Contextual Essay

VUS.10b - The student will demonstrate knowledge of World War II by: (b) describing the major battles and turning points of the war in North Africa, Europe, and the Pacific, including Midway, Stalingrad, the Normandy landing (D-Day), and Truman's decision to use the atomic bomb to force the surrender of Japan.

While the Second World War did not become a truly global conflict until December 1941, virtually all accounts of the war date its onset as September 1939, with Hitler's invasion of Poland serving as the conflict's opening act. The German blitzkrieg exacted a heavy price, with Poland suffering roughly 200,000 casualties and the conquest of its army in four weeks; Nazi losses numbered roughly 40,000, a not insignificant figure when combined with high attrition rates for both German tank and air forces. Poland's misery was not limited to invasion from the west, however. Owing to the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression treaty signed the previous month, Moscow invaded Poland from the east, occupying half the country; by mid-1940, Stalin had forcibly annexed the Baltic republics of Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia as well. Britain and France declared war on Germany within days of Hitler's initial thrust but delayed land operations against the Nazis. Instead, the major powers conducted what was termed a "Phoney War" or "Sitzkrieg" throughout the winter of 1939-1940. Nevertheless, hostilities between the powers did take place during this period. British planes bombed German naval installations at Wilhelsmhaven and fighting between enemy ships took place at sea, though these skirmishes had little impact on subsequent events.

Most historians regard the blitz, featuring the speed and flexibility of mechanized units, as an ominous beginning to the war. A contrary view is offered by John Mosier, who argues, in The Blitzkrieg Myth, that Poland succumbed so quickly not because of German military doctrine but because it became a pawn in the political machinations of Hitler and Stalin. Politics is also at the center of Nicholas Bethell's The War Hitler Won, which is unsparingly critical of British and French policies prior to September 1939, especially those of British prime minister Neville Chamberlain. Alexander Rossino also questions the novelty of the blitz in his Hitler Strikes Poland, in which the Nazi assault appears most remarkable not for its speed but for the brutality it directed toward non-combatants, prisoners-of-war, and ethnic groups. According to Rossino, the assualt provided a kind of laboratory for the more systematic racial policies Hitler would enact later in the war.

Once the weather cleared in Spring 1940, the wider European war began with startling speed and scale. Germany attacked Denmark and Norway in early April and then moved against Belgium, Holland, and Luxembourg before taking on France. Hitler succeeded in each of these campaigns, though at some cost, especially to his navy in the Norwegian operation. Victory over France, drawn up by Hitler in the audacious Plan Yellow—a northern feint followed by a main thrust through the Ardennes Forest—met with astonishing success. As Ernest May argues in Strange Defeat, German advantages in field leadership and communicationsbut especially in the realm of strategy and surprise—led Paris to capitulate in June 1940. The fall of France was a turning point in the war for it left Britain as the only European nation fighting Germany, and thus the only nation standing between Germany and the United States. Britain's survival thus became a vital necessity for U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt. Its ability to withstand the Nazi air assault, during late summer and fall of 1940, set the stage for the war's next phase.

Barbarossa and The Eastern Front

On the heels of his rapid victory over France, Hitler, in July 1940, spoke increasingly of a proposed invasion of the Soviet Union. He settled on an attack plan—code named Barbarossa—more formally in September and began assembling a fighting force of almost four million the following spring. The decision to invade Russia was Hitler's alone; virtually no support for the attack existed among Germany's professional military elite. Indeed, Hitler's decision to scrap his non-aggression pact with Stalin committed him to deploying vast amounts of men and material to an Eastern Front at a time when his armies were fighting the British in North Africa and occupying most of Western Europe. Given the outcome of Barbarossa, the matter of its timing has long interested scholars and lay readers alike. Clues to Hitler's strategy lay largely in the person of Hitler himself, for the Fuehrer was entirely committed to the vision of "race" and "space" that had fueled his National Socialist project since its outset. In Hitler's Decision to Invade Russia, Robert Cecil illustrates how this ingrained animus toward the Soviet Union put Germany on a path toward Barbarossa from which Hitler did not waver.

Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, altering fundamentally the course of the war. Stalin's disregard for intelligence of the impending attack and his decision to deploy Soviet troops in forward rather than defensive positions left the Red Army ill-prepared for the onslaught. Over half a million Russians died during the first two weeks of fighting, with over a million taken prisoner; the Soviets, moreover, lost thousands of planes and tanks. By early August, the Red Army had called up over 5 million troops and had temporarily stemmed the German advance. Hitler pushed on, capturing Kiev in September before turning his sights on the Soviet capital. By late fall 1941, German forces were within thirty miles of Moscow. Only the snows of October and the redeployment of two million troops from Siberia, along with the introduction of 1,500 of its new T-34 tanks, enabled the Red Army to stave off the Nazi attack. Bernd Wegner's edited volume, From Peace to War: Germany, Soviet Russia, and the World, 1939-1941, covers numerous dimensions of this struggle, from the pre-war partnership of the two nations, to the war itself, to the reactions of several onlookers, including Britain, Japan, and the United States.

Having secured the Ukraine and encircled Moscow and Leningrad, Hitler next chose to capture the oil-rich Caucuses in the south. Success in that campaign would allow the Wehrmacht to drive further toward the Middle East and then back up through the rear of the Urals, completing the capture of the Soviet capital. The focal point of Hitler's attack, which began in late June 1942, would be Stalingrad, the city that bore the Soviet ruler's name. The long, cold weeks of battle and eventual Soviet victory at Stalingrad came to symbolize Moscow's war effort. Fighting was fierce and took place at very close quarters, a tactic adopted by Russia to avoid bombing from German planes. One of the keys to the Red Army's victory, argues Richard Overy in Russia's War, is that Stalin let his generals take the lead in planning and executing the counteroffensive—a significant decision since German forces held a more-than 2-1 advantage when they entered the city on September 12. The Soviet counter began on November 19, collapsing the German front, which included armies of both Romanian and Italian soldiers. Hitler decreed that his forces stand fast but German troops, suffering in frigid temperatures and lacking adequate food and clothing, were no match for the Red Army. German general Erich von Paulus, recently promoted to the rank of Field Marshal to boost his resolve, surrendered nonetheless on January 31, 1942. The balance sheet was staggering: German deaths approached 200,000, with over 90,000 taken prisoner; Soviet casualties were even larger, with 500,000 dead. Extraordinary as those numbers may seem—especially on the Russian side—they constituted less than 10% of all Soviet losses; by then, Soviet war casualties had risen to over 11 million.

The Soviet victory at Stalingrad demonstrated that the Russians could defeat the vaunted German army. As such, it marked the turning point on the Eastern Front, a conclusion most historians readily accept. Geoffrey Roberts goes further, however; in Victory at Stalingrad, he maintains that the battle was the key moment of the entire war. David Glantz, who has written widely on the Red Army, attributes its victory to Soviet deception and disinformation, German underestimation of the Soviet counteroffensive threat, and the logistical inadequacy of German forces.

Pearl Harbor and The Pacific

In the time between Hitler's launching of Barbarossa and his defeat at Stalingrad, the war became transformed from a regional to truly global conflict. Japan, bogged down in China and fearful over maintaining continued access to vital resources, lashed out at the western powers in Southeast Asia and the Pacific. Most dramatically, it attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, drawing America formally into the war. With Hitler's subsequent declaration of war on the United States—an act soon reciprocated by Congress—the Allies would now benefit from America's full productive might in their battle against the Axis.

Several historians have contributed significantly to an extensive literature on Pearl Harbor and the coming of war in the Pacific. Much of this writing has been affected by access to documents, with the initial openness of American archives pointing toward U.S. culpability for the attack. Paul Schroeder, for instance, had argued that undue American concern with the Japanese war in China—in effect, demanding that Japan return to its pre-1931 position in East Asia—pushed Japan toward war with the United States. Jonathan Utley, though recognizing the obstinacy of Japanese militarists, also takes U.S. diplomats to task for failing to generate a modus vivendi over China that might have prevented the final rupture in relations. In Race To Pearl Harbor, Stephen Pelz notes the influence of American and British shipbuilding programs in Japanese calculations.

Later work was more critical of Japan. Akira Iriye, for example, in The Origins of the Second World War in Asia and the Pacific, maintains that the inability to pacify China and extract its resources led Japanese militarists to seek those materials in Southeast Asia and, as a result, into direct conflict with the western powers. Similarly, Michael Barnhart, in Japan Prepares for Total War, argues that such an understanding between Japan and the United States was a virtual impossibility.

Following a series of Japanese victories at Pearl Harbor, Guam, Wake Island, and the Philippines, American forces rallied. Aided by advances in cryptanalysis—code-named Magic—naval strategists dealt Japan a series of defeats, most notably at Midway Island in June 1942. Thereafter, the Americans pursued an island-hopping campaign divided into two theaters—one in the central Pacific and another in the Southwest Pacific—in an effort to bring the war ever closer to the Japanese mainland. Ronald Spector, who offers a comprehensive account of the Pacific War in Eagle Against the Sun, finds value in what remains, for historians, a controversial command structure. Alan Levine's Japan Versus the Allies also treats the fighting in this theater comprehensively, focusing on both Allied and Japanese strategy and politics, as well as on Japanese war aims and occupation policies.

North Africa

Fighting had been raging in North Africa since the fall of France in June 1942 as Britain battled both Italy and Germany in an effort to preserve access to its vital supply lines through the Suez Canal. And it was here that the U.S. military first tangled with German forces—more than four months following Hitler's push toward Stalingrad and eleven months since the Japanese attacks at Pearl Harbor. Roosevelt was committed to engaging Germany in 1942, a decision he arrived at partly out of domestic considerations and partly out of concerns about allied solidarity; Russia had been fighting Germany since June 1941 and Roosevelt was eager to aid the Soviet Union—and discourage any thoughts Stalin might have of suing for peace—by opening up a "second front" against the Nazis. Strategic consultations between British and American officials lasted through the winter and spring of 1941. Churchill and his aides sought to strike at Germany from an oblique position, while Roosevelt and his aides preferred a more direct route. General George C. Marshall, chief of staff of the U.S. Army, was adamant about the need to fight a limited battle with Germany in 1942 in preparation for a more substantial assault that he envisioned coming in 1943.

Treatments of these arguments mark virtually all studies of the western war. Russell Weigley, a pre-eminent military historian, details this episode in The American Way of War and characterizes the decision to fight first in North Africa, and not Europe, as perhaps the most important of the war. Mark Stoler takes on this issue directly in The Politics of the Second Front, arguing that both politics and military concerns dictated the timing as well as the locale of that monumental operation. In the end, pragmatism called for the southern route. With German U-boats making naval passage in the North Atlantic still exceedingly treacherous throughout 1942, the allies simply could not have built-up their forces in England for a cross-channel invasion of any lasting significance. The invasion of France would have to wait.

As a result, the invasion of North Africa, code-named Operation TORCH, began on November 8, 1942, with U.S. and British forces setting ashore in French Morocco and Algeria. The goal was to move east toward Tunisia and Libya, and then link-up with British forces pinching west from Egypt. Efforts to discourage Vichy resistance to the initial landings proved uneven as French general Henri Giraud, a former prisoner of war, was unable to quite Vichy guns. By sheer coincidence, the commander of all Vichy military forces, General Jean Darlan, happened to be in Algiers at the time and was able to secure a cease-fire. Darlan's order allowed for a relatively speedy allied occupation of Algeria and French Morocco; his eventual assassination on Christmas Eve removed any lingering distaste over allied cooperation with the despised Vichyite. Nevertheless, Darlan's acquiescence to allied forces prompted Hitler to dispatch German troops to Tunisia, a move that led to continued fighting in the region until May 1943.

As noted previously, historians have differed on the value of the North African landings, with some regarding TORCH as an unnecessary distraction from the more primary objective of engaging the Germans in France. At the same time, given the challenges of coordinating command structures and implementing battle plans, operations in North Africa provided a degree of experience the allies would draw on as they prepared for the more daunting challenge of a cross-channel invasion. Keith Sainsbury takes this position in The North African Landings, 1942, maintaining that the logistics of the invasion—as well as those of a projected 1942 or 1943 cross-channel attack—made TORCH a pragmatic and worthwhile operation. At the same time, the landings had a wider impact on the global conflict, as Gerhard Weinberg notes. In his A World at Arms, Weinberg observes that the German defense of North Africa absorbed troops that could otherwise have gone to Stalingrad, creating a synergy between the Eastern and Western fronts of great benefit to the Allies. For both a micro and macro history of the landings, readers should turn to Rick Atkinson's An Army at Dawn, a solid, general history of the North African campaign.

The Mediterranean

The outcome of Stalingrad was already well in hand by the time that British and American leaders met in Casablanca to affirm their plans for the next phase of the offensive. Churchill once again succeeded in gaining Roosevelt's support for a southern drive into Europe. Allied forces vaulted onto Sicily in July 1943 as a prelude to their assault on the Italian mainland; the latter campaign began in early September with the Allies moving from Sicily to Reggio, in southern Italy, and landing at Salerno, just south of Naples. Operation HUSKY, the code-name for these maneuvers, succeeded in knocking Italy out of the war. Fighting on its terrain would persist, however, as German forces moved south to forestall an Allied thrust toward the Reich. During the year-and-a-half of combat on the peninsula, the Allies would suffer over 310,000 casualties; the Germans, slightly more than 330,000.

Was it all worth it? This question has long animated the literature on the Mediterranean war. George Botjer, whose Sideshow War amounts to a "social history" of the campaign, suggests that both sides realized their objectives; the Allies, moreover, succeeded in maintaining morale while waiting for Overlord, and in giving lesser co-belligerents, such as the Poles and Brazilians, an opportunity to fight. Eric Morris is highly critical of decision which led to the Italian campaign as well as its execution; his Circles of Hell credits German generals with providing more ingenuity and flexibility than those of the allies. Carlo D'Este provides perhaps the most readable and concise version of these events in World War II in the Mediterranean, maintaining that the campaign, though effective in pinning down German forces, was marred by Allied disagreements over tactics and strategy, as well as a failure in military leadership. Finally, Dominick Graham and Shelford Bidwell, in their Tug of War, provide a narrative of how the limited objectives of the Allies led them inexorably to commit resources to a broader and deeper campaign than any had first imagined.

The Cross-Channel Invasion/D-Day

Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin confirmed at Tehran that the cross-channel invasion would come in Spring 1944. Preparations for the assault continued throughout the winter and early spring, with sustained bombing of German production, air and ground reconnaissance, and disinformation and deception operations easing the entry of Allied forces into northern France. The actual introduction of those forces, on June 6, 1944, was anything but easy, however, especially for American troops massed at Omaha Beach, one of the five landing points in Normandy. Their stories can be found in Stephen Ambrose's D-Day and Citizen Soldiers, narrative accounts of the European campaign in which Ambrose attributes Allied (and particularly American) success to the capabilities of junior officers and the rank-and-file G.I.—men who had absorbed the virtues of their nation's democratic institutions and then sought both to protect and promote them as part of a noble cause.

Problems beset the Allies, however, in their advance to Paris. British general Bernard Law Montgomery's inability to take the pivotal city of Caen—it was supposed to have been taken on D-Day plus Two—constituted, in the words Carlo D'Este, a significant failure. At least as consequential in retarding the allied advance was the quality of the German soldiers themselves, a point that Max Hastings makes in Overlord: D-Day and the Battle of Normandy. Much less deserving of credit is the German leadership. Delays in receiving a green light to move Panzers to exert maximum counterforce hurt the German position, as did Hitler's decision not to move his forces from Calais.

German armies would live to fight another day, however. The decision not to encircle the Germans created a gap in the allied lines around the town of Falaise, a hole through which roughly 50,000 German forces retreated. Allied armies chasing them were temporarily blunted by Hitler's counterattack in the Ardennes, a series of operations which lasted from mid-December through Christmas and known popularly as the "Battle of the Bulge." Improved weather allowed for allied bombing of German positions and paved the way for the final push into Germany, which the allies would launch with close to two million men-three—fourths of whom were American—in mid-February 1945. One month earlier, Soviet forces, scattered over a territory from the Baltics in the north to the Balkans in the south, and totaling over 6.5 million troops, began their push west toward Germany. On April 25, American and Russian troops met on the Elbe city of Torgau; Berlin, the capital of the Reich, fell one week later. Alan Levine's From the Normandy Beaches to the Baltic Sea, which captures these events in a single volume, highlights the logistical and tactical dimensions of this campaign, in addition to its military component, and emphasizes the shared burdens of various allies in the defeat of Germany.

The success of Operation Overlord and the ensuing drive toward Germany led Allied leaders to develop plans for the postwar world. They met in the Crimean resort town of Yalta in February 1944 to hammer out agreements on the fate of Germany, the shape of Central Europe, the conclusion of the Pacific War, and the economic and political institutions that would keep the peace. In her book, Yalta, Diane Shaver Clemens concludes that each of the conference attendees were guided by pragmatism and that Roosevelt was neither duped nor deceived into signing an agreement contrary to western interests. Russell Buhite offers a much more critical appraisal of Roosevelt's diplomacy in Decisions at Yalta. As it were, implementation of the Yalta agreements proved exceedingly difficult. American and British statesmen worried over Soviet behavior in Eastern Europe; disputes broke out over the mechanics of Italy's surrender; and a new presence on the world stage—Harry S. Truman, who had assumed the presidency following the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt—altered perceptions of East-West unity. Further talks between the "Big Three" were held in the Berlin suburb of Potsdam later that summer, though they failed to generate consensus on future of Germany, the borders of postwar Poland, the reparations question, and the composition of the east and central European postwar governments. Charles Mee's Meeting at Potsdam argues that these difficulties were the unfortunate but inevitable result of clashing interests and agendas.

These events have often prompted questions surrounding Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower's decision not to capture Berlin, a decision that guaranteed Soviet occupation of that city and eastern regions of the Reich. Stephen Ambrose defends that decision in Eisenhower and Berlin, 1945, an early work of his which argues that it was more important to end Germany's capacity to make war than to waste men and material on a battered and defeated city. More recent studies of this chapter includes Antony Beevor's The Fall of Berlin 1945, in which the author combines a general narrative of events with an exposition of their more personal dimensions.

Ending the Pacific War

Within weeks of the Potsdam conference, the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, bringing to a close the war in the Pacific. Debate over this episode has raged for years, with a handful of scholars maintaining that emerging difficulties with Russia prompted Truman to drop the bomb. Gar Alperovitz's Atomic Diplomacy and his more recent The Decision to Use the Bomb, rank as the pre-eminent statements of this position. Diametrically opposed to Alperovitz is Robert Maddux, who argues forcefully, in Weapons for Victory, that the bomb simply provided the most sensible instrument for ending the war. A broader historical consensus has formed around a more subtle interpretation, incorporating the "atomic diplomacy" thesis while giving greater weight to the bomb's military value. Barton Bernstein has written several essays from this angle, most notably in the Spring 1975 volume of Political Science Quarterly, and both Martin Sherwin's A World Destroyed and Richard Frank's Downfall provide book-length expositions of this position.

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