The 40s: The Story of a Decade (47 page)

Eleven days before the Normandy invasion, General Eisenhower issued a letter to field commanders that began, “Shortly we will be fighting our way across the Continent of Europe.… Inevitably, in the path of our advance will be found historical monuments and cultural centers which symbolize to the world all that we are fighting to preserve. It is the responsibility of every commander to protect and respect these symbols whenever possible.” On June 6th, however, art preservation must have been the last thing the field commanders thought about as they battled for an invader’s toehold in the Atlantic Wall, blasting Gothic spires and billeting their tired, dirty men in any Norman château, full of art or not, they were lucky enough to find intact. In any case, no Monuments men were present to make suggestions. About a fortnight later, two American Monuments officers, Captain (afterward Major) Bancel LaFarge, A.U.S., and Lieutenant George Stout, U.S. N.R., and one Englishman, Squadron Leader J. E. Dixon-Spain, R.A.F., arrived in Normandy—without typewriters, cameras, or trucks—and were turned loose to hitchhike toward their goal, the salvation of art. The situation the trio found themselves in was novel: they had to explain, practically in the heat of battle, who they were, what they were trying to do, and why. Their task was to give first aid to badly injured art (though they had no
supplies to repair with), to prevent improper billeting in historic buildings (though the field commanders were supposed to have the Protected Monuments Lists with them, even if they didn’t read them), and to inspect and report on the state of the monuments to be protected (though they had no machines to inspect in or to type with). Whether the whole Monuments project was to continue or be scrapped—the latter was greatly favored by some brass hats before the scheme was even tried—depended on the kind of show these three (and three other Americans and two other British, who were added before the summer’s end) were able to put up. The amazing accomplishments of these eight men, who at first had to make their way by riding on anything from regimental laundry trucks to liberated bicycles, resulted in the piecemeal arrival of the Allies’ full wartime art group, which—the early ambitious plans forgotten—was maintained at an average strength of fifteen, and which, up to the end of hostilities, scoured France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Germany and actually inspected 3,145 monuments and archives, or what was left of them.

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The M.F.A. & A. was among the smallest outfits, and was certainly the most recherché one, in the Allied armies. Once, in the autumn of 1945, shortly after the German capitulation, it swelled to eighty-four officers and men, but while the fighting was on, no such number, it was felt, could be spared for art. About half of the Americans in the M.F.A. & A. had been recommended by the Roberts Commission for transfer to Monuments on the basis of their civilian backgrounds. They were largely youngish art professors, museum curators, sculptors, painters, and architects, and occasionally talented dilettantes. Their chief adviser to SHAEF was the Slade Professor of Fine Art from Cambridge University, Lieutenant Colonel Geoffrey Webb. Some of the luminaries among the earlier American Monuments men were—in addition to LaFarge, who had been a New York architect, and Stout, who had been an expert on conservation at the Fogg Art Museum—Lieutenant Lamont Moore, National Gallery, Washington; Lieutenant Sheldon Keck, Brooklyn Museum; Lieutenant Calvin Hathaway, Cooper Union Museum for the Arts of Decoration; Captain Everett Lesley, Art Professor, University of Minnesota; Pfc. Lincoln Kirstein, art patron; Captain Robert Posey, architect; Captain Walker Hancock, Prix de Rome sculptor; Lieutenant James Rorimer, Metropolitan Museum; Captain Walter Huchthausen,
Art and Architecture Professor, University of Michigan; and Captain Ralph Hammett, architect.

The first of these professional art experts were sent off to their Normandy-invasion jobs carrying directives sprinkled with such helpful hints as “A castle is usually defined as a large fortified building and a palace as an unfortified stately mansion or residence of royalty,” of which republican France has none. The Monuments men’s own definition of a palace was, according to one of them, “the local honey on the Supreme H.Q. protected list, where the blasted colonels will certainly billet their troops unless a wandering Monuments man gets there first with an ‘Off Limits’ sign and his neck stuck out.” In their billeting-overseeing job, the Monuments men were like frantic boarding-house keepers, trying to put thousands of lodgers into the right rooms and out of the wrong ones and, above all, trying to prevent them from pocketing everything pretty that belonged to the house. “Off Limits” signs were tried and didn’t work, so “Protected Monument” signs were stuck up to discourage our uniformed souvenir hunters from liberating art items to send home to Mom. And the cynical Monuments men marked off really attractive debris and important buildings with white tape, falsely indicating the presence of unexploded mines. It was the worry of our State Department, especially after the Liberation idyll began to fade, that the prestige of the United States Army and the American idea would decline still further if our troops and officers manhandled or lawlessly occupied the western democracies’ historic properties. As long as our armies remained in Europe, “the greatest single” M.F.A. & A. problem, an official report declared, was saving the Continent’s art “from spoliation and damage by the U.S. Armed Forces.” A great deal of minor damage was, it seems, done to châteaux by billeted Americans who nailed pinup girls to highly valued, highly carved antique
boiseries.
This was, however, literally only a pinprick among all the wounds art suffered.

The worst billeting jam occurred in the autumn of 1944, while the war was still on, in the Paris sector—the part of France that is richest in palaces and châteaux—when American troops were pouring toward the front. Improper billeting became almost as big an M.F.A. & A. pain as the unwarranted demands for fancier billets by outfits that were already billeted. One colonel of a replacement group aspired to billet his fifty officers in Mme. de Pompadour’s historic mansion at Fontainebleau—a demand that was easy to refuse because another outfit had accidentally just set fire to the Henri IV wing of Fontainebleau Palace. The Monuments
people also received endless intimate requests from the French: that a Quartermaster trucking battalion billeted in the Château de Celle please respect the collection of stag antlers belonging to its owner, the Duc de Brissac; that the room in which Cardinal Richelieu once slept in the Château Fleury-en-Bière be marked “Off Limits”; that an Air Forces unit near Chantilly abandon its project to practice-bomb a camouflaged hunting lodge on an island where the Vollard art collection was hidden. There was a claim that all the furniture of the Château Voisenon had disappeared with a certain distinguished bombardment group, famous also for liking comfort. There was a protest that American troops billeted in the Château de Frémigny, built for a friend of Napoleon, had done more harm in the two months they were in residence than the Germans billeted there had done in four years. However, the M.F.A. & A. report on the gutted Château de Chamerolles, where Germans had also been billeted for four years, noted the owners’ complaint that the Boches had carted off seven hundred valuable paintings and drawings, a hundred and forty-seven sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Oriental rugs, some seventeenth-century tapestries, and masses of rare silver—the most Herculean cleaning out accomplished by any unit in Europe in the entire war.

The Battle of the Bulge produced a great number of front-line billeting disasters. Surprise, confusion, danger, and bitter cold drove our men into any shelter, no matter how artistic; those who weren’t freezing in foxholes were sweating it out in Belgian châteaux almost as fine as those in Touraine. The Château de Pailhe, the finest Louis XV structure in Belgium, was burned to the ground when the Americans used gasoline cookers on a parquet floor. Chimney fires and ruined marble mantelpieces were frequent. Most of our men had had no experience with elegant, ancestral open fireplaces; they had been brought up on comfortable steam heat.

An unexpected secondary war duty of the Monuments men consisted of acting as an ambulant lost-and-found department for art. In 1940, as the Germans started invading, western Europe frantically began hiding the treasures it loved, burying them in gardens the way dogs cache bones, hiding them in haylofts, in church steeples, in slaughterhouses, in bank basements or lunatic asylums, in any place of concealment that seemed logically safe or so absurd that it was unlikely to be discovered. City people sent their valuables to the country for safety and country people carted their stuff to town. The first reaction of the populace in the Liberation,
after the cheers, was to hunt for their things. As the Monuments men moved around, they made lists of lost-and-found art, sent reports to one another, dispatched inquiries, and filed good news of discoveries and clues.

They also took notes on the gigantic, yawning destruction of the architectural face of war-struck Europe—of those now lost features of beauty, art, and picturesqueness, of housed history or charm, whose disappearance makes the profile of the Continent unrecognizable and will necessitate the rewriting of all the Baedekers. The first handful of Monuments officers, by thumbing rides and not standing on professional dignity, covered a tremendous amount of territory and compiled, often on borrowed typewriters, reams of notes that could serve the guidebook editors well. They didn’t see everything, but they saw a lot. In the twelve weeks before Christmas of 1944, one man travelled thirteen thousand miles in France and inspected two hundred and twenty-four monuments. The M.F.A. & A. notes showed that in the most badly injured regions of the occupied countries, damage ran to about 45 percent. In Germany, inventor of the blitz, 45 percent of the great historical monuments were struck and 60 percent were blitzed to nothingness. The Monuments men also observed a fact that would have gratified the medieval building trades: the fragile-looking Gothic constructions, with their airy, resilient flying buttresses and broken surfaces, resisted the shock of bomb concussion better than the solid, unbroken surfaces of the Renaissance constructions, which—being built on the modern, four-square principle—were bashed flat by modern blast.

The Monuments reports were brief and melancholy. Of Boulogne, after Patton’s Third Armored had fought its way in, the summarizing note read, “On M.F.A. & A. requests, engineers scraped 14th-century cathedral ruins from street functioning as Red Ball highway between Omaha and Utah beaches.” A British note read, “Antwerp, Musée Plantin-Moretus, world’s most famous printing museum, 18th century façade struck by buzz bomb.” Major the Lord Methuen, Royal Scots Guards, the M.F.A. & A. officer in the Brussels region, kept a diary in the best travelling-Englishman manner, with appreciative observations on art (“Aerschot, inspected Béguinage, pleasant building dated 1636, badly damaged by bombing. Thielt, inspected charming Renaissance Belfry with tower and spire shot up in ’44”) as well as notes on whom he’d lunched with and the latest difficulties with his sinus, which was troubling him in the Lowlands climate. In Holland, the notes of Major Ronald
Balfour, Fine Arts Officer for the Canadian First Army and former Fellow at King’s College, Cambridge, were also personal, but they had a severer tone: “To appoint an officer for a whole area and to expect him to cadge lifts is not only faintly ludicrous but gives the Netherlands authorities a clear and perhaps accurate impression that we are not interested in their monuments at all.”

The M.F.A. & A. men who followed the Allies into Aachen and the Rhineland became simply obituary writers, since dead art lay in every direction: “Cologne, circa 80 percent of monuments and churches destroyed, including St. Maria im Capitol, famous Romanesque landmark …” “Kleve, Stitskirche, mid 14th century, air bombed Oct. ’44, again Feb. ’45, an eliminating operation. Church shattered.” After completing his mortuary report on Kleve, including a two-page epitaph on architectural details of the church alone, Major Balfour, the Canadian First Army Monuments officer, was killed by Nazi shellfire. From the town of Xanten came this note: “St. Victor’s cathedral, rated most beautiful Gothic complex of buildings in the Rhineland, is wrecked. Shot, shell, blast.” Another note recorded: “Münster, remarkable for assembly of fine buildings 14–18th century, is gone for good. Aerial bombardment Sunday March 25, 1945.” A Münster postscript, written by an M.F.A. & A. archivist, said, “Münster city records on methods of Nazi treatment of Jews as well as future plans in that regard reported intact in Schloss Nordkirchen.” From Trier: “Dom, 11th century, oldest church in Germany, heavily bombed Xmas week, ’44. Karl Marx House, birthplace, used as Nazi newspaper H.Q., direct bomb hit, destroyed.” Near the Ruhr pocket, Captain Huchthausen, the peacetime Professor of Art and Architecture at the University of Michigan, was killed by machine-gun fire on an
Autobahn.
Like all Monuments men, he felt that his job was concerned not only with the death of art but occasionally with its resuscitation. He was killed in a borrowed jeep while answering a hurry call to come inspect a newly found art cache.

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It was the discovery of one underground art cache after another and the unexaggerated reports that they were worth millions of dollars that presently gave European art its place on the front page, along with the battles, and made it unnecessary for the Monuments men to go on being apologetic about their work. The first underground cache our armies encountered was a specially constructed art air-raid shelter in a deep subterranean
sandstone chamber outside the Dutch town of Maastricht. There the Dutch had stored their most valuable museum pictures, with Nazi approval. The fact that the art had been hidden by our Allies decreased the excitement of the discovery for our men, though they took sightseeing tours underground to stare at some Rembrandts—once it had been explained who and how important Rembrandt was. For the next fortnight, every Dutch daub found in a farmhouse attic was called a Rembrandt, and the nearest Monuments officer was sent for, posthaste, to authenticate it.