The Rape of Europa (40 page)

American art historians were no less eager than anyone else to join the growing effort, but they did not at first think of working through such groups as American Defense Harvard. Once the safety of the museums was assured, George Stout and W. G. Constable, in late September 1942, wrote to the Committee on the Conservation of Cultural Resources, still regarded as the proper forum for art matters, suggesting that a subcommittee be formed to study the physical conservation of endangered works of art in both the United States and Europe, in order to “give a lead to the world when peace comes.”
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Off the record, Constable specifically recommended against any museum directors being on the subcommittee, as they “had neither the experience nor particular interest necessary.” He and Stout had in mind a technical group, which would analyze the frightening problems Stout’s European friends had so vividly described. The response was bland and polite—the committee would study the matter.

Despite Constable’s feelings about museum directors, they too had become
interested in the protection of Europe’s treasures. Francis Henry Taylor, director of the Metropolitan Museum, had already discussed the idea of a committee on protection with David Bruce, then president of the board of the National Gallery and soon to head OSS operations in London. They envisaged a group which might work under the United Nations Refugee and Rehabilitation Agency (UNRRA) being formed by Governor Lehman of New York. In November 1942, after conversations in Cambridge with Stout and Paul Sachs of the Fogg Museum, Taylor took the long train ride to Washington through the blacked-out autumn countryside to discuss his ideas further with “the people at the National Gallery,” which, in the continued absence of action by the Committee on the Conservation of Cultural Resources, had now become the museum community’s lobbying organization. This was no frivolous choice. In Washington, then as now, access was everything. The board of the National Gallery included the Chief Justice and the Secretaries of State and the Treasury, and its administrator, Harry McBride, a former State Department officer, had, since the outbreak of war, performed a number of delicate missions at the personal request of Secretary of State Cordell Hull.

Francis Henry Taylor, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Taylor was immediately ushered in to present his proposals to Chief Justice Harlan Stone, who promised to discuss the matter with FDR. A few days later, William Dinsmoor, president of the Archaeological Institute of America and another recruit to the cause, also met with the Chief Justice. The matter was formally discussed by the board of the National Gallery on November 24; David Finley was able to inform Taylor the very next day that Stone would accept chairmanship of a national committee. Archibald MacLeish, Librarian of Congress, would take Stone’s nomination to the President; John J. McCloy, Assistant Secretary of War, also expressed enthusiasm.

Full of optimism after this high-level response, Taylor wrote Sachs on December 4, 1942: “I do not know yet how the Federal Government will decide to organize this, but one thing is crystal clear: that we will be called upon for professional service, either in civilian or military capacity. I personally have offered my services, and am ready for either.”
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To reinforce their actions, Taylor and Dinsmoor had both written a memorandum for presentation to the President, recommending “a corps of specialists to deal with the matter of protecting monuments and works of art in liaison with the Army and Navy.” As flamboyant as the man himself, Taylor’s long memo somewhat undiplomatically referred to the centuries-long dispute over British possession of the Elgin marbles, and to Napoleon’s removal of the bronze horses of Saint Mark’s in Venice, in the same paragraph as
the confiscations by the Nazis.
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(Dinsmoor, clearly feeling otherwise about Napoleon, suggested that the specialist corps actually be modelled on the art historians who had accompanied the future Emperor to Egypt during the campaign of 1798.
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) Taylor felt that an expert committee, under his leadership, should immediately be sent to Spain, England, Sweden, and Russia to study the situation and report back to the President. How this was to be accomplished, given the recent invasion of North Africa, the deadly situation at Stalingrad, and the continued bombing of Britain, was not addressed.

The Chief Justice, as good as his word, sent his recommendations to the White House on December 8, set forth in a no-nonsense memo from which all historical references had been removed and replaced by the proposal that the British and Soviet governments be requested to form similar groups. During invasions, it suggested, the committees would furnish trained personnel, many of whom were already serving in the armed forces, to the General Staffs “so that, so far as is consistent with military necessity, works of cultural value may be protected.” The committee should also compile lists of looted works. At the time of the “Armistice,” it should urge that the terms include the restitution of public property, and if such property were lost or destroyed, that “restitution in kind” be made by the Axis powers from a list of “equivalent works of art… which should be transferred to the invaded countries from Axis museums, or from the private collections of Axis leaders.”
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Three weeks later the President replied in favorable terms to the Chief Justice. The “interesting proposal,” he said, had been referred to the “appropriate agencies of the Government for study.” Then there was silence.

What the stymied museum men could not know was that a tremendous struggle had been going on for nearly two years in the bosom of the government over the whole concept of the control of the areas soon to be in the hands of the Allies.
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Traditionally this had been the Army’s job, but long-term occupation was a problem the military establishment had never before faced on such a scale. President Roosevelt and the Army itself favored civilian control as soon as possible. And indeed, as soon as war had been declared, civilian agencies of every stripe, government and private, of which the Harvard and museum groups were but two, began making plans, forming committees, and clamoring for attention. Uneasy at the thought of losing all control to a plethora of civilians untrained in military ways, the Army, in June 1942, set up a small Military Government Division in the office of the Provost Marshal General, and a school of military government in Charlottesville, Virginia. American Defense Harvard and the museum men, having joined forces, immediately proposed that instructions
on the preservation of monuments and works of art be included in its curriculum.

For a while this arrangement seemed sufficient, and when General Dwight D. Eisenhower requested a civil administration section for the staff planning the invasion of North Africa, several of the newly trained Charlottesville officers plus a State Department contingent were quickly sent off. This group was to deal mainly with issues of local government. Economic problems, such as food supplies for the local populace, were rather vaguely assigned to the “appropriate civil departments of the United States and the United Kingdom.” Eisenhower could hardly wait to be rid of all this and concentrate on fighting the war: “Sometimes I think I live ten years each week, of which at least nine are absorbed in political and economic matters,” he commented to General Marshall.
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All these plans were fine on paper, but not practical in a theater of war. The civilian agencies, top-heavy with executives and planners, had few operatives on the scene, and were utterly dependent on the Army for such amenities as intelligence, shipping space, and ground transportation. But the feeling seemed to be that when things did not work, the addition of another committee would help. The War Department was not represented on any of these committees, though it was essentially the conduit through which they all had to function. The solution to this was often to send VIPs to the theater to deal directly with headquarters, as Francis Henry Taylor had in mind, a process which consumed Eisenhower’s precious time and would later make him reluctant to have any nonmilitary functionaries at all in his theater.

Roosevelt and Churchill met in Casablanca in the third week of January 1943. There they decided, not without some friction, that Sicily rather than northern France would be the next Allied objective. The invasion was set for July. This would be the first time that British and American forces would jointly occupy an enemy nation. War Department officials concerned with civil affairs saw immediately that their efforts of liaison and planning would have to be greatly improved if they were to deal with expansion into another theater. All such activities were quickly centralized in a new Civil Affairs Division (CAD) under the Secretary of War, which officially came into being on March 1, 1943.

Only days after the heads of state had left Casablanca, planning was begun for Sicily. Officers were sent off to study the British occupation already set up in Tripolitania, where they would find an informal monuments protection program already in place. The resulting proposal called for the then staggering number of four hundred officers for all Civil Affairs functions. By April a training facility had been set up near Algiers,
and by May 1 the top secret plan for HUSKY, as the Sicilian invasion was code-named, was virtually complete. The idea of civilian participation was still accepted as part of the immediate postcombat occupation by both nations; the only trouble was that the total secrecy surrounding HUSKY prevented any concrete civilian planning.

If progress toward an official government body to ensure the safety of works of art had been slow in the United States, in London, where the British and various Allied governments-in-exile planned their return to the Continent, it was positively snail-like. This was in great part due to the European attitude that civilians could and should not interfere with the workings of armies in combat. George Stout and W. G. Constable in their early 1943 campaigns had written colleagues such as Kenneth Clark and Eric Maclagan, director of the Victoria and Albert, to inform them of their efforts to establish an official protection committee and ask if any similar action was contemplated in England. Both gentlemen seemed surprised at the very idea. “I find it hard to believe that any machinery could be set up which would carry out the suggestions contained in your petition; e.g., even supposing it were possible for an archaeologist to accompany each invading force, I cannot help feeling that he would have great difficulty in restraining a commanding officer from shelling an important military objective simply because it contained some fine historical monuments,” wrote Clark.
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Maclagan agreed and was, if anything, even less encouraging: “In violent fighting damage will happen anyway … I do not think it would be the faintest use to have an official archaeologist at GHQ.”
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As for looting, he was not worried: “Now that there is no market outside Europe … only the internal looting subsists,” about which nothing could be done until the “time of the Peace Treaty.” Both correspondents felt that British and American troops would not damage anything on purpose, and that the admonitions to them contained in the field manuals would suffice.

There were some other signs of interest, but these concentrated almost entirely on the recovery of looted objects after the war. A Conference of Allied Ministers of Education had been formed in October 1942 to plan the cultural rehabilitation of the Continent and by midsummer 1943 was studying the thorny problem of restitution. The representatives of the occupied countries, who dominated the organization, were naturally more interested in this than the British; by far the most active of them was Karol Estreicher, the Polish representative, whose reports and letters to Francis Henry Taylor had greatly encouraged the latter’s efforts.

In January 1943 the United Nations, which at that time consisted of the
U.S., the occupied countries, the British Commonwealth, China, and the USSR, had also issued a declaration calling invalid all “forced transfers of property in enemy-controlled territory.”
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Another group, the Comité Interallié pour l’Etude de G Armistice, trying to draft a law for restitution of looted property, had been bogged down for some months by its inability to agree on the exact meaning of the key word
spolié
(looted), and as yet had produced nothing. But as the invasion of the Continent still seemed to be far off, all these initiatives remained in the realm of theory, and the physical protection of monuments was hardly mentioned.