ABSTRACT
Allied commander U.S. general Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1944. (AFPIGetty Images)
James Doolittle Gives America Hope
If they could have seen the future, the soldiers of Hitler's army, the Wehrmacht, would have thrown down their machine guns and flamethrowers and surrendered in goose-stepping unison the minute Hitler declared war on the United States. If they could have seen the future, the Japanese would have skipped bombing Pearl Harbor, thereby avoiding the Bataan Death March in the Philippines, the firebombing of Tokyo, and the incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If he could have seen the future, Allied Supreme Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower might have rushed his troops into Berlin in April 1945 rather than allowing the Soviet army to get there first
Instead the Wehrmacht occupied more than fifteen nations, slaughtered more than 15 million civilians and soldiers, and continued to fight even through the last cold winter of1944-1945, when it equipped sixteen-year-olds to face Allied armies pounding in from east and west The Wehrmacht's last stand following the D-day invasion of Normandy, France, on June 6,1944, enabled Nazi executioners at Treblinka, Auschwitz, Sobibor, Dachau, B ergen-B elsen, and other death camps to kill more than half a million Jews during those last six months of 1944 alone: a hellish near-realization of the "Final Solution" that had sprung from the diseased imaginations of SS leader Heinrich Himmler and his deputy, Reinhard Heydrich, in a Berlin suburb called Wannsee in January 1942. Before Stalin's RedArmy liberatedAuschwitz in January 1945, doctors Josef Mengele and Carl Clauberg erased the boundaries of cruelty in experiments that subjected Jewish and Gypsy men, women, and children to dehydration, starvation, chemical burns, sterilization without anesthetics, injection with tetanus and malaria, and all kinds of psychological tests, including the study of the brains of dead children who had been informed prior to execution that they were slated to die. Common foot soldiers of the Wehrmacht sent home grinning photographs of themselves tanding proudly over the limp bodies of just-murdered Jews.1 Even after the death camps were liberated by Allied soldiers who saw living skeletons lying in mute anguish, the United States showed mercy to the citizens of West Germany and poured millions of dollars into the economy to rebuild what had been lost Postwar Europe's resurrection happened thanks to the manna of American money judiciously spent The punitive reparation payments foisted onto Germany as part of the peace settlement after World War I were mostly discarded in 1945 in favor of making Western European democracies a stable barrier against Soviet-style communism looming to the east
In the Pacific in December 1941, Japanese forces stormed General Douglas MacArthur's joint American-Filipino army the day after Pearl Harbor. Two weeks later, MacArthur ordered his forces to retreat from the capital of Manila
and to fortify themselves in the forested mountains of the Bataan Peninsula. Facing starvation and no prospect of reinforcements-and with MacArthur gone in March 1942 to Australia-a u.s. general surrendered on April 9. The Japanese lost no opportunity to torture and humiliate their captives on what has become known as the Bataan Death March. After fourteen day s and ninety mosquito-filled miles, nearly 20,000 American and Filipino soldiers were dead from disease, physical abuse, and lack of food and water. A few captives were crucified with bayonets, most had their possessions tolen, and all had to endure hours in the blazing sun sitting next to occasional supplies of potable water they were not allowed to touch. By June 1942, Japanese control over the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere-a jelly-filled euphemism for "empire"-seemed certain. Dutch oil reserves in Indonesia, rubber plantations in Vietnam, and the unlimited resources of China's coast were being plundered daily. All that remained was to capture Australia, defeat a few scraggly European, American, Chinese, and Indian armies, and rule. Japan was winning its war.
