America at War (Part II)

1. Chapter 8 (Part II)

3.  Once the United States entered the European theater in 1942,
the decision to be made was where to start?
 A cross-channel invasion of Europe?
 An invasion of French North Africa?
 With Churchill fundamentally opposed to any invasion of
Western Europe and Stalin still a political wildcard, Roosevelt
could see no alternative to a North African invasion.
 Once they had fully committed themselves to Operation Torch,
Roosevelt and Churchill appointed Dwight D. Eisenhower to
command the operation.

4. In 1951, Truman endorsed
Eisenhower as a
presidential candidate and
pushed him to run as a
Democrat; however, he
declared himself and his
family as Republicans.
Eisenhower is responsible
for the creation of the
Interstate Highway System.
The loblolly pine, known as
the “Eisenhower Pine,” is
located on Augusta’s 17th
hole, approximately 210
yards from the Masters tee.

5.  Eisenhower and the British high command agreed to land
along the Atlantic coast in Morocco and Algeria.
 The U.S. Western Task Force would land at Casablanca, Morocco.
 Combined Central Task Force would land at Oran, Algeria.
 Combined Eastern Task Force would land at Algiers, Algeria.
 The Allies tried to convince the French military and naval
commanders in North Africa not to resist the landing.
 This would allow the gain to be quick and bloodless; however, many
of the French officers in North Africa were loyal to the Vichy
regime and resisted the Allied landing.
 Eventually, the French offered a cease-fire and joined the Allied
movement.

7.  Once the Allies landed, they raced to the strategic position of
Tunisia.
 A month prior, Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery led a
powerful assault on a Nazis garrison at El Alamein sending
Erwin Rommel and his panzer divisions reeling to Libya.
 If the Allies could reach Tunisia, Rommel would be trapped
between them and Montgomery’s troops.
 In March 1943, the U.S. II Corps, under Major General George
S. Patton, led a coordinated assault with Montgomery on the
German Mareth Line.

8. Montgomery traveled with
his pets: two puppies named
“Hitler” and “Rommel” and a
cage of canaries.
Montgomery often criticized
his wartime comrades,
namely Eisenhower, whom
he accused of prolonging the
war through poor
leadership.
Montgomery was stripped of
his honorary citizenship of
Montgomery, Alabama for
his criticisms of Eosenhower.

9. Rommel earned the
nickname the “desert fox”
for being the most able
commanders of desert
warfare in world history.
He is regarded as being a
humane and professional
officer; Rommel was never
accused of war crimes
against opposing soldiers,
Jewish or not.
Rommel committed suicide
with a cyanide pill after
being linked to a plot to
assassinate Hitler.

10. Patton’s address to the
Third Army in 1944, prior to
the Normandy Landings, is
considered to be the one of
the greatest motivational
speeches of all time.
In December 1945, Patton
was paralyzed in a car
accident and died in his
sleep of a pulmonary edema.
Patton was laid to rest in
Hamm, Luxembourg
alongside his wartime
casualties of the Third Army.

11.  In early April, American and British forces met and squeezed the
Axis into the northeastern tip of the country.
 On May 7, British armor entered Tunis as the American infantry
entered Bizerte.
 Six days later the last Axis resistance in Africa ended with the
surrender of over 170,000 troops.
 Though it was a loss, Nazi forces in Tunisia lengthened the Allied
operation in North Africa to such an extent that a cross-channel
invasion in 1943 was no longer possible.
 Once again, Roosevelt accepted Churchill’s proposal that the Allies
concentrate on additional offensive operations in the Mediterranean,
specifically an invasion of Sicily.
 In return, Churchill approved the massive buildup for a cross-channel
invasion in 1944.

13.  As the Tunisian campaign came to a close, British intelligence
officers managed to pull off one of the most successful wartime
deceptions ever achieved – Operation Mincemeat.
 In April 1943, a decomposing corpse was discovered floating off
the coast of Huelva, in southern Spain.
 Personal documents identified the corpse as Major William Martin
of the British Royal Marines and attached to his wrist was a black
attaché case.
 When Nazi intelligence learned of Martin’s briefcase and
British efforts to retrieve it, they did all they could to gain
access.
 Although Spain was officially neutral in the conflict, much of its
military was pro-Nazi, and assistance came from Madrid.

14.  Spanish and Nazi officials found a letter from military
authorities in London to a senior British officer in Tunisia,
indicating that an Allied force (mostly American) were
preparing to cross the Mediterranean from their positions in
North Africa and attack German-held Greece and Sardinia.
 The Nazi intelligence network allowed Hitler to transfer troops
from France to Greece ahead of what was believed to be a
massive Allied invasion.
 The only problem was that it all was an elaborate hoax.
 The “drowned” British Marine was actually a Welsh tramp,
named Glyndwr Michael, whose body was obtained in a
London morgue by British intelligence officers Charles
Cholmondeley and Ewen Montagu.

16.  After creating an elaborate fake identity and backstory for
“William Martin,” Cholmondeley and Montagu got Charles
Fraser-Smith to design a special container to preserve the
body during its travel.
 One of England’s leading racecar drivers transported the container
to a Royal Navy submarine, which launched the body off the
Spanish coast.
 Once the Spanish recovered the body, British authorities
began their frantic “attempts” to recover the body, counting on
the fact that their efforts would convince the Nazi’s of the
document’s validity.
 As a result of the false intelligence, the Nazis were caught unaware
when 160,000 Allied troops invaded Sicily in July 1943.

18.  Hitler fell for the hoax and after having redirected his troops
elsewhere, Sicily was left venerable.
 Once again, Roosevelt and Churchill agreed that Eisenhower
would serve as supreme commander of the Sicilian operation.
 This invasion would be code-named Operation Husky.
 On July 9, Patton and Monty invaded the island, one from the
southeast and the other from the southwest.
 In just over a month of fighting, naval gunfire, infantry
counterattacks, and field artillery fire broke all German
fortifications.
 On August 17, the Axis evacuated Sicily.
 The Allies choose to follow their success up with the invasion of
Italy.

21.  The Allies’ control of Sicily led to two vital results.
 First, the Mediterranean was cleared for Allied shipping and for an
invasion of the Italian mainland.
 Second, it assisted in Mussolini’s fall from power.
 The war was a nightmare for the Duce and the Italians had
become disillusioned with his leadership.
 On July 24, King Victor Emmanuel III dismissed him as
premier and had the police arrest Mussolini.
 Emmanuel installed Marshall Pietro Badoglio in his place.
 Badoglio dissolved the Fascist party and formed a
government without political affiliation.
 He also opened secret negotiations with the Allies for an armistice.

22.  On September 3, negotiations between Badoglio and the Allies
concluded in what was nothing short of unconditional surrender.
 The agreement provided for Italy to hand over its navy, merchant
marines, and air force to the Allies as well as agreed to become a
cobelligerent against Nazi Germany.
 Days later, German commandos landed gliders on the mountain of
the prison, rescued Mussolini, and led an escape by airplane.
 Hitler installed the Duce as the ruler of the puppet Fascist state in
northern Italy.
 Allied forces would continue to fight in northern Italy with the help of
Badoglio until 1945.
 On April 28, 1944, Mussolini and his mistress were shot to death
and their corpses were trampled and spat on in Milan.

24.  In November 1943, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin agreed on
the basic details of the long-awaited and promised cross-
channel invasion at the Teheran Conference.
 This was the first face-to-face meeting of all three Allied leaders,
the “Big Three.”
 Teheran was the capital of Iran, which the Soviets and British had
jointly occupied since 1941.
 The “Big Three” agreed that a cross-channel invasion in 1944
was top priority and that continued fighting in Italy was of
second importance.
 The code-name for this invasion would be Operation Overlord and
it was here that Roosevelt appointed Eisenhower the supreme
commander of the Allied expeditionary forces.

26.  The Allies chose the coast of Normandy, France as the site for
the cross-channel invasion.
 Normandy contained two important ports, which would be
extremely valuable for supplying the invading troops.
 British ports across the channel were larger and could handle
much greater ship and troop concentration.
 The Germans expected the invasion to come at Pas de Calais,
200 miles to the northeast but only twenty miles from England
across the Strait of Dover.
 Additionally, this was the launch site for the Nazi V-1 and V-2
rockets, which were still under development.

30.  Allied leaders underwent massive deception operations to
convince the Germans that the main invasion target was Pas-
de-Calais.
 In addition, they led the Germans to believe that Norway and
other locations were also potential invasion targets.
 Many tactics were used to carry out the deception, including
fake equipment, supply depots, and railroads; a phantom army
commanded by Patton and supposedly based in England;
double agents; and fraudulent radio transmissions.
 The double-agent Juan Pujol Garcia, fed the Germans false
information, indicating that the Allies were going to invade at Pas
de Calais.
 Garcia was known by the British codename Garbo and the German
codename Arabel.

31. Garcia holds the
distinction of being the
only man to receive
decorations from both the
sides during the war: the
Iron Cross from Germany
and an MBE from Britain.
Fearing Nazi retaliation
after the war, Garcia
traveled to Angola and
faked his own death from
malaria in 1949; he would
live out his life in
Venezuela, sunning a
bookstore.

34.  The invasion would be launched by five Allied divisions that
would form the initial seaborne landing force.
 Of the five landings, the Americans would land at Utah and
Omaha, the British would land at Sword and Gold, and the
Canadians would land at Juno.
 Shortly before these troops would go ashore, two American
airborne divisions (82nd & 101st) were to land to the west of the
American beachheads to provide flank cover.
 Preparations for such an invasion took months to complete.
 The invasion required the transportation of 1.5 million American
troops, 600 warships and over 4,000 transports and various
landing craft, and 12,000 planes.
 This was the greatest invasion Armanda in the history of the
world – never to be challenged.

36.  The invasion date was set for June 5, 1944, but stormy
weather forced Eisenhower to postpone and threatened to
delay the invasion for two weeks.
 Eisenhower later received a report that there would be a lull
(break) in the weather so he set the invasion for the next
morning, June 6.
 The D-Day invasion would unfold in three stages.
 Break-in – the actual landing and joining at the beachhead.
 Buildup – expand the beachhead and increase the size of the
invasion force.
 Break-out – punch through German defenses around the
beachhead and head towards the German border.

41.  The D-Day invasion is said to have been the most important
day of the Second World War.
 The Allied landing in Normandy dealt Hitler a significant
psychological blow and accelerated the final defeat of Germany.
 The importance of D-Day comes in its relation with the
Soviets.
 Because the German assault on Russia (Operation Barbarossa)
had failed, the Soviets began to push hard towards Berlin.
 Had the cross-channel invasion failed then all of Germany and
much of Western Europe would have fallen into the hands of the
Soviets.

42.  Hitler masterminded one last offensive in an attempt to push
the Allies back from Berlin.
 He chose to strike in the Ardennes, recognizing it was a weak point
in the Allied line and France’s Achilles’ heel in 1940.
 Operation Autumn Fog, as Hitler called it, was a complete
surprise and began on December 16 with a predawn artillery
barrage.
 The Germans outnumbered the American forces along the 70-
mile front but American troops stubbornly defended two roads
junctions at St. Vith and Bastogne (101st).
 This trump card became better known as the Battle of the Bulge.

46.  By January 3, 1945, it became obvious that German forces
must withdraw from the Ardennes but Hitler refused to allow
retreat.
 By the end of January, American troops had eliminated the
German forces of the bulge.
 Hitler had sacrificed his last reserves and greatest concentration of
armor in an operation that never had a chance of success.
 The Battle of the Bulge dealt a serve blow to German morale on
the Western Front.

47.  The greatest drama of the war unfolded in Berlin.
 Hitler took refuge in an underground bunker near the Reich’s
Chancellery building.
 The once mighty conqueror had become physically weak: stoop,
suffered from tremors in his limbs, and dragged his left leg when
he walked.
 Theodore Morell, his quack doctor, had prescribed Hitler with a
variety of pills and frequent injections of amphetamines.
 In March 1945, Hitler called for a scorched-earth policy where
all German bridges, dams, factories, mines, etc… would be
destroyed so that they would not be useful to Allied forces.
 On April 16, the Red Army launched its final offensive on
Berlin.

48.  On April 29, Hitler had decided that death was his only course
of action.
 He first married his longtime mistress, Eva Braun then he drafted
his political testament.
 The following day, Hitler retired to his suite, where he and his
bride committed suicide.
 Aides burned their bodies immediately.
 On May 2, 1945, the last fighting ended in Berlin.
 The Soviets suffered over 300,000 killed, wounded, or missing.
 The German causalities are unknown but the 134,000 POWs were
taken and 100,000 civilians lost their lives.
 Red Army soldiers engaged in an orgy of rape in the aftermath:
95,000 to 130,000 were estimated victims.

50.  The last remnants of Nazi leadership signed an unconditional
surrender on May 7, 1945 in a schoolhouse in Reims, France at
2:41 a.m.
 World War II in Europe was over and Hitler’s “Thousand Year
Reich” had expired only after twelve years.
 The Second World War statistics are as follows:
 63,185,500 human beings lost their lives in total – 23,620,100
military deaths and 33,833,000 civilian deaths.
 416,800 American soldiers gave the ultimate sacrifice; 418,500
(civilian casualties included).
 Throughout seventeen European and Asian nations, 5,907,900
Jews perished in the conflict.

51.  From the time that Hitler ascended to power, he was clear in
his plan to expel the Jewish population from Germany and any
other territory that fell under his control.
 The early approach focused on imposing numerous restrictions
aimed at making life miserable for the Jews and encouraging
their emigrations from Germany.
 Some Jews did leave but the majority stayed.
 Many simply lacked the financial means to flee while others
disliked the thought of abandoning their homeland.
 The grim reality was that outside nations placed strict limitations
on the number of Jewish refugees they would admit as immigrants,
especially the United States.

52.  Prosecution became more intense on November 9, 1938, when
a Jew assassinated a German embassy official in Paris,
France.
 The ensuing wave of terror became known as Kristallnacht, the
night of the broken crystal.
 On this night over one hundred Jews were murdered and some
30,000 others were arrested while synagogues were burned and
Jewish shops destroyed.
 In the aftermath, the Nazis forced the Jewish community to
pay a heavy indemnity, seized Jewish businesses, and required
firms to dismiss Jewish employees.
 All of this led to a great increase in emigration in late 1938.

53.  In early 1939, the Nazis established a special agency to
facilitate emigration, but despite their efforts, 350,000 Jews
still remained when war erupted in Poland.
 With the outbreak of hostilities, Jewish emigration became
extremely difficult and the Nazis resorted to deportation.
 The initial solution was to capture the island of Madagascar, a
French possession off the coast of Africa, and to convert it into
a permanent Jewish homeland.
 In failing to gain control of the island, the Nazis designated Poland
as the official dumping ground for the Jewish population.
 The concept of the final solution appears to have taken shape
gradually.

54.  Beginning in 1941, Jews throughout the European continent,
as well as hundreds of thousands of gypsies, were transported
to the Polish ghettos.
 The German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941
marked a new level of brutality in warfare.
 Mobile killing units called Einsatzgruppen would murder more
than 500,000 Soviet Jews and others (usually by shooting) over the
course of the German occupation.
 A memorandum dated July 31, 1941, from Hitler’s top
commander, Hermann Goering, to Reinhard Heydrich, chief of
the security service of the SS, referred to the need for an
Endlosung (final solution) to “the Jewish question.”

55. Unable to fulfill his
wartime commitments
with the Luftwaffe, Goring
withdrew and focused on
acquiring property and
artwork confiscated from
the Jews.
Upon hearing of Hitler’s
suicide, Goring asked to
assume control of the
Reich – Hitler considered
this act treasonous and
Goering was expelled from
all Nazi ranks.

56. Historians regard
Heydrich as the
darkest figure within
the Nazi elite.
Heydrich died in 1942,
due to injuries
sustained in Operation
Anthropoid – the Allied
plot to assassinate
him.
Two funerals were held
in his honor: first in
Prague and the second
in Berlin.

59.  In September 1941, every person designated as a Jew in
German-held territory was marked with a yellow star, making
them open targets.
 Tens of thousands were soon being deported to the Polish ghettoes
and German-occupied cities in the Soviet Union.
 Since June 1941, experiments with mass killing methods had
been ongoing at the concentration camp of Auschwitz, near
Krakow.
 That August, 500 officials gassed 500 Soviet POWs to death
with pesticide Zyklon-B (hydrogen cyanide).
 The SS soon placed a huge order for the gas with a German pest-
control firm, an ominous indicator of the coming Holocaust.

63.  In late 1941, the Germans began mass transports from the
ghettoes in Poland to the concentration camps, starting with
those people viewed as the least useful.
 The least useful were the sick, the old, the weak, and the very
young.
 The first mass gassing began at the camp of Belzec, near
Lublin, on March 17, 1942.
 From 1942 to 1945, Jews were deported to the camps from all
over Europe, including German-controlled territory as well as
nations allied with Germany.
 The heaviest deportations took place during the summer and fall of
1942, when more than 300,000 people were deported from the
Warsaw ghetto alone.

66.  Though the Nazis tried to keep operation of camps a secret,
the scale of the killings made this virtually impossible.
 Eyewitnesses brought reports of Nazi atrocities in Poland to
the Allied governments, who were harshly criticized after the
war for their failure to respond, or to publicize news of the
mass slaughter.
 The lack of action was likely mostly due to the Allied focus on
winning the war at hand and the news of the Holocaust was met
with denial and disbelief.
 At Auschwitz alone, more than two million people were
murdered in a process resembling a large-scale industrial
operation.
 A large population of Jewish and non-Jewish inmates worked in
the labor camp there; though only Jews were gassed, thousands of
others died of starvation or disease.

69. Nicknamed “the Angel
of Death,” Mengele
performed medical exp.
of unspeakable horror
at Auschwitz.
Children recall smiling
Uncle Mengele who
brought them candy
and clothing before he
mutilated them.
Prior to the Red Army's
liberation of the camp,
Mengele escaped to
South America.

70.  During the summer of 1944, a large proportion of Hungary’s
Jewish population was deported to Auschwitz.
 As many as 12,000 Jews were killed every day.
 By the spring of 1945, German leadership was dissolving amid
internal dissent, with Goering and Himmler both seeking to
distance themselves from Hitler and take power.
 In his last will and political testament, dictated in a German
bunker that April 29, Hitler blamed the war on “International
Jewry and its helper.”
 Additionally, he urged the German leaders and people to follow
“the strict observance of the racial laws with merciless resistance
against the universal poisoners of all peoples” – the Jews.

71.  German forces had begun evacuating many of the death camps
in the fall of 1944, sending inmates under guard to march
further from the advancing enemy’s front line.
 These so-called “death marches” continued all the way up to the
German surrender, resulting in the deaths of some 250,000 to
375,000 people.
 In his classic novel “Survival in Auschwitz,” the Italian Jewish
author Primo Levi described his own state of mind, as well as
that of his fellow inmates in Auschwitz on the day before
Soviet troops arrived at the camp in January 1945:
 “We lay in a world of death and phantoms. The last trace of
civilization had vanished around and inside us. The work of bestial
degradation, begun by the victorious Germans, had been carried to
conclusion by the Germans in defeat.”

73.  The wounds of the Holocaust were slow to heal.
 Survivors of the camps found it nearly impossible to return
home, as in many cases they had lost their families and been
denounced by their non-Jewish neighbors.
 As a result, the late 1940s saw an unprecedented number of
refugees, POWs, and other displaced populations moving across
Europe.
 In an effort to punish the villains of the Holocaust, the Allies
held the Nuremberg Trials of 1945-1946, which brought Nazi
atrocities to horrifying light.
 Increasing pressure on the Allied powers to create a homeland for
Jewish survivors of the Holocaust would lead to a mandate for the
creation of Israel in 1948.

74.  Over the decades that followed, ordinary Germans struggled
with the Holocaust’s bitter legacy, as survivors and the
families of victims sought restitution of wealth and property
confiscated during the Nazi years.
 Beginning in 1953, the German government made payments to
individual Jews and to the Jewish people as a way of
acknowledging the German people’s responsibility for the crimes
committed in their name.
 The initial Jewish population in Europe prior to the war was
9,508,340 and after sixty-three percent was exterminated
(5,962,129) only 3,546,211 remained.
 Hitler also condemned the Roma (gypsies) to a similar fate, killing
an estimated 200,000 of the 700,000 European Roma.

76.  In December 1942, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin met to
resolve the issue of how to prosecute those responsible for the
violence against the civilian populations.
 Stalin initially proposed the mass execution of 50,000-100,000
German staff officers while Churchill discussed the possibility of
summary execution (execution without a trial) of high-ranking
Nazi officials.
 Roosevelt persuaded them that individual criminal trials would be
the most effective because they required extensive documentation.
 The city of Nuremberg in the German state of Bavaria was
selected as the location for the trials because its Palace of
Justice was relatively undamaged by the war and included a
large prison facility.

78.  The Allies established the laws and procedures for the
Nuremberg trials with the London Charter of the
International Military Tribunal.
 The charter defined three categories of crimes:
 Crimes against peace (including planning, preparing, waging wars
of aggression in violation of international agreements).
 War crimes (including violations of customs or laws of war –
improper treatment of civilians and prisoners of war).
 Crimes against humanity (including murder, enslavement, or
deportation of civilians on political, religious, or racial grounds).
 The prosecutors and defense attorneys were of American and
British law but the verdicts and sentences were imposed by a
judicial tribunal (panel of judges) rather than a jury.

79.  Over the course of four years, a series of thirteen trials were
carried out in Nuremberg, Germany.
 The defendants included Nazi Party officials and high-ranking
military officers as well as German industrialists, lawyers, and
doctors.
 The best-known of the Nuremberg trials was the Trial of Major
War Criminals, held from November 20, 1945, to October 1,
1946.
 Twenty-four individuals were indicted, along with six Nazi
organizations determined to be criminal; for example, the Gestapo
or secret state police.
 The twelve proceedings to follow included the Doctors Trial
(December 1946 – August 1947), the Judges Trial (March –
December 1947), and other subsequent trials.

81. A “county-seat lawyer,”
Jackson remains the
last Supreme Court
Justice appointed who
did not graduate from
any law school.
Jackson’s opening and
closing arguments
before the Nuremberg
court are widely
considered the best
speeches of the
twentieth century.

82.  In the end, the international tribunal found all but three of the
defendants guilty.
 Twelve were sentenced to death, one in absentia, and the rest were
given prison sentences ranging from ten years to life behind bars.
 Ten of the condemned were executed by hanging on October 16,
1946.
 Hermann Goring, Hitler’s designated successor and head of
the Luftwaffe, committed suicide the night before his
execution with a cyanide capsule he had hidden in a jar of skin
medication.

85.  Although legal justifications for the trials and their procedural
innovations were controversial at the time, the Nuremberg
trials are now regarded as a milestone toward the
establishment of a permanent international court.
 Additionally, the trials saw the introduction of a technological
innovation taken for granted today – instantaneous
translation.
 IBM provided the technology and recruited men and women from
international telephone exchanges to provide on-the-spot
translations through headphones in English, French, German, and
Russian.