In terms of weapons, the war appeared both astounding and ridiculous. Combatants moved by jet and mule, battled from hundreds of feet beneath the waves to thirty thousand feet above the ground, and killed with atomic radiation and sharpened sticks. The volume of ordnance was, in a word, unreal. For each citizen of the Axis, the United States had three artillery shells. There were enough bullets made worldwide to shoot every living person on the planet forty times.8
One consistency: it was a war in motion. Where its predecessor involved armies trying not to budge, the Second World War involved forces trying to move the fastest. The primary cause of this revolutionary change in the nature of warfare was the perfection of the internal combustion engine. When asked his opinion on the most effective weapons of the war, Gen. DWIGHT EISENHOWER cited the Jeep, the C-47 transport aircraft, the bazooka, and the atomic bomb. Fittingly, two of his responses were motorized, and the bomb required a four-engine plane for delivery.9
Excluding rockets (see Firsts), below is a roster of the prominent weapon types listed by amount procured. Note that the majority were essentially delivery systems exhibiting the changing nature of war, in which mobility equaled power.
1. MINES (600 MILLION)
With speed a decisive factor in fighting, mines were a cheap and easy way to slow down opponents. Categorized as naval, antitank, and antipersonnel, mines appeared in all theaters, destroying bodies and equipment alike.
Most complex and explosive were naval mines, numbering five hundred thousand total. Detonation occurred by contact, magnetic impulse, or sound waves. Planted by ships, submarines, and aircraft, mines were only practical in high-traffic shallow waters such as harbors and bays. To combat them, minesweepers cut cables, noise-making devices burst acoustic mines, and electric currents counterattacked magnetic detonators. Although these mines accounted for a tiny fraction of all ship losses, they were the most effective way to close ports and sea lanes for days at a time.
Land mines were most prominent in the Soviet Union and North Africa, where large areas were void of natural defenses. Some were rudimentary booby traps of grenades or other small explosives. In many instances, artillery shells were simply buried with nose fuses flush to the surface. Mass production allowed for standardized versions to be made in phenomenal quantities. The Soviets claimed to have planted more than two hundred million in their soil. The king of Egypt complained that the Allies left some forty million devices in his country. His estimates were probably not far off. The United States procured more than twenty-four million land mines during the war.10
Demolition engineers were usually charged with removal, in many cases while under hostile fire. Detectors were not available until 1942. Most were unreliable because many explosives’ casings were made of wood and plastic. The alternatives were to set mines off with airbursts, with tanks fitted with flailing chains, or more often than not, by getting down on hands and knees and prodding the soil with an angled knife or wire.
In Eastern Europe and North Africa, unexploded land mines from World War II were still killing scores of people and animals annually into the 1980s.
2. SMALL ARMS (300 MILLION)
World War II marked a fundamental change in the arming of combat infantry. In the nineteenth century the ideal was to have an entire regiment fitted with one type of musket or rifle. By 1940 units worked best when they had a variety of tools. It was not uncommon for a regiment to have twenty or more kinds of weapons, allowing soldiers to fight effectively in different environments and situations.
Bullets could not drop into trenches or lob over walls, but grenades could. Respected were the German “potato mashers” and American “pineapples,” but the petrol-filled bottles of “Molotov cocktails” often proved just as effective. In various forms the United States made more than eighty-seven million grenades.
The arrival of tanks required something beefier than a handgun. Most effective were grenade launchers, bazookas, and their German cousins, the Panzerfaust and Panzerschrek. Such devices could save a squad from annihilation, but there were drawbacks. Firing usually gave away a soldier’s position, so the first shot had to count.11
From left to right, U.S. Marines utilize a Thompson submachine gun, a .30 caliber machine gun, and an M-1 carbine during a standoff at Cape Gloucester in the Solomons.
Submachine guns were popular among airborne and special ops groups. Light and inexpensive, they laid down a menacing rate of fire but also ate ammunition quickly. More effective, though bulkier, were machine guns. The British Bren and U.S. Browning (or BAR) were valuable in offensive and defensive actions. Among the most revered and dependable were German MG-42s. One soldier described its use against a Red Army charge: “swinging backwards and forwards along the brown-coated files, smashing the cohesion of the attack… [T]he killing was prodigious.” Indeed, machine-gun fire of all forms accounted for 10 percent of all combat deaths.12
Pistols were largely useless. Adored by souvenir hunters, the German Luger would be hard pressed to stop a charging badger.
The anchor of the infantry was still the rifle, and for nearly every army, it was an archaic bolt-action, single-shot weapon of pre-1914 design. The exception was the semiautomatic U.S. M-1 Garand, the most effective rifle of the war. More than four million were made. Reliable, accurate, just shy of ten pounds, it shot an eight-round magazine using a gas-powered piston. If soldiers had a common complaint, it was the M-1’s voice. With a full clip, the rifle spoke with an authoritative and intense “kow kow.” But on its final shot, it uttered a distinctive “clank” as it coughed out its empty clip. The sound told the owner to reload, but it also told the enemy that the rifleman was temporarily defenseless.13
A deadly small-arms innovation was the German SG-44, a fully automatic rifle. Issued too late to change the course of the war, it was the forefather of the Russian AK-47, the most heavily produced gun of all time.
3. ARTILLERY (2 MILLION)
The Russians had a saying: “The artillery is for killing, the infantry for dying.” At SECOND EL ALAMEIN, a British tank brigade lost seventy of its ninety-four tanks to field guns. At Kursk, the biggest tank battle in history, there were a total of seven thousand tanks and thirty thousand artillery pieces. British medics calculated that 70 percent of all deaths and injuries in NORMANDY came from mortars. Approximately half of all battle wounds came not from bombs or tanks but from artillery.14
Including massive coastal guns, rail guns, antitank guns, mortars, howitzers, assault guns, and recoilless cannon, artillery was the most adaptable and damaging weaponry in World War II. Most numerous and effective were the portable field pieces.
The Soviets depended heavily on their long-barreled 76mm guns. Americans and British produced dual-purpose artillery, capable of lobbing shells like a howitzer and launching straight shots like a cannon.
The most famous, or infamous, gun of the war was the German 88mm Flieger Abwehr Kanone (flak). Introduced in 1934 as an antiaircraft gun, the 88 was clearly ineffective in its intended role, requiring thousands of rounds just to score a single hit. But in the Spanish CIVIL WAR, crews aimed the barrel at ground targets and discovered it was a viciously effective tank killer. Intended to hurl projectiles twenty thousand feet into the sky, its muzzle velocity was two times faster than many ground guns, allowing its sixteen-pound shell to crack pillboxes, tanks, bunkers, and vehicles with ease. One trooper calculated that an 88 shell flew three hundred yards ahead of its sound, producing an eerie effect of a cataclysmic explosion followed by the scream of the approaching shell. A wary British soldier said of the 88, “That’s the deadliest bastard that’s come out of this war so far.”15
Of the war’s artillery, American field gun versions may have rated highest in versatility. Most models could fire more than a dozen different kinds of shells, including armor-piercing, smoke, incendiary, and poison-gas.
4. FIGHTER-BOMBERS (450,000)
Single-engine combat aircraft served as metaphors for the war as a whole. Initially, the Axis aircraft were more agile and powerful, but Allied planes caught and passed their adversaries with greater numbers and technology.
Among the hundreds of aircraft makes and versions were several standouts, including the dominant Messerschmitt 109, the most produced German aircraft and chariot of the most prolific aces of the entire war. Not until the British put a Merlin engine in the American P-51 Mustang were Me-109s summarily tamed. The Mustang was nearly a hundred mph faster and had a range five times that of the German fighter. Mustangs also enabled Allied bomber command to bomb Germany almost at will, having the unmatched ability to escort bomber formations all the way from England to Czechoslovakia and back, whereas the Messerschmitt could barely make a round trip from NORMANDY to London.16
In the Pacific, the Mitsubishi Zero, with its featherweight body and ample wings, could outsprint and outturn all of its early adversaries, especially at low altitude. But when a downed Zero was discovered intact in the Aleutians and brought to the United States for study, its innovations helped create the F6F Hellcat. Ultimately faster and more resilient than the Zero, the Hellcat accounted for more air-to-air kills in the Pacific than all other U.S. aircraft combined, although it served for only the last two years of the war.17
Altogether, fighters may have been the most adaptable weapons, performing as interceptors, dive bombers, rocket launchers, torpedo launchers, escorts, tank busters, sub hunters, radar and reconnaissance platforms, artillery spotters, and kamikazes. Yet all the adaptability in the world would not help the Axis, who lacked the pilots and planes to stay even with the Allies. For every fighter the Axis produced, the Allies manufactured five.
The top 108 fighter aces in World War II were all German or Austrian.
5. TANKS (300,000)
Except in areas of dense jungle, land combat revolved around tanks. By 1940 every country knew the importance of the relatively new weapon. The question was how to use it. Conventional thinking viewed tanks as infantry support to be deployed piecemeal among slow-moving foot soldiers. German blitzkrieg tactics dismantled this logic by massing armored vehicles together and smashing through lines.
Tanks were generally classified as light, medium, and heavy. Light tanks were little more than armored cars, useful for reconnaissance or against poorly armored foes. Most Japanese and Italian tanks were of the light variety, the latter frequently called “self-propelled coffins.” Heavies were meant to be indestructible land cruisers, but most were too heavy and came too late to change the war’s outcome, the exception being the Russian KV-1. The Third Reich’s much celebrated King Tiger was a beast. More than thirty feet long and twelve feet wide, it had frontal armor nearly one foot thick. Unfortunately for the Germans, it drank two gallons a mile and sank in soft ground.18
U.S. infantry huddles close to an M-4 Sherman medium tank during the September 1944 advance into Belgium.
The most effective tanks were the mediums, such as the M-4 Sherman. The Sherman’s strength came from reliability and huge numbers. Eleven different companies produced more than forty thousand of them. Drawbacks included thin armor and precarious ammunition storage. A German observed that a Sherman would “burn like twenty haystacks.”19
Workhorses of the German stable were the Panzer III and IV, which functioned exceptionally well until they encountered the Soviet T-34. With sloping armor, wide treads, and high-torque diesel engines, T-34s could punch holes in the panzers from almost a mile away. Most of all, more than sixty-four thousand were made, more than all German tanks combined. Of its shortcomings, it had no radio, which forced commanders to use flags or hand signals or play “follow the leader.”
More than anything else, superior numbers ensured Allied dominance. From 1939 to 1944, for every tank the Axis built, the Allies made eight.20
Sometimes it took very little to knock out a tank. When a panzer division on the eastern front came under attack, more than two-thirds of the vehicles would not start. Later inspection revealed that throngs of mice had gotten into the engine compartments, probably for warmth, and chewed through the electrical wires.
6. MEDIUM AND HEAVY BOMBERS (170,000)
Most bombers throughout the war had one or two engines, with the medium twin-engines being the mainstay of most air forces. Only the United States and Great Britain produced operational four-engine aircraft in quantity.
Japan had three medium bombers as its workhorses, all manufactured by Mitsubishi. Germany’s twin-engine Heinkel 111 was as good on paper as the U.S. B-17. Italy’s Fiat BR20M could fly nearly as far and as fast as the B-25 Mitchell. Although the Axis suffered from want of payload on their missions, failure came down to lack of protection. The Axis simply did not have the fighter escort capability of the Allies and suffered accordingly. As an example, the B-17G bristled with thirteen machine guns (hence the name “Flying Fortress”), but it still underwent terrible losses when traveling beyond fighter protection.
There were alternatives. Britain’s twin-engine De Havilland “Mosquito,” of which more than seven thousand were made, consisted of a wood frame and no defensive weapons, yet it had one of the lowest fatality rates of the RAF. Flying at around four hundred mph, Mosquitoes simply outran the competition. The famed B-29 Superfortress, a technological marvel of pressurized cabins and a range of four thousand miles, flew too high for interceptors or antiaircraft fire to reach.
On reputation, the B-17 and B-29 get accolades, but the B-24 Liberator was the most utilized and produced bomber of the war. Ugly as sin, with a fat fuselage, pug nose, and a tail fin that looked like earmuffs on a harmonica, the B-24 worked in all theaters and carried a greater load and flew farther than the B-17. It was also vastly more adaptable than the B-29. More than eighteen thousand were made, outnumbering B-17s and B-29s put together.21
Ugly but effective, more B-24 Liberators were manufactured than any other warplane in U.S. military history.
During the war, the versatile B-24 saw service with the U.S. Army Air Force, Navy, and Marines, plus the air forces of Australia, Brazil, Canada, Nationalist China, France, Great Britain, India, liberated Italy, New Zealand, Portugal, South Africa, the Soviet Union, and Turkey.
7. SUBMARINES (2,100)
At the start of the war, no fewer than ten navies possessed submarines. In fact, the largest underwater fleets belonged to the Soviet Union, Italy, and France.
Types were of the extreme. Smallest were “midgets,” with crews of one to five. Both the attack on Pearl Harbor and the D-day landings began with midget-sub reconnaissance. Largest was the I-400 class developed by Japan. Longer than a football field, the I-400s were intended to attack the United States and the Panama Canal but never became fully operational. The prize for endurance went to Germany’s Type IXD Ucruiser, capable of sailing around the world, whereas Japan’s manned suicide torpedo was designed for much shorter trips. For maximum flexibility, several countries had models that carried floatplanes or collapsible aircraft.
Crews commonly engaged in nonconfrontational pursuits. The low-profile vehicles were ideal for guerrilla and secret operations support, smuggling agents and ammunition as well as money and medicine. Subs also performed a large number of rescue operations. In September 1944, the USSNarwahl made an impressive haul by evacuating eighty-two Allied POWs from the Philippine island of Mindanao.22
Attack sub USS Wahoo claimed twenty kills in the Pacific before she and her entire crew were lost off the coast of Japan in October 1943.
The most common task was hunting merchant ships. The Royal Navy eventually ruled the Mediterranean, choking off supplies to the Afrika Korps. A few hundred German U-boats, operating from the Arctic to the Caribbean, sank nearly two thousand Allied transports. After replacing defective torpedoes in 1943 (initial models swam too deep), one hundred U.S. submarines accounted for more than half of all Japanese ships sunk in the Pacific, including four thousand merchant vessels. In contrast, the Japanese mainly used their small fleet to hunt enemy warships, with costly results. On average, for every enemy vessel sunk, Japan lost one submarine.23
The work was perilous. One in four Allied and three of four Axis submariners did not survive.
In September 1944 a TBM Avenger was shot down off the coast of Okinawa. The submarine USS Finback sailed to the site and managed to save the sole survivor of the three-man crew, U.S. Navy pilot Lt. George Herbert Walker Bush.
8. DESTROYERS AND CRUISERS (1,700)
A basic measurement of a warship was its main guns. Destroyers had gun barrels of three to six inches in diameter, cruisers five to eight, battleships fourteen to eighteen. During the war, only seven navies possessed battleships, whereas eighteen owned destroyers and cruisers.
Destroyers proved to be the most adaptable of naval vessels. Used mainly to escort merchant and warship convoys, destroyers were simultaneously torpedo boats, sub hunters, rescue ships, scouts, and antiaircraft screens. They also functioned as minesweepers, coastal patrol boats, radar platforms, and support batteries for amphibious landings. The Japanese, with the third-largest contingent of destroyers, used them aggressively in surface battles and paid dearly. The Imperial Navy lost more than three hundred during the war, more than all other Japanese warship losses put together. Britain owned the second-largest fleet, using the vessels predominantly in escort duties and losing almost half as many as the Japanese, mostly to U-boats. The U.S. Navy had the largest collection of destroyers, losing eighty-two, but dominating both the Atlantic and Pacific with superior numbers and radar-sonar capability.24
Cruisers were designed to be self-sufficient, long-distance combat ships and convoy raiders, ranging in size from very large destroyers with crews of six hundred to virtual battleships with twelve hundred officers and men. As with destroyers, the United States had the largest fleet, and the Japanese suffered the highest losses. Serving in all naval theaters, cruisers figured predominantly in the Pacific, where they proved faster than battleships and more powerful than destroyers.25
The Japanese destroyer Amagiri became infamous after ramming and sinking a PT boat skippered by future U.S. president John F. Kennedy.
Days after safely delivering components of the Hiroshima bomb to Tinian Island, the cruiser USS Indianapolis was sunk by a Japanese sub. Out of 1,196 men on board, 900 were alive when the ship went under. Four days later 317 were rescued. The rest died of exposure, wounds, and shark attacks.
9. AIRCRAFT CARRIERS (180)
Only Great Britain, Japan, and the United States deployed operational carriers, ranging from “escort carriers” holding a few dozen planes to “light carriers” with thirty to forty aircraft to “fleet carriers” with sixty to ninety fighters, dive bombers, and torpedo planes.
Most were escorts tasked with shepherding convoys to safety. The United States and Britain made many (110) and Japan few (5). The Japanese Empire consequently lost nearly all its merchant shipping in a few short years.
Of the light and fleet carriers, numbers were initially small. In 1940 there were nineteen large carriers in existence. By the end of 1942 thirteen of them were at the bottom of the ocean. Britain and Japan replaced their losses slowly, launching a few flattops each year, while the industrial behemoth United States almost made it look easy, commissioning fifteen new ships in 1943 alone.26
The hull sizes of most flattops were equivalent to a cruiser. In fact, many carriers were converted from old or half-built cruisers, including the Coral Sea casualty Lexington, PEARL HARBOR and Midway veteran Akagi, and all nine ships of the Independence class.27
For the Royal Navy, objectives included patrolling the home islands, supporting convoys in the North Atlantic and Indian Oceans, and flushing the Italians from the Mediterranean. The U.S. and Japanese large carriers were essentially committed to attacking each other, either ship-to-ship or ship-to-shore. The battle of MIDWAY helped tip the scales in favor of the Americans, with the battles around LEYTE GULE dooming the Imperial Navy for good.
During the war, the U.S. Navy built nearly three times as many fleet carriers as did the Empire of Japan.
The carrier USS Franklin was a tough nut to crack. In October 1944, over a period of two weeks in the Philippines, she was hit by a kamikaze, a bomb, and another kamikaze. Sent to the United States for repairs, she returned to the Pacific in time for the Okinawa campaign only to be hit by two more bombs and set on fire. But the carrier never sank.
10. BATTLESHIPS (50)
Bismarck, Arizona, Prince of Wales, Yamato—it is sad yet symbolic that the most famous battleships were all sunk. For centuries, battlewagons were the prestige and soul of the major navies, and there was no reason to believe otherwise when the Second World War began.
At the height of their influence, the Arizonas of the world were appropriately called “capital ships,” top of the line. Brandishing the largest guns and heaviest armor of anything afloat, they were born to fight other ships for control of the seas, thus their deaths were often interpreted as a serious if not mortal blow to a nation’s naval strength.
By the time the conflict officially ended—ironically on the deck of a battleship—it was patently obvious that the grand vessels no longer ruled the waves. In a way, the aforementioned battleships demonstrated the paradigm shift. All four were sunk in part or completely by aircraft.
Just weeks before December 7, 1941, a U.S. Navy publication boasted that America had never lost a battleship to air attack.
Given few opportunities to sink enemy ships, crews adapted to new assignments, primarily battering land targets and protecting aircraft carriers. Direct attacks on other fleets were rare. During the war, U.S. battleships exchanged salvos with enemy vessels in only three engagements: Casablanca, GUADALCANAI, and LEYTE GULF. One of several naval actions at Leyte Gulf involved the battle of Surigao Straight, in which Japanese and American armadas traded fire in the early morning hours of October 25, 1944. The fight ended when the imperial battleship Yamashirosank from torpedo hits. The USS Mississippi trained its big guns on the dying vessel and fired its first and only volley of the affair. It was the last time in history a battleship ever fired on another. Confirming the end of an epoch, the shots missed.28
The four largest American battleships ever made—the Iowa, Missouri, New Jersey, and Wisconsin—never took part in a surface engagement during the entire war.