World War II - A Few Basics and the Nature of Chance

This first little section is a set of ideas I tried to cover with my American history classes:

The 1930s are era of thug governments; totalitarian states; Mussolini and his Fascist followers believe the “state” has a right to use force to silence enemies. Individual rights are not as important as the nation.

Vocabulary and other details to know:

Arsenal

Dictator

Fascism

Gestapo

Isolationist

Nazi

Neutral

Pacifist

Pact of Paris (1927) said countries would not ____ to win their goals. [resort to force]

Japan is the size of ____ [Montana]

Identify the three main Axis Powers [Germany, Japan, Italy]

Identify the five main Allies [USSR or Russia, United States, China, France, Great Britain]

Mussolini—who does he attack? [Ethiopia in 1935] 

Hitler’s promise at Munich [he will have no additional territorial demands]; and what is the “Lesson of Munich?” [never back down from a bully; LBJ later compares it to letting a bully insult you in your yard; next he’ll be up on your front porch; this lesson leads us into the Vietnam War] 

Attacks start war 9-1-39; what does USSR get? [half of Polish territory]

By the time I retired from teaching in 2008,
I was running into students who did not recognize this man.

* 

“Neanderthals in airplanes.” 

William Shirer wrote that the Nazis had left “an ugly scar on civilization that will surely last as long as man on earth.” 

Someone once described the Nazis as, “Neanderthals in airplanes.” The Nazi Party had about 8,000,000 members. 

Adolf Hitler says:  “As long as the police carries out the will of the leadership it is acting legally.” 

“I shall shrink from nothing and shall annihilate anyone who is opposed to me,” he also warns.

Hitler used his position of absolute power to exempt himself from taxes; he received a royalty for the use of his picture on stamps and ate with gold eating utensils. He could be quite boring, often keeping aides up to late hours, talking about himself. 

The Nazi government controlled schools, movies, radio, and newspapers. In 1939, in an operation nicknamed “Canned Goods,” the Germans used Polish prisoners dressed as Germans to stage an attack. 

The U.S. was not really neutral after 1940; Cash and Carry; gave 50 old destroyers in trade for bases; Lend-Lease (3/41) U.S. began lending or leasing weapons/equipment to nations that needed them – to be paid for later; FDR calls U-boats “rattlesnakes of the Atlantic;” froze trade with Japan (7/41), cutting off 80% of her oil; also cut scrap iron, cotton; we took over Greenland, Iceland, organized protection for convoys of supply ships; we became the “Arsenal of Democracy.” 

One opponent of FDR said all this help meant plowing under one American boy in four. 

First peacetime draft: October 1940. 

Dwight D. Eisenhower finished 61^st in his West Point class, out of 164; 95^th in discipline. “What am I doing here,” he once wondered. As a boy, he wanted to be a train engineer or a major league shortstop. 

Hitler might have knocked Britain out of the war if he had pushed his attacks; but 360,000 Allied troops were saved at Dunkirk. He was ready to invade England but was unable to gain control of sky. As Churchill said of the Royal Air Force, which fought off Germany’s Blitz: “Never before was so much owed by so many to so few.” At one point Goering focused on bombing air bases, then quit, maybe a week or ten days before the Brits were going to lose. 

Factual matters: Hiroshima, 78,000 killed; Nagasaki, 74,000 killed; the two atomic bombs had an explosive power equal to 20,000 tons of dynamite. Today, there are nuclear weapons with the power of 100,000,000 tons! 

NOTE TO TEACHERS: It worked in my classes to ask students: What would one ton of dynamite do? [You could level most of a school building.]

 

American forces had met fanatical resistance at Saipan, and on Okinawa, and estimates of losses invading Japan ran to four million. 

The U.S. did warn the Japanese, that if they failed to surrender they would face “prompt and utter destruction.” 

Are there limits in war? 

Can you argue that it is “better for a few thousand Japs to die than one of our boys?” Of course, it matters a great deal if it’s your boy.

*

“I don’t think God has anything to do with this war.”

This section is about the random nature of chance in combat. All examples come from Rick Atkinson’s trilogy on the U.S. Army in World War II. I highly recommend them three volumes to history teachers or readers, generally. 

I neglected to write down page numbers or books, An Army at Dawn, The Day of Battle, The Guns at Last Light: 

A night mission, involving 2300 paratroopers from the 504^th Parachute Infantry, who were expected to reinforce the First Division inland, as Allied forces attacked Sicily, went horribly wrong. American antiaircraft guns and everything the invasion fleet had opened up on the 144 C-47s in the dark. Twenty-three went down in smoke and flames or were blown to bits in midair. Another thirty-seven were badly damaged. 

A conservative estimate put losses at 410 killed or wounded, “the worst friendly fire episode in modern warfare.” 

Soldiers often die for no good reason. Slapton Sands, on the southern coast of England, was meant to be a dress rehearsal for D-Day, involving 30,000 American troops. With General Dwight D. Eisenhower watching, German subs happened upon the exercise and sank landing craft at will, with 749 Americans losing their lives. 

They died for nothing.

Going in on D-Day, June 6, 1944.

Gordon Gaskill, a reporter, walks along Omaha Beach after fighting has shifted inland; in 400 paces he counts 221 American dead. Corporal William Preston later remembered, “I shall never forget that beach.” One dead G.I. caught his attention. “I wonder about him,” he wrote his loved ones back home. “What were his plans never to be fulfilled, what fate brought him to that spot at that moment? Who was waiting for him at home?” 

A soldier hesitates to cross an open pasture in France, “I lie in the grass pondering whether to take a chance. Yes – no – yes – no.” 

Ernie Pyle, the veteran war reporter, was wearing out, feeling like someone using up “your own small quota of chances for survival.” 

A V-2 rocket strikes a theater in Antwerp where twelve hundreds G.I.s and Dutch civilians are enjoying a matinee performance of The Plainsman, a 1936 movie starring Gary Cooper as Wild Bill Hickok. 

At 3:20 on December 15, 1944, the V-2 makes a direct hit; 567 are killed, another 200 injured. 

“We gamble life and death,” another American wrote home to his family. “Daddy, you will understand this. Just like in cards you may win night after night but you can’t be lucky always … I am always scared to death.” 

Atkinson tells a story about Hitler’s early days: He was invited, out of the blue, to attend a Nazi meeting. Hitler recalled later passing out 80 slips to friends, inviting them to meetings. No one showed. “An hour late, the ‘chairman’ finally had to open the ‘meeting.’ We were again seven men, the old seven,” the future Nazi dictator remembered. 

One wonders: What if Hitler had become discouraged, and given up his political dreams. 

“I don’t think God has anything to do with this war,” remarked one G.I. after his friend was killed. 

The FX-1400 or Fritz-X was an early form of guided bomb, with four stubby wings, a delayed fuse, a 600-pound warhead, and a radio transmitter which allowed a German bomber pilot to steer it with a joystick. Two hit the Italian battleship Roma on September 9, 1943, as the warship sortied to join the British at Malta in the wake of Italy’s surrender from the war. 

Thirteen hundred members of the crew – on their way to safety – were lost. 

A British soldier remarked, “We had learned our first lesson, mainly that fate, not the Germans or Italians, was our undiscriminating enemy. With the same callousness as Army orders, without fairness or judgement, ‘You and you - dead. The rest of you, on the truck.’” 

An American battalion commander was crushed to death in his foxhole by the falling engine of a German fighter plane blown up in the air. 

Captain Helmut Meitzel, 23, had been wounded five times – the last so severely he had to be evacuated on one of the last planes to leave Stalingrad. 

Compared to General Robert T. Frederick, Meitzel lead a charmed life. Of Frederick, a junior officer once said, “His casual indifference to enemy fire was hard to explain.” It might have had something to do with the fact he earned eight Purple Hearts during the war and a reputation as “the most-shot-at-and-hit general” in U.S. history. 

Audie Murphy was knocked unconscious by an exploding enemy shell, the man right next to him killed. 

Two Ranger battalions, 767 strong, advanced in the night, suffered heavy casualties, including 250-300 killed, with most of the rest captured in a total debacle. Only eight escaped unharmed and returned to American lines. The regimental commander would never forget driving to the bivouac area where the men had formed up. There he saw “hundreds of bedrolls and barracks bags … piled on canvas ground clothes, neatly stenciled with the names and serial numbers of men who would never return to collect them.” 

One G.I. wrote: “There is something about heavy artillery that is inhuman and terribly frightening. You never know whether you are running away from it or into it. It is like the finger of God.” 

A German bomber, chased by a Spitfire over Anzio, jettisoned its bombs, which fell on a U.S. Army hospital, killing 28, including three nurses and two doctors. 

The infantry made up 14% of the U.S. Army forces and piled up 70% of the casualties. A study done by men far less likely to be hit than the men being studied, found that a typical infantryman soon began to wonder.  It wasn’t a question, any longer, of “whether he will be hit, but when and how bad.” 

Lt. Colonel Jack Toffey was killed in June 1944. “Perhaps he was kept overseas a little longer than his odds allowed,” said one comrade.

Loveland Middle School students with WWII veteran Bill Mansfield.

Year 1940

BUGS BUNNY made his official debut in a cartoon called “A Wild Hare.” For an example of Bugs’ hare-raising escapes, see “Dynamite Dance.” 

Elmer Fudd is foiled again.

* 

Lawrence Brooks is drafted to serve in the U.S. Army. Brooks, an African American will end up the oldest living veteran of World War II, dying in 2021, at age 112. Like most members of his race, Brooks did service work in the military, taking care of the needs of three white officers, as an enlisted man in the 91^st Engineer General Service Regiment. His unit mostly built bridges, roads and airstrips in Australia during the war. 

Brooks admitted later that he was not sorry to avoid combat, explaining, “I got lucky. I was saying to myself, ‘If I’m going to be shooting at somebody, somebody’s going to be shooting at me, and he might get lucky and hit.’” 

Asked about his experiences in 2014, Brooks remembered that he was treated better in Australia than back home in Louisiana. He told an interviewer it made him angry to think about all the Jim Crow laws, so he tried not to.

 

* 

February 29: Hattie McDaniel shows up at the Coconut Grove Restaurant in Los Angeles, to accept her academy award, for best supporting actress, in the movie Gone with the Wind. She is shunted off to a side table for two, at the far back wall. The restaurant has a strict “no blacks allowed” policy, but she and her escort are served, as a favor to the movie industry – and her white agent does sit with them. 

In the movie, McDaniel plays a stereotypical role, as "Mammy" to Scarlett O'Hara.

Louella Parsons, a gossip columnist wrote about the moment McDaniel rose from her seat receive her award:

 

Hattie McDaniel earned that gold Oscar by her fine performance of 'Mammy' in Gone with the Wind. If you had seen her face when she walked up to the platform and took the gold trophy, you would have had the choke in your voice that all of us had when Hattie, hair trimmed with gardenias, face alight, and dress up to the queen's taste, accepted the honor in one of the finest speeches ever given on the Academy floor.

 

McDaniel herself called it “one of the happiest moments of my life” and thanked the Academy. I sincerely hope I shall always be a credit to my race,” she added, “and to the motion picture industry. My heart is too full to tell you just how I feel, and may I say thank you and God bless you.” 

That line – that McDaniel would have to prove a “credit” to her race, somehow prove that African Americans had worth, says more about the barriers people of color faced than Parsons, or perhaps even McDaniel understood that night. No white actor had to prove anything about his or her race. 

If they had talent, that was enough. 

Rita Dove, an African American poet, later penned a poem about that night: 

late, in aqua and ermine, gardenias
scaling her left sleeve in a spasm of scent,
her gloves white, her smile chastened, purse giddy
with stars and rhinestones clipped to her brilliantined hair,
on her free arm that fine Negro,
Mr. Wonderful Smith.

It’s the day that isn’t, February 29th,
at the end of the shortest month of the year—
and the shittiest, too, everywhere
except Hollywood, California,
where the maid can wear mink and still be a maid,
bobbing her bandaged head and cursing
the white folks under her breath as she smiles
and shoos their silly daughters
in from the night dew … what can she be
thinking of, striding into the ballroom
where no black face has ever showed itself
except above a serving tray?

Hi-Hat Hattie, Mama Mac, Her Haughtiness,
the “little lady” from Showboat whose name
Bing forgot, Beulah & Bertha & Malena
& Carrie & Violet & Cynthia & Fidelia,
one half of the Dark Barrymores—
dear Mammy we can’t help but hug you crawl into
your generous lap tease you
with arch innuendo so we can feel that
much more wicked and youthful
and sleek but oh what

we forgot: the four husbands, the phantom
pregnancy, your famous parties, your celebrated
ice box cake. Your giggle above the red petticoat’s rustle,
black girl and white girl walking hand in hand
down the railroad tracks
in Kansas City, six years old.
The man who advised you, now
that you were famous, to “begin eliminating”
your more “common” acquaintances
and your reply (catching him square
in the eye): “That’s a good idea.
I’ll start right now by eliminating you.”

Is she or isn’t she? Three million dishes,
a truckload of aprons and headrags later, and here
you are: poised, between husbands
and factions, no corset wide enough
to hold you in, your huge face a dark moon split
by that spontaneous smile—your trademark,
your curse. No matter, Hattie: It’s a long, beautiful walk
into that flower-smothered standing ovation,
so go on
and make them wait.

* 

In France, Josephine Baker, the famous American dancer, turns to work with the French underground, after Nazi forces overrun France. She has already developed a bitter hatred for Hitler and fascists, in general. As The New York Times notes,

 

On tour in Austria in the early 1930s, churches rang their bells to drown out her performances, and once France was occupied in 1940, she was banned from the stage there, along with all Black and Jewish performers. Undaunted, she joined the French Resistance and collected intelligence while performing in North Africa, smuggling back information written in invisible ink on her score sheets.

 

(In 1961, the French government would award Baker the Croix de Guerre in honor of her bravery. Two years later, she would return to the United States and speak at the March on Washington, organized by civil rights leaders, including Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.)

Year 1941

__________

 

“I fought the war from the cockpit of a Zero, and can still remember the faces of those I killed. They were fathers and sons, too. I didn’t hate them or even know them.”

 

Kaname Harada

__________

In 1941, the Zero was superior to anything the U.S. could fly.

 

 

January 6: In his State of the Union Address, FDR lays out both the plan for “Lend-Lease”  and the famous “Four Freedoms.”

 

NOTE TO TEACHERS: If I were teaching modern U.S. history, I might ask students to consider the ideals and issues laid out by Roosevelt eighty years ago, and decide which, if any, remain worth fighting for today.

 

First, he notes, 

What I seek to convey is the historic truth that the United States as a nation has at all times maintained clear, definite opposition, to any attempt to lock us in behind an ancient Chinese wall while the procession of civilization went past. Today, thinking of our children and of their children, we oppose enforced isolation for ourselves or for any other part of the Americas.

 

Second, he outlines the growing danger, 

Every realist knows that the democratic way of life is at this moment being directly assailed in every part of the world – assailed either by arms, or by secret spreading of poisonous propaganda by those who seek to destroy unity and promote discord in nations that are still at peace.

During 16 long months this assault has blotted out the whole pattern of democratic life in an appalling number of independent nations, great and small. The assailants are still on the march, threatening other nations, great and small.

Therefore, as your President, performing my constitutional duty to "give to the Congress information of the state of the Union," I find it, unhappily, necessary to report that the future and the safety of our country and of our democracy are overwhelmingly involved in events far beyond our borders.

 

He notes that the U.S. is building up its defenses and arming for war, should it come, but, 

To change a whole nation from a basis of peacetime production of implements of peace to a basis of wartime production of implements of war is no small task. And the greatest difficulty comes at the beginning of the program, when new tools, new plant facilities, new assembly lines, and new ship ways must first be constructed before the actual materiel begins to flow steadily and speedily from them.

 

As for the democratic nations still in the fight, Roosevelt tells Congress, 

The time is near when they will not be able to pay for them all in ready cash. We cannot, and we will not, tell them that they must surrender, merely because of present inability to pay for the weapons which we know they must have.

 

I do not recommend that we make them a loan of dollars with which to pay for these weapons—a loan to be repaid in dollars.

 

I recommend that we make it possible for those nations to continue to obtain war materials in the United States, fitting their orders into our own program. Nearly all their materiel would, if the time ever came, be useful for our own defense. …

 

For what we send abroad, we shall be repaid within a reasonable time following the close of hostilities, in similar materials, or, at our option, in other goods of many kinds, which they can produce and which we need.

 

He expresses confidence in the spirit of the American people, this way: 

For there is nothing mysterious about the foundations of a healthy and strong democracy. The basic things expected by our people of their political and economic systems are simple. They are:

 

Equality of opportunity for youth and for others.

 

Jobs for those who can work.

 

Security for those who need it.

 

The ending of special privilege for the few.

 

The preservation of civil liberties for all.

 

The enjoyment of the fruits of scientific progress in a wider and constantly rising standard of living.

 

 

__________ 

The Four Freedoms

__________ 

 

Norman Rockwell painted "The Four Freedoms."
This is the first.

Then he lays out a vision of the kind of world the U.S. will be fighting for, should it become necessary to fight: 

In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.

 

The first is freedom of speech and expression—everywhere in the world.

 

The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way—everywhere in the world.

The third is freedom from want—which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants—everywhere in the world.

The fourth is freedom from fear—which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor—anywhere in the world.

 

That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.

 

Congress then appropriates $7 billion to make Lend-Lease work.

 

 

* 

June 25: FDR signs an executive order admitting blacks to federal job-training programs and forbidding racial discrimination by companies doing federal defense contracting work. By the end of the war, two million blacks are employed in defense industries. 

Still, George Wolfskill paints a bleak picture of the era, faulting the Democratic Party: 

A party that was not rebuild at the grassroots, not committed to liberalism at the grassroots, was not going to change much at the local levels. Blacks would ride in the back of the bus, when they were not being lynched. Sharecroppers would still be swindled by local landowners. Political decisions would still be made by minions of political bosses lounging around brass spittoons in the court house, by lobbyists supplying the liquor and girls in the state capitals. And Roosevelt’s “economic royalists” would still buy or browbeat their way out of behaving themselves and paying their taxes. (1127/178) 

 

*

 

July: Japan forces Vichy France to surrender bases in south Indo-China. The U.S. freezes all Japanese assets, which means “a complete embargo and the severing of all trade relations.” (1127/61)

 

*

 

September 26: Pitching for the Cleveland Indians, Bob Feller gives up only one hit, a topper that rolled down the line toward third base. The St. Louis Browns did score two runs, but the Indians prevailed 3-2. 

Feller would not pitch another game for almost four years, as World War II intervened, and he served in the U.S. Navy.

 

*

December 7: Kaname Harada takes part in the raid on Pearl Harbor, a fighter ace, last surviving combat pilot from the raid; his part: to protect Japanese carriers rather than fly to Pearl. He was injured after a crash-landing on Guadalcanal, later trained suicide pilots, and was long plagued by nightmares after the war. “I realized the war had turned me into a killer of men and that was not the kind of person I wanted to be.” “I fought the war from the cockpit of a Zero, and can still remember the faces of those I killed. They were fathers and sons, too. I didn’t hate them or even know them.” 

The “Zero” name came from the last digit of the year the plane entered service, 2600 on the Imperial calendar, 1940 on the Gregorian. He downed five U.S. torpedo planes in one morning at Midway, but had to ditch after his carrier was sunk and he ran out of fuel. Four months later, a Marine pilot shot him down over Guadalcanal. He was badly injured and had to wait ten days before a warship could take him off the island. 

He met his adversary after the war – Joe Foss, who went on to become the governor of South Dakota, AFL commissioner and president of the NRA. (NYT obituary; 5/6/16)

 

 

*

 

Robert Thacker is piloting one of several newly built B-17’s that day, on a flight from the Mainland to Hawaii. He arrives over Pearl Harbor in the middle of the attack, at first unaware what is happening. Now, as he began his descent to land at Hickam Field, he and the rest of his crew were astonished to see Japanese bombers and fighters roaming the skies and black smoke rising from the airfield and nearby military installations. Moments later, an enemy fighter shot off the front landing gear of Thacker’s bomber and they skidded to a stop. Then they “bailed out” and headed for a nearby swamp to take cover. 

Thacker would live to fly 80 combat missions during World War II, dropping bombs of his own on both German and Japanese targets before fighting ended. He went on to become an elite Air Force test pilot, and served in combat during the Korean War and the Vietnam War. 

Unlike so many men and women killed on December 7, he lived a long and happy life, dying in 2020, at age 102.

*

On that fateful morning, Boatswain’s Mate Ken Potts, a crane operator on USS Arizona, had been on weekend liberty, and was still ashore when the attackers struck. He heard the call for all sailors to return to their ships, but before he could reach the battleship it was blown to bits. “When I got back to Pearl Harbor, the whole harbor was afire,” he later recalled. “The oil had leaked out [of several damaged or sunken warships] and caught on fire and was burning.” 

He remembered dragging other sailors out of the oily water, some injured, some burned, some close to slipping under the waves forever. “We couldn’t think much about it,” Potts explained. “You don’t think much of anything, I guess. You’re in shock. All you worried about was staying alive.” 

Potts was assigned to duty at Pearl Harbor for the rest of the war, also lived to age 102, had children, got to see grandchildren and great grandchildren grow up, before he died. Only 93 sailors and Marines on board the Arizona when it blew up survived. Eleven hundred and seventy-seven were not so lucky. 

Potts and 241 more were ashore at the time of the attack.

 

* 

Joe Whitt was another survivor of the attack. On the morning of December 7, he once told this blogger and his students (Joe would come visit my old school), he was taking a guitar lesson below decks on the USS San Francisco, a heavy cruiser. He had paid another sailor $5 to teach him. The call to battle stations interrupted the lesson, and Joe rushed up to the main deck, where he was handed a rifle, and started shooting as Japanese aircraft whizzed past. He could see the “big red meatball” painted on their fuselages, didn’t believe he hit anything, but felt better just firing. 

I knew Joe had been at Pearl Harbor when I invited him to speak, but he been in several other fierce battles. In one night fight, near Guadalcanal, the San Francisco was hit 47 times by enemy fire. When the battle seemed over, a launch with medical personnel from the USS Juneau was sent over to offer help. “I don’t know why they sent us over here,” remarked one of the men from the Juneau. “You’re wrecked and probably going to sink.” Moments later the Juneau was ripped by a huge explosion, broke in half, and sank. Joe told my classes (or I misunderstood what he said) that a Japanese battleship had fired a last salvo over the horizon, before retreating as the sun came up. In fact the Juneau had been hit by torpedoes, and the main magazine exploded. 

There were 697 men aboard, and 597 went down with the ship. The rest ended up floating in the water, but the U.S. Navy had to retreat, and days passed before anyone could return to pick up survivors. By that time, only ten men in the water were alive. I don’t know how many men who came over to the USS San Francisco made it to the end of the war, but Joe never forgot that moment. 

Every year, when he would tell that story, “All those American boys…” he would say, he would have a catch in his throat, and I would have to pretend, in the back of my class, that I wasn’t tearing up. 

The five Sullivan brothers, George, Francis, Joseph, Madison and Albert, were all killed when the Juneau sank.

Joe is fourth from the left. 
I was able to get a group of veterans to speak to all our students every year.

 

NOTE TO TEACHERS: I think students would be interested in discussing the fates of men like Harada, Thacker, Potts, and Whitt. All could have been killed during the attack on Pearl Harbor, or at any other point during the war. What was it like for them, to see so many of their friends maimed or killed? 

Indeed, what would the dead say about the war, had they the ability to speak?

I should also point out that it was easy to get veterans to come and talk to students at my school. Most who have served in combat have not talked about their experiences; and I will never forget Ace Gilbert who still visits my old school (I retired in 2008) telling me, “John, you saved my life.” He had had that much anger and pain stored up, before he started talking to the kids. Eventually, even some of my former students came back to talk about serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

See my post: “The Veterans Come to Loveland Middle School.”