The History Buff's Guide to World War II (32 page)

But the one patriotic tune for which he was best known was the ballad “God Bless America,” written long before the Second World War and debuted on Armistice Day in 1938. Simple, brief, with a grandiose crescendo, its lyrics paid homage to an idyllic and expansive countryside. After 1941, it played consistently before or after radio programs, public functions, and sporting events. The tune became a virtual second national anthem. One young listener recalled, “We listened to the radio and heard Kate Smith sing ‘God Bless America’ more times than we recited the Lord’s Prayer or Pledge of Allegiance in school each morning.” In keeping with his practice of donating royalties of patriotic tunes, Berlin gave every penny he earned on the song to the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts of America.
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Berlin composed and played purely by ear. In all his 101 years of life, he never learned to read or write music.

7. “THERE’LL ALWAYS BE AN ENGLAND” (1939)

After learning of the astounding success of “God Bless America,” a London publicist asked a pair of songwriters, Hughie Charles and Ross Parker, to compose a British equivalent. Borrowing heavily from Irving Berlin’s references to placid fields and wholesome folk, the two managed to pump out “There’ll Always Be an England” in about three hours, but the song failed to take off.
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Months later, while Hitler invaded Poland, Britain braced for attack. A buzz developed around an obscure nationalistic ballad about country lanes and fields of grain, and the song became a full-fledged hit when King Charles VI mentioned it in a somber radio message to his subjects. Sheet music flew off the shelves. BBC airwaves rang with its cheery chords. The title appeared on bumper stickers in Canada, and Londoners sang it in bomb shelters: “There’ll always be an England, and England shall be free, if England means as much to you, as England means to me.”
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The drag of the ensuing P
HONY
W
AR
period diminished its luster, but the syrupy refrain made a comeback with the B
ATTLE OF
B
RITAIN
in 1940. By 1942, it played less often than romantic songs like “The White Cliffs of Dover” and Hughie Charles and Ross Parker’s own “We’ll Meet Again,” but “England” matured throughout the war to be an old standard of the Commonwealth.
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In tribute to the occasion, British schoolchildren once again bellowed the lyrics of “There’ll Always Be an England” at the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953.

8
. “THE HORST WESSEL SONG” (1930)

Like their opponents, Germans preferred sentimental classics, jazz, and pop tunes to brash, banging martial compositions. Amid personal dreams and the daily grind, “Awake, German Fatherland” and “Tomorrow We March” simply lacked the appeal of a good dance number or love song, such as “Do You Remember the Beautiful May Days?” Even in the darkest hours, citizens of the Reich cared for “No More Beautiful Death in the World” before “Deutschland Über Alles.”
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But in the Third Reich, orchestral works by the German masters (Hitler preferred Wagner) and military ensembles were the order of the day. Dominant among the latter was “The Horst Wessel Song.”

Wessel was a twenty-three-year-old member of the Nazi Sturmabteilung, the SA, a.k.a. “Brownshirts.” In his spare time he wrote marching tunes and attended rallies. He also bullied Communists, until one came to his apartment and shot him (his compatriots maintained he was struck down in a street brawl). When Wessel subsequently died weeks later, Nazi propaganda director Joseph Goebbels hailed him as an angelic martyr and adopted one of the deceased’s poems, originally titled “Raise the Flag on High,” as the official anthem of the Nazi Party.
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The drum-tinged vocal-dominated tribute to belligerence received numbingly repetitive play on state radio and in official assemblies. The music may have been lifted from an old Salvation Army tune, but the imposed words were far from charitable: “SA men march with bold, determined tread, Comrades felled by Reds and Ultras in fight, March at our side, in spirit never dead.”

By 1942, many Germans were clearly unenthused with such nationalist themes and the constant reminders of war. Fearing he was going to lose his audience completely, Goebbels mandated a return to light music, which soon took up 70 percent of programming. From then on, Horst’s march played infrequently, but extreme departures like jazz remained verboten (forbidden).
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Because of its connection with the Nazi Party, it is currently illegal to sing or play the “Horst Wessel Song” in the Federal Republic of Germany.

9
. “DON’T SIT UNDER THE APPLE TREE” (1939)

East and West, some of the most popular songs centered around three themes: love, loneliness, and a plea for abstinence. The Chinese sang “Wait for Me,” French voices echoed “Wait for Me, My Love,” and English singers assured “I’ll Be Seeing You” and “I’ll Walk Alone.” A favorite German hit was “Come Back to Me,” while Russians asked “Are You Waiting?” Topping them all in circulation was the peppy American ditty “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree (with Anyone Else but Me).”
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Written in 1939, the earnest tune became the rage when the Andrews Sisters sang it in the 1942 movie
Private Buckaroo
. Number one on Your Hit Parade from October 1942 to January 1943, no other war-related tune in the United States spent as much time at the top as the one that asked a sweetheart to wait “until I come marching home.”
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Unfortunately for Americans and everyone else, many lovers did not wait. Years of separation, uncertainty, and a sense of fatalism placed exceptional stresses on relationships. By necessity, military training for most armed forces included lectures and films on sexual hygiene. Socially transmitted diseases were major contributors to unit casualties, and many women left behind also pursued physical companionship.

Americans received “Dear John” or “Dear Jane” letters confessing infidelity. Germans wrote of “suitcases” (secret lovers). In countries where divorce was permitted, separations doubled over the course of the war. In Britain, illegitimate births more than doubled, and separations filed because of alleged adultery quadrupled. But songs of faithfulness remained popular for the duration.
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The International Red Cross in Geneva had a department to handle divorces for prisoners of war.

10
. “AH! LA PETIT VIN BLANC” (1943)

Call it pragmatism, call it denial, but most citizens in occupied France tried to make the best of a bad situation, to create a sense of security in a very insecure time. Vichy culture embodied this pursuit by glorifying traditional male-female roles, villages, rural life, folk art, and music.

Sounding this retreat into the past was the most popular melody of the occupation era, “Ah, La Petit Vin Blanc,” sung by the general of joie de vivre, Maurice Chevalier. Paying grand homage to a little bottle of white wine, a romantic getaway in the countryside, and bright carefree optimism, the leisurely waltz was just one of many French songs with a blatantly escapist theme.

Countering was an artistic resistance of sorts. Citizens were attentive to double entendres within lyrics, poems, or plays, searching works for anti-German messages. In reality, most works did not have such hidden meanings. Artists such as Spanish exile Pablo Picasso and playwright Jean-Paul Sartre continued to produce works high in emotional content but evasive in political meaning. Music was generally submissive as well. Frenchmen may have sung the resistance march “Le Chant des Partisans” in public after liberation, but before that time, “La Petit Vin Blanc” had already sold 1.5 million copies of sheet music.
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For playing to German audiences, Maurice Chevalier was later accused of being a collaborator, an affront he shared with thousands of other conspicuously cooperative French citizens, including the mistress of a German officer, Coco Chanel.

IN RETROSPECT

FIRSTS

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus proclaimed, “War is the father of all things.” Compelling as his words may be, reality speaks otherwise. Historically, wars tend to constrict if not consume incubators of innovation, such as laboratories, libraries, universities, and human beings. Over the course of major conflicts, everything from architecture to literature stagnates as resources are diverted to issues of more immediate security.

Exceptions come from the science of survival, exemplified by inventions made between 1937 and 1945. Allied airmen witnessed the first pressurized cabins, autopilot systems, and rubber-coated “self-sealing” gas tanks that could take a bullet and not explode. Nutritionists synthesized vitamins and high-calorie meals. Although blood types were known since the beginning of the century, blood banks were used for the first time, as were nonperishable plasmas.
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For every novelty made to preserve a body, there seemed a dozen invented to tear it apart. During the war, a team of Harvard researchers concocted a gummy liquid called Napalm. U.S. weapons designers fashioned handheld rocket launchers nicknamed “bazookas.” Nazis created nerve gas. Several countries introduced a host of new bombs, bullets, fuses, land mines, shells, and torpedoes. For better or worse, the conflict deserved Winston Churchill’s classification as “the wizard war.”
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Following in chronological order are the first of their kind in world or American history. Some are events; others are objects of warfare. Most played significant roles in the course of the war. All exercised equal or greater effect on history after 1945.

1
. FIRST FULLY MOTORIZED ARMY (SEPTEMBER 1939)

World War II often conjures images of German armor and American industry. But the first entirely mechanized armed forces belonged to Great Britain. All other combatants utilized beasts of burden, many of them extensively.

Infantry officers of numerous countries rode on horseback during the war’s early years. Almost every army possessed horse cavalry, such as the U.S. Second Cavalry Division deployed to Morocco in 1943. Draft horses hauled supply wagons, ammunition, and the wounded. Most of Italian and German artillery was horse-drawn. Because of the rugged terrain in Sicily, the U.S. Army routinely employed pack mules. Red Army draft animals numbered in the millions.
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The fully mechanized British war machine motors across Libya while the vast majority of German and Italian infantry travels on foot.