When Hitler Took Cocaine and Lenin Lost His Brain (18 page)

‘Almost as he fell', noted his divisional record, ‘the gunfire died away and an appalling silence prevailed.'

The army would eventually restore him to the rank of sergeant and also award him two posthumous medals for gallantry. Henry Gunther emerged from the war as both its last victim and its final hero.

 

17

To Hell and Back

Audie Murphy was short, skinny and underage, hardly suitable material for a fighting soldier in the Second World War. The American army certainly thought him inadequate when he tried to enroll for service in December 1941. They rejected him not only on the grounds of his youth – he was just sixteen-and-a-half – but also because of his slight frame.

Murphy made a second attempt to enlist in the following year. He was once again rejected, not only by the regular army but also by the Marine Corp, the Airborne and the navy.

After much persistence, he finally succeeded in getting himself enrolled in the army and was sent for training in Texas. He proved unsuitable in every respect, vindicating the army's previous decisions to reject him. During one training session he fainted from exhaustion. His company commander was so alarmed that he tried to move him to an army cookery school.

But Murphy was determined to prove the doubters wrong and he was to do so in style. The first inkling of his bravery came in September 1943, when his scouting party was ambushed by German machine guns on the Italian front. Murphy returned fire and killed all five Germans. His unexpected heroism earned him promotion to sergeant.

He fought in further battles in Italy and France and began to display a reckless determination to win at all costs. He was at his most efficient leading small groups of men into attack against an overwhelmingly superior enemy.

After participating in Operation Dragoon in Southern France, he and his men were transferred to Alsace, where fighting between the Allies and crack German soldiers was at its most intense.

His platoon came under heavy fire while crossing a vineyard. Murphy managed single-handedly to seize one of the enemy machine guns and then turned it on the Germans, killing or wounding them. His action was extraordinarily brave and won him the Distinguished Service Cross.

Shortly afterwards, his best friend was killed by a group of Germans who were pretending to surrender. Murphy was so disgusted by their underhand trick that he charged them, killing six, wounding two and taking eleven of them prisoner.

During seven weeks of tough fighting, Murphy's division suffered 4,500 casualties. Murphy himself was always in the thick of it. He received two silver stars for heroic action, was promoted to second lieutenant and elevated to platoon leader. Although he had proved himself one of the bravest soldiers fighting in Alsace, his moment of glory still lay before him.

In January 1945, he and his men were moved to the woods near Holtzwihr. This territory was strategically vital to the Allied advance and had only recently been captured. It was no less crucial to the Germans, who were determined to recover their ground.

Murphy's unusual leadership skills had by now so impressed his superiors that they made him a company commander. His orders were to block any German advance.

On 26 January, his men went into action against the enemy. It was bitterly cold – minus 10ºC – with an arctic wind and two feet of snow on the ground. The men fought with tenacious courage but a ferocious firefight steadily reduced them to an effective fighting force of just 19 men out of their original 128.

Murphy realized that the remnants of his company couldn't hold out any longer and ordered them to retreat into the forest. But he had no intention of following their retreat. He clambered onto a burned-out tank destroyer and used his lone position to direct American artillery fire coming from the rear.

‘I loved that artillery,' he later recalled. ‘I could see Kraut soldiers disappear in clouds of smoke and snow, hear them scream and shout, yet they came on and on as though nothing would stop them.'

The Germans slowly advanced, despite the bombing, and were soon within fifty yards of Murphy's hiding place. When battalion headquarters asked him to inform them of the enemy's position, Murphy replied: ‘If you just hold the phone a minute, I'll let you talk to one of the bastards.'

He continued to spray the advancing troops with bullets, killing some fifty German soldiers in one sustained burst of fire. At one point he spied a group of soldiers hiding in a nearby ditch. ‘I pressed the trigger and slowly traversed the barrel – the bodies slumped in a stack position.'

Murphy only stopped fighting when his line of communication to headquarters was cut by enemy artillery. He was badly injured yet he continued to lead his men for the next two days until the area around Holtzwihr and the Colmar Canal was finally cleared of Germans. It was an exceptional feat of war and all the more remarkable given the fact that he had been twice rejected by the army on the grounds that he was too feeble to fight.

On 2 June 1945, Murphy was presented with the Medal of Honor, America's highest honour. It was the peak of his military career, one that ended with thirty-two additional medals, ribbons, citations and badges.

Murphy would later become a Hollywood star, acting in the film of his own experiences,
To Hell and Back
. But his life was cut tragically short when he died in a plane crash in 1971. He was just forty-six.

When asked what motivated him to fight single-handed against a company of German infantry, he replied: ‘They were killing my friends.'

 

18

Let's Talk Gibberish

Japanese code-breaker Seizo Arisue had every reason to feel satisfied with himself. He and his team had met with great success in cracking the secret transmissions of the American high command. Many of these deciphered intercepts concerned the deployment of troops, giving the Japanese a significant advantage.

But in the spring of 1945, Seizo Arisue found himself completely perplexed by the new code being used by the American army. He spent many hours attempting to decipher it, but all to no avail.
Ahkehdiglini
was one of the words.
Tsahahdzoh
was another. And so it continued for several pages. Arisue could only conclude that it had been written in gibberish.

The messages were indeed indecipherable, just as the Americans intended. They were sending them in Navajo, a highly complex Native American language that very few people in the world were able to speak.

The idea of using the Navajo language for battlefield communications was first suggested by Philip Johnston, the son of an American missionary. He was one of the few non-Navajos in the world who spoke the language fluently.

Johnston knew that Native American languages had been successfully used for battlefield communications in the First World War. He also knew that Navajo would present the Japanese code-breakers with a formidable challenge. Its tortuous syntax and numerous dialects rendered it unintelligible to anyone who had not been exposed to it for years.

The US army first tried out Johnson's ingenious idea in the spring of 1942. It proved so foolproof that they began drafting more Navajo speakers into the army's ranks. They became known as the code-talkers and they were to play a crucial role in the war in the Far East.

Among them was Samuel Tso, a twenty-three-year-old Navajo speaker who directed communications for the United States Marine Corps during the battle for Iwo Jima. He and his team of six code-talkers transmitted hundreds of strategically vital commands during the month-long battle.

The commands were relayed as a string of seemingly unrelated Navajo words that bore no obvious relation to battlefield terms. This was because words like ‘machine gun' and ‘battleship' didn't exist in Navajo.

To overcome this problem of vocabulary, Tso's team used designated Navajo words to describe military hardware. ‘Whale' was used to describe a battleship, ‘iron-fish' to describe a submarine and ‘hummingbird' to describe a fighter plane.

But the code was a great deal more sophisticated than that. One of the basic principals was that specific Navajo words were chosen to represent individual letters of the Roman alphabet. To represent the letter ‘a', for example, Tso could use any of the following:
wollachee
(ant),
belasana
(apple) or
tsenill
(axe). These words had one key element in common: when translated into English, they all started with the letter ‘a'.

Tso and his team sent and received dozens of commands each day. When they received a coded message, their first task was to translate the Navajo words into English. They would then use the first letter of each word to spell out the message. And this is why it proved so impossible for the Japanese to crack. Any code-breaker attempting to read the cipher had to know the meaning of the Navajo word in English. Since there was no Navajo dictionary, they found themselves up against an impossible task.

Tso's team transmitted information on tactics, troop movements and other battlefield communications. They were highly skilled and extremely accurate. As the US Marines fought their way up the heavily defended beaches of Iwo Jima, the code-talkers more than proved their worth.

Major Howard Connor, 5th Marine Division signal officer, was adamant that Tso's men had led the Marines to victory: ‘Were it not for the Navajos, the Marines would never have taken Iwo Jima.'

The Japanese code-breakers worked around the clock in their quest to crack the Navajo code, but never succeeded in deciphering a single message.

Philip Johnston's idea of using Navajo had proved to be an inspired one. The use of this indecipherable language had saved tens of thousands of lives.

 

PART VII

Dial M for Murder

It was kept in a chamber and was a great fowl somewhat bigger than the largest Turkey cock, and so legged and footed, but stouter and thicker and of more erect shape, coloured before like the breast of a young cock pheasant.

SIR HAMON L'ESTRANGE IS SHOWN A LIVE DODO IN LONDON, 1638. WITHIN TWENTY-FIVE YEARS THE DODO WAS EXTINCT.

 

19

Good Ship
Zong

Captain Luke Collingwood was used to grim voyages across the Atlantic, but this one had been worse than most.

Dysentery, diarrhoea and smallpox had already claimed the lives of seven of the crew aboard the
Zong
. The slave cargo had suffered a far higher mortality rate. More than sixty had died since leaving the shores of Africa.

As Captain Collingwood searched in vain for the coast of Jamaica, he grew increasingly alarmed. He knew that the ship's insurers would not cover the cost of his lost human cargo. Since each slave was worth about £30, he stood to lose a fortune.

On 29 November 1781, he was struck by a macabre idea, one that could turn loss into profit. At a meeting with the
Zong
's officers, he suggested that they throw the slaves overboard. There was a sinister logic to his reasoning. If his slaves died of illness, their insurance value was lost. But if they were thrown overboard in order to preserve the ship's scant supply of water (and thereby save the lives of others), an insurance claim would be valid under a legal principle known as the ‘general average'. It allowed the captain of a ship to sacrifice some of his ‘passengers' in order to save others.

The First Mate of the
Zong
, James Kelsall, was appalled by the captain's proposal. He said it was cold-blooded murder. But Collingwood disagreed, insisting that it would be ‘less cruel to throw the sick wretches into the sea than to suffer them to linger out a few days, under the disorder with which they were afflicted'.

After much persuasion, Kelsall changed his mind and reluctantly agreed with the captain and other officers. The weakest slaves were to be pitched overboard that very day.

Collingwood went below decks to select his first ‘parcel' of victims. He decided to concentrate on the women and children, probably because he knew that they would put up less of a struggle. A total of fifty-four were hurled off the ship and could be seen flailing in the sea before eventually weakening and drowning.

Two days later, on 1 December, Collingwood elected to throw out another ‘parcel': this time, his forty-two victims were all men. They drowned so quickly, and with such little effort on the part of the captain and his crew, that Collingwood decided to pitch even more slaves overboard. He was intent on getting the largest possible sum of money from the ship's insurers. He ordered another thirty-six to be thrown into the ocean.

But this third batch of victims were made of stronger stuff and vehemently refused to go to their deaths without a struggle. Collingwood's men were forced to chain them by the ankle and weigh their feet with balls of iron so they would sink immediately.

‘The arms of twenty-six were fettered with irons and the savage crew proceeded with the diabolical work, casting them down to join their comrades of the former days.' So reads a contemporary account of the massacre.

Ten of the slaves were so terrified by their fate that they leaped overboard before the captain had the chance to have them chained.

Three weeks after the last murders, the
Zong
finally reached Jamaica with 208 slaves still aboard. They sold for an average price of £36 each, earning Collingwood a substantial profit even before he made his insurance claim. But he did not have long to enjoy his money: he died within three days of making landfall.

His death might have been the end of a sordid and macabre tale, but there was to be an extraordinary postscript, one that caused a sensation in Georgian England.

The ship's owners expressed their full support for what the late Captain Collingwood had done and filed an insurance claim for the 132 slaves that had been thrown overboard. They hoped to recuperate nearly £4,000 in jettisoned ‘cargo'.