To address Jewish concerns about attending the United States Military Academy at West Point and serving in the military, the late Colonel Zickel (US Army Reserve, USMA class of 1949) asked 630 Jewish graduates of West Point to recount their experiences there. He includes excerpts of their overwhelmingly positive responses to his questionnaire in regard to both general and religious issues, after tracing the role of Jews in US military history and discussing his own service in the army. The book also explores the thus far undocumented history of the Jews at West Point, including the creation of a Jewish chapel for cadets which many of the graduates site as bringing them closer to their Jewish heritage. This book will be of value to anyone interested in West Point, Jewish history and American military history. Annotation ©2009 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
The Jews of West Point in the Long Gray Line
By Lewis L. ZickelKTAV Publishing House, Inc.
Copyright © 2009 Lewis L. Zickel
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-60280-117-2Contents
In Memoriam..............................................................ixAcknowledgments..........................................................xPreface..................................................................xiIntroduction.............................................................xiii1. The West Point Story..................................................1Birth of the Academy.....................................................3The Jewish Warrior.......................................................7War and Peace............................................................9Racial and Ethnic Prejudice..............................................14Comments on Anti-Semitic Experiences.....................................20Individual Responses.....................................................22Bedrock Values Programs: Honor and Respect...............................44Religion at West Point...................................................47Shabbat Worship is Very Special..........................................61The Birth of the West Point Jewish Chapel................................62Jewish Religious Activities at West Point, 1984-2005.....................78The Alumni Gallery.......................................................93The Three Amigos.........................................................982. My Story..............................................................107Plebe Year...............................................................122The Fourth Class (Plebe) System..........................................124The Elusive Young Man....................................................130Outside the Box..........................................................134Football Rally...........................................................138The Picnic...............................................................139Roadside Service.........................................................140The Pencil...............................................................144Combat Chaplain..........................................................145The Battle of Unsan......................................................146My Seventy-ninth Mission.................................................147Bridging the Generations.................................................148A Chance Meeting.........................................................152The Recruiter............................................................157The New Orleans Belle....................................................162The Marksman.............................................................1633. Their Stories.........................................................167Tales of the Shinyo Maru.................................................170A Sample Questionnaire...................................................181Selections from the Questionnaires.......................................208Epilogue.................................................................315Index....................................................................317
Chapter One
PART 1 THE WEST POINT STORY
Birth of the Academy
The "shot heard around the world" fired at Concord, Massachusetts, in 1775 came from the muskets of untrained colonial rebels. The professionals wore red coats. It was the start of a war against the strongest military power of the time, waged by untrained leaders and soldiers from General George Washington down to the men in the line. Neither Washington nor his generals and officers had any formal education in the military arts, the sciences, or engineering. If not for foreign volunteers such as the Marquis de Lafayette, the Polish patriot Thaddeus Kosciuszko, and the Prussian officer Baron Friedrich Wilhelm Augustus von Steuben, the Continental Army and the Minutemen might have been hard pressed to defeat the British and to win the American Revolutionary War.
The eighteenth-century colleges of higher learning in the American colonies (later to become the newborn nation) offered courses only in the liberal arts, theology, and some science. American education was devoid of engineering courses and military science. Schools specializing in these studies simply did not exist, nor were there teachers qualified to teach them. General, later President, George Washington was painfully aware of these shortfalls, which plagued his efforts all through the war. By the time he became president, he was convinced that the nascent nation needed a school, or a series of schools, to educate officers, engineers, and scientists. He envisioned a single school combining all of these courses of study. He sought support from Congress to open and fund such an establishment, and he selected the fortified ramparts of West Point on the Hudson River for its location. Alexander Hamilton wrote a curriculum for the new school. However, neither Washington nor John Adams, his successor, was able to persuade Congress to authorize such a school in the postwar environment. Ironically, success fell to Thomas Jefferson during his presidency. The irony stems from the fact that Jefferson had always opposed the establishment of a federal military academy, but for an unknown reason, he moved rapidly to have it approved by Congress. Finally, on March 16, 1802, Congress authorized the establishment of a Corps of Engineers consisting of ten cadets, with provisions to double that number. This marked the birth of the profession of engineering and the profession of arms in the United States. The new academy formally opened with two cadets, Joseph G. Swift and Simon Magruder Levy. As Swift observed in his diary, Levy "was from a prominent Baltimore Jewish family."
The early years of the Academy were less than ideal until a member of the Class of 1808, Sylvanus Thayer, became its fifth superintendent. Recommended for the post by then Chief Engineer Joseph G. Swift and appointed by President James Monroe, Thayer served in that capacity from July 28, 1817, until July 1, 1833.
Thayer realized that the Academy needed proper textbooks, qualified faculty, and a system of discipline, teaching, and learning. In 1816 the president authorized him to travel to France to seek the first two items on his list. He and Lieutenant Colonel William McCree (initially offered the assignment of superintendent, but who had turned it down) were dispatched with a letter of introduction from the president to the aged Marquis de Lafayette, asking him to introduce Thayer to Napoleon. Thayer was excited by the prospect of meeting the great Napoleon Bonaparte. Unfortunately for Thayer, the emperor had been defeated by the British at the Battle of Waterloo and sent into exile before he arrived in Paris.
Thayer's mission was to "study the military schools of Europe and coastal fortifications of France, considered the best in the world, and to purchase books and scientific equipment for the Academy." Thayer visited bookstores, Saint-Cyr, the French military academy, and the Ecole Polytechnique, the French school of engineering. With Napoleon gone, King Louis XVIII was in power, wreaking revenge on all he could find who had been enemies of the House of Bourbon. One of those being hunted down was General Simon Barnard, a talented engineer from Napoleon's staff and his aide-de-camp. Barnard willingly accepted an invitation to emigrate to the United States and become a professor at West Point. The president approved the appointment despite a firestorm of resentment from the current superintendent of West Point, the Corps of Engineers, and others in the Army. Thayer prevailed. He returned with Barnard and more than 1,100 engineering and science textbooks, a French encyclopedia, and an array of scientific instruments. He now had the materials and the nucleus of a faculty to create an effective institution of higher learning.
In 1817, Thayer proceeded to redesign the system of teaching and reorganize the academic structure of West Point. Many of those innovative changes survived and are in use to this day. Small classes of ten to fifteen cadets are still part of the West Point system of pedagogy, and every cadet was required to recite in every subject and to be graded daily. This system had little tolerance for lazy students and those prone neither to study nor to participate in the classroom. Coupled with frequent examinations in each subject, the cadet was exposed to the material three times. This enhanced learning and retention of the material. America was now in position to properly educate its officers as engineers and military leaders trained to wage war. In time other American schools of engineering opened. Sylvanus Thayer founded one of them, the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College.
The Class of 1823 graduated thirty-five out of the eighty-nine who entered the Academy in 1819. The first man in order of merit in the class was Jewish, Alfred Mordechai, born in North Carolina. Upon graduation, Mordechai was appointed assistant professor by Major Thayer. He held this post until 1825, when he was assigned as an assistant to the chief engineer of the United States Army. His son, three great-grandsons, and a great-great-grandson followed in his footsteps and became West Point graduates. The last of the line known to me graduated in 1946, when I finished my plebe year. As of the graduation of 2005, more than 823 Jews followed Simon Magruder Levy as graduates of the Academy.
Two noteworthy cadets of the nineteenth century were James Abbott McNeil Whistler and Edgar Allan Poe. Whistler, a renowned artist, failed to graduate with the Class of 1855. He failed chemistry and later quipped, "If silicon were but a gas, today a general I would be." The portrait of his mother is internationally known. Poe, the distinguished American poet, made a sterling start during Plebe Year, then became a disciplinary problem and was dismissed from the Class of 1834 on February 8, 1830.
West Point, as the first engineering school in the country, produced graduates who were at the cutting edge of technology. They were instrumental in designing and building the transcontinental railroads. They mapped and surveyed large and small parcels of land along the east coast and throughout the Midwest General Egbert L. Viele, Class of 1847 of the United States Army Corps of Engineers, among other projects, mapped all of the underground streams and the locus of the original banks of the Hudson and East rivers in New York City in 1854 and he upgraded these maps in 1876. I use his maps, as do other engineers, whenever I investigate basement water-intrusion cases in New York. The originals are in the New York Public Library and I kept a complete set of full-scale copies of those maps. General Viele also contributed to the design of Central Park and Prospect Park in New York City. The foregoing were just some of the notables of the period, the Civil War officers and generals, members of the Long Gray Line who fought on both sides of the conflict, notwithstanding.
The notable graduates who rose to fame in the twentieth century are familiar to most Americans: Generals Pershing, MacArthur, Eisenhower, Bradley, Arnold, Patton, Abrams, and Schwarzkopf to name a few. There are others not as well known to the public and often forgotten, such as George Washington Goethals, Class of 1880. He built the Panama Canal. Leslie R. Groves, Class of November 1918, directed the Manhattan Project, which produced the atomic bomb before Nazi Germany could accomplish that monumental task. Many of the astronauts who made space history deserve recognition here: Frank Borman, Class of 1950; Buzz Aldrin, Class of 1951; Michael Collins and Edward H. White II, both of the Class of 1952. Two of our graduates have served as president of the United States; Ulysses S. Grant and Dwight D. Eisenhower. Alexander M. Haig, Jr., Class of 1947, served President Ronald Reagan as chief of staff of the White House and was appointed supreme Allied commander in Europe. He ultimately became Secretary of State of the United States. Many graduates became members of Congress, mayors, governors, judges, lawyers, physicians, engineers, architects, captains of industry, cabinet secretaries, advisers to the president, diplomats, educators, and served in many other honorable professions. One of the many graduates who became captains of industry was the founding chief executive officer and chairman of America On Line, James V. Kimsey, Class of 1972. He was a major donor for the construction of the athletic center at Michie Stadium that bears his name.
All of America has benefited from the graduates of the school for soldiers envisioned by President George Washington and realized by President Thomas Jefferson more than 200 years ago. Because West Point is today considered to be the premier leadership school in the country, if not the world, its graduates will continue to serve our nation with distinction in future generations.
Service to nation and society is a noble pursuit, particularly to this nation and particularly by Jews. We came here more than 350 years ago with the earliest explorers and colonists. We are not here at the largess or whim of some ruling monarch who could decide to expel Jews from "his" country. We are here because we helped to create the nation; we are here because we helped America to rise in revolt and wrest itself from British rule, helped it to grow and flourish, and, above all, helped to defend it. With the exception of the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, never since the commencement of the Diaspora has Jewry been so undeniably a part of the birth and growth of a new nation as in America. It is certainly worth defending. To do so is to answer the highest calling. This is our obligation, and that is why young Jewish men and women have chosen to attend West Point.
The Jewish Warrior
"And he gave Joshua the son of Nun a charge and said; 'Be strong and of good courage; for thou shalt bring the children of Israel into the land which I swore to them; and I will be with thee'" (Deuteronomy 31:32).
Thus Jewish military history was born. Joshua was the first Jewish warrior. In 1451 B.C.E. he conquered the armies of the five kings of Canaan and "the walls came tumbling down" half a millennium after Abraham left the city of Ur in Mesopotamia and settled near Shechem in the land of Canaan. Close to 3,000 years later, the Jewish warrior was memorialized at the United States Military Academy side-by-side with Christian and pagan warriors of note. There are nine statues on the a massive stone mantle located in the academic board room in the Headquarters Building, carved by Lee Oscar Lawrie (1877-1963), a renowned German-born sculptor, "of the world's nine greatest warriors: three worshippers of ancient gods, three Jews, and three Christians-Hector, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar; Joshua, David, Judas Maccabeus; King Arthur, Charlemagne, and Godfrey de Bouillon." I first saw the memorial to these warriors, described as quoted above in the 1945 volume of Bugle Notes, a handbook about West Point presented to each new cadet, when I entered the Academy as a plebe. It had been there for many years, twenty-five years or more prior to 1945. According to Robert Pinsky, in his book The Life of David, Arab poets credit David, the biblical warrior-king, with inventing the coat of mail, the metallic chain-link light body armor worn through the Middle Ages by most armies. David conquered lands from the Euphrates River to the Nile in Egypt during his warrior years.
The Book of Judges in the Holy Scripture ranges over 271 years of Judaic history beginning in 2901 B.C.E.-and ending in 2630 B.C.E.. This is about 900 years after the death of Abraham.
Toward the end of that period, as recounted in Judges 20:1-48, a conflict arose between the tribes of Israel and the tribe of Benjamin over the murder and dismemberment of the concubine of a man from Benjamin. Both tribes boasted hundreds of thousands of swordsmen. One of Benjamin's generals was left-handed and he reasoned that a battalion of left-handed warriors would offer great tactical advantage, so he organized a force of 700 men.
Opposing right-handers they held their swords in their right hands and shields in their left, "Every one could sling a stone at a hair-breadth and not miss!" This is analogous to a left-handed boxer.
The carnage was so great that the tribes of Israel prayed for God to intervene. He apparently did! The tribes of Israel prevailed.
This is but one example of the ingenuity of the Jewish warrior in biblical days.
War and Peace
HaRav Avraham Yitzhak HaCohen Kook was the chief rabbi of Palestine during the early years of the twentieth century. Rabbi Kook was a highly respected Jewish scholar and philosopher. At the height of World War I he wrote a series of essays on war and peace. Until recently, these essays were available only in Hebrew. Recently, they were translated into English in the Orot Series by Rabbi David Samson and Tzvi Fishman.
In the book Rabbi Kook cites Exodus 15:3, which declares that "Hashem [God] is a man of war." According to Rabbi Kook, the sin in the Garden of Eden and the creation of the Golden Calf during the Exodus angered Hashem into condemning mankind to evil, hate, war, and violence. Rabbi Kook came to this conclusion through meticulous research in Judaic literature: the Five Books of Moses, Prophets, Psalms, Rashi, Talmud, Gemara. "Wars are acts of God; not only their outcomes, but also their unfolding and design." As to participation in war by Jews, he writes:
In Russia, the question arose whether a Jew should serve in the Russian army. Students of the Chafetz Chaim [a prominent rabbi of the nineteenth century] asked his opinion. He answered: in a short time, the Mashiach [Messiah] will come, and we will have a state, and a state needs an army. Will you wait until then to learn how to be soldiers? ...
Suddenly we realize that we can be soldiers too. During World War I the Hebrew Brigade, HaG'dud HaIvri, helped the British conquer Israel from the Turks. This is the first appearance of Jewish fighting units since the soldiers of Bar Kochva's rebellion against the Legions of Rome.
Every year since 1999 the Jewish cadets at West Point have hosted an event called the Jewish Warrior Weekend. The guests are Jewish students from colleges and universities in the Greater New York area, upstate New York, and Connecticut, as well as cadets of the Air Force, Naval, and Coast Guard academies. The weekend commences with a Friday night Shabbat service in the Jewish Chapel. At the commencement of one of these weekends, I addressed the group after the service. On one side of the sanctuary sat the civilian guests, representing the entire spectrum of Judaic practice and the cadets sat on the other side of the central aisle.
I opened my talk by saying, "The Jewish warrior may be an oxymoron to many of you, but as students of the Torah you must be familiar with our history as a people." The Jews of the biblical period, I explained, were a warlike people. They fought for survival and for conquest. In the last half of the twentieth century, I continued, the Israel Defense Forces certainly proved the point many times over again that Jews are excellent soldiers. The problem is that Jews in the Diaspora find this hard to believe or even accept as being applicable to them. The Jewish American warrior is just as capable and has proved it in every war from the American Revolution to Operation Iraqi Freedom, not to mention the "MACHAL" (overseas volunteers for Israel) and Colonel David (Mickey) Marcus, the American Jews who fought in the Israeli War of Independence. Jews in America are of the same heritage as the Israelis. I often remind those who cannot understand the concept of the non-Israeli Jewish warrior that we all came from the same continent, pointing out that "The difference lies with the destinations of migration; some went west, some went south. The only differences between these two groups are attitude and self-perception."
(Continues...)
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