By Tom Clavin

“The Overlook” appears every Wednesday at tomclavin.substack.com. If you enjoy the column, please “like” it and let me know what you think by commenting. All support is appreciated. Don’t forget to hit the ‘Subscribe’ button – it’s free!

Yes, for the 250^th anniversary, let’s celebrate the American revolutionaries whose sacrifices and heroism led to the creation of an independent United States. But let us not forget, during this time of disruption with our European allies, the efforts of France to aid our cause. No one embodied that more than the Marquis de Lafayette. Thankfully, he was honored during his lifetime: It was 202 years ago this month that he made a triumphant return and tour of the country which had grown from 13 colonies to 24 states since the Frenchman first set foot on American soil.

He was, at 66, the last surviving major general of the Revolutionary War. At 19, he had presented himself to General George Washington as a fervent believer in American liberty. Lafayette would go on to fight in several crucial battles, including the Battle of Brandywine in Pennsylvania (where he was wounded) and the Siege of Yorktown in Virginia. He had then returned to France and pursued a political career championing the ideals of liberty that the American republic represented.

Inspired by the Declaration of Independence and with Thomas Jefferson’s assistance, he helped to write the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (of France). He also advocated the end of slavery, in keeping with the philosophy of natural rights. After the storming of the Bastille in July 1789, Lafayette was appointed commander-in-chief of France’s National Guard and tried to steer a middle course through the years of the French Revolution.

In August 1792, radical factions of the revolution took control of the government and ordered Lafayette’s arrest, so he fled to the Austrian Netherlands. He was captured by Austrian troops and spent more than five years in prison. Lafayette returned to France after Napoleon Bonaparte secured his release in 1797, though he refused to participate in Napoleon’s government or his military conquests. After the Bourbon Restoration of 1814, Lafayette served in the French legislature until 1824, when President James Monroe invited him to tour the United States.

Lafayette visited all of the American states and traveled more than 6,000 miles, accompanied by his son Georges Washington de La Fayette and others. The main means of transportation were stagecoach, horseback, canal barge, and steamboat.

Different cities celebrated in different ways. Some held parades or conducted an artillery salute. In some places schoolchildren were brought to welcome the Marquis. Aged veterans of the American Revolution welcomed the Marquis, and some dined with him. While touring Yorktown, he recognized and embraced James Armistead Lafayette, a free man of color who adopted his last name to honor the Marquis. (More than a century later, various towns continued to honor their own “Lafayette Day.”)

The trip had begun when Lafayette left France on the American merchant vessel Cadmus on July 13, 1824, and on August 15 he arrived in New York. Weeks of touring and celebrating followed. A major and poignant highlight was on November 4 when Lafayette arrived at Monticello in a carriage with a military escort of 120 men. Thomas Jefferson waited outside on the front portico. Close to 200 friends and neighbors had also arrived for the event. Lafayette’s carriage pulled up to the front lawn where a bugle sounded the arrival of the procession with its revolutionary banners waving. Lafayette slowly stepped down from the carriage. Jefferson was 81 and in ill health, and he gingerly descended the front steps and began making his way towards his old friend.

His grandson Randolph was present and witnessed the historic reunion: “As they approached each other, their uncertain gait quickened itself into a shuffling run, and exclaiming, ‘Ah Jefferson!’ ‘Ah Lafayette!’ they burst into tears as they fell into each other’s arms.” Everyone in attendance stood in respectful silence, many of them stifling sobs of their own. Jefferson and Lafayette then retired to the privacy of the house and began reminiscing over the many events and encounters which they had shared years before.

The next morning, Jefferson, Lafayette, and former President James Madison were taken to the Central Hotel in Charlottesville. They were escorted by mounted troops and followed by the local townspeople and other friends. They were greeted and honored with speeches, then departed the hotel at noon and set out for a banquet at the University of Virginia which Jefferson was anxious for Lafayette to see. After a three-hour dinner, Jefferson had someone read a speech that he had prepared for Lafayette, as his voice was weak and could not carry very far. This proved to be Jefferson’s last public address. After an 11-day visit, Lafayette bid farewell to Jefferson, who would pass away the following July 4.

After much more touring which would last well into 1825, Lafayette was ready to return to France. President John Quincy Adams decided to have an American warship carry him back to Europe, and he chose a recently built 44-gun frigate named Susquehanna for this honor. It was renamed the USS Brandywine to commemorate the battle in which the Frenchman had shed his blood for American freedom and as a gesture of the nation’s affection for Lafayette.

He enjoyed a last state dinner to celebrate his 68th birthday on the evening of September 6, and two days later the frigate sailed out of Chesapeake Bay toward the open ocean. After a stormy three weeks at sea, the warship’s honored passenger was finally home.

Lafayette assumed the role of elder statesman. He spoke publicly for the last time in the Chamber of Deputies on January 3, 1834. The next month, he collapsed at a funeral from pneumonia. He recovered, but in May he became bedridden after being caught in a thunderstorm. The Marquis de Lafayette died at age 76 on May 20, 1834. He was buried next to his wife at the Picpus Cemetery under soil from Bunker Hill, which his son Georges Washington sprinkled upon him.

In the United States, President Andrew Jackson – the last president to fight in the American Revolution -- ordered that Lafayette receive the same memorial honors that had been bestowed on George Washington at his death in December 1799. Both Houses of Congress were draped in black bunting for 30 days and members wore mourning badges. Congress urged Americans to follow similar mourning practices.

Later that year, former President John Quincy Adams gave a eulogy of Lafayette that lasted three hours, calling him “high on the list of the pure and disinterested benefactors of mankind.”

Tom Clavin is the bestselling author/co-author of 25 books, the latest being Vengeance: The Last Stands of Custer, Crazy Horse, and Sitting Bull, published in May by St. Martin’s Press. Please go to your local bookstore or to Bookshop.org, Amazon.com, BN.com, or tomclavin.com to purchase a copy.

By Tom Clavin

“The Overlook” can be found at tomclavin.substack.com. If you enjoy the column, please “like” it and let me know what you think by commenting. All support is appreciated. Don’t forget to hit the ‘Subscribe’ button – it’s free!

Tomorrow is the 150^th anniversary of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, certainly one of the most dramatic events to take place on American soil. My book Vengeance: The Last Stands of Custer, Crazy Horse, and Sitting Bull was published recently to coincide with that anniversary. As the title indicates, the battle was much more than “Custer’s Last Stand.” It led directly to the demise or imprisonment of Native leaders and the end of the Indian Wars in the American West. This excerpt from Vengeance details the death of Sitting Bull, who had led the Sioux-Cheyenne coalition against the 7^th Cavalry on June 25, 1876.

In 1889, Sitting Bull had an unexpected addition to his lodge. Caroline Weldon, a member of the National Indian Defense Association, reached out to him from Brooklyn, offering to be his secretary, interpreter, and advocate. Sitting Bull accepted. Weldon arrived with her young son, Christie, and moved into the family home.

She would stay only a little more than a year. The split with Sitting Bull was prompted by her opposition to the growing Ghost Dance movement. Weldon warned that it would give the government a pretext to harm him and to summon the military for intervention which would destroy what remained of the Sioux Nation. Frustrated, Weldon and her son left Sitting Bull and the Standing Rock Agency in November 1890.

Weldon would prove prescient. “By 1889 the Lakotas had fallen into despair,” writes Robert Utley. “Land agreements had cost them half of the Great Sioux Reservation, sixty million acres. Scorching dry winds had killed their crops, and Congress had delayed appropriations for so long that their rations had to be severely cut. Sickness swept the reservations.”

The following year, word spread among the reservations of a Paiute prophet named Wovoka, whose expanding fame was due to the founding of the “Ghost Dance.” Wovoka claimed to have had a vision that the Christian messiah, Jesus Christ, had returned to Earth in the form of a Native American. Though a rather confusing concept, it proved alluring to an impoverished and despairing people.

Furthermore, according to Wovoka, the white invaders would disappear from Indian lands, ancestors would lead them to good hunting grounds, the buffalo herds and all the other animals would return in abundance, and the ghosts of their ancestors would appear to them on Earth. They would then live in peace. All this would be brought about by the performance of the slow and solemn Ghost Dance, performed as a shuffle in silence to a single drumbeat.

After learning the dance from Wovoka, two Lakota leaders, Kicking Bear and his brother-in-law Short Bull, taught others in the tribe. They also wore specially made Ghost Dance shirts. Kicking Bear misunderstood the meaning of the shirts and contended that they had the power to repel bullets. Another claim by Ghost Dance proponents – which had to be particularly appealing – was that the power of the Ghost Dance would produce a great earthquake and flood which would drown all the white people.

Surrounding settlers were alarmed by the sight of the Northern Plains tribes performing the Ghost Dance, and they worried that such brazen defiance might be a prelude to armed resistance. Among them was the U.S. Indian agent James McLaughlin. He and other officials decided to take some of the chiefs into custody to quell what they called the “Messiah craze.” At the top of the list was Sitting Bull.

“Sitting Bull had gone with zest into the business of promoting the new religion,” McLaughlin alleged. “Knowing his people, and utilizing the mysticism with which he habitually preyed on their superstitions, he established himself as the high priest of the cult.”

On December 14, 1890, McLaughlin ordered the arrest of Sitting Bull in a letter to Lieutenant Bull Head of the Indian police. “P.S.,” McLaughlin added, “you must not let him escape under any circumstances.”

The next morning, Sitting Bull was awoken by as many as 40 Indian police officers arriving at his cabin on the Grand River. He let in Bull Head and several others. Bull Head told Sitting Bull that he was under arrest. Sitting Bull acquiesced, dressing and coming quietly out of his cabin. But one of his wives began to shout and his son Crow Foot berated him for simply going along. Dogs in the village, woken by the dawn raid, barked, waking dozens of people who began to coalesce into a crowd at their headman’s home.

Sitting Bull changed his mind about complying. The police were ordered to force him out of the cabin. Like Crazy Horse, his last stand was in a doorway. Sitting Bull resisted until forced outside.

The Lakota in the village were enraged. One of them, Catch-the-Bear, raised a rifle and shot Lieutenant Bull Head, who reacted by firing his revolver into the chest of Sitting Bull. Another police officer, Red Tomahawk, shot Sitting Bull in the back of the head. He and Bull Head fell to the ground. Inside the cabin, Crow Foot was shot to death.

Shortly after noon that day, Sitting Bull died. He was 59 years old. Bull Head would also die from his wound.

After Sitting Bull’s death and the subsequent skirmish, 200 members of his Hunkpapa band, fearful of reprisals, fled Standing Rock to join Spotted Elk and his Miniconjou band at the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation. And not feeling safe enough there, on December 23, Spotted Elk and his band, along with 38 Hunkpapa, left that reservation and fled to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation to seek shelter with Red Cloud.

They were allowed to camp at a place called Wounded Knee.

Tom Clavin is the bestselling author/co-author of 25 books. The latest one, Vengeance: The Last Stands of Custer, Crazy Horse, and Sitting Bull, was published last month by St. Martin’s Press. To purchase a copy, please go to your local bookstore or to Bookshop.org, Amazon.com, BN.com, or tomclavin.com.

By Tom Clavin

“The Overlook” can be found at tomclavin.substack.com. If you enjoy the column, please “like” it and let me know what you think by commenting. All support is appreciated. Don’t forget to hit the ‘Subscribe’ button – it’s free!

[There are three reasons why I have dusted off and (slightly) updated this essay: (1) A recent, very enjoyable reunion of the Pacers, (2) The Knicks championship, and (3) Father’s Day this weekend. The essay originally appeared in Promise: A Collection, a memoir of sorts published in 2020, which can be found on Amazon.]

One of the first things I did when I moved out to Sag Harbor many years ago was to find out where the basketball action was, and I was welcomed by newfound friends at evening games in Amagansett and East Hampton gyms. While I was never a particularly good player, I could not imagine not playing ball.

It’s quite a different story now with a balky back and a lot more rings in my tree. I had to retire at the age of 42 because of the back pain. Some years ago, I thought of writing a book with a fairly clever title of The Court of Appeal that would be a chronicle of my ardent connection to basketball and detail my midlife return to the game. That did not happen, and now I am certain it won’t.

Though a wonderful book written by the late Pete Axthelm was titled The City Game, I don’t recall that I played basketball when living in the Bronx (though I did two decades later at the East 68^th Street courts in Manhattan). St. Brendan’s must have had a court, but I remember only the strike-zone boxes chalked on the school’s walls for stickball games and buying Mars-colored “Spaldeens” at the corner stationary store to play curb ball. Fun events in my neighborhood were when the men played streetball. The roster of players was always changing, even in the middle of a game, because in that Irish-Catholic neighborhood many of the men were cops, firemen, and bartenders and they came and went as their shifts began and ended. Sometimes fights broke out, but every game ended with the men sharing quart bottles of Piel’s and Ballantine.

It was when I moved out to Long Island that I got into basketball. We bought a house that was only a block from the school where I went from third through fifth grade. It had a court with metal backboards and rims and chain-link nets. What became one of life’s most enjoyable consistencies was to trot over to the court any day and find some guys playing hoop, and this was as true in 11^th grade as it was in fifth. Basketball was not the only reason but it was a big reason why several of the guys I played with from eight years old on remain my best friends today.

It had to be a relief for the parents of that neighborhood in Deer Park that most of the time they knew where their sons were. There were no cell phones then, of course, so if you wanted to check on your kid or you had to pick him up for a dental appointment or whatever, you drove to Memorial School and shouted a name out the window. “One more basket!” or “Almost done!” was the response. Only when you finally accompanied the shouting with a honking horn did the targeted kid reluctantly leave the game and walk off to a chorus of “Mama’s boy!” This happened to all of us at one time or another, but it was a lot more fun when it was someone else’s turn.

Today, when I drive past a court and it’s covered in ice or snow, no one is playing ball. Winter was no obstacle to us. Our mothers insisted we have coats, gloves, and hats on when we left the house. That was okay because when we got to the court our first job was to break through and sweep away the ice or snow, and when that was done, we were warm enough to strip down to shorts and t-shirts and handle the ball with fingers no longer numb. It was such an exhilarating feeling to be hot and have sweat dripping off my skin and the air was 35 degrees or lower.

Just about everyone acquired nicknames. One guy – who now lives in Wainscott – was Set-Shot because he didn’t move that much, just picked a spot about 20 feet from the basket and if you got him the ball there the result was almost always a swish. Mine was Hondo. Mostly, this was because I tried to emulate John Havlicek with his ceaseless motion making up for marginal talent, but also because of the John Wayne movie I’d seen about a dozen times.

Another reason for a basketball court being so appealing was that it was a good place to hang out. We didn’t necessarily call anyone, we just went to the basketball court at the elementary school, even for years after we graduated from it. Sometimes another kid was there, other times I shot around until another kid I knew showed up. It was a comfortable way to talk while exchanging shots and deciding if we felt like a game of one-on-one. It wasn’t something you could do as well with a football or baseball because to have a decent catch you had to stand far enough apart, forcing you to yell at each other.

Actually, you don’t have to be a kid to enjoy hoop moments with just another friend. I have a very fond memory of a day about 35+ years ago at the outdoor court at the Wainscott School. Back then – and this could still be true – the court was a very popular one for games because the backboards were straight and sturdy, the asphalt wasn’t full of cracks, and when you took a break the ocean was only a couple of minutes away.

That day many years ago was a throwback to Deer Park days. It was June, and my son, Brendan, was six months old. Hondo and Set-Shot had some time to kill. We drove to Wainscott and I placed my son in his car seat at the edge of the court. For a couple of hours friends simply shot around, talking about this and that, marveling at how Brendan stayed awake the whole time with his eyes following the ball.

Certainly one topic of conversation: When a bunch of us who were best friends from that neighborhood in Deer Park were in high school, we were known as the Pacers. This had nothing to do with the NBA team in Indiana. My vague recollection is that we set the pace of games and just plain outlasted better opponents. The Pacers were responsible for one of my most satisfying moments.

We challenged a team from the west side of town for the school championship. They were called the Klean Kut Kids. Yes, they even had that on t-shirts and they were bigger, stronger, and nastier than us and had kicked our butts numerous times before in schoolyard games. The rag-tag Pacers were lambs being led to slaughter for the assembled students’ amusement.

Only minutes before the game, Debbie, the girl I had a crush on, told me the last thing an infatuated high school guy wants to hear (other than “I’m pregnant”): “I just want us to be friends.”

My heart shattered and the pieces fell into my guts like metal shavings. Being the team captain, I couldn’t hide, so I stumbled into the gym, announcements were made, the game began. We killed the Klean Kut Kids. I remember little about the game itself but I remember vividly holding the trophy aloft and thinking that when all else fails, I could count on these guys. Thankfully, that is still true.

Tom Clavin is the bestselling author/co-author of 25 books. The latest one, Vengeance: The Last Stands of Custer, Crazy Horse, and Sitting Bull, was published last month by St. Martin’s Press. To purchase a copy, please go to your local bookstore or to Bookshop.org, Amazon.com, BN.com, or tomclavin.com.

By Tom Clavin

“The Overlook” can be found at tomclavin.substack.com. If you enjoy the column, please “like” it and let me know what you think by commenting. All support is appreciated. Don’t forget to hit the ‘Subscribe’ button – it’s free!

The 82^nd anniversary of D-Day was this past Saturday and making some box-office hay is the recently released Pressure. This film stars Brendan Fraser as General Dwight Eisenhower and details the decision to launch the invasion of Normandy in June 1944 despite challenging weather conditions.

Rightly so, the casualties of D-Day should be mourned and they should be respected for their courage and sacrifice. There was no better demonstration of General William Tecumseh Sherman’s statement: “War is hell.” But often overlooked are the casualties of a pre-D-Day “invasion” with the death toll being at least 700 men -- more than would die in the actual landings at Utah Beach some five weeks later.

Planning for “Operation Overlord” (D-Day) began in earnest in 1943. In November, the Devon County Council in England was informed by the War Cabinet that the Slapton Sands area was to be totally evacuated to permit part of the South Hams to be used to practice assault landings for Utah Beach.

Preparations began for a series of exercises, with various code names, to take place on the beaches of Slapton Sands during the month of April 1944, including naval operations and live fire exercises on the beaches. The faux invasion was to be known as “Exercise Tiger.”

On the afternoon of April 27, 1944, thousands of men began boarding eight Landing Ship Tanks at Plymouth and Brixham. The LSTs were about to embark on a full-dress rehearsal for D-Day. Slapton Sands was chosen because of its similarity to Utah Beach, the D-Day assignment for this convoy. The exercise also included live ammunition on the beach. The local British residents had been evacuated from their farms and homes for the duration of the rehearsals taking place.

American soldiers were in full combat gear below in the tank deck, along with their vehicles. The LSTs were loaded with smaller amphibious vehicles -- tanks, jeeps, weapons, and trucks that were full of fuel and ammunition. The sailors and officers were at their posts as they set sail. The ships were on their way to meet and form one convoy in Lyme Bay. The distance from Lyme Bay to Slapton Sands was the approximate time it would take to make the crossing to Utah Beach on D-Day.

The convoy’s intended escort, the HMS Scimitar, a British destroyer, was kept in port for repairs. The American military was not informed that the escort would not be there. The only other British ship with the convoy was the Royal Navy Corvette Azalea. Also, unknown to the LSTs’ communications room, a typographical error was made on the radio frequency the ships were given to be told of enemy activity in the English Channel. The convoy never heard the warnings about German submarines in the area.

All of the LSTs arrived at approximately 2 a.m. on April 28 in Lyme Bay and formed one long convoy as they began the journey back to Slapton Sands. Suddenly, a wolfpack of German subs, on a routine patrol, approached the convoy and began spewing torpedoes at the ships. General Quarters was sounded on all the ships, but the LSTs had little firepower and protection against these fast-moving underwater predators.

Initially, the torpedoes missed hitting the LSTs because of their flat-bottom hulls. Survivors from the tank decks recounted stories of hearing the torpedoes scraping the bottom of the hull. The submarines quickly made adjustments and LST 507, at the back of the convoy, took a direct hit and soon was in flames and sinking. LST 531, in the middle of the convoy, then took direct hits from two torpedoes. She would sink within six minutes. LST 289, in front of LST 507, was the third and final ship that was hit by a torpedo. It did not sink but took extensive damage to the stern and suffered the loss of life of 13 men and many were injured.

The LSTs remaining afloat followed orders and moved out in a zig-zagging pattern as they began making their way to the nearest port. By this time the subs had left the scene. Captain John Doyle, of LST 515, the lead ship of the convoy, disobeyed orders and returned to rescue survivors from the sea. His crew rescued approximately 134 men who would have surely perished. Doyle and his LST remained on the scene until the HMS Onslow arrived at dawn to assist in rescuing men and retrieving the bodies of those who died.

There was plenty of work to do: The waters were frigid and hypothermia quickly set in. Soldiers carrying their heavy gear in backpacks did not receive instructions on the proper use of their life preservers and drowned. There were not enough lifeboats and the surface of the water was in flames from the burning fuel. Those who survived were taken to various established and temporary hospitals. They were told never to speak of what happened under threat of court martial because of the secrecy required for D-Day . . . and, of course, to not reveal what an embarrassing disaster Exercise Tiger was.

There was no leave given to survivors to recover from the trauma, no time for mourning those who died. They were reassigned to other LSTs and took part in the D-Day invasion. It was not until the Sherman Tank Memorial was established in 1984 that the tragedy slowly became known to the public. The survivors began to speak about it, a few at a time.

By 1994, on the 50th anniversary of the event, many survivors were interviewed on television documentaries, and finally the family members of those lost finally knew what happened to their loved ones. Even now, more than 80 years later, the very few survivors left still weep when speaking about the tragedy and the great loss of life.

Some solace is that all of the deceased have been accounted for. Individual bodies retrieved at the time were buried temporarily at Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey, England. Records were kept on those whose bodies were lost at sea or who went down with the ships. After the war, the families were asked if they wished to have their family member returned to the United States for burial or have them remain overseas. Those whose remains were not returned to the U.S. were buried at Cambridge American Cemetery in England. Those whose bodies were not recovered have their names on the Wall of the Missing at Cambridge American Cemetery or on the Wall at the Normandy American Cemetery in France.

Tom Clavin is the bestselling author/co-author of 25 books. The latest one, Vengeance: The Last Stands of Custer, Crazy Horse, and Sitting Bull, has just been published by St. Martin’s Press. To purchase a copy, please go to your local bookstore or to Bookshop.org, Amazon.com, BN.com, or tomclavin.com.

By Tom Clavin

“The Overlook” can be found at tomclavin.substack.com. If you enjoy the column, please “like” it and let me know what you think by commenting. All support is appreciated. Don’t forget to hit the ‘Subscribe’ button – it’s free!

The bombs started falling at dawn on December 8, 1941.

Laura Mae Cobb pressed herself against the floor as explosions shook the naval hospital in Manila. At 49, she’d seen plenty in her nursing career. But nothing like this. The Cavite Navy Yard next door was burning. Black smoke filled the sky. And wounded men were already arriving faster than anyone could count. They came in cars, trucks, anything with wheels. Four and five soldiers crammed into each vehicle. Blood everywhere.

“Operating table’s full,” a doctor shouted. “Use the steps. Use the floor. Anywhere.”

Cobb had been Chief Nurse for less than a year. Now she was watching her world explode.

Laura Mae Cobb was born in Atchison, Kansas, in May 1892. She graduated from Mulvane High School in 1910, taught school for a time, entered the nursing training program at Wesley Hospital in Wichita in 1915, and graduated from that program in 1918.

She served as a nurse in the U.S. Navy from July 1918 to July 1921 (including brief service at the Canacao Naval Hospital in Manila at the end of World War I) then worked in civilian hospitals in Iowa and Michigan for three years. She rejoined the Navy in April 1924 and served in naval hospitals throughout the U.S. in the 1920s and 1930s. After serving for more than a decade in a naval hospital in Washington, D.C., rumors of war prompted her to request “to go overseas because someone had to go.” She was subsequently transferred to the naval hospital on Guam in April 1940, where she received a commendation for continuous duty for 48 hours during a typhoon that November.

In February 1941, Cobb was again assigned—now as Chief Nurse—to the Canacao Naval Hospital in Manila. When the Japanese attacked in December 1941, Cobb and 10 other navy nurses remained with the wounded. For weeks, they worked around the clock as American forces retreated. Manila fell. The Navy abandoned the hospital. But Laura Mae Cobb and 10 other nurses stayed behind. Someone had to care for the men too wounded to move.

On January 2, 1942, the Japanese arrived. “You are now prisoners of war,” the commander announced. Eleven women. Surrounded by enemy soldiers. Thousands of miles from home.

Before the guards could search them, she stuffed all 11 military records under her uniform. If the Japanese found those papers, her nurses could face execution as spies. The hidden documents pressed against her ribs -- a secret that could save their lives.

“Inventory all medical supplies,” the Japanese officer commanded.

Cobb stared at their precious quinine bottles. Without this medicine, malaria would kill half their patients. She had seconds to decide. “Relabel everything,” she whispered to her staff. “The quinine becomes baking soda. The morphine becomes aspirin.”

They worked through the night, switching labels, hiding their best medicines in plain sight. When the Japanese looted the pharmacy the next morning, they grabbed bottles of “worthless” baking soda and left the real quinine behind. For 37 months, the ruse worked.

Two months after the Japanese takeover, the nurses were moved to Santo Tomas University. The occupiers had turned the campus into a prison camp for over 3500 people. Cobb became superintendent of the camp hospital. Eleven nurses treating hundreds of patients with almost no supplies. They made bandages from torn sheets. Scavenged metal for surgical tools. Boiled rainwater for IV fluids.

“We don’t have medicine,” Cobb told her nurses. “But we have our hands, our hearts, and each other.”

Month after month, conditions got worse. The Japanese cut food rations. Then cut them again. By 1944, each person got 900 calories a day. Near the end, barely 300. Cobb watched her nurses grow skeletal. Their uniforms hung like sacks. But they never stopped working 12-hour shifts. Cobb saved every scrap of food for her nurses. Picked weevils out of their rice by hand. She later said, “We got so we didn’t especially mind the weevils, but the cockroaches and worms made eating tough going much of the time.”

When dysentery hit the camp, Cobb again worked without sleep for 48 hours straight. The other nurses called her their anchor. The one steady thing in hell.

By February 1945, people were dying of starvation. Cobb weighed 65 pounds. Her heart was failing. Arthritis twisted her hands. But she still made morning rounds. Still checked on every patient. Still whispered encouragement to nurses half her age.

Then, on the 23rd, they heard gunfire. “American paratroopers!” someone screamed. The rescue had come. After 37 months, freedom was bursting through the camp gates. As chaos erupted, Cobb told her nurses, “Protect the babies with all your life.” They began to evacuate newborns and wounded patients under enemy fire. Every nurse followed Cobb to safety. Not one was left behind.

All 11 Navy nurses survived. Against impossible odds, through starvation and disease and brutality, they’d all made it. Back in America, people called them heroes. The Angels of Bataan. They received medals and parades and newspaper headlines. But Laura Mae Cobb just wanted to keep nursing.

Seventy-eight American nurses became prisoners of war in World War II. Only one was a chief nurse who kept her entire team alive while continuing to heal others. Her story reminds us that real strength isn’t about fighting back -- sometimes it’s about never stopping the work that matters most.

Upon evacuation to Guam, Cobb said, “I want to return to the Philippines.” But the nurses were nevertheless returned to the United States, where Cobb was promoted to lieutenant commander and awarded the Bronze Star, a Gold Star in lieu of a second Bronze Star, the Defense of Philippines Ribbon, a Distinguished Army Unit Citation, and the Asiatic-Pacific Theater Ribbon with two Battle Stars.

Laura Mae Cobb retired from the Navy in 1947 for health reasons and worked in a sanatorium in Los Angeles. She moved back to Wichita in 1974 and died there in September 1981 at 89.

Tom Clavin is the bestselling author/co-author of 25 books. The latest one, Vengeance: The Last Stands of Custer, Crazy Horse, and Sitting Bull, has just been published by St. Martin’s Press. To purchase a copy, please go to your local bookstore or to Bookshop.org, Amazon.com, BN.com, or tomclavin.com.

By Tom Clavin

“The Overlook” can be found at tomclavin.substack.com. If you enjoy the column, please “like” it and let me know what you think by commenting. All support is appreciated. Don’t forget to hit the ‘Subscribe’ button – it’s free!

I was remiss in not writing about Gladys Brown West when she passed away in January at the age of 95. I can make up for that now with the summer traveling season beginning. What is the connection? Read on.

As a child in Sutherland, Virginia, she was Gladys Mae Brown. It was a rural, impoverished community with woods stretching for miles in every direction. No paved roads. No streetlights. Just tobacco fields and woods. Twice a day she walked those woods, three miles each way, to reach a one-room schoolhouse that leaked when it rained. The desks were rusty hand-me-downs. The books were falling apart. Still, Gladys knew that education was her way out.

Her mother worked in the local tobacco factory. Her father worked for the railroad. They barely scraped by. But when Gladys became valedictorian of her high school, something impossible happened – Virginia State College gave her a full scholarship. She would use the money she’d saved from babysitting to pay for room and board. In 1952, she walked onto the campus with a suitcase and a dream.

Gladys was there to study mathematics. This was at a time when many people believed that women – and especially black women -- weren’t supposed to understand numbers. Just three years later, she had a Master’s Degree in the subject.

A year after that, Gladys Brown received a letter that would change history. The U.S. Navy wanted her at their secret facility in Dahlgren, Virginia. It was home to the most powerful computer in the world. She was the second black woman they’d ever hired and she became one of four black employees in the entire place. One of them, Ira West, also a mathematician, would become her husband.

Dahlgren sat on the Potomac River like a fortress. High security. Segregated dormitories. Hotels that wouldn’t take black guests when she traveled for work. The civil rights movement was exploding outside those gates, but as a government employee, she couldn’t march or protest. Instead, Gladys solved problems that nobody else could solve.

Her first big project took 100 hours of calculations. By hand. Every single number checked and double-checked and verified again. She was mapping Pluto’s movement relative to Neptune. Gladys won an award for that work. But more importantly, she’d found her calling.

For the next four decades, she would use math to figure out exactly where everything was in space. And exactly where Earth was in relation to everything else. The problem sounds simple, but it wasn’t because the Earth isn’t round. It bulges at the middle. It’s flat at the poles. Gravity pulls differently in different places. The ocean tides change everything. Mountains and valleys bend the surface in ways you can’t see.

If you want a satellite to stay where it’s supposed to stay, you need to know Earth’s exact shape. Get it wrong by even a little bit, and your satellite drifts away. Get it really wrong, and nothing works. Gladys spent years getting it right.

In the 1960s, computers began to replace the human calculators who did this work by hand. Gladys learned to program the IBM 7030, which at the time was the world’s fastest supercomputer. She taught it to process satellite data faster than any human ever could. But the human brain was still doing the thinking.

In 1975, Gladys became manager of a project called GEOS-3. This was a satellite that combined two different ways of measuring Earth’s surface from space. For the first time, scientists could see the invisible bumps and dips in the ocean floor just by looking at how gravity pulled the water around. Gladys published her results in 1979 in the Journal of Geophysical Research.

Three years later, she managed another satellite project: SEASAT. This one could measure ocean waves, water temperature, and coastal features from orbit. Her team cut the processing time in half. And then she published the paper that changed everything: “Mean Earth Ellipsoid Determined from SEASAT 1 Altimetric Observations.”

Buried in that dry academic title was the mathematical model of Earth’s exact shape. Every bump. Every dip. Every gravitational pull mapped with precision nobody had ever achieved. That model became the foundation for GPS.

Here’s how the Global Positioning System works: Satellites in space know exactly where they are. They send signals down to your phone. Your phone measures how long those signals take to travel. Then it does math to figure out exactly where you are. But that math only works if you know Earth’s exact shape. If the model is wrong, every GPS calculation on the planet is wrong. Your phone thinks you’re in the wrong place. Navigation fails. The whole system crumbles.

Gladys West’s model was so precise that GPS could work. Every time your phone tells you where you are, you’re using her math. Every time you get directions to somewhere new, you’re following her calculations. Every rideshare pickup. Every food delivery. Every “Find My Phone” search. All of it works because a sharecropper’s daughter from rural Virginia spent 42 years getting the numbers exactly right.

However, while Gladys was changing the world, she kept getting passed over for promotions. White male colleagues got the advancement she deserved. She saw it happening. She wasn’t bitter about it. “I always felt responsible for being the best and doing the best that I could,” she said later. “I would give my best regardless of what was going on. Because I just respected myself that well.”

Gladys West retired in 1998. She was 68 and had recently had a stroke. Most people would have stopped there. She enrolled in a doctoral program. She was 70 years old when she earned a Ph.D.

For most of her career, almost nobody outside that Navy facility knew her name. The world was using her work every single day, but she was invisible. Recognition came slowly. In 2017, her commanding officer wrote about her role in GPS for Black History Month. In 2018, at age 88, she was inducted into the Air Force Space and Missile Pioneers Hall of Fame. In 2021, the United Kingdom’s Royal Academy of Engineering awarded her the Prince Philip Medal, its highest individual honor.

Her legacy was brought to public attention following the release of the book and the blockbuster Hollywood film Hidden Figures, which celebrated the crucial work of black female mathematicians at NASA.

When people asked what it was like to realize the impact of her work, she replied, “When you’re working every day, you’re not thinking, ‘What impact is this going to have on the world?’ You’re thinking, ‘I’ve got to get this right.’” She got it right. She placed invisible mathematical foundations under the entire modern world. Her numbers are still up there in space, still guiding every GPS signal back down to Earth.

Gladys and Ira West, who married in 1957, had three children and seven grandchildren. She died in January 2026, 15 months after her husband.

Tom Clavin is the bestselling author/co-author of 25 books. The latest one, Vengeance: The Last Stands of Custer, Crazy Horse, and Sitting Bull, has just been published by St. Martin’s Press. To purchase a copy, please go to your local bookstore or to Bookshop.org, Amazon.com, BN.com, or tomclavin.com.

By Tom Clavin

“The Overlook” can be found at tomclavin.substack.com. If you enjoy the column, please “like” it and let me know what you think by commenting. All support is appreciated. Don’t forget to hit the ‘Subscribe’ button – it’s free!

The train robbery on May 22, 1868, turned out even better than the Reno Gang expected – at total of $96,000 was taken. And it went off without a hitch.

The gang of 12 men, led by three of the Reno brothers, stopped the train outside Marshfield, Indiana. They uncoupled the express car, broke in, threw the manager outside, and turned their attention to the two safes. They were opened without much difficulty and emptied. As the gang members rode away, they split up into smaller groups to better evade capture.

Some of you are aware that in The Last Outlaws I tell the story of the Dalton Gang. If I were to return to the topic of outlaw brothers, I’d write about one of the first such notorious gangs, named for the Reno brothers. They set the infamous standard for post-Civil War outlaws. And the punishments were more sensational than the crimes.

The story begins with J. Wilkison Reno, who moved to Indiana from Kentucky and married Julia Ann Freyhafer in 1835. Future gang members Franklin (Frank), John, Simeon (Sim), and William (Bill) Reno were born to the couple in Rockford. There was also another son, Clinton (”Honest” Clint), and a daughter, Laura. In their early years, the siblings were raised in a strict Methodist farming household and were required to read the Bible all day on Sunday, according to John Reno’s 1879 autobiography.

The older three brothers got into trouble early. John claimed that he and Frank bilked travelers in crooked card games. The Renos were also suspected when a series of mysterious fires broke out around Rockford over a period of seven years beginning in 1851. The crimes caused considerable tension in the town, so Wilkison and his family fled, relocating to St. Louis. The Civil War broke out shortly after, and the brothers enlisted.

During the war, Frank, John, and Simeon became “bounty jumpers.” They were paid to enlist in the Union Army, then failed to appear for duty. They continued to enlist under different names and in different locales, taking additional money. Federal records show that eventually Frank, John, and Simeon deserted.

In 1864, Frank and John returned to Rockford and a gang began to form under their leadership. Simeon and William soon joined them. Late that year, Frank and two other gang members, Grant Wilson and a man named Dixon, robbed the post office and Gilbert’s Store in nearby Jonesville. They were arrested but were released on bond. Wilson agreed to testify against his fellow robbers but was murdered before he could do so, and Frank was acquitted.

The Reno Gang would have the dubious distinction of being the first “Brotherhood of Outlaws” in the United States. They terrorized the Midwest for several years and inspired a host of similar gangs who copied their crimes, leading to several decades of high-profile train robberies. Their gang attracted several new members after the end of the war. They started by robbing and murdering travelers in Jackson County and began to branch out to other counties, where they raided merchants and communities.

They planned to rob their first train near Seymour, Indiana, an important rail hub at that time. On the evening of October 6, 1866, John Reno, Sim Reno, and Frank Sparkes boarded an Ohio and Mississippi Railroad train as it started to leave the depot. They broke into the express car, restrained the guard, and smashed open a safe containing approximately $16,000. From the moving train, the three men pushed a larger safe over the side, where the rest of the gang was waiting. Unable to open the second safe, the gang fled as a large posse approached.

Later, passenger George Kinney stepped forward to identify two of the robbers. The three men were arrested but were released on bail. When Kinney was shot and killed, the other passengers refused to testify and all charges had to be dropped. However, the robbery would ultimately lead to the gang’s downfall. The contents of the safe were insured by the Adams Express Company, which hired the Pinkerton Detective Agency to track down and capture the gang.

On November 17, 1867, the courthouse in Gallatin, Missouri, was robbed. John Reno was identified, arrested by Pinkerton agents, and sentenced to 25 years in the Missouri State Penitentiary. He was released in February 1878. He returned to Seymour, but was again sent to prison, for three years, this time for counterfeiting.

John Reno’s absence did not deter the gang. Three robberies in Iowa followed in quick succession, in February and March 1868. Frank Reno and fellow gang members Albert Perkins and Miles Ogle were caught by detectives led by Allan Pinkerton’s son William, but they broke out of jail on April 1. A second train robbery occurred in December 1867, when two members of the gang robbed another train leaving the Seymour depot. The robbers netted $8,000, which was turned over to the brothers. A third train, owned by the Ohio & Mississippi, was stopped by six members of the gang on July 10, though the Reno brothers were not involved. Waiting in ambush, however, were 10 Pinkerton agents. A shootout ensued, and after several of the gang were wounded, the would-be robbers fled.

In March 1868, the residents of Seymour formed a vigilante group with the aim of killing the Reno Gang. In response, the gang fled west to Iowa where they robbed the Harrison County treasury of $14,000. The next day, they robbed the Mills County treasury of $12,000. The Pinkerton detectives quickly located the men and arrested them at Council Bluffs, Iowa. But the gang escaped from their jail and returned to Indiana.

Next up was the robbery on May 22. Twelve men boarded a Jefferson, Madison and Indianapolis Railroad train as it stopped at the depot in Marshfield, Indiana. As the train pulled away, the gang overpowered the engineer and uncoupled the passenger cars, allowing the engine to speed away. After breaking into the express car and throwing express messenger Thomas Harkins off the train (causing fatal injuries), the gang broke open the safe, netting an estimated $96,000. This robbery gained national attention and was reported on in many major papers. The Pinkertons pursued, but the gang dispersed throughout the Midwest.

The gang attempted to rob another train on July 9. Pinkerton detectives had learned of the plan and 10 agents were waiting on board. When the gang broke in, the agents opened fire, wounding two of the gang. Everyone was able to escape except Volney Elliot, who identified the other members of the gang in exchange for leniency. Using this information, the detectives arrested two more members of the gang, Charlie Roseberry and Theodore Clifton, the next day.

All three men were taken by train to jail. However, on July 10, 1868, three miles outside Seymour, the prisoners were taken off the train and hanged from a nearby tree by a group of masked men calling themselves the Jackson County Vigilance Committee. Three other gang members, Henry Jerrell, Frank Sparks, and John Moore, were captured shortly after in Illinois and returned to Seymour. They were also hanged by vigilantes, from the same tree, at the site which became known as Hangman Crossing, Indiana.

On July 27, 1868, the Pinkertons captured William and Simeon Reno in Indianapolis. They were tried in Lexington and convicted of robbing the Marshfield train, but because of the threat of vigilantes, they were moved to the more secure Floyd County Jail. Sure enough, the day after their removal from Lexington, the vigilantes broke into the vacated jail, hoping to catch and lynch the men.

Frank Reno, the gang’s leader, and Charlie Anderson were tracked down to Windsor, Ontario. With the help of U.S. Secretary of State William Seward, the men were extradited and sent to New Albany, Indiana, to join the other prisoners.

On the night of December 11, 1868, about 65 hooded men traveled by train to New Albany. The men marched four abreast from the station to the Floyd County Jail where, just after midnight, they forced their way into the jail and the sheriff’s home. After they beat the sheriff, Thomas Fullenlove, and shot him in the arm for refusing to turn over the keys, his wife surrendered them to the mob.

Frank Reno was the first to be dragged from his cell to be lynched. He was followed by brothers William and Simeon. Another gang member, Charlie Anderson, was the fourth and last to be lynched. It was rumored that the vigilantes were part of the group known as the Scarlet Mask Society or Jackson County Vigilance Committee.

No one was ever charged, named, or officially investigated in any of the lynchings. Many local newspapers, such as the New Albany Weekly Ledger, stated that “Judge Lynch” had spoken.

Frank Reno and Charlie Anderson were technically in federal custody when they were lynched. This is believed to be the only time in U.S. history that a federal prisoner had ever been lynched by a mob before a trial. Secretary Seward wrote a formal letter of apology as a result. A new bill was later introduced into the U.S. Congress that clarified the responsibility for the safety of extradited prisoners.

A tasty bit of trivia: The Reno Brothers have been portrayed in at least three films, most notably in the 1956 movie Love Me Tender, in which Elvis Presley made his big-screen debut as Clint Reno.

Tom Clavin is the bestselling author/co-author of 25 books. The latest one, Vengeance: The Last Stands of Custer, Crazy Horse, and Sitting Bull, has just been published by St. Martin’s Press. To purchase a copy, please go to your local bookstore or to Bookshop.org, Amazon.com, BN.com, or tomclavin.com.

By Tom Clavin

“The Overlook” can be found at tomclavin.substack.com. If you enjoy the column, please “like” it and let me know what you think by commenting. All support is appreciated. Don’t forget to hit the ‘Subscribe’ button – it’s free!

Vengeance: The Last Stands of Custer, Crazy Horse, and Sitting Bull is being published this week by St. Martin’s Press. In several of the interviews that I have already done, I’ve been asked: Why another book on the Battle of the Little Bighorn? After all, a whole stable of distinguished writers – including, in more recent years, James Donovan, Mark Lee Gardner, Nathaniel Philbrick, and Robert Utley – has tackled one of the most famous topics in American history.

That very fame is a reason. The battle on June 25 – 27, 1876 is like our version of a Greek myth. It is a story of warriors clashing in the most dramatic way, and it ends in tragedy. With every re-telling we re-experience that epic event and we learn new things – or change our opinions – about the battle and its participants.

It makes sense, too, that there is a new book to coincide with the 150^th anniversary of the Battle of the Little Bighorn. It reminds us of reports reaching major cities throughout the United States in July 1876 of the defeat of not only of an entire Army regiment but the demise of George Armstrong Custer, the most charismatic cavalry commander in the country. The anniversary of such a catastrophe – for white America – is reason enough.

“In truth, it was also the last stand of the Sioux and Cheyenne as well, because their victory over Custer led to their own destruction,” writes Herman J. Viola in Little Bighorn Remembered. “Imagine the shock and embarrassment to citizens of the United States enjoying the centennial year of their independence. The U.S. Army went after Sitting Bull and his allies with a vengeance.”

Indeed, because the battle is often referred to as “Custer’s Last Stand,” where he met his glorious end – as it would be portrayed in scores of illustrations and paintings – such a Custer-centric view obscures that the event hastened the end of independence for the Lakota Sioux and Cheyenne. By the finish of the following year, many of their leaders were dead, in exile, or confined to reservations, sometimes starving thanks to the malfeasance of Indian agents. The experiences and fates of Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, Gall, and others are crucial to the full story.

Then there is that word again: Vengeance. That theme is woven throughout the story. In addition to gaining prestige and counting coup, warriors in the Great Plains tribes were always seeking to avenge some previous transgression. When the white settlers and soldiers arrived, the hunger for vengeance intensified – Cheyene must avenge the Sand Creek Massacre, the Army must avenge the Fetterman Fight, etc. The ultimate vengeance came at Wounded Knee in December 1890 – the same month that saw the murder of Sitting Bull. It was the final “battle” of the war against the Plains tribes.

One more reason: I wanted to tell this legendary tale through my own lens. Having written a number of books about well-known characters and events in the 19^th-century American West, the thought occurred: Why haven’t I written about the Battle of the Little Bighorn? And I wanted to write the story in as straightforward a way as I could, without over-analyzing and taking detours. If readers keep turning pages, I have achieved that goal.

This story is one that does not get old – it gets retold and retold, as befits an event featuring characters who hold a prominent place is American mythology.

Tom Clavin is the bestselling author/co-author of 25 books. The latest one is Vengeance: The Last Stands of Custer, Crazy Horse, and Sitting Bull, being published this week by St. Martin’s Press. To purchase a copy, please go to your local bookstore or to Bookshop.org, Amazon.com, BN.com, or tomclavin.com.

By Tom Clavin

“The Overlook” can be found at tomclavin.substack.com. If you enjoy the column, please “like” it and let me know what you think by commenting. All support is appreciated. Don’t forget to hit the ‘Subscribe’ button – it’s free!

[Vengeance: The Last Stands of Custer, Crazy Horse, and Sitting Bull is to be published next Tuesday by St. Martin’s Press. One reason for the main title can be found in the following excerpt. While the majority of the warriors at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in June 1876 were Sioux, as was the overall leader, Sitting Bull, the Cheyenne participants could connect their hunger for vengeance directly to an event that took place eight years earlier.]

A foot of snow had already fallen before sunrise on November 23, 1868. The soldiers of the 7^th Cavalry shook the sleep out of their eyes and the flakes off their shoulders as they gathered around flickering campfires struggling to survive the frequent blasts of wind. As they drank weak coffee, the troopers glanced up: The storm showed no sign of slowing.

This was good news to Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer, the field commander of the regiment.* Only the calendar disagreed that it was winter in Oklahoma. Here was a blizzard at just the right time for an operation against the Indians. Traditionally, the U.S. Army did not conduct winter campaigns, and thus the Indians felt safe in their remote villages until the first signs of spring. Custer aimed to rattle that complacency sometime during the next few days.

When he was ready, Custer mounted his horse and had his troopers do the same. Even in such challenging conditions the regimental band managed to strike up the familiar tune of “The Girl I Left Behind Me.” The notes were swallowed up by the swirling snowflakes in the predawn darkness, and soon so too were the groggy and shivering men of the regiment. Their destination was the Washita River Valley.

The head man of the Cheyenne village in the valley, Black Kettle, has to be considered as one of the more unfortunate Indian leaders in U.S. history. And his wife too. They had survived the Sand Creek Massacre four years earlier in Colorado – though Medicine Woman Later had been shot nine times –and here in Oklahoma, over 500 miles to the southeast of that attack, the couple was in the crosshairs of another military unit.

He had been born around 1803 in what became South Dakota. Little is known of Black Kettle’s life prior to 1854, when he was made a chief of the Council of Forty-Four, the central government of the Cheyenne tribe. The Council met regularly at the Sun Dance gatherings, where its members affirmed unity. Black Kettle was a pragmatist who believed that U.S. military power and the number of west-bound emigrants were overwhelming and could not be successfully resisted. In 1861, he and Arapaho allies surrendered to the commander of Fort Lyon in Colorado, believing that he could gain protection for his people. After a visit to Washington, D.C., where he was presented a large American flag by President Abraham Lincoln, Black Kettle and his followers settled in at the Sand Creek Reservation.

At dawn on November 29, 1864, Colonel John Chivington, a former clergyman, and his 3rd Colorado Cavalry attacked the reservation. Most of the warriors were out hunting. Following Indian agent instructions, Black Kettle flew the American flag plus a white flag from his tipi but they did not provide protection from the marauding white men. They shot and stabbed 163 Cheyenne to death and burned down the village encampment. Most of the victims were women and children. For months afterward, members of the militia displayed trophies in Denver from their battle, including body parts they had taken for souvenirs.*

Black Kettle escaped the massacre then returned to rescue the severely injured Medicine Woman Later. Despite the death toll, pragmatism continued to rule over anger and he continued to counsel pacifism, believing that military resistance was doomed to fail. “Although wrongs have been done me, I live in hopes,” Black Kettle said. He added, however: “I have not got two hearts. I once thought that I was the only man that persevered to be the friend of the white man, but since they have come and cleaned out our lodges, horses, and everything else, it is hard for me to believe white men anymore.”

But he tried. Black Kettle moved south and continued to negotiate with U.S. officials. In October 1865, he signed the Treaty of the Little Arkansas River. By this document, the United States promised “perpetual peace” and lands in reparation for the Sand Creek massacre. However, its practical effect was to dispossess the Cheyenne yet again and require them to move to what was called Indian Territory, present-day Oklahoma. There, with life not any better for the Cheyenne, Black Kettle’s influence waned. “Dog Soldiers” led by Roman Nose, who was at least 20 years younger, rebelled and waged war against the Army.

So, one would think that a sidelined Black Kettle would be out of harm’s way, especially after he signed yet another peace document, in 1867. The Medicine Lodge Treaty was a series of agreements further establishing reservations in Indian Territory and protecting them from white intruders.

But once again, the star-crossed Black Kettle was at the wrong place at the wrong time. The 7^th Cavalry was inexorably approaching his camp.

Only a few days earlier, Black Kettle had made his way to Fort Cobb to reassure the post commander, Colonel William Hazen, of his peaceful intentions. Hazen was convinced but he was probably unaware of the campaign created by General William Tecumseh Sherman to further corral the Cheyenne.

On November 26, after three days of struggling through snow, Custer’s regiment crossed the Canadian River at the Antelope Hills. Now having a better idea of where he was, Custer ordered Major Joel Elliott to take three companies upstream to find a trail his weary troopers and their horses could follow. Elliott was more successful than his commander had hoped: He not only found a trail after traveling just 12 miles but it had been made by the feet of as many as a hundred Cheyenne heading south. To the major, this indicated an Indian village of some size was in that direction.

A messenger plowed through the snow to bring a communique to Custer. The delighted lieutenant colonel sent a message back, telling Elliott to follow the trail. The rest of the regiment, leaving its baggage train to plod along as best it could, hurried to catch up. Soon after midnight, after having reunited with Elliott’s companies, the 7^th Cavalry arrived on a ridge behind an Indian camp. After moving forward with his Osage scouts and surveying the area, Custer planned to divide the regiment into four battalions and attack the village.

One of the Osage scouts, Little Beaver, pointed down and told Custer, “Heap Injuns down there.” The more the better, thought Custer.

At this time, Black Kettle’s camp consisted of about 250 Cheyenne. The headman, not in turn reassured by Colonel Hazen about any protection and horrid memories of Sand Creek still vivid, was planning to move his camp down the Washita River to join larger Cheyenne encampments and seek safety in numbers. But Black Kettle was in no particular rush, given that the Army was not known to conduct campaigns in heavy snow. Thus, his plan would remain only a plan, not a solution.

Custer had his own plan and in pitch dark he assembled his officers to tell them of it: Attack at dawn. The colonel was queried about possibly there being many more Indians than the regiment could handle. “All I’m afraid of is we won’t find half enough,” Custer replied. “There are not Indians enough in the country to whip the 7^th Cavalry.”

This scene would be repeated almost identically less than eight years later in Montana overlooking another – and many times larger -- Indian village.

By dawn, the regiment was very cold but ready. The four battalions would attack simultaneously: Elliott and three companies from the northeast, two companies from the south under Captain Wiliam Thompson, Captain Edward Myers would lead two companies from the west and Custer with four companies from the north. The latter contingent would be accompanied by the regimental band.

Though some fingers were frozen stiff, the band managed to launch into “Garry Owen,” Custer’s favorite fighting tune. The song was short-lived, however, because the instruments froze too. The buglers managed to blare “Charge” and the columns of the 7^th Cavalry attacked the village. Custer, dressed in buckskin and his face almost obscured by a full, thick beard and a fur cap pulled low, was in front of his battalion and he burst into the camp of startled Cheyenne.

What ensued was deadly chaos. Half-asleep villagers exited their tipis and ran around each other, some being knocked down. Gunshots resounded, mixed with the screams of frightened women and children. Men searched for weapons and equally frightened horses. In all, close to 800 troopers rampaged through the Cheyenne encampment.

There would be no survival this time for Medicine Woman Later. She was shot dead during the charges of the four columns. So too was her husband. Both Black Kettle and his wife were struck by bullets in the back as they tried to cross the Washita River in a desperate search for safety. (As an aside: Black Kettle’s body could not be found. It was assumed that he had been carried to a remote canyon for burial. Not quite seventy years later – July 13, 1934 – some WPA laborers who were lengthening a bridge over the Washita accidentally uncovered a skeleton dressed in Black Kettle’s jewelry. His bones were donated to a local newspaper, the Cheyenne Star, which displayed them in a window.)

In 10 minutes, the “battle” was over. The Cheyenne later claimed only 11 of their men had died. The rest were women and children. In addition, 51 lodges and their contents were burned, and the camp’s pony herd of roughly 800 horses was killed. The 7th Cavalry suffered 22 men killed, including two officers. One was Captain Louis Hamilton, who had the misfortunate of having a bullet pass through his heart a moment after he burst into the village.*

The rest of the stay at the Washita River was a mopping-up operation. Some Cheyenne were spared, and 53 women and children were taken as prisoners to be brought to Fort Supply. One of them was Monahsetah. She was the teenaged daughter of the Cheyenne headman Little Rock, who had been killed during the assault. She was seven months’ pregnant and would give birth in January 1869.

One of Custer’s senior officers, Captain Frederick Benteen, as well as Cheyenne oral history contended that Custer “cohabited” with Monahsetah during the winter and early spring and that in late 1869 she bore a son, fathered by Custer. The boy was named Yellow Swallow.

In addition to preparing the captives for travel, the wounds of 15 troopers were attended to. Before the 7^th Cavalry left, however, Lieutenant Colonel Custer had two mysteries to ponder. One: Where was Major Elliott? His detachment had last been seen pursuing Cheyenne who were trying to reach the Washita River. Elliott had been heard to shout, “Here goes for a brevet or a coffin!”

Two: Why were the Osage scouts reporting a large number of Indians approaching from downstream? There were too many to be a Cheyenne hunting party returning to the village.

Custer was completely unaware that farther down the Washita River there were three larger encampments. The one Black Kettle had planned to join was Cheyenne and the other two were Arapaho and Kiowa.

To be on the safe side, though, it was time for the regiment to get out of there. Troopers pushed tipis over and set fire to them, then threw into the blazes clothing, weapons, saddles, and any other Cheyene possessions they could find. By the time the 7^th Cavalry left, the village was virtually destroyed.

Because Custer never resolved the second mystery, what he took away from the Washita River Valley experience was that numbers of hostiles did not matter. A swift surprise attack by well-armed and determined cavalry would terrify and confuse not just the Cheyenne but any tribe. Victory went to the bold.

It would be weeks before the first mystery was solved – horribly.

[As if this column was not shameless plug enough, here’s another one: My 2024 book Bandit Heaven, about Butch Cassidy, the Sundance Kid, and the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang, is receiving a special ebook promotion this month. Through the 31^st, you can purchase Bandit Heaven from an ebook retailer for just $2.99. Details: us.macmillan.com/books/9781250282415/banditheaven]

Tom Clavin is the bestselling author/co-author of 25 books. The next one, Vengeance: The Last Stands of Custer, Crazy Horse, and Sitting Bull, will be published on May 12. To purchase a copy, please go to your local bookstore or to Bookshop.org, Amazon.com, BN.com, or tomclavin.com . . . well, as soon as I update the web site.

* One of these bizarre displays was an appearance of Colonel Chivington on a Denver stage where he described the battle as the audience gaped at a display of some one hundred Indian scalps.

* Louis McLane Hamilton was akin to American royalty. His father was Philip Hamilton, who was the youngest son of Alexander Hamilton. Like his grandfather, Louis’s older brother, Philip Jr., died in a duel. Louis Hamilton fought in Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, and other major battles and managed to emerge without a serious injury.

By Tom Clavin

“The Overlook” can be found at tomclavin.substack.com. If you enjoy the column, please “like” it and let me know what you think by commenting. All support is appreciated. Don’t forget to hit the ‘Subscribe’ button – it’s free!

One does not ordinarily think of April 30 as Inauguration Day. It’s January 20 when the president of the United States is sworn in for a new term, right? Actually, that has been true only since 1937, when the date shifted from March 4. But the very first Inauguration Day was 237 years ago tomorrow, on April 30, 1789.

The presidency was just one of the precedents George Washington set during his two terms as chief executive. Another was choosing not to run for a third term as two was enough and he emphasized that he was not a king who served until death. Only once has that precedent been broken, when Franklin Roosevelt ran for and won a third term in 1940 and then a fourth in 1944. As it turned out, he died in office.

Washington’s journey to being sworn in as the first U.S. president began on April 14, 1789, when he was informed of having been elected, receiving all 69 electoral votes. Two days later, he left Mount Vernon. On the trek to New York City he was accompanied by Charles Thompson, his official escort, and Col. David Humphreys, his aide. They traveled through Alexandria, Baltimore, Wilmington, Philadelphia, Trenton, Princeton, New Brunswick, and Bridgetown (now Rahway, N.J.).

At these and other places along the route, artillery units roared salutes of honor and the citizens and officials presented him with marks of affection, so that the trip became a triumphal procession. On April 23, Washington crossed the water from Bridgetown to New York City in a magnificent barge built especially for the occasion.

Lacking guidelines for a first presidential inauguration, Congress had appointed a joint committee to consider the time, place, and manner in which to administer the oath of office required by the Constitution. Certain difficulties in planning and arrangements arose from the fact that Congress was meeting in New York’s former City Hall, rechristened Federal Hall, which was in process of renovation under the direction of Pierre L’Enfant.

On April 25, Congress adopted the joint committee’s recommendation that the inaugural ceremonies be held the following Thursday, April 30, and that the oath of office be administered to Washington in the outer gallery adjoining the Senate Chamber so that “ the Oath of Office may be administered to the President in the most public manner, and that the greatest number of people of the United States, and without distinction, may witness the solemnity.”

On Inauguration Day, New York City was crowded with townspeople and visitors. At half past noon, Washington rode alone in the state coach from his quarters in Franklin Square to Federal Hall on the corner of Wall and Nassau Streets. Members of Congress appointed to escort Washington and heads of executive departments of the government under the Confederation preceded the coach, while to the rear followed ministers of foreign countries and local citizenry.

At Federal Hall, Vice President John Adams, the Senate, and the House of Representatives awaited Washington’s arrival. After being received by Congress, Washington stepped from the chamber onto the balcony, where he was followed by the Senators and Representatives.

Before the assembled crowd of spectators, Robert Livingston, Chancellor of the State of New York, administered the oath of office prescribed by the Constitution: “I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

After repeating this oath, Washington kissed the Bible held for him by the Chancellor, who called out, “Long live George Washington, President of the United States!” This was followed by a salvo from 13 cannons.

Except for taking the oath, the law required no further inaugural ceremonies. But, upon reentering the Senate Chamber, the brand-new president read an address. After it, Washington and the members of Congress proceeded to St. Paul’s Church for divine service. A brilliant fireworks display in the evening ended the official program for this historic day.

About that first Inauguration Day address: President Washington was humble, hoping he would be up to a task of an office that had no previous occupant. Then he said:

“To the preceding observations I have one to add, which will be most properly addressed to the House of Representatives. It concerns myself, and will therefore be as brief as possible. When I was first honored with a call into the service of my country, then on the eve of an arduous struggle for its liberties, the light in which I contemplated my duty required that I should renounce every pecuniary compensation. From this resolution I have in no instance departed; and being still under the impressions which produced it, I must decline as inapplicable to myself any share in the personal emoluments which may be indispensably included in a permanent provision for the executive department, and must accordingly pray that the pecuniary estimates for the station in which I am placed may during my continuance in it be limited to such actual expenditures as the public good may be thought to require.

“Having thus imparted to you my sentiments as they have been awakened by the occasion which brings us together, I shall take my present leave; but not without resorting once more to the benign Parent of the Human Race in humble supplication that, since He has been pleased to favor the American people with opportunities for deliberating in perfect tranquility, and dispositions for deciding with unparalleled unanimity on a form of government for the security of their union and the advancement of their happiness, so His divine blessing may be equally conspicuous in the enlarged views, the temperate consultations, and the wise measures on which the success of this Government must depend.”

President Washington’s first inaugural address was primarily drafted by James Madison. He had asked to write the speech after Washington discarded a73-page draft prepared by his aide, David Humphreys, opting instead for a more concise address regarding governing values.

In a fascinating turn of events, Madison also wrote the House of Representatives’ response to the address and subsequently wrote Washington’s reply to that response. And, of course, the prolific Madison would write his own inaugural address, which would be delivered on March 4, 1809.

Tom Clavin is the bestselling author/co-author of 25 books. The next one, Vengeance: The Last Stands of Custer, Crazy Horse, and Sitting Bull, will be published on May 12. To purchase a copy, please go to your local bookstore or to Bookshop.org, Amazon.com, BN.com, or tomclavin.com . . . well, as soon as I update the web site.

By Tom Clavin

“The Overlook” can be found at tomclavin.substack.com. If you enjoy the column, please “like” it and let me know what you think by commenting. All support is appreciated. Don’t forget to hit the ‘Subscribe’ button – it’s free!

A few weeks ago, I wrote about Sgt. Juan “Top” Valdez, the last Marine to leave Saigon when it fell to North Vietnamese troops, 51 years ago, on April 30, 1975. Valdez lived into his late 80s. Alas, I just received word that Terry Bennington has passed away. He was another one of the 11 Marines who were lifted off the roof of the American Embassy that morning. Bennington was 73.

It’s a bit of a shock to realize that the youngest American Vietnam War veterans are now generally in their early-to-mid 70s. Most surviving veterans served toward the end of the conflict and were born in the mid-1950s. But there are some surviving veterans who, like Sgt. Valdez, are in their 80s.

And somehow, this got me wondering: Who was the youngest American soldier to die in the Vietnam War? Incredibly, he would be just 72 today . . . because he was 15 when he was killed in action.

Dan Bullock was born in December 1953 in Goldsboro, North Carolina. He lived in North Carolina until he was about 12, when his mother died and he and his younger sister, Gloria, moved to Brooklyn to live with their father and his wife. He said he wanted to become a pilot, a police officer, or a United States Marine.

When Bullock was 14 years old, he altered the date on his birth certificate to show that he was born on December 21, 1949. He processed through the recruiting station and enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps on September 18, 1968. He was a member of Platoon 3039 at Parris Island. At first, he struggled to make it through but was able to do so with the help of one of his fellow recruits. Bullock graduated from boot camp on December 10, 1968 – 11 days before his 15^th birthday.

Private First Class Bullock arrived in South Vietnam on May 18, 1969, and was assigned as a rifleman in 2nd Squad, 2nd Platoon, Company F, 2^nd Battalion, 5^th Marines, 1^st Marine Division. He was stationed at An Hoa Combat Base, west of Hoi An in the Quảng Nam Province.

Less than a month later, on June 7, Bullock and three other Marines were occupying a bunker near the base airstrip when a Viet Cong sapper unit attacked the base at night, throwing a satchel charge into the bunker. The explosion killed all four Marines. Bullock had been assigned to cleaning duty at the base camp but was transferred to the night watch after one Marine was wounded on night duty.

After Bullock was interred, his grave site did not have a marker. A veteran’s marker was finally provided in 2000. He was one of 7262 African-American servicemen to die during the Vietnam War.

He has not been entirely forgotten. In June 2003, a section of Lee Avenue in Brooklyn, where Bullock had lived since age 11, was renamed in his honor. In 2019, a North Carolina state historical marker honoring his life was erected near his childhood home in Goldsboro on West Ash Street. And the entrance to Elmwood Cemetery in southwest Goldsboro was named “PFC Dan Bullock Way.”

Tom Clavin is the bestselling author/co-author of 25 books. The next one, Vengeance: The Last Stands of Custer, Crazy Horse, and Sitting Bull, will be published on May 12. To purchase a copy, please go to your local bookstore or to Bookshop.org, Amazon.com, BN.com, or tomclavin.com . . . well, as soon as I update the web site.

By Tom Clavin

“The Overlook” can be found at tomclavin.substack.com. If you enjoy the column, please “like” it and let me know what you think by commenting. All support is appreciated. Don’t forget to hit the ‘Subscribe’ button – it’s free!

The possibility of boots on the ground in Iran, Cuba and/or who knows where else (Greenland?) brings up bad memories of Iraq, Afghanistan, and, of course, Vietnam. If a ground war begins, men and women will die. But the “hidden” cost is agonizing too – the maimed, psychologically as well as physically. In a war zone, no one is immune to catastrophe.

A stark example of this is the son of Lewis Puller, the most decorated Marine in U.S. history. He earned the nickname “Chesty” primarily due to his notably barrel-chested, physical presence and confident, forward-thrust posture. This demeanor embodied a fearless, commanding presence, with many also attributing the nickname to his commanding, booming voice or as a reference to his cocky attitude. But for Chesty Puller’s son, it was more guts than glory.

Lewis Burwell Puller Jr. was born on August 18, 1945, when his father, back from fighting in the Pacific Theater, was the commanding officer of Camp Lejeune. Lewis Jr. graduated from the College of William and Mary in 1963, enlisted in the Marine Corps, and after completing Officer Candidate School he was sent to South Vietnam.

Beginning in July 1868, Puller was an infantry platoon leader in the 1^st Marine Division. On October 11, his rifle jammed during an engagement with North Vietnamese troops. Searching for a better defensive position, Puller was wounded when he tripped a booby-trapped howitzer round. He lost his right leg at the hip, his left leg to above the knee, his left hand and most of his fingers on his right hand in the explosion. Also, the shell riddled his body with shrapnel.

Puller lingered near death for days with his weight dropping to 55 pounds, but he survived. He later recalled the first time his father saw him in the hospital, Chesty broke down weeping and that hurt him more than any of his physical injuries. Those who knew Lewis Jr. say that it was primarily because of his iron will and his stubborn refusal to die that he survived. He was medically discharged from the Marine Corps. He was awarded the Silver Star, Purple Heart, and other medals.

For years after he returned to a reasonably sound physical condition, he remained emotionally shaken, though he earned a Juris Doctor degree, had two children with the woman he had married before going to Vietnam, and raised a family. He was admitted to the Virginia Bar in 1974 and began working as a lawyer for the Veterans Administration and on President Gerald Ford ‘s Clemency Board. He mounted a campaign for Congress in 1978 as a Democrat in Virginia but lost to incumbent Republican Congressman Paul Tribel.

But all was far from well. Through the years, Puller battled periods of despondency and drank heavily until 1981, when he underwent treatment for alcoholism. Despite that treatment, Puller continued to suffer severe depression.

He turned to writing, telling the story of his ordeal and its aftermath in his 1991 book, Fortunate Son: The Autobiography of Lewis B. Puller Jr., published by Grove Press. The account ended with Puller triumphing over his physical disabilities and becoming emotionally at peace with himself. The following year, his book was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Autobiography. As some of you might recognize, the book’s title was borrowed from the song “Fortunate Son” by Credence Clearwater Revival.

Despite such critical success, Puller spent the last months of his life in turmoil. He left his job as a lawyer at the Pentagon to accept a teaching position at George Mason University. In the days leading up to his death, Puller fought a losing battle with the alcoholism that he had kept at bay for 13 years. Plus, he struggled with a more recent addiction, to pills initially prescribed to dull continuing pain from his wounds.

Puller died from a self-inflicted gunshot on May 11, 1994. He was survived by his wife, Linda “Toddy” Puller, from whom he had separated in 1991. Puller’s survivors included his two children, Lewis III and Maggie; his twin sister, Martha Downs; and another sister, Virginia Dabney.

Lewis Puller Jr.’s name is not listed on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial because it is reserved for those who died or who are listed as missing in action. However, his name is listed on the nearby In Memory Memorial Plaque, which represents those veterans, like Puller, who died after their service in the Vietnam War but as a direct result of that service, and whose names are not otherwise eligible for placement on the memorial wall.

Terry Anderson, the former Associated Press journalist who was held hostage in Lebanon, recalled about Puller, “This is a man who had so many burdens, so many things to bear. And he bore them well for 25 years. What did I miss? I was his friend. I thought he was winning.”

Toddy Puller issued a statement after her husband’s suicide: “Our family has been moved and humbled by the outpouring of affection for Lewis. The many acts of kindness from our friends across the country have helped us in this very difficult time. It is clear that Lewis affected the lives of people in ways that we never knew. He suffered terrible wounds that never really healed.”

Three years earlier, she had been elected to the Virginia House of Delegates, and after recovering from a stroke, she was elected to the Virginia State Senate. Toddy did not seek re-election in 2015, and is now retired, aged 81.

Lewis Puller III did not follow in his father’s footsteps by joining the Marine Corps. Instead, he spent many years as a caddy on the PGA Tour, including for Jason Gore at the 2005 U.S. Open at Pinehurst, North Carolina.

Tom Clavin is the bestselling author/co-author of 25 books. The next one, Vengeance: The Last Stands of Custer, Crazy Horse, and Sitting Bull, will be published on May 12. To purchase a copy, please go to your local bookstore or to Bookshop.org, Amazon.com, BN.com, or tomclavin.com . . . well, as soon as I update the web site.

By Tom Clavin

“The Overlook” can be found at tomclavin.substack.com. If you enjoy the column, please “like” it and let me know what you think by commenting. All support is appreciated. Don’t forget to hit the ‘Subscribe’ button – it’s free!

Recently, for the second time, I watched the movie Nuremberg. The story centers on efforts during the Nuremberg Trials in 1946 to get Herman Goring, the most senior survivor of the Third Reich, to admit he knew about the concentration camps where millions of people died. I’m also wary of the directive from the Trump administration to compel the University of Pennsylvania to compile and provide lists of Jewish employees and students. Perhaps it is a coincidence that Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania, is an ardent critic of the administration and Jewish.

Never Forget: So much of what happened during the Holocaust began with lists. Then the government-backed goons moved in.

It was 81 years ago this month that American soldiers opened a gate in Germany and found something that changed them forever. They had no word for what they were looking at. Nobody did. The word wouldn’t exist for another year.

In early April 1945, the war in Europe was almost over. Everyone knew it. The Third Reich was collapsing on two fronts — the Soviets driving from the east, the Americans and British pushing from the west. General George Patton’s Third Army was moving fast through central Germany, fast enough that the front lines were fluid and the maps couldn’t keep up.

One morning, soldiers of the U.S. 4th Armored Division and the 89th Infantry Division came upon a camp near the town of Ohrdruf, in the Thuringian hills of Germany. It should be noted that by April 1945, word had spread about the existence of Nazi labor and death camps. The Soviet forces had liberated several camps, including Auschwitz in January, and the British had liberated camps too. But for American soldiers, Ohrdruf – a subcamp of Buchenwald -- would be a new experience.

Don Timmer was just 18 years old, a private in the 89th Infantry. He described what he saw when they drove through the gate: “Between the gate and the barracks were 30 dead, the blood still wet from departing German guards. Bodies were stacked in a shed like cordwood, sprinkled with lime. Others were partially incinerated on pyres outside — the SS had tried to burn the evidence before fleeing and had not had time to finish. A pile of naked men, starved to bone, were found in one room. Prisoners who were too weak to be marched out to Buchenwald had been shot in the head where they lay.”

Every American officer on the scene gave the same order immediately: Leave everything untouched. Don’t move anything. Don’t touch anything. This needs to be documented. They understood, without being told, that someone would try to deny it.

The news reached General Patton — “Old Blood and Guts,” the man who had driven tanks across North Africa, who had slapped a soldier for cowardice and nearly ended his own career, who had seen more violence than almost any American alive. Patton arrived at Ohrdruf and walked through it.

Within half an hour he vomited against the side of a building. He could not enter the shed where the bodies were stacked. The smell and the sight were beyond what even he could bear.

Word reached General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe, in Belgium. He flew to Ohrdruf, accompanied by Generals Omar Bradley and Patton. A survivor led them through the camp as a guide. They viewed the charred remains on the pyres. The gallows. The torture devices, demonstrated by prisoners who were still there. The shed filled with bodies.

Eisenhower said he had never been so angry in his life. He said the English language did not have words to describe what he saw. He wrote to Winston Churchill, “Everything you read in the paper does not adequately describe what has really happened here.”

And then Ike said something that has echoed across the eight decades since. He said he made the visit deliberately in order to be in a position to give firsthand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to propaganda.

Eisenhower knew. Standing there 81 years ago, surrounded by the evidence of what human beings had done to other human beings, he already knew that someday people would try to say it hadn’t happened. He was building his testimony in advance.

The Supreme Commander ordered every American unit not engaged at the front to be brought to Ohrdruf and walk through it. He cabled Washington to request that members of Congress and prominent newspaper editors be flown to Germany to see the camps with their own eyes.

He also ordered German civilians from the nearby town of Ohrdruf to tour the camp and bury the dead. The mayor of the town and his wife made the tour that evening. The next morning, they were found dead in their home. A note said: “We didn’t know. But we knew.”

Ohrdruf was a small facility built to provide forced labor for a Nazi construction project. It was not Auschwitz. It was not Buchenwald. It was not even close to the largest or most lethal installation in the Nazi system. And yet what the men of the 4th Armored Division and 89th Infantry found there in April 1945 was enough to make the toughest general in the U.S. Army physically sick. Enough to change Dwight Eisenhower permanently. Enough to make a small-town German mayor and his wife unable to live with what they finally, fully understood.

In the weeks that followed, American soldiers would open the gates of Buchenwald, Dachau, Mauthausen, Nordhausen, Flossenbürg — camp after camp after camp, each one a fresh confrontation with the same monstrous machinery. Thirty-six U.S. Army divisions would be designated as “liberating divisions” before it was over.

The Allies and the Soviets were kept busy: According to research by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Nazis established approximately 44,000 camps and incarceration sites between 1933 and 1945. This vast, interconnected system included around 980 concentration camps, 30,000 slave labor camps, 1150 Jewish ghettos, and several dedicated killing centers.

After the inspection at Ohrdruf, Eisenhower gathered his generals and declared, “We are told that the American soldier does not know what he is fighting for. Now, at least, he will know what he is fighting against.”

Tom Clavin is the bestselling author/co-author of 25 books. The latest one with Bob Drury, The First to Go West, has just been published in paperback. To purchase a copy, please go to your local bookstore or to Bookshop.org, Amazon.com, BN.com, or tomclavin.com.

By Tom Clavin

“The Overlook” can be found at tomclavin.substack.com. If you enjoy the column, please “like” it and let me know what you think by commenting. All support is appreciated. Don’t forget to hit the ‘Subscribe’ button – it’s free!

It was 161 years ago that the United States executed a woman for the first time. To this day, there are many doubts about her guilt. Mary Surratt was a boarding house owner in Washington, D.C., in 1865 who was convicted of taking part in the conspiracy to assassinate President Abraham Lincoln. She maintained her innocence until her death.

Born in Maryland in 1823, Mary converted to Catholicism at a young age and remained a practicing Catholic for the rest of her life. She wed John Harrison Surratt in 1840 and had three children with him. An entrepreneur, John Sr. became the owner of a tavern, an inn, and a hotel. The Surratts were sympathetic to the Confederate cause and often hosted fellow Southern sympathizers at their tavern.

Upon her husband’s death in 1862, Mary Surratt had to manage his estate. Tired of doing so without help, she moved to her townhouse in Washington, D.C., which she then ran as a boardinghouse. There, she was introduced to John Wilkes Booth. He visited the boardinghouse numerous times as did Booth’s co-conspirators. Shortly before killing Lincoln, Booth spoke with Surratt and handed her a package containing binoculars for one of her tenants.

After Lincoln was assassinated in April 1865, Surratt was arrested, then tried by a military tribunal the following month along with the other conspirators. She was steadfast in insisting that she had no knowledge that in her boarding house a plot was being hatched to assassinate President Lincoln. Five of the nine judges at her trial asked that Surratt be granted clemency by President Andrew Johnson because of her age and sex. Johnson refused.

Construction of the gallows for the hanging of the conspirators condemned to death began on July 5, after the execution order was signed. John Wilkes Booth would not be one of those strung up. After shooting Lincoln, he had fled to southern Maryland and then to northern Virginia. Twelve days after the event, he was found in a barn in the company of another conspirator, David Herold. The latter surrendered but Booth held out against lawmen. After the barn was set on fire, a Union soldier shot Booth in the neck. Paralyzed, he died a few hours later, on April 26.

At noon on July 6, as the gallows was being constructed, Mary Surratt was informed she would be hanged the next day. She wept profusely. She was joined by two Catholic priests and one of her three children, Anna. Chronic menstrual problems had worsened, and she was in such pain and suffered from such severe cramps that the prison doctor gave her wine and medication. She spent the night on a mattress, weeping and moaning in pain and grief, ministered to by the priests.

On the morning of July 7, Anna left her mother’s side and went to the White House to beg for her mother’s life one last time. Her entreaty rejected, she returned to the prison and her mother’s cell. The soldiers began testing the gallows about 11:25 a.m., and those sounds unnerved all the prisoners. Shortly before noon, Mary Surratt was taken from her cell and then allowed to sit in a chair near the entrance to the courtyard. The heat in the city that day was oppressive. By noon, it had already reached 92 degrees. The guards ordered all visitors to leave at 12:30 p.m. When she was forced to part from her mother, Anna’s hysterical screams of grief could be heard throughout the prison.

Perhaps all was not lost: Surratt’s lawyers had not finished trying to save their client. That morning, they asked a District of Columbia court for a writ of habeas corpus, arguing that the military tribunal that had convicted Surratt and ordered her execution had no jurisdiction over their client. The court issued the writ at 3 a.m., and it was served on General Winfield Scott Hancock, who was ordered to produce Surratt by 10 a.m. General Hancock sent an aide to the commandant of the prison, ordering him not to admit any U.S. marshal, as that would prevent the marshal from serving the writ there. President Johnson, when informed that the court had issued the writ, promptly cancelled it at 11:30 a.m. under the authority granted to President Lincoln by the Habeas Corpus Suspension Act of 1863.

At 1.15 p.m., a procession escorted the four condemned prisoners through the courtyard and up the steps to the gallows. Each prisoner’s ankles and wrists were bound by manacles. Surratt led the way, wearing a black dress, black bonnet, and black veil. More than 1,000 people, including government officials, members of the U.S. armed forces, friends and family of the accused, official witnesses, and reporters, watched.

Alexander Gardner, who had photographed the body of Booth and taken portraits of several of the male conspirators, photographed the execution for the government. As the order of execution was read Surratt, either weak from her illness or swooning in fear, had to be supported by two soldiers and her priests. The condemned were seated in chairs, Surratt almost collapsing into hers. She was seated to the right of the others, the traditional “seat of honor” in an execution.

White cloth was used to bind their arms to their sides and their ankles and thighs together. (The cloths around Surratt’s legs were tied around her dress below the knees.) Each person was ministered to by a member of the clergy. From the scaffold, one of the condemned men stated, “Mrs. Surratt is innocent. She doesn’t deserve to die with the rest of us.” The priests prayed over her and held a crucifix to her lips. A white bag was placed over the head of each prisoner after the noose was put in place. Surratt’s bonnet was removed and the noose put around her neck by a U.S. Secret Service officer. When she complained that the bindings about her arms hurt, the officer replied, “Well, it won’t hurt long.”

Finally, the chairs were removed. Mary Surratt’s last words, spoken to a guard as he moved her forward to the drop, were, “Please don’t let me fall.” Surratt and the others stood on the drop for about 10 seconds, then there was a clap of hands by the execution supervisor and four soldiers knocked out the supports holding the drops in place. The condemned fell.

Surratt, who had moved forward enough to barely step onto the drop, lurched forward and slid partway down the drop, her body snapping tight at the end of the rope, swinging back and forth. She appeared to die relatively quickly with little struggle. That was true of one of the men, too. But the remaining two men struggled for nearly five minutes, strangling to death.

The bodies of the executed were allowed to hang for about 30 minutes. Soldiers began to cut them down at 1:53 p.m. Surratt’s body was the last to be cut down. The manacles and cloth bindings were removed but not the white execution masks. The bodies were placed into the pine coffins. The name of each person was written on a piece of paper and inserted in a glass vial, which was placed into the coffin. The coffins were buried against the prison wall in shallow graves, just a few feet from the gallows. A white picket fence marked the burial site. The night that she died, a mob attacked the Surratt boarding house and began stripping it of souvenirs until the police stopped them.

Repeatedly, and without success, Anna Surratt asked for her mother’s body. In 1867, the War Department decided to tear down the portion of the Washington Arsenal where the bodies of Surratt and the other executed conspirators lay. The coffins were disinterred and reburied in Warehouse No. 1 at the Arsenal, with a wooden marker placed at the head of each burial vault. Booth’s body was buried alongside them. In February 1869, Edwin Booth asked Johnson for the body of his brother. The President agreed, and in addition Surratt’s body was turned over to her family. She was buried in Mount Olivet Cemetery in Washington, D.C., on February 9, 1869, and there she remains.

By the way: Mary’s son, John Jr., was a co-conspirator who escaped to Europe before being captured, and his charges were later dismissed. He settled in Baltimore, where he married and had seven children, representing the primary line of descent. Unlike the Lincoln family, which is considered extinct, or the Booth family, whose descendants have been researched, descendants of Mary Surratt are largely private citizens, some of whom are known to still live in the Maryland/Virginia area.

Tom Clavin is the bestselling author/co-author of 25 books. The latest one with Bob Drury, The First to Go West, has just been published in paperback. To purchase a copy, please go to your local bookstore or to Bookshop.org, Amazon.com, BN.com, or tomclavin.com.

By Tom Clavin

“The Overlook” can be found at tomclavin.substack.com. If you enjoy the column, please “like” it and let me know what you think by commenting. All support is appreciated. Don’t forget to hit the ‘Subscribe’ button – it’s free!

With everything else going on last week, readers may have missed the news about a fire aboard a U.S. Navy ship. According to The New York Times in its March 18 print edition: “It took more than 30 hours for sailors to put out the fire aboard the aircraft carrier Gerald R. Ford last week, as the beleaguered ship continued its monthslong slog through President Trump’s military operations. The fire started in the ship’s main laundry area. By the time it was over, more than 600 crew members had lost their beds and have since been bunking down on floors and tables.”

In a remarkable coincidence of history, Gerald Ford himself experienced a fire aboard an aircraft carrier. In this case, the stakes were much higher. You can read about it in the book Halsey’s Typhoon by Bob Drury and yours truly, or in the essay below which was written by us and originally published in the December 28, 2006, edition of The Times.

For Americans under a certain age, Gerald Ford is best remembered for his contribution to Bartlett’s — “Our long national nightmare is over” — or, more likely, for the comedian Chevy Chase’s stumbling, bumbling impersonations of him on “Saturday Night Live.” But there’s a different label we can attach to this former president, one that has been overlooked for 62 years: war hero.

In 1944, Lt. j.g. Jerry Ford — a lawyer from Grand Rapids, Mich., blond and broad-shouldered, with the lantern jaw of a young Johnny Weissmuller — was a 31-year-old gunnery officer on the aircraft carrier Monterey. The Monterey was a member of Adm. William Halsey’s Third Fleet, and in mid-December, Lieutenant Ford was sailing off the Philippines as Admiral Halsey’s ships provided air cover for the second phase of Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s “I shall return” Philippine invasions.

The Monterey had earned more than half a dozen battle stars for actions in World War II; during the battle of Leyte Gulf, Lieutenant Ford, in charge of a 40-millimeter antiaircraft gun crew on the fantail deck, had watched as a torpedo narrowly missed the Monterey and tore out the hull of the nearby U.S. cruiser Canberra. Two months later, in the early morning hours of Dec. 18, the Japanese were the least of the Monterey’s worries, as it found itself trapped in a vicious Pacific cyclone later designated Typhoon Cobra.

Lieutenant Ford had served as the Monterey’s officer of the deck on the ship’s midnight-to-4-a.m. watch and had witnessed the lashing rains and 60-knot winds whip the ocean into waves that resembled liquid mountain ranges. The waves reeled in from starboard, gigantic sets of dark water that appeared to defy gravity, cresting at 40 to 70 feet. In his 18 months at sea, Lieutenant Ford had never seen waves so big. As breakers crashed over the carrier’s wheelhouse, he could just barely make out the distress whistles sounding about him — the deep beeps of the battleships, the shrill whoops of the destroyers.

After his watch Lieutenant Ford had strapped himself into his bunk below decks, and it seemed that his head had barely hit the pillow when the Monterey’s skipper, Capt. Stuart H. Ingersoll, sounded general quarters, calling all hands to their stations. Lieutenant Ford bolted upright in his dark sea cabin. He thought he smelled smoke amidships. Racing through a rolling companionway dimly lighted by red battle lights, he reached the outside skipper’s ladder leading to the pilothouse and began to climb. At that precise moment a 70-foot wave broke over the Monterey. The carrier pitched 25 degrees to port, and Lieutenant Ford was knocked flat on his back. He began skimming the flight deck as if he were on a toboggan.

Just as he was about to be hurled overboard, Lieutenant Ford managed to slow his slide, twist like an acrobat, and fling himself onto the catwalk. He got to his knees, made his way below deck, and started back up again.

By the time he reached the Monterey’s pilothouse, the fighter planes in its hangar deck had begun slamming into one another as well as the bulkheads — “like pinballs,” Mr. Ford recalled 60 years later — and the collisions had ignited their gas tanks. The hangar deck of the Monterey had become a cauldron of aircraft fuel, and because of a quirk in its construction, the flames from the burning aircraft were sucked into the air intakes of the lower decks. As fires broke out below, Lieutenant Ford remembered the smoke he smelled when he’d bolted from his bunk.

Admiral Halsey had ordered Captain Ingersoll to abandon ship, and the Monterey was ablaze from stem to stern as Lieutenant Ford stood near the helm, awaiting his orders. “We can fix this,” Captain Ingersoll said, and with a nod from his skipper, Lieutenant Ford donned a gas mask and led a fire brigade below.

Aircraft-gas tanks exploded as hose handlers slid across the burning decks. Into this furnace Lieutenant Ford led his men, his first order of business to carry out the dead and injured. Hours later he and his team emerged burned and exhausted, but they had put out the fire.

Three destroyers were eventually capsized by Typhoon Cobra, a dozen more ships were seriously damaged, more than 150 planes were destroyed, and 793 men lost their lives. It was the Navy’s worst “defeat” of World War II. But the Monterey and nearly all of its men survived to take part in the battle of Okinawa, and the future president ended his Navy stint in 1946 with the rank of lieutenant commander.

Like many of his fellow World War II veterans, Mr. Ford returned home and resumed his life, rarely speaking publicly of his heroism. But in contrast to the public’s image of him as a clumsy nonentity, Mr. Ford was a man whose grace under pressure saved his ship and hundreds of men on it.

Tom Clavin is the bestselling author/co-author of 25 books. The latest one with Bob Drury, The First to Go West, has just been published in paperback. To purchase a copy, please go to your local bookstore or to Bookshop.org, Amazon.com, BN.com, or tomclavin.com.

By Tom Clavin

“The Overlook” can be found at tomclavin.substack.com. If you enjoy the column, please “like” it and let me know what you think by commenting. All support is appreciated. Don’t forget to hit the ‘Subscribe’ button – it’s free!

The choking off of oil supplies because of the war with Iran might make some of us wish that in the last couple of decades we had explored solar power more aggressively. Maybe the story of Maria Telkes will be of some inspiration.

Who was she? During World War II, she invented a device that used only sunlight to turn ocean water into drinking water. And it fit snugly in a life raft. True, most people have never heard of her. But military pilots and sailors stranded in the Pacific certainly knew her name—because her invention kept them alive.

Born in Hungary in 1900, Mária earned a Ph.D. in physical chemistry from the University of Budapest in 1924. A year later, she immigrated to the United States with her scientific training, her ambition, and an idea that seemed almost like magic: What if we could harness the sun’s energy to solve practical problems? She could not resist doing some research.

Becoming an American citizen in 1937 marked a pivotal moment in Telkes’s life. That same year, she transitioned to a research engineer role at Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company in Pittsburgh. She initially focused on developing metal alloys for thermocouples to convert heat into electricity. Her venture into solar energy research began in 1939. As part of the Solar Energy Conversion Project at MIT, she investigated thermoelectric devices powered by sunlight. She was at MIT for 13 years and then at New York University for five years.

When World War II broke out, the U.S. military faced a deadly challenge. Many downed pilots and shipwrecked sailors stranded at sea, surrounded by water they could not drink, often died not from injuries but from dehydration. By then, however, Maria had developed the Telkes solar still. It was a portable, inflatable device made of clear plastic that could be packed into life rafts and emergency kits. Using nothing but sunlight, it evaporated seawater, then condensed the pure water vapor, leaving the salt behind. The device could produce about one quart of fresh drinking water per day. That doesn’t sound like much, until you realize that one quart per day can be the difference between life and death for someone floating in the Pacific Ocean.

The U.S. military added the Telkes solar stills to life rafts throughout the Navy and Air Force. They remained standard emergency equipment into the 1960s. No one knows exactly how many lives the device saved, but “countless” isn’t an exaggeration. Every pilot, every sailor who survived long enough to be rescued because they had fresh water owed their survival, in part, to Mária Telkes. Her colleagues started calling her the “Sun Queen.” But she wasn’t done.

After the war, while most solar research was still considered fringe science, Mária was already building the future. In 1948, working with architect Eleanor Raymond and funded by philanthropist Amelia Peabody, she designed and built the Dover Sun House in Massachusetts. It was the first residential building in the world heated entirely by solar power.

The system was ingenious yet simple: solar collectors on the south-facing roof captured the sun’s heat during the day. But the revolutionary part was Mária developed a chemical storage system using Glauber’s salt (sodium sulfate) that could store that heat and release it slowly at night and on cloudy days. In 1948, when most homes were heated by coal or oil, when “solar power” sounded like science fiction, Mária Telkes built a house that stayed warm using only the sun. No furnace. No fossil fuels. Just chemistry and sunlight.

The Dover Sun House worked successfully for three winters before technical issues emerged, such as the salt eventually degraded and heating became uneven. But the concept was proven. It was possible. She had shown the world that solar heating wasn’t a dream—it was engineering.

Mária Telkes continued her work for decades. She held over 20 patents. She developed thermoelectric devices for NASA. She pioneered phase-change materials for thermal energy storage—the same basic concepts used in modern solar thermal systems. In 1977, the American Solar Energy Society gave her their Lifetime Achievement Award. She was 77 years old and still working, still innovating, still pushing the boundaries of what solar energy could do.

Mária Telkes died in 1995 just 10 days shy of her 95^th birthday. By then, solar panels were becoming common, residential solar heating was an established technology, and the renewable energy revolution she’d helped pioneer was finally gaining momentum. Nowadays, when you see solar panels on a roof, when you hear about thermal energy storage, when you read about concentrated solar power plants, you’re seeing the legacy of the “Sun Queen.” She proved that Hungarian immigrant with a chemistry degree could change the world.

During WW II, when pilots were being shot down over the Pacific, Mária Telkes gave them a chance to survive until rescue arrived. And she did it with nothing but plastic, sunlight, and brilliant engineering.

Tom Clavin is the bestselling author/co-author of 25 books. The latest one with Bob Drury, The First to Go West, has just been published in paperback. To purchase a copy, please go to your local bookstore or to Bookshop.org, Amazon.com, BN.com, or tomclavin.com.

By Tom Clavin

“The Overlook” can be found at tomclavin.substack.com. If you enjoy the column, please “like” it and let me know what you think by commenting. All support is appreciated. Don’t forget to hit the ‘Subscribe’ button – it’s free!

Here is a different way to honor next Tuesday: Did you know there was a St. Patrick’s Brigade that fought against the United States in the Mexican-American War? If not, read on.

The brigade was led by John Patrick Riley. He was born in County Galway, Ireland, around 1817, and his original Irish name was Seán Ó Raghailligh. He served with the British Army before emigrating to Canada. Many of Ireland’s rural regions suffered greatly during the Great Famine, and millions of people emigrated by ship to Canada and the United States to survive. Riley was among them.

After crossing the border into Michigan, Riley enlisted in the U.S. Army. He served in Company K of the 5^th Infantry Regiment. Riley and Patrick Dalton deserted in 1846, just before the beginning of the Mexican-American War. Both men subsequently joined the Mexican Army, where they eventually formed the Batallón de San Patricio, or St. Patrick’s Battalion. It was made up of mostly Irish and German immigrants, although it included Catholics from many other countries as well. The unit fought in several battles during the Mexican-American War. Eventually, the battalion was forced to make a last stand at the Battle of Churubusco, which took place on the outskirts of Mexico City on August 20, 1947.

The St. Patrick’s Battalion initially met the attackers outside the walls of a fortified convent. Heavy cannons were used from this position to hold off the American advance. Several U.S. charges towards the bridgehead were thrown off, with the San Patricio companies serving as an example to the supporting battalions. Unlike the San Patricios, most of whom were veterans (many having served in the armies of the United Kingdom and various German states), the supporting Mexican battalions were simply militia.

A lack of ammunition led the Mexican soldiers in the trenches between the bridgehead and the convent to disband -- without ammunition, they had no way to fight back. General Santa Anna ordered half of these soldiers to a different part of the battlefield. When the requested ammunition wagon finally arrived, the 9 ½ drachm cartridges were compatible with none but the St. Patrick’s Battalion’s “Brown Bess” muskets, and they made up only a fraction of the defending forces. Further hampering Mexican efforts, a stray spark from an artillery piece firing grapeshot at the oncoming U.S. troops caused the just-arrived ammunition to explode and set fire to several men. A withdrawal behind the walls of the convent was called when the threat of being outflanked proved too great.

Though hopelessly outnumbered and under-equipped, the St. Patrick’s Battalion repelled the attacking U.S. forces with heavy losses until their ammunition ran out and a Mexican officer raised the white flag of surrender. Patrick Dalton of the San Patricios tore the white flag down, prompting the men to fight on, with their bare hands if necessary. One battalion member reported that when the Mexicans attempted to raise the white flag two more times, members of the San Patricios shot and killed them.

Soon, however, after brutal close-quarters fighting with bayonets and sabers through the halls and rooms inside the convent, U.S. Army Captain James M. Smith suggested a surrender after raising his white handkerchief. Following the U.S. victory, the Americans vented their vocabulary of Saxon expletives, not very courteously, on Riley and his fellow disciples of St. Patrick.

Approximately 35 members of the battalion were killed, while another 85 were captured by U.S. forces, including Riley. The remnants of the unit, numbering approximately 85 men, managed to escape alongside the retreating Mexican forces. Some of the surviving soldiers took part in the Battle for Mexico City, though they were too few to constitute a cohesive military unit. The battalion itself was formally disbanded in August 1848, six months after the end of the war, allegedly due to one of the unit’s officers being implicated in an attempted military coup.

Because Riley had deserted before the U.S. declared war against Mexico, he was not sentenced to death following his conviction at the court martial held in Mexico City. He testified to deserting because of discrimination against and mistreatment of Irish Catholics in the U.S. Army as well as in general society. While he escaped the mass hanging of around 50 other captured members of the Saint Patrick’s Battalion, Riley was branded on his cheek with the letter “D” for deserter.

Following his conviction and branding, Riley was released and eventually rejoined the Mexican forces. Reportedly, he grew his hair to conceal the scars on his face. He continued to serve with the regular Mexican Army after the end of the war, being confirmed in the rank of “Permanent Major.” Stationed in Veracruz, he retired in August 1850 on medical grounds after suffering from yellow fever.

John Riley’s ultimate fate has been lost in the mists of time. He may have died from the disease soon after his retirement. In any case, he lives on, in a way: To honor him and the St. Patrick’s Battalion who fought against the U.S., a bronze sculpture was erected in his birthplace of Clifden, Ireland, as a gift from the Mexican government.

Tom Clavin is the bestselling author/co-author of 25 books. The latest one with Bob Drury, The First to Go West, has just been published in paperback. To purchase a copy, please go to your local bookstore or to Bookshop.org, Amazon.com, BN.com, or tomclavin.com.

By Tom Clavin

“The Overlook” can be found at tomclavin.substack.com. If you enjoy the column, please “like” it and let me know what you think by commenting. All support is appreciated. Don’t forget to hit the ‘Subscribe’ button – it’s free!

This past Sunday, Robert Max Widerman would have turned 100. He almost made it, being 96 when he died. This was remarkable for a man who had survived Nazi concentration camps. A startling coincidence is that as the actor Robert Clary, he achieved fame playing a prisoner in a World War II Nazi camp.

Widerman was born on March 1, 1926, in Paris, the youngest of 14 children, seven of whom died in the Holocaust. His parents, Baila and Moishe Widerman, were Polish Jewish immigrants. At age 12, he began a career singing professionally on a French radio station and he also studied art. In 1942, because he was Jewish, he was deported to the Nazi concentration camp at Ottmuth, in what is now Otmet, Poland. Widerman was tattooed with the identification A5714 on his left forearm. He was later sent to the notorious Buchenwald labor camp.

There Clary sang to an audience of SS soldiers every other Sunday, accompanied by an accordionist. He later recalled, “Singing, entertaining, and being in kind of good health at my age, that’s why I survived. I was very immature and young and not really fully realizing what situation I was involved with.”

He continued: “We were not even human beings. When we got to Buchenwald, the SS shoved us into a shower room to spend the night. I had heard the rumors about the dummy shower heads that were gas jets. I thought, ‘This is it.’ But no, it was just a place to sleep. The first eight days there, the Germans kept us without a crumb to eat. We were hanging on to life by pure guts, sleeping on top of each other, every morning waking up to find a new corpse next to you. Sometimes I dream about those days. I wake up in a sweat terrified for fear I’m about to be sent away to a concentration camp. There’s something dark in the human soul. For the most part, human beings are not very nice. That’s why when you find those who are, you cherish them.”

Widerman was liberated from Buchenwald on April 11, 1945. Twelve other members of his immediate family had been sent to the Auschwitz death camp, and none of them survived. When he returned to Paris after the war, he reunited with six of his 13 siblings as well as half-siblings and several nieces and nephews who had avoided being taken away and survived the Nazi occupation of France.

He returned to the entertainment business and began singing songs that became popular not only in France but in the United States as well. After renaming himself, Robert Clary made his first recordings in 1948. The following year he traveled to the U.S., and one of his first appearances was a French-language comedy skit on “The Ed Wynn Show.” He later met Merv Griffin and the singer Eddie Cantor. (He would marry Cantor’s daughter Natalie in 1965 after being close friends for years.) Cantor got Clary a spot on “The Colgate Comedy Hour,” and the TV jobs came along steadily as did stage work. He made a movie too, Thief of Damascus, with Paul Henreid and Lon Chaney Jr.

In 1965, the diminutive Clary – he was only 5’1” tall -- was offered the role of Corporal Louis LeBeau on a new television sitcom called “Hogan’s Heroes.” The series was set in a German prisoner of war camp during World War II, and Clary played a French POW who was a member of an Allied sabotage unit operating from inside the camp.

Asked about parallels between LeBeau’s incarceration and his own, Clary said, “Stalag 13 is not a concentration camp. It’s a POW camp, and that’s a world of difference. You never heard of a prisoner of war being gassed or hanged. When the show went on the air, people asked me if I had any qualms about doing a comedy series dealing with Nazis and concentration camps. I had to explain that it was about prisoners of war in a stalag, not a concentration camp, and although I did not want to diminish what soldiers went through during their internments, it was like night and day from what people endured in concentration camps.”

Robert Clary was the last surviving original cast member of “Hogan’s Heroes.” Kenneth Washington, who joined the cast in the show’s final season as Sergeant Richard Baker, was the only surviving cast member when Clary died.

After the show was cancelled in 1971, Clary maintained close ties to fellow cast members Werner Klemperer, John Banner, and Leon Askin, whose lives were also affected by the Holocaust. Clary appeared in a handful of feature films with World War II themes and others such as The Hindenburg, playing Joseph Spah, a real-life passenger on the airship’s final voyage.

When not acting, he spent years touring Canada and the United States, speaking about the Holocaust. He was a painter, painting from photographs he took on his travels. Clary was among dozens of Holocaust survivors whose portraits and stories were included in the 1997 book The Triumphant Spirit. In the book, Clary wrote, “I beg the next generation not to do what people have done for centuries — hate others because of their skin, shape of their eyes, or religious preference.”

In 2001, his memoir From the Holocaust to “Hogan’s Heroes”: The Autobiography of Robert Clary was published.

His wife had died four years earlier. The former Robert Max Widerman died at his Los Angeles home on November 16, 2022.

Tom Clavin is the bestselling author/co-author of 25 books. The latest one with Bob Drury, The First to Go West, has just been published in paperback. To purchase a copy, please go to your local bookstore or to Bookshop.org, Amazon.com, BN.com, or tomclavin.com.

By Tom Clavin

“The Overlook” can be found at tomclavin.substack.com. If you enjoy the column, please “like” it and let me know what you think by commenting. All support is appreciated. Don’t forget to hit the ‘Subscribe’ button – it’s free!

“Top” Valdez died last week at 88. He was the last Marine to board the last helicopter to leave the roof of the U.S. Embassy two hours before Saigon surrendered on April 30, 1975. And he was loved and admired by the leathernecks who served with him.

Juan Jose Valdez was born in San Antonio, Texas, in 1937. His parents, Salome and Antonia, were second-generation Mexican immigrants who worked various jobs within the Hispanic community. Valdez was a good athlete who played football in high school, standing over six feet tall. Valdez joined the Marine Corps after high school. He completed his training at Camp Pendleton in 1956 and was assigned to Company “A” 1st Amphibian Tractor Battalion 4th Marines, 3rd Marine Division, near San Francisco. In 1965, Valdez served his first tour of duty in Vietnam. When his Vietnam assignment was completed in September 1967, he returned to the U.S. to become a company first sergeant at Camp Pendleton.

When the Vietnam War began to wind down in 1972, most of the Marine contingent in Vietnam was gone from the country, except at consulates and the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. In 1974, Master Sergeant Valdez was sent to Saigon to serve as the commanding officer of the U.S. Embassy Marine Corps detachment.

When Valdez arrived in South Vietnam that September, the country’s situation was starting to unravel. North Vietnamese forces had already violated the Paris Peace Accords and were rapidly overtaking large chunks of South Vietnamese territory. By April 1, 1975, South Vietnamese troops were trading their uniforms for civilian clothes. Marine Corps Major Jim Kean was ordered to Saigon to oversee the 45 members of the Marine Security Guard detachment.

On April 24, NVA soldiers reached Bien Hoa Air Base 15 miles northeast of Saigon. The following day 40 Marines from the Seventh Fleet were flown to the embassy to shore up the compound’s defenses. The situation in the streets of Saigon was panic and chaos. Civilians rushed the gates seeking safety. Only those with American passports, allied foreign passports, third-country nations, Vietnamese with U.S. Mission Embassy cards, and Vietnamese with evacuation authorization documents were allowed in the compound.

At 1500 hours on April 29, the embassy’s evacuation began as the first CH-46 helicopter arrived under the code name Operation Frequent Wind. The CH-46s were assigned for the rooftop evacuations, and the larger CH-53s evacuated people from the compound parking lot. Reinforcements came in with the first CH-53 at 1800. Helicopters arrived at 10-minute intervals until 0500 on April 30. The Marines were ordered to load only Americans at that point, as the helicopters would only be evacuating from the roof.

Maj. Kean and MSgt. Valdez began pulling the other Marines back from their three perimeter placements. CH-46 “Lady Ace 09,” piloted by Capt. Gerry Berry, landed with orders that Ambassador Graham Martin was to be loaded immediately on his helicopter. The Marines began the final evacuation from the roof, blocking doors with heavy objects from that point forward. When Berry’s helicopter lifted off the roof, it was assumed that all Americans were out of the U.S. Embassy.

But at the bottom of the stairway blocking the double-door entryway were Kean, Valdez, and nine Marines. While they had been locking down the elevators and barricading the last door, they had missed the last helicopter. When they reached the rooftop, it was assumed that another helicopter would arrive shortly. After 20 minutes, no transport had arrived, and the gates of the embassy were fully breached.

The rest of the story is from the book Last Men Out by Bob Drury and yours truly:

Jim Kean sensed that the NVA wanted nothing to do with starting another war with the United States. As a combat veteran, however, he also knew that the danger lay in the possibility of small troop units coming into contact with each other. He thought of the 9,000 frustrated and pissed-off Marines cramped together in the holds out of the Seventh Fleet, armed to the teeth and itching for revenge over the killings of Judge and McMahon. He had seen it in their eyes when the young Thompson-Powers’ platoon had poured off the helicopters. They were almost twitching for action. A wayward shot now, he thought, was all it would take to light the fuse. He gathered his men in the center of the roof.

“People,” he began, “Charlie, Cowboys, God knows who, are going to be throwing pot shots up here to gauge our reaction. I want no return fire. No one – unless on my say-so. All weapons on safe. Round in the chamber. Dicks in the dirt.”

Not a minute later a bullet ricocheted off the incinerator room not far from where Steve Schuller was nearly asleep on his feet. He dove into Bobby Schlager’s lap.

“I been shot at all fucking night. I’m tired of people fucking shooting at me.”

“So who you want to shoot back at?” Schlager was goading him.

“I don’t give a fuck. Just, just ... somebody.”

Schlager kicked the toe of his combat boot at the back-up ammunition clip stuffed into Schuller’s belt. “Wouldn’t last too long. Specially against tanks.”

“We could make a run downstairs to the gun room.” Duane Gevers had joined the conversation. He was fingering the safety of his sidearm, nervously clicking it off and on. “Got rifles, shotguns, pistols. Maybe a couple of .60s.”

Schlager jerked a thumb over his shoulder toward the incinerator room door. Steve Bauer had returned to his post and spraying a gas grenade at the disembodied hands clawing through the broken wire-mesh window. “Through that?” Schlager said.

“Climb over and down the rocket shield?” Gevers said.

Schlager laughed. He was still staring at the door. “You think they left any weapons for us?”

“Hell with weapons,” Schuller said. “Could make a run for it.” He thought back to the long nights during boot camp. Everyone else in his platoon beat to shit after humping a pack all day, racking out, or crowding around the pool table and crappy television set in the recreation room. While he was out running mini-marathons.

“Yeah,” he said softly. “Make a run for it.”

“What about the French Embassy,” Gevers said. “The hole in the wall? Don’t they have to grant us asylum or something?”

Schlager just laughed. “We ain’t getting off this roof,” he said.

They had all heard he horrible stories about North Vietnamese prison camps. The Hanoi Hilton. The Tiger Cages. Mike Sullivan intuited the thoughts running through each man’s mind. It wasn’t supposed to end like this. Vietnam was supposed to be another Korea, a country divided in the middle. The southern half kept safe by an uneasy truce. At best, he thought, we’d go back in and kick some Communist ass. Drive them right back into China. “Everybody bring it in,” he said.

One by one the Marines gathered about him. Schlager was the first to break the tense silence. “You think the fleet’s even still out there?”

“Of course it is,” Sullivan said.

Schlager gave him a look. “Then what’s taking them so long?”

“I ain’t ending up in no camp,” Bennington said. He motioned toward one of the machine guns. “I got my spot picked out.”

“Then we’ll die up here.” It was Babel. The first words he’d uttered all morning.

“So be it,” said Bobby Frain.

“We better take a vote,” Sullivan said. He had no doubt had it would come out. But he wanted to make it official.

One by one, each man voted to fight.

Kean and Valdez stood 30 feet away, watching. The two men eyed each other, the silence broken only by the muffled crumps of artillery, now from all directions. Kean knew the Marines would not ask for an officer’s vote. The Corps was not a democracy. Valdez, however, was another matter. He may have been their commander and de facto leader, but he was still an enlisted man. The Major jerked his chin.

“Go see what’s up, Top.”

Valdez reached the circle just as Bobby Frain was finishing a speech. “ ... and so anyway, that’s what I say.” His hand brushed the dog tags hanging from the thin metal chain around his neck. “It may not be a long fight, but when they pull these off me I want them to have to dig through a pile of Gooks to get them.”

Valdez was struck by the matter-of-fact tone of Frain’s voice. By all of their voices.

The sun was higher now, and the humidity weighed on the Top Sergeant like an anvil. All eyes were on him. Everyone else had voted to make a last stand, and his was the final ballot. Somebody had said that it had to be unanimous.

Valdez, too, was certain this was the end. But he knew it would not arrive in an Alamo-like siege. There would be no enemy infantrymen storming up the stairs; no Davey Crocket moment. Why would the NVA waste soldiers like that? He peered out again at the artillery explosions rocking Tan Son Nhut. No, he thought, when the final blow comes, it will fall from above. One well-placed round is all it will take. But there would be more, just to make certain. There was no need for the North Vietnamese to start conserving ammunition now. He thought of his two sons. What would they be told? What would everyone back home know about what happened today? He raised his right hand.

“Aye, we fight,” he said.

Terry Bennington had settled into his “spot,” slumped behind one of the M-60s, with clear fields of fire toward both the stairwell door and the windows of the abandoned British Embassy. He looked around at his fellow Marines and felt as if he could physically feel the tug of the bond among each of them.

He had never been much for introspection, but now he thought about how the Marine Corps had changed his life. It had accepted him like no one else before – not family, not friends – and, he guessed, like no else would again. He knew couldn’t have put his feelings it into words if someone put his own machine gun to his head, likely because the trust he felt for every one of these men trapped on this roof went deeper than words allowed. To the point of love. No, he thought, what he felt went even beyond the word love. It was if there was an invisible cord stretched among them, splicing them together like the ends of 11 raw nerves. They were all brothers this morning. Brothers sharing the same beliefs, the same challenges, the same fears. Together. Maybe for the last time. He racked the slide on the big gun.

Up on the helipad Dave Norman was having similar thoughts. A warm feeling had suddenly washed over him; he was at peace with the fact that he was going to die on this roof with a good bunch of Marines. He had never felt so serene before, although his one regret was that he would never see his Mom and Dad back in Ohio again. He was certain they would understand.

He could tell the NVA was close. Not just the artillery and ground troops pouring into the city, but he could hear the rumbling of their tanks. Whoever wants us first, come and get us. It was only a matter of time. He sat up straight and gazed about the rooftop. He felt as if he should say something. Instead he re-checked the clip of his rifle for the for the 20^th time.

Mike Sullivan found a piece of shade next to Phil Babel on the west side of the helipad. He was seated with his back against the wall of the incinerator room, and he knew the men were stealing glances at him. They were scared and alone, he could read it on their faces. They were also wondering why he’d humped that damn “Prick-25” around with him all morning if he wasn’t going to use it. He didn’t have the heart to tell them that not only were the radio’s batteries almost dead, but the Fleet had never given him a call sign. Without a call sign, he knew, no American would reply even if they could hear him.

He lifted the headset to his ear and keyed the handset. “Navy, Navy, this is Embassy. Over.”

No answer. He tried again. “Navy, hello United States Navy. This is the Marine Security Guard detachment at the United States Embassy in Saigon. Over. Hello Navy, can you hear me? Over.”

While he spoke into the dead radio he studied the concerned faces of his young MSGs. What could it hurt?

“Navy, U.S. Navy, this is Embassy. Eleven Marines requesting extraction. Repeat, eleven packs. Over.”

A pause. “Yes, sir. I understand. Perfectly, sir. No problem, sir. We will indeed hold the fort, sir. Over.”

Sullivan cupped the headset against his chest. “They’re on their way,” he said. He ignored the skeptical glances from Kean and Valdez.

“They’re on their way,” he repeated. “Just gotta fuel up and change crews.”

Phil Babel turned and pretended to look down into the compound. “Bullshit,” he said under his breath.

“Shut up,” Sullivan whispered. “You talk too much.”

Valdez made his way over to a corner of the roof where Jim Kean sat alone. The major was watching a motorcade speeding down Thong Nhut Boulevard toward the bunker-like facade of the Presidential Palace. Big Minh’s last ride, Kean thought. Wants to meet his conquerors with all due pomp and ceremony.

As the convoy neared the palace gates the riot police in Minh’s Jeep escorts began firing into the knots of looters along Mac Dinh Nhut Street. Kean jumped to his feet and emptied his .45 into the big radio satellite dish.

“Major!”

Kean turned, arms akimbo, his pistol now at his side. “Top?”

“Sir, uh, maybe somebody hears those gunshots and figures we’re looking for a fight.”

“Aren’t we?” Kean said. He was scared to death, but determined to keep it to himself. “Point taken, Top. I just didn’t want to leave any coms material intact for the NVA.”

“Pretty sure the thermite grenades in the Bubble Room took care of that, sir.” Valdez stroked his massive chin. By now Kean knew the unconscious gesture meant something was troubling the big man.

“Top?”

“Major, you think they forgot us?”

Kean looked about the roof. The whiskey was gone, the two bottles standing naked and empty on the asphalt. Mike Sullivan was still hunched over the Prick 25, pretending to receive messages. By now he was fooling no one. The remainder of his MSGs had dispersed to their own private islands; slumped with their backs literally against the low wall. Dragging deep on cigarettes. Alone with their thoughts. Even if Gen. Carey thought all his Marines were out of the city and scattered among the fleet, Kean thought, certainly by now he would looking for my debrief. And what about Gerry Berry? He had been flying for over 18 hours, and that was enough to give a man bugs on the brain. But enough to forget the last 11 Americans?

“There is that possibility,” Kean said.

There was a long silence. The Major broke it. “No rope?”

Valdez shook his head.

“Sure as hell can’t jump.”

“Climb down that rocket screen?” Valdez said.

Both men peered over the side. The jutting edges of the rough concrete latticework might provide a man with handholds and toeholds. But then what? The angry Vietnamese below them in the compound resembled swarming insects.

“Human chain, maybe,” Valdez said.

Kean ran his hands through his filthy hair. “Out the back door and dash to the river ...”

“And steal a boat,” Valdez said, finishing the thought.

“Could be done,” Kean said. “The vote to stand and fight? Unanimous?”

Valdez shrugged. What do you think?

Kean nodded, and again looked over the rampart. He checked his watch. It had been just over an hour.

Terry Bennington, squatting behind his M-60, and Dave Norman, lying on his back on the helipad, spotted it almost simultaneously – a slender white contrail painting the blue sky far to the southeast.

“Major Kean.”

In the time it took Kean to raise his binoculars, the contours of the CH-46 were visible to the naked eye. Four Marine AH-Cobra gunships flew cover on the compass points – above, below, and to either side of the Sea Knight, criss-crossing in attack formation every half mile.

The sniping turned into a barrage as the chopper banked for its final approach and HMM-164, call sign Swift 2-2, set its great black tires down on the rooftop helipad. Its Crew Chief dropped the tailgate. The glass in the side windows had been shot out.

Kean ran to the cockpit and shouted above the beating blades. “Waitin’ for you. Didn’t think you were coming.”

The Marine pilot, Captain Tom Holben, grinned and gave the thumbs up. The Cobra gunships, nose down for optimal firing, swooped like hawks above the Embassy. High above them a Navy A-7 Corsair attack jet left its own contrail circles.

Kean turned and raised both arms. “Strip down,” he hollered. “Lighten up. Lose grenades, helmets. Just leave them.” He looked toward Bauer. “Ten minutes, Corporal. Then get your ass up here.”

Kean led the Marines up the ramp – ducking and zig-zagging; no one wanted to be killed now – and took a sling seat behind the pilot. Valdez waited outside the tail ramp. On Kean’s signal he shouted for Bauer. Bauer took one more slow, sentry walk in full view of the faces on the other side of the broken window and edged out of sightline. He bolted up the stairs two at a time, losing his flak jacket as he ran. He flung his helmet away before stepping in through the tailgate.

Sgt. Juan Valdez, the last American serviceman to depart Vietnam, snapped a group picture with a small Brownie camera before scuttling aboard.

“Pop the gas,” someone yelled, and Bobby Schlager pulled the pins on two canisters of CS. He rolled them out the gunner’s door. They tumbled off the helipad and settled in front of the incinerator room door.

It took a moment for everyone to realize the mistake. The rotors were sucking the vapors into the cockpit and cabin of the helicopter. The pilots were blinded. The helicopter hopped and lurched, its skids bouncing one, twice, three times off the LZ. The ramp was still down, and on the third bounce Juan Valdez rolled out of the chopper.

Three sets of hands shot out of the clam shell. Valdez waived them off and got to his knees. He clambered back aboard.

“Planning on staying, Top?” Mike Sullivan yelled.

Valdez grinned and strapped himself into a sling seat. Through the fog of CS he could just make out the door to the incinerator room. It bulged, buckled, and broke. He thought of Da Nang, the civilians fighting to pile aboard the Birds, clutching at the skids. If it happened now the weight would surely force the aircraft over the side of the building.

Holben and his co-pilot’s eyes were red with fatigue and the effects of the tear gas, but most of it had blown off. They could see if they squinted. Holben lifted off as the mob surged up the outside staircase. He banked the aircraft southeast, toward the river. The rotors drowned out the sounds of small arms fire. Jim Kean checked his watch: 0758. Twenty-three hours after he had found out his wife was pregnant. Swift-22 passed low over the Presidential Palace where Big Minh awaited his fate. Then the downtown hotels hove into view beneath the skids, their terraces and roof bars eerily deserted.

“Look,” Bobby Schlager hollered. He pointed to a half-dozen Russian-made T-32 tanks, flanked by armored NVA vehicles, lumbering across the Newport Bridge.

Each Marine in the helicopter craned for a view, each thinking of what might have been.

Tom Clavin is the bestselling author/co-author of 25 books. The latest one with Bob Drury, The First to Go West, has just been published in paperback. To purchase a copy, please go to your local bookstore or to Bookshop.org, Amazon.com, BN.com, or tomclavin.com.

By Tom Clavin

“The Overlook” appears every Wednesday at tomclavin.substack.com. If you enjoy the column, please “like” it and let me know what you think by commenting. Check out previous columns while you’re at it. And don’t forget to hit the ‘Subscribe’ button – it’s free!

Please indulge me: This week sees the trade paperback publication of The First to Go West: American Ambition, Bloody Conquest, and the Fateful Journey of Jedediah Smith, by Bob Drury and yours truly. The original hardcover edition, published in 2024, was titled Throne of Grace. Alas, it did not grab the wide audience we hoped to find, so the publisher has decided upon a new title. Now we hope again for a good audience because we think it is a terrific story.

The pantheon of early American adventurers is a Who’s Who of famous names – Daniel Boone, Lewis and Clark, Kit Carson, John C. Fremont. We are glad to introduce another, the greatest American explorer you have never heard of: Jedediah Smith. From Smith’s first journey up the Missouri River and into the Rocky Mountains in 1822 to his violent death in 1831 on the Cimarron, this fair-haired voyager completed not one, but two trailblazing trips to the Pacific Coast and back, along the way unlocking a plethora of the mysteries contained in the vast western territories known only on maps of the era as the “Great American Desert.”

Historical nonfiction authors like us dream of unearthing the tales of such a fascinating figure waiting to be discovered by a mainstream audience. In Jedediah Smith, our dream came true. The happy result is The First to Go West.

Our story is set in the early 1800s, when President Thomas Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase from Napoleon Bonaparte nearly doubled the size of the United States. A nascent America’s boiling ambition to both explore and conquer these thousands of square miles of western lands birthed what would come to be called Manifest Destiny. This thirst also inevitably led to scores of bloody battles between Indigenous tribes and white adventurers personified by the grizzled mountain men and fur trappers who acted as the tip of the trailblazing spear. Jedediah Smith was one such pioneer, a leader of men lured west by the opportunity to open new vistas into the unknown.

Our page-turning narrative was a joy to research and write, infused as it is with a cast of colorful characters determined to unlock the mysteries of this beautiful if treacherous new territory. Our storyline follows Jed Smith and his cohort as they begin to realize that there is another dimension to their commercial enterprises; that is, the idea of transforming the United States into a continental world power. Moreover, the detailed journals that Smith kept during his explorations – of which we make great use – point to his awareness that he could become as legendary a figure as his heroes Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. That he did not live long enough to become either a savvy self-promoter (such as Fremont) or the subject of dueling hagiographers (like Boone) does not obscure the fact that accomplishments live on in our book.

Just for a few examples, we describe in The First to Go West:

· How Smith was the first American to traverse the heretofore unknown gap in the Rocky Mountains known as South Pass that became the gateway to the west along the famed Oregon Trail.

· How Smith was the first American to range along the western edge of the continent’s high cordilleras from South Pass to the North Pass navigated by Lewis and Clark.

· How Smith was the first American to circumnavigate the country’s largest inland sea known today as Utah’s Great Salt Lake.

· How Smith was the first American to cross the man-killing Mojave Desert and enter California from the east.

· How Smith was the first American to travel up the West Coast from San Diego to the Canadian border.

· And how Smith was the first American to traverse the continent’s waterless Great Basin and live to tell the tale.

Finally, we would like to add how telling Jed Smith’s story completes a puzzle for us. Two of our previous books – The Heart of Everything That Is and Blood and Treasure – were robust best sellers. The timeline of The First to Go West fits snugly in between them, forming a gripping trilogy about not only the expansion of America from the days of Daniel Boone to the end of the 19^th century but the impact on the thousands of Indigenous peoples in the path of that quest for the completion of a new nation.

Although we believe that The First to Go West stands on its own many merits, we also think readers will embrace the full and exciting saga of this very American trilogy.

Tom Clavin is the bestselling author/co-author of 25 books, including the newest one in hardcover, Running Deep. To purchase copies, please go to your local bookstore or to Bookshop.org, Amazon.com, BN.com, or tomclavin.com.