Download Lecture: The World at War

The World at War
World War II was, militarily, an entirely different sort of war than World War I.
The Great War had bogged down in trench warfare and ultimately proved to be a war of
attrition. World War II was a war of movement. Entirely new to the battlefield were the
radio telephone and the bazooka, a hand-held rocket launcher. With these tools, infantry
troops captured territory rather than merely holding territory. Inventions from World
War I were improved for World War II including airplanes (with better bombing), tanks,
hand grenades, flamethrowers, and more portable machine guns. New in the air were
rockets, jets, and helicopters. Plying the skies, even at night, was RADAR (Radio
Detecting and Ranging). Plying the seas were aircraft carriers. The US found itself in a
race with Germany to produce an atomic weapon. We won.
While women helped win World War II (even being the first test pilots for
helicopters), there are several men who were particularly important and whose names all
Americans should remember. George C. Marshall, the Chief of Staff for the American
military, was the most important but least remembered because it was his job to pick the
Generals and Admirals who fought the war. Ernest King was the highest ranking
Admiral in the Navy, but his subordinates Chester W. Nimitz and William F. (Bull)
Halsey were the most remembered for learning how to win with aircraft carriers. Under
Marshall in the Army were Dwight D. Eisenhower in the European Theater and Douglas
MacArthur in the Pacific Theater. Generals Mark Clark and George S. Patton made
names for themselves fighting the Germans under Eisenhower’s direction of both
American and British forces. Eisenhower, or Ike, was the Supreme Commander.
The situation was grim when America declared war against the Japanese and their
allies responded by declaring war against us. At sea the German U-boat menace claimed
400 US Merchant vessels in just six months, but by 1943 the Germans built 198 new
submarines and lost 186 to Allied destroyers. A destroyer destroyed a submarine by
dropping depth charges after detecting the sub’s approximate location using sonar. When
a depth charge detonated near a submarine, the combined pressure of the ocean and of the
explosion caused the U-Boat to implode, not explode.
To secure Australia the Japanese moved a fleet of warships four times the size of
what the US could bring to bear to a place in the South Pacific called the Coral Sea. This
battle was historically significant because on May 7th and 8th in 1942 ships fought without
ever seeing one another. American aircraft carriers, therefore, saved Australia even
though Billy Mitchell had been court-martialed when he first suggested the idea of
having planes take off and land on a deck built up over a large ship. Planes launched
from carriers from both sides scoured the seas looking for the enemy fleet and then could
either strafe, torpedo, or dive-bomb enemy ships.
Admiral Yamamoto, the architect of the Pearl Harbor attack, was finally turned
back in a three-day battle for Midway Island from June 3-6 in 1942. The Americans flew
Dauntless dive bombers and sank or crippled all of the four Japanese aircraft carriers in
the fleet attacking Midway. Then MacArthur got air and sea support to launch the first
major amphibious assault on a Japanese position at Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands.
MacArthur developed the plan of “leapfrogging” around heavily fortified islands
occupied by the Japanese. This strategy allowed Americans to focus on the main goal, to
eventually secure islands from which American planes could routinely bomb the
Japanese mainland.
In Europe Allied forces prepared to attack the periphery of Hitler’s would-be
empire in North Africa. Dwight Eisenhower had never led troops into battle, but he
designed Operation Torch to land troops using amphibious assault craft. While waiting
beneath the Rock of Gibraltar for a break in the weather, Eisenhower developed a
leadership doctrine that can serve you well when you lead, which most of you will do.
Ike said, “Optimism filters down in an organization. Pessimism filters down faster.”
Finally, the weather improved and from November 7-8 in 1942 green American troops
fought their way onto the African continent.
Bernard Montgomery, a flamboyant British general, was already there. One of
Eisenhower’s chief goals throughout the war was to channel the headstrong Patton and
Montgomery to fight the Germans instead of each other. Montgomery went at the
German general known as the Desert Fox, Edwin Rommel, at the Battle of El Alamein.
This battle is still the largest tank battle in history, and the British won. Patton got his
shot at the Germans at Tunis, where he also won and famously stepped out into the open,
shaking his fist at Rommel and shouting, “I read your book! I read your book!” Rommel
had written a book on tank tactics. The battle for North Africa was over by May of 1943.
The soft underbelly lay exposed. Allied forces took Sicily in 1 month, Patton racing
Montgomery all the way. Italy was more difficult, and our troops took eight months to
fight up the peninsula just from Naples to Rome by June of 1944. The winter of ’43-’44
was so cold that American troops had to keep our tanks constantly in motion to prevent
them from being frozen to the muddy roads.
Operation Overlord came next, and it remains the largest attack ever made on an
enemy’s shores. “D-Day,” military jargon for the day the attack begins, was the attempt
to attack in France to open yet another front from which to march on Berlin, thereby
relieving the Soviets who would march from the opposite side. On June 6, 1944,
thousands of planes bombed and strafed German defensive positions in Normandy. Over
5,000 ships disgorged 176,000 men onto the beaches while three divisions of airborne
troops parachuted behind enemy lines to cut off both retreat and re-supply. Even with
this overwhelming force, and even though the Germans thought the attack was coming
elsewhere, their resistance was so strong it took a whole week to secure 7 miles of beach
from 5 to 15 miles inland. Edwin Rommel retreated, was surrounded, and prepared to
surrender for which Hitler ordered him shot.
American forces liberated France on August 25, 1944. We were ready to invade
Germany by September of 1944, exactly five years after they had invaded Poland to start
the whole war. Back home FDR ran again after America rejected the idea of postponing
the presidential election until the war ended. I hope that all Americans recognize that
letting an election be postponed by a crisis is how a dictator will take over our republic.
Note that the selection of a Vice President was all important because no one thought
Roosevelt would survive his fourth term. Harry S. Truman was a World War I veteran
and anti-corruption Democrat from Missouri. He was as tough as the Missouri mules that
had been shipped to Burma to help the war effort there.
The Germans did not go quietly. Hitler threw his last supply of tanks and
gasoline into the Battle of the Bulge, named such because the Panzer divisions penetrated
50 miles deep into the broad front Ike was driving across Europe toward Germany. This
attack also occurred in bitter cold after a snow storm. Most Americans in the direct line
of the assault were slaughtered. Bastogne was completely surrounded, and the Germans
sent a message to General McAuliff demanding his immediate surrender. McAuliff sent
the famous response, “Nuts!” The best the German translator could do with that was “Go
to hell.” The 101st Airborne parachuted into Bastogne to reinforce it, and Patton was sent
to the rescue. When Patton arrived, McAuliff refused to acknowledge that he had been
“rescued.” The German offensive was stopped but even that victory occurred largely
because the Panzers had run out of gas.
Hitler, surrounded now by the western Allied forces and the Soviets, refused
advice for a strategic retreat. By April 18, 1945, the last major German army surrendered
in the Ruhr valley. On April 25th, US and Soviet forces met face to face in Germany. On
April 30th Hitler got married to Eva Braun and promptly shot her and himself in his
underground bunker. His guards had difficulty finding enough gasoline to carry out their
Fuhrer’s last wish, the burning of his body and his personal records. A similar fate had
occurred to Mussolini and his mistress back on April 28th when an Italian mob lynched
them and tore their bodies apart. “VE” day occurred on May 7, 1945, with the
unconditional surrender of all German forces by German Admiral Doenitz.
In the Pacific theater, Douglas MacArthur did go back to the Philippines on
October 22, 1944 and said, “I have returned.” American forces were able to gain back
the Philippines through the largest sea battle ever, the Battle of Leyte Gulf. Amazingly,
the Japanese divided their superior navy into thirds, which we beat one by one. A distinct
cultural difference caused Japanese commanders to commit suicide when their ships were
sunk while American commanders just boarded new ships and fought on. The worst
battles Americans have ever fought happened on Iwo Jima in March of 1945 and
Okinawa in April. Both were fought in order to acquire air bases close enough to allow
round-the-clock bombing of Japan from “unsinkable aircraft carriers.” These were
volcanic islands that made hellish battlefields. Mt. Suribachi, the dormant volcano on
Iwo Jima taken by US Marines, was the sight of the most famous WWII photograph, the
raising of the American flag. The Japanese had been there for years tunneling in the
volcanic rock of the mountain to make it a formidable fortress.
The death of FDR on April 12, 1945, in Warm Springs, Georgia, was a blow to
American morale. Many of the soldiers fighting the war had never known another
president. Truman became president and was only then briefed on the Manhattan Project
and the nature of the weapons it created. He attended the Potsdam Conference with this
knowledge in July of 1945. Truman met with Stalin and Clement Atlee, the Prime
Minister of England that replaced the great warrior, Winston Churchill. The new Big
Three reviewed proposed peace treaties, post-war partitioning, and the prosecution of
Axis leaders (the three Ps of the Potsdam Conference). Truman hinted to Stalin that
America had developed a weapon that could destroy cities. Historians often cite that
conversation as the beginning of the Cold War. Stalin thought Truman was bluffing.
George Patton was not bluffing when he said America should just roll right on into the
USSR to take out the communists while we had an army on hand. We might have done
well to do so, but Patton was run over by a truck and was no longer around to push the
plan.
Both Stalin and Japan were about to learn that Truman was not bluffing either.
Allied forces had already fire-bombed Tokyo back in April of 1942, and that tactic was
continued and killed more than the atomic bombs did. We detonated the first atomic
bomb in the world at Los Alamos, New Mexico on July 16, 1945, just to make sure it
would work and that it would not ignite the atmosphere and kill all of life on the planet.
Ten days later American planes dropped leaflets all over Japan with an ultimatum—
surrender or suffer prompt and utter destruction. Since they did not, Truman ordered the
dropping of the first atomic bomb on a target city. Hiroshima was selected and four
square miles of the city were destroyed on August 6, 1945. An estimated 60,000
Japanese civilians were killed. Still the Japanese did not surrender, so on August 9th the
second (and last) atomic bomb in our arsenal was dropped on Nagasaki killing around
80,000 people. Finally, the Japanese surrendered onboard the battleship Missouri on
September 2, 1945, or “VJ” day.
When asked why he dropped the bombs, Truman said the Japanese had started the
war with a surprise attack, and ending the war with the atomic bombs saved one million
American lives, not to mention the Japanese who would have been killed in an all-out
invasion of their country. The Japanese government, by the way, had given its women
and children sharpened wooden spears with which they were supposed to resist Allied
invaders. They also had trained boys to take off in planes without teaching them how to
land because they were going to fly the planes into American ships.
The worldwide expenditure of money to fight World War II is estimated at $1.1
trillion. $230 billion in damage was done. Estimates of the number of civilians killed
range from 50 to 100 million. Combat casualties are numbered more precisely at 22
million killed and 34 million wounded. The US spent a total of $560 billion and had 1
million casualties, 300,000 of whom were killed.
The end of the war spurred the formation of the United Nations that was discussed
at the Dumbarton Oaks Conference in Washington, D. C. and finalized at the San
Francisco Conference. Among other things, the Allied nations demanded the trial of war
criminals like Hideki Tojo and 21 other Axis leaders. Of the 22 defendants, 19 were
found guilty of “crimes against humanity,” and 12 were sentenced to death at what was
known as the Nuremberg Trials. As the war ended, more and more of the Holocaust was
revealed. Eastern European nations fell under the sway of the Soviet Union which was
led by a man so cruel he had killed millions of his own people including all his top
generals. These and other events on top of the destruction from World War II caused
Winston Churchill to pronounce the 20th Century a colossal failure.
On the bright side, the United States of America had saved the world from fascist
tyranny and come out of the war incredibly unscathed. The only successful attack on
America soil after Pearl Harbor was a Japanese submarine’s torpedoing of a truck on a
beach in California. The United States had only six civilian casualties. I repeat, six. The
nations of our enemies and our allies had been destroyed, yet our economy had returned
to prosperity and our country was about to become the richest the world has ever seen.
As you will see, we also became the most generous nation the world has ever seen. In
just the presidency of Harry Truman the United States gave away proportionally more
money than had any other nation or empire before. We took no land as a result of our
victories. We gave back the Philippines to the Filipinos in 1946. Why does the world,
and many of our own citizens, view us as incurably selfish? What more could we give
and remain strong enough to take on the next triumvirate of crazed dictators?