The Monuments Men by Robert M. Edsel
There was only one constant, it seemed, in that wilderness of destruction and reprieve: the churches. In almost every town Rorimer saw the sight he had first seen in Carentan: intact church, broken tower. Normandy was flat ground, and the highest point for miles was usually a cathedral tower. The Western Allies wouldn’t violate the sanctity of a cathedral; the Germans showed no such scruples. In violation of the Rules of Land Warfare set forth in the Hague Conventions, German snipers and observers regularly hid in the towers, picking off troops and calling down mortar fire on advancing units. The Allies learned to call in their own concentrated fire, collapsing the towers while leaving the rest of the cathedral largely unscathed. Rorimer didn’t know if the Allies were looking at the protected monuments lists or not, but it didn’t matter. The army commanders understood, inherently, that some structures were worth saving.
Not that every cathedral was spared. At La-Haye-du-Puits, Rorimer had to dislodge the huddled peasants who had been coming there every day to pray; the structure was badly damaged, and he feared the shaking caused by the armored vehicles and artillery pieces rolling by in the street outside would collapse the tower. Allied bulldozers had pushed the rubble of the central section of the church of Saint-Malo at Valognes into the nave to clear a supply route—which, unfortunately, went right through the remains of the church. The citizens cried and begged for relief, but when Rorimer told them there was no other way, they understood. This was the price of freedom.
There were closer calls. The historic abbey of St. Sauveur-le-Vicomte, a German munitions depot, was destroyed by Allied aerial bombardment. When Rorimer arrived, American GIs were feeding children out of their own rations; there had been fifty-six orphans and thirty-five nuns inside. “The abbey is blessed,” the mother superior told him. “It was destroyed, but everyone escaped unharmed.”
The château of Comte de Germigny had been set ablaze by Allied bombers. As he approached, Rorimer could see the shards of wall, blackened on the edges, sticking up like enormous shoulders of stone. In their shadow, a bulldozer was backing, preparing to knock down one of the last nearly complete walls. It was common practice to knock down damaged walls; the army used the stone as base material for roads. But this château was on the protected monuments list, and this particular wall was part of the château’s private chapel. On the back side, Rorimer noticed two large eighteenth-century statues.
“Stop the bulldozer,” he yelled at the startled engineer, who no doubt had spent the last few days knocking down other walls at the damaged château. “This is a historic home.” He held up his list of protected monuments. “It is not to be destroyed.”
A few minutes later, the commanding officer came stomping through the rubble. “What’s the trouble here… Second Lieutenant.” The mention of Rorimer’s rank, the lowest commissioned-officer rank in the army, was intentional. The Monuments Men had no authority to give orders; their role was purely advisory, and this officer knew it.
“This is a historic monument, sir. It’s not to be damaged.”
The officer looked at the broken wall and the fragments of stone. “The flyboys should have thought of that.”
“It’s private property, sir. It must be respected.”
The officer buttonholed the junior man—junior in rank, at least, if not in age. “We have a war to win here, Lieutenant. My job in that war is to see that this road goes through.”
The officer turned to leave. In his mind, the conversation was over, but James Rorimer was a bulldog: short, squarely built, and not afraid of a challenge. Through persistence and hard work he had advanced to the highest levels of the Metropolitan Museum, America’s greatest cultural institution, in less than ten years. He had that potent mixture of ambition and belief: in himself and in his mission. He had no practice in failure, and he had no intention of starting now.
“I’ve photographed this wall for an official report.”
The officer stopped and turned around. The cheek of this bastard. Who did he think he was? Rorimer held out a copy of Eisenhower’s proclamation on monuments and war. “Only in the event of necessity, sir. Supreme Commander’s orders. Do you want to spend the rest of your tour explaining why this demolition was a military necessity, not a convenience?”
The officer stared the little man in the eye. He looked like a soldier, but damned if he didn’t act like a fool. Didn’t this screwball know there was a war on? But he could see, just looking at James Rorimer, that it was no use. “Okay,” the officer grumbled, signaling the bulldozer back from the wall, “but this is a helluva way to fight a war.” 16
Rorimer thought about the abbey of St. Sauveur-le-Vicomte, where he had found American GIs feeding children out of their rations. The soldiers had been camped out in the rain, ordered out of the monks’ warm, dry beds by a combat general who understood the historic and cultural value of the abbey. That general probably wasn’t too popular with the troops, but Rorimer knew it was men like that who won the respect of the French.
“I disagree, sir,” Rorimer said to the officer at Comte de Germigny. “I think this is exactly the way to fight a war.”
Letter from George Stout To his wife, Margie
July 14, 1944
Dear Margie:
Luck struck me three days back and I’ve a billet under a roof. It is a great comfort and I’m making the most of it while it lasts.
Put me down as saying that I take my hat off to the people of France. I don’t mean the important political people. They may be alright but I don’t know about them. The valor of the simple country people is touching. Everyone sees it as he moves about the roads. Crippled and battered and seemingly unchanged they keep about their jobs. They are kind to us—more kind than we deserve—and are most friendly. Their own tri-color is hung out at hundreds of cottage doors, and a staggering number of stars and stripes. Where they got them is beyond imagination. They must have been sewn in the linings of their clothes. Some plainly were home-made, the stripes sewn out of white and something approaching red, the stars stitched on. Going about the roads we are waving to them all the time, and often they stand in front of crushed houses. No victory parade could match this for meaning.…
Writing now makes me feel as if I had lost at least one of my senses. I can’t hear you or see you and I wonder if you hear me. One thing is quite sure. I love you.
Yours,
George
CHAPTER 11
A Meeting in the Field
Normandy, France
August 1944
An ancient crossroads, the town of Saint-Lô sat on high ground commanding a view of a main east-west highway in Normandy. Since early June, the 29th Infantry Division (the “29ers”) had been bogged down there in a deadly showdown with the German 352nd Division. By mid-July, hardly a man was alive on either side who had fought on D-Day.
On July 17, an hour before dawn, the 29ers began an all-out assault on Saint-Lô, no reinforcements held in reserve. It was a surprise attack; the men jumped into the German trenches using primarily bayonets and hand grenades. They broke through the enemy lines at dawn and took the high ground less than a mile from town. The Germans counterattacked, but a massive Allied artillery and fire-bomber strike broke their charge. In the smoky haze of a French morning, the 29ers pushed over the final hill and saw for the first time the objective for which they had fought and died. “St.-Lô had been hit by B-17s on D-Day, and every clear day thereafter,” wrote the historian Stephen Ambrose. “The center of the place was a lifeless pile of rubble ‘in which roads and sidewalks could scarcely be distinguished.’ ” 1
But the city wasn’t lifeless. Behind every pile of stones, a German soldier was waiting. The Allied advance soon turned into a running battle, with much of the fighting centered on the cemetery near the collapsed church of Sainte-Croix. Bullets shattered headstones as rhino tanks equipped with homemade battering rams ran over tombs like hedgerows, forcing the Germans back into the decimated town. When the battle finally ended in Allied
James Rorimer was sent to Saint-Lô to assess the damage. He found a city in ruins, the dead lying unburied in the rubble, the homeless residents stumbling through piles of splintered wood and ashes in search of food and water. “The Germans set fire to homes with gasoline,” one man told him, as he picked his way through the debris. “They set mines on every major street.” Somewhere nearby a mine exploded; another building collapsed. The city architect wept at his first sight of the town’s historic district. The Germans had built trenches and underground concrete forts around and within the city’s most important monuments, and the Allies had bombed them flat. The main government buildings were cratered by bombs, then devoured by flames. The Hotel de Ville, whose library contained the charter of William the Conqueror, was gutted. The nearby museum and its centuries of accumulated treasures were reduced to dust. The center of the church of Notre-Dame was a pile of rubble twenty feet high. The parts of the church still standing, Rorimer noted, were “filled with grenades, smoke bombs, ration boxes, and every conceivable sort of debris. There were booby traps on the pulpit and on the altar.” 2
The officers at headquarters found Rorimer’s report so unbelievable the colonel in charge of Civil Affairs made his own inspection. He found the scene, if anything, even more terrible than Rorimer described. Later estimates put the destruction at 95 percent, a scale of annihilation rivaled only by the worst of the firebombed German towns. The great Irish writer Samuel Beckett, an expat in France, described Saint-Lô as “the Capital of the Ruins.” 3 Rorimer’s inventory of destroyed objects included not just the town’s ancient architecture but hundreds of years of archives, an astonishing collection of ceramics, numerous private art collections, and, perhaps most sadly, a large selection of illuminated manuscripts prepared and collected by the monks at the monastery of Mont Saint-Michel. The priceless manuscripts, handwritten in script, decorated with illustrations, and dating in some cases to the eleventh century, had been moved to the Departmental Archives at Saint-Lô for safekeeping.
But the destruction, while unfortunate, was far from wanton. The capture of Saint-Lô was a linchpin of Allied success, giving them the high ground from which they could pinpoint artillery and aerial strikes on the heart of the German defenses. A few weeks later, after the largest aerial bombardment in military history, U.S. First Army and U.S. Third Army funneled through the break at Saint-Lô, finally smashing the German “Ring of Steel” that had kept the Allies hemmed into Normandy for two months. If ever a city symbolized the complexity of the Monuments Men’s mission, the difficulty of balancing preservation and strategic advancement, it was Saint-Lô.
It was fitting then that the Monuments Men in the field met as a group for the first time outside the ruins of Saint-Lô. The meeting took place on August 13, just as General Patton, who had been driving east from the town, turned his Third Army northwest in an attempt to surround the German army. Although the battle for Normandy was not officially over, victory seemed inevitable, and it was time both to assess the past and consider the future. It had been a hard few months, and the weariness in their bones spoke to the difficulty of the mission. James Rorimer, hitching a ride from headquarters, was practically asleep in his mud-stained boots. He was accompanied by the architect Captain Ralph Hammett, a fellow Monuments Man serving in Comm Zone. Major Bancel LaFarge, the New York buildings expert and first Monuments Man ashore, arrived in a small car provided by his colleagues in British Second Army. In February, LaFarge would leave the field to become the MFAA’s second in command. Captain Robert Posey, the Alabama architect and outsider of the group, who was assigned to George Patton’s hard-charging Third Army, couldn’t secure transportation from the front and missed the meeting.
From an outside vantage, it didn’t appear much of a group: three middle-aged men in wrinkled brown uniforms, less than half of the eight MFAA officers who had been expected in Normandy. They hadn’t seen each other since Shrivenham, and in each other’s faces they saw how much they had changed from the polished career men they had so recently been. There was no laundry in Normandy, no shower, no leave. They had spent weeks scrambling across endless battlefields and through brutalized towns, often in driving summer rains that turned every dirt patch into a sucking, muddy mess. They were exhausted, dirty, frustrated… but alive, both physically and spiritually. They could see it in each other’s eyes. After all those months and years of waiting, it was good to be doing something, anything, to help the Allied cause.
“I think that I have never been happier,” James Rorimer had written his wife. “I work from morning until night and with the most splendid cooperation from my Colonel and his staff. I not only have the proper credentials from higher authority but the fact that I am a slave to work and am Infantry trained are now redounding full fold. My French is always anything but hesitating and I am doing all the things I have wanted to do since war was declared.” 4
This was not to say the job was easy: far from it. The men had all realized that they really were on their own in the field. There were no set procedures to follow; no proper chain of command; no right way of dealing with combat officers. They had to feel each situation out; to improvise on an hourly basis; to find a way to finish a job that seemed more daunting every day. They had no real authority, but served merely as advisors. When they were in the field, no one was there to help except the enlisted men and officers they convinced of the rightness of their cause. Those who expected clear guidelines, power, proper tools, or even visible success were going to wash out of the service quickly. But for those, like James Rorimer, who thrived on muscling through progress in a difficult and sometimes deadly environment, it was an adrenaline rush that no civilian job could provide. As Rorimer wrote, “These are not the days for personal considerations…. Kay, you were right, it’s a thrilling experience.” 5
There was no use complaining. These were the parameters of their war, and in the scope of all the other duties in the combat zone, it wasn’t a bad war to fight. Rorimer had never been a complainer; he had always been a doer. That’s why he was here. And that’s what he expected to do from now until Hitler was dead in the ground and the German army was buried with him.
Nonetheless, despite everyone’s best intentions, the conversation soon turned to problems. There weren’t enough “Off Limits” signs, someone said, for all the damaged churches, much less the other buildings. Cameras had supposedly been ordered for Hammett and Posey, but they still hadn’t arrived. And nobody had a radio. Theirs was a solitary task. They weren’t a unit; they were individuals with individual territories and individual goals and methods. How were officers wandering the field alone supposed to communicate with headquarters, much less each other, if they didn’t have a radio?
Rorimer was just about to bring up the subject of permanently assigned transportation—or the lack thereof—when he noticed the dilapidated German Volkswagen bouncing across a nearby field. Behind the wheel, with his foot firmly pressed to the gas pedal, was an American in standard officer uniform: a metal helmet, woolen OD (officer dress) shirt, green OD trousers, and field boots beneath a pair of overshoes. Although it was warm, he wore a field jacket for protection against the rain, which had been rising at a moment’s notice all summer. The car had no windshield, so the officer wore rakish goggles, similar to those used by World War I pilots. Around his helmet was a blue stripe; on the front of his jacket were the large white letters “USN,” the unmistakable marks of a navy man. It was that more than anything that told Rorimer the man behind the wheel was their colleague George Stout.
Stout stepped out of the car, snapped off his goggles, and brushed the road dirt carefully from his fa
The first thing everyone wanted to know was where he had acquired the car. “It has no horn, a sprung transmission, a weak brake, a loose steering column, and no top,” Stout told them, “but I am most grateful to the Germans for leaving it behind.”