Those Who Have Borne the Battle (17 page)

The army air forces also tended to be attractive to young volunteers. And up until 1943 this special branch of the army had “skimming” privileges that permitted them to take army draftees with the highest scores on qualification tests. The army air forces ended up playing a major role in the war, particularly in Europe, and by 1944 2.4 million men and women served in the AAF.

The B-17 Flying Fortresses were the mainstay of the bombing campaigns in Europe, though they proved far more vulnerable than air planners expected. In 1943 the Eighth Air Force lost about 5 percent of its planes on every mission. Two-thirds of all airmen did not complete their
tour of twenty-five missions. The B-24s provided some greater flying range, but this resulted in even more dangerous missions.

As perilous as this service was, it was effective. The army air forces and the British Royal Air Force controlled the skies over Europe by the late spring of 1943, which was a major factor in the success of the Normandy landing and the campaign that followed. More than 88,000 airmen died in the war, but by the end of combat operations, this army unit had proved its strategic value and a separate service branch, the air force, was established in 1947.

The navy evolved quickly during the war from a battleship strategy to one emphasizing more and more the role of airpower. The development of carriers provided a significant tactical strength that the navy utilized particularly in the Pacific, despite the opposition of “old navy” officers, including Pacific Fleet commander Admiral Chester Nimitz. Carrier aircraft inflicted a significant defeat on the Japanese in the Battle of Midway in June 1942. The United States lost 180 carrier aircraft in this battle, and the Japanese lost 332. By the end of the war, the carrier dominated naval operations and engagements.
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In 1945, more than 3.4 million men and women were serving in the navy. The navy lost 32,925 enlisted men and 36,950 officers to combat deaths.

The Marine Corps had focused in the 1920s and 1930s on amphibious warfare, building upon its historical and institutional linkage with the navy. By 1940 it had developed the Fleet Marine Force as its mobile light infantry assault force. Marine leadership also had developed a tactical air division. When World War II began, the army and senior military leadership at the Pentagon did not value highly the Marine Corps assault troops and assigned them to the Pacific rather than to Europe. The tension between the marines and the army that had begun during World War I had not abated in the interwar years.

There were some 50,000 marines in December 1941, following a buildup in strength over the previous year. Marines recruited aggressively and effectively—weekly enlistments jumped from a prewar high of 552 to 6,000. The marines expanded by 45,000 in the three months after Pearl Harbor, and the quality of recruits improved as well. By war's end there were 475,000 marines.

World War II confirmed and validated the role of the Marine Corps. Intense battles and remarkable courage at Guadalcanal, Peleliu, Tarawa, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and several other Pacific islands became part of the American war narrative. The marines were adaptable, disciplined, and tough light infantry fighters—and they benefited from a slower buildup to European action and a skilled public relations group. As one marine historian noted, “If the central Pacific campaign was the supreme test of amphibious doctrine, it was also a media event of unparalleled drama for American war reporting. And it was the Marine version of the war that largely dominated the press.”
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American military planning for the war focused heavily on using airpower, both carrier based as well as land based, tanks and armor, and punishing artillery. Senior officers were reluctant to focus on massive infantry tactics if machines could reduce the casualties. Americans assumed that technology could reduce the terrible losses that marked the Civil War and World War I—as well as the Soviet-German conflict on the eastern front of World War II. Adrian Lewis, a military historian and retired army officer, described it this way: “While the army's most basic tenet was that man was the ultimate weapon on the battlefield, ground combat was the least desirable American way of war. American beliefs about manhood, battle, and war were at odds with the value placed on young American lives, a value that compels Americans to expend every resource, almost unconditionally to remove man from the battlefield.”
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There is little doubt that technology, especially tactical airpower and armor, did take on some of the combat burden. However, there is also little doubt that troops in the field finally were essential to victory. Major General Walter Smith wrote in an army training memorandum of 1943:

In the first weeks of the war, some communities held farewell parties to acknowledge those who were going off to military service. But “as the war went on the departures came with less fanfare. For one thing, there were so many of them; then, too, the increasing number of family men preferred to say their good-byes privately, in the warmth and intimacy of their homes. But most of all, departing draftees did not care for patriotic send-off ceremonies.”
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Robert Leckie wrote about leaving his home in New Jersey to join the marines in January 1942. His dad accompanied him to the shipping center in New York. “Breakfast at home had been subdued. My mother was up and about; she did not cry. It was not a heart-rending leave-taking, nor was it brave, resolute—any of those words that fail to describe the thing. It was like so much else in this war that was to produce unbounded heroism, yet not a single stirring song: it was resigned. She followed me to the door with sad eyes and said, ‘God keep you.'” After arriving at the New York induction center, “My father embraced me quickly, and just as quickly averted his face and left.” Six months later Robert Leckie sailed with his unit from San Francisco, and in August he was on Guadalcanal.
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The mobilization for this war was comprehensive, and the armed services ultimately met their manpower objectives. Essentially, all age-eligible males were in the pool, even the foreign born who were in the United States illegally. During the war some 16.3 million men and women served in the US armed forces: 11.2 million in the army, including the army air forces; 4.1 million in the navy; and 669,000 in the marines. There were 333,000 women in the military. By war's end, the army was thirty times its 1940 size, and the navy was twenty times its size in 1940.

The average serviceman had completed more years of education than his civilian counterpart. One careful student of the draft concluded that
“the best and brightest did not evade service.”
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Another study confirmed the absence of educational or economic bias in combat. In fact, higher-income and better-educated communities had higher casualties. This was largely the result of the draft and enlistment standards, but it also related to the high casualty rates in the navy and army air forces.
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The military in World War II represented a cross-section of the population. The armed forces expected at least fourth-grade literacy—in two months in the summer of 1941, draft officials rejected 90,000 men who did not meet this guideline. There were also higher expectations for fitness and medical condition. Over the war, some 5 million men failed to pass the physical exams. All of the evidence suggests that these men who failed Selective Service examinations were more likely to be from poorer communities.
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Charles Milton “Stubbie” Pearson graduated from Dartmouth College in 1942. A native of Madison, Minnesota, Pearson excelled in college as a student and as an athlete, serving as captain of football and basketball teams and graduating Phi Beta Kappa. He was the valedictorian for his class, which graduated early due to the war. Ninety-one percent of his Dartmouth Class of 1942 would serve in the armed forces. Speaking at the commencement ceremony, Pearson urged that no one feel sorry for his generation: “We are not sorry for ourselves. Today we are happy. We have a duty to perform and we are proud to perform it.” He reminded his class that their task was to end the war and then to make the world a better place. “A tomorrow with a ray of sunshine more bright than we have ever seen before.” He hoped to teach or work in education to accomplish this. As a navy pilot in the Pacific, Stubbie Pearson wrote home that war was not glorious, but “a dirty, predatory, slimy job that must be done.” Recipient of the Distinguished Flying Cross for his performance in naval battles at Truk and Palau, he died at the latter place when his SBD Dauntless dive-bomber was hit by antiaircraft fire while attacking a Japanese destroyer. Thirty-three of his Dartmouth classmates, 5 percent of the number who matriculated as freshmen in 1938, would also die in the war.
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Celebrities and stars served in this war. Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Robert Montgomery, Clark Gable, and Jimmy Stewart all enlisted. Stewart and Gable served in the army air forces on combat missions over Europe;
Stewart was a pilot, and Gable served as a gunner on B-17s (Nazi leader Hermann Göring offered a five-thousand-dollar reward to any pilot who shot Gable down). William McChesney Martin, the president of the New York Stock Exchange, was drafted. And sports stars such as Bob Feller, Ted Williams, Phil Rizzuto, and Joe Louis were 1-A and eligible for early conscription. The American public was not supportive of any special treatment for celebrities.

In September 1942 Glenn Miller was thirty-eight years old, too old for the draft. Though Miller was one of the most successful band leaders in the United States, he disbanded his orchestra and joined the army. Certainly, he forfeited millions in earnings by taking this step. He said, “I, like every patriotic American, have an obligation to fulfill. That obligation is to lend as much support as I can to winning the war.” Miller said that he had been privileged to live in the United States as a “free man,” and now he would help to protect “the freedom and the democratic way of life we have.”
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Glenn Miller led the army air forces orchestra—a forty-two-man marching band—as well as a nineteen-person dance unit, a radio outfit, a string ensemble, and a small jazz combo. He and his groups engaged in bond drives and entertained troops in the United States and overseas. His band did not play military music but played popular swing that bore Glenn Miller's musical trademark. It evoked sentimental images of home and of women at home. Miller said that the American GI wanted “songs he used to know played as he used to hear them played.” Glenn Miller was tragically lost when a small plane in which he was flying went down over the English Channel in December 1944.

The Glenn Miller story has many of the elements of those themes that define the American memory of World War II. He was selfless and sacrificing and patriotic, ending up a casualty of that “good war.” But his story also opens a page to some of the less heroic annals of this war. Miller's music stressed a “clean-cut” swing, and his approach, as one scholar noted, “worked with the government policy of military segregation and its desire not to disturb deeply held racial values.”
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His music was clearly influenced by black music of the era—but his orchestra and groups were all white. Black entertainers such as Duke Ellington and
Count Basie along with people like Benny Goodman resisted this segregation. Glenn Miller and the army air forces band did not.

 

 

The US military was segregated in World War II; there were some all-black units in the army. In the first part of the war the navy and marines did not take any black members. So in a convoluted system, embarrassingly inconsistent with the values for which the United States was fighting, the army had “race-specific” quotas. It issued these to the Selective Service, which then were passed along to establish state and local board goals.

This policy resulted in significant problems in draft calls. It was based on a principle that discriminated against blacks—and had ironically an additional consequence of discriminating against whites, who were disproportionately called up in most communities. Because blacks served only in segregated units and because there were at the outset few of these units, the demand for black inductees was lower. For example, in one month there were eleven hundred whites drafted in Washington, DC, while no blacks were called up.
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Selective Service director Lewis Hershey, who became a negative symbol to draft protesters during the Vietnam War, pressed both Secretary of War Henry Stimson and even President Roosevelt on this matter. He wrote to the president, “It is obvious we must sooner or later come to the procedure of requisitioning and delivering men in the sequence of their order numbers without regard to color.” Neither Stimson nor Roosevelt responded.
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Once inducted, black draftees as well as black volunteers had to deal with significant racism. It was a deeply rooted racism that was sharpened by American society and politics of the 1930s and 1940s. It was a racism that, as in World War I, failed to recognize the distinguished service of black combat units in the nineteenth century. The racism was compounded by the fact that most military bases were in the South.