By mid-May 1943 it was all over and the Axis in North Africa completely smashed. Much of the credit goes to Allied airpower, which cut off the German supply line by sea from Italy and then, when the Germans and Italians tried to resupply the Axis troops by air, shot their transports out of the skies by the hundreds, at a ratio of ten to one. As well, Montgomery’s Eighth Army, which had defeated Rommel’s Afrika Korps in Libya and chased it back into Tunisia, then proceeded to smash it again and again as the Germans set up rearguard lines, only to have them overrun by Allied tanks and infantry. The Americans had become a formidable battle force by now, too, and the Axis was being hammered on both sides in the unforgiving, mountainous terrain. The fighting was bitter and costly but the the steady stream of American tanks, artillery pieces, and warplanes ferried across the Atlantic supply line from U.S. ports was taking its toll. On May 7 Allied troops entered the major cities of Tunis and Bizerte to a riotous welcome of cheering, kisses, and flowers flung by the liberated French population. The Mediterranean was now open to Allied shipping; there was no more Axis threat to Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Libya, and the Suez Canal and the Germans had been handed their first major defeat. It would not be the last; in fact, it was only the beginning.
Nearly 300,000 Axis troops were taken prisoner, and very few escaped to fight another day—a remarkable achievement, and even more ignominious for the Axis since the newsreel cameras were churning, recording the events. What the Allies had assumed, wishfully, would take a mere month or so had taken seven, with dreadful loss of life. But now they were poised to invade Sicily, and then on into the Italian homeland, with the now hardened American GI sharpening his trench knife or bayonet with bloodthirsty vigor.
Things were going no better for the Germans in their attack on the Soviet Union. They had failed to overrun Stalingrad the previous year but in the late summer and autumn of 1942 they attacked with renewed vehemence, reducing most of the city of half a million to rubble. Still the Soviets held them on the banks of the Volga and, with the harsh Russian winter again coming on, the reinforced Red Army attacked in a pincers maneuver, trapping the Germans in the snow and biting cold. After their last airfield was captured, the German commander, Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus, asked Hitler for permission to withdraw, since his troops were starving, but this was met with the same directive Der Führer had delivered to Rommel at El Alamein: “fight to the last man.” This they almost did. By mid-January nearly 120,000 German soldiers had been killed and Paulus surrendered the rest, about 100,000, to the tender mercies of Joseph Stalin’s people. Of these, only 5,000 ever came back after the war. Not only that, but the hundreds of thousands of Russian prisoners who were repatriated by the Germans after the war were immediately sent off by Stalin to hard labor in the gulags, branded as traitors.
The Russian affair sealed Hitler’s fate. If he had held off declaring war on the Soviet Union until the situation in North Africa had been settled—or not even attacked Russia at all—then the course of the war might have changed in his favor, at least for a while. But Hitler foolishly spread himself too thin and in the end he and his nation paid the price.
The price was high; when it was over Germany was for all practical intents destroyed.* Rather than stand trial for his crimes Hitler shot himself in the final days as Soviet tanks and troops pulverized Berlin. Here was where the argument against Roosevelt’s “unconditional surrender” edict came into play. Some believed that high German officials (provided their own lives were spared) would willingly have surrendered Germany to the Allies instead of resigning themselves to being conquered by the Soviets, who they knew would have long memories of atrocities visited upon their country by the Germans. But Roosevelt’s unconditional surrender did not include any deals about sparing any high officials’ lives and so they fought on to the bitter end. As it turned out, Stalin and the Soviet communists confiscated more than half of Germany and all of Eastern Europe for themselves and stayed put for more than forty years until it was discovered by the Europeans—and the Russians too—that the practice of communism was no bed of roses.
Erwin Rommel, who had lost North Africa for the Third Reich, was rewarded for his efforts by being put in charge of the English Channel defenses for the Allied invasion of France that everyone knew was coming. In 1944 he was seriously injured when a U.S. plane attacked his staff car and, while recuperating, was sucked into the abortive plot to assassinate Hitler, hatched by a number of high-ranking German officers. When it failed Rommel, who had become a German national hero, was found out by Hitler’s Gestapo but allowed by the Nazis to commit suicide by poison rather than submit to the dishonor of standing public trial.
The Japanese, after resounding defeats at Midway, Guadalcanal, and New Guinea, unadvisedly hunkered down for a long fight. The spirit of their armies was then necessarily reversed from the offensive to the defensive, at which they excelled if only because of their soldiers’ unwavering disposition to die for their emperor. During the long bloody slog across the Pacific there were many harsh battles for Japanese-held islands because, unlike the Germans, when the Japanese said they were going to fight to the last man they actually meant it.
It was this same tenacity that caused the Japanese to pay the price, too. By November 1942, American nuclear physicists, using facilities at the University of Chicago and working under General Leslie Groves, set off the first sustained atomic chain reaction. This demonstrated at least in theory that an atomic bomb could be created. The science was still so new that two different and conflicting methods were used to create the material to build the thing. One was through the production of specially enriched uranium (the same uranium that at the breakout of war had been secretly shipped from the Belgian Congo and stored on Staten Island), processed at an enormous plant built in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, near Knoxville. The other was through use of plutonium, produced at an even more enormous facility near Hanford, Washington.* At their peak these plants occupied thousands of acres and employed tens of thousands of workers, all cleared for the utmost security. Another facility was set up in the desert near Los Alamos, New Mexico, to produce the actual bombs themselves, one igniting uranium, the other plutonium.
Having been driven all the way across the Pacific by the U.S. armed forces and watching their homeland cities bombed to rubble every day, if the Japanese even at that late date had understood the handwriting on the wall and surrendered unconditionally, they surely would have spared themselves the agony of nuclear holocaust. But that would have meant loss of face and thus their misery became palpable. One still has to wonder, though, how much Roosevelt’s unconditional surrender proclamation at Casablanca had to do with it.
When the war finally ended General Tojo was convicted by an Allied military tribunal and sentenced to death but not before he attempted suicide by trying to shoot himself in the heart with a pistol. He missed. By then the American and British POWs had been freed and their stories of Japanese atrocities inflamed the Allied world. As Japan’s highest commander, Tojo was held ultimately responsible for all of this and, for that matter, for starting the war in the first place. Just past midnight on December 22,1948, along with six other high-ranking Japanese generals and admirals, Tojo was marched to the gallows in a Tokyo prison and hanged. In a final act of defiance, just before the trap was sprung, each of the seven condemned shouted “Banzai!” Among Tojo’s final words was a haiku he himself had composed.
It is time for farewell.
I shall wait beneath the moss,
until the flowers are fragrant again
in the islands of Yamato.2
Nearly a thousand Japanese officials shared Tojo’s fate, from high-ranking officers to prison guards identified by former POWs bent on revenge, resolution, and what has now come to be called “closure.” Among these were General Tomoyuki Yamashita, the Tiger of Malaya, and General Masaharu Homma, who had led the invasion of the Philippines.
Yamashita, who had replaced Homma as high commander of the Philippines, was convi
cted on accusations that he allowed the destruction and rape of Manila in 1944 as the Allies closed in. It was not a particularly strong case, and Yamashita, who was several hundred miles away at the time, insisted he knew nothing of the event. But he was convicted anyway and hanged in a prison yard near Manila on February 23, 1946. General Homma was blamed for the Bataan Death March and related atrocities, which he also denied knowing anything about, but he was allowed the more honorable death by an American firing squad a week later.* The executions of these two men created a bit of a stir in the Western press because, unlike the war-crimes tribunals in Tokyo and Nuremberg, their convictions and sentences seemed by some to have come as a result of a kangaroo court ultimately responsible to General MacArthur himself. Perhaps this was so; by that point MacArthur truly considered himself “supreme,” and these were the men who had run him out of his beloved Philippines.
The emperor, however, was not punished. This decision was also made by MacArthur who, as commander of Allied forces in the Pacific, wished to use His Majesty as a pawn to bring about harmony between the Japanese people and the Americans who now occupied their country.
The Japanese-American woman known as Tokyo Rose got a six-year prison sentence, but Colonel Masanobu Tsuji, who many later came to believe was responsible for the mistreatment of so many prisoners, was not accused or tried, and lived out his life in Japan, even writing a book and becoming an elected member of the rejuvenated Japanese Diet, or parliament. Commander Mitsuo Fuchida also escaped prosecution, converted to Protestantism, and wrote a book about his experience in leading the attack on Pearl Harbor and the fighting at Midway, published, interestingly enough, by the U.S. Naval Institute Press in Annapolis.
It was nearly two years into the war before the American torpedo fiasco was finally straightened out by the U.S. Navy’s Bureau of Ordnance. Until then the bureau insisted on blaming the lack of Japanese ship sinkings on bad marksmanship by U.S. submarines and destroyers. Finally one U.S. Navy sub skipper turned in a report that got the attention of somebody in navy headquarters. He recorded that in July 1943 he had fired four torpedoes at a Japanese tanker at a range of 1,000 yards—sitting-duck range. None exploded. In frustration, he then fired the remainder of his entire arsenal at the enemy tanker—twelve more torpedoes—and found that all were duds.
When the ordnance people finally began looking into the problem they discovered two things. First, the American torpedo firing mechanisms were oversensitive and, if the missile hit an enemy ship head on, it most often would mash into itself and not explode. Second, many other American torpedoes had been equipped with a state-of-the-art magnetic field detonator, which was supposed to make the thing blow up whenever it entered the magnetic field of a ship. Unfortunately, what nobody at the Bureau of Ordnance thought to consider was that near the equator—where so much of the Japanese shipping was concentrated—the magnetic field of ships is quite different than it would be in, say, the North Atlantic or deep in the South Pacific—or even the Caribbean—and thus most American torpedoes were running harmlessly about eleven feet beneath the enemy ships.3
At last the torpedo problems were resolved and U.S. sinkings of enemy vessels increased dramatically. But in fact Japan, in particular, had so neglected its merchant marine in favor of building warships that it could not even take advantage of all the bounty of its southern conquests, even without the interference from American subs.
Admiral Yamamoto did not live to see the destruction of his navy and his homeland, and one imagines that this was probably a good thing for him, since he likely would have found himself after the war in some Allied prison, if not swinging from an Allied rope. Two months after the Japanese evacuation of Guadalcanal Yamamoto decided to fly down from Truk and take a tour of the installations on Rabaul to inspect his troops. The message revealing this plan—including date and time—was plucked out of the air by American code breakers in Honolulu and sent straight up to Admiral Nimitz. After a brief consultation with Navy Secretary Knox, it was decided to try to assassinate the Japanese commander by aerial ambush. Sixteen of the new American P-38 fighters were dispatched from Henderson Field and, at precisely the time indicated, Yamamoto’s plane appeared over the skies of Bougainville, where it was shot down and crashed into the jungle, killing all aboard. The navy did not reveal this stunning news story to the media for fear of alerting the Japanese that their most secret code might be compromised, and up until the end of the war Imperial General Headquaraters believed it was just plain dumb luck on the part of the Americans. For his part, Nimitz appeared uncharitably disappointed in Yamamoto’s somewhat clinical assassination, informing his fellow officers that, instead, he’d “hoped to lead that scoundrel up Pennsylvania Avenue in chains, with the rest of you kicking him in the ass.”
Just before the war ended a far more solemn procession was led up Pennsylvania Avenue. After serving the longest term of any U.S. president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt died of a stroke at his retreat in Warm Springs, Georgia, in April 1945. Though he didn’t live to see the surrenders, by early 1945 it was clear that the end was near and that the democracies (excepting the Soviet Union) would win. From his first election as president in 1932 Roosevelt had become a lightning rod, loved and hated with as much passion as any U.S. president ever has. But he had been a splendid wartime leader and even his many enemies could not begrudge him that. His faithful aide Harry Hopkins, who was chronically ill all during the war years but had shuttled back and forth to England to carry out Roosevelt’s wishes, died the following year.
In England, even before the war ended, the British electorate turned Churchill out of office, owing mainly to the labor union vote. After he had led them so magnificently for seven long and perilous years, it seemed a noteworthy act of ingratitude. Also because of the war, the vast British empire, which in 1939 had encompassed nearly a quarter of the earth, was slowly dismantled. It just wasn’t worth it anymore. The process went on for nearly twenty years, but by the late 1960s there remained outside the isles of Great Britain itself no vestiges of Rule Britannia save for a few isolated outposts. For better or worse, her once subject peoples were now free to do of their own choosing, but soon many of these former colonies—particularly in Africa and the Middle East—perhaps inevitably, degenerated into chaos and bloody turmoil, and remain so today.
In France the imperious Charles de Gaulle got his wish and became the leader of the French people (while his old antagonist Giraud had faded into obscurity). But de Gaulle, too, was plagued with colonial unrest, including bloodthirsty revolutions in the French colonies of Algeria and Indochina (Vietnam). Henri-Philippe Petain, now the eighty-nine-year-old former leader of the Vichy puppet government, was found guilty of treason and sentenced to death by firing squad. The sentence was later commuted to life in prison, where he died in 1951.
Of the other individuals included in this drama: The spy “Cynthia” who had unclothed herself in the French embassy in Washington eventually married the French naval captain who aided her in obtaining the Vichy naval codes that had so assisted the North Africa invasion. According to her biographer, H. Montgomery Hyde, the two were still living happily together twenty years afterward.
Commander Columbus Darwin Smith and his companions Woolley and Storey made it through to Chinese-American positions after a nearly two-month, seven-hundred-mile trek through Japanese-held territory. From there they were flown to India on one of the Hump transport planes, where they finally sat down to the supper they’d been dreaming about: lobster, steak, and french fries, washed down with iced champagne.
Immediately after the Japanese surrender, General Chiang Kai-shek and his Chinese Nationalist Army predictably went to war with Mao Tse-tung’s communist forces. After several years Chiang was defeated, whereupon he took the remainder of his troops and their families and supporters to the island of Formosa (now Taiwan), where their multitudinous descendants reside today, much to the irritation and displeasure of China’s communist regime.
; Of the American military men, Eisenhower of course went on to lead the Allied forces in the D-day landings at Normandy in June 1944 and the ultimate conquest of Germany and, afterward, become the thirty-fourth president of the United States. George Patton, after a tempestuous but successful career as commander of the famed Third Army, which spearheaded the American attack on Germany, died of injuries suffered in a traffic accident just after the war ended. He is buried in the American military cemetery in Luxembourg, where a life-sized bronze statue commemorates his career.
When the First Marine Division was relieved on Guadalcanal General Alexander Vandegrift was made commandant of the Marine Corps, from which position he fought a long but ultimately successful battle after the war to keep Congress from folding the corps into the army and navy.
After fulfilling his promise to the Filipinos that “I shall return,” Douglas MacArthur as supreme commander of U.S. forces in the Far East, presided over the surrender and reconstruction of Japan and, in 1950, over the Korean War. Sacked for defying instructions from President Truman, MacArthur finally retired to the United States, a country he had not set foot in since his first commission to the Philippines in 1935.
James Doolittle, after the celebrated Tokyo raid, was named commander of the U.S. Twelfth Air Force during the North Africa landings and later, in Europe, of the Fifteenth and Eighth Air Forces, respectively. At one point when Patton was in the doghouse with Eisenhower for the notorious incident of slapping an enlisted man who had said he had “battle fatigue,” Doolittle made a special trip to see his old friend, then in exile in Sicily. “When I landed,” Doolittle said, “there was Georgie in his famous jeep with the three-star flags flying, his helmet reflecting the sun gloriously and his ivory-handled revolvers at his side. He rushed forward, threw his arms around me and, with great tears streaming down his face, said, ‘Jimmy, I’m glad to see you. I didn’t think anyone would ever call on a mean old son of a bitch like me.’”
1942: The Year That Tried Men's Souls Page 46