The History Buff's Guide to World War II (46 page)

No country benefited more from geography than the United States. Bordered by two vast oceans and resting between two cooperative neighbors, the nation was effectively in its own world. Safe from attack by land or air and far too large to be taken by amphibious assault, the United States may have been at war, but vast distances allowed its factories and government to function in relative peace.

The forty-eight United States were not entirely free from hostile fire. In February 1942, a Japanese submarine shelled an oil refinery near Santa Barbara, California. Late in the war, thousands of Japanese “balloon bombs” floated to North America, with several hundred reaching land and killing a dozen people.

9
. “THE DECISIVE BATTLE”

Wars are rarely decided by a single event. Most involve extenuated, inglorious bouts of tedium and attrition, punctuated on occasion by sharp spikes of armed engagement. Though World War II followed this pattern to the letter, both Hitler and several members of the Japanese high command developed a counterintuitive faith in a last “decisive battle.”

History may have contributed to this reasoning. Later in the war, Hitler habitually brought up how Prussia’s Frederick the Great pulled out an unlikely eleventh-hour victory in the Seven Years’ War against Austria, France, Russia, and Sweden. In Japan a favorite “lesson” from the past was the pivotal naval battle of Tsushima in the R
USSO
-J
APANESE
W
AR
. More recent memories conjured up thoughts of instant glory, namely Hitler’s dizzying successes in 1939 and 1940 and Japan’s sweep into the Pacific in December 1941.
¹⁴¹

Nostalgia turned into military strategy late in the war. In 1944, Japan launched extremely large ground offensives in China and India, an air assault off Saipan, and naval offensives in L
EYTE
GULF. In each case, the commanding officers expressed the desire to win the war in a single blow. Hitler’s last great offensive, known as the B
ATTLE OF THE
B
ULGE
to Americans, was a vain attempt to relive his greatest and most decisive victory.
¹⁴²

In all cases, though inflicting heavy casualties, the Axis lost a disproportionate number of troops. For Hitler’s attack, the losses were nearly two to one. For the Japanese, the deficits averaged out to six to one. The battles were decisive to a certain extent: the massive casualties facilitated defeat, which would have likely come much later had a more defensive posture been taken.

The Japanese Mitsubishi Zero was an excellent fighter plane, but it was purposely built without armor. The rationale was that protecting the pilot made him act less aggressively.

10
. THE “ARMY-NAVY GAME”

Interservice rivalries are as old as military history. Branches often fight each other as much as the enemy for prestige, assets, and autonomy. While the major Allied powers were able to temper internal discord through leadership and communication, the Axis states were not.

Case in point: aircraft. H
ERMANN
G
ÖRING
and Benito Mussolini believed their air forces should have a monopoly on combat planes, which was a fundamental reason why neither navy developed a working aircraft carrier and why Italian and German armies often lacked timely air cover. In contrast, the U.S. Army, Navy, and Marines each had its own combat aircraft, which could be used as needed in any given situation.

Axis intelligence processing remained strictly segregated among the armed services, creating what can be best described as schizophrenic paranoia. The German army, for example, often spent more time spying on the Luftwaffe than on the Allies.

Undoubtedly, the biggest internal rivalry existed in Japan. One of the major incentives for the Imperial Navy to strike into the Pacific was to stem the growing power of the Japanese army, which siphoned much of the military budget with its expanding war in China. The branches also conducted their own work on
INTELLIGENCE
, radar development, and jet propulsion yet refused to share their findings with each other. The divisive practice wasted money, resources, and time, all of which the empire could not afford to lose.
¹⁴³

One American military rivalry that continued uninterrupted was the annual Army-Navy football game. Navy won in 1942 and 1943; Army triumphed in 1944. The official program for the 1941 game, played nine days before Pearl Harbor, contained a photo of the doomed
USS Arizona.

PURSUING THE WAR

GENERAL HISTORIES

There are at least 175,000 books about World War II. Approximately half are in English. On average, a bound volume concerning the conflict is published somewhere in the world every four hours.
¹

In the first postwar decade, publications were principally memoirs, diaries, and battle accounts. Most read askew, penned by individuals validating themselves while belittling their opponents. Authors desiring to create balanced works suffered from want of reliable information. Letters, diaries, dispatches, and statistics were available only in small amounts. Military intelligence, especially in the outbreak of the Cold War, was off-limits. Most archives were either destroyed, in disarray, or under lock and key.

Over time, accessibility to information increased, treatment of the subject matured, and several excellent publications emerged. Listed below are just some of the best overviews for general audiences, selected for their accuracy, cited evidence, readability, and most of all, for their capacity to thread complex events into a comprehensive tapestry.

1
.
WORLD WAR II
JOHN KEEGAN (1989)

Eloquent and effortless, John Keegan's writing is that of a craftsman wholly familiar with his medium. The venerable authority on military history, he expounds upon Machiavellian axioms and modern artillery with equal ease. Keegan's
World War II
outshines the two standard general texts on the subject: Peter Calvocoressi and Guy Wint's encompassing but argumentative
Total War
and Gerhard Weinberg’s scholarly but impersonal
A World at Arms
.

Simultaneously expressive and succinct, Keegan’s single-volume work vividly demonstrates how war is more than a meeting of brigadiers and battalions. For example, other overviews may mention the Italian campaign involving the U.S. Fifth and British Eighth armies. Keegan reminds readers that those armies consisted of Texans, Londoners, and Canadian volunteers, plus crack units from India and vengeful émigrés from Poland, and that they fought swollen streams, a bitter winter, and jagged mountains, as well as Germany's best reservists. Drawing upon his vast knowledge of the past, Keegan also points out how these men were up against history itself, noting that Italy had only fallen twice to rapid invasions in the last thousand years.

Excluded are endnotes. Keegan offers a small remedy by including a collection of suggested readings. But the absence of supporting materials does not diminish his credibility, as Keegan has a well-earned reputation for factual and impartial work.

Concerning military events, Keegan's coverage is not exhaustive. He highlights only six engagements: the B
ATTLE OF
B
RITAIN
, the airborne operation of Crete, the naval engagement at M
IDWAY
, the armored battle around Falaise, urban fighting within B
ERLIN
, and the amphibious attack on O
KINAWA
. But by using case studies, he defines the Second World War as a whole, not as a ledger of names and dates, but as a leviathan conflict of human beings empowered by science and inseparable from nature.

In 2000, in recognition of his great and many contributions to the field of history, John Keegan was knighted.

2.
“THE GOOD WAR”: AN ORAL HISTORY OF WORLD WAR TWO
STUDS TERKEL (1984)

Chicagoan Studs Terkel possessed an astounding gift for extracting gems of memory. Though trained in law, Terkel developed a talent for reading people through years of work as a radio actor, disk jockey, and television emcee.
Hard Times
, his 1970 interview anthology of the Great Depression, remains one of the most humanistic reflections on a topic often treated as purely economic. He repeats the accomplishment with greater effect in a compilation of a hundred reminiscences in the Pulitzer Prize–winning
The Good War
.

Contributors cover the spectrum: generals and privates, homemakers and hospital nurses, politicians and shopkeepers, Americans, Germans, Japanese, and Russians. From venerable economist John Kenneth Galbraith's controversial views on aerial bombing to poet Oleg Tsakumov's childhood memories of living through the siege of Leningrad, each monologue is potent in its unpolished candor. Two of the most moving excerpts come from Maxine Andrews of the Andrews Sisters singing trio and army nurse Betty Hutchinson. Both tenderly recount working with soldiers who suffered multiple amputations and extensive facial destruction.

Missing from this great litany is an overall conclusion. After displaying the harrowing stories of others, Terkel (who served in the army air force) downplays his own experiences. Yet in leaving his subjects and audience to their own conclusions, Terkel divulges his subtle genius. He simply listens.

In 1953, Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities accused Studs Terkel of being a Communist. Terkel refused to name names and was subsequently blacklisted and fired from his job in television.

3.
THE OXFORD COMPANION TO WORLD WAR II
EDITED BY I. C. B. DEAR AND M. R. D. FOOT (1995)

Containing thousands of subject entries, statistical tables, a chronology of each military theater, and more than 120 detailed maps,
The Oxford Companion
is the outstanding single-volume encyclopedia on the war.

Credibility rests firmly on its faculty of contributors, a who's who of World War II historians, including the above-mentioned Gerhard Weinberg, preeminent Eastern Europe authority Norman Davies, and the ever-popular Stephen Ambrose. More than 130 scholars and military commanders from more than a dozen countries provide succinct information on leaders, battles, weapons, logistics, communications,
etc.
Cross-references link related topics, and suggestions for further reading direct readers to reputable works.

The Oxford Companion
's shortcomings are few. Treatment is not always proportional. For example, a synopsis of Australian involvement receives ten pages of text, whereas the Ukraine gets four. Yet Ukrainians underwent German and Russian invasion and experienced 150 times the casualties as the Aussies. Subject headings are not always self-evident: casualty figures are listed under “demography”; songs can be found under “marching songs.”

Organizational nuances aside, the work is exceptionally accurate and inclusive. Strong in the traditional focuses of Germany, Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union, and Japan, it also gives attention to commonly bypassed regions, such as East Africa, the Balkans, Scandinavia, and the open seas. It is aptly titled a companion, as it helps readers navigate through other works that might be heavy in detail but light on definition.

Collectively, the contributors to
The Oxford Companion
earned more than three hundred academic degrees and spent more than a thousand years attaining them.

4.
U.S. ARMY IN WORLD WAR II
U.S. ARMY CENTER OF MILITARY HISTORY (1946–)