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1945: Freedom Secured

The corpses of some forty inmates of Buchenwald, abandoned by German guards in a truck outside the camp crematorium.

For all the Allied advances, 1944 ended with a sharp sting in its tail. On December 16, in the Ardennes - scene of the German attack that had led to the fall of France in 1940 - Hitler had thrown his last dice. typically, the plan was bold and daring, but also was over-ambitious and lacked adequate supply lines and reinforcement. He managed to muster some thirty divisions, and exhorted his most fanatical and loyal troops to make one last charge. General Sepp Dietrich's Sixth S.S. Panzer Army led the attack. Lieutenant Colonel Otto Skorzeny's paratroopers included some who spoke fluent English and who penetrated U.S. lines in G.I. uniforms to cause havoc and confusion.

The attack took the Allies by surprise and knocked a sixty-mile hole in their line of advance, near the German border; this "bulge" gave the battle its name. Only the rapid, brave response by U.S. troops under Generals Patton and Hodges halted the advance. By the New Year, the Allies were pushing the Germans back. Hitler lost over 100,000 of his half-million men and almost all his armor, critical losses from which he never recovered. Churchill said the Battle of the Bulge was the greatest American battle of the war. The Ardennes campaign also produced one of the many atrocities that marked the conduct of the war by both Germany and Japan. At Malmedy on December 17, an S.S. unit executed seventy-one American soldiers and several civilians. After the war, Dietrich and several fellow S.S. officers were imprisoned for war crimes.

In February, Roosevelt (newly inaugurated for an unprecedented fourth term), Churchill, and Stalin met at Yalta, in the Crimea. The Allied forces were still in shock after the Battle of the Bulge, but the Red Army was within a hundred miles of Berlin, having liberated most of Eastern Europe. Churchill and Roosevelt had little to bargain with, and, moreover, Roosevelt needed Stalin's troops to move against Japan, once the war in Europe was over. Stalin won major concessions. Thus were created the postwar political boundaries between democratic West and communist East, and the ideological divide that engendered the "Cold War."

Roosevelt's failing health had been an issue in the 1944 presidential election. Now he was fading fast, but the seriousness of his condition was kept secret. The long trip to Yalta did not help, and during March his health worsened. He died of a stroke in Warm Springs, Georgia, on April 12, 1945. America's grief was deep, sincere, and longlasting. The cause of freedom had lost a dear friend. Churchill said, "Not one man in ten millions, stricken and crippled as he was, ... would have tried, not one in a generation would have succeeded, not only in entering the [political] sphere, not only in acting vehemently in it, but in becoming indisputable master of the scene."

The brutalities of the end of the war in Europe were matched by those in Asia. Each side portrayed the other as monstrous, murderous, subhuman, and each believed its own propaganda. The hatred had led to atrocities on both sides. Nearly 70,000 U.S. troops landed at Luzon in the Philippines on January 9, 1945. Despite stiff resistance from a quarter of a million Japanese defenders, the capital, Manila, fell on March 4. The whole Philippines campaign was over by July.

On February 15, the focus of U.S. attack in the Pacific shifted to the small, but significant, island of Iwo Jima. It was within a thousand miles of the Japanese mainland, and could be used by P-51 Mustangs to give vital fighter protection to B-29 planes bombing Japan. But Iwo Jima was a hard nut to crack, its thick black volcanic sand concealing 20,000 troops and an extensive network of gun positions, bunkers, minefields, and tunnels. Yet again, the Marines had to fight yard by bloody yard to extract the stubborn defenders.

On February 23, in a truly symbolic moment, the Marines hoisted the Stars and Stripes atop Mount Suribachi. But that symbolism had cost almost 7,000 U.S. lives. General Holland Smith said it was the toughest action in the Marines' 168-year history. Once again, few Japanese troops surrendered; most fought to the death.

The next target was Okinawa, which - though 350 miles from mainland Japan - is part of the Japanese homeland; the assault would give an indication of how the increasingly desperate Japanese might react to an attack on their main islands. Dismantling Japan's empire, piece by piece, was costing hundreds of U.S. lives per square mile. Kamikaze attacks typified the Japanese response to impending defeat: better death than defeat. The planes needed little speed or sophistication, their pilots little training; and defense against them was difficult. These "human bombs" raised the specter of increasingly fanatical defenders of the emperor, as U.S. forces neared Tokyo.

In the attack on Okinawa, kamikaze accounted for 36 ships sunk and 368 damaged, at a loss of 5,000 U.S. servicemen. It is estimated that over 2,500 Japanese pilots died in these attacks by the end of the war. The amphibious landings on Okinawa, on April l, were the last significant conventional military operation of the Pacific war, involving some half-million Marines and infantry and 1,200 warships. The Japanese commander, General Mitsuru Ushijima, concentrated his force of 100,000 inland, out of range of the ships' guns; he hoped for a prolonged battle which would inflict huge casualties on the invaders. By the end of April, only the southern tip, around the capital city, Naha, still held out. After fierce fighting, Naha fell at the end of May, but Ushijima fell back to a last redoubt on the Oroku peninsula. The final encounter was the costliest of all the U.S.'s Pacific battles: 7,600 Marines and infantrymen died, and only 7,500 Japanese troops surrendered. General Ushijima and his staff committed ritual suicide and ordered the civilian population to do the same. Many thousands obeyed.

The fall of Okinawa left Japan defenseless, especially against air raids. B-29 bombers, whose loads included napalm bombs, inflicted huge damage and killed hundreds of thousands of people. On the night of March 9, a firestorm engulfed Tokyo when over 300 planes dropped incendiaries, killing at least 100,000 people. But Japan's leadership steadfastly refused to surrender, still clinging to a vast land-based Asian empire which included the key cities of Seoul, Beijing, Saigon, Hong Kong and Singapore. At that point, it seemed as if the Allies - the Soviets from the north, the British from the west and the U.S. from the south and east - might have to wage a massive land war to clear mainland Asia of Japanese troops, while staging a bitter campaign on mainland Japan. The issues arising from the dilemma, and the solution to it, would, for the new President, Harry S. Truman, pose the most difficult ethical question of the war.

As Japan suffered under relentless air attacks, a similar price was being paid in Germany. On February 13-15, 1945, British and American bombers attacked the lightly defended city of Dresden; the resulting firestorm destroyed virtually the entire city center. It is estimated that more than 50,000 people were killed; questions about the morality of such attacks were still being asked, over fifty years later.

Events began to move rapidly in Europe, as Germany suffered the humiliation and pain of total defeat. It became a tragedy of unimaginable proportions, as the full extent of the horror of Hitler's Germany began to emerge: the revelation of the enormity of the Nazi policy of genocide. It was a crime on an unimaginable scale, committed not only by hundreds of thousands of Germans, but also by hundreds of thousands of active and passive collaborators throughout occupied Europe.

From the oppression and arrests of the 1930s, to the concentration camps and the death squads of the early years of the war, to the extermination camps of the "Final Solution," Nazi Germany had systematically murdered over six million European Jews, as well as Gypsies, Slavs, socialists, homosexuals, the physically or mentally disabled, and other "undesirables." The horror will forever live in history as the Holocaust.

As the Allied armies closed in on the German heartland, the awful truth emerged. The Red Army had liberated Auschwitz at the end of January, and on April 11, the day before Roosevelt's death, the U.S. Army reached the concentration camp at Buchenwald, where the surviving prisoners had already liberated themselves. One U.S. Ranger, who discovered the furnaces used to burn the dead, described what he saw. "Heavy metal trays had been pulled out of the openings. On those trays were partially burned bodies. On one tray was a skull, burned through, with a hole in the top; other trays held partially disintegrated arms and legs. And the odor, my God, the odor!"

On April 25, the U.S. and Soviet armies met at Torgau, on the River Elbe. The end was only days away. On April 28, Benito Mussolini and his mistress were shot by Italian partisans, their bodies strung up for public ridicule. Two days later, after marrying his mistress, Eva Braun, Hitler shot himself in his Berlin bunker. In a squalid and sordid funeral scene, in total contrast with the mythical fantasies he had envisaged for himself, his body was burned in a shell hole. The S.S. fought on to the bitter end, as the capital city of what had once been envisaged as a "Thousand Year Reich" descended into an orgy of killing and revenge.

The war in Asia was also nearing its end. In late July, the Conservative Party was defeated in the British general election, and Churchill was replaced by Clement Attlee at the Potsdam Peace Conference. Although Churchill had already endorsed a positive decision, President Truman now had to think the unthinkable. The Red Army was about to strike into China and Korea, but there was still no sign of surrender from Tokyo. An atomic bomb had been successfully tested at Alamogordo, New Mexico, a few weeks earlier, and the president had to decide whether to use the terrifying new weapon. Military planners had predicted that an invasion of the Japanese mainland would entail huge losses on both sides. Truman had little choice but to use the A-bomb and try to end the war quickly.

The first bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, the second on Nagasaki on August 9. Whatever the morality of the decision, the Japanese surrender did come: it was broadcast by radio, on August 15, by Emperor Hirohito himself, the first time his voice had ever been publicly heard. He remained on the throne (and thus, technically, part of a conditional, rather than unconditional, surrender) but it marked the end of his "divinity" and the beginning of modern Japan.

The formal surrender was signed aboard the U.S.S. Missouri, in Tokyo Bay, on September 2, 1945, six years and a day after German panzers had rolled into Poland, and almost four years after Pearl Harbor. Over 50 million people had died in the fight against European fascism and the tyranny of the Japanese Empire. Thirty million people were homeless. Most of the dead and destitute were Russians, Poles, and other Eastern Europeans. Several countries, including Japan and Germany, were completely devastated, and many more had suffered damage which it would take decades to repair.

The United States had suffered less than most. But it was, after all, not a party to the forces that had created the whirlwind. When it did join the fray, it did so with remarkable commitment, tenacity, and bravery, and it was U.S. involvement which, in the early days of the war, tipped the balance and made the Allied victory inevitable. This remains true, even with the greatest respect to the astonishing bravery of the people of the Soviet Union (those that were'nt shot in the back by their Soviet counterparts), the redoubtable courage of Britain and its empire, and the heroic support of many other nations and countless individuals.

Over 400,000 Americans died in World War II, and 670,000 were wounded. Almost 140,000 servicemen were taken prisoner; many of them suffered hardship, hunger, and torture. Countless more were scarred for life by the experience and are still haunted by it. Freedom had been secured, but at a terrible price.

Stewart Binns & Adrian Wood. 1945: The Terrible Reckoning. . Sevenoaks Limited. 2001.

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