Worth mentioning is an incident involving U.S. paratroopers. As part of the invasion of Sicily, some two thousand soldiers of the 82nd Airborne Division made a night jump onto the island. Their planes took the paratroopers over the invasion fleet. Nervous gunners then mistook the American aircraft for German intruders. The results were disastrous. Twenty-three planes were shot down, and 229 paratroopers were killed or wounded. This was not the first incident of “friendly fire,” nor would it be the last. It did, however, reflect a risk of warfare, one that remains today. To ensure it did not recur when, in 1944, the Allies invaded Normandy, the commander of the 82nd insisted that the planes carrying the paratroopers make a wide berth of the invasion fleet.
Next up was Italy. The British were eager to proceed, the Americans less so. Generals Marshall and Eisenhower were concerned that a campaign to seize the Italian mainland would divert resources required for the cross-channel invasion. But when they learned that invasion would not occur in late 1943 as originally thought, but in the spring of 1944 at the earliest, they agreed to the venture. The initial goal was to capture the port city of Naples and the airfields surrounding the town of Foggia. Later, this was expanded to include Rome, and later still, the entire peninsula. The result was a major Allied military effort. The campaign would last until April 1945 and cost many, many lives. Author Robert Wallace described the fight for Italy as “one of the most grinding and protracted struggles of the entire war.”
It began on September 3, 1943, when British troops crossed over the Straits of Messina and entered the continent of Europe. Six days later, additional British troops landed at Taranto. That same day, American and British soldiers under the command of Mark Clark went ashore on the beaches of Salerno, just south of Naples. German forces contested the landing and came close to pushing the Allied troops into the sea. But, after nine days of intense fighting, the invaders prevailed, though at the cost of thirty-five hundred casualties.
Naples fell on October 1. Days later, the airfields of Foggia were in Allied hands. This enabled the American Fifteenth Air Force, with its B-17s and B-24s, to begin its strategic bombing of Germany, which it did, and which it continued until the day the war ended.
The Italian terrain of mountains and rivers favored the Germans, who proved adept at defensive operations. This, plus the cold weather and lack of roads, made Allied advances extremely difficult.
By early 1944, a stalemate had arisen. So General Clark launched an amphibious operation hoping to outflank the Germans. American troops landed at Anzio, a small coastal town on the western side of Italy, some twenty-five miles south of Rome. The Germans pounded the position, and Anzio became a problem for the Allies. Not until mid-May were the U.S. troops able to break free and then only because the Germans had decided to move farther north.
At Anzio the Americans displayed much courage, none more so than the U.S. Army nurses who served in the field hospitals. These medical stations provided immediate care and, illustrating the scale of the Anzio endeavor, treated more than thirty-three thousand men. Throughout the ordeal German artillery fired on the Americans. Most of the shells hit legitimate targets. Some, however, struck the hospitals, where some two hundred nurses were at work. Six nurses were killed at Anzio. Four won the Silver Star, the first women ever to do so.
The Allied advance from Naples to Rome was never more difficult than at Monte Cassino. The town of Cassino lies midway between the two cities, on the western side of the Apennine Mountains. Its most noteworthy feature was the monastery atop a seventeen-hundred-foot-high hill immediately adjacent to the town. The monastery was a historic treasure. The birthplace of the Benedictine order, it contained medieval manuscripts of great value. It also was a perfect place for the Germans to observe Allied movements.
Respecting the historical significance of Monte Cassino, the German army had not occupied the monastery. The Allies, whose army by then included troops from New Zealand, South Africa, India, and Poland as well as Free French forces, did not know that. They assumed the Germans were watching their every move. Thus the Allies attributed the difficulties they were having in capturing Cassino to the ability of the Germans to pinpoint their positions. After repeated failures to capture the town, they decided to eliminate the monastery and all of the Germans therein.
On February 15, 1944, Allied aircraft dropped bomb after bomb on the monastery, destroying it completely. The unintended result was to create such rubble that once the Germans occupied the hill, which they quickly did, seizing the hilltop became that much more difficult.
At about the same time the Allies finally took control of Cassino, the Americans at Anzio broke out. As Anzio was north of Cassino, the hope was to trap the retreating Germans. This might have happened but for a decision made by the senior American general in charge. Mark Clark decided he’d rather be the first to reach Rome than destroy the retreating German Tenth Army, the unit which so capably had been resisting the Allied advance. Eager for the glory associated with the capture of the Eternal City, Clark directed his divisions north to Rome. They entered the city on June 4. Clark got his reward. But it was short-lived. Two days later, events in Normandy overshadowed the general and the Italian campaign.
The advance up the peninsula would continue. Lasting a total of 607 days, the entire Italian campaign was costly in matériel and expensive in lives. American dead eventually numbered 19,475. Four times that number were wounded. The losses to Britain and the other Allied nations were comparable. It was a high price for an effort than in his memoir General Eisenhower described as a “distinctly subsidiary operation.”
Yet the campaign’s accomplishments were many. The fighting forced Italy out of the war. It secured the Mediterranean for the British. It provided airfields for the strategic bombing of Germany. It kept the U.S. Army in battle for the year 1943 and gave FDR a response to Stalin when the Russian leader complained that only the Red Army was fighting the Nazis. Most important, at least for George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower, it tied down twenty German divisions that otherwise would have been available to confront the Allies in Normandy.
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Of necessity, this narrative contains few references to individual combat units of the U.S. Army. Numbered field armies and air forces, such as Patton’s Third Army, that fought in Normandy and the Fifteenth Air Force are mentioned, but smaller organizations, such as infantry divisions or fighter groups, rarely are identified. One exception is the Army Air Force’s 332nd Fighter Group.
This air force unit has become known as “the Tuskegee Airmen.” Composed exclusively of African-Americans, all of whom were trained at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, the 332nd flew in both North Africa and Sicily. Later, based in Italy and equipped with P-51 Mustangs, the group escorted Fifteenth Air Force bombers on raids into Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Romania. Commanded by Colonel Benjamin O. Davis, the group compiled an outstanding combat record. For the loss of fifty-one pilots, the 332nd Fighter Group destroyed 119 enemy aircraft.
This record is even more noteworthy in view of the discrimination these black Americans had to endure. In the early 1940s, the United States was an overtly racist society. African-Americans were denied equal opportunities and equal rights. Few institutions were more racist than the U.S. Army. The 332nd overcame such injustice. The 92nd Infantry Division could not.
The 92nd was composed of African-American enlisted men and white officers. The former were poorly trained. The latter were unhappy in their assignment. The result, not surprisingly, was failure in battle. Only with time would the army rid itself of the absurd notion that black Americans could not fight with skill and courage. During the Second World War, some 961,000 African-Americans served in the armed forces. Most, however, were relegated to support units.
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When Churchill and Roosevelt met at Casablanca in January 1943, they reached agreement on an Allied military priority in addition to that of Sicily and the strategic bombing of Germany. The president and the
prime minister agreed that the defeat of the enemy’s submarine forces was to be Britain’s and America’s most urgent objective.
Throughout the Second World War, German submarines, the U-boats (Unterseeboote), waged a campaign to defeat Great Britain by depriving her of food and war materials. Nazi Admiral Karl Dönitz, commander of the U-boats, reasoned that if his boats were to sink enough of the ships delivering supplies, Britain would have no choice but to surrender. Germany had tried this plan of attack once before, in 1917. She failed then and would fail again. But from September 1939 to May 1945, her submarines would wreak havoc at sea, ultimately sinking 5,140 merchant vessels.
Thus was fought what is called the Battle of the Atlantic. This was not a single engagement, but a host of small battles below, on, and above the ocean. The combatants were the U-boats and those Allied ships and planes attempting to sink them. The battle began the day the war started. It ended on May 4, 1945, when Dönitz signaled the U-boats to cease operations and return to base. In his memoirs Winston Churchill called the Battle of the Atlantic, “the dominating factor all through the war.”
Even before the United States entered the war, President Roosevelt had become acquainted with the U-boats. Early in September 1941 the American destroyer USS Greer was in the Atlantic south of Iceland. A German submarine fired two torpedoes at her. Both missed. A month later a German torpedo struck the USS Kearny, another destroyer. The ship survived, but eleven sailors died. The USS Reuben James was not so fortunate. On October 31, 1941, U-568 sank the vessel, killing 115 American sailors. Harold Stark, then one of the navy’s most senior admirals, said, “The Navy is already at war in the Atlantic but the country doesn’t seem to realize it.” Franklin Roosevelt did. After the attack on the Greer, he ordered the U.S. Navy to fire on any ship threatening American vessels or those under American escort.
At first, the battle against the U-boats did not go well, for neither Great Britain nor the United States. Once Germany and America were at war, Dönitz sent the U-boats to American waters. There they enjoyed great success, sinking ships from Cape Cod to the Caribbean. Foolishly, the U.S. Navy initially chose not to mandate that merchant ships sail in convoy. This made the job of the U-boats much easier. So did the bright lights of American cities. Only belatedly were they blacked out. The initial result was a maritime massacre. The Germans called the submarine campaign Operation Paukenschlag, best translated as the introductory roll of kettle drums. The U-boat commanders referred to it as “the Happy Times.”
Early in the war, the British too had felt the full force of the U-boats. From May through November of 1940, in the waters off England, there had been an earlier Happy Time. In June alone the U-boats sank 173 ships. By then the German submarines had gained an important advantage. With the defeat of France, Dönitz had been able to base his boats at French ports. This shortened their voyages to and from operational areas.
During 1942, despite increasing losses, the U-boats continued to enjoy success. And their numbers grew. At times, Dönitz had one hundred U-boats on patrol in the Atlantic. Sometimes these were replenished at sea. The Type XIV submarine, nicknamed the Milk Cow (Milchkuh) carried fuel and food, fresh water and torpedoes. These submarines would rendezvous in mid-ocean with the attack boats, which then would continue the hunt. Often the U-boats would strike in “wolf packs,” a number of submarines acting in concert. Pity the convoy they encountered. In 1942, a banner year for Dönitz, his U-boats sank 1,662 Allied ships.
On February 18, 1942, as the Battle of the Atlantic raged, U-578, sank the American destroyer escort the USS Jacob Jones. Twenty–five years earlier, as Germany’s kaiser sought to control the seas, U-53 had torpedoed an American warship. It too was named Jacob Jones.
Yet in May 1943 the Allies gained the upper hand. More escorts, better weapons, plus advances in technology made the Atlantic Ocean safer for convoys and more dangerous for the U-boats. One key factor was the increasing use of aircraft. These would first detect the submarine and then attack. Employing American-built long-range B-24s, Britain’s Coastal Command made life difficult for the U-boats. So did escort carriers. These were small warships that operated naval aircraft. Along with destroyers they formed hunter-killer groups. In mid-June 1944, one of them, an American, captured a U-boat. The war prize, U-505, is today on display in Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry.
By the beginning of 1944 the Allies had won the Battle of the Atlantic. U-boat losses were heavy. That year alone, 242 boats did not return. Dönitz attributed the defeat to technological advances in radar and radio detection. He would have been surprised to learn that a principal reason for the Allied victory was that the British Intelligence Services had penetrated U-boat communications and were able to read the encrypted messages that Dönitz and his U-boat captains sent to one another. At first, the British used this knowledge to reroute convoys away from the wolf packs. Later, this highly secret intelligence was employed to direct air and surface forces to where the U-boats were.
Key to this intelligence coup was early work by Polish and French agents. This was built on by the British. At Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire, some extremely smart men and women analyzed captured German code books as well as Germany’s famous Enigma machine (one of which had been plucked from a sinking U-boat). The Enigma machine was a sophisticated electromechanical encoding device, about the size of an old-fashioned typewriter. It was the means by which senior German generals and admirals communicated. That the British were able to intercept and decode these communications was extraordinary. Indeed, it was one of the most remarkable accomplishments of World War II. So critical was this intelligence that only a few individuals were privy to it. The intercepts were labeled ULTRA. Closely guarded—their existence was publicly revealed only in 1977—ULTRA intelligence was of great value to the Allies. In the Battle of the Atlantic, it was decisive.
When Admiral Dönitz recalled the U-boats in May 1945, it marked the end of a titanic struggle. Germany had contested the Atlantic with Britain and America and had lost. During the Second World War, Dönitz sent a total of 859 U-boats on war patrols. A staggering 648 of them failed to return. Toward the end of the conflict, a German submarine leaving port was embarking on a suicide mission. In total, some 30,000 U-boat crewmen lost their lives.
Dönitz survived. Upon Hitler’s death, he became head of state. But, not for long, as Germany soon surrendered and the admiral was placed under arrest. At Nuremberg, where the top Nazis were tried postwar, Dönitz received the comparatively light sentence of ten years in prison. He died in 1980. His impact on the war and that of the German submarines were substantial. Winston Churchill expressed it in simple prose: “The only thing that ever really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril.”
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As the Royal Navy and its American counterpart fought the U-boats, their comrades in the Allied air forces were engaging the Luftwaffe, the German air force. In 1939 the Luftwaffe was the foremost aerial combat organization in the world. By 1943 it was waging war on three fronts—Italy, Western Europe, and Russia—and the strain was beginning to tell. Yet it remained a formidable foe, as both England’s Royal Air Force and the American Eighth Air Force were finding out.
Proponents of airpower in both the United States and Great Britain believed aircraft alone could destroy Nazi Germany, thus making the inevitably costly cross-channel invasion unnecessary. Their plan was to strike Germany from the air with well-armed long-range bombers. They expected to destroy the Nazis’ capacity to make war and to break the morale of the German people. In the event, they accomplished neither. But the damage their bombers inflicted was immense and their contribution to victory significant.
The British bombed at night. Their principal targets were German cities. By April 1945, most major cities in Germany were in ruins, thanks to the RAF’s Bomber Command. Because thousands and thousands of German civilians were killed, postwar moralists would declare the raids to be inhumane, condemning Bomber Command and
its leader, Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris. Harris, however, simply wanted to win the war. He and his pilots thought what they were doing was eminently reasonable given what the German air force had done to Warsaw, Rotterdam, Coventry, London, and numerous Russian cities.
The Americans bombed in daylight. Their goal in the strategic bombing campaign was to destroy Germany’s industrial base. Over a period of 966 days the four-engine B-17s and B-24s of the Eighth Air Force would depart England and fly to the Continent. There, they would bomb shipyards, railroad yards, munitions factories, naval bases, aircraft plants, and the like. By mid-1944, the Luftwaffe no longer could stop them.
The Eighth Air Force was one of fifteen numbered air forces the United States established during the Second World War. Eleven of them were deployed overseas. The Tenth Air Force, for example, operated in Burma and India. The Fifth flew in the southwestern Pacific. The Eighth was based in East Anglia. It operated from sixty-two airfields that crowded this most eastern bulge of the United Kingdom.
The Eighth began its endeavors on February 29, 1942, when seven U.S. Army Air Force officers arrived in Britain. Their job was simple: create an aerial armada that would pulverize the enemy. That is exactly what they did. But the cost was high. Some twenty-six thousand Americans of the Eighth Air Force did not return home alive.
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At first, progress in building the Eighth was halting. Airplanes and crew were slow in arriving, and some were transferred to Africa to assist Eisenhower in the battle for Tunisia. Then, General Ira Eaker, the commander of the Eighth, discovered that B-17s and B-24s could not safely fly over Germany without protective escort fighters. Yet the fighter available, the P-47 Thunderbolt, did not have sufficient range. So, consistent with U.S. war fighting doctrine, the bombers went on alone into Germany. The results were disastrous. Luftwaffe fighters destroyed many, many U.S. aircraft. Perhaps the most notorious missions targeted Schweinfurt. On August 17, 1943, and October 14 of that same year, Eaker dispatched first 337 planes and then 420 to Schweinfurt and, on the first mission, to nearby Regensburg as well. The latter was the location of an important aircraft manufacturing plant. Schweinfurt was where most ball bearings in Germany were made. On both days the Luftwaffe hammered the attacking force. Each time their guns destroyed more than sixty B-17s. As one B-17 Flying Fortress carried a crew of ten, the Schweinfurt raids cost the Eighth Air Force no fewer than twelve hundred men.
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