Hello Everyone,
We’re waiting in the hotel lobby in London waiting for the 2024 WWII students to arrive. Hopefully they’re finding their way through Heathrow and on to the Tube.
Over the next three weeks plus, they will be posting their observations from three different points in the trip. Please keep an eye out and enjoy the trip with them.
David Steigerwald
Professor David Steigerwald
Last fall when the OSU marching band performed for the NFL in London, a good friend of the WWII Program, Steve Habash, had dinner with an alumni and his wife who live there. Steve has a knack for making good things happen for us, and he is not one to miss a chance. In this case, the Buckeyes he met were Tim and Jenny Ringo. Tim is a 1994 graduate of the Fisher School, who has made a career in Human Resources and Human Capital Management for such companies as Anderson Consulting, Accenture, and IBM. Jenny, a native of greater London, also worked for Anderson, and the two met while on a joint project in Prague. Jenny’s father, Michael Handscomb, was a teenager during WWII. And this was the chance that Steve sensed: Would Mr. Handscomb have any interest in meeting with the Buckeye WWII students and regale them with stories about growing up in the midst of war?
Regale us he did. With all the style and vigor of a practiced lecturer, Michael told us of buzz bombs and doodlebugs, black-out nights and strict rationing. His family lived just east of London in a small community, Bexleyheath, that metropolitan London long ago collected into its expansive maw. He was the eldest of two boys, his father a scientific tool-maker and his mother a university graduate and a school teacher who continued to work even after marriage—both then rarities for women.
When the war began, Michael’s father thought it was best to decamp—literally—to a relative’s property on the coast near Portsmouth. It seemed well out of the way of potential violence. There, Michael and his brother, Colin, lived like Boy Scouts, tramping around the property, playing war, building forts out of the remnants of an old brickyard, and learning how to catch and skin rabbits, a skill that unexpectedly came in handy once rationing clamped down.
This was 1939, the year of the “phony war,” when Britain was technically at war with Germany but the Nazis had not yet made their drive west. Like a great many people across Western Europe, Michael’s parents were lulled into complacency and decided to take the family back home.
So, in the first few days of September 1940, the Handscombs returned to Bexleyheath.
And the Blitz began.
Having secured air bases in France and the Netherlands, the Germans began their systematic air attacks and took aim at London. Nighttime bombings intensified during the second and third weeks of September, before the Royal Air Force prevailed. In the meantime, large sections of the London metro area were pummeled, thousands died, and much of the population found some small measure of safety in the city’s bomb shelters, often improvised in subway tunnels.
While no place was safe—Buckingham Palace itself was hit twice—the East End suffered most. The main targets were the factory and wharf neighborhoods along the Thames. East of the city, Bexleyheath lay directly on the flight path both in and out of London. If a German pilot hadn’t released his load going in, he had to drop it going back out. Bexleyheath was as good as anyplace to leave it.
So 11-year-old Michael got his first taste of war. His father served as a community air-raid warden. Every night after dark, he walked the neighborhood to make sure the blackout rules were being honored. The family spent night after night in their Anderson shelter, a prefab metal unit installed in family gardens. As Michael explained it, these acts of civic activism and family pluck gained inspiration from Winston Churchill’s crucial leadership.
An Anderson Shelter: Easily installed at home, the shelters were supposed to be covered with 18 inches of dirt for extra protection. They could never defend against a direct hit. But they did provide protection against shrapnel, flying debris, and other deadly residue of bombings. Above all, they provided confidence, a sense of control, and an antidote against despair. And they reinforced the nuclear family, since a household with an Anderson didn’t need to mingle in the depths of Tube stations with so many other people.
Though the bombings diminished, one could never take safety for granted. The black-outs remained. Rationing grew to extremes. To students accustomed to summoning up pizzas from their phones, hearing that basics like cheese and butter were limited to a few ounces a week was pretty shocking. Michael explained that though meat was rationed, a friendly butcher might be expected to slide a bit extra round the corner with regularity. And if he caught a rabbit, well, it fell into skilled hands.
Michael’s most dramatic stories weren’t of the Blitz so much as of the VI and V2 attacks of 1944. Even more than during the Blitz, Bexleyheath was in the line of fire. These terrifying weapons were notoriously inaccurate—indeed their most unnerving quality was that no one could be sure where they would land, least of all the Germans. The V1 was aimed at London, more or less, but it fell wherever it ran out of fuel, and the Handscombs’ neighborhood too often was just that place. You could always hear them coming, Michael explained as he imitated the peculiar buzzing noise of the incoming “doodlebug.”
Whenever the siren sounded, Michael’s father snapped to duty. If need be and the worst happened, Michael was pressed into service to clear damage and even extract victims. “It was the first time I’d ever seen a dead body,” he told the students.
Mr. Michael Handscomb and the 2016 World War II students, London.
Yet life went on, its routines woven oddly, yet necessarily, around the presence of disaster. Once, he and his brother were playing in the countryside when a rocket barreled to earth so close that the explosion knocked Colin out of the tree he was climbing. What was the boys’ first reaction? They ran to see what the crater looked like and to help themselves to any souvenirs. Their second reaction: Don’t tell mother.
As he catalogued the anguish and resolution of the British people, Michael ended with a most thoughtful postscript. Shortly after the war, he won a contest with a junior United Nations group and was invited to travel to Prague by no less a figure than Jan Masaryk, the famous Czech patriot. This was 1947, and Europe had hardly begun to recover from the war’s massive destruction. Stopping briefly in Cologne and Nuremburg, he saw the complete devastation that Allied bombing had brought to Germany. Though what he saw hardly lessened his pride in England’s wartime efforts, he took it as a sobering lesson that no one really wins wars and that, in the event, misery is humanity’s common possession.
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Not only was Michael’s visit with us a terrific lesson in personal history. It reminded me of how important our Ohio State connections are and what a broad reach this institution has. We can count friends worldwide, friends who can bring a wealth of experience and a breadth of perspective to our students. And in turn, we expect this group of Ohio State students to take inspiration from the contacts we present to them and to imagine living to the model of the global citizen.
Having spent the last few years traveling internationally with student and alumni groups, I’ve developed a long list of rules. I call them the DS rules, and as of today there are 177 of them. I haven’t yet drawn them all up on a list, but I’m working on it. I’m beginning to think that I should compile all the DS rules and publish them in a “How to Travel” Manual. Rick Steves look out.
Some of the rules are pretty much common sense. Rule #3, for instance, is that students must show me their passports every time we leave one place to head for another. Most everyone no doubt would agree that it’s a good rule.
I’ll admit that a few are a tad more idiosyncratic. Rule #8 is that you should never buy anything while traveling that has either dimensions or volume. This is because what you buy, you have to pack.
Students find this rule puzzling. Everything, they remind me, has some volume, and under Rule #8 they can’t buy anything.
Exactly!
Now, I recognize that they have mothers and friends, and they want to bring home some special mementos of their time in Paris or what not, and so, like most of my rules, they treat this one more as a guideline. So I’ve decided to develop a ratio: the less volume you take on, the happier you will be and the better your experience.
Students don’t seem to like the ratio appendix to Rule #8 any more than they like Rule #8.
There’s a word for someone with 177 rules. They’re called curmudgeons. And curmudgeons usually have lots of pet peeves. This might surprise you, but I have lots of pet peeves. It’s always annoyed me, for instance, that ties cost as much as shirts. What’s up with that?
But let’s get back to travel. I now, officially, have a new #1 pet peeve: the digital camera. It is the worst invention of all time as far as travel is concerned.
The digital camera claims many virtues. Photos can be downloaded on your computer and easily sent to others. In electronic form they can be altered and improved, the amateur’s mistakes somewhat corrected. And they can store thousands on thousands of photos.
Here is the problem. Relatively speaking, in the pre-digital age, photos were scarcities. Tourists could only take as many photos as they had film. Whatever film they used had to be packed up and hauled home. (See DS rule #8.) Then they had to pay to have it developed. Hassle and expense meant that most people could afford to take only so many bad pictures.
Today, thanks to digital cameras, people can take as many bad pictures as they please. And they do. Now that every smart phone is also a camera, pretty much everyone takes as many bad photos as they can.
They take photos of everything, no matter how stupid or trivial, and as often as not they make a bad photo infinitely worse by including themselves in it. I’m told that these are called “selfies.” Hawkers at all the big tourist must-sees sell sticks with little plastic phone holders at the end that add a few feet of perspective. They’re called selfie-sticks. For a while there I thought the new tourist thing was to carry around a 9-iron, because that’s what they look like from a distance. I got to wondering why people thought they could pitch golf balls in Trafalgar Square.
Tourists preparing to hit golf balls in the Louvre Courtyard
Leaving aside that this practice shows that narcissism truly is a universal human condition, it might not be so big a deal that people seem to think they deserve to be in the same frame as, say, Caravaggio’s Christ at Emmaus.
The problem is that these big-shot selfie snappers now clog up entire museums. They walk into rooms, stop, and take pictures of the ceilings and walls. The three thousand or so people behind them trying to flow through a place like Versailles all have to stop too, and the three thousand people behind them, and the three thousand people behind them—well, you get the picture, so to speak.
Worse still, they stand in front of humanity’s greatest masterpieces and insult them by taking bad picture after bad picture of them, mostly with themselves included, and then move aside so the big-shot selfie snapper traveling with them can do the same. Then they each take a double selfie.
The other day I thought I’d found a small bit of serenity walking among the marble sculptures in the Louvre. Suddenly some mad man came running around snapping pictures of everything, completely indiscriminately, of light fixtures, of flooring tiles, of Aphrodite’s toenails. He looked like a little kid on his first Easter Egg hunt, who isn’t sure where he’s supposed to look but thinks he’s supposed to pick up everything in sight. He studied nothing. He took not a second to soak in the genius in the great work around him. But then he didn’t seem to know the difference between the art and the smoke detector.
No one actually looks at great art anymore. They just take pictures of it.
This isn’t just annoying, though it certainly is that. It indicates a profound disregard for the nature of art. The beauty and authenticity of great work reveal themselves only in the uniqueness, the singularity, of the work itself, as anyone who really has spent time standing in front of original work knows. The light, the texture, the detail, and what Walter Benjamin long ago called “the aura” of the real thing allow for an intimate conversation across time and space between the artist and the art lover. The conversation depends on having at least a few quiet minutes engaged with a piece, and this is getting harder and harder to enjoy against the selfie insanity.
Man taking a picture of air, Paris
So DS Rule #178: Ban the Camera!
One of our most important stops on the WWII Study Abroad tour is at the famous American Cemetery at Coleville sur Mer. If you don’t recognize the name, you know the place: It’s where Saving Private Ryan opens, and where the film finishes. You know the alabaster monuments, lain in the serenity of breezes easing toward the sea.
We now know that there are thirteen Buckeyes buried here. When we visit, we lay a rose at each Buckeye headstone, and we hope that conveys, in some tiny way, both our gratitude for and our commitment to the memory of Buckeyes who served.
Of those Buckeyes interned here, most were students when they went into military service, but some were alums. What stands out is how many of them were married and how many of them were fathers.
We don’t know nearly so much as we’d like about the Buckeye 13. Thanks to Steve Habash, our stalwart supporter, we’ve begun to learn what we can about them. We even hope that perhaps we can find a family member who might want to know of our visits. But we don’t know much about any of them at this point, beyond what the alumni sources tell us.
Imagine, then, my astonishment, when our visit to the German cemetery at La Cambe in Normandy turned up a remarkable document from one of our Buckeyes.
Some background: We take the students to three different cemeteries. Of course we go to the American cemetery. We also visit the British cemetery here in Bayeux. The nearby German cemetery is an interesting case in contrast to the others. In its dark somberness, it seems like an apology in stone.
The German War Graves Commission, which is responsible for the site, has finally finished the visitors’ center there. It’s been in the works for several years. The theme—that all war is irrational—is made plain. Like many museums here, it presents its case through collages.
While going through it, I was stunned to be looking at a facsimile of a letter from Robert A. Lane to his daughter. Lane was a graduate of OSU, 1934 in agriculture, and an Army major who had served in North Africa and Italy before going to the D-Day invasion.
Early in his extensive service, he wrote his daughter Sandra. This is what he said in 1942:
My Dear Sandra,
“I know that a little girl who is not quite two years old can’t read a letter but perhaps you’ll be old enough to read before I see you again. Your Daddy was in the Army when you were born and most of your life has been without having me with you. We were just getting to know each other when I had to go away and I believe I could have taught you to say ‘Daddy’ if I could have been with you a little longer. I have watched your brother and sister grow up from a baby too and you were a very good baby whenever I got to see you. As you learn to talk and ask for things I want you to pay close attention to what your mother says for your mother knows what is best for you. I hope I get to see you again before so very long and we can really get acquainted.
As ever, Daddy
Robert A. Lane, Class of 1934, was killed in France, August 23, 1944.
He is buried in Coleville sur Mer, France, Plot A, Row 4, Grave 41.
Nick Gelder, a junior from Cincinnati, approaching the grave of Melvin Spruiell, one of three OSU faculty members killed in Europe. Behind on left, Selena Vlajic and Vince Hayden; on right, Kayla Karg and Anthony Tenney.
Our students are discovering that London is, if nothing else, a city of museums. They have almost as many museums here as Starbucks or Pret A Mangers. In fact, I walked up Museum Street this afternoon. It was one of the few streets that didn’t seem to have a museum on it.
They are also discovering that not all museums are equal. Take the Clink Prison Museum at London Bridge, the city’s “oldest jailhouse.” Its brochure promises “Real History,” but the guy who handed it to me was dressed up as a pirate, so that raised suspicions on that score. It does have a “mystery coffin,” however. And for the kids, they promise rodent hunts. So there’s that.
At least one of the genuinely bona fide sites steeped in the city’s history has been a real disappointment. Since just our last visit, St. Paul’s Cathedral no longer accepts the London Pass, which otherwise is accepted virtually everywhere worthwhile. One always suspects money, or lack thereof, is behind the switch. The Cathedral now charges nearly $30 for a visit. This puts St. Paul’s in the same category, I’m obliged to point out, as the Clink Prison. Actually, the Clink only charges about $12. And they do rodent hunts.
Those students interested in how museums function have gotten a case lesson in the varied consequences of funding through visits to WWII sites. Our schedule began at the Churchill War Museum, then took us Bletchley Park, and then to the HMS Belfast. The Imperial War Museums administers both the Churchill and the Belfast; Bletchley is under the control of an independent trust.
And the difference shows.
With origins in the Great War era and the official imprimatur of a Parliamentary decree, the Imperial War Museums presently is a consortium of five sites under a single administrative umbrella. It administers the Churchill, the Belfast, sites in Manchester and Cambridgeshire, and its jewel, the world-class Imperial War Museum. Though the IWM courts private support, it is publicly-supported, and a position on the Board of Trustees comes through an appointment by the Prime Minister. It bears much the same relationship to the British state as the Smithsonian does to the American government.
With their more or less public status assured, the museums of the IWM are state-of-the-art. The Churchill War Rooms contain, among many other things, the most amazing interactive time-line I’ve seen anywhere. When the students asked me how long they should expect to spend touring the Belfast, I said: “Well it’s just a ship, but once you get inside, it’ll take about at least two hours to see most of it.” They were inside a full two hours, because the entire ship—a WWII cruiser-class—is a floating museum informative in a hundred ways.
Bletchley Park, by comparison, is the responsibility of the Bletchley Trust, which was organized only in 1992 and is entirely dependent on private support. Perhaps its very nature put it at a disadvantage. For those who don’t watch The Women of Bletchley on WOSU, Bletchley Park is where British intelligence established the vital Ultra cryptography effort that successfully broke both the Enigma and Lorenz Codes that the Nazis used for naval and strategic communications. What happened there was the greatest intelligence feat of WWII. And yet the site’s secret purpose and the rather informal way the property had been arranged for wartime use probably left it languishing for almost thirty years, when, finally, a group of interested people rescued it from developers.
I first visited Bletchley a few years ago on a scouting trip to see if it would be worth putting on the students’ schedule. I was dubious, frankly. The museum was displaying some of the important artefacts associated with Ultra: a German Enigma machine (which looks like a typewriter tricked out with extra keys and dials); one of the “Bombes” (the huge proto-computers that did the calculations necessary to deciphering the daily German codes); and a few other items. The second floor of the museum looked like someone’s attic. Period ephemera was scattered about, presumably intended to demonstrate how wartime civilians lived. An elderly fellow, aptly representative of British quirkiness, had taken over a large hall adjacent to the main building and filled it with a lifetime’s collection of everything Churchill—Churchill cigars; Churchill shot glasses; Churchill plates; Churchill magazine covers; Churchill derbies. The effect was to give the place the feel of a flea market. Misgivings aside, we put it on the schedule because of its intrinsic importance and because the train ride into the Midlands gives students a bit more of England.
I’m happy to report that the Bletchley people have done remarkable work in just a few years to turn the site into a teaching museum befitting its historical value. They have made the most of the representative machines and give demonstrations of how the Bombe worked. They now have the world’s largest collection of German Enigma machines. They’ve arranged a tribute to Alan Turing, the mathematical genius behind the proto-computers, who died—probably by suicide—after being prosecuted for homosexuality in the early 1950s. They also have an interesting exhibit on the Ultra spies, a small group of shady characters who served as double agents and who filtered back to the Germans misinformation concocted on the knowledge gained through the cypher program. And they’ve cleaned out the attic, including the world’s largest collection of Churchill junk.
All in all, the improvements made at Bletchley Park have been impressive, particularly considering that they must still be struggling to raise funds. Wise leadership, professional vision, and a committed group of volunteers—human capital, in each case—are making do. Now it’s a must-see, rather than an add-on to our student tour. ______________________________________________________________________________
One of the students, Courtney Gehres, visiting London for the first time, made the shrewd observation that here the very old and the very new seem to jostle for the same space.
Here is a good example of what she meant:
On the left is Southwark Cathedral, which is over 1000 years old. Towering over now is The Shard, Europe’s tallest skyscraper, which opened officially only this year.
Many years ago when I was a Fulbright Scholar in Japan, I heard a joke I still find both funny and telling.
What do you call someone who speaks three languages? Trilingual.
What do you call someone who speaks two languages? Bilingual.
What do you call someone who speaks one language? An American.
I suspect that the Japanese relished that joke because they too are notoriously resistant to language diversity. But it is certainly an accurate reading of Americans’ language backwardness. We are the most linguistically-challenged people outside of—well, anywhere. Indeed, places we dismiss as “undeveloped” require native peoples to command several different languages at once.
I plead guilty. I am a pure American in this regard. Even the Spanish in which I was formally trained and competent some years ago is pretty much gone.
So when we travel abroad, we Americans are brought face-to-face with our linguistic disabilities. You can’t help but marvel at the facility of everyone you come into contact with in Europe. Northern Europeans—the Danes, the Fins, the Swedes—speak sounder English than most Americans. Workers in the travel industry, from hotel desk clerks to concierges to information people at kiosks wherever, speak competent English. Hotel maids speak three languages at me at once as they try to figure out whether I need a fresh towel; they’re much smarter than I.
The most amazing thing about the linguistic agility of Europeans is how quickly they can go from speaking to their companion in Italian or Spanish or Estonian to speaking to me in English, as in “Excuse me sir.” I seem to have some air about me that obliges people to “excuse me sir.” It certainly can’t be my physical size. I’m not a hostile person, as far as I know. I assume that they just know I can’t speak any other language. Maybe I have some otherwise inscrutable stamp on my forehead that says: “That’s right. I’m from the States. I can’t speak anything but Ohioan.”
You’d get the impression that this state of affairs makes global life easy for us lazy and language-deaf Americans. Everybody speaks English. Why should we go to all the hassle of learning?
But I’m not sure it’s that simple.
Tonight, I had dinner in London’s Soho. I felt like Indian food. I like Indian food. In fact, my neighbor at home is an Indian-American, and his brother owns that marvelous Indian kiosk at the North Market. I love going to Andy’s parties. He’s got lots of interesting friends, but Raj always caters, which makes it an event you can’t beat.
So I chose one place over about a half-dozen other Indian places in the district that I walked by. When I went in, I could hardly make out what my waiters were saying. I’m guessing that they’ve not been in London too long; that they’re first-generation immigrants who haven’t yet picked up the British accent. I had to ask them to repeat, and repeat, and repeat. And yet as Indians, as great-grandchildren of the great empire, English might well have been their not-so-second language. As I ate my meal, I heard three different languages in the tiny restaurant, and yet somehow the French table, the German table, and the East European table (I can’t tell the difference between Romanian and Slovakian or Albanian) managed to communicate with the wait staff, which was speaking a version of English I was hardly familiar with.
This is a fascinating thing. As the world comes indisputably closer together, our linguistic differences come into ever more tangled conversation. English might be the international language of business, law, and diplomacy today. But at those points where globalization is most focused—London, Paris, New York, Rome—it’s a mish-mosh of people struggling to order food that’s not too hot for them, or trying to explain that they have a nut allergy, or need gluten-free food. How do you say gluten-free in English that everyone in the world understands?
As of now, the lingua franca is a blessed welter of bare comprehension.
I’ve arrived a day earlier than the fourteen students who are enrolled in the World War II Study Abroad Program for May 2014. All looks in order awaiting them tomorrow. Most are probably getting ready to go off the airport as I write. Three students–David Corrigan, Kelsey Mullen, and Nick Gelder–have stopped in Dublin on their way, so they’re already in the European Theater of Operations.
Tomorrow will be a settle-in day, as we try to get over our jet leg. We’ll take a ride on the Tube to get familiar with how that works. We got lucky this week when a threatened strike by the Tube workers did not materialize. We’re staying very centrally this year, within easy walking distance of Westminster. So perhaps we wouldn’t have been too terribly disrupted in any case.
Our first official trip will be Thursday morning, when we begin with the Churchill Museum and Cabinet War Rooms. We go out to Bletchley Park, home of the code-breakers, on Friday.
So far, the weather in London looks warmer than last year. Today was sunny, but I fear that won’t last. That’s Europe in May.
David Steigerwald