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

by The New York Times

  GUADALCANAL, Solomon Islands, Sept. 7 (Delayed)—Life has never a dull moment for the Marines on Guadalcanal, site of the important Solomons air base that was wrested from the Japanese a month ago. There are Japanese air attacks one day, followed by raids from the sea the next day, and there are nighttime forays by Japanese jungle snipers; such action is interspersed with duels off shore between United States dive-bombers and enemy cruisers. If the enemy is not attacking, the Marines are.

  Existence is an incessant struggle for survival and a continuous series of alarms and surprises and battles and excursions. Marines here say it isn’t so bad now as it was a week or two ago, but there is still plenty of excitement—enough to make “never a dull moment” almost the universal phrase for passing the time of day out here.

  My diary records that on the night of my arrival on Guadalcanal a week ago the Marine positions were bombed twice by large flights of Japanese aircraft. Shortly after midnight three enemy warships, either cruisers or destroyers, slipped in to shore some fifteen miles to the east of our bivouac and were landing troops and supplies to reinforce a contingent of troops that the Japanese evidently hoped some day might be large enough and strong enough to attempt to eject the Marines from Guadalcanal.

  Army landing troops and supplies on Guadalcanal in 1942.

  The night vibrated with the whirl of wings as our planes took to the skies to attack the Japanese air and sea raiders. Enemy bombs bracketed our encampment and a few were killed and several injured. The Marines, cursing “tojo”—generic term here for the Japanese—tumbled from their bed rolls to their foxholes and then back to bed again. The moon broke hazily through the scudding clouds and made splotches of pale light beneath the palm and ironwood trees. It was a typical night on Guadalcanal.

  The Japanese bombed us again about noon the next day and our fighters got four Zeros and two bombers in an air battle.

  The following night “Oscar”—the Japanese submarine that seems to lurk continuously offshore—surfaced at midnight and indulged in some ten minutes of scattered shelling of Marines. There were no casualties and no great harm was done.

  “Never a dull moment,” said the Marines the following morning as they broke out their shaving kits and wash basins. “Did you ever read ‘The Forty Days of Musa Dagh’? asked one officer reflectively as he sorted out his mess gear at breakfast table. Life is like that on Guadalcanal.

  Two nights later two Japanese destroyers and a light cruiser crept into the bay off Guadalcanal and shelled the shore positions. The destroyers the day before had taken a Marine raiding party to little Savo Island off Guadalcanal to clean up the remnant of Japanese forces there. Life is like that on Guadalcanal. If trouble does not come to the Marines, they go out looking for it.

  Meanwhile, the routine camp life goes on. The Marines bivouacked in encampments over an area of jungles and palm trees. The palm trees here are part of the world’s largest coconut plantation, owned by Lever Brothers, and are the source of copra for soaps that are sold all over the globe.

  Most of the Marines live on the ground under tiny pup tents. The others, who are without tents, have rigged up makeshift caves in the sides of the hills. Some have strung hammocks between trees and some have found haven in a few shamble tin-roofed houses that escaped the complete destruction in the bombardments by United States ships that preceded Marine landings.

  Men sleep with their jobs—gunners with their guns, drivers with their trucks and jeeps. Mosquito nets are a necessity against anopheles. It rains almost every night—weepy tropical rain soaks into the bed rolls and seeps through tarpaulin. The nights are passed in wet chill and discomfort and the days in mud and filth that the Marines, who have been too busy fighting, have not had time to clean up.

  Japanese materials—great dumps of gasoline, trucks (many broken down), food, clothing, piping, steel, cement, one-cylinder engines, bicycles, ammunition, boxes, lumber and sand bags—are still strewn throughout the Marine area. They are interspersed with supplies that the Marines themselves have brought in. The Marines deal with filth on their clothes and bodies in the Unga River, which runs miraculously swift and clear through the occupied area.

  The swim in the Unga is one of the daily necessities on Guadalcanal. Many of the men drive mud-covered jeeps and trucks into the shallow, pebbly stream and wash themselves, vehicles and clothes all at one session.

  The Marines were on pretty poor rations for a short time after landing and had to eat lots of captured Japanese rice and canned goods, but now the supply situation is well ahead.

  Nevertheless, there are still only two meals daily. They are generous meals, however, and a typical menu, includes steak, beans, bread and butter with jam, canned peaches and coffee. The men supplement regular meals with coconuts and occasional local tangerines. There are no natives around to climb trees and get them coconuts, but high winds have solved this problem by breaking off tops of trees and bringing down a bonanza of nuts.

  Many of the men still are smoking captured Japanese cigarettes and eating captured Japanese peppermint candy, which is not so bad as wearing Japanese underwear. There is a thriving black market in Japanese souvenirs, which range all the way from fencing shields to occupation bank notes.

  Life is reduced to essentials and Guadalcanal’s greatest pleasure is just in still being alive, in mail from home, in nighttime camaraderie around radio programs from home, in group singing of all songs that have become American folk music.

  SEPTEMBER 19, 1942

  43 BIG R.A.F. RAIDS SMASH NAZI CITIES

  More Than a Dozen Industrial And Maritime Centers Feel Weight of 110-Day Havoc

  By GEORGE GARROTT

  Since the 1,000-plane British raid on the German industrial city of Cologne on May 30, constituting until that time the largest concentration of bombers over a city in the history of warfare, the Royal Air Force has carried out forty-three large-scale raids on more than a dozen German industrial cities.

  In London the Air Ministry disclosed early today that new 8,000-pound bombs had caused vast destruction in the raid on Duesseldorf Sept. 10 and that against Karlsruhe Sept. 2. Reconnaissance photographs taken after the raids showed that 270 acres of Karlsruhe and 370 acres of Duesseldorf had been devastated.

  The tonnage of British bombs dropped on German rail, industrial, munition and shipping centers far exceeds the weight of German bombs dropped on London in the Blitz two years ago. During the 110-day period the British Air Ministry has acknowledged the loss of 639 bombers in its daily communiqués, but observers estimate the losses at materially less than the 10 per cent considered the limit in successful aerial warfare.

  At the time of the Cologne raid, British spokesmen heralded the beginning of a prolonged aerial offensive of 1,000-plane-a-night raids with the object of devastating German industrial centers one by one. While the 1,000-plane schedule has not been maintained, according to figures from British communiqués of the last two months, the announced purpose of destroying German industry has been followed with raids in smaller force every few days.

  FIGHTERS IN DAILY SWEEPS

  In addition to the large-scale bombing raids over industrial objectives, R.A.F. fighters by the hundred have been making almost daily sweeps along the Channel coast to blast German airfields, troop concentrations and isolated factories in occupied France and along the Belgian and Netherland coasts. Some of these raids have included more than 500 planes in sorties against objectives spread hundreds of miles along the “invasion coast.”

  Bremen, an important German port with shipyards for building submarines and factories producing dive-bombers and the long-range Focke-Wulf and Kondor planes, has been bombed seven times since May 30 by aerial armadas ranging in force from 200 to more than 1,000 planes. Hamburg, the largest German port and the center of submarine building, has been bombed twice with forces of 600 planes. Emden, a North Sea naval and industrial center, has been raided four times with large forces.

  Other frequent objectives of l
arge-scale British raids have been Essen, home of the Krupp munition works, bombed twice, once with a force of more than 1,000 planes, and Duisburg, industrial center of the Ruhr Valley, which has been attacked five times.

  Osnabrueck, Prussian rail and war factory hub, and Saarbruecken, large steel-producing center, have been heavily bombed three times. The naval base and shipbuilding yards at Wilhelmshaven, a constant target since the beginning of the war, have been bombed twice in large force since the Cologne raid, and Duesseldorf, an important Rhenish steel-producing center, also has been visited twice. Two raids each also have been made on the war factories of Mainz, Frankfort on the Main and Wiesbaden.

  The pattern of successive raids shows almost equal alternation between coastal shipbuilding centers, devoted principally to making submarines, and inland industrial points manufacturing munitions for the Nazi land war machine.

  Chapter 13

  “HIMMLER PROGRAM KILLS POLISH JEWS”

  October 1942–January 1943

  Through most of 1942, while the battles were going on in the Pacific and Europe, the German authorities were carrying out the genocide of the Jews of Europe. The details remained obscure, but in November The Times published a full account supplied by Polish witnesses of what was later to become known as the Holocaust, or Shoah. The article described the whole process—the rounding up of Jews; the cattle-truck transport in which half the victims died; the extermination camps in occupied Poland at Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec; the selection of a fraction of fit Jews for forced labor; and the arrival of Jews from Germany and Western Europe, slated for liquidation. On December 18 The Times reported that the “War on Jews” had been formally condemned by the Allied nations as a manifestation of Hitler’s “oft-repeated intention to exterminate the Jewish people in Europe.” Despite German efforts to conceal the crime, the details of the genocide were there for people to read years before the end of the war.

  At last the military conflict between October 1942 and January 1943 swung decisively in the Allies’ favor. News gradually emerged in early November about a major battle being fought in North Africa between Rommel’s Axis armies and the British Commonwealth Eighth Army under the command of General Bernard Montgomery. The Battle of El Alamein swung first one way then the other, but overwhelming Commonwealth air and sea power turned the tide; by November 4 it was clear that Rommel had been beaten. He escaped encirclement and capture and retreated back to Tunisia, but Axis days were numbered.

  On November 8 Roosevelt announced “the first great American blow at the Axis” when he revealed the landings in Northwest Africa in French colonial territory, called Operation Torch. Correspondents in London had been, in Raymond Daniell’s words, “custodians of one of the war’s biggest secrets.” Nothing leaked out from the press and complete surprise was achieved in the invasion. The landing provoked an immediate move by German forces into the unoccupied area of Vichy France, and it also prompted a political crisis in Africa. The leader of the Free French, Charles de Gaulle, wanted to take the lead in reestablishing French rule in North Africa, but the Americans preferred Admiral François Darlan as their local collaborator and General Henri Giraud as commander-in-chief of French forces. Darlan was assassinated on December 24, prompting a long struggle between de Gaulle and Giraud for leadership of the French forces and territory now on the side of the Allies. The conflict surfaced sharply in January 1943 when Roosevelt and Churchill traveled by airplane to a summit meeting in the Moroccan city of Casablanca on January 14. Here they worked out their strategy for 1943, deciding to invade Sicily and Italy, maintain a combined bomber offensive to weaken Germany, but to postpone a full second front. An uneasy truce was established between de Gaulle and Giraud, whose arguments took up a significant part of the whole conference.

  North Africa took away news from the other major battles. On Guadalcanal the Americans continued to build up their ground and air forces and to hammer away at the Japanese forces and supply lines. By late January the Japanese began to pull out and on February 8 the island was in American hands. The Japanese lost 20,000 men, the Americans 1,752 dead, a disparity that was to repeat itself across the Pacific campaign. In Russia the Red Army sprang the greatest surprise of the war. Unbeknownst to the Germans, a huge reserve army was moved into place to cut off the German Sixth Army under General Friedrich Paulus in Stalingrad. Operation Uranus was launched on November 19 and 20, 1942 and was an immediate success. German and Axis forces were smashed and Paulus encircled. The battle in Stalingrad became a terrible struggle of attrition. Each soldier, Hanson Baldwin later wrote, “endured the unendurable” in his own way. On January 31, Paulus surrendered. Over 300,000 soldiers died in the final struggle to capture the city.

  OCTOBER 2, 1942

  Editorial

  HITLER AND THE EAST

  Lost in the verbiage of Hitler’s latest speech is a remarkable passage which has received less attention than it deserves. The program he announced for this year—”to hold everything that must be held and let the others attack”—has been generally interpreted as a turn from the offensive to the defensive. There is not the slightest doubt that Hitler would stop if he could. For some reason he is already saving his air power. The “reprisal” bombings he promises England are not taking place. The activity of the Luftwaffe is almost negligible in Egypt and even at Malta is reduced to a minimum. The losses of men and machines sustained in Russia, plus the dangerous strains that have developed in the whole structure of production and supply, are compelling reasons for a shift to a conservative strategy. Supposing Hitler were still free to choose his course, supposing further that he could control the forces he has set in motion, he would naturally want to halt where he is.

  Concretely and immediately, he proposes to take over and develop the territory he has occupied in Russia. He does not say merely that Stalingrad will be taken. He declares that “no human being will ever push us away from that spot.” He goes on to assert that his aim is to organize the vast space he has conquered, not simply for the purpose of rendering it usable in war but “to link it with the nutrition of our people and the obtaining of raw materials for the maintenance of all Europe.” He speaks of “freeing the population from Bolshevist power” and refers to detailed and gigantic plans to build up and exploit the region. When he describes how roads and factories, mills and mines are being opened up, he states flatly that what is being done is being done “forever.” Instead of bringing coal from Germany to the East, “we shall build our own industry there,” he says, with the object of supplying a great part of Europe with Russian coal.

  This is a pronouncement of striking, almost sensational, importance. If it means anything, it means the annexation of the Ukraine and the Black Sea and the intention to annex the Caucasus. Hitler is not occupying this region as a military measure; he is taking possession. In affirming that Germany is on the defensive in the north and in the west in order to gain the necessary conditions for the organization of the rest of Europe, he proclaims that his purpose is to stay in Russia and rule Russian territory. This is a reversion to “Mein Kampf.” It is an attempt to realize “the German mission in the East” and to place the frontier of Europe where the Nazis claim it should be—on the Volga. More clearly than any previous war utterance, it stakes the bounds of the German “lebensraum” and gives substance to Hitler’s concept of the Third Reich’s “colonial space.”

  There may be method in this madness. In telling the world that his ambitions lie in the East and he will move in the West only if attacked, Hitler may be launching the peace offensive we have all been expecting as soon as he is able to establish his Winter line in Russia. But it is no use. Although he scorns the strategy of his opponents, he should know by now that its central aim is to keep him from ending the war on any front until they develop enough power to smash him and all his works and plans. Wherever he turns, he will never be allowed to rest.

  OCTOBER 7, 1942

  CHURCHILL BLOCKS 2D FRONT DEBATE


  Asks Commons Not to Press Issue at ‘A Period Which Is Certainly Significant’

  STALIN’S LETTER IS CITED

  British Premier Indicates He Regrets Timing of Soviet Leader’s Statement

  By RAYMOND DANIELL

  Wireless to The New York Times.

  LONDON, Oct. 6—Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin’s letter to an American newspaper man declaring a second front in the West the best way the Allies could aid Russia had its repercussions in the House of Commons this afternoon. Prime Minister Churchill refused, however, to be lured into debate about whose move it was “at this period, which is certainly significant.”

  Nevertheless, parliamentarian that he is, the Prime Minister could scarcely hide the inference that Mr. Stalin’s sense of timing was almost as unfortunate as his choice of words in the present circumstances.

  Neither the Prime Minister nor anyone else enjoying the privileges of the Commons has made any direct reference to Wendell L. Willkie’s suggestion that it would take prodding to get the United Nations’ military leaders to act. The British press hitherto has been somewhat divided on Mr. Willkie’s Moscow statement

  DEBATE HAS BEEN REVIVED

  Premier Stalin’s letter, coming atop Mr. Willkie’s statement, has tended to revive a debate that cannot be openly conducted without revealing secrets to the enemy. The Times, London, editorially puts the problem thus:

  “Stalin’s recent letter to an American journalist is a disturbing document, obviously intended to disturb. It closely follows utterances in which Mr. Willkie has declared the need for ‘publicly prodding’ the strategic authorities who alone, it is acknowledged, can determine the time and place for Allied offensive action.