Monthly Archives: April 2017

The Bath Blitz — 75 Years Ago

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When Charles Williamson named his infant community Bath in 1793, he established a connection between the raw new hamlet and an elegant city that was already ancient before the Romans discovered its charms.  Assuming that the mineralized water was also medicinal, they named it Aquae Sulis.  The more prosaic conquering Saxons called it Bath.

*Modern-day Saxons and Romans made war on their distant cousins from 1939 to 1945, and on April 25 through 27, 1942, they brought the war direct to Bath with three lengthy attacks from the air.  Each attack lasted for hours — “raid” doesn’t do justice, suggesting as it does a quick or small attack.  German bombers attacked Bath with explosives and incendiaries.  They even flew back, once they’d dropped all their bombs, to massacre civilians with machine-gun fire.

*This was not because the people of Bath represented any particular military threat, but simply because Germany had decided to destroy Britain’s cultural treasures.  With typical Nazi tone-deafness to public relations, a German official crowed that they would bomb anything that got three stars in the Baedeker travel guide.

*Bath paid for its heritage in those April nights.  The attackers killed 417 people, and wounded a thousand more.  They destroyed or seriously damaged 1100 buildings, and also damaged 18,000 more.  True to the “mission statement,” damage and destruction engulfed many structures of cultural and historical significance, including most of the city’s churches.

*It would be 1960 or so before all the war damage was dealt with.  Last May workers found an unexploded 500-pound bomb under a playground.  The neighborhood had to be evacuated while the Royal Army removed the bomb and detonated it safely.

*In their internal communications, German leaders such as Goebbels referred to these attacks as terror raids, but in public they sternly announced that the attacks were retaliation for an earlier British bombing of the cultural center of Lubeck.

*True enough.  And also true that by this time both sides, including the United States, were making war on the enemy population, trying to destroy their “will to fight,” and both sides were failing, and neither side would ever succeed.  It’s true as well that both sides turned to this expedient because neither one was good enough at bombing military targets to make a strategic difference.  Cities, just as they had in World War I, made a relatively easy target to hit.

*The Germans were incensed when the British bombed their cities, and portrayed themselves as put-upon people only responding in kind to provocation.  This completely ignored all the attacks they had already made on British cities, and all the British non-combatants they had killed.

*It also highlights a warp in the Nazi psyche.  When the British bombed German cities, Nazi leaders took that as an unwarranted escalation of the war.  But this ignored the terrific air attacks on cities such as Warsaw, when the war was only a few days old.  To the Nazis that didn’t really count.  The Poles were largely Slavs and thus, to the Nazi mind, not human anyway.  They could be tortured for entertainment, and so bombing them was nothing that needed to concern civilized and Germanic countries.  The British, to them, seemed quite unreasonable to get worked up about that sort of thing.
(Germany had included civilian massacres as part of their war plans BEFORE the First World War, and implemented them in that war too, long before there were any such things as Nazis.)

*Bath was devastated… and pointlessly devastated, when evaluated from the viewpoint of wisely allocating military resources.  But though Hitler tried to break the people of Bath, he failed.  They dug out.  They cleared rubble.  They put out fires.  They found and cared for the wounded, they found and buried the dead.

*After six weeks or so, even such fantasists as Hitler and Goebbels faced the fact that they weren’t accomplishing anything worthwhile, and the campaign largely petered out.  A fourth of all the deaths had been in Bath, where the toll was far higher than that in any other city attacked in the “Baedeker Raids.”

*Bath’s Calvary took place 75 years ago this week — April 25-27, 1942.  Against the backdrop of that gargantuan war, historians might pass it by with nary a mention.  But from our own Bath safe over here, we might well raise our hats to the unbeaten people of endangered Bath over there, whom Adolf Hitler tried so hard to break.  And failed.

A Hundred Aprils Ago, We Entered World War I

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The Great War had been raging for almost three years by the time the U.S. declared war on Germany in April, 1917, and it was already affecting our country deeply.

*When Jack Vilas came to Hammondsport to buy an airplane in 1913, he later stated, it was clear that cash was short in the Curtiss operation.  Two years later Glenn Curtiss sold controlling interest in his company for seven million dollars in cash and stock.  The war made him a fortune, and the old Hammondsport plant — by then the smallest in Curtiss’s empire — was soon employing more people than lived in the village, straining Hammondsport and Bath beyond the limit.

*But if the war was lining local pockets by making the Curtiss company boom, it had the opposite effect on the Thomas Brothers Aeroplane Company.  As orders piled up the Thomases abandoned Bath for Ithaca, where they could find more labor, not to mention added capital needed to expand.

*Corning Glass Works was already benefiting from the war.  German lab-ware had long been considered the best on the market.  But with imports closed off, first by blockade and then by the state of war, Corning rushed into the market vacuum.  The same pattern would follow, after the war, with Christmas ornaments — buying German was no longer popular.

*In fact, nothing German was popular.  Germania Winery in Hammondsport changed its name (temporarily) to Jermania.  The fact that many vinters (Frey and Freidell in Hammondsport, Widmer and Reisinger in Naples) and brewers (Schwarzenbach in Hornell) had German names fueled demands for Prohibition, on the theory that debilitating America through alcohol was a German plot.

*The buildup to the declaration of war took weeks, giving German nationals a chance to flee the country, often for neutral Mexico (Canada being already at war).  Citizens of other Central Powers may have done the same, though we didn’t go to war with Austria-Hungary until December, and never declared war on Bulgaria or the Ottoman Empire.

*With much of the French and Belgian agricultural heartland in enemy hands, and with Britain requiring massive food imports even in the best of times, agricultural prices boomed.  Since it was clear that large numbers of young farmhands would soon be going into uniform, and also clear that the money was flowing well, many farmers turned to mechanization.  The Extension Service sponsored tractor workshops in Hornell, and many farmers invested.  This modernization marked a turning point in local agriculture, but when the war ended abruptly and unexpectedly in 1918, many farmers found themselves with low farm prices and high monthly payments.  The first component of the Great Depression was in place, more than a decade before the stock market crash.

*Crashing demand for grapes and wine also hurt locally, and so did the closure of the Curtiss plant with the end of the war.

*The lads in their hundreds came in for the war. Some experienced it as an all-expenses-paid trip to Europe. For others, it was the end of their lives… we’ll see more about that in another column. Women too now wore America’s uniform, for the first time in America’s history. Members of the Army Nurse Corps were not contractors, or civilian employees. They were military personnel. In 1909 the army asked Jane Delano of Montour Falls to take command. She blended the Corps with the Red Cross Nursing Service and with the American Nurses Association… both of which she also headed. She was frantically preparing for on oncoming gigantic war which she, almost alone, had seen on the horizon.

*Besides advancing into the army, women also won the vote in New York, thanks to a statewide referendum in November, 1917. All-male voters had turned it down two years earlier… men in Steuben, Chemung, Schuyler, and Yates STILL voted no… but New York women had full voting rights as of 1918, two years ahead of national women’s suffrage.

*Corning and Painted Post between them fielded three Home Defense Unit companies, complete with uniforms and rifles. Given that we already had an army, navy, reserves, Marine Corps, Coast Guard, and National Guard… and the fact that no attack on Corning seemed imminent… these units were pretty much superfluous and soon quit drilling, becoming largely ceremonial.

*Rationing, spy scares, and Liberty Bonds still lay ahead. Stay tuned!

The Worst Air Crash in Steuben County’s History

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What appears to be Steuben County’s worst air crash is surprisingly hard to find information on — and what you find is often confused. This concerns a B-17F on a test flight from Rome Air Depot.

The fact that the crash took place in a wooded part of a small town (Troupsburg) may contribute to the problem. So may the fact that it was an army crash, taking place at the height of World War II. Security was probably (if pointlessly) demanded. The dead were strangers, having no connection to Steuben County. The war was all-consuming by 1944, and each family was preoccupied with the fate of their own loved ones.

The contemporary Farmer’s Advocate (Bath newspaper) says that the crash took place on Monday, November 6, 1944. The U.S. Army Air Forces listed the date as November 7, 1944, while the 1976 History of Troupsburg states it was November 9, but adds that it was election day, which would have been the seventh.

The History says that seven men were aboard, of whom six died. The Advocate quotes the commander of the Rome base as saying that six were on board, of whom three died, and names all six. The official army list of crashes for the month says that four were killed. (It’s possible, of course, that one man died later from injuries, raising the total from three to four.)

Both the History and the Advocate agree that at least some of the men attempted to parachute out, but were too close to the ground. (The History says six, the Advocate says two). The Advocate, which has the most detailed report and apparently on the authority of an official statement, says that an army captain (the pilot) and two civilian workers were killed, while an army captain and two civilian workers survived. The army list names the pilot as Capt. Arthur R. Faiesz, while the Advocate spells the name as Freisz, and adds that he was 27 years old and lived in Rome.

The History says that the crash took place about a mile north of Troupsburg Center, and the Advocate describes it as taking place at 4:10 PM on the Delbert Potter farm, adding that the aircraft exploded on impact and scattered wreckage over a wide part of the hill. Stories are passed down of people rushing out of the polling place, and in one instance of a family leaving an extremely annoyed mother in childbirth with only the midwife.

The 1944 records have been declassified, meaning that we could for a fee obtain a copy of the accident report, and perhaps nail down some of the details, but we imagine that this would run to quite a few pages and would include a lot of technical analysis that wasn’t relevant to us. Perhaps some day someone will examine that document and report to us, or maybe we’ll find letters, diaries, or more extensive newspaper reports — though the Canisteo paper has only a short notice with no details.

While this seems to be the worst airplane crash, the worst helicopter crash apparently took place immediately after the 1972 flood. Three men were surveying damage for the Army Corps of Engineers when their helicopter struck power lines near Hornell, then went down into the Crosby Creek, killing all three. Nineteen people in Steuben County died directly from the flood (out of 24 statewide), but these three indirect deaths would raise the county total to 22.