the US’s Star Trek, doomed by limited funding and Masterclass Theatre
As far as Wormhoudt is concerned the viewer is treated to a foul re-enactment of the massacre: Beachcombing surged up from his seat in fury, Tiny Miss B almost falling from his lap in the process. Once his blood pressure had come back down Beachcombing was intrigued though by two decisions on the part of the BBC.
First, the massacre was not shown as it happened. Men were marched out to be shot and then the grenades were thrown in: a reversal of the actual order of events. Beachcombing couldn’t make any sense of this, either in historical or dramatic terms.
Second, Beachcombing wondered vaguely whether it was sensible to even show the killings. Of thirty thousand captured Britons in May 1940, only, to the best of our knowledge, about two hundred were slaughtered in this heinous fashion: Le Paradis Massacre is the other sad name from those days. The Germans treated Slav and later the Greek and Italian POWs appallingly. But British and French soldiers in 1940 were, for the most part, treated well on their surrender, perhaps because of crooked racial views, perhaps because these were the first months of the war. This was true, for example, of the survivors of the Wormhoudt Massacre, once they fell into German hands for the second time.
A plaque on the cow-shed refers to the ‘slain’: that seems an overly eumphimistic way to describe what happened on that day. The cow-shed has been patched back together and its story is told on this outstanding internet page from which Beach borrowed the image posted above.
Beachcombing is going to take a while to get the photo above out of his mind: a twentieth-century icon of cruelty and horror all dressed in verdant colours of the French spring. The shed is empty here, but the ghosts of the hundred terrified men are there, jammed in, listening to the German outside and trying to breathe, getting ready, praying, hoping… The evil of what happened hardly needs to be emphasised: it stands with Katyn, Malmedy and Biscari. But the failure of the British govenment to ever bring anyone to justice for what was done that day beggars belief, especially given the fact that more than a dozen witnesses survived.
Beachcombing is always on the look out for striking historical photographs: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com .
Image: St Paul’s rides the blitz December 9, 2010
Posted by Beachcombing in Contemporary, Uncategorized.Tags: Blitz, Britain, Image, London, St Paul's, WW2
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Beachcombing should start today with an apology. In his mission statement about his Image series he promised to put up only little known photographs and paintings. And yet here he is, six months on, offering the most famous of all British pictures from 1940, as if it were a scoop.
Sorry.
Beachcombing only hopes the reader will agree that this is a picture that deserves more attention.
29 December 1940, the end of the worst year in British history, sees a heavy attack on central London: Germany’s (late) Christmas present to the British people – they didn’t even have the manners to deliver on time! – was the ‘Second Great Fire of London’. Incendiary bombs rained down on the capital causing first conflagration and then a fire storm.
Thousands of buildings were to be destroyed over the next hours and days – there was a follow up attack the night after – and St Paul’s itself, Britain’s most famous church was threatened.
According to British wartime mythology St Paul’s was saved by a miracle. But the truth is that Britain was all out of miracles by the end of 1940.
The Cathedral was saved, first, by an express order from Churchill, who effectively sacrificed other parts of the city centre. Second, and most importantly by cockney firemen, a number of whom died in the three-day battle to shield the cathedral. And, third, by volunteers who poured sand on the incendiary bombs that landed on St Paul’s roof.
Today, in more secular times, Britain’s war effort is remembered as an act of democratic daring-do against Continental totalitarians. But in the war itself Christian imagery was preferred by many of Britain’s war leaders, especially those on the right. Churchill’s speeches, for example, are larded with reference to ‘crusades’ and ‘Christian civilisation’.
The subliminal – and as it happens correct – message was that Germany and Italy’s high ups were not typically to be found in the front pew come Sunday morning.
This picture, taken from the roof of the Daily Mail building by Herbert Mason, plugs into this Christian schemata.
The Cathedral is cloaked in a sheen of light as the fires rage around without ever touching St Paul’s consecrated stones. The gutted buildings in front are a reminder that this is all deadly, deadly serious, while the crooked take stops the picture seeming ‘staged’; any hint of sugar and spice disappears in that skew.
Interestingly the picture became an instant (self-declared) classic with the Daily Mail running it on its front page on December 31 under the banner headline ‘War’s Greatest Picture’.
Forty thousand died in the London Blitz and many more, of course, were injured.
But this was over months and months. Compare it to twenty plus thousand in two nights in Dresden or one hundred thousand over two nights in Tokyo.
The truth is that London was lucky to be hit so early in the war, while most of Britain’s fighters were operational and before bombs increased in killing power to the truly terrifying levels of 1944 and 1945.
Ask Britons today about the London Blitz and they think ‘resistance’ not ‘death’.
This was true of wartime Britons as well. When British warriors prepared to disembark at Normandy in 1944 they were encouraged to ‘Remember Dunkirk! Remember Coventry!’ by the loudspeakers, respectively the great military and the great civilian disaster of the war. No mention was made of the London bombings.
One of Britain’s worst cultural losses was Coventry cathedral – there is a heartbreaking radio description from the then bishop (?) describing Coventry’s old medieval centre turning into a furnace.
The most painful memory of landmark loss in the capital were a few livery halls and MPs having to walk over broken glass in Parliament. Still it was a close run thing for St Paul’s.
Beachcombing is always grubbing after interesting and, ideally, little known historical pictures. Drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
Bats fight Japan November 28, 2010
Posted by Beachcombing in Contemporary, Uncategorized.Tags: Bats, Japan, US, Weird Wars, WW2
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Beachcombing recently described the possible Byzantine use of weaponised crows soaked in pitch and wondered aloud whether other birds or flying creatures had been employed by ancient or medieval armies.
And, almost immediately, like an answer from heaven, he got three emails pointing him to a wonderful story that he’d never heard before: kudos to Ostrich (a bizarrist of the highest quality), Rick from the Anomalist and Steve W. from Australia who all nodded to the bat bombs of the Second World War.
Beachcombing has been reading ever since and is still shaking his head at the insane weirdness of it all.
The bat bombs were the brain child of a US dental surgeon, Lytle S. Adams in the period after Pearl Harbour – dentists rate in the ranks of evil somewhere between sociologists and Caribbean dictators.
LSA had been impressed by bats on a recent holiday to the south-western states and asked himself (as you do) whether these beautiful creatures could not be employed for the war effort, especially since bats can lift up to three times their own body weight. Could a bat even be persuaded to carry a small-timed explosive, be released over Japan and then convinced into roosting in local houses where the incendiary would go off? In LSA’s wet dream of destruction, thousands upon thousand of bats carrying sticks of dynamite and the Stars and Stripes would have made an inferno of Japan’s wooden cities.
The US military authorities were all ears and pushed ahead with testing and, from January 1942 to August 1944, thousands of bats, a lot of US military property and absolutely no Japanese houses were destroyed.
The Mexican free-tailed bat – hardly an autarchic choice – was nominated for the task. These were captured in their caves and then hibernated (note the unusual active verb) by being placed in refrigerated conditions. A surgical clip on their chest attached the bomb to the sleeping bats by a piece of string. They were then loaded into containers that changed through development and that ranged from flimsy cardboard boxes to huge canisters capable of containing a million bats. The bat would – at least theoretically – fly off from the container as it fell towards the ground – parachutes were deployed for the canisters – and, again theoretically, they would flap their way into the eaves of Japanese housing until… bang/fire/fire-service/conflagration/surrender/America GIs singing ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ in Kyoto.
The bats, however, reacted with an almost unbelievable lack of patriotic fervour. Some refused to wake up from their artificially-induced hibernation and were found dead on the ground after test raids. Others flew away and paid no attention to mock ups of Japanese villages. Then there was a spiteful minority that worked for the enemy. These bats flew to army buildings and a general’s car causing destruction wherever they went.
The bat bomb project was finally cancelled in August 1944 with not a single fire on Japanese soil having been caused, leaving behind it irritated RandD death-dealers, a melancholy dentist and the spirits of tens of thousands of pissed-off flying mammals.
All in all it might have been cheaper to have paid the Japanese government to burn some of their own houses down.
Beachcombing has struck a slightly jocular tone here but the bat bombs would, if the war had gone on until 1947, have likely been workable, especially given the material out of which so many Japanese houses were made – wood, paper… Whether it would have been ‘right’ as far as the Japanese, the American taxpayer and the bats were concerned is, of course, another question.
Beachcombing will turn, on another day, to American experiments with pigeon bombers… Then there were the Polish anti-tank dogs and the submarine hunting dolphins. Any other animal weapons from the Second World War? drbeachcombing @ yahoo DOT com
De Gaulle flies into history November 17, 2010
Posted by Beachcombing in Contemporary, Uncategorized.Tags: Charles de Gaulle, Churchill, Edward Spears, WIBT, WW2
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Beachcombing has a soft spot for Charles De Gaulle. Indeed, he often thinks of old lemon face on the balcony in Mostaganem in 1958, denying that the twentieth century had happened. Or the good General pissing off the Canadians in Quebec in 1967. Then there is de Gaulle’s comment on the death of his daughter, Anne, with Down syndrome: ‘now she is like all the others’. Or what about Pompedou’s dirge in 1970: ‘La France est mort’?
But the scene that stands out more than all these is 17 June 1940 – one of Beachcombing’s WIBT (Wish-I’d-Been-There) moments – when De Gaulle jumps onto an already moving plane and flies into the history books.
17 June 1940 was the climax of a decisive month in De Gaulle’s life. In the previous weeks he had watched the French army and the French government collapse as Hitler’s blitzkrieg smashed into northern France. For a man who felt France within him as many monks feel God it must have been a painful time.
In this month, De Gaulle – then a minor minister – was talent-spotted by the British as their best bet for keeping France in the war. In fact, already in early June, De Gaulle was fantasising about moving the French government to northern Africa or establishing a Breton redoubt, the kind of mad cap idea that was bound to excite Churchill.
And, suitably enough, it is Churchill who gives us the most succinct and perhaps the most touching description of de Gaulle’s flying escapade. The British prime minister had been speaking to his personal liaison officer with the French, Edward Spears… [Spears is pictured above with de Gaulle]
On the morning of the 17th I mentioned to my colleagues in the Cabinet a telephone conversation which I had had during the night with General Spears, who said he did not think he could perform any useful service in the new structure at Bordeaux [where the French government was re-establishing itself]. He spoke with some anxiety about the safety of General de Gaulle. Spears had apparently been warned that as things were shaping it might be well for de Gaulle to leave France.
In Spears’ own account it transpires that it was de Gaulle himself who had confided that Weygand would have de Gaulle arrested. Churchill continues:
I readily assented to a good plan being made for this. So that very morning – the 17th – de Gaulle went to his office in Bordeaux, made a number of engagements for the afternoon, as a blind, and then drove to the airfield with his friend Spears to see him off. They shook hands and said good-bye, and as the plane began to move de Gaulle stepped in and slammed the door. The machine soared off into the air, while the French police and officials gaped.
De Gaulle carried with him, in this small aeroplane, the honour of France.
‘The honour of France’…? Beachcombing is not so sure. But de Gaulle’s flight certainly made the bleaching of Vichy from French memory a good deal easier after the war.
Even now it is not clear to what extent the British really wanted de Gaulle. Churchill seems to have had his doubts, perhaps sensing later troubles – though he ordered a special mission to bring the general’s family to Britain. Spears received a signed photograph from de Gaulle after the flight, but then later, after arguments with de Gaulle in the Levant, noted that ‘my cross is the cross of Lorraine’!
Beachcombing would like to get all weak at the knees about the General’s leap: and he does, in truth, find the account extraordinarily moving – perhaps because of his unaccountable affection for de Gaulle. But de Gaulle’s supporters’ proper sense of the General’s importance has meant that Churchill and Spears’ retelling have been fiercely contested.
After all, it is bad enough that ‘the English’ were rescuing de Gaulle: something that de Gaulle would later thank the Brits for by keeping them out of the Common Market with his veto. But what really seems to have offended the Gaullists’ sensibility was the circus-like trickery of the great one hopping onto a moving aircraft. The rarely smiling, living incarnation of La France just didn’t do scenes from Marx brother films. His hagiographers have been then understandably miffed, something made even worse in Spears’ description, where de Gaulle is ‘pulled’ onto the aeroplane!
Stepped, pulled, dragged, hopped… In any case, Beachcombing suspects that there was little conversation on board as the British aircraft wheeled up towards the Atlantic and de Gaulle took what would be his last look at France for almost five years.
Was de Gaulle thinking about his wife and children, still in France? Was he thinking of the broadcast speech he would make that night to France from London? Or was he already wondering how he would explain this embarassing exit? Beachcombing would put all his francs on the last.
Any more de Gaulle stories, particularly bizarre ones? drbeachcombingATyahooDOTcom
The last scalping in history? October 26, 2010
Posted by Beachcombing in Contemporary, Modern, Uncategorized.Tags: Amerindians, Scalping, Weird Wars, Winnebago, Wrong Time, WW2
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Beachcombing cannot deny it. He has a bit of a thing about the removal of heads this week. First, there was the question of the last western beheadings, second an exploration by photograph of Japanese decapitations in the Second World War and today he is going to move on to a close cousin of beheading, scalping.
He promises that after that he will leave heads well alone for at least a month.
Now Beachcombing will hardly surprise any reader if he states that scalping involves removing the top of the scalp from the head with a knife. The scalp is then typically kept for bounty money or as a war souvenir (often with holy connotations, see below). Scalping has been used in various societies in various parts of the world. But it is certainly most easily associated with the American west where both Amerindian and Colonial types resorted to scalp-chopping. Read Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian for the dirt.
But Beachcombing will probably surprise his readers when he states that the latest instance of scalping he has found comes from the Second World War.
Beachcombing quotes from The Taking and Displaying of Human Body Parts by Amerindians (2007), 625.
Lastly, we would like to point out that trophy taking by some Amerindian individuals and groups has continued well into the modern period. During World War II, a Winnebago serving in the US armed forces took a German scalp and returned with it to a traditional victory dance. Such trophies became cherished family heirlooms and are placed within a family’s war bundle, or they are placed on a grave so that the spirit of the scalped man may serve the deceased in the hereafter.
This an almost comically downplayed summary of the extraordinary description given in Nancy Lurie Mountain Wolf Woman, Sister of Crashing Thunder: The Autobiography of a Winnebago Indian (1961). Mountain Wolf Woman, the narrator, unfortunately gives no information as to where the scalp was taken. However, she does describe the scalp being welcomed home. Beachcombing invites his readers to enjoy the peyote-fuelled dancing and the unexpected appearance of the German.
At one time I thought it was just empty talk when they spoke about old religious ways. Once they said they were going to have a scalp dance, a victory dance with the scalp. One of the scalps was going to come back [i.e. the German scalp], they were saying… In the evening they had a victory dance. They danced outside. I was right in the midst of things with my quilt top. I danced and when they were finished with the victory dance and the sun was going down they then danced around the lodge and everybody danced. We danced all around the lodge and then we went inside the lodge. They put the drum down and they stuck in the ground the stick to which the ornamented scalp was attached. In the course of the ceremony people are invited to dance with the scalp, and danced with the scalp. It came time for the feasting and they ate. Then the night dancing was begun. All night long we danced. Outside there were a lot of automobiles. This is something I think and this is why I am telling it. Long ago whenever they did this they did everything in the proper way. But now, late at night, everybody left one by one. It would seem that the people would do things as they are supposed to do them, but they went away. The only ones remaining were Cloud Over There, Queen of Thunder and Water Spirit Woman. These people who were leaving were going to be in their tents outside and they were even sleeping in the cars. When day began to break we sang as loudly as we could so that with our singing we would awaken those who were sleeping. We were singers. Three women singers were left and Cloud Over There, the man who was supposed to give the war whoop at the end of the songs. He would do this. We were doing things according to the rules. It seemed we peyotists were the only ones who were left and who were dancing. They saw us, but that is the way they behaved, those people who were holding the dance. They did not obey the rules.
They held the dance for two nights and on the second night when day overtook us, I came home. But we had a little narrow cot in the kitchen and I went there to lie down. My granddaughters said, ‘Grandmother, are you tired?’ I was not really sleepy and I said, ‘I am just resting for a little while. I am not very tired but am going to lie down here.’ ‘all right, grandmother, I am going to close the door,’ one of them said, so they would not disturb me. I lay there, closing my eyes now and then. I became rather drowsy but I did not sleep deeply. Suddenly, there was a young man with blond hair combed back in a wavy pompadour. He was a handsome young man and he was wearing a soldier’s uniform. He had on a khaki jacket and he had his hands in the pockets. Oh, he was dancing, dancing the way everyone else was dancing! He began dancing and I saw him glance at me. ‘Oh we beat you!’, I said. ‘We beat you. That is why we are dancing at your expense, with your scalp. Whatever power you had is all going to be ours because we beat you!’. I sat up. I was startled. That is what I saw.
Later, when we ate, we invited my nephew Lone Man to eat with us. I told him what I had seen. ‘Well, aunt’, he said, ‘you respected that scalp dance from the beginning… You were there two nights. You spent the time properly. That is what you did. You spoke the truth in saying that we beat them, even in doing this you respected the scalp dance. Some do not respect it. They just remain for a short time. Some of them even go home during the dance. That is what they do. But, for as long as you were there, you were dancing. From the beginning you followed through to the end. Some of them do not even dance after a while. You were the only one left, and this did not go unobserved. You certainly spoke the truth. We won. That is why you were dancing with the scalp. Whatever good luck was to have befallen him [who?] we won for ourselves. You spoke well. You spoke the truth, aunt, when you said this.’
Beachcombing cannot help but think of Johann Schulz or whatever the surprised member of the wehrmacht was called. First, he has the misfortune to die at the hands of a Ho-Chunk warrior with a very sharp knife. Then, next, he finds his spirit in an eternity of playground taunts, serving the family of Mountain Wolf Woman. He probably would have preferred a walk on Linden Strasse and a sugared Berliner, but, hey, that’s the fortunes of war.
Any other scalping from the Second World War or more recent times? Beachcombing would love to know. Drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com No serial killers please…
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1st Nov 2010: Richard Dieterle, who has his own excellent site on the Ho-Chunk (Winebago) has this to say about the scalp dance: ‘it might be worth mentioning that in the old days they took the whole head. Mt Wolf Woman speaks of dancing with the scalp — the charm of having the whole head is that it can be, as they used to say, ‘made to sing its own song’. Indian dancing involves a lot of jumping up and down, and the muscles of the head’s jaws are, of course, totally relaxed. The result is that the jaw moves up and down, causing the mouth to open and close, so that it looks as if the head is singing to the dance music… Before I got to Vietnam, it used to be the practice to take ears as trophies, but the Army put its foot down on that practice. However, it can hardly be doubted that some scalps were taken.’ Beachcombing had wondered about Vietnam… Thanks a million Richard!
Image: Decapitation at Aitape, 1943 October 24, 2010
Posted by Beachcombing in Contemporary, Uncategorized.Tags: Capital Punishment, Decapitation, Image, Japan, Leonard Siffleet, Medieval Photographs, Papua New Guinea, WW2
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Beachcombing continues with his series of striking images. He is offering today though not the neat studio photograph of an Australian, Leonard Siffleet (1916-1943), opposite. But another more worrisome photograph of the same man that he has included in the middle of this post. There any reader, who feels up to it, will see the brave Australian serviceman about to be decapitated by a Japanese ‘Samurai’ at Aitape beach in 1943.
Please don’t write to Beachcombing afterwards and say that he ruined your sleep/digestion/working day: what follows is unpleasant and the sensitive would be well advised to avoid it and go and boil a potato instead.
Beachcombing apologises too to any Australian readers. He certainly does not intend to offend their sensibilities with this uncomfortable memory of an awful war.
Much as Beachcombing adores the Japanese – love hotels, Totoro, fish-flavoured liquorice… – he has always felt rather queasy about the whole Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Certainly, there is no denying that Japanese servicemen treated Allied prisoners of war with appalling callousness. Nor is there any question that the civilian populations of China and Allied civilian pockets in centres like Hong Kong and Singapore faced ‘institutionalised racism’ from their Japanese conquerors. (Nor is there any question that Allied soldiers paid Japanese soldiers back in kind…)
This leads us to Z Special Unit and M Special Unit, two Australian-led special operations groups to which Leonard Siffleet belonged. Siffleet, by all accounts a talented young officer, was trained by Z and then recruited into M (which specialised in reconnaissance) and sent to Papua New Guinea. There in October 1943 his small party watched Japanese sea traffic, until, only some days after they had established camp, they were captured by locals and handed over to the Japanese. The Japanese interrogated them for some two weeks before, 24 October, they were decapitated on the beach at Aitape.
Not the least extraordinary fact about Siffleet’s killing is that the Japanese soldier assigned to ‘execute’ him, Yasuno Chikao, asked for this photograph to be taken as a souvenir and that this photograph then became an ‘item’ among Japanese soldiers. In fact, the image came to light when it was found in the pocket of a dead Japanese soldier in the spring of 1944.
Of course, from there it made its way into Australian newspapers and even Life. One typical caption read as follows: ‘Within in a split second of the camera recording the scene, he was dead. He died alone, with his arms tied down to his sides with rope. He died when a Jap officer in lust and hatred swung a samurai sword and severed his neck at a stroke. He was entitled to the protection granted to men taken in war-a man whose simple rights are respected by all civilised peoples. In spite of this they led him out, blindfolded him and butchered him-with a circle of grinning yellow monkeys looking on. This is the enemy we now fight. An enemy without pity-with the bug of madness in his blood. Look long on this picture-and DO NOT FORGET.’
Here we have echoes of that unpleasant race hate that suffused so much Allied anti-Japanese propaganda and that actually led one US senator to present Roosevelt with a Japanese arm bone that had been made into a letter-opener.
The Japanese presumably in this case had decided that Siffleet was a spy and thus deserved to die, according to the rules of war: compare Hitler’s treatment of British and Dominion commandos – never-mind the uniforms that they had on. Disagreeable as this is, it is certainly quite different from some of the obscenities carried out by Japanese units elsewhere: e.g. the decapitation of about 200 injured Indian and Australian soldiers at Malay.
What Beachcombing struggles to understand is what decapitation meant to Japanese soldiers in the Second World War. Decapitation is often seen, in cultures from around the world, as an honourable death. As such a Japanese soldier killing an Australian in this manner might be taken as a – bizarre – form of compliment towards a courageous foe. Certainly Samurai were killed by decapitation after capture.
However, there is also plentiful evidence that the Japanese employed decapitation on Chinese civilian captives, where there is absolutely no evidence of respect.
For now Beachcombing is left with this image of Siffleet kneeling in the cold sand, thinking of his family in far away New South Wales. His position, the smiling crowd and his pinioned arms hardly suggest a going gently into that good night…
Beachcombing would also love to know more of the fate of Yasuno Chikao the sword-wielder: different sources give him different fates and someone with Japanese could surely uncover the truth here. Drbeachcombing at yahoo DOT com
The table leg that changed history (kind of) September 29, 2010
Posted by Beachcombing in Contemporary, Uncategorized.Tags: Claus von Stauffenberg, Hinge Moments, Hitler, WW2
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Beachcombing knows that estimates of the number of serious assassination attempts against Hitler vary from ten to twenty. However, the only one of these attacks that actually drew Adolf’s blood was the last, Claus von Stauffenberg’s gutsy solo effort towards the end of the war. In fact, on three different occasions – 11, 15 and 18 July 1944 – Stauffenberg carried his bombed up briefcase into Hitler’s Conference Room in the Wolf’s Lair, but only on the third did he actually decide the conditions were favourable for detonation. Stauffenberg primed the bomb with a pencil detonator in the bathroom, placed the briefcase next to a table leg and then left the room summoned by a prearranged telephone call.
It is always nice to kill obnoxious dictators and get away with it. From outside Stauffenberg heard the explosion and watched with satisfaction as plumes of smoke rose from the Conference Room. He then sensibly headed for a plane, mission accomplished.
But things had not gone according to plan. Though Hitler subsequently needed two hundred splinters removed from his body – he also sent his singed uniform to Eva Braun as a keepsake – he came out essentially intact. Only four of the twenty in the room died and one of these was the stenographer that strikes Beachcombing as being grossly unfair considering the calibre of evil there.
So what saved the Fuhrer from the anger of the German resistance? Well, all the indications are that the abovementioned table leg put paid to von Stauffenberg’s bomb.
Stauffenberg had left the briefcase against this solid table leg with nothing but trousered legs between said briefcase and the leader of the Reich. However, Colonel Heinz Brandt, a one time Olympic gold medal winner – equstrian in case you were wondering – found that the briefcase was getting in his way and, once von Stauffenberg had vanished, he moved it around to the other side of the table leg so that he could get a better look at a map. Doubtless some sets of contours relating to the Russian front.
Seven minutes later the bomb went off. But the heavy table leg effectively shielded Hitler – and peppered him with splinters.
Curiously Brandt was something of a good luck talisman for Hitler as 13 March 1943 he had been tricked into carrying some cognac – actually a bomb – onto Hitler’s personal plane. That bomb didn’t even go off… Hitler brought no luck, however, to Brandt who lost a leg July 18 and died the next day.
If Beachcombing were playing to his normal script he would now get all lyrical about the table leg that changed history. His finger would reach for the shift key and the exclamation mark and he would hover wondering whether or not he should really lay it on.
But by the summer of 1944 it is difficult to see just how Hitler’s death would have changed a damned thing. The Americans and British had, by then, established a convincing if worrying pact with the Soviet Union that would not have fallen apart with the death of Hitler. (Would it? Drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com.) They were also ashore in Normandy.
Hitler’s successor would have either come from within the closed circle of his personal nasties – Goebbels, Himmler etc. Or, failing that, from Prussia’s starchy military caste whose record in the First World War against Belgian and French civilians and on the Eastern Front in the Second does not say much in favour of the Wehrmacht’s humanity.
In either case Germany would have been fighting an implacable war against the Soviet Union, a war that they were almost certainly bound to lose. Perhaps it was even a blessing that Brandt moved that bomb for Germany’s defeat arguably came more quickly under half delusional Hitler than it would have come, say, under a smiling Albert Kesselring, one of the most capable men to command in the Second World War.
For Beachcombing the great bonus of the attack are the wonderful photos of a clownish Mussolini being personally shown around the destroyed bunker by Hitler, who interestingly spent the trip muttering about that old whore ‘Providence’.
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27 Feb 2011: Ann from Sweden writes in about the attempt on Hitler’s life detailed here with this fabulous picture. Ann reminds Beachcombing that Mussolini did not know of the attack when he arrived – he was coming to talk to Hitler about the war going wrong. What Beachcombing did not know was that Hitler sat Mussolini down to talk in the bombed out room making the claim that destiny was on his side: a brilliant stroke given how depressed Mussolini was. Enjoy this shot of Hitler’s trousers and thanks to Ann!
Image: they can because they think they can September 27, 2010
Posted by Beachcombing in Contemporary, Uncategorized.Tags: Battle of Britain, Brian Lane, Image, RAF, WIBT, WW2
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As his final tribute to the RAF on the seventieth anniversary of the Battle of Britain, Beachcombing offers this remarkable photograph from 19 Squadron.
19 Squadron had fought over Dunkirk and spent the Battle of Britain in the front line at Duxford: the legless and incorrigible Douglas Bader was one of her pilots as was the legendary ‘grumpy’ Unwin. 19 Squadron later undertook, inter alia, fighter sweeps on D-Day and would become a frontline British squadron in the Cold War, finally being disbanded in 1992.
19 Squadron’s motto was ‘Possunt quia posse videntur’ – ‘They can because they think they can’. It might reasonably do service as a title for this superb photograph by Stanley Devon.
The ravaged twenty-three year old caught between life and death here is Squadron Leader Brian ‘Sandy’ Lane – Beachcombing always forgets how young the British fighter pilots were – while on his right was Unwin, an old man at 27. The photograph was taken at Fowlmere in early September 1940 in one of the most critical phases of the Battle of Britain.
Commentators have noted the strain on Lane’s face, but more striking perhaps are the eyes that seem to stare right through Beachcombing’s arthritic and crunched up figure at the keyboard. Sandy is just back from a sweep – his hair has been tousled by a flying helmet – and perhaps he has not even seen the photographer? Indeed, his eyes suggest that he has barely registered the presence of Unwin or his other colleague on the left. Does he hear their words or smell their cigarette smoke? His senses that have been primed for the last two hours can now close down – at least for a while.
Yet contrast this with the description that Lane offers of the RAF feeding frenzy on September 11, mere days after this photograph was snapped.
‘Party over London. Sighted big bunch of Huns south of the river and got in lovely head-on attack into leading He 111s. Broke them up and picked up a small batch of six with two Me 110s as escort. Found myself entirely alone with these lads so proceeded to have a bit of sport. Got one of Me 110s on fire whereupon the other left his charge and ran for home. Played with the He 111s for a bit and finally got one in both engines. Never had so much fun before!’
Beachcombing has always been fascinated by the gap between RAF reality and RAF, Beachcombing will call it, ‘rhetoric’. When the definitive twenty-first-century history of the Battle of Britain comes to be written it must, in some manner, bridge that gap and this photograph might stand as one of the supports of said bridge.
To remind readers of the other (very necessary) ‘rhetorical’ RAF Beachcombing includes here the ‘airbrushed’ Sandy – one of Churchill’s knights within arm’s length of his white steed.
Lane himself died in or above the sea about thirty kilometres from southern Holland in 1942. There is something horribly ignoble about a combat pilot drowning in his cockpit and Beachcombing hopes that it was over long before the Squadron Leader hit the brine. His book Spitfire! was published just before his death under a pen name, B.J.Ellan. It is still available today though the author is now properly ‘Brian Lane’.
The correspondent who put Beachcombing onto the photo that heads this piece wrote: ‘I cannot stop looking at this picture’. Beachcombing certainly has been doing little else all afternoon. Thanks, kudos and boiled sweets to JEC.
Possunt quia posse videntur!
Beachcombing is always on the look out for striking WWII photographs: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
Mrs B. offers a minority opinion: she thinks SL Lane is angry with the photographer…
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