GRACE UNDER FIRE Japan Attacks Mainland America

I draw your attention to one rather peaceful morning.  A lone sailing vessel tacks gracefully across an empty silver grey horizon. It could be anytime in history after 1430, and it could be a vision on any sea. Violence must have seemed a million miles away from that sleek wooden hull. But it was Saturday, 4 November, 1944, and war was about to intrude upon grace.

The sailing vessel was a member of the "Corsair Fleet" – private sailing yachts which patrolled the outer approaches to American ports on both coasts. This particular ship was criss-crossing the Pacific, 66 miles outside of San Pedro and the Port of Los Angeles. The owner, too old for military service, was her acting captain. But she was crewed by uniformed members of the United States Coast Guard. Being wooden and small, these vessels were often missed by the radar of the day. While under sail, they were invisible to submarines listening for the grinding of propellers from patrol craft. And then a crewman’s shout pierced the morning serenity.

Rolling with the swell was a large section of white cloth. The captain reefed his sails and hove to. As the sailors pulled the cloth on board they became aware that suspended beneath the fabric was a large metal ring resembling a bicycle wheel, upon which was mounted electronic equipment, all marked in Japanese.

Three months earlier, in August, students at the Yamaguchi Girl’s High School received a visit from a Major from the Kokura military arsenal. He informed the girls they were now members of the Student Special Attack Force, and would be working on a secret weapon which would fly directly to America and would have a great impact upon the war. The girls were thrilled at being asked to participate directly in the war effort, especially considering the traditional subservient and hidden role of Japanese women.

One of the girls, 15 year old Tanaka Tetsuko, explained later. “Stands were placed all over the schoolyard and drying boards were erected on them.... We covered the board with a thin layer of paste...and then laid down two sheets of Japanese paper and brushed out any bubbles. When dry, a thicker layer of paste, with a slightly bluish hue…. was evenly applied to it. That process was repeated five times".

 "We really believed we were doing secret work, so I didn’t talk about this even at home. But my clothes were covered with paste, so my family must have been able to figure out something. We didn't have any newspapers, no radio. We didn't even hear the news announcements made by Imperial General Headquarters. We just pasted paper”

Over the next few months some 300 balloons fell to sea and earth off Hawaii and in Alaska, Oregon, Washington State, California, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and Texas, as well as British Columbia and Alberta, Canada.

 The balloons were all 33 feet in diameter and made of mulberry paper, glued together with potato flour and then inflated with hydrogen. Each balloon was programed during its three to five day flight across the north Pacific to control its height by dropping 2 lb. bags of sand ballast each evening.

Once they had flown long enough to be over North America they would then drop their cargo of 33-lb fragmentation and incendiary bombs.  The production markings made in grease pen by the Japanese workers revealed the balloons had been made only a few weeks before being launched, and even recorded the hours required to make them.

There was initial panic among officials because of the real fear was that these balloons might carry a biological attack.  American intelligence sources had already heard rumors of the Japanese Unit Number 731, which was experimenting with plagues on prisoners of War in Manchuria. Some 200,000 unwilling test subjects, mostly Chinese, would die. American authorities clamped a total press blackout on any information concerning the balloons, to prevent the Japanese from learning of their effectiveness. Meanwhile, a search was begun to find their launching point. The Military Geology Unit within the U.S. Geological Survey, provided the answer.

Geologists examined the sand in the ballast bags under a microscope. They found several species of extinct single-celled plants, described by prewar Japanese marine biologists. In addition the sand contained enough trace minerals to narrow their source to one of  two beaches, one of which was at Ichinomiya, Japan. In February of 1945, surveillance flights identified two plants near Ichinomiya which manufactured hydrogen. In April, American B-29 bombers burned over half of Ichinomiya to the ground, and destroyed both of those plants. There was a third plant, left undamaged because it was undiscovered, But without any information on the effectiveness of the 9,000 balloons released so far, the Japanese military decided to cut off funding for any future balloons.

On the morning of Saturday, 5 May, 1945, 27 year old Reverend Archie Mitchell and his wife Elsie (above), who was five months pregnant, were accompanying children from their church on a fishing outing to Leanord Creek, at the foot of Gearhart Mountain, five miles outside of Bly, Oregon. The  children's parents were all working overtime to produce lumber and food for the war effort, and the couple were trying fill in for the parents and restore a small piece of a normal childhood lost to the war.  Archie dropped his wife and the children off at a bend in the road and drove a mile ahead, to the river bank. He unloaded the fishing gear, and had just returned to the car to unload the picnic supplies, when he heard Elsie and the children approaching. He heard Elsie call out that one of the children had found a weather balloon.

Archie just had time to shout a warning when an explosion ripped through the forest. By the time Archie had reached the scene, his wife and unborn child and all five of the other children were dead.

Sherman Shoemaker, age 11, Jay Gifford, age 13, Edward Engen, age 13, Joan Patzke, age 13, and Dick Patzke, age 14; these and Elsie Mitchell age 26, and her unborn child, were the only American civilian casualties during the Second World War, giving the Japanese balloon bombs a kill rate of just 0.067% of all bombs launched.

The last of the Japanese balloon bombs was discovered in Alaska in 1955. It’s bombs were still lethal. The remains of another balloon bomb were discovered in 1978 near Agness, Oregon. It can be seen in the Coos County Historical Museum.

But it was not until the 1986 that now 55 year old Tanaka Tetsuko learned what one of the bombs she had helped to construct, had achieved. She and two of her classmates carefully folded 1,000 paper storks, and in 1987 arraigned for them to be delivered to the community of Bly, with her heartfelt apology.

It must be assumed that of the 9,000 “Fu-Go” balloon bombs launched from Japan, roughly 10% reached North America. Even 65 years later, less than 300 have been found. In all probability the bombs from some of the missing 200 of so balloons are still out there, hidden in the underbrush, tangled in tree branches and still capable of killing people, even those who think the Second World War is over and ancient history.

Wars are not fought merely by armies. And their violence does not cease merely because a peace treaty is signed.

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A DEATH IN WARTIME - The Execution of Mata Harji.

I admit, she was a sinner, and an experienced one at that. But was she responsible for the deaths of 50,000 French soldiers, as she was charged with?  In six short months of 1917 the arrogant and inept commander of the French armies General Robert Nivelle was responsible for throwing away the lives of 33,000 Frenchmen, and the wounding at least 182,000 more, while driving the French army to mutiny. During that same spring Margaretha Zelle seduced officers of the French, German and Russian Army, usually just one man at a time. If anything she improved morale, if just one man at a time. But she was the one they shot.

They came for her in the dark, before five on the morning of Wednesday, 15 October, 1917. They hoped to find her awake when they opened the door of cell number 12, but a nun had to touch her shoulder to wake Margaretha. The martinet who had prosecuted her, Captain Pierre Bouchardon, informed the startled woman, “Have courage! Your request for clemency has been rejected by the President of the Republic. The time for atonement has come.” Her first reaction was panic. She cried out, "It's not possible! It's not possible!” Then, luckily for her executioners, Margaretha got herself under control, whispering to a nun, “Don't be afraid, Sister, I shall know how to die.”

It took her thirty years, but Margaretha Zella eventually learned how to live. Adam Zelle's “little princess” was the only daughter in a Fisian speaking Dutch family with four sons. When she was 13 her doting father lost his hat shop and went bankrupt . Over the next three years her parents divorced, her mother Antje died and her father remarried. The siblings from the first marriage were scattered to relatives and Margaretha was eventually shuffled off to an uncle. Three years later Margaretha answered an ad in a lonely hearts magazine and married Rudolf MacLeod, a mustached Dutch Colonial Army captain, more than twice her age. A year later she gave birth to a son, Norman. The following year Rudolf was posted back to the Dutch East Indies. In 1898, now in Indonesia, the 21 year old Margaretha gave birth to a daughter, named Jeanne. That same year Margaretha began studying local culture, and in her native dance class she adopted the Malay name meaning “Eye of the Day.”: Mata Harji.

She dressed quickly in the cold cell, in the few threads of respectability nine months of imprisonment had left her - a gray suit, a blouse and stockings, with a blue coat slung over her shoulders, and topped by a jaunty tri-cornered hat to hide her gray hair. In the courtyard of the Prison de Saint-Lazare (above), they hustled her into an automobile, with the windows blocked out. Before five thirty that morning they drove her away from the River Seine, southward in the cold dark empty streets, past the palace of Palace of  Versailles. Turning right on the Avenue de la Pipinere, and then right again onto the Avenue Mufs du Pare, the car passed through the stone gates of a cavalry barracks.

A year after their arrival in Indonesia , both children fell ill. Two year old Norman died, and the marriage drowned in recrimination. Randolf wrote his family that Margaretha was "scum of the lowest kind, a woman without heart, who cares nothing for anything". Margaretha told her family, “I prefer to die before he touches me again. My children caught a disease from him.” She dreamed of living “like a colorful butterfly in the sun.” Rudolf resigned from the army, and the family returned to Holland in 1901. In 1903, leaving her daughter with Rudolf, Margaretha moved to Paris, but the 5'10” olive skinned woman could only find work riding horseback in a circus, and as an artists' model. In desperation, she even sought work as an exotic dancer.

As the car pulled to a stop, an officer shouted out, “Sabremain! Presentez-armes!” and the twelve khaki uniformed Zouave Sergeants snapped to attention. None of them knew their intended target was to be a woman until Margaretha stepped out of the car. It is unlikely any of them knew who the 41 year old woman was even then, since her trial had been secret, and the peak of her fame was a decade passed. Quickly, efficiently, Margaretha was led to the chosen spot in front of an eight foot berm, which was to act as a backstop for the firing squad. Her coat was removed, while a Captain quickly droned through her death sentence, and a sergeant looped a rope around her waist, binding her to the execution post. He started to bind her wrists as well, but Margaretha told him, “That will not be necessary.”

The 30 year old Margaretha, with little grace or training, fashioned her image after the bohemian artist dancer, Isadora Duncan. One historian has written, “There can have been no more ludicrous spectacle...than the bogus temple dance with which ''Lady MacLeod, Mata Hari'' rounded off the dinner parties of Parisian high society. Audiences in evening dress peered approvingly... while ''Lady MacLeod''...gyrated to allegedly Oriental strains on the violin, removed a series of veils....and finally collapsed into the sacred, though clearly carnal, embrace of the invisible (god) Siva.” '

She was famous, featured in post cards, and lurid magazine stories. But within five years “anyone who was anyone in Europe had seen her dance at least once”, and she was competing with dozens of more talented and younger imitators of herself.. By 1908 her career had begun to fade, and she had become a professional courtesan , the mistress to millionaire industrialist Émile Guimet, who was followed by numerous other wealthy men.

A priest whispered a passage from the bible, while an officer offered Margaretha a blindfold. She asked, “Must I wear it?” The officer replied, “If Madame prefers not, it makes no difference.”  He turned on his heel and he and the priest strode away, leaving the lady alone, facing the twelve combat veterans (above). The young sublieutenant raised his saber, and shouted “Joue!”, or prepare! Twelve rifles were raised to twelve shoulders. It was just after six in the morning, Wednesday, 15 October, 1917, and through the damp cold clouds, the sun was struggling to rise over the horizon.

At the outbreak of the war in August of 1914, Margaretha was caught in Germany. Two days later, she tried to leave. German custom officials seized her fur coat. Once in Switzerland, the neutral bureaucrats were suspicious of her Dutch papers, and she was returned to Germany. There an army officer offered her 20,000 francs if she would be a spy  Margaretha saw the funds as reimbursement for her stolen property. The Germans assigned her the code name H-21.

Margaretha met the eyes of the young sublieutenant and loudly thanked him, but for what was unclear. Perhaps she saw pity in his eyes. Then she blew a kiss to her lawyer, 74 year old Edouard Clunet, and then did the same to the twelve men staring at her over their rifles. Witnesses saw her turn her head away from the guns and nervously smile. The officer's saber flashed down in the gray light. The twelve rifles fired as one. Eleven bullets slammed into her chest. Margaretha Zelle crumpled against the rope binding her to the post. Then, wrote British reporter Henry Wales, “...she seemed to collapse...slowly, inertly...her head up always, and without the slightest change of expression on her face...gazing directly at those who had taken her life...and did not move”.

Margaretha contacted German intelligence only once, and then only at the request of Capt. Georges Ladoux, of French Intelligence. Then British Intelligence intercepted a German radio message about information obtained in Belgium from agent H-21. Shortly after, in February 1917,  Margaretha returned to Paris - while General Nivelle was planning his disastrous April offensive - and Ladolux ordered her arrest. Margaretha was charged with spying, but not tried until July - as British armies were suffering during the bloody muddy Passchendaele offensives (above), launched to distract the Germans from the French army's mutiny.

Prosecutor Bouchardon said that hanging on the post, Margaretha “ looked like a heap of skirts.” An officer strode up to the body, drew his pistol, and held it's barrel an inch from Margaretha's right ear. He pulled the trigger, and with a bang! a lead pellet plowed into her brain, demolishing forever whatever was left of the “little princess” and Mati Hari, and everything in between those two images.

At her trial Prosecutor Bourchard had blamed her for the failure of the Nivelle offensive. Her ex-lover Clunet had argued, “Mata Hari has been a courtesan, but never a spy.” But he was allowed to call only one witness in her defense.. After forty minutes of consideration, the six man military jury had sentenced Margaretha to die. The transcripts of her trial were ordered sealed, and will not be released to the public before October, 2017. But thirty years after her death, Bourchard would admit of the case against her, “there wasn't enough evidence to flog a cat”

Four days after Margaretha's death  in 1917, the man who had ordered her arrest, Captain Ladoux, was himself arrested, and charged with spying for Germany. He was not tried until after the war, when cooler heads acquitted him. The transcripts from his trial were also ordered sealed for one hundred years.

When Margaretha's ex-husband, Rudolf MacLeod, heard of her execution, he told the reporter, “Whatever she has done in life, she did not deserve that.” The same could have been said of every one, soldier and civilian, who has died in any war. Mata Hari: she died for our sins, as well as her own.

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MENSCH UND UBER-MENSCH Friedrich Nietzsche and God

I hope they continue to leave Friedrich Nietzsche alone. I understand why they once wanted to dig him up, of course.  And I understand why, if he was still around,  somehow, to offer an opinion, that he would say it really didn't matter.  He’s been dead a hundred years and what is left of him has long since turned to dust. What does it matter where his dust resides, or even if it all resides all in the same location? Clearly it mattered to his sister, but she was an anti-Semitic witch. She loved Friedrich but her attachment to his dust was her opiate, not his. He didn’t worry about such things, so why should I?  Why should we?  In that light, the threat to his dust was a nasty joke. The very ground they buried him in was briefly considered too valuable to be allowed to simply rest where it was, with him in it.

I care because although there is much about Friedrich that is troubling and contradictory, there was also one thing in particular which Friedrich wrote, words that spoke to me like a clarion call of honesty and integrity; and which dispelled half a lifetime of conventional pandering and route idiocy. These were the words he wrote which convinced me that intellectually I was not alone on this earth;  "Plato was a bore.” God, yes, he certainly was: a fascist, hate mongering snob and a bore; and Friedrich Nietzsche was the first man I ever read who was brave enough to say that out loud. Sometimes I feel like shouting it. PLATO WAS A BORE!

Friedrich, on the other hand, was nuts; toward the end of this life, a literal raving lunatic - was what he was. He ordered the Kaiser to journey to Rome, and once there to be executed by the Pope. And Friedrich wasn’t kidding. He wrote to friends to explain why he had done this, as if they were going to disapprove of the Kaiser’s imminent demise and hold Friedrich responsible, as if the Kaiser was imminently about to demise. Maybe that is how you know he was crazy; he could not distinguish between what he wanted to do and what he could do.

Perhaps insanity is that simple, the inability to divide in the mind between what is and what ought to be, some kind of hormonal imbalance of the chemical hierarchy of the brain, encouraging you to stuff your pigeon into the wrong hole. It was probably a symptom of the syphilis or gonorrhea he had contracted as a young soldier in the service of the crown. He was a medical orderly who in retrospect hated war and all the justifications for it. The crown he served as a young man was the last thing he had believed in outside of his own brain. As Friedrich himself wrote, “A casual stroll through a lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.” And who would know that better than Friedrich?

But that was yesterday, the age of mensch and uber-mensch. Today the mensch (or men) of Germany are far from uber (0r super), with smaller minds and smaller dreams. Unemployment in the first decade of the 21st century,  in what was recently the corrupt East Germany, was over 20%. And the little village of Rocken, where Friedrich lies in the church yard, buried next to his father, sits atop a vast reserve of lignite, politely known as “brown coal”.

It is ugly and burns dirty. But Germany has over six and one half billion tons of such lignite reserves. The heat produced by burning lignite (as opposed to anthracite) is so low as to be uneconomical unless the power plants are built right next to the vast open pit mines. Twenty-five German villages had been  already eaten up by such open pits since World War Two. And it seems Rocken would be number twenty-six or twenty-seven.  And they had to burn the coal. Who could ever imagine a world without coal?  But then, whatever would become of Friedrich? Then, in a nasty joke on all of us, the world changed. 

And it’s an old joke. A dead atheist is one who is all dressed up with no place to go. And there is the story of the rabbi, the priest and the atheist sentenced to death by the French Revolution. Asked if he has any last words, the rabbi proclaims, “I believe in the one true God!” The executioner yanks the rope and the blade flashes down and -Thud! - it stops just short of the rabbi’s neck. He is immediately released, much to the crowd’s disappointment. The Priest is next, and he proclaims, “I believe in the son, the father and the holy ghost!” The blade flashes down and – Thud! – stops just short of his neck. To the disappointment of the crowd, he is also released. Then the atheist is tied down and asked if he has any last words. And he says, “Oh, here’s your problem. You’ve got a bone stuck in the gears.”

And then of course there was the indecisive insomniac/dyslexic agnostic who lay awake all night, pondering the existence or non-existence of dog. Is Friedrich laughing yet?

Friedrich Nietzsche usually gets the blame for providing the philosophical justification for Hitler and the “final solution”, but in fact Friedrich considered anti- Semitism to be foolish. He wrote that it should be “…utterly rejected…by every sensible mind”. He hated the ultra-nationalists, like the Nazis. That’s why he broke off his friendship with the composer Richard Wagner.

Friedrich called the idea of a “master race” “…a mendacious swindle” which was a polite way of saying that Hitler was full of manure, or would be full of manure, since Hitler was 11 ½ when Friedrich died in 1900. As Friedrich wrote, “Although the most acute judges of the witches and even the witches themselves were convinced of the guilt of witchery, the guilt nevertheless was non-existent. It is thus with all guilt.” Could a man who could write that really have condoned killing Jews for having killed Jesus Christ?

Friedrich answered Rene Descartes bold claim of "God’s logic" (I think, therefore I am) with a desperate appeal for compassion: “I still live, I still think: I still have to live, I still have to think.” 

Or, to put it another way, logic once dictated that eventually Friedrich and his father and all other "less important" graves in the Rocken church yard, and the church and the entire village, would  have to be dug up. Logic dictated that every drop of oil that was burned made each remaining drop that much more valuable, and that increased the value of every ton of lignite beneath the little village of Rocken. The mining company, Milbrag, insisted the mining must start by the year 2005. But it did not. Well over half of the residents (64%) opposed the idea, and in 2008 the plans were dropped. Today Germany is moving to shut down all coal production and burning. You might still argue with Fredrick that God is dead , but there can no longer be any doubt that coal is dead, As a door nail.  While Friedrich Nietzsche lives. Not bad for a crazy old atheist. To have outlived what was once thought an essencial. 

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TORN FROM A FRAME Isabella Stewart Gardner and Her Museum

I have been in love with Isabel Steward Gardner for more than forty years. And she’s been dead for over 70 years.  Isabel was the daughter of wealth, who, as was the practice in the Gilded Age, married into even more wealth. She lived in a Back Bay mansion at 152 Beacon Street. And in the tiny fenced front yard, common to most Back Bay mansions, there grew a single tree, in which, legend has it, Isabel used to perch on summer afternoons to unexpectedly greet her startled visitors. Of course she was also quoted as saying, “Why spoil a thing with the truth.”

In March of 1865, after her 2 year old son died of pneumonia,  Isabel’s husband, Jack, began to take the broken hearted Isabel on European trips. There Isabel courted the likes of artists such as John Singer Sargent and James Whistler, and writers such as Henry James. Isabel loved to collect art, and to attend boxing matches and Harvard football games. She bet the ponies at Suffolk Downs and advised her fellow blue bloods, “Win as though you were used to it, and lose as if you like it.” And she once scandalized proper Boston society at a Philharmonic Concert by wearing a formal evening gown adorned with a headband that read “Oh, You Red Sox!”After her husband Jack died in 1898 Isabel built herself a Venetian Mansion in the reclaimed marshlands which would shortly give Fenway Park its name. Isabel called her new mansion “Fenway Court”, and it held her personal art collection. And it was there she died of a stroke, in 1924. Isabel left all her fortune to the ASPCA and endowed her home as the “Isabel Stewart Gardner Museum”. And that was why I was so personally offended by the 1990 St. Patrick’s Day robbery of the Gardner. What was stolen was not just art. It had all been the personal property of Isabel. It had all meant something special to very special woman. How dare those thugs steal from a great lady like her!We still don’t know who did it.  But the money remains on the same North End gangs that a generation earlier had robbed the Brinks Armored Car Company. But whereas the Brink’s Job of January 1950 had been the work of mooks who were all caught, the Gardner heist remains a complete and total mystery. No one has been even tried to claim the $5 million reward. The statute of limitations on the theft has run out and no one has felt the need to unburden themselves of guilt or hot paintings. And the only rumor that ever even hinted at the possible return of the 13 stolen masterpieces was probably just a confidence scam.The best guess is the thieves tried it twice. On the second attempt, they succeeded. Shortly after one AM on Monday, 19 March, 1990 two mustached “police officers” talked their way into the closed museum and swiftly handcuffed the two inexperienced guards, and then stashed them safely in the museum’s basement. Motion detectors followed the thieves for the next 81 minutes as they separated and each smashed, cut and shattered a dozen paintings from their frames; $400 million dollars worth of Rembrandts, five Degas, a Vermeer and a Manet: and one gold eagle from atop a Napoleonic banner. Then, after removing the video tapes from the VCRs at the security desk, the thieves made two separate trips out to their red hatch back parked in the side street around the corner from the museum. Before 3AM, the crooks and the paintings had disappeared forever.The real cops weren’t called until 8:15 AM the next morning. By that time it was likely the paintings were already on their way out of the country. The only description of the thieves that was broadcast was pathetic; one of the men was described as resembling Colonel Klink, from “Hogan’s Heroes”. There were no finger prints left behind, no articles of clothing, and no whispers were ever heard in art or criminal circles. No leads were received until four years later when a letter offered to return the paintings in exchange for $2.6 million. But after a first hint, that letter led nowhere. Again, in 1997, a reporter for the Boston Herald was led blindfolded to a hidden location and shown what he was told were the stolen Rembrandt’s, and even provided with paint chips as proof. But upon further examination the chips could not have been from the painting they were claimed to be from, and the whole thing was eventually written off as an attempt to finagle the freedom of Myles Connor, an art thief already under arrest.

It has been thirty years since the dozen paintings were stolen, and increasingly it appears they will never be restored. The lack of any information on the paintings’ whereabouts, or even rumors as to their location would seem to hint that the thieves are not now or perhaps were never in a position where they could blackmail whoever paid them to steal the paintings. There is, of course, no honor amongst thieves. So perhaps the thieves are dead. And with the passage of time, it becomes clear that whoever masterminded the theft is now, also dead, and their heirs may have decided to destroy the evidence of their family shame. But the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum still keeps the empty frames on the wall, to document the stolen masterpieces which have still not been returned. It is in the same spirit Isabel must have used to preserve that torn place in her heart where her little son had once resided.But what a great broad she was.

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