The Germans, nevertheless, persisted. Demands on Allied bomber commands occasioned by the invasion and the Normandy battles gave the Nazis' aircraft planners the rest that they needed to disperse production and locate much of it underground. Again a Japanese military attaché betrayed the Germans' expectations of producing a thousand jets a month by January 1945. And again the Allied bombers, able to break off from their ground war support, knew where to strike to delay work on the jets.
As the war approached its end, Hitler hoped to organize a corps of five hundred jets and reserves of fuel for them to be used as a "trump card." There were too many obstacles. The card was never played.
More serious threats were posed by the V-ls and V-2s. Once more a Nazi hater first tipped off the British about these and other German technical developments. Shortly after the war began, a never-identified source in Oslo left with the British embassy there an analysis of Germany's progress in weapons research. This "Oslo Report," passed on to the Air Ministry in London, accurately forecast what the Germans were planning in both pilotless aircraft and rocket missiles. It also disclosed to the British for the first time that the German center for technological experiments was on Peenemünde, an island off the Baltic coast.
The reported plans were so far ahead of British weapons development that at first they were dismissed as airy imaginings. But in early 1943 an Ultra decrypt reported the transfer of a Knickebein team to Peenemiinde. Anti-Nazis' reports quickly confirmed that this was the center of German work on advanced aerial weapons. Ultra removed any confusion about what these weapons were. At one end of the island, development was going forward on what became known as the V-l pilotless aircraft; at the other end a team of rocket scientists under the direction of Wernher von Braun was developing the V-2 rocket. French Resistance observers began reporting on launch sites in northern France that were plainly positioned to aim the V-ls toward London.
When these secret reports identified the work going on at Peenemunde, Churchill personally ordered Bomber Command to attack the island. Carried out on the night of August 16, the raid pulverized Peenemunde and set back this phase of German weapons development by months. Braun's team moved to a new underground center in Bavaria, and a new test site was built in Poland. Allied bombers slowed up the first firings of the new weapons by destroying many of their launch sites in France.
Because of the delays and design problems with the weapons, the Allies had landed in Normandy before the V-l buzz bombs began their guttural flights to Britain. They would pulse-jet ahead until their inner "air logs" had clicked off the requisite number of miles, shut down their fuel supplies and sent them into their deadly dives. For those of us stationed at Hall Place, the odds of survival were suddenly diminished. On the first long June night when V-ls began to arrive in full force, our captain ordered one of our guards to station himself in a cupola atop our roof and try to sound an alarm if the bomb came directly toward the manse. That poor sweating GI counted sixty-seven V-ls buzzing past and over him before dawn.
What we didn't know was that because of Ultra decodes and other intelligence, the British had had six months to get ready for the buzzers. In May 1944, as an example, Tricycle's spymaster sent a warning that this most valued of German agents should move out of London as soon as he could so as to escape Hitler's secret weapons targeted on the city.
We at Hall Place gained a firsthand view of one of the defensive steps taken by the British. On the second morning of the V-ls' arrival we were amazed to look southward and find that, overnight, a whole line of barrage balloons had been raised across the largely unpopulated heathlands, with cables forming a steel fence between them. Even as we watched, a buzz bomb tangled itself on one of the wires and came down in a harmless flash.
When the V-ls first started coming over, the antiaircraft batteries near us fired their shots ridiculously far behind the small, scudding craft. We didn't know that the British and American scientists were cooperating to correct that problem. Masses of antiaircraft guns equipped with American-developed proximity fuses were lined up on the south coasts to shoot down the V-Is before they could reach land.
On another day my shift was doing calisthenics outside Hall Place when a V-l came toward us. We hurried to flatten ourselves against the wall as we realized that on the buzz bomb's tail was a Spitfire whose guns were chattering away as it sought to bring the V-l down short of London. Fortunately, both planes went over the hill beyond our digs before the bomb exploded. Again, we learned later that the speeds of RAF fighters had been increased and Britain's own small fleet of jet planes pressed into use to run down the buzz bombs, mostly out at sea. As the summer went on, fewer and fewer of the bombs came our way and we began to breathe easier.
Although the V-ls destroyed more than a million homes and killed some ten thousand people, their reign was far shorter and less corrosive in terms of morale than the Germans had hoped. The launch sites originally chosen for them, in the Pas de Calais, were soon overrun by the Allies, forcing the Germans to fire the bombs from greater distances in Holland. Given this advantage, the RAF shot down more of them over the sea, and the coastal AA batteries were better able to track the ones that got through. In August the kill rate rose to seventy-four percent, and it climbed to eighty-three percent in the last days before the offensive ended in September. Hitler himself admitted, "The V-l unfortunately cannot decide the war."
The V-2s were another matter. They required little in the way of launch sites, and there was no defense against them. The giant rockets, prototypes of ballistic missiles, simply soared into the stratosphere, arced over Britain and smashed down with an impact that sent powerful shock waves radiating outward to remind war-weary Britons of the men, women and children who lay dead or dying at their epicenters. Braun and his colleagues managed a successful firing in October 1942. Seeing a film of the launch, Hitler called the V-2 "the decisive weapon of the war" and envisioned thousands of the missiles pouring down on England to pummel the cities into rubble and force the people, even at this late date, to sue for peace.
How near the Germans came to turning this last great fantasy of Adolf Hitler into reality is hard to assess. War historians seem to take it for granted that the plucky Brits, who had weathered so much, would also have endured this one without folding. As one who lived through that time, I am convinced that the threat of the V-2 rockets has been underestimated. Certainly, given more time, the Germans could have pounded much of England into dust, killed or maimed civilians by the thousands and hundreds of thousands and wiped out the masses of the Allied troops assembled there. And although it now seems inconceivable that British morale could have collapsed, I can testify that the V-2s' psychological impact was more powerful than their physical blows. There was no warning of them, no sirens wailing, no drone of approaching motors. There was just this brilliant flash and you and everything yards around you were gone, ionized, blown to bits. English people told me that the V-2s drove fear into the psyche as no earlier experience had done.
Add to this the fact that Braun's team was already working on a two-stage rocket that could have hurtled over the Atlantic to reach the U.S. Work was also under way on a rocket that could be launched from a platform towed by a U-boat.
The V-2 was a near thing. Its defeat in World War II was a matter of timing. The delays caused by the bombing of Peenemünde and other sites pushed back the beginning of the missiles' attack until September 8, 1944. On March 29, 1945, Allied troops overran their last launch sites. The countermeasures engineered by the British and their anti-Nazi colleagues on the continent limited the V-2 onslaught on Britain to 1,115 rockets, as calculated by Dr. Jones and his staff. In all they killed "only" about twenty-five hundred people in Britain. Their deaths were tokens of what might have been.
The Germans rained even more of the rockets on the Belgian cities of Antwerp and Liege after they were in Allied hands.
A footnote. For those of us Americans billeted in Kent's "Bomb Alley," the V-weapon attack
s held an irony that we learned about only decades later. Lacking adequate air reconnaissance, the Germans decided to use their spies in Britain as forward observers for their unique artillery. The agents were instructed to report where the V-weapons hit and at what time, enabling the German specialists to correct their trajectories so as to deliver more of them on London rather than too far north or too far south. But of course the spies were under British control. Churchill's scientific guru, the ubiquitous Dr. Jones, devised a scheme whereby these pseudo observers reported the actual point of strike of bombs that had hit the central part of London coupled with the time of strike of those that had fallen short. This stratagem caused the Germans to believe the shorter-range setting was correct. Obligingly they set the timing mechanism so that more of them fell—where? On the approaches to London, on Bomb Alley. We at our intercept station were, unknowingly, helping to bring Hitler's vengeance weapons down on our own heads. That they landed all around us, without doing us in, was a matter of chance.
The "Final Solution" Delivers an Ultimate Message
As Allied armies smashed across Germany and its occupied territories in April 1945, the troops encountered phenomena that pierced even their war-hardened mind-sets. These were the Nazi death camps, where what Nazi Walter Schellenberg had called the "Final Solution" to the problem of the Untermenschen, the so-called inferior peoples, was being administered. GIs and Tommies alike were horrified by the scenes the open gates disclosed: the pathetic masses of gaunt, hollow-eyed survivors clad in fragments of filthy, lice-ridden striped cotton, the thousands of unburied emaciated corpses left to rot like great piles of garbage. A man as tough as George Patton vomited when he witnessed the barbarism of the camp at Ohrdruf.
In early 1941, Bletchley Park began receiving messages relating to the massacres of those the Nazis classed as undesirables. BP was breaking the non-Enigma codes of German police units assigned to the elimination of "inferior races" and was also breaking one of the codes used by Himmler's killing squads.
By August 1941, Churchill was sufficiently enraged by the information he received through Bletchley decrypts that he decided to speak out against the German atrocities, even though his so doing might jeopardize Britain's codebreaking operation. In a public broadcast he expressed his horror that "scores of thousands—literally scores of thousands—of executions in cold blood are being perpetrated by the German police troops." He added that not since the Mongol invasions of Europe had there been such methodical, merciless butchery on such a scale. "We are," he said, "in the presence of a crime without a name."
When Churchill issued his public denunciation, the BP decrypts had not yet made clear that the main thrust of the SS and the police was to eradicate the Jews of Europe. So his speech made no reference to Jews. As Richard Breitman acerbically noted in his book Official Secrets—an in-depth review of "what the Nazis planned, what the British and Americans knew"—Churchill's " 'crime without a name' was not the Holocaust."
The Nazi massacres should not have been a surprise. In Mein Kampf Hitler dwelled on his hatred of Jews, his theories of "inferior races" and his assertion of the German people as the apotheosis of Aryan supremacy. He claimed that World War I would have turned out differently if a large segment of "Hebrew corrupters" had been eliminated by poison gas.
As Breitman has carefully documented, however, despite the steady infusion of BP's incriminating decrypts, official recognition of the Jews' plight was painfully slow in coming. Left over from the Great War was a hearty skepticism toward purported atrocities. No one could believe that men this side of Attila could do such heinous things as line up people along the edge of the ditch they had just dug and then shoot them so that they conveniently fell into their own graves. Added to this was the harsh fact that many high-placed Allied officials themselves harbored anti-Semitic prejudice.
Evidence of the Final Solution's reality nevertheless mounted, and it affected Allied leaders, particularly Churchill and Roosevelt. On December 17, 1942, with the concurrence of Stalin, came the joint Allied Declaration denouncing the Nazis' killings of the Jews. In Parliament it was read on the floor of the House of Commons, and a moment of silent prayer was observed.
Still, words and prayers fell far short of action to carry out rescue operations and save Jewish lives. It seemed that strong objections could be found to reject every rescue proposal. To evacuate refugees into the Middle East would upset Muslim allies and might also arouse unrealistic hopes for a Jewish homeland. To have neutral countries take in thousands of Jews raised the necessity of providing massive amounts of food, medicine, housing and other forms of support—in those times of dire shortages, who was willing to assume these extra demands? Attempts to supply aid to Jews in German-occupied Europe would, it was argued, only weaken the Allies' blockade and forestall Germany's collapse.
What became the prevailing view was expressed by Adolf Berle, U.S. assistant secretary of state: "Nothing can be done to save these helpless unfortunates except through the invasion of Europe, the defeat of the German armies and the breaking of German power."
Of all this, most people were only dimly aware. Concerned with their own wartime responsibilities, having to conduct their lives under difficult conditions, they failed to let recognition of the Holocaust penetrate. They saw the photos of men and women having to wear the yellow Star of David sewn on their outerwear and of the shop windows of Jewish-owned stores shattered by hoodlums and the like, but to accept that these signs of depravity extended to state-ordered mass shootings and gas oven executions and baskets of gold teeth knocked out of the jaws of Jewish corpses and of lamp shades crafted of human skin—these were beyond human understanding.
That is, until the Allies liberated the death camps, until the press photographers sent back their horrifying pictures of Nazi evil. Only then did the public at large awake to the proofs of a nation gone rabid.
For those whose beliefs in that European phase of the war had been buffeted by what often seemed senseless slaughter, the waste of young lives under posturing generals, the loss of family members and good friends, the sheer cruelty and horror of it all, suddenly all doubts were wiped away. World War II was, after all, a necessary war; it had to be fought and won; the tremendous sacrifices were justified. We of what Tom Brokaw has labeled "the greatest generation," who are now of an age that he, not to miss a sentimental beat, has called "the twilight of their lives," we who are now disappearing at the rate of more than a thousand a day, look back with satisfaction on a job that needed doing and was, with the inestimable help of the codebreakers, well done.
20
The Pacific: Last Battles, Final Decisions
Once MacArthur had retaken the Philippines, the time had come to close in on the Japanese homeland. Even though the outcome of the war was now clear, the Nipponese were ruled not by a sense of reality so much as by the Bushido code of the samurai, one of whose tenets was to prefer suicide to defeat or dishonor. Still in the grip of the military, the people prepared to apply the code to the nation as a whole rather than just to individual warriors.
Allied planners fixed on the outlying islands whose possession was deemed essential as the last stepping-stones to Japan. The first was the small island of Iwo Jima, 625 miles north of Saipan and 660 miles south of Tokyo. Second was Okinawa, the large island the Japanese had occupied since 1879 and had made a prefecture of greater Tokyo. Peopled by farmers and fishermen loyal to the empire, it was only about 350 miles from Japan's southernmost island of Kyushu and less than a thousand miles from Tokyo.
The taking of Iwo Jima was dictated in large part by the needs of U.S. Superfortresses. Flying from Saipan, the big bombers had made devastating raids on Japan, but since the long distances precluded the protection of fighter escorts, the costs were high. Japanese fighters stormed up to meet them. By January 1945 the crew of a B-29 setting out for Japan could expect to be subjected to an average of eight fighter attacks. Between December and March, thirty-seven B-29s were shot down.
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Air bases at Iwo Jima would mean greater security for the Forts and their crews. The island could provide navigational beacons for flights from Saipan as well as emergency landing sites for crippled planes. Most important, long-range fighters could launch from Iwo Jima's airfields to accompany the Superforts.
Responsibility for the attack on Iwo Jima shifted to Spruance and his Fifth Fleet. Spruance showed his continuing belief in the efficacy of signals intelligence by assigning a codebreaking team to his flagship as well as placing teams on four of his other ships. The main cryptanalytic crews in Oahu, Washington and Melbourne backed them.
One incident illustrates the Allied mastery of Japanese codes at this late stage of the war. On April 1, 1945, the Japanese navy changed to a new codebook, a real attempt to make their communications more secure. Yet the code was broken the next day, and within two days Japanese messages were again being read routinely. The Japanese high command could make scarcely a move without having word of it passed on to Allied commanders.
By contrast, the Americans put into use at Iwo Jima an additional type of code communications that proved impenetrable to the Japanese. This was the language of the Navajo code talkers. The Navajo tongue has such a complex, irregular syntax that few people outside the tribe can understand it. Consequently, use of the Navajo code talkers speeded up battlefield communications by eliminating the need for encoding and decoding. A few Choctaw code talkers had served in World War I. In the Pacific, it was the Navajos who were enlisted: four hundred of their code talkers literally "fought with their tongues." Lacking Navajo words for modem military equipment, they developed equivalents: tas-chizzie, or "swallow," meant a torpedo plane; jay-sho, or "buzzard," stood for a bomber; da-he-tih-hi, "hummingbird," was a fighter plane. At Iwo Jima, in the first forty-eight hours of battle, the code talkers sent and received some eight hundred messages without an error—and without the Japanese ever gaining the first understanding of the guttural chatter that came over their intercept receivers.
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