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]
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By the time I retired from teaching in 2008, I was running into students who did not recognize this man. |
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“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 61st in his West Point class, out of 164; 95th 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 504th 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.
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Going in on D-Day, June 6, 1944.
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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.
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Loveland Middle School students with WWII veteran Bill Mansfield. |
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