The Monuments Men (7 page)

Signed: GÖRING

CHAPTER 5

Leptis Magna

North Africa

January 1943

W
hile the Americans worried and planned, the British were actively engaged in combat operations against the Axis powers. In Europe, the Allied war machine consisted mainly of underground saboteurs and the brave pilots battling the German Luftwaffe over the English Channel; in the USSR, the Red Army was fighting a defensive entrenchment against an aggressive Nazi offensive; but across the Mediterranean the battle swung back and forth over the great desert of North Africa. The British held Egypt; a combined German-Italian force held Libya and Algeria to the west. For two years, starting with an Italian assault on Egypt in 1940, the battle went back and forth across the desert. It wasn’t until October 1942, and the decisive defeat of the German-Italian forces at the Second Battle of El Alamein, that the British finally broke through and began to push their way toward Tripoli, the Libyan capital.

By January 1943, they had reached Leptis Magna, a sprawling Roman ruin only sixty-four miles east of Tripoli. It was here that Lieutenant Colonel Sir Robert Eric Mortimer Wheeler, Royal Artillery, British North African Army, beheld the majesty of Emperor Lucius Septimius Severus’s imperial city: the imposing gate of the basilica, the hundreds of columns that marked the old marketplace, the enormous sloping amphitheater, with the blue waters of the Mediterranean sparkling in the background. At the height of its power at the turn of the third century AD—when Emperor Severus had showered money on his hometown in an attempt to make it the cultural and economic capital of Africa—Leptis Magna had been a port, but in the last seventeen hundred years the harbor had silted up and become a hardpan of clay, a dull and empty world.

Here
, Mortimer Wheeler thought,
is power. And a reminder of our mortality
.

The city was broken, wearing down and sliding back into the Sahara Desert that had been encroaching on it for the last two thousand years. Most of the columns and blocks were dull, already mirroring the color of reddish sand, but amid the ruins he could make out a few gleaming white additions, some of the many “improvements” made by the Italians over the last decade.
A new empire is rising from the ruins of the old
, Mussolini told the Italians time and again.
We are building another Roman empire
. Wheeler took a drink from his canteen and scanned the enormous sky for signs of enemy planes. Nothing, not even a cloud. For the second time, the Italians had forsaken this cornerstone of their “empire” without even putting up a fight.

The first time was 1940, when 36,000 British and Australian troops turned back an advance on Egypt by the 200,000-man Italian Tenth Army.

The British lost the ruins in 1941 when the Italians, buttressed by crack German troops and under the command of the German general Erwin Rommel, pushed them back to Egypt. Soon after, the Italians published the great cultural propaganda piece
Che cosa hanno fatto gli Inglesi in Cirenaica
—
What the English Have Done in Cyrenaica
. The pamphlet showed plundered artifacts, smashed statues, and defaced walls at the Cyrene Museum, the work, the Italians claimed, of British and Australian soldiers. Only with the recent recapture of Cyrene, four hundred miles east of Leptis Magna, had the British learned the Italian claims were false. The statues had been broken for hundreds of years; the pedestals were empty because the Italians had removed the statues; the graffiti was not on the walls of the museum galleries, but in a back room filled with similar graffiti by Italian troops.

But what a black eye the whole episode had caused the War Office: For almost two years, the British had to defend themselves against charges they had no way to confirm or deny. They had no archeologists in North Africa, and no one had examined the site while it was in British hands. In fact, no one in the army had considered the historic and cultural value, and therefore propaganda value, of Cyrene at all.

Now Wheeler stood in the center of Leptis Magna, watching in amazement as the British army repeated that mistake. To his left, equipment trucks were grinding over the ancient Roman paving stones. To his right, troops were climbing on fallen walls. An Arab guard, Wheeler noticed, could do nothing more than wave his arms as a tank drove right past him and into the temple. The gunner popped out and started waving. His mate snapped a picture.
Perfect day in North Africa, Mum, wish you were here
. Had the British army learned nothing from the debacle of Cyrenaica? At this rate, they really were going to give the Italians something to complain about.

“Can’t we do something, sir?” Wheeler asked the deputy chief Civil Affairs officer (CAO). Civil Affairs was assigned to administer a captured area once the fighting had stopped. It kept the peace, as it were, even if that peace was only a mile or two from the front line.

The officer shrugged. “Just soldiers being soldiers,” he said.

“But this is Leptis Magna,” Wheeler protested. “The great city of the Roman emperor Lucius Septimius Severus. The most complete Roman ruin in all of Africa.”

The man just looked at him. “Never heard of it,” he said.

Wheeler shook his head. Every officer had been told about Cyrenaica. But a CAO of the British North African Army had never been briefed on Leptis Magna, even though the army was sure to be fighting there. Why? Because they hadn’t yet been accused of desecrating it? Was the whole war an exercise in understanding mistakes only after they had been made?

“Are they important?” the officer asked.

“What?”

“The broken buildings.”

“They’re classical ruins, sir. And yes, they’re important.”

“Why?”

“They’re irreplaceable. They’re history. They’re… It’s our duty as soldiers to protect them, sir. If we don’t, the enemy will use that against us.”

“Are you a historian, Lieutenant?”

“I’m an archeologist. Director of the London Museum.”
1

The Civil Affairs officer nodded. “Then do something about it, Director.”

When Wheeler realized the CAO was serious, he swung into action. By good fortune, he soon discovered that an archeological colleague from the London Museum, Lieutenant Colonel John Bryan Ward-Perkins, happened to be serving as an artillery captain in a unit near Leptis Magna. With the support of the CAO, the two men rerouted traffic, photographed damage, posted guards, and organized repair efforts at the ruined city.
If nothing else
, they thought,
it keeps the troops busy
.

In London, their reports met with a quizzical stare. Leptis Magna? Preservation? “Send it to Woolley,” someone finally said. “He’ll know what to do.”

Woolley was Sir Charles Leonard Woolley, a world-famous archeologist who in the years before World War I had been a close companion of Sir Thomas Edward Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia. Now in his sixties, he was serving in the British War Office in a completely unrelated capacity. Woolley did indeed care about the world’s ancient treasures, and by the spring of 1943, the three men had found time around their regular duties to prepare preservation plans for all three of Libya’s ancient sites.

It was Wheeler and Ward-Perkins who insisted that, in addition to being protected, “the ancient sites and the Museums [of Greek and Roman North Africa] should be made accessible to troops and the interest of the antiquities be brought home to them.”
2
An informed army, in other words, is a respectful and disciplined army. And a respectful and disciplined army is much less likely to cause cultural harm. Without realizing it, the British were inching their way toward the goal George Stout was pushing so earnestly back in the United States: the world’s first front line monuments protection program.

CHAPTER 6

The First Campaign

Sicily

Summer 1943

I
n January 1943, as Wheeler and Ward-Perkins formalized their plans for Leptis Magna and George Stout reported for naval duty in Maryland, U.S. President Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill met for a secret summit in Casablanca, Morocco. (Soviet premier Joseph Stalin would join them a few days later.) North Africa lay in Allied hands, the Italians having been routed by Free French and British forces in Algeria, but Fortress Europe remained unbreached. Churchill wanted to attack immediately across the English Channel; Roosevelt, under the advice of his military commanders, in particular generals George C. Marshall and Dwight D. “Ike” Eisenhower, argued that the Allies weren’t ready. After ten days of meetings, the two powers agreed on an invasion of Europe, but not across the English Channel. They would go in through the back door: the island of Sicily, just off the toe of the Italian mainland.

The Sicilian campaign would be a joint operation, unprecedented in history, with the United States and Great Britain sharing command on everything from air combat missions to laundry duty at the preparations base in Algiers. Needless to say, it was not going to be easy to integrate two independent armies. Almost immediately, the troops in North Africa noticed the home powers had gotten a few assignments muddled: The food was British and the toilets French, when it should have been the other way around. It was a harbinger of things to come.

Among the thousands of responsibilities that became “allied” between the two powers that spring was the nascent conservation program begun by Wheeler and Ward-Perkins in the ruins of Leptis Magna. In late April 1943, it was decided that two officers, one American and one British, should be sent to Sicily to inspect all monuments in the occupied territories “as soon as practicable after occupation.”
1
Paul Sachs and the museum directors got their first crack at policy when the U.S. Army asked them to recommend someone to become the American Advisor on Fine Arts and Monuments. They suggested one of their own, Francis Henry Taylor, the Met director and maker of “big schemes” so derided by George Stout, but he was rejected for military duty because he was… well, too fat. Pressed for time, and needing someone already enlisted in the military, the directors chose Captain Mason Hammond, a Harvard classics professor working in Army Air Forces Intelligence.

Unfortunately, nobody told Hammond, who arrived in Algiers for his mysterious new assignment knowing only that he would be working on conservation issues. His first days were filled with more shocks than just terrible food and despicable toilets.

He arrived in June. He was told the invasion was set for early July.

Invasion? He had assumed he would be serving in North Africa. No, he was told, he was going to Sicily.

Then he better get to the library in Algiers and brush up on his knowledge. Sicily was not his area of expertise. Sorry, he was told, no public research. It could tip German spies to the army’s next destination.

Then he would study the army’s research on Sicily. None was available, for the same reason.

Then could he study the lists and descriptions of the monuments he was supposed to protect? Unfortunately, the lists were still being worked on by Paul Sachs and his colleagues in New York. They might not be finished for weeks. And even if they arrived before the invasion, they would be off-limits, too. Same reason: German spies. The lists would be shipped to Sicily and given to commanders
after
the landing.

Then he needed to speak to his fellow art officers immediately.

Art officers? There was only one. And he was British. And he… wasn’t there. Lord Woolley, who was running the British side, had wanted Wheeler or Ward-Perkins, but both had been reassigned since Leptis Magna. Once he found out they weren’t available, he had begun to drag his feet on assigning his officer.

Dragged his feet?

There wasn’t another officer. At least not yet.

Then what about staff for the deployment?

No staff.

Transportation?

None assigned.

Typewriters? Radios? Lanterns? Maps? Scratch paper? Pencils?

No supplies assigned either.

What about orders?

Didn’t have any. He was free to go where he chose.

Hammond, confronted with the reality on the ground, realized that in essence there was no mission at all. Freedom, it seemed, was another word for nothing important to do. Which didn’t bother Hammond. “I doubt if there is need for any large specialist staff for this work,” he wrote from North Africa to a friend, “since it is at best a luxury and the military will not look kindly on a lot of art experts running around trying to tell them what not to hit.”
2
Even the first “Monuments Man,” as the conservation experts came to be known, initially thought the manner in which the army was going about the mission was utterly foolish and a waste of time.

The Allies landed in Sicily on the night of July 9–10, 1943. Hammond, low on the priority list for transportation and considered part of the occupation force, didn’t arrive until July 29, long after the troops had left the beachhead. In Syracuse, his first headquarters, the weather was warm but pleasantly breezy. Local cultural officials greeted him enthusiastically—the mainland Italians and Germans had treated them terribly, they were happy to be free of them—and took him on a sightseeing tour of the local monuments. Despite being in the path of the army, they had received little damage. The southern coast, his next destination, was tranquil, nothing but hills sloping quietly to the sea. As he looked over the great Roman ruins at Agrigento a few days later, striped with shadow in the relentless Sicilian sun, he saw plenty of damage, but none that had been done in the last thousand years. His prediction seemed prescient; other than consult with a few local Sicilian experts, there wasn’t much for a Monuments Man to do.