Table of Contents

Tragedy and Hope

A History of the World in Our Time

By Carroll Quigley

PART FIFTEEN







Part Fifteen: World War II: the Ebb of Aggression: 1941-1945

Chapter 55: The Rising in the Pacific, to 1942

     Traditionally, American policy in the Far East had sought to preserve the territorial integrity and political independence of China and to maintain an "Open Door" for China's foreign trade. These goals became increasingly difficult to achieve in the course of the twentieth century because of the growing weakness of China itself, the steady growth of aggression in Japan, and the deepening involvement of other Powers with Far Eastern interests in a life-or-death struggle with Germany. After the fall of France and the Low Countries in the summer of 1940, Britain could offer the United States little more than sympathy and some degree of diplomatic support in the Far East, while the Netherlands and France, with rich colonial possessions within reach of Japan's avid grasp, could provide no real opposition to Japan's demands. After Hitler's attack on Russia in June 1941, the Soviet Union, which had actually fought Japanese forces in the Far East in 1938 and again in 1939, could exert no pressure on Japan to deter further Nipponese aggression. Thus, by the summer of 1941, Japan was ready for new advances in the Far East, and only the United States was in a position to resist.

     This situation was complicated by the domestic political divisions within the United States and Japan. In general, these divisions tended to postpone any showdown between the two Powers. On the one hand, the American government had developed a fissure between its military strategic plans and its diplomatic activities, just at the time when isolationist opinion within the country was making its most vociferous objections to the Administration's policies in both these fields. On the other hand, the Japanese government was by no means united, either on the direction or on the timing of its next moves.

     The divisions in public opinion within the United States and even within the Roosevelt Administration are obvious enough to Americans, but the equally great divisions in Japan are largely ignored. It should be recognized by Americans today, as it was recognized by the Japanese leaders at the time, that the Japanese aggressions of 1941 which culminated in the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7th were based on fear and weakness and not on arrogance and strength. To be sure, the earlier aggressions which began in Manchuria in 1931 and in North China in 1937 had been arrogant enough. The Japanese had been supremely confident of their ability to conquer all China, if necessary, even as late as 1939. As a consequence, their advance had been accompanied hy brutality against the Chinese, by various actions to drive all Europeans and all European economic enterprises out of China, and by insults and humiliations to Europeans found in China, especially in Shanghai.

     By 1939 all of this was beginning to change. The attack on China had bogged down completely. The Japanese economy was beginning to totter under a combination of circumstances, including the exhausting effort to strangle China and to administer a fatal blow to the retreating Chinese government by octopus tactics, the reorganization of Japan's home industry from a light basis to a heavy industrial plant (for which Japan lacked the necessary resources), the gigantic capital investment in Manchuria and North China, the growing restrictions on Japanese trade imposed by Western countries, and, finally, the combination of a rapidly growing population with acute material shortages. Problems such as these might have driven many nations, even in the West, to desperate action. In Japan the situation was made more critical by the large-scale diversion of manpower and resources from consumption to capital formation at a very high rate. And, finally, all this was taking place in a country which placed a high esteem on military arrogance.

     In theory, of course, Japan might have sought to remedy its material shortages in a peaceful way, by seeking to increase Japan's foreign trade, exporting increasing amounts of Japanese goods to pay for rising Japanese imports. In fact, such a policy had obvious weaknesses. The world depression after 1929 and the growth of economic autarchy in all countries, including the United States, made it very difficult to increase Japanese exports. The excessively high American Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930, although not so intended, seemed to the Japanese to be an aggressive restriction on their ability to live. The "imperial preference" regulations of the British Commonwealth had a similar consequence. Since Japan could not defend itself against such economic measures, it resorted to political measures. To do otherwise would have been contrary to Japanese traditions. But, by embarking on this course, Japan was heading in a direction which could hardly have a favorable outcome. If Japan adopted political measures to defend itself against economic restrictions, the Western Powers would inevitably defend themselves with even greater economic restrictions on Japan, driving Japan, by a series of such stages, to open war. And, in such a war, in view of its economic weakness, Japan could hardly hope to win. These stages were confused and delayed over a full decade of years (1931-1941), by indecision and divided counsels in both Japan and the Western Powers. In the process Japan found a considerable advantage in the parallel aggressions of Italy and Germany. It also found a considerable disadvantage in the fact that Japan's imports were vital necessities to her, while her exports were vital necessities to no one. This meant that Japan's trade could he cut off or reduced by anyone, to Japan's great injury, but at much smaller cost to the other nation.

     The steps leading to open war between Japan and the Western Powers were delayed by the long-drawn indecision of the Sino-Japanese War. For years Japan hoped to find a solution for its economic and social problems in a decisive victory over China, while in the same years the Western Powers hoped for an end to Japanese aggression by a Japanese defeat in China. Instead, the struggle in that area dragged on without a decision. The Western Powers were too divided at home and among themselves, too filled with pacifism and mistaken political and economic ideas to do anything decisive about China, especially when open war was impossible and anything less than war would injure China as well as Japan. Thus, no sanctions were imposed on Japan for its aggression on Manchuria in 1931 or for its attack on North China in 1937. The American Neutrality Act was not applied to this conflict because President Roosevelt adopted the simple legalistic expedient of failing to "find" a war in the Far East. But the mere existence of laws which might have imposed economic sanctions or economic retaliation on Japan revealed to that country the basic weakness of its own position.

     In 1937 Japan received a series of lessons in the precarious state of its strategic-economic position. In the first half of that year, as background for its growing military pressure on China, Japan bought a record amount of American scrap iron and steel, 1.3 million metric tons in six months. Agitation to curtail this supply, either by applying the Neutrality Act to the Sino-Japanese conflict or by some lesser action, was growing in the United States. Early in October 1937, President Roosevelt caused a controversy by a speech suggesting a "quarantine" of aggressor nations. Isolationist sentiment in the United States, especially in the Midwest, was too strong to allow the administration to take any important steps toward such a "quarantine." Nevertheless, Stimson, who had been American secretary of state at the time of the Manchurian crisis in 1931, made a public appeal for an embargo on the shipment of war materials to Japan. A month later, November 3-24, 1937, a conference of the signers of the Nine-Power Treaty of 1922, which guaranteed the integrity of China, met at Brussels to discuss what steps might be taken to end Japan's aggression in China. There was considerable talk of economic sanctions, but no Great Power was willing to light the fuse on that stick of dynamite, so the occasion lapsed, and nothing was done. But the lesson was not wasted on Japan; it intensified its efforts to build up Japanese power to a position where it could use political action to defend itself against any economic reprisals. Naturally, the political actions it took in this direction served only to hasten economic reprisals against itself, especially by the United States, the world's most devoted defender of the status quo in the Far East and the only Great Power in any position, especially after Hitler's attacks, to adopt an active policy against Japan.

     Japan could have achieved little toward a political solution of its problems if it had not been for the aggressions of Italy and Germany on the other side of the world. A full year before the Brussels Conference, on November 25, 1936, Japan had joined the league of aggressors known as the Anti-Comintern Pact. Discussions seeking to strengthen this arrangement into a full German-Japanese alliance went on for years, but were not concluded until September 1940.

     Hitler was not sure whether he wanted Japanese support against the Western democracies or against the Soviet Union, and, accordingly, sought an agreement which could be swung either way, while Japan was interested in a German alliance only if it ran against the Soviet Union. At the same time, Germany objected to the Japanese war on China, since this prevented Japan's strength from being directed against either of Germany's possible foes, and jeopardized German economic interests in China. All these difficulties continued, although Ribbentrop's advent to the post of foreign minister in Berlin in February 1938 inaugurated a period of wholehearted cooperation with Japan in China, replacing Neurath's earlier efforts to maintain some kind of neutral balance in the Sino-Japanese War. The German military advisers with Chiang Kai-shek were withdrawn, although some of them had been in their positions for ten years and were likely to be replaced by Soviet advisers; the German ambassador was withdrawn from China, and the protection of German interests was generally left to lesser officials, using Japanese officials in areas under Japanese occupation; the Japanese regime in Manchukuo was explicitly recognized (20 February 1938); all shipments of German war materials to China (which reached a value of almost 83 million marks in 1937) were ended, and in-completed contracts totaling 282 million marks were canceled; the Japanese claim that their attack on Nationalist China was really an anti-Communist action, although recognized as a fraud in Berlin, was tacitly accepted; and the earlier German efforts to mediate peace between China and Japan ceased.

     In spite of these concessions, Japan continued its efforts to curtail German economic enterprises in China, along with those of other Western nations. The alienation of these two aggressor countries by the summer of 1939 can be judged by the fact that the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact of August 1939 was made in flagrant violation of the German-Japanese Anti-Comintern Agreement of November 1936, since this latter document bound the signers to make no political agreements with the Soviet Union without the previous consent of the other signatory state. This was regarded in Tokyo as such a blow to the prestige of the Japanese government that the prime minister resigned.

     In the meantime the American government began to tighten the economic pincers on Japan just as Japan was seeking to tighten its military pincers on China. In the course of 1939 Japan was able to close all the routes from the outside into China except through Hong Kong, across French Indochina, and along the rocky and undeveloped route from Burma to Chungking. The American government retaliated with economic warfare. In June 1938 it established a "moral embargo" on the shipment of aircraft or their parts and bombs to Japan by simply requesting American citizens to refuse to sell these articles. Early in 1939 large American and British loans to China sought to strengthen that country's collapsing financial system. In September 1939 Washington gave the necessary six-month notice to cancel the 1911 commercial treaty with Japan; this opened the door to all kinds of economic pressure against Japan. At the same time, the "moral embargo" was extended to eleven named raw materials which were vital to Japan's war machine. In December this embargo was extended to cover light metals and all machinery or plans for making aviation gasoline.

     In general, there was considerable pressure in the United States, both inside the administration and elsewhere, to increase American economic sanctions against Japan. Such a policy was opposed by the isolationists in the country, by our diplomatic agents in Tokyo, and by our quasi-allies, Britain, France, and the Netherlands. These diverse opinions agreed that economic sanctions could be enforced, in the long run, only by war. To put it bluntly, if Japan could not get petroleum, bauxite, rubber, and tin by trade, it could be prevented from seizing areas producing these products only by force. To avoid this obvious inference, Cordell Hull sought to make America's economic policy ambiguous so that Japan might be deterred from evil actions by fear of sanctions not yet imposed and won to conciliatory actions by hopes of concessions not yet granted. Such a policy was a mistake, but it obtained President Roosevelt's explicit approval in December 1939. It was a mistake, since it paralyzed the less aggressive elements in Japanese affairs, allowing the more aggressive elements to take control, because the uncertainty it engendered became so unbearable to many, even of the less aggressive, that any drastic action seeking to end the strain became welcome; there was no real faith in America's intentions, with the result that the period of sustained uncertainty came to be interpreted in Japan as a period of American rearmament preliminary to an attack on Japan, and the ambiguity of American commercial policy toward Japan was, over the months of 1940-1941, slowly resolved in the direction of increasing economic sanctions. There was a steady increase in America's economic pressure on Japan by extensions of the "moral embargo," by the growth of financial obstacles, and by increasing purchasing difficulties, presumably based on America's rearmament program..

     Japan continued to advance in China with brusque disregard of Western interests, citizens, or property. By the end of 1939, Japan controlled all the chief cities, river valleys, and railroad lines of eastern China, but faced constant guerrilla opposition in rural areas and had no control over the deep interior of China, which remained loyal to Chiang Kai-shek's government in far-off Chungking on the Upper Yangtze in southwestern China. In March 1940 the Japanese set up a puppet Chinese government at Nanking, but the reality of its power deceived no one.

     In the winter of 1939-1940, Japan began to make vigorous commercial demands on the Netherlands East Indies. These demands, chiefly concerned with petroleum and bauxite, were increased after the German victories in France and the Low Countries. From these victories and from Hull's doctrinaire refusal to encourage any Japanese hope that they could win worthwhile American concessions from a more moderate policy, the advocates of extremism in Japan gained influence. A Japanese demand was made on France, following the latter's defeat by Germany, to allow Japanese troops to enter northern Indochina, in order to cut off supplies going to China. This was conceded at once by the Vichy government. At the same time (June 1940), Britain received a demand to withdraw its troops from Shanghai and close the Burma Road to Chinese imports. When Hull refused to cooperate with Britain, either in forcing Japan to desist or in any policy aiming to win better Japanese behavior by concessions, Britain withdrew from Shanghai and closed the Burma Road for three months.

     Just at that moment a powerful new weapon against Japan was added to the American arsenal, by an amendment to the National Defense Act giving the President authority to embargo the export of supplies which he judged to be necessary to the defense of the United States. The first presidential order under this new authority required licenses for many goods which Japan needed, including aluminum, airplane parts, all arms or munitions, optical supplies, and various "strategic" materials, but left petroleum and scrap iron unhindered.

     As France was falling in June 1940, Roosevelt, for reasons of domestic policy, added to his Cabinet two leaders of the Republican Party, Henry L. Stimson and Frank C. Knox; both of these were interventionists in behalf of Britain, while Stimson, for years, had been demanding economic sanctions against Japan, assuring the more cautious of his audience that such a policy would bring about a Japanese retreat rather than any war. The error in this point of view was clearly revealed at Pearl Harbor in December 1941, but the exact nature of the error is not always recognized.

     The real error in the American negotiations with Japan in 1940-1941 was a double one. On the one hand, there was no correlation between our demands on Japan and our actual power in the Pacific, since our demands were vastly more extensive than our strength. On the other hand, there was no correlation between our strategic plans and our diplomatic activity, with the consequence that there was no correlation between our German policy and our Japanese policy. The American strategic plans were based on the premise that Germany must be defeated before Japan. From this perfectly correct premise followed several corollaries which were not fully grasped by American leaders, especially by the nonmilitary leaders. One of these corollaries provided that America must not get into war with Japan before it got into war with Germany, for, if it did so, it would either have to abandon its strategic plans and proceed to fight Japan or declare war on Germany itself. The much greater danger from Germany, and especially from a German victory over either Britain or the Soviet Union, made the first of these unacceptable, while American public opinion would never have accepted an American declaration of war against Germany when we were already in a state of war with Japan. A second corollary from all these conditions was that American diplomatic pressure on Japan must be timed in terms of American-German relations and not in terms of American-Japanese relations in order to avoid pushing Japan into desperate action before American-German relations had passed the breaking point.

     As we shall see, American diplomatic pressure on Japan was increased on the basis of moral outrage, high-flown principles, incidental retaliation, and an unrealistic conception of international legality, without any attempt to coordinate this pressure either with our relations to Germany or, what was even worse, with our actual power in the Pacific. Hull was able to do this because his attitudes were generally shared by the civilian heads of the two service departments, by Stimson as secretary of war, and by Knox as secretary of the navy; thus the more realistic views of the military and naval leaders, and their better appreciation of the implications of America's strategic plans, did not have their proper weight on America's policy-making on the Cabinet level or even at the White House. Fortunately, America was saved from many of the consequences of these errors when Hitler made his greatest mistake by declaring war on the United States.

     By the beginning of 1941, the Japanese attack on China had bogged down and was in such imminent danger of collapse that something drastic had to be done. But there was no agreement within Japan as to what direction such drastic action should take. A timid majority existed, even within the Japanese government itself, which would have been willing to withdraw from the Chinese "incident" if this could have been done without too great "loss of face." On the whole, this group was timid and ineffectual because of the danger of assassination by the extreme militarists and hyper-nationalist groups within Japan. Moreover, it was impossible to reach any agreement with the Chinese Nationalist government which would allow Japan to retain its "face" by covering a real withdrawal from China with an apparent diplomatic triumph of some sort.

     The advocates of an aggressive policy in Japan were divided among the insignificant group who still believed that an all-out assault on China could be brought to a successful conclusion and the more influential groups who would have sought to redeem the stalemate in China by shifting the offensive against either Soviet Siberia or the rich Anglo-Dutch possessions of Malaysia and Indonesia. In the long run, the group which advocated a drive to the south was bound to prevail, because Malaysia and Indonesia were obviously weak and rich, while Soviet Siberia lacked those items (such as petroleum, rubber, or tin) which Japan most urgently needed, and it had demonstrated its power in the battles of 1938-1939. Germany, which originally encouraged the Japanese to move southward against British Malaysia and then, when it was too late, sought to redirect the Japanese blow against Siberia, played an insignificant role in Japan's policy. The decision to move southward, where the defense was weaker and the prizes so much greater, was made in an ambiguous and halfhearted way in the summer of 1941. The critical turning point was probably during the last week in July.

     During the six-week period, March 12-April 22, Matsuoka, the fire-eating foreign minister, was absent from Tokyo on a visit to Berlin and to Moscow. In the German capital he was advised to make no political agreements with the Soviet Union, because of the imminent approach of war between that country and Germany. Matsuoka at once went to Moscow, where he signed a Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact on April 13, 1941. In the meantime, in March, Japanese diplomats won special economic concessions in Siam, while in June the nine-month-old trade discussions with the Netherlands East Indies broke down without Nippon obtaining any of the concessions it desired. These agreements, if obtained, might have put Japan in a position where it could have withstood a total American petroleum embargo. Failure to obtain these meant that Japan's large oil reserves would continue to decrease to the point where Japan would be militarily helpless from total lack of oil. America could accelerate this process either by curtailing the supply of oil or by forcing Japan into actions which would increase the rate of its consumption. Japanese oil production in 1941 was only three million barrels a year compared to a consumption rate of about 3z million barrels a year. Reserves, which had been 55 million barrels in December 1939, were below 50 million in September 1941, and fell to about 43 million by Pearl Harbor.

     On July 21, 1941, Japan's threats won from Vichy France the right to move troops into southern Indochina. This was a threat to British Malaya rather than to the Burma Road in China. Within a week, on July 26, 1941, the United States froze all Japanese financial assets in the United States, virtually ending trade between the two countries. The members of the British Commonwealth issued similar orders, while the Netherlands Indies established special licenses for all exports to Japan. No licenses were issued for vital commodities like oil or bauxite. In the same week, an American military mission went to China, and the Philippine Army was incorporated into the American Army.

     As a result of these pressures, Japan found itself in a position where its oil reserves would be exhausted in two years, its aluminum reserves in seven months. The chief of the General Staff of the Japanese Navy told the emperor that if Japan resorted to a war to break this blockade it would be very doubtful that it could win. The president of the Japanese Planning Board confirmed this gloomy opinion. The armed forces insisted that Japan had a choice between a slow decline to extinction under economic pressure or war which might allow it to break out of its predicament. The navy had little hope of victory in such a war, but agreed with this analysis. It was also agreed that war, if it came, must begin before the middle of December, when weather conditions would become too adverse to permit amphibious belligerent operations; it was clear that economic pressure was too damaging to allow Japan to postpone such operations until the resumption of good weather in 1942. Accordingly, the decision was made to make war in 1941, but to continue negotiations with the United States until late October. If an agreement could be reached by that date, the preparations for war could be suspended; otherwise the negotiations would be ended and the advance to open war continued. Matsuoka, the foreign minister, who was opposed to continuing the negotiations with the United States, was dropped from the Cabinet on July 16th; from that date on, the civilian portion of the Cabinet desperately sought to reach an agreement in Washington, while the military portion calmly prepared for war.

     In the course of 1941, Japan's preparations for war were gradually expanded from a project to close the southern routes into China by an attack on Malaya, to an attack on the United States. The decision to close the Burma Road by force meant that Japan must move into French Indochina and Siam, and cross British Malaya, after neutralizing the British naval base at Singapore. Such a movement had numerous disadvantages. It would mean war with Britain; it would leave the Japanese lines of communication southward open to a flank attack from American bases in the Philippines; it was doubtful if China could be defeated even when all Western supplies were cut off (after all, these supplies were so insignificant that in 1940 American arms and munitions to China were worth only $9 million); even a total defeat of China would leave Japan's material shortages acute, especially in respect to the greatest material need, petroleum products. In view of these disadvantages, under which Japan would expend so much to gain so little, it seemed to many Japanese leaders that very considerable gains could he obtained with only a slight additional effort if an attack on the rich Netherlands Indies were combined with the attack on Malaya and the Burma Road. Such an advance to the tin and bauxite of Malaya and to the oil of the Dutch Indies had every advantage over any alternative possibility, such as an attack on eastern Siberia, especially as the Japanese Army (but not the Navy) had a higher opinion of Soviet power than they had of Anglo-American strength.

     Having given the attack on Malaya and Indonesia the preference over any possible attack on Siberia, the Japanese leaders accepted the fact that this would mean war with Britain and the United States. In this they were probably not wrong, although some Americans have claimed that America would not have gone to war if Japan had passed by the Philippines and left other American territories untouched on its road to the south. It is certainly true that such actions would have touched off a violent controversy within the United States between the isolationists and the interventionists, but it seems almost certain that the policies of the Roosevelt Administration would have been carried out, and these policies included plans for war against Japan's southern movement even if American areas were not attacked. In any case, judging American reactions in terms of their own, the Japanese decided that an American flank attack from an untouched Philippines on their extended communications to the southward would be too great a risk to run; accordingly, an attack on the Philippines to prevent this was included in the Japanese plans for their southern movement.

     This decision led at once to the next step, the project to attack the American fleet at Pearl Harbor on the grounds that an inevitable war with the United States could be commenced most effectively with a surprise attack on the American Navy rather than by waiting for an intact American fleet to come to seek out the Japanese in their zones of active operations in the southwestern Pacific. It must be recognized that one of the chief factors impelling the Japanese to make the attack on Pearl Harbor was that few Japanese (and these mostly in the army) had any hope that Japan could defeat the United States in any war carried to a decisive conclusion. Rather, it was hoped that, by crippling the American fleet at Pearl Harbor, Japan could conquer such a large area of the southwestern Pacific and southeastern Asia that peace could be negotiated on favorable terms. Here, once again, the Japanese misjudged American psychology.

     The negotiations in Washington between Kichisaburo Nomura and Secretary Hull were among the strangest diplomatic discussions ever carried on. Although Nomura probably was not informed of the Japanese plans to make war, he could not have failed to infer them because he had received instructions that he must reach an agreement hy late October if peace were to be preserved. He found it impossible to reach such an agreement because Hull's demands were extreme, and his own superiors in Tokyo were unwilling to make any political concessions to win a relaxation of economic restrictions.

     The Americans had a clear view of the situation because they had broken the secret Japanese codes and generally had Nomura's instructions from Tokyo before he did. Thus the Americans knew that Nomura had no powers to yield on any vital political issue, that he had been given a deadline in October, and that war would begin if he failed to obtain relaxation of the economic embargo before that deadline. They did not, however, have any details on the Japanese military plans, since these were not communicated by radio, and they did not realize that these plans included an attack on Pearl Harbor. In the course of November American Naval Intelligence knew that Japanese armed forces were mobilizing and moving southward; by November 20th it became clear that a task force of the navy, including four of the largest Japanese aircraft carriers, had vanished. At the end of November intercepted Japanese messages showed clearly that the negotiations were no longer of significance. In early December these showed that the Japanese Embassy in Washington had been ordered to destroy all its codes and to prepare its staff for departure.

     The negotiations between Hull and Nomura were lengthy, technical, and hopeless. In essence they boiled down to the conclusion that America would not relax its economic restrictions on Japan unless (1) Japan promised to refrain from acts of force in the southwest Pacific area; (2) Japan agreed to violate its treaty with Germany to permit the United States to support Britain even to the point of war with Germany without any Japanese intervention on the side of Germany; and (3) that Japan would agree to withdraw its armed forces from Indochina and from China and restore equality of economic opportunity in the latter country on a schedule to be worked out later.

     When it became clear on October 15, 1941, that agreement was impossible, Hideki Tojo, leader of the activist military group in Japan, forced Prince Fumimaro Konoye to resign. The new Cabinet had General Tojo as Premier, Minister of the Army, and Minister of Home Affairs (controlling domestic police). This was clearly a war government, but the negotiations continued in Washington.

     On November 10th operations orders were issued to the Japanese Navy to destroy the American fleet in Pearl Harbor on December 7th. Orders had already been issued to conquer Thailand, Malaya, the Philippines, Borneo, and Sumatra; the rest of the Netherlands East Indies were to be taken in a second movement and all the conquered areas enclosed in a defensive perimeter to run from the Japanese Kurile Islands, through Wake Island and the Marshall Islands, along the southern and western edges of Timor, Java, and Sumatra, to the Burma-India border. By November 20th the American defensive forces knew that Japan was about to strike but still felt that the blow would he southward.

     On November 27th a war warning was sent from Washington to Pearl Harbor, but no changes were made there for increased precautions or a higher level of alertness. Fortunately, the three carriers of the American Pacific Fleet were not in Pearl Harbor on the morning of the attack, but the Japanese had detailed anchorage sites for the vessels which were there, including seven battleships and seven cruisers. The Japanese attack force consisted of six carriers with 450 planes escorted by two battleships, two cruisers, eleven destroyers, twenty regular submarines, and five midget submarines. This force, in complete radio silence and without encountering any other vessels, sailed in 1 l days in a great northward circle from the Kuriles to a point 275 miles north of Pearl Harbor. From that point, at 6:00 A. M. on December 7, 1941, was launched an air strike of 360 planes, including 40 torpedo planes, 100 bombers, 130 dive-bombers, and go fighters. The five midget submarines, dropped from larger submarines, were already operating at Pearl Harbor and were able to enter because the anti-torpedo net was carelessly left open after 4:58 A. M. on December 7th. These submarines were detected at 3:42 before they entered the harbor, but no warning was sent until 6:54 after one had been attacked and sunk.

     About the same time, an army enlisted man, using radar, detected a group of strange planes coming down from the north 132 miles away, but his report was disregarded. At 7.30 an enlisted sailor noticed two dozen planes about a mile over his ship hut did not report it. In the next half-hour these early arrivals from the Japanese carriers were joined by others, and at 7:55 the attack began. Within thirty minutes the Battle Line of the Pacific Fleet had been wiped out. The American losses included 2,400 men killed, almost 1,200 wounded, four battleships sunk with three others hardly damaged, many other vessels sunk or damaged, and hundreds of planes destroyed on the grounds. The greatest damage was inflicted by special shallow-water torpedoes launched from planes which came in below the 100-foot altitude. In all, the Japanese losses were small, amounting to no more than a couple of dozen planes, because the surprise was so great. The Japanese fleet was not found after the attack, because the search order was issued 180 degrees off direction through an error in interpretation.

     Pearl Harbor was but one of several attacks made by the Japanese in their opening assaults on December 7th-10th. Air attacks on Wake Island, Midway Island, Guam, the Philippines, and Malaya destroyed hundreds of planes, mostly on the ground, and set fire to large stores of supplies. Lack of antiaircraft facilities, inadequate air power and fields, and carelessness by higher officers transformed the defenders' situations from critical to hopeless, although personal bravery and resourcefulness made the Japanese pay heavily for their gains.

     Midway Island, 1,300 miles northwest of Honolulu and linked to it hy a very important cable, survived a hit-and-run attack of December 8, 1941, and hy 1942 was America's westernmost base, especially valuable for planes, submarines, and reconnaissance. Wake Island, 1,200 miles southwest of Midway, was struck on December 8th and surrendered on December 23rd after a heavy two-day assault. Guam, 1,500 miles west of Wake and in the midst of the Japanese-mandated Mariana Islands, was invaded at the beginning and gave up on December loth. The Philippines, 3,ooo miles west of Wake, were attacked by landings at nine points in the seventeen days before Christmas; by December 27th the Japanese had compelled the American ground forces to evacuate Manila and to retire into their last defense areas, the rocky caves of the island of Corregidor and the forests of the Bataan Peninsula. Savage fighting continued until May 6, 1942, when the last American forces on Corregidor surrendered. The commanding officers, General Douglas MacArthur and Admiral Thomas Hart, had already withdrawn to Australia.

     Fifteen hundred miles wrest of the Philippines, a Japanese army invaded Thailand from Indochina, and on December 8th captured Bangkok without a struggle. About the same time Japanese landings were made on the Malay Peninsula north of Singapore. When the British battle cruiser Repulse and the new battleship Prince of Wales ventured north without air cover (since their accompanying carrier, Indomitable, ran aground), they were sunk by Japanese land-based planes (December loth). These were the only Allied capital ships west of Pearl Harbor. But the event had much more significance than this. It showed that the capital ship was no longer the mistress of the seas, as it had been for at least two generations, and, by doing so, it showed that the American losses at Pearl Harbor, concentrated as they were on battleships, were not nearly so important as they had seemed to be. But, even more significant, these sinkings off the east coast of Malaya marked the end of British supremacy on the seas which had begun with the destruction of the Spanish Armada in 1588. For the next two years supremacy on the seas was in dispute, but at the end of that time the decision was falling clearly in favor of a new champion, the United States.

     Fanning outward as they spread over the southwestern Pacific and southeastern Asia, the Japanese forces captured Hong Kong on December 25, 1941 and advanced on Singapore across the swamps on its landward side. This great naval base, the bastion of all British power in the Far East, had to surrender on February 15, 1942, without even being able to defend itself, its great guns, aimed seaward at an army which never came, being completely useless against the Japanese who crept up on it from the landward side.

     Lying north of Australia in a great curve from Singapore to New Guinea was the Malay Barrier, originally intended to form the southern perimeter of the Japanese defense area. Like beads on a necklace across a distance of 3,500 miles were stretched dozens of islands: Sumatra, Java, Bali, Lumbok, Flores, Timor, New Guinea, and others. These were taken so rapidly by the Japanese octopus that the straits between the various islands were closed before some Allied ships could escape through to the south. Five Allied cruisers and many destroyers were caught in this way and sunk in the week of February 26, 1942; Sumatra, Java, and Timor surrendered by March 8th; and Netherlands forces were wiped out, British forces withdrew to Ceylon, and the few surviving American vessels limped home for repairs. Rangoon, the Burmese capital, surrendered on March 8th, and exactly a month later the triumphant Japanese naval forces swept westward to strike at Ceylon. In the first week of April, Holy Week of 1942, Japanese Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, who had led the attack on Pearl Harbor, made a similar attack on Ceylon, sinking the British carrier Hermes, two heavy cruisers, and many lesser vessels (including 136,000 tons of merchant ships).

     At this dark moment, mid-April of 1942, the tide of battle in the Pacific began to turn. The three American aircraft carriers which had been spared at Pearl Harbor (Lexington, Enterprise, and Saratoga) were joined by one of the two carriers from the Atlantic (Yorktown). These, with cruisers, destroyers, submarines, and supply ships, became nuclei for "task forces" which relentlessly prowled the Pacific. On April 2, 1942, the new carrier Hornet, with sixteen United States Army Mitchell bombers (B-25's) wedged on its deck, sailed from San Francisco with a message for Tokyo. Escorted by the Enterprise Task Force to a point 850 miles from the Japanese capital (and thus 2,100 miles from their assigned landing fields in China) the sixteen B-25's were taken off the plunging deck of the carrier by their army crews of eighty men led by Lieutenant Colonel James H. Doolittle. Four hours later they dumped sixteen tons of bombs on the Japanese capital, and continued westward to China. Fifteen planes crashed in China after running out of gasoline, while the sixteenth found internment in Siberia. With Chinese help, seventy-one of eighty crew members returned to America. The whole episode was more spectacular than fruitful, but it did give a great boost to American morale, and frightened the Japanese so badly that they kept four Japanese air groups in Japan for defense.

     During this period of the war the United States had amazingly correct information regarding Japanese war plans. Some of this came from our control over the Japanese codes, but much of the most critical intelligence came from other sources which have never been revealed. Through these channels, while Admiral William Halsey was still en route back from the Tokyo raid with two carriers, American naval authorities learned of two Japanese projects. The first of these planned to send an invasion force from Rabaul in New Britain, north of New Guinea, to capture Port Moresby on the southern shore of New Guinea. The second plan hoped to extend the Japanese defense perimeter eastward by seizing the Aleutian Islands and Midway Island in the northern Pacific. The former project was frustrated in the Battle of the Coral Sea, May 7-8, 1942, while the second project was disastrously defeated in the decisive Battle of Midway, June 4, 1942.

     The Coral Sea, brilliantly blue and white, forms a rectangle more than l,000 miles wide from east to west and slightly longer from north to south. Open on the south, it is boxed in on the other three sides with Australia to the west, the New Hebrides and New Caledonia to the east, and New Guinea and the Solomon Islands to the north. On May 8th, as the Japanese invasion force for Port Moresby came into this area from the northwest, it was intercepted by an American task force, including the carriers Lexington and Yorktown. The invasion force was turned back, a small Japanese carrier was sunk, and a large carrier severely damaged, while fires on both American carriers were extinguished. After the battle, however, the Lexington blew apart from gasoline fires ignited by an electric-motor spark deep within its hull.

Chapter 56: The Turning Tide, 1942-1943:Midway, E1 Alamein, French Africa, and Stalingrad

     The Second World War was a gigantic conflict because it was an agglomeration of several wars. Each of these wars had a different turning point, but all of these occurred in the year following the surrender of Corregidor on May 6,1942. The first turning point to be reached, in the war between the United States and Japan, occurred at Midway on June 4, 1942, while the second was reached in the defeat of the Italo-German attack on Egypt on November 2, 1942. The American war on Germany took a turn for the better with the successful American invasion of French North Africa on November 8, 1942, while, at the same time, the crucial struggle between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union reached its turn in the long agony at Stalingrad from November 1942 to February 1943. Needless to say, long and hitter exertions were needed to push the three aggressor states hack from their points of farthest advance.

     The Battle of Midway arose from a Japanese trap which was supposed to destroy the rest of the Pacific Fleet but resulted quite differently. Whatever illusions the Japanese Army may have had, the Japanese Navy fully recognized that it could not possibly win in the Pacific until the American fleet was totally destroyed. To achieve this, a trap was set to draw the fleet out from Pearl Harbor bN7 the threat of a Japanese amphibious invasion of Midway Island from the southwest. When the Americans hurried out to attack this invasion fleet at Midway, they were to have been destroyed by the planes from four Japanese carriers lying in ambush 200 miles northwest of Midway. The ambush was reversed because Admiral Chester Nimitz at Pearl Harbor had a clear picture of the Japanese plans and sent his own carriers out to spring on the Japanese carriers from a point 200 miles northeast of their position.

     The American counter-ambush worked because of a most extraordinary series of fortunate chances. The four Japanese carriers expected the American counterattack to come from Pearl Harbor after several days' delay, and accordingly felt free to use their own carrier planes to bombard the Midway defenses, softening them up for the benefit of the invading force coming up on Midway from the southwest. These bombardment planes had returned from Midway to their carriers and were still feverishly refueling on the flight decks when the American carrier "strike" came in: 116 planes from Enterprise and Hornet were followed shortly after by 35 planes from Yorktown.

     Caught in a horrible tactical position, the Japanese defended so skillfully that 37 out of 41 American torpedo-bombers were lost, hut, as wave after wage of dive-bombers continued to come in, the Japanese defense was "saturated," and soon all four carriers were sinking in flames. Before the fourth Japanese carrier went down, it sent off 40 planes which torpedoed the Yorktown. The American carrier w-as incapacitated and mistakenly abandoned, so that it was easily sunk by a Japanese submarine two days later. This loss, even in combination with the loss of the Lexington in the Coral Sea a month earlier, was a cheap price to pay for the destruction of five Japanese carriers in these two areas in the space of five weeks, since the United States had the industrial capacity to replace its losses, while Japan did not.

     Two events of November 1942, the British victory at El Alamein and the Anglo-American invasion of French North Africa, provided tactical lessons and strategic reversals fully as great as those provided in the Pacific five months earlier. During most of 1942, the British clung to their lifeline across the Mediterranean from Gibraltar to Malta and Egypt by no more than a fingernail's margin. Italo-German submarine and air attacks were steadily intensified. While the whole northern shore of the Mediterranean from Gibraltar to the Aegean was under Axis control or sympathetic to it, the Italian foothold on the southern shore of the Mediterranean in Libya was steadily strengthened, largely by German reinforcements, and German pressure was brought to bear on Vichy France to increase Nazi influence in French North Africa.

     As long as the British were opposed only by Italian forces in the Mediterranean, they were able to keep convoys moving, but on January lo, 1941, the German Air Force intervened in the central Mediterranean with devastating effect. From that point onward, for a period of two years (until May 1943) it was impossible to get a merchant convoy through the Mediterranean from Gibraltar to Alexandria; accordingly, the British imperial forces in Egypt had to be supplied by the longer route around Africa. Even British naval vessels found it difficult to pass through the Mediterranean; in the course of 1941 all the British capital ships and carriers in the central and eastern Mediterranean were sunk or damaged so badly that they had to be withdrawn.

     The island of Malta, situated in the middle of the Axis supply lisle from Italy to Africa, was pulverized from the air for more than nineteen months (until October 1942), and all vessels, even submarines, had to be withdrawn from its harbors. Efforts to replenish its supplies of food and ammunition became suicidal, but had to be continued, as its civilian population stood up magnificently under the pounding and could not be left without supplies by the fighting services. For months at a time, no convoys could get through, but each time supplies approached exhaustion, fragments of a convoy arrived with enough to keep the island fighting a little longer. In June 194 l ten merchant ships from Alexandria and six from Gibraltar were sent simultaneously in order to divide the enemy; although protected by a battleship, two carriers, twelve cruisers and forty-four destroyers, only two of the sixteen cargo vessels arrived at Malta, at a cost of three destroyers and a cruiser sunk and many others damaged. Two months later, when Malta had only a week's supplies left, fourteen very fast merchant vessels were sent from Gibraltar with an escort of two battleships, four carriers, seven cruisers, and twenty-five destroyers. Five badly damaged merchant ships reached Malta with a naval loss of a carrier, two cruisers, and a destroyer sunk, another carrier and two cruisers badly damaged.

     This severe fighting in the central Mediterranean arose from the vital need, by both sides, to control the communications of that area. The northern shore of the Mediterranean Sea, from west to east, was controlled by Franco Spain, by Vichy France, by the Axis, and by Turkey. Spain was pro-Axis but unable, through economic weakness, to intervene in the war until Britain was thoroughly beaten; Vichy France remained ambiguous and a major leak in the economic blockade of Europe until November 1942; Turkey was pro-British but unable to offer anything more than benevolent neutrality. On the southern shore of the Mediterranean, Libya (consisting of Tripolitania in the west and Cyrenaica in the east) was in between Egypt and French North Africa, and could be used as a base to attack either, because of the Axis supply lines from Italy and Sicily. These lines were greatly strengthened by the Axis conquest of Greece and Crete in may and June 1941.

     From this base in Libya the Axis struck at Egypt three times, and were answered by three British counterattacks. These provide the historian with an amazing sequence of movements in which the battle lines surged across Africa between Egypt and French Tunis, a distance of 1,200 miles. T he real struggle was for control of Cyrenaica, and especially for its seaports strung like beads from Benghazi eastward 270 miles by way of Derna and Tobruk to Sollum on the Egyptian frontier. If the Germans could control this stretch, they could use Tobruk as a supply port free from interference from Malta, while, if the British could control it, they could provide air cover for Malta from African fields.

     The first Axis advance, by the Italians under Graziani, went no farther than Sidi Barrโni in Egypt, so miles east of Sollum (September 1940). This was repulsed by an amazing British advance of 500 miles from Sidi Barrโni to E1 Agheila, 150 miles beyond Benghazi (December 1940February 1941). It was to stop this Italian retreat, early in 1941, that the Nazis intervened with an air fleet of 500 planes, under Kesselring, and the famous Afrika Korps, under Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. Rommel, a tactical genius, had three German divisions (two armored and one motorized) supported by seven Italian divisions (six infantry and one armored). By a series of smashing blows, Rommel advanced eastward to Egypt' destroying most of the British armor on the way, but his advance stopped at Sollum in April 1941. Hitler held up most of the supplies going to Rommel because he needed them in Greece, Crete and, later, in Russia. The supply routes to Rommel were very precarious because of British naval attacks out of Alexandria, only 250 miles to the east, and because of an Australian division left in Tobruk, that, although surrounded by Rommel and besieged for months, denied him the use of its port.

     While Rommel's supplies were dwindling and the British Navy was being driven from the central Mediterranean by Axis air power and submarines, the defense of Egypt was being built up by the circum-Africa supply line. Over this 10,000-mile route came 951 light tanks and 13,000 trucks, many of these under Lend-Lease, by the end of 1941. With this equipment General Claude Auchinleck attacked Rommel in November 1941 and in two months relieved Tobruk and forced the Germans back to El Agheila (January 1942). Within a week Rommel counter-attacked and advanced eastward, being stopped forty miles west of Tobruk (mid-February 1942). Both sides rested there, while the Western Powers feverishly built up their supplies in Egypt. At the end of May 1942, Rommel struck again; this time he captured Tobruk and was finally stopped at El Alamein, only sixty miles short of Alexandria, after five days of furious fighting at that point (July 1-5, 1942).

     In August, General Bernard L. Montgomery, later Field Marshal and First Viscount Montgomery of Alamein, replaced General Auchinleck. His forces were equipped with every piece of armament that could be spared from the United States, including 700 two-engine bombers, 1,000 fighting planes, over 400 M-4 Sherman tanks, go new American self-propelled guns, and 25,000 trucks and other vehicles. On October 23rd, while Rommel was absent in Germany, Montgomery attacked the Axis forces at their strongest point, along the coast road, and after twelve days of violent combat broke through the German position. Rommel returned, but could not stop the rout. By November 20th he had lost Benghazi and was still retreating. Worse than that, on November 8th, only four days after El Alamein, Rommel heard that a large-scale American invasion of French North Africa had already landed at three points. These had to be hurled backward, for the German forces could be cut off if the Americans passed Tunis.

     The American invasion of North Africa on November 8, 1942 (Operation Torch) arose as a compromise of quite dissimilar strategic ideas in Moscow, London, and Washington. Stalin was insistent that the Anglo-Americans must open a "second front" in western Europe in 1942 in order to reduce the Nazi pressure on Russia. He was completely unreasonable in his attitude, going so far as to taunt Churchill with cowardice at the Moscow Conference in August 1942. In London there was, indeed, great lack of faith in any possible invasion of Europe; instead, there was hope that the Germans could be brought to terms by air attacks and economic blockade after perhaps ten years; Churchill went a little further by speaking of a possible invasion of the Continent from the Mediterranean through what he mistakenly called the "soft underbelly of the Axis." In Washington the military leaders were convinced, from the earliest stages of the war, that Hitler could not be beaten without a full-scale invasion of western Europe. As early as April 1942, Harry Hopkins and General Marshall appeared in London with plans for an invasion of western Europe by thirty American and eighteen British divisions. The British were very reluctant, but, as Stalin kept insisting on a "second front" in 1942, Roosevelt, on July 25th, obtained, as a compromise, an agreement to invade French North Africa in the autumn of 1942.

     There was hardly time for adequate planning, and no time for adequate training, before the landings were made on November 8th. Although the operation was a joint British-American venture, the British role was little publicized to avoid antagonizing French—especially French naval—feelings, which were still hostile because of the British attacks on Dakar, Oran, and Syria. In addition, a difficult problem arose about the question of political cooperation with the French authorities in North Africa. The British had placed most of their faith in General de Gaulle, but it soon became clear that he had very little support in North Africa, and was too difficult and uncooperative personally to be made part of the invasion plans.

     The Americans, who had maintained diplomatic relations with Vichy, believed it would be necessary to replace the local Vichy leaders as soon as North Africa had been conquered; they pinned their faith on the heroic General Henri Giraud, who had obtained considerable publicity by his spectacular escapes from German prisons in both world wars. Unfortunately, as the invasion proceeded, it was discovered that Giraud had even less influence in North Africa than De Gaulle, especially in the French Navy, which was providing the chief combat resistance to the invasion. Accordingly, in order to stop the fighting, it became necessary to make a deal with Admiral Darlan, who was in North Africa at the time; this deal, which recognized Darlan as the chief political authority in all French North Africa, with Giraud as his commander in chief, has given rise to much controversy. It was argued that the high principles enunciated in our declared war aims, especially in the Atlantic Charter, were being unnecessarily sacrificed by making a deal with an unprincipled Nazi collaborator such as Darlan.

     The deal was justified by its makers, General Mark Clark on behalf of General Eisenhower and Ambassador Robert Murphy on behalf of President Roosevelt, on grounds of military urgency. This argument is rather weak, since Darlan's cease-fire order, made at noon on November 8th, was not obeyed in two combat areas (Morocco and Oran) and obeyed only partially in the third area (Algiers), and by the time the formal deal was made on November 11th, organized fighting by the French forces had ceased everywhere. The additional justification made, to the effect that some kind of legal continuity with the Vichy regime had to be established to avoid French guerrilla resistance, involves too many unknown factors to permit any convincing judgment of its value. It seems weak, since the German reaction to the Allied invasion of North Africa took an anti-French direction which was so drastic that any French resistance to the Americans or British would have been clearly pro-German, and thus most unlikely behavior for any patriotic Frenchmen. In any case, the Darlan deal was soon swallowed up in the swift pace of events, and was personally ended when Darlan was assassinated by his French enemies on December 24th.

     The Anglo-American invasion of North Africa, known as Operation Torch and under the over-all command of General Eisenhower, involved landings at three points: on the Atlantic coast of Morocco near Casablanca by a force coming from North America, and at two points on the Mediterranean coast in Algeria by forces coming from England. The Morocco attack was almost foolhardy, since it involved carrying 35,000 completely inexperienced and inadequately trained troops with 250 tanks, all in 102 vessels, a distance of 4,000 miles across the ocean to make a night landing on a hostile coast. In spite of these obstacles and tenacious French resistance at certain points, the operation Noms a success, and fighting ceased in three days. The other portion of Operation Torch, the landings in Algeria, were on a larger scale, since they involved 49,000 American and 23,000 British troops, and were equally successful. By November 14th the Allies were moving eastward into Tunisia to cut off Rommel's retreat from the east, and by November 28th they were only twelve miles from Tunis. From that point they were hurled backward by the Germans.

     Hitler's reactions to Torch were vigorous. All France was occupied by Nazi forces; his efforts to capture the French fleet at Toulon were frustrated when most of the vessels were scuttled at their anchorages or were sunk trying to escape from the harbor; as early as November loth, German airborne troops, with Laval's blessings, were occupying Tunisia. These German forces held up the Allied advance from the west, inflicting a bitter defeat on the American forces at the Kasserine Pass in February 1943. In this way Rommel, who had been forced out of El Agheila by Montgomery on December 13th, was able to withdraw westward into Tunisia and take a stand along the Mareth Line below Gab่s in southeastern Tunisia in February.

     During the third week in January 1943, Roosevelt, Churchill, and their staffs met in secret conference at Casablanca. Once again the Americans had to struggle against English reluctance to commit themselves to any "cross-Channel" invasion of Europe, to any offensive against Japan or, indeed, to any long-range planning. From the compromises of the conference emerged agreement to postpone any cross-Channel operation, to keep up pressure on Germany in Europe by air attacks, and to allow the United States to take any offensive actions against Japan which would not jeopardize the priority still given to the defeat of Germany. Two other decisions were to proceed to the military occupation of Sicily and to demand the "unconditional surrender" of the three totalitarian Powers. Naturally, the military decision on Sicily was kept secret, but the political decision on unconditional surrender was published with great fanfare, and at once initiated a controversy which still continues.

     The controversy over unconditional surrender is based on the belief that the expression itself is largely meaningless and had an adverse influence by discouraging any hopes within the Axis countries that they could find a way out by slackening their efforts, by revolting against their governments, or by negotiations seeking some kind of "conditional" surrender. There seems to be little doubt that the demand for unconditional surrender was incompatible with earlier statements that we were fighting the German, Japanese, and Italian governments rather than the German, Japanese, and Italian peoples and that this demand, by destroying this distinction, to some extent solidified our enemies and prolonged their resistance, especially in Italy and Japan, where opposition to the war was widespread and active. Even in Germany the demand for unconditional surrender discouraged those more moderate and peace-loving Germans upon which our postwar policy toward Germany must be based and, in fact, has been based. But in 1943, and for most of the duration of the war, the Allied Powers had neither time nor inclination to look ahead toward any postwar policy with respect to Germany, and issued the demand for unconditional surrender without any analysis of its possible effects on the enemy peoples, either during the war or after it was over. The demand for unconditional surrender was made, rather, as a morale booster for the Allied Powers themselves, and in this function it may well have had some slight influence at the time.

     As the Allied leaders were conferring in Casablanca after turning back the German assault in Africa, Soviet forces were inflicting an even greater defeat on Hitler in eastern Europe. Hitler's Russian campaign of 1942 was very similar to that of 1941 except that his original plan was restricted to a single aim: to capture the oil fields of the Caucasus. The German forces, consisting of 44 infantry, 10 armored, and 6 motorized divisions, along with 43 satellite divisions and 7oo planes, were to drive along the north shore of the Black Sea, pass through a congested bottleneck at Rostov, and capture the Soviet oil fields (the chief of which, at Baku, was 700 miles beyond Rostov). To protect the long northern flank of this drive, other German attacks were ordered farther north toward Voronezh and toward Stalingrad on the Volga River. The German offensive did reach the Caucasus, advancing almost as far as Grozny (400 miles beyond Rostov), but did not capture the chief oil fields. As in the 1941 offensive, scores of Soviet divisions were destroyed and hundreds of thousands of Soviet prisoners were captured, but no vital injury was inflicted on the Soviet Union.

     Suddenly, on July 18th, after seven weeks of advance, Hitler ordered the capture of Stalingrad. Since all the available armored forces had been put into the Caucasus offensive, where they uselessly clogged up Rostov, the attack on Stalingrad could not begin until September 12th. After two months of savage house-to-house fighting, the Germans had possession of almost all the city, but it had been completely demolished. In late November, Russian counteroffensives north and south of Stalingrad broke through Romanian armies on either side of the German Sixth Army and joined together on its rear. Hitler forbade any retreat or any effort by the Sixth Army to fight its way westward out of the trap. Instead he undertook to supply the Sixth Army from the air until new German forces could break in to relieve it. The surrounded Sixth Army consisted of 20 divisions, about 270,000 men, including 3 armored and 3 motorized divisions. Although a force of this size required about 1,500 tons of supplies each day, the Luftwaffe was never able to deliver as much as 200 tons a day, and lost about 300 planes in the effort. Nor could the German forces to the west, although only 4o miles away, fight their w av in to the Sixth Army..

     While this was going on at Stalingrad from December 1942 through January 1943, another Soviet offensive, striking down from the northeast toward Rostov, was trying to cut off the whole German force in the Caucasus by capturing the city of Rostov and thus closing the bottleneck north of the Sea of Azov. The German withdrawal from the Caucasus began on the first day of 1943. With extraordinary skill the Germans succeeded in keeping the Rostov passage open, although hy January 23rd it was no more than 3o miles wide. The German Sixth Army at Stalingrad, although frozen, starved, and hardly able to fight for lack of supplies, was not permitted to surrender because, as soon as it did so, the three Soviet armies which had surrounded it would be freed to drive west and close the Rostov passage. On January 23rd General Friedrich von Paulus, commanding the Sixth Army, accepted Hitler's radio order to fight to the last man in order to gain time. A week later Hitler promoted him to field marshal, and two days later he surrendered. Of 270,000 Germans originally surrounded, over 100,000 were dead, 34,000 had been evacuated by air, and 93,000 surrendered. Ten days after Paulus's surrender, the Germans abandoned Rostov. For the next two weeks it looked as if a new Soviet offensive from Voronezh might cut off the whole of German Army Group South, but Field Marshal von Manstein succeeded in reestablishing a stable defensive line by April 1st, just about at the line where the German offensive of 194Z had begun eleven months earlier. But, in that eleven months, Hitler had lost about 38 German divisions, an equal number of satellite divisions, had reduced all German divisions from nine battalions to six, had failed to capture the Caucasus oil fields, Moscow, or Leningrad, and had not been able to cut the Murmansk railway.

     Over that railway, and by other routes, a growing flood of American supplies was flowing to the Soviet armies. By October 1942, 85,000 trucks had arrived, with the result that the Soviet Army from that date to the end of the war had greater mobility than the Germans. Luftwaffe forces on the eastern front had 2,000 planes in the campaign of 1941, 1,300 at the opening of the campaign of 1942, and could hardly be kept at l,000 after the end of that campaign. Allied pressure in the w est made it necessary to reduce the portion of the German Air Force allotted to the east, with the result that Germany had only 265 operational planes on the Russian front on May 1, 1944. At the same time, American supplies' including planes, flowed into the Soviet Union in an amazing flood. The German U-boats were unable to prevent this flow of goods, although they did sink 77 out of 2,660 vessels loaded with Lend-Lease supplies. Many of these sinkings occurred on the frightful Murmansk route.

     In 1941 and 1942 the Allies sent the Soviet Union almost 2,000,000 tons of supplies. This was followed hy over 4,500,000 tons in 1943 and a total of over 15,000,000 tons worth $10,000,000,000 before the end of the struggle. Included in the final total were 375,000 trucks, 52,000 jeeps, 7,056 tanks, 6,300 other combat vehicles, 2,328 artillery vehicles, 14,795 aircraft, 8,212 antiaircraft guns, 1,900 steam locomotives, 66 diesel locomotives, 11,075 railway cars, 415,000 telephones, 3,786,000 vehicle tires, 15,000,000 pairs of military boots, 4,478,116 tons of food, and 2,670,371 tons of petroleum products. In contrast with this, the German armored divisions were kept idle for lack of fuel for weeks at a time as early as 1942, and both operational and training flights of the Luftwaffe were drastically curtailed from 1942 onward. The lack of fuel was so acute that Hitler decided, late in 1942, to decommission most of the surface vessels of the German Navy. When Grand Admiral Raeder protested too vigorously, he was removed from his position as head of the navy, and replaced by the U-boat specialist Admiral Karl Doenitz, in January, 1943.

     All these events should have made it clear that Germany could not possibly win the war, but for the next two years Hitler and his immediate associates became increasingly fanatical, increasingly merciless, and increasingly remote from reality. Anyone who audibly doubted their insane vision of the world was speedily liquidated.

Chapter 57: Closing in on Germany, 1943-1945

     The year 1943 represented the turning point in the European struggle as the year 1942 had seen the turning point in the Pacific. In 1943 North Africa was freed from the Nazi grasp in May, Sicily was overrun in July and August, the southern part of Italy was occupied, and the German armies were pushed backward from eastern Europe. As a consequence, the Mediterranean was opened to Allied traffic, and Italy was forced to surrender in September 1943.

     These were the obvious events of this critical year 1943, open to public view and hopeful in their implications for the future. But the role of this year as a turning point in the conflict with Germany was much greater than this, fur, behind the scenes, the military successes of the year forced decisions on strategic plans and postwar projects whose implications are still being worked out today. And still very much behind the scenes, these strategic and postwar plans revealed deep fissures and rivalries among the three Allied Powers.

     Rivalries among the members of a coalition are always to be expected and are usually, and necessarily, kept secret during the war itself. In the Second World War they were most significant in the year 1943. In the years before 1943 these disputes were more concerned with strategic decisions than with postwar planning, while in the later years, when strategy had been set, postwar plans were the chief causes of disputes. The year 1943, however, had its full share of both, since the major strategic decisions were made in that year, and these decisions, in themselves, played a major role in determining the nature of the postwar world.

     In the years 1941-1943 the chief strategic questions were concerned with two problems: (1) Should the European war against Germany continue to receive priority over the Pacific war against Japan? and (2) Should Germany be attacked, indirectly, by aerial bombardment, blockade, and guerrilla forces or should Europe be invaded with large infantry forces, either from England directly across the Channel to western Europe or from the Mediterranean through southern Europe; the answers given to these strategic questions, especially the last one, played a major role in establishing the postwar political settlement in Europe.

     In the earlier years a certain direction was given to postwar planning by Roosevelt’s proclamation of the Four Freedoms in January 1941, and the Anglo-American publication of the Atlantic Charter in August 1941. When the stunning news of Pearl Harbor reached London on December 7, 1941, Foreign Minister Eden was just leaving for Moscow. It was decided that he should go anyway but that Prime Minister Churchill should go simultaneously to Washington to do all he could to prevent popular, anti-Japanese feeling in the United States from reversing the agreement that the military defeat of Germany must have priority over the defeat of Japan. In Washington, at what was called the Arcadia Conference (December 22, 1941-January 14, 1942), the exuberant prime minister found no desire to change the military priorities, and was able to plan intensified military activity along the lines already established. At the same time Roosevelt presented him with a draft for a public “Declaration of the United Nations.” This document declared that the twenty-six signatory states were fighting “to defend life, liberty, independence, and religious freedom and to preserve human rights and justice in their own lands as well as in other lands, and that they are now engaged in a common struggle against savage and brutal forces seeking to subjugate the world." Each signer promised "to employ its full resources and to make no separate armistice or peace" in the struggle for victory over Hitlerism.

     Most of the secret discussions leading up to the publication of this declaration on January 1, 1942 were concerned with verbal or procedural issues, but some of these were symbolic of future problems. There was considerable discussion as to the order in which the signatures should be affixed to the document; the decision to rank them in two groups, with the four "Great Powers" of the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and China followed by twenty-two lesser states in alphabetical order, was an early indication of the similar division which still exists in the United Nations today. The inclusion of China, in spite of its obvious weakness, among the Great Powers was a concession made to the United States by the other Powers. The American leaders, from Roosevelt down, insisted that China was, or at least should be, a Great Power, although the only evidence they could find to support this argument was its larger population. The Americans seemed to hope that by encouragement and reiteration, or perhaps even by invocation, China could be made into a Great Power, able to dominate the Far East after the defeat of Japan.

     Other notable features of this United Nations Declaration were: (1) the fact that De Gaullist France was excluded from the signers in order not to recognize it as a government, (2) the fact that the United States was ranked first among the Great Powers, and (3) the difficulty in wording the declaration so that Japan, with which the Soviet Union was not at war, should not specifically be included among the enemy and yet, at the same time, should not be excluded from the "brutal forces" which were condemned.

     In the meantime, in Moscow, Anthony Eden was being faced with Soviet demands for a specific delimitation of the post-war boundaries of eastern Europe. In the north, the Bolshevik leaders wanted explicit British recognition that Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania were parts of the Soviet Union and that the Soviet-Finnish frontier should be as it had existed after the "winter war" of 1939-1940; in the center, the Soviets demanded a frontier with Poland along the so-called Curzon Line, which followed, it was true, the linguistic frontier, but was 150 miles west of the Polish-Soviet frontier of the 1921-1939 period; in the south, Stalin wanted Eden to agree to a Soviet-Romanian border which would have allowed Russia to have Bessarabia and Bukovina. These demands sought recognition of the Soviet Union’s western boundary as it existed between the Nazi-Soviet Pact of September 1939 and Hitler's attack in June 1941, except that the Curzon Line was, in some places, slightly to the east of the 1940 line.

     Although these Soviet demands were clearly in conflict with the high purposes of the Atlantic Charter, Churchill was not averse to accepting therm on grounds of physical necessity, but American objections to any settlement of territorial questions while the war was still going on forced him to refuse Stalin's requests. In general, the British found themselves in a difficult position between the high and proclaimed principles of the Americans and the low and secret interests of the Russians. Because of American pressure, Eden avoided any territorial commitments, and persuaded Stalin to accept a twenty-year treaty of alliance with Britain. This Anglo-Soviet Treaty of May 26, 1942 had no territorial provisions, and included a statement that the signers would "act in accordance with the two principles of not seeking territorial aggrandizement for themselves and of non-interference in the internal affairs of other States."

     Although the Soviet Union accepted the terms of the British alliance, in 1942 their suspicions of the West were still high, and their relations with Britain became increasingly unfriendly, reaching a critical stage by 1943. In Moscow there was fear that the West wished to protract the war in order to bleed both Germany and the Soviet Union to death. It was feared that this end could be obtained if American supplies to Russia were placed at a level sufficiently high to keep Russia fighting but insufficiently high to allow her to defeat Hitler. To avoid this, Moscow continued to insist, with unreasonable repetition, on the need to increase Lend-Lease supplies to it and, above al1, on the need to open a second front on the Continent by an immediate Anglo-American invasion of Europe from England. Judging, perhaps, that American psychology would work along the same lines of "power politics" as their own, a mistake which the Japanese, with considerably greater reason, had made in the months before Pearl Harbor, the Russians could not conceive that the United States would grant sufficient aid to Russia to permit a speedy defeat of Hitler, since such a policy, almost inevitably, would leave the victorious Soviet armies supreme in eastern, and probably also in central, Europe.

     As a matter of fact, while some Americans unquestionably did think in terms of "power politics" and may, in a few cases, have gone so far as to prefer a Hitler victory over Stalin to a Stalin victory over Hitler, such people were very remote from the centers of power in the American government. At those centers of power there was complete conviction in the value of unrestricted aid to Russia, the speediest possible defeat of Germany, and a full "cross-Channel" invasion of Europe as soon as possible. In fact, these aims were so firmly embraced by those Americans with whom the Russians had relationships, men like Harry Hopkins, General Marshall, or Roosevelt himself, that these men sometimes misled the Russians by expressing their hopes rather than their expectations, with the consequence that Russian suspicions were roused again, at a later date, when these hopes were not fulfilled. Immediately after the signing of the Anglo-Soviet alliance, Soviet Foreign Commissar Molotov came to Washington to urge the need for an immediate second front in Europe. Although such a project would have been unwise, if not impossible, in 1942, the White House communique of June Tl, 1942 sought to satisfy the Russians and to frighten the Germans by saying that "full understanding was reached with regard to the urgent tasks of creating a second front in Europe in 1942."

     In the early summer of 1942 Soviet messages to Washington and to London continued to insist on the need for an immediate second front in Western Europe in order to reduce the Nazi military pressure on the Soviet forces. Recognizing the impossibility of such a venture in 1942, the Anglo-Americans sought to relieve the pressure on Russia by landing at a place where the German defense would not be so strong. It was this desire which resulted in the decision of July 25, 1942 to invade North Africa in November. Having made the decision to substitute this project for any possible cross-Channel attack in 1942, it was necessary to convey the news to the Soviet Union. Churchill undertook this delicate task on his first meeting with Stalin in Moscow in August 1942. The result was a most unpleasant explosion by Stalin. The Soviet leader charged that Molotov had obtained a definite promise for a second front in 1942, that failure to carry out this promise would jeopardize Soviet military plans, and that Churchill was opposed to such a venture from cowardice!

     The strategic disputes among the three Allied Powers were sharp and based on very different outlooks, but in no case did cowardice play any role. The Soviet insistence on an immediate, all-out cross-Channel attack to relieve Nazi pressure on Russia was perfectly understandable, although insistence on such an attack in 1942 was unrealistic. Equally understandable was Russia's fear that the Anglo-Americans might divert their power from Germany in order to avoid a Soviet-dominated postwar Europe, although this fear showed no realistic appreciation of the American outlook. On the other hand, the British reluctance to attempt the cross-Channel attack was perfectly clear. Sir Alan Brooke, the chief of the Imperial General Staff, opposed all plans for such an assault, while others, like Churchill, wanted to postpone such an attack indefinitely or reduce it to no more than a series of small raids to establish permanent anti-German bridgeheads in western Europe. The difficulties of such raids were shown on August 19, 1942 when a force of 5,000 men, mostly Canadians, landed at Dieppe and suffered 3,350 casualties in a few hours.

     The Americans, especially General Marshall, were convinced that Germany could be defeated only by a cross-Channel attack, and advocated one on the largest possible scale at the earliest possible date..

     These differences of strategic opinion reflected basic differences of outlook. The American outlook was largely military. They were cager to defeat Germany and end the war as soon as possible and had little time or energy for political problems or postwar planning. The British, on the other hand, were much concerned witl1 political issues and the way in which the postwar situation would he influenced hy strategic and military actions earlier. The Soviet leaders, to some extent, represented a combination of the two other points of view and could do so because there was no such divergence between their military and political or between their wartime and postwar aims. The more deeply the Anglo-Americans could be involved in the struggle with Germany, the sooner Germany could be defeated, and such a defeat, especially if it arose from a cross-Channel attack, would deliver all of eastern Europe into the power of the Red armies, which would find no rivals in that area.

     Churchill and other British leaders could not forget the terrible casualties Britain had suffered in the trench warfare of 1916. They felt that these casualties had injured Britain permanently by wiping out a whole generation of Britain's young people, especially among the better-educated class, and they were determined not to repeat this error in 1944. These leaders wanted a Balkan or Aegean offensive which, they believed, would, with fewer casualties, leave the English-speaking Powers dominant in the Mediterranean and in the Near East, would make it possible to balance Soviet power in eastern Europe, and would cut the Soviet Union off from the Balkans and some of central Europe. The possibility of Britain obtaining American consent to such an Aegean offensive was so remote that little effort was made to get it by direct persuasion. On the contrary, efforts to move toward it, step by step, were persistent. These efforts sought to postpone, or to reduce the emphasis on, the cross-Channel invasion, since this would, inevitably, have compelled the end of Britain's Mediterranean projects. But here, again, American insistence on the cross-Channel invasion was so emphatic that the British could not challenge this directly, just as they could not advocate an Aegean invasion directly. Instead, while accepting the cross-Channel invasion explicitly, the British offered, one after another, alternative projects which would postpone or distract from the cross-Channel invasion.

     The North African invasion was the first of these distractions, followed by the Sicilian campaign, and then by the Italian invasion. These were accepted by the Americans, since they felt it was urgent to do something to meet the Soviet demands for Anglo-American action against Hitler. Some kind of Balkan intervention was the next British proposal, but there was no hope of obtaining American consent to such a project. It was formally rejected by the Combined Chiefs of Staff on September 9, 1943. Churchill did not give up, but continued to push these peripheral schemes as best he could. He ordered General Wilson, British commander in the Near East, "to be bold, even rash" in attacking the Germans in the Aegean and he also tried to persuade Eisenhower to shift forces from Italy to the Aegean or to persuade Turkey to declare war on Germany. The only success Churchill had in these efforts was to persuade the Americans to engage in an amphibious attack on Italy at Anzio after the Americans had canceled plans for such an attack and had decided to choke off the Italian offensive in order to concentrate on the cross-Channel attack.

     In the long run Churchill had to accept the American strategic plans because America would provide most of the supplies and even a majority of the men for any direct attack on Europe. The American ability to compel British acquiescence in strategic decisions was a very real element in the conduct of the war. It arose from the great British need for American manpower and supplies, and it functioned through the mechanism of the Combined Chiefs of Staff.

     When Churchill came to the Arcadia Conference in Washington at the end of '941, his chief aim was to retain the established priority of "Germany first." He obtained this very easily on its own intrinsic merits, but at the same time he had to accept something he did not want—a Combined Chiefs of Staff organization to control strategy on a worldwide basis. This new committee developed more power than Churchill, or anyone else, expected, because it had control of the supply of weapons. This power was decisive. Since no military operation could be conducted without weapons or supplies, control over these gave the Combined Chiefs of Staff control over all operations and, thus, over the strategic conduct of the war and over all local commanders. The Combined Chiefs of Staff operated through weekly meetings within the framework of the general policy decisions made by Roosevelt and Churchill at their periodic conferences. In this way Britain's dependence on the United States for its implements of war gave the United States control of British strategic decisions and military operations, even in those areas (such as southeast Asia or the Near East) where a British commander was nominally in charge. In the same way, the United States had indirect control over much of Britain's postwar planning.

     In spite of the fact that the Anglo-Americans had agreed in ambiguous terms with Molotov's insistence on the need for a direct attack on Hitler in Europe in 1942, it was perfectly clear that no such assault could be made that early in the war, so the attack on North Africa was offered as a substitute. In the course of the North African fighting it became clear that the cross-Channel attack could not be mounted before the spring of 1944. Accordingly, when the Germans in North Africa surrendered in May 1943, it was necessary to open a new front against Hitler quickly, since it would have been very dangerous to leave Hitler free to throw most of his forces against Russia for a full year. Plans for attacks on Sardinia or Sicily had been prepared, and on January 23, 1943, orders were issued to invade the latter island during the "favorable July moon." This was not regarded by the Russians as a major effort, and their resentment rose to the boiling point. As Secretary of State Hull put it in his memoirs, the atmosphere in Anglo-Russian relations became reminiscent of what it had been exactly four years earlier, just before the Nazi-Soviet Treaty of August 1939. It was at this time, apparently, that two fateful, and mutually incompatible, decisions were made on the highest levels of authority in Washington and Moscow.

     The decision made in Washington is one we have already mentioned—the decision to try to win Soviet cooperation in the postwar world by doing everything possible to win her trust and cooperation in the wartime period. This decision was probably based on the belief that it was not possible to control Russia's postwar behavior by any policy of force against her during the war itself, since such an effort would benefit Hitler without winning any enforceable agreements from Stalin.

     At this time, it would appear, Stalin made his decision to seek Russian security in the postwar world, not through any scheme for friendly cooperation in some idealistic international organization, as Roosevelt hoped, but by setting up, on the Soviet Union's western frontiers, a buffer area of satellite states under governments friendly to Moscow. Such governments, probably in Communist control, would replace the Cordon sanitaire which the Western Powers had created to isolate Russia following the First World War, with what might be called a Cordon "insanitaire" which could serve to isolate the Soviet Union from the outside world following World War II. Washington was informed of this possibility by the American ambassador in Moscow on April 28, 1943, but paid little attention to the warning, probably because of the near-impossibility of finding any alternative policy toward the Soviet Union.

     In spite of Soviet scorn, the military operations in Africa and the Mediterranean were major efforts for the inexperienced forces of un-militarized nations, although they obviously could not compare to the Nazi-Soviet death-lock involving hundreds of divisions on the plains and in the forests of eastern Europe. The victory in North Africa was completed in May 1943. Two months later came the invasion of Sicily. The attack on this strategic island was the greatest landing-assault of the war, eight divisions coming ashore simultaneously side by side. The island is almost a right-angle triangle, with its right angle in the extreme northeast, separated from the Italian mainland by the Strait of Messina, only three miles wide. The landings were made on the opposite side of the island, on the hypotenuse of the triangle, where the coast faces southwestward toward Tunisia. The British Eighth Army, under General Montgomery, with 250,000 men in 818 ships and escort vessels, landed on the southeastern point of the Sicilian triangle, while the American Seventh Army (General George Patton), with 228,000 men and 580 vessels, landed on the British left on either side of Gela.

     The defensive forces of four Italian divisions and two German panzer divisions were widely scattered on the island, and the Allied landings were skillfully executed against light resistance (July 10, 1943). Once ashore, however, the campaign was ineptly carried on because occupation of territory was given precedence over destruction of enemy forces: Patton drove north-westward to seize Palermo (July 22nd), and then followed the enemy forces eastward to Messina along the northern coast; Montgomery, moving slowly northward parallel to the eastern coast, made a detour to the west of Mount Etna.

     No efforts were made to close the Straits of Messina; as a result, the Germans were able to send almost two divisions as reinforcements from Italy and, later, when the island had to be abandoned, they were equally free to evacuate it, carrying almost 40,000 troops with 9,650 vehicles and 17,000 tons of stores over the Straits of Messina to Italy in seven days without loss of a man. At the same time, in a separate operation, 62,000 Italian troops also escaped to the mainland. By August 17th Sicily had been conquered, but the evacuated enemy forces were reorganizing to defend Italy itself.

     The Italians had no taste for the defense of Italy. They had been dragged into the war by Mussolini's action and against their own desires, in June 1940, and by 1943 they were heartily sick of the whole thing. This discontent was fully developed long before the attack on Sicily in June. In February the Duce had dismissed Count Ciano, his son-in-law, and Count Dino Grandi from their posts as ministers of foreign affairs and of justice because of their defeatism and opposition. But these qualities continued to spread, even in the innermost circles of the government. The invasion of Sicily gave the final spurt to this development. On July 24th the Fascist Grand Council passed a motion calling for the restoration of the constitutional functions of all agencies of the government and the restoration to the king of full command of the armed forces. This motion, carried 18-8, was essentially a vote of no-confidence in Mussolini. The following morning the king demanded the Duce's resignation and, as he was leaving the palace, had him arrested.

     The fall of Mussolini, on July 25, 1943, after being in power for over twenty years, did nothing to improve Italy's position. The king, who was opposed to the establishment of a parliamentary regime or a responsible government, put Marshal Pietro Badoglio, the conqueror of Ethiopia, in as head of the government but would not allow him to establish a Cabinet of non-Fascist leaders. The Fascist Party was abolished and the Fascist Militia was incorporated into the regular army, but it was impossible to get rid of Fascist sympathizers from either the administrative system or from the armed services. On the whole, the fall of Mussolini was welcomed by the Italian people, not because of any political ideas but simply because they believed that it would lead to the end of the war and the end of food rationing. It achieved neither of these, because the powers of contending forces were too evenly balanced in Italy to allow any decisive outcome to be reached.

     The history of Italy in 1943 is a history of lost opportunities, perhaps necessarily lost, but, nevertheless, a disappointment to everyone concerned. If events had turned out favorably, Italy might have got out of the war in the summer of that year and the Germans might have been ejected from the peninsula shortly afterward. Instead, Italy was torn to pieces; its peoples and the invading Allied troops suffered great hardships; and the country got out of the war so slowly that Germans were still fighting on Italian soil at the final surrender in 1945.

     These general misfortunes of Italy were the result of a number of forces working together. One was the military weakness of Italy in respect to Germany; this made it impossible for Italy to end the war, or even to surrender to the Allies, because any effort to do so would lead to an immediate German seizure of the whole country and of its leaders, the exploitation and devastation of the one and the massacre of the others. Italy was far too weak to hold the Germans back long enough to permit an Allied occupation of Italy. A second factor was the weakness of the Allies because of the diversion of their power to Britain in preparation for Overlord: this meant that the Allies lacked the strength to move quickly into Italy to protect it from complete German occupation, even if Italy could surrender secretly to the Allies and cooperate with their entrance. A third factor was the complete mistrust of the Italians both by the Germans and by the Allies. This mistrust, for which the political conduct of the Italians, both foreign and domestic, over at least two generations, was responsible, provided the key to the whole situation. The only way in which the fighting in Italy could have been ended quickly would have been for Italy to surrender secretly to the Allies and cooperate with them in an immediate large-scale invasion of northern Italy, but the Allies were too distrustful of the Italians to cooperate with them in a project such as this or even to accept a secret surrender. And, finally, a fourth obstacle was the wooden and inflexible Allied insistence on unconditional surrender which, meaningless as it might have been, nevertheless made it impossible for the Badoglio government either to cooperate with the Allies as co-belligerents against the Germans (as it wished to do) or to keep the surrender secret from the Germans long enough to forestall their violent reactions. Not only did unconditional surrender exclude both co-belligerency and secrecy; it also left the Italians helpless to resist the Germans. Above all, these four factors made it impossible to prevent a German seizure of Rome, which was, in some ways, the center of the whole problem.

     The Germans, who had eight divisions in Italy, doubled this number as soon as they heard of the fall of Mussolini. They refused a request from the Badoglio government to allow any of the fifty-three Italian divisions in the Balkans and Russia to return home, thus holding them as hostages. When the Badoglio government made contact with the Allies through Madrid on August 16tl1 and offered to join them in fighting Germany, all it could obtain was a demand for unconditional surrender. After days of discussion, an armistice accepting the Allied terms was signed on September 3rd, with the understanding that it would be kept secret until the Allies had troops ready to land in force on the mainland. Three days later, the Italian government discovered that the Allied landing operation, already in progress, was only a small force and was headed for Salerno, south of Naples, where it would he no help to the Italians in resisting any German efforts to take over most of Italy. They insisted that the publication of the armistice and a tentative Allied paratrooper "drop" in Rome must be put off until sufficient Allied forces were within striking distance of Rome to protect the city from the German troops near it. Eisenhower refused, and published the Italian surrender on September 8th, one day before the American Seventh Army landed at Salerno.

     The Germans reacted to the news of the Italian "betrayal" and of the Allied invasion of southern Italy with characteristic speed. While the available forces in central Italy converged on the Salerno beachhead, an armored division fought its way into Rome, Italian troops were disarmed or intimidated everywhere, and the Badoglio government, with King Victor Emmanuel, had to flee to the British-controlled area around Brindisi. Much of the Italian fleet escaped to Allied control in the Mediterranean, but numerous vessels were sunk by the Germans or were scuttled to escape falling into their hands. In most of Italy, there was political paralysis and confusion; at some places Italians fought one another, or simply murdered one another, while opinion ranged the whole gamut from complete indifference on one extreme to violent fanaticism on the other.

     In order to have some legal excuse for controlling Italy, the Germans sent parachutists to rescue Mussolini from his "prison" in a summer hotel in the mountains of the Gran Sasso, escaping with him by air to northern Italy where he was presented with a German-picked government of "neo-Fascists" under the name Italian Social Republic (September 13-15, 1943). Broken and weary, the ex-Duce of Fascism became a pliant tool of German ruthlessness and of the corrupt and criminal neo-Fascists who surrounded him. In this group the most influential were the family of Mussolini's mistress, Clara Petacci, which Count Ciano called "that circle of prostitutes and white slavers which for some years have plagued Italian political life."

     In Allied hands, the king and Badoglio were forced, on September 29, 1943, to sign another, much longer, armistice; by its provisions "the Italian Government were bound hand and foot, and made completely subject to the will of the Allied Governments as expressed through the Allied Commander-in-Chief." In conformity to this will, on October 13th the king's government declared war against Germany..

     As the Allied forces slowly recovered Italian territory from the tenacious grasp of the Germans, the royal government remained subservient to its conquerors. Civilian affairs immediately behind the advancing battle lines were completely in military hands under an organization known as Allied Military Government of Occupied Territory, or AMGOT; farther back, civilian affairs were under an Allied Control Commission. The creation of these organizations, on a purely Anglo-American basis, to rule the first Axis territory to be "liberated" became a very important precedent for Soviet behavior when their armies began to occupy enemy territory in eastern Europe: The Russians were able to argue that they could exclude the Anglo-Americans from active participation in military government in the east since they had earlier been excluded from such participation in the west.

     While these political events were taking place, the military advance was moving like a snail. The Allied invasion of Italy, at American insistence, was given very limited resources for a very large task. This limitation of resources in Italy sought to prevent the British from using the Italian campaign as an excuse for delaying or postponing the cross-Channel attack on Europe scheduled for the spring of 1944. It was only under such limitations of resources, explicitly stated, that the Americans had accepted the British suggestion for any invasion of mainland Italy at all. In May 1943, at a plenary meeting in Washington, the Combined Chiefs of Staff had set May 1 944 as target date for a cross-Channel invasion of Europe with 29 divisions, had ordered a full-scale aerial offensive on Germany with 2,700 heavy and 800 medium bombers, had given the American Joint Chiefs of Staff complete control over the Pacific war against Japan, and had asked General Eisenhower to draw up plans for an invasion of Italy using no forces beyond what he had on hand. This last limitation was repeated on July 26th when the general was ordered to carry out his plans..

     The invasion of Italy was a two-pronged effort. On September 3rd two British divisions under General Montgomery crossed the Straits of Messina and began to move northward against little opposition. Six days later a British airborne division from Bizerte was landed at Taranto and began to move up the Adriatic coast. On the same day, September 8th, the Fifth Army of two American and two British divisions under Lieutenant General Mark W. Clark landed at Salerno. The landing site was in the next bay south of the famous Bay of Naples, and separated from it by the rugged Sorrento Peninsula. There was no preliminary bombardment by naval guns, in order to retain tactical surprise, and the American Units came over the heavily mined and barbwired beaches right into the face of the German 16th Panzer Division. Within three days, six German divisions, four of them motorized, were around the Salerno beachhead, with six hundred tanks. In fierce fighting, the area was slowly expanded, although at one point the German counterattacks almost broke through to the beach. Naval gunfire against the German tanks was the decisive factor in a seesaw struggle.

     On September 13th the American 82nd Airborne Division was dropped behind the beachhead. About the same time, Rommel, in command in northern Italy, refused to release reinforcements to Kesselring in the south. On September 16th the latter commander authorized a withdrawal from the area in order to get beyond the range of naval gunfire. On the same day, Montgomery's Eighth Army made contact with Clark's Fifth Army, and an Allied line was stretched across Italy to the Adriatic. This line moved slowly northward, capturing Naples on the first day of October 1943. The city was a shambles, filled with wreckage and heavily booby-trapped; the water supply had been deliberately polluted, and all food stores and government records had been destroyed; the harbor area, completely in flames, was filled with sunken ships, locomotives, and other large objects to make it unusable. This was the kind of situation where American energy, humanitarianism, anti ingenuity excelled; sanitation and order were restored at once, food was provided for the hungry Italians, and the harbor was cleaned up so successfully that it \vas handling tonnage beyond its prewar rated capacity within three months.

     By October 7th the Allied advance had been stopped on the Volturno River line twenty miles north of Naples. Two months later, when General Eisenhower was transferred to take over the Supreme Command for the approaching invasion of western Europe, the Allied lines had moved northward no farther than the German Gustav Line. This line, eighty miles south of Rome and following, roughly, the Rapido River in the west and the lower Garigliano in the east, took every advantage of the rugged terrain, and allowed the enemy to inflict heavy casualties on the attackers, especially by artillery fire from the greatly feared German 88-mm. guns. To outflank this position, an amphibious landing was ordered beyond the German rear at Anzio, just north of the Pontine Marshes, thirty miles south of Rome. Originally the landing was to have been made in one operation, leaving the Allied forces on a beach with supplies for eight days and no provision for any reinforcements or replenishment from the sea. This was based on the expectation that the main Allied forces would come up from the south in time to relieve the new beachhead. When it became clear that the Allied forces could not advance up the peninsula, the plan was canceled on December 22'nd. Three days later, at a hurriedly summoned conference at Tunis, Churchill was able to have the plan reinstated, offering a British division to go with the single American division originally planned.

     On January 20, 1944, General Clark tried to cross the flooded Rapido River at the foot of the great hill on which stood the ancient Benedictine Monastery of Monte Cassino. His aim was to advance northward toward Anzio. After two days of bloody fighting, the crossing had to he abandoned; that same day (January 22nd) the two Allied divisions landed at Anzio, hoping to cut the German communications going southward toward Monte Cassino. The landing was easy, but within a week Marshal Kesselring was able to shift sufficient forces from the subsiding Rapido front to seal off the Anzio beachhead. Although the Allies committed four more divisions to the Anzio operation, giving six in all, they could not break out of the German vise. The result was a stalemate in which the Germans could hold both the Rapido line and the Anzio line by shifting forces rapidly from one to the other as seemed necessary.

     As is usual in a stalemate, there was much of criticism of these operations, especially from the Allied side. It was suggested that the German success in holding the Rapido was due to the accuracy of their artillery fire and that this was being spotted from the ancient monastery (founded hy St. Benedict in A.D. 529) on the top of Monte Cassino. It was further suggested that General Clark should have obliterated the monastery with aerial bombardment but had failed to do so because he was a Catholic. After February 15, 1944, General Clark did destroy the site completely by Air Force bombs without helping the situation a bit. We now know that the Germans had not been using the monastery; but, once it was destroyed by us, they dug into the rubble to make a stronger defense.

     The stalemate on the Gustav Line was broken in the latter half of May 1944. By that time French, Polish, and Italian units were fighting on the Allied side, giving twenty-seven Allied divisions against twenty German. On May I 6th a French corps crossed the Garigliano River, and three days later, after terrible casualties, a Polish division captured Monte Cassino. Kesselring sullenly withdrew northward, followed by the Allied forces. The latter were greeted with hysterical enthusiasm by the liberated Italians. On May 2sth contact was made with the Anzio forces, and, on June 4, 1944, the American 88th Division, an all-selective-service unit, entered Rome.

     As the liberating forces came in and the Germans hurriedly withdrew, Rome was little short of a madhouse. Hundreds of prisoners held by the Germans and neo-Fascist secret police were murdered in their cells, and helpless civilians were murdered as hostages or in reprisal by the retreating German forces. Guerrilla bands behind the German lines performed good services to the Allied cause, harassing communications, assisting Allied intelligence, and helping escaping prisoners. Many of these guerrillas were fighting for social revolution as well as for the liberation of Italy, and there was a good deal of rivalry and even of violent conflict among them. The dominant influence was that of the Communists, who were more highly disciplined and more closely controlled than the non-Communist units.

     The fall of Mussolini gave a considerable impetus to postwar planning within the Allied camps. There had been a certain amount of this during the dark days from 1939 to 1943, but on the whole the Allied leaders were reluctant to commit themselves to any projects which might restrict their freedom of action in conducting the war or in manipulating its diplomatic and propagandist background. The collapse of one of the enemy states, however, made it necessary to devote some serious attention to postwar plans. At the same time, experiences in Italy showed that the problems of the post-war era would be much broader than merely political or diplomatic, and would include social, economic, and ideological problems on a scale never experienced previously. It was clear that the poverty, confusion, and human suffering found by our advancing armies in Italy would be increased tenfold when the much more bitter resistance of Germany had been overcome.

     In order to avoid any repetition of the widespread Allied "deals" with Darlan and other "Vichyites," the occupied areas of Italy were subjected to a completely military Allied government, although, to obtain legal continuity and legal justification for this government, the various agreements were signed by Badoglio. Even this small amount of contact with ax-Fascist leaders aroused adverse comment in certain circles in the United States, although at the same time and, usually, in the same circles, there was objection to the use of a purely military administration as an alternative. The only other possibility would have been to turn the newly liberated areas over to the local anti-Fascist native groups. This last solution was out of the question, for these groups were generally so determined on social and economic revolution that they would have created conflicts and disturbances which would have jeopardized the position of our armies of occupation and would certainly have increased the social and economic problems which most Americans were eager to reduce. These social and economic problems were mostly of a very practical nature and were concerned with starvation, disease, public order, and the care of displaced persons.

     All these problems were drastically increased by the ruthless destructiveness of the German forces as they withdrew toward Germany itself. Food supplies were taken away or were destroyed; millions were left homeless, many of them far from their homes and in pitiful conditions of semi-starvation and disease. These conditions, whicl1 became steadily worse as the war drew to its close, made a great appeal to the humanitarian feelings of Americans, and presented problems with which American generosity and organizational efficiency were well able to deal. On the other hand, Americans had weak political interests and narrow ideological training and were eager to avoid problems such as forms of government, patterns of property distribution, or nationalistic disputes. It is, then, not surprising that American postwar planning and the behavior of American administrators neglected the latter kinds of problems to devote their energies to the more practical tasks of material survival. On the political, legal, or ideological problems the American "liberators" had little to offer beyond rather vague and idealistic praise of democracy, private ownership, and freedom.

     While the military efforts of the Anglo-Americans were, in full public view, passing from victory to victory in the early months of 1943, a very ominous situation had arisen behind the scenes in respect to their relations with the Soviet Union. We have already mentioned the evidence that quite incompatible decisions about the postwar world had been made in Washington and Moscow at this time. The decision in Washington seems to have been that every effort would be made, through wartime concessions to the Soviet Union, to obtain Russian cooperation in a postwar international organization and that all territorial problems should be left to the postwar period. The decision in Moscow seems to have been that the Anglo-American Powers could not be trusted and that the Soviet Union must seek to ensure its postwar security by creation of a series of satellite and buffer states on its western frontier. The incompatibility of these points of view gave rise to the Polish crisis of May 1943

     After the Nazi-Soviet division of Poland in September 1939, a Polish government-in-exile was established in France and later in London, with General Wladyslaw Sikorski as prime minister. This government, although recognized as the successor to the defeated Polish government by most of the world, was not recognized by the Axis Powers or by the Soviet Union. These pretended that Poland had ceased to exist. Russia, which had received half of Poland, with 13.2 million of Poland's 35 million inhabitants, incorporated these areas into the Soviet Union, imposing Soviet citizenship on the inhabitants, and forced over a million of them to go to other parts of Russia to work in mines, in factories, or on farms. Most educated or professional persons among the Poles were arrested and put into concentration camps with the captured officers of the Polish armies. In the meantime the portions of Poland taken by Germany had been divided into two parts, of which the western (with 10.5 million inhabitants) was incorporated into Germany, and the rest (with 11.5 million inhabitants, and including Warsaw) was organized as the government-general of Poland under German administration. The Nazis sought to force all ethnic Poles into the government-general; to exterminate, either directly or through the exhaustion and malnutrition of slave labor, all the educated elements among the Polish people; and to murder without compunction the country's large Jewish population.

     The German attack on the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941 led to a brief reversal of the Kremlin's attitude toward Poland. In an apparent effort to obtain Polish support in the struggle with Germany, the Soviet Union reestablished diplomatic relations with the Polish government-in-exile in London, and signed an agreement on July 30, 1941 by which the Soviet-German partition treaties of 1939 were canceled, a general amnesty was granted Polish citizens imprisoned in the Soviet Union, and General Wladyslaw Anders was allowed to organize a new Polish army from the Poles in the Soviet Union. Efforts to create this army were hampered by the fact that about 10,000 Polish officers along with about 5,000 Polish intellectuals and professional persons, all of whom had been held in three camps in western Russia, could not be found. In addition at least 100,000 Polish prisoners of war, out of the 230,000 captured by Soviet forces in September 1939, had been exterminated in Soviet labor camps from starvation and overwork, and over a million Polish civilians were being similarly treated.

     Constant obstacles were offered by the Soviet authorities to the efforts of General Anders to reconstruct a Polish army in the east. When rations were cut to 26,000 to feed a force of 70,000 soldiers and many thousands of Polish civilian refugees, Anders obtained permission to evacuate his force to Iran (March 1942). It was this group which fought so well the following years in Italy and in western Europe..

     As soon as Anders's forces left Russia, the Soviet leaders began to organize a group of Polish and Russian Communists into a so-called Union of Polish Patriots which sponsored a Polish-language radio station and a new Communist-controlled Polish army in Russia. In January 1943, Moscow informed the Sikorski government in London that all Poles originating from the provinces occupied by Soviet forces in September 1939 would be regarded as Soviet subjects.

     While Soviet-Polish relations were deteriorating, the German radio suddenly announced, on April 13, 1943, that German forces in occupied Russia had discovered, at Katyn near Smolensk, Russia, mass graves containing the bodies of 5,000 Polish officers who had been murdered by the Soviet authorities in the spring of 1940. Moscow called this a Nazi propaganda trick and declared that the Polish officers had been murdered and buried by the Nazis themselves when they captured the officers and the locality by overrunning this Soviet territory and its concentration camps in August 1941. When the Polish government in London requested an investigation of this crime at the site by the International Red Cross, the Soviet government broke off diplomatic relations with the Sikorski government on the grounds that it had fallen victim to Nazi propaganda because of anti-Soviet feeling.

     The Katyn massacres were a subject of controversy for years. Today there is no doubt that the great mass of evidence indicates that these victims, numbering 4,243, met their deaths by being shot through the back of the neck in the early spring of 1940 and not August 1941 (or later), when the area was in German possession. This evidence, which clearly indicates Soviet guilt, includes the following points: (1) the victims were wearing the uniforms and boots issued to them at the outbreak of war in 1939, and these were in good condition, showing a minimum of wear as might be the case in April 1940, but could not have been true in August 1941; (2) all letters, journals, or documents on the bodies had dates previous to May 1940, and in no case later; (3) the victims were arranged in the graves in groups in the same order in which they had been removed from the Soviet concentration camp at Kozielski in March and April 1940; (4) the victims wrote letters to their families at home up to April 1940, but not later; (5) letters to victims from their families were delivered by Soviet authorities up to April 1940, but were returned to the senders as undeliverable after that date; (6) in private conversations various Soviet authorities at various times admitted the murders. There is much other evidence showing Soviet guilt in this affair, but it must not be forgotten that both Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany were determined to exterminate all Polish leaders and the Polish nation by reducing the leaderless Poles to the status of slave laborers and that Germany also would have killed these Polish officers if they had captured them, since the Germans did exterminate 4,000,000 Poles in this way during the war. Although the number of bodies at Katyn was less than 5,000, the number of officers murdered was almost twice this figure, the rest, apparently, having been drowned in the White Sea..

     The crisis in Soviet-Polish relations in the spring of 1943 marks a turning point in the relations of the three Great Powers fighting Germany, although every effort was made to conceal this fact at that time. From March 1943 onward, the Soviet authorities did all they could to build up the Union of Polish Patriots as the center of aspirations of the Poles still suffering in their own country, while, at the same time, Washington began to pay the Polish government-in-exile an annual subsidy of $12.5 million to finance its underground organizations in Poland and its diplomatic relations with Latin-American countries. Within Poland itself, the London government soon had a secret army and a secret underground government, including a parliament, schools, and a system of courts. This government met in secret, made decisions, and executed sentences on disloyal Poles, especially on collaborators with the Nazis.

     Nazi plans aimed at the eventual extermination of the Poles and the Polish nation. In the winter of 1939-1940, all Poles were deported, street hy street with only a few hours' notice, from the western areas annexed to Germany into the government-general. In the latter areas, under the rule of Hans Frank and Arthur Seyss-Inquart, all wealth which could be used by Germany was confiscated and removed; all Polish institutions of higher learning or culture were abolished, so that only elementary schools (and these conducted in the German language) were allowed; all outstanding persons were murdered; millions were deported westward to work as slave laborers in German factories; the food consumption of those who remained was reduced by German seizure of food supplies to a quarter of the daily need (to 600 calories); and various measures, such as separation of the sexes, were taken to prevent the reproduction of Poles. Under these circumstances it is remarkable that Polish spirit could not be broken, that hundreds of thousands of Poles continued to resist in guerrilla bands, in the underground "Home Army" under Generals "Grot" (Stefan Rowecki) and "Bor" (Thaddeus Komorowski), and that sabotage, propaganda, spying, and communication with the Polish government in London continued to flourish.

     At the time these events were taking place, the people of the English-speaking world were almost totally ignorant of the diplomatic controversies behind the scenes and almost equally ignorant of the conditions of life in German-occupied Europe. On the other hand, they were fully aware of the victory in North Africa, of the conquest of Sicily, and of the invasion of Italy. The strategic decisions involved in these campaigns and, above all, the decision of September 1943 to reject Churchill's plans for a Balkan campaign in order to concentrate on the cross-Channel offensive for 1944, were of vital importance in setting the form that postwar Europe would take. If the strategic decision of 1943 had been made differently, to postpone the cross-Channel attack and, instead, to concentrate on an assault from the Aegean across Bulgaria and Romania toward Poland and Slovakia, the postwar situation would have been quite different. This we can say with assurance even though we cannot say with any certainty what the difference would have been.

     In the course of 1943, while Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin were still devoting their chief attention to the conduct of the war, their foreign ministers, Cordell Hull, Anthony Eden, and Vyachislav Molotov, were giving increasing attention to planning for postwar problems. The chief of these problems which were discussed were: (1) the economic demobilization of the victor Powers, (2) the relief and rehabilitation of the defeated countries and of the liberated areas, (3) problems involving refugees and displaced persons, (4) problems of finance and of international monetary exchanges, (5) the punishment of "war criminals" in the defeated states, (6) the forms of government of these states and of the liberated states, (7) territorial questions such as the boundaries of Germany, of Hungary, or of Poland, (8) the disposition of the colonial possessions, or, as they were called, the "dependent areas," of both victors and vanquished, (9) the problem of the postwar political relationships of the victorious states and of the world as a whole.

     It is evident that many of these problems were of an explosive nature and could lead to disputes among the Allies and possibly even to a weakening of their joint anti-German efforts. As a consequence, the foreign ministers' discussions of many of these problems were tentative and hesitant and were frequently interrupted to confer with the three heads of governments. Even on this higher level, agreement could not be reached in some cases, and these problems were generally put aside lest efforts to reach an agreement alienate the Allies to the detriment of their war efforts against Germany. This was most emphatically true of questions involving the possible postwar situation in eastern Europe where the frontiers of Germany, of Poland, and of the Soviet Union or the status of Poland and of the Baltic states were far too controversial to be raised except in a most tentative way.

     It has frequently been argued in recent years that failure to reach any agreement on the territorial and governmental settlement of eastern Europe while the war was still in progress meant that these questions would tend to be settled by the military situation in existence at the end of the war with little consideration for questions of legality, humanity, freedom, nationalism, the rights of small states, or other factors which were mentioned so frequently in the Allied wartime propaganda. Specifically, this meant that the Soviet armies would undoubtedly dominate eastern Europe once Germany was defeated and that these armies could make a settlement based on force unless the Soviet Union had been compelled, before the complete defeat of Germany, to make agreements with its fellow Allies for some more desirable settlement in eastern Europe. These arguments usually assume that the Soviet Union was reluctant to make an early agreement on this subject and that it could have been forced to do so because of its need for American supplies during the fighting. This assumption implies that America should have threatened to reduce or to cut off Lend-Lease supplies going to the Soviet Union unless we could obtain Soviet agreement to the kind of eastern European settlement we wanted. These arguments are based on hindsight and not on any realistic understanding of the historical facts as they developed.

     It is now clear, from the published documents, that the Soviet Union was eager to obtain some early agreement on the eastern European postwar settlement and that both the United States and Britain were reluctant to make such an agreement, apparently because of the fear that we could do so only at the price of extensive concessions to Russia at the expense of the smaller eastern European states. We were unwilling to use our control of Lend-Lease supplies to force concessions from Russia because any reduction of such supplies, by weakening the Soviet Union's resistance to Germany, would increase Germany's ability to fight the Americans and would lengthen the war. Moreover, Soviet ideas on the Baltic states and the eastern frontiers of Poland were so rigidly uncompromising that no concessions could have been obtained on these points except, perhaps, by reducing Lend-Lease shipments to a degree which the Anglo-Americans, in their own interests, were unwilling to do. It was feared that any drastic Anglo-American pressure on Russia in this form would lead to violent protests from the electorate in Britain and in the United States, since the citizens of the two democratic Powers were much more concerned with getting on with the war than they were with the postwar situation of the Poles or of the Baltic states. Moreover, the Anglo-American leaders were fearful that, if Russia's ability to fight Germany was reduced by any curtailing of supplies, the Soviet leaders might make a separate peace with Hitler, allowing the Nazis to turn the full brunt of their fury westward. Rumors of possible Soviet-Nazi discussions looking toward a separate peace were circulating in London and Washington at various times, particularly in the latter part of 1943, and the Anglo-American leaders were too clearly aware of the sudden Nazi-Soviet agreement of August 1939 to push the Russians so hard that they might make another, more fateful, agreement of a similar character.

     The ... [strategy taken] by the Anglo-American leaders throughout the war was that full-scale Soviet resistance to Germany seemed essential if the Nazis were ever to be beaten.... [The allied nations were already preparing the post-war world by building up the Soviet Union for the so-called Cold War.] Winston Churchill, in June 1941, had welcomed the Russians as allies against Hitler with the statement that he would be ready to ally with the devil in hell if the devil was ready to fight Hitler. Naturally, this point of view became less extreme as the defeat of Hitler became less remote, but the Germans fought so well, up to the very end of the war, that it never became possible to force any Soviet concessions in regard to the postwar political settlement in eastern Europe. Instead, the tactic was adopted, wholeheartedly by President Roosevelt, more reluctantly by Prime Minister Churchill, of trying to win the Soviet leaders, especially Stalin, to a less suspicious and more conciliatory mood by full-scale cooperation in the war and by friendly concessions to Soviet sensibilities on wider issues. This alternative policy was by no means an easy one, for Soviet suspicions were so close to the surface and Soviet sensibilities were so touchy that cooperation with these people proved to be a very delicate and unpleasant business. It was, however, a business at which Roosevelt was personally adept, and it worked, adequately enough, until the war with Germany and Roosevelt's life drew to their close together in the spring of 1945.

     The various postwar problems we have mentioned were discussed at a series of high-level conferences during the war years. At a conference in Washington in March 1943, Eden and Roosevelt agreed that Germany should he broken up into three or four states after its defeat, but did not see eye to eye on many other matters. Roosevelt felt that only the four Great Powers would need to be armed in the postwar world and could keep the peace for all other states if they could agree among themselves. Other states, relieved of the burden of armaments, could devote all their resources to economic reconstruction. The four Great Powers would be helped in the task of keeping the peace for all by their joint possession of various strategic points throughout the world, like Dakar or Formosa, and could work together to instruct the public opinion of the world by a joint sponsorship of informational centers scattered about the globe. In such a system, in which lesser states did not have to defend themselves, there could be no objection, in Roosevelt's thinking, to separating peoples, like the Serbs and Croats, who could not agree, or in providing independence for dependent areas, such as Hong Kong. Most of this made little sense to Eden, who was not prepared to give up Hong Kong or other portions of the British colonial possessions or to see the Soviet Union on the borders of a Europe in which all other states were disarmed. The chief areas of agreement at this conference were that Germany should be dismembered after the war and that Poland could obtain East Prussia.

     Two months later, at the so-called "Trident" Conference in Washington, Churchill and Roosevelt went over the same matters (May 1943). The cross-Channel attack, Overlord, was set for May 1944, and an intensified aerial bombardment of Germany ordered as a preliminary. No important decisions could be made on postwar problems, although the atmosphere was brightened by a Soviet announcement of the abolition of the Communist International and an Anglo-American announcement renouncing extraterritorial rights in China.

     The next conference, held in May and June 1943 at Hot Springs, Virginia, was of a technical nature, and discussed postwar food and agricultural problems. From this conference there emerged a United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), an advisory body to collect and disseminate agricultural information, as had been done previously by the League of Nations affiliate, the International Institute of Agriculture in Rome.

     Closely related to FAO, but of a temporary rather than permanent character and possessing administrative rather than simply advisory powers, was the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA). At the first meeting of this international organization, at Atlantic City, New Jersey, in November 1943, forty-four nations agreed to contribute I percent of their national incomes to purchase relief supplies for war-devastated peoples. Herbert Lehman, former governor of New York, was elected director-general of the new organization.

     In the meantime, in August 1943 at Quebec, in what is sometimes called the "Quadrant" Conference, Churchill and Roosevelt found some time for discussion of postwar policy, although their chief concern was with Italy, with Overlord, and with a new supplement to Overlord consisting of an invasion of southern France from the Mediterranean Sea and up the Rhone Valley. This new invasion, known as Anvil, was to be launched in the summer of 1944.

     At Quebec, Churchill accepted Roosevelt's postwar projects with considerable reluctance. The prime minister felt strongly that the United States and the Soviet Union would be the two giants of the postwar world and that Britain's best interests lay in building some kind of British sphere of influence in Europe and in Asia as a balance against these two giants. He wished to see two regional associations for these two areas, with Britain in both, the two forming part, if necessary, of some larger, worldwide association. It soon became clear that the United States would accept no regional associations of this character, and insisted on a worldwide association of individual countries. The American insistence on no spheres of influence and no settlement of frontiers while the war was on, like the American insistence that China was a Great Power, was regarded by the other two Allies as childishly unrealistic and even hypocritical, especially as both Britain and Russia were convinced that the United States was aiming to create American spheres of interest, if not regional associations, in its areas of chief concern, Latin America and the Far East.

     Churchill had to accept Roosevelt's projects for a postwar international organization for fear that resistance to these might lead to a revival of American isolationism following the Second World War, as had happened after 1919. This, above all, Churchill had to prevent, since it would leave Britain facing the Soviet Union with no Great Power companionship. Accordingly, at Quebec in August 1943, Churchill accepted Hull's draft for a postwar United Nations Organization, consisting of four Great Powers and associated lesser Powers on a worldwide basis. This meant that Britain was committed to seek support against the Soviet Union from the United States within the United Nations organization rather than through some tripartite balance-of-power system with spheres of influence.

     One important consequence of this British commitment to the American point of view appeared in 1943 with respect to the explosive problem of the Polish frontiers. Britain and Russia reached a tentative agreement to move the whole Polish state westward by wholesale transfers of population, drawing its eastern boundary along the Curzon Line and compensating for this loss of territory in the east by moving its western boundary to the Oder and Neisse rivers. Churchill sincerely felt that this shift would greatly strengthen Poland, since the areas lost in the east to Russia were largely swamps and pine barrens, while the areas to be acquired from Germany in the west were rich in agricultural and mineral resources. This project had to be abandoned, however, when it was rejected by both the United States and Poland. The only agreement which could be reached was an informal one that Poland should obtain East Prussia.

     In preparation for the forthcoming first meeting of the Big Three (Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin) in Teheran, their foreign ministers met in Moscow in October 1943. Russian suggestions to force Turkey into the war or to demand air bases in Sweden were rejected, and it was generally agreed not to dismember Germany after the war but to force Germans to pay reparations for damages and to undergo punishment for crimes against humanity or international law. It was agreed that a disarmed Germany should be ruled jointly under an Inter-Allied Commission and that Austria should be reestablished as an independent country.

     The chief achievement of the conference was the signature of a Four-Nation Declaration on the United Nations. This document stated that the signers would continue to cooperate after the war "for the organization and maintenance of peace and security." It further promised to create "a general international organization based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all peace-loving states and open to membership by all such states." The four Powers also promised not to use their armies in the postwar period in the territories of other states "except for the purposes envisaged in this declaration and after joint consultation" and to cooperate together to regulate post-war armaments. This declaration was significant because of the American promise not to relapse into isolation again and because of the American success in having China accepted, admittedly with reluctance, as a Great Power.

     In reporting to a joint session of Congress on the significance of this agreement, Secretary of State Hull voiced that kind of naive idealism which made Churchill squirm. He said, "As the provisions of the Four-Nation Declaration are carried into effect, there will no longer be need for spheres of influence, for alliances, for balancing of power, or any other kind of special arrangements through which, in the unhappy past, the nations strove to safeguard their security or to promote their interests." He went on to point out, as a desirable fact, that questions of boundaries had been left in abeyance until the end of hostilities, as the United States had desired.

     Just at this time considerable efforts were being made in the United States to obtain popular commitments against any postwar return to isolationism. On September 7, 1943, a conference of leaders of the Republican Party at Mackinac Island, Michigan, endorsed the hopes for a post-war international organization. Two weeks later, the Fulbright Resolution favoring such an organization passed the House of Representatives by a vote of 360 to 29, and in November a similar expression, the Connally Resolution, was accepted in the United States Senate by a vote of 85 to 5.

     The Moscow Conference of Foreign Ministers Noms followed, within a month, by the first meeting of the Big Three, held at Teheran from November 28 to December I, 1943. Since Russia was not at war with Japan, there were no Chinese representatives at Teheran, and the Anglo-Americans met with these at two separate conferences in Cairo before and after the sessions in Teheran (November 22-26 and December 3-6, 1943). Although the war against China was being fought quite independently from the war against Germany, the Cairo discussions formed a background for the Teheran negotiations, and undoubtedly influenced them. Once again, this influence was exerted through strategic discussions.

     Originally, American strategy against Japan had, under General MacArthur's influence, given a major role to the army with supporting roles for the navy and air force. This earlier strategy had taken a form known as "island-hopping" and had envisaged a major role for China and the Chinese Army. This strategy intended to approach Japan from Australia, island by island, landing on each and wiping out the Japanese garrisons on each before going on to the next. Eventually this method would have brought the American Army into contact with China, both across Burma into the southwestern provinces and also along the southeastern coast at the traditional points of entry to China, at Hong Kong and Canton. Once contact with China had been made in this way, the final assault on Japan would be made by using Chinese forces and Chinese bases as major elements in this final assault.

     Just as the Teheran Conference was meeting, this Far East strategy was being modified as a result of three factors. In the first place, the success of the United States Navy with carrier-based planes and with amphibious landing operations was showing that an attack on Japan could be made directly from the open Pacific without any need to recapture many of Japan's island bases beyond those which were needed as bases for our own air-force attacks on Japan and that this could be done without any preliminary contact with the Chinese mainland....

     It was just at this moment that Stalin indicated his willingness to intervene in the war on Japan and to provide Soviet forces for the elimination of the Japanese troops in Asia as soon as the war with Germany was finished. As American faith in China's ability to overcome the Japanese forces on the Asiastic mainland steadily dwindled and their faith in America's ability to strike a fatal blow at Japan itself from the open Pacific grew, it became increasingly a part of America's aims to obtain a Soviet commitment to enter the war against Japan in order to overcome the Japanese troops in Asia. This desire, forced on Roosevelt by his military leaders, greatly weakened the President in his negotiations with Stalin, since Roosevelt could not be adamant on Russia's position in eastern Europe, or even in eastern Asia, if he w as seeking to obtain a Soviet commitment to go to war with Japan.

     At Teheran, Stalin was chiefly motivated by an intense fear of Germany and a desire to strengthen the Soviet Union along its western border as protection against Germany. Apparently, this fear was so great that Stalin did not want Germany to go Communist after the war, possibly from fear that such a change would strengthen it. Instead, he demanded, and obtained, Polish frontiers on the Curzon Line and the Oder-Neisse Line and won acquiescence for his rather moderate plans for Finland. The latter included the 1940 frontier, a Soviet naval base at Hang๖ or Petsamo, reparations to Russia, and a complete break with Germany.

     The British were generally unsuccessful in obtaining their desires at Teheran. They hoped to postpone Overlord and the projected campaign to reopen the Burma Road, shifting the Burma equipment instead to the Aegean, but were forced to accept a May 1944 target date for Overlord, while Stalin emphatically vetoed any Turkish, Aegean, or Balkan projects. Stalin and Roosevelt did authorize Churchill to negotiate with Turkey in an effort to persuade that country to go to war on Germany, but no one had much hope that these efforts would be successful, and Roosevelt and Stalin generally opposed them for fear they might delay Overlord.

     Roosevelt was mostly concerned with military questions at Teheran. Having fixed a date for Overlord, he announced his decision to give the supreme command of that operation to Eisenhower. On the same day, as a result of Stalin's announcement that the Soviet Union would go to war with Japan as soon as Germany was beaten, he made the decisive shift in Far East strategy from the Chinese approach to the Pacific approach to Japan, leaving the Japanese Asiastic forces to Russia rather than to the Chinese, and decided to allow the Burma campaign to languish. At the same time, he asked Stalin for the use of heavy-bomber bases in European Russia and in the Siberian Maritime Provinces. The Siberian bases were to be used against Japan, but never came into action because Stalin was reluctant and because the rapid American advance across the Pacific gave the United States substitute bases, especially on Okinawa. The bases in European Russia were to have been used for a "shuttle-bombing'' technique by which American heavy bombers would fly from England to Russia, and return, bombing Germany on both trips. The technique was used several times but could not be continued because the Russians did not provide sufficient antiaircraft protection for the eastern bases, with the result that the German Air Force bombed American planes on the ground with relative impunity and heavy losses.

     The Teheran Conference reached important conclusions regarding Iran and Yugoslavia. A joint declaration was signed and issued by which the three Powers agreed to maintain the independence, sovereignty, and territorial integrity of Iran. This was regarded as a victory for the Anglo-American cause, since Russian intrigues in Persia had been threatening its independence and integrity since the days of the czars and had been particularly objectionable since the Anglo-Soviet military occupation of the country in August 1941. This occupation had been undertaken to force the expulsion of about seven hundred German agents and technicians, and was justified under the Soviet-Persian Treaty of 1921. That treaty permitted Russia to send troops into Persia if it were ever threatened by other forces. As the Russians occupied the northern portion of the country, the British occupied the south. Iranian public opinion was sullenly submissive. The assembly accepted an Allied demand that the German, Italian, Romanian, and Hungarian legations be expelled, and a week later the shah abdicated in favor of his son, Muhammad Riza Pahlavi. On January 29, 1942, Britain, the Soviet Union, and Iran signed an alliance by which the first two promised to respect and protect Iran's integrity, sovereignty, and independence, while Iran gave the two powers military control over the trans-Iranian trade route until six months after the war ended, and promised as well to sever diplomatic relations with all countries which had broken with the other two signers.

     Reorganization and re-equipment of the trans-Iranian route under American guidance made it possible to ship to the Soviet Union over this route 5.5 million tons of supplies during the war. These efforts carried a considerable disruption of Iranian life, especially by price inflation and acute food shortages, but the chief disturbance arose from Soviet political actions in northern Iran. The Russians excluded most Iranian officials, and encouraged local separatist and revolutionary forces. On several occasions the United States secretary of state sent inquiries to Moscow about these activities, but never received a satisfactory reply. [In] ... the Declaration of Teheran of December 1, 1943 ... Stalin joined with Roosevelt and Churchill in guaranteeing Iran's independence and integrity.

     The Teheran agreement about Yugoslavia was even more significant than the one about Iran, and could not, in any honesty, be called a victory for the West. The South Slav state had been suffering under a brutal Axis occupation since the spring of 1941 and was also split by a civil war between two underground movements which spent more energy fighting each other than they used to fight the Axis. The earlier of these undergrounds, that of the Chetniks, supported the Yugoslav legitimate government now in exile in London; it was led by General Draža Mihajloviๆ, minister of war in the exiled government. The second underground movement, known as the Partisans, was Leftish and republican in its sympathies and was dominated by the Communists led by Moscow-trained Josip Broz, known as Tito.

     The contrast between these two underground movements was a sharp one, but to Churchill and Roosevelt these differences were largely ignored in favor of the more immediate question of which was more willing to fight the Axis. The answer to that question, in Churchill's opinion was Tito. For this reason Churchill at Teheran made the fateful suggestion that the Allied supplies going to Yugoslavia be shifted from Mihajloviๆ to Tito and that Russia should send a military mission to Tito to join the British military mission already there. These suggestions were accepted by the Big Three apparently without any clear idea of what this change in policy meant, but it was a change filled with significance since it meant that the Communists would control Yugoslavia in the postwar period. This outcome was certainly not intended by at least two of the Big Three, but they were willing to overlook obvious facts in their eagerness to defeat Germany. Among these obvious items was the fact that Mihajloviๆ represented the forces of royalism, of Serb centralism, and of social conservatism, while the Partisans represented the forces of republicanism, of South Slav federalism, and of social revolution.

     Mihajloviๆ's reluctance to continue guerrilla attacks on the Axis forces lost him British support but was, from his point of view, the only possible tactic. Every guerrilla attack on the Germans was answered by German reprisals on the Serbs in which thousands were massacred, undefended villages were destroyed, and hundreds of peasants had to flee to the mountains where they were recruited into Partisan bands. Tito, who had no desire to maintain the previous social, economic, or ideological structure of Yugoslavia, had no desire to avoid German reprisals which simultaneously destroyed the old social structure and provided recruits for his Partisan forces. Accordingly, Tito was more willing to fight Germans, and thus won the right to Allied support at Teheran. But Tito's willingness to fight Germans was only slightly more eager than that of Mihajloviๆ, since the chief aim of each was to keep his forces strong enough to take over Yugoslavia when the Axis was driven out. Moreover, neither group, even with Allied supplies, was sufficiently strong to drive the Axis out of the country or to take over control of any significant parts of the country. The Italian forces in Yugoslavia were defeated by the Anglo-American victory in Italy itself, while the German forces were ultimately expelled by the advance of Soviet and Bulgarian forces from the east in the winter of 1944-1945. Nevertheless, the Teheran decision to shift Allied supplies from the Chetniks to the Partisans was of major significance in forming postwar Europe.

     The Allied leaders parted after the Cairo and Teheran conferences in hopeful moods and proceeded to direct their full energies to military matters. Thus, there was no other important meeting until the Second Quebec Conference in September 1944, and no other meeting of the Big Three until Yalta in February 1945. The nine months following Teheran were devoted to military matters of which the chief was Overlord, begun on D-Day, June 6, 1944.

     The preparations for Overlord were among the most elaborate in military history. The planning, under British General Frederick E. Morgan, occupied almost a year before Eisenhower came to England to take command in January 1944. The preparatory work involved the accumulation of enormous manpower and supplies in England, extensive intelligence work and retraining of troops, detailed planning on a very large scale, the accumulation of much special equipment, including over 5,000 escort vessels and landing craft, two artificial floating harbors, numerous block ships and caissons for emergency piers, and strenuous exertions to overcome the German Air Force and submarine fleet before the project began.

     The Eighth American Air Force had been established in England in August 1942, but had not delivered the full impact of its attack because of constant diversion of men and planes to North Africa and the Mediterranean. At Casablanca in January 1943, the divergent British and American ideas on aerial bombardment were reconciled in what was called the "Combined Bomber Offensive." The Americans believed that Germany could be crippled to the point of paralysis by precision daylight bombing on strategically chosen plants of German industry; the British, who felt that daylight bombing would be too costly, placed their hopes in nighttime saturation bombing of whole areas, thus destroying civilian morale and exhausting German manpower as well as destroying military facilities. The Combined Bomber Offensive sought "round-the-clock" bombing of Germany by allowing each Ally to concentrate on its special type of attack. Gradually the very heavy casualties suffered by the Americans in daylight raids, along with recognition that "precision bombing" was far too inaccurate to fulfill the goals set for it, plus technical advances such as radar and radio-locating which improved the precision of night bombing brought the Americans to some extent to the British point of view.

     The Combined Bomber Offensive shifted its targets several times, and at the beginning of 1944 concentrated on the elimination of German fighting planes. This was achieved by killing off German pilots faster than they could be trained, a goal which was greatly assisted by the fact that fuel supplies in Germany were not sufficient to permit adequate training flights. In spite of Allied bombing on factories, German production of fighter planes rose steadily in 1944 and was at 2,500 a month just before D-Day. But pilot training, from lack of gasoline, had been cut from 260 to 100 hours and even in some cases to so hours. As a result, losses of planes from accidents were almost as high as losses from Allied action and, in February 1944, reached the extraordinarily high figure of 1,300 planes, half of the month's production of new planes. In the meantime, losses of American bombing planes on raids over Germany were approaching lo percent, and in one case, over the ball-bearing factory at Schweinfurt, reached 25 percent of the planes sent. In the early months of 1944 a series of raids on Berlin was launched with the deliberate purpose of provoking the German fighter forces into combat so that they could be destroyed. This was a complete success. On the last of these raids the Allied bombers were not attacked by German fighters at all, and by June the Allies had won complete aerial supremacy over Germany.

     A similar result, somewhat earlier and not so conclusive, was reached in the antisubmarine warfare. In this effort, thanks to radar and combined air and sea attacks, the U-boats were driven completely from the North Atlantic. The turning point occurred in May 1943, when 30 percent of the German submarines which put to sea failed to return. The number of Allied ships torpedoed fell from 141 in March 1943 to 19 in June 1944 and only 3 in August 1944. At the same time the Allied shipbuilding program was growing so rapidly that even in 1943, after losses had been subtracted, it increased by almost 11 million tons.

     The Germans were poorly prepared to cope with any Allied landing in the west. Two-thirds of their forces were fighting in Russia and eastern Europe, and the rest had to be spread from the Aegean to the Pyrenees and thence north to Norway and Finland. The drain on German manpower and vital materials was so great that the country grew steadily weaker. Still it fought on, the leaders becoming more and more ruthless and more and more remote from reality until finally they were living in an insane frenzy of hatred, suspicion, and frustration. Lack of manpower, particularly of trained hands, and lack of materials, even of such ordinary commodities as concrete or steel, made it impossible to strengthen the German defenses to the necessary degree. Above all, lack of gasoline made it impossible even to withdraw equipment before the advancing Russians. In the last two months of 1943, the German armies lost almost a thousand tanks and half as many self-propelled guns to Soviet forces. Repairs became as difficult to achieve as new construction. In June 1943 the Germans had 2,569 operational tanks and 463 under repair; in February 1944 the corresponding figures were 1,5.9 and 1,534.

     In the west the German defenses had, necessarily, been allowed to run down in order to strengthen the Russian front. While there were a few good divisions in the west, the majority of the German forces there were in units not prepared for combat, and totally lacking in mobility. The men were over-age or very young, physically unfit or convalescing, prepared to serve as occupation police and beach-watchers but quite unfit for real fighting. There was even one division made up almost entirely of men with digestive disorders. Most divisions in the west were only two regiments, and, because they were totally lacking in transport, they were classified as "static" (not fully combatant) units.

     Although Hitler had ordered the coast to be fortified, this was done almost nowhere, for lack of concrete and manpower. Allied aerial bombardment increased these lacks; almost a million men were engaged in air defense in Germany itself. Disruption of railway transportation made it difficult to get the supplies that were available to the shore area. In May, for example, with a daily need of 240 carloads of cement for one area, the arrival was 16 a day. When Rommel took over the active defense in the west, he ordered a continuous belt of land mines to be laid, requiring, at a minimum, 50 million mines. Only 6 million were laid. Similarly, sea mines were ordered laid off the coast, plus a renewal of the mid-Channel mines which had been put down in 1943 and were now too old to function properly. The last could not be done at all, while the coastal mines were put down in the wrong area.

     The chief German defensive forces were the Fifteenth Army defending the Pas-de-Calais and the Seventh Army farther southwest in Normandy and Brittany. The Germans expected the attack to come in the Pas-de-Calais, since it was closer to England. They continued to believe this, even after D-Day, since they thought that the Normandy landings were merely a diversion preliminary to the main attack farther north. Moreover, the Germans were convinced that the attacks would come just before high tide in order to minimize the width of beach to cross and, accordingly, constructed their obstacles and laid mines down to the half-tide mark only.

     Although the Allied cross-Channel attack was not a large one, being only five attack divisions preceded by parts of three airborne divisions, it was beautifully planned, competently carried out, and encountered a number of very lucky chances, especially from the weather.

     The desired landing conditions were low tide, just after dawn, following a moonlit night. These occurred only once a month and lasted for only three days. In June 1944 these days were the 5th, 6th, and 7th. Bad weather, making air operations difficult, and impossibly heavy surf forced Eisenhower to postpone the attack on June 5th; but because better weather information, expertly interpreted, showed the Allies that the weather would improve suddenly, the supreme commander ordered the attack to take place on June 6th, at a time when the Germans expected the adverse weather to continue. The two American divisions went ashore on either side of the Vire River near Carentan with "Utah Beach" to the west and "Omaha Beach" (between the Vire and the Dr๔me rivers) to the east. A Canadian and two British divisions went ashore between the Dr๔me and the Orne rivers, in front of Bayeux and Caen. Airborne divisions were dropped inland on either flank of the attack area to hold up any German counter-thrust, and another airborne division was dropped inside Utah Beach to seize the causeways which crossed the lagoons inside the beach. Tactical surprise was achieved at all points, so completely, in fact, that at Omaha Beach the strongest German coastal battery in the west was found unmanned and unguarded. Except at Omaha Beach, where high bluffs had to be scaled under fire, the landings were immediately successful. At Omaha the issue hung on the balance into the second day. As a result, 2,000 casualties were suffered at Omaha compared to 200 at Utah Beach.

     As soon as the landings were established, men and equipment were poured into the beachheads. A great gale of June 19th-23rd stopped all unloading for two days and destroyed the American artificial harbor at Omaha, but, by the time the gale began, there had been put ashore 629,000 men, 95,000 vehicles, and 218,000 tons of supplies. The millionth man landed on July 6th, just a month after the first..

     In spite of this success, the Allied forces were hemmed in in Normandy for two months. On the left, the British forces under the cautious Montgomery were unable to take Caen; the American forces under General Bradley were stopped in the center before Saint-L๔. Only on the right was movement possible, to cross the peninsula (June 18th) and turn westward to storm and capture Cherbourg. This great seaport, taken with its 40,000 German troops on June 27th, was so devastated that it could not be brought into service until late in August, and Allied supplies continued to come in over the Normandy beaches.

     In the first 18 days of July, Caen and Saint-L๔ were taken after severe fighting initiated by a terrific aerial bombardment by over 2,200 planes which dropped 7,000 tons of explosives on one town and 4,000 on the other. Both towns were wrecked, but the Allied forces were still unable to move, meeting furious resistance from German forces as they fought their way across field after field, each bordered by an impenetrable hedgerow.

     As the Allies crept forward in this way, two sensational events occurred elsewhere in western Europe. On June Isth the first of Hitler's "vengeance weapons," the V-l, was fired from Pas-de-Calais on London. This was a small jet-propelled, pilotless, and automatically guided plane, moving at 400 miles per hour and carrying a one-ton explosive charge. About 8,000 of these were fired in 80 days, but the defense was steadily improved so that, late in August, go percent were being stopped before they reached London. Nevertheless, 2,300 reached their targets, inflicting over 20,000 casualties, one-quarter of them fatal, and forcing a million women and children to evacuate the city.

     On September 8, 1944, the V-l was replaced by the much superior V-2, a rocket which could not be intercepted because it moved faster than sound. A total of 1,050 of these weapons fell on England before the end of the war, killing over 2,700 persons and injuring three times that number. On the whole these weapons, while frightening, used Up large German resources and energies but achieved no military results.

     Equally spectacular was the attempt to assassinate Hitler by exploding a bomb concealed in a briefcase beside his chair at his headquarters in East Prussia. This was the last of several attempts of this kind, made by the same group which had tried in vain to negotiate with Chamberlain, Halifax, and Churchill in September 1938. The conspirators, mostly from the conservative upper classes, consisted chiefly of army officers, with a minority of civilian and diplomatic leaders. The chief military figures were Generals Ludwig Beck, Georg Thomas, Erwin von Witzleben, Karl von Stuelpnagel, and others; the chief civilian leader was Carl Goerdeler, one-time mayor of Leipzig; the chief intellectual figure was Count Helmut von Moltke, son of the German commander in chief of 1914; the leading diplomatic figures were the brothers Kordt, Theodor and Erich, the first in the London Embassy, while the second headed Ribbentrop's office in the Foreign Ministry; among those linked with the conspiracies in an ambiguous fashion were Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, chief of Military Counter-intelligence, and Paul Schmidt, Hitler's personal interpreter.

     This group for years discussed ways of getting rid of Hitler and what should he done with Germany afterward. Sporadically they made attempts to kill the Fhrer. All of these were unsuccessful because of a combination of bad luck, lack of resolution, and Hitler's extraordinary intuition.

     On July 20, 1944, however, success seemed near when Colonel Count Klaus Schenk von Stauffenberg, chief of staff of the Home Army, made his daily report to Hitler, and left the conference without picking up his briefcase, which rested against the leg of Der Fhrer's chair. In the briefcase was an English-made bomb with a ten-minute fuse. When the bomb exploded, Stauffenberg gave the signal for the military units in Berlin, Paris, and elsewhere to seize control of these areas from the fanatical Nazi SS units..

     Unfortunately, Hitler's conference on July 20th, because of the heat, was held in a wooden shed instead of the usual concrete bunker. This allowed the explosion to dissipate itself. Moreover, a few seconds before the bomb went off, Hitler left his chair to go to a map on the most distant wall of the conference room. As a result, some in the room were killed or badly injured, but Hitler escaped relatively unscathed. This was broadcast on the radio at once by the Nazis, and, by contradicting Stauffenberg's signal, threw the conspirators into sufficient confusion and irresolution to enable the SS and loyal Nazis to disrupt the plot.

     About 7,000 suspects were arrested and about 5,000 were killed, usually after weeks or even months of horrible tortures. A few, like Field Marshal Rommel, were allowed to commit suicide, as a special reward for their past services to the Nazis. As a consequence of this fiasco, the anti-Hitler opposition was destroyed, the most fanatical and least sane Nazis increased their power within Germany, any chance of negotiating peace—admittedly a remote possibility at all times—became impossible, and the inner administration of the Nazi regime became a complete madhouse.

     In the meantime, in the west, the main strength of the German forces was concentrated against the British near Caen. As the latter slowly inched southward toward Calais, a newly formed American Third Army, mostly armored, under General George S. Patton, drove southward from Saint-L๔ to Avranches (July 18-August 1). While some units turned westward from Avranches into Brittany in an effort to capture additional seaports at Saint-Malo, Brest, and Saint-Nazaire, the armored units swung eastward to Le Mans (August 11th) and then northward to Argentan, leaving only a narrow gap (Calais-Argentan) between American and British forces, as an escape route through which eight shattered German divisions might escape eastward (August 19-21, 1944). Many broke through, but 25,000 men were captured in this pocket, and the German defensive forces in France were completely disrupted. From Le Mans units of the American Third Army, moving at speeds up to forty miles a day, drove eastward south of Paris, passing the city to reach the Seine at Fontainebleau. On their left, the American First Army reached the river below Paris on the same day, while farther west British and Canadian armies swung left toward the lower Seine.      In the midst of this excitement the American Seventh Army, with strong French forces, landed on the Mediterranean coast of France (August Isth) and began to drive northward up the Rh๔ne Valley. The landings, made between Toulon and Cannes against negligible resistance, quickly captured Marseille. At the end of two days, the German High Command ordered all German forces to withdraw from the French Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts except from seaports and fortresses. At the end of eight days, the Seventh Army had advanced 140 miles up the Rhone and had taken 57,000 prisoners. Both Lyon and Dijon were taken without a fight, and contact was made with the United States Third Army near Chโtillon-sur-Seine on September 12th.

     In the meantime, on August r9, 1944, the citizens of Paris rose in revolt, led by 50,000 armed members of the French Forces of the Interior (FFI), as the underground resistance armies were called. Here, as elsewhere in Europe, these forces were dominated by Communists. General Jean Leclerc, with the French 2nd Armored Division, burst into the city on August 24th and accepted the surrender of the German garrison of 10,000 men eager to escape from the FFI. By this time the resistance forces were rising in n1ucll of France, attacking German forces and wreaking vengeance on Frenchmen who had collaborated with the Germans. On August 26th De Gaulle entered Paris and immediately was made president of a provisional government formed by a coalition of returning exiles and underground leaders. General Eisenhower reviewed a triumphal march of Allied forces down the Champs Elysees, but the main Allied armies swept by both sides of Paris toward the German frontiers.

     During the autumn of 1944, the Allied advance in the west was slowed up, as much by its own problems of transport and supply as it was by German opposition. This advance had to cross a series of famous rivers, the Seine, the Somme, the Aisne, and the Meuse. All were crossed without difficulty because of weak German resistance. But the big problem looming ahead was the Rhine, where German resistance would inevitably be tenacious. On an Allied front over two hundred miles wide, the American Third Army, on the right, captured Verdun as early as August 3rd; the American First Army, in the center, took Sedan and entered Belgium (August 31st); on the left the British Second Army passed Amiens heading for Lille (August 31st), while on the extreme left the Canadian First Army had the unrewarding task of sealing off the entrenched German garrisons in the Channel ports. These were taken, one by one, after very bitter fighting, but in most cases the harbors could not be used at once because of damage or other causes. Antwerp, taken on September 4th, could not be used for two months because the Germans continued to hold the river banks nearer the sea.

     On September 11th the United States First Army crossed the German frontier near Trier and headed for the Rhine. When Aachen, the first German city to be reached, refused to surrender, it was almost completely destroyed by bombardment and taken by bitter street fighting. Most German cities subsequently preferred to surrender.

     At this point, a sharp difference of opinion arose between Eisenhower and Montgomery. The former wished to continue the broad-front assault on Germany, while the latter wished to put every hope on a single lightning thrust across the lower Rhine and into the essential industrial area of the Ruhr. The lower Rhine splits into a number of small rivers as it approaches the sea; in order to pass several of these in one rush Montgomery offered a daring plan: three airborne divisions were to be dropped at step-intervals ahead of the British Second Army to capture the river crossings and open the way for a sixty-mile advance by the Second Army. On August 15th, this attempt was made. The American 8:nd Airborne Division dropped at Eindhoven to cover the Meuse River; the American 101st Airborne Division dropped near Nijmegen to cover the Waal crossing; and the British 1st Airborne Division was dropped near Arnhem to cover the northernmost branch of the Rhine, the Neder Rijn, above Rotterdam. German resistance to the advance of the Second Army was so great that it was unable to reach Arnhem, and after a week of furious fighting, the remnants of this heroic group, less than a quarter of those dropped, vv-ere evacuated. This failure doomed the hopes for one vital thrust across the Rhine to the Ruhr.

     By mid-December the Allied armies were struggling eastward toward the Rhine, in fog and rain, with short days and long nights. Conditions were particularly bad in the thick forests of the Ardennes. There the Germans determined to make their last counteroffensive. Secretly concentrating 25 divisions in weather too bad for air reconnaissance, the Germans struck westward, chiefly with armored forces, into General Omar Bradley's Twelfth Army Group, splitting it wide open and threatening to break through over the Meuse. Although the First and Third American armies were separated by a German advance of over 60 miles, no vital points were reached largely because of the stubborn American resistance, even when surrounded, as at Bastogne. By December 26th the German drive had stopped, and three weeks later most of the lost ground had been recovered. In the attack the Germans inflicted casualties of about 76,000 on the Americans, but suffered casualties of about 90,000 themselves and used up irreplaceable supplies and equipment. Before this Battle of the Bulge could be finished, Hitler had to withdraw from it many of the forces which had made the original attack, in order to send them hurriedly to the east in a vain attempt to slow down the Soviet winter offensive which began on January l2, 1945.

     The Battle of the Bulge was hardly over before the German defenses in the west had to sustain a series of shifting hammer-like blows preparatory to the Allied invasion of Germany. Plans for the spring offensives showed 85 Allied divisions attacking 80 under-strength German divisions. In the east the Germans were already reeling before the Soviet winter offensive of 155 divisions. On March 7, 1945, the American 8th Armored Division captured the Ludendorff Railway Bridge across the Rhine at Remagen a few minutes before it was to have been blown up by the Germans. In spite of desperate Nazi efforts to destroy it, this could not be done for ten days. By that time it was too late, for other crossings had been established, and many Allied divisions were across. By the end of March 1945, German strength in the west amounted to no more than 46 divisions heavily pressed by 85 Allied divisions. As the official History of the United States put it, "The German Army could no longer he considered a major obstacle." But the German military leaders, under the fanatical insistence of Hitler and Himmler, were not permitted to surrender.

     The Allied advance in the west was regarded with mixed feelings in Moscow, where there was real concern that the Germans might shift all their strength to the east to oppose Russia while admitting the Anglo-American forces in the west. The Germans regarded the Russians as sub-humans aroused to frenzy by German atrocities on Soviet soil, and had every reason to fear Russian occupation and retaliation, while everyone knew that any American occupation would be motivated by humanitarian considerations rather than by retaliation. The Nazi leaders were too much absorbed in their own irrationalities to adopt such tactics as these, however, although the Soviet leaders continued to dread the possibility and convinced themselves, in spite of the contradictory evidence, that it was likely. Accordingly, the Soviet advance became a race with the Western Powers, even though these Powers, by Eisenhower's orders, held back their advance at many points (such as Prague) to allow the Russians to occupy areas the Americans could easily have taken first.

     From midsummer of 1943 until the war's end in May 1945, the Soviet offensive in the east was almost continuous. In January 1944, Russian forces crossed the old border into Poland; in February they pushed the Germans back from besieged Leningrad, and, in the following month, they began a southern offensive which crossed the Prut into Romania. In July 1944, the Soviet armies reached the Vistula River, across from Warsaw, and began an offensive to overrun Romania. These events raised in acute form the problem of who would rule over the liberated areas of eastern Europe.

     In general, the Anglo-Americans recognized the Russian need for security along their western frontier, but felt that this could be obtained if independent states with constitutional governments (in which the Communist Party played a role) could be established in Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, and Yugoslavia. They saw no hope of liberating the Baltic states from Russia, and paid little attention to Finland. It was generally felt that Russian security in eastern Europe could he assured if the victorious Powers, including Russia, could retain their unity in the postwar period and operate together in a United Nations organization in peacetime as they had done in war. While the Western Powers recognized that the Russians had a justifiable suspicion of international organizations based on their unhappy experiences with the League of Nations, it was felt that this could be overcome by the English-speaking Powers giving evidence of their new spirit of cooperation and by the existence of regional arrangements, such as the Anglo-Soviet twenty-year alliance of May 26, 1942, or the French-Soviet agreement of December 10, 1944. All efforts to achieve some arrangement with Russia over the lesser states was deeply involved with the indecisive negotiations about the fate of Germany.

     There was general agreement about Germany to the extent that the errors of October 1918 would not be repeated: German military leaders would be forced to sign a total capitulation without any legal restrictions on the victors' future behavior toward Germany; Germany would then fall under the victors' rule directly through military government; considerable portions of eastern Germany, possibly as far west as the western Neisse River (the line of the Oder), would be taken from Germany; Germany would be completely disarmed and industrially crippled; and considerable reparations in kind would be taken from her. The apparent conflict between the desire to reduce Germany's industrial level and the desire to obtain reparations from her was glossed over temporarily by a plan to dismantle German industrial plants as reparations for Russia.

     These agreements about Germany left unsettled at least three major questions and, in consequence, left Stalin with a strong feeling of insecurity about Germany's future: there was no agreement whether Germany would be dismembered or be treated as a unity, even under military occupation; there was no agreement about the nature of the future German government; and there was no agreement about methods for permanent enforcement of German disarmament and restricted industrial development.

     We need not narrate the continuous series of negotiations, temporary agreements, misunderstandings, and reinterpretations which went on for years among the Allied Powers regarding the fate of Germany and of the liberated countries. The idea that the Soviet Union and the Anglo-American Powers could continue to cooperate in peace as they had done in war, either by diplomacy and conference of their leaders or within some structure of international organization, was naive. Such a possibility was foreclosed by two factors: the fundamental underlying suspicions on both sides, even in wartime, and the very nature of the political power of modern states.

     For these two reasons, both sides, in the midst of reassuring public statements about their solidarity of outlook and plans for postwar cooperation, began to work toward another, more realistic arrangement of spheres of interest and power balances. This alternative, and ultimately inevitable, path was adopted earlier by Stalin and Churchill than by Roosevelt, not because the latter was naive or ill but because he wanted to smother the naked opposition of power balances by a chaotic blanket of legal restrictions, conflicting public opinion, and alternative institutional arrangements which would hamper the outright operation of power conflicts and which would allow men like himself to divert and postpone crises from day to day, wl1ile they improvised better economic and social arrangements for their peoples in the successive intervals of peace won from the postponement of forcible solutions to power conflicts. None of this could be achieved, in Roosevelt's view, unless Stalin's mania of suspicion of capitalist Powers could be reduced by granting him as concessions things he could not be prevented from taking anyway. In the last resort Roosevelt's sense of the realities of power were quite as acute as Churchill's or Stalin's, but he concealed that sense much more deliberately and much more completely under a screen of high-sounding moral principles and idealistic statements of popular appeal. It is unlikely that Roosevelt had any alternative plan based on power politics to fall back upon if his stated aims of postwar cooperation and United Nations failed. Churchill, on the other hand, while sincerely pursuing cooperative goals, had a secondary outline based on power balance and spheres of interest. Stalin reversed Churchill's priorities, giving primary position to spheres of power and secondary, rather ironic, acceptance of cooperation and international organizations.

     So far as eastern Europe was concerned, the Stalin priorities made quite impossible any mechanism of cooperation or international agreement. There can be little doubt that Stalin was determined to achieve security on the Soviet western frontier by establishing a buffer of states under complete Communist control. This covered Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria necessarily and any others he might get incidentally. He was not concerned with Greece, Albania, or Austria, had little hope of getting Czechoslovakia, hoped to retain Yugoslavia, and had considerable, but unspecified, fears over Iran. The technique to be used to get Communist control over these states was similar to that used by Hitler in Austria: (1) to establish a coalition government containing Communists; (2) to get in Communist hands the ministries of Defense (the army), Interior (the police), and, if possible, Justice (the courts); (3) to use administrative decrees to take over education and the press and to cripple opposition political parties; and (4) to establish, finally, a completely Communist regime, under the protection of Soviet military forces if necessary.

     The success of these steps in Poland, Bulgaria, and Romania was assured, while the war was still going on, by the Western Powers' acceptance of coalition governments containing Communists as a necessary price for Soviet security locally and for Soviet cooperation elsewhere (especially the Far East) and by the fact that Russian armies were in occupation of the areas concerned.

     One of the first evidences of Churchill's alternative policy based on spheres of power was Eden's suggestion to the Soviet ambassador in London on May 5, 1944 that Britain would permit Russia to take the lead in policies about Romania in return for Russian support for Britain's policies in Greece. This was defended as being based on "military realities," was opposed by Secretary of State Hull, but Noms accepted by Roosevelt "for a three months' trial." It led to an agreement between Churchill and Stalin, at the Moscow Conference of October 9-18, 1944, that Anglo-Soviet interests in the Balkans might be divided on a percentage basis, with Russia predominant in Romania and Bulgaria, with England predominant in Greece, and with Hungary and Yugoslavia divided fifty-fifty. [The] ... agreement was put down on paper and signed. At Stalin's insistence, the gist of the arrangement had already been sent to Washington, where Roosevelt initialed it during Hull's absence on vacation (June 12, 1944).

     This agreement had little influence on Churchill's actions. He continued to work for cooperative constitutional arrangements in eastern Europe and elsewhere. When Belgian Foreign Minister Paul Henri Spaak, in the summer of 1944, sought to obtain a Western defense bloc, extending from Norway to the Iberian Peninsula and including Britain, Churchill and Eden both rebuffed the plan on the grounds that it would divide Europe into two blocs, Western and Soviet, which would outbid each other for German support in the postwar world. The British chiefs of staff, however, in the autumn of 1944, sought to establish, as an alternative policy, the dismemberment of Germany and the incorporation of industrialized west Germany into Western defense plans in the event of Russian hostility in postwar eastern or central Europe. The British civil leaders, led by Eden, in September and again in October, rejected these General Staff suggestions and reiterated their determination to pursue a policy of unity and cooperation within the United Nations and to renounce any efforts to form any anti-Soviet bloc, least of all with Germany. The chiefs of staff yielded, unconvinced, and warned of the need to prepare an alternative policy if the United Nations broke down owing to differences with Russia and the need then arose to face a united Germany dominated by, or in collaboration with, Russia.

     In the meantime the Soviet Union, in 1944, under cover of the continued violence of war and the negotiations to establish a united postwar world organization, took steps to establish its western buffer of Communized satellite states.

     In August 1944, Finland, Romania, and Bulgaria sought to get out of the war. King Michael of Romania overthrew the pro-Nazi government of General Antonescu and sent a delegation, led by a Communist, to Moscow to sign a formal armistice. The surrender, signed on September 12th, was to the United Nations, but its enforcement was left to the Soviet High Command, with the Anglo-British members of the Allied Control Commission relegated to the status of observers. A similar armistice was signed with Finland on September 19th.

     The Bulgarian surrender was more complicated, since that country was not at war with Russia. A new Bulgarian government, formed on September 4th, proclaimed its neutrality, and requested withdrawal of all German forces. Russia declared war the next day, marched unopposed into Sofia on September 16th and supported a coup d'้tat which established a Communist-dominated government. The new regime at once declared war on Germany and was occupied by Russian forces. Churchill and Eden, from Quebec, vetoed an armistice like the Romanian one, but the final Bulgarian armistice of October 28, 1944 was little different.

     Soviet forces meanwhile had crossed Bulgaria and invaded Yugoslavia, liberating Belgrade on October Isth. They then swung north into Hungary, reached Budapest on November 11th, and surrounded it by the end of the month. The Germans prevented a Hungarian surrender by seizing control of the government on October 15, 1944, and as a result Budapest was largely destroyed in fierce fighting during November and December. Only on January 20, 1945, was the provisional government of General Miklos able to conclude an armistice with the Russians, although fighting continued in the country for several months longer. The agreement left Hungary largely under Soviet military control (signed January 20, 1945)..

     Vain efforts extending over several years were made by the Western Powers, especially Britain, to prevent Yugoslavia and Poland from falling under complete Communist influence. In the course of r943, rather futile efforts were made, through control of supplies of weapons and the work of British liaison officers, to get the Chetniks and Partisans to fight Germans rather than each other. Growing evidence that the pro-Serb Chetniks under royalist General Mihajloviๆ were collaborating with the Germans inclined the British to shift their support to Tito, but it proved as difficult to get the royal Yugoslav government-in-exile in London to accept Tito as it was to get the latter to accept the royal government. A successful German attack on Tito, which forced him to flee to the Adriatic islands, brought both sides to terms, and, in October 1944, royal Prime Minister Ivan Subasic agreed to join a Tito government in which the Partisans would hold an overwhelming majority of the posts. The agreement promised free elections for a constituent assembly within three months of total liberation and the return of King Peter only after he had been accepted by a plebiscite. The king refused to accept this agreement until Churchill threatened to expel him from England. The new government, accepted by the Powers at Yalta, was established in Belgrade on March 4, 1945.

     As might be inferred, the Polish settlement was even less happy than the Yugoslav one, since the Poles were under the full weight of the Soviet armies, and inaccessible to Western power. As early as 1943, the Polish Cabinet in London, which operated an underground army and underground government in Poland, was threatened by Russian demands that the Polish eastern frontier be moved westward to the Curzon Line and that anti-Soviet members of the government be removed. Futile negotiations dragged on for months. In July 1944, when the Soviet armies were approaching the Vistula, a Communist "Polish Committee of National Liberation" was set up under Soviet protection in Russia. It claimed full legal sovereignty over Poland under the Constitution of 1921 and denounced the Polish government in London as illegal.

     Polish ministers hurried from London to Moscow to negotiate. While they were still talking there, and when the Soviet Army was only six miles from Warsaw, the Polish underground forces in the city, at a Soviet invitation, rose up against the Germans. A force of 4o,ooo responded to the suggestion, but the Russian armies stopped their advance and obstructed supplies to the rebels, in spite of appeals from all parts of the world. On October 3, 1944, after sixty-three days of hopeless fighting, the Polish Home Army had to surrender to the Germans. This Soviet treachery removed the chief obstacle to Communist rule in Poland, and the London government accordingly was ignored. On January 5, 1945, Russia recognized the Committee of National Liberation as the government of Poland, while the Western Powers continued to recognize the government in London.

     Only in Greece was it possible to save a Balkan state from Communist domination; this was achieved because the country was accessible to British forces arriving by sea. The guerrillas resisting the Germans in Greece were controlled by two groups: a Communist one was known from its initials as ELAS, while a smaller local group of anti-Communist resistance fighters in Epirus was known as EDES (under pro-English Colonel Zervas). British efforts to unite the two groups under a common government and program were frustrated by the extreme unpopularity of the king. Finally, such a government was formed under a liberal republican, George Papandreou, with British General R. M. Scobie as commander in chief of all guerrilla fighters. In mid-October 1944, British forces returned to Athens with this government, but armed ELAS groups prowled Athens as a constant threat to public order. A decision to disarm these led to an armed uprising in the city. Defeated by the British, they took to the hills, but received no support from Russia, and, on February 13, 1945, accepted disarmament and amnesty under the regency of Archbishop Damaskinos, with General Nicholas Plastiras as prime minister in a non-Communist government.

     In spite of these conflicts with Communist elements in eastern Europe, the Western Powers continued to cooperate with the Soviet Union in the military subjugation of Germany and the diplomatic negotiations to establish a general postwar arrangement. In the latter negotiations the problem of a European, particularly a German, postwar settlement was inextricably mingled with the establishment of a world security organization. The central core of both was the hope that the three Great Powers would be able to cooperate in peace as they had done in war, but this rather tenuous hope was concealed under a mass of other considerations.

     We have already seen the dominant role played in Soviet operations by Russia's insistence on security along its western frontier. Britain had equally forceful aspirations, of which the chief w ere to prevent an American reversiol1 into postwar isolationism as in 1921 and to maintain the unity of the Commonwealth. The Roosevelt Administration in Washington was equally fearful of any resurgence of American isolationism, and hoped to avoid it by a symphonic appeal to mingled notes of American idealism and interests: The United States would be the greatest Power in a world security organization which would prevent future wars but, at the same time, would be unable to impose any decisions on the United States. Under that peace the world would be reconstructed economically to satisfy the basic needs of all human beings, end poverty and disease by American technical skill and science, and raise standards of living everywhere to the simultaneous satisfaction of American idealism and American industry's need for profitable markets.

     The outlines of this American post-war paradise were sketched as goals by such proclamations as the Four Freedoms speech of January 1941, the Atlantic Charter of August 14, 1941, and the United Nations Declaration of January 2, 1942. Differences of view among the Big Three in drawing up the latter document were concealed in its final wording, but are of some significance. They included American insistence on excluding France and including China as Great Powers, British efforts to include social security and to protect imperial preference, and Soviet objections to the importance of religious freedom..

     The organizational structures to secure these goals in the post-war period were sketched out in a number of international conferences on various governmental levels. These included the major summit conferences of heads of governments already mentioned and subsequent ones at Second Quebec (September 1944), Moscow (October 1944), Malta (January 1945), Yalta (February 1945), and Potsdam (July 1915), and a number of specialists' conferences. The latter included: (1) a conference on post-war economic problems at London in September 1941; (2) another on food and agriculture at Hot Springs, Virginia, in May-June 1943; (3) one on refugees and emergency postwar relief held at Atlantic City, New Jersey, in November 1943; (4) a conference on international monetary problems at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in July 1944; (5) the Conference of Ministers of Education of the Allied Governments, held in London in April 1944; and (6) the two conferences to establish an international security organization at Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, in October 1944, and at San Francisco in April-June 1945.

     These conferences were surrounded with preliminary and subsequent negotiations and gave rise to the basic international organizations of the postwar period. Among these were the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), now stationed in Rome; the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA); the International Monetary Fund and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (World Rank), now in Washington; the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), now in Paris; and the United Nations security organization now operating out of its glittering glass buildings along the East River, New York City. The arguments and conflicts whose compromises and resolutions provided these post-war organizations of "one world" idealism will be discussed later; during the war itself they were largely lost under the din of world conflict.

     While the Western Powers were thus laying the foundations for their ... [New Imperial Order for] the post-war world during 1943-1945, the basically destructive, pathological, and irrational character of Nazism was turning Germany and occupied Europe into a madhouse. By September 1943, no objective person in Germany could expect a German victory; by September 1944, every German military leader saw that defeat was imminent. Yet the Nazi hierarchy and its jackal collaborators, isolated from reality by their obsessive delusions, only increased the violence of their insane frenzies. This violence was turned increasingly inward in a determination to destroy everything in one vast holocaust if Hitler's New Order could not be achieved. Efforts to destroy entirely those peoples, such as Jews, gypsies, Slavs, and the "politically unreliable," who were special targets of the Nazi psychosis, were accelerated as the Western and Soviet armies slashed deeper into the Reich. Eager subordinates worked overtime to slaughter the emaciated prisoners in concentration camps before the whole system collapsed. More significantly, persons held as resisters and opponents in crowded prisons were condemned to destruction by shooting or hanging before they could be released by the invading armies.

     In many places within Germany the uproar of the war itself was almost lost in the crackle of the executioners' guns, the screams of the tortured, the acrid smell of the gas chambers, the moans of millions of victims of avarice and hate, the stench of burning bodies, and the scurrying around of the bestial Nazis seeking to hide or destroy documentary evidence, to conceal the treasures looted from centuries of Europe's earlier culture in the days of Hitler's victories; to secrete the jewels and precious metals (including gold yanked from the teeth of murdered Jews), and to satisfy their last impulses of avarice and spite. Hundreds of millions of dollars of such hidden loot were uncovered by the armies in their final stages of victory.

     When these victorious armies broke into Germany, late in 1944, the Nazis were still holding the survivors of 8,000,000 enslaved civilian workers, 10,000,000 Jews, 5,750,000 Russian prisoners of war, and millions of prisoners from other armies. Over half of the Jews and Russians and several millions of the others, possibly 12,000,000 in all, were killed by murder, overwork, or deliberate neglect before final victory in the spring of 1945. The work of these enslaved and exploited millions allowed the great majority of Germans to escape the economic stringencies of the war. While the standards of living of the British were pushed downward by rationing and shortages to levels where energy and work were hampered, and at a time when German-occupied countries were frequently forced below the subsistence level, German standards of living were, on the average, higher than they had been since 1928, and the mobilization of Germans for work or war service was less stringent than in any other major combatant country. This was especially true of women and nonessential workers. By mid-1943, for example, the number of persons in domestic service in Germany was only about 8 percent less than four years earlier, while in Britain over the same four years the reduction was 67 percent. Over the same period the number of workers in heavy industry increased 68.5 percent in Britain, but only 18.8 percent in Germany. In August 1944, Albert Speer, minister of armaments and war production and one of the few rational figures in high position in Germany, estimated that there were still 7.7 million unproductive employees in Germany, including 1.4 million in domestic service. The number of women mobilized for war production in the first four years of the conflict was 2.25 million in Britain compared to 182,000 in Germany.

     This relative ease of the Germans in the midst of history's most destructive war was possible because of the convergence of a number of factors of which the most significant were the slowness of industrial mobilization, the ruthless looting of occupied areas, and the working to death of millions of enslaved peoples. As one consequence of this situation, recognition that the war was lost came to the Germans, as it came to Hitler, relatively late and with surprising suddenness, but the leaders of the armed forces recognized their hopeless position a year, or even two years, before the end. Fear of Hitler's terror prevented them from taking any steps to end the war or even from mentioning it to Hitler, from fear of his rage; and their efforts to kill Hitler, though persistent, were pathetically incompetent.

     Thus Hitler's fanatical devotion to destruction made surrender impossible and drove the war on to its bitter end. This bitterness was carried to the majority of Germans by the Combined Bomber Offensive, approved by the Combined Chiefs of Staff on June 10, 1943. Before this offensive the bombardment of Germany from the air was of little significance. In the whole war almost l.5 million tons of bombs were dropped on Germany, but only 15,000 of this fell in 1940, and about 46,000 in 1941. The 1942 figure, even with the help of the United States Eighth Air Force, was only 7,000 tons higher than that for 1941. Thus 95 percent of the total bombs dropped on Germany in the war fell after January 1943.

     The Combined Bomber Offensive was an effort to carry out the largely erroneous ideas of an Italian general, Giulio Douhet, whose most significant achievement was a book, The Command of the Air: An Essay on the Art of Aerial Warfare, published in Italian in 1921. In this and other works, Douhet made a series of claims and assumptions which were almost totally wrong and had a pernicious influence on subsequent history.

     These included the following: (1) that the defensive supremacy prevailing in land warfare in 1916 would continue, and, accordingly, no decision could be reached by ground combat; (2) that air forces, on the contrary, had an offensive supremacy against which no defense was possible; (3) that decision in war, accordingly' could be reached by air forces alone and could be reached, on that basis, within the first twenty-four hours of a future war; (4) that all air power must be devoted to such strategic purposes (immediate total defeat of the enemy) and must not allow themselves to become involved, on a tactical basis, with ground or naval forces; (5) that aerial victory would be achieved by the immediate and total collapse of civilian morale under minimal bombardment; (6) accordingly, that attack by air must be directed at civilians in enemy cities, with poison gas as the chief weapon supplemented by incendiary bombs but with high-explosive bombs unnecessary beyond a minimum and token amount of about twenty tons. (Any city, he felt, would be destroyed totally by 500 tons of bombs, mostly gas.)

     To this nonsense Douhet added a number of subsidiary ideas, including the following: (1) war must begin with a preemptive (first) strike from the air on enemy cities without any formal declaration of war; (2) since antiaircraft guns are totally ineffective and fighter planes are almost equally futile, bombers do not need high speed and will never need escort by fighter planes; and (3) since whole cities will collapse immediately, there is no problem of target selection, no need for economic warfare or economic mobilization, and little need for concern for replacements or reserves of planes or other equipment.

     On their face these ideas seem so unconvincing that it is almost inconceivable that they played a major role in twentieth-century history, but they did play such a role, and made a substantial contribution toward forming the new age in which we live. These ideas were almost wholly ignored in the Soviet Union and were largely rejected in Germany; they created great controversy in France; and were accepted to a large extent among airmen in Britain and the United States. Wherever they were accepted they led airmen to struggle to escape from tactical operations by getting free from the other services (land or sea) by the creation of a third service, the independent air force.

     Acceptance of Douhetism by civilian leaders in France and England was one of the chief factors in appeasement and especially in the Munich surrender of September 1938. Baldwin reflected these ideas in November 1932, when he said: "I think it is well also for the man in the street to realize that there is no power on earth that can protect him from being bombed. Whatever people may tell him, the bomber will always get through.... When the next war comes, and European civilization is wiped out, as it will be, and by no force more than that force, then do not let them lay blame on the old men." In September 1938, the Chamberlain government reflected these ideas and prepared the way to Munich by issuing 35 million gas masks to city dwellers.

     And as a consequence of Douhetism among British and American airmen, the strategic bombing of Germany was [deliberately and strategically] mishandled from the beginning until almost the end of the war. Correctly, such strategic bombing should have been based on careful analysis of the German war economy to pick out the one or two critical items which were essential to the war effort. These items were probably ball bearings, aviation fuels, and chemicals, all of them essential and all of them concentrated. After the war German General Gotthard Heinrici said that the war would have ended a year earlier if Allied bombing had been concentrated on ammonia plants. Whether this is correct or not, the fact remains that strategic bombing was largely a failure, and was so from poor choice of targets and from long intervals between repeated attacks. Relentless daily bombardment, with heavy fighter escort, day after day, in spite of losses, with absolute refusal to be distracted to area or city bombing because of losses or shifting ideas might have made a weighty contribution to the defeat of Germany and shortened the war substantially. As it was, the contribution by strategic bombing to the defeat of Germany was relatively incidental, in spite of the terrible losses suffered in the effort.

     The shift to city bombing was ... [deliberate and strategic for it prolonged the war and preserved key estates, industries and cartels of the German Industrialists secretly aligned with Britain and the United States]. In spite of the erroneous ideas of Chamberlain, Baldwin, Churchill, and the rest, the war opened and continued for months with no city bombing at all, for the simple reason that the Germans had no intentions, no plans, and no equipment for strategic bombing. The British, who had the intentions but still lacked the plans and equipment, also held back. After the fall of France, where almost all German bombardment was tactical or psychological with the major exception of the attack on Rotterdam, the Battle of Britain was fought and lost by tactical bombing on shipping and occasional airdromes or airplane factories.

     The attack on cities began by accident when a group of German planes which were lost dumped their bomb loads, contrary to orders, on London on August 24, 1940. The RAF retaliated by bombing Berlin the next night. On September 2, 1940, as counter-retaliation, Goring announced the beginning of city bombardment for September 7th, but the policy had already begun with a series of attacks on Liverpool after August 28th. The British efforts to counterattack by daylight raids on military objectives in Germany resulted in such losses that the air offensive was shifted to night attacks. This entailed also a shift from industrial targets to indiscriminate bombing of urban areas. [This change was deliberately designed to protect the private property, estates, industries, etc., of the German Industrialists secretly aligned with Britain and the United States and to prolong the war.] This was justified with the wholly mistaken argument that civilian morale was a German weak point and that the destruction of workers' housing would break this morale. The evidence shows that the German war effort was not weakened in any way by lowering of civilian morale, in spite of the horrors heaped upon an effort was made to begin "thousand-bomber" raids against a single target in one night, and three of these were carried out, the first at Cologne on May 30th. This was a terrible shock to the Germans, but had little impact on their ability to wage war. Since the British Bomber Command had about 450 first-line bombers, a raid as large as that on Cologne required use of all reserves and training planes, with instructors flying about a quarter of the planes. Of 1,046 planes sent off, 898 reached the target and dropped 1,455 tons of bombs, with 40 planes lost in action and 12 more damaged beyond repair. In the city 474 persons were killed, 565 hospitalized, over 5,000 injured, 45,000 made homeless, and hundreds of factories destroyed, yet the life of the city was back to normal in two weeks, with war production in the city back to normal in about six weeks. The next thousand-plane raid (really 956), on Essen two days after the attack on Cologne, was so ineffective, partly from cloudy weather, that the German air defense did not even report an attack on Essen that night, while reporting attacks on three other Ruhr cities.

     Improvements in finding their targets, heavier attacks, and the arrival of the American Eighth Air Force (which inaugurated "round-the-clock bombing" in 1943) increased the damage from strategic bombing of Germany, without reducing the scale of the German war effort. This failure resulted from a number of factors which should be understood. The chief one was that the Western governments had, from 1933 on, entirely misconceived the nature and amount of German munitions production. It was overestimated by a wide margin (twofold or threefold) in 1933-1943, and was underestimated hy an equal margin in 1943-1945. The British assumed that there was full industrial mobilization for war in Germany as early as 1938; but this was never achieved and was not even attempted until December 1943.

     Consequently, Germany, until the winter of 1944-1945, had a cushion of un-mobilized resources which allowed an astonishingly rapid repair of bomb damage and an even more astonishing increase in production of war goods as late as January 1945.

     Failure by the Western Powers to analyze the German war economy led to changeable and misguided efforts to attack it. When successful attacks were made on vital objects, such as ball-hearing or chemical plants, they were not followed up, thus giving the Germans time to repair or even to disperse these facilities. Much effort was expended on bombing almost wholly unrewarding targets, such as airfields, submarine pens, ports, railroad yards, tank factories, and others. For a variety of reasons, these targets could not be damaged sufficiently to make substitution or repair impossible. The original decision for the Combined Bomber Offensive in January 1943 gave highest target priority to submarine construction yards. A fraction of the planes and crews used in this unremunerative task could have contributed greatly to defeat the submarine if they had been used in night searches for the submarines themselves on the Atlantic.

     As early as June 10, 1943, the Combined Bomber Offensive top priority was shifted from submarine yards to German fighter-plane production, but here the error was made of concentrating on body and assembly plants (of which there were many) instead of on engine factories, which were few and more vulnerable. By April 1944, with production of German fighter planes increasing rapidly, this effort had failed, and the Bomber Offensive at last turned, in May 1944, toward a vulnerable target: airplane-fuel production. To this was added, in October 1944, an attack on the general rail and canal transport system. The fuel attack incidentally disrupted the chemical industry, and this combination, along with transportation, brought the German economic base for war to its knees in February 1945. The delay was partly caused by the lack of determination in concentrating on the targets selected and the constant attraction of the mirage of city bombing. Even after May 1944, when the chief target was fuel factories, only 16 percent of the bombs dropped were aimed at these, and 27 percent were still being thrown away on bombing civilian residences in cities. The importance of choosing the correct target in strategic bombing may be seen from one incidental, and probably accidental, success. The Germans had only one factory producing the Maybach heavy HL engine used in their Tiger and Panther tanks. This was destroyed by an aerial bomb in 1944. This immobilized hundreds of these heavy tanks on the Russian front and contributed substantially to a successful Russian breakthrough.

     The British effort to break German civilian morale by area night bombing was an almost complete failure. In fact, one of the inspiring and amazing events of the war was the unflinching spirit under unbearable attack shown by ordinary working people in industrial cities. This was as true in Russia (in Moscow and above all in Leningrad) as it was in Germany or Britain (above all in the dock areas of East London). Attacks on these peoples had a greater influence on the morale of their soldiers fighting on the front than it did on the suffering peoples themselves.

     The most extraordinary example of this suffering occurred in the British fire raids on Hamburg in 1943. For more than a week, beginning on July 24th, Hamburg was attacked with a mixture of high-explosive and incendiary bombs so heavily and persistently that entirely new conditions of destruction known as "fire storms" appeared. The air in the city, heated to over a thousand degrees, began to rise rapidly, with the result that ground-level winds of gale or even hurricane force rushed into the city. These winds were so strong as to knock people off their feet or to move flaming beams and walls through the air. The heat was so intense that normally nonflammable substances burned, and fires were ignited yards from any flame. The water supply was destroyed on July 27th, but the flames were too hot for water to be effective: it turned to steam before it could reach flaming objects, and all ordinary methods of quenching flames by depriving them of oxygen were made impossible by the storm of fresh air roaring in from the suburbs. Nevertheless, the supply of oxygen could not keep up with the combustion, and great layers of carbon monoxide settled in the shelters and basements, killing the people huddled there. Those who tried to escape through the streets were enveloped in flames as if they were walking through the searing jet of a blowtorch. Some who wrapped themselves in blankets dipped in water from a canal were scalded as the water turned suddenly to steam. Hundreds were cremated, and their ashes dispersed by the winds. No final figures for the destruction were possible until 1951, when they were set by German authorities at 40,000 dead (including 5,000 children), 250,000 houses destroyed (about half the city), with over l,000,000 persons made homeless. This was the greatest destruction by air attacks on a city until the fire raid on Tokyo of March 9, 1945, which still stands today as the most devastating air attack in human history.

     The arrival of the American strategic air forces and the beginning of the Combined Bomber Offensive in the summer of 1943 gave a new turn to the air attack on Germany. The first great American effort, against Schweinfurt, a city which produced 80 percent of German ball bearings, showed the difficulty of the American aim of precision daylight bombing of military targets (October 14, 1943). A force of 228 heavy bombers dropped 450 tons of explosives on the target, but 62 planes and 599 men failed to return. Such losses could not be sustained, and resulted from the fact that escorting fighter planes were of such short range that they had to turn back at the German border. As a result, Schweinfurt was not bombed again for four months, during which most of its ball-bearing production was dispersed to five small nearby towns. A series of well-aimed attacks after February 21, 1944, cut production about a quarter in the next eight weeks, but this had little influence on Germany's fighting power.

     The figures on German munitions production are revealing. In 1944, when Germany had armed forces of about 150 full divisions of 12,000 men each, it manufactured sufficient armaments to equip completely 250 infantry and 40 panzer divisions. In some cases, full expansion continued into 1945. The total production of munitions in Germany in January 1945 was a quarter larger than in January 1943. Aircraft production in January 1945 was the same as January 1944, and both were almost 40 percent over January 1943. Production of weapons in January 1945 was 4 percent more than the same month of 1944. Production of tanks, with January-February 1942 taken as 100, was up 54 percent in January 1943; up 338 percent in January 1944; and up 457 percent in January 1945. The following figures for actual production of specific items will help to put the strategic bombing of Germany into perspective:

     Items                    Year          Germany     United Kingdom

     Military aircraft          1942          14,200           23,600

                         1944          39,600           26,500

     Tanks                    1942          6,300           8,600

                         1944          19,000           4,600

     Heavy trucks               1942          81,000           109,000

                         1944          89,000           91,000

     Heavy antitank guns          1942          2,100           500

                         1944          13,800           1,900

     Antiaircraft guns          1942          4,200           2,100

                         1944          8,200           200

     Machine guns               1942          320,000      1,510,000

                         1944          790,000      730,000

     Small-arms ammunition     1942          1,340 million      2,190 million

     (rounds)               1944          5,370 million      2,460 million

     It would probably not be unfair to say that Germany in January 1945, after two years of heavy air bombardment from the Western Powers, was not only outproducing the United Kingdom on most significant items of military equipment but had also improved its relative position. Some of this, of course, can be attributed to the fact that the United States was taking over production of some items, but the chief cause was the unbelievable economic mobilization of Germany in the year from December 1943 to December 1944. The relative costs of the strategic bombing effort may be shown in figures. The Americans and British together lost 40,000 planes and 158,906 airmen, almost equally divided between them. The Germans suffered about 330,000 civilians killed, almost l,000,000 injured, and about 8,000,000 made homeless; for the last year and a half of the war over l,000,000 Germans were employed clearing and repairing bomb damage. All these things contributed indirectly to hamper the German war effort.

     The direct contribution of strategic bombing to the war effort came chiefly after September 1944, and was to be found mainly in the disruption of fuel and transportation. Even this could have been avoided if Hitler had been willing to take the advice of his subordinates and adopt proper defensive measures against the Western air attacks. Hitler himself insisted on priority of flak (antiaircraft guns) over fighter planes and of retaliatory bombing of England over defense by German fighter planes, both mistaken decisions. If the men and materials which Germany devoted to its efforts to bomb England had been entirely used for defensive fighter planes, the influence of Allied strategic bombing on the outcome of the war would have been insignificant.

     Germany would still have been defeated, because in the long run its position was hopeless, once Hitler attacked Russia while Britain was still undefeated. This defeat arose from the destruction of the German armies in battle, and was made inevitable from the economic point of view by the loss of the Romanian oil supply in August 1944, and the loss of the Ruhr industrial region in April 1945.

     One unforeseen (and still largely unrecognized) event in the defeat of Germany's ground armies was Hitler's greater resistance to Western than to Soviet advances. It had been assumed, especially in the Kremlin, that Hitler's hatred of Communism would lead him to weaken his defenses in the west in order to resist more effectively the advance of Russia. He did exactly the opposite. In the late summer of 1944, two-thirds of Germany's fighting men were resisting the Russians in the east (2,000,000 in all), with 300,000 in Italy and 700,000 elsewhere in the west. By the time of Yalta (February 1, 1945), Germany had 106 divisions in the west (of which 27 were in Italy) facing an equal number of slightly larger divisions of the Western Powers, while they had 133 in the east (24 less than on June 1, 1944), of which only 75 (including 4 armored) faced Russia's 100 divisions (with 80 more in reserve) along the 600-mile front from the Carpathian Mountains to the Baltic.

     This shift in German forces can be explained on military grounds, but the real causes were much deeper and were embedded in the distorted recesses of Hitler's brain and in the very nature of Nazism. In spite of Hitler's verbal attacks on Communism, his real hatred was directed at the values and traditions of Western Civilization and at Christian and middle-class ways of life. This hatred impelled him to overrule the objections of his military commanders in order to mobilize all his dwindling reserves of manpower and supplies (especially truck transport and gasoline) to hurl his final offensive effort against the Western Powers on December 16, 1944. This futile effort stopped the Western attack on Germany for two months, but opened the east to annihilating Soviet blows which began on January 12, 1945.

     The Western ground attack on Germany was not resumed after the Battle of the Bulge until February 8, 1945. Two months later a pincers was extending eastward, north and south of the Ruhr. On April 1st this closed to complete the encirclement of the great industrial area; seventeen days later Field Marshall Walter Model surrendered his 325,000 Germans and at once killed himself. Ten days later again, the German-Italian forces in Italy, trapped in Lombardy between Army Group C and impassable swamps, sea, and rivers, began to surrender a force about three times as large. On April 28th, Mussolini, on his way to the Swiss frontier with extensive treasure, was captured and killed by Italian guerrillas; his body was taken back to Milan, scene of his earliest triumphs to hang by the heels in a public square alongside that of his mistress, Clara Petacci. The long-drawn Italian campaign, which had served its purpose by tying down dozens of German divisions in the peninsula, ended with a total of 536,000 German and 312,000 Allied casualties.

     Meanwhile, General Eisenhower, following the victory in the Ruhr, ignored Berlin to the northeast and drove directly eastward toward Dresden. He was unduly disturbed by rumors that the Germans had prepared a final defensive "redoubt" in southeastern Germany. Churchill and others, for political bargaining purposes, wanted the American advance redirected to Berlin, but the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington refused to interfere with Eisenhower's decisions in the field. These decisions, based on [secret political and military agreements between Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin] ... permitted the Soviet forces to "liberate" all of the capital cities of central Europe. Budapest fell to the Russians on February 13th, followed by Vienna on April 13th. On April 25th Russian forces encircled Berlin and made contact with American troops seventy miles to the south, at Torgau on the Elbe. The previous day, Eisenhower, advancing on Prague, had been warned by the Soviet General Staff that Russian forces would occupy the Moldau Valley (which included the Czech capital). As late as May 4th, when the American forces were sixty miles from Prague and the Soviet armies more than a hundred miles from the city, an effort by the former to advance to the city was stopped at the request of the Soviet commander, despite a last vain message from Churchill to Eisenhower to take the Czech capital for political bargaining purposes. [This secret strategy set the stage for the post-war world where Russia dominated Eastern Europe and turned those countries into the Captive Nations or colonies of Russia. It was an act of betrayal that has few rivals in history.]

     In the meantime, the Russian troops, screaming, looting, and raping, were smashing into Berlin. On April 20th, following Hitler's fifty-sixth birthday celebration, which most of the Nazi Party and military leaders attended, the Fuhrer refused to leave the doomed city. Most of the rest escaped that night through the last narrow corridor to central Germany. For another nine days Hitler continued to telephone orders from his bunker in the garden of the new Chancellery building, but few paid any attention to these. His former lieutenants were scattered throughout central Germany, intriguing to take over as Leader or planning to vanish from sight. Only Goebbels, with his wife and six young children, and Hitler's mistress, Eva Braun, planned to remain to the end. The Fhrer experienced a complete mental breakdown on April 22nd. A week later only a few subordinates remained to carry out his last wishes. With Russian shells falling all about the Chancellery, he married Eva Braun, ordered G๖ring and Himmler arrested for treachery, and drew up a "Political Testament" which blamed the war and all Germany's misfortunes on the Jews, and told the nation, "The aim must still be to win territory in the East for the German people." On the afternoon of April 30, 1945, with the Russian soldiers only a block away, Eva Braun took poison and Hitler shot himself through the mouth. Subordinates, in accord with their instructions, flooded the bodies with gasoline and burned them in a Russian shell-hole in the Chancellery garden. [There are those who believe that Hitler and his closes aides were smuggled out of Germany and into South America and lived out their lives in seclusion.]

     At Hitler's death, leadership of the wreckage of Germany was bequeathed to Admiral Karl Doenitz. His efforts to surrender to the Western Powers while continuing the war against the Soviet Union were rebuffed on May 4th, and three days later all German forces were surrendered unconditionally to all the victor Powers. The latter's armies continued to advance, overrunning concentration and prison camps with the ovens still hot, finding thousands of bodies of murdered inmates stacked up like cordwood, with other thousands, staggering out, like walking skeletons in filthy rags, to meet the incredulous gaze of well-fed, softhearted American youths.

     Soon the names Buchenwald, Dachau, and Belsen were being repeated with horror throughout the world. At Belsen 35,000 dead bodies and 30,000 still breathing were found. The world was surprised and shocked. There was no excuse for the surprise, for Hitler's aims and these methods, including the genocide of any peoples or groups his twisted mind condemned, had been common knowledge among students of Nazism long before 1939 and had been explicitly advocated in Mein Kampf, a book which sold 227,000 copies before Hitler came to power and over a million copies in 1933, his first year as chancellor. That Hitler's government in practice was making every effort to carry out all the vile purposes which it embraced in theory had been made explicitly clear to all informed persons by 1939, most notably, perhaps, in The Revolution of Nihilism by Hermann Rauschning, former Nazi leader in Danzig, or in The Book of the Hitler Terror, based on evidence from refugees, and published in 1933. There was no excuse for the world's press to be surprised at Nazi bestiality in 1945, since the evidence had been fully available in 1938. By V-E Day, May 8, 1945, this bestiality had brought death to more than 30,000,000 human beings as sacrifices to mystic Germanic tribalism.

Chapter 58: Closing in on Japan, 1943-1945

     When Germany surrendered on May 8, 1945, Japan was already defeated, but could not make itself accept unconditional surrender and was trying to stave off that inevitable end by suicide tactics. In the thirty-five months from the Battle of Midway to the German surrender, the Japanese Navy and merchant marine had been swept from the western Pacific and largely destroyed in the process, cutting the home islands off from vital overseas supplies and leaving millions of their armed forces isolated in southeast Asia, China, New Guinea, the Phillippines, and other island pockets.

     The war against Germany and the war against Japan were separate wars, although involving the same victorious nations. Weapons, strategy, and tactics were quite different, chiefly because one was a war of air and land, while the other was a struggle of naval and air forces over an immense ocean. Even American strategic bombing was different in the Pacific, using B-29's, unknown in Europe, for area bombing of civilians in cities, something we disapproved in Europe. The great weapons against Japan were the aircraft carriers, which relentlessly prowled the ocean and provided the necessary protection for amphibious assaults on the island stepping-stones which led to Japan. The total destruction of the Japanese Navy and Air Force were almost incidental to this process of protecting landing forces of marines and army units.

     Even where the same weapons were used in the European and Pacific struggles, the outcomes were different. In the former, the German submarines were hunted down and destroyed, while in the Pacific, American submarines made a great contribution to victory by the almost total annihilation of the Japanese merchant fleet. Japan's minimal need for merchant shipping to keep its civilian population from starvation was about 2 million tons. It had started the war with 6 million tons, added 3.5 million tons during the war from building and capture of foreign vessels, but had 8.2 million tons sunk during the war and finally surrendered with only 231 vessels of 860,936 tons still able to operate. Of the loss, 5.l million tons were sunk by submarines, 2.3 million by aircraft, and 0.3 million by mines. By the spring of 1945 Japanese merchant shipping was already below its minimum civilian-survival level.

     Immediately after Midway, the vital issue for the United States became the need to stop the Japanese advance against Australia in the southwestern Pacific. At that time the southern edge of the Japanese defense perimeter ran east and west through New Guinea just north of Australia. Its advanced base was Rabaul on New Britain Island, taken from Australia in January 1942. This base, a magnificent but remote harbor 3,000 miles from Tokyo, was linked to the Japanese capital by two fortified bases which had been constructed illegally in the Japanese Mandated Islands. About 800 miles north of Rabaul was Truk in the Caroline Islands, and almost 700 miles north of Truk was Saipan, in the Marianas Islands. From Saipan, later a B-29 base for bombing Tokyo, it was almost 1,600 miles to the Japanese capital. Just before Midway the Japanese extended their threat 600 miles farther south from Rabaul, southwest to New Guinea (thus threatening Australia) and southeast to Guadalcanal, the southernmost of the Solomon Islands (2,375 miles north of Wellington, New Zealand).

     The American counterattack to this Japanese southward push took the form of two parallel thrusts northward, passing to the east and west of Rabaul and Truk. The western thrust, under General MacArthur, aimed to reconquer New Guinea and move northward through the Admiralty Islands and the Philippines to the China Sea. The eastern American thrust, under naval control, sought to go northward through the Solomon Islands, then bypass Rabaul and Truk far to the east through the Marshall Islands, returning to the Tokyo road by attacking the Marianas from the Marshall Islands (700 miles east of Truk). This double movement is usually referred to as a "ladder" in which alternative advances on either side by the Americans led to Japanese counterattacks from Rabaul and Truk between the two legs.

     At first much of the fighting was piecemeal, with inadequate supplies for both sides, but American supplies continued to come, while Japanese support was much more intermittent. This eventually became the story of the Pacific war, as American supplies, delivered from 6,000 or more miles away, buried the Japanese beneath water and earth. This struggle northward from Australia and New Zealand was to have been accompanied by a third thrust, under General Joseph W. Stilwell and Lord Louis Mountbatten from India, across Burma, to reestablish connections with southwestern China. For some time it was expected that MacArthur and Stilwell, converging on China from the Philippines and Burma, would establish a mainland base from which the final assault on Japan could be made. The Burma Campaign, held up by the difficulties of the terrain and constant diversion of men and supplies to other theaters, did not reach China, over the hand-built Burma Road, until February 1945. MacArthur was held up for two years (1942-1944) in the New Guinea area. Thus we must focus our attention on the eastern drive from New Zealand northward through the Solomons.

     This eastern drive began on August 7, 1942, when Guadalcanal was invaded by naval and marine forces from Wellington, New Zealand, 2,375 miles farther south. By February 8, 1943, after six months of horrible jungle combat, often without either air or sea support, the Solomons were conquered. Six drawn naval battles during the struggle greatly weakened the enemy surface forces, while his air forces were crippled. In the same period, Japanese advance bases were expelled from the Aleutian Islands, and at least 135,000 enemy ground forces were left isolated in New Guinea and Rabaul.

     By the autumn of 1943, the Allied forces had reached the great barrier of the Japanese Mandated Islands in the central Pacific. These were passed in a series of amphibious operations called "island hopping." The first of these, Tarawa, in the Gilbert archipelago, was a small operation in comparison with subsequent "landings," but its name still brings horror to those who remember it. In four days 3,100 marines were torn to pieces (a third fatally) to capture a small coral island defended by 2,700 Japanese with 2,000 civilian laborers. The fanaticism of the Japanese was a revelation, and may be measured by the fact that 4,500 were killed. We learned a great deal about amphibious warfare at Tarawa, especially the need for thorough preliminary naval bombardment and for detailed knowledge and planning in regard to tides, winds, reefs, and local fire support.

     In February 1943, this experience was applied at Kwajalein, the world's largest atoll, 560 miles north of Tarawa, and at Eniwetok, 340 miles west of Kwajalein, in the Marshall Islands. In these landings Americans had their first large-scale experience of the irrationalities of fighting Japanese. Officers of the Mikado attacked tanks with ornamental swords, while privates sometimes killed themselves when they had Americans at their mercy. But usually they fought skillfully and tenaciously until the outcome was hopeless, when they made suicidal "Banzai!" charges. These two landings cost 695 American dead to kill 11,556 Japanese. During these operations Admiral Raymond Spruance led a carrier task force in a strike on Truk which destroyed over 200 Japanese planes and a dozen naval vessels at a cost of 17 American aircraft.

     In the course of 1943 the American advance up the right leg of the Pacific "ladder" to Tokyo got so far ahead of schedule that several projected landings were eliminated, all future landings were advanced in date by a couple of months, and the whole weight of the advance was shifted from its original project of a final assault on Japan from Formosa or the Asiatic mainland to an undated and unspecified amphibious attack from Pacific bases. This left three major problems: (1) the need for an island close enough to Japan for preliminary bombardment by land-based planes; (2) the possibility of very large American casualties when the Japanese invasion came off (possibly in 1946); and (3) what could be done about the millions of Japanese ground forces in northern China and in Manchuria. The last two of these problems led to efforts to obtain Soviet intervention in the war against Japan; they meant, almost certainly, that considerable concessions must be made to the Russians in the Far East and that the final assault on Japan must be left until several months after the final defeat of Germany, to allow Soviet forces to be shifted from Europe to the Far East. In the meantime, the need for an air base for land-based bombers within range of Japan resulted in the conquest of the Marianas Islands.

     The Marianas were 700 miles north of Truk, over l,000 miles northwest of Eniwetok, and almost 1,600 miles from Tokyo. The conquest of Saipan in the middle of this archipelago in June and July 1944 was the second great amphibious landing that summer, two marine divisions, under Lieutenant General Holland M. Smith, hitting the beach at Saipan on June Isth, only nine days after D-Day in Normandy. The Japanese had 29,000 men on Saipan, 7,000 on Tinian, and 18,000 on Guam. All three were eliminated by the end of July. Japanese resistance was so intense on Saipan that an American Army division, held in reserve at sea for the other islands, had to be thrown ashore at Saipan on the second day. That island was conquered by July 9th, with 27,000 of the Japanese garrison of 32,000 killed to 3,400 Americans dead and 13,000 wounded. Over 24,000 Japanese and 2,214 Americans were killed on the other two islands.

     Efforts by the Japanese fleet to disrupt the Marianas attack led to the Battle of the Philippine Sea (June 19-20, 1944). This was another "naval" battle in which no surface vessels fired upon, or even saw, each other, since it was fought entirely in the air and under the surface. On the opening day the Japanese lost 402 planes, while destroying 26 American planes, and two of their carriers were sunk by American submarines. As the Japanese fleet, denuded of air protection, fled westward, Spruance's planes pursued and sank a carrier and several lesser vessels at a cost of 20 planes. This engagement shattered the Japanese naval air support and left the Philippines open to American assault.

     In September 1944, another amphibious attack landed in the Palau group of the western Caroline Islands, 1,175 miles directly west of Truk and only 610 miles directly east of Mindanao, the large southern island of the Philippines. Feverish haste was made to conquer this group and to prepare Ulithi Atoll, the best harbor in the area, as a base for American surface vessels, since the invasion of Leyte in the Philippines had been moved up from December 20th to October 20th, only four weeks after the occupation of Ulithi on September 23rd. The invasion forces of two divisions had left Hawaii on September 15th with their original destination at Yap, just south of Ulithi, but were diverted to rendezvous with two divisions from MacArthur at sea, 450 miles east of Leyte. In the meantime, in the first half of 1944, the Japanese fleet shifted from the Inland Sea of Japan to Lingga Roads, off Singapore, in order to be closer to a supply of fuel oil; and the Japanese Army on the mainland of China drove southward from Hankow to Hanoi (Indochina), cutting Chiang Kai-shek off from all eastern China and overrunning the American strategic bombing bases in the area.

     On July 27th President Roosevelt, Admiral Chester Nimitz, and General MacArthur, meeting at Pearl Harbor, decided to speed up the assault on Japan, to recapture the Philippines without awaiting the defeat of Germany, and to force Japan "to accept our terms of surrender by the use of sea and air power without an invasion of the Japanese homeland." On September 13th Admiral William F. Halsey suggested cancellation of four projected intermediate landings and use of these troops for the immediate seizure of Leyte. The suggestion, conveyed to Roosevelt and Churchill at the Second Quebec ("Octagon") Conference, was approved and ordered within ninety minutes (September 15, 1944). The Palau landing began the same day.

     Both the time and place of the American landing at Leyte were anticipated in Tokyo, but the Japanese were unable to reinforce the single division on the spot. To cover the landing Admiral Halsey led the Third Fleet of 9 fleet carriers, 8 escort carriers, 6 battleships, 14 cruisers, and 58 destroyers to pound the Ryukyu Islands, Formosa, and Luzon (October 10-17, 1944). Witl1 over l,000 American planes in the air at a time, this force destroyed 915 enemy- planes and hundreds of naval vessels. Since Japanese naval planes had been critically reduced in the Battle of the Philippine Sea and since most of these destroyed in Halsey's sweep were land-haled, the Japanese were critically short of trained pilots after October 17th, and began to adopt kamikaze (suicide) tactics. In these tactics half-trained pilots dived their planes, loaded with bombs, onto the decks of American ships. These new tactics inflicted severe losses on the Americans in the next few months.

     In the week of October 17-24, Halsey's Third Fleet was back off Leyte to cover the invasion force of 732 ships. In five days 132,400 men and 200,000 tons of supplies were landed against only moderate opposition. To destroy this landing the Japanese gave orders which resulted in the Battle of Leyte, the largest naval conflict in history.

     The eastern shore of the Philippines may be regarded as two very large islands, Luzon on the north and Mindanao to the south, separated by a cluster of smaller islands (the Visayas) which include almost contiguous Samar and Leyte on the eastern shore. Between Luzon and Samar was San Bernardino Strait, w hire, farther south, Leyte and Mindanao are separated by Surigao Strait. The Japanese plan was to send a small force as bait from Japan to entice Halsey's Third Fleet northeast from Luzon, while three other Japanese forces (one from Japan and two from Singapore) would secretly approach from the west, with the Center Force under Admiral Takao Kurita passing through San Bernardino Strait, and the Southern Force under Admirals Kiyohide Shima and Shoji Nishimura passing through Surigao Strait to converge on Admiral Frederick C. Sherman's Seventh Fleet to destroy both it and the Leyte beachhead before Halsey could return from his northern pursuit of Admiral Jisaburo Ozawa's sacrificial "bait."

     These plans, requiring precise timing and ruthless execution, failed only because the quality of American fighting men was so superior to that of Japanese admirals that it overcame Japanese superiority in guns and ships in actual combat. The resulting Battle of Leyte ended the Japanese Navy as an effective fighting force. On one side were 216 American and 2 Australian ships, with 143,668 men, plus many auxiliary vessels, while the enemy had 64 major ships manned by 42,800 Japanese.

     The Japanese Northern Force was made up of 2 heavy, 1 large, and 3 small carriers, which could no longer be used as carriers because of lack of naval aviators. These 6 vessels, escorted by 3 light cruisers and 8 destroyers, sailed down from Japan to entice "Bull" Halsey's Third Fleet, with almost all the American heavy striking power, northward away from the Leyte landing. Unexpectedly it escaped observation until October 24th, a day later than expected, and had to sail in circles waiting for Halsey to come north.

     In the meantime, Kurita's Center Force, which hoped to remain undetected, had been intercepted by American submarines, and reported. This Japanese force, headed for San Bernardino Strait, had 7 battle. ships (including the two largest in the world of 68,000 tons, with 18.1inch guns), 11 heavy cruisers, 2 light cruisers, and 19 destroyers. All these major vessels were faster and heavier than comparable American ships but had little air cover, poor fire control, and inferior morale. On October 23rd the American submarines Darter and Dace torpedoed three of Kurita's heavy cruisers, sinking two (including Kurita's flagship). While Kurita was being rescued from the water and dried out, Halsey, warned by Darter, sent an air strike over the top of the Philippines and sank the 68,000-ton battleship Musashi with 19 torpedoes and 17 bomb hits, and also knocked out a heavy cruiser. Hours earlier, Japanese land planes from Luzon made a strike at Halsey and were mostly destroyed, but a single bomb, exploding in the carrier Princeton's bakery, set a fire which ignited its torpedoes and aviation gasoline and blew it apart, inflicting heavy casualties on the cruiser Birmingham which had come to the rescue. When Halsey's planes, returning from west of the Philippines, gave exaggerated reports on the damage to Kurita and announced that he had turned westward, Halsey took off with 65 ships (including all his heavy vessels) northward to where Ozawa's "bait" of 17 ships was patiently circling. Kurita, seven hours behind schedule, resumed his course to San Bernardino Strait and Leyte Gulf.

     In the meantime, two other Japanese forces were converging on Surigao Strait, far to the south. Together they had 2 battleships, 3 heavy cruisers, a light cruiser, and 8 destroyers. Their approach was reported to the American Seventh Fleet off Leyte. This moved southward to meet the threat at Surigao Strait, assuming that Halsey would continue to cover San Bernardino Strait. The intercepting force of Admiral Thomas Kinkaid's Seventh Fleet had 6 battleships, 4 heavy cruisers, 4 light cruisers, and z8 destroyers.

     As the Japanese Southern Force plowed through Surigao Strait in the long, dark night of October 24-25, it was attacked by 30 PT boats; these were dispersed after great confusion. Then came more than 100 torpedoes from American destroyers, scoring 9 hits, which sank 3 Japanese destroyers and a battleship. Gunfire from the American heavy ships then sank most of the Southern Force; damaged vessels were pursued by air and submarine, until, by November 5th, only one cruiser and 5 destroyers of the whole force were still afloat.

     As the Seventh Feet disengaged from the remnants of the Southern Force at 5:00 A. M. on October 2sth, the main Japanese force, under Kurita, 175 miles to the north, had emerged from San Bernardino Strait and was bearing down on Leyte, which was protected by a flotilla of 6 escort carriers with a screen of 7 destroyers under Rear Admiral Clifton Sprague. These small vessels were off Samar Island with about 25 planes each and were backed by two similar flotillas farther south. Surprise was complete on both sides, at 6:47 A.M., when a patrol plane discovered Kurita's presence. The news had hardly registered, when the Japanese big guns opened fire. Fortunately, Kurita was completely disconcerted by the encounter, and believed he had run into Halsey's fleet.

     Sprague, under cover of smokescreens and rain squalls, tried to escape the heavy Japanese gunfire, while holding the enemy out of Leyte Gulf by vigorous air strikes from his "baby flat-tops" and torpedo attacks from his destroyers. The Japanese shells, of 5- to 16-inch caliber, were all armor-piercing and went through the thin plates of Sprague's vessels without exploding; but, with up to forty holes each, these ships were soon leaking freely. They attacked so vigorously, however, using their e-inch guns when all torpedoes were gone, that Kurita's fleet was scattered, and he decided to withdraw to regroup his forces. He had sunk two American destroyers, an escort carrier, and a destroyer escort, but lost three heavy cruisers in return. By this time (9:15 A. M.) air attacks were beginning to come in from all over the Philippines, and Kurita had received news that only one destroyer had survived the Southern Force's defeat at Surigao. He began to withdraw through San Bernardino Strait. Sprague's escort carriers were much cut up, and still under heavy pounding from the earliest kamikaze attacks. These sank St. L๔, an escort carrier, about 1 l: 30.

     At 8:45 A. M. urgent appeals to Admiral Halsey had detached a force of five fast carriers with escort vessels to pursue Kurita. Two hours later, while still 335 miles away, these launched a series of air strikes, 147 planes in all, of which 14 were lost without significant damage to the Japanese. The following day strikes of 257 planes sank another of Kurita's cruisers.

     During this same eventful October 25th, Admiral Ozawa's Northern Force, the "bait," had been swallowed. In five air attacks, totaling 527 planes, Halsey's carriers, commanded by Admiral Mitscher, sank four Japanese carriers and a destroyer. Among these was the last of the six carriers which had attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941.

     The Battle of Leyte, strategically ill-advised from the Japanese point of view, ended its navy as a significant force in the Pacific. From that date, the American advance was held up chiefly by suicide tactics (the kamikaze attacks). Leyte is of great historical significance as the last naval battle in which battleships participated and played a role, admittedly minor. The Third Fleet's Battle Line of six great ships did not even fire its heavy guns.

     While General MacArthur and the army were clearing up the Philippines, capturing Manila after fierce house-to-house combat on March 14, the navy and air arms pressed on toward Japan. By October 1, 1944, two intermediate targets had been set: one was to capture Iwo Jima in the Bonin Islands, about halfway from Saipan to Tokyo, to be used as an emergency landing area and fighter-plane base for the B-29's attacking Tokyo from Saipan. The other was to capture Okinawa and other islands in the Ryukyus as bases for land forces to invade Japan itself.

     Iwo Jima was invaded on February 19th and secured by March 26th. Bitter fighting which involved flushing Japanese, one by one, out of caves yielded 20,703 Japanese killed and only 216 prisoners by March 26th; 2,469 more (of which a third were killed) were disposed of in the next two months. The Americans lost about 5,000 killed, but three divisions suffered over two-thirds casualties in the struggle to capture this island of 4.5 by 2.5 miles. The dead on both sides thus amounted to 2,400 per square mile..

     Iwo will always be remembered for the famous raising of the American flag on the top of 550-foot Mount Suribachi at the southern tip of the island on February 23rd, while fighting was still severe. On April 7th the value of the island was shown when, for the first time, B-29's returning from Tokyo jolted down onto Iwo for relief; fifty-four landed that day. These big planes, flying the round trip from Saipan to Tokyo in about seven hours, were already engaged in the systematic destruction of all Japanese cities. The flimsy houses of these crowded urban areas made them very vulnerable to incendiary bombs, but the distance was so great that only moderate-sized bomb loads could be carried. On March 9, 1945, the Air Force tried a daring experiment. The defensive armament was removed from 279 B-29's, releasing weight for additional incendiaries, and these planes, without guns but carrying 1,900 tons of fire bombs, were sent on a low-level attack on Tokyo. The result was the most devastating air attack in all history. With a loss of only 3 planes, 16 square miles of central Tokyo were burned out; 250,000 houses were destroyed, over a million persons were made homeless and 84,793 were killed. This was more destructive than the first atomic bomb over Hiroshima five months later.

     The conquest of Okinawa was a much bigger task than Iwo Jima; 760 miles west of Iwo, it was only 360 miles from the Chinese mainland, and almost the same distance from both Formosa and Japan. It was 830 miles southwest of Tokyo Bay, a full 900 miles north of Leyte, and over 1,200 from the United States Navy's refuge in Ulithi Atoll. The size of the island, almost 500 square miles, made it a possible staging area for an invasion of Japan.

     The magnitude of the assault on heavily populated Okinawa is almost beyond belief. The fighting navy of 110 combat vessels with over 100 supply ships protected an amphibious attack of 1,213 vessels carrying 182,113 assault troops. The preliminary bombardment by naval guns fired 40,412 rounds in 16- to 5-inch calibers. The assault, on a perfect Easter morning, April I, 1945, hit the coral reef, with four divisions on a front five miles wide. The size of the whole operation may be judged from the fact that the supply tankers in eight weeks (to May 27th) delivered 8 3/4 million barrels of fuel oil and 2 ฝ million gallons of aviation gasoline; in five of these weeks the same tankers delivered over 24 million letters to men engaged in the attack.

     The Okinawa campaign was the most severe of the Pacific War. It required three months of intense combat to secure the island against the 77,000 Japanese defenders, most of whom had to be killed or committed suicide. The invasion force had 40,000 casualties, of which almost one-fifth were killed. The naval and air support suffered intensely from 1,900 kamikaze attacks which sank 30 and damaged 368 naval vessels, with the loss of 763 fleet aircraft, and with 10,000 naval casualties (of which half were killed)..

     The degree and kind of resistance from the Japanese at Okinawa raised grave questions regarding the final defeat of Japan. By May 1945, a major part of the Japanese population was completely disillusioned with the war and eager to find a way out of it. These sentiments were shared by most of the civilian leaders and by a good portion of the naval leaders. Some of the army, however, still believed that they could make the costs of an American invasion of Japan too high to be acceptable to American opinion. Somewhat similar ideas occurred to some of the American leaders. These Japanese fanatics believed that they could get a major part of Japan's fighter-plane construction dispersed and placed underground by mid-September 1945. If these facilities were used to build cheap, un-instrumented kamikaze planes manned by untrained suicide volunteers (who were available in large numbers) and supplemented by human torpedoes, it might be possible to inflict unbearable losses on any American invasion of Japan itself.

     As part of this project the Japanese had perfected a manned glider bomb, called Baka (foolish) by the Americans, which carried a man and 2,645 pounds of trinitroanisol in a 20-foot fuselage with 16.x-foot wingspan. Without any engine, but carrying three thrust rockets, this weapon was dropped from a conventional plane and came in on its target at over 600 miles per hour. Even with air cover and using proximity fuses, American ship defenses could be "saturated" and exhausted if enough of these came in over sufficiently extended periods. Several incidents in the Okinawa campaign raised fears of this nature. On April 16th the destroyer Laffey sustained 22 attacks in 80 minutes and destroyed all of them, but 6 kamikazes hit the ship, knocking it out. On May 11th, the picket ship Hadley was attacked by lo planes simultaneously; all were destroyed but the vessel was hit hy a Baka, a kamikaze, and a bomb, and was knocked out.

     Neither of these ships was sunk, but casualties were so heavy that American leaders shuddered to think of the results if such attacks were hurled at troop transports coming in on amphibious attack. In June 1945, American estimates of their casualties in such an attack were over half a million. It is true that Japan could have offered such resistance, for at mid-August 1945, when 2,550 kamikaze planes had been expended, the Japanese still had 5,350 left, with adequate pilots ready, and had about 5,000 planes for orthodox bombing attacks, plus about 7,000 more in storage or under repair. These, with bombs and gasoline, were being saved for the American invasion. These considerations form the background to the Yalta and Potsdam conferences and the decision to use the atom bomb on Japan.

     The conference of Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin held at Yalta, in the Crimea, on February 4-12, 1945, sought to reach agreement on most of the issues of the war and of the immediate postwar period ....

     As the discussions proceeded, the victorious armies were pressing forward rapidly into Germany in the Soviet offensive which began on January 12, 1945, and Eisenhower's attack which had begun on February 8,1945. Victory could clearly be foreseen in the European war, but in the Far East the future was much more clouded.

     In Europe the attitude of mutual trust seems to have been high, probably higher than the actual relationships of the three Powers justified, but this was so prevalent that no efforts were made to establish limits of demarcation for the advancing armies within Germany. There was rapid agreement on joint postwar administration of Germany, with a four-Power control commission (to include France) and three separate zones of military occupation (any zone for France to be taken out of the area assigned to the Western Powers). Berlin, outside any zone, was to be governed jointly by a Kommandatura of commandants assigned by the respective zone commanders in chief. Access to Berlin, as a military question and on the advice of the United States War Department, was left to subsequent military arrangements with "freedom of transit" as the guiding principle.

     Differences regarding the rules of the United Nations Organization were settled with surprising ease. Stalin accepted Roosevelt's suggestion that the members of the Security Council be unable to veto discussion of disputes involving themselves within the Council, and the Anglo-Americans, in turn, accepted the Soviet demand for extra seats in the Assembly by offering them two, for the Ukraine and White Russia.

     The crucial problem of Poland was subject to agreements which gave the Russians much of what they wanted. The Curzon Line of 1919 was accepted as its eastern frontier, but the western border was left indefinite, since Stalin would have placed it farther to the west (involving deportation of additional millions of German residents) than either Roosevelt or Churchill considered acceptable. It was no longer possible to find a government for Poland by fusion of the London group with the Communist-dominated Lublin Committee, since the former, after the resignation of Mikolแjczyk, had become openly anti-Soviet and the latter, on December 31, 1944, had been recognized by Moscow as the government of Poland. Compromise was reached by agreement to expand the Lublin group by the addition of "democratic leaders from Poland abroad" and that this expanded government would be recognized when it had been "pledged to the holding of free and unfettered elections as soon as possible on the basis of universal suffrage and secret ballot." No form of supervision of these elections, even by their ambassadors, could be obtained by the English-speaking countries.

     Much of the Yalta Conference was concerned with the Far East. It would [not] be a mistake to regard these discussions as revolving about payments to Soviet Russia in the Far East in return for its intervention in the war with Japan. All three Powers were agreed that Japanese imperialist gains at the expense of Russia and China since 1854 should be undone, and Stalin was as ready to enter the war against Japan after the defeat of Germany as Roosevelt was eager to have Russia do so. The talk was concerned rather witl1 the terms and details of both of these actions.

     The First Cairo Conference of Roosevelt, Churchill, and Chiang Kai-shek on December 1, 1943 had agreed to a "Declaration" which promised that "Japan will be expelled from all territories which she has taken by violence and greed." At Yalta this declaration was extended and specified. It was agreed to undo the results of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 as follows:

     Southern Sakhalin would be granted to the Soviet Union along with a lease on the Port Arthur naval base and a dominant position in the "internationalized" port of Dairen; the Chinese Eastern Railroad and the South Manchurian Railroad which serves Dairen would be operated jointly by a Soviet-Chinese company in which Soviet interests would be dominant, although full sovereignty over Manchuria would be retained by China. In addition the Kurile Islands would be ceded to the Soviet Union; and Outer Mongolia, which had been free of Chinese power for decades, would be granted autonomy permanently.

     These agreements, drawn up in a formal document at Yalta and specified as the price of Soviet intervention in the war on Japan, were kept secret, although it was agreed that they should be conveyed to Chiang Kai-shek. This could not be done much before the Soviet intervention in the war, because security was so poor in Chungking that there were no secrets from the Japanese there; accordingly, the Chinese were not informed of the secret Yalta agreements until President Truman told the Chinese prime minister and foreign minister, T. V. Soong, about June 10, 1945.

     During this period, the Great Powers were thoroughly disillusioned with China. ... Trade had reached a point of semi-collapse, inflation was rampant; capital of the most fundamental kinds, such as farm tools, roads, and communications, was worn out; go percent of the railroads were out of operation; and the chief concern of almost all Chinese was survival.... The existing political divisions offered little hope of remedying any of China's ills even after Japan had been defeated. [Actually the Great Powers were secretly setting the stage for Stalin to introduce communism into China, to set up Mao as the new leader, betray the Chinese people, including their leader Chang Kai-shek and establish a Communist Nation that would be time take over leadership of Asia. The fall of China into the hands of communism could have been completely avoided in the United States and its allies would have supported Chiang Kai-shek and his forces. However, this strategy was not part of the secret plan they were following to create a giant new communist nation and a new Imperial Order after the war.]

     The dominant Kuomintang Party[‘s] ... chief aim seemed to be to maintain its armed blockade of the Communist forces operating out of Yenan in northwestern China. There the highly disciplined Communist armies had taken over the area and appeared to have gained some degree of local support..

     American hopes of fusing the two parties into a common and energetic Chinese government, however, broke down on the refusals of the Kuomintang and the remoteness of the Communists....

     As became clear even in 1944, however, the United States was not going to get its wishes in China.... [That is a coalition government with the communists in charge.] As early as September 1944, Roosevelt was so completely disillusioned with the Chinese war effort, especially with Chiang's lack of energy in fighting the Japanese, that he suggested that General Stilwell should be given command of all Chinese forces. This demand, sent to Chiang on September 16th, was answered within ten days by a blunt demand from Chiang that Stilwell be removed from China. [The deliberate betrayal by the United States and Britain of the Chinese people into the hands of communism has few parallels in history.]

     These circumstances made it inevitable at the time that American leaders, especially the military, should welcome possible intervention of Soviet forces against Japan on the mainland of Asia and should doubly welcome the addition of the first atomic bombs to their arsenal of weapons. [Actually it was planned that Russia would enter the war against Japan to ensure that the communist forces of Mao would be successful in China. The U. S. did not need Russia to enter the war to defeat Japan. The war was nearly over.]

     The making of the first atomic bombs is surely the most amazing story of World War II. It is a long, complex, and technical study which most historians would like to omit, but it is not possible to understand the history of the mid-twentieth century without some understanding of how this almost unbelievable weapon was achieved and especially why the Western Powers were able to achieve it and the Fascist Po\vers were not. The gist of this story will be told in the next chapter. Here we need only record that the United States obtained its first three atom bombs over a three-week period from July I5 to August lo, 1945.

     The theory on which the nuclear explosions were based was known to the scientists of all countries before April 1939, and the direction in which practical efforts to achieve a bomb must go were established and equally known before worldwide secrecy descended a year later, in April 1940, just before the fall of France. Scientific ignorance, however, was so universal among political and military leaders throughout the world that the use of the existing scientific knowledge would not have been achieved anywhere but for two factors: (1) many of the world's greatest nuclear scientists had fled as refugees from Fascism to England and the United States, and (2) Franklin Roosevelt was quite willing to listen to unconventional suggestions if his attention could be obtained.

     In the years 1939-1941 the refugee scientists in the United States were so fearful that Hitler would obtain the atomic bomb that they were able to prevail upon the best known among them, Einstein, to allow his name to be used to catch Roosevelt's attention. Once this had been done, the urging of these same scientists and the growing urgency of the war itself made it possible for the administrative talents of American scientists to utilize the enormous resources made available to them to reach the goal they sought. After September 1942, Brigadier General Leslie R. Groves, U.S.A., was in charge of the whole project and, in an atmosphere of fanatical secrecy, brought it to a successful conclusion with an expenditure of about $2 billion and the work of about 150,000 persons.

     In this, as in other matters, the sudden death of President Roosevelt on April 12, 1945 had a great and incalculable effect. Vice-President Truman knew nothing of the atomic-research program until he was told of it by Secretary of War Henry Stimson, briefly on April 12th and at greater length two weeks later. In fact, Truman had been kept so far outside the whole war effort that his first few months as President required an almost superhuman effort of absorbed attention to get the major lines of policy into his hands. To avoid a repetition of this situation in case of his own death, he decided to place James F. Byrnes, perhaps the most widely experienced man in American government, into the office of secretary of state, since at that time the incumbent of this first Cabinet post was designated as second in line of succession, after the Vice-President, to the Presidency. The new secretary of state, however, had been serving as "Assistant President" largely concerned with domestic questions, and he was almost as unfamiliar with the main problems of foreign policy as Truman himself.

     The problems which Truman, Byrnes, and their advisers faced in reestablishing the peace of the world were greatly intensified by the obstructionism of the Soviet government and by the fact that Winston Churchill had set an election in England, the first in ten years, for July 5, 1945, to renew his government's mandate. The result was not clear until July 27, 1945, because of the need to count absentee ballots from soldiers overseas, but these eventually showed a smashing two-to-one victory of the Labour Party over Churchill's Conservatives.

     Thus Byrnes became secretary of state only on June 30th. He went with President Truman to the Potsdam Conference, which opened on July 17th and lasted until August 2nd, but on July 28, 1945, Clement Attlee and Ernest Bevin, the new prime minister and foreign secretary of Britain, replaced Churchill and Eden as delegates at Potsdam. The transition was made somewhere easier by the fact that Attlee had been deputy prime minister since 1942 and had been on the British delegation to Potsdam from the opening of the conference. Nevertheless, the fact that Stalin was the sole survivor of the Big Three heads of government who had conferred so often during the war undoubtedly weakened the West in this last, "Terminal," conference.

     In general, the American delegation seemed to regard as its chief aims to seek to continue the Big Three cooperation into the postwar world within the structure of the United Nations whose charter had been adopted at San Francisco on June 2sth. The American delegation felt that Europe was falling very rapidly into two antithetical parts in which Britain would seek to balance a Soviet-dominated eastern Europe by a British-dominated western Europe. The Americans wished to avoid this and particularly to prevent two possible consequences of this: a revival of Germany by Britain to help serve as a shield against Soviet power in the east and the jeopardizing of western Europe's and the world's economic revival by the splitting of Europe into opposed blocs. As one evidence of this American attitude, we might mention President Truman's refusal to confer separately with Churchill before the main conference at Potsdam and his refusal to allow the State Department and the Foreign Office to make any advance agreement on joint policies.

     On July 16th, while Truman was surveying the devastation of Berlin, the atomic scientists were gathered on the desolate open plain of Alamo-gordo, New Mexico, 125 miles southeast of Albuquerque. There an implosion-type plutonium bomb at the top of a steel tower one hundred feet high was detonated at 5:30 A.M. The result was an explosion beyond all expectations: a burst of blinding light far brighter than the sun expanded into a ball of fire two miles high, which lasted, second after second, as a great mushrooming pillar of radioactive smoke and dust surging upward to a height of almost eight miles. Almost a minute later, as if the door of a hot oven had been opened, the blast reached "base camp," ten miles from the bomb point, with sufficient force to push some people backward. The light was seen 180 miles away by early risers, and the sound, by some freak, split windows at that distance. At the scene, General Thomas F. Farrell said to General Groves, "The war is over," but the scientists, stricken with horror at their success in releasing a force equivalent to 17,500 tons of TNT from about 12 pounds of plutonium, had had a glimpse of hell. In that instant, many of them became politicians, convinced of the social responsibilities of science, especially to avoid war and to direct the unlimited power of science to human welfare. It was soon established that the steel bomb tower had been volatilized, as was a 4-inch iron pipe, 16 feet high, deeply set in concrete 1,500 feet away. Another forty-ton steel tower, 70 feet high and a half-mile away, had been torn to pieces.

     The first message of the great event in New Mexico reached Secretary of War Stimson at Potsdam on July 17th. It had only three words: "Babies satisfactorily born." More details followed, and General Groves's detailed account arrived by courier on July 21st. All this information was given to Churchill as it arrived. It was agreed to give the Russians no information, but merely to mention the success of the new bomb as casually as possible to prevent any later accusations of withholding information when the story became public. The prime minister at once saw the significance of the event, but his chief of staff, Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke, belittled Churchill's excitement, and wrote in his diary:

     "He had absorbed all the minor American exaggerations and, as a result, was completely carried away. It was now no longer necessary for the Russians to come into the Japanese war; the new explosive alone was sufficient to settle the matter. Furthermore, we now had something in our hands which would redress the balance with the Russians."

     Lord Alanbrooke's ignorance, based on his illiteracy in scientific matters, was shared by almost all military men of all armies in the world and by the overwhelming mass of politicians as well. Among the latter group was Stalin, but fortunately not Truman. The President on July 18th ordered the second bomb to be dropped on Japan as soon as it was ready, and on July 24th he chose the list of possible targets: Hiroshima, Kokura, Nigata, and Nagasaki. Secretary Stimson, moved by the tears of Professor Edwin O. Reischauer and his own memories of the place, persuaded the President to drop from the list Kyoto, a city of temples, shrines, and artistic treasures. These cities were already being spared from B-29 air raids to reserve them for the test of the atom bomb.

     On this same day Truman told Stalin of the successful test. There is no doubt that the President, in order to discourage any questions from Stalin, overdid the casualness of his communication. Moreover, he spoke to him aside, using a Russian interpreter whose English was limited. Truman's own account shows that Stalin either did not understand or was ignorant of the fact that an atomic explosion was a significant event. The President wrote:

     "I casually mentioned to Stalin that we had a new weapon of unusual destructive force. The Russian Premier showed no special interest. All he said was that he was glad to hear it and hoped we would make good use of it against the Japanese."

     It seems likely that Stalin's personal interest in atomic fission in June 1945 was about the same as that of Lord Alanbrooke, although, as we shall see in the next chapter, lesser men in the Soviet system were more aware of the significance of the subject.

     The atom bomb thus seems to have played no role at Potsdam. General Marshall and Secretary Stimson, as well as Churchill, realized that Soviet assistance was no longer needed to defeat Japan, but no move was made to avoid such intervention. It is, however, extremely likely that the frantic and otherwise inexplicable haste to use the second and third bombs, twenty-one and twenty-four days after Alamo-gordo, arose from the desire to force a Japanese surrender before any effective Soviet intervention.

     The chief task of Potsdam was to lay the basis for a peace settlement. This was to be worked out, in each case, by a council of foreign ministers of the Big Three, France and China, using general principles agreed on at Potsdam. These principles were vague and were interpreted or violated subsequently so that, on the whole, the Soviet Union achieved what it wished east of the Oder River and Adriatic and north of Greece, while the Western Powers obtained their general desires west and south of these boundaries. As usual, the chief problem was Germany. There the Soviet Union still wanted some kind of partition in order to dominate the fragments, while, in the west, only France, from continued fear of Germany, sought to fragment and weaken that country, while the English-speaking countries wanted as unified an administration as feasible and a level of economic revival sufficient to make American economic aid unnecessary. In addition, the United States was determined to avoid any repetition of the 1920's when German reparations had been paid to the other victors from resources borrowed from the United States.

     The chief principles for postwar Germany, as established at Potsdam. were: (1) permanent and total disarmament and dispersal of all military forces; (2) complete de-Nazification of public and private life; (3) nullification of all Nazi discriminatory laws; (4) punishment of individuals guilty of war crimes and atrocities; (5) indefinite postponement of any central German government (and thus of any German peace treaty), but maintenance of a central, national, administrative machine to be used by the Control Council for economic activities of national scope; (6) decentralization and democratization of political life and of the judicial system; (7) a multiparty system with only Nazi groups forbidden; (8) democratization and westernization of German education; (9) establishment of basic Western freedoms of speech, press, religion, and labor-union activities.

     On the economic side, it was agreed that Germany should be treated as a single economic unit, with uniform control measures in all zones, aimed at establishing a consumer-oriented economy, under German control. and able to ensure maintenance of occupying forces and refugees, with a standard of living for the Germans themselves no higher than that of non-Russian continental Europe. This somewhat modified version of the Morgenthau scheme (which had sought the complete ruralization of German economic life to an agrarian basis) was modified almost at once by a number of factors.

     The first modifying factor was the desire for reparations. The Americans insisted that reparations must be taken, as far as possible, from existing stocks and plants rather than from future production (a complete reversal of the American position of 1919) in order to avoid the error of the 1919-1933 period, the overbuilding of German capital equipment and American financing of German reparation payments into the indefinite future. No total and no division of reparation benefits were set, but it was provided that all reparations come from Germany as a whole and be credited to the victors on a percentage basis. To administer this, to escape from Polish reparation claims, and to get the Russians out of the Italian question (so that that country could become a partner of the Western Powers), Secretary Byrnes worked out a complicated deal.

     The central basis for this deal was that Germany had an industrialized west and an agricultural east. The Soviet Union wanted reparations from the industrial plants of the west, while the United States and Britain wanted agricultural products (not reparations) from eastern Germany to feed the western Germans and the millions of German refugees and repatriates who were pouring westward from all Communist-dominated areas of the east and from the lands lost to Poles, Czechs, and others. In simple terms, Byrnes's compromise was that each country take reparations from its own zone, but that Russia would get 40 percent of the heavy war industrial equipment of western Germany for which it would pay for only 25 percent in food, coal, and other basic needs from the east. From this total the Soviet Union would pay the reparation claims of Poland, release Italy from all Russian reparation claims, and agree to the immediate admission of Italy into the United Nations.

     One of the critical events of this period was the Soviet refusal to supply food or coal to the areas of Berlin occupied by the democratic Powers. This and the millions of Germans streaming westward to seek refuge beyond the reach of vengeful Russians, Poles, and Czechs played a great role in arousing sympathy for Germans in the west and in establishing a common front of cooperative work and mutual dependence in that area.

     On July 26, 1945, Truman, Attlee, and Chiang Kai-shek issued an ambiguous ultimatum to Japan, warning the latter that it must accept immediate unconditional surrender or suffer complete and utter destruction. This was regarded by the three leaders as a threat of atomic holocaust unless Japan laid down its arms, but the atomic threat was unspecified and, to the Japanese, meaningless, while their chief concern, whether "unconditional surrender" meant removal of the emperor, was equally unspecified. The Japanese premier, Admiral Kantaro Suzuki, who had been put into office to find a way out of the war, was caught in a trap. If he made any serious effort to surrender, he could be murdered by the militarists, while his secret efforts had been rebuffed by the West as too vague. To ward off the former, he made a public statement that the Potsdam Declaration was ''unworthy of notice."

     On July 26th the heavy cruiser Indianapolis, top-heavy with new antiaircraft and radar equipment and still unequipped with underwater submarine detection devices, unloaded the bomb without its last essential part of Uranium-23: on Tinian. It put to sea at once and, in the night of July 28th, between Guam and Leyte, was practically blown apart by torpedoes from Japanese submarine I-58. In fourteen minutes, with all communications knocked out, the great ship rolled over and dived to the bottom. One-third of her 1,200 men w ere already dead; the rest were left struggling in the water. Four days passed without anyone in the American armed forces asking a question about the Indianapolis. Then an American plane spotted survivors in a large oil patch; 316 were picked up in the next few days. But the bomb was safe on Tinian..

     While the I-58 was stalking the Indianapolis in the Pacific, the heavy cruiser Augusta was in mid-Atlantic, bringing President Truman and his assistants back from Potsdam. From mid-ocean the President sent the signal to Washington and Tinian to drop the bomb on Japan. By August 5th all was ready, and at 2:45 A. M. the following morning the modified B-29 Enola Gay, Colonel Paul W. Tibbets, Jr., in command, went roaring down the long Tinian runway on its 7-hour flight to Hiroshima. Only one man aboard, a scientist commissioned as a navy captain, William S. Parsons, knew exactly what the strange new bomb was or why Colonel Tibbets had been given such unorthodox orders regarding bombing technique. These orders were to dive for maximum speed and turn 150 degrees the moment the bomb was released. Parsons directly violated his orders to arm the bomb before it was loaded in the plane, because he had seen several B-29's en route to Japan crash on takeoff, and he realized that an atomic accident might destroy Tinian airfield with its hundreds of million-dollar planes and its tens of thousands of trained men. Just before takeoff, Captain Parsons borrowed a loaded revolver to use on himself if the Enola Gay landed in Japanese territory.

     Six and a half hours later, 1,700 miles north of Tinian, the Enola Gay came in sight of its target. The doomed city lay quiet in flooding early-morning sunshine. At 9:15, precisely on schedule, the giant plane went into its bombing run at 31,600 feet, speed 328 mph. As the bomb was released, the plane twisted violently away to get as far as possible from the blast. Seconds ticked off as the bomb fell almost five miles to 2,000 feet; then the two masses of uranium came together at lightning speed and turned to energy. The fireball expanded outward, enveloping the center of the city, its intense heat and blast driving outward to shatter buildings and ignite the debris. Fifteen miles away, the Enola Gay was slapped twice by the concussion. An hour and a half later, from 360 miles away, the crew could look back and still see the mushroom cloud rearing up to 40,000 feet. Under that cloud, at least 40,000 Japanese were killed instantly; an additional 12,000 died in the next few days; and eventually 60,175 perished, with an equal number injured. The city was over half destroyed, with the area of devastation extending out a mile from ground zero.

     News of this great disaster was released at once in Washington, but in Japan communications were disrupted, and there was no agreement on what had happened. The emperor sent word to Premier Suzuki to accept the Potsdam Declaration, but the militarists insisted on three conditions: (1) Japan would disarm its own troops, (2) the occupation of Japan would be limited, and (3) war criminals would be tried by Japanese courts. All assumed that the emperor's position was beyond discussion. The stalemate continued, as the Soviet Union declared war on Japan (late on August 8th). The Japanese Supreme War Council remained deadlocked day after day, in spite of a second, plutonium, bomb dropped on Nagasaki with about 100,000 casualties, of which one-third were dead (August 9, 1945).

     Early on the morning of August 10th, when the War Council had been in continuous session for sixteen hours, Emperor Hirohito personally ordered it to make peace. A message accepting the Potsdam terms, with reservation of the emperor's position, was sent the same day. This Noms accepted by an American note which provided that the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers (SCAP) would issue orders to the emperor and government of Japan. A military coup was attempted in Japan but was suppressed on August Isth. Seven Japanese generals and admirals committed hara-kari. The emperor then, for the first time in history, spoke on the radio, asking his people to accept the peace. Many listeners expected him to ask them to fight to the death. All were stunned, and remained in this strange condition for weeks. They had been so misled by their own propaganda that many had believed they were about to win the war. A cease-fire was issued late on August 16th. On September 2nd the final surrender was signed on the deck of the battleship Missouri in the shadow of the great 16-inch guns and under the thirty-one-star flag which Perry had flown at the same anchorage ninety-two years before.

     Thus ended six years of world war in which 70 million men had been mobilized and r 7 million killed in battle. At least 18 million civilians had been killed. The Soviet Union and Germany had lost most heavily. The former had 6.1 million soldiers killed and 14 million wounded, hut lost over lo million civilian dead. Germany lost 6.6 million servicemen killed or died in service, with 7.2 million wounded and 1.3 million missing. Japan's armed forces had 1.9 million dead. Britain's war dead were 357,000, while America's were 294,000.

     All this personal tragedy and material damage of untold billions of dollars was needed to demonstrate to the irrational minds of the Nazis, Fascists, and Japanese militarists that the Western Powers and the Soviet Union were stronger than the three aggressor states and, accordingly, that Germany could not establish a Nazi continental bloc in Europe nor could Japan dominate an East-Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. This is the chief function of war: to demonstrate as conclusively as possible to mistaken minds that they are mistaken in regard to power relationships. But, as we shall see, in demonstrating these objective facts in order to change mistaken subjective pictures of these facts, war also changes most drastically the objective facts themselves.

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