The new group will also aim to inform the United States military and allied forces of sites to avoid in airstrikes and ground fighting, and places where it should try to forestall looting. Those prevention and detection efforts conform to the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property, which the United States first joined in 2009.
Officials say the new force will start training at the Smithsonian Institution over five days in March of 2020, and that they hope to have about 25 experts ready to be deployed immediately afterward.
The training will encompass military doctrine as it relates to cultural protection, no-strike lists, and procedures to work with host nations to evacuate and safeguard museum collections.
The initiative comes at an urgent time for a region where human settlement dates back as far as 10,000 years and includes the remnants of Mesopotamian, Sumerian, Persian, Assyrian and Babylonian cultures. Afghanistan has been pillaged and desecrated by the Taliban for two decades; the Islamic State has wrought destruction and looted artifacts in Iraq, Syria and Libya; and rebel factions have sacked museums and mosques in Yemen.
While American forces are hardly expected to defend cultural treasures everywhere there is conflict, the military field manuals indicate that preserving artifacts “is not only a legal obligation but also plays a vital role as a force multiplier, winning the hearts and minds of the local population.” It also sends “a strong message that the U.S. military is respectful and professional,” the manuals say.
The United States suffered a black eye during the invasion of Iraq in 2003, when it was faulted for failing to protect the Iraq National Museum in Baghdad from plunder amid the chaos of the city’s fall. Archaeologists and State Department officials had warned that the museum’s tens of thousands of ancient objects were vulnerable, but the military had no equivalent of the monuments team at that point.
After that ransacking, Matthew Bogdanos, a colonel in the Marine reserves and classics scholar, formed an ad hoc group that took charge of protecting the museum and hunting down its stolen items. He wrote a book on his experience, “Thieves of Baghdad” (2005). He serves as chief of the Antiquities Trafficking Unit of the Manhattan district attorney’s office, the only such department in the nation.
Of the new group, he said, “It was a great idea when I first proposed it in back in 2003, and it is even more crucial in today’s world where antiquities trafficking often funds terrorism.”
Reserve leaders working on the project were eager to evoke their forerunners in wartime Europe. “It’s like going back to our history,” said Brig. Gen. Jeffrey C. Coggin, deputy commander of the civil affairs command, largely staffed by reservists, who is to run the unit with its commander, Maj. Gen. Darrell J. Guthrie.
The announcement Monday, in the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art housing some records of the Monuments Men, is meant to recall the 345 people — mostly men but also several dozen women — who donned uniforms and applied their art expertise overseas from 1943 to 1951. In the end they tracked down and recovered four million of some five million paintings and other artworks, books, Judaica and valuables stolen by the Germans in wartime. Two lost their lives.
A 2014 George Clooney movie, “The Monuments Men,” was based on work by Robert M. Edsel, a longtime champion of the Army art-hunters.
As reservists, the team will not be deployed full time, but will be attached to military units as conditions dictate, including in war zones where they could come under fire. The age limit for joining the Army reserves is 35, but that limit is often waived for specialists, and organizers of this unit say they are confident they will be permitted to recruit experienced professionals.
The United Kingdom has also formed a contingent of art reservists, the Cultural Property Protection Unit. Colonel DeJesse just returned from training with the British unit under Tim Purbrick, a lieutenant colonel and Gulf War veteran.
“The idea will be to identify sites so that we don’t drop bombs on them or park tanks on top of them,” Colonel Purbrick told journalists.
Matthew Bogdanos, left, a colonel with the Marine reserves, at the national museum in Baghdad in 2003. He formed an ad hoc group to protect the museum and hunt down its stolen treasures.
CreditSamir Mizban/Associated Press
The new unit’s role will extend beyond war zones, said Dr. Kurin of the Smithsonian. In Haiti after the catastrophic 2010 earthquake, some 35,000 cultural treasures were rescued from the ruins, he said.
“Saving culture is not just the icing on the cake,” he said in an interview. “It’s the key to people’s identity, who they are.”
During and after World War II, the “Monuments Men” hunted for and recovered artworks that had been seized by the Nazis.CreditNARA
