IN MAY 2013, MY WIFE AND I DROVE A GOOD PORTION OF THE ROUTE of what would be that year’s Tour de France, its hundredth running, taking a path through a countryside abundant with landmarks of historical significance to the race, to France, and to the world: Nice, Marseilles, Ax 3 Domaines, Saint-Malo, Mont-Saint-Michel, Lyon, Mont Ventoux, Alpe d’Huez, and of course the fabled cobbles of the Champs-Élysées in Paris. There was so much to see in this beautiful country, so many treasures like the Bayeux Tapestry, châteaus and vineyards and mountains and cathedrals—all of them jewels to our eyes—but something in Paris struck me as particularly poignant: I remember standing inside Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, with its medieval stained-glass windows that transformed daylight into lilac. We were bathed in majesty and from this feeling coming to a profound understanding: a cultural monument—a cathedral, a statue, a bicycle race—is a jewel for the world to keep and to cherish for as long as humans live on this earth.
A year later, I was in my living room watching a CNN newscast when crackles of an explosion resounded from my TV. A stone building erupted in the Iraqi desert from a bomb blast deep in the ground, sending a shock wave of black-gray dust and smoke over a dry field. Cannonballs of sandstone fragmented in all directions. The voice-over reporter spoke: “More than three thousand years of history obliterated in seconds. This video was released by ISIS. CNN cannot independently verify its authenticity, but it purports to show the radicals destroying Nimrud, one of the most important archaeological sites in Iraq.”
In the video, I saw a bearded youth wielding a sledgehammer and smashing it into a stone wall covered with relief carvings. Pieces fell to the floor. He struck again and shoved it off the wall. It crashed onto the stone floor and scattered fist-sized chunks and dust.
Another man on a ladder swung a hammer and severed a white plaster sculpture from a wall. It was a man’s face, flat and round, with prominent forehead, Roman hair, and dark holes for eyes, which looked straight forward, almost smiling. When the blow struck, the eyes looked down despondently, while the face ripped loose and crashed to the ground, breaking into chips and dust.
Again, the voice-over: “These are remnants of the ancient Assyrian civilization. Nimrud used to be its capital. They’ve stood since the thirteenth-century BC and survived many wars but were destroyed by the militants—probably in less than a day.”
ISIS had posted this video within weeks of the destruction.
The following year, in the public square under the ancient Arch of Triumph in Palmyra, in Syria, built in the second millennium BC, ISIS publicly beheaded Khaled al-Asaad, a university professor and Palmyra’s general manager for museums. He had spent his life preserving antiquities. “His crime,” according to a Syrian official, “was refusing to pledge allegiance to ISIS and refusing . . . to reveal the location of archaeological treasures and two chests of gold” that ISIS thought were in the city.
ISIS claimed that it destroyed the antiquities out of religious duty, but its real motivation was purely financial and hypocritical: “looting archaeological sites to support its thriving illegal trade in antiquities.” When I saw the CNN video, a sense of loss and anger welled up inside me. Elise Blackwell wrote, “It is a tragedy when human gifts that have survived across generations are disrespected for any reason short of basic survival. To loot artifacts for spending money—or to allow that to happen—is a violation of history.”
Around the same time, I’d also been listening to some lectures about great cathedrals, including Saint-Denis, Notre-Dame de Paris, Reims and Rouen Cathedrals, and Notre-Dame de Chartres. In World War II, the lecturer noted, Chartres’ stained-glass windows had been removed and hidden in the countryside to protect them from war damage.
I was amazed. I wondered how a project of such magnitude could be accomplished. I imagined scores of French workers in 1939, under threat of German invasion, working through the night—hoisting cranes, scaffolding, cables, and packing cases from trucks into the cathedral, and then craftsmen dismantling and removing thousands of glass pieces to be packed and transported. Where did they hide them? Who planned the project, and who did the work?
Unconnected in space and loosely connected in time, these three experiences are how this book started.
Over the years, I’d heard of cultural monuments and artworks under attack during World War II. Yet hearing of Chartres in the wake of seeing that ISIS video propelled me to learn more about what’s been done in the past to protect cultural treasures. How have people prepared to avoid such destruction and looting?
Chartres’ 176 windows are the largest collection of twelfth- and thirteenth-century stained glass in one place on Earth, consisting of twenty-seven thousand square feet of glass. Many individual windows are more than a dozen feet wide and twenty feet tall and have as many as fifty panels. The collection comprises 5,500 panels.
But among the thousands of books written about the nine-hundred-year-old Chartres Cathedral—and the many about its windows—none describes this story of the windows’ removal during the war.
What better demonstration of reverence for the distinctly human achievement the windows represent than to dismantle, pack, and transport them to secret locations to protect them? That task, I later learned, had also been accomplished in World War I at Chartres Cathedral, another chapter in the nine-hundred-year story of the windows’ survival through religious wars, fires, and revolutions.
I set out to learn enough about stained glass and about Chartres to appreciate the difficulty and risks of the task—not even imagining that much of the work was done as German bombs fell around Chartres and ground forces approached.
During my research, I came across multiple blog references to a career American Army colonel, Welborn Barton Griffith Jr., from rural Quanah in north Texas, who was the headquarters operations officer—the number-three man—in the Twentieth Corps in Patton’s Third Army in 1944. Twentieth Corps was one of what one might call the “A Teams” in the Army. Its job was to wait and come ashore at Utah Beach three weeks after D-Day to break out of the beachheads and chase the Germans across France and toward Berlin until ordered elsewhere. And Chartres was its first sizable, challenging battle after the breakout. Scattered German units had been ordered to reassemble and resupply at Chartres to resume the fight—and they did, overseen by virtue of the commanding 360-degree view from the twin four-hundred-foot towers of Chartres Cathedral, over the wheat fields that surrounded Chartres.
Those blog references to Griffith echoed strangely similar language that credited him with having “questioned” an order for Allied forces to shell and destroy the cathedral and having “volunteered” to “go behind enemy lines” to personally inspect the cathedral and determine whether the Germans were using it as an observation post to direct artillery fire on Allied forces. The blogs went on to say that Griffith found that the towers were “not so being used by the Germans . . . and [that he] managed to call off any further Allied firing” on the cathedral.
They said he then headed to the commune of Lèves northeast of Chartres, where he directed a tank “toward enemy forces [that] he had located and [he] was killed in action.”
The common source I found for those many blog posts was the Army’s 1944 citation that awarded the Distinguished Service Cross to Griffith posthumously. What it didn’t mention was that Griffith had chosen to ride outside on the rear of the tank. He was killed by intense enemy machine-gun, rifle, and rocket-launcher fire, his body to be found that afternoon on the street by villagers with his empty rifle in one hand and empty pistol in the other. The next day the corps retrieved his body and buried him in a simple funeral in a nearby field.
To this day, the French honor Griffith annually in Chartres and in Lèves as the man who saved the cathedral. Yet nothing centered around his story has been published.
So the story of Chartres Cathedral and its windows and the story of Colonel Griffith are separate but intertwined narratives.
I have set out to explore the colonel’s background and role in the corps to understand his motivations. It seems that simply calling him a hero is inadequate. But the further I’ve dug, the more questions have arisen.
My challenge has been not just to seek the truth but also to spot where truth can’t be determined. During my work on this book, I have traveled several times to Paris and in 2015 twice to Chartres, and I have twice visited the cathedral, searched archives, retrieved project documents and more from Chartres and Paris, and visited Colonel Griffith’s home-town, Quanah, Texas, and have been astounded by what I have found. I’ve interviewed Griffith’s daughter in Florida and his nephew—a retired US Army lieutenant general—and also Eugene G. Schulz, a surviving GI in Milwaukee who worked as Griff’s clerk-typist during the war for more than a year up to the time Griff died, and I’ve corresponded with two other of Griff’s grandnephews and the surviving husband of one of his nieces, who provided me with family photos, letters, and other documents; I’ve also reconstructed Griff’s military career, his Army personnel file having been destroyed in a fire at the National Archives in Saint Louis in the 1970s. From those interviews, Army combat records, and an unpublished diary written by a Father Douin—a French priest who, to his surprise, encountered Griff as Griff was inspecting the cathedral during the battle—I have uncovered more questions.
Despite all my research, there are times when I’ve had to use my imagination to depict aspects of both stories.
Why had Griffith left his desk to take up a frontline combat role for the first time? Why had he gone to the cathedral himself rather than order military intelligence to do so? Why had he assumed command of the tank column? And why had he exposed himself to danger by riding on the back of the tank? He seems to have been driven by something. Unanswerable questions leave ambiguity and mystery in his story.
He was consumed by a personal drive to take command—not just to lead but also to exercise his full talents, and for a once-in-a-lifetime purpose. He had a clear path for promotion to the rank of general within a month; yet, by risking his life, perhaps he needlessly chose not to take it. He was a fierce competitor, respected and valued by his superiors, revered by his peers and subordinates. He wanted something, and he discovered something big was at stake. His daughter described him as “very serious” and told me he would have been annoyed to be called a hero.
I’ve spent several years trying to know and understand Griffith. While his saving of the cathedral was honorable, he was not a saint. In author Tilar Mazzeo’s words, making him a saint in the telling of his story would “dishonor . . . the true complexity and difficulty of [his] very human choices.” Like most of us, he was flawed and conflicted.
Did Griffith have a public purpose, or was he driven by private vanity or ambition?
I have come to appreciate that it is important to save historic monuments. It is important because monuments are our means to symbolize ancestors, civilizations, and ideas that teach many of us who we are, the foundation whence we have come.
Forces of the universe have conjoined—by natural selection or higher power—to create the human mind, heart, and emotions. Humans have capacity to be aware—of themselves, other humans, other life forms, and surroundings. We can think and feel emotion, and we discern joy and have capacity to harness emotions into campaigns larger than ourselves.
Churches are venues in which individuals’ core life events occur, through which they garner memories. For entire parishes, communities, and nations, churches host rituals that spawn similar remembrances on a communal scale.
Historic French cathedrals reveal art and history apart from religion. As buildings owned by the state, they represent the nation’s patrimony, symbolizing France’s political essence.
We must save monuments because without them evildoers can distort and fabricate, and impose savagery. Nazis destroyed monuments in conquered countries to eliminate symbols of culture, like Poland’s statues of Chopin. ISIS and others do so today.
Chartres Cathedral has meaning to millions. Hundreds of thousands depend on it as their vessel for negotiating life’s passages, and the French economy has depended every year on money from millions of visitors and pilgrims.
The tale of the World War II rescue of the Chartres windows has its roots in the French Revolution, which decimated many cathedrals. As a result, Chartres Cathedral—like most others in France—became a state-owned historic monument. The French have since developed leading methods for protection of monuments, which were invented because they had to be. The modern phase of this tale began in World War I, with the theretofore-unthinkable 1914 German artillery bombardment of the city of Reims and its cathedral (France’s Westminster Abbey). The attack destroyed Reims Cathedral and most of its stained-glass windows. Then, as the war dragged on, a string of deadly accidental explosions surrounding Paris led at long last to the first precarious protective actions at Chartres.
During the war, General Eisenhower declared that historic monuments symbolize to the world all we are fighting for and ordered that when destruction is unnecessary and can’t be justified, commanders must preserve them through exercise of restraint and discipline.
Apart from Griffith’s story, the story of the rescue of the Chartres windows revolves around four central characters, two of whom—Jean Zay and Jean Moulin—are among the most famous of French Resistance martyrs. The others are compelling in other ways.
But without volunteer assistance and financing that was provided by local Chartres citizens—and, probably also, the last-minute strains and sweat and grit of refugee volunteer workers—the windows wouldn’t have been saved from danger and later would have been destroyed during the battles.
At Chartres, ordinary people took responsibility for saving these symbols. A group of dedicated men and women felt compelled to protect their cathedral. Most were French. Griffith was an American whom we remember for choosing to join their cause during battle and by risking his life to prevent needless destruction, and in the process perhaps he learned who he was. Griff’s bravery saved the cathedral, and his drive to press his column forward through Lèves contributed to the corps’ success in cutting off the enemy at the Seine and liberating Paris—even allowing for the day they stopped the war to bury him.
As I was completing this book, the April 2019 fire at Notre-Dame de Paris erupted. Frightening video reminded the world that even elaborate precautions don’t relieve us of the need to vigilantly gauge how historic monuments would hold up against all perils. Notre-Dame de Paris is the preeminent cultural and religious landmark—the romantic symbol—of France, the landmark against which all others in France are compared. Professor Peter Sahlins, who grew up near Paris, describes it as “the focal point of Parisian life in ways that surpass religion.” The 2019 tragedy at the Paris cathedral suddenly shined the spotlight of relevance on this story of how Chartres Cathedral and its windows were rescued during World War II.