Ripper J. American Stories: Living American History. Volume 2: From 1865

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AMERICAN STORIES

178

James Doolittle Gives America Hope

If they could have seen the future, the soldiers of Hitler’s army, the Weh-

rmacht,

would have thrown down their machine guns and ﬂamethrowers and

surrendered in goose-stepping unison the minute Hitler declared war on the

United States. If they could have seen the future, the Japanese would have

skipped bombing Pearl Harbor, thereby avoiding the Bataan Death March in

the Philippines, the ﬁrebombing of Tokyo, and the incineration of Hiroshima

and Nagasaki. If he could have seen the future, Allied Supreme Commander

Dwight D. Eisenhower might have rushed his troops into Berlin in April 1945

rather than allowing the Soviet army to get there ﬁrst.

Instead the Wehrmacht occupied more than ﬁfteen nations, slaughtered

more than 15 million civilians and soldiers, and continued to ﬁght even through

the last cold winter of 1944–1945, when it equipped sixteen-year-olds to face

Allied armies pounding in from east and west. The Wehrmacht’s last stand

following the D-day invasion of Normandy, France, on June 6, 1944, enabled

Nazi executioners at Treblinka, Auschwitz, Sobibor, Dachau, Bergen-Belsen,

and other death camps to kill more than half a million Jews during those last

six months of 1944 alone: a hellish near-realization of the “Final Solution”

that had sprung from the diseased imaginations of SS leader Heinrich Him-

ler and his deputy, Reinhard Heydrich, in a Berlin suburb called Wannsee in

January 1942. Before Stalin’s Red Army liberated Auschwitz in January 1945,

doctors Josef Mengele and Carl Clauberg erased the boundaries of cruelty

in experiments that subjected Jewish and Gypsy men, women, and children

to dehydration, starvation, chemical burns, sterilization without anesthetics,

injection with tetanus and malaria, and all kinds of psychological tests, includ-

ing

the study of the brains of dead children who had been informed prior to

execution that they were slated to die. Common foot soldiers of the Wehrmacht

sent home grinning photographs of themselves standing proudly over the limp

bodies of just-murdered Jews.

Even after the death camps were liberated by

Allied soldiers who saw living skeletons lying in mute anguish, the United

States showed mercy to the citizens of West Germany and poured millions

of dollars into the economy to rebuild what had been lost. Postwar Europe’s

resurrection happened thanks to the manna of American money judiciously

spent. The punitive reparation payments foisted onto Germany as part of the

peace settlement after World War I were mostly discarded in 1945 in favor of

making Western European democracies a stable barrier against Soviet-style

communism looming to the east.

n the Paciﬁc in December 1941, Japanese forces stormed General Douglas

MacArthur’s joint American-Filipino army the day after Pearl Harbor. Two

weeks later, MacArthur ordered his forces to retreat from the capital of Manila

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and to fortify themselves in the forested mountains of the Bataan Peninsula.

Facing starvation and no prospect of reinforcements—and with MacArthur

gone in March 1942 to Australia—a U.S. general surrendered on April 9.

The Japanese lost no opportunity to torture and humiliate their captives on

what has become known as the Bataan Death March. After fourteen days and

ninety mosquito-ﬁlled miles, nearly 20,000 American and Filipino soldiers

were dead from disease, physical abuse, and lack of food and water. A few

captives were cruciﬁed with bayonets, most had their possessions stolen, and

all had to endure hours in the blazing sun sitting next to occasional supplies

of potable water they were not allowed to touch. By June 1942, Japanese

control over the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere—a jelly-ﬁlled

euphemism for “empire”—seemed certain. Dutch oil reserves in Indonesia,

rubber plantations in Vietnam, and the unlimited resources of China’s coast

were being plundered daily. All that remained was to capture Australia, defeat

a few scraggly European, American, Chinese, and Indian armies, and rule.

Japan was winning its war.

However, a skinny pilot with a comic-book name, Lieutenant Colonel James

Doolittle, ignored the odds when on April 18 he led sixteen twin-engine B-25

bombers off the wooden deck of the carrier Hornet, some 600 miles from the

oast of Honshu, Japan’s main island. The Hornet group had been spotted and

could risk going no closer. The Doolittle bombs did more damage to Japan

in American newspapers than they did to the industrial buildings of Tokyo,

Kobe, and Nagoya: the risky raid thrilled a dispirited American public. With the

Hornet anchored too far away for a round-trip, Doolittle buzzed his squadron

into

China, where ﬁfteen of the planes—each staffed by volunteers—crash-

landed. The last plane made it into Russian territory. Japanese forces captured

eight of the airmen, executing three of them. After receiving help from Chinese

civilians (and after Doolittle parachuted into a pile of manure, making for a

squishy but gentle reunion with the ground), he and the rest of his men made

it back to the States for further action. Rather than facing court-martial for

losing sixteen new bombers, James Doolittle returned to a hero’s welcome,

including commendation by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and a promo-

tion.

After the devastating losses at Pearl Harbor and the humiliating defeat

in the Philippines, the United States suddenly had reason to celebrate. The

war could be taken directly to Japan, if only in the air. What was more, partly

in response to the Doolittle raid, Japanese commanders diverted their naval

ﬂeet to the Coral Sea (near Australia) in May and to Midway Island in June,

in order to better position themselves for an attack on Australia and to knock

out U.S. aircraft carrier groups, which were obviously capable of doing more

harm to Japan than Japan had thought possible.

scorted by destroyers, cruisers, and refueling tankers, the carriers Lexing-

AMERICAN STORIES

180

ton and Concord motored into the Coral Sea in the ﬁrst days of May, looking

for prey. Japanese landing forces were preparing to take Port Moresby, New

Guinea, a move that could have isolated Australia. Admiral Isoroku Yama-

oto—the eight-ﬁngered, Harvard-educated tactician who had devised the raid

on Pearl Harbor—now had the opportunity to ﬁnish what he had missed the

previous December when the Lexington and Concord evaded his dive-bombers.

But U.S. naval intelligence gave a crucial edge to U.S. forces. Admiral Chester

Nimitz knew just where to send his ﬂeet, while Yamamoto could only guess

where trouble might be waiting. American pilots with outdated airplanes held

the future in their gloved hands, waiting for the order to brave death and save

democracy. On May 7 and 8, the tide of war in the Paciﬁc started to change

in America’s favor. With the ﬂeets as little as seventy miles apart, repeated

waves of ﬁghter planes, dive-bombers, and high-altitude bombers engaged.

When the chaos ended, one small Japanese carrier and one American—the

Lexington—had been sunk, along with more than thirty planes each and a

batch of escort ships. Technically the American ﬂeet suffered greater losses

of tonnage, but Yamamoto called off his planned assault on Port Moresby.

The Japanese advance stopped at the Coral Sea.

the Battle of the Coral Sea was a tipping point, the Battle of Midway

on June 4, 1942, was a disastrous change of tides for Yamamoto. Still with a

numerical advantage in planes and ships, he set his sights again on Hawaii.

Sitting to the west of Hawaii proper, the strategic jewel of Midway atoll hosted

the westernmost outpost of the U.S. Navy along with lounging palm trees and

a species of ﬂuffy albatross known as gooney birds. Once again supplied with

advanced knowledge of the massive Japanese armada approaching from three

directions, Admiral Nimitz prepped his defenses with a string of submarines,

aircraft carriers, and a complement of marines. The marines’ day ignited at

6:15 am when they did their dying best to arrest the onslaught of bombers

whose

escort of Zero planes shredded the marines in their inadequate air-

ships.

The gooney birds’ day started at 6:30 am when Japanese bombs rocked

the

few square miles of island with shudders and explosions. What seemed

to be the start of another Japanese victory quickly turned into a rout. Coun-

terstrikes

from the still operational airstrips and U.S. carriers resulted in the

loss of four Japanese carriers. Down with its carriers went the last vestiges of

Japan’s hope to scare the United States into a forced settlement recognizing

Japanese hegemony in the Paciﬁc. Other than lives, there was nothing the

United States could not replace. North America had been transformed into a

three-thousand-mile–wide factory that spit out 300,000 airplanes and 77,000

seaworthy vessels in only four years.

The

Battle of Midway ensured American naval supremacy in the Paciﬁc,

but to win the war, Japanese ground forces would have to be scoured from the

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jungles of the Philippines, Burma, Wake Island, and all the other places they

had occupied in their brief, furious advance during the previous few months.

The worst ﬁghting of the war in the Paciﬁc was yet to come at places like

Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa.

The

War in Europe, 1941–1943

More than any other war previously fought, World War II pitted men against

machines. Warriors have always sought some claw or club to drub an enemy,

maximizing damage to the other and minimizing damage to themselves. For

more than 2,000 years they had used swords, clubs, spears, and arrows. In

only a few generations, inventors and their killing customers had leapfrogged

from one-ball-a-minute smoothbore muskets to repeat-action, riﬂe-barreled

guns to belt-fed machine guns spitting out thousands of bullets every minute;

from horseback to the insides of steel tanks belching out explosive rounds;

from sailing boats ﬁring lumpy cannon balls to submarines launching explo-

sive

torpedoes; from the ground to the air where ﬂying cofﬁns dropped lethal

explosives by the hundreds of pounds. Men had covered themselves in metal

and were tearing through lines of fortiﬁcations like X-rays through bone.

Machines had not replaced men, however. On every front of the war, mil-

lions

of soldiers faced each other, and ﬁnal victory depended on their willing-

ess to die and kill. Six months after Hitler’s June 1941 invasion of the Soviet

Union, there were 3 million dead Russians and 800,000 German casualties.

And winter had not even joined the war yet, a winter of minus-ﬁfty-degree-

Fahrenheit days, a winter that froze the Luftwaffe into immobility but gave

10 million acclimated Soviet workers time to move whole airplane factories

one block at a time into the Ural Mountains. By spring 1942, even though

Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa had initially demolished 5,000 Soviet airplanes,

the Soviet proletariat was out-producing the fabled German factories and

enabling the resigned Russian people to ﬁght back with air support. In less

than a year, the Soviet Union built 41,000 planes and trained 131,000 pilots.

And at Stalingrad during the winter of 1942–1943, misery and sacriﬁce were

redeﬁned by the outnumbered Soviet defenders—including civilians—who

proved more adept at starving and shivering than the million German, Hun-

garian, and Bulgarian invaders of the

Wehrmacht.

The

Soviets resisted because the only alternative was certain death and

enslavement. Civilian women and men picked up dead soldiers’ guns and

held on to every basement, every bit of rubble, every street and alleyway.

Frightening stories had already spread to the embattled populace about Nazi

atrocities in conquered territory. Hitler’s army, however, fought because the

führer demanded ﬁghting of them on pain of execution. The little madman’s

AMERICAN STORIES

182

decree was “Surrender is forbidden”; this hard edict followed on the heels of

his cold commentary months earlier concerning the high numbers of deaths

in his ofﬁcer corps: “Why, that’s what the young gentlemen are there for.” On

January 31, 1943, trapped in the city he had stormed, German ﬁeld marshal

Friedrich Paulus and 90,000 remaining Wehrmacht soldiers surrendered to

Soviet general Georgy Zhukov. Almost 500,000 Soviet people had died, civil-

ans and soldiers. In their passing they had saved Mother Russia. Hitler would

never again be able to attack effectively on the eastern front.

The strategies and grandiose designs of Hitler, Hirohito, and Mussolini were

countered and checked by the Allied leaders Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt.

While Hitler saluted himself and sent his soldiers to the slaughterhouse with

no more regard for their lives than an amateur chess player has for his pawns

(even though he had undergone the gore of World War I trenches), Churchill

and Roosevelt lamented the crumpled youth of America and the British Com-

monwealth.

The prime minister and the president had not wanted this war,

though both had seen it coming much earlier than their countrymen. And they

had to meld two armies, two navies, and two air forces into one effective com-

and. Stalin did not care whom they chose for supreme commander of forces

on the western front so long as they chose someone who would distract the

Nazis from his Soviet doorstep. But the two democracies had joined forces

with the paranoiac Stalin out of necessity only, and the old fox Churchill

felt with clairvoyant certainty that, if mishandled, the Allied defeat of Hitler

would lead to a wounded Soviet-Russian bear occupying Europe with the

same brutality inﬂicted by the Nazis. During the 1930s, Joseph Stalin had

forced his people to industrialize and to collectivize their farms; anyone who

resisted or whom Stalin’s vast network of informers thought might resist was

labeled a traitor and sent to the labor camps—the death camps—of the gulag.

Millions died. The ofﬁcer corps had been bled of its best and ablest. Stalin

was not a man that Roosevelt or Churchill trusted, other than to ﬁght back

against Hitler. That they could count on.

Winston Churchill plugged his brilliant mouth with Havana cigars, scotch,

tea, and champagne morning to night while churning out a stream of dictation

to secretaries who struggled to gulp enough coffee to write down the speeches,

books, and essays that Churchill orated from bed, bath, and garden. A daring

soldier in his ambitious youth who had traveled into South Africa during the

Boer War of 1899 as a journalist only to be captured and then to escape with

a price on his head, Churchill had gone on to serve as a naval leader during

World War I, the chancellor of the exchequer (the second most important

job in British government), a member of the House of Commons, a popular

historian, and the most far-sighted—and therefore disliked—man in England.

During the 1930s, Churchill demanded that England arm itself for a war that

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WORLD WAR II

Hitler would surely make. Next to no one agreed with him. On one occasion

in 1939, prior to the Nazi blitzkrieg (“lightning war”) into Poland, Churchill

attended a party thrown by Lady Astor, a woman with pro-German sentiments

who detested Churchill’s anti-Nazi pessimism. While uncomfortably close

in the coffee line, Lady Astor spat out a curse at Churchill: “If I were your

wife I would put poison in your coffee.” Unfazed as usual, Churchill replied,

“Nancy, if I were your husband, I’d drink it.”

Willing to offend those with whom he disagreed, Winston Churchill knew

how to court those whom he needed. His people’s only chance for survival

sat 3,000 miles away in the White House. Roosevelt and Churchill met for

the ﬁrst time early in 1941 on a naval vessel in the North Atlantic, where

they instantly minted a lasting respect and friendship. Agreeing to a set of

idealistic principles under which their democracies would ﬁght—the Atlantic

Charter—all Churchill needed was for the rest of America to see as clearly as

Roosevelt. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor cleared America’s vision, and

Churchill had his ally: “We are all in the same boat now,” the prime minister

happily told the president. The English-speaking armies of the United States

and the British Commonwealth (including Canada, New Zealand, Australia,

and South Africa) would need one man at the helm to craft a plan for victory.

Dwight David Eisenhower became that man.

Dwight D

. Eisenhower

Dwight D. Eisenhower—known as “Ike” while both a grade-school tyke and

as president of the United States—was born poor and died bald. In between,

he traveled the world on Uncle Sam’s dollar, earned Winston Churchill’s sup-

port,

led the D-day invasion of France in June 1944, and served two terms as

president. Born in 1890, Ike lived until he was seven in a rundown shack in

Abilene, Kansas, once home to Wild Bill Hickok and thirsty teams of cowboys

who visited Abilene as the ﬁnal stop on the Chisholm Trail. Ike could still see

remnants of Abilene’s frontier past all around him, and though he remained

proud of his origins throughout his life, he wanted something more than farm

labor or the small prospects of small-town America. As a kid, Ike scrapped

often enough with his ﬁve brothers to prepare for the dash and crash of foot-

ball,

his favorite pastime other than baseball and history books, all of which

shared a common ingredient: tactics. By 1911, with a good enough head on

his shoulders to impress the right people, he got admitted to West Point, the

appropriate place for a sports-loving history buff.

Although few if any people at the military academy would have known it

at the time, West Point provided a foundation for Dwight Eisenhower’s rise

to the presidency. Ike the cadet did better running touchdowns and racking

AMERICAN STORIES

184

up demerits than following the strict standards of a spit-and-polish war col-

lege. Not long after getting knocked aside by the Olympic gold-medallist

(and former Carlisle Indian School student) Jim Thorpe in an embarrassing

tackle attempt, Ike busted his knee well enough that a sports career was out.

So he ﬁnished his time at West Point coaching the junior varsity team and

dreaming up some way to patch together a military career with a bum knee

and uninspired grades. Ike’s answer was to sign up for the one assignment

most ofﬁcer candidates were only too happy to bypass: the infantry.

For a junior ofﬁcer eager to prove himself, there was no better opportunity

than the Great War, which President Wilson had promised to stay out of, but

into which he led the nation anyway. Posted to a base in Texas rather than to

the Philippines as he had requested, Eisenhower continued to snatch fortune

from failure. After marrying Mamie Doud in 1916, he found out that tanks

rather than the ﬁelds of Flanders were his next assignment—the second time a

direct request had been denied. At Camp Colt in Pennsylvania, he puzzled out

every tactical advantage the tank could offer and demonstrated his penchant

for organizing men and lifting their morale. With no actual tanks on base, Ike

got the men to make believe with trucks. When a posting for European duty

did arrive, the departure date fell within a week of Armistice Day.

Now nearly thirty years old and with a blessed peace stretching into the

foreseeable distance, Lieutenant Colonel Dwight Eisenhower had nothing to

do. Peace was good for health and bad for promotion. The size of the army

plummeted to 120,000, and those who did not get decommissioned often got

demoted. Eisenhower ﬂanked a loss in pay by signing up for a genuinely unique

chance: jangling across country (at about six miles an hour, it turned out) as

part of a military convoy designed to test the nascent federal highway system.

After touring the nation more slowly than most people had since sweating

along the Oregon Trail, Eisenhower served at the tank school at Camp Meade,

Maryland; in Panama, where he studied military theory in the sweltering jungle

environment of the great canal; at Fort Leavenworth’s General Staff School,

“the seminary for future generals,” in Kansas;

and in Paris. Paris worked

out serendipitously, like all his other unwanted assignments. Fifteen years

later, as the supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force chasing

after German panzer divisions, Eisenhower could refer back to the mental

map of the French countryside he had plotted in 1928.

Through these years

Eisenhower made important military contacts, including the brash Colonel

George S. Patton; an inﬂuential mentor, General Fox Conner; and George C.

Marshall, later army chief of staff during World War II.

Returning from Europe to an isolationist nation with a skeleton army,

Eisenhower threw his considerable intelligence serving under Army Chief of

Staff Douglas MacArthur, the same egomaniac who had led the impromptu

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WORLD WAR II

raid on the Bonus Army’s camp at Anacostia ﬂats in 1932. When MacArthur

headed for the Philippines to set the military in order, he demanded that

the Eisenhowers go along. Mamie unhappily recalled the melting days in

Panama, but the crew of servants at their home in Manila soon reconciled her

to the third-world posting. Ike, on the other hand, had to suffer MacArthur’s

pompous circus act as Philippine president Manuel Quezon’s ﬁeld marshal,

ordering lavish parades for a Filipino military that would end up insufﬁcient

to stop the Japanese invasion of 1941. During the 1936 presidential election,

Eisenhower and MacArthur disagreed about which candidate was sure to

win—Roosevelt or Alf Landon. MacArthur called Eisenhower’s pro-Roosevelt

prediction “stupidity,” and Eisenhower went home and wrote in his diary,

“Oh hell.”

Unable to take as much of MacArthur as MacArthur could take

of himself, Eisenhower got reassigned stateside in 1940—the ﬁrst time one

of his requests was granted.

Now

ﬁfty years old, Eisenhower was just about past the point at which he

could hope for anything more than a good desk job, where a general’s star

would be as meaningful on a coffee cup as on a helmet. But during a mas-

sive

battle simulation, he led a daring infantry assault on a tank corps and

got his name (usually misspelled, once as Lieut. Colonel D.D. Ersenbeing

)

splashed all over the front pages of national newspapers. The timing could

not have been more fortuitous. Public adulation and the army’s need for a

handsome hero got him posted to Fort Houston in Texas—sporting a brigadier

general’s single star. Eisenhower heard word of Pearl Harbor from a major

who woke him from a late morning nap. America was at war. Ike’s patience

had paid off.

The Liberation of North Africa and Italy

Adolf Hitler was amazingly inept. He could have had most of what he wanted

had he not tried to take more than he could have. As late as 1943, the German

military was probably the best in the world. People who fought against it

tended to say so. Its weapons were advanced (including prototype jet engine

ﬁghter planes and rockets). Its soldiers had extensive combat experience and

worked well together. Collaborators aided the Third Reich in every country it

took over. In France, for example, only the northern half of the country was

occupied in 1940 because southern France ended up under the administration

of the Vichy government headed by Marshal Philippe Pétain, a World War I

veteran who willingly went along with Nazi overlordship in order to spare the

southern portion of his nation more direct meddling by Hitler’s most senior

henchmen. But Hitler could not stop, would not stop. He invaded the Soviet

Union and drained his resources to the snapping point. He invaded Egypt,

AMERICAN STORIES

186

wanting the Suez Canal and its direct route to Middle East oil. He signed

a treaty with Mussolini, which meant that every mistake the Italians made

(which were many) had to be cleaned up by yet more German troops. And

stupidest of all, Hitler kept attacking the British, which meant he was sure to

drag the United States into the war. If Hitler had stopped at France without

attacking Britain and the Soviets, he quite likely could have kept more than

half of Europe under his sick thumb.

The

United States had to ﬁgure out how to ﬁght what amounted to two

separate wars: one against the Germans and Italians, the other against the

Japanese. By 1942, both sets of Axis forces were dug in to their respective

conquests. The Germans were busy building fortiﬁcations along the Atlantic

coast of Europe—concrete pillboxes with slits just wide enough for the barrel

of a machine gun, mines adrift in the sea lanes outside likely invasion points.

And the Italian peninsula was a natural wall of valleys and mountains that

would make for bleak prospects if the British and Americans chose to drive up

from the Mediterranean. Meanwhile, the Japanese built bunkers and tunnels

throughout the scattered atolls and islands of the Paciﬁc. Americans in 1942

wanted to beat Germany, but they wanted to annihilate Japan. The feelings

were mutual. Left without allies, U.S. planners would likely have thrown their

might against Japan and dealt with Germany later. But Winston Churchill ex-

erted

an almost magical inﬂuence on American leaders, and for good reason.

Other than the United States, Great Britain was the last democratic bulwark

in the world to stand against fascism. If Hitler had his way with Britain, the

United States would stand alone.

the United States concentrated at ﬁrst on the struggle against Hitler.

To coordinate the joint effort, Army Chief of Staff George Marshall selected

Dwight Eisenhower, a man well liked but with not two seconds of actual

combat experience. British generals, especially ﬁeld marshal Bernard “Monty”

Montgomery, sniffed and snorted at the choice. But once Eisenhower reached

London in June 1942, he quickly justiﬁed Marshall’s and Roosevelt’s conﬁ-

dence

in him. Ike listened and synthesized; he made self-effacing jokes and

broke English rules of etiquette in a peculiarly Midwest American sort of

way that seemed to make everyone laugh, for instance by lighting cigarettes

at banquet tables before the king had been properly toasted. Ike lunched

weekly with Churchill (who called him a “prairie prince”), attended formal

to-dos when not avoidable, got the prickly British press on his side (one writer

labeled him a “jolly good bloke”), and impressed other military men with his

studied gift for strategy, tactics, and organizing.

With a joint command in

place, conﬁdence rising, and American troops arriving in England at the rate

of 50,000 a month by mid-1942, it was time to ﬁght.

Churchill convinced Roosevelt to delay an invasion of France and instead to

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WORLD WAR II

go after the fascists in North Africa, part of Churchill’s overall plan to attack

the Nazis from the “soft underbelly” of Europe, i.e., Italy. Secret landings at

three separate locations were scheduled for November 8, 1942, code named

Operation Torch. Arriving within an hour of their scheduled landing, 35,000

marines and green army troops under Eisenhower’s tank-school conﬁdant,

General Patton, spilled onto the beaches near Casablanca, Morocco, where

they were met by brief but intense opposition from Vichy French troops.

Another 10,000 army troops splashed ashore farther to the east under a Brit-

ish

command. From an underground bunker on the British rock at Gibraltar,

General Eisenhower tracked the clash, and ﬁve days later he ﬂew to Africa to

confer with François Darlan, a Nazi stooge in a Frenchman’s body who could

nevertheless get the Vichy troops to stop ﬁghting the Allies. The bad press

generated by dealing with Darlan was worth the American lives saved, and

Darlan himself was soon taken care of by an assassin’s bullet delivered by a

Frenchman recently escaped from a German prisoner-of-war (POW) camp.

For ﬁve more months—until May 7, 1943, when the last 150,000 Axis

soldiers in North Africa surrendered—the U.S. Army ﬁgured out how to ﬁght.

German general Erwin Rommel, billed as the “Desert Fox,” gave Allied com-

manders

like Patton and Omar Bradley an excellent chance to chip their teeth

while matching metal with the Afrika Korps, Rommel’s hard bitten cavalry.

Rommel himself returned to Europe to ﬁght another day, but not before he

gave Eisenhower a stinging defeat at Kasserine Pass in the Atlas Mountains

of Tunisia in February 1943. In only a few minutes, Rommel’s Korps ripped

through the American defensive line and sent most of the troops into a swarm-

ing

retreat, weapons and matériel left behind for the Germans to collect at

will. Like all good generals before him, Eisenhower accepted his newspaper

bruises and learned from the defeat. Namely he ﬁgured out which generals he

could count on, Patton and Bradley making it to the top of his list.

Incidentally

, many of the German soldiers captured in North Africa waited

out the duration of the war in POW camps scattered throughout the United

States, more than thirty in Texas alone. Rommel’s personal barber was one

of the POWs who got sent to Fort Lewis, Washington, where he enjoyed the

ﬁne hospitality of American camp life, including plenty of ﬂour for baking

cakes. A fellow German POW escaped from Fort Lewis and made his way into

downtown Seattle, where he lived with a two-week girlfriend. When she broke

up with him, he returned to Fort Lewis, saying he had nowhere else to go.

Driving

Hitler out of North Africa was one thing. Defeating him in Europe

would be another. In December 1943, Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill met in

Tehran, Iran, the ﬁrst time the “Big Three” all sat together. The stakes could

not have been greater. Stalin did not trust his two English-speaking equals to

throw their combined strength headlong against Hitler, and they certainly did