American History for Truthdiggers: Just How Good Was the 'Good War'?
Grim duty during World War II: A soldier in the Quartermaster Corps Graves
Registration Service examines a skull in attempting to identify the remains.
Editors note: The past is prologue. The stories we tell about ourselves and
our forebears inform the sort of country we think we are and help determine
public policy. As our current president promises to make America great
again, this moment is an appropriate time to reconsider our past, look back
at various eras of United States history and re-evaluate Americas origins.
When, exactly, were we great?
Below is the 26th installment of the American History for Truthdiggers
series, a pull-no-punches appraisal of our shared, if flawed, past. The
author of the series, Danny Sjursen, an active-duty major in the U.S. Army,
served military tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and taught the nations
checkered, often inspiring past when he was an assistant professor of
history at West Point. His war experiences, his scholarship, his skill as a
writer and his patriotism illuminate these Truthdig posts.
Part 26 of American History for Truthdiggers.
* * *
For the past 50 years, the Allied war has been sanitized and romanticized
almost beyond recognition by the sentimental, the loony patriotic, the
ignorant, and the bloodthirsty. Former U.S. Army Infantry Lt. Paul
Fussell, famed author and poet, in his 1989 book Wartime: Understanding and
Behavior in the Second World War
The United States role in the Second World War has been so mythologized
that it is now difficult to parse out truth from fantasy. There even exists
a certain nostalgia for the war years, despite all the death and destruction
wrought by global combat. Whereas the cataclysm of World War II serves as a
cautionary tale in much of Europe and Asia, it is remembered as a singularly
triumphant event here in the United States. In fact, the war often serves as
but a sequel to Americas memorialized role in the 20th century: as
back-to-back world war champ and twice savior of Europe. The organic
simplicity of this version suits the inherently American vision of its own
exceptionalism in global affairs.
However, there is a significant difference between a necessary warwhich it
probably wasand a good war. In fact, good war might be a contradiction in
terms. The bitter truth is that the United States, much as all the combatant
nations, waged an extraordinarily brutal, dirty war in Europe and especially
the Pacific. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt cut nasty deals and allied
with some nefarious actors to get the job done and defeat Germany and Japan.
In the process, he, and those very allies, shattered the old world and made
a new one. Whether that was ultimately a positive outcome remains to be
seen. Nevertheless, only through separating the difficult realities of war
from the comforting myths can we understand not only the burden of the past
but the world we currently inhabit.
For the United States, a two-front war was by no means inevitable. Tough
talk and crippling sanctions helped push Japan into a fight in the Pacific
that probably could have been avoided. And, though Roosevelt had been waging
an undeclared naval war with Germany in the North Atlantic, Japans 1941
attack on Pearl Harbor hardly guaranteed that a still isolationist-prone
American public would support war in Europe. This was awkward in light of
Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchills secret policy of
Germany First as a target in any future war. Lucky for them, Germanys
megalomaniacal Adolf Hitler spared them the trouble. Within days of Japans
surprise strike on Pearl Harbor, Germany and Italy foolishly declared war on
the United States.
Hitler misread American intentions and its military potential. In the wake
of Pearl Harbor he declared, I dont see much future for the Americans.
Its a decayed country. And they have their racial problem, and the problem
of social inequalities.
American society is half Judaized, and the other
half Negrefied. How can one expect a state like that to hold togethera
country where everything is built on the dollar. While Hitlers analysis of
American social problems may have been astute in some respects, he
underestimated the very power of that American dollar. His foreign minister,
Joachim von Ribbentrop, had a more clear-eyed assessment, warning the
fuhrer, We have just one year to cut off Russia from her American supplies.
If we dont succeed and the munitions potential of the United States joins
up with the manpower potential of the Russians
we shall be able to win
[the war] only with difficulty. Here, Ribbentrop, up to a point,
essentially predicted the near future and exact course of the conflict
between Germany and its foes.
Americas allies were overjoyed by the Pearl Harbor attack and the
subsequent German declaration of war. Churchill, whose nation had declared
war on Germany in 1939 and who had always pinned Englands hopes on American
intervention, remembered thinking when he heard of the Japanese attack: So
we had won after all.
Hitlers fate was sealed. Mussolinis fate was
sealed. As for the Japanese, they would be ground to powder.
There was no
more doubt about the end. That night, Churchill wrote later, he slept the
sleep of the saved and thankful. Chinas Chiang Kai-shek was described as
being so happy he sang an old opera aria and played Ave Maria all day.
He too foresaw his countrys salvation. Still, there remained a war to
actually fight.
Who (Really) Won World War II?
Ask the average American who won the Second World War and you can count on a
ready answer: The U.S. military, of course! Certainly the U.S. contributed
mightily, but the truth is far less simple. By the end, more than 60 million
people would die in the war, only about 400,000 of them American. Those
figures alone point to the magnitude of the roles of nations other than the
U.S.
There were three fundamental determinants of Allied victory: time, men and
materiel. A longer war favored the Allies because of their manpower and
economic potential. Both Germany and Japan pinned their hopes on a short
war. But it was British and, even more so, Russian men who provided that
time for what Britains Lord Beaverbrook called the immense possibilities
of American industry. In the second half of 1941 alone, Russia had suffered
3 million casualties, and it would eventually sacrifice some 30 million
(military and civilian) lives in the epic struggle with Nazi Germany. Eight
out of 10 Germans killed in the war fell on the Eastern Front.
This is not to downplay the role of American might in the wars outcome. As
for materiel, the U.S. capacity for mobilization was uncanny. The national
income of the United States, even in the midst of the Great Depression, was
nearly double the combined incomes of Germany, Italy and Japan. Still, make
no mistake, Russian sacrifice and Russian manpower were the decisive factors
in Allied victory. That, of course, is a discomfiting fact for most
Americans, especially because World War II was so quickly followed by a
cold war between the Soviet Union and the U.S. But this doesnt make it
any less true. Indeed, a broad-stroke conclusion would be that Russian (and
to some extent British) men bought the necessary time for American materiel
to overwhelm the mismatched Axis Powers. Such an (albeit accurate) analysis
is far less rewarding for American myth makers.
The United States was actually rather fortunate. Thanks to timingit entered
the war lateand geography, the U.S. could choose to fight a war of
equipment and machines rather than men. This route would cost the least in
terms of American lives and also had the ancillary benefit of revitalizing
the Depression-era economy and positioning the U.S. for future global
leadership. All this was possible thanks to the Atlantic and Pacific oceans
and the resultant fact that the U.S. homeland, almost alone among combatant
nations, was untouched by the war itself.
U.S. military planning reflected these fortunate realities. Prior to the
Pearl Harbor attack, Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Marshall assumed that
Russia would fall and therefore victory in Europe would require some 215
American infantry divisions. However, as the war evolvedand especially
after Germanys defeat in Russia at the pivotal Battle of Stalingradit
became apparent that the Soviets would survive. In response, the U.S.
military truncated its mobilization to just 90 divisions. This arsenal of
democracy strategy guaranteed that American industry would combine with
Russian bloodshed to win the war. Thus, even though the United States did
raise the largest army in its own history, that force remained smaller than
Germanys and less than half the size of the Soviet military.
Thus, while the untouched American economy expanded throughout the war, the
Russian people faced economic contraction and diminishing quality of life in
their titanic ground struggle with the Nazis. Due to the brutal German
invasion, Soviet food supplies were cut by two-thirds, millions slid into
destitution and many starved to death. In the U.S., by contrast, personal
wealth grew and the American economy proved capable of producing ample
amounts of guns and butter. Despite the undoubted courage of U.S. service
members in combat, the average Americans chance of dying in battle was only
one in 100, one-tenth the rate of the American Civil War. Furthermore, as a
proportion of the total, U.S. military casualties were lower than among any
of the other major belligerents in World War II.
By way of comparison, fewer Americans were killed than Hungarians, Romanians
or Koreans. Twice as many Yugoslavians died as Americans, 10 times as many
Poles and 50 times as many Russians. This reality was not lost on Josef
Stalin and the often frustrated Russians. Even at its height, only 10
percent of U.S. lend-lease aid went to the Soviets, and, one Russian
complained during the war, Weve lost millions of people, and they
[Americans] want us to crawl on our knees because they send us Spam. Even
Churchill recognized the Russian point of view in early 1943 when he
declared that in April, May and June, not a single American or British
soldier will be killing a single German or Italian soldier while the
Russians are chasing 185 divisions around. When the British prime minister
spoke those words only eight U.S. divisions were in the entire European
theater. Given this disparity, one understands Stalins frustration and his
demand for the Western Allies to open a second front in France. Indeed, this
concern animated much of the tension in the troubled alliance throughout the
war.
The Politics of Alliance: The United States, Britain and the Soviet Union
The Big Three powersBritain, the Soviet Union and the U.S.forged what was
ultimately an alliance of convenience and necessity, rather than ideology.
For all the lip service paid to the liberal principles of the Atlantic
Charter, the reality is that a flawed American democracy had little choice
but to partner with an unabashed maritime empire (Britain) and a vast
communist land empire (the Soviet Union) to fight international fascism.
Such an alliance would be messy from the start.
The dynamics of the alliance were ultimately based on the different goals
and relative positions of each partner. The United States was distant from
the battlefields and endowed with extraordinary economic potential. It
sought supremacy in the Pacific, relative stability and balance in Europe,
and global economic dominance in the postwar world. Britain hoped merely to
survive and then to salvage its still substantial global empire. The British
wanted to maintain clout in Europe and ensure that no one continental
powerwhether Germany or the Soviet Uniondominated the region. Britains
diminishing manpower and economic output meant that it required help from
its larger partners. Stalin engaged in an existential fight with the Nazis
and initially feared his nations utter destruction. Thus the Soviet Union
had little choice but to work withand receive aid fromthe Western
capitalist powers. Nevertheless, the Soviets still adhered to a
revolutionary ideology of communist expansion, and, fearing future invasion
from the West, hoped to create a friendly buffer zone of protection in
Eastern Europe. This directly collided with the wish of the Western
democracies to establish capitalist republics in the same region. Clearly
the Allied positions and desires were often contradictory and affected the
strategies of each power.
The defining issueand point of contentionin the alliance was the Soviet
demand for Britain and America to swiftly open a second front in Western
Europe in order to take German pressure off the Russian heartland. This
demand ran into limits of timeit would take the U.S. military quite a while
to fully mobilizeand British hesitancy. Churchill remembered well the
slaughter of trench warfare in the Great War and the embarrassment of the
British armys recent defeat in France and evacuation from Dunkirk. The
British thus preferred peripheral actions that secured their empire and
played to its strengths, at sea and in the air. The Americans, however, were
willing and eager to quickly strike the heart of Germany to end the war, but
they faced the reality that British manpower would form the bulk of troop
strength in Europe for at least one or two years as Washington raised its
army. Thus, throughout the war, a pattern repeated whereby the Western
Allies delayed launching a second front in France and the Soviets expressed
increasing frustration and, ultimately, mistrust of their capitalist
partners.
In early 1943, leaders of the Allied Powers met in Casablanca. (With the
Soviet Union beset with fighting, Stalin declined to attend.) At that
conference Churchill maintained the leverage required to win the day. He
convinced Roosevelt to first invade North Africa and take pressure off the
British army, then grappling with German Gen. Erwin Rommel in Egypt. Without
a fully mobilized force, Roosevelt had limited means to reassure the Soviet
Union that a true second front was forthcoming. So he did his best,
announcing a doctrine that called for nothing less than the unconditional
surrender of Germany and Japan. This strategic straitjacket would
eventually have significant effect on the wars outcome, but did little to
ease Stalins legitimate concerns. Roosevelt may have had little choice at
the Casablanca conference but to defer to Churchills peripheral
Mediterranean strategy, but American strategists had an additional fear. If
the Soviets truly turned the tide of battle in the eastwhich seemed
probable by 1943before the Western Allies invaded France, might the
Russians not dominate all of the European continent?
U.S. Secretary of War Henry Stimson recognized this at an early point,
criticizing Churchill and the British plan. In May 1943, Stimson declared,
The British are trying to arrange this matter so that the British and
Americans hold the leg for Stalin to kill the deer and I think that will be
a dangerous business for us at the end of the war. Stalin wont have much of
an opinion [of that policy] and we will not be able to share much of the
postwar world with him. Furthermore, U.S. generalsimbued with the unique
American way of war replete with overwhelming, swift offensivessaw a
massive invasion of France as the only logical way to win the war and save
the continent. Besides, any victory that kept American casualties relatively
low required Russian survival. As Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, senior U.S.
commander in Europe, emphasized in pushing for a rapid invasion of France,
We should not forget that the prize we seek is to keep 8,000,000 Russians
in the war.
As the British and Americans scuffled over the timing for an invasion of
France, the date for a true second front was continually delayed. In May
1943, Roosevelt was still assuring Stalin that he expected the formation of
a second front this year, and even added that in order to facilitate this,
American lend-lease supplies to the Soviet Union would be cut by 60 percent.
Of course, the reality was that no second front in France was forthcoming
until at least spring 1944 so long as the British kept insisting on
campaigns in Africa and the Mediterranean and in the air. British hesitancy
and intransigence frustrated the American military chiefs to no end, and
they recommended to Roosevelt in July 1943 that if the Brits didnt relent
we should turn to the Pacific and strike decisively against Japan; in other
words, assume a defensive attitude against Germany. Such a move, in fact,
might have been popular with an American populace that was, after the sneak
attack on Pearl Harbor, more angry with Japan than with Germany.
Nonetheless, Roosevelt refused to back away from the Germany First
strategy and overrode his military chiefs. Politics played a role here, as
they often did for FDR. American mobilization took time, and the president
felt he needed to unleash some sort of strike on Germany before the midterm
elections. An all-out invasion of France wasnt yet possible, so Roosevelt
agreed to Churchills proposed lesser invasion in North Africa, pleading
with Gen. Marshall, Please, make it before election day. Eisenhower, who
would lead the attack, thought the African diversion strategically unsound
and concluded that it would have no effect on the 1942 campaign in Russia.
If FDRs generals were unhappy, Stalin was livid. The Soviet leader, with
good reason, doubted the sincerity and motives of the Western Allies and
resented bearing the full brunt of the German armys offensives. At the
first meeting of the Big Three leaders, in Tehran, Iran, in November 1943,
Stalin reminded Churchill of the millions of casualties already sustained by
the Red Army. Indeed, later historians would see this period as sowing the
seeds for a divided, suspicious, Cold War world that would emerge soon after
the German surrender.
Amid the British hesitancy about an invasion of France, the Americans felt a
greater sense of urgency. The U.S., unlike Britain, was truly engaged in a
two-front war and needed Soviet assistance in the Pacific to avoid massive
casualties in the already bloody campaign against Japan. Stalin knew this,
and months before the Tehran conference had reminded Roosevelt that in the
Far East
the U.S.S.R. is not in a state of war. If the Americans wanted
future Russian intervention in the Pacific, Stalin made it clear that FDR
had to push the British along and deliver a second front soon. That second
front was also necessary, many American strategists knew, if the U.S. and
Britain were to maintain postwar influence on the continent. One State
Department assessment at the time warned, If Germany collapses before the
democracies have been able to make an important military contribution on the
continent
the peoples of Europe will with reason believe that the war was
won by the Russians alone
so that it will be difficult for Great Britain
and the United States to oppose successfully any line of policy which the
Kremlin may choose.
With both these concerns in mind, Roosevelt decided on a relatively sanguine
approach to Stalin. Given the strength of the Soviet army, he may not have
had much choice. Nevertheless, FDR appeared to acquiesce to Stalins postwar
influence in Eastern Europe, and again played politics in his negotiations
at the Tehran conference. After agreeing to Soviet dominance in the Baltic
states, the future of Poland came up. Here, according to official minutes
from the conference, Roosevelt explained to Stalin that there were in the
United States from six to seven million Americans of Polish extraction, and,
as a practical man, he did not wish to lose their vote. Therefore, while
accepting a Soviet sphere of influence in the region, Roosevelt asked Stalin
to delay any decision on Polish frontiers and to make some public
declaration in regard to future elections in Eastern Europe. Given that the
Second World War erupted over the issue of Polish sovereignty, this was a
remarkable concession. Then again, while the U.S. had approximately 10
divisions in Europe at the time, Stalin had hundreds more, some of them even
then on the very frontier of Poland. Its unclear how the Western Allies
could have then stopped him.
In another remarkable exchange, Roosevelt appeared to placate Stalin, much
to the consternation of Churchill. When, over dinner, Stalin proposed that
50,000 German military officers be physically liquidated after the war,
Churchill rose to his feet and declared, I will not be party to any
butchery in cold blood! Roosevelt, seeking to lighten the mood, stated, I
have a compromise to propose. Not fifty thousand, but only forty-nine
thousand should be shot. Churchill was furious, but such was the nature,
and paradox, of the alliance. In the end, the leaders left Tehran after
agreeing to the opening of a second front in France by May 1944, and for a
Soviet entrance into the Pacific war soon after the defeat of Germany.
When next the three leaders met, in Yalta, in February 1945, Germany was on
the verge of defeat and Russian troops had fought their way to the outskirts
of Berlin. Stalins divisions dominated Eastern Europe by way of physical
presence, and the U.S. was engaged in an increasingly bloody
island-hopping campaign in the Pacific. There, the Japanese showed no sign
of relenting and were fighting to almost the last man in each and every
battle. Soviet assistance was thought necessary to shorten the Pacific war.
At Yalta the Allies discussed the membership rules for the new United
Nations, the partition of Germany, the fate of Eastern Europe, and Soviet
participation in the war with Japan.
Here again, Roosevelt appeared to appease Stalin regarding Poland and all of
Eastern Europe. The Russian leader made clear that Poland was a question of
both honor and security, even one of life and death for the Soviet Union.
Roosevelt replied with a personal note that assured Stalin the United
States will never lend its support in any way to any provisional government
in Poland that would be inimical to your interests. Such a statement
appeared to give Stalin a free hand in Eastern Europe, and many later
historians would conclude that FDRperhaps due to his increasingly feeble
healthhad sold out to Stalin.
The reality was much more nuanced. Roosevelt knew he held the weak hand in
Europe. The Red Army already occupied half the continent, and unless FDR was
willing to mobilize a few hundred more divisions and order Eisenhower to
fight his way to Poland, there was little the president could do to alter
the facts on the ground. When the presidential chief of staff, Adm. William
Leahy, demurred about the implications of Roosevelts note, FDR said, I
know, BillI know it. But its the best I can do for Poland at this time.
Soon after, he told another associate that, regarding Yalta, I didnt say
the result was good. I said it was the best I could do. And it probably
was, though that was certainly little consolation to Poles.
In exchange, Stalin promised, again, to declare war on Japan. Roosevelt saw
this as the real prize to be gained at Yalta. He told Stalin that he hoped
that it would not be necessary actually to invade the Japanese islands, if
the Soviets attacked in Manchuria, made Siberian air bases available for
U.S. bombing of Japans cities, and otherwise demonstrated the essential
hopelessness of Tokyos cause. This was genuinely vital. The American Joint
Chiefs of Staff estimated that a Soviet intervention could shorten the
Pacific war by a year or more and thus save many American lives. Besides, a
shrewd FDR also hoped that focusing Soviet military strength eastward might
actually loosen Stalins grip on Eastern Europe.
In the final assessment, the Big Three ultimately managed a difficult
alliancebuilt on necessity rather than affinityto achieve the defeat of
both Germany and Japan. This was no small task. The cost of victory was a
divided Europephysically and ideologically. FDR and Churchill werent
feeble but they were rather realistic in their negotiations with Stalin.
Perhaps Roosevelt, ever the charmer and the schemer, had something in mind
for future policy pressure on the Soviets, but, with his death just two
months after the Yalta Conference, well never know.
Fighting a World War: Paradox and Contradiction
[The bombing] is inhuman barbarism that has profoundly shocked the
conscience of humanity. President Franklin Roosevelt, describing the
German bombing of Rotterdam, Holland, in which 880 civilians were killed
(1940)
There are no innocent civilians. It is their government and you are
fighting a people, you are not trying to fight an armed force anymore. So it
doesnt bother me so much to be killing the so-called innocent bystanders.
Gen. Curtis LeMay, U.S. Army Air Corps commander in the Pacific Theater
after American planes killed approximately 90,000 civilians in Tokyo (1945)
Charred remains of Japanese civilians after the firebombing of Tokyo, March
9-10, 1945.
The Second World War even surpassed World War I in its barbarity. In this
second global conflict, civilians would bear the brunt of the fighting, a
significant change from the First World War. As the conflict rolled along,
the combatant countries increased in desperation and brutality. This was not
limited to the Axis Powers or the Communist Soviet dictatorship. To win the
war at the least cost in their own peoples lives, the Western democracies
would continually dial up the cruelty of their tactics and shift the
suffering onto enemy civilians. That, perhaps, was the major contradiction
of the Anglo-American war effort. Two ostensible democracies agreed in
principle to the humanitarian tenets of the Atlantic Charter, then waged a
terror war (especially from the sky) on civilians.
There were other paradoxes and realities that deflated many popular myths
about Americas role in the war. For example, though most Americans remember
World War II as a time of extreme patriotism and selflessness, in truth the
populace did not race as one to the recruiting stations. A strong strain of
isolationism remained even after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Indeed, all but
a few of the most anti-interventionist congressmen were re-elected in
November 1942. Draft deferments were common and coveted from the start.
Because married men were exempted from the first draft calls, some 40
percent of American 21-year-olds became betrothed within six weeks! The
exemption was later ended, and eventually some 18 percent of families would
send a son to the military. Nevertheless, this was a fraction of the
commitment seen in other belligerent nations.
The draft itself was controversial andas in most large, hasty
bureaucraciesinefficient and often unfair. The typical GI who liberated
Western Europe and the Pacific was 26 years old, 5 feet 8 inches tall and
144 pounds. He had, on average, completed just one year of high school. He
took a pre-induction classification test that determined which jobs he was
qualified for. Paradoxically, those troopers who were larger, stronger and
smarter usually ended up in the Army Service Forces and Army Air Forces.
Thus, the typical infantryman who carried a heavy pack and did the bulk of
the fighting was shorter and weighed less than his peers in the rear. All
told, the U.S. Armys tail-to-teeth ratiothe relative number of support
to combat trooperswas 2 to 1, the highest of any army in the war.
Proportionally far fewer men in the U.S. Army did the fighting than in
Allied or enemy armies.
When U.S. soldiers did fightat least in Europethey were often outmatched
by the Germans and equipped with gear that was inferior. German tanks, in
particular, were superior, and nothing in the American armored arsenal could
stand toe-to-toe with the feared Panther and Tiger tanks of the enemy. What
the Americans did have was numbers. They made up for inferior quality with
mass production of mechanized vehicles. Still, the rule of thumb was that it
took five or more American Sherman tanks to overcome a Panther or Tiger
tank. German troops were also more battle-hardened and usually more
effective in early combat meetings between the two forces. This, too, defies
the myth of American superiority and single-handed victory in the war. After
all, in late 1944, when the U.S. Army nearly ran out of infantry replacement
troops, the Soviets deployed exponentially more divisions worth of foot
soldiers against the Germans.
The Western democracies also fought a war with such brutality that it
contradicted their own principles. This, too, is often forgotten. Strategic
air bombing of German (and sometimes French) cities was inaccurate and,
beyond the slaughter on the ground, was notoriously dangerous for the flight
crews. Thats why, early on, the British shifted to nighttime area bombing
over more hazardous but somewhat more accurate daytime bombing. At first,
the U.S. Army Air Corps recoiled at these tactics, with one senior U.S.
officer deploring British baby killing schemes that would be a blot on
the history of the air forces of the [allied] U.S. However, as the
realities of the danger and inaccuracy sank in, the Americans, though
sticking to daylight bombing, would succumb to the pressure to bomb
civilians. By 1944-45, the Army Air Corps was staging massive raids on major
cities. A single attack on Berlin killed 25,000 civilians. Ten days later, a
combined Anglo-American assault unleashed a firestorm in Dresden that killed
35,000. All told, the British and American air forces killed many hundreds
of thousands of German civilians from the air. The fiction that the targets
were strategic, military or industrial didnt stand up under close
scrutiny.
Did the bombing work, though? Air power enthusiasts, then and now, are
certain that it did and doesthat bombing alone can end a war. Nevertheless,
in 208 separate postwar studies conducted by the U.S. Strategic Bombing
Survey, that military-commissioned organization concluded that bombing had
contributed significantly but had not by itself been decisive. Even under
the heaviest bombing, German economic output tripled between 1941 and 1944,
and while the attacks certainly hurt local morale they had markedly less
effect on behavior. In other words, factory employees kept going to work,
soldiers kept fighting and German industrial output actually increased
during the war.
The bombing of Japan was even more brutal and more overtly targeted at
civilians. When Gen. Curtis LeMay took over the 21st Bomber Command in
January 1945, he unleashed a literal firestorm on Japans mostly wooden
cities. Ill tell you what war is about, he once opined, Youve got to
kill people, and when youve killed enough they stop fighting. In that
spirit, LeMay had his pilots practice and perfect firebombing techniques
meant to purposely set off thermal hurricanes that killed by both heat and
suffocation as the flames removed oxygen. On the single night of March 9-10,
1945, a massive raid in Japan killed 90,000 men, women and childrensome
boiled alive within the canals where they had sought refugeand left 1
million people homeless. In the five months after that night, 43 percent of
Japans 66 largest cities were destroyed. About a million people died, 1.3
million were injured and 8 million lost their homes.
Working as an analyst on LeMays staff in those days was a young officer,
Robert McNamara, who would be secretary of defense during the Vietnam War.
His job was to carefully study and increase the efficiency of this mass
murder. McNamara remembered that LeMay once admitted they probably would
have been tried for war crimes had the U.S. lost the war. And, when asked
about this more than 60 years later, McNamara concluded that the general had
been correct.
The European Theater: Distractions and a Second Front
A GI outside the cathedral in Cologne, Germany, reads a sign on April 4,
1945, that warns support troops from the rear echelon against sightseeing at
the historic structure.
Americas war for Europe actually began in North Africa. There, in November
1942, Gen. Eisenhowers army rushed ashore on the beaches of the Vichy
(Nazi-collaborating) French colonies of Algeria and Morocco. Though U.S.
commanders and diplomats tried to convince the French troops guarding those
beaches to lay down their arms, it came to passparadoxicallythat in its
first major ground combat in the European theater of operations (ETO), U.S.
troops killed French soldiers and died at French hands. After 48 hours and
hundreds of deaths, the U.S. arranged a general cease-fire with the
fascist-sympathizing Adm. François Darlan. An incensed Hitler immediately
occupied the remainder of France and forced the Vichy government to invite
German forces into Tunisia to check the American advance.
In early combat engagements with the Germans, Eisenhowers untested troops
were regularly embarrassed by Gen. Rommels battle-hardened veterans. At
Kasserine Pass, the first sizable engagement between U.S. and German troops,
the Americans were handily beaten. Nevertheless, by March 1943, assaults of
Americans from the west and Gen. Bernard Montgomerys British forces from
the east converged to defeat the German-Italian army. The Allies captured
some 250,000 Axis prisoners, but many of the best German divisions escaped
to Italy. Meanwhile, as the Allies were making this early (if feeble) effort
at a second front, the Soviets still were confronting more than 200 Axis
divisions in Russia.
Though the American military commanders wanted to strike next at France
itself, the Britswho still provided the majority of divisions in the
ETOconvinced Roosevelt to next target the island of Sicily (July 1943),
followed by the Italian mainland (September 1943). The Americans insisted,
however, that all new divisions sent to the ETO be diverted to Britain in
preparation for the invasion of France. Thus, the campaign in Italywhich
the U.S. commanders didnt want to fight in the first placewould have to
proceed on a shoestring. The Germans sent just 16 divisions to Italy, and
that force, under the command of the brilliant Field Marshal Albert
Kesselring, used the peninsulas rugged terrain to tie down two Allied
armies in an indecisive battle of attrition for nearly two years. As the
historian David M. Kennedy strongly concluded, this was a campaign whose
costs were justified by no defensible military or political purpose,
except, perhaps, to assuage Churchills hesitancy about the France invasion
and his career-long obsession with securing the Mediterranean Sea.
When the Allies hit the Italian mainland at Salerno, the U.S. commander,
Gen. Mark Clark, unwisely chose to forgo the customary preliminary
bombardmenthoping to exploit the element of surpriseand as a result a
vicious German counterattack almost drove the Americans back into the sea.
Only emergency naval gunfire support saved the beachhead. What followed was
five months of grinding attritional warfare. Unable to make any significant
northward progress, Clark requested another amphibious assaultwhich
controversially delayed the France invasion againon the beaches of Anzio,
north of the main German defensive lines. Though little resistance was met
on the shoreline, Gen. John Lucas hesitated long enough for the Germans to
mount another counterattack. Lucas pathetic force was thus pinned down on a
narrow beachhead for months, and the entire Italian campaign again ground to
a halt. When, in the late spring, the Allied forces finally broke through
the German defense, Gen. Clark struck out for the political prize of Rome
rather than cutting off the main German force. This allowed Kesselring to
escape and set up a new series of defensive lines to the north. Then the
whole process repeated itself for nearly a year.
Kesselrings small force held out until almost the end of the war. The
needless sideshow in Italy cost 188,000 American and 123,000 British
casualties. All the while, Kesselring held the two Allied armies at bay with
fewer than 20 divisions, hardly any of which had been transferred from the
Eastern Front. Stalin and the Soviets were enraged by the Allied foray into
Italy, especially when the Salerno and Anzio landings further delayed the
cross-channel invasion of France. He wrote to Roosevelt that the latest
delay leaves the Soviet Army, which is fighting not only for its country,
but also for its Allies, to do the job alone, almost single-handed. Stalin
then hinted at how this frustration could presage later (Cold War-style)
conflict, adding, Need I speak of the dishearteningly negative impression
that this fresh postponement of the second front
will produce in the
Soviet Unionboth among the people and in the army? Given the quagmire in
the Mediterranean, the Soviet leader had a point.
While the battles raged in North Africa and Italy, the Combined Bomber
Offensive (CBO)strategic bombing from the airwas the closest thing to a
second front available in Northwestern Europe. This controversial campaign
was both dangerous to airmencasualty rates among bomber crews were among
the highest in the warand highly destructive to civilians. Nonetheless,
both British and American air commanders hoped to prove that their services
contribution could win the war single-handedly. It was not to be so. What
did occur was a massacre of German civilians. This shouldnt have been
surprising. The Italian Giulio Douhet, the principal air war theorist of the
1920s, had long argued that in modern warfare civilian targets should be
fair game. As he famously wrote, The woman loading shells in a factory, the
farmer growing wheat, the scientist experimenting in the laboratory were
targets as legitimate as the soldier carrying his gun. Ironically, this
was the precise argument al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden would make years
later in justifying his 9/11 attacks on the U.S. homeland.
Some of the devastation among civilians was inevitable, given the
technological limitations of 1940s aircraft; military decisions growing out
of those limitations greatly increased death on the ground. A British bomber
command study in 1941 concluded that only one-third of bombers made it to
within five miles of their targets. Thus, in 1942, the British Royal Air
Force (RAF) directed that bombers henceforth focus on targeting the morale
of the enemy civil population. The Brits euphemistically referred to this
as area bombing. It amounted to premeditated murder from the skies. At
first, the U.S. Army Air Forces (USAAF) shunned the British approach, but
soon the Americans were mimicking the RAF tactics. The war had changed the
hearts of many leaders. Back in 1940, President Roosevelt was horrified by a
German air attack on Rotterdam that killed some 800 civilians. He called the
incident barbaric. By 1943-44, the RAF and USAAF were sometimes killing
thousands of civilians per day.
The airmen of the USAAF faced their own horrors. Accidents took nearly as
many lives among American airmen as combat actions. In 1943, the USAAF lost
5 percent of its crewmen in each mission, casualties so appalling that
two-thirds of American airmen that year did not survive their required quota
of 25 missions. Despite this human cost, and despite the optimistic
predictions of the airpower enthusiasts, strategic bombing alone could not
substitute for a ground-level second front in France.
On June 6, 1944D-Daynearly two years and seven months after the attack on
Pearl Harbor, British and American troops rushed ashore on the beaches of
Normandy, France. The invasion was coordinated with an even larger Russian
offensive, Operation Bagration, which shattered many German divisions and
caused 350,000 Axis casualties. Initially, at least, the Normandy invasion
met with far less success. Though the Western Allies managed to get tens of
thousands and then hundreds of thousands of troops ashore, it took more than
a month to break out of the stalemate at the beachhead. Finally, in
Operation Cobra (July-August 1944), a massive aerial bombardment followed by
Gen. George Pattons armored spearhead, the Anglo-American armies
annihilated 40 German divisions and inflicted 450,000 casualties. For a
moment it looked as though the war would be over by Christmas. The
Intelligence Committee in London predicted that organized resistance
is
unlikely to continue beyond December 1, 1944, and
may end even sooner. It
was not to be.
The Allies still had only one functioning French port available to them, and
this slowed vital logistics. Fuel and food simply couldnt keep up with
Patton and Montgomerys mechanized thrusts. In September 1944, Operation
Market Garden, the brainchild of Gen. Montgomery, kicked off with a
three-division parachute assault to secure key bridges on the path to
Germany. The attack stalled, and Montgomerys tanks couldnt reach the final
bridge in time. The long-shot gamble hadnt worked. Market Garden cost
thousands of Allied casualties and then petered out, leading to a winter
stalemate. The Germans still had a lot of fight in them and held strong for
two more months, inflicting 20,000 American casualties at the indecisive
Battle of the Huertgen Forest, which occurred along the Belgian-German
border.
Then, in December, Hitler launched one final mad offensive to divide the
Allied armies and seize the vital port of Antwerp in Belgium. The Americans
were initially pushed back, creating a bulge in the Allied lines. Then
Hitlers gamble ground to a halt when the skies cleared and Allied planes
could again pound the vulnerable Germans from the air. Even though the
Battle of the Bulge came as a shock to the Allies, and turned out to be the
bloodiest single fight for the Americans in the ETO, Hitler had expended his
last reserves and suffered 100,000 more casualties. By April, the Soviets
were fighting on the outskirts of Berlin, Eisenhowers troops had breached
Germanys Western Wall, and American and Russian troops were linking hands
along the River Elbe west of Berlin. In the first week of May, Hitler
committed suicide and Germany surrendered. The date, May 8, would be forever
known as Victory in Europe (V-E) Day.
The Pacific Theater: War Without Mercy
A U.S. war bond advertisement during World War II depicts the Japanese as
maniacal enemies seeking to ravage white American women. American racism
against the Japanese was on prominent display both in the Pacific military
campaign and the U.S. homeland.
The war in the Pacific wasnt supposed to occur at all. Containment and
deterrence of the Japanese was supposed to delay, perhaps avoid, a war in
the Pacific. Germany First was the strategy agreed upon by the British and
American senior commanders well before the U.S. entered either theater of
war. Nonetheless, in a calculated, if ill-advised, gamble, the militarists
atop the Japanese government decided on an all-out surprise attack meant to
destroy the American Pacific fleet in hopes of forcing Washington into a
peace settlement and economic concessions. The architect of the attack, Adm.
Isoroku Yamamoto, knew the risks involved. He had studied at Harvard, later
served as a naval attaché in Washington and held a deep respect for
Americas vast industrial potential.
Yamamoto had, in the recent past, been a voice for moderation and argued
against the surprise attack. He knew that Tokyo would have only a small
window for victory and that Japan, if the war dragged on, would eventually
be overwhelmed by the now-roused American sleeping giant. If I am told to
fight regardless of the consequences, Yamamoto had warned the Japanese
prime minister, I shall run wild for the first six months or a year, but I
have utterly no confidence for the second or third year. How prescient the
admiral would prove to be.
At first Yamamotos gamut seemed to pay off. By 10 a.m. on Dec. 7, 1941, the
day of the Japanese attack, 18 U.S. ships, including eight battleships, had
been sunk or heavily damaged, more than 300 U.S. aircraft destroyed or
crippled and more than 2,300 sailors and soldiers killed. The Americans were
caught by surprise, butin a stroke of lucknone of the U.S. Navys aircraft
carriers, which would prove more valuable than battleships in the coming
war, were at Pearl Harbor that morning. All survived to fight another day.
Still, Yamamoto and the Japanese military did indeed run wild in the six
months following Pearl Harbor. British, Dutch and American possessionsHong
Kong, Guam, Wake Island, the East Indies and Indochinafell one after the
other to the Japanese blitz. On Feb. 15, 1942, in what is widely considered
the worst defeat in British military history, a garrison of 85,000
surrendered to a Japanese force barely half its size. The attack on the U.S.
contingent in the Philippines, commanded by the implacable, demagogic Gen.
Douglas MacArthur, had begun Dec. 8, 1941, the day after the Pearl Harbor
attack. Though MacArthur had been warned of the possibility of an imminent
Japanese attack, he unforgivably allowed nearly his entire air force to be
destroyed on the ground. Without an air corps and with the U.S. Pacific
fleet crippled, the fate of the Philippines was sealed.
MacArthur had been a strong combat leader in World War I, but he gained a
reputation as a shameless self-promoter. After the Japanese attack on the
Philippines he was given the derisive nickname Dugout Doug, which implied
he was making himself safe in his tunnel headquarters while his men were
dying under the Japanese assault. He would visit only once with his soldiers
during their fierce battle on the Bataan peninsula before Roosevelt ordered
him to evacuate to Australia.
On March 12, MacArthur left Gen. Jonathan Wainwright in command of the
doomed garrison and left with his family and personal staff on a small
patrol boat. In what seemed an obvious PR stunt and face-saving measure,
Congress conferred the Medal of Honor on him. By May 6, roughly 10,000
American and 60,000 Filipino soldiers had surrendered to the Japanese.
Dwight Eisenhower, a former subordinate of MacArthur, was less than
impressed with the senior generals performance. In his diary that night,
Ike wrote that [the Philippine garrison] surrendered last night. Poor
Wainwright! He did the fighting.
[but MacArthur] got such glory as the
public could find in the operation.
General Macs tirades to which
I so
often listened in Manila, would now sound as silly to the public as they did
to us. But hes a hero! Yah.
A tragedy followed. The Japanese army in the Philippines, itself
undersupplied and malnourished, wasnt prepared to accept 70,000 prisoners.
Furthermore, in a clash of cultures, the Japanesewho subscribed to a
Bushido code that some experts have described as a range of mental
attitudes that bordered on psychopathy and which saw surrender as the
ultimate dishonorbrutalized the captives. In an 80-mile forced march, the
prisoners were denied water, often beaten and sometimes bayoneted. Six
hundred Americans and perhaps 10,000 Filipinos died on the Bataan Death
March. Thousands more wouldnt survive the following four years of
captivity in filthy camps.
The Americans and British had surely taken, in the words of Gen. Vinegar
Joe Stilwell, one hell of a beating. Even so, as Yamamoto had feared, the
tide quickly turned. When the Japanese fleet headed for tiny Midway Island,
an American possession to the west of Pearl Harbor, to finish off the
remaining U.S. ships, the Americansthanks to Magic, their program for
cracking the Japanese naval codewere ready. American flyers sank four of
Japans six carriers at the loss of only one U.S. carrier, shifting the
momentum of the entire Pacific war in a single engagement. From this point
forward, U.S. industry would pump out carriers, submarines, cruisers and
aircraft at a rate exponentially higher than Japans. For example, whereas
the Japanese constructed only six additional large carriers throughout the
war, the U.S. fielded 17 large, 10 medium and a stunning 86 escort carriers.
The Americans now went on the offensive, albeit slowly at first. Naval
commanders preferred a drive straight across the Central Pacific,
island-hopping from one Japanese garrison to the next, but MacArthur
insisted on a campaign through the Southwest Pacific from Australia, to New
Guinea, and finally to the Philippinesto which MacArthur had famously vowed
to return. Roosevelt, the astute politician, split the difference in
supplies and troops and decided on a less efficient two-track advance. Adm.
Chester Nimitz and the Marine Corps would lead in the Central Pacific while
MacArthur and the Army moved slowly toward the Philippines.
The first stop for Nimitz was the distant Solomon Islands. There, on the
island of Tulagi, the Marines received their firstbut certainly not
lasttaste of fierce Japanese defensive tactics. Only three of Tulagis 350
defenders surrendered. Others were incinerated when lit gasoline drums were
thrown into their concealed caves. On nearby islands, only 20 of 500
defenders surrendered. All told, 115 U.S. Marines died in these fights,
establishing the approximately 10-1 ratio of casualties that would prevail
throughout the long Pacific war. Nevertheless, the Japanese still had some
offensive potential and in the Battle of Savo Island inflicted the
worst-ever defeat of the U.S. Navy on the high seas. Nearly 2,000 American
sailors were killed or wounded. Still, the Japanese had failed to ward off
the U.S. invasion of the island Guadalcanal in the Solomon chain. Thus began
one of the strangest campaigns of the Pacific warperhaps the only such
battle in which Americans were defending an island and did not, as of yet,
enjoy total air and naval superiority. It was a long, tough campaign and
stretched the morale and resources of the U.S. soldiers and Marines engaged.
The brutality and fanaticism of both sides were again on display. When
American Marines ambushed an attacking force, 800 Japanese died and only one
surrendered. And, after some of the wounded tried to kill approaching
American medics, the Marines slaughtered every surviving Japanese soldier.
By October 1942, the U.S. garrison had been reinforced, expending to some
27,000; by years end the number would be 60,000. The joint Army/Marine
force could then take the offensive. Still, in four more months of bloody
fighting the Americans suffered nearly 2,000 more casualties. At that rate,
U.S. casualties could grow to cataclysmic levels if every Japanese island
garrison were assaulted. It was thus decided to hop the islands, bypassing
most and securing only vital platforms for airfields and logistics hubs.
Most of the other Japanese garrisons were left to rot, their supply lines to
Tokyo severed.
In the Southwest Pacific, MacArthur first helped the Australians defend
Papua, though the ever-charming general won few friends there when he
described the more than 600 Australian dead on that island as extremely
light casualties, indicating no serious effort. MacArthurs own force
suffered heavy casualties when he recklessly wasted troops to seize Buna and
Gona, but it did, by December 1942, end the Japanese threat to Australia. In
March 1943, MacArthurs air chief, Gen. George Kenney, successfully
organized his planes in a spectacular attack on a Japanese reinforcing
convoy of ships. After the bombers sank the troop transports and a few
destroyers, American fighter planes and patrol boats strafed and
machine-gunned the floating survivors in a veritable war crime. Such was the
mercilessness of the Pacific war. Then, in April 1943, when the Magic code
showed that Adm. Yamamoto intended to fly in and visit his troops at the
front, U.S. Navy flyers intercepted his airplane, sending the admiral to a
warriors death.
For the rest of the war, U.S. Marines and soldiers hopped from one island
to the next, suffering horrific casualties whenever they needed to seize,
and not bypass, a stronghold. Early on, U.S. commanders began to worry about
the potential catastrophe of invading Japan itself, since with each step to
the home islands the defenders fought even more tenaciously. For example, on
the tiny island of Tarawaabout the size of New York Citys Central
Park5,000 Japanese defenders inflicted 3,000 casualties on the attacking
Marines. That attrition rate was simply unsustainable for the Americans. The
resolve of the Japanese soldiers was demonstrated on island after island.
Almost none became prisoners, partly because U.S. troops decided to stop
taking any, but mainly because to surrender was to the Japanese the ultimate
dishonor. Indeed, the Japanese armys Field Service Code contained no
instructions on how to surrender, stating flatly that troops should [n]ever
give up a position but rather die.
So it was that Nimitz drove straight west across the Central Pacific and
MacArthur hopped to the northeast of Australia. When Nimitzs troops
reached the island of Saipan, the final 3,000 desperate Japanese defenders,
some wielding only knives tied to bamboo poles, suicidally rushed the
American lines screaming the battle cry Banzai! They were wiped out. Then
on Marpi Point, at the northern tip of the island, Japanese women and
children leaped to their deaths off the 250-foot cliffs. The horrified
American interpreters shouted through bullhorns in an attempt to coax at
least some to choose surrender over suicide. Still, thousands jumped, and
when the battle finally ended, the Americans had suffered an additional
14,000 casualties.
In July 1944, President Roosevelt visited his two Pacific commandersNimitz
and MacArthurin Hawaii to discuss strategy. When Nimitz and members of the
presidents staff suggested that it was perhaps best to bypass the
well-defended Philippines, MacArthur loudly objected. Should their Filipino
wards not be liberated, MacArthur boldly warned FDR, I dare say that the
American people would be so aroused that they would register most complete
resentment against you at the polls this fall. Only a man like MacArthur
would dare serve up such an overt political threat. Nonetheless, the
president made another non-decision; both Nimitz and MacArthur would drive
forward as planned and the Philippines remained on the target list.
The war had permanently turned against the Japanese by late 1944. The issue
was settled, and only the final casualty counts were in question. U.S.
submarines cut Japanese oil and other supplies to a trickle. Japan was in
danger of being starved. Then, in the epic Battle of Leyte Gulf, the
Japanese fleet was all but destroyed once and for all. And, when U.S. rescue
vessels approached the thousands of floating Japanese survivors, most
submerged themselves and chose drowning over capture. Leyte Gulf marked the
end of an era of ship-on-ship gunnery duels. Naval airpower was now the
dominant force, and no nation would ever again build a battleship. Moreover,
though the Japanese fleet was forever crippled, it was at Leyte that the
remaining Japanese naval aircraft began their suicidal kamikaze attacks,
purposely flying into American ships.
On Jan. 9, 1945, MacArthur landed more than 10 divisions in the Philippines.
Yet, as predicted, his opponent, Gen. Tomoyuki Yamashita, along with a large
garrison, put up a stout defense. Retreating into the jungles and mountains
of the vast Philippine interior, Yamashita executed a costly delaying action
for months in a campaign that resembled the tough fight in Italy. In the
end, the Philippine invasion was a costly operation that historian David M.
Kennedy has concluded had little direct bearing by this time on Japans
ultimate defeat.
In the Central Pacific theater, the next stop was the volcanic island of Iwo
Jima. Here, despite 72 days of aerial bombardment and three days of naval
gunfire, the 21,000 Japanese defenders managed to inflict 23,000 casualties
on the U.S. Marines. Almost none of the defenders surrendered, and more than
20,000 diedmany incinerated in their bunkers by tank-mounted flamethrowers.
The final battle in the Central Pacific was on the island of Okinawa. Though
the locals were racially distinct, the Japanese considered them part of the
home islands. As had Yamashitas force in the Philippines, the 77,000
Japanese defenders decided not to contest the landing sites and chose to
wage a lengthy battle of attrition inland. The Japanese knew they couldnt
win; they merely hoped to buy time so their brethren could better fortify
the homeland.
On Okinawa, the American invasion force rivaled the numbers put ashore in
Normandy, France. So intense was the combat that the senior American
commander, Gen. Simon Bolivar Buckner, was himself killed. Toward the end of
the desperate, doomed defense, Japanese volunteersin an early form of
suicide bombingwould rush the Americans with satchel charges strapped to
their bodies. The U.S. soldiers and Marines referred to them as human
bazookas. The suicidal tactics also proliferated offshore, where waves of
kamikaze aircraft sank 36 ships, damaged 368 more and inflicted some 10,000
casualties.
In June, the final 6,000 Japanese defenders, armed with sidearms and spears,
made a final Banzai charge. The Japanese commander ordered an aide to
behead him once he had ritually thrust a hara-kiri dagger into his own
belly. When it was all over, 70,000 Japanese soldiers were dead along with
100,000 Okinawan civilians. The Americans suffered 39,000 combat casualties
and 26,000 more non-combat injuries, for a total casualty rate of 35
percent. Thus, with Okinawa and Iwo Jima secured, Hitler dead and Germany
having surrendered, nervous American generals and admirals wondered what
sort of carnage awaited them in Japan itself. The question was whether such
an invasion would be necessary.
Original Sin: Race Rears its Ugly Head at Home and Abroad
This illustration in the U.S. Marine monthly magazine Leatherneck depicted
the Japanese as lice and contained language saying,
Before a complete
cure may be effected the origin of the plague, the breeding grounds around
the Tokyo area, must be completely annihilated. The drawing was published
in March 1945, the same month that the United States Air Forces adopted a
policy of low-level incendiary bombing of Japanese cities.
Im for catching every Japanese in America, Alaska, and Hawaii now and
putting them in concentration camps.
Damn them! Lets get rid of them
now! U.S. Rep. John Rankin of Mississippi, on Dec. 15, 1941
Their racial characteristics are such that we cannot understand or trust
even the citizen Japanese. Secretary of War Henry Stimson in 1942
Racial caste and racism constitute, undoubtedly, the original sins of the
American Experiment. In each overseas war that the U.S. has waged, that sin
didnt halt at the shoreline. Rather, Americas racist baggage was and is
always along for the trip. This was especially true during the Second World
War, a war ostensibly waged for democracy. Both at home and abroad the U.S.
failed to live up to its values and treated African-Americans and the
Japanese in particular with a brutal form of racial animus.
No description of the American homefront in World War II is complete without
a brief account of the internment of Japanese-Americans on the West Coast,
many of them native-born citizens. Essentially, over 100,000 of these people
were uprooted from their homes, turned into internal refugees and then
imprisoned in sparse inland camps for the duration of the war. This
treatment of the Japanese-Americans, ostensibly motivated by fear of
internal subversion (of which almost none was eventually found), was unique
to this Asian minority. Even though Nazi Germany was considered the greater
global threat and the first military priority in the stated Germany-First
strategy of the Allies, no substantial class of German-Americans or
Italian-Americans was interned. That only Japanese were so treated should
not come as a surprise. There had long been racial hatred of the Japanese in
California, and all immigration from Japan was shut off through the federal
Immigration Act of 1924.
So it was on Feb. 19, 1942, that Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066,
sealing the fate of 112,000 Japanese-Americans, 79,000 of whom were
citizens. They were first placed under a curfew, and then, with only what
they could carry, they were moved to camps in a number of states. There they
lived under guard behind barbed-wire fences for years. In many cases those
who were interned had sons fighting for the country that had imprisoned
them. Indeed, in a bit of irony, the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, an
all-Japanese-American unit, was one of the most decorated outfits in the
entire war.
Plenty of Americans were appalled by internment, even at the time. The famed
photographer Dorothea Lange took photos of the removal process. She had been
commissioned to do so by the War Relocation Authority, but once the photos
were developed the government chose to lock them away in archives labeled
IMPOUNDED for decades. Lange herself disagreed with the presidents
executive order, and, according to her assistant, She thought that we were
entering a period of fascism and that she was viewing the end of democracy
as we know it. Despite personal appeals from sympathetic citizens,
Japanese-Americans found no relief from the U.S. Supreme Court, which, in an
infamous 1944 decision, Korematsu v. United States, upheld the order in a
6-3 decision.
Unlike the war in Europe, the Pacific war was a race war, one that cut both
ways. In the Pacific theater, Japanese troops and civilians were treated far
worse than Americas German or Italian enemies. Some of this mistreatment
may be explained by the unwillingness of Japanese troops to surrender,
Japans mistreatment of American prisoners of war and the ongoing anger over
the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. Still, generations of anti-Asian racism
did seem to play a role in the unique animus toward the Japanese enemy. The
hatred on both sides of the Pacific conflict was so intense that the
esteemed historian John Dower called it a war without mercy. Neither side
saw the other as fully human. As one Marine on Guadalcanal lamented, I wish
we were fighting against Germans. They are human beings, like us.
But the
Japanese are like animals. Indeed, it was not atypical for the Japanese
people as a whole to be depicted, especially by wars end, as vermin to be
exterminated. Nor were the Japanese above perpetuating their own intra-Asian
philosophy of racism. They too were a proud, chauvinist people with a great
deal of racial nationalism animating their wartime actions.
Still, there was something unique about the fighting in the Pacific. Though
most Americans loathed the Nazis, it was only in the Pacific theater that it
became commonplace for U.S. servicemen to shoot prisoners, strafe lifeboats,
mutilate bodies, make necklaces out of ears or teeth, and fashion letter
openers from Japanese bones (one of which was mailed to FDR, who refused the
gift). As historian John Dower wrote, It is virtually inconceivable that
teeth, ears, and skulls could have been collected from German or Italian war
dead and publicized in the Anglo-American countries without provoking an
uproar. Prisoner mistreatment also defined the Pacific war. Some 90 percent
of captured Americans reported being beaten, a typical prisoner lost an
average of 61 pounds and more than a third died in captivity. In Europe, by
contrast, 99 percent of imprisoned Americans survived the war. In response
to this mistreatment and especially after several groups of Japanese
attempted ambushes in surrender ruses, U.S. troopers turned to an informal
policy of shooting all prisoners.
Propaganda on both sides depicted the other as racially inferior and
subhuman. Japanese schoolbooks instructed students that they, as Japanese,
were intrinsically quite different from the so-called citizens of
Occidental countries, who were depicted as weak and overly materialistic.
In the U.S., wartime cartoonsincluding animated cartoons by leading
filmmakers such as Warner Bros.portrayed the Japs as buck-toothed savages
and bespectacled lunatics. And, in Frank Capras famous Why We Fight film
serieswhich was mandatory viewing for all soldiers in basic trainingthe
narrator instructed the viewer that all Japanese were like photographic
prints off the same negative. Furthermore, the senior Navy admiral, William
Bull Halsey, publicly defined his mission as to Kill Japs, kill Japs, and
kill more Japs, vowing that after the war the Japanese language would be
spoken only in hell. Overall, while the U.S. government depicted war with
Germany and Italy as a war against fascism or Nazis, in the Pacific the war
was distinctly waged against the Japanese as a people. This alone surely
contributed to the brutality of the fighting.
* * *
Dear Lord, today
I go to war:
To fight, to die,
Tell me what for?
Dear Lord, Ill fight,
I do not fear,
Germans or Japs;
My fears are here.
America!
A Draftees Prayer, a poem in The Afro-American, a black newspaper, in
January 1943
The America that went to war in December 1941 was still a Jim Crow America.
The United States fielded a Jim Crow military, manufactured with a Jim Crow
industry and policed the homefront with Jim Crow law enforcement.
Ironically, a nation that purported to fight against Nazi racism and for
human dignity did so at the time in which nearly all public aspects of
American life remained segregated. The war did, however, begin to change
Americas racial character, setting off one of the great mass migrations in
U.S. history as blacks left the South for Northern industrial plants or
induction into the military.
Throughout World War II, blacks served in segregated units led by white
officers. In the Army they were usually relegated to support duties and
menial labor. They were at first denied enlistment in the Army Air Corps or
U.S. Marines altogether. In the Navy they worked only as cooks and stewards.
(The Naval Academy at Annapolis had yet to have a single black graduate!)
Northern blacks had to deal with the double indignity of serving under white
officers in (primarily) Southern mobilization camps. In such locales, it was
not uncommon for black troops to be denied service in restaurants that
gladly served German and Italian POWs. And, as in World War I, many
uniformed African-Americans (seen as uppity blacks) were lynched.
The vibrant black press recognized all this as a problem from the very start
and pushed hard for racial integration and equality in public and economic
life. The Crisis newspaper editorialized that [a] Jim Crow Army cannot
fight for a free world. While philosophically correct, this proved to be
practically untrue. Some African-Americans, understandably, refused to
serve. One black man from the Bronx wrote to President Roosevelt that
[e]very time I pick up the paper some poor African-American soldiers are
getting shot, lynched, or hung, and framed up. I will be darned if you get
me in your forces.
Some progress was made when FDR mandated equal employment practices in war
industries in the face of black labor leader A. Philip Randolphs threat to
march 100,000-plus African-Americans on Washington. Eleanor Roosevelt, well
known as a civil rights proponent, had arranged for Randolph to meet with
the president, and the result was Executive Order 8802, which prohibited
racial discrimination in defense-related industries. On other issues,
however, Roosevelt caved in to his Southern Democratic supporters. During
the 1944 presidential election, progressive congressmen hoped to guarantee
black soldiers the right to vote, something they were denied in their home
(mostly Southern) states. However, FDRalways politically consciousacceded
to his partys Southern wing and left enforcement of voting laws, even for
soldiers, to the individual states, with obvious consequences. So, huge
numbers of black draftees were fighting and dying for a country in which
they could not vote.
Many blacks pointed to the hypocrisy of such measures and organized to press
for reform. They took to calling their goals the Double V Campaign,
meaning victory over the Axis and victory at home against segregation and
Jim Crow. The Double V philosophy also often had international components,
demonstrating solidarity with black and brown colonized peoples around the
world. As the black sociologist Horace Cayton wrote in the Nation magazine
in 1943, To win a cheap military victory over the Axis and then continue
the exploitation of subject peoples within the British Empire and the
subordination of Negroes in the U.S. is to set the stage for the next world
warprobably a war of color. Indeed, quite a few such wars of colonial
independence did break out in the decades following the surrender of the
Axis.
Violence also plagued military camps and cities on the homefront. When
blacks attempted to move into a Detroit public housing project, whites
barricaded the streets. A riot broke out and 6,000 federal troops marched on
the city in June 1943. That August, another race riot broke out in response
to rumors of police violence in Harlem in New York City. Six people were
killed, and 600 were arrested. Riots cut both ways. In Mobile, Ala., white
shipyard workers rioted over the influx of black workers and the promotion
of some African-American welders. Eleven blacks were seriously injured. In
Beaumont, Texasa town plagued by housing and school shortageswhite mobs
rampaged through black neighborhoods, killing two and wounding dozens.
In the face of the domestic violence and prejudice against blacks in the
military, some African-American troops served with great distinction in the
war. One such decorated unit, the all-black 761st Tank Battalion, fought in
Normandy under Gen. Patton. The fiery Patton sent them straight to the front
with dignity, exclaiming: I dont care what color you are, so long as you
go up there and kill those Kraut sonsabitches. No doubt, such unit actions,
combined with black migration to the North, and homefront activism did,
slowly, shift the needle on civil rights in America. Though a meaningful
civil or voting rights bill would have to wait for two decades, President
Harry Truman, in 1948, three years after the wars end, finally ordered full
desegregation of the U.S. armed forces. It was a small victory, but a
victory nonetheless.
Dropping The Bomb: The Atomic Weapons Debate
Killing Japanese didnt bother me very much at that time.
I suppose if I
had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal.
But all war
is immoral and if you let that bother you, youre not a good soldier.
Gen. Curtis LeMay, U.S. Army Air Force commander in the Pacific theater
One of the greatest and most terrible projects of World War II was the
production of the atomic bomb and the ushering in of the Nuclear Age. In the
end, for better or worse, the United States won the race to harness atomic
energy. That it did so, ironically, was at least in part due to Hitlers
persecution of German Jews, including Jewish physicists, dozens of whom fled
to America and worked on the secret Manhattan Project to build and test the
bomb. German racial biases also derailed their own (eventually canceled)
atomic program after Hitler took to calling nuclear physics Jew physics.
By 1945, the U.S. military had developed atomic bombs capable of destroying
entire cities. The scientists involvedmany of whom actually were
pacifistshad unleashed upon the world a destructive weapon that could not
be stuffed back into Pandoras box.
The question now, with the Pacific war still raging, was whether to use the
A-bomb on Japanese cities. In the generations since the decision to drop the
two bombs, a great debate has occurred among scholars and laymen alike over
whether it was necessary or right to do so. After all, many Americans find
it disturbing to note that the United States is the only nation ever to use
such a weapon in war. The debate centers on the purported justification, or
motive, for dropping the bombs. Most agree that the prime motivation was to
avert the massive American (and Japanese) casualties expected in an invasion
of the Japanese home islands. Some analysts have overestimated the supposed
casualty projectionsthrowing around numbers of up to 1 million American
soldiersto argue that the no-warning atomic bombings were ethically
excusable. However, estimates by top military authorities varied from Gen.
Marshalls low of 63,000 to Adm. Leahys 268,000. Whichever estimate one
chooses, there is no doubt that one deciding factor was fear of high
casualtiesespecially after U.S. troops had suffered a killed/wounded rate
of 35 percent against Japanese defenders on Okinawa just months before.
But were the only options the A-bomb and an invasion? This question hinges
on Roosevelts earlier proclamation that the Allies would accept only the
unconditional surrender of the Axis Powers. This unqualified demand
limited American options for closing the Pacific war and made an invasion of
the home islands seem inevitable. Still, even at the time, there were
dissenting voices on the issue. Roosevelts chief of staff, Leahy, expressed
fear
that our insistence on unconditional surrender would result only in
making the Japanese desperate and thereby increase our casualty lists.
Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy added, We ought to have our heads
examined if we dont explore some other method by which we can terminate
this war than by just another conventional attack. McCloy listed as
alternatives giving the Japanese a warning (or demonstration) of the bomb
prior to dropping or modifying the unconditional-surrender demands. In fact,
the latter might not have proved too difficult.
In reality, by June 1945, Emperor Hirohito had asked his political leaders
to examine other methods (besides a fight to the finish) to end the war. As
it turned out, within Japan serious consideration was given to such peace
entreaties, and Tokyo reached out through Soviet interlocutors to propose a
qualified peace. The main Japanese demandto which the U.S. would eventually
accede!was to maintain the emperor as the head of state.
Either way, by summer 1945 the Japanese were beaten. They were confined to
their home islands, could barely supply their main army in China (an army
that would soon be attacked by the Soviets) and had no navy left to speak
of. To be clear, they no longer posed any serious offensive threat to the
United States. Therefore, couldnt an invasion be avoided, and a simple
naval blockade be continued until Japan surrendered? Perhaps. Then again,
given the extreme defense put up by Japans soldiers throughout the war,
its also plausible that mass starvation might set in before the enemy
capitulated. Its difficult to measure the potential casualty rates and
ethical considerations of this alternative to dropping the bomb.
All of this amounts, in the end, to counterfactual speculation. The reality,
as historian John Dower convincingly demonstrates, is that the eventual
choice to drop two A-bombs on Japan amounted to a non-decision. Besides
one petition against the no-warning use of the bomb initiated by some
prominent scientists who had worked on the Manhattan Project, theres no
evidence that any senior policymakersincluding Trumanever seriously
considered not dropping the weapon on civilians. Secretary of War Stimson
and Manhattan Project leader Gen. Leslie Groves each remember that the final
meeting to discuss dropping the bomb lasted less than 45 minutes. Truman
later wrote, Let there be no mistake about it, I regarded the bomb as a
military weapon and never had any doubt that it should be used. Here we
must understand that these officials and decision makers led a nation at war
that had fire-bombed women and children from the sky as a matter of course.
This, they felt, was necessary and proper. By the time the final decision
was made, nearly 1 million Japanese and several hundred thousand German
civilians had already been killed in conventional bombings. The dropping of
the two atomic bombs, then, was in a sense a non-decision; however, it is
one with which the world has had to live forever after.
None of this should read as ethical relativism or historical apologetics.
There were plenty of senior officials then and soon afterward who opposed or
lamented the use of the A-bombs. Former Ambassador to Japan Joseph Grew
argued that the U.S. should agree both to retention of the emperor and to
eliminate the demand for unconditional surrender. Secretary of War Stimson
thought that contrary to public misconception Japan is susceptible to
reason and might soon surrender if the United States agreed that the
emperor would remain. Key military figures from the war also opposed the
bombs use. Adm. Bull Halseynever known as a soft manwrote, The first
atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment.
It was a mistake ever to drop
it
[the scientists] had this toy and they wanted to try it out, so they
dropped it.
It killed a lot of Japs, but the Japs had put out a lot of
peace feelers through Russia long before. Gen. Eisenhower, meanwhile, wrote
in his memoirs: [Upon hearing the bomb would be dropped] I had
a feeling
of depression and
voiced
my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my
belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was
completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country
should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment
was
no longer mandatory
to save American lives.
Nevertheless, Truman did drop atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of
Hiroshima (140,000 dead) and Nagasaki (70,000 dead) before Emperor Hirohito
declared to his advisers, I swallow my own tears and give my sanction to
the proposal to accept the Allied proclamation. Japan surrendered soon
afterward, and, under direction from the emperor himself, there was no
resistance to military occupation from a populace that quickly took on
pacifistic qualities. Meanwhile, the emperor was allowed to keep his
ceremonial position. The American people had reached V-J Day.
* * *
The problem after a war is with the victor. He thinks that he has just
proved that war and violence pay. A.J. Muste, a noted pacifist, in 1941
World War II altered the planet forever. It was the bloodiest war ever
fought between human beings. It built the foundation for a new world, for
better or worse. Yet there are tragic ironies inherent in the Allied
endeavor. The Western democracies went to war in response to the invasion of
Poland, way back in 1939; still, at wars end the Allies grimly acceded to
the domination of that same Polish state by one of the Allied Powers, the
Soviet Union. Their willingnesseven if they had no real choiceto
substitute an authoritarian Soviet state for a German Nazi state in Eastern
Europe demonstrates what should have been obvious all along: Britain and
France didnt really fight for democratic sovereignty but, rather, for
self-interest, for the balance of power. The Allies ended the war with a
divided Europe, half of which would be undemocratic after all, setting the
stage for a new and deadly Cold War.
Allies who purportedly fought for the freedom agenda of the Atlantic Charter
never lifted a finger to stop the Holocaust or accept substantial Jewish
refugees. The British still dominated an empire full of brown people, while
the Americans carried Jim Crow across the seas. National-liberation
struggles against European colonial rule would proliferate in the decades
following the war, when local populations made Japans earlier obtuse slogan
Asia for the Asians a reality. As for the Jews, after suffering 6 million
deaths amid a stunning global silence, the worlds guilty conscience would
soon shift the burden of past European sins to the Palestinian Arabs of the
Middle Eastestablishing a Jewish state, Israel, in a complex region without
the permission of the local inhabitants. That, of course, would set off a
new intractable conflict, one that has raged ever since the end of the
Second World War.
As for the United States specifically, the wardespite its cost of 400,000
American livesproved a boon. Deficit spending and stimulus brought the
Great Depression to a close, and the destruction of the world economy, while
the U.S. homeland remained untouched, positioned America to lead with
increasing industrial and financial strength. American bankers would run the
International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. American diplomats would
lead politically in the new United Nations.
The U.S., which had harbored traditions of isolationism or at least
anti-interventionism in world affairs since the time of George Washington
and right up until Dec. 7, 1941, would now flex its political and diplomatic
muscles the world over. Never again would the U.S. military retire to its
home bases after a war; instead it would sprout new outposts the word over.
Today, the U.S. has some 800 overseas bases while China and Russia combine
for fewer than a dozen. The full mobilization of the war economy to defeat
the Axis Powers wouldnt disappear so easily either. What emerged was a
powerful military-industrial complex that influenced members of Congress and
benefited the arms manufacturers, so that by the late 20th century the
United States, of all countries, would be the number one global arms dealer.
No less a figure than General, then President, Eisenhower would eventually
warn the nation about this nefarious nexus known as the military-industrial
complex.
The war changed forever the moral calculus of combat, altered what was
acceptable, sometimes in the span of precious few years. Roosevelt in 1940
decried German terror bombing of Dutch cities but in 1945 would sanctioned
his own air forces incinerating 90,000 Japanese civilians in a single night.
All this would set the stage for a world in which both the Americans and the
Soviets could confidently craft nuclear war plans with the potential for
barely imaginable destruction. Nuclear weapons would spread, of course,
until a dayour own dayin which the world lives a hair trigger away from
the annihilation of humanity. One person alone (the U.S. president), or, at
least, one person among a very few global leaders, holds the power to press
the proverbial button and set off a war that would dwarf the cataclysm of
World War II. Now thats a power beyond the dreams of either Hitler or
Mussolini.
When I was teaching freshman cadets, future Army officers, at West Point, I
often concluded my lesson on the Second World War with a purposely
provocative question. What is the moral difference, Id ask, between flying
passenger jets into the World Trade Center and the Pentagonthereby killing
almost 3,000 (mostly) civilianson the one hand, and sending hundreds of
airplanes to firebomb, incinerate, suffocate and boil 90,000 civilians on a
single night in Tokyo, on the other? This question inevitably set off a
firestorm of its own, as cadets yelled and debated with one another (and me)
until the bell rang. The general conclusion of most cadets was simple: Since
the U.S. had actually declared war on Japan, those airstrikeseven though
they targeted exponentially more civilianswere more acceptable than
al-Qaidas attack on the United States. Thats a fair point, and one worth
parsing out, but it too ultimately falls flat. After all, Osama bin Laden
did declare, in writing, war on the United States way back in 1996.
The point of the debate, of the entire analysis of Americas actions in
waging the Second World War, was to grapple with tough questions of ends and
means. Can a country, even a democracy, truly wage a good war? Does such a
conflict exist, even theoretically? If, as I suspect, the answer is
emphatically no, then perhaps its time to jettison the mythology and
sanctity of our memories of World War II and see it for what it was: a
(probably) necessary war, waged most terribly by all combatant nations. A
war that should have dissuaded human beings from engaging in future warsbut
failed to do so. The United States is many things, some admirable, some less
so, but it is most certainly not the innocent protagonist of the Second
World War. We are a nation that incinerated a million civilians from the
sky, matching one-sixth of the Holocaust with our planes. A country, alone
among nations, that chose to drop atomic bombs without warning on two
Japanese cities. We cannot change those facts all these years later, but
grapple with them we must.
For when we analyze the new world that American victory made, a world we
largely still inhabit, it is imperative, and rare, to do so with humility.
The American military, even in its nostalgic heyday, never was simply a
force for good in the world. U.S. power, like all power, corrupts, is
complex and is dangerous. If, even at its best, a necessary war against
totalitarian fascism, it was so brutally vicious and imprecise, then perhaps
we should carefully scrutinize American military hegemonya gift of World
War IIin the world today.
* * *
To learn more about this topic, consider the following scholarly works:
Michael C.C. Adams, The Best War Ever: America and World War II (1994).
Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the 20th Century
(2001).
George Herring, From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since
1776 (2008).
David M. Kennedy, Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression
and War, 1929-1946 (1999).
Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States (2018).
Maj. Danny Sjursen, a regular contributor to Truthdig, is a U.S. Army
officer and former history instructor at West Point. He served tours with
reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has written a memoir and
critical analysis of the Iraq War, Ghost Riders of Baghdad: Soldiers,
Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge. He lives with his wife and four sons
in Lawrence, Kan. Follow him on Twitter at @SkepticalVet and check out