1942: The Year That Tried Men's Souls

  In 1936 Hitler made his move. He marched troops into the Rhineland, a direct violation of the Versailles Treaty, which had set up that area along the French-German border as a demilitarized zone. The French and British squawked but did nothing. Hitler, for his part, made a series of false promises such as: “We have no territorial intentions in Europe. ... Germany will never break the peace.” Thus was the pattern Hitler repeated until the outbreak of total war, and it very often worked. He even tricked old Arnold Toynbee, best known among British historians, who returned from a visit with Hitler convinced of “the Fuhrer’s sincerity in desiring peace in Europe and close friendship with England.”8

  True to form, Hitler next marched on Austria and annexed it to the Nazi empire; again the Western democracies did nothing. It was true that the Austrians did not resist and many even welcomed Hitler’s storm troopers with flowers and cheering, but it was another flagrant violation of the Treaty of Versailles. Next it was Czechoslovakia’s turn, and both England and France were finally and thoroughly alarmed. Czechoslovakia had been carved out of the old Austro-Hungarian empire in accordance with the Versailles settlement. Hitler had been making threatening gestures toward this peaceful neighbor ever since the Anschluss (the annexing of Austria), and France was actually sworn by treaty to protect it, but was unwilling to do so without British support. The British now began to feel they were being slowly sucked into a war on the continent that they did not want, and during the month of September 1938, there was a sort of collective foot stomping and hand wringing throughout the United Kingdom.

  Der Führer’s pretext this time was that there were some three million German-speaking citizens living in Sudaten Czechoslovakia who were unhappy at being separated from their Fatherland. Meantime, the British government was desperately seeking some way to placate Hitler. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who not only had suffered the abomination of the First World War but had lost two close relatives in it, went on a last-minute journey to Munich to dissuade Hitler from dismantling Czechoslovakia. He failed miserably. Hitler wound up persuading Chamberlain to agree that Germany could control all Czech areas in which German-speakers were a majority. Here was a perfect example of the old Arab proverb about never allowing a camel to get its nose into your tent lest the rest of the camel soon be inside as well. In any case, the Czechs themselves were not consulted in this betrayal.

  The tall, bowler-hatted, wing-collared, umbrella-carrying Chamberlain arrived back in London waving the agreement with Hitler and declaring “peace in our time.”* For the most part the British and the French held their noses but also managed to breathe a sigh of relief. One of those who did not sigh with relief was Churchill, who declared, “We have passed an awful milestone in our history ... the whole equilibrium of Europe has been disarranged.”9 He denounced the Munich agreement as cowardly, and in a towering prophetic rage he roared, “The government had to choose between shame and war. They have chosen shame, and now they will get war.”

  As if on cue six months later, in March 1939, Hitler’s storm troopers moved in and annexed all of Czechoslovakia, including its vast armament factories at Skoda and elsewhere. Again the British and the French governments did nothing, but it was becoming painfully clear, in places high and low, that Hitler had to be stopped. Then, in August 1939, Hitler pulled off one of the most breathtaking diplomatic coups of all time. Nazi foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop concluded with the Soviet government a ten-year “nonaggression” treaty, thus making Hitler’s rabid anti-communist regime an ally of the world’s most powerful communist power. This news shocked the world and more than befuddled leftists and fellow travelers. In the United States, for example, the Communist organ The Daily Worker, which for years had been preaching of the dangers Hitler posed, fell suddenly silent, but then quickly took up the Soviet line that Nazi Germany was now a good friend and no action should be taken to restrain Hitler.

  For his part Chamberlain, who had consistently blocked all attempts to rearm Great Britain in the face of Hitler’s threats, now warned that the British armed forces were “not strong enough” to take on the Germans. Nevertheless, he agreed to a treaty with France pledging that if Hitler should attack Poland, both countries would come to her aid. In September 1939 Hitler did exactly that—overrunning Poland in a matter of weeks—but Britain and France did not come to Poland’s aid at all. Instead they declared war on Germany, then squatted along their own lines of defense to await developments, which were not long in coming. Meanwhile, Germany’s new ally Communist Russia also maliciously marched into Poland and took about half the country as spoils of its own, at the same time making a grab for the small Baltic Sea nations on its border, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia.*

  For the next seven months the action between the Allies (Britain and France) and their German antagonists took place mostly at sea, with each side losing a battleship. This came to be known as the Phony War, because correspondents who knew of the mayhem of the Western Front in the 1914-1918 war naturally expected more of the same. Meantime, Germany set about gobbling up the small Scandinavian countries Denmark and Norway.

  Then on May 10, 1940, with a stunning swiftness that would startle the world as Blitzkrieg (lightning war), Nazi tanks and infantry smashed through neutral Holland and Belgium and headed for France. Chamberlain was forced to resign, with the words “peace in our time” still warm on his lips. He had embraced the shame of Munich and could not be trusted to fight the war Winston Churchill had predicted. The British Parliament named Churchill prime minister that same day. It took Hitler just over a month to crush France, which surrendered under the absurd understanding that the French could continue governing a small part of the nation, as well as its foreign colonies, from the inconsequential town of Vichy. This so-called Vichy government became internationally recognized as merely a puppet regime of the Nazis, who could abolish it at any time (and eventually did so). Nominally, Vichy was headed by the ancient field marshal Henri-Philippe Petain, the so-called Hero of Verdun during World War I, who was then in his dotage and dusted out of retirement as a figurehead. It was actually run by a right-wing lawyer and media mogul named Pierre Laval, whose cooperation with the Nazis spilled over into collaboration; after the war he was stood up to the firing squad.

  Mussolini, meantime, promptly declared war on France and England in order to get in on the plunder. A British army of 300,000 that had gone to France to help out was isolated by the German onslaught and narrowly escaped destruction by a miraculous evacuation from the cross-Channel port of Dunkirk.

  With France securely in his grasp, Hitler then contemplated his invasion of England, which thankfully never came off. Knowing that no invasion could succeed without knocking out the British will to fight, Hitler launched the Battle of Britain with mammoth air strikes against England’s cities and ports, especially against the mostly working class of London’s East End. He had concluded that the common British people, whom he had scornfully lumped among those in the category of “weak and decadent democracies,” would soon rise up against their government in the face of massive bombing attacks. Fortunately for the British, their military had been able to establish powerful air defenses, built around a new English invention called radar, as well as fast, maneuverable, and high-flying fighter planes, the Hurricane and the Spitfire. Churchill later described this as the “wizard war,” because technology and new arms helped the British shoot the Germans out of the skies by the hundreds.

  Less than a year after razing thousands of buildings and killing tens of thousands of British civilians, Hitler sourly abandoned (at least temporarily) his plan to conquer England by invasion and turned without warning upon his erstwhile partner in crime, Stalin’s Soviet Union, with a monstrous assault along a two-thousand-mile front. Although he did not yet realize it, Hitler had become like the sorcerer’s apprentice, who had set the broom to hauling water and then forgot the spell to turn it off.

  Chapter Two

  Until Commodore Matthew C.
Perry sailed his sleek black-hulled United States naval squadron into Tokyo Bay on July 8, 1853, and anchored under the looming eminence of Mount Fujiyama, the island kingdom of Japan had remained the most remote civilized nation on earth. In the nearly six hundred years since the great Kamikaze (divine wind) had blown up across the Sea of Japan to sink and scatter the ships of an invading Mongol army, its shogun rulers had decreed that no foreigners would ever touch the sacred shores of Japan.

  Commodore Perry changed that in a hurry by running out his big cannons and firing off a thirteen-gun salute over the heads of the startled Japanese on shore, followed by his unheard-of demand to see the mikado. Menaced by U.S. military might, the illustrious sovereign shogun agreed to accept in the name of his emperor a letter from President Millard Fillmore that offered the mysterious and medieval Japanese ruler “friendship and commerce” with the American people. Perry then sailed off, only to return some months later with a full fleet of twenty-four warships bearing gifts of whiskey, champagne, women’s velvet fashions of the day, modern tools, guns, a telegraph, a steam engine, pictures of New York City, and an English-language dictionary. Thus Perry was able to “sail triumphantly home, having brought ‘a mighty empire into the family of nations without bloodshed.’”*1

  Perry’s feat launched a chain of events that, in some fifty years, would change the world and then, in less than fifty years more, would change it again, and not for the better. The opening of Japan to international trade had a profound effect on its leaders and, consequently, on all its citizens. The old feudal system was replaced with a national monarchy under the “boy emperor” Meiji, who began incorporating Western science, customs, and military technology into the Japanese culture at such an astounding rate that by the turn of the century Japan had become a powerful modern state, which was likewise astounding to the rest of the modern world. Unfortunately, her role model would be the Prussian government (from eastern Germany’s warlike province), which inspired her new constitution and government administration.2 Tens of thousands of silk farmers harvested their cocoons for the looms of the many new silk factories, which shipped this valued staple to nations far and wide. Railroad and telegraph systems soon connected the country; a modern banking system made the economy boom; and their diplomats were dispatched to capitals throughout the world. The Japanese purchased large warships from the British and were trained to use them by British officers. Their new Imperial army was modernized with the latest in weaponry and was trained by German officers.3

  The Americans provided teachers and missionaries to improve the Japanese school system, and Japanese students were soon attending prestigious colleges and universities in the United States. The Japanese took to copying eagerly and shamelessly whatever they thought useful from the modern Western nations. A perfect example: In the late 1930s an American engineer named Stanton wanted to bring two gigantic electric generators to Japan. In mid-Pacific the ship was threatened by a typhoon and Stanton ordered that the generators, which had two huge holes bored into each leg to bolt them down, immediately have two more holes bored and bolted to better secure the generators from breaking loose in the rough seas. He and the generators arrived in Japan intact. When Stanton returned to Japan ten years after the Second World War he visited a number of electrical generating plants throughout Japan. At each site he was amazed to see that every generator was an exact copy of the two he had originally brought over, right down to having four holes bored in each of its legs.4

  The Japanese also began copying the principles of imperialistic expansion so much in vogue among the Western powers in the second half of the nineteenth century. In the words of her own foreign minister at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, “Japan saw that success, not to say survival, meant empire, and forthwith she set about attaining one.”5 Beginning in 1894 she sent her armies to Korea, as well as to the vast Chinese island of Formosa and the southern part of Manchuria. Alarmed, the Russians, with a country a hundred times the size of Japan, forced the Japanese to retreat from Manchuria, then took the entire country for themselves. But the Japanese were not to be denied. In a chilling parallel to the Pearl Harbor raid thirty-seven years later, Japan in 1904 launched a sneak naval torpedo attack that annihilated the Russian Oriental Fleet, including two of the czar’s largest battleships, which had been lying at anchor at Port Arthur. Only afterward did the Japanese bother to declare war. Fighting broke out immediately in Manchuria between the Japanese and Russian armies, and the Japanese quickly got the better of it, laying siege to Port Arthur and causing a hundred thousand Russian casualties at the Battle of Mukden.

  One year later the Japanese defiantly faced the much larger Russian Baltic Fleet, which had steamed halfway around the world to suppress the upstart Orientals. It was the worst naval defeat in modern history. Twenty-two Russian warships were surprised by the Japanese fleet and were sent to the bottom during the Battle of the Tsushima Straits, including four new Russian battleships. Seven other Russian battleships struck their colors and were captured. In a blazing barrage of two thousand shells per minute at least four thousand Russian sailors were killed (some say six thousand), at a cost to the Japanese of a few patrol boats. Thus was the world awakened to the fact that Japan was now a military power to be reckoned with.

  The Russo-Japanese War also marked the first stirrings of anti-American sentiment in the new and prideful Japanese empire. American victory in the Spanish-American war of 1898 had ceded to the United States the vast Philippine Island archipelago, as well as outposts in such remote places as Guam and Wake Island, all of which were in East Asian waters uncomfortably close to the Japanese homeland. President Theodore Roosevelt was one such person “awakened” to the dangers of the growing conflict in East Asia. Japanese armies were driving the Russians fiercely in Manchuria but, after fifteen months of total war, Japan was at the end of her resources. Russia, on the other hand, at the losing end of a humiliating series of defeats, was also anxious to end the war.

  Into this diplomatic tangle stepped TR to mediate between the two warring powers. Japanese and Russian diplomats met with the president first at Sagamore Hill, his home in Long Island’s Oyster Bay, and then, curiously, were taken by (separate) U.S. Navy cruisers all the way up to the small town of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to get down to business. The Japanese, holding the winning hand, at least so far as military victory went, were hard bargainers. They issued a long list of “nonnegotiable” demands, including a really sticky one calling for war reparations. Russia said it would not pay and Japan insisted it pay or fight. They haggled for weeks, but at long last Roosevelt persuaded the Japanese to drop the demand for a war indemnity and a treaty was signed between the two combatants.

  Roosevelt was hailed as a peacemaker and a master diplomat by everybody in the world—except the Japanese. In Tokyo people rioted in the streets and Japanese newspapers shrieked that even though Japan had won the war she had been cunningly swindled out of her just deserts by the president of the United States. Even the president’s daughter Alice was treated with coolness when she traveled there for a visit.

  Worse to come were Japanese accusations of racism by the United States. The Japanese had been immigrating to America—many of them illegally—in increasing numbers until by the early 1900s they were arriving at the rate of a thousand per month in California alone. West coast newspapers began shouting warnings about the “yellow peril.” This prompted the San Francisco Board of Education in 1906 to issue an order segregating all Japanese schoolchildren from the white student population. Moreover, the California legislature had passed a resolution that branded Japanese immigrants as “immoral, intemperate [and] quarrelsome.”6 Not only that but workers in California began rioting and beating immigrant Japanese who, they claimed, were willing to work for “coolie” wages, thus putting them out of their jobs.

  Roosevelt was aghast and sent emissaries from Washington out to California to ameliorate the situation, but little was accomplished. In the Japanese Diet (parlia
ment) there was loud and angry talk of declaring war on the United States, fueled further by reactionary newspapers in Tokyo. Moreover, Japan began to order new warships from Europe, including one of the new dreadnought-class battleships from England. Diplomatic relations between the two countries chilled considerably and Admiral George Dewey, hero of the Spanish-American War, warned that Japan, at present, could capture with impunity the Philippines, Hawaii, and all other U.S. possessions in the Pacific.

  Roosevelt, whose motto, “Speak softly and carry a big stick,” had become a slogan in the American lexicon, now decided to wield his stick. He ordered all sixteen of the U.S. Navy’s battleships freshly painted white and sent around the world on a “goodwill” cruise. What he was aiming at was to demonstrate to the Japanese, in the most highly visible way, that the United States was no pushover—the supreme example of gunboat diplomacy.

  On December 16, 1907, the Great White Fleet, as it soon came to be known, set sail from the Chesapeake Bay in the wake of a 336-gun salute* to the president, who was on hand for its departure, headed south for Cape Horn and thence into the Pacific Ocean. Even before the Great White Fleet arrived in Japan, it had created a change in attitude among those in the Tokyo government. In what was diplomatically called a “gentleman’s agreement,” Japan at last agreed to sharply curtail the immigration of its citizens to the United States. As if by magic the recent animosities seemed to melt away and by the time the Great White Fleet reached Yokohama its sailors were greeted by throngs of cheering Japanese and showered with gifts.