War Stories III

Table of Contents

 

 

 

INTRODUCTION

M
ore than fifty-five million people were killed in World War II. Seven times that number were wounded, injured, or suffered serious deprivation. The global war affected people on every continent except Antarctica, and arguably caused greater political, cultural, and demographic change than any other armed conflict in the human record.

In this book and the accompanying DVD are the personal, eyewitness accounts of American and Allied men and women who lived through the epic battles of the European theater during this brutal conflict. Their stories are inspirational—yet most of these heroes are unknown except to their families and neighbors. Their first-person accounts serve as a reminder that the price of liberty in blood and treasure can be very high indeed.

For more than forty years, it has been my privilege to keep company with heroes—those who place themselves at risk for the benefit of others. All of us involved in these
War Stories
books—and the award-winning FOX News documentaries on which they are based—are dedicated to preserving for posterity the record of people like these in this volume who have served on the front lines of freedom.

These World War II participants are now in their twilight years. Most are in their eighties and nineties and they will not be with us much longer
to share their stories—for they are dying at the rate of about 1,000 a day. I am grateful that we were able to capture these priceless narratives while there was yet time, as a legacy for future generations of our great nation.

This book was also written at a time when brave men and women, serving at home and abroad, are once again engaged in an armed struggle against a deadly foe. Like Hitler and the other Axis leaders, today's adversaries are brutal, murderous, and fanatically refuse to abide by civilized rules or laws. These stories from the past are replete with lessons to teach us about our country's future, and the principles that govern and guide us despite the passage of time.

In 1941, Winston Churchill spent Christmas in Washington, D.C. He came to the United States in secret, but at the lighting of the national tree on Christmas Eve, President Roosevelt asked him to say a few words. Churchill urged all Americans to “cast aside, for this night at least, the cares and dangers which beset us and make for the children an evening of happiness in a world of storm.”

“Let the children have their night of fun and laughter,” Churchill said. “Let us grown-ups share to the full in their unstinted pleasures—before we turn again to the stern tasks and the formidable years that lie before us, resolved that by our sacrifice and daring these same children shall not be robbed of their inheritance or denied their right to live in a free and decent world.”

In the days after Churchill's remark, nearly all Americans would experience stern tasks and be called to daring deeds. Whether for those who saw these heroes firsthand, or those who know of them only through the shared stories of family and friends, this book can help bring insight, understanding, pride, and even closure. From 1941 to 1945, almost every American family had a loved one—brother, father, husband, son, sister, or daughter—who served in some capacity during World War II. Theirs are
War Stories
that deserve to be told.

Semper Fidelis,
Oliver North
21 October 2005

CHAPTER 1

WAR CLOUDS 1938–1941

W
orld War II in Europe was both inevitable and preventable. It was a war started by a military dictator who came to power not by a coup, but by the ballot box. One man—Adolf Hitler—precipitated the carnage, and he was able to do so because the German people and the democracies of the world were unwilling to confront his growing evil until it was too late.

A World War I veteran, unsuccessful artist, and failed businessman, Hitler was a charismatic demagogue, xenophobe and racist. From 1919 to 1923, with Germany reeling in the chaotic political environment after World War I and crippled by reparations imposed by the Treaty of Versailles, he and a half-dozen other political unknowns organized the nucleus of what was to become the National Socialist—or Nazi—Party.

In the autumn of 1923, the French army occupied the Ruhr River valley, Germany's industrial heartland, in an effort to force Berlin to pay its World War I reparations. The value of the German currency plummeted and Hitler convinced himself—and several thousand followers—that the hyper-inflation and French “invasion” had created conditions conducive to a coup that would bring down the national government.

The “Beer Hall
Putsch,
” in Munich on 9 November 1923, failed miserably. Had Hitler and his co-conspirators been sentenced to lengthy jail terms, that might well have ended any threat that he and his
Sturmabteilung
—the “SA,” brown-shirted “Storm-troopers”—posed to the Weimar Republic and the security of Europe. But as it turned out, he only served nine months, just enough time to dictate his political manifesto,
Mein Kampf
(My Struggle) to his leading accomplice Rudolf Hess, a fellow World War I veteran.

Once freed, Hitler spent the next eight years building a political machine—and a 400,000-man private army. In the elections of 1932, the Nazi party won more than 37 percent of the vote and a plurality of seats in the
Reichstag,
the German parliament. Beset by the catastrophic effects of the worldwide “Great Depression,” six million unemployed workers, and the rising specter of Communist-inspired revolution, Paul von Hindenburg, a World War I hero and the figurehead president of the republic, installed Hitler as chancellor on 30 January 1933.

 

Nazi brownshirts saluting Hitler (1935).

The following month the Reichstag was destroyed by fire. The Nazis claimed that the fire had been set by Communists and used the incident to pass the infamous “Enabling Bill,” which suspended legislative authority and gave Hitler near absolute power to make new laws. In June of 1934 he had all of his rivals in the SA brutally murdered, and when Hindenburg died in August of that year, Hitler combined the offices of chancellor and president in a new post:
Führer.
From that moment on, war was practically inevitable.

Hitler immediately set about consolidating his hold on absolute power. By 1935 his public works projects: railroads, motorways (he called them
autobahnen
), airports, military conscription, and armaments industries, had cut German unemployment to a fraction of that in the rest of the world. Meanwhile, Europe's leaders did little but debate about what to do about the growing menace in the heart of the continent.

The French, alarmed at Hitler's withdrawal from the League of Nations and his unilateral abrogation of the Versailles Treaty, did little but double the term of service for their army conscripts and speed up work on their border fortifications—the Maginot Line. The British, in the first of many acts of appeasement, agreed that Germany was no longer bound by naval restrictions imposed by the Versailles Treaty. In Moscow, Josef Stalin was busy purging his military and establishing a totalitarian police state that oppressed, tortured, and killed millions. In Rome, Hitler's philosophical ally and fellow fascist, Benito Mussolini, was engaged in his own imperial ambitions in Africa. Militarism and expansionism also gained ground in Asia, as the Japanese expanded their territorial ambitions in the heart of China from Manchuria, which it had occupied in 1930.

Emboldened by the impotence of his neighbors, in March 1936, Hitler sent troops into the “demilitarized” Rhineland, in violation of the Treaty of Versailles. In October that same year, Hitler and Mussolini signed the Rome-Berlin Axis Agreement—expanded a year later to include a military agreement under the so-called Anti-Comintern Pact—pledging military support to one another in the event of war with the Soviet Union.

In late 1937 the Führer also reorganized the German military and established a new strategic command structure—the
Obercommando der
Wermacht
(OKW)—and put himself at its head. In November of that year, Hitler convened a secret conference in the Reich Chancellery, where he outlined for his cabinet and senior military commanders his plan to gain
Lebensraum
—“living space”—for the “Aryan” race, a term for the German people that he'd first articulated in
Mein Kampf
.

The broad strokes of Hitler's plan called for expanding German territory to the east, seizing resources, “purifying” German-held territory of “non-Aryan” peoples and “confronting Communism.” In his grand plan for creating a “Third Reich,” he envisioned massive propaganda campaigns, the use of disinformation to spread fear, the use of espionage operations in an enemy's heartland, and “lightning stroke” military maneuvers to overwhelm adversaries without the static attrition that had characterized combat in World War I. He correctly surmised that the French would have to be beaten militarily but wrongly assumed that both the Soviet Union and Great Britain could be cowed into submission.

The Führer's strategic premise—that the Western democracies would be powerless to stop the German juggernaut—was supported by assessments of his military intelligence service, the
Abwehr
. By the time he finished laying out his plan for European domination, no one in the Nazi party had any doubt that Hitler was ready for war.

On 12 March 1938 Germany annexed Austria in what the Führer called an
Anschluss
—or “re-unifying annexation.” The European democracies filed a diplomatic protest. When Hitler arrayed his army on the border of Czechoslovakia that September, Neville Chamberlain and Édouard Daladier—the British and French prime ministers—flew to Munich in an effort to appease the German dictator. On his return to London, Chamberlain, quoting an old hymn, promised that they had secured “peace for our time.” Less than six months later, on 15 March 1939, the grey-clad, jack-booted
Wehrmacht
marched into Prague, Czechoslovakia, without resistance. Only then did the British and French start serious preparations for war.