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Knowledge Without Wisdom
© 2001 by Paul Bond
04 | World War
II
The journey has
been well worth making — once. — Winston Churchill
Bear in mind
that my brain works in about the same way as a calculating machine.
— Adolf Hitler
On September 1, 1939, the German army under Adolf Hitler invaded
Poland and began World War II. The German military machine struck
decisively at Poland in what was known as a blitzkrieg (lightning
war). High-speed panzer (tank) units pushed across the borders,
blasting holes in the Polish lines. From the skies, Luftwaffe (air
force) bombers destroyed the Polish air force, damaged
communications lines, and prevented the Poles from moving
reinforcements, supplies, and ammunition to the front lines. Then,
German foot soldiers moved forward to hold the conquered ground.
Meanwhile, Britain and France declared war on Germany on September
3.
On September 17 that same year, Soviet troops marched into
Poland. The Polish government and high command escaped into exile on
the next day. The Soviets halted at a line running from East Prussia
down to the Bug River. Hitler and Stalin then partitioned the
conquered country: the USSR occupied the eastern half, populated by
Ukrainians and White Russians as well as Poles; the Germans took the
western half, which included Gdansk (Danzig) and the Polish
Corridor.
Three million Polish Jews were subjected to a Blitzpogrom of
murder and rape. Reinhard Heydrich, an aide to Heinrich Himmler,
issued a ghetto decree that month, and Jews were progressively
fenced off from the rest of the population. Seven hundred thousand
Polish Jews would die of disease and starvation over the next two
years as the Nazis toyed with the idea of deporting all Jews to
Nisko, a proposed reservation in the Lublin area, or to Madagascar.
When Germany attacked the USSR in June 1941, four special
Einsatzgruppen (strike squads) were deployed against Soviet
Jewish civilians. The worst atrocity committed by these squads
occurred at the Babi Yar ravine in Kiev, where 33,771 Jews were
machine-gunned September 29 and 30, 1941. At Hitler’s insistence, in
January 1942 Heydrich chaired the Wannsee Conference on the Final
Solution of the Jewish Question.
In late September and early October, Stalin forced the Baltic
states — Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuaniato — to accept garrisons of
Soviet troops within their borders. The following year, elections
held under Soviet auspices resulted in the incorporation of the
three nations into the USSR as constituent republics.
After crushing the Poles, Hitler subdued Norway, Denmark,
Belgium, and The Netherlands. Then, he set his sights on France.
Collapse of France
During the winter of 1939 and 1940, the French army and the
German Wehrmacht faced one another in what was regarded satirically
as the Sitzkrieg, or sit-down war. The world waited in anticipation
of a major conflict between two powerful forces. On May 13, a
bridgehead was established at Sedan, considered the gateway to
France, and then suddenly, on May 16, 1940, a day after the Dutch
capitulation, the German blitzkrieg was released on northern France.
German mechanized forces outflanked the Maginot Line, surprised the
Allies by attacking through the wooded Ardennes rather than the
Belgian plain, and drove the British Expeditionary Force (BEF)
from the continent at Dunkirk. On June 5, the Germans launched
another offensive southward from the Somme. They entered Paris
unopposed on June 14 and forced France to sign an armistice at
Compiegne on June 22, 1940.
The fall of France was an extraordinary victory for Hitler. The
supposedly unbeatable French army had melted away before the
onslaught of his mobile units with their convincing display of
mechanized power. Nazi Germany then occupied most of France and
permitted the establishment of a friendly government at Vichy, in
central France on the Allier River.
The Vichy Government was headed by Marshal Henri Petain, hero of
World War I, and Pierre Laval, a collaborationist. Disgruntled
French patriots rallied around General Charles de Gaulle, who
pronounced himself leader of the Free French.
During the early months of the war, Benito Mussolini maintained
Italy’s neutrality. When France was about to fall, he decided to
join the Nazis. Declaring war on the Allies on June 10, 1940, he
invaded southern France in what U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt
described as a “stab-in-the-back.”
Dunkirk Retreat
During the Belgian campaign, the Germans drove rapidly across
southeastern Belgium and turned toward Abbeville on the French
coast, thereby isolating Allied troops. The British Expeditionary
Force and its French comrades appeared to be doomed. While some of
the troops of the French First Army sold their lives in a fierce
rearguard action, from British ports sailed one of the strangest
armadas in history, composed of destroyers, motor launches, private
yachts, old ferries, steamers, even fishing smacks, about 850
vessels in all. While planes of the Royal Air Force (RAF)
provided an umbrella over the scene to drive off German bombers, the
fleet of British vessels moved to Dunkirk and proceeded to evacuate
about 338,000 British, French, and Belgian troops from May 26 to
June 4, 1940. Not only was a military disaster turned into a
propaganda victory, but several hundred thousand experienced troops
were saved for future action against the Axis.
Battle of Britain
Hitler, anticipating further eastern conquests, hoped Britain
would accept German control of the Continent and seek peace. But
Britain shunned the chancellor’s overtures of July 1940, and, in
August, Hermann Goering’s Luftwaffe began an all-out attack on
British ports, airfields, and industrial centers and, finally, on
London. The goal was to crush British morale and wipe out the RAF in
preparation for Operation Sea Lion, an invasion of England.
The Battle of Britain was the first great air battle in history.
For fifty-seven nights, London was attacked by an average force of
160 bombers. The outnumbered RAF, employing the effective Spitfire
fighter and aided by radar, destroyed 1,733 aircraft while losing
915 fighters. German air power could not continue sustaining such
heavy losses, and in October, Operation Sea Lion was postponed
indefinitely. France fell that same year, but Hitler’s plan to
invade Britain was foiled when the German air force lost the air
Battle of Britain. When Italy’s invasion of Greece and Africa
failed, Hitler seized the Balkans and North Africa.
During this time, the Nazis began to import “inferior races”
from conquered countries to relieve the manpower shortage. Those who
resisted were herded into concentration camps. About twelve million
people, including about six million Jews, were exterminated.
USSR Invasion
Since well before the war, Hitler had looked toward the conquest
of the Slavic peoples of eastern Europe and the USSR to provide the
additional Lebensraum, or “living space,” he believed the
German people needed. He hoped to establish German colonies in those
regions to be served by the despised Slavs. After the defeat of
France, the German chancellor began planning an invasion of the
USSR. To avoid fighting a two-front war, Hitler first tried to make
peace with Britain. After that attempt to clear the western front
failed, he launched the Battle of Britain but again failed to put
the British out of action.
Nevertheless, full-scale preparations for the invasion of the
USSR began in December 1940. He believed Britain, having been
expelled from the Continent, no longer posed an offensive military
threat. He was convinced that the greater menace came from the
Soviets, who in June 1940 had moved uncomfortably close to Romanian
oil fields.
Originally scheduled for mid-May of 1941, the invasion of the
USSR, called Operation Barbarossa, was delayed until June 22 by
Hitler’s campaign in the Balkans. Launching a blitzkrieg with 121
divisions on a 3,200-kilometer (2,000-mile) front from the
Baltic to the Black Sea, the Germans employed a three-pronged
assault. In the north, they moved on Leningrad via the Baltic
states. Moscow, the target of the German center, was approached by
forces moving east to Smolensk. In the south, the invaders marched
toward the Ukraine and Kiev, where they planned to turn south to the
Crimea and cross the Don to the Caucasus and to Stalingrad on the
Volga. A smaller force of Romanians and Germans attacked in the
extreme south.
As justification for the move, Hitler accused the Kremlin of
treachery, of threatening German frontiers, and of disseminating
anti-German and pro-communist propaganda. He alleged that the
invasion was a crusade against Bolshevism; in addition, however, he
was attracted by wheat, oil, and mineral supplies that would enable
him to defy the British blockade. So certain was he of victory that
he did not even bother to equip his troops for winter.
The onslaught took the Soviets entirely by surprise, and the
Germans made startling progress. In the first eighteen days, the
attackers advanced 640 kilometers (400 miles), capturing
three hundred thousand prisoners, a thousand tanks, and six hundred
guns. During the first forty-eight hours alone, the Soviets lost
more than two thousand aircraft. The northern forces had entered
Leningrad province by July 10, and on August 31 were within 16
kilometers (10 miles) of the city. In the center, German
troops took Minsk on June 30 and Smolensk, only 320 kilometers (200
miles) from Moscow, in mid-July. Progress in the south was
slowed by unexpectedly heavy resistance and rainy weather, but the
invaders captured Kiev in late September. More than a million Soviet
prisoners had been taken by the end of that month. The Soviets
retreated, adopting a defense-in-depth strategy, but German victory
seemed imminent.
The German invasion of the USSR signaled a change in the alliance
structure. Despite his aversion to communism, Churchill promised
Stalin economic and technical assistance against the Axis. On July
13, 1941, Moscow signed a mutual-aid pact with London. Offers of
help also came from Washington. Italy and the Axis satellites —
Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary — allied themselves with
Germany. Vichy France broke off its diplomatic ties with Moscow. On
August 1, Britain severed relations with Finland, which the Germans
had used as one base for their invasion. Sweden had granted
permission for German troops to cross its territory, but announced
its determination to remain neutral. Despite pressure from the USSR
and from Britain, with whom it had an alliance, Turkey, too,
proclaimed its neutrality. Japan, which had concluded a mutual
nonaggression pact with the Soviets in April and was, in addition, a
member of the Axis Pact, adopted a policy of watchful waiting.
Growing U.S.
Involvement
From the beginning of the war in Europe, the sympathy of the
American public was with the Allied cause; most Americans felt a
Nazi triumph would pose a grave threat to the United States. As
German victory followed German victory, isolationist sentiment,
originally strong, began to evaporate.
From 1935, U.S. neutrality legislation had forbidden the selling
of war supplies to belligerent countries. In November 1939, a
revised neutrality law authorized the sale of war supplies on a
cash-and-carry basis while forbidding U.S. vessels and nationals
from traveling in combat zones. This act was intended to prevent
direct U.S. involvement in the war through the sinking of U.S.
vessels, a problem that had spurred the nation’s involvement in
World War I. From the beginning of the war, however, the British
dominated the seas; the cash-and-carry law thus had the effect of
favoring the British cause.
The next year, President Roosevelt and Congress began preparing
for possible U.S. entry into the war. In September 1940, the first
peacetime draft law in U.S. history provided for the registration of
17 million men. The Alien Registration Act of 1940 was aimed at
curbing subversive activities. In March 1941, Congress passed the
Lend-Lease Act, empowering the president to allow the shipment of
vital war material to nations, primarily Great Britain, whose
defense he considered to be necessary for U.S. security. Later that
year, the law was extended to include China and the USSR. The
Americans also took measures to defend the Western Hemisphere by
patrolling the Atlantic Ocean. American forces occupied Greenland
and Iceland. In August and September 1941, the sinking of U.S.-owned
ships led to a measure authorizing the arming of U.S. merchant
vessels and permitting them to carry cargoes to belligerent ports.
On August 14, 1941, President Roosevelt and Prime Minister
Winston Churchill held a conference on a war vessel off the coast of
Newfoundland. The two agreed to present plans for a new world based
on an end to tyranny and territorial aggrandizement, the disarmament
of aggressors, and the fullest cooperation of all nations for the
social and economic welfare of all. The Atlantic Charter was
designed as a counterthrust to a possible new Hitler peace offensive
as well as a statement of postwar aims. The next month, the USSR and
fourteen other anti-Axis countries endorsed the Atlantic Charter.
Japanese Expansion
and U.S. Response
Japan’s 1931 invasion of Manchuria and its 1937 full-scale
assault against China had brought expressions of disapproval from
the U.S. government. With public opinion strongly isolationist,
however, the United States did not act to halt Japanese
expansionism. Not until the outbreak of World War II in Europe and
the escalation of Japanese aggression did the U.S. response become
strong.
In 1940, Nazi Germany’s march into western Europe opened up
opportunities for Japan to consolidate its position in China and
penetrate Southeast Asia, thereby advancing the Japanese goal of
dominating a “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.” After
the fall of France, the Vichy government accepted in August 1940
Japanese demands that aid through French Indochina to the Chinese
resistance be cut off and that Japan be allowed to use air bases in
Indochina. In September, Japanese troops moved into northern
Indochina, and Japan joined the Axis. Meanwhile, with Britain
fighting for its life and the Netherlands under Nazi occupation,
Japan called on the British to close the Burma Road to supplies
bound for China and pressed the Dutch East Indies for economic and
political concessions. In July 1941, Japan occupied southern
Indochina, an obvious prelude to further expansion in Southeast
Asia, a rich source of rubber, tin, oil, quinine, lumber,
foodstuffs, and other vital raw materials.
Japanese prime minister Prince Konoe Fumimaro (1891-1945)
hoped the United States would accept Japan’s actions, but in
September 1940, President Roosevelt imposed an embargo on U.S.
exports of scrap iron and steel to Japan. In July 1941, he froze all
Japanese assets in the United States. This action virtually ended
U.S. -Japanese trade, depriving Japan of vital oil imports.
On September 6, 1941, an imperial conference met in Tokyo to
consider worsening relations with the United States. Emperor
Hirohito and Prime Minister Konoe favored a continuation of
negotiations in Washington, D.C. The war minister, General Tojo
Hideki (1884-1948), however, believed the United States was
determined to throttle Japan, that war was inevitable, and that it
would be preferable to begin the conflict sooner rather than later.
Tojo’s views had wide support within the Japanese military.
At the insistence of the war party, Konoe was given six weeks to
reach a settlement with the United States and was to insist on a set
of minimum demands: immediate cessation of economic sanctions, a
free hand for Japan in China, and rights for Japan in Indochina.
With no progress occurring in the negotiations, Konoe resigned on
October 16 and was replaced by Tojo, whose cabinet decided to wait
only until the end of November for a diplomatic breakthrough.
Talks between U.S. secretary of state Cordell Hull (1871-1955)
and Japanese emissaries remained stalled. U.S. cryptographers had
broken Japan’s major diplomatic code, and U.S. authorities knew that
rejection of the minimum demands would mean war. Even so, on
November 26, Hull formally reiterated the U.S. position. Japan, he
said, must withdraw from China and Indochina, recognize the Chiang
Kai-shek regime in China, renounce territorial expansion, and accept
the Open Door policy of equal commercial access to Asia. An imperial
conference on December 1 set the Japanese war machine in motion.
Pearl Harbor
The United States expected the first blow to be in the
Philippines or Southeast Asia. But Japan had made plans for a
devastating aerial strike against the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl
Harbor, in the Hawaiian Islands. In late November, a powerful
Japanese task force left the Kuril Islands; on December 2 it
received a coded message issuing the attack order. The undetected
Japanese force arrived off the Hawaiian Islands on the morning of
December 7. In two successive waves, more than 350 Japanese bombers,
torpedo planes, and fighters struck. Altogether, eighteen U.S. ships
were sunk or disabled. At one stroke, U.S. naval power in the
Pacific was crippled. Fortunately for the Americans, their aircraft
carriers were on missions elsewhere. The U.S. Navy and Marine Corps
lost 2,117 men, the Army lost 218, and 68 civilians were killed.
More than twelve hundred were wounded. About two hundred aircraft
were destroyed, most on the ground. The Japanese lost twenty-nine
planes.
The next day President Roosevelt told a joint session of Congress
that December 7 was “a date which will live in infamy.”
Congress voted to declare war on Japan. On December 11, Germany and
Italy declared war on the United States. The European war now merged
with the Pacific war into one global conflict.
After Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, Hitler declared war
on the United States. Hitler’s defeat at Stalingrad (now
Volgograd), in the Soviet Union, marked the turning point of the
war. The Allies drove the Nazis out of Africa, Italy, and the Soviet
Union. Germany became a battleground as the Allies closed in from
east and west.
U.S. War Effort
Following Pearl Harbor, the U.S. economy was placed immediately
on a war footing, and its industrial productivity plant played a
crucial role in the global conflict. All key industries were running
twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Within a year after
Pearl Harbor, U.S. war production equaled that of all Axis nations
together and by the beginning of 1943 greatly exceeded that of the
Axis powers. During the war, the United States manufactured 296,000
planes, 87,000 tanks, and 2.4 million trucks, as well as millions of
rifles and millions of tons of artillery shells. From January 1,
1942, the nation produced 28 million U.S. tons of shipping, enabling
the Allies to replace vessels lost to the enemy.
Turning of the
Tide
In 1942 and 1943, the German offensive in the USSR ended at
Stalingrad, and the Allies won the North African campaign, secured
the Atlantic for their shipping, and were winning the battle of the
skies. The days of German supremacy in the European theater were
over.
As Germany suffered military defeats, it also faced increasing
difficulties inside occupied Europe. At first, resistance to German
occupation occurred on a modest scale, in part because many believed
the Nazis to be invincible. But after the Battle of Britain and
later Axis setbacks, anti-Nazi activity in occupied countries
increased. Organized groups, aided by British and, later, American
intelligence, killed officials and soldiers, wrecked trains, blew up
ammunition dumps, sabotaged factories, provided useful information
to the Allies, and helped escaped prisoners of war as well as downed
Allied pilots. Many who were not active in the resistance helped
shelter and protect those who were. Having spread his forces over a
large area and treated many of the conquered peoples with
unprecedented cruelty, Hitler could not crush the resistance despite
the extremely harsh retaliatory measures taken by his
administrators.
Battle of the
Atlantic
Early in 1942, German U-boats were sinking more Allied shipping
than ever. From January to June, they destroyed three million U.S.
tons, much of this along the U.S. coast. Soon, however, the
productivity of the U.S. war economy began to neutralize the German
effort. In August 1942, the construction rate of new Allied ships at
last reached the level of Allied losses, and in December permanently
surpassed it. As more and longer-range planes were built, air
support was extended to all but the mid-Atlantic region. There,
escort carriers began providing air cover for convoys in March of
1943. New types of radar also facilitated the detection of enemy
ships. From the spring of 1943 the U-boats were, finally, held in
check.
Germany’s surface ships were hamstrung by the British blockade,
although in February 1942 the battleships Gneisenau and Scharnhorst
and the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen broke through it. The British
retaliated in March by sending commandos to destroy the locks at
Saint Nazaire, a French port at the mouth of the Loire and the only
Atlantic port suitable for the repair of Germany’s bigger ships.
Allied Strategic
Bombing
Aided by rapid production of aircraft in the United States, the
Allied forces began making major air raids on Germany in 1942. The
Royal Air Force attacked the cities of the Ruhr Valley, a major
center of German heavy industry, in crippling raids. In May 1942,
the first RAF thousand-bomber raid was directed against the
Rhineland city of Cologne, destroying much of the city. In the
summer of 1942, the U.S. Army Air Force joined in the operations
against Germany. U.S. B-17 Flying Fortresses and B-24 Liberators
concentrated on daylight precision bombing of industrial targets,
whereas the British struck at night. Most raids were still small and
of limited destructiveness, however. Although the German Luftwaffe
had played a major role in the early campaigns of the war, its
effectiveness declined precipitously after the Battle of Britain.
Not until after the Casablanca Conference of January 1943, when
Churchill and Roosevelt decided to place greater stress on strategic
bombing, did the Allies begin winning air superiority in Europe. The
Combined Bomber Offensive was launched, and the bombing became
better organized and more intensive. In the summer of 1943, for
example, three-quarters of Hamburg was destroyed in combined raids.
Round-the-clock bombing mounted steadily until all Germany was
subjected to massive air raids. As the effectiveness of the U.S.
fighter escorts increased, the Luftwaffe became less and less able
to counter the air attacks.
In 1942 and 1943, the Allies thwarted Japanese efforts to expand
farther southward and eastward and began their island-hopping
campaign toward Japan. In the summer of 1943, a disagreement arose
among Allied strategists on the method for opening the route to the
Japanese home islands. General Douglas MacArthur (1880-1969),
the Southwest Pacific commander, favored an approach along the New
Guinea-Philippines axis. But Admiral Chester Nimitz (1885-1966),
Central Pacific commander, believed it best to capture key Central
Pacific islands to win strategic air and naval bases that would be
used to cut Japan off from its empire.
The Combined Chiefs of Staff gave priority to Nimitz’s design,
but elements of both plans were to be employed. Nimitz’s forces
would island-hop through the Gilberts, Marshalls, Carolines, and
Marianas. MacArthur would capture northern New Guinea and islands
lying between New Guinea and Mindanao, the southernmost island of
the Philippines.
The Allies on the
Offensive
By 1944, after the Allied invasions of Sicily and Italy, the
Soviet advance in the east, and the establishment of a second front
with the Normandy landing, Germany was in full retreat.
Invasion of Sicily
Meeting in Washington in mid-May 1943 at the conference
code-named Trident, Roosevelt and Churchill confirmed the invasion
of Sicily, decided on a cross-Channel invasion of France for early
May 1944, and agreed to step up the airlift of supplies to China and
to go ahead with plans to retake Burma. To implement the first of
these goals, Operation Husky was put into action under the command
of Eisenhower’s deputy, British general Harold Alexander. First, the
little island of Pantelleria, Italy’s fortified base midway between
Tunisia and Sicily, was bombed into submission from sea and air. A
month later, on July 9 and 10, 1943, British and American forces
landed in Sicily in a combined action.
Although German and Italian troops in Sicily had expected the
invasion, the date and precise landing points were complete tactical
surprises. Italians surrendered in great numbers. The Germans,
however, began a spirited defense, and for a time the success of the
invasion was in doubt. After initial difficulties at Gela, the U.S.
Seventh Army swung across the center and west of the island and took
Palermo on July 22. The British Eighth Army, reinforced by
Canadians, plodded up the east coast against strong German
resistance and took Catania on August 5. Both armies moved on
Messina, which was taken August 17, 1943.
On July 25, 1943, Mussolini was overthrown in a surprise
development, and Marshal Pietro Badoglio assumed the post of head of
the government. Italians throughout the country demanded peace.
Suspecting (with good reason) that the Italians might defect,
the Germans seized all strategic centers on the Italian mainland and
awaited an Allied invasion of the peninsula.
Italian Campaign
Not until after the Sicilian invasion was the Allied decision
made to strike at the Italian mainland. On September 3, 1943,
British and U.S. forces moved across the Strait of Messina to the
toe of the Italian peninsula. A week later, the U.S. Fifth Army,
under General Mark W. Clark (1896-1984), landed on the
beaches of Salerno; within a month, southern Italy was under the
control of the Allies. Naples fell on October 1, 1943. Now, however,
German resistance stiffened, and the Allied campaign bogged down. By
the end of the year the Allied forces were still closer to Naples
than to Rome. About 130 kilometers (80 miles) south of Rome,
the Germans had set up a strong defensive line, the Gustav, or
Winter, Line.
At Algiers on the day of the invasion (September 3), the
Badoglio regime secretly signed an armistice with the Anglo-American
forces. The Italian capitulation was announced on September 8, and
on October 13 the Badoglio government declared war on Germany. In
the meantime, however, the Germans had rescued Mussolini from
imprisonment, and he was installed as the head of a puppet regime in
northern Italy.
Eastern Front
Meanwhile, on the eastern front, the Germans, after their loss of
the Battle of Stalingrad, were unable to mount a crushing offensive.
It was February 1943 and the Germans and their allies had lost
850,000 to death or capture since the beginning of the Soviet
invasion in the summer of 1941.
After several months of retrenchment, General Erich von Manstein
(1887-1973) launched a desperate summer counterattack against
the Soviets in the south. The situation had changed slightly in the
Germans’ favor since Stalingrad. They had shortened their lines,
while the Soviet troops were stretched over a massive front with a
bulge westward around Kursk. On July 5, 1943, the Germans, using
their new Tiger and Panther tanks, struck at this Soviet salient.
Hitler committed more than a thousand planes against the Red Army’s
enormous concentration of troops, artillery pieces, and tanks. The
encounter developed into one of the largest and most vicious armor
battles ever fought. More than three thousand tanks were engaged on
the grasslands. On July 12, 1943, the Soviets, favored by a
seemingly endless supply of troops and tanks, moved in fresh tank
divisions, and the advantage finally swung to the Russians.
Manstein, having lost seventy thousand men, half his tanks, and more
than a thousand planes, was forced to withdraw.
The Germans pulled back to strong defensive lines. As they
retreated, the Soviets launched a new offensive northward toward
Orel, which they captured on August 4, 1943. They also captured
Kharkov (August 23), Poltava (September 22), and
Smolensk (September 25). Kiev was liberated in early
November. Manstein’s forces were being severely reduced by the
steady Russian advance, but Hitler still refused to allow a massive
withdrawal, leaving his now-outnumbered troops to the grinding
Soviet military machine.
The Soviet advance halted temporarily as winter set in, but once
the roads and waterways were firmly frozen, an enormous Soviet
counteroffensive began along the entire eastern front. In
mid-January 1944, the 890-day siege of Leningrad was relieved after
Soviet troops reestablished land communications with the city. Since
September 1941, the people of Leningrad had withstood German
artillery and air bombardment. More than two hundred thousand of
them had been killed in the siege; a half million more died from
cold, starvation, and exhaustion, although for a time the city had
been tenuously supplied across frozen Lake Ladoga.
As the Red Army pressed westward, it took Riga and Vilna in the
north and was crossing into East Prussia by mid-July. In the center,
the Germans had withdrawn from Minsk by July. In the south, the
entire Crimea was in Soviet hands by May. By mid-July 1944, the
Soviets were deep into Poland and by the end of August had crossed
into the Balkans. As the Red Army approached the suburbs of Warsaw,
the resistance in the Polish capital led a revolt in August through
October against the German occupiers in an unsuccessful attempt to
gain control of the city before the Soviets arrived.
Collapse of Italy
In early 1944, the Allied armies in Italy were slowed down
because of difficult terrain and stubborn German resistance. On
January 22, 1944, in an attempt to catch the Germans in a pincer
movement, fifty thousand U.S. troops were landed at Anzio between
the German Gustav Line to the south and Rome 53 kilometers (33
miles) to the north. Unable to move forward immediately, the
troops settled on the beachhead. Under General Albert Kesselring (1885-1960),
eight German divisions moved to form a powerful perimeter around
Anzio. After repeated attacks, which included the destruction of the
old monastery at Monte Cassino, the Allies managed to break the
German lines. On June 4, 1944, Rome fell to the Allies. In the
ensuing months, the Germans retreated from one defensive line to
another as Allied troops pushed cautiously but irresistibly north
toward Tuscany. Not until early 1945 did the Allied forces reach the
heights overlooking the Po Valley. Mussolini was captured by
anti-fascist partisans near Lake Como on April 28, 1945. He and his
mistress were shot and their bodies were taken to Milan — the city
where fascism had first taken root — and displayed in the public
square.
Tehran Conference
During 1943, while the campaign in Italy was underway, Allied
leaders met in two significant conferences to plan a grand assault
on France and to map out other aspects of their strategy against the
Axis. At the first Quebec Conference, held in mid-August, Roosevelt
and Churchill confirmed the decision to establish a second front in
France and approved specific plans for a landing at Normandy, to
take place on May 1, 1944.
At the Tehran Conference, from November 28 to December 1, 1943,
Stalin met with Churchill and Roosevelt for the first time, and the
date for the invasion, code-named Operation Overlord, was confirmed.
Stalin agreed to launch a simultaneous attack on Germany’s eastern
front. At Tehran, Stalin was also assured that a second invasion of
France (from the Mediterranean), known as Operation Anvil,
would take place. He reaffirmed that the Soviets would join in the
fight against Japan after Germany was defeated but asserted that the
USSR wanted Sakhalin, the Kuril Islands, and a year-round Pacific
port on the mainland of Asia. The postwar restoration of Iran was
also discussed.
As they prepared for a cross-Channel assault on France, the
Western Allies built up on British soil one of the largest and most
powerful invasion forces in history. For two months before the
landing, while troops, equipment, and supplies poured into Britain,
the Allied air forces bombed railroads, bridges, airfields, and
fortifications in France and Belgium and continued their attacks on
German industrial centers.
Postponed by delays in gathering the necessary landing equipment
and by weather and tidal conditions, Operation Overlord, with
Eisenhower in command, began on June 6, 1944, afterward known as
D-Day. Throughout the preceding night, paratroopers were dropped
behind German coastal defenses to sever communications and seize key
defense posts. Hundreds of warships and innumerable small craft
supported the invasion.
Between 6:30 and 7:30 a.m., waves of Allied troops moved ashore
between Cherbourg and Le Havre in history’s largest amphibious
operation, involving approximately five thousand ships of all kinds.
About eleven thousand Allied aircraft operated over the invasion
area. More than 150,000 troops disembarked at Normandy on D-Day.
Because all major French ports in the north were mined and
fortified, the Allies improvised two artificial harbors, with
pontoons, breakwaters, and sunken ships. One of the harbors was
destroyed by a severe Atlantic gale, but the other worked perfectly.
Twenty pipelines below the Channel were used to bring in critical
supplies of gasoline for the tanks.
The Germans had anticipated an Allied invasion of western Europe
at about this time, but were surprised by its location. General Gerd
von Rundstedt (1875-1953), commander of German forces in the
West, had expected the Allies to take the shortest water route and
land at Pas de Calais. A British intelligence operation called
Ultra, having broken key German ciphers, learned of his
misapprehension. To capitalize on the situation, the Allies
stationed a phantom army in Kent that reinforced Rundstedt’s
mistaken opinion. It may also have influenced Hitler to decide
against sending reserve panzer divisions to Normandy, a decision
that greatly facilitated the landing and the establishment of
beachheads.
Yet, the Germans struck back vigorously. For more than a month,
they resisted while Allied forces were being built up on the crowded
beaches. The defenders were under a severe handicap, however,
because Hitler had been forced to send many of his troops from
France to the eastern front, where the Soviets were on the
offensive.
Campaigns in
France
To trap the Germans in a pincer movement, the Allies had decided
on a second landing in the south of France. On August 15, 1944, a
fleet of Allied warships appeared off the French Mediterranean coast
between Toulon and Cannes. Following a heavy bombardment, they
unloaded an army of U.S. and French troops. Speedily taking
Marseille and Nice, the Allies headed northward along the Rhone
River. German troops in western France were now threatened with
isolation.
The huge Allied force that had set ashore on the Normandy
coastline — more than a million men within three weeks of D-Day —
gradually extended its width but not its depth. Cherbourg was
captured on June 27, 1944, giving the Allies a major port for the
flow of men and supplies. On July 25, Allied troops broke through
the German lines between Caen and Saint Lo and then fanned out into
open country. The Germans counterattacked at Avranches but were
contained by U.S. troops. The heavily armored U.S. Third Army, led
by Lieutenant General George Patton (1885-1945), turned the
German left flank at Avranches, broke into Brittany, and then moved
northeast to the Seine, to outflank Paris on the south.
To avoid expected loss of life, Eisenhower intended to bypass
Paris. The French resistance fighters inside the city and French
troops in the liberation army, however, called for a quick and clean
capture of their capital. On August 19, Eisenhower changed his mind
on receiving word of an uprising in Paris. He sent the Free French
Second Armored Division, supported by U.S. troops, into the city.
Paris fell to the Allies on August 25 without great damage because
the German commandant disobeyed Hitler’s orders to “fight to the
last man” and to raze the city.
Western Offensive
Toward Germany
As the Allied commanders planned final strategy for the assault
on Germany, a disagreement arose among them. Montgomery urged a “big
thrust” of all concentrated Allied armor through Belgium to the
Ruhr, but Eisenhower, although he agreed to give initial priority to
such a drive, decided that the earlier plan of simultaneous advance
by all the separated armies should thereafter be resumed. In early
September, the British liberated Brussels, and U.S. troops crossed
the German frontier at Eupen. On October 21, the U.S. First Army
took Aachen — the first city within Germany’s prewar borders to fall
to the Allies. Meanwhile, the invasion forces from Normandy and
southern France joined near Dijon. The Allies now had a continuous
front from Belgium down to neutral Switzerland.
German resistance stiffened, however, in the last months of 1944.
In late September, a British airborne division was dropped behind
German lines across the Rhine near Arnhem in the Netherlands. The
operation incurred heavy casualties: of the ten thousand troops
landed, more than a thousand were killed and at least sixty-four
hundred were taken prisoner. The Allied offensive ground to a
temporary halt.
On December 16, 1944, General von Rundstedt launched a
counteroffensive, known as the Battle of the Bulge, which took the
Allies by surprise. With a quarter of a million men and a massive
panzer force, he hit the center of the Allied lines at the thinly
held Ardennes area. In eight days the Germans cut deeply into
Allied-held territory. Eisenhower ordered Patton and his Third Army
to turn north toward the fighting. In clearing weather, Allied air
power, which had been grounded at the start of the counterattack,
now hit hard at the Germans. In early January 1945, the German
thrust was contained. The last great German offensive in the West
had failed to terminate the Allied drive to the heartland of
Germany.
Air War
After the successful landings in Normandy, the Allied Combined
Bomber Command turned its full attention once again to targets
inside Germany. By the end of 1944, it had seriously curbed German
oil production. The Luftwaffe, with diminishing resources and
pilots, tried to strike back. In late December, eight hundred German
aircraft attacked Allied-held airfields in northern Europe, taking a
toll of a hundred aircraft. The Allies, however, were able to
replace their losses immediately; the Germans were down to their
last reserves.
Many Germans continued to hope that Hitler would unveil at the
proper time some secret weapon of shattering power that would turn
the tide of battle in Germany’s favor. In 1944, two deadly
Vergeltungswaffen (vengeance weapons) were ready for use
against the Allies. On June 13, 1944, just seven days after D-Day,
Hitler ordered the release of the first V-1s, or “buzz bombs,”
from bases along the French coast in the Pas de Calais sector. They
were aimed at London in an effort to terrorize the civilian
population. The robot bombs whined across the English Channel on a
predetermined course. RAF pilots became adept at shooting them down.
Altogether, about half of the V-1s sent off to London from northern
France and Belgium reached the city; the bombs killed nearly six
thousand Londoners, injured forty thousand others, and destroyed
more than seventy-five thousand homes.
The heavier and more deadly supersonic V-2 rocket was put into
action on September 8, 1944. From bases in the Low Countries, the
V-2 hurtled toward London. With its 1-ton warhead, the V-2 buried
itself into the ground and exploded violently. Of the more than one
thousand V-2s rained on England, about five hundred hit London; they
caused nearly ten thousand casualties. Although the “vengeance
weapons” were deadly and caused much loss of life and property
damage, they came too late to influence the course of the war.
Germany Collapses
During the first four months of 1945, a two-front trap closed in
on Germany, forcing its surrender in early May. Meanwhile, the
Allied leaders met to deal with the Far Eastern theater, to cope
with problems concerning the liberated states of eastern Europe, and
to establish terms under which postwar Germany would be occupied.
Soviet Advance to
the Oder
With the Germans in the midst of their western counteroffensive,
the Soviets, on January 12, 1945, initiated a tremendous assault on
the German lines in the east. Within five days they took what
remained of Warsaw and two days later captured Krakow. In the north,
Soviet troops swept across East Prussia and took Gdansk (Danzig).
By February, the Soviets cut off the crucial coal-producing region
of Upper Silesia and crossed the Oder River near Breslau (Wroclaw).
As the Soviets moved through Poland, they came upon the notorious
Auschwitz extermination camp, where as many as two million Jews,
gypsies, Poles, Russians, and members of other groups that the Nazi
leaders deemed as “undesirables” had died in the crematoria.
Yalta Conference
From February 4 to February 11, 1945, Roosevelt, Churchill, and
Stalin met at the Yalta Conference held in the Crimea. In eastern
Europe, then being occupied by the Soviets, Stalin promised to
establish provisional governments that would include all democratic
elements and to hold free elections as soon as possible. The USSR,
it was agreed, would receive eastern Poland, with Poland to be
compensated at Germany’s expense. Germany was to be divided into
four zones of occupation, to be administered by the three major
Allies and France.
In exchange for its declaration of war against Japan within three
months of Germany’s surrender, the USSR was to receive the southern
half of Sakhalin Island, the Kuril Islands, and special rights in
the Manchurian ports of Dairen (Ta-lien) and Port Arthur (Lu-shun).
Later criticized as excessively generous to the Soviets, these
concessions were made at a time when the Far Eastern conflict was
expected to continue many months after Germany’s defeat.
Battle for Germany
In February 1945, Patton’s fast-moving tanks cleared the entire
west bank of the Rhine. The Americans captured intact a key bridge
at Remagen near Cologne on March 7. Allied troops began to pour over
it in strength and were soon crossing the Rhine at other points.
With Montgomery poised in the north and Patton in the south, the
Allies were now in a position to drive into Germany and head
straight for Berlin.
Eisenhower, however, intent on pursuing the enemy and not aware
of the political significance of Berlin, decided to head for Leipzig
and then to concentrate his power on the supposed “national
redoubt” in the south, where he expected Hitler to make a last
stand. Thus, although U.S. forces reached the Elbe on April 12,
1945, and were only about 96 kilometers (60 miles) from
Berlin, Eisenhower informed Stalin that he was leaving the city to
the Soviets. Systematic bombing by Soviet artillery and Allied air
power operating from England reduced the German capital to ruins.
The Luftwaffe, with its corps of pilots depleted, airfields
destroyed, and fuel supply nonexistent, could not protect the city.
On April 16, 1945, the final attack was launched on Berlin. By
the end of the month, the Soviets had penetrated to the center of
the city. German soldiers and civilians, fearful of revenge expected
from the Soviets, hastened to surrender to the Americans and the
British in the belief that they would receive better treatment from
the Western Allies. On April 25, 1945, Soviet troops, who now
encircled Berlin, met the Americans at Torgau on the Elbe.
German Surrender
While the Soviets were making their final drive on Berlin, Allied
troops liberated one concentration camp after another. In April they
reached Buchenwald as well as Belsen — where they found forty
thousand inmates barely alive and ten thousand unburied corpses —and
Dachau, one of the worst extermination centers. A shock of amazement
ran through the entire world at the extent of Hitler’s “Final
Solution,” unprecedented in the entire history of civilization.
Allied armies occupied all of Germany. They found it a wasteland.
Allied bombers had almost pulverized the large cities. Thousands of
civilians had died in air raids. Some 3,250,000 German soldiers had
been killed. The war left Germany shrunken in size. In early 1939,
it had been a country of 183,000 square miles (474,000 square
kilometers) with a population of about 60,000,000. In 1945 it
was reduced to 144,000 square miles (373,000 square kilometers)
and was also reduced by several million inhabitants. The Soviets
annexed northern East Prussia. Poland administered southern East
Prussia, Pomerania, and Silesia, and Germany’s eastern border was
pushed back to the Oder and Neisse rivers.
Hitler committed suicide in his Berlin bunker on April 30. On May
7, 1945, representatives of Germany’s armed forces capitulated to
the Allies at Eisenhower’s headquarters in Reims. The formal
unconditional surrender came the next day in Berlin. Hitler’s Third
Reich had come to an end.
Potsdam Conference
The last wartime Allied conference was held at Potsdam, Germany,
from July 17 to August 2, 1945. Attending were Churchill, replaced
by Clement Attlee during the conference; Harry S. Truman, successor
to Roosevelt, who had died in April; and Stalin. They confirmed the
Yalta plan for the division of Germany into four zones of
occupation, and reached agreement on plans for the de-Nazification,
demilitarization, and democratization of Germany. Those Nazis and
Nazi supporters guilty of war crimes or atrocities were to be tried.
The conferees also called for the unconditional surrender of Japan.
Truman informed Stalin that the United States had tested an atomic
bomb that could be used against Japan.
Differences among the Allies also appeared at Potsdam. Britain
and the United States refused to accept the pro-Soviet provisional
government in Poland because they did not consider it to be
democratically based. They called for free elections in Romania,
Bulgaria, and Hungary, whereas Stalin demanded that the Western
Allies recognize the puppet regimes established by the Soviets in
those nations. Disagreements also arose over German reparations and
other matters.
Defeat of Japan
In 1944 and 1945, the Allies completed the Central Pacific
campaign, took the Philippines, bombed Japan, and penetrated the
Japanese home islands. By the summer of 1945, Allied victory was
only a matter of time; it was hastened when the United States
perfected the atomic bomb and dropped two of the devices on Japan.
By early 1945, Japan was on the verge of collapse. About 1.5
million Japanese troops remained in the home islands, with another 3
million in the Pacific or in China and Manchuria; the Japanese air
fleet, however, had been severely mauled. The navy had lost 11
battleships, 19 aircraft carriers, 34 cruisers, nearly 150
submarines, and many other combat craft. The merchant fleet had been
drastically reduced.
With one naval and air defeat after another, supply lines
extended for impossible distances, and raw materials cut off, Japan
could not hold out much longer. In a new development, American
fliers operating from the Marianas began in November 1944 the
strategic bombing of Japanese airfields, industrial targets, and
naval installations. The bombing intensified in 1945 as the Allies
captured air bases in the home islands.
Iwo Jima and
Okinawa
A tiny island of volcanic ash, Iwo Jima, was one of the most
strategic locations in the Western Pacific. Only 1,200 kilometers (750
miles) from Tokyo, it would be for the Americans an invaluable
refueling base or emergency landing field for heavy bombers going to
or returning from Japan. They reached the peak of Mount Suribachi on
February 23 and secured the island by mid-March. The Japanese lost
twenty-one thousand to death; only two hundred were taken prisoner.
The next objective was Okinawa, the main island of the southern
Ryuku Archipelago. Allied strategists were attracted by its
airfields within about 560 kilometers (350 miles) of Japanese
cities. In the Pacific theater’s largest amphibious operation, the
first of the 172,000 troops of the U.S. Tenth Army began moving
ashore on April 1. Within three weeks, they held four-fifths of the
island, but organized Japanese resistance continued until June 17.
The door to Japan was now open, with U.S. casualties totaling
twelve thousand dead or missing. The Japanese lost one hundred
thousand; many committing suicide to avoid capture. In the Japanese
code of warfare, defeat was unthinkable and shameful. Nonetheless,
Japan faced imminent subjugation. Desperately seeking to turn the
tide of battle, Japan began to employ suicide as an official weapon.
Young pilots were asked to join the Kamikaze Corps, whose members
were to crash their bomb-laden planes into Allied ships. Volunteers
were plentiful.
The kamikaze pilots began operating at Leyte Gulf in October
1944. At Okinawa, they made fifteen hundred individual attacks.
Altogether, they sank 34 naval craft, none larger than a destroyer,
and damaged 358 others. Despite the fury of their assaults, they did
not affect the outcome of the war.
Hiroshima and
Nagasaki
By the end of July 1945, almost half of Tokyo had been destroyed,
and scores of Japanese cities had been leveled by strategic bombing.
Preparations were being made for an Allied invasion. On July 16,
however, the work of the U.S. Manhattan Project came to fruition
when an atomic bomb was successfully tested at Alamogordo, New
Mexico. President Truman decided in favor of using the weapon to end
the war quickly unless Japan surrendered. From Potsdam on July 26,
Truman, Churchill, and Chiang Kai-shek issued an ultimatum demanding
the unconditional surrender of Japan. It did not mention the bomb.
Japan decided to continue the war.
On August 6, 1945, an atomic bomb with an explosive force greater
than 20,000 U.S. tons of TNT was dropped on the Japanese city of
Hiroshima, with a population of about three hundred thousand. At
least seventy-eight thousand people were killed outright, ten
thousand were never found, and more than seventy thousand were
injured. Almost two-thirds of the city was destroyed. On August 9,
the day after the USSR declared war on Japan, an atomic bomb was
dropped on Nagasaki, with a population of 250,000. About forty
thousand people were killed, and about the same number were injured.
Surrender
On August 10, Japan sued for peace on the condition that the
emperor’s position as sovereign ruler be maintained. The next day,
the Allies stated that the future status of the emperor must be
determined by them. At the behest of the emperor, an imperial
conference on August 14 accepted the Allied terms. The next day,
U.S. forces were ordered to cease fire. On September 2, 1945,
Japanese representatives signed the formal document of surrender on
the deck of the U.S. battleship Missouri, anchored in Tokyo Bay.
Crimes of War: The
Holocaust
The first concentration camps were established in 1933 for
confinement of opponents of the Nazi Party. The supposed opposition
soon included all Jews, Gypsies, and certain other groups. By 1939,
there were six camps: Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, Mauthausen,
Flossenburg, and Ravensbruck. The outbreak of war caused a great
demand for labor, and other camps were added. The most notorious was
Auschwitz in conquered Poland. Inmates were required to work for
their wages in food. So little food was given, however, that many
starved. Others died of exposure or overwork. The dead bodies were
burned in huge crematoriums in or near the camps.
The most horrible extension of the concentration camp system was
the establishment of extermination centers after 1940. They were set
up primarily to kill Jews. It is believed that from eighteen to
twenty-six million people were killed in them, including six million
Jews and four hundred thousand Gypsies. Prisoners in these camps
were also used for barbaric medical experiments. This slaughter is
known as the Holocaust.
Holocaust, an Old Testament sacrificial term, is used by
historians to describe the massacre of six million Jews by the
German Nazi regime during World War II. Hitler gave top priority to
removing the Jews from Germany. Between 1933 and 1938, the Nazis
boycotted Jewish businesses, established quotas in Germany’s
professions and schools, forbade intermarriage between Jews and
Gentiles, and instituted the first concentration camps at
Oranienburg, Buchenwald, and Dachau. During the next three years,
Jews represented more than half of those exterminated as
undesirables in concentration camps. Methods of killing at Auschwitz
and other camps included cyanide gas or carbon monoxide gas,
electrocution, phenol injections, flamethrowers, and hand grenades —
all of this while the rest of the world looked on.
The Nazis used the assassination of Ernst vom Rath, a German
legation secretary in Paris, as an excuse for Kristallnacht (the
night of broken glass). One night in November 1938, storm
troopers burned 267 synagogues and arrested 20,000 people. Germany’s
Jews were also required to pay a fine of four hundred million
dollars for damage to their own property.
Lacking weapons, weakened by disease and starvation, and isolated
from the Allies (who were apparently apathetic about their fate),
Jews nevertheless fiercely resisted the Nazis throughout the war.
Perhaps as many as sixty thousand joined the partisan units that
operated from North Africa to Belorussia. Ghetto uprisings occurred
in Krakow, Bialystok, Vilna, Kaunas, Minsk, and Slutsk, as well as
in Warsaw from April to May 1943. Jewish inmates destroyed Sobibor
and Treblinka and led rebellions in fifteen other concentration
camps. Despite these efforts, when World War II ended, two-thirds of
Europe’s Jews had been murdered, more than had been slain in pogroms
during the previous eighteen hundred years. The foundations of
Western theology have been shaken by these horrors; a vast
literature has developed that attempts to reconcile God,
civilization, and the gas chambers of Auschwitz.
Anti-Semitic extremists have sought to propagate the notion that
the Holocaust is a myth, and many people show a surprising ignorance
about it.
The Costs of the
War
No one will ever know what the war cost in the number of people
killed, crippled, and wounded. Many nations could not accurately
count their losses. The military forces of the Allies and the Axis
reported a total of about 14.5 million killed. The civilian
population suffered even more than the military through air
bombings, starvation, epidemics, and deliberate massacre. Estimated
civilian deaths amounted to almost thirteen million, which did not
include those in China and other parts of eastern Asia. Total
military costs were more than a trillion dollars; property damage
was estimated at almost that much. The war at sea cost 4,770
merchant vessels, with a gross tonnage of more than twenty-one
million. This amounted to twenty-seven percent of all the ships in
existence at the start of the war.
In addition, war spending did not stop when the fighting ended.
Care of the crippled, pensions, and other expenses continued. In the
United States, money spent for United Nations relief, occupation of
foreign countries, and veterans benefits raised the total cost by
another thirty billion dollars.
Churchill and
Hitler
There are two dominant personalities involved in this world
catastrophe: Sir Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler. Both were
politicians and both had knowledge; however, neither of these
protagonists possessed wisdom, but rather a level of egoism and lust
for destruction in the extreme. One would destroy tens of millions
and the British Empire; the other millions more and the German
Empire.
Churchill and Hitler each masked a dark sinister side beneath his
public persona. As this modern tragedy played out, these dark and
sinister personalities began to manifest. Of course, it must be
remembered that, like the first world war, World War II was
proclaimed a “just” war. However, like all wars preceding it,
World War II was nothing more than an act of lunacy perpetrated and
foisted on humanity by dysfunctional individuals who sought fame and
immortality through their misguided actions. As usual, the victims
were the innocent participants, whether directly as military
personnel or as civilians.
As we review this war, it becomes obvious that the published
reasons for its existence were skewed, masking and camouflaging the
underlying motives. These stemmed from almost a half century of the
triune sophistries of the secular revolt, materialism, and atheistic
science. These human inventions, involving philosophy, politics,
social, and physical sciences, would mutate into a worldwide mindset
that would readily accept the thinking of the major leaders in this
war — men such as Churchill, Hitler, Stalin, Roosevelt, Mussolini,
and Hirohito. These men reacted in their own way to the triune
sophistries shaping the national patriotism to suit their particular
agendas. Each harbored egocentric and self-aggrandized plans, not
only for his place in history, but also for his nation’s dominance
over the world’s landscape. This mindset, having found a populist
place globally, would continue to manifest all the way through to
the end of the twentieth century.
Let us take a look at two of these men of war to assess who they
were and why they were as they appeared at this defining moment on
the temporal stage of action.
Sir Winston
Churchill
Winston Churchill will always be remembered as the “First
Citizen of western Civilization, Defender of the Faith.” Or so
said Henry R. Luce in 1946, publisher of the magazines Time, Life,
and Fortune.
After a decade of meticulous research, noted historian David
Irving presents a shockingly different picture of the great man. In
all of the historical works on Churchill, it was found that David
Irving’s Churchill’s War provided the most accurate and revealing
story of a flawed, complex world leader who was more saboteur than
savior. We shall draw heavily on his research to expose this
politician as the master exploiter of “idiots” — the masses.
In the introduction to Churchill’s War, David Irving
paints the real picture of the postwar Churchill, flush with
victory:
It was March 14, 1946: the uneasy interlude after the end of
World War II had ended, and everybody could sense it. Luce’s
fellow editors and executives scrutinized the famous Englishman,
as if taken aback to find him so small, in the way that movie
fans are startled to find that their idols are less than the
twenty-foot giants of the silver screen. In the words of a lucid
and penetrating memorandum that Charles Murphy wrote for Luce’s
private files, there was just a dress-shirted cave where the
chest should have been, and a swelling paunch that bore
testimony to years of rich fare.
Behind them was a brooding sculpture of a bald eagle, carved
in clear ice some hours earlier by the Union Club chiefs. The
wings of this symbol of American might were outstretched: its
eyes glittered, and every crevice was heaped with black caviar.
The club’s heating had been turned up, and rivers of iced water
dribbled down its chest. Churchill leered. “The eagle,”
he announced, “seems to have caught a cold.”
He was hypnotized less by the sculptor’s art than by the
caviar. He waved aside the genteel slices of toast an editor
handed him, explained, “This stuff needs no reinforcement,”
and put words into action by shoveling a whopping helping onto a
plate, and from there, with scarcely a perceptible interruption,
straight and undiluted to his mouth — seemingly unabashed at the
appreciative belches that shortly emerged from that orifice. “I
hope, Gentlemen,” he apologized with little evidence of true
contrition, “I hope you don’t find me too explosive an
animal.”
Luce misinterpreted the remark. “On the contrary, sir,”
he said, “you were only putting into words what was gravely
in the minds of many Americans.”
The remainder of the evening, or so Charles Murphy’s memorandum
goes, saw the obese animal that had become Churchill quaffing down
copious amounts of liquor and rich food, until finally:
At one point that evening, Churchill just settled back and
let his thoughts ramble — over Eisenhower, whom he always called
“Ike,” over that vanishing breed, horses; over Drew
Pearson and American journalism. Then he eagerly described a new
American gadget, the Dictaphone: “Think of being able to talk
for twenty minutes into a little green disk that only costs a
dime,” he said. “But that is not the end of the marvelous
accomplishments of this machine. If you wish to ponder what you
have said, it is only necessary to flick a switch and it will
play your words right back.”
The journalists present that evening would probably never
forget their encounter with Winston Churchill. With fire in his
eyes, he talked wistfully of the panoply of battle, and he said
challengingly: “War is the greatest of all stimulants.”
Henry Luce proposed a toast in words which everybody felt
exactly right: “We are accustomed,” announced Luce, “to
drink toasts to people. I propose a toast to Civilization. But
Civilization is embodied in people. So, to Winston Churchill,
the First Citizen of Western Civilization, Defender of the
Faith.”
They were sorry to see him leave. Churchill pulled himself to
his feet, politely repeated the name of each person as he shook
hands with him, and peered intently into that man’s face as
though fixing it hard upon his memory. He was no longer Prime
Minister but in opposition. A spent force? “The fire has
unmistakably burned low,” wrote one observer.
If there was one passage that fixed itself on their minds, it
was when Churchill warmed to the theme of Fulton and the furor
that his “Iron Curtain” speech has caused. He dismissed
the Soviet reaction as ill tempered, crude, and a typically
Communist trick. In fact — and his cheeks positively glowed as
he said it — Stalin had used almost the same terms to attack him
as had Hitler in his time. “War Monger, inciter of wars,
imperialist, reactionary has-been-why, it is beginning to sound
like old times,” scoffed Churchill.
We see a glimpse here of the real Churchill, bloated and scoffing
at the aphrodisiac of war and the remembrance of past battles
irrespective of lives lost whether innocent or not; Churchill, the
consummate politician having made decisions to send men and women to
do battle and yet not once showing any remorse or personal feeling
about doing so. The real Winston Churchill was a power-hungry
politician who deliberately prolonged the war to advance his own
career. He was a coward who goaded Hitler into bombing London then
fled to safety during the Blitz. He was a serious alcoholic who
hired an actor to deliver his greatest speech because he was too
drunk to broadcast it himself.
The real Churchill lived for the moment of power and the lustful
life. As Hitler was to become the terror of civilization, so
Churchill would respond in equally terrifying ways. Here are a few
more examples from Irving’s Churchill’s War:
I fear that if we entered upon this pass we should soon find
that it led to Mussolini being a mediator between us and
Germany, and to an Armistice and conference under the conditions
of our being at Hitler’s mercy. Such a conference would only end
in weakening fatally our power to resist the terrible terms
which will almost certainly be imposed, if not upon France, at
any rate upon Britain.
We do not feel unable to continue the struggle and our people
would never allow us to quit until we have fought our fight.
They are an unbeaten people and will never allow us to
surrender. They know well that for us once under the Nazi
domination there can be no mercy.
Thus we do not see any way but to fight on, and we have good
hopes of holding out until some deep change occurs in Germany or
Europe … (Irving, page 295)
Political oblivion moving ever closer, Churchill whistled up
the familiar demons to prove Britain had no choice: “If,”
he argued, “Herr Hitler was prepared to make peace on the
[basis of] restoration of the German colonies and the over
lordship of Central Europe, that was one thing. But it was quite
unlikely that he would make any such offer” (Irving, page
299).
Churchill spoke scathingly of the French —“hypnotized by
the Maginot Line,” he called them. He blamed the B.E.F.’s
retreat on the French failure to push northwards from the Somme.
“How many would get away we could not tell …. Calais had
been defended by a British force which had refused to surrender,
and it was said that there were no survivors.”
Dunkirk, he continued, motioning with his cigar, was under a
pall of black smoke. “On two occasions great flights of
German bombers turned away and declined battle when they saw our
fighter patrols.” It would be said, “and with some truth,”
that this was the greatest British defeat for centuries.
“Attempts to invade us would no doubt be made, but they
would be beset with immense difficulty. We should mine all round
the coast; our Navy was immensely strong …our supplies of food,
oil, etc., were ample; we had good troops in this island, others
were on the way by sea, both British Army units coming from
remote garrisons and excellent Dominion troops.”
His main purpose was to discourage thoughts of peace:
“It was idle to think that if we tried to make peace now,
we should get better terms from Germany than if we went on and
fought it out. The Germans would demand our fleet — that would
be called ‘disarmament’ — our naval bases, and much else.
We should become a puppet state, though a British Government
which would be Hitler’s puppet would be set up — ‘under
Mosley or some such person’ … Therefore …we shall go on and
we shall fight it out, here or elsewhere. And if at last the
long story is to end … let it end only when each one of us lies
choking in his own blood upon the field.” (Irving,
page301)
When, in mid-August 1940, Chamberlain was growing weaker because
of cancer, Winston’s attitude toward him was contemptuous:
… that rather distant and sympathetic manner that the United
States was manifesting towards Britain. Behind the sympathy was
a lingering contempt. “History will deal severely with
Chamberlain,” he would rasp, toward the end of the current
war, and add, after a well timed pause, “I know — because I
shall write it,” (Irving, page 401)
Readers may be alarmed at some elements in these pages. Few of
the visiting statesmen failed to comment in their private papers on
Churchill’s consumption of alcohol, occasionally coupling their
remarks with the puzzled observation that even the hardest liquor
appeared to leave him unimpaired. In official American publications,
documents have been doctored to omit such passages. Irving’s book
also shows evidence that, on occasions, Churchill’s temporary
incapacitation resulted in political or military decisions that
damaged British prestige, and even caused casualties among the
soldiers and sailors concerned. He was his happiest at war, and said
so. He was rarely a creator, always a destroyer — of cities, of
monuments and works of art, of populations, of frontiers, of
monarchies, and finally his own country’s empire.
During the years leading up to the war and the political struggle
between Churchill and Chamberlain, we see the real Churchill emerge.
Churchill was a consummate politician who connived and stretched the
truth to obtain his way. According to Irving:
At the Admiralty, the Officers were aghast at the distinct
possibility that Churchill would profit from Chamberlain’s
humiliation. The danger to my mind [wrote the acting Director of
Operations that night] is that out of it will come a Government
headed by that arch-idiot Winston. I’m quite certain he’s played
the whole of his last 8 months to become P.M., often at the
expense of helping to win the war as witness the way he never
backed us against the Air.
There are too many examples in Churchill’s war to mention, which
propose that this man of destiny had an agenda based on
self-interest and a breakneck speed to get his way. This, of course,
is the hallmark of the egocentric, of which Churchill was perhaps
this century’s champion.
As Hitler was a psychopath, so Churchill was the consummate
manipulator, hell-bent on creating history no matter the cost,
whether they be lives or empires. To prolong the war and immortalize
himself in history, he deliberately fastened the British Empire into
debt with the United States, dressing it up as the Lend Lease.
In addition to Hitler and Churchill, we have a the third player
in this disaster: Franklin D. Roosevelt. Roosevelt was the
consummate gambler, playing his cards very close to his chest, never
letting the right hand know what the left hand was doing. “I
would rather,” said Roosevelt in 1942, “lose New Zealand,
Australia, or anything else rather than have the Russians collapse.”
He also said England was “an old tired power and must take second
place to the younger United States, Russia, and China.” Later,
this sly statesman conceded, “When there are four people sitting
in a poker game and three of them are against the fourth, it is a
little hard on the fourth.”
France’s humiliating defeat and Britain’s threatening bankruptcy
gave Roosevelt an opportunity to clean up these old empires. At
Teheran in 1943, he confided to Stalin, “I want to do away with
the Third Reich.” He added, “In any language.” Stalin
liked that. Roosevelt’s policy was to pay out just enough to give
the empire support — the kind of support a rope gives a hanging man.
When his treasury secretary confirmed, after visiting London in
1944, that Britain was penniless, the cynical man in the Oval Office
snickered: “I had no idea,” he said. “I will go over there
and make a couple of talks and take over the British Empire.”
This inspired American statesman would pursue his subversion of
the Empire throughout the war. He might lead the crusade for
democracy, but he expected the front-line nations to foot the bill.
During the Munich crisis, he had predicted to his cabinet that the
United States would be enriched by any resulting war. Sure enough,
gold from the beleaguered nations had begun to flow in payment for
American war materials. The 1939 revision of neutrality legislation,
which legalized this sale of war goods to belligerents, and the
Johnson Debt-Default Act required that such purchases be for cash.
So the great bloodletting began. Britain donated £2,078 million in
aid to its own minor allies during the war years, but the United
States extorted from Britain every movable asset in return for
acting as an arsenal of democracy. During the war, Britain would
sell off £1,118 million of foreign investments; in addition, its
foreign debt would increase £2,595 million from 1938 to 1945.
Formerly the world’s major creditor, Britain became an international
pauper and even forty years later had not permanently recovered.
The turning point came when the United States Congress enacted
Lend Lease. On that day, Britain was saved from an ignominious
defeat at the hands of the arch-enemy Hitler and the Third Reich —
but at what price? Churchill, in vanity and ineptitude, had
destroyed the empire and its assets. So as we see this savage and
brutal conflict play out between the old empires of Germany, France,
and Britain (Russia having succumbed to the Bolsheviks), the
new empire of the United States — with a history of self-interests
and socialization under Roosevelt — was to become the champion.
Materialism was in full swing at this point of the twentieth
century. Leadership was at an all-time low on all fronts, with greed
and power lust fueling the veins of the protagonists as they
sacrificed everything in their quest for dominance. This was no “just”
war; it was no different from any other war prior or since. It was
merely about greed and power.
Eventually, with the well-designed and well-executed official
entry of the United States into the war after the bombing of Pearl
Harbor, the war in Europe meandered toward its final conclusion. One
of its protagonists, Adolf Hitler, commited suicide. Although
Churchill secured his place in history and Roosevelt attained his
greedy ambitions, the war in the Pacific was relatively short,
although savage and blood-thirsty, as the animal-minded Nippon
forces cut a swathe through the Pacific. Their end came with the
godless yet fully “justified” acts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
By war’s end, knowledge was in full cry and wisdom long forgotten.
Adolf Hitler
As we explore the warped and obviously insane mind of Adolf
Hitler, we will use references from Robert G. L. Waite’s The
Psychopathic God, Adolf Hitler. According to H. Stuart Hughes,
of all the works authored on Adolf Hitler since 1945, Waite’s is “a
triumph — a wonderful mixture of psychological perception and good
sense. Even though a thousand books are written on Hitler, this will
long remain the best.” In reviewing this definitive
psychological portrait of Adolf Hitler, which documents accounts of
his behavior, beliefs, tastes, fears, and compulsions, many new
revelations emerge explaining not only how his insanity manifested
but why. Waite sheds new light on this complex figure. It is
recommended to any serious student of history.
The young Adolf suffered from many mental disorders that emanated
from an abnormal relationship with his parents. He idolized his
mother and lived in fear and hate of his father:
Like many fathers of his place and time, Alois Hitler
believed in corporal punishment. Bridget Hitler, the wife of
Alois Jr., testified that her husband had often told her about
his childhood and described his father as a person with “a
very violent temper.” He “often beat the dog until it …
wet on the floor. He often beat the children, and on occasion …
would beat his wife Klara.” Other people who knew Alois
Hitler have said that his children never dared to speak in their
father’s presence without being told to. They were not permitted
to use the familiar “du,” but were told to address him as
“Herr Vater.” He was accustomed to calling his son Adolf
not by name but by putting two fingers in his mouth and
whistling for him as he did for his dog. (Waite, page 134)
The adolescent Adolf developed a decidedly abnormal and
dysfunctional personality. His twisted and paranoid mind of terror
was prone to all manner of fetishes and symbolical responses to
everyday life.
During his adolescence, he suffered an identity crisis. A painful
process of “finding” himself followed:
During the identity crisis a person may adopt a “negative
identity” as a means of attacking a hated father … when a
son takes on an identity radically different from one his father
intended for him — and this is certainly what Adolf did — he is
showing a “paranoid form, a powerful death wish (latent
in all severe identity crises) against [his] parents.”
(Waite, page 185)
In Hitler’s case, this was accompanied by an extreme need for
some type ideology:
… a total commitment that will answer all the vague but “urgent
questions which arise in consequence of identity or conflict.”
Hitler found his faith in anti-Semitism and racial nationalism …
It became the ground of his being and the core of his political
philosophy. It allowed him … to destroy and to create. It
required that he destroy the “Jewish peril” and create a
radically pure Motherland.
Anti-Semitism was deeply satisfying to Hitler for
psychological as well as historical or philosophical reasons. He
embraced anti-Semitism at a highly vulnerable point in his life.
Even before his mother died [of breast cancer while under the
treatment of a Jewish physician], Adolf had experienced one
of the most shattering events of his life: he was rejected by
the Viennese Academy of Fine Arts, apparently smashing his
cherished ambition to become an artist. (Waite, pages 186-187)
Questions about his own genealogy made him extremely uneasy. When
he was once threatened with blackmail by a relative who claimed to
have special information that Adolf had a Jewish grandfather, he
ordered his lawyer to investigate. His lawyer discovered Adolf’s
father was the illegitimate son of a domestic who worked in a Jewish
home. Adolf became obsessed with worry about the possibility that he
was Jewish.
The two physical characteristics he associated with Jews — body
odors and large noses — were two things that bothered him about
himself. Hitler’s obsessive concern with personal cleanliness and
his abhorrence of perfume and after shave lotion was so great, one
suspects, because he was afraid that either the smell of body odor
or the use of perfume to cover it up might make people think he was
a Jew. When one of his colleagues asked why Jews “always remain
strangers in the nation,” Hitler had his ready answer: “The
Jews [have] a different smell.” (Waite, page 131)
He was the doe-eyed, sympathetic figure who could instantly
change into a terrorizing despot. His response to the arts was that
they demanded fanaticism. According to Christa Schroeder, one of his
secretaries, “His library contained no classics or any single
book of humane or intellectual value.” Hitler himself said, “I
read to confirm my ideas.”
Since Hitler saw himself as a Messiah with a divine mission to
save Germany from the incarnate evil of “International Jewry,”
it is not surprising that he likened himself to Jesus. On one
occasion during the 1920’s, as he lashed about him with the whip he
habitually carried, he said that, “In driving out the Jews, I
remind myself of Jesus in the Temple.” At another time, “Just
like Christ, I have a duty to my own people…” (Waite)
At a Christmas celebration in 1926, Hitler thought it appropriate
to compare his own historical importance favorably with that of
Jesus. Christ had changed the dating of history and so would Hitler.
It was his intention to “complete” what was begun by Christ.
He would mark the beginning of a new age in the history of the world
with his final “victory” over the Jews. In a speech on
February 10, 1933, he parodied the Lord’s Prayer in promising that
under him a new kingdom would come on earth and that his would be “the
power and the glory, Amen.” He added that if he did not fulfill
his mission, he should be crucified.
In reminiscing about the institutions and ideas that had
influenced him, Hitler said he had learned a great deal from Marxist
terrorism, from the protocols of the Elders of Zion, and from the
Freemasons. But, he concluded, “Above all, I have learnt from the
Jesuit Order.” Certainly, the oath of direct obedience to the
Fuehrer was strikingly reminiscent of the special oath that the
Jesuits swear to the Pope. Moreover, Hitler spoke of his elite SS,
who wore the sacred symbol and dressed in black, as his “society
of Jesus.”
In this self-deluded messianic state of mind, Hitler projected a
vision of human history that was one of religious mythology and
mysticism. He believed a pure German people had lived in an early
Garden of Eden. He concluded that this pure race had been attacked
by the devil and made incarnate in the form of the Jew. He said many
times that “the Jew is the personification of the devil and all
evil.” By fighting the devil (Jews), he rationalized the
he was doing the work of the Almighty God. His theology, based on
original sin as depicted in the biblical Garden of Eden story,
concluded that the original sins of this world manifested in blood
and race. World War II was regarded in eschatological terms by
Hitler, who saw himself as the commander of the forces of good
standing at Armageddon, battling the forces of Satan: “Often it
seems to me as if we are being tested by the Devil and Satan and we
must pass through Hell together until we finally obtain ultimate
victory.”
He viewed the Nazi Party and the Reich not merely as secular
organizations. “I consider those who establish or destroy a
religion much greater than those who establish a State, to say
nothing of founding a Party,” he wrote in Mein Kampf. Years
later he told his followers, “We are not a movement, rather we
are a religion.”
The institutional pattern he used for creating his new order was
the Roman Catholic Church, which had so greatly impressed him. As a
boy, he had dreamed of being an abbot. When he became Fuhrer,
however, he raised his sights and saw himself as a political Pope
with an apostolic succession. He announced to a closed meeting of
the faithful in the Brown House during 1930, “I hereby set forth
for myself and my successors in the leadership of the Party the
claim of political infallibility. I hope the world will grow as
accustomed to that claim as it has to the claim of the Holy Father.”
Hitler’s obsession with the Jews came primarily from his reading
of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and he believed his personal
mission on Earth was the eradication of all Jews.
The member of the Thule Society who most influenced Hitler and
who helped reinforce his political ideas was the racist poet
Dietrich Eckart, best known in Germany for his translation of Peer
Gynt. Hitler’s eyes invariably moistened whenever he spoke of Eckart.
He dedicated the second volume of Mein Kampf to him — a highly
atypical public acknowledgment of indebtedness. And years later, in
a midnight reverie, he looked back upon Eckart as an admonishing
father figure in whose presence he felt like a small boy: “He
shone in our eyes like a polar star. When he admonished someone, it
was with so much wit. At that time [1922] I was
intellectually a child still on the bottle.”
Eckart had written scathing attacks on Jews and other non-Germans
in his racist periodical, Auf gut Deutsch (In Plain German),
a journal that shows clearly Eckart had read Lanz-Liebenfels, List,
Fritsch, Wagner, and H. S. Chamberlain, and that he too was
fascinated with runic mysteries and such secret signs as the SS and
the swastika. His poetry, which Hitler considered “as beautiful
as Goethe’s,” proclaimed his belief in Germany’s messianic
mission:
Father in Heaven, resolved to the death Kneel we before
Thee, Oh answer us, then! Does aught other people Thine awful
command More loyally follow than we Germans do? Is there
one such? Then Eternal One, send Father, Thou smilest? Oh,
joy without end! Up! and onward, onward to the holy crusade.
A little-known pamphlet that seems to have been written jointly
by Hitler and Eckart and published in 1924 is an important source
for Hitler’s political ideas during these years. Despite its
ambitious title, Bolshevism from Moses to Lenin: Dialogue Between
Adolf Hitler and Me, there is virtually nothing in the pamphlet
about Bolshevism. Hitler’s concern here, as it had been in Vienna,
is with race and the alleged Jewish conspiracy. He and Eckart
discuss various other matters, including freemasonry, Christianity,
pacifism — but not Communism. Hitler’s invectives against the “Bolshevik
peril” were to come later, as his propagandists later claimed, “instinctively
anti-Communist.” Indeed, he had grudging admiration for their
radical activist theory and openly admired the way Communist leaders
used their theory to control and manipulate the masses. Stalin, he
often said glowingly, was “just one helluva fellow!”
Fulfillment
As technology and our ability to use it in acquiring knowledge
continued, we see the fulfillment of the prophecies of past ages.
This chapter of the twentieth century was a defining moment in our
planet’s long and turbulent history, whereby the consolidation of
these three sophistries was effected. From that consolidation would
emerge the beginning of the dire harvest of materialism and
secularism; still more terrible destruction was yet to come.
While the evolution of mankind provides our modern civilization
with incredible technological advances together with an exciting and
self-gratifying experience, patience will be required if our planet
is to evolve to a point where all people benefit equally. Unbridled
self-gratification and impatience have the propensity to plunge
mankind into devolution. History records eloquently that this
undisciplined impatience quickly unravels the well-woven fabric of
society.
In our confusion over man’s origin, we must not lose sight of our
eternal destiny. Let’s not forget that Jesus loved little children,
and that He forever made clear the great worth of human personality.
As we view the world, remember that the black patches of evil we see
are shown against a white background of ultimate good. We do not
view merely white patches of good that show up miserably against a
black background of evil.
When there is so much good truth to publish and proclaim, it’s a
pity to dwell on and accept the evil in the world simply because it
appears to be an unalterable fact. The beauty and spiritual values
of truth are more pleasurable and uplifting than is the phenomenon
of evil. In religion, Jesus advocated and followed the method of
experience, even as modern science pursues the technique of
experiment. We find God through spiritual insight, but we approach
this insight of the soul through the love of the beautiful, pursuit
of truth, loyalty to duty, and worship of divine goodness. Of all
these values, love is the true guide to real insight, which is
wisdom.
As we learn from our past mistakes, we must strive to break the
pattern that has afforded such destruction. But how is this to be
achieved when our children are denied the complete picture of our
recent history? Our institutions of learning have been modified and
manipulated by those who would prefer ignorance and indolence in our
curriculums so that their agendas may be progressed.
As adults, we face similar obstructions to truth. Our modern
minds are so preoccupied with survival and the present that we
scarcely have time for reflection on our history. The information
overload is so great that our news is provided in five-second sound
bytes that cater to a mass audience with a diminishing ability to
concentrate, weigh and question.
Little wonder, then, that so many accept World War II as being a
“just” war when, in fact, it was an amazing chronicle of mass
human carnage and genocide. This panoramic review of the twentieth
century up to the end of World War II provides a sense not only of
what went wrong but why. Wars are the product of egocentric
megalomaniacal political leaders. Their personal psychotic impulses
are so strong and unfettered that they recklessly plunge their
nations and eventually the world into blood-soaked battles where
there are no winners — and the losers are the innocent mortals so
cruelly destroyed by their leaders. How can any war — no matter who
starts it, who participates, and whatever comprises its principles —
ever be justified and described as “just”? Yet, it’s a
popular description, utilized by those in our societies who fall
into the populist mindset of the day.
This mindset is described by Howard Bloom in his book The
Lucifer Principle. Bloom examines the research of Dr. Paul D.
MacLean, who first posited the concept of the “triune brain.”
According to MacLean, near the base of a human skull is the stem of
the brain poking up from the spinal column like an unadorned walking
stick. Sitting atop that rudimentary stump is a mass of cerebral
tissue bequeathed us by our earliest totally land-dwelling
ancestors, the reptiles. When these beasts turned their back on the
sea, roughly three hundred million years ago and hobbled inland,
their primary focus was simple survival. The new landlubbers needed
to hunt, find a mate, to carve out territory, and to fight in that
territory’s defense. The neural machinery they evolved took care of
these elementary functions. MacLean calls it the “reptile brain.”
The reptile brain still sits inside our skull, like the pit at the
center of a peach. It is a vigorous participant in our mental
affairs, pumping its primitive, instinctual orders to us at all
hours of the day or night.
Violence as it has developed in the twentieth century is the
product of the “neocortex,” according to Bloom’s elucidation
of MacLean’s theory. Having only just reached a point of
pre-civilization, the neocortex is breached by the primal savagery
of the “reptile brain.” What Bloom failed to recognize is
that in this transition from reptile to mammal to primate brain,
hundreds of millions of years culminated in the emergence of “free
will.” This free will as exercised by the modern hominid already
possessed psychotic tendencies and resulted in reptilian thinking.
In modern language, this is referred to “fight or flight.”
Remembering that it takes two or more sides to eventuate a war, the
opposing political leaders, being ignorant of their “reptilian
brains,” reacted with similarly reptilian responses — savagery.
Once the reptile brain is loosened from the nurturing mammalian and
hominid neocortex, savagery and barbarism are unleashed in
blood-letting, as the history of world wars proves.
Eons after the first reptiles ambled away from the beach, their
great-great grandchildren, many times removed, evolved a few
dramatic product improvements. These upgrades included fur, warm
blood, the ability to nurture eggs inside their own bodies, and the
portable supply of baby food we know as milk. The remodeled
creatures were no longer reptiles; they had become mammals. Mammals’
evolved features gave them the ability to leave the lush tropics and
make their way into the chilly north. Their warm blood allowed them,
in fact, to survive the rigors of an occasional ice age while
exacting certain costs. Warm blood meant that mammalian parents
could not simply lay an egg and wander off. It forced mammalian
mothers to brood over their children for weeks, months, or even
years. And it required a tighter social organization to take care of
these suckling clusters of mammal mothers and children.
All this demanded that a few additions be built into the old
reptilian brain. Nature complied by constructing an envelope of new
neural tissue that surrounded the reptile brain, like a peach’s
juicy fruit enveloping the pit. MacLean called the add-on the “mammalian
brain.” The mammalian brain guided play, maternal behavior, and
a host of other emotions. It kept our furry ancestors together in
nurturing gangs.
Far down the winding path of time, a few of our hirsute
progenitors tried something new. They stood on their hind legs,
looked around them, and applied their minds and hands to the
exploitation of the world. These were the early hominids. But
proto-human aspirations were impractical without the construction of
another brain accessory. Nature once again complied, wrapping a thin
layer of fresh neural substance around the two old cortical standbys
— the reptilian and mammalian brains. The new structure, stretched
around the old ones like a peach’s skin, was the neo cortex — the
primate brain. This primate brain, which includes the human brain,
had awesome powers. It could envisage the future. It could weigh a
possible action and imagine the consequences. It could support the
development of language, reason and culture. But the neocortex had a
drawback; it was merely a thin veneer over the two ancient brains.
And those were as active as ever, measuring every bit of input from
the eyes and ears and issuing fresh orders. The thinking human, no
matter how exalted his sentiments, was still listening to the voices
of a demanding reptile and a chattering ancient mammal. Both were
speaking to him from the depths of his own skull.
Richard Leakey, the eminent paleoanthropologist, says war didn’t
exist until men invented agriculture and began to acquire
possessions. In the back of Leakey’s mind, one might find a wistful
prayer that agriculture would go away so we could rediscover peace.
But Leakey is wrong. Violence is not a product of the digging stick
and hoe.
Hitler, as described in Waite’s The Psychopathic God,
released the reptilian side of his nature. Churchill responded in an
equally reptilian manner, spurred on by political aspiration, greed
and power lust. The whole episode escalated into a blood-letting
period that is unsurpassed in our history. Roosevelt responded in an
equally reptilian manner by maneuvering Churchill and the British
into a suicidal plunge to poverty and the end of the British Empire.
Stalin, Mussolini, and Hirohito were no different. They each acted
out their reptilian natures in ways that would see their countrymen
slaughtered either on the battle field or innocently in cities.
World War II was created by unwise and reptilian-minded political
leaders, undertaken by the reptilian minds of the various military
commanders, filtering down to expose the worst propensities of man.
Atrocities and all manner of savage behavior resulted that rivals
only the “Jurassic” era.
The glorification of war is nothing more than the primitive mind
of mankind seeking to justify the voices of a demanding reptile and
a chattering ancient mammal. The truly civilized mind of hominid not
only controls the reptile brain, but seeks to shame future
generations into accepting that it is unnecessary. It preempts and
corrupts our individual free will. Ultimately, it is against God.
Insights from this piece of modern history together with the
valuable information that Bloom gleans from MacLean’s theory will
form much of the content of solutions presented in later chapters.
We must first know our history, then evaluate why things happen.
More important, we must know ourselves if we are ever to develop a
system of government that provides peace on earth. There are
solutions to our problems. They are available if we as societies of
so-called civilized beings will only stop and take proper notice of
past prophets and teachers. We must seek the “truth” with
open minds and a willingness to learn anew. Then and only then will
our world be free from the savagery of our reptile natures and share
the sublimity of peace on earth. Anything less, and we shall all
surely suffer the suicidal fate that hangs like a dark cloud over
our heads in the twenty-first century.
source (kingdomwithin.org)
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