Although Japan was one of the Axis Powers during WWII, one Japanese diplomat did his best to mitigate the horrors of his country's ally, Nazi Germany. Before the war ended, he saved thousands of Jews from concentration camps but ended up selling lightbulbs in order to survive.
Chiune Sugihara was first assigned to Harbin, China in the early 1930s as Japan's Deputy Foreign Minister where he learned German and Russian. Despite a promising career, he resigned his post in protest over how his country treated the Chinese.
Due to his experience and linguistic abilities, however, he was reassigned in 1939 to Kaunas, Lithuania as vice-consul; though his real job was to report on German and Soviet movements. Japan never trusted either country, which is why Sugihara also maintained ties with Polish Intelligence.
After the Soviet invasion of Lithuania on June 15, 1940, the Japanese consulate began dismantling itself since they already had an embassy in Russia. Sugihara and his family got ready to move to Berlin for reassignment, when they received an unusual visit on the morning of July 27.
Not many requested Japanese visas in Lithuania, so the staff was surprised to find about 200 men, women, and children massed at the gates of the consul. The unruly crowd tried to climb the gates, but security kept them back.
Sugihara asked them to send in five representatives. Their leader was Zorach Warhaftig, who explained that they were mostly Polish and Lithuanian Jews trapped in the country because of the Soviet occupation.
All were trying to get to Curaçao (then a Dutch colony) since it had no visa requirements – but to get out of Lithuania, they needed transit visas. Unfortunately, few countries were sympathetic. Even more unfortunate, neither was Japan.
Although Germany had asked Japan to adopt anti-Semitic policies, most Japanese neither knew what a Jew was nor particularly cared. All Japan wanted was that any visa applicant follows their rules and procedures which meant time, paperwork, and money.
Many of those standing outside had none of the above. Nor were they really interested in getting to Japan. They just needed official paperwork that would allow them to leave, which made Sugihara their last chance.
Over the next several days, the vice-consul thrice requested his superiors in Tokyo for a special permit for the applicants considering the circumstances – but their response was always "no." Anyone wanting to enter Japan had to follow proper protocol regardless of their religious affiliation or circumstances.
Since about a third of Lithuania's urban population were Jews, the crowds outside the consulate continued to grow. Despite the threat to himself, his wife, and four children (all of whom lived at the consulate) Sugihara decided to disobey Tokyo.
He began writing out 10-day transit visas to Japan.
To make sure they got out, he negotiated with Soviet officials so that his visa holders could leave the country on the Trans-Siberian Railway. They'd be allowed to reach Vladivostok, and from there, head on to Kobe, Japan. The catch, however, was that Jewish passengers had to pay five times more than everyone else.
Sugihara then spent 16 to 18 hours a day handwriting the visas, uncaring that half had no passports. For these, he accepted blank sheets of paper, stamping them with the consulate's insignia and affixing his signature and permit to them.
The number of those requesting visas grew even more. Moses Zupnik even requested transit visas for all the 300 members of the Mir Yeshiva. Sugihara granted it to the despair of his German assistant, Wolfgang Gudze. When Zupnik returned several days later, he offered to help Gudze with the paperwork, but Sugihara still had to handwrite the permits to make them valid.
He even asked his superiors for an extension so he could stay in Lithuania longer, but it did no good. In August, the Soviets ordered the consulate closed. The family moved into the Metropolis Hotel on August 28 where Sugihara continued to write even more visas.
On September 4, they finally made their way to the Kaunas Railway Station. From the window of his coach, Sugihara continued to handwrite visas, throwing them out the window to the desperate crowds gathered on the platform.
As the train left, one of the men ran after it. Sugihara leaned out and handed him the consulate seal, saying, "Please forgive me. I cannot write anymore."
He had handwritten over 2,000 visas, though Japanese records show that in the period he was at Kaunas, 5,580 transit visas were issued. Though many Jews got out, the Sugiharas did not. They were at their new post in Bucharest, Romania in 1942 when the Soviets arrested them as citizens of an enemy nation. They were only released from a POW camp in 1946.
Back in Japan, however, Sugihara was disgraced. To make ends meet, he had to take on menial jobs, including a stint selling light bulbs door-to-door.
At least till one of the people he rescued ended up rescuing him.
In the 1940s, Jehoshua Nishri was a Polish teen who made it to Israel because of Sugihara's transit visa. In 1968, he worked as an economic attaché for the Israeli Embassy in Tokyo when he managed to track down his benefactor.
In 1985, Israel deemed Sugihara as one of the "Righteous Among the Nations," an award given to those who helped Jews during WWII. His honor restored, Sugihara died the following year. Before he did, however, Sugihara said that he always wondered how many survived because of his visas, if at all.
That was answered in 2013 when the Visas for Life Foundation tracked down 2,139 Sugihara beneficiaries (since one visa could cover an entire family). It's believed that he may have saved as many as 6,000, while an estimated 40,000 can trace their descent to a Sugihara survivor. When his wife, Yukiko, traveled to Israel in 1998, she was greeted by survivors who presented her with the faded visas her late husband had written.
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Roughly six months later, the storied division would launch an unprecedented airborne assault taking them over 150 miles (241 kilometers) behind enemy lines and within 100 miles (161 kilometers) of the Iraqi capital, Baghdad.
In 1990, a coalition of forces from around the world, headed by the United States, gathered in Saudi Arabia. The task was to remove the Iraqi Army from Kuwait and protect against an expansion of Saddam Hussein's aggressiveness.Within 12 hours of the invasion of its southern neighbor, Kuwait, the Iraqi army was without any significant opposition. The world's 4th largest army at the time now had solid control of Middle East oil production and was moving troops to the border with Saudi Arabia.
The coalition of forces sought a peaceful solution to the conflict and insisted that the Iraqi forces immediately vacate Kuwait. But a defiant Saddam Hussein decided to "double down" and warned of the "mother of all wars."
Hussein was given an ultimatum and date by which to comply. The stage was set for the first large scale U.S. military action since Vietnam.
The 101st Airborne would set the stage for a 42-day-long aerial bombardment of Iraqi positions, defenses, and command and control facilities.
Eight Apache helicopters of the 101st Division set off on January 16th under cover of darkness with a mission to take out two Iraqi radar stations. The Apaches, using advanced equipment like thermal imaging, penetrated into Iraq, flying only 50 feet (15 meters) off the deck to approach the sites undetected.Once in range, the Apaches took out the sites and auxiliary targets with extreme efficiency. Over 40 Hellfire missiles and more than 200 Hydra 70 flechette rockets were fired on Iraqi targets as well as an unspecified amount of 30 mm cannon rounds.
The mission opened up a 20-mile (32-kilometer) wide corridor in Iraqi airspace for coalition forces to fly through without being detected. As the Apaches from the 101st returned from their successful mission, they could hear and see the swarms of coalition aircraft starting their sorties.
Desert Storm had begun.
The ground assault to push Iraqi forces out of Kuwait began on February 24th, 1991. After over a month of constant bombardment by coalition aircraft, missiles, and artillery, U.S. Marines led the attack on Iraqi positions in Kuwait.
Other coalition forces would strike out into the Iraqi desert, eliminate or subdue forces encountered, and cut off the Iraqi Army from the Euphrates and Tigris River valleys.
The operation was billed as "innovative" by the coalition commanders at the time but was essentially an engage and flank maneuver on a grand scale.
The 101st had a special task in this "left hook" that would take them 155 miles (249 kilometers) behind enemy lines, transported there by over 400 helicopters.
In December of 1990, when the 101st had been deployed in Saudi Arabia for a few months, questions and criticisms continued to be reported about the combat readiness and effectiveness of America's "peacetime army."
Many reports indicated that the Apaches and other vehicles and equipment would not function properly in the desert environment. Furthermore, many critics were vocal in their lack of confidence in the U.S. soldiers' capabilities.
As Major General Robert Clark reflected later, the soldiers of the 101st themselves were starting to suffer deterioration in their morale. He noted two specific events that lifted spirits and fired up the men and women of the unit.
First, every member of the 101st Airborne received a card from a former member of the 101st, many of whom had served in WWII. The messages on the cards were varied, but a common theme existed in each: You have a date with destiny. Honor the unit, badge, and those that wore it before.Second, the division was told, "The way home is through Iraq. Time to go to work."
The 101st Airborne set out with two early objectives in Operation Desert Storm. The first was to set up a forward base behind Iraqi lines named Cobra. Elements of the 101st set out and established this base quickly and effectively.
The second early objective took large elements of the 101st Airborne even further into Iraq and to the Euphrates River. A distance of over 150 miles (241 kilometers) from their base in Saudi Arabia and less than 100 miles (161 kilometers) from Baghdad.
There, the 101st took control of Highway 8, which connected the Iraqi capital with its army in the south. Now, less than two days into the ground offensive, the Iraqi army was already in full retreat from Kuwait.
At this point, the question wasn't whether the coalition forces would rid Kuwait of the Iraqi Army, but whether the U.S. led forces could close the noose on Saddam Hussein's best forces, the Iraqi Republican Guard.
Around the third day of the ground offensive, the 101st set out again to establish a forward base. This time they headed east towards Basra and established Forward Base Viper.
From Viper, the 101st was able to conduct operations against Iraqi forces falling back from Kuwait and Basra, helping to eliminate the ability of those forces to consolidate and reform.
Aircraft elements of the 101st Division took part extensively in the turkey shoot of retreating Iraqi forces that are most commonly referred to as the Highway of Death. The destruction and devastation along this stretch of road was complete.
With Saddam's forces in total disarray, the 101st was already preparing to go on the offensive again, heading even further north into Iraq. However, the political and strategic aims of the conflict had already been achieved, and coalition forces were ordered to ceasefire.As the conflict wound down, the 101st Airborne returned to the United States with a heroes' welcome. They had achieved all their mission goals, demonstrated their abilities, and wreaked havoc on their enemy. The division sustained only five soldiers KIA in the conflict.
Commanding General Norman Schwartzkopf commented during one of his press briefings how extremely fast, tough, and effective the 101st had been. He called them the "Lightning in Desert Storm."
Libby Prison started as an old food warehouse on Tobacco Row along the James River.
Captain Luther Libby, along with his son George W. Libby, leased the three-story brick building where they operated a ship chandlery and grocery business. In 1862, the Confederacy took over the building and turned it into a prison for Union officers.
Colonel Thomas E. Rose, a Union officer from the 77th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry, was captured during the Battle of Chickamauga and taken to Libby Prison. He found conditions appalling and immediately started plotting his escape. He devised an ambitious plan to dig a tunnel from the cellar of the prison to a tobacco shed that stood just outside the prison walls.Rose revealed his plan to a few trusted accomplices and planning got underway. Life inside Libby Prison was miserable. Prisoners were held on the second and third floors of the building. Windows were barred but open, leaving inmates freezing in the winter and insufferably hot in summer. Overcrowding created constant stress and resulted in 2 food shortages. The lack of sanitation led to disease and death. One father whose son was held at Libby prison desperately sought to have supplies delivered to the prison.
He wrote, "He has been confined during the whole summer without a change of clothing, and is in a very destitute condition." Desperate for relief, it was not difficult for Rose to find prisoners willing to help with his plot.
Outside of Libby was a canal, and during wet weather, the prison's cellar flooded bringing hundreds of rats scurrying into the building. The putrid air in the cellar kept everyone away and helped it earn the nickname, Rat's Hell.
The area was largely avoided by Confederate guards and provided Rose and his associates the perfect place to dig undetected.Rose accessed Rat's Hell by removing bricks behind an old kitchen stove. He then shimmied down a chimney to the cellar. From there, Rose and his team scraped away at the hard dirt using crude makeshift tools. Much of the digging took place at night in the dark when the exterior was heavily guarded, but conditions inside the prison were somewhat relaxed.
Loads of earth were removed one bucket at a time, by packing an old spittoon with excavated dirt. The vermin-infested cellar, the rats, and the lack of oxygen made the work excruciating. At one point, after digging a tunnel nearly 60 feet long, the prisoners broke through the surface to find they were off by several feet. Hearing the voices of Confederate guards, the prisoners quickly hid the tunnel and readjusted the approach to the shed.
After weeks of digging, the prisoners managed to clear a tunnel that surfaced in the tobacco shed. One prisoner described the escape, "Everyone wanted to be first. In order to get down the chimney as well as long the tunnel, it was necessary to strip naked, wrap the clothes in a bundle and push this on before them. As soon as it was seen that only a few could possibly get out before daylight, all rushed for the mouth of the tunnel who could - each man being determined to get out first. The room was now crowded to suffocation all struggling to get in the hole. The strongest men forced their way to the front while the weak ones were more roughly brushed aside and jammed up against the walls."
The next morning at roll call, Confederate guards were shocked to find 109 prisoners missing, their escape route concealed by the remaining inmates. Of those 109 prisoners that escaped, 59 eventually reached Union lines, 48 were recaptured and two drowned in a river crossing.
Two of these fanatics, Marita Perigoe and Eileen Gleave, were being watched by London legend agent 'Jack King.' He was reputedly Hitler's 'top man' but Jack was Eric Roberts, an ex-bank clerk from Epsom in Surrey.
However, Roberts was not to be underestimated. With patience and guile, he managed to snare dozens of would-be Nazi spies who believed that the information they were passing on to him was going directly to Berlin. He posed as an undercover officer of the German Gestapo and exploited a taste for cloak and dagger "melodrama" amongst the would-be fifth columnists by supplying invisible ink and setting up a meeting room in the basement of an antique shop.When he met Perigoe, he wrote that she "was not neurotic, she is a masterful and somewhat masculine woman, an arrogant Hun."
Her violent anti-British sentiment merited special attention. She would search their meeting room for bugs and would often talk about killing Roberts, suspecting him of being a double-agent. She was paid four pounds a week, and in return, she kept MI5 busy with contacts and intelligence throughout the war years.
Gleave, on the other hand, had become bitter following the death of a cousin at Gallipoli, for which she blamed the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill. This developed over time into an irrational hatred which was to set her on a path to find revenge.
Perigoe was a Swedish German and married to a member of Oswald Mosely's notorious British Union of Fascists, a "black-shirt" who had been imprisoned in Brixton Prison. However, Moseley's fascism didn't go far enough for Perigoe, so she teamed up with Gleave to devise a plot to secure a Nazi triumph.
In early 1944, Field Marshal Montgomery and General Eisenhower were planning Operation Overlord or D-Day as it is otherwise known, from the Headmaster's office at St Paul's School in Hammersmith, West London. The children had been removed to East Hampstead Park in Berkshire to escape the German bombardment of London.Although neither Perigoe nor Gleave knew what was going to be discussed behind the doors of the evacuated school, they knew that killing both men would be both a morale-breaker for the Allies and a coup for the German Forces. The tide was beginning to turn against Germany, with a stalemate on the Eastern Front and the Atlantic supply lines opening up once more for Britain.
Their plan involved looting of the local Wembly Home Guard Arms Depot and then storming the school. Spy-master "Jack King" was in no doubt as to the motivation of the two women but was worried that if he tried to stop them, his cover would be blown.
He was able to warn Eisenhower, who failed to take his concerns seriously. Indeed, on May 15, 1944, plans for Operation Overlord were presented to Churchill and the King in the lecture theatre at the school.
In the end, the attack planned by the two women never went ahead, and Operation Overlord became the successful invasion the Allies had banked on to loosen the Nazi grip on Europe. Of the five-hundred or so fascist fifth columnists identified by MI5's Eric Roberts and others, there were no efforts to round them up after the fall of the Third Reich.MI5 had apparently not kept the British Home Secretary informed of its activities among the fifth columnists, and reference to the Montgomery-Eisenhower plot was only recently uncovered by author and researcher, Robert Hutton. His new book 'Agent Jack' is based on information that has recently been declassified by the British Government.
Eric Roberts kept up his dual role as Jack King for three years, evading discovery by those who would be all too keen to dispatch him in the name of the Fatherland. He eventually retired with his wife and children to Canada.
Perigoe and Gleave went to their graves convinced they had done their best for Germany.
It is the invasion of Cambodia that made people back home in the U.S. vehemently question the war and why the U.S. was involved. It led to widespread rioting and violence back on U.S. territory.
Now as new intelligence emerges it is thought that the invasion of Cambodia was because President Nixon believed that there was a secret Vietnamese headquarters based in the country. Both the President and military chiefs believed that if they could find and destroy the headquarters it would stop the North Vietnamese army’s progress towards the south.
The truth was that there was no headquarters located in Cambodia. The North Vietnamese leadership was fragmented and mobile with its forces fighting in Vietnam. Nevertheless, at the time the U.S. was determined to act on the intelligence it had received in order to try to debilitate the enemy and ultimately end the war.President Nixon ordered his ground troops to invade Cambodia at the end of April in 1970, the Atlas Obscura reports.
U.S. and South Vietnamese troops fought against not only the North Vietnamese army but also Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge when it invaded the country.
Back in the U.S., the invasion was perceived with negativity and the operation was stopped after only two months. Nixon lauded the operation as a success and that U.S. troops had been able to infiltrate communist elements operating in Cambodia, but the invasion never located the enemy headquarters that the U.S. had hoped they would find.
The CIA director during the Vietnam War later described the search for the enemy headquarters. He said that the U.S. tried in vain to find a command center of the North Vietnamese deep in the Cambodian jungle, but that it was never found. He says that the leadership of the North Vietnamese troops was probably only a few commanders and their officers, nothing more.
It is thought that if the Cambodian invasion had continued longer and the U.S. troops were able to scour the country for North Vietnamese then they may have uncovered more than they did. But it was pressure from civilians back at home in the U.S. that drew the invasion to an early halt.
Some still believe that there may have been some headquarters complex in the Cambodian jungles.
Twenty-five years after her passing, Audrey Hepburn remains the most beloved of all Hollywood stars, known as much for her role as UNICEF ambassador as for films like Roman Holiday and Breakfast at Tiffany's. Several biographies have chronicled her stardom, but none has covered her intense experiences through five years of Nazi occupation in the Netherlands. According to her son, Luca Dotti, "The war made my mother who she was."
Audrey Hepburn's war included participation in the Dutch Resistance, working as a doctor's assistant during the "Bridge Too Far" battle of Arnhem, the brutal execution of her uncle, and the ordeal of the Hunger Winter of 1944. She also had to contend with the fact that her father was a Nazi agent and her mother was pro-Nazi for the first two years of the occupation. But the war years also brought triumphs as Audrey became Arnhem's most famous young ballerina.
Audrey's own reminiscences, new interviews with people who knew her in the war, wartime diaries, and research in classified Dutch archives shed light on the riveting, untold story of Audrey Hepburn under fire in World War II. Also included is a section of color and black-and-white photos. Many of these images are from Audrey's personal collection and are published here for the first time.
Reader's Reviews
The author did an amazing amount of research on Ms. Hepburn's background. This was a difficult read. No one wants to admit that their mother supported Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, especially when they are later trapped by the same man that they had once supported. Clearly, Audrey Hepburn was a very young girl when her mother traveled to Nuremberg to attend Hitler's rally, and to meet Hitler. And, she was a young girl when she danced for the Nazi troops who had overrun her home country of The Netherlands. She was only a couple of years older when she worked for the Dutch resistance against these Nazis, risking her life to help rid her homeland of them. The fact that she survived the near-starvation and the violent acts of war was miraculous. She was an amazingly brave and heroic teen. After the war, she had to shut down many questions, due to her mother's dubious Nazi leanings prior to the war, and her mother's actions during the first two years of World War II. This was an excellent book, and I urge everyone to read it.
~Richard R.
Excellent story told honestly. I found the background of family members somewhat superfluous for my interests but overall the book is well written. This book also clarified the story of Operation Market Garden which was a disaster. General Montgomery had his own ideas and the book does not clarify why help was not more immediate from allies in the south.
An interesting sidelight is how JE Hoover and FBI managed to get Hepburn's mother back to the US after her investigation by Dutch authorities for Nazi sympathies. This aspect is, however, treated honestly and fairly. Not surprised that Audrey's father a Nazi sympathizer abandoned the family and when released went to Ireland to live - not welcome back in the Netherlands.
~Ronald Turco
Matzen does a remarkable job describing WWII from Audrey's point of view, showcasing his researching capabilities but still respecting the subject and its heroes. I knew Audrey had grown up in the war, that she had danced to raised funds and carried messages for hidden soldiers. I did not know, however, just what it meant to be "occupied" by the Nazis. Matzen beautifully portrays Audrey and Arnhem's heartbreak and perseverance during one of the darkest times in history.
~ Shannon
If you're an Audrey Hepburn fan (and how could you not be?), this is a "must-read" - an absorbing account of her early life, with a particular focus on her time in the Netherlands during the war, going through a very harrowing experience that she would be fairly vague about during the rest of her life. It is definitely worth reading.
~Don Donahue
About the Author
Robert Matzen is the award-winning author of Mission: Jimmy Stewart and the Fight for Europe, Fireball: Carole Lombard and the Mystery of Flight 3, and five other books. He has appeared on national broadcast programs and his byline has appeared in the Wall Street Journal among other publications.
Robert Matzen is an award-winning American author who specializes in Hollywood history and World War II. He uses creative fiction techniques to translate meticulous research into a narrative that draws readers in. His eighth book, "Dutch Girl: Audrey Hepburn in World War II," was released by Good Knight Books in April 2019. His seventh, "Mission: Jimmy Stewart and the Fight for Europe," shot to bestseller status during the 2016 holiday season and earned national media coverage, including an essay by Robert in the Wall Street Journal. He toured with the book at venues across the United States through 2017.
With every book, Matzen gets personal with history. For "Dutch Girl" this meant spending weeks in the Netherlands talking to the people who lived through the war with Audrey Hepburn. For "Mission" he flew in B-17 and B-24 bombers and walked the muddy fields of Jimmy Stewart's base at Tibenham, England. And for "Fireball" he famously climbed a mountain-Mount Potosi, Nevada-to explore the wreckage of Carole Lombard's TWA Flight 3.