Exposing the Third Reich: Colonel Truman Smith in Hitler’s Germany

20. Politics, Travel, and Writing

302 20 politics, Travel, and Writing Colonel Smith Is Vindicated. —Headline, Baltimore Sun, 2 February 1945 I expect to read any day now in the New York Times that Mr. Ferdinand Mayer and Col. Truman Smith, prominent Rightists, have contributed to stirring up the hate and violence which played the key role in bringing about the recent assassination of our President. —Truman Smith, letter to Ferdinand Mayer, December 1963 Smith had some creative notions about the U.S. Army’s personnel policies, at least one of which came to fruition in part due to his friendship with Clare Boothe Luce. Both Smiths knew and liked Luce from Berlin and Washington days, and Kay enjoyed telling amusing stories about the attractive woman who would be a journalist -playwright-congresswoman-ambassador in the course of her life. She was also the wife of Time magazine publisher Henry Luce. Kay once remarked of her good friend that she had a woman’s body and a man’s mind, and knew how to use both. In an 18 September 1944 letter, as a member of Congress serving on its Military Affairs Committee, Luce thanked Smith, who was also her constituent, for “suggestions on making the regular army more effective.” She said she awaited a memorandum from him, “and when I get it will draft it into legislation at the earliest possible moment.”1 Smith had proposed that members of Polish units that had participated in Allied campaigns in the war in Europe should be settled in the United States. Luce’s Joint Resolution of the House of Representatives on 19 February 1945 said, in part, that “upon the politics, Travel, and Writing 303 cessation of hostilities in Europe, with their wives and children, all officers and enlisted men and others who have served with the Polish Armed Forces in French, British and American theatres of war” will be admitted to the United States. Smith wanted to do right by the Polish fighters and their families whose homeland was dominated by the Soviets after the war and who were displaced persons. But, having experienced the drastic reduction in the size of the U.S. Army after World War I from millions to about 140,000 for most of the interwar period, Smith was also concerned with how much his army would be reduced in the aftermath of World War II. The conscription law was allowed to expire but was then renewed when voluntary enlistments were insufficient to man the force. Various plans for universal military service were surfaced and discussed, but none was made law. Smith, in his proposal to Luce, was promoting a kind of foreign legion. His initiative would be modified, but eventually an approximation of what he wanted would be realized. Five years later, on 2 June 1950, Luce sent a “Dear Truman” letter from the Waldorf-Astoria saying, “Here’s a copy of that Bill, you remember, which we introduced in 1945.” She signed off, “love to you and Kay, affectionately, Clare.” That bill had evolved into a program granting American citizenship to qualified young men— most of them formally identified as displaced persons adrift in a broken postwar Europe—after five years of honorable service in the U.S. Army. Many were from Middle and Eastern Europe and found themselves in Germany after the war for a variety of reasons.2 Luce chose not to run for reelection in 1946, when she resumed writing plays. Smith ran for her office, but he was defeated in the Republican primary by John Davis Lodge, who went on to win Connecticut ’s 4th congressional district seat. Smith and Lodge enjoyed an amicable relationship, and Smith gave both Luce and Representative Lodge credit for pursuing the 1950 displaced persons legislation , the seed for which he had planted in 1944.3 Smith’s daughter, Kätchen, a Smith graduate of 1943, later worked briefly for Congressman Lodge, which suggests the absence of any lingering resentment from the 1946 primary contest on the part of either man. Kätchen had earlier worked as a reporter for the Washington Times Herald and would later work for the United Nations in New York before marrying and settling in Middletown, Connecticut. Smith, like most Regular Army officers of his vintage, had 304 EXPOSING THE THIRD REICH not spoken out regarding party politics while in uniform, but his private writings and Kay’s letters and memoir leave no...