Alan Axelrod - Complete Idiot’s Guide to American History

With pressure applied from the south, from the east, from the air, and at sea, the time was at last right for a major Allied thrust from the west: a full-scale assault on what Hitler liked to call “Fortress Europe.” For this offensive, the Allies mounted in Britain the largest and most powerful invasion force in history. Officially christened Operation Overlord, the invasion of Normandy became popularly known by the military designation of the day of its commencement: D-Day, June 6, 1944.

U.S. General Dwight David Eisenhower was in command of the high—stakes operation, which—astoundingly-caught the Germans off guard. True, the Germans expected an invasion—but not at Normandy. Through an elaborate program of deception and disinformation, the Allies had led the Germans to believe that the invasion would come at Calais. Nevertheless, German resistance was stiff, but the Allies prevailed and on August 15, 1944, launched a second invasion of France, this time in the South between Toulon and Cannes. The objective was to trap German forces within the laws of a giant pincers. On August 25, Paris—beloved capital of France, in German hands since 1940—fell to the Allies.

From France, the Allies launched an invasion into the German homeland itself. By early September, British forces liberated Brussels, Belgium, and American troops crossed the German frontier at Eupen. On October 21, the U.S. First Army captured Aachen—the first German city to fall to the Allies.

The Germans had lost the war. At least, that is how any rational leader would have viewed it. But Adolf Hitler was no longer rational—if he ever had been. Hitler ordered his soldiers to fight to the last man, and he reinforced his thinning lines with underage boys and overage men. Although the Germans continued to retreat, resistance was always fierce. Then, on December 16, 1944, General Gerd von Rundstedt (1875-1953) led a desperate counteroffensive, driving a wedge into Allied lines through the Ardennes on the Franco-Belgian frontier. With German forces distending the Allied line westward, the ensuing combat was called the Battle of the Bulge. The U.S. First and Third armies—the latter led brilliantly by General George S. Patton (1885-1945)—pushed back the bulge, which was wholly contained by January 1945. The battle was the last great German offensive, and it was Germany’s last chance to stop the Allies’ advance into its homeland.

During February 1945, General Patton sped his armored units to the Rhine River and, after clearing the west bank, captured the bridge at Remagen, near Cologne, on March 7. Allied forces crossed this bridge and at other points along the Rhine, and were now poised to make a run for Berlin. However, General Eisenhower, believing Hitler would make his last stand in the German south, chose to head for Leipzig. With U.S. troops just 96 miles west of Berlin, the Supreme Allied Commander sent a message to Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, telling him that he was leaving the German capital to the Red Army.

While the British and Americans had been closing in from the West, the Soviets had executed a massive assault on the German’s Eastern Front. By the end of January, the Red Army had pushed through Poland into Germany itself. In truth, little was left of Berlin. A combination of U.S. and British air power and Soviet artillery had razed the capital of Hitler’s vaunted “Thousand-Year Reich.” On April 16, 1945, Soviet Marshal Georgy Zhukov moved his troops into Berlin. Many German soldiers and civilians, terrified of the vengeance the Soviets might exact, fled westward to surrender to the Americans and the British.

Indeed, Germans could have found few places of refuge in the spring of 1945, for the entire world was learning of war crimes committed on an unimaginably vast scale. In their drive toward Berlin, the Allies liberated one Nazi concentration camp after another—centers of extermination to which Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, homosexuals, and others deemed by the Reich as “undesirable” had been sent for extermination. Such names as Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Belsen, and Dachau seared themselves into history. The Nazis bad not been content with conquest; they intended nothing less than genocide.

Westbound Soviet and eastbound American troops met at the river Elbe on April 25, 1945. Five days later, Adolf Hitler, holed up in a bunker beneath the shattered streets of Berlin, shot himself. On May 7, 1945, senior representatives of Germany’s armed forces surrendered to the Allies at General Eisenhower’s headquarters in Reims. The very next day came a formal unconditional surrender. From the pages of American newspapers, headlines shouted the arrival of V-E—Victory in Europe—Day.

German scientists discovered the possibility of nuclear fission—a process whereby the tremendous energy of the atom might be liberated—in 1938. Fortunately for the world, Hitler’s tyranny drove many of Germany’s best thinkers out of the country, and the nation’s efforts to exploit fission in a weapon came to nothing. Three Hungarian-born American physicists—Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner, and Edward Teller—were all intimately familiar with what a man like Hitler could do. They asked America’s single most prestigious physicist, Albert Einstein (a fugitive from Nazi persecution), to write a letter to President Roosevelt, warning him of Germany’s nuclear weapons research.

Late in 1939, FDR authorized the atomic bomb development program that became known as the Manhattan Project. Under the military management of General Leslie R. Groves (1896-1970) and the scientific direction of J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967), the program grew to vast proportions and employed the nation’s foremost scientific minds. A prototype bomb—called “the gadget” by the scientists—was completed in the summer of 1945 and was successfully detonated at Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945.

At this time, the Allies were planning the final invasion of Japan, which, based on the bloody experience of “island hopping,” was expected to add perhaps a million more deaths to the Allied toll. President Truman therefore authorized the use of the terrible new weapon against Japan. On August 6, 1945, a lone B-29 bomber dropped “Little Boy” on Hiroshima, obliterating the city in three-fifths of a second. Three days later, “Fat Man” was dropped on Nagasaki, destroying about half the city.

On August 10, the day after the attack on Nagasaki, Japan sued for peace on condition that the emperor be allowed to remain as sovereign ruler. On August 11, the Allies replied that they and they alone would determine the future of Emperor Hirohito. At last, on August 14, the emperor personally accepted the Allied terms. A cease-fire was declared on August 15, and on September 2, 1945, General MacArthur presided over the Japanese signing of the formal surrender document on the deck of the U.S. battleship Missouri, anchored in Tokyo Bay.

Never before or since World War II have Americans fought with such unanimity and singleness of purpose.

If ever a war was a contest of good versus evil, such was World War II, and America’s role in achieving victory elevated the nation to “superpower” status in the postwar political order.

The Japanese military was guided by the code of the Samurai warrior, as ancient as it was harsh. To be killed in battle was an honor, but to be taken prisoner, a disgrace. Accordingly, the Japanese treated its prisoners of war as dishonored men. America learned this fact the hard way when U.S. and Filipino soldiers who surrendered at Corregidor on April 9, 1942, were sent on a forced march to captivity in Bataan. The infamous Bataan Death March resulted in the deaths of 10,000 P. 0 W. s because of abuse and starvation.