“The Battle of the Bulge” began in mid-December, and for two weeks it appeared as if the Germans might at least reach the Meuse River, if not Antwerp. Penetrating the extended front of four American divisions, the two Panzer armies broke the 1st U.S. Army’s front and drove fifty miles toward the Meuse. Showing a desperate courage that surprised the Germans, the American infantrymen and tankers fought back with a ferocity fueled by true tales of SS atrocities and stark anger at their predicament. While many American service units clogged the roads with panicked convoys, combat units from isolated platoons to the better part of divisions ruined the German timetable and forced the penetration into a narrow corridor. Both shoulders of “the Bulge” held, and ferocious defenses at St. Vith and Bastogne cost the Germans precious time and troops. Starved for fuel and continuous air support, the Panzer divisions reached the limit of their offensive endurance, the best Christmas gift the Allies received in 1944.
As soon as he assessed the scope of the German attack, Eisenhower organized an overwhelming riposte against both flanks of “the Bulge.” To simplify command arrangements and draw British armored divisions into the fray, he gave Montgomery temporary control of the 9th U.S. Army and all but one corps of the 1st U.S. Army along the northern flank. Montgomery’s unfortunate manner and thirst for publicity irritated the Americans, but he managed the battle with skill, blunting the attacks of the right-flank Panzer army with the right mix of delaying actions and counterattacks. On the southern flank, which required less cautious action, Bradley unleashed Patton, whose 3d U.S. Army changed the direction of its operations and slammed into the left-flank Panzer army. As Eisenhower urged, his generals fought the battle as “one of opportunity for us and not disaster.” Enjoying air superiority when the weather cleared, the Allies regained the initiative and by the end of January had driven the German remnants from “the Bulge” in a hard-fought campaign made more taxing by snow and bitter cold. When the battle ended, the Americans had lost 100,000 men, the Germans 120,000. The German losses in skilled troops, tanks, self-propelled artillery, and mechanized vehicles made their defeat a catastrophe. “The Battle of the Bulge” ended the Wehrmacht’s ability to disrupt even a broad-front Allied offensive into the heartland of the Third Reich.
As the Allied armies in Europe beat back the last great German offensive, MacArthur’s 6th Army and the 7th Fleet turned north toward Luzon to liberate the most populated island of the Philippines. With air support from USAAF fighters on Mindoro, captured in a follow-up of the Leyte operation, and from the carriers of the 3d Fleet, the 7th Fleet would have been undisturbed by conventional Japanese attacks. The kamikazes, however, made January 4–15, 1945, the worst period in the Navy’s war since the battles in the southern Solomons in 1942. Intercepting the 7th Fleet (an armada of 164 vessels) on its way to Lingayen Gulf, the kamikazes sunk an escort carrier and damaged four other warships on January 4, damaged nine vessels the next day, and sank a destroyer and damaged eleven warships the next day. In three days the Navy suffered 1,100 casualties, many of them burned and dismembered by explosions. Despite concentrated air strikes on Luzon’s airfields, the suicide attacks continued—with more sinkings and destruction—until the Japanese ran out of airplanes on January 15. When the raids ended, the Navy had lost five ships sunk, eighteen severely damaged, and thirty struck at least once; 738 sailors died and 1,400 had been wounded. Concerned about the kamikazes’ effectiveness, the 3d Fleet’s fast carriers doubled their fighter strength by disembarking their dive bombers.
The land campaign for Luzon showed no diminution of the Japanese willingness to die for the Emperor. In six months of combat, the 6th Army endured nearly 10,000 casualties while killing over 100,000 Japanese. When the war ended, another 50,000 Japanese were still holed up in Luzon’s mountains. In conventional battle on the Luzon plains, the Americans crushed the Japanese with close air support, armor, artillery, and infantry assaults, but in the mountains the war became more equal, with Filipino guerrillas a plus for the 6th Army. The battle for Manila, however, demonstrated the dogged character of Japanese resistance. Although General Tomoyuki Yamashita had declared Manila an open city, some 20,000 Japanese naval and army service troops disobeyed his orders and fought the Americans block by block. It took three American divisions a month to capture the city at a cost of 1,100 dead; almost all the Japanese defenders perished in the rubble, for Manila became a shambles. Caught in the battle, more than 100,000 Filipinos died in the city, many massacred by the Japanese. The battle for Manila again demonstrated that the Japanese armed forces might be doomed by Western standards, but they would use every opportunity to kill Americans and Filipino civilians in the faint hope that their very ferocity would demoralize their enemy. As MacArthur’s 8th Army liberated the Visayans and Mindanao, the Americans and their guerrilla allies showed little inclination to take prisoners, and the Japanese did nothing to attract mercy, often murdering wounded and prisoners as part of their thousands of last stands.
If the Luzon campaign dramatized the kamikaze danger, the capture of the volcanic island of Iwo Jima (February 19–March 26, 1945) proved the damage that Japanese cave and bunker defenses could deliver upon even the most determined, skilled American landing force. Three crack Marine divisions slugged their way with blast-and-burn tactics across and up the island. They seldom saw the Japanese, who shelled and machine-gunned them from belts of fortified positions hidden in thousands of caves and bunkers. Although the island had real value as a haven for stricken B-29s and a base for their escort fighters, Iwo Jima cost the Marines about 6,000 dead and 20,000 wounded. For the infantry regiments, the campaign was a nightmare of incessant shelling, sudden death from hidden positions, relentless attacks, and pestilence, for the island became infested with flies feeding on the dead. As one Marine despaired, “They send you to a place . . . and you get shot to hell and maybe they pull you back. But then they send you right up again and then you get murdered. God, you stay there until you get killed or until you can’t stand it anymore.” Although the 21,000 Japanese troops on Iwo Jima perished almost to a man in their caves, they had for the first time in the central Pacific campaign inflicted more casualties than they suffered. Their defensive system frustrated both naval gunfire and air attack, leaving the Marines no choice but to fight the battle with flame-throwers, hand grenades, and demolitions. Such tactics demanded that uncommon valor become a common virtue. It also meant that three Marine divisions had to be rebuilt with teenage replacements before they could fight again.
The war in Europe also reached a new frenzy as the Allies and the Russians opened the continuous offensives in January 1945 that would end the war against Hitler in May. Russian armies of nearly 7 million men pushed forward from the Baltic to the Balkans, and in the same month the 4 million men of the Anglo-American armies surged against the last strongholds on the Siegfried Line on their way, finally, across the Rhine. Two-thirds of his divisions and tactical air wings were by now American, but Eisenhower gave the 21st British Army Group the place of honor in the offensive and used the 9th U.S. Army for reinforcement. Eisenhower accepted Montgomery’s theory that the weight of the Allied attack should be north of the Ruhr; the Germans agreed and defended the Rhine River line in front of 21st British Army Group with fierce skill. As Montgomery organized a “big push” in his best World War I style, the 1st and 3d U.S. Armies to the south broke the German forces west of the Rhine into isolated pockets and punched across the last great barrier of the Third Reich. Exploiting success, Eisenhower planned to envelop the Ruhr and trap about half the remaining Germans on his front. Shuttling scarce Panzer reserves from one Allied penetration to another, German operations had become (as even Hitler recognized) “moving the catastrophe from one place to another.”
The last month of the European war found the armed forces of the Grand Coalition mounting exploitation campaigns on three fronts. In Italy the Allies reached the Po Valley and soon received the first major German surrender. The Russians drove to within thir
ty miles of Berlin by April, only to face stiffening German resistance. Benefiting from the general collapse of the Wehrmacht and Hitler’s last, desperate dispatch of reserves against the Russians, the American armies roared eastward from the Rhine to the Elbe, the prearranged place to meet the Russians. Some forces went even farther, as the 1st and 3d U.S. Armies crossed the Czech and Austrian borders. In the Ruhr the Americans captured over 300,000 Germans. So fluid had the front become that one German corps commander tried to reorganize a mass of Wehrmacht soldiers until an American MP politely informed him that he, too, had just become a POW. Only fierce national and military pride, the effectiveness of the Nazi police-security organization, and Hitler’s mad determination preserved a semblance of resistance. After briefly celebrating FDR’s death in April, Hitler made himself the Third Reich’s most important war death before the month was out. His successors surrendered to the Allies on May 7 amid a ruin of death and fire Germany had not seen since the Thirty Years’ War. The conflict in Europe had ended.
The Asian Götterdämmerung came at Okinawa, only 350 miles south of the home islands, in a campaign that pitted the 5th Fleet and the 10th Army against the most savage Japanese resistance of the war. For the Navy the campaign developed as a battle of attrition, pitting the fast carriers and their escorts against the kamikazes. In ten major attacks the Japanese threw 2,800 aircraft of all kinds against the fleet and lost most of them. In sheer numbers the kamikazes punished the Navy as the Imperial Fleet had not; when the battle ended in mid-June, the 5th Fleet had lost around 10,000 casualties (half of them killed) and 28 ships and craft sunk by air attack. Of the 325 ships damaged, 43 had to be scrapped. Six fast carriers took successive hits, two so many that they had to leave the war. Although the kamikazes sometimes reached the amphibious task force and destroyed American vessels, they poured their worst havoc upon the destroyers and smaller escorts along the antiaircraft picket line. The kamikazes that escaped the combat air patrols dove in succession at American warships, penetrating the curtain of antiaircraft fire often enough to turn destroyers into flaming junkheaps manned by bloody remnants of their crews. Although the kamikazes did not slow the land battle, they impressed the Navy and made the prospect of future amphibious operations grim.
The battle for Okinawa itself (April 1–June 21, 1945) again allowed the Japanese army to employ its cave-and-bunker defense system and forced the 10th Army to pay dearly for its victory. Defending only the lower third of the long, thin island, the Japanese (with one exception) fought from their prepared positions without major counterattacks. Rejecting the option of amphibious flanking attacks for reasons that remain arguable, the 10th Army’s commander committed five Army and two Marine divisions to a series of bloody offensives against the Japanese defenses. Although the Americans enjoyed massive close air support and artillery superiority, the Japanese positions could not be eliminated except by infantry assault. Veterans of Peleliu and Leyte remembered the seesaw battles along the muddy ridges as the worst of the war. Before it had killed more than 100,000 Japanese soldiers, the 10th Army lost around 40,000 men, about a fourth of them killed in action. High and low shared the slaughter. Both the American and Japanese commanding generals perished, as did an estimated 100,000 native Okinawans. As the campaign staggered to a close, the Army began to redeploy divisions from Europe for the invasion of the home islands in late 1945. The Japanese defeat was inevitable, but the orgy of death seemed equally unstoppable if the war in the Pacific continued in its new form.
The American government, now led by President Harry S. Truman, had one unused weapon: the atomic bomb. Warned of the military implications of German nuclear research by two refugee scientists, Enrico Fermi and Albert Einstein, Roosevelt in 1939 had arranged minor government subsidies for similar research in the United States. Convinced of the theoretical possibility of causing an atomic chain reaction, scientists at five major universities pursued their basic research into the explosive properties of the uranium atom until the University of Chicago group created the first chain reaction in December 1942. Proven theory did not a weapon make. Throughout 1943 and 1944 the Office of Scientific Research and Development and the Army Corps of Engineers’ “Manhattan Project” assembled thousands of scientists, engineers, and skilled craftsmen—at Oak Ridge, Tennessee; Hanford, Washington; and Los Alamos, New Mexico—to fabricate a working atomic bomb that could be dropped. Without knowing its mission, a special B-29 group practiced dropping a bomb that had not yet been built, let alone exploded. The organizational and security aspects of the project fell to Major General Leslie R. Groves, but Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer provided the scientific leadership at Los Alamos that turned theory into reality. On July 16, 1945, the Los Alamos team exploded the first nuclear device in the desert. As he watched the mushroom cloud boil upward, Oppenheimer recalled a Hindu quote: “Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds.”
To Harry Truman, a man of modest attainments and simple instincts, fell the task of deciding to use the bomb against Japan. Informed of the bomb’s likely existence after becoming president, Truman arranged careful consideration of the issue by a civilian Interim Committee, which considered scientific and political opinion, and by the JCS. With the exception of a dissident group of scientists who counseled nonuse, the advisers assumed that the weapon would be used to end the war. Most of the arguments dealt with postwar concerns, especially relations with the Soviet Union. One group of scientists suggested a demonstration of the weapon, but Oppenheimer and others feared a misfire. With only two working bombs available in August 1945, there was little margin for miscalculation. Faced with the prospect of an invasion of Japan and millions of Japanese and American casualties, the JCS preferred the bomb, since economic blockade and the air war had not yet brought peace.
Truman had every reason to seek a quick end to war, for his advisers pointed out that the Soviet Union would soon enter the war with Japan, which promised to complicate peacemaking in Asia. According to an agreement made with FDR at Yalta in February, Stalin pledged to break his neutrality pact with Japan and enter the war three months after Germany’s defeat. The Japanese government sensed Russia’s new policy when it tried to find some third party to negotiate peace with the Allies after April 1945. All the principals saw only part of the politico-strategic problems of the period. Truman, for example, saw that the preservation of the institution of the Emperor did not endanger postwar reconstruction of Japan, but he knew that the American public saw Hirohito as a war criminal. His advisers thought unconditional surrender might in practice be modified, but only after a military capitulation. The Japanese peace faction around Hirohito wanted to retain the Emperor and saw their nation as an impoverished state with 13 million bombed-out refugees; their opponents (largely army generals) saw Japan as a nation with 2.3 million soldiers and 4 million paramilitary fighters ready to die fighting the Americans, rallied by their commitment to the Emperor’s divine being. Already aware of the American bomb and committed to nuclear weapons development of their own, the Russians did not quail at Truman’s hints about a “super weapon” when they again met the Americans at Potsdam in July. They instead hastened preparations for their planned offensive into Manchuria and Korea. An Allied declaration from Potsdam threatened the Japanese with worse war but also hinted at a negotiated settlement. The Japanese response was equally subject to misinterpretation. Although the Japanese intent was to explore the terms, the American government thought the response a contemptuous declaration of continued war.
With no presidential order to delay its atomic bombing attacks, XXI Bomber Command organized its last raids. The target list came from Washington; the exact cities to be bombed and the timing rested in the USAAF’s hands. On August 6 the first bomb fell on Hiroshima, and the second exploded over Nagasaki three days later. The explosions killed 135,000 Japanese and razed the two cities. In between raids the Soviet Union abrogated its neutrality treaty and declared war on Japan. Despite a desperate attempt by army diehards to seize the g
overnment by capturing Hirohito and assassinating his advisers, the Emperor rallied the peace faction and in a rare demonstration of imperial action ordered his government to sue for peace on August 10. As the Truman administration had hoped, the two atomic bombs had shocked the peace faction into decisive resistance against the war faction. To save the remnants of the Japanese nation, Hirohito ordered his armed forces to surrender. Equally relieved by the sudden end of the war, the Allied high commanders in the Pacific met a Japanese delegation aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay on September 2 to bring an end to the modern world’s most devastating conflict. As General MacArthur observed in his radio announcement of the surrender ceremony, “We have had our last chance. If we do not devise some greater and more equitable system, Armageddon will be at our door.”
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FIFTEEN
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Cold War and Hot War: The United States Enters the Age of Nuclear Deterrence and Collective Security, 1945–1953
The end of World War II marked the beginning of a new era for the United States, for its foreign policy could no longer stand on the twin pillars of noninvolvement and commercialism and its defense policy on the dual concepts of maritime security and wartime mobilization. The second maiming of Europe and the collapse of its empires in Africa and Asia opened international relations to a bewildering array of conflicts that carried the potential for wider wars. Had the United States followed its diplomacy of the marketplace and relied on broad oceans to protect it, the nation might have avoided the traumas of foreign wars, military alliances, and higher levels of peacetime military spending. The United States might also have lost its political and economic power and mortgaged the safety of its population. The creation of nuclear weapons and their adaptation to intercontinental bombers stripped the shield of time and space from American security. Amid the casualties of World War II lay the corpse of traditional American defense policy.
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