Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

Meanwhile, General Eisenhower, following the victory in the Ruhr, ignored Berlin to the northeast and drove directly eastward toward Dresden. He was unduly disturbed by rumors that the Germans had prepared a final defensive “redoubt” in southeastern Germany. Churchill and others, for political bargaining purposes, wanted the American advance redirected to Berlin, but the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington refused to interfere with Eisenhower’s decisions in the field. These decisions, based on military considerations only, and ignoring political factors, permitted the Soviet forces to “liberate” all of the capital cities of central Europe. Budapest fell to the Russians on February 13th, followed by Vienna on April 13th. On April 25th Russian forces encircled Berlin and made contact with American troops seventy miles to the south, at Torgau on the Elbe. The previous day, Eisenhower, advancing on Prague, had been warned by the Soviet General Staff that Russian forces would occupy the Moldau Valley (which included the Czech capital). As late as May 4th, when the American forces were sixty miles from Prague and the Soviet armies more than a hundred miles from the city, an effort by the former to advance to the city was stopped at the request of the Soviet commander, despite a last vain message from Churchill to Eisenhower to take the Czech capital for political bargaining purposes.

In the meantime, the Russian troops, screaming, looting, and raping, were smashing into Berlin. On April 20th, following Hitler’s fifty-sixth birthday celebration, which most of the Nazi Party and military leaders attended, the Führer refused to leave the doomed city. Most of the rest escaped that night through the last narrow corridor to central Germany. For another nine days Hitler continued to telephone orders from his bunker in the garden of the new Chancellery building, but few paid any attention to these. His former lieutenants were scattered throughout central Germany, intriguing to take over as Leader or planning to vanish from sight. Only Goebbels, with his wife and six young children, and Hitler’s mistress, Eva Braun, planned to remain to the end. The Fiihrer experienced a complete mental breakdown on April 22nd. A week later only a few subordinates remained to carry out his last wishes. With Russian shells falling all about the Chancellery, he married Eva Braun, ordered Goring and Himmler arrested for treachery, and drew up a “Political Testament” which blamed the war and all Germany’s misfortunes on the Jews, and told the nation, “The aim must still be to win territory in the East for the German people.” On the afternoon of April 30, 1945, with the Russian soldiers only a block away, Eva Braun took poison and Hitler shot himself through the mouth. Subordinates, in accord with their instructions, flooded the bodies with gasoline and burned them in a Russian shellhole in the Chancellery garden.

At Hitler’s death, leadership of the wreckage of Germany -was bequeathed to Admiral Karl Doenitz. His efforts to surrender to the Western Powers while continuing the war against the Soviet Union were rebuffed on May 4th, and three days later all German forces were surrendered unconditionally to all the victor Powers. The latter’s armies continued to advance, overrunning concentration and prison camps with the ovens still hot, finding thousands of bodies of murdered inmates stacked up like cordwood, with other thousands, staggering out, like walking skeletons in filthy rags, to meet the incredulous gaze of well-fed, softhearted American youths.

Soon the names Buchenwald, Dachau, and Belsen were being repeated with horror throughout the world. At Belsen 35,000 dead bodies and 30,000 still breathing were found. The world was surprised and shocked. There was no excuse for the surprise, for Hitler’s aims and these methods, including the genocide of any peoples or groups his twisted mind condemned, had been common knowledge among students of Nazism long before 1939 and had been explicitly advocated in Mein Kampf , a book which sold 227,000 copies before Hitler came to power and over a million copies in 1933, his first year as chancellor. That Hitler’s government in practice was making every effort to carry out all the vile purposes which it embraced in theory had been made explicitly clear to all informed persons by 1939, most notably, perhaps, in The Revolution of Nihilism by Hermann Rauschning, former Nazi leader in Danzig, or in The Brown Book of the Hitler Terror, based on evidence from refugees, and published in 1933. There was no excuse for the world’s press to be surprised at Nazi bestiality in 1945, since the evidence had been fully available in 1938. By V-E Day, May 8, 1945, this bestiality had brought death to more than 30,000,000 human beings as sacrifices to mystic Germanic tribalism.

Closing in on Japan, 1943-1945

When Germany surrendered on May 8, 1945, Japan was already defeated, but could not make itself accept unconditional surrender and was trying to stave off that inevitable end by suicide tactics. In the thirty-five months from the Battle of Midway to the German surrender, the Japanese Navy and merchant marine had been swept from the western Pacific and largely destroyed in the process, cutting the home islands off from vital overseas supplies and leaving millions of their armed forces isolated in southeast Asia, China, New Guinea, the Phillippines, and other island pockets.

The war against Germany and the war against Japan were separate wars, although involving the same victorious nations. Weapons, strategy, and tactics were quite different, chiefly because one was a war of air and land, while the other was a struggle of naval and air forces over an immense ocean. Even American strategic bombing was different in the Pacific, using B-29’s, unknown in Europe, for area bombing of civilians in cities, something we disapproved in Europe. The great weapons against Japan were the aircraft carriers, which relentlessly prowled the ocean and provided the necessary protection for amphibious assaults on the island steppingstones which led to Japan. The total destruction of the Japanese Navy and Air Force were almost incidental to this process of protecting landing forces of marines and army units.

Even where the same weapons were used in the European and Pacific struggles, the outcomes were different. In the former, the German submarines were hunted down and destroyed, while in the Pacific, American submarines made a great contribution to victory by the almost total annihilation of the Japanese merchant fleet. Japan’s minimal need for merchant shipping to keep its civilian population from starvation was about 2 million tons. It had started the war with 6 million tons, added 3.5 million tons during the war from building and capture of foreign vessels, but had 8.2 million tons sunk during the war and finally surrendered with only 231 vessels of 860,936 tons still able to operate. Of the loss, 5.1 million tons were sunk by submarines, 2.3 million by aircraft, and 0.3 million by mines. By the spring of 1945 Japanese merchant shipping was already below its minimum civilian-survival level.

Immediately after Midway, the vital issue for the United States became the need to stop the Japanese advance against Australia in the southwestern Pacific. At that time the southern edge of the Japanese defense perimeter ran east and west through New Guinea just north of Australia. Its advanced base was Rabaul on New Britain Island, taken from Australia in January 1942. This base, a magnificent but remote harbor 3,000 miles from Tokyo, was linked to the Japanese capital by two fortified bases which had been constructed illegally in the Japanese Mandated Islands. About 800 miles north of Rabaul was Truk in the Caroline Islands, and almost 700 miles north of Truk was Saipan, in the Marianas Islands. From Saipan, later a B-29 base for bombing Tokyo, it was almost 1,600 miles to the Japanese capital. Just before Midway the Japanese extended their threat 600 miles farther south from Rabaul, southwest to New Guinea (thus threatening Australia) and southeast to Guadalcanal, the southernmost of the Solomon Islands (2,375 miles north of Wellington, New Zealand).