Nine Things I Didn’t Know About World War II
Three years ago, I set out to write a book about World War II, which is a bit like Christopher Columbus setting out to discover Portugal. Global bookshelves are filled with scholarly narratives of the war, and most are so thoroughly comprehensive they leave no stone unturned. But therein lies their drawback. While such 700-page tomes are certainly well-suited for military history enthusiasts, they are beyond daunting for scores of other readers, particularly those keen to understand the broader brush strokes without esoteric analyses of Charlie Company’s assault on Hill 123 or the climbing speed of the Messerschmitt 109E.
The research for this work was painstaking, exhilarating, and far more enlightening than I expected. To borrow a bit from Winston Churchill, never before has one person who thought he knew so much come to realize how little he actually knew. The unfathomable courage on the battlefields was little surprise, but other aspects of the war were a revelation, even to this self-described World War II junkie. I’ll save the larger storylines for the book, but among the countless pieces of history I learned on this journey, here are some fascinating snippets that merit a greater spotlight.
German Horsepower. Like most WWII aficionados, I was aware the Germans pioneered mechanized, “blitzkrieg” warfare, overwhelming early foes with onslaughts of tanks and dive bombers. Such forces were the tip of a seemingly fearsome German spear, but in truth, the spear was a 19th century relic. With German manufacturing straining to meet battlefield demands, there was little remaining production capacity for secondary needs, most notably trucks and other means of transport, leaving the Germans to rely on livestock to move artillery, ammunition, and wounded men. This dependence — German armies invading the USSR in 1941 were accompanied by 625,000 horses — was terribly inefficient, and the lack of mobility became a glaring liability for Hitler’s forces, leading to mass encirclements and surrenders throughout the war.
The Empire Strikes Back. In 1940, German armies swept across Northern and Western Europe with ease, and with the shocking fall of France, the British were left standing alone against the Nazis. But were they alone? The British Commonwealth of Nations stretched far beyond English shores, encompassing one-quarter of the world’s population and a mix of colonies and self-ruling dominions that gave mightily to the Allied cause. India alone fielded an army of more than two million men, while Canadian naval and air forces safeguarded the lifeline of ocean commerce keeping Britain in the war. Australian infantry fought tenaciously from New Guinea to North Africa, and even tiny Trinidad and Tobago pitched in, fueling the Royal Navy with its oil production. The British showed as much mettle and resiliency as anyone in the war, but they were most definitely not alone.
Civilian Suffering. By the time World War II came to a merciful end, more than two-thirds of the sixty million dead were civilians. At least twelve million of those came at the hands of the Nazis and their maniacal quest to eradicate Jews and other “lessor” races, but millions more were victimized in other atrocities, deadly crossfires, or mass bombing campaigns. Consider the famed “Doolittle Raid,” when an American aircraft carrier sailed perilously close to Japan and launched sixteen Army bombers from its deck. The eighty pilots and crewmen bombed strategic targets in Tokyo and other cities before crash landing or bailing out of their aircraft in occupied China. Most made it to safety, aided by local peasants, triggering a rampage among enraged Japanese occupation troops. In retaliation for the deaths of just eighty-seven Japanese in the American bombing raid, an estimated 250,000 Chinese men, women, and children were slaughtered.
Oh Canada! Most with a passing interest in the war know who the Allies were, but the contributions of Canada have remain largely unheralded. With a population of just twelve million, Canada proved an indispensable wartime partner, most notably in the pivotal Battle of the Atlantic, when its naval and air forces shielded transatlantic convoys of cargo ships and troop transports from “wolfpacks” of German U-boats. In fact, the Royal Canadian Navy finished the war with the third largest fleet in the world. On D-Day, the First Canadian Army stormed ashore at Normandy, securing one of the five Allied landing zones, and was later assigned the unenviable task of clearing the approaches to the critical deep-water port of Antwerp, defended by a crack German army. At home, Canada added its industrial heft to meet production needs, with more than 150 factories churning out machinery and goods to support Allied forces, including 16,000 warplanes.
Nightmare in Italy. Many are aware of the horrors of Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and Stalingrad, but the Allied drive up the Italian peninsula ranks as one of the most punishing campaigns of the war. Though the Italians had dropped out of the Axis alliance by late 1943, Hitler was unwilling to cede an inch of ground, and his subordinate in Italy, Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, emerged as one of the shrewdest tacticians of the war. He foiled his adversaries with a series of defensive belts across Italy’s rugged, mountainous interior, turning the American-led advance into a blood-soaked grind. From the beaches of Anzio to the heights around Cassino, the Allies suffered staggering losses, with more than 300,000 killed and wounded during the 19-month campaign. Kesselring ultimately withdrew to northern Italy, where his outnumbered forces managed to hold out until nearly the end of the war.
Moral Ambiguity. By 1944, Allied air power dominated the skies in both the Pacific and European Theaters, largely thanks to American factories rolling out astounding volumes of new planes each month. As great masses of heavy bombers hammered industrial and population centers across Germany and Japan, day and night, civilian casualties were impossible to avoid. That was true long before the first atomic weapons were used to induce Japan’s surrender, when the United States and Britain began firebombing select cities, incinerating civilians by the tens of thousands. The necessity and morality of using incendiaries on densely populated areas merits a much lengthier discussion but consider a haunting remark by Lieutenant General Curtis LeMay of the US Army Air Forces, one of the architects of the Allied strategy: “Killing Japanese didn’t bother me very much at the time…I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal.” He was not wrong.
America’s Identity Crisis. The wartime achievements of women and African Americans are rightfully celebrated, as is their perseverance and resolve given the latent hostility that greeted their pioneering entrance into the military services and manufacturing workforce. Serving in segregated units, African American tank crews and fighter pilots amassed some of the most impressive combat records of the war, and women not only served in uniform, but filled critical industrial positions in factories and shipyards from coast to coast. Equally remarkable were the contributions of Japanese Americans after more than 120,000 men, women, and children — the vast majority US citizens — were rounded up after Pearl Harbor and imprisoned in remote desert and mountain camps because of their ethnicity. Despite the injustice and deplorable treatment, thousands of Japanese American detainees still volunteered for the US Army, forming a regiment that became one of the most decorated of the war.
Battle of the…Tennis Court? It was a savage struggle and the turning point of the war in Asia, yet, until recently, I had never heard of Imphal. The British base in northern India was the primary objective of a 100,000-strong Japanese army invading from occupied Burma (present-day Myanmar) in early 1944. Allied air power thwarted the Japanese advance, shuttling in reinforcements and supplies to besieged British and Indian forces, as farther north, pockets of Allied troops made a gritty stand near the hilltop town of Kohima. The two sides brawled there for days, their corpse-filled trenches separated by as little as twenty-five yards on a former tennis court, but the outnumbered British and Indians refused to yield. Cut off from supplies, the starving Japanese ultimately fled India, beginning a broader retreat from long-occupied Asian territories that continued to shrink their once-mighty empire.
Arsenal of Democracy. There is no single factor that decided the war in the Allies’ favor but consider a scene from the iconic series Band of Brothers, when a war-weary American paratrooper riding in a truck shakes his fist at columns of German POWs marching to the rear, screaming “Say hello to Ford and General f-ing Motors!” It is a telling piece of dialogue, accurately framing the role of America’s mindboggling industrial production during the war. Detroit became the epicenter and a manufacturing powerhouse after US automakers remade their factory floors to build heavy bombers, tanks, and mountains of other war goods. A single Ford plant and its mile-long assembly line completed nearly 9,000 B-24 “Liberator” bombers — roughly one an hour at peak production — while a Chrysler facility delivered 22,000 tanks, nearly as many as every German factory combined. The glut of modern machinery and weaponry produced by America’s industrial base was too much for the Axis powers to overcome, muscling the Allies to final victory.
Those vignettes barely scratch the surface of all that unfolded during this remarkable period and epic fight for humanity. For those interested in learning more about this historic clash and the men and women who lived through these tumultuous years, I promise you will not be disappointed.
Andy Kutler is an author and writer from Arlington, Virginia. His latest work, The Fight of Their Lives: A 21st Century Primer on World War II, is now available from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other fine booksellers.
