Authors: Terence T. Finn
Tags: #History, #Asia, #Afghanistan, #Military, #United States, #eBook
That was not to be. In large part because the Allies, despite American expertise in logistics, were running short of supplies. Five hundred tons of food, ammunition, clothing, and gasoline were required each day just to sustain U.S. troops. The needs of British, Canadian, and French soldiers added to the shortage. There was another problem as well. The German army, though defeated in Normandy and battered by the Russians, showed no signs of giving up. In fact, Hitler’s men fought increasingly hard as the Allies closed in on the River Rhine.
In June, the Germans had started using a new weapon. Called the V-1, it was a pilotless flying bomb, the first of what are now called cruise missiles. They were aimed at London and at cities in Belgium. The RAF shot down 1,771 of them, but twice that number struck the English capital. Some six thousand civilians were killed. By September, however, the V-1 launch sites were in Allied hands, so the threat they posed subsided.
The Germans then deployed a more deadly device, one for which there was no defense. This was the V-2, the world’s first ballistic missile. Developed by Werner von Braun, who later built the Saturn V rocket that launched the Apollo astronauts, the V-2s targeted London. They first struck in September 1944. Eighty-five landed in October. The next month the number rose to 154. Hitler thought it and the V-1 would reverse Germany’s declining fortunes of war. They did not. But they illustrated the Third Reich’s technical ingenuity and gave the Allies great cause for concern.
In September, two major Allied attacks took place The first was an uncharacteristically bold venture Montgomery had conceived. It consisted of dropping paratroopers behind enemy lines deep into Holland in order to secure key bridges. Unfortunately for the Allies, particularly the British who participated, the attack failed. The second offensive was a drive by the Canadians toward Antwerp. This succeeded, but not quickly and not without considerable casualties.
U.S. troops had better results, at least initially. In October, after hard fighting, the U.S. First Army entered Germany and took control of Aachen, the first city in Germany to be seized by the Allies.
First Army then attacked an area known as the Hürtgen Forest. This became one of the more searing campaigns ever waged by an American army. Virtually unknown today, more than 120,000 U.S. soldiers fought in what authors William K. Goodneck and Ogden Tanner call “a chamber of horrors, combining the most difficult elements of warfare, weather, and terrain.” When the battle finally ended on December 13, approximately twenty-four thousand Americans were either dead or wounded, missing or captured.
As the fighting in the Hürtgen indicated, the German army was far from being a spent force. Nevertheless, several Allied generals thought their opponents had little fight left in them. These officers were in for a surprise. On December 16, at five-thirty in the morning, three German field armies, some 250,000 men, struck the Americans in the Ardennes, a region where the borders of Belgium, Luxembourg, and Germany converge. This attack began what is called the Battle of the Bulge (after the indentation it created in the Allied front lines) and, ultimately won by the Americans, was the largest battle fought by the United States in the entire war. Some 81,000 U.S. troops were casualties, of whom 10,276 were killed. The weather was atrocious. There was much snow and extremely cold temperatures. Notable was the American defense of Bastogne and the drive north to Bastogne by Patton’s Third Army. Both of these actions are legendary, and rightly so.
Less well known are the events at Stavelot and Malmédy. At both places German troops killed U.S. soldiers who had surrendered. These were SS troops, fanatical Nazis imbued with all the evil Hitler’s regime represented. They took unarmed Americans to a snow-covered field and simply shot them. Earlier, in Normandy, SS men had murdered 156 Canadian prisoners of war. These events, particularly the one at Malmédy, backfired on the Germans. Word of the killings spread quickly. The result was that U.S. troops fought with greater tenacity. Sadly for the Americans, one division did not. This was the 28th. It was an inexperienced unit and, early in the battle, was mauled by the advancing Germans. Some seven thousand of its soldiers surrendered.
These men, along with other Americans taken prisoner during the Battle of the Bulge, were among the ninety thousand U.S. soldiers and airmen held captive in Germany during the Second World War. For the most part, they were treated well. Most received Red Cross packages shipped from the United States to Germany via Lisbon. These contained food and clothing, cigarettes and reading materials.
German soldiers surrendering to Americans were transported to the United States (except for those who called it quits very late in the war). This enabled U.S. troops in Europe to concentrate on winning the war. German prisoners of war (POWs) in America numbered some 370,000 and were held in 666 camps, most of which were located in the South (this kept heating costs low). The prisoners were well fed and provided with decent housing. Many were put to work, in forests and on farms and in selected factories. Receiving pay of 80 cents per day, these prisoners in fact alleviated labor shortages in the U.S.
By January of the new year the Allies were ready to clear the lands west of the Rhine. This meant breaching the Siegfried Line, a series of fortifications on the border erected to halt the Allied advance. In this the Line failed. By March, Eisenhower’s armies—British, American, Canadian, and French—were at the great river. The Rhine epitomized the German state. Crossing it, in addition to providing military advantage, would be of immense symbolic value.
One of the armies engaged in battles west of the Rhine, and later beyond, was the U.S. Ninth Army. Overshadowed by Patton’s Third Army, the Ninth played a significant role in defeating the Nazis. For example, in crossing the Roer River, necessary in order to reach the Rhine, it displayed both skill and courage, eventually taking thirty-six thousand German soldiers prisoner. Commanding the Ninth was General William Simpson. Eisenhower later wrote of the general, “If Simpson ever made a mistake as an army commander, it never came to my attention.”
To cross the Rhine, the Allies assembled a massive force. All four American armies in Europe participated. More than a thousand assault boats were needed. The force included two airborne divisions, some twenty-one thousand men, who, as at Normandy, would parachute into enemy territory or arrive by glider. The great assault began in March. Troops were ferried across the Rhine, usually under fire, and soon established a secure bridgehead. Eisenhower’s armies then advanced into the heartland of Germany. As they did so, they began to see that in towns and villages white flags of surrender hung from windows and balconies.
In the north, Montgomery’s soldiers raced into northern Germany, taking control of the Baltic ports. In the south, Devers’s two armies (the U.S. Seventh and the Free French First) secured Nuremberg and the surrounding areas. Patton’s army, taking a thousand prisoners a day, moved rapidly into south central Germany, eventually reaching Czechoslovakia. First Army occupied the Ruhr Valley. Simpson’s Ninth Army reached the Elbe River on April 11, 1945. There, it met up with Soviet troops that had defeated the Germans in the east.
As the Americans and Russians were advancing into Germany, they discovered the concentration camps the Nazis had established primarily to exterminate men, women, and children of the Jewish faith. Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Dachau, as well as the other camps, epitomized the vile nature of the Third Reich. Over time, the Nazis killed six million Jews. Rarely in human history has such cruelty been perpetuated. With good reason Herr Hitler and his cronies are seen today as the personification of evil.
By mid-April, thousands of Hitler’s soldiers were laying down their weapons. Wisely, Germany’s führer chose not to surrender. On April 30, 1945, he put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger. By then, Soviet troops were in Berlin and the Third Reich had ceased to exist.
There remained only the formal surrender of the German armed forces. This took place on May 7, at Eisenhower’s headquarters in Rheims, France. Three days earlier Montgomery had received the surrender of German armies in Holland, Denmark, and northern Germany. But the Soviets claimed that they were not adequately represented at either event, so a third ceremony was held. This occurred in Berlin on May 8.
The German officer who surrendered to Field Marshal Montgomery soon thereafter committed suicide. The two generals who signed the documents of surrender in Rheims and Berlin later were hanged. Given the death and destruction they and their fellow Nazis had caused, it seemed appropriate.
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The Second World War, however, was far from over. In the Pacific, American soldiers, sailors, and marines were engaged in fierce combat with the Japanese. Together with their Australian, British, and Chinese allies, these Americans were taking back the territories Japan had seized early in the war.
The day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese naval forces took control of Guam. This was a small island in the Marianas, an American outpost that served as a stepping stone to the Philippines.
After Guam, the Japanese struck Wake Island, also an American outpost. On this tiny speck of land the Americans put up a spirited defense, sinking two Japanese warships and damaging several other vessels. But the Japanese soon overwhelmed the defenders, who surrendered on December 24, 1941.
The most important American possession in the Pacific was the Philippines. This the United States had won as a result of victory in the Spanish-American War. By the standards of the day, America’s rule in the islands had been enlightened, and the Philippines was due to gain independence in 1946.
Japan, rightly, saw the American presence in the Philippines as an obstacle to its move south to the Dutch East Indies (now the Republic of Indonesia). So it amassed a strong strike force and attacked on December 8.
Defending the Philippines was a sizeable number of American and Filipino soldiers. These were commanded by Douglas MacArthur. He was a former U.S. Army chief of staff, well known to the American public. MacArthur’s political supporters in Washington believed he was a military genius, a view MacArthur himself shared. Unfortunately for the United States, his defense of the Philippines left much to be desired.
MacArthur allowed his airpower to be destroyed on the ground and mishandled the land campaign. After abandoning Manila, his troops, some eighty thousand Americans and Filipinos, withdrew to Bataan. This was a peninsula to the west of the capital. Within a short time, with reinforcements unable to be sent, MacArthur’s men were in a desperate way. They were short of supplies, undernourished, and in need of medical care. Trapped on the peninsula, they surrendered on April 9, 1942. It was—and still is—the largest capitulation of an American field command in the history of the United States.
About seventy thousand men, American and Filipino, were marched off to prison camps. This was the infamous Bataan Death March. More than seven thousand perished. Some were killed by guards; others were simply too weak to survive.
MacArthur was not one of them. He and several thousand men (plus a few female army nurses) had moved to Corregidor, a small, heavily fortified island at the tip of the Bataan Peninsula. After incessant pounding by the Japanese, it too surrendered. The surviving defenders were sent off to a prison camp outside of Manila.
The Japanese, who considered surrendering a dishonorable act, had little regard for Allied POWs. In addition to beating and starving their captives, they sometimes simply shot them. Only 4 percent of the British and American servicemen taken prisoner by the Germans died while in captivity. The comparable statistic for POWs of the Japanese was 28 percent.
When Corregidor fell, Douglas MacArthur was in Australia. He had been ordered there by President Roosevelt. MacArthur was too well known an American to be captured, so Roosevelt directed him to escape, which he did, departing Corregidor by PT boat. Once in Australia, the general was given command of all American and Australian forces in the Southwest Pacific. He also was given a medal. Anxious to placate MacArthur’s supporters in Washington and aware of the need to create American heroes, Roosevelt and George Marshall arranged for MacArthur to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor. Never has the award been less deserved.
By March 1942, the Empire of Japan had achieved great success. In but a short time the Japanese had vanquished their foes, ending the myth of Western superiority. The empire’s battle-tested army had triumphed. Its navy, the Imperial Japanese Navy, appeared invincible. In Tokyo the strategy was to consolidate the gains made and await the inevitable American response. One more victory and the Empire of the Rising Sun would be secure. Nothing would then rival its power or its prestige.
America’s initial response came in a totally unexpected way. On April 18, 1942, a small U.S. Navy task force appeared off the coast of Japan. On board one of the ships, an aircraft carrier, were sixteen army B-25 medium bombers, twin-engine craft with a crew of five. No one had ever flown a B-25 off a carrier. One by one, the army bombers revved their engines, released their brakes, and roared down the flight deck. All of them made it safely into the air. Led by Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle, they bombed Tokyo and several other cities. Damage to the cities was slight and all of the planes save one (it landed in the Soviet Union) crash-landed in China. However, the impact of the raid was huge. Morale in America soared. In Tokyo Japan’s generals and admirals were deeply humiliated.
For his efforts, Doolittle was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, which (unlike MacArthur) he richly deserved. Prior to the war, he had been a well-respected aviator. During the conflict Doolittle served elsewhere with distinction as well, eventually commanding the American Eighth Air Force in England. But his fame today rests largely on the daring raid he led in 1942. How fitting then that when he passed away in 1993, a lone, restored B-25 flew in salute above his funeral procession.