The History Buff's Guide to World War II (42 page)

If anything, the tragedy of Dieppe provided an opportunity for heroics. Chaplain Maj. John Foote carried thirty wounded men to rescue ships, then swam back to be with his regiment as it entered captivity.

9
. GERMANY’S GIANTS (NAZI LARGE WEAPONS PROGRAM, 1937–44)

Along with some of the most effective designs in trucks and artillery, Hitler’s arsenal also included a cast of the big and bizarre, none of which worked well, unless their purpose was to devour materials, money, and manpower.

From his experience in World War I, Hitler respected the destructive effect of artillery. Figuring bigger was better, he endorsed production of a colossal rail howitzer christened the “Gustav Gun,” or as its crews dubbed it, “Big Dora.” Weighing nearly fifteen hundred tons and measuring fifty yards in length, it could only be moved in pieces and on two parallel railroad tracks. Assembly required two more adjacent tracks for cranes. Big Dora took five hundred men to load and fire, plus nearly a division to maintain. The entire contraption, used sparingly in the capture of Sevastopol and against Warsaw, was comically inaccurate and profoundly ineffective.
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Another überhowitzer was the V-3, a cannon 170 yards long, designed to shell London from Continental Europe. Hitler ordered fifty, each to be buried within the French coastal limestone, their exposed muzzles aiming directly at the British capital. Testing was a failure. Shells fell short, the goliath barrels cracked and exploded during firing, and the complex subterranean bunkers were never fully completed. But twenty-five thousand shells were made, and thousands of technicians and artillerists worked on the project for a year before Allied bombers and demolition experts entombed the guns and bunkers under a blanket of rubble.
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Good props for shooting photos but not for much else, the Third Reich’s mammoth railroad guns never justified their consumption of resources.

Not to be outdone, the Luftwaffe failed to develop an adequate four-engine bomber program but did create a six-engine lumbering behemoth made to span the Atlantic and bomb New York, which it never did. German engineers also produced a tank that weighed 180 tons (the workhorse Sherman tank weighed a fifth as much). Slow and costly, with a fickle transmission and engines to match, the tank was too wide and heavy for nearly every road in Europe, and it served as solid proof that the leaders of the thousand-year Reich were not adept at thinking ahead.
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Among the designers working on Germany’s supertanks was a Mercedes engineer who also helped develop the Volkswagen: Ferdinand Porsche.

10
. MUSSOLINI’S BALKAN EXCURSION (ITALY INVADES GREECE, OCTOBER 28, 1940)

Benito Mussolini became envious of (and definitely overshadowed by) Hitler’s lightning successes in Poland, Scandinavia, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, France, and Romania. In comparison, il Duce’s Continental empire began and ended with Albania. Aspiring to greater conquests, he targeted Greece, a politically fragmented country, albeit a good source of olive oil and only one-fifth the size of Italy.

Expecting an easy victory, he ordered a demobilization of nearly half his army just two weeks before the invasion. Claiming to have planned out every detail, he had obviously missed a few. Most of the troops assembled for the invasion were barely trained and very inexperienced. His estimate of Greek army strength was low—by a factor of ten. Greece’s mountainous terrain apparently was not taken into account, nor was its impending winter weather. Yet there was little opposition to the plan, mostly because Mussolini neglected to inform Hitler, his own air force, and his own navy of the operation until a few days before it was set to begin.
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Not only did the attack fail, but the Greek army also pursued Mussolini’s paltry force of seventy thousand back into Albania. Mussolini later added four hundred thousand troops to the effort with no positive effect. In the face of such blatant ineptitude, an Italian public began to turn against the dictator. The following year, an angered but sympathetic Hitler invaded Greece for Mussolini and, in doing so, may have fatally delayed the invasion of the Soviet Union.

Hours before he killed himself, Hitler reflected on the great catastrophes that plagued his reign. Among the failures he listed was Mussolini’s “useless campaign against Greece.”
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HEROINES

It is said that wars are man-made. Whether warfare is a natural pursuit of either gender is debatable, but women were involved in every arena of World War II.

Most nations discouraged women from joining the service until the totality of war dictated otherwise. Eventually one out of fifty Americans in uniform was female. In Poland the ratio was one in twelve, and in Britain one in ten. Unlike their male counterparts, most women served in noncombat roles, a point emphasized by recruiting slogans. American naval auxiliary posters read, “Enlist in the Waves, Release a Man to Fight at Sea.” In nearly every culture, the order was, “Be the woman behind the man behind the gun.” Even in the Soviet Union, where by necessity nearly a half-million women served in combat, the initial battle cry was “men to the front, women to the home front.”
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Guerrilla warfare offered greater opportunity for frontline work. Conservatively, 10 percent of underground combat units in France, Italy, and Yugoslavia were women. Fifteen percent in Russia and Poland were female. Directly involved in the fighting, their losses mounted accordingly. While the U.S. Army lost sixteen female nurses killed in action, Yugoslavia lost nearly ten thousand woman partisans, approximately one out of every four who served.
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Behind the lines, women were the backbone of aid societies, such as the International Red Cross, Women’s Volunteer Service of Britain, and the Greater Japan Women’s Association. Most prevalent was the female presence in the work force. “Rosie the Riveter” symbolized a doubling of American women in factories. By 1945 36 percent of the American labor pool was female, 37 percent in Britain, and 50 percent in Germany and the Soviet Union.
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Regardless of the degree of service, official recognition was not forthcoming. In 1944, France awarded the Compagnon de la Libération medal to 1,057 individuals, only 6 of whom were female. Germany granted tens of thousands of Iron Crosses throughout the war, with a paltry 29 going to women. America’s 100,000 WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) would not receive veterans benefits until 1977.
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Many risked their lives, but few achieved widespread influence and adoration in the service of their country. Listed here are ten exceptions. They are just ten out of some half-billion women who persevered through the largest and bloodiest of wars yet “made by man.”

1
. ELEANOR ROOSEVELT (U.S., 1884–1962)

The “First Lady of the World,” Eleanor Roosevelt utilized her unique station, sharp intellect, unbendable will, and the modern media to become the most visible woman on the globe and arguably the most influential female in the Western Hemisphere since Catherine the Great.

Venomous to the corrupted, altruistic to the downtrodden, intense, vocal, and uncompromising, Eleanor Roosevelt was an idealist driven to action. She was the first wife of a president to hold press conferences, write syndicated columns, and speak regularly on radio, “fighting for democracy at home” when the pressures of war threatened to reverse social gains. She unsuccessfully protested the internment of Japanese Americans and lobbied for granting visas to European Jews. In the name of equality and the war effort, she successfully lobbied for increases in the number of women in the workplace and African Americans in the military.
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Though she intensely hated to travel, Roosevelt flew to Britain and the South Pacific during the war, often in rickety bombers, to speak with dignitaries, address civilians, and visit the sick and wounded in uniform. In one month she managed to traverse twenty-five thousand miles.

Her brash and relentless character offended many, including white conservative southerners, anti–New Deal Republicans, and a fair number of women. But others grew to revere her, particularly minorities, British civilians, and American servicemen. Accompanying her on a hospital tour in Guadalcanal, the stoic Adm. William “Bull” Halsey marveled at her determination and tenderness and greatly respected the way “she went into every ward, stopped at every bed, and spoke to every patient.” Winston Churchill said she had “a spirit of steel and a heart of gold.” Joseph Goebbels, angered by her popularity and influence, forbade German papers to write about her.
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Immediately after the war, at the insistence of President Truman, Eleanor Roosevelt became a U.S. delegate to the United Nations.

While visiting wounded soldiers at Walter Reed Hospital, Eleanor Roosevelt came upon a young man severely burned while fighting in North Africa. He mentioned he played the piano. To encourage him, Mrs. Roosevelt said he could practice on the Steinway in the White House, which he did for a year, and he recovered.

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. MARINA RASKOVA (USSR, 1912–43)

Soviet Aviation Group 122 consisted of standard-issue bombers, fighters, uniforms, and equipment. Formed in late 1941, there was little to distinguish the group from any other air-combat unit in the war, except that nearly all of its pilots, mechanics, navigators, and support personnel were women, assembled under the leadership of Marina Raskova.
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The first professional female navigator in the Soviet Union, Raskova was a famous endurance pilot before the war and became an air force officer. The young and cheerful Raskova also knew Stalin, which enabled her, in the face of much social and professional opposition, to demand and lead the formation of a female air-combat unit.
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