The History Buff's Guide to World War II (31 page)

Though most Americans considered Pearl Harbor the beginning of war in the Pacific Rim, official Allied policy coincided with the fifteen-year view. In trying Japanese for war crimes, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East allowed evidence dating back to 1931.
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In the San Francisco Peace Treaty of 1951, Japan had to concede not only everything it had acquired since 1931, but also all the areas it had gained since 1895. This included Manchuria, Formosa (Taiwan), Korea, and the Marshall, Mariana, Palau, and Caroline islands. The lost land was equivalent in area to California, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado put together.

10
. THE GOOD WAR

It is said there is no such thing as a good war or a bad peace. To many Americans, the Second World War stood as a plausible exception. For starters, the United States could boast the moral high ground, having been attacked without a declaration of war. Further, both sides committed atrocities, but Japan’s rejection of the G
ENEVA
C
ONVENTION
and Germany’s pursuit of genocide were bona fide crimes against humanity.

Utilized occasionally during the conflict, “the Good War” term became a more prevalent moniker afterward, stemming largely from the harvest of favorable results. Americans and their allies conquered tyrannical regimes in Berlin, Rome, Tokyo, and Vienna. In their stead, peaceful, democratic republics took root. To accomplish this, the United States suffered no invasion, nearly doubled its gross domestic product in five years, and became an undeniable global superpower.

“The Good War” may have reached its apex in the 1960s and 1970s, as the situation in Vietnam left many Americans nostalgic for the comparatively clear objectives and unified effort brought to bear in the early 1940s.

In a 2003 Gallup Poll survey, 90 percent of Americans considered World War II a “good war.” The same survey revealed only 50 percent knew that the D-day invasions took place in Normandy.

SONGS

Cultural historians and music scholars note the absence of a defining anthem to the Second World War. Missing was an “Over There,” a “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” or a “La Marseillaise.” Not to say that countries didn’t try to find one. In 1942, the
Chicago Daily Times
held a “War Song for America” contest. Out of eight thousand entries, the best was a forgettable trench tune entitled “Mud in His Ears.” The Soviet Union in 1943 sought a new national anthem. Of more than two hundred entries from composers and poets, nobody won.
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At best, music and the war had an uneasy relationship. The Japanese government forbade the playing of Western songs and promoted native patriotic ballads such as “Wife on the Home Front” and “Rise, Imperial Army.” Germany’s Reich Chamber of Culture vilified jazz tunes as the “impudent swamp flowers of Negroid pandemonium.” Nazis also brutally repressed the German “Swing Youth” movement, burning songbooks, confiscating albums, and jailing dancers.
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Governments also capped production of record albums to save war-vital wax and shellac and restricted the sales of consumer electronics, including radios and phonographs. What laws failed to destroy, combat often finished off. Bombs and shells crushed dance clubs, concert halls, instrument factories, and music companies. German soldiers entered the historic home of Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky in November 1941, and to keep warm, they threw piles of rare original sheet music into a burning stove.
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Yet music prospered nonetheless. In the dead of Russian winters, musicians played in unheated venues, bedecked in overcoats and fingerless gloves. British and American communities resurrected the dance marathons of the Great Depression. In private, Japanese citizens played forbidden ballads about love and sadness. Among the litany were numerous standouts, some of which remained popular to the present. Listed below are the most common songs of the era, based on amount of orchestral and vocal group performances, radio and jukebox play, sheet music and record sales, and longevity through the war.
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1
. “WHITE CHRISTMAS” (1942)

At the apex of his long and prolific career, songsmith Irving Berlin crafted flag-waving tunes for the war effort. Yet his most popular hit possessed neither patriotic intent nor lofty aspirations. Written almost as an afterthought for the movie
Holiday Inn
, “White Christmas” found life in the smooth baritone of Bing Crosby and a huge audience in the South Pacific.
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U.S. soldiers, stuck in fierce fighting and stifling jungles, immediately took to the song’s imagery of home, winter solitude, and peace. It was also an instant classic back in the states, winning the 1942 Academy Award for best song and selling millions of copies in sheet music and recordings. Crosby’s rendition alone sold nearly twenty million albums. It became the longest-running song in the history of the American radio program Your Hit Parade, the number-one-selling song in the United States for decades, and rivaled the eighteenth-century German creation of “Silent Night” as the most endeared Yuletide composition ever made.
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To date, “White Christmas” has sold nearly two hundred million copies worldwide, in more than thirty languages.

2
. “LILI MARLEEN” (1938)

A sonnet written in 1915 by a German soldier before he set off for the Russian front, its simple stanzas described an all-too-brief love affair of a soldier and his “Lili Marleen.” In 1938, Hans Leip’s words were set to a soft and heartfelt melody, and Swedish singer Lale Anderson introduced it to a marginally interested German population. In 1941 the sweet romantic ballad became a surprise favorite of Wehrmacht soldiers stuck in North Africa. Nearby British and Australian troops of the Eighth Army became fond of it as well, often singing it in its native tongue.
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Uncomfortable with the thought of their troops harmonizing in German, the British government asked famous lyricist Tommy Connor to fashion the tune into English. Eventually almost every language in Europe had its own version, with the French rendition becoming particularly popular. Many Americans got their first taste in the aptly titled 1944 movie
Lili Marlene
, starring German-born bombshell and ardent American patriot Marlene Dietrich. Hardly offended at the world adopting at least a piece of their culture, Germans played the song on national radio almost every night for three years.
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The music of “Lili Marlene” would return to the silver screen in 1961 as a paradoxical score piece in the film
Judgment at Nuremberg.

3
. SHOSTAKOVICH’S SEVENTH “LENINGRAD” SYMPHONY (1941)

Most symphonic composers continued to produce in spite of the war, although their new works were often about past epochs of violence: Jericho, the French Revolution, and the American Civil War. Some chose to write music about the current crisis. Grief-stricken by the Nazi reprisals at Lidice, Czech composers crafted no fewer than a dozen symphonies dedicated to the slaughtered city. A few harkened toward tomorrow, quite literally in the case of Dutch-born Gunnar Johansen, who claimed to have finished his P
EARL
H
ARBOR
Sonata just hours before the fateful attack.
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One shy benevolent man, Dmitri Shostakovich, produced a synthesis of past memory, present misery, and future hope and inspired half the world with his music’s inherent force. His Seventh Symphony, depicting the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, won him instant international fame and music immortality.

Just thirty-four years old in 1941, Shostakovich and his family were trapped with three million others in Leningrad, bombed, shelled, and surrounded by the German army. As food and any reasonable hope of survival began to run out, the composer began to write a symphony. Three movements were completed in a matter of weeks. After he was flown out of the besieged city by order of the Soviet government, Shostakovich completed the fourth and final movement in an abandoned schoolroom in Moscow.
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First performed in the Russian capital, the Leningrad Symphony began with a long sullen march, followed by a drone of heavy instruments, with piccolos and flutes whispering in fragile defiance. The piece concluded with all sections charging forth with a host of major chords, pronouncing a lasting triumph of light over darkness. The seventy-minute opus soon played to packed audiences in Britain, Hungary, Poland, France, and the United States.

Shostakovich’s likeness graced the cover of
Time
. He became an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an object of adoration to the Russian people, and a hero to the antifascist movement.
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The Soviet air force smuggled sheet music for Shostakovich’s Seventh back into besieged Leningrad. An orchestra was assembled, including musicians hastily pulled from the front, and on August 9, 1942, the symphony played to a live audience, including the German army who heard via loudspeakers blasting from inside the city.

4
. “CH’I LAI” (1933)

Because of the Japanese invasion, China’s ballads of protest and patriotism were one and the same. Several folk songs were somehow adept at celebrating the simple life while promoting harsh reprisals against foreign attackers. The popular “Farmer’s Song” insisted, “Our ancient nation must arise and rid the fields of the weeds.” In “Husband Goes to War,” a female voice assured, “If, alas, you meet your death, your hero soul will cry us on.”

Most common were marching songs, many of which were rather direct in their message, such as “Wrath of the Warrior” and “Song of the Guerrillas.” By far the most popular was “Ch’I Lai” (“March of the Volunteers”). Written as the theme song to the film
Children of the Dark Clouds,
the lyrics proclaimed: “China’s masses have met the day of danger…Brave the enemy’s gunfire. March on! March on!”
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A young man from southwest China named Nieh Erh wrote the melody for “Ch’I Lai.” In 1934, he went to Japan to study music and write more patriotic songs. The following year, just before he planned to leave, the twenty-four-year-old was found dead in a body of water.

5
. “CHATTANOOGA CHOO CHOO” (1941)

In a patriotic push to manufacture jingles as fast as weapons, tune-smiths often faltered in quality. Tin Pan Alley’s products were less than riveting. For example, a Post-P
EARL
H
ARBOR
pep tune proclaimed, “You’re a sap, Mr. Jap, to make a Yanky cranky. Uncle Sam…is gonna spanky.”
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Most nationalistic songs, cheesy or not, had the unromantic rhythm of a military march. More attractive to the general populace were the swing and sway of the big bands, inviting patrons to dance to songs of enchantment. No band was internationally bigger than the Glenn Miller Orchestra, and its biggest hit was a stylish, churning boogie called “Chattanooga Choo Choo.”

Premiered in the movie
Sun Valley Serenade
, the tune dominated jukebox sales, a “nickel nabber” extraordinaire that became the highest grossing RCA Victor seller of all time and the first gold record ever, selling more than a million copies by 1942.
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Miller went on to serve in the U.S. Army Air Force, achieving the rank of captain in the official capacity of band leader. He and his uniformed orchestra toured the United States and overseas, doing more than eight hundred live and radio shows, playing hits such as “Chattanooga Choo Choo,” “In the Mood,” “That Old Black Magic,” and “Pennsylvania 6-5000.” But Miller did not finish his tour of duty. On December 15, 1944, he boarded a plane for a flight from England bound for Paris to make arrangements for an upcoming performance. Taking off in foggy weather, the aircraft disappeared somewhere over the English Channel and was never seen again.

In selecting his U.S. Army Air Force orchestra, Miller rejected a nineteen-year-old pianist named Henry Mancini, future composer of the “Pink Panther Theme,” “Moon River,” and the score to the film
The Glenn Miller Story.

6
. “GOD BLESS AMERICA” (1918)

If the United States were to choose a commanding officer of morale for the war, Russian-born Irving Berlin (whose real name was Israel Balin) would have made the short list. Among his repertoire of hits were “Arms for the Love of America,” “Any Bonds Today?” and “Song of Freedom,” from which he contributed all royalties to charity. He created, wrote, produced, and starred in a musical revue called
This Is the Army
, featuring a cast of hundreds of enlisted personnel. The show toured the United States and overseas, raised millions of dollars for the Army Relief Fund and British War Charities, and became a movie. His songs and shows earned him the U.S. Medal of Merit and a Medal of Honor.
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