America in WWII - (Page 69) Rommel, Mussolini, Joseph Mengele, Eichmann, Raoul Wallenberg, and Anne Frank’s family—all of the leading characters represented in original letters…. Of particular importance are Hitler’s draft of the Munich Agreement, containing his notations as well as Neville Chamberlain’s; the first message alerting armed forces of the attack on Pearl Harbor; Patton’s letter to the Sultan of Morocco announcing the American landings and threatening destruction; Montgomery’s address to the troops before El Alamein; Patton’s annotated map for the invasion of Sicily; the complete plans for the D-Day invasion in Normandy; and MacArthur’s draft of the Japanese surrender terms.” Besides all the paper, the museum also has a large collection of artifacts. Among the more notable pieces are Adolf Hitler’s first sketch for the Nazi flag, the dark-colored beret that never seemed to leave the head of British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, and five different Enigma code–cracking machines (which look like it,” he replies, unperturbed. Those who find the goings-on too cute (critic James Agee, for instance, called the movie “a tired soufflé”) might be entertained by the economics. This movie is from a different world indeed, one where $12 can get you a room for a week, and a man like Prendergast can do very well for himself on $8,600 a year. Why, it almost sounds like a fantasy. The room shortage was very real, too. Journalist David Brinkley recounted a favorite story from the war years in his 1988 book Washington Goes to War. A man crossing the 14th Street Bridge saw a man in the water. “What’s your name and address?” he shouted down to the drowning man. Information in hand, he rushed to the unfortunate man’s address to take over his apartment, but the landlord told him it was already rented. But I just left the previous tenant drowning in the river, the man said. “That’s right,” responded the landlord, “but the man who pushed him in got here first.” —Tom Huntington Camp Hill, Pennsylvania modified typewriters). “My whole life has been about preserving history,” writes Rendell, “preserving letters, the thoughts, the words and all areas of life’s pursuits. Forming this museum has been very different…. Forty years ago I started the collection…. I don’t know what the future of the museum may be. It is not open to the public and it cannot be…. It is an interactive museum in the sense that you get out of it what you put into it….” The site emphasizes that the museum’s collection is privately owned, and Rendell points out on the site that “visitation is by appointment only. We want our visitors to be those who appreciate the importance of the collection and the interactive nature of the exhibits and artifacts.” Interestingly, for a place that has thousands of pieces of WWII history, the museum has a general policy of not accepting donations of papers and artifacts. The museum will do its best, however, to help find other museums to store and maybe even showcase would-be donations. Artifacts do move in the other direction, with the website store offering various items for sale. “Everything is original,” the site says. “There are no reproductions.” —Mark Weisenmiller Tampa, Florida Spadefish: On Patrol with a Top-Scoring World War II Submarine, Stephen L. Moore, Atriad Press, 463 pages, $24.95. S IXTY YEARS AGO, America’s so-called silent service lived in obscurity. Its submariners sailed where they could not be seen and sought targets the Japanese navy scarcely valued. Yet its erosion of the Japanese merchant marine slowly throttled the island empire’s wartime economy and hastened its defeat. Perhaps because the submarine crews seldom had the sense of direct involvement with the enemy as experienced by tankers, bomber crews, surface ships, and infantry, their stories seldom received the attention they rated. Veteran author Stephen L. Moore skillfully re-creates life and war aboard one of America’s most successful WWII submarines, the Spadefish (SS-411). Spadefish was a latecomer to the silent service, not entering the war until the summer of 1944. But in five war patrols under two captains, she quickly made up for lost time, sinking six ships on her first excursion. Her pace never slowed, and her toll came to include an aircraft carrier as well as escort vessels, freighters, and even the Asian rowboats known as sampans. By the end of the war, Spadefish rated sixth in terms of total ships sunk, and fifth in terms of total tonnage. And unlike some better subs, she survived the war intact. The breadth and depth of Moore’s spadework for Spadefish is evident. Every action above or below the surface is recounted, along with minor incidents such as accidental injuries and patrol-end promotions and decorations. The book has the lush detail of a scrapbook, including excellent photographs and extremely helpful outlines of the target ships. Images taken through the periscope are especially exciting. Moore succeeds in capturing the texture of sub-bound life, and some of the greatest pleasures in Spadefish are the descriptions of drunken excess, midnight requisitions of hardware, and efforts to humanize life inside a machine. During this time, the only female companionship for the crew was a dog, Luau, acquired in Hawaii. She becomes one of the book’s most memorable characters. She liked beer, got drunk, bore a litter mid-cruise, and kept quiet during depth-chargings from convoy escorts. Spadefish’s numerous encounters with vengeful Japanese escorts make for some of the most exciting reading. The submariner motto is “Run silent, run deep,” yet in many of Spadefish’s Yellow Sea missions, there was less than 200 feet of water, meaning there was almost no place to hide. Here, skipper Gordon Underhill’s ingenuity saved the day. Figuring the Japanese would set their depth charges for maximum depth, he stayed a safe distance from the seabed. Still, each encounter was a brush with death, leading to broken crockery, deflated bread dough, shattered bulbs, broken instruments, and dislodged dental fillings. No matter how many hits you survived, each one was terrifying. Spadefish’s war was not exclusively comprised of such high-profile actions. Moore gives equal attention to the other OCTOBER 2007 AMERICA IN WWII 69
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