Fake News: The Legends of Al Capone and the ‘Conference’ that Wasn’t

Al Capone was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1899. As a young man he moved to Chicago and became involved in prostitution, gambling and, in the 1920s, bootlegging rackets. He became rich enough to buy a mansion in Florida and a bullet-proof car but was convicted of tax evasion in 1931. He served time in federal prisons, notably Alcatraz prison in San Francisco Bay before being released in 1939 after it had become clear he was losing his mind as a result of a case of untreated syphilis. He died of a heart attack at the age of 48, a relatively young man. Besides these basic facts, most other claims about the world’s most famous gangster are fictional. Among the false or unsubstantiated claims frequently made about Capone include the following: He was ‘the boss’ of Chicago; he founded the ‘Outfit’ – an organized crime organization based in Chicago; he orchestrated the St Valentine’s Day Massacre; and finally, he was a participant in a ‘conference’ held in Atlantic City in 1929 that established a nationwide crime syndicate.

Michael Woodiwiss looks at these claims.

Al Capone in 1930.

Capone was never the boss of Chicago rackets, let alone the boss of Chicago. The historian Mark Haller has done the most thorough analysis of Capone’s business activities.   The group known to history as the Capone gang,’ he wrote, ‘is best understood not as a hierarchy directed by Al Capone but as a complex set of partnerships.’ Capone, his brother Ralph, Frank Nitti, and Jack Guzik formed partnerships with others to launch numerous bootlegging, gambling, and vice activities in the Chicago Loop, South Side, and several suburbs, including their base of operations, Cicero. These various enterprises, Haller continued, ‘were not controlled bureaucratically. Each, instead, was a separate enterprise of small or relatively small scale. Most had managers who were also partners. Coordination was possible because the senior partners, with an interest in each of the enterprises, exerted influence across a range of activities.’ Like other criminal entrepreneurs, Capone did not have the skills or the personality for the detailed bureaucratic oversight of a large organization. Criminal entrepreneurs are ‘instead, hustlers and dealers, for whom partnership arrangements are ideally suited. They enjoy the give and take of personal negotiations, risk-taking, and moving from deal to deal.’  Haller’s analysis helps to explain why Capone’s removal as a criminal force in Chicago made no difference to the extent of organized crime in the city. There was no ‘Outfit’, although Chicago gangster businessmen after the Second World War might have used the word to describe their loose associations. The Belgian comic strip artist, Herge, basing his research on the hyperbolic claims in Chicago newspapers, referred to Capone as the ‘Boss of Chicago’ in Tintin in America (1931) and many thousands more in True Crime books, documentaries, movies and TV shows simply repeated similar assertions without substantiation.

Capone’s notoriety reached a peak on February 14, 1929, St Valetine’s Day. At a garage at 2122 North Clark Street, seven of the associates of North Side gangster George ‘Bugs’ Moran were waiting for a shipment of illegal liquor. A Cadillac drew up and five men, two in police uniforms, got out and entered the garage. They disarmed the Moran men, who assumed it was the inconvenience of a routine raid and did not object. They were lined up against a wall, as if for a search, and then suddenly sprayed with machine-gun bullets. No one survived.  Capone was in Florida at the time but was soon thought to be responsible. The murders remained unsolved.

Atlantic City and the ‘Conference’ that Wasn’t

The Atlantic City gangster “conference” story began life as a credible account by Al Capone of a trip he made to the New Jersey resort in May 1929. The newspaper and magazine reports of this visit at the time were based almost entirely on Al Capone himself as a source. There have been countless reconstructions since, in books, articles, television documentaries and Martin Scorsese’s TV series Boardwalk Empire, yet Capone remains the only credible source for the story.

Capone was arrested for carrying a gun in Philadelphia on May 16, 1929, a day after he had been in Atlantic City, and told police investigators the following: 

I have tried hard to stop all this killing and gang rivalry. That was my purpose in going to Atlantic City. It was a peace conference. I engineered it. Some of the biggest men in the business in Chicago were there. ... “Bug” Moran, leader of the north side gang, ... and three or four other Chicago gang leaders were there [emphasis added]. We talked over our trouble and at the end agreed to sign on the dotted line, bury the past and forget warfare for the general good of all concerned. 

This was reported on 18 May in the Atlantic City Daily Press, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the New York Tribune and the Los Angeles Times. So, that was the word on the Atlantic City “conference” from the only known witness consulted. Capone and three or four other Chicagoans talking about peace.

The exaggeration of Capone’s account began with the publication of a book by Walter Nobel Burns, The One-Way Ride: The Red Trail of Chicago Gangland from Prohibition to Jake Lingle, in 1931. Burns upped the number of conference attendees to “about 30 veterans” of Chicago gang wars from the “North, South and West Sides” of the city. Other journalists would by then have taken note that Burns’ inflation of the numbers was not challenged.

The fictionalization of Capone’s account had already begun in November 1929 with the publication of a short story by Damon Runyon in Cosmopolitan magazine. Runyon was by then one of the most popular American authors, turning out mainly tales of low-life for the publication group owned by William Randolph Hearst. In the story “Dark Dolores,” his narrator relates how he was “persuaded” by “Dave the Dude” to catch a train to Atlantic City to attend a “big peace conference” to settle a gang war going on in St. Louis between three rival mobs. It would have been clear to readers that St. Louis stood for Chicago and that one of the mob leaders, “Black Mike” – “an Italian with a big scar on his face” – stood for Capone. The popularity of Runyon’s stories would have assured that the ‘conference’ entered popular consciousness.

After Runyon’s story the fictionalization process took a big step forward with the printing of a photograph in the New York Evening Tribune on January 17, 1930. It showed Capone walking next to the political boss of Atlantic City, Enoch “Nucky” Johnson. The picture looks fake – Capone’s wearing heavy winter clothes, Johnson’s in light summer clothes. However, the alliance between corrupt politics and gangdom implied by the juxtaposition of the nation’s most notorious gangster with a machine politician chimed with the dominant perspective on organized crime at this time. 

There was little more published about the Atlantic City “conference” until Hickman Powell’s Ninety Times Guilty in 1939. Powell was the first author to claim that Runyon’s imaginary “interstate” conference was actually true. He wrote: “In May 1929, Al Capone went to a peace conference in Atlantic City,” and elaborated that “The last year had been bloody. There had been the killing of Frank Yale in Brooklyn, the Valentine’s Day massacre in Chicago, and various minor killings.” “Frankie Costello, the slot machine man,” he continued, “who has never been one to encourage violence, arranged the meeting and spent twenty-five thousand dollars of his own money on it. Various gang chieftains were entertained for several days at the Hotel President.” Powell does not mention a credible source for these claims. He did not have to – True Crime books and articles weren’t required to reference their sources.

Powell went further than merely paraphrasing a fictional account. He sowed the seeds of what became the mainstream interpretation of organized crime history, supported by most writers, film directors and – most damagingly – by the US government. “The aim of the Atlantic City conference,” he claimed, “was to establish peaceful co-operation in the underworld instead of warfare.”

Consolidating the “Conference” Legend

On December 10, 1940, the Hearst newspaperman Jack Lait made a reference to the mythical Atlantic City meeting, as he praised the efforts of the IRS against “syndicate” criminal and corrupt politicians. “There’s a convention in New York ... Its [sic] a gathering of top gangsters and racketeers of the nation. Such get-togethers are not uncommon. They have been held in Chicago, Miami, Atlantic City, Phoenix, Providence and other points.”

It must have been a lengthy New York convention since he repeated the column almost verbatim on July 22, 1949 – nine years later. The only difference was a subeditor’s correction to Lait’s omission of an inverted comma in the first version: “It’s a gathering of gangsters and racketeers ...” The federal policing agencies were singled out for praise as the only answer to such evidence of nationwide organization and super-government among hoods: 

And a shudder of fear has the mob geniuses shaky. They haven’t forgotten what happened to Al Capone, “Lucky” Luciano and “Nucky” Johnson ... They know that whenever the Feds really try, they can get these malefactors of great stealth, for they are all venal and vulnerable, they have influence beyond calculation, but when the G-boys are ordered from up above to close in, nothing can help them. 

This was the first time the politician Johnson was mentioned in connection with the Atlantic City “conference,” albeit indirectly, and it was not as the host in the way later writers embellished the story.

In 1950, the year after the second of Lait’s reports on the alleged conference, Senator Kefauver read and later endorsed a book that Lait co-wrote with another journalist, Lee Mortimer: Chicago Confidential. Kefauver was preparing for an influential investigation of organized crime. The federal policing agencies were singled out for praise by politicians and journalists alike as the only answer to such evidence of nationwide organization and super-government among hoods.

Lee Mortimer was another newspaper columnist for the Hearst newspaper chain who specialized in scurrilous stories about celebrities. The Confidential books feature the two main preoccupations of post-war America—communism and organized crime—in an amalgam of racial and political bigotry. The only evidence they provide about the American Mafia indicates that the concept originated in the paranoid imagination of reactionaries. The Mafia, according to Mortimer and Lait, was

The super-government which now has tentacles reaching into the Cabinet and the White House itself, almost every state capital, huge Wall Street interests, and connections in Canada, Greece, China and Outer Mongolia, and even through the Iron Curtain into Soviet Russia.

The organization is ‘run from above, with reigning headquarters in Italy and American headquarters in New York’. It ‘controls all sin’ and ‘practically all crime in the United States’, and is

an international conspiracy, as potent as that other international conspiracy, Communism, and as dirty and dangerous, with its great wealth and the same policy—to conquer everything and take over everything, with no scruples as to how.

Kefauver’s senate investigation into organized crime encouraged rather than discouraged such hyperbole.

Mafia? 

In 1959, Frederic Sondern, a journalist who relied on agents from the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) for his sources, made the claim that not only were Atlantic City “conference” gangster delegates from across the whole of the United States, but that they were all members of the Mafia. The ‘Mafia’ at this time was thought to be a single centralized organization of Italian-Americans that allegedly controlled organized crime in America.  In Brotherhood of Evil: The Mafia, he claimed: 

… Capone issued invitations to the senior capi Mafiosi of Chicago, Detroit, New York, Philadelphia and several other big centers to meet in Atlantic City in May 1929. ... It was the Atlantic City gathering that made underworld and Mafia history ... The Sicilians listened as Capone explained a project on which he had been working for some three years – a nationwide syndicate and organization, not only for bootlegging but gambling, prostitution, labor racketeering and various kinds of extortion as well ... At Atlantic City a series of peace treaties for the Chicago, New York and other areas was hammered out and ratified – without documents and signatures but with a validity that lasted a long time. It was the fundamental design and unwritten constitution of the modern American Mafia.

Sondern had taken Hickman Powell’s imaginative reconstruction of the Atlantic City “conference” and made all the significant participants Italian American in line with the FBN’s propaganda contention that organized crime in the US was controlled by a single Italian entity.

In 1965, one of America’s best-known journalists, Walter Winchell, added his prestige to the Atlantic City “conference” mythology. Winchell was in a sense the voice of the “gangbuster” since he was the narrator of the popular Untouchables television series. In his syndicated column, he wrote:

It was Capone who organized the nation-wide crime syndicate ... In May 1929 the mob chiefs gathered in Atlantic City at Capone’s invitation ... There they organized their operations on a more business-like level ... They operated like any big business ... Recognized leaders, standard rules of procedure and periodic meetings. ... If the black flag of the underworld were to unfurl atop one of the tallest skyscrapers in New York it would be a fit symbol of how the Mafia has gained control of that building and many other real estate holdings.  

By this time most of the American law enforcement community, as well as the rest of the America media, shared the kind of interpretation articulated by Winchell, and given official sanction by President Lyndon Johnson’s Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice in 1967. “Today,” according to the Commission’s report, “the core of organized crime in the United States consists of 24 groups operating as criminal cartels in large cities across the Nation. Their membership is exclusively Italian, they are in frequent communication with each other, and their smooth functioning is insured by a national body of overseers.”

The report offered very little historical substantiation for its claims besides the following short paragraph:

The present confederation of organized crime groups arose after Prohibition, during which Italian, German, Irish and Jewish groups had competed with one another in racket operations. The Italian groups were successful in switching their enterprises from prostitution and bootlegging to gambling, extortion, and other illegal activities. They consolidated their power through murder and violence.  

The only known source for a “history” that implied that only immigrants participated in organized crime was Sergeant Ralph Salerno of the New York Police Department. Dwight Smith, a colleague of Salerno, has detailed the ways in which Salerno provided as much historical and analytical substance as the commission required in its efforts to justify a large increase in policing resources and powers to combat what it saw as a security threat to the United States. Accuracy was not the commission’s concern.

The commission’s work culminated with the Organized Crime Control Act of 1970 that was significant nationally and internationally in establishing a widely accepted template for organized crime control.  In a book published in 1969, Salerno and his co-writer, John S. Tompkins, confirmed an acceptance of Atlantic City “conference” mythology. After detailing Capone’s conviction and imprisonment on tax evasion charges in 1931 and the shootings of John Dillinger and other bank robbers, they asserted that, “Unnoticed during all of the hoopla about sending Capone to prison and the FBI’s war on crime, major crime itself was organized at a meeting in Atlantic City in 1931, and the details worked out over the next few years.” By moving the mythical meeting from 1929 to 1931, the authors had managed to prevent the only known source for the alleged convention or conference – Al Capone – from attending it altogether.

By the 1970s there was no limit to the imagination and deceit of True Crime writers when it came to descriptions of the Atlantic City “conference.” In 1971, Hank Messick devoted six pages to the event in Lansky, a biography of the Jewish American gangster businessman who founded something Messick called the National Crime Syndicate. Lansky, Messick claimed, was the real inspiration for the gathering of mobsters – not Capone, Luciano or Costello. Messick embellished the story in three ways. First, by adding claims and details on Enoch Johnson. Instead of being just being the subject of the probably doctored photograph walking along the city’s Boardwalk beside Capone, Johnson now “ruled a criminal-political empire” in the resort who could be depended upon to “entertain the boys in style.” Second by making up conversations between Lansky, Luciano and others that happened four decades earlier and could have no other source than Messick’s imagination. Finally, giving the names of long-dead ‘gang chieftains from all over the U.S.A.’

The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano

Messick’s imaginative reconstruction of the conference was soon outdone by Martin Gosch and Richard Hammer in The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano (1975). The book project was initiated by Gosch, Hammer was a crime journalist brought in later. Gosch was usually described as a film producer, although confidence trickster is a better description.

According to Gosch’s account, Lucky Luciano himself had told him that he was the central player in the Atlantic City “conference.” Luciano had asked him to be his “Mr. Boswell” in 1961, a year before he died. The heart attack happened, appropriately and, in terms of publicity, profitably, when Luciano was meeting Gosch at Naples airport on January 26, 1962. The 1961 deal, according for Gosch, was for Luciano to record his life story to Gosch on tape and for it to be written up and published ten years after his death. According to Gosch, Luciano said he wouldn’t “hold back nothin’” and that the money gained would be “an annuity” for Gosch and his wife, Lucille.

The paperback rights of Last Testament were auctioned for $500,000, a serialization appeared in Penthouse magazine the year before publication and the book was chosen as main selection by both the Book-of-the-Month club and the Playboy Book Club. Its success was based largely on the publisher’s claim that it was the life story of Lucky Luciano as dictated by the Mafia boss himself before his death in 1962. Last Testament, however, was a fake, based mainly on hearsay accounts written by Hickman Powell and others. It quotes Luciano as saying that he was at meetings and events during the time that he was in prison – it even quotes him talking about an event that happened two years after he died. Faking True Crime books was made easier at the time since, as noted earlier, they were not required to have notes indicating the sources of their frequently outlandish claims.  Gosch himself did not benefit from the hoax since he died just before the book was published. There was, however, clearly “an annuity” for his wife.

Gosch and Hammer added several more gangsters to Messick’s list: “Purple Gang” leader, Abe Bernstein, Willie Moretti from New Jersey, John Torrio, and Dutch Schultz, Albert Anastasia, Vince Mangano and Frank Scalise. Gosch and Hammer, like Messick, invented dialogue and put Nucky Johnson at the center of events that followed the alleged refusal of one hotel to let the imaginary group of lowlifes in, “So Nucky picks Al up under one arm and throws him into his car and yells out, ‘All you fuckers follow me!’” Johnson then, according to Gosch and Hammer, laid on “a constant round of parties, with plenty of liquor, food and girls.” This is quite a leap given the only evidence of Johnson’s presence was a photograph showing him in summer clothes walking besides Al Capone in winter clothes on the Atlantic City boardwalk. The Atlantic City “conference” was a good base for a story, however, as the author of Boardwalk Empire (2010), “The true story that inspired the HBO series,” must have realized. He uncritically used The Last Testament as one of his main sources. Biographies of Capone written after The Last Testament reference the book as if it were a legitimate source. Even scholarly criminologists have used the made-up dialogue as if it were real.   

Calling Capone’s meeting with fellow Chicago gangsters in Atlantic City a ‘Conference’ was itself an exaggeration, calling it a conference with gangsters from across the United States setting out to control organized crime throughout the whole country was pure invention. There is no doubt that Italian-American gangsters such as Capone and Luciano in America have been among the most prominent gangsters since the Prohibition years. The dispute is over the identification of organized crime almost exclusively with Italian Americans and the suggestion that organized crime is some sort of alien transplant onto an otherwise pure political and economic system. Thanks to fanciful accounts of the Atlantic City ‘Conference’ and other variations of Mafia mythology, many people, in every part of the world, not just in America, believed that something called the Mafia ran organized crime in the U.S. for decades. By constantly highlighting a centralized super-criminal conspiracy, set up after a series of conferences following Atlantic City, U.S. opinion makers  ensured that people’s perception of organized crime was as limited as their own. The constant speculation, hyperbole, preaching, and mythmaking served to confuse and distract attention away from failed policies, institutional corruption and much systematic criminal activity that was more damaging and destructive than the undeniable criminal activity of the likes of Capone.

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References

Michael Woodiwiss, Double Crossed: The Failure of Organized Crime Control (London: Pluto, 2017)

William Moore, The Kefauver Committee and the Politics of Crime (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1974).

Frederic Sondern, Brotherhood of Evil: The Mafia (London: Panther, 1961).

President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice, The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1967).

Ralph Salerno and John S. Tompkins, The Crime Confederation, (New York: Popular Library, 1969), p. 275.

Hank Messick, Lansky (London: Robert Hale, 1971).

Tony Scaduto, Lucky Luciano (London, Sphere Books, 1976).

Martin Gosch and Richard Hammer, The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1975), p. viii.

Nelson Johnson, Boardwalk Empire (London: Embury Press, 2010).

David Critchley, The Origin of Organized Crime in America: The New York City Mafia, 1891–1931 (New York: Routledge, 2009).

Damon Runyon, Guys and Dolls and Other Stories (London: Penguin, 1997).

Marc Mappen, Prohibition Gangsters: The Rise and Fall of a Bad Generation (London: Rutgers University Press, 2013).

Hickman Powell, Ninety Times Guilty (London: Robert Hale, 1940).

Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer, Chicago Confidential (New York: Crown, 1950)

Whan NATO Fought Itself: The Turbot War

As inconceivable as it may sound, there was an occasion when two NATO allies were considered in a state of war, albeit limited. It was the only time that that two NATO allies were in a heated exchange and exchanged fire. The incident was called the Turbot War (named after a type of fish which was the cause of this strange altercation). This minor escalation was between Canada and Spain between March 9 and April 16, 1995 and fought over a dispute involving their respective international fishing rights in what Canada saw as their territorial waters. To call it a war may be an exaggeration, but that was the term adopted by the media to create sensationalism. The incident brought no formal declarations of war, but shots were fired in anger by the Canadian Navy upon Spanish vessels and at one point even involved the deployment of the Spanish Navy in retaliation.

Steve Prout explains.

El Vigía, a vessel sent by Spain to protect its fishing fleet. Source: Manuel Luís Soto Sáenz, Cádiz, 11 de Octubre de 2008, available here.

Fishing Rights and Canadian Waters

This article does not intend to delve into the legal complexities of international fishing rights but give an outline of the causes. The Canadians complained that their fishing rights were being violated by various foreign trawlers citing the regulations set by the North Atlantic Fisheries Organization (NAFO). On this occasion Canada accused Spain and Portugal of trespassing and of overfishing in Canadian territorial waters. It was a claim both Spain and Portugal disputed.

The Canadians had an established shipping perimeter two hundred nautical miles from their shores. This perimeter had been agreed in 1982 by the Third United Nations Convention on the law of the sea. It took until November 1994 for an exclusive economic zone finally to be recognized. It would not be enough to resolve the ongoing issues and was either ignored or misunderstood. The EU meanwhile issued a ruling which gave European vessels an increased quota in a disputed zone close to what Canada claimed was within her territorial waters.

The matter of overfishing had been a concern for Canada since the 1970s, but little had been done to address their issues. These concerns were made more urgent by the Grand Banks Fishery collapse, which occurred due to over overfishing of cod over the years. Fishing communities had been devastated and any further damage or a repeat of this over the turbot stocks would not be allowed or tolerated.

The war was named after the type of fish known as Turbot (also known as Greenland Turbot and Greenland Halibut) that was being decimated by the presence of these trawlers. Brian Tobin, a Canadian politician and Director of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans championed the Canadian side of the dispute. Canada claimed that there were over fifty violations of their international waters and their attempts to reach out to the Spanish and Portuguese governments met no response and so the Canadians felt that more assertive action should be taken.

The beginning of hostilities

On March 9, 1995, a Canadian air patrol plane spotted the Spanish trawler Estai fishing in Canadian waters. The Canadian Coast Guard and Navy vessels, led by Sir Wilfred Grenfell, were launched and headed towards the Spanish trawler. On spotting the approaching Canadian vessels the skipper of the Estai, Captain Enrique Davila Gonzalez, ordered the crew to cut their nets in a desperate attempt to remove evidence of their fishing activities and attempted an escape.

The chase then developed, escalated, and “shots fired in anger”. The Estai only stopped when the Canadian Coast Guard vessel Cape Roger fired a burst of machine gun fire across its bows and warned that the next shots would be aimed at the Spanish trawler itself. The event was not just isolated to the Estai because other Spanish fishing boats had come to assist the Estai but were repelled by high-pressure water cannons. The Estai was then boarded by DFO officers who discovered numerous infringements of Canada’s fishing laws. A Canadian trawler was used to recover the Estai’s net from the seabed. A number of other infractions by the Spanish crew were found by the Canadians. It was soon found that the net had a much smaller mesh size than Canadian law allowed. The crew of the Estai were subsequently arrested with the trawler being towed back to Canada (the city of St. John’s) where it was displayed. The incident then was widely publicized to the world with the blame being put onto Spain by Canada. The Spanish trawlers attempt to hide the incriminating evidence failed and an international furor followed when Canada seized the vessel which in turn caused the European Union to accuse Canadas of acts of piracy.

The Canadians used the publicity to their maximum advantage. A crowd of over five thousand Canadians gathered to witness the Estai being impounded in St. John’s harbor, with Brian Tobin swiftly arranging a press conference in New York City outside of the United Nations headquarters. Tobin ordered the Estai’s net suspended from a crane while he addressed the world’s media, explaining in detail how the small mesh size meant that the Spanish vessel had been fishing illegally. Tobin was steadfast in his view that Canadian law applied in the waters where the Estai was fishing and furthermore Canada had the legal authority to act against the Spanish vessel and arrest the crew.

Spain escalates and the EU is divided

A small drama back in 1995 looked and felt quite different at the time as this affair escalated and caused diplomatic divisions amongst EU states and fellow NATO allies. Britain, for example, backed Canada and other EU states supported Spain, at least from a respectable distance. Meanwhile, in retaliation to the seizure, Spain dispatched a Serviola-class gunboat, armed with machine guns and cannons, to protect the Spanish trawlers operating in the area from the Canadian navy and coastguard. The diplomatic exchanges intensified and became heated. Spain demanded the immediate release of the trawler and the crew claiming Canada had no right to impound the boat or its crew who were Spanish nationals. They did however concede that the net used by the trawler was illegal under Canadian law, but they still maintained that they were fishing outside of Canada’s EEZ in international waters. Canada cited the 1982 Law of the Sea Convention, which stated that they had the legal right to protect fish stocks that straddle their EEZ (Exclusive Economic Zone) and international waters. They asserted that Canadian law applied to all vessels fishing in these waters. The technicalities continued for and against continued.

Canada was further vindicated by an immediate inspection of the fishing catch. The Canadian claims were further strengthened when an independent inspection of the Estai reported that seventy to eighty percent of the turbot catch within the Spanish vessel were undersized or protected species. More damningly the trawler also possessed false bulkhead that revealed secret storage tanks that contained twenty-five tons of the heavily protected American plaice - which had been under a protective moratorium since 1992 due to declining stocks.

For Spain there was more damning evidence of illegal activity that was discovered aboard the trawler. The captain of the Spanish trawler had maintained two differing sets of logbooks recording his catch which was a favorite trick of corrupt skippers who needed to hide from the authorities the fact that they had caught over their quotas. This explains the desperate attempt by the Estai to cut its nets and outrun the Canadian Navy.

Europe is temporarily divided

The matter soon involved some of the wider international community. In fact, European countries were split over who they supported in the dispute. Britain and Ireland took Canada’s side. The rest of the European Union supported the Spanish. Meanwhile, the dispute had degenerated into churlish name-calling, with the Spanish claiming the Canadians had behaved like “pirates,” while Canada accused Spain of being “conservation criminals” and “cheats.” British Prime Minister John Major (1990-1997) risked turning the EU community against Britain by reiterating staunch support for the Canadians. When the issue of the EU bringing trade sanctions against Canada was proposed, Major made it clear that Britain would use its veto to block any such sanctions from going ahead.

Many British and Irish trawlers began flying the Canadian flag to show which side they supported in the dispute, which antagonized a European ally and member of NATO. A Cornish trawler, called Newlyn, was challenged by a French patrol boat whom the latter mistook as being a Canadian ship because it was flying the Canadian flag. The French backed down when they realized the ship was British and no further action was taken. What if that had been a Canadian trawler? Now France would have been at military odds with their NATO ally. Thankfully, the incident of the “Turbot War” took on a more proportionate response later, but the incident had a little more milage left in terms of rhetoric and naval mobilization before that resolution was found.

Canada later released Captain Gonzalez and the crew of the Estai, and, once the owners of the Spanish vessel had paid a fine of $500,000, the Canadians released the ship and the crew who then sailed back home. The concluded the matter of the Estai but the dispute continued.

Canada still refused to enter any negotiations until all foreign fishing vessels left the disputed area on the edge of their EEZ. Spain steadfastly ignored this and sent trawlers back to the disputed Canadian waters, this time accompanied by a Spanish navy patrol boat to protect them. Spain also began to prepare a more serious task force consisting of frigates and tankers to head to the area. It was no surprise that in late March talks between the two nations broke down. The naval detachments escalated as Canada began to increase the numbers of its naval and coast guard vessels across the edge of their EEZ, along with a higher number of surveillance air patrols. Brian Tobin also declared that he was prepared to use net cutters to sever the trawl nets of Spanish vessels (in the same way as the Icelandic Coast Guard did to British trawlers in the Cod Wars of the 1970s). It was also reported that Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien had authorized his navy to fire at any armed Spanish Navy ships that sailed in or around Canada’s EEZ.

The pressure built up in Europe as they baulked at the very real possibility of actual conflict breaking out. The EU eventually put pressure on Spain to back down and agree to a deal. Despite Spanish objections they acquiesced, and a deal was reached on April 5. The result was a win for Canada. Spain was forced to leave the disputed zone and Canada’s right to eject foreign fishing vessels from the area, using military force, if necessary, was accepted. Under the deal, Canada refunded the $500,000 fine to the owners of the Estai. And with that, the Turbot War ended.

Conclusion

The incident has now been forgotten although it is certain to remain in the memories of the fishing community and the crew of the Estia. Canada understandably needed to protect her fisheries and her industry and showed the level of force that she was prepared to take - and indeed did so to the extent that the international community was also taken by surprise by her uncharacteristically aggressive response. This was understandable given the Grand Banks fisheries collapse just three years before. Canada still felt the severe economic backlash from hardship due to fish stocks collapsing and was not going to allow their turbot stocks to be decimated by foreign vessels in the same way as cod stocks previously. She deserved the favorable outcome.

While the dispute on the surface focused more on fishing rights, beneath the surface the tension from this affair tested for a brief time the relationships between NATO allies. Countries belonging to NATO and the larger European Economic Block were at odds with each other but despite this applying the actual word “war” to describe this affair does appear disproportionate. The level of military engagement was limited. Interestingly we are left with a question: how would NATO have dealt with a quarrel within its own internal structure? The matter has never been tested and hopefully never will be. Of course, the worst-case scenarios would have been highly unlikely as sensible heads would have prevailed over any impasse.

It does go to show that underneath the solidarity of an alliance like NATO there does exist on occasions underlying tensions and altercations but rarely have shots been fired in anger. In 1972 the Cod Wars again concerning fishing rights saw the UK and Iceland also disagree, but no shots were fired in anger and no forces were mobilized. However, the threat of Iceland withdrawing from NATO expedited a climb down by the UK. On both occasions it was not the Warsaw Pact that was the only cause of disquiet for this organization. It was a not so simple matter of troublesome fishing rights. Currently the NATO alliance is experiencing more stresses and strains as the US continues to press some of its European allies to increase spending levels and prove their commitment to the NATO alliance. Nothing has ever erupted and dissipated like the long-forgotten Turbot incident.

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Wings of Genius: The Wright Brothers and the Birth of an Aeroplane

On a blustery winter morning in December 1903, amid the dunes and salt-laden winds of North Carolina's Outer Banks, two bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio, changed the course of human history. Orville and Wilbur Wright, driven by ingenuity, science, and relentless perseverance, achieved what millennia of dreamers and engineers had only imagined, the first controlled, sustained flight of a powered, heavier-than-air aircraft.

This is the story of the Wright brothers' Kitty Hawk aeroplane, its meticulous development, groundbreaking construction, and those first exhilarating flights that transformed the world.

Terry Bailey explains.

The first flight of the Wright Flyer on December 17, 1903.

Orville and Wilbur Wright, the sons of Milton Wright, a bishop in the Church of the United Brethren in Christ, and Susan Catherine Koerner Wright, grew up in a household that encouraged curiosity, intellect, and mechanical tinkering. Born in Dayton, Ohio, Wilbur in 1867 and Orville in 1871, the brothers were raised in an environment that valued learning but offered few formal advantages. Their father's wide-ranging library and frequent travels exposed the boys to new ideas, while their mother, who had a mechanical aptitude and built small appliances, served as an early influence on their technical abilities.

Neither brother graduated from college. Wilbur, a bright student, had plans to attend Yale but abandoned them after a family move and a severe injury caused by an ice-skating accident. Orville, more mischievous and inventive as a child, dropped out of high school to start a printing business. Their first entrepreneurial venture involved publishing local newspapers and magazines using a homemade printing press. However, it was their fascination with bicycles, a booming technology of the 1890s that truly set them on the path to aviation.

In 1892, the brothers opened the Wright Cycle Company in Dayton, repairing and eventually building bicycles of their design. The shop funded their aviation experiments and provided them with vital mechanical experience, particularly in precision manufacturing, lightweight design, and balance skills that would later prove essential in building their aircraft. The act of designing bicycles taught the Wrights the importance of stability and control in motion, a concept they would carry into their pursuit of flight.

The success of their bicycle business allowed them to devote more time and money to the growing challenge of human flight. By combining practical mechanical skills with methodical scientific investigation, Orville and Wilbur Wright laid the foundation not just for their own success, but for the birth of modern aviation itself.

The dream takes flight

The dream of human flight was ancient, stretching back to the mythological story of Icarus offering metaphorical concepts of humankind's wish to fly, through to Leonardo da Vinci's sketches and designs to the eventual early balloonists. However, no one had yet solved the riddle of powered, controllable flight in a heavier-than-air machine. Inspired by German glider pioneer Otto Lilienthal, the Wright brothers began experimenting in the late 1890s. Their approach was revolutionary: they believed that true flight could only be achieved through the mastery of three axes of control, pitch, roll, and yaw, rather than simply building a large wing and hoping for lift.

By 1900, the brothers had chosen the remote sandhills near the small fishing village of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, as their testing ground. With steady winds, open terrain, and few obstacles, the site offered ideal conditions. The brothers would make annual trips to test their gliders and refine their designs.

Building the flyer

The Wright Flyer of 1903, the machine that would make history was the culmination of years of experimentation and data collection. The brothers were not just inventors but engineers and scientists in their own right. Dissatisfied with published aerodynamic data, they built their wind tunnel in 1901 to test over 200 wing shapes, collecting accurate data to refine lift and drag coefficients. This careful study set them apart from their contemporaries.

The 1903 Flyer, completed in the fall, was a biplane with a 12.3-metre (40-foot) wingspan and weighed about 274 kilograms (605 pounds) with the engine. Its skeletal frame was constructed of spruce wood and muslin fabric. Power came from a custom-built, 12-horsepower gasoline engine designed by their bicycle shop mechanic, Charlie Taylor. The brothers also designed and produced their propellers after discovering that not one of the existing designs was efficient enough; their twisted, airfoil-shaped blades were themselves miniature wings, providing thrust as they spun.

Control was achieved through a forward elevator for pitch, a rear rudder for yaw, and a unique wing-warping system for roll, achieved by twisting the wings using cables connected to a hip cradle in which the pilot lay prone.

The 17th December 1903 - A new epoch begins

After several setbacks, including a damaged propeller shaft and unfavorable weather the winds finally cooperated on the 17th of December. At around 10:35 a.m., Orville took the controls for the maiden flight while Wilbur steadied the Flyer's wing. In a dramatic moment captured in one of the most iconic photographs in history, the Flyer lifted off the ground and remained airborne for 12 seconds, covering 36.576 meters, (120 feet).

Though brief, it was an unprecedented triumph: the first powered, controlled, and sustained flight by a manned, heavier-than-air machine. The brothers would make three more flights that day, taking turns as pilots. The fourth and final flight, with Wilbur at the controls, lasted 59 seconds and covered 259.69 meters, (852 feet), demonstrating both control and increased stability. Just after the final flight, a gust of wind flipped and damaged the Flyer beyond repair. It never flew again, but its legacy had already taken wing.

Refinements and subsequent flights

The 1903 Flyer was a prototype, a successful proof of concept. Over the next two years, the Wright brothers returned to Dayton and focused on improving their design. In 1904 and 1905, they developed the Flyer II and Flyer III, which offered better stability and longer flight durations. These new versions were tested at Huffman Prairie, near Dayton. By 1905, the brothers had built a truly practical flying machine. The Flyer III, significantly improved in structure and control, could stay airborne for over half an hour.

On the 5th of October, 1905, Wilbur flew it for 39 minutes, covering 24 miles in 30 laps of the field, undeniably proving the potential of powered flight.

However, the world was slow to recognize their achievement. The Wrights, cautious about intellectual property and wary of competitors, kept many of their details under wraps. It wasn't until 1908, when they demonstrated their aircraft publicly in France and at Fort Myer, Virginia, that their genius received international acclaim.

A lasting legacy

The Wright brothers' accomplishment at Kitty Hawk was not an isolated marvel, it was the birth of modern aviation. Their scientific approach to flight laid the groundwork for aerospace engineering, and their fundamental understanding of control systems remains central to aircraft design even today. Their humble wooden flyer now hangs in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, revered as a relic of one of humanity's greatest breakthroughs. What began with a 12-second flight in the dunes of Kitty Hawk sparked a century of innovation, shrinking the world, transforming economies, and carrying humankind into the sky and eventually beyond Earth's atmosphere.

"If we worked on the assumption that what is accepted as true really is true, then there would be little hope for advance."

Orville Wright

The dunes of Kitty Hawk have long since returned to quiet, but the echo of that December morning in 1903 still resonates across time, reminding us that innovation is born not only of daring but of persistence, intellect, and vision.

The story of the Wright brothers is not merely the tale of two inventors who built a flying machine, it is a testament to the boundless potential of human curiosity and determination. From a modest bicycle shop in Dayton to the windswept shores of Kitty Hawk, Orville and Wilbur Wright transformed flight from myth into reality through a rare combination of mechanical intuition, scientific rigor, and sheer perseverance. Their success was not a matter of chance but the result of disciplined experimentation, bold innovation, and an unwavering belief in the power of their ideas.

In mastering the elusive elements of lift, propulsion, and control, the Wrights solved problems that had stymied humankind for centuries. Their Flyer did more than lift off the sand; it lifted the veil on a new era of possibility. The subsequent revolution in transportation, communication, and exploration owes its origins to that fragile machine and the minds that conceived it.

Today, as jetliners traverse the globe and spacecraft leave Earth's atmosphere, the seeds planted by the Wright brothers continue to bear fruit.

Their legacy lives on in every pilot's ascent, every satellite launch, and every child who dares to dream of flying. Their journey proves that with clarity of vision, courage to defy convention, and the patience to solve one problem at a time, humanity can rise to the challenge of the impossible.

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Notes:

Otto Lilienthal: The Glider King who inspired the age of flight

Otto Lilienthal, often called the "Glider King," was a German aviation pioneer whose groundbreaking work in the late 19th century laid the essential foundation for modern aeronautics. Born in 1848 in Anklam, Prussia, Lilienthal was a trained mechanical engineer with a passion for understanding the mechanics of bird flight. He spent years carefully observing storks in flight and conducting scientific measurements, believing that successful human flight could only come through the mastery of natural aerodynamic principles.

Between 1891 and 1896, Lilienthal constructed and tested more than a dozen different glider designs, becoming the first person in history to make repeated, well-documented flights in a heavier-than-air aircraft. His gliders typically featured monoplane or biplane wings made from fabric stretched over a lightweight wooden frame, which he launched by running down hills.

He made over 2,000 successful flights, some reaching distances of more than 250 meters. His experiments proved that controlled gliding was possible and that wing shape and stability were crucial to successful flight.

Lilienthal's most enduring legacy was not just his flights, but his meticulous scientific approach. He published extensive data on lift, drag, and wing camber that was invaluable to later aviation pioneers.

His 1889 book, Der Vogelflug als Grundlage der Fliegekunst (Bird flight as the Basis of Aviation), became a seminal text in the field. Tragically, Lilienthal died in August 1896 after a crash caused by a stall during one of his flights. His final words—"Sacrifices must be made"—echo his belief in the inevitability of risk in pursuit of progress.

Among those who were deeply influenced by Lilienthal's work were Wilbur and Orville Wright, who considered him a guiding light in their quest for powered flight. The Wright brothers once said, "Of all the men who attacked the flying problem in the 19th century, Otto Lilienthal was easily the most important." His courage, innovation, and scientific rigor earned him a permanent place in the history of aviation as the man who truly gave wings to human aspiration

Earlier attempts at powered flight

There are several recorded attempts at powered flight before the Wright brothers' Kitty Hawk flight in December 1903, but not one fully met the criteria of a controlled, sustained, powered flight of a heavier-than-air machine with a pilot onboard, which is why the Wrights are still recognized as the first to achieve it.

Notable pre-Wright flight attempts

Clément Ader (France, 1890 & 1897)

Aircraft: Éole (1890) and Avion III (1897)

Claim: Ader reportedly flew about 50 meters (165 feet) in 1890 using a bat-like steam-powered aircraft.

Problems: The flight was uncontrolled, unverified, and not sustained.

His later government-funded attempt in 1897 failed publicly, and no successful, documented flights were made.

Conclusion: Ader's craft may have hopped off the ground, but lacked control and documentation.

Hiram Maxim (United Kingdom, 1894)

Aircraft: Large steam-powered test rig on rails

Claim: His enormous contraption briefly lifted off its tracks due to high power output.

Problems: The machine was tethered to rails and not free-flying.

It had no meaningful control system or sustained flight.

Conclusion: Important for development, but not a powered, free, controlled flight.

Gustave Whitehead (Germany / USA, 1901–1902)

Aircraft: No. 21 and No. 22

Claim: Whitehead allegedly flew over 800 meters (half a mile) in Connecticut in August 1901.

Evidence: Supporters cite newspaper articles and witness accounts.

No photographic proof exists of the flights.

Mainstream aviation historians (including the Smithsonian Institution) remain highly skeptical.

Conclusion: If true, it would predate the Wright brothers, but the lack of verifiable documentation or technical continuity makes it speculative.

Karl Jatho (Germany, August–November 1903)

Claim: Jatho conducted short powered hops near Hanover in mid-to-late 1903.

Problems: His aircraft reportedly lifted off for flights of just a few feet high and 60 meters long.

No effective control, and little documentation until decades later.

Conclusion: A promising effort, but not sustained or well-documented enough to challenge the Wrights.

Why the Wright Brothers are still first

The Wright brothers' flight on the 17th of December, 1903, at Kitty Hawk is still considered the first successful powered sustained flight of a heavier-than-air piloted machine.

Achievements

Controlled, yes

Sustained, yes

Powered, yes

Manned, yes

A heavier-than-air flight

It was carefully documented, photographed, witnessed, and followed by repeatable success. Most importantly, the Wright brothers also understood and developed control systems for pitch, yaw, and roll, which no earlier experimenter had solved completely.

Final Verdict

It is well known that others attempted powered flight before the Wright brothers. However, as indicated, not one of the other known attempts met all the technical and historical criteria of their first flight. The Wrights' breakthrough was not just a machine that flew but one that could be controlled, steered, and improved repeatedly over a number of ever-increasing time and distance flights, thus ushering in the true age of aviation.

The USS Panay: The Ship Before Pearl Harbor

The USS Panay Incident played a crucial role in the timeline of the United States' involvement in international affairs in the late 1930s as the world prepared for the Second World War. Yet today, most Americans have never heard of the incident. It is cited as both the first time American Naval ships had been sunk by enemy aircraft, as well as the first time US ships had been targeted since the conclusion of World War I.

Ryan Reidway explains.

The USS Panay sinking after the Japanese attack.

With three men killed and 48 injured, the incident led, on one hand, to the passage of the March 1938 Naval Act that allowed the expansion of the American Pacific Fleet.[1] On the other hand, it led to increasing anti-war and isolationist sentiment at home. Happening only months after the adoption of the Ludlow Amendment, which restricted the ways Congress could declare war when attacks happened overseas[2]. Although there was initial condemnation and outrage towards the Japanese government in the United States, it seems to have been forgotten in the pages of history.

The USS Panay had been commissioned in 1927 in Shanghai as part of the Asiatic Fleet. It was designed to patrol the Yangtze River to protect American interests in China. It was a shallow draft river boat, with a displacement of between 370 and 500 tons. It could reach speeds of 13 knots and had armor plating on the forward and aft of the ship. It was armed with several.30 Caliber Lewis Machine Guns[3] as well as two 3-inch main guns[4].  Fon Huffman, who is believed to be the last living survivor of the Panay, proclaimed, “It was a good ship. It was a really good ship.”[5]

By the 1930s, the Panay and its crew had become accustomed to fending off pirates who often tried to attack Standard Oil vessels as they moved up and down the river. 1n 1931 According to Lieutenant Commander R. A. Dyer, "Firing on gunboats and merchant ships have [sic] become so routine that any vessel traversing the Yangtze River sails with the expectation of being fired upon. Fortunately," he added, "the Chinese appear to be rather poor marksmen and the ship has, so far, not sustained any casualties in these engagements."[6]

1937

Fast forward to the summer of 1937, when the Japanese army invaded China, Western powers, including the United States, looked on with horror and dismay at the brutality of the conflict. After the fall of Shanghai in November of that same year, Japanese commanders set their sights on Nanjing. Fearing for the lives of their citizen, the United States initially ordered all Americans to enter an International Safe Zone that had been set up in the city. But by early December, Chinese Nationalists had abandoned the city, and the American government wanted its citizens out.   

On December 9th, 1937, the Panay’s commanding officer was Lieutenant Commander James Joseph Hughes, and its Executive Officer was Lieutenant Arthur F. Anders, received orders to evacuate all American Citizens from Nanjing. By that night, 15 American citizens, embassy workers, several foreign nationals, and reporters had boarded and joined the 59 officers and enlisted men already on the ship. The Panay remained anchored at the dock on December 10th, despite the carnage of the Japanese onslaught in the city.

By December 11th, Japanese artillery shells were landing too close for comfort, and the order to pull away from the dock was given. The ship slipped away from the dock with American flags flying visibly and proceeded to head up the Yangtze River. It joined a convoy of three Standard Oil ships, the Meiping, Meian, and Meihsia. Those ships had been helping to evacuate employees of Standard Oil, many of whom were Chinese.[7]

Early on December 12th, the Japanese naval officers boarded the ship for an inspection. Commander Hughes replied to the officers, “The United States is friendly to Japan and China alike. We do not give military information to either side.” [8]The Japanese officers left, and the Panay continued down river, eventually anchoring 28 miles north of Nanjing.[9]

Attack

Later that afternoon, as lunch was being served, three Japanese bombers bombed the Panay. After releasing their bombs, they came back around and strafed the ship with their machine guns. Battle stations were manned, and the crew of the Panay attempted to fight back. It was in vain as the ship had sustained too much damage, and the order to abandon ship was given. By 3:55 pm, the ship had sunk. Many of the wounded were evacuated from the ship via sampans as there were no lifeboats. As the men tried to escape the carnage, the Japanese planes came back and strafed them again.

When it was all over, three people had been killed and 50 had been wounded[10]. Two of the three oil tankers had sunk, and one had run aground. Desperate to avoid capture by the Japanese forces, the survivors of the Panay proceeded to walk towards the friendly Chinese village of Hoshien. They were later rescued by American and British naval vessels in the area.

Probably the most remarkable thing about the whole incident was that it was recorded. There were a few reporters aboard the ship, including Norman Alley of Universal Press. Remarkably, using his camera, he was able to document the entire event. The footage would later go on to be used in legal hearings between the governments of the United States and Japan, as well as be broadcast in movie theaters around the United States.  A copy of the footage can still be found on the Internet Archive site. In it, there is a narration of the events of that day, including the moments before the attack, the call to arms, the heroic stand, and eventually the sinking of the ship. Viewers will also notice the very visible American flag, which would play a crucial role in the doubts historians have about the official narrative.    

Apology

The Japanese government quickly issued a statement apologizing for the incident and claiming it was an unfortunate mistake. While there was an investigation conducted by the American Government, the results showed that the attack was due to “poor field communications and bad visibility”[11]. Ultimately, Japan paid over two million dollars in damages, and while the United States formally accepted the apology in 1938, the American public was outraged. Fear that the American people would demand war forced the United States government to bury the incident and continue diplomatic relations with the Japanese. 

Historians have argued, however, that the pilots of the Japanese bombers would have known what the ship looked like, its position in the river, and would have seen the American Flags flying from the air. In addition, reports later came out that the Japanese military had ordered all ships sailing north on the Yangtze to be destroyed to target Chinese military forces. Documents also show that commanders of the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy argued which branch was ultimately responsible. The last piece of evidence to show the Japanese involvement was the pilot's request for confirmation of permission to attack before bombing the Panay.

Regardless of the reason for the attack, it is surprising in the 21st Century that this kind of incident did not lead to conflict between the nations.  Nonetheless, this tragic event has been forgotten by most despite its revealing nature of the state of events during the run-up to the surprise attack on  Pearl Harbor. Speculation dictates that the events of the Second World War could have been very different if the American government had pushed the issue. 

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References

Alley, N. (Director). (n.d.). Norman Alley's Bombing of USS Panay Special Issue, 1937/12/12 [Film]. Universal Studios. https://archive.org/details/1937-12-12_Bombing_of_USS_Panay (Original work published 1937)

Barnett, K. (2016, 06 27). Fon Huffman Remembers the USS Panay Attack 1937. Ken Barnett Design Youtube Channel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1yUbW_WkDM&list=PLtJturmrhWAHvT9Hoi9Z4r_vkvacS0Fx6&t=75s

Frank, L. (2023, 08 08). Hidden History: The USS "Panay" Incident. Daily Kos. https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/8/8/2172658/-Hidden-History-The-USS-Panay-Incident

HISTORY.com Editors. (2009, 11 09). Rape of Nanjing: Massacre, Facts & Aftermath | HISTORY. History.com. https://www.history.com/articles/nanjing-massacre

Lyons, C. (2015). Attack on the USS Panay. Warfare History Network. https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/attack-on-the-uss-panay/

Naval History and Heritage Command. (2021, June 14). The Panay Incident. Naval History and Heritage Command. Retrieved June 29, 2025, from https://www.history.navy.mil/browse-by-topic/wars-conflicts-and-operations/world-war-ii/1941/prelude/panay-incident.html

1937 USS Panay Incident | A Pearl Harbor Preview. (2024, 12). Today's History YouTube Channel. https://youtu.be/EKECgwufjg8?si=kqf-dnGCphliy0hv

Roberts Jr, F. N. (2012, 11). Climax of Isolationism, Countdown to World War. U.S. Naval Institute, 26(6). https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history-magazine/2012/november/climax-isolationism-countdown-world-war#:~:text=What%20became%20known%20as%20the%20Panay%20Incident%2C%20in,at%20home%20was%20strong%20and%20tensions%20abroad%20high.

USS Panay (PR-5). (n.d.). Detail Pedia. https://www.detailedpedia.com/wiki-USS_Panay_(PR-5)

[1] (Naval History and Heritage Command, 2021)

[2] (Roberts Jr, 2012,)

[3] (Naval History and Heritage Command, 2021)

[4] (Frank, 2023)

[5] (Barnett, 2016)

[6] (USS Panay (PR-5), n.d.)

[7] (Lyons, 2015)

[8] (Lyons, 2015)

[9] (Lyons, 2015)

[10] (Lyons, 2015)

[11]  (Roberts Jr, 2012)

How Did Polish Jews Resist the Nazis Prior to the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising?

When the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, they had to determine how the increasing numbers of Jews would be controlled. Their temporary solution was to section the Jews off into ghettos, and Jewish methods of resistance must be seen in the context of that environment.

Heather Voight explains.

Resistance members captured during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

A cursory reading of a Holocaust textbook would lead most readers to conclude that Polish Jews failed to respond to persecution prior to the Warsaw ghetto uprising in 1943. In order to determine whether the Jews resisted their oppressors, however, the term resistance must be defined. Webster’s New World Dictionary defines the word resist as “to oppose actively; fight, argue, or work against; to refuse to cooperate with, submit to, etc.” According to this definition, the Jews could resist their oppressors in other ways besides warfare, though physical fighting was sometimes involved. Patterns of resistance did not remain static but changed just as the situation of Jews changed. Polish Jews in the ghettos altered their response to persecution as the types of persecution they faced changed, but some form of resistance was ever-present.

Smuggling Food as Resistance

The Jews in Polish ghettos had every intention of surviving the war. In order to accomplish this, they needed more food than the meager Nazi provisions. Food supplies to inhabitants of the Warsaw ghetto each had a caloric value of 220, 15% of the normal daily requirement. Jews acquired the food they needed through smuggling. Adam Czerniakow, leader of the Warsaw Judenrat, a council of Jews created by the Nazis to carry out their orders, estimated that smuggling accounted for 80% of the food available in the Warsaw ghetto. Many smugglers were women and children who managed to circumvent the Nazi guards. Renia Kukielka went out of the Jedrzejow ghetto with her sisters to trade lace placements for coins that were used to buy food. Other young women served as couriers, smuggling out food and medicine.

Regardless of who did the smuggling, it was a dangerous task. Abraham Lewin, who kept a diary while in the Warsaw ghetto, wrote about children going over to the Aryan side to get potatoes. “There are some Germans who show a little mercy for these unfortunate children and pretend not to see, turning away deliberately, and the children dart with their little overcoats bulging…There are also vicious guards who hit the children with murderous blows…more than one child has fallen victim to their bloodlust.” Yet the Jews continued to engage in smuggling despite the bloodshed. The Nazis hoped the Jews would starve and thus disappear, but children and adults bravely resisted by smuggling food.

Music as Resistance

The people in the ghettos also continued to participate in cultural activities such as concerts. Though the Nazis didn’t allow Aryan music, Jewish musicians in the Warsaw ghetto still played to large audiences, which sometimes included Poles on the Aryan side of the ghetto. Not everyone thought these performances were appropriate, however. In his diary, Adam Czerniakow wrote, “Many people hold a grudge against me for organizing play activity for the children, for arranging festive openings of playgrounds, for the music, etc. I am reminded of a film: a ship is sinking and the captain, to raise the spirits of the passengers, orders the orchestra to play a jazz piece. I had made up my mind to emulate the captain.” Czerniakow understood that culture should continue regardless of what the Nazis did. Other ghettos also held concerts, including one of Poland’s most isolated ghettos in Lodz. Musical concerts in the ghetto resumed two months after deportations. Despite the loss of family and community members, Jewish creativity went on.

Religious Observance as Resistance

In defiance of the Nazi order which forbade all public religious practices, religious life for Jews in the ghettos simply went underground. Warsaw ghetto diarist Chaim Kaplan wrote, “Public prayer in these dangerous times is a forbidden act..But this does not deter us. Jews come to pray in a group in some inside room facing the courtyard, with drawn blinds on the windows.” Given their followers’ unprecedented circumstances, some tenets of Jewish law were modified. For example, people could not keep the sabbath because the Nazis forced them to work. Rabbis also permitted the consumption of non-kosher food because the preservation of life was more important than dietary laws. Though they had to practice their religion differently, the Jews did not surrender their beliefs.     

Education as Resistance

In addition to religious practices, the Nazis banned education in the Warsaw ghetto and others. Nevertheless, students and teachers found ways to meet. As early as 1939, teachers received bread in exchange for teaching groups of 4-8 children for a few hours. Unfortunately, there is no information on the number of these groups in the Polish ghettos because of the secrecy involved. As Chaim Kaplan explained in his diary: “It is possible that the ban against study also applies to such small groups, and if questions were asked they would have to be stopped. But no one asks questions. The matter is done quietly, underhandedly. There is no other solution.”

Education wasn’t limited to younger students. High school and college age students helped to organize education for themselves in consort with their teachers. A Zionist youth movement organized an illegal high school in the Warsaw ghetto which existed between 1940 and summer 1942. It wasn’t a high school in the traditional sense since teachers travelled to the students’ apartments. Yet by spring of 1942 the school had 120 pupils and 13 teachers. Courses included math, history, biology, philosophy and literature. There were also university level courses in education and medicine. In spite of the Nazi ban on education, teachers and students were determined to provide knowledge that students would need if they survived the conditions of the ghettoes and the eventual deportations.  

Writing as Resistance

Jews in the ghettos also used writing to keep the world and each other informed about the Nazi’s plans to exterminate the Jews. Jews sometimes escaped from concentration camps to the tenuous safety of the Warsaw ghetto. They told the inhabitants of the Nazi’s plans to kill them all. Courier girls who initially smuggled food and medicine began to smuggle underground writings.

In addition to communicating within the Polish ghettos, coded postcards from courier girls were sent to Jews outside Poland. Frumka Plotnicka wrote, “I am waiting for visits from guests: Machanot and Avodah should be coming here.” Machanot and Avodah were Hebrew words for camp and work. “Pruetnitsky and Schitah lived with me.” These are Hebrew words for pogroms and destruction. By using words the Nazis couldn’t decode, Jews in Polish ghettos warned others about their fate.

One of the most lasting ways that Jews defied the Nazis was by documenting their experiences. Secret archives were established to preserve the history of life in the ghettos. The Oneg Shabbat of Warsaw was established by Dr. Emanuel Ringelblum. He persuaded people like former teacher Abraham Lewin to contribute their accounts. Part of Lewin’s diary was discovered in a milk pail after the war. The partial diary covers late March 1942 to January 1943. Lewin wrote in June 1942, “We gather every Sabbath, a group of activists in the Jewish community, to discuss our diaries and writings. We want our sufferings, these ‘birth pangs of the Messiah’ to be impressed upon the memories of future generations and on the memory of the whole world.” Lewin’s diary entries got shorter whenever deportations to the death camps were increased. For example, he struggled to describe his heartbreak when his wife was deported in August 1942. “I have no words to describe my desolation. I ought to go after her, to die. But I have no strength to take such a step.” Although Lewin often found it difficult to write about the actions of the Nazis, his diary and others like it testify to the horrors of the Holocaust.   

Violence as Resistance

 Although much of Jewish resistance prior to the Warsaw ghetto uprising was nonviolent, this was not always the case. For example, in fall of 1942 Jews in the town of Lubliniec were ordered to gather in the market and undress. Naked Jewish women began attacking the officers, biting them and throwing stones. The Nazis ran away. The headline in the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s report read “Jewish Resistance in Poland: Women Trample Nazi Soldiers.” A bit later in the year, an armed act of violence by Jews in Krakow occurred. On December 22, 1942, 40 Jewish men and women fighters descended upon three coffee houses and bombed a Nazi Christmas party. Others threw grenades into another café. Their efforts killed at least seven Nazis and wounded many more. The Jewish resistance leaders were killed but others still bombed targets outside the city. Most importantly, Jews who used violence to resist inspired those who became part of the larger Warsaw ghetto uprising.

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References

Batalion, Judy. The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos. New York: HarperCollins, 2020.

Bauer, Yehuda. A History of the Holocaust. Danbury, CT: Franklin Watts, 1982.

Dwork, Deborah and Robert Jan van Pelt. Holocaust: A History. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2002.

Lewin, Abraham. A Cup of Tears: A Diary of the Warsaw Ghetto. Edited by Antony Polonsky. New York: Basil Blackwell Inc., 1989. 

Britain’s Unwitting Entanglement in the 1961 US-Backed Invasion of Cuba

The Bay of Pigs Invasion was a failed US-supported landing on Cuba against Fidel Castro’s Communist Cuba in 1961. Here, J.J. Valdes considers Britain’s involvement in the affair.

Bay of Pigs Invasion: The flagship Blagar, near the Cuban coast, April 16, 1961.

“Speak in English,” Bob Hines, radio operator at the airport tower in Grand Cayman, kept telling the Spanish-speaking pilot of the Douglas B-26 Invader circling overhead. There was no scheduled arrival of a plane on that early morning of April 15, 1961, so Hines was perplexed about the identity of the unexpected flight. Hines spoke some Spanish and could understand that the pilot was asking for landing instructions. Unable to get the man to communicate in English, he gave him instructions in Spanish as best he could and the plane finally landed.

The radio operator, who was working alone in the tower at the time, then went out to meet the plane on the tarmac. The pilot, in military garb, was the first to exit the aircraft, which bore Cuban air force markings. “Give you this,” he said to Hines, holding two pistols in his outstretched hand. Hines took the pistols then, deciding that this was something for the government to handle, summoned the islands’ Immigration Officer (also the Chief of Police) and Administrator Jack Rose.

Cayman Islands

The Caymans, consisting of Grand Cayman and two other smaller isles, came under British rule in 1670. In 1961 the territory was administered as a dependency of Jamaica, where the governor resided. Jack Rose, a former Royal Air Force (RAF) fighter pilot during World War II, was the island’s resident administrator.

Rose quickly arrived at the airport. The Cubans were demanding to be flown to Miami and at first Rose assumed that they were defectors from that country. But in fact, the unexpected arrivals were Cuban exile pilot Alfredo Caballero and navigator Alfredo Maza. They were part of a force trained in Central America by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for an invasion of Cuba intended to topple Fidel Castro. Their plane was one of three B-26s that had attacked San Antonio de los Baños airbase, near Havana, as part of pre-invasion strikes on three of the country’s main airfields. Caballero had discovered en route to Cuba from Nicaragua that there was a malfunction with the plane’s droppable fuel tanks. Despite his flight leader’s order to turn back, he had opted to continue with the mission. However, his fuel situation had become critical on the return trip, forcing him to divert to Grand Cayman.  

No one had bothered to inform Rose about the possible arrival of such visitors and he was “far from pleased to see them” because he “smelt trouble.” Adding to his foreboding was the fact that one of the plane’s rockets had apparently misfired and was still attached under a wing. The Cuban crew offered no cooperation in addressing the dangerous situation. Rose, therefore, called on his old RAF skills to remove the device and other ordnance from the plane with help from ground personnel and an American tourist onlooker who had been a bomber crewman.

Rose’s next order of business was to contact the governor in Jamaica, Sir Kenneth Blackburne. As there was no telephone connection at the time between Kingston and the Caymans, messages had to be exchanged via radiotelegraphy. Blackburne, it turned out, was as surprised as Rose by the incident and had little to offer. This left Rose in a crux regarding “what attitude to adopt in practical and propaganda terms.” He thought it prudent “to try to keep the lid on what had happened.” Thus, in addition to requesting local ship owners to refrain from radio chatter about the B-26’s arrival, he arranged for the postmaster to hold off all outgoing mail for a time.

Lack of knowledge

Even the highest levels of the British government had apparently not been informed by the Americans of their plans for an invasion of Cuba, let alone that an airstrip on British territory had been designated as an emergency landing alternative. British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, despite his close association with President John F. Kennedy, had been kept in the dark about such plans when he had visited Washington in early April. The American strategy seemed to have been not to involve the British authorities pending the advent of actual emergency landings on the Caymans. If the British then decided to intern any landed aircraft, the Americans considered raising the specter that Cuba and other nations might view the planes’ presence there as indicative that the islands were being used as a launch base.

As it happened, however, the British government proved most cooperative. During the evening, Rose received a radiogram from Sir Blackburne informing him to expect “a visitor” during the night who “should be given every courtesy.” Around midnight, a transport aircraft with no landing lights approached the dark runway (which lacked an illumination system) at low level. Upon touching down, the “visitor” and several other CIA men deplaned. The leader of the group introduced himself and, over the course of their conversation, revealed to be intimately acquainted with assorted details about Rose’s life. The rest of the group consisted of aviation technicians who immediately set to work on the parked B-26.  

After sizing up the situation, the lead CIA man indicated that he needed to phone Washington. He initially thought Rose was joking when the latter informed him that the island had no telephone connection to the outside world. Arrangements were then made via radiogram for a charter plane from Jamaica to pick up the American in the morning and fly him there so he could make his call. Afterward, he returned on the plane to Grand Cayman. Rose came to find out that, to pay for expenses, this fellow carried a case containing stacks of US paper currency, “neatly packed just as one sees them in films or television as ransom money.”

Events took a precipitous turn on April 17 when the disembarkation of troops at the Bay of Pigs began. Throughout the day, the invasion force received air support from B-26 bombers arriving over the area from Nicaragua in staggered fashion. The aircraft, which lacked tail guns, were often engaged in lopsided aerial battles by fighter planes from Castro’s air force. By day’s end, two more B-26s had arrived at Grand Cayman. One, piloted by Marío Zúñiga, diverted there in the early morning low on fuel after engaging in a dogfight with, ironically, a British-made Hawker Sea Fury. A number of the prop fighters had been inherited by Castro from former Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. Another B-26, piloted by Antonio Soto, arrived in the early afternoon after having one of his engines shot out by a T-33 jet.

In retrospect

Both Rose’s and Hines’s oral accounts, recorded more than three decades after the events, are imprecise in various respects, including the total number of B-26s, each carrying a two-man crew, that diverted to Grand Cayman. Whereas they both claim that a total of four planes arrived, CIA documents indicate that only three did, including Caballero’s on the 15th. The three aircraft were flown back to Nicaragua by CIA personnel as soon as each was made airworthy. Meanwhile, the six Cuban exile crewmen they had carried were issued civilian clothes and flown out on regular air service flights to Miami. Zúñiga and Soto arrived back in Nicaragua in time to join the invasion’s most devastating air support mission late on the afternoon of April 18. Caballero, however, was transported by mistake to Retalhuleu, the CIA’s airbase in Guatemala, and remained there until the invasion’s collapse on April 19.

Both Administrator Rose and Governor Blackburne subsequently received letters of commendation for their handling of the affair from the British Permanent Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Sir Frederick Millar. However, Rose was “given to understand” that if the matter had attracted any adverse publicity, he alone would have been assigned blame for the incident.

The role of British territory in the CIA’s Cuban invasion has largely remained hush and been little publicized over the years. Radio operator Hines declared in his 1995 oral account that he “was the only person allowed to take pictures [of the landed planes], on word that I would not publish them; I have never published them.”  To this day, the pictures have never come to light.

Author J.J. Valdes’s recent book about the 1961 Cuban invasion is Besieged Beachhead: The Cold War Battle for Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. Available here: https://www.amazon.com/Besieged-Beachhead-Cold-Battle-Cuba/dp/0811776794

Sources

Beerli, Stanley W. “Transmittal of Documents.” Memorandum to Lt. Colonel B. W. Tarwater, USAF (Attachment C), April 26, 1961. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/DOC_0000252273.pdf.

Lesley Hines. “Interview with Lesley (Bob) Hines.” By Heather McLaughin. Cayman Islands National Archive Oral History Programme (16 February 1995; finalized transcription: 16 April 1997)

Pfeiffer, Jack B. Official History of the Bay of Pigs Operation. Vol I. Central Intelligence Agency, 1979.

Jack Rose. “Interview with Jack Rose.” By Heather McLaughin. Cayman Islands National Archive Oral History Programme (18 May 1999; finalized transcription: 22 July 1999).

Sandford, Christopher. Harold and Jack: The Remarkable Friendship of Prime Minister Macmillan and President Kennedy. Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 2014.

Valdés, J.J. Besieged Beachhead: The Cold War battle for Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. Essex, Connecticut: Stackpole Books, 2024.

Wells, Davis. A Brief History of the Cayman Islands. Dover, UK: The West India Committee, 2018. eBook.  https://www.cigouk.ky/downloads/Cayman-Islands-e-book-October2018.pdf.

Wise, David, and Thomas B. Ross. The Invisible Government. New York: Random House, 1964.

Sleeping with the Bomb: The Unsettled Legacy of the SS Richard Montgomery

It lies just beneath the surface—literally and figuratively. A rusting American Liberty ship, broken-backed and quietly corroding off the coast of Kent and Essex, barely three miles from Sheerness. To many in the southeast of England, the name Richard Montgomery is familiar, even faintly iconic. Its skeletal masts still protrude from the Thames Estuary at low tide like a warning, or a forgotten monument. But beneath those masts lies something altogether more sobering: over 1,400 tons of unexploded ordnance. The wreck is a wartime time capsule that, by all reasonable estimates, has the potential to unleash the largest non-nuclear explosion on British soil since the Second World War.

Richard Clements explains.

The wreck of the SS Richard Montgomery. Source: Christine Matthews, available here.

The story of the SS Richard Montgomery has never truly gone away. Locals have lived in its shadow for decades. Teenagers are warned off from daring swims. Journalists periodically revisit it. The government monitors it. Yet in recent months, the Richard Montgomery has once again found its way into headlines. With new sonar scans, rising concerns over corrosion, and questions about how long inaction can remain the official policy, this long-silent threat has begun to murmur again.

A Wartime Wreck with a Dangerous Cargo

The SS Richard Montgomery was built in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1943—one of over 2,700 Liberty ships constructed at speed to fuel the Allied war effort. She arrived in the Thames Estuary in August 1944, destined to join a larger convoy headed for Cherbourg, where her cargo—thousands of tons of munitions—was to support operations in liberated France. At the time, the estuary’s Great Nore Anchorage near Sheerness served as a gathering point for vessels awaiting safe passage.

While anchored there, the Montgomery’s mooring reportedly dragged or failed, and the vessel drifted onto a shallow sandbank known as Sheerness Middle Sand. Grounded and listing, the ship’s structural integrity was compromised. Efforts to refloat her proved unsuccessful. Salvage teams began offloading the munitions, but before the operation could be completed, the ship’s hull split amidships.

An estimated 6,000 tons of ordnance had been on board. Roughly half was safely removed. The remainder—some 1,400 tons by official estimates—remains inside the forward holds to this day. The cargo includes high explosive bombs, anti-tank devices, and aerial munitions, many of which have become unstable with time. A wartime manifest is believed to exist, though details have often been redacted in public summaries. Over the years, surveys have confirmed the presence of explosive material, but exact specifications are rarely disclosed in full.

The wreck was declared a dangerous site, and further salvage was ruled out for fear that disturbing the remaining cargo could trigger an explosion. Instead, the area was marked with buoys, designated an exclusion zone, and subjected to regular monitoring—a policy that has continued into the 21st century.

Living with the Risk

For most residents of coastal Kent and Essex, the Richard Montgomery is less a mystery than a fact of life—an ever-present silhouette on the horizon. Its masts, protruding from the water like the ribs of a fossilized beast, have been visible for generations. Schoolchildren grow up hearing about it. Locals give it a wide berth. And yet, for something that holds such destructive potential, it remains curiously normalized.

Signs near the shoreline warn of exclusion zones. Maritime charts mark the wreck with bright symbols. Navigation buoys flash their silent signals to passing vessels. But on land, conversation about the ship is often casual. It has become, over time, one of those shared local oddities—like a long-standing crack in the pavement or a tree that leans the wrong way. Everyone knows it’s there. Most choose not to think about it too much.

The British government has kept a close, if quiet, eye on the wreck. Annual surveys by the Maritime and Coastguard Agency check for structural shifts. A Department for Transport report in 2022 reiterated that the risk of explosion remains low so long as the site is left undisturbed. But concerns do resurface. In 2020, the Ministry of Defence released footage from a sonar scan showing the ship’s hull deteriorating, fueling public speculation.

There have been no shortage of ideas over the years—from controlled detonation to encasing the wreck in concrete. None have gained traction. Each option, it seems, carries greater risk than simply leaving it alone. Successive governments have opted for cautious monitoring rather than intervention, a decision often criticized as kicking the can down the road. Yet the wreck persists, and so does the uneasy status quo.

For those who live nearby, this balance between familiarity and latent danger is strangely British in character. Not quite forgotten, not quite feared, the Richard Montgomery remains part of the local backdrop. As one long-time resident in Sheerness once quipped to a reporter, “If it hasn’t gone up by now, it probably won’t—will it?”

Back in the Headlines

After decades of relative obscurity, the Richard Montgomery has once again captured national attention. In early June 2025, Kent Online confirmed new flight restrictions imposed over the wreck—pilots are now prohibited from flying below 13,100 feet within a one-nautical-mile radius, following expert advice aimed at further reducing risk. This no-fly rule, in effect until further notice, applies to all aircraft except emergency or coastguard flights.

The news wasn’t confined to regional outlets. National broadcasters followed with commentary on broader safety concerns, describing the wreck as “a forgotten time bomb” in one headline. Security experts noted that the estuary’s proximity to major shipping lanes—used by LNG carriers and container ships—heightens concerns not only of accidental detonation but also of potential sabotage.

Despite the growing attention, subsequent government statements have maintained a cautious posture. The Department for Transport confirmed that structural deterioration is ongoing, but insisted the risk remains low provided the site remains undisturbed. Meanwhile, maritime exclusion zones are still enforced and the wreck continues to be monitored by the Maritime and Coastguard Agency.

Managing a Legacy: Proposals and Precautions

Over the decades, a variety of solutions have been considered for the Richard Montgomery. Options have ranged from full ordnance removal to structural reinforcement or burial in concrete. However, none have been pursued—primarily because the danger of disturbing the wreck is considered greater than leaving it alone.

The Maritime & Coastguard Agency, the Department for Transport, and the Ministry of Defence have stuck to a policy of passive containment. The site is clearly marked and monitored, with exclusion zones for shipping and—as of June 2025—a no‑fly zone prohibiting aircraft below 13,100 feet within a one‑nautical‑mile radius.

The remaining cargo, estimated at around 1,400 tons of high explosives including bombs of various sizes and white phosphorus smoke devices, remains buried in the forward holds beneath silt and collapsed steel. As long as the wreck remains undisturbed, the official assessment describes the threat as low, though not negligible.

While public imagination often oscillates between a catastrophic detonation and a safe cleanup, reality demands nuance. These wrecks are treated more like dormant geological faults—stable under current conditions but potentially volatile if tampered with.

Lessons from the Deep: The SS Kielce Case

A comparable cautionary example comes from the English Channel, with the Polish freighter SS Kielce. The Kielce sank in 1946, carrying munitions when it collided with another ship off Folkestone. The wreck settled in some 90 feet of water—well over twice the depth of the Richard Montgomery, which lies at approximately 50 feet.

In 1967, efforts to dismantle the Kielce ended badly. The Folkestone Salvage Company placed demolition charges on the hull and inadvertently detonated remaining munitions. The blast created a crater in the seabed over 150 feet long, 67 feet wide, and 20 feet deep. It registered as a magnitude 4.5 seismic event—detected across Europe and North America—and shattered windows and roofs in Folkestone, several miles away.

It is worth noting that despite its deeper waters and lower explosive payload, the Kielce explosion still caused significant damage. In contrast, the Richard Montgomery sits in shallower water—its masts still visible above the low tide—and holds far more ordnance. Its proximity to densely populated areas and strategic infrastructure such as Sheerness docks and Thames shipping lanes makes its situation uniquely sensitive.

The Kielce disaster remains a sobering historical precedent. It underlines the unpredictable dangers of attempting salvage operations on munitions-laden wrecks, and supports the reasoning behind official efforts to keep the Montgomery undisturbed.

Conclusion – Between Memory and Responsibility

The SS Richard Montgomery is more than a rusting wreck—it is a persistent testament to wartime legacies and the decisions we make to contain them. Its silhouetted masts serve as a stark reminder that beneath the Thames isn’t just history, but latent danger.

The Kielce incident teaches us that intervention—even cautious, professional intervention—can have unintended consequences. That wreck lay deeper and held fewer explosives than the Montgomery, yet when disturbed, its blast shook communities and created seismic ripples around the world.

The Thames wreck lies closer to shore, holding much more volatile material. It is not merely passive decay; it is a hazard managed by surveillance, exclusion zones, and measured restraint. While erosion and rust continue their slow work, the official approach remains surveillance—not removal.

In the end, the Richard Montgomery reveals much about our relationship with the past. It sits—watched, measured, contained—but unresolved. An explosive time capsule in shallow water, it tests the limits of prudence. As history recedes into memory, this wreck stands as a powerful symbol of the care and caution we must exercise in the aftermath of war.

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References

Daily Express. “Warning over UK ‘Time Bomb’ Ship Loaded with 1,400 Tons of Explosives.” Daily Express Online, June 2025.

Department for Transport. Annual Report on the Condition of the SS Richard Montgomery Wreck Site. London: UK Government Publications, 2022.

Kent Online. “New No-Fly Zone Introduced over Richard Montgomery Wreck.” KentOnline, June 4, 2025.

Maritime and Coastguard Agency. Wreck Monitoring Report: SS Richard Montgomery, 2023.

Smith, Roger. “The Kielce Explosion of 1967: Lessons from a Wartime Wreck.” Maritime Historical Review, Vol. 11, No. 2, 1998.

BBC News Archive. “Underwater Blast Rocks Channel: Wreck Detonates during Salvage.” BBC News, July 1967.

Folkestone Salvage Company Records. “Case File: SS Kielce,” National Archives Reference FS/1967/072.

Remembering the Sorsa Era: A Golden Period for Social Democracy in Finland?

This September is a significant milestone in the history of Finnish democratic socialism; marking the 50th anniversary of the end of the first socialist-led coalition of Kalevi Sorsa. A journalist who went on to work for UNESCO and the Finnish foreign ministry on multiple occasions, while also going on to serve as Secretary and later Chairman of his own Social Democratic Party (SDP), Sorsa became prime minister following a general election held in Finland in 1972. Over the next three years, Sorsa presided over a truly transformative administration. Although circumstances led to his government’s premature collapse in 1975, Sorsa would go on to serve as prime minister again for three non-consecutive terms; in the process holding that position for a longer period than any of his predecessors.

Vittorio Trevitt explains.

Finnish politician Kalevi Sorsa in 1975. Source: http://www.finna.fi/Cover/Show?id=musketti.M012%3AHK7155%3A309-75-1&index=0&size=large&w=1200&h=1200
Image record page in Finna: musketti.M012%3AHK7155%3A309-75-1, Available here.

Despite the electoral victory achieved by the SDP, it failed to win enough seats to win majority representation in both the cabinet and in the legislature; a situation that remained unaltered during Sorsa’s subsequent premierships. The lack of socialist majorities in these two bodies, however, was no obstacle to radical social reform. What helped the SDP was the fact that the Centre Party, one its main coalition partners during the Sorsa years (though not always seeing eye to eyewith the Social Democrats), had a progressive outlook on social issues, advocating not only extensions to the welfare state but also the facilitation of rented housing, further educational opportunities and the utilisation of income policies in reducing inequalities. Additionally, the Liberal People’s Party and the Swedish People’s Party (two long-established groups that would become mainstays of various cabinets led by Sorsa) were advocates of activist, socially responsible government. Thanks to the intervention of the country’s president, a broad-based coalition comprising parties of differing philosophical persuasions was formed, with Sorsa at the helm. Thus marked the beginning of an age of reform that one could call “The Sorsa Era.”

Sorsa’s electoral successes can be seen in the wider context of a global trend towards socialism, in which certain developments witnessed left-wing parties enter government in several countries; many for the first time. In 1974, after Portugal’s long-established right-wing dictatorship came to a long-awaited end following a coup, the Portuguese colonies of Angola, São Tomé and Príncipe, Cape Verde, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau became independent states with leftists at the head of these new, free nations. In Europe, an election held in Ireland in 1973 produced a coalition formed between Fine Gael and the social-democratic Labour Party, with the latter awarded cabinet posts related to social concerns that enabled it to realise important advances in social security in subsequent years. Five years later, an election in San Marino resulted in the formation of a socialist-communist governing alliance that would lead the principality for the next 13 years. “The Sorsa Era” was therefore not unique to Finland, but a reflection of international politics at that time.

Notable government

What was notable about Sorsa’s longevity was the fact that his SDP, unlike its counterparts in Norway, Sweden and Denmark, had failed to establish itself as the dominant force in national politics, with most governments that led Finland following its independence from the Russian Empire in the early Twentieth Century being of a liberal or conservative orientation. This did not mean, however, that the SDP remained a political outsider. In 1926, the SDP made a breakthrough when it formed a minority administration (albeit a temporary one), and nearly a decade later formed a key part of what was known as a “Red-Earth” ministry with liberal and agrarian-oriented figures. Lasting from 1937 to 1939, it was responsible for milestones in social legislation such as the introduction of comprehensive maternity aid, better dietary requirements for seamen, and wide-reaching pension coverage. After the Second World War, the SPD often provided positions in coalition cabinets, two of the most notable being the “Popular Front” cabinets from 1946-48 and from 1966-70 (the former communist-led and the latter SDP-led) which affected major reforms in areas like education,social security, occupational safety, and workers’ rights. The SDP also governed alone, first from 1948-50 and again from 1956-57. During these periods, it presided over notable undertakings in social policy. Amongst others, these included measures to improve accident insurance and combat TB (including free treatment for poorer patients), provide care for mentally disabled people, and facilitate employment opportunities. Sorsa’s terms enabled him to build on the record of past left-wing coalitions, leaving his own imprint on domestic policy in the process.

The legislative output of Sorsa’s first administration was considerable, with a broad array of reforms carried out that reflected the democratic socialist aspirations of his party. New pension benefits were introduced in cases of disablement together with farmers’ retirement and succession, while a greater number of people became entitled to financial support for housing. The innovative Day Care Act required municipalities to provide either childminders at home or day care facilities; effectively making childcare an integral part of the Finnish welfare state. Extra grants for children under the age of three were introduced, together with recompense (both monetary and in kind) in cases of wrongful arrest, detainment and criminal damage; the latter including the property in addition to the person involved. Guaranteed pay in cases of insolvency and bankruptcy was also enshrined into law, along with measures aimed at ensuring safe working conditions, while the replacement rate of supplementary private sector pensions was raised by a sizeable amount. Legislation was introduced providing for free trials and the establishment of local legal aid offices (aimed at ensuring that limited resources were not barriers to justice), together with compensation for farmers leaving their profession for a certain amount of time. Laws aimed at promoting exercise in open spaces, providing special treatment in intoxication cases, and establishing separate taxation of married partners were also passed; the latter of which helped more women to enter the workplace. Government spending also went through an expansionary phase, which rose by double-digits during Sorsa’s premiership.

Sorsa’s tenure, however, was cut short by gathering financial storms not of his own doing. Finland’s economy was battered by an international oil crisis, which contributed to a decision Sorsa made to stand down as prime minister in 1975. Two years later, however, Sorsa returned to the premiership with the Finnish economy in a parlous state, which the government successfully tackled by the application of measures designed to weather the financial storm. Symbolically, the policies pursued by the SDP-led government were shaped by the “Bad Sillanpää” programme adopted by the SDP in early 1977, which committed the party to more market-friendly policies as a means of strengthening the economy.

Social progress

The economic difficulties of this period, however, did not lead to social progress being neglected during Sorsa’s second term, which exhibited a similar reforming zeal to the first. Poorer pensioners became eligible for a special aid supplementwhile maternity leave was more than doubled and paid absence for fathers of newborn babies was established for the first time. An additional week of general paid leave was instituted, together with requirements of firms to not only set up health services in the workplace, but also for there to be negotiations between employers and workers or their representatives over matters that directly impacted staff, like dismissal. Laws intended to safeguard consumers and provide support services tailored to the needs of certain disabled people were also implemented.

In 1978, however, the cabinet fell; precipitated by division over financial policy. Sorsa regained the post of prime minister in 1982, but his new premiership faced a premature end due to internal cabinet opposition over a planned, significant rise in defence expenditure; with one of his coalition partners, the communist Finnish National Democratic League (SKDL), opposed to such a move. Although Sorsa made the SKDL leave the coalition, it was quickly replaced by a different party. Thus Sorsa came to lead his fourth and final administration; serving what would be his longest term in office. While some regressive decisions concerning the way pension increases are calculated were made, social policy for the most part was forward-looking during Sorsa’s last term. A compensation scheme for those afflicted by healthcare-associated injury and a universal income support benefit were established, together with a home care allowance for vulnerable groups and reforms to unemployment benefits that included higher levels of payment. A law aimed at putting a stop to gender discrimination was passed, together with measures designed to guarantee the safety of consumer goods, provide adequate shelter for those living with severe disabilities and those experiencing homelessness, and ensure supportive networks for those with issues concerning alcoholism and addiction. More people were also brought into compulsory pension insurance and a shared system of parental leave was inaugurated, together with a cash allowance for parents who stayed at home in place of daycare. This particular reform, which was promoted by the Cente Party, was a bone of contention for the SDP, who would only accept it if Centre agreed to greater public assistance for childcare.

1987 election

These accomplishments, however, did not translate into electoral success, with the SDP losing seats in a national election in 1987 and a new administration formed under the leadership of the centre-right National Coalition Party. Although the SDP maintained a degree of cabinet representation in what became known as the “red-blue” coalition, “The Sorsa Era” had finally drawn to a close.

Sorsa’s departure from the premiership did not spell the end of his involvement in public life, however. He went on to serve as Governor of the Bank of Finland, and back in the Nineties became involved in talks with employers and workers in an effort to hammer out an agreement between the two groups during a time when the country experienced a severe economic recession, with the former calling for an effective reduction in labour costs that trade unionists opposed (an agreement supported by the latter was eventually made). Sorsa also sought to become his party’s candidate for an upcoming presidential race, but despite his impressive credentials there was a clamouring for change within the SDP, with over six out of ten party members voting for a rival candidate; thus sadly ending Sorsa’s aspirations to one of the highest offices in the land.

Although Sorsa’s political career was at an end, the SDP has continued to play a prominent part in Finnish politics; participating in numerous cabinets to the present day. Since 2023, however, Finland has been led by a conservative ministry (which includes members of a radical right-wing party) that has pursued reactionary policies in regards to social security and asylum. Although the next election isn’t due until 2027, the SDP has consistently outperformed its rivals in countless polls for over a year, strongly suggesting a swing back to the Left if the SDP maintains its momentum. The legacy that “The Sorsa Era” left for Finland, with the many beneficial reforms and higher levels of social justice left in its wake, is one that a future SDP-led administration can use as a roadmap in leading Finland towards a brighter, fairer future. The memory of Kalevi Sorsa, who tragically passed away in 2004, should live on not only in the hearts and minds of Finnish social democrats today, but in their future actions as well.

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To What Extent had a Personality Cult Developed Prior to Lenin's Death in 1924?

Lenin became the most influential person in what was to become the Soviet Union, following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. But, to what extent had his cult of personality been developed prior to his death in 1924? Ed Long considers this question.

Lenin with a cat in 1922.

Stalin v Lenin

This topic has received far too little direct attention since two articles in the early 1980s by Nina Tumarkin, and although referred to in passing by many of the more recent texts that deal with post-Tsarist Russia, it deserves a more in-depth treatment than it has received thus far. By comparison with the far more well-known and well-documented Cult of Stalin, Lenin has lost out by being considerably less well documented, and as a result far less well known. Based on the number of words penned on the use of the Lenin Cult as part of Stalin’s apparatus in order to cement his position as Vozhd, the evidence is overwhelming that a Cult of Personality centred around Lenin was in existence after the latter’s death in January 1924. However, what is less certain is to what extent such a Cult predated Lenin’s demise, and was then constructed by Stalin in order to portray himself as the "high priest [... and] theorist"[1] of Leninism, thereby driving the ideals of the October Revolution and The Civil War forward. In fact, a Lenin 'Cult' did not exist in any meaningful way prior to his death at the age of 53. Instead, I will argue here that whilst a certain level of 'mystique' may have surrounded Lenin prior to his death, starting perhaps from the time of the failed attempt on his life in 1918, this did not constitute a fully formed Cult of Personality.

A posthumous Cult of Personality?

The evidence to suggest that the Lenin Cult was “posthumous”[2] as Fitzpatrick accurately describes, is truly overwhelming.  "[T]he Lenin cult [that was] so evident in the immediate aftermath of his death"[3] was the creation of Krupskaya and, to a far greater extent, Stalin, both of whom had a vested interest in erecting the Lenin Cult in order to ensure a smooth succession of power. As the "high priest" and "high priestess of the Lenin cult"[4] their ability to determine the ideological shape of post-Lenin Russia was central to stability and particularly Stalin's rise to power. Tumarkin describes the work also undertaken by others beyond Stalin and Krupskaya to ensure that Lenin took his rightful place as the "Man-God of Communism"[5] in the Communist pantheon. Indeed, by the beginning of February 1924, the cult had already reached "nationwide"[6] proportions. To effect this end, Bonch-Bruevich had made "many of the arrangements for the portraits, sculptures, photographs and movies depicting the leader during the brief period of his active rule"[7], "Lunacharskii [...] immortali[sed] Lenin as a genius and Creator [...] when he took charge of the competition for the design of a permanent mausoleum of stone that would enshrine Lenin forever"[8] which would "surpass Mecca and Jerusalem in its human significance"[9]. Lenin's funeral was the centerpiece in rolling-out the new cult to the Russian people, and Tumarkin is right to emphasize its unifying effect on the Russian people as "an organi[s]ed system of rituals and symbols whose collective function was [...] to induce the public to go through the motions of revering Lenin as an outward sign of solidarity"[10]. Crucially, it was 'organized' and orchestrated and as I shall argue below, this was not the case to any great extent prior to the Lenin’s death. Whilst it may have been designed to unify the Russian public, it divided many in Sovnarkom. Stalin got to work as soon as he was able, throwing Trotsky off the scent immediately by establishing himself front and center during Trotsky's vacation and convalescence at the moment of Lenin's funeral. Service's view that "Stalin's leadership of the funeral commission put him at a crucial advantage"[11], due to the fact that Stalin was in many senses coming from behind in order to establish his position as a leading Bolshevik, reveals how important this leadership opportunity was for Stalin and hence how crucial it was that he took full advantage of it. Trotsky's prominence as the facilitator of the October Revolution, Chairmanship of the Petrograd Soviet and leadership of the MRC and Red Guards allowed him to portray himself as a greater defender of the revolution than Stalin. As leader of the Red Army and Commissar for War during the Civil War from 1918 his position as de facto right hand man to Lenin was solidified even more. Whilst this is not to denigrate Stalin's importance in these events, nonetheless he had significant ground to make up relative to Trotsky and so it was crucial that he took immediate advantage of the situation in January 1924. Furthermore, as Stalin "had no time to write a lengthy piece of work before 1917"[12] about Lenin's work, he clearly realized that the time was right to do so. Thus, his Foundations of Leninism, published by 1924 and in that year also delivered in the form of nine lectures at the Sverdlov University[13] established Stalin not only as the rightful heir to Lenin's throne, but also as the chief arbiter of Leninist doctrine thereafter. Montefiore's view that "Lenin was a tower and Stalin a little finger"[14] accords perfectly with Service's contention that Stalin was "a mere pupil of the great man"[15]; the torchbearer shining the light of Lenin's example for all to follow. This light promised a brighter future in Russia, and in following Lenin's lead, Stalin's role as benevolent and selfless disciple was indisputable. In much the same way as Hitler was able to use Mein Kampf as the blueprint for the new Germany after January 30th 1933, having of course formulated his ideas in and after his incarceration in Landsberg Prison after the failed Putsch in November 1923, Stalin was able to use the Foundations of Leninism in precisely the same way. He was the keeper of Lenin's legacy, "a village sorcerer who held his subjects in his dark thrall”[16], and as such had supreme ideological control over the Russian people, and even more crucially against 'wreckers', 'deviationists', and any others within and without the party who presumed to challenge his control. Those who stood in his way stood in Lenin's way. Such sacrilege would be punished in the strongest possible terms; Yagoda, Yezhov and later Beria awaited with their torture chambers primed and tools sharpened. The bloodshed here, justifiable in Lenin's own words by the epithet: “Even if 90% of the people perish, what matter if the other 10% live to see revolution become universal”[17], makes the icepick to the back of Trotsky's head seem humane by comparison. In the later 1920s, this method of relentlessly guarding Lenin's legacy was key to Stalin's rise from party notable to Vozhd. The claim, then, that the Lenin cult was only constructed after his death has a lot of merit. This was indeed a powerful tool that allowed Stalin to claim that his policies were being promulgated only in accordance with Lenin's wishes, and therefore to distance himself from much of the chaos that prevailed in the later 1920s and 30s[18]. As such, we can conclude with certainty that the cult existed after Lenin's death. However, to do so is not to say anything new; what is both more prescient and controversial is the extent to which the cult existed prior to his death.

Folklore or cult?

That a 'cult' existed prior to Lenin's death is shrouded in uncertainty not only from an historic, but also a semantic point of view. It is not the purpose of this work to deny the existence of tales and myths about Lenin prior to his death. Panchenko discusses the existence of such "folklore"[19] and the extent to which it was in fact "fakelore"[20] but confines his analysis to the period "in the first decades after the Revolution"[21] - clearly this also encompasses the years 1917-24, and therefore could imply that Lenin mythology was in existence prior to his death, however on two levels this is not compelling evidence. First of all, Panchenko's own words are revealing: Whilst discussing such rhymes as came out about Lenin, for example "Il'ich's red arse"[22] and the 'Voronezh tale' in which Lenin "chops them like a cabbage [w]ith his sharp sword"[23] (them being the whites), he states that these forms of eulogising Lenin are far more difficult to classify on the same level as the much more obvious Cult of Stalin established later on; "the cultural forms themselves, ranging from rhetoric to rituals and representing the distinctive character of the veneration of Lenin in the Soviet Union are not as homogeneous, simple and transparent"[24]. The clear implication here, then, is that its scale relative to Stalin would immediately lead us to conclude that the use of the word 'cult' is not appropriate. By extension, the instances that Panchenko describes seem, at least at their inception, to have no official sanction by Sovnarkom. As such, the use of the word 'cult' is totally misleading by this yardstick. Secondly, the latter half of Panchenko's article deals with further instances which he describes once again as "folktales"; the 'Muzhitskii skaz o Lenine', published in 1924, the 'Khitryi Lenin' by Akul'shin, published in 1925, and 'Lenin ne umer - on zhiv' published in 1925-6[25]. Whilst the dates given are only those of publication, not necessarily inception, and indeed Panchenko himself claims that many were heard by the authors as early as 1918, this is scant evidence on which to claim that a cult, or even a well-established folk tradition, was in existence prior to Lenin's death. However, Panchenko gives us a vital clue as to the nature of Lenin's aura that pre-dated his demise, and is especially important as tales such as those examples above were a hugely important precursor to the later, fully-fledged cult that was built by Stalin after 1924, whose "contours were shaped by traditional peasant culture"[26]. These tales, then, were the early building blocks of Stalin's cult of Lenin, but before 1924 had yet to be organized into any coherent structure.

White's analysis develops the idea that the cult was in existence before Lenin's death, and indeed over-extends to the point where credibility is lost. He claims, in contradiction to the ideas set-out earlier in this argument, that “Stalin did not create the Lenin Cult. He found it already in existence and propelled by the momentum that Lenin himself had given it”[27]. Perhaps the basis of White's claim owes something to ideas such as those outlined by Panchenko above. However, by doing so we have jumped from the concept of 'folklore' to a 'cult' far too quickly. We have seen that there were indeed seeds for Stalin to nourish once the ideal situation presented itself on Lenin's death. However, for us to accept White's position we would have to accept two equally difficult claims. First, that Stalin's role in creating what we would recognize as a bona-fide 'cult' was much less than we have already established, either before or after Lenin's death, and second that Lenin himself played an active role in creating the cult of his own personality during his lifetime. The former claim has already been shown to be indefensible, but the latter is worthy of further discussion. Prior to the October revolution, it was in Lenin's, and other leading Bolsheviks', best interests to remain incognito. His previous encounters with the Okhrana, in the wake of his brother's execution in 1887 and after 1903 as part of the clandestine revolutionary underground, had shown him the value of anonymity. Indeed, applying for a passport in 1917 he was forced to shave of his facial hair in order to be successful, and even after the October revolution it took some time for him to grow it back completely. Being totally unrecognizable had its advantages but also its disadvantages it seems. Nonetheless, up to late 1917 Lenin was clearly playing an active role in preventing himself from being widely known, in direct contradiction of White's views. Lenin's attempts were so effective, indeed, that "even in the Civil War he had difficulty in getting recognized by the general public"[28]. This goes directly against Tumarkin's assertion that "the Lenin cult [...] developed in the context of the Russian Civil War"[29] - this seems unlikely, except insofar as Lenin was the acknowledged supreme leader of the Reds, and perhaps some echoes of the attempt on his life (see below) were still being felt but not by the Russian population at large. By 1920 when the Civil War was drawing to a close, then, the majority of Russia did not know what Lenin looked like and so to claim that a personality cult existed at this point and that Lenin himself had played a key role in its inception is to exaggerate the situation wildly.

Lenin’s role in creating his own Cult of Personality

Figes also contends that the cult was in existence prior to Lenin's death but diverges from White's analysis as he is careful to point out that Lenin played no role in creating it himself (indeed Lenin railed against such an outcome, trying to "put a brake on it when he recovered" from the assassination attempt[30]). The failed attempt on Lenin's life by Fanny Kaplan on August 30th 1918 after he had spoken at the Hammer and Sickle armaments factory is seen by Figes as the key moment where the cult sprang into existence; "Lenin's quick recovery was declared a miracle in the Bolshevik press. He was hailed as a Christ-like figure, blessed with supernatural powers, who was not afraid to sacrifice his own life for the good of the people"[31]. Whether, of course, the press beyond the Bolsheviks' own took as much notice and elevated the attempt so highly seems unlikely. Figes then goes on to say that "[i]t was the start of the Lenin cult - a cult designed by Bolsheviks, apparently against Lenin's will, to promote their leader as the 'people's tsar'"[32]. Figes is therefore in broad agreement with Tumarkin, who more plausibly states that "the first stage of its formation was the spontaneous mythologi[s]ing of Lenin that followed upon an attempt on his life [... o]n 30 August 1918"[33]. They differ importantly, as we have already noted on the use of the word 'cult'. Here, Figes goes too far but Tumarkin only refers to the reaction only being a first step towards its construction - "the cult of Lenin had been set on its course "[34]. Nonetheless, as a result of Lenin's virtual resurrection, photos of him appeared in the 'Lenin Corner' also known as the 'Red Corner' or 'Holy Spot' in peasant dwellings[35] (broadly agreeing with Panchenko's ideas as discussed above). Service corroborates Figes' assertion that the cult started to be established in the wake of the assassination attempt[36] but without putting a timescale on precisely when. All of these three accounts suffer from a common weakness - none go beyond asserting that a cult existed as early as August 1918, and proceed to provide only scant evidence to prove that this was actually the case. Figes' account suffers from this fault the least. It seems plausible, but not especially likely, that the Bolshevik press (over which Lenin had tight rein, crucially so as a propaganda weapon against first the Provisional Government and later The Whites in the October Revolution and Civil War respectively) and the Bolshevik leadership (above whom Lenin resided atop the Sovnarkom pyramid, his power here shown for example in pushing through the NEP in 1921 amidst huge opposition and earlier forcing the pace of the seizure of power from the April Theses to the October Revolution itself 6 months later) were able to create such a cult in spite of Lenin's express wishes. From the point of view of the latter, this would have been hugely insubordinate, and perhaps betray not only the ideals of the revolution itself (eg in creating a quasi-religion which would contradict Marxist principles and also in elevating Lenin into a 'class' of his own) but also exacerbate Lenin's worries about, and later explicit orders against, factionalism[37]. Perhaps, though, we can arrive at a middle ground. If an aura did surround Lenin, from the assassination attempt and later mystical stories which resulted from it, then it was not as part of an officially sanctioned ideology. Instead, it was merely an invention along the lines of Panchenko's thinking as outlined above. Once again, to claim that a 'cult' existed from the point of the assassination onwards is hugely problematic.

Timing

Finally, let us look more closely at the timing of the alleged establishment of the Lenin Cult. We have already found that by the end of the Civil War, Lenin was not well enough known to be said to be surrounded by a Personality Cult. An important effect of Fanya Kaplan's attempt against Lenin's life was the legacy of medical difficulties bestowed upon him - she did succeed in killing him, it just took a long time to play out. As a result of one of the three shots fired lodging in Lenin's neck and leading to multiple strokes, Lenin was often wheelchair-bound. After his second stroke in December 1921, he was allowed to dictate for only '5 to 10 minutes a day'. As a result, Lenin had become Stalin's prisoner[38]. He had also become a prisoner insofar as he was isolated from not only the central party leadership, allowing Stalin crucial opportunities to subvert his wishes, but also from the Russian people themselves. For the next two years or so, Lenin's health prevented him from interacting effectively with either of these groups, and indeed was so ill and unbeknown to Russians in general and his own Guards in particular that he was denied entry to the Kremlin in 1923[39]! Under such circumstances, it would have been undesirable for 'the real' Lenin to be well known but it is possible that at this point it did become desirable for thoughts of how to secure Lenin's legacy to start forming in the minds of leading Bolsheviks in general and Stalin in particular. For this reason, it is highly plausible that a sanctioned and sanitized version of Lenin was starting to be effected, and the previous concern raised by Figes that Lenin was averse to such a development became moot. “The Cult of Lenin, which Lenin himself opposed and managed to keep in check until incapacitated by a stroke in March 1923”[40] could now start to coalesce for two reasons - firstly because Lenin's health was so critical that the regime needed to be safeguarded, and that secondly this could, indeed had, to take place now that Lenin was no longer an obstacle to its establishment, being too ill to mount any effective opposition to such a scheme. Tumarkin, therefore, is vindicated in stating that "the elevation of Leninism to the status of holy writ [...] developed in 1923 in response to this concern [about life after Lenin] and reached national proportions after Lenin's death"[41], i.e. the process started during his profound illness but was only fully realized upon his death. Prior to this, it was merely "piecemeal"[42]and disorganized. Only at this point were steps taken to try to safeguard his legacy by, for example, the Moscow Committee setting up a 'Lenin Institute' in 1923 to organize, catalogue, preserve and conserve many of Lenin's documents[43]. Only at this point was a concerted effort made by the regime to "organi[s]e[...] and promote[...]" a cult to act as a "stabili[s]ing and legitimi[s]ing force in Soviet political life"[44]. Between March 1923 and January 1924, therefore, the Cult of Personality of Lenin started to take shape mostly due to Lenin's inability to stop it. As such, it picked up and started to put together the pieces that we have already examined; Panchenko's myths, tales and folklore that developed in the wake of the 1918 assassination attempt being the key components. Only at this point were they put together to form the 'cult' that Stalin used from that point on.

Lenin as a stepping-stone for Stalin’s rise to power

Therefore, a 'Cult' of Personality of Lenin did not exist prior to his death. Events during his premiership may have facilitated planning for the after-Lenin zeitgeist by Stalin and Krupskaya, in particular, and these took on a more urgent aspect in the last ten months of his life. Prior to this, no 'cult' existed. This was for a number of reasons. Lenin was not well known enough by the end of the Civil War for us to term what Lenin legends that did exist sufficient for us to accept the existence of a 'cult'. After 1921, Lenin was so ill that it was undesirable for him to be well known as he actually was, but crucially he was able to retain enough control over his own affairs that he was able to withstand any attempts to create a 'cult' against his will. It was only once he was unable to safeguard his own reputation that leading Bolsheviks did so on his behalf. Therefore, Stalin was able to start building his own “cult of impersonality"[45] as a testimony to Lenin's life and work in the months prior to the latter's death, but this only started to take full expression as Stalin led the funeral oration to Lenin, crucially with Trotsky absent, on January 28th 1924. In the same way that in Stalin's regime, “Kirov's murder provided an ideal pretext [to] solidify[] the power of the dictator [...] The bonds of institutional and clan loyalties, along with the vestiges of collective leadership and intraparty democracy, were the last impediments to sole and unquestioned power”[46], Stalin's construction of the Lenin Cult after his death was the first crucial step to removing the first 'impediments' to Stalin's path to power as Lenin's sole successor.

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Bibliography

Figes, O 1996: “A People’s Tragedy”. Pimlico, London.

Fitzpatrick, S 2008: “The Russian Revolution”. OUP, Oxford.

Khlevniuk, O 2015: "Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator". Yale University Press, New Haven.

Lenin, V 1922: "Continuation of the notes" to the "Last Will & Testament".  Accessed online from https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/dec/testamnt/congress.htm

Lenin Q IN Dewey, J. 1929: "Impressions of Soviet Russia and the revolutionary world". New Republic Inc, New York.

Montefiore, S 2014: “Stalin: Court of the Red Tsar”. Phoenix Books, London.

Panachenko, A 2005: “The Cult of Lenin and ‘Soviet Folklore’”. Folklorica X (1); 18-38.

Service, R 2000: “Lenin”. MacMillan, London.

Service, R 2004: “Stalin”. MacMillan, London.

Tucker, R 1979: “The rise of Stalin’s Personality Cult”. The American Historical Review 84 (2); 347-366.

Tumarkin, N 1981: “Religion, Bolshevism, and the Origins of the Lenin Cult”. The Russian Review 40 (1); 35-46.

Tumarkin, N 1983: “Political Ritual and the Cult of Lenin”. Human Rights Quarterly 5 (2); 203-6.

White, D 2001: “Lenin – The Practice and Theory of Revolution”. Palgrave, Basingstoke.

[1] Service 2004; 221

[2] Fitzpatrick 2008; 111

[3] Tumarkin 1981; 38

[4] Service 2000; 483

[5] Tumarkin 1981; 46

[6] Tumarkin 1983; 205

[7] Tumarkin 1981; 39

[8] Tumarkin 1981; 46

[9] Tumarkin 1981; 44

[10] Tumarkin 1983; 204

[11] Service 2004; 218

[12] Service 2004; 221

[13] Service 2004; 221

[14] Montefiore 2014; 66

[15] Service 2004; 357

[16] Service 2004; 309

[17] Lenin Q IN Dewey 1929; 145

[18] Khlevniuk2015; 39

[19] Panchenko 2005; 19

[20] Panchenko 2005; 20

[21] Panchenko 2005; 19

[22] Panchenko 2005; 21

[23] Panchencko 2005; 22

[24] Panchenko 2005; 21

[25] Panchenko 2005; 24

[26] Tumarkin 1981; 37

[27] White 2001; 185

[28] Service 2000; 9

[29] Tumarkin 1983; 204

[30] Figes 1996; 628

[31] Figes 1996; 627

[32] Figes 1996; 628

[33] Tumarkin 1983; 204

[34] Tumarkin 1983; 205

[35] Figes 1996; 629

[36] Service 2000; 393

[37] Lenin 1922; 3

[38] Figes 1996; 797

[39] Service 2000; 476

[40] Tucker 1979; 347

[41] Tumarkin 1981; 36

[42] Tumarkin 1983; 204

[43] Tumarkin 1983; 205

[44] Tumarkin 1981; 37

[45] Service 2004: 357

[46] Khlevniuk 2015; 137

How a Fake British Military Leader Fooled the Germans During World War 2

Deception has always been a part of military tactics, from the ancient Trojan Horse to the Gulf War, when Saddam Hussein positioned his troops along the Iraq-Kuwait border, claiming they were on a training mission as a cover-up for his true intentions of invading Kuwait. It was no different during the Second World War, when commanders devised unusual deception strategies. One of these involved an actor impersonating Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery.

Róza Gombos explains.

Montgomery during World War II.

In 1942, the Allies began to turn the tide of the war — the Germans had been stopped in North Africa, the Japanese had been pushed back in the Pacific theatre, and the German 6th Army had been encircled at Stalingrad. Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin decided on an Allied landing in Normandy, codenamed Operation Overlord. Executing the operation required massive preparation, lasting several months. One of the most important objectives was to prevent the Germans from learning the time and location of the invasion. To achieve this, commanders devised a number of deception operations to mislead the enemy.

Bernard Montgomery played a key role in the operation. He was the Ground Forces Commander-in-Chief and also contributed to refining Lieutenant General Morgan’s invasion plan. Since Montgomery was a central figure in the operation, the time and location of the Allied landing could potentially be linked to his whereabouts. The deception plan, known as Operation Copperhead, aimed to mislead the Germans about where and when the invasion would occur. If they spotted Montgomery somewhere else, it could lead them to believe the invasion was imminent in a different location, prompting them to redeploy their forces and divert divisions away from Normandy.

All the intelligence services needed was a double for Bernard Montgomery…

The double

After a persistent search for the ideal double, Lieutenant Colonel John Jervis-Reid from the deception planning department of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force saw a photo in the News Chronicle of someone who looked remarkably like Montgomery. With that, they had found the perfect candidate for the operation.[1]

The photo was of actor Meyrick Edward Clifton James. He had fought in the First World War at the Battle of the Somme. After the war, he took up acting. Later, during the Second World War, he was commissioned into the Royal Army Pay Corps.

Many people noticed his striking resemblance to Montgomery and often joked about it. James wrote in his memoir that after Montgomery’s victories in North Africa, he was in Nottingham when he went on stage to make an announcement. The crowd mistook him for the general and greeted him with loud applause and cheering.[2]

In London, after a night performance of When Knights Were Bold, a News Chronicle photographer came into his dressing room. The photographer had been told that James looked like Montgomery, which piqued his interest. The actor borrowed a beret, and the photographer took pictures of him.[3]

The photo appeared in the News Chronicle with the caption ’You’re wrong – it’s Lieut. Clifton James’.

Worry?

While it seemed to be an innocent joke, James began to worry—what if the senior military staff saw the photo? He even had a nightmare in which he was deported and dropped by parachute into Berchtesgaden for impersonating the general.[4]

James’ unease soon proved justified. The higher military circles had indeed seen the photos—and they took serious notice of his resemblance.

In May 1944, the actor received a phone call from Colonel David Niven from the Army Kinematograph Section. The colonel offered him a role in an Army film they were supposedly making.

Niven instructed him to meet Colonel Lester at the Grand Hotel in Leicester and to bring some photographs of himself.[5] They had lunch, but the colonel did not mention anything about a film. As a result, James assumed he was not qualified and had not been selected for the role.[6]

The next day, he received a letter from Niven informing him that he was indeed suitable for the job and that he needed to travel to London. To James’ confusion, Colonel Lester later told him that they were not going to make any films after all.[7]

“You are very much like General Montgomery, or Monty, as he is commonly called,” said Colonel Lester. James froze—he thought it was a trap and that he was going to be arrested for unlawful impersonation.[8] But then Lester continued:

“You have been chosen to act as the double of General Montgomery before D-Day. I am in charge of this job. It is our business to trick the enemy.”[9]

The plan

The plan was for James to impersonate Montgomery in the Mediterranean, in order to make the Germans believe the Allies would launch the invasion there, while the real Montgomery remained in the United Kingdom. To prepare for this, MI5 arranged for James to spend several days with Montgomery’s staff so he could study his voice, gestures, and mannerisms.[10]

The operation had to be kept top secret. James could not tell anyone; he was advised to be constantly suspicious and to avoid drinking with strangers.[11]

When everything was ready, James was flown to Algiers, where he met General Maitland Wilson. In the capital of Algeria, he was cheered by thousands of troops and high-ranking officers. According to James, nobody doubted that he was Montgomery.[12]

He was seen publicly with General Wilson to create the illusion that Montgomery and Wilson were planning the invasion. Afterward, he was sent to Cairo to keep him out of the public eye while the Normandy landings were underway. Later, he returned to London without arousing any suspicion.

During the interrogation of captured German generals, they confirmed they had been aware of Montgomery’s supposed arrival in the Mediterranean. However, one of them admitted he was not sure whether it was the real Montgomery or just a feint.[13] The operation itself was successful, though it did not significantly influence the course of the Normandy landings.

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[1] https://marksimner.me.uk/i-was-montys-double-meyrick-edward-clifton-james/ Accessed: 18 May 2025)

[2] M. E. Clifton James: I was Monty’s Double (The Popular Book Club, 1957) p. 20.

[3] James, 1957, p. 20.

[4] James, 1957, p. 20.

[5] James, 1957, p. 22.

[6] James, 1957, p. 24.

[7] James, 1957, p. 26.

[8] James, 1957, p. 30.

[9] James, 1957, p. 30.

[10] James, 1957, p. 45.

[11] James, 1957, p. 50.

[12] James, 1957, p. 167.

[13] Graham Lord: The Authorized Biography of David Niven (St. Martin’s Press, 2004) p. 124.