James F. Tierney (d. 3May2009)

IG FARBEN WAR CRIMES TRIALS AT NUREMBERG Jim Tierney was a fascinating neighbor. He arrived in Europe as an Army Lieutenant and freshly-minted lawyer -- too late to fight the war, but just in time to become the documentation officer at the Nuremberg trials of the industrial chemical cartel, "I.G. Farben", which used slave labor to power Hitler's war machine with synthetic fuel, munitions, artificial rubber, nylon -- even the poison gas used to kill enemies of the state and millions of Jews.

To me, "IG Farben" was where my father worked when he was a Case Officer at the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) Frankfurt station, later in the 1950s. Because of Jim, I finally looked up what all the fuss was about. The IG Farben story is an amazing tale.

IG FARBEN RECONSTRUCTION After the cartel was broken up, Jim worked with several of the "pieces" to protect their remaining infrastructure, secure scarce materials, and restore their business and thus Germany's prosperity. Members of the Boards of Directors at Cassela Farbwerke Mainkur (Frankfurt) and Bobingen AG für Textil-Faser (near Augsburg) gave Jim gifts inscribed in memory of their common work together.

You knew Jim came from The Greatest Generation because he kept insisting he wasn't anybody important. For me, Jim's generation embodied the greatness Americans can sometimes achieve because he -- one and the same man from that generation -- could both prosecute the leading figures of a foreign society for war crimes, and work with others from the same set of leaders to rebuild their personal and national prosperity.

LEGAL CAREER Jim became a prosecuting attorney for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in 1956, and was appointed by President Nixon in 1969 to serve as the FCC's administrative law judge. After retirement in 1990, he served as an arbitrator for the DC Bar and NASD, the National Association of Securities Dealers, a quasi-private group set up to regulate stock brokers etc. under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. New York Stock Exchange self-regulatory functions and NASD responsibilities were consolidated under FINRA, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, in 2007.

It was difficult to pry his stories out of him, but I tried anyway. Jim died 3 May 2009 (obituary). Please mail me your corrections, additions --- and memories. .

Jim’s parents had little money. Jim did law school at night and worked days at the British Purchasing Commission, which today is known for its airplane purchases -- so many, that it stimulated the American aviation industry before the US was even in the war. From Jim's point of view, the action wasn't just airplanes. The Purchasing Commission was busy implementing the Lend-Lease Plan by commissioning the purchase of everything under the sun, especially airplanes, ships, lifeboats, lifeboat divots, tanks, machine guns, anything iron or steel that looked like a boat or could be made into one. Jim’s born-in-Scotland grandmother got him into this historic $35-a-week job.

LEND-LEASE BACKGROUND: President Roosevelt recognized that the Fascist forces of Europe would have to be stopped, but entering the war was politically unpalatable to most Americans until the Pearl Harbor attack of Sunday, 7 December 1941. This illustrates the adage that "Man cannot see the writing on the wall until his back is against it."

Pearl Harbor was Dec 1941, yet France had fallen and England was bombed in the Battle of Britain during the summer and autumn of 1940. Lend-Lease provided $50.1B (nearly $700B in 2007 dollars) of materials presented to the public as a loan or a lease.

Jim did so well as the "bench boy" or go-fer that the commissioners recommended him to the Henry J. Kaiser Shipbuilding company on Church St. up around 87th or 90th Ave. That office had opened in January of 1942. Kaiser was rich compared to Great Britain, and Jim’s salary went from $35/week to $90/wk.

Jim would have preferred to enlist in the the Navy, but Chester W. Nimitz told him his eyesight was terrible and the Office of Naval Personnel (which was what Nimitz ran at the time) wasn't going to make any exemptions. Handwritten letters from Nimitz sell for $1900 on eBay, a hand-addressed envelope is $400, so I told Jim to go find this autographed letter. Fleet Commander Nimitz rose to be Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet in WWII and led the Battle of Midway and the liberation of Guam.

In 1942, Jim volunteered to enlist one month early in the Army-Air Force. After struggling to make his bunk in Ft. Dix New Jersey for 3 weeks, the Army sent him to a hotel in Atlantic City. The Army had commandeered the hotels and there weren't any maids or room service, but real beds were easier to deal with than bunks in a barracks.

There was a shortage of rifles to train with -- the other, advanced troops got the 1903 Springfield rifle, enlarged from 7 mm (about .28 caliber) to .30 caliber in 1906, and called the "30-ought six" ever after. It was the best bolt-action rifle ever made, and beloved of snipers as late as the Viet Nam war. Jim, unfortunately, got the old British Lee Enfield rifle and complains to this day it was too heavy. The Enfield is .303 caliber.

ON TO YALE & GLEN MILLER People poured into the Army, and Jim was asked to help an intelligence unit interview new recruits looking not only for criminality but also for Nazi sympathizers. He was made a corporal and transferred to do more interviews at Yale University, where he lived in Graduate Hall.

One interviewee was the wife of Moe Purtill, Glenn Miller's drummer, who was a German American and had to be checked for Nazi sympathies. After enlisting, Glenn Miller had established a band that was billeted on the University campus (1943-44) along with Jim. Miller's twenty-four piece marching band, which later grew to forty pieces, accompanied the cadets to the New Haven Green for morning review and evening retreat ceremonies.

Still a corporal, Jim went to to Officer Candidate School (OCS) in late 1943, probably at Ft. Benning, Georgia. OCS had been cranking out "90 Day Wonders" (2nd Lieutenants), but just as Jim arrived the course was put back to 120 days. The fun and games included jumping off a tower into a tank of water to simulate abandoning ship if you got torpedoed on the high seas. By grabbing your barracks bag (a lighter-weight duffel bag) as you went down, you could fill it with air and use it for flotation. Jim's bag wound up around his neck, and he had to be pulled out of the tank, but they passed him anyway.

By February 1944, Jim was a 2nd lieutenant on his way to the Combat Intelligence School of the US Amy Air Force in Harrisonburg PA. Intelligence for combat begins with learning to identify military aircraft as friend or foe before shooting them out of the sky. This skill was especially important for the heavy bomber crews pointing anti-aircraft guns at other planes.

Knowing more than he ever wanted to about every plane in the Japanese, German, British and American fighting forces, Jim transferred from Harrisonburg to Fresno, CA for a couple weeks and then on to Walla Walla Washington, where many heavy bombing crews were being trained.

During World War II the 2,164-acre Walla Walla Army Airbase was developed as a training base for B-17 ("The Flying Fortress") and B-24 aircraft ("The Liberator"), America's two heavy bombers. During the war years, it was estimated that more than 8,000 officers were trained in Walla Walla producing 594 heavy bomber crews. Those crews completed approximately 114,414 hours in the air while training. (See http://www.wallawallaairport.com/ownership/history.cfm ) Jim thought the base population overall was about 15,000 people when he was there. (Contemporaneous air base archival newspaper material at http://www.wallawallaairport.com/archives/article.htm is neglected and unsearchable 7/09.)

Our other WWII bombers were the B-25, small enough to take off from aircraft carriers, and the B-26, used extensively on D-Day. The B-26 was fast, but dangerous on takeoff if the crew was not well-trained.

The B-24 Liberator has 4 engines, a double tail and 50 caliber machine guns -- not 30 like the British. 50 caliber guns can tear buildings and other planes to shreds. The plane had dual-barrel guns in the nose, in the upper ball, and in the tail turrets, while the waist gunner manned either of two single guns pointing out opposite sides of the plane. These are the days before "radar lock" and "missile launch". If you want to get rid of an attacking plane, shoot it down yourself.

Jim got lots of rides on B-24s and could still recognize Yakima, Moses Lake and places all over eastern Washington State from the air.

A less enjoyable part of the work was recovering the bodies of dead B-24 crews who crashed into the Blue Mountains on a weekly basis, dying only 50 miles away and often on night training flights. Sometimes the dead men were from local states, and Jim or others from Walla Walla had to accompany the bodies home, both to inform relatives of the loss, and to see to it that the coffins remained sealed, as the bodies were typically destroyed and burned beyond recognition. (The planes carried up to 3,600 gals of aviation fuel.)

Crews were typically 10 persons: pilot, co-pilot, engineer, radio operator, navigator, bombardier, nose, ball, waist and tail gunners

The war effort could sustain one or two B-24 crashes on a weekly basis out at Walla Walla, as over 18,000 planes were built, although in several variations. B-24s dropped over 630 kilotons of bombs -- the equivalent of 30 small atomic bombs. (Hiroshima's Little Boy yielded 15 kilotons; Nagasaki's Fat Man yielded 20 kilotons.)

B-24 bombers. Note the Plexiglas belly bubble, the mid-ships side-gun (behind the wing) and the tail gun.

After about 5 months in Walla Walla, Jim transited through Wright Patterson Field, Dayton Ohio to Freeman Field in Seymour Indiana. A bomber group (40 to 50 aircraft) was formed and training to go to the Pacific from Walla Walla, but Jim was split off from it.

Freeman Field was a repository for captured foreign aircraft, where they were flown, tested, and reverse-engineered (formally, Freeman Field was home to the Foreign Aircraft Evaluation Center of the US Air Force). Enemy radar sets and even V-1 and V-2 rockets arrived at the base.

TUSKEGEE AIRMEN: Several all-black groups including the Tuskegee Airmen also trained there, sometimes with public racial tensions on the base (recollected here, from Disabled American Veterans Magazine for Jan/Feb 2006).

Flying out of their own separate airfields, the Tuskegee Airmen flew P-51 Mustang fighter escorts for heavy bomber missions. Often the bombers were flying into Germany across the Alps and the fighters were coming up for escort duty out of small airstrips in the foothills of northern Italy and Austria. The bomber crews who came to love to see the fighter escorts come into sight often never realized their pilots were black. This was certainly the case for one disabled B-24 crew shot up over Linz, Austria and forced to make an emergency landing on small airstrip off the Adriatic in northern Italy. Everyone that rushed out to help the disabled plane was black. On that occasion, one crew member refused to sleep in the black sleeping quarters; today, you couldn’t keep these men away from their reunions together. http://www.af.mil/news/airman/0202/crew.html

At Freeman Field, Jim liked running around on a forklift and was caught stacking aircraft engines and upbraided because "officers don't work". Jim made it to 1st Lieutenant anyway.

The move from Walla Wall WASH to Ohio pointed Jim away from the Pacific Theater and towards Europe.

Promoted to First Lieutenant, Jim was sent through France (with a brief visit to Paris) to then to Germany. Luxury transportation into Frankfurt, Germany was a C-47, a noisy 2 engine plane with bucket seats. With the Rhein-Main Airport bombed out of existence, the rough flight ended with a rougher landing at a steel-mats-over-mud airstrip. Fighting ended in Europe only in the first half of May, 1945.

BERLIN and MAJOR GENERAL WILLIAM DRAPER Berlin was divided into four occupied sectors, each with a military governor from one of the victors (Russia, Britain, France, USA). These four governors together formed the Allied Kommandatura, which governed Berlin. Four flags flew from the building, and guards from four nations' armed forced stood in front.

Whenever Jim walked from where he lived to where he worked with Draper, he passed the Kommandatura building and everyone saluted him.

The Allied Kommandatura was located in Dahlem/Zehlendorf, at 16-18 Kaiserswerther Strasse & Thielallee. It was returned to the Freie Universität Berlin, whose campus is in the neighborhood. The Allied Control Council (ACA) occupied the much larger home of the German Supreme Court of Prussia, the 'Kammergericht'. (It became the Kammergericht once again in 1994.) The Kommandatura governed Berlin, the ACA governed Germany as a whole, and, within the ACA, the US Zone was governed by OMGUS, the Office of Military Government, United States, under General Lucius D. Clay

Maj. Gen. William Draper said Jim was needed at the Allied I.G. Farben Control Group offices, so Jim went to Griesheim just outside of Frankfurt. (Jim, do you have a better name than "Allied I.G. Farben Control Group" ?)

Besides developing Zyklon B poison for the gas chambers, I. G. Farben used SS troops to run slave labor camps, notably the buna rubber factory that was a satellite to the Auschwitz concentration camp. 25,000 laborers were worked to death before they could get to the gas chambers for extermination.

The I.G. Farben company and the Hitler regime cooperated closely on the financing, manufacture and supply of much war material. For this reason, the U.S. wanted to break up the giant chemical industry cartel, convict its officers, and denazify what remained. Jim was needed to gather documentation for these proceedings.

How many billions in aid were given by the Federal Republic of Germany in reparations to Jews for confiscated property and the unpaid wages of slave labor? Justice is imperfect, and the Germany Embassy turned repeatedly to the lawyer Peter Heidenberger as claims of varying validity were filed in the United States against Germany. Peter, as chance would have it, turned out to be a neighbor at Gwen and Jim’s beach house in Bethany Beach, DE.

For more on Peter Heidenberger, see: From Munich to Washington: A German-American Memoir
Kabel Publishers Inc.. Rockville, MD 20852, 2004, 177pp. (Kabel Publishers Inc.. 11225 Huntover Dr, Rockville, MD 20852-3613; tel/fax 301/468-6463)

The I.G. Farben Trial at Nuremberg was held from 27 August 1947 to 30 July 1948.

Twenty-three I. G. Farben executives came to trial in the Nuremberg Trials and 12 or 13 received prison sentences. The executives who set up the Auschwitz III camp for buna rubber manufacturing where 25,000 people were killed got 6 years prison time for "enslavement". They were Carl Frauch and Heinrch Buetefisch, Director of IG Auschwitz; see http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/IG_Farben).

Josiah E. Dubois, Jr. was the deputy chief of counsel for War Crimes in charge of the I.G. Farben case. Dubois wrote the book, The Devil’s Chemists (1952; republished as Generals in Grey Suits, 1953). DuBois's book is critical of the outcome of the trial, and of Justice Morris's impact on it. According to Joseph Borkin, the author of The Crime and Punishment of I.G. Farben (1978), as DuBois left the courtroom after the decision, he declared: "I'll write a book about this if it's the last thing I ever do."

Borkin, like Dubois, cites Justice Morris for being impatient with the prosecution: Borkin writes that Morris "voiced his irritation with the proceedings" and scolded the prosecutor: "This trial is being slowed down by a mass of contracts, minutes and letters that seem to have such slight bearing on any possible concept of proof in this case."

The man who particularly wanted Jim was Edwin S. Pilsbury, a wealthy lawyer from California, who told him, "Jim, we need you to take care of building up documentation for trials at Nuremberg."

Jim says, "The Germans convicted themselves. They made copies of everything. They saved their copies in salt mines. I went there and told the employees, 'Don't remove anything'. Every document ended with 'Heil Hitler' at the bottom."

Nuremberg Trials. The prosecution table. From DuBois’ book, The Devil's Chemists. Jim Tierney is the left-most of the three men in the rear, listening to their simultaneous translation earphone. We could make a better scan of this photo if someone would dig out Jim's copy of DuBois’s book.

The proceedings run to 1400 pages and were available from the Government Printing Office:

TRIALS OF WAR CRIMINALS BEFORE THE NUREMBERG MILITARY TRIBUNALS UNDER CONTROL COUNCIL LAW No. 10 VOLUME VII

For sale by the Superintendent of Documents, U. S Government Printing Office Washington 25, D.C. - Price $4.75 (Buckram)

The complexities revealed by the trial at Nuremberg of the I.G. Farben industrial cartel is thought by many to have been Eisenhower's inspiration for his famous pronouncement upon leaving the presidency in 1961:

In the councils of Government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.

Jim says there were about 30 war crimes trials outside of Nuremberg. Whereas Nuremberg was run by the 4 Allied powers, the Americans alone pursued such cases as the trial of Ilse Koch, the "Bitch of Buchenwald," an SS officer's wife who made lampshades out of the skins of prisoners, among other crafts.

Very early after the war, there were also some extralegal executions. Petty tyrants too small for the Americans to prosecute were released, but sometimes they were released to partisans who took them to a Displaced Persons camp whose residents knew them very well. Jim indicated they were promptly executed (murdered). He had never witnessed such an event in the camps, demurred that it was mob violence, and said he believed the people in the camp were immediately assembled, the person publicly accused, and shot on the spot. (JIN: I had never heard of revenge killings before. Concentration camp survivors more often say they must not sink to the level of their captors.)

Jim: “I was sent by my colonel to Munich and passed the former Dachau concentration camp, liberated by the 3rd Army. The people had nowhere to go and were living in "DP Camps" (Displaced Persons) near the old concentration camps. There were several concentration camps in the Western zones.”

Camps: Dachau (American Zone, prosecution late 1945), Bergen-Belsen (British Zone, prosecution Nov 1945), Sachsenhausen (Oranienburg), Buchenwald.

Jim: "At Stalin's request, thousands of Russian POWs were forcibly returned to Russia in 1945 by the Americans. The prisoners were in handcuffs and leg irons, because they would rather run up on your bayonet and kill themselves than go back. We loaded them onto transport cars. What a terrible mistake. When they got back to Russia, they were either killed or sent to Siberia."

Jim: “A German Jew who came to America as the war broke out returned to Germany and participated in both the Nuremberg trial of IG Farben and he worked with me afterwards as the company was split and its parts reconstituted separately. He was a lawyer in Berlin and certainly knew German law because he taught it. In America, he went the NYU Law School. He went by the name Randolph Newman in America, and Rudolph Neumann in Germany. We were responsible for the de-Nazification of this industrial cartel, and this Jewish man overruled me. I would say ‘This man is a Nazi and we have the documents to show it’ and Newman or Neumann would say he was just a businessman, he is so patrician. He overruled me and let Nazi businessmen back into German business.”

Germany faced starvation, a rising infant mortality rate, and limited resources to get thousands of unproductive people trapped in “”DP” (Displaced Persons) camps out of their of shacks and sheds and resettled into working, productive lives. (JIN: A fourth-grade outing of my Army-American grade school took us to see a DP camp first hand. As late as 1953, it was terrible, a shanty-town of cold, muddy streets. Now I understood why our parents were always holding charity events for “displaced person resettlement” funds. But what I remember most was my spinster teacher trying to explain to the kids literally hanging on her skirts afterwards, stunned and asking her, “Why do they have children if they have to live like that?” She looked straight at us and said, “Because maybe they think it can make them happy.” She hoped we would understand. She smiled patiently hoping we would understand but we were young. There was nothing more to say.)

The Russians unbolted everything in East Germany they could and shipped it east. Russia’s “bleed it white” policy also depopulated the rural countryside, a demographic change which the CIA tracked by counting newspaper reports of children – and even adults – killed by growing packs of wolves. The French also confiscated industrial infrastructure, while the British and especially the Americans increasingly saw the need to get Germany prosperous again. The initial intent – before the Marshal plan – was to convert Germany to an agrarian economy and save the world from war, which it was believed only Germans knew how to start.

When Allied plans shifted to re-industrialization, people were needed to supervise Germany’s largest, most powerful chemical & industrial corporate entities, to help them re-build and to ensure that the same bad players did not rise within them (“de-nazification”). Jim was one of the people tapped to perform this role, and he was urged to leave the Army and immediately re-enter government service as a civilian. Jim had an inside-out familiarity with the most powerful chemical industry players from his work as “documentation officer” for the Nuremberg Trial of Germany’s giants of the chemical industry. He became a true industry insider and wound up supervising many of Germany’s largest players in the chemical and pharmaceutical industries.

(Jim, when did you leave the Army? Did you go home and come back?
What rank did they give you to come back in? GS-12?)

From 1945 to 1951, Jim supervised 45-50 different companies in the U.S. Zone and in the U.S. Sector of Berlin. His authority was in some respects above the position of CEO and Chairman of the Board, as he was empowered to pass on who was appointed to either position. (JIN: It's a pity our own banking industry has been handed over a trillion dollars with less supervision than this.) His “supervision” included protection and procurement. For each company under his care, Jim was the best liaison channel to the American Forces. Jim was in a position to deflect scarce supplies to “his” plants or secure needed transportation. Nylon or Perlon? There was competition and cross-licensing between DuPont and BASF over these two nylon variants even before World War II. Jim's support enabled Perlon to emerge as an early, successful driver of economic recovery in Germany's post-war industrial chemical industries.

At least two companies’ top officials were moved to give Jim tokens of their appreciation for successful governance and reconstruction when Jim left in 1951.

Coffee service given by Cassela Farbwerke Mainkur (a former unit of the I.G. Farben cartel in Nazi Germany) to the young American serviceman and lawyer who supervised their "denazification" and reconstruction after World War II.

“Professor Dr. Zck” is obviously Prof Dr. Werner Zerweck, who went on to serve as the first post-war CEO of Farbwerke Mainkur in 1952. The other initials are harder to find on the Internet.

Tierney’s straight-arrow reputation formed early. One of the German managers in one of the plants Jim supervised was bribed in US dollars, which were illegal tender in Germany at the time. The person offering the bribe had no trouble with that, because he was visiting from American on behalf of powerful interests. His goal was to get the manager to change the classification of dyestuffs to “damaged”. Germany was the inventor and leading manufacturer of “coal-tar” or “aniline” dyes, as research into the byproducts of coal combustion in the steel industry and leading to the founding of a major branch of organic chemistry generally. In any event, getting these products labeled “damaged” would have changed pricing and tariffs and generated 450 to $100 million (Jim, in 1950 dollars?!!) in profits for those driving the bribery.

The man offering Jim’s manager the bribe had a powerful law firm behind him and friends in Congress as well, all of whom threw their weight around, resulting in Jim being called onto the carpet before General Lucius Clay in Berlin. Clay was the father of the Berlin Airlift and rose from deputy to Eisenhower in 1945 to military governor of the U.S. Zone from 1947-1949, when he retired, so this event occurred in 1947-49. Jim had some of the dollars used in the bribe and recovered from the German civilian, which violated Clay’s own rules. Clay supported Jim and ended the affair then and there.

Jim was a Federal Judge, but did not sit on a Circuit Court. Perhaps he served on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Judge Harold H. Greene, who broke up AT&T, served on that court, and Jim knew him personally.

After retirement, Jim reviewed many cases to support the court in deciding procedural matters (rulings on motions to dismiss an attorney or accept a particular complaint as part of a lawsuit, or to accept a claim as suitable in reckoning damages). Many of these cases involved investments and securities.

Gwen Tierney, ca. 1951
As busy as Jim was down in the salt mines retrieving hidden documents for
the Nuremberg Trials, he also managed to find and court his lifetime companion, Gwen, the only daughter in an American Army family that left for Germany in 1947.

Jim and Gwen were married in Arlington, VA, 26 December 1953, a year or two after Jim returned from Germany. He obtained a job as prosecuting attorney for the FCC, and became an administrative law judge with the Federal Comminications Commission (a Presidential Appointment) in 1969.

Jim remained in the Reserves and rose to Lt. Colonel, a move which gave Gwen PX and Commissary privileges.

Upon retirement from the FCC, Jim served as an arbitartor with the National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD); Cases often involved disputes between investors and the brokers handling their money. The NASD is the self-policing arm of the NASDAQ (NASD Automatic Quotation system--a computer network, not an open-call marketplace with real people). The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE; a real market taking place in a room) had a self-policing arm as well. Both the NYSE and NASD self-regulators were combined into FINRA (Financial INdustry Regulatory Authority) in 2007. The Authoritiy has been criticized from dropping the pursuit of violations as reflected in the drop in fines levied against violators from nearly $150 million yearly to less than $50M/yr.

Lend-Lease Act was passed in March 1941. Washington suddenly and unexpectedly terminated Lend-Lease on September 2, 1945.

Arthur B. Purvis was made chairman of the Anglo-French Purchasing Board in the United States. That Board drove (or became) the British Purchasing Commission. Representatives of other Commonwealth countries had representatives on the Commission. Sir Clive Baillieu was Director General of the British Purchasing Commission (but possibly only in Australia?)
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Henry J. Kaiser's Kaiser Shipbuilding company got a contract to build so many troop ships that he needed a new shipyard in Richmond, California. To prepare for constructing the new yard and the building of ships that would be much more complex than Liberty ships, Clay Bedford opened a Kaiser office in New York City in January 1942, and Dan Peacock moved there temporarily to start purchasing materials. The old Liberty ships consisted of only 9,600 items, but the new C-4 troop transports would require a much more complex purchasing program, because each C-4 needed about 130,000 items. Bedford and Peacock hired Jim Tierney to help. Morris Wortman, Kaiser's chief facilities engineer, and Harry Bernat, the marine design engineer, also came to New York to start designing the layout of the new California shipyard.
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Glenn Miller enlisted and formed a band. Officially, they were the 418th Army Air Forces Band from the Technical School of the Army Air Force Technical Training Command stationed at Yale University. Miller was in charge of forming all the bands for the Army Air Force Technical Training Command. He surveyed the recruits passing through Atlantic City for basic training to spot any musicians, and assigned the best to his own band.

[ Red Norvo Orch ] b. March 31, 1908, Beardstown, IL Theme Song: "Mr. and Mrs. Swing" (This song represented the fact that the 'girl' vocalist, Mildred Bailey, was also Red's wife.)

Mildred and Red co-directed their own orchestra during the 1936 to 1939 years. Mildred, who was part Native American, was probably one of the two or three greatest pop and jazz singers of her day. Her brother was Al Rinker, one of Whiteman's 'Rhythm Boys'(along with Bing Crosby and Harry Barris). Red had a great little band which finally disbanded due to friction between the sidemen and Red's wife.

Red was a soloist with the Paul Whiteman Orch in the late 20's. By 1935, he had a sextet that was playing the Famous Door club in NYC. By 1936, he was fronting a 'big' 10 piece band (really the augmented sextet) at the Syracuse Hotel (Syracuse, NY). The girl singer was Nance Flake, who later married Moe Purtill, Red's drummer.

In 1938, Moe Purtill moved to the Glenn Miller band and greatly invigorated it. Murtill was still with Miller at Yale in 1943, when his wife had to be grilled by intelligence cadet James Tierney to asses her loyalty.

After singer Nancy Flake left for Glenn Miller’s orchestra, Mildred Bailey, Red's wife took over the singing chores for his band. A lot of tongues were wagging when Red married Mildred due to Red being a 'white' man and Mildred was a Native American woman. Mildred's voice was absolutely lovely, but the bandsmen found her not an easy person to get along with.

JIN Rev 13May09, 30Jul09 17Aug09 +2 photos of Jim in 1940s,
Rev Jan19 email, link to.german-hosiery-museum nylon/perlon story for 1951