A Patriot's History of the Modern World (63 page)

In creating Hughes Aircraft in Glendale, California, Hughes personalized aviation and set air speed records on both closed courses and nonstop transcontinental flights. Hughes's love of aviation, for which he won numerous flying awards, and its glamour dovetailed with his entrance into filmmaking, where he made the classic flying movie
Hell's Angels
(1930) after already turning out three Academy Award–nominated pictures. In 1928, Hughes won an Oscar for best director for his work on
Two Arabian Knights
. Personally involved in his film ventures, Hughes romanced many of the actresses he worked with. Throughout his dalliances, he never lost sight of the serious side of flying, and even insisted on piloting experimental aircraft himself, ultimately flying the XF-11 in 1946, when he crashed and sustained severe injuries.
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Capitalism is a continual churning in which the market sorts out the good from the bad. Wartime innovation was no different: in a climate where as many ideas as possible were needed under all manners of risk, the American system surpassed all others. Hughes, along with hundreds of others, typified a willingness to entertain new ideas, from any source at any level. When Andrew Jackson Higgins, later called by Dwight D. Eisenhower
“the man who won the war” because of his landing boats, fulfilled an order for the Marines of a light, fast, wooden landing craft, General Victor “Brute” Krulak noticed that the design could be greatly improved by adding a “spoonbill” or “tongue” that dropped down at the front, allowing troops to run directly onto the beach.
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Higgins, casting aside his ego and resentment of an officer telling him what to do, instantly improved the design. Higgins typified the American entrepreneur. A boat builder born in landlocked Nebraska, who had made his fortune by providing rum-runner boats during Prohibition, he spent the post-Prohibition years designing and racing some of the fastest craft in the world, including the famous
Dixie Greyhound
.
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His landing craft made possible all the invasions, which would have been infinitely more difficult and costly in human life without his contributions.

While the Left routinely touts the battlefield performance of the Russian T-34 tank as evidence of the superiority of a state-controlled system (forgetting that it was a chassis based on American Walter Christie's design, lacked radio controls, and, after 1941, greatly outnumbered opposing German armor), the United States produced weapons and machinery of war the likes of which no other country even attempted. Germany had no need for ocean-going assault boats and landing craft, nor did the USSR. Who else produced carriers to match or even challenge the United States after 1942? (The Soviets built
none
.) All the cargo ships built during the war by the rest of the world combined did not rise to a small fraction of U.S. output, and Kaiser's yards alone exceeded the total industrial output of the vast majority of nations. Germany had some superior weapons (never enough, however), but the United States had more, and without the hundreds of thousands of trucks and the many million tons of supplies sent by the United States to the Soviet Union, Russia's defeat of Germany was nowhere near assured. On the contrary, it would have, without question, taken much longer and been far costlier. The B-29 had no equal, and the P-47 and P-51 were the best piston-driven fighters anywhere. Only the jet-propelled Me-262 could compete with the P-51 because of its speed, but the German plane crashed in accidents as often as it shot down an American fighter. No other country possessed a night fighter like the Black Widow, no one else possessed caterpillar tractors and bulldozers capable of turning jungle into an airstrip in twenty-four hours, and on and on.

American production brought about a shift in world naval power, too, as Britain's previously uncontested position now yielded to the rising American
presence. Before 1940, the Royal Navy had 5 fleet carriers to America's 7, and each had 15 battleships, although the Americans had nearly double the number of submarines as England. When the Japanese surrendered in September 1945, the British still had not added a single fleet carrier to the Royal Navy, while the United States had built 12 more fleet carriers and 71 escort carriers to
one newly built
escort added to the British fleet. The postwar United States Navy counted 1,166 warships, even after suffering losses during combat—but that did not count the amphibious vessels, supply ships, auxiliaries such as tankers, all of which added more than
five thousand more
ships to the American numbers. The Royal Navy, which prior to 1940 had ruled the seas, was now in a very distant second place, and no other country, Allied or Axis, could make a claim to having any significant fleet for third.

Germany's weakness at sea, including the romantic but ultimately strategically meaningless missions of the
Graf Spee
and the
Bismarck
, concealed British decline, which was only made apparent in December 1944 when the Royal Navy cobbled together its most powerful task force of the entire war under Admiral Bruce Fraser. With four of Britain's five fleet carriers, two newer battleships, five cruisers, plus destroyers and support vessels, Task Force 57 sailed for the Pacific to join the U.S. Navy for action against Japan. Upon Fraser's arrival, though, he discovered his “large” force nearly lost in the seemingly limitless numbers of American ships, and he further learned how far behind the British were when it came to replenishment at sea, a necessity for maintaining operational tempo in the vast Pacific. Embarrassingly, Fraser's task force needed substantial training to function in the new style of sea battles fought by the United States and Japan. Not until March 1945 was Task Force 57 ready for action on a par with the Americans, and ultimately its most important action for England was to break off from fighting Japanese and take possession of Hong Kong before the Americans could contest its recovery for the British Empire.

In the air, it was only a slightly different story. Here, too, America's military production was astonishing and fit perfectly with the capabilities of the British at the time. Having suffered through the “Blitz,” England had only one means to strike back directly at Germany, namely through the air. Commander in chief of Britain's Bomber Command, Sir Charles Portal, who assumed the post in 1940, was a devout advocate of Giulio Douhet's concept of a total air war on the enemy. “Any distinction,” Douhet had written after World War I, “between belligerents and non-belligerents is no
longer admissible…because when nations are at war, everyone takes part in it; the soldier carrying his gun, the women loading shells in a factory, the farmer growing wheat, the scientist in his laboratory.”
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It was Portal who crafted an air strategy of “area bombing” targeting German morale. In September 1941, Portal told Churchill,

Portal predicted such a campaign would require four thousand heavy bombers, at a time when Britain had only five hundred available for service on any given day. Area bombing received approval as a strategic plan among the British war councils because they could do nothing else. Lacking the numbers of land troops to invade Europe—even if they had control of the skies, which they did not—Britain could either play defense for years, or use her bombers. American-style precision bombing was out of the question, and British attacks in 1940 were so imprecise that German analysts, seeing bomb craters strewn over hundreds of miles, could not discern the actual intended target. Churchill tepidly endorsed civilian bombing in October 1941, warning that even if “all the towns in Germany were rendered uninhabitable,” military control might not weaken, especially given the dispersion of the Nazi empire throughout Europe.
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When Americans arrived in England in 1942, Britain's air chief marshal Sir Arthur “Bomber” Harris, now in charge of the bombing campaign, failed to persuade Generals Henry H. “Hap” Arnold and Ira Eaker of the benefits of nighttime area bombing, nor could the Americans convince the British that daylight precision bombing was possible. The American strategy was based on a theory developed at the Air Corps Tactical School in Montgomery, Alabama, which postulated the existence of a vulnerable “industrial web.” According to this theory, precise and relentless attacks on steel, ball bearings, electricity, and other interconnected industrial choke points in this “web” could collapse an enemy's economy. Ultimately, Eaker's offhand comment, “We'll bomb them by day. You bomb them by night,”
became official policy emanating from the two sides' irreconcilable differences.
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The British night bombing concerned the Germans far less than the daylight precision bombing by the Americans. Even the British finally admitted as much in an intelligence briefing, saying, “There can be no doubt that Germany regards defence of the Reich against daylight air attack as of such supreme importance that adequate support for military operations in Russia and the Mediterranean has been rendered impossible.”
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Despite terrific casualties—some nights, 30 percent of the British bombers would either not return or return with heavy damage—the air war in the West increased in scale and devastation. Using ingenious “bouncing bombs,” the Royal Air Force breached the Ruhr dams (at the high cost of fifty-six air crews), but the key Sorpe Dam was not destroyed. As part of the Ruhr air offensive, other targets were attacked but the overall assault lacked coordination and, above all, repetition. Albert Speer later claimed the war could have been decided in 1943 with a more sustained effort in the Ruhr. Meanwhile, between March and July 1943, Essen, Duisburg, Bochum, Krefeld, Düsseldorf, Dortmund, Barmen-Wuppertal, Mülheim, Elberfeld-Wuppertal, Gelsenkirchen, and Cologne were flattened by more than a thousand bombers escorted by an equal number of fighters, thoroughly disrupting and devastating the Reich's wartime economy. Speer contributed to the ease of Allied destruction by concentrating German production into larger factories more easily targeted (in contrast to the Japanese, who dispersed their inferior production facilities in the face of sustained bombing). Speer met with Hitler three days after Hamburg was reduced to ashes in July 1943 (where 42,000 people perished in firestorms) and stated flatly that armaments production was collapsing. He told Hitler if six more German cities were devastated in the manner Hamburg was, war production would halt. Hitler replied, “You'll sort it out.” After the Ruhr bombings, party members stopped wearing their badges in public and people no longer gave the Nazi salute.
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Aerial destruction forced reallocation of resources, as the Germans needed trainloads of quicklime for disposal of thousands of corpses and had to send armies of repair and debris-clearing teams into urban areas so trucks and trains could again move.

Amazingly, Speer did “sort it out,” and was able to raise German war production in spite of Allied bombing, reaching its peak in late summer and fall of 1944, a year that accounted for nearly 38 percent of all German war production from 1939 to 1945. Factories were moved underground, and railroads were maintained in a high state of efficiency through herculean
efforts by the populace. It was only after the loss of Romania and its critical oil supplies in August 1944 that German production flagged.

One reason the bombing did not significantly retard, let alone end, German wartime production was that the Nazi armaments industry was fed by sucking in millions of foreign slaves as factory workers. The high irony of Speer's armaments “miracle” was that he had succeeded in reversing Lebensraum by colonizing Germany with millions of foreign workers—seven million by 1944. Locomotive production, considered one of Speer's great accomplishments, rested on a 90 percent increase in the workforce in 1942, most of it from Nazi-occupied territories. Conquest supplied the muscle power that fed armament production, which in turn would have fueled more conquest, but now staved off economic collapse. One aberration in the feedback loop was the disposition of Jews. Dead Jews weren't workers—quite the contrary, exterminating Jews absorbed precious resources in the form of trains, guards, camps, even quicklime needed to dispose of corpses.

Enslavement of large labor pools worked in the totalitarian states, but in the free nations other measures were needed. In Britain, especially, liberals used the necessities of war to lay the foundations for a postwar welfare state. William Beveridge, who delivered a 1942 paper called “Social Insurance and Allied Services,” saw his wartime work as “a contribution to a better world after the war.”
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Keynes, of course, had already drafted an unpublished declaration of war aims that emphasized the need for social security after the war. Only Friedrich Hayek, an Austrian economist at Oxford, ran counter to this. His 1944 book,
The Road to Serfdom
, insisted that socialism was incompatible with human freedom, and those who argued that economic planning could coexist with personal liberties were delusional. Planning would always, he observed, rest on the “naked rule of force.”
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Even though Hayek and Keynes shared an aircraft watchtower at Cambridge University during the war, Keynes's ideas were in vogue while Hayek's free-market ideas were less popular. This trend reflected a deeper, depressing view of the nature of existence itself. Albert Camus in 1944 wrote, “I continue to believe that this world has no ultimate meaning.”
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This philosophy (or, more appropriately, nonphilosophy) undergirded the effort to use the war to advance postwar socialism under a variety of definitions. Jacques Maritain, writing in 1943, reasoned, “It is not a question of finding a new name for democracy, rather of discovering
its true essence
…[and] it is a question of passing from bourgeois democracy…to an integrally
human democracy, from abortive democracy to real democracy.”
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William Temple, the Archbishop of Canterbury who attempted mightily to marry socialism with Christian faith, echoed Maritain, advocating a “ ‘Democracy of the Person' as opposed to an egotistical ‘Democracy of Individuals.' ”
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That these individuals utterly lacked an understanding of the American representative democracy goes without saying.