Collecting area: World War II

A branch of the Communist Party of the United States of America, the Communist Party of Massachusetts enjoyed strong popularity during the 1930s and 1940s, organizing the textile and other manufacturing industries.

This small collection is comprised of a miscellaneous assemblage of fliers, broadsides, and ephemera issued by the Communist Party of Massachusetts and its affiliates from the mid-1930s through the repression of the McCarthy era. Originating mostly from Boston, the items in the collection center on significant themes in Communist thought, including opposition to Fascism and militarism, labor solidarity against capital, and elections. A small number of items relate to Party-approved cultural productions, including plays and gatherings to celebrate Lenin or the Russian Revolution. Many items are associated with Otis A. Hood, a perpetual candidate for public office on the Communist Party ticket who became a target for McCarthy-era repression in the mid-1950s.

Raised in a Polish American family from Greenfield, Mass., Janina Smiertka Davenport was the epitome of a life-long learner. After graduating from Greenfield High School in 1933, Davenport received degrees from the Pratt Institute in Food Management and from the Franklin County Public School for Nurses (1937). In 1938, she began work as a nurse in the U.S. Navy, receiving two special commendations for meritorious service during the Second World War. She continued her formal and informal education later in life, receiving degrees from Arizona State University in 1958 and UMass Amherst in Russian and Eastern European Studies (1982). Davenport died in Greenfield in March 2002.
The Davenport Papers contain a thick sheaf of letters and documents pertaining to her Navy service before and during World War II, along with assorted biographical and genealogical data, materials collected during educational trips to Poland and elsewhere, and approximately one linear foot of family photographs and photo albums.

A working class native of Ware, Mass., Robert E. Dillon was a student at Massachusetts State College when he was drafted into the Army in 1943. After his induction at Fort Devens, Mass., and training for the Quartermaster Corps in Virginia and California, Dillon was assigned to duty as a mechanic and driver with the First Service Command. Stationed at Rest Camps number 5 and 6 in Khanspur, India (now Pakistan), Dillon’s company maintained the trucks and other vehicles used to carry supplies over the Himalayas to Chinese Nationalist forces. After he left the service in February 1946, having earned promotion to T/5, Dillon concluded his studies at UMass Amherst on the GI Bill and earned a doctorate in Marketing from Ohio State. He taught at the University of Cincinnati for many years until his death in 1985.

The Dillon Papers consist of 178 letters written by Dillon to his family during his service in World War II, along with several written to him and an assortment of documents and ephemera. Beginning with basic training, the letters provide an essentially comprehensive account of Dillon’s military experience and interesting insight into a relatively quiet, but sparsely documented theater of war.

The graphic artist Siegfried Ebert had an important influence on the visual language of East German television and animated motion pictures. Born in Eibau on July 20, 1926, Ebert was drafted into the Luftwaffe in 1943, but shortly after going on active duty, he was severely wounded and taken prisoner by the English. After his release, Ebert shifted course in life, studying commercial art at the Kunstgewerbeschule Zittau and film at the Hochschule für bildende und angewandte Kunst in Wiessensee. He became one of the earliest artists to specialize in the new medium of television, working for Deutscher Fernsehfunk, doing graphic design and animation. A member of the Verband Bildender Künstler Deutschlands, he later worked on animated films for the DEFA studios. Suffering from ill health for the last several years of his life, Ebert suffered a heart attack in November 1985, and died at home shortly after his sixtieth birthday in 1986.

The Ebert Collection includes a small assortment of correspondence, awards, and biographical materials, along with examples of his graphic work for television and film. Among other unusual items in the collection are attractive handbills (small posters) for Progress and DEFA films, some original sketches, photographs and mockups of his artwork for television, and an assortment of personal and professional ephemera.

On January 30, 1995, the National Air and Space Museum capitulated to popular and political pressure and scuttled an exhibit they had planned to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War. Early in 1993, curators began to develop plans for an exhibit that would center around the Enola Gay, the B-29 Stratofortress bomber that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, but opposition from veterans’ groups rose almost immediately. By mid-summer, the Air Force Association and American Legion led opposition to the exhibit, fearing that it would not present a balanced view of the events and that it would focus exclusively on the “horrors of war” and an alleged “moral equivalence” between Japan and the United States. Although several attempts were made to rewrite the script of the exhibit, congressional and public pressure eventually led to the cancellation of the exhibit in January 1995 and to the resignation of the Director of the Museum, Martin Harwit, in May.

Collected by historian Waldo Heinrichs, the Enola Gay Controversy Collection contains the various versions of the scripts of the planned exhibition and copies of correspondence, memos, publications, and the three volumes of “Revisionism gone wrong: Analysis of the Enola Gay controversy” issued by the Air Force Association.

Charles Edgar Eshbach, Jr., a 1937 graduate of Massachusetts State College, and Maude Sybil Hartley met in late 1939, while she was a student at Simmons College and he was working for the New England Radio News Service, part of the USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service. They soon began dating and in February 1941 were engaged. After graduating in 1942, Sybil lived at home in Rochester, Mass., and taught school. Charles was drafted and enlisted in the army December 30, 1942. Trained as a radio operator, he was assigned to the Army Air Force Technical Training Command’s 326th Signal Co. Wing. Charles and Sybil married in September of 1943, and by November, Charles was in England, part of the 67th Fighter Wing stationed at Walcot Hall in Lincolnshire. Although not in combat, Charles rose to the rank of Technical Sergeant. He returned to the U.S. in December 1945. He and Sybil moved to Weymouth and had four children. Charles was appointed professor of Agricultural Economics at UMass in 1959. The family moved to Amherst in 1964, as Charles’ department was transforming into the Hotel, Restaurant and Travel Administration Department. He taught at UMass until 1986, when he retired. He died in 1997. Sybil worked at the University store for thirty years and died in 2009.

Consisting chiefly of their letters to each other, the Eshbach Papers vividly document the courtship and early married life of Charles and Sybil, particularly during their long separation, against a wartime backdrop. The collection also contains diaries, photograph albums, loose photographs, histories and rosters from Charles’ army unit, and a variety of ephemera and memorabilia such as ration tickets, receipts, programs, and Charles’ army badges and dog tags.

A legal scholar and pacifist, Caleb Foote was born in Cambridge, Mass., on March 26, 1917, the son of a Unitarian minister and Quaker mother. Earning degrees in history from Harvard (AB 1939) and economics from Columbia (MA 1941), Foote was hired by the Fellowship of Reconciliation to organize their northern California office as the U.S. entered the Second World War. A committed conscientious objector, he refused assignment to a Civilian Public Service camp, arguing that the draft was undemocratic and “an integral part of the war effort,” thus earning a sentence of six months in prison. When released, Foote resumed his work with the Fellowship, opposing the internment of Japanese Americans, but ran afoul of the Selective Service a second time in 1945, earning an additional eighteen months. After a presidential pardon in 1948, Foote became Executive Director of the Central Committee for Conscientious Objection, but left after two years to return to school, hoping a law degree might aid him in the cause of addressing racial and economic injustice. He held academic positions in law schools at the University of Nebraska (1954-1956), Penn (1956-1965), and Berkeley (1965-1987), becoming well known for his opposition to a bail system that unfairly burdened the poor and falsely accused, among other causes. Foote died in Santa Rosa, Calif., in 2006, shortly before his 89th birthday.

An extraordinary archive of principled resistance to war, the Foote collection contains a thorough record of one man’s experience as a conscientious objector during the Second World War. Accompanying some of the legal proceedings associated with Foote’s refusal of assignment to Civilian Public Service is an extensive correspondence with family while imprisoned and other associated content. Foote also retained important material from his wartime work with the Fellowship of Reconciliation and later work with the CCCO. His later correspondence provides an important perspective on his developing legal career, particularly the earlier years, and an extensive series of essays and autobiographical writings provides critical personal and intellectual context for Foote’s pacifism and legal practice. The collection also includes some correspondence and writings by and about Foote’s education, his father, Henry Wilder Foote, and mother.

An East German Prosecutor General, Carlos Foth was a key player in the legal effort to investigate and punish Nazi war criminals. For two decades beginning as a law student in Berlin in 1947, Foth was part of a team dedicated to the prosecution of former Nazis, and he contributed to the creation of an antifascist internationalist system quite distinct from the weaker efforts in West Germany. Having assisted in high profile cases such as those stemming from the Koepenicker Blutwoche (the SA-led pogrom in Berlin in June 1933), Foth found himself at the center of investigations that highlighted the tensions between the East and West German systems. In a series of cases in the early 1960s, East German prosecutors uncovered former Nazis working in the West German judiciary, culminating in the 1963 “show trial” conviction in absentia of Hans Globke, National Security Advisor to West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, who had been the author of Nazi racial purity laws. As department head for international relations beginning in 1972, Foth was engaged in negotiations between the German legal systems and in 1979 he was invited to assist in the investigative phase of war crimes trials against the Khmer Rouge. He left office after reaching retirement age in 1988.

The Carlos Foth Papers offer important documentation of East German attempts to hold former Nazis accountable for war crimes and crimes against humanity and they provide insight into the operation of the East German legal system and its relations with the west. In addition to materials on prosecutions of SA Brownshirts involved in political violence during the Köpenicker Blutwoche, the collection includes files relating to prosecutions of West German officials accused of Nazi-era crimes and materials relating to Foth’s role as a consultant to the 1979 war crimes trials against the Khmer Rouge.

Attached to the 20th Air Base Group in 1941, Athol-native Bill Freeman was a first-hand witness to the beginnings of the war in the Pacific. Enlisting in the Army Air Corps in 1940, Freeman was stationed at Nichols Field in the Philippines when the Japanese invaded, and after taken as prisoner or war, he was forced on the Bataan Death March. Freeman died of malaria in Cabanatuan Prison Camp in July 1942.

The Freeman scrapbook and photograph album that Bill Freeman kept offer a visually-intensive perspective on the brief life of an American serviceman in the Second World War. Kept during and immediately after high school, the scrapbook includes notices of his musical performances and other activities; the extensive photograph album documents his service in the Army Air Corps from the start of deployment through his travels in Hawaii and Guam to the early months of his service in the Philippines. The collection also includes a letter written from the Philippines during the summer 1941.

A destroyer commissioned in 1936, the USS Reid was assigned to the Pacific Fleet and in 1939 was moved to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The Reid was being serviced in port on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor occurred. The Reid survived and was re-assembled so quickly it was out patrolling later that morning. Between 1941 and 1944, the Reid served on numerous patrol and escort missions, including in the Aleutian Islands and Solomon Islands and joined forces fighting in Guadalcanal. During the Reid’s involvement in the battle of Leyte Gulf, it was attacked by twelve kamikaze fighters, several of which made contact with the Reid, including one that crashed into the port quarter and exploded, blowing the ship apart and killing 103 of the 268 aboard.

The Gardner/Wilson Collection represents the efforts of Leonard F. Gardner (BA ’49), Pearl Harbor survivor, who served on the Reid from 1941-1944. Gardner collected photographs and documents from former shipmates and produced a newsletter from 1997 to 2015 that recorded the lives of shipmates and included photographs and information about the USS Reid. In addition to the original materials Gardner collected, a full run of the newsletter and other documents related to the Reid’s service in World War II, the Gardner/Wilson collection includes a website curated by Gardner and designed, created, and maintained by James M. Wilson III (MBA ’86, MS ’86, PhD ’00), whose father, James M. Wilson, Jr., served on the USS Reid from 1940 and survived its sinking in 1944. Wilson also conducted oral histories of remaining USS Reid 369 members in 2006. The original website can be found at http://ussreid369.org. SCUA also maintains an archived version of the site. Several documents and photographs relating to the sinking of the Reid were added to the collection by Gordon Seastrom, a Pearl Harbor survivor and Reid shipmate.