title: Nicholas Ray

text: A hometown friend studying at the University of Chicago had pitched the benefits of his school, especially his classes with Thornton Wilder, who had already impressed Ray when he had seen the writer in La Crosse. Ray had improved his record and was eligible to transfer in Fall 1931. He was pledged to a fraternity and played some football, but by his own account he was more committed to the elements of college life that included drinking and pursuing college girls. As well, he later recounted a homosexual experience, when he was approached by the university's Director of Drama, Frank Hurburt O'Hara (whom Ray does not name), reflecting that his own attitude, more tolerant than usual at that time, "became very helpful to me in understanding and directing some of the actors with whom I've worked." Ray spent only one quarter at the University of Chicago, and returned to La Crosse in December, resuming enrolment at Teachers College in autumn 1932, where he announced to readers of the school paper that he was "apparently free of amorous entanglements," but also, "I have been known to like a party." That same year, he and his friend Clarence Hiskey also agitated to start a chapter of the US Communist Party.


title: Nicholas Ray

text: As 1932 ended, Ray left college, and, now calling himself Nicholas Ray, sought new opportunities, including, with the help of Thornton Wilder, meeting Frank Lloyd Wright, with the hope of joining Wright's Fellowship at Taliesin. Lacking the tuition fee, in 1933 Ray ventured to New York City, where, staying in Greenwich Village, he had his first encounters with the city's bohemia. There, shortly before his stint at Taliesin, Ray met young writer Jean Evans (born Jean Abrahams, later Abrams), and they started a relationship. After he returned east, they lived together, and married in 1936. When Ray took a position at the WPA in Washington, by January 1937 they had moved to Arlington, Virginia. They had one son, Anthony Nicholas (born November 24, 1937), known as Tony, and named for Ray's friend and fellow Federal Theatre director Anthony Mann. Washington government life wore on both Ray and Evans, and Ray's drinking and unfaithfulness strained their marriage. Evans moved back to New York in 1940, having found a job at PM, the new leftist newspaper. Ray returned to New York as well, in May of that year, but soon the couple separated. A few months later he again attempted to reconcile, while also living at Almanac House, a Greenwich Village loft occupied by Pete Seeger, Lee Hays, and Millard Lampell, core members of the Almanac Singers. He committed himself for a time to psychoanalysis, but in time fell back into old habits. Evans filed for divorce in December 1941, and the process was finalized the next summer.


title: Nicholas Ray

text: Ray had been rejected for military service on medical grounds, but worked for the Office of War Information (OWI), under John Houseman. There Ray met Connie Ernst, the daughter of lawyer Morris L. Ernst, and a producer of "The Voice of America". After his divorce, she and Ray lived together, in New York, from 1942 to 1944, when the OWI sent her to London prior to D-Day, and after she had begun seeing another staff member, Michael Bessie, whom she later married. Ray later wrote, "We had once wanted to marry," though she had remembered his drinking and gambling, commenting, "It was very tricky, being with Nick."


title: Nicholas Ray

text: Relocating to Los Angeles to work with Elia Kazan, Ray first lived in a flat at the Villa Primavera, on the corner of Harper and Fountain, that became the model for the apartment building in "In A Lonely Place", before moving into a house in Santa Monica. While at Fox, he socialized with fellow transplanted east coasters and theatre folk at Gene Kelly and Betsy Blair's house, among them Judith Tuvim, soon to be known as Judy Holliday, whom he had briefly, unsuccessfully pursued in New York, after his marriage ended. On one occasion, fueled by alcohol, they waded into Santa Monica Bay, an excursion that turned into a halfhearted double suicide attempt, before they changed their minds and struggled back to dry land.


title: Nicholas Ray

text: While directing "A Woman's Secret", he became involved with the film's co-star, Gloria Grahame, later remembering, "I was infatuated with her but I didn't like her very much." Nonetheless, they married in Las Vegas on June 1, 1948, just five hours after her divorce from her first husband was granted, and five months before the birth of their son, Timothy, on November 12. (RKO announced that he was born "almost four months before the date he was expected.") Tensions in their marriage were known early on, and by autumn 1949, while shooting "In A Lonely Place", they had separated for the first time, keeping the split a secret from studio executives. At the end of the year, they announced that they planned to travel to Wisconsin, to spend the holidays with Ray's family there, but he went alone, reuniting with his mother and three sisters, and then on to New York and Boston, to prepare his next project, "On Dangerous Ground", and to see his ex-wife and firstborn. In 1950, as that project was ending and as "In A Lonely Place" was opening, Ray and Grahame were reported to have reconciled, living in Malibu, though their marriage remained dysfunctional. Ray stated that he had discovered Grahame in bed with his son, Tony, who was 13 years old at the time. Although they were irreparably estranged, Ray and Grahame were nominally connected again, when he was called on to help rescue "Macao" (1952), a project Josef von Sternberg was directing for RKO. Ray directed additional scenes, but evidently none in which she was featured. Grahame filed for divorce, and she testified in court that Ray had struck her twice, once at a party and once in private, at home, before the divorce was granted, on August 15, 1952. Gloria Grahame and Tony Ray married in 1960 and divorced in 1974. Tony Ray died June 29, 2018, age 80.


title: Nicholas Ray

text: The HUAC investigations of Hollywood and the entertainment industry, which largely coincided with Ray's marriage to and divorce from Gloria Grahame, further weighed on him. Fellow RKO employees, such as Edward Dmytryk and Adrian Scott, were among the Hollywood 10, who had been cited for contempt of Congress in the aftermath of the 1947 hearings; "Knock On Any Door" and "In A Lonely Place" star Bogart was a charter member of the Committee for the First Amendment, which protested against the hearings; and Ray's old friend Elia Kazan testified confidentially in 1952, first refusing to name names, and later doing so, in order to protect his career. The date and content of Ray's own communication with the committee are unknown (McGilligan reports a gap in Ray's Freedom of Information files, between 1948 and 1963), but his ex-wife Jean Evans remembered that he admitted to her that he testified she "was the one who brought him to the Communist Youth League, which wasn't true at all."


title: Nicholas Ray

text: Although he had been wary of therapy, by court order in the divorce, he started seeing psychoanalyst Carel Van der Heide. Even so, he continued womanizing (columnist Dorothy Kilgallen called him "a well-known movie colony heartbreaker") and drinking, both prodigiously. He had romances with both Shelley Winters and Marilyn Monroe, who were roommates at the time, as well as Joan Crawford—with whom he was planning a suspense film, "Lisbon", in 1952, and who later starred in "Johnny Guitar"—and Zsa Zsa Gabor. More lasting was his relationship with German Hanne Axmann (also known as Hanna Axmann, and later Hanna Axmann-Rezzori), who aimed to start an acting career. She left her troubled marriage to actor Edward Tierney to live with Ray at, by her account, a desultory time for him, of drinking, gin rummy, and analysis that did him little good. While he was preparing "Johnny Guitar" (which featured her brother-in-law, Scott Brady), Ray asked her to return to Germany, and said he would join her there. He did not make good on that promise, though they remained in touch and friends for years thereafter.


title: Nicholas Ray

text: "Johnny Guitar" was placed reasonably well on "Variety"'s list of "1954 Boxoffice Champs," increasing his professional capital. By now, he had moved into Bungalow 2 at the Chateau Marmont, his headquarters while shooting "Rebel Without A Cause", a project of particular importance to him, about troubled young people. That was where he pitched his need to make such a film to Lew Wasserman, prompting his agent to send him to Warner Bros. The hotel residence also became Ray's headquarters and rehearsal space, and it was where James Dean arrived, aiming to meet the director. Dean started to attend Ray's "Sunday afternoons," his regular gatherings of friends at the bungalow, where scenes of the film to come were starting to take shape. Natalie Wood remembered Ray's relationship with Dean as "fatherly," and attributed the same quality to Sal Mineo's and her own connection to their director, even though the sixteen year-old also was sexually attracted to him, and his bungalow became the site of their assignations, while she was also involved with supporting player Dennis Hopper. Ray himself was also busy with roommates Monroe and Winters, Geneviève Aumont (then the professional name of Michèle Montau), and even Lew Wasserman's wife, Edie, while also interested in Jayne Mansfield, whom he tested for the role Wood won in "Rebel".


title: Nicholas Ray

text: Ray and Wood continued their affair for several months after production wrapped, and while he was shooting his next project, "Hot Blood" (1956), a pregnancy scare, which turned out to be false, prompted her to break off the romance. Dean had had apprehensions about Ray, but their trust, partnership, and friendship grew, and they talked about forming a production company, collaborating again, and, after "Rebel Without A Cause" opened, sharing a Nicaragua holiday. None of those plans materialized, with Dean's death in a car crash, on September 30, 1955, that left Ray devastated and bereft. On a European tour at the time, he sought comfort with Hanne Axmann, and again in alcohol, in Germany. According to one friend, Ray had been more moderate for some time, and especially during the summer when he was working on "Rebel", but, realizing that the filmmaker was drinking as he was, concluded, "I think it was all over on that September night of 1955."


title: Nicholas Ray

text: Some biographers state that Ray was bisexual, alleging his experience at the University of Chicago was the start of his sexual experimentation. Ray denied this in 1977, responding to a question about Ray's use of James Dean's "probable bisexuality" in a sequence of "Rebel Without a Cause" involving Dean and Sal Mineo. First, Ray responds that he doesn't understand whether the interviewer is referring to Dean's bisexuality, Mineo's, "or the bisexuality of myself, then states, "I am not bisexual, but anyone who denies having had a fantasy or a daydream denies having eaten a bowl of potatoes, mashed potatoes, you know, it has the same reality." Returning to Europe, in London, Ray met Gavin Lambert, with whom he had corresponded since Lambert's pioneering positive review of "They Live By Night." Talking about "In A Lonely Place", Lambert remembered Ray's comments about Dix Steele, Bogart's character, at the film's end: "Will he become a hopeless drunk, or kill himself, or seek psychiatric help? Those have always been my personal options, by the way." After a night of vodka and conversation, after 3:30 am, Ray and Lambert, who was gay, had sex, and Ray cautioned "that he wasn't really homosexual, not really even bisexual," advising that he had slept with many women, "but only two or three men." The next day, Ray urged Lambert to accompany him to Hollywood to work on what became "Bigger Than Life", and Lambert remained a sometimes-sexual partner, while Ray continued to pursue women. According to Lambert, Ray "behaved like a possessive lover, expecting me to be always here on call...," while Ray continued to dwell on the loss of James Dean.


title: Nicholas Ray

text: "Bigger Than Life" tells the story of a man who grows reliant on his abuse of medication, and consequently more and more broken. The connections to Ray, who had grown increasingly dependent on both alcohol and drugs, were not lost, even on Ray. In 1976, Ray confessed to himself, in a private journal entry, that he had lived in a "continuous blackout between 1957 or earlier until now," and his wife Susan, on seeing the film, commented to her husband, "This is your story before you lived it." Ray's drug use was abetted, while he was shooting "Bitter Victory", by his new girlfriend, a heroin addict named Manon, and his gambling losses led him to a pitiable state that broke his friendship with Gavin Lambert.


title: Nicholas Ray

text: Seventeen year-old Betty Utey first crossed paths with Nick Ray in 1951, at RKO, when he was assigned to direct some additional scenes for "Androcles and the Lion" (1952), including one with a troupe of bikini-clad dancers. He described it as the "steam room of the vestal virgins." Some weeks after shooting the scene, in which he featured her, he asked her out to the ballet and dinner, and then took her to the house he was renting, having split with Gloria Grahame. At the end of their evening, like "In A Lonely Place", he called a cab and sent her home. She subsequently did not hear from him for almost three years, when he called her to come to his Chateau Marmont bungalow for an assignation. He then disappeared again, until 1956, when he called again. In 1958, she won a place as one of the chorines in "Party Girl", and after shooting ended they eloped to Maine, where Ray hoped to start his third marriage by drying out. En route, he collapsed at Boston's Logan Airport, suffering from the DTs. He recovered sufficiently to travel on to Kennebunkport, where the couple spent several weeks, before marrying on October 13, 1958. They had two daughters, both born in Rome: Julie Christina, on January 10, 1960, and Nicca, October 1, 1961. Ray's mother Lena had died in March 1959.


title: Nicholas Ray

text: In early 1963, the family moved from Rome to Madrid, where Ray used money from his Samuel Bronston contract to try to develop projects, which never came to fruition. With a partner, he opened a restaurant and cocktail lounge called Nicca's, after his younger daughter, and it became the hangout for film people working in Madrid, but also a place for Ray to sink a fortune, reportedly a quarter-million of his dollars in its first year. To manage it, he hired his nephew, Sumner Williams (whom he had cast in several pictures through the 1950s). Ray continued his chronic habits: too many drinks and pills, too little sleep. He and his wife separated in 1964, and she returned to the US with their children, while he remained in Europe. They remained married until January 1, 1970, when their divorce was finalised and Betty Ray remarried.


title: Nicholas Ray

text: Through the middle of the 1960s, Ray lived peripatetically, setting up in Paris, London, Zagreb, Munich, and, for a while, Sylt, a German island in the North Sea. He had reacquainted himself with younger son Tim, then at Cambridge, and enlisted him to help with an autobiography—the elder Ray would record his recollections, and the younger would transcribe—for which a publisher had provided an advance, though no such memoir appeared in Nick Ray's lifetime. Wherever he went, his friends and acquaintances were accustomed to Ray cadging a handout. "Periodically he stopped drinking," writes Bernard Eisenschitz, "switching to a diet of black coffee, going through stretches without sleep, then crashing for forty-eight hours at a time." Retrospectives of his films were marking the growth in his reputation, especially outside the US, including a double bill of "Johnny Guitar" and "They Live By Night" in Paris, in May 1968, placing Ray and his son amid the political uprising.


title: Nicholas Ray

text: He returned to the United States on November 14, 1969, landing in Washington, DC just in time for the second Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam. Soon after, he announced plans for a documentary about "the young rebels of the 1960s," and relocated to Chicago, to shoot as the trial of the Chicago Eight, soon to become the Chicago Seven, proceeded. He filmed a party for the defendants and their team the evening of December 3, the day the prosecution ended its case. Overnight, the Chicago police killed Fred Hampton, Illinois chair of the Black Panther Party, in his sleep, and Ray and his crew were on the scene early in the morning to film the aftermath.


title: Nicholas Ray

text: The project had mutated from a documentary to a strange dramatic reconstruction, for which Ray considered casting Dustin Hoffman or Groucho Marx or the long-retired James Cagney, as the trial judge, Julius Hoffman. According to Ray's own account, in late January 1970, not untypically, Ray was working through the night, and he fell asleep at the editing table, waking to feel a "heavy" sensation in his right eye. "It took me six hours to find a doctor, and if I had made it twenty minutes sooner, they would have been able to inject nicotinic acid and save the eye." He was hospitalized from January 28 to February 6, and according to writer Myron Meisel, that was Ray's first treatment for cancer. Despite this explanation, Ray remained somewhat elusive about the exact cause, and McGilligan notes several possible sources and witnesses to Ray's diminished vision, including a special-effects blast fifteen years previous, while shooting "Run For Cover" (1955). After 1970, however, Ray started regularly wearing a key prop in the construction of his mystique. He was tall, craggy, with a leonine mane of white hair, and now a black patch over his right eye, looking, in the remembrances of his student Charles Bornstein, "like a cross between Noah, a pirate, and God!"


title: Nicholas Ray

text: During the trial, Chicago Seven lawyer William Kunstler introduced Ray to Susan Schwartz, an eighteen year-old newly arrived to study at the University of Chicago, who skipped classes to watch the courtroom theatrics. In February 1970, as the jury deliberated, she found herself in a taxi, on the way to join the hive of activity that surrounded Ray at his house. "After only one day on Orchard Street," she later wrote, "the decision was easy: at the end of the term I would quit school and join the adventure, whatever it was." They became companions, and the adventure lasted until the end of Ray's life, and beyond.


title: Nicholas Ray

text: They relocated to New York City, where Schwartz worked, in real estate and then publishing, to make a living for both of them while Ray sought money to continue work on the film and start other projects. They stayed with Ray's old cronies, including Alan Lomax and Connie Bessie, before finding a place of their own, while Ray continued to indulge his addictions and at night haunt the seamier corners of Times Square. When they crossed paths at a Grateful Dead show at the Fillmore East, Dennis Hopper invited Ray to his house in Taos, New Mexico, where Hopper was editing "The Last Movie" (1971). There Ray again found chaos of creativity and debauchery, of a type he had come to thrive upon, at least until the costs of hosting Nicholas Ray—Nicca Ray heard her father ran up a phone bill of $2,500, while Hopper himself likely exaggerated it as $30,000 a month—caused Hopper to ask him to leave. In Taos, Ray asked Susan to marry him, giving her his ring, and in return she gave him a pearl.


title: Nicholas Ray

text: While in New Mexico, in spring 1971 Ray was invited to speak at Harpur College, an academic unit of the State University of New York at Binghamton. The event he presented convinced Larry Gottheim and Ken Jacobs that Ray should join them on faculty in the Cinema Department, then one of the epicenters of experimental film in the US. Appointed on a two-year contract in the fall of 1972, Ray initially lived in an apartment in the university's infirmary. He then rented a farmhouse, and the hours that students spent there, time that he demanded of them, turned it into a communal living and working situation, redolent of his Chateau Marmont bungalow while making "Rebel Without A Cause", or, before that, the 1930s New York scene of political theatre and music, though with cannabis and harder drugs (including amphetamines and cocaine) added to alcohol and creativity as fuel.


title: Nicholas Ray

text: "There was increasing tension that became animosity," recalled one of the students, principally between Jacobs and Ray. In part their differences might have stemmed from the different aesthetics of the two artists. Jacobs and Gottheim worked within the largely non-narrative and to varying degrees poetic and formalist realm of experimental film, while Ray's background was in drama and mainstream narrative cinema. Nonetheless, the project upon which he embarked with his students, envisioned as a feature-length film, first called "Gun Under My Pillow" (alluding to the character Plato, in "Rebel Without A Cause") and finally titled "We Can't Go Home Again", might have been seen as consistent with the avant-garde approaches to filmmaking that the department represented. As well, however, he and Jacobs were both, in the recollection of one student, "extremely strong-willed individuals, with tempers," and they came into conflict, in Gottheim's view, involving "a need for control and loyalty," especially from their students. There were other points of contention, however, including the monopolization and abuse of the department's filmmaking equipment by Ray's project and student crew, as well as Ray's drug and alcohol habits and his students' emulation of him. As department chair, Gottheim had mediated the friction between his colleagues, but in spring 1973 Jacobs became acting chair, escalating the conflict; shortly thereafter, Ray's contract was not renewed. Jacobs would later characterize hiring Ray as a "calamitous error."


title: Nicholas Ray

text: Ray's goal was to work on "We Can't Go Home Again", in order to screen it at the Cannes Film Festival, in May 1973. Leaving Binghamton, followed by a few students who drove the film's elements across country in a driveaway car, he travelled wherever he might find cheap or free editing facilities, money to continue the project, and friends who would tolerate him as a guest. He started in Los Angeles, where he wound up back in Bungalow 2 at the Chateau Marmont, running up bills and seeking investment from his old Hollywood connections. But it was Susan who managed to find the money to get them both, and the film, to France. Ray's reputation in Europe might have helped secure a screening slot at Cannes, but it failed to convince the press and any other festivalgoers that the film warranted notice.


title: Nicholas Ray

text: At loose ends, Ray and Susan spent some time in Paris, borrowing money from his longtime champion François Truffaut and racking up hotel costs paid by writer Françoise Sagan. Susan returned to New York, and Ray stayed awhile on a boat owned by Sterling Hayden, his "Johnny Guitar," from almost twenty years before. Ray travelled to Amsterdam, shooting a segment, "The Janitor", for the feature-length "Wet Dreams" (1974), a softcore anthology produced by Max Fischer. He returned to New York by the end of the year, but in March 1974 he went back west, to the San Francisco Bay Area. The purpose was a retrospective of his films at the Pacific Film Archive, but he came with boxes of footage and personal goods, intending to stay awhile. He lived in a spare room at archive curator Tom Luddy's residence and worked overnight shifts in the editing rooms of Francis Coppola's Zoetrope facility, and, after he wore out that welcome, at the film collective CIne Manifest. While in the area, Ray was taken to hospital twice, once for alcoholic haemorrhaging. The first time, Luddy called Tony Ray to tell him of the fear that Ray would die, and Ray's son declined to do anything, and the second time, Luddy similarly called John Houseman, who happened to be in the area, meeting a similar dismissal.


title: Nicholas Ray

text: Later in 1974, Ray returned to Southern California, to stay with his ex-wife Betty and their daughters, Julie, now fourteen, and Nicca, almost thirteen, whom he had not seen since they left Spain, ten years previous. "It was like seeing a man who had been emptied out," Betty recalled. She arranged for a house where he could stop drinking, but soon determined that he needed medical supervision and had him admitted to the detoxification unit at Los Angeles County Hospital. Ray resumed using, however, even persuading his older daughter to buy cocaine for him. On his departure, he left a letter advising that "it is best I live apart from you and our children," for many reasons, ending, "above all others I can bring you no joy."


title: Nicholas Ray

text: He attended Sal Mineo's funeral, in February 1976, and, shortly after, he returned to New York City, where he was offered the opportunity to direct a film starring Marilyn Chambers and Rip Torn, which Ray titled "City Blues", but financing fell through by July 1976, and the project never materialised. He continued to drink and abuse drugs heavily, and found himself in and out of hospital, with a variety of maladies and injuries due to impairment. Finally, Susan left him, and, on professional advice, gave him the ultimatum that she would not return unless he checked in to the Smithers Alcoholism and Rehabilitation Center, and was sober for one month. Shortly after, he had himself admitted. He remained for ninety days, and was discharged early in November 1976. He started attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, and he and Susan moved into a Soho loft, at 167 Spring Street.


title: Nicholas Ray

text: In early 1977, Ray started to realize some new opportunities. In March, Wim Wenders cast him in a small but notable role, alongside Dennis Hopper, in "The American Friend" (1977). At the same time, with the support of old friends Elia Kazan and John Houseman, he started to present workshops on acting and directing at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute, and then at New York University. He was also approached about directing a couple of films, including "The Story of Bill W.", about the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous. In November 1977, however, he was diagnosed with lung cancer. Surgery showed that the tumour was too close to his aorta to be safely removed, so he received cobalt therapy.


title: Nicholas Ray

text: He had travelled to California in summer 1977, taking Betty and Nicca to dinner, and leaving his daughter a letter that caused her to "start believing that Nick understood me better than Betty ever would." He returned west in February 1978 to play a bit part in Miloš Forman's "Hair" (1979). Where he had looked robust in "The American Friend", he now looked gaunt and drawn. After his scenes were shot, he visited Houseman in Malibu, and he summoned Nicca, so that he could tell his daughter that he was dying of cancer. They remained in contact, and though she hoped to travel to New York, it was the last time they saw each other.


title: Nicholas Ray

text: On April 11, 1978, Ray underwent additional surgery, at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, involving therapeutic implantation of radioactive particles. Then on May 26, he had surgery again, to remove a tumour on his brain. He was frail and coughed painfully, he had lost his mane of hair, yet he was still active, hired to teach another summer workshop at NYU. He was then invited by László Benedek—once Ray's contemporary, as a Hollywood director, now chair of the NYU graduate film program—to teach in the autumn. He assigned Ray a teaching assistant, soon to become a friend, Jim Jarmusch.


title: Nicholas Ray

text: With the imminent prospect of his death, Ray had spoken with his son Tim about making a documentary about a father-son relationship. Though that project remained unpursued, Tim Ray, experienced in cinematography, joined the crew that assembled to make "Lightning Over Water", a collaboration of Ray and Wenders, though credited collectively to all the participants. With no appetite, and increasingly unable to swallow, Ray was wasting away, and had to be admitted to hospital for intravenous feeding, restoring some weight and buying some time. Ray was visited by friends including Kazan, Connie Bessie, Alan Lomax, and his first wife, Jean, as well as students from Harpur College, and his more recent students.


title: Nicholas Ray

text: Ray died in hospital, of heart failure, on June 16, 1979. A memorial was held at Lincoln Center shortly after. Among the attendees were all four of his wives and all four of his children. He was survived by two sisters, Helen and Alice (Ruth had died in a fire, in 1965), and his ashes were returned to La Crosse, Wisconsin, his hometown, and interred in the same section of Oak Grove Cemetery as his parents. His grave bears no inscription.


title: Nicholas Ray

text: In the decades after his professional peak, and since his death, filmmakers continue to cite Ray as an influence and object of admiration.


Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) is the military headquarters of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's (NATO) Allied Command Operations (ACO) that commands all NATO operations worldwide. ACO's and SHAPE's commander is titled Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR), a U.S. four-star general officer or flag officer who also serves as Commander, U.S. European Command. SHAPE is situated in Mons, Belgium.


title: Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe

text: Under the 2002 Berlin Plus agreement, SHAPE may also take part in the European Union's (EU) command and control structure as an operational headquarters (OHQ) for EU missions. In such an instance, the Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe (DSACEUR), who is always a European, would serve as Operation Commander (OpCdr). This use of SHAPE by the EU is however subject to a "right of first refusal", i.e. NATO must first decline to intervene in a given crisis, and contingent on unanimous approval among NATO states, including those outside of the EU.


text: Since 1967 it has been located in Casteau, north of the Belgian city of Mons, but it had previously been located, from 1953, at Rocquencourt, next to Versailles, France. From 1951 to 2003, SHAPE was the headquarters of Allied Command Europe (ACE). Since 2003 it has been the headquarters of Allied Command Operations, controlling all NATO operations worldwide.


text: SHAPE retained its traditional name with reference to Europe for legal reasons although the geographical scope of its activities was extended in 2003. At that time, NATO's command in Lisbon, historically part of Allied Command Atlantic, was reassigned to ACO.


text: An integrated military structure for NATO was first established after the Korean War raised questions over the strength of Europe's defences against a Soviet attack. The first choice for commander in Europe was American General of the Army Dwight D. Eisenhower, as he had successfully directed the Allied landings in Normandy and subsequent march into Germany during World War II, amid many inter-Allied controversies over the proper conduct of the campaign on the Western Front. On December 19, 1950, the North Atlantic Council announced the appointment of General Eisenhower as the first SACEUR. British Field Marshal Sir Bernard L. Montgomery moved over from the predecessor Western Union Defence Organization (WUDO) to become the first Deputy SACEUR, who would serve until 1958. Volume 3 of Nigel Hamilton's "Life of Montgomery of Alamein" gives a good account of Montgomery's exacting, tireless approach to improving the command's readiness, which caused a good deal of bruised feelings in doing so. In establishing the command, the first NATO planners drew extensively on WUDO plans and personnel.


text: General Eisenhower arrived in Paris on January 1, 1951, and quickly set to work with a small group of planners to devise a structure for the new European command. The Planning Group worked in the Hotel Astoria in central Paris while construction of a permanent facility began at Rocquencourt, just west of the city, at Camp Voluceau.


text: Devising command arrangements in the Central Region, which contained the bulk of NATO's forces, proved to be much more complicated. General Eisenhower considered naming an overall Commander-in-Chief (C-in-C) there as well but soon realized it would be difficult to find an arrangement that would satisfy all three major powers with forces in the Center—the United States, United Kingdom and France—as they had strongly differing views on the proper relationship of air and ground power. Drawing upon his World War II experience, General Eisenhower decided to retain overall control himself and did not appoint a C-in-C for the Central Region. Instead there would be three separate C-in-C's (air, land, and sea).


text: In December 1950 it was announced that the forces initially to come under General Eisenhower's command were to be the U.S. Seventh Army in Germany, the British Army of the Rhine (BAOR), with the 2nd Infantry and 7th Armoured Divisions, to be bolstered by the 11th Armoured Division and a further infantry division, three French divisions in Germany and Austria, the Danish, Belgian, and the Independent Norwegian Brigades in Western Germany, and the American and British garrisons in Austria, Trieste, and Berlin. Four days after Eisenhower's arrival in Paris, on 5 January 1951, the Italian defence minister, Randolfo Pacciardi, announced that three Italian divisions were to be formed as Italy's 'initial contribution to the Atlantic army', and that these divisions would also come under Eisenhower's control.


text: On April 2, 1951, General Eisenhower signed the activation order for Allied Command Europe and its headquarters at SHAPE. Headquarters, Allied Forces Central Europe (AFCENT) was activated in Fontainebleau, France in 1953. On the same day, ACE's subordinate headquarters in Northern and Central Europe were activated, with the Southern Region following in June.


text: By 1954 ACE's forces consisted of Allied Forces Northern Europe, at Oslo, Allied Forces Central Europe (Fontainebleau), Allied Forces Southern Europe (Paris/Naples) and Allied Forces Mediterranean at Malta.


text: Four exercises were conducted in the ACE area during autumn 1952. "Blue Alliance" was a major allied air force exercise for the Allied Air Forces Central Europe (AAFCE) to achieve air supremacy over the Central European front and provide close air support to NORTHAG ground forces under the overall command of Lt. General Lauris Norstad, USAF. Two 1952 central region exercises involved air-ground combined forces. "Equinox" was a major air-ground exercise involving French-American tactical air units and a French airborne infantry unit under the command of "Général d'Armée" Alphonse Juin, French Army. "Holdfast" was a major allied air-ground exercise involving 150,000 British Army of the Rhine, Dutch, Belgian and Canadian troops of NATO's Northern Army Group in coordination with the Allied Air Forces Central Europe. They maneuvered east of the Rhine River in the British Zone under the overall command of Lt. General Sir Richard Nelson Gale, British Army. Finally, "Rosebud" involved ground maneuvers by the U.S. Seventh Army in the American Zone of Occupation of Allied-occupied Germany.


text: The initial plans saw the defence of Western Europe from a Soviet invasion resting heavily on nuclear weapons ('Massive retaliation'), with conventional forces merely acting as a 'tripwire.' The policy enunciated in Military Committee document MC14/1, issued in December 1952, saw the defence of Germany as principally a delaying action, to allow a line of resistance to be established along the lines of the IJssel and Rhine rivers. The conventional forces would attempt to hold this line while the allied strategic air forces defeated the Soviets and their allies by destroying their economy and infrastructure.


text: What this strategy meant for the land battle in the central region was described for publicity purposes in January 1954 by then-Supreme Allied Commander Europe General Alfred Gruenther as:


text: In 1957, SACEUR General Lauris Norstad, USAF, noting the numerical superiority of Soviet and Warsaw Pact forces over NATO ground forces, called for "about 30" divisions to augment NATO's central European front. That year Allied Command Europe carried out Operation Counter Punch, which involved AFCENT forces on the European mainland, and two other major military exercises in September 1957. Operation Strikeback was a series of multilateral naval exercises that concentrated on NATO's eastern Atlantic/northern European flank. Operation Deep Water involved NATO carrier and amphibious assault forces operating along NATO's southern flank in the Mediterranean Sea.


text: To improve alliance military readiness and integration, NATO continued to hold annual alliance-wide military exercises each autumn ("FALLEX") that was jointly planned and executed by SACEUR and SACLANT forces.


text: From 1967 however, under 'flexible response', the aim became to build up conventional forces so that, if possible, nuclear weapons might not be needed. However it was made clear that first use of nuclear weapons might be necessary if the conventional defences were being overwhelmed. Eventually SACEUR was allocated planning control of a small number of US and British ballistic missile submarines, and some 7,000 tactical nuclear weapons were deployed in Europe.


text: One of the most significant events in the history of Allied Command Europe (ACE) was France's withdrawal from NATO's integrated military structure. This move forced SHAPE and several other ACE headquarters to leave French territory. France's resentment over NATO's military structure had been brewing for a number of years, as successive French governments had become increasingly incensed with Anglo-American domination of the command structure and insufficient French influence. In February 1966 President Charles de Gaulle stated that the changed world order had "stripped NATO of its justification" for military integration, and soon afterward, France stated that it was withdrawing from the NATO military structure. SHAPE and all the other NATO installations, including NATO Headquarters and Allied Forces Central Europe (AFCENT), were informed that they must leave French territory by April 1967.


text: Belgium became the host nation for both NATO's political headquarters and SHAPE. General Lyman Lemnitzer, SACEUR at the time, had hoped that SHAPE could be located near to NATO Headquarters, as had been the case in Paris, but the Belgian authorities decided that SHAPE should be located at least 50 kilometres from Brussels, NATO's new location, because SHAPE was a major wartime military target. The Belgian government offered Camp Casteau, a 2 km Belgian Army summer training camp near Mons, which was an area in serious need of additional economic investment. In September 1966, NATO agreed that Belgium should host SHAPE at Casteau. SHAPE closed its facility at Rocquencourt near Paris on 30 March 1967, and the next day held a ceremony to mark the opening of the new headquarters at Casteau.


text: The drawdown of the British Mediterranean Fleet, the military difficulties of the politically decided command structure, and the withdrawal of the French from the military command structure forced a rearrangement of the command arrangements in the southern region. Allied Forces Mediterranean was disbanded on 5 June 1967, and all forces in the south and the Mediterranean assigned to AFSOUTH in Naples. This left SHAPE and Allied Command Europe with three commands: AFNORTH covering Norway and Denmark, AFCENT most of Germany, and AFSOUTH Italy, Turkey, Greece, and the rest of the southern region.


text: The headquarters' new home in Mons, Belgium, was the center of international attention from time to time as new Supreme Allied Commanders came and went, with one of the more notable being General Alexander Haig. Haig, who had retired from military service in order to serve as White House Chief of Staff for President Richard Nixon during the depths of the Watergate crisis, was abruptly installed as SACEUR after Watergate's denouement. Haig arrived in 1974. Some scattered notes about his time at SHAPE are recorded by Colodny and Shachtman's book "The Forty Years War". In addition, then-Lieutenant Colonel John Galvin (later to become SACEUR himself) served as speechwriter for both Goodpaster, Haig's predecessor, and Haig. Galvin wrote that 'Goodpaster was ..internationally minded, avuncular, philosophical, gentlemanly, thoughtful, warm, and measured in his ways. Haig was combative and suspicious, and conspiratorial in outlook.' While at SACEUR Haig felt that the large Warsaw Pact exercises were intimidating to observers, and, despite HQ staff disapproval, created the Exercise Autumn Forge exercise series, increasing the size of the event by holding all the NATO ACE exercises at the same time of year.


text: A creature of habit, Haig took the same route to SHAPE every day – a pattern of behavior that did not go unnoticed by terrorist groups. On June 25, 1979, Haig was the apparent target of an assassination attempt in Mons, Belgium. A land mine blew up under the bridge on which Haig's car was traveling, narrowly missing Haig's car, but wounding three of his bodyguards in a following car. Authorities later attributed responsibility for the attack to the German Red Army Faction.


text: Haig's successor, General Bernard W. Rogers, became somewhat of an institution in Europe as the former U.S. Army chief of staff occupied the office for nearly eight years; a brief outcry arose from the other NATO capitals when Rogers was slated for retirement by the U.S. administration in 1987.


text: ACE in 1986 had three major subordinate commands (MSCs), one each for Northern, Central, and Southern Europe, as well as smaller commands.


text: From 1993, the staffing of ACE was reduced in line with personnel reductions already in progress since 1990 and the Schaefer Plan, drafted by retired German general Shaefer. Shaefer's aim was to begin the first effort to streamline NATO's Cold War structure to meet the new circumstances. Personnel in the headquarters fell from 18,354 in 1990 to 12,919 in 1996. Costs fell from US$621m to $482m over the same period. From 1994-c.1999, there were three Major Subordinate Commands in ACE: Allied Forces Northwestern Europe at RAF High Wycombe, Allied Forces Central Europe at Brunssum, The Netherlands, and AFSOUTH in Naples.


text: After much discussion within the Alliance, ACE's three-command system was reduced to two commands covering the same area after 1996, one for north of the Alps and one for south of the Alps. The United States had wished to retain three commands, arguing that 'the span of control might be excessive.' It was feared by Pentagon officials at the time that if the two-command structure was adopted, some functions at the MSC level would have had to be moved 'downward' in the new structure. But while the United States eventually had to give in on a reduction to two commands, it was successful in that a European officer was not placed in charge of the new southern command (now Allied Joint Force Command Naples), a move which France and Germany supported. Despite French President Jacques Chirac exchanging letters with Bill Clinton personally over the issue in September–October 1997, the United States stood firm and today an American admiral remains in charge of the Naples command. In addition to the two continental commands AFNORTHWEST covered the United Kingdom and Scandinavia.


text: An early retirement again disrupted the Mons headquarters in 2000 as General Wesley Clark was shunted aside in favor of Air Force general Joseph Ralston. Although the move was publicly characterized as a purely administrative move necessitated by Clark's approaching retirement and the lack of an open four-star slot for the highly respected Ralston [a reality which would have compelled him to either accept a temporary demotion to two-star rank or retire from the service], Clark's relief has been often seen as a slap at the general on the part of a Pentagon leadership that had been very much at odds with him during the Kosovo war the previous spring.


text: From the early 2000s ACO as it became had more and more activities related to the NATO Response Force. Yet after Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania joined the alliance, and especially after the 2008 Georgia-Russia war, more attention began to be paid to NATO's core Article 5 defence obligations. The three Baltic states' worries were specifically focused on a potential Russian threat. Thus while some exercises were ostentially run to prepare the NRF, sometimes they also included Article 5 aspects. Among these dual-purpose exercises was 'Steadfast Jazz', part of the NATO Exercise Steadfast series, which was run in November 2013 across a number of NATO countries, including Poland and the Baltic states.


text: In 2003, a French flag was set up in the SHAPE headquarters in Mons following the return, after almost forty years, of French military officers to the HQ. Fifteen French military officers, including General Jean-Jacques Bart, work there, of a total amount of 1,100 personnel. They are however considered as "inserted," and not as "integrated," as they cannot be ordered to move without previous French approval.


text: Between 2003 and 2006, a new category of forces was created, principally to improve the flexibility and reach of land forces. The structure incorporated six "NATO Rapid Deployable Corps headquarters." Formed from October 2003, the NATO Rapidly Deployable Corps are designated High Readiness Forces (HRF), designed to be able to react on short notice. Although these forces cannot deploy on five days warning like the NATO Response Force (NRF), they have a longer sustainment capability in combat than the NRF, which is limited to 30 days.


text: The Multinational Corps Northeast headquartered in Szczecin, Poland, was seen along with the downgraded Greek corps, as the third echelon deployable force in the NATO rapid deployment capability. The Eurocorps HQ, in Strasbourg, France, is an EU force with a technical agreement linking it to NATO.


text: Naval Striking and Support Forces NATO (STRIKFORNATO), homeported at Gaeta, Italy, whose lead nation is the United States, is commanded by Commander United States Sixth Fleet, and is also part of the NATO Force Structure. STRIKFORNATO is the only command capable of leading an expanded maritime task force.


text: The final formation is Commander French Maritime Forces, initially aboard the "Charles de Gaulle", but now aboard the amphibious ship "Mistral". The French naval component is drawn from the Force d'Action Navale, the French Navy's surface fleet.


text: Island Commander, Iceland, remains in existence as a detachment of HQ ACO, as does Allied Submarine Command, a NATO command based on the United States Navy's ComSubLant. A special operations coordination centre and an intelligence fusion centre have also recently been formed within SHAPE.


text: As more capable rapid reaction forces were established, earlier 'fire brigades', including the ACE Mobile Force (Land) ('AMF (L)'), were disbanded; AMF(L) was disbanded on 30 October 2002.


text: Airlift support for SACEUR's travels is provided by the USAF's 309th Airlift Squadron at Chièvres Air Base, Belgium.


text: In 2012 and 2013, NATO underwent a reorganization of the military command, and the land component commands at Heidelberg and Madrid were deactivated, the maritime component command at Naples was closed and the air component command at Izmir also shut down.


text: Today Allied Command Operations (ACO) is one of the two strategic commands of NATO (the other being Allied Command Transformation (ACT).


text: There were initially two joint force operational headquarters and several single service commands under Allied Command Operations:


text: In 2018, it was agreed that a new joint force operational headquarters in Norfolk would be created to conduct operations in the Atlantic.


text: Joint Force Command Norfolk (JFCNF) was established due to the rising Russian threat, making the Atlantic sea routes a critical domain. A Joint Support and Enabling Command (JSEC) was also created in Ulm, Germany, to improve rear area logistical support.


text: Since 2003 the Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) has also served as the head of Allied Command Europe and the head of Allied Command Operations.


text: Ian Fleming referenced SHAPE in his short-story 'From a View to a Kill', collected as part of "For Your Eyes Only".


title: Left Party (Sweden)

text: The Left Party ( ; V) is a socialist political party in Sweden. On economic issues, the party opposes privatizations and advocates increased public expenditure. In foreign policy, the party is Eurosceptic, being opposed to the European Union, NATO, and Swedish entry into the eurozone. It attempted to get Sweden to join the Non-Aligned Movement in 1980, but did not succeed. The party is eco-socialist, and also supports anti-racism, feminism, and republicanism. It is placed on the left-wing of the political spectrum.


title: Left Party (Sweden)

text: The party has never been part of a government at the national level, though it has lended parliamentary support to the Swedish Social Democratic Party-led government in the Riksdag. From 1998 to 2006, the Left Party was in a confidence-and-supply arrangement with the ruling Social Democrats and the Green Party. Since 2014, it has supported the minority government of Social Democrats and Greens in the Riksdag, as well as in many of Sweden's counties and municipalities.


title: Left Party (Sweden)

text: The party originated as a split from the Social Democrats in 1917, as the Swedish Social Democratic Left Party ( ; SSV), and became the Communist Party of Sweden in 1921. In 1967, the party was renamed Left Party – the Communists ( ; VPK); it adopted its current name in 1990. The Left Party is a member of the Nordic Green Left Alliance, and its sole MEP sits in the European United Left–Nordic Green Left (GUE/NGL) group. In 2018, the party joined Maintenant le Peuple.


title: Left Party (Sweden)

text: Revolutionary fervour engulfed Sweden in 1917. Riots took place in many cities. In Västervik, a workers council took control of day-to-day affairs. In Stockholm, soldiers marched together with workers on May Day. In the upper-class neighbourhood of Stockholm, Östermalm, residents formed paramilitary structures to defend themselves from a possible armed revolution.


title: Left Party (Sweden)

text: The party originated as a split from the Swedish Social Democratic Party in 1917, as the Swedish Social Democratic Left Party ("Sveriges socialdemokratiska vänsterparti", SSV). The split occurred as the Social Democratic Party did not support the 1917 Bolshevik revolution in Russia, whereas SSV did support the Bolsheviks. Another reason for the split was also the opposition against the social democratic cooperation with the Liberals and the increasing militarism. The SSV brought with them 15 of the 87 Social Democratic members of parliament and the youth wing. Many of the breakaways were inspired by Lenin's revolutionary Bolsheviks, others by libertarian socialism. Almost all SSV leaders eventually returned to the Social Democrats (SAP), but the foundation was laid for a party on the left wing of the labor movement.


title: Left Party (Sweden)

text: In 1921, in accordance with the 21 theses of the Comintern, the party name was changed to Communist Party of Sweden ( ; SKP ). Liberal and non-revolutionary elements were purged. They regrouped under the name SSV. In total, 6,000 out of 17,000 party members were expelled.


title: Left Party (Sweden)

text: Zeth Höglund, the main leader of the party during the split from the Social Democrats, left the party in 1924. Höglund was displeased with the developments in Moscow after the death of Vladimir Lenin, and he founded his own Communist Party, independent from the Comintern. Around 5,000 party members followed Höglund.


title: Left Party (Sweden)

text: On 23 and 24 January 1926, SKP organized a trade union conference with delegates representing 80,000 organized workers.


title: Left Party (Sweden)

text: In 1927, SKP organized a conference of National Association of the Unemployed, and called for the abolition of the Unemployment Commission (AK).


title: Left Party (Sweden)

text: In 1929, a major split, the largest in the history of the party, took place. Nils Flyg, Karl Kilbom, Ture Nerman, all MPs, and the majority of the party membership were expelled by the Comintern. The expelled were called "Kilbommare", and those loyal to the Comintern were called "Sillenare" (after their leader Hugo Sillén). Out of 17,300 party members, 4,000 sided with Sillén and the Comintern. Conflicts erupted locally over control of party offices and property. In Stockholm, the office of the central organ, held by the Kilbommare, was besieged by Comintern loyalists. Fist-fights erupted in Gothenburg, in a clash over control of the party office. Effectively, the Kilbom-Flyg factions continued to operate their party under the name of Socialist Party, soon renamed "Socialistiska partiet". Notably, they took with them the central organ of the party, "Folkets Dagblad Politiken". SKP started new publications, including "Ny Dag" and "Arbetar-Tidningen".


title: Left Party (Sweden)

text: Under Sillén's leadership, the party adhered to the "Class against Class"-line, denouncing any co-operation with the Social Democrats. Sven Linderot, a dynamic young leader, become the party chairman.


title: Left Party (Sweden)

text: The infamous Ådalen shootings of unarmed demonstrating workers took place in 1931. This development led to increased labour militancy and gave new life to the crisis-ridden SKP.


title: Left Party (Sweden)

text: The Spanish Civil War began in 1936. SKP and its youth wing sent a sizeable contingent to fight in the International Brigades. 520 Swedes took part in the brigades and 164 of them died there. Simultaneously, an extensive solidarity work for the Second Spanish Republic and the people of Spain was organized in Sweden.


title: Left Party (Sweden)

text: During the 1930s, the party was rebuilt; as the Kilbom-Flyg party crumbled, the party base was enhanced. By 1939, SKP had 19,116 members.


title: Left Party (Sweden)

text: The Second World War (1939–1945) was a difficult time for the party. The party was the sole political force in Sweden supporting the Soviet side in the Winter War, which was frequently used as a pretext for the repression against the party. The party supported Soviet military expansion along its Western border. "Ny Dag", the main party organ, wrote on 26 July: "The border states have been liberated from their dependence of imperialist superpowers through the help from the great socialist worker's state."


title: Left Party (Sweden)

text: Moreover, the party supported the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. The Central Committee adopted a declaration in September 1939, which read: "The ruling cliques in England and France have in fear of Bolshevism, in their badly hidden sympathy for Fascism, in fear of workers power in Europe, refused to enter into an agreement with adoptable conditions for the Soviet Union to effectively crush the plans of the warmongers. They have supported the refusal of Poland to accept the Soviet help. The Soviet Union has thus, in clear accordance with its consequent politics of peace, through a non-aggression pact with Germany sought to defend the 170-million people of the first socialist state against Fascist attacks and the bottomless misery of a world war."


title: Left Party (Sweden)

text: When Nazi Germany invaded Norway in April 1940, SKP took a neutralist stand. In an article in Ny Dag, the German take-over in Norway was described as a "set-back for British imperialism".


title: Left Party (Sweden)

text: Following orders by the German legation in Stockholm, several repressive measures were taken by the Swedish government against the party. The main publications were effectively banned (they were banned from transportation, meaning it was illegal to carry the SKP newspapers by any form of vehicle). Key cadres of the party and youth league were detained in camps, officially as a part of their military service. In total, 3500 persons were interned at ten different camps, the great majority of them were communists. Many party activists went underground, including the party chairman. A complete ban on the party was discussed in government circles, but never became effective.


title: Left Party (Sweden)

text: In 1940, the office of the regional party organ in Norrbotten, "Norrskensflamman", was bombed. Five people, including two children, were killed. This constitutes the deadliest terrorist act committed in Sweden in the 1900s. One of the financial supporters of the group behind the attack, Paul Wretlind, was a regional leader of the Liberal Party in Stockholm.


title: Left Party (Sweden)

text: During the war, the largest co-ordinated police action in Swedish history took place against the party. 3,000 policemen took part in raids on party offices and homes of party members all over the country. However, the raids failed to produce any evidence of any criminal activity of the party.


title: Left Party (Sweden)

text: The party actively supported resistance struggles in Norway and Denmark. In northern Sweden, party-affiliated workers stole dynamite from mines, and smuggled them to the Norwegian resistance. In other parts, the party gave shelter to anti-fascist refugees.


title: Left Party (Sweden)

text: As the military fortunes of the Third Reich turned sour, the party regained a strong position in Swedish politics. In the parliamentary elections of 1944, SKP got 10.3% of the votes.


title: Left Party (Sweden)

text: In the 1946 municipal elections, SKP got 11.2% of the votes. Party membership reached its historical peak, 51,000. These developments, along with developments in the international arena and new Soviet policies of peaceful co-existence, led the party to initiate a re-adjustment of its role in Swedish politics. The electoral gains strengthened the perception that the party would be able to come to power within the parliamentary framework. Likewise, the idea of a "united front" with the Social Democrats gained ground in the inner-party debate. The trade union policy of the party was changed towards a less conflictive position towards the Social Democracy within the trade union movement. These changes met with some resistance in the party ranks.


title: Left Party (Sweden)

text: However, the onset of the Cold War became a difficult challenge to the party. The electoral gains of the post-war years would not last long. The prime minister Tage Erlander declared the intention to turn "every trade union into a battlefield against the communists". Communists were purged from the trade union movement. However, the party continued its development of the united front strategy.


title: Left Party (Sweden)

text: In the 1952 parliamentary by-elections in Jämtland and Kristianstad, the party decided to withdraw its lists, in order to ensure that the Social Democrats would not lose the elections. The party leadership argued that communists had to make an effort to "ensure a labour majority in the Riksdag". Moreover, the two concerned counties were electoral districts where it was highly unlikely that any communist MP would be elected. However, the leftist minority within the party (led by Set Persson) saw the new line as a capitulation to the Social Democrats.


title: Left Party (Sweden)

text: Another issue concerned the youth league. The party took an initiative to create a broad-based youth movement, looking at similar developments in countries like Finland. In 1952, Democratic Youth ("Demokratisk Ungdom" ) was founded as a broad youth movement, parallel to the existing Young Communist League of Sweden. The hard-liners saw this as diluting the political character of the youth movement.


title: Left Party (Sweden)

text: An issue of high symbolic importance was the decision of the party to promote joint May Day rallies with the Social Democrats. Yet another issue was the decision of the party to give financial support to the "labour press", which was essentially in the hands of the Social Democrats.


title: Left Party (Sweden)

text: The intra-party polemic reached its peak at the 1953 party congress. Persson fiercely exposed his criticism, particularly towards the new party chairman Hagberg, whom he branded as an opportunist. Persson was in turn accused of being an egoist, and of wanting to divide and damage the party. Criticism was delivered towards Persson by Knut Senander and Nils Holmberg, who said that Persson had to be held accountable for lack of political orientation and anti-party actions. Both Senander and Holmberg were considered as being part of the leftist section of the party, but on this occasion they appeared as the most firebrand defenders of the party line. Only a handful of delegates defended Persson, and those who did clearly highlighted that they did not fully share Persson's critique of the line of the party leadership. In a highly emotional conclusion of the debate, Persson declared his resignation from the party in a speech to the congress. After his departure a purge was carried out against Persson's followers within the party, out of whom several were expelled.


title: Left Party (Sweden)

text: When Joseph Stalin died the same year, the party organized a memorial function, which was addressed by C.-H. Hermansson.


title: Left Party (Sweden)

text: When the Hungarian revolt broke out in 1956, internal party debate surged on what stand the party should take. In the end, the party leadership chose to support the official Soviet line.


title: Left Party (Sweden)

text: In 1961, leading party members founded the travel agency Folkturist, which specialized in tours to Eastern Europe.


title: Left Party (Sweden)

text: In 1964, C.-H. Hermansson was elected party chairman. Hermansson came from an academic background, unlike previous party leaders. Hermansson initiated a change in the political direction of the party towards Eurocommunism and Nordic Popular socialism.


title: Left Party (Sweden)

text: Ahead of the 1967 party congress, a heated debate took place. Several distinct tendencies were present. One section wanted to transform the party into a non-communist party, on the lines of the Danish Socialist People's Party (SF), and thus proposed that the party should change its name to "Vänsterpartiet" ("Left Party"). Another section, largely based amongst the trade union cadre of the party, wanted to maintain the communist character of the party and the fraternal bond to the CPSU. The former party leader Hagberg, who was associated with the pro-Soviet grouping, tried to launch the name "Arbetets Parti" (; "Party of Labour"), as a compromise. The party leadership came up with another compromise, and the party name was changed to Left Party – the Communists (VPK). VPK continued on the Eurocommunist course, but with a loud pro-Soviet minority grouped around "Norrskensflamman". In addition, there was a small pro-Chinese group led by Bo Gustafsson and Nils Holmberg, that left the party to form Communist Party of Sweden (; KFML) at the time of the congress. The youth wing broke away, eventually forming Marxist-Leninistiska Kampförbundet (MLK).


title: Left Party (Sweden)

text: In 1968, VPK was the first Swedish party to publicly condemn the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia. The party organized a demonstration outside the Soviet embassy in Stockholm, which was addressed by Hermansson. This disapproval of Soviet aggression was an exception among the Western communist parties. The party line on Czechoslovakia irritated the pro-Soviet minority.


title: Left Party (Sweden)

text: In the municipal elections of 1968, VPK received 3,8% of the votes, the lowest electoral result of the party in the post-war era. Lacking a functioning youth and students wing, the party was unable to capitalize on the international surge of youth radicalism.


title: Left Party (Sweden)

text: At the onset of protests against the U.S. war in Vietnam, VPK launched the Swedish Vietnam Committee. The Committee raised the demand 'Peace in Vietnam' and appealed for all-party unity on the issue. The Committee was rapidly out-manoeuvered by the United FNL Groups (DFFG), an organization led by KFML that was actively supporting the armed struggle of the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam. Soon, VPK left the Swedish Vietnam Committee and many members became active in DFFG.


title: Left Party (Sweden)

text: In 1972, the party shifted towards a more leftist position with the adaptation of a new party programme. The neo-Leninist tendency emerged as an important section of the party.


title: Left Party (Sweden)

text: In 1975, Lars Werner was elected party chairman. The runner-up candidate was Rolf Hagel of the pro-Soviet group. Werner was elected with 162 votes at the party congress. Hagel got 74 votes.


title: Left Party (Sweden)

text: In February 1977, the pro-Soviet minority left the party, and founded the Workers' Party – Communists (APK). The founder of APK took with them the newspaper "Norrskensflamman" and two MPs (Hagel and Alf Löwenborg). Between 1,500–2,000 VPK members joined APK.


title: Left Party (Sweden)

text: In 1990, VPK changed its name to "Vänsterpartiet" ((v), Left Party) and ceased to be a communist party.


title: Left Party (Sweden)

text: In the 1994 parliamentary elections, the party received 6.2% of the votes. The prolonged electoral crisis of the party was thus ended. The influence of the party started to grow, especially amongst the youth. In the same year, the party was active in the "No"-campaign in the plebiscite on joining the European Union.


title: Left Party (Sweden)

text: Having passed through a period of severe crisis, the party began to regain public support during the mid-1990s. In retrospect, the main factor behind this shift was not caused by the party itself, but by the fact that the Social Democrats had moved considerably towards the right during the preceding years, which had alienated much of its traditional votebank.


title: Left Party (Sweden)

text: In 1998, the party obtained its best-ever result in a parliamentary election, getting 12% of the votes nationwide. Following the elections, the party entered into an arrangement with the Social Democrats, and started to support the government from outside.


title: Left Party (Sweden)

text: In the 2002 parliamentary elections, the voteshare of the party dropped by 3% to a total of 8.3%. Simultaneously, the Social Democrats regained 3%.


title: Left Party (Sweden)

text: The 2004 party congress elected Lars Ohly as the new party chairman. In the end of the year, Schyman left the party, becoming a parliamentary independent. Lars Ohly originally called himself a communist, but retracted that statement later.


title: Left Party (Sweden)

text: In the same year, a two-part documentary on the party was broadcast on the SVT show "Uppdrag Granskning". The documentary focused mainly on the international relations of the party during the post-war era. Following the broadcast, debate surged once again concerning the relations of the party with the ruling parties in the former Socialist Bloc.


title: Left Party (Sweden)

text: In the September 2006 election, the Left Party got 317,228 votes (5.8%; in 2002: 8.4%), and therefore 22 Riksdag seats (previously 30). In the 2010 election, the party got 5.6% of the votes (334,053 votes) and 19 seats.


title: Left Party (Sweden)

text: On 7 December 2008, the Social Democrats launched a political and electoral alliance known as the Red-Greens, together with the Left Party and the Green Party.


title: Left Party (Sweden)

text: The parties contested the 2010 general election on a joint manifesto, but lost the election to the incumbent centre-right coalition The Alliance. On 26 November 2010, the Red-Green alliance was dissolved.


title: Left Party (Sweden)

text: On 6 January 2012, the Left Party congress elected Jonas Sjöstedt as the new party chairman, since Ohly had announced his resignation.


title: Left Party (Sweden)

text: On 31 October 2020, the party elected Nooshi Dadgostar as party leader, following the retirement of Sjöstedt.


title: Left Party (Sweden)

text: On 15 June 2021, the party withdrew its support for the coalition government, after a disagreement on rent controls.


title: Left Party (Sweden)

text: The party opposes further liberalization of the Employment Protection Act, and vowed to initiate a vote of no confidence against the Löfven II Cabinet if they were to attempt such a liberalization.


title: Left Party (Sweden)

text: The Left Party claims that Sweden does not have social equality in regard to gender. The party thus advocates the creation of a specific Minister of Social Equality, as well as to introduce the teaching of "feminist self-defence" in high schools. Feminism as a concept was introduced in the party program in 1997, but it believes that it has always worked to strengthen women's rights. Feminist theory has grown into the party since the 1960s, when the women's movement gained a theoretical basis beyond Marxism.


title: Left Party (Sweden)

text: During the 2020 - 2022 mandate period, five of the seven members (71%) of the Left Party's executive committee, and ten of the 16 other board members (63%), are female.


title: Left Party (Sweden)

text: The party supports a generous immigration policy, granting refugees permanent residency, and prioritizing family re-unification. A strong welfare system and the uniting of families is necessary for refugees to be able to integrate in society, according to the Left Party.


title: Left Party (Sweden)

text: In regards to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, the party supports a two-state solution based on the 1967 border. The party calls for the freezing of EU trade agreements with Israel, ending Swedish military co-operation and arms trade with Israel, and a general consumer boycott of Israeli goods to put pressure on Israel.


title: Left Party (Sweden)

text: In February 2019, the party dropped a long-held policy that Sweden should leave the European Union. However, by 2022 the party's platform was amended to support leaving the EU once again and called for the European Parliament to be either abolished or fundamentally changed.


title: Left Party (Sweden)

text: The Left Party opposes joining NATO, stating that they support neutrality and freedom of alliance, and calls for a left-wing alliance in Europe to ensure the dissolution of NATO.


title: Ronnie Peterson

text: Bengt Ronnie Peterson (; 14 February 1944 – 11 September 1978) was a Swedish racing driver. Known by the nickname 'SuperSwede', he was a two-time runner-up in the Formula One World Drivers' Championship.


title: Ronnie Peterson

text: Peterson began his motor racing career in kart racing, traditionally the discipline where the majority of race drivers begin their careers in open-wheel racing. After winning a number of karting titles, including two Swedish titles in 1963 and 1964, he moved on to Formula Three, where he won the Monaco Grand Prix Formula Three support race for the 1969 Grand Prix. Later that year he won the FIA European Formula 3 Championship and moved up into Formula One, racing for the March factory team. In his three-year spell with the team, he took six podiums, most of which were scored during the 1971 Formula One season in which he also finished as runner-up in the Drivers' Championship.


title: Ronnie Peterson

text: After seeing out his three-year contract at March, Peterson joined Colin Chapman's Team Lotus in the 1973 season, partnering defending champion Emerson Fittipaldi. During his first two seasons with Lotus, Peterson took seven victories, scoring a career-best 52 points in 1973. After a poor 1975 season, Peterson moved back to March and scored his final victory for the team at the 1976 Italian Grand Prix. After spending the 1977 season with Tyrrell, he moved back to Lotus for the 1978 season as number two driver to Mario Andretti. Peterson scored two wins, at the South African and Austrian Grand Prix races, and finished second in the Drivers' Championship standings despite his fatal first-lap accident at Monza during the Italian Grand Prix.


title: Ronnie Peterson

text: Peterson was born in Almby in the vicinity of Örebro, Sweden. He developed his driving style at a young age while competing in karting, and rapidly worked his way up to the pinnacle of European karting before switching to cars.


title: Ronnie Peterson

text: After his karting years, Peterson entered Formula Three racing in the "Svebe", a 1-litre, Brabham-derived Formula car he co-designed with his father Bengt (who was a baker) and Sven Andersson.


title: Ronnie Peterson

text: Superb results from the outset quickly attracted the attention of the ambitious Tecno company from Italy, who signed him in 1968. With them, he won the 1969 Formula Three Championship.


title: Ronnie Peterson

text: Even after his elevation to F1 status Peterson still drove in lower echelon racing series (which was common at the time), winning the 1971 European Formula Two Championship driving for March.


title: Ronnie Peterson

text: Peterson made his Grand Prix debut in a March 701 for Colin Crabbe's works-supported Antique Automobiles Racing Team at the 1970 Monaco Grand Prix. The limited budget of Crabbe's privateer team allowed only minimal testing, and Peterson qualified 12th out of 16 cars in the race. He was 10 places behind Jackie Stewart and Chris Amon, both on the front row of the grid in their newer specification 701s, but only just behind the more experienced Jo Siffert in the second works March. Peterson was the only March driver to finish the race, in seventh place. In 1971 Peterson moved up to the full March works team, and made an instant impression. Five Formula One Grand Prix second places earned him the position of runner-up to Jackie Stewart in that year's World Championship. Within that year, Peterson drove in the World Sports Car Championship driving an Autodelta Alfa Romeo to win the Watkins Glen 6 hours. Peterson stayed at March until 1973, when he signed for John Player Team Lotus to partner Emerson Fittipaldi.


title: Ronnie Peterson

text: Peterson's first Grand Prix win was at the 1973 French Grand Prix, held at Paul Ricard, in a Lotus 72. He took three more wins that year, in Austria, Italy and the United States, but poor reliability restricted him to only third place in the World Championship at season's end.


title: Ronnie Peterson

text: For 1974, the Lotus 76 was brought forth. The car, however, proved to be a failure, disliked by both Peterson and his teammate Ickx. The team therefore opted to let them drive the much older Lotus 72s. Peterson did well in the old car and claimed three more victories: the French and Italian Grands Prix, as well as the Monaco Grand Prix.


title: Ronnie Peterson

text: 1975 was a bad year for Lotus. Peterson and Ickx were forced to drive with the now archaic 72 model, whose age was now really beginning to show.


title: Ronnie Peterson

text: Peterson had signed for Shadow but Lotus owner Colin Chapman convinced him to stay with Lotus due to a promise Chapman made to accelerate the rate of development on the Lotus 77. He drove the first race of 1976 in the Lotus 77 before rejoining March Engineering. Driving the March 761, he won the Italian Grand Prix.


title: Ronnie Peterson

text: He also continued to drive sports cars, particularly for BMW in 1974 and 1975. For instance, he was paired with Hans-Joachim Stuck in a BMW 3.0 CSL for the South African "Wynn's 1000" in November 1975, where they started on pole but finished in second after a number of stops with engine vibrations, spark plug, and similar problems. Stuck and Peterson raced together for BMW in Europe, Africa, and also in North America.


title: Ronnie Peterson

text: In 1977, he raced for Tyrrell, driving the six-wheel Tyrrell P34B. Peterson retired from the opening four races of 1977, he spun off in Argentina, was involved in a crash with Jochen Mass's McLaren and Clay Regazzoni's Ensign in Brazil, and suffered fuel systems problems in South Africa and United States West. He finished eight in Spain but retired at Monaco with brake failure. Peterson's only podium finish was a third place at a rain-affected race in Belgium. Hopes were high at home in Sweden but Peterson retired with ignition problems and then finished 12th at France. He had an engine failure in Britain, finished ninth at Germany and got fifth in Austria. Peterson retired with ignition problems at Holland, sixth in Italy and 16th in the United States. Peterson retired from the last two races of 1977, a fuel leak in Canada and in Japan, he collided with Gilles Villeneuve's Ferrari but the crash killed a marshal and photographer as they were standing in a prohibited area of the track when the accident occurred.


title: Ronnie Peterson

text: He won the 1978 South African Grand Prix, with a last-lap victory over Patrick Depailler, as well as the Austrian Grand Prix, in the innovative 'ground effect' Lotus 79. His teammate Mario Andretti won the Drivers' Championship with Peterson acting effectively as the Team "No. 2" with the pair scoring four 1–2 wins, all with Andretti at the lead. Both of Peterson's wins occurred when Andretti encountered trouble, with Andretti winning once when Peterson failed to finish (not including the Italian Grand Prix). Many times, Peterson followed Andretti closely home, leading to speculation that 'Team Orders' were in place.


title: Ronnie Peterson

text: Throughout the 1970s Peterson had the reputation of being the fastest driver in F1 in terms of raw speed. During the 1978 season Andretti would frequently post the faster qualifying time. Another view, held by some contemporary observers, was that while Peterson may have in fact been the outright quicker of the two, it was Andretti's considerable car development skills that brought the recalcitrant Lotus 78 and 79 to full potential, and Peterson's seeming deference to Andretti was a tacit acknowledgement of this. Despite this, Peterson was offered a seat at McLaren at 1979. Peterson refused to contribute to any controversy, and on numerous occasions dismissed the speculation by stating that Andretti had simply turned the faster time.


title: Ronnie Peterson

text: The 1978 Italian Grand Prix at Monza started badly for Peterson. In practice he damaged his Lotus 79 race car beyond immediate repair and bruised his legs in the process. Team Lotus had a spare 79, but it had been built for Andretti, and the much taller Peterson did not fit comfortably inside. The team's only other car was a type 78, the previous year's car, which had been dragged around the F1 circuit that season with minimal maintenance.


title: Ronnie Peterson

text: In the days after the race, many drivers on circuit stated that the race starter lit the green light for the race too early. Although a Formula One start is meant to be a standing start for all cars in the field, the early green light meant that cars in the rear rows were still rolling when the green light came on. This resulted in cars in the back getting a jump on those at the front, and an accordion effect as the cars approached the first chicane, bunching them tightly together. The front four, Andretti, Gilles Villeneuve, Jean-Pierre Jabouille and Niki Lauda, were far enough ahead to avoid any drama, but Peterson had made a poor start from the third row of the grid, and was immediately passed by Alan Jones, Jacques Laffite and John Watson.


title: Ronnie Peterson

text: Jody Scheckter and Riccardo Patrese, starting 10th and 12th, had moved to the right across the line that separated the Grand Prix front straight from the approach to the old Monza banking. While Scheckter's Wolf was able to rejoin the track well ahead of the bunching pack, Patrese moved back in just ahead of James Hunt, who feinted left and collided with Peterson, with Vittorio Brambilla, Carlos Reutemann, Hans-Joachim Stuck, Patrick Depailler, Didier Pironi, Derek Daly, Clay Regazzoni and Brett Lunger all involved in the ensuing melee.


title: Ronnie Peterson

text: Peterson's Lotus went into the barriers hard and caught fire before bouncing back into the middle of the track. He was trapped in the burning wreck, but Hunt, Regazzoni and Depailler managed to free him before he received more than minor burns, while track marshals were extinguishing the car. He was dragged free and laid in the middle of the track fully conscious, but with severe leg injuries. Hunt later said he stopped Peterson from looking at his legs to spare him further distress.


title: Ronnie Peterson

text: At the time there was more concern for Brambilla, who had been hit on the head by a flying wheel and was slumped comatose in his car. Brambilla was seriously hurt and did not race again in Formula One until a year later. Peterson's life was not seen to be in any danger. Sid Watkins and his medical team headed over to Brambilla's car to extract him from the wreckage. The injured drivers along with Peterson were taken to a hospital in Milan and the race was restarted when the track had been cleaned up.


title: Ronnie Peterson

text: At the hospital, Peterson's X-rays showed he had about 27 fractures in his legs and feet. After discussion with him, Peterson was sent to intensive care so that the surgeons could operate to stabilize the bones. There was some level of dispute between the doctors regarding whether all fractures should be immediately fixed or not. During the night, Peterson's condition worsened, and he was diagnosed with fat embolism. By morning he was in full kidney failure due to the embolism, and was declared dead at 9:55am on 11 September 1978.


title: Ronnie Peterson

text: His teammate Mario Andretti clinched the championship at the race. "It was so unfair to have a tragedy connected with probably what should have been the happiest day of my career", Andretti said, "I couldn't celebrate, but also, I knew that trophy would be with me forever. And I knew also that Ronnie would have been happy for me". Peterson took second place in the 1978 drivers' standings posthumously.


title: Ronnie Peterson

text: At his funeral, the pallbearers included Åke Strandberg, James Hunt, Jody Scheckter, John Watson, Emerson Fittipaldi, Gunnar Nilsson and Niki Lauda.


title: Ronnie Peterson

text: Peterson is considered by some to be one of the best Formula One drivers to have never won a championship, as well as the best racing driver from Sweden. In 2016, in an academic paper that reported a mathematical modeling study that assessed the relative influence of driver and machine, Peterson was ranked the 21st best Formula One driver of all time, and the sixth best to never win a title.


title: Ronnie Peterson

text: Arrows driver Riccardo Patrese was falsely blamed by several members of the Grand Prix Drivers' Association (mainly by James Hunt) with being a primary cause of the first lap wreck at the Italian Grand Prix. He was banned from competition for one race, from the 1978 United States Grand Prix.


title: Ronnie Peterson

text: The circumstances of Peterson's death were prosecuted in an Italian criminal court. Driver Riccardo Patrese and race director Gianni Restilli were both charged with roles; Patrese, for manslaughter because of an unsafe maneuver on track which was considered to be a primary cause of the wreck, and Restilli, as contributing to Peterson's death by starting the race with a premature start signal. Both were cleared of criminal charges on 28 October 1981.


title: Ronnie Peterson

text: Peterson's widow Barbro (née Edwardsson) never got over his death and committed suicide on 19 December 1987. She was buried alongside Ronnie in the Peterson family grave in Örebro. She and Ronnie had a daughter named Nina Louise (named after Jochen Rindt's wife) who was born in November 1975.


title: Ronnie Peterson

text: There is a statue of Peterson in Örebro () by Richard Brixel. The official Ronnie Peterson museum was officially opened by Ronnie's daughter, Nina Kennedy, in Örebro on 31 May 2008. The museum closed in October 2009 because it was unable to secure further government funding.


title: Ronnie Peterson

text: "Superswede: A film about Ronnie Peterson" (2017), directed by Henrik Jansson-Schweizer, with the participation of Mario Andretti, Emerson Fittipaldi, Nina Kennedy, and Niki Lauda, is available on YouTube, as are several other short tributes.


title: Ronnie Peterson

text: During the 2014 Monaco Grand Prix fellow Swedish Formula One driver Marcus Ericsson wore a special helmet in tribute to Peterson which was modeled on Peterson's. Ericsson wore a similar helmet en route to victory in the 2022 Indianapolis 500.


title: Deadheading (employee)

text: Deadheading is the practice of carrying, free of charge, a transport company's own staff on a normal passenger trip so that they can be in the right place to begin their duties. In United States railway usage, the term may also be used for movement of train crews to or from a train using another means of vehicular transportation, as passenger train service is infrequent or nonexistent in many areas.


title: Illithid

text: In the "Dungeons & Dragons" fantasy role-playing game, illithids (commonly known as mind flayers) are monstrous humanoid "aberrations" with psionic powers. In a typical "Dungeons & Dragons" campaign setting, they live in the moist caverns and cities of the enormous Underdark. Illithids believe themselves to be the dominant species of the multiverse and use other intelligent creatures as thralls, slaves, and chattel. Illithids are well known for making thralls out of other intelligent creatures, as well as feasting on their brains.


title: Illithid

text: Mind flayers were created by Gary Gygax, who has said that one of his inspirations for them was the cover painting of the Titus Crow book "The Burrowers Beneath" by Brian Lumley. Tim Kirk's cover art on the book, then in its first printing, depicted only the tentacles of the titular burrowers, the Chthonians.


title: Illithid

text: Mind flayers first appeared in the official newsletter of TSR, "The Strategic Review" #1, Spring 1975, in the section named "Creature Features". Here, the mind flayer is described as "a super-intelligent, man-shaped creature with four tentacles by its mouth which it uses to strike its prey." When it hits prey with a tentacle, the tentacle penetrates to the brain and draws it forth, allowing the monster to devour it. A mind flayer's major weapon is given as the Mind Blast, a 5-foot radius wave of "Psi force" which affects each opponent differently based on how intelligent it is; possible effects include permanent insanity, rage, confusion, coma, and death. They were also included in the "Eldritch Wizardry" supplement, for the original (white box) "Dungeons & Dragons" game (1976), wherein they are described as super-intelligent, man-shaped creatures of great (and lawful) evil, with tentacles that penetrate to the brain and draw it forth for food.


title: Illithid

text: The mind flayer appears in the first edition "Monster Manual" (1977). Roger E. Moore authored "The Ecology of the Mind Flayer," which featured in "Dragon" #78 (October 1983).


title: Illithid

text: The article "The Sunset World" by Stephen Inniss in "Dragon" #150 (October 1989) presented a world that had been completely ravaged by mind flayers. The "Dragon's Bestiary" column, in the same issue and by the same author, described the "illithidae", the strange inhabitants of this world.


title: Illithid

text: The mind flayer appears first in the "Monstrous Compendium Volume One" (1989), and is reprinted in the "Monstrous Manual" (1993).


title: Illithid

text: The "ulitharid", or "noble illithid" was introduced in the "Dungeon" adventure "Thunder Under Needlespire" by James Jacobs in "Dungeon" #24 (July/August 1990), and later included in the "Monstrous Compendium Annual One" (1994).


title: Illithid

text: The "alhoon", also known as the "illithilich" or "mind flayer lich", was introduced in the "Menzoberranzan" boxed set, in the booklet "Book One: The City" (1992).


title: Illithid

text: The book "The Illithiad" (1998), and the Monstrous Arcana module series that accompanies it, greatly develops the mind flayer further. "The Illithiad" introduced the illithid "elder brain" and the illithid-roper crossbreed, the "urophion". The module "Dawn of the Overmind" featured an origin story for the illithids.


title: Illithid

text: The mind flayer appears in the "Monster Manual" for this edition (2000). "Savage Species" (2003) added the mind flayer "racial class", allowing Mind Flayers to be played from level 1 onward until they reached parity with normal Mind Flayers, and added the "Illithid Savant" prestige class.


title: Illithid

text: The mind flayer appears in the revised "Monster Manual" for this edition (2003), in both playable and non-playable forms. One of the differences between the playable Mind Flayer in the "Monster Manual" and the Mind Flayer racial class in "Savage Species" is that the racial class has only itself as a favored class, while the normal Mind Flayer has wizard as a favored class. The mind flayer received its own chapter in the book "Lords of Madness: The Book of Aberrations" (2005).


title: Illithid

text: The "Expanded Psionics Handbook" (2004) re-introduced the psionic mind flayer, detailing the differences between psionic and normal mind flayers, although creating a Psionic Mind Flayer still requires the information from the "Monster Manual". "Monster Manual V" (2007) introduced the concept of "thoon", a driving force (be it some alien god, outside philosophy, or other driving incentive) which has changed several mindflayers' world outlooks.


title: Illithid

text: Additional information about the mind flayers is found in Volo's Guide to Monsters (2016). The information includes details about their origins, their reproduction, their dispositions and behaviors, and their elder brain. The book also details this edition's "Alhoon", "Ulitharid", "Mindwitness" and "Neothelid".


title: Illithid

text: Illithids have a humanoid body with an octopus-like head. They have four tentacles around a lamprey-like mouth, and require the brains of sentient creatures as part of their diet. An illithid who snares a living creature in all four of its tentacles can extract and devour its living brain. Their eyes are pale white, and they can see perfectly well in both darkness and light. Their sense of hearing is slightly poorer than a human's; they have difficulty distinguishing between several sounds mixed together, yet they are good at discerning from what direction sounds came from. Their skin is purplish blue to gray-green and covered in mucus, and is very sensitive to sunlight. They loathe sunlight, though it does not actually harm them.


title: Illithid

text: One of their most feared powers is the dreaded "Mind Blast", where the illithid emits a cone-shaped psionic shock wave with its mind in order to incapacitate any creature for a short amount of time. Illithids also have other psionic powers, generally telepathic in nature, although their exact effects have varied over editions. Other powers include a defensive psionic shield and powers of psionic domination for controlling the minds of others.


title: Illithid

text: Illithids are hermaphroditic creatures who each spawn a mass of larvae two or three times in their life. The larvae resemble miniature illithid heads or four-tentacled tadpoles. Larvae are left to develop in the pool of the Elder Brain. The ones that survive after 10 years are inserted into the brain of a sapient creature. Hosts are determined in a very specific manner. Hosts generally are humanoid creatures that are between 5 feet 4 inches and 6 feet 2 inches. The most desirable of races for hosts are humans, drow, elves, githzerai, githyanki, grimlocks, gnolls, goblinoids, and orcs. Upon being implanted (through any cranial orifice), the larva then grows and consumes the host's brain, absorbing the host's physical form entirely and becoming sapient itself, a physically mature (but mentally young) illithid. This process is called "ceremorphosis". Illithids often experiment with non-humanoid hosts, but ceremorphosis involving other creatures usually fails, killing both host and larva. The transformation between the host (almost always a human or similar humanoid, such as an elf or dwarf) takes about a week, unless detected and removed within about thirty minutes of injection into the incapacitated host.


title: Illithid

text: When an illithid undergoes ceremorphosis, it can occasionally take on some elements of the absorbed host creature's former mind, such as mannerisms. This typically manifests as a minor personality feature, such as a nervous habit or reaction (e.g., nail-biting or tapping one's foot), although the process that determines the type and number of traits so inherited appears to be stochastic. Some adult illithids have even been known to hum a tune that its host knew in life. Usually, when a mind flayer inherits a trait like this, it keeps it a closely guarded secret, because, were its peers to learn of it, the illithid in question would most likely be killed. This is due to an illithid legend of a being called the "Adversary". The legend holds that, eventually, an illithid larva that undergoes ceremorphosis will take on the host's personality and memory in its entirety. This Adversary would, mind and soul, still be the host, but with all the inherent abilities of an illithid.


title: Illithid

text: Occasionally, ceremorphosis can partially fail. Sometimes the larva does not contain enough chemicals to complete the process, sometimes there is psionic interference. Whatever the reason, it has happened that ceremorphosis has ended after the internal restructuring, resulting in a human body with an illithid's brain, personality and digestive tract. These unfortunates must still consume brains, typically by cutting open heads (as they lack the requisite tentacles). These beings are often used as spies, where they easily blend in with their respective host types.


title: Illithid

text: Illithid society also maintains a long-standing taboo related to deviations to or failures of the ceremorphosis process and hunt and destroy such exceptions. Occasionally mind flayer communities are attacked (often by vengeful githyanki and githzerai) and their inhabitants must flee. This leaves the larvae unattended. Bereft of exterior nourishment, they begin to consume one another. The survivor will eventually leave the pool in search of food (brains). This unmorphed larvae is known as "neothelids". If the neothelid consumes an intelligent creature it will awaken to sapience and psionic abilities and grow to immense size, while retaining its memories of savage survival. In "Complete Psionic", it was revealed that illithids have a step between larva and neothelid called a "Larval Flayer", which looks like an overgrown tadpole. The existence of these beasts is a guarded secret among illithids, and it is considered impolite to speak of them.


title: Illithid

text: Alhoons (also called illithiliches) are illithids that choose to focus on developing arcane abilities in addition to their psionic ones, and have grown powerful enough in magic to become undead liches. Alhoons are generally pariahs in illithid society because they go against most illithids' eventual goal: to merge with the Elder Brain, both physically and psionically. Alhoons, on the other hand, are more concerned with their own personal survival. When discovered near illithid communities, Alhoons are mercilessly hunted down.


title: Illithid

text: The alhoon first appeared in second edition "AD&D" for the Forgotten Realms setting in the "Menzoberranzan" boxed set, in the booklet "Book One: The City" (1992), and reprinted in "Monstrous Compendium Annual Volume Three" (1996). The creature was further detailed in the supplement "The Illithiad" (1998). The alhoon also appeared in third edition in "Monsters of Faerûn" (2001) and "Lords of Madness" (2005).


title: Illithid

text: Ulitharids are created from tadpoles much like standard illithids; fewer than 0.1% become ulitharids, and it is impossible to determine whether a tadpole will become an ulitharid until ceremorphosis is complete.


title: Illithid

text: Superior in nearly all ways to a regular mind flayer, ulitharids possess two extra tentacles, which are twice as long as the others, and an extreme arrogance, even by the standards of their own kind. Only the Elder Brain holds more sway within an illithid community.


title: Illithid

text: The origins of these unique undead mind flayers are unclear. All that is known of these creatures is that they cannot create spawn, need both fresh blood and fresh brains to survive, are more feral than typical illithids, and are barely intelligent. One possible origin is given in the Ravenloft adventure "Thoughts of Darkness", where "vampiric mind flayers are either the result of a Mind Flayer tadpole infecting a vampiric host or a host that becomes a vampire before the tadpole fully converts them". These creatures are hated and feared by typical illithids. Christian Hoffer, "for ComicBook.com", wrote, "Not only do the vampiric mind flayers possess the psionic powers of a mind flayer, they also have the undead strength and bloodlust of a vampire, making them twice as deadly". Hoffer also highlighted that they "were created when Lyssa von Zarovich (a descendant of Strahd) attempted to create a creature powerful enough to overthrow her great uncle". Jacob Creswell, for "CBR", highlighted that "Vampiric Mind Flayers are a classic "Dungeon & Dragons" monster that combines two terrifying concepts. [...] Originally known as vampiric illithids, vampiric mind flayers were a force to be reckoned with in "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons". Their superior strength stat meant that they'd be able to overpower most adventurers". Creswell included them on list of the seven best monsters introduced in the 5th Edition campaign guide "Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft".


title: Illithid

text: Brain Golem: An eight-foot-tall humanoid-shaped construct made entirely of brain tissue, these creations exist only to serve an elder brain and its illithid community.