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Fire for Effect
The Price of Peace By Robert M. Citino
W
E’VE ALL heard that campus address declaring that graduation does not mark a conclusion, but a beginning. V-E Day was like that. We usually think of victory in World War II as an end: the final defeat of Adolf Hitler and minions, the crushing of Nazi ambitions for world domination, Europe unchained. Historians like to paint 1945 in ebullient shades, using a glossy palette to portray liberated capitals, heroic military parades, and delirious crowds shouting themselves hoarse. Freedom! What’s not to like? Amid the hoopla, however, we should try to revisit that era not on our terms but its own. The Europe of V-E Day was in extremis. Tens of millions had died there; millions more had missing limbs, shattered minds, and other wounds that would never heal. Fighting had obliterated entire cities, most by air but some in landward sieges a time traveler from the Thirty Years War would have recognized instantly. Europe in 1945 was a continent as trash heap. The Allies had smashed the Wehrmacht—but Germany’s armed forces were not all that got smashed. Consider France. To isolate Normandy and prevent German reinforcements from rushing to the province, the western Allies prefaced their invasion in June 1944 by raining bombs on France and its inhabitants. The the preliminary air assault killed 20,000 French civilians—the very people the Allies were coming to liberate. Death and destruction were just one subset of the European crisis. People had hardly anything to eat. The shape of the fighting kept the Allies from unshack-
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ling the Dutch until well into 1945. Nazi rapacity resulted in the “hunger winter” of 1944–1945 that saw some Netherlanders try to survive on 400 calories a day; 20,000 starved to death. In 1945 no one in Europe was dining especially well. Allied soldiers were liberators, certainly. But they were also strapping young men—4.5 million by war’s end. Unfettered by the trappings of civil society and operating under what we delicately call today the “50-mile rule,” many were doing what soldiers do. The result was a venereal disease epidemic. Even Supreme Allied Commander General Dwight D. Eisenhower could do little to stop the infectious carnival. By June 1945, about 15 percent of U.S. Army personnel in Europe—half a million men—had contracted some form of VD. Germany’s situation was uniquely complex. Bombing had wrought enormous ruin—to the point that Allied fliers complained of running short on targets. The former Reich bristled with calamities only its conquerors could address. What
would become of millions of freed concentration camp prisoners, many near starvation, never mind riddled with typhus, typhoid fever, or cholera? Or millions of slave laborers suddenly wandering hundreds of miles from wherever the Germans had dragooned them? Or refugees, including ethnic Germans fleeing territory the Reich had subjugated and abandoned? The world came to employ a new set of initials: DP, for “displaced person.” The seeming solution—go home—was often a pipe dream. The war might have consumed those homes or their occupants, or transformed homeland politics to preclude safe return. Germany alone counted at least at eight million DPs, mostly warehoused in camps— sometimes the very enclosures in which the Nazis had penned them. V-E Day was the start of the tough job of rebuilding Europe, restoring public health and polity, feeding the starving, and remaking Germany into a law-abiding nation. These tasks required time, creativity, and mountains of money, as well as what we now call non-governmental organizations. For instance, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, established in 1943, waged a heroic fight against misery on its particular battlefields: soup kitchens, first aid stations, and delousing facilities. A leading strategist once pointed out that the real purpose of war was not merely to win battles, but a “better peace.” Europe’s reconstruction was the true victory of World War II, America’s greatest achievement of the 20th century, and a process that began on “commencement day”—May 8, 1945. 2 ILLUSTRATION BY HARRY CAMPBELL
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Time Travel
House of Games By Gavin Mortimer
Wartime decription center Bletchley Park is the main setting for The Imitation Game.
B
LETCHLEY PARK is one of the world’s great survivors. The mansion, 50 miles northwest of London and dating to the late 1870s, was almost lost to the British nation twice. In 1938 a local builder was eyeing the parcel as a development site when the government stepped in, buying the property from the Leon family to house a Code and Cypher School. And in 1992 bulldozers loomed again until local historians barred their path. Forming the Bletchley Park Trust, advocates saved the complex, where a secret wartime operation broke the German Enigma code, and recast the Park as a museum. Now appreciation for that act of preservation is reaching beyond Britain; of the site’s 150,000 yearly visitors, more and more hail from overseas. Those ranks will only swell thanks to The Imi-
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tation Game, the Oscar-winning movie about code-breaking genius Alan Turing. During the 1920s and 1930s, the Park had been a country idyll, popular with shooting parties, until that 1938 purchase began the estate’s transformation into a hub of Allied counterintelligence work during the Second World War. I visited on a raw December day with my father. Born in 1938, Dad grew up five miles away; he found it moving to return to a place he had not seen since leaving for Oxford University in 1956. As we neared Bletchley station he noticed through the railway car window a parking building on the spot where, during the bitter winter of 1947, he told me excitedly, had sprawled the coal yard to which his mother would send him to fetch household fuel. The government chose Bletchley Park as a code breakers’ perch primarily for
its location. With war against Germany imminent, Whitehall wanted its code wizards away from London and Luftwaffe bombs. The manse sits at a safe distance from the capital city, but within 200 yards of a railroad station. Nearby are the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, in the late 1930s fertile environments for recruiting the brilliant minds required for high-level intelligence analysis. Entering the estate, one at first sees only motley brick-and-timber huts, splayed at odd angles like drab dominos. The bleak, utterly authentic scene makes it easy to picture streams of extremely bright young things, male and female, arriving hurriedly by foot and on bicycles three-quarters of a century ago. The tour begins in the Visitor Center— wartime Block C, where clerks, mostly women, indexed the details of decoded LES. LADBURY/ALAMY
Clockwise from above: Block B and a memorial marker, a captured Enigma machine, mathematician Alan Turing in 1951, and wartime military personnel busy with the deciphering machine he developed.
Bletchley Park Cambridge
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messages in a giant cross-referencing system. The assignment was painstaking, a point made clear in footage of reenactments that runs continuously. “To be successful,” an instructor tells newcomers, “you must be an enthusiast because there will be times when the work seems monotonous.” Monotonous, yes—but vital. Eventually, Bletchley Park and environs employed 10,000 people. Some intercepted, some deciphered, some translated, some distributed, but all the intelligence they winkled out of myriad enemy radio signals mattered critically to the Allied cause. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill called the Bletchley Park team “the geese that laid the golden egg.” In July 1945, General Dwight D. Eisenhower sent a message to British Major General Stewart Menzies, who headed the operation. FROM TOP LEFT, GAVIN MORTIMER; STEVE VIDLER/ALAMY; NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY; MAP BY HAISAM HUSSEIN; LONDON SCIENCE MUSEUM/SCIENCE & SOCIETY PICTURE/GETTY
Describing the intelligence gleaned there as “priceless,” the Supreme Commander said the Bletchley Park workforce had “saved thousands of British and American lives and, in no small way, contributed to the speed with which the enemy was routed.” The museum displays a copy of Eisenhower’s communiqué. Visitors depart the center bearing an easy-to-use audio device that directs them around the rest of the grounds— another mark of the museum’s thoughtfulness. I, for one, am not blessed with undue mathematical competency, and would be lying if I suggested that prior to my visit I wasn’t a bit apprehensive. Ultra, Enigma, Bombe, Lorenz…Would I be able to keep up or would the topic’s complexity befuddle me? Fear not. All is explained in lay terms, and old-schoolers can sign up for a com-
prehensive tour conducted by one of the site’s knowledgeable guides. We went with the talking machine, but did cross a guide’s path in Block B. Standing before a replica of Alan Turing’s Bombe, he explained to his companions how the computing mechanism worked. “Turing,” the docent concluded, “is one of the great unsung heroes of British history and were it not for him we might be here speaking German.” There is much to learn about Turing in Block B. The centerpiece is the Bombe, a functioning model of which testifies to its inventor’s genius. The mechanism is seven feet tall and six and a half feet wide. The original had 108 drums, each vertical set of three representing a German Enigma encoding and decoding machine. Early Enigmas had three rotors (later the Reich would add a fourth). A sender MAY/JUNE 2015
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Time Travel
scrambling a message could set each ring at any of 26 positions; in effect an Enigma machine had 17,576 (26) settings. The Bombe’s drums could drive through every potential setting in about 12 minutes by electrically performing a chain of logical deductions based on a portion of plain text. Turing’s device rejected combinations that produced contradictions— as the majority did—supplying the code breakers with a small number of possible Enigma settings. If that sounds complicated, don’t worry—interactive touch screens and straightforward diagrams help “decode” Turing’s achievements in smashing the enemy code. More personal exhibits illuminate the man behind the genius: Turing’s Swiss wristwatch and his teddy bear, Porgy. Perhaps that tatty stuffed plaything more than any other artifact at Bletchley Park affords a glimpse of Turing’s human vulnerability. And the secrets keep coming; recently during a renovation workers uncovered notes of Turing’s stuffed between the walls of Hut 6 as insulation, along with the only known examples of Banbury sheets—forms that the mathematician devised to speed decoding. The visit ends in the mansion, an elegant Victorian building that overlooks the Nissen huts and a lake aggregated more than 200 years ago from the remains of
Hut 8, where Turing worked his mathematical magic.
medieval fishponds. Entering “The Main House,” as wartime workers called it, is a pleasing step back to the Old England of yesterday and recreated BBC memory. The red brick mansion fuses Tudor and Dutch Baroque architecture, with an eye-catching array of bay windows, tall chimneys, and crenelated parapets. One enters through a Gothic-style inner porch to encounter an interior of mahogany paneling, decorative plaster ceilings, elegant carpets, and whiffs of yesteryear. To the right of the porch is the lounge hall, on whose elaborate stone and marble chimneypiece stands a bust of Winston Churchill. A timber staircase leads to the first floor; the highest story is the attic, a century ago quarters for servants. Until November 2015 much of the
WHEN YOU GO Only an hour by train from London Euston—one of the British capital’s central stations—Bletchley Park is a stroll from the local train station. The Park is on Sherwood Drive, Bletchley, Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, England; 44-1908640404, bletchleypark.org.uk WHERE TO STAY AND EAT Hut 4, where clerks decoded German naval messages during the war, houses the museum’s restaurant. Expect traditional British food— such as fish and chips, stew, sausages, a wide selection of sandwiches, and a choice
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of soft drinks and beer—at reasonable prices. Four miles away, Milton Keynes, the nearest big town, has plenty of budget and mid-range hotels, and someone staying in London easily can manage a day trip. WHAT ELSE TO SEE The National Radio Centre and the National Museum of Computing are in close proximity to Bletchley Park (admission to the former is included in the price of visiting Bletchley Park) and are well worth a visit. The Computing Museum houses a rebuild of Colossus, the world’s first programmable electronic digital computer.
mansion’s interior will house an exhibition featuring The Imitation Game. In the billiard room are the costumes worn by actors Benedict Cumberbatch (Turing) and Keira Knightley (the mathematician’s colleague, Joan Clarke). The ballroom holds the bar depicted in the film, and my father yelped with delight as he recognized brands of beer and soft drinks he had last seen 60 years ago. The exhibition also reveals that among the film’s cast of extras was a great nephew of Turing’s. How delighted he must be at his great uncle’s rehabilitation in recent years: Britain’s official apology in 2009 for hounding him to his death and, four years later, a posthumous royal pardon. Pardon for what? For the now-banished crime of homosexuality. In 1952 Turing’s country prosecuted him for being himself, driving him to suicide two years later, a stain on the British establishment well documented in The Imitation Game. It’s taken 70 years and $12 million, but Bletchley Park offers Turing and company a fitting memorial. As Her Majesty said in 2011, unveiling a sculpture at the estate honoring the code breakers: “This was the place of geniuses such as Alan Turing. But these wonderfully clever mathematicians, language graduates, and engineers were complemented by people with different sets of skills, harnessing that brilliance through methodical, unglamorous, hard slog…. You were history-shapers and your example serves as an inspiration to the intelligence community today.” 2 GAVIN MORTIMER
REMEMBERING PEARL HARBOR: 74th ANNIVERSARY COMMEMORATIVE TOUR Journey to Hawaii with The National WWII Museum
DECEMBER 3 – 9, 2015 Commemorate the Pearl Harbor anniversary amid the idyllic beaches and volcanoes of Oahu, where American forces faced an unexpected attack on December 7, 1941. Tour preservation sites and monuments that memorialize “a date which will live in infamy.” Call 877-813-3329 x 257 or visit ww2museumtours.org to learn more.
[70TH] V-E DAY
ANNIVERSARY
With Europe’s liberation in sight, American armies fought brilliantly in the Ruhr Pocket
Death in the West BY ROBERT M. CITINO
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On March 27, 1945, a 6th Armored Division M10 tank destroyer highballs down a Frankfurt street past a dead German antitank team.
H
ISTORY LITTLE NOTES the final great confrontation in the West European theater, and not without reason. When supercharged American armies were encircling and—in an ironic echo of the Blitzkrieg—crushing the last Wehrmacht force there, Germany was scant weeks from unconditional surrender. Amid the war’s final tumult, peals of relief at Adolf Hitler’s downfall, and horrifying revelations about the Final Solution, it’s easy to overlook the Battle of the Ruhr Pocket, the climax in a tale of two armies. The Wehrmacht had dominated the theater’s early years, but by 1945, German losses were soaring, replacements were not keeping up, and much of the Reich’s army consisted of Volkssturm (People’s Assault) units: old men and boys, sketchily trained and haphazardly equipped. German weapons—Tiger tanks and Messerschmitt Me 262 jet fighters—might have been quite advanced technologically, but they rarely made a difference to the men at the front. Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, German supreme commander in the west, once complained that leading German armies in those days was like “playing a Beethoven sonata on an old, rickety, out of tune piano.” As the Wehrmacht was descending, the U.S. Army was rising. The Americans stumbled in their North African and Italian debuts, but by 1945 had grown as seasoned and professional as any combatants in the field. Buttressed by weapons, fuel, ammunition, and food of lavish proportion and quality, the U.S. Army was mobile and lethal. Finding a seam in enemy defenses, an American unit could slash through and hurl more
Volkssturm boys in Lichtenberg and British and American paratroops at Wesel (right) sum up the contrast between forces.
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brute firepower than any force ever. The intensity of American artillery never ceased to shock the Germans, who had to obliterate more selectively. And overhead, American commanders had a literal thunderbolt: the Republic P-47, which, along with the Consolidated P-51 Mustang and other fighter-bombers, made it nearly impossible for German forces to move by day. In 1945, all these advantages coalesced in an engagement of a rare sort. World War II was messy and unpredictable, and plans rarely worked out as conceived. In the Ruhr Pocket, however, the U.S. Army lived and fought the dream: establishing full-spectrum dominance to achieve, at minimal cost, the greatest American victory of the European war.
E
ARLY 1945 SAW THE ALLIES still trying to shake off the shock of the great German offensive in the Ardennes Forest. Even after they righted themselves and regained momentum, the going was slow, with a month of gritty fighting needed to clear the densely populated Rhineland and close on the great river itself. Allied armies were still 300 miles from Berlin, and final victory seemed a long way off for Supreme Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower’s four-and-a-half-million men: in the north, 21st Army Group, consisting of British, Canadian, and American forces under Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery; the all-American 12th Army Group in the center under General Omar Bradley; and in the south the 6th Army Group, American and French forces under General Jacob L. Devers.
The Rhine presented a dauntingly serious obstacle—until, in one of the war’s most dramatic moments, that watery barrier evaporated. On March 7, astonished Americans, seeing that the Ludendorff Bridge at Remagen still stood, rushed the span just as German explosives failed to knock it down. Suddenly, the Allies were over the Rhine. Within the hour, Lieutenant General Courtney Hodges was pushing every man and vehicle of his First Army that he could across the railroad bridge to form a powerful lodgment on the east bank. Despite that lucky break, a Rhine crossing was only the means to an end. The task now was to smash the Wehrmacht and finish the war—easier said than accomplished. In the Americans’ path stood German Army Group B, with the 5th Panzer Army on the right and on the left the Fifteenth Army, a total of 400,000 men. The 5th Panzer was defending the Ruhr, one of the last remaining German industrial centers, home to the massive Krupp Steel Works at Essen. The Fifteenth Army opposed the U.S. bridgehead east of Remagen. Army Group B’s commander, Field Marshal Walter Model, was one of the most determined fighters left in Hitler’s stable.
A bitter-ender and highly skilled defensive specialist, Model was, in his men’s words, the “Führer’s fireman,” thrown in where the fighting was hottest and the straits most dire. A mean Prussian with an acid tongue, Model was a gifted tactician. Son of a non-military middle-class family, he fought as a lieutenant in World War I, was badly wounded twice, and was awarded the Iron Cross First Class. On World War II’s Eastern Front he earned a reputation as a defensive genius, commanding the Ninth Army during the furious Soviet winter offensive of 1941–1942, holding the city of Rzhev while German armies around his were reeling back or dissolving, and reprising that feat during the massive 1943 Soviet thrust at Orel. Model spurned complexity. He preferred to maintain a cohesive front, no matter how weak in spots, and backstop it with multiple fortified lines, husbanding his reserves until the Soviets committed to an attack, whereupon he plugged the holes with a brisk counteroffensive. This doctrine did not bring victory, but did ward off catastrophe often enough to make Model Hitler’s favorite commander. Above all, Model was ruthless: toward his officers and men,
Finding a seam in enemy defenses, an American unit could slash through and hurl more brute firepower than any force ever.
Surrendering Germans run a cordon of British tanks and American troops in April 1945.
ALL IMAGES NATIONAL ARCHIVES UNLESS OTHERWISE NOTED
MAY/JUNE 2015
37
toward the enemy, toward Soviet civilians unlucky enough to live in his zones of operation. During the Ninth Army’s 1943 retreat at Orel, he infamously evacuated the district’s entire population, with great loss of life. In 1944, hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens died in concentration camps behind his lines in Latvia. These deeds landed him on a Soviet list of war criminals. He even made Hitler uncomfortable. “I trust that man to make it happen,” the Führer declared, “but I wouldn’t want to serve under him.” To get home, the Americans had to go through Model and Army Group B, whose armies were still strong enough to bloody an attacker foolish enough to launch a frontal assault. As the Soviets had learned, even weakened German forces
deploy reserves, as he had done on the Eastern Front. But Allied intelligence had drawn a detailed and accurate portrait of the German defense. In the south, Hodges would target German LXVII Corps, holding the left—southern— flank of the Fifteenth Army. Hard fighting in the Rhineland had left the corps understrength, undersupplied, and shy about reconnaissance patrolling, a sure sign of ebbing German élan. In the north, however, the U.S. Ninth Army would be moving more slowly, and Simpson’s forces were not yet over the Rhine. Montgomery, a by-the-numbers fellow, liked to square things away and take his time doing so. Moreover, the marshy, wooded terrain east of Wesel harbored a reserve Panzer division that Allied reconnaissance flights had just identified as the
The plan was fraught. Success required immobilization of German forces, lest Model spot the threat and deploy reserves. usually had cohesion, experienced troops, and morale enough to gut a clumsy assailant. If German boys were willing to die hard in the Caucasus and in the Crimea, there was no reason to think they would fold on home soil. Even before D-Day, the Allies had in mind to seize the Ruhr and paralyze German heavy industry. But a fight through the Ruhr, that sprawl of cities, factories, and millions of civilians, was the stuff of bloodbaths, promising urban warfare on an unimaginable scale. For that very reason, Eisenhower had always intended not to blast straight at German forces in the industrial area but to encircle them. Often maligned as a dull “broad front” strategist who preferred to keep his armies advancing in lockstep, Ike nonetheless knew a battlefield opening as well as any general in the war. And that lucky turn of the card at Remagen revealed an enormous one. Eisenhower called for a classic two-army pincer maneuver. Hodges’s First Army would break out at Remagen and drive east. Meanwhile, 90 miles north, the U.S. Ninth Army under Lieutenant General William H. Simpson would traverse the Rhine at Wesel as part of Montgomery’s multi-army crossing, Operation Plunder. Once over the river, the Ninth, too, would motor east. Essentially, one American army would be on the Ruhr’s northern flank, and another on its southern. Each would wheel toward the other and link up, enveloping Army Group B. The plan was fraught. As they advanced, the American armies would not be able to maintain contact. Success required the immobilization of German forces by denying them fuel and attacking from the air, along with surprise and speed— but mainly speed. Otherwise Model might spot the threat and 38
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116th. Characteristically, Montgomery decided to augment his crossing with an airborne drop, Operation Varsity, to disrupt defenders and keep German reserves from the front. Montgomery launched Operation Plunder-Varsity on March 23 with a four-hour, 4,000-gun barrage preceding drops by British 6th and U.S. 17th Airborne Divisions. The parachute troops experienced heavy losses, but the main body got over the Rhine against weak resistance, installing itself on the far bank. (See “Storm over the Rhine,” January/ February 2015.) Simpson’s U.S. Ninth Army now prepared to break out to the east, with 8th Armored and 2nd Armored Divisions probing for German weaknesses. As anticipated, the pace was plodding. The Ninth Army took a full week to chew through the enemy and the terrain, aided every step of the way by heavy artillery fire and nonstop air sorties. Even so, not until March 29 could Simpson break clear. While the Ninth Army was shouldering ahead, the First Army at Remagen put on the one of the great American shows of the war. North to south, Hodges arrayed three corps abreast: VII Corps under Major General J. Lawton “Lightning Joe” Collins, III Corps under Major General James Van Fleet, and V Corps, led by Lieutenant General Clarence R. Huebner. Crowding 35 miles of the Rhine’s east bank, the corps bulged with manpower and equipment and the usual extravagant firepower. The attack that began the Battle of the Ruhr Pocket opened before dawn on March 25 and simply vaporized the German defenders. Even the weather cooperated, offering a crystalline day; XIX Tactical Air Command owned the skies, swooping at will onto hapless Germans. By noon, all three American corps
Enveloping the Ruhr
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had departed the bridgehead, covering 12 miles that day and 20 the next. In the frenetic advance, infantrymen, rather than wait for trucks, often hitched rides on passing Shermans. Already, American forces were taking the surrender of myriad Germans—17,000 by III Corps on March 26 alone. A few enemy units attempted counterattacks, but American momentum smothered those efforts before they got started, and most GIs probably never even noticed them. Onward came the Americans, reaching Giessen and Marburg on March 28. Having advanced 80 miles, the First Army wheeled north. It was time to cut across Army Group B’s rear and link up with the Ninth Army to envelop the entire German force in the Ruhr—giving the enemy a taste of his trademark Kesselschlacht, or “battle of encirclement.” Third Armored Division commander Major General Maurice Rose was an aggressive and hard-driving leader, considered by many the best tanker in the U.S. Army. Rose believed in attacking “even with insufficient strength and against superior numbers,” capitalizing on armor’s speed and power. Assembling a task force—a reinforced tank battalion, including three of the army’s newest M26 Pershing tanks, under Lieutenant Colonel Walter B. Richardson—Rose now issued a simple order: “Just go like hell.” The troops in the task force complied, loping forward with alacrity. Next morning, groggy tank crews finally met actual German resistance, an ad hoc battalion of SS cadets supported by armor. A tough, two-day scrap ensued. On March 30 General Rose came up to supervise. On the way to the front,
On March 7, 1945, 5th Infantry troops in vehicles, including repainted German halftracks, poise to drive for the Rhine.
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his column—two jeeps, a motorcycle, and an armored car— encountered a company of Tiger tanks of the 507th Battalion. In that firefight, Rose was killed. But American forces kept coming, sidestepping SS defenses at Paderborn and heading west toward Lippstadt. As had become a given, the Germans were unable to keep up with their opponents. Model and his staff spent most of their time trying to elude the rampaging foe. Rocked by the American rush, Model relocated Army Group B headquarters north from Rimbach to Rohde, then moved again, this time further north to Lüdenscheid, finally evacuating to Wuppertal: four headquarters in three weeks. This constant repositioning sapped valuable hours and energy, and forced Model into reactive mode. Chased from town to town to town, the Führer’s fireman could never pause long enough to douse the flames. At Lippstadt, American lead elements—the Ninth Army coming over from Wesel, the First coming up from Remagen—made contact. Just after the noon hour on April 1, Easter Sunday, the pincers snapped shut, and the U.S. Army achieved its greatest encirclement of the war. The Americans had trapped Model’s Army Group B—5th Panzer and Fifteenth Armies, seven corps, and 19 divisions, each accompanied by its support troops and headquarters— in an egg-shaped portion of the heavily developed Ruhr. The pocket, which roughly measured 30 miles by 75 miles, was studded with cities, towns, and factories. Within its precincts were 26 German generals and even an admiral, Werner Scheer, who commanded Defense District I in Essen.
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HE AMERICANS’ blistering tempo so shredded German command and communications that Model and cohort could barely respond. Since 1945, historians have composed litanies of explanations: half-strength divisions, scarce fuel, Allied air superiority, morale collapse, and of course, Hitler’s allergy to tactical retreat. Caught in a perfect equation of military disaster, Model did his best, trying to shift his meager reserves into the path of the American thrust and ordering counterattacks that died just as they were getting started. By April 2 Model had lost contact with the commander of his Fifteenth Army, General Gustav-Adolf von Zangen. Presumed captured or killed, Zangen was neither—however, he and Model could not make radio contact. Model appointed another commander and ordered him to launch a counterattack with units from the Fifteenth Army, just as Zangen was trying to form his stragglers into a new defensive position to the east. No wonder confusion gripped so many German soldiers. To the Ruhr’s populace, the Americans seemed to arrive out of the blue. Near Paderborn, villagers at church in Gesseln
on Tuesday, April 3, heard sprocket wheels squeaking, treads clanking, and engines roaring. As a woman was whispering to the celebrant, “Herr Vicar, they are here,” the muzzle of a Sherman’s 76mm gun poked through the church door, trained on the altar. GIs defused the moment by entering the nave, kneeling, and joining parishioners attending Mass. The battle wrought enormous physical destruction. Since Easter, artillery units attached to U.S. XVI Corps northwest of the pocket had fired no fewer than 259,000 rounds. At that rate American gunners may well have fired one million shells during the battle. Factories closed. Production ceased. So did distribution of food in the region’s densely populated municipalities. Electricity, water, and sewer systems broke down—a recipe for epidemic. Russians and Poles unshackled from the Nazi slave empire pillaged at will. The merest gesture of resistance—a sniper’s shot, a random mortar round, a skirmish— enraged the “Amis,” who almost always replied with a storm of shelling that flattened the vicinity. German civilians could try to surrender early at the risk of retribution by Nazi diehards, or wait too long to do so, and chance experience with
The merest gesture of resistance enraged the “Amis,” almost always triggering a storm of shells that flattened the vicinity.
Beneath white flags, GIs catch a ride through Heppenheim. More than 300,000 Germans—twice the Allies’ estimate—were captured in the Ruhr (right).
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O
NE GERMAN did not surrender. the American way of war. All too often, a local Nazi bigwig incited townsmen to fight to the death, then, just before the Walter Model, crushed by the totality of his defeat, as well as by the news that the SoviAmericans attacked, hit the road. ets wanted to try him for war crimes, grew Model at first wanted to fight on. From Berlin, the High Command demanded that he stay put and defend “Fortress despondent. The shadows were closing in. His wife and daughter, one of his three children, lived in DresRuhr.” Hitler promised to send a newly formed army, the den, and while they had been lucky enough to survive the terTwelfth, as relief, hinting that “wonder weapons” would turn the tide. Model soon realized that neither the Twelfth Army rible Allied firebombing in February, an air raid on March 2 destroyed the family home. Late that month, nor miracle weapons would be materializing. During Easter Week, April 1 to 7, the grasping the situation, Model had his personal Americans solidified the ring enclosing papers burned. On April 15, more bad news: without a word to Model, LIII Army Corps Army Group B, placing four corps around the perimeter. Those forces immediately commander Lieutenant General Fritz Bayerlaunched converging drives, squeezing the lein had surrendered his entire force. On top of all that, the field marshal learned this while outmanned and unsupplied Germans into an ever-smaller space. By April 11, the pocket diving for cover during a heavy American air attack on his Wuppertal headquarters. The was half the size it had been on Easter; by final twin blows—Bayerlein’s stab in the back April 14, American attacks toward Hagen, and his own brush with death—seem to have a city in the center of the encirclement, induced an epiphany. Model now saw himself had split the pocket. Here and there, often abandoned from below by subordinates and encouraged by residents of towns they were betrayed from above by Hitler, whose promcrowding, German troops started surrenThe relentless Rose fought to the last, dying in action. ised relief army was a chimera. dering. On April 14, with the pocket torn in Nevertheless, Army Group B’s commander two and German units short on ammunition would not raise the white flag. As the Führer had, Model had and rations—the 116th Panzer Division had not one serviceoften derided the “cowardice” he thought General Friedrich able tank nor an artillery round to its name—mass surrenders Paulus had shown in letting himself be taken prisoner at Stalbegan. “What’s the point in this?” a Wehrmacht man asked. ingrad on January 31, 1943, one day after Hitler had elevated “I have a wife and children.” On loudspeakers, the Americans him to field marshal. “A field marshal does not become a priscalled for the Germans to call it quits, and thousands, then tens oner,” Model had muttered. “It simply isn’t done.” The same of thousands, did. The POW tally reached 317,000, twice what day that Bayerlein gave up, Major General Matthew Ridgway, U.S. Army intelligence had estimated. The human herd milled commander of the U.S. XVIII Airborne Corps on the southern in barely fenced fields—“Rhine meadow camps,” Germans face of the pocket, sent Model a letter demanding he surrender called them—stretching as far as the eye could see.
COUNTDOWN TO VICTORY As spring 1945 bloomed, the Allies torqued down on APRIL 25: The Red Army’s 58th Guards Division of the 5th Guards Army meets the U.S. 69th Infantry Division of the First Army, near Torgau, on the Elbe River.
APRIL 21: German Field Marshal Walter Model shoots himself.
APRIL 21, 1945
APRIL 23
APRIL 25 APRIL 23: Soviet forces enter Berlin.
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APRIL 28
APRIL 28: Italian partisans capture Benito Mussolini and mistress Clara Petacci, shoot them, and hang their corpses by the heels at a gas station.
TIMELINE: APRIL 21 (BUNDESARCHIV BILD 146-1986-102-36A, PHOTO, O.ANG), MAY 2 (BUNDESARCHIV BILD 146-1983-028-05, PHOTO, O.ANG)
with them. Many of Model’s soldiers did present stiff resistance, and some 100,000 Germans died in the Ruhr fighting, but those sacrifices went for naught. The Ruhr, font of German military hardware, was where Germany’s army died, where German dreams of world conquest dissipated, and where modern Germany began to become what that nation was destined to be all along: an important regional power, not a global juggernaut. Rather than live with such a reality, the German commander in the Ruhr—Model— shot himself, as his Führer would nine days later. Their life’s work of bringing the planet under the Reich’s heel had come to nothing in the course of two world wars. The U.S. Army, by contrast, came of age in the Ruhr. Like the Germans, the winning side could claim a dead general—not a suicide in a dark wood but a hero on the verge of triumph: Major General Maurice Rose of the 3rd Armored Division, who died boldly riding forward to be with his men in the thick IMING IS EVERYTHING, of the fight. American troops fought a battle Model, the model Prussian militarist, did himself in. and the Battle of the Ruhr of maneuver to perfection, deftly synchroPocket had the unfortunate nizing fire and movement and proving, once timing to occur near enough to Germany’s and for all, that when their nation is threatened, soldiers of a surrender to be consigned to its shadow. (See democracy will fight like lions. Moreover, they did these things “Countdown to Victory,” below.) To regard the confrontaat the end of a 4,000-mile logistical pipeline, and at a cost of tion in that way, however, is to read backward. The German only 10,000 casualties, remarkably light by late-war standards. surrender took place so quickly precisely as a result of the A year before the Ruhr, the U.S. Army had been mired in an all-encompassing nature of the American achievement, which attritive grind of a campaign in Italy; nine months before, its ripped the heart out of the German army in the West. lead assault waves had barely gotten ashore at Omaha Beach. In the Ruhr, the Wehrmacht proved unable to match the Since then, the forge of battle had tempered that force into a Americans in a contest of maneuver, or successfully slug it out new superpower’s terrible swift sword. 2 in language that blended conciliation and threat. In his communiqué Ridgway invoked “a soldier’s honor,” as well as the “German lives” and the “German cities” Model would save by surrendering immediately. The Prussian refused even to consider the American’s overture; he had other plans. On April 17, Model decided to dissolve Army Group B; his men could find their way home. The order was ex post facto: Army Group B had already dissolved. “What is left for a defeated general?” the field marshal asked his chief of staff, General Carl Wagener, that day. Wagener said nothing. “In ancient times,” Model continued, “they took poison.” On April 21, on the run and fresh from hearing Joseph Goebbels on the radio call on the German people to fight on without “weakness or wavering,” Model took leave of his aides outside Duisburg. He trudged into a beautiful copse of tall oaks and, with his Walther 6.35mm service pistol, shot himself.
T
a Germany nearly drained of military power and sinking into despair
MAY 2: German General Helmuth Weidling surrenders Berlin to Soviet General Vasily Chuikov.
APRIL 30: Adolf Hitler and his wife of one day, Eva Braun, kill themselves.
APRIL 30 MAY 1
MAY 2 MAY 1: The Soviet 1st Ukrainian Front destroys Germany’s Ninth Army in the Battle of Halbe.
TOP, HISTORYNET ARCHIVE
MAY 7: General Alfred Jodl signs an unconditional surrender at Reims.
MAY 4
MAY 8: Soviet ire at the Reims accord as premature leads to a Berlin signing attended by Marshal Georgy Zhukov (center). — Jon Guttman
MAY 7
MAY 8
MAY 4: Field Marshal Montgomery accepts the surrender of German forces in the Netherlands. MAY/JUNE 2015
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Ambitions and agendas collide in the rush to Germany’s unconditional surrender
The Crowded BY DAVID KILEY
An American delegation investigating Nazi war crimes arrives in Reims in April 1945 in time to see German officers captured in the Ruhr loaded aboard a C-47. The author’s father, reporter Charles Kiley, is second from left.
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Hour
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As pool reporter, Kiley (left) shadowed Eisenhower for the last weeks of the war.
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N LATE APRIL 1945, the world was on edge. And in a single 24-hour period, April 29–30, two momentous pieces of news broke. From a conference in San Francisco, the Associated Press posted a story that the Germans had surrendered unconditionally. And news sources worldwide reported that in Berlin Adolf Hitler had died by his own hand. Hitler was dead. But the war in Europe was not over. Still, the AP report had hustled President Harry S. Truman out of Blair House and across Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House to confirm the claim. The man who should have known whether the Germans had surrendered, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, was in his bedroom in Reims, France, about to turn in for the night. And the man at Reims whose job it was to confirm the AP claim, Stars and Stripes reporter Charles F. Kiley, 31, was in his billet near Eisenhower’s quarters and the red brick technical school that had become Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) headquarters. Kiley, a U.S. Army staff sergeant, was the pool reporter shadowing Eisenhower on behalf of the world’s press—with the European campaign speeding to a close, an assignment that could make a career. But with Kiley and the Supreme Commander in France, where it was 3 a.m., confirming the story was a strange task. Had the Germans surrendered in San Francisco? Dick Underwood, copilot of Eisenhower’s plane, grabbed the general’s jeep, collected Kiley, and motored to Ike’s quarters. The general did not know of the San Francisco report, although he had heard of an earlier dispatch stating that Hein-
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rich Himmler had offered to surrender to the U.S. and Britain, but not to Russia. An aide of Eisenhower put through a call to 10 Downing Street in London, and Kiley and Underwood stood by in silence as the general lit a cigarette, offered the two men smokes, and waited to speak with Winston Churchill. There was nothing to it. The AP story was false. Kiley described Eisenhower’s reaction in a letter to his wife Billee the next morning. “Frankly, darling, he was a little perplexed,” Kiley wrote, adding that Eisenhower remarked to the men that it “‘would be an ironic climax to this war if it was over and I didn’t know about it.’” Kiley felt the same. He had drawn the assignment to cover the big finish: what if a wire reporter 6,000 miles away scooped him?
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HARLES KILEY WAS MY FATHER. As a child, I had pored through the 10 volumes of Stars and Stripes my uncle had had bound, gently turning the yellowing pages and asking Dad all I could about stories with his byline. I listened to the tales he and his Stripes friends told, and later read the voluminous correspondence between him and my mother—all told, more than 800 letters. And in his last year of life I spent most of a month at his bedside, interrupting his depression over the broken leg that had landed him in a nursing home by saying, “Tell me about that time when you were in France with Eisenhower,” or “Tell me what it was like to put out that paper on Utah Beach.” Charles Kiley was no stranger to history or to celebrity. As a sportswriter for the Jersey Journal in Jersey City, New Jersey, he
The staff of Stars and Stripes’ Liège, Belgium, edition gathers in their bureau in January 1945.
Kiley maintained a lifelong friendship with fellow Stripes reporter Andy Rooney (right).
“It would be an ironic climax to this war,” Eisenhower told the men, “if it was over and I didn’t know about it.” had covered Babe Ruth up close and been in the Yankee locker room. He had reported on Joe Louis’s 1936 and 1938 fights against German Max Schmeling at Yankee Stadium. But when he was drafted into the army in November 1941 and set out for basic training at Camp Croft in Spartanburg, South Carolina, as a buck private with the 26th Infantry Training Battalion, he hardly could have pictured himself standing in General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s bedroom while the Supreme Commander phoned Winston Churchill. In the fall of 1942, Kiley was plucked out of his infantry company in Northern Ireland, where he was training as a radio operator and three weeks away from deployment to North Africa. Stars and Stripes, the army’s newspaper, was going from weekly to daily, and needed experienced reporters. At 28, Kiley had a few years on many other staffers and draftee reporters, and he became a mentor and friend to younger newsmen, including Andy Rooney (later of 60 Minutes fame), Jimmy Cannon (who would become a celebrated sports writer), and Earl Mazo (a leading political reporter in the 1950s, and Richard Nixon’s official biographer). He flew on bombing raids, trained with FROM LEFT, U.S. ARMY; U.S. ARMY/STARS AND STRIPES; COURTESY OF THE KILEY FAMILY; PREVIOUS PAGES, U.S. ARMY
Army Rangers, and cranked out a two-sided single-sheet edition of Stars and Stripes from Utah Beach for a few weeks until he and a small team were able to set up the paper’s continental edition in Cherbourg. Kiley was managing editor with the paper’s Liège edition when, in April 1945, he was assigned to be Eisenhower’s pool reporter.
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FTER EISENHOWER phoned Churchill, Kiley quickly learned that the premature surrender story—which, under the headline “Nazis Quit,” quoted a “high official” in San Francisco—had stemmed from a remark by Senator Thomas T. Connally (D-TX). As word spread that Connally was the source, the senator explained to another reporter that the Germans had surrendered “in fact, if not on paper.” A politician’s wish to show off, combined with a reporter’s ambition, had produced the false report. Still, V-E Day was not an “if,” but a “when.” German divisions were surrendering daily. Allied units were liberating concentration camps. The United Nations Commission for the Investigation of War Crimes was already identifying war criminals. MAY/JUNE 2015
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Although pockets of hardcore Nazis continued to fight, even German-run radio stations were reporting that the Wehrmacht was smashed and surrendering en masse. The first step to final unconditional surrender came on May 4, when Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, Hitler’s successor as Führer, authorized Admiral Hans-Georg von Friedeburg—Dönitz’s successor as commander of the German navy—to sign cease-fire terms with British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery outside Wendisch Evern, a village in northwest Germany. Dönitz told Friedeburg to surrender all forces in northern Germany, Holland, and Denmark, and all laid down their arms on May 5— the day Friedeburg set out for Reims to begin negotiations for a general surrender. On May 6, General Hermann Niehoff, commander of some 40,000 German forces near Berlin, surrendered
to address Smith. Kiley’s story for the May 8 Stars and Stripes describes what came next: “General,” Jodl began. “With this signature the German people and the German armed forces are for better or worse delivered into the victors’ hands. “In this war, which has lasted more than five years, both have achieved and suffered more than perhaps any other people in the world. In this hour I can only express the hope that the victor will treat them with generosity.” Jodl broke halfway through his address, and appeared on the verge of tears. He regained his composure however, and finished with a strong voice. His hands were trembling when he finished.
Kiley had warned Eisenhower’s staff that the news would be “damn difficult to hold” and word was leaking out all over. to Red Army forces in Breslau, east of the German capital. Half an hour later, General Alfred Jodl, German high command chief of staff, flew to Reims to join Friedeburg to negotiate specifics for unconditional surrender. As pool reporter, Kiley would be the only journalist in close proximity to the talks, and his notes would be shared with the world press at the surrender signing. “Close proximity” meant an office outside the main negotiating room. Kiley would receive steady updates from Eisenhower’s longtime aide, Lieutenant Colonel Ernest “Tex” Lee, and, when possible, SHAEF chief of staff General Walter Bedell Smith, who led the proceedings. Eisenhower was on the scene but not taking part in face-to-face interactions with the Germans. Seventeen reporters and photographers were being flown in from Paris to witness the signing. En route, they were required to agree to an embargo prohibiting release of the story. They were told SHAEF would lift the embargo within hours. The atmosphere around SHAEF was tense. No one involved had had much sleep. Kiley noted that when idle, especially on their first day at Reims, the Germans fell asleep almost instantly. Jodl and Friedeburg puffed away on a supply of cigars they had brought. To ease the pressure and pass the time between bursts of negotiating, SHAEF staff and Kiley smoked constantly. The haze inside the school rarely dissipated. For 34 hours, from the arrival of the first Germans to the signing of the papers, Kiley kept concise notes of arrivals, departures, facial expressions, food consumption, demeanors, and points of negotiation and disagreement leading to the final deal and the signing, at 2:41 a.m. on Monday, May 7. Jodl then stood 48
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T
HE WAR WAS OVER. But there was a new problem. Although the Soviets had a representative at Reims, General Ivan Susloparov, he had signed without Joseph Stalin’s endorsement. The Soviet premier demanded a surrender of his own, in Berlin. Stalin’s insistence meant that Eisenhower, Churchill, and Truman could not officially acknowledge the surrender until May 8, in order for everyone to assemble in Berlin and to account for time differences. A second surrender ceremony created a logistical nightmare for Americans and Brits—especially for reporters. The newly extended embargo demanded they sit on the story of the century for another 36 hours. Kiley had warned Eisenhower’s staff that the news would be “damn difficult to hold.” And word was leaking out all over. German radio acknowledged the capitulation at 1:03 p.m. London time—8:03 a.m. EST. With no official statement from Churchill, the BBC announced that the war was over, citing the German broadcasts. Awaiting official word, throngs jammed Times Square in New York City, Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC, Piccadilly in London, and the ChampsÉlysées in Paris. Through the early morning hours, furious reporters who had signed the SHAEF embargo clamored for permission to break it. “The absurdity of attempting to bottle up news of such magnitude was too apparent,” AP reporter Edward Kennedy wrote later. Kennedy, who returned to Paris later that morning, rationalized that Allied censors must have cleared the German radio stations to confirm the surrender, which, for him, invalidated the embargo. He found an unmonitored phone line, called the
Ed Kennedy’s big story got appropriately splashy play in the New York Tmes; Kiley covered both ceremonies for Stars and Stripes.
VIEW PHOTOS OF THE SURRENDERS IN OUR IPAD EDITION
AP bureau in London and, without telling his editors that he was breaking an embargo, dictated a “flash” report at 9:24 p.m., Paris time. The story moved on the AP wire at 9:35 a.m. EST. The scoop was Kennedy’s. “Well, you know all about it now,” Kiley wrote to Billee. “I felt the unconditional surrender would leak out ahead of time; and it has.” Kiley was disappointed. There wasn’t time to dwell on it, though: he was headed to Berlin in a C-47 for the second show, again serving as pool reporter, and likely the only reporter to witness both signings. “The negotiations in Berlin went on all afternoon and night before the ceremony started after midnight, Berlin time,” he wrote to his wife, describing an exhausting jumble, with an official victory banquet and “24 toasts, no sleep for gosh knows how long, vodka, champagne, cognac, wine, caviar, squab, Russian TOP, AP PHOTO/RICK BOWMER; BOTTOM, U.S. ARMY
cigarettes, but also the picture of hopeless people, weary refugees streaming through Berlin, smoldering fires everywhere.” After filing his story, Kiley had time to explore Berlin, including the remains of Hitler’s Chancellery, where he snagged a few Reich relics, before boarding a flight to join Eisenhower in Paris. “I think sometimes it is all a wild dream,” he wrote Billee later that day. “This morning I was driving and walking through what is left of a completely destroyed Berlin. This afternoon I sat at a table outside a sidewalk cafe on the Champs-Élysées, watching one of the most unbelievable and colorful sights, thousands of Parisians and soldiers of all nations just walking in a solid mass along the wide boulevard.” Kiley’s surrender stories played on page one in all Stars and Stripes editions, and were picked up stateside in numerous papers, including the New York Herald Tribune, which hired Kiley after the war as a reporter, then an editor. The war was over for Ed Kennedy, too, but he wasn’t done with combat. Two days after the New York Times ran his surrender flash, the paper published an editorial saying Kennedy had committed a “grave disservice” to the newspaper profession. Fifty-four reporters—Kiley included—signed a condemnation of Kennedy. SHAEF stripped him of his press credentials and the AP sent him stateside, firing him the following November. “I would do it again,” Kennedy said afterward. “The war was over; there was no military security involved, and the people had a right to know.” He died in 1963, never working again for a big media outlet and, according to his daughter, a somewhat broken soul.
M
Y DAD DIED IN 2001 at age 87, having worked as a daily newspaper editor for the New York Herald Tribune until it folded in 1966, and then editorin-chief of the New York Law Journal until he was 76. I had been working as a reporter for a while myself, at CNN, when I learned about the broken embargo and Kennedy’s censure. I asked my father how he felt; he said the whole situation “was awful” for the reporters. But he was unwavering in his belief that Kennedy was wrong to break the embargo, and certainly wrong to do so without involving his editors in the decision. Never given to needless embellishment, Dad found it easier to talk about his role, which he described to Billee from Paris while sitting at that café. “I am satisfied that I did a good job,” he told her. 2 MAY/JUNE 2015
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[ portfolio ]
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ALL IMAGES COPYRIGHT BY BILL MAULDIN. REPRODUCED WITH PERMISSION OF THE BILL MAULDIN ESTATE, EXCEPT WHERE NOTED. OPPOSITE, JOHN PHILLIPS/THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES
Willie and Joe
Come Home
Bill Mauldin’s legendary dogfaces kept faith with returning veterans of every generation By David T. Zabecki
W
ars never really end for veterans.
Patton, who famously scorned Mauldin’s
Those who make it home return
depictions of soldiers (opposite; see “The Best
to a world they do not recognize,
of Willie and Joe,” January/February 2008),
and that does not recognize them. So it was
Mauldin drew a swaggeringly familiar figure he
for Willie and Joe, World War II’s most famous
called “Gen. Blugget”—an unmistakable varia-
fictional GIs. Creations of Pulitzer Prize-win-
tion on Patton’s nickname, “Blood and Guts.”
ning Stars and Stripes cartoonist Bill Mauldin,
THE GI’S GI
a sergeant in the 45th Infantry Division, the
Bill Mauldin, 23 upon discharge, never lost his love for the common GI, and the army responded in kind. In 1982 he received the Doughboy Award, the highest honor the chief of infantry can bestow on an infantryman; in 2001 Mauldin was promoted to honorary first sergeant. He died in 2003.
two were so popular Willie made the June 18, 1945, Time magazine cover. That year, a collection of Mauldin’s wartime cartoons appeared in a bestseller, Up Front. After his discharge Mauldin began editorial cartooning, and continued advocating for soldiers and veterans by following Willie and Joe into civilian life. Just as in wartime, not every cartoon featured Willie and Joe, but the characters were the foundation of Mauldin’s veteran-related drawings. One theme he carried over from his days in uniform was the age-old friction between officers and enlisted men. In a parting shot at General George S.
Reconnecting with wives and girlfriends was a key topic. Willie was married when he was drafted, and now his wife doesn’t seem to understand him. Joe, the younger of the two, bluntly learns why his girlfriend broke off their engagement while he was overseas. Equally disturbing, once back in civvies, the men find that fellows still in uniform no longer see them as members of the fraternity of arms. Then there is the generation gap. Despite their experiences, veterans of World War I regarded World War II vets as snotnosed kids—ironically, the same way Vietnam
VIEW IMAGES OF WILLIE AND JOE AT WAR IN OUR IPAD EDITION
veterans felt treated by World War II veterans. Mauldin’s fierce sense of social justice Continued on page 55 MAY/JUNE 2015
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“Shut up, kid. You got no business discussin’ serious matters.” 52
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BRAVE NEW WORLD Many of the homecoming experiences Mauldin drew he also experienced: adjusting to life out of uniform, confronting changed relationships, and viewing former commanders with new eyes. Mauldin called the cartoon of Major Wilson (left) “admittedly malicious.”
“Major Wilson! Back in uniform, I see.” “I was hoping you’d wear your soldier suit so I could be proud of you.”
“Seems sorta drab....”
“Hullo, Suzy....I wondered why ya broke off our engagement while I wuz in Sicily.” MAY/JUNE 2015
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“Naw,—we don’t hafta worry about th’ owner comin’ back. He wuz killed in Italy.” 54
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came out most strongly in a cartoon depicting postwar America’s attitude toward Nisei veterans (opposite). Despite being members of America’s most decorated military unit and having a composite Purple Heart rate of a staggering 68 percent, the Japanese-Americans of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team were often “the enemy,” as far as fellow citizens were concerned. That tune has changed, but back then Mauldin was bucking public opinion. Mauldin’s early postwar cartoons appeared in a nearly forgotten 1947 memoir, Back Home. By then Mauldin had pretty much retired Willie and Joe, to address broader social and political issues. In 1959 he won a second Pulitzer Prize for a cartoon featuring Doctor Zhivago author Boris Pasternak in a Soviet prison camp. “I won the Nobel Prize for literature,” the caption reads. “What was your crime?” Mauldin occasionally revived Willie and Joe: when Generals George C. Marshall and Omar Bradley died, for example, and in 1988 to memorialize fellow cartoonist Milton Caniff, creator of Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon. The pair made one more major appearance during Mauldin’s lifetime, although Mauldin had nothing to do with it. In 1998 cartoonist Charles M. Schulz— who as a machine-gun squad leader in World War II
“Who said my medals wouldn’t buy me a cuppa coffee?”
had been one of Mauldin’s beloved combat infantrymen—integrated one of Mauldin’s wartime drawings into what has since become an iconic Veterans Day image (below). It was the only cartoon where Schultz did not draw every line personally. He signed it,
A TOAST TO THE MASTER
“Schulz and my hero, Bill Mauldin.” 2
Charles Schulz created his famous salute to GIs and Mauldin by adapting a cartoon that appeared in the June 26, 1944, Stars and Stripes. In the original, Willie says, “I see Comp’ny E got th’ new style gas masks, Joe,” as they look down at a trail of discarded defective gas masks littering the ground.
BOTTOM, PEANUTS © 1998 PEANUTS WORLDWIDE LLC. DIST. BY UNIVERSAL UCLICK.
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The Doolittle attack generated more, and more violent, ripples than once thought By James M. Scott
AFTER An official stands in a crater surrounded by ruins of a Tokyo-area factory destroyed in the Doolittle Raid (above).
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PHOTO CREDIT
Fleeing Japanese troops in China after the raid, missionary Sisters of Charity and priests ford a stream.
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IEUTENANT COLONEL Jimmy Doolittle, at the controls of a B-25 Mitchell medium bomber, zoomed low over northern Tokyo at midday on Saturday, April 18, 1942. He could see the highrises crowding the Japanese capital’s business district as well as the imperial palace and even the muddy moat encircling Emperor Hirohito’s home. “Approaching target,” the airman told his bombardier. Doolittle pulled back on the yoke, climbing to 1,200 feet. The B-25’s bomb bay doors yawned. “All ready, Colonel,” the bombardier said. Amid antiaircraft fire from startled gunners on the ground, Doolittle leveled off over northern Tokyo. At 1:15 p.m. the red light on his instrument panel blinked as his first bomb plummeted. The light flashed again. Then again. And again. Four bombs—each packed with 128 four-pound incendiary bomblets—tumbled onto Tokyo as Doolittle dove to rooftop level and turned south, back toward the Pacific. The veteran airman had accomplished what four months earlier had seemed impossible. The United States had bombed the Japanese homeland, a feat of arms and daring aviation that would stiffen the resolve of a demoralized America. For more than seven decades Americans have celebrated the Doolittle Raid largely for reasons that have little to do with the mission’s tactical impact. A handful of bombers, each carrying two tons of ordnance, after all, could hardly dent a war machine that dominated nearly a tenth of the globe. Rather, the focus has been on the ingenuity, grit, and heroism required to execute what amounted to a virtual suicide mission, which Vice Admiral William Halsey Jr. hailed in a personal letter to Doolittle. “I do not know of any more gallant deed in history than that performed by your squadron,” wrote Halsey, who commanded the task force that transported Doolittle and his men to Japan. “You have made history.” But the raid did have a significant impact, some of those outcomes positive, some very dark. The American bomber squadron inflicted widespread damage in the target areas but also caused civilian deaths that included children at school. In retaliatory campaigns that went on for months, Japanese military units killed hundreds of thousands of Chinese. And in the years following the Japanese surrender, American occupation authorities sheltered a general suspected of war crimes against some of the aviators. All these facts have been illuminated only recently through declassified records and other previously untapped archival sources. The new information in no way undermines the bravery of the first Americans to fly against Japan’s homeland. Rather it shows that after more than 70 years, one of the war’s best known and most iconic stories still has the power to reveal more about its intricacies and effectiveness.
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Newspapers in Allied nations trumpeted the news of the raid, here being read aboard a troopship in the Pacific by Private Adam Pickerz of the 387th Quartermaster Battalion.
Japan’s Yomiuri Shimbun daily also played the story page one, with an image of a raider over Tokyo bracketed by antiaircraft fire. The text praises the “spirited defense of the homeland,” claiming “indiscriminate bombing misses military installations.”
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WEEKS AFTER PEARL HARBOR, A PLAN BEGAN TO EMERGE FOR A SURPRISE ATTACK TO TAKE THE WAR TO THE JAPANESE CAPITAL. VEN AS CREWS were recovering American dead from Pearl Harbor’s oily waters, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was demanding that his senior military leaders take the fight to Tokyo. As Army Air Forces chief Lieutenant General Henry Arnold later wrote, “The president was insistent that we find ways and means of carrying home to Japan proper, in the form of a bombing raid, the real meaning of war.” Thus the concept of a surprise attack on the Japanese capital was born. Within weeks, a plan emerged. An aircraft carrier protected by a 15-ship task force—including a second carrier, four cruisers, eight destroyers, and two oilers—would steam into striking distance of Tokyo. Taking off from the carrier— something never before attempted—16 B-25 medium bombers would assault Tokyo and the industrial cities of Yokohama, Nagoya, Kanagawa, Kobe, and Osaka. After spreading destruction across more than 200 miles, the airmen would fly to regions of China controlled by the Nationalists. Navy planners
had the perfect vessel in mind—the USS Hornet, America’s newest flattop. The Tokyo raid would be the $32 million carrier’s first combat mission. To oversee the Army Air Forces’ role, Arnold tapped his staff troubleshooter, Doolittle. The 45-year-old had chafed his way through World War I, forced because of his excellent flying skills to train others. “My students were going overseas and becoming heroes,” he later griped. “My job was to make more heroes.” What Doolittle lacked in combat experience, the airman with an ear-to-ear to grin—and MIT doctorate—more than made up for in intelligence and daring, character traits that would prove vital to the Tokyo raid’s success. But where to bomb in Tokyo, and what? One Japanese in 10 lived there. The population was nearly seven million, making Japan’s capital the world’s third largest city after London and New York. In some areas population density exceeded 100,000 per square mile, with factories, homes, and stores jumbled together. Commercial workshops often doubled as private residences, even in areas classified as industrial. As they studied maps, the colonel drilled his 79 volunteer pilots, navigators, and bombardiers on the need to hit only legitimate military targets. “Crews were repeatedly briefed to avoid any action that could possibly give the Japanese any ground to say that we had bombed or strafed indiscriminately,” he said. “Specifically, they were told to stay away from hospitals, schools, museums, and anything else that was not a military target.” But there was no guarantee. “It is quite impossible to bomb a military objective that has civilian residences near it without danger of harming the civilian residences as well,” Doolittle said. “That is a hazard of war.”
The attack led by pilot Richard Joyce destroyed several wooden houses. All told, Joyce’s sortie killed 25 Japanese.
A bomb crater near the Asahi Electrical Manufacturing plant in Tokyo measured more than 15 feet across and 10 feet deep.
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The 16 bombers roared off the Hornet’s deck on the morning 10 feet deep and 30 feet across. A dud ripped through a house of April 18, 1942. All bombed targets but one, whose pilot had to bury itself in the clay beneath, forcing the military to set a to ditch his ordnance in the sea to outrun fighters. According 650-foot perimeter to excavate the projectile. to materials only lately brought to light, the raid obliterated 112 As Doolittle anticipated, the attack burned residences from buildings and damaged 53, killing 87 men, women, and chilTokyo to Kobe. In 2003 Japanese historians Takehiko Shibata dren. Among 151 civilians seriously injured, one was a woman and Katsuhiro Hara revealed that pilot Travis Hoover alone shot through the face and thigh while gathering shellfish near destroyed 52 homes and damaged 14. One bomb blew a woman Nagoya. At least 311 others suffered minor injuries. from the second floor of her house to land unhurt in the street In Tokyo, the raiders burned the Communication Ministry atop a mat. In the same neighborhood 10 civilians died, some transformer station, as well as more than 50 buildings around burning to death in collapsing houses. Pilots Hoover, Robert the Asahi Electrical Manufacturing Corporation factory and Gray, David Jones, and Richard Joyce accounted for 75 of the 13 adjoining the National Hemp and Dressing Company. In 87 fatalities. Jones’s attack claimed the most lives—27. Kanagawa Prefecture, just south of Tokyo, raiders targeted Gray strafed what he thought was a factory, complete with foundries, factories, and warehouses of the Japanese Steel a rooftop air defense surveillance tower. But it was Mizumoto Corporation and Showa Electric as well as the Yokosuka Naval Primary School, where students, like many across Japan, Base. Robert Bourgeois, bombardier of the 13th plane, which attended half-day classes on Saturdays. After school let out at attacked Yokosuka, later commented on the intensity of his 11 a.m, many students had stayed to help clean classrooms; preparation. “I had looked at the pictures on board the carrier one died in the strafing attack. At Waseda Middle School, one so much that I knew where every shop was located at this naval of Doolittle’s incendiaries killed fourth-grader Shigeru Kojima. base,” he recalled. “It was as if it were my own backyard.” Children’s deaths became a rallying point. A Japanese sergeant In Saitama Prefecture, to the north, bombardiers blasted later captured by Allied forces described the furor that erupted Japan Diesel Corporation Manufacturing. At Nagoya, a masfrom the raid. “One father wrote to a leading daily telling of the sive Toho Gas Company storage tank burned completely. killing of his child in the bombing of the primary school,” his Bombs there also damaged a Mitsubishi Heavy Industries interrogation report stated. “He deplored the dastardly act and aircraft factory. Six wards of the army hospital went up in flames, along with a food warehouse and army arsenal. The Japanese logged the 16 B-25s left the Hornet, formed results of the war’s first small groups, and followed raid on their homeland in roundabout routes to targets on Honshu, the largest home island. minute detail, records that largely survived the 1945 One crew flew on to Vladivostok, Russia. bombardment of Tokyo and the deliberate destruction of records that preceded Japan’s surrender. Pilot Edgar McElroy’s attack on Planes took off early when a the Yokosuka Naval Base Japanese picket ripped a 26-by-50-foot hole boat crew saw the Hornet. This in submarine tender Taigei’s added 200 miles port side, delaying its conto a trip being made with short version to an aircraft carrier fuel supplies. for four months. One of pilot Harold Watson’s 500-pound demolition bombs peneThe other 15 crews trated a warehouse filled flew toward China, with gasoline, heavy oil, and some bailing out, some crash landing. volatile methyl chloride, only to bounce into the neighboring wooden building before exploding. Bombs left craters
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MAP BY KERRY HYNDMAN
avowed his intention of avenging the child’s death by joining the army and dying a glorious death.”
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The lead B-25 crew in China, from left: Fred Braemer, Paul Leonard, Richard Cole, Jimmy Doolittle, and Hank Potter, with three unidentified Chinese Nationalist soldiers.
LL 16 CREWS made it out of Japan. Low on fuel, one pilot flew northwest across the Japanese mainland to Vladivostok, Russia, where authorities interned him and his crew for 13 months. The rest flew south along the Japanese coast, rounding Kyushu before crossing the East China Sea to mainland Asia. Aircrews bailed out or crash-landed along the Chinese coast, getting help from locals and missionaries. Bent on preventing further strikes, furious Japanese leaders tried in June to extend the nation’s defensive perimeter with a grab for Midway, triggering a disastrous naval battle that cost them four carriers and shifted the balance of power in the Pacific in favor of America. But the raiders’ choice of haven revealed coastal China as another dangerous gap in the empire’s defense. Japan already had many troops in China. Within weeks, the Imperial General Headquarters sent the main force of the Thirteenth Army
Chinese soldiers greet airmen from B-25 “Avenger”: from left, bombardier Sergeant Robert C. Bourgeois, copilot Lieutenant Richard A. Knobloch, pilot Lieutenant Edgar E. McElroy, and navigator Lieutenant Clayton J. Campbell. They and gunner Sergeant Adam R. Williams (not shown) fought through the war in the China-Burma-India Theater.
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and elements of the Eleventh Army and the North China Area Army—a total force that would swell to 53 infantry battalions and as many as 16 artillery battalions—to destroy the airfields the Americans had hoped to use in the provinces of Chekiang and Kiangsi. “Airfields, military installations, and important lines of communication will be totally destroyed,” the order read. The unwritten command was to make the Chinese pay dearly for their part in the empire’s humiliation. Details of the destruction emerged from previously unpublished records on file at Chicago’s DePaul University. Father Wendelin Dunker, a priest based in the village of Ihwang, fled the Japanese advance along with other clergy, teachers, and orphans under the church’s care, hiding in the mountains. He returned to find packs of dogs feasting on the dead. “What a scene of destruction and smells met us as we entered the city!” he wrote in an unpublished memoir. The Japanese returned to Ihwang, forcing Dunker out again. Troops torched the town. “They shot any man, woman, child, cow, hog, or just about anything that moved,” Dunker wrote. “They raped any woman from the ages of 10–65.” Ihwang’s destruction proved typical. Bishop William Charles Quinn, a California native, returned to Yukiang to find little more than rubble. “As many of the townspeople as the Japs had been able to capture had been killed,” he said. One of the worst hit was the walled city of Nancheng. Soldiers rounded up as many as 800 women, raping them day after day. Before leaving, troops looted hospitals, wrecked utilities, and torched the city. In Linchwan troops tossed families down wells. Soldiers in Sanmen sliced off noses and ears. The Japanese were harshest on those who helped the raiders, as revealed in the diary of the Reverend Charles Meeus, who toured the devastated region afterward and interviewed survivors. In Nancheng, men had fed the Americans. The Japanese forced these Chinese to eat feces, then herded a group chestto-back 10 deep for a “bullet contest,” to see how many bodies a slug pierced before stopping. In Ihwang, Ma Eng-lin had welcomed injured pilot Harold Watson into his home. Soldiers wrapped Ma Eng-lin in a blanket, tied him to a chair and soaked him in kerosene, then forced his wife to set her husband afire. Canadian missionary Bill Mitchell traveled the region for the Church Committee for China Relief. Using local government data, Reverend Mitchell calculated that Japanese warplanes flew 1,131 raids against Chuchow—Doolittle’s destination— killing 10,246 people and leaving 27,456 destitute. Japanese soldiers destroyed 62,146 homes, stole 7,620 head of cattle, and burned a third of the district’s crops. Japan saved the worst for last, unleashing secretive Unit 731, which specialized in bacteriological warfare. Spreading plague, anthrax, cholera, and typhoid by spray, fleas, and contamination, Japanese forces fouled wells, rivers, and fields. Journalist Yang Kang, reporting for newspaper Ta Kung Pao, visited the village of Peipo. “Those who returned to the village after the 62
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THE JAPANESE WERE HARSHEST ON THOSE WHO HELPED THE DOOLITTLE RAIDERS, INFLICTING TORTURE AND SHEER TERROR. enemy had evacuated fell sick with no one spared,” she wrote in a September 8, 1942, article. Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett, who accompanied Kang, said disease had left entire cities off limits. “We avoided staying in towns overnight, because cholera had broken out and was spreading rapidly,” he wrote. “The magistrate assured us that every inhabited house in the city was stricken with some disease.” Japan’s approximately three-month terror campaign infuriated the Chinese military, who recognized it as a byproduct of a raid meant to boost American morale. In a cable to the U.S. government, General Chiang Kai-shek claimed the Doolittle strike cost his nation 250,000 lives. “After they had been caught unawares by the falling of American bombs on Tokyo, Japanese troops attacked the coastal areas of China, where many of the American fliers had landed. These Japanese troops slaughtered every man, woman, and child in those areas,” Chiang wrote. “Let me repeat—these Japanese troops slaughtered every man, woman, and child in those areas.”
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N THEIR SWEEP through coastal China, Japanese forces captured eight Doolittle raiders. Accused of indiscriminately killing civilians, all were tried for war crimes and sentenced to death. The Japanese executed three in Shanghai in October 1942 but commuted the others’ sentences to life in prison, in part for fear that executing all of them might jeopardize Japanese residents in the United States. Of the surviving raiders, one flyer starved to death in prison while the other four languished for 40 months in POW camps. Upon Japan’s capitulation, Allied authorities arrested four Japanese who played a role in the imprisonment and execution of the raiders. Those included the former commander of the Thirteenth Army, Shigeru Sawada, the judge and the prosecutor who tried the raiders, and the executioner. War crimes investigators weren’t satisfied justice would be served by prosecuting only those four. Investigators likewise doggedly pursued ex-general Sadamu Shimomura, who had replaced Sawada as commander of the Thirteenth Army on the eve of the raiders’ executions. Shimomura himself was said to have signed the order to kill the Americans. As the war was
ending, Shimomura was elevated to be Japan’s war minister; after the surrender, he worked closely with American authorities to demobilize the Imperial Army. In December 1945, investigators following up on the executions of Doolittle raiders asked occupation authorities to arrest Shimomura. General Douglas MacArthur’s staff refused; the former general was too valuable an asset in managing the conquered country. The investigators persisted. If Shimomura figured in raiders’ executions, they reasoned, he should be prosecuted. On January 11, 1946, they formally requested his arrest. MacArthur’s staff again balked, this time claiming the case would be considered from an “international standpoint,” alluding to Shimomura’s importance in postwar Japan. On January 23, the investigators again sought Shimomura’s arrest, then came to Japan, arousing international news coverage. Shimomura was arrested and interned at Tokyo’s Sugamo Prison in early February 1946. In March the other four defendants went on trial. To keep Shimomura out of court, members of MacArthur’s staff did all they could, going so far as to elicit statements from witnesses that might exonerate the former general. In the end, MacArthur’s intelligence chief, Major General Charles Willoughby, played the followingorders card. “As the final decision for the execution of the fliers had been made by Imperial General Headquarters, Tokyo, on 10 October,” Willoughby wrote in a memo, “the signature of the Commanding General Thirteenth Army on the execution order was simply a matter of formality.” The other four defendants made the same argument, but
they were tried and convicted; three were sentenced to five years hard labor and one received nine years. For Shimomura, however, the tactic worked—if only because it ran out the clock. Efforts by MacArthur’s staff on Shimomura’s behalf so delayed the legal process that there wasn’t time to prosecute him. “The War Crimes mission in China is about to close,” stated a concluding memo in September. “Further action by this Headquarters with respect to the trial of General Shimomura is no longer possible. Accordingly, this Headquarters is not disposed to take any action in the case.” Willoughby orchestrated Shimomura’s secret release, including the stealthy elimination of his name from prison reports. A driver took him to his home on March 14, 1947, before officials sent him “to a quiet place for a few months.” The man who had allegedly inked his name to the execution order for Doolittle’s raiders never served another day in jail. Shimomura was later elected to the Japanese parliament before a 1968 traffic accident claimed his life at age 80. Compared to 1945’s B-29 raids—when as many as 500 bombers flew nightly against Japan, leveling cities by the square mile—the Doolittle raid was a pinprick. But, as history has shown, those 16 bombers delivered a disproportionate punch—leading America to celebrate its first victory of the war, the Chinese to mourn a quarter-million dead, and the Japanese to blunder into defeat at Midway. Doolittle raider Robert Bourgeois summed up the story many years later. “That Tokyo raid,” the old bombardier said. “That was the daddy of them all.” 2
Ying-tan was among Chinese towns that Japanese forces reduced to rubble to punish civilians suspected of having aided the American raiders.
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WEAPONS MANUAL by Jim Laurier Death from Below Stalins carried 12.7mm antiaircraft machine guns.
Up Tight So much space went for main-gun recoil that the turret interior was quite cramped. The tank commander had to run the show, oversee firing, and work the radio.
Bear With You The IS-2 here, of the 8th Guards Army’s 7th Independent Guards Heavy Tank Battalion, helped take Berlin. The polar bear on the turret honors a campaign in Karelia, above the Arctic Circle.
V-12 for Victory A huge diesel engine coupled to an eight-speed transmission drove a Stalin to 23 miles per hour with a range of 150 miles.
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German Tiger
German Panther
• Crew: 5 • Top speed: 28 mph • Weight: 60 tons • Range: 120 miles • Armament: 88mm main gun, 2 7.92mm machine guns • Production: 1,347 • Nicknamed by designer Ferdinand Porsche, the Tiger was a daunting but sometimes finicky fighting vehicle with sky-high manufacturing costs.
• Crew: 5 • Top speed: 29–34 mph • Weight: 49 tons • Range: 160 miles • Armament: 75mm main gun, 2 7.92mm machine guns • Production: about 6,000 • Inspired and strongly influenced by the Soviet T-34, the Panther began on paper as a 22-ton design that once in production more than doubled in weight.
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Left-Hand Compliment Wehrmacht armor guru Heinz Guderian urged a wide berth for IS-2s. “Do not get in a fight with a Stalin without overwhelming numerical superiority,” the Prussian general warned.
IS-2s rolled into Berlin in platoons of five, with infantry, flame-thrower, and sapper teams. Crews used high-explosive rounds to topple buildings.
Slow on the Draw The 122mm gun, originally built for ships, employed a two-part round. A 100mm was considered, but the Soviets had a stockpile of the bigger tubes and ammunition, hence that choice. To fire, the four-man crew needed 20 to 30 seconds—time enough for a German Tiger to loose six or seven 88mm shells.
Angle of Rebuff A 60-degree glacis and 100mm armor enhanced chances of survival. Armor thickness varied from 30mm on the hull to 160mm on the turret.
Like all Soviet heavy tanks, the IS-2 had a 7.62mm machine gun (center) mounted on the turret.
Fit and Finish, Phooey! Western critics carped at the IS-2’s crudity. But the Reds were trying to get tanks into combat and keep them there, not win design awards.
Heaviest Duty Soviet IS-2 Stalin heavy tank The brawl at Kursk changed Joseph Stalin’s mind— and spawned a new vehicle. In mid-1943 the Soviet leader was resisting heavy armor R&D when he learned that on the steppes his tankers’ rounds had bounced off Hitler’s metal menagerie. Tigers, Panthers, and Elefant self-propelled guns demanded more muscle. The IS-2, for “Iosif Stalin,” debuted in April 1944. Factories built 3,854 of them. Able to deflect the vaunted German 88mm round, the 51-tonner and its 122mm main gun quickly built an
enthusiastic fan base. In a month, at a cost of eight Stalins, a 10-tank unit killed 41 Tigers and Elefants. IS-2s also fought in tandem with infantry, smashing enemy lines and leaving it to T-34 crews to clean up the detritus. “The heavy tanks worked well and exceeded the warranty period by 1.5 to 2 times, in both hours of usage and kilometrage,” a Soviet commander reported from Belorussia. Durability and brute firepower perfectly suited the Stalin’s role in victoriously carrying the war to Hitler’s capital.
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Hitler dedicates the first Volkswagen factory on May 26, 1938. The distinctive vehicle was a pet project of the Führer, who ostensibly sketched its design on a napkin in 1932 (opposite).
Think Again. For the Volkswagen Beetle it was a long strange trip on the road from Nazi symbol to countercultural icon By Richard J. Evans When I went to Germany in the early 1970s, the roads swarmed with Volkswagen Beetles—squat, misshapen little beasts bustling about city streets or rattling along the autobahns with their noisy, air-cooled engines, curved roofs tapering to a point at the back, and, in older models, oval back windows so tiny I wondered how a driver could see anything in his rearview mirror. Their exterior ugliness, however, was nothing in comparison to the horror of riding inside one: sitting in the APIC/GETTY IMAGES; OPPOSITE, IMAGNO/GETTY IMAGES
back seat, as I often had to when being driven around, I was oppressed by the claustrophobia imposed by the low roof, while the loud rattling and whirring of the engine behind me quickly gave me a headache, made worse in winter by the heating system’s repulsive smell. Turning corners at speed—such speed as the vehicle could muster—was a nightmare, as the car rocked and rolled and churned my stomach. Yet the Beetle was the most successful car of its time. In MAY/JUNE 2015
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the late 1960s and early 1970s, when one car in three on West German roads was a Beetle, sales exceeded one million each year. In 1972, total sales of the Beetle—a truly global vehicle—passed those of the century’s most popular passenger car, Henry Ford’s Model T. It was an amazing accomplishment for a vehicle whose origins were hardly auspicious. Though after World War II most people chose to ignore the fact, the Beetle began life in the 1930s as a pet project of Adolf Hitler. Once in power, Hitler was determined to bring Germany up to what he thought of as the modernity common in the United States and other advanced economies. Few people in Germany owned radios, so Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, introduced the Volksempfänger (People’s Receiver), a cheap and cheerful little wireless—short-wave so listeners couldn’t tune into foreign broadcasts. Fridges were even rarer, so the Nazi government introduced the Volkskühlschrank (People’s Refrigerator). Soon many other products had similar names and similar intentions. (See “Products for the People,” page 71.)
The People’s Car—the Volkswagen— belonged to this milieu. Although it was widely referred to by that name, its official title was the “Strength through Joy Car” (the Kraft durch Freude-Wagen, or KdF-Wagen), signifying its association with the German Labor Front leisure program that went by the same name and whose purpose was to reward German workers with affordable diversions. From the outset, Hitler was determined to modernize Germany’s roads. In the early 1930s, Germany was one of Western Europe’s least motorized societies. Even the British had six times more cars relative to population. This was partly because German public transport was second to none—smoothly efficient, quick, omnipresent, all-encompassing. Germans mostly felt no need for cars. And had they wanted cars, they couldn’t have afforded them. The economic disasters of the Weimar Republic had depressed demand. So empty were German roads that Berlin, a lively metropolis, did not find it necessary to install traffic lights until 1925. Three-quarters of German workers were laborers, artisans, farmers, and peasants, unable to purchase expensive products by Daimler-Benz or the country’s 27 other car makers, whose inefficient production methods and small outputs led to models that only members of the country’s intermittently affluent bourgeoisie could buy. To reach American levels of car ownership, Hitler told the automobile show in Berlin in 1934, Germany had to increase the number of cars on its roads from half a million to 12 million. To the further dismay of German nationalists, the two
Early advertisements depicted the “Strength through Joy Car” as an ideal companion to glamorous Aryan couples enjoying their leisure time.
BONUS CONTENT THE STORY BEHIND THE AD, IN OUR IPAD EDITION
Adapted from The Third Reich in History and Memory by Richard J. Evans with permission from Oxford University Press, Inc. Copyright © Richard J. Evans 2015
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Volkswagens cruise an autobahn near Berlin in 1938. Hitler intended the car and the new highways for the average German, but few wanted or could afford automobiles.
most successful mass vehicle manufacturers in the country were based in the United States: Ford, which opened a factory in Cologne in 1931, and General Motors, which operated the Opel car factory at Rüsselsheim. By the early 1930s, Opel cars were dominating the passenger vehicle market in Germany, with 40 percent of annual sales. Hitler pursued motorization on several levels. Building the famous Autobahnen was one. Another was the promotion of motor racing. Hefty government subsidies brought German speedsters by Daimler-Benz and Auto Union victory in 19 of 23 Grand Prix races held from 1934 to 1937. Ideology played an important role. In the interests of national unity, the government replaced local regulations with a Reich-wide Highway Code. Far from straitjacketing drivers, the 1934 Code placed its trust in the Aryan’s consciously willed subordination to the racial community’s interests. On the road, owners of expensive cars had to put “discipline” and “chivalry” first and set aside outmoded class antagonisms. Jews, of course, couldn’t be trusted to do this, so from 1938 on they were banned from owning or driving cars. The automobile, Hitler declared, responded to the individual will, unlike the railway, which had brought “individual liberty in transport to an end.” So the Highway Code abolished speed limits—with catastrophic results. In the first six years of the Third Reich, accident rates on German roads climbed to become Europe’s highest. By May 1939 the regime had to admit defeat and set speed limits on all roads except the autobahns, still Europe’s most terrifying roads. Cars, Hitler proclaimed, had to lose their “class-based, and, as a sad consequence, class-dividing character.” They had to be available to everyone. What was needed was a home-built vehicle that bridged the social divide. Hitler commissioned Austrian engineer Ferdinand Porsche to design an affordable car for ordinary people. (In a typically Nazi addendum, officials stipulated that the hood be stout enough to accommodate a machine gun if necessary.) Ambitious and politically skilled, Porsche secured Hitler’s backing for a huge factory that emphasized streamlined production techniques. The Labor Front put its vast financial reserves at Porsche’s disposal and sent the designer on a tour of automotive factories in the United States, where he hired engineers of German extraction to take back with him to work on the new car. Hitler opened the Volkswagen factory near the village of Fallersleben, in what is now Lower Saxony, in 1938. In time an entire new town, Strength through Joy City, was to be built to house and serve auto workers. In his comprehensive history of the Beetle, The People’s Car, Bernhard Rieger describes the elaborate groundbreaking ceremony held at the site. “Fifty thousand spectators, most of whom had been transported to the deep countryside by special trains, set the stage for the hour-long ceremony broadcast live on national radio,” Rieger writes. “In the cordoned-off area 70
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reserved for Hitler and his entourage, three models of the ‘people’s car’—a standard limousine, a limousine with a retractable canvas roof, and a convertible—gleamed in the sunshine, strategically arranged in front of a wooden grandstand that was draped with fresh forest greens from which the party grandees delivered their speeches.” The Labor Front campaigned to get Germans to join a Volkswagen savings scheme. People stuck red stamps worth five Reichsmarks each in official savings books until they reached the 990 Reichsmarks required to buy a Beetle. Over a quarter of a million people enrolled in less than 18 months. Impressive though this total seemed, it fell far short of what the regime envisioned. With this level of enrollment, the scheme would never even remotely have covered the costs of production. Most of the savers were middle-class, and a third had a car already; the masses simply couldn’t afford the level of savings required. Moreover, as Rieger points out, the mass reluctance to part with savings reflected anxiety about the Nazis’ increasingly bellicose foreign policy.
Ordinary Germans were right to be skeptical about the savings scheme. No individual who signed up ever got a Volkswagen—at least not from funds invested during the Nazi era. The money went into arms production. So, too, did the factory. Only 630 Beetles were made before the war, most snapped up by regime officials. In 1939, as the Reich was whisking Volkswagen workers off to labor on Germany’s western fortifications, the Nazis were able to keep production going only by obtaining 6,000 laborers from Italy. They lived in wooden barracks; by September 1939 only 10 percent of the planned accommodations in Strength through Joy City had been completed. The Italians worked to build a military version of the Beetle. The jeep-like Kübelwagen, or “bucket wagon,” saw service wherever German forces operated. The Schwimmwagen was an amphibious variant. After Germany’s defeat, the factory and company town fell within the British Zone of Occupation. Ivan Hirst, a major in the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers Corps, arrived to inspect the plant. He found that 70 percent of its buildings and 90 percent of its machinery were intact. The British Zone had 22 million inhabitants owning a mere 61,000 motorcars, nearly two-thirds of them described as “worn out.” Railway track and rolling stock were in ruins. Needing rapid improvements in transport, the British military government ordered Hirst to restart Beetle production. Applying ideas and methods derived from British colonial experience in Africa, Hirst set to work, using existing factory staff. When denazification booted more than 200 senior managers and technical experts, Hirst found substitutes or had verdicts overturned, in a triumph of necessity over legality and morality typical of occupied Germany in the late 1940s. He
Products for the People Before leading Germany to war, Hitler tried to introduce touches of modernity
Volkspflug PEOPLE’S PLOW Ferdinand Porsche designed seven prototypes of the Type 110 tractor in the late 1930s, but the war brought work on the farm vehicle to a halt.
Volksempfänger PEOPLE’S RECEIVER The only mass-produced “People’s” product, this radio received broadcasts from inside Germany alone.
also managed to recruit 6,000 workers by the end of 1946. But the resurrection had been too hasty. Mechanical and other problems dogged the cars. British auto engineers said the noisy, smelly, underpowered Beetle had no commercial potential. No one wanted to relocate the factory to Britain. So the Germans got the Volkswagen back.
Heinrich Nordhoff,
a German engineer for Opel who enjoyed close contacts with that company’s owners in America, General Motors, turned things around. Although not a Nazi, Nordhoff had contributed to the war economy by running the Opel truck factory, Europe’s largest. His extensive use of forced labor denied him employment in the American sector, but the British did not mind. Nordhoff threw himself into the job with manic intensity, working 17 hours a day to streamline production, eliminate technical deficiencies, recruit dealers, and establish effective management. The car came in bright colors, or, as Nordhoff put it, a “paint job absolutely characteristic of peacetime.” Production figures began to climb, and sales started to improve. But it was not so easy to shake off the automobile’s Nazi past. Strength through Joy City was renamed Wolfsburg, after a nearby castle—though some may have recalled that “Wolf” was Hitler’s nickname among cronies, so the name could be read as “Hitler’s Fortress.” Wolfsburg was crowded with refugees and expellees from the east—some of the 11 million ethnic Germans ejected from Poland, Czechoslovakia, and other Eastern European countries at the war’s end. Burning with resentment, they proved easy marks for ultra-nationalist agitators. By 1948, the neoNazi German Justice Party was garnering nearly two-thirds of FROM LEFT, HISTORYNET ARCHIVE (BOTH); ©INTERFOTO/ALAMY
Volksfernseher PEOPLE’S TELEVISION Another non-starter: a handful of sets was produced before the war, but none was offered for public sale.
the local vote, while vandals repeatedly daubed factory walls with swastikas and many ballot papers were marked with the words “We want Adolf Hitler.” As a new town, Wolfsburg lacked experienced politicians to counter extremist nostalgia. Only gradually were mainstream parties able to push the neo-Nazis back into the shadows. Heinrich Nordhoff aided in this, insisting that Germans’ travails in the late 1940s were the result of “a war that we started and that we lost.” His frankness had limits: he did not mention the mass murder of Jews or other Nazi crimes. He even echoed Nazi language in urging workers to focus on “achievement”— Leistung—just as Hitler in 1942 had urged “a battle of achievement for German enterprises” in war production. Whatever the rhetoric, the workers certainly did “achieve.” While the badly damaged Opel and Ford factories were struggling to get production under way, the Volkswagen plant was already turning out Beetles in large numbers. Efficiency rose steadily during the 1950s as Nordhoff introduced full automation on lines pioneered in Detroit. In August 1955 the millionth Beetle rolled off the line, painted gold, bumper encrusted with rhinestones, before 100,000 onlookers. Twelve marching bands played Strauss tunes, belles from the Moulin Rouge danced the cancan, a black South African choir sang spirituals, and 32 female Scottish dancers performed the Highland Fling to the sound of pipers. Reporters enjoyed lavish entertainment, while the event, and the accomplishments of the Volkswagen factory, were brought to the public in a 75-minute movie. The Beetle achieved iconic status in West Germany as a typical product of the 1950s Wirtschaftswunder, or “economic miracle”—not flashy or glamorous, but solid, functional, dependable, inexpensive to acquire and run, and easy to mainMAY/JUNE 2015
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tain: everything the Third Reich had not been. As West Germany became a “leveled-out middle-class society,” the Beetle became the leveled-out middle-class car of choice. Lacking obvious national symbols, Germany west of the fortified border that divided it from the Communist east fixed on the Beetle as an icon. Car ownership suited West German society’s retreat into private and family life in reaction to the Nazi era’s overheated, over-politicized public sphere. The liberty to drive anywhere, whenever you chose, was celebrated as a pillar of Western freedom during the Cold War. The Beetle’s Nazi associations faded in a historical car wash that ascribed its origins to Ferdinand Porsche’s genius. Veterans fondly remembered driving its cousin, the Kübelwagen. Younger individuals liked the little car’s utilitarian sobriety. The Beetle represented for Germans the “new landscape of desire” of the sober, conservative 1950s. At the same time, the Beetle was making giant inroads as an export, with an especially fruitful market in the United States. Sales of the Beetle—also called the “Bug”—took off in the U.S. in the mid-1950s. By 1968, Volkswagen was shipping more than half a million Beetles a year across the Atlantic, accounting for 40 percent of production. At least five million Americans bought Beetles. By the 1970s the car had even become a countercultural fixture, with aerospace-engineer-turned-mechanic John Muir’s How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive selling more than two million copies. Foreign sales sustained the company as Germany’s Beetle era ended. The 1973 to 1974 oil crisis, changing fashions, tough new safety regulations, and failure to maintain the pace of automation caused domestic sales to slump. With the end of the “economic miracle” came the end of the Beetle. West Germans began to demand vehicles that were faster, roomier, more comfortable, more elegant. In 1978 the factory at Wolfsburg stopped manufacturing Beetles. In 1997, Volkswagen introduced a “New Beetle,” appealing to the American fashion for retro-chic but making clear that this vehicle fully met 21st-century motorists’ demands (“Less Flower. More Power,” one ad put it). Its curving silhouette deliberately invokes the original. Yet owners of old Beetles know it’s not the same. They rally with their vintage vehicles at locations worldwide to admire antique models and imaginative custom jobs. One meeting has occurred annually since the 1980s in Nuremberg at the scene of the 1930s Nazi Party rallies, in front of the rostrum where Hitler ranted. Nobody seems to notice. The Beetle has long since become globalized, detached for most people from its Nazi origins. In 1998, New York Times columnist Gerald Posner mentioned to his mother-in-law, whom he described as a “conservative Jew,” that he had bought a New Beetle. “Congratulations darling,” she replied. “Maybe the war is finally over.” 2 72
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Nazi big shots Hermann Göring (above) and Robert Ley (at right, below) admire early VWs. The few prewar cars produced went to top Nazis; the nearest many ordinary Germans got to the People’s Car was the Kübelwagen (bottom), a military variant that served on many fronts.
FROM TOP, ©SUEDDEUTSCHE ZEITUNG PHOTO/ALAMY; BUNDESARCHIV BILD 146-1974-021-09, PHOTO, O. ANG; BUNDESARCHIV BILD 101I-301-1960-21, PHOTO, GENZLER; OPPOSITE, WALTER SANDERS/THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES
New Volkswagens roll off the assembly line at the main plant at Wolfsburg— still showing signs of bomb damage—in 1949.
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REVIEWS [
BOOKS
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Raising Hell and Striking Hard
The men of “Hell’s Angels” were the first Eighth Air Force B-17 crew to complete 25 missions.
HELL’S ANGELS The True Story of the 303rd Bomb Group in World War II By Jay A. Stout. Berkley Caliber, 2015. 458 pp. $27.95.
F
orty heavy bomber groups served with the Mighty Eighth Air Force during its campaign against the Third Reich. Well-regarded aviation writer Jay Stout selected one of them—the 303rd “Hell’s Angels”—as the subject of a detailed and engaging unit history. The 303rd’s rich experience makes it a good choice. The unit flew more missions than any B-17 group, boasted two Medal of Honor recipients, and supported the USAF
first Eighth Air Force B-17 to complete a tour of 25 missions. (No, not “Memphis Belle”: the 303rd’s “Hell’s Angels”— whose nickname inspired the bomb group’s—beat the “Belle” to the magic mark by six days.) But the book is more than a litany of accomplishment. Stout gives a solid overview of the USAAF bomber offensive, and experiences unique to the 303rd stand out against the historical backdrop. The group went through the two dreadful Schweinfurt raids largely unscathed while the rest of the Eighth
lost a whopping 120 bombers. Other missions—including some expected to be milk runs—turned deadly. Stout records the lows and the highs; a grueling mission to Oschersleben in January 1944 cost the group 27 percent of its aircraft, yet the 303rd was still the first to tally 200, then 300 missions. In all, 210 of its planes failed to return. Stout never loses sight of the human dimension, following a number of airmen through their training, their flights, and sometimes their fiery deaths. He recounts heroic deeds but does not MAY/JUNE 2015
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REVIEWS
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GAM E S
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Cold Winter, Cool Missions COMPANY OF HEROES 2 Ardennes Assault For Windows, 2014. $39.95 for download. Rated M for Mature.
World War II Rating
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
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THE BASICS: Relic Entertainment’s latest release from the Company of Heroes computer game franchise takes players to the Battle of the Bulge. The real-time strategy game is typical of the developer, a subsidiary of Sega, which has been making virtual war games since 1999. Relic’s other World War II titles cover more hot spots on the Eastern and Western fronts.
THE OBJECTIVE: The player commands a company of dogfaces, and action begins with Germany’s surprise assault. Scenarios vary, but center around accessing resource points needed to sustain U.S. troops. German forces stand in the way and must be out-fought with tactical decisions until the player completes every mission and “turns the tide of the war.”
HISTORICAL ACCURACY: Definitely a game for gamers, not a simulation for historians. The motif is World War II, but game play doesn’t accurately recreate period combat. For example, the player can call in airborne reinforcements who will jump into the dark, snowy Ardennes, even though that option wasn’t available in 1944.
PLAYABILITY: Ardennes Assault is a single-player game, with online interactions limited to tournament-style play. With 18 missions and engagements, a choice among infantry, support, or airborne companies, and customizable skills, the game rarely becomes repetitive. An added bonus— the player inhabits a different commander’s personality in each company.
THE GOOD, BAD, AND UGLY: Despite—or perhaps because of— the historical inaccuracy, the game is highly entertaining. The graphics and sound are fantastic— snow and smoke often cloud your vision—and the fast-paced combat holds the player’s full attention. Broad choices of tactics, units, and mission order further enhance the experience.
THE BOTTOM LINE: Historians looking for a strict simulation of World War II combat won’t find it here. But the sacrifice of accuracy for dramatic gameplay is successful— Ardennes Assault is exciting and engaging, exactly what a casual World War II buff will enjoy. —Chris Ketcherside, a former Marine, is working on a PhD in military history.
WORLD WAR II
neglect the minor absurdities of wartime service, as well as more serious snafus, often consequences of human error and frailty. Stout’s protagonists include commanders, airmen from every crew station, and the essential—though so often overlooked—ground personnel. Most of the veterans have died, but fortunately the 303rd Bomb Group Association has amassed a rich trove of documents, letters, and personal histories. Unlike other recent treatments of the U.S. air war, Stout does a thorough job examining the German defenses—with one small mistake. He downplays the effectiveness of German antiaircraft fire, noting that it took some 4,500 rounds to down a bomber. Though flak defenses didn’t bring many aircraft down, they frequently spoiled the bombers’ aim, stopping the Eighth’s bombers from striking targets accurately—their most important goal. Stout also occasionally overreaches with his literary license: the final memories and innermost thoughts of doomed airmen can only be imagined. Good unit history is like good biography. The reader should be drawn into the tale of how the subject came to be, grew and learned, suffered and triumphed, and finally faded from the scene as it passed into history. Stout has brought this bomb group to life. —Richard R. Muller is a frequent contributor to World War II magazine and teaches military history to air force officers.
Playing with Fire THE DEVILS’ ALLIANCE Hitler’s Pact with Stalin, 1939–1941 By Roger Moorhouse. Basic Books, 2014. 382 pp. $29.99.
I
t’s easy to argue with Roger Moorhouse’s contention that historians have ignored the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939. “Except in Poland and the Baltic states,” he writes, “the pact is simply not part of our collective narrative of World War II.” Moorhouse’s own 11-page bibliograGAME ICONS BY L-DOPA; PHOTO, RELIC ENTERTAINMENT
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REVIEWS
phy suggests he’s exaggerating the point: the agreement between Hitler and Stalin to dismember central Europe, brief as it was, has often been named as a turning point in the war. His real dispute is with the conventional portrayal of Stalin’s role in the pact as essentially expedient and defensive. Not so, says Moorhouse. The author’s greatest strength is to see history as the interaction between individual human beings. At the center of the devils’ alliance, of course, stand Hitler and Stalin, each assuming that he had bested the other. Of the two, Stalin has been less well understood; Moorhouse is right that we’ve shortchanged Stalin’s aggressive role in pursuing a deal with the Führer, just as Westerners have often ignored the undeniable moral equivalence between the regimes the two leaders created and ruled. The pact perfectly reflected Stalin’s personality: duplicitous, cold-blooded,
bound to end in betrayal. He could save himself from the consequences of his own bad judgment only through relentless, indeed mind-boggling, acts of personal and institutional brutality. The human cost of the pact during its 20-month life— the impressment of 1.5 million Poles into Soviet slave labor camps, just for starters—Stalin saw as merely strategic, another opportunity to maintain and reinforce a buffer between his empire and Hitler’s. One beneficiary of Stalin’s brutality was his own ace diplomat, Vyacheslav Molotov, who, Moorhouse tells us, first proved himself to his boss by overseeing the genocidal collectivization of Ukrainian agriculture. Yet when Molotov warned of Hitler’s coming Soviet invasion in 1941, Stalin totally ignored him
[
The Showa series, by World War II vet and celebrated manga artist Shigeru Mizuki, is part autobiography, part war history. Filled with both cartoons and realism—like Mizuki’s 1942 draft (above left) and Yamamoto’s 1943 death (above right)—the novels are read traditionally from back to front.
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BOOKS
because, Moorhouse writes, he was so heavily invested in the pact that he had desired and designed. When the betrayal came, Stalin quickly buried his original intentions. The enemy he embraced as a friend was an enemy again. He publicly congratulated himself on slyly deploying the pact to secure “peace for a year and a half and the opportunity of preparing [Soviet] forces to repulse fascist Germany.” He was rewriting history into a version that many Western historians went on to echo for decades. We can thank Roger Moorhouse for setting the record straight in this thrilling book, which will likely stand as the authoritative text on its subject, neglected or not. —Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
]
Artistic License SHOWA A History of Japan 1926–1939, 1939–1944, 1944–1953 By Shigeru Mizuki. Drawn & Quarterly, 2013, 2014. 533, 548, 540 pp. $24.95 each.
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The Pacific War and Contingent Victory Why Japanese Defeat Was Not Inevitable Michael W. Myers “A major new and provocative account of the Pacific War that draws from a wide and diverse number of sources. Myers turns a lot of received wisdom about this subject on its head and tackles many assumptions that scholars of the conflict have assumed are a given. His argument merits a close and careful read.”—Nicholas E. Sarantakes, author of Allies against the Rising Sun: The United States, the British Nations, and the Defeat of Imperial Japan 208 pages, Cloth $34.95, Ebook $34.95
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Through the Maelstrom A Red Army Soldier’s War on the Eastern Front, 1942–1945
HELL FROM THE HEAVENS The Epic Story of the USS Laffey and World War II’s Greatest Kamikaze Attack By John Wukovits. 336 pp. Da Capo, 2015. $25.99. On a picket line off Okinawa during the Allied invasion of that island in 1945, the destroyer USS Laffey endured the war’s most intense kamikaze attack, recounted here minute by minute.
POTSDAM The End of World War II and the Remaking of Europe By Michael Neiberg. 336 pp. Basic, 2015. $29.99. In a fresh, penetrating study, Neiberg examines the fraught conclave, held in newly defeated Germany, which set the stage for the Cold War.
SWANSONG 1945 A Collective Diary of the Last Days of the Third Reich By Walter Kempowski, translated by Shaun Whiteside. 480 pp. Norton, 2015. $35. Whiteside’s deft translation honors Kempowski’s profound survey of Germans at war’s end in the first of 10 volumes to be translated from German to English, inventorying memories of life during wartime among those who endured the Third Reich and those who decamped to freedom.
Boris Gorbachevsky Translated and edited by Stuart Britton Foreword by David M. Glantz “A must-read for scholars of the Eastern Front and those interested in the role of the Communist Party in the Red Army during World War II.”—Army History 480 pages, 32 photos, Paper $29.95
University Press of Kansas Phone 785-864-4155sFax 785-864-4586swww.kansaspress.ku.edu
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THE DEFEAT OF GERMANY THEN AND NOW Edited by Winston Ramsey. 544 pp. After the Battle, 2015. $94.95. An exhaustive visual and verbal catalog of the war in Europe, this archive includes latter-day images conveying the extent to which scenes of conflict have and have not changed through the decades. —Michael Dolan is the senior editor of World War II.
REVIEWS
[
ON THE TUBE
] really sunk the sub—and put to rest allegations of Claudius’s poor judgment. The program goes beyond the U-166 to cover Operation Drumbeat, the 1942 U-boat war in America’s east coast waters. Animated CGI diagrams, expert commentary, and the judicious use of period images make the program appropriate for neophytes and buffs. Film clips include a home movie shot by the U-166’s commander and an interview with the late Erich Topp, World War II’s third-most-successful U-boat commander. The investigation into Claudius’s legacy adds a human dimension that makes Nazi Attack on America compelling even for people not interested in naval warfare. —Gerald D. Swick is the editor of HistoryNet.com.
Underwater Tech Uncovers Truth NAZI ATTACK ON AMERICA Produced and directed by Kirk Wolfinger. 60 minutes. NOVA/National Geographic. May 6, 9:00 p.m. EST, check local listings.
T
he title sounds like it belongs on an alternate-history novel, but this PBS special explores one of World War II’s forgotten battlefields—the site of vicious U-boat attacks off the U.S. coast. The documentary focuses on the ambiguous history of the U-166—the only U-boat sunk in the Gulf of Mexico—and the legacy of Herbert Claudius, the patrol ship commander who dropped depth charges on the German vessel. (See “Sunken Sub
A submersible illuminates the U-166.
Find Confirms ’42 Kill Claim,” page 16.) In the special, Ocean Exploration Trust president Robert Ballard and a team of scientists use remote-exploration devices to examine the sub’s wreckage a mile below the surface of the Gulf. The team turns detective, enlisting special gear and underwater photos to determine who
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The Meeting from Hell: Conspiracy By Mark Grimsley
Y
OU KNOW THE meeting—management convened it to present some new undertaking and solicit everybody’s input. That is what neophytes believe, anyway; the more experienced know the score, and enter the conference room resigned, wary, even disposed to revolt. But the boss has clout enough to cram his agenda down everyone’s throats. Such cramming occurs in all walks of life: governmental, commercial, educational, ecclesiastical. The conference held on January 20, 1942, in Wannsee, a lakeside district southwest of Berlin, was like any other of its kind, except that the Schutzstaffel—the SS—organized the conclave, whose agenda was the destruction of Europe’s 11 million Jews. Directed by Frank Pierson, Conspiracy re-creates the Wannsee Conference in nearly real time, showing the mansion in which the gathering took place in a flyover shot and reproducing the building’s interior for the set. Writer Loring Mandel based his script on the “Wannsee Protocol”—the meeting’s top-secret minutes. The original document is deliberately vague; its language gives no hint that the subject is mass murder. Nor does the protocol paint the conference as anything less than wholly harmonious. But anyone who has watched bureaucrats battle over turf knows differently, and a close reading of the minutes suggests fault lines and objections. The filmmakers have fleshed out these intimations to deliver a riveting
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Over lunch, Nazi middle management arranges the slaughter of millions.
drama that takes place almost entirely around a large conference table. Conspiracy, which premiered in 2001, opens with SS Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Eichmann (Stanley Tucci) fussing over touches for the conference that include excellent wines, fine cigars, and a lavish buffet lunch for 15. As they enter, the guests, representatives of some of Nazi Germany’s most powerful men, introduce themselves to one another and the viewer. Two look glum: Friedrich Wilhelm Kritzinger (David Threlfall), deputy head of the Reich Chancellery, whose boss, Hans Lammers, is among Hitler’s legal advisers; and Wilhelm Stuckart (Colin Firth), chief architect of the Nuremberg Laws that stripped German Jews of their civil rights, defining “Jew” using formulas of Stuckart’s devising. Kritzinger and Stuckart believe their offices resolved the “Jewish question.” Fretting that the SS is about to hijack that “question” and impose its own solution, the two quietly grouse to one another.
Last to appear is the man who called the meeting, SS Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich (Kenneth Branagh), chief of the Reich Main Security Office. Heydrich presides with the jaunty air of a man assured that he is going places. He quotes a directive from Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring assigning Heydrich to find “a complete solution of the Jewish question in the German sphere of influence in Europe,” and also stipulating that relevant agencies “cooperate” with this endeavor. Kritzinger instantly objects; the Chancellery, he declares, has received no directive on this subject. He fruitlessly tries to gain a hearing but Heydrich smoothly and stubbornly plows on, leaving a sidelined Kritzinger to fume. Heydrich explains that Nazi policy has been forcing Jews to leave Germany voluntarily or to “emigrate” involuntarily to German-instituted ghettoes in Polish cities. That has changed. Jews under Nazi control now number several million, with five million to be added as the conquest of the Soviet Union proceeds. Alas, that invasion has stalled. “We are standing still in Russia; the Americans have joined the war. Both events are a further drain on our military, our economy, our manpower, our food supply,” Heydrich says. “We cannot store these Jews. Emigration is over.” The new policy is “evacuation,” a term made clear as he fields queries. “I have the real feeling I ‘evacuated’ MAY/JUNE 2015
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30,000 Jews already, by shooting them at Riga,” an SS major observes. “Is what I did ‘evacuation’?” Yes, Heydrich says. Kritzinger rages. “That is contrary to what the Chancellery has been told. I have directly been assured!” the Chancellery’s man says. “Purge the Jews, yes…. But to systematically annihilate all the Jews of Europe? That possibility has personally been denied to me by the Führer.” “And it will continue to be,” Heydrich replies, locking eyes with Kritzinger to let his message sink in. Stuckart protests—out of territoriality, when he sees that Heydrich is going to junk his genealogical formulas for identifying Jews. Without his equations, Stuckart warns, legal chaos will ensue. Kritzinger and Stuckart—supported by other of the bureaucrats on hand—suggest that instead of killing these Unter-
“Dead women don’t get pregnant,” Heydrich tells his guests. “Death is the most reliable form of sterilization.”
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menschen the Nazis sterilize them. “We won’t sterilize them and wait until they die. That’s farcical,” the SS man says. “Dead men don’t hump. Dead women don’t get pregnant. Death is the most reliable form of sterilization. Put it that way.” Heydrich has Eichmann outline programs for gassing Jews. So far, the participants who control Poland have delighted to watch Heydrich run rampant over Kritzinger and Stuckart. Now it dawns on them that most of what Eichmann is describing has been going on in Poland under their noses, without their knowledge. Soon everyone understands this “consultation” to have been more of a sham than anyone could have guessed. The meeting adjourns. The officials walk to their cars, shaken—not by the industrialized horror they now realize to be taking place, but by the bureaucratic tour de force they have witnessed. 2
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One to Remember At 21, Scottish-born actress Deborah Kerr won a breakout role in the British film The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, playing three women. Kerr’s performance was hailed, but the film had a noteworthy detractor. Winston Churchill believed its depiction of the main character—a military man—as blustery and rigid was bad for the morale of a nation at war. Despite disapproval, Blimp was released in the UK in 1943; a greatly cut version reached U.S. theaters just before V-E Day. Kerr’s best-known roles— in From Here to Eternity, The King and I, and An Affair to
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