somemythsofww2

8/2/2019 SomeMythsOfWW2

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Te 2011 George C. Marshall Lecture in Military History

Some Myths o World War II*

I

Gerhard L. Weinberg

A

s World War II recedes in memory and thousands o its veterans in all theparticipating countries pass away each day, some myths about that war con-

tinue to ourish in a ew circles while others remain widely spread. In this talk Ihope to engage some o these, concentrating rst on two about the war in general,then taking up individual leaders and countries, and nally commenting on awidely held mistaken view o World War II combat.

* Tis article is based on the George C. Marshall Lecture delivered on 8 January 2011 at

the annual meeting o the American Historical Association, Boston, Massachusetts. Te Mar-

shall lecture is co-sponsored by the Society or Military History and the George C. Marshall

Foundation.

Gerhard Weinbergcame to the United States rom Germany at age twelve. Ater service in thearmy he took an M.A. (1949) and Ph.D. (1951) in history at the University o Chicago and sub-sequently spent a number o years classiying and microlming German documents capturedat the end o World War II. In 1959 Weinberg joined the history aculty at the University oMichigan and eventually became its chair. In 1974 he accepted an endowed chair at the Uni-

versity o North CarolinaChapel Hill, rom which he retired in 1999. Author or editor o tenbooks and a hundred chapters and articles, Weinberg perhaps will be best known to this audi-ence as author oA World at Arms: A Global History o World War II(1994) and editor oHitler'sSecond Book: Te Unpublished Sequel to Mein Kamp(2003), which he had discovered in 1958.

Te Journal o Military History 75 ( July 2011): 701-718.Copyright 2011 byTe Society for Military History, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or trans-mitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission in writing from the Editor, Journal of Military History, George C.

Abstract

The talk engages some myths of the war that have been widely shared.

The examination includes myths pertaining to the war as a whole as

well as about individual leaders and groups of individuals. Included

among the latter are Adolf Hitler and his generals, Winston Churchill,

Benito Mussolini, Josef Stalin, Franklin Roosevelt, and Yamamoto

Isoroku. The text also touches on such issues as the Yalta Confer-

ence, the Morgenthau Plan for Germany, and the disappearance of

the horses from people's image of the war.

The H-Diplo editors would like to thank the Managing Editor ofThe Journal ofMilitary History, Roberta Wiener, for granting H-Diplo permission to post the

following article. Copyright remains with The Society for Military History.


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GERHARD L. WEINBERG

One myth about the war that has been disseminated is that the victory othe Allies was the result o their overwhelming superiority in human and materialresources. Tis view would have elicited bitter laughter rom those actually engaged

in the ghting at critical turning points in the conict. It is true that Britain wasproducing more planes per month than Germany at the time o the Battle oBritain, but the notion that the victory o the Royal Air Force was the producto vastly greater numbers than the German air orces is preposterous since thosevastly greater numbers did not exist.1 When the Red Army halted the Germanadvance in 1941 it did have greater numbers, but these had been nullied by theprior decimation o its leadership by Stalins purges.2 Contrary to the abricationsin German military memoirs, a subject I shall return to, Stalin did not control theweather. It was invariably as cold and the snow was as deep on the Russian as on

the German side o the ront; temperatures and snow were not subject to the Sovietleaders control as the ront lines shited. Furthermore, there is a winter in Russiaevery year; it is not something that the government in Moscow or St. Petersburgarranges when there are Swedish, French, or German invaders in the country.

It is now time to turn to the Battle o Midway. Mathematics was never my strongpoint, but there cannot be any doubt that eight aircrat carriers are more numerousthan three. I shall return to the alleged competence o Japanese commander Yama-moto Isoroku subsequently, but even the our carriers allotted by him to the criticalengagement were more, not less, numerous than the three American ones, quite aside

rom the act that one o the American ones, the Yorktown, had been damaged in theBattle o the Coral Sea and was still in the process o being repaired.3

Te wider issue o resources also needs a more careul look. By the summer o1942 the resources o the area under the military control o the Axis powers werein no way substantially inerior to those controlled by the Allies. One ought not toexclude the possibility that it was the mobilization and organization o resources,and not merely their availability, that made a substantial dierence in the eldingo eective orces or combat.4 In many ways the Allies proved vastly superior indrawing on the resources at their disposal than their enemies, who urthermore

complicated their own utilization o the resource-rich lands they had conquered bythe systematic mistreatment o the populations who lived there. It is certainly truethat in the nal stages o both the European and Pacic segments o the conict,the Allies indeed utilized overwhelming air and sea orce, but they had come rombehind in their eorts against powers that earlier had held most o the tactical andsome o the strategic advantages.

1. Richard Overy, Te Battle o Britain: Te Myth and the Reality (New York: Norton,2000).

2. David Glantz and Jonathan House, When itans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped

Hitler(Lawrence: University Press o Kansas, 1995).


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Some Myths of World War II

A second myth, or perhaps it should be called a working assumption o mosthistorians, is the separation o the war rom the Holocaust, an assumption basedon the erroneous belie that the two just happened to coincide in time. Hitler did

not plan a war with France because the French would not allow him to visit theEiel ower, and the Germans did not invade the Soviet Union because the Sovi-ets would not permit Robert Ley, the leader o the German Labor Front, to puta cruise ship on the Caspian Sea. Tere was a purpose to the war that Germanyinitiated, and that purpose was a demographic revolution on the globe o whichthe killing o all Jews on earth was a central part.

Erwin Rommel was sent to North Arica in the rst place to salvage Mus-solinis hold on Libya, but he was not sent into Egypt so that the Giza pyramidscould be dismantled and then reerected on the edge o Berlin the way the Germans

had earlier done with the Pergamum Altar in the middle o the city. He was tosupervise the killing o all Jews in Egypt, Palestine, and elsewhere in the MiddleEast under the control and with the participation o the murder commandoattached to his headquarters.5 Hitler did not trust the Italians, to whom the areawas to be allotted, to carry out this critically important mission as thoroughly ashe was condent his own people would beore the land was turned over to his ally.German military leaders who complained in the winter o 194142 that their menwere reezing, losing limbs and sometimes their lives, because o the absence otrains to bring warm clothing, when there were trains on the same lines to bring

Jews to be killed in the newly occupied Soviet territory, learned the hard way whatthe objectives and priorities o the regime they served actually were.6I should insert here a comment that the reverse o this erroneous perception

o events is also true. Most o those who write about the Holocaust do not pay su-cient attention to the way that the military developments o the war impacted thesubject they study. Tus, on the one hand, there is practically no recognition in theliterature on the rst stages o the systematic killing o Jews o the reality that theGerman army in June and July o 1941 was moving very rapidly through the areao densest Jewish settlement in Europe with resulting practical problems or those

who had been instructed to kill them. On the other hand, there is equally littlenotice o the act that the exertions o the Allies saved two-thirds o the worldsJews rom the ate the Germans intended or them.

In view o the reality that Allied ghting and bombing killed ar more Ger-man soldiers and civilians out o a smaller population than Japans, I shall notwaste time to engage the silly notion that this was a racial war in which, presum-ably, thereore, the Americans and their allies were especially interested in killingas many whites and as ew Orientals as possible. Instead, it is now time to turn tosome o the key leaders in the war, and since he initiated it, Adol Hitler needs to

5. Te material in the relevant article and book by Klaus-Michael Mallmann and MartinCppers is now available in English in Nazi Palestine: Te Plans or the Extermination o the Jews


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7. Gerhard L. Weinberg, Hitler and England, 19331945: Pretense and Reality, in theauthors Germany, Hitler, and World War II: Essays in Modern German and World History (New

York: Cambridge, 1995), 8594.

8. Bernd Wegner, Erschriebene Siege: Franz Halder, die Historical Division und die Re-

konstruktion des Zweiten Weltkrieges im Geiste des deutschen Generalstabes, in Politischer

Wandel, organisierte Gewalt und nationale Sicherheit: Beitrge zur neueren Geschichte Deutschlands

be reviewed rst. I have earlier dealt in print with the myth that he was interestedin an agreement with England.7 It would be air to say that there are more mythsabout Hitlers relations with his generals and admirals than about any other aspect

o World War II. Tere is time here to engage only a small selection o them, buta high proportion are the product o the sel-serving abrications and omissions inGerman postwar military memoirs and the well-paid-or garbage German generalsproduced or the American army ater the war under the direction o their ormerchie o sta, Franz Halder.8

I have already touched on the act that the weather was identical on bothsides o the Eastern Front. Tis was in general also true or the distances involved,or the state o the roads, and or the problem with the dierent width o railwaytracks between the standard European and the Russian variety. I one believes

what military memoirists wrote, a big problem was their authors inability to securepermission rom Hitler or major retreats when they believed them necessary. Teremay have been some real instances o this, but as a generalization that is endlesslyrepeated, it cannot hold up under scrutiny. A striking example: in the all o 1944three dierent German army groups were threatened with the danger o being cuto by the advances o Allied armies. Te army group in southwest France aced thisthreat rom a meeting o the Allied orces that had broken out o the Normandybeachhead with those that had landed on the French Mediterranean coast. Hitlerauthorized the army groups withdrawal. Te army group in southeast Europe, pri-

marily in Greece, Albania, and southern Yugoslavia, was about to be cut o by theadvance o the Red Army meeting itos partisans. Hitler authorized their with-drawal. Te army group at the northern end o the Eastern Front was threatened bya Red Army thrust to the Baltic Sea that was temporarily interrupted by a Germancounteroensive but then made eective as the Red Army cut o major Germanorces in western Latvia. Hitler reused to authorize withdrawal o this army groupin the same weeks that he allowed the other two to pull back. Why? Can this beattributed to a general policy o reusing withdrawal? Te real explanation is nei-ther a general opposition to withdrawals nor a special interest on Hitlers part in

western Latvia. As a ne monograph by Howard D. Grier has shown, Hitler wasresponding to the urgent advice o Admiral Karl Dnitz. Te head o the Germannavy stressed the need to hold the southern shore o the Baltic Sea to prevent incur-sions into the Baltic by the Red Navy so that Germanys new submarines and theircrews could be prepared or operations that he expected would turn the tide back in


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9. Howard D. Grier, Hitler, Dnitz and the Baltic Sea: Te Tird Reichs Last Hope, 19441945

(Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2007).

10. Gerhard L. Weinberg, German Plans or Victory, 19441945, in Weinberg, Germany,

Germanys avor in the Battle o the Atlantic.9 Following the advice o Dnitz wasa part o Hitlers looking or ways to win the war, not how best to lose it.10

A second area o dierence in which Germanys World War II generals

asserted their postwar claims to genius was their periodic insistence on pulling outo salients so that with a shorter ront to hold they could build up reserves to meetuture Red Army oensives or to launch their own. In all o their writings, thereis never to the best o my knowledge a single reerence to the likelihood that suchabandonment o salients would NO leave the Red Army units in their old posi-tions but instead would produce a shorter Red Army ront with analogous oppor-tunities to create reserves. Tere is a dramatic example o this in the preparationsor the German 1943 summer oensive on the Eastern Front. Te generals hadpersuaded Hitler to allow the abandonment o the Demyansk and Rzhev salients,

with the latter conducted under the code-name Bel Bewegung, OperationBualo. As might have been expected, this had two eects on Red Army disposi-tions, one strategic, and one tactical. Te strategic eect was that there was now noexpectation o a German oensive toward Moscow, something that Stalin had mis-takenly expected in 1942; a subject I shall return to. Tere was accordingly no needto hold extra reserves beore the capital. Te tactical eect was that the Red Armyalso shortened its lines and gathered extra units or its own subsequent drive intothe rear o the northern portion o Germanys 1943 summer oensive, OperationZitadelle, Operation Citadel. Tat operation would probably have ailed anyway,

and I am not suggesting that in all disputes between them, Hitler was always rightand his military leaders wrong, but rather that the time is long past or a reassess-ment o the latters requently alleged high competence.

Germanys military leaders were certainly competent at the tactical level, buthardly beyond that. In about the same number o months o serious ghting, outo an only slightly larger population they got almost three times as many o theirsoldiers killed as in World War I, and they signed o on more than a hundred timesthe number o death sentences on their own ofcers and men. By their conduct oa war o annihilation in the East, they managed the extraordinary accomplishment

o converting Stalin rom a bloody and hated dictator into the benign deender ohis people rom a ate ar worse than any they had experienced. According to theGerman militarys own gures, they supervised the killing or deaths rom hungerand disease on the average o 10,000 prisoners o war per day, seven days a week, orthe rst seven months o the war in the East, a record without parallel in history.11Please note that this gure o over 2 million deaths does not include the substan-tially over 1 million Soviet civilians killed in the same months.


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12. A striking example is Erich von Manstein, Verlorene Siege, 2d. ed. (Frankurt/M:

Athenum, 1964); English language translation o the rst edition, Lost Victories (Chicago: Reg-

nery, 1958). A ne general analysis is Georey P. Megargee,Inside Hitlers High Command(Law-

rence: University Press o Kansas, 2000).13. Tere are reerences to the court but there is as yet no study o this travesty o justice. On

Hitlers systematic bribery o military and civilian leaders, see Gerd R. Ueberschr and Winried

All these horrors occurred in ull view o the military and civilian survivors andwere quickly known in general outline throughout the unoccupied parts o the SovietUnion. Is it any wonder that the people rallied to the regime, endured endless priva-

tions, and succeeded in crushing the army that brought only death with it? Underthese circumstances it should not be surprising that the adoption by the United Stateso the man who had incompetently led German wartime intelligence on the EasternFront rom the winter o 194142 to 1945, General Reinhard Gehlen, should resultin an intelligence organization nanced rom Washington and later rom Bonn butlargely run rom Moscow as he recruited Soviet agents and others whose criminalbackgrounds made them obvious candidates or blackmail.

It may be that the manuacture o airy tales by Germanys military leadersdesigned to ool posterity was caused by three experiences they shared. Teir prede-

cessors in World War I had obscured their own responsibility or deeat by inventingthe stab-in-the-back legend. Tis time their deeat would be blamed on the man atthe top instead o imaginary back-stabbers at home.12 A second element may havebeen their recognition o the embarrassing act that they had all accepted huge secretbribes rom their beloved leader. Tey needed to nd other ways to explain theirloyalty to Hitler, and their almost unanimous support o him on 20 July 1944, by pre-tending that their loyalty had really been to the men under their command and not totheir paymaster. A third possible explanation may lie in widespread internal inversiono values. When what we today call the Holocaust was described by them to their

soldiers as the gerechte Shne, just punishment, or the Jews, they might have haddifculty explaining what a one-, two-, or three-year-old could have done or whichkilling was the just punishment. When a special court was set up to kick out o themilitary those allegedly connected with the 20 July plot, two o the three judges, FieldMarshal von Rundstedt and Army Chie o Sta General Guderian (not GeneralSchroth), were accepting regular bribes rom the prosecution while serving as judges,but the accused were not allowed either to appear in person or to be represented. Tisarce was ofcially called the Ehrenho der Deutschen Wehrmacht, the Court oHonor o the German Armed Forces. A concept o honor that, I would suggest, was

closely related to these individuals concept o justice.13

It is time to turn to Benito Mussolini. It can surely be said that his mouth wasvery much larger than his brain; he preached endlessly about the benets that warbrought to people but ailed to recognize Italys limited capacity and the likely costo allying himsel with Germany. Nevertheless, there is ar too much denigration o


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19. Te issue o the Baltic States as seen by Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin is reviewed in

the chapters on them in Gerhard L. Weinberg, Visions o Victory: Te Hopes o Eight World War IILeaders (New York: Cambridge, 2005).

20. Lord Strang, Home and Abroad (London: Andre Deutsch, 1956), 21315. Te author

was the British representative on the European Advisory Commission where the zonal borders

were agreed upon.

21. See Daniel J. Nelson, Wartime Origins o the Berlin Dilemma (University: University o

Alabama Press, 1978); William M. Franklin, Zonal Boundaries and Access to Berlin, WorldPolitics 16 (October 1963): 131; and Gretchen M. Skidmore, Te American Occupation o

the Bremen Enclave, 19451947 (M.A. thesis, University o North Carolina at Chapel Hill,

the Soviet Union ater the Germans invaded the latter. Churchill again wanted toconcede the Soviet demand or ormal recognition o the annexation, and Rooseveltagain by massive pressure obliged the British government to abstain rom ceding

the point.19

From Churchills perspective, this looked like an inexpensive way, rstto try to wean the Soviets away rom their alignment with Germany, and later tosatisy a new and highly important ally. From Roosevelts point o view, the orceddisappearance o independent countries was no more acceptable when carried outby the Soviets than when implemented by the Germans.

A second example involves the proposed zones o occupation in Germany aterthat countrys deeat. Greatly worried about the possibility that Stalin might orderthe Red Army to stop when it reached the countrys June 1941 border and tell theWestern Powers that it was their turn to do the rest o the ghting, Churchill had

his government prepare a zonal division that placed Berlin, to be jointly ruled in anycase, deep inside the Soviet zone.20 Tis would provide the Soviets with an incen-tive to push orward until they met their allies in central Europe. With clues thatthis was not what the Americans wanted, he had the British delegation present theproposed line in the European Advisory Commission. It was immediately acceptedby the Soviets, who presumably thought it the only good idea Churchill ever had.Roosevelt had wanted a division into zones that met in Berlin. Te proessionalRoosevelt-haters may interpret this as his plan to deprive the people o Berlin othe joys o watching the airlit in 194849. Since the president was very concerned

about direct access to the American zone o occupation, originally wanted theUnited States to have the northwest zone, and agreed ater a year o negotiations tothe southern zone only ater the British yielded an enclave at the port o Bremen,one should not exclude the possibility that the president knew what he was about.21Anyone interested can today see the contrasting British and American zonal mapsin Earl Ziemkes book on the American army in postwar Germany.22

I one asks or an explanation o the policies o the two men at the time andChurchills reversal o them in his memoir-history, it would be best to considerboth their relative positions in 194344 and also Churchills postwar career. At

the time, Churchill was leading a country that had exhausted its human and


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23 Mary E Glantz FDR and the Soviet Union: Te Presidents Battles over Foreign Policy

nancial resources, was practically certain to be weaker in the uture, and hencemight best make whatever concessions were needed early rather than be obligedto make greater ones rom an even weaker position later. Roosevelt, on the other

hand, headed a country that was still mobilizing its resources, was likely to becomestronger over time, and hence would do well to postpone concessions i possibleand make them later when the countrys position was stronger. He certainly rec-ognized the essential role o the Soviet Union in the war, and like Churchill wasequally worried that it might either be deeated or arrive at a compromise peacewith Germany. He accordingly worked hard to develop and maintain decent rela-tions with a difcult ally, but there were limits to the concessions he would make.23Unlike Roosevelt, who died beore the war ended, Churchill continued to be activein British politics ater his electoral deeat in July 1945. In memoirs written partly

when leader o the opposition and partly when back in power, thereore, he couldreashion the past in accordance with what would have been his preerences. It isironic that on the zonal issue he shited to something closer to Roosevelts conceptin the spring o 1945, but by then it had all been settled in signed agreements.

It might be useul to devote a moment to the implications o any extensiono Churchills preerred strategy o continuing to emphasize the Mediterraneantheater. Stalin was a consummate liar, but when he told Churchill at eheranthat the Allied armies in Italy would eventually run into high mountains, he wasor once speaking the truth. An invasion o the Balkans would have obviated the

cross-Channel invasion; the same units could not be employed in northwest andsoutheast Europe at the same time. Fighting their way over the mountains o thatregion, they might well have reached Romania and Hungary by the time the RedArmy had occupied all o Germany and liberated Denmark, the Low Countries,and France.24 It has never been clear to me why an iron curtain running east-westalong the Pyrenees, Alps, and Carpathian mountains would have been better orBritain and the United States in the postwar era than one running north-southrom the Baltic to the Adriatic.

Te reality o the situation was that the insistence o this country on an inva-

sion across the Channel meant that although the Soviets did most o the ghting,the Western Allies gathered in the economically most advanced portions o thecontinent. In either case, whether the major eort o the United States and Britainwas in northwest or southeast Europe, Poland was going to end up under Germancontrol i the Germans won or under Soviet control i the Allies won. Contrary toanother postwar myth, neither the British nor the Americans had placed Polandin Eastern Europe between Germany and the Soviet Union. By the time o theYalta Conerence, the Red Army was in control o Poland, and neither Churchillnor Roosevelt was in any position to change that act. Tis was indeed terribly

unortunate or the Poles, but the blame or this must rest with neither o the two


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25. Te Russian army had entered Berlin in the Seven-Years War o 175663. Tereater, in

the First Partition o Poland in 1772, Frederick II, King in Prussia and Elector o Brandenburg,

had created an east-west corridor to join the two main territories he had inherited, separating

Poland rom its port o Danzig. Prussians and later Germans thought so highly o the inventor

Western leaders but with the unwillingness o the Germans to accept the concepto an independent Poland until ater a Russian army came to Berlin or a secondtime.25 One can argue about the eorts both Churchill and Roosevelt made to

assist Poland in their dealings with the Polish Government-in-Exile and by arguingwith Stalin about the countrys borders, but neither should be held responsible orthe countrys sad ate.

It is now Stalins turn. Since the evidence o his real views o Czechoslovakiabecame apparent in part during the war, one needs to go back to a myth about hispolicy beore the war. It is oten argued that the Soviet Union should not have beenexcluded rom the settlement o the crisis over Czechoslovakia arrived at in Munichin 1938. Tere is the myth that the Soviet Union was interested in the territorialintegrity o Czechoslovakia and was prepared to ght to deend it. How does this

square with subsequent Soviet policy? When Germany ended the countrys indepen-dence in March 1939, and created the puppet state o Slovakia, the Soviet Union wasthe only country on earth outside the Axis that extended legal recognition to this unitand hence to the disappearance o Czechoslovakia. Was that just because Stalin wasso ond o its nominal leader, Monsignor iso? May I express doubts on this score?When as a result o the annexation o the eastern part o Poland, the Soviet Unionattained a common border with what had been Czechoslovakia, Stalin insisted onannexing the eastern part o that countrya curious way o demonstrating interestin its territorial integrity. One should note that the nominal basis or this annexation

o a wartime allys territory was the same one applied in Munich, namely that theethnic afnity o the majority o the local population should govern its inclusion inthe adjacent state. Here is another myth that deserves urther thought.

We must now turn to the war itsel. Tere is a widespread belie that Stalin wasextremely shrewd. Tat might have been so when it came to the internal situationwhere he not only wangled his way into power but also managed to have any andall conceivable and imaginary opponents killed, sent to the gulag, or banished toinsignicant positions. In oreign aairs, however, he was as handicapped as Hitlerby his belie in the nonsense he spouted. Because he seriously believed that Ger-

many wanted colonies, markets, and investments rom the Western Powers, it neveroccurred to him that Hitlers primary interest was in the seizure o lands or agri-cultural settlement rom the Soviet Union. In spite o Roosevelts strong advice tothe contrary, Stalin opted or an agreement with Germany in 1939 and proceededto help that country drive the Allies o the continent in the north, then the west,and then the south. He never ceased to blame others rather than himsel or thesubsequent situation o acing Germany alone on the continent in the east. We now


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30. Robert J. C. Butow, Te FDR apes,American Heritage33 (FebruaryMarch 1982):1617.

trying to avert them. Roosevelt did utilize the minute number that occurred to tryto awaken the American people to the dangers ahead, but it would, o course, havebeen possible to utilize the available inormation to insure an incident every ew

days. Unortunately the linguistic isolationists who predominate among Americandiplomatic historians have neither utilized Rohwers ndings nor checked therecords available in College Park themselves. Even without this inormation, therewas the discovery by Robert Butow o tapes o the presidents condential con-versations when a recording machine was accidentally not turned o.30 Tis text,published in 1982and in Englishsimilarly shows the presidents interest inkeeping the country out o ormal participation in the war.

When one turns to the Pacic, there is equally solid evidence that has beenequally generally ignored. Presidents, like all others, are limited to twenty-our hours

per day. Te demands on their time are erce. It raises the question o why thepresident devoted such an enormous amount o time to the negotiations with theJapanese both in direct personal conversations and in discussions with Secretary oState Cordell Hull when the latter was to meet with the Japanese Ambassador. Wasthis merely because Roosevelt had nothing else to do? Is it not more likely that hewas trying to stall o any attack by Japan until its leaders could see or themselvesthat Germany might well lose, not win the war? Had they waited another two weeksthey might have recognized in the German deeats on the Eastern Front and theBritish oensive in North Arica clear signs that a victory or Germany was by no

means as certain as they believed. Interestingly enough, Hitler had the opposite con-cern: he pushed the German army orward in its desperate eort beore Moscow inDecember 1941 in part precisely because he eared that the Japanese might not takethe plunge into war but make an agreement with the Americans instead.31

Te issue o the embargo on oil sales to Japan also deserves another look.When the Japanese occupied the northern part o French Indo-China in Sep-tember 1940, one might see this as a means o their cutting o a possible routeo supplies to Nationalist China over the Haiphong-Hanoi railway, and thatthereore this move was connected with the Japanese conict with China. But

the occupation o the southern part o French Indo-China in July 1941 obviouslypointed away rom their war with China and toward war with the United States,Britain, and the Netherlands. Unlike the allegedly smart Stalin, who provided theGermans with oil and other war materials until minutes beore they invaded hiscountry, Roosevelt did not believe it wise to provide the Japanese navy with theoil it wanted to stockpile or war with the United States. Also, unlike too manyhistorians, he knew that the Nationalists o Chiang Kai-shek did not have a navyor the Japanese to engage. In the nal stage o the negotiations, the suggestion


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32. Te relevant documents have been published by the Department o Deense in the

set entitled Te Magic Background o Pearl Harbor(Washington: Government Printing Ofce,

1978).

33. Henry Morgenthau, Jr.,Germany is Our Problem (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1945).

Te text is in the ront, and the map aces p. 160.

34. Bernd Greiner, Die Morgenthau-Legende: zur Geschichte eines umstrittenen Plans (Ham-

was made that i the Japanese would return to the situation o the summer byevacuating southern Indo-China, the United States would sell them all the oil theywanted. Te Japanese diplomats in Washington were promptly directed that they

were under no circumstances to discuss such an idea.32

From okyos perspective,war with the United States, Britain, and the Netherlands was clearly preerable.Te single-minded determination on this may help explain why it never occurredto anyone in the Japanese government that i they conquered the lands or whichthey were already printing the occupation currency, there was no way to move theoil wells, rubber plantations, and tin mines rom Southeast Asia to the Japanesehome islands, but that is another story.

A nal myth about Roosevelt or which there is time here concerns his andChurchills approval o the plan advanced by Secretary o the reasury Henry Mor-

genthau or transorming Germany into a country rather like Holland and Den-mark with a high standard o living but no heavy industry. As Churchill repeatedlyput it, at but impotent. Tose who write about this have generally been careul torerain rom looking at the original document, published over hal a century ago.33Its our pages and map illustrate the obvious: i such a change were to be made,Germany would have to keep the bulk o its agricultural land in the east. One couldnot take that away, push the Germans living there into the remainder, and expectthe country to survive without vast export industries. Te project was abandonedbecause o Stalins insistence on the Oder-Neisse line; the proposal Roosevelt and

Churchill preerred was too sot, not too hard on the Germans. Te detailed analy-sis o the issue by Bernd Greiner is invariably missing rom accounts published inthis country.34 I have sometimes wondered whether the additional 5 to 6 millionGermans who lost their homes because o the abandonment o the project sharethe general enthusiasm over its ate.

One urther myth about the American general conduct o war during Rooseveltspresidency deserves a word. It is oten asserted, especially in books published inEurope, that the Americans generally acted only when they had overwhelming orceavailable to bring to bear on the planned operation. Tis is as silly an assertion as

the one I dealt with earlier about Allied human and material superiority as the keyelement o their victory. Certainly the rst signicant oensive in the Pacic theater,the landing on Guadalcanal in August 1942, was carried out on a shoestring, andthe minimal reinorcements that were available or it contributed to making this thelongest battle in American history.35 Te landing in Normandy in June 1944 was


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36. See the book cited in n. 24.

ordered by General Eisenhower when there was, ater a months delay, sea-lit orve divisions and airlit or three divisions or an assault against an area held by atleast ty-eight German divisions. A curious way o acting only with vastly superior

orces.36

Tere were occasions when operations were launched, especially in surpriselanding, with superiority in orce, but this was by no means the rule.wo myths about President ruman relate to his wartime role and deserve a

look. Te emphasis on his unpreparedness to assume the presidency is generallyexaggerated. He not only had served in the American army in France in WorldWar I but had maintained an interest in military aairs in subsequent years. Obvi-ously he had to be brieed on many critical matters when he succeeded to thepresidency, including details on the atomic bomb and on Soviet espionage into itsdevelopment, but he was not the ignoramus that he is oten pictured as. Like his

predecessor, he developed a close working relationship with Army Chie o StaGeorge C. Marshall and relied heavily on his advice. Unlike the civilian side o thegovernment, where ruman made substantial changes relatively early, he kept theteam o military leaders Roosevelt had appointed. In the only signicant change incommand necessitated by the death o General Buckner in the ghting on Oki-nawa, he promptly appointed Joseph W. Stilwell on Marshalls recommendation, achoice Roosevelt would presumably have welcomed in view o his earlier reluctanceto remove Stilwell rom the China-Burma-India Command.

Te other myth in need o another look is the controversy over the anticipated

American and Allied casualties in the two planned invasions o the home islandso Japan o which ruman authorized the rst in mid-June 1945. Invariably thelikely casualties o the Chinese, Russians, British, and others are omitted rom thisdiscussion. Similarly the planned Japanese killing o all the prisoners o war theyheld is ignored. Perhaps into the discussion one should also enter the anticipatedcasualties on the Japanese side about which there was no controversy within theJapanese leadership. It was accepted that there would be 20 million such casual-ties. Tis gure those in charge in okyo unanimously deemed acceptable until thesecond atomic bomb suggested to some o them that the Americans could drop an

indenite number and hence not have to invade at all.37

In this connection, it maybe worth noting that both the British government and Stalin had agreed to the useo the atomic bomb beforeWashington had asked them.

Now that the ocus has turned to Japan, this may be an appropriate pointto touch on Japanese war aims. Tese are all too oten described as limited toresource-rich parts o Southeast Asia. Te Japanese certainly wanted them, butthe inclusion o India, Alaska, New Zealand, and Cuba in Japanese planningtomention merely a ewhardly points to a modest program o annexations.38 Onecannot help wondering what Fidel Castro would think o the inclusion o Cuba


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39. Homer N. Wallin, Pearl Harbor: Why, How, Fleet Salvage and Final Appraisal(Washing-

ton: Government Printing Ofce, 1968).

in the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphereand o being rescued rom thisprospect by the Yankees.

A Japanese leader who has received more avorable attention than he deserves

is Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku. First there is his insistence on the attack on PearlHarbor as a substitute or the prior plan o the Japanese naval high command, aninsistence that carried the day in mid-October 1941 because o his threat to resignas Commander o the Combined Fleet unless his scheme were approved. Quiteapart rom the reality that an attack on the Americans in peacetime was practicallyguaranteed to destroy the Japanese strategic concept o conquering lots and thenmaking a settlement in which they would keep many o their gains, there were twopractical deects to Yamamotos plan. Both were easily predictable and neither couldbe remedied since they were inherent to the project.

In the rst place, as the Japanese well knew, the places where the Americanwarships were anchored were quite shallow. It was or this reason that special tor-pedoes that ran rather shallow had to be utilized and were loaded on board justbeore the eet sailed or the attack. In practice that would mean that ships torpe-doed at their moorings would sink into the mud; they could in reality not be sunk.We know that in the event the Arizona exploded, but the other battleships settledonto the shallow harbor oor. From there, all except the Oklahoma were raised,repaired, and returned to action.39 It may have been just as well or Yamamotospeace o mind that he was dead by the time o the battle in the Surigao Strait in

October 1944 when a substantial portion o the Japanese navy was demolished bysix American battleships o which two had been allegedly sunk and three had beenbadly damaged in the Pearl Harbor raid.

A second equally predictable result o the Pearl Harbor raid was the survivalo most o the crew members o the ships attacked. Tis is not to ignore the heavyloss o lie on the Arizona and the substantial casualties rom other ships, butattacking warships at anchor in port on a Sunday in eect guarantees that manycrew members will be on shore leave and most o those on board at the time oattack will survive. One cannot understand the revival and eective ghting o the

American navy in subsequent years without paying attention to the trained andexperienced crew members o the warships who survived the attack and took theirskills to other ships or their repaired old ones. Tis is an issue ignored in the bulko the relevant literature. Te dierence between a major warship hit at anchor andone sunk on the open ocean had been demonstrated earlier that year in May in theNorth Atlantic. When the British battle-cruiser Hoodwent down, o the crew oover 1,500, only 3 survived. When the Bismarck was sunk a ew days later, o the2,200 men aboard, 115 survived.40 No one will ever know i the Japanese navys


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GERHARD L. WEINBERG

original hopes or an engagement on the open Pacic would have worked out as itsdesigners plannedthis student o the war has considerable doubtbut nothingcould have been worse or Japan than Yamamotos scheme.

Tat raises the question: why was he so absolutely insistent on a project withdeects that were so readily oreseeable? Could it be that he was so personallyinvested in the idea that he was simply unwilling and unable to analyze the matterobjectively? Tere is an intriguing aspect o the last paper exercise o the plan thathe conducted in September 1941, about a month beore the naval sta in okyonally agreed to his demand that his plan replace theirs. In that exercise, it wasdetermined that among other American ships sunk at their moorings would bethe aircrat carriers including the Yorktown. Not a single ofcer in the room hadthe moral courage to say, But your Excellency, how can we sink the Yorktown in

Pearl Harbor when we know that it is with the American eet in the Atlantic?None o these ofcers lacked physical courage: they were all prepared to die or theEmperor, and many o them did. But none had the backbone to challenge a com-mander whose mind was so rmly made up that none dared prize it open with atouch o reality.41

In this extraordinary rigidity o Yamamotos we may also see one o the roots ohis preerence or exceedingly complicated battle plans, a tendency that he passedon to his successors. As I mentioned earlier, o the eight carriers at his disposal, heallocated our to the central portion o the Midway operation with two sent o

to support the landing on the Aleutians and two held back with the main battleeet. Tese our survived the battle, but what would have happened i at the criticalpoint the Americans had aced not our but eight carriers? And i the Japanese had,like the Americans, made some ast repairs on the carrier damaged in the CoralSea engagement and thus had made it nine against three? Tis is not the time toreview the similarly very complicated Japanese plan or the biggest naval battle othe war, the one generally reerred to as the Battle o Leyte Gul, but it was notjust the participation o American battleships Yamamoto imagined sunk at PearlHarbor as mentioned earlier that shows his inuence on Japanese naval planning

concepts even ater he had been killed by an American air interception. Perhaps thediscussion o Yamamoto should conclude with the suggestion that i he had ounda way to sink in the Pacic an American carrier operating in the Atlantic, he wouldindeed be entitled to the praise so oten lavished on him.

Something should also be said about the Chinese war eort under ChiangKai-shek. While there is no doubt about the corruption and other internal prob-lems o his regime, the time may have come or another look at a leader who man-aged to hold much o his country together against a better armed oe or so manyyears. Te insistence o the Japanese on ghting the Chinese all those years, and

doing so in the most horrendous way they could think o, paved the way or the


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42. Tere is a start in Jonathan Fenby, Chiang Kai-shek: Chinas Generalissimo and the NationHe Lost(New York: Carroll & Gra, 2003).

triumph o Mao. Few would be inclined to suggest that the people o the countryare better o as a result.42

A nal myth in need o review is one that applies to an important aspect o the

way the two sides actually ought the war on the eld o battle. Tere is an inclina-tion to think o World War II as one ought by men, women, and machines. Tatis simply wrong. Te United States utilized a great variety o animals rom dogsin the Pacic to mules in Europe with the British adding elephants in the Burmatheater. It is hence only appropriate that the National World War II Museumin New Orleans last year had a special exhibit and series o lectures on LoyalForces: Te Animals o World War II. Te Japanese and Italian armies utilizedhorse transport extensively. Te German army was extremely heavily dependenton horses, employing a total o over 3 million during the war.43 Here was another

source o riction between Hitler and his generals on a subject where he was closerto the reality at the ront than the latter. In the winter, bringing up odder or thehorses is difcult at the very time when they cannot graze through deep snow. Sincethis is also precisely the time when pulling equipment over poor snowed-in roadsis especially difcult, double-harnessing requently had to be resorted to. When aorce is advancing, the equipment and vehicles without motors let behind can beretrieved by leading the horses back subsequently, but when a orce is retreating,whatever could not be pulled back rst is likely to be lost. Te enormous, practi-cally certain losses o valuable and scarce equipment under these circumstances was

simply not ully understood by higher German commanders, most o whom hadreceived their experience o combat on the Western Front o World War I with itsrelatively short distances over which movements occurred.

Ironically, it was their own dependence on horses that contributed to thecondence o many German military leaders that they could most likely crush anyAllied landing in the West. Tey correctly estimated that because o the weatherin the Channel, such a landing would occur in the summer months. Tere wouldthen be plenty o grass in France and Belgium or their horses to graze on, butthey assumed correctly that the Americans and British could not have trained

their tanks and trucks to eat grass. Te essentially total dependence o the invadingWestern Allies on motorized equipment and transport would thus provide a majoradvantage or the German army with its vast number o horses. It never occurredto the sel-anointed geniuses on the German side that this was a problem knownto the Allies who had decided to cope with it by the development o Pluto, thepipeline under the ocean, to pump uel under the Channel or vehicles that they tooknew could not eat grass. Te rapid pursuit across France by the Allies in AugustSeptember 1944 did indeed eventually come to be slowed down and even halted at


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GERHARD L. WEINBERG

A (N Y k

points because o the uel problem, but by that time there could be no question othrowing the Allied armies back into the Channel.

Te Red Army was also very heavily dependent on horses throughout the

ghting on the Eastern Front. It is true that the American provision o tens othousands o trucks under Lend-Lease greatly assisted the Soviets in this regard.Nevertheless, German civilians in Berlin in April 1945 noted with some surprisethat the Red Army brought into the city enormous numbers o horses and smallbut substantial numbers o camels.44

I one asks, how did this aspect o the reality o World War II come to be over-looked so widely, it may be helpul to consider the source o much o the lm oot-age that has inuenced popular images o the ghting. American and British lmsvery rarely show the relatively small numbers o animals they employed. It is the

lms produced by the Germans and by the Soviet Union that have been misleading,in my opinion at least in part quite deliberately. It was not that the horses o the twocontesting armies were camera shy, but rather that both governments preerred tooer viewers o newsreels and other movie ootage an image o modern motorizedwarare. Horses might accordingly appear when Germans paraded through Paris in1940 or in Red Square in the Soviet victory parade o 1945, but their exceedinglynumerous employment at and behind the ront during the ghting was generallyconsidered a possible indicator o backwardness best not exhibited on the screen.Whatever the reason, neither o the huge armies ghting on the main ront o

World War II could have operated eectively without the enormous number ohorses that have largely disappeared rom popular memory in this country.

In the memory held by a wider public as well as substantial segments o thescholarly community, a considerable number o myths have come to inuenceperceptions o the greatest war o which we know. A talk named or one o themost careully objective military leaders o the conict may well be a good occasionto subject a ew o these myths to the cold look that he tended to accord dubiousproposals.

Tank You.


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