The History Buff's Guide to World War II (28 page)

Nazi occupation of Paris = 3 years, 67 days. Japanese occupation of Nanking = 7 years, 255 days.

10
. DEATH OF A FAMILY MEMBER

For those who lost relatives in the armed forces, many found consolation if victory was achieved. Even in victory, an absence of closure haunted many who never knew exactly what happened to their loved ones. The number of American deceased whose remains were returned to the states (by request of the families) roughly equaled the number listed as missing in action or presumed dead. Germans officially listed as missing outnumbered all American fatalities put together. Russians listed as missing outnumbered all Americans who served in Europe.
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Yet a person was more likely to lose a family member who was not in the armed forces. Such was the case for the Belgians, losing three civilians for every serviceman. In Poland the ratio was nine for every one. In Holland it was eighteen noncombatant deaths for each soldier killed. Civilian deaths were also likely to be witnessed by a family member, especially in refugee migrations, bombing raids, and concentration camps.

To combat a sinking national morale from the mounting losses in China and the Pacific, the government of Japan implemented a “National Smile Week” in March 1943.

FORMS OF RESISTANCE

Romanticized and glorified, resistance was a far more fragmented, varied, and rare animal than initially portrayed. Multitudes claimed to have actively fought their oppressors, yet few actually did.

As for the great silent majority, most preferred to rationalize their plight rather than rebel against it. Lacking the organization and firepower of professional armies, civilians expected minimal gain and maximum cost for fighting back. If caught, imprisonment was the least of their worries. Nazis frequently advertised the price of rebellion by publicly hanging captives. Soviets traditionally shot dissenters in the back of the head. Frustrated by heavy resistance in northern China, the Japanese army diligently applied a succinct mantra in 1941 and 1942: “Take all, burn all, kill all.”
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A small percentage accepted the risks and in many cases achieved measurable success. By biting the hand that terrified them, Greeks and Yugoslavs tied down more than fifteen Axis divisions in the Balkans. Filipinos and Indonesians prevented Japan from securing total occupation. Several resistance leaders eventually became heads of state, such as Hoxha in Albania, Tito in Yugoslavia, de Gaulle in France, and Mao in China.

Ranked here, by level of violence, are the ten most prominent forms of civilian dissent in the war against military repression. Some were more effective than others, but all provided hope against the specter of degrading servitude.

1
. COMBAT

By 1943, the Polish Home Army had at least 40,000 members, partisans in the Soviet Union numbered 200,000, and Communist soldiers and militia in China totaled 300,000. There was the Home Front of Norway, the Czech Central Leadership of Home Resistance, Indochina’s Viet Minh, and hundreds of other groups. Yet in any given occupied country the number of armed insurgents was less than 1 percent of the population. Exceptions were Albania, Greece, and Yugoslavia, all of which had more than 10 percent (and all three were undergoing civil war).
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Paramilitary activity was at first uncommon and minuscule. As the war progressed, persons under occupation began to gather around remnants of army units, political parties, and religious groups. Some outfits were ad hoc gangs of the brutish and vengeful; others became highly structured networks with their own paymasters and medical personnel. Assisting these groups were state agencies, such as the U.S. Office of Strategic Services and Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service. Among the most organized were the Communists, especially in France and China, with well-defined memberships and long traditions of opposition.

Two of the better-documented episodes of guerrilla combat were the Warsaw uprisings. By 1943 a quarter-million Warsaw Jews had died through starvation, execution, or deportation. In April, to honor Hitler’s impending birthday, the SS moved in to eradicate the last 60,000. Several hundred Jews, armed with incendiaries, pistols, and a single machine gun, held off the onslaught for nearly three weeks. Fewer than one hundred insurgents escaped alive. In August 1944, 40,000 Poles, most of them in the Home Army, resisted a German advance into the capital. After two months of vicious urban fighting, 250,000 inhabitants were dead, and the Home Army essentially ceased to exist.

In most pitched battles the goal was to stave off defeat rather than achieve outright victory. Yugoslavia was, for all intents and purposes, the only country self-liberated. Even in France, synonymous with “the resistance,” freedom came only after the Allied invasion. Reportedly Charles de Gaulle confessed to an associate after the war, “Between you and me, Resistance was a bluff that came off.”
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Jean Moulin created the Conseil National de la Résistance, a unification of eight major resistance groups and the eventual foundation of Charles de Gaulle’s political support. In 1943, Moulin was betrayed, imprisoned, and tortured to death at the hands of Klaus Barbie, the “Butcher of Lyon.”

2
. ASSASSINATION

Along with the sniper shot, assassinations were carried out by ambush, grenade, firing squad, knifing, and demolition. A German commissioner died in his sleep—immediately after the bomb under his bed went off.
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German officials and officers were targets. In an effort to curb the attacks, Nazi officials published the consequences for such attacks. Belgians were told they would lose five countrymen, the French heard fifty, Poles were told one hundred, and Czechs were given no limit. In this the Third Reich was good to its word. The slaying of an officer in France brought a fine of several million francs and the immediate execution of fifty townspeople. The death of a Gestapo agent in Poland resulted in one hundred locals being rounded up and shot. When Czechs assassinated Reinhard Heydrich, architect of the Holocaust, the SS leveled the nearby towns of Lidice and Lezaky and killed at least two thousand inhabitants.
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Underground assassins most often aimed for known collaborators. Whereas killing a soldier brought dire consequences, killing a stooge taught locals to stay with the resistance or stay out of the way. The practice was most prevalent in the eastern front and in China, especially against anyone caught figuratively or literally sleeping with the enemy.

Undoubtedly the most famous partisan assassination occurred near Lake Como, Italy, on April 28, 1945. After surviving two previous attempts on his life, Benito Mussolini was captured, taken to the countryside, and shot nine times with a submachine gun.

Then there were the ones who got away. During the war, unsuccessful attempts were made on the lives of Nikita Khrushchev, Maurice Chevalier, Wilhelm Keitel, Rudolfo Graziani, Victor Emmanuel III, Tojo Hideki (twice), and Adolf Hitler (at least three times).

3
. SABOTAGE

The threat of sabotage was often more menacing than the actual event. This forced militaries to dedicate far more resources to the protection of railways, bridges, and roads than normal. It also led many officials to credit any accident or bottleneck to the work of saboteurs. Stalin and Hitler blamed any breakdown on the work of saboteurs, and the FBI insisted there were more than three thousand acts of sabotage in the United States during the war.
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Not to say the paranoia was unfounded. Partisan armies, lone daredevils, and hard-line terrorists destroyed factories, government buildings, phone lines, airplanes, pipelines, and tanks. A favorite target was rail lines. Rail lines being long and vulnerable, removal of a piece of track or a few spikes could derail a train in seconds and block a route for days. On average, a forced derailment occurred somewhere in Poland every forty hours. But railroad damage was often a double-edged sword. If enemy troops and shells couldn’t be shipped, neither could food and coal for everyone else.
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Actions didn’t have to be explosive to be efficacious. Due to the constant shortage of rubber, slashing truck tires did amazing damage to army logistics. Removal of a firing pin rendered any gun impotent. Mislabeling a shipment manifesto could send vital supplies far astray. The British claimed to have developed an abrasive grease that would rapidly wear out engine parts and factory machinery.
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A few saboteurs were fortunate enough to work with cyclotrimethylene-trinitramine, Composition C—a wartime British invention better known as plastic explosives.

4
. PUBLIC PROTESTS

Vocal and open demonstration was a dangerous undertaking in areas under totalitarian control. In 1942, when told their nation was going to be annexed into the Reich, citizens of the tiny duchy of Luxembourg protested en masse. The Nazis crushed the revolt through widespread executions and deportations.

Two avenues of marginal effect but frequent use were pulpits and schools. In a rare case of civil victory against Nazi atrocities, Bishop of Münster Clemens August Count von Galen succeeded in halting Hitler’s euthanasia program on the physically and mentally handicapped, but not until one hundred thousand had perished.
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In Norway almost every clergy member of the state Lutheran Church resigned in protest of the fascist puppet government. From the pulpit, Cardinal van Roey of Belgium beckoned his parishioners to fight “the enemy” and all their collaborators. More than a thousand rebellious French priests were arrested and extradited by the Third Reich.

Among schools and universities, students and faculty rejected closures and censorship. Nearly all teachers in Norway refused the creation of Hitler Youth programs in their schools. Thirteen hundred were summarily arrested. In France and Belgium, students protested the dismissal of Jewish students and professors. Whereas many churches continued to resist, especially at the parish level, academic institutions declined in influence due to forced closures and conscription.
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The “White Rose” operated out of Munich University for four years, quietly disseminating reports on Nazi atrocities. In 1943, they “went public,” handing out leaflets and protesting in the open. Their leaders were immediately arrested, tried, and executed.

5
. LABOR STRIKES

In a world where unarmed attacks against totalitarian regimes were tantamount to suicide, labor strikes provided a clever substitute. Strikers masked their assaults by making nonthreatening demands, such as asking for more bomb shelters, shorter workweeks, and safer working conditions. In gathering together, demonstrations also projected a moral unity. Of a more concrete impact, work stoppages curbed production of war materials. Yet several marches turned bloody. In Oslo, Norway, during September 1941, workers demonstrated against milk rationing. The SS addressed the issue by rounding up hundreds of laborers, torturing many, and selecting a few for execution.
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Labor uprisings became more aggressive in the last years of the war. In the spring of 1943 Italy’s industrialized north erupted in widespread protest. Wracked by inflation, corruption, and a string of military defeats abroad, laborers at the Turin Fiat factory initiated a walkout that grew to hundreds of thousands. The fascist government reluctantly arrested a few hundred and sent a token amount of demonstrators to the front in Sicily. In 1944 French factory walkouts exploded after D-day, Hungarian workers openly demonstrated against the pro-Nazi government, and the Dutch launched a rail strike in concert with O
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The United States was not without labor strikes, experiencing nearly fifteen thousand of them during the war. A massive 1944 railway stoppage threatened the war effort enough to make George C. Marshall call it the “damnedest crime ever committed against America.”

6
. ESPIONAGE

More so than government operatives, civilians were the eyes of the war. Rail clerks read train schedules. Dockworkers knew what was being loaded onto ships. Shopkeepers spotted shoulder patches on visiting troops and thus knew which divisions were in the area. Farmers reported on local weather and road conditions—essential information for military ground operations. Residents along sea lanes had clear views of ship convoys and support squadrons.