1942: The Year That Tried Men's Souls
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*This was the outfit made famous by James Jones in From Here to Eternity and The Thin Red Line.
* British officer Peter Fleming, brother of novelist Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond, concluded after studying Japanese documents following the war that the intelligence section at Imperial General Headquarters was fantastically inept. It would be “a waste of time,” he said, “to give them information about battalions or regiments, since, although they were glad to get it, they were unable to make any deductions from it” (Thaddeus Holt, The Deceivers, 2003).
*Seattle, Washington, which is commonly used as the watershed of excessive rainfall in the United States, gets an average of about thirty-six inches of rain per year.
*Two types of cannibalism were practiced by the Japanese. The first, and most common, was simply to stay alive when Imperial troops were abandoned by their superiors on far-away islands with no food to speak of. The second, and more disgusting, was the custom of some ranking Japanese officers who, in the spirit of Bushido—the way of the ancient Japanese warrior—deliberately eat the livers and other organs of fallen enemies in the belief that it made them strong and brave. Grotesque but instructive examples of this are given in James Bradley’s best-selling book Flyboys (2003).
*Casablanca was released in the United States in November 1942, after most of the Torch invasion force had sailed for North Africa.
*Thaddeus Holt, however, in his masterful work The Deceivers, points out that the U.S. military feared by sailing time that as many as 5,000 American troops probably knew at least some of the plan and that it had likely been compromised by the Axis. In fact they never found out, and if that is not a miracle it ought to be.
*As things later turned out, it might not have been so unnecessary after all. During the North Africa invasions the Germans did indeed march into Toulon and demand that the French hand over to them their remaining fleet. Instead, the French scuttled their ships right there and then, much to the dismay of the flabbergasted and irate Germans.
*More than half of the American landing craft had been smashed up on the beaches because of heavy surf and the inexperience of their drivers, and thus could not return for more troops.
*The fascinating tale of Claire Phillips, from which this condensation is taken, is told in its entirety in her autobiography, Manila Espionage, published in 1947.
†Heaven knows what they would do in the same situation today, since American coins now contain little or no silver.
*The “big” mountains of the Himalayas include the 29,000-foot Mount Everest.
* Losing prisoners to murder, starvation, or disease did not seem to have the same effect on the Japanese authorities of Tojo’s regime.
*Which they did. Beginning in 1942 the shipbuilding industry began turning out “liberty ships” at the rate of approximately one every two weeks.
*In May 1943, the Memphis Belle was retired and she and her crew were sent back to the States for a bond-raising tour. After the war, instead of being scrapped like thousands of other B-17s, the Belle was enshrined in a special viewing hangar on Mud Island, in the Mississippi River at Memphis, where it can be seen today.
*The Maoris were a fierce tribe of natives who had inhabited New Zealand before the British came. Even after 250 years of “civilization,” they were known to revert to tribal savagery during the rigors of war.
*On several occasions during battles American troops noticed Arabs lighting fires, “sending smoke signals” to warn Germans of approaching Allied forces. These people were ordered taken under fire, and the practice diminished.
*Dj El Ahmer was the Arabic name for the hill but, just as the Americans have the shortstop in the game of baseball, the British named it after a cricket term.
*Fortunately, they settled on the Third Division Artillery Band, which not only played “Hail to the Chief” but entertained the distinguished conferees with such selections as “Missouri Waltz,” “Deep in the Heart of Texas,” “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” and “The Naughty Marietta Waltz.”
*Sir Roy Jenkins, in his brilliant biography of Churchill, suggests that “The main result—maybe the main purpose—of the action was to take the edge off the mounting obstreperousness among idle Canadian troops in the South of England and to demonstrate how difficult was a landing on a fortified coast.” If that is so, it was indeed a cynical mind that conceived it.
†With a few U.S. Army rangers and British commandos thrown in.
*Even the Soviets, who were fighting the battle of their lives at Stalingrad, recognized by the end of 1942 that the vast armies they were gathering behind that beleaguered city were capable of extinguishing the German threat.
†As readers will have discerned, massive events such as World War II do not lend themselves to precise pigeonholing calendar dates. Thus for the purposes of this story the import of the year 1942 actually began earlier, on December 7, 1941, with the attack on Pearl Harbor, and ended a month afterward, in January 1943, with the defeat of the Japanese at Guadalcanal and New Guinea, and with the Allies overpowering the Germans in North Africa by mid-March.
*Some people wanted to keep it that way. The most vociferous was Roosevelt’s secretary of the treasury, Henry Morgenthau, who was Jewish. It was his incensed conviction that Germany should henceforth “be turned into a sheep pasture,” so as never to threaten the world again. This was not to be. When U.S. Army chief of staff George Marshall became secretary of state in the next administration he devised the Marshall Plan, which poured billions of American dollars into the restoration of wrecked Europe and certainly helped stem the spread of communism, which the Soviets were peddling with alarming efficiency among the destitute Europeans.
*Hanford was chosen not only because of the availability of hydroelectric power but for its remoteness in case something went wrong. The scientists were dealing with a power they had never encountered and if a chain reaction was started they were still not certain they would be able to shut it down.
*There is a stirring verse in the Irish ballad “Kevin Barry,” about a sixteen-year-old boy who was sentenced to death for his role in the 1916 Easter Uprising: “Oh, shoot me like an Irish soldier/Do not hang me like a dog.”
*It was indeed harrowing because in the Russia of the time it was quite customary to shoot first and ask questions later—and that included the native tribes they encountered.
* Claire Phillips returned with her daughter to her birthplace of Portland, Oregon. In 1951 she received the Medal of Freedom; she died in 1959.
*This was all too true. After the war the Americans uncovered a document sent from Japanese Imperial Headquarters that instructed Japanese POW camp commanders to kill the prisoners as soon as they appeared to be in danger of being overrun by Allied forces.
*For an excellent account of this raid, see Hampton Sides’s book Ghost Soldiers.
†Statistics collected after the war revealed that the death rate for U.S. prisoners of war in German and Italian POW camps was about 4 percent. In Japanese camps it was closer to 30 percent.
*Many other nations declared war on the Axis before it was all over, but most waited until they could clearly see which way the wind was blowing. Thus, it was not until 1945, the last year of the war, that such countries as Equador, Paraguay, Peru, Chile, Venezuela, Turkey, Uruguay, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Finland, and Argentina finally saw their way clear to enter the fight on the side of the Allies. The so-called neutrals—Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland, among others—remained so throughout the whole nightmare.
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