A Patriot's History of the Modern World

by Larry Schweikart

  With his natural self-discipline and hard work coupled with a likable personality matched only by Eisenhower’s, Nimitz rose steadily in the Navy. Although he preferred sea duty and disliked service in Washington, he understood that power was gained in the capital through connections and social graces. In 1939, he received a plum assignment as chief of the Bureau of Navigation, a misnomer for what later became the Bureau of Personnel. In that position he controlled personnel assignments, and would be automatically considered for the next top post of his choosing, which came on December 16, 1941. Admiral Kimmel’s name was irrevocably associated with the Pearl Harbor disaster, and Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox suggested Nimitz to Roosevelt, in part because the Texan could get along well with Admiral Ernest J. King, the irascible chief of naval operations. Roosevelt agreed. “Tell Nimitz,” he said, “to get the hell out to Pearl and stay there till the war is won.” Indeed, Nimitz hopped a Navy plane and, despite no rest and motion sickness, commanded the pilot to give him an aerial tour of Pearl. What he saw shocked him: even though the attack had taken place more than two weeks earlier, wreckage was still strewn everywhere. Nimitz addressed the officers, refused to assign blame, and coolly informed them that while it would be a long haul, the United States Navy would soon exact vengeance.

  Working for Admiral King was no picnic. He was known and feared for his harshness, and inspired respect but not affection. Best known for his activities in seducing other officers’ wives, King proved a stern taskmaster who made no mistakes and brooked no treason among his subordinates with contrary opinions. Yet with a single exception, Nimitz was able to handle this difficult personality effectively. That exception came when King and Commander John Redman, head of King’s Navy code-breaking operation in Washington, initially believed the Japanese were going to strike the West Coast—later they altered their prediction to the Aleutians, then Samoa—instead of Midway in June of 1942.90 Nimitz sided against King with Commander Joseph J. Rochefort, the brilliant head of Hawaii’s Combat Intelligence Office, who had broken the Japanese naval code, JN-25b, and sent his carriers to ambush the Japanese task force at Midway. Rochefort had engineered the most extraordinary intelligence achievement of the war, and had been able to brief Nimitz on the complete Japanese plan and predict exactly where Frank Jack Fletcher’s task forces would find the Japanese carriers. In spite of the victory, or because of it, King, urged on by Commander Redman and his brother, Rear Admiral Joseph Redman, chief of naval communications, arranged for Rochefort to be transferred into oblivion for being right.91 King’s and Redman’s payback constituted a waste of Rochefort’s exceptional talent and almost certainly extended the war and cost American lives; Washington never again was able to read JN-25 except for low-value, repetitive traffic. It took Admiral Edwin T. Layton’s 1985 book And I Was There to win a greatly deserved posthumous Distinguished Service Medal for Rochefort. Nimitz, unable or unwilling to protect Rochefort, thereby put the only major blot on his record. Otherwise, Nimitz’s skill in balancing such wildly different, yet effective, personalities as Vice Admiral William (“Bull”) Halsey and Vice Admiral Raymond Spruance testified to the loyalty of his subordinates and Nimitz’s willingness to allow them wide discretion.

  Red Storms in the East

  While the United States clawed back into the Pacific war, the USSR moved from defense to offense against the Nazis. If Moscow in 1941–42 had not been the turning point, certainly the destruction of the German 6th Army at Stalingrad was. There, bled white against Soviet defenses kept strong by constant infusions of new manpower to replace the fallen, the Germans nevertheless appeared poised for victory. By November, 90 percent of Stalingrad lay in Hitler’s control. Notable among the defenders was Front Commissar Nikita Khrushchev, the round and ruthless protégé of Lazar Kaganovich, the only Jew among the “Old Bolsheviks” to survive Stalin’s purges.

  On July 28, 1942, Stalin issued his famous People’s Commissariat of Defense Order 227, “Not a step back.”92 His armies in the field took his words seriously, for failure to do so meant execution or service until killed in a penal battalion. While consuming German attention and assault forces in Stalingrad, the Soviets had marshaled new armies for counterattacks, which commenced in November as the weather again turned cold: one (Operation Mars) would encircle the German forces of Army Group Center, and another (Operation Uranus) swept against the northward-facing Italian, Hungarian, and Romanian positions along the Don River, all the while attacking northwestward from south of Stalingrad on the Volga to encircle the 6th Army in Stalingrad.

  Operation Mars was a failure, and has been almost totally ignored by historians in the West as well as in the Soviet Union. Zhukov was the architect of both Mars and Uranus, yet the Soviets have trumpeted one while not mentioning the other. In Mars, Zhukov attacked both sides of the Rzhev salient in late November of 1942 with seven armies comprising 817,000 men and more than 2,000 tanks. At the end of the month-long battle, the Soviets had lost 1,600 to 1,800 tanks and 335,000 men, and the battle lines had not appreciably changed.93 For modern readers, its significance is lost, but this meaningless battle demonstrated the terrific losses the USSR was willing to sustain: in this single engagement, the Soviet Union suffered 85 percent of the battle deaths the U.S. Army recorded in Europe during the entire war.

  Operation Uranus, on the other hand, met with great success, easily overrunning the Romanians, Hungarians, and Italians. Within a few days, the Soviets had encircled the German 6th Army. Hitler peremptorily ordered the 6th Army commander, General Friedrich Paulus, into the pocket with his army, where 205,000 German soldiers and almost 52,000 Russian volunteers were trapped.94 Hitler quickly recalled von Manstein from Leningrad and made him commander of Army Group Don, which included the 6th Army. But instead of ordering 6th Army to immediately organize a breakout to the West, Hitler chose to supply the encircled troops by air while von Manstein organized a relief force to break the encirclement. Hitler wanted to hold Stalingrad at all costs, and that rapidly became a fatal error.

  Von Manstein cobbled together a relief force that attacked the Soviet ring from the southwest on December 12, coming within thirty miles of 6th Army, but Paulus didn’t cooperate. Since Hitler had not authorized a withdrawal, the timid Paulus was unprepared to break out, would not go against Hitler’s wishes, and secretly feared any such attempt would end in disaster.95 The moment passed; von Manstein had to rush his men back to fight the Soviets at Rostov, and Paulus was left to his fate with his troops. On February 2, 1943, more than 95,000 Germans surrendered, of whom only 5,000 ever saw their homeland again.

  Von Manstein still had a few rabbits to pull out of his hat. The overwhelming Soviet forces were slowed but not stopped when the Germans abandoned Kharkov against Hitler’s express order. Suspecting the Soviets were overextended, von Manstein launched a major counterattack using newly formed SS panzer units, advancing northward behind Soviet positions, cutting the enemy off, and retaking Kharkov. The shocking Soviet defeat surprised and greatly angered Stalin. Somehow von Manstein had been able to pull off the single German winter victory of the war, stabilize the line in Ukraine, and set the stage for a decisive battle after the spring muddy period.

  But Kharkov would be the last major victory enjoyed by the Germans in the Soviet Union. Despite the Red Army’s enormous losses in offensives, the Soviet superiority in weapons, manpower, and supply had become impossible to overcome. By the end of 1942 the Red Army had 2.7 times the number of tanks, most of them now T-34s, twice as many guns, and 1.8 times the number of combat aircraft as it had at the end of 1941.96 Stalin had moved 1,300 factories east out of the battle zone and they were now in full production. The manpower disparity between the Soviet and German forces remained as large as ever, and the Germans were able to maintain their Eastern Front army at an operative level only by replacing 2.1 million German factory workers with foreign labor.

  Snapping the Axis

  After Kharkov, the war turned permanently against the Nazis. Sov
iet forces had taken Kursk in February 1943 and created a large salient in German lines north of Kharkov that begged to be pinched off. In the summer, the Germans took their last chance to reverse the war in the East, and the largest tank battle in human history resulted. Armed with 2,928 tanks—many of them new Tiger and Panther models—the Nazis sought to cut off the salient and encircle a large part of the Red Army. But the Russians had dug in while the Germans waited for the new equipment to arrive, erecting a series of defensive networks known as “defense in depth,” whereby minefields, artillery zones, and antitank emplacements stretched more than two hundred miles deep. Even worse for the Germans, the Russians outnumbered them in tanks and men almost two to one. Only in aircraft were the two sides even close in numbers. After the Nazis fought through two defensive belts, they were exhausted and faced at least five more rings. Typical of the losses suffered throughout the army in the battle, one German armored unit began the attack with 118 tanks and when it retreated had only 20. In retrospect, the Luftwaffe might have provided the critical difference—but one third of its planes were busy with American and British bombers in the west.

  Just two months before Kursk, in “Black May,” the German Navy had lost 25 percent of its operational submarines while sinking only fifty-eight merchant ships. But July was the critical month in a number of ways. Hamburg went up in a massive Allied firebombing, and Sicily was invaded in July. (It fell to the Americans and British in August.) Coming on top of Kursk, these body blows rattled Hitler—and his Italian allies, who sought a way out of the war. Italy concluded an armistice with the Allies on September 3. Hitler would not tolerate a defection so close to the Fatherland and rushed German troops in to defend the Italian peninsula, some of them pulled out of Kursk while the outcome was still in doubt (at least in the eyes of the German generals there). But the temporary plug in the dike in Italy paled in comparison to the leaks springing everywhere else in German territory. Kiev fell to the Red Army in October, and as 1944 dawned, Nazi forces had been pushed back to the prewar Ukrainian border.

  The Japanese had not fared any better. In March 1943 the Battle of Bismarck Sea resulted in the loss of all eight Japanese transports and four of their escorting destroyers by U.S. ships and planes under the command of Lieutenant General George Kenney in the Americans’ first application of game theory to military decision making. (Kenney constructed a matrix to predict the likeliest routes that Lieutenant General Hitoshi Imamura would use to reinforce his forces, weighing the different routes with the expected payoffs.) Then Admiral Yamamoto was killed while flying on an inspection tour in the Solomon Islands in April—an operation involving four P-38 Lightnings specifically authorized by Roosevelt to assassinate the admiral. Japan lost the Aleutian island of Attu and evacuated Kiska Island in the summer. The Allies, everywhere, were on the march.

  Many of these operations were difficult, and few came without savage fighting. At Tarawa in November 1943, for example, Marines had to cross more than one hundred yards of underwater coral atoll on foot, under extreme fire, as the boats were unable to land them on the beach. Meanwhile, Army troops eliminated the last remaining Japanese stronghold on New Georgia while MacArthur’s forces advanced up the northern New Guinea coast. Bougainville in the Solomons was assaulted, and a critical airfield constructed. And to close out 1943, the 1st Marine Division went ashore at Cape Gloucester on New Britain. All of these operations were fiercely opposed, but the Japanese could no longer stop the United States from seizing whatever island it wished. Only in Burma against the British and in China were the Japanese able to make advances, and in the greater scheme of the war, the Burmese front was now meaningless.

  In the West, Roosevelt and Churchill met at the Casablanca Conference in January 1943 to work out future strategy and policies for the war. Seeking to avoid any repetition of the “stab in the back” theory developed when the Allies failed to invade Germany in World War I, Roosevelt and Churchill agreed the Axis powers had to surrender unconditionally. The Battle of the Atlantic received top priority (to supply England), and assistance to Russia received second place. Third was to continue operations in the Mediterranean, with the conquest of Sicily. Operations in the Pacific were to continue, Burma was to be reconquered (and restored to the British Empire) and the Burma Road reopened. Going along with British planning, the two heads of state put off a cross-Channel invasion of Europe until 1944, with a British general, Frederick Morgan, as chief of staff to plan the operation. This decision outraged Stalin and convinced him the Americans and British were allowing the Nazis and his Red Army to fight each other to exhaustion. Stalin had not attended the meetings, claiming that military operations kept him in Moscow, but actually he was terrified of flying and he did not trust leaving Soviet territory, lest he be overthrown.

  Casablanca saw the British gain significant advantages. Marshall and King headed the American contingent, which arrived with a skeletal staff, apparently expecting a polite, high-level discussion of strategy in which each American service, Army, Army Air Corps, and Navy, could offer its different point of view. The British, however, brought an overwhelming staff of “experts,” a general disdain for the Americans as military amateurs, and firm goals in mind. They sent a 6,000-ton liner to Casablanca before the conference to serve as a floating headquarters and communications resource, complete with technical details that would cover any proposed operation.97 Marshall and King, outmaneuvered at every turn, agreed to strategy that greatly strengthened the British in the Mediterranean and their empire. U.S. general Albert Wedemeyer put it differently: “We came, we listened, and we were conquered.”98 Nor did the British stop there. Churchill placed Harold Macmillan in Eisenhower’s headquarters to represent Britain’s political interests and to act as a spy. FDR agreed to Macmillan’s presence, and there was nothing Eisenhower could do. The infuriated King left the conference and advocated that the United States relegate Europe to second priority behind Japan. It was a Pyrrhic victory for the overreaching British, who would face ever-increasing American resentment and reluctance to give in to British points of view, as well as the willingness of FDR to side with Stalin against Churchill.

  FDR pleaded constantly for a meeting of the “Big Three,” which Stalin finally agreed could take place in Tehran, Iran, a location the Soviets could secure. This constituted the only time in his life that Stalin flew in an airplane.99 To work up a united front beforehand, the British and Americans met in Cairo (the Cairo Conference), but FDR was in poor health and in no mood for sub rosa dealings with Churchill. As a result Stalin dominated the Tehran meeting (November 28–December 1, 1943), bullying FDR, who continued to think he could talk to Stalin alone and establish a working relationship built on mutual trust. Instead, the Soviet dictator obtained everything he wanted in return for apparently agreeing to his western Allies’ war policies. Postwar Poland’s borders were fixed on the Curzon Line in the East, and the Oder and Neisse rivers in the West, effectively moving the Soviet border substantially westward. Eastern Europe was acknowledged to be in the Soviet “sphere of interest,” meaning Stalin not only could reannex the Baltic states but would also obtain control over the postwar governments of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania. Certainly throughout the negotiations Stalin knew his ace in the hole, his agents well placed in Roosevelt’s administration, could get whatever he wanted. Through Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt’s personal adviser, Harry Dexter White, the assistant secretary of the Treasury, and Vice President Henry Wallace, the KGB exercised astounding influence. What else did Roosevelt have to bargain with? Russian Lend-Lease supplies had already been guaranteed for another year on October 19 when the third London Protocol was signed. The United States had agreed to send 5.1 million tons of Lend-Lease supplies and material to the Soviet Union through the Persian Gulf and Vladivostok. For the second time the United States had been outmaneuvered and outnegotiated. Yalta and Potsdam in 1945 would complete the unbroken series of American conference defeats.

  A
lways mistrustful, Stalin never ceased to look for hidden motives in British and American actions, and when the Casablanca Conference confirmed that Britain and the United States would fritter away a year in the Mediterranean, Stalin used what he claimed was Western perfidy to build resentment in the Soviet Union against the democracies. But he scarcely would have needed it, and in a closed shop such as he ran, no other opinions were possible. Stalin’s ideas were everyone’s ideas, to the extent anyone wanted to stay alive.

  Churchill had endeavored to keep Stalin supplied no matter what. After the destruction of convoy PQ-17 to Murmansk in June of 1942, Churchill had escorted the next convoy, PQ-18, with no less than seventy-seven warships for forty merchantmen, a commitment the Royal Navy could not maintain.100 He therefore wanted to skip PQ-19, scheduled for departure on October 2. Roosevelt begged Churchill to honor their pledges to Stalin, but the best Churchill would commit was to allow eight merchantmen to leave in several groups. Only five arrived safely in the USSR. At the same time Britain and the United States proposed a plan to Stalin to help secure the Russian oil fields in the event the Red Army collapsed. Stalin concluded that if the Western allies had no supplies for his troops in the thick of the fight for Stalingrad and the Caucasus—but could spare forces to secure Soviet oil—that said much about their priorities. Nevertheless, seldom if ever in human history had essentially free peoples done so much to support and strengthen a barbaric, despotic regime, even if out of self-interest.