(Sequel to “Blitzkreig”)

With the fall of France in June 1940, Britain stood alone against Germany and Italy.  The British army was in a state of total disarray.  It was never very large, and it had lost almost all its equipment during the evacuation from Dunkirk.  The imminent threat of invasion loomed over the British Isles as the Germans assembled their landing boats on the shores of the English Channel. On the other side of the Atlantic, America was in a state of shock.  The sudden collapse of France was completely unexpected and frightening.  What if the Germans managed to defeat the British and took over the British fleet?  How could the United States survive in a world dominated by totalitarian states?  Sentiment in the country was generally pro-Allied, but most Americans did not wish to become involved in a shooting war. Neutrality remained the watchword.  Nevertheless, President Franklin Roosevelt was determined to do everything he possibly could to see that Britain withstood the coming assault.  Substantial materiel support was provided to Britain, stretching our neutrality laws to the limit. Also, in preparation for possible future troubles, the United States instituted its first peacetime military draft.  The American armed forces had a long way to go.  In June 1940 the United States Army was smaller than those of several third-class European states.  

Two things deterred the German invasion of Britain.  First was the British air force.  Second was the British navy.  Hitler and his generals determined that their initial task was to destroy the British air force by a series of concentrated attacks on the enemy’s air bases.  Once the Royal Air Force’s fighting effectiveness was destroyed, it might be possible for the Luftwaffe to provide the air cover needed to push an invasion force through the British fleet.  Unfortunately for Hitler, the RAF did not cooperate.  Although Chamberlain’s kowtowing to Hitler at Munich in October 1939 may have cost the Allies a chance to thwart the Fuhrer’s plans at that time, the intervening months had given the British time to develop their air defenses. By June 1940 they had a chain of interconnected radar towers backed by a powerful fleet of modern fighter planes. All through the summer and early autumn of 1940, British and German pilots fought it out over the skies of England and the channel, and, in the end, the Germans lost the contest.  German plane losses were too heavy, and British air power, though wounded, remained strong.  In Churchill’s eloquent words of tribute to British airmen, “Never has so much been owed by so many to so few.”  The Luftwaffe then switched its major effort from attacking RAF air bases to the terror bombing of British cities, and German invasion plans were put on indefinite hold. After the threat of invasion eased Churchill could afford to be jocular.  Speaking to the Canadian Parliament in late 1941, he said: “After France fell, General Weygand (the French commander) said that the Germans would wring the neck of the British chicken.”  Pause. “Some chicken!” Another pause.  “Some neck!”

 Elsewhere the war continued to spread.  On November 30, 1939, Soviet troops had invaded Finland.  The Finns resisted skillfully and with great courage, and over the winter months the Soviet forces were thrown back again and again.  Finally, the sheer weight of numbers and equipment took its toll, and Finland was forced to sue for peace in March 1940.  To German observers of the Russo-Finnish war, it appeared that Soviet military leaders were totally incompetent and their soldiers ill-prepared for conflict.

In June 1940 the Soviets occupied the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania and parts of Romania.  In Africa, the Italians took over British Somaliland in August and attacked Egypt in September. On October 28, 1940, the Italians invaded Greece from their occupied state of Albania.

 Italian war efforts were fated for nothing but frustration.  Their thrust into Greece was turned back, and soon hard fighting Greek troops advanced deep into Albania.  In Africa, the British repulsed the Italian advance into Egypt and pursued their beaten foe into Libya.  The Italians were also defeated in British Somaliland, and the British then attacked Italian forces in Ethiopia.  Mussolini’s quest for military glory and a restoration of Roman power had been a total failure.  At that point it was up to Germany to succor its ally.  In March 1941, General Erwin Rommel and his Afrika Korps landed in Libya, and the combined German-Italian force soon began pushing the British back toward Egypt.  In April, on the other side of the Mediterranean, German, Italian, and Romanian armies swept down from the north and overwhelmed Yugoslav and Greek resistance.  Yugoslavia and Greece surrendered in late April, and the strategic island of Crete fell by the end of May.  The British dispatched troops to Greece in a forlorn effort to help, but this doomed expedition only served to cost men and equipment and weaken British forces in North Africa.

 On June 22, 1941, the Germans turned their armed might against their erstwhile friend, the Soviet Union.  The German-Soviet non-aggression pact of 1939 had been nothing but an expedient sham. As Hitler revealed in Mein Kampf, always his intention had been to strike east in the quest for lebensraum. Churchill’s reaction to this latest turn of events was interesting.  He promised to give the Soviets all possible assistance. When reminded of his long-standing condemnation of communism and the Soviet Union, he said (paraphrasing) that “If Hitler’s armies invaded Hell he would have a few kind words of support for the Devil.” British materiel support was necessarily limited, but the United States slowly began sending what was one day to become a steady stream of war supplies to the Soviets.

 Although the British had warned Stalin about the impending German assault, Stalin refused to believe the warnings, and the Soviet army and air force were caught by surprise.  As a result, initial losses were devastating.  Soviet planes were destroyed on the ground, and hundreds of thousands of their soldiers were killed, captured, or sent reeling to the rear.  Based on initial progress, Hitler and his generals believed that the war would be over long before Christmas.  But Soviet resistance stiffened, and the terrain became more difficult.  Even so, by early December 1941, the Kremlin was in view of the forward German units.  For the Germans, however, as it was for the French under Napoleon in 1812, a frigid enemy was waiting.  General Winter entered the fray, and the German attack ground to a halt.  Moscow did not fall, and the Soviets even mounted a successful counterattack.  Further north, the Germans had surrounded but failed to take the great city of Leningrad.  Perhaps as many as a million soldiers and civilians in that city starved to death or were killed by air attacks and bombardment, but the city would not surrender.  Meanwhile, behind German lines, special Nazi paramilitary units were secretly beginning their systematic effort to exterminate Polish, Ukrainian, and Russian Jews.

Suddenly a new and dangerous foe appeared in the Pacific.

On December 7, 1941, Japanese naval aviators, flying from aircraft carriers, attacked the United States naval base at Pearl Harbor.  A few days later, Germany and Italy declared war on the United States, and America was now fully engaged in World War II.  It is one of the great puzzles of the war that Hitler was so foolish as to declare war on the United States without insisting that the Japanese join him in the fight against the Soviet Union.  The German army was at the gates of Moscow in early December 1941, and a Japanese attack from the east could have made a great difference.  Germany was not obligated to join Japan in the war against America.  Their treaty with Japan required them to become involved only if Japan was attacked.  In this instance, it was Japan that did the attacking, and Germany could have stayed out of it.  Nevertheless, Churchill was delighted with Hitler’s decision to stand with his Asian ally.  His fervent prayers that America join Britain in the fight against Germany had finally been answered affirmatively, and he felt assured of final victory.

The Japanese attack was not unexpected.  It was only the place of the attack that surprised the American military.  American-Japanese relations had been steadily deteriorating since Japan invaded mainland China in 1937.  Citizens of the United States were horrified by reports of Japanese atrocities in China – the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians, the mass rapes, the use of Chinese prisoners of war for bayonet practice, the frequent decapitations, etc.  The government of the United States became alarmed as the Japanese evinced even greater territorial ambitions, and it began putting increasing pressure on Japan to pull back.  The pressure was applied in a series of economic sanctions, and with the imposition of an American oil embargo the matter was brought to a head.  Without oil, the Japanese army and navy would be severely handicapped, and territorial expansion would no longer be possible.  Plenteous oil could be had in the Netherlands East Indies, but the American Pacific Fleet must be neutralized to make it possible to take this oil.  The Japanese military leaders hoped that a severe bloody nose would dissuade the United States from further interference in the Far East, an area in which they believed Americans had few legitimate interests and should rightly regard as in Japan’s sphere of control.  Out of this thinking came the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Pearl Harbor was a remarkable victory for Japanese naval aviation but a disaster for the Japanese nation.  The sneak attack aroused the rage of the American people, and nothing would assuage their anger but the total defeat of the Empire of Japan.  At the outbreak of war, the navy was the best prepared and the most professional of all the American military services, but the fleet was hit hard at Pearl Harbor and seriously outgunned in the Pacific for many months thereafter.  Also, the Japanese had the advantage of battle experienced soldiers and airmen and, at least initially, better aircraft. They also had superb torpedoes that wreaked havoc on Allied ships during the early naval engagements. The first six months of war in the Pacific theater were a near calamity for the Allies.  American outposts in Guam, Wake Island, and the Philippines all fell during that time, along with Hong Kong, British Malaysia (including the great naval base at Singapore), and the Dutch East Indies.  The Philippine affair was particularly painful to Americans as their beleaguered forces made their brave but futile stands in Bataan and on Corregidor.  The defenders suffered from disease and near starvation, and there was no way to reach them with relief.  The fall of Singapore was perhaps an even more painful experience for the British.  That bastion of empire and symbol of British power had been considered virtually impregnable, yet it had surrendered to a numerically inferior enemy after a very short siege.  The British Empire was shaken to its core. It seemed that the Japanese could not be stopped.

With their impressive display of military might and acumen, the Japanese achieved revenge on those foolish and arrogant Caucasians who thought of Asians as an inferior human species.  While exacting their vengeance, Japanese soldiers frequently engaged in acts of brutality seldom exceeded in the long and lamentable history of man’s cruelty to man.  Furthermore, these quick conquests bred a feeling of overconfidence, or what the Japanese later referred to as “victory disease.” The antidote was on its way.

In early June 1942, heroic American naval aviators achieved their first great victory over the Japanese in what later became known as the “Miracle of Midway”.  In April, Japanese pride had been pricked by an air raid on Tokyo and other Japanese cities.  The raid did little damage but was psychologically devastating. The attack had been carried out by bombers launched from the deck of an American carrier; therefore, Japanese military leaders determined that they must eliminate the few remaining American carriers in the Pacific.  To achieve this goal, the Japanese naval command devised an elaborate plan calculated to lure the American fleet out to certain destruction.  The bait was to be placed by an attack on the Midway Islands, a small atoll located approximately 1300 miles northwest of Hawaii.  The Japanese thought that the Americans would respond by sending their fleet from Pearl Harbor to succor the island defenders, thus falling into the Japanese trap. Unknown to the Japanese, however, American cryptanalysts had achieved a degree of success in cracking Japanese naval codes, and Pacific Fleet Headquarters in Hawaii was alerted to the planned Midway operation.  When the Japanese fleet arrived off Midway, American forces were positioned to surprise them.

Though the Americans had the advantage of surprise, the odds were against them.  Almost the entire Japanese fleet was involved in the Midway operation, and four of their large carriers were positioned for battle.  The American fleet was much smaller, and only three fleet carriers were available, one of which, the Yorktown, had been severely damaged in an earlier encounter in the Coral Sea. This carrier had been desperately patched up and sent to sea to make the odds a bit more even. The Japanese naval aviators were experienced pilots with months or even years of combat experience, whereas most Americans had never flown in combat before. The Japanese also had superior fighter planes and torpedo planes, and their torpedoes were far better than American torpedoes, especially in terms of reliability. The Americans had some advantages in dive bomber design and tactics, and they had more highly developed damage control procedures.

The Japanese fleet approaching Midway on June 4, 1942, brushed off initial American attacks with ease. High altitude B-17 and other bombing attacks from the island failed to do any damage. The obsolescent torpedo planes from the three American carriers then arrived and were literally blasted from the sky.  One squadron suffered a 100% loss of planes with only one pilot survivor.  The two other torpedo squadrons also experienced appalling losses.  Despite the skill and magnificent bravery of these men, the American torpedo planes did not hit a single Japanese warship.  At this precise moment the tide of battle turned.  Two squadrons of American dive bombers arrived on the scene, and within minutes three of the four Japanese carriers were turned into blazing hulks.  The planes from these carriers and most of their pilots were also lost.  Before the day ended the fourth Japanese carrier was destroyed.  The Japanese fleet had suffered a blow from which it would never fully recover.  The oft-damaged carrier Yorktown was subsequently sunk by a Japanese submarine.  This was only American capital ship lost during this amazing and courageous triumph over adversity.

Meanwhile, in other areas of the world, the fighting raged on.  As the Russian winter moderated in the spring of 1942, the Germans renewed their offensives.  The major thrust was now to the southeast.  The German Army pushed the Soviets to the utmost in the Caucasus campaign, driving hundreds of miles toward the Russian oil fields and inflicting severe losses on the Red army.  It took a combination of Slav fortitude and another Russian winter to bring a halt to German forces at the Volga.

 While the Soviets were in their life or death struggle, during all of 1942 and much of 1943 German submarines sank ships at an alarming rate in the Atlantic.  The supply lines to Britain and Russia were threatened. Things gradually began to turn around in late 1943 as the British and Americans improved the convoy system, built more escorts (including small aircraft carriers), and exploited German naval communications. The breaking of the German Enigma ciphers was a brilliant accomplishment achieved primarily by British mathematicians and cryptanalysts.  The Germans had such confidence in their Enigma encipherment machine that they refused to believe that their secret messages could ever be read, and they continued to use Enigma throughout the war.  British success in exploiting Enigma helped win the Battle of the Atlantic and contributed in other ways to final victory for the Allies. On the other side of the world, American cryptanalysts had similar successes in reading Japanese diplomatic and military codes and ciphers. 

 In North Africa the German, Italians and British, with some Free French involvement, fought back and forth across the sands of Libya.  Rommel was a brilliant strategist and tactician, and time after time he outwitted and outfought the British generals sent to oppose him.  In June 1942, he captured Tobruk, Libya, and then drove deep into Egypt.  With proper reinforcement and resupply, Alexandria and Cairo were within reach.  But the German high command was fully occupied with the Caucasus campaign, and Rommel did not receive the needed support.

The turning of the tide came in late 1942 and early 1943.  In August 1942, the Solomon’s island campaign began with the American invasion of Guadalcanal.  In early September, the Germans reached the outskirts of Stalingrad, but they would go no further.  In October, the British initiated the Second Battle of El Alamein with an overwhelming attack on Rommel’s positions, and in early November a largely American force invaded French North Africa.  Within months the Japanese had experienced total defeat in the Solomons, a major German army had been surrounded and destroyed at Stalingrad, and the Germans and Italians had lost the North African campaign along with another large army.

 None of these victories came easily.  Guadalcanal was a horror for the young American marines who were landed on the island right out of boot camp.  The stinking, fetid jungle, the cruel and tenacious Japanese foe, and the frequent enemy air raids and naval shelling were enough to drive a normal man to the edge of insanity.  But the marines endured and finally triumphed.  Stalingrad was an exceedingly bitter battle that left its mark on the souls of all the soldiers involved.  More than a million and a half men were killed or wounded there, and relatively few of the tens of thousands of captured German, Italian, Romanian, and Hungarian soldiers returned to their homes after the war.  It is assumed that most of them left their bones in some miserable Soviet prison camp.  The North African campaign was the first real baptism of fire for the new United States Army, and it was a sobering experience.  Americans landed in French North Africa on November 8, 1942, and the following February saw their first contact with soldiers of the famed Afrika Korps. Those veteran German troops gave Americans a nasty reception at the Kasserine Pass, and untried American soldiers came off second best in the initial encounters.  A few commanders also failed the test.  But there is no school like the school of combat, and soldiers and officers learned fast.  Capable leaders like Eisenhower, Bradley, and Patton proved themselves, and some American units became battle hardened. The veteran British Army, victorious at El Alamein, linked with the Americans, and in May 1943 the Allies defeated and captured a large German-Italian army in Tunisia.  That was the effective end of the war in North Africa.  As these momentous events were unfolding, Winston Churchill described the situation in his own inimitable words, “This is not the end.  It is not even the beginning of the end.  But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”   

 In July 1943, American and British forces invaded Sicily.  Then in September came the landings in Italy and the slow, bloody advance up the Italian boot.  Churchill had once referred to this as “the soft underbelly of Europe.”  An American commander would later remark that “it was actually a tough old gut.”  Progress though the Italian mountains was agonizingly slow, and Allied troops did not take Rome until the following July.  German troops were still holding out in northern Italy when the war ended.

On June 6, 1944, the Allies finally made their cross-channel attack on the French Normandy coast. Again, progress was very slow.  The Germans battled tenaciously, using every combat skill they had learned in five years of fighting.  The hedgerows of Normandy contributed to the difficulties, but the Allies gradually built up their strength and worked to break out of the beachhead. In the east, the Soviet troops were battering their way through eastern Europe toward the German heartland.  

 At the same time, from their British and Italian bases, Allied aircraft struck Occupied Europe and Germany with ever increasing strength.  Early in the war the British had learned that daylight bombing of Germany led to unacceptable losses of men and aircraft.  Afterwards they confined themselves to nighttime bombing raids, usually area bombing of German cities.  There was very little precision about it.  Fire and destruction rained on German cities in an increasing crescendo of violence until the very end of the war, and German civilian casualties mounted into the hundreds of thousands.  If Germans had sown the wind by bombing British cities in 1940, they were now reaping the whirlwind. 

 When American airmen entered the European air war in 1942, they were fixated on daylight precision bombing of strategic targets.  Unfortunately, they soon discovered that bomber raids deep into Germany without fighter escort led to an alarming loss of planes.  A long and difficult air war ensued, and it was only with the development of long range fighter escorts that the American bombing campaign reached its full potential.  From that point on, the attacks were interminable, the Americans by day and the British by night, and every sizable German city suffered massive destruction and heavy casualties. German industrial and transport facilities were also hit hard; nevertheless, the Germans maintained a certain level of weapons production to the very end.  Conquest by ground troops was the only way to end the madness.

The air war over Europe was very costly to aircraft and men.  More than 40,000 British airmen died, and 40,000 American airmen also made the ultimate sacrifice.  The heroism of these aviators is difficult to overstate.  Death rode the wings of every flight.  Bravery, of course, knows no nationality. Russian air losses were perhaps even greater than those of the British or Americans.  As for the Germans, very few of those bright eyed young Luftwaffe pilots who flew off to war in 1939 survived the conflict.

 With the Allied breakout from Normandy in August 1944 and a landing in the south of France by American and French troops, the finish in Europe was almost in sight; but near year’s end the Germans made one last desperate attempt to defeat the western Allies by attacking through the Ardennes.  The aim was to drive a wedge between the American and British armies and perhaps force them to consider a negotiated peace. This campaign became known as the Battle of the Bulge.  Interestingly, this is the same area in which the German panzers surprised the French in 1940.  In December 1944, just as in May 1940, the Germans struck with a massive blow in a lightly defended area where an attack was least expected.  This time, however, the German Army no longer had the reserve strength to exploit its initial success.  By early January the Germans had been thrown back to their original lines, and their military strength was now thoroughly depleted.

 In early 1945, the Allies resumed their offensive in the west while the Soviets attacked from the east.  As concentration camps were overrun, people began to comprehend the true horror of the Nazi effort to eliminate Jews and other “undesirables”. The world learned that Hitler and his henchmen, in a cold-blooded program of unimaginable cruelty, had executed millions of Jews in Auschwitz and other death camps. 

 On April 25, 1945, American and Soviet troops linked at Germany’s Elbe River.  Meanwhile, the Russians were fighting their way deeper into the city of Berlin. On April 30th Hitler committed suicide, and on May 7th Germany finally surrendered.  The long European nightmare, costing tens of millions of lives and untold misery, had finally ended.

 Japan was still holding on in the Pacific, but the end was near.  American war production reached its full potential by early 1944.  The United States had built new aircraft carriers, battleships, and craft of every type, and the Japanese navy could no longer face the Americans with any prospect of success.  American airplanes filled the Pacific skies, and American submariners gradually destroyed the Japanese merchant fleet, starving the enemy of vital war supplies. Forward bases were seized within flying distance of the Japanese homeland, and fleets of American bombers began to strike Japanese cities from air bases on Guam and Tinian and other islands.  Fire and fury rained down on Japanese cities with little concern for civilian casualties, and they died in the hundreds of thousands. As Allied forces moved ever closer to the Japanese homeland, the enemy launched desperate, suicidal air attacks. In the island fighting on Iwo Jima, Okinawa and elsewhere, Japanese soldiers and airmen proved themselves ready to fight to the last man, and American casualties climbed.  Military planners contemplating the coming invasion of the main Japanese islands anticipated Allied losses ranging from a half-million to a million men, and there was no definite sign that the Japanese were ready to give up the fight.

It was in these circumstances that President Truman approved the use of the atomic bomb.  It had been developed in secret, and the attack on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, was a total shock to the American people as well as to the rest of the world.  On August 8 the Soviet Union declared war on Japan and Russian troops surged into Manchuria.  On the following day the second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki.  On August 15 Emperor Hirohito announced Japan’s surrender.   

World War II was finally over. Much of Europe and Asia lay in ruins, and sixty million people lay dead in the carnage of the most destructive war in human history.  Displaced persons wandered the streets of Europe.  Parents looked for their children, and children looked for their parents – usually to no avail.  The pall of sorrow was everywhere, and the world cried out for peace.  But was lasting peace finally within our grasp? Had mankind really learned anything?  Were we finally cured of war madness? 

 Less than five years after the end of World War II, American troops were fighting in Korea.  Then came Vietnam and the wars with Iraq.  More recently, the United States has been engaged in the seemingly endless conflict with militant Islam.  I do not blame America for these wars. None of them was started by the United States for the purpose of conquest.  Rather, each began to prevent the spread of Communism or militant Islam or to deter development of a deadly threat to the American homeland.  Perhaps some of the wars should not have been fought, but our intentions were honorable.

I am not a pacifist.  War is sometimes necessary to defend the homeland – our homes, our wives, and our children. There is genuine evil in this world, and if we did not resist there would be no end to the horrors inflicted upon us.  Quakers and others sometimes cite the Biblical admonition “Do not kill,” but a more accurate translation of the Hebrew phrase would be “Do not murder,” or “Do not shed innocent blood.”  War is sometimes necessary.  But, though not a pacifist, I oppose the glorification of war.  We should be honest about it. War is altogether a bloody, dirty business, and there is nothing glorious about it except for the fact that many brave men and women are willing to hazard their lives for the sake of others. 

Looking back on more than a century of warfare, the bloodiest century in the long history of mankind, it is well to question man’s sanity.  How can we have allowed these things to happen?  Is there any hope?    

On September 2, 1945, as General Douglas MacArthur stood on the deck of the USS Missouri to sign the peace terms with Japan, he expressed the following sentiment:

“It is my earnest hope and indeed the hope of all mankind that from this solemn occasion a better world shall emerge out of the blood and carnage of the past—a world founded upon faith and understanding—a world dedicated to the dignity of man and the fulfillment of his most cherished wish—for freedom, tolerance and justice

He also offered his own analysis of man’s problem in achieving lasting peace

“Military alliances, balances of power, leagues of nations, all in turn failed, leaving the only path to be by way of the crucible of war. We have had our last chance. If we do not now devise some greater and more equitable system, Armageddon will be at our door. The problem basically is theological and involves a spiritual recrudescence and improvement of human character that will synchronize with our almost matchless advances in science, art, literature and all material and cultural developments of the past two thousand years. It must be of the spirit if we are to save the flesh.

MacArthur was an eloquent speaker, but he often employed overly elaborate phraseology.  Instead of using the term “spiritual recrudescence”, a Christian evangelical speaker might have expressed the same thought by saying, “We must be born again,” or “Only by being filled with the Holy Spirit will men be able to truly love one another.”

Have we achieved the spiritual recrudescence of which MacArthur spoke?  Sadly, the answer is no. Too many people in this world reject the concept of the “Brotherhood of Man” and are driven by feelings of envy or hatred directed towards those persons of another nation, race or religion. The United States of America is a particular object of that hatred. There are those who would destroy us if they could.  Therefore, we must maintain an effective military force to protect ourselves.

I believe that the American military of today compares favorably with elite military forces of the past.  I pray that this is so.  In these perilous times we need a strong and vigilant force to defend us from those who wish our destruction.  It is especially critical that we maintain our advantage in weapons technology and tactics to hold our enemies at bay.  I thank the Lord that our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines stand ready to defend us.  May God protect them and help them keep the peace.

Who knows how it will all end?  There are still madmen in the world willing to plunge all of us into an abyss of destruction for the sake of some twisted ideology or to satisfy some insane thirst for personal power.  The threat of instant retaliation might not deter them.  Nuclear devices or other weapons of mass destruction in the hands of such men could mean death and devastation on an unprecedented scale.  Could civilization survive such an event?

 May God protect us.   

And he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.  Isaiah 2:4