A Patriot's History of the Modern World (59 page)

Meanwhile, the United States rapidly built up its military might far beyond the quiet naval expansion Roosevelt had promoted since 1933 to meet Japanese threats in the Pacific. At that time the entire navy consisted of 372 ships, some 150,000 tons short of its treaty allowance, but the Vinson-Trammell Expansion Program of 1933 had authorized the addition of 1 aircraft carrier, 12 cruisers, 65 destroyers, 30 submarines, and 1,184 planes to be put into service by 1942. FDR obtained further authorization for 2 more carriers and 6 cruisers in 1936; in 1937 2 battleships were authorized; and in 1938 an additional 2 carriers, 2 battleships, 8 destroyers, 4 submarines, and nine auxiliary vessels were added, along with an increase in naval aviation to 3,000 planes.

But the real push for American military preparedness began in 1940 after the fall of France. In June, Congress voted twice to increase tonnages in literally all classes of ships. The acts provided for an increase in the Navy by 1,492,000 tons, and the total increase was planned as 7 battleships, 22 carriers, 35 cruisers, 115 destroyers, 50 submarines, 75,000 tons for auxiliary vessels, and a naval aviation strength of 4,500 planes. Clearly, the United States had grown concerned about its maritime strength. Its building program in aircraft carriers would give it a planned two-to-one advantage over the Imperial Japanese Navy in carriers by 1944 (although in reality from 1941 to 1945, America outbuilt the Japanese
seventeen-to-one
in major fleet carriers).

The U.S. Army, however, was a much different matter. In June of 1940, the American Army's authorized strength of 227,000 men was less than that of Romania.
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Even worse, the Army was nowhere near its authorized strength and most tactical units existed largely on paper. The regular Army consisted of eight under-strength infantry divisions, one cavalry division, and one mechanized cavalry brigade.
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In short, the fighting strength of the U.S. Army was smaller than that of the Dutch, who had held out only four days against the Germans. Although in theory this force was supplemented by eighteen untrained divisions of the National Guard, those units were poorly equipped with obsolete equipment. Many West Point graduates had left the service, but a hidden strength was present in that most serving officers
knew one another's capabilities and were a tight, effective core. When it came time to promote officers into positions of high command, relatively few selections would prove totally unsuitable.

After the fall of France, the Army undertook a frantic expansion. Numbers increased through the Selective Training and Service Act (draft), passed in September, and 16 million men were classified. Roosevelt federalized the National Guard in September, and by July 1941, the Army's strength had been brought to over 1.2 million men on paper, many of whom, however, remained little more than uniformed untrained mobs. This force suffered in leadership and quality as many of the best potential draftees opted to volunteer for the Navy, Marines, or Army Air Corps. Additionally, many of the National Guard officers were overage or physically unfit, and in their untrained state, leaders had to be trained alongside their men. No one knew exactly how many men would be needed, or whether the United States would go it alone: General Albert Wedemeyer postulated an army of 215 divisions in the fall 1941 Victory Program, assuming the USSR would shortly capitulate and the United States and Britain would be isolated. When the USSR survived the winter of 1941, General George Marshall and Secretary of War Henry Stimson decided that 89 divisions would be sufficient, although Japanese capabilities did not figure significantly into their calculations. These numbers are significant, even astonishing, given that the Soviets would routinely hurl 200 divisions into offensives against the Nazis, but U.S. military leaders determined that firepower, not manpower, would provide the critical edge.

Although the German army had undergone a similar rapid expansion in 1937–39, it possessed cultural advantages the United States did not have. Membership in the Hitler Youth, mandatory since 1936, prepared boys for military service, and German army units were formed by locality to enhance unit cohesion. The United States adopted a policy of thoroughly mixing hometowns and states in units to lessen the effects on a locality if the unit suffered severely in battle—as had occurred so often in the Civil War—but this greatly reduced unit cohesion without extensive training. In fact, unit cohesion was largely ignored in U.S. planning, for as soon as trainees became proficient in their duties and required skills, the best men were siphoned off to form cadres for new units. Worse, the Army's Specialist Training Program (ASTP) allowed 150,000 of the brightest (or most well-connected) men to continue college after induction (Robert F. Kennedy was one).

In addition, the ultimate capping of the army's size at 89 large divisions handicapped the maintenance of morale and effectiveness in the field. Divisions could not be rotated out of battle for rebuilding and training with replacements as in the German system, and the American replacement system resulted in excessively high casualties and reduced unit cohesion. Replacements received less training than original unit members, and when immediately assigned to a unit in combat, frequently became casualties before they could reach any state of effectiveness—sometimes they died before fellow squad members even learned their names. What the 89-division cap did do was ensure that the massive American industrial capacity would outperform all other combatants by leaps and bounds because it kept so many men in the workforce. Nonetheless, America's huge industrial and military potential went almost unnoticed by European states facing a rampaging Nazi Germany.

Having already seized Poland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Holland, France (and her North African territory), and Albania, and forced Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland into neutrality, the Axis powers became the beneficiaries of a bandwagon effect. Other nations—Hungary, Slovakia, and Romania—seeing the writing on the wall, joined the Tripartite Pact. Just as the Luftwaffe engaged the RAF in the skies over England, Italy pushed into Greece, sensing an easy conquest. That was an error which infuriated Hitler, who viewed the Mediterranean as an uninteresting sideshow. Greece fought off Mussolini's troops, and the Italians were pushed back to their Albanian bases, holding on by the skin of their teeth. So far-reaching was this debacle that the official German history of World War II titled its chapter on this action “Mussolini's Surprise Attack on Greece and the Beginning of the End of Italy's Role as a Great Power.”
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British and Australian troops hurled the Italians back out of Egypt and East Africa, then went on the offensive against them in Libya. These efforts were substantially due to Churchill's decision—against the advice of his war cabinet and the military—to reinforce Egypt with nearly half of Britain's available tanks even though they required a journey around the Cape of Good Hope. In addition, a carrier-based air attack by the British against the Italian naval base at Taranto dealt heavy damage to the Italian fleet—a success the Japanese would study in preparation for their Pearl Harbor operation. At the Battle of Cape Matapan, off Greece, three Italian heavy cruisers were sunk and another battleship wrecked, forcing Italy's navy essentially out of the war.
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With no domestic raw materials, little martial ardor, and a tiny industrial
base, Italy was more a liability than an asset to Hitler. He was forced to send forces to Libya in February 1941 to prevent Mussolini's total defeat and expulsion from North Africa, involving Germany in a debilitating and long, seesaw campaign in North Africa. He picked up Bulgaria as yet another ally in April, but not one that would provide troops or take an active part in his campaign against Russia. Meanwhile the situation in Albania deteriorated, and Mussolini begged him for another intervention to save his ally. With British advisers in Greece aiding the Greek army against Mussolini and British agents active in Yugoslavia, Hitler's southern flank was in disarray. On December 13, 1940 Hitler gave orders to plan Operation Marita (the invasion of Greece) to secure his southern flank and drive the British from the Balkans.

The necessity to clear the Balkans of unfriendly forces became urgent on March 27, 1941, when the Yugoslav government was overthrown in a coup, replacing a German-friendly regent Prince Paul with a hostile King Peter II and taking Yugoslavia out of the Tripartite Pact they had joined two days earlier. Hitler immediately ordered Yugoslavia to be conquered at the earliest possible date. Although some historians have held that Hitler's actions against Yugoslavia and Greece significantly delayed his timetable in Russia, thereby losing weeks of campaign time, others argue persuasively that Hitler's stage-wise postponement of his attack on the Soviet Union from May 16 to June 22 was primarily because of inclement weather.
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In any case, Hitler attacked Yugoslavia and Greece on April 6, easily brushing aside Yugoslav defenders of their country and ending organized resistance in a week of fighting. Greece was more difficult with over 420,000 troops in the field, but they were no match for the heavy weapons, armor, and close-in fighter-bomber support of the Germans. Greece's only hope lay in the British forces that had been concentrating there since mid-March, numbering more than 62,000 veterans from the British Desert Army in Libya and including the British 1st Armored Brigade, a New Zealand division, an Australian division, and seven squadrons from the RAF. Superior combined arms assaults by the Germans carried even the best defensive positions, including Thermopylae, forcing the British Commonwealth forces to the Peloponnesus, then from Greece altogether. By April 29 it was all over, the Greek armies had surrendered, and the British were on their way to Crete or back to Egypt.

On May 20 the Germans assaulted Crete from the air, initially taking heavy casualties in their paratroop and glider forces. Nonetheless, the paratroopers
hung on grimly, slowly clearing British positions singly and in small groups. The issue was in doubt until the second day, when the Germans began flying in reinforcements directly into Maleme airfield, which was not yet under full German control. In spite of horrendous casualties, they secured the airfield by nightfall, and a foothold on the island had been won. By June, when the British evacuation was completed, only 52 percent of the Commonwealth forces had been rescued. A myth arose about Crete to justify the Commonwealth losses: that the Germans suffered so heavily in airborne troops they never again carried out an airborne assault; however, over two years later Germany successfully employed parachute forces in the Aegean Sea's Dodecanese Islands in a campaign wresting them from British control.

As the battle for Crete unfolded, the German battleship
Bismarck
was sunk in the North Atlantic and the Axis suffered a setback in the Middle East when a pro-Nazi coup in Iraq was scotched by British troops. Shortly thereafter, the Free French helped the British invade Syria and Lebanon, solidifying some of the region for the British. But a defeat in North Africa would render those minor victories irrelevant, and the longer-term threat, no matter how remote in hindsight, was that somehow the Japanese would subdue India and join with the Germans near Iraq or Iran. Soon the German general Erwin Rommel, the “Desert Fox,” would chase the British out of most of Libya, making even the most outlandish scenario seem possible.

Fatal Misjudgment

Just as Nazi Germany and fascist Italy seemed unstoppable in Europe, Japan had continued its expansion from Manchuria southward into Longzhou, China, nearly closing off avenues for allied support of Chiang Kai-shek. The Yunnan–Vietnam Railway still allowed supplies to come from Haiphong, Indochina, to Kunming, China, and Japan took steps to seal off this lifeline. After repeated requests to the Vichy government to close the railway in French Indochina, Japan threatened invasion and Vichy gave the Japanese basing rights inside Indochina. Japanese forces quickly exceeded the parameters of the agreement. French troops fought back, but were overwhelmed and by the end of September 1940, northern Indochina was in Japanese hands.

Franklin Roosevelt, looking at the ominous developments in Europe, recognized that it would not take much for the United States to be isolated facing both Nazi Germany and Japan alone. Britain was barely holding its
own behind the moat of the English Channel, while the USSR was still allied with Germany (though acting like a neutral). Communists in the United States were singing Germany's praises because of the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, and the leftists in Roosevelt's administration only tepidly supported American rearmament.

All that changed overnight on June 22, 1941, when Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union. True to his words in
Mein Kampf
, he sought to crush Bolshevism once and for all. A few overtures to bring the USSR into the Axis had taken place in November 1940, but contrary to some recent claims by historians, those were short-term expedients at best. Hitler had no intention of permanently allying with Bolsheviks and Jews, as he characterized the Soviet Union.
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Behind the scenes, Hitler had told his generals a full year earlier that the defeat of France “finally freed his hands for his important real task: the showdown with Bolshevism.”
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Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union came as no surprise to anyone except Stalin, who had deluded himself into thinking the Germans wouldn't attack until 1942 at the earliest. He had given Hitler no reason to invade; the Soviet Union had been furnishing Germany with raw materials and food religiously since the partition of Poland, and had stood aside when Hitler gobbled up the remainder of eastern Europe, the Balkans and Greece. Although he said on May 5, 1941, that “war with Germany is inevitable,” Stalin continued Soviet economic aid to the Nazis unabated.
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