The Winds of War
Chapter 1

"People do not have the natural herd instinct . . . only fear of authority commanding and using force can create a community."
-Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

It was glorified by politicians as "The War to End All Wars," but dark clouds hovered over Europe at the end of World War I. After the bloodiest conflict the world had ever known--more than 12 million dead, more than half of them civilians--an uneasy, unsatisfying peace had been achieved. The terms of the settlement, however, had sown the seeds of a second worldwide conflict rooted in even deeper resentments than the first. For all their self-congratulations, the politicians had failed. Somewhere down the road, the generals would get a second chance--and with vastly deadlier weaponry.

German generals had failed in what the world then knew as The Great War. Despite overwhelming victory by the Germans on the Eastern front against the Russians, the arrival of American doughboys to bolster the British and French armies had turned the tide on the Western Front and driven the Germans from France. Germany had been forced to give up all captured territories, pay damages to its opponents and agree to a massive reduction of its armed forces, as mapped out by President Woodrow Wilson in the Treaty of Versailles. This 14-point peace document had not been received well by Germany or the allies, France and Britain, since it effectively called for the end of conquest of weaker nations, which had been standard practice in Europe since the creation of the nation-state.

The day the armistice was announced in 1918, a 29-year-old soldier who'd fought for the Kaiser was recovering in a hospital from temporary blindness caused by British mustard gas. Before the war he'd been a chronic underachiever, supposedly eager to study art or architecture but working instead as a day laborer in abject poverty, selling picture post cards and doing odd jobs to make ends meet. He'd fought bravely in the Great War, however, and was profoundly dismayed by the Fatherland's surrender. As he lay in bed, his eyes gradually regaining their focus, Adolf Hitler silently vowed to return Germany to its former greatness.

An Austrian who'd settled in Munich in 1913, Hitler decided after the war to pursue a political career. He joined a local army organization and was assigned to spy on the German Workers Party, which had only about two dozen members. Attending a party meeting and finding himself incensed by one of the speakers, Hitler rose and delivered a fiery rebuttal that so impressed the group's leader, Anion Drexler; that Hitler was invited to join the fledgling organization. After some thought, Hitler agreed. He quickly became a key figure in shaping and expanding the German Workers Party. Two years later, he founded the National Socialist German Workers Party--or, as it came to be nicknamed, the Nazi Party. The party's platform rested on three legs--hatred of the Treaty of Versailles, hatred of communists and hatred of Jews, whom Hitler blamed for polluting Germany's "racial purity."

By 1923, the Nazis had attracted as members some prominent veterans of the Great War--among them a full field marshal and Hermann Goering, a noted air combat ace. The Nazis also had established their own military organization, the Storm Troopers. An attempt to take over the City of Munich, however, failed when the National Guard opened fire. Fourteen Nazis were killed, and Hitler fled. Captured, put on trial and sentenced to five years in prison for treason, Hitler ended up serving less than a year--long enough to hammer his "German Master Race" doctrine into a book, Mein Kampf (My Struggle). Upon his release, Hitler was delighted to discover that his trial and incarceration had made him a celebrity. Despite a government ban against Nazi newspapers or any public speaking by Nazi leaders; the party began to gain ground as the established German government faltered.

In 1929, the world plunged into an economic depression. Germany was hit particularly hard. Millions of Germans were unemployed and in quest both of scapegoats and strong national leadership. By now, Hitler had become a German citizen. He ran for president and lost, but his Nazi Party was left as Germany's strongest, setting the stage in 1933 for Hitler to be named chancellor, the second most powerful position in the government. Later in the year, the Reichstag, the German national legislative building, burned to the ground. Communists did it, Hitler charged--although it had been Nazis who'd set the fire. Responding to what Hitler insisted was a national emergency, Germany's lawmakers promptly voted to grant the new chancellor dictatorial powers. In August 1934, after the death of President Paul von Hindenburg, Hitler succeeded him as president and took the new title of Fuhrer, or leader. In a few short years, Germany had been transformed into a totalitarian police state with a virulent animosity toward Jews.

Over the next three years Hitler went about with the "Nazification" of Germany. He was bent on breaking the Versailles Treaty and its strict limitations on the capability of the German army, navy and air force. In utmost secrecy, he ordered the armed forces tripled in size. The press, films, art and radio fell victim to extreme censorship as all youth groups were abolished and reformed into a single "Hitler Youth" entity. Churches that opposed his doctrine were persecuted and their clerics often arrested and sent to concentration camps.

Hitler believed that invaders had polluted the German bloodline and that Germany was obligated to conquer the world to cleanse it of the "lesser races"--of anyone not Nordic or Aryan. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 reflected that philosophy by withdrawing German citizenship from Jews. No Jew could hold public office, vote, work in civil service, the media, farming, teaching, the stock exchange or, eventually, in the fields of law or medicine. Hostility toward Jews was encouraged. They became increasingly persecuted and ostracized in German society.

In defiance of the Versailles Treaty, Hitler ordered his naval chief, Admiral Erich Raeder, to construct warships vastly larger than permitted under the agreement and a fleet of submarines--vessels that also had been strictly forbidden. Goering, chief of the air force, was ordered to build the Luftwaffe into a fierce fighting force. In 1935, Hitler purposely leaked to British officials the existence of the banned aircraft--which, it was later learned, had already been known to them--to determine if the treaty would indeed be enforced. The reaction of France and England was to essentially ignore Germany's military buildup. That encouraged Hitler to openly engage in military induction, increasing German's army to approximately half a million men. Meanwhile, the Fuhrer was delivering spirited speeches denouncing war and stressing his desire for peace with his country's neighbors.

In March 1936, Hitler again tested the resolve of the allies to enforce the Versailles Treaty by marching German soldiers over bridges into the previously demilitarized Rhineland. A much larger French army near the border did nothing in response to the violation of this area, west of the Rhine River. Cheered by that passive reaction, Hitler continued to solidify his military position by rapidly building defensive fortifications along the French and Belgian borders while, at the same time, offering to enter into non-aggression pacts with France and Belgium. The Rhineland occupation represented genuine peril for Central Europe. Countries like Austria and Czechoslovakia relied on intervention by the French in the event of a German invasion, and the French had taken no action in response to Hitler's move into the Rhineland. Seven months later, Hitler formed an alliance with the far right-wing Italian dictator, Benito Mussolini. Known as the Rome-Berlin Axis, the pact included an agreement on a common foreign policy and mutual defense.

As he tested the resolve of the nations that had won the Great War to enforce the terms of its armistice, Hitler's popularity continued to grow inside Germany, strengthening his power over the nation's military leadership. The winds of war were being fanned by the failure of France and England to enforce the letter, or even the spirit, of the Treaty of Versailles. They were allowing Hitler to edge ever closer to his goal of securing additional "living space" for Germany--for the lands of other nations to be gobbled up for the growth of his German Master Race and the ultimate racial "purification" of the planet.

In 1938, Germany annexed Austria. The nations that had defeated Germany in the Great War responded by meeting with Hitler in Munich, listening to his demands and giving Germany part of Czechoslovakia in exchange for a promise that Nazi expansionism would be satisfied. The following year, Hitler negotiated a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union and promptly sent German tank divisions rolling into Poland, where the outdated Polish army struggled futilely to oppose the deadly fighting machines from the backs of horses.

Two days after the Germans invaded Poland, Britain, France, Australia and New Zealand declared war on Germany, followed by Canada. For the next nine months, Germany continued to invade and defeat its neighbors--including Denmark, Norway, Holland, Luxembourg and Belgium. On June 14, 1940, the German army entered France, forcing one of the major peacekeeping entities of Europe to sign an armistice. On September 27, 1940, Japan joined Germany and as one of the Axis powers. By mid-1941, the Germans had conquered and were in control of most of their neighbors. With the British busy battling the Italians and Germans in North Africa, Hitler then turned his attention to the conquest of the Soviet Union, with its rich array of natural resources. On June 22, 1941, the German army invaded the Russian homeland in flagrant violation of the non-aggression pact Hitler had signed with Soviet leader Josef Stalin. From the Fuhrer's standpoint, the treaty had been no more than a stall tactic to prevent the Russians from interfering with his invasion of Poland.

The Russians later admitted the loss of 1,200 aircraft within the first nine hours of the attack. Within a week, 90 per cent of the Soviet Union's frontline strength had been vanquished. Over the next several months, the Germans took Minsk, Smolensk, Novogrod, Kiev, Kharkov, Kursk and Rostov. By October 1941, German troops were marching on Moscow. As the German Army took control of the town of Orel, German press chief Otto Dietrich declared to the world's leading newspapers, "For military purposes, Soviet Russia is done for. The British dream of a two-front war is dead."

German General Heinz Guderian was the military strategist who'd masterminded the "Blitzkrieg"--the intense, devastating, aerial bombing attacks on England during 1940-1941. He was a major proponent of tank warfare, which had crushed Poland, and was in charge of Operation Barbarosa, the code name for Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union. Known for his disagreements with Hitler concerning military strategy, he wrote on October 6, 1941, that snow had begun falling on the invading German Army. Six days later, snow still fell. Russian roads were a sea of mud. By November, Guderian was reporting to Berlin severe cases of frostbite among his troops and complaining that no winter clothing had arrived to save his troops from freezing to death.

On November 25th, the Germans launched a full-blown attack on Moscow. By December 4th, General Guderian was reporting the halt of the Second Panzer Army's assault on the city. The temperature had fallen to 31 below zero, and the next morning was five degrees colder. The ill-prepared German troops were confronting what Napoleon's Grand Army had suffered 130 years earlier, when they'd been defeated not by the Russian army but by the bitter Russian winter.

On December 5th, after only 10 days into the assault on Moscow, the German Army formally abandoned its attack. The Germans had been stopped everywhere along the 200-mile, semicircular front around Moscow. The following day, Russian General Georgi Zhukov secured the Soviet capital by unleashing on the invaders 100 divisions equipped and trained for harsh weather conditions. During the following weeks, the Germany army--denied by Hitler permission to retreat, as the German generals had recommended--was pushed back from Moscow.

A day after the German invasion on the Eastern front froze in place, another Axis power with similar ambitions of conquest would wake a sleeping giant and usher the most powerful nation in the world out of its isolationist pipe dream and into the conflict full force. At the time, Americans were ambivalent about the conflict in Europe. They clearly favored Britain and France over Hitler's Nazi Germany but were overwhelmingly opposed to the United States entering the war. By early 1940, as news of Hitler's army rolling over Western Europe reached American shores, public opinion began to shift in favor of decisive action. Several grass roots lobbying organizations evolved--including the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, formed to promote "all aid short of war," and the America First Committee, which included famed aviator Charles A. Lindbergh and called for avoiding war even at the expense of an Axis victory.

Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt, while campaigning for an unprecedented third term, maneuvered for bipartisan support of a pro-Allied foreign policy by appointing two international-minded Republicans as secretary of war and secretary of the navy. Two months before the election, he decided to trade 50 aged American destroyers to the British for military bases in the Caribbean. Roosevelt's Republican presidential opponent, Wendell Willkie, publicly supported this transaction. While neither candidate called for direct intervention, Roosevelt's election in November 1940, paved the way for American support of the Allied war effort, a clear break from the nation's isolationist past.

In early 1940, Congress had considered cutting defense spending, but after the German invasion of France a multi-billion-dollar increase was passed. By June, Roosevelt had set up a National Defense Research Committee, which oversaw new weapon programs--including the Manhattan Project, which ultimately produced the atomic bomb. The third-term President was faced with the daunting prospect of enlarging the Navy, in order to fight a two-ocean war, and of properly arming a virtually weaponless U.S. Army that had begun maneuvers in August 1940, using broomsticks to simulate machine guns and rain pipes as make-believe mortars. Roosevelt's most controversial pre-war initiative was to impose a peacetime draft, the first in American history, to bolster the woefully inadequate army, which numbered only 500,000 men. At the time, Hitler's fighting forces numbered nearly eight million men armed with the newest, most effective weaponry on the planet. In September 1940, the House of Representatives passed the draft by a one-vote margin.

Other actions by the United States made clear that America was not truly neutral and was at least pondering entry into the war. In January 1941, Roosevelt announced the Lend-Lease Program designed to provide England with up to 50 per cent of U.S. military production in return for a promise of postwar repayment. The bill was ratified in March. In August, it was expanded to include war supplies to the beleaguered Russians.

In early 1941, the U.S. Atlantic fleet was reorganized in an effort to protect the flow of lend-lease supplies to Britain. Later that year, in cooperation with the Royal Navy, the U.S. Navy began assisting in the tracking of German submarines. In September, after the USS Greer was fired on by a German U-boat, President Roosevelt issued a shoot-to-kill order that initiated an undeclared naval war between the U.S. and Germany. A month later, the American destroyers Kearney and Reuben James were torpedoed in the North Atlantic.

It came as a complete surprise, therefore, that the United States ended up eyeball deep in the war not because of any action by the Germans in the Atlantic but because the U.S. government had imposed severe, crippling economic sanctions on the Japanese Empire in an effort to curb Japanese aggression. The Japanese had taken control of Manchuria, Korea, Formosa and the Ryukyu and the Pescadores islands from China. Recognized since World War I as the world's third-ranking naval power, Japan felt it had outgrown its island kingdom and was bent on expansion. Japan continued to attack and conquer its neighbors throughout the 1930s, including a 1937 attack on Mainland China. After war broke out in Europe, a modernizing Japan sought to expand its influence, not only in Asia, but also throughout the entire Western Pacific. This doctrine resulted in escalating diplomatic tension with Washington.

After a Japanese attack on French Indochina (present-day Vietnam) in early 1940, Roosevelt took action against the Empire of the Rising Sun by imposing embargoes on scrap iron, steel and aviation fuel, followed by a freeze of Japanese assets in the United States. A further ban on all oil shipments was imposed by the British and Dutch.

On September 6, 1941, deep inside Tokyo's Imperial Palace, a fateful meeting was held. Present was Emperor Hirohito, the Son of Heaven, the 124th in an unbroken line of earthly deities reigning over the Japanese people for more 2,600 years. While Hirohito reigned, however, he did not rule. That task belonged to the members of the Supreme Command and the Japanese cabinet. They discussed the desperate situation facing their nation. One by one, the foreign minister, the national planning board director and the navy chief of staff denounced the United States, Britain and the Netherlands as they described the economic sanctions that were strangling Japan. The Navy alone was consuming 400 tons of oil every hour. Unless the embargo was lifted, Japanese fuel reserves wouldn't last the year. It was decided that if Japan's diplomats could not negotiate away the sanctions by November, Japanese military forces would attack the territories of their enemies--including the American base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, the British island fortress of Singapore and the Netherlands' East Indies. In the end, the diplomats failed, and the sanctions stayed in place.

Just before 8 AM on Sunday, December 7, 1941, the first wave of more than 200 planes, launched from Japanese carriers, attacked Pearl Harbor's Battleship Row. A second attack force of 170 planes swooped in an hour later. In less than 70 minutes, all the massive battleships of the U.S. Pacific Fleet were out of commission. Sunk and lost permanently were the Arizona, Oklahoma and Utah. Nearly 200 U.S. planes were destroyed, half of which never had time to get airborne. A total of 2,403 American soldiers and sailors were killed and another 1,178 injured. In stark contrast, the Japanese attackers--under the battle cry "Tora, Tora, Tora"--lost only 29 planes and fewer than 100 men.

Although every diplomatic development since October had pointed toward the likelihood of an attack on U.S. interests in the Pacific, the United States was caught totally off guard by the all-out Japanese aggression in Hawaii. American forces literally were caught sleeping despite reports as late as that very morning of ship and aircraft movements near the island of Oahu and the sinking of a Japanese "midget sub" at Pearl Harbor's entrance.

From Boston to San Diego, from Minneapolis to Miami, American outrage erupted over the Japanese attack. The venerable philosophy of isolationism died in the flames of the Arizona as she sank to the floor of Pearl Harbor. The following day--although 15 per cent of Americans opposed the action, according to the Roper Poll--America declared war on Japan. A few days later, Germany and Italy declared war on the United States.

The War to End All Wars had a sequel.