Frederick Krantz
Two dates this month, December 7, the 78th anniversary of Japan’s surprise 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, and December 16, 1944, the beginning of the Battle of the Bulge, have come and gone, little noticed and, sadly, generally unremarked. The first, the ”date that will live in infamy”, as FDR termed it, marked the entry of the American colossus into the Second World War, which for Great Britain and the Commonwealth had already begun on September 1, 1939, with the German invasion of Poland. The second initiated Wacht Am Rhein, the “Watch on the Rhine”, the last great German offensive on the Western front, which had it succeeded might well not only have prolonged the war, but even split the Allies.
Churchill, who after the fall of France in June, 1940 had fought on, alone, recalled in his memoirs (1950) that, upon hearing of the Japanese attack, “I knew the United States was in the war, up to the neck and into the death. So we had won after all…Hitler’s fate was sealed. Mussolini’s fate was sealed. As for the Japanese, they would be ground to powder.” Hitler, who in losing the Battle of Britain lost decisive air superiority over the Channel, crucial to the success of Operation Sea Lion, had abandoned the invasion of Great Britain, and had already turned eastward, invading Russia in June, 1941.
On December 11, 1941 the Fuehrer made a second major mistake, declaring war gratuitously and prematurely on the United States. He was convinced that the U.S., now preoccupied in Asia with Japan, would not be “a threat to us in decades—not in 1945 but at the earliest in 1970 or 1980”. Wanting to strike at US Navy ships already escorting Lend-Lease fortified Britain-bound convoys, Hitler now enabled Roosevelt, who had already assured Churchill that Europe would come first, to maximize American military and industrial production.
In January, 1942 $52 billion of the $59 billion budget ($9 billion in 1940) presented to Congress by FDR was devoted to military production, a sum which would rise steadily across the war. As the historian Andrew Roberts notes (The Storm of War. A New History of the Second World War), by 1945 the U.S. was fielding a military of 14.9 million, as against 269,023 in 1941 (the world’s seventeenth largest, and smaller than Romania’s).
And the cumulative production figures are staggering: By 1945, 296,000 aircraft, 147 aircraft carriers, 932 warships, 88,000 landing craft, 86,333 tanks, 351 million metric tons of bombs, 12.5 million rifles, with 1941-1945 military budgeting totaling $180 billion, or 20 times the 1940 amount.
By early December 1944, as the Russians pushed ever westward, Allied armies under General Dwight D. Eisenhower and led by American Generals George Patton and Omar Bradley and the British victor over Rommel, Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, had reconquered France. About to push into Germany itself, bets were being taken on whether the war might well be over within six months or less.
And then, on December 16, 1944, pushing (as in June, 1940) in complete secrecy and surprise through the Belgian Ardennes Forest , the weakest point in the Allied line, 50 SS Panzer-led German divisions, 500,000-men strong, sought to split the US and British armies along a north-south axis through St. Vith and Bastogne. The plan: to drive to the Rive Meuse and then on to the great prize, the Allies’ key supply-port, Antwerp. and the English Channel.
Hitler, rejecting the cautions of his leading generals, Manteuffel and Rundstedt, rolled the dice in one last, desperate move, hoping to extricate himself from the two-front vise in which his forces were trapped by dividing and destroying the Allies in the west, and then turning and blocking the Russian advance from the east. He attacked (as severe snowstorms and the worst cold in a generation blocked hitherto decisive American airpower) in the weakest sector of the 80-mile-long front, initially over-running several inexperienced or weakened American divisions (with SS outfits committing atrocities against captured US troops, executing 100 captured prisoners at Malmédy).
The initial rapid German advance, running out of fuel and steam, slowed, stalling before the dangerous “Bulge” in the American line, at the crucial cross-roads town of Bastogne. There the 101st Airborne’s desperate defense, under Brigadier-General Anthony C. McAuliffe, blocked the German advance. Their imperious demand that the isolated Americans surrender, was met by McAuliffe’s eternal reply, “Nuts!”.
And then the weather turned, American fighter-jets scrambled (2,000 sorties on Christmas Day alone), and General George Patton’s armored divisions, quickly turning north to relieve Bastogne, helped transform the situation. “A clear, cold Christmas”, said the inimitable Patton, “lovely weather for killing Germans…the Kraut’s head is stuck in a meat-grinder, and I’ve got hold of the handle”.
The great winter offensive (the second such “surprise” suffered by the Americans in World War II, after Pearl Harbor) was largely spent by the second week of January; by the 28th, the “bulge” was in the Germans’ line, as they quickly retreated east, One hundred thousand of their 500,00 troops were dead, wounded or captured; almost all of the preciously-husbanded 1,000 Luftwaffe planes with which they had begun the attack were lost, along with the bulk of the German armor (including many of their best, 68-ton, Tiger heavy tanks). Allied casualties were similar, but with one major difference—they were, given the Allied manpower pool and combined industrial might, relatively easily replaced.
As a result of “Watch on the Rhine” German resources against the Russian offensive were seriously weakened–never again would the Wehrmacht be able to mount a major effort; soon,
on April 25, 1945, Allied and Russian troops would link up at Torgau, on the Elbe River, Berlin would fall, and the war in Europe would indeed be over. Hitler, by committing yet another strategic mistake, had, once again, contributed to Allied victory.
The U.S. not only fought a global war simultaneously on two fronts, against Germany and Italy in Europe and Japan in the Far East (what Victor Davis Hanson’s recent study calls The Second World Wars), it supplied trucks (800,000), tanks (37,000), planes (43,000), innumerable ships, artillery, munitions and foodstuffs to the Allies, including China and, above all, Russia.
The Red Army—after initial reverses and aided by the earlier Allied invasions of North Africa and Italy, and above all of France, begun with the great amphibious landings in Normandy in June, 1944 and the defeat of Hitler’s last great offensive at the Bulge in December, 1944-January, 1945–rolled over the Wehrmacht in eastern Europe and Germany and into Berlin. (And it rolled, one should note, in tens of thousands of Studebaker and Dodge trucks, with Ivan, the eponymous infantryman, eating canned American food known generically in Russian as “spam”.)
As Roberts observes, “if Britain [fighting on alone after the fall of France in 1940] had provided the time, and Russia the blood [over 27 million fatalities, military and civilian—of every five Germans who died in battle in WWII, four died in Russia], it was America that produced the weapons [including, finally, the atomic bombs which brought the Pacific war to an end in August, 1945].”
In 1942, Hitler’s Foreign Minister Ribbentrop, who had lived in the U.S., playing to his Nazi boss’s fantasies, averred “I know them [the Americans]; I know their country. A country devoid of culture, devoid of music–above all, a country without soldiers, a people who will never be able to decide the war from the air. When has a Jewified nation like that ever become a race of fighters and fighter aces?”
Such fantastically mistaken illusions, shattered along with many others, and not least by the Americans’ valiant victory in the Ardennes snow-drifts over the best the Nazis could throw at them, underlay the final, smoldering defeat of the Third Reich in bombed-out Berlin. There, as Russian shells exploded on the Chancery building above his underground bunker, Der Fuehrer committed suicide on April 30, 1945.
Europe had indeed “come first”, to paraphrase FDR, and Japan would soon follow, falling–to the relief of war-weary European-theater Allied soldiers fearing transfer to the East–not to a final cataclysmic invasion of the Japanese mainland, estimated (after the fanatical to-the-death Japanese defenses of Iwo Jima and Okinawa) to cost a million casualties, but to air-dropped atomic devices named Little Boy (Hiroshima, August 6) and Fat Boy (Nagasaki, August 9).
Emperor Hirohito broadcast the surrender to his nation on August 14, followed on Sunday, September 2, 1945 by General Douglas MacArthur taking the formal capitulation, in Tokyo Bay, on board the battleship USS Missouri (named after President Harry Truman’s home state). Six years and a day after the German-Nazi invasion of Poland, and after over fifty million civilian and military deaths, including the Holocaust genocide’s Six Million, the Second World War, the greatest catastrophe in all human history, had finally ended.
(Prof. Frederick Krantz is Director of the Canadian Institute
for Jewish Research, and Editor of the Isranet Daily Briefing).
