7

WORLD WAR II

1939–1945

On November 26, 1941, an extremely powerful fleet of the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) departed the northern waters of Japan. At the core of the strike force were six aircraft carriers. Their destination was a spot in the ocean two hundred miles north of the Hawaiian Islands, where at Pearl Harbor on Oahu, the U.S. Navy’s Pacific Fleet lay at anchor. Launching 350 aircraft in two waves, the Japanese struck the Americans early on Sunday morning, December 7. Surprise was total. Dropping bombs and torpedoes, the Japanese sank five battleships and damaged numerous other warships. They also destroyed a large number of U.S. military aircraft and killed 2,403 people. The six Japanese carriers began recovering aircraft at 11:15 A.M., and with planes and pilots safely aboard—they had lost twenty-nine aircraft—the strike force steamed for home, reaching Japan on December 24.

Brilliantly executed, the attack on Pearl Harbor was a resounding success. In one stroke, the Japanese had dealt a severe blow to America’s Pacific Fleet, thereby damaging the one opponent capable of opposing their further expansion into Southeast Asia. Their intent was to achieve military superiority before the United States was able to strike back, then either negotiate with a dispirited America or gain a victory at sea against a depleted fleet. Either way, Japan and its empire would be secure.

Essential to any American military response to the Japanese were aircraft carriers. In 1941 the United States had seven of these vessels. Two were incapable of sustained combat, one being old and the other quite small. Of the remaining five, three were assigned to the Pacific Fleet. At that time, many admirals considered battleships to be the most important warship afloat. But, as events would show, the aircraft carrier was to become the decisive weapon in the war against Japan. Fortunately for the Americans, none of the three Pacific carriers were at Pearl Harbor on December 7. The USS Lexington was delivering planes to the American garrison on Midway Island. The USS Saratoga was in a naval yard on the West Coast. And the USS Enterprise was returning to Hawaii having transported airplanes to the marines on Wake Island. The survival of these three ships meant that the Americans, despite the catastrophe at Pearl Harbor, could mount offensive operations against the Japanese.

If the attack on December 7 was a tactical success—and it was—it was also a strategic blunder. For the attack, undertaken while diplomatic negotiations between the United States and Japan were under way, enraged the Americans. They believed, rather quaintly, that nations first declared war and then attacked, rather than the other way around. “Remember Pearl Harbor” became a rallying cry for a nation intent upon revenge. “December 7,” said President Franklin Roosevelt, was “a date that will live in infamy.” Few Americans, then, objected when on the next day Congress formally declared war.

Until that date the United States had been a nation divided over whether to engage in foreign wars, especially the one then taking place in Europe. Many Americans believed that the country should remain neutral. They saw the price of involvement as too high in both blood and treasure.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, however, was no isolationist. He realized that the United States needed to stop the Nazis. He understood that Adolf Hitler’s Germany represented a grave threat to all democratic nations. But the president was mindful of the strong isolationist feelings in the country, especially as he was running for an unprecedented third term. He therefore proceeded cautiously.

But Roosevelt did act. He authorized the United States to sell armaments to Britain and France. He established (to the disadvantage of Germany and the German-controlled French government) a naval exclusionary zone in Latin America. He asked for, and received, from Congress a military draft. He sent fifty overaged destroyers to Britain in exchange for leases of naval bases in Newfoundland, Bermuda, and the Caribbean. And, on January 6, a newly reelected President Roosevelt spoke eloquently of what he called the Four Freedoms: Freedom of speech, Freedom of worship, Freedom from want, and Freedom from fear. As historian C. L. Sulzberger later wrote, “It took no seer to recognize this was a world in which Adolph Hitler had no place.”

***

In January 1933 an elderly Paul von Hindenburg, then president of the German Republic, and earlier the senior commander of the kaiser’s army during the First World War, appointed Hitler chancellor of Germany. Hindenburg did so in recognition of Hitler’s National Socialist Party having won the largest number of seats in the previous election. In other words, Adolf Hitler came to power legally. Millions of Germans saw him as the country’s savior. Two years later, after Hindenburg’s death, they voted enthusiastically to combine the vacated presidency with the office of chancellor. By the end of 1934 Hitler’s power was absolute. Moreover, he was, as historian Robert E. Herzstein has written, “the heart and soul of the German state.” That the man was a thug seemed not to matter.

How had such an individual come to power? Part of the answer lies in his magnetic personality and in remembering that he was a mesmerizing speaker. Part lies in Hitler being able to take full advantage of the chaos then enveloping Germany. Adolf Hitler promised to deliver what the German people desperately wanted—economic recovery, financial stability, social order, and, as important, pride in the Fatherland. The years following World War I had been difficult for Germany. Reparations and the Great Depression had made things worse. To millions of Germans, including those of the middle class, Hitler offered hope.

Once in control, Der Führer moved swiftly. He embarked on a massive program of rearmament and secured from the military’s officer corps an oath of personal allegiance. He crushed political dissent, making the Nazi Party the sole legitimate political organization. Internationally, he repudiated the Treaty of Versailles, withdrew Germany from the League of Nations, engineered a union (Anschluss) with Austria, and formed a military alliance with Fascist Italy and the Empire of Japan.

As Germany grew in strength and assertiveness, the rest of Europe took notice, but did nothing. In particular, Great Britain and France, two nations that might have restrained Herr Hitler, stood aside. They themselves were in dire economic straits and had no stomach for military confrontation. When German forces reentered the demilitarized lands west of the Rhine, France and Britain remained silent. When Germany dismembered Czechoslovakia, they acquiesced, appeasing the German leader and hoping that a piece of paper Adolf Hitler had signed in Munich would bring an end to German demands.

It did not. Only when the German führer invaded Poland in September 1939 did Britain and France respond. They declared war on Germany, and so began, in Europe at least, the Second World War.

For Great Britain and, later, for the United States, the war was a global conflict, not one confined to the boundaries of Europe and of the Atlantic Ocean. For at the same time Adolf Hitler brought his own brand of misery to the Continent, Imperial Japan was striking hard into China, eyeing the resources-rich islands of the Dutch East Indies and contemplating how best to counter the U.S. Navy’s Pacific Fleet.

From 1941 to 1945 President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill never were able to concentrate solely on the war in Europe. They had the Pacific conflict to contend with as well. Because both theaters required men and material, allocating resources to one meant depriving the other. Shipping P-51 fighter aircraft to England meant General George Kenney’s Fifth Air Force in New Guinea did not receive the Mustang. Landing craft assigned to marine regiments in the Pacific meant these essential vessels were not available for transporting General Eisenhower’s soldiers onto the beaches of Europe. The simultaneous demands of what truly was a global conflict required planning of the highest order and a fair amount of juggling. In retrospect Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill—and their countries’ senior military commanders—did both, and did so extremely well.

***

By the time Mr. Roosevelt had enunciated his Four Freedoms, France had fallen to Germany’s impressive war machine and Britain stood alone against the Nazis. Earlier, from August through October of 1940, Britain’s Royal Air Force (RAF) had thrown back the Luftwaffe. But this aerial conflict, known as the Battle of Britain, meant only that Britain was not yet defeated. Her army was small, her navy overextended. Her financial reserves were dwindling, and with U-boats prowling the Atlantic, the small island nation, home to the Magna Carta and parliamentary democracy, seemed likely to collapse—unless the United States was to provide massive assistance.

“Give us the tools and we will finish the job,” said Britain’s bulldog of a prime minister, Winston Churchill. But how to do so, when Great Britain had no money and the United States, at least formally, was neutral?

Roosevelt found a way. He likened the situation to when a neighbor’s house is on fire. “You don’t,” he said, “make the neighbor first pay before permitting him use of your garden hose. You lend it to him, and do so immediately.” The president then revived an obscure federal law that allowed the War Department to lease military equipment, and the Lend-Lease Program was established. This program was the means by which the United States provided huge amounts of war material to those nations fighting the Germans and Japanese. The scale of the effort was immense. Britain, for example, received slightly more than $31 billion worth of armaments. Some of this was in the form of aircraft for Britain’s Royal Navy. By the end of the war, Fleet Air Arm carriers were well stocked with Hellcats, Avengers, and Corsairs, all of which were manufactured in the United States.

Russia too received Lend-Lease aid. After conquering Poland in 1939, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, and France in 1940, and Yugoslavia and Greece early in 1941, while, for the moment at least, putting Great Britain on the defensive, Hitler turned his attention east. In one of the Second World War’s most momentous decisions he ordered his army loose against Russia, which then was constituted as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Deploying some three million soldiers and 3,330 tanks, the Germans, in Operation Barbarossa, invaded Russia on the morning of June 22, 1941. What made the attack somewhat surprising was that, in August of 1939, Hitler had signed a nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union. Once the invasion began, the Russians resisted, though not very well. At the battle for Minsk, for example, the Germans crushed two Russian field armies and, indicative of the scale of the fighting, took three hundred thousand Russian soldiers as prisoners. By late August the Germans had gained control of much Russian territory. Soon Russia was reeling. Though stretched thin, the German army had victory within its reach. Joseph Stalin, a man who, like Hitler, represented evil in its most pure form, took several steps to save Mother Russia. He poured more and more soldiers into battle. He shot commanders who failed. And he sought American aid.

Eager to strengthen any country combating Nazi Germany, the United States responded, providing assistance via Lend-Lease. Some $11.3 billion in war materials were sent to the Soviet Union. Among the aid were 4,924 Airacobras, planes the Red Air Force used to great advantage against German tanks. Only recently has Russia acknowledged the key role this aid played in the victory the Soviet military achieved in 1945.

Lend-Lease supplies were delivered to Russia by three different routes. Some aircraft simply were flown to Siberia from Alaska. Most aid, however, took a more indirect journey. It first was shipped to Iran and then by road and rail transported north into Russia. U.S. troops operated much of the Iranian National Railway, employing more than forty thousand Iranians to help move supplies.

The third route of Lend-Lease supplies to the Soviet Union was the most treacherous. Material was shipped to Britain (which also provided aid) and then by ship sent in convoy past the Arctic Circle and around Norway to Murmansk and Archangel. Throughout the voyage, the vessels were subject to attack from German submarines (U-boats), surface warships, and aircraft. Yet the most dangerous foe was the weather. High seas and bitter cold made the trip difficult and dangerous.

The legislation authorizing Lend-Lease became law in March of 1941. Late in December of that same year, well after the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt gave a radio address to the nation. It was one of his signature “fireside chats.” These were seemingly informal conversations in which the American leader spoke directly to the people of the United States. At the time, these addresses were novel, and millions of Americans tuned in to listen. In this particular chat, Franklin Roosevelt coined a phrase that has become synonymous with the United States in regard to the Second World War. Speaking of the need for the United States to supply the tools of war to those willing to do battle with Japan and Germany, Roosevelt said that America should become “the arsenal of democracy.” And that is exactly what the United States did.

Shielded from the enemy by two oceans, American industry turned its attention to the manufacturing of military equipment and supplies. Vast quantities of armaments were produced. American workers, many of them women (the symbol of whom was “Rosie the Riveter”), turned out the tools of war in numbers hitherto unimaginable. For example, in 1943 American aircraft manufacturers delivered more planes than Britain, Germany, and Japan combined, and twice the number from the Soviet Union.

Shipyards too were hard at work. During World War II the United States became the world leader in shipbuilding. Yards on three coasts launched more ships than German U-boats could sink and Japanese aircraft could destroy. In addition to warships, the Americans built cargo vessels, lots of them. None were more critical to success than the Liberty ships. These were dry cargo ships of a standard design. In 1943 alone, 140 Liberty ships were launched per month. A California industrialist by the name of Henry J. Kaiser developed the concept of prefabricating the components of the ship and then rapidly assembling them at the shipyard. So efficient was this process that, at the peak of their manufacture, Liberty ships were being built in ten days.

It is no exaggeration to state that America’s role as the arsenal of democracy made possible the Allied victory of 1945.

Neither HMS Prince of Wales nor the USS Augusta were Liberty ships. The former was a British battleship, the latter an American cruiser. The battleship had carried Winston Churchill to the waters of Newfoundland, where, off Argentia in Placentia Bay, he met with Franklin Roosevelt, who had arrived on the Augusta. The two leaders had exchanged a great deal of correspondence but were eager to meet face-to-face. Both men understood the importance of stopping Adolf Hitler. On board the two warships, the president and the prime minister, and senior military officers of both countries, held extensive talks from which emerged a joint declaration of democratic values. Known as the Atlantic Charter, the document set forth the political and economic foundations that Great Britain and the United States deemed essential for the future.

Remarkably, the meeting off Argentia took place before the Japanese struck Pearl Harbor. The leader of an ostensibly neutral country was discussing how a postwar world might look with the leader of one already at war. No doubt, Herr Hitler took notice, especially as the charter did not mince words, referring as it did to “the final destruction of Nazi tyranny.”

In fact, the British had hoped to secure from Roosevelt a stronger expression of American commitment to the war. Already the president had taken additional steps. He had ordered the U.S. Navy to escort British-bound convoys to a midpoint in the Atlantic, thus easing the burden on the Royal Navy. He also had ordered American armed forces to assume the defense of Iceland. Yet the president resisted the British efforts. He was ever so conscious of the thin ice on which he was stepping. After all, on August 12, 1941, the day he and Churchill signed the Atlantic Charter, the United States House of Representatives approved an extension of the military draft by only one vote.

On Sunday, August 10, Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt, along with their advisors, gathered together aboard the Prince of Wales for divine services. Of that morning occasion Churchill later wrote:

This service was felt by us all to be a deeply moving expression of the unity of faith of our two peoples, and none who took part in it will forget the spectacle presented that sunlit morning on the crowded quarterdeck—the symbolism of the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes draped side by side on the pulpit; the American and British chaplains sharing in the reading of the prayers; the highest naval, military and air officers of Britain and the United States grouped in one body behind the President and me; the close-packed ranks of British and American sailors, completely intermingled, sharing the same books and joining fervently together in prayers and hymns familiar to both.

I chose the hymns myself—“For Those In Peril on the Sea,” and “Onward Christian Soldiers.” We ended with “O God, Our Help in Ages Past . . .” Every word seemed to stir the heart. It was a great hour to live.

There is a sad postscript to the story of the Atlantic Charter. Along with the battle cruiser HMS Repulse, the Prince of Wales was dispatched to Southeast Asia in order to defend Singapore, now an independent nation but then a British colony. The Japanese were intent on capturing the city, and the two British vessels were directed to stop them. But the ships lacked air cover, and on December 10, 1941, Japanese aircraft easily sank both of them. The British people took great pride in their navy, so the news of the sinkings hit hard. “In all the war,” wrote Churchill, “I never received a more direct shock.”

***

Soon after the attack on the American fleet at Pearl Harbor, Prime Minister Churchill journeyed to Washington, D.C., for the first of several wartime conferences with the American president. At this initial meeting Roosevelt and Churchill made two important decisions. The first was that the fight against Germany would take priority over the one against Japan. The second was that the United States and Great Britain would plan their military operations jointly.

To carry out this second decision, the two men established an unusual, albeit highly successful, military command organization. Known as the Combined Chiefs of Staff (CCOS), it consisted of the leaders of the armed forces of both countries acting as a single unit. For the Americans this meant that General George C. Marshall, chief of staff of the U.S. Army, and Admiral Ernest J. King, commander in chief of the U.S. Fleet, served as members. So did General Henry H. Arnold, who headed America’s air force, which at the time was part of the army (unlike in Britain and Germany, where the Royal Air Force and the Luftwaffe were separate services, independent of the army and navy). In addition, Admiral William D. Leahy was a member of CCOS. He served as President Roosevelt’s personal representative to the new organization.

These four men and their British counterparts directed the overall war effort. When they were unable to reach agreement, the issue would be referred to the president and the prime minister. What is remarkable is that despite difficulties (the British general on CCOS, Alan Brooke, thought the Americans were amateurs at warfare, while Admiral King intensely disliked the British), the Combined Chiefs of Staff worked well. A common language helped. So did a mutual desire to utterly crush the Third Reich and the Empire of Japan.

By the evening of December 8, the United States was at war with Japan—but not Germany. Yet if America was to combat those that threatened democracy, it needed to fight the Nazis as well as the Japanese. Roosevelt understood that. But how was he to bring the nation into war with a second opponent? After all, Germany had caused little if any harm to the United States. The solution came from Hitler himself. In a hate-filled speech on December 11, he simply declared war on the United States. Benito Mussolini, the Italian fascist leader, followed suit. By the end of the year, the sides were drawn. The Axis powers were Germany, Italy, and Japan. America, Great Britain, and Russia constituted the Allies.

Anxious for American troops to do battle with the Germans, President Roosevelt dispatched General Marshall and Admiral King to England for talks with British military leaders. They were to decide, with British agreement, how best to confront the Third Reich. Roosevelt had mandated that U.S. forces initiate combat against the Nazis in 1942. He knew that American morale required action as soon as possible. He knew also that the Soviet Union was demanding that Great Britain and the United States open up a “Second Front” in order to relieve the pressure on the Red Army. Both the president and Churchill worried that German success in the east might force Russia out of the war, as had occurred in World War I. Were that to happen, the full might of the German war machine would be directed against an outmatched Britain and an unprepared America.

In meetings with the British, the Americans, and particularly General Marshall, favored an early cross-channel invasion of Europe. The British were opposed to the idea, fearing high casualties. The chief of staff, however, soon realized that such an invasion simply could not be accomplished, at least not until the fall of 1943. The necessary landing craft were not available, nor were there a sufficient number of aircraft, tanks, and troops. Consequently the idea was soon discarded.

In its place, the British and Americans decided to invade North Africa, where German troops had been trying—with some success—to advance toward the Suez Canal. The landings were to be called Operation Torch, for, as the first joint endeavor of British and American ground forces, they were to light the way.

As the U.S. Army’s chief of staff during World War II, George C. Marshall had great responsibilities. One was to select officers of senior rank for command of America’s field armies. It was Marshall who chose the commander for the Allied invasion of northwestern Africa. The man he chose was a general without combat experience. However, the man was an astute planner, a fine soldier whose personality was well suited to working with the British.

The general’s name was Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Although British troops were to participate in the landings, Torch was portrayed as an American operation. This was because northwestern Africa was under French control, and the French were less likely to oppose an American expedition than a British one. Indeed, the hope was that U.S. troops would be welcomed.

When France surrendered to Germany in 1940 (Hitler held the surrender ceremony in the same railroad car at Compiègne in which the Germans in 1918 had signed the armistice that ended the First World War), the victors had taken direct control of the northern half of France, including Paris. The French government, headed by a hero of World War I, the elderly Marshal Philippe Pétain, controlled the southern portion of the country. Headquartered at Vichy, it also administered France’s colonial possessions, including those in Africa.

With France no longer opposing Hitler, the British were alarmed lest the French fleet become naval assets of the Nazis. Were this to happen, the British position in the entire Mediterranean area would be vulnerable. Churchill told the Royal Navy to remove the threat. This the navy did, opening fire on the French fleet in July 1940 as it lay at anchor. Most of the French ships were put out of action, with heavy loss of life. Needless to say, the French were not pleased. British troops landing along the African coast thus were likely to receive a hostile reception. Willingly then, the British let Torch be largely an American show. Once U.S. troops were ashore, with the French forces either neutralized or enlisted in the fight against the Germans, British soldiers would join the fray.

The landings took place on November 8, 1942. American troops went ashore at three locations. On Morocco’s Atlantic coast some 25,000 men, under the command of Major General George Patton, hit the beaches near Casablanca. In the Mediterranean 39,000 U.S. soldiers landed at Oran. These troops were led by Lloyd Fredendall, also a major general. And, 250 miles farther east, another 43,000 troops landed at Algiers. In total, the United States Army placed 107,000 men onto the northwestern shores of Africa. It was, up to then, the largest military amphibious operation ever attempted.

Once ashore, these soldiers were joined by British troops and by those French forces who decided the enemy was Germany, not Britain or America. Eisenhower, in overall charge of the invading force, hoped to reach Tunis quickly but was unable to do so. One reason was the inexperience of U.S. troops. The other was the German army.

Torch surprised the Nazi high command. But it reacted swiftly. Hitler deposed Pétain and had his army occupy the rest of France. He also sent reinforcements to Tunisia.

The result was a series of nasty little battles in which the Americans initially did poorly. At Sidi bou Zid and the Kasserine Pass, the Germans thrashed Eisenhower’s men. In tactical command of U.S. ground forces was Fredendall. Clearly, he was not up to the job. (The senior British general in Africa, Harold Alexander, is reported to have said to Eisenhower, “I’m sure you must have a better man than that.” An American commander put it more bluntly, saying, “He’s no damn good.”) General Eisenhower sacked Fredendall, although, to avoid a public relations disaster, the army promoted him to lieutenant general and gave him a training assignment back in the States.

Patton was put in charge of the American troops, who, gradually but decidedly, learned how to fight. As 1942 turned into 1943, the U.S. soldiers and their allies began to make headway against the Germans. By mid-January, General Bernard Montgomery’s British Eighth Army, having defeated Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps at El Alamein, was closing in from the east. German forces in Africa thus were confronted by Patton to the west and Montgomery to the east. It was not an enviable position.

Montgomery was a very capable military leader. He was battle-tested and, unlike many British generals up to then, had led British troops to victory. He was also rather arrogant. He had an extremely high opinion of his own abilities, and a correspondingly low opinion of those of his American counterparts. Of Eisenhower he wrote—privately—that the U.S. commander in chief “knows nothing about how to make war or to fight battles.” Throughout the war, Montgomery never could understand why he was not the Allies’ supreme commander. Patton, needless to say, could not stand the man.

By May, the Americans and the British were squeezing the German army hard. Rommel flew to Germany to plead for more troops. Worried more about Russia and judging Tunisia to be a sideshow, Hitler said no. The führer then relieved Rommel of command, ordering him to remain in Germany (losing battles, which the field marshal of late had been doing, was no way to win favor with Herr Hitler). To lead the dwindling German army in Africa the High Command dispatched a veteran of the Russian front, Jürgen von Arnim.

It mattered little who was in charge. Victorious American troops entered the key port city of Bizerte on May 7. British troops took control of Tunis shortly thereafter. Von Arnim is remembered today simply as the commander of 125,000 German troops who surrendered to the Allies.

With the entire northern coast of Africa secure, the question arose of where next the American and British forces would strike. The answer had been given at Casablanca. There, in January 1943, Roosevelt and Churchill had met, joined as always by their respective nations’ armed forces chiefs. Several key decisions were reached. The Americans would institute a campaign of daylight strategic bombing of Germany. Preliminary planning for a cross-channel invasion of France would begin. The Allies would stop fighting only when Germany surrendered unconditionally. And, most relevant to our narrative here, Sicily would be the next objective.

Attacking the island of Sicily held several advantages. It would draw German units to its defense, thereby easing the pressure on Stalin’s armies. It also would maintain the momentum the Allies had gained by their victory in Africa. Additionally, it would encourage the Italians to get rid of Mussolini. And, much to Churchill’s satisfaction, it would reflect the strategy he favored of invading Europe not from England directly, but from the Mediterranean.

American and British troops, about eighty thousand in number, invaded Sicily on July 10, 1943. The campaign to capture the island took thirty-eight days and produced nineteen thousand Allied casualties. Although a large number of German soldiers escaped, the fact was that, once again, American and British soldiers had engaged the enemy and emerged victorious.

Worth mentioning is an incident involving U.S. paratroopers. As part of the invasion of Sicily, some two thousand soldiers of the 82nd Airborne Division made a night jump onto the island. Their planes took the paratroopers over the invasion fleet. Nervous gunners then mistook the American aircraft for German intruders. The results were disastrous. Twenty-three planes were shot down, and 229 paratroopers were killed or wounded. This was not the first incident of “friendly fire,” nor would it be the last. It did, however, reflect a risk of warfare, one that remains today. To ensure it did not recur when, in 1944, the Allies invaded Normandy, the commander of the 82nd insisted that the planes carrying the paratroopers make a wide berth of the invasion fleet.

Next up was Italy. The British were eager to proceed, the Americans less so. Generals Marshall and Eisenhower were concerned that a campaign to seize the Italian mainland would divert resources required for the cross-channel invasion. But when they learned that invasion would not occur in late 1943 as originally thought, but in the spring of 1944 at the earliest, they agreed to the venture. The initial goal was to capture the port city of Naples and the airfields surrounding the town of Foggia. Later, this was expanded to include Rome, and later still, the entire peninsula. The result was a major Allied military effort. The campaign would last until April 1945 and cost many, many lives. Author Robert Wallace described the fight for Italy as “one of the most grinding and protracted struggles of the entire war.”

It began on September 3, 1943, when British troops crossed over the Straits of Messina and entered the continent of Europe. Six days later, additional British troops landed at Taranto. That same day, American and British soldiers under the command of Mark Clark went ashore on the beaches of Salerno, just south of Naples. German forces contested the landing and came close to pushing the Allied troops into the sea. But, after nine days of intense fighting, the invaders prevailed, though at the cost of thirty-five hundred casualties.

Naples fell on October 1. Days later, the airfields of Foggia were in Allied hands. This enabled the American Fifteenth Air Force, with its B-17s and B-24s, to begin its strategic bombing of Germany, which it did, and which it continued until the day the war ended.

The Italian terrain of mountains and rivers favored the Germans, who proved adept at defensive operations. This, plus the cold weather and lack of roads, made Allied advances extremely difficult.

By early 1944, a stalemate had arisen. So General Clark launched an amphibious operation hoping to outflank the Germans. American troops landed at Anzio, a small coastal town on the western side of Italy, some twenty-five miles south of Rome. The Germans pounded the position, and Anzio became a problem for the Allies. Not until mid-May were the U.S. troops able to break free and then only because the Germans had decided to move farther north.

At Anzio the Americans displayed much courage, none more so than the U.S. Army nurses who served in the field hospitals. These medical stations provided immediate care and, illustrating the scale of the Anzio endeavor, treated more than thirty-three thousand men. Throughout the ordeal German artillery fired on the Americans. Most of the shells hit legitimate targets. Some, however, struck the hospitals, where some two hundred nurses were at work. Six nurses were killed at Anzio. Four won the Silver Star, the first women ever to do so.

The Allied advance from Naples to Rome was never more difficult than at Monte Cassino. The town of Cassino lies midway between the two cities, on the western side of the Apennine Mountains. Its most noteworthy feature was the monastery atop a seventeen-hundred-foot-high hill immediately adjacent to the town. The monastery was a historic treasure. The birthplace of the Benedictine order, it contained medieval manuscripts of great value. It also was a perfect place for the Germans to observe Allied movements.

Respecting the historical significance of Monte Cassino, the German army had not occupied the monastery. The Allies, whose army by then included troops from New Zealand, South Africa, India, and Poland as well as Free French forces, did not know that. They assumed the Germans were watching their every move. Thus the Allies attributed the difficulties they were having in capturing Cassino to the ability of the Germans to pinpoint their positions. After repeated failures to capture the town, they decided to eliminate the monastery and all of the Germans therein.

On February 15, 1944, Allied aircraft dropped bomb after bomb on the monastery, destroying it completely. The unintended result was to create such rubble that once the Germans occupied the hill, which they quickly did, seizing the hilltop became that much more difficult.

At about the same time the Allies finally took control of Cassino, the Americans at Anzio broke out. As Anzio was north of Cassino, the hope was to trap the retreating Germans. This might have happened but for a decision made by the senior American general in charge. Mark Clark decided he’d rather be the first to reach Rome than destroy the retreating German Tenth Army, the unit which so capably had been resisting the Allied advance. Eager for the glory associated with the capture of the Eternal City, Clark directed his divisions north to Rome. They entered the city on June 4. Clark got his reward. But it was short-lived. Two days later, events in Normandy overshadowed the general and the Italian campaign.

The advance up the peninsula would continue. Lasting a total of 607 days, the entire Italian campaign was costly in matériel and expensive in lives. American dead eventually numbered 19,475. Four times that number were wounded. The losses to Britain and the other Allied nations were comparable. It was a high price for an effort than in his memoir General Eisenhower described as a “distinctly subsidiary operation.”

Yet the campaign’s accomplishments were many. The fighting forced Italy out of the war. It secured the Mediterranean for the British. It provided airfields for the strategic bombing of Germany. It kept the U.S. Army in battle for the year 1943 and gave FDR a response to Stalin when the Russian leader complained that only the Red Army was fighting the Nazis. Most important, at least for George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower, it tied down twenty German divisions that otherwise would have been available to confront the Allies in Normandy.

***

Of necessity, this narrative contains few references to individual combat units of the U.S. Army. Numbered field armies and air forces, such as Patton’s Third Army, that fought in Normandy and the Fifteenth Air Force are mentioned, but smaller organizations, such as infantry divisions or fighter groups, rarely are identified. One exception is the Army Air Force’s 332nd Fighter Group.

This air force unit has become known as “the Tuskegee Airmen.” Composed exclusively of African-Americans, all of whom were trained at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, the 332nd flew in both North Africa and Sicily. Later, based in Italy and equipped with P-51 Mustangs, the group escorted Fifteenth Air Force bombers on raids into Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Romania. Commanded by Colonel Benjamin O. Davis, the group compiled an outstanding combat record. For the loss of fifty-one pilots, the 332nd Fighter Group destroyed 119 enemy aircraft.

This record is even more noteworthy in view of the discrimination these black Americans had to endure. In the early 1940s, the United States was an overtly racist society. African-Americans were denied equal opportunities and equal rights. Few institutions were more racist than the U.S. Army. The 332nd overcame such injustice. The 92nd Infantry Division could not.

The 92nd was composed of African-American enlisted men and white officers. The former were poorly trained. The latter were unhappy in their assignment. The result, not surprisingly, was failure in battle. Only with time would the army rid itself of the absurd notion that black Americans could not fight with skill and courage. During the Second World War, some 961,000 African-Americans served in the armed forces. Most, however, were relegated to support units.

***

When Churchill and Roosevelt met at Casablanca in January 1943, they reached agreement on an Allied military priority in addition to that of Sicily and the strategic bombing of Germany. The president and the prime minister agreed that the defeat of the enemy’s submarine forces was to be Britain’s and America’s most urgent objective.

Throughout the Second World War, German submarines, the U-boats (Unterseeboote), waged a campaign to defeat Great Britain by depriving her of food and war materials. Nazi Admiral Karl Dönitz, commander of the U-boats, reasoned that if his boats were to sink enough of the ships delivering supplies, Britain would have no choice but to surrender. Germany had tried this plan of attack once before, in 1917. She failed then and would fail again. But from September 1939 to May 1945, her submarines would wreak havoc at sea, ultimately sinking 5,140 merchant vessels.

Thus was fought what is called the Battle of the Atlantic. This was not a single engagement, but a host of small battles below, on, and above the ocean. The combatants were the U-boats and those Allied ships and planes attempting to sink them. The battle began the day the war started. It ended on May 4, 1945, when Dönitz signaled the U-boats to cease operations and return to base. In his memoirs Winston Churchill called the Battle of the Atlantic, “the dominating factor all through the war.”

Even before the United States entered the war, President Roosevelt had become acquainted with the U-boats. Early in September 1941 the American destroyer USS Greer was in the Atlantic south of Iceland. A German submarine fired two torpedoes at her. Both missed. A month later a German torpedo struck the USS Kearny, another destroyer. The ship survived, but eleven sailors died. The USS Reuben James was not so fortunate. On October 31, 1941, U-568 sank the vessel, killing 115 American sailors. Harold Stark, then one of the navy’s most senior admirals, said, “The Navy is already at war in the Atlantic but the country doesn’t seem to realize it.” Franklin Roosevelt did. After the attack on the Greer, he ordered the U.S. Navy to fire on any ship threatening American vessels or those under American escort.

At first, the battle against the U-boats did not go well, for neither Great Britain nor the United States. Once Germany and America were at war, Dönitz sent the U-boats to American waters. There they enjoyed great success, sinking ships from Cape Cod to the Caribbean. Foolishly, the U.S. Navy initially chose not to mandate that merchant ships sail in convoy. This made the job of the U-boats much easier. So did the bright lights of American cities. Only belatedly were they blacked out. The initial result was a maritime massacre. The Germans called the submarine campaign Operation Paukenschlag, best translated as the introductory roll of kettle drums. The U-boat commanders referred to it as “the Happy Times.”

Early in the war, the British too had felt the full force of the U-boats. From May through November of 1940, in the waters off England, there had been an earlier Happy Time. In June alone the U-boats sank 173 ships. By then the German submarines had gained an important advantage. With the defeat of France, Dönitz had been able to base his boats at French ports. This shortened their voyages to and from operational areas.

During 1942, despite increasing losses, the U-boats continued to enjoy success. And their numbers grew. At times, Dönitz had one hundred U-boats on patrol in the Atlantic. Sometimes these were replenished at sea. The Type XIV submarine, nicknamed the Milk Cow (Milchkuh) carried fuel and food, fresh water and torpedoes. These submarines would rendezvous in mid-ocean with the attack boats, which then would continue the hunt. Often the U-boats would strike in “wolf packs,” a number of submarines acting in concert. Pity the convoy they encountered. In 1942, a banner year for Dönitz, his U-boats sank 1,662 Allied ships.

On February 18, 1942, as the Battle of the Atlantic raged, U-578, sank the American destroyer escort the USS Jacob Jones. Twenty–five years earlier, as Germany’s kaiser sought to control the seas, U-53 had torpedoed an American warship. It too was named Jacob Jones.

Yet in May 1943 the Allies gained the upper hand. More escorts, better weapons, plus advances in technology made the Atlantic Ocean safer for convoys and more dangerous for the U-boats. One key factor was the increasing use of aircraft. These would first detect the submarine and then attack. Employing American-built long-range B-24s, Britain’s Coastal Command made life difficult for the U-boats. So did escort carriers. These were small warships that operated naval aircraft. Along with destroyers they formed hunter-killer groups. In mid-June 1944, one of them, an American, captured a U-boat. The war prize, U-505, is today on display in Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry.

By the beginning of 1944 the Allies had won the Battle of the Atlantic. U-boat losses were heavy. That year alone, 242 boats did not return. Dönitz attributed the defeat to technological advances in radar and radio detection. He would have been surprised to learn that a principal reason for the Allied victory was that the British Intelligence Services had penetrated U-boat communications and were able to read the encrypted messages that Dönitz and his U-boat captains sent to one another. At first, the British used this knowledge to reroute convoys away from the wolf packs. Later, this highly secret intelligence was employed to direct air and surface forces to where the U-boats were.

Key to this intelligence coup was early work by Polish and French agents. This was built on by the British. At Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire, some extremely smart men and women analyzed captured German code books as well as Germany’s famous Enigma machine (one of which had been plucked from a sinking U-boat). The Enigma machine was a sophisticated electromechanical encoding device, about the size of an old-fashioned typewriter. It was the means by which senior German generals and admirals communicated. That the British were able to intercept and decode these communications was extraordinary. Indeed, it was one of the most remarkable accomplishments of World War II. So critical was this intelligence that only a few individuals were privy to it. The intercepts were labeled ULTRA. Closely guarded—their existence was publicly revealed only in 1977—ULTRA intelligence was of great value to the Allies. In the Battle of the Atlantic, it was decisive.

When Admiral Dönitz recalled the U-boats in May 1945, it marked the end of a titanic struggle. Germany had contested the Atlantic with Britain and America and had lost. During the Second World War, Dönitz sent a total of 859 U-boats on war patrols. A staggering 648 of them failed to return. Toward the end of the conflict, a German submarine leaving port was embarking on a suicide mission. In total, some 30,000 U-boat crewmen lost their lives.

Dönitz survived. Upon Hitler’s death, he became head of state. But, not for long, as Germany soon surrendered and the admiral was placed under arrest. At Nuremberg, where the top Nazis were tried postwar, Dönitz received the comparatively light sentence of ten years in prison. He died in 1980. His impact on the war and that of the German submarines were substantial. Winston Churchill expressed it in simple prose: “The only thing that ever really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril.”

***

As the Royal Navy and its American counterpart fought the U-boats, their comrades in the Allied air forces were engaging the Luftwaffe, the German air force. In 1939 the Luftwaffe was the foremost aerial combat organization in the world. By 1943 it was waging war on three fronts—Italy, Western Europe, and Russia—and the strain was beginning to tell. Yet it remained a formidable foe, as both England’s Royal Air Force and the American Eighth Air Force were finding out.

Proponents of airpower in both the United States and Great Britain believed aircraft alone could destroy Nazi Germany, thus making the inevitably costly cross-channel invasion unnecessary. Their plan was to strike Germany from the air with well-armed long-range bombers. They expected to destroy the Nazis’ capacity to make war and to break the morale of the German people. In the event, they accomplished neither. But the damage their bombers inflicted was immense and their contribution to victory significant.

The British bombed at night. Their principal targets were German cities. By April 1945, most major cities in Germany were in ruins, thanks to the RAF’s Bomber Command. Because thousands and thousands of German civilians were killed, postwar moralists would declare the raids to be inhumane, condemning Bomber Command and its leader, Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris. Harris, however, simply wanted to win the war. He and his pilots thought what they were doing was eminently reasonable given what the German air force had done to Warsaw, Rotterdam, Coventry, London, and numerous Russian cities.

The Americans bombed in daylight. Their goal in the strategic bombing campaign was to destroy Germany’s industrial base. Over a period of 966 days the four-engine B-17s and B-24s of the Eighth Air Force would depart England and fly to the Continent. There, they would bomb shipyards, railroad yards, munitions factories, naval bases, aircraft plants, and the like. By mid-1944, the Luftwaffe no longer could stop them.

The Eighth Air Force was one of fifteen numbered air forces the United States established during the Second World War. Eleven of them were deployed overseas. The Tenth Air Force, for example, operated in Burma and India. The Fifth flew in the southwestern Pacific. The Eighth was based in East Anglia. It operated from sixty-two airfields that crowded this most eastern bulge of the United Kingdom.

The Eighth began its endeavors on February 29, 1942, when seven U.S. Army Air Force officers arrived in Britain. Their job was simple: create an aerial armada that would pulverize the enemy. That is exactly what they did. But the cost was high. Some twenty-six thousand Americans of the Eighth Air Force did not return home alive.

***

At first, progress in building the Eighth was halting. Airplanes and crew were slow in arriving, and some were transferred to Africa to assist Eisenhower in the battle for Tunisia. Then, General Ira Eaker, the commander of the Eighth, discovered that B-17s and B-24s could not safely fly over Germany without protective escort fighters. Yet the fighter available, the P-47 Thunderbolt, did not have sufficient range. So, consistent with U.S. war fighting doctrine, the bombers went on alone into Germany. The results were disastrous. Luftwaffe fighters destroyed many, many U.S. aircraft. Perhaps the most notorious missions targeted Schweinfurt. On August 17, 1943, and October 14 of that same year, Eaker dispatched first 337 planes and then 420 to Schweinfurt and, on the first mission, to nearby Regensburg as well. The latter was the location of an important aircraft manufacturing plant. Schweinfurt was where most ball bearings in Germany were made. On both days the Luftwaffe hammered the attacking force. Each time their guns destroyed more than sixty B-17s. As one B-17 Flying Fortress carried a crew of ten, the Schweinfurt raids cost the Eighth Air Force no fewer than twelve hundred men.

Another difficulty was the weather. Fog, rain, and high winds either kept the planes on the ground or made precision bombing impossible. The Americans thought their top-secret Norden bombsight would ensure accuracy. It did not. Bombardiers trained in the sunny, peaceful skies of the American Southwest found their jobs much more difficult once in German airspace, especially when antiaircraft guns and Luftwaffe fighter planes were trying to kill them. As Eighth Air Force intelligence officers discovered, the B-17s and B-24s more than occasionally missed their targets.

Yet the Eighth persevered. Its numbers grew, and by late 1944, it could put a thousand bombers into the air. Moreover, when early in that year a new fighter arrived, prospects for success dramatically increased. The new plane was the P-51 Mustang. It was fast, maneuverable, and most important, it could fly to Berlin and back. Hermann Göring, the head of the Luftwaffe, is reported to have said that once he saw Mustangs over the German capital he knew the war was lost.

With the P-51s—and the Thunderbolts—the Eighth Air Force was in a position to destroy the German air force. What the Eighth needed to do was to draw Luftwaffe fighters into battle. This was accomplished primarily in two ways. The first was to mount large-scale raids against factories producing German aircraft. Known as “Big Week,” these raids took place in February 1944. The second was to attack Berlin. Early in March, the Eighth struck the German capital. In both cases, the Luftwaffe responded. But the German air force incurred huge losses, and by late spring, the Luftwaffe, short of experienced pilots, was a spent force.

So when Allied soldiers landed on the beaches of Normandy, the German air force was nowhere to be seen.

***

To command the great invasion, code named Overlord, Churchill had hoped to designate General Sir Alan Brooke, chief of the imperial general staff, the British army’s most senior position. By 1944, however, it was clear than an American would have to hold the job, because Americans would constitute a large majority of the troops involved. So the choice was Franklin Roosevelt’s. Initially, he planned to appoint George Marshall. At the last minute, the president decided that he needed Marshall right where he was: in Washington directing the United States Army. With General Marshall’s full concurrence, Roosevelt gave the most important field command any American would hold in World War II to Eisenhower.

Eisenhower’s title was Supreme Commander Allied Expeditionary Force. His deputy was a British airman, Sir Arthur Tedder. Tedder had worked with Ike (the nickname used by everyone save the more formal George Marshall) and shared the American commander’s commitment to a staff of British and American officers functioning as a single, integrated unit. The senior naval commander for Overlord also was British, as was the top air force officer.

Eisenhower had wanted Field Marshal Sir Harold Alexander for command of the invading ground forces. An Englishman, he had seen success in Egypt, Tunisia, and Italy. “Alex” was well liked and very good at his job. But Churchill insisted that he remain in the Mediterranean. So the assignment was given to Montgomery. In fact, “Monty” was an obvious choice, though not one Eisenhower relished.

The newly installed Supreme Commander arrived in England on January 15, 1944. By then much planning for the invasion already had taken place. A British officer, Lieutenant General Sir Frederick Morgan, had put in place key parameters of the plan. It was Morgan, for example, who selected Normandy. He also initiated construction of the artificial harbors as well as the oil pipeline that ran under the channel from the coast of Cornwall to the Contentin Peninsula. One of Eisenhower’s biographers, Michael Korda, has called Morgan’s plan “inventive, audacious . . . and well-prepared.” Later, Montgomery would attempt to take credit for Overlord. But Korda reminds us that it was Frederick Morgan who did much of the planning.

When assigned his task, Morgan had been told Overlord would comprise three infantry divisions plus paratroopers. To his credit, Montgomery realized more troops would be needed and that the beachhead needed to be much wider (eventually it would span nearly fifty-five miles), an assessment with which Eisenhower agreed. However, more troops meant more landing craft, more equipment, and importantly, more time. So the date for the invasion was pushed forward. It was to take place on June 5.

By then, indeed even at the beginning of 1944, Germany’s generals expected the Allies to invade Western Europe. Their problem was that they didn’t know where the landings would occur. Norway was a possibility. So was Holland. The location they themselves would have chosen was in France, at the Pas de Calais. This is where the channel-crossing would be the shortest, and it offered a direct route into Germany. Normandy and Brittany also were possible locations, as was Spain.

To add to the Germans’ dilemma, the Nazi commanders did not know exactly when the Allies would strike. It might be in the spring or, possibly, the summer. The fall would be less likely given the weather. But still, September and October could not be ruled out.

To mislead the Germans the Allies engaged in an elaborate program of deception. Through the use primarily of radio signals that the Allies knew the Germans would intercept, the British and the Americans created phony invasion forces, one in Scotland and one in southeastern England. The latter was “commanded” by Patton, who on occasion would appear in public in Kent and Sussex in order to lend credence to the fictitious army. Such a force so close to the Pas de Calais and led by one of America’s most dynamic generals helped persuade German officers that the invasion would take place across the Straits of Dover. Hitler, himself, thought Norway was a strong possibility.

This effort in deception by the Allies was highly successful. It threw the Germans off balance and kept troops away from Normandy. Indeed, of the two German armies stationed in France, the strongest purposely was deployed in the area around Calais.

To prepare for the invasion, the Germans constructed an extensive network of coastal fortifications. Known then and now as “the Atlantic Wall,” it consisted of guns, beach obstacles, and mines. Of the latter there were many. In order to repel the invaders, the German army planted 6.5 million mines along the French, Belgian, and Dutch coasts.

Further, reasoning that the Allies would require deep water ports to keep their troops supplied, the Germans designated eleven seaports as festungsbereiche. These were heavily armed fortress areas. Self-sufficient, they were not dependent on reinforcements and were intended to be impregnable. Deny the Allies ports for their supply ships and the invasion would be contained.

All told, the Atlantic Wall presented a formidable obstacle to Eisenhower and Montgomery. Yet it had one major drawback. It wasn’t finished. Moreover, the Germans faced two further problems, both self-imposed. The first was that many of their troops in France were not first-rate. The second pertained to their command arrangements. These were cumbersome, and they hindered rather than aided efforts to defeat the Allies.

The German generals had still another problem. They did not agree on the strategy to be employed once the Allies arrived. Field Marshal Rommel, reinstated by Hitler, and in tactical control of most German troops in France, wanted to meet the Allies head-on at the beaches. He wanted command of all armored forces, which he would fling at the invaders as they were stepping ashore. Other generals wanted to hold the tanks back from the coast, away from naval gunfire. Their approach was first to determine where the principal attack was taking place (there might be a diversionary landing) and then order the tanks into battle. Rommel’s reply was that armor thus employed would be subject to Allied aircraft as it moved into position.

Both points of view had merit. The solution was a compromise. Some tanks were placed under Rommel’s immediate command. Others were held in reserve, allocated to another general. Still other forces were under Adolf Hitler’s personal control. The arrangement was far from satisfactory, especially given that in the absence of the Luftwaffe, German success depended on rapid deployment of armor.

Eisenhower too faced difficulties in the structure of command established for the invasion. One of the difficulties involved control of strategic airpower. The Supreme Commander wanted to employ the heavy bombers of the Eighth Air Force and RAF Bomber Command in a tactical role. He wanted them to pound railroads, bridges, and roads in and around Normandy so that German troops on the coast could not be reinforced. The air commanders objected. Sir Arthur Harris and his American counterpart, Lieutenant General Carl Spaatz, thought their aircraft would be best utilized attacking German industry. In particular, Spaatz wanted to destroy the enemy’s petroleum assets. Neither man had much use for Trafford Leigh-Mallory, the RAF officer formally in charge of Overlord’s air campaign. They ignored whatever he had to say and went about their business, which, to them, was strategic air warfare. Eisenhower, however, was adamant. He insisted they divert their planes to Normandy and environs. When they continued to resist, Ike threatened to resign. Harris and Spaatz then gave way. The result was that for several months American and British heavy bombers dropped thousands of bombs on targets in Normandy. But in order not to give the Germans a clue as to where the Allies were to land, the bombers struck more often in the area around the Pas de Calais.

With but one exception, the Overlord air campaign was highly successful. British and American aircraft kept many of the enemy away from the battle. Those that did arrive were delayed and battered. Of critical importance were the Allied fighter-bombers. These were smallish, single-engine aircraft, exceptionally rugged and armed with both bombs and rocket-propelled explosives. Two such aircraft, the British Typhoon and the American Thunderbolt, harassed the enemy every day.

The one exception took place on the day the Allies invaded. American heavy bombers were directed to pulverize the beach areas just before the troops landed. But, fearful of hitting the Americans moving toward the shore, they overcompensated. Their bombs struck well beyond the beaches. Few German soldiers were killed, although the number of cows in Normandy was severely reduced.

Those planes had “bombed long.” A more distressing incident involving “bombing short” occurred in Normandy several weeks later. To support the breakout of American troops from the confines of the ground gained in the first weeks of the invasion, the Eighth again was instructed to strike enemy positions immediately in front of the soldiers. Unfortunately, their aim was off. The bombs struck the Americans instead. Many of them were killed and wounded. Among the dead was Lieutenant General Leslie J. McNair. He had been the commander of the huge stateside organization responsible for training and equipping the entire U.S. Army. In Normandy to observe the troops he had trained, McNair was the highest ranking American officer in Europe killed during the Second World War.

Eisenhower faced another difficulty, one over which he as Supreme Commander had no control. This was the weather. Placing thousands of troops on the beaches of Normandy required relatively calm seas to prevent the small landing craft from capsizing. Fair weather also was required for operating aircraft that would fly in support of the invasion. On June 4, the weather was dreadful. Hard rain, high winds, and choppy seas posed too great a risk to Overlord. The forecast was similar for June 5, the date scheduled for launching the attack.

Eisenhower postponed the invasion by one day. Given the prediction for the 5th, this was not a difficult decision. The next one was.

Because of requirements regarding tides and moonlight, few days in June were suitable for the invasion. June 6 was one of them, but the next date was not until June 17. By June 4 the troops had been moved to their embarkation points and much of southern England was sealed off. Further delay would jeopardize the secrecy that so far had been maintained.

What would the weather be on June 6?

Overlord’s chief meteorological officer was J. M. Stagg, a group captain in the Royal Air Force. On June 4, he reported to Eisenhower and the senior commanders that data indicated that on the 6th the weather would moderate. Conditions would not be good, but they would be less severe. The invasion could be carried out. Everyone in the room understood it would be dicey and that there would be no guarantee of success.

At stake was more than the lives of the troops involved. Were the invasion to fail, the consequences would be enormous. There would be no Second Front. Nor would there be a second chance to invade Normandy, at least not for a year or two. Hitler then would be able to concentrate on the east. The outcome of the Second World War, however it played out, would not favor the United States and Britain. A failed Overlord would be seen as a defining moment, a catastrophe that constituted an unparalleled setback to the cause of freedom. And the responsibility would be Eisenhower’s.

Should he again postpone the invasion, or despite the weather, should he order the invasion to proceed? The Supreme Commander did not flinch. He gave the order putting Overlord in motion. The Allies, said Eisenhower, were to land in France on June 6, 1944. Writing in 1983, Montgomery’s biographer Nigel Hamilton noted, “It was Eisenhower’s moment of trial—and he responded with what can only be called greatness.”

Transporting 132,700 soldiers across the English Channel to a Normandy occupied by two German armies was not a simple task. Assembled for the trip were some 5,000 vessels, including 138 warships. The latter included battleships, cruisers, destroyers, and the all-important minesweepers that provided safe passage through mine-infested waters. One of the battleships was the USS Nevada, which had been damaged but not destroyed at Pearl Harbor.

The plan of attack called for five landing sites. Each had a code name. From west to east, these were Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno, and Sword. Utah and Omaha belonged to the Americans. Juno was assigned to the Canadians. Gold and Sword were British. Further, three airborne divisions, one British and two American, were to make night jumps on both flanks of the invading force.

American paratroopers numbered approximately thirteen thousand. They were superbly trained, perhaps the best soldiers in the entire United States Army. Carried to Normandy by 822 C-47 aircraft, they were to secure the causeways leading away from Utah Beach and delay, if not prevent, German reinforcements from dislodging the American 4th Division that had come ashore.

The paratroopers, and their comrades who arrived by glider, achieved these goals but at great cost. More than a few C-47s were shot down killing all aboard. The Germans had flooded the environs of Utah, so many paratroopers drowned. Practically none of them landed where they were supposed to. Confusion was great, but somehow the airborne soldiers rallied, and started to kill Germans. When, in August, the Battle for Normandy was over, the two American airborne divisions were in need of rest. One of them, the 82nd—one of America’s most famous military units—had endured a 46 percent casualty rate. Their dead numbered 1,142.

The U.S. Navy’s big guns opened fire at 5:30 A.M. At Utah the tide carried the troops somewhat south, but the 4th Division was able to secure the beach with relatively light losses. Indeed, the Americans had lost more soldiers in a disastrous training exercise at Slapton Sands on the southeastern coast of England than they did at Utah Beach. Among the soldiers in the first wave was Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt Jr. The son of the former president, he did well that day, earning the Congressional Medal of Honor. In July, while still on duty, he died of a heart attack. The general was buried in Normandy, in an American military cemetery. Nearby is the grave of his younger brother, Quentin, an aviator killed in the First World War.

At Omaha U.S. infantry and combat engineers landed at six-thirty in the morning. They were met with murderous enemy fire. Those that survived, as well as those that died, passed into legend. Omaha Beach today is one of America’s most sacred spots. Loss of life on June 6, 1944, was great, and early on, consideration was given to withdrawing the troops. Part of the difficulty was the terrain. Heights close to the beach provided excellent fields of fire for the defenders. Another was that, unbeknownst to the Americans, a first-rate German division was stationed at Omaha. Still another problem was the absence of U.S. tanks. Most of those allocated to Omaha floundered in the rough water while attempting to reach shore. During the morning, American soldiers, many dazed and wounded, huddled beneath the coastal bluffs. To them and to their commanders, the situation looked grim.

Instead of withdrawing, the soldiers picked up their weapons and attacked. Supported by U.S. warships that moved in close, individual soldiers rallied, motivated in part by Charles Taylor, one of their officers, who shouted, “Two kinds of people are staying on this beach, the dead and those about to die. Now let’s get the hell out of here.” And they did. By late afternoon, U.S. troops had secured the beach and moved a mile or so inland. The cost, however, was high. Casualties at Omaha numbered slightly over forty-one hundred, of whom at least a thousand were killed.

Hard fighting took place at the other landing sites as well. The British and the Canadians fought tenaciously. By day’s end, they had established a presence in Normandy that the Germans were unable to dislodge. After five days, the Allies had landed 326,000 men. Eisenhower’s army was on the Continent to stay.

What followed in the fighting that lasted until August 22 is now called the Battle for Normandy. At times, the combat was fierce. Allied commanders proved skillful, and despite occasional setbacks (Montgomery at Caen, for example), they were able to defeat their enemy. When it was over, a great victory had been achieved. Hitler had lost some four hundred thousand men, half of whom were casualties. The rest were prisoners. The Allies too had suffered. Nearly thirty-seven thousand were dead.

***

On August 25, 1944, Allied soldiers liberated Paris. More and more troops were arriving, so that by September General Eisenhower commanded seven separate field armies. In the north were the Canadian First Army and the British Second Army under the overall command of Montgomery, newly promoted to field marshal. In the center, Omar Bradley, one of Ike’s most trusted generals, was in charge of the U.S. First, Third, and Ninth Armies (George Patton, reporting to Bradley, commanded the Third Army). To the south, having come north after landing in Southern France, were the Free French First Army and the U.S. Seventh Army. Both of these were under the direction of Lieutenant General Jacob Devers, who, like Bradley and Montgomery, reported to Eisenhower. In total, the Supreme Commander commanded well over three million men. It was a formidable force, one that many hoped would end the war by Christmas.

That was not to be. In large part because the Allies, despite American expertise in logistics, were running short of supplies. Five hundred tons of food, ammunition, clothing, and gasoline were required each day just to sustain U.S. troops. The needs of British, Canadian, and French soldiers added to the shortage. There was another problem as well. The German army, though defeated in Normandy and battered by the Russians, showed no signs of giving up. In fact, Hitler’s men fought increasingly hard as the Allies closed in on the River Rhine.

In June, the Germans had started using a new weapon. Called the V-1, it was a pilotless flying bomb, the first of what are now called cruise missiles. They were aimed at London and at cities in Belgium. The RAF shot down 1,771 of them, but twice that number struck the English capital. Some six thousand civilians were killed. By September, however, the V-1 launch sites were in Allied hands, so the threat they posed subsided.

The Germans then deployed a more deadly device, one for which there was no defense. This was the V-2, the world’s first ballistic missile. Developed by Werner von Braun, who later built the Saturn V rocket that launched the Apollo astronauts, the V-2s targeted London. They first struck in September 1944. Eighty-five landed in October. The next month the number rose to 154. Hitler thought it and the V-1 would reverse Germany’s declining fortunes of war. They did not. But they illustrated the Third Reich’s technical ingenuity and gave the Allies great cause for concern.

In September, two major Allied attacks took place The first was an uncharacteristically bold venture Montgomery had conceived. It consisted of dropping paratroopers behind enemy lines deep into Holland in order to secure key bridges. Unfortunately for the Allies, particularly the British who participated, the attack failed. The second offensive was a drive by the Canadians toward Antwerp. This succeeded, but not quickly and not without considerable casualties.

U.S. troops had better results, at least initially. In October, after hard fighting, the U.S. First Army entered Germany and took control of Aachen, the first city in Germany to be seized by the Allies.

First Army then attacked an area known as the Hürtgen Forest. This became one of the more searing campaigns ever waged by an American army. Virtually unknown today, more than 120,000 U.S. soldiers fought in what authors William K. Goodneck and Ogden Tanner call “a chamber of horrors, combining the most difficult elements of warfare, weather, and terrain.” When the battle finally ended on December 13, approximately twenty-four thousand Americans were either dead or wounded, missing or captured.

As the fighting in the Hürtgen indicated, the German army was far from being a spent force. Nevertheless, several Allied generals thought their opponents had little fight left in them. These officers were in for a surprise. On December 16, at five-thirty in the morning, three German field armies, some 250,000 men, struck the Americans in the Ardennes, a region where the borders of Belgium, Luxembourg, and Germany converge. This attack began what is called the Battle of the Bulge (after the indentation it created in the Allied front lines) and, ultimately won by the Americans, was the largest battle fought by the United States in the entire war. Some 81,000 U.S. troops were casualties, of whom 10,276 were killed. The weather was atrocious. There was much snow and extremely cold temperatures. Notable was the American defense of Bastogne and the drive north to Bastogne by Patton’s Third Army. Both of these actions are legendary, and rightly so.

Less well known are the events at Stavelot and Malmédy. At both places German troops killed U.S. soldiers who had surrendered. These were SS troops, fanatical Nazis imbued with all the evil Hitler’s regime represented. They took unarmed Americans to a snow-covered field and simply shot them. Earlier, in Normandy, SS men had murdered 156 Canadian prisoners of war. These events, particularly the one at Malmédy, backfired on the Germans. Word of the killings spread quickly. The result was that U.S. troops fought with greater tenacity. Sadly for the Americans, one division did not. This was the 28th. It was an inexperienced unit and, early in the battle, was mauled by the advancing Germans. Some seven thousand of its soldiers surrendered.

These men, along with other Americans taken prisoner during the Battle of the Bulge, were among the ninety thousand U.S. soldiers and airmen held captive in Germany during the Second World War. For the most part, they were treated well. Most received Red Cross packages shipped from the United States to Germany via Lisbon. These contained food and clothing, cigarettes and reading materials.

German soldiers surrendering to Americans were transported to the United States (except for those who called it quits very late in the war). This enabled U.S. troops in Europe to concentrate on winning the war. German prisoners of war (POWs) in America numbered some 370,000 and were held in 666 camps, most of which were located in the South (this kept heating costs low). The prisoners were well fed and provided with decent housing. Many were put to work, in forests and on farms and in selected factories. Receiving pay of 80 cents per day, these prisoners in fact alleviated labor shortages in the U.S.

By January of the new year the Allies were ready to clear the lands west of the Rhine. This meant breaching the Siegfried Line, a series of fortifications on the border erected to halt the Allied advance. In this the Line failed. By March, Eisenhower’s armies—British, American, Canadian, and French—were at the great river. The Rhine epitomized the German state. Crossing it, in addition to providing military advantage, would be of immense symbolic value.

One of the armies engaged in battles west of the Rhine, and later beyond, was the U.S. Ninth Army. Overshadowed by Patton’s Third Army, the Ninth played a significant role in defeating the Nazis. For example, in crossing the Roer River, necessary in order to reach the Rhine, it displayed both skill and courage, eventually taking thirty-six thousand German soldiers prisoner. Commanding the Ninth was General William Simpson. Eisenhower later wrote of the general, “If Simpson ever made a mistake as an army commander, it never came to my attention.”

To cross the Rhine, the Allies assembled a massive force. All four American armies in Europe participated. More than a thousand assault boats were needed. The force included two airborne divisions, some twenty-one thousand men, who, as at Normandy, would parachute into enemy territory or arrive by glider. The great assault began in March. Troops were ferried across the Rhine, usually under fire, and soon established a secure bridgehead. Eisenhower’s armies then advanced into the heartland of Germany. As they did so, they began to see that in towns and villages white flags of surrender hung from windows and balconies.

In the north, Montgomery’s soldiers raced into northern Germany, taking control of the Baltic ports. In the south, Devers’s two armies (the U.S. Seventh and the Free French First) secured Nuremberg and the surrounding areas. Patton’s army, taking a thousand prisoners a day, moved rapidly into south central Germany, eventually reaching Czechoslovakia. First Army occupied the Ruhr Valley. Simpson’s Ninth Army reached the Elbe River on April 11, 1945. There, it met up with Soviet troops that had defeated the Germans in the east.

As the Americans and Russians were advancing into Germany, they discovered the concentration camps the Nazis had established primarily to exterminate men, women, and children of the Jewish faith. Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Dachau, as well as the other camps, epitomized the vile nature of the Third Reich. Over time, the Nazis killed six million Jews. Rarely in human history has such cruelty been perpetuated. With good reason Herr Hitler and his cronies are seen today as the personification of evil.

By mid-April, thousands of Hitler’s soldiers were laying down their weapons. Wisely, Germany’s führer chose not to surrender. On April 30, 1945, he put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger. By then, Soviet troops were in Berlin and the Third Reich had ceased to exist.

There remained only the formal surrender of the German armed forces. This took place on May 7, at Eisenhower’s headquarters in Rheims, France. Three days earlier Montgomery had received the surrender of German armies in Holland, Denmark, and northern Germany. But the Soviets claimed that they were not adequately represented at either event, so a third ceremony was held. This occurred in Berlin on May 8.

The German officer who surrendered to Field Marshal Montgomery soon thereafter committed suicide. The two generals who signed the documents of surrender in Rheims and Berlin later were hanged. Given the death and destruction they and their fellow Nazis had caused, it seemed appropriate.

***

The Second World War, however, was far from over. In the Pacific, American soldiers, sailors, and marines were engaged in fierce combat with the Japanese. Together with their Australian, British, and Chinese allies, these Americans were taking back the territories Japan had seized early in the war.

The day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese naval forces took control of Guam. This was a small island in the Marianas, an American outpost that served as a stepping stone to the Philippines.

After Guam, the Japanese struck Wake Island, also an American outpost. On this tiny speck of land the Americans put up a spirited defense, sinking two Japanese warships and damaging several other vessels. But the Japanese soon overwhelmed the defenders, who surrendered on December 24, 1941.

The most important American possession in the Pacific was the Philippines. This the United States had won as a result of victory in the Spanish-American War. By the standards of the day, America’s rule in the islands had been enlightened, and the Philippines was due to gain independence in 1946.

Japan, rightly, saw the American presence in the Philippines as an obstacle to its move south to the Dutch East Indies (now the Republic of Indonesia). So it amassed a strong strike force and attacked on December 8.

Defending the Philippines was a sizeable number of American and Filipino soldiers. These were commanded by Douglas MacArthur. He was a former U.S. Army chief of staff, well known to the American public. MacArthur’s political supporters in Washington believed he was a military genius, a view MacArthur himself shared. Unfortunately for the United States, his defense of the Philippines left much to be desired.

MacArthur allowed his airpower to be destroyed on the ground and mishandled the land campaign. After abandoning Manila, his troops, some eighty thousand Americans and Filipinos, withdrew to Bataan. This was a peninsula to the west of the capital. Within a short time, with reinforcements unable to be sent, MacArthur’s men were in a desperate way. They were short of supplies, undernourished, and in need of medical care. Trapped on the peninsula, they surrendered on April 9, 1942. It was—and still is—the largest capitulation of an American field command in the history of the United States.

About seventy thousand men, American and Filipino, were marched off to prison camps. This was the infamous Bataan Death March. More than seven thousand perished. Some were killed by guards; others were simply too weak to survive.

MacArthur was not one of them. He and several thousand men (plus a few female army nurses) had moved to Corregidor, a small, heavily fortified island at the tip of the Bataan Peninsula. After incessant pounding by the Japanese, it too surrendered. The surviving defenders were sent off to a prison camp outside of Manila.

The Japanese, who considered surrendering a dishonorable act, had little regard for Allied POWs. In addition to beating and starving their captives, they sometimes simply shot them. Only 4 percent of the British and American servicemen taken prisoner by the Germans died while in captivity. The comparable statistic for POWs of the Japanese was 28 percent.

When Corregidor fell, Douglas MacArthur was in Australia. He had been ordered there by President Roosevelt. MacArthur was too well known an American to be captured, so Roosevelt directed him to escape, which he did, departing Corregidor by PT boat. Once in Australia, the general was given command of all American and Australian forces in the Southwest Pacific. He also was given a medal. Anxious to placate MacArthur’s supporters in Washington and aware of the need to create American heroes, Roosevelt and George Marshall arranged for MacArthur to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor. Never has the award been less deserved.

By March 1942, the Empire of Japan had achieved great success. In but a short time the Japanese had vanquished their foes, ending the myth of Western superiority. The empire’s battle-tested army had triumphed. Its navy, the Imperial Japanese Navy, appeared invincible. In Tokyo the strategy was to consolidate the gains made and await the inevitable American response. One more victory and the Empire of the Rising Sun would be secure. Nothing would then rival its power or its prestige.

America’s initial response came in a totally unexpected way. On April 18, 1942, a small U.S. Navy task force appeared off the coast of Japan. On board one of the ships, an aircraft carrier, were sixteen army B-25 medium bombers, twin-engine craft with a crew of five. No one had ever flown a B-25 off a carrier. One by one, the army bombers revved their engines, released their brakes, and roared down the flight deck. All of them made it safely into the air. Led by Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle, they bombed Tokyo and several other cities. Damage to the cities was slight and all of the planes save one (it landed in the Soviet Union) crash-landed in China. However, the impact of the raid was huge. Morale in America soared. In Tokyo Japan’s generals and admirals were deeply humiliated.

For his efforts, Doolittle was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, which (unlike MacArthur) he richly deserved. Prior to the war, he had been a well-respected aviator. During the conflict Doolittle served elsewhere with distinction as well, eventually commanding the American Eighth Air Force in England. But his fame today rests largely on the daring raid he led in 1942. How fitting then that when he passed away in 1993, a lone, restored B-25 flew in salute above his funeral procession.

The military juggernaut that Japan had unleashed in the Pacific was not limited to attacks on the United States. In 1937 Japan had begun its invasion of China. In 1940 Japan took control of what then was called French Indochina and is now Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. In late 1941, Japanese forces landed on the coast of Malaya, at the southern tip of which lay Singapore, then a British Crown Colony, and today an independent city-state.

The British considered Singapore an impregnable fortress, able to withstand any assault the Japanese might mount. There was good reason for such optimism. More than eighty thousand troops were on duty in Malaya, far more than Lieutenant General Tomoyuki Yamashita’s invading force. Yet the individual Japanese soldier was tougher and better led than his British counterpart. British forces were commanded by Lieutenant General A. E. Percival, whom no one mistook for a second duke of Wellington. Yamashita estimated the campaign would take one hundred days. It took seventy. Percival surrendered on February 15, 1942. British prestige in the Far East was destroyed.

The ultimate goal of Japan’s drive to the south was the Dutch East Indies. These mostly comprised the large islands of Sumatra, Borneo, Java, Celebes, and East Timor. Rich in rubber, metals, and oil—of which Japan had none—the Dutch East Indies were vital to the empire’s economic well-being.

Defending the Dutch-controlled islands was a small force that the Japanese easily cast aside. The most noble Allied effort was made by a naval force under the command of Dutch Rear Admiral Karel Doorman. The British, Australian, American, and Dutch navies cobbled together several cruisers and destroyers, which Doorman led into battle. They were defeated decisively on February 27, 1942, in the Battle of the Java Sea. Most of Doorman’s ships were sunk and the admiral was killed.

One of the Allied ships sunk belonged to Australia. Perceiving this English-speaking nation as an obstacle to its imperial ambitions, Japan hoped to neutralize Australia either by blockade or invasion. To accomplish either, Japan needed to take control of Port Moresby. This was a harbor town located on the southern coast of New Guinea, not far from Australia itself.

To seize Port Moresby, the Japanese assembled an invasion fleet that set sail early in May. Protecting these ships were powerful warships, including two fleet carriers, both of which were veterans of the attack on Pearl Harbor, and one small aircraft carrier. Aware of the threat to Port Moresby, the United States Navy responded. It dispatched an equally powerful fleet to Australian waters. The results of the ensuing battle favored the Japanese. They sank one of America’s most important warships, the carrier USS Lexington, plus a fleet oiler and a destroyer. Additionally, they shot down more than sixty American aircraft. United States forces were able only to destroy the light carrier and damage one of the two large fleet units. Strategically, however, Coral Sea was a victory for the Americans because the Japanese invasion fleet turned around and went home. Port Moresby would remain in Allied hands.

The Battle of the Coral Sea was the first naval engagement in history in which the opposing navies never came within sight of each other. All of the fighting, on both sides, was conducted by naval aircraft.

Despite the losses, America’s naval aviators had done well in the battle, better perhaps than Uncle Sam’s sailors realized. Not only had the aviators depleted the ranks of Japanese naval aircraft by 104 machines, they had heavily damaged one of the large enemy carriers, thus reducing the number of aircraft carriers the IJN had available for the next major engagement at sea.

This would be the Battle of Midway, and it would be one of the most decisive clashes ever waged between two nations at war.

***

Some eleven hundred miles west of Hawaii lay the tiny islands of Midway, comprising little more than two square miles. In 1942 the islands were an American possession (they still are today). On one of them was an airfield, plus a modestly sized garrison of U.S. soldiers, sailors, and marines. Midway was but a spot in the ocean, but it was of great strategic value.

Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the commander of Japan’s powerful navy, decided to strike at Midway. The architect of the attack on Pearl Harbor, his prestige within Japan was enormous. Like others in the Imperial Japanese Navy, Yamamoto was embarrassed by the Doolittle raid. He felt that once the Japanese were in control of Midway, it would not be possible for such a raid to take place again. More important, by targeting Midway, Yamamoto understood that he would force the remaining U.S. carriers into battle. The admiral was convinced he would win such a fight. He then easily could occupy Midway, which would serve as a strong defensive outpost for the empire he faithfully served.

Early in June 1942 Yamamoto sent his fleet toward Midway. The fleet’s main punch was four aircraft carriers, all veterans of the strike at Pearl Harbor. American intelligence services, however, had broken Japan’s naval code and were aware of the Japanese plans. Yamamoto believed the Americans had but two carriers left. In fact, they had three: Enterprise, Hornet, and Yorktown (the latter damaged but not destroyed at Coral Sea). Commanding the U.S. Navy’s Pacific Fleet was Admiral Chester Nimitz (for whom the current class of American nuclear supercarriers are named). He ordered the three warships and their escorts to ambush the Japanese. In charge of the American task force was Rear Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher.

The Battle of Midway began when Japanese naval aircraft struck the island’s airfield and garrison, causing much destruction. These planes then returned to their carriers to refuel and rearm. Additional aircraft, held in reserve, also were on board. These were being readied for flight operations. Thus, as Yamamoto’s carriers were preparing for follow-on attacks, they had on board more than two hundred airplanes, all full of highly flammable aviation gas, that were armed with bombs and torpedoes.

Just then, planes from the American carriers arrived on the scene. They were Douglas TBD Devastators, single-engine torpedo bombers that carried a crew of three, and there were forty-one of them. Attempting to sink the enemy carriers, the Devastators flew low, just above the water, and released their “fish.” But the American plane was slow and lightly armed. Above the carriers were numerous Japanese fighters. They were providing essential air cover for Yamamoto’s ships. Seeing the American torpedo planes, they swooped down and attacked. All but five of the Devastators were destroyed. None of their torpedoes struck home. The attack of the Devastators was a total failure. Loss of life among their crew was extensive. In one squadron all fifteen planes were shot down and only one man, out of forty-five, survived.

As the American torpedo bombers were crashing into the sea, more U.S. Navy aircraft appeared, well above the Japanese carriers. These were dive-bombers, and with Japanese fighters down low attacking the torpedo planes, they had a clear run at the enemy ships. The results, for the Japanese, were catastrophic. The dive-bombers scored direct hit after direct hit, creating massive explosions aboard the carriers. Three of the big warships were destroyed. Five hours later, the fourth carrier was struck and it too sank. In but a few hours on one day, June 4, 1942, the primary weapon of Yamamoto’s fleet, four large aircraft carriers, was sent to the bottom of the sea. For the Japanese, Midway was a staggering blow. No longer would Yamamoto and his navy move with ease across the Pacific. For America, Midway was a stunning triumph.

Despite his defeat, Yamamoto remained in command of the IJN’s combined fleet. Indeed, his prestige within Japan seems to have suffered not at all. In April 1943, the admiral was at Rabaul and decided to inspect Japanese air units on Bougainville, an island some 180 miles to the southeast. His staff sent word ahead, providing full details of the trip. U.S. intelligence intercepted the message and informed Admiral Nimitz. Because Yamamoto’s destination was within range of American P-38 fighters, a mission to intercept Yamamoto’s aircraft was feasible. At first, Nimitz was reluctant to approve such a mission, not wanting to compromise U.S. intelligence capabilities. When assured that steps would be taken to safeguard these capabilities, Nimitz gave the go-ahead. On April 18, 1943, sixteen Army P-38s took off to intercept Yamamoto’s aircraft. They flew to where the admiral’s plane was scheduled to be, and right on time the airplanes—there were two of them—appeared. Only six Japanese fighters were on station serving as escorts. The Americans attacked and easily shot down the two planes. The admiral was killed, along with everyone else on board. Only after the war, did the Japanese learn that Yamamoto’s death was not the result of an unlucky coincidence.

Isoroku Yamamoto’s strategy for Midway included an assault on the Aleutian Islands. This was intended to divert Nimitz from concentrating his ships where the principal Japanese effort was to be made. On June 3, the IJN’s Northern Force raided the American outpost at Dutch Harbor on one of the Aleutian Islands. Four days later, Japanese troops occupied the islands of Attu and Kiska, farther west.

A chain of desolate islands approximately twelve hundred miles long, the Aleutians form stepping stones between Japan and the United States. In 1942, Japanese and American leaders feared the other side would use the islands as a route of invasion. Hence the need arose in both Tokyo and Washington to control them. Many Americans perceived a Japanese presence in the Aleutians as a direct threat to the continental United States. However, the army’s top general in Alaska, Lieutenant General Simon Buckner, took a more realistic view, commenting, “They might make it, but it would be their grandchildren who finally got there, and by then they would all be American citizens.”

Buckner’s perception notwithstanding, the United States mounted a major effort to seize the two islands. On May 11, 1945, the Army’s 7th Division, some eleven thousand soldiers, went ashore on Attu, supported by a fleet of warships that included three battleships. The weather on the Aleutians was atrocious. Fog, high winds, frigid cold, and stormy seas made living difficult and fighting even more so. The Americans persevered, taking control of the island by the end of the month. Japanese resistance was fierce, and fanatical. Of a garrison of twenty-three hundred men, none survived save for twenty-nine taken prisoner. U.S. casualties numbered 1,697, of whom 549 were killed.

Kiska was next. A huge force was assembled. Some thirty-four thousand troops, including fifty-five hundred Canadians, invaded the island on August 15, 1943. To their surprise—and relief—there was no one there. The Japanese had withdrawn. The fighting in and for the Aleutians, truly a dreadful place for combat, was over.

***

A different but equally dreadful place to fight was Guadalcanal. This is a small island in the Solomons, a tropical rain forest where malaria and the jungle combined to constitute a formidable foe. When U.S. intelligence learned that the enemy was building an airfield on the island, the Marine Corps was given the job of seizing Guadalcanal. On August 7, 1942, the marines went ashore. The resulting six-month battle was a difficult, bloody affair. Some fourteen thousand Japanese were killed, nine thousand more died of disease. American casualties numbered fifty-eight hundred, of whom sixteen hundred died in battle. In 1959, the National Broadcasting Company produced a television documentary on the Second World War. It was called Victory at Sea. Of the fight for Guadalcanal, the narrator spoke the following of the American marines:

They kept their rendezvous—these men, these grim men, these young old men. And on Guadalcanal there is a lonely grave with an epitaph for each who lost his youth there—

. . . when he goes to heaven

To St. Peter he will tell:

Another Marine reporting, Sir

I’ve served my time in hell!

The struggle for Guadalcanal took place not just on land, but also in the air and on the seas surrounding the island. At night, the Japanese would bring reinforcements to the island as well as warships to pound the Americans. The U.S. Navy, less adept at night warfare but having the advantage of radar, would attempt to stop them. More than a few sea battles took place—especially effective were the Japanese long-range torpedoes fired from surface ships—and while the Americans eventually triumphed, they did not always win. Between August 1942 and April 1943, twenty-four U.S. naval vessels were sunk, including two aircraft carriers and six cruisers.

One of the sea battles deserves particular mention. On the night of November 14, a squadron of ten IJN warships led by a battleship steamed south to bombard the marines on Guadalcanal. To prevent them from doing so, the Americans dispatched two new battleships, the USS South Dakota and the USS Washington, and their escorts. In the fight that ensued the three battleships traded salvos. The South Dakota was hit forty-two times but survived. The Washington, however, pummeled the Japanese ship, which sunk soon thereafter. That night, no bombardment of U.S. marines took place. The battle was one of the few naval engagements of the Pacific War in which battleships, once the primary weapon afloat, traded gunfire with one another.

For the Americans, Guadalcanal was a significant victory. Unlike their triumph at Midway, which, as had the battle at the Coral Sea, halted Japan’s military expansion, the success at Guadalcanal represented the first step in taking back territories the Japanese had conquered. In effect, the road to Tokyo started at Guadalcanal. For the United States the battle had not been easy. But once achieved, victory meant Japan was on the defensive. As to this obscure island in the Solomons, it became enshrined in American military history. When historians write of decisive battles fought by the United States they write not just of Saratoga, Gettysburg, and Normandy, but of Guadalcanal as well.

Concurrent with the struggle for Guadalcanal, General MacArthur, from Australia, was directing U.S. and Australian forces on New Guinea, where, save for Port Moresby and environs, the Japanese were well entrenched. His goal was to drive off the enemy and then seize the island of New Britain. As he did so, to decidedly mixed reviews, U.S. marines and army troops moved up the Solomons from Guadalcanal, taking control of New Georgia, Vella Lavella, and Bougainville. This force, as well as the ships and airplanes that supported it, was commanded by Admiral William Halsey. As with MacArthur, his objective was New Britain. For on the island stood the town of Rabaul, a major base of the Japanese armed forces.

Command of the U.S. forces fighting Japan in the Pacific was divided. General MacArthur was in charge of the Southwest Pacific. Admiral Nimitz (to whom Halsey reported) was in command of the Central Pacific. They competed for resources and proposed different strategies. MacArthur wanted to focus on the Philippines. He saw the army as the nation’s primary military force. In the general’s view, the navy’s role was to support his soldiers. Admiral Nimitz, with Admiral King’s full backing in Washington, believed the war against Japan was essentially a maritime conflict, and therefore the navy should lead the endeavor. King, in particular, wanted to advance to Japan via the islands of the Central Pacific. He and Nimitz believed that naval forces would so weaken Japan that an invasion would not be necessary.

Neither the general nor the admiral would budge. In fact the dispute—and it was very real—was between the United States Army and the United States Navy. For each service the stakes were high, and neither intended to give way. The only person capable of resolving the dispute was Franklin Roosevelt.

The president, however, did not resolve the dispute. He simply agreed to let each service proceed as it wished. MacArthur received permission to invade the Philippines (to which, with exaggerated gravitas, he had vowed to return). Nimitz was ordered to seize the islands he had targeted in the Pacific. The arrangement was far from perfect, but it worked.

On December 26, 1943, General MacArthur’s troops crossed over onto New Britain. They secured their immediate objective, Cape Gloucester, and prepared to slug it out with the 135,000 Japanese soldiers remaining on the island. Then U.S. commanders reached an important but unusual decision. They decided to bypass Rabaul and leave New Britain to the Japanese. The soldiers there had few airplanes and no means of resupply. They posed little threat. Why then waste time and men in an effort to dislodge them? Besides, Douglas MacArthur’s primary goal was to liberate the Philippines.

An archipelago of some seven thousand islands, the Philippines was an essential step in any effort to defeat Japan. The Philippines had been an American colony and its citizens enjoyed a close relationship with the United States. Its liberation was an American imperative, and no one was more anxious to return there than MacArthur.

The first invasion—there were several on different islands—took place on October 10, 1944. Approximately two hundred thousand soldiers ultimately participated, as did much of the U.S. Navy’s Pacific Fleet. The fighting was brutal and the death toll high. Capturing Manila alone cost the Americans six thousand casualties while, in defending the capital, the Japanese had sixteen thousand men killed. The city itself was devastated. So too were the island’s citizens. In MacArthur’s nine-month-long campaign to free the Philippines some one hundred thousand Filipinos lost their lives.

The Imperial Japanese Navy fully perceived the threat posed by the American presence in the Philippines. In response, their admirals mounted a last-ditch effort to destroy U.S. naval forces supporting the invasion. If the American ships could be eliminated, the soldiers ashore would be easy pickings. The IJN assembled most of its remaining warships, including four carriers, and set sail. The carriers were to act as decoys. They had few airplanes on board. Three years of fighting had depleted their supply of both aircraft and pilots. The four ships, steaming north of the islands, were to draw off the Americans’ aircraft carriers, leaving the other American ships without protective air cover. These would be sunk by powerful Japanese squadrons sailing from the south and west.

The resulting battle is called the Battle of Leyte Gulf. It was the largest sea battle of the Second World War. Commanding the American carriers was Admiral Halsey (an aggressive commander, the press had nicknamed him “Bull” Halsey, although no one in the navy ever had called him that). Halsey fell for the trap and took his carriers north, leaving the beaches undefended. But the Japanese failed to take advantage of the situation. In two major engagements, their strike forces were defeated by American warships. Among the latter were four battleships, the California, the Maryland, the Pennsylvania, and the West Virginia. Each had met the Japanese three years before, at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

The Battle of Leyte Gulf was decisive. For the Americans it meant the invasion of the Philippines could unfold as planned and that Japan’s navy no longer could contest the seas. For the Imperial Japanese Navy, once the most powerful fleet in the world, it meant the war had been lost.

***

Well before the invasions of the Philippines had begun, Admiral Nimitz launched his campaign to seize islands in the Central Pacific. First on the list was Tarawa. This was a flat coral reef, just half the size of New York City’s Central Park. Defending this real estate were 2,600 Japanese. Well entrenched, they were willing to die for their emperor, which all but 17 did. In the seventy-six hours it took to secure the island the United States had 1,056 of its marines killed. The American public was shocked by this number. General MacArthur argued that Tarawa proved that his strategy and approach to combat were preferable to that of Nimitz and the navy’s.

But the navy, Admiral Nimitz, and the United States Marine Corps learned from Tarawa. When the marines subsequently attacked Kwajalein and Eniwetok in the Marshall Islands and later Saipan, Guam, and Tinian in the Marianas, their casualties were less.

The pattern for these operations were similar. The islands first would be bombarded from the air. Then a large amphibious force would arrive offshore. After battleships and cruisers pounded the island in question, marines would motor to the beaches in small landing craft. By 1944, America’s navy and its maritime soldiers were extremely proficient at this type of operation.

Protecting these invasion forces was the most formidable fleet the world had ever seen. At its core were new American aircraft carriers. Named after the first of its kind, the Essex class carriers were big ships, and fast. They displaced 27,100 tons and carried ninety aircraft. Each of the fourteen that saw action in the Pacific required a crew of more than three thousand sailors. By tradition U.S. Navy carriers were named after American military victories or previous naval vessels. Hence, the carriers included the Ticonderoga, the Bunker Hill, the Intrepid, and the Wasp. The navy also named several of the Essex class ships after American patriots: for example the Hancock and the Franklin. This last vessel, nicknamed Big Ben by her crew, was ripped apart by enemy bombs in March 1945, at the cost of 724 men killed and 256 wounded. But she did not sink. Badly battered, Big Ben sailed home under her own steam.

From late 1943 on, American carrier task forces attacked Japanese bases across the Pacific. These raids severely reduced the number of ships and planes the enemy could muster. Off Saipan, in what became known as “the Marianas Turkey Shoot,” U.S. naval aircraft decimated their Japanese counterparts. This helps explain why, four months later in the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the four IJN carriers had few airplanes aboard.

Airfields in the Marianas enabled the United States to mount a strategic air offensive against the Home Islands of Japan. Carrying out the aerial offensive was a brand-new bomber, Boeing’s B-29. With a crew of eleven, this four-engine machine could deliver forty 500-pound bombs to Tokyo, a round-trip flight of more than fourteen hours. That the 29’s power plant, the Wright Cyclone R-3350, occasionally caught fire made the missions even more eventful.

Initial operations with the B-29 were not successful. High winds, bad weather, inexperienced crews, and Japanese defenses plagued the American bombers. Then General Curtis LeMay, one of the B-29 commanders, made a surprising decision. Instead of high-altitude bombing as the plane’s design and air force doctrine mandated, the B-29s, stripped of guns and gunners to save weight, would go in low. Their payload, moreover, would include not just high-explosive bombs, but incendiaries. Japanese cities were full of wooden structures, and LeMay intended to burn them to the ground, which is exactly what the B-29s did.

The most devastating American attack took place on the night of March 9, 1945. LeMay sent 279 B-29s to Tokyo. They were loaded with incendiaries, and coming in low and fast, they leveled sixteen square miles of the city. Approximately eighty-three thousand people were killed. Had the Japanese been rational, they would have surrendered there and then. But they were not. The slaughter continued. During the ten months of the Marianas air campaign the B-29s flew 190 combat missions, the last one occurring on August 14, when 828 B-29s struck north of Tokyo. By then, LeMay and his airplanes were running low on priority targets.

Initially, the B-29s were based in China. Logistical support there was difficult, so the move to the Marianas was welcomed by all. China itself was a major theater of operations in the Second World War (as was, for the British, Burma). Japan had invaded China in 1937. Chinese forces opposing the Japanese were split. There were the Nationalists led by Chiang Kai-shek and the Communists led by Mao Tse-tung. Chiang and Mao despised each other, and each man intended, once the Japanese were disposed of, to eliminate the other. Franklin Roosevelt thought China to be important and was a strong supporter of Chiang, and so much American energy—and treasure—were expended in aiding the Chinese Nationalists.

When the Japanese cut the Burma Road, the principal route for supplies going to China, American aid to Chiang was delivered by air. Aircraft took off from fields in India, crossed over the Himalayan Mountains, and landed in Kunming. The planes employed were unarmed twin-engine transports. Extremely dangerous, the route was called “the Hump.” Beginning in mid-1943, huge amounts of supplies were flown into China, but at a high price. More than fifteen hundred American aviators were killed flying the Hump.

In charge of the U.S. military mission to China was General Joseph W. Stilwell. He also served as chief military advisor to Chiang. Stilwell was in an impossible situation. The area for which he was responsible, China, Burma, and India (known as the CBI) was not an American priority, despite Roosevelt’s enthusiasm for China. Making Stilwell’s job even more difficult was the Chinese Nationalist leader himself. Chiang Kai-shek was a military leader of little skill who often ignored Stilwell’s advice. What Chiang most wanted to do was horde the American equipment he received so it could be used later against Mao. “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell did not succeed in China, but given the circumstances, no American commander could have.

However, there was one American general who enjoyed a modicum of success in China. He was an aviator by the name of Claire Chennault. Resigning from the U.S. Army Air Corps, he had gone to China to help Chiang fight the Japanese. Recruiting American pilots, Chennault established the Flying Tigers, three fighter squadrons that, in 1942, did well against Japanese aircraft (the pilots, in fact, were mercenaries who received a bonus of $500 for each enemy plane destroyed). When the United States started to aid the Chinese, Chennault was brought back into the U.S. Army. He then commanded the Fourteenth Air Force, which conducted aerial operations against Japan.

***

Roughly halfway between the Marianas and Japan lies the small island of Iwo Jima. At its southern tip, but dominating the landscape, lies Mount Suribachi, a dormant volcano. Early in 1945, twenty-three thousand Japanese soldiers manned the island’s defensives. Understanding that no reinforcements or additional supplies would be delivered, these soldiers expected to die on the island. They were determined to make the Americans pay a high price for Iwo Jima.

American commanders wanted the island as a base for fighter aircraft that then would escort the B-29s on their raids on Japan. More important, the island’s airfields would provide Superfortresses returning home to the Marianas a place to land in case of emergencies. Either battle-damaged or with an engine on fire, numerous B-29s were ditching in the ocean, well short of their airfields in the Marianas. In time, once Iwo Jima was in U.S. hands, B-29s would utilize this safe haven more than two thousand times.

To seize Iwo Jima, the Americans assembled the largest formation of United States marines ever to conduct a single operation: three divisions, totaling 70,647 men. The landings took place on February 19, 1945. They were preceded by seventy-three days of aerial bombardment. As was the routine, U.S. Navy warships then pounded the island.

The defenders fought tenaciously. So did the marines. Men were killed on practically every square yard of the island. When the battle was over, on March 19, the Americans had paid a high price. Marine deaths totaled 6,812. The number wounded was 19,217. Very few Japanese, a few hundred perhaps, survived. These numbers reflect the extraordinary level of violence the battle produced. A number that illustrates the courage of the Americans on that island is 27. That was the number of Congressional Medals of Honor awarded to marines and naval medical personnel of the black sands on Iwo Jima.

One remaining piece of the story about Iwo Jima needs to be told. It concerns a photograph, a very famous photograph, one that in the United States became the best known image of the Second World War. Early in the battle, U.S. marines reached the summit of Mount Suribachi. Several of them then raised a small American flag. Other marines cheered and the ships offshore blew their whistles in celebration. Later, wanting a larger flag and hoping to keep the small flag for posterity, six men—five marines and a naval medical corpsman—planted a larger flag. Standing nearby was an Associated Press photographer, Joe Rosenthal. He saw what was happening and snapped a picture. The resulting photograph won a Pulitzer Prize. Much later, the image was reproduced in sculpture form to serve as the official memorial to the United States Marine Corps.

In addition to incendiaries and high-explosive bombs, the B-29s based in the Marianas dropped aerial mines into the waters off Japan. As intended, these took a toll on Japanese vessels. An island nation with few natural resources, Japan depended on its merchant marine for delivery of supplies. Were the Americans able to stop the flow of shipping to Japan, the empire would be brought to its knees.

To do just that, the Americans employed a weapon that proved decisive in the Pacific War. The weapon was the submarine. Operating from bases in Australia and Hawaii, American submarines roamed the Pacific. After a slow start due in part to faulty torpedoes, the U.S. Navy’s submarine force scored success after success. In 1944 alone the boats (U.S. submarines are “boats” not “ships”) sank six hundred enemy ships. Men such as Slade Cutter, Richard O’Kane, and Howard Gilmore are today unknown to the American public. But these three submarine skippers and many others—seventy-six submarine captains sank five or more enemy vessels each—brought about the defeat of Japan. After the war, Admiral William Halsey, in ranking the tools of war most responsible for the victory over Japan, listed the submarine first. This victory, however, came at a price. Fifty-two U.S. submarines failed to return.

Howard Gilmore’s story warrants a few words. During a night action, his boat, the USS Growler, collided with a Japanese warship. Gunners aboard the ship fired down on Growler’s bridge, killing two men and wounding Gilmore. Apparently unable to move but fully conscious, Gilmore gave the command that sealed his doom, but saved his boat. It is an order that still resonates with the United States submarine service: “Take her down!” Posthumously, Howard Gilmore was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor.

American submarines did more than just sink ships. They also saved lives.

B-29s and other U.S. aircraft, either damaged or out of fuel, often ditched in the sea. Prospects for rescue seemed bleak. Imagine then the airmen’s relief when an American submarine surfaced and hauled them aboard. On lifeguard duty in the Pacific, U.S. boats rescued 504 airmen. One of them was a young naval aviator by the name of George H. W. Bush.

Having captured Iwo Jima and taken control of the Philippines, American strategists set their sights on Okinawa, an island just three hundred miles from Japan. For the United States, Okinawa would be the last stop on the road to Tokyo. Once Okinawa was secured, the next attack would target Kyushu, the most southern of Japan’s five major islands. Aware of what the loss of Okinawa portended, Japanese military leaders intended to make the Americans pay an extremely high price for the island.

On April 1, 1945, U.S. forces landed on Okinawa. Commanded by Lieutenant General Buckner (who no doubt was glad to be far from the bitter cold of Alaska and the Aleutians), the force eventually numbered some 169,000 men. Designated the U.S. Tenth Army, Buckner’s command included two U.S. Marine divisions in addition to four divisions of the army. It was a large force (the landings at Normandy involved five divisions), one that faced approximately seventy-six thousand Japanese troops. These troops were aided by an additional twenty-four thousand men in support roles, many of whom were native Okinawans.

The Japanese were well prepared. Most of them were deployed in well-protected caves and tunnels on the southern part of the island. The fight to remove them was both difficult and fierce, but making good use of tanks and flamethrowers, the U.S. troops took control of the island, killing most of the Japanese. The battle for Okinawa, the last campaign of the Pacific War, lasted eleven weeks. While the outcome never was in doubt, the cost to the Americans was high, just as the Japanese had wanted. On Okinawa, U.S. dead numbered 6,319. Americans who were wounded totaled 32,943. Among those killed was General Buckner, who was struck down by enemy artillery fire. He thus joined Lieutenant General McNair as the highest ranking American officer killed in action during the Second World War.

As American forces got closer and closer to Japan, U.S. commanders noticed that the Japanese defenders fought with increased determination. Indeed, as the battles for Iwo Jima and Okinawa indicated, the Japanese were fanatical in their efforts to halt the American advance. Nowhere was this more evident than with the kamikaze. These were suicide strikes in which Japanese pilots deliberately crashed their bomb-laden aircraft into enemy ships.

The kamikazes brought a new form of terror to the war on the Pacific. Eventually, they killed more than three thousand Americans. Their appearance off Okinawa and the Philippines, moreover, was not the result merely of a few crazed aviators. Kamikaze attacks were the result of deliberate decisions made by Japan’s senior commanders. Nor were the kamikazes few in number. Nearly four thousand Japanese pilots met their death in such attacks. Many more were waiting to take off when the war ended.

Helping to reduce the number of aircraft available to the Japanese was the newly arrived British Pacific Fleet. Once the war in Europe was over, the British were anxious to have the Royal Navy take part in operations against the Japanese. They wished to repossess Singapore and Hong Kong and, in general, to restore British influence in the region. Moreover, they wanted to avenge the loss of HMS Prince of Wales and the Repulse. Admiral King had no desire to see the British share in America’s victory, but he was overruled. By April 1945, British warships had sailed from Ceylon, attacked oil refineries in Sumatra and Java, and after refitting in Australia, had arrived off Okinawa. The fleet consisted of four large aircraft carriers, two new battleships, and a number of cruisers and destroyers. It was a formidable force, the most powerful Britain had ever put to sea. Yet it was but a fraction of the immense array of warships assembled by the United States. The task of the British ships was to intercept Japanese aircraft being ferried from Formosa to Okinawa. Employing mostly American-built aircraft, the British Pacific Fleet destroyed in total ninety-six of the enemy’s planes. While not a particularly large number, it represented a useful contribution to America’s victory at Okinawa.

The most spectacular kamikaze attack of the Pacific War involved not Japanese aircraft but a battleship, a very large battleship. The ship was the Yamato. She displaced 69,500 tons and carried 9 eighteen-inch guns (the most powerful American battleships—the Iowa class—weighed in at 45,000 tons and was armed with sixteen-inch guns). Yamato’s final sortie took place on April 6, 1945. With fuel sufficient for but a one-way trip to Okinawa, the massive vessel hoped to smash American warships in one last glorious engagement. The mission was suicidal. It also was a complete failure. American carrier-based aircraft put ten torpedoes into her well before she reached her destination. When she slipped beneath the waves, so did three thousand Japanese sailors. In sinking the Yamato the U.S. Navy lost twelve airmen. No doubt the Americans thought it a fair exchange.

Well before U.S. forces appeared off Okinawa, American strategists were planning the invasion of Japan. The plan consisted of two parts. The first was to have the U.S. Sixth Army, some six hundred thousand men commanded by General Walter Krueger, land on the southeastern coast of Kyushu. This was to be called Operation Olympic and take place on November 1, 1945. The second part, Operation Coronet, was scheduled for March 1, 1946. In this attack, two additional armies were to land on Honshu, near the port city of Yokohama. In overall command of all the armies would be Douglas MacArthur, a command he relished.

Of course, neither Olympic nor Coronet ever took place.

On August 6, 1945, a B-29 nicknamed Enola Gay left the Marianas bound for Japan. In the plane’s bomb bay was an atomic bomb. That morning, Hiroshima became the recipient of the first nuclear bomb dropped in anger (the first atomic explosion had taken place earlier on July 16, on American soil, in the desert of New Mexico). When the destruction of Hiroshima failed to secure the surrender of Japan, a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. Even then, Japan’s military commanders wanted to continue the war. They hoped to so bloody the Americans on the beaches of Japan that the United States would seek a negotiated end to the war, an end more favorable to Japan than the one likely to result from surrendering unconditionally. Fortunately for all concerned—Japanese as well as Americans—Emperor Hirohito took the unprecedented step of personally intervening in his government’s decision-making. On August 9 Hirohito said it was time to end the war and spare the people of Japan further harm. Reluctantly, Japan’s generals and admirals bowed to his wishes.

And so the Second World War came to an end. On September 2, 1945, representatives of the Japanese government and of the Japanese military signed the document of surrender. General MacArthur signed on behalf of the Allied Powers. Signing for the United States was Admiral Nimitz. The ceremony took place aboard the USS Missouri, one of the four Iowa class battleships. That day, she was anchored in Tokyo Bay, along with more than 250 other Allied warships. Today, decommissioned, she sits at rest in Pearl Harbor. Close by lies the wreckage of the Arizona, a battleship destroyed on December 7, 1941. For Americans, these two vessels mark the beginning and the end of the great war that took place in the Pacific years and years ago.

Why did Japan declare war on the United States by attacking the American fleet at Pearl Harbor?

In the 1930s, Japan hoped to expand its influence well beyond the Home Islands. Governed by zealots and convinced of its citizens’ racial superiority, Japan, by 1941, had subjugated Korea, seized Manchuria, invaded China, and taken control of what is now Vietnam. Japan also wanted its empire to include the petroleum-rich Dutch East Indies. The Americans opposed Japan’s imperial ambitions. In response to the Japanese actions, the United States froze Japanese assets in the United States. It also forbade the sale of oil to Japan, a step the Japanese considered tantamount to a declaration of war. Further, as both a precautionary measure and as a signal to Tokyo, President Roosevelt transferred the home base of the U.S. Navy’s Pacific Fleet from the west coast of America to Hawaii.

The two nations were on a collision course. To prevent a clash of arms, Japan would have had to reverse its policy and recall the troops, especially those fighting in China. But Japan could not do so without losing face, a step inconceivable to the military commanders running the government. If the United States would not peacefully step aside, so the commanders reasoned, it would have to be made to do so. Hence, with little dissent, Japan’s leaders chose to go to war.

Many senior Japanese commanders realized that the United States was economically much stronger than Japan. They believed, however, that Americans possessed little physical and spiritual toughness. If the Imperial Japanese Navy could destroy the Americans’ Pacific Fleet either at Pearl Harbor or in a subsequent battle at sea, the demoralized Americans, lacking the fiber of the samurai, would acquiesce to Japan’s territorial conquests. Rarely have the leaders of a country so miscalculated.

Was it likely that Japan would defeat the United States?

Not really. Japan might win occasional battles, which it did, but the island nation simply did not have the resources necessary to emerge victorious in a full-scale war with the United States. Neither in manufacturing nor in manpower could the empire match the capability of America. By mid-1944, American ships and aircraft were overwhelming their Japanese counterparts. What Japan did have, from the beginning of the conflict to its end, was determination and courage. But as long as the United States was willing to fight a long and costly war, Japan had little hope of winning. After the debacle at Pearl Harbor, the American people were willing to endure the hardship of war to see victory realized.

Did America’s insistence on unconditional surrender prolong the conflict?

Yes, it did. In Europe, America’s goal was not simply to defeat the German armed forces. It was the elimination of the Nazi regime. To be sure, such insistence stiffened Germany’s resistance. Had there been a willingness to strike a deal with Hitler, the fighting probably would have ended sooner and, consequently, with fewer casualties. But the war in Europe was not just a battle over national boundaries and political influence. It was a crusade, a campaign to rid the world of an evil that had infected continental Europe. In both 1940 and 1945, Germany would have been happy to negotiate a settlement that ended the fighting in the west, thus enabling the Germans to concentrate on their most hated enemy, the Soviets. Churchill and Roosevelt would have none of it. Their goal was to crush the Third Reich. Given what the Nazis had done and what they represented, this was entirely appropriate. If that meant additional lives lost, so be it.

Similarly with the Japanese. After December 7, 1941, America’s goal was the unconditional surrender of Japan. Leaders in Tokyo—generals, admirals, and civilians—had embarked on a path of military conquest. In so doing, they had caused thousands and thousands to die. The United States went to war determined to eradicate those responsible. The goal was not a negotiated settlement that allowed those in power to remain. It was victory, total and clear-cut. As with Germany, this had the effect of making Japan fight harder. But in the Pacific as in Europe, the Second World War was a fight to the finish.

Why did the Allies, principally Great Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union, defeat Germany in the Second World War?

The Allies triumphed for several reasons: (1) America’s “arsenal of democracy” produced first-rate weapons of war in quantities Nazi Germany could neither match nor imagine; (2) the British intelligence services were superb; (3) the extraordinary talents of scientists in both the United States and Britain led to technologies that made a difference on the battlefield; (4) Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, unlike Adolf Hitler, provided political leadership of the highest caliber; (5) Allied military commanders were a talented lot; (6) the Royal Air Force and the U.S. Army Air Forces were superior to the much vaunted Luftwaffe, which, from the vantage point of history, turns out to have been woefully inadequate; and (7) British, Soviet, and American soldiers—the Tommy, Ivan, and the GI—proved equal to the dangerous and difficult assignments they were given.

There is an additional reason why the Allies were victorious, one perhaps more important than those mentioned above. In 1940, the Nazis had the resources to combat Britain and France and, with better leadership, could have challenged the United States. What they could not do was to fight all three nations and, at the same time, take on the USSR. By attacking Stalin’s Russia in June 1941, Hitler committed Germany to a struggle it could not win, especially given the willingness of the Soviet Union to endure casualties in numbers unacceptable to the people of Britain and the United States. When the Russians threw back the Germans at Stalingrad during the winter of 1942–1943 and later defeated the Nazis at Kursk in July 1943, in the largest tank battle ever fought, Herr Hitler and his Third Reich were doomed.

How many American soldiers and sailors lost their lives in World War Two?

U.S. military deaths during the Second World War numbered slightly more than 405,000. This is a small number (though no less regrettable) relative to the losses other nations sustained, as revealed in the following list. Losses shown cover military deaths only. Note the death toll for the Soviet Union.

France—250,000

Britain—240,000

Poland—600,000

Germany—3,250,000

Italy—380,000

Yugoslavia—300,000

China—3,500,000

Japan—1,700,000

Soviet Union—8,700,000

One notable feature of the Second World War was the large number of civilians killed. The years of conflict, 1939–1945, saw blood flow like rivers, a deluge from which noncombatants were not spared. Often civilian deaths were the result of bombardment. At other times, civilians were trapped in firefights between opposing ground forces. Sometimes, most often on the Eastern Front, they were simply murdered. In the nations listed above more than 37,000,000 civilians did not survive the ordeal of World War Two. Of this number 16,900,000 were inhabitants of the Soviet Union.

Was it necessary for the United States to employ atomic bombs against Japan?

By August 1945, Japan had been defeated. There was no way in which the island nation could have won the war. But Japan had not surrendered, nor did it seem inclined to do so. Her military leaders looked forward to an American invasion, for they intended to make the invaders pay such a price in blood that the American people would demand a negotiated end to the conflict.

Admiral Nimitz thought an invasion was unnecessary. So did Curtis LeMay. The former believed U.S. submarines would deprive Japan of food and other essentials, thus causing the country to collapse. LeMay thought his B-29s would so pound the Japanese that the nation would cease to function. Both men probably were correct. If American submarines were to have continued to sink Japanese vessels, if the B-29s were to have mounted raid after raid, Japan would have been beaten into submission. But both endeavors would have required time. Most likely, the fighting would have continued into November or December, and even then the Japanese might not have given up. They were fanatical in the extreme, and with at least six hundred thousand soldiers in the Home Islands and five thousand kamikaze aircraft at the ready, they still might have dared the Americans to attempt an invasion.

General MacArthur thought the landings were necessary. Air and sea power had not negated the need for army-led invasions of Europe, so he reasoned the same would be true for Japan. Only the seizure of the Home Islands by troops on the ground, declared the general, would secure the victory required.

What the atomic explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki achieved were an early end to the war. The two bombs shocked the Japanese as no other action might have, including the entry of the Soviet Union into the war against Japan. The bombs brought about the immediate surrender of Japan, and they did so before the Japanese people either were starved to death by American submarines or burned to death by LeMay’s B-29s. Moreover, they made certain that no invasion of Japan took place.

Lives were saved by the two bombs. Fewer people died at Hiroshima and Nagasaki than would have been killed in the four to six months the war would have continued were atomic weapons not utilized. Not only would people have died in the Home Islands. They would have died in Manchuria, where the Russians and Japanese had begun combat operations. In Burma too they would have died, where British troops were fighting the Japanese. In Malaya as well, where British and Indian soldiers were preparing an invasion, many, many people would have died. In China, were the struggle to have continued, the loss of life would have been enormous. The lives lost at Hiroshima and Nagasaki totaled approximately 140,000. It is more than likely that a greater number would have perished were the war not to have ended when it did.

In addition to bringing the Second World War to a close, the dropping of two atomic bombs on cities in Japan conveyed a powerful message to future generations. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, no one could have any doubt about what atomic warfare would bring. Ever since, that awareness has tempered the actions of national leaders as they contemplate dealing with their countries’ enemies. It has funneled strife away from a kind of warfare that, because of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, no longer is unimaginable.