The New York Times Book of World War II, 1939-1945

by The New York Times

  The Times was keen during the war to show that it could maintain its political independence, demonstrated by its support for the Republican, Wendell Wilkie, in the 1940 election and for Franklin Roosevelt, a Democrat, four years later. It was difficult both before the war and during it to remain indifferent to Axis aggression. Only an automaton, “a journalistic robot,” wrote Daniell, “could remain neutral in such circumstances”. He thought that what was still possible was “journalistic objectivity” in the face of the barrage of misinformation and propaganda to which correspondents were subjected everywhere.11 If The Times followed a line at all, it was to support internationalism. Sulzberger had been anti-war in the earlier 1930s, but both he and Charles Merz, the new editor appointed in November 1938, came to see the importance of greater American involvement in the wider world. Ferdinand Kuhn, the veteran correspondent in London before Daniell, predicted in 1939 that British weakness in the face of Germany would bring an inevitable doom of economic decline and apocalyptic bombing, while the United States seemed Britain’s natural successor in the world, thanks to the “virility and youthfulness” of its population and the opportunities to “use our democracy wisely.”12

  The Times remained a strong advocate throughout the war of the idea that the United States should assume its proper share of post-war responsibilities. The Times diplomatic correspondent, Harold Callender, in A Preface to Peace published in 1944, warned that the United States now faced “an essentially smaller and tighter world in which no great power can be neutral or isolated.”13 Sulzberger remained anxious through the discussions that led to the formation of the United Nations Organization that somehow the public would fail to see that internationalism was now in its interest. In August 1945 The Times claimed, not without reason, that “we have become the most powerful nation in the world.” But the message was intended to make sure that the American leadership and public understood that this meant an end forever to isolationism.14

  The influence of The Times is hard to judge, though editorials were clearly read with interest and concern in the White House and by leaders abroad. But when it came to direct involvement, the opportunities were limited. The Japanese procurator, summing up the case against Otto Tolischus after his arrest, told Tolischus that because in a democracy the press affects public opinion, and public opinion affects the government, the things he had written contributed to a policy that “led to war between Japan and the United States,” and that Tolischus was therefore “responsible for the war.”15 In truth, that kind of influence was far removed from reality. The Times occasionally provided a platform to prominent soldiers or politicians to explain their case. British Air Chief Marshal Arthur Harris was given several pages in 1944 to describe in great detail what the bomber offensive was accomplishing, the fruit of an earlier correspondence between Sulzberger and Harris about promoting bombing strategy in the American press.16 In the summer of 1943, Sulzberger, accompanied by James Reston, visited Moscow to meet Soviet leaders. His objective, with Roosevelt’s personal approval, was to try to show the Soviet leadership that the American press understood that Russia was an important part of the war effort. He was shown the Pravda offices and was puzzled that there was no news room (news was handed down from above) and he met Soviet Foreign Commissar Vyacheslav Molotov, who smiled and said little. Sulzberger concluded that “Russia did not want to be known,” and The Times ran many fewer Soviet stories later in the war than it had in 1941.17 Soviet attitudes toward the paper can perhaps be summed up by a hostile profile of The Times’ defense correspondent, Hanson Baldwin, published in Pravda in April 1944, in which Baldwin was called “an admiral of the ink pool” and accused of writing misleading and patronizing military analysis.18 The Times’ greatest influence was undoubtedly its unstinting support for the United Nations project and American world policy. In October 1944 The Times condemned both “nationalistic isolationists” and those pure idealists who wanted a genuine “Parliament of Man” for undermining the search for a new world organization, which for all its faults would still be better than a return to the pre-war world.19

  The Times was progressive on many issues that were important to wartime America. There were anxieties about the large extension of presidential powers brought about by the war, which explains Roosevelt’s often awkward relationship with the paper. On the right of blacks to join the war effort and to fight and work on equal terms, The Times ran regular reports and campaigned for greater integration. Special mention was made of the black unit that fought in the embattled enclave at Bastogne in December 1944 during the Battle of the Bulge.20 There were regular features and editorials highlighting the work that women were doing and the paper provided a platform for the argument that after the war more women would want to continue with a career rather than accept the role of unpaid housekeeper. Neither American blacks nor American women got what they wanted in 1945. The Times’ description of the disembarkation of demobilized soldiers in New York failed to comment on the segregation of white and black soldiers as they came down the gangplank.

  The Times was not shy on exposing wartime atrocity, whether in the Czech village of Lidice or by the Japanese in the Chinese city of Nanjing. And the paper was a force in exposing injustice, evident in its regular coverage of the British failure to offer independence to India. The Times has been criticized, however, for failing to influence opinion on the biggest horror of them all, the persecution and extermination of six million European Jews by Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich. It is nevertheless misleading to suggest that The Times ignored the subject. Throughout the 1930s and into the war, it published reports on German policy against the Jews. It reported on Kristallnacht in November 1938, and in November 1942 on Heinrich Himmler’s systematic slaughter of Polish Jews.21 But Arthur Sulzberger was conflicted about his own Jewishness, hostile to Zionism, and at great pains to ensure that American anti-Semitism would not identify The Times as a “Jewish paper.”22 In his determination to achieve that end, as Susan E. Tifft and Alex S. Jones wrote in “The Trust,” their history of The Times, “he missed an opportunity to use the considerable power of the paper to focus a spotlight on one of the greatest crimes the world has ever known.” Articles about the murder of the Jews rarely made it to page one of the paper. The description of the operations of the death camp at Treblinka appeared on page 11. In “Buried by the Times” Laurel Leff wrote that the destruction of Europe’s Jews “remained below the surface, only emerging now and then in a diluted and fractured form.”23

  What The Times did in the wartime years was to publish what Hanson Baldwin called “history in the raw,” different from the “precise, emotionless chronology of school books.” This was the view of history as it happened, with all its limitations, and it was possible to get many things wrong, since reporters were always looking to an uncertain future, unlike historians who look back on a certain past. The Times published articles in late 1932 and early 1933 suggesting that there would never be a Hitler dictatorship. In April 1940, four weeks before British Primes Minister Neville Chamberlain resigned, the paper reported that he seemed more secure than ever as British leader. On June 12, 1941, ten days before the Barbarossa campaign, The Times ran Walter Duranty’s special report that renewed agreement was much more likely between Germany and the Soviet Union than war.24 Duranty, a longtime Moscow correspondent for The Times and Pulitzer Prize winner, was later severely criticized for underplaying Bolshevik brutalities and ignoring the Ukrainian famine in the early 1930’s, causing the paper to renounce the award.

  But The Times also got many things right, and often told the story before its major competitors. Both the good and the bad are reproduced in this selection of wartime articles culled from tens of thousands published throughout the whole period of war from 1939 to 1945. Since many of the articles were very long in the original, some, though not all, of this selection have been edited down from their original length. They have been chosen because they reflect the main narrative of the war seen from the perspe
ctive of New York, including war on the home front and some of the strange quirks that the war provoked in American and European daily life. Articles also appear that describe the tough daily routine of service life in the field, which many correspondents shared. The narrative moves from crisis and uncertainty for the Allies, through a tense period in 1942 and 1943 when everything still seemed poised in the balance, to a final rush for victory which a stubborn Axis defense made more costly and lengthier than the public had been led to expect. It ends with the advent of a new nuclear age in which the certainty of unconditional victory brought with it the uncertainties of a nuclear future. That victory is now often taken for granted as the product of the natural triumph of virtue over crime. But it did not always seem so to those dictating the news to correspondents eager for something to lighten the grim images of war and death. All the more remarkable that a Times editor, Robert Duffus, could write in June 1940 after the British evacuation from Dunkirk, “It is the great tradition of democracy. It is the future. It is victory.” On this prediction, The Times proved in the long run unassailably right.25

  Prologue

  “REICH TROOPS JAM ROAD TO POLAND”

  1919–1939

  On June 28, 1919 in the Hall of Mirrors in the French Palace of Versailles, outside Paris, a treaty was signed between the victorious Allied powers and Germany, bringing World War I to an end. American President Woodrow Wilson hoped that the treaty would pave the way for a new world order based on peace, disarmament and the freedom for peoples to choose their own destiny. Only twenty years separated the end of the first war and the start of a second war that was even more destructive and global. The roots of that second conflict can be found in the settlement reached in 1919. Alongside the idealistic ambitions for a new, peaceful world order were sown the seeds of a narrow nationalism that spawned a violent, intolerant politics. Even Wilson’s idealism proved short-lived when, in 1920, the Senate rejected ratification of the treaty and effectively took the United States out of the new League of Nations. The League had been established to try to resolve international disputes by rational, peaceable means. Throughout the twenty years that followed, the United States stood aside from any formal commitment to the international order, just as the newly founded Soviet Union, emerging from the wartime Communist revolution of 1917, remained on the international margins. Britain chose to be semidetached from the crises inside and outside Europe, seeking the self-preservation of the Empire and unwilling to run risks that might undermine Britain’s worldwide interests.

  This situation was fertile ground for those forces in world politics that had not been satisfied by Wilsonian idealism. Economic downturns and political instability after the war plunged Italy into crisis and prompted a nationalist backlash expressed in the rise to power of Benito Mussolini and his Fascist blackshirts. Appointed prime minister in October 1922, Mussolini had established a tough dictatorship by 1926, with himself as self-proclaimed Duce, or leader. In Germany a post-war crisis was brought on by defeat and the humiliating Versailles Treaty that blamed Germans for the war and made them pay reparations for starting it, stripped away German territory in Poland and France, and forced Germany to disarm. All this generated a hyperinflation that destroyed all savings and at the same time prompted the rise of violent, ultranationalist movements that rejected the peace imposed by the West and pursued the politics of revenge. Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist Party was among their number, though Hitler was not yet the prominent political figure he was to become. In November 1923 he staged a coup in imitation of Mussolini but it ended in farce with his arrest and imprisonment. It took him almost ten years to establish a broad nationalist movement, animated by a hatred of the Versailles Treaty and the Jews, and a desire to reestablish German military power. In 1933, in the midst of a major economic crisis and political chaos, Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany, and within months had enacted legislation designed to exclude Germany’s Jewish population from the new “national revolution.” By 1934 he too had become dictator, Germany’s Führer; in 1938 he appointed himself commander-in-chief of the armed forces.

  On the other side of the world, Japan also came to reject the settlement arrived at in 1919. Japanese military leaders resented the second-class status accorded to Japan by the other major powers. They saw Japan’s destiny as the leader of a major empire, like that of Britain and France, in a reinvigorated Asia. Frustrated by economic crisis and closed markets abroad, the Japanese Army invaded Manchuria in 1931, and moved on to attack northern China the following year. Step by step, Japan consolidated its position in Asia and when a full-scale war broke out in July 1937 between Japan and Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist China, the Japanese declared a “new order” in Asia and tried to compel Europe and the United States to accept the altered balance of power in the region.

  Mussolini and Hitler also were attracted to the idea of “new orders” in Europe and Africa, and since none of the League powers had prevented Japanese aggression, they began to undertake their own programs of territorial expansion. In 1935 Italy attacked the African nation of Ethiopia and conquered it by May 1936. In July 1936 Mussolini, together with Hitler, agreed to help the nationalist general Francisco Franco in his bid to seize power in Spain. Later, in the spring of 1939, Mussolini occupied Albania and began to think about further wars to build an Italian empire in the Mediterranean. Hitler tore up the Versailles Treaty by rearming Germany, remilitarizing the Rhineland and repudiating reparations. In March 1938 German troops were ordered into Austria and a so-called “Greater Germany” was created. In the summer of 1938 pressure was put on the Czech government to hand over territory where the majority of the population was German, and on September 30 at Munich, Britain and France accepted German arguments and agreed to transfer the “Sudeten” Germans to German rule, dismembering the Czech state.

  Throughout the period when the “new order” states were disrupting the international order, the only states committed to upholding the international order—Britain and France—found their options limited. Neither wanted to risk all-out war because of the terrible human and material cost already revealed in the horrors of WWI. Both had unstable empires, full of nationalists demanding liberation from colonial rule. Both faced economic crises in the 1930s that increased the political risks for democracies if they chose to rearm. But in the end these multiple crises forced the democracies to begin large-scale rearmament, while trying to figure out ways of preserving peace. This strategy of appeasement might have worked if Britain and France had faced reasonable opponents. It was clear by 1939 that there was no possibility of appeasing Hitler, Mussolini and the Japanese Army and that war was now likely.

  After the occupation of Prague by the Germans in March 1939, the British and French gave a guarantee to Poland that shaped the coming conflict. Hitler wanted Poland to give back the territory the Germans had lost in 1919, and to agree that the city of Danzig (which was under League supervision) should become German again. The Poles rejected this, fearful that they would suffer the fate of Czechoslovakia. Throughout the summer the British made it clear that any aggressive move by Germany would be met with force. On August 23 Hitler suddenly signed a pact with the Soviet Union guaranteeing non-aggression between the two countries. He was convinced that this freed him to attack Poland and seize the territory he wanted. He was also convinced that the West would back down. His war was a gamble on the timidity of the democracies. Though he could not know it, when he ordered the attack on Poland on September 1, he had launched World War II.

  JUNE 29, 1919

  SIGNING PROVIDES BRILLIANT PAGEANT

  Ceremony Staged in Gorgeous Setting of “All the Glories of France.”

  STORM OF CHEERS FOR FOCH

  Wilson Received with Enthusiasm—Doughboys and Tommies In the Vast Throng.

  By WALTER DURANTY

  VERSAILLES, June 29.—There could have been found no nobler setting for the signing of peace than the palace of the greatest of French kings, on the hil
lcrest of Versailles. To reach it the plenipotentiaries and distinguished guests from all parts of the world, who motored to their places in the Hall of Mirrors, drove down the magnificent, tree-lined Avenuedu Chateau, then across the huge square—the famous Place d’Armes of Versailles—and up through the gates and over the cobblestones of the Court of Honor to the entrance, where officers of the Garde Republicaine, in picturesque uniform, were drawn up to receive them.

  It was a few minutes after 2 when the first automobile made its way between dense lines of cavalry backed by a double rank of infantry with bayonets fixed—there were said to be 20,000 soldiers altogether guarding the route—that held back the cheering crowds.

  The scene from the Court of Honor where I was standing was impressive to a degree. The Place d’Armes was a lake of white faces, dappled everywhere by the bright colors of flags and fringed with the horizon blue of troops whose bayonets shone like flames as the sun peeped for a moment from behind heavy clouds. Above airplanes—a dozen or more—wheeled and curvetted.

  The entrance to the palace courtyard is usually barred by great gilded gates. Today, in the words of the hymn, it was “flung open wide the golden gates and let the victors in,” Up that triumphal passage, fully a quarter of a mile long, between the wings of the palace and the entrance to the Hall of Mirrors, representatives of the victorious nations passed in flag-decked limousines—hundreds, one after another, without intermission—for fifty minutes.