The History Buff's Guide to World War II (29 page)

Some of the best collectors and transporters of information were young women. Unlike healthy young men of military age, teenage girls were rarely suspected of being partisans or spies. Some of the best spy networks consisted predominantly of ordinary citizens, such as France’s “Noah’s Ark,” led by M
ARIE
-M
ADELEINE
F
OURCADE
.
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Occupying powers never fully stopped the flow of information. When Nazis demanded the confiscation of all bicycles in Holland, the Dutch scrounged up and sent in every old rusty bike they could find and simply hid their good ones. The Third Reich also tried, with little success, to eradicate all known homing pigeons.
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Though not always heeded by the military hierarchy, citizens offered their scouting services. The Belgian underground supplied most of what the Allies knew about German radar tactics and development. Civilians informed Allied bomber command that Germany’s ball-bearing plants were almost exclusively in Schweinfurt. When a V-2 rocket crashed far off course, Poles removed the engine and sent it off to London.
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“Rote Kapelle” (Red Orchestra) was a prolific Communist spy ring operating against the Third Reich. In 1942, the Gestapo arrested forty-six of its members, tortured them, then guillotined the women and hanged the men. One Leopold Trepper escaped and made his way to Moscow. Stalin accused him of being a Nazi spy and threw him into prison.

7
. PROTECTION OF JEWS

Swedish envoy Raoul Wallenberg granted “protective passports” to tens of thousands. Practically the whole villages of Chambon-Sur-Lignon, France, and Nieuwlande, Holland, helped those in need. Diplomat Sugihara Sempo lost his job in the Japanese consulate in Lithuania for granting exit visas to fleeing Jews.

In spite of the obvious danger in doing so, many citizens of Western Europe defied the principle objective of Himmler’s SS from 1942 to 1945. In Warsaw the underground had literal meaning; neighbors broke through cellar walls to create a vast grid of subterranean passageways, connecting with sewers and water mains, creating paths to freedom. France had scores of escape routes out of the country. Danes successfully ferried away 95 percent of their Jewish population to neutral Sweden. Even fascist Italy was wholly uncooperative with the Nazis in regard to handing over Jewish citizens.
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Through their own volition and the work of others, some 280,000 European Jews left the Continent, while more than 3 million stayed behind and survived the Holocaust.
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The State of Israel officially recognizes more than fourteen thousand Gentiles as “Righteous Among Nations” for having risked their lives to save Jews.

8
. UNDERGROUND PRESSES

To people under occupation, underground papers were gold in black and white. From scraps of parchment slipped into mail slots to multipage dailies plastered on walls, the written word became the most consistent, visible, and communal expression of the resistance.

Some journals actually prospered. France’s
Combat
grew from 40,000 copies per issue in 1943 to 300,000 by 1944.
Défense de la France
went from a circulation of 5,000 in 1941 to almost a half-million by the time of liberation. Ukrainians printed and read an estimated 400 million copies of leaflets and newspapers during the war.
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For reasons of safety, most covert prints were small and temporary affairs. Norway had some three hundred different journals, but the majority soon disappeared by force or flight. Shortages of ink and paper, loss of printing machines, plus arrests and executions quieted many more. Yet everywhere the presses continued. Soviets behind the lines read
Death to Our Enemies
. Italians took courage from
Unita
, Belorussians learned of guerrilla triumphs in
Partizanskoye Slovo
. News mattered less than the papers themselves, acting as tangible proof that the resistance was alive and working.
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One country where underground presses did not flourish was China. The country’s literacy rate of 20 percent may have been a contributing factor.

9
. PASSIVE RESISTANCE

After the war, when citizens claimed to be part of the resistance, they most often recalled engaging in labor “slowdowns,” a kind of patriotic slacking. Machinists “misplaced” tools, teamsters drove at a leisurely rate, station agents took their time loading trains. Work absenteeism often reached 30 percent in parts of occupied Europe and China. It all had some tangible effect. From prewar levels, Belgian coal mining dropped more than 60 percent; steel and iron production in Luxembourg fell 70 percent.
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Barely perceptible but greatly reassuring were symbolic gestures. Devoted Scandinavians refused to talk to suspected collaborators, what became known as the “Ice Front.” Dissidents marked sidewalks and walls with patriotic graffiti—“H7” for Norway’s King Håkon VII, the Cross of Lorraine in France, and V for victory across Europe. Everywhere, flowers and wreaths, especially those in the hue of national colors, appeared in buttonholes and on monuments.
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Citizens often used levity to lighten the weight of oppression. As with speech, press, and assembly, the freedom of humor was also heavily curtailed under totalitarian regimes. Cracks against Hitler and Stalin often brought imprisonment, but the custom endured nonetheless, with its profound ability to both hide and express anguish.

Humor became a tool of survival in many concentration camps. Jewish psychiatrist and author Viktor Frankl kept himself sane in Auschwitz by trying to invent a joke each day.

10
. DRAFT EVASION

Faced with conscription into factories and the armed forces, literally millions simply refused to go. Nazi Germany demanded seventy thousand young Norwegian men for labor service in the Third Reich; they collected only three hundred. A further eighty thousand went into hiding rather than submit. Before and during the war, countless ethnic Germans and Austrians living in East Europe fled westward to avoid impressments into the Red Army. The largest number escaping mandated service were the Chinese, millions of whom refused to work for either the Japanese or the warlord C
HIANG
K
AI
-S
HEK
.
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Governments designated the adamantly uncooperative in several ways. The Third Reich used the term “work-shy elements.” Stalin preferred the classification “traitors.” The usual reprimand for those so designated was harsh imprisonment. Though no state tolerated “draft dodging,” a few countries officially recognized conscientious objection, namely Australia, Holland, the Scandinavian nations, Great Britain, and the United States.
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Of these, Britain may have been the most tolerant. Only about 1 percent of those drafted declared objection on moral or political grounds. Some were given jail time and some were excused from obligation, but most “conchies” were assigned to public service. Less than 0.1 percent of American draftees declared C.O. status. The U.S. government granted no dismissals. Options were jail, public service, medical experimentation (such as subjection to typhus, hepatitis, sleep deprivation), and military support.
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Both Britain and the United States had C.O.’s take part in combat. A third of Britain’s airborne ambulance corps on D-day were conscientious objectors. In a definitive expression of counterviolence, several hundred C.O.’s volunteered for bomb disposal.
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In the Second World War, three American conscientious objectors won the Medal of Honor, two of them posthumously.

ALTERNATE NAMES FOR THE WAR

In the early years of the war, when its scope was not yet perceptible, American president Franklin Roosevelt openly asked advisers and colleagues what he should publicly call the conflict. No one offered a satisfactory answer.
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Four years later, a month after the war had ended, Roosevelt’s replacement asked the same question. With further deliberation, Secretary of War Henry Stimson recommended a term that had appeared often in radio broadcasts, newspapers, and several articles of legislation. The president agreed, and on September 11, 1945, Harry Truman accepted “World War II” as the official U.S. designation.
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The term was primarily of German construct, employed by Nazi spokesmen who wished to convey a sense of worldliness to their endeavor. Cultures adopted the title gradually, if at all (“Second World War” was not part of British vernacular until the late 1940s). Around the world, people mainly called it la guerre, voina, senso, der Krieg, the war. Following are the next most common references among hundreds used in print and in public during and immediately after the conflict.
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1
. HITLER’S WAR

Historically, wars often had surnames attached to them. For example, the Napoleonic Wars, King George’s War, Lincoln’s War,
etc.
So, too, with the Second World War, whether in praise or condemnation, people spoke of Roosevelt’s War, or Churchill’s, or Stalin’s, or Hirohito’s. In the Western Hemisphere, however, one name dominated the rest.

Historians will perpetually debate the actual extent of Adolf Hitler’s role in creating international conflict in 1939 (see
CAUSES
). Whether people considered him a blathering figurehead or an unequaled mastermind, Hitler certainly declared himself the latter. In private conversations, public speeches, written statements, and military dispatches, he repeatedly emphasized a national destiny for greatness and his crucial role in making it a reality. “Essentially all depends on me, on my existence,” he informed his military commanders in 1939.
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Socially, politically, militarily, his imprint was everywhere, thanks mostly to the German Ministry of Information and Propaganda. City centers throughout Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe were given a “Hitler Square.” Boulevards and buildings were christened in his honor. The prestigious SS First Panzer Division, the National Socialist youth organization, and even public greetings bore his name.

Rather than dismiss his role in the course of world events, his enemies tended to emphasize it. Branding Hitler as an “evil genius,” “madman,” and “sole cause of the war” not only simplified the escalation of international hostility but also removed all other governments from any shared responsibility for the collapse of peace.
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A wartime Czech joke stated: “In India, a person starves because of all the people. In Europe, all the people starve because of one person.”

2
. THE PHONY WAR

In early September 1939, in response to the Nazi invasion of Poland, both France and Britain declared war on Germany, called up reservists, and mobilized their armed forces.

In major cities, women and children piled into railcars and buses carrying food, clothes, and gas masks, evacuating en masse to private homes, farms, schools, and hotels. Across Western Europe, as many as two million children were abruptly relocated. Many Frenchmen assumed they would be attacked by both the Germans and Soviets, just as Poland had been. Britain’s Parliament legislated a flood of emergency acts, including forced blackouts, rationing, and the closing of dance halls and movie theaters for fear of bomber strikes. Hospitals turned away heart patients to free up beds for anticipated battle casualties.
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Then nothing of substance happened. Aside from France’s advance into German territory near Saarbrücken and sporadic German bombings of English and French positions, all sides avoided provocation. Only on the high seas was there much action, mostly via U-boats. Days turned into weeks, then months. A partially relieved, partially annoyed British public cried “Phony War.” Clever journalists labeled the apparently baseless scare Sitzkrieg. Cynical Parisians called the whole situation Drôle de guerre.

In Britain, by late spring of 1940, 40 percent of all children and 90 percent of mothers and babies had returned to their original residence. Similar percentages returned in France and the Low Countries. Americans as well suspected the worst was likely over. A promising Harvard student named John Fitzgerald Kennedy, son of the American ambassador to Great Britain, adroitly observed, “Everyone is getting much more confident about our staying out of the war, but that of course is probably because there is such a lull over there.”
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