The History Buff's Guide to World War II (44 page)

Though a woman of many firsts, Margaret Bourke-White took the last known photograph of Mohandas Gandhi, just hours before he was assassinated in 1948.

8
. MARIE-MADELEINE FOURCADE (FRANCE, 1909–89)

She was the only woman to head a major network of the French underground, a spy ring the Gestapo called “Noah’s Ark” for the animal code names given to its operatives. Secretary to the Ark’s founder, Marie Madeleine Fourcade (a.k.a. Hedgehog) took over when her boss was arrested in 1941. Under her direction, the network became the largest and most prolific civilian espionage system in Western Europe.

Positioned across France, at one time numbering more than three thousand operatives, her beasts of burden collected details on troop movements, bunker locations, unit strengths, and supply routes. Information was then fed through a score of radio transmitters to the British Secret Intelligence Service. When maps, images, and volumes of material were collected, Fourcade arranged to have the RAF fly them out.
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Moles infiltrated the Ark on several occasions. Fourcade herself was arrested twice and escaped both times, once by squeezing through the window bars of a Gestapo holding cell. Every time the network collapsed, she rebuilt it. Though she and her network survived the war, more than five hundred of its operatives died along the way.
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In Paris is the Foundation of Memory and Hopes of Resistance at Place Marie-Madeleine Fourcade.

9
. ANDRÉE DE JONGH (BELGIUM, 1916–2007)

Twenty-four-year-old Andrée De Jongh became furious when her country capitulated after only eighteen days of fighting. She vowed to work for victory and set upon the idea to rescue Allied soldiers and airmen caught behind the lines. Creating a chain of safe houses in Belgium with her father, she laid the foundation for a network that would rescue some eight hundred military personnel.

In 1941, she and two accomplices smuggled a British airman out of Belgium. Andrée and her entourage proceeded through France, across the Pyrenees, and into Madrid. Meeting with British officials, she convinced them to support an underground railroad from Brussels to Gibraltar. The system was soon to be known affectionately as the “Comet Line.” Fierce and untiring, she was dubbed “La Petit Cyclone” and “the Postman.” De Jongh personally delivered 118 pilots, navigators, gunners, and engineers to safety, many of whom returned to the service.

In the course of their work, several conductors on the Comet Line were arrested and executed, including Andrée’s father, Frederich. The Gestapo caught up with Andrée in January 1943 and sent her to prison in Paris. They later sent her to Ravensbrück concentration camp. She survived the internment and was liberated by Allied troops in April 1945. After the war, she worked as a nurse in impoverished areas of Africa.
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For creating the Comet Line and for her courageous work, Andrée De Jongh received the American Medal of Freedom and the George Cross (Britain’s highest civilian decoration) and was made a Belgian countess.

10
. HANNA REITSCH (GERMANY, 1912–79)

A natural-born flyer, Hanna Reitsch earned her pilot’s license by age twenty. Impressing the public at air shows, she also broke distance and altitude records. Before the war she had not particularly cared for the Nazi regime, going so far as to publicly criticize its ethnic policies. But the opportunity to fly the latest and fastest machines had her working as a test pilot for the Reich by 1938.

Weathering a number of crashes, she nearly died in a 1942 incident. She suffered a dislocated jaw, cracked vertebrae, and skull fractures but won much sympathy and attention from Hitler. After ten months of recuperation, Reitsch was again in the air, testing the Messerschmitt 163 rocket plane and a prototype of the V-1 buzz bomb.

She became a national icon, gracing the pages of newspapers and magazines. Far from the Nazi ideal of an obedient homemaker, Reitsch nonetheless served as a symbol of German courage and achievement, a status she did not take lightly. When Allied air raids and Soviet offensives began to tear into the German heartland, Reitsch approached Hitler and offered to lead a suicide mission, piloting modified V-1 rockets to key targets. He halfheartedly consented. Though nothing came of the idea, the gesture ensured her place as one of the last and most trusted members of Hitler’s entourage. She would be one of the last people to see him alive.

In April 1945, as the Red Army stormed into the center of Berlin, Reitsch and Luftwaffe Gen. Robert Ritter von Greim flew through Soviet gunfire to reach the Chancellery bunker. Upon seeing his cherished pilot, Hitler exclaimed: “Brave woman! So there is still some loyalty and courage left in the world!” Yet the Führer refused her offer to fly him out of Berlin. She and von Greim left the bunker two days before Hitler’s suicide.
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Arrested and detained after the war, Reitsch returned to condemning the Third Reich. Released after a year’s incarceration, she toured the world, met Jawaharlal Nehru and John F. Kennedy, and set more flying records.
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Hanna Reitsch is the only woman in German history to receive both a second-and first-class Iron Cross.

REASONS THE ALLIES WON

The old axiom “God is always on the side with the biggest battalions” has an appealing simplicity to it. But history is full of examples where the largest army did not prevail: the American Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, and the Korean War, to name a few.

Any event contains an interplay of infinite variables, as exemplified by the Second World War. Perhaps the best that can be done, when investigating why one side succeeded and the other failed, is to discern what the major differences were and determine which of those differences played a significant role in the progression of the conflict.

The following are ten key distinctions between the Allies and the Axis. Some were centuries old. Others were recent developments. By themselves, none could have swayed the war to its particular conclusion. In concert, however, these facets greatly affected the chances of the warring parties.

1
. OBJECTIVES

Succinctly stated, the Axis had to conquer more than thirty countries while the Allies had to defeat three. Moreover, the Axis did not have a definitive endpoint to its military ambitions, whereas the Allies did.

Japan’s “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,” a weak attempt to define imperialism as “unity under one monarch,” targeted Manchuria and China. But the sphere soon expanded to include Indochina, Burma, the Dutch East Indies, and the Philippines. Early success fostered dreams of incorporating Australia, India, and parts of North and South America. For Italy, il Duce dabbled with imperialism by fits and starts and momentarily believed he could conquer most of southern Europe. Part of Hitler’s early success came from convincing his country and most of Europe that his goals were limited. But as demonstrated by invasions of Czechoslovakia, Poland, France, and the Soviet Union, Hitler’s aims continually grew.

In contrast, starting in 1943, the Allies adopted the war aim of
UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER
, vowing to cease fighting immediately after the governments of Germany, Italy, and Japan capitulated absolutely.

There had been much public criticism (which continues to the present) of the Allies’ goal, arguing that unconditional surrender forced the Axis to fight to the death rather than negotiate, thereby elongating and intensifying the war unnecessarily. Though there is no way of knowing what any alternative plan may have produced, the Allies’ aim was probably a productive move. First, allowing negotiations would have implied concessions. Negotiating certainly failed in the prewar era. In addition, there was little historical evidence that negotiations necessarily shortened any war or created much postwar stability, the Versailles debacle being only one example.

On the point of forcing the Axis to fight to the finish, both the Japanese and Germans were making public declarations of “annihilating the enemy” well before 1943. Events such as the Rape of Nanking and SS death squads on the eastern front suggested the Axis fought viciously, no matter what position the Allies took.

As for the Allies, unconditional surrender reduced the chance of any one government opting for a separate peace. It also gave soldiers and the home front a clear reason for their sacrifices and granted the Allied war effort a focus other approaches would not.

Franklin Roosevelt summed up the Allied objectives when he announced the capture of Rome: “One down. Two to go.”

2
. INDUSTRIAL CAPACITY

In a heavily mechanized war between industrialized countries, the Axis had the early edge. Against the rising power of Germany and the yet underdeveloped Italy, Great Britain probably could have stayed even in manufacturing. But with the freakish bond between Hitler and Stalin in the N
AZI
-S
OVIET
P
ACT
, the British were clearly outmatched. Their detached partner, China, although home to four hundred million people, by 1939 had lost most of its factories and foundries, holding onto less heavy industry than Belgium.

Everything changed in 1941. Germany’s assault on the Soviet Union and Japan’s attack on the United States swung the pendulum in favor of the Allies, uniting the globe’s top three industrial powers against the Axis. In 1942 Britain produced nearly eight times the number of tanks as the Japanese, and the Soviets made ten thousand more aircraft than Nazi Germany. The United States alone manufactured more war materials than the entire Axis combined. In fact, the United States surpassed the Axis close to the time H
ERMANN
G
ÖRING
claimed Americans “could only produce cars and refrigerators.”
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