Ripper J. American Stories: Living American History. Volume 2: From 1865
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not trust Stalin to respect any nation’s independence in the event of an Allied
victory. But the two and the one did a good job of pretending to get along
well, posing for the cameras in chairs to accommodate Roosevelt’s inability
to stand on his own. To some extent Roosevelt even managed to charm Stalin
by whispering in his ear, giving Stalin the sense that Churchill was the odd
man out. Along with ego-saving games, Roosevelt and Churchill pledged
what Stalin most wanted to hear: an invasion of the French coast in spring
1944, Operation Overlord.
Before
the Axis was defeated in North Africa, Churchill and Roosevelt
met in Casablanca once it was secured. After enjoying a desert sunset over
the Moroccan hills and likely a drink or four, the president and the prime
minister agreed to strike at Hitler through Sicily and Italy. Then Roosevelt
announced on January 24, 1943, that Germany must submit to unconditional
surrender—unusual in the history of European warfare but nonnegotiable for
the leader of an American people who demanded that the German war machine
be put out of business permanently. Seven months later, on July 10, the largest
amphibious assault in recorded history (up to that point) descended on the
island of Sicily; some 3,000 boats delivered a first wave of 150,000 British,
Canadian, and American assailants. Italian resistance was nonexistent, but
60,000 German soldiers got away and relocated to Italy proper, where they
joined twenty-two other crack divisions of the Wehrmacht that would push
back against the Allied incursion for two straight years.
The Italian campaign was a success and a failure. Hundreds of thousands
of German troops were tied up, relieving pressure on the Soviets and making
Operation Overlord less daunting for the Allies to envision. Two weeks after
Sicily was invaded, Mussolini was removed from office and thrown in jail
(though German paratroopers rescued him six weeks later and installed him as
head of a northern Italian Nazi-puppet regime). Under a new government headed
by Pietro Badoglio, the Italians gratefully surrendered to the Allies, many not
having wanted to fight alongside the Nazis in the first place. And Allied troops
got more of the training they would need to beat the main German armies in
Western Europe. However, the training came at the cost of about 90,000 Allied
lives with many more wounded, including Daniel Inouye, the young Japanese-
American who had tended to the wounded at Pearl Harbor for five straight days
in December 1941, a time he called “the great turning point of my life.”
8
Daniel Inouye and the 442nd: D-day and the Fall of the
Third Reich
W
anting to serve his country in the military, Inouye had had to wait until
Japanese-descended citizens were cleared of their “enemy alien” status, which
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happened on February 1, 1943. He then joined the 442nd Regimental Combat
Team, consisting exclusively of Japanese-Americans, for a year’s training in
Mississippi. Two thirds of the recruits were from Hawaii; most of the rest had
come straight from internment camps. When the two groups met, friction es-
c
alated to fracas. Differences in attitude and culture between mainlanders and
islanders led to alcohol-fueled brawls in the barracks at night. The Hawaiians
called the mainlanders “kotonks” after the sound their noggins made when
they hit the floor. The mainlanders taunted the Hawaiians with the nickname
“Buddhaheads,” “a play on the word buta, Japanese for ‘pig.’”
9
With military
command ready to break up the unruly regiment, a salve was applied by send-
ing
the group to visit the nearby internment camps of Jerome and Rohwer
in Arkansas. Once the Japanese recruits from Hawaii saw the barbed-wire
enclosures where their mainland rivals had been living, what indignities they
had endured, all grievances eased into instant comradeship.
The
442nd Regimental Combat Team shipped out for Italy in May 1944.
When Sergeant Inouye disembarked at Naples, he saw wrecked ships sulking
in the harbor and long lines of soldiers winding their ways toward battlefronts
not far away. Bivouacked on the outskirts of town, Inouye and his team were
watched from a stand of nearby trees by a dozen Italians with, as he remem-
bered
it, “dark and haunted eyes.” The Italians were starving and offered
to trade their labor for food. When Inouye agreed, the bedraggled Italians
launched into a late lunch of servicemen’s garbage, a mixed-up assemblage of
food scraps, cigarette dust, and spit. Frantic at the sight, Inouye insisted that
they return later that night for a better meal. The company commander agreed
to help, and the men set aside apples, dollops of mashed potatoes, and slices
of bread to be given to the returned Italians at nightfall. Inouye commented,
“so I began to find out what war was all about.” Sadness and charity were part
of Inouye’s war, but within the year the 442nd earned its boot-camp motto,
“Go for broke,” by sacrificing more than apples and sliced bread.
Sergeant Daniel Inouye’s fellow kotonks and Buddhaheads had landed in
Italy one month before D-day—the planned invasion of the beaches of Nor-
mandy
. While the 442nd was getting its first combat outside of Rome in late
May 1944, the final preparations for D-day were being executed in Britain.
Eisenhower and Churchill motored from camp to camp, shaking confidence
into the hands of men receiving last-minute specialty training: how to scale
cliffs defended by entrenched machine gunners; how to make it off a landing
craft and into a foxhole freshly scooped out by 100-pound bombs dropped
moments in advance by B-17s; how to parachute behind enemy lines with-
out
detection and storm key artillery batteries that, if left in German hands,
could obliterate D-day assault forces; in short, Allied GIs and their British
Commonwealth comrades were trained to adapt and survive in a killing zone.
AMERICAN STORIES
190
D-day was originally slated for May 1944, but Eisenhower had to put it off by
a month so that enough ship-to-shore landing craft could be delivered from
the States. During the last days of May, 5,000 ships lay anchored off British
shores with more than 150,000 assault troops and nearly 30,000 vehicles of all
sorts, all waiting in tomb-like secrecy for a June 5 launch across the English
Channel into Nazi-occupied France.
Over
the previous year and just in time, Allied air forces had established
dominance in the skies, without which D-day could never have been launched.
Ever since the Battle of Britain, British Bomber Command and the United
States Army Air Forces (USAAF) had been sending squadrons on near-
suicidal missions to bomb German industrial and civilian sites. There had
been a constant, terrible, and dispiriting loss of crews and planes. Many mis-
sions
suffered at least an 8 percent loss rate, which meant that pilots could not
expect to reach their twenty-fifth mission, considered a complete tour of duty
by the USAAF. Flying was tough to start with. Planes were not pressurized,
so at 25,000 feet, temperatures dropped well below zero. A careless pilot who
took off a glove to scratch his nose and then absentmindedly touched a metal
part of the plane could end up having to rip off the skin of his hand to break
it free. And German engineers had designed rocket-fired mortars mounted
under fighter planes’ wings. Freezing Allied airmen on a five-hour mission
faced deadly swarms of German planes defending their homeland with air-
to-air missiles. The effects were unnerving and exhausting.
One night over Berlin, Britain’s Royal Air Force lost 96 planes and 960
crewmen while killing fewer than 100 Germans. Numbers like that did not add
up. Even the B-17 Flying Fortress, bristling with machine gun turrets above,
below, and behind, could not compete with antiaircraft fire and Luftwaffe
ME-109s. And although vital factories, like one that produced Messerschmidt
fighter planes, received repeated pummelings from above, Germany still pro-
d
uced 44,000 planes in 1944. Although the bombing campaign seemed to exact
too great a cost for the minimal damage it caused, Churchill had little else he
could throw at the Germans dug in throughout Europe. The proverbial tables
turned, however, when the P-51 Mustang long-range fighter arrived in England
in September 1943. The British mounted their superior Merlin Rolls-Royce
engines, and with 450-caliber machine guns blazing, the Mustang ruled the
air, acing 2,121 Luftwaffe planes in February 1944 alone and another 2,115
in March. Loss of Allied planes during an average mission dropped to below
1 percent, and as D-day approached, Churchill and Eisenhower decided to
concentrate on installations within occupied France itself to soften German
defenses, even though that would mean the deaths of innocent French civil-
i
ans. The leader of Free French troops, Charles de Gaulle, had said the French
would willingly die in order to be free. With that kind of permission, Allied
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sorties laid waste to German railroad lines and oil and gas depots. Nonethe-
less and totally unbeknownst to Allied intelligence, underground factories in
Germany increased production of tanks, shells, bullets, and other essential
war matériel.
During
the years of bombing German targets, terror had become a tactic,
deplored by many but seen as morally acceptable by those in charge. German
troops simply did not yield, often because Hitler refused to let them do so, as
had been his order at Stalingrad in 1943. If the Nazis were willing to sell their
lives to the last woman and child, how many soldiers would the Allies have
to consign to death in order to win? Somehow—Churchill, Roosevelt, and
Eisenhower agreed—they needed to sap the average German citizen’s will to
fight, thus reducing Hitler’s base of support at home. It was well known that
whatever dictatorial powers he had, Hitler was still a politician reliant on his
people’s complicity. In this vein of desperation and altered moral standards,
Allied engineers and bombers figured out how to create artificial firestorms
through the use of incendiary bombs.
All
the advances in medicine that graced army field hospitals during the
war—namely blood plasma and penicillin—could not keep pace with the new
methods devised for exterminating tens of thousands of people in minutes.
On
July 27, 1943, British Air Command unleashed 729 bombers toward
Hamburg. For the previous three evenings the city had been hit, and fires still
burned. On the 27th,
even before the last aircraft had departed, the multiple fires in Hamburg had
become a single holocaust, with temperatures reaching 1,000 C, creating
an enormous tornado of fire that uprooted huge trees, set asphalt streets
afire, and sucked human beings huddling in their homes into the heart of
the storm. Bomb shelters were turned into crematoriums, where the victims
were first asphyxiated by carbon monoxide and then burned to ashes. . . .
As many as 50,000 died.
10
Later, on February 13, 1945, a historically more infamous firebombing
devastated Dresden, where an American GI named Kurt Vonnegut, captured
during the Battle of the Bulge in late December 1944, was held in a meat
plant basement known as Slaughterhouse Number Five. Using the techniques
pioneered at Hamburg nearly two years earlier, British and American planes
set the town of more than half a million people ablaze, killing at least 25,000.
In 2003, in a National Public Radio interview, Vonnegut—by then a famous
author known for Slaughterhouse-Five—recalled the Dresden inferno as “pure
nonsense,”
11
echoing many historians’ opinion that the city had been burned
out of retribution rather than for any justifiable military necessity.
AMERICAN STORIES
192
Before Dresden, however, came D-day. By June 1944, 2 million Allied
soldiers were grouped in southern England waiting to do what they had come
to do—liberate Europe from the Nazis. The average American GI could not
name even three of Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms”—the ostensible soul of the
mission. Nor did the average soldier cotton to the autocratic style of military
life; after all, these were citizen soldiers fed political spoonfuls of freedom
language since childhood, raised to be equal, not subordinate. But the mood
on the ships drummed with purposeful resignation to duty. A handsome
Hungarian-born Life magazine photographer named Robert Capa circulated
a
mong 2,000 anxious men aboard the USS Chase, winning at poker and letting
them know he would go in with the first wave, E Company, on its surf-soaked
charge at Omaha Beach.
On June 5, Eisenhower surveyed the skies and the tide reports. Although
the cloud cover mitigated against effective and safe tandem use of bombers
and ground forces, he did not want to delay another day. On his own he gave
the go-ahead. Then he sat down and wrote a note to be used in the likely
event that the invasion failed. The note placed all blame for a failed landing
on his shoulders alone.
Just
after midnight on June 6, some 15,000 paratroopers whooshed toward
their drop points up and down the coast, charged to disable bridges, to take
artillery installations, to prevent panzer tank divisions from making it to the
beaches. Field Marshal Erwin Rommel had left the coast the afternoon before
to celebrate his wife’s birthday in Germany and to meet with Adolf Hitler and
try to convince the führer to release all panzer divisions to Rommel’s direct
control effective immediately. Hitler not only refused, but Rommel was injured
a month later in France in a bombing raid (and soon committed suicide after
being implicated in an unsuccessful plot to kill Hitler with a suitcase bomb).
The Desert Fox, who thought very little of Hitler’s abilities, knew the Allies
were getting ready to strike, but he assumed the main brunt would land at
Pas-de-Calais, the point on the coast nearest to England and hence easiest for
a massive troop transport. By the time Rommel caught word of the landings
and got his driver to speed back, 156,000 Allied troops had made their mortal
assaults at Omaha, Utah, Gold, Sword, and Juno beaches—the code names
for the coastal strike points.
German
machine guns shot out 1,200 bullets per minute, enough to inflict
death rates exceeding 100 percent in some rifle companies.
12
(Rates could
exceed 100 percent because replacements were nearly continuous.) Robert
Capa hit the water at Omaha Beach with E Company and—after hiding with
other men behind metal obstacles strewn on the beach by Germans—sprinted
toward a shattered tank for cover. There were no foxholes in the sand because
the bombardiers had all missed their marks half an hour earlier for fear of hit-
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ting their own troops. Capa clicked about 100 exposures and chanted a phrase
to himself he had picked up during the Spanish Civil War in 1936: “This is a
very serious business.” Unable to load another roll of film because his hands
were shaking too much, Capa splashed back onto one of the rectangular
troop transports and headed back toward England to get the film developed.
Once aboard the landing craft, Capa later said, “I felt a slight shock and I
was all covered with feathers. ‘What is this? Is somebody killing chickens?’
Then I saw that the superstructure had been shot away and the feathers were
the stuffing from the Kapok jackets of the men who were blown up.”
13
Only
eleven of Capa’s pictures ended up usable because the film technician, in a
rush, dried the roll too quickly and ruined most of it. Although only a handful,
Capa’s photos—grainy and blurred—evoke the confusion and hectic scramble
of young men charging headlong into hell. By the end of the day, 4,720 Al-
lied
men had been killed, wounded, or gone missing on Omaha Beach alone.
All told, 6,603 U.S. servicemen died on D-day. Allied casualties amounted
to nearly 10,000. Unfortunately for everyone, the most deadly and intense
fighting of the war was yet to come.
Over the next six months, the Allies liberated Western Europe under
Eisenhower’s overall planning. His second-in-command, Omar Bradley, an old
friend from West Point, helped keep internecine bickering between the joint
commanders from becoming too raw, while the pearl-handled-pistol-toting
George Patton got his Third Army to devastate German divisions (in between
bouts of insisting that his men wear neckties unless actually in combat).
American commanders on the ground were fighters. Patton wanted action as
much as one of his subordinates, Creighton Abrams, who wore out six tanks
and preferred to be “way out on the goddam point of the attack, where there’s
nothing but me and the goddam Germans and we can fight by ourselves with-
out
stopping to report back to Headquarters.”
14
More than 200,000 resistance
fighters—French, Belgian, Luxembourgian—ripped up rail lines, passed along
secret intelligence, and joined in skirmishes. Loss of life mounted, reaching
12,000 to 18,000 dead American GIs every month toward the end of the year.
In the Vosges Mountains of southern France in late October, Daniel Inouye’s
442nd made a nearly week-long assault on entrenched German troops who
had surrounded the “Lost Battalion”—275 soldiers from a Texas-based unit
who had charged too far, too fast into a trap. The 442nd lost more men than
it saved and became the most highly decorated unit of its size in U.S. military
history. Nearly a year later, Inouye (who had missed the rescue of the Lost
Battalion) lost the use of one arm in battle. Having already been shot in the
gut after tossing a grenade and cutting down a handful of Germans, he was
“shuffling” toward a bunker when he spotted a German soldier preparing to
shoot him again. Then, Inouye remembered, “as I cocked my arm to throw,
AMERICAN STORIES
194
he fired and his rifle grenade smashed into my right elbow and exploded and
all but tore my arm off. I looked at it, stunned and unbelieving. It dangled
there by a few bloody shreds of tissue, my grenade still clenched in a fist that
suddenly didn’t belong to me anymore.” Inouye killed the German and then
slumped into unconsciousness. The fact that Inouye was still fighting in spring
1945 testified not to the failure of Operation Overlord, but to the stupefying
overconfidence caused by its success.
By December 1944, the European war seemed just about over. The
Wehrmacht had been pushed back inside Germany, cognac flowed sweet
and free into servicemen’s glasses in the cafés of Paris, and the only ques-
t
ion remaining was to figure out who would get the glory of finishing off
Hitler’s western armies: the British general Montgomery or the necktie-
obsessed Patton.
Then, on December 16, a quarter-million well-equipped German troops—
many teenage Hitler youth, old men long past their prime, and conscripted
criminals—made the question of Allied glory academic. Along an eighty-
mile front bordering a weak spot in Allied defenses near Luxembourg, the
Wehrmacht began the Battle of the Bulge, some of the most ugly, most tir-
ing
fighting of the war. Hitler knew the Red Army was about to obliterate
Germany from the east, so he gambled on disrupting the Allied alliance with
an unexpected lunge at the port city of Antwerp. For more than a month,
exemplary courage and ferocity enabled Allied front-line rifle companies,
paratroopers from the Eighty-Second and 101st, and any other able-bodied,
patched-together GIs in the western theater to repulse Hitler’s last mistake.
America suffered 80,000 casualties in little more than a month—20,000 young
men dead and many others permanently damaged by the incessant shelling
and the splattered shock of a comrade’s blood and brains. In the region’s
coldest winter in decades, GIs had not yet received winter boots; feet and
toes swelled with frostbite and then turned metallic black as gangrene set it.
For many there was no relief, and some rifle companies suffered 250 percent
loss rates, the replacements coming from desk jobs or anywhere else men
with two arms could be found. But the Germans’ offensive was thrown back
over their own dead bodies.
Patton
and Bradley’s tanks rushed in after them. The Soviets crossed the
Oder River and ploughed toward Berlin. Eisenhower had a choice to make:
take Berlin from the west and risk a clash with the numerically superior Red
Army or let Stalin have Berlin and go after the remnants of the Wehrmacht
to
the south. In February 1945, Roosevelt and Churchill set the basis for
Eisenhower’s decision. At the Yalta Conference on the Crimea, they met one
last time with Stalin and decided the world’s fate. Germany would get divided
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between the Soviets, French (a token gesture), British, and Americans. Berlin,
although falling within the Soviet sphere, would get subdivided between the
four occupiers, another token symbol of goodwill. So Eisenhower let the So-
viets
“take” Berlin, at the further loss of another 100,000 Soviet fighters who
had to claw their way through the unyielding Germans. On April 12, 1945,
Franklin D. Roosevelt died of a brain hemorrhage only months after taking
the presidency for a fourth term. Vice President Harry S. Truman—a former
dirt farmer, World War I veteran, and two-term senator from Missouri who
could swear impressively in private, never smoked, and felt like the sky had
fallen on his head—took the oath of office on April 13. On April 30, Adolf
Hitler, having gone completely crazy in his underground bunker, shot himself
in the mouth with a pistol. On May 7, German high commander Alfred Jodl
surrendered, and the following day, Dwight Eisenhower proclaimed V-E Day,
victory in Europe.
W
ith the Soviets and Americans promising each other all sorts of yummy
trust and peace, but nobody believing them for a moment, the war in Europe
came to a deafening silence. The Soviets had promised at Yalta to help the
United States defeat Japan within three months of V-E Day. President Truman
turned his gaze toward the east.
Notes
1. For a thorough examination of common German soldiers’ seeming enthusiasm
for killing Jewish people, see Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners:
Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Vintage, 1997).
2. Quoted in Dominique Enright, The
Wicked Wit of Winston Churchill (London:
Michael O’Mara, 2001), 103.
3.
James C. Humes, Eisenhower and Churchill: The Partnership That Saved the
World (New York: Prima, 2001), 105.
4. Stephen E. Ambrose, Eisenhower (New York: Touchstone, 1990), 43.
5. Ambrose, Eisenhower, 46.
6.
“Eisenhower: Soldier of Peace,” Time, Friday, April 4, 1969, www
.time.com/
time/magazine/article0,9171,839998-4,00.html
7. Humes, Eisenhower and Churchill, 167, 166.
8. For this and all other quotes from Daniel Inouye, please see Daniel K. Inouye
with
Lawrence Elliot, Journey to Washington (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall,
1967). A condensend version of Senator Inouye’s war experiences can be found at
his Senate website: http://inouye.senate.gov/gfb/index.html.
9
. Robert Asahina, Just Americans: How Japanese Americans Won a War at Home
and Abroad (New York: Gotham, 2006), 60.
10. Walter J. Boyne, Clash of Wings: World War II in the Air (New York: Simon
& Schuster, 1994), 319.
11. Quoted in “Novelist Vonnegut Remembered for His Black Humor,” Day to Day,
April 12, 2007, www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9539740.
AMERICAN STORIES
196
12. Joseph Balkoski, Omaha Beach: D-Day June 6, 1944 (Mechanicsburg, PA:
Stackpole, 2004), 121.
13.
Richard Whelan, Robert Capa: A Biography (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1985), 215.
14.
William L. O’Neill, A Democracy at War: America’s Fight at Home and
Abroad in World War II (New York: Free Press, 1993), 371.
FROM WORLD WAR TO COLD WAR
11
From World War to Cold War
Albert Einstein (on left) and J. Robert Oppenheimer.
(Alfred Eisenstaedt/Getty Images)
197