THE FINEST HOUR
World War II
THROUGH MOST OF THE 1930S, AMERICANS’ ATTENTION remained riveted to their own massive internal challenges and the spirited internal debates about how best to address them. As we’ve seen, the problems of economic recovery and reform were elusive, with effective solutions hard to come by and hard to agree upon. These persistent facts alone would have been enough to ensure that the nation’s energies would be largely directed inward during those years. But there was another important factor in play. The American public had a strong and lingering sense of regret over the country’s involvement in the First World War, accompanied by a deep mistrust of any moves that might draw the country into making that same mistake again. The urgent need to solve problems at home coincided with an acute reluctance to go abroad in search of monsters to destroy.
The resulting national mood is frequently labeled as “isolationist,” but that term can be a bit misleading. It is true that, in rejecting the League of Nations, the United States demonstrated an unwillingness to join a new multilateral organization that might infringe on its national sovereignty (as Article X of the League Covenant seemed to do). Although in that case, as we’ve seen, the rejection of the League need not have happened; it had less to do with “isolationism” than with Woodrow Wilson’s extreme stubbornness in refusing to adapt the terms of the agreement by even so much as a particle, to meet the understandable concerns of its critics. A majority of senators, including Henry Cabot Lodge, would have readily supported the League, had their reservations, particularly those about the dangerous ambiguities of Article X, been addressed.
But even if one accepts this single example as a potential indicator, in most other respects, the United States during most of the interwar years was very far from being isolationist, if that term is taken to indicate a withdrawal from involvement in the larger world. To begin with, given its far-reaching commercial interests all around the globe, the United States was unlikely to be withdrawing from the world anytime soon. But there was more than that. The United States would play a leading role in promoting the cause of general disarmament, as in its sponsorship of the Washington Conference of 1921, which sought to limit the naval arms race among the major powers, and the Kellogg–Briand Pact of 1928, which sought to eliminate war as an instrument of national policy and attracted sixty-two nations as signatories. Whatever the wisdom or effectiveness of these actions, they were not the actions of an “isolationist” nation. It would be more accurate to say, instead, that in the interwar years, the United States was reverting to a traditional policy of acting selectively and unilaterally, with the national interest foremost in its mind. This meant acting in ways that were independent of the international security organization that the League was intending to create, or any other such systems of multilateral alliance. It meant an attempted return to the foreign-policy orientation of George Washington and John Quincy Adams.
It is also important to acknowledge that the interwar years saw a marked improvement in the relations of the United States with the countries of Latin America, relations that had suffered badly under TR and Wilson. Much of the initial groundwork for that improvement was laid by Republicans. In 1921, President Harding paid Colombia $25 million for the rights to the Panama Canal; later, President Coolidge would remove American troops from the Dominican Republic and Nicaragua, respectively; would eventually broker a peace settlement in the latter; and then would resolve a conflict with Mexico regarding American oil properties in that country. In 1928, Coolidge went to Cuba to open the Pan-American Conference; later that year, President-Elect Hoover would tour ten Latin American countries and, once in office, would generate considerable goodwill by signaling that the United States would not intervene in the region, a resolution to which he adhered as president. By the time FDR brought this era of improved relations to an even higher point, enunciating a “Good Neighbor Policy” that would take nonintervention and noninterference as its keynote, he could draw upon a pattern of more than a decade’s improvements.
So things were steadily improving in the western hemisphere. But in the meantime, the world beyond American shores was sliding into dangerous instability, with the rise of authoritarian and expansionist regimes in Japan, Italy, and Germany, all of which seemed bent upon enlarging their sway by aggressive means. Japan had rapidly transformed itself into an impressive industrial power under the Meiji Restoration in the later nineteenth century. By the twentieth century, it was trying to build an empire to match those of the Western powers, seeking out resource-rich Asian territories that could supply Japan with the raw materials needed to support its modernizing economy. Italy had been humiliated by the Great War and the Treaty of Versailles, was embarrassed and demoralized by its chronic disorder and disunity, and found in Benito Mussolini and his governing philosophy of fascism a cultish form of highly centralized and authoritarian nationalism, a force that might weld together that fractious nation and restore to Italy the eminence that was once hers – the greatness of the Renaissance princes, the power and glory of ancient Rome.
Germany had been even more devastated by the War and the crushing burdens of war debt, not to mention the treaty’s wound to German national pride. By 1933, the nation’s valiant attempt to establish a liberal democracy, the Weimar Republic, had been overwhelmed by the forces of economic depression and political instability, and given way to the strongman Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party. Upon being appointed chancellor in 1933, Hitler quickly assumed dictatorial powers and began to reorient Germany, both internally and externally. He openly defied the hated Versailles Treaty, pulled Germany out of the League of Nations, and began the task of rebuilding the nation’s military strength.
As these three new aggressive powers came on the world stage, and their intentions began to emerge, one could almost hear a foreboding beat begin to sound, a low and menacing bass drum, starting quietly but becoming louder and louder with each act of wanton aggression – and as each transgression was met with only a feeble or negligible response from the exhausted and fearful Western democracies. The transgressions began in earnest in 1931 with the Japanese occupation of Manchuria, and then with its invasion and occupation of the Chinese port of Shanghai, as Japan brushed aside the treaty commitments it had made in the 1920s. Under Hitler, the Germans began rearming in violation of the Versailles Treaty and, by 1936, felt strong enough to bring troops into the Rhineland area of Germany, a flagrant treaty violation. That same year saw the beginning of the bloody Spanish Civil War, in which Spanish general Francisco Franco established a fascist-style dictatorship with extensive military assistance from Italy and Germany. In July 1937, Japan went to war against China and joined Germany and Italy in the Rome–Berlin–Tokyo Axis. The Japanese assault on China was markedly brutal; after capturing the then-capital city of Nanking (Nanjing), the army carried out what became known as the Rape of Nanking, with the massacre and torture of as many as three hundred thousand Chinese and the rape of tens of thousands of women.
In each case, the governments of the Western democracies did little or nothing, placing their hopes in a policy of appeasement, in which relatively small and regional acts of aggression and expansion would be tolerated in the larger interest of avoiding the possibility of large-scale open warfare.
Hitler was the most aggressive of the three and seized greedily upon the opportunities the weak appeasement policy provided him. He continued to press outward everywhere he could, using the Wilsonian pretext that he was merely reuniting the parts of an artificially fractured Greater Germany. He annexed Austria in 1938, then the ethnically German Sudeten territory of Czechoslovakia, soon to be followed in March 1939 by the rest of Czechoslovakia and parts of Lithuania. By then the pattern of his actions was unmistakable. As he began to prepare for a similar incursion against Poland, preparations that included the conclusion of a nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union, Britain and France warned that they would go to war if Poland were to be invaded by Germany. When the German invasion of Poland took place anyway, on September 1, 1939, the British and French had to make good on their promise, and so they declared war upon Germany. And so, once again, Western Europe was plunged into war. What had begun in China two years before had now become a globe-encircling world war.
As these tragic circumstances rippled through the decade of the 1930s, the United States stood back and assumed a position of neutrality, just as it had always tried to do in the past. American public opinion was vehemently opposed to any involvement in the European situation, an opinion that was reinforced by the disturbing findings of the Nye Committee, whose report provided strong evidence that bankers and munitions manufacturers had indeed made fortunes off the war effort, even if there was no evidence of their having been behind Wilson’s war decision. Under pressure from a suspicious public, Congress passed and Roosevelt signed a series of neutrality acts, beginning in 1935, that were designed to inhibit trade with the warring nations and thus make it impossible for the United States to become pulled into the conflicts afflicting Europe, in the way it had been in the First World War. This reflected an overwhelmingly popular position. A Gallup poll in March 1937 found that 94 percent of its respondents preferred efforts to keep America out of any foreign war over efforts to prevent such wars from breaking out – a sentiment that can justly be described as “isolationist,” since it meant forswearing any attempt by America to influence the flow of events in the world. Congress even came very close to approving a constitutional amendment, known as the Ludlow Amendment, which would have required a national referendum to confirm or overturn any declaration of war by Congress, except in cases in which the United States had been attacked first.
In hindsight, we can see that these neutrality measures played into the hands of the Axis powers. The militarists in the Japanese government could feel confident that the Americans would not intervene against them in China. Hitler knew he could count on a free hand in pursuing his goals in Europe, including the use of unrestricted submarine warfare in the waters around Great Britain and the prosecution of a proxy war in Spain, which provided him with a testing ground for some of the weapons and tactics he would soon employ in the rest of Europe. And yet, it was clear that there was still little inclination among Americans to back away from the neutrality policy, even though by the time the war in Europe was fully under way, the American public had come to deplore Hitler’s despotic rule and wanted to see him defeated.
Events were conspiring to make that position more and more difficult to sustain. The German expansion was being driven by a seemingly unstoppable new military tactic that came to be called Blitzkrieg, or lightning war. It was designed expressly to circumvent the stalemates of World War I. In this highly mobile and mechanized approach to warfare, an attacking force, spearheaded by dense and rapidly moving columns of tanks and mechanized forces, with close support from military aircraft, would focus its destructive power on a narrow front. By puncturing the opponent’s line of defense with short, fast thrusts designed to capture key targets (railheads, bridges, communications centers), this combined air–land attacking force spread confusion and havoc behind enemy lines. The effective use of air superiority and additional rapid thrusts by mechanized units kept the enemy off balance, and prevented the reorganization or reinforcement needed to mount a defense. Then, conventional German infantry units could encircle and capture the disoriented remnants of the enemy.
The Blitzkrieg had first worked its intense and pitiless fury in Poland, and then, after a deceptive lull of seven months, the Germans went on offense again in April 1940. First they overwhelmed Denmark and Norway in a matter of days. Next to fall were Belgium and the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and then it was on into France. It seemed that nothing could stop the Blitzkrieg. The French armies were soon shredded into insignificance by the German advance. By June 14, 1940, the capital city of Paris, which had eluded serious threat through the years of the First World War, was occupied by the Germans. The world could now see photographs of the Nazi swastika flag flying near the iconic Eiffel Tower. The world also could see Hitler forcing the French to accept his surrender terms in the same railroad car in which the defeated Germans had surrendered to the Allies in 1918. The bitter defeat, and the humiliation of Versailles, had now been fully avenged.
Such photographs expressed an exceedingly grim reality, a radical change in Europe’s condition that had come about with lightning speed. In a matter of two months, between April and June, more territory had been gained by the remorseless efficiency of the Blitzkrieg than by all the mayhem of the First World War. All of Western Europe was now effectively in Hitler’s hands, with the sole remaining holdout being Great Britain. Only Britain’s small and vulnerable island stood between Hitler and his dream of complete European domination – and his appalling plans for the racial purification of the world. Only a miraculous evacuation of the fleeing British Expeditionary Force from the French seaport of Dunkirk, using a makeshift fleet of naval vessels and hundreds of civilian craft of all sizes to cross the English Channel, and thus to escape only narrowly the concentrated fury of the German forces, saved the British Army from being all but annihilated.
Nearly 350,000 Allied troops (minus their heavy equipment) had been rescued at Dunkirk, but the evacuation would be a hollow victory if further German advances could not be stopped. Britain now had to gird itself for the likely horror of an amphibious or airborne invasion. Its heroic prime minister, Winston Churchill, struggled to keep alive his nation’s spirits with unforgettable oratory and a growling promise that “we shall never surrender.” Americans were now beginning to awaken to the extent of the danger posed by the awesome Nazi war machine, not only to their cousins in Great Britain, but eventually to America itself. With the cooperation of Congress, Roosevelt initiated an American military buildup and began to make arms and airplanes available to the British. It was not yet an abandonment of neutrality. But Roosevelt now began also a long process of persuading, educating, cajoling, and maneuvering the American public into shaking off its isolationist suspicions and taking on a larger role of defending the Western democracies, and all that they stood for, against the Nazi aggressors.
As with the American Civil War, so with the Second World War. Because we all know how the war came out, we tend to underestimate the degree to which it was actually a very close-run thing, with the outcome deeply uncertain to those who had to live through those harrowing times. Americans in particular, having never had to contemplate the very near prospect of our country being overrun by intensely hostile foreign forces, need to use our imaginations if we are to appreciate what the world looked like to the British at this moment, as they faced the most fearsome military force in history, and faced it essentially alone.
Speaking to the British House of Commons, Winston Churchill expressed the stakes with a stirring exhortation:
The Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilisation. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be freed and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands…. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves, that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, “This was their finest hour.”
Hitler understood that a German amphibious assault on Britain would be very difficult, given the Royal Navy’s command of the seas, and even the threat of one would not be plausible until the Germans had achieved decisive air superiority. So the defeat of the Royal Air Force became the focal point of the Battle of Britain.
If there are moments that we can single out as hinges of history, then the summer and fall of 1940 would have to be among them. It was a moment when much of the world held its breath, as the future of Britain, and perhaps of all Europe, hinged upon the outcome of this entirely airborne Battle of Britain – a strange and unprecedented kind of battle, like almost nothing that had ever come before it, in which the heroic and skilled pilots of the Royal Air Force managed to defeat the more numerous aircraft of the German Luftwaffe, and thwart their effort to gain control of the skies over Britain. Hitler was forced to shift strategy, abandoning the air war in favor of a saturation bombing of London, the so-called Blitz, hoping by those brutal means to demoralize the British and sap their will to fight.
But it was a clear victory for Britain, and this victory marked the first serious reversal of the hitherto unstoppable Nazi war machine. It forced the Germans to delay indefinitely an invasion of Britain and bought time for Roosevelt to supply American destroyers to the British for use against the German submarines that were wearing down the capacity of the Royal Navy. It also helped Roosevelt’s efforts at reversing the isolationist tide of American public opinion, discrediting the views of those, like the U.S. ambassador to Britain Joseph P. Kennedy, who sneered to the Boston Globe that “democracy is finished in England” and strongly advocated against America’s providing military and economic aid.
As we have seen, reversing that tide would not be easy. Indeed, by casting the destroyer transaction as a “trade” with the British in exchange for American use of a string of eight British naval bases from Newfoundland to the Caribbean, Roosevelt got around the legal and political delays that might have held up the deal if it had been structured in a more straightforward way. But such a clever diplomatic move on Roosevelt’s part had the effect of reactivating the passionate debate between those advocating extensive aid to Britain and those who distrusted Roosevelt and feared that such a policy would inexorably lead to American involvement in the war. The interventionist–internationalist side was ably represented by groups like the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, led by Kansas journalist William Allen White; on the noninterventionist–isolationist side was the formidable America First Committee, with eight hundred thousand members at its peak, led by General Robert E. Wood of Sears Roebuck and Charles Lindbergh.
In fall 1940, Roosevelt ran for reelection to an unprecedented third term. The restriction of American presidents to two terms was a tradition established by George Washington, but Roosevelt and the Democrats felt that the critical nature of the times, with the war raging in Europe, justified a departure. The Democrats also wanted to keep their top campaigner at the top of the party’s ticket. “Don’t switch horses in the middle of the stream,” they urged the country’s voters. Interestingly, the Republican nominee, Indiana businessman Wendell Willkie, differed very little from Roosevelt in his policy views; he saw the Nazi threat clearly and strongly supported aid to the Allies, unlike more isolation-minded Republicans, many of whom had preferred Senator Robert Taft to him. In the end, Willkie vainly tried to draw contrasts by alleging that Roosevelt actively favored intervention and by criticizing Roosevelt’s breaking of the two-term tradition. But neither of these was enough to carry the day for him, and Roosevelt would be reelected easily, though by a slightly smaller margin than in his two previous victories.
Encouraged by this win, Roosevelt ramped up his advocacy of support for the Allies, using a postelection fireside chat in December 1940 to explain how the American people could best support the war effort by serving as the “great arsenal of democracy,” the chief provider of material support to the democracies’ struggle. His purpose, he reassured his listeners, was the preservation of American national security, an effort “to keep you now … out of a last-ditch war for the preservation of American independence.” There would be no need to enter the fight ourselves. “The people of Europe who are defending themselves do not ask us to do their fighting. They ask us for the implements of war, the planes, the tanks, the guns, the freighters which will enable them to fight for their liberty and for our security. Emphatically we must get these weapons to them in sufficient volume and quickly enough, so that we and our children will be saved the agony and suffering of war which others have had to endure.” Great Britain and the British Empire constituted “the spearhead of resistance to world conquest,” and they were “putting up a fight which will live forever in the story of human gallantry.” It would be America’s task to supply them with the tools to prevail.
Roosevelt took a further step in the direction of intervention in two speeches in January. On January 6, 1941, in his annual message to Congress, Roosevelt attempted to give a definite shape to the war’s aims, distilling them into a set of fundamental democratic commitments that he called the “Four Freedoms”: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. These four values were universal in character and described a world “attainable in our own time,” a world that was “the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create.” Then, four days later, Roosevelt introduced the Lend-Lease Bill to the Congress, a measure providing that the president be given the power to lend or lease to the British – or to any other country whose defense he considered vitally important to the national interest – any war supplies that he deemed suitable. The program, which passed Congress on March 11, would constitute a massive involvement in the war; it would enable a battered and cash-starved Britain to have the means to carry on.
Isolationists like Robert Taft firmly opposed Lend-Lease, claiming it would “give the President power to carry on a kind of undeclared war all over the world.” And Taft had a point. Lend-Lease was a popular measure, and its popularity seemed to mark a decisive shift in public opinion, toward aiding Britain at whatever cost. But its implementation would cast neutrality to the wind and would surely increase the chances of an American entanglement in the war. So too did the increasing American involvement in convoying and protecting American and British ships making their way across the North Atlantic, an endeavor that rapidly led to conditions approaching undeclared war. After the U.S. Navy destroyer Greer had been attacked on September 4 by a German U-boat, Roosevelt gave an order for American naval vessels thenceforth to “shoot on sight” any German or Italian raiders that they came across and to arm merchant ships traveling into dangerous zones. He did not disclose to the American people that the Greer had been shadowing the German U-boat and was reporting its position to the British – that it had, in a word, been actively helping the British war effort.
The United States was walking a knife’s edge, hoping to help Britain and the other allies as much as possible without itself becoming a belligerent party. How long this constantly escalating but still undeclared and mostly secret war in the Atlantic could have gone on, without eventuating in outright war, is hard to know. But in any event, these undeclared hostilities were not to stay undeclared much longer. What changed matters decisively was something unexpected, coming from the other side of the world, an ocean away.
The Japanese incursion into China had become stalled by 1940, and as a consequence, Japanese leaders began to look to other East Asian territories as sources of vitally needed raw materials. They formulated the idea of a pan-Asian empire that would be called the “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,” a bloc of Asian nations firmly under Japanese leadership, promoting the larger cause of Asian independence and self-sufficiency. And they looked to Southeast Asia – French Indochina, the Dutch East Indies, Malaya, and Burma – as sources for the oil, rubber, and other strategic materials they needed to flourish.
Japan remained dependent on American oil, however, and when the Japanese occupied French Indochina in July 1941, Roosevelt retaliated by freezing Japanese assets in the United States and embargoing shipments of U.S. oil to Japan. This was a potentially debilitating move, because the Japanese had only very limited reserves, and it was a provocation that Japan was not likely to stand for. Secretary of State Cordell Hull was in contact with Japanese diplomats and sought some kind of solution, which would include a withdrawal from China, as a means of lifting the embargo and resuming American trade. But the Japanese leadership would not give up its dreams of empire, and the dominant faction within the government opted for war instead. The Japanese were well aware of American reluctance to go to war in Europe and figured that a similar reluctance would prevail in the Far East.
Meanwhile, the United States intelligence services had broken the Japanese diplomatic code and knew that this change of policy had occurred. They knew in advance that a war was imminent. By November, they were certain that a surprise attack was in the offing, but they were not able to detect where it would occur. Perhaps it would be in the Dutch East Indies, perhaps the Philippines, perhaps Thailand. But almost no one suspected that on November 26, even as the Japanese ambassador continued to negotiate with the Americans, a massive Japanese aircraft-carrier fleet was steaming undetected across the North Pacific, bound for the American naval base at Pearl Harbor on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, preparing an audacious attack on the U.S. Navy’s Pacific Fleet. With this bold move, the Japanese had hopes of striking a crippling blow to American sea power in the Pacific, one that would discourage the U.S. Navy from interfering with Japan’s aggressive moves in Southeast Asia.
The attack largely succeeded in its immediate objectives. Early on the peaceful Sunday morning of December 7, Pearl Harbor was attacked by 353 carrier-borne Japanese warplanes – a mix of fighters, level bombers, dive bombers, and torpedo bombers – arriving in two separate waves. They caught Pearl Harbor completely unaware and battered it for two hours, leaving the Pacific Fleet in shambles. All eight U.S. battleships were either sunk or heavily damaged, while a dozen other vessels were put out of operational order, 188 planes were destroyed, and twenty-four hundred servicemen were killed. It was a shocking blow, and yet only a part of the vast Japanese plan, which over the course of seven hours included roughly simultaneous attacks on the United States in the Philippines, Guam, and Wake Island and on the British in Malaya, Singapore, and Hong Kong.
It was an ambitious and well-executed plan. But it would emerge in due course that the Japanese had overlooked some important things. For one thing, the U.S. Navy was supremely fortunate that its three Pacific-based aircraft carriers were all at sea at the time of the attack and were thus unscathed. As the Pearl Harbor attack itself illustrated, aircraft carriers were becoming the capital ships of the fleet, far more valuable and important than battleships for purposes of projecting power at a distance. In addition, the attacking planes neglected to destroy the oil tanks and support facilities that served the fleet, an omission that made it possible for the remnants of the fleet to stay in Hawaii rather than retreating to the West Coast and to recover far more quickly than would otherwise have been the case.
They also failed to reckon with the response of the American people. That was perhaps their greatest miscalculation. A country that had been furiously divided on December 6 became furiously united on December 7 and ready to do battle with the Japanese aggressor. There would be no more talk of neutrality. It is not hard to imagine why outside observers with entirely different cultural expectations would assume that a nation so outwardly divided would be unable to put aside its differences and unite so readily, even under attack. It would be hard for subjects of an authoritarian empire to understand that the genius of a free and self-governing society lies in the opportunity it affords men and women to form free and uncoerced loyalties, loyalties that allow for dissent and disagreement – loyalties that, fed by freedom, can be surprisingly intense and durable when circumstances draw upon them.
On December 8, Roosevelt delivered his war message to Congress, referring memorably to December 7 as “a date which will live in infamy,” and he went on to lay out the treachery of the Japanese government in pretending to be in negotiations even as it was planning and launching this attack. He concluded by calling upon Congress to acknowledge the state of war that existed between the United States and Japan. Three days later, on December 11, Japan’s allies Germany and Italy both declared war on the United States. The U.S. Congress responded immediately by declaring war on them too. Thus the European and Asian wars had become linked, a single global conflict with the Axis powers: Japan, Germany, Italy, and others, aligned against the Allied powers, which now included the United States.
The ranks of the Allies by now also included the Soviet Union, who had gotten its own taste of treachery from its former ally Hitler. The German leader had without warning renounced his nonaggression pact with the Soviets and turned his military machine eastward on them in June 1941. The operation reflected not only Hitler’s distrust of the Soviet leader, Josef Stalin, but also the Nazis’ goal of conquering the western Soviet Union to repopulate it with Germans, while seizing the oil reserves of the Caucasus. The German invasion of Soviet Russia turned out to be a colossal mistake and the single most important turning point leading to the failure of Hitler’s war effort.
The incorporation of the totalitarian and thuggish regime of Stalin into the ranks of the Allied democracies would be awkward at best and would lead to intense problems in the postwar world. But that was all in the future, and present circumstances made an alliance absolutely necessary. As Churchill recognized from early on, it would likely be impossible to defeat Hitler decisively without the Soviets. And that was the first priority in his mind. “Hitler,” he told his radio audience on June 22, “is a monster of wickedness, insatiable in his lust for blood and plunder.” Hence, as Church quipped to his private secretary, “if Hitler invaded Hell, I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.”
So the battle lines were now drawn, and it was time for Franklin Roosevelt, who had been elected in 1932 and 1936 primarily as a domestic-policy leader, to transform himself from Dr. New Deal to Dr. Win-the-War. Yet American domestic policy was not completely out of the picture, since the success of the Allied cause was going to depend so heavily upon the productive capacity of the U.S. industrial economy. American industry had struggled for more than a decade to emerge fully from the Great Depression, and its rapid transformation into a true arsenal of democracy would be a heavy lift. Could it do it?
In fact, it made the lift with surprising speed, exceeding all expectations and spearheading the Allied drive to victory. All the gloom and frustration of the past decade was set aside, as the moral equivalent of war gave way to the moral force of the real thing. Consider some statistics. By the end of the first year of American involvement in the war, American arms production had risen to the same level as that of Germany, Italy, and Japan put together. By 1944, it was double that amount. By the end of the war, the United States had turned out two-thirds of all the military equipment used by the Allies combined: a staggering 280,000 warplanes, 100,000 armored cars, 86,000 tanks, 8,800 naval ships, 2.6 million machine guns, 650,000 artillery pieces, millions of tons of ordnance, and 41 billion rounds of ammunition. Accomplishing all this, while putting into uniform 11 million soldiers, 4 million sailors, 700,000 marines, and 240,000 coast guardsmen, meant drawing into the industrial workforce a great many women and minorities, on an even greater scale than occurred in World War I. Depression-era unemployment rates were now a distant memory, as the factories of the nation whirred with activity.
As in the previous war, the U.S. government organized special agencies to coordinate military and economic resources, such as the War Production Board and the Office of War Mobilization. The Office of Price Administration regulated most aspects of civilian life, freezing prices and rents and handling the rationing of scarce commodities, such as meat, gasoline, and tires. As federal spending increased by 1,000 percent during the war years, deficits were pushed up to unheard levels, producing a national debt of $250 billion (five times what it had been in 1941), but also producing torrid economic growth, sometimes at a rate of as much as 15 percent per annum. Perhaps this was the great jolt of stimulus that the economy had been waiting for but would never have received in peacetime. As with the New Deal, though, the smaller corporations tended to lose out on government contracts, while the largest corporations led the recovery and pocketed the earnings, accounting for up to 70 percent of wartime manufacturing.
Numerous captains of industry played outsized roles in this great wartime expansion. The builder Henry J. Kaiser was one of the most important, a blustery, colorful entrepreneur with boundless energy, capable of going days without sleep when he threw himself into enormous projects, such as the construction of the Hoover Dam. Kaiser cared passionately about the war in Europe and involved himself in efforts to bring relief to victims of the Nazis as early as 1940. His chief contribution to the defeat of Hitler, though, was in inventing critically important techniques for the mass production of commercial and naval ships, such as the use of welding and subassemblies that allowed for Ford-like efficiency. He established the famous Kaiser Shipyard in Richmond, California, where he perfected the construction in a mere forty-five days of the homely but indispensable workhorse vessels known as Liberty ships, the first all-welded prefabricated cargo ships, later to be superseded by the larger and faster Victory ships. Other Kaiser shipyards produced the smaller “escort carriers,” more than a hundred of them, deployed to protect convoys and otherwise project airpower in both the Pacific and Atlantic theaters of the war. All were produced in record time.
The war’s effects were visible throughout the economy, and the social transformations it wrought were equally profound. Once again, women found themselves playing an indispensable role in the industrial labor force, while more than two hundred thousand women served in the military. Minorities were similarly afforded fresh opportunities. African Americans came north, as their forebears had done a quarter-century before, attracted by jobs in the humming and labor-hungry factories. In addition, a million young African American men joined the armed forces. The seeds of the postwar civil rights movement were planted by their experiences of discrimination endured at home while fighting for liberty and equality abroad. Civil rights leaders urged veterans to adopt the double-V slogan: one V for victory in Europe, and another V for victory in the struggle for equality at home. Native American “code talkers” helped ensure the security of tactical telephone and radio communications by devising ingenious forms of secret coding based on their Native languages. Mexican Americans also served in the military, three hundred thousand of them, and starting in 1942, Mexican braceros were allowed into the country to fill the labor shortage in agriculture.
There was one conspicuous exception to the pattern. Japanese Americans suffered grievously from their association with the nation’s Pacific enemy, even though some twenty thousand Japanese Americans were serving honorably in the armed forces. The surprise Pearl Harbor attacks had produced a suspicious attitude toward Americans of Japanese descent, and there were even widespread fears of a Japanese attack on the West Coast of the United States. Succumbing to pressure from figures like California attorney general Earl Warren, President Roosevelt authorized the internment of over 110,000 Japanese Americans, mostly on the West Coast, and their relocation to camps in the nation’s interior. They were forced to sell their homes and businesses at below market rates, see their lives uprooted, and then endure the supervision of armed guards in unpleasant settings, far away from everything that was familiar to them. It was a bitter injustice and a stain on the nation’s otherwise admirable conduct during this war.
Now let us turn to the conduct of the war itself. Almost immediately upon American entry into the war, the Allies agreed that the defeat of Hitler ought to take priority. The ultimate offensive against Japan in the Pacific could be postponed, since the Japanese were not intent upon conquest of the American mainland. Hitler was the more formidable foe and the more immediate danger, and defeating him would be a more complicated and demanding task, with many stages and many dimensions to consider.
First of all, the German successes in submarine warfare against Allied convoys in the shipping lanes of the Atlantic would have to be stopped, or at least severely curtailed. In May 1942 alone, for example, 120 merchant vessels were sunk. Such a horrendous toll, a veritable Blitzkrieg of the seas, simply could not continue, or the war would be lost. By mid-1943, though, the situation had been turned around, thanks to a number of innovations, technological and tactical. The development of radar and sonar technologies, which enabled the detection of submarines, and the effective bombing of German naval bases helped. Even more important was the deployment of naval escort vessels and patrolling aircraft to allow for convoys on the major sea routes. Unescorted merchant shipping operating out of the U.S. East Coast didn’t have a chance against the U-boat menace, but once convoys began operating effectively in tandem with air support from both land- and escort carrier–based aircraft, and were supplied with intelligence intercepts of U-boat activity and communications, the menace was brought under control.
© DAVID LINDROTH
The Second World War, European theater.
Then, the Germans had to be driven out of their advance positions in North Africa before a Mediterranean invasion of the European continent could be undertaken successfully. Once that had been accomplished in May 1943, under the leadership of British general Bernard Montgomery and U.S. general Dwight Eisenhower, the next step was a July invasion and occupation of the island of Sicily, preparatory to an assault upon the Italian peninsula itself in September. Churchill had imagined that Italy would be the “soft underbelly of the Axis,” but U.S. general Mark Clark had it closer to the truth: it was, he said, “one tough gut.” Mussolini had fallen from power by this time, but that only meant that the more formidable German troops now controlled much of the country and put up fierce resistance, taking every advantage of the rocky, challenging terrain. Movement up the peninsula was a matter of costly, inch-by-inch advances, and it would not be until June 4, 1944, that Mark Clark would take Rome, and many months more before the country could actually be cleared. The Italian campaign was a hard victory that weakened the Germans by tying up twenty-three of their army divisions – but it was not the dramatic breakthrough that had been hoped for.
Nor was there a ready solution to be found in the growing use of strategic bombing, the military term for sustained aerial assault on railways, harbors, urban and industrial areas, and other strategic targets in enemy territory, generally carried out by fleets of heavy, long-range bombers. Military theorists between the two world wars had pondered the potential uses of airpower in future conflicts, and some argued that strategic bombing could be highly effective in breaking down civilian morale and avoiding ground stalemates like that of the First World War. Such arguments seemed to make sense, and strategic bombing would thus be used by both sides in the war, notably by the Germans against the British during the Blitz of London and by the Allies against Germany, especially in the final year of the war. But strategic bombing would always remain controversial. Tactically, it was controversial, because its effects registered only gradually and cumulatively, wearing down the enemy by pounding away at him rather than taking him out in dramatic and visible strokes. Morally, strategic bombing was controversial, because it nearly always entailed civilian deaths and collateral damage on a massive scale – a moral issue that made its use weigh on the consciences even of the fiercest Allied leaders.
Meanwhile, all of this time, the Soviets had been complaining, and not without justice, that they were being forced to bear a disproportionate amount of the suffering and death in the bloody battles on the Eastern front. They had wanted to see the opening of a second front in the West at the earliest opportunity, to divert some portion of the enemy’s full force away from them. The Italian invasion had not accomplished that; something else was needed. Finally, by summer 1944, the other Allies agreed that the right time had arrived for such a major new opening. On the morning of June 6, 1944, the D-Day invasion at Normandy established the long-awaited Western front to press in upon Hitler and relieve the burden in the East.
D-Day was, and remains, the greatest invasion of its kind in military history. In a stupendous feat of logistics and bravery, the invasion landed 326,000 men, 50,000 vehicles, and 100,000 tons of supplies in a single week, overcoming extensive German defensive preparations, including a seemingly unassailable set of fortifications on the French coastline. Despite its massiveness and complexity, and the many ways that things could have gone wrong – and, in a few cases, did go wrong – D-Day proved an unqualified success and provided the dramatic breakthrough that the Allies had needed. The story is not only a masterwork of large-scale military and logistical planning but also a mosaic of countless individual acts of unbelievable valor and daring.
Forty years after D-Day, an American president, Ronald Reagan, stood on that site and paid tribute to the remaining survivors of one of the most heroic such acts, the taking of the sheer cliffs of Pointe du Hoc by 225 U.S. Army Rangers:
The Rangers looked up and saw the enemy soldiers – the edge of the cliffs shooting down at them with machine guns and throwing grenades. And the American Rangers began to climb. They shot rope ladders over the face of these cliffs and began to pull themselves up. When one Ranger fell, another would take his place. When one rope was cut, a Ranger would grab another and begin his climb again. They climbed, shot back, and held their footing. Soon, one by one, the Rangers pulled themselves over the top, and in seizing the firm land at the top of these cliffs, they began to seize back the continent of Europe. Two hundred and twenty-five came here. After 2 days of fighting, only 90 could still bear arms.
Behind me is a memorial that symbolizes the Ranger daggers that were thrust into the top of these cliffs. And before me are the men who put them there.
These are the boys of Pointe du Hoc. These are the men who took the cliffs. These are the champions who helped free a continent. These are the heroes who helped end a war.
Gentlemen, I look at you and I think of the words of Stephen Spender’s poem. You are men who in your “lives fought for life … and left the vivid air signed with your honor.”
By June 24, the Allies had landed more than a million men and controlled a beachhead sixty miles wide and as much as fifteen miles deep, a large chunk of Normandy and Brittany. Their foothold on the continent was secure now. After a dramatic advance by General George Patton’s Third Army, the Americans were able to swarm across France, while up from the Mediterranean came the Seventh Army under General A. M. Patch. Paris would be freed by August 25, the culmination of a liberatory campaign whose restorative sweep would mirror the rapidity with which Hitler had captured France in 1940.
In retrospect, it is clear that D-Day broke the back of the Nazi effort. By September, American and British troops had crossed into Germany and begun to push toward the capital city of Berlin from the west, even as Russian troops advanced toward Berlin from the east. The Germans launched an impressive and determined counterattack in Belgium in December 1944, in an effort known as the Battle of the Bulge, but it only delayed the inevitable and further depleted Germany’s diminishing reserves. The race was on to Berlin.
Meanwhile, the question of who would get to Berlin first had begun to take on genuine importance. Winston Churchill had always been more deeply realistic about the character of Josef Stalin and the Soviets than was Roosevelt, and he urged Roosevelt to ensure that Eisenhower and the Americans should be the ones to get to Berlin first, to forestall the possibility that the Soviets would use their occupation as a source of leverage in shaping the postwar settlement according to their own self-interest. At the Big Three summit meeting of the three principal Allied leaders, held February 4–11, 1945, at the Crimean resort of Yalta, the leaders had decided that postwar Germany would be divided into four occupation zones, one for each of the Allies (including the French), with Berlin similarly divided and jointly occupied. Stalin had promised to respect the future of free government in Poland – whose freedom and independence, remember, was the cause of British and French entry into the war in 1939 – and the other countries of Eastern Europe. But Churchill did not trust him to follow through. “I deem it highly important,” he told General Eisenhower, with characteristic wit, “that we shake hands with the Russians as far to the east as possible.” The Soviets had been their allies, yes, but as soon as the war was over, all would be changed, he predicted, and they would become “a mortal danger” to the free world.
But Eisenhower disagreed and made the fateful decision to ignore this advice, and allow the Soviets to take Berlin, deeming the occupation of the German capital a “prestige objective” not worth the cost in American soldiers’ lives that might be entailed in getting there. His objective was the destruction of the enemy’s armed forces, not the taking of political targets. He assumed that the Yalta plan for division of the postwar German state would hold and would ensure a peaceful transition into the future. Meanwhile, the war in the Pacific was unfolding, and there as in Europe, the eventual outcome was by no means predetermined. In fact, in the days and months after Pearl Harbor, it appeared that there would be a steep and perilous path forward. The lightning strikes of December 1941 had set the Allies back on their heels and presaged a steady stream of Japanese military successes. By early 1942, the Japanese controlled much of East and Southeast Asia, occupying Korea, eastern China, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Burma, Malaya, French Indochina, the Dutch East Indies, and most of the Pacific islands west of Midway Island, including Guam, Wake Island, and the Gilbert Islands. As was the case with the Germans mowing their way across Europe in 1940, so the Japanese military machine seemed nearly invincible in those early days of the war.
Like the Germans, they found the air of victory to be intoxicating and lost any sense of when to stop or where their limits lay. Flush with success, they made the decision to push into the South Pacific, seeking to cut off Australia and prepare the way for a second strike at Hawaii to finish off the American Pacific Fleet before it had time to recover.
Their advance would be abruptly stopped, however, in two critical naval battles between carrier-based aircraft, first at the Coral Sea (May 4–8, 1942) and a month later, even more decisively, at Midway (June 4–7, 1942), which the Japanese hoped to use as a launching pad for their renewed assault against Hawaii. Once again, though, American intelligence had cracked the Japanese naval code and knew in advance what the Japanese were planning, so that when the Japanese fleet arrived near Midway, it would be met by a well-prepared American force. The resulting battle was a brilliant success for the Americans and a calamity for the Japanese, who lost four carriers – all four of which had participated in the Pearl Harbor raid – and many of their most experienced aircrews. These losses, especially the loss of so many extraordinarily skillful Japanese pilots, would prove enormously consequential. It was, wrote historian John Keegan, “the most stunning and decisive blow in the history of naval warfare” and must be counted one of the war’s turning points. Without any ability to contest American air superiority, the Japanese were never again able to launch a major offensive in the Pacific theater.
But that result could not be known at the time, and Midway, though a smashing win, was only one victory after many defeats. The Allies had not yet been able to put together a successful offensive, and they would need to do so, if they were to create any momentum against the Japanese. Hence they chose to follow up the triumph at Midway with a move to expel the Japanese from the Solomon Islands, a move that would have strategic importance for the defense of Australia. The action ended up being focused on a swampy island called Guadalcanal, where the Japanese had built an airstrip that could be used to harass Allied shipping to Australia and New Zealand. The campaign that followed was a fiercely contested, six-month-long struggle on air, land, and sea, in which the Allies eventually prevailed. As the first major American combat operation of the war, it attracted excellent journalistic coverage, notably the on-the-scene reporting of Richard Tregaskis of the International News Service, whose powerful 1943 book Guadalcanal Diary was one of the finest accounts to come out of the Pacific War.
© DAVID LINDROTH
The Second World War, Pacific theater.
Having thus blunted the Japanese advance at Midway and removed the Japanese presence from the Solomons, the United States and its allies in Australia and New Zealand began their long counteradvance across the Pacific, using a two-pronged offensive strategy, with the two prongs eventually converging on the Japanese islands. In the southwestern Pacific, General Douglas MacArthur would move across northern New Guinea toward the Philippines, while in the central Pacific, Admiral Chester Nimitz would push westward through the Gilbert Islands, the Marshalls, the Marianas, and then on to the Philippines. Thanks to Americans’ command of the skies, they were able to employ a strategy called leapfrogging or island hopping, in which Japanese strongholds could be neutralized by being bypassed in favor of less fortified islands and then cut off from resupply.
Once New Guinea and the Marianas were secured, Roosevelt met with MacArthur and Nimitz, and they decided the next move would be the retaking of the Philippines. Knowing the loss of the Philippines would cut them off from access to the raw materials of the East Indies, the Japanese prepared for a ferocious fight, concentrating their naval forces for three huge battles at Leyte Gulf in October 1944. In three battles, known collectively as the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the largest naval engagement in history, the Japanese were soundly defeated and their navy rendered all but nonexistent. After Leyte Gulf, there was no question in anyone’s mind about the eventual outcome of the war.
But getting to that final outcome would be another matter. Ominously, Leyte Gulf saw the introduction of a new and terrifying instrument of war: kamikaze suicide pilots who would crash their explosives-laden planes into the American carriers. Such tactics echoed profound spiritual traditions (the word kamikaze means “divine wind”) deeply ingrained in Japanese military culture, traceable back to the Bushido ethic of the samurai warrior: the honor entailed in loyal service to their Emperor would take precedence over life itself. The events at Leyte Gulf also suggested that Japanese resistance to an actual invasion of their homeland might be unimaginably fierce and costly. Such an apprehension was only reinforced by the ensuing ferocity of the eighty-two-day-long battle for Okinawa, the single bloodiest battle of the Pacific War, a “typhoon of steel” lasting from April to June 1945, which not only featured a new wave of some fifteen hundred kamikaze sorties but almost a quarter of a million deaths, many of them Okinawans used as human shields by the Japanese.
By the time Okinawa was secured, the war in Europe had ended, but not before an ailing Franklin Roosevelt had died on April 12, 1945, of a cerebral hemorrhage, as he was resting at his retreat in Warm Springs, Georgia. Sadly, although he lived to be reelected in November 1944 to an unprecedented fourth term, he did not live long enough to taste the victory he had worked so hard to achieve. Nor did his rival Hitler live to taste in full the bitter destruction that he had brought upon his people. He committed suicide on April 30, as the advancing Red Army was closing in on Berlin. On May 2, Berlin fell to the Soviets, and German forces in Italy surrendered to the Allies. On May 7, the chief of staff of the German armed forces signed an unconditional surrender to the Allied forces. The following day, May 8, would mark the end of the war in Europe: V-E Day.
There would be celebrations everywhere, but their mood was dampened, not only by the sadness of Roosevelt’s recent death, but by horrifying news beginning to filter out of American soldiers’ discovery of abandoned German concentration camps, the ultimate sites of Hitler’s campaign to exterminate the Jews of Europe. First to be discovered was the Ohrdruf camp, found on April 5, and toured a week later by Generals George Patton, Omar Bradley, and Dwight Eisenhower. They found thirty-two hundred naked, emaciated bodies in shallow graves. Even the hard-boiled Patton found himself nauseated, unable to bear the camp’s sights. Eisenhower was shown a shed piled to the ceiling with bodies and equipped with various torture devices, as well as a butcher’s block used for smashing the mouths of the dead and extracting gold fillings from their teeth. The old soldier’s face turned white with shock at what he beheld, but he insisted on seeing the entire camp. He promptly issued an order that all American units in the area were to visit the camp. “We are told that the American soldier does not know what he was fighting for,” he stated grimly. “Now, at least he will know what he is fighting against.”
Further dampening any mood to celebrate V-E Day was the awareness that there was still a Pacific War to be won – a victory that, given the evidence of Okinawa, was going to involve a range of horrors all its own. Estimates of likely Allied casualties from an invasion of the Japanese mainland hovered at around 250,000 American casualties, and many more Japanese ones; but some estimates from respectable sources predicted as many as a million deaths, and some went even higher, numbers that, although staggering, did not seem beyond the range of possibility. (And such numbers did not include the likely execution, in the event of an invasion, of some one hundred thousand Allied prisoners of war then held in Japan.) The resistance mounted by the Japanese was likely to be intense. As the historian Paul Dull explained, “plans were already being formulated that if Japan herself were invaded, every Japanese man, woman, and child would be organized as teishin butai (Volunteer Corps) to meet the invaders, even though the Japanese might only be armed with sharpened bamboo spears.” The determination to fight on at whatever cost, the brutalities inflicted on the Okinawans, the proliferation of new weapons, such as the kaiten suicide submarines and suicidal rocket-powered baka bombs – all these things seemed to point toward a truly horrifying task ahead.
By this time, however, a possible alternative was emerging. The United States had developed a new weapon, the atomic bomb, which was the product of the top-secret Manhattan Project. Research had begun in 1940 at Roosevelt’s direction, after he had been alerted to the possibility of such a weapon by a personal letter from the physicist Albert Einstein. A refugee from Hitler’s Germany, Einstein feared the possibility that Germany might develop such a weapon first and use it to devastating effect. Such a weapon would derive its power from the energy released by the fission of uranium atoms in a nuclear chain reaction, resulting in a bomb more powerful than tens of thousands of tons of TNT. So secret was the development of this weapon that the new American president, Harry S. Truman, had not been informed of its existence until becoming president after Roosevelt’s death, and now he was the one who had to make the fateful choice whether to use it against Japan – and if so, how to do so.
Truman was a blunt, straightforward, and decisive man who did not agonize over his choices, and he quickly decided that it would be imperative to use this new weapon as something that would save lives, particularly in light of the experience in Okinawa and what it portended for a conventional invasion and occupation of Japan. But how best to use it? Given the fact that only two bombs were then available, and given the very real possibility of their failing to explode properly, it did not make sense to announce a demonstration explosion in some uninhabited area, to prove the weapon’s awesome power. For one thing, the detonation might fail entirely and make any American threats look hollow. Even if a demonstration bomb did explode, it might not have the desired effect anyway. And how could Truman possibly justify to the world his declining to use this weapon, if that declining resulted in hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths? He concluded that the only realistic choice open to him was to demand Japanese surrender in the starkest and most threatening terms, with a deadline attached, and, when the deadline passed, to drop one of the bombs without warning on a valuable Japanese target.
That is what he did. There was a warning on July 26 to surrender or face the grim reality that “the alternative to surrender is prompt and utter destruction.” Then, when there was no surrender forthcoming, early on the morning of August 6, a lone B-29 bomber dropped the first bomb unannounced on the port city of Hiroshima, a major naval and war-industrial center. It exploded as designed, with a blinding flash of light, followed by a towering fireball, shock wave, firestorm, and cyclone-force winds. Its destructive power was even greater than its creators had suspected; it killed eighty thousand people almost instantly and flattened four square miles of the city into rubble. Three days later, the second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, with similar damage.
The second bomb convinced the Japanese Emperor that they were now up against an irresistible force, and he surrendered, although he was allowed to keep his titular status as head of state. General MacArthur would receive the Japanese surrender formally aboard the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Harbor on September 2, 1945 – six years and one day after the German invasion of Poland, and eight years after the Japanese invasion of China.
Thus ended the most destructive war in human history, a conflict whose many facets and repercussions are almost impossible to grasp, let alone to hold together all at once in one’s mind. The vast geographical sweep of the war, the immense scale of the casualties, the disorienting changes in the methods and textures of warfare, the disruptive influence on the various combatant peoples, the changes good and bad that it wrought in American society and culture, its effect on our conceptions of human rights and human dignity, all the way down to the revolutions effected by the uncanny array of innovations the war spawned, from radio navigation and computers and atomic energy to penicillin and jeeps and M&Ms candies – all of these things and more count as part of the war’s legacy.
No contemporary could ignore the immense brutality of this war, from the massacres and tortures inflicted by the Japanese in Nanking to the horrors of the Holocaust in Europe and the civilian carnage caused in the strategic bombing of German and Japanese cities, including not only the two atomic bombs but the Allied firebombing of cities like Dresden and Hamburg, resulting in hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths and incalculable devastation. As in the First World War, so in the Second: the idea that humankind was riding a wave of inevitable progress was given a rude shock, from which it is still yet to recover.
But for our present purposes, one consequence of the war stands out above all the others: the permanently transformed status of the United States. Never again would it be able to return to anything like the remote and decentralized bucolic agrarian empire it once was; never again would isolation from the world be possible, let alone desirable. Nor could it ever again look to Europe in the way that a child looks to its parent. All that was changed. The mantle of world leadership had passed to it now, indeed had been thrust upon it, in a way it could no longer refuse. That mantle came to the United States not only because of its preeminent military and economic power but because of the generous way it had employed that power in the world’s hour of desperate need. Without the sacrifice of blood and treasure by the United States and its allies, the world would not have been able to elude the awful fate of domination by the Axis powers. No thoughtful person can contemplate that prospect without a shudder, followed by a wave of gratitude. It was certainly one of America’s finest hours.
“Forty summers have passed,” said President Ronald Reagan in his speech to the veterans of Pointe du Hoc gathered once again at the windswept French cliffs on June 6, 1984, “since the battle that you fought here.”
You were young the day you took these cliffs; some of you were hardly more than boys, with the deepest joys of life before you. Yet, you risked everything here. Why? Why did you do it? What impelled you to put aside the instinct for self-preservation and risk your lives to take these cliffs? What inspired all the men of the armies that met here? We look at you, and somehow we know the answer. It was faith and belief; it was loyalty and love.
The men of Normandy had faith that what they were doing was right, faith that they fought for all humanity, faith that a just God would grant them mercy on this beachhead or on the next. It was the deep knowledge – and pray God we have not lost it – that there is a profound, moral difference between the use of force for liberation and the use of force for conquest. You were here to liberate, not to conquer, and so you and those others did not doubt your cause. And you were right not to doubt.
In the postwar world, the idea of America as a land of hope acquired new layers of meaning. No longer merely a refuge, or a frontier, or an exemplar, the United States now found thrust upon it a role as a self-conscious leader for the world. It was an unaccustomed role, one that did not rest easily with many aspects of the American past. Would it represent a departure from everything that the nation had been and aspired to be, from its earliest days as a people self-consciously set apart? Or would it be a logical development of the American idea, a form of organic growth fully in continuity with the American past – perhaps even the fulfillment of a destiny? The answer remained to be seen.
