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A World at War
by A. Bernstein
Part II
For Part I of this series click here.
For Part III of this series click here.
In the first part, we saw the beginning of the war as Germany suddenly attacked Poland, and swiftly overran it. As the Nazi war machine gained control over more and more of Europe, the Americans hoped that they could sit out the fighting.
President Roosevelt began to sell war material to Britain and gradually began more and more openly to take the side of America's traditional allies in Europe. Little by little, the U.S. administration drew closer to its friends in Europe. However, there was an unmistakable reluctance on the part of the U.S. to be drawn into the conflict, even after it was clearly evident that Hitler was clearly in the wrong.
Slowly, America began to take a side in the conflict. There were incidents and provocations in the North Atlantic, but the final declaration of war came after crucial events in the Pacific.
The War Spreads to the Far East
Tension in the Far East had been mounting for more than half a year. After the German victories in May-June 1940, moderate elements in Japan found it more difficult than ever to subdue the militants over there. After Germany conquered France and Holland, the French territories in Indo-China, and Indonesia, became ripe territorial goals for Japan, and also Malaysia, Burma and even India appeared tempting.
Japan pressured the Vichy government in France into permitting her to build air bases in Indo-China. Tokyo then joined the Axis powers by signing a Tripartite Treaty with Germany and Italy, the Fascist powers of Europe. Japan then invaded China and the United States responded with a partial ban on the exportation of goods to Japan.
FDR
America is Finally Forced to Declare War
In 1941, events began to lead toward a crisis. In July, Japan captured Indo-China. President Roosevelt responded by appointing General Douglas MacArthur to command of the U.S. Army in the Far East, and by freezing Japanese assets in the United States. Great Britain and Holland followed in her footsteps. Japan was excluded from the American market, and from purchasing vital materials such as rubber, metals, oil and airplane fuel.
The Japanese war mongers decided to declare war against these three countries within four months, if the flow of these strategic materials was not renewed. The negotiations that both of these governments held from then on were really hide seek games which they played in order to gain time, because both of them understood that war was unavoidable. Japan refused to leave China, and the United States did not agree to any other arrangement.
The American government wanted to postpone the outbreak of the war, because its armed forces were still not prepared to fight. By the end of the autumn, the Japanese decided to act. On the 26th of November 1941, a Japanese force, made up of six large aircraft carriers, on whose decks were 353 war planes, in addition to various support ships and eleven destroyers, headed toward the large American naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii (then an American territory).
The Japanese completed their secret mission with destructive efficiency. Ohau Island of Hawaii, was in a tranquil mood until that Sunday morning, the 7th of December, 7:55, when the bombs started to fall. Despite warnings of an attack, Admiral Kimmel had not canceled his vacation. General Short directed his planes to park as close as possible to each other, because he was only worried about land based sabotage.
At the end of that bleak and bloody day, 2,403 sailors, soldiers, and American citizens had been killed, and 1,178 had been injured. 149 planes were destroyed on land and at sea. The battleship, Arizona, was sunk. Oklahoma was hit and capsized. Tennessee, West Virginia and California cascaded into the deep. In order to avoid going under, the Nevada beached itself. Other ships were destroyed or seriously damaged.
Even MacArthur's Far Eastern command was given sufficient warning regarding the Pearl Harbor attack. Still, an attack of the Japanese bombers launched from Formosa trapped American air force units grounded in the airfields near Manilla and wiped them out almost completely.
The next day, Congress declared war against Japan. On the 11th of December, Germany and Italy, out of loyalty to the Tripartite Treaty with Japan, declared war on the United States.
American pacifism and isolationism had been strong enough to keep America in a state of peace more than two years after totally unprovoked invasion of Poland in September 1939 and after many other countries of Europe were similarly conquered. However, in the end the United States entered the Second World War as a leader and a full partner. Together with the other Allies, they eventually achieved an all encompassing victory.
Landing on the coast of France
The Draft in the United States
Franklin D. Roosevelt led the United States to war, not as a secondary power, as it had been during the First World War, but as a full-fledged member of the Allied Nations, which later became a union that boasted 46 member nations. The President, in conjunction with Prime Minister Churchill, intervened directly in the planning of military strategy, and in the supervision of war campaigns.
The two countries had already decided on an important principle of action: they would concentrate first on victory in Europe. This approach was accepted, because the military power of the Rome-Berlin Axis was significantly greater than that of Japan. This consideration became more pressing after Hitler attacked Russia, because if Germany were to win, Hitler would rule over a vast expanse of territory, from Spain to Vladivostok in Russia, and from the north of Europe until the horn of Africa. This was a key element of the Allied strategy throughout the war.
Such large scale war demanded the mobilization of tremendous resources and much human sacrifice. All males between the ages of 18-45 were liable to be drafted into military service. During the war, over 15 million men served in the U.S. armed forces alone, including those who had volunteered their services. These broke down into 10 million in the U.S. Army, 4 million in the Navy and Coast Guard and 600,000 in the Marine Corps. 216,000 women served as nurses or in the women's branch of the army, or in the naval reserves. Of a total of 970,000 American casualties, 245,000 died and 66,000 were missing in action.
On the European Front
From the 15th of Sivan 5700 (June 22, 1940) until the 27th of Sivan 5701 (June 22, 1941) — a full year which began with the surrender of France and ended with Russia's entry into the war — Great Britain was alone in the battle against Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. During that difficult period, it was guided by the firm resolve of its new leader, Winston Churchill (who later recorded his war memoirs in a number of volumes).
All of Britain's resources were mobilized for the war effort. German war planes bombarded central and northeastern England with great force. London was one of the main targets of the blitz, and approximately thirty thousand people were killed in these raids. Large areas were destroyed and many historical landmarks effaced. However, as Winston Churchill said: "This was Britain's finest hour."
This was before the U.S. entered the fray, and one of the things which helped Britain withstand the Germans was President Roosevelt's decision to transfer warships to the British, in exchange for the rental of military bases as part of the Lend Lease program.
On the twenty-seventh of Sivan, 5701 three million German soldiers and the German satellites — Italy, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia and Finland — crossed into Russia by surprise, in three major areas along a 3,200 kilometer front. This attack was known as Operation Barbarossa.
In the first few months of the battle, the Russians, and the Jews who lived in her territories, suffered many losses. The Germans advanced very rapidly. Special commandos known as storm troopers massacred hundreds of thousands of Jews in the conquered Russian lands of Poland and Lithuania. Three million captives fell into the hands of the barbaric S.S. soldiers. During that period, the Satanic Fuhrer, Hitler, ordered his forces to begin carrying out the Final Solution to the "Jewish problem."
The Germans launched a three-pronged attack. In the north they moved toward Leningrad, and by the fall of 1941, they reached the gates of Leningrad (St. Petersburg). In the center the Germans headed toward Moscow and in the south toward the Ukraine and Caucasia (Stalingrad). The battlefront extended from the Baltic Ocean to the Black Sea.
"Imperialist" Britain and Stalinist Russia now made a treaty and united together against the Germans and the other Axis countries. At the request of Great Britain, the United States agreed to extend its full help even to Russia, by means of the Lend Lease program.
Hitler was so confident of rapid success that he hadn't even bothered to equip his troops for cold weather. Russia, though, was fortunate in that its bitter winter arrived a bit early that year, and halted the advance of the Germans and their allies.
Stalin adopted a new policy of "scorched earth" which involved destroying everything of value in Russia as his forces retreated, before the German soldiers invaded, so as not leave them anything from which they might derive benefit. They also waged a guerrilla war, in which groups of soldiers and armed volunteers fought within the conquered territories, behind the front lines.
A Worldwide War
After the Japanese bombardment of Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the Americans declared war against the Japanese. The British joined them in declaring war against Japan and the Germans and Italians in turn declared war against the United States, according to the agreement of the Axis powers. The war encompassed the entire globe.
The Principles of the Atlantic Charter
About half a year before the outbreak of the American-Japanese war, on the 14th of August, 1941 (5 Av), Churchill and Roosevelt met on a war vessel off of Newfoundland to agree on principles of world peace. The result was the Atlantic Charter, which was designed to provide a statement of the aims of the Allies in peace as well as war. The main principles of the Charter were an end to tyranny and territorial conquest, to disarm all aggressors and to cooperate socially and economically for the benefit of all nations.
In early 1942, 26 countries including the United States, Britain, the U.S.S.R. and China signed a United Nations Declaration. They endorsed the Atlantic Charter, pledged to use all their resources to defeat the Axis powers and agreed to make no separate peace with any of them.
The scheming, wicked Russian Satan, Stalin, surely did not uphold these principles, but he had been already attacked by Hitler and he endorsed them. In the thick of the war, on March 7, 1942, Churchill sent Roosevelt a written request in which he said: "Due to the increasing gravity of the war, it seems to me that we cannot, at this point, say that the principles of the Atlantic Charter deny Russia the boundaries which were hers at the time of the German invasion."
That is to say, Russian was to be granted the fruits of her original aggression based on the original pact she signed with Hitler.
It was on this basis that Russia participated in the signing of Charter, and is probably why the Russians approached the destruction of enemy elements in the Baltic nations with such vigor, when they conquered those areas at the beginning of the war.
However, President Roosevelt and the State Department did not budge from their original position that the Russian conquests be voided. On the 26th of May 1942, a general treaty, valid for twenty years, and which contained no territorial clauses, was signed. After this, the Russian foreign minister Molotov set out for Washington, for a military conference in which the question of waging war against the Axis powers on a second front, and thus becoming an historic partner to Britain and the United States, was discussed.
The Anglo-American-Russian treaty insisted on the rights of Polish citizens, who had been exiled to Russia and placed in labor camps and communal farms (kholkhozes) in Siberia. The Russians were forced to release them in order to prove that they indeed abided by the principles of the Atlantic Charter. After the war, thousands of exiled Polish citizens returned to Poland, and from there continued on to liberated countries.
Stalin, the scheming dictator, who had so recently signed a secret agreement with Hitler over the joint conquest of eastern Poland, and who afterwards had annexed Lithuania, Latvia and other countries, did not dream of curtailing his evil plans or curbing his lust for conquest and tyranny.
The Beginning of the Russian Victory
In the summer of 1942, the Germans continued deep into Russia, and Moscow was virtually surrounded from all sides. The Stalinist government left the capital (leaving behind only Stalin himself, who was well-guarded by machine guns which were perched on the roof tops which surrounded his office). Industrial plants were transferred to safe zones deep inside Russia.
In south Russia, German troops advanced toward the cities of Caucasia. On September 1942, the German forces and their satellites reached the industrial center surrounding Stalingrad and besieged her.
It was then that a turning point took place in the war of the Germans against the Russians. The battle which raged around and within the city continued for four months, and the German generals advised retreat. However, Hitler stubbornly insisted on fighting, and in the end, approximately 100,000 starving soldiers, along with their commanding officers, surrendered to the Russians. 300,000 German soldiers were killed in the battle for Stalingrad. After the victory at Stalingrad, the Russians continued and pursued the Germans amidst bitter battles which caused the Nazis great losses.
El-Alamein: A Turning Point
In May 1942, the German General Rommel, started a drive with his Afrika Korps that took them into Egypt and the battle which took place in the desert outside El-Alamein, near Alexandria. Their purpose was to destroy the British and to continue on toward Egypt and Eretz Yisroel. Though under heavy pressure, British forces held firm and counterattacked. All summer there was a seesaw battle in the deserts of Egypt and Libya.
Many prayers were said in Eretz Yisroel, resulting in an open miracle, which constituted a turning point in the course of the war. In the autumn of 1942, British commanding officers managed to hold off the German attack in El-Alamein. British Field Marshall Montgomery then regrouped for an attack and by October, the British pushed Rommel out of Egypt.
In November 1942, American forces landed in Morocco and Algeria, under the command of General Eisenhower, opening another front in North Africa. They began to put pressure on Rommel's forces from the west. In the spring of 1943, all of North Africa was liberated from the Germans and hundreds of thousands of Axis soldiers were taken captive.
In the summer of 1943, the Allies invaded Italy. They advanced with surprising speed and the Italians surrendered quickly and joined the Allies who had liberated them from the crushing yoke of Fascist Moussolini. The Germans still held the northern part of Italy, which continued to be dominated by Moussolini [nearly until the end of the war]. From then on, the Allies began to win, and to penetrate the enemy territories.
On June 6, 1944 the Allies invaded Normandy, France. More than 150,000 Allied soldiers reached the shores on the first day, and three million within three weeks. In August 1944 there was a second landing on the French Mediterranean coast near Cannes. Though the Nazis resisted stubbornly, they could not resist the tremendous forces that were brought to bear against them.
As the war ended and the Allied forces penetrated deeper into Germany, Austria and Poland, they came across the concentration camps of Buchenwald, Dachau, Belzec, Auschwitz, Linz and Lublin. Their eyewitness reports of the atrocities they encountered, shook the entire Western world.
These camps were originally built in 1937 for the Jews and for the anti-Nazi Germans and Austrians. When the war broke out, the Nazis interred war prisoners from many other nations, as well as Jews who had been arrested in Italy, France, Holland and Hungary. In these camps, "scientific murders" were perpetrated against hundreds of thousands of prisoners. Many others died of epidemics, starvation and torture.
Over six million Jews were massacred by the Nazis. The primary factor which convinced the world of the extent of the terrible horrors which had taken place, and of the deep evil imbedded in the Nazi school of thought, was the gruesome reporting of the Allies. These reports had a far greater impact on the world than all of the showcase war trials conducted after the war.
In 1945, while the German opposition was collapsing and the victory of the Allies seemed imminent, the Western world mourned the death of President Roosevelt, who returned from the Yalta Conference very ill. In February, he set out for his winter home in Warm Springs, Georgia, collapsed and died. Vice president Harry Truman was sworn in as President of the United States.
The War In the Pacific
After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japan attacked from two directions: from the northeast in the Pacific Ocean, and from the southwest in the Indian Ocean and on its shores. The power and the success of the Japanese forces amazed the world. In joint land and naval operations, the Japanese conquered Hong Kong in a short time, and seized Malaysia from the British. They attacked the British armed forces in Singapore's outposts and advanced toward Thailand. In that way, they reached the Indian border.
East-Asian fleets of Britain and Holland were defeated in naval battles at the Gulf of Siam and in the Java Sea. The Japanese army landed in the Philippines and overran it with ease. The American army, which had retreated to the peninsula of Bataan and on the Coreggidor outpost, was nonetheless forced to surrender in May 1942, and the Japanese continued to advance toward the northeastern shores of New Guinea and its southern shores which led toward Australia. The Japanese continued to wage war against China and conquered her.
The Japanese victories had been achieved mainly as a result of the planning, expertise and fighting prowess of her soldiers. In the summer of 1942, at the height of Japan's victories, her rule extended across all of southeast Asia and the islands between Japan and Australia.
These victories were accompanied by atrocities perpetrated against the captives. The Japanese have recently admitted that they committed acts of horror at that time. The Japanese stated that the purpose of their conquests was to free all of the nations from the dominion of the Western colonialistic powers. However, in reality, they themselves clamped down on all of the lands they conquered. Japan and Russia were neutral toward each other until just before Japan's collapse, which occurred as a result of the two atomic bombs which were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Only after that, did the Soviet Union join the war against Japan in Manchuria. By this time, Japan was already vanquished.
During the latter part of 1942, when the full fighting ability of the United States was brought to bear, a turning point, which proved to be for the advantage of the Americans and the remainder of the Allies, occurred. The Japanese began to suffer many losses, one after the other, which included tremendous losses of lives. Rapidly their supplies and means of communication began to dwindle and the Japanese units on the islands found themselves cut off from their bases. The Americans advanced from island to island, despite the opposition of the Japanese soldiers who fought desperately until the end.
In the beginning of 1944, the Americans conquered Saipan in the Mariana Islands and transformed it into an air base from which they bombed the Japanese cities and their industries, one after the other. The Japanese engaged the American ships between the Philippines and the Mariana Islands in the Battle of the Philippine Sea, the biggest carrier battle of the war. The American forces destroyed more than 350 Japanese ships including three aircraft carriers. Later, with typical American whimsy, the engagement was called "the Great Mariana Turkey Shoot."
Afterwards, the Japanese Navy was wiped out in a battle at the Gulf of Leyte. In bloody fighting, the Americans took Iwo Jima and Okinawa, leaving the Japanese mainland open to air attacks. The Japanese attempts to conquer India proved fruitless. The counterattacks of the British thrust the Japanese out of Burma.
Nevertheless, the Japanese army prepared to continue fighting in face of the demand that they surrender unconditionally to the Allies. Half of Tokyo was in ruins and scores of Japanese cities were already leveled. Preparations were under way for an Allied invasion of Japan. On July 26 the Allies issued an ultimatum demanding unconditional surrender. The Japanese decided to continue fighting.
Their resolve was shattered only by the two atomic bombs which hit them — the first of which was dropped over the center of the Japanese city of Hiroshima, on the sixth of August, 1945, the 27th of Av, 5705, at 9:15 in the morning.
Hiroshima, a city of 300,000 was totally wiped out. Six square kilometers of land were razed. 78,000 people — men women and children — were killed. 10,000 were never found, and about 70,000 were injured.
On August 8 the Russians finally declared war on Japan. In the afternoon of the ninth of August, another bomb was dropped over Nagasaki, a city of 250,000, and about 40,000 people were killed.
On August 10 the Japanese sued for peace on the sole condition that the emperor's position as sovereign of Japan be preserved. The next day the Allies rejected this condition and insisted on total surrender. On August 14 the Japanese accepted the Allied terms. The next day the shooting stopped and on September 2, a formal document of surrender was signed by the Japanese on the U.S. battleship Missouri, anchored in Tokyo Bay.
The Terrible Toll
There are no accurate figures for the overall loss of human life in the war, but it is clear that over 45 million people lost their lives.
Military deaths were around 20 million. Of the dead in the fighting Germany suffered about 3.5 million dead, Japan about 1.5 million and Italy about 200,000. The U.S.S.R. lost 7.5 million soldiers, China 2.2 million soldiers, Britain and the U.S. about 300,000 and France over 200,000.
Total civilian deaths were at least 25 million. More than 10 million were killed in the U.S.S.R., more than 6 million died in China. About 400,000 died in France, 65,000 in Britain and even the U.S. lost about 6,000 civilians. About 500,000 German civilians were killed in the fighting, 600,000 Japanese and 145,000 Italians. The figure also includes the 6 million Jews who perished. The numbers are staggering.
Europe and Japan lay in ruins. No exact tally of the destruction is available.
The question of whether the United States was justified in resorting to the use of atomic force in order to vanquish the Japanese, and whether it was really necessary to snuff out so many lives for this purpose is still asked. This issue will be discussed in the third part of this essay.
Hashem yeracheim!
End of Part II
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