WWII Overview
This is a huge topic to cover in an hour, and because I am recording it, I am going to include some good analysis from others. I gave you a one-page outline called World War II Overview, which I will read, and if you would like to make any notes, of course you can put them on the back. How to describe this greatest World War in hour? I will start with earlier events in the 20th century that led to war.
We know about the Great Depression in the United States, which was not escaped until we became the “arsenal for democracy” to support mostly England. We know the Republican War against Franco in Spain, in which the Nazis tried out their new equipment, especially their new war planes. Many of us know that the terms of armistice that ended World War I was the basis on which Adolf Hitler later built his mass appeal to the German people. This appeal was described in the series of films that were tremendous war propaganda called “Inherit the Wind” by Leni Riefenstahl. Immediately after the Anschluss of Austria into the Third Reich in March 1938, Hitler positioned himself as the leader of ethnic Germans everywhere, especially living in Czechoslovakia. England’s Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain met with Adolf Hitler on the15th of September and agreed to this secession of the Sudetenland to Germany. Italian Prime Minister Benito Mussolini suggested a conference of the major powers in Munich, and on September 29th, Hitler, Premier Edouard Daladier of France, and Chamberlain met and agreed to Mussolini’s proposal, the Munich Agreement, accepting the militarization of this section of Western Czechoslovakia. The Munich agreement was actually written by the Germans.
We know less about Russia and Japan. The internal program inaugurated to force conversion to collective communism caused the deaths of about nine million in the 1930s, possibly up to 30 million estimated by Norman Davies, which would be greater than Russian casualties in World War II. As an example in Ukraine about 5 million kulaks (landowners), who in their worst horror on their old lands, had their food taken from them, and starved. Japan became a modern military nation early in this century as the clear victor in the Russo-Japanese war of 1904 to 1905 to establish hegemony in Korea and eastern Manchuria. Japan was an active ally of England in World War I, and was one of the Big Four who negotiated the treaty of Versailles in 1918, a little-known fact for most Americans. Even less known is the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact outlawing war as an instrument of national policy, signed by dozens on nations including Japan, Italy, and Germany. Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931, and Italy invaded Abyssinia in 1935.
China had fragmented into warlordism, but by the 1928 Chiang Kai-shek defeated the warlords, and achieved nominal unification with Manchuria. The Japanese staged the Mukden Incident in 1931 using as a pretext for an invasion of Manchuria and set up the puppet state of Manchukuo. The last emperor of the defunct Qing Dynasty, Pi Yu, became the figurehead for this Manchukuo Republic. The Marco Polo Bridge incident on July 07, 1937 succeeded in provoking the war between the Republic of China (a republic in 1924) and the Empire of Japan. In 1939, Japanese forces under Masanobu Tsuji tried to push the Soviet armies from Manchuria but were soundly defeated in the battle of Khalkhin Gol by mixed Soviet and Mongolian force led by Georgy Zhukov. I include this detail because the principals on both sides, Zhukov and the Japanese Tsuji, were the leaders in the later strategic development in World War II.
Nazi Germany’s war was Poland, begun on September 1, 1939 was an uneven contest. Five German armies with one and a half million men, 2000 tanks and 1900 modern aircraft’s faced fewer than a million Polish troops with less than 500 aircraft and a small number of armored vehicles. By September 7th, the war was virtually over. On September 17th, once it was clear that Poland was close to defeat, Red Army units from Russia moved into Poland and met up with victorious German troops along a pre-arranged frontier. On September 28th, the two dictatorships signed another treaty, which divided Poland between them. Britain and France had declared war on Nazi Germany on September 3rd when it became clear that negotiating the German was hopeless, honoring their treaties to defend Poland in the case of war.
Germany launched its offensive in the low countries, Fall Gelb, in the early morning of May 10, 1940. The forces in the field were 2,900,000 for the Allies and 2,750,000 for the Germans. The Allies had 2,574 modern tanks and 2,128 aircraft; 1,648 French and 480 British, with another 800 operating from British airfields. Germany had 2,600 tanks and 3,227 aircraft. Blitzkrieg tactics by General Irwin Rommel led to a panic in French forces. Between May 27 and June 4 338,226 men of the Allied Expeditionary Force (including 120,000 French and Belgian) were evacuated from Dunkirk by a civilian fleet. The British left behind 2,000 guns, 60,000 trucks, 76,000 tons of ammunition, and 600,000 tons of fuel and supplies. Italy entered the war on June 5. France formally surrendered to Germany on June 25, 1940. In six weeks the military lineup in Western Europe had moved from approximate parity to total defeat for the Allies. Hitler controlled, or was allied with, essentially all of the industrial might of continental Europe.
On July 6 Hitler proposed a peace pact with Britain based on a joint partition of the world. On July 19 speaking to the Reichstag Hitler addresses a last appeal to Britain as European victor. President Roosevelt signed the Two-Ocean Navy Expansion Act, a key event. The Triparte Pact between Germany, Italy and Japan is signed September 27, 1940 in Berlin, setting the order of battle for the balance of the war. Japan increased its war preparations, revealed as attacks on Pearl Harbor, Wake Island, Guam, The Philippines, Hong Kong, and Papua New Guinea the week of December 7, 1941, bringing all SE Asia was under its control.
How did the Allies win this World War?
If you step back and look at this situation as viewed by people outside of Europe, in the years following our Great Depression we had less understanding about international happenings. While Germany was an industrial power, so was Czechoslovakia. Spain did not account for much industrially but was controlled by Franco. Germany now had the coalfields of Silesian in Poland. They had the industrial might of Europe, which was greater at that point than the (depressed) industrial might of the United States.
For Japan, 1853 was the year that Admiral Perry dropped anchor in Tokyo Bay, forcing an opening by Japan with the West. By 1905, Japan had won the war with European power Russia, which covers 11 times zones and had to split their forces between east and west. This war was a tremendous boost to Japan, and to a militaristic order that was rising in Japan. There is various analysis of how this happened, but the question is why it happened. Akira Iriye in 1987 wrote a book called the Origins of The Second World War in Asia And Pacific and in 1997, Brad DeLong, a professor of economics at the University of California at Berkeley, wrote a long comment to answer the question of: Why did Japan act as they did? Japan had by far the least potential of great powers as heavy industrial capacity, with perhaps 25% of Germany’s, about 20% of Britain’s, perhaps 15% of the Soviet Union, and perhaps 5% of America’s. Japan’s blue-water battle fleet and air force were substantial, but the industrial base, the key to planes, newly-trained pilots and ships flowing to the front were not. Given Japan’s relative industrial weakness, the first principle for leaders, even the most militarist and aggressive leaders, was that strategy should have chosen targets carefully. Perhaps Japan had the strength to evict the Soviet Union from the Far East and add Manchuria and Siberia up to Vladivostok to its Empire, as long as the Nazi’s were distracted by Stalin in the East. Perhaps Japan had the strength to drive to the Chinese capital and impose a peace of its own choosing on the Chinese Nationalists as long as Britain, America, and the Soviet Union were more worried about Europe and Germany. Perhaps Japan had the strength to take advantage of the fall of Western Europe to the Nazi’s by extending into China and Indonesia, establishing the puppet governments. Japan was claiming the end of European imperialism and forming a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. But could they do all three? The answer turns out; they could not.
So, why did they do this? If you saw some of the movies they go back to pre-modern Japan, of course it is an old society. Japan was first unified in the decade after 1600 under the Tokugawa Shogunate , and they were ruled by an Emperor. When I say they were ruled by an Emperor, there was a titular ruler but the politicians under that Emperor could essentially do what they wanted to do. The Shogunate set up a strict class society, rigidly enforced, which led to 250 years of peace and prosperity in an insular island nation. Perry’s mission changed all that. The Emperor retained nominal authority, but underneath Japanese society became increasingly militaristic. Their result was the stunning victory over Russia, which they equated to god’s support, similar to the two typhoons that had twice devastated Kublai Khan’s invading fleets in the late13th century. The Treaty of Portsmouth ending that war was chaired by U.S. President Teddy Roosevelt, fortunately for Japan because they could not win a long war with Russia.
There were two events they both occurred in 1941 that set the scene for the rest of the war, to be covered in the next two sessions. The first one was Hitler’s invasion of Russia, the putative ally of Germany in a standoff pact, on June 22, 1941 as Operation Barbarossa was launched. The second, of course that we know well, was the attack by the Japanese on Pearl Harbor December 7, 1941, which actually started 30 minutes before the declaration of war by the Japanese ambassador was delivered to our government in Washington. We know that story pretty well. So, that upset the world scene. But what if Germany had been content to expand their sphere? For instance, the Luftwaffe was only formed in 1933 in Germany, because they were not allowed to have an air force, so they did this in secret. Essentially by 1940 they had built this great strength in seven years. What if Hitler had taken another seven years to quadruple the strength? The Japanese had increased heavy industry; if you read the battles of the war they had some super battleships that were formidable. They had a very maneuverable fighter in the Mitsubishi Zero, and they would become even more formidable
But the key to both governments was that there were no checks and balances in either the German or Japanese governments. There were certainly no checks on Hitler, and a later act that helped the defeat of Nazi Germany occurred in December 1941, when Hitler personally assumed command of the military and gave increasingly irrational orders. Something similar happened in Japan.
I want to take a little break to add to the course theme, voices of the war, some voices that came to me from this war. The first one in March 1942 came from my mother when I had turned three years, and was playing with a little toy while my mother was doing laundry. She scolded me for playing with that toy because it was made by the Japanese, and they were very bad. I remember that because people were committed in the hinterlands; I had several uncles who served in the war, so we were totally engaged. The second one came in 1962, twenty years later, when I was in the First Armored Division that was the base force for the invasion of Cuba in 1962 to take out the Russian missiles. It came from Sergeant Powell, an E-8 sergeant from Wichita Falls, TX who had been in the First Armored Division at the Battle of Kasserine Pass in North Africa when it was clobbered by Rommel. The reason is that essentially the German tanks had twice the range and twice the firepower of the American tanks. The amount of investment in U.S. Army materiel that the United States did not do after World War I, before the start of World War II, is almost incomprehensible. (The U.S. Congress appropriated $9 billion for the Army in 1940, more than all funding spent by the War Department in the previous 20 years.) I was in US Army Ordnance and used to have to repair modern tanks so I am going to bring up few notes about technology. In tank models early in the war rotary engines, developed for aircraft, were dropped into the tanks because those engines had enough power. But they did not have the gunnery; only 75 mm bore and much slower muzzle velocity than the Germans.
A later voice is the 95-year old friend of my mother-in-law, John Jamele, who was a radio operator in Third Corps during the Battle of the Bulge in Germany. He described listening to an American tank man who was being pursued by a Tiger tank. The American tanks could not match a Tiger tank. Even if they hid behind a brick building, they could be knocked out by Germans firing high-velocity rounds right through the building. Fortunately when he came to a tee in the road, they went one way, the Tiger went the other way, and he was able to turn around and fire into the rear engine compartment. Another note on tanks; although Japan was a sea power, they had lousy tanks. If you see the picture of Japanese tanks in the late 30s, they were the size of a jeep with some armor that might stop 30 caliber bullets but that was about it. We tend to not give the Russians much credit, but the Soviet tanks leading up to and including the T-34 were very good tanks and operated with lower maintenance than the United States tanks.
What is another big reason why the allies won? Well if you talked to people from Russia, and I did visit Russia. a half dozen times in 1992 and 1993, they described two things. First of all, you can cite the events of Napoleon in 1812 when he crossed the border attacking Russia with 400,000 troops in July to reach Moscow. When he returned he had 10,000 troops, losing most of his force to the Russian winter. Something similar happened to the Russians. Their attack was supposed to be a surprise, but if you look at the distance from Germany to Moscow, it is just too far to be a surprise. The Russians beat the Wehrmacht in fearful intensive fighting, in 1943 in huge tank battles further south, as at Kursk.
On the day of Pearl Harbor, the entire US Army had 1700 field-grade officers (Major and higher; the average age of Majors was 48 years.) One of those officers named Dwight David Eisenhower had taken 16 years to get promoted from Major to Lieutenant Colonel. The army was not very well funded and not a good place to be in the 1930s. Of course, he later was promoted more rapidly as is known. But what was not understood, even by (I think) the people of Washington at that time, was the latent industrial might of the United States. Because of the downtrodden economy in the Depression we were not perceived as the industrial power that we could be. Gordon Cook loaned me the second official report by Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King, Chief of Naval Operations, for military and manufacturing operations from March 19, 1944 to March 19, 1945. This report includes a graph, which you can see, that showed the number of ships that were built. The number was approximately 14,500 in 1942, 31,000 ships in 1943, and about 45,000 ships in 1944. The shipyard employees in the same period went from about 440,000 in 1942, 910,000 in 1943 to 970,000 in 1944. A great story is the Kaiser ship-building capabilities which I came across later; they also formed special methods for worker health care. By 1944 Kaiser could lay a keel and build a Liberty ship in 25 days. They also could build light escort carriers in about the same amount of time. Japanese Admirals knew that they could have initial success, but they knew the industrial might of the United States would eventually prevail.
I have mentioned some of the military evidence, and I do not want to say too much about the quick fall of France, but it was stunning. Part of the reason was not so much the actions of the French, but the military actions of the German. French leadership was static, but General Rommel was so far ahead in pushing the concept, not yet then called blitzkrieg. His nickname within the German Army was the ‘ghost division’ because he advanced so quickly, beyond the range of radios. So, there were some tremendous initiatives. Of course, this was the same person who in October 1944, being part of the July plot to kill Hitler, was forced to commit suicide on the promise that his family would not be harmed. That is a interesting story, and I can say more about that later, that a relatively wide array of high-ranking military officers in the German Army had plotted for two years to kill Hitler and 5000 of them were executed; not the 250 typically reported, but 5000. If you think about it what you do when you realize that a monster had taken over your country and has no check against him? That is certainly a voice of those German people that comes back over history.
To come to my other voices, I attended chemical engineering at Cornell and both I and my son were educated in a key course by Professor Ray Thorpe who was a very good teacher. Later I learned that in World War II he originally had a desk job stateside, but volunteered for sea duty. Then he was switched to the new carrier Bennington as gunnery office. They did not know about suicide bombers when they shipped out to the Pacific, but kamikazes started with the Battle of Leyte Gulf. At his memorial at Cornell in September 2006 after his death, I was able to quote his own words about those days that had such an effect on him that he decided to devote his life to teaching:
“I was originally assigned to a tin can (destroyer) in the Atlantic; not much happened. Then I was transferred to the Carrier Bennington for duty in the Pacific. I was the assistant gunnery officer, and the gunnery officer had no understanding of how to train people. I realized that my life, and the life of my shipmates, could depend on how well I could teach them to shoot.
The big guns on battleship had range finders or electromechanical (Ford) computers, and slugged it out at long distance. For my anti-aircraft crews, hand-eye coordination was important. When we started in training, the proximity fuses just didn’t work, and we couldn’t hit anything. Pretty demoralizing. By the time we got to our station, we had much more training, and soon after a new-model proximity fuse actually worked. We had heard about kamikaze attacks, which were not very widespread when we were in training. But they increased a lot in 1945 when we were on duty in the Pacific around Iwo Jima.”
We are at a point where I might mention some things that, just as the predecessor events affected World War II, World War II itself affected ones that would come later. For those who remember it, when President Roosevelt died and Harry Truman as Vice President became President, there was general concern. Because of course Truman did not have the stature of Roosevelt, and in fact one of the things that President Truman did was to walk from his residence to the capitol daily, and gave reporters an open question-and-answer session to build his confidence, and the nation’s confidence in him. Before he took over his President, he had not been informed that there was the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb. He had not been informed of that little detail. Of course later, it was his decision to use those two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
I come back to some other voices. One of them is a long-term dean of the Weatherhead Business School, Ted Alfred, who in his last couple years was suffering increasingly with Alzheimers. One time two years before his death I mentioned the War. I am not sure if he still knew who I was, and he told his story about being in San Francisco waiting to be shipped out for the invasion of the Japanese homeland. The order-of-battle estimate of the Japanese home forces was about 10 divisions that would defend the homeland, and we were attacking with 14 divisions. He was relieved when he heard of the atomic bomb drop, and that the war was over. We learned later in reality, the Japanese homeland had 16 to 17 divisions, so we would have been outnumbered.
If you looked at the movie, “Letters from Iwo Jima” in the session on movies, the defense of the Japanese soldiers of occupied islands in the Pacific was essentially fought to the last man. I mean their dedication to the Emperor was far greater than any German’s dedication to Hitler. So, the question later, and some people later apologized for dropping the atomic bomb, that the Japanese casualties in that invasion would be well over a million. Although the others died, approximately 130,000 at Hiroshima, it had a tremendous effect because after the first drop on August 5th, there was a key war council to determine what they should do. Their military leader, Hideki Tojo, said the United States only had one bomb. So when a second bomb, which was a different type, was dropped on Nagasaki three days later, that certainly compromised his position. They choose peace, on one condition. The only condition at the surrender was that they retain their Emperor. In reality the military leaders were ready to sacrifice millions of Japanese citizens, thinking that world opinion would stop the Allies because of the slaughter.
There are various stories on General MacArthur’s behavior in the battle that led up to Corregidor and the Bataan death march, and in later conduct in the war. But one of the things that he did after war, with I am not sure how much input from Washington DC, was essentially he converted this centuries-old Emperor figurehead/military-led society to a western democracy in a matter of years. That is a great post-war story. For any of us that drive a car, we know that Germany and Japan are two of our leading competitors in the worldwide automobile industry, and right now they are more or less winning; certainly we are not winning. That was one of the after effects of the war. Another after effect was Korea, where in a police action, President Truman, the same person who was the country’s concern on leadership when he took over toward the end of the World War II, led the effort for the resistance of South Korea against North Korea. The North Koreans had attacked with the support of our former allies, the Soviet Union and China. That action eventually led to about 40,000 American deaths, but in that case, at least we were fighting with modern equipment. One of the unfortunate aspects is MacArthur’s leadership. The Yalu River is the dividing line between North Korea and China. Without authorization, MacArthur decided he was going to pursue to, and cross the Yalu. That pursuit triggered a huge invasion of Chinese troops and pushed the allied forces south of the 38th parallel, eventually leading to a stalemate near the 38th parallel a year after the invasion, and a truce two years later.
Another effect on our ally, the Soviet Union, after we had dropped the atomic bomb, caused them to develop their own bomb by 1949, actually a copy of the Fat Man bomb dropped on Nagasaki with help from a spy. The first U.S. hydrogen (fusion) bomb was exploded in 1952, causing the Russians to counter with their own hydrogen bomb in 1955. They continued their push for technology and I am sure everybody remembers the day in 1957 when they launched Sputnik and then 4 years later, launched the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin. That shook us again and our young President, John Kennedy, decided that we were going to the moon in that decade. There is the effect of competitive technology that ended one war, and then caused the start of another, the Cold War.
I think I know a bit about technology, so I am going to tell about how it affected the war. One of the great sub-stories of the war was the development of the Merlin engine by Rolls-Royce. When the Merlin (not called the Merlin at first) first came out, it had about 750 horsepower and had a lot of problems. By the time it was used in the Hurricane and Spitfire fighters, it had 1200 horsepower. They had it optimized pretty well in 1942 to about 1600 horsepower, and by the end of the war, tested out as 2600 horsepower. The counterpart on the other side was the Be109 fighter, developed by Willy Messerschmitt, who was not favored by the German military, but his airplanes kept winning the competitions. The story of how they went from fabric-covered double-wing aircraft that was repaired by taking some spirit glue and patching some fabric over the wing, to a smooth metal monohull, with speed of 100 miles an hour increasing to 350 miles an hour, is a great story of pre-war military competition. The engine for the 109 was developed by Daimler Benz. One of the contributions of Rolls-Royce is that they were very good in making smooth well-painted automobiles. In going from 100 miles an hour to 350 miles an hour, the need is to reduce aerodynamic drag, and Rolls was a great help in that story, which underlies the Battle of Britain.
Now I come to my focal point: how do the allies win the war? A very big part of that is that England did not lose the war in 1940. The story of that war was recently published as The Wings of Eagles in February of this year, a gift to me by Bruce Beale. If anybody is interested in that I have a summary of that book, which is covered in only 6 pages that can be sent by e-mail. One of the big reasons why the Germans did not win is that they did not pursue war after their victory over France. They could not believe the French Army had collapsed in six weeks. Nobody could believe it. So after the surrender of Paris, they essentially did not do anything for awhile except enjoy their victory. Hitler was under the hope that, as the victor in Europe, he could form a global alliance with the British, whom he admired, based on the behavior of Neville Chamberlain, the Prime Minister. But of course the bulldog Winston Churchill was made Premier, and rallied England. The story of that battle is a story of preparation. Starting in 1932 Air Marshal Dowding built the coordinated defenses that included the commercialization of radar, which everybody knew could be used but had not done, into a system of radar towers along the English channel. These were connected to sector headquarters manned by a war room situation through which they could give the outnumbered RAF fighters time to get off the ground to a fighting altitude. The Merlin engine in a Spitfire could climb from ground level to 25,000 feet in just under 11 minutes and in air combat, height is everything because you want to dive on the enemy airplane’s tail. They had no trouble picking off the Stuka JU87 bombers, but the Messerschmitt was a very even battle; in fact at above 18,000 feet, the Be109 had the advantage because it was fuel injected in the 1940s.
Germany’s loss in the Battle of Britain was seeded by their unexpected victory over France. After that, in army matters, Hitler considered himself to be a superior military mind over his mostly Prussian Generals. Air Marshall Goring gloated as leader of the Luftwaffe that terrorized Poland and France, neither of which had a modern air force. His assistants continually underestimated the manufacturing capability of England to keep a rough parity of RAF fighters in the air, and they never understood how to attack the system defense of Dowding. The Battle of Hastings in 1066 was the last successful invasion of England. In 1940, the battle was lost by the combined war-egos of Goring and Hitler, vastly overconfident because of easy victories. Less than a year later, Hitler invaded Russia, sealing his fate.
Some other aspects of technology were used to break the limits of Germany as a land-locked nation. Even when they had control of Europe, they had no source of crude oil. There is something called the Fischer–Tropsch process that was invented by Mr. Fischer, who was later spared in the holocaust. This process was later practiced by South Africa, which also has no oil. Coal is converted into carbon monoxide and hydrogen, which is 1 carbon and then added together to get 7, 8, 9, 10, and 11 carbons, which is the basis for gasoline and aviation gas. It requires high pressures, something that the Germans can do, and had commercialized in 1928. Another aspect is that Germany never had much of an empire to access other nations for raw materials, and one of the things they lacked was the nitrates in Chilean saltpeter, which was the basis for explosives. In 1908 Fritz Haber invented a process which, at very high pressure, converted nitrogen and methane into ammonia. The Haber process was commercialized in 1913 so that the munitions of the Germans in World War II using ammonium nitrate was set a couple decades earlier, or they could not have prosecuted this war.
There was a tremendous amount of high technology on both sides, not to mention of course the Manhattan Project. The possibility of an atomic bomb was first advised to President Roosevelt by Albert Einstein in late 1938. The understanding that an atomic bomb could be built led to the expectation that the Germans, given their scientific superiority, would actually be working on one, but it turns out they were not. Earlier in my career, I met a company called EG&G Inc., formed in the Boston area to make triggers for the atomic bomb. The story of how that bomb was developed in the Manhattan project, and later at Los Alamos National Lab, is another story that has now been relatively well publicized.
If we go back to our own American Civil War, what ended this war? You could say it was General William Sherman, in his march through Georgia to the sea. He waged total war a century earlier, which was the basis for total war in the later stages of World War II. (The British named the American M4 tank after Sherman.)
This course is ‘Voices from World War II’, and we have one of those voices here who I will introduce by saying that one of the limitations of the Merlin engine was that it was carbureted. For performance it used 100 octane gasoline, none of which was produced in Great Britain; none. So nost of the 100 octane fuel was produced in Trinidad-Tobago and had to be shipped to England. One of battle items I did not mention is that in 1940 and 1941, the German submarine wolfpack ruled the Atlantic. It was not until 1942 that some parity was achieved and by 1943, it was worse to be in the German submarine. This explosive fuel had to be sent to sustain Britain in their most difficult hour, and with that I introduce Gordon Cook who, served in such duty. [Gordon Cook interval]
I would like to introduce some other voices of people who are not here; many who did not survive in the war. One of the aspects of the D-day invasion on Omaha beach, called ‘bloody Omaha’ on June 6, 1944 was that all the landing forces were equipped with amphibious tanks. The term is somewhat of a misnomer because these tanks weighed about 34 tons, and they were fitted with a canvas superstructure that was supposed to keep the water out, but it was not very effective. There was very low freeboard, which if breached would sink the tank. In fact, in the British landing on Utah beach, the tactical orders were that the LST landing ships would release these tanks almost a mile from the beach. After they released a half dozen, and all of them sank within 30 seconds because of a rough sea, they realized that this was a futile action, so they continued and released the tanks much closure to shore, most successfully. But unfortunately, the Americans at Omaha beach followed orders and released all these tanks, with five-man crews who were drowned within a minute. Nobody speaks for these people because they were lost, so someone does speak for them now. Once the infantryman got to Omaha beach they had absolutely no cover. The big advantage of a tank is as a great thing to hide behind. You can hide a couple of dozen peoples behind the tanks against machine gun pillboxes, but they essentially had no tanks. In the official report I cited, which had the ship number buildup, the mention that “most of the tanks at Omaha were lost” consists of those few words.
Some other audacious events occurred in the battle in the Southeast Pacific of Leyte Gulf. At this point, the Japanese no longer had naval superiority, and they were concerned over a landing force by General MacArthur in the Philippines. They devised a plan with four naval forces that included a decoy force to the north, to get the Allied Navy under Admiral William (Bull) Halsey to follow them with his large surface ships. The lead Japanese southern force was mostly destroyed in the Surigao Strait in a classic military maneuver of ‘Crossing the Tee’. The smaller southern force arrived late, lost some ships, and turned around. Halsey pursued that decoy force and so a fourth Japanese force of the super battleship Yamato, three other battleships, six super-cruisers, two light cruisers, and about a dozen destroyers were opposed by Admiral Kincaid’s task force with about 11 Fletcher-class destroyers and lightly-armed escort carriers. These were better destroyers than earlier models and had improved torpedoes. A group of three destroyers then attacked this superior force with torpedoes and 5-inch guns even though they were tremendously outgunned. In fact, it startled the Japanese Admiral Kurita such that he pulled the Yamato back around to the rear because he did not want to lose it. The lead attacking destroyer, the Johnston commanded by Ernst Evans, ¾ American Indian heritage, was pounded by the Japanese cruisers and was sunk, but he did receive the Medal of Honor. When Evans took this initiative, every man on the ship was carried along, with no say except to fight. Even though it was essentially impossible to succeed, that is one of the cases of audacious action and; in fact, the landing force at Leyte by MacArthur was protected.
Another action was the attack in 1940 on the Bismark, a ‘pocket’ battleship built under the stretched limits of the Versailles Treaty. In the battle to sink it was a double-winger World War I torpedo bomber; that had fabric wings that I described earlier. The pilot attacked the rear of the Bismark and managed to hit the rudder with a torpedo. In a naval battle it is costly to lose steering, moving at a constant 15 degrees left, so that the allied forces could fire with accuracy. It is ironic that a World War I plane helped bring down the Bismark.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Epilogue
My co-host in the first several March dinners to honor WWII vets was Prof Jack Wallace at CWRU. A great story of WWII is the movie “Patton”. In one incident in Italy a balky donkey on a bridge is holding up one of Patton’s tank columns. Patton comes up, shoots the donkey, and directs the men to throw it off the bridge. One of Jack Wallace’s short stories was: “I was there.”
At the October 7th session at Baldwin Walalce, I was asked for added comments. I replied by saying that the highlight of my talk on September 23 was when, as I started the story on Leyte Gulf, a veteran raised his hand and said: “I was there.” Then Sherwin Goodman, a gunner on a PBM Avenger, came forward and gave his story on first seeing the Yamato, and then trying to attack her. Sherwin loaned me his copy of The Battle of Leyte Gulf by Thomas Cutler, published 50 years later so Cutler had access to the post-war testimony of the Japanese admirals, as well as survivors of the Johnston. The book includes reference to a text in the Napoleonic era, On War by the Prussian General Carl von Clausewitz, a classic work. In a chapter entitled “Friction in War”, Clausewitz used a term ‘friction’ to describe all that can go wrong in a war, and in another chapter “Intelligence in War” described the difficulty in obtaining accurate information. He combined these into the ‘fog of war’, a factor particularly evident at the Battle of Leyte Gulf, where both the American and Japanese sides had a split command, causing mis-communication that led to the uneven battle.
Cutler also references the action in the Crimean War enshrined in history by Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade”, with occurred 90 years to the day (October 25, 1854) before the final day at Leyte Gulf. Cutler’s 18th chapter is entitled “Charge of the Light Brigade”, in which Tennyson’s verses are interspersed with the Leyte battle action. It is the highlight of this book; the last two paragraphs of that chapter follow in [ ].
[As the survivors of Johnston floundered about in their new environment, watching their ship slowly disappearing into the sea, they saw a Japanese destroyer bearing down on them. Fearing they were about to be strafed, many slipped out of their life jackets and dove beneath the water for protection. Others feared being depth-charged and tried to float on their backs, believing they would sustain less injury this way. Still others watched in fatalistic terror as the Japanese vessel rapidly approached.
But the Japanese ship did not strafe and did not depth-charge these men. Instead, some of the crew tossed cans of food to their enemies now floating helplessly in the water. And many of the Johnston’s survivors then witnessed something they would never forget. There on the bridge-wing of the Japanese destroyer, an officer stood watching as Johnston, his enemy of just moments before, slipped beneath the waves. As the noble ship went down, this Japanese officer lifted a hand to the visor of his cap and stood motionless for a moment… saluting. ]
One silent chapter on the behavior of the Japanese in China was uncovered by my elder son Eric, currently a DuPont executive based in Shanghai. He visited a war memorial in ChangChun, the 1930s capital of the puppet government under Pu Yi, the last Emperor of the Qing Dynasty prior to China becoming a republic. The details are too gruesome to include, but see the Sheldon H. Harris text in the reference bibliography.
Another audacious action was Lt. Colonel James Doolittle’s radio by fifteen B-25 bombers over Tokyo on April, 1942, which shook the Tojo-led Japanese military, who had assured the Emperor that the home islands were safe from attack. The flyers who landed on Japanese-held areas were executed. The lucky ones landed in China, protected by local villagers. This personal story was told by Captain Ted W. Lawson in “Thirty Seconds over Tokyo”, first published in March 1944, with an excerpt pp 112-113 following in [ ]:
[ We got to the village in the early afternoon, hours ahead of our next means of travel. Then the always magic-working Chinese produced a 1941 Ford station wagon and a Chinese charcoal-burning truck. God knows how.
Doc thought it would be better for me to ride in the truck because I had to stretch out (my injured leg.) Three quilts were put on the floor of the truck. At dark I was placed on top of them and off we went. The others, except for Dr. C----, went in the station wagon. Dr. C--- sat in the dark truck with me.
I had looked forward to this for a long, long time, but after a bit I began to pine for the sedan chair and even Charlie’s stretchers. The springs on that truck weren’t springs. Every time we hit a bump, and we must have hit a million, I’d leave the floor. The next bump would get me coming down. I used both my hands to keep what was left of my leg form banging. That didn’t help much. It just bumped and bled and throbbed. We kept going.
I can still see Dr. C--- trying to comfort me. “Ah, Mista Lawrence, All right?” he’d ask in the darkness. I could only moan. Behind I heard one explosion after another. When I could speak, I asked Dr C--- what they were.
“Ah, Mista Lawrence” he said, sad and placid. Japanese too close. So Chinese blow up road behind you, just after we pass….I didn’t want to tell you.
Late that night we stopped and, when they carried me out of the truck, I guess that I was pretty well broken down. But I did hear them say that we had reached Choo Chow Lishiu, the place where I had wanted to land the Ruptured Duck (damaged B25 bomber.) …. They were saying it “Leeshway.” ]
Joseph Degenfelder, September 23, 2009 at Baldwin Wallace “Voices of World War II” Cleveland, OH
Appendix: Voices/Stories of World War II
Gordon Cook, The Big Shipwreck of the USS Salmonie, 1957 re-told September 23, 2009
R. J. Degenfelder, Curtiss Wright Airplanes made in Buffalo in World War II, November 1994
Martin Comella, Deadly wind became the adversary for WWII sailor, Plain Dealer, August 26, 1995
John Hamilton, Battle of Kasserine Pass Revisited 2005, Air Defense Artillery April-June 2005 pp 41-42
Chris Main, John S. McCain DDG-56 and Japanese Surrender on Missouri, March 16, 2008
Sherwin Goodman, Service in the Pacific during World War II, Plain Dealer, July 11, 2009
Sherwin Goodman, Tarawa to Leyte Gulf in a PTM Avenger, in press
Pat Boyd Stanzel, ‘Rosie the Riveter’ in Cleveland: A World at War, Plain Dealer, August 1, 2009
Joseph Degenfelder, Naval Fire Control – Ford AI Computer, October 2009
Rodney Gould, Messerschmitt Jet Fighter April 27, 1945, October 27, 2009
Joel Paris, Curtiss Wright P-40 Testimonial and History, October 28, 2009
John Jamele, Brooklyn Guy in the Seventh Armored Division, November 7, 2009
Chris Main, Bath Iron Works improves U.S. Destroyers in World War II (in press)
Reference Bibliography
Carl von Clausewitz, On War, English translation by J.J. Graham, N. Trubner, London, 1873
Ted W. Lawson, Thirty Seconds over Tokyo (Doolitte April 1942 Raid), Penquin, New York 1944
Oliver Jensen, Carrier War, Pocket Book (New York) 1945
William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Simon and Schuster New York 1960
C. L. Sulzberger & David G. McCullough Ed., History of World War II, American Heritage 1966
John Costello, The Pacific War 1941-45 (Summary), Rawson Wade, New York, 1981
Meirion Harries and Susie Harries, Soldiers of the Sun: The Rise and Fall of the Imperial Japanese Army,
Random, House, New York 1991
Thomas J. Cutler, The Battle of Leyte Gulf, Harper Collins, New York, 1994
