POPULAR MYTHS AND MISCONCEPTIONS

Mysteries and conspiracies tend to be more alluring than cold facts and hard truth. Such is the case with the Second World War, a veritable factory of compelling fiction. Rumors had squadrons of Japanese bombers over California, German armies marching through Moscow, and Hitler dying several times before his actual suicide. Often the sources of mythology were government propaganda machines. For years Washington contended that only the Arizona had been sunk at Pearl Harbor while Tokyo proclaimed that virtually the whole U.S. fleet had been destroyed.²⁵

Over time, information becomes available, evidence emerges, governments declassify documents, and sometimes accuracy topples illusion. But like slag from a cauldron, falsehoods continue to rise from history and reside within the general psyche as assumed truths. Assembled here in chronological order of their origination are the most enduring myths and misconceptions of the war still widely held in the West.

1. HITLER WAS INTO THE OCCULT

Mysterious, fanatical, and laden with symbolism, the Third Reich appeared to many as an ideological cult led by its author, Adolf Hitler. Yet Hitler was personally indifferent to religion. Although Catholic all his life, he felt annoyed by Germany’s attachment to Christianity and its messages of love and forgiveness. He once lamented, “Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?” But the occult never interested him.²⁶

A few individuals within the Nazi hierarchy attempted to replace Christianity with something more “Germanic.” None were more active in this pursuit than SS chief Heinrich Himmler. As leader of Hitler's elite bodyguard, which grew to be a political and military entity unto itself, Himmler tried to plant the seed of a state religion, a mixture of monotheism and paganism. He sponsored archaeological digs, started a porcelain factory that produced pre-Christian idolatry, and formed academic societies to research the roots of Nordic culture. In private ceremonies Himmler tried to introduce Germanic baptisms and marriages, with candles, chalices, and vows loosely based on folk history.²⁷

Except for the most indoctrinated of the SS guard, the “Death’s Head” extermination units, the experiment found no root or respect. Most Germans, including the majority of the SS, remained with their church. Few were more critical of Himmler's projects than Hitler.

“What nonsense,” fumed der Führer. “Here we have at last reached an age that has left all mysticism behind it, and now he [Himmler] wants to start that all over again.” On excavations, Hitler added, “Isn’t it enough that the Romans were erecting great buildings when our forefathers were still living in mud huts; now Himmler is starting to dig up all these villages of mud huts and enthusing over every potsherd and stone axe he finds.”²⁸

Of the world's religions, one that Hitler admired but knew very little about was Islam, which he viewed as “faith by the sword.”

2. ROOSEVELT KNEW IN ADVANCE ABOUT PEARL HARBOR

The assumption pervades that a pro-war President Franklin D. Roosevelt knew of an impending Japanese attack on the Pacific Fleet in Honolulu and allowed it to happen, thus provoking isolationist America into war. Assuming FDR and others were somehow willing to sacrifice thousands of American lives, the bulk of the navy, and national peace in exchange for a two-front war, the charge of conspiracy falters under its central argument: that the president learned of the imminent raid by way of decoded Japanese messages.

True, the United States had been intercepting Japanese diplomatic and military exchanges since September 1940. But intelligence successfully deciphered less than 10 percent of all Imperial code traffic, due primarily to a limited peacetime staff of cryptographers and linguists. Also true, the U.S. Departments of State and War strictly curtailed access to the decoded information. Far from a plot to keep American troops and the public in the dark, the intense secrecy was instead a shrewd and ultimately successful effort to prevent the Japanese from discovering their code had been broken.

Regardless, the Japanese attack fleet had just started using a new code variation called J-25b, which U.S. intelligence had yet to crack. Unable to track specifics, Roosevelt and the War Department sensed enough on November 27 to issue a clear warning to posts in the Pacific theater²⁹: “Japanese future action unpredictable but hostile action possible at any moment. If hostilities cannot, repeat cannot, be avoided the United States desires that Japan commit the first overt act. This policy should not, repeat not, be construed as restricting you to a course of action that might jeopardize your defense.”³⁰ U.S. intelligence correctly predicted the attacks on Guam and the Philippines but did not expect simultaneous assaults on Pearl Harbor, Wake Island, Midway, Hong Kong, Malaya, and the Chinese coast.

From December 1941 to February 1946, the U.S. government and military conducted eight extensive and highly publicized investigations as to why the attacks caused such surprise and devastation. Most inquiries appeared more interested in leveling blame than improving an obviously deficient intelligence process. Contrary to the hopes of anti-Roosevelt Republicans and staunch isolationists, several of whom were on the probe committees, no evidence of a Roosevelt conspiracy ever emerged.

In short, it can be said that the U.S. executive and military were ultimately guilty of the same offense at Pearl Harbor as Neville Chamberlain was at Munich, Adolf Hitler at Stalingrad, and Tojo Hideki at MIDWAY—they dangerously underestimated their adversary. As one Atlanta columnist curtly observed, “The Japs caught us unprepared because we were unprepared.”³¹

In the summer of 1941, Japanese prime minister Prince Konoye offered to meet Roosevelt and discuss ways to ease tensions between the two countries. For a summit location Konoye suggested the Oahu city of Honolulu, home of Pearl Harbor. The meeting never took place.

3. FRENCH SOLDIERS READILY SURRENDERED IN 1940

The butt of innumerable jokes in Europe and the United States, the French military fought with much greater ferocity against the Germans in May and June 1940 than was ever recognized. France was not conquered by cowardice but by convoluted chains of command, outdated military faith in static defenses, a vastly better organized enemy, and an exceedingly defeatist government.

In spite of their detriments, French forces continued to battle the invaders. To the north, the Fourth Armored Division under Col. Charles de Gaulle blunted the spearhead of the German attack, while French and Belgian infantry divisions fought to buy time for a British evacuation in the “Miracle of Dunkirk.” To the south, soldiers successfully repulsed an Italian invasion of the French Alps despite being outgunned and outmanned seven to one. To the east, the much derided Maginot Line never fell. Overall, French opposition to the Germans increased as the invasion progressed, exemplified by valiant though tactically unwise last stands along the Somme and Aisne rivers to the northeast of Paris.³²

The City of Lights fell nonetheless on June 14, and France officially surrendered on June 22. Comparatively speaking, the “cowardly French” fared better than their neighbors by holding out for forty-two days. Belgium fell in eighteen days, Holland five, and Denmark one.

Of France's 200,000 military deaths in the Second World War, nearly half of them occurred in the six weeks of the German invasion of 1940.

4. BLITZKRIEGS SUCCEEDED BECAUSE OF OVERWHELMING NUMBERS

Ironically, it was Germany's lack of numerical superiority that compelled its high command to employ “lightning war” tactics. Any alternative meant a war of attrition, which Hitler and company well knew they had neither the resources nor reserves to endure.

Poland in 1939 had one of the largest armies on the Continent, and for that matter the world, with about 1.3 million effectives. Germany attacked with a similar number. In 1940 France equaled Nazi Germany in troops, tanks, and planes. With the British Expeditionary Force of ten divisions, the French possessed clear majorities in every category except antiaircraft guns.³³

But by using velocity over volume, German air and ground forces were able to slice through and get behind their opponents, essentially stunning them into submission. Heavy tanks did the cutting, planes and artillery severed lifelines, and light tanks and infantry mopped up.

Hitler believed the system would also succeed against Russia, where once again the balance sheet showed relatively equal sides. The invasion did in fact reap immediate rewards. In three months the Soviet Union lost more than half its armed forces, all but seven hundred of its fifteen thousand tanks, and two thousand of three thousand combat aircraft. So rapid was the German advance, many (including the U.S. and British chiefs of staff and the U.S. secretary of war) believed that the Soviet Union would collapse in a matter of weeks. Of course, the Soviet Union did not fall, primarily because the German blitzkrieg accomplished everything but its most important objective. It never got behind the enemy.

The word blitzkrieg is probably not of German origin. Some Western journalists claimed to have coined the term, but its exact time and place of invention has never been conclusively determined.³⁴

5. HITLER'S JET FIGHTERS COULD HAVE CONTROLLED THE SKIES

Much has been made of Hitler's “mistake” in changing the first operational jet aircraft from a fighter into a fighter-bomber, thus negating its superior speed. If allowed to attack a bomber instead of trying to be one, so the logic goes, the abundantly fast Messerschmitt 262 would have always won.

Actually, the first Me-262s were pure fighters, as were most of the fourteen hundred made. But their performance against Allied bombers was not outstanding. In a straight line, the jets were magnificent. Dogfights and bomber interceptions were another matter. Me-262s accelerated slowly, turned poorly, and had difficulty pulling out of dives. The aircraft were also prone to catastrophic failure, especially engine fires. Overall, the German wonder birds had a kill-to-loss ratio of about one to one.³⁵

Along with other major roadblocks—Allied bombing of jet factories, scarcity of nickel and chromium for engine construction, lack of qualified technicians—nothing slowed deployment more than the Me-262s themselves. The highly sophisticated planes were difficult to build and maintain. Their touchy handling in flight required the skills of experienced pilots, of which Germany had precious few in the later stages of the war. Their gas-guzzling engines provided brief flying time, fifty minutes at best, barely adequate for search-and-destroy missions. In the end, Germany's fighter jets were more of a marvel than a menace, accounting for less than 5 percent of the Luftwaffe’s operational fighter force and less than 1 percent of confirmed kills.³⁶

Due to a lack of fuel, pilots, parts, and reliability, only 220 Me-262s (about 17 percent of those manufactured) ever saw action.

6. ROCKETS COULD HAVE WON THE WAR FOR GERMANY

At first, Hitler was extremely skeptical of a proposed long-range rocket, but when he saw film footage of V-2 test launches, he became rapturous. “This is the decisive weapon of the war,” he told Albert Speer, “and what is more, it can be produced with relatively small resources.”³⁷

Der Führer was wrong on both counts. A single rocket cost more to produce than fifteen fighter planes. Also, its one-ton warhead was meager. Four rockets equaled the bomb load of one B-17. Of the four thousand V-2s launched against Belgium, England, and France, their combined explosive power was less than a single Allied air raid. In addition, guidance systems and electronics were a consistent problem, sending hundreds of missiles into the sea. Midair explosions were also commonplace. In the end, more slave laborers (at least 10,000) died constructing the V-2 and its facilities than British citizens perished from some one thousand strikes (2,724).³⁸

Though just as horrifying as V-2s to intended targets, V-1 buzz bombs were as unreliable. More than a third failed in flight. They were also slow, noisy, and low-flying, consequently making them easy targets for fighters and antiaircraft guns. Some RAF pilots managed to fly next to the flying bombs, tip their wings, and send them back to their place of origin. The V-1 killed nearly three times as many people as the V-2 but still accounted for approximately 0.5 percent of all air-raid fatalities in the war.³⁹

Though relatively ineffective, the V-2 served as the principle design for two future rockets: the U.S. Atlas and the Soviet Scud. The latter possessed virtually the same range and payload as the V-2 but was about three times more accurate.

7. ONLY JEWS PERISHED IN NAZI CONCENTRATION CAMPS

The Third Reich murdered an estimated eleven million men, women, and children, consisting of at least six million Jews and five million non-Jews. Nazis applied the same methods of extermination to both groups: shootings, torture, privation, medical experimentation, and gassing, much of which occurred in a network of concentration camps.⁴⁰

The first camps opened in 1933 and were primarily for detaining and “reeducating” political and cultural prisoners—Communists, intellectuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, Freemasons. First to die in large numbers, however, were the mentally and physically handicapped in 1939. More than seventy thousand were killed, mostly through carbon-monoxide poisoning. Not until the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 did widespread extermination of all targeted groups begin.

Slated for total annihilation were Jews and Gypsies. The former referred to this systematic genocide as Shoah (the Holocaust); the latter called it Porrajmos (the Great Devouring). Killed outright or subjected to slave labor were Slavs (Czechs, Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, etc.). Czechs and Ukrainians were considered potential candidates for hard labor, but the Poles, in the words of SS chief Heinrich Himmler, were to “disappear from the world.” In addition, the Nazis intensified persecution of political and social detainees. The Third Reich lasted for twelve years, but most of its Jewish and non-Jewish victims died between 1942 and 1944.⁴¹

Decades after the war, these murdered millions received little public consideration. Traumatized survivors, silent perpetrators, and incomplete information left much of the concentration camp system sheltered from heavy academic scrutiny. But the early 1970s witnessed a massive upsurge of Holocaust studies, concentrated almost exclusively on the Jewish experience. The ground swell of films, poems, songs, documentaries, and novels led some to call the phenomenon “the Shoah business.” While illuminating the loss of six million lives, such works largely overshadowed the fate of millions more who were not Jewish and only recently have received scholastic attention.⁴²

The first to die in the gas chambers of Auschwitz were Polish and Russian POWs.

8. JAPAN WAS READY TO SURRENDER BEFORE HIROSHIMA

When the “Big Three” gathered in mid-July 1945 in the aristocratic Berlin suburb of Potsdam, Stalin informed Truman and Churchill that Japan had offered, by way of its ambassador in Moscow, to stop the war. But this initiative was far from the unconditional surrender demanded by the Allies.

The cabinet of Prime Minister Suzuki Kantaro agreed to a cease-fire but not capitulation. Japan volunteered disarmament, yet insisted it would disarm itself. There was to be no foreign occupation, and all war criminals would be defined, tried, and prosecuted by the Japanese. In addition, the government would remain in place, as would the existing boundaries of the empire, including Formosa, Korea, and Manchuria, which encompassed three times the land and twice the population of Japan proper.⁴³

On both sides, there was little military indication that an end was soon coming. The United States was already shuttling divisions from Europe and North America to the Pacific. In all, two million troops were assigned to take part in the eventual invasion of Japan's main islands, scheduled to begin in November 1945 at the southern island of Kyushu and in early 1946 onto the main island of Honshu. Japan also persisted militarily, retaining large portions of eastern China, sending kamikaze flights from Kyushu into approaching U.S. ships and arming soldiers and civilians alike with anything available for the impeding invasion. The main islands possessed at least two million regular troops.

In addition, fighting intensified the closer the U.S. forces came to Japan. Retaking Manila cost 11,000 American and Japanese dead. Iwo Jima resulted in 25,000 total dead. Okinawa, the last major island south of Japan, cost at least 112,000 American and Japanese deaths, plus another 80,000 native Okinawans.⁴⁴

With this in mind, Truman decided without much consultation to use atomic devices. He ordered the two available bombs dropped just days apart to give the impression the United States had a cache of such weapons (and believed, as did Gen. George C. Marshall and Henry Stimson, that more than two would be needed to defeat Japan). The tactic worked. Immediately after Hiroshima, Tokyo's high command debated whether the event was indeed atomic. Some argued the United States had only the one bomb. But reports came in of an additional explosion at Nagasaki, and the hawks faltered. Minister of War Anami Korechika, previously committed to a fight to the end, feared the Americans had “one hundred atomic bombs.”⁴⁵

In an unprecedented move, Hirohito ordered his subjects to accept immediate surrender. Even this stunning interdiction failed to persuade everyone. Army officers and Imperial guards launched a coup d’état on the night of August 14. Raiding the palace, soldiers attempted to find and destroy a recording of the emperor’s surrender speech, set to be broadcast nationally the following day. Failing in their mission, several of the conspirators committed suicide in the palace.⁴⁶

Some believed War Minister Anami Korechika, the second most powerful man in Japan, was behind the coup against the emperor. Anami did nothing to dispel this theory when, just hours after the coup failed, he slashed open his stomach and throat and slowly died.

9. USE OF THE ATOMIC BOMB WAS RACIALLY MOTIVATED

Racism was a prevalent reality in midcentury America. With the exception of the merchant marine, the armed forces were segregated. The U.S. government placed 110,000 Japanese Americans, most of whom were full and legal U.S. citizens, in internment camps for more than two years. Truman himself was not averse to using the word Jap in private discourse.

For American servicemen, the war in the Pacific contained definite racial hatred surpassing anything expressed in Europe. The Rape of Nanking, the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, and the grotesque abuses of prisoners of war led many U.S. soldiers, sailors, and marines to view the Japanese as beastlike.

But for all the official and unofficial discriminatory practices in the United States, the atomic bomb was created and intended for use against Germany. When it looked as if the Third Reich would collapse before the devices were ready, Japan became the target by default. Germany returned to primary status during the 1944 ARDENNES OFFENSIVE, only to be removed from consideration after the fall of BERLIN.⁴⁷

In the end, Roosevelt’s successor decided to use the devices on Japan, not based on a racial premise, but in the firm belief that atomic weapons would end the war sooner than any other option available.

In his August 9, 1945, radio announcement of the destruction of Hiroshima, Truman explained the bomb was a successful “race of discovery against the Germans.”⁴⁸

10. TRUMAN “GAVE UP” EASTERN EUROPE

In the West a postwar sentiment quickly emerged: Truman was too soft on Stalin and thereby allowed communist systems to take root in Eastern Europe. In comparison, Churchill recommended that the Allies occupy Prague by force, and Gen. George S. Patton stated to U.S. Undersecretary of War Robert Patterson, “If you wanted Moscow, I could give it to you.”⁴⁹

Yet nearly a year before Winston Churchill’s 1946 “Iron Curtain” speech in Fulton, Missouri, Truman all but threatened Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov with retaliation if Poland were not allowed its freedom. At Potsdam, Truman repeatedly argued for guarantees of Polish, Bulgarian, Greek, and Romanian independence, to which Stalin said that any government not fascist was a democracy.⁵⁰

Unfortunately for the American president, the war itself limited his options. For all intents and purposes, Eastern Europe was not Truman’s to give. The eventual demarcation between democratic and communist Europe closely resembled the positions of the victorious armies on V-E Day, making the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe a harsh fait accompli.⁵¹

To be sure, Stalin did break his agreement at Yalta to allow free and unfettered elections in postwar Europe, condemning nearly half the continent to communist dictatorship. In the larger view, Truman fared considerably well, to the point where many in the Soviet Union believed Stalin had failed immensely against the Americans. Conquered by the Red Army, Berlin remained mostly in the hands of the West. The French, playing a marginal role defeating the Third Reich, were allowed to occupy a large portion of western Germany. Soviet-occupied Vienna and east Austria soon fell completely within the Western sphere of influence, as did heavily communist Greece. On the world stage, vehemently anti-communist nations held four of the five Security Council seats in the newborn United Nations, and most significantly, Britain and the United States shared atomic secrets with each other but not with the Soviet Union.

Potsdam was Harry Truman’s first and last international conference of his presidential career.