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Francis L. Sampson, "Look Out Below!: A Story of the Airborne by a Paratrooper Padre" (Catholic U of America Press, 2023)
00:48:21
An interview with Sean Brennan
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- [00:00]
A
Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast, or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts, and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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B
Hello, everybody, and welcome to New Books in Catholic Studies, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. This channel and episode were created in collaboration with the American Catholic Historical Association, a conference of scholars, archivists, and teachers of Catholic studies. My name is Alice Nesador and I'm a host of the channel today. We welcome back Dr. Sean Brennan, a professor of history at the University of Scranton. Shawn has written a historical introduction for the memoir. Look out for below. Look out below. A memoir. Man, messing that up. Let's try that again. Beauty of editing. I can cut all that out.
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C
That's right. Yep.
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B
Okay. Sean has written a historical introduction for the memoir Look Out. A Story of the Airborne by a Paratrooper Padre by Father Francis L. Sampson, and this was published by Catholic University of America Press this June. Look out below is a memoir written by Francis L. Sampson, a veteran of the Second World War and the Korean War, whose exploits inspired one of the most famous war movies, Saving Private Ryan. Sampson was part of a rare breed of parachute chaplains, in his case, with the 101st Airborne Division. Sampson spent much of his career as an army chaplain in the center of maelstorms of the 20th century. Throughout it all, Sampson offered a valuable Christian witness in the darkest times and most difficult circumstances. This second edition of his memoirs look out below contains material on his service during the Korean War and occupation during occupation duty in Germany and Japan, as well as the Second World War with a new historical introduction written by Sean Brennan. Sean, welcome back to the show.
- [03:15]
C
Thank you so much for having me again.
- [03:17]
B
Yeah, always. Can you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself if they haven't listened to the first podcast?
- [03:25]
C
Sure. Or the. Or the one before that or the one after that. Yeah. So I'm a professor of history at the University of Scranton. I've been there since 2009, and I'm also on the executive committee of the American Catholic Historical association for another year, year and a half, I believe. And I've written a number of works on religious history and on the intersection between religious individuals, clergy and laity, and religious institutions during periods of political, social, military upheaval. So my first work was on the Soviet occupation of Germany after World War II and how the German churches, both the Protestant and Catholic ones, reacted to that. My second was a biography of the Passionist priest Fabian Flynn, who, like Father Samson, served in the Second World War as an army chaplain. And then I was commissioned by Catholic University America Press to do a translation of the Mitrokin archive from Vasily Mitrokin, a KGB archivist and internal Soviet dissident, and the specific records regarding the kgb, the Soviet secret police, and the Vatican. So, Catholic University of America Press, once again, the way I came across this work is they asked, given my previous experience in writing on these topics, if I'd be interested in writing a new historical introduction, placing some of the things Father Sampson talks about in historical context for a new edition of his memoirs that they wanted to publish. And, you know, you never say, just like you never say no to a book review, you know, request you never say no to an invitation for something like that. It's so tricky to sometimes get things published anyway, when a press asks you to write something, you don't say no. And I think Samson led an amazing life and a very heroic. Played a very heroic role in both conflicts. And of course, also, just like me, he's an alumni of the alumnus of the University of Notre Dame. So there was that connection, too.
- [05:36]
B
Yeah, I mean, you've kind of already knocked out my next question, which was how you got into this project. Right. Catholic University of America asked you to write this. What I thought was really interesting about the first 30ish pages of this book is that it has a historical introduction by you, but it also contains a letter from Cardinal Spellman, the Archbishop of New York A foreword written by Philip M. Hannon, the Auxiliary Bishop of Washington, and an introduction by Thomas F. Hickey, a lieutenant general of the US army, along with the original introduction by Samson. Why were these included instead of just, say, having Samson and your introductions in the book?
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C
Well, the reason was in order to demonstrate in what high regard Samson was held by people in positions of authority in both the Catholic Church and the United States Armed Forces, and how important they saw that this memoir was in terms of conveying what it was like for chaplains and also more broadly for paratroopers, which Father Sampson technically was in both the Second World War and in the Korean War, where paratroopers played a very vital role in both of those conflicts. And the. The question about this memoir was, technically, Father Sampson wrote two memoirs. The first was Paratrooper Padre, which was just about his time in the the Second World War. And look out below, which was also talked about his occupation duty, as you said, in Germany and then in Japan and then his role in the Korean War. And we decided that we should republish Lookout below because that gives a fuller account of a lot of his activities. I mean, you know, he was also the head of the Chaplain Corps during the Vietnam War. He traveled to Vietnam during that conflict. Unfortunately, he didn't write a third edition of the memoirs to really talk about his full story. He was also the head of ROTC at Notre Dame for a while. So there's so many things about his life that you almost wish he had written a third edition of the memoirs. But since the second one told the more complete story, we wanted to use that. But we also wanted to incorporate some of the introduction material that was used in the first one.
- [08:07]
B
Yeah. And getting to your introduction, you know, I was wondering when you were writing it was what were you. What was your method in doing that? Were you going to archives and looking at military records or what were you doing?
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C
I did look up some military records about the first off the 101st Airborne Division, which he served in, and then also the 506th Airborne Regiment, which is the one he was a paratroop chaplain in, and they served with, but not, not exactly on side of the 501st, which is, of course, depicted in the famous 2001 miniseries, Band of Brothers. So I looked up a lot of records about that, and then some of the records around D Day and Operation Market Garden, because those were the two big paratroop drops during the later stages of the Western Front of the Second World War. And just some other memoirs and works about chaplains. And Americans generally who had spent time and As a German prisoner. As a prisoner of war of the Germans, particularly during the later stages of World War II. Because for Americans captured towards the end of World War II, their experience in German captivity was very different than, say, those captured earlier in, say, 1940, 1943 or earlier in 1944. The Germans weren't, were in a desperate. This isn't to excuse their treatment of POWs, of course, but the Germans were in a desperate position at that point. And let's just say the Germans didn't always observe the niceties of the Geneva Convention regarding to the treatment of prisoners of war during these stages of the conflict. I actually just. It's going to come out in the summer edition of American Catholic Studies. I wrote a review of three different documentary films about three different priests, and one of the whom was a man named John McNeil. And he served in World War II. And like father Sampson, he was captured during the Ardennes Offensive, also known as the Battle of the Bulge. And he. And he nearly starved to death. A number of other American soldiers he was with starved to death during the Harsh Winter of 44 and 45 in German custody. And I could talk more about this later, but I. That's one reason I really thought this, his memoir is important for understanding World War II because the experience of serving as a POW during World War II and also what liberation was like at the end of the war, there's often a lot. There's not much understanding about that in American popular culture. And sometimes how it's depicted in films and television shows in particular gives a very skewed perspective. And I think Samson's memoir is a nice redress of that.
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B
Right? Yeah. And let's get to Samson. Right. He was a chaplain in the U.S. airborne Division, serving in the Second World War in the Korean War, but also had a career in Vietnam as well. As you've mentioned, can you tell us a little bit about Father Sampson? I had never heard of him before picking up this book, to be honest.
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C
Yeah, of course. He. I mean, I was somewhat familiar Father Samson before this for two reasons. One, because of his connection to Saving Private Ryan, which I know we'll get the film, which I know we'll get to. And then also, again, just because when I was at Notre Dame, I. I heard about him because of his distinguished career. He was the son of Irish immigrants. So he was born in the United States, specifically in the town of Cherokee, Iowa, which is the northwestern part of the state, in 1912. But both of his Parents came from County Cork in Ireland, and so he attended a public high school, but then he again attended the University of Notre Dame and prepared for the priesthood. He attended St. Paul's Theological Seminary in Minnesota, and he graduated there for master's degree in theology in 1941. And then he was ordained a priest in the Diocese of Des Moines in June of 1941. So again, if you're in Iowan, he, he had a huge connection to that state. He always loved that state and spent as much time there as he could. And that's where a lot of his work, just as a priest came from. But kind of like Father Flynn, once the United States becomes involved in the Second World War, he had a strong desire to enter into the U.S. armed forces to serve as a chaplain. And unlike Flynn, who, because of his health problems, had to go through a lot of different appeals and issues with his order to try and enter into the chaplain service, Samson really didn't have that, that many problems, despite the fact he'd only been priest for less than a year. And again, the United States Armed forces were desperate to get as many chaplains as possible because there were never, there was never enough chaplains, whether they were Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, or Orthodox, to provide for the, the, the numbers of soldiers who they'd have to provide spiritual leadership to. And so again, like Flynn and like many, many other chaplains, the most chaplains had to provide spiritual leadership to soldiers who weren't Catholic. Doesn't mean necessarily they gave the communion, they heard confession, but it's not. But Catholic chaplains, Protestant chaplains, Jewish and Orthodox ones, all came in with the understanding that you're going to provide spiritual leadership and aid to anyone who needs it. And they accepted that. And also, I might have mentioned this, the Flynn podcast, but there were a lot of regional dispute differences with the chaplains as well. Most of the Catholic ones came from either New England or they came from the upper Midwest, like Samson. And a lot of the Protestant chaplains came from the South. So, and again, America at the time was in the 1940s, was obviously 80 years ago, very different than now. It was not as ethnically diverse. And also it was a lot less common for Americans from different regions to travel to other regions unless their job required it. So for a lot of Americans serving In World War II, this was their first time meeting people of different faiths, meeting, meeting Americans of different faith, meeting Americans from different geographical areas. And so they were just all kind of thrown into that. And also to prepare for service in the greatest war in human history, you know, being fought on different sides of the world.
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B
Yeah. I mean, that was such an interesting aspect of this memoir to read about, was that his time, his early time in his early time getting into the military. And that was interesting to me because I had never really. I don't really know much about chaplains other than, say, like, them being in a hospital setting. That's my only experience. And I think many people have that experience if they don't have that military connection.
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C
Right.
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B
And so for him to also be a paratrooper, that was fascinating.
- [15:53]
C
Yeah. And by his own admission, he kind of just joined it on a whim. He thought that they desperately needed chaplains to be for that service because the physical requirements were so demanding. And he basically said that it would determine the rest of the course of my life. But I just thought, oh, yeah, that sounds like that could be fun. That could be an interesting adventure. I'll try it. And he said if he had known all the physical demands brought about of it, he might have. Might have given it a second thought.
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B
Right. Yeah. But as you mentioned earlier, and as I mentioned in the introduction, you know, his memoir inspired one of the, like, most famous war movies, Saving Private Ryan. And you bring up also Band of Brothers at the start of your introduction.
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C
Yeah, well.
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B
You know, these media, these films, television, and other historical narratives, as you explained in the introduction, were influenced by memoirs like Samson's. However, Samson specifically, you say, gets a few of the details wrong when writing about his encounter on Utah beach weeks after D Day, and his interactions with a private named Fred Frederick Fritz Nyland. Can you tell our listeners about that encounter and what details Sampson got wrong?
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C
Yeah. So Nyland was a member of H company of the 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment, which is the one, again, Samson served in If I again, 501st, the one from Banner Brothers 506. Yeah. There's. There's two issues. One, the Samson in his memoirs gets the names of two of the brothers incorrect, and also the circumstances of it that. That Fritz Nyland. The circumstances, as Samson describes, is that Nyland lost all three of his brothers and that his mother was in combat in the Second World War, two in Europe, two actually during the D Day invasion and afterwards, and one in the Pacific, and that their mother received the three telegrams all at the same time informing the fate of her son. So that's. That's what he says, and that's how it's depicted in Saving Private Ryan. Right. Well, in reality, the mother did receive three telegrams that day, but Two of them said that two of her sons had died in Europe, but the other son, Robert Nyland, the other son, excuse me, not Robert Nyland, but the oldest brother, Edward. So the two who died were Robert Nyland, who was killed on D Day, and the other was Preston Nyland who was killed on June 7, both when they were engaged in combat the Germans. But the oldest brother, Edward, he was serving in the Pacific and his plane had been shot down by the Japanese over Burma. What is it was a former British colony. It's now known as Myanmar. So that's where a lot of intense fighting between the Americans, the British on one side and the Japanese on, on the other occurred in the, in the Pacific war outside of the island hopping campaign. So the telegram she received about Edward was that he was mia, missing in action, not kia, killed in action. And actually, and this always amazes me, Edward survived. He was shot down over the, over Burma. He wandered around the jungles for a few days and it's amazing he survived that. And then he was captured by the Japanese. And it's amazing, frankly, he survived that as well. Because the Japanese were notoriously brutal. The Japanese military was notoriously brutal to POWs, whether they were American, Australian, British, Chinese, Filipino. And he was liberated by the British army on May 4, 1945. And so actually, so Fritz Nyland only lost two of his brothers. The one who in the film is depicted as dying in the Pacific miraculously survived. But that error is still in the edition of the old edition of Lookout below. And because Samson's story was so famous, that gets repeated in a number of other historical works about D Day that, oh, there was this soldier named Francis Nyland. He lost three brothers almost simultaneously, just with over a few days. The mother received the telegrams the same day and the US army got him back to his family. So they didn't lose all of their sons. So again, two of the brothers had died. The oldest one actually survived, but his fate wasn't known for, until the, until May 14th of 1945, towards the end of the Second World War. The other thing is, of course in the movie, James Francis Ryan, played by Matt Damon, kind of a star making role for him, refuses to abandon his men. And you know, the, the, the soldiers sent to find him, the paratroopers sent to find him staged this big last stand against the Germans, this huge battle holding this bridge against them. And most of the, the soldiers who went to find Ryan are killed. I don't want to. I now feel sorry. Spoilers for a 25 year old movie. If anyone hasn't seen it, I won't say specifically who is, but there aren't many survivors. Ryan is one of them. In real life, it wasn't really that dramatic that once Samson had ascertained that Nyland had lost two of his brothers and possibly a third, he was sent away from the combat zone and sent back to the United States. So there wasn't some big final battle. And the only after he survived that was he set home. It wasn't that dramatic. I mean, once they had visited the graves of two of the brothers and the circumstances were clear, he was sent back home to his family and. And then eventually the older brother Edward was able to rejoin them following his own liberation about a year and a half later. So, ironically, there's a scene in Saving Private Ryan where it's right before the final battle where Matt Damon's character is talking to Tom Hanks about the night before his oldest brother went to enlist. And that was the last time the four of them were together. Right. Tells a very funny story about that. And in real life, that brother that the real world equivalent of Ryan Nyland is talking about was the other survivor. But that made it into a book by Stephen Ambrose. And Stephen Ambrose for a while was like the dean of works on the Second World War and works on the common soldiers during World War II. Not the professional soldiers, but the men who were drafted who were just doing this, their duty to fight against either the Germans or the Japanese and then wait for the big boat home. And that he wrote a book on D Day and that made it in the hands of the screenwriter Robert Rodat, who wrote the screenplay for Saving Private Ryan. And then Steven Spielberg, of course, was very interested in that. And then away we go.
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B
Right. And I mean, I think that's one of the most incredible parts of this memoir is your, your introduction pointing out that, hey, he got it wrong. This is, this isn't necessarily correct. And it's had this long lasting impact on how we memorize or memorialize World War II through different medias.
- [24:01]
C
Yeah. And. And again, it's still a remarkable story and it is still trend. I can't. You know, I've. I have two brothers myself. I couldn't even imagine finding out both of them were killed at the same time. Right. But, yeah, it's amazing how you go back, you look at the memoir and then you look up the further historical details, and it doesn't really take away necessarily for the impact of the film or the memoir, but it does give you a clearer Picture about what happened. And if I can go to the Pacific theater again. I mean, they're constantly. That famous photograph of the Marines raising the American flag on Mount Suribachi. The. The Marine Corps has done a number of investigations. They found that some of the men who claimed to be in that photograph actually weren't. And. And some people who. Who were actually there were. Were misidentified as not being there. And so that's been. That's been revised numerous times, right?
- [24:58]
B
Yeah. So getting to what you describe, and I completely agree with you, is the darkest chapters in this memoir is Samson's time as a pow. There's two chapters dedicated to this. What was his experience like at I might butcher this Stalag 2A? And what was that experience like for him? Did he. He being a Catholic chaplain, change his experience from, say, like other POWs in the camp?
- [25:37]
C
Yeah, I like to say that Samson had one and a half times in captivity because he was captured on D day and interrogated by some German officers, and it looked like they might execute him. And some of the men he was with. He talks about how a German sergeant who was Catholic could recognize Samson as a chaplain. Said, look, the man's a chaplain. The soldiers he's with, or he was providing spiritual aid to them. He. He, you know, we can't kill him. And then after interrogating him, the Germans just kind of let him wander off. Limu Gimu and Doug Limu and I always tell you to customize your car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. But now we want you to feel it. Cue the Emu music. Limu. Save yourself money today. Increase your wealth.
- [26:27]
B
Customize and save.
- [26:29]
C
We say that may have been too much feeling. Only pay for what you need@liberty mutual.com Liberty Liberty. Liberty Savings. Very underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company affiliates. Excludes Massachusetts, but the net. But the second time was, of course, during the Ardennes offensive in December of 1944. And basically, just to set the context for this here, D Day, of course, was a military disaster for the Germans because as Rommel correctly said, he was the famous desert fox of World War II, who Hitler had put along with Gerrit von Rundstedt as the commander of German forces in northwest France. Rommel famously said, we either stop the Allies on the beach or we don't stop them at all. If we don't drive them back into the Channel on the first day, if they establish a foothold in wherever they land and we can't drive them off, they will eventually break out and we'll start marching eastward. In the meantime, we're dealing with the Red Army. Marching westward will be caught between the two of them and there's no way we can possibly win this war after that. And of course, that takes them a while. But the Allied Expeditionary Force does break through Normandy by late June, early July in Operation Cobra. And then by August, Paris is liberated. But then, but then the Germans have a series of military victories. The Allied Expeditionary Force gets bogged down on the western front of the bow of the Hurricane Forest, which basically turns into a World War I style stalemate. You have Operation Market Garden, which was an attempt to drop thousands of American and British paratroopers behind German occupied lines in the Netherlands to seize all these bridges over the Rhine River. That ultimately fails. And so for Germany's military leadership, they have the perspective that, okay, this is kind of like World War I again, we control the center. We have enemies on the periphery. We send German forces to the west or the east to fight back the Allied Expeditionary Force or the Red army, depending on where they're needed. But for Adolf Hitler, who's less inclined now to trust his military leadership anyway after the military coup attempt against him on July 20, 1944, decides now we're not going to do that. We're going to launch a massive offensive in the west. Because Hitler thought his general strategy of kind of stalling for time with. And that was really Germany's only hope was that the Allies would start quarreling with each other and Germany could sign an armistice with one or the other. Hitler thought that, that all that would do is delay Germany's defeat. It would not prevent it. So he calls for a massive offensive in the west, which comes to get to the Ardennes Forest. The idea that Germany could replicate its great victory in 1940 over the British and the French armies and again literally push the Allies back to the sea and take the key ports of Antwerp and possibly Le Havre, which were the two main ports that supplies were being dropped off for the Expeditionary force. And the offensive was a winter offensive. Winter offensives are notoriously hard to pull off. We, you know, just today the Ukraine's finally start. The Ukrainians started their big offensive against the Russians and that took months to set up. And it's in the summer, so winter offensives are hard to pull off. The Germans did anyway. Hitler thought that it would boost the morale of his soldiers to attack after so much retreating. And it took the Allies completely by surprise. The Ardennes offensive failed in taking Antwerp, pushing the Allies back into the sea. Largely because, despite having the element of surprise, Germany had next to no air force to speak of at the time, and their army units were totally dependent upon cloud cover. But they did succeed in taking tens of thousands of British, American, and Canadian soldiers prisoner in late December and early late December of 1944, early January of 1945. And Sampson specifically was taken prisoner on December 20th of 1944, while basically looking for bodies of American paratroopers who'd been killed in the offensives and also looking for abandoned American medical equipment, because that's another thing chaplains had to do. And what made their work so difficult, they had to identify the bodies of dead soldiers and in many cases, not just perform last rites for them, but help bury them as well. Literally. Both Samson and Father Flynn, as well, literally had to dig the graves of dozens, if not hundreds of soldiers, because often there just wasn't anyone else around besides the chaplain and maybe one or two other soldiers to help. So he gets captured by the Germans, and he spends the rest of the war in German custody at Stalag 2A, which was located in Mecklenburg Vorpomman, which is in the north, what is now in the northeastern part of Germany. And he's there with about 80,000 other Allied prisoners. So that's the British, the French, a number of Canadian soldiers, a number of Polish soldiers, Italian soldiers after Italy switches sides in 1943, and also soldiers from Yugoslavia. There was a contingent of Serbians there and a number of Russian and Ukrainian soldiers as well. So it was kind of like a little United nations there. But Sampson argues the Germans were only barely observing the Geneva Conventions in terms of providing adequate food and medical care for the Allied POWs. And the camp conditions were filthy. A lot of soldiers died because of poor sanitation and poor medical care. And, I mean, one of the things that's often written about World War II is that the Germans abided by the Geneva Convention, which the German government had signed, which said, among other things, you can't summarily execute prisoners of war. You can't use them for slave labor. The only thing they have to give to their captives are their name, their rank, and their serial number. And you have to provide them with adequate food, housing, and medical care. Now, for much of World War II, the Germans observed that with regards to British or French, or after 1941, and really 42, 43, it's when he started encountering American soldiers in large numbers for American POWs, the Germans did not observe the Geneva Convention with regards to Soviet POWs. Over half of prisoners of War taken by the Germans from the Red army died in German captivity. And again, the Germans position was we don't need to follow the Geneva Convention regarding Soviet prisoners because the Soviet Union never signed it. Of course, that went the other way too. The Soviets didn't abide by the Geneva Convention either, dealing with access prisoners of war. But for the Americans, it was a very rough environment during this time period. And this is why I'm glad we published a new edition. Because way too often captivity in a German POW camp is often depicted as not that different from like being like a summer camp for grown men. Right. And again, that even leaving aside Bob Crane's antics, leave it at that. That notorious 60s TV show Hogan's Heroes is the most notorious example of that, where it's full of wacky adventures, the Germans are basically incompetent and, and there's very few actual Nazis around. It's a nice. His those sections of the memoir are a nice counterpoint to that where he depicts how rough it was and for a lot of soldiers from the Allied Expeditionary Force. Anthony Bavor, who's a great historian of World War II, he's written a great work a few years ago on the Ardennes offensive. He makes the case that the, the way the Germans fought on the Eastern Front against the Soviets, not taking prisoners of war, sometimes summarily executing them, brutal treatment towards POWs, if they did take them in that. Now that was happening on the Western Front because a lot of the Germans were, who were spearheading the Ardennes offensive were combat veterans of the Eastern Front, which again, that's not a surprise. I mean, 80% of German soldiers, 80, 85% of German soldiers who died in World War II died on the Eastern Front. But anyway, so again, it was during this kind of this, these final stages of the war, from December 1944 until the surrender of Germany in May of 1945, the way it was fought and the nature of it really changes on the Western Front as well. And the other thing is, and a lot of movies and TV shows kind of depict this. It's always kind of assumed that, well, you know, at the end of the war, the Americans were liberated by the US army showed up to liberate them, the British showed up to liberate them. No, actually, for a lot of American soldiers who were liberated at the end of World War II, they were liberated by the Red army because a lot of the German POW camps were located in the northeastern part of Germany, or it's now the northwestern part of Poland. Right. That Germany loses all this territory at the end of World War II. At the Yalta and Potsdam Conferences, Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt and Truman agree that, yeah, Germany's going to lose a lot of territory to Poland because Poland's losing a lot of territory to the Soviet Union. Right? But at the time, that's where a lot of the POW camps were. And so the Americans were liberated by the Red Army. And Samson got to see firsthand what a lot of Americans didn't get to see firsthand, which was the reality of the Eastern Front in World War II, which was so different from the Western Front in so many ways. Like, he talks about how the German guards and the commandant and the staff were mortally afraid of the Red army and the Soviets. And so they actually surrendered themselves to the American POWs shortly before the Soviets got there and asked the Americans to lock them up. Like, you can be in charge of the camp. You can meet the Soviets when they come in. And for a lot of them, that didn't save their lives. The Soviets just dragged them out and executed them anyway. And so a lot of the POWs who were liberated from the camp who just went on kind of. And as well as some of the Red army soldiers just went on kind of a blood bender of looting and indiscriminate violence against German civilians in the nearby towns. And Samson says the America, he. He and some other chaplains and other officers were able to persuade the Americans to try not to engage in that kind of behavior. And Samson says at one point, conditions were so bad at the camp, a lot of the soldiers, the American pow, started talking about staging an escape, but just rioting against the Germans. Like, we're probably, we're going to die in this camp, but we can take a whole bunch of German guards with us. And Samson was able to persuade them not to do it because he said, no, we'll all die if you do that. And again during the. Again during the Battle of the Bulge, there were a number of incidences, like the Malmedy Massacre, of German soldiers doing just that. If POWs even looked at them the wrong way of executing them. And then eventually it took a little while for a lot of them to be fully released because Stalin had informed Truman and Churchill and Attlee when he takes over, that we want you to transfer all of these Soviet citizens back to us or we won't give you your POWs back. We believe these are people who collaborate. If the Germans against us, and because, you know, the British and American governments wanted to get their POWs back they did transfer a lot of people who had fled to the British occupation zones, the American occupation zones, to the Soviets. And Stalin had a lot of these people shot. And those who weren't were sent to concentration camps in Siberia or Kazakhstan. And those who were still alive in 1956, Khrushchev gave them an amnesty. Now, Samson wasn't aware of all this, but he talks about, you know, it took us a while to get us back ultimately to American lines. And that's why. And again, for a lot. A lot of American readers have no real idea about any of this. And he brings it to life in a way even like a book I would write couldn't, because he saw it and experienced it firsthand.
- [39:25]
B
Right, exactly. And, like, kind of going back to what we were talking about with, like, Saving Private Ryan, you know, or Band of Brothers, this, the way it's been depicted is not necessarily correct or it's been misused to fit a certain narrative. And so you're right, Sampson does give us this reality check in some ways by showing us really, the darkest sides of POWs or the. The darkest experiences that they went through.
- [39:59]
C
And this was a common. You're right. And this was common in a lot of liberated camps, not just POW camps, but also concentration camps also liberated by the Red army, that often, sometimes it's depicted that when the liberation of the camps occurs and the Allies show up and the Germans run away, that's. And then the sun rises over the hill, that's the end of the story. And that's not. And there's what goes on afterwards and. And how people survived and try to return some normalcy to their life in extraordinary times is a crucial part of the story as well. I mean, I'm always joking if my students, because I've written a lot about this, that, you know, European history, world history doesn't end after 1945. Right. And that's why, again, I. I personally pushed for that lookout below. Get a new edition. Because he talks about his experience in occupation duty in Germany, and then he talks about his experiences in Korea. Because I've always actually argued that in many ways, the Korean conflict is kind of a continuation of an era that begins in the late 30s and continues up to the early 1950s. I like. So in 1937, for example, China and Japan go to war, which is the beginning of the Second World War in the. In Asia. Right. And then I would say this begins an era that goes the next 16 years until 1953, the death of Stalin and the ending of the Korean War. And so Samson's memoir takes us through a lot of that period. And another thing he had a really unique perspective on was during the Korean War, in The fall of 1950, after the General Douglas MacArthur surprise landing at Inchon had routed the North Koreans and the UN coalition was kind of chasing the North Koreans above the 38th parallel and trying to unify all of Korea under the UN auspices. Samson was there for the fall of Pyongyang. That was the one time in the Cold War the Communist capital actually fell to an Allied army. And he talks about the fact that one group of people who were coming out and welcoming the American and South Korean soldiers as liberators were. There was the Christian community in Pyongyang, which had been so viciously persecuted by Kim Il Sung's regime. And again, I mean, they weren't able to hold Pyongyang for too long, unfortunately, because a few months later, China intervenes in the Korean War and throws. And then throws the UN coalition backwards. And I like to think Samson was actually transferred to the south before that happened, or otherwise he might have been in captivity a third time.
- [43:01]
B
Right. Yeah. And it's a great transition to moving on, to talking about his experience in Korea. Right. What was his role in the Korean War? How was it different than his time, say, in Germany and France?
- [43:18]
C
Well, this time he was with a different. He was with a different unit. He was with the. The 11th. The 11th Airborne Division, in this case, not with. With the 501st. And his. His time there was a little shorter. He wasn't involved in the Korean War quite as long as he was in the. In the Second World War, but. So he wasn't there until its conclusion. But he talks about his experiences there as giving him hope that of the greater. That for all the cultural differences between himself and what he observed in both Japan and in Korea, he was comforted by the fact that, for example, Japan and the United States had been vicious enemies just shortly before. But he said that occupation duty in Japan went very easily. The people there are very friendly. They don't view America as an enemy anymore. And also, Japan didn't have a very large Christian population, but Korea did. So Samson kind of saw that his role in the Korean War was not just providing spiritual aid to American soldiers once again, but also to Korean. Korean civilians who had suffered in a conflict and particularly Korea's rather sizable Christian community. And he spends a lot of time in his memoirs talking about the experiences of Korean refugees who had fled from the north to the south due to their persecution for religious beliefs, whether they were Catholics or Methodists or what have you.
- [45:00]
B
Yeah. I think we have time for one more question.
- [45:04]
C
Sure.
- [45:04]
B
As we wrap things up here.
- [45:08]
C
You'Ve.
- [45:09]
B
Written this historical introduction. Are you going to be currently working on anything new? Are there any more historical introductions you're writing or writing forward? You're writing, or has your work moved in a new direction?
- [45:24]
C
Well, I'm. I don't have any other historical introductions lined up right now that I'm. I'm writing, although I will accept any invitations to do so. I'm actually writing a history. I'm putting together a primary source collection of the essential speeches of the Cold War. So I picked, like, 45 speeches. So I'm writing a little historical introduction to each one, adding some historical footnotes for a greater context. Actually, my workout on this new edition of Lookout below kind of inspired that many ways. And then I'm also working on a writing project looking at depiction of the Cold War in film. But another book that is going to directly tie back into religious history again is I want to write a history of the years 1979 to 1981, talking about the end of detente and the resuming of a very tense period in the Cold War. And a figure who plays just a huge role in that is, of course, John Paul ii. So he'll be a very significant figure in that work. And also about how, more broadly, I have an interest in the use of religious language and symbology and Cold War discourse. So we'll see where that takes me.
- [46:39]
B
Well, that all sounds fascinating, and I can't wait to read it. Sean, thanks for being on the show again.
- [46:47]
C
Thank you so much for having me, Allison. I appreciate it.
- [46:50]
B
Yeah. This has been New Books in Catholic Studies, a podcast panel on the New Books Network.