WORLD WAR II 1945
From January 1 to April 12 1945
by Mike Donovan
CONTENTS
Happy New Year
Bulge Busted
Soviet Offensive Begins - 1 12 45
Inauguration Day 1-20-45
To the Rhine
Berlin Jan 22 - The 24 Generals Conference
Malta Pre-Yalta - Ike-Bashing 101
Yalta
Why Would They Tell Him That?
Yalta and the Japanese War - Ouch
Hitler-Guderian Confrontation of Feb 9 and the Difference Between Stalin and Hitler
Dresden Valentine
Patton Prize - Trier March 1
The Adolph Hitler Bridge
War Women
Rhine Debate US and UK
The Bridge at Remagen
Someone Must Pay for the Remagen Blunder
German Volk Welcome the Liberators
3-45 - Finishing off the Germans West of the Rhine
Oder of Frankfurt
Clap for the Wolfman - March for Peace
You Surrender? This Time No Problem
Joan of Arc Burns at the Copenhagen Stake 3-21-45
Rhino North - The Main Thrust - March 23-4
Who’s on Rhine First?
Saving Private Watters - The Raid on Hammelberg - 3-26
Surrounding the Ruhr
Felix Kersten - Massage for Humanity
The Italian Front
The Italian Jews
Benito a Finito April 29 1945
Nazi Techno Threat
Churchill Criticizes Ike 3-45
Political German Rivers to Cross
The Russian Front Jan-April 1945
Cost
THE PACIFIC WAR
The Liberation of the Philippines
Cabantuan Raid Jan 30
Bismarck Sea and Ommaney Bay - CVL Down - Kamikaze!
Iwo Jima - March 1945
Sub Plot - Pacific War
Okinawa - April to June 1945
The Morality of Air Bombing
Fire Raid on Tokyo
Indochina 1945
Cold Body at Warm Springs April 12
Legacy of FDR
Sources
The New Year 1945 began with the Battle of the Bulge in full swing in Europe, Allied Armies making laborious progress in Italy north of Rome, and the invasion/liberation of the Philippines just getting into gear. It was obvious to all by now who was going to win the war, but it was just as obvious that there was much hard fighting ahead against the two stubborn Axis enemies.
The Germans fought better with inferior resources than the Allies did with their superior resources, although some historians, like the ubiquitous historian Stephen Ambrose, wouldn't agree. In the summer of 1944 the American high command thought the war in Europe might be won by the time Santa stopped by on Christmas. The war was still going strong when the Easter Bunny stopped by with some rotten eggs.
BULGE BUSTED JANUARY 1945
On New Years Day 1945 the Luftwaffe sent out it’s most effective air strike of the final campaign. They smashed more than 125 ABC aircraft (America Britian Canada) on the ground in a mini-Pearl Harbor surprise attack.
But the ABC fighter cover shot down more Luftwaffe planes in the sky than they were destroying on the ground. The mission ended with a net loss for Goering's flying monkeys.
This brave expenditure of German air power in a surprise offensive was similar in a way to the land war when the Battle of the Bulge was in its latter stages in January 45. The Germans had inflicted heavy casualties and gained some ground, but at a high cost.
On both air and ground Germany captured a significant propaganda victory. Allied newspapers exaggerated the German gains, even more than the German press, much to the irritation of a few US generals.
But the Battle of the Bulge had exposed dozens of German divisions to the full force of Allied firepower. ‘The Krauts’ were like a boxer that decided on an all-or-nothing round and as a result exposed his chin to six or eight haymakers. The other fighter might never have landed such a punch even once if the boxer played a tight defensive 15 rounds.
By attacking at the Bulge, the Wermacht did most of Ike and Monty’s work for them. The Allied commanders knew they had a huge force ad (Vegas slang for 'advantage'.) The Allies problem was how to get that force ad to strike hard at broadly exposed German positions. If Germany had fallen back along sharp lines of defense, the bulk of Allied firepower would be shackled by the simple geography of a well maintained German zig-zagged battlefield. Lunging the Wermacht out into the open was a holiday present from Hitler to Ike. The Germans lost nearly 600 tanks in the Bulge and more than a quarter of a million Germans troops killed, captured or wounded. And it was done just so Hitler could personally maintain his ego image of a guy that never runs away.
On January 12 the Soviet Army resumed its offensive in the east after a three month lull in which Stalin stabbed the Poles and his Allies in the back outside the gates of Warsaw. Hitler rushed many divisions from the west to the east, but these divisions were so depleted in quality and quantity as a result of the Ardennes offensive that they were of little value in stopping the Red Army. Germany paid for the Bulge in the east too.
Chuck De Gaulle pitched in during the Battle of the Bulge in his usual way. On January 3 1945 he came to Ike and demanded that the Allies do more to protect the city of Strasbourg on the secondary southern front. The German army had shown indications of a possible counterattack there and De Gaulle emphasized to Ike the importance of Strasbourg to the French people. Ike in turn reminded De Gaulle that the likelihood of a genuine attack against Strasbourg was slight and the Allied forces could hardly afford to be diverted there. Frog 1 then spread his peacock feathers and said that if Ike would not act then De Gaulle “would act independently.” Ike said “Be my guest, but if you don’t follow my orders then the Free French Forces will get no more food, supplies or ammunition from the USA. Bon chance!” De Gaulle had lost his showdown with the linebacker from Kansas.
GREAT SOVIET OFFENSIVE BEGINS – 1 12 45
The final drive to win the war in the east began on January 12 1945 when 3,000,000 Russian troops attacked 750,000 German troops along a fron the stretched from the Baltic to the Danube.
The leading Russian heroes in command of “Fronts,” the equivalent of an American Corps, were Rossokovsky, Konev, and Zhukov. (An American corps, to review, was a group of Armies and each Army had several divisions, and a division is 15,000 men give or take - These Russian “Fronts” had a half a million fighting men in each of them.)
The Russian front often gets short treatment in the general military histories, especially when you consider that this was where the largest numbers of troops were fighting.
At first I thought this might have something to do with a racial and political prejudice against the east and the Soviets in particular, but I think the answer lies elsewhere.
In the west, there were complex political situations within each Allied country, between the Allies, and between the Allies and their enemies. There were constant arguments about which military and political strategies to consider. There were complex and powerful personalities all about with much to do and say, unlike Russia where only one man counted for anything. There was a lot of story to work with. Stalin monopolizes the Russia story even more, far more, than Hitler monopolizes the German story.
On the Russian front, there, paradoxically, wasn't much to tell, even though it was the bulk of the fighting action. It was the same routine story in East Prussia that it was in Bessarabia. The Russians attacked, the Germans retreated. The Germans troops froze and starved, while the Russians did not. The German civilians fled west and added to the confusion and difficulty of German resistance.
Hitler ordered this general to hold the line and the general said he cannot and had to retreat. Then he sacked the general and replaced him with a lackey general. Even the lackey eventually told Hitler that the Wermacht had to retreat. The Russians had a zillion new planes and tanks, and 39 trillion troops, while the Germans had less and less of everything every day thanks to the western front, the attrition of Allied air bombing, and all the long term attrition of six years of war.
So they Russian front gets small coverage because its the same devastating but relatively dull story over and over in town after town, and theatre after theatre.. How many hundreds of pages are required to understand that along a massive front, it was one Russian victory after another as the Nazi dream crumbled before an irrepressible gigantic offensive for the opening five months of 1945. There isn't a lot of political reporting to do either. Stalin tolerated no disagreements, no one defied him, and everything behind the Kremlin walls was secret anyway.
This is why you get 80 pages on the western front and 10 on the eastern front in any given history of WWII. It's not that historians aren't interested in the Russian front, it's just that there isn't much to say besides, 'the Russians beat the Germans brains in for five months and a thousand miles north to south and east to west.”
The political situation in southeast Europe opens some doors for historians, but the military Russian front story is ironically boring considering it's the heart of Allied victory.
More on the Russian front later.
INAUGURATION DAY JANUARY 20 1945
Roosevelt defied the legacy of William Henry Harrison and gave his Inaugural Address in the January cold. Franklin was old and ill. At one point in the speech he said, “The only thing we have to fear is ..... I can't remember.”
At his first cabinet meeting Franklin made the best joke of his life, “Always remember boys, When it comes to the Presidency, the first twelve years are always the hardest!”
FDR's Inaugural Address was short and competent, just good enough that it did not reveal to the public how ill he was. FDR saved up what little strength he had and expended it all on the speech.
TO THE RHINE
As of January 16 the German counter-offensive in the Ardennes was over. The Germans had suffered more than 120,000 casualties. The Americans sustained 8,000 killed, 48,000 wounded and 21,000 missing/captured.)
Stalin and Molotov assured Roosevelt that the Rooskies would not let up until victory. FDR and Leahy were worried that the Russian Army might stall again and as it had done perniciously at the gates of Warsaw in late 1944, enabling Germany to transfer divisions back to the western theatre. Stalin told US emissaries in Moscow not to worry about that. But support for the western Allies was not the reason Russia was not about to let up on the offense. By now the Soviets realized what FDR did not; that the race to Berlin was a competition between the Communists and the western democracies to decide what the post war world would look like. The Soviets would not betray their Allies by stalling on the battlefield, so they could better betray them later at the conference table.
As the Red Army and Red-White and Blue Armies began to apply the grand pincer on Germany Ike realized that the time would soon come when the two would be in close enough proximity to each other that close communication would be needed in order to avoid friendly fire from allies.
Without consulting Washington D.C. Ike sent three generals to Moscow in February (one was named General Bull) to meet with the Russian leaders to begin close co-operation in the military sphere.
But the diplomatic junket caused a little storm. A few Brits thought that this was just as much a political matter as it was a military one and that Ike had no business making moves on his own in such a high states game. He was charged with overreaching the boundaries of civilian versus military command of the Armed Forces. The Ike mission to Moscow was allowed to complete its work but Ike knew he had to be more careful in the future when dealing with foreign governments. He had to clear it from the top from now on.
24 GENERALS CONFERENCE – BERLIN 1 27 45
Hitler convened a big meeting at the Chancellery on January 27 to discuss the desperate situation on both fronts.
Both Guderian and Goring were unhappy that the Reich was defending every inch of ground in the west with desperation, while letting the Russians pour their way in from the east like a flood. Weren't the Bolsheviks the greater enemy. If Germany had to lose to someone, at least it should keep Communism out of Europe while losing.
Hitler and Goring had a huge explosive argument at this meeting over bringing old officers out of retirement to help with the last desperate defense of Germany. Both agreed this must be don. The problem was, Hitler insisted they come back in at entry level officer rank, even if they were generals before. Goring protested that this was the greatest insult to their honor and they would never submit to such a demotion. They would rather not serve, than serve as petty officers having once known military glory.
The argument itself wasn't that important, all things considered. What was impressive was how much Goring was allowed to let the Fuhrer have it right to his face. I mean, these guys went at it like a senile couple in their late 80's, who married under duress at 18, fighting over the stopped up saltshaker and whose fault it was. The argument sent everyone an unwitting signal that Goring was going to take over with vigor if anything ever happened to the Fuhrer. Goring, by this account, and contrary to the evaluation of some historians, was nobody's stooge. Herm 'soitanly' was his own man with the big Kahuna.
Hitler paid special attention at this meeting to the US and British PW's were were in eastern Germany and about to be liberated by the Russians. He wanted them evacuated west into central Germany. He did not want to give up his prisoners, and especially did not want to give them up the Russians.
An officer entered the room and gave the 24 an exited report that these prisoners had volunteered to fight for Germany! That's how much they hated the Russians too!
Some of the Generals got a little exited over this, but Hitler showed some actual maturity. He said that he doubts this report and that it was probably one or two prisoners that volunteered and that the report became wildly exaggerated. “This is no time to get exited about a military movement based on the words of one hungry prisoner,” he said dejectedly. The officer said, “Very good , Mein Fuhrer, we will develop this immediately!” and left the room, as if he hadn't absorbed what Hitler actually said.
Most of the prisoners at Sagan Camp had read the pamphlets calling on them to join with Germany to fight the greater enemy, Communism. But Hitler was right. 99.9% of the PW's laughed in the Fuhrer's face when they read the pamphlet.
On January 27 the prisoners marched out of the Sagan camp in the whipping winter snow to the “safety” of central Germany.
MALTA PRE-YALTA – IKE BASHING 101
The Allies met at Malta to get ready for Yalta.
FDR arrived in Valetta Harbor on the USS Quincy and waved from the deck to Churchill who was anchored on the bridge of the HMS Orion.
At the Malta pre-game show, Alan Brooke, the snooty and frank CIGS (Commander of the Imperial General Staff) expressed a lot of displeasure with the American choice of Dwight D. Eisenhower as commander of the war in western Europe. Brooke would have much preferred Douglas MacArthur.
CIGS AB thought that Eisenhower was too cautious, and that Ike's plan to have Montgomery lead the attack across Europe from his northern front was partly a ruse. Brooke suspected, and as it turned out, of course, rightfully so, that as soon as Patton or Bradley found any good opening on the German D, Ike would feed his four-star pals new supplies and men and would give them the ok to go ahead and try to beat Monty to Berlin. Brooke thought that all this deference to British leadership was just in keeping with Eisenhower's proclivity for trying to be all things to all people. Ike was giving Monty the lead on the northern flank, just to please.
In trying to please both sides, Ike pleased neither, as is the norm in life. Bradley and Patton were furious with Ike for giving Monty and his British and Canadian Armies (with one US one attached) the leading role in the final
drive. Patton was certain he could beat Monty to Berlin with what he had right now, and only needed Ike's permission to attack.
But most of the military historians (and this amateur does not include himself in this group) seem to concur with the Brooke, Patton and Bradley complaint that Ike was always too cautious, a leader who never let his line of advance become uneven just because one army group was driving too well and getting ahead of everyone else. Some generals and historians say that Ike was simply too timid about any daring and bold offensive plan.
I say that Ike was hired to be Ike. FDR, Marshall, Hull and Leahey all knew what they were getting when they put him there. They needed someone who was a people-person, to keep a lid on troubles between the US and the Brits. They needed a clerk who was so fair and wise with how he dealt with people that he rose to the top with little actual talent. If FDR and Marshall wanted a MacArthur or a Marshall or a Patton in command in Europe, they would have installed one. Ike was the cat's paw for the caution of FDR, Marshall, Leahey, Hopkins and Morganthau. It's like a soccer team owner hired a coach who is famous for playing the rookies ahead of veterans, even when the rookies aren't producing, because in the long run it will still help the team to give young talents the experience. Halfway through the season the sportswriters are criticizing the coach for choosing to play too many rookies ahead of veterans. It's the owner who made that call they day they hired that particular coach. They already knew what his decision making process was.
Many WWII people (especially those who say “shedule”) ripped Ike for always being too influenced by the last person he talked to about anything. I have that problem in common with Ike. The last book I read on any subject over-influences me. There is a fine line between open-minded and gullible.
YALTA CONFERENCE FEB 4-11 1945
Stalin wanted a summit meeting in the worst way. But Rus Marshall wouldn't fly off to meet anyone. All the western leaders had to fly to him. It wasn't fair. Roosevelt and Churchill had already traveled far from home to meet with Stalin at Teheran back in 43. Stalin’s stated reason back in 1943 for making the USUK leaders come so far was that the eastern front was still in doubt and he needed to be close to the Soviet battlefront.
But this was 1945. Stalin was in better health than Roosevelt, the war was being won on all fronts, and really, it was his turn to treat.
But Stalin was dealing with a weak president. He knew he could bully the liberal old man, that he could always get his way with FDR. Joey laughed at FDR behind his back. When Stalin said the summit would have to be held in Yalta in the Crimea, or no summit at all, FDR snapped to and said, “yes, master, whatever you say.” Style equals substance and just agreeing to go to Russia put him and Winston in an inferior position. The results were reflected accordingly.
FDR was already a walking ghost with little life left in his body except a beating heart. Every person who came to visit him in these last months left the room feeling almost as sick as FDR looked. They would come in to discuss some important matter and would leave in horror. It was wrong that a man so physically feeble was actually running the country.
Roosevelt was physically incompetent when he ran for re-election in 1944. People would hand him an important memo and he would scan it and make a token comment about one or two phrases he had managed to absorb. It was just for show, to demonstrate that he was still mentally alert. But the essence of the memo and the response the visitor needed was off the radar. FDR would ramble incoherently about some boyhood experience he'd suddenly recalled and the decision on what to do about an important matter was never even discussed. The visitor would leave in a state of shock. This is a consistent theme of the last months of his life.
FDR had to hold his head up with his hand while he talked! He was so green with sickness that one visitor wished him “Happy St Patrick’s Day!”
The American people had no idea that the country basically had no leader capable of making any important decisions responsibly. If he was a bigger man he would have resigned the presidency and let Mr. Truman take over. Mrs. Woodrow Wilson commented that Franklin looked exactly like her husband did when the former President was confined to a wheelchair after his stroke in 1920. This was the man we were sending to Yalta to negotiate the post-war world with Joseph Stalin! And on top of that he was a liberal who, though not personally a Communist, trusted and supported 'The Soviet Experiment' in principle!
Out of this conference came the so-called “Yalta Agreements.” Russia managed to violate most of them before the war ended and violated the rest after the war ended. One of them committed the USSR to free and democratic post-war elections in Poland. ... Ha ha ha ha ha! That's a good one. And Roosevelt bought it.
The main topic of the Crimea discussion was not Poland, but how Germany would be administered after the war. It was obvious that Adolph was going to die, but who would then rule Germany and how would they rule?
Churchill and Roosevelt wanted France included in plans to occupy and administer Germany. Stalin wanted the French excluded. The Marshall deeply resented France for surrendering in 1940 and leaving the Russians to face Hitler alone on the continent. To Stalin, France was le back-stabber.
Stalin made the earlier deal with Hitler in 1939 that gave Germany the green light to attack in the east and destroy Poland, which enabled Hitler to then attack west and defeat France. Hitler never could have directly invaded Poland without the full co-operation of Russia coming in from the other side. If Russia had stood up to Hitler, France would have too. By October 1939 with his eastern flank won, Hitler could prepare to attack France full-force. So Russian's deal with Nazi Germany led to the Fall of France. Now Stalin is calling out France for losing the war he had enabled and the war they could have won if the Soviet Union had been an Ally from the start.
By ruthlessly adding Polish territory from the carved Polish turkey, the Soviets put themselves on a long common border with the Nazis. The gains of 1939 set up the loss in 1941. The Soviets had only themselves to blame for their “noble sacrifice” in the war.
But at Yalta and elsewhere, and indeed for 65 years since the war ended, the Russians never stop moaning about their great sacrifices in World War II and how the west should thank them more for it. It wouldn't be bad if only Russia preached it. The problem is that most liberal western historians also buy into this version of history. Certainly the pop documentaries all buy it, as well as talk show hosts who pretend to be experts on history in casual cross-reference moments. We still hear powerful Americans making statements about the incredible sacrifices of Russia in World War II while meticulously avoiding any mention of Soviet treachery. Throughout the entire history of the Cold War the American left praised the Soviet heroism in the war in a subtle partisan spirit. The idea was that we were the aggressors in the Cold War and we should praise and appreciate and understand them more and better. The war was cited as a reason to love them.
American 'moraleftists' scream and shout and finger-wag about smaller countries that commit genocide, commit acts of terror, build nukes without our permission, or invade their neighbor in Africa. But the Soviets always got a free-pass.
Even today, their crimes are swept under the rug because they are a nuclear superpower with the mobile Topol 28 ICBM that can destroy every city in America in one afternoon. That's as of 2011. And it was worse in the 70's and 80's. This threat creates a natural desire to try and get along with them and determines US mass willingness to bury certain unpleasant historical truths. And the few times the left mentioned Soviet misdeeds, these actions are always then compared to something the the USA did that was very bad too.
The point being that Stalin had a lot of nerve to gripe at Yalta about Soviet sacrifice. The burglar got stuck in the drainpipe and now he wants to sue the city.
By the Yalta plan for Germany there would be three post-war zones of occupation, the US, UK, and USSR each getting their slice. Stalin proposed that if you guys want to include France in the conquerers, even though their only contribution was to be conquered, then take it out of your slice, not mine. This is what eventually happened. France was included as an occupying power at the end of the war. Churchill and FDR knew that they would need pot-war France, regardless of her war record. France would be the front line of defense against Germany in the west. France had plenty of experience as an occupying power. Administering a foreign land was second nature to France. And so a portion of western Germany was gerrymandered for France in the Truman summer of 45.
Roosevelt told Stalin at Yalta that American troops would not stay in Germany after the war for more than two years. This was a foolish thing to say, and Churchill spit out his coffee. He looked at Roosevelt and said in booming voice, “But that could change according to circumstances, right Franklin?” - There was a pause and FDR looked at Churchill. Did he get it? The pale Prez nodded a yes and Churchill breathed a sigh of relief.
By giving Stalin a timetable for US withdrawal, FDR was inviting the Soviet Union to dominate Europe militarily and politically. All the Soviets would have to do is sit tight for a couple of years and then take over. FDR was acting as though his closest foreign policy advisors were Jeanette Rankin and Abbie Hoffman.
FDR was always under the impression that he had a magic personal power over anyone. That went double for how he “knew” he could handle Stalin. Churchill played along at times but was always torn between mistrusting Joe, which he always did, and needing favors out of FDR, which he always did. The negative trump card was that FDR always trusted Stalin.
In the meantime all three always had to pretend they all loved each other and got along great. Stalin and Churchill knew full well that they were playing cat and mouse in the budding Cold War and had a twinkle when they look each other in the eye, while the naïve FDR pontificated about stuff he knew little about and tried not to die. Roosevelt was the bad ballplayer in the neighborhood that owns all the equipment, so he gets to make the lineups and bats clean-up.
WHY WOULD THEY TELL HIM THAT?
FDR and Churchill had a secret nickname they used for the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Union of Socialist Republics in their private correspondence and conversation. They called him “Uncle Joe.” But it was a light cross between respect and derision.
At Yalta FDR was so full of his own charm that he suddenly thought he could spill the beans. “Winston and I have a secret nickname for you that we have been using for quite some time, 'Uncle Joe.'”
When the translator finished, Stalin mad an angry and hurt face.
Why wouldn't he?
Why would they tell him that?
YALTA AND THE JAPANESE WAR - OUCH
FDR gave away the store at Yalta in the Far east even more so than he did on the rest of his naive globe. Roosevelt was so confident that he was going to give too much to Stalin to ekkp his good will that he arranged meetings with Stalin on the Far East that excluded Churchill, all top British officials, and even all top American officials. FDR knew that the Brits and even his own people would hit the roof and spit out their tea if they hear the kinds of concession he was going to hand to the USSR in Asia, so he just didn’t allow them to be around when it happened. There were only four persons in the room when FDR gave Stalin post-war domination in Asia in exchange for a promise that Russia would enter the war against Japan two months after the defeat of Germany. The four persons were Stalin, Roosevelt and the two interpreters. It was a bad day at Black Rock for the United States of America.
FDR said Stalin could get back all the territories Russia had lost at the end of the 1904-5 war with Japan. Russia had lost that war badly and Stalin wanted territorial restoration.
But Russia had only lost territory in Asia in 1905 that it had acquired by illegal imperialist aggression in the first place. Russia under the Tsars was every bit as greedy and domineering as th Communists later on. Russia only lost bully booty in 1905, not lands that were really “historically Russian.” So FDR was a real hypocrite when he crusaded to break up the British imperialist Empire after WWII, while at the same time restoring the imperialist Russian empire in Asia at Yalta! And in exchange for a Russian entry into the war that was clearly no longer needed, and in the end would add absolutely nothing to the equations of reduced American casualties in defeating Japan. When Russia entered the war in August it just took Manchurian lands and did nothing to strike at Japan directly.
HITLER-GUDERIAN CONFRONTATION OF FEB 9 – AND THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN HITLER AND STALIN
The Fuhrer summoned his top general to Berlin for a special conference on February 9. General Guderian had been through his ups and downs with Hitler. He got fired when his performance on the Russian front was deemed a failure, and went into obscurity for more than a year. Hitler brought him out of retirement in late 1944, but he never really trusted him, although he trusted that Guderian was not one of the generals out to kill him. Nevertheless, when Guderian went in to consult with the Fuhrer he had to submit to a strip search and his briefcase was thoroughly examined. Hitler wasn't taking any more chances after Tom Cruise tried to kill him in the Valkerie plot.
Goring and a few other generals were there as Guderian took the floor and explained the military situation to Hitler, and what had to be done. Zhukov's Red Army spearhead had run too far ahead of its supply line in the excitement of advance. It was time to strike at it from both flanks in the rear and cut it off from the north and south. This was a long shot but the best one they had right now, advised Guderian. German divisions near the Baltic coast and the Hungarian front would have to break away from what they were doing and hit the Zhukov line.
On this point Hitler would not agree. The Fuhrer especially would not weaken his defensive position in Hungary in order to take a chance with Guderian's bold plan. Guderian got hot and said that he was the expert and he was telling Hitler that this was the only hope, and he had to have those divisions. He told Adolph, “This is the only thing to do if you care about Germany.”
This was not a good thing to say.
Hitler got Fuhrer furious and said, “How dare you speak to me like that! No one has risked more for Germany than I have!” If Hitler said that to me I would have backed off. But Guderian was brave. He not only continued to argue the point, he yelled and made it personal like he wasn't afraid of this guy in the least and didn't care who knew it. Hitler and Guderian were just yelling at each other, like it was their sixtieth wedding anniversary (ed. note - I’d prefer to use the number 60 but all my writing programs mess up line spacing when they add the after-number “th” above the line for some awful reason - and none of my books have that problem in physical print, so why do writing programs always mess that up?.)
Von Ribbentrop stepped in and asked Guderian to step outside the room with him. Everyone needed to calm down. Goring and Speer chimed in that this was a good idea. No one liked it when the Fuhrer flipped his wig.
Fifteen minutes later von Ribbentropp comes back in with Guderian and everyone is calm now. They start talking it over agin. Within a few minutes the same argument slowly starts up all over again. It climbs the ladder to where it was before and advances past that. This time the Fuhrer says something that makes Guderian so mad that the General leaps out of his chair and storms over to where Hitler is sitting as if he wants a piece of him. Hitler rises in anger and the two bump each other and are an inch from each other's face yelling at each other like they're about to fight. Folks, I'm not making this up!
Finally Goring grabs Guderian by the back of his jacket and pulls him away, physically dragging him into the other room.
The long and short of it was that Hitler in the end agreed to a watered down version of Guderian's plan. Guderian could use only a small portion of the Hungarian and Baltic front troops. Guderian returned to the battlefield, thankful for his hide. He hadn't planned on losing his temper with the Fuhrer, it just happened.
This story tells me a lot about the mythical image of Hitler. There are a lot of stories like this in WWII where people have it out with Hitler.
He really was crazy like a fox. While his public image (and his superficial image on a TV documentary) is that of a man who would brook no disagreement and no one would dare try anyway, the tale of Nazi Germany doesn't show that at all. Sure, he was a brutal man to argue with and you could get killed for it, but it is nothing short of remarkable to me how often he let it happen. Arguments with Hitler could never have happened if he hadn't been long sending sociological signals that it was permissible to do so. It was risky, it wasn't fun, and you had to be important to do it, but Hitler didn't consider frank disagreement and criticism an act of disloyalty. He hated criticism, possibly even more than I do, but he allowed it quite often, definitely more than I do. Hitler might react unfairly and ignore an obvious truth, and he might yell at you, but you could get in the door and let him have the ruthless truth if you had the courage, and quite a few high-end Germans did.
You can read what you want into it, but here's what I read.
Hitler was more of a team player than he ever really let on. He respected courage and cut people some slack for having it. He hated sneaky backstabbers a thousand times more than face-punchers.
It was the opposite with Stalin. Unlike Hitler, Joseph did not respect courage or talent. He saw men with such qualities as threats, and had them all killed. Only the lackeys of Russia survived in his circle of power. I have read a great deal of Russian history in my life, and I don't recall many or any scenes like that with Gensec Stalin, where someone was in his face screaming at him about what to do in some important national crisis. Total strangers looked at Stalin the wrong way at a meeting and disappeared forever the next day. His close friends could look at him the wrong way and disappear.
The fools at Yalta didn't appreciate that Stalin had talent. Like turkeys who have been to too many Hollywood movies, they thought that any evil person had an evil aura, and since FDR and Churchill (especially FDR) really liked Stalin's personality and charm, they though that meant he was not evil.
Evil arrives to seduce the King as a beautiful smiling young woman, not an ugly frowning old man. The culture brainwashes us that beauty and charm make good people. Caustic people can be good people, and charming people can be bad people. But FDR didn't see it that way. He could read people, and he liked what he saw in “Uncle Joe.”
Stalin could, like most serial killers, “double himself.” Stalin could create a second Joe for playing nice with foreign diplomats, allowing blunt disagreement without a hint of being upset, and then go back to the Kremlin and be the man no one dared speak frankly to if they wanted to live. FDR bought Joe's serial killer double.
Hitler was famous for ordering armies to stand and fight to the death. No retreat! - What is less known is how he sometimes (I didn't say 'often') quietly allowed generals to disobey that order without a hint of a punishment, and indeed, without even a hint of anger. The demand to stand to fight to the death was sometimes just a shrewd propaganda play.
The point is that Hitler, unlike Stalin, was not an isolated maniac, he was very much connected to those around him, more than his public image allowed. Otherwise Guderian would never have got the opportunity to act like that towards him in the first place. He wasn’t connected socially with anyone but his lady tea company, but professionally, he was connected. Stalin’s isolation was monumental.
A month later Hitler and Guderian had another screaming face-to-face fight in Hitler's office about whether Himmler who was SS, not Wermacht, should be allowed to command the last ditch German defense against the Russians. Guderain had his own choice in mind, an old army pro, and right in front of both Himmler and Hitler, Guderian screamed that Himmler was incompetent in military affairs and that Hitler cannot make such a foolish appointment.
Himmler and Guderian were asked to leave the room for a while. Hitler talked it over with Bormann and Speer. When Himmler and Guderian they came back, Hitler had completely taken Guderian's side. Himmler would not command the desperate defenses in the north east. Hitler walked Guderian out of the office with his arm around him and said, “Well Guderian, looks the Army has finally won a major battle.”
Stalin was at his best when dealing as an Eddie Haskell diplomat with other world leaders. Harrimann says that he never saw Stalin lose his cool or make a mistake. Not even a small one. Stalin found the maximum opportunity for gain in every moment of every meeting, and in every social situation too. Dzugashvilii was perfect every time. The same cannot be said of any other major leader in the war from Churchill to De Gaulle to Ciano to Konoye in Japan. JS was like a guy who is the perfect host at a house party but his wife has a black eye from a recent “fall.” And she’s so afraid of her husband that she tells you how it happened and it’s scary how good she tells it. Both of their acting performances are so fantastic, that those who see through them are alarmed to panic.
Stalin was flawless to outsiders and ruthless to insiders.
(Eddie Haskell was a TV character on Leave it to Beaver - an older boy who bullied little Beaver. But whenever Beaver’s parents showed up Haskell would become poised and courteous and charm them and tell them what a fine young boy they had. As soon as the parents went out Haskell would start smacking Beaver around the house, while Lumpe and Wally laughed. Stalin was Eddie Haskell with 280 divisions. )
THE BOMBING OF DRESDEN – HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY
From late on the evening of February 13 to the early morning of February 15, Allied bombers destroyed the German city of Dresden. The fire that consumed the city was set deliberately and was one of the most horrific incidents of WWII.
The Germans reported to the world that more than 200,000 civilians died in the bombing of Dresden. Some post-war estimates put it at closer to 500,000.
The Dresden firestorm set off a firestorm of political historical debate. The liberal histories show their bias by stressing the story in space allotment, if by nothing else. Auchwitz gets two paragraphs, Dresden gets three pages.
The Zinn history and histories written with that mind-set go all out in citing Dresden as an example of abhorrent behavior by the Allies. Dresden is something of a Blame the Allies Equally icon of WWII history. How can the democracies condemn the Axis when both sides committed mass atrocities? Hiroshima and Dresden speak for themselves and the West should be ashamed of themselves for how they conducted the war.
The bombing of Dresden was a mistake, but those who planned and authorized didn't know it was going to be. Unlike the Final Solution, it wasn't deliberate mass murder of civilians.
Or was it?
Part of the Dresden crime was that the war was almost won. It wasn't going to make a difference. It would be one thing to attack a Dresden with a daring raid of 200 planes loaded with precision bombs in early 1943 with the war in the balance. It was another to raid an Eastern European city, closer to the Russian front than the western, with 1,100 planes loaded with incendiary bombs.
Bomber Harris was openly advocating mass terror bombing of German cities. He wasn't making any apologies for it. The whole world had gone callous about war by now. P-47 pilots strafed civilians in ferry boats with the same vigor that they strafed an Axis minelayer. The Germans were trying to develop a “New York Bomber” to set Manhattan on fire as soon as they could build it. So the Zinn crowd is right when they “accuse” the west of deliberately mass murdering Axis civilians in World War II. The proof is that Allied air commanders were openly saying that, so it's no scoop, really to tell us that it was mass murder. The war had turned that way and everyone accepted it. After years of peace it's easy to forget the suddenly callous new rules of the times. In times of peace we are supposed to do everything in our power to assume that all life is precious, and only some mass murderer who tortured 80 people one at a time before killing them, deserves to die. But in February 1945 there were about 100 million Americans and about 30 million Brits who wouldn't lose any sleep over the bombing of Dresden, even if they knew the basic details of how bad it was. The enemy was out to kill them, and whatever it took to prosecute this war, do it.
Some of the Lancaster and Fort crews thought it was strange that the Soviet Air Force wasn't going to bomb Dresden, if it needed to get bombed. The Rooskies were much closer than Allied Bomber Command. Dresden was at the far end of the range of a B-17. FDR and Churchill asked Stalin if their planes could raid Dresden and then land in Russia. Stalin said no. With Allies like these, who needs enemies?
Another element to the Dresden crime against humanity was the exceptional cultural value of the old town. They called it the Florence of Germany. Dresden brimmed with art treasures and monumental works of fab architecture. The critics of the air crime stress the greatness of Dresden as a cultural and artistic Mecca.
Defenders of the attack say that there were plenty of military targets there. It had factories, and was a key railroad junction. The destruction of the Dresden rail-yards would contribute to victory.
Yeah. For who? The Russians? Why speed them up by razing Dresden?
The truth was probably that Bomber Harris and Hap Arnold were more trying to terror bomb - mass murder the families, so the soldiers on the road will surrender to save those that still live. Dresden was as good a place as an to hit, and they were running out of clean target cities. Dresden had only taken two Allied air raids before February of 1945. People in Dresden had taken to ignoring air raid sirens. During the first air raid, a circus was under way and those inside had ignored the sirens and went on watching the clowns ride the horses while the first bombs went off. When a piece of shrapnel tore through the tent and killed a mime, the crowd panicked and broke up.
All right, I made up the part about the mime, just wishful thinking on my part, but the Dresden Circus continuing on while the sirens went off, that part is true.
The Allied press reported the firestorm of Dresden matter of factly as a positive news blurb. But some in the House of Commons became loud critics of this needless terror bombing of Germans civilians in the Russia theatre of war, when the war was virtually won, and everyone knew it. Many journalists picked up the cry.
Churchill got the word out fast that the words “terror bombing” were not to be used anymore in high gvmt. circles. From now on it's “area bombing.” In Nam and Gulf 1 there was something called “carpet bombing.” Roughly similar, but “carpet bombing” an old German city with 1,100 four engine bombers filled with incendiaries, was a little more deadly than B-52's hitting a desert area to clean out a couple of Iraqi tanks or VC platoons. Dresden caught fire and it was very much on purpose.
The United States Army in the 1950's did a study of Dresden and concluded that only 25,000 people had died in the great fire raid. Then David Irving wrote a book on the Dresden horror show and concluded that more than 125,000 people died.
In 2010 the Dresden City Council concluded it's own independent study. Dresden officially declares that 25,000 people died in the inferno.
I am going to go with 60,000, and here's why. Dresden and the Army were going by people who were accounted for as unaccounted for after the fire. What about the dregs of society, the homeless, the drifters, the lunatics. Are they really al going to be accounted for in the 'let's see who's missing' show if hands?
So there's another 5,000 right there, that makes 30.
I add 30,000 more because Dresden on Valentine's Day 1945 was overcrowded with 600,000 refugees recently arrived fleeing the Red Army. I presume that the two studies tried to factor these people in, but I really think it's impossible to account for the final fate of that many people so on the edge of life to begin with. I say 60,000 died in Dresden. God/Allah only knows.
One Dresden survivor tells of running through flames past the courtyard of an old age home. The white-haired people were sitting there looking around at Dante's Inferno as if this was a day like any other. Like I wasn't already afraid of getting old. A story like this .... as terrifying as the fire.
The fire burned down the walls of the DZ, the Dresden Zoo in the early stages of the attack. So on top of everything else unreal and horrible going on for those trying to escape, there were lions and tigers and crocodiles running around Dresden in a bad mood. John Toland writes of a witness running by the dead bodies of “a leopard and two naked women.” I kid you not.
Those who did get out knew they were safe when they suddenly went from roasting hot to freezing cold. Climbing to some high ground on the edge of town, the lucky ones looked back like Lot on what was once a city crackling up in 16 square miles of fire.
Reportedly Goebbels heard the news that more than 100,000 Germans had died in the air attack, and he cried openly. Then he changed to figure to 200,000 and gave that figure to the world. I wonder why anyone told him 100,000 at first if it really was more like 25,000.
The bottom line is that the gesture of bombing Dresden was political. It was supposed to impress the Russians. Stalin never stopped complaining that the west wasn't doing enough to pitch in to win the war, as if 1.4 million fighting men on the ground was nothing. So Hap and Harris were following a policy set in Washington, and one they were happy to enforce. The Russian army would not have to fight for Dresden because the RAF and USAAF had zapped it off the map.
I wonder how many Dresdenians who died in that fire would have been raped or murdered by Red Army soldiers a few weeks later if the air raid had never happened.
The movie Slaughterhouse Five incorporates the bombing of Dresden into the story. I recommend it. Not bombing Dresden, I mean I recommend the 1974 movie.
PATTON TAKES TRIER
MARCH 1 1945
The German city of Trier on the Moselle was a valued target for the US Army. If Patton could take it, his 3A could then follow the Moselle all the way up to the Rhine. But Eisenhower estimated that it would take four divisions to take Trier, so it would have to wait. He cabled that message to Patton.
The three star ego cabled back “I have taken Trier with two divisions. What do you want me to do with it? Give it back?”
Ike had wanted to let Patton loose, but he didn't want to offend the British, so he ordered Patton to stand firm and not attack. Then he let Bradley call Patton and arrange a secret disobedient attack against Ike's wishes. But Ike was in on it. He and Brad were playing Patton like a fiddle. Patton took Trier thinking he was defying Ike, but Ike was using Patton to keep from offending the British. If Patton caught up with Monty, the British would have to complain to Patton, not Ike. Patton had disobeyed orders, Brad had pretended to, and since Patton was winning, it didn't seem right to take one his stars away.
After years of disliking Patton, I bought his memoir. Patton won me over when he casually noted in his diary that “I finished reading the Koran last night. Very interesting book.” But then he lost me again when I saw a film of his speech in New York in November 1945. The city was feting him like a King and he was the guest of honor at a huge gathering. His speech was not good at all. He had a high pitched unpleasant voice and a bad accent. Patton was a terrible orator who obviously though he was pretty good, and he seemed to lack command of the material, reaching for the next line as if he might not really know it. He didn't sound smart at all. The General made a lot of smug jokes about wiping people out. He smiled and bragged about destroying entire towns. The crowd hesitated, then laughed. Several times. They were a little uncomfortable, but rolled with it. He gloated over killing people, and I was offended. I don't mind a wildcat military leader doing that in private, but if he does it in public, he deserves to be a private. It was a one-star speech.
Patton said famously that, “compared to war, all other forms of human endeavor shrink to insignificance.” Compared to bragging about killing people, all other human faults shrink to insignificance, too.
Patton believed in reincarnation, as do I. But the difference is that he believed that he was once a Roman general, and I believe I ran a Roman bath house.
ADOLF HITLER BRIDGE
The Allies in the west desperately needed to capture a bridge across the Rhine intact. Marshall, Ike, Monty, and Brad all accepted that this was an unlikely hope.
Near Cologne was the Adolph Hitler Bridge. It thought it was better than any other bridge in the world, and lost its temper 80 times a day.
Leading patrol elements of the US Army actually crossed the AHB on March 3 and went back across the west side to report back that this one could be taken.
But just as the American tank units were within sight of the bridge, it drank the Kool-aid. The Germans blew up the Adolph Hitler Bridge in the nick of time in the early hours of March 4. One of the reasons that the Allies captured the Ludendorf Bridge at Remagen was that on Hitler's orders, the Hitler Bridge had an oversized defense force for the war situation. He cared too much about it just because it was named after him, which is partly why Stalin defended Stalingrad so desperately.
WAR WOMEN
Allied planes had recently accidentally killed a high ranking Soviet officer. Friendly fire was bad enough within one's own force, but when Allies begin to hit each other with friendly fire, something has to be done.
The Soviets didn't exactly feel that way because they cared less about human life and they put secrecy at the top of the priority chain. Stalin could care less that the Allies sometimes killed his own people by accident. As long as Soviet movements and positions remained secret from everybody, he was happy. It was all about the Communist (Russian imperialist disguised as “Communist”) post-war domination of Europe.
Britian and the US didn't see it that way and continued to implore the Reds to improve open communications between the two armies converging on the germs of Germany.
Field Marshall Harold Alexander finally persuaded the Soviets to allow him to fly to the eastern front and have a personal meeting with General Bityanosoff near Cracow, Poland.
When “Alex” arrived, he found the Red General's camp swarming with absolutely gorgeous Russian women. They wore army uniforms and many carried guns. There were almost as many knock-out Russian women as there were tough looking Russian male soldiers. It was bizarre.
Alexander tried to come to some sort of an agreement about communications and the friendly fire controversy, but the Soviet general didn't seem to care about the deaths of a few Russians to accidental Allied bombs and bullets. These things happen in war, and what good did it do to get too worried about it? In essence, from the start, the entire mission had been a waste of time and a dangerous journey.
When “Alex” went to his bed in a top of the line Red hut, there was a scantily clad beautiful young Russian woman in it. She volunteered to sleep on the floor. Alex was a married man and didn't really know what the hell was going on. She woke him up the next morning with a toothbrush and a pan of fresh water and asked him if he needed anything else. Harold said, “leave me alone, I'm a family man.” She feigned innocence and left the hut.
This is all easily explained. The Russians have a serious inferiority complex about the fact (and I use that word carefully) that their women, on average, are some of the ugliest in the world.
People all over the world have been laughing and joking about the ugly Russian women for a thousand years. When Stalin gave in to British importunities for this meeting to reduce friendly fire dangers, he knew nothing would come of the meeting because he gave the orders that nothing would come of the meeting. But he wanted to gain something positive from it so he arranged to have every nice looking young Russian woman within 900 miles rushed to Cracow to impress the cracker. Alexander could report back that nothing came of it, but, “boy, those Russian women, what lookers!”
In 1991-1, when the fall of Communism and the new reconciliation between the west and the Soviet Bloc was at a fever pitch, the Phil Donahue TV talk show had a special event where 400 American women in New York had a satellite feed talk show about the political situation with 400 Russian woman in Moscow. Dingbat Donahue hosted, and the show, of course, was useless verbiage from non-political people trying to sound erudite, and arguing all over the road over vague nothing points. What had me laughing out loud was the shameless stack of the Moscow audience with beautiful Russian women. The New York Americans had a natural range of ugly to beautiful women. 7% of the Americans were knock-outs. The rest ran the gamut. The Russians were 92% beautiful women that would make grandpa faint if they merely passed him by on the street. You would think that the average Russian woman was four times better looking than the average American woman. Dream on, Ivan. I'm sorry you're so hung up on Russian women being ugly that you had to do that. The TV women summit was the exact same syndrome that Alex ran into when he met Bityanosoff on March 1945.
Apart from looks, there is a great chasm between how Russian treat women and how Americans do, and did in 1945.
On the positive side, Russians respected women as workers and soldiers far more than Americans did. It really wasn't unusual to see Russian female soldiers, while it was unheard of in America. The USSR didn't wait for a war emergency to decide that it was socially acceptable for women to work in factories, in mines, and in farm fields. In the USA this only became common in the war emergency. Germany, even when losing the war, didn't want it's women to work in factories, and certainly didn't want them fighting. But in Russia, the woman was free to wear army boots. 170 pound Russian tanks worked on 35 ton Russian tanks.
So in a way, that is progressive. But Russian men were also far more disrespectful to women. During the fall of Soviet Communism in 91-92, when the veil of secrecy fell from the old USSR, many Russian women spoke on TV of the terrible way that Russian men treated Russian women in general. No one ever trained them to be gentlemen.
The mass rape by Russian soldiers on the Eastern front was beyond description and tally, and no modern American mass rape such as this has ever occurred. We're talking a million rapes here, people.
Some American PW's in eastern Europe were abandoned in transport by their German captors, and suddenly became free on the eastern front. They eye-witnessed the endless rapes and sometimes were foolish enough to try to stop them. These PW's would go into a town for three days and see wave after wave of Russian troops come in and rape the women who had already been raped by the last brigade that came through yesterday.
At one point, near Wurtgarten, an American officer protested an ongoing rape festival and was held back at gunpoint and told by a Red Colonel,
“Mind your own business. All women are property of the Red Army.”
In Hungary the Red troops were instructed that this country had not really supported Hitler, and so they didn't rape quite so much at first. But after Budapest put up a stubborn fight, that changed. The Red soldiers did the Nanking shuffle on Budapest to celebrate another great socialist victory. They defeated Hungary and humanity at the same time.
Stalin of course, gave official and very public orders that Soviet troops were not to act like that in the liberated territories. In reality he not only allowed it, he enabled it with enthusiasm.
By the way, there was one brief desperate despairing moment in March 45 when Hitler suggested to Goring that women should join in the front lines of the fighting. “They are braver than men anyway,” he said. But it was a passing fanciful remark and he had no intention of really doing that.
RHINE DEBATE UK AND US
The British believed that the Allies should try to smash through the Rhine barrier at a single spot and then try to break through to blitzkrieg victory. The islanders felt that the Allies did not have the strength to clear out all the German fighting forces west of “Rhino.” But Ike wanted to occupy the west bank of the Rhine on a line across Central Europe and bag all the German armies left out of the Rhine-wall. British Generals told Ike that trying to hold a long line would weaken Allied strength to the point where the move to penetrate the Rhine at one point could fail. As things worked out, Ike was proven right, and got his wish to advance along a broad front before, during, and after the penetration of the Rhine barrier.
There were two superb lines of defense left for Germany in its hope for survival. One was the Larry Siegfried Line and the other the Rhine, a great river and the border of Germany in the west. No foreign invader had crossed the Rhine for centuries. In the German psychology it was a liquid Maginot Line.
THE BRIDGE AT REMAGEN
No German with a brain hoped for victory anymore, but there was always the faint hope of a bloody stalemate like WWI that could in theory force the Allies to abandon their unconditional surrender stance and accept a compromise peace. Germany in 1944-5 was fighting for the same prize that the CSA was fighting for in 1864-5, a moderately humiliating armistice without abject surrender.
The Siegfried Line (or “Westwall”) of western German fortifications was very effective but had been breached in two places by the beginning of 1945. The Westwall built by Dr. Todt had fallen. That left the Rhine as the last line. The logical place to defend the Rhine was behind it, in German territory, using the river as a shield. But the dumb Fuhrer gave the macho order that the enemy had to be stopped before he reached German territory. The bulk the of the best remaining German divisions therefore slugged it out with Monty and Ike to the west of the Rhine. When the Allies finally reached it, there was that much less of a German Army behind it. More attrition to ruin Adolph’s ambition.
The Germans would undoubtedly blow up all the bridges spanning the wide Rhine as they retreated and Eisenhower never expected to actually bag a bridge intact. But on March 7, 1945 the US Army captured the big bridge at Remagen. It was a key moment in WWII.
Of all the bridges spanning the Rhine, the Ludendorff was the oldest and least desirable. That contributed the Nazi and Allied neglect of it as a potential focus point.
Hitler wanted all the Rhino bridges blown up, but he didn't. He hoped for a miracle and therefore ordered all bridges held intact until the last possible moment the enemy approached them. This is how the Allies captured the Ludendorf Bridge at Remagen.
An army commander named Jimmy Hoge deserves much of the credit fot taking the LB. Just as his units were making their way onto the west side of the bridge and exchanging small arms fire with the German defenders, Hoge got an order to turn south and join up with Patton who had just broken through and was closing in on the Rhine. Hoge knew that if he disobeyed the order and the attack on the Remagen Bridge failed, and it blew up taking hundreds of American to their death, he would face a courts martial and become a bitter alcoholic for the rest of his life. Hoge bravely went ahead with the attack across the bridge.
Both the Germans and the Americans could see the dyn-o-myte charges all around the bridge, connected by wire, and could see the germans trying to fight their way to the middle of the bridge to set it off. The men were shooting each other up playing this video game to see if the Germans could get to the detonators, and the Americans were trying to stop them, and get across the bridge to secure it.
Hoge was watching from the west bank and through his field glasses saw the fighting like a bleacher bum at Wrigley. Then he heard the explosion of a lifetime, even by war standards, and his glasses saw nothing but smoke. Hoge dropped his binocs and felt sick. He not only had failed to stop the Germans, he had personally made one of the murderous blunders of WWII.
But slowly the smoke cleared and the choir sang happily. The Germans had indeed set the charges off but the wire connecting the charges was cut off in a few spots by American shells, and it wasn't enough to take old Ludy down. The Bridge at Remagen was alive and well and the inspired US Army men were pouring across the 1,100 foot span and German defenders were surrendering. A portal was open through which the American tanks (including some new Pershings with 90mm guns) could pass into the heartless heart of Nazi Germany.
The news of the captured span was withheld from the public for one day, but when it broke, it was the most exiting story to hit the American home front since June the Sixth. America was ecstatic over the Bridge at Remagen.
Capturing Remagen bridge changed strategy for the Allies. Prior to March 7 Montgomery was to lead the main thrust toward Berlin from the northern sector. The Montymen would get most of the Allied supplies for this main effort and the Americans would hold the line at the Rhine and come through only after the big breakout up north.
But with the Remagen Bridge taken, Ike and Brad felt that a two pronged thrust was now possible. The Americans could drive from the center while Monty moved into Germany in the north. But then Ike backed off and slowed down the Remagen front, while reassuring Monty that his was still the main front. Ike even complained to a subordinate that he didn't want to do it, but felt he had to, and when Patton heard about what Ike said, Patton slapped a soldier senseless for having his helmet on crooked.
Once the Yanks secured it, the Krauts tried persistently to destroy it with artillery. But within seven days of securing the grand old Ludendorff, Ike's troops built two temporary bridges beside it. These temps were called Jeff Treadway Bridges and many were built in the war with the exact same specs. The 'Treads' weren't built to last, and they weren't giants, but Treadways could handle tanks and troops and supply trucks and that was all the Allies needed to penetrate the Reich and take war home to Hitler. But the Luftwaffe and Wermacht continued to bomb and shell the old Ludendorff Bridge until there seemed a danger it would indeed collapse after all.
Ike felt that it didn't matter anymore what with the short-term Treadways working just fine. “For all I care, Ludendorff can go jump in a lake,” quipped Ike. But a senior officer felt that the old bridge was worth saving for long term-use and asked for permission to repair it. Ike agreed, to his later regret. German artillery continued to pound the bridge, and the center, the part the Germans almost took out, weakened fatally. The Bridge at Remagen collapsed suddenly on March 17, sending many fine American men to a tragic St. Patrick's Day death.
Simpson called Ike to tell him that he had “a bridge in the sack.” Ike was thrilled. Simpson asked how many divisions he should send to the other side. Too few could put them in danger of counterattack. Too many could upset Ike's larger plans for the offensive. Ike told Simpson to get five divisions across and establish a perimeter. But Simpson was not to launch a serious drive into Germany ahead of the rest of the line, just because he had breached the Rhine.
Ike had to consult with Monty on expanding the Remagen bridgehead, and, as Ike expected, Monty would not approve. Monty had his master plan and “didn't want to tinker with it” by opening up a new advancing front from the Remagen bridgehead. It made sense at ground level to exploit the Remagen avenue to the max, but I can understand Monty's thinking completely. People will suggest a change in a joke, but that change, even if it improves one joke, will upset the complete overall diagram of my set. So I don't make the change.
The movie The Bridge at Remagen is an historic travesty. The film has the Americans trying to destroy the Remagen bridge in order to trap a German army on the west side of the river. The Germans are depicted trying to save the bridge from destruction. This movie not only does not tell the story accurately, it presents an outrageous reversal of the most important element of the story. Typical Hollywood. You're better off never seeing any historical movies if you want to know your history (except for Nicholas and Alexandria and The U-2 Incident with Lee Majors.)
SOMEONE MUST PAY FOR REMAGEN BLUNDER
Hitler had refused to listen to one German general after another who said that the German Army must retreat behind the Rhine and not get caught west of it where it could be surrounded and defeated. The Allies bagged a half a million prisoners as a result. Hitler had ordered all the bridges to stay open as long as possible, which was why the Allies were so fortunate as to capture the one at Remagen.
When the Americans took the Remagen Bridge and established a perimeter on the east side of the Rhine, Hitler was furious. Someone must be held responsible. First he fired General Rundstedt and replaced him with Kesselring. Then Hitler sent a “Flying Tribunal” to the battle zone to hold military trials of all those responsible for the debacle at Remagen. Three Army officers were sentenced to death, including one who had bravely launched a desperate counterattack on the east side of the Bridge on his own initiative.
GERMAN VOLK WELCOME THE LIBERATORS
Most German townspeople who saw the US Army conquer their towns came out and waved and cheered. They displayed pictures of Hitler and then spat and stomped on them, as if that makes up for their being for the last ten years “Hitler's Willing Executioners” to quote a book title that studied that issue. These weather-vanes were acting like they were citizens of Antwerp or Oslo or Shanghai, being liberated by the welcomed heroes. Nice try, Gerda. You loved Hitler when he was on top and you know it. It was shaky enough when the Italians hailed the enemy as liberators. That was borderline, 'who are you people trying to kid?' This was over the top.
FINISHING OFF THE GERMANS WEST OF THE RHINE- 3-44
Ike's map calls it the “Saar-Palatinate Triangle.” This was another 'bulge' on the map, the reverse of the one that inspired the German counter-offensive of December 1944. The one in 44 was an Allied salient thrusting into German- held land that Hitler decided was vulnerable to a pincer attack cutting it off and destroying it. The Nazis failed at the Bulge. They didn't have the resources to back the theory.
Now on the South-central front, just south of the Moselle River the Germans had triangular 90 miles by 90 miles salient pointing into Allied controlled territory. Ike wanted the Germans completely cleared out west of the Rhine before he advanced along a broad front for the final victory drive.
It was time to patch up that salient. Ike ordered General Patch to take his fully loaded U. S. Seventh Army (14 divisions of 15,000 men each, sightly less for armored divisions) and the the French First Army (27 men) and attack the SPT from the south while the powerhouse Third Army would attack the line from the North near the Moselle (sometimes spelled the Mosel) River.
The Allies had already crossed the Rhine at Remagen, so the Germans expected an Allied invasion to the farthest east possible with all engines burning. As a result they were not expecting the big 3 to attack from the North to the South. They should have retreated from the SPT salient before they were destroyed, but stupid Hitler as always refused to allow for tactical retreat.
So instead of sprinting to Berlin, US 3 was assigned to be the northern pincer in the attempt to win Battle of the Moselle Bulge.
The Battle of the SPT was a huge success for the Allies. The troops in the salient had no chance. Ike was amazed that they hadn't retreated behind the Rhine while they had time.
ODER OF FRANKFURT
On the eastern front the new German commander was Heinrici. He had replaced none other than Heinrich Himmler who had to goose step down from the job of military commander. His record in charge of the northern flank of the Russian front and it was partly his fault. He knew nothing about waging war against armed peoples. One general told Hitler that Himmler had to be replaced. Hitler defended Himmler and the general screamed back,
“Himmler has never so much as led a platoon across a creek!”
Hitler dropped his head and agreed to replace Himmler. He was too beat to fight with his generals anymore. He’d already had this fight with Guderian in February over the incompetence of Himmler.
General Heinrici was a better general than Dr. Evil, but it was too late to improve the situation much. The Russians were closing in. The Germans were more afraid of the Russians winning than the Americans and British.
In mid March 1945 the Russians had breached the Oder River in two places. The Red Army was determined to take the cities of Frankfurt and Kustrin. High-end autobahn highways led from these places west all the way to downtown Berlin.
CLAP FOR THE WOLFMAN – MARCH NEOGTIATIONS FOR PEACE
A polite round of applause is in order for an SS general named Karl Wolff, or, “The Wolf-man” as he was known around Berlin. KW was sure the war was lost (what a genius) and he occasionally grumbled about it to important people. Off the record of course. Wolfman griped to those around him that there was no real reason to continue the war and he didn't understand why the Fuhrer couldn't spare the German people form continued death and destruction in a lost cause.
Hint, hint.
Next thing you know, Wolf-man and other Germans are in Switzerland secretly meeting with representatives of Billy Donovan's OSS, the Overseas Strategic Services which evolved after the war into the CIA. One of the OSS reps was Alan Dulles, the brother of the future head of the CIA under President Eisenhower. Their meeting was to discuss possible terms for a negotiated armistice to end the war. The Nazis were very concerned about a postwar east Europe dominated by the Red Army and Soviet sponsored Communist movements all over western Europe. Many Nazis were sure that northern Italy was on the verge of going completely Communist in short order if the Germans didn't let the lesser of two evils, the USA, win the war as soon as possible.
Wolff and a Major Dorman, also of the OSS were angry when the terms were presented. The Germans would have to surrender all of their foces unconditionally. Those who helped arrange the surrender would be given every consideration after the war. In other words, there were no political prizes for giving up, only a personal hope that you won't hang for war crimes like those who never helped to arrange a surrender.
The Germans went back to the Fatherlessland in a foul mood about the terms. Dulles had further demanded that they show good faith by getting two particularly innocent Italian political prisoners out of jail and deliver them to Switzerland at the next meeting.
But Wolff gave it some thought and had to concede that humiliating terms were better than sitting still and watching Germany get micro-waved one day at time from land and air.
The SS sprang Frederico Parri and Major Usami from jail and put them in a hospital in Zurich. Dulles was an old friend of Parri. When the SS pakced him off to a hospital in secret he was praying his finals because he knew he was going to be shot by the end of the day. But instead of an SS guy with a frown and a pistol, into his room walked his old friend Dulles with a smile. Parri cried like a baby.
YOU SURRENDER? THIS TIME NO PROBLEM!
In the month of March 1945 the Allies took in 10,000 German Prisoners of War a day! The Tommy PW's were seized, de-loused, packed, shipped and handled with no problem.
Handling PW's can hurt results. Back in 1943 the Allied effort in North Africa was stalled when the Allies did not have the infrastructure to handle the mass of surrendered Nazi soldiers in Tunisia. The Allied war machine had come along way since then. Now the Allies were taking ten times as many prisoners and not losing a step on the march.
JOAN OF ARC BURNS AT THE COPENHAGEN STAKE 3-21-45
Danish resistance to Nazi occupation had a better record than Danish resistance to the initial invasion, which was zero. By March 1945 the Danish resistance was getting bold.
The defiant Danish Resistance called in an Allied air strike against Gestapo headquarters in Copenhagen, the Shell House, on March 21. The DR planted a fluff tourist story in an international magazine with color photos showing the buildings to be hit. The Allies used the magazine for targeting assistance. This mission was to save Resistance lives, because the Nazis kept all their records in “The Shell” and were on the verge of mass arrests and executions of Resisters. The air raid was time sensitive.
The raid by 49 Mosquito bombers and 32 P-51 Mustangs was a success. They shelled the Shell House and killed 94 Nazis.
Nevertheless, one Mosquito bit the wrong arm and set off a terrible tragedy, even by WWII standards. The plane hit the nearby Joan of Arc Catholic School with a bomb which set off a fire. Other planes followed the trail of smoke thinking it led to Gestapo Headquarters. They pounded the Joan of Arc School like it was a ball-bearings plant. 98 Danish schoolchildren died in the fire at Joan of Arc.
RHINO NORTH – MAIN THRUST MARCH 23-24
The Remagen Bridge put five US division across the Rhine on March 7, but the main thrust was to come in the north, where the Rhine was wider, swifter, and better defended. The main crossing under Monty and the US Ninth Division was called Operation Plunder. That was a foolish name because if it had failed it would have caught on forever as Operation Blunder.
Brit 2 Canada 1 and US 9 were long supposed to lead the main charge to victory anyway. Ike respected Monty's role and did not choose to exploit the Remagen hole and make it the main drive, but he was glad to have it as an advanced power flank.
2,1, and 9 crossed the Rhine on 23.
Prime Minister Churchill was personally in the wave of crossings on day 2. He always had to be there on the front lines when something good was happening. He arranged to cross the Rhine in a small boat while German shells were still occasionally landing in the vicinity. Churchill was in heaven. He even defaced a part of the famous “West Wall” with a crude suggestion, and pledged the reporters not to report it, which they did not.
Ike did not know that Churchill had finagled his way to the front lines, and claims that he would not have allowed it if he had known about it in advance.
Churchill and Monty had actually waited until Ike had left the area before they hopped into a little boat and tried to find the fighting. They were like mischievous little boys sneaking one past the stern teacher. At one point Churchill got out of the boat and started marching towards a much more dangerous zone with an exited smile. General Dempsey (Brit) ordered him to to stop and return back across the river as he could no longer guarantee the PM's safety and did not want to be the goat of WWII who let Churchill get killed.
WHO'S ON RHINE FIRST?
Patton thought that the most important thing in the world was for his Americans to cross the Rhine before the British did. This was typical Patton-think, and he had employed it in Africa and Sicily too. Who cares who gets there first? Patton could hide behind the flag and claim that he wanted this for America, but he really wanted it for Patton.
Back on March 4 General OJ Simpson ( I name him that to help us all remember that General Claude Simpson was an American – I tend to mix him up with the British General Dempsey) had reached the Rhine near Dusseldorf with US Army 9 Corps ahead of everyone, including the Remagen men by three days. Simpson asked Montgomery for permission to cross, and Monty refused. Many Yanks thought this was just a matter of Monty's big ego or of British chauvinism in generals. But Simpson tooh the high road. He said that Monty just wanted to stick to his larger plan and wasn't agreeable to changes, even if they were positive ones. Simpson kept his white bronco on the west side of the river and mopped up the area. Simpson was not cross that he couldn't cross, and refused to hang Monty on a cross of criticism. Simpson didn't agree with Monty but respected his motives, as do I. I think the Americans had a bigger issue with who crossed first, than the British did. Americans have a bigger ego problem than the British, or at least the Americans lack the subtlety to hide it. Which side of the ocean leads the world in congratulating and adoring themselves when they make a nice play on a football field? I can't believe how great I just wrote that.
Patton's army managed to cross the Rhine at Oppenheim to the south. This was about 22 hours before Monty crossed up near Wesel. Monty wasn't worked up about it one way or another. To Patton it was all about this. Who gets there first, who gets the credit? Never mind that people are dying and the battle between good and evil is coming to a climax. No, it's all about who and which side gets the glory.
Is was Lt. General Larry Miles Dempsey who led the first strategic wave across the Rhine 25 miles north of Dusseldorff to light resistance.
SAVING PRIVATE WATTERS – HAMMELBURG 3-26-8
In the Philippines, the Americans had liberated Cabantuan PW camp spectacularly. In March of 1945 General Patton decided he was going to match MacArthur in these heroics. Patton planned a daring raid 80 miles deep inside German lines. His boys would liberate the Allied troops of the PW camp at Hammelburg.
The mission to free the PW's was a disaster. The camp was not liberated and the Americans took heavy casualties.
The great Patton had ordered the raid for personal reasons. It seems that one of the PW's was his son in law, Private Watters.
Some revisionist historians now claim that Patton didn't even know that his son-in-law was at Hammelburg, and that the story was contrived by “Patton-haters.” So why is there a group of “Patton-haters” in the first place? There certainly isn't a flock of “Bradley-haters.”
I wonder if this story has anything to do with the movie Saving Private Ryan?
There was sharp fighting at the camp before the mission failed. It got close to succeeding. At one point an American priest held mass at the PW barracks while the two sides were in the middle of a terrifying tank and infantry fight. An atheist soldier tells the story of looking up from the ground during the explosions and seeing the priest reciting the Latin Mass while bullets and bombs flew all about. The window was shattered and the mix of shadow and sunlight gave the Father the look of a mystical icon as he prayed and the bullets whizzed by his head. The soldier didn't say if this scene converted him to believing in God.
SURROUND THE RUHR
This was the Ike goal in the spring. Not only would this take prisoners and territory, it would take away the best industrial supply base for the Germans.
The classic simple West Point way was to get both of his flanks moving far ahead of the center and then converge in the enemy rear.
The Allies were such a ridiculous monster at this point that Ike's “flanks” consisted of several corps, each with about 400,000 men, 450 tanks and 1,200 supporting aircraft.
Mostly it was the US Ninth under General Oscar Joe Simpson that was to advance to the German rear and then wheel north to encircle the Ruhr near the city of Cassel (or Kassel, but I prefer the C spelling.) This large encirclement Ruhr trap was just about finishing up successfully when FDR died on 4.12.
About General Simpson, Ike said this, “If he ever made a mistake, I am not aware of it.”
FELIX KERSTEN – A MASSAGE FOR HUMANITY
In March 1945 Hitler issued an order to Himmler to exterminate all remaining prisoners in the concentration camp. The Fuhrer was not going to give the enemy the satisfaction of liberating a single person from his camps. What a guy.
Himmler was getting a massage from his masseuse when he got the message from the messiah to kill all campers. Heinrich began thinking out loud that this wasn't right. The war was already lost. What good would it do now to kill all these people? Hitler was being too mean, even for Himmler!
Heinrich’s maneuvering masseuse was a man named Felix Kersten. While loosening Himmler's tired back muscles he began to implore Heinrich to disobey the order,
“You're right. It’s obvious. It makes no sense to kill all these people. Write up an order that these prisoners are not to be killed.”
“But I would be disobeying the Fuhrer!”
“We all know that he has gone mad! You have enough police power to protect you from anyone! This order must not stand. You have to stop it!”
The two men argued while the massage went on. They continued to argue about it while they dressed up in their fascist uniforms. Felix knew that Heinrich wanted to take his advice so he did not let up on HH of the SS.
Himmler buttoned his last button on his impeccable uniform, slowly sat down, picked up his pen, looked up to Kersten and said,
“I might live to regret this.”
To which Kersten replied,
“You might die and regret this. At this point it is your duty”
Himmler signed. Then Felix grabbed the pen and, even though his signature was not required, co-signed,
“In the name of humanity, Felix Kersten.”
Mr. Evil, Heinrich Himmler may have saved a million lives with an act of courage near the end of the war, like a Lt. Bill Calley heroically saving one My Lai baby from a hut fire after slaughtering the rest of the village civilians the day before. Felix Kersten has to go down in the history of WWII as a hero for persuading Reichfuhrer Himmler to change his unheavenly mind.
The scenes of the Allied troops liberating the concentration camps and seeing the endless walking skeletons might have ended up even worse if Felix the masseuse hadn't convinced Himmler to work out a relatively happier ending.
ITALIAN FRONT
The final offensive in the Italian campaign was launched in April of 1945. It was the long desired breakout into the Po Valley. This campaign is ignored by short histories of the War. The huge offensive into Germany is so much more compelling that the Po campaign of April 1945 is reduced to a forgotten footnote. If it had taken place alone it would have been big news and a famous part of world history. Earlier battles at Anzio and Sicily are forever remembered because at the time they were the only Allied dog in the hunt.
The city of Bologna was the prize of this theatre, and that's no bologna. When Bologna fell, fascism was a finito in Italy. When mechanized units broke out into the plains of the Po it was plain the Allies had finally found that soft underbelly that Churchill had promised. But by then the Axis was spinning out of control in defeat on all fronts and the underbelly wasn't a great help. Mussolini had a soft underbelly, but Italy did not.
The deposed fascist dictator of Italy, Ben Mussolini was hiding with the German divisions fleeing the Allies in the Po Valley. He was still the leader of German occupied Italy, but that was specious presidency to say the last. The Nazis were using Mussolini as a hapless regent, a forcibly installed dictator of a Northern Italy being conquered by the Allies. In his case in 1945 it was not good to be the King.
The Allies conquered the mountainous Italian peninsula from the Germans rock by rock, and brick by brick. On May 1, 1945 The German commander of Italy's fake northern government surrendered formally. The war was over in Italy.
War historians speak of the Italian campaign as if were a major Allied blunder. The pen-pushers blame Churchill and Freyburg for a campaign that bogged down in the mud when it was supposed to stay on schedule ahead of Overlord. Allies rewards were not equal to the toll in blood and resources. Italy's soft underbelly had abs of steel.
But at least the Allies were playing it like Grant in Virginia. The good guys may be going slow, losing some battles, and often facing superior generals. But the Allies in Italy were engaging the enemy full-scale non-stop and draining the industrially inferior enemy of valuable resources. The Russians won in the east in largely because of the German divisions withdrawn from Russia to defend Italy. And in the west, D-Day and beyond would have been much tougher on the Allies if not for the large German air and ground forces that had been diverted to Italy.
In these ways the Italian campaign was a strategic success in spite of the soft-bellied Churchill being wrong about the soft-underbelly of Europe. Overall, I go with the crowd that says the Italian campaign was a strategic mistake.
THE ITALIAN JEWS
There were 58,000 Italian Jews in Mussolini's Italy in 1938. Since Germany was the Axis leader, and the Nazis were determined to commit genocide against the Jews, it would follow that Italy would join in the persecution of the Jews.
This was not so. Although Italy did pass some discriminatory laws against the Jews, it didn't actively persecute them, at least not prior to November of 1943. In fact, Italy had become a refuge for almost 20,000 Italo-German Jews who retreated to the boot in the 1930's.
When the Nazis intervened to “save” Italy in November of 1943 they presented the Italians a long list of Jews they wanted handed over. Mussolini's puppet government and the Catholic Church generally resisted these demands. But there were exceptions. In the end almost 9,000 Italian Jews were arrested and exported to concentration camps to die.
Thousands of Italian Jews fled during the war. At the end of WWII there were only 40,000 Jews left in Italy.
BENITO A FINITO APRIL 29 1945
He tried to escape to Spain by disguising himself as a common German soldier on his way to the Swiss border. But Communists banditos found and arrested the dictator near Lake Como in the town of Dongo.
Mussolini instantly squealed that his 25 year old girlfriend Clara Pettaci was in custody somewhere else. Benito asked if he could be united with her. Clara was in disguise, and the partisans didn't even know they had bagged her until her boyfriend tipped her off. Talk about a bad date.
Yet Pettaci was still in love. Clara was just as eager to share Mussolini's fate as he was eager to drag her down with him. Clara told the authorities who she was before anyone outed her. She wanted to die with him! I give the woman credit. She really was head over heels in love with the man and it was, as my old doorman Kenny used to say, “the real deal.” Patacci was no lowlife gold-digger.
The lovers were shot on April 29, 1945. Their bodies were driven to Milan where they were hung upside down in the town square. The people danced. Not a sign of a good life when you die and everyone starts dancing.
A carnivorous carnival was held over the bodies. Americans arriving in Milan to “liberate” saw a jaw-dropping sight as they drove their jeeps into the town square. There were thousand of people cheering. Sergeant Frances Hogan of the Tenth Mountain division described the scene this way,
“I turns the corner, beeping my horn. I can hear the cheering. I expect to see flowers and American flags. Instead there in the middle of the square is a line of about 12 corpses hung upside down by the ankles. These Italians were pretty sore! One of them is obviously Mussolini, another one is obviously his dame. There's a rope barricade holding back an angry crowd. They're cheering the sight of his dead body.
They're calling him names. Even though it's in Italian, I can tell its all bad. They're yelling at the corpses like they could hear them. Next thing you know the mob breaks through and there's a thousand berserk Italians spitting on these stiffs and beating them with sticks. We had to fire off a few rounds to get em back into the rope line. These people didn't even know or care that the Americans had just liberated their town. We were beeping horns at them and waving US flags and they didn't even hear us. They were just beating up these corpses.”
Frank Hogan Tenth Mtn.
What a bad funeral that was. Michael Jackson gets the Staples Center - El Duce gets used for lunger practice hung upside down on a hot afternoon in the town square with his dead girlfriend beside him. I wouldn't even wish that on Michael Moore!
NAZI TECHNO-THREAT
German war technology was still running slightly ahead of the American/British even in the last weeks of combat. The weapons the Nazis deployed were serious. They launched V-1 and V-2 intercontinental rockets, the first unmanned long range strategic delivery system of history.
The V-1 was a low level flying bomb and the V-2 was a medium range high-altitude ICBM. V1 and V-2 were Hitler's answer to Churchill's V hand sign. The Vs hit London and other targets with destructive and terrifying effects. A large percentage of the rockets stayed local. They were targeted to strike Allied positions in Western Europe. Spitfires and courage could stop a lot of the V-1s but could not stop the V-2s. The German engineers were at the same time trying to build a “New York Bomber” capable of a mission to Manhattan and back from Europe. And, oh by the way, they were working on a nuclear bomb, and making good progress. Scary stuff.
In 1945 the Luftwaffe unveiled the word’s first jet fighter plane, the ME-262. One-on-one the 262 could take anyone, but it couldn’t take everyone. The ME-262 was several cuts above anything the US and the Brits, and the Russians could send up against it.
But it was too late. The Allies could overpower the superior jet in a dogfight with sheer numbers. Allied air raids destroyed more ME-262’s on the ground than they ever shot down in the air. 1,200 ME-262’s were built but only 300 ever saw action, thank God.
Top Gun Too Late – ME 262 Nazi Jet Fighter
The 262 had weaknesses. It had bad karma because it was fighting on the side of evil. It could not maneuver well at slower speeds. 262's gas tank was not self sealing. A couple of rounds near the gas tank and ka-boom.
In the spring of 1945, Ike directed the US Army Air Force to make the Nazi airstrips that carried these jet fighters a top priority target.
CHURCHILL CRITICIZES IKE – 3 - 45
Prime Minister Churchill publicly criticized Eisenhower in late March for sharing too much military information with the Soviets. Churchill didn't trust the Reds while Ike was more concerned with avoiding accidental clashes with Soviet forces, and friendly fire.
Ike got mad and wrote to the CCS, the Combined Chiefs of Staff, asking them to make a call. They could either support him completely, or accept the Prime Ministers criticisms completely. It was a veiled threat to resign of Churchill didn't get off his back. Was he going to run this war like a general or as a puppet of the politicians?
The CCS assured Ike that they were behind him 100%, and they sent Churchill a gingerly worded note to the effect that Ike was in command on the ground and we should all help him out by respecting that fact. The matter was all settled about March 30.
The two men usually got along very well and that helped too.
POLITICAL GERMAN RIVERS TO CROSS
Now for a controversial story with a bad oder.
The Allied armies stopped at the Elbe but could have/should have advanced to the Oder river. If they had advanced to the Oder then the Russians would never have taken over Berlin and avoided the first defeat of the Cold War.
Over the next 44 years the divided city of Berlin became a trip-wire threatening to detonate World War III. If only FDR hadn’t been so naïve about Russia then the Allies would have never stopped at the Elbe and the entire post-war history of Russia and America might have been vastly different in a better way. That is the argument, and I tend to buy it, because I want to.
But both Eisenhower and Bradley do not agree with this post-war assessment. Both men state unequivocally in their battle memoirs that the decision to halt at the Elbe was not politically motivated. If the USUK Allies had marched to the Oder, they would have had to withdraw after the war anyway. That was the agreement between all the Allies before 1945. Besides, a rush to the Oder would out-race supplies which could lead to some lost battles. The flooded plains on the westerly approaches to Berlin could have been a giant tank trap for resisters to exploit. A USUKCANZ rush to the Oder might even end up creating accidental clashes between Russian and American forces.
Churchill nevertheless was angry with Eisenhower for not pushing hard to Berlin regardless of any previously agreed meeting places.
He didn't care. By the spring of 1945 he had already committed British troops and money to intervention in the Greek civil war against the Communists, so in an indirect way he was already at war with his “Ally” Soviet Russia. Church already had bets down on next season before this one was over. Winnie didn't mind risking damage to relations with the Soviet Union with a frantic Anglo offensive directed at Berlin, but he couldn't get Ike or Bradley or FDR on board. Churchill felt betrayed already by Stalin because Stalin had already gave him 90% of Greece on a napkin at Yalta, and now the Communists reneged. Churchill gave them Poland Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary at Yalta in exchange for Greece, and now they were trying to take Greece too.
Whenever Churchill met with Stalin at the big conferences he became conciliatory and even trusting. But when he got back to London he became his old Bolo-hater self. I don't think it was because he was being deceptive at Yalta or Potsdam, it was more that he got drunk with the influence of personal contact. If you only read Win's statements at the Big Three pow-wows, you'd think he was as naïve about Stalin as Roosevelt.
Churchill had an old fashioned military philosophy that placed the capture of the enemy capitol city as top priority. He'd already vastly overestimated the benefits of capturing Rome in 1944. The UKPM now passionately wanted to capture Berlin, while Ike didn't give a shilling about it. Ike just wanted the war to be won and ended.
The United States probably blundered when it continually placed winning the war above all political considerations. This 'all that counts is ending this war' mentality applied also in Asia where the United States so desperately wanted the USSR to join in the war against Japan. That one didn't work out well in the long run either.
In another prologue to the Cold-War story the Americans had been a little mystified as to why Montgomery had diverted large forces away from the march on Berlin to a northeast diversion in the direction of the Baltic sea near the port of Lubeck. It was a little shot across the bow in the percolating Cold War. The British did not want the Soviet Army to have a route to Denmark so they could liberate and enslave it. The US Generals thought the British were being sadly and needlessly mistrustful of our good friends the Russians. They thought that thrusts to cut off the Russians from Denmark were a bit immoral and not the maximum production value for the military forces. Americans were focused on the battle map while the British watched the post-war map. Monty blocked the route to Denmark and Denmark thanks him for it.
As previously mentioned, Eisenhower was very concerned about friendly fire between allies as the two legions closed in on Germany. So much so that he made a personal call to Stalin to let him know exactly where our forces were and where they were going. Churchill was not happy about that phone call.
From a military point of view there was no reason for the USUKCANZ armies taking Berlin. The city was a political objective and only a political objective.
Between the Elbe and Berlin there was a difficult 50 miles of water-laced terrain pocked with strong defenses. On this lowland plain of canals and streams General Bradley estimated that the US alone would take 100,000 casualties.
And the western powers were still going to have to (or at the very least had formally agreed to) withdraw from that territory within a very short time after it was taken, so why fight and die for it? It had already been agreed that the city of Berlin was going to be divided up and administered by the US-UK-and-USSR alliance (plus France added making it a four power city.) So the US and Britian were going to be given half of Berlin for free anyway. Why should anyone die for it?
Presuming that Churchill was right in not trusting the Soviet Union, we still have to wonder how marching to Berlin would have been the right and wise thing to do. You can’t betray someone first on the grounds that you are pretty sure you can’t trust them. If the Russians were the bad guys, you have to let them demonstrate this first and then react. Pre-emptive back-stabbing to prevent back-stabbing is still back-stabbing. Until Stalin did some very bad things the West was still bound to honor the prearranged deal calling for withdraw from the territory between the Elbe and the Oder which included Berlin.
Conservative history now says Churchill was right and the United States brains trust were wrong, and the decision not to push to the Oder was a blunder.
The real mistake was not extracting a promise from Stalin that all of the Allies would be guaranteed access to Berlin by land from the west. Berlin was alone in the Soviet sea of greater East Germany even though the other Allies would be allowed to live inside the limited half of the city limits. Stalin assured the other allies that they would have access across the Soviet Zone to Berlin. But they make him put it in writing. Stalin's promise was worth about as much as the guarantee of a Hollywood agent. All right, it wasn't that worthless, but it was worthless.
FDR and friends got politically lazy and took Stalin's assurances as a guarantee. A guarantee probably could have been nailed down if smarter Allies had stubbornly insisted on it as their condition to sign all the Yalta accords. The Yalta accords were a cord around the Allied neck. The failure to guarantee at least a “cracker line” to Berlin was the big mistake of the end game in germany controversy, not the decision to halt at the Elbe. (The “Cracker Line” was a thin desperate supply line that saved the Union Army when it was besieged by the Rebs at Chattanooga.)
Russia later cut the west off from all land access to Berlin and this more than once nearly led to the Third World War. Irredentist Free Berlin gave several Presidents sleepless nights. President Kennedy was so distraught over Berlin that one night, when the political situation in East Germany was very volatile, he didn’t cheat on his wife! Most fictional novels about World War III begin with a clash between the superpowers over Berlin.
If Churchill had won his way the western Allies would have crashed the Elbe and marched to the Oder. But Franklin Roosevelt chose not to march. History is mad at him for what may be the smartest thing he did in the entire war. Teddy Roosevelt would have pushed to Berlin. And the US would have been blamed for starting the Cold War.
By the way, TR's son, Teddy Roosevelt Jr. was a brave officer in this theatre who put himself in harm’s way calmly while everyone around him ran for cover. TR Jr. was the real embodiment of the fantasy soldier that his father wanted to be. TR Jr. died at his San Juan Hill.
THE RUSSIAN FRONT JAN 1- APRIL 12 1945
Elderly Russians to this day still refer to it as “The Drive” The final offensive in eastern Europe that put the Third Reich and its leader in the grave began On January 12.
But the Marshall split his forces. Stalin pulled a Churchill. He went for the Balkans with half of his forces, when the Balkans were not that valuable militarily. It was political war in military form. Instead of concentrating on winning the war against Hitler, Jo Jo Stalin was winning the war against Churchill, a war that went back to 1918 when Winston first began referring the Bolsheviks as “The Bolos.”
Russian armies drove for the Adriatic. The Red Army captured Romania, Bulgaria and most of Yugoslavia for Communism. The Russians pretended they were winning these prizes for the Allies, so there was a naïve sense of celebration in the west with these Russian victories.
COST
The Second World War cost the United States and average of eight billion dollars a month. The National debt was about 48 billion dollars in November of 1941. In September of 1945 it was 246 billion. And remember, this was back when a a new school bus cost five dollars.
PACIFIC WAR –JANUARY – APRIL 1945
“I had no problem with killing Japs. Sometimes, … it was a downright pleasure. Some nights I couldn’t sleep cause I couldn’t wait to get up in the morning and kill some more.”
Frank Peto, USMC
THE LIBERATION OF THE PHILIPPINES
The operation to liberate the Philippines began on October 1944 when the Americans landed on Leyte Island. Leyte was secured by the end of November. Now it was time to take the main island of Luzon, where Manila was located and where Americans had suffered so badly during the Bataan Death March in 1942.
The invasion force hit the beach at Lingayen Gulf on Luzon on January 2 1945. The US deployments were almost identical to those of the Japanese when they had invaded four years earlier. The Japanese were not there to oppose the landing, even though Tokyo Rose, the mother of all liars, had promised on the radio that if the Americans dared to land there they were face “the mother of all battles.”
MacArthur made good his pledge to return as he waded ashore on Luzon in January of 1945. It was a great photo op as he splashed ashore. But Dugout Doug had already got his pants wet with the same showboat move back in 44 on Luzon. Mac couldn't be more of a hambone. The Philippine people could certainly forgive the conceit, since MacArthur alone had convinced FDR and the Joint Chiefs that it was morally right to take the Philippines, even if it wasn't a strategic necessity. He saved thousand of Philippino lives, and spared thousands more from more pain under Japanese occupation.
The leader of the defense on Luzon was the “Tiger of Manila” General Yamashita. The tiger would hang as a war criminal after the war. But most historians defend Yamashita alone among those Japanese executed after the war. Yamashita was a tenacious fighter, but whether he ever ordered any atrocities on civilians or PW's is a mater of a long debate.
MacArthur was hoping to slug it out with the Japanese defenders on the open plains of Luzon, near Manila, but Yamashita wisely withdrew most of his army into the mountainous regions, where is was plainly easier to resist. But they had to concede the great city and harbor of Manila as the price of this better resistance.
By January 9 the Americans had established a pretty good beach perimeter around Lingayen Gulf. This was the same landing spot of choice for the Japanese back in 1942.
The Japanese were outnumbered and out of gasoline. So they took their tanks and buried them into the ground up to the turrets. Many Americans died crashing the tank fixed artillery.
About 20,000 Japanese troops remained in Manila for a last ditch stand, and did they ever make one. This was the Stalingrad of the Pacific. It was house to house fighting for weeks, and when Manila fell it was like a scene out of the liberation of the concentration camps in Europe. A hundred thousand Philippino civilians had been killed in the battle, more than half of them by their Japanese occupiers deliberately. It was a mass slaughter.
On February 16 the US made a major airborne landing on Corregidor Island. This was the last holdout of 1942 and it had to be captured back because it guarded the entrance to Manila Harbor. America intelligence estimates were that 1,000 Japanese troops were on Corregidor and 5,000 on Bataan Peninsula. The reverse was true. Corregidor would put up a stubborn fight for the second time in the war.
The military historians always say that the Nazi invasion of Crete was the last time in history that a major parachute operation took place. But that may be splitting hairs. I guess they figure that 5,000 men dropped on Corregidor on Feb 16 was small. The US airborne troops made the difference on the rock in 45.
The 1,123 Japanese who defended Corregidor did so fanatically. How fanatically? Only 19 got off the island alive as PW's. The were dug deep inside tunnels, so the naval bombardments didn't soften them up for the grunts very effectively. Each acre of the rock went down fighting. The flamethrowers helped, and the Americans began pumping gasoline and phosphorous grenades into the tunnels and blowing them up one at a time. The Japanese realized the situation was hopeless and that they were going to die anyway, so they beat the Yanks to the punch. On two separate occasions they lured the attackers to the ground above them. Then just as the Americans were beginning the set up to explode the tunnels the Japanese beat them to the punch. They set off a suicidal explosion twenty times greater than anything the Americans had in mind. In the second one at Malita Hill, more than 60 US Paratroopers died along with who knows how many Japanese who committed TNT hari kari. Not a bad way to go, actually. Now you're here, now you're not.
There were three small islands yet to be cleared of Japanese troops at the entrance to Manila Bay. They were Cabalo, Carabao and El Fraile. There was a stubborn typical battle to win Carabao, and Cabalo went down without a shot. The third island, near the southern shore of Luzon was anything but frail. El Fraile was Spanish for Fort Drum. El Fraile was a little rock of an island so small that the only way to make it militarily useful was to build a virtual stationary box-shaped battleship on top of it and have the 70 Japanese defenders live on the immobile ship and not on the island. “The Drum” was loaded with powerful guns and also served as a Japanese ammunition depot. US Navy ships found a blind spot out of harms way from the Drum guns. They laddered-up and landed top notch troops on the roof who sealed off the ventilation holes and escape hatches. Then the Navy pumped 4,800 gallons of high octane airplane fuel into one chosen hole in the metal box that was Fort Drum. Three Yanks then rolled phosperous hand grenades into the hole and ran for their lives. As they jumped onto a minesweeper that headed for safety as fast as can be, the first explosions began. It was like a bad Hollywood blockbuster with ridiculous giant explosions goin off in the background while the good guys run towards the camera in the foreground, except it was real. El Fraile made a deadly drumbeat of explosions for nearly three hours as crowds stood on the southern shore watching is disbelief. None of the 70 Jap. defenders got out alive. As if I had to tell you that.
After MacArthur secured most of Luzon (he never completely cleared all the Japanese pockets out) he proceeded to invade the rest of the major islands. But he never really had the authority to do so.
A few admirals and generals were against expending resources on taking the rest of the Philippine islands. They griped that these troops would be more crucially needed for the invasions of Iwo Jima and Okinawa, and that the southern Philippine islands were of no strategic importance. Third, they griped that no one had authorized MacArthur to take his Army corps and invade the southern Philippines. This was borderline insubordination and at the grand strategy level. It was a bit of an intimation of how Mac would behave in the Korean War. FDR wasn't about to tell MacArthur not to invade the rest of the Philippines, now was he about to reprimand him for taking military initiative without official authority. Mac hadn't disobeyed any superior order, he had merely invented one for himself and obeyed it.
CABANATUAN RAID 1 30
It was one of the most spectacular events of the entire war. On January 30 US Army Rangers and Philippino guerillas infiltrated 40 miles behind enemy lines and rescued 500 US and Philippino prisoners of war. The Japanese were in the habit of massacring prisoners when they heard the enemy closing in, so the rescue not only freed these 500 from the prison, they rescued them from massacre.
In 2002 Hollywood made a very good movie about the Raid on Cabantuan. It was called, 55 Days at Peking.
BISMARCK SEA AND OMMANEY BAY - CVL DOWN
The Japanese suicide planes inflicted heavy losses on the US Navy. It's a good thing there were plenty to spare. Two US aircraft carriers were on the list of victims in early 1945.
On January 4, CVL Ommany Bay was patrolling near Luzon when the divine wind struck. A Kamikaze smashed into the 10,000 ton ship and started a hundred fires that sent it to the bottom. 93 sailors died. The destroyer that helped evacuate the crew of Ommany Bay suffered two KIA's when the torpedoes of the carrier planes finally melted and blew up.
On February 21, a twin engine Kamikaze bomber crashed into the USS Bismarck Sea and it was the same story. Abandon ship. Too many fires, and a mercy killing with a US Kevorkain III torpedo.
That made three carriers sunk by Kamikaze. The other was the St. Lo which went down in October of 44.
Ommany Bay is in Alaska and I have no idea why anyone would name a carrier after it.
IWO JIMA 3-45
The United States Armed Forces took the island of Iwo Jima in February and March of 1945. The story of the savage fighting there is famous. The United States returned IJ to the Japanese recently, perhaps as a reward for their continued lying about their war record.
The Marines fought for Iwo primarily to set up an emergency first aid airstrip station for wounded B-29's, not (as widely believed) to set up an offense oriented bombing pad.
B-29 Superfortress raids on Japan had begun in June 1944 on Japan shortly after the USAF secured Saipan with the help of my father-in-law in his P-47.
Al's P47 was a smooth machine, but the B-29 was huge, new, untested and full of imperfections. The strategic air campaign against Japan was experimental, learn as you go. If the 29 had been developed in peacetime it would have been put into service after many months of de-bugging and testing. But there was no time to wait for the perfected B-29. As a result, losses of B-29 planes and crew were shockingly high in 1944. Japanese antiaircraft fire took a heavy toll. Many Japanese fighters flew air-to-air Kamikaze missions, streaking straight into the flight paths of the 29’s.
Too many damaged (and undamaged but malfunctioning) B-29’s were not making it back safely to Saipan and something had to be done. That was the reason that the United States decided to take Iwo Jima. It was halfway home from the bombing raids. The island could have easily been bypassed on the Tokyo road, but American lives were valuable, especially those of trained bomber crews. Too many were splashing. There was a moral, patriotic, religious and practical tactical motive for saving these lives. That's why we fought at Iwo. I shouldn't say “we.” I never even joined the ROTC.
The battle for Iwo is legendary. The flamethrower was more important than the rifle. A lot of men died and a lot of men fried. 21,000 men on both sides died fighting on this isolated little island in the Pacific.
After Iwo fell the Seabees built an emergency airfield, not ideal for B-29 takeoffs, but adequate for landing.
One historian estimates that at least 2,400 B-29’s made emergency landings on Iwo Jima before the war ended. Multiply that number times the crew and you get 21,000 lives saved, one air-life saved by Iwo Jima for every ground-life taken by it.
SUB PLOT
The Japanese did not appreciate at any time during the war until it was too late to do anything about it, the threat posed to them by Allied submarines. The IJN had its own fleet of offensive minded submarines, and they did some damage, but ASW (anti-submarine warfare) was never on their mind very much. The IJN thought it could win the sea war by driving foreward, without a peek in the rear view mirror for subs. By 1945 the Pacific Ocean was an American lake. Fleet class US subs were pouring out of the west coast and sending almost five million tons of Japanese merchant shipping to the bottom. US subs also sank 196 Japanese warships of destroyer size or better, at a cost of 52 submarines lost. And that's not counting merchant ships dunked.
The Japanese simply neglected anti-submarine warfare research and development both before and during the war.. While the battle of the Atlantic saw an intense techno-competition between U-boats and Allied ASW, the Pacific saw no such game of cat and mouse. The US submarine fleet gained strength from start to finish while ASW on the Japanese end gained nothing. Yankee subs were by 1944 doing more damage in a given month than a surface fleet of battleships could inflict in a year.
The extent of damage done to the Japanese merchant fleet from beneath the waves was unforeseen even by American war planners. During the pre-war years, the Annapolis war games did not include this strategy of sink the enemy merchant fleet. It was not included because the United States had gone to World War One over the rights of merchant ships to ply their trade even in times of war. The idea in 1917 was that U-boat warfare itself was immoral. We went over there to put a stop to this uncivilized way of war being waged by the Hun. It was thus unthinkable to plan on destroying the Japanese merchant marine with American subs if war broke out in the Pacific. Woodrow Wilson would be rolling in his grave. But when Nanking, Rotterdam, the Blitz and especially Bataan were added to the equation (to name only four examples of the Axis rule book) the destruction of the Japanese merchant marine from below didn't seem like so bad of an idea after all. Too many other people were rolling in fresh graves for anyone to give a damn anymore about Wilsonian principles.
Japan went to war in 1941 to gain oil import supplies, and by 1944 imports of any and all kind were shut off indefinitely by the US submarine force alone.
On the down side, for the first year and a half of the war American torpedoes malfunctioned at a catastrophic rate. US torpedoes were more unreliable than Verizon cell phone service signals! In 1942 many Japanese ships pulled into Yokohama Bay with an unexploded American torpedo
lodged in the hull. All that work, all that training, and that investment in the mission to get within range and launch. Then “ping!” - No explosion. Let's get the hell outa here. This happened hundreds of times, not dozens.
Then, in the late summer of 1942 some kids in Atlantic City found a torpedo stuck in the sand. They stepped on it while waist deep at low tide. It was a German miss torpedo and it was soon in the American laboratory. Within months, it had been copied and produced in American factories. By 1943 the new improved American copycat torpedoes were in service and it was all uphill from there.
The Japanese may have fallen into a dangerous complacency when their merchant fleet was not suffering at first. If US Navy torpedoes had worked properly from December 8 1941, the Japanese might have devoted more effort to ASW. So maybe in the long run, the failed torpedoes contributed in an indirect but important way. The duds lulled Japanese ASW to sleep and the later submariners reaped the benefits.
One fact puts it in perspective. The six U. S. submarines that the Japanese failed to destroy at Pearl Harbor sank twice as many tons before war's end as the Japanese sunk on 12/7.
OKINAWA – APRIL TO JUNE 1945
The battle for Okinawa was the bloodiest military fight in US history. And yes, that means worse than Gettysburg.
The Japs had defended Iwo Jima desperately, but that was a colonial possession. Okinawa was the first time the Japanese were defending their homeland. Famed Japanese martial fanaticism would rise to new levels on Okinawa, or as the Marines called it “Okee-Dokee.”
It took more than two full months to take Okinawa. 12,000 Americans died there. That adds up to double the US KIAs from Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima put together. Today the country is horrified because in eight years the Iraq War has cost more than 4,000 American lives.
Oki would be the last major battle of the Second World War although no one would have predicted it at the time. Only a handful of humans knew of the existence of the new atomic bomb, and of those who knew, few knew if it would work and if it did, whether it would compel Japan to surrender.
At least 60,000 Japanese soldiers died defending Okinawa, but 80,000 civilians also died! Thousands of civilians committed suicide. Why did they pull a Jonestown? It was dumb, but understandable that Japanese officers or soldiers might kill themselves rather than surrender. But why should thousands of non-combatants also drink the Kool-aid?
Why? Because the Jonestown analogy is not a joke.
The Japanese had brainwashed these fools into believing that if they surrendered, the Americans would come in and torture and rape and kill them. Of all the low scum propaganda tricks. Granted, it was a savage war and my father-in-law strafed sailors in lifeboats. But lining up women to be raped, tortured and then bayoneted for laughs, well that was the Japanese specialty, not the American. How dare they project their evil onto U.S. guys to scare their own people into killing themselves? That is just about the lowest low blow of the entire war as far as I’m concerned, a worse crime than Pearl Harbor. It’s the exact same trick that Jim Jones used at Jonestown to get all those poor souls to kill themselves in 1978. He had them convinced that the Guyanese government was on the way to the camp to torture and kill them.
The number of wounded Americans on Okinawa was staggering. I don't know exactly how many it was but it was staggering. One book says it was 38,000.
A huge number was not from blood but from stress. Many fighting men had to be taken back to ships because of what was called back then, “battle fatigue.” This was a euphemism for ‘the guy freaked out – he couldn’t take it anymore and he snapped – he lost it – he wigged out – he’s a basket case’. That’s what ‘battle fatigue’ is or was. Every soldier has a certain amount of ‘battle fatigue’ at the end of every battle. A good nights sleep might cure the basic version of it. But battle fatigue on Okinawa was a different animal. The roar of battle went on and on and men went sleepless in terror. I don’t know how long I would have lasted. I go berserk when a false car alarm won’t stop wailing for 30 minutes in the middle of the night.
American morale on Okinawa was terrible. It was hell in the pacific. One Marine asserts that if the United States had been forced to invade the home islands of Japan in 1945-46 there would have been a severe morale problem. “I don’t know if we would have had the stomach for it.” The image of our U.S. fighting hard and winning inch by inch is accurate, but the number of men who quit is the dirty little secret of Okinawa. And those quitters weren't cowards. They were brave enough to have gotten that far in the first place.
The naval battle of Okinawa was as dramatic as the land. Kamikaze attacks reached their peak. This was the last stand before the homeland. Thousands of Japanese planes tried to ‘body crash’ (as the Jap. pilots called it) into American warships and many succeeded.
The SAC had hit the Japanese airfields on southern Kyushu hard recently, but not recently enough. Kyushu was only 349 miles from Oki and the field had since been repaired. The Japanese launched a mass Kamikaze attack on the huge US fleet surrounding Okimawa. 700 meatball-winged planes went out on a one-way trip to kaput. The Divine Wind sank 36 American ships, a fantastic figure. 4,977 sailors died from these Kamikaze attacks, even more fantastic. So much for the comedian who said to me after I told him that my father-in-law flew combat aircraft in the Pacific in 1944-45, “well, the dangerous fighting was pretty much over by then.”
In a desperate measure the Japanese Navy sent out the biggest battleship in the world to try and stop the US fleet. The Yamato was the pride of the IJN. Yamato's guns were bigger than anything the United States ever made. But what could Y do against overwhelming numbers both at sea and in the air? Not much. It was the lion taking on 400 hungry hyenas.
Understanding the odds, the Japanese decided to turn Yamato into something of a sea version of a Kamikaze. Yamato went out from the homeland on one final glorious groundbreaking mission. It would steam to Okinawa and ground itself at a parallel between the shore and the American ships. From there it would turn itself into a giant shore battery and give bloody hell to the United States Navy with its state of the art 18-inchers.
But the Yamato never made it to Oki. American carrier planes spotted the great warship when it was halfway between Kyushu and Okinawa. For nearly two full days 300 starred-wing planes attacked the Yamato. The Yamato was seeing stars all right. The Yamato went down to Yamamoto's Locker. I wish I could have been to yell a sarcastic ‘banzai!’ Yamato never fired a shot in combat. The only positive thing Yamato ever did was to provide coral reef for a lot of pretty fish. I sometimes use a photo of the Yamato exploding as desktop background on my computer.
The Japanese still write their own glorified biased accounts of World War II and all of its battles. They have no shame for anything they did. The emotional fight is still joined for me.
Estimates of Japanese dead vary from one source to another. One book said 60,000 Japanese killed. Another said 100,000. Therefore I say that 80,313 Japanese died on Okinawa.
The fighting began under president Roosevelt and ended under President Truman.
THE MORALITY OF AIR BOMBING
Germany was working full throttle throughout the war on their own nuclear bomb, but the project was continuously delayed by Allied bombing raids.
Today there is a serious debate that never ends about whether it was morally acceptable or militarily effective for the Allies to heavily bomb German and Japanese cities. At the time there was a very small amount of debate over whether it would be or was in fact effective, and in the immediate post-war academic world there was further debate on that.
But the moral debate about bombing was not taken up until those that carried out the deeds were retired, dead, or walking with canes. Easy for the hippies of the 60’s and 70’s to start up saying the bombing was immoral. Easy for you to say. You weren't there. You didn't feel threatened. 1965 or 2010 is a good snug smug seat from which to judge the brave aircrews of the RAF and USAAF.
The alleged immorality and ineffectiveness of the allied air campaign in World War Two are two articles of faith in the liberal revisionist history of the United States. The topic is heard much more today than it was ten years ago. The liberals seem to have won. Yup, the bombing raids didn’t do any good. All they did was make people hate us more and make the enemy will to resist that much stronger. Now it's a standard thing for any talking head on TV to say if that subject comes up in passing. It was immoral and it was murder. The bombing brought the enemy people closer together. The raids didn’t even accomplish anything militarily. They didn’t stop industrial production and a lot of innocent civilians died. And for what? The research now proves that the air raids of World War Two did not even help the war effort and were instead a tragic error for which we should be ashamed.
Let's put to rest once and for all this business that bombing only increases the enemy’s will to resist.
Is anyone out there stupid enough to believe for one second that Japan and Germany in 1944 weren’t nations of proud militaristic people who were going to fight to the finish anyway, with or without the bombings? So what if it strengthened their morale. They were all 100% fighters anyway. They were already giving us all they had. Now that they had no resources left we were supposed to lay off the air raids so as not to make their morale too strong, lest they then fight better? Give me a break. Like we had some chance to win a ‘hearts and minds’ compromise with the populations of Berlin and Tokyo in 1943, that is until those bully bombers ruined that entire plan.
This argument is derived from the experience of the Brits in the London. Nazi bombing only increased the British will to resist, therefore bombing only increases the will of civilian populations to resist. The London and Bristol bombing had no relation to the disastrous conditions surrounding the Allied air raids on Germany and Japan in the last months of the war. These were two different situations entirely. Morale is great and relevant when one out of five homes in London is damaged or destroyed as happened in the Blitz. Morale is less relevant when you’re living in a sea of rubble and one out of fifteen homes is not destroyed. So what if the people of Osaka or Essen are evermore determined and shaking their fists defiantly at the bombers? So morale is now stronger in the dust that was once Berlin. Oh! We’re scared now. They didn’t have electricity or water or gas, or busses, or cars, or bikes, or currency, or cattle, or railroads, or food, or houses, or factories, or post offices, or limbs, but thanks to foolish Allied bombing they had that decisive morale.
By the latter stages of the war the primary object of bomber command in Europe especially was to destroy everything of value they could land a bomb on. The destruction of civilian morale wasn't the primary goal.
The argument that German and Japanese industry were not slowed down by these air raids and that this in turn did not assist in the war effort does not merit serious consideration, even conceding that post-war studies have showed that Axis ability to rebuild damaged facilities had been clearly underestimated. It is absolutely true to say that Allied resources that went into the bomber campaign would have been more effectively used in other ares, especially landing craft; but to say the bombing did not help win the war is weeeeeak.
We are just trying to rewrite all of our history through a lens of revisionist, presentist political correctness and the bombing crews of World War Two are a big ripe safe target. Those old folks are dying anyway, and the ones still able to walk can’t even find their false teeth. They can’t defend themselves from these new charges they were little better than flying William Calleys who weren't even contributing to winning the war.
No one on the ground in any of those cities would tell you the bombing was ineffective. So after the air raid they were going to fight that much better? With what?
They can have all the morale they want. The bombing was costing them the war. It takes factories to build ships, tanks, planes, guns, bullets, and the nuts and bolts to keep the battle moving. It takes railroads to get the food to the troops and keep the countryside from starving. The bombing campaign hurt all of this infrastructure and helped win the war. It’s embarrassing to have to even argue this. Its should be so simple and obvious. The demonizing of the Allied Air Campaign of World War Two is an unfair Blame America First stain on our nation’s history and a stain on the science of both military and American history.
I just heard reporter Bob Zelnick of ABC say on a 1991 news broadcast tape that ‘the bombing campaign of World War Two failed to stop industrial production.’ ‘Failed to stop’, well, that’s pretty slick. So if a Police Chief oversees an 80% drop in crime in his city in one year we can safely write that he ‘failed to stop crime.’ Of course we failed to stop industrial production. We would have had to nuke every square inch of Germany and Japan to do that, so this is an unfair standard to live up to. The piece was being shown on the ABC news on the eve of the Gulf War, and the ABC slant was angled to show that bombing has proved historically ineffective. Zelnick also says that “the carpet bombing in the Vietnam War failed to bring Hanoi to the bargaining table.” Slick again. Carpet bombing did not. But the precision targeting missions on Haiphong and Hanoi in December 1972, The Operation Linebacker air offensive campaign in December of 1972 is exactly what did bring Hanoi to the bargaining table after all those Nam years. So you imply that air power doesn't work by singling out one form that failed.
Here’s how it works; the person who destroys everything the other person has, wins the war. Step one; I blow up your house. Step two; You surrender. And even if you don’t, what’s it matter? I’ve blown up your house.
But in the liberal mentality if you blow up the guy’s house then you’ve lost because you’ve made him mad.
In early 1945 no one was politically correct. Nuns and Rabbi’s were smiling when they read the headlines like “1,000 Nazis Killed at Kursk!” or “Three Jap Ships Sunk!” Little old ladies were reading about the German cities under attack and saying unprintable things about how pleased they were. In the 1945 United States everyone except Phil Donahue's father was on the same page. It was like the medieval King who said of his enemy, ‘I’m not sure what their people will think about this, but whatever it is they think, they will all think the same thing.’ Such was the virtual unanimity of feeling in the United States in the latter stages of World War II.
I have read and have seen it corroborated on film in a WWII black and white documentary, that American air pilots in the Pacific would routinely shoot up and sink tiny Japanese fishing boats with one or two civilians aboard. As the P-47 shoots up the tiny fishing vessel to pieces the narrator in the documentary for public consumption was matter-of-factly saying that there’s one less boat to feed the homeland with. It was no big deal. Civilians watching this documentary in US movie theatres didn’t flinch. They just grabbed another bite of popcorn. They knew they too were fair game if the Germans ever got their chance. They knew they were safe for now, but they weren’t foolish about the world they were in. My father-in-law shot up a Japanese power boat in February of 1945 in his P-47. I read his official battle report. I happen to know that he was a good guy and raised a good girl. I don't think of Al as a murderer. Let's not re-write him into one.
Every civilian in a military dictatorship does their part to keep any warring nation in the ball game. In total war, everyone productive in any way is a target. Small children, the very old, the sick, and invalids should be morally be be spared if it were possible, but anyone productive is a fair target.
Oh yes, and of course; there is one other obvious point that must be stated, and again it’s embarrassing to have to even mention this because it should be so obvious, yet somehow to the revisionist libs it isn’t. Germany and Japan started all the brutality in World War II. They made the rules. We just followed them. In the matter of bombing raids it was they who started it in both hemispheres. The Fascists bombed Guernica, Rotterdam, Coventry and built Auschwitz, and the Japanese who bombed Shanghai and Chunking years before Hitler invaded Poland. It was the Japanese who murdered millions of civilians after taking over the cities of east Asia, not during the fight itself. I did say millions. It was the Italian fascists who used poison gas delivered by airplane to win the war in Ethiopia.
THE FIRE RAID ON TOKYO – MARCH 1945
March 10, 1945 was a date that will live in infamy. On that date the USAF set one of the largest cities in the world on fire.
By August 1 1945 even Germany was helping to defeat Japan. German industry had been in Allied hands for two months and was actually supplying weaponry for the Allied Pacific campaign. It was Japan against the world. A sane nation would have surrendered before the atom bomb was dropped. But then again a sane nation wouldn’t have told every soldier to cut out his own bowels if he failed to do his duty flawlessly on every mission.
Before the atom bombs, the B-29's from airfields in Saipan and Manchuria rained conventional death on civilian populations to a degree at least equal to the suffering inflicted by the two atomic bombs. But only the atom deaths were out of bounds.
The B-29’s dropped fire-starters instead of explosives, deliberately burning up the cities on the Japanese islands. 1945 was mass murder after mass murder with no quarter given. One mission in particular was the full definition of ‘war is hell.’
On the night of March 10 at 0015 a.m. more than 300 B-29’s began dropping thousands of incendiary bombs on Tokyo. More than 110,000 people died in one night, considerably more than the death toll from either of the Atomic bombs. More than half the city was destroyed. It was the worst fire in a populated area in all of human history. The fire of 3.10.45 made the Chicago Fire of 1871 and the San Francisco Fire seem like something started by punks in a trash barrel. Because it occurred at the end of a long war that had desensitized everyone to death and destruction, the Tokyo inferno has received limited coverage in history. Every detail of the Pearl Harbor attack has been minutely examined and told. Less than 3,000 people died that morning including civilians. 110,000 died in Tokyo on the Tenth of March. That's as many Union troops that died in four years of fighting in the Civil War. 40 eyes for an eye. 100,000 people burned to death. The Allies liberated Nazi concentration camps that did not claim as many victims.
This was US Pacific strategy in practice. You Japanese soldiers in China, Burma and Rabaul, you hang on to your glorious conquests. Keep them; they’re all yours. We’re not even coming after you. Instead we will bypass your positions and bomb your cities into ashes. We won’t kill you but we will be killing your wives, children, parents, grandparents, and flattening your houses while you’re enjoying your stay in someone else’s country. So don’t bother writing any more letters back. There’s nothing at that old address.
It was a strategy of terror. 20,000 Japanese troops had died fighting to hold Guadalcanal for six months. The USAAF was killing twice that many Japanese civilians every three our four days, mostly women, children, and the elderly. The young men were on the road.
The night after the terror raid on Tokyo the B-29’s struck the city of Nagoya. The story was the same in 90 major cities in Japan. Utter merciless devastation and torture, and what could fit the definition of torture better than making everyone in a city do their Joan of Arc imitation at the same time?
It was concentration in force, one massive raid on one city each night, weather permitting. Never two. Doomsday for this city one night, then another city the next. Its one of the creepiest things that has ever happened on this planet. If one of these many raids had taken place in 1939, they would have been reported as major events in the history of the world. Many B-29 incendiary raids caused more death and destruction in one night than the Luftwaffe did to London during the entire war!
But the world was numb from all the killing since Japan invaded manchuria in 1932. Raids on Japanese cities by firebomb on a nightly basis wasn’t even show-stopping news anymore, except in Japan.
The B-29’s destroyed half of Osaka on the night of March 13, 1945. Kobe was set on fire on March 16. Nagoya suffered a second hellish incendiary attack on March 19. In ten days in March of 1945 the four largest cities in Japan were virtually destroyed. The war had taken a sudden, shocking and horrible turn for the Japanese people.
It was cold. It was Cruel. But most of the homes in these Japanese cities had been long since converted to wartime production. Each citizen was expected to do their part, and they did. Even if we concede that most of these people were victims of their own governments policies, the fact still remains that the people of Tokyo and other cities were actively producing materials with which to kill Americans, and this was war, not a morality debating club. We were not killing pure non-combatants, as is charged, with the exception of the very old and very young who could not produce.
It was bad Karma come back to roost. Who broke into hospitals in Hong Kong on Christmas Day 1941 and bayoneted every last sick patient in their sickbeds, and then raped and murdered all the nurses? Who raped Nanking and strafed innocent civilians to death in downtown Honolulu? Who beheaded American prisoners of war for laughs? Japan did. Who conducted sick and cruel medical experiments on Chinese civilians in Manchuria? Who reaped what they sewed in the B-29 air raids of 1944-1945?
Leftist and even some centrist historians have called the deliberate burning of Japanese cities inhumane. We were murdering innocent peace-loving people who had no business being a target, thus proving to the BAF (Blame America) First that the United States was the bad guy then, just as of course it is now (at least until Obama.)
Japan was sending balloons into the eastward winds filled with infectious germs. The balloons were supposed to land in the United States and spread disease. Other balloons contained incendiary bombs, designed to set the western forests of United States on fire. More than 2,000 of these balloons were launched in 1944-45. The only casualty came in the town of Bly Oregon when a little girl picked up one of the bombs and lost her life. If they could have, they would have wiped out, San Francisco, New York, Chicago and Boston and my grandmother with it.
We dropped the incendiaries and then the A-bomb for one simple reason: because we could. Armchair quarterbacks can say whatever they want 70 years later. But what would they have said at the time? What would have made them so different that they would have seen it another, and more holy way than every other Tom, Dick and Harry did in 45? The logic in place at the time made the decisions.
Visitors to Hiroshima today are given lectures on how this terrible atrocity must never be repeated. I couldn’t agree more. Don’t try and conquer the world and rape and murder half a million women and there’s a pretty good chance that no one will have wipe out your cities with air raids ever again.
INDOCHINA 1945
Roosevelt was all in favor of post-war independence for most of the former colonies of Britain and France. If outright independence could not be granted then at least he wanted the recovered colonies ruled by a trusteeship under the colonialist nations similar to the system established after WWI with a view to independence later. FDR particularly wanted France to give up its colonies in Africa and Asia, which of course included Indochina (Vietnam).
Why?
Because Roosevelt disliked colonialism and because Roosevelt disliked De Gaulle (as did every non-French person in the entire world). Franklin would be delighted to see France stripped of its old possessions overseas.
But The United Kingdom saw no reason to give up its own colonies along with France. England had not lost the war as had France, so why should England be punished in victory? Britain convinced Roosevelt to abandon the trusteeship concept entirely. This left France free to resume its control over Vietnam after the war without diplomatic objection from the US.
This was a first step in the mess that led later the America’s longest war, the one for Vietnam.
COLD BODY AT WARM SPRINGS 4-12-45
FDR died in Warm Springs Georgia on April 12, 1945 of a cerebral hemorrhage. His last words were, “I have terrific headache.”
LEGACY OF FDR
World War II was so spectacular that all the mistakes of FDR’s years as President before it are forgotten by history. Young adults only learn of the sainthood and heroism of Roosevelt.
Roosevelt was personally a great man and had integrity. He is the kind of man you would want as a friend and he was a great speaker and a born politician. But FDR was naïve about Russia, and a starry-eyed fool about communism. Stalin probably bullied FD a bit in the post-war settlement conferences near the end of the Second World War. His monstracizing of the Federal bureaucracy is less bothersome to me, but overall it's a negative.
The foreign policy mistakes are primary. There might never have been a need for the joyous overthrow of Communism between 1989 and 1991 if FDR had stood up the Stalin and the Soviets in the first place. FDR made the deal that divided Europe before the US Army got a chance to have a final say during the end game. US armies were stopped while on the march, and denied access to the Balkans in order to appease the USSR. Patton and Bradley of course couldn’t have beaten the Russians to Poland but US-UK forces could have taken more of Central Europe before it was Sovietized.
FDR gave a bag of massive foolish concessions to the Russians in exchange for an independent Poland and the Soviets laughed later in Truman's face when he asked for that. Nice going, Frank. … You dunderhead! You gave away the store and got nothing in return but insult and aggression.
SOURCES FDR - FOR ALL CHAPTERS COVERING 1933-45
American Ambassador, Joseph C. Grew and the Development of the United States Diplomatic Tradition, by Waldo H. Heinrichs, Jr, c)1966 –
Grew was US ambassador to Japan in the years before the outbreak of the Pacific War. All in all I would rather have read Grew's memoirs than Waldo's take on the guy. But I never saw Grew's book at a flea market or used book store in 30 years, so I'm stuck with the Heinrich maneuver.
American Diplomacy During the Second World War, by Gaddis Smith – This is a ridiculously good book. It is one of the shortest books in my library but is a closely consulted source. Gaddy makes his points better than I do when I re-write them, so read this book. It’s short and loaded. Smith, a Yale history prof is highly critical of Roosevelt’s diplomatic performance in World War II.
Good for Gaddis.
American Messiahs, by the Unofficial Observer, c) 1935, This mischievous book by a secretive anonymous author provides short debunking biographies of several contemporary U.S. political action figures of the early FDR time. Huey Long and Father Coughlin are roasted over the coals, to name two.
Anonymity has its advantages.
This ghost of a writer also wrote a smart profile on the ‘Brains Trust.’ The Unofficial Observer is a very cynical man and has inside access to some of these people. I don't want to even know if the identity was ever revealed.
The American Pageant, A History of the Republic, by Thomas A. Bailey of Stanford University – c) 1961 D.C. Heath
Bailey writes of Mussolini that “together with his mistress, he was brutally lynched by his own people?”
Well how else can a person get lynched ... gently? I write that as, “Mussolini was lynched by his own people.” I think that covers the situation pretty well.
I'm kidding, of course. Far be it for me to criticize this man's writing. TAB is a dazzling historian to look up to in so very many ways.
The Battle of the Atlantic, September 1939-May 1943 – by Samuel Eliot Morsion – c) 1951 – Volume I of this amazing naval history series. Did you know that New York Harbor was closed for two weeks during 1942 when a tugboat exploded revealing a German minefield recently set by a U-boat?
In 1942 German U-boats set more than 350 mines around Key West to disrupt US commerce. A single U-boat could have done much more damage by surfacing and destroying bridges on the causeway with the deck cannon.
The Battle of Britain, by Edward Bishop, c)1968 – Don't miss the movie by the same title. It's very good. I only read 20 pages of this book but I've seen the movie three times.
The Bomber War, by Robin Neillands, c) 2001 – Neillands claims that this is the first comprehensive history of the bombing campaign against Germany. It’s amazing to report that he is correct. I was always mystified by this gap in WWII history. With all the smaller battles that get dozens of book treatments, the bomber campaign, which may have decided the war, waited 56 years for its first solid history.
Neillands is a Brit and bristles at the historic comparison between the good-guy United States Army Air Force which precision bombed by daylight, and the bad-guy RAF who carpet-bombed at night. Robin gives the USAAF a lot of criticism and the RAF a lot of praise.
This is forgivable because Rob is probably right on all counts and because he is carrying the torch in the front line for those of us who believe that the Allied Air campaign was justified and at least somewhat effective and helpful in winning the war. Neillands takes the revisionists on frequently, and also provides the anti-dote to those who argue that unconditional surrender and the destruction of Germany were sadistic unnecessary objectives.
He also makes this good historical point about the German mind-set on war and how there was only one way to change it.
“All the wars started by Prussia and Germany from
1860-1939 – against Denmark and Austria in the
1860’s, against France in 1870-71, and against
France, Britain and Russia in 1914 – had been
fought on foreign soil. Other countries were
damaged or devastated; the German homeland
remained intact.
The bomber offensive of 1939-1945 finally
brought war home to Germany. Then the German
people discovered that they had no more taste for
war than any of the peaceful countries they had
themselves so often occupied and despoiled. If
the price of European peace and a final freedom
from chronic German militarism was the physical
destruction of Germany, many may argue that the
price was well worth paying.”
Parts of Bomber War bombed. There are too many boring chapters about the technical war, and brutally boring biographies about unimportant people. Bomber War is worth reading, but it should have been an exiting book.
Boston Public Library – Speeches of Roosevelt on audio tape. The quickest way to win a bet is to ask which President said, “We have nothing to fear except fear itself,” in his inaugural speech. Then bet everyone 10 to one on ten dollars that the answer was wrong.
The actual quote is, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
If Roosevelt were in show business he would be a below average orator. But as most presidents are dull speech givers, Roosevelt was definitely above average. I don’t buy the stuff about him as a ‘spellbinding’ radio voice. I’ve sat through most of his speeches on tape once and I wouldn’t care to sit through them again.
I have heard Hoover tapes and Coolodige tapes and Harding audio recordings. Compared to those duds, FDR was indeed spellbinding.
The Brains Trust, by Rexford Tugwell – Tugwell explains FDR better than FDR ever did. Rex helped FDR run the election campaign of 1932.
Tug was a member of the famous Brains Trust. Sometimes it's called The Brain Trust, but Tug says emphatically that Brain Trust is a misnomer and that it's “Brains Trust.”
Charles De Gaulle The Crucial Years, 1943-1944, by Arthur Layton Funk – c) 1959 – Most De Gaulle bios are translated from the French and chauvinistic, but Funk looks at De Gaulle in this book as a problem in American Foreign relations. Most of the top U.S. brass couldn't stand the guy. He was tall enough to stuff it.
Churchill and the Generals, by Barrie Pitt – c) 1981 – This is an unusual book in that the book was based on the movie, rather than the other way around. Actually it a was a BBC TV Drama by the same title that aired in 1979. The Docu-drama Churchill and the Generals was so well received that the BBC commissioned Barrie Pit to write a follow-up book based on the play. Pitt fleshes out the TV story into a solid World War II history book.
I've seen the TV show. My favorite line is from a Parliamentary debate where some M.P. yells at Chamberlain,
“Depart I say! And let us have done with you! Go! In the name of God! Go!”
That's a coincidence. My father said the exact same words to me on my 18th birthday.
The Compact History of the United States Navy, by Fletcher Pratt c)1962 This book is killer. The author died a week after completing the manuscript.
Fletch Pratt was a very famous historian. I don’t always agree with him and he drops in a ton of words that only a sailor knows. Nevertheless, Compact is always a fun book to pick up, as are his other works. I've read most of this one.
The Conquerers, Roosevelt, Truman and the Destruction of Germany 1941-1945, by Michael Beschloss - c) 2002 – I read two chapters in the middle and the scholarship is worth taking in. But I hate his writing.
Crusade in Europe, by Dwight Eisenhower – This book is one of the nicest experiences of my entire life. I love the book, the man and the writing. I was not expecting all that. The perfect companion volume to Omar Bradley’s book A Soldier's Story. Ike was the boss in Europe and “Brad” was the operations manager, so to speak. The executive boss was General Marshall.
So many volumes of Crusade were sold, and it is such a sturdy and attractive physical book, that it is easy for the reader to find a copy at a flea market for a dollar or two. Find it. Don’t miss either of these two participant/historian books if you really want the real story of the war in Europe. The writing is complex, yet easy to follow, although you do have to slow down and check the map quite often. There are many excellent battle maps. A wonderful book. I have 68 pages to go and I don't want it to end.
Deliver Us From Evil, by Robert Leckie –This is a fairly thorough, up to date general history of the Second World War, but Leckie is extremely opinionated, to the point where it is hard to consider it a true general history. He should call his book ‘a polemic history of the Second World War.’ ‘Deliver Us’ has a particular axe to grind against Winston Churchill. Leckie picks up Churchill's famous heroic reputation, spins it above his shoulders and throws it out of the ring. Everything Winnie decided upon was a mistake. Leckie implies that we only won the war in spite of Churchill's and our military strategies, not because of them.
RL fought in World War II in the Marine Corps, and I think, in Korea too. His book Helmet For My Pillow is a military classic of his fighting days in the Pacific battles. I read it at the library as a kid but I remember I didn’t finish it. I was stuck on Morrison’s Navy volumes and a giant History of US Submarine Operations In World War II.
Eagle Against the Sun, The American War With Japan, by Ronald H. Spector - c) 1985 - MacMillan
This is a very readable book, until you get to the end of each chapter where you get his with four pages of tiny font boring notes. I understand the publishing system that requires that and I oppose it. Let us read without questioning the integrity of every piece of info and then challenging the author to “prove it.” Let the lawyers, editors and academics worry about that in private, and leave the general readers on bloody peace! We’re not losing sleep about the validity of every assertion typed up in a history book. But this format makes it seem like we are.
The Enduring Vision, by Boyer, Sitkoff & co. – This should be called the enduring politically correct vision.
If you go to the microfilm of any big city and read the year 1942 newspapers you will find that the fighting on Guadalcanal was headline news for six straight fantastic months. The entire country was focused on the island. If you read books about it you will find that our guys there fought with the same ferocity as the enemy. We gave back what we got and the Marines on that Island were heavily decorated. It is an amazing tale of long hard fighting and the USA pulled it off and won. This battle was only given one short paragraph in the Enduring Vision. The book has many two page sidebar features about less important things.
US troops were stalemated for almost three months, until
Admiral Halsey’s fleet destroyed the Japanese ships in
the area, isolating those Japanese remaining on Guadalcanal.
Yet it would take another three months before the Japanese
were driven off the island, leaving behind more than
twenty-five thousand of their dead”
They put the spin on a stalemate. Like it was some frustrating disappointment to be 'stalemated' with the Japanese at that time. A ‘stalemate’ was a victory for America at the time. The Japanese were stopped dead in their tracks and held for the first time since they began their march of conquest in Manchuria in 1932..
Flyboys, by James Bradley – c) 2003
This is one of the most offensive books I have ever read in my entire life of reading history books. He tells a version of Japanese history that is so apologist, so blame the west for everything the Japanese ever did wrong, that it's safe to say that he had better not step in front of my car with a bag of groceries while I'm changing the radio station. Bradley is awful writer, and an even worse historian. The story line is all over the road, with no anchor and no focus.
The book is ostensibly the story about Japanese mistreatment of downed America flyers on the island of Chi Chi Jima, but he fills it with so much bitter left wing USA bashing about subjects complete off the subject, that by the time the book gets to the core story I am too disgusted to go on. He spends pages on how the United States conducted a vicious policy of “ethnic cleansing” against the Indians, as if that is directly relevant to Nanking and the Bataan Death March. His cheap use of this term “ethnic cleansing” makes me want to find out where he lives, and go from there. It's a cheap call-back to recent events in Bosnia, and a set up to his grand thesis that the reason the Japanese raped and murdered throughout the Far East in WWII is because they were merely imitating the United States and its racist thug history up to that point. Believe me, I am not misrepresenting or overstating his motif. I submit that what the United States did in 1846 is no excuse for what Japan did in 1944, but he clearly doesn't see it that way.
Flyboys is supposed to honor the fallen American heroes of WWII in the Pacific, but his America-bashing sleazy theme dishonors them totally. If the dead guys he is supposed to be praising could come back from the dead and read the first half of this book they would put him in a headlock and rearrange his face. Then they would make a public statement that this book does not properly represent their memory. Blame America First lefties did not fly Dauntless dive bombers in WWII, and does not want one of them as their spokesman.
Who buys a book about Pacific War POW's in order to get a lecture about the evil United States in the Mexican War? I can rebut every one of his polemic history points, but he hides behind a smaller specific subject matter and just slips in his despicable large politics along the way, so no one gets the chance to call him out on it. I challenge any moderate conservative to read his opening chapters and not agree with me that it is one of the most inexcusable hateful polemics against the historical record of the United States ever on record. He's three kilometers to the left of Howard Zinn and George Carlin, and wants to write a book about WWII heroes at the same time.
Die in your sleep. The victims of Japanese atrocities would appreciate it.
The Gathering Storm, by Winston Churchill – This is the only volume I have finished reading. It's a year's work reading all six volumes.
Winston certainly has a right to gloat about his role between the wars when he was trying to warn the United Kingdom of the menace of Nazi Germany. For ten years before the Hitler's invasion of Poland in 1939, Churchill warned everyone about the Nazis. But people didn't take him all that seriously because for the first ten years after the end of World War One he had had been warning the UK about the dangers of Red Communist infiltration, and that had proven an exaggerated threat.
Churchill did not however stick up very strongly for Ethiopia when Italy invaded that innocent country in 1935. He sold out Ethiopia to try and prevent Mussolini from forming an alliance with Hitler.
The Growth of the American Republic, Vol II 1865-1937, by Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager – c) 1940 Oxford Univ. Press.
Excellent scholarship and writing on the outside, mean spirited partisanship on the inside. They apparently hate the Republicans more than the Nazis!
Hats in the Ring, by Cornog and Whelan, - c) 2000 for the four FDR election stories. This is primarily a picture book, so it is remarkable how strong the text is, considering the limited space these scholars had to fill. I think they are sometimes very opinionated, but I can't tell for sure whether they think they are.
Hirohito, by Edward Behr, c)1989 – Eddie agrees with Bergamini's Japan's Imperial Conspiracy that Hirohito knew everything, but thinks that Bergy goes a bit too far with how much Hirohito conspired to start the war.
A History of the Soviet Union, by Georg von Rauch – c)1957 Praeger
History of a Free People, by Henry W. Bragdon (Phillips Exeter) and Samuel P. McCutchen (NYU) – c) 1954
A high school textbook with so much homework in it that the reader will have no choice but to cheat on tests if they ever want to have a social life and get passing grades in history.
History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, by Samuel Eliot Morrison – 11 volumes is probably the best account of World War Two ever written, even if it is only about the U.S. naval aspect. Reading these books as a boy of 12 and 13, I understood about half of the material, but enjoyed even the parts that were over my head. This is the work that started me on a lifetime of historical study. Morrison is such a hero to me. He is an inspirational historian. But … he is a different writer when he is when he is writing general political history as opposed to military history. It is with regret that I find much of his Oxford History of the American People disagreeable.
Hitler, A Study in Tyranny, by Alan Bullock – Read this cover to cover in 1979 and now I'm ready to read it again 30 years later. This is generally considered the best biography of Herr Schecklegruber.
Hitler vs. Roosevelt, The Undeclared War in the Atlantic 1939-1941, by Thomas A. Bailey and Paul B. Ryan.
Bailey is the most readable historian. This book is a superb source for the “Phoney Peace” in the Atlantic Ocean.
Hitler and Stalin, Parallel Lives, by Alan Bullock c) 1991 – A thick book. I throw it in my trunk in January so I can get better traction in the snow.
Japanese Destroyer Captain, by Captain Tameichi Hara, of the Imperial Japanese Navy, with Fred Saito and Roger Pineau - c) 1961
Japan’s Imperial Conspiracy, by David Bergamini C) 1972– This book challenges the image of Emperor Hirohito’s role in World War II as an innocent figurehead. Bergamini argues that Hirohito was not only aware of everything Japan did bad in World War II, the man even helped to plan it.
Hirohito's brother-in-law was the real butcher of Nanking.
I-Boat Captain, by Hideki Matuosi
Surprisingly insightful political memoir which thinks it's just a military war memoir. Matsuisi helps us get inside the sick Japanese mind of 1941-45, even though that's not why he wrote the book.
The Liberation of the Philippines, by Stanley L. Falk – c) 1970 – Hazell, GB
Solid little history of what I consider to be one the understudied campaigns of WWII. The liberation of the Philippines was the center square in the tic tac do of the counterattack campaign of the Pacific War.
The Last 100 Days, by John Toland, c) 1965 – Random House
The fall and fall of the Third Reich, by a very good historian and writer. I did catch him in an error on page 92, and I'm proud that I am capable of catching a leading historian in an error.
It is in regards to Stalin's complaint to FDR and Churchill at Yalta that Germany has twice invaded Russia by way of Poland.
Lion by the Tail, The Story of the Italo-Ethiopian War, by Thomas M. Coffey – c)1974 Viking – This is one of the best books on WWII I have ever read. You can't do better on this war than this book. It is breathtaking how little most people know about this war. This war was decided by the use of poison mustard gas.
Luftwaffe War Diaries, by Cajus Bekker,
LWD is a mature look at the air war in Europe from the German vantage point using first hand sources. It deflates the myth of German air superiority at the beginning of the Battle of Britain and argues throughout the book a singular critical point. That the Luftwaffes’ bark was always worse than its bite because it never had a heavy four-engine bomber with a large payload and big fuel tank. The allies were overwhelmingly ahead in bomber threat at all times and as quickly at the raids on London began, the allies hit back with raids on Germany.
The Luftwaffe never had the capability of obliterating London that the Allies had of obliterating Berlin or Dresden. At the lowest point for Downing Street in the Battle of Britain, the English still had an overwhelming superiority in bomber thrust and payload, but no one wants to tell you that because it ruins a great story about how the odds were so overwhelmingly against the British and somehow through courage and fortitude they pulled it off. The superior materiel helped too.
The Allies were using huge four engine bombers of a dozen interesting designs throughout the war and the Germans never launched a single bombing mission in a four-engine plane (excluding armed reconnaissance Condor missions over the Atlantic and these were miniscule in number).
That was why the Battle of Britain was always hopeless for Germany. Britain magnified the threat of German firepower, for that made the country toughen up for defense. But from the German standpoint, the Stuka was antiquated, the Heinkel-111 was nothing special with a weak payload, the Me-110 was good but had an even weaker payload, and 109 fighter protection had precious little fuel to operate with on long distance.
History has been entertained by the great dogfights between these two teams
The tide turned slowly towards the British on the fighter front near the end of the Battle of Britain. But the Germans gave up on the terrorist attack on London primarily because it finally faced the facts. It didn’t have the weight in the sky to carry out its threats.
This is one of the best World War II books because it consistently offers a different angle. Bekker is an unrepentant Nazi German. He may not have been a party member but he still loves the Germany he knew under Nazi rule. I read his other book about the naval war and its safe to say that he is still steamed that Germany lost the war. There’s a lot of sneaky moves in these pages, little digs at the Allies and praise and excuse towels for his team. It’s the same in the Pacific book theatre. There are a lot of valuable war memoirs by Japanese military men and it’s the same sour sake there too.
I love the book and dislike the person. A tremendous read.
The National Experience – Part Two A History of the United States Since 1865 – by John M. Blum of Yale, Edmund S. Morgan also of Yale, the famous Arthur M. Schlesinger of CUNY, the not as famous Willie Lee Rose of Johns Hopkins, my hero Kenneth M. Stampp of UC Berkeley who is the last word on the Reconstruction era, and C. Vann Woodward of Yale who is also a wizard on the post-Civil War era. - c) 1981 HB Jovanocich NY
Navies of World War II, by Anthony Preston – Map of the gunnery duel on D-Day
The New Dealer’s War, by Tom Fleming (who also wrote Now We Are Enemies, about Bunker Hill) 2002 – Basic
NDW is provocative, fast moving and somewhat iconoclastic account of WWII and FDR’s role in it. Highly recommended.
Fleming thinks that the ‘unconditional surrender’ platform first promulgated at Casablanca was a massive blunder. He also challenges the Allied decision to bomb German and Japanese cities as being both inhumane and counter-productive. Yet he is no left-winger. He dislikes FDR viscerally, much more than I do. It’s not easy to get me to start feeling defensive about Roosevelt, but I find myself doing so as Fleming trains his 16 inch guns on the guy for 700 pages.
At least Fleming is also very critical on the matter of US appeasement of the USSR. Anyone who harps on US kow-towing to the Soviet Union under Roosevelt is always a good guy in my house.
I have relied often on his hard work, shortening and paraphrasing entire pages. But I have also argued with him in many a marginal note.
Tommy drops a lot of big words, but other than that, he is a very good and lively writer.
New Georgia, Pattern for Victory – Ballantine book about the central Solomons campaign of 1943.
This historian isolates this campaign somewhat, whereas in actually it was connected with the larger New Guinea offensive, at least if I am to believe Basil Liddell Hart.
No Clear and Present Danger, A Skeptical View of U.S. Entry into World War II, by Bruce M. Russett, c)1972 – This is a long essay turned into a short book, and very worthwhile reading.
No Clear is largely a byproduct of the 72 times. The country was so 99% against our intervention in Vietnam at the time that it was easy to write a challenge against any and all U.S. historical interventions, even the holy WWII. There has never been a moment when a challenge to our entry into WWII could have been so readily published and appreciated. Bruce is not pompous and hateful in his arguments, like so many left-wing writers. Hence we find sentences like “My intention here is to be provocative and not to set forth revealed truth.”
Russett asks us to separate the issues of whether the war was moral, and whether the United States was ever really indeed threatened by the Axis. I wouldn’t throw this book away if I had to move into a tiny trailer.
Out of Many, A History of the American People, by John Mack Faragher (Yale); Mary Jo Buhle (Brown), Daniel Czitrom (Mount Holyoke); and Susan Armitage (Washington State), c)1994 – This liberal polemic disguised as a US history textbook thinks that FDR is Jesus.
The Oxford History of the American People, by Samuel Eliot Morison, c) 1965 –
SEM's personal judgements sold to us as the judgments of history. This is a swan song written late in life where he finally reveals his true opinions, and some of them are ugly, especially on race in the pre-Civil War era.
As for FDR, Morison is a kow-towing worshipper at the alter. He is so biased towards the Dems that any conservative reader has to frown,
“FDR's administration saved American capitalism by purging it of gross abuses. This historian believes him to have been the most effective conservative since Alexander Hamilton, as well as the most successful democrat since Lincoln.”
As for WWII, Samuel Eliot is my hero on this subject, having written the work that made me a history student for life, the 15 volume History of the United states Naval Operations in WWII. I can't say enough about these books. If I had never read them at age 12, I probably would never have written this.
A Patriot’s History of the United States, by Schweikart and Allen, c) 2004 – These guys are highly critical of FDR. Sacrilege!
Present at the Creation, My Years in the State Department, by Dean Acheson, c)1969 – Aecheson was Assistant Secretary of State during World War II and was always jealous of Cordell Hull.
Dean Aecheson is without a doubt the most conceited obnoxious snob puke I have ever read in my entire life. He makes Clark Clifford seem genuinely humble. Present, unfortunately, is important enough to qualify as a must read. There is nothing more ego than pompous fake humility and he wreaks of it on page after page. Now and then he settles down to some hardball descriptions of important events and for a few paragraphs I can hold in my lunch and gain wisdom. Then he goes back to quoting letters praising himself that are supposed to be offered as praise for the person writing the letter.
I'm going to put him on my Mt. Rushmore's of worst egos in American History. I'll have Aecheson ip there with Benjamin Butler, Howard Cosell, and Colonel Edward House.
The Reluctant Admiral, Yamamoto and the Imperial Navy, by Hiroyuki Agawa – c) 1969 – (Translated and republished in English in 1979 – Printed in Japan by Kodansha International Ltd.) - I had a choice at the bookstore between a biography of Yamamoto by Edwin Hoyt with markings in it by the previous owner, or a rare import by a Japanese author in mint condition. I'll wait on Hoyt. I've already read two Hoyt books already and I don't love him.
Ordinarily the extensive early life parts of biographies are the pits, but with foreign subjects you get insights into the country's culture, society, politics, and economy. This adoring bio has a lot about Yamamoto before the war. The Japanese Navy doesn't strike Pearl Harbor until page 262 of a 392 page book.
This guy would gamble on anything.
Reminiscences, by General Dugout Doug MacArthur,
I like to dislike this guy so I thought it was only fair that I mail order his book and let him tell his version of his own story.
The Rising Sun, (Volume One) by John Toland –c)1970 is a wonderful two volume work on the Pacific War. It is the work of a western historian trying to write the story from a Japanese center of gravity. Toland called the attack on the Philippines “a second Pearl Harbor” and I have borrowed the phrase without quotes because quotes within active paragraphs slow up the reading, and the phrase is short and someone else also probably said it anyway.
I’ve read volume one twice (1981; 2007) and have never read or owned volume two. Volume one ends after we whip the bad guys at Midway. This book cost me a trivia point recently. The question was to name the author of a novel called The Rising Sun. No sooner did the words ‘John Toland’ get out of my mouth than I remembered that my Rising Sun wrote a non-fiction war book. Apparently the novel The Rising Sun was controversial in Japan. I don't read novels.
Roosevelt and Hopkins, by Robert Sherwood –
This is a masterpiece. One of the most detailed accounts of the Roosevelt presidency focusing on his intimate relationship with his close friend and advisor Harry Hopkins. - Priceless source book on Roosevelt. Sherwood was a member of the Roosevelt inner circle and was in charge of the Office of War Information in World War II. Rob Sherwood is a very likable man, and a truly fine writer. They don't make em like that anymore. This kind of class is a thing of the past.
The Roosevelt Myth, by John T Flynn, c)1948
There are stacks of books praising Roosevelt to the point of sainthood. Roosevelt’s unmitigated glory is a standard of American history. For a critical assessment, one has to look hard. No conservative should be without a copy of this book. If I were a liberal who loves Roosevelt I would still want this book because politics is best served hot and because a good point of view must be able to withstand the best arguments against it. That is why I read smart left-wing writers all the time like Zinn and Choamsky, and I try to avoid the know-nothing big mouths. They not only aren’t worth responding to, they aren’t worth listening to in the first place.
Flynn is a smart representative of the right against Roosevelt. Flynn and was a syndicated newspaper columnist throughout the Roosevelt years, and is not above a low blow on occasion.
Roosevelt, Soldier of Freedom, by James Macgregor Burns, an admiring and detailed book on the President’s performance in the war. Very enjoyable and important work.
The Russian Campaigns of 1941-43, by W.E.D. Allen and Paul Muratoff – c )1944
This Penguin wartime book, published in the UK, is a collaboration between a Russian and a British military historian. They are writing about the battles of Russian front while the events are still fresh. You have to allow for propaganda of the war emergency, but other than that, this is priceless for a book that cost me one dollar in an Atlantic City antique shop.
Muratoff left the USSR in the early 1920's for the west, but he is an expert on Russian military affairs. Paul served in the Tsar's Army in World War One and in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05. Oddly, Allen is the one who speaks of the historian having to live history, not just write it, so he goes mountain climbing in the areas he studies.
A Short History of the American Nation, by John A. Garraty of Columbia – c) 1966 – revised and abridged edition c) 1977
Garrity was born in 1920 and served his country as a swimming instructor for the Merchant Marine during WWII. He wrote a biography of Pop Warner in 1939.
The Six Week’s War, France, May 10-June 25, 1940, by Theodore Draper, c)1944
This is a military history that I find difficult to read. I am as interested in the author as much as the manuscript, and the mid-war lens is always useful.
A Soldier’s Story, by Omar Bradley – The title is misleading because it is anything but an autobiography. Bradley led the American Army in the European War and details the story here. The title seems like the book would be self-centered, but it is exactly the opposite. Bradley keeps his personal self out of the book to an astonishing degree and instead consistently praises others.
This is the best ‘hands-on’ description of US ground operations in Europe that I have ever read. The book produces an intangible feeling of being there that I can’t describe. I literally get goose bumps reading this book.
Their Finest Hour, by Winston Churchill – This is volume II of Winston’s six volume history of the Big One. Millions of people own these volumes and few have read them. Winston has a heavy style and the detail is sometimes boring and overwhelming at once together, a tough mix. There are too many long tiresome passages of letters, state papers and telegrams, all usually to make a rather secondary point.
Winston's real purpose of writing these memoirs seems to be self-justification. He takes half the pages to settle some old dispute he had with some subordinate during the war.
But just as often as it bores, it snaps out of it and is fabulous. There’s always light at the end of the dark boring tunnels. These books were the icing on the cake of a great life. Someone should edit them down to two 700 page volumes.
A Torch to the Enemy, by Martin Caidin, c) 1960 – This is the grim story of the B-29 campaign against the cities of Japan. I have read several of Caidin’s books on air combat in World War II and have concluded that he is having a little too much fun writing up all the gory details. By today’s standards he is simply insensitive, but if we don’t see history from the present, he's a sample of the mindset of the time, and might be forgiven for enjoying his country’s second-half rout of the enemy.
The right and wrong of the US strategic terror bombing of Japan is a controversial topic today. Right or wrong, one thing seems clear; The people of Tokyo were helping to fight the war and were not completely innocent. Quoted next are victims of US B-29’s, who survived the fire,
The Mizuka home is also a small workshop.
Before the war the Mizuta family made
umbrellas. Since 1941, however, they have
made parts for machine guns.
…
Mr. Tsukakoshi’s home is also a small
workshop. Once the machines produced
parts for automobiles. Now Mr. Tsukakoshi
manufactures filters for the lubrication oil
systems of bombers and fighters.
Torch has a valuable chart of all the cities in Japan and the damage caused by the fire raids. Its scary.
I used to keep my Vegas baseball betting slips in this book.
This I Remember, by Eleanor Roosevelt – Ellie toured the country making progressive political speeches while FDR played with his stamp collection at Hyde Park and gave a fireside chat every four months.
Triumph and Tragedy, by Winston Churchill – c) 1953
“I am right and everyone who ever criticized is wrong. And here's 675 boring long telegrams in tiny font to prove it.”
The most prolific history of WWII ever written. Six volumes is too much for most readers, but for Churchill it isn't enough. He was famous for talking and talking and talking until everyone in the room wants to kill themselves. He takes this same personal trait into this interminable account of the war. It was more readable, I would welcome the length. It's just not fun to read. Sadly, the scholar necessarily finds it an obligation.
The United States Air Force, A Turbulent History, c)1976 by Herbert Malloy Mason Jr.
⁃ This is a very enjoyable book, although it does get patriotic to a fault now and then.
The United States, A History, by Henry Bamford Parkes – c) 1953 – Parkes was born in England in 1904 and came to the United States in 1927. Even a Brit historian transplant is converted into an FDR worshipper. He sweeps the critics of FDR under the rug by calling them simplistic nay-sayers, “The weakness of the opposition to the New Deal, however, was that is was almost wholly negative.”
The United States, A History of the Republic, (Teachers Edition) by Davidson/Lyttle, c)1981
This 90 pound textbook provided the map of the Pacific theatre of operation in the US-Japanese War. A picture is worth a thousand words. Sometimes a map is two.
The United States: The History of a Republic, by Richard Hofstadter of Columbia, William Miller co-author of The Age of Enterprise, and Daniel Aaron of Smith College - c) 1957
Smith is one of the only colleges in Massachusetts I have never performed at for some reason.
The United States and World Sea Power, multiple (12) authors all members of the United States Naval Academy, c)1955 Prentice-Hall – Many of the Pacific War map scans are from this, one of the greatest books ever written. The two head writers were E.B. Potter and J.R. Fredland, since they have an editor as well as a writer credit. It is smart, yet clear. It is concise yet thorough. It is written by insiders but without inside naval jargon to make it hard reading (the sin of Sam Morison.) Every read is a rare pleasure. It is Biblical in scale yet not a single sentence is useless. Its an enormous heavy hardcover. It opens wide and flat so you can read it while you're doing something else.
War as I Knew It, by General George S. Patton Jr. -
Basically a 240 military history of the march across Europe to victory. Very nice book, and it made me like Patton a lot more than before.
Patton kept a private diary that was so rich with violent criticisms of famous people that his wife dared to not publish it after the died. Now that's a book I would read. Very little of the diary it was used in this war book, but now that everyone's dead or deaf who lived in the era, maybe it's time for a revised version of War as I Knew It, with the fiery diary mixed in.
Warriors of the Rising Sun, by Robert B. Edgerton –
Before I criticize let me say that this is a great book full of lots of stimulating arguments and information, and is very well written to say the least. I single out some areas of disagreement but this is hardly a disagreeable book.
The author is UCLA professor of anthropology and an apologist for Japanese atrocities in World War II. He has a Japanese wife. RBE is a Japanese anthropologist.
Bobby explains that the Japanese soldiers in earlier wars were the most kind and chivalrous of all the armed forces of the world. The Chinese and the western powers were the ones who tortured and raped in these earlier conflicts, while Japanese behavior was always nothing short of exemplary. Point taken and superbly documented. This proves that there must be some extenuating circumstances for Japanese behavior in the Second World War.
Edgerton documents Japanese atrocities in the Pacific War with a thoroughness almost unparalleled in previous books, but he always has an eye out for the final message which is apologist to the extreme. Once again we were just as bad if not worse because we bombed their cities. That argument again;
“burning hundreds of thousands of helpless civilians
to death in their homes did not bring Americans any
closer to God. Had Japan won the war, a Japanese
war-crimes tribunal would certainly have found
senior US officers and government officials guilty
of war crimes, and it is not difficult to imagine that
an impartial tribunal of neutral countries would have
agreed with them soon after the war or, for that
matter, even today.”
First of all the concept of a Japanese war-crimes tribunal is a joke, unless they planned on trying themselves. Second of all, ‘had Japan won the war,’ all of the US officers would have been tortured and then summarily executed so the idea of a Nuremberg style car crimes trial is a product of Edgerton’s fantasy.
Neutral countries would have supported the conviction of the US generals for their prosecution of the war you say? In your dreams. Neutral countries were just as frightened by the threat of Axis world domination as were active Allied states. Which neutral countries did you have in mind? Hey pal, there were no ‘impartial’ neutral countries. The King of Lesotho hated the Nazis and he hated the Japanese militarists. If someone asked him to in August of 1945 he would have given the US generals a parade and a week at the Royal mansion for what they did to win the war. The King of Nepal felt the same way. -- The “even today” part however is true. There is no denying that the slick injustice of presentism has gradually made the United States the bad guy and the Japanese civilians the good guy. But the “soon after the war” argument is a joke. In September of 1945 not one standing nation was mad at the Allies for doing what had to be done. They were cheering us on Mars.
Working With Roosevelt, by Sam Roseman
Sam was FDR’s chief speechwriter. It’s a fine book in substance and style, much better and more useful than I expected. I thought it would be fluffy. This is hard core politics by a key player and a great writer. Rosemann doesn't admire his subject. He worships the ground FDR rolls on. But Sam does it with such style and substance that you don't mind. At least I didn't.
The Hinge of Fate, by Winston Churchill
The Grand Alliance, by Winston Churchill,
Closing the Ring, by Winston Churchill
VIDEO
The History Channel – For the story of the germ-filled balloons and the Bly civilian casualty. Also for Frank Peto quote from the documentary Hell in the Pacific.
Everyone tells me, “Wow, you really study history. You must love the History Channel.” No. That's why I can't watch it for more than five minutes a week.
Maps
The Aleutians is Public Domain
Many naval maps from US Naval Academy –scanned from US and World Sea Power, so as they are works created in the process of doing a government job, they are in the public domain. I hope so.
Churchill’s six volume History for Malaya map.
Coral Sea map from Titans of the Seas, c)1975
Note: there is no Port Quigley in the UK – The D-Day rehearsal took place at Slapton Sands, England – Also, the Captain Flint was actually a ship called the City of Flint. Captain Flint was Long John Silver’s parrot in Treasure Island.
Most of the black and white maps of the Allied offensive in Western Europe are from A Soldiers Story, by Omar Bradley.
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