From the Archives: Road Trip Through History–The American Cemetery
It is Memorial Day here in the United States: a time to remember soldiers fallen in our country’s service. Instead of writing a new post on the subject, I’ve chosen to share this post from 2016.
* * *
People often visit the English Cemetery* when they go to Florence. The final resting place of prominent nineteenth century inglesi, including Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the cemetery is by all accounts a beautiful park in a city that already teems with beauty.
It was on our list of possibles, but when push came to running out of time we chose the American Cemetery instead. Where the English Cemetery holds the graves of self-selected nineteenth century expats, the American Cemetery honors an involuntary group of expatriates: 4398 American soldiers who died in the Allied campaign to liberate Italy in World War II. The cemetery site was taken by the US Fifth Army on August 3, 1944 and was subsequently granted for use as an American burial ground by the Italian government **
When I think of Florence and history, I think of the Renaissance. I don’t think about World War II. This is, of course, ridiculous. When you are in Florence, subtle reminders of the war are everywhere. Stories of museum curators and librarians who protected treasures of Renaissance art. Bridges that no longer exist because retreating German forces destroyed all of the bridges across the Arno except for the Ponte Vecchio, which was spared at the last minute.*** (Instead they blocked access by destroying the medieval buildings at either end of the bridge.) Tales of collaboration, resistance and the tricky balancing act in-between.
There is nothing subtle about the American Cemetery, which is made up of seventy acres of beautifully maintained graves and an imposing monument that tells the story of the Allied push from northward from Rome to the Alps. It is breath-taking, impressive, heartbreaking. But the thing that got me right in gut was the guest book. Most of the visitors who signed in were not American but Italian. And in the comments section one of them wrote a single word–grazie. Thank you.
*Yet another historical misnomer, like Prince Henry the Navigator or the Silk Road. The cemetery was founded in 1827 by the Swiss Evangelical Reformed Church and originally named the Protestant Cemetery. But over the course of the century the size of the Anglo-Florentine community grew. So did the number of English (and American) Protestants who needed a final resting place.
** The American Battle Monuments Commission maintains American cemeteries and memorials, including the cemetery in Florence, in sixteen countries.
***Tour guide history attributes this to a personal order from Hitler. I suspect this is comic-book history, but I don’t really know.
X-Rays: Earlier than I Realized
A machine gun bullet embedded in a foot bone: x-ray. Photograph, 1914/1918. Wellcome Collection. In copyright
Every book I write leads me down unexpected byways that inform what I write, and even what I think, but don’t actually appear on the page. In the case of Sigrid Schultz, I regularly found myself up against questions of technology. Often I pursued a technical question because I wanted to understand how Schultz and her colleagues transmitted their stories overseas.* (I will admit, I still do not entirely understand how reporters were able to send photographs, maps and other illustrations by radio.) Other times, I was presented with the technical aspects of a story Schultz was covering—these were the days when innovation in general and aviation in particular were hot stuff.
And occasionally I wanted to understand when a particular technology came into existence and how prevalent it was in the period I am working on. In some cases—the microphone for instance—putting a technology into the timeline actually made the story clearer in my head. In other cases, though, I just hit something that spurred my curiosity and sent me down a happy rabbit hole.
For example, Sigrid Schultz casually mentioned having her knee x-rayed after an accident in 1941. I was surprised. Somehow I had assumed, based on no information whatsoever, that x-rays were a later technology. Wrong.
German physicist Wilhelm Roentgen accidentally discovered x-rays in 1895 while testing whether cathode rays could pass through glass.** Roentgen must have also been inclined to travel unexpected byways: after some experimentation he learned that when he projected what he called X (as in unknown) rays toward a chemically coated screen, they could pass through most substances, including human tissue, but would leave shadows of higher density objects, like bones, on the screen. Moreover, the resulting images could be photographed.
News of his discovery, and its potential medical uses, spread quickly. Within a year, doctors through Europe and the United States were using the new technology to view broken bones, kidney stones, bullets, and even swallowed objects without having to cut the patient open. A few researchers, including Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla, warned of possible dangers from radiation exposure, but they were largely ignored. By the 1930s and 1940s, x-ray technology was so common that some shoe stores offered customers free e-rays of their feet.***
Roentgen won the first Nobel prize in physics for his discovery in 1901.
* They had choices: the mail, telephone, wireless, and cable—and combinations thereof. Which one they chose depended on a complicated trade-off between time and money that varied from story to story. None of the methods were entirely reliable and bureau chiefs like Schultz spent a great deal of time trying to organize ways for correspondents and “stringers” located outside London, Paris and Berlin to get their stories to the home office.
**This is the point at which I realized I didn’t know what cathode rays were and wandered down an adjacent rabbit hole. For those of you who are similarly inclined, this is the most understandable of the sources I found: https://www.thoughtco.com/cathode-ray-2698965
***Why customers would want to see the bones in their feet is not clear to me.
Operation Cornflakes
On February 5, 1945, near the end of WWII, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) began a widespread propaganda campaign in Germany with the unwitting help of the German postal service.
As a first step, Allied bombers derailed a German mail train, scattering its cargo in the process. A second wave of bombers followed and dropped eight mail bags, each filled with 800 properly stamped propaganda letters addressed to homes and businesses in the northern Austrian towns to which the train made deliveries. The idea was that when the postal service realized the train had been derailed, the Germans would collect whatever mail had survived the bombing, including the faked letters containing propaganda, and deliver it to German homes as regularly scheduled. In most cases, the delivery occurred at breakfast time, resulting in the code name Operation Cornflakes.
In preparation for the operation, OSS operatives collected samples of German mail, including stamps, cancellations, and envelopes, and compiled lists of German names and addresses from telephone directories. Propaganda that traveled through the German mail system included an OSS-produced newspaper that claimed to be the work of a growing German opposition party,* letters supposedly written by Nazi party leaders about Hitler’s ill health, and by generals who wanted to surrender. Together, the pieces were designed to create doubt in the minds of the civilian population and to weaken German morale.
Over the course of the operation, the allies dropped 20 loads of fake mail, with a total of 96,000 pieces of mail. A unit in Rome addressed 15,000 envelopes a week. Groups in Switzerland and England created the newspapers and letters and forged stamps.**
The operation eventually failed because of a typo. The return addresses on the envelopes were all those of legitimate German businesses. An OSS operative, perhaps with a cramping hand or aching eyes after hours of addressing envelopes, misspelled Kassenverein as Cassenverien on several envelopes. An alert postal clerk caught the error and brought it to the attention of his superiors. The envelopes were opened, and the propaganda discovered.
Did the operation have an effect on German morale? No one knows. But from a strategic perspective, Operation Cornflakes played a valuable role by putting additional strain on Germany’s communication and transport system.
*It is unlikely that any Germans would have believed this, given that the Nazi party had gained control of the German press at all levels within a year of taking power.
**Including stamps that weren’t standard. If you look closely, you’ll notice some creative changes that wouldn’t have passed by an alert censor.
