A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror

by Larry Schweikart

  Today, with the benefit of hindsight, most can agree that the relocation of Japanese Americans during World War II was an unfair and mistaken policy. Although the wartime Supreme Court supported Roosvelt’s policy (Executive Order 9066), a subsequent ruling vacated the World War II decision, making the relocation order inoperable (but stopping short of overturning it). Subsequently, Nisei internees were awarded $1.25 billion in reparations during the Reagan administration. Yet with the benefit of the same hindsight, one must say that the relocation was not, as two historians label it, a policy of “hysterical racial repression.”43 Instead, Roosevelt took understandable precautions to protect national security in the face of what most Americans firmly believed was an impending attack.

  A few contemporary liberal scholars continue to call the Japanese American internment camps concentration camps. Considering that this same term is also applied to the Nazi and Japanese camps, its usage is loaded indeed. In fact, there existed critical and simple distinctions between the two. Can anyone honestly compare the American camps—where perseverant, brave, and industrious Japanese Americans grew vegetables and flowers, published their own newspapers, established schools, and organized glee clubs and Little League baseball teams for their children—to Auschwitz and Bataan? Can anyone forget the brave Nisei men who, despite the wrongs they had suffered, left the camps to join and fight bravely in the U.S. Army’s European theater? Moreoever, had Germany won the war, does anyone actually believe the inmates in the Nazi camps would have been released—let alone paid reparations? The fact that the United States not only addressed the constitutional violations with shame, and ultimately attempted to make restitution speaks volumes about the fundamental differences in worldviews between America and the Axis.

  Yet the constant string of bad news that produced the internment camps, and the apparent Japanese invincibility, masked a fatal flaw in the Japanese war mentality. Like other non-Western cultures, Japan, despite her rapid modernization in the early twentieth century, had not adopted the fundamentals of a free society that produces westernized soldiers. Bushido, the warrior code, combined with the Shinto religion to saddle Japan with a fatal strategy employing surprise and quick strikes—all aimed at forcing the United States to exit the war with a treaty. Japan did not understand that it was at war with a westernized democracy with a tradition of civic militarism—an American nation that fought with intense discipline, yet incorporated the flexibility of individuality. Whereas Japanese admirals went down with their ships, American admirals transferred to other vessels, realizing that long after their ships were gone, the navy would still need their talent. Junior officers of all ranks respectfully criticized war plans and offered suggestions, providing a self-evaluation for the armed forces that did not exist in Germany or Japan. Above all, the Western way of war, with its emphasis on the value of the individual and his life, demanded an unrelenting campaign to the finish—a war of annihilation or total surrender, without a face-saving honorable exit.

  American victory, however, seemed in the far distance as Japan conquered Burma, closing the Burma supply road to China; captured Wake Island; and threatened Port Moresby in New Guinea. In its relentless march of conquest, Japan had grabbed more territory and subjugated more people than any other empire in history and, for the most part, had accomplished all this in a matter of months—all for the net cost of one hundred aircraft, a few destroyers, and minor casualties in the army. Threats still remained, however. Destroying the four American aircraft carriers in the Pacific, which had escaped the Pearl Harbor massacre, remained a prime strategic objective for the imperial fleet, especially after the shocking bombing of Tokyo in April 1942 by Colonel Jimmy Doolittle’s force.

  Doolittle, convinced that the United States needed a victory of some sort to regain its confidence, conceived a mission in which highly modified B-25 bombers (fittingly named the Mitchell bombers for Colonel Billy Mitchell) would take off from a carrier, bomb Tokyo, then continue on to safe airfields inside China. Even in the planning stages, Doolittle doubted that most of his aircraft would make it to China. Their chances grew slimmer when the Hornet’s task force was discovered and Doolittle had to launch early. Nevertheless, the strike force attacked Tokyo in broad daylight as flabbergasted Japanese warlords looked on (described in Ted Lawson’s famous book, Thirty Seconds over Tokyo).44 Although some of the crews were killed or captured—three were beheaded after Japanese trials—the raid exceeded American expectations.

  Not only did Doolittle’s brave crews buck up morale, but the attack also so incensed imperial planners that it goaded them into reckless attacks in the Coral Sea and near Port Moresby. And it convinced Yamamoto that Midway Island was a strategic target. At the Battle of the Coral Sea, American and Japanese fleets engaged in the first naval engagement in history fought solely by carrier-launched aircraft. Most history books call the battle a draw, with both sides losing a carrier and the American carrier Yorktown suffering what most thought was crippling damage. In fact, however, the loss of the Yorktown, which headed for an expected two-month repair job at Pearl Harbor, left the Allies with exactly two undamaged capital ships—carriers Enterprise and Hornet—in the eastern Pacific to confront the entire Japanese fleet.

  Miracle at Midway

  What occurred next was nothing short of what historian Gordon Prange termed a “Miracle at Midway.” Determined to force the last two carriers out in the open and destroy them, Yamamoto moved an invasion force toward Midway Island. His real goal, though, was to lure the American carriers into positions for destruction. Midway’s airfield had to be eliminated first. Japanese attacks failed to knock out the airfield, requiring second strikes. But where were the carriers? After receiving reports from scout planes he had sent in an arc around Midway, Yamamoto ordered a second attack on the island. Only one scout had yet to report when Yamamoto rolled the dice and ordered his tactical bombers to rearm for another attack on the island.

  In the midst of this tedious reloading process, word arrived from the last scout: the American carrier fleet was right below him! At that point, Yamamoto countermanded his previous order and then instructed the aircraft to prepare for attacking the carriers (which required a complete change in the types of armaments on the planes). Apparently out of nowhere, several squadrons of American planes from the two U.S. carriers—launched independently and groping blindly for the Japanese fleet—all converged at the same instant. They all were shot down. This, actually, was good news in disguise.

  In the process of wiping out the attackers, the Japanese Zeros ran out of fuel, and there was another delay as they landed and refueled. Suddenly another squadron of American dive-bombers appeared above the Japanese fleet, which, with no fighter cover and all its planes, bombs, and fuel sitting exposed on its carrier decks, was a giant target in a shooting gallery. The American aircraft, astoundingly enough, had come from the Yorktown, her three-month repair job completed in forty-eight hours by some twelve hundred technicians working nonstop. In a matter of minutes, Yorktown’s aircraft had sunk three of the carriers, and a follow-up strike by the other U.S. carriers’ reserves destroyed the fourth. Yorktown herself was again badly damaged, and was sunk by a Japanese sub on her way back to Pearl, but the United States had pulled off its miracle. Not only did Japan lose four modern carriers, but more important, more than three hundred trained pilots died when the ships sank. Japan never recovered, and in the blink of an eye, the empire’s hopes for victory had vanished. The Japanese never won another substantial victory, and even though bloody fighting continued on many islands, Japan lost the war in June 1942.

  The End of the “Thousand-Year Reich”

  Germany’s invasion of Russia in May 1941 led to a string of victories as sweeping and unrelenting as Japan’s early conquest of Asia, putting Nazi forces just ten miles outside Moscow. In retrospect the German assault on Russia was a huge blunder, pitting Nazi armies against the bottomless pit of Soviet manpower and the vastness of Russian geography. At the tim
e, even many Wehrmacht officers knew they lacked the resources to pull off such a military operation. Germany’s supply lines were widely overextended; and Hitler’s generals, who had warned him they needed far more trucks and tanks, displayed astonishment at the incredible size of Russia, which seemed to swallow up their army.

  Nevertheless, Nazi successes led Stalin’s diplomats to press the British and Americans for immediate relief through an invasion of Europe. As of 1942, neither the United States nor Britain (nor, certainly, the limited Free French or Polish forces that had retreated to England) had nearly enough men or matériel in place to achieve a successful invasion of France from the English Channel. In August 1942 the British tried a mini-invasion, called a reconnaissance-in-force, at Dieppe, which proved a disaster. The debacle did, however, alert Eisenhower to the difficulties of breaching Hitler’s defenses, called the Atlantic Wall, which was a gigantic series of concrete barriers, pillboxes, barbed wire, minefields, and tank traps built by tens of thousands of slave laborers and prisoners of war.

  Between January 1942 and July 1943, the war continued on another hidden, but absolutely vital, front. Germany’s U-boats had conducted a devastating undersea war against shipping from America to Britain and the Soviet Union. Whatever industrial might the United States had was meaningless if it was unable to get war materials and food to England and Russia. In January 1942 a German submarine force of only six vessels unleashed a ferocious series of attacks on ships leaving U.S. ports. Many were sunk within sight of the coast, their silhouettes having marked them as easy targets against the lights of the cities. During a six-month period, a handful of U-boats sank 568 Allied ships. Carefully moving his forces around, German Admiral Karl Doenitz kept the Allies off balance, returning to the North Atlantic in November 1942, when many escorts had been diverted to support the landings in Africa. That month, Doenitz’s U-boats sank 117 ships. This rate of sinking exceeded even Henry Kaiser’s incredible capacity to build Liberty Ships.

  Finally, under the direction of Admiral Ernest King, a combination of air cover, added escorts (including small carrier escorts that could launch antisubmarine aircraft quickly), and the convoy system, the United States slowly turned the U-boat war around. New location devices—sonar and radar—aided in the search for subs. By May 1943, when thirty U-boats were sunk, the Allies had made the sea-lanes relatively safe. Again, however, only a narrow margin separated victory from defeat: a handful of subs had come close to winning the war in the Atlantic. Had Hitler shifted even a minimal amount of resources to building additional subs in 1941–42, there could have been disastrous consequences for the Allies.

  In the meantime, Germany’s success in Africa under General Erwin Rommel, the “Desert Fox,” had convinced General Dwight D. “Ike” Eisenhower, commander of the Allied forces in Northwest Africa, that the British plan for retaking North Africa was both necessary and feasible. Ike commanded a multinational force, with the November 1942 landings in Casablanca (French Morocco), Algiers, and Oran (French Algeria) now opening a true second front in Africa. American and British forces now closed in on Rommel from the west, while British general Bernard Montgomery’s Desert Rats of the Eighth Army pushed out from Egypt through Libya in the east. Superior American and British naval power pounded the Germans and Italians from the sea, and Allied control of the air soon left the Axis forces in Africa reeling, leaving them holding only Tunisia. Operation Torch ended any hopes Germany had of extending eastward to link up with the Japanese. In May 1943 more than a quarter of a million German and Italian soldiers surrendered, dealing Hitler his first serious defeat and securing the Mediterranean for Allied navies once and for all. But Allied forces failed to bag the Desert Fox, who escaped to supervise construction of the Atlantic Wall that the Allies would have to breach in June 1944.

  Germany’s defeat in North Africa technically opened for Stalin his much-desired second front, but to little avail. Hitler had dedicated no more than a small portion of Germany’s resources to Africa. However, Sicily, and later mainland Italy, now lay open for invasion. In July 1943, after deceiving the Germans with an elaborate hoax involving a corpse that washed ashore in Spain with information that the invasion would occur in Greece, Patton and Montgomery invaded Sicily at different spots on the island. The ruse worked: Hitler had reinforced Greece, and advancing American troops encountered enthusiastic Italian citizens who greeted the liberators with cries of “Down with Mussolini!” and “Long live America!” Italian soldiers surrendered by the thousands, and townspeople threw flowers at GIs and gave them wine and bread. If the Italian army no longer posed a threat to the invaders, the German troops that remained proved far more determined and skillful, mining roads, blowing up bridges, and otherwise successfully delaying the Allied advances long enough to escape back to the Italian mainland.

  The defeat on Sicily coincided with increased Italian dissatisfaction with Mussolini and his unpopular war, and it occurred at a pivotal moment during the struggle in the East. Hitler, weighing whether to continue the offensive at Kursk with reinforcements or to divert them to Italy, chose the latter. His concerns about Italian allegiance were well founded. While the forces were en route, Allied aircraft dropped propaganda leaflets urging the Italian people to abandon the regime, and on July 24, 1943, even the Fascist ministers in the Grand Council agreed to hand control of the Italian army back to the king, Victor Emmanuel III, who accepted Mussolini’s resignation. Marshal Pietro Badoglio, Il Duce’s successor, signed an unconditional surrender in September 1943. Germany reacted before the Allies could actually occupy the mainland of Italy or before Mussolini himself could be captured, but the second front had in fact helped ensure Soviet victory at Kursk.

  The Nazis’ thirteen divisions—more than 100,000 men—arrived, seized Rome and other major cities, and freed Mussolini from his house arrest, reinstalling him as a puppet dictator. That meant, of course, that Hitler was then calling the shots for all of Italy. German general Albert Kesselring, who directed the German defense, instructed his troops to dig in across the rocky northern part of the country and fortify every pass. Patton’s open-field tank tactics would have been useless even if he had remained in command, but an incident in which he slapped soldiers for cowardice on two separate occasions prompted Eisenhower to discipline him. Patton’s temper tantrum (which his biographer suggests may have been caused by the general’s own battle fatigue) was a blessing in disguise because it saved him from a slow and bloody slog up the Italian coast. Murderous fire and dogged resistance by the Germans delayed the American conquest of Italy, which had other unintended effects. A rapid Italian campaign would have enabled the Anglo-American forces to invade the Balkans, preventing Eastern Europe from falling into the grasp of the Red Army. Instead, Naples fell on September 30, 1943, after which Allied troops plodded inch by inch up the coast, covering less than a hundred miles by June 1944, when Rome was liberated, only two days before the D-Day invasion.

  The Longest Day

  Thanks to Admiral King’s effective anti-U-boat campaign, and air superiority, by 1943 the United States had turned a trickle of supplies, maintained by a tenuous lifeline through the submarine packs, into a flood that poured through open-ocean pipelines. On any given day, more than thirty convoys were at sea with more than 650 merchant ships and 140 escorts. After midyear, virtually none of the troopships were lost to torpedoes. This stream of materials and men had made possible the invasion of Sicily and Italy, and now it opened the door for the invasion of France.

  All along, Roosevelt and Churchill, despite their hopes for a quick surge up the coast of Italy, knew that talk of the “soft underbelly of Europe” was just that, and an invasion of France by sea was necessary. Planners had concluded that an invasion could only occur during summer months, given the tides along the beaches at Normandy where the Allies wanted to land and the weather that would permit air cover. In December 1943, Roosevelt and Churchill appointed General Eisenhower commander of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expediti
onary Force (SHAEF), headquartered in London. As a masterful diversion, Patton, who had been languishing in Eisenhower’s doghouse because of his Sicilian slaps, was ordered to set up a vast—and completely phony—“army” poised to attack the Pasde-Calais, exactly where Hitler had determined the Allies would strike. But Ike had other ideas. The real invasion was to occur two hundred miles away, on the beaches of Normandy, where there was more room and fewer German ports or defenses. Operation Overlord involved more than 1.6 million American soldiers as well as British, Canadians, Poles, and Free French.

  In retrospect, the invasion seemed destined for success from the outset: the Allies owned the air and sea-lanes; they vastly outnumbered the defenders—some of whom were the unlikeliest of conscripts (including a handful of Korean POWs)—and they had the French and Belgian resistance movements to assist behind the lines. At the time, however, the invasion presented countless dangers and could have collapsed at any of a number of points. Lingering in the minds of Allied planners was the Canadian disaster at Dieppe and the ill-fated landing at Anzio. Churchill worried about another potential catastrophe, perhaps a new Dunkirk, and Ike’s own advisers estimated the odds of success at no better than even.45

  Nevertheless, the Allies possessed overwhelming air and sea superiority, large numbers of fresh troops, and the element of surprise. They read the German secret Enigma codes, which provided crucial, often pinpoint, intelligence. The bombing campaign had already severely winnowed not only the Luftwaffe, but the regular army and defensive positions. Both the British and American forces had good field commanders like General Montgomery, General Omar Bradley, and Lieutenant General Theodore Roosevelt Jr., the son of President Teddy Roosevelt. Facing them, the German commander was no less than the famed Desert Fox, Rommel himself, who had organized a thorough network of coastal defenses including mines, barbed wire, tank traps, bunkers, and pillboxes—all topped off with a series of trenches running along the high ground above the beaches. Rommel had strenuously argued for concentrating his forces—including the reserves of Panzers—close to the beaches and fighting at the water’s edge. His superior, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, favored allowing the enemy to land, then striking before they could consolidate. As a result, the Germans had infantry at the beaches, tanks in the rear, and little coordination between them. Rommel appreciated the difficulty of the situation and prophesied that there would only be one chance to defeat the invasion, and perhaps, decide the entire war: “The war will be won or lost on the beaches…. We’ll have only one chance to stop the enemy and that’s while he’s in the water.” It would be, he observed, “the longest day” of the war.46