World War II

World War II (WWII or WW2), also known as the Second World War, was a global war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all the great powers—forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis. In a state of total war, directly involving more than 100 million personnel from more than 30 countries, the major participants threw their entire economic, industrial, and scientific capabilities behind the war effort, blurring the distinction between civilian and military resources. World War II was the deadliest conflict in human history, resulting in 70 to 85 million fatalities, with more civilians than military personnel killed. Tens of millions of people died due to genocides (including the Holocaust), premeditated death from starvation, massacres, and disease. Aircraft played a major role in the conflict, including in strategic bombing of population centres, and the only uses of nuclear weapons in war.

Origins of the War

1933

• Du bist nichts; Dein Volk ist alles.
  • You are nothing; your people is everything.
  • Adolf Hitler, in Reden, Schriften, Anordnungen: Februar 1925 bis Januar 1933, p. 403

1936

• It is us today. It will be you tomorrow.
  • Haile Selassie I after the end of the Second Italo-Abyssinian War, as quoted in ""The Lion is Freed" in TIME magazine (8 September 1975)

1938

• More and more we felt that only a resolution of the European situation could save Spain, if Spain was to be saved. The Blum Government, at least, had recognized the importance of Spain to French security. The Daladier outfit was hand in glove, not only with its own brand of Fascists, but with the foreign gang as well. (Class is thicker than nationality.) "Why doesn't France do something?" became a cliché. "Don't they see that if Hitler and his little pal take over Spain, France will be strangled on three fronts?" Well, either they didn't see it or they didn't care, which was more likely. The French people were with us heart and soul; they had given thousands of their best sons, millions of their money; the French people's rulers were against us. They bore no ill-will toward the Fascists; they were Fascist.
  • Alvah Bessie, Men in Battle: A Story of Americans in Spain (1939), p. 180

• Men went to Spain for various reasons, but behind almost every man I met there was a common restlessness, a loneliness. In action these men would fight like devils, with the desperation of an iron-bound conscience; in private conversation there was something else again.
  • Alvah Bessie, Men in Battle: A Story of Americans in Spain (1939), p. 181-182

• Hitler and Mussolini never could afford to withdraw their 'volunteers'- ten times as many as we had- and it could no longer be denied that the British Government was a silent partner in the Fascist Powers' attempts to strangle Spain; that we were witnessing one of the most amazing and cynical displays of hypocrisy in world history.
  • Alvah Bessie, Men in Battle: A Story of Americans in Spain (1939), p. 192-193

• They had started at twenty thousand feet, mixed it up till you couldn't tell what they were doing, and the scream of their propellors as they dived sounded in our ears as though they were directly overhead. Three went down in flames, one after the other, with two parachutes blooming suddenly like spring flowers in the air, and floating slowly down. You could see the men hauling on the shrouds to guide the chutes, swinging wildly from side to side like pendulums as their own planes, Fascists, dived at them and tried to machine-gun them. "The bastards!" Aaron said. "Look at them, the sons-of-bitches!" Two of our planes spiralled slowly around the descending pilots to protect them. "This is one hell of a war," Aaron said.
  • Alvah Bessie, Men in Battle: A Story of American in Spain (1939), p. 269

• Fog meant no airplanes, so we could relax. Yesterday they had been active all day, bombing Pinell behind us, Corbera and the road to Gandesa on our right, Mora and our lines of communication. We could see them from the hilltop, cruising slowly in formidable array and with damnable slowness over the terrain, sowing their seed up and down, back and forth over large square areas, and for hours the air was full of smoke and dust and trembling with the constant drumming of the explosive. Our 'pom-pom' guns sniped at them pitiably. This is a long, light anti-aircraft gun that was fairly effective, but we had s few that they paid no attention to them. Seventy-five planes merely sailed with exasperating ease through their sparse fire; then when ten of ours appeared they had to run a gauntlet of fire that blackened the sky for hundreds of acres. It was heart-breaking, and you could thank France for that; you could thank England and its Non-Intervention Committee; you could thank Italy and Germany, and last but not least you could thank the good old U.S.A. and its 'Neutrality' Act, that permitted the sale of American-made munitions to Italy and Germany for transhipment to Franco.
  • Alvah Bessie, Men in Battle: A Story of American in Spain (1939), p. 282-283

• The news from Europe was worse than ever, with England and France agreeing to the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia and presenting a 'plan' of compromise to her. This plan was cynical in the extreme: it involved outright cession of the Sudeten areas; the autonomy of other regions containing a large German population; the 'neutralization' of Czechoslovakia in the event of a major conflict between other powers, and the usual 'guarantees' of her frontiers by England, France, Germany and Italy. The murderers were guaranteeing to respect the corpse! These terms, we believed, the present Czech Government would never accept. It had an army second to none. Its people had tasted years of true democracy. It had a munitions industry that any one could well have envied (many did). And so we expected that France would respect her previous commitments, that popular indignation in both France and England would bring about the fall of their respective cabinets. We were wrong.
  • Alvah Bessie, Men in Battle: A Story of Americans in Spain (1939), p. 336-337

• Thus, by every device from the stick to the carrot, the emaciated Austrian donkey is made to pull the Nazi barrow up an ever-steepening hill.
  • Winston Churchill, "The Rape of Austria," letter (July 6, 1938), in Churchill, Step by Step, 1936–1939 (1939), p. 262. This volume is a compilation of the fortnightly letters he wrote from 1936–1939, mainly on foreign policy and defense.

• Many soldiers went beyond rape to disembowel women, slice off their breasts, nail them alive to walls. Fathers were forced to rape their daughters, and sons their mothers, as other family members watched. Not only did live burials, castration, the carving of organs and the roasting of people become routine, but more diabolical tortures were practiced, such as hanging people by their tongues on iron hooks or burying people to their waists and watching them torn apart by German shepherds. So sickening was the spectacle that even Nazis in the city were horrified.
  • Iris Chang NYTimes

• Peace in our time.
  • Neville Chamberlain, Speech at Heston Airport (30 September, 1938), 1938: 'Peace for our time' - Chamberlain part of the BBC "On this day" series]

• I believe there is sincerity and good will on both sides. My main purpose has been to work for the pacification of Europe.... The question of Czechoslovakia is the latest and perhaps the most dangerous [problem]. Now that we have got past it I feel that it may be possible to make further progress along the road to sanity.
  • Prime Minister Chamberlain, defending his actions — including giving German-speaking areas of Czechoslovakia to Germany -- at the Munich Conference (October 3, 1938).^{[specific citation needed]}

• How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas masks here because of a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing. It seems still more impossible that a quarrel which has already been settled in principle should be the subject of war.
  • Neville Chamberlain, national broadcast, London (September 27, 1938); in Chamberlain, In Search of Peace (1939), p. 174. He was prime minister at the time.

• Many people, no doubt, honestly believe that they are only giving away the interests of Czechoslovakia, whereas I fear we shall find that we have deeply compromised, and perhaps fatally endangered, the safety and even the independence of Great Britain and France....
  I foresee and foretell that the policy of submission will carry with it restrictions upon the freedom of speech and debate in Parliament, on public platforms, and discussions in the Press.
  • Winston Churchill, speech in Parliament attacking Prime Minister Chamberlain's policy of appeasing Hitler.^{[specific citation needed]}

• What a shambles! If only our enemies knew what a mess we have made of it! Beneš was a fool not to fight!
  • Walter von Reichenau on October 3, 1938, in the Park Hotel in Karlsbad after the annexation of the Sudetenland territory of Czechoslovakia into Germany. As quoted by Leonard Mosley in On Borrowed Time: How World War II Began (1964), p. 78.

1939

• The frontier of America is on the Rhine.
  • Attributed to Franklin D. Roosevelt, by a member or members of the Senate Committee on Military Affairs, meeting in executive session at the White House (January 31, 1939); in Whitney H. Shepardson and William O. Scroggs, The United States in World Affairs (1940), p. 104. Reports of this remark caused an outcry by American isolationists and in the German press, while they gave courage to the British and French. Roosevelt vehemently denied the remark, calling it a "deliberate lie" at his press conference on February 3. The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1939 (1941), p. 113. Representative John A. Martin referred to this in remarks in the House during a discussion of building military airplanes: "A controversy has been raging over an alleged private remark of the President that the frontier of America is on the Rhine. Whether he said it or not, the frontier of America has been on the Rhine, and beyond. An American Army has trod the soil of Germany. The American frontier has been on the coasts of Europe, of Africa, and of Asia, when those coasts were vastly more distant from ours than they are today". Congressional Record (February 14, 1939), vol. 84, p. 1394.

• Some recent work by E. Fermi and L. Szilard... leads me to expect that the element uranium may be turned to a new and important source of energy in the immediate future. Certain aspects of the situation call for watchfulness and, if necessary, quick action on the part of the administration.....
  In the course of the last four months it has been made... possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium, by which vast amounts of power... would be generated. Now it appears almost certain that this could be achieved in the immediate future.
  This new phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs, and it is conceivable — though much less certain — that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed. A single bomb of this type, carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory. However, such bombs might very well prove too heavy for transportation by air...
  In view of this situation you may think it desirable to have some permanent contact maintained between the administration and the group of physicists working on chain reactions in America.
  • Letter dated August 2 (one month before the start of World War II) from physicist Albert Einstein to President Roosevelt, warning him of the danger that Nazi Germany could develop an atomic bomb. This led to two later developments:
    (1) Roosevelt’s efforts to aid all countries at war with Nazi Germany, to help them defeat Germany before it could develop an atomic bomb, and
    (2) the top-secret "Manhattan Project" in which the government did in fact work together with "the group of physicists working on chain reactions in America" to develop an atomic bomb.

• There is a hush over all Europe, nay, over all the world…. Alas! it is the hush of suspense, and in many lands it is the hush of fear. Listen! No, listen carefully, I think I hear something—yes, there it was quite clear. Don't you hear it? It is the tramp of armies crunching the gravel of the paradegrounds, splashing through rain-soaked fields, the tramp of two million German soldiers and more than a million Italians—"going on maneuvers"—yes, only on maneuvers!
  • Winston Churchill, "A Hush over Europe", broadcast to the United States from London (August 8, 1939), in Robert Rhodes James, ed., Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches, 1897–1963 (1974), vol. 6, p. 6150.

Start of the War

1939

Now that we have resolved to finish it, I know that you will all play your part with calmness and courage. ~ Neville Chamberlain

• I am speaking to you from the cabinet room of 10 Downing Street. This morning the British Ambassador in Berlin handed the German Government a final note, stating that, unless we heard from them by 11 o'clock that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received and that consequently this country is at war with Germany.
  • Neville Chamberlain, Broadcast from the Cabinet Rooms at 10 Downing Street (3 September 1939)

• His actions shows convincingly that there is no chance of expecting that this man will ever give up his practice of using force to gain his will. He can only be stopped by force. And we and France, are today, in fulfillment of our obligations, going to the aid of Poland who is so bravely resisting this wicked and unprovoked attack upon her people.
  • Neville Chamberlain, Broadcast from the Cabinet Rooms at 10 Downing Street (3 September 1939)

• The situation in which no word given by Germany's ruler could be trusted, and no people or country could feel itself safe, has become intolerable. Now that we have resolved to finish it, I know that you will all play your part with calmness and courage.
  • Neville Chamberlain, Broadcast from the Cabinet Rooms at 10 Downing Street (3 September 1939)

• Now may God bless you all, and may he defend the right. For it is evil things that we will be fighting against—brute force, bad faith, injustice, oppression and persecution—and against them I am certain that the right will prevail.
  • Neville Chamberlain, Broadcast from the Cabinet Rooms at 10 Downing Street (3 September 1939)

1940

• The gratitude of every home in our Island, in our Empire, and indeed throughout the world, except in the abodes of the guilty, goes out to the British airmen who, undaunted by odds, unwearied in their constant challenge and mortal danger, are turning the tide of the World War by their prowess and by their devotion. Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.
  • Winston Churchill, speech during the Battle of Britain, House of Commons (August 20, 1940), in Robert Rhodes James, ed., Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches, 1897–1963 (1974), vol. 6, p. 6266.

• We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old."
  • Winston Churchill, Speech in the House of Commons (4 June 1940); It has been noted that the most famous passage, beginning "We shall fight on the beaches ..." and ending "… we shall never surrender," consists entirely of words derived from Old English (Anglo-Saxon), except for the word "surrender" — which is derived from Old French.

• What General Weygand called the Battle of France is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, "This was their finest hour."
  • Winston Churchill, speech, House of Commons (June 18, 1940), in Robert Rhodes James, ed., Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches, 1897–1963 (1974), vol. 6, p. 6238.

• France has lost a battle, but France has not lost the war.
  • Leader of the Free French Charles de Gaulle, in the Appeal of 18 June.

• I followed the German Army into Paris that June... and on June 19 got wind of where Hitler was going to lay down his terms for the armistice.... It was to be on the same spot where the German Empire had capitulated to France and her allies on November 11, 1918: in the little clearing in the woods of Compiègne. There the Nazi warlord would get his revenge.... Late on the afternoon of June 19 I drove out there and found German Army engineers... pulling the [railroad] car [where the war ended in 1918] out to the tracks in the center of the clearing on the exact spot, they said, where it had stood at 5 A.M. on November, 1918, when at the dictation of [French Marshal Ferdinand] Foch the German emissaries put their signatures to the armistice.
  And so was that on the afternoon of June 21 I stood by the edge of the forest at Compiègne to observe the latest and greatest of Hitler’s triumphs....
  I look at the expression in Hitler’s face. I am but fifty yards from him and see him through my glasses as though he were directly in front of me. I have seen that face many times at the great moments of his life. But today! It is afire with scorn, anger, hate, revenge, triumph.
  • American war correspondent William L. Shirer, in his The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960).

• Hitler is striking with all the terrible force at his command. His is a desperate gamble, and the stakes are nothing less than domination of the whole human race.
  If Hitler wins in Europe -- the strength of the British and French armies and navies is forever broken — the United States will find itself alone in a barbaric world — a world ruled by Nazis, with ‘spheres of influence’ assigned to their totalitarian allies. However different the dictatorships may be, racially, they all agree on one primary objective: ‘Democracy must be wiped from the face of the earth.’...
  There is nothing shameful in our desire to stay out of war, to save our youth from the dive bombers and the flame throwing tanks in the unutterable hell of modern warfare.
  But is there not an evidence of suicidal insanity in our failure to help those who now stand between us and the creators of this hell?
  • Newspaper advertisement from the Committee to Defend America, whose ideas were identical with those of President Roosevelt.^{[specific citation needed]}

• All aid to the Allies short of war.
  • President Roosevelt's redefinition of neutrality.^{[citation needed]}

• We must be the great arsenal of democracy.
  • President Roosevelt, on the need to provide weapons to the British after the Germans defeated France in May-June 1940.^{[citation needed]}

• First they were too cowardly to take part. now they are in a hurry so they can share the spoils.
  • Hitler on the Italian declaration of war on France and Great Britain, June 10th, 1940.-Martin Gilber, the Second World war pg. 90.

• On this tenth day of June 1940, the hand that held the dagger, has struck it into the back of its neighbor.
  • Franklin Roosevelt on the Italian decleration of war on France and Britain, June 10th, 1940.-Martin Gilber, the Second World war pg. 90.

• I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again: your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.
  • Statement by President Roosevelt during his re-election campaign.^{[citation needed]}

• The butchering may continue as it will, it shall remain the historical guilt of the Western powers that they did not promptly provide the sharpest preventative measures against the continued attack-politics Germany undertook. Possibilities existed for this, but no measures were seized upon.
  • Friedrich Kellner, German Chief Justice Inspector, diary entry of May 29, 1940.

1941

• Give us the tools, and we will finish the job.
  • Winston Churchill, radio broadcast, London (February 9, 1941), in Robert Rhodes James, ed., Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches, 1897–1963 (1974), vol. 6, p. 6350.

• Our spirit of enjoyment was stronger than our spirit of sacrifice. We wanted to have more than we wanted to give. We tried to spare effort, and met disaster.
  • Philippe Pétain. Attributed to him in a caption, which said, "Frenchmen … heard Marshal Pétain pronounce this requiem over a lost France". The caption accompanies an article, "Danger: Men Not at Work!" by Hatton W. Summers, Nation's Business (May 1941), p. 15.

• The Lend-Lease policy, translated into legislative form, stunned a Congress and a nation wholly sympathetic to Great Britain. The Kaiser’s blank check to Austria-Hungary in the First World War was a piker compared to the Roosevelt blank check of World War II. It warranted my worst fears for the future of America, and it definitely stamps the president as war-minded....
  Never before have the American people been asked or compelled to give... so completely of their tax dollars to any foreign nation. Never before has the Congress of the United States been asked by any President to violate international law. Never before has this nation resorted to duplicity in the conduct of its foreign affairs. Never before has the United States given to one man the power to strip this nation of its defenses....
  Approval of this legislation means war, open and complete warfare. I, therefore, ask the American people before they supinely accept it — Was the last World War worthwhile?
  If it were, then we should lend and lease war materials. If it were, then we should lend and lease American boys. President Roosevelt has said we would be repaid by England. We will be.... Our boys will be returned — returned in caskets, maybe; returned with bodies maimed; returned with minds warped and twisted by sights of horrors and the scream and shriek of high-powered shells.
  • Senator Burton K. Wheeler, opposing the Lend-Lease Act.^{[citation needed]}

• I know I will be severely criticized by the interventionists in America when I say we should not enter a war unless we have a reasonable chance of winning.... We are no better prepared today than France was when the interventionists persuaded her to attack the Siegfried Line....
  It is not only our right but it is our obligation as American citizens to look at this war objectively and to weigh our chances for success if we should enter it. I have attempted to do this, especially from the standpoint of aviation; and I have been forced to the conclusion that we cannot win this war for England, regardless of how much assistance we extend.
  • Charles Lindbergh, opposing Lend-Lease.^{[citation needed]}

• Joint declaration of the President of United States and the Prime Minister, Mr. Churchill, representing His Majesty’s government in the United Kingdom....
  First, their countries seek no aggrandizement, territorial or other.
  Second, they desire to see no territorial changes that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned.
  Third, they respect the rights of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live.
  Fourth, they will endeavor, with due respect for their existing obligations, to further the enjoyment of all states, great or small, victor or vanquished, of access, on equal terms, to the trade and to the raw materials of the world.
  Fifth, they desire to bring about the fullest collaboration between all nations in the economic field....
  Sixth, after the final destruction of Nazi Germany, they hope to see established a peace which will afford to all nations the means of dwelling in safety within their own boundaries....
  Seventh, such a peace should enable all men to traverse the high seas and oceans without hindrance.
  Eighth, they believe that all of the nations of the world, for realistic as well as spiritual reasons, must come to the abandonment of the use of force.... They believe, pending the establishment of a wider and permanent system of general security, that the disarmament of such nations is essential.”
  • The Atlantic Charter, written by President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill, meeting on two warships off Newfoundland in August 1941.

• When I warned them [the French] that Britain would fight on alone whatever they did, their generals told their Prime Minister and his divided Cabinet, "In three weeks England will have her neck wrung like a chicken." Some chicken! Some neck!
  • Winston Churchill, speech to a joint session of the Canadian Parliament, Ottawa, Canada (December 30, 1941), in Robert Rhodes James, ed., Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches, 1897–1963 (1974), vol. 6, p. 6544.

The Blitz

1941

• Some of us remember the Blitz and the burning,
  The black-faced force in the red and the blue,
  St Paul's in peril and the Hun returning,
  The tanks all dry and the night half through.
  • British writer A. P. Herbert, from a "Seeing it Through" poster by Eric Kennington (1944). The "black-faced force" was the London Fire Brigade.

The Eastern Front

1941

• We have only to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down.
  • Adolf Hitler, on the proposed invasion of the Soviet Union.

• There is no doubt that the absence of a second front in Europe considerably relieves the position of the German Army, nor can there be any doubt that the appearance of a second front on the Continent of Europe—and undoubtedly this will appear in the near future—will essentially relieve the position of our armies to the detriment of the German Army.
  • Joseph Stalin, radio address from Moscow (November 6, 1941). Vital Speeches of the Day (December 1, 1941), p. 102.

• .... Comrades, Red Army and Red Navy men, commanders and political instructors, men and women guerrillas! The whole world is looking to you as a force capable of destroying the brigand hordes of German invaders. The enslaved peoples of Europe under the yoke of the German invaders are looking to you as their liberators. A great mission of liberation has fallen to your lot. Be worthy of this mission! The war you are waging is a war of liberation, a just war.
  • Joseph Stalin, Stalin speech-- November 7, 1941
• Regarding the conduct of troops towards the Bolshevistic system, vague ideas are still prevalent in many cases. The most essential aim of war against the Jewish-Bolshevistic system is a complete destruction of their means of power and the elimination of Asiatic influence from the European culture. In this connection the troops are facing tasks that exceed the one-sided routine of soldiering. The soldier in the Eastern territories is not merely a fighter according to the rules of the art of war but also a bearer of ruthless national ideology and the avenger of bestialities which have been inflicted upon German and racially related nations. Therefore, the soldier must have full understanding for the necessity of a severe but just revenge on subhuman Jewry. The Army has to aim at another purpose, i.e., the annihilation of revolts in the hinterland, which, as experience proves, have always been caused by Jews.
  • Walter von Reichenau, "Orders for Conduct in the East," Issued on 10 October 1941. First published in Office of U.S. Chief of Counsel for the Prosecution of Axis Criminality, Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Princeton Office, 1946), 8:585–87.

1942

• Not a step back! (Russian: Ни шагу назад! / Ni shagu nazad!)
  • Order No. 227, Issued by Joseph Stalin, July 1942.

• What place does the possibility of a second front occupy in the Soviet estimates of the current situation? A most important place; one might say a place of first-rate importance.
  • Joseph Stalin, letter to Henry C. Cassidy, representative of The Associated Press in Moscow (October 4, 1942); in The New York Times, October 5, 1942, p. 1.

• The street is no longer measured by meters but by corpses ... Stalingrad is no longer a town. By day it is an enormous cloud of burning, blinding smoke; it is a vast furnace lit by the reflection of the flames. And when night arrives, one of those scorching howling bleeding nights, the dogs plunge into the Volga and swim desperately to gain the other bank. The nights of Stalingrad are a terror for them. Animals flee this hell; the hardest stones cannot bear it for long; only men endure.
  • German officer on the Battle of Stalingrad, as quoted in Max Hastings' Inferno: The World At War, 1939-1945 (2012)

1944

• Two break-throughs, Comrade Stalin, two break-throughs.
  • Konstantin Rokossovsky, on the plan for Operation Bagration.

• There are two kinds of mines; one is the personnel mine and the other is the vehicular mine. When we come to a mine field our infantry attacks exactly as if it were not there. The losses we get from personnel mines we consider only equal to those we would have gotten from machine guns and artillery if the Germans had chosen to defend that particular area with strong bodies of troops instead of with mine fields. The attacking infantry does not set off the vehicular mines, so after they have penetrated to the far side of the field they form a bridgehead, after which the engineers come up and dig out channels through which our vehicles can go.
  • Attributed to Georgy K. Zhukov by Dwight D. Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe (1948), p. 467–68. Eisenhower added, "I had a vivid picture of what would happen to any American or British commander if he pursued such tactics, and I had an even more vivid picture of what the men in any one of our divisions would have had to say about the matter had we attempted to make such a practice a part of our tactical doctrine. Americans assess the cost of war in terms of human lives, the Russians in the over-all drain on the nation".

Japan Attacks Pearl Harbor (Dec. 7, 1941)

1927

• In the future if we want to control China, we must first crush the United States just as in the past we had to fight in the Russo-Japanese War. But in order to conquer China we must first conquer Manchuria and Mongolia. In order to conquer the world, we must first conquer China. If we succeed in conquering China the rest of the Asiatic countries and the South Sea countries will fear us and surrender to us. Then the world will realize that Eastern Asia is ours and will not dare to violate our rights. This is the plan left to us by Emperor Meiji, the success of which is essential to our national existence.
  • The Tanaka Memorial (July 27, 1927), the long-term strategic plan of Japanese Prime Minister Tanaka Gi-ichi.

1941

• It has been 20 years since the Navy signed the humiliating Washington Naval Treaty. During [that] time we have whetted our swords to stab [the] US.
  • A Japanese officer.^{[citation needed]}

• The Empire will... crush America, British, and Dutch strongholds in East Asia and the Western Pacific... and secure major resource areas and lines of communication in order to prepare a posture of long term self-sufficiency. All available methods will be exerted to lure out the main elements of the US fleet at an appropriate time to attack and destroy them.
  • Tai Bei-Ei-Ran-Shou Senso Shumatsu Sokushin-ni Kansuru Fukuan (A Plan for Completion of the War Against the United States, Great Britain, the Netherlands, and Chiang Kai-Shek [of Nationalist China]), action plan adopted at a meeting of the Japanese Imperial General Headquarters and the Cabinet (November 1941).

• Nii Taka Yama Nobore 1208. (Execute the Hawaii operation on December 8 [Japanese time]).
  • Message sent by Japanese Imperial Navy Headquarters to the carrier fleet approaching Pearl Harbor (2 December 1941).^{[citation needed]}

• Tora! Tora! Tora!
  • (Translated: Tiger! Tiger! Tiger!'); signal at 0730 (local time), 7 December 1941 from Commander Mitsuo Fuchida, leading the first wave of the attack, to the carrier fleet that his "tigers" succeeded in their surprise attack at Pearl Harbor.^{[citation needed]}

• Yesterday, December 7, 1941 — a date which will live in infamy — the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.
  The attack yesterday on the Hawaiian Islands has caused severe damage to American naval and military forces. Very many American lives have been lost....
  As commander in chief of the Army and Navy I have directed that all measures be taken for our defense.
  Always we will remember the character of the onslaught against us. No matter how long it my take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people, in their righteous might, will win through to absolute victory. I believe I interpret the will of the Congress and of the people when I assert that we will not only defend ourselves to the uttermost but will make very certain that this form of treachery shall never endanger us again....
  With confidence in our armed forces — with the unbounded determination of our people — we will gain the inevitable triumph — so help us God.
  I ask that the Congress declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday, December, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese Empire.
  • Franklin D. Roosevelt, address to a joint session of Congress asking that a state of war be declared between the United States and Japan (December 8, 1941); in The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1941 (1950), p. 514.

• I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.
  • Attributed to Isoroku Yamamoto, a Japanese admiral in World War II, in the motion picture Tora, Tora, Tora. Twentieth Century Fox, Tora, Tora, Tora; Dialogue and Cutting Continuity (1970), reel 18, p. 16. The screenplay was written by Gordon W. Prange, based on his unpublished material, and by Ladislas Farago, who had published The Broken Seal in 1967. The sentence is not in Farago's book, nor did it appear later in Prange's book, At Dawn We Slept, published posthumously in 1981. No evidence exists that these words were Yamamoto's. However, in a letter to Ogata Taketora, dated January 9, 1942, Yamamoto wrote, "A military man can scarcely pride himself on having 'smitten a sleeping enemy'; in fact, to have it pointed out is more a matter of shame". Hirosuki Asawa, The Reluctant Admiral, trans. John Bester (1979), p. 285.

• Both America and Britain... have aggravated the disturbances in East Asia.... These two powers, inducing other countries to follow suit, increased military preparations on all sides of our Empire.... They have obstructed by every means Our peaceful commerce, and finally resorted to a direct severance of economic relations....
  Patently We waited and long have We endured, in hope that Our Government might retrieve the situation in peace. But Our adversaries, showing not the least spirit of conciliation, have unduly delayed a settlement.... Our Empire for its existence and self-defense has no other recourse but to appeal to arms and to crush every obstacle in its path.
  • Japanese Emperor Hirohito, stating Japan’s reasons for attacking the United States and Great Britain (December 8, 1941).^{[citation needed]}

The United States Fights Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy

1941

• I don't see much future for the Americans ... it's a decayed country. And they have their racial problem, and the problem of social inequalities ... my feelings against Americanism are feelings of hatred and deep repugnance ... everything about the behaviour of American society reveals that it's half Judaised, and the other half negrified. How can one expect a State like that to hold together?
  • Adolf Hitler, Statement in conversation, 7 January 1942, as quoted in Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer p. 895, from transcripts published as Hitler's Secret Conversations, 1941–1944 (1953). These should not be confused with later publications such as "Hitler's Secret Book" (1961) from transcripts of 1928, nor the widely known hoax of the Hitler Diaries.

1942

• The time has come when we must proceed with the business of carrying the war to the enemy, not permitting the greater portion of our armed forces and our valuable material to be immobilized within the continental United States.
  • George C. Marshall, Army chief of staff, as reported by the Washington, D.C., Times-Herald (March 3, 1942), p. 1.

• Why am I fighting?
  Not, certainly, ‘just because I was drafted’ — the cynical, easy retort of the half-believer. I was a draftee, yes — because circumstances prevented me from joining up when I should have liked. I envy and honor the boys who enlisted — the ones who, seeing their country’s need, acted upon it without waiting to be called — or compelled.
  Not just because of Pearl Harbor. That’s an immediate reason, yes,... [b]ut Pearl Harbor, or some other harbor, would have come sooner or later; indeed, might have come too late....
  Not to “force our ideas on the rest of the world”.... I am fighting for the right of peoples to say how they shall be governed. If they like our form of government, fine. If not, let them have another — but let the choice be theirs, not something handed down to them by a self-styled “Leader” — or a yoke laid on them by an invader....
  For what, exactly, are we fighting?...
  Well, it goes a long way back.
  It goes back to the taproots of America. Back beyond the World War, with its simple slogan of fighting to make the world safe for democracy. Back beyond ‘98, when we fought to set Cuba free. Back beyond the Civil War when we fought to make and keep America a nation of freemen. Back beyond 1812, when our cry was freedom of the seas. Back even beyond the Revolution that saw our forefathers pledge ‘their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor’ that the colonies might be freed from the yoke of the Hanoverian king. Back to the Bill of Rights, back, back to the Magna Carta seven hundred years ago — that first great landmark of man’s history-long effort to be politically free.... Freedom of the individual to rule himself, to make his laws, to have his say in council, to set his course and follow his star!
  Fine words you say; but what do they have to do with fighting a Germany whose chief concern was Europe, a Japan whose ambitions were — perhaps — only Oriental?
  I say they have a lot to do with Japan and Germany.... Nazism dominant in Europe and Asia would result... In the emergence and ultimate dominance of the Nazi principle in American life.
  Men (some, not all — but alas! Enough) would have looked at each other in confusion and alarm and doubt. They would have said, fearingly, ‘Democracy has failed in Europe. We thought it was the best way, but how can it be, if it is so weak? Maybe the Nazis have something. Maybe... maybe...’ So the whispers would have started....
  That’s why I am fighting.... I’m trying to kill Fascism now, before it has a chance to eat in its ugly way at the American vitals.... I’m fighting because the world, like our own America, ‘cannot exist half slave and half free.’ I’m fighting because I think China has a right to live as a nation, not exist as a vast puppet state....
  I’m fighting because I want to be able to look my children in the face some day and say to them that America wasn’t afraid to fight once again for an ideal, the ideals that have made America great. I love peace, but I hate war for the shocking waste of everything that it is; but even war is preferable to supine acquiescence in international murder, not merely of the body, but of the spirit.
  • Sgt. Henry C. Nelson, “To Be Able to Look My Children in the Face,” in Why I Fight, published by the U.S. Army.

• The mightiest bomber ever built.
  • A description of the B-17 Flying Fortress, flown to England to participate in Eighth Air Force bombing attacks on German industrial targets.^{[citation needed]}

• I fail to detect a spirit of sacrifice in the group gyrations before Congress. Neither does it indicate that we have a spiritual grasp of our threatening fate when we sell bonds to help finance a war of survival or extermination on the promise of profitable monetary returns on the investment. I see no fundamental grasp of our predicament in anti-union employers who sabotage production committees for fear that industry will be sovietized, nor in labor union leaders who are so concerned about the competitive position of their own little groups as to examine the war with regard to how their own puny fortunes will be affected if labor unity is achieved or jurisdictional lines are eradicated.

  I think our insufferable and materialistic pride has rendered us incapable of realizing fully that in German nazism we are fighting a monstrous thing that started out as a god-man complex, and now is fighting to the death whether that god-man complex still exists or not, in the desperate realization that nazism and the deluded fools who are backing nazism cannot survive if they do not win and exterminate their victims.

  • Ralph Austin Bard, United States Assistant Secretary of the Navy, to the Industrial Union of Marine and Shipbuilding Workers of America, New York City, September 24, 1942. ^[1]

Second Battle of El Alamein (23 October – 11 November 1942)

Winston Churchill stated that before Alamein, the Allies had never had a victory and that after they never had a defeat. ~ Christian House

• Houdini reportedly claimed that, "what the eyes see and the ears hear, the mind believes". This could have been the motto of the camouflage unit sent to the North African campaign at the height of the Second World War. In The Phantom Army of Alamein, Rick Stroud has illuminated the shadowy antics of this little-recognised outfit during the battle of El Alamein. In doing so, he has created a fascinating study of how the most unlikely characters can become heroes.
  Among their fold were engravers, painters, cartoonists and sculptors, and their commander, Major Geoffrey Barkas, was an Oscar-winning film director. The brief was to support the Army using a combination of concealment and embellishment created with whatever came to hand. The Surrealist Roland Penrose tutored them, his lover Lee Miller posing nude in camouflage cream and netting as inspiration. And one of the more grandiose members was the Piccadilly magician Jasper Maskelyne, a Chancer tasked with experimental developments, who fogged his own reputation as much as any desert convoy.
  • Christian House, "The Phantom Army of Alamein, By Rick Stroud", The Independent, (21 October 2012).

• Operation Bertram, the section's greatest endeavour and the heart of this tale, was an act of monumental misdirection. The Alamein war zone was bookended by the sea and the Qattara Depression, leaving a small front. The unit created dummy tanks out of jeeps to go south, while, in a reverse feint, it covered real tanks with wooden cases, disguising them as trucks, each opening on top like a giant ladybird. These were sent north for the real offensive. "Hey presto!" judged Barkas. "Now you see them. Now you don't." Rommel was fooled and Alamein was won.
  Winston Churchill stated that before Alamein, the Allies had never had a victory and that after they never had a defeat.
  • Christian House, "The Phantom Army of Alamein, By Rick Stroud", The Independent, (21 October 2012).

1943

• It is difficult to go anywhere in London without having the feeling that Britain is now Occupied Territory.
  • British writer George Orwell.^{[citation needed]}

• They’re overfed, overpaid, overdressed... and over here.
  • Common complaint of British people, as American troops were shipped to Britain to prepare for the invasion of German-occupied Europe.^{[citation needed]}

• We are out to win the war in the quickest and most economical way.
  • Gen. George C. Marshall, Army Chief of Staff.^{[citation needed]}

• In the magazines war seemed romantic and exciting, full of heroics and vitality.... I saw instead men... suffering and wishing they were somewhere else.
  • War correspondent Ernie Pyle.^{[citation needed]}

• Today we are fighting in a country which was contributed a great deal to our cultural inheritance, a country rich in monuments which...illustrate the growth of the civilization which is ours. We are bound to respect those monuments so far as war allows. If we have to choose between destroying a famous building and sacrificing our own men, then our men's lives count infinitely more and the building must go. But the choice is not always so clear-cut as that. Nothing can stand against the argument of military necessity. That is an accepted principle. But the phrase 'military necessity' is sometimes used where it would be more truthful to speak of military convenience or even personal convenience. I do not want it to cloak slackness or indifference. It is a responsibility of high commanders to determine through AMC Officers the locations of historical monuments whether they be immediately ahead of our front lines or in areas occupied by us. This information passed to lower echleons through normal channels places the responsibility on all commanders of complying with the spirit of this letter.
  • Dwight D. Eisenhower, December 29, 1943 letter as qtd. in “The Law of Armed Conflict: Constraints on the Contemporary Use of Military Force”, edited by Howard M. Hensel, 2007, p. 58.

1944

• Shortly we will be fighting our way across the Continent of Europe in battles designed to preserve our civilization. Inevitably, in the path of our advance will be found historical monuments and cultural centers which symbolize to the world all that we are fighting to preserve. It is the responsibility of every commander to protect and respect these symbols whenever possible. In some circumstances the success of the military operation may be prejudiced in our reluctance to destroy these revered objects. Then, as at Casssino, where the enemy relied on our emotional attachments to shield his defense, the lives of our men are paramount. So, where military necessity dictates, commanders may order the required action even though it involves destruction to some honored site. But there are many circumstances in which damage and destruction are not necessary and cannot be justified. In such cases, through the exercise of restraint and discipline, commanders will preserve centers and objects of historical and cultural significance. Civil Affairs Staffs at higher echleons will advise commanders of the locations of historical monuments of this type both in advance of the front lines and in occupied areas. This information together with the necessary instruction, will be passe down through command channels to all echleons.
  • Dwight D. Eisenhower, May 26 1944 letter as qtd. in “The Law of Armed Conflict: Constraints on the Contemporary Use of Military Force”, edited by Howard M. Hensel, 2007, p. 58.

• People of Western Europe: A landing was made this morning on the coast of France by troops of the Allied Expeditionary Force. This landing is part of the concerted United Nations plan for the liberation of Europe, made in conjunction with our great Russian allies.... I call upon those who love freedom to stand with us now. Together we shall achieve victory.
  • Radio address by U.S. General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the commander of allied forces, on "D-Day", the start of the Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe, beginning with the landing in France on June 6. Note: “D-Day” is the term used in military planning that specifies the date that an amphibious (ship-to-shore) invasion occurs.

The free men of the world are marching together to victory. I have full confidence in your courage, devotion to duty, and skill in battle. We will accept nothing less than full victory. ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

• Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Forces: You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers-in-arms on other Fronts you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world.Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well trained, well equipped and battle-hardened. He will fight savagely. But this is the year 1944. Much has happened since the Nazi triumphs of 1940-41. The United Nations have inflicted upon the Germans great defeats, in open battle, man-to-man. Our air offensive has seriously reduced their strength in the air and their capacity to wage war on the ground. Our Home Fronts have given us an overwhelming superiority in weapons and munitions of war, and placed at our disposal great reserves of trained fighting men. The tide has turned. The free men of the world are marching together to victory. I have full confidence in your courage, devotion to duty, and skill in battle. We will accept nothing less than full victory.Good Luck! And let us all beseech the blessing of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking.
  • Speech given by Dwight D. Eisenhower to the troops on D-Day before the allied invasion.

Boys were turned into men. Some would be very brave men; others would soon be very dead men, but any who survived would be frightened men. Some wet their pants, others cried unashamedly. Many just had to find within themselves the strength to get the job done. Discipline and training took over...~ Bob Slaughter

• We saw the bomb explosions causing fires that illuminated clouds in the otherwise dark sky. We were twelve miles offshore as we climbed into our seat assignments on the LCAs [amphibious landing craft] and were lowered into the heavy sea from davits. The navy hadn’t begun its firing because it was still dark. We couldn’t see the armada but we knew it was there.
  Prior to loading, friends said their so longs and good lucks.... All of us had a letter signed by the Supreme Commander, General Eisenhower, saying that we were about to embark upon a great crusade. A few of my cohorts autographed it an I carried it in my wallet throughout the war.
  The Channel was extremely rough, and it wasn’t long before we had to help the craft’s pumps by bailing with our helmets. The cold spray blew in and soon we were soaking wet....
  As the sky lightened, the armada became visible. The smoking and burning French shoreline also became more defined. At 0600, the huge guns of the Allied navies opened up with must have been one of the greatest artillery barrages ever.... I could see the [battleship] Texas firing broadside into the coastline.
  Bomm-ba-ba-boom-ba-ba-boom! Within minutes, giant swells from the recoil of those guns nearly swamped us and added to the seasickness and misery. But one could also see the two-thousand-pound missiles tumbling on their targets. Twin fuselaged P-38 fighter-bombers were also overhead protecting us from the Luftwaffe [German Air Force] and giving us a false sense of security. This should be a piece of cake....
  A few thousand yards from shore we rescued three or four survivors from a craft that had been swamped and sunk....
  About two or three hundred yards from shore we encountered artillery fire. Near misses sent seawater skyward and then it rained back on us....
  About 150 yards from shore, I raised my head despite the warning, ‘Keep your head down.’ I saw the boat on our right taking a terrific licking from small arms. Tracer bullets were bouncing and skipping off the ramp and sides as the enemy zeroed in on the boat which had beached a few minutes before us. Had we not delayed a few minutes to pick up the survivors of the sunken craft, we might have taken that concentration of fire.
  Great plumes of water from enemy artillery and mortars sprouted close by. We knew then this was not going to be a walk-in. No one thought the enemy would give us this kind of opposition at the water’s edge. We expected A and B Companies to have the beach secured by the time we landed. In reality no one had set foot in our sector. The coxswain [boat driver] had missed the Vierville church steeple, our point to guide on, and the tides also helped pull us two hundred yards east.
  The location didn’t make much difference. We could hear the ‘p-r-r-r-r, p-r-r-r-r’ of enemy machine guns to our right, towards the west. It was obvious someone was... getting chewed up where we had been supposed to come in.
  The ramp went down while shells exploded on land and in the water. Unseen snipers were shooting down from the cliffs, but the most havoc came from automatic weapons....
  When I did get out, I was in the water. It was very difficult to shed sixty pounds of equipment, and if one were a weak swimmer he could drown.... Many were in the water, and drowned, good swimmers or not. There were dead men floating in the water, and live men acting dead, letting the tide take them in....
  I crouched down to chin deep in the water as shells fell at the water’s edge. Small arms fire kicked up sand. I noticed a GI running, trying to get across the beach. He was weighed down with equipment and having difficulty moving. An enemy gunner shot him. He screamed for a medic. An aidman moved quickly to help him and he was also shot. I’ll never forget seeing that medic lying next to that wounded soldier, both of them screaming. They died in minutes.
  Boys were turned into men. Some would be very brave men; others would soon be very dead men, but any who survived would be frightened men. Some wet their pants, others cried unashamedly. Many just had to find within themselves the strength to get the job done. Discipline and training took over....
  I took off my assault jacket and spread out my raincoat so I could clean my rifle. It was then I saw bullet holes in my jacket and raincoat. I lit my first cigarette; I had to rest and compose myself because I became weak in the knees.”
  • Bob Slaughter, 29th Infantry Division, who landed on Omaha Beach at Normandy, where 3,500 Americans and 700 Germans were killed on June 6, 1944, in the battle of the beachhead.^{[citation needed]}

• [The assault units] were disorganized, had suffered heavy casualties and were handicapped by losses of valuable equipment.... They were pinned down along the beach by intense enemy fire.... Personnel and equipment were being piled ashore... where congested groups afforded food targets for the enemy.
  • An American officer at the landing beach at Normandy, June 6, 1944.^{[citation needed]}

• Sure, we all want to get home. We want to get this thing over with. But the quickest way to get it over with is to go get the bastards. The quicker they’re whipped, the quicker we go home. The shortest way home is through Berlin.

  And there’s one thing you’ll be able to say when you get home. When you’re sitting around your fireside, with your brat on your knee, and he asks you what you did in the great World War II, you won’t have to say you shoveled shit in Louisiana.

  • General George S. Patton, Jr., speech to his Third Army before it was sent to join in the Battle of France (July 1944).

• Any commander who fails to obtain his objective, and who is not dead or seriously wounded, has not done his full duty.
  • Gen. George S. Patton, Jr., instructions to the Third Army.^{[citation needed]}

• Austin White, Chicago, Ill., 1918 and 1944. This is the last time I want to write my name here.
  • Inscription found near Verdun, France by a reporter for Yank magazine (a magazine for the soldiers). Yank Magazine

1945

• The mission of this Allied Force was fulfilled at 3 a.m., local time, May 7, 1945.
  • Message from Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, SCAEF (Supreme Commander, Allied Expeditionary Force) to the Combined Chiefs of Staff (the command of British and American forces), on the signing of the surrender by German delegates at Eisenhower’s headquarters at Rheims, France.^{[specific citation needed]}

The War in Europe: The Holocaust

1944

• When we got off the cattle truck, they ordered, ‘Men right; women, left.’... I went with my father. My little sister, Esther, she went with my mother. Esther was only eleven. She was holding my mother’s hand. When they made a selection of the women, Esther clung to my mother. My mother wouldn’t give her up.... They went straight to the gas chamber.
  • Account of Moritz Vegh, sent to the Auschwitz extermination camp with his family at age 13. He worked as a slave laborer and was the only survivor from his family.^{[citation needed]}

1945

• In another part of the camp they showed me the children, hundreds of them. Some were only 6 years old. One rolled up his sleeves, showed me his number. It was tattooed on his arm. B-6030, it was. The others showed me their numbers. They will carry them till they die.... I could see their ribs through their thin shirts.
  • CBS news correspondent Edward R. Morrow, reporting from a Nazi concentration camp, (April 16, 1945).^{[specific citation needed]}

• I want every American unit not actually in the front lines to see this place.... We are told that the American soldier does not know what he is fighting for. Now, at least, he will know what he is fighting against.
  • Comment of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander, after visiting a Nazi extermination camp, where bodies were stacked in the barracks the smell of burnt bodies came from crematoria.^{[citation needed]}

• For months, for years we had one wish only: the wish that some of us would escape alive, in order to tell the world what the Nazi convict prisons were like..... There was the systematic... urge to use human beings as slaves and to kill them when they could work no more.
  • Concentration camp survivor Marie Valliant, in testimony at the Nürnberg War Crimes Trials.^{[citation needed]}

• What makes this inquest significant is that these prisoners represent sinister influences that will lurk in the world long after their bodies have returned to dust. They are living symbols of racial hatreds, of terrorism and violence, and of the arrogance and cruelty of power.
  • U. S. Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, serving as a judge at the Nürnberg Trials of surviving Nazi leaders for war crimes and crimes against humanity.^{[citation needed]}

• Concentration camps Dachau - Velden - Buchenwald, I am ashamed that I am a German.
  • Inscription in German language being a commentary about Nazi crimes including also the Holocaust, painted on the wall of Feldherrnhalle in Munich after American liberation in 1945.
  • Source: https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/muenchen-weltkriegsende-feldherrnhalle-1.4896848

The United States Fights Imperial Japan

1941

• I know most of you here, and I have complete confidence in your ability and judgment. We've taken a whale of a wallop, but I have no doubt of the ultimate outcome.
  • Chester W. Nimitz, meeting with United States Pacific Fleet staff officers upon assuming command on 31 December 1941. As quoted by Ian W. Toll, Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942 (2012), p. 160

• While you may have your initial success, due to timing and surprise, the time will come when you too will have your losses, but there will be this great difference. You will not only be unable to make up your losses, but will grow weaker as time grows on, while on the other hand we will not only make up our losses but will grow stronger as time goes on. It is inevitable that we will crush you before we are through with you.
  • Admiral Harold Stark, USN, Chief of Naval Operations, speaking to the Japanese ambassador before the war.

• In the first six to twelve months of a war with the United States and Great Britain I will run wild and win victory upon victory. But then, if the war continues after that, I have no expectation of success.
  • Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, planner of the attack on Pearl Harbor, to Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoe.

• Tennōheika banzai! (May the Emperor live ten thousand years!)
  • Shout made by Imperial Japanese troops in attack.

Japan on the Offensive: The Fall of the Philippines (December 1941- May 1942)

1942

• We're the battling bastards of Bataan;
  No papa, no mama, no Uncle Sam;
  No aunts, no uncles, no nieces;
  No pills, no planes, no artillery pieces....
  And nobody gives a damn.
  • Sung by soldiers defending the Bataan peninsula, on the northwest of Manila Bay, the last major force holding out against Japanese invaders of the Philippines.^{[citation needed]}

• Suppose you’re a sergeant machine-gunner, and your army is retreating and the enemy advancing. The captain takes you to a machine gun covering the road. ‘You’re to stay here and hold this position,’ he tells you. ‘For how long?’ you ask. ‘Never mind,’ he answers, ‘just hold it.’ Then you know you’re expendable. In a way anything can be expendable — money or gasoline or equipment or most usually men. They are expending you and that machine gun to get time.
  • William L. White, They Were Expendable, his account of the fall of the Philippines to the Japanese in early 1942.

• The sun beat down upon my throbbing hear.... Along the road the jungle was a misty green haze, swimming before my sweat-filled eyes.
  The hours dragged by, and a great number of prisoners reached the end of their endurance. The drop-outs became more numerous. The fell by the hundreds in the road....
  There was the crack of a pistol and the shot rang out across the jungle. There was another shot, and more shots, and I knew that, straggling along behind us, was a clean-up squad of Japanese, killing their helpless victims on the white dusty road.... The shots continued, goading us on. I gritted my teeth. 'Oh, God, I've got to keep going. I can’t stop. I can’t die like that'.
  • Sergeant Sidney Stewart, a survivor of the Bataan Death March of April 1942, when the Japanese sent 70,000 American and Filipino prisoners 60 miles from the Bataan Peninsula to their prison camps. About 10,000 prisoners were killed by gunshot, bayonet, or starvation during the march.^{[citation needed]}

• The President of the United States ordered me to break through the Japanese lines and proceed from Corregidor to Australia for the purpose, as I understand it, of organizing the American offensive against Japan, a primary objective of which is the relief of the Philippines.
  I came through and I shall return.
  • General Douglas MacArthur, remarks to reporters in Australia after he had been ordered by Pres. Roosevelt to leave the fortress on the island of Corregidor in Manila Bay before it fell to the Japanese (March 30, 1942). Reported in Representative Speeches of General of the Army Douglas MacArthur (1964), p. vi; Senate Doc. 88–95.

• God have mercy on us!
  • General MacArthur, on learning of the state of Australia’s lack of preparedness to meet an attack by the Japanese.

Japan’s Offensive Halted: The Battle of Midway (June 1942)

1942

• We knew what Nimitz was doing. He did the right thing, and we let him alone.
  • Ernest King, Comment on Chester Nimitz's role in the Battle of Midway in Time magazine's interview with King, Volume XL, Number 23 (December 7, 1942), p. 33

• [The Doolittle Air Raid on Tokyo in April 1942] ended the debate... as to whether Midway was to be attacked.
  • Admiral Yamamoto, Commander, Japanese Fleet.^{[citation needed]}

• There is no choice but to force a decisive fleet encounter. If we set out from here to do that and we go to the bottom of the Pacific in a double suicide, things will be peaceful on the high seas for some time.
  • Admiral Yamamoto to the Japanese Naval General Staff before Operation Mi, the attack on Midway Island.^{[citation needed]}

• Surprise was paramount because we believed that the Japanese did not know of the presence of our carriers.
  • Commander Joseph Worthington, Commanding Officer of the destroyer USS Benham, on the US Navy’s planning for the Battle of Midway, which relied on the breaking of the Japanese code.^{[citation needed]}

• Within five minutes all her [Japanese aircraft carrier Akagi's] planes would be launched. Five minutes! Who would have dreamed that the tide of battle would shift completely in that brief interval of time?... The first Zero fighter gathered speed and whizzed of the deck. At that instant a lookout screamed, 'Hell divers [U.S. Navy dive bombers]!' I looked up to see three black enemy planes plummeting toward our ship. Bombs! Down they came straight toward me!
  • Commander Mitsuo Fuchida, a Japanese officer on the Akagi, in Midway: The Battle That Doomed Japan. In the Battle of Midway (June 3-6, 1942), the U.S. Navy stopped the Japanese advance on Hawaii and sunk four of the enemy’s aircraft carriers. The U.S. forces would advance without letup in the next years of the war in the Pacific.

Turning the Tide in the Pacific

1942

• No army has ever done so much with so little.
  • Douglas MacArthur, as reported by The New York Times (April 11, 1942), p. 1. He referred to the fall of Bataan.

• [My forces are] unable to control the sea in the Guadalcanal area.... The situation is not hopeless but it is certainly critical.
  • Admiral Chester A. Nimitz, commanding U. S. Naval forces in the Guadalcanal Campaign (November 1942).

• Once Japan is destroyed as an aggressive force, we know of no other challenging power that can appear in the Pacific…. Japan is the one enemy, and the only enemy, of the peaceful peoples whose shores overlook the Pacific Ocean.
  • Jospeh C. Grew, address for United China Relief, Carnegie Hall, New York City (October 10, 1942); in The Department of State Bulletin (October 10, 1942), p. 798. Grew was the U.S. ambassador to Japan, 1932–1941.

1943

• I look upon the Guadalcanal and Tulagi operations as the turning point from offensive to defensive, and the cause of our setback there was our inability to increase our forces at the same speed as you.
  • Japanese Admiral Osami Nagano, Chief of Naval Staff, to American officers after the war.

• Bataan is like a child in a family who dies. It lives in our hearts.
  • Douglas MacArthur, reflection on the first anniversary of the fall of Bataan, April 9, 1942, as reported by The New York Times, April 9, 1943, p. 9, which added, "It was the first time General MacArthur had mentioned the name Bataan publicly" since the day after the fall.

America's Amphibious Advance in the Pacific

1939

• A landing on a foreign coast in the face of hostile troops has always been one of the most difficult operations of war. It has now become much more difficult , almost impossible, because of the vulnerable target which a convoy of transports offers to the defenders’ air force. Even more vulnerable is the process of disembarkation in open boats.
  • British military writer Captain B. H. Liddell Hart, in The Defense of Britain (1939).

1943-1945: Victory in the Pacific

• The outstanding achievement of this war in the field of joint undertakings was the perfection of amphibious operations, the most difficult of all operations in modern warfare.
  • Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King, in The War Reports of General of the Army George C. Marshall, Chief of Staff, General of the Army H. H. Arnold, Commanding General, Army Air Forces, Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King, Commander-in-Chief, US Fleet and Chief of Naval Operations (1947).

1944

• [The campaign objective is to obtain] positions from which the ultimate surrender of JAPAN can be forced by intensive air bombardment , by sea and air blockade, and by invasion if necessary.
  • Commander in Chief Pacific Ocean Areas (Admiral Nimitz), Campaign Plan Granite (January 15, 1944).^{[specific citation needed]}

• If Saipan is lost, air raids on Tokyo will take place often.
  • Message sent by Emperor Hirohito to encourage the Japanese forces defending Saipan.^{[citation needed]}

• Our ships have been salvaged and are retiring at high speed toward the Japanese fleet.
  • Admiral William F. (“Bull”) Halsey, radio message following Japanese propaganda broadcasts about most of his Third Fleet had been lost on the Battle of Leyte Gulf (October 1944).^{[citation needed]}

• This is Blackjack himself. Your work so far has been superb. I expect even more. Keep the bastards dying!
  • William Frederick Halsey, Jr. in his closing message to all hands of the U.S. Third Fleet on 31 December 1944, as quoted by Halsey himself in Admiral Halsey's Story (1947), p. 242

• People of the Philippines: I have returned. By the grace of Almighty God, our forces stand again on Philippine soil…. The hour of your redemption is here…. Rally to me! As the lines of battle roll forward to bring you within the zone of operations, rise and strike. Strike at every favourable opportunity. For your homes and hearths, strike! For future generations of your sons and daughters, strike! In the name of your sacred dead, strike! Let no heart be faint. Let every arm be steeled. The guidance of Divine God points the way. Follow in His name to the Holy Grail of righteous victory.
  • Douglas MacArthur, speech to the people of the Philippines, on landing in Leyte, Philippines (October 17, 1944). Reported in MacArthur, Reminiscences (1964), p. 216–17.

1945

• The Navajo Code Talkers have proved to be excellent Marines, intelligent, industrious, efficient.
  Were it not for the Navajos, the Marines would never have taken Iwo Jima.
  • Comments about the "Code Talkers", Navajo Indian soldiers and Marines, who communicated on radio using their native language, which could not be understood by any Japanese who were listening.^{[citation needed]}

• To be avoided, and if necessary ignored, were gung-ho platoon leaders who drew enemy fire by ordering spectacular charges. Ground wasn’t gained that way; it was won by small groups of men, five or six in a cluster, who moved warily forward in a kind of autohypnosis, advancing in a mysterious concert with similar groups on their flanks.
  • Sgt. William Manchester, USMC, reflections on ground combat in the Battle of Okinawa, in his personal history of the Pacific War, Goodbye Darkness.

• Aboard a Fast Carrier in the Forward Pacific Area, May 11 (Special-Delayed) -- Two Japanese suicide planes carrying 1,000 pounds of bombs plunged into the flight deck of Vice Admiral Marc A. Mitscher’s own flagship today,... transforming one of our greatest flat-tops (aircraft carriers) into a floating torch, with flames soaring nearly 1,000 feet into the sky.
  For eight seemingly interminable hours that followed the ship and her crew fought as tense and terrifying a battle for survival as had ever been witnessed in the Pacific, but when dusk closed in, the U.S.S. Bunker Hill — horribly crippled and still filmed by wisps of smoke and steam from her smoldering embers — was plowing along under her own power on the distant horizon, safe. Tomorrow she will spend another eight terrible hours burying at sea men who died to save her.
  From the deck of a neighboring carrier a few hundred yards distant I watched the Bunker Hill burn. It is hard to believe that men could survive those flames or that metal could withstand such heat.
  One minute our task force was cruising in lazy circles about 60 miles off Okinawa without a care in the world and apparently without a thought of an enemy plane. The next the Bunker Hill was a pillar of flame. It was as quick as that — like summer lightning....
  For the first time in a week, our own ship had secured from general quarters an hour or two before... and those men not on regular watch were permitted to relax from the deadly sixteen-hour vigil they had put in at battle stations every day since we had entered the battle area.
  So it was on the Bunker Hill. Exhausted men not on watch were catching a catnap. Aft, on the flight deck, 34 planes were waiting to take off. Their tanks were filled to the last drop with highly volatile aviation gasoline. Their guns were loaded to the last possible round of ammunition....
  Just appearing over the horizon were the planes returning form an early mission.... Then it was that a man aboard our ship caught the first glimpse of three enemy planes and cried a warning. But before general quarters could be sounded on this ship, and before half a dozen shots could be fired by the Bunker Hill, the first kamikaze had dropped his 550-pound bomb on the ship and plunged his plane squarely into the 34 waiting planes in a shower of burning gasoline....
  But before a move could be made to fight the flames, another kamikaze came whining out of the clouds, straight into the deadly anti-aircraft guns of the ship....
  Minutes later a third Jap suicider zoomed down to finish the job. Ignoring the flames and the smoke that swept around them, the men in the Bunker Hill’s gun galleries stuck to their posts.... It was a neighboring destroyer, which finally scored a direct hit on the Jap and sent him splashing harmlessly into the sea....
  For more than an hour there was no visible abatement in the fury of the flames.... Crippled as she was she plowed ahead at top speed, and the wind that swept her decks blew the flames and smoke astern over the fantail, preventing the blaze from spreading forward on the flight deck.... Trapped on the fantail itself, men faced the flames and fought grimly on; with... no way of knowing how much of the ship remained on the other side of that fiery wall....
  After nearly three hours of almost hopeless fighting, she had brought the fires under control, and though it was many more hours before they were completely extinguished, the battle was won and the ship was saved.
  A goodly thick book could not record all the acts of heroism that were performed aboard that valiant ship today....
  [A]t the cost of three pilots and three planes today the enemy killed a probable total of 392 of our men, wounded 264 others, destroyed about 70 planes and wrecked a fine and famous ship. The flight deck of that ship tonight looks like the crater of a volcano.... But the ship has not been sunk.... As it is the Bunker Hill will steam back to Bremerton Navy Yard under her own power and there will be repaired.... But within a few weeks she will be back again, sinking more ships, downing more planes, and bombing out more Japanese air fields.
  Perhaps her next task will be to cover the invasion of Tokyo itself!
  • Phelps Adams, "Kamikazes: An Eyewitness Account", from Masterpieces of War Reporting: Great Moments of World War II, ed. Louis Snyder (1962), pp. 487-494. The "Kamikaze" or "Divine wind" in Japanese: referred to suicide pilots who would fly their bomb-laden planes into American naval ships. The USS Bunker Hill was repaired in Bremerton, Washington and returned to the Pacific Fleet in September. The ship remained in the Navy until it was sold for scrap in 1973.

The Battle of Monte Cassino (Italy 1944)

• Meantime, the French forces had crossed the Garigliano (River) and moved forward into the mountainous terrain lying south of the Liri River. It was not easy. As always, the German veterans reacted strongly and there was bitter fighting. The French surprised the enemy and quickly seized key terrain including Mounts Faito Cerasola and high ground near Castelforte. The 1st Motorized Division helped the 2nd Moroccan division take key Mount Girofano and then advanced rapidly north to S. Apollinare and S. Ambrogio. In spite of the stiffening enemy resistance, the 2nd Moroccan Division penetrated the Gustav Line in less than two day’s fighting. The next 48 hours on the French front were decisive. The knife-wielding Goumiers swarmed over the hills, particularly at night, and General Juin’s entire force showed an aggressiveness hour after hour that the Germans could not withstand. Cerasola, San Giogrio, Mt. D’Oro, Ausonia and Esperia were seized in one of the most brilliant and daring advances of the war in Italy, and by May 16 the French Expeditionary Corps had thrust forward some ten miles on their left flank to Mount Revole, with the remainder of their front slanting back somewhat to keep contact with the British 8th Army.
  For this performance, which was to be a key to the success of the entire drive on Rome, I shall always be a grateful admirer of General Juin and his magnificent FEC... The 8th Army’s delay made Juin’s task more difficult, because he was moving forward so rapidly that his right flank---adjacent to the British---constantly was exposed to counter-attacks.
  • General Mark Clark describes how the French Expeditionary Corps (FEC) under the command of Marechal Juin broke through the Gustav Line in May of 1944; in Mark Wayne Clark, Calculated risk (1950), p. 348.

• For me, it has been a deep source of satisfaction to see how the vital part played by the French troops of the Fifth Army throughout our Italian campaign against the common enemy has been universally acknowledged. During these long months, I have had the real privilege of seeing for myself the evidence of the outstanding calibre of the French soldiers, heirs of the noblest traditions of the French Army. Nevertheless, not satisfied with this, you and all your people have added a new epic chapter to the history of France; you have gladdened the hearts of your compatriots, giving them comfort and hope as they languish under the heavy and humiliating yoke of a hated invader. The energy and utter disregard for danger consistently shown by all members of the C.E.F., along with the outstanding professional skills of the French army officer, have aroused admiration in your Allies and fear in the enemy. From the banks of the Garigliano where your first successes set the tone which was to characterize the whole offensive, then pushing on to Rome through the mountains, crossing the Tiber and pursuing the enemy relentlessly to Sienna and to the hills dominating the valley of the Arno, France’s soldiers have always accomplished everything that was possible and sometimes even that which was not...With my deepest gratitude for the tremendous contribution that you have made to our joint victories, my dear General.
  • In a letter to Marechal Juin, General Mark Clark, paid tribute to the soldiers of the French Expeditionary Corps.^[2]

Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (August 6/9, 1945)

1945

• Please, for God's sake, stop sending our finest youth to be murdered in places like Iwo Jima.... Why can't objectives be accomplished some other way?
  • Letter written to the Secretary of the Navy.^{[citation needed]}

• National Resistance Program.^[Quote?]
  • Japanese plan for using all males, ages 15 to 60, and females, ages 17 to 40, in combat roles in the expected Allied invasion of the Japanese home islands, planned to begin with Operation Olympic on 1 November 1945. Postwar analysis of Japanese documents showed that "sacrificing 20 million Japanese lives" was expected.

• [Japanese defenses threatened] to grow to [the] point where we attack on a ratio of one (1) to one (1) which is not a recipe for victory.
  • Major General Charles Willoughby, G-2 (chief of intelligence) on General MacArthur’s staff, on the buildup of Japanese forces in the zone of the planned Operation Olympic assault.^{[citation needed]}

• When I saw a very strong light, a flash, I put my arms over my face unconsciously.... The whole city was destroyed and burning. There was no place to go.
  • Michiko Yamaoka, a survivor of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima (August 6, 1945).^{[citation needed]}

The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East

• Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, an important Japanese Army base. That bomb had more power than 20,000 tons of TNT....
  With this bomb we have now added a new and revolutionary increase in destruction to supplement the growing power of our armed forces....
  It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East....
  Having found the bomb we have used it. We have used it against those who attacked us without warning at Pearl Harbor, against those who have starved and beaten and executed American prisoners of war, against those who have abandoned all pretense of obeying international laws of warfare. We have used it in order to shorten the agony of war, in order to save the lives of thousands and thousands of young Americans.
  We shall continue to use it until we completely destroy Japan’s power to make war. Only a Japanese surrender will stop us.
  • President Harry S Truman, radio address to the American people, following the bombing of Hiroshima, Japan (August 6).

• You think of the lives which would have been lost in an invasion of Japan’s main islands — a staggering number of Americans, but millions more of Japanese — and you thank God for the atomic bomb.
  • Comment of one Marine in the Pacific.^{[citation needed]}

• Would it not be wondrous for this whole nation to be destroyed like a beautiful flower.
  • General Anami, Japanese War Minister, at a meeting of Japan’s Supreme Council for the Direction of the War (August 9, 1945).^{[citation needed]}

• We of the peace party were assisted by the atomic bomb in our endeavor to end the war.
  • Koichi Kido, aide of Emperor Hirohito.^{[citation needed]}

• [The atomic bombings were a] gift from heaven.
  • Mitsumasa Yonai, Japanese Navy Minister, who argued that the bombings caused the collapse of the power of leaders who favored continuing the war.^{[citation needed]}

• The atomic bomb was a golden opportunity given by heaven for Japan to end the war.
  • Hisatsune Sakomizu, the chief cabinet secretary in 1945.^{[citation needed]}

• We declared war on America and Britain out of Our sincere desire to ensure Japan's self-preservation and the stabilization of East Asia, it being far from Our thought either to infringe upon the sovereignty of other nations or to embark upon territorial aggrandisement. But now the war has lasted for nearly four years. Despite the best that has been done by everyone -- the gallant fighting of the military and naval forces, the diligence and assiduity of Our servants of the State and the devoted service of Our one hundred million people, the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage, while the general trends of the world have all turned against her interest. Moreover, the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to damage is indeed incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives. Should We continue to fight, it would not only result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization.
  • Surrender speech of Emperor Hirohito (August 15, 1945). This was the first occasion in which common Japanese heard the voice of their emperor.^{[specific citation needed]}

• Today the guns are silent. A great tragedy has ended. A great victory has been won. The skies no longer rain death... men everywhere walk upright in sunlight. The entire world lies quietly at peace. The holy mission has been completed. And in reporting this to you, the people, I speak for the thousands of silent lips, forever stilled among the jungles and the beaches and in the deep waters of the Pacific which marked the way....
  As I look back on the long, tortuous trail from those grim days of Bataan and Corregidor, when an entire world lived in fear, when democracy was on the defensive everywhere, when modern civilization trembled in the balance, I thank a merciful God that He has given us the faith, the courage, and the power from which to mold victory. We have known the bitterness of defeat and the exaltation of triumph, and from both we have learned there can be no turning back. We must go forward to preserve in peace what we won in war.
  • General Douglas MacArthur, commander of allied forces in the Pacific, radio address on V-J Day, September 2, 1945, when Japanese representatives signed the surrender agreement on the deck of the battleship USS Missouri, in Tokyo Bay.

Aftermath

Your name is unknown. Your deed is immortal. ~ Tomb of the Unknown Soldier (Moscow)

But all these agree with me in the selection of the truly heroic figure of this war. He is G.I. Joe, and his counterpart in the Air, the Navy, and the Merchant Marine of every one of the United Nations. ~ Dwight Eisenhower

• Your name is unknown. Your deed is immortal. (Russian: "Имя твоё неизвестно, подвиг твой бессмертен"/Imya tvoyo neizvestno, podvig tvoy bessmerten)
  • Tomb of the Unknown Soldier (Moscow).

• Merely to name my principal supporters in the Canadian, French, American and British forces, is to present a picture of the utmost in efficiency, skill, loyalty, and devotion to duty. The United Nations will gratefully remember Teather, Montgomery, Spots, Bradley, Bilat, Crere and many others.
  But all these agree with me in the selection of the truly heroic figure of this war. He is G.I. Joe, and his counterpart in the Air, the Navy, and the Merchant Marine of every one of the United Nations. He has braved the dangers of U-Boat infested seas. He has surmounted charges into desperately defended beaches. He has fought his teagest patient way throught the ultimate in fortified zones. He has endured cold, hunger, fatigue. His companion has been danger, death has dogged his footsteps. He and his platoon commanders have given us an example of loyalty, devotion to duty, and indomitable courage that will live in our hearts as long as we admire those qualities in men.
  • General Dwight Eisenhower, V-E Day Speech, 1945.
• It would be wrong to think that the Second World War broke out accidentally, or as a result of blunders committed by certain statesmen, although blunders were certainly committed. As a matter of fact, the war broke out as the inevitable result of the development of world economic and political forces on the basis of present-day monopolistic capitalism. Marxists have more than once stated that the capitalist system of world economy contains the elements of a general crisis and military conflicts, that, in view of that, the development of world capitalism in our times does not proceed smoothly and evenly, but through crises and catastrophic wars. The point is that the uneven development of capitalist countries usually leads, in the course of time, to a sharp disturbance of the equilibrium within the world system of capitalism, and that group of capitalist countries regards itself as being less securely provides with raw materials and markets usually attempts to change the situation and to redistribute “spheres of influence” in its own favor — by employing armed force. As a result of this, the capitalist world is split into two hostile camps, and war breaks out between them. Perhaps catastrophic wars could be avoided if it were possible periodically to redistribute raw materials and markets among the respective countries in conformity with their economic weight by means of concerted and peaceful decisions. But this is impossible under the present capitalist conditions of world economic development.
  • Joseph Stalin, election speech, 1946

• In the Second World War every bond between man and man was to perish. Crimes were committed by the Germans under the Hitlerite domination to which they allowed themselves to be subjugated find no equal in scale and wickedness with any that have darkened the human record. The wholesale massacre of by systematised processes of six or seven millions of men, women, and children in the German execution camps exceeds in horror the rough-and-ready butcheries of Genghis Khan, and in scale reduces them to pygmy proportions. Deliberate extermination of whole populations was contemplated and pursued by both Germany and Russia in the Eastern war. The hideous process of bombarding open cities from the air, once started by the Germans, was repaid twenty-fold by the ever-mounting power of the Allies, and found its culmination in the use of atomic bombs which obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We have at length emerged from a scene of material ruin and moral havoc the like of which had never darkened the imagination of former centuries. After all that we suffered and achieved we find ourselves still confronted with problems not less but far more formidable than those which we have so narrowly made our way.
  • Winston Churchill, The Second World War: Volume 1: The Gathering Storm, p. 14, 1948

• Well, it's all over. I wonder what I'm going to do tomorrow.
  • Fleet Admiral Ernest King, 9th Chief of Naval Operations, in a remark to Neil K. Dietrich on 14 August 1945; King had just learned that President Harry Truman was going to announce Japan's decision to surrender unconditionally to the Allied powers. As quoted by Thomas B. Buell in Master of Sea Power: A Biography of Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King (1980), p. 498
• Behind much of the current fascination with World War II lies the feeling, certainly on the Allied side, that it was the last morally unambiguous good war. German Nazis, Italian Fascists, and Japanese militarists were so clearly bad people who had to be defeated. (The fact that we were allied with one of the greatest tyrants of the twentieth century in Joseph Stalin is something to be overlooked.) The wars since have not been as clear-cut. The Korean War, true, was necessary to defeat Soviet expansionism, but General MacArthur’s attempt to turn it into a crusade against Chinese Communism divided Americans among themselves and against their allies. Vietnam was a catastrophe for the United States, and now the occupation of Iraq is looking like another.
  • Margaret MacMillan, The Uses and Abuses of History (2008)

War Aims and the Diplomacy of War

1943

• America must choose one of three courses after this war: narrow nationalism, which inevitably means the ultimate loss of our own liberty; international imperialism, which means the sacrifice of some other nation’s liberty; or the creation of a world in which there shall be an equality of opportunity for every race and every nation. I am convinced the American people will choose, by overwhelming majority, the last of these courses. To make this choice effective, we must win not only the war but also the peace, and we must start winning it now.
  To win this peace three things seem to me necessary — first, we must plan now for peace on a worldwide basis; second, the world must be free, politically and economically, for nations and for men, that peace may exist in it; third, America must play an active, constructive part in freeing it and keeping its peace....
  This cannot be accomplished by mere declarations of our leaders, as in an Atlantic Charter. Its accomplishment depends primarily upon acceptance by the peoples of the world.... The Four Freedoms will not be accomplished by those momentarily in power. They will become real only if the people of the world forge them into actuality.
  • Wendell Willkie, the 1940 Republican candidate for president, in One World.

1943

• Before this year is out, it will be made known to the world — in actions rather than in words — that the Casablanca Conference produced plenty of news; and it will be bad news for the Germans and Italians — and the Japanese....
  In an attempt to ward off the inevitable disaster, the Axis propagandists are trying all of their old tricks in order to divide the United Nations. They seek to create the idea that if we win this war, Russia, England, China, and the United States, are going to get into a cat-and-dog fight....
  To these panicky attempts to escape the consequences to their crimes we say — all the United Nations say — that the only terms on which we shall deal with any Axis government or any Axis factions are the terms proclaimed at Casablanca: ‘Unconditional Surrender.’ In our uncompromising policy we mean no harm to the common people of the Axis nations. But we do mean to impose punishment and retribution in full upon their guilty, barbaric leaders.
  • President Roosevelt, fireside chat after returning from the Casablanca Conference with Prime Minister Churchill.

1945.

• The establishment of order in Europe and the rebuilding of national economic life must be achieved by processes which enable the liberated peoples to destroy the last vestiges of Nazism and Fascism and to create democratic institutions of their own choice.
• State Department report on the Yalta Conference, in which the Big Three met in February 1945 at a resort in southern Russia, to finalize plans to defeat Nazi Germany and to begin the reconstruction of Europe.

Cultural heritage protection

They followed U.S. Army units into liberated town where they scoured hiding places for stolen artworks that they prepared for future repatriation and stored them in protected locations. Additionally, Monuments Men carried lists of treasures compiled by Western art experts. If a listed building or monument was damaged, they recorded the damage, supervised repair work and prevented further damage to the object of cultural property. ~ Gregory J. Ferrara

They earned their name from their primary role as protectors of statues, historic buildings and cultural landmarks. This was a huge task encompassing 3,415 monuments listed within a 560,000 square mile area of the European continent. ~ Gregory J. Ferrara

• The specialized knowledge needed for delicate military operations concerning cultural heritage objects is most readily available from academic institutions. Scholars, professors and museum specialists are the front-line experts to consult when protecting objects of cultural heritage. These individuals can identify threatened works and know the appropriate responses for their care and preservation. Many have honed their specialized skills during long careers with their associated institutions and are valuable contacts for military planners to keep on hand. Academic institutions for this paper include colleges or universities, museums, art galleries and non-profit learned societies.
  During World War II the millitaries of Germany and the United States selected individuals from this community of higher learning to staff their art protection agencies. German and American army commanders sought professionals with extensive knowledge on cultural property, how to identify it and how to handle it. Individuals with qualifications that met the demands of cultural protection were selected for service under parent army organizations. Some were assigned officer ranks in their respective millitaries to further their leadership capabilities and strengthen the influence of cultural heritage protection policies in military procedure.
  • Gregory J. Ferrara, “Museum Treasures in the Fog of War: a Historical Analysis of Cultural Heritage Protection During a Time of War”, Seton Hall University, (Spring 5-2013), p. 9.

• American academic institutions consulted with the United States federal government about vulnerable cultural sites before Americans joined the land war in Europe during World War II. Representatives of the Archaeological Institute of America, the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Fogg Museum of Fine Arts of Harbard University and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. met as a single group with the U.S. State Department in the fall of 1942. A committee of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) further discussed the issue in January 1943. These concerned scholars approached the federal government well before American soldiers landed in Sicily during July 1943 and Normandy during June 1944 as part of European theatre operations.
  These individuals realized that artworks and cultural heritage sites in occupied nations were subject to damage during the inevitable invasion of Hitler's "fortress Europe." This outreach from America's major art museums, galleries and intellectual societies gained the attention of President Franklin Roosevelt who authorized the cooperation of academic institutions with the Joint Chiefs of Staff - a composition of senior Army, Navy and Army Air Corps leaders who advised federal departments on military matters. Roosevelt also authorized the creation of the Roberts Commission (officially titled the "American Commission for the Protection and Salvage of Artistic and Historic Monuments in War Areas") in August 1942. In response to Roosevelt's authorization of the Roberts Commission,the U.S. military created its own organization called the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Service, (MFA&A). The famed Monuments Men emerged from this parent organization.
  • Gregory J. Ferrara, “Museum Treasures in the Fog of War: a Historical Analysis of Cultural Heritage Protection During a Time of War”, Seton Hall University, (Spring 5-2013), pp. 19-20.

• The Monuments Men were incorporated as a section of the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) commanded by Dwight D. Eisenhower. Eisenhower recognized that the advance of Allied troops would threaten shared cultural heritage that belonged to all humanity. He addressed soldiers advancing on Rome, saying "Today we are fighting in a country which was contributed a great deal to our cultural inheritance, a country rich in monuments which...illustrate the growth of the civilization which is ours. We are bound to respect those monuments so far as war allows." As Supreme Allied Commander, Eisenhower increased support for the mission of the Monuments Men following the destruction of the Italian cultural site as Monte Cassino in February 1944 and added protection of European patrimony to the list of war aims. The Monuments Men arrived in Europe following the 15 August 1944 Allied landings on the southern coast of France. They followed U.S. Army units into liberated towns where they scoured hiding places for stolen artworks that they prepared for future repatriation and stored them in protected locations. Additionally, Monuments Men carried lists of treasures compiled by Western art experts. If a listed building or monument was damaged, they recorded the damage, supervised repair work and prevented further damage to the object of cultural property. The Monuments Men continued operations in Europe following the end of hostilities until the MFA&A was dissolved in June 1946.
  • Dwight D. Eisenhower as qtd. in Gregory J. Ferrara, “Museum Treasures in the Fog of War: a Historical Analysis of Cultural Heritage Protection During a Time of War”, Seton Hall University, (Spring 5-2013), p. 21-22.

• The Monuments Men had a similar mission as their German counterparts in the Kunstschutz with the addition of repatriation of looted materials. Monuments Men duties included increased awareness and native population cooperation policies like those exhibited by the Kunstshutz, but their four main concentrations were (1) repairing damaged monuments in Allied possession, (2) protecting monuments from damage or misuse at the hands of Allied soldiers, (3) protecting monuments in territories occupied by enemy forces from unnecessary damage and (4) recording theft by enemy forces and collecting available evidence to facilitate recovery. They earned their name from their primary role as protectors of statues, historic buildings and cultural landmarks. This was a huge task encompassing 3,415 monuments listed within a 560,000 square mile area of the European continent.
  This large geographic challenge required cooperation from a dutifully informed Allied chain of command. The Monuments Men increased awareness by creating several publications to disseminate among officers and U.S. Army leadership. Monuments Men provided Army Air Corps and infantry artillery units with lists of art treasures that must be spared damage when possible to avoid bombing and shelling historic structures during saturation attacks. Each entry was rated with an easily understood star system according to age, preservation condition and reputation among the local or international community. Three out of three stars was the highest ranking available.
  • Gregory J. Ferrara, “Museum Treasures in the Fog of War: a Historical Analysis of Cultural Heritage Protection During a Time of War”, Seton Hall University, (Spring 5-2013), pp. 22-23.

Economic impact

After World War II and the surrender of Japan, an attempt was made to dismantle the zaibatsu. American economic advisers to presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman were highly suspicious of monopolies and restrictive business practices, which they felt to be both inefficient and a form of corporatism. ~ Jennifer Beamer

• From the late 1900s onward, the zaibatsu were instrumental in economic and industrial activity within Japan. Zaibatsu groups were made up of a central holding company, owned by a controlling family, which held the stocks of major affiliates. While this style of pyramid control was common in the West, what made the zaibatsu unique was that they held a minority interest in affiliated members and controlled them through other techniques. Dependence on banking, shipping, and trading facilities of the combine was one of these techniques, but more important was the personal loyalty of the executives to all the firms of the group. The four largest Zaibatsu had direct control over more than 30 percent of Japan's mining, chemical, and metals industries; almost 50 percent control over the machinery and equipment market; 60 percent of the commercial stock exchange; as well as a significant portion of the export merchant fleet.
  • Jennifer Beamer, “Japanese Zaibatsu”, Hawaii.edu, (2012), p. 301

• After World War II and the surrender of Japan, an attempt was made to dismantle the zaibatsu. American economic advisers to presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman were highly suspicious of monopolies and restrictive business practices, which they felt to be both inefficient and a form of corporatism. During the occupation only 16 zaibatsu were targeted for complete dissolution, and 26 more for reorganization. In 1946, the controlling zaibatsu families' assets were seized. holding companies were eliminated, and interlocking directorships. necessary to the old system of intercompany coordination, were outlawed. Neveretheless, complete termination of the zaibatsu was never achieved, mostly because the U.S. government reversed course in an effort to reindustrialize Japan, as a bulwark against Communism from other parts of Asia. The zaibatsu were in this case considered to be beneficial to the Japanese economy and government. The opinions of the Japanese public, however, ranged from indifferent to disapproving.
  • Jennifer Beamer, “Japanese Zaibatsu”, Hawaii.edu, (2012), p. 301

The War at Home

1941

• [The attack on Pearl Harbor showed] the seriousness of the challenge confronting us and our very souls became so inflamed with righteous wrath, so fired with patriotism, that our differences and divisions and hates melted into a unity never before witnessed in this country.
• Rep. John Flannagan of Virginia.

1942

• Loose lips sink ships
• Wartime slogan that urged people to keep quiet because spies could always be listening.

• In time of this grave national danger, when all excess income should go to win the war, no American citizen ought to have a net income, after he has paid his taxes, of more than $25,000 a year.
  • Franklin D. Roosevelt, message to Congress (April 27, 1942); in The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1942 (1950), p. 221.

1942

• Eat more corn, oats, and rye products — fish and poultry — fruits, vegetables and potatoes. Baked, boiled and broiled foods.
• Eat less wheat, meat, sugar and fats to save for the army and our allies
• Text of a wartime conservation poster.

1942

• The need is urgent — War in the Pacific has greatly reduced our supply of vegetable fats from the Far East. It is necessary to find substitutes for them. Fat makes glycerine. And glycerine makes explosives for us and our Allies — explosives to down Axis planes, stop their tanks, and sink their ships. We need millions of pounds of glycerine and you housewives can supply it.
  Don’t throw away a single drop of used cooking fat, meat drippings, fry fats — every kind you use. After you’ve got all the cooking good from them, pour them through a kitchen strainer into a clean, wide-mouthed can. Keep it in a cool dark place....
  Take them to your meat dealer when you’ve saved a pound or more. He is cooperating patriotically. He will pay you for your waste fats and get them started on their way to war industries.
  • Federal Government pamphlet getting civilians involved in the war effort.

1943

• Dr. New Deal... [has been replaced by] Dr. Win the War.... The overwhelming first emphasis should be on winning the war.
  • President Roosevelt, on the change in the priorities of the Federal Government.

1943

• The honest-minded liberal will admit that the common man is getting a better break [now] than he did under the New Deal.
  • A New Deal administrator.

1943

• To harden home-front morale, the military services have adopted a new policy of letting civilians see photographically what warfare does to men who fight.
• Newsweek magazine on the War Department’s policy of letting photos of American troop casualties be shown in order to reverse the public’s overconfidence.

The War at Home: Japanese-Americans

• 1942
• The very fact that no sabotage has taken place to date is a disturbing and confirming indication that action will be taken.
  • War Department report on Japanese migrants and Japanese-Americans on the West Coast after the attack on Pearl Harbor.^{[citation needed]}

1942

• Despite the color of our hair and skin, despite the shape of our eyes, the U.S. was our country. I remember how my parents reminded us of that fact. Just before our family was evacuated, my father... said, "No matter what happens, this is your home."
  • U.S. Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta, taken as a child to an internment camp.^{[citation needed]}

1942

• During the bleak spring of 1942, the Japanese and Japanese-Americans who lived on the West Coast of the United States were taken into custody and removed into camps in the interior. More than 100,000 men, women, and children were thus exiled and imprisoned. More than two-thirds of them were American citizens.
• These people were taken into custody as a military measure on the ground that espionage and sabotage were especially to be feared from persons of Japanese blood. The whole group was removed from the West Coast because the military authorities thought it would take too long to conduct individual investigations on the spot. They were arrested without warrants and were held without indictment or a statement of charges.... Despite the good intention of the chief relocation officers, the centers were little better than concentration camps.
• If the evacuees were found ‘loyal,’ they were released only if they could find a job and a place to live, in a community where no hoodlums would come out at night to chalk-up anti-Japanese slogans, break windows, or threaten riot. If found ‘disloyal’ in their attitude to the war, they were kept in the camps indefinitely — although sympathy with the enemy is no crime in the United States (for white people at least) so long as it is not translated into deeds or the visible threat of deeds.
  • Eugene V. Rostow, in Harper’s, 1945^{[specific citation needed]}

1942

• There were no lights, stoves, or window panes.... We slept on army cots with our clothes on. … The barbed wire fence which surrounded the camp was visible against the background of the snow-covered Sierra mountain range.
  • Karl Yoneda on conditions at the internment camp for Japanese migrants and Japanese-Americans at Manzanar, California.^{[citation needed]}

1944

• After all those years, having worked his whole life to build a dream — having it all taken away.... He died a broken man.
  • Peter Ota, whose family was interned at a camp in Colorado.^{[citation needed]}

1944

• We must accord great respect and consideration to the judgments of the military authorities who are on the scene and who have full knowledge of the military facts.... At the same time, however, it is essential that there be definite limits to military discretion.... Individuals must not be left impoverished of their constitutional rights on plea of military necessity that has neither substance nor support.
  • Supreme Court Associate Justice Frank Murphy, one of three justices dissenting in Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214 (1944). The Court's six-judge majority supported the interning of Japanese and Japanese-Americans.

The War at Home: African-Americans

• My own opinion was that blacks could best overcome racist attitudes through their achievements, even though these had to take place within the hateful environment of segregation....
  The... war represented a golden opportunity....
  We owned a fighter squadron — something that would have been unthinkable only a short time earlier. It was all ours.... Furthermore, we would be required to analyze our own problems and solve them with our own skills.
  • General Benjamin O. Davis, the first African American general in the Air Force, and commanding officer of the Tuskegee Airmen during World War II.^{[citation needed]}

• I knew I had strong feelings about the war against fascism. But, I also had strong feelings against fighting in a racially segregated army..what, I ask, is it like to be a Negro veteran? You fought, if you are a Negro veteran, to tear down the sign "No Jews Allowed" in Germany, to find in America the sign "No Negroes Allowed." You fought to wipe out the noose and the whip in Germany and Japan, to find the noose and the whip in Georgia and Louisiana...I ask you this-an honest question-why is there talk of Spain and Yugoslavia, of Palestine and Greece but no talk of Aiken County, South Carolina.
  • Ollie Harrington Why I Left America and Other Essays (1993)

• This is a war to keep men free. The struggle to broaden and lengthen the road of freedom — our freedom — here in America — will come later. That this private, intra-American war will be carried on and won is the only real reason we Negroes have to fight. We must keep the road open....
  The very fact that I, a Negro, can fight against the evils in America is worth fighting for. This open fighting against the wrongs one hates is the mark and the hope of democratic freedom.
  • From J. Saunders Redding, “A Negro Looks at This War,” American Mercury (November 1942), pp. 585-592.

Women in the War

1942

• Days and nights were an endless nightmare, until it seemed we couldn’t stand it any longer. Patients came in by the hundreds, and the doctors and nurses worked continuously under the tents amid the flies and heat and dust. We had from eight to nine hundred victims a day.
• Eunice Hatchitt, Army nurse serving on Bataan in the Philippines.

1943

• To be doing something towards winning the war, to be making some money, to learn a trade, men and women have been pouring into the city [of Mobile, Alabama] for more than a year now.
• Observation of novelist John Dos Passos.

1943

• I was an eager learner, and I soon became an outstanding riveter. At Rohr I worked riveting to boom doors on P-38s.... The war really created opportunities for women. It was the first time we got a chance to show that we could do a lot of things that only men had done before.
• Winona Espinosa, an aircraft worker.

1943

• Something is happening that Adolf Hitler does not understand..... It is the miracle of production.
• Time magazine, on American industry’s production of immense numbers of planes, ships, and tanks. Actually, German military intelligence DID correctly estimate what the U.S. could manufacture, but Hitler chose to ignore the report and declared war on the U.S.

1943

• Instead of cutting a cake, this woman is cutting a pattern of aircraft parts. Instead of baking a cake, this woman is cooking gears to reduce the tension in the gears after use.
• Narrative in a news video showing women working in an aircraft factory.

1944

• There is nothing in the training to prepare you for the excruciating noise you get down in the ship. Any who were not heart-and-soul determined to stick it out would fade out right away.... And it isn’t only your muscles that must harden. It’s your nerve, too.
• Woman shipyard worker.

1944

• You had better be careful how you talk to me ‘cause I have developed a big muscle in my right arm and a good strong one in my left, so take it easy, kid.
• Margaret Hooper, age 20, in a letter to a friend in the Pacific Fleet. Margaret was working as an incoming materials inspector at an aircraft plant in San Pedro, California.

1944

• “Rosie the Riveter”
• Name of the tough, patriotic, fictional woman cartoon character made to rally women support and help during the war.

1944

• The sirens blow, and death is in the air
  Still at her post the trusty Captain stands,
  And counts her change, and scampers up the stair,
  As brave a sailor as the King commands.
  • A. P. Herbert, "Seeing It Through", London Transport poster. The "Captain" was a London bus conductress.

1945.

• It gave me a good start in life. I decided that if I could learn to weld like a man, I could do anything it took to make a living.
• Nova Lee Holbrook, on how her experience in war work was invaluable.

Quotes about World War II

Major-General JFC Fuller, the man credited with developing modern armored warfare in the 1920s, called failure to use it "the greatest blunder of the whole war." He even suggested that British and American tank divisions could have overrun Germany before the Russians – if it had been deployed, that is. ~ David Hambling

• On the eve of World War II, Japan was a thriving industrialized power of about seventy million people. The nation had become a major manufacturer of consumer goods, but, by the early 1930s, the military-dominated central government was increasingly replacing the market economy with features of a totalitarian command economy, including strong government control and planning of production. A growing sector of production was being devoted to war-related industries. Additionally, during 1934-36, the electric power and oil industries were nationalized, and in 1939 rice rationing was introduced. By the end of the decade, Japan was on a war footing driven by wartime economy.
  • Alan Axelrod, The Real History of World War II: A New Look at the Past, (May 6, 2008), Sterling. pp. 138-139.

• Those Americans who went to Spain to fight Franco and stave off World War II have never minded being called "premature anti-fascists." They were proud of the label.
  • Alvah Bessie, Men in Battle: A Story of Americans in Spain (1939), Foreword to the 1954 reprint.

• We have long memories. We have developed a relative immunity to the endless barrage of propaganda, slander and outright lies that has been laid upon us. And especially, we are immune to the Big Lie that destroyed Spain and which Hitler developed to such a point of perfection that it was necessary for millions of human beings to die to achieve the defeat of the Axis. Yet the Big Lie survives and flourishes mightily in our own country today. As it is promulgated daily, hourly and every minute of the day through every medium of communication, so it must be answered- until our own people see it for what it is and explode it in their own good time.
  • Alvah Bessie, Men in Battle: A Story of Americans in Spain (1939), Foreword to the 1954 reprint.

Whenever we hear it said that Communism threatens us from within and without; whenever we are told that the Soviet Union menaces our "way of life" and wants to conquer the world; whenever we are summoned to a Holy Crusade that- if it is allowed to begin- will ravish the entire earth, we recall the following simple facts of history:

Mussolini killed whatever democracy existed in Italy by claiming that Italy was threatened by Communism;

Hitler destroyed the German Republic with the same weapon;

Tojo broke the resistance of the people of Japan by using the identical thesis;

Franco murdered the Spanish Republic in the name of the "Red menace";

The Axis launched World War II under the slogan of saving the world from Communism.

• Alvah Bessie, Men in Battle: A Story of Americans in Spain (1939), Foreword to the 1954 reprint.

• To a striking degree, the way the United States conducted World War II was a consequence of Roosevelt’s own experience as the assistant secretary of the Navy during World War I—a period that made him appreciate the benefits of overwhelming the enemy with machinery, as well as the risks of ground warfare. When he traveled to France in 1918 to tour the front lines, the battlefield disgusted him. The conditions for soldiers were too crowded, and he wrote in his diary that “the smell of dead horses” offended his “sensitive naval” nose. Instead, he fixated on logistics and material: the deployment of large naval guns, transported on land via train carriages, to batter German lines; a push for rapid advances in aircraft and bomb technology. He promoted a plan to thwart German U-boat attacks by creating a minefield across the entire North Sea rather than putting Allied ships at risk. (The scheme was not complete when the war ended.) Roosevelt’s work during this period also showed him the value of working closely with trusted international partners such as Britain and France. Strong alliances, he came to learn, were how modern wars were won.
  Unlike many Americans, Roosevelt did not become an isolationist after World War I. He understood that aggressive authoritarian regimes had to be stopped and believed that the U.S. could protect many of its own interests via machinery and alliances. He was so wedded to these two ideas that, during World War II, he provided Britain and the Soviet Union with massive amounts of aid without expecting any repayment. So much better, Roosevelt believed, to strengthen U.S. allies and let them do much of the land fighting. This approach led to one of his greatest successes as a war leader.
  • Phillips Payson O’Brien, “The National Interest Is What the President Says It Is”, The Atlantic, (8/29/2024)

• It might have been the greatest lost weapon of World War II. Major-General JFC Fuller, the man credited with developing modern armored warfare in the 1920s, called failure to use it "the greatest blunder of the whole war." He even suggested that British and American tank divisions could have overrun Germany before the Russians – if it had been deployed, that is.
  • J. F. C. Fuller as qtd. in David Hambling, "Secret Strobelight Weapons of World War II", Wired, 22 October 2012.

• I was there.
  • William D. Leahy, I Was There (1950), p. 1

• World War II, at least in Europe, may have had some moral justification, though there can be some legitimate debate as to whether the US and its freedoms were ever really threatened, and certainly many of the Americans who died in that war saw their struggle as worthy, so that we may at least in good conscience honor their deaths.
  • Dave Lindorff, The Glorification of War (May 31, 2010), CounterPunch.

• Unlike World War One, then, the Second War—Hitler's War—was a near-universal experience. And it lasted a long time—nearly six years for those countries (Britain, Germany) that were engaged in it from beginning to end. In Czechoslovakia it began earlier still, with the Nazi occupation of the Sudetenland in October 1938. In eastern Europe and the Balkans it did not even end with the defeat of Hitler, since occupation (by the Soviet army) and civil war continued long after the dismemberment of Germany.
  • Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (2005), Chap. 1: The Legacy of War

• The World War that reached its brutal end in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was fought among the wealthiest and most powerful of nations.  Their civilizations had given the world great cities and magnificent art.  Their thinkers had advanced ideas of justice and harmony and truth.  And yet, the war grew out of the same base instinct for domination or conquest that had caused conflicts among the simplest tribes; an old pattern amplified by new capabilities and without new constraints.  In the span of a few years, some 60 million people would die -- men, women, children no different than us, shot, beaten, marched, bombed, jailed, starved, gassed to death. 
  • Barack Obama, “Remarks by President Obama and Prime Minister Abe of Japan at Hiroshima Peace Memorial”; Hiroshima Peace Memorial Hiroshima, Japan, (May 27, 2016)

• There are many sites around the world that chronicle this war -- memorials that tell stories of courage and heroism; graves and empty camps that echo of unspeakable depravity.  Yet in the image of a mushroom cloud that rose into these skies, we are most starkly reminded of humanity’s core contradiction; how the very spark that marks us as a species -- our thoughts, our imagination, our language, our tool-making, our ability to set ourselves apart from nature and bend it to our will -- those very things also give us the capacity for unmatched destruction.
  • Barack Obama, “Remarks by President Obama and Prime Minister Abe of Japan at Hiroshima Peace Memorial”; Hiroshima Peace Memorial Hiroshima, Japan, (May 27, 2016)

• At the war's end, the death toll of the peoples of the Soviet Union numbered some 27 million. Twenty-seven million people were killed, murdered, bludgeoned, starved or left to die as a result of forced labour by National Socialist Germany. Fourteen million of them were civilians. No one had to mourn more victims in this war than the peoples of the then Soviet Union. And yet these millions are not as deeply etched in our collective memory as their suffering and our responsibility demand. This war was a crime – a monstrous, criminal war of aggression and annihilation.
  • Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Anniversary of Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union speech, (18 June 2021)

Ernest King and Walter M. Whitehill, Fleet Admiral King: A Naval Record (1952)

• Of the 10,583,755 tons of Japanese naval and merchant vessels sunk during World War II, 9,736,068 tons were sunk by United States forces, 5,320,094 tons being accounted for by United States submarines alone. Our submarines were doing to the Japanese in the Pacific what the German U-boats were doing to Allied shipping in the Atlantic; but the industrial power of the United States was almost limitless, while that of Japan was not. Until the closing months of 1942 the German submarines continually reduced the available total of Allied tonnage, but thereafter both by the improved effectiveness of antisubmarine measures and the stupendous output of American and British shipyards, Allied shipping constantly increased. Although approximately 23,351,000 tons of Allied shipping were sunk by German U-boats between 1939 and 1945, new construction reached the total of 42,485,000 tons so that the final balance sheet in the Atlantic showed a net gain of 19,134,000 tons. Japanese losses, not being offset by comparable new construction, were in large part final. Thus as the enemy's links with his extended positions and overseas sources of logistic strength in the Pacific were being weakened by our submarines, his very hold upon those conquests was challenged by the industrial productivity of the United States.
  • p. 530

• The last seven months of 1944 had witnessed incredible progress both in Europe and the Pacific. The long-awaited invasion of Normandy had taken place. The Marianas Islands were in our hands and we had returned to the Philippines, well in advance of even the most optimistic schedules. In the Battle of the Philippine Sea and the Battle for Leyte Gulf a great part of the Japanese fleet had been disposed of forever and the remainder had been made ineffective for some time to come. Although the war was still far from won, it was at least approaching its final stages on both sides of the world.
  • p. 582

• To King, Leahy, Nimitz, and naval officers in general, it had always seemed that the defeat of Japan could be accomplished by sea and air power alone, without the necessity of actual invasion by the Japanese home islands by ground troops. In 1942, 1943 and 1944, while attention of most of the Allied political and military leaders was focused on Europe, and while the war in Japan was left largely to King to manage with what forces he could muster, the Pacific war had proceeded largely upon this assumption. With the approaching victory in Europe a larger amount of attention was concentrated on the Pacific by people who had not previously been too greatly concerned with the problems of that war, and an increasing amount of high-priced thought was devoted to it, some of which seemed to King not strictly pertinent. From the time of the Teheran Conference there had been the political consideration of Soviet intervention in the war against Japan, and the Army had been convinced that the use of ground troops would be necessary. Upon Marshall's insistence, which also reflected MacArthur's views, the Joint Chiefs had prepared plans for landings in Kyushu and eventually in the Tokyo plain. King and Leahy did not like the idea, but as unanimous decisions were necessary in the Joint Chiefs meetings, they reluctantly acquiesced, feeling that in the end sea power would accomplish the defeat of Japan, as proved to be the case.
  • p. 598

• World War II gave King the opportunity of putting in practice another conviction. His earliest studies of the Napoleonic campaigns had indicated to him that the great weakness of the French military system of the period was that it required the detailed supervision of Napoleon. His belief that one must do the opposite, and train subordinates for independent action, had been confirmed and strengthened through his years of association with Admiral Mayo. During World War II King would jokingly maintain that he managed to keep well by "doing nothing that I can get anybody to do for me," but in all seriousness he could not have survived the four years of war without having made full use of the decentralization of authority into the hands of subordinate commanders, who were considered competent unless they proved themselves otherwise, and who were expected to think, decide, and act for themselves. Upon Nimitz in the Pacific, Edwards, Cooke and Horne in Washington, Ingersoll in the Atlantic, Stark in London, Halsey, Spruance, Kinkaid, Hewitt, Ingram and many other flag officers at sea, King relied with confidence and was not disappointed.
  • p. 645

James B. Reston, Prelude to Victory (1942)

• I wonder when I hear people scoffing at the four freedoms and wondering whether wars, after all, ever really settle anything. Do we, even now, understand the revolutionary nature of this war? Are we putting everything to the test; will it help win the war? Are we clear on the enormity of our task? Do we realize the size of the stakes?
  • p. 24

• "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with inherent and inalienable Rights; that among these, are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." Could anything be more in conflict with the fundamental philosophy of the totalitarian states? These states do not agree that there are any truths in this paragraph; they deny most vehemently and have taken up the sword to prove that all men are not created equal, but that they, the master races, have the right and duty to dictate to the lesser men of the world; they do not concede that man has any "unalienable Rights" except his right to bear arms and carry out the will of the God-state; and they deny him not only his liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but his life as well.
  • pp. 24-25

• The second paragraph of the Declaration continues: "That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness." This clearly is the very antithesis of the totalitarian belief. Those governments were not instituted to secure these individual rights for their people. Neither the Nazis nor the Japanese militarists nor the Fascists of Italy derive "their just powers from the consent of the governed," and their concentration camps and common graves are full of people who even dared to suggest that the people had any right to criticize let alone to alter or abolish, the existing regimes.
  • p. 25

• These are the thing we are really talking about when we speak of "our way of life"; and these are precisely the things that are at stake in this war. For the Germans have denied every democratic and Christian principle that has been handed down to us and preserved and developed in this great republic. The Greeks gave us the idea of intellectual liberalism, Plato the conception of reason, yet the Nazis deny their right to exist. Christ gave us the doctrine of love and mercy, but the Germans scorn Christ as a Jew and scoff at love and mercy. The French confirmed our faith in democracy with their cry of "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity," yet the Germans dismiss this as a hypocritical slogan to be opposed, as Hitler's pal Hans von Bülow has said, by their "Prussian realities of Infantry, Cavalry, and Artillery." The Romans and British gave us our conception of the "rule of law and the sanctity of treaties," and we have known for years what the totalitarians thought of these fundamental virtues. We in the United States have given all these honorable things a worthy home and have proved to the world what can be done by heroic men whose minds are free to question and experiment, to seek truth according to their own conscience, and to listen sympathetically to the most unorthodox views.
  • p. 35

• But we must understand that these are not permanent things. Democracy is no heirloom to be possessed and passed on like a Governor Winthrop desk. It is "an endowment like life that must be purchased in every generation." Sympathy and reason and true democracy can be destroyed overnight. They can be destroyed by a conqueror, as in Norway; they can be taken from us by our own selfishness, as in France. Every bureaucrat who tampers with freedom of the press, every newspaper publisher who willfully suppresses or distorts or minimizes the truth; every unreasonable citizen who nurses his own prejudices and refuses to listen sympathetically to the other fellow's point of view, is, we must clearly understand, endangering these principles for which we are fighting. Never before in the history of the republic has it been so important that we understand this fact, for in time of war these principles are often threatened at the top by a small minority of officials who would curtail our freedom to know, and at the bottom by a number of people who, even in the face of the enemy, cannot shelve their own prejudices or abandon the interests of their particular groups.
  • p. 35-36

• The root of the trouble lies, I think, in the military situation. We do not like this unprecedented parade of bad news; we don't like to get shoved around all over the world; so we are complaining bitterly about almost everything. But neither do the British like it, and neither do the Russians, nor the Chinese, nor the Dutch, who have had to take a lot more than we have. Adverse criticism of our allies will not help our military situation. It does no good to complain now about Singapore; that milk has been well and truly spilt. It does even less good to meditate on King George III, or the last World War, or the war debts, or the unfortunate accents and manners of certain officials sent out here from Whitehall. I have not read any adverse criticism in the British press about Pearl Harbor (what would we have said if they had got caught like that at Alexandria or Gibraltar or Scapa Flow?); I have heard no attacks in the House of Commons on our naval dispositions or on the size of our expeditionary forces; I have heard of very few recriminations about our failure to be ready for war despite our years of criticizing British unpreparedness.
  • pp. 162-163

• Why, then, all the sniping over here? We are not doing anybody any favors in this war. This is no exercise in knight-errantry. The Russians and the British are doing just as much for us as we are doing for them. They need our weapons and what men we can send; we need their help, and we need it desperately if we are ever to win this war. If most of the people who are doing most of he complaining had their own way with our foreign policy, we might not have had any allies today, and unless we had wanted to connive with the Japs at the destruction of China, the Netherlands Indies, and the British Empire, we should still have been attacked at Pearl Harbor. There was only one honorable course on December 7, and we chose it; there is only one honorable course now, and that is to be helpful or to be quiet.
  • p. 163

• I have heard it often- that if the conquered peoples of Europe do not like our democracy the way it is, they can go fly a kite. It is absolutely true that a great majority of us found the old life very comfortable and would like to go back to the "normality" that produced it; but... we destroyed that "normality" trying to save our lives and cannot now go back to it any more than we can turn 1943 back into 1938. Nor can we tell the conquered peoples of Europe to go fly a kite if they do not like our democracy, because we need their help and will need it desperately before the war is over, and in order to get it we shall have to remove the doubts that are in their minds. That means that the people of America must look forward and not backward. That means that we must prove that our democracy is just as efficient as the totalitarian creed of our enemies. That means that we must make democracy live up to its promises. "Most governments," said Abraham Lincoln, "have been based on the denial of the equal rights of men; ours began by affirming those rights. We made the experiment, and the fruit is before us. Look at it- think of it." The democracy of Lincoln is not dead. It has not lost its revolutionary fervor. It has not lost its appeal to the men of the world. Our problem is to prove that we really believe in it.
  • pp. 214-215

• A great number of people in this country do not even take the Atlantic Charter seriously. They think it is some jiggery-pokery trumped up by Roosevelt and Churchill to propagandize their meeting at sea in 1941. They do not see it for what it should be: an extension of the Rights of Man, and another logical step in the fulfillment of the purpose of this nation. The scornful conception of the Atlantic Charter and of all other attempts to state our purpose will not do. For unless the spirit of the people is behind these declarations, they will have no true value. The essence of patriotism is in believing in the principles of America. Either you believe in the equalitarian idea behind this republic or you do not. Either you believe in Lincoln's "government of the people, by the people, and for the people" or you do not. Either you believe in liberty, justice, and right, or you do not. If you do, then our appeal to the revolutionary spirit of the world will be heard, but if you do not, all the Atlantic Charters in the world will not inspire the conquered nations to fight for principles that we proclaim but do not follow.
  • pp. 215-216

Misattributed

• Send us more Japs!
  • Attributed by media sources to Lieutenant Colonel James P. S. Devereaux during the Battle of Wake Island. Reported in Paul F. Boller, Jr., and John George, They Never Said It: A Book of Fake Quotes, Misquotes, & Misleading Attributions (1989), p. 20. Deveraux denied having made such a statement, saying "I did not send any such message. As far as I know, it wasn't sent at all. None of us was that much of a damn fool. We already had more Japs than we could handle."

Sources

1. ↑ Vital Speeches of the Day, Vol. VII, pp. 21-23
2. ↑ Marechal Juin, Mémoires, Fayard, 1959, p. 355

See also

• Aftermath of World War II

External links

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