The History Buff's Guide to World War II (11 page)

During the war, four million Germans died in the Soviet Union, mostly military. Twenty-five million Soviets died, mostly civilian.

7. “A DATE WHICH WILL LIVE IN INFAMY” (ROOSEVELT—DECEMBER 8, 1941)

“They have attacked us at P
EARL
H
ARBOR
. We’re all in the same boat now.” Roosevelt’s words elated Churchill, who had called the White House soon after hearing ambiguous reports of a Japanese offensive in the Pacific. The president’s mood stood in stark contrast. Incoming reports only added to the confusion within the executive mansion. Casualty totals were imprecise. Dispatches reported Japanese landings on Oahu. Strikes on the American West Coast appeared possible. The situation in the Philippines was unknown.

One certainty was Roosevelt’s first move. He immediately drafted a request for a declaration of war. Unlike most of his speeches, this one he created almost entirely on his own. Presented to a packed joint session of Congress and millions of radio listeners worldwide, his statement was brief—just six minutes—and to the point.
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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 United States was at peace with that nation and, at the solicitation of Japan, was still in conversation with its Government and its Emperor looking toward the maintenance of peace in the Pacific…I ask that the Congress declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday, December seventh, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese Empire.

Up to the time of the speech, Roosevelt was not completely sure the country or Congress would approve of going to war. The Axis had previously sunk American vessels in the Atlantic and on the China coast. None of the incidents pulled the public away from isolationism. Yet whatever doubts the president had were quickly dispelled. Within hours of his address, Congress approved a declaration of war, voting unanimously in the Senate and 388-to-1 in the House of Representatives.
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Upon hearing of Roosevelt’s call for a declaration of war against Japan, Hitler accused the United States of provoking the attack and called Roosevelt “mentally insane.”

8. “TOTAL WAR” (GOEBBELS—FEBRUARY 18, 1943)

The Nazi Ministry for Propaganda and Information worked diligently to shelter the public from the unpleasantness of war, such as rationing and casualty lists. But after the invasion of the Soviet Union, such protective measures were impossible to maintain. Time, money, and resources were running out. The numbers of dead and missing were rising. When S
TALINGRAD
ended in utter defeat for the Germans, Joseph Goebbels feared the sudden loss would shatter the confidence of the home front.

In a flash of despotic brilliance, wee, wiry Goebbels decided to magnify the tragedy rather than hide it, to shock the nation into sacrificing everything for victory. Hitler, hiding in his Wolf’s Lair and wallowing in defeat, hesitantly agreed to the tactic.
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On January 30, 1943, the Reich minister unleashed the news. Though more than ninety thousand Germans were taken alive at S
TALINGRAD
, Goebbels insinuated that they had all died, going so far as to intercept letters from prisoners to silence their existence. To emphasize a sense of mourning, he closed businesses and played songs of bereavement on state radio for three days. He then called for a huge rally to be staged at the Berlin Sports Palace, with extensive media coverage and teeming masses of party faithful, to deliver a new message.
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Total war is the demand of the hour…The danger facing us is enormous. The efforts we take to meet it must be just as enormous. The time has come to remove the gloves and use our fists…The German people are shedding their most valuable blood in this battle…[T]he danger is to us all, and we must all do our share. Those who today do not understand that will thank us tomorrow on bended knees that we courageously and firmly took on the task.

On cue, sacrifices were made. In 1943 war production increased, mostly from influxes of female and slave labor. In addition, more German civilians died in Allied bombings, more German soldiers died in combat, and more “enemies of the state” died in concentration camps than in any previous year.

When Goebbels finished his speech, the crowd at the Berlin Sports Palace gave him a thunderous standing ovation that lasted more than twenty minutes.

9. “THE TIME FOR DECISIVE BATTLE HAS ARRIVED” (TOJO—JULY 19, 1944)

Echoing the German phenomenon the previous year, Japan was about to undergo a drastic change in policy. Since the war’s beginning, the Japanese hierarchy concealed their tremendous losses in the Pacific. But the devastating loss of S
AIPAN
and the growing number of B-29s over the Japanese mainland fractured the myth of invincibility. Peace campaigners and war hawks alike demanded immediate change.

The obvious target was Gen. Tojo Hideki, prime minister of the empire since October 1941. Attempting to keep his domineering position, Tojo tried everything, from changing his cabinet to threatening to dethrone the emperor. Nothing worked.

Realizing his once solid support had liquefied, Tojo resigned along with his entire cabinet. In his last act as prime minister, he spoke on Radio Tokyo. It would be the first time the nation of Japan would hear the true and terrible costs of the war to date. As Goebbels had done in Berlin, Tojo used the revelation to shock his people into a heightened level of resolve.

Our Empire has entered the most difficult state in its entire history. But these developments have also provided us with the opportunity to smash the enemy and win the war. The time for decisive battle has arrived.

Thereafter, Japanese spoke of “the spirit of Saipan” and committed themselves to total war. Schools closed. Families evacuated their children to the countryside. Factory workers labored round the clock. Most significantly, military tactics became increasingly suicidal. Within months of Tojo’s speech, the armed forces resorted to all-or-nothing offensives, initiated the use of kamikaze, and promoted the idea of fighting until every last American or Japanese was dead.
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A clique of junior officers desiring an end to the war had schemed to kill Tojo using explosives if he did not step down. The target date was July 20, the same day a bomb went off in an East Prussia bunker and failed to kill Hitler.

10. “A NEW AND MOST CRUEL BOMB” (HIROHITO—AUGUST 15, 1945)

On August 14, 1945, forty-four-year-old Emperor Hirohito entered the library of the imperial palace to record a statement. He had decided to accept the Allies’ demand of
UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER
. The emperor and several key advisers believed he had to make the announcement personally or risk a revolution, if not anarchy.

The recording played on national radio the following day. It was the first time the Japanese public had ever heard his voice, and the first time in its twenty-six-hundred-year history that Japan surrendered. At noon Tokyo time, trains pulled into stations and waited. Street traffic ceased. Radio sets across the empire tuned in to the subdued strains of the national anthem followed by the husky voice of Prime Minister Suzuki Kantaro introducing the emperor. After a brief silence, a high-pitched, soft, melodic, and tired voice began to speak. Using the ancient formal language of the high court, which many listeners found difficult to follow, the emperor stated:

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 do 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.

He thanked his subjects for their selfless sacrifice and acknowledged their considerable pain and suffering, concluding with a request for calm acceptance: “Beware most strictly of any outbursts of emotion that may engender needless complications, of any fraternal contention and strife that may create confusion, lead you astray, and cause you to lose the confidence of the world.” Following his speech, a brief announcement stated that surrender was due primarily to atomic weapons.
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By and large, citizens went into apathetic mourning. Some went to the gates of the imperial palace and cried or prayed or cheered that the war was over. Some committed suicide. Several senior politicians and officers chose to kill themselves—a former prime minister, the minister of war, a former chief of staff, the founder of the kamikaze plan. Scores of junior officers shot themselves, committed hara-kiri, or blew themselves to pieces with grenades. Several burn and radiation victims in a Hiroshima hospital demanded revenge against their attackers. But peace ensued nonetheless.
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To reach remote areas that did not have radio access, the Japanese government launched flocks of balloons trailing giant banners that read: “Great Emperor Accepts Peace.”

SIMILARITIES BETWEEN STALIN AND HITLER

Of the twentieth century’s prominent leaders, none were more despotic than Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin. Unquestioned in rule, extreme in method, they expressed little respect for anyone, save themselves and each other. Wary allies in the September 1939 invasion of Poland, they became malignant enemies by June 1941 and thereafter spread virulent ruination upon nearly all of Central and Eastern Europe. In the end, their respective reigns accounted for more than half the deaths administered and received during the whole of the Second World War.

For such absolute adversaries, they shared a number of fundamental traits. Brooding and temperamental, intelligent and widely read, they were also socially unskilled and physically small. Night owls with a penchant for movies, they slept with difficulty, felt ill frequently, and avoided exercise religiously. Despite their infirmities, they were eerily charismatic. People were often awed by their direct and riveting stare—Hitler’s eyes a clear and azure blue, Stalin’s a demonic yellow.

Naturally there were differences. Stalin was better traveled, having toiled as a revolutionary in Krakow, St. Petersburg, Berlin, London, Stockholm, at home in the sunny Caucasus, and in exile within the Arctic Circle. In 1913 he briefly visited Vienna, where hundreds of aspiring art students lived, including a twenty-four-year-old named Hitler, who at that time had seen little of the world beyond Austria and Bavaria.

Of the two, only Hitler had served in the military, fighting nearly four years in the First World War. A messenger for a Bavarian infantry regiment stationed in the trenches of northern France, he was twice wounded and twice awarded the Iron Cross before being temporarily blinded by mustard gas in 1918.

Later in life, Hitler proved to be the better public speaker. Clear of voice, he began his orations quietly, then built himself and his message into climactic frenzy. Stalin possessed a gravely tenor sound and spoke in a manner best described as stoic.

Despite their differences, fundamental parallels pervaded amid the two most dominant figures of the European war. Here in roughly chronological order are ten major similarities between the men who sacrificed millions in an attempt to destroy each other.
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1. HITLER WAS NOT GERMAN, AND STALIN WAS NOT RUSSIAN

Officially, Joseph Stalin’s birthday was December 21, 1879, but newly uncovered evidence indicates it was actually December 6, 1878. Biographer Edvard Radzinsky credits the discrepancy as yet another example of how Stalin habitually buried the past.
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Born in the Transcaucus country of Georgia, Josef Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili was the last of four children and the only one to live past infancy. As a young man, he resorted to nearly twenty different aliases, including Koba (“Indomitable”) and Ivanovich (“son of Ivan”), before settling on Stalin (“Steel”) in 1913. His poverty-stricken and barely literate mother doted over him and sacrificed much for his happiness. His father was a cobbler and was known to be verbally and physically abusive to his son.
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Ten years later, Adolfus Hitler entered the world in the tiny Austrian village of Braunau am Inn on April 20, 1889. The fourth of six children, only he and his younger sister Paula survived childhood.