A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (126 page)

Within two months, the Allies held a tactical beachhead and had brought in enough supplies that at the end of July they could attempt a breakout. Using a devastating air bombardment—this time extremely effective—Bradley’s troops punched out at Saint-Lô. With the Americans coming down from the northeast (behind the enemy), and the British and Americans from the west, the German Seventh Army was nearly encircled. Hitler ordered a counterattack to drive between the armies, but once again, Ultra, the code-breaking operation, allowed the Allies to place antitank guns in defensive positions to slaughter the advancing panzers. Hitler finally ordered a retreat. German forces now rushed to escape complete encirclement. Thanks to a rearguard defense at the Falaise Gap, one third of the German forces escaped the pincer, but overall, the disaster “was the worst German defeat since Stalingrad,” and it ensured the liberation of France.
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Moreover, Patton, reassigned to command of the U.S. Third Army, was now in his element—in the open fields of France with plenty of gas. By that time, the U.S. Seventh Army had invaded southern France and driven north to link up. The delay in unifying the northern and southern command in France ensured the communist domination of southeastern Europe. Already the Soviets had taken Poland and other territories. Churchill urged the United States to divert forces from the southern French landings to an amphibious invasion on the Adriatic side of Italy, where the Anglo-American forces could swing east and save large parts of the Balkans from Soviet conquest. But at the Tehran Conference in 1943, Roosevelt had promised eastern Europe to Stalin.

Meanwhile, Patton launched his armored invasion, bypassing Paris in pursuit of the fleeing German army, capturing an astounding 2,700 Germans per day. This allowed French partisans, in conjunction with the French Second Armored Division, to liberate the City of Light. General Charles de Gaulle led the procession down the Champs-Élysées in August 1944. With Bradley’s armies gulping enormous quantities of fuel and consuming vast stockpiles of supplies, the Red Ball Express, a continuous trucking route from the beaches to the front, tried to maintain a flow of materials.

Here Eisenhower’s good judgment failed him. Montgomery from the north and Bradley in the center-south both demanded supplies, and the Allies had enough to keep only one of the two groups moving decisively. Either group probably could have punched through to Berlin, perhaps ahead of the Soviets. True to his diplomatic evenhandedness throughout the invasion effort, however, Ike refused to focus all the emphasis on one spearhead, choosing to advance slowly across a broad front. Perhaps because he realized that the Anglo-American forces were capable of a bolder stroke, Eisenhower approved Montgomery’s plan for Operation Market Garden, an overly ambitious airborne drop intended to capture six key bridges in Holland leading into Germany. But advancing British armored units could not seize the bridge at Arnhem in time, and the operation failed. Weather, not Hitler, slowed the Allies. Over Christmas, 1944, American armies settled down for a hibernal regrouping.

A Contrast in Governments

Meanwhile, a political nonevent occurred back home. In November 1944, Roosevelt ran for a fourth term. Governor Thomas A. Dewey of New York, the Republican nominee, came remarkably close in the popular vote (22 million to FDR’s 25 million), but suffered a blowout in the electoral college (432 to 99). Dewey and the Republicans had virtually no platform. They supported the war and could hardly complain about FDR’s wartime leadership. Roosevelt, by virtue of his control over presidential events at a time when gas and even newsreels were “war materials,” could overwhelm any foe with a propaganda blitz. To appease the party bosses, however, Roosevelt ditched left-wing vice president Henry Wallace, who was certainly the most radical politician ever to hold that office, and replaced him with someone more politically appealing, Senator Harry S. Truman of Missouri.

An “election” of sorts was also being held in Germany, where, not long after D-Day, a cadre of German officers attempted to assassinate Hitler with a bomb at his Wolf’s Lair bunker. They failed. He had the ringleaders brutally executed.

The contrast between the two episodes of choosing leadership—one in America, one in Nazi Germany—could not be clearer. In the totalitarian state, where death reigned, Hitler escaped removal through luck, terror, and total control of the state media. But in the United States, even during a major war whose outcome still had not been decided, regular elections took place, and the Republican opponent mounted a substantial challenge to a popular incumbent.

The Wolf’s Lair assassination attempt reflected the desperation of the professional officer class in Germany, which was in sharp contrast to the deluded Hitler’s fantasies of victory. Despite the increasing collapse of the Eastern Front, Hitler remained convinced that a sharp victory would turn American public opinion against the war and allow him to regain the initiative. He therefore stockpiled some 2,000 tanks, including the new Tiger IIs, an equal number of planes, and three full armies for a massive counterattack through Belgium under the cover of winter weather. Hitler still fantasized that he could split Allied lines, somehow force the United States to withdraw from the war, and defeat the Soviets in the East without pressure from the Western Front. In December 1944, the Battle of the Bulge began as Germans ripped a hole forty-five miles wide in Allied lines. Devoid of air cover, Allied troops rushed poorly supplied units, such as the 101st Airborne, under General Anthony McAuliffe, to key spots like Bastogne. Lacking winter gear, and often without ammunition, the airborne forces nevertheless somehow held out as an isolated pocket in the German rear. When German negotiators approached, asking McAuliffe to surrender, he responded with the one-word reply, “Nuts!” Then the weather cleared, and the Nazi advance ground to a halt. Eisenhower’s staff quickly assembled 11,000 trucks and 60,000 men to throw into the breach on a single day. Again, American productivity and volume of equipment overcame temporary tactical disadvantages as the American forces hurled a quarter of a million men at the German troops, spearheaded by Patton’s Third Army, which arrived to rescue the 101st.
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To this day, living members of the 82nd reject the notion that they needed rescuing. Either way, the outcome in the West was no longer in doubt.

In another sense, however, the Battle of the Bulge was a postwar defeat for the United States: by shifting massive forces away from the Eastern Front, Hitler had ensured that the Soviets and not the Anglo-Americans would capture Berlin. Attacking just weeks after Bastogne was relieved, the Red Army swept through Poland, moved into East Prussia, and slowed only thirty miles from Berlin. Eisenhower’s resupplied troops crossed the Rhine River (Patton ceremoniously urinated in the river), capturing the bridge at Remagen that the Germans had intended, but failed, to destroy. While the Russians regrouped on the Oder River east of Berlin, Patton swung into Czechoslovakia, and other Allied units reached the Elbe River. There Ike ordered the troops to halt. He had received a mandate from Roosevelt that Prague and Berlin were to be captured by Soviet forces. Patton fumed, arguing that he should march into the German capital before the Red army, but Ike, wishing to keep out of the geopolitics, blundered by allowing the communists to bring historic and strategic cities into their empire.

Shaping the Postwar World

Soviet forces closed to within fifty miles of Berlin by February 1945, establishing communist regimes in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. Austria was poised to collapse, and much of Finland lay in Soviet hands. In Eastern Europe, only Greece, where Churchill had dispatched British troops to prevent a communist takeover, remained out of Stalin’s orbit. The communist dictator arrived at Yalta in the Crimea for a meeting with the other members of the Big Three, Churchill and Roosevelt, able to deal from a position of strength. From February fourth to the eleventh, the three men deliberated the fate of postwar Europe. Stalin told the western leaders he would brook no unfriendly governments on his borders. Yet what, exactly, constituted the borders of an expansionist Soviet state? The boundaries of prewar Russia? Germany? Stalin did not elaborate. In fact, the Soviets, stung by the loss of millions of lives during World War II and fueled by communist self-righteousness, fully intended to impose a buffer zone across all of Eastern Europe.

Roosevelt had entered the alliance with a naïve view of Stalin, believing his advisers’ reports that the dictator was interested in traditional balance-of-power concerns, not a buffer zone or an expansionist communist ideology. Roosevelt ignored the reality of Stalin’s mass exterminations—which had exceeded Hitler’s—going so far as to tell Churchill, “I think I can personally handle Stalin better than either your Foreign Office or my State Department.”
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Roosevelt even admitted planning to give Stalin “everything I possibly can and ask nothing from him in return [and therefore] he won’t try to annex anything and will work with me for a world of democracy and peace.”
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This, of course, was Roosevelt admitting that he would violate the principles of the Atlantic Charter of August 1941, which he himself had codrafted, and which prohibited turning territories over to occupying countries without the “freely expressed wishes of the people concerned.”

No doubt his failing health contributed to the mistaken notion that he could “control” Stalin. Stalin promised “free and unfettered elections” in Poland at the earliest convenience, but neither there, nor in other areas seized by the Red Army, did the USSR take the slightest step to withdraw. Roosevelt, on the other hand, seemed obsessed with drawing the Soviets into the war with Japan, perhaps fearing the high casualties that he knew a full-scale invasion of the home islands would produce and hoping that the Red Army would absorb its share. And at the time, FDR did not know with confidence that the atomic bomb would be ready anytime soon; he knew only that American scientists were working on it. He informed Stalin of the existence of such a program, to which Stalin responded with a shrug of indifference. The Russian dictator already knew about it, of course, through his spies; but that would only become apparent after the war.

Among other agreements at Yalta, the Big Three decided to try German and Japanese principals as war criminals, creating for the first time in history a dubious new category of villainy for the losers of a conflict. The Holocaust notwithstanding, it set a dangerous and perverse precedent, for at anytime in the future, heads of state on the wrong side of a military outcome could be easily demonized and tried for “crimes against humanity.” Worse, unpopular winners could now find themselves accused of war crimes by losers whose religion or politics were shared by whatever majority of the international governing body happened, at the time, to be overseeing such nonsense. Predictably, critics of American policy in the Vietnam War some twenty years later would employ the same language against Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon.

Yalta also produced an agreement to hold a United Nations conference in San Francisco in April 1945, with the objective of creating an effective successor to the old League of Nations. To Roosevelt, these “concessions” by Stalin indicated his willingness to work for peace. Little did he know that Soviet spies in the United States had already provided the Russian dictator with all the information he needed about the American positions, and thus he easily outnegotiated the “woolly and wobbly” Roosevelt.
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Others, however, noted that Stalin traded words and promises for carte blanche within territory he already held, and that having lost more than 20 million defeating Hitler, Stalin felt a few more casualties in the invasion of Japan seemed a cheap price in exchange for occupying large chunks of China, Korea, and northern Japan.

Whether or not the Soviets would actually enter the conflict in the Far East remained a matter of doubt. What was not in doubt was the complete collapse of the Axis and the inglorious deaths of the fascist dictators. Allied armies closed in on Mussolini at Milan; he fled, only to be captured by Italian communist partisans who killed the dictator and his mistress. Then, with the Red Army entering Berlin, Hitler married his mistress and the two committed suicide. On May 7, 1945, General Alfred Jodl, chief of staff of the German armed forces, surrendered unconditionally. VE Day (Victory in Europe Day), May 8, 1945, generated huge celebrations. These, however, would be tempered in relatively short order with revelations of the Holocaust and of the vast empire that the Soviets had now established. It cannot be ignored that “more Jews would be gassed from the time Patton closed in on the German border in late summer 1944 until May 1945 than had been killed during the entire first four years of the war.”
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Thus, there is some evidence to support the notion that a “narrow front” might have saved countless Jewish lives.

The Holocaust and American Jews

Roosevelt’s Soviet policy, which gave the Communists undeniable advantages in postwar Europe, must be seen in the context of another issue in which pressures existed to divert resources from purely military aims, namely, a steady stream of information reaching the United States about the mass murder of Jews by the Nazis. America’s response to news of this genocide, the Holocaust, patterned exactly FDR’s approach to the Soviet advances and demonstrated remarkable consistency by the American government. In each case, the goal remained winning the war as quickly as possible. Roosevelt refused to veer off into any other direction, whether it involved denying the Soviets postwar footholds in the Balkans or diverting air power to bomb railroads leading to the Nazi death camps. In retrospect, however, the two issues were vastly different, and required separate analysis and solutions.

Hitler had made clear to anyone willing to read his writings or listen to his speeches that from at least 1919 he intended a
Judenfrei
(Jewish-free) Germany. Those who suggest he did not intend the physical extermination of the Jews ignore the consistency with which Hitler operated and the single-minded relentlessness of the Nuremberg Laws and other anti-Semitic legislation. Most of all, they ignore Hitler’s own language: he referred to Jews as subhuman, a “bacillus,” or as “parasites” on the German body. One does not reform a parasite or educate a bacillus. From his earliest speeches, he compared Jews to a disease. One does not exile a disease; one eradicates any sign of it.