WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY
Volume 4 / Number 4 / 2007
Promoting Research and Scholarship
· In This Issue ·
Letters to the Editor..............................................................................3
The BEF in Belgium and France, 10 May – 04 June 1940................4
by Julian Thompson
Spanish Soldiers in the German Army and Waffen-SS...................25
by Wayne H. Bowen
Q&A: Barrett Tillman........................................................................37
by Robert von Maier
Author's Perspective...........................................................................51
by Howard D. Grier
A Mighty Air Effort Revisited...........................................................59
by Leo J. Daugherty III
Book Reviews.......................................................................................65
Books in Brief......................................................................................79
by Michael D. Hull
Novus Libri..........................................................................................82
by Nicolas d'Aubigné
Books in Retrospect.............................................................................87
by Karl J. Zingheim
WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY
Volume 4 / Number 4 / 2007
Editorial Review Board
William F. Atwater • William H. Bartsch
Christopher M. Bell • Enrico Cernuschi
Roger Cirillo • Robert J. Cressman
Edward J. Drea • Christopher R. Gabel
David M. Glantz • Ashley Jackson
Donald A. Jordan • John B. Lundstrom
Richard B. Meixsel • Richard R. Muller
Vincent P. O'Hara • Mark R. Peattie
E. Bruce Reynolds • Roger F. Sarty
Mark A. Stoler • Barbara B. Tomblin
Gregory J.W. Urwin • Nigel West
H.P. Willmott • Karl J. Zingheim
Executive Editor
Robert von Maier
Contributing Editors
Nicolas d'Aubigné • Michael D. Hull
World War II Quarterly is a peer-reviewed, scholarly journal dedicated to the
study of the Second World War (all theaters of operation and areas of conflict,
1931-1945). Reproduction in whole or in part is strictly prohibited without prior
written consent from the publisher.
Prior to submitting a manuscript, authors should contact the Editor for specific
requirements and guidelines. All articles and essay-reviews will be refereed and
may be edited for content. Unsolicited books reviews are not accepted.
Individual subscription rates are $45.00 per year (four issues). Institutional
subscription rates are $65.00 per year (four issues). Checks should be in U.S.
funds and made payable to: Pacific War Study Group.
© Pacific War Study Group, 2007 • All International Rights Reserved
ISSN 1559-8012 • Published in the United States of America
PO Box 131763, Carlsbad, CA 92013-1763
(760) 727-4355 • [email protected]
2 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
Letters to the Editor
Stephen A. Tascher (London, England)
In reference to issue 4.3 of your journal, I should like to point out that
Dr. Raymond A. Callahan's article, "Winston Churchill, Australia, and
the Defense of Rangoon," is one of the finest pieces of scholarship I
have yet seen on the subject. Please extend my compliments to Dr.
Callahan, and may I add that as long as World War II Quarterly continues to publish this level of learned historical discourse, you shall have
me as an earnest reader.
Considering that your journal has entered uncharted territory by being
the first World War II-specific periodical of its kind, I applaud you for
disregarding (wisely, I add) the caveat hic sunt dracones and pressing
onward with the important task at hand.
Edmund Kolinski (Omaha, Nebraska)
I am interested in French-language materials pertaining to the Battle of
Gabon (1940). I have, of course, visited several archives and libraries in
France, but am hoping to find additional documents, eyewitness accounts, photographs, etc.
Also, I would like to locate detailed information – including eyewitness accounts, documents, and photographs – regarding the following little-known battles: Battle of Tai'erzhuang (1938); Battle of Bzura (1939);
Battle of Modlin (1939); Battle of Suomussalmi (1939/40); Battle of
Nanos (1942); and the Battle of Poljana (1945).
The information/material I am seeking is for a research project dealing with several "forgotten" battles of the Second World War. My email
address is: <[email protected]>.
Christian De Backer (Verviers, Belgium)
During research-related travels throughout Europe, I have visited a number of small museums that have been useful, and may be of interest to
other journal readers. Depending on one's area of study, the following
may be worth a visit: Ardennen Poteau '44 Museum located near St.
Vith, Belgium <www.museum-poteau44.be>; Fort Fermont, which was
part of the Maginot Line <www.maginot.info>; and Fort de Schoenenbourg, also part of the Maginot Line <www.lignemaginot.com>.
3 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
The BEF in Belgium and France,
10 May – 04 June 1940
JULIAN THOMPSON
Introduction
The story of the saving of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) at
Dunkirk in May/June 1940 has been told perhaps too often in the context
of the "dithering of Hitler and the immortal exploits of the 'little ships.'"1
Less well known is the story of the three weeks of continuous hard fighting by the main body of the BEF between the German invasion of France
on 10 May 1940 and the end of the evacuation from Dunkirk on 4 June.
The mythology surrounding Dunkirk tends to eclipse much of what went
before (including why the BEF found itself in such a predicament), and
the actuality of the evacuation, including the contribution of the French.
For years, the British government shied away from committing Britain
to fighting alongside the French on the continent of Europe. By April
1938 the government had concluded that in the event of war with Germany, the British contribution to the Allied response should be mainly
naval and air forces. A large army would not be sent to the continent of
Europe; instead, its role would be confined to defending the United
Kingdom and her overseas territories. So priority for the army was given
to anti-aircraft guns and coastal batteries. The five divisions of the field
force were trained and fitted out for imperial defense, not continental
warfare against a first class enemy. The Territorial Army (TA) was to be
supplied only with training equipment. This was the state to which successive governments had reduced the British Army. 2
When the British Government finally agreed to a continental commitment for the Army in February 1939, it was on the assumption that the
next war would mirror the opening years of the last one: in the event of
invasion, the French would contain the Germans. This would allow the
British Army to build up sufficiently both in manpower and equipment
to enable it to play its full part in what would be a replay of the previous
war. It took nine months to build up the BEF from its original September
1939 strength of four divisions, to the ten divisions that faced the Germans on 10 May 1940, plus another three that landed in France later in
May. During the nine months leading up to the German offensive in the
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west, except for patrol skirmishes in the Maginot Line sector, the BEF
was not engaged in any fighting whatsoever. Despite being granted this
unforeseen intermission, there was still insufficient time to manufacture
the necessary equipment, and raise and train the units required to expand
the 1940 BEF into the force comparable with the BEF of fifty-six divisions that eventually fought on the Western Front between 1916 and
1918. By May 1940, a great deal more was required to bring the BEF up
to full fighting efficiency, let alone expand it. But thanks to the manner
in which the Germans conducted their campaign, and the swift collapse
of the French army, time was not granted to implement the necessary
measures in terms of equipment and training.
The Opposing Forces
The German Army had used the opportunity of sending "volunteers" to
fight on Franco’s side in the Spanish Civil War to practice some of its
techniques and theories. But, much more important, the campaign in
Poland provided an excellent live-firing rehearsal for what was to follow
in France six months later. The Germans learned a number of useful
lessons, and were able to hone their techniques for employing battle
groups, infantry-tank cooperation techniques, and the use of aircraft to
supply intimate support for ground formations, as well as the necessary
liaison and communications to orchestrate the modern all-arms battle.
The German Army on the other hand had many horsed formations and
units, and did so until the end of the war in 1945. The vast majority of
formations were not mechanized. These were infantry divisions that
marched on foot, and although each had some 942 motor vehicles, the
bulk of their supplies was carried in horse-drawn wagons, 1,200 per division. In the German Army, horse-drawn artillery hugely outnumbered
motor-towed pieces. Slow-moving horse-drawn transport should be allocated dedicated roads to avoid blocking the route for its motorized counterpart. However, this was not always possible and the resulting traffic
jams sometimes impeded the progress of the army as a whole. Horses
consume bulky fodder, yet another unwelcome problem for the logisticians. This horse/motor mix created a quartermaster's nightmare and was
to contribute to the failure of the German campaign in Russia beginning
in 1941. Tactically, there were two German armies: one fast and mobile,
and the other slow and plodding. This Achilles heel in the mighty German war machine was to be amply demonstrated in 1940. Only operational and tactical ineptness, principally on the part of the French, prevented the Allies from exploiting this fundamental weakness in the German way of making war.
The British were more up-to-date than the Germans in just one aspect,
that of mechanization or motorization. The BEF that went to France in
1939 was totally motorized and partially mechanized. Like the German
5 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
and French armies, it had tanks, but in addition every infantry battalion
had ten small open-topped tracked vehicles called Bren gun carriers designed to provide some mobile protected firepower for the battalion.
Specially designed motorized vehicles towed all the BEF's guns, and all
its supplies were carried in trucks, as were some of the troops. Cars,
small vans, and motorcycles were provided for commanders, liaison, and
carrying messages. Upon the outbreak of war, many of these vehicles
were requisitioned from civilian firms. For example, Major General
Bernard Montgomery's 3d Division went to war with laundry and baker's
vans, as did most other British formations. None of these commandeered
vehicles were really suitable for military use, often underpowered, not
four-wheel drive, and therefore almost useless across country; however
they were better than nothing. Other than dispensing with horse-drawn
transport, the British were well behind the Germans in techniques for
fighting a modern war, not least in armored divisions. The British fielded only one armored division in France in 1940. It arrived too late to
take part in the campaign with the main body of the BEF in Belgium and
northern France, and was committed south of the Somme.3
The French pinned their defense hopes on the Maginot Line (la Ligne
Maginot). Constructed between 1930 and 1935, extending from Luxembourg to the Swiss border, the Maginot Line was not really a line, but a
string of concrete forts built about three miles apart, interspersed by
smaller casemates. Belgium was still an ally while the Maginot Line was
under construction and so extending the Line to cover the 250 miles of
the Franco-Belgian border was considered tactless, as it would send a
signal of no confidence in Belgium's capability to resist invasion, and
isolate her on the "wrong" side of the wall. An added disincentive to extending the Line was cost. The eighty-seven miles completed by 1935
had cost 4,000 million francs in excess of the 3,000 million allocated in
the budget. Finally, an extension of the Line would run through the
heavily industrialized region of Lille-Valenciennes, causing major disruption to French industry. Experience in the First World War had persuaded the French that if they were to avoid losing this northern industrial region, they must stop the invader before he crossed the French frontier. So when Belgium elected for a policy of strict neutrality, the French
realized that they would have to enter Belgian territory the moment the
Germans invaded. In this event, instead of fighting from behind the concrete and steel of the Maginot Line on which so much treasure had been
spent, the French would be forced to engage in a mobile battle of encounter in open country, a contest for which they were neither mentally
prepared nor organised.
The French planned to fight a methodical battle under a system of
rigid centralization and adherence to orders from the top. Unit and formation commanders were supposed to remain at their command posts;
6 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
the theory being that here, at the center of communications, they were
best placed to receive information and orchestrate the battle. This, of
course, begged the question, what should one do if the communications
did not work. It was a question that demanded an answer, the French
failed to answer it, and it was a key ingredient in their defeat. For there
were few radios in French units and formations, and communication was
mainly by messengers, or the telephone, using either the civilian system
or line laid by the military. Initiative in subordinate commanders at
whatever level was frowned upon. No one was trained to react to the unexpected, and therefore, how to work through the chaos. The French
doctrine ignored the dictum attributed to the German commander Helmuth von Moltke: "no plan of operations will ever extend, with any sort
of certainty, beyond the first encounter with the hostile main force," and
that success in battle was, and still is, gained by the commander's ability
"to recognize the changed situation, to order its foreseeable course and
to execute this energetically."
French planning envisaged that as soon as the enemy attacked he was
to be stopped by concentrated artillery fire and static defense, rather than
by counter-attack. Local reserves would be placed in front of enemy penetrations to slow him down, and eventually stop him. Meanwhile, local
superiority of men and equipment would be assembled, and then, and
only then, would counter-attacks be mounted. The armor would not be
employed en masse, but in penny packets accompanying the infantry as
mobile pillboxes. Even had the communications worked, this rigid, plodding operational concept was hardly the best way to fight a mobile enemy. Once the two-way flow of communications was slowed by enemy
interdiction, or even broke down altogether, commanders sitting in their
command posts would be completely out of touch and unable to influence events.
The German system was totally the opposite, and stressed personal
initiative and what modern soldiers call mission command. Subordinates
were told what their superior's mission was, and were expected to adapt
their plans and the execution of them to achieve the mission, and to exploit a changing situation to their advantage, while their superiors supported them with all the means at their disposal. Everybody was trained
to command at least one if not two levels up, and therefore able to take
over when superiors became casualties. The leaders of Nazi Germany
knew that their country was not well placed economically to fight a long
war, but instead must win swiftly. Thus was born the principle of
Blitzkrieg (lightning war) which, following Moltke's teachings, demanded flexibility and the will to win. The German army was adept at combining mass and aggressive tactics, and in achieving this the commander's mental alertness and drive were essential factors, for the force of
his personality affected the whole of his command.
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The success of "mission command" depended not only on commanders being well forward where they could "read" the battle, but also in a
position to communicate the necessary orders to take account of the
changing situation, either face-to-face with subordinates or by radio. The
German system demanded good communications, and they had them. In
addition, German commanders were able to call upon support from their
air force, especially dive bombers, that they used in lieu of artillery, particularly if they had advanced beyond the range of their guns. In this
way, the Germans fought a true all-arms battle, with infantry, armor, artillery, and air. Their armor and mechanized infantry were concentrated
in elite armored (panzer) formations, with tanks used en masse.
At this point, it might be helpful to address some of the myths about
the relative strengths and types of armor on both sides. The ultimate German success has been ascribed to superiority in the numbers and types of
equipment, especially tanks. The French possessed some 4,000 armored
fighting vehicles of all types. Of these, approximately 2,000 were fit for
modern warfare. A good proportion of these modern tanks were the
S-35s (known as Somuas from the initials of the maker). This was one of
the best tanks in service in the world, with a 47mm turret-mounted gun.
The French also had some slower, but more heavily armored Char B1s,
with a hull-mounted short-barrelled 75mm, and a 47mm in the turret.
The Somuas were grouped in three light mechanized divisions (Division
Légère Méchanique – DLM), much like the German light divisions being a mix of motorized infantry with a powerful tank element. The excellent Somua medium tank was more heavily armored and as fast as any
contemporary German tank, and except for the Panzerkampfwagen Mk
IV, had a heavier gun. The Char B1s were grouped in three armored divisions (divisions cuirassées). These had only recently formed and had
done little or no collective training. A DLM had 220 tanks compared
with only 150 in a division cuirassée. The DLMs were allocated to separate armies, and the divisions cuirassées to the reserve: one to the general reserve and two to the reserves of the French First Army Group in the
center, and deployed piecemeal.
The Germans deployed 2,539 tanks when they started their offensive
in the west, but of these 1,478 were obsolete Mk Is and Mk IIs, whose
main armament consisted only of machine-guns or 20mm canon. The
only battleworthy tanks were 349 Mk IIIs with a 37mm gun main armament, 334 Czech tanks also with 37mm guns, and 278 Mk IVs, which in
1940 had a short-barrelled 75mm and was intended as a close support
tank for the Mk IIIs. The Mk IVs were not upgunned until later in the
war. The French outnumbered the Germans in battleworthy tanks.
The British fielded three types of tanks: the Light Mk VI equipped
with one .303in and one .55in machine-gun, three Marks of Cruiser tank
each with a 2-pdr main armaments, and two Marks of Infantry Tank. The
8 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
Mk I Infantry Tank had a .303in machine-gun, and the far heavier Mk II
or Matilda had a 2-pounder and a .303 machine-gun. One of the legacies
of British interpretations of Liddell-Hart's and Fuller's teachings on the
subject of armored warfare was the three types of tanks with which the
British went to war: the infantry tank suitable only for infantry support;
an armored division equipped with cruiser tanks, highly mobile but weak
in firepower; and light tanks for reconnaissance. 4 The correct answer,
which took the British most of the war to arrive at, was a medium or
main battle tank, combining fire power, protection, and mobility in one
type of tank; for technical reasons a difficult balancing act, but one
which the Germans achieved long before the British. The tanks produced
by the British were under-gunned and, except for the Matildas, lacked
armored protection. Wedded to the 2-pounder gun, the British built tanks
with turret rings far too small to accept any larger caliber guns. The 2pounder was too small caliber to produce an effective high explosive
(HE) round, and fired only solid shot, which was useless against infantry
and bunkers. Dual capability and larger caliber tank guns did not appear
in the British inventory until the American tanks arrived (Lee-Grants and
Shermans).
Both the French and the British believed that the German offensive in
the West, when it came, would be a repeat of 1914, with the main point
of effort on the Allied left flank. In November 1939, Allied planners expecting the Germans to outflank the Maginot Line and attack through
Belgium, came up with what was known as Plan D. This called for the
French 1st Army Group under General Billotte and the BEF to rush into
Belgium and create stop lines to slow down the Germans in accordance
with current French tactical principles. These stop lines would, it was
hoped, slow down and eventually halt the German advance, and buy time
to build up reserves for a counter-attack. The stop lines were based on
river lines, particularly the Escaut (Scheldt to the Belgians) and the
Dyle. The Dyle was farther east than the Escaut, and where the initial
stop line would be established; hence plan D for Dyle being preferred to
Plan E for the Escaut. The Belgians were fully aware of the plan, but
clinging to their neutrality, would allow only a few British officers in
plain clothes to carry out reconnaissance.
The command arrangements were entirely of French design, the senior
partner in the forthcoming campaign in France and Flanders by virtue of
their overwhelming superiority in numbers over their British allies. The
French Supreme Commander, sixty-eight-year-old General Maurice
Gamelin, had no radio contact with the commanders in the field. He
commanded by messenger from his headquarters in the Chateau de Vincennes outside Paris. It would be misleading to imagine Gamelin as an
earlier version of General Dwight Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander
Allied Expeditionary Force that fought in North West Europe in
9 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
1944/45. Unlike Eisenhower, Gamelin did not have a staff of French and
British officers working together to produce a common and agreed strategy. Instead, a military mission under Major General Sir Richard
Howard-Vyse (known as the Howard-Vyse Mission) was appointed to
Gamelin's headquarters to represent the British Chief of the Imperial
General Staff (CIGS). Furthermore, there was no Anglo-French equivalent to the Anglo-U.S. combined chiefs of staff, introduced after the
United States came into the war at the end of 1941, to which Eisenhower
as Supreme Allied Commander reported. Gamelin reported to the French
Government, and the British Chiefs of Staff effectively had no influence
whatever over his decisions, other than representations by the HowardVyse Mission or personal visits by the CIGS.
The Allied perception of likely German strategy in the West was confirmed when a German light aircraft carrying Luftwaffe Major Helmuth
Reinberger landed by mistake in Belgium on 10 January 1940. The papers carried by Reinberger revealed that the Germans intended on invading France through Holland and Belgium.
Spurred on by the sight of the German plans, Gamelin, the Supreme
Commander French Land Forces, strengthened the force that would go
into Belgium in the event of German invasion. Now instead of ten
French divisions and the BEF, thirty would go in, among them the best
the French army could offer: two out of France's three new armored divisions, five out of seven motorized divisions, and all three light mechanized divisions (DLM).
Giraud's Seventh Army of seven first class divisions, including one
DLM, was to be deployed on the extreme left flank. Until Gamelin made
these changes, the Seventh Army was to have constituted the major part
of the operational reserve for C-in-C North-Eastern Front, General
Georges. Gamelin's decision to commit this powerful reserve in Belgium
from the outset was to have dire consequences. On Giraud's right would
be Gort's BEF, on the Dyle from four miles north of Louvain to Wavre.
South of the BEF would come Blanchard's First Army, tasked to hold the
Gembloux Gap down to Namur on the Meuse. Corap's Ninth Army was
to occupy the line of the Meuse in the Belgian Ardennes south of Namur. General Huntziger's Second Army would deploy from Sedan to
Longwy and the start of the Maginot Line.
Thus the main striking power of the French Army was to be committed to operations in Belgium north of Namur. For years after the Second
World War, the French believed that the forced landing by Reinberger
was a "cunning German plan." It was not. The German scheme that was
to cause such mayhem was not approved until 17 February, over a month
later. Indeed, up to that time, although aware that their plans had fallen
into the hands of the Allies, the German strategy remained unchanged.
Eventually, General von Rundstedt (commanding Army Group A) and
10 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
General von Manstein persuaded Hitler to change the whole plan of
campaign.Von Rundstedt's reasons were not connected with the original
plan being compromised, but because it risked a replay of the stalemate
of the First World War. Accordingly, the whole weight of the attack was
transferred to the German left wing. Colonel General von Bock's Army
Group B, consisting of twenty-six infantry and three panzer divisions,
would still attack into Belgium, distracting the Allies' attention. But von
Rundstedt's Army Group A (forty-four divisions) would attack through
the thinly-defended Ardennes, then turn north and cut off the French and
British forces. The armored elements of Army Group A consisted of
three panzer corps: Hoth's XV (5th and 7th Panzer Divisions); Reinhardt's XLI (6th and 8th Panzer Divisions); and Guderian's XIX (1st, 2d,
and 10th Panzer Divisions). Colonel General von Leeb's Army Group C
remained behind the Siegfried Line threatening the Maginot Line.
The War in the West Begins
On 10 May 1940, in response to the German invasion of Belgium and
Holland, the BEF along with the French First, Seventh, and Ninth
Armies advanced into Belgium to take up pre-planned defensive positions. The BEF deployed with the Belgian Army on its left and French
First Army on its right, and was soon engaged with the advancing German Army Group B.
Until 12 May, Gamelin, along with most other senior commanders,
British as well as French, had their attention firmly fixed on developments in Belgium and Holland. Gamelin’s Headquarters (Grand Quartier General – GQG) was convinced that the German main point of effort
was between Maastricht and Liège. The London Times military correspondent wrote "This time there has been no strategic surprise," an allusion to the Schlieffen Plan of 1914, and how the British and the French
had been taken in by it. General William Edmund Ironside, the British
Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS), wrote in his diary, "we shall
have saved the Belgian Army. On the whole the advantage is with us. A
really hard fight this summer...."5 By the time these words were penned,
strategic surprise was to be unleashed against the Allies by von Rundstedt's Army Group A. It was called Sichelschnitt by the Germans, which
translates to "sickle cut" in English. It was to hack through the French
and almost took the BEF in its deadly swing.
Von Rundstedt's armor crossed the Meuse on 13 and 14 May at Dinant and Sedan, and sliced through the French Ninth Army. By 21 May
the leading armored elements had reached the coast, and the Germans
speedily established strong infantry positions on the Somme. The Allied
armies were cut in half. A counter-blow by the BEF at Arras on 21 May
caused considerable angst among the German high command, although
its perceived effect was out of all proportion to its actual impact on the
11 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
German armored advance. But it nevertheless made enough impression
to rate as the sole Allied counter-stroke singled out for special mention
in the subsequent German propaganda film Sieg im West (Victory in the
West).
The tempo of the German advance shattered French self-confidence,
causing General Georges to burst into tears, and the French Prime Minister to tell his British opposite number, Churchill, on the telephone, "We
are defeated. We have lost the battle." Churchill flew to Paris, and on
asking Gamelin where his strategic reserve was placed, was told "there
isn’t one," as indeed there was not thanks to it being committed in Belgium.6
By this time, the BEF had been forced to start a series of withdrawals
by the retreat of the Belgian Army on its left and the French First Army
on its right, and the inability of either to mount counter-attacks. The Cin-C of the BEF, General Gort, was especially concerned by the total
lack of coordination by General Billotte, whose duty it was to keep him,
Gort, in the picture, and by the breakdown in the French high command.
By 19 May, the BEF was back on the line of the River Escaut, and
General Weygand replaced Gamelin. As the German advance on both
flanks of the BEF became more threatening, it became clear to Gort that
not only would he have to pull back from the Escaut to the original line
held before the advance into Belgium, the Frontier Line between Halluin
and Maulde, but also guard his back against the German armor swinging
in from the south. To this end, he deployed III Corps along a series of
canals from Lens-Bèthune-Aire-St. Omer-Gravelines (the Canal Line),
leaving I and II Corps on the Frontier Line.
By 25 May, the BEF and French First Army occupied a sack stretching seventy miles inland from the channel coast. It was twenty-five miles
long narrowing to thirteen. To the north-east, in an appendix to the sack,
some thirty-one miles by twenty, stood the Belgian Army on the point of
collapse. Weygand, the new French Supreme Commander totally out of
touch with events on the ground, was talking in terms of mounting a
counter-attack north across the Somme onto the German corridor in concert with another striking south from the BEF and French First Army.
Gort, with some misgivings, agreed to take part.
At this juncture, the British captured documents giving a detailed picture of the whole German order of battle, and of even more immediate
interest, the German Sixth Army's plans for the attack that had begun
that morning towards Ypres and round the BEF's left flank. This threatened to prise open the existing gap between the Belgians and the BEF,
exposing the BEF to an attack on its rear and cutting it off from the
coast. At the same time, it became clear that the French contribution to
the counter-attack would be only one division instead of the promised
three with 200 tanks.
12 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
In the nick of time, Gort made the decision that saved the BEF from
destruction. He would plug the gap between the BEF and the Belgians,
and withdraw to the coast. With hours to spare, two divisions, the 5th
and 50th, switched from counter-attacking southwards, closed the gap,
and prevented the BEF from being surrounded.
Now began the most testing time for the BEF. Conducting a withdrawal in the face of a determined and well-trained enemy is one of the
most difficult operations of war. Perhaps the most outstanding feat of
soldiering was by Lieutenant General Alan Brooke’s II Corps. It fought
a continuous and sometimes fluid battle against superior forces for five
days, in the process covering over forty miles. Its tenacious defense and
skillful night moves consistently outmaneuvered von Bock's Army
Group B; one of the few examples of the Allies in 1940 being "faster on
the draw" tactically speaking than their opponents.
On the other side of the sack, three British infantry divisions, one of
which was short of a brigade, faced six panzer and three motorized divisions. Still, the BEF managed to withdraw in good order, although not
without serious loss. The BEF were dogged in defense, and mounted local counter-attacks that sometimes gained enough elbow room for a
clean break. The war diary of the XLI Corps sums up the German view
of the British defense: "Fighting for individual houses and villages prevents the Corps from gaining ground to the east and north-east. Losses in
men and equipment are grievous. The enemy fights with determination
and stays in his positions until the last moment; if he is expelled from
one point he appears a little later at some other and takes up the fight
again."7
Dunkirk
By 30 May, the bulk of the BEF was back in the Dunkirk perimeter. Operation DYNAMO, the evacuation from Dunkirk, had already begun.
Dunkirk harbor in 1940 was the biggest on the Channel coast, and the
third largest in France. It had seven deep-water basins, four dry docks,
and five miles of quays. Surrounded by marshes that were easily flooded, it was the most defensible too, and although most of the fortifications
around the town were old, they were capable of standing up to considerable shelling. Near the docks was the hugely strong Bastion 32, containing the headquarters of Admiral Jean-Marie Abrial, the naval and military commander of the northern coastline, who took his orders only from
Paris. The English-speaking General Alfred Fagalde, whose XVI Corps
was transferred from the Belgian front, was ordered by Weygand to
come under Abrial’s command and take charge of the Boulogne-CalaisDunkirk sector. So, in addition to his corps, Fagalde had three garrison
battalions, two training units, three almost unarmed labor regiments, a
couple of anti-tank batteries, five infantry battalions from the 21st Divi13 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
sion, and eleven batteries of artillery. By the time Fagalde arrived at
Dunkirk, Boulogne and Calais were about to be invested by the Germans.
On the morning of Monday 20 May, Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay, the
Flag Officer Commanding Dover, held his first meeting at his headquarters to consider the possibility of large scale evacuation if, "as then
seemed unlikely," the need should arise [emphasis in original].8 The
speed with which the situation in France and Belgium subsequently unravelled is brought home when one recalls that on the morning of Ramsay’s 20th May meeting, the BEF was on the Escaut line, the Channel
ports were still in Allied hands, and the German panzer divisions had
only just started crossing the Canal du Nord, south-east of Arras. By
Sunday 26 May, the whole of France north of the Somme was in German
hands, except for the sack containing the BEF and French First Army,
and the Belgian appendix, a sack which was being squeezed hard.
The evacuation of British troops from Dunkirk had actually started on
19 May when GHQ ordered that "useless mouths" be sent back to England. There were plenty of these, as Dunkirk had been used as the port of
entry for many non-combatant specialists. In addition, there was an accumulation of wounded in casualty clearing stations in and around
Bailleul, south of Poperinghe. From here, the road and railway provided
the safest evacuation route to Dunkirk; a route that became increasingly
hazardous as the Germans closed in. Thanks to the attentions of the Luftwaffe, Dunkirk probably marked the most dangerous point in the journey. By 20 May, the German bombing of the port had become so severe
that all merchant ships were ordered out of port. Despite this, by midnight on 26 May, 27,936 wounded and unwounded troops had been
transported to England; by which time Operation DYNAMO had begun.
There had been less than a week to plan, and furthermore no one
could predict the scale of Operation DYNAMO with any certainty. No
one knew how many troops would reach the coast. Even if almost everyone made it, an evacuation of this magnitude was not just a matter of everyone slogging back to the coast and expecting it all to happen. To begin with, the planners in London estimated that the enemy could be held
for a maximum of two days, and that approximately 45,000 soldiers
might be brought off. Naval plans were made accordingly, and although
not all the ships and craft that it was thought would be needed were yet
assembled, the Mona's Isle, an armed boarding vessel, sailed for Dunkirk
two hours after the Admiralty ordered Operation DYNAMO to begin.
She arrived in Dunkirk in the middle of an air raid, but embarked 1,420
troops. After leaving harbor to return to England, she was straddled by
enemy guns on shore between Gravelines and Les Hemmes, followed by
being machine-gunned by enemy aircraft. Twenty-three men on board
were killed and sixty wounded. She reached Dover at midday on Mon14 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
day 27 May. Five transports that had sailed earlier that morning were so
heavily shelled off the French coast that they could not reach Dunkirk,
and turned back. The fall of Calais on 26 May allowed the enemy to site
guns on the coast and interdict the last leg of the most direct sea route
from Dover to Dunkirk. Accordingly, an alternative route was swept of
mines, but the diversion more than doubled the length of the passage.
This longer route increased the danger of attack by surface craft, Uboats, and the Luftwaffe, while doubling the turn-round time of vessels,
thus halving the number of troops that could be brought off over a given
period. Later, Ramsay brought a further route into operation. It was better protected against surface attack by sandbanks and nearby British
minefields, and shorter than the alternative route. But navigational difficulties posed by the sandbanks and minefields restricted this route to
daylight only. These difficulties possibly explain why it took the Germans three days before they discovered that this route was in use, and
provided a respite from attack by the Luftwaffe, much appreciated by the
crews and passengers of the vessels ploughing back and forth.
The shipping allocated to Ramsay for Operation DYNAMO was of a
magnitude inconceivable today after more than sixty years of erosion of
British maritime power. Despite the demands of the battle of Narvik in
Norway, still in progress, the Atlantic convoys, the Mediterranean, and
the Far East, Ramsay had thirty-nine destroyers, including the Polish destroyer Blyskawica, (this was one-fifth of the Royal Navy's total after
losses elsewhere); the anti-aircraft cruiser HMS Calcutta; thirty-eight
minesweepers; sixty-one minesweeping craft; eighteen anti-submarine
trawlers; six corvettes; one sloop; and seventy-nine other small craft including MTBs; gunboats; and Dover flare-burning drifters. The Merchant Navy provided thirty-six passenger ferries, seven hospital ships
converted from ferries, trawlers, barges, and dredgers. In addition, there
were the "little ships," civilian-owned yachts and motor cruisers. The
French, Belgians, and Dutch also provided shipping, including nineteen
French destroyers, sixty-five French civilian craft, and forty-three Dutch
schuyts ("scoots" to their Royal Navy crews). In all, some 848 vessels
served under Ramsay for the Dunkirk evacuation, an impressive demonstration of British maritime power. Without it, no large-scale evacuation
could have even been contemplated.
The problem facing any commander holding a bridgehead from which
he wants to withdraw is maintaining a crust tough enough to resist enemy penetration, while thinning out troops to embark. From time to time
he must reduce the length of the perimeter in order to release men to
maintain the flow of troops back to the waiting ships and craft. Fortunately, Montgomery, now in command of II Corps, and Alexander in
command of I Corps of the BEF, were both well able to juggle the conflicting demands of holding off the enemy while conducting a withdraw15 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
al.9 German penetrations of the perimeter were thrown back by strong
counter-attacks supported by what artillery was available. The routines
for withdrawal in contact at night, well practiced during the retreat, progressed surprisingly smoothly. An added bonus was the German reluctance to fight, or even follow-up withdrawals, at night; a fault, which,
with a few exceptions, they were to manifest throughout the war.
Furthermore, until 31 May there had been an uncharacteristic lack of
grip within the German high command. There was no coordinated plan
for the attack on Dunkirk, and much argument about whether Fourth or
Sixth Army would undertake the task. Kleist, having been told to get
moving and attack with his panzer group on the south-western side of the
perimeter, replied that his formations were unsuitable since tanks could
not be used among the canals and concrete fortifications. Kleist was told
that "by higher orders an end must finally be made of the embarkation at
Dunkirk," while the Fourth Army commander personally intervened to
order all forces to the coast east of Dunkirk immediately. Kleist still
dragged his feet, and reported that as the medium artillery had run out of
ammunition, attempts would be made to fire on Dunkirk with light artillery. It was at that point that Küchler was put in charge of operations
against Dunkirk. His Eighteenth Army having been engaged against the
Belgians, was now directed to destroy or capture all Allied troops in the
bridgehead. Küchler had IX, X, XIV, and XXVI Corps consisting of the
14th, 18th, 56th, 216th, 254th, 256th, and 61st Infantry Divisions; two
motorized brigades, the 9th and 11th, the motorized Regiment Grossdeutschland, plus the 20th Motorized Division, and the SS Adolf Hitler
Regiment.
German Army Group A could now forget about attacking Dunkirk,
and concentrate on the next phase, attacking what von Rundstedt believed was the major and undefeated portion of the French army. He had
already lost about fifty percent of his armor, and did not want to lose
more among the ditches and canals of the Dunkirk sector, to have done
so would in his opinion, have been bad judgement. The debate continues
to this day about whether Rundstedt handled Army Group A as well as
he might, having ripped open the Allied Front after crossing the Meuse.
At one stage while Gort had only the 5th and 50th Divisions in the Arras
area, and some scratch forces scattered thinly along the Canal Line,
Rundstedt had seven armored, six motorized, and four infantry divisions
in the rear of the BEF, and no one to oppose him. With this potent force
he contented himself with taking the lightly-defended towns of Calais
and Boulogne and harried the BEF as it withdrew to Dunkirk. This despite the fact that his Army Group alone was stronger than the BEF, and
in addition he had Army Group B engaging the attention of the BEF on
its other flank. What is absolutely irrefutable is that Rundstedt's "sickle
stroke" reduced the French high command to a state of paralysis so se16 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
vere that they never recovered their equilibrium thereafter.
There is no evidence that Hitler interfered with Rundstedt, but he certainly contributed his pennyworth to Army Group B's plan to attack
Dunkirk, including suggestions for the use of artillery; an early example
of the Führer's inclination to become involved in minute military detail.
Hitler's helpful hints are revealed in a message from the German Commander-in-Chief, Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch, containing
personal suggestions for overpowering the Allies around Dunkirk. 10 It
makes nonsense of the notion that Hitler wanted the BEF to escape.
Despite better coordination by the Germans, they still tended to attack
at several points along the perimeter, but with the heaviest assaults at the
eastern end. This suited the British because that sector, held by II Corps,
was to be abandoned on the night 31 May-1 June. That night, the Royal
Navy mounted its biggest effort, and as the II Corps soldiers arrived at
Dunkirk they found ships waiting for them. Throughout 1 June, the embarkation alongside the East Mole at Dunkirk went on under heavy attacks by the Luftwaffe, mainly in gaps between RAF fighter sweeps.
That day, the Luftwaffe sank thirty-one ships, including four destroyers.
At 1800 hours, Captain William G. Tennant, Royal Navy, senior Naval
Officer Dunkirk, decided that there would be no more daylight embarkations from Dunkirk or the beaches remaining in Allied hands. The total
number of troops evacuated during 31 May and 1 June was 132,443 of
which 40,290 were taken off beaches, and 92,153 from Dunkirk harbor.
By now, the accumulated total evacuated was 259,049. Approximately
20,000 British troops remained and a far greater number of French.
With II Corps embarked, all that remained operational of the BEF on
the morning of 1 June were the seven brigades of Alexander's I Corps.
German attacks persisted throughout the hours of daylight. Stubborn defense brought most of the attacks to a halt among the flooded dykes and
ditches. On the flanks, the French held off the Germans in a spirited defense. Although the Germans succeeded in penetrating the area where
the BEF was making its last stand, they made no attempt to exploit their
gains. With the onset of darkness, the British battalions began to thin out
and pull back.
The embarkation went well that night, but at 0300 hours on 2 June, on
orders from Admiral Ramsay, all the ships departed to avoid the massive
losses of the previous days. The East Mole was packed with troops four
abreast waiting quietly and in good order, British on the right, French on
the left. The sudden departure of the ships caused some confusion.
Those at the front turned about, while those at the back pressed on. It
presented a juicy target for the German gunners, but only the odd shell
crashed down to blast a hole in the queue. The dead were pushed over
the edge of the mole or causeway that linked mole to beach. Eventually,
everyone turned and walked back into town to take cover in the dunes or
17 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
cellars of Malo les Bains and wait for the night.
It had become clear to Alexander that with embarkation suspended
during daylight, he would not be able to complete evacuation on the
night 1-2 June as originally envisaged. He thought there were about
3,000 British troops left, although subsequently it turned out there were
more according to the embarkation returns. At this stage, Rear Admiral
W.F. Wake-Walker (Rear Admiral Dover, in charge offshore at Dunkirk)
was told there were about 5,000 with an unknown number of French.
Alexander formed a tight perimeter around Malo les Bains, with twelve
2-pounder anti-tank guns that had been man-handled through the sand
dunes, and sited to take on any tanks that might break through. In addition, there were three 3-inch anti-aircraft guns, and four 40mm Bofors to
take on the Luftwaffe.
Thanks to the devoted service by the French holding the Germans at
bay, no British ground units were required to engage the enemy that day.
Bergues fell as late as 1700 hours after the failure of a costly counter-attack by a French training battalion. On the west side of the perimeter, the
French 68th Division, firing their 75mm guns over open sights, saw off
an armored attack by the 9th Panzer Division; while the 32d Infantry Division turfed the Germans out of Teteghem. The 12th Infantry Division
in their frontier positions repulsed all attempts to break in from the east.
It is important to emphasize that but for the efforts of the French
Army far fewer British soldiers would have got away at Dunkirk. This
was especially so on 2 June when the British rearguard was reduced to a
small perimeter on the outskirts of Dunkirk, and relied entirely on the
French to hold off the enemy. This was largely due to the leadership of
General Fagalde. He was to show a dynamism lacking in many of his
contemporaries.
At nightfall, the embarkation started, undisturbed by the Germans
who had settled down for the night as was their wont. The soldiers filed
quietly along the mole, and their demeanour greatly impressed Alexander. He wrote later: "The men at no time showed fear or restlessness.
They were patient, brave and obedient, and when finally ordered to embark they did so in perfectly disciplined groups, properly armed and
equipped."11 Throughout the day, Alexander's immaculate appearance
and quiet good manners had raised the morale of all who saw him as he
moved among the troops.
The last of the BEF to leave were the 1st King's Shropshire Light Infantry, who had covered the withdrawal of the 1st Division the previous
night. As they stood in the slowly moving queue on the mole, waiting for
shells to fall on them, they were illuminated by the massive fires burning
in the port and town behind them.
Just before midnight on 2-3 June, the Channel ferry St. Helier slipped
from the mole and made for England with the last of the BEF. Captain
18 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
Tennant signalled Dover Command: "BEF evacuated." He and Alexander boarded a launch to tour the harbor and beaches in search of any remaining British troops. Alexander shouted through a megaphone, "Is
anyone there, is anyone there?" Having satisfied themselves that no one
remained, they transferred to a destroyer, which was under machine-gun
fire from the land.
Some 20,000 French troops were taken off in the night, and about
30,000 were left. Throughout 3 June they put up a magnificent fight. But
by late afternoon, the Germans were on the southern outskirts of
Dunkirk, approximately two miles from the mole. Fagalde, however, retained a good grip on the situation, and the familiar German inertia at
night allowed him to put into effect his plan for the final withdrawal.
This necessitated holding an inner rearguard until 0200 hours on 4 June,
and all went to plan, with no interference from the Germans, other than
some sporadic machine-gun fire.
It was thanks to the Royal Navy and Merchant Navy that a substantial
number of French got away. It would have been unthinkable to have
abandoned them, but Ramsay's sailors, both Royal and Merchant Navy,
were almost at the end of their tether. There had been cases of civilian
masters of merchant vessels refusing to take their ships to sea again. On
28 May, the master of the Canterbury, a large passenger ferry, had sailed
for Dunkirk only after receiving a direct order, and with a naval officer
and some ratings embarked to "stiffen the crew." On 29 May, after one
round trip, the captain of the St. Seiriol had refused to sail. The ship finally sailed after the captain had been put in open arrest, and a Royal
Navy party put on board. She was hit and damaged on her way home, it
was her last trip to Dunkirk. In the evening of the horrendous day, 1
June, the crew of the Tynwald, having completed three trips, also refused
to sail. She sailed twenty-four hours later with a relief crew and a Royal
Navy party, although with her chief officer as master, and five others of
her ship's company. She ultimately completed five trips.12 These were
not the only examples of merchant crews refusing to sail. But those who
did so were the minority.
The exhaustion of ships' companies was now the critical factor that
Ramsay had to take into account when assessing how much longer Operation DYNAMO could be sustained. He wrote in his dispatch with reference to 3 June: "No assurance could be obtained that this coming night
would terminate the operation and considerable anxiety was felt regarding the effect of the gradual exhaustion of the officers and men of the
ships taking part in Dynamo. This exhaustion was particularly marked in
the Destroyer force the remnants of which had been executing a series of
round trips without intermission for several days under navigational conditions of extreme difficulty and in the face of unparalleled air attack.
"The Vice-Admiral [Ramsay] accordingly represented to the Admiral19 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
ty that the continuance of the demands made by the evacuation would
subject a number of officers and men to a test which might be beyond
the limits of human endurance, and requesting that fresh forces should
be used if execution had to be continued after the coming night, with the
acceptance of any consequent delay."13
Despite this representation, Ramsay had already issued orders for another night of operations involving all his destroyers and nine out of ten
of his ferries were to go, with the usual mixture of supporting vessels
and craft. "We arrived off Dunkirk breakwater at 11.57 pm" recorded
Captain Clarke of the passenger ferry Princess Maud. "We entered the
pier heads, and looked for a berth. The narrow fairway was crammed to
capacity . . . Wrecks dotted the harbour here and there. The only light
was that of shells bursting, and the occasional glare of fires." She sailed
loaded with French soldiers at about 0150 hours on 4 June. At 0255
hours, the Royal Sovereign slipped, the last of the passenger ferries to
leave, having completed six trips and carried a total of 6,858 soldiers in
the course of the operation, one tenth of all those rescued by passenger
ferries. The paddle minesweeper Medway Queen completed her seventh
trip. The elderly destroyer HMS Sabre completed her tenth sortie, having lifted a total of 5,000 men.14
The French Navy also played a part in the evacuation of their soldiers.
Some sixty-three vessels of all kinds were involved. The Allied ships
lifted a further 26,175 soldiers in that final lift. The last ship to leave
Dunkirk, having already completed several trips, was HMS Shikari, one
of the Royal Navy's oldest destroyers, dating back to 1919. At 0340
hours, as the grey light of dawn began to lighten the sky through the
heavy pall of smoke that hung over Dunkirk, she slipped from the East
Mole with her decks crammed with French soldiers. The rattle of German machine-guns close by marked where the French rearguard still gallantly held off the Germans.
At 1423 hours on 4 June, the Admiralty made the signal ending Operation DYNAMO. Originally it was thought that some 45,000 soldiers
might be rescued. In the end, a total of 338,226 were taken away,
308,888 in British vessels. If the troops evacuated in the week before
DYNAMO are included, the number transported to England rises to
366,162. But as the historian Correlli Barnett has observed, the losses to
the Royal and Merchant Navies were equivalent to those one might expect in a major sea battle. Of thirty-eight destroyers, six had been sunk,
fourteen damaged by bombs, and twelve by collision. Of forty-six personnel carriers (ferries and the like), nine were sunk, and eleven damaged, eight so badly that they were withdrawn from service.15
The Reckoning
The evacuation of the BEF at Dunkirk was spoken about as a miracle at
20 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
the time, and still is depicted in those terms to this day. The only miraculous element in the operation was the weather: gales and high seas would
have allowed far fewer troops to be taken off; probably none from the
beaches, and drastically less from the seaward side of the East Mole. Although, on the plus side, bad weather, especially if accompanied by bad
visibility and low cloud, might have curtailed the activities of the Luftwaffe. The Dunkirk operation owed its success to the power and skill of
the Royal Navy, not to any mystical intervention. The part played by the
Royal Navy has been consistently underestimated; without the Royal
Navy the considerable contribution by the RAF, and courage and skill of
the BEF, would have been to no avail. That the contribution of the "little
ships" to the successful evacuation from the Dunkirk beaches was significant is without doubt. But their role has become the enduring myth of
the operation to the extent of obliterating the contribution of the Royal
and Merchant Navies. This can be understood in the context of the time,
to boost national morale and cohesion the story of the "little ships" was
milked as hard as it could be. The facts are that over two and a half times
as many troops were taken from Dunkirk harbor than from the beaches,
and of those taken off the beaches, the majority were transported in destroyers or other ships, albeit in many cases ferried out to these larger
vessels, either by "little ships," or ships' boats. The number of men taken
directly from the beaches to England by the "little ships" was small. The
breakdown of figures is in Table 1. One third of all the troops evacuated
were taken off in the fifty-six destroyers involved in the operation.
There is no doubt that Gort's decision saved the BEF. He may not
have been a brilliant army commander, but he was able to see with absolute clarity that the French high command was utterly bankrupt of realistic ideas, consequently Allied plans would lead nowhere, and he had the
moral courage and unwavering willpower to act in the face of censure
and criticism, thus ensuring that the BEF was saved. There are few occasions when the actions of one man can be said to be instrumental in winning a war. This was one of those. Had the BEF been surrounded, cut
off, and forced to surrender, it is inconceivable that Britain could have
continued to fight. That is not to say that Britain would necessarily have
been occupied, but a humiliating accommodation with Hitler would surely have followed.
British Army casualties for the whole of the fighting in France and
Flanders in 1940, including actions south of the Somme not covered
here, were 68,111 killed in action, died of wounds, missing, wounded,
and prisoners of war. The material losses of the Army were enormous,
either in battle or destroyed, or left behind as Table 2 illustrates. 16 Despite these losses, the morale of the British Army was intact. The BEF
came back with an unshakeable belief that given equal terms they could
have defeated the enemy. Let the final word on this subject be left to the
21 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
enemy. In August 1940, German divisions training for the invasion of
the United Kingdom were provided with a report prepared by the German IV Corps, which in Bock's Sixth Army had fought the BEF from the
Dyle to the coast. The report covers mainly technical detail of British
fighting methods, but this is what it has to say about the British soldier,
the emphasis by use of italics is in the German original: "The English
soldier [sic] was in excellent physical condition. 17 He bore his own
wounds with stoical calm. The losses of his own troops he discussed
with complete equanimity. He did not complain of hardships. In battle
he was tough and dogged. His conviction that England would conquer in
the end was unshakable. . .
"The English soldier has always shown himself to be a fighter of high
value. Certainly the Territorial divisions are inferior to the Regular
troops in training, but where morale is concerned they are their equal.
"In defense the Englishman took any punishment that came his way.
During the fighting IV Corps took relatively fewer prisoners than in engagements with the French or Belgians. On the other hand casualties on
both sides were high."18
The French high command has often been criticized. Whatever excuses one might offer, in the end one has to ask how was it that the French
army, with better tanks and more of them than the Germans, was so utterly defeated in so short a space of time? The French, having been on
the winning side in the First World War, were entirely content that the
lessons they drew from it were the right ones. After the First World War,
believing in the power of the defense (a conclusion they had drawn from
that War), they aimed to fight a static war in the next contest. Conducting operations in this way would not require good communications because the pace of events would, in their estimation, be so slow that their
inadequate communications and rigid command and control organization
would be able to cope. There was no point in massing their armor, because its principal role was to support the infantry in defense and local
counter-attack. Events did not go as they had foreseen, and the shock to
an army whose morale was already flawed was too much. The French
Army met General James Gavin's definition: "Organizations created to
fight the last war better are not going to win the next one."
The German Army, having been defeated in the First World War,
were not above analyzing the lessons at the tactical and operational level, and drew the right conclusions. That they failed to learn the strategic
lessons contributed to their ultimate defeat in the Second World War as
it had in the First.
22 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
Table 1
British and Allied Troops Landed in England from Dunkirk
Date
From the
From Dunkirk
Total
Beaches
Harbor
27 May
Nil
7,669
7,669
28 May
5,930
11,874
17,804
29 May
13,752
33,558
47,310
30 May
29,512
24,311
53,283
31 May
22,942
45,072
68,014
1 June
17,348
47,081
64,429
2 June
6,695
19,561
26,256
3 June
1,870
24,876
26,746
4 June
622
25,553
26,175
Grand Total
98,671
239,555
338,226
Accumulated
Total
7,669
25,473
72,783
126,606
194,620
259,049
285,305
312,051
338,226
Table 2
Losses of British Equipment and Stores
(includes losses incurred in fighting south of the Somme by elements not evacuated via
Dunkirk)
Shipped to France Consumed/Expended
Brought Back
(September 1939 in action or destroyed
to England
May 1940)
or abandoned
Guns
2,794
2,472
322
Vehicles
68,618
63,879
4,739
Motorcycles
21,081
20,548
533
Ammunition (tons)
109,000
76,697
32,303
Supplies/Stores (tons) 449,000
415,940
33,060
Petrol (tons)
166,000
164,929
1,071
Of approximately 170 cruiser tanks, 175 light tanks, and 100 infantry tanks, only thirteen
light tanks and nine cruiser tanks were brought back to England.
Notes
1. Brian Bond, The Battle for France & Flanders: Sixty Years On (London: Leo Cooper,
2001), p. 236.
2. During a press briefing on 15 May 1940, Major General Mason-Macfarlane remarked:
"History provides many examples of a British Army being asked to operate under appalling handicaps by the politicians responsible for British policy, but I doubted that the
British Army had ever found itself in a graver position than that in which the governments of the last twenty years had placed it." Ewan Butler, Mason-Mac: The Life of Lieutenant General Sir Noel Mason-Macfarlane (London: Macmillan, 1972), p. 116.
3. One of the 1st Armoured Division's tank battalions and all of its infantry were detached to defend Boulogne, where the survivors were captured.
4. Following the First World War, Major General J.F.C. Fuller and Captain Basil Liddell-Hart were the two British leading advocates of the employment of armor.
5. Alistair Horne, To Lose a Battle: France 1940 (London: Macmillan, 1969), p. 292.
6. Winston Churchill, The Second World War, Vol. II, Their Finest Hour (London: Cassell & Co., 1949), p. 42.
7. Gregory Blaxland, Destination Dunkirk: The Story of Gort's Army (London: William
Kimber, 1973), p. 305.
8. L.F. Ellis, The War in France and Flanders, 1939-1940 (London: Her Majesty's Stationary Office, 1953), p. 182.
9. As soon as Brooke, commanding II Corps, arrived in the Dunkirk perimeter, he was
sent back to England on orders from the War Cabinet to ensure that he was available to
23 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
start the work of re-constituting the British Army. At the time, it was thought that the
bulk of the BEF would be captured. Lieutenant General M.G.H. Barker, commanding I
Corps, whose performance during the retreat had been very poor, was relieved of command after his corps arrived in the perimeter.
10. Ellis, The War in France and Flanders, pp. 349, 398.
11. Blaxland, Destination Dunkirk, p. 344.
12. Correlli Barnett, Engage the Enemy More Closely: The Royal Navy in the Second
World War (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1991), pp. 159-160.
13. Ibid., p. 160.
14. Ibid., pp. 160-161.
15. Ibid., p. 161.
16. Ellis, The War in France and Flanders, p. 327.
17. The Germans, and the French, often used the expression England both to refer to that
country itself in a geographical sense and to the whole of the United Kingdom. They used
the word "English" in the same way regardless of whether the people to whom they were
referring were English, Scots, Welsh, or Irish.
18. Ellis, The War in France and Flanders, p. 326.
MAJOR GENERAL JULIAN THOMPSON CB OBE served in the Royal Marines for thirty-four years in the Near Middle East, the Far East,
Europe, and Northern Ireland. He commanded 40 Commando Royal
Marines for two and a half years and the 3rd Commando Brigade for two
years. The latter period of command includes the Falklands War of
1982. He is a graduate of the British Army Staff College, where he later
instructed. He graduated from the Royal College of Defence Studies in
1980, retired as a Major General in 1986, and is presently a Visiting Professor at the Department of War Studies, King's College London. Major
General Thompson is the author of more than a dozen books, including
3 Commando Brigade in the Falklands: No Picnic (Barnsley: Pen &
Sword, 2007); The Imperial War Museum Book of the War in Burma,
1942-1945 (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 2002); The Royal Marines:
From Sea Soldiers to a Special Force (London: Sidgwick & Jackson,
2000); Ready for Anything: The Parachute Regiment at War, 1940-1982
(London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989); and the forthcoming Dunkirk:
Retreat to Victory (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 2008).
24 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
Spanish Soldiers in the German
Army and Waffen-SS
WAYNE H. BOWEN
Introduction
From 1941 to 1944, nearly fifty thousand Spanish soldiers served voluntarily in the German Army and Waffen-SS, almost entirely on the Eastern
Front. While during 1941 and 1942 they were recruited by the regime of
Generalissimo Francisco Franco, then interested in collaboration with
Nazi Germany, by late 1943 these soldiers were an unwelcome reminder
of Spain's close ties to the failing cause of the Axis. In that year, when
most of the veterans returned home, the Spanish government had lost interest in their fate, and closed offices created to aid their families and
find jobs for those demobilized. For the next ten years, Spain did its best
to forget these soldiers, and refused to endorse their efforts to receive
campaign medals, disability pensions, and other support from Germany,
as had been promised at the time of their enlistments. Franco at this time
was desperate to end Spain's isolation in trade and diplomacy, and so
tried to hide his nation's dalliance with the Third Reich.
The Blue Division, the principal Spanish unit in the German Army during World War II, began as an initiative of Falangists within the Franco
Regime, who saw the German invasion of the USSR on 22 June 1941 as
a chance to destroy communism in Europe. 1 After a mass rally in Madrid
on 24 June, thousands of anti-communist Spaniards began volunteering
to serve in what was officially known as the Division Española de Voluntarios, but was called the Division Azul because of the blue shirts
(camisas azules) worn by Falangist volunteers. This unit, created at the
behest of the Spanish government, was to become the 250th Infantry Division of the German Army, and see service in Army Group North on the
Eastern Front, from October 1941 to October 1943. A smaller successor
unit, the Legion Española de Voluntarios (Blue Legion), replaced the
Blue Division until its withdrawal in March 1944.
Those who joined the Blue Division were driven by many motivations: a craving for adventure, a desire to repay the visit of the International Brigades,2 a feeling of having missed out on the Civil War, an
25 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
urge to punish Stalin for aiding the Spanish Republic, 3 and loyalty to
what was seen as a project of the Falange. Other volunteers were active
duty soldiers bored with a peacetime army, veterans of the Civil War
who missed the camaraderie of combat, and former Republicans who
wanted to repair their political pedigrees. More importantly, however,
were anticommunism, feelings of solidarity with Germany, and political
opportunism.4
Although many Spaniards were excited at the prospect of joining in
the destruction of the Soviet Union, none were more enthusiastic at the
opportunity than the radical Falangists. Indeed, the ranks of the Blue Division filled up with many leaders of the Falange: those most dissatisfied with Franco's lack of commitment to the New Order, including
Dionisio Ridruejo, Agustín Aznar, Manuel Mora Figueroa, Carlos Pinilla, Enrique Sotomayor, Alfredo Jiménez Millas, Vicente Gaceo del Pino,
Juan Domínguez, Agustín de Foxá, and Javier Garcia Noblejas. All were
camisas viejas, comrades of José Antonio, frustrated in their efforts to
bring national syndicalism to Spain.5 Although a minority in the Blue
Division, as in the Falange, these few radicals were important greatly
out of proportion to their numbers. They were, even after years of disappointment, dedicated to the New Order and wanted Spain to enter the
war on the side of the Axis. In place of Spanish belligerency, these
Falangists offered their own belligerency in the Blue Division. The most
dynamic elements in the Falange joined the Axis, even if Spain did not.
There was also a groundswell of volunteers among the general population. By the hundreds and thousands, Spanish men petitioned the
Falange and Serrano's Foreign Ministry to allow them to join the Blue
Division.6
Upon the announcement of the creation of a volunteer unit to fight
alongside the Wehrmacht, the camisas viejas and leadership of the
Falange responded enthusiastically. Dozens of national and provincial
leaders of the Falange and government ministries petitioned to join in
the fight against communism.7 Within a few days, the list of volunteers
included Labor Minister Girón, Ambassador to Brazil and former Secretary General Raimundo Fernández Cuesta, former Vice-Secretary Pedro
Gamero del Castillo, the writer Ernesto Giménez Caballero, University
student chief José Miguel Guitarte, Labor Subsecretary Manuel Valdés,
dozens of other members of the Consejo Nacional8 and Junta Política,9
and the majority of staff at the party's General Secretariat. Arrese and
Serrano Suñer, under the direction of Franco, selected which Falangist
leaders could join, and which could not. Not all of these men were happy
with these decisions. On hearing that Serrano and Arrese had denied his
request, Consejero Nacional Higinio París Eguilaz expressed despondently that this was now "the worst time in my life." Author and early
Falangist leader Ernesto Giménez Caballero also was denied enlistment.
26 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
Guitarte, concerned that Arrese might not let him join, indicated that if
not selected for this service, he would not have the strength to continue
in his present office: "I cannot tolerate the idea that certain people want
to monopolize heroism for themselves, closing this opportunity for the
rest of us Spaniards." Identifying themselves with the Third Reich, some
went so far as to declare "the triumph of Germany [will be] the triumph
of Spain."10
The division entered the front lines in October 1941, taking up defensive positions in the zone of Army Group North, between Moscow and
Leningrad. By this time, it was becoming clear that the war would not be
over within weeks, and that winter the Spanish government prepared a
system to send replacements for those injured on the front lines, and to
eventually bring home those with the most time in the trenches. The rotation policy, created in early 1942, began to operate in late spring. On
25 May, the first battalion of 1,300 replacements left Spain, met en route
from Germany by an equal number of repatriatees. The first wounded
veterans began returning to Spain in early 1942; the prominent Falangist
writer Dionisio Ridruejo among them. Ridruejo returned with his health
in a precarious state, but still agitating for closer ties with Germany. He
had joined the Blue Division "as a firm interventionist," convinced that
the triumph of the Axis would lead to the "constitution of a united Europe, independent and powerful, in which Spain ... would play an important part," but he returned in April 1942 a disillusioned man. After realizing that his service on the Eastern Front would not serve as a "trampoline" into political power and that there was no chance for a genuine
Falangism to take hold in Spain, in the summer of 1942 he resigned all
of his positions in the party. Denouncing the Falange as "inert and without a program," he also accused Franco of never having believed in the
true mission and ideology of José Antonio.11
Others who returned were often just as frustrated with Spain's ambivalent position in the war. On 16 August 1942, this frustration erupted in a
confrontation between a handful of returning Blue Division veterans and
five thousand Carlist monarchists at a Mass in Bilbao commemorating
Civil War dead. Among the worshippers was War Minister General José
Varela, a bitter enemy of the Falange. As the ceremony ended, and the
monarchists began to proceed out of the Basilica of the Virgin of Begoña
chanting Carlist slogans, a scuffle erupted and a hand grenade, thrown
by the Falangist veteran Juan Domínguez, exploded, causing a few minor wounds. Varela, who claimed that the incident was the beginning of
a Falangist attack on the army, pushed for the convictions of the seven
Falangist divisionarios involved. While this was an absurd accusation, it
exemplified the conflicts within the Francoist coalition over the shape of
the regime and the relationship to the outside world. While not all
monarchists were pro-Allied, nor all Falangists pro-Axis, clearly these
27 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
two tendencies predominated within each respective political family. Begoña demonstrated this clash, but it did not begin or end the struggle. It
did, however, end the careers of its two most important protagonists,
General Varela and Serrano Suñer. While neither had instigated the scuffle, both were the most visible sponsors of the factions involved. The alleged bomb-thrower, Juan Domínguez, lost more than his career – he
was executed on 3 September. In 1945, Franco commuted the other six
prison sentences imposed on participating Falangists.12
Another veteran of the Blue Division was also frustrated with the position of Spain. This veteran, however, could throw more than a grenade;
he could conspire to bring Spain into the war. General Muñoz Grandes,
the commander of the Division, had grown increasingly pro-German
with his service on the Eastern Front. While still in Russia, in June 1942,
he entered into secret negotiations with an emissary from the German
Foreign Minister, with the aim of bringing Spain into the war on the side
of the Axis. The general, an old friend of Franco, hoped to urge the
Caudillo into the war, and may have been looking in these discussions
for some way to do so without acting disloyally. Muñoz Grandes "counted himself as a social revolutionary" and "regarded Hitler's Germany as
Spain's natural ally – as a model for national socialist revolution and
anti-Marxism."13 The Germans, upset at Franco's intransigence, were
more than happy to talk to the general. Hitler, who had been impressed
by the performance of the Blue Division and likewise irritated over Franco's refusal to enter the war, hoped to use the general, along with the remaining Naziphiles in Spain, to replace Franco. Throughout the rest of
1942, and into the first part of 1943, Muñoz Grandes maneuvered for position with the Germans, fellow Falangists, and other pro-German
Spaniards. Hitler was clearly concerned with "clearing up the Spanish
political situation," planning to use General Muñoz Grandes and veterans of the Blue Division in "a decisive role, when the hour for the overthrow of this parson-ridden regime strikes."14
Although Muñoz Grandes continued to negotiate with the Germans,
while trying to remain in command of the Blue Division, in December of
1942 he found himself on the way back to Spain, rotated out of his position by Franco, who might have heard of the general's discussions with
the Germans. His replacement was General Emilio Esteban-Infantes, the
contrary of Muñoz Grandes in appearance, temperament, and politics.
Esteban-Infantes was a meticulous staff officer with little interest in politics. He was also, like the replacements who took the place of those rotated back to Spain, loyal to Franco, and unlikely to be attracted by Nazi
schemes. Aware of the sentiments of Esteban-Infantes, Hitler had managed to delay his assumption of command for half a year, forcing the
Spanish general to cool his heels in Berlin for two months and permitting him to join the division in the late summer of 1942 only at first as
28 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
Chief of Infantry.15
When Esteban-Infantes finally took up his new command, the old divisional commander returned to Madrid. After a final meeting with
Hitler on 13 December, during which the Führer awarded him the Ritterkreuz mit Eichenlaub (Knight's Cross with Oak Leaves), Muñoz
Grandes returned to a hero's welcome in Spain. 16 At the border town of
Irún, the crowds broke through police cordons to greet the general. On
18 December, Muñoz Grandes arrived in Madrid to another boisterous
welcome by a large crowd, which included the Ministers of the Falange,
Army, Interior, Air Force, Agriculture, Labor, and Education, all Delegados Nacionales and Secretarios Nacionales of the Falange, Franco's
daughter, and other military, religious, and diplomatic representatives.
Embraced first by Army Minister General Asensio, then by the other
Ministers, the victorious general soon found himself surrounded by veterans of the Blue Division who, breaking with protocol, stormed forward
to cheer their former chief.17
Received as a hero, Muñoz Grandes also earned the praise of the
Caudillo, who promoted him to Lieutenant General and awarded him the
Palma de Plata, the Falange's highest honor. This advancement was a
mixed blessing, however. Instead of a new troop command, he was appointed to head Franco's Military Household, a prominently powerless
position. The guest of countless receptions and dinners hosted by the
Falange, Spanish military, and Axis diplomats, Muñoz Grandes henceforth was well-regarded, well-rewarded and, except as a symbol of collaboration with Germany, nearly irrelevant to Spanish political life. Although the general continued to discuss Spain's political course, making
plans with his fellow Naziphiles, he was not a significant power broker
in Madrid. He, along with a handful of important Falangists and proGerman military figures, still wanted Franco to bring Spain into the war
as Germany's ally, and to implement the long-awaited Falangist social
revolution, but this ambition faded fast in early 1943.18 As the commander of the Blue Division, he had the ear of Hitler and the power of an
armed constituency. Back in Madrid, he was just one more general without troops.
Elsewhere in Europe, Blue Division veterans had begun the first of
what would be many conferences supporting Nazi ideas, both during and
after the war. In April 1942, Falangist university leader José Miguel
Guitarte led a delegation of nine fellow Blue Division soldiers and veterans to Dresden, where they participated in an International Congress of
Student Combatants. Representing the two thousand university students
of the Blue Division, the Spaniards and fellow soldier-scholars from sixteen Axis nations rallied in support of the New Order, Nazi Germany,
and the war. The five-day Congress, 15-20 April, also attracted the attendance of Belgian collaborator Léon Degrelle; former ambassador to
29 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
Spain Wilhelm Faupel; and Bernhard Rust, Reich Minister of Science,
Education, and Culture.19
This withdrawal of identification with the New Order, which Franco
began in late 1942, did not meet with approval in all quarters. In Madrid,
German diplomats and Nazi leaders made their displeasure known both
officially and informally. Their unhappiness found a strong echo among
the remaining Naziphiles in the Falange, the Blue Division, and other areas of the Spanish political system. Even as Axis defeats destroyed their
dreams of remaking the world, many of these radicals remained faithful
to the cause. Internal resistance to the changes in Spanish foreign policy
occurred at many levels, and might have constituted an ongoing threat to
Spanish independence throughout the period, had Hitler ever been willing to support a radical solution to deal with his Spanish problem. Instead, the Germans temporized. While German foreign policy adjusted to
the cooling climate of Hispano-German relations, Nazi leaders continued
to welcome the support for the New Order by leaders and rank-and-file
members of the Falange, the División Azul, and other Falangist organizations, encouraging the aspirations of members of these elements.
While the Nazis tried to organize Blue Division veterans into clandestine
cells to work in support of common objectives, some Falangists printed
pamphlets denouncing Franco's abandonment of revolution and the New
Order. This "Authentic Falange" called for a renewal of the National
Syndicalist Revolution in collaboration with Germany.20
In public speeches and secret publications, believers in the New Order
affirmed their devotion to the Axis, support for radical social revolution,
and hostility not just towards the Allies, but also to conservative elements of the Franco regime and Spanish society. While most Spaniards
were encouraged by Franco's change of stripes, many leaders of the
Falange, soldiers of the Blue Division, and Spanish workers in Nazi
Germany did not budge from their earlier adherence to Hitler's European
crusade, seeing Spain's destiny as fixed alongside that of the Third Reich, and regarded their nation as a fitting partner for Hitler's Germany.
Their goal was a true New Order in Europe, a continental system of allied authoritarian and fascist regimes, hierarchical meritocracies with
charismatic leaders, and socially revolutionary ideologies. The Nazis
were temperamentally unsuited to accept alliances between equals, however, and never considered their Spanish comrades as anything other
than prospective pawns for the sinister ends of National Socialism.21
Nineteen-forty-three was the year of Spain's transition away from proAxis neutrality. In January, the Blue Division was at full strength and the
Secretary General of the Falange, José Luis de Arrese, visited Germany
to reaffirm the strength of Hispano-German relations. By December, the
Blue Division was withdrawing and Jordana was sending out mediation
offers to both sides of the war. Franco's declining faith in an Axis victo30 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
ry steered him first toward hopes for a negotiated settlement in the war,
and later to closer ties with the United States and Great Britain. Foreign
Minister Jordana was his point man in this shift and "did a masterful
job" in steering Spain back to a more genuine neutrality. During 1943,
still not entirely convinced of the outcome of the war, Franco pursued a
double policy. While Jordana and the Foreign Ministry courted the Allies, Arrese and many in the Falange maintained strong ties with Germany.22 As the year progressed, however, Franco began to ally himself
more with Jordana's course, leaving Spanish Naziphiles increasingly
alienated from his regime. For example, the Spanish government refused
an offer by the German Institute of Culture in Madrid to subsidize vacations in Germany for five veterans of the Blue Division.23 Spain also refused to continue negotiations on a Hispano-German accord to provide
ongoing health care for veterans of the Blue Division, judging correctly
that the international climate was not conducive to a new treaty with the
Third Reich, whatever the benefit to veterans.24
Despite the efforts of Franco's government, the Nazis maintained connections to their allies among Falangist activists and veterans of the
Blue Division. With the return of the final elements of the Blue Legion
in early 1944, this pool of potentially radical Naziphiles grew dramatically. Even in early 1945, the Nazis could still count on reliable agents
in the Spanish police forces, army, Falange, and other party and government organizations for these purposes. Allied planners worried that these
men, numbering more than 8,000, could prove dangerous advocates of
Nazi interests in the peninsula. As Franco was moving away from the
Axis, the Allies predicted a radicalization of Spanish politics, possibly
leading to civil war, violent unrest, or German intervention.25
Even the Blue Division, for so long the darling of the Falange and
War Ministry, became unwieldy baggage in this time of Allied ascendancy. After years of praise and financial support to the unit, veterans,
and their families, in late 1944 all such assistance ended. The support offices of the unit in Madrid and the provinces were closed, publicity ended, and the Spanish War Ministry indefinitely postponed questions about
veterans' pensions, promotions, and decorations. In response, the veterans and their families decided to organize themselves to lobby for their
due. A few Falangist stalwarts in Spain did what they could to prop up
the collapsing Nazi war effort: smuggling supplies to German redoubts
in France, spying on the Allies, and protecting German citizens from Allied expulsion demands, but these efforts were irrelevant to the general
picture of deteriorating Spanish relations with the Third Reich.26
The leadership of the Falange tried to appease Germany with comforting words, even as the Spanish government became increasingly unfriendly. Party Secretary General José Luis de Arrese, in an article in
January 1945 denying that the Falange had been domesticated, wrote:
31 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
"Today it is very fashionable to camouflage the Falange and dress it in
the most inoffensive democratic aspect, just as before it was to present it
as a wild fascist beast." Despite a dramatic shift away from pro-Axis reporting, the Falangist press still had words of praise for the courage of
the German military and the Hitler Youth: "...strong, healthy in body and
soul, patriotic, [and] full of a fanatic will to victory. ... How beautiful the
scene of those children-soldiers, those twelve year old heroes!" In their
time of desperation, Nazi leaders struggled to maintain a base of support
in Spain for whatever contingencies might arise, sending 10-15,000 pesetas per month for "pensions and the organization of reunion evenings"
among veterans of the Blue Division.27
In 1944, a number of Spaniards, denied the opportunity to enlist in the
Blue Division or Legion, crossed into France to enlist in the German
Army and Waffen-SS, much to the consternation of the Franco regime.
The Spanish government's attempts to lobby the German government for
the return of these men were unsuccessful. Franco's Ambassador in
Berlin tried his best to rescue these Spaniards, but informed the Spanish
Foreign Ministry that Berlin was unlikely to surrender precious volunteer laborers and soldiers to an increasingly unfriendly Madrid.28 The Allies protested strongly to the Spanish Foreign Ministry about these enlistments in German military and intelligence services. Of particular concern to the United States and the Free French representative in Madrid
was the service in the Gestapo of dozens of Spaniards in France and rumors that hundreds more were preparing to join them. The Spanish Foreign Ministry vehemently and deceptively denied knowledge of any enlistments or service in the German military, indicating that perhaps these
soldiers and agents might be Spanish expatriate Reds who, for "the spirit
of adventure and economic necessity" may have enlisted. The Spanish
government had not and would not authorize the enlistment of
Spaniards, whether Blue Division veterans or not, in German military,
security, or police forces, nor allow them to aid German forces in
France, and after the war did not recognize these veterans as equivalent
to those of the Blue Division. The Spanish Foreign Ministry suspected
that elements of the Falange were aiding Nazi recruitment efforts, however, and sent a letter to Falangist Secretary-General Arrese, asking if
the party knew anything about a group of four hundred falangistas, allegedly preparing to leave Spain for France to join German occupation
forces there.29
What was the significance of Blue Division veterans in Spain? During
the war, they were a base of potential collaborators for Germany, had
Hitler decided to launch an attack on the Iberian Peninsula. It is easy to
imagine General Muñoz Grandes as Hitler's choice to rule in Madrid.
With the end of the Second World War, however, the veterans, once
32 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
praised by Franco, became an embarrassment. Faced with disinterest
from the government, widows and family members of the soldiers of the
Blue Division formed an organization to provide mutual support. The
first gatherings were masses attended by those praying for sons and husbands on the Eastern Front. When the division's headquarters in Madrid
was closed by the order of Franco, meetings and masses continued in
other Falangist buildings and churches. In 1946, faced with mounting
expenses, the families organized formally. In 1953, a larger organization
formed to incorporate veterans as well as families of the fallen or those
held prisoner. The Cold War, and Spain's improving relations with the
West, brought official recognition for this organization, which in 1959
constituted itself as the Hermandad de la División Azul (HDA).30
The HDA became an affiliate of the official veterans' organization,
with its members receiving the same benefits and legal status as those
who had fought on the Nationalist side in the Spanish Civil War. With
these changes, the political rehabilitation of the HDA was complete, as
during the height of the Cold War, having fought against the Soviet
Union was once again a fact to be publicly celebrated by the Spanish
government.
Notes
1. Falangists were members of the awkwardly-titled Falange Española Tradicionalista y
de las J.O.N.S. (Juntas Ofensivas Nacionalsindicalistas), or the Traditionalist Spanish
Phalanx of the National Syndicalist Offensive Group. The original Falange Española
(Spanish Phalanx) was founded in 1933 as a fascist movement and was dedicated to reviving Spanish nationalism, opposing communism and liberalism, and reviving Spain's
Catholic and imperial heritage. In 1934, the Falange Española (FE) merged with another
small party, the J.O.N.S., to create the FE y de las JONS, but even combined, the party
never earned one percent of the vote during the elections held during the Spanish Republic (1931-1936). In 1936, the FE y de las JONS supported the Nationalists in the Spanish
Civil War, and in 1937, Francisco Franco forcibly merged the party with the Traditionalists – a monarchist party – to create a single, unitary party for Spain.
2. The International Brigades were units of foreign volunteers, mostly organized by the
COMINTERN (Communist International organization controlled by the Soviet Union)
and other left-wing parties, which fought in the Spanish Civil War to defend the Spanish
Republic against the Nationalists. Historians estimate that 25,000-50,000 served in these
units, with the largest contingents from France, Germany, Italy, Poland, and the United
States. The brigades were disbanded at the end of 1938, less than six months before the
end of the Civil War.
3. The Soviet Union was the largest provider of weapons, military equipment, training,
and advisers to the Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War. For its aid, often sold
at inflated prices, the Soviet Union received more than $500 million in gold from the reserve of the Bank of Spain.
4. José Gordón, "Porqué me fuí a Rusia," Blau División, April 1994; Joaquín Miralles
Güill, Tres dias de guerra y otros relatos de la División Azul (Alicante, Spain: García
Hispán, 1981), pp. 22-24, 27; José Díaz de Villegas, La División Azul en línea
(Barcelona: Ediciones Acervo, 1967), p. 90; Interviews by the author with Felipe Fernández Gil, 30 January 1994, Cáceres, Spain; Luis Nieto García, 9, 11 March 1994, Madrid;
Enrique Serra, 14 March 1994, Madrid; Miguel Salvador Gironés, 24 March 1994, Ali33 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
cante, Spain; Ramon Pérez-Eizaguirre and Fernando Vadillo, 7 May 1994, Valdeolmos,
Spain; Jorge Mayoral, 12 May 1994, Madrid.
5. Camisas Viejas (Old Shirts) were those members of the Falange who joined the party
before the February 1936 elections – the last elections before the Spanish Civil War –
when the Falange was a small party. Those who joined after February 1936, or especially
after the Civil War began in July 1936, were called "camisas nuevas" (new shirts), a term
that implied their membership was more opportunistic than idealistic.
José Antonio Primo de Rivera (1903-1936) was the founder of the Falange, and also
the son of former military dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera. He was known by friend and
enemy alike as "José Antonio." Arrested by the Republicans in June 1936, he was executed on 20 November 1936.
6. Arriba, 10, 15 July, 24 August, and 25 October 1941, 4, 6 January 1942; Archivo del
Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores (Archive of the Foreign Ministry, AMAE),
LegR1080/28 and LegR1079/59; Medina, 3, 10 July 1941; Luis Suárez Fernández,
Cronica de la Sección Femenina y su tiempo (Madrid: Asociación Nueva Andadura,
1992), pp. 140-142; Blau División, March 1962, April 1965, June 1984, February 1986,
September 1987.
7. For a contrary position, see Sheelagh M. Ellwood, Spanish Fascism in the Franco
Era: Falange Española de las Jons, 1936-76 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1987),
p. 83.
8. The Consejo Nacional (National Council) was the leadership assembly of the Falange,
and had its origins in the early days of the party. It never exercised significant legislative
authority under the Franco Regime, but its membership (approximately 100-150) was
carefully balanced between the major elements of the Nationalist coalition (Falangists,
monarchists, military officers, Catholic leaders, and other conservatives).
9. The Junta Política (Political Junta) was created in 1939, and planned as the executive
arm of the Falange, with an added responsibility to supervise research and ideology within the party. Like the Consejo Nacional, it had little more than a ceremonial role.
10. Arriba, 29 June and 11 July 1941; AMAE, LegR1079/56. Various documents, 25
June to 30 August 1941, between the Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores (MAE), Falange,
and the Army on petitions by Falangist leaders to join the Blue Division; Ernesto
Giménez Caballero, Memorias de un dictador (Barcelona: Editorial Planeta, 1979), pp.
146-147; letter, 2 July 1941, from Guitarte to Arrese; Agustín Aznar, in a broadcast over
Radio Berlin; Boletín Informativo de la División Azul, 3 August 1941.
11. Arriba, 11 July 1941, 23 April, 24, 26 May, and 10 June 1942; Gerald R. Kleinfeld
and Lewis A. Tambs, Hitler's Spanish Legion: The Blue Division in Russia (Carbondale,
Ill: Southern Illinois University Press, 1979), pp. 168-170; Dionisio Ridruejo, Escrito en
España (Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada, 1962), pp. 28, 138; Dionisio Ridruejo, Casi
unas memorias (Barcelona: Editorial Planeta, 1976), pp. 224-243; Juan Benet, Ramón
Serrano Suñer, Marià Manent, et. al., Dionisio Ridruejo: de la Falange a la oposición
(Madrid: Editorial Taurus, 1976), pp. 71-81.
12. Arriba, 9, 11, 19, 25 August 1942; Blau División, March 1993; Antonio Marquina
Barrio, "El atentado de Begoña," Historia, vol. 16, no. 76, 1982, pp. 11-19; Daniel
Sueiro and Bernardo Díaz Nosty, Historia del Franquismo, vol. 2 (Madrid: Editorial
Sedmay, 1977), pp. 64-71; Stanley G. Payne, The Franco Regime: 1936-1975 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), pp. 306-309; Ellwood, Spanish Fascism,
pp. 84-88; Ramón Serrano Suñer, Memorias (Barcelona: Editorial Planeta, 1977), pp.
364-371; Xavier Tusell and Genoveva García Queipo de Llano, Franco y Mussolini: La
politica española durante la segunda guerra mundial (Barcelona: Editorial Planeta,
1985), pp. 165-168.
13. Kleinfeld and Tambs, Hitler's Spanish Legion, p. 194.
14. Norman Cameron and R.H. Stevens, translators, Hitler's Table Talk: 1941-44 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973), pp. 569-570; Klaus-Jörg Rühl, Franco, Falange y
III Reich: España durante la II Guerra Mundial (Madrid: Editorial Akal, 1986), pp.
34 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
198-201.
15. Servicio Histórico Militar (Military Historical Service, SHM), 29/3712/26. EstebanInfantes took over on 13 December 1942; SHM, 29/52/11, 13.
16. Blau División, March 1986; SHM, 29/53/2/11-12.
17. Arriba, 18 December 1942.
18. Arriba, 18-19, 24, 31 December 1942, 3, 6, 13 January, and 13 February 1943; Blau
División, March 1986; Ramón Garriga, La España de Franco: de la División Azul al
pacto con los Estados Unidos: 1943 a 1951 (Puebla, Mexico: Editorial Cajica, 1971),
pp. 12-13; Kleinfeld and Tambs, Hitler's Spanish Legion, pp. 228-248; National
Archives and Records Administration (NARA), Washington, D.C., T120, Roll 82,
62534-62744; Payne, The Franco Regime, pp. 313-316.
19. Arriba, 10, 14, 16, 18 April and 6 May 1942; Hoja de Campaña, 6 April 1942;
Archivo General de la Administración (General Administration Archives, AGA), Secretaría General del Movimiento (General Secretariat of the Movement, SGM) 10. Report,
25 May 1942, Berlin Falange.
20. Fundación Nacional Francisco Franco (National Foundation of Francisco Franco,
FNFF), Documentos inéditos para la historia del Generalísimo Franco, vol. 4 (Madrid:
Azor, 1994), pp. 38-40.
21. FNFF, 4, 1/5-10.
22. FNFF, 4, 16/94-99. "Nota de Jordana a Franco quejándose del viaje de Arrese a Alemania;" J.W.D. Trythall, El Caudillo: A Political Biography of Franco (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970), pp. 186-188; Charles Halstead, "Spanish Foreign Policy, 1936-1978,"
in James W. Cortada, ed., Spain in the Twentieth Century World: Essays on Spanish
Diplomacy, 1898-1978 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980), pp. 71-73; Ramón Garriga, Franco-Serrano Suñer: un drama politico (Barcelona: Editorial Planeta, 1986), pp.
143-144.
23. AGA, P, SGM 54. Letter, 12 June 1944, from Luisa M. de Aramburu, Regidora Exterior, Sección Femenina, to Celia Giménez, Berlin SF leader; letters, 17-22 June 1944, between the Spanish Foreign Ministry and the Delegación Nacional del Servico Exterior
(National Delegation of the Exterior, DNSE).
24. AGA, T 16262. Letters, 8 September and 27 October 1943, from the Comisión Interministerial Para el Envio de Trabajadores a Alemania (Interministerial Commission for
the Sending of Workers to Germany, CIPETA) to the Delegación Local de Sindicatos,
Vigo-Pontevedra. CIPETA was an agency formed by the Spanish government in 1941 to
organize the dispatch of volunteers to work in Nazi Germany, as well as to supervise
working conditions. From 1941-1944 it sent groups of laborers on one-year contracts.
Although the initial plan projected sending 100,000, due to poor working conditions, a
lack of organization by the Spanish government, and unfulfilled promises by the Germans, only 25,000 went, with no more than 7,000 at any one time.; letter, 14 September
1943, from CIPETA to the Delegación Local de Sindicatos, Murcia; AMAE, R2197/43.
Various documents, German Embassy to Spanish Foreign Ministry, September 1943 –
June 1944.
25. AMAE, LegR2299/3. Report, 8 January 1945, Spanish Police Attaché, Berlin to
Spanish Foreign Ministry; NARA, OSS Report, 1 March 1944. RG226, OSS E97, Box
29, Folder 508.
26. NARA, OSS Report, 4 December 1944, RG226, OSS E21, Box 420; NARA, Magic,
3 November 1944, 31 January and 23 April 1945; Christian Leitz, Economic Relations
Between Nazi Germany and Franco's Spain, 1936-1945 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1996), pp. 215-216.
27. José Luis de Arrese, "Participación del pueblo en las tareas del Estado," Boletín Informativo de la Delegación Nacional del Servico Exterior, January 1945; Mayo, 4 January 1945; NARA, Magic, 10, 19 March 1945.
28. Rafael García Pérez, "El envío de trabajadores españoles a Alemania durante la segunda guerra mundial," Hispania: Revista española de historia, vol. 48, no. 170, 1988,
35 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
pp. 1031-1065; NARA, OSS Report, 14 June 1944, RG226, OSS E127, Box 31, Folder
217; AGA, T, 16255 and 16256. Various reports, August 1944 and other months;
AMAE, LegR2192/31-32. Various letters, 1943-1945, from parents and relatives to
Spanish Foreign Ministry; AMAE, LegR2192/31. Letter, 27 September 1944, from Ambassador Vidal to Foreign Minister Lequerica; and AMAE, LegR2225/1, 6. Various documents, 1944-1945.
29. AMAE, LegR2192/32. Diplomatic Notes, 7, 11 August 1944, from the British and
U.S. Embassies in Madrid to the Spanish Foreign Minister, respectively; AMAE,
LegR2192/32. Diplomatic Note, 8 August 1944, from Jacques Truelle, Minister Plenipotentiary of the Provisional French Republic, to Subsecretary, Foreign Ministry Pan de
Soraluce. This was a follow-up to a personal complaint of 5 August; AMAE,
LegR2192/32. Diplomatic Note, 2 August 1944, from Foreign Minister to U.S. Ambassador; AMAE, LegR2192/31. Diplomatic Note, 31 August 1944, from Foreign Minister
to British Ambassador; AMAE, LegR2192/32. Letter, 8 August 1944, from Subsecretary
Pan de Soraluce to the Secretary General Arrese.
30. Rafael Ibáñez Hernández,"Las Hermandades de la DA, Blau División, June 1959,
May, June, July/August 1993.
WAYNE H. BOWEN is Associate Professor of History at Ouachita Baptist University in Arkadelphia, Arkansas and the Battalion Commander
of the 431st Civil Affairs Battalion (USAR) in North Little Rock,
Arkansas. He is the author of several books, including Undoing Saddam:
From Occupation to Sovereignty in Northern Iraq (Dulles, VA: Potomac
Books, 2007); Spain during World War II (Columbia, MO: University of
Missouri Press, 2006); and Spaniards and Nazi Germany: Collaboration
in the New Order (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2000).
36 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
Questions and Answers:
Barrett Tillman
ROBERT VON MAIER
Barrett Tillman is the author of more than forty books, including LeMay
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Heroes: U.S. Army Medal of
Honor Recipients (New York: Berkley, 2006); Clash of the Carriers:
The True Story of the Marianas Turkey Shoot of World War II (New
York: New American Library, 2005); Brassey's D-Day Encyclopedia:
The Normandy Invasion A to Z (Dulles, VA: Brassey's, 2004); Above
and Beyond: The Aviation Medals of Honor (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002); TBD Devastator Units of the US Navy (Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2000); SBD Dauntless Units of World War 2
(Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 1998); TBF/TBM Avenger Units of World
War 2 (Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 1999); U.S. Navy Fighter Squadrons
in World War II (North Branch, MN: Specialty Press, 1997); Corsair:
The F4U in World War II and Korea (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press,
1979); Hellcat: The F6F in World War II (Annapolis: Naval Institute
Press, 1979); and The Dauntless Dive Bomber of World War II (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1976).
Q: Are there any Second World War scholars who have been an important influence on you as a military historian?
A: As with absolutely everybody who delves into the Pacific, Samuel
Eliot Morison was an early, lasting, and profound influence. I grew up
reading in the 1950s and 1960s, when there wasn't a lot of variety in
PTO [Pacific Theater of Operations] coverage. We didn't know better,
but in those days Edwin P. Hoyt and Martin Caidin passed for serious
historians. Anyway, Morison's work still holds up, despite the errors and
lapses, and I think that's as much a tribute to his style as his substance.
He really was an elegant writer, and since I regard myself as essentially
a storyteller, the way a story is told remains important to me.
We can quibble about semantics regarding scholars, but another major
influence was Edward P. Stafford. I think he's only written two or three
books, but The Big E probably remains the finest ship "biography" ever
37 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
penned.1 I read it for the first time in 1964, and it whetted my appetite
for Enterprise and a personal telling of history. Several years later, I began getting acquainted with CV-6 veterans, and it was an immensely rewarding experience, personally and professionally. Major players like
Dick Best, Bill Martin, [Rear Admiral James D.] "Jig Dog" Ramage,
"Hotshot" Charlie Henderson, and others. All of them were extremely
supportive of my work – especially Jig. He and Ginger practically adopted me, as did Alex and Kay Vraciu and Marion and Edna Carl.
In high school, I read Edward Jablonski's B-17 book and was taken by
his personal-operational approach to essentially a technical subject. 2
Back then, most aviation "history" books were more "rivet counter" texts
than operational histories, and I remember thinking, "Why aren't more
books written like Flying Fortress?" When I began writing my series of
carrier aircraft volumes for the Naval Institute, Jablonski's format was
well in mind. It's proven a sound, durable concept, though I admit I'm
still surprised when some reviewers or readers say they want more technical information in my books. I just don't understand that attitude, because there are dozens of sources for that material.
Q: If you were asked to recommend five books that should be in the library of anyone interested in the Pacific War, what works would you select and what are the specific reasons for your selections?
A: We PTO historians work under a significant disadvantage, given the
problems with the Japanese language. The ETO [European Theater of
Operation] guys have a much easier time, and on the rare occasions
when I need German information, I have two good sources. My younger
brother was a Rhodes Scholar who speaks German, and there's an aviation-literate young lady who can read the old-style Gothic (Fraktur)
script. She even deciphered part of a FW-190 manual for me. But
Japanese is much more of a challenge.
Fortunately, in recent years it's become easier to obtain translations of
Japanese primary sources. The Senshi Sosho series has been partially
translated, although I don't know if the entire set will ever be completely
available. Therefore, books with Japanese primary sources are essential
to studying the Pacific War, which I separate from the China War [SinoJapanese Conflict]. So, here are my selections...
1) The Rising Sun by John Toland.3 Toland spoke and wrote the language, and his wife was Japanese. Working with primary sources in the
1960s, he compiled his two-volume history based on military and diplomatic documents as well as interviews with senior, middle, and lower
level Japanese veterans of the period 1936-1945. For insight as to how
the war was conducted from Tokyo, Rising Sun is an excellent resource.
It's especially good on diplomacy and palace politics, which is a perspec38 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
tive we seldom see in the West.
2) A Battle History of the Imperial Japanese Navy by Paul Dull.4 I met
Professor Dull at the University of Oregon in the 1970s. A really interesting man. I remember him saying that he had trouble translating his
book into Japanese because there's no equivalent to the phrase "a Pier
Six brawl!" As a Japanese linguist before the war, he had a rare perspective on the situation, and his single-volume history makes a very handy
reference. I think it's best read in conjunction with the appropriate Morison volumes for an overall perspective.
3) History of United States Naval Operations in World War II by
Samuel Eliot Morison.5 His fifteen volumes are the standard reference
on the subject, based on tons of documentation and interviews conducted
during and shortly after the war. As any hard-core PTO student knows,
Morison needs to be read with one eyebrow raised, since there were inevitable errors in so massive an undertaking, and he was not always objective. (John Lundstrom provides chapter and verse on that subject in
his new biography of Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher. 6) But I regard Morison as the New York Times of World War II naval history – the extensive
first draft providing the base for later researchers and writers to build
upon. He covers the battles for each island and, to an extent, New
Guinea and the Philippines, so the series provides a comprehensive view
of sea, air, and land operations.
4) Silent Victory by Clay Blair.7 Blair has carved a deserved niche for
himself as "Mr. Submarine" among World War II historians, as he followed his U.S. study with an equally comprehensive U-boat history. 8 As
a World War II submariner himself, he brought exceptional knowledge
and detail to the subject. Additionally, working much later than Morison,
Blair enjoyed greater perspective and was able to focus more sharply on
the merchant war against Japan. He's very good with personalities, addressing "the skipper problem" as well as the torpedo scandal, and he
makes cogent observations about submarine employment and tactics, and
a reasonable degree of intelligence usage. Also, there's an enormous
amount of reference material, including summaries of each war patrol.
5) Guadalcanal by Richard B. Frank.9 The first four entries on my list
are necessarily broad treatments of very large subjects. But Rich Frank's
definitive study deserves inclusion for at least two reasons. Even after
Midway, Guadalcanal represented an all or nothing situation for Japan;
the fork in the road from which there was no return. It's also the most interesting of the Pacific battles because it was just about the only one
fought on anything like even terms. (We could have lost Guadalcanal,
unlike anything that followed, with the possible exception of Tarawa,
which mattered far less in determining the course of the war.)
Secondly, in my opinion, Rich's book is the finest campaign study yet
produced on the Pacific War. Immensely detailed, readable, with plenty
39 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
of anecdotes and a wealth of references, it stands atop the pantheon of
"Cactus" literature.
Q: Vis à vis the need for additional scholarship, what do you believe is
the most under-examined aspect of 1) the Pacific War; 2) the air war in
Europe; and 3) the naval war in the Mediterranean?
A: Regarding the Pacific War, the B-29 mining campaign is generally
acknowledged, but seldom receives the attention it deserves. It remains
perhaps the best example of economy of force, since only 1,500 sorties
resulted in choking off most of Japan's east coast ports with less than one
percent losses.
Regarding the air war in Europe, I would say strategic targeting. For
instance, Germany's electric grid was placed at the top of the AWPD-1
list in 1941, but slipped to twelfth place or even lower during actual conduct of operations. The experts said that the grid was too extensive and
too resilient to be permanently affected by bombing, and they were
wrong, wrong, wrong. I think that Speer and others kept waiting for the
other shoe (bomb) to fall.
Regarding the naval war in the Mediterranean, I would say the use of
carriers is widely acknowledged, but seldom examined. Norman Polmar
and David Brown have both addressed the subject in their respective
books, but I don't think there's ever been a specific study. 10 I have a
quasi-personal stake in the subject because in 1990 I was able to introduce Dave McCampbell to Rod Smith, brother of the Spitfire pilot who
Dave waved aboard the USS Wasp [CV-7] – minus a tailhook – during
one of the Malta reinforcements.11
Q: What were some of the influencing factors in your decision to research and write LeMay, which is part of Palgrave Macmillan's Great
Generals Series?
A: That's an odd situation. Palgrave contacted my agent, Jim Hornfischer, seeking an author to write a biography of Marine General Holland M.
Smith for the series. Jim tossed it to me, but I said that I could do a good
job on Jimmy Doolittle, as I knew him a bit more than casually, and he
would make an excellent aviation representative (no admirals need apply
to the series.) I was surprised when Palgrave declined, saying that General Jimmy was "not significant enough as a leader." That was a revelation to me! (Ho-lee smokes: he was the only officer to command three
numbered air forces: 12th, 15th, and 8th!) But the publisher said it
would consider a proposal on LeMay.
I cannot claim to have known LeMay, though my friend Ken Walsh,
the Marine fighter ace, once pointed him out in a Los Angeles restaurant.
40 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
But I was intrigued with writing a biography because there had not been
a posthumous treatment of him, and I liked the idea of being the first.
His memoir was released in 1965 and the only other bio, Iron Eagle, appeared in 1986, four years before he died. 12 So I thought there was a
market for an objective biography.
In some ways, Curt LeMay was a difficult subject because he was so
studiously low-key. Other titles in the Palgrave series include Patton
with his flamboyance and Eisenhower with his avuncular quality and the
controversy about his female chauffeur. Not LeMay. His private life was
private, and as far as I know he never strayed.
The key to understanding LeMay is that he was about results. General
Lauris Norstad said that LeMay was the ultimate operator, and that's
true. He was already an excellent pilot when he arrived at the 2nd Bomb
Group in 1937, and he became one of the finest aerial navigators of his
era. Along the way, he taught himself everything there was to know
about bombing. He was, simply, the most thoroughly professional military airman of his generation. Even Robert Strange McNamara admired
that quality in him, if nothing else.
I knew the book would draw criticism on a couple of counts. First, a
lot of people loath Curt LeMay for his Cold War attitude and his political affiliation with George Wallace. Irving Stone's description of LeMay
as "a caveman in a bomber" caught on immediately. So some reviewers
apply their preconceived notions of the man to the book, as if he should
never be the subject of a biography.
Secondly, Palgrave did not do a terrific job marketing the series. Its
target audience is corporate managers as well as military readers, but
that's never been well explained. Consequently, the series authors get
criticized for meeting the editorial requirements. For instance, I was
asked to speculate on how LeMay would view events in the war on terror and invasion of Iraq, which I did. (He would urge the same thing as
he did in 1942-1945: massive violence unstintingly applied, though targeting poses problems.) But some reviewers object to what is seen as
gratuitous attempts at current relevancy.
Q: If you had the opportunity to interview General LeMay regarding his
service in World War II, what questions would you ask him?
A: The first question I would ask him is: How could training have been
improved?
LeMay was always about training. It would be a vast understatement
to say that he was disappointed in the standard of training for his initial
cadre of 305th Bomb Group personnel. Many of his B-17 pilots had no
formation experience in four-engine aircraft, and few had ever flown for
prolonged periods at altitude. He was especially critical of gunnery train41 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
ing, as he thought that any well-adjusted American male should have
been exposed to the rudiments of marksmanship.
Therefore, LeMay set about building his first command from the
ground up – literally. The philosophy he used there was expanded constantly over his career, eventually to the point that SAC [Strategic Air
Command] combat crews commonly were cross-trained. Pilots could
navigate, navigators could bomb, etc.
The second question I would ask is: Should we have continued daylight bombing without long-range fighters?
Somewhere in my notes I have a source that LeMay acknowledged
that the daylight bombing offensive continued for lack of anything else
to do. He was undoubtedly right, as the air campaign was the only way
of directly attacking Germany until 1945. But the price was heavy, as the
8th and 15th Air Forces – not to mention the RAF – sustained periods of
near-unsupportable losses. In early 1943, it was statistically impossible
for a bomber crew to survive a full twenty-five-mission tour.
Despite AAF doctrine of the self-defending bomber, LeMay and his
colleagues recognized that for deep penetration into Reich airspace,
fighter escort was essential. (Of the Schweinfurt-Regensburg mission he
quipped, "Our escorting fighters had black crosses on their wings.") But
to cancel the campaign or to switch to night missions was unthinkable.
The United States simply possessed the will and ability to accept the
losses until fighters became available.
The third question I would ask is: Why continue high-altitude bombing over Japan?
When LeMay took over XXI Bomber Command in January 1945 he
was told that he would succeed or be fired. (Who would have replaced
him was far from certain – the threat from Arnold via Norstad may have
been more for theatrics than anything else.) But Haywood Hansell, an
old friend of LeMay's, had tried the school solution since Marianas B-29
ops began in November, with a striking lack of success due to weather
and the unexpected effects of the jet stream. Therefore, it's odd that
LeMay, as coldly analytical as he was, continued the high-altitude missions until early March. With the spectacular success of the first large
Tokyo fire raid, the low(er)-level approach proved itself beyond all
doubt, but nearly two months were lost in the process.
Q: Another important addition to the literature is your Clash of the Carriers: The True Story of the Marianas Turkey Shoot of World War II.
Would you discuss a few of the details regarding this particular volume?
A: Clash of the Carriers was suggested by Jim Hornfischer, who had
just finished his excellent debut, Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors.13
When I got to looking at the historiography, it was surprising how little
42 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
attention had been paid specifically to the Marianas Turkey Shoot. "First
Philippine Sea" is of course addressed in broad-scope books such as
Morison, but there were only three previous specific treatments in sixtyone years. The most recent had been Tom Y'Blood's excellent Red Sun
Setting in 1980.14 In contrast, Midway and Leyte Gulf have fifteen to
twenty or more titles apiece.
The most difficult selling point was the perceived lack of drama, since
the odds were so lopsided for the Americans – as were the results. But I
put it this way: consider the night of 20 June [1944], the "mission beyond darkness." NOBODY ever thought of 200 airplanes running out of
gas, at night, literally in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. There had never been anything remotely like it before, nor has there been since. That,
folks, is dramatic!
The book was fairly easy to write, partly because I had so much material already on hand. The sad thing is, looking at the list of contributors,
one-third of them are now deceased. There's a lesson for all of us: DO IT
NOW! The most recent loss was Zenji Abe, the Junyo dive bomber commander, who was most helpful. I also received excellent assistance from
Henry Sakaida, Jim Sawruk, Jim Lansdale, and Sam Tagaya, who are
just terrific colleagues.
Oddly, I had far more difficulty filling in the TF-58 table of organization than the Mobile Fleet. I found that Morison's appendices contained
gaps and errors, and it took some real spadework to identify some
squadron commanders and ship skippers. There was far more IJN information on the internet than USN. For some obscure reason, very few
World War II ship websites list the captains.
If you look at the Amazon.com reviews, you'll see a lot of invective.
It's as if some readers resent the outcome of the battle, maybe even the
war. Steve Coonts' foreword compares America's naval/industrial potential then and now, but his comments are seen as chauvinist or jingoistic.
That's become typical of the information age: everybody with a computer can express an opinion, no matter how half-baked or ill-informed.
Anyway, I think that Clash of the Carriers will remain the last treatment written with significant first-person help. By the time the market's
ready for another book, the World War II generation will be nearly extinct.
Q: In Clash of the Carriers, you make several references to Rear Admiral John W. "Black Jack" Reeves, a World War II naval officer who has
not garnered a great deal of attention from historians. How did he acquire the monicker "Black Jack," and was there anything you learned
about him during the research for your book that you found especially
interesting or noteworthy?
43 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
A: Reeves graduated in the upper half of the Annapolis class of 1911 but
was a latecomer to aviation, winning his wings in 1938 at age forty-seven. Tough and short-tempered, he acquired his nickname based on his
less than sunny personality. However, he was a competent carrier operator, serving as a task group commander from October 1943 to July 1944.
As a "JCL" (Johnny come lately), Reeves represented the growing importance of naval aviation at a time when senior aviators were in short
supply because there had been insufficient time for an adequate career
path – less than twenty years. Nobody had anticipated that carriers
would become so important so quickly, hence the need to pin wings on
senior officers to comply with the law requiring airmen to command airmen. Other better-known examples were Bull Halsey, Fred Sherman,
and John McCain Sr., all circa 1936. Their subordinates had been flying
since the 1920s.
However, an early Naval Aviator number did not ensure competence.
Marc Mitscher is, frankly, much over-rated. He learned to fly in 1916,
but his performance at Midway was decidedly inglorious (he actually
thought his career was over), and he needed a hand-holder the quality of
"blackshoe" Arleigh Burke to run TF-58. Mitscher's strength was leadership, not intellect or innovation. I believe that John Towers, Arthur Radford, or [Joseph J.] "Jocko" Clark would have made a far better task
force commander.
Q: There are numerous obscure, essentially unknown small unit naval
actions that occurred during the Second World War. Would you discuss
one or two of them that you believe deserve further attention?
A: I don't want to appear Clintonesque by quibbling about "small," but
have long thought that we need a good survey of the Solomons surface
battles of '42 and '43. There must've been a dozen or more. Morison and
others have dealt with each engagement from Savo Island to
Bougainville, but I can only recall one volume that wraps them in a single package, and that was at least twenty years ago. Evidently there's a
more recent volume on all World War II surface battles, but I don't know
about it. Meanwhile, Jim Hornfischer is researching a volume on the
Guadalcanal actions.
Q: First published in 1976 to great acclaim (and since released in paperback), The Dauntless Dive Bomber of World War II has become an essential reference for air war/aircraft historians. Please tell us how you
came to write this book, and how do you think the Dauntless compares
to other dive bomber aircraft of the period?
A: This was my first book, and I came to write it by roundabout means. I
44 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
grew up in aviation – my dad was a U.S. Navy-trained pilot in World
War II and I learned to fly at age sixteen. Our family owned a 1,500-foot
"duster strip" near my little Oregon hometown, so airplanes were just
part of my environment. In 1967, Dad bought a 1940 N3N-3 and we finished restoring it to original configuration. I've always said that I got my
license in Piper Cherokees, but I learned to fly in the "Yellow Bird."
In 1971, the year I graduated from college, Dad and two other antique
airplane friends purchased an A-24B from the city of Portland, Oregon,
which had used it as a spray plane to control mosquitoes. We spent a
year restoring it as an SBD-5, and I was immensely privileged to get
about six or eight hours in it. At the time, it was the only Dauntless flying in the world. Back then, you could read anything you wanted about
B-17s, Mustangs, 109s, and Spitfires, but there had never been a book on
the SBD, and – long story short – the Naval Institute published The
Dauntless Dive Bomber of World War II in October 1976. Hard to believe it's been in print for thirty-one years now!
We sold the airplane to Doug Champlin in 1974, and it's now at the
Air Force Museum as an A-24B. Much as we would have liked to dive
it, we never did. It still had the original thirty-year-old hydraulic seals,
and we did not want to dismantle the bird in order to replace them. I still
remember studying the pilot's manual: "The SBD-5 airplane will not
maintain level flight with the dive flaps extended."
However, with all the SBD pilots I've known, and designer Ed Heinemann, I've gained an informed opinion of the Dauntless versus other dive
bombers. One of my six Osprey books was on the SB2C, and NOBODY
claims it was as good as the SBD, let alone better. The SBD's ailerons
were superb – Ed and his team worked long and hard perfecting them –
and they gave the bird the precise control to remain on target in a 240knot dive. If there's ever been an empirical study of the CEP [Circular
Error Probable] of various dive bombers, I've not seen it, but in expert
hands, the Dauntless could put a bomb within fifty to seventy-five feet of
an aim point over half the time.15
The other contenders, of course, are the Aichi D3A and Junkers Ju-87.
Both were excellent dive bombers, both sank a lot of ships, and the Stuka proved surprisingly versatile. But within their relative arenas, the
SBD could handle itself better against enemy fighters than the others.
Look at the record: Wildcats snacked on Vals and the RAF used to talk
about "Stuka parties."
I contend that three airplanes were crucial to victory in the Pacific: the
SBD, F6F, and B-29. We would have won the Pacific War without
B-17s, P-38s, or F4Us, but could not conduct business as we did absent
the Dauntless, Hellcat, and Superfort. In the "honorable mention" category, I'd include the B-24/PB4Y, P-38, and C-47/R4D.
45 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
Q: Which of the lesser-known World War II-era aircraft do you believe
warrant additional research by historians and why?
A: They're not really less known, but the Martin B-26 and Hawker Typhoon both merit more study than they've received Their role over
Northwest Europe before and right after D-Day has been overshadowed
by the more glamorous types: B-17s, P-51s, and of course, Spitfires.
Even the B-25 has more ink than the B-26, but if you look where the
Mitchell was sent, Northwest Europe is conspicuously absent. I just
don't think the B-25 could survive in that environment, where the air defense system was mathematically devised to destroy flying objects from
the ground up, and was operated by the most experienced anti-aircraft
gunners on the planet. However, the B-26 could absorb a load of flak
and keep flying.
The Typhoon's naturally more appreciated in Britain than in the U.S.,
but it did a terrific job post D-Day, albeit with heavy losses. (A Canadian pilot told me that 250 "Tiffy" drivers were buried in Normandy.) The
P-47 gets all the ink, that should rightly be shared with the Hawker. I can
only think of a couple of hardcover books specifically about the Typhoon.
For Axis types, I would suggest the Heinkel He-219 [Uhu] and
Kawasaki Ki-100. Though the Uhu was not built in large numbers –
something under 300 – it just appeals to me on a gut level. Actually, the
219 wasn't much better than the Ju-88R, but the program history is interesting: the squadrons wanted it when the air ministry didn't, and ways
were found around the bureaucracy. I'm unaware of a thorough Englishlanguage treatment of the He-219.
The Ki-100 (no code name) interests me as a successful example of
improvisational engineering. Kawasaki had hundreds of Tony airframes
without Daimler-Benz copies and did a successful mix and match job,
adapting the Ki-61 to a 1,500-hp Mitsubishi radial engine. Fewer than
400 were built, but they made an impression on U.S. pilots who fought
them.
Q: We recently discussed some of the interviews you have conducted
with World War II veterans. Please tell us about some of the more noteworthy interviews and explain why these oral histories are so important?
A: I've done two official oral histories and tons of others. Those for the
Naval Institute were "Jig Dog" Ramage (CO VB-10 at Philippine Sea
and a major influence in post-war heavy attack) and Captain D.W. Tomlinson, who ran Naval Air Transport Command (Pacific) in World War
II and the Berlin Airlift. Both were extremely forthcoming. I knew Jig
from years before, but found Tommy a fascinating study. He's barely
46 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
known, even among aviation historians, but his record was astonishing,
from test flying to airlines and back to the navy.
I already alluded to my many friends from Enterprise, and a more historic assembly you simply cannot find. One who doesn't get enough
recognition was CV-6's superb landing signal officer, Robin Lindsey.
His performance at Santa Cruz remains the epitome of the LSO trade:
with the deck "locked" he brought the last Wildcat aboard and cut Swede
Vejtasa onto the "one wire." It was a fortunate choice, as Jimmie Flatley
said that Swede was the finest carrier aviator afloat. I last saw Swede in
2006, filming one of the History Channel's Dogfights segments, and he
looked terrific.
Because so many of my books addressed Guadalcanal air ops, there's
a disproportionate number of Cactus Air Force aviators: Marion Carl,
Bob Galer, Dick Mangrum, and Joe Foss to name the most familiar.
Among those, it's remarkable how low-key Marion and Bob were, almost
shy. Not at all what you'd expect of Marine generals! Joe was always extroverted and effusive. (He wanted me to marry his granddaughter, but
she had other plans.) He was absolutely genuine: what you saw was the
real deal, and he treated everybody the same, from presidents up to janitors.
I knew the three principals of the Yamamoto mission: John Mitchell,
Rex Barber, and Tom Lanphier. In a way, I unwittingly started the 1983
flail by showing Lanphier USAF Historical Study 85, which reassessed
the wartime credits of one bomber each for him, Barber, and Besby
Holmes.16 He exploded in anger, as if I had done the dirty deed, and began a political campaign to reverse the process. John never had any
doubt that Rex downed Yamamoto, and the physical evidence went entirely that way, but Lanphier wrote the mission report and published a
copyrighted article right after VJ-Day, claiming credit. All you need to
know about the conflicting claims is that Tom Lanphier wanted to be
President of the United States and Rex Barber wanted to be an Oregon
farmer.
One caution about interviews: some veterans have agendas, and we
need to be aware of them. The two who come to mind, besides Lanphier,
were Greg Boyington and George Gay of Torpedo 8. Boyington, of
course, admitted he was a bum, and many of his claims just do not stand
up, from the AVG onward. Gay made a career out of being a professional "sole survivor," and most of what he told Admiral Nimitz and BuAer
[Bureau of Aeronautics, U.S. Navy] after Midway was demonstrably untrue. (I do not understand that, because, my goodness, the facts were dramatic enough without embellishment.) But some interviewers succumb
to the "Hell, son, I was there" attitude, and allow egregious errors to
stand.
In that regard, one source stands out. Rear Admiral Bill Leonard was a
47 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
superb source, and he became a valued friend. He was a Yorktown fighter pilot at Coral Sea and Midway and was land-based at Guadalcanal.
Later, he was on McCain's staff in the fast carriers, so he was a one-stop
source for Pacific air ops. I never knew Bill to be wrong about any facts.
Never. He had a fabulous memory and, unlike most veterans, he was seriously interested in history. His son Rich carries on the tradition, I'm
glad to say.
Dave McCampbell was quite a character – signed autographs "Dashing Dave." He wrote the foreword to my Naval Institute F6F book while
sailing the Caribbean with a twenty-one-year-old lady, when he had to
be in his late 60s. He was arguably the finest fighter pilot the U.S. naval
service ever produced, but he never became the close student of the
game that, say, Ken Walsh did. Dave did not enjoy the war like some
aviators – and I've known one who sat down and cried on VE-Day because he felt the best time of his life was over.
If I had to choose one man to start a civilization in the wilderness, it
would be Marion Carl. He was probably the most capable, determined
individual I've ever known, and that's saying something.
Similarly, if I had to choose one warrior to represent our side in a winner take all contest, you could do no better than Dick Best. He was totally devoted to the war. He saw what was coming and left fighters for dive
bombers because he knew he could make a difference in SBDs, and he
certainly proved it. He planned on being in the Pacific until VJ-Day, and
was heartsick when he contracted TB at Midway. Ginger Ramage and I
used to joke that if dive bombing became an Olympic event, our money
was on Dick Best for the gold. But we weren't joking.
Q: Are you presently working on any new World War II book projects?
If so, would you share a few of the details regarding the work?
A: Odd you should ask! I'm recently contracted with Simon and Schuster
for a project called Whirlwind. It's surprising that, near as I can tell,
there's never been a single volume devoted to Allied air ops over the
home islands in 1944-45. Naturally, there's been a great deal of B-29
coverage, but nobody has integrated naval and AAF operations into a
unified context. I am fortunate that, having interviewed PTO aviators
since the 1970s, I have a considerable amount of material from some significant "players" who are no longer with us. They include Mickey
Moore, who commanded the 7th Air Force fighters on Iwo Jima. Of
course, the naval aspects are covered in some of my previous books, but
not in the detail that I envision for Whirlwind. It will literally be a
ground-up treatment, including airfield construction in China and the Pacific. I hope to include a variety of material from the Japanese perspective, but am still looking for sources. I expect to be working at it through
48 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
2008, alternating with my fiction contracts and magazine work.
Q: Do you have any additional thoughts on researching and writing
about the Pacific War?
A: In the course of researching forty or more books, you get to know a
lot of people. One thing that strikes me is the personal element, how historic events come down to individual players. For example, a Midway
fighter pilot became a very successful attorney, and his career took him
away from the navy and aviation. When I first interviewed him, it was as
if he'd waited decades to open up. Then he said, "You know, it takes a
long time for a burning airplane to fall 14,000 feet." He looked at me and
asked, "Do the others talk about it? I mean, do they still have dreams?"
That was a revelation, even though I'd been writing for over a decade
at the time. Later, I occasionally dated the daughter of a Hellcat ace. She
was pretty unconventional – she'd been a Playboy bunny before teaching
grade school – but she could be philosophical. One evening, on the way
to her folks' place, we mused that we'd have never met if our fathers hadn't survived World War II.
Personal attitudes like those stay with me, and I try to inject some of
that emotion into my history as well as my fiction.
I do wish that it were possible to meet with "The Usual Suspects"
more often. I've developed valued relationships with John Lundstrom
and Rich Frank, but we don't see each other even once a year. And I still
haven't talked to Jim Hornfischer in person.
One other thing comes to mind. In the run-up to the 50th anniversary
of VJ-Day, John and Rich and I discussed the conventional wisdom that
World War II history would decline after 1995. We didn't believe it because we knew there was still so much to be told. John's taken a leave of
absence from the Pacific to write a couple of Civil War books, but he'll
be back. And Rich is starting a three-volume history of the Asia-Pacific
campaigns that obviously will occupy many years. So it stands to reason:
when we're still learning about "The War of Northern Aggression" 140
years later, the Great Pacific War will be with us for decades to come.
Notes
1. Edward P. Stafford, The Big E: The Story of the USS Enterprise (New York: Random
House, 1962).
2. Edward Jablonski, Flying Fortress: The Illustrated Biography of the B-17s and the
Men Who Flew Them (New York: Doubleday, 1965).
3. John Toland, The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire,
1936-1945 (New York: Random House, 1970).
4. Paul S. Dull, A Battle History of the Imperial Japanese Navy, 1941-1945 (Annapolis:
Naval Institute Press, 1978).
5. Samuel Eliot Morison, History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, 15
vols. (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1947-1962).
49 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
6. John B. Lundstrom, Black Shoe Carrier Admiral: Frank Jack Fletcher at Coral Sea,
Midway, and Guadalcanal (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2006).
7. Clay Blair, Jr., Silent Victory: The U.S. Submarine War Against Japan (Philadelphia:
J.B. Lippencott Company, 1975).
8. Clay Blair, Jr., Hitler's U-Boat War: The Hunters, 1939-1942 (New York: Random
House, 1996) and Hitler's U-Boat War: The Hunted, 1942-1945 (New York: Random
House, 1998).
9. Richard B. Frank, Guadalcanal: The Definitive Account of the Landmark Battle (New
York: Random House, 1990).
10. Norman Polmar, Aircraft Carriers: A History of Carrier Aviation and Its Influence
on World Events Vol. 1, 1909-1945 (Dulles, VA: Potomac Books, 2006); David Brown,
Aircraft Carriers (New York: Arco Publishing, 1977).
11. On 9 May 1942, in company with HMS Eagle, the USS Wasp (CV-7) returned to
Malta, embarking sixty-four Spitfires, sixty of which reached their destination. But a
Canadian Pilot Officer, Jerrold A. "Jerry" Smith, lost his drop tank after takeoff. Given
the choice of bailing out or attempting a landing, he tried for the deck. The Wasp's landing signal officer was Lieutenant David McCampbell, who had briefed the British pilots
on carrier procedures. The first pass looked good, but Smith was too fast and received a
wave-off. He went around for another try.
Decades later, McCampbell said: "He was still a little fast on the second pass so I cut
him long." Giving the "chop" signal sooner than normal, McCampbell judged it nicely.
Smith got his Spitfire on the deck and stood on the brakes. Incredibly, he lurched to a
stop less than fifteen feet from the forward deck edge. Having been carrier qualified, he
received naval aviator's wings that evening.
12. General Curtis E. LeMay with MacKinlay Kantor, Mission with LeMay: My Story
(New York: Doubleday, 1965); Thomas M. Coffey, Iron Eagle: The Turbulent Life of
General Curtis LeMay (New York: Avon Books, 1988).
13. James D. Hornfischer, The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors: The Extraordinary
World War II Story of the U.S. Navy's Finest Hour (New York: Bantam Books, 2004).
14. William T. Y'Blood, Red Sun Setting: The Battle of the Philippine Sea (Annapolis:
Naval Institute Press, 1981).
15. Circular Error Probable (CEP), or Circular Error Probability, is a simple measure of a
weapon system's precision. It is defined as the radius of a circle into which a warhead,
missile, bomb, or projectile will land at least fifty-percent of the time. CEP is used as a
factor in determining probable damage to a target.
16. USAF Historical Study No. 85, USAF Credits for the Destruction of Enemy Aircraft,
World War II (Washington, DC: Office of Air Force History, 1978).
50 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
Author's Perspective
HOWARD D. GRIER
All strategies do not succeed; some fail completely. Although this appears obvious, some historians dismiss the notion that Adolf Hitler even
had a strategy in 1944 and 1945. The popular conception of Hitler in the
final years of the war is that of a deranged Führer who stubbornly demanded the defense of every foot of ground on all fronts and ordered
hopeless attacks with nonexistent divisions. To imply that Hitler had a
rational plan to win the war flies in the face of accepted interpretation.
Yet, just because a plan does not succeed should not rule out the possibility that one existed. In fact, refusal to consider the possibility that
Hitler had a strategy in the final years of the war is more striking than to
assume the reverse. Most scholars agree that Hitler possessed a strategy
in 1939, 1940, 1941, 1942, and possibly even 1943. Why would he suddenly discard plans to win the war in 1944 and 1945? The British had a
strategy in the dark days of 1940 and 1941, and the United States developed plans to defeat Japan even as Japanese forces overran Allied positions in the Pacific in 1941 and 1942. Was Germany alone in neglecting
to devise a strategy when its enemies held the initiative?
Hitler, Dönitz, and the Baltic Sea: The Third Reich's Last Hope,
1944-1945 argues that it is more reasonable to assume that Hitler still
hoped to win the war, and that he had some idea how to achieve this. Although we now know it proved unsuccessful in the end, piecing together
such a strategy helps to answer lingering questions about German actions in the Third Reich's final months. Some key evidence often used to
demonstrate that Hitler had no strategy can be used to support an opposing interpretation. For example, between October 1944 and March 1945,
more than one million German soldiers were cut off from land contact
with the rest of the front in coastal regions of Latvia, Lithuania, and eastern Germany. An additional 350,000 troops sat idle in Norway until Germany's capitulation in May 1945. Could Hitler not have better used these
men to defend Germany's heartland? The standard interpretation for the
emergence of the Courland pocket in Latvia, as well as those in East and
West Prussia, and elsewhere, is simply that Hitler never permitted retreats. His insistence on holding the line everywhere meant that he could
hold it nowhere, which represented no strategy at all. Many historians
maintain that these examples in particular provide the best evidence that
51 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
any strategy of Hitler's actually best served the goals of the Allies.
Some historians who concede that Hitler had a strategy in the final
years of the war assert that he fought on primarily in hopes of winning
the war by unleashing Germany's "miracle weapons." Technological
studies of the war tend to focus on rockets and jet aircraft as the most decisive of these weapons. Yet neither of these was a strategic offensive
weapon. The Nazis launched the V-1 and V-2 rockets to strike terror into
the hearts of their enemies and to exact vengeance for the destruction of
German cities, but these weapons were not accurate enough to hit individual strategic targets. The main task of the jet aircraft, for their part,
was defensive, to drive Allied bombers from the skies over Germany.
Hitler also had a third, often overlooked, miracle weapon in his arsenal. This was a new, technologically advanced submarine, the Type
XXI, with which naval commander-in-chief Admiral Karl Dönitz
planned to regain the initiative in the Battle of the Atlantic. An offensive
weapon with war-winning potential, the Type XXI was a true submarine
rather than a submersible, and its speed and ability to remain underwater
indefinitely rendered contemporary Allied anti-submarine tactics ineffective. With a fleet of these new U-boats, Dönitz intended to starve
Britain into submission and halt the shipment of American troops and
supplies to Europe. But before these new submarines could be brought
into action, they had to undergo trials and their crews had to be trained,
which for geographic reasons was possible only in the eastern Baltic. If
Dönitz was to revive the war at sea and turn the tide yet again in Germany's favor, the Nazis had to control the Baltic and maintain possession
of its ports. Norway's retention was also essential, because it remained
the only suitable location from which to launch the new U-boat war following the loss of Germany's submarine bases in France in the summer
of 1944.
Hitler, Dönitz, and the Baltic Sea proposes an alternative way of
viewing some of Hitler's military decisions in the last months of World
War II, suggesting that he did possess a strategy to regain the initiative,
and that the Baltic theater played the key role in this plan. This strategy,
Hitler believed, provided more than a chance to stave off defeat. Rather,
it offered an opportunity to achieve his long-cherished ambition – total
victory and mastery of Europe. This work examines German naval strategy and its role in shaping the war on land on the northern sector of the
Eastern Front, particularly in determining where the army would have to
stand and fight along the Baltic coast and where it could retreat. To
demonstrate this, it is necessary to analyze operations in this theater
from the end of 1943, when Hitler considered withdrawing Army Group
North from the Leningrad area, until Germany's capitulation in May
1945. Throughout 1944, as the Red Army steadily drove Army Group
North back to the west, Dönitz increasingly urged the defense of the
52 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
Baltic coast in the interest of naval strategy. By mid-October 1944,
Army Group North, with more than 500,000 men, had been isolated in
Latvia, cut off from land contact with the Reich. After Hitler had commanded the soldiers of Army Group North to remain and defend Courland, German naval strategists then switched their attention to influence
Army Group Center's defense of the Baltic coast in eastern Germany.
Germany's relations with Finland and Sweden, two other nations sharing the Baltic shoreline, assumed greater significance as the new submarines approached operational readiness. Finland fought alongside
Germany in the war against the Soviet Union and provided Germany
with vital raw materials, particularly nickel, but in September 1944 Finland surrendered to the Russians. Finland's role in the Second World
War has been the topic of several fine monographs. 1 These studies, however, focus mainly upon Finland's value to Germany economically and
on the land front, overlooking the Finns' crucial importance to the German Navy in preventing the Soviet Baltic Fleet from leaving its base
near Leningrad. Hitler's frantic efforts to keep Finland in the war resulted more from naval considerations than from the need for raw materials.
Neutral Sweden's geographic location posed a potential threat to German domination of the Baltic, and thus it was a source of concern to
Hitler and Dönitz. In general, Sweden's role in the war has evoked little
interest. In the mid-1960s, historians debated the importance of Swedish
iron ore for Germany's war economy, but otherwise little has been written outside of Sweden on its position during the war.2 Hitler, however,
demonstrated a keen interest in ensuring that Sweden remain neutral.
This study examines steps Germany took to prevent Sweden's entry into
the war, as well as Swedish war plans and the Swedes' assessment of the
German threat at various stages of the war. 3 Surprisingly, the Swedes believed that the threat of a German attack had receded at the very time
Hitler seriously contemplated invading the country.
In the last years of the war, German officers who rose to prominence
tended to be those who demonstrated personal loyalty to Hitler and ideological conformity to National Socialism. Three Nazi military leaders
will be examined in this context: naval commander-in-chief Karl Dönitz;
army chief of staff Heinz Guderian; and Army Group North commander
Ferdinand Schörner. The person who most influenced Hitler's Baltic
strategy was Admiral Dönitz, whose memoirs4 are not trustworthy and
for whom no satisfactory biography exists.5 Dönitz's role in shaping
Hitler's grand strategy requires further analysis. Furthermore, his devotion to Hitler and unquestioning acceptance of National Socialist ideology, although documented by naval experts, are not widely recognized
among non-specialists. Particularly intriguing is the question of why
Hitler selected Dönitz as his successor. Hitler did not appoint Dönitz
simply by default or as a soldier suitable to make peace, as is often sug53 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
gested, but because Dönitz had proven himself one of Hitler's most loyal
and ideologically reliable supporters.
General Guderian portrays himself in his memoirs as a military technician, uninterested in National Socialism and repelled by Hitler. 6 He
bitterly condemns Hitler's conduct of the war in the East and presents
himself as the would-be savior of eastern Germany, but he neglects to
mention his early support for Nazi ideology and his eager acceptance of
landed estates and bribes from the Führer. His role in shaping Hitler's
strategy in this period was to insist that Hitler evacuate all of the Third
Reich's outposts to defend Germany itself. That Hitler listened to Dönitz
rather than Guderian is no surprise, for Guderian's course of action simply aimed to postpone defeat, while Dönitz offered the Führer a chance
to win the war.
Of all the German Army generals, Schörner probably has the worst
reputation. He is usually depicted as an insanely brutal man who owed
his rapid promotion to fanatical adherence to National Socialism and
sycophantic devotion to Hitler. Schörner's military abilities have been
considered negligible at best. His notoriety stems mainly from the execution of numerous soldiers in the war's final months and from his reputed
unquestioning obedience to Hitler's commands. Schörner left no memoirs, and there is surprisingly little information on this important general
whom Hitler named commander-in-chief of the German Army prior to
his suicide. Although he played only a minor part in shaping grand strategy in the war's final phase, he had to implement Hitler's Baltic strategy
and endure its consequences. Schörner's portrayal as a brutal commander
and fanatical Nazi is accurate, but depictions of him as a toady and an
untalented military leader are off the mark. Schörner was a skillful tactician who repeatedly disobeyed Hitler's orders not to retreat, but Hitler
never relieved him of command because he realized that Schörner was
loyal to him personally.
The present study fits in with a broad range of literature on the German Navy in World War II. Early accounts of Hitler's relationship with
the Kriegsmarine maintained that Hitler thought solely in continental
terms and had no understanding of matters relating to the sea. This idea
remained unchallenged for the most part until the early 1970s, when Jost
Dülffer's monograph on the German Navy between the wars 7 and
Michael Salewski's magisterial three-volume study of the German Naval
Staff revealed Hitler's extraordinary interest in naval affairs.8 It was
Salewski who first sketched the outlines of Hitler's Baltic strategy. More
recent contributions by naval historians Charles S. Thomas, Eric Rust,
Keith Bird, Holger Herwig, Gerhard Schreiber, Werner Rahn, Herbert
Kraus, and Douglas Peifer have immensely enhanced our understanding
of the German Navy in the Nazi period. 9 An examination of Hitler's
strategy in the Baltic can provide further evidence of his emphasis upon
54 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
naval affairs and of the German Navy's close relationship with Hitler.
Such a study also addresses some questions of continuity and discontinuity in German naval history.
Surprisingly little has been written concerning operations on the Eastern Front's northern sector. This theater has attracted scholars' interest
mainly for the German advance to Leningrad and siege of the city. The
Nazi retreat from Leningrad has received very little attention, and there
is even less on Army Group Courland (as Army Group North was renamed in January 1945) during its isolation in the Latvian peninsula of
Courland from October 1944 until Germany capitulated in May 1945.
Existing works focus almost exclusively on tactical matters, ignoring the
army group's vital role in Hitler's grand strategy of protecting the navy's
Baltic submarine training areas. These studies examine either the army
group's retreat to Courland10 or events that transpired there until the end
of the war.11 They fail to investigate the most critical issue – why Hitler
ordered half a million seasoned troops to defend a remote Latvian peninsula at the very time Allied armies were entering German territory from
both east and west.
Furthermore, Courland was not the only German bridgehead along the
Baltic. A small garrison defended the port of Memel from mid-October
1944 until the end of January 1945. Another large bridgehead arose after
the Soviet drive from the Vistula to the Oder in January 1945 isolated almost another entire German army group in East Prussia. The Russian offensive in Pomerania in March 1945 forced yet another German army
back into bridgeheads around the ports of Danzig and Gdynia in West
Prussia. These bridgeheads, especially those in East Prussia, have received much more extensive treatment than the one in Courland, but
again, existing works dwell largely upon the course of battle, rarely considering Hitler's strategic motives or Dönitz's role in the defense of
coastal areas.12
Because relatively little has been written on the northern sector of the
Eastern front in 1944-1945, Hitler, Dönitz, and the Baltic Sea is based
primarily upon archival sources. The author conducted most of his research at the German military archives in Freiburg, examining various
army and naval units' war diaries and the personal papers of several generals, admirals, and U-boat engineers. The author also consulted documents on Admiral Dönitz's short-lived government at the Berlin-Lichterfelde archives, and Albert Speer's papers in Koblenz. Additional
archives visited include Munich's Institute for Contemporary History,
and Washington's National Archives, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and Naval Operational Archives at the Washington Navy Yard.
Sweden's Royal Military Archives in Stockholm provided the author
with unparalleled assistance. When I wished to examine the Swedish
Navy's war plans, the archives' director, Swedish Air Force expert Dr.
55 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
Erik Norberg, informed me that these documents were restricted because
they displayed the location of coastal defense installations in use today. I
explained that these were of no interest to me, and Dr. Norberg spent a
great deal of time going through maps and documents to remove those
detailing the site of coastal artillery emplacements. The remainder he
permitted me to examine. One often neglected archive is the Czech Military Archive in Prague, which holds many SS records. Although I was
able to visit this repository, there was little information on the divisions
relevant to this work.
One brief section of the manuscript omitted for reasons of space discussed German occupation policy in Latvia, Latvia's participation in the
war against the Soviet Union, and Latvian attempts to gain self-rule.
Like German policy in other eastern territories, concessions granted by
the Germans, when they even bothered to make any at all, were too little
and came far too late. Despite repeated calls from military leaders to
grant Latvia true independence, to the end Hitler refused to do so.
Most studies of German strategy in World War II focus almost exclusively upon land, or sea, or air strategy, seldom examining their interrelationship. This work is neither army history nor naval history. It analyzes both the army's and navy's strategic goals and how they played out
in the Baltic theater. The organization is chronological and thematic.
The first six chapters provide an operational history of warfare on the
northern sector of the Eastern Front in 1944 and 1945 and provide evidence of the navy's demands that the Baltic coast be protected in order to
preserve U-boat training areas. The following three chapters analyze
possible reasons for Hitler's defense of the Baltic coast. The first was the
"official" reason given by Nazi propaganda, that German forces defending isolated coastal sectors tied down disproportionate numbers of Soviet troops. A second possible reason was that the retention of coastal areas – Courland in particular – deterred Sweden from entering the war on
the side of the Allies. Finally, and by far the most likely reason, was that
Hitler accepted Dönitz's assurances that the navy could turn the tide of
the war with its new U-boats. The final chapter examines Dönitz's personal and ideological relationship with Hitler, his influence in shaping
German strategy, and reasons why Hitler selected an admiral as his successor rather than a general or Nazi Party official.
Notes
1. Important works dealing with Finland's role in World War II include Earl Ziemke, The
German Northern Theater of Operations, 1940-1945 (Washington, DC: Government
Printing Office, 1960); Ernst Klink, "Die deutsch-finnische Zusammenarbeit 1944," in
Militärgeschichtlichen Forschungsamt, ed., Operationsgebiet östliche Ostsee und der
finnische-baltische Raum 1944 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1961); H. Peter
Krosby, Finland, Germany and the Soviet Union, 1940-1941: The Petsamo Dispute
(Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968); Waldemar Erfurth, The Last
56 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
Finnish War, 1941-1944 (Washington, DC: University Publications of America, 1979).
2. This debate is summarized in Martin Fritz, "Swedish Iron Ore and German Steel,"
Scandinavian Economic History Review, Vol. 21, 1973, pp. 133-144.
3. Major works on Sweden in World War II include Ziemke, The German Northern Theater of Operations; Erik Boheman, På Vakt, Vol. 2, Kabinettssekreterare under andra
världskriget (Stockholm: Norstedts, 1964); Carl August Ehrensvärd, I rikets tjänst: Händelser och människor från min bana (Stockholm: Norstedts, 1965); Wilhelm M. Carlgren, translated by Arthur Spencer, Swedish Foreign Policy during the Second World
War (London: Ernest Benn, 1977); Wilhelm M. Carlgren, Svensk underrättelsetjänst
1939-1945 (Stockholm: Försvarsdepartementet, 1985); Carl-Axel Gemzell, "Tysk militär
planläggning under det andra världskriget: fall Sverige," Scandia, Vol. 41, No. 2, 1975,
pp. 198-248; Carl-Axel Wangel, ed., Sveriges militära beredskap 1939-1945 (Köping:
Militärhistoriska Förlaget, 1982).
4. Karl Dönitz, translated by R.H. Stevens, Memoirs: Ten Years and Twenty Days (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1959).
5. The most recent biography, Peter Padfield, Dönitz, The Last Führer: Portrait of a
Nazi War Leader (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), contains much useful information,
but is marred by questionable psychoanalysis.
6. Heinz Guderian, Erinnerungen eines Soldaten (Heidelberg: Kurt Vowinckel, 1951).
7. Jost Dülffer, Weimar, Hitler und die Marine: Reichspolitik und Flottenbau (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1973).
8. Michael Salewski, Die deutsche Seekriegsleitung, 1935-1945, 3 Vols. (Munich:
Bernard & Graefe, 1970-1975).
9. Charles S. Thomas, The German Navy in the Nazi Era (Annapolis: Naval Institute
Press, 1990); Eric C. Rust, Naval Officers Under Hitler: The Story of Crew 34 (New
York: Praeger, 1991); Keith W. Bird, Weimar, The German Naval Officer Corps and the
Rise of National Socialism (Amsterdam: B.R. Grüner, 1977); Keith W. Bird, Erich Raeder: Admiral of the Third Reich (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2006); Holger Herwig,
Politics of Frustration: The United States in German Naval Planning, 1889-1941
(Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1976); Gerhard Schreiber, Revisionismus und
Weltmachtstreben: Marineführung und deutsch-italienische Beziehungen 1919-1944
(Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1978); Werner Rahn, "Kriegführung, Politik und
Krisen – Die Marine des Deutschen Reiches, 1914-1933," in Deutsches Marine Institut
and Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt, ed., Die deutsche Flotte im Spannungsfeld
der Politik 1848-1985 (Herford: Mittler, 1985), pp. 79-104; Werner Rahn, "Winkelriede,
Opferkämpfer oder Sturmwikinger? Zu besonderen Einsatzformen der deutschen Kriegsmarine 1944/45," in Werner Rahn, ed., Deutsche Marinen im Wandel. Vom Symbol nationaler Einheit zum Instrument internationaler Sicherheit (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2005),
pp. 503-524; see also Rahn's sections in Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt, ed., Das
Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg, vol. 6: Horst Boog et al, Der globale Krieg
(Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1990); Herbert Kraus, "Karl Dönitz und das Ende
des 'Dritten Reiches,'" in Hans-Erich Volkmann, ed., Ende des Dritten Reiches – Ende
des Zweiten Weltkriegs: Eine Perspektivische Rundschau (Munich: Piper, 1995), pp.
1-23; Douglas C. Peifer, The Three German Navies: Dissolution, Transition, and New
Beginnings, 1945-1960 (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2002).
10. Helmuth Forwick, "Der Rückzug der Heeresgruppe Nord nach Kurland," in Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt, ed., Abwehrkämpfe am Nordflügel der Ostfront
1944-1945 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1963).
11. Werner Haupt, Kurland: Die letzte Front – Schicksal für zwei Armeen (Bad
Nauheim: Podzun, 1959); Werner Haupt, Heeresgruppe Nord, 1941-1945 (Bad
Nauheim: Podzun, 1966); Werner Haupt, Kurland: Die vergessene Heeresgruppe,
1944/45 (Friedberg: Podzun-Pallas, 1979); Franz Kurowski, Todeskessel Kurland:
Kampf und Untergang der Heeresgruppe Nord 1944/1945 (Wölfersheim-Berstadt:
Podzun-Pallas, 2000).
57 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
12. Rudolf Kabath, "Die Rolle der Seebrückenköpfe beim Kampf um Ostpreussen,
1944-1945," in Abwehrkämpfe am Nordflügel der Ostfront; Kurt Dieckert and Horst
Grossmann, Der Kampf um Ostpreussen: Der umfassende Dokumentarbericht über das
Kriegsgeschehen in Ostpreussen, 2nd ed. (Stuttgart: Motorbuch, 1976); Otto Lasch, So
fiel Königsberg, 2nd ed. (Stuttgart: Motorbuch, 1977); Erich Murawski, Die Eroberung
Pommerns durch die Rote Armee (Boppard: Harald Boldt, 1969).
HOWARD D. GRIER is Professor of History at Erskine College in Due
West, South Carolina, and author of Hitler, Dönitz, and the Baltic Sea:
The Third Reich's Last Hope, 1944-1945 (Annapolis: Naval Institute
Press, 2007). He received his Ph.D. in Modern European History at the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
58 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
A Mighty Air Effort Revisited
LEO J. DAUGHERTY III
The late Captain Edward M. "Goodie" Goodman, USAAF, who flew
converted, unarmed B-24s over the Himalayas during World War II said
to the author in a 1995 interview that "We were just a bunch of crazy
kids...you'd have to be to do what we did during the war." Indeed, in the
build-up that followed Japan's bombing of Pearl Harbor and Germany's
declaration of war on the United States in December 1941, the ranks of
the Army Air Forces were soon filled with these same eager young men
hoping to fly the fighters and bombers that began rolling off the assembly lines in mid-1942 to fight Hitler's vaunted Luftwaffe or the pilots of
the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy. By mid-1943, with the young
men who enlisted from across America to fly and fix them, the same
planes that were only drawings on an architect's table only a year before
now crowded the skies over Germany and Japan. Indeed, by the end of
the wars in Europe and the Pacific in 1945, the U.S. Army Air Forces
had launched the greatest air effort ever attempted by a nation at war.
This essay-review examines some of the fine books that detail what Second World War historians have labeled one of the "mightiest air efforts"
in military history.
The enormity of the air war and the efforts by the U.S. Army Air
Force's Eighth Air Force can be seen in Captain Charles Ailing's A
Mighty Fortress, who wrote that by mid-1944, when he and his crew reported in overseas, the Eighth Air Force comprised three air divisions
consisting of forty-two bomber groups.1 When these bomber groups operated at full capacity, there were a total of 1,600 bombers and 1,200
fighters available for combat at any given time. Indeed, between the airmen and ground crews and other support personnel, the "Mighty Eighth"
consisted of 300,000 men by war's end in May 1945.
A Mighty Fortress is the story of ten of those young men who left
their families in order to be part of the air effort against Nazi Germany.
The book is a personal reminiscence of his time as the pilot of "Miss
Prudy," the name he gave to his B-17 in memory of his late sister who
died before he left for England.
Assigned to the 4th Squadron of the 34th Bomb Group stationed at
Mendlesham after a year of intense training, Ailing and the crew of
"Miss Prudy" prepared for their first missions in support of General
59 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
George S. Patton's Third Army near Metz. In almost painstaking detail,
the author provides an intimate look at the life of a B-17 crew, from the
time they awoke in the morning until they returned from their missions
and finished their debriefing by the squadron intelligence officer. More
important, however, is Ailing's attention to detail in his description of a
typical mission and what it took to launch such an effort on a daily basis.
This can be seen in his description, for instance, of the amount of fuel
required for a mission into Germany (2,800 gallons), and the types and
weight of the bombs carried by the B-17s. Indeed, as one reads Ailing's
memoir, one can feel the power of the B-17 almost as if he is sitting in
the cockpit as the author describes the takeoff and leveling out of the
mighty bombers inside the "stream" of other bombers as they head for
Germany, and all targets east. In fact, while the crew of the "Miss
Prudy" flew many tactical missions in support of the Third Army and the
U.S. forces as they fought their way to the German border, Ailing wrote
that, "The Eighth Air Force was a strategic air force. Our goal was to
fracture the enemy superstructure – communications, factories, power
generators, oil refineries, and railroad marshaling yards way behind enemy lines."
As the "Miss Prudy" made its way toward German lines, flying in
tight formations in order to minimize their vulnerability to the onslaught
of German fighters (Ailing wrote that they flew in tight formations because the "Luftwaffe would pick off the planes that became separated"),
the gunners in the turrets waited anxiously as the cry of "bandits...12 o'clock high" echoed throughout the intercom system. Indeed, as German
fighters buzzed about the formation, gunners and the fighter escorts of
P-47s and P-51s (known as "our little friends") filled the air with a wall
of bullets from their .50-caliber machineguns. Once over the target, the
bombers, still in their tight formations, and at their cruising altitude of
30,000 feet, flew into puffs of black clouds containing shrapnel from the
deadly German flak guns that rocked the airplane. Once near the target,
the pilot turned the plane over to the navigator who in turn passed the
aircraft over to the bombardier who, as they came closer to the target,
shouted "bombs away" as he pressed the toggle switch that released the
B-17's load of 500-lb bombs. Ailing recalled that the pilot had to be prepared for the sudden loss of weight once the bombardier released the
bombs, jerking the aircraft upward and sometimes causing it to break
formation, which made it easy prey for the Luftwaffe pilots.
In addition to the rigors of aerial combat, Captain Ailing describes the
time spent at their base in Mendlesham as missions were often scrubbed
because of the foul weather. Indeed, this is one of the strongest portions
of the book as Ailing provides rich details of the life of a B-17 crew and
how their lives were often cut short by German fighters, flak, and accidents before they completed the required twenty-five missions. Ailing's
60 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
book is one the best works on the air war over France and Germany, and
of the men and machines who suffered and bled as much as their comrades on the ground in order to achieve victory in May 1945. Highlighted by photographs and organizational charts of the Eighth Air Force, A
Mighty Fortress is an excellent tribute to the young men who flew – and
supported – the air effort against Nazi Germany.
Unlike Ailing's work, Jerome Klinkowitz's Yanks Over Europe examines the different types of pilots who flew in the air war over Europe,
from the "fighter jocks" to the bomber pilots in the Mediterranean and
European theaters of operation, and their experiences and attitudes in
combat against the Luftwaffe.2 In fact, the book is an excellent study of
the psychological motives and actions of men in aerial combat and how
the pilots reacted to the stress of flying and fighting in an enclosed
space. As Klinkowitz and the other authors wrote, the fighting in the air
was as savage and bitter as that which occurred on the ground. Indeed,
German pilots commented that as they closed their cockpits, they often
felt as if they were "pulling the lids over their own coffins." Klinkowitz
describes one scene when the pilot of a P-47 Thunderbolt agonized as he
watched a Luftwaffe pilot burn to death in the cockpit of his Me-109.
The author wrote that, only two hours prior, this same P-47 pilot had
witnessed a similar scene, but was amazed when he spotted a parachute.
As the American flew past the hapless Luftwaffe pilot, the German suddenly froze, as he feared he would be machine-gunned by his counterpart. Then, in an act of chivalry, and much to the surprise of the German,
the American pilot dipped his wings as if to signal that he would allow
his enemy to live, and go on to fight another day.
Brigadier General J. Kemp McLaughlin's The Mighty Eighth in World
War II is a concise examination of the Eighth Air Force from the viewpoint of the author, who enlisted in the Army Air Corps in September
1941.3 McLaughlin's account is lively and nostalgic as he recalls his
training in the months before Pearl Harbor, and how everything changed
dramatically on 7 December 1941 as the United States, now at war,
needed thousands of pilots. McLaughlin wrote that the "attack on Pearl
Harbor brought many changes to our operations" as Air Cadets. This included "flight training which was now conducted seven days a week."
After successfully completing his initial training as an Air Cadet,
McLaughlin and the other trainees headed for the U.S. Army Air Corps
Flying Training School, located in Greenville, Mississippi. From there,
the trainees went on to twin-engine school in Columbus, Mississippi
where they received further instrument training before undertaking their
three-hour navigational cross-country flight. Completing this training
successfully and commissioned a second lieutenant in the Army Air
Forces, 2nd Lieutenant McLaughlin was assigned to the 92nd Bomb
Group and stationed in Alconbury, England.
61 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
It was in England where McLaughlin first met Lieutenant Colonel
Curtis E. LeMay, whom the pilots of the 305th (LeMay's Squadron)
nicknamed "Iron Ass," because of his attention to detail. McLaughlin
lavished great praise on LeMay, who eventually became Air Force Chief
of Staff, as a man most knowledgeable in bombing techniques and tactics. Indeed, McLaughlin credited LeMay with developing the system
employed by American B-17 pilots during the war "to assemble our
groups at altitudes above the weather using low frequency radio beacons, then fly a zigzag route from one beacon to another to pick up our
sister groups and thus form the bomber train in the sky while en route
across the English Channel." As McLaughlin points out, it was LeMay,
along with Colonel Frank Armstrong of the 306th Bomb Group, who developed the concept of keeping bombers in tight "combat box" formations, with lead, high, and low groups forming the box. Like Ailing,
McLaughlin added that the development of the "combat box" saved
many American lives as it gave the B-17s better protection against the
German fighters.
McLaughlin's book parallels Ailing's in his description of the missions
of the 305th Squadron (92nd Bomb Group) over Germany and the many
dangers faced by the B-17 crews. McLaughlin, unlike Ailing who arrived in England in late 1944, arrived in 1943, and flew many missions
deep into Germany. McLaughlin, in fact, wrote of the many comrades
lost to the Luftwaffe and the deadly flak batteries over such places Regensburg and Schweinfurt as the American Eighth Air Force repeatedly
hit Germany's ball-bearing factories. Indeed, McLaughlin writes, during
one raid over Schweinfurt, the 305th Squadron, of which he was a member, "displayed the skill, courage, and leadership of American airmen,
who, under continuous attack for nearly six hours, destroyed 70 percent
of German ball-bearing production while losing 25 percent of the
bomber force... To me, they were among the greatest Americans in history. They met their challenge."
McLaughin provides an excellent description of both Group and Aerial operations, and the drain constant action had on the men and the aircraft. Like Ailing, he described the down-time with particular emphasis
on the relations with British civilians. The author's last missions occurred in January 1945, after nearly thirty-three months of war.
All three books – A Mighty Fortress, Yanks Over Europe, and The
Mighty Eighth in World War II – provide excellent accounts of the air
war over Germany and of the men who flew and manned the legendary
B-17s.
Complimenting these fine books on the air effort are Sherri Ottis' Silent
Heroes4 and Agnes Mangerich's Albanian Escape5 that detail the experiences of American and British combatants – both men and women – shot
62 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
down over Europe, and of the assistance they received from the French
underground and the Albanian underground in their attempts to reach
Allied lines.
Ottis' Silent Heroes is undoubtedly one of most stirring accounts of
the assistance rendered downed American and British flyers shot down
over France and Belgium. Through meticulous research and a personal
journey to France, Ottis met many of the former resistance members who
spirited these young Allied pilots away from the Germans and vividly remembered the harrowing escapes and deprivations they were forced to
endure for four long years. Ottis, who actually set out on foot to follow
the escape trail used by one resistance leader, clearly illustrated the dangers these ordinary Frenchmen took in order to rescue Allied airmen
from certain imprisonment and/or death at the hands of the Gestapo.
Silent Heroes, in fact, provides a detailed look at the so-called "rat line"
that the Resistance developed to feed, clothe, hide and, if necessary, provide medical treatment for the downed airmen, many of whom were
American B-17 crews returning from missions over Germany and Belgium.
This is one book that needs to be read and re-read for its lessons in
survival, evasion, and escape from would-be captors. Also, it is a book
about betrayal and deceit as Frenchman turned against Frenchman in
their dealings with the German occupiers. Finally, Ottis' book, which is
well-written and superbly documented, demonstrates that the French
were, and are to this day, grateful for their liberation from the Nazis.
In a similar light is Agnes Mangerich's Albanian Escape, which illustrates the bravery and courage of the Albanian underground during the
Second World War in its assistance to downed American flyers. Mangericgh's narrative, taken from her day-to-day diary while on the ground in
Albania, relates the story of a group of Army nurses and the pilot and
crew of a downed C-47 that crash-landed in northern Albania and, for
nearly three months, successfully evaded the German Army and their Albanian and Yugoslav allies until their rescue in January 1944.
What is different about this book is Mangerich's description of a littleknown theater of operations during World War II and the role Albania
played in the Allied victory. Caught between Mussolini's Fascist troops
and Adolf Hitler's Wehrmacht, Albania and the rest of the Balkans (most
notably Yugoslavia) became the focus of the British intelligence services
(MI6) and the newly-formed Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the
forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency. The "war within a war"
between Marshal Tito's Partisans and the Chetniks, as well as the different warring factions inside the Albanian underground (Fascists vs. Communists, or nationalists vs. Fascists), continued unabated despite the
"other" war with the Axis. Indeed, as Mangerich's book illustrates, the
Balkans, and Albania in particular, became the focal point of the Cold
63 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
War between the West and the Soviet Union even before the war ended
as each "ally" sought to assist its respective group. As Mangerich writes,
these political uncertainties and different alliances produced much anxiety among the fleeing Americans as to what the politics of their wouldbe rescuers were as they made their escape across Albania to Italy.
Much like Ottis' Silent Heroes, Mangerich's Albanian Escape is a story that had to be told for it deals with a theater of operations that has received very limited coverage by Second World War historians. Unfortunately, due to the onset of the Cold War, the heroics of the Albanian underground have largely been forgotten. Hopefully, Mangerich's work
will not be the last on the war in the Balkans.
Finally, both books provide an account of how the war was not just
between armies and air forces, but was truly a "people's war" as well as a
"people's victory."
Notes
1. Charles Ailing, A Mighty Fortress: Lead Bomber Over Europe (Havertown, PA: Casemate Publishers, 2002).
2. Jerome Klinkowitz, Yanks Over Europe: American Flyers in World War II (Lexington,
KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1996).
3. Brigadier General J. Kemp McLaughlin, USAFR (Ret.), The Mighty Eighth in World
War II: A Memoir (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2000).
4. Sherri Greene Ottis, Silent Heroes: Downed Airmen and the French Underground
(Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2001).
5. Agnes Jensen Mangerich, Albanian Escape: The True Story of U.S. Army Nurses Behind Enemy Lines (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1999).
LEO J. DAUGHERTY III, who received his Ph.D. in Military History
from The Ohio State University, is the Command Historian for the U.S.
Army Accessions Command at Fort Monroe, Virginia. He is the author
of several books, including The Allied Resupply Effort in the China-Burma-India Theater During World War II (Jefferson, NC: McFarland &
Company, 2008); Fighting Techniques of a Japanese Infantryman,
1941-1945: Training, Techniques and Weapons (St. Paul, MN: MBI
Publishing Company, 2002); and Fighting Techniques of a US Marine,
1941-1945: Training, Techniques, and Weapons (Osceola, WI: MBI
Publishing Company, 2000).
64 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
Book Reviews
The Pearl Harbor Myth: Rethinking the Unthinkable. George Victor.
Dulles, VA: Potomac Books, 2007. Illustrations. Map. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Cloth. Pp. 380. $27.50.
In a recent front-page article, The New York Times reported for the first
time that an Iowa-born Soviet mole had penetrated so deeply into the
World War II Manhattan Project that he apparently provided his Kremlin
masters with most of the manufacturing know-how to make an atomic
bomb. Exactly what information Dr. George Koval provided is unknown, but as the Times concluded, "...it is clear that Moscow mastered
the atom very quickly compared with all subsequent nuclear powers."1
Shortly before the Times article, former Secretary of the Navy John
Lehman wrote in the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings that "If I took
away one thing from my service on the 9/11 Commission, it's that there
were – and there continue to be – glaring deficiencies in the way America's armed forces and intelligence agencies cooperate with each other,
share information, and develop their professionals. A Navy Top Secret
clearance, for example, still means almost nothing at CIA or NSA."2
Thus, it would seem that nearly seven decades after Pearl Harbor, the
American political and intelligence communities remain woefully inadequate to the task of ensuring national security.
What, then, are we to make of yet another book claiming that the successful Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was not the result of confusion
and incompetence by responsible circles within the American government, but rather the climax of conspiracy and cover-up at the highest
levels? George Victor's The Pearl Harbor Myth is part of Potomac
Books' Military Controversies series, and one would expect the author to
provide fresh information or insight regarding one or another aspect of
the story he has chosen to tell, as has, for example, Tripp Wiles in his
Forgotten Raiders of '42, a fascinating book about the Makin Island raid
of 1942.3 Regrettably, this is not the case. Victor has chosen to follow in
the footsteps of a score of other Pearl Harbor "revisionists," presenting
an argument that is unsustainable. Along with many before him, Victor
insists that President Franklin D. Roosevelt based the U.S. Pacific Fleet
at Pearl Harbor as bait and lure to entice Japan into an attack and that
"By November 1941, provocation would be his main purpose." Roosevelt "seems to have concluded – correctly, as it turned out – that Japan
65 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
would be easier to provoke into a major attack on the United States than
Germany would be."4
Having angered the Japanese sufficiently, Victor continues, Roosevelt
and his closest civil, military, and naval advisers then deliberately withheld vital information from the Hawaiian army and fleet commanders
about Japan's impending assault in order to create the incident that
would propel the United States (and Japan) into World War II. Although
Army Chief of Staff George Marshall and Chief of Naval Operations
Harold ("Betty") Stark told wartime investigators that they had kept Admiral Husband Kimmel and General Walter Short "fully informed of developments affecting their commands," in fact, "On their orders...intelligence of Japan's coming attack had been held from Short and Kimmel."
The administration then covered up the conspiracy, Victor continues, by
withholding the intelligence from the various wartime and immediate
post-war investigatory commissions. Since the intelligence "specified
Pearl Harbor as Japan's target, keeping it from the commission[s] was
crucial."5 Roosevelt and his people ignited the conspiracy,Victor asserts,
by countering sincere Japanese efforts in the autumn of 1941 to negotiate outstanding differences with an "ultimatum." The legitimacy of that
"ultimatum" is never seriously examined, because Victor, following several generations of conspiracy theorists, is after bigger game: to legitimatize the charge that Roosevelt and his colleagues encouraged the
Japanese attack because of an overriding desire to defeat Hitler in Europe. Pearl Harbor was their "back-door-to-war" solution to the stalemate with strong isolationist sentiment at home.6
Victor's argument, like those of his fellow revisionists, fails at many
crucial points, perhaps most strikingly in its fatally flawed assumption
that Roosevelt and his immediate circle could take the country to war.
Despite subsequent subversion by several presidents, the fact remains,
and was jealously guarded in 1941, that only Congress can declare war.
And Congress was filled with "Fortress America" isolationists who
wanted no "foreign war" and certainly would not have joined on 8 December 1941 in declaring a two-front war with Germany in Europe as
well as Japan in the Pacific. FDR knew this and did not ask for such a
declaration. The two-front war came only on 11 December, courtesy of
Adolf Hitler, who for reasons that are still not wholly certain, opted to
join the Japanese; a decision not mandated by the Axis Pact.
At key points, Victor candidly admits that outright evidence for a
Pearl Harbor conspiracy simply does not exist. It can only be "inferred."
He writes at one point, "Lacking direct evidence of his [Roosevelt's]
thinking, further inferences will be offered." On several other occasions
he cites the sensational contents of alleged documents, which have not
"come to light" or whose "authenticity" could not be "verify"[ed]. Victor
admits that an alleged transcript of a Roosevelt-Churchill conversation
66 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
shortly before Pearl Harbor "intercepted" by Nazi radio intelligence was
later deemed a "fake" by a German expert who could not absolutely
prove his allegation. Still, the document in question is evidently of highly dubious provenance and was very probably a piece of German dis-information. Having acknowledged that he cannot penetrate Roosevelt's
thought processes in the days leading up to Pearl Harbor, nor can he find
incriminating documents (ie. smoking guns), Victor admits that "Among
the defenses the [Roosevelt] administration offered, the hardest to evaluate is that the Pearl Harbor warnings did not stand out and therefore
went unnoticed. It is impossible to put ourselves at the desks of intelligence officers and their superiors in 1941 and judge exactly what stood
out for them."7 (A point that Roberta Wohlstetter emphasized forty-five
years ago.8) And, second, that while as early as 25 November 1941,
"U.S. intelligence workers" allegedly "intercepted" two messages indicating the route and schedule for the Japanese carrier task force about to
strike Hawaii, "evidence that they were decoded in time is lacking."9
Roosevelt and his people understood that luring Japan into a Pacific
war would have immeasurably compounded the nation's crisis. "Betty"
Stark stated the problem baldly in a memorandum to Roosevelt sometime in late September or early October 1941. According to Robert E.
Sherwood, a close White House confidante at the time and quoted at several points in Dr. Victor's account, the president found Stark's ideas "refreshing." Stark wrote that a simple declaration of war on Germany, as
was being urged by some around the president, "might bring Japan into
the war as an active belligerent. This would be without question a decided disadvantage because the United States would then be engaged in actual hostilities on two fronts; something we may have to accept, but every effort should be made to avoid this situation. I might add that I believe efforts in this behalf will best be served by our continued strong
stand against Japanese aggression."10
Victor has combed the record with great diligence and though he appears not to realize it, has produced a very plausible scenario of why
Pearl Harbor happened. When Roosevelt determined in mid-1940 to base
the Pacific Fleet in Hawaii as a deterrent to Japanese aggression, fleet
commander Admiral J.O. Richardson vigorously protested. Pearl Harbor
was a death trap, and his fleet was not ready. Moreover, Washington persistently refused to provide Oahu with sufficient defenses, especially aircraft, nor to provide the Hawaiian base commanders with details of the
dimensions and nature of the Japanese threat as derived from ongoing intelligence. At the various wartime commission hearings about Pearl Harbor, Kimmel and Short made the lack of adequate intelligence information the basis of their defense: they had not been ready that Sunday
morning because they had not been told to be ready. The famous 27
November "war warning," they argued, was ambiguous and unclear be67 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
cause it suited the Roosevelt administration's interests to be vague and
ambiguous. Dr. Victor takes up this argument with relish.
In fact, matters were not that simple. No matter how sensitive
Richardson may have been to real or alleged shortcomings in intelligence sharing, his successor, Kimmel, and those around him did not
seem all that interested, nor was the United States Navy as a whole.
From 1930 on, American naval attachés at the embassy in Tokyo compiled and submitted to Washington often remarkably accurate and insightful reports on Japanese naval developments, including capital-ship
construction and significant advances in Japanese naval aviation and
ordnance. All such information was dismissed because it failed to conform to prevailing American racial stereotypes and prejudices regarding
Japan. In 1942, Washington and the naval establishment would profess
astonishment at the appearance of the Zero fighter and the twenty-fourinch long-lance torpedo, both of which had been identified by the naval
attachés in Tokyo several years before. When young Stephen Jurika, returning from Tokyo, passed through Pearl Harbor in June 1941, his head
stuffed with critical information on Japanese naval capabilities, he remarked, "I didn't see anybody. It was a weekend, a Saturday, and there
was nobody around, not a soul. I did attempt to find somebody connected with CinCPacFlt's [Commander-in-Chief Pacific Fleet, Admiral Kimmel] intelligence outfit, but nothing." The duty officer "wasn't much interested" in anything Jurika might have to say. "He was, I think, over at
the Officer's Club having lunch at the time that I reported in. So that was
useless."11
Moreover, Kimmel gave Stark and the Washington naval establishment every indication before Pearl Harbor that the Pacific Fleet was
ready for action. The world was a far different place sixty-six years ago.
Hawaii was at least forty hours away by the fastest means of transportation, the comparatively little-used airplane. There were no e-mails or
BlackBerry devices for instant communication; the telephone remained
uncertain and costly; cables remained the preferred means of communication. Thus, local commanders as far afield as Pearl Harbor, Schofield
Barracks, and the Philippines where Douglas MacArthur held sway, enjoyed enormous discretionary powers. Unless they queried a cabled directive or an order in good time, authorities in Washington assumed that
everyone was on the same page. Everyone in Washington agreed that the
American response of 26 November 1941 to Japan's latest unyielding
note brought a Pacific War measurably closer. The following day, Stark
and his opposite, Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall, dispatched
their war warnings to Hawaii and the Philippines. Victor agrees with
Kimmel and Short that these messages were at once imprecise and misleading. They were not.
Both messages began with the simple declarative statement: "This dis68 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
patch is to be considered a war warning." Marshall's message to Short
then directed him to initiate reconnaissance flights "and other measures
as you deem necessary" subject only to the stipulation that they not be
carried out so spectacularly as to "alarm" the civilian population. Short's
response was to initiate anti-sabotage measures and then report that he
had done so to Washington. While the warning to Kimmel stated that
Japanese assaults against the allies were expected to be confined to the
far western Pacific (i.e., the Philippines, Thai or Kra Peninsula, and possibly Borneo), the admiral was also directed to "Execute an appropriate
defensive deployment preparatory to carrying out tasks assigned in WPL
[War Plan] 46."12 This was a critical policy change, and Kimmel should
have picked up on it. As Victor emphasizes, Richardson had been fired
by FDR in part because he insisted on carrying out a defensive training
program for the Pacific Fleet. Victor argues, probably rightly, that an
oversensitive president feared that even defensive moves by the Fleet
might be construed in Tokyo as an offensive gesture. Now, Stark was removing the ban. Moreover, to drive the seriousness of the war warning
home, Stark included in his war warning to Kimmel Marshall's warning
message to Short. Kimmel's predecessor had complained that he had not
been kept informed; well, Stark would warn Kimmel in the most direct
language possible while lifting the ban on defensive deployments.
Stark's war warning to Kimmel must also be seen in its immediate
context. Victor maintains that WPL 46 had been issued in the summer of
1941 and directed the Pacific Fleet, upon the outbreak of war, to steam
to the Japanese-held Marshall Islands, some two thousand miles southwest of Hawaii and capture them with the objective of luring the Imperial Japanese Navy away from British Malaya and the Philippines. (John
Lundstrom states that the Plan simply called for "reconnaissance and
raiding.") As Victor also notes, on 15 November 1941, just a dozen days
before Stark's war warning and three weeks before the Pearl Harbor attack, "Kimmel reported that he was preparing his fleet for offensive operations against Japan. On 25 November, [just two days before issuing
the war warning] Stark approved that report."13
Busy men in Washington from Roosevelt on down, distracted by everescalating crises in the Atlantic, including the outright sinking of one
U.S. destroyer by a German U-boat, thus had a legitimate right to presume that the Pacific fleet was ready at its guns, particularly since the
war warning had lifted the ban on defensive deployments. And if Kimmel's sailors were standing by on alert, Short's soldiers and airmen (who
were responsible for fleet protection) presumably were also. FDR, Stimson, Marshall, Stark, Kimmel, and Short all knew of Britain's recent,
daring, and spectacularly successful assault by carrier aircraft against the
Italian fleet anchorage at Taranto, and Kimmel knew, or certainly should
have known, of Japan's formidable capabilities in carrier warfare as
69 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
demonstrated repeatedly since 1937 off the China coast. Indeed, it is
clear from Edward Layton's memoirs that Kimmel did appreciate
Japanese abilities. Kimmel's intelligence officer later recalled that on 2
December 1941, just five days before the Japanese attack, he informed
his fleet commander that he did not know where the two chief Japanese
carrier divisions were. "Admiral Kimmel looked at me, as he sometimes
would, with somewhat a stern countenance and said, 'Do you mean to
say that they could be rounding Diamond Head and you wouldn't know
it?' or words to that effect. My reply was that 'I hope they would be
sighted before now,' or words to that effect." 14 The war warning clearly
invited Kimmel to respond in some positive fashion. Yet, he did nothing
new while Short's implementation of anti-sabotage measures was clearly
an insufficient response. (In fact, planes were lined up wing tip-to wing
tip, ripe targets for Japanese bombing and strafing attacks.)
But conspiracy is what Dr. Victor is after. Like his fellow theorists, he
depicts FDR, Marshall, Stark, Stimson, and the others as devious foxes
when it suits his purpose, and as great fools when it also suits his purpose. In his eagerness to condemn the president, Victor cites a statement
submitted to the Joint Congressional Pearl Harbor Hearings by the
daughter of the director of War Service for the American Red Cross.
"Shortly before the attack in 1941 President Roosevelt called" Don
Smith "to the White House for a meeting concerning a Top Secret matter," Smith's daughter alleged. "At this meeting the President advised my
father that his intelligence staff had informed him of a pending attack on
Pearl Harbor by the Japanese. He anticipated many casualties and much
loss, he instructed my father to send workers and supplies... He left no
doubt in my father's mind that none of the Naval and Military officials in
Hawaii were to be informed and he was not to advise the Red Cross officers who were already stationed in the area. When he protested to the
President, Roosevelt told him that the American people would never
agree to enter the war in Europe unless they were attack[ed]." Victor
also cites "reporter" Joseph Leib, "a friend of Hull" who according to
later statements "claims" and "says" that on 29 November, "[Hull]...revealed to me and gave me a copy of an intercept which showed that he
had information that Pearl Harbor would be attacked the following week.
I asked him if Roosevelt knew about it and he assured me that he had
discussed the matter with the president. I asked him if the FBI knew
about it. He assured me that he had talked to [FBI Director J. Edgar]
Hoover about it."15
Such stories beggar belief. Here is an administration beseiged by isolationist enemies, ostensibly plotting conspiracy in response, talking
about it in advance to a newspaper reporter and a leading Red Cross official and presuming that these individuals would say nothing. Millions of
Americans in 1941 expressed open fear that their President would drag
70 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
the nation and their sons or brothers into war. Smith allegedly expressed
dismay to FDR, but neither he nor reporter Joe Lieb (who had just been
given the scoop of the century by the U.S. Secretary of State) ever revealed the administration's dastardly designs until well after they came
to fruition. Both men or either man could have gone to a dozen Republican senators, a hundred Republican congressmen, and a sizeable portion
of the press (starting with Colonel McCormick's Chicago Tribune) with
the story of FDR's plan, yet neither said anything until the Pearl Harbor
attack was well in the past. Why would Roosevelt or Hull blurt their intentions not to warn Pearl Harbor about an impending attack when the
whole idea (according to Victor and others) was to obtain the maximum
shock value from a Japanese assault that would somehow propel U.S.
entry into the European war? Sending Red Cross workers and supplies to
Hawaii to alleviate a Japanese raid in advance of its occurrence would
soften if not defeat the entire purpose of the conspiracy. The answer to
these questions, of course, is there was no conspiracy. Smith's daughter
and Joe Lieb either heard what they wanted to hear, or fabricated.
Granted that Roosevelt and everyone around him expected Japan to
fire the first shot of a Pacific War; and they expected it to be fired in
Southeast Asia. But clearly Washington assumed in December 1941 that
American forces were ready and able to fire the second and succeeding
shots; that they would not be caught at anchor with locked magazines
and grounded aircraft.
As I have argued elsewhere, if Roosevelt was, for whatever reason,
bent on war, and if he had known the Japanese were about to attack
Pearl Harbor, there remained another alternative that would have gotten
him his war without any substantial loss of blood or weapons. Knowing
of the impending Japanese attack, FDR could have sent a flash cable ordering the fleet to sail (and the army and its air corps to stations) in the
dark hours of the night preceding the Japanese assault. A simple message to Hawaii at 0300 or 0400 Hawaiian time (mid-morning in Washington) could have sent the fleet to sea at dispersal stations hours before
the Japanese appeared. No Japanese spy in Honolulu was around/awake
to reveal the sudden departure of Kimmel's fleet. In 1917-18, the U.S.
battleship force with the British Home Fleet had sortied frequently in the
middle of the night without incident from the equally land-locked, often
wind-swept harbor at Scapa Flow with its narrow, twisting, treacherous
channel. Who was the American fleet gunnery officer at the time? Lieutenant Commander Husband E. Kimmel. In ordering a post-midnight sortie from Pearl, FDR would have had his war without major casualties.
Japanese aircraft appearing above Hawaii shortly after dawn – itself an
act of war – would have found an empty anchorage, their targets at sea
with guns uncovered and sufficiently dispersed so as to be difficult to
hit, and with a proportion of Short's aircraft with which to contend.16
71 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
And what of Kimmel's behavior early on the morning of 7 December?
Shortly before or after 0700, nearly an hour before Japanese aircraft first
appeared over Pearl Harbor and nearby Schofield Barracks, Kimmel was
informed of an attack upon and the apparent sinking of a submarine in
unauthorized waters immediately off the harbor entrance. There had
been numerous false sightings of submarines in the area before, but this
time the captain of the destroyer USS Ward (DD-139) depth charged and
was fairly certain that he had sunk a submarine. Kimmel asked for verification, but given the well-documented fact that nearly everyone from
Washington to San Francisco to Manila believed on the night of 6 December that war was but hours away, a prudent admiral would on the
morning of the seventh, have immediately sent his fleet to battle stations
upon receipt of the Ward's report and warned General Short urgently,
with the recommendation that any and all aircraft available on this early
Sunday morning be sent aloft. Kimmel did neither; he dithered, simply
asking for more information before acting. It can be argued that snafus
and confusions farther down the line would have prevented either the
fleet or the air corps from going to battle stations at such short notice in
any case. But what does that tell us about the training that both Kimmel
and Short gave to their people in the hurried days between the war warning and the attack?
Had Kimmel ordered the fleet to quarters before 0730, had he urgently contacted Short, and had the Air Corps been able to get at least a
handful of planes aloft to meet the Japanese as they winged in, then in
all probability the two commanders would have deservedly escaped most
if not all of the censure that their fellow citizens, and history, bestowed
upon them. Instead, they and their commands were caught completely
off guard. The magnificence of the response to the sudden rain of
Japanese bombs and torpedoes was too little and too late to disrupt a
brilliantly conceived and implemented attack.
Were Kimmel and Short thrown to the wolves? "On 11 December
Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox arrived at Pearl as the president's personal emissary to investigate the surprise attack and frankly to size up
Kimmel. Nothing he saw reassured him. Understandably, Kimmel and
his fellow officers appeared quite shaken by events. Capt. Frank E Beatty, Knox's naval aide, described how 'the shock effect of the attack' adversely affected them in proportion to their 'authority and responsibility.'
Admiral Kinkaid, Kimmel's brother-in-law...flew into Oahu on the
twelfth and graphically described the scene: 'If I had been shocked by the
sight of Pearl Harbor from the air I was doubly shocked by the appearance of the members of Cincpac's [i.e.Kimmel's] staff and of the senior
officers of the Fleet whom I saw at Headquarters. Each of them looked
as though he had not had a wink of sleep in the five days that had
elapsed since the Japanese attack. All were in a defiant mood but at the
72 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
moment none could produce a concrete plan as to how we would 'get
those ______.'"17 Fleet planners led by Captain Charles "Soc" McMorris
swiftly produced a scheme to relieve the besieged Marine garrison at
Wake Island, while mounting a diversionary attack on the Marshall Islands. But it was too late for Kimmel. Knox, Kinkaid, and the others had
seen quite enough (and in the event, the Wake Island relief mission was
never completed).
John Lundstrom, whose knowledge of the U.S. side of the Pacific War
during its early stages is perhaps unmatched, recently lamented that
"Roosevelt, Stark, Marshall, and the others refused to acknowledge that
they, too, never believed Pearl Harbor in peril of a massive surprise attack. They allowed a political firestorm to destroy an honorable man,
who should have been allowed to contribute to the enemy's defeat."18 But
Kimmel and Short contributed greatly to their own destruction by almost
immediately demanding hearings, then publicly proclaiming in those
hearings that they had been sabotaged by schemers in Washington. Such
tactics seldom win an individual a return to high command, or, indeed, to
any command at all.
In truth, there was enough legitimate blame to lay at the feet of Kimmel and Short. They were the men on the spot; they had been warned,
however much they and others may have argued to the contrary, and they
(Kimmel, in particular) had given their superiors in Washington every
indication that they were standing by their guns; they presumably knew
as well as anyone else in American military and naval circles of Japan's
military and naval capabilities, and the attractiveness and vulnerability
of their commands to attack. They held the power and bore the responsibility – the command responsibility – and did little or nothing. And so
they were rightly sacked and condemned.
It is time to lay the Pearl Harbor conspiracy to rest. Inference, innuendo, and simple assertion, whether stridently expressed or softly intimated, seldom if ever add up to truth. The truth of Pearl Harbor is in Dr.
Victor's pages, if he and others will but read it aright. Unlike 9/11, Pearl
Harbor was quickly transformed into a flaming partisan issue; an effort
by President Franklin Roosevelt's bitter critics to condemn him for an act
of treason that he did not commit. Scholars serious and otherwise have
long been tempted to transform the partisan claims of the era they study
into truth. It seldom works. To treat such sniping as serious history not
only constitutes a pack of vile tricks we play on the dead, but does serious harm to the national interest. For in depicting the occasional calamitous bureaucratic or administrative breakdown as a full-blown conspiracy, we deflect attention from the need to constantly monitor and improve
the capabilities and performances of those to whom we entrust our national security.
73 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
Notes
1. William J. Broad, “A Spy’s Path: Iowa to A-Bomb to Kremlin Honor,” The New York
Times, 12 November 2007.
2. John Lehman, "The Maritime Strategy: ‘A Bravura Performance,'" U.S. Naval Institute
Proceedings, Vol. 133, Issue 11, November 2007, p. 23.
3. Tripp Wiles, Forgotten Raiders of '42: The Fate of the Marines Left Behind on Makin
(Dulles, VA: Potomac Books, 2007).
4. George Victor, The Pearl Harbor Myth: Rethinking the Unthinkable (Dulles, VA: Potomac Books, 2007), pp. 164, 185.
5. Ibid., p. 19.
6. Charles Callan Tansill, Back Door to War: The Roosevelt Foreign Policy, 1933-41
(Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1952).
7. Victor, Pearl Harbor, pp. 31, 254, 255-256, 296.
8. Roberta Wohlstetter, Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1962).
9. Victor, Pearl Harbor, p. 256.
10. Robert E. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1948), pp. 379-380.
11. Jurika Oral History quoted in Lisle A. Rose, Power at Sea: The Breaking Storm:
1919-1945 (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2007), pp. 340-341.
12. Quoted in Victor, Pearl Harbor, p. 82.
13. Ibid., pp. 100-101; John B. Lundstrom, Black Shoe Carrier Admiral: Frank Jack
Fletcher at Coral Sea, Midway, and Guadalcanal (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press,
2006), p.52.
14. Edwin T. Layton, Roger Pineau, and John Costello, "And I Was There": Pearl Harbor and Midway – Breaking the Secrets (New York: William Morrow, 1985), p. 18.
15. Quoted in Victor, Pearl Harbor, pp. 50, 51.
16. Rose, Breaking Storm, pp. 349-350.
17. Quoted in Lundstrom, Black Shoe Carrier Admiral, p. 18.
18. Ibid., p. 28.
LISLE A. ROSE
Edmonds, Washington
The Battle of Britain on Screen: 'The Few' in British Film and Television Drama. S.P. MacKenzie. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2007. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Paper. Pp. 181. $25.00.
The Battle of Britain in 1940 remains the dominant feature of twentieth
century British history. Or does it? Professor Simon P. MacKenzie's survey of theatrical productions pertaining to the "BoB" demonstrates conflicting attitudes among film critics and the British population at large.
In his brief introduction, MacKenzie notes the difference between
film (entertainment) and history. How many "historical" movies withstand informed scrutiny? Extremely few: in recent years, the most authentic probably is Saving Private Ryan; the least certainly being the
atrocious Pearl Harbor.1 Exceedingly few aviation films match 1955's
74 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
The Dam Busters (a story screaming to be redone), which features correct aircraft serial numbers.2
Yet today, movies and television provide millions of people with the
bulk of their history lessons. Great War aviation enthusiasts tolerated the
formulaic Flyboys by saying, "A poor World War I flying flick beats no
World War I flying flick."3 Similarly, the hugely egregious Midway introduced a generation of youngsters to that historic event, some of whom
investigated further.4
MacKenzie's book spans the period from 1939 to 1991, with seven
films reviewed in order of their release.
The Lion Has Wings debuted at the outset of the war, depicting a successful defense of British airspace, complete with barrage balloons and
ugly actors portraying the Luftwaffe.5 Nevertheless, MacKenzie cites the
film's morale boost for a population directly concerned with one of "the
most widely anticipated events of the 20th century."
First of the Few is well known as Leslie Howard's portrayal of designer R.J. Mitchell, who bequeathed his scepter'd isle the fabulous Spitfire
before dying in 1936.6 The author addresses abortive BoB films planned
during the 1941 Blitz amid the paradox of the RAF winning the cinematic battle when movies were consistently interrupted by air raid sirens.
(Life imitated art when Howard was killed in a DC-3, which had been
shot down over the Bay of Biscay in 1943.)
A more direct portrayal of the battle was Angels One Five, set in a fictional Hurricane squadron.7 The "new boy" endures humiliation and
frustration upon arrival, but slowly turns into an asset before becoming a
casualty. Reviews were mixed, but Douglas Bader gave it a thumb up.
Bader himself featured in the next offering, Reach for the Sky, which
was based on the Paul Brickhill biography.8 With Kenneth More in the
title role, Bader's grim determination and puckish personality come
through in fine form. Bader, however, boycotted the premiere, upset over
the elimination of several characters.
Thirteen years later, More was promoted to station commander in the
ambitious, sprawling Battle of Britain.9 The all-star cast included Laurence Olivier, Christopher Plummer, Michael Caine, and a flock of RAF
and German aircraft. The aerial photography was excellent; the script
giving equal treatment to both sides. (A contemporary review noted that
a begartered Susannah York's main contribution was filling a shirt tail so
fetchingly.)
In the 1988 television version of Piece of Cake (based on Derek
Robinson's unworshipful treatment of Fighter Command), the personality mix in a combat squadron is well portrayed. 10 It's instructive that Moggy, the best fighter pilot, is also the worst human being. In the six-part
series, heroes and heels live cheek by jowl, even among The Few. Perhaps that's why MacKenzie quotes critics who found Piece of Cake too
75 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
controversial, and not controversial enough!
Finally, A Perfect Hero graphically shows the appalling price that
some pilots paid for the glamour of flying.11 Those who were badly
burned experienced the furies of hell in reconstructive surgery, and
some, like the late Geoffrey Page, frankly admitted returning to combat
with advanced homicidal mania.
In addition to the seven main films, MacKenzie alludes to others that
are partly set in the Battle. They include some British television dramas
and the excellent Czech offering, Dark Blue World.12 Oddly, he omits
better known productions such as Mrs. Minniver and the television miniseries Danger UXB.13
MacKenzie concludes that the Battle has lost its place in the forefront
of the nation's consciousness. A 2004 poll indicated that one-third of all
Britons did not know that the BoB occurred in World War II, a figure
rising to half in the sixteen to thirty-four age bracket.
Whether future BoB movies will be made is problematical. The
abortive Tom Cruise feature, The Few, apparently was scuttled owing to
British resentment at the impression (again) that America won the Battle
of Britain in addition to the Battle of the Atlantic (U-57114).
The Battle of Britain on Screen is extensively footnoted with a sixteen-page bibliography. Overall, the work is an informed, enjoyable look
at a rarely-covered subject.
Notes
1. Saving Private Ryan, Dir. Steven Spielberg, Perfs. Tom Hanks and Matt Damon,
DreamWorks SKG, Motion Picture, United States, 1998; Pearl Harbor, Dir. Michael
Bay, Perfs. Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett, Touchstone Pictures, Motion Picture, United
States, 2001.
2. The Dam Busters, Dir. Michael Anderson, Perfs. Michael Redgrave and Richard Todd,
Associated British Picture Corporation, Motion Picture, United Kingdom, 1955.
3. Flyboys, Dir. Tony Bill, Perfs. James Franco and David Ellison, Flyboys Films Ltd.,
Motion Picture, United States, 2006.
4. Midway, Dir. Jack Smight, Perfs. Charlton Heston and Henry Fonda, Universal Pictures, Motion Picture, United States, 1976.
5. The Lion Has Wings, Dir. Adrian Brunel et al, Perfs. Merle Oberon and Ralph
Richardson, London Film Productions, Motion Picture, United Kingdom, 1939.
6. First of the Few, Dir. Leslie Howard, Perfs. Leslie Howard and David Niven, British
Aviation Pictures, Motion Picture, United Kingdom, 1942.
7. Angels One Five, Dir. George More O'Ferrall, Perfs. Jack Hawkins and Michael Denison, Templar Film Studios, Motion Picture, United Kingdom, 1952.
8. Reach for the Sky, Dir. Lewis Gilbert, Perfs. Kenneth More and Lyndon Brook, Angel
Productions, Motion Picture, United Kingdom, 1956; Paul Brickhill, Reach for the Sky:
The Story of Douglas Bader, DSO, DFC (London: Collins, 1954).
9. Battle of Britain, Dir. Guy Hamilton, Perfs. Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine, Spitfire Productions, Motion Picture, United Kingdom, 1969.
10. Piece of Cake, 6 episodes, Dir. Ian Toynton, Perfs. Tom Burlinson and Neil Dudgeon, London Weekend Television, Television Mini-Series, United Kingdom, 1988;
Derek Robinson, Piece of Cake (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1983).
11. A Perfect Hero, 6 episodes, Dir. James Cellan Jones, Perfs. Nigel Havers and James
76 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
Fox, Havahall Pictures, Television Mini-Series, United Kingdom, 1991.
12. Dark Blue World, Dir. Jan Sverák, Perfs. Ondrej Vetchý and Krystof Hádek, Biograf
Jan Sverák, Motion Picture, Czech Republic, 2001.
13. Mrs. Minniver, Dir. William Wyler, Perfs. Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon, Loew's
Incorporated, Motion Picture, United States, 1942; Danger UXB, 13 episodes, Dir. Ferdinand Fairfax et al, Perfs. Anthony Andrews and George Innes, Euston Films, Television
Mini-Series, United Kingdom, 1979.
14. U-571, Dir. Jonathan Mostow, Perfs. Matthew McConaughey and Bill Paxton, Universal Pictures, Motion Picture, United States, 2000.
BARRETT TILLMAN
Mesa, Arizona
Panther vs T-34: Ukraine 1943. Robert Forczyk. Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2007. Illustrations. Bibliography. Index. Paper. Pp. 80. $17.95.
Osprey Publishing's new Duel series presents military history authors
with a venue to compare some of the principal weapons systems of
World War II. Dr. Robert A. Forczyk uses this opportunity to address
one of the enduring myths of the Second World War: the alleged superiority of Germany's Panther medium tank.
Design work on the Panther began in December 1941 in response to
the Soviet T-34. By May 1942, the Panther was ordered into mass production in spite of the fact that it was not ready. In June 1943, Guderian
informed Hitler that it was not ready for combat. His warning, however,
was rejected, and the Panther went on to make a disastrous combat debut
at the battle of Kursk in July. The Panther was the result of a series of
design compromises, all well-explained by Forczyk. What resulted was
not a program to get the best possible tank to the front, but one driven by
the desire to get the Panther into production as soon as possible. This
haste, and the lack of proper testing prior to entering combat, resulted in
a number of problems and difficulties that are detailed in the book.
On the other hand, the T-34 was already a mature combat vehicle by
1943. Design work on the prototype that was to become the T-34 began
in November 1937. When it first met the Germans in combat in 1941,
the T-34 was a worthy opponent, but by 1943 the design had become
somewhat outdated. This placed Soviet tankers in a position of technical
inferiority in comparison with their German armored counterparts.
The author does a reasonably good job comparing the two very different tanks. This comparison is not based on theoretical capabilities, but
actual battlefield performance. The Panther had excellent frontal armor,
equal to German heavy tanks, but its flank was vulnerable to many Soviet weapons, including the T-34. Panther firepower was far superior to
77 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
that of the T-34, as was the training of its crews. However, the Achilles
heel of the vehicle was its mobility. Its final drive was very weak, the result of the flawed and hurried design process, and its overall reliability
in 1943 was unacceptable. While the T-34 could boast a seventy to ninety percent combat readiness in 1943, Panther combat readiness was in
the range of thirty-five percent. Many more Panthers were lost to this
problem than to enemy fire.
The Panther was first committed to action on 5 July 1943 when 184
tanks attacked as part of the southern pincer of the Kursk offensive. By
12 July, the 39th Panzer Regiment (parent unit of the only two Panther
battalions) was combat ineffective. In August, the Panthers formed part
of the German defense around Kharkov, but they were still dogged by reliability problems. During the remainder of the year, despite isolated
successes, the Panther's reliability problems proved to be its most negative characteristic.
The author contends that the vaunted Panther was the loser in the duel
with the T-34, its primary armored adversary in 1943. Athough the numbers would indicate that many more T-34s were destroyed by Panthers
than the reverse, the operational mobility of the more mature T-34 was
instrumental in the successful Soviet drive to reclaim the Ukraine and
cross the Dnepr. Whatever its strengths, the Panther had clearly not
proved to be the decisive weapon for which the Germans had hoped.
This work provides a welcome contrast to the usual praise surrounding
the Panther, and it is one of the best Osprey Duel series titles to date.
MARK E. STILLE
Vienna, Virginia
78 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
Books in Brief
MICHAEL D. HULL
LeMay. Barrett Tillman. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Illustrations. Notes. Index. Cloth. Pp. 224. $21.95.
Major General Ira C. Eaker, second commander of the U.S. Eighth Air
Force in World War II, described Curtis E. LeMay as a "today general"
and his best combat leader, while General James H. Doolittle, leader of
the historic B-25 raid on Japan in April 1942, believed that LeMay was
probably "the best air commander the United States or any other nation
ever produced."
Chunky, gruff Curtis Emerson LeMay was an innovative self-starter, a
tough taskmaster, and a man with minimal charisma. He was incapable
of small talk, and had no patience for under-achievers. Nicknamed "Iron
Ass," he was generally feared in the U.S. Air Force. According to a popular story, he once stood under the wing of a giant B-36 bomber of
Strategic Air Command (SAC) during the Cold War, and lit up one of
his favorite Cuban cigars. When an aide warned that the aircraft might
explode, LeMay growled, "It wouldn't dare." He admitted later, "I started
that story. But I always followed my own orders."
The apocryphal story said much about LeMay, whose abrasiveness
was legendary. "He'd fire you in a heartbeat," said one officer. Yet General LeMay was warmly regarded by those who knew him best, and colleagues told of his "heart of gold" and "great feeling for the troops." As
one subordinate noted, "Curt LeMay irritated many people, but, he usually ended up right." And no one ever doubted LeMay's dedication to the
building and wielding of air power in the cause of freedom and peace.
The life story of General LeMay, a highly decorated leader who led
from the front and listened far more than he spoke, unfolds in this balanced and insightful biography by Barrett Tillman, the author of many
fine aviation books. He has done a masterful job of portraying the complex, controversial airman for the first time, and it is long overdue. Tillman is a scrupulous researcher, and his prose is crisp and tight.
Born in Columbus, Ohio, the son of a steel worker and handyman,
young Curtis LeMay displayed energy and ambition from the start. He
saved up for a bicycle so that he could start a paper route, strove for Eagle Scout rank, and became a deadly marksman with his BB rifle while
79 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
shooting birds to feed his neighbor's lazy cat. He dabbled with engines
and electronics, built a crystal set, and preferred "tinkering" and hunting
to socializing. He was awkward around girls.
Later, as Tillman relates, LeMay decided that applying for a West
Point appointment was too daunting, so he joined the Ohio National
Guard. What he lacked in academic standing, he made up for in persistence, and set his sights on becoming an aviation cadet. His flying career
began in a Consolidated PT-3 trainer at March Field, California.
Tillman writes that Lemay became the finest navigator in the U.S.
Army Air Corps. He helped to develop the famed Norden bombsight, led
a B-17 bomber group of the Eighth Air Force in England, and then commanded the 4th Bombardment Wing. He perfected pattern bombing,
tight formation tactics, the maximizing of B-17 firepower, and longrange shuttle missions.
Assigned to the Far East in August 1944, LeMay faced a new enemy,
the Japanese, with a new weapon, the B-29 Superfortress bomber. He led
the 20th and 21st Bomber Commands in China and the Mariana Islands,
respectively, and directed devastating incendiary raids against Japanese
cities. He then played a major role in selecting Hiroshima and Nagasaki
as targets for the first atomic bombs. Tillman believes that LeMay, along
with Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, was one of the two commanders most
responsible for defeating the Japanese empire.
After World War II, LeMay commanded the U.S. Air Force in Europe, organized the historic Berlin Airlift, and headed SAC. Later, he became Air Force chief of staff and ran as Governor George Wallace's vice
presidential candidate in 1968.
Tillman has crafted a literate, definitive portrait of the fighting, nononsense airman whose career ranged from 1920s biplane fighters to the
jet-powered bombers of the 1960s.
The Battle for Leyte, 1944: Allied and Japanese Plans, Preparations,
and Execution. Milan N. Vego. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2006.
Maps. Tables. Notes. Index. Cloth. Pp. 481. $55.00.
Launched on 20 October 1944, the invasion of Leyte – one of the largest
and most complex combined operations conducted during the Second
World War – represented the first Allied effort to open a campaign in the
Pacific by penetrating and then seizing a large island in the center of the
enemy's geostrategic defense position.
The success of the Leyte landings was critical to mounting an assault
on Luzon and liberating the rest of the Philippine Islands. The campaign,
often bitterly fought, ended with the liberation of the entire archipelago
less than a year later.
80 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
By the end of the campaign, as Milan Vego explains in this scholarly
and exhaustively researched study, the Allied air, ground, and naval
units had severed Japan from its vital sources of raw materials in the
south. From airfields on Luzon, Allied bombers and fighters were able to
neutralize Japanese air power on Formosa (Taiwan), while the Philippines were also used as a base for preparing the final assault on the
Japanese home islands.
While this could hardly be called a briskly written book, the author
deserves high marks for his thorough evaluation of the theater-wide
command, organization, intelligence, and logistics aspects of the Leyte
campaign. Incredibly detailed and comprehensive, it will prove a valuable reference work for any study of the Pacific War.
Vego points out that efforts to deny the Allies control of 7,241square-mile Leyte severely depleted Japanese air and naval strength.
This, in turn, had a decisive impact on their ability to defeat the Allied
landings on Luzon in February 1945 and subsequent landings aimed at
securing the rest of the archipelago. A series of engagements fought on
24-27 October 1944 broke the back of the Imperial Japanese Navy, and it
never again represented a serious threat in the western Pacific.
The author shows that despite occasional setbacks and disappointments for the Allies, particularly inclement weather and poor intelligence, the outcome of the struggle for Leyte – which was secured late in
December 1944 – was never in doubt.
MICHAEL D. HULL is a military historian whose articles and book reviews have been featured in many periodicals. He is a contributing author to The World War II Desk Reference (New York: HarperCollins,
2004), a book published in cooperation with The Eisenhower Center for
American Studies.
81 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
Novus Libri
NICOLAS D'AUBIGNÉ
Strategy for Victory: The Development of British Tactical Air Power, 1919-1943. David Ian Hall. Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, 2007. Illustrations. Maps. Notes. Index. Cloth. Pp. 272. $125.00.
This volume examines the nature of the inter-Service crisis between the
British Army and the Royal Air Force (RAF) over the provision of effective air support for the army in the Second World War. Material for the
book is drawn primarily from the rich collection of documents at the National Archives (UK) and other British archives. The author points out
that Britain's independent RAF was in fact a disguised blessing for the
Army and that the air force's independence was in part a key reason why
a successful solution to the army's air support problems was found. The
analysis traces why the British Army went to war in 1939 without adequate air support and how an effective system of support was organized
by the RAF. As such, it is the first scholarly survey of the origins and development of British air support doctrine and practice during the early
years of the Second World War.
The provision of direct air support was of central importance to the
success enjoyed by Anglo-American armies during the latter half of the
Second World War. First in North Africa, and later in Italy and NorthWest Europe, American, British, and Empire armies fought most if not
all of their battles with the knowledge that they enjoyed unassailable air
superiority throughout the battle area. This advantage, however, was the
product of a long and bitter dispute between the British Army and the
Royal Air Force that began at the end of the First World War and continued virtually unabated until it was resolved in late 1942 and early 1943
when the 2nd Tactical Air Force was created. Battlefield experience and,
in particular, success in North Africa, combined with the hard work, wisdom, and perseverance of Air Marshals Sir Arthur Tedder and Arthur
Coningham, the active cooperation of General Bernard Montgomery,
and the political authority of Prime Minister Winston Churchill, produced a uniquely British system that afforded what may have been the
most comprehensive, effective, and flexible air support provided by any
air force during the war.
The book is divided into two equal parts of five chapters. Part one sur82 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
veys how the British Army went to war in 1939 without adequate air
support, and part two explains how an effective system of air support
was organized by the middle years of the war. The analysis traces
Britain's earliest experience with aircraft in the Great War of 1914-1918,
the inter-war period of doctrinal development and inter-Service rivalry,
and the major campaigns in France and the Middle East during the first
half of the Second World War when the weaknesses in Army-RAF cooperation were first exposed and eventually resolved.
The German Home Front 1939-45. Brian L. Davis. Oxford: Osprey
Publishing, 2007. Illustrations. Index. Paper. Pp. 64. $17.95.
In 1939, Germany was committed to the concept of Blitzkrieg – a swift
and decisive war. Yet, the reality became something very different as every corner of German society was impacted by the realities of war.
Moreover, the German civilian population had to live their lives according to the rules and regulations that the Nazi state imposed with a ruthless efficiency.
This book, by one of Britain's leading authorities on the insignia and
regalia of the Third Reich, details the critical civilian support that was
necessary to maintain Nazi control of the population and includes firsthand accounts of the experiences of civilians who suffered at the hands
of their own government, as well as enduring the deprivations and fears
of wartime life. With analysis and descriptions of civil and home services, including the State Labor Service, Fire Protection Police, Ordnungspolizei, Sonderpolizei, and Air Protection Warning Service, this
work provides a detailed, lavishly illustrated view of wartime life in Germany, exploring the tentacles of the Nazi state as they affected every
man, woman, and child.
Japan and the League of Nations: Empire and World Order,
1914-1938. Thomas W. Burkman. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i
Press, 2007. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Cloth. Pp. 312. $58.00.
Japan joined the League of Nations in 1920 as a charter member and one
of four permanent members of the League Council. Until conflict arose
between Japan and the organization over the 1931 Manchurian Incident,
the League was a centerpiece of Japan's policy to maintain accommodation with the Western powers. The picture of Japan as a positive contributor to international comity, however, is not the conventional view of the
country in the early and mid-twentieth century. Rather, this period is
usually depicted in Japan and abroad as a history of incremental imperi83 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
alism and intensifying militarism, culminating in war in China and the
Pacific. Even the empire's interface with the League of Nations is typically addressed only at nodes of confrontation: the 1919 debates over
racial equality as the Covenant was drafted and the 1931-1933 League
challenge to Japan's seizure of northeast China.
This volume fills in the space before, between, and after these nodes
and gives the League relationship the legitimate place it deserves in
Japanese international history of the 1920s and 1930s. It also argues that
the Japanese cooperative international stance in the decades since the
Pacific War bears noteworthy continuity with the mainstream international accommodationism of the League years.
Professor Thomas Burkman sheds new light on the meaning and content of internationalism in an era typically seen as a showcase for diplomatic autonomy and isolation. Well into the 1930s, the vestiges of international accommodationism among diplomats and intellectuals are clearly evident. The League project ushered those it affected into world citizenship and inspired them to build bridges across boundaries and cultures. Burkman's cogent analysis of Japan's international role is enhanced and enlivened by his descriptions of the personalities and initiatives of Makino Nobuaki, Ishii Kikujirô, Nitobe Inazô, Matsuoka Yôsuke, and others in their Geneva roles.
Agent Zigzag: A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love, and Betrayal.
Ben Macintyre. New York: Harmony Books, 2007. Illustrations. Notes.
Index. Cloth. Pp. 384. $25.95.
This work details the relatively little-known story of one of Great
Britain’s most extraordinary double-agents of World War II. Genuinely
courageous, and able to withstand withering interrogations from both
sides, Eddie Chapman was a charming criminal, a con man, and a philanderer. Inside the traitor was a man of loyalty; inside the villain was a
hero. The problem for Chapman and his spymasters was to know where
one persona ended and the other began. In 1943, Colonel Tim Stephens
of MI5 – the British Secret Service – said of the story of Chapman: "In
fiction it would be rejected as improbable."
The previously classified material pertaining to Chapman (more than
1,800 pages) has only recently been released by the British government,
and Macintyre had complete access to all of Chapman's manuscripts, letters, and photographs. What emerges from this treasure trove is an exhilarating true story of loyalty and betrayal, courage and cowardice, and a
crook who was also a hero.
In 1941, after training as a German spy in occupied France, Chapman
was parachuted into Britain with a revolver, a wireless, and a cyanide
84 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
pill, with orders from the Abwehr to blow up an aircraft factory. Instead,
he contacted MI5. For the next four years, Chapman worked as a doubleagent, a lone British spy at the heart of the German Secret Service who
at one time volunteered to assassinate Hitler for his countrymen. He
travelled throughout Europe under different names, all the while weaving plans, spreading disinformation, and, miraculously, keeping his stories straight under intense interrogation.
The Germans feted Chapman as a hero and awarded him the Iron
Cross. In Britain, he was pardoned for his crimes, becoming the only
wartime agent to be thus rewarded.
A fascinating tale of loyalty and treachery, Agent Zigzag offers a
unique glimpse into the psychology of espionage, with its thin and shifting line between fidelity and betrayal.
The Last Drop: Operation Varsity March, 24-25, 1945. Stephen L.
Wright. Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2008. Illustrations. Maps.
Notes. Bibliography. Index. Cloth. Pp. 336. $29.95.
Operation VARSITY was the last major airborne offensive of the Second World War. Conducted primarily by the British 6th Airborne and
American 17th Airborne Divisions, and including Canadian elements,
the goal of VARSITY was to cross the Rhine River and gain a foothold
for the final Allied drive into Germany.
Drawing on war diaries, unit histories, after-action reports, and interviews with veterans, Stephen L. Wright details the horrors of parachuting through flak-filled skies, the dangers of piloting a glider safely to the
ground, and the struggles of infantry combat.
The Last Drop illustrates how thorough training, extensive planning,
solid execution, and sheer guts combined to make Operation VARSITY
a stunning Allied victory. It is the first full-length history of the largest
and most successful airborne offensive of World War II.
Normandy: The Landings to the Liberation of Paris. Olivier Wieviorka. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2008. Maps. Charts. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Cloth. Pp. 376. $29.95.
The Allied landings on the coast of Normandy on 6 June 1944 have assumed legendary status in the annals of the Second World War. But in
overly romanticizing D-Day, Professor Olivier Wieviorka argues, historians have lost sight of the complete picture. Normandy offers a balanced, more complete account that reveals the successes and weaknesses
of the titanic enterprise.
85 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
In addition to describing the landings with precision and drama,
Wieviorka covers the planning and diplomatic background, Allied relationships, German defensive preparations, morale of the armies, economics and logistics, political and military leaders, and civilians' and
soldiers' experiences of the fighting. Surprisingly, the landing itself was
not the slaughter the general staff expected. The greater battle for Normandy – waged on farmland whose infamous hedgerows, the bocage,
created formidable obstacles – took a severe toll not only in lives lost,
but on the survivors who experienced this grueling ordeal.
D-Day, Wieviorka notes, was a striking accomplishment, but it was
war, violent and cruel. Errors, desertions, rivalries, psychological trauma, and self-serving motives were all part of the story. Rather than diminishing the Allied achievement, this candid work underscores the
price of victory and acknowledges the British, American, and Canadian
soldiers who dashed onto the Normandy beaches not as demigods, but as
young men.
NICOLAS D'AUBIGNÉ is a military historian whose research focuses
on the history of the Panzerwaffe from 1935-1945.
86 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
Books in Retrospect
KARL J. ZINGHEIM
Command Decisions. Kent Roberts Greenfield, ed. Washington, DC:
Center of Military History, 1960. Maps. Notes. Index. Cloth. Pp. 565.
Among other nations after the end of the Second World War, the United
States government commissioned its armed forces to research, write, and
publish official military histories of the recent conflict. The resulting
works, which appeared mostly in the 1950's, were extremely detailed,
particularly in operational matters, and remain valuable references to
modern historians. Because of the extraordinary depth of the histories
and the talents of the men and women who compiled them, the Office of
Military History in the Department of the Army was able to produce a
special supplement drawing on the earlier research which had a focused
theme, namely, an examination of military decisions which had an impact on many campaigns of World War II.
Assembling a veritable constellation of leading military historians of
the late 1950's, among them Martin Blumenson, Richard M. Leighton,
John Miller, Jr., Louis Morton, and Forrest Pogue, the Army published
Command Decisions, which spans the breadth of the war, although primarily from an American point of view. The twenty-three chapters and
introduction all go into considerable depth, while preserving a professional's brevity. Topics ranging from the "German Decision to Invade
Norway and Denmark;" "The Decision to Evacuate the Japanese from
the Pacific Coast;" "U.S. Merchant Shipping and the British Import Crisis;" to "The Decision to Halt at the Elbe" provide the modern reader
with not only excellent scholarship, but also a glimpse of perspectives
when the war was still a living memory and many of the principals were
still alive.
For example, Sidney T. Mathews' chapter, "General Clark's Decision
to Drive on Rome," is surprisingly mild in its critique of Clark's rush for
Rome at the expense of theoretically cutting off a good portion of the
German Fourteenth Army. In his analysis, Clark's sin appears to be inefficiency in matching these divergent goals instead of questioning the
military necessity of an early arrival in Rome over destroying more of
the retreating Germans. In Matthews' view: "...[if the U.S.] VI Corps
main effort had continued on the Valmontone axis on 26 May and the
87 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
days following, Clark would undoubtedly have reached Rome more
quickly than he was able to do by the route northwest from Cisterna. The
VI Corps could have cut Highway 6 and put far greater pressure on the
Tenth Army than it did."
In a similar vein, Louis Morton's "The Decision to Withdraw to
Bataan" is restrained in criticizing MacArthur's prewar strategy of defending the entire Philippine archipelago with airpower and the Philippine national army he was attempting to raise. Because of this grandiose
ambition, MacArthur tabled the established War Department Rainbow
Plan. This scheme had for decades conceded the indefensibility of the
large island chain and concentrated on a rapid withdrawal to prepared
positions on the Bataan peninsula to deny an enemy the use of Manila
Bay until hopefully, the navy would arrive from across the Pacific and
raise the siege.
As events transpired, MacArthur's airpower was neutralized within
hours of the start of war, and his modestly-equipped, partly-trained
Philippine Army was singularly unequal to the task of defeating the
Japanese on the beaches. Although MacArthur did warn Philippine President Quezon as early as 12 December, four days into the war, that an
evacuation of the government to Corregidor was a possibility, he held
onto his overall strategy and awaited the main Japanese landings. This
assault occurred in the early morning of 22 December in Lingayen Gulf
and the Philippine defense promptly collapsed. Whole regiments melted
away and heavier weapons like artillery and machine guns were abandoned. So severe was the rout that by the evening of the 23rd,
MacArthur was obliged to abandon his plan and adopt the original Rainbow Plan, known as War Plan Orange-3 (WPO-3). More than a fortnight
of preparations had been frittered away, which would eventually spell
disaster for the garrison of Bataan which went on short rations the moment they arrived.
In Morton's appraisal, MacArthur's belated decision to invoke WPO-3
"...saved the 75,000 troops on Luzon from immediate defeat, delayed the
Japanese timetable for conquest by four months, and kept large Japanese
combat forces tied up in the Philippines long after Malaya, Singapore,
and the Indies had fallen." This rosy view of MacArthur's defense of the
Philippines has endured until recent years.
History does not occur in a vacuum, and neither does the writing of it.
Analysis of military actions is often colored by contemporary politics
and this is quite evident in Pogue's "The Decision to Halt at the Elbe."
For decades while the Cold War raged, Western historians have raged
back and forth on Eisenhower's decision to make the German river a natural dividing line between advancing Allied and Soviet armies in 1945.
Had the Anglo-American forces pressed eastward as far as they could
across a defeated Germany, the contention went, the postwar Western
88 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
stance in Europe would have been much more favorable in regards to
where the Iron Curtain would have been drawn.
As Pogue points out, however, Eisenhower was instructed by Washington to keep strictly military considerations in mind while coordinating contact with Soviet forces, not geo-political ones. As Marshall told
Eisenhower, "Personally, and aside from all logistic, tactical, or strategical implications, I would be loathe to hazard American lives for purely
political purposes." Therefore, the Supreme Allied Commander eventually settled on an unmistakable natural dividing line, which turned out to
be the Elbe running up the middle of Germany. Furthermore, in the
spring of 1945 the United States was anxious to secure Soviet participation in the war against Japan – far from a given at that time. Plunging
into Eastern Europe and planting the flag would certainly have made
Stalin's entry against Tokyo problematic.
Also, it was presumed at the Yalta Conference in February 1945 that
the Soviet advance could very well extend west of the Elbe, considering
that at that moment, the Allied armies were still rebounding from the
German Ardennes offensive and were encountering stiff resistance west
of the Rhine. Therefore, no sound line of demarcation had been given to
Eisenhower beforehand. Another problem was the issue of postwar governments in the liberated countries. Though the topic was discussed at
length at Yalta, any agreement was still subject to interpretation.
To Eisenhower, German territory east of the Elbe was likely to be
handed to the Soviet's for their occupation zone, and nations east of Germany were largely under the control of the Red Army already. In his
view, sacrificing American lives for land that would be transferred to the
Soviets anyway was foolish.
Looking at such decisions in the post-Cold War era casts a new light
on what Eisenhower faced. As Truman and Attlee discovered at Potsdam
in July 1945, Stalin was determined to install communist subordinate
regimes in Eastern Europe where his Red Army held sway, and any prior
Allied bloodletting on those lands would have been in vain. Over the
course of a half century, however, keeping half of Europe under yoke
was extremely taxing for the Soviets and it was the freedom movement
in these countries which ultimately propelled the collapse of communism
in Europe. If the events of 1989-1991 had been foreseen in 1960 when
the chapter was written, what would Pogue have made of them?
A peculiar – and important – feature from the official histories that is
carried over to this volume is an extensive collection of maps. Cartography and military history go hand-in-glove, and rarely has this graphic art
been exceeded as that contained in these works. It is shameful that many
histories written in the last few decades have neglected this most necessary accompaniment.
Command Decisions still stands as a testament to skillful historical
89 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
analysis, even if some of the conclusions have staled over time. It is an
elegant work both from its textual contents and its maps, and is an excellent window on the early historiography of World War II.
KARL J. ZINGHEIM, a graduate of the United States Naval Academy,
is the Director of History for the USS Midway Museum in San Diego,
California. He is a naval historian whose research focuses primarily on
the Pacific War.
90 │ WORLD WAR II QUARTERLY Volume 4 Number 4 2007
- Conferences and Lectures Military Oral History Conference
21-23 February 2008 • University of Victoria, Canada
contact: Dr. Shawn Cafferky
[email protected] • (250) 721-7287
Churchill and Nazi Propaganda
A Lecture by Terry Charman
13 March 2008 • Churchill Museum and Cabinet War Rooms
contact: General Inquiries, Cabinet War Rooms
[email protected] • (01144) 207 930 6961
Military Historical Society of Australia
50th Jubilee Conference 2008
22-24 March 2008 • Army Museum of Western Australia
website: www.mhsa.org.au
contact: Paul Hamilton
[email protected]
Society for Military History 75th Annual Meeting
"The Military and Frontiers"
17-19 April 2008 • Weber State University
contact: Professor Bill Allison
[email protected] • (801) 626-6710
42nd Annual Military History Conference
7-11 May 2008 • Salt Lake City, UT
website: www.campjamp.org
contact: Dr. Michael Brodhead
[email protected]
Before the Holocaust:
Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany, 1933-1939
4-6 July 2008 • Birkbeck College, London
website: www.camps.bbk.ac.uk
contact: Dr. Christian Goeschel
[email protected] • 020 7631 6299
XXXIV International Congress of Military History
31 August - 5 September 2008 • Trieste, Italy
website: www.nimh.nl
contact: Dr. Piero Del Negro
[email protected]
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