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Overview
Captured by History is an autobiography like none other, for few historians have interviewed as many men and women who helped shape the most momentous events of our century than John Toland. Here, for the first time, Toland reveals how he found these key players and how he persuaded them to talk to him. From disgraced Japanese generals to the German doctor who nearly succeeded in assassinating Hitler, Toland's sources are remarkable for what they reveal about their subjects, along with the secrets and stories they would tell no one else.
Toland's unorthodox approach to history came from his early desire to be a playwright. Even before graduating from Williams College during the depths of the Depression, Toland spent his summers hitchhiking and riding the rails as a hobo. He lived and worked with other bindle stiffs, learning their lingo and ways. He served five short jail sentences for riding freights and trespassing. His experiences and the characters he met encouraged Toland to write plays and early novels (unsuccessfully) until 1957, when he published his first book, Ships in the Sky.
His work in the next four decades was nothing short of extraordinary, for Toland found that he saw history as a play, with narrative structure and drama, not as a dry series of dates and names. The result was a series of landmark works such as Infamy; The Rising Sun, which won him the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in 1970 and reflected his ability, with the help of his Japanese wife, to open doors normally closed to Westerners in Japan; In Mortal Combat; The Last 100 Days; and his best-selling biography of Adolf Hitler.
Captured by History is not only the summation of a lifetime of groundbreaking works, but the story of a man who through his historical investigations became a witness to many of the most catastrophic events of the twentieth century. A self-effacing man in person, Toland nonetheless comes across as having had a life as fascinating as the lives of the many historical figures he has interviewed. Written by one of our last witnesses to the terrible and deracinating conflicts that split the world asunder at mid-century, Captured by History is an astonishing personal story of a hugely inquisitive man who became a historian not by accident or design, but by fate; a man who succeeded in chronicling the most tumultuous events of our century.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781250191885 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 10/03/2017 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 415 |
| Sales rank: | 283,608 |
| File size: | 12 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
I Arrive
I have heard the story of my birth so many times that I feel I was present as a spectator. It was a hot Saturday — the 29th of June, 1912, a few weeks after the sinking of the Titanic — and my parents were aboard my father's houseboat. That afternoon my mother, Helen Chandler Snow, felt that I might be coming and asked my father, Ralph, to please return to the dock. The Mississippi was unruly near La Crosse, Wisconsin, and the houseboat was difficult to handle. But my father could perform any physical task, being six feet tall, a prominent local athlete, and Irish. After docking, they hurried to their red brick house on Vine Street, where my maternal grandmother Belle (actually Lell) Snow and a Christian Science nurse, Mrs. Annie Slinn, were nervously waiting.
Mrs. Slinn told my mother she should not eat too heartily at dinner. Afterward the two older women went upstairs to prepare things while my mother went to the backyard to tell Ralph. "You know, honey, things are going to happen tonight," she said. It was still hot.
"I'm sure of it," he said.
The MacDonalds from across the street approached and invited them to a party that evening. "That's wonderful, Don," said my mother. "Thank you, but I'm going to have a party of my own."
My mother went upstairs and started helping the others gather clothing and towels, but her mother scolded her and she was put to bed. At 10:00 P.M. I was born. My father was at the foot of the bed next to my grandmother, whom everyone in the family called Dammy. They could see my face turning dark blue. The umbilical cord was wrapped around my neck. Grandma never saw anyone act as quickly as Annie Slinn. Her hands flew as she disengaged the cord and snipped it. Then she held me by my feet with one hand and slapped my rear so vigorously that Dammy called out, "Oh, Mrs. Slinn, not so hard!" But the nurse kept pounding until she heard a squeal. She then handed me to my grandmother, who had four daughters. But the sight of a boy was so unsettling she could only say, "What'll I do with him?"
"You might wrap this towel around him," suggested my father. Then, when all was calm, he went downstairs and played Chopin softly on the piano, accompanied on the violin by his older brother, Leigh. It was the most beautiful and soothing music my mother had ever heard.
My parents agreed to call me John after my renowned great-uncle Colonel John Toland, a cavalry officer in the Union Army. My middle name, Willard, came from my mother's father, Willard Snow. My other grandfather, Frank Joseph Toland, had died two years earlier; but his widow, Margaret Leigh, a beautiful and talented singer, was still in La Crosse — at a mental institution.
On the third day of my life a stocky nurse from the asylum brought Margaret to Vine Street. How stunning she looked, thought my mother, as Margaret sailed into the room like an opera star, wearing a huge hat. She was delighted to see the baby and expressed such happiness that she seemed perfectly normal. After some time the attendant started toward Margaret. Seeing she was about to be taken back to the institution, Margaret took me, then drew out a long hat pin and put it to my throat. "If you make me go back to that place, Ralph," she exclaimed, "I'll kill him."
My father seized her and tried to shake the pin from her hand, but she doggedly held on to it. The pin was waving around dangerously, and my mother grabbed me. My father finally flung his mother to the floor, but she kept struggling, lashing out with her feet, her eyes gleaming. Never had she looked so beautiful, my mother thought incongruously. Finally my father had his mother under control. She couldn't move. As the attendant leaned over to pick her up, she looked up pleadingly and touched my mother's dress. "Helen," she said, "you can understand as a mother. Plead with the boys to let me stay! You understand," she kept repeating. "Please help me, Helen! Please, Helen!"
Few of my immediate ancestors could be described as dull. My paternal great-grandfather, a native of Kentucky who moved to St. Louis, was not born a Toland. He was Dr. Cyrus C. Fitch until he married Rebecca Toland in 1848 and immediately took her name, for reasons which I have heard were "professional," perhaps indicating a need to cover up some scandal. I was named after one of his sons, Colonel John Toland, the cavalry officer in the Union Army. A dentist by profession, the colonel conducted one of the most daring raids in the war in 1863, driving more than twenty miles behind Confederate lines. He brought almost all of his troops safely back, but on the last day was shot and killed by someone in a church belfry. He was posthumously promoted to brevet general, and during World War II an army camp in Ohio was named in his honor.
Another son, Frank Joseph Toland, was my grandfather. He called himself "the World's Greatest Handwriting Expert" and established a dozen successful business schools in the Midwest. He fell in love with a boisterous and gorgeous girl of sixteen, Margaret Leigh, a descendant of an Irish nobleman, and "married" her in 1879 — fourteen years prior to the date on the marriage license in my possession. This suggests that both my uncle Leigh and my father may have been bastards. As a boy I often heard them angrily calling each other bastards, but this was undoubtedly no more than a Toland manner of speech.
My uncle Leigh, eight years older than my father, wrote a long account of his early years in Ohio when his father traveled with his little family from town to town, stopping at hotels, in order to teach penmanship. Leigh recalled, "Occasionally a rowdy or two tried to have fun at the little class's expense. The Dad asked no help, he just went out and socked the first smart aleck he could get to; that ended the fracas almost always. I never heard of or remember that he had to take more than fifteen seconds to whip the average man. He was fast and his physical courage was boundless ... though he was an artist at heart."
The closeness of the three members of this small family in those days undoubtedly caused both parents to shower all their love on the firstborn, Leigh. In later years my father, Ralph, and the youngest brother, Putch, got only the leavings. It was Leigh who always got the most of everything, in the spirit of the outworn Irish rule of primogeniture.
Leigh as a boy was never allowed to forget his father's Irish temper. "Some man about town made derogatory remarks about the little mother," he wrote. "In the small towns no handsome, well-dressed woman was free, evidently, from such remarks. In any event the Dad was particularly incensed, so he took his shotgun and the Mother to call on the gentleman, who signed a statement admitting himself a liar, and apologizing."
My grandfather Frank was convinced that the well-known Irish author John Toland was his great-grandfather. The Encyclopœdia Britannica describes him as a "controversial freethinker whose Rationalist philosophy and political writings forced church historians to consider seriously questions concerning the biblical canon." Born in North Ireland in 1670, he converted to Anglicanism in his teens and studied in Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Oxford universities. His first book, Christianity Not Mysterious, caused such offense that he was forced to flee England. He wrote a number of controversial books and articles, including diatribes against the oppression of Jews and Negroes.
Frank Toland left behind a mass of material on the famous John Toland, including a statement by an Irish priest who one day met him on the highway when he was a boy and reported to his superiors that "the lad spoke with the voice of the devil." The same charge has been made by some of my critics. I cannot share the delusion that he was my great-great-great-grandfather, but there is no doubt that his unorthodox ideas had some impact on me.
I never saw my grandfather Frank, but I have a picture showing him on a horse in cowboy attire. In imitation of his close friend the famous gunslinger Doc Powell, he is wearing the sort of flowing mustache and goatee that Buffalo Bill made popular. My father told me that Frank often went to the Wisconsin Business University in this outfit. He must have caused quite a stir. When my father was two, Frank had stuck his cowboy hat on him and photographed him for history. When I was almost two, my father put the same hat on me for the same purpose.
In his photo my father is as dashing as his father. I, with my curls, just look cute. As I grew up I realized that I was not like my father. I was not at all athletic or physically well coordinated; I was just a kid who couldn't pitch a curve or kick a football more than twenty-five yards. By the time I was in junior high school I realized that I wasn't a typical Toland.
The most memorable ancestor on my mother's side was my great-grandmother Clarabelle Chandler, a dynamic and fearless woman who turned out to be a major influence in my life. I never knew anything about her until I hitchhiked across the country and stopped at Danville, Illinois, to see my mother's sister, Jeanette Ludwick. In my grandmother Dammy's room I noticed an oil portrait of Clarabelle; Dammy told me that when her father died, Clarabelle, by sheer grit, had left her home in the South and taken her eight children to the North before the Civil War. She brought them up by herself under the most difficult circumstances imaginable.
Clarabelle (née Grigsby) had been born in the Midwest but married a Virginia plantation owner, Claiborne Chandler, a man who had been shanghaied in his early teens and was the first on either side of my family to visit China. Years after his marriage and the birth of eight children, his adventures in the Far East tempted him to explore California and the West Coast. He bought considerable property in Seattle, got sick, was bilked by a business partner, and died not long after his return to his Virginia plantation.
The portrait of Clarabelle Chandler depicted her as a typically beautiful Southern belle. In reality, Dammy told me, she was always a hard-working Grigsby from Missouri. She was meticulous, for example, in her care of the plantation slaves. The third of her six daughters, Lell — my grandmother Dammy — never tired of telling me about her mother. "Clarabelle had a great love for the slaves and on certain days would make an inspection tour of their quarters. She'd go through just like a whirlwind. She tore the beds apart. She inspected their food and clothing. 'This is not right,' she would scold. 'Your children have to be brought up properly. They have to have the proper food. They have to be clean.'" Clarabelle, she added, was always into something. "She won many horse races. She was a great horsewoman, and I often saw her mounting her horse for the race. I never saw anything quite as lovely. Sidesaddle, with everything just so. Her gloves had to be right, and she wore this high hat. But when she went to the slave quarters she wore a divided skirt and rode like a man."
Clarabelle also brought the spirit of a pioneer with her from Missouri. After her husband died almost penniless, she decided to take her children north for a better education. She sold all but a dozen of her slaves for a dollar apiece to friends who promised to treat them well, then took her brood of six daughters and two sons to Wisconsin, along with the dozen servants who refused to leave her. "You can go with me," Clarabelle had said, "if I pay you. Because you're no longer slaves. I freed you. I will not let you come with me unless you take money for your work." And so Clarabelle Chandler, her children, and a dozen of the former slaves, all of whom took the name Chandler, moved to the outskirts of Boscobel, a small Wisconsin town, in 1858. There she bought a farm with the little money salvaged from the plantation and put everyone to work planting and harvesting.
Clarabelle became my ideal. I wanted to be like her. She had courage and common sense. She could improvise, yet lived a life of regularity. By the time I was in college I had planned every day before it started. How it irritated my father when I came home on holidays and still planned each hour of every day. But Clarabelle would have understood.
Although many of her neighbors were harassed by Indians, and some even murdered, Clarabelle maintained peaceful relations with them. "Don't ever fight anyone with their weapons," she told her children and the black workers, "no matter how bad they are. Fight them in your way." And Clarabelle's way was to invite the Indians into her house, where she, clad in her Southern finery, served them brownies and cider. The children would be hiding in a secret place behind the wall, but could see through peepholes what was going on in their living room. It was Lell's duty to prevent their little dog, Rags, who apparently hated Indians, from barking; she would stuff a towel in his mouth.
Two years after their arrival in Boscobel, the Civil War broke out. This grieved everyone in Clarabelle's extended family, because they loved both North and South. My grandmother remembered the day her two brothers confronted their mother while she was knitting in the living room. They kneeled in front of her, and one said, "Mama, we've had to make a decision. We must fight in this war, and we had to make a terrible choice."
"Which side?" asked Clarabelle.
"The North."
Lell would never forget how their mother placed a hand on each boys' heads and said, "My dears, you have made the right choice."
"Mama," said Lell once the boys had left, "what would you have said if they had decided to fight for the South?"
"My dear girl, I would have said the same thing."
Years later a young man of Scottish descent from Boston, Willard Snow, heard that there was a beautiful girl called "the Belle of Boscobel" teaching in that little town. Willard's father had made considerable money in copper but, after a hint of scandal, had turned to timber in Wisconsin. Willard was now working in one of his father's logging camps not too far from Boscobel. He was a big man, but gentle, and disliked every moment he spent in the camp. "I couldn't stand to be in a business," he once told me, "where I had to watch beautiful trees, that took many years to grow, cut down wholesale. That's destroying life. I just couldn't stay in a business like that."
Willard came to Boscobel and met the "Belle," who would become my maternal grandmother. During the courtship Willard once stepped in a bear trap and later almost suffocated after stumbling into a huge pile of sawdust. When the workers finally dug him out, he was laughing. While telling this to me, he was still laughing. What Toland could laugh at himself? I thought. And what Toland (except myself, of course) could be so clumsy? Was it any wonder that I felt closer to him than to anyone on my father's side of the family?
Willard quit the lumbering business, got a job as an insurance investigator, and married Lell. They moved to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and had four daughters in this order: Floss, Jeanette, Grace, and my mother, Helen. Only Helen had children — Virginia in 1910 and me two years later.
When Helen's sister Jeanette saw me for the first time, she remarked that I had the Grigsby eyes. "Yes," said Floss, "but I hope he also has the Grigsby grit and brains!"
Clarabelle's younger brother, Melvin Grigsby, had enlisted in the Union Army when he was sixteen. After almost two years of service he had been captured and imprisoned at Andersonville. His book The Smoked Yank (a copy of the 1888 edition is in the Library of Congress) relates in absorbing detail the horrors of that camp. Later he became the commander of a voluntary cavalry regiment known as Grigsby's Cowboys, or the Rough Riders. According to family records and letters, it was he who invited Teddy Roosevelt, a hunting buddy, to join him on the charge up San Juan Hill in the Spanish-American War of 1898. This exploit helped Teddy, a Republican, to win the presidency in 1900.
After Roosevelt was elected he came to Sioux Falls to thank Uncle Melvin. It was a great occasion for the city. On Sunday my grandfather Willard Snow escorted the president to a small Dutch Reformed church. The place was jammed. As the services were about to commence, the floor collapsed, and half the congregation, including Roosevelt, plunged into the basement. Dadda peered down. "Will you take the hand of a good Democrat, Mr. President?" he asked with a big smile. Roosevelt good-naturedly grasped Willard's hand and was hoisted up.
After a formal dinner in his honor, Roosevelt asked if he could try out Melvin Grigsby's mare. Half an hour later he returned, entering the courtyard at a gallop, then jerking the mare to a sudden stop. Grigsby was furious, and my mother would never forget his red face. "Get off!" he shouted. "You'll never ride a horse of mine again! Any man who rides like that should be flogged!"
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Captured By History"
by .
Copyright © 1997 John Toland.
Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Title Page,
Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Prologue,
Volume I: Growing Pains,
[Part One]: In the Beginning (to 1923),
1. I Arrive,
2. A Boy's Life,
3. Eastward, Ho!,
[Part Two]: A Raw Youth (1924–1936),
4. Growing Up,
5. The Play's the Thing,
6. "Exeter Fair, Mother Stern Yet Tender",
7. Williams College, or Building Castles in the Air,
[Part Three]: A Fool There Was (1936–1942),
8. On the Road,
9. Going Left,
10. With Confused Confidence (1940–1942),
[Part Four]: At War with the Army (1943–1957),
11. At Ease,
12. Riding the Air Force Roller Coaster,
13. Return to Duty,
14. Life Begins at Forty-two,
Volume II: Living History,
[Part One]: New Ventures (1958–1965),
1. The Battle of the Bulge,
2. My Bridge to the Orient,
3. Try, Try, Try Again,
4. The Dillinger Days,
5. The Last 100 Days,
6. The Search Begins,
7. Behind the Iron Curtain,
8. The Last Days of the Nazis,
[Part Two]: The Rising Sun (1966–1970),
9. Abandon Self,
10. The Last Battles,
11. The Road to Peace,
12. Endgame,
Volume III: Adolf Hitler,
[Part One]: The Quest (1970–1976),
1. Off to Germany,
2. The Beer Hall Putsch,
3. The Family Circle,
4. The Final Solution,
5. The Writing Process,
[Part Two]: From Fact to Fiction (1977–1986),
6. No Man's Land,
7. Infamy,
8. Gods of War and Occupation,
[Part Three]: In Mortal Combat (1987– ),
9. "One Good Man Can Work Wonders",
10. In Dubious Battle,
11. Captives and Heroes,
12. Journey's End,
Index,
Photographs,
Acknowledgments,
Books by John Toland,
About the Author,
Copyright,