The Monuments Men (12 page)

The reason was instantly obvious: there wasn’t room for anyone else. Beyond Utah Beach, Rorimer found not the tranquil French countryside that had existed only two months before, but a teeming city of soldiers. In the channel behind him, the scene was “stupefying and impressive,” according to John Skilton, a Civil Affairs officer who later became a Monuments Man. The channel was full to the horizon with vessels waiting to dock. The beaches were crawling with troops; the water teemed with soldiers wading ashore. Overhead, thousands of silver balloons formed a security wall against enemy aircraft. Beyond them were the Allied fighters. In front, off the beach, there was traffic. “Never had I seen such a multitude of vehicles of all types and sizes,” wrote Skilton. “As far as the eye reaches the roads form one uninterrupted ribbon of vehicles.”
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But it wasn’t until he was riding in a convoy toward Advance Section headquarters that Rorimer realized the magnitude of the situation. Around him was a moonscape of blown-open pillboxes, mutilated hedgerows, and rutted land. Destroyed vehicles were being moved off to dumps by giant wreckers, while shattered guns and fortifications rusted alongside the road. Airplanes roared continuously overhead. The explosions of their bombs mixed with the detonations of nearby mines. Most of the mines were being blown by minesweepers, but others were being tripped by unlucky troops or civilians. “The attempt to record [cultural] damage amid the gaping craters and fire-swept hulks of buildings,” Rorimer wrote of his first sight of Normandy, “would be like trying to scoop up wine with a broken keg.”
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Advance Section headquarters (Ad Sec), strung out for miles in farm buildings and tents, appeared no more organized than the beaches. Rorimer, having missed his crossing the day before, was only vaguely expected. He had to walk several miles, and back again, just to be sworn in. His commanding officer simply warned him about booby traps, which had turned up in safes, church pews, and even on dead bodies, then turned back to his maps. That was it. James Rorimer was on his own. So he set up a little office, sat back, and wondered what to do first.

He didn’t sit long. It is one thing to be an eighteen-year-old soldier and to know you are heading into a life-and-death struggle with another eighteen-year-old soldier as far removed from the reason for this battle as you are. Even the majors and sergeants knew they were battling not monsters but career military men like themselves who happened to be wearing a different-colored uniform. To most soldiers, war was circumstance. But to someone like James Rorimer, it was the mission of a lifetime. Hitler had fired a shot across the bow of the art world in 1939, when the blitzkrieg of Poland included units tasked with the deliberate theft of art and destruction of that country’s cultural monuments. The watershed event came soon after, when the Nazis seized the Veit Stoss Altarpiece—a Polish national treasure—and transported it to Nuremberg, Germany. Then they stole Leonardo da Vinci’s
Lady with an Ermine
, one of only fifteen or so paintings solely attributed to the hand of the master, along with masterpieces by Raphael and Rembrandt. These works, all but the Veit Stoss altarpiece part of the famed Czartoryski Collection, were the most important in Poland. None had been seen or heard of since. A year later, when Western Europe fell, facts gave way to rumor and innuendo. But even that was enough for the art world to know that museums and collections, large and small, were being systematically dismantled and transported to Germany. The landing at Normandy was the first chance for the museum professionals in America and England not only to discover what had occurred behind the Nazi veil, but to begin to right the wrongs. James Rorimer had no intention of sitting at a desk while art history was unfolding before him.

And yet that is almost exactly what happened.

Rorimer volunteered for military duty in 1943. At thirty-seven years old, he was a rising star at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, having recently been promoted to curator of the Cloisters, the branch of the Met dedicated to medieval art and architecture. But like many other successful professionals, Rorimer was inducted as a buck private and stationed at Fourth Infantry Training Battalion, Camp Wheeler, Georgia. In February 1944, his daughter Anne was born. “At last, I am a proud father,” he wrote his wife, Katherine, whom he called Kay, at the news, “the pictures are the most valued possessions I have with me.”
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Soon after, he shipped out for England. He would not see his daughter for more than two years.

Assigned to training in Civil Affairs at Shrivenham, the determined Rorimer soon got himself assigned to monuments work. “Gradually I meet more art ‘historians’ here,” he wrote his wife after his posting to the MFAA. “We will be held in a pool for duty when, where and if needed…. I keep in the background while others play politics.”
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With a background in French art and knowledge of the language, Rorimer expected to be working on preparations for the invasion of his “favorite European country.”
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But the MFAA was a muddle. By April, with an official monuments posting but no assignment, Rorimer went in search of a useful job. He finally found one on April 9—teaching officers to drive army trucks. With his usual diligence and hard work, he was soon an expert on trucks and teaching classes eight hours a day. But he admitted to Kay that “I have been carrying monuments work into the field as often as I had a spare moment.”
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Still, when an opportunity arose on April 30 to be a public relations officer and historian for another unit, he immediately embraced the opportunity. But MFAA head Geoffrey Webb refused to release him from service. “My actual assignment depends on circumstances, moods, politics and Webb,” he groused to Kay.
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He believed in monuments work, but like the dapper Fogg conservator George Stout, who had spent years trying to get the unit off the ground, he had little faith the effort would ever crystallize. “Tell Sachs that all I had feared had happened,” he wrote just more than a month before D-Day, “and that I had a good job teaching motor vehicles and maintenance.”
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A week later, on May 7, he had changed his mind. “Some days, or hours—once in a while—one thinks that Civil Affairs is the most wonderful assignment in all the world… we [Monuments Men] have an extraordinary job to perform and I am satisfied that things are being as well handled as possible.”
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The fact is, James Rorimer wasn’t conditioned for the army’s bureaucratic runaround. At the Metropolitan Museum, he had risen rapidly through the ranks. Despite his youth, he had bulldozed through the difficulties of creating a new museum branch like the Cloisters, cultivating a great patron in John D. Rockefeller Jr., and organizing a disparate staff. In the army, Rorimer was at the bottom of a huge bureaucracy and completely powerless; a promotion to second lieutenant still meant he was the lowest-ranking commissioned man in the army and in the MFAA. “War disrupts many things,” he wrote his wife in April, “particularly if one is a junior officer after years of a continued successful civilian career. I only hope that my desire to serve will in due time not be hampered by the little fellows who play politics and show brass.”
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He didn’t receive his assignment in the MFAA until more than four weeks
after
the Normandy invasion; soon after, he was on the continent. Once clear of the bureaucratic tangle of England, with his dream assignment, there was no way James Rorimer was going to fail—no matter how difficult and unsure the task at hand.

In Normandy, each Monuments Man had a battle zone for which he was responsible. Most corresponded with individual battle groups, such as U.S. First Army, U.S. Third Army, or British Second Army. Rorimer’s was Communications Zone, the area behind the front lines where roads were built and supplies ferried through. Unfortunately, the information on the boundaries of the “Comm Zone” was changing so rapidly that it was almost impossible to keep track of them—or sometimes even the exact location of the front lines. Normandy was crisscrossed by hedgerows, enormous earthen dams topped with trees and bushes that separated the fields and sheltered the roads. There were often eight or ten a mile, limiting visibility to the empty field in front of you and, across it, the ominous wall of the next hedgerow. After two or three hedgerows, all running at lopsided angles, commanders didn’t know whether they were heading forward or back.

“Just stick to the road,” a harried officer advised Rorimer as he was about to head out from headquarters for his first day in the field. “And keep your head down. A dead Monuments officer is of no use at all.”
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At the motor pool, a soldier checked his orders and shook his head. “Sorry, Lieutenant, Monuments section isn’t on the list. You’ll have to hitch a ride. Trucks are always leaving—repairing wires, transporting supplies, burying the dead. You shouldn’t have any trouble.”

Rorimer headed out in the first convoy that could take him. He had dozens of sites to visit, but no plan and no defined objective. He had only the desire for action, to be of service. His first stop was Carentan, the strategic link between Omaha and Utah beaches. The town had been nearly obliterated by aerial bombardment and Allied artillery, but in the midst of the carnage Rorimer was surprised to find the one building on the protected monuments list, its cathedral, almost untouched. Only the tower had been damaged, and even that was minor. Rorimer lowered his binoculars. His first task was to record the condition of the monuments after the battle; his second was to supervise emergency repair work if needed. With the tower in no immediate danger of collapse, there was no reason to linger in Carenten. He press-ganged the elderly French departmental architect of Cherbourg, who was also inspecting the ruins, into taking responsibility for reinforcing the tower, then motioned to a boy watching him from the shadows across the street.

“
Tu veux aider
?” Rorimer asked. “Do you want to help?” The boy nodded. Rorimer reached into his pack. “When that man comes down from the tower,” he instructed the boy in French, “tell him I moved on to another town. Then ask him to put these on the building.” He handed the boy several signs. They said, in both English and French:
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OFF LIMITS

To all Military Personnel

HISTORIC MONUMENT

Trespassing on or Removal of any Materials or

Articles from These Premises is Strictly Forbidden

By Command of the Commanding Officer

A Monument Man’s third, and perhaps most important, task was to see that no further damage occurred, from soldiers or local citizens. Protected monuments, even in ruins, were not to be disturbed. He watched as the boy moved off toward the cathedral, a small ragged spot against the background of shattered stones and broken glass. He wasn’t even wearing shoes. Rorimer chased after him a few steps, grabbed him by the shoulder. “
Merci
,” he said, holding out a stick of gum. The boy took it and smiled, then turned and ran toward the cathedral.

A few minutes later, Rorimer was gone, off in another convoy to check another monument. Within a few days, he couldn’t even have begun to tell where he’d been without the help of his field journal and checklist of monuments. The towns blurred together as he backtracked and crisscrossed his own path in search of transportation. He’d be an hour on a road packed with tanks, all outfitted by their crews with pointed metal battering rams. “Rhino tanks,” they called them, perfect for driving through the hedgerows instead of over them. Then the jeep would turn a corner and there would be no one for miles. In one stretch, the hedgerows would be burned out and chopped through, the ground pitted with bomb craters and muddied by boots. In the next, the cows lolled in the shade of the tree line, as peaceful as the summer before. Some towns were destroyed; others untouched. Even in the towns, one block would be decimated while the next looked completely whole—until you noticed the one broken window on a second floor where a stray bullet had struck. War did not come like a hurricane, Rorimer realized, destroying everything in its path. It came like a tornado, touching down in patches, taking with it one life while leaving the next person unharmed.

There was only one constant, it seemed, in that wilderness of destruction and reprieve: the churches. In almost every town Rorimer saw the sight he had first seen in Carentan: intact church, broken tower. Normandy was flat ground, and the highest point for miles was usually a cathedral tower. The Western Allies wouldn’t violate the sanctity of a cathedral; the Germans showed no such scruples. In violation of the Rules of Land Warfare set forth in the Hague Conventions, German snipers and observers regularly hid in the towers, picking off troops and calling down mortar fire on advancing units. The Allies learned to call in their own concentrated fire, collapsing the towers while leaving the rest of the cathedral largely unscathed. Rorimer didn’t know if the Allies were looking at the protected monuments lists or not, but it didn’t matter. The army commanders understood, inherently, that some structures were worth saving.

Not that every cathedral was spared. At La-Haye-du-Puits, Rorimer had to dislodge the huddled peasants who had been coming there every day to pray; the structure was badly damaged, and he feared the shaking caused by the armored vehicles and artillery pieces rolling by in the street outside would collapse the tower. Allied bulldozers had pushed the rubble of the central section of the church of Saint-Malo at Valognes into the nave to clear a supply route—which, unfortunately, went right through the remains of the church. The citizens cried and begged for relief, but when Rorimer told them there was no other way, they understood. This was the price of freedom.