To celebrate Women’s History Month, the American Library hosted a talk on 8 March by Professor Emma Long from the University of East Anglia, who spoke to an engaged and appreciative audience about the women justices of the United States Supreme Court. You can read all about it in fellow Library Scholar Lauren Cortese’s blog post.
Professor Long highlighted a few books about the justices that are available to check out from the Library, shown at bottom. If you’re interested in the Supreme Court and the American legal system, we have additional titles, so pay us a visit and ask one of our knowledgeable librarians to assist you.
There are a number of pressing issues facing the nation when it comes to women’s rights. One is the pending Supreme Court case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which could overturn the Court’s 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade, upholding a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion and control over her own reproductive decisions. According to the Center for Reproductive Rights: ‘The right to safe and legal abortion is a fundamental human right protected under numerous international and regional human rights treaties and national-level constitutions around the world.’ [UPDATE: On 24 June 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade, holding that the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion, in a case that has troubling implications for due process protections in America. The text of the decision can be found here. I recommend reading the dissent by Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.]
There is also the necessity of confirming President Biden’s nominee to fill the vacancy left by the announced retirement of Justice Stephen Breyer. Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson is a highly qualified candidate and would be the Court’s first Black female justice, not to mention being from this writer’s hometown of Miami, Florida. I venture to predict that despite the political sideshow surrounding Judge Jackson’s nomination, Congress will do the right thing in confirming her. [UPDATE: On 7 April 2022, a bipartisan group of Senators confirmed Judge Jackson’s nomination as the 116th Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court. She was sworn in and took her seat on 30 June.]
There is another, perhaps surprisingly, unresolved issue: the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the US Constitution, guaranteeing equal rights for women.[1] First drafted in 1923 by leaders of the suffrage movement and finally taken up by Congress in 1972, the ERA requires the ratification of three-quarters, or 38 of the 50 states. Virginia became the 38th state to ratify it in 2020. However, according to the Brennan Center for Justice: ‘The ratification deadlines that Congress set after it approved the amendment have lapsed, and five states have acted to rescind their prior approval.’
The resolution to this legal nail-biter rests on the issues of whether Congress can waive the time bar (a procedural limitation not mandated by the Constitution) and whether states are permitted to rescind their ratifications. The 50.8% of ‘female persons’ who make up the US population, according the 2020 US census, await the answer. It’s been nearly a century since the ERA was first put forward by suffragists. I have no doubt that even if it eludes passage this time around, it will eventually prevail.
The text of the ERA reads: ‘Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex. The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.’ If ratified, it will be the 28th Amendment to the US Constitution.
I’ll close by noting that all opinions expressed in this post are those of the writer, and do not represent the position of the American Library, which is one of neutrality.
–post by Suzanne Solomon
[1] Gender equality is guaranteed under the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, in great part due to the brilliant legal strategy of American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) lawyer Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who would go on to become the Court’s second woman and first Jewish female Justice.
On the façade of the New York Appellate Division, First Department Courthouse in Manhattan, there is a Holocaust memorial sculpture carved into a column of Carrara marble, a representation of the Auschwitz concentration camp, based in part on an aerial photograph taken by the 15th Air Force, United States Army Air Forces. I discovered it quite by accident, on one of my usual long strolls in the city, often ending by stopping at a park to jot down my thoughts. The park in this instance was Madison Square Park, a green expanse popular with locals enjoying an al fresco lunch, as well as with tourists taking snaps of the nearby Flatiron Building.
‘Memorial to Victims of the Injustice of the Holocaust’, a sculpture by New York artist Harriet Feigenbaum on the Madison Avenue side of the courthouse at E. 25th Street, was installed in 1990. The artist worked from ‘photographs of the death houses and a rendering of the main camp at Auschwitz in Poland, drawn by a prison inmate in 1944’, she told the New York Times in 1988. The piece had the impact on me probably intended by makers of public art: I was startled, then riveted, then overcome. I visited the sculpture many times afterward, a regular feature of my walks, a pilgrimage to honor the memory of the dead as well as those who sacrificed their lives to stop the genocide.
The Holocaust was ‘the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jewish men, women and children by the Nazi regime and its collaborators’[1], as well as ‘at least five million prisoners of war, Romany, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, and other victims’.[2] Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi death camp, was liberated by Soviet troops on 27 January 1945, commemorated in the UK and Europe as Holocaust Memorial Day. Over a million people[3] were murdered there, the vast majority Jews who had been deported from countries all over Europe in furtherance of the Nazis’ ‘final solution’ to annihilate the Jewish population.
Auschwitz was only one of a network of 44,000 concentration, forced labor and death camps and other incarceration sites in the Nazi-occupied countries. Dachau was the first such camp, opened in Germany in 1933 to intern political prisoners. It ‘served as a model for all later concentration camps and as a “school of violence” for the SS men under whose command it stood.’[4] Over a twelve-year period, the camp imprisoned political opponents of the Nazi regime, Jews, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Roma (Gypsies), homosexuals, ‘asocials’ and repeat criminal offenders.[5] The prisoners were used for forced labour. German doctors performed medical experiments on others. Over 200,000 people were detained there; of those, at least 28,000 died. American forces liberated the camp on 29 April 1945. ‘As Allied units approached, at least 25,000 prisoners from the Dachau camp system were force marched south or transported away from the camps in freight trains. During these so-called death marches, the Germans shot anyone who could no longer continue; many also died of starvation, hypothermia, or exhaustion. … In early May 1945, American forces liberated the prisoners who had been sent on the death march.’[6]
Photograph of the Dachau Concentration Camp circa May 1945, taken by the author’s father, Flight Officer Eugene L. Solomon. On the reverse, he wrote: ‘moat, barbed wire, high tension wire, living quarters.’
In October’s post for this blog, I wrote about my father’s service as a Jewish B-17 pilot with the 384th Bomb Group, stationed at Grafton Underwood. In a 2006 family interview, he described a mission in May of 1945, when he and his crew flew to an air station outside Munich to pick up supplies ‘destined for Dachau concentration camp.’ They then drove to the camp. When they went through the gates, they saw these ‘thousand men in striped uniforms.’ They were ‘walking bones – their eyes were sunk into their heads, and they would look at you and … mumble and try to talk. We were just stunned … looking at these people that are literally walking dead.’ He went into the commanding officer’s office and found in his desk ‘a series of little insignias. One was a gas mask.’ The crew walked through the gas chamber and saw ‘pipes with the false spray heads.’
As you walked in there were tons of shoes and clothing and all and you would see piles of adult shoes and piles of children’s shoes … when you came out the other end, you walked into the crematorium—there were three crematoriums there. There was a table there with a grinder, so if any of the bones weren’t completely demolished, they would put them into that grinder and grind them up and there was a basket there to catch it. And then they would take all of the ashes and bring it in the back. There was a huge field back there where for several years they were dumping ashes. … You’re twenty years old and you see that, it really shakes you up. And you don’t know what to say to the people. You don’t speak their language … You go through the barracks where they had nothing but a flat board where like nine people would sleep, and then there would be another deck and another deck, and they would crowd them in there. … There were thousands of US troops in there, and they brought food in. … We brought an airplane full of supplies. … There were men, there were women, there were Jews, there were Gentiles, there were gypsies. There were all kinds of people. [My mother asks, off camera: ‘Children’?] ‘Oh, yeah, there were children. … It was a terrifying sight.
It’s not hard to conclude that what my father and his crew witnessed, the horrific aftermath of unspeakable acts, was in fact, as the Holocaust memorial sculptor back in Manhattan saw it, ‘the gate to hell.’ If it was evil that conceived of and created this hell, it was indifference that facilitated it, and all the genocides afterward.
Holocaust Memorial Day commemorates the six million Jews murdered during the Holocaust and the millions of other people killed under Nazi persecution of other groups and in genocides that followed in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur. The theme for this year’s remembrance is ‘One Day’. As Holocaust survivor Iby Knill said: ‘You didn’t think about yesterday, and tomorrow may not happen, it was only today that you had to cope with and you got through it as best you could.’
You can find resources on genocide and the Holocaust at the American Library and check out e-books in our collection here. The Imperial War Museum’s Second World War and Holocaust Partnership Programme collaborated with writers to create an online exhibit, One Story, Many Voices, featuring the accounts of survivors. Other resources are available on the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust website.
It was a warm, dry autumn day on September 18, 2021, when I made the pilgrimage to Grafton Underwood to see the airbase where my father, Flight Officer Eugene Leonard Solomon, was stationed during the Second World War. I’d intended to visit the previous year, but my plans were scuttled by another global emergency: the Covid-19 pandemic. In England for the duration, I shared the uncertainty of its course until a vaccine was developed, the enforced isolation, the restrictions on movement and ordinary routines, the threats to health and well-being and the collective grief over mass deaths, while admiring the bravery and dedication of National Health Service and other frontline workers. I couldn’t have known it then, but that experience would put me in the perfect frame of mind to retrace the footsteps of the twenty-year-old pilot who arrived on British shores on April 1, 1945.
My father was a B-17 pilot with the 1st Air Division, 384th Bomb Group. He entered active duty on November 20, 1944, after more than a year of flight training and qualification to pilot the Flying Fortress. He was assigned to the 547th Bomb Squadron, whose patch (second image, below) says it all.
The 384th Bomb Group: ‘Keep the Show on the Road’547th Bombardment Squadron Patch, image courtesy of the American Air Museum in Britain
My guide for the visit was Matt Smith, a personable and knowledgeable volunteer who coordinates local activities for the 384th Bomb Group, Inc. (the post-war association formed by 384th Veterans in the late 1960s). While my journey there was just a short train ride from Norwich to the East Midlands, Matt immediately made me feel welcome by collecting me from the station. We made our way to the picturesque village of Grafton Underwood to see the stained glass memorial window at St. James the Apostle Church. I’d seen pictures of it, but nothing could compare to the experience of viewing this stunning tribute in person, with the poignant words at bottom: ‘Coming Home’. Our family is Jewish, so for me, it was especially moving to see the Star of David included there.
Matt SmithAt Grafton Underwood‘This window is dedicated before God in remembrance of those who gave their lives for freedom during World War II while serving at Grafton Underwood 1942-1945, especially those members of the 384th Bomb Group (H) of the United States 8th Air Force.’
The base, built in 1941, was nicknamed ‘Grafton Undermud’. The land was requisitioned from the Boughton Estate, reverting to the estate after the war. According to the 384th Bomb Group website, it comprised some 500 acres and could accommodate up to 3,000 personnel, with ‘all the facilities needed, including a hospital, cinema, and chapel.’ The living quarters were mainly of Quonset hut construction, with more permanent structures like mess halls and clubs built from brick. Here I should emphasize the importance of having Matt Smith as my guide. He made it his mission to help me see the base as my father would have, which is no small feat, considering it has mostly been reclaimed by woods and the activities of a working estate.
8th Air Force deployment at peak strength marking USAAF and RAF airfields in the east of England, July 1944-August 1944, image courtesy of the 2d Air Division Digital ArchiveAerial view of airbase, image courtesy of 384th Bomb Group
Next, we visited the 384th Bomb Group Memorial, a granite structure on the main runway which informs visitors of this notable fact: ‘The first and last bombs dropped by the 8th Air Force were from airplanes flying from Grafton Underwood.’
Author at 384th Bomb Group Memorial384th BG Memorial with 1st AD triangle tail marking
The 384th lost 1,581 men, about third of its combat crewmen. Among those were 425 killed in action, 880 prisoners of war and 62 who remain missing in action; another 214 fatalities were from other causes. The 384th website reports that ‘combat aircrews considered themselves very lucky if they survived their missions, becoming members of the “Happy Warriors Club” as a result.’ Reflecting on these losses impressed on me how lucky we were to have my father return safely when so many families did not get to see their loved ones ‘come home’.
We walked around the airfield, with its clearly visible runway and taxi strips and the road to the base sentry gate. Matt pointed out where the planes would have been parked, camouflaged by trees.
We walked the foundations of the 547th Squadron’s barracks, the site of the movie theater and officers’ club and, in the distance, the operations block where the air crews had their briefings.
547th Squadron barracksParking‘Now showing’ … the movie theatreOperations block in distance
My father and his navigator, Ted Gore, were the youngest in his crew. In between bombing raids, they flew submarine patrols, food drops and weather missions. It’s easy to imagine the periods of waiting, when they occupied themselves with routine chores, movies, visits to the local pub and constant pranks. It’s a bit harder to put myself in the cockpit of a B-17, although I feel a rush of adrenaline thinking about how it must’ve been.
The crew: Pilot Lawrence E. Thurston, Co-Pilot Eugene Leonard Solomon, Navigator Theodore T. Gore, Togglier (bombardier) Robert Lee Wilkinson, Radio Operator/Gunner William O. King, Engineer/Top Turret Gunner Oliver T. Larson, Ball Turret Gunner Elias S. Huron, Waist (Flexible) Gunner James Lindsay, Tail Gunner Ralph Cauthen. My father is pictured top row, second from left. The other crew members are not pictured in order. If any readers can match names to faces, please get in touch in the comments.
Flight Officer Solomon was credited with two combat missions as co-pilot: Mission #315, on April 20, 1945, targeting the Railroad Marshalling Yards in Seddin, Germany, and Mission #316, on April 25, 1945, targeting the Skoda Armament Works in Pilsen, Czechoslovakia. On the latter mission, he co-piloted Hell’s Messenger with the 384th Bombardment Group (H), in the last strategic bombing mission of the war in Europe. The Sortie Report replicated on the 384th Bomb Group’s website states that ‘the 384th had the honor of dropping the final bombs of the war on Axis Targets’.
Veteran readers of this blog will be familiar with the friendly rivalry between B-17 and B-24 crews. I hope my 2d Air Division friends will forgive me for repeating the old quip told to me: that B-24s were the crate B-17s were delivered in. On a more sobering note, my father’s account of his final bombing raid is a vivid testament to the B-17’s legendary capability.
My father described his experience of that last air raid in an interview I did with him before he passed away:
The Germans knew they were coming and the ack-ack [anti-aircraft guns] was very, very heavy. The weather was very bad. The first time they tried to bomb, they couldn’t get a sight. They went in again but couldn’t see a thing. The squadron leader took them around a third time, and they came in at a different angle (in the meantime getting shot up like hell). There were enough breaks in the clouds for the bombardiers to get a sighting of the plant and “bombs away”—except in his airplane. The flak was so fierce that it cut the wires and their bombardier couldn’t release the bombs. You can never land with bombs; they’ll blow you up. They were flying “hot camera”, taking pictures of the bomb hits, so they didn’t have a ball turret gunner. Ted [their navigator] figured out where they were—over a train marshalling yard—and his engineer and bombardier went back to the open bomb bays at 25,000 feet, without parachutes, and kicked all the bombs out of the plane. The bombs had already been armed—there was no way of disarming them. As they left the target they were flying on another guy’s wing, and he got shot up and lost control of his plane. He recovered but slid into them. My father yelled over to Red [his co-pilot] “Let me have it!” and he grabbed the wheel and sucked the airplane up and the other plane slid under them. The tail gunner was screaming. If it had hit, they would’ve both gone down. The flight was about 10 hours and 40 minutes—the longest flight a B-17 had ever made. When they got back to England, as they were landing, one of the engines cut out, no gas. You can “slow fly” a B-17 at 75 or 80 mph and slowly lose altitude. They were glad to get back home.
Dad stayed in close touch with his navigator, Ted Gore, all their lives. He never forgot his crew, along with the nearly 2,100 men and women it took to keep the Flying Fortresses and crews in the air: the nurses, doctors, mechanics, armorers, ground crews and other support units. While we owe more than we can repay to the bravery of these young men who risked and often lost their lives, it’s also right to reflect on the death and destruction caused by such powerful bombs. The air crews were part of a concerted and successful effort to halt the murderous spread of Nazism, at great cost. At a young age, they faced a painful moral calculus (conscious or not) that no doubt took its toll on them.
After VE Day on May 8, 1945, Flight Officer Solomon would be assigned to occupation duty in Germany and other missions, which I’ll cover in a later post.
The 384th Bomb Group has been an invaluable resource, from connecting me with the gracious Matt Smith to providing a wealth of information and access to digitized archival materials: https://384thbombgroup.com. Many thanks to all involved, especially Matt and Memorial Site Supervisor Kevin Flecknor.
The American Library and the Second Air Division Memorial Trust have also been a wonderful resource, both in my family research as well as in supporting my PhD in creative and critical writing with the UEA American Library Scholarship. I’m grateful to the Governors, Trust Librarian Orla Kennelly, and my library colleagues for their collegiality and support.
My father passed away in 2009 and never knew that I had moved to England or visited his airbase, but I felt very near to him as I walked in his footsteps. I’m certain he wouldn’t at all have been surprised to find me there.
Twenty years later, I can still smell the charged electrical burn of the pile as I walked by it, weeks after the 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan. The last standing piece of the twin towers, the braided steel facade known as the shroud, rose from the wreckage. NYPD officers were corralling tourists on Lower Broadway, urging them away from what was now a mass grave. As a New Yorker, I understood the pull—the incomprehension at a vast absence where there was once a living, vibrant presence, at one moment a teeming plaza, busy offices stacked up to the sky, the next, a pile of still smoking rubble, a void.
I was on my way to a training for the legal first responders of 9/11: a group of volunteer attorneys mobilized to help the victims’ families negotiate the grim bureaucratic gauntlet such a mass disaster presents. New York had initiated an emergency procedure for recording these unprecedented deaths, since ordinarily the family of a missing person (for that’s what their loved ones were, in the absence of a body) would have to wait three years before asking a court to issue a death certificate. The next of kin would still have to complete the paperwork to prove that their relative—spouse, child, grandchild, parent, grandparent or sibling—had been at the World Trade Center at the time of the attack, but they now had the option of requesting what was known as an expedited death certificate.
My colleagues and I would be working with the New York City Medical Examiner’s office to provide the legal documentation the families needed to pick up the shattered pieces of their lives: to apply for emergency cash grants, file for social security and insurance benefits, initiate probate proceedings, plan funerals. (There were other sources of assistance available to those without legal next of kin status, such as domestic partners.) The staff of the Medical Examiner’s office would concurrently be working—as they still are, to this day—to identify victims through DNA analysis of remains recovered at the scene. The City of New York set up a Family Assistance Center at Pier 94 on the Hudson River to process these thousands of deaths and assist the families of first responders, office, restaurant and building workers, air crews and passengers. There were booths with representatives from federal, state and local agencies, companies that had employed people killed in the attacks, nonprofit and charitable organizations, trauma counselors, childcare facilities, a canteen, National Guard and New York City police and fire department personnel and, at our booths equipped with computer stations for the legal forms and resources we needed, the lawyers.
Our job was to interview family members so that we could record in affidavit form the information needed to issue an expedited death certificate. Names and birth dates and addresses. Biographical, family and employment details. We had to see the next of kin’s photo ID and proof of their relationship with the missing person, such as a marriage certificate or a child’s birth certificate. All of that paled next to the question that was crucial for stating the basis of their belief that their loved one was in the World Trade Center at the time of its collapse: their last contact with the missing person and the details of that contact. The hurried goodbye as she rushed off to work. The phone call from his office on the 101st floor. It must have felt horribly insensitive, but more often than not the family members displayed grace, fortitude and patience.
One thing was not at issue: the manner of death. All the reported deaths of the 9/11 victims would be classified as homicides.
Working in disaster relief settings like this can be stressful and emotional, if also gratifying. My role was a small one, but such experiences tend to leave vivid impressions. Here are some of mine:
The community liaison officers of the NYPD, who escorted the family members to our workstations. I ran into one of these cops years later, a compact woman with curly brown hair, a freckled nose and kind eyes. We recognized each other immediately, with the connection of people who have shared the aftermath of conflict. One evening, the officer saw me get up from my chair to trail after one of the family members, a new widow pregnant with her first child, as she made her way down the corridor to the next station. It was the end of my shift, but I felt helpless, wanting to do more for her, for all of them. But there wasn’t any more I could do. ‘Go home,’ the officer would say to me. ‘Get some rest.’ She knew the feeling. We’d be back again the next day, and the day after that.
The American Red Cross mental health counselor who was my partner, on hand to assist family members during the interview if needed. She gave me her Albany chapter Red Cross pin to remember her by. I would later honor that partnership by volunteering with the New York City chapter’s disaster response unit, doing emergency relief work after Superstorm Sandy and the Miracle on the Hudson, the emergency landing of US Airways Flight 1549. As a Red Cross volunteer, I would also attend memorial ceremonies for the families at Ground Zero when it was a construction site for the rising towers of the new World Trade Center.
What I recall as a surreal bus stop at Pier 94, a waiting area for families who would be ferried to the pile to see the spot where their loved ones drew their last breath. I still wonder if I imagined it.
The mounds of comfort donations. I was given a teddy bear by my Red Cross partner. Someone else was handing out moisturizer and lip balm, surprisingly useful for hours spent reciting legal requirements, eliciting information, apologizing for intruding on precious and private last moments to record the details needed for the death record. For years I kept these items, the smell and tactility of them evoking what memory had elided.
But most of all, the gentle gratitude of these families faced with unimaginable loss, who only wanted their loved ones’ deaths to mean something so that in the future such tragedies could be prevented, sparing others their bottomless pit of grief.
American Library 
