Hitler had made clear to anyone willing to read his writings or listen to his speeches that from at least 1919 he intended a Judenfrei (Jewish-free) Germany. Those who suggest he did not intend the physical extermination of the Jews ignore the consistency with which Hitler operated and the single-minded relentlessness of the Nuremberg Laws and other anti-Semitic legislation. Most of all, they ignore Hitler’s own language: he referred to Jews as subhuman, a “bacillus,” or as “parasites” on the German body. One does not reform a parasite or educate a bacillus. From his earliest speeches, he compared Jews to a disease. One does not exile a disease; one eradicates any sign of it.
Hitler’s anti-Semitism has been explained by a variety of factors, none completely convincing. His motivations are irrelevant in the long run. Hitler made clear he would elevate destruction of the Jews above even winning the war.
Following a relentless and incremental program to isolate and dehumanize Jews, Germany began systematic extermination during the invasion of Russia, where killing squads called Einsatzgruppen followed closely behind the regular army units and massacred Jews in captured towns. Hitler carefully avoided written orders on the Holocaust, and apparently other participants received unmistakable directions to keep as much as possible out of the written record. The Nazi leader Alfred Rosenberg, after a meeting with Hitler on the Jewish issue, commented on the secrecy of the program.57 Hitler’s reluctance to document his killing program, or even discuss it publicly, is demonstrated in Himmler’s speech to a group of SS officers in 1943, wherein he urged that they all “take this secret with us to the grave.”58
In July 1941, Hitler ordered (through his propaganda head Josef Goebbels) Reinhard Heydrich to enact the “final solution,” at which time some 500,000 Russian Jews already had been executed by firing squads. The term “final solution,” which some Holocaust deniers lamely have tried to argue meant relocation, was defined by Goebbels—on Hitler’s orders—to Heydrich. According to Heydrich’s assistant, Adolf Eichmann, the term meant “the planned biological destruction of the Jewish race in the Eastern territories.”59 At the time the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Hitler already controlled more than 8.7 million Jews in Europe, with orders going out the following April to round up all Jews into concentration camps.
When, exactly, FDR learned of the Holocaust remains murky. Reports had already reached public newspapers by 1942, and it is likely he knew at that time. At least one early cable, to the State Department’s European Division, detailed the atrocities, yet was met with “universal disbelief,” and was suppressed by Paul Culbertson, the assistant division chief.60 Certainly the latest date at which Roosevelt could claim ignorance was November 1942, by which time “an impressive collection of affidavits and personal testimony” had descended upon the State Department.61 Most scholars agree that by 1943 at the latest he had solid information that Hitler planned to exterminate the entire Jewish population of Europe even if it cost him the war to do so. Polls showed that more than 40 percent of all Americans at the time thought Hitler was systematically slaughtering the Jews.
For years, Roosevelt had “devoted a good deal of rhetorical sympathy to the Jews, but did nothing practical to help them get into America.”62 He had at his disposal a multitude of executive orders, bureaucratic options, and even arm-twisting with Congress, yet FDR—often accused by critics of being blatantly pro-Jewish—turned his back on Europe’s Jews in their darkest hour. No special immigration waivers, exemptions, or other administrative manipulations were employed; no lobbying of allies in Latin America or elsewhere occurred, asking them to accept more Jewish immigrants.63 The Anglo-American Bermuda Conference, ostensibly called to offer some relief, was a “mandate for inaction.”64 Roosevelt claimed that attempting to change immigration policies would result in a lengthy and bitter debate in Congress. Backed by a Treasury Department report, and amid growing public concerns that the United States should act, FDR established a War Refugee Board with limited resources and a broad mandate not specifically directed at Jews. While it facilitated the escape of perhaps two hundred thousand Jews, the government did little else.
The most recent student of the failed refugee policies, David Wyman, concludes, “The American State Department…had no intention of rescuing large numbers of European Jews.” He points out that even under existing administrative policies, the United States admitted only 10 percent of the number of Jews who legally could have been allowed in.65 Roosevelt’s indifference was so “momentous” that it constituted the “worst failure of [his] presidency.”66 That said, FDR’s policy nevertheless demonstrated rigid consistency: he pursued victory over German armies in the field in the most narrow sense, pushing aside all other considerations.
Ironically, Roosevelt’s lack of concern for the Jews seemed to matter little to his Jewish supporters, who remained loyal to the Democratic Party despite the president’s unenthusiastic responses to Zionist calls for the creation of the state of Israel. Had FDR not died in April 1945, it is doubtful whether Israel would have come into existence at all, as one of his assistants noted.67 Neither he nor his State Department supported the formation of a Jewish state in Palestine. The British Foreign Office opposed it, despite signing the Balfour Declaration in 1921 guaranteeing the creation of a Zionist state; the defense departments in both the United States and Britain opposed it; and most business interests opposed it, wishing to avoid any disruption of Middle Eastern oil flow. Many American politicians worried about the influence of the “Jewish lobby.” Secretary of Defense James Forrestal referred specifically to American Jews when he wrote that no group should “be permitted to influence our policy to the point where it could endanger our national security.”68
On April 12, 1945, Franklin Roosevelt, in Warm Springs, Georgia, to prepare for the upcoming United Nations conference, died of a cerebral hemorrhage. Hitler, delusional to the end, thought that with FDR’s death, the Americans would pack up and go home. Instead, the constitutional process worked perfectly, as Vice President Harry S. Truman took the oath of office as the new president. Repeatedly underestimated, Truman hardly elicited confidence from the New Deal inner circle. David Lilienthal, head of the TVA, described in his diary a “sick, hapless feeling” when it dawned on him who would replace Roosevelt.69 Harold Ickes, the secretary of the interior, worried that Truman “doesn’t have great depth mentally.”70 Truman, as dogged as Roosevelt about bringing the war to an end, nevertheless differed from FDR in his view of the Soviets—he neither liked nor trusted them—and was much more supportive of an Israeli state. By then it was too late to do much about the Holocaust, or about the communist occupation of most of Eastern Europe.
Thus, the two nonmilitary issues that could have shaped American strategy in World War II, Soviet empire building and the Holocaust, both turned on the decision by the U.S. government—from the president through the chief of staff to Eisenhower—to concentrate narrowly upon winning the war as quickly as possible. That view no doubt had its roots in the significant isolationism before the war. The United States defined the Second World War in strictly military terms, and remained completely consistent in the pursuit of military victory to the war’s last days and through two different presidents. In the Pacific, the narrow focus maintained a relentless demand for the unconditional surrender of the Empire of Japan. Japanese leaders ignored those demands at a terrifying cost.
On to Japan!
Following Midway, Admiral Chester Nimitz and General Douglas MacArthur controlled the skies in the Pacific and, for the most part, the seas. Japan had lost too many trained pilots and too many ships and aircraft at Midway to oppose the steady string of island invasions that followed. Instead, Admirals Yamamoto and Nagumo conserved their naval forces, still hoping for a single Tsushima-style “big battle” that would give them a decisive victory.71
Guadalcanal, some six hundred miles southeast of the main Japanese staging base at Rabaul, soon emerged as the key to driving the Japanese out of the island chains. Japan ha
d tried to build an airfield there, leading the United States to send 19,000 marines to eliminate the threat. In August 1942, less than a year after the Japanese thought they had put the American fleet out of action, eighty-nine American ships landed thousands of marines on Guadalcanal. Japan launched an immediate counterattack by the imperial navy, forcing the American support fleet to withdraw. The stranded marines were on their own. For four long months, Japanese banzai attacks hammered the leathernecks until they were rescued by Admiral William “Bull” Halsey. After the Japanese defeat, and their failure to retain the airstrip, in just over twenty-four hours the Seabees (navy construction batallions) had aircraft flying out of Guadalcanal. The victory was as momentous as the Midway success farther to the north in May, and it was quickly followed by the Australian-American invasion of Port Moresby on New Guinea.
Provided with air cover from New Guinea and Guadalcanal, MacArthur implemented his strategy of bypassing many of the more entrenched Japanese fortifications and cutting off their lines of supply and communications. Island hopping played to American strengths in numbers of aircraft and ships while at the same time minimizing U.S. casualties. In several encounters, American air superiority caused devastating losses for Japan. An important blow was delivered to the Japanese at Tarawa, an island defended to the death by forces dug into honeycombs of caves and tunnels. “A million men cannot take Tarawa in a hundred years,” boasted its commander, but it took only 12,000 Marines four days to secure the island.72 It was not easy. At “Bloody Tarawa,” the United States suffered one of its highest casualty tolls, losing 983 marines killed and 2,186 wounded, but positioning American forces to strike the key Japanese naval base at Truk.73 All but about 100 of the nearly 5,000 defenders died, refusing to surrender. “Here was an army unique in history, not because it was sworn to fight to the last man, but because it very nearly did.”74
Japan tried one last time to deliver a crushing blow at sea to the U.S. Navy, in June 1944. Admiral Soemu Toyoda, by then in charge, planned an ambitious attack with his heaviest battleships and waves of aircraft. Before the Japanese could even get into action, American ships had sunk two carriers, and waves of Japanese strike aircraft were shot down in what was labeled the “Marianas Turkey Shoot.” Japan lost 445 pilots, which, when combined with the losses at Midway, virtually eliminated any Japanese naval air activity for the rest of the war. Then, in the fall of 1944, the U.S. Navy wiped out the remainder of the Japanese fleet at the Battle of the Philippine Sea.
Bloody struggles over Iwo Jima and Okinawa remained. Despite heavy losses in each battle, MacArthur’s casualty ratio in the Pacific was lower than any other general’s in any theater. The success of island hopping reflected the clear superiority of American technology and U.S. wartime manufacturing capability, and enabled U.S. forces to achieve casualty ratios similar to those of Europe’s colonial era. At the same time, the staggering number of American casualties on Okinawa convinced U.S. planners that an invasion of the Japanese home islands would be extremely costly, and in the long run the lists of dead from Okinawa made Truman’s decision on the atomic bomb fairly easy.75
Since November 1944, American bombers (the new B-29 Superfortresses) had attacked the Japanese home islands from bases in the Marianas. Japanese radar installations on Iwo Jima alerted interceptor aircraft of the approaching B-29 formations, and the defenders inflicted sharp losses on the bombers. Iwo Jima not only provided an early warning system for the Japanese, but it also offered the potential of a landing field for the B-29s if it could be captured. The four-mile-long island, defended to the death by the 21,000–man garrison, featured a honeycomb of caves in which the Japanese hid. In February 1945, U.S. Marines stormed ashore to little resistance. Ordered to hold their fire until the invaders actually got on the beaches, the defenders sat through an awesome bombardment, which nevertheless did little damage to the entrenched and camouflaged Japanese troops. Once the marines were on the beaches, however, the U.S. Navy had to lift much of its bombardment, allowing the Japanese to open fire. Still, the marines moved in steadily, and on February twenty-third, a patrol scrambled its way to the top of Mount Suribachi, where it raised a small American flag—too small to be seen by the troops below. Later, another larger flag appeared; five marines and a navy medic raised the flag, captured in the classic photo by Joe Rosenthal of the Associated Press, and later reproduced as the bronze memorial to the U.S. Marines at Arlington Cemetery. Taking the island had indeed exacted the fearful cost the Japanese general had expected, with some 7,000 Americans killed, including 5,900 marines. Only 200 of the 21,000 defenders surrendered.
With Iwo Jima as a base, the bombings of Japan intensified. In March a B-29 raid on Tokyo destroyed a quarter of a million homes in the most destructive single bombing mission of the war. Astonishingly, the Japanese still refused to surrender. That required the invasion of Okinawa, just 350 miles south of Japan. Like Iwo Jima, Okinawa was defended with suicidal fervor, including generous use of the kamikaze (divine wind) suicide planes. Contrary to the myth that Japanese airmen had to be forcibly strapped into the planes, the pilots of the kamikazes volunteered for missions in which they would crash their small aircraft full of bombs into an enemy ship. One life for a thousand, the strategic reasoning went. The standard kamikaze aircraft, called baka bombs by the Americans (baka is Japanese for idiot), consisted of four-thousand-pound rocket vehicles dropped from manned bombers to be guided by their human pilots to a divine explosion on the deck of a U.S. carrier. Clouds of kamikazes—up to 350 at a time—swept down on the Okinawa landing force. Gunners shot down the incoming suicide planes in vast numbers, but enough got through that 34 ships were sunk and another 368 damaged. The attacks just about emptied Japan’s arsenal, since more than 4,200 were shot down. Meanwhile, the American invasion forces pressed on, and by June, Okinawa was secured.
By that time, only Emperor Hirohito was pressing his Supreme War Council to seek peace, although recently released Japanese documents have questioned how sincere this “peace offensive” was. Hirohito himself vacillated between resistance and surrender.76 Surrounded by American submarines, which had completely sealed off Japan and prevented importation of any raw materials from China, the country was now subjected to heavy air bombardment; and having lost virtually its entire navy, it faced direct invasion. Within the Japanese hierarchy, however, a sharp division arose between the military commanders directing the war, who had no intention of surrendering, and a peace or moderate faction. The warlords carried the day.
In June 1945, Japanese military leaders issued Operation Decision, a massive defense plan of the home islands in which some 2.5 million troops, backed by a civilian militia of 28 million, would resist the American invaders with muzzle loaders if necessary. Women “practiced how to face American tanks with bamboo spears,” according to Japanese historian Sadao Asada.77 Almost 1 million soldiers would attack the Americans on the beaches, supported by midget submarines used as manned torpedoes and more than ten thousand suicide aircraft, many of them converted trainer planes.
Aware that no hope for victory remained, the warlords promised to fight to the bitter end, and they treated the Potsdam Proclamation, issued in July by the United States, Britain, and China, with utter contempt. Although the Potsdam Proclamation stated that the term “unconditional surrender” applied only to military forces, it also made clear that Japan’s home islands would be occupied, that she would lose all overseas possessions, and that a new elected government would have to replace the imperial military rule. One sticking point that remained was the fate of Emperor Hirohito, whom the Japanese people, in the tradition of the Shinto religion, regarded as a god. Would he be a war criminal subjected to the same kinds of trials as the Nazi killers, even though the Allies had specifically exempted Hirohito from reprisals? And even if he was exempted, would that change the opinion of the same warlords who had ordered the Rape of Nanking or the Bataan Death March? Reports had already leaked out about Japanese treatment of prisoners o
f war and Asians trapped inside the Japanese Empire. As the Allied noose tightened, the Japanese became even more brutal toward their prisoners. In Burma and elsewhere, Japanese slave-labor camps, though lacking the merciless efficiency of the Nazis, nevertheless imitated them in a more primitive form, stacking masses of bodies on teak logs and firing the pyres. As one observer reported,
When the bodies started to char, their arms and legs twitched, and they sat up as if they were alive. Smoke came out of their burned-out eyes, their mouths opened, and licks of flames came out….78
Ground Zero
On July 16, 1945, at a desolate spot 160 miles from Los Alamos, New Mexico, the United States tested a weapon that would make even the most hardened and suicidal Japanese leaders change their minds. The device, referred to by the Los Alamos technicians as the gadget (and never as an atomic bomb), represented an astounding technological leap and an acceleration of the normal peacetime process needed to do the job by a factor of three, compressing some fifteen to twenty years of work into five. Yet the test was only that, a test. No bomb was actually dropped. Instead, a device sitting atop a huge tower in the New Mexico desert was detonated through cables and wires from bunkers thousands of yards away. Few, however, were prepared for the fantastic destructive power released at the Trinity bomb site on July sixteenth. A fireball with temperatures four times the heat of the sun’s center produced a cloud that reached thirty-eight thousand feet into the sky while simultaneously turning the sand below into glass. The cloud was followed by a shock wave that shattered windows two hundred miles away and hurricane-strength winds carrying deadly radioactive dust, the dangers of which few perceived at the time. Brigadier General Thomas Farrell reported that the air blast that came after the fireball was “followed almost immediately by the strong, sustained, awesome roar which warned of doomsday and made us feel that we were puny things, were blasphemous to dare tamper with the forces heretofore reserved to The Almighty.”79
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