THE LAST WEEK - THE ROAD TO WAR
Chapter 8 - Part 3
August 30, 1939

A British officer asks a worker how they are destroying 3 million artillery rounds. The Kruppianer show that they are lining them up in rows and setting off fires near the nose fuses to melt the charges.

"But haven't you killed men doing it that way?" the Briton asks.

"No, Herr General, not so many," is the response. They can't dump the shells at sea - Versailles has eliminated the German shipping fleet.

Britain's Colonel Leverett arrives at the Hauptverwaltungsgebaude to oversee the destruction of Krupp's armaments and machinery, and finds that Die Firma does not have as many shells to deliver as are required. In a decision straight out of Lewis Carroll, Leverett orders Krupp to produce the shells on their assembly lines, then deliver them to the French for disposal. After that, in summer heat, Krupp destroys its machinery to produce armament. It is a degrading scene for the Kruppianer, to be sure, but it has a silver lining: when Krupp re-builds its "black" armaments line, it will do so with the most modern technology.

After the destruction, Germany's industrialists refuse to cooperate further with Allied inspectors, and the Control Commission is powerless to prevent the schlotbarone from building secret arms factories throughout the Reich or in other countries.

When Allied officers visit factories or Reichswehr barracks, they find German officers, officials, and executives ready to quibble over the treaty's clauses. One depot officer refuses to turn over his Zeiss rangefinders. He needs them to determine the heights of clouds for the Weather Service. Another officer needs his flamethrowers to spray crops and burn insects off the field. And besides, flammenwerfer are "humane weapons of war."

At the Mauser Waffenfabrik in Oberndorf-am-Neckar in the Black Forest, the executives insist their machinery merely make hunting rifles and carbines. More than 4.5 million KAR 98K rifles get crushed, but 1.5 million are "lost" from the records.

British and French officers who try to inspect German army barracks must submit their tour routes in advance, and invariably arrive to find only the regimental sergeant major on hand, the CO and XO having gone for the day, taking the keys to the confidential files with them. Or everyone is present, lined up for inspection, except the Versailles liaison officer, so the inspection cannot proceed, under the treaty's clauses. The Allied officers leave amid gales of Teutonic laughter.

Other German troops try fiercer measures. French officers in Bremen ask for a unit's muster roll and are hurled on the ground and threatened with bayonets. In the same city, German troops toss a Royal Navy officer off a pier.

And a parcel arrives at the French Embassy in Berlin, containing the body of a dog, "in advanced state of decomposition." A note attached to the package reads, "The first and last payment of the Reparations!"

The French ambassador, Comte St. Quentin, shows Gallic sang-froid when he forwards the package to the German Foreign Office, noting that the sender has failed to comply with German veterinary regulations.

All these pranks and attacks result in a $250,000 fine slapped on the Reich, which ends the physical abuse, but not the hostility.

And meanwhile, under Seeckt, the Reichswehr becomes a tightly-knit and well-trained elite. Sergeants are taught to lead platoons, lieutenants to lead battalions - a technique that George Marshall will emulate in America 20 years later.

Cooks and bakers are made as familiar with Spandau machine-guns as with goulash cannons. Seeckt eliminates the heavy-handed brutality of the Prussian officers. Reichswehr officers can no longer slap their enlisted men with riding crops or jail them for the slightest infraction. They must treat their men with respect. Instead of endless square-bashing, Reichswehr troops go on exercises or compete in sports programs, promoting a sense of community.

But Seeckt has his weaknesses: he insists that the German Army maintain its cavalry units, and dismisses the tank.

On July 6, 1919, Seeckt memos his General Staff Officers: "The form changes, the spirit remains as before. It is the spirit of silent, selfless performance of duty in the service of the Army. General Staff officers have no name."

Those anonymous officers now take courses in foreign languages through the Foreign Office, history and political science through the National Archives, communications and railway systems through the Ministry of Transport, and face grueling examinations in these complex subjects. The programs last three years, and cover everything from veterinary services to logistics to military history to sports. Among the officers teaching the classes are majors and colonels named List, Kluge, Manstein, Paulus, Halder, Guderian, Jodl, and Rheinhardt. Rommel himself is very popular for his lectures on infantry tactics, based on his own experiences. He stresses boldness, flexibility, and leadership from the front.

When not giving lectures or working on his stamp collection, Rommel commands a company of the 124th Regiment, which consists initially of "red" Sailors from the German Navy, initially refuses to drill and holds revolutionary meetings. Hearing of one in progress, Rommel goes to the meeting, stands on a desk, and tells his men he proposed to command soldiers, not criminals. Next day he marches them behind a band to the parade, but the men refuse to do drill. Rommel simply rides off on his horse. The men have to glumly follow him back to the barracks. After that, Rommel has no trouble with them, even when they have to guard a black-market Schnapps factory.

On New Year's Day in 1921, Rommel takes command of a company of the 13th Infantry Regiment at Stuttgart, periodically quelling riots and mobs, once using fire hoses at Gmund.

A hole in Versailles allows no limits on the number of Reichswehr NCOs, so Seeckt passes out sergeant's stripes to 40,000 men - one noncom for every private. Another hole allows the Prussian Police to have armored cars and machine guns, which Seeckt can use.

Seeckt's secret army is an elite force and a political one. Anyone with left-wing or Marxist sympathies is turned away. Young and malleable peasants are preferred over opinionated city slickers. Sons of Army noncoms and officers are preferred. And Jews are absolutely barred.

Despite its humiliating nature, the disarmament of Germany actually gives the Generalstab an advantage for the next time around. Since they have to get rid of all their wartime munitions, they will not be burdened with outdated equipment and tactics. The Germans will have to build new factories and precision machines to create their new war machine from scratch, and will do so with full Teutonic vigor and efficiency.

When Hitler's army bursts into Poland in 1939, much of its equipment, from goulash cannons - field kitchens - to tanks and dive-bombers will be of the newest design, often fresh from Reich factories. Meanwhile, their Polish, British, and French opponents will have to fight the war armed with rifles, machine-guns, tanks, and artillery pieces that have been in storage since Ypres and Verdun, often covered with cosmoline and useless.

Meanwhile, victorious Allied officers are resuming their careers. A bullet-headed Japanese major named Hideki Tojo is assigned as the Mikado's military attaché in Berlin. Two Grenadier Guards officers, Captains Bernard Freyberg and Viscount Gort, both holders of the Victoria Cross are assigned to the Camberley Staff College in April 1919. Both pass the exacting course in January 1920.

On June 5, 1920, King George V bestows on his second son, Prince Albert, the title Duke of York.

One week later, the Republican Party nominates Warren Harding for president, supposedly after bosses reach a discussion in a hotel room. Reporter H.L. Mencken, studying Harding's slim resume of newspaper publishing and Senate work, pronounces, "Henceforth, no American can be safe from being nominated for president."

The same day, Brian Horrocks, a POW for the second time of his short military career, this time of the Bolsheviks in Irkutsk, sets off on a 3,500-mile rail journey east to Moscow. Everyone aboard hopes it is the first stage of repatriation to Britain. "We should have known better," Horrocks writes later.

Instead of England, he lands in a camp in the Ivanovsky Monastery. There Horrocks finds 457 prisoners, of which 45 are women. Among them are generals, admirals, politicians, former ladies-in-waiting from the Tsar's court, and prostitutes, all mixed together. "It was the most pathetic place I have ever seen, because all these people were without hope of any sort. Some indeed had gone mad," Horrocks writes later.

A high-ranking and elderly Russian general, for example, works very hard at being in charge of the lavatories, and anyone seeking to use them is required to click his heels, salute, and shout out in a loud voice, "Your most Highest. May I have the privilege of using your lavatories today?"

The general then salutes back and gives permission in an equally firm voice.

The food ration consists of three-quarters of a pound of black bread in the morning, boiled grain at midday, and soup from horseflesh in the evening. A French organization, however, brings in bread, potatoes, and some eggs and sugar twice a week. Horrocks eats his bread over a sheet of paper, to avoid wasting a single crumb. The guards demand that the British work. The British refuse. The Reds hurl threats. The British still refuse. The Reds do nothing to the British, but periodically, people depart from the camp "without baggage," and never return.

Back in Germany, the Allied Control Commission moves to try the 900 German war criminals on their blacklist before a military tribunal. The National Zeitung answers, "Extradition is out of the question. Does the Government really think that Reichswehr officers are prepared to see their former comrades handed over to foreigners for trial?"

The Allies capitulate in nine days, swiftly backing away from their own Versailles terms. The Blacklist is cut down to 113 names. These men face a Weimar civil court in Leipzig. The other 797 defendants see their charges dropped. Among the beneficiaries are the All-Highest and General Alexander Von Kluck, whose hands are bloodied with the 1914 Dinant massacre of 674 Belgian civilians. Also freed are the men who burned and sacked Louvain and gutted its famed library.

The trial turns into a farce. Generalstab officers sit in the court with a "watching brief," being treated by the lawyers and judges with "almost servile deference," according to a British officer attending the proceedings.

The three generals who are indicted have their cases dismissed by the public prosecutor. Two enlisted men charged with beating POWs draw two- and 10-month sentences, respectively. Two other enlisted POW camp guards get off with the defense that they were only "doing their duty" and that "obedience in camps must be preserved at all costs" when they clubbed POWs.

A major who rode down POWs, clubbed them, and photographed them they while used outdoor camp latrines gets six months. He tells the judges he took the photos "with no ill feeling, but only to commemorate my service as Commandant."

Two U-boat skippers who torpedoed a fully-lit British hospital ship, Llandovery Castle, on June 27, 1918, and machine-gunning survivors in the only three lifeboats to escape, get the stiffest punishment of all - four years in prison. After all, they gunned down a lifeboat with 14 nurses in it. But a few weeks later, they "escape" from prison and are never re-apprehended.

The trials are comical, but they have an impact: Germany is still powerful enough to defy its victorious foes, and the Allies are too weak to impose their will. Germany's war crimes are regarded as minor outrages that have been ballooned out of proportion. The orderly, cultured, disciplined Germans cannot be capable of the vast massacres of which they were accused in 1915. When the Germans butcher millions in 1942, nobody will believe these stories. And despite Germany's defeat, beneath the shame and chaos, the Reich is a strong and powerful nation…a phoenix awaiting its chance, like Ruhr coal, waiting to burst into flame.

Back in Munich, Hitler gets his Army discharge and moves into a small apartment right near the offices of the Münchener Beobachter, which changes its name to the Volkischer Beobachter. The paper, which runs Hitler's writing, also prints heavy-handed articles with headlines that read "Do A Real Job on the Jews!" which demands that Germany be cleansed of them.

And Hitler builds up his Nazi Party, moving it out of the beer halls and into ballot boxes and salons. He meets Alfred Rosenberg, a son of an Estonian mother and Lithuanian father, both of German extraction. Rosenberg writes anti-Semitic tracts like "Immorality in the Talmud" and "The Tracks of the Jew through the Ages," which Hitler devours. Nobody else can really understand anything in them except the anti-Semitic drivel. But that's good enough for Hitler, who starts quoting Rosenberg in his speeches and writings.

Hitler's rhetorical ability is enormous. He believes that the greater the lie, the more easily it will be believed, so he invents the "big lie" - the "grossenluge" - as a tool, and attributes it to the Jews. He paints his terms in simple manner: black and white, good and evil, never hesitating, never qualifying, and never backpedaling.

In a theory that anticipates the television advertising campaigns of the last quarter of the 20th century, Hitler says, "The receptive powers of the masses are very restricted, and their understanding is feeble. On the other hand, they quickly forget. Such being the case, all effective propaganda must be confined to a few bare necessities and then must be expressed in a few stereotypical formulas."

He scorns intellectuals who want to bring in new ideas: "Only constant repetition will finally succeed in imprinting an idea on the memory of a crowd."

Hitler's speeches become harsher and harsher, his audiences greater. He relies on the verbal speech, not the written word, repeating terms like "smash," "force," "ruthless," and "hatred." His gestures and style of whipping himself up from an uneasy beginning to near-hysteria inflame his crowds. He develops this style through endless rehearsal in front of a mirror. He has himself photographed in preparation, and studies the photographs later. He is the most effective demagogue of his day.

His views are also clear: April 6, 1920: The Jews are "to be exterminated."

As if to prove his point about fear of foreigners, the next day, French Senegalese troops fire on a crowd in Frankfurt, killing seven Germans.

August 7, 1920: "You cannot fight a disease without killing the cause, without annihilating the bacillus, and do not think that you can fight racial tuberculosis without taking care that the people are free of the cause of racial tuberculosis." April 1921: The "solution of the Jewish question" can only be achieved through "brute force."

Newspapers stop regarding him as a vaudeville comedian. Hitler also starts gaining support from disaffected left-wingers, outraged when big shots from Moscow like Grigori Zinoviev come to German Socialist conferences and demand obedience to the Soviet Union. Well-heeled Bavarians like the Bechstein family of piano-makers start funding Hitler, who is able to buy the bankrupt Volkischer Beobachter in December for the party. Hitler changes his occupation on his tax returns from "painter" to "Newspaper publisher."

Another new recruit is Hitler's old boss, Mayr, who gets his discharge in July 1920, and modestly takes credit for "discovering" Hitler. He writes to Kapp in 1922, "I've managed to bring some very competent people to the fore. Herr Hitler, for example, has become a dynamic force, a people's tribune of the first rank. In the Munich chapter of the Nazi Party we have over 2,000 members, compared to only 100 in September 1919."

Another joiner is former Army Captain Ernst Röhm, who brings in armed men from his own Army-backed Freikorps to serve as the Nazis' strong-arm force to protect meetings and disrupt the opposition with ferocious brawls. The thugs are called the "Gymnastic and Sports" section, but later become the "Storm Detachment," or Sturmabteilung, the SA. Wearing Army-supplied surplus brown uniforms originally intended to be shipped to German troops in East Africa during the war, they become known as the "Brownshirts." They soon become renowned for their snappy appearance, marching in formation, and viciously stomping political enemies in beer halls.

Röhm, a tough, battle-wise and facially-scarred veteran of the war, quickly gains Hitler's friendship. Röhm is one of the very few Germans who can use the "du" form of address with Hitler. He is also a homosexual, as are a number of early Nazis, but Hitler ignores Röhm's lifestyle - then considered perversion - or does not know about it.

But Röhm's combat record - a nose smashed by Allied shrapnel - and penchant for violence appeal to Hitler's political plans. Röhm describes himself: "Since I am an immature and wicked person, war and unrest appeal to me more than well-behaved bourgeois order." He has no interest in ideals, just mindless violence.

On January 26, 1922, four days after the death of Pope Benedict XV, Röhm visits the Munich University, to drum up recruits for the SA and partners for his bed. He is intrigued by a colorless, bespectacled agriculture student named Heinrich Himmler. The owlish Himmler dreams of military glory and is obsessed with regulations and personal files. As an officer cadet, Himmler spends most of his time as orderly room clerk, examining the personnel filing system and its contents. When not studying, Himmler sells fertilizer.

Röhm doesn't get far in trying to persuade the prudish Himmler to have sex with him, but Himmler becomes fascinated with the Nazi Party's rhetoric of rebuilding Germany's racial nationalist heritage, and he joins the Party.

The fall of 1920 is dramatic for another young American, as Franklin D. Roosevelt fills the vice-presidential slot of the Democratic presidential ticket. Two Ohio newspaper publishers, James M. Cox and Warren G. Harding, face off for the presidency. The incumbent, Woodrow Wilson, battered by strokes and crushing defeat, cannot run. The Democratic bosses pick Cox and Roosevelt, and the 38-year-old Roosevelt urges support for the League of Nations. His voice goes unheard. The Democratic leadership dislikes Wilson and his schoolmaster ways. Cox himself, despite being governor of Ohio, is unpopular, sounding like an echo of Wilson as he and Roosevelt crisscross the nation, making several speeches a day.

Meanwhile, Harding doesn't leave his front porch. The choice from the "smoke-filled room" tells voters that the nation needs "not heroics, but healing, not nostrums, but normalcy, not revolution, but restoration…not surgery, but serenity." With Calvin Coolidge as his running mate, Harding blasts Cox 16.1 million votes to 9.1 million, taking 404 electoral votes to 127. The Democrats carry only 11 states, all but Kentucky in the South. Isolationism is confirmed by the American electorate.

Franklin and Eleanor - voting in her first election - take the defeat philosophically. There will be other opportunities.

Ike and Patton also take their position philosophically. Their ideas rejected by the Army, they slog on, solving old tactical problems, finding the Leavenworth staff solution too timid. Patton and Ike inject tanks into their paper wargames, and start winning. They also start an argument that will last until Patton's death over the chief ingredient of modern war. Patton believes is inspired battlefield leadership. Ike believes leadership is just one factor, citing logistics. The arguments sometimes turn to screaming matches.

Eisenhower meets General Fox Conner, Pershing's operations officer from France, at a dinner, hosted by Patton, and Conner is fascinated by the two officers' theories. He spends the evening asking them far-ranging questions about armor, and urges the two to keep at their work. With that, Ike publishes his article on armored warfare in Infantry Journal, to the usual negative reaction.

But Conner, en route to command an infantry brigade in Panama, asks Ike if he'd like to serve there as executive officer. It beats the Infantry School doghouse, but the War Department won't send him.

Tragedy then befalls Eisenhower. Just before Christmas, his son "Icky" develops scarlet fever. A specialist from Johns Hopkins is called in - he can only advise prayer. Sulfa drugs are another marvel yet to come. Icky goes into quarantine. Eisenhower cannot see his son. On January 2, 1921, Icky dies. "This was the greatest disappointment and disaster in my life," Eisenhower writes as an old man, half a century later. For that half century, Ike sends flowers to Mamie every year on Icky's birthday.

There is little for Eisenhower now…even work cannot take him out of the depression that follows, as he is merely going through the motions, and coaching football. 1921 is a hard year for Eisenhower.

Patton, however, is happier. When not playing polo, he tells Ike, "The next war may happen just about 20 years from now. This is what we'll do. I'll be Jackson, you'll be Lee. I don't want to do the heavy thinking; you do that and I'll get loose among our enemies." Realizing that the Tank Corps is doomed, he transfers back to his roots in the Cavalry.

While Eisenhower and Patton ponder their professional future, Brian Horrocks, still imprisoned at the Andronoffsky Monastery, wonders if he'll have a future. But a "little fat man in riding breeches" turns up to tell Horrocks and the other British POWs that under an exchange scheme between London and Petrograd, the Britons are going home. Russian women being held beg Horrocks and the other Britons to marry them. "If only you will marry us so that we can get over the frontier out of Russia, we will promise never to worry you again." The British officers feel sorry for these women, but decide that they can't marry them and then abandon them once over the border. The answer, then, is no.

Two other American majors are having a rough peace, too. Maj. Henry Harley Arnold, known as "Happy" for his permanent grin - he's actually very serious - and Carl A. "Tooey" Spaatz, both quiet and soft-spoken airmen, are finding little to do in peacetime but play chess with each other and agree that airpower will be vital in a future war. Arnold should know - the nation's second military aviator, he was taught to fly by Orville and Wilbur Wright.

On October 29, 1920, the same day a Chicago grand jury indicts eight White Sox players and five gamblers in connection with the "fixed" World Series, Horrocks and Vining cross the frontier into Finland. The British party comes home on the new cruiser HMS Delhi, still wearing the shabby clothes of their prison ordeal. The ship's captain lets the exhausted Horrocks spend the voyage in the skipper's in-port cabin at the stern. After a fancy dinner in Copenhagen, Horrocks returns to London, to find his parents exhausted from the agony of his year-long odyssey.

Aged 26, Horrocks' military experience consists of years as a German and Russian POW. "There seemed not the slightest chance of a successful career for me in the army."

Another British officer returns home at this time, Lord Louis Mountbatten, on HMS Renown, with the Prince of Wales. The Australian trip has been grueling - the Prince can't sleep on Australian trains, and while going from Sydney to Perth, their train is suffers a derailment. At Canberra, the Prince lays a stone in the center of a barren shantytown for the planned national capital. Both the Prince and Mountbatten cast a cold eye on the would-be metropolis and tell each other it won't add up to much.

En route home, Mountbatten shoots films of Renown engaged in maneuvers to use for the teaching of signaling. He sends the film to the Admiralty, which responds, "Their Lordships are unable to see any useful applications for cinema films for instructional purposes in the Royal Navy." Decades later, when instructional films are the norm for all armed forces, Mountbatten tries to find his own film. It's long gone.

With the Australian and New Zealand trip such a roaring success, the Prince wants Mountbatten with him on the next road trip, to India, and Japan. Before doing so, Mountbatten has to command a platoon of naval stokers to be sent to the Nottingham coal pits to maintain order in case the miners' strike turns rough. The men move to Aintree, near the Grand National, and camp out in a disused bicycle shed, eating bully beef, sleeping under flea-infested blankets, and square-bashing for 15 hours a day. "Thank God I'm not in the Army!" Mountbatten writes. "They deserve all the pay they get, poor fellows."

Other officers are fighting boredom in billets. Capt. Frederick Browning of the Grenadier Guards becomes resident Captain at the Guards Depot. This gives him time to practice hurdling for Britain's 1924 Olympic team. Captain Charles De Gaulle is an officer on France's military mission to Poland, commanded by General Maxime Weygand. Flt. Lt. Keith Park is deputy commander of 25 Fighter Squadron at Hawkinge, which is most of Britain's fighter defense. There he flies a Handley Page bomber in a flypast over the heads of senior RAF officers, shaking them up. The big boss, Hugh Trenchard, rails at the man who ordered the flypast, Sholto Douglas, who is Park's boss. Douglas in turn berates Park and the two officers are permanent enemies after that. In August 1920, Park is sent to command the School of Technical Training at Manston, making Squadron Leader on January 1, 1921. Capt. Brian Horrocks returns to his 1st Battalion, the Middlesex Regiment, now part of the British Army of the Rhine, occupying Cologne.

Provisional Lt. Harry Foster is impressing his fellow militiamen of the King's (Nova Scotia) Mounted Rifles with his horsemanship in the summer of 1920, before starting McGill University. When Harry arrives with a letter from his father for General Sir Arthur Currie, the mountainous Currie delivers Foster a warning on the importance of maintaining celibacy during university studies and the dangers of Montreal's nightlife. He maintains an 82 average, which will point him towards the Canadian Army's academy at Kingston.

In Kansas City, Missouri, the Truman and Jacobson haberdashery is struggling. Despite Harry's membership in Kansas City businessmen's clubs where he rubs shoulders with political power Jim Pendergast, sales are down, along with farm prices. Truman has to borrow money to stay afloat, but remains a soft touch for loans for his equally hurting pals from Army days.

George Simpson is a lieutenant on the battleship HMS Benbow, part of the Mediterranean Fleet. Ensign Lyman Swenson of the U.S. Navy is enduring a difficult marriage to Milo Abercrombie, in her mother's 42-room San Francisco mansion. Swenson, a poor Mormon Utah farm boy, is familiar with the rugged life of farming and naval watch-standing. Milo, the daughter of Texas oil barons, prefers cocktail parties and debutante gossip. The marriage is already disintegrating.

Not so is the marriage of Tom and Alleta Sullivan, in Waterloo, Iowa. Sullivan, a freight conductor on the Illinois Central Railroad, enjoys the blessings of five high-spirited sons, whose childhood is filled with squirrel hunting, fishing, and occasionally stealing watermelons from railroad cars. The destinies of the five Sullivan brothers - Joseph, Francis, Albert, Madison, and George - will intersect with that of Lyman Swenson on board the light cruiser USS Juneau in the South Pacific in 1942, with fatal results.

As the 1920s open, the generation that will actually fight the Second World War is in its babyhood, childhood, or school. Future American submarine commander Ignatius Galantin is attending school in Des Plaines, Illinois, heading for the U.S. Naval Academy in 1929. F.W. Von Mellenthin, who will serve on the staff of panzer armies, is attending the Real-Gymnasium in Breslau. Jock Platt, who will serve and suffer as a British Army chaplain in Colditz, is working for in his uncle's boot and shoe repair shop in Cheshire, before training as a Methodist minister. Future Victoria Cross recipient Leonard Trent is a four-year-old, whose family has just moved from Nelson to Takaka in the Golden Bay area, 66 kilometers northwest of Nelson. Another New Zealander, Jim Burrows, is star of his rugby and cricket teams at Christchurch Boys' School. Fellow New Zealander Charles Hazlitt Upham, on the other hand, is only showing a 12-year-old's spirit of independence at Waihi, a boarding school near Timaru. In Flensburg, Germany, nine-year-old Hans Von Luck is learning the origin of foreign words and to do his own chores from his stepfather, a Navy chaplain. Charles Stacey is doing a monthly newspaper at University of Toronto Schools, where he is also in the cadet, drilling on campus lawns.

Twelve-year-old Robert Scott is releasing white pigeons into a tent meeting of Holy Rollers in his native Macon, Georgia, convincing the Fundamentalists that a sign from God has flown in. However, the event's preacher has Scott arrested for disturbing the peace. An irritated Scott retaliates by cutting off 50 feet of the tent's canvas, turning it into a glider. When he makes his first "flight," jumping off the top of a house 67 feet up, he crashes into a Cherokee rosebush, scratched but unharmed. His father has Scott turn the glider into a canoe, sailing river rapids, but young Scott never loses his love of flying.

Another 11-year-old, Jack Hinton, of Colac Bay, New Zealand, sets traps for possums and rabbits for family dinners.

Most are just small boys, like Monty Berger in Quebec; Robert Morgan in North Carolina; Eddie Slovik in Michigan; Al Deere, John Holm, Evan Mackie and Keith Elliott in New Zealand, Nick Carter in England's Northampton; John F. Kennedy in Massachusetts, Henrich Timm in Germany's Bremen; R.V. Jones in London; Mark Muller in The Bronx, Donald Watt, Frank Perversi, and Ed Webster in Australia, Ray Wyatt in Kansas, Mike Crosley in Liverpool; Andrew Wilson in Herne Bay, in England; Guy Penrose Gibson, in Simla, India; and Witold Urbanowicz, Jan Zumbach, Witold Lokuciewiski, Zdislaw Krasnodebski, and Miroslaw Feric in Poland.

Other young Americans are in their childhood or infancy…Eugene Roe in Louisiana, born in 1921; David Kenyon Webster in New York, born in 1922; Richard Winters and Bill Guarnere in Pennsylvania; and Carwood Lipton in West Virginia. Their fates will become entwined in an American parachute regiment in Europe.

Another group of young men whose lives will be intertwined as prisoners, escapers, and victims of atrocity, are in varying stages of their young lives. Lt. Harry Day is a lieutenant in the Royal Marines. Brooklyn-born Johnny Dodge, a naturalized British subject and relative of Winston Churchill, is trying to map trade routes in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran. Tommy Thompson, George Wiley, Gordon Kidder, and George McGill are small boys in Ontario; Jim Wernham in Winnipeg; Sandy Gunn in Scotland; Michael O'Casey in India; Ian Cross in Portsmouth, England; Pat Langford in Alberta; Brian Evans in Wales; Johnny Bull, Sid Swain, Sydney Dowse, Les Brodrick, Bob Stewart, and Tim Walenn in London; Gordon Brettell in England's Chertsey; Nick Skantizikas in Greece; Wally Valenta in Czechoslovakia; George Harsh in Georgia; Tony Hayter in Hampshire; John Stower in Argentina; Bob van der Stok in Dutch Borneo; Halldor Espelid and Nils Fuglesang in Norway; Henri Picard in Belgium; Reg Kierath, Al Hake, and Jimmy Catanach in Australia; Tom Kirby-Green in Nyasaland (today Malawi); Arnold Christenson, Willy Williams, and Johnny Pohe in New Zealand; Rene Marcinkus in Lithuania, Pawel Tobolski and Danny Krol in Poland; and Rupert Stevens, Neville McGarr, Johannes Gouws, and Roger Bushell in South Africa. Their diverse lives will link together in the cockpits of the Royal Air Force, behind the barbed wire fences of German POW camps, and in shining courage, seen in a stinking hole beneath the Silesian soil…and again in the face of the Gestapo's pistols.

By January 1921, the Nazis hold their first national congress, now a respected force in right-wing politics. They have real issues to address, too. The Allies finally present Germany with the reparations bill: 134 billion gold marks. Much of Germany has no heat and little food, so the battered Reich is outraged. At the Zirkus Krone, Hitler rages to thousands of people about "Future or Ruin," and draws massive applause and cheering from the audience and the press. Even Kahr and the Bavarian triumvirate recognize Hitler, inviting him up for a chat.

But Hitler's rise scares his other party members, including Drexler, who plot to cut Hitler down to size, calling him a "traitor" and suggesting he's being paid off by the Jews. Hitler throws one of the classic temper tantrums that will later give cartoonists fodder and generals terror, and then resigns the party, which scares them even more. Drexler begs Hitler to re-join the party, and name his conditions.

The conditions are simple: Hitler must have absolute power, under the "Fuhrerprinzip," or "Leadership principle," which becomes the central organization of the party and ultimately, Germany. Hitler will make all decisions in an arbitrary manner, and the entire party owes him personal and unconditional loyalty. That will mean that the Party and ultimately Nazi Germany will be based entirely on loyalty to Hitler - personal relationships, clienteles, patronage, and a semi-feudal court will replace the three political institutions the "artistic" Hitler hates: bureaucracy, government by officials, or government by committees. Drexler agrees.

On July 27, 1921, Canadian biochemists Frederick Bantin and Charles Best, unveil a new treatment for diabetics called insulin. Two days later, Nazi party leaders vote 543 to 1 to make Hitler party chairman. Drexler is kicked upstairs to the post of Honorary President and disappears from history.

Now in charge, Hitler appoints his old sergeant-major from the List Regiment, Max Amann, to run the party's finances, and Dietrich Eckart to run the Volkischer Beobachter. Soon the party moves from the back room of the Sterneckerbrau to a new office, rapidly accumulating wealth and furniture. By February 1923, Volkischer Beobachter is spewing anti-Semitic propaganda as a daily paper.

In August 1921, Prince Albert holds his first Duke of York's Camp at a disused airfield on Romney Marshes, with 400 selected boys - half from public schools, the other from his Industrial Welfare Society - tenting on the field in identical shirts and shorts, to break down class differences. Despite problems with organization and the caterer, the camp is a great success, and both boys and the Duke of York enjoy themselves. The camp becomes a regular annual event, and by 1935, Harrods and the Savoy Hotel are providing the food.

On September 12, 1921, Hitler fires off his first circular letter as party chairman. It describes party symbols in detail. Party members are to wear the symbol at all times.

Two days later, while New Yorkers rave over the new Broadway play, "Tarzan of the Apes," which offers audiences lions and apes on stage, Hitler and some Nazis go to a meeting of the Bavarian League, a separatist outfit, and march onto the platform to confront and silence speaker Otto Ballerstedt. Someone switches off the lights. When they come back on, chants of "Hitler! Hitler! Hitler!" keep Ballerstedt from continuing. The Bavarian separatist tries to do so, so Hitler's thugs separate Ballerstedt from his teeth, hurling him to the floor and beating him severely. The cops close the meeting, and Hitler gets a month in jail. The cops warn Hitler that if he pulls another such stunt again, they'll ship him back to Austria.

Instead, Hitler leads another bunch of thugs into another beer hall brawl that November, taking on Social Democrats. Fueled by German hops, beer steins, Stormtroopers and Social Democrats fly across the beer hall. Oddly enough, those who get beaten up soon join the party.

Meanwhile, Seeckt is a busy man. In defiance of Versailles, he creates the "black Reichswehr," of 20,000 men in "labor battalions" under military control, to prevent Polish incursions into Silesia. Seeckt creates secret military courts to try Freikorps opponents and murder them. Working with the Defense Ministry, he negotiates a deal with the Soviet Union that enables the Reichswehr to build secret bases in Russia where the Germans can train fighter and bomber pilots, radio operators, and test war planes and armored vehicles. Seeckt writes that Poland's continued existence is untenable, and that Germany and Russia, despite their opposing political systems, have a common interest in achieving Poland's subjugation.

The Weimar government responds to Allied reparations demands by refusing to pay them. French poilus and Belgian troops occupy Duisburg and Düsseldorf in retaliation and issue an ultimatum for two billion marks annually. Failure to pay will result in the French occupying the whole Ruhr.

The conservative Berlin government resigns, and the new Centrist party gives in to the demands. More violence follows. Among those killed: Matthias Erzberger, signer of the 1918 Armistice.

On Easter Sunday, 1922, future artist Kingsley Amis is born, and German Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau makes the German-Soviet deals official with the Treaty of Rapallo. The pact gives the Soviets modern technology and trade in return for secret military bases. While the Reichswehr is delighted, the right wing it supports is outraged that Germany's first postwar act of diplomacy is a treaty with the hated Communists. Both nations also cancel pre-Great War debts, wartime financial claims, and Germany recognizes the Soviet Union.

While riding in his official car in the early morning of June 24 on Berlin's Konigsallee, Rathenau sees a six-seat limousine pull out of a side street and appear next to him, with three men in it, wearing leather coats. They whip out automatic pistols and gun down Rathenau and chauffeur in best Chicago gangland fashion, finishing them off with a hand grenade. The diplomat who orchestrated Germany's deal to re-arm itself lies dying with five bullets in his body.

Two of the murderers, identified as former Eberhardt Brigade Freikorps members, are killed by cops in a shootout three weeks later. Three more members of the assassination ring are caught. But they draw minimal sentences - two to 15 years - and serve little time. The Allies are baffled by the murder of this statesman who has served the Reich so well. The only answer their intelligence and Control Commissioners can give is the basic one: Rathenau is a Jew.

Stunned by the murder of a key cabinet member, the Weimar government whips up the Law for the Protection of the Republic, to curb right-wing terrorists. Hitler assails the new law as a Jewish conspiracy to "reduce all criticism to silence." He bellows at his audience, "Join our storm troops!" He tells his friends that he intends to hang every Jew in Munich, leaving the bodies on the scaffolds until they stink, until "Germany is cleansed of the last Jew."