World War II: Triumph over Tyranny
by Weekend Desk
On Sept. 1, 1939, the Second World War broke out with the German invasion of Poland. Thousands of books have been written about the war. And by now revisionist historians of revisionist historians engage in an endless cycle of disagreement over why the war started, how it ended, and what it all meant. Here are a few more controversial thoughts on the horrific conflict that killed 60 million people, wrecked Europe, and set the stage for an ensuing half-century Cold War. Many blame Germanys aggressions on the supposedly harsh terms of the Versailles Treaty following the First World War, which stripped a defeated Germany of territory, required reparations, and dismantled its military. But Versailles was far more lenient than what the Germans had planned for Britain and France should they have won in 1918. And it was not nearly as harsh as the terms the Germans imposed on a defeated Russia under the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in early 1918, before they lost the larger conflict. A better reason there was a Second World War, but not a Third, is that Germany was occupied and monitored after 1945 unlike following its previous defeat in 1918. Most give the Red Army the most credit for wrecking the German army. That is absolutely true: Two of three German soldiers who died in the war were killed on the murderous Eastern Front, a larger theater of conflict than all others combined. Yet despite the superhuman heroism of millions of brave Russian soldiers, Stalins Soviet government was largely an amoral actor throughout the war. It, along with Hitlers Germany, invaded neutral Poland in September 1939. Three months later, it attacked tiny Finland. Until the day it was invaded by Hitler, Stalins Soviet Union had provided Nazi industry with much of its strategic materials used to defeat and occupy democratic Western Europe. Communist Russia renounced most of its wartime promises, guaranteeing that a war that started to free Eastern Europe from totalitarian government ended by ensuring it under Soviet control. Lately, the role of the United States in World War II has been downplayed, since we came late to it, and suffered the fewest military and civilian casualties of the major Allies. But no other power fought on so many fronts in so many crucial ways: strategic air campaigns against Germany and Japan; invasions of North Africa, Sicily, Italy, Western Europe, and the Pacific islands; submarine and surface fleet operations against Germany and Japan; and massive convoys and supplies to Britain, China, and the Soviet Union. Likewise, it has become fashionable to diminish the British role, given that by 1943 its manpower reserves were exhausted and the bulk of the later fighting against the Axis was conducted by Russian and American troops. In fact, Britain nearly alone saved Western civilization between September 1939 and June 1941. From May 1940, it fought almost alone against the entire continent of occupied Europe, when the United States was still isolationist and the Soviet Union was actively helping the Nazi cause. One of the great mysteries of the war is how an isolated Britain survived the Blitz, German submarines, Gen. Erwin the Desert Fox Rommel, and the industrial might of the entire European continent until Russia and America joined its cause. We also forget that the Allied victory was not foreordained. By December 1941, the odds were all in favor of the Axis powers. They had been arming since the mid-1930s. Hitler controlled much of the present-day area of the European Union and its surrounding environs from the Atlantic Ocean to the suburbs of Moscow, and from the Arctic Circle to the Sahara Desert. Much of China and almost all of Southeast Asia were under Japanese control. Why then did the Allies recover and win? Largely because of Russian manpower, the American industrial colossus, and British wartime experience. By 1944, the Allies had the best and most numerous tanks, artillery and planes; the largest armies; the best wartime leadership in Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin; and the most adept generals. Did any good come from such a monstrous bloodletting? Perhaps. The Holocaust was finally stopped before every Jew in Europe was killed as Hitler had planned. Germany, Italy, and Japan were transformed from monstrous regimes into liberal states whose democracies have done much for humanity in the ensuing years. And Western civilization survived its own heretical cannibals to foster in the ensuing decades the greatest growth in freedom and prosperity in the history of the planet.
Seventy years ago, on the morning of August 6, 1945, a B-29 Superfortress named Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. A short time later, other B-29s began dropping leaflets on Tokyo. Because your military leaders have rejected the 13-part surrender declaration, the leaflets said, we have employed our atomic bomb. ... Before we use this bomb again and again to destroy every resource of the military by which they are prolonging this useless war, petition the emperor now to end the war.
There was no way that Japanese civilians could petition Emperor Hirohito to accept the terms of the July 26 Potsdam Declaration outlining the Allies surrender demandsamong them the complete disarmament of Japanese forces and the elimination for all time the authority and influence of those who have deceived and misled the people of Japan into embarking on world conquest. But the leaflets reflected reality: Only the emperor could end the war. To do that, though, he would have to defy his military leaders, knowing that his call for peace would almost certainly inspire a military coup.
When news of the Nagasaki bombing came on August 9, the Supreme War Direction Council reacted not by moving toward peace but by declaring martial law throughout Japan. With the cabinet unable to reach a consensus on whether to accept the surrender terms, and War Minister Korechika Anami leading the opposition, its members finally turned to the emperor for a decision.
Shortly before midnight, Hirohito, a weary, sad-eyed man, walked into the hot, humid air-raid shelter 60 feet below the Imperial Library where his 11-member cabinet was gathered. He sat in a straight-backed chair and wore a field marshals uniform, ill-fitting because tailors were not allowed to touch this man revered as a god. The gathering itself was an extraordinary event known as a gozen kaigina meeting in the imperial presence. Hirohito had been emperor since 1926 and, as commander in chief of the Japanese armed forces, had often been photographed in his uniform astride his white horse during the war. But U.S. propaganda portrayed him as a figurehead and blamed the generals for prolonging the war.
Hirohito patiently listened as each cabinet member presented his argument. At 2 a.m. on Friday, August 10, Prime Minister Kantaro Suzuki did something that no prime minister had ever done: He asked Hirohito for an imperial commandknown as the Voice of the Crane since the sacred bird could be heard even when it flew unseen.
Speaking softly, Hirohito said he did not believe that his nation could continue to fight a war. There is no transcript of his address, but historians have pieced together accounts of his rambling words. He concluded: The time has come when we must bear the unbearable. ... I swallow my own tears and give my sanction to the proposal to accept the Allied proclamation.
On August 10, the Japanese Foreign Ministry transmitted a response to the Allies, offering to accept the terms of the Potsdam declaration with the understanding that those terms did not comprise any demand which prejudices the prerogatives of His Majesty as a Sovereign Ruler. By August 11, Japan had received the Allied reply, including the U.S. insistence that the authority of the Emperor and the Japanese Government to rule the state shall be subject to the Supreme Commander of the Allied powers who will take such steps as he deems proper to effectuate the surrender terms.
In America, most people believed that peace had come. Japan Offers to Surrender, bannered The New York Times; another Times story was headlined GIs in Pacific Go Wild With Joy Let Em Keep Emperor They Say. In Japan, however, the war went on. The Japanese offer of surrender, and the Allied reply, were known only to high government officials. Morning newspapers in Japan on August 11 carried a statement in the name of General Anami and addressed to the army: The only thing for us to do is fight doggedly to the end ... though it may mean chewing grass, eating dirt, and sleeping in the field.
But on the morning of August 14, another blizzard of leaflets swirled over Tokyo and other cities, and this time they contained news of the messages exchanged between Japan and the Allies. Marquis Koichi Kido, Hirohitos closest advisor, later recorded in his diary that seeing one caused me to be stricken with consternation over the possibility that some leaflets could fall into the hands of the troops and enrage them, making a military coup dtat inevitable.
A coup, in fact, was already underway. If Anami were to give his support to the plot, much of the Japanese Armya million soldiers in the Home Islandswould almost certainly rise against the cabinet with the claim that the emperor had been duped by cowardly civilians. If Anami resigned from the cabinet, it would fall and Japan would fight on.
At Kidos frantic urging, the emperor declared another gozen kaigin in the air-raid shelter, where he issued an imperial command: I desire the cabinet to prepare as soon as possible an imperial rescript announcing the termination of the war. Hirohito knew that publication of the rescripta proclamation of the gravest importwould not be enough. He decided to be a true Voice of the Crane. He would step before a microphone and read the rescript to his people, who had never before heard him speak.
That night, the emperors offer to surrender reached Allied governments, and the designated Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers, Army General Douglas MacArthur, began the formalities. About the same time, Anamis brother-in-law, Lieutenant Colonel Masahiko Takeshita, was urging Anami to lead a coup. Anami refused.
Kido and other aides to the emperor started hurriedly arranging for the imperial broadcast with stunned directors of the Japan Broadcasting Corporation (NHK). The chairman of NHK brought a recording team to the palace complex to capture Hirohitos words. That afternoon, Kido recorded in his diary, a visitor noticed that far more soldiers than usual were on the palace grounds. I am afraid of what may be happening at the Imperial Guards Division, he said, referring to the elite soldiers who guarded the emperor and the palace.
The NHK staff waited while cabinet members haggled over the wording of the rescript. At about 8 p.m., copyists were finally given a scrawled, heavily edited manuscript. But as they began transcribing it into classic calligraphy, they were given more changes. To their aesthetic horror, the copyists had to make corrections on tiny pieces of paper and paste them in.
A leaflet dropped from a B-29 plane after the bombing of Hiroshima, announcing American plans to drop another bomb (Wikimedia)
During the regular 9 p.m. Japanese radio news, listeners were told that an important broadcast would be made at noon the next day. Mimeographed copies of the final text went to newspapers, with a publication embargo until after the emperors broadcast.
At 11 p.m., Hirohito was driven the short distance across the palace grounds from his living quarters to the blacked-out building of the Household Ministry, which ran the affairs of the imperial family. In the audience hall on the second floor, the NHK technicians bowed to the emperor. Hirohito, looking perplexed, stepped before the microphone and asked, How loudly should I speak? Hesitatingly, an engineer respectfully suggested that he speak in his normal voice. He began:
To our good and loyal subjects: After pondering deeply the general trends of the world and the actual conditions obtaining in our empire today, we have decided to effect a settlement of the present situation. ... Let the entire nation continue as one family from generation to generation, ever firm in its faith in the imperishability of its sacred land.
When he finished, he asked, Was it all right?
The chief engineer stammered: There were no technical errors, but a few words were not entirely clear.
The emperor read the rescript again, tears in his eyesand soon in the eyes of others in the room.
Each reading was only four and a half minutes long, but the speech spanned two records. The technicians picked the first set of records for the broadcast, but they kept all four, putting them in metal cases and then into khaki bags. The technicians, like everyone else in the palace, had heard rumors of a coup. They decided to stay there that night rather than attempt a return to the NHK broadcasting studio, out of fear that army mutineers would attempt to steal and destroy the recordings. A chamberlain placed the records in a safe in a small office used by a member of the empresss retinue, a room normally off-limits to men. Then he hid the safe with a pile of papers.
In the early hours of August 15, Major Kenji Hatanaka, a fiery-eyed zealot, and Army Air Force Captain Shigetaro Uehara burst into the office of Lieutenant General Takeshi Mori, commander of the Imperial Guards Division. Hatanaka fatally shot and slashed Mori, and Uehara beheaded another officer. Hatanaka affixed Moris private seal to a false order directing the Imperial Guards to occupy the palace and its grounds, sever communications with the palace except through Division Headquarters, occupy NHK, and prohibit all broadcasts.
Meanwhile, Major Hidemasa Koga, a staff officer with the Imperial Guards, was trying to recruit other officers into the plot. At the palace, soldiers supporting the coup, with bayonets affixed to their rifles, rounded up the radio technicians and imprisoned them in a barracks. Wearing white bands across their chests to distinguish themselves from guards loyal to the emperor, they stormed the palace and began cutting telephone wires.
The war situation has developed not necessarily to Japans advantage. Moreover, the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb.
Koga, hoping to find and destroy what he thought was the single record of the emperors message, ordered a radio technician to find it. The technician, unfamiliar with the palace, led several soldiers into the labyrinth. Soldiers roamed palace buildings, kicking in doors, flinging contents of chests onto the polished floors. The emperor remained in his quarters and watched through a slit in the steel shutters protecting his windows.
Lieutenant Colonel Takeshita, meanwhile, tried again to bring Anami into the plot. Anami once more declined. Instead, with Takeshita in the room, Anami knelt on a mat, drove a dagger into his stomach, and drew it across his waist. Bleeding profusely, he then removed the knife and thrust it into his neck; Takeshita pushed the knife deeper until Anami finally died.
Rebellious soldiers swarmed into the NHK building, locked employees in a studio, and demanded assistance so they could go on the air and urge the nation to fight on. Shortly before 5 a.m. on August 15, Hatanaka walked into Studio 2, put a pistol to the head of Morio Tateno, an announcer, and said he was taking over the 5 oclock news show.
Tateno refused to let him near the microphone. Hatanaka, who had just killed an army general, cocked his pistol but, impressed by Tatenos courage, lowered the gun. An engineer, meanwhile, had disconnected the building from the broadcasting tower. If Hatanaka had spoken into the microphone, his words would have gone nowhere.
It took most of the night for troops loyal to the emperor to round up the rebels. At dawn, they finally removed the mutineers from the palace grounds. Now judging it safe to leave, the NHK engineers brought the emperors records to the radio station in separate cars using different routes. They hid one set in an underground studio, and prepared to play the other. At 7:21 a.m. Tateno went on the air and, without recounting the adventures of the night before, announced, His Majesty the emperor has issued a rescript. It will be broadcast at noon today. Let us all respectfully listen to the voice of the emperor. ... Power will be specially transmitted to those districts where it is not usually available during daylight hours. Receivers should be prepared and ready at all railroad stations, postal departments, and offices both government and private.
At noon, throughout Japan, as the emperors voice was heard, people sobbed. It was a sudden mass hysteria on a national scale, Kazuo Kawai, editor of Nippon Times, later wrote. The emperor spoke in classical language not readily understandable to most Japanese people. The war situation, he said, has developed not necessarily to Japans advantage, while the general trends of the world have turned against her interest. Moreover, the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb. ... We have resolved to pave the way for a grand peace for all the generations to come by enduring the unendurable and suffering what is insufferable. He never used the words defeat or surrender.
After the broadcast, Hatanaka ended his mutiny standing outside the palace gates, trying to hand out leaflets that called on civilians to join with us to fight for the preservation of our country and the elimination of the traitors around the emperor. No one took the leaflets. Hatanaka shot himself in the head.
In the days that followed the emperors radio address, at least eight generals killed themselves. On one afternoon, Vice Admiral Matome Ugaki, commander of the Fifth Air Fleet on the island of Kyushu, drank a farewell cup of sake with his staff and drove to an airfield where 11 D4Y Suisei dive-bombers were lined up, engines roaring. Before him stood 22 young men, each wearing a white headband emblazoned with a red rising sun.
Ugaki climbed onto a platform and, gazing down on them, asked, Will all of you go with me?
Yes, sir! they all shouted, raising their right hands in the air.
Many thanks to all of you, he said. He climbed down from the stand, got into his plane, and took off. The other planes followed him into the sky.
Aloft, he sent back a message: I am going to proceed to Okinawa, where our men lost their lives like cherry blossoms, and ram into the arrogant American ships, displaying the real spirit of a Japanese warrior.
Ugakis kamikazes flew off toward the expected location of the American fleet. They were never heard from again.
The end finally came on September 2. The emperor was secure in his palace. His voicethe voice of the cranehad been heard throughout the land. Nearby, on the deck of the U.S. battleship Missouri, moored in Tokyo Bay, Japan surrendered to the Allies while a thousand U.S. carrier planes and B-29 bombers flew over. General MacArthur, after presiding over the surrender ceremony, was now the de facto emperor of Japan.
he Americans, British, and Canadians stormed the beaches of Normandy in the largest amphibious invasion of Europe since the Persian king Xerxes invaded Greece in 480 b.c. About 160,000 troops landed on five Normandy beaches and linked up with airborne troops in a masterly display of planning and courage. Within a month, almost a million Allied troops had landed in France and were heading eastward toward the German border. Within eleven months the war with Germany was over. The western front required the diversion of hundreds of thousands of German troops. It weakened Nazi resistance to the Russians while robbing the Third Reich of its valuable occupied European territory. The impatient and long-suffering Russians had demanded of their allies a second front commensurate with their own sacrifices. Their Herculean efforts by wars end would account for two out of every three dead German soldiers at a cost of 20 million Russian civilian and military casualties. Yet for all the sacrifices of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin was largely responsible for his war with Nazi Germany. In 1939, he signed a foolish non-aggression pact with Hitler that allowed the Nazis to gobble up Western democracies. Hitlers Panzers were aided by Russians in Poland and overran Western Europe fueled by supplies from the Soviets. The Western Allies had hardly been idle before D-Day. They had taken North Africa and Sicily from the Germans and Italians. They were bogged down in brutal fighting in Italy. The Western Allies and China fought the Japanese in the Pacific, Burma, and China. The U.S. and the British Empire fought almost everywhere. They waged a multiform war on and under the seas. They eventually destroyed Japanese and German heavy industry with a costly and controversial strategic-bombing campaign. The Allies sent friends such as the Russians and Chinese billions of dollars worth of food and war matriel. In sum, while Russia bore the brunt of the German land war, the Western Allies fought all three Axis powers everywhere else and in every conceivable fashion. Yet if D-Day was brilliantly planned and executed, the follow-up advance through France in June 1944 was not always so. The Allies seemed to know the texture of every beach in Normandy, but nothing about the thick bocage just a few miles inland from Omaha Beach. The result was that the Americans were bogged down in the French hedgerows for almost seven weeks until late July suffering about ten times as many casualties as in the Normandy landings themselves. So how did the Allies get from the beaches of Normandy to Germany in less than a year? Largely by overwhelming the Wehrmacht with lots of good soldiers and practical war matriel. If German tanks, mines, machine guns, and artillery were superbly crafted, their more utilitarian American counterparts were good enough and about ten times as numerous. Mechanically intricate German Tiger and Panther tanks could usually knock out durable American Sherman tanks, but the Americans produced almost 50,000 of the latter, and the Germans fewer than 8,000 of the former. Over Normandy, British and American fighter aircraft not only were as good as or better than German models but were far more numerous. By mid 1944, Germany had produced almost no four-engine bombers. The British and Americans had built almost 50,000, which by 1944 were systematically leveling German cities. Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt were far more pragmatic supreme commanders than the increasingly delusional and sick Adolf Hitler. American and British war planners such as George Marshall, Dwight Eisenhower, and Alan Brooke understood grand strategy better than the more experienced German chief of staff. Allied field generals such as George S. Patton and Bernard Montgomery were comparable to German legends like Gerd von Rundstedt and Erwin Rommel, who were worn out by 1944. The German soldier was the more disciplined, experienced, armed, and deadly warrior of World War II. But his cause was bad, and by 1944 his enemies were far more numerous and far better supplied. No soldiers fought better on their home soil than did the Russians, and none more resourcefully abroad than the British Tommy and the American G.I., when bolstered by ample air, armor, and artillery support. Omaha Beach to central Germany was about the same distance as the Russian front to Berlin. But the Western Allies covered the same approximate ground in about a quarter of the time as had the beleaguered Russians. D-Day ushered in the end of the Third Reich. It was the most brilliantly conducted invasion in military history, and probably no one but a unique generation of British, Canadians, and Americans could have pulled it off.
wo important round-number anniversaries passed this month. The first, on June 6, was the 70th anniversary of D-Day. The second, on June 7, was the 60th anniversary of Alan Turings suicide. On June 6, 1944, the final push towards a free Europe and a Nazi-free world was launched; it would not have been possible without Alan Turing. By late 1938, Turing was a distinguished young mathematician. He was also a part-time code breaker at the British cipher center in Bletchley Park. Meanwhile, the German Anschlsse were becoming Blitzkriege. The Germans were encoding messages with their Enigma machines, whose system of encryption they believed would never be broken. They had good cause of confidence: The Enigma generated ciphers through a progressive series of substitution wheels; for any output letter, the machine might be in any one of a billion-billion settings. Figuring out which was the challenge. The German Naval Enigma was even more complicated, and with Britains reliance on shipping and naval power, it was vitally important. But in 1939, no one at Bletchley Park had started working on it. So Turing decided to give it a try. By late 1939, he had developed a method for quickly eliminating incorrect wheel patterns. By 1940, Enigma codes were being cracked. By D-Day, the Allies were able to follow German radio traffic for updates on troop movement. Without the tens of thousands of men who stormed the Normandy beaches on June 6, 1944, the war might have been lost. And without Alan Turing, it might have been lost. With the 70th anniversary of D-Day, those men who ran up the beaches are au courant. And so is Turing: In December, the Queen exercised her Prerogative of Mercy and pardoned his 1952 conviction for gross indecency. A year after D-Day, less than two months after Germany was defeated, and more than a month before Japan would surrender, Great Britain had a general election. On July 5, 1945, Great Britain threw Winston Churchill out of office. Churchill had just saved the world for democracy; his defeat was an incomprehensible instance of ingratitude. Perhaps it set the tone for Britains treatment of Alan Turing. Eight years after D-Day and twelve after the Enigma was cracked, Turing was chemically castrated by the British government, as punishment for being homosexual. Two years later, he killed himself. Turing was one of the great men of the 20th century. He laid the theoretical groundwork for the digital computer and artificial intelligence. Had he lived, the history of science would have been very different. We shouldnt let the 60th anniversary of his virtual murder pass without remembering that. Unfortunately, the command structure of the Allied invasion force was topsy-turvy. The swashbuckling U.S. general George S. Patton in the doghouse for the slapping of ill GIs a year earlier during the Sicily campaign came to Normandy late. His superb Third Army was relegated to a supporting role and assigned the longest route into Germany. In contrast, the professional (but slow and methodical) General Bernard Montgomery won the pivotal position in the north to break through to the Ruhr on the shortest path into the Third Reich. Meanwhile, U.S. general Dwight D. Eisenhower, the supreme commander of the Allied Forces, and his subordinates, generals Omar Bradley and Courtney Hodges, were reconciled to a slow, incremental slog through France along a broad front. Patton, however, would have none of it. By early August, the Third Army was unleashed and off to the races in a series of brilliant armored outflanking movements that encircled and bypassed stunned German divisions. Taking great risks, the mercurial Patton outsourced the protection of his flanks to the U.S. Air Force. Patton plowed ahead, seeking to stun, bewilder, and collapse German resistance. It almost worked. The Third Army rolled with Patton right through France to near the largely unguarded German border. An exuberant American media dreamed that the war in the West might be over by autumn 1944. Hundreds of thousands of trapped Germans either surrendered or were killed by Allied pincers. British and American fighters blanketed the skies above nearly 2 million Allied soldiers, most of them motorized and protected by thousands of tanks and artillery pieces. But then the wondrous American August came abruptly to an end. Allied planners had never found a way to recapture intact the key French ports on the Atlantic Coast from besieged German defenders. The farther Patton and other Allied armies advanced from the beaches, almost 400 miles away, the longer their supply lines grew and the easier it became for the enemy to support its own retreating forces. Shorter late-summer days, inclement weather, mounting casualties, supply shortages, and the need to help liberate occupied France all slowed down the once-rapid American advance. Once the United States entered the war after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Axis cause was largely doomed. America mobilized 12 million soldiers about the same number as did the Soviet Union, despite having a population of about 40 million fewer citizens. American war production proved astonishing. At the huge Willow Run plant in Michigan, the greatest generation turned out a B-24 heavy bomber every hour. A single shipyard could mass-produce an ocean-going Liberty merchant ship from scratch in a week. In just four years, the United States would produce more airplanes than all of the major war powers combined. Germany, Japan, Italy, and the Soviet Union could not build a successful four-engine heavy bomber. America, in contrast, produced 34,000 excellent B-17s, B-24s, and B-29s. By 1944, the new U.S. Navy had become the largest in the history of civilization at more than 6,000 ships. Its B-29 heavy bomber program and Manhattan Project efforts together cost more $50 billion in todays dollars. America sent troops throughout the Pacific islands, and to North Africa, Italy, and Western Europe. The United States staged two simultaneous bombing campaigns against Germany and Japan while conducting surface and submarine campaigns against all of the Axis powers. At the same time, the U.S. supplied the Soviet Union with 400,000 heavy trucks, 2,000 locomotives, 11,000 railcars, and billions of dollars worth of planes, tanks, food, clothing, and strategic resources. By 194344, the U.S. also supplied about 20 percent of Britains munitions. If the measure of wartime success is defined by quickly defeating and humiliating enemies at the least cost in blood and treasure, then America waged a brilliant war. Of the major powers, only Americas homeland was not systematically bombed. It was never invaded. While its 400,000 fatalities were a terrible cost of victory, the United States lost the smallest percentage of its population of any major power. By late 1944, the American M1 rifle, B-29 heavy bomber, P-51 Mustang fighter, Gato-class submarines, Essex-class aircraft carriers, and Iowa-class battleships were the best weapons of their class. America did not win World War II alone. But without the United States, the war against Axis fascism would have been lost.
