The Smart Aleck's Guide to American History

by Adam Selzer

  Rosie the Riveter, one of the best pieces of war propaganda ever (and one we can still be proud of today). As the men of America went off to war, women took their places in the factories on the home front, showing that they could do anything men could do. Of course, after the war ended, they were expected to head right back to the kitchen.

  To keep the army from running out of supplies, common household items were rationed, and therefore hard to get. People were encouraged to turn in anything made of tin, steel, rubber, or aluminum so it could be used to build weapons.

  Taxes during the war were high; practically everyone agreed that paying higher taxes during wartime was necessary for the war effort. Roosevelt’s attempts to impose a hundred percent income tax for income over $25,000 (meaning that $25,000 was the maximum anyone could earn—if you earned $100,000, $75,000 would have gone to taxes), however, were unsuccessful. No one was that patriotic.

  There was no question that the war was good for the economy. Countless factories were converted for military use, and anyone who was out of work could sign up for the army—the military would take pretty much anybody. The last lingering effects of the Depression were wiped away.

  Americans at home weren’t quite as affected as the home-bound British, who were getting bombed back to the Stone Age as Hitler launched a series of blitzkriegs, or bombing raids, on London. Initially, Hitler had ordered the Nazis not to attack London, but, after someone got the wrong memo and did it anyway, the Royal Air Force countered by bombing Berlin. The Germans countered by bombing London again. And the Royal Air Force countered by … well, you get the idea. Over the course of the war, these bombing raids claimed the lives of thousands of innocent civilians on both sides.

  In England, the entire country participated in blackouts. Windows were covered in thick black fabric, and outside lights were painted black to make it more difficult for German planes to find anything to bomb. City parents, fearful of bombings, sent their children to live with strangers in the country; anyone with an extra room was expected to house an evacuee. People carried gas masks wherever they went. And people were encouraged to eat potatoes, skins and all, as often as humanly possible, because potatoes contain a lot of nutrients and didn’t have to be imported. Lord Woolton, the British food minister, never seemed to shut up about potatoes. A popular rhyme of the day reminded people to eat potatoes with the skins still on, “knowing that the sight of peelings / Deeply hurts Lord Woolton’s feelings.”

  Few people worried that Japan could ever attack the mainland United States, seeing as how it was protected by the Pacific Ocean. According to legend, Jack Warner of Warner Bros. worried that his studio looked too much like Lockheed, the aircraft manufacturer that was a likely target of any theoretical bombings, from the air. To ensure the safety of his studio, he painted a big arrow with the words LOCKHEED THATAWAY! on the roof. This is probably just an urban myth, though. If it’s true, no one seems to have thought to get a picture of it.

  Rationing was a lot harsher in England, too. At one point, people were allotted only one slim bar of soap per month and only five inches of water per bath. Nylon stockings were outlawed, since nylon was needed for parachutes; some women simply painted their legs brown to make it look like they were wearing stockings. Many even painted a seam. Clothing factories were eventually shut down to free factory workers to join the army.

  But while it wasn’t quite as rough in America, where only people on the West Coast had to worry even a little about being bombed, everyone was expected to pitch in, and people found all sorts of ways to help the war effort, from going to work in munitions factories to turning in household goods made of metal for use in tanks.

  AND IN EUROPE

  While soldiers in the Pacific set up camp around Asia to prepare for an attack on Japan, millions were sent to Europe and North Africa to help stop Hitler.

  The “Big Three”: Winston Churchill, FDR, and Stalin. Stalin was at least as big a jerk as Hitler, but was on the Allies’ side at this point.

  In early 1943, Roosevelt met up with British prime minister Winston Churchill to put together a strategy for the eventual invasion of Europe. All they were prepared to do at the time was defend England and the other countries that Hitler hadn’t taken over yet, but they knew that sooner or later they were going to have to launch an invasion to liberate the countries Hitler had taken over and eventually take over Germany itself.

  Hitler, meanwhile, had invaded Russia, which was a huge mistake. The Battle of Stalingrad, in which Germany and its allies fought Russia for control of the city, raged for a good six months and is sometimes considered the bloodiest battle in human history. Casualties reached something like a million and a half.

  The Nazis were able to handle the Russian army, but not the Russian winter. In late January, when the Russian army captured a group of about ninety thousand German soldiers, it was the first time a German officer had surrendered to any army. The soldiers were taken prisoner, and all but about five thousand died; starvation and freezing caused massive amounts of German fatalities. The Allies still probably would have won the war eventually (spoiler alert: they did), but it would have taken a lot longer if Hitler hadn’t invaded Russia. Napoléon had made the same mistake back in 1812. So let this be a lesson to those of you who plan to take over Europe in a ground war: don’t plan on Christmas in Moscow.

  TOP HITS OF THE DAY

  This was the era of the Big Band and singing groups such as the Andrews Sisters. One thing the whole Smart Aleck Staff agrees on is that World War II had the best music of any major war. Very few songs about the war are remembered today, though a few, such as “Remember Pearl Harbor” and “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition,” were popular in their day. Some other good songs from the war include “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy,” “We’ll Meet Again,” “Lili Marlene” (which was popular with both the Allies and the Nazis), “Miss Pavlichenko” (an upbeat tune by Woody Guthrie—go find out who Miss Pavlichenko was!), and “Right in der Fuhrer’s Face,” recorded by comedian Spike Jones (this became the sound track for a cartoon rarely shown nowadays in which Donald Duck dreams he’s a Nazi). Go on our Web page for audio clips!

  Soldiers, meanwhile, continued their custom of writing naughty and gory parodies of popular songs. One, “Blood on the Risers,” which is set to the tune of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” tells in great detail the story of a parachuter whose chute doesn’t open:

  He hit the ground, the sound was “Splat,” his blood went spurting high,

  His comrades all were heard to say: “A hell of a way to die!”

  He lay there rolling round in the welter of his gore,

  Now he ain’t gonna jump no more!

  Gory gory, what a hell of a way to die.

  Gory gory, what a hell of a way to die.

  Gory gory, what a hell of a way to die.

  He ain’t gonna jump no more! 53

  Meanwhile, back on the home front in England, schoolchildren sang “Hitler Is a Jerk” to the tune of “Whistle While You Work,” including verses so naughty that we can’t print them if we don’t want parents outside Smart Aleck Headquarters with torches, but you are, as usual, free to look them up yourself. Many of them were first heard on school playgrounds, after all.

  AND IN FRANCE

  Crack all the jokes about the French you want (actually, we here at the Smart Aleck’s Guide don’t recommend making any ethnic jokes, even about the French), but people who worked for the French Resistance during World War II were tough as nails.

  While the Nazis occupied their country, most French people just lived their lives the same way they had before the Nazis had shown up—or at least they tried to. The rations and curfews imposed by the Nazis were awfully harsh, but the French, like the British, rolled up their sleeves and tried to make do. They had to be awfully tough just to keep going.

  People from every possible walk of life joined underground resistance groups that worked to aid the Allies, establish escape
routes, and generally annoy the crap out of the Nazis. As the Nazis imposed harsher terms on the French—including censoring their news, bombarding them with propaganda, and occasionally razing entire villages that they decided they didn’t like—the number of people serving in the Resistance grew.

  THE NAME OF THE WAR

  At first, no one called the war World War II; most people just called it the war. When he had to give it a specific name, Roosevelt would usually call it the Tyrants’ War or the War for Survival of Democracy. Eventually, in 1945, when the war was nearly over, he asked Secretary of War Henry Stimson to pick an official name, and his choice, World War II, stuck. We here at the Smart Aleck’s Guide think it was a stupid idea on his part. When you give something a name like World War II, it sort of implies that there’s going to be a third one sooner or later.

  Hitler gets his picture taken at the Eiffel Tower in 1940. Ten bucks says he cut in front of everyone else in line at the gift shop. That’s just the kind of guy he was.

  One of the biggest jobs of the Resistance movement was spying. Resistance spies would check out what sort of fortifications the Germans had set up around the shore and relay the information to the Allies in the form of coded messages that were broadcast over the radio.

  Sabotage was also important. One of the most effective ways the French found to antagonize the Nazis was to destroy the railroads so that the Germans couldn’t use them. At first, the Resistance movement built their own bombs, but eventually found it easier simply to steal dynamite from the Nazis. Quite a bit of track was blown up before they figured out that removing the bolts holding the rail to the ground worked just as well in the long run.

  And make no mistake—this was seriously dangerous business. By one estimate, the life expectancy of anyone actively working for the Resistance in France was about six months.

  D-DAY: JUNE 6, 1944

  The most difficult task facing Allied troops was invading Europe itself. Throughout 1943 and early 1944, bombing raids were carried out all over Europe, but bombing a country from an airplane and actually taking it over via ground invasion are two different things.

  The invasion of Normandy had to be kept a closely guarded secret.

  Invading and taking back France and the rest of Europe had been a major war goal since the beginning of the war, but the French coastline was heavily fortified by German artillery. The Allies were faced not only with the task of preparing one of the most massive military operations in history but also with doing so in such a way that the Germans, stationed only miles away from the British coastline, wouldn’t know what was going on.

  At the 1943 conference in Tehran to plan the invasion, Churchill noted that the plans must be protected by “a bodyguard of lies.” To keep the Germans guessing, the Allies set up a couple of invasion plans: Operation Bodyguard, which was designed to make the Germans think the Allies were invading later than planned, and Operation Fortitude, which was to make them think Norway would be invaded first.

  The real invasion was named Operation Overlord. Quite a few pieces of information about the operation were leaked. For example, the word “overlord” appeared in a crossword puzzle in British newspapers the day of the invasion, which seemed like quite an alarming coincidence to officials. They quickly brought the guy who wrote the puzzle in for questioning. However, while the Germans knew that something called Operation Overlord was going on, they had no details about it and eventually brushed it off as just another phony plan meant to distract them.

  General Eisenhower gives the troops the ol’ thumbs-up. Apparently, what he’s actually saying here is “Go get ’em, Michigan,” to a soldier from that state.

  General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was in charge of the invasion, was nervous about the whole thing. He felt that there was only about a 50 percent chance that it would be successful. But on June 5, he rallied the troops, and early the next morning, 150,000 men sailed and parachuted onto the beaches of Normandy. Within a couple of weeks, more than 600,000 troops had stormed the beach, bringing with them over 200,000 tons of supplies.

  Casualties were high; about ten thousand Allied soldiers were captured, wounded, or killed. But in the end, the invasion was a succcess. The Battle of Normandy was a decisive victory for the Allies. Churchill announced that while the war was far from over, the invasion marked “the beginning of the end.” Or at least “the end of the beginning.”

  SO, NOW WHAT?

  Soon there were around a million Allied troops on the Continent, slowly driving the Nazis back to Germany. But it wasn’t going to be easy to finish the job.

  Efforts on the part of the French Resistance to blow up the railways around France had been very successful in keeping the Germans from using them, but there was a drawback: once the Allies landed, they couldn’t use them, either.

  Some soldier starting writing “Kilroy was here” wherever he went. Who this was, or what it really meant, is one of those things that people argue about. In reality, several people were probably doing it; others seem to have copied whoever was doing it first, as the phrase soon showed up all over the world. If you write it on the wall at school, you can claim that you’re paying tribute to American forces in World War II! As usual, don’t come crying to us if you get in trouble.

  In August, the Allies regained control of Paris, but pushing farther through France was a difficult task. However, the German high command soon began to realize that defeat was inevitable.

  Things were looking up in the Pacific, too. General MacArthur and his men finally returned, as promised, and dealt the Japanese navy a major defeat at the Battle of Leyte Gulf. There were still no plans for an actual ground invasion of Japan on the table, but the Japanese had to rely increasingly on kamikaze attacks—suicide missions in planes full of explosives. These attacks would eventually kill an estimated one hundred thousand American soldiers.

  Back on the home front, Roosevelt was doing something no one else had ever tried: running for a fourth term as president. In 1940, he had been so popular that when he decided to run for a third term (though no one had ever won one before), the Republicans decided that they might just as well run someone with a name like Wendell Willkie against him. Roosevelt defeated Willkie pretty handily.

  The Battle of the Bulge. Camouflage is pret-ty useless in the snow.

  In 1944, the Republicans ran Thomas Dewey, the governor of New York, against Roosevelt, and Roosevelt again won easily, despite the fact that he was deathly ill by then. He had always been a sick man, of course, but now doctors were pretty sure he was dying. We don’t want to spoil the end of the chapter for you, but he would only live a few months into his fourth term.

  THE BATTLE OF THE BULGE

  In December of 1944, shortly after Roosevelt won his record-shattering fourth term, the Germans launched one last offensive. Because this surge looked like a bulge cutting into the Allied lines, the fight became known as the Battle of the Bulge.

  By this time, the Germans knew they were never going to win the war. Hitler’s idea was that if he hit the Allies hard enough, they’d agree to just leave him alone rather than invading Germany. The Allies had no intention of letting Hitler remain in power under any circumstances, so the whole surge was a waste of time on Hitler’s part.

  The attack caught the Allies with their pants down and caused about nineteen thousand American deaths in the first few days. But in another way, the Nazis played right into the hands of the Allied forces. Running extremely low on fuel, the Allies were having a hard time pushing into France, and with the Battle of the Bulge, the German army kind of solved the problem for them. They couldn’t get to the Germans, so the Germans came to them.

  This isn’t to say that it wasn’t a rough battle, though. The Battle of the Bulge consisted of a couple of weeks of harsh fighting in the forest of Ardennes, which was freezing cold and covered in snow.

  The Allies had figured that the Germans were planning an attack at some point, but the Ardennes Offensive, as the German oper
ation was officially called, really took them by surprise; perhaps they thought Hitler had learned his lesson about fighting in cold weather when the winter ravaged his troops in Russia. But learning lessons just wasn’t one of Hitler’s strong points.

  The element of surprise took its toll on the Allied defense, and the battle became the bloodiest that America fought in the war. Some twenty thousand Allied soldiers were killed, and another sixty thousand or so were wounded, captured or missing by the end of it. In the first three days, a couple of U.S. infantry divisions were even forced to surrender.

  Midway through the battle, German forces encircled Allied forces near the town of Bastogne in Belgium, and the German commander sent a note to General Anthony McAuliffe, who was in charge of the Allies in the town, asking for him to surrender with honor to keep them from blowing up the entire town. McAuliffe responded by saying, “Nuts!”

  The message was sent to German officers, reading, “Nuts—the American commander.” Soon, German officers appeared at the camp to ask him exactly what the heck he meant. He explained that it meant that he wasn’t about to surrender.

  It took a couple of weeks for the Allies to halt the German offensive, but at the end of it, the German supply lines were heavily depleted. Since they were also unable to stop the Russians from advancing on their eastern border, Germans found themselves under attack from both the east and the west without enough weapons left to defend either side. The war was coming to an end.

  THE HOLOCAUST: JUST HOW BAD WAS HITLER?