The New York Times Book of World War II, 1939-1945 Read online

  BOOK OF

  WORLD WAR II

  1939–1945

  The Coverage from the Battlefield to the Home Front

  EDITED BY RICHARD OVERY • FOREWORD BY TOM BROKAW

  Contents

  Foreword

  Introduction

  PROLOGUE “Reich Troops Jam Road to Poland” 1919–1939

  CHAPTER 1 “Can the United States Keep Out of War?” September-October 1939

  CHAPTER 2 “Fighting in the West is at a Standstill” November 1939-March 1940

  CHAPTER 3 “The Sun Also Sinks” April-June 1940

  CHAPTER 4 “Britain is Defiant” July-September 1940

  CHAPTER 5 “Hitler Will Decide Law of New Europe” October-December 1940

  CHAPTER 6 “A Call to Nation” January-May 1941

  CHAPTER 7 “Nazis Try the Blitz on Russians” June-July 1941

  CHAPTER 8 “Aim of President is War” August-November 1941

  CHAPTER 9 “Japanese Attack Unites America” November-December 1941

  CHAPTER 10 “Million Women are needed for War” January-February 1942

  CHAPTER 11 “Lidice, Illinois” March-June 1942

  CHAPTER 12 “Red Verdun Holds” July-September 1942

  CHAPTER 13 “Himmler Program Kills Polish Jews” October 1942-January 1943

  COLOR PHOTOS 1938-1942

  CHAPTER 14 “War on All Fronts” February-May 1943

  CHAPTER 15 “Eisenhower Rubs His Seven Luck-Pieces” June-July 1943

  CHAPTER 16 “Russia Still Asks for Second Front” August-September 1943

  CHAPTER 17 “Three Men of Destiny” October-December 1943

  CHAPTER 18 “The Doughboy’s Grim Route to Rome” January-May 1944

  CHAPTER 19 “This is the Europe We Came to Free” June-July 1944

  CHAPTER 20 “Patton Lashes Out” August-September 1944

  CHAPTER 21 “Nuts” October-December 1944

  CHAPTER 22 “Japanese Expected to Win, Poll Finds” January-March 1945

  CHAPTER 23 “Germans Capitulate on All Fronts” April-May 1945

  CHAPTER 24 “New Age Ushered …” June-September 1945

  EPILOGUE “Atom Blast in Russia Disclosed” 1945-1949

  COLOR PHOTOS 1943-46

  Glossary of People and Events

  Index

  Acknowledgments

  Foreword

  By Tom Brokaw

  A hundred years from now, five hundred, a thousand, historians will be studying World War II and wondering, “How did it come to this? This madness of all out war in the heart of Western civilization and across the vast Pacific ocean, a war so lethal and so ambitious it would be described by John Keegan, the noted British military historian, as “the greatest event in the history of mankind.”

  As you will see in these dispatches from reporters from The New York Times at home and abroad—from 1939 to the end of the war in 1945—it was at the beginning a confusing, complex time of duplicity, denial, wishful thinking. Adolf Hitler aroused Germany with maniacal fervor and Japan began to plant its flag well beyond its small island boundaries.

  Germany invades Poland and on September 1, 1939, The Times reported in bold print “WASHINGTON VIEWS THE CRISIS GRAVELY,” describing how President Franklin D. Roosevelt spent the day reading press dispatches and listening to radio broadcasts from Europe. The following day France mobilizes eight million for military duty and the day after that Great Britain declares war on Germany.

  Yet on September 3 Harold B. Hinton of The New York Times publishes a long, analytical piece headlined, “CAN THE UNITED STATES KEEP OUT OF WAR?” He describes President Roosevelt’s apprehensions about Hitler and his subtle preparations for war but he quotes the President as saying he hoped and believed the country could stay clear and his Administration would do all it could to keep it out of war.

  That is how it began, this greatest event in the history of mankind, with ominous German overtures, alarmed European reaction and now you see it, now you don’t denial from America’s commander in chief.

  From that date forward the reporters and editors of The New York Times were in a quick step march to keep pace with the unfolding events.

  Canada and Australia, British Commonwealth countries, jump in; James Reston in London for The Times describes a city hunkered down against German air raids and then later chronicles the rise of Winston Churchill. In prescient terms: “War is Mr. Churchill’s natural element. Like a happy old tug-boat captain with a battered sailor’s cap on his head and a dead cigar between his teeth he has looked and sounded like a real war leader.”

  And so he was.

  The news kept on coming, from East and West:

  “BRITISH CHILDREN EVACUATED FROM CITIES”

  “FABLED RUSSIAN WINTER CLOSING IN ON INVADER”

  “SINGAPORE DOUBTS JAPANESE THREATS”

  “U-BOAT SINKS BRITISH BATTLESHIP”

  Charles Lindbergh continues to speak out against the United States getting involved in the war and American mothers of sons storm Congress, demanding the U.S. not get involved.

  But by the fall of 1941 FDR’s private concerns have turned into a roaring war weapons program he calls “The Arsenal of Democracy” and Hanson Baldwin writes in The Times “the Arsenal of Democracy has commenced to bristle with arms.”

  A month and a week later, December 7, 1941, the United States is stunned, attacked on a sunny Sunday morning at Pearl Harbor by the Japanese. It is, as FDR would tell the world, “a day that will live in infamy,” a day that catapulted the United States into the war.

  In the last great naval battles of modern history, the U.S. and Japan fight across the Pacific and on the tiny islands no one had heard of before—Tarawa, Iwo Jima, Guadalcanal—American and Japanese fight hand to hand, face to face in utter savagery.

  A World War unlike any other. In North Africa, Italy, throughout Europe and in western Russian, in all the seas and the skies above.

  Sixteen million Americans are in uniform doing everything from penetrating deep behind enemy lines to baking bread and packing parachutes, from jumping out of airplanes and taking submarines to great depths.

  Russia advances from the east. Allied forces gather in England for the greatest military invasion ever under the command of a genial Kansas farm boy who had been a colonel as late as 1941.

  D-Day, June 6, 1944, the emblematic battle of the war. It was a massive sea, air and land operation and it was the beginning of the end of the Third Reich and the madness of Adolf Hitler.

  Yet, news of the invasion didn’t reach New York Times reporters and other journalists in Washington until three hours after it began.

  From that day on the news began to be more hopeful. Headlines in The Times:

  “NAZIS CONTINUE TO GUESS ABOUT GENERAL PATTON’S ARMY”

  “JAPANESE CRUSHED” (in Saipan)

  “B-29s MAKE THEIR DEBUT”

  “RED ARMY DRIVE

  SHOWS NO SIGN OF FLAGGING”

  Caught in the pincers of Russia advancing from the east and the Allies from the West, the Germans fight on but the wounds are fatal. Adolf Hitler, history’s despot, puts a gun to his head in a Berlin bunker, his malignant dreams of a thousand-year empire, at an end in less than a decade.

  In the Pacific, the Allied spear is now pointed at the Japanese homeland, an invasion that no one welcomes but unless the Japanese surrender, it cannot be avoided.

  But it is, called off by the devastating impact of two bombs, new weapons created out of the terrifying effect of nuclear fusion.

  The madness ends in August 1945. A world war in every sense of the phrase giv
es way to a difficult peace with unprecedented re-building and realignment required, with a new kind of war, a Cold War between the Soviet Union and the West, with the creation of a new nation in the Middle East as a partial tribute to the horrors of the Holocaust.

  An uneasy peace, but a welcome one. Men came home to go to college or go to work in a peacetime economy that had been dormant too long. Women gave birth to a new generation with its own distinctive title. Detroit began to build civilian cars again. Meat was available in the supermarkets, and butter. New cities arose in the southeast, southwest and west.

  Those who had borne the battle left the terrible memories deep in an emotional vault and got on with their lives, determined to make up for all they and their families and friends had sacrificed.

  In these reports from The New York Times you can trace the origins of that chaotic time, share in the momentous decision making, be inspired by the greatness of the leaders of the victors and enraged by the mendacity of the war mongers.

  This is timeless journalism and a gift to those of us who lived through it and those who want to know history’s great question: how did this happen, and how did we prevail.

  Introduction

  “HISTORY IN THE RAW”

  World War II represented a profound challenge to every major newspaper in the democratic world because of its sheer scale, length and complexity. No one in 1939 could possibly have foreseen a war that was to last for six years and cost at least 55 million people their lives. No one in 1939 could have predicted that a war that began with the German invasion of Poland, a conflict confined at first to eastern Europe, would engulf the entire globe, from the Aleutian Islands in the far north of the Pacific to Madagascar in the southern Indian Ocean, from the sea lanes of the Caribbean to the icy waters of northern Norway.

  The complexity of the war derives from the many conflicts now known unsatisfactorily by the single label of World War II. In Asia the Japanese began a war in 1937 against China and then undertook another one in 1941 across the Pacific, and a further campaign into Southeast Asia and toward India. In the Mediterranean, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini began war against Britain and France in June 1940 and then turned to Greece and Africa to try to carve out a new Roman Empire while the West was in crisis. The main threat came from the militarily and industrially powerful Germany. Hitler also found himself fighting two wars, one against the Western democracies, including by 1941 the United States, and a second one of imperial conquest in the Soviet Union. Against the West, at sea and in the air, Germany fought a war based on the most modern science and technology; against the Soviet Union it was more traditional, a clash of mass armies. Descriptions of the German soldiers at Stalingrad read like accounts of the Grand Army of Napoleon that froze to death in Russia 130 years earlier.

  To make sense of these many conflicts, the fighting powers reduced the issue to one of life and death. For the democracies, the whole western tradition and democratic way of life seemed under mortal threat from the menace of militarism and modern authoritarianism. For Germany, Italy and Japan, the world dominated by the democracies and their empires (which were certainly not democratic) seemed to be based on outworn liberal values and a hypocritical defense of political freedom and open trade, which the West failed to honor in practice. They saw their own national futures blighted by Western domination. The Axis powers, as they became known, were ruled by aggressive nationalist regimes that wanted to replace the West’s historical self-importance with what they called a “New Order” in Asia, in the Mediterranean and in Europe. It was against this rising ambition that the rest of the world rallied to support the Allies, who in January 1942 adopted the title United Nations in recognition of the growing number of states who opposed the Axis.

  The major Allies—Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union and China—had very different regimes and antagonistic agendas, but they were united by the single desire to defeat their common enemies as the first step to building a more rational and peaceable world system. It was easy for them to reduce the conflict to a simple right versus wrong, even though from the democracies’ point of view there was a great deal that was wrong with the dictatorships that ruled China and the Soviet Union. The commitment to victory that held the alliance together until 1945 gradually gave way to a new crisis in which wartime friends soon became post-war enemies.

  Through all the years of war The New York Times was dedicated to reporting, without “fear or favor,” as much military and political news as possible. This meant filling the paper with articles and reports and editorials that were devoted to places and issues often remote from American interests. The Times publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, and his editorial staff were committed during the war to making sure their readers were aware of the wider story of the conflict. More than 160 Times correspondents worldwide found themselves in distant geographical areas, following events rather than sitting in The Times bureau in a more familiar capital city. The Times printed more words on the war than any other newspaper, an average of 125,000 every weekday, and 240,000 in the Sunday edition. A million words a day flooded in to New York by radio, telephone or wire, and valuable advertising space was surrendered to make sure all the news was covered. The number of readers increased during the wartime period, from an average 1.26 million (weekday and Sunday) in 1941 to an average 1.47 million in 1945.1 Despite limitations imposed by the wartime scarcity of newsprint, this does not seem to have unduly affected The Times. In late 1942 Sulzberger was invited to join the Publishers Newsprint Committee, which then fixed the allotment of paper at the average consumption in 1941. Under Order L-240, a scheme was established to ensure that every newspaper got its quota of supply. The Times printed more news, particularly world news, than other papers, and those extra pages came at the expense of advertising revenue.2

  Many problems arose in seeking out the news and making sure that it got into print. There was nothing straightforward about wartime reporting and wartime publishing. The first problem was official silence, the second censorship. Military operations were highly secret and the course of battle often shrouded by a deliberate veil of misinformation, or no information at all. The Battle of France in 1940 and the invasion of Normandy in 1944 had to be guessed at by correspondents on the basis of what few reliable communiqués were available. On the Eastern Front and the war in China, there were regular difficulties in getting any worthwhile material. German press conferences in the six months following the Barbarossa campaign launched against the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941 were contrived events with little hard news about the course of war. A major press conference held in early October in Berlin reported that the Soviets were now defeated, a claim that aroused a natural skepticism among the few American correspondents present, and was soon shown to be nonsense.3

  Even when there was news to report, every country practiced censorship to avoid compromising security. This could take many forms, and correspondents became adept at writing copy that skirted what was known of censorship rules, which affected not only text but also images. American newspapers were not permitted to show pictures of dead soldiers or of people weeping. Britain permitted no images of the dead or badly injured from bombing raids.4 Censorship could be a source of real frustration. Raymond Daniell, head of The Times London bureau during the London Blitz of 1940-41, curtly explained how newsmen felt about it:

  “And always there is the censor to deal with. He often is a well-intentioned blunderer who either hopelessly slows things up or is so obtuse about differentiating between military information and harmless speculation that he drives correspondents to the verge of nervous breakdowns.”5

  Daniell thought that censorship, like Prohibition, was “noble in purpose,” but a failure in practice. In dictatorships, censorship was taken for granted as a risk run by all foreign reporters. When The Times’ Austrian correspondent, George E. Gedye, was expelled from Vienna in 1938 for publishing unflattering reports after the German takeover in March, he was told that no reason
had to be given. He left the country accompanied by a detective and was searched thoroughly by customs men who stuck needles into his soap and inspected the cuffs of his trousers.6 Times reporter Otto Tolischus was expelled from Germany in 1941 for articles defying censorship (for which he won a Pulitzer Prize), but then a few months later was imprisoned in Japan for writing articles that the censor had in fact passed.7

  The war exposed The Times overseas’ correspondents to frequent dangers, often in the most remote parts of the world. The dangers were seldom evident in the final reports in the paper, or appreciated by the public that read them. The British novelist W. Somerset Maugham, in a preface to Daniell’s book, gave an honest assessment of their unsung risks:

  “It is not a very safe profession that the newspaper man follows in wartime. Where there is trouble they must get into it if they can. They must have courage and endurance; they must undergo discomfort and often hardship; they must face danger and sometimes death to provide you with the news. But there is no mention in despatches for them; there are no medals or orders; they may show heroism but it will pass unnoticed.”8

  Correspondents wore a military uniform and a helmet at the front line, and the risks they ran were considerable. Two Times correspondents were killed. Byron Darnton was the victim of “friendly fire” from a B-25 light bomber that mistakenly attacked his landing craft on the way to Buna in New Guinea. Robert Post of the London bureau was lost in one of the first Eighth Air Force missions over Germany against the port of Wilhelmshaven in February 1943. Richard Johnston was wounded in an American attack on the French port of Brest, and Hal Denny, who had already been captured in North Africa and interrogated (in this case painlessly) by the Gestapo, was hit by bomb fragments in Belgium. Out of the Times staff, 910 served in the three services, and nineteen of them died.9

  One of the most remarkable stories involved the diminutive theater critic Brooks Atkinson, who became impatient to report on the war rather than Broadway shows. In late 1942 he traveled to Africa where he filed his first war report, and then on to China as correspondent in the China-Burma theater. Atkinson was the first to hear in October 1944 that Chiang Kai-shek had asked for General Stilwell to be recalled as his American adviser, and to avoid the censor he took a difficult route all the way back to New York to file the story. He had become so ill in China that he was immediately hospitalized on his return, his weight reduced to a fraction of his already meager body by the harsh conditions he had faced in Asia.10