A Little Music in a Big War: The Ocarina and the Men Who Carried Music With Them*

Sitting in the World War I gallery at Ghosts of the Battlefield is an object that is remarkably easy to overlook. It is small, black, battered and worn. Much of its finish has disappeared through years of handling, exposing the brown material beneath. Several finger holes puncture its rounded body, and a short mouthpiece projects from one end. At first glance, it hardly looks like something that belongs in a military museum. It is an ocarina, a small wind instrument sometimes nicknamed a “sweet potato” because of its distinctive shape.

We do not yet know who owned our ocarina. We do not know exactly when it was made, where it traveled, or whether it was ever carried by a serviceman. No name or documented history accompanied it that allows us to make those claims. But its presence in our World War I gallery may not be as misplaced as it first appears. The style of the instrument itself belongs comfortably to the period.

The modern European ocarina was developed in Budrio, Italy, by Giuseppe Donati in the 1850s. Donati transformed earlier simple clay vessel flutes into a practical musical instrument with multiple finger holes capable of playing recognizable melodies. The idea spread quickly through Europe, and by the late nineteenth century ocarinas were being manufactured in Italy, France, Austria and elsewhere. The Smithsonian preserves several surviving examples from this period, including a black-glazed ceramic ocarina made by Heinrich Fiehn in Vienna sometime between about 1877 and 1914. Another Smithsonian example made in the United States dates from approximately 1878–1882.

That matters when we look at ours. Our instrument appears to be ceramic rather than carved wood. Beneath the worn black surface is the lighter material of the body, and faint gold-colored markings remain around some of the holes. That combination bears a strong resemblance to surviving late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European ocarinas, particularly the black-glazed instruments produced in central Europe. Heinrich Fiehn's documented examples, for instance, were made from clay with black glaze and gold markings. Until we can examine every marking on ours, however, we cannot responsibly assign it to Fiehn or any other manufacturer. For now, the safest description is simply an early-style ceramic ocarina of unknown maker and date. But it is entirely possible for an instrument of this general type to have existed during the First World War.

And that raises a much more interesting question. Why would something like this have any place in the story of men at war?

The answer is surprisingly simple. Because soldiers still needed music.

Wars are remembered through explosions, weapons, aircraft, ships and battles. The enormous amount of time servicemen spent waiting tends to disappear from the story. Men waited for orders. They waited for transportation. They waited in barracks and camps. They waited aboard ships. They waited behind the lines. Prisoners of war sometimes waited for years. A small instrument could make those hours a little more bearable. An ocarina was almost ideally suited to that world. It did not require electricity. It was inexpensive, portable and small enough to fit into a bag or pocket. A man did not need to transport a guitar, find a piano or organize a band. With a little practice, a simple clay instrument could produce familiar melodies almost anywhere.

By the Second World War, however, the military connection becomes much clearer. The United States armed forces recognized music as an important part of recreation and morale. In 1941, the Joint Army and Navy Committee on Welfare and Recreation established a Sub-Committee on Music specifically to help provide music, instruments, instructional material and entertainment to servicemen. Its work reached from military bands down to individual soldiers simply trying to learn an instrument in their spare time. Buried among the surviving papers of that committee is a wonderfully revealing piece of wartime instructional material: “10 Minute Self Instruction for the Tonette, Ocarina, Harmonica, Ukelele.”

The ocarina had made its way into the American military's organized effort to give servicemen something besides war to occupy their minds.

That connection followed men into captivity as well. Anyone familiar with the 1953 film Stalag 17 may remember the prisoner Joey carrying and playing his little ocarina. It can look like an odd Hollywood character detail until you discover that men in actual German prisoner-of-war camps remembered exactly the same instrument.

Colonel Keith K. Compton Greening, an American prisoner at Stalag Luft I, later recalled how important music became to the men behind the wire. Prisoners who had shown little interest in music before the war suddenly began looking for anything that offered an escape from the monotony and uncertainty of captivity. Greening remembered that it seemed almost everyone was playing something, specifically mentioning the harmonica and ocarina. Music allowed prisoners, if only temporarily, to push the barbed wire surrounding them into the background. That may be the most meaningful part of this little instrument's military story.

An ocarina could not shorten a war. It could not open the gates of a POW camp. It could not stop artillery or bring someone home. But for a few minutes, it could make a barracks, a troop camp or a prison compound sound like somewhere else. That matters.

We often think about wartime artifacts according to what they helped men do. A rifle fired. A helmet protected. A radio communicated. A compass helped someone find his way. Objects like this remind us that servicemen carried things that helped them simply remain themselves. They played cards. They wrote letters. They read books until the covers fell apart. They made things from scraps. They told jokes, argued, sang songs and found whatever small distractions they could from circumstances over which they often had very little control. And sometimes they made music.

The ocarina in the Ghosts of the Battlefield collection still has questions surrounding it. Its worn black finish and surviving markings suggest age, and comparable ceramic instruments were certainly being manufactured during the decades surrounding World War I. Further examination may eventually give us a manufacturer or a tighter date. Until then, we will not give it a history that we cannot prove.

Its larger story does not need embellishment.

For generations, small instruments like this one traveled through the same world occupied by soldiers and sailors. By World War II they had become part of organized military recreation, and ocarinas could even be heard behind the barbed wire of German POW camps.

We may never know the songs once played on the battered little instrument sitting in our gallery. We may never know whose hands covered those worn finger holes. But perhaps that uncertainty is part of what makes it worth preserving.

Not every artifact that survives war is a weapon. Some survive because, in a world filled with the sounds of war, someone still wanted to hear a little music.

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