A Patriot's History of the Modern World

by Larry Schweikart

  American production brought about a shift in world naval power, too, as Britain’s previously uncontested position now yielded to the rising American presence. Before 1940, the Royal Navy had 5 fleet carriers to America’s 7, and each had 15 battleships, although the Americans had nearly double the number of submarines as England. When the Japanese surrendered in September 1945, the British still had not added a single fleet carrier to the Royal Navy, while the United States had built 12 more fleet carriers and 71 escort carriers to one newly built escort added to the British fleet. The postwar United States Navy counted 1,166 warships, even after suffering losses during combat—but that did not count the amphibious vessels, supply ships, auxiliaries such as tankers, all of which added more than five thousand more ships to the American numbers. The Royal Navy, which prior to 1940 had ruled the seas, was now in a very distant second place, and no other country, Allied or Axis, could make a claim to having any significant fleet for third.

  Germany’s weakness at sea, including the romantic but ultimately strategically meaningless missions of the Graf Spee and the Bismarck, concealed British decline, which was only made apparent in December 1944 when the Royal Navy cobbled together its most powerful task force of the entire war under Admiral Bruce Fraser. With four of Britain’s five fleet carriers, two newer battleships, five cruisers, plus destroyers and support vessels, Task Force 57 sailed for the Pacific to join the U.S. Navy for action against Japan. Upon Fraser’s arrival, though, he discovered his “large” force nearly lost in the seemingly limitless numbers of American ships, and he further learned how far behind the British were when it came to replenishment at sea, a necessity for maintaining operational tempo in the vast Pacific. Embarrassingly, Fraser’s task force needed substantial training to function in the new style of sea battles fought by the United States and Japan. Not until March 1945 was Task Force 57 ready for action on a par with the Americans, and ultimately its most important action for England was to break off from fighting Japanese and take possession of Hong Kong before the Americans could contest its recovery for the British Empire.

  In the air, it was only a slightly different story. Here, too, America’s military production was astonishing and fit perfectly with the capabilities of the British at the time. Having suffered through the “Blitz,” England had only one means to strike back directly at Germany, namely through the air. Commander in chief of Britain’s Bomber Command, Sir Charles Portal, who assumed the post in 1940, was a devout advocate of Giulio Douhet’s concept of a total air war on the enemy. “Any distinction,” Douhet had written after World War I, “between belligerents and non-belligerents is no longer admissible…because when nations are at war, everyone takes part in it; the soldier carrying his gun, the women loading shells in a factory, the farmer growing wheat, the scientist in his laboratory.”7 It was Portal who crafted an air strategy of “area bombing” targeting German morale. In September 1941, Portal told Churchill,

  [the] attack on morale is not a matter of pure killing, although the fear of death is unquestionably an important factor. It is rather the general dislocation of industrial and social life arising from the damage to the industrial plant, dwelling houses, shops, utility and transport services…. [Therefore] the morale of the country as a whole will crack provided a high enough proportion of town dwellers is affected by the general dislocation produced by the bombing.8

  Portal predicted such a campaign would require four thousand heavy bombers, at a time when Britain had only five hundred available for service on any given day. Area bombing received approval as a strategic plan among the British war councils because they could do nothing else. Lacking the numbers of land troops to invade Europe—even if they had control of the skies, which they did not—Britain could either play defense for years, or use her bombers. American-style precision bombing was out of the question, and British attacks in 1940 were so imprecise that German analysts, seeing bomb craters strewn over hundreds of miles, could not discern the actual intended target. Churchill tepidly endorsed civilian bombing in October 1941, warning that even if “all the towns in Germany were rendered uninhabitable,” military control might not weaken, especially given the dispersion of the Nazi empire throughout Europe.9

  When Americans arrived in England in 1942, Britain’s air chief marshal Sir Arthur “Bomber” Harris, now in charge of the bombing campaign, failed to persuade Generals Henry H. “Hap” Arnold and Ira Eaker of the benefits of nighttime area bombing, nor could the Americans convince the British that daylight precision bombing was possible. The American strategy was based on a theory developed at the Air Corps Tactical School in Montgomery, Alabama, which postulated the existence of a vulnerable “industrial web.” According to this theory, precise and relentless attacks on steel, ball bearings, electricity, and other interconnected industrial choke points in this “web” could collapse an enemy’s economy. Ultimately, Eaker’s offhand comment, “We’ll bomb them by day. You bomb them by night,” became official policy emanating from the two sides’ irreconcilable differences.10 The British night bombing concerned the Germans far less than the daylight precision bombing by the Americans. Even the British finally admitted as much in an intelligence briefing, saying, “There can be no doubt that Germany regards defence of the Reich against daylight air attack as of such supreme importance that adequate support for military operations in Russia and the Mediterranean has been rendered impossible.”11

  Despite terrific casualties—some nights, 30 percent of the British bombers would either not return or return with heavy damage—the air war in the West increased in scale and devastation. Using ingenious “bouncing bombs,” the Royal Air Force breached the Ruhr dams (at the high cost of fifty-six air crews), but the key Sorpe Dam was not destroyed. As part of the Ruhr air offensive, other targets were attacked but the overall assault lacked coordination and, above all, repetition. Albert Speer later claimed the war could have been decided in 1943 with a more sustained effort in the Ruhr. Meanwhile, between March and July 1943, Essen, Duisburg, Bochum, Krefeld, Düsseldorf, Dortmund, Barmen-Wuppertal, Mülheim, Elberfeld-Wuppertal, Gelsenkirchen, and Cologne were flattened by more than a thousand bombers escorted by an equal number of fighters, thoroughly disrupting and devastating the Reich’s wartime economy. Speer contributed to the ease of Allied destruction by concentrating German production into larger factories more easily targeted (in contrast to the Japanese, who dispersed their inferior production facilities in the face of sustained bombing). Speer met with Hitler three days after Hamburg was reduced to ashes in July 1943 (where 42,000 people perished in firestorms) and stated flatly that armaments production was collapsing. He told Hitler if six more German cities were devastated in the manner Hamburg was, war production would halt. Hitler replied, “You’ll sort it out.” After the Ruhr bombings, party members stopped wearing their badges in public and people no longer gave the Nazi salute.12 Aerial destruction forced reallocation of resources, as the Germans needed trainloads of quicklime for disposal of thousands of corpses and had to send armies of repair and debris-clearing teams into urban areas so trucks and trains could again move.

  Amazingly, Speer did “sort it out,” and was able to raise German war production in spite of Allied bombing, reaching its peak in late summer and fall of 1944, a year that accounted for nearly 38 percent of all German war production from 1939 to 1945. Factories were moved underground, and railroads were maintained in a high state of efficiency through herculean efforts by the populace. It was only after the loss of Romania and its critical oil supplies in August 1944 that German production flagged.

  One reason the bombing did not significantly retard, let alone end, German wartime production was that the Nazi armaments industry was fed by sucking in millions of foreign slaves as factory workers. The high irony of Speer’s armaments “miracle” was that he had succeeded in reversing Lebensraum by colonizing Germany with millions of foreign workers—seven million by 1944. Locomotive production, considered one of Speer’s great
accomplishments, rested on a 90 percent increase in the workforce in 1942, most of it from Nazi-occupied territories. Conquest supplied the muscle power that fed armament production, which in turn would have fueled more conquest, but now staved off economic collapse. One aberration in the feedback loop was the disposition of Jews. Dead Jews weren’t workers—quite the contrary, exterminating Jews absorbed precious resources in the form of trains, guards, camps, even quicklime needed to dispose of corpses.

  Enslavement of large labor pools worked in the totalitarian states, but in the free nations other measures were needed. In Britain, especially, liberals used the necessities of war to lay the foundations for a postwar welfare state. William Beveridge, who delivered a 1942 paper called “Social Insurance and Allied Services,” saw his wartime work as “a contribution to a better world after the war.”13 Keynes, of course, had already drafted an unpublished declaration of war aims that emphasized the need for social security after the war. Only Friedrich Hayek, an Austrian economist at Oxford, ran counter to this. His 1944 book, The Road to Serfdom, insisted that socialism was incompatible with human freedom, and those who argued that economic planning could coexist with personal liberties were delusional. Planning would always, he observed, rest on the “naked rule of force.”14 Even though Hayek and Keynes shared an aircraft watchtower at Cambridge University during the war, Keynes’s ideas were in vogue while Hayek’s free-market ideas were less popular. This trend reflected a deeper, depressing view of the nature of existence itself. Albert Camus in 1944 wrote, “I continue to believe that this world has no ultimate meaning.”15 This philosophy (or, more appropriately, nonphilosophy) undergirded the effort to use the war to advance postwar socialism under a variety of definitions. Jacques Maritain, writing in 1943, reasoned, “It is not a question of finding a new name for democracy, rather of discovering its true essence…[and] it is a question of passing from bourgeois democracy…to an integrally human democracy, from abortive democracy to real democracy.”16 William Temple, the Archbishop of Canterbury who attempted mightily to marry socialism with Christian faith, echoed Maritain, advocating a “ ‘Democracy of the Person’ as opposed to an egotistical ‘Democracy of Individuals.’ ”17 That these individuals utterly lacked an understanding of the American representative democracy goes without saying.

  Whereas the First World War was popularly seen in Europe as the end of monarchies and unfettered capitalism, its replacement by social democracy had spawned communism and fascism, or socialism controlled by nationalists. Deep in World War II, this view even affected leftist academics in the United States who turned further left, following the European elites by blaming the war on capitalism, seeing Nazism as National-Capitalist, not National-Socialist. Ford, General Motors, ESSO (Exxon), and IBM were castigated for enabling Hitler’s ascent to power, whereas delusional socialism, unable to satisfy the needs of people through state planning, was overlooked.

  Even worse, Christianity was seen by many to contribute to Nazism. Pope Pius XII was especially criticized due to his 1933 Concordat with the Nazis (signed by him when he was Vatican secretary of state), for continuing to support the Third Reich as Europe’s bulwark against Bolshevism almost until the end of World War II, and for fracturing Italy into equal parts of communism and Catholicism after the war; and Protestant German clerics were taken to task for not standing up to Hitler. Those who did went to concentration camps and were executed (the most famous being Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who joined in a plot to assassinate Hitler), but to someone safe from combat or the horrors of fascism back in the United States, that was no excuse. As a result of the hammering by the Left, Christianity’s credibility was damaged. Faith was replaced by skepticism and atheism. Temple’s contributions marked the beginning of that decline in Britain, and the country wouldn’t wait for the war to be over to reject Churchill for a socialistic government.

  Hence, at the very time that European intellectuals and policy makers abandoned, at least in their limited concept, liberty, democracy, free markets, and even Christianity, for socialism and state control of individuals, the United States had turned to freer industrial production to save the West and the world. And by the end of 1942, the Americans had shifted from defense to offense.

  Remember Pearl Harbor, Remember Bataan!

  The transition came only after the Imperial Japanese Navy went on a rampage throughout the Pacific such as the world had never seen. Even before Pearl Harbor, Japanese forces had landed on the Malay Peninsula and begun their march to Singapore, while pounding the city with bombs. Wake Island, the Philippines, Hong Kong, and Guam were soon assaulted and conquered, and the Japanese racked up an unbroken string of successes. Isolated Wake fell after repelling one Japanese assault in a heroic but futile defense, Guam’s tiny force didn’t last a day, and Hong Kong’s 14,000 British, Canadian, and Indian troops resisted for seventeen days, but the outcome and fate of Westerners in the colony was sealed from the start. One day after Pearl Harbor, Japanese aircraft caught the British battleship Prince of Wales and battle cruiser Repulse in the Gulf of Siam and quickly dispatched them to the bottom. Singapore fell to General Tomoyuki Yamashita’s bicycle-riding troops in seventy days, and the bastion Churchill had called “impregnable” became a glittering Japanese prize, wiping 85,000 British Commonwealth troops off the British order of battle along the way. Held up only in the Philippines, the Japanese raced into the Dutch East Indies, annihilating the mixed American, British, and Dutch naval forces in their path, and capturing the vital oil fields for their war machine. The run of successes made the Japanese appear invincible, particularly when the task force that struck Pearl Harbor raided Ceylon, destroying the British presence in the Indian Ocean, sinking an aircraft carrier, three cruisers, three destroyers, and various miscellaneous vessels.

  The Philippines were the only sticking point, but they too were doomed. Lieutenant General Masaharu Homma directed the invasion against the islands, defended by 151,000 troops, mostly untrained and lacking arms and equipment, although 12,000 were Philippine Scouts, taken in and made a part of the American Army. The Scouts would soon prove their effectiveness on Bataan, the peninsula on Luzon where the allied forces concentrated for defense. American forces were under the leadership of General Douglas MacArthur, who, retired from the army, had served as an adviser to the Filipino armed forces. He had been reinstated and named commander in July 1941 when FDR federalized the Philippine Army. At that time, the Filipino forces consisted of about 10,000 U.S. troops and the Philippine Scouts. MacArthur, controversial and flamboyant, brilliant and mistake-prone, had a penchant for self-promotion. Even the issue of his popularity with his men remains one of historical uncertainty. He seemed both to exhibit recklessness—he had exposed himself to German fire in World War I and would gain a reputation for showing up to inspect positions under fire in World War II—and, at the same time, earned the nickname “Dugout Doug” for his unwillingness to visit troops on Bataan. His stay on Corregidor, the rock island off Bataan where the U.S.-Filipino troops made their last stand, and his subsequent evacuation—ordered by Roosevelt personally—went down poorly among those men who remained to enter captivity.18

  In his headquarters in Manila, he received the news of the attack on Pearl Harbor at 3:00 A.M., which called for him to enact the Rainbow 5 war plan and attack Japanese bases on Formosa (Taiwan). But his failure to act aggressively (weather reports said Formosa was experiencing heavy fog) and confusion among recently arrived personnel caused squadrons of aircraft in the Philippines to be on the ground just as the Imperial Japanese forces struck first. Only three American fighters got off the runways.

  American and Filipino troops were quickly driven off the beaches, then withdrew in confusion, ultimately evacuating to the Bataan Peninsula, which protruded between Subic Bay and Manila Bay. Initially, MacArthur had 43,000 troops on the Peninsula to supply by barge from Manila, although before long another 80,000 troops and refugees arrived. Food and medical supplies were rapidly exhausted, leavi
ng the survivors to face grim conditions. On January 23, having consolidated their forces, the Japanese assaulted Bataan, and as the position weakened, Franklin Roosevelt ordered MacArthur to personally evacuate to Australia as Supreme Allied Commander South West Pacific Area. Upon arriving safely in Australia after a hazardous journey by PT boat and a B-17 bomber, MacArthur issued his famous “I shall return” statement, making the Philippines’ liberation his personal mission. Out of food, medicine, and ammunition, the U.S.-Filipino troops on Bataan surrendered on April 10, leaving 11,000 men, many of them wounded, on Corregidor to carry on the fight.

  What followed was the infamous Bataan Death March, in which 75,000 U.S. and Filipino POWs were marched sixty miles to a railhead for transport to Camp O’Donnell. The Allied forces, already starving and exhausted, with many wounded, were denied food and water in the blazing heat and humidity. Thousands dropped out, and Japanese guards shot or bayoneted them while those continuing on were beaten unmercifully with bamboo sticks and rifle butts. So-called cleanup crews killed anyone missed by the guards, and by the time the POWs reached their destination, between 5,000 to 10,000 Filipinos and 650 Americans had died.19