World War II

When Nazi Germany began its conquest of Europe, and Japan its assault on its neigh­bors, the majority of Americans did not want to get involved in either of the two conflicts. “We Must Keep Out!” was the slogan of the day.

U-boats

The German U-boat (U-Boot, Unterseeboot [submarine]) campaign was directed at spe­cific targets. It was intended to weaken the Allied naval blockade of Germany, restrict the movement of Allied military power,

German poster showing the United Kingdom surrounded by German U-boats.German U-boats destroyed 70 percent of the Allied shipping. (Library of Congress)

and act as the front line in imposing Ger­many’s blockade of Britain—in effect sev­ering all maritime communications with Britain.

The fall of France in June 1940 gave the German U-boats direct access to the Atlantic. Although the number of opera­tional U-boats in the first winter of the war was limited to twenty-seven in August

1940, dropping to twenty-one by January

1941, this period became known to Ger­man submariners as the “happy time” due to the high numbers of Allied shipping sunk and the limited risk to the sub­mariners themselves.

The active involvement of the U.S. Navy in the battle of the Atlantic increased during 1941, following the meeting at Pla­centia Bay in Newfoundland, Canada, in August between Churchill and Roosevelt. At this meeting it was decided, for the pur­pose of naval projection, that the world should be divided into spheres of strategic control. The western Atlantic, which was to include Iceland, was to be under the control of the United States, and in Sep­tember 1941 the U.S. Navy began escort duties alongside the Royal Canadian Navy (RCN) between the Grand Banks and Ice­land. This meant that even before Ameri­can entry into the war the U.S. Navy was involved in combat protecting convoys against U-boat attack.

When America entered the war after the attack at Pearl Harbor, the lessons learned in the early days of the battle for the Atlantic were often forgotten or ig­nored. The United States followed the dis­credited policy of offensive patrols de­signed to deprive U-boats of access to American waters. In practice this often meant that while naval and air forces were directed out to sea searching for the sub­marine threat, merchant shipping was left to continue unprotected in coastal waters. For the Germans this meant a second “happy time” as American shipping con­tinued to ignore the realities of war and the eastern seaboard of the United States be­came a rich hunting ground for German U-boats with losses reaching as high as 1 million tons of shipping sunk in the months of May and June 1942.

The experience of the U.S. Navy while assisting in prewar escort in support of the RCN led to the belief that slow-moving con­voys were of themselves a danger. It was be­lieved to be safer to allow slower-moving ships to operate independently in the relative safety of shallow coastal waters. The Ameri­can policy of following routine patrols along predicted routes meant that the U-boats could easily avoid contact with the patrols while at the same time ensure that their tally of individual victims steadily increased.

This second “happy time” came to an end when coastal convoys were introduced and air coverage was increased, both points aimed at providing a protected in-shore corridor. The U-boats still depended upon swift surface movement to race ahead of their intended target and position them­selves for attack, and the increase in air cov­erage meant that they were vulnerable while on the surface. The aim was to deny U-boats the ability to operate within the protected area.

Iceland was abandoned as a staging area for convoys in late 1942 after New York had been transformed into the main staging area for transatlantic convoys. The convoys were now sent on a direct route between the Grand Banks and Ireland. However, this allowed the U-boats to take advantage of a gap in the protective air cover—the period when the convoys were beyond the range, and therefore the pro­tection, of land-based aircraft operating from bases in the United States, Canada, and Scotland. It was only with the intro­duction of a limited number of Liberator aircraft converted for long-range flight that convoys from America to Britain were able to be protected all the way with a resulting drop in tonnage lost to U-boat activity.

North African Landings

When France fell in June 1940, her North African colonies were left in the hands of Vichy French administrations. On Novem­ber 8, 1942, Allied troops were landed in French Morocco and Algeria as the initial part of the North African campaign. Al­though this could not be seen as the second front that Joseph Stalin was demanding, it offered a greater opportunity for success, while at the same time requiring fewer landing craft, and was seen in the circum­stances as a more suitable baptism of fire for untried American troops.

Given the codename TORCH, the inva­sion was conceived and carried out as an American operation. Lieutenant General Dwight D. Eisenhower was appointed commander in chief of the Allied Expedi­tionary Force, with Major General Mark Clark as his deputy.

It was hoped that if the French forces in North Africa could be persuaded to welcome the Allied invasion force there would be little or no bloodshed. To this end the Allies sent a submarine to bring General Henri Giraud, a staunch oppo­nent of Germany, out of Vichy France. At the same time, Mark Clark landed secretly near Algiers on October 22, 1942, to meet the pro-Giraud Major General Charles Mast, chief of staff of the 19th French Corps.

Three landing places were chosen for the operation. Casablanca was the objec­tive of the Western Force, commanded by Major General George Patton; Oran was chosen for the Central Force, commanded by Major General Lloyd Fredendall; and the Eastern Force, commanded by Major General Charles Ryder, was to land at Al­giers. The two westerly landings were sup­ported by Western Air Command, while the Eastern Air Command provided sup­port for those landing at Algiers.

The Western and Central landing forces were all American, and, in the hope of preventing hostilities with the French, who were more likely to oppose British landings after the British sinking of the French fleet at Mers-el-Kebir, the Eastern Force initially comprised an American as­sault force that was to be reinforced later by British troops. Initial landings took place in the early hours of November 8, 1942, with 65,000 Allied troops involved. The land­ings achieved complete strategic surprise. A naval force of 650 warships was deployed to transport the Central and Eastern forces from the United Kingdom, while Patton’s force sailed directly from the United States to the African landing sites.

It was argued that the North African landings were a distraction and diverted the attention of the Allies from their pri­mary goal of invading France. However, given the rawness of the American troops, such a large-scale undertaking could not have been successfully achieved in 1942 or 1943. The experiences gained from the TORCH landings were to provide valuable information and skills that were put to use in the invasion of Sicily and when the Al­lies landed in Normandy in June 1944.

D-Day

The Allied invasion of occupied northwest Europe in June 1944 was given the code­name OVERLORD while the assault phase, the Normandy landings, was given the codename NEPTUNE. The successful opera­tion had a number of requirements: A suit­able landing area in the Low Countries or France where the beach defenses could be overcome by the invasion forces. The land­ing site itself had to be within the range of Allied fighters and able to ensure that the rate of build-up of Allied troops could equal the rate of reinforcement of the de­fending German forces. It was necessary to find firm and sheltered beaches over which the troops landing ashore could move for­ward and expand the beachhead. The site eventually chosen for the landings was the Baie de la Seine, between Le Havre and the Cherbourg peninsula. The site fitted the necessary criteria and was close to Cherbourg, which it was hoped could be captured intact. Because the Allies could not rely on the capture of a major port like Cherbourg, the build-up of Allied troops on the beachhead was dependent on the creation of two artificial harbors, which had to be towed across the English Chan­nel. These harbors were designed to handle all supplies while fuel was to be pumped directly across the English Channel by a se­ries of pipelines known as Pluto.

All previous Allied amphibious opera­tions had begun under cover of darkness, but in this instance, because of the scale and complexity of the landings, the assault was timed to begin after dawn. This would also allow air and naval forces to neutralize the coastal defenses. June 5 was the day chosen for the landings, due to the tides and the need for the airborne troops to land under a full moon, but the operation was delayed for 24 hours due to bad weather. Just after midnight on June 6, some 23,400 British and American para­troopers were dropped on the flanks of the invasion beaches. The 6th British Airborne Division was dropped on the left flank east of the river Orne, while the 82nd and 101st U.S. Airborne Divisions landed on the right flank between Ste Mere Eglise and Carentan. At 6:30 A.M. the first assault di­visions were delivered to the beaches by five naval assault forces, each designated by the first letter of the codename of the beach on to which it was to deliver its division. The beaches were codenamed UTAH, OMAHA, GOLD, JUNO, and SWORD. Some 7,000 ships and landing craft took part in the operation, bombarding German posi­tions, landing the five assault divisions, and countering any German naval attack.

Altogether 57,500 American troops and 75,215 British and Canadian troops were landed on D-Day, and the assaulting forces suffered 6,000 American casualties and 4,300 British and Canadian ones. The assault phase of the landings, NEPTUNE, ceased on June 30, 1944, with the loss of 59 ships sunk and 110 damaged. In that time 850,279 men, 148,803 vehicles, and 570,505 tons of supplies had been success­fully landed at the Normandy beachhead.

Battle of the Bulge

Commonly known as the Battle of the Bulge, the Ardennes Offensive launched in December 1944 was Adolf Hitler’s last­ditch offensive in northwest Europe. The aim of the offensive was to drive a wedge between the Allied armies and recapture Antwerp, at that time the Allies’ most vital supply port. The attack was launched in poor weather and achieved total strategic and tactical surprise due to the inability of the Allied air power to operate. The success of the offensive relied on the newly created Sixth SS Panzer Army, commanded by SS general Joseph “Sepp” Dietrich, to make a quick breakthrough in the northern Ar­dennes around Monschau. Simultaneously, Lieutenant General Erich Brandenberger’s Seventh Army attacked in the south while Lieutenant General Hasso Manteuffel’s Fifth Panzer Army attacked in the center. Totaling 30 divisions, and supported by more than 1,000 aircraft, these armies were assembled in the greatest secrecy and repre­sented the final recourses of the Third Reich. Special units were employed to break through and capture bridges across the river Meuse, paratroops were employed to block U.S. reinforcements moving south, and a handful of English-speaking troops dressed in American uniforms and driving American vehicles were employed to cause confusion and apprehension.

Lieutenant General Courtney Hodges’s First U.S. Army, part of General Omar Bradley’s Twelfth Army Group, was respon­sible for the Ardennes sector, which was the chosen area for new or recuperating divi­sions. At the time of the offensive its only five divisions defended the 80-mile front: the 99th and 106th from Hodges’s 5th Corps, the 28th and 4th from his 8th Corps, with the 9th Armored in reserve. This lack of strength was a calculated risk taken by the Allies to pursue strategic ob­jectives north and south of the Ardennes. With no advanced intelligence, both Bradley and British general Bernard Mont­gomery saw any impending attack in the

A file of American prisoners march along a road somewhere on the western front. The prisoners were captured by Germans during the surprise enemy drive into Allied territory during the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944. (NARA)

Ardennes area as only a remote possibility, and when information did finally arrive, it was initially interpreted as a local attack.

The 10th Armored Division of Pat­ton’s Third U.S. Army and the 7th Ar­mored Division of Lieutenant General W. H. Simpson’s Ninth U.S. Army were or­dered by Dwight D. Eisenhower, supreme Allied commander, to reinforce the front­line infantry divisions. The first few days were critical, however; in the north the 99th Division was soon reinforced by two others, the 1st and 2nd, and later by the 9th. Manteuffel’s panzers broke through and headed for two important centers of the local road network, St. Vith and Bas- togne. Cut off from reinforcements, two regiments of the 106th Division were forced to surrender on the Schnee Eifel, but its third put up a stout defense before St. Vith. At Bastogne the 101st Airborne Division and part of the 10th Armored managed to throw a defensive ring around the town before it was surrounded and re­pelled Manteuffel’s advancing forces.

On December 19, Eisenhower, now alerted that the Germans were heading for the Meuse, stopped all Allied offensive ac­tion along his front. Patton was ordered to attack northward, changing the axis of his advance. The intention was to relieve the pressure on Hodges’s beleaguered forces. With Dietrich’s advance blocked in the north, Bastogne remained a severe hin­drance to Manteuffel’s advance, sucking in as many as nine German divisions desper­ately required elsewhere. On December 22 the turning point came when the weather began to clear and Allied fighter-bombers appeared for the first time in force. On De­cember 23 the Ninth U.S. Army Force flew nearly 1,300 sorties and on Christmas Eve 31 separate targets were attacked by over 2,000 Allied aircraft.

The arrival of Allied air power was of critical importance. The already over­stretched German supply organization was destroyed, Manteuffel’s panzers, already hampered by fuel shortages, poor roads, and facing dogged defense, were left vul­nerable to air attack. At its limit the offen­sive penetrated nearly 60 miles. However, weakened by Bastogne’s determination not to surrender, and by his continuing supply problems and heavy losses, Manteuffel could advance no further. The retreating German armies had suffered over 100,000 casualties with the loss of nearly all their tanks and aircraft, and, while the Allies’ losses were almost as heavy, they could re­place them, while the Germans, in the final months of the war, could not.

Air Offensive

In February 1942 the Allies introduced a policy of area bombing in which entire cities and towns would be bombed in an attempt to destroy civilian morale in Ger­many. One of the tactics developed by the Royal Air Force (RAF) and the U.S. Army Air Force (USAAF) was the use of firestorms. Incendiary bombs, filled with phosphorus or petroleum jelly (napalm), were dropped in clusters over a specific tar­get. The air above the bombed area became extremely hot and rose rapidly causing cold air to rush in at ground level from the out­side, sucking people into the fire. The first man-made firestorm was created during the Allied bomber offensive against Ham­burg and affected an area of 8.5 square miles. The city was attacked in strength by the RAF and the USAAF in a series of day­light and night raids during the period July 24 to 29, 1943. These attacks combined high explosive and incendiary bombs alter­nately, the effect of which was to render helpless the city’s firefighting force. It is es­timated that the raids killed 42,000 civil­ians (Stackelberg 1999, 202). In addition to the heavy civilian casualties the bombing reduced half the city to rubble and the re­mainder had to be evacuated.

Although aimed principally at the civilian population, the raids destroyed or damaged some 580 industrial and war pro­duction firms. The U-boat yards on the river Elbe escaped serious damage, but it was acknowledged that U-boat production suffered as a result of the casualties among the civilian workforce. Within five months of the attacks industrial output had re­turned to 80 percent of normal, but the city was never fully able to recover during the war. After the successful air offensive against Hamburg, the Allies were deter­mined to bring the same concentration of effort against Berlin, believing that the same scale of destruction inflicted on the German capital could bring about the early surrender of Germany. The RAF mounted three attacks against Berlin during the pe­riod August 23 to September 4, 1943, but with the loss of 126 bombers out of a total of 1,647 dispatched, the attacks proved costly.

At the conference at Yalta (February 1945) Stalin asked for Allied air assistance to disrupt communications and prevent the movement of troops from the west to the eastern front. The attacks began two days after the conference in an attempt to take advantage of the Soviet offensive westward and add to the growing chaos in Germany by disrupting the flow of refugees fleeing in the face of the Soviet attack. The decision was taken to create a firestorm in the city of Dresden, the de­struction of which would seriously ham­per the movement of German reinforce­ments eastward. Large numbers of refugees fleeing from the advancing Red Army had expanded the population of the city above the normal 650,000. Between February 13 and 15, 1945, the RAF bombed Dresden with 796 Lancaster bombers. Over the next two days the USAAF sent 527 B17 bombers to com­plete the task. Approximately 650,000 bombs fell on the city and Dresden was almost totally destroyed as a result of the ensuing firestorm. Estimates vary as to the number of civilian casualties caused by the bombing. Allied figures suggest that 40,000 to 50,000 died in the air raids while German sources, ever mindful of the propaganda value, claimed as many as 100,000 people perished in the flames (Wall 2002, 273-274).

The morality of these attacks was questioned in the American press after an Associated Press correspondent was told “off the record” that the aim of the attack on the civilian population was not only to destroy large centers of population but to prevent relief supplies getting through to the casualties.

Rhine Crossing

In March 1945 the river Rhine stood as the last natural obstacle barring the west­ern Allies’ advance through Germany. Al­though elements of Lieutenant General William Simpson’s Ninth U.S. Army ar­rived on the west bank of the river oppo­site Dusseldorf on March 2, the retreating German forces had blown up all of the bridges. On March 7 at Remagen, Hodges’s First U.S. Army stumbled across an intact bridge. Although every effort was made to reinforce the bridgehead at Rema­gen, it was realized that the countryside east of the Rhine in this area would allow the Allies to break out only on a narrow front. To concentrate his resources on a single narrow bridgehead was against Eisenhower’s broad-front policy; the pref­erence was to wait until other bridgeheads had been established and allow his forces to break out on a wide front. To put his broad-front policy into action, Eisenhower had Dever’s Sixth Army Group in the south, Bradley’s Twelfth Army Group in the center, and Montgomery’s Twenty- First Army Group in the north. By March 10 Montgomery’s Twenty-First Army Group had reached the Rhine and began preparations for a crossing at Wesel, north of the Ruhr. Meanwhile, in the south Pat­ton’s Third U.S. Army, supported by Lieu­tenant General Alexander Patch’s Seventh U.S. Army, continued to clear the sector between the Moselle and the Rhine.

On the night of March 22 to 23, Pat­ton caught the German defenders totally by surprise and, in what was described as “a lightening move,” succeeded in forcing a crossing at Oppenheim, south of Mainz. In marked contrast to Patton, Montgomery’s crossings at Emmerich, Rees, Wesel, and Rheinberg the following night (March 23 to 24) were the end product of elaborate planning and massive artillery support. The attacks between March 22 and 24 were supported by British and U.S. air­borne divisions operating east of Wesel. Over the following few days further cross­ings were made by the Third U.S. Army on the night of March 24 to 25 at Boppard and St. Goar, while the Seventh U.S. Army crossed near Worms on March 26 and the French crossed at Germersheim and Speyer on March 31.

Eisenhower’s broad-front strategy had proved successful. In the space of three weeks the Western Allies had crossed the Rhine on a wide front of 320 km (198.7 miles). The crossings themselves represent three distinct types of operational river crossing. Hodges’s First U.S. Army made the most of the opportunity presented at Remagen, while the hasty crossing at Op­penheim by Patton’s Third U.S. Army caught the enemy unawares. Both were in contrast to the deliberate action of Mont­gomery’s Twenty-First Army Group.

Between February and May 1945, American, British, and Russian troops crossed the rivers Rhine in the west and the Oder in the east, thus advancing deeply into the German heartland. At the end of April, Russian troops encircled Berlin and on April 25, American and Russian troops

met at the river Elbe. Five days later, Hitler committed suicide, thus rendering Ger­many leaderless. On May 7 and 8, 1945, the remaining German military leadership unconditionally surrendered to the Ameri­can and Russian forces.

At the war’s end, overall U.S. casualties in the European theater stood at 234,874 dead, 701,385 wounded, and 124,079 prisoners of war. In contrast to this, the So­viet forces fighting in eastern Europe suf­fered 12,000,000 dead and 5,700,000 cap­tured. Some 17,000 Americans died while in captivity as the result of wounds, illness, and disease. In comparison to this, approx­imately 3 million Russian soldiers died while in captivity either in prisoner-of-war camps or after transfer to concentration camps (Stackelberg 1999, 213—214).

Derek Rutherford Young

See also Casablanca Conference/Unconditional Surrender; Hamburg; Nuremberg Trials;

Tehran Conference; U.S. Plans for Postwar Germany (1941-1945); World War I

References and Further Reading

Beck, Earl R. Under the Bombs: The German Home Front, 1942-1945. Lexington: University of Kentucky, 1986.

Friedrich, Jorg. Der Brand: Deutschland im Bombenkrieg. Berlin: Propylaen, 2002.

Hart, Liddell B. H. History of the Second World War. New York: G. P Putnam and Sons, 1971.

Neumann, William L. After Victory: Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin and the Making of the Peace. New York, London: Harper and Row, 1967.

Sainsbury, Keith. The North African Landings. London: Davis Poynter, 1976.

------. The Turning Point: Roosevelt, Stalin, Churchill, and Chiang-Kai-Shek, 1943 the Moscow, Cairo, and Teheran Conferences. Oxford, UK: Oxford University, 1985.

Smith, Gaddis. American Diplomacy during the Second World War, 1941-1945. New York, London: Wiley, 1965.

Stackelberg, Roderick. Hitler’s Germany: Origins, Interpretations, Legacies. London and New York: Routledge, 1999.

Strawson, John. The Battle for North Africa. New York: Ace, 1977.

Wall, Donald D. Nazi Germany and World War II. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/ Thomson Learning, 2002.

Weinberg, Gerhard L. A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University, 1994.

Wheeler-Bennell, Sir John, and Anthony Nickills. The Semblance of Peace: The Political Settlement after the Second World War. London: Macmillan, 1972.

Williamson, Gordon. Kriegsmarine U-Boats 1939-45. Oxford: Osprey, 2002.