A new coat of paint and a restored "disappearing gun" |
It is only 4 miles across Admiralty Inlet between Forts Worden and Casey |
Great views at Fort Casey |
A new coat of paint and a restored "disappearing gun" |
It is only 4 miles across Admiralty Inlet between Forts Worden and Casey |
Great views at Fort Casey |
This book “Recommendation and Review” is for “Agent Sonya” by Ben Macintyre.
I am a Cold War veteran, having spent three years patrolling the East German border back in the 1980s. Maybe that’s why I like spy stories so much. Fiction or nonfiction, it doesn’t matter. At least from a media standpoint, the Cold War made for some good spy stories. You had definitive bad guys (that would be the Soviets) versus us, the good guys. This book isn’t like that.“Agent Sonya: Moscow’s Most Daring Wartime Spy” by Ben Macintyre is the true story of Ursula Kuczynski, also known as Ruth Werner,
Ursula Beurton, Ursula Hamburger, or her code name: Sonya. She was born in
Germany in 1907 and was a teenager and young adult during the political
upheaval immediately following World War I. She became a devout, ideological
communist, passionately opposed to the rise of fascism in her country. When her
husband was offered a job in Shanghai, she went with him. There in China, she
met other communists and was recruited into working for Soviet intelligence.
Over her career worked in China, Poland, Switzerland, and Great Britain.
Although Sonya didn’t “spy” firsthand, she did run agents in these locations
and radio information back to Moscow.
I’ve read books by Ben Macintyre before, specifically Rogue Heroes and Agent Zigzag. So I knew the writing would be excellent
and that this book, like the others mentioned, would be a true story that reads
like fiction. What makes this book different from the usual spy story is that
it is told from the perspective of Kuczynski. I gained an understanding of why
a person would embrace Communism during the 1920s, especially if faced with a weak government
(the Weimar Republic) and a threat of Fascism. As an aside, Ursula became
disillusioned with the Soviet Union after the purges by Stalin in the 1930s,
but she never lost her idealistic faith in communism. During the story of her
career as a spy during the 30s and 40s, you of course sympathize with Ursula
and are on the virtual edge of your seat during the times she was nearly
caught.
SPOILER ALERT! If you don’t want to know the rest of the story, skip the next paragraph.
Why a book devoted to this one spy? One of her agents she ran in Great Britain was another German Jew, a talented physicist by the name of Klaus Fuchs. Fuchs had escaped from Hitler’s Germany and was sponsored into Great Britain. He was investigated and cleared to work on Britain’s atomic bomb project, despite being a devout communist. Once Fuchs realized what the project was about, he decided to share all the information about his work with the Soviet Union. Agent Sonya was his handler in Great Britain. When Great Britain’s nuclear bomb program was merged with the Manhattan Project (the United States nuclear bomb project), Fuchs was sent to work in the U.S. and passed off to a KGB handler in America. The information that Fuchs passed to the Soviets arguably gave them the bomb or certainly allowed them to develop their own five years earlier than expected. When Fuchs' treachery was found out, it would lead straight back to Ursula. In 1950 she escaped Great Britain and settled into retirement in East Germany, eventually writing a book about her own escapades.
So you have to ask: Did Agent Sonya help to start the Cold
War or did she prevent World War III by helping to maintain a balance of power?
Don’t try to answer that question without reading the book. I think it will
change the way you look at that period of our history. It did mine.
You can stay in the house that was the 509th CP
during the Battle of Anzio.
(click on any image for a larger version.)
509th CP during Anzio |
Map courtesy of Mike Reuter |
Il casale di Giulia before rennovation. |
After rennovation |
Aerial view showing B/509th position on forward hill. |
Diego shared quite a few pictures with me, and I’ve included
some of them for you to see as well. The next time I’m in the archives at NARA
or AHEC I plan to look in the records of the 3rd ID for that missing
overlay. In the meantime, I’m planning a trip after covid to visit Anzio, Il casale di Giulia, and other sites where the Geronimos fought. Ever thought
about it?
This book Recommendation and Review is for “The Boy who Followed His Father into Auschwitz” by Jeremy Dronfield.
By the cover design and title, I mistakenly at first thought
this book was a work of fiction. So did my wife who first saw it on the shelf
in our local bookstore. She read it; she was enthralled by it. Then she
insisted that I read it. She is not a big reader of nonfiction history and
rarely pushes me to read nonfiction (that’s because my nonfiction reading stack
is always piled so high). So, I moved this read to the top of the list. Really glad
I did.
This is a true Holocaust story that reads like fiction. In
fact, the author started out a fiction writer but switched to narrative
nonfiction. If you read a lot of books about World War II, you might know
Jeremy Dronfield from his previous nonfiction work, “Beyond the Call.” At the
time I’m writing this, “The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz” has 4.8
stars on 1853 reviews on Amazon. With numbers like that, it is no wonder it is a
bestseller and I'm probably wasting your time telling you that the book reads like
a novel. A “page-turner” as my dad would say.
The book is about the Kleinmann family of Vienna, Austria.
There is the father, Gustav, a combat veteran of the First World War, his wife
Tini, and their four children, Edith, Fritz, Herta, and Kurt. They are a Jewish
family, but not overly devout, living in a Jewish neighborhood. They are part
of the community; they have non-Jewish friends and neighbors. The story begins
with the impending vote in Austria on Anschluss, the joining of Germanic peoples
together under the Third Reich. The family lives through the arrival of the
Nazis, the growing prejudice of their non-Jewish neighbors, and Krystallnacht. All
this beginning in March of 1938, a year and a half before the beginning of
World War II in Europe and over three and a half years before America entered
the conflict.
Soon after, the Nazis begin to arrest Jewish adult males,
initially as political prisoners. Gustav and his eldest son, Fritz, are caught
up in this and sent to Dachau. Fritz was only sixteen. I had the opportunity to
visit Dachau, a concentration camp outside of Munich, when I was stationed in
Germany back in the 1980s. This connection allowed me to visualize the
Kleinmanns in this evil and depressing place. Gustav and Fritz are transferred
to other camps during the course of their years as slave laborers. While they are in captivity, Tini attempts to
get her other children sponsored to immigrate to Great Britain and the United
States. She is only partially successful. After years of starvation and
beatings with no word from the other members of his family, Gustav is informed
that he and hundreds of other prisoners will be sent to Auschwitz, the infamous Nazi concentration camp in Poland. Upon hearing this news, Fritz volunteers to
go to Auschwitz with his father. Both believe this is a sentence of certain
death, but they believe that it is better to be together than to die alone.
The book is based on a diary Gustav kept during his six
years in concentration camps. Not only will you learn of the horrors of the
concentration camp system, but also how difficult it was to flee Germany or an
occupied country. Hint: countries like the United States and Great Britain
limited the intake of refugees, and once the war was declared on and by these countries, even this avenue was
cut off to the victims of the Nazi regime. This is an amazing story and through
the experiences of this one family the reader gains a visceral understanding of
the different ways that people suffered during the Holocaust.
I wish that every American would read this book. I spent
three years in Germany, forty years after the war. I found the German people to
be warm and friendly. I enjoyed my time there. Though I could never reconcile how
the people I met there who were alive during that time could possibly allow the
rise of fascism and the Holocaust to take place, much less enter a pathway to
war that would eventually destroy their country. I worry that we have demonized
the Nazis to such a level that we can’t learn anything from this period of history. I hope that is not
the case. This is different than reading about fighting the war. This is about
learning about the cause and effect of it. Please read two books. First, “The Nazi Seizure of Power” by William Sheridan Allen. In this book, you’ll learn how the Nazis
took over Germany, not by Hitler from the top down, but on a grassroots level through
local action by Nazi party members. The other is this book, “The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz” by Jeremy Dronfield. If you’ll make that
investment of time, and it won’t be boring, then you’ll understand the what
and the how. I doubt we’ll ever understand the why.
Learn About the Maritime History of the Pacific Northwest in Astoria, Oregon.
Astoria, Oregon, is located near the mouth of the Columbia River that creates the border between the states of Washington and Oregon. Astoria,
the oldest city in Oregon, is an interesting and fun place to visit. Anyone who
is on a Lewis and Clark pilgrimage is going to stay there of course. But there
is a rich history about this town that goes way beyond the Corps of Discovery.
For more information, visit the Columbia River Maritime Museum website.
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The Civil War-Era Fort under the Golden Gate Bridge
Did you know that there was a Civil War-era fort under the Golden Gate Bridge? I realize that at times I can be slow on the uptake, but I didn’t know about Fort Point until just a few years ago. And I grew up in California! How could I not notice? I’ve driven over the bridge several times in my life. The first time way back in high school. When I was in the army, I even flew a helicopter from Camp Roberts to the Presidio in San Francisco – didn’t notice it then. Finally, Fort Point came on the radar several years ago when I visited the Presidio as a tourist. Who knew? The history of the site goes back to the late 1700s. The Spanish were worried about encroachment into California by Russia and Great Britain. They built a fort on a cliff at the southern point of the narrowest entry to the bay. That would later be known as the “Golden Gate.” The fort, Castillo de San Joaquin, was completed in 1794, was made of adobe walls, and mounted from 9 to 13 cannons. When Mexico gained independence from Spain, the Mexican army moved to Sonoma and let the fort deteriorate.At some point during the Spanish and Mexican eras, the cliff that the fort was located on was known as the Punta del Cantil Blanco (point of the white cliff) became known as Punta del Castillo (Castle Point). After the Mexican-American war and the United States gained control of California in 1848, the name was carried over as “Fort Point.” Soon the Gold Rush was in full swing, California became a state in 1850, and the United States now needed to protect the bay. A series of defensive fortifications were proposed that included Alcatraz Island, Fort Mason (located adjacent to Fisherman’s Wharf), and Fort Point.
The construction on Fort Point began in 1853. The first task was to knock down the cliff and build the fort near sea level. The idea was that guns placed in the first level of the fort could skip cannonballs along the ocean and hit ships at the waterline. Two hundred former gold miners were employed on the construction of the fort for eight years, finishing it in time to be garrisoned just before the start of the American Civil War in 1861. The fort is constructed with seven-foot-thick walls and three levels, or tiers, that built with a reinforcing arch. The fort could aim 126 guns at any ship passing through the narrow Golden Gate, although during the Civil War there were only 55.Read complete histories of Fort Point at the National Park Service website, the Presidio San Francisco website, or on Wikipedia.
Okay, for those of you unfamiliar with the Pacific
Northwest, Snoqualmie Falls is a 268-foot waterfall on the Snoqualmie River,
between the cities of Fall River and Snoqualmie, Washington. Perhaps it is
easier to visualize if I just tell you that from downtown Seattle, get on eastbound Interstate 90 and drive for about fifty minutes and you will run right
into it. There is free parking, a gift shop, a nice lodge, and a 1.4-mile round trip hiking path that runs from the upper viewing area down to a lower viewing
platform. Of course, the real star is the falls themselves. They are beautiful year-round,
but I gather that some dedicated individuals drive up there after a few days of
heavy rain to get a view of the falls on steroids.
We are still working with COVID-19 restrictions and I was
happy to see that although viewing the falls is an outdoor activity, a vast
majority of people were wearing their masks and doing their best to stay
socially distanced. That social distancing was easily accomplished up top and
on the trail down. But as you get to the bottom, the trail narrows to a
boardwalk that goes past the old 1911 powerplant building and out to a viewing
platform. Unfortunately, when we got down there, it was busy. A crowd that
could stay distanced in the upper viewing area could not on the sidewalk-width
of the boardwalk. Folks were patient and queued up nose-to-back along the
boardwalk waiting for their turn to go out onto the viewing platform. But that’s
not the point.
Enjoy the pictures and videos. Stop by and see Snoqualmie Falls when
you are driving from Spokane to Seattle. It is worth the stop. Look at the Falls
and think of a much longer history that you are seeing. And double-down on those
protocols: mask, wash hands, stay distanced. The only way to get through the
pandemic is with a little dose of discipline and good judgment.