Don't Know Much About History, Anniversary Edition: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't Know Much About®) (62 page)

June 22
(Home front) President Roosevelt signs the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act that will provide funds for housing and education after the war. It is better known as the GI Bill.

June 27
(Europe) The French port of Cherbourg is captured by the Allies, although it has been badly sabotaged and booby-trapped by the departing Germans.

July 9–25
(Europe) After the British take Caen, and St.-Lô falls, Patton’s tank troops of the Third Army break through a German line, isolating German troops in Brittany.

July 20
(Europe) With defeat becoming more certain, a group of German officers plot to kill Hitler and take control of the government. The coup fails when Hitler escapes injury from a bomb planted in a suitcase at his headquarters. The leaders of the plot are discovered and executed, and thousands of possible conspirators are killed.

August 10
(Pacific) Guam falls to U.S. forces after three weeks of intense fighting. The Japanese losses are put at 17,000; some 1,200 Americans die and another 6,000 are wounded. The completed conquest of the Marianas will give the United States an airbase from which to begin a large-scale bombardment of Japan. Napalm is used for the first time in these bombings, and the island of Tinian is the base from which the
Enola Gay
will make its fateful flight a year later.

August 14
(Home front) With war production requirements easing, production of vacuum cleaners and other domestic products is allowed to resume.

August 15
(Europe) A second invasion front is opened in southern France as Allied troops sweep up the Rhone River valley, meeting little resistance.

August 25
(Europe) French troops led by General LeClerc retake Paris. On the following day, General de Gaulle, leader of the Free French, enters Paris in a ceremonial parade. On August 27, Eisenhower and other Allied leaders enter Paris. Relatively untouched by the war, Paris has flourished under German occupation, and the great fashion houses have prospered. Frenchwomen who are suspected of having slept with Germans are led into the streets to have their heads shaved.

September 12
(Europe) The second wave of von Braun’s missiles, the V-2s, which are the first modern rockets, are launched across the Channel. Five hundred hit London. These are more accurate, but they are too few, too late to make any impact on the war’s outcome.

October 20
(Pacific) General Douglas MacArthur, in the now-famous photograph, wades ashore at Leyte Island, the Philippines, fulfilling his promise to return. Three days later, the Battle of Leyte Gulf results in a major Japanese naval defeat. The Japanese now begin to resort to the infamous kamikaze suicide attacks, in which Japanese pilots attempt to crash their explosive-laden planes into American ships. Kamikaze attacks will result in the loss of some 400 ships and nearly 10,000 American seamen.

November 7
(Home front) President Roosevelt wins his unprecedented and unequaled fourth term by defeating New York governor Thomas Dewey.

December 16
(Europe) The Battle of the Bulge. In the last major German counteroffensive, Allied troops are pushed back in Belgium’s Ardennes Forest. (As Allied lines fall back, a “bulge” is created in the center of the line, giving the battle its familiar name.) Two weeks of intense fighting in brutal winter weather follow before the German offensive is stopped. One of the most famous moments in the long battle comes when the American 101st Airborne Division is encircled by Germans in Bastogne. When the German general demands surrender, General Anthony McAuliffe reportedly replies, “Nuts.” The 101st is relieved a few days later as Patton sends in his tanks. This last-gasp German gamble is followed by rapid defeat for Germany.

1945

February 1
(Europe) One thousand American bombers raid Berlin.

February 4–11
(Europe) The Yalta Conference. Meeting in the Crimea, Churchill, Stalin, and an ailing Roosevelt discuss plans for the final assault on Germany, and agree to create a peace organization that will meet in San Francisco on April 25 and will become the United Nations. More significantly, the meeting also produces the groundwork for the postwar division of Europe among the Allies.

February
(Pacific) A monthlong siege in the Philippines ends with U.S. troops retaking Manila.

February 13
Dresden, the capital of the German state of Saxony, is firebombed by 1,400 Allied planes as part of an all-out air assault on Germany. With no strategic value and undefended, Dresden was also near a POW camp holding more than 25,000 Allied prisoners. Some 650,000 incendiary bombs were dropped on Dresden, killing more than 100,000 Germans.

March 7
(Europe) American forces cross the Rhine River at Remagen, and by the end of the month, all German forces have been pushed back into Germany.

March 9
As U.S. planes begin to bombard Japan more heavily, Tokyo is attacked by a massive firebombing. Two thousand tons of gasoline-gel and oil-gel incendiary bombs are dropped on the city, beginning a firestorm, fanned by winds, that the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey called a “conflagration.” The water in Tokyo’s shallow canals actually boiled. The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey estimates that “probably more persons lost their lives by fire in Tokyo in a six-hour period than at any time in the history of man.” More than 100,000 men, women, and children die in Tokyo on this night, and another million are injured; a million lose their homes. In the next few days, the cities of Nagoya, Osaka, and Kobe are also firebombed until the U.S. Air Force literally runs out of bombs. In ten days, the firebombings kill at least 150,000 people and burn out the centers of Japan’s four largest cities.

March 16
(Pacific) Iwo Jima. A monthlong struggle for this rocky, eight-square-mile piece of volcanic island comes to an end. Possessing Japan’s last line of radar defense to warn against American air attacks, Iwo Jima is a strategically significant prelude to the invasion of Okinawa. The combined naval and ground attack begins one of the most terrible and hard-fought battles of the war.

The U.S. military considers the use of poison gas shells before sending in troops but decides against it, probably because of the outcry against poison gas in World War I. The famous image of the six marines—three of whom will die on Iwo Jima—raising the flag atop Mount Suribachi becomes an American icon of the day. Losses on both sides are horrifying, with the U.S. Marines suffering 6,821 killed and more than 21,000 wounded; the 50 percent casualty rate was the highest in Marine Corps history. More than 20,000 Japanese defenders died while only 1,083 were taken prisoner.

April 1
(Pacific) In the next stepping-stone, U.S. troops invade Okinawa on Easter Sunday, or, as the soldiers note ironically, April Fool’s Day. The Japanese allow the troops to land, and then systematically attempt to destroy their naval support, beginning a fight that will last almost three months, the bloodiest battle of the Pacific, which will eventually cost 80,000 American casualties.

April 11
U.S. troops reach the Elbe River. They halt there and meet advancing Russian troops on April 25.

April 12
(Home front) After suffering a massive cerebral hemorrhage, President Roosevelt dies at his retreat in Warm Springs, Georgia. Vice President Harry S Truman (1884–1972) is sworn in as president.

April 14
President Truman, aware of the existence of the Manhattan Project but not its purpose, is told about the atomic bomb. Truman is initially reluctant to use the weapon, and orders a search for alternatives. He is also confronted with the idea that the secret of the bomb should be shared with America’s allies, including Stalin’s Russia. Development continues, and a search for potential Japanese targets of an atomic bomb is proposed.

April 30
With Russian shells falling on Berlin, Hitler marries his mistress, Eva Braun, in his bombproof Berlin bunker. He then poisons her and kills himself. His remains are never recovered.

May 7
(Europe) The Germans formally surrender to General Eisenhower at Rheims, France, and to the Soviets in Berlin. President Truman pronounces the following day V-E Day.

June 5
(Europe) The United States, Russia, England, and France agree to split occupied Germany into eastern and western halves, and to divide Berlin, which is within the eastern, Russian-occupied half of Germany.

June 21
(Pacific) Okinawa falls. The Japanese have lost 160,000 men in fighting on the island; more than 12,500 Americans die on Okinawa.

July 5
(Pacific) General MacArthur completes the recapture of the Philippines; 12,000 Americans have died in the ten-month fight for the islands. With the reconquest of the Philippines and the securing of Okinawa as a base, the United States begins to plan for an invasion of Japan.

July 16
(Home front) The first atomic bomb is successfully detonated in a secret test at Alamogordo, New Mexico, the fruits of the top-secret Manhattan Project begun in 1942 by President Roosevelt and continued under Truman.

August 6
(Pacific) Hiroshima. The U.S. B-29 Superfortress
Enola Gay
drops the atomic bomb on this industrial city. The destructive capacity of this now-primitive weapon levels the city, killing some 80,000 immediately, seriously injuring another 100,000 (out of a total population of 344,000), and leveling 98 percent of the city’s buildings. The bomb’s force astounds even its makers, who have not truly understood its destructive potential or the effects of radiation. Three days later, on August 9, a second bomb is dropped on Japan, this one on the city of Nagasaki, and Stalin declares war on Japan, launching an invasion of Manchuria.

August 14
(Pacific) Fighting ends in the Far East. Three days later the Allies divide Korea along the 38th parallel, with Soviet troops occupying the northern half and U.S. troops holding the south.

September 2
(Pacific) General MacArthur, named Supreme Commander of Allied Powers in Japan, accepts the formal, unconditional surrender of Japan aboard the USS
Missouri
in Tokyo Bay. In December, MacArthur is appointed by Truman to attempt to negotiate a settlement between the Nationalist Chinese under Chiang Kai-shek and the Communists under Mao Zedong.

What was the cost of World War II?

While there is no “official” casualty count for the Second World War, it was clearly the greatest and deadliest war in history, costing more than 50 million lives. The estimates of battle losses are numbing: 7.5 million Russians; 3.5 million Germans; 1.2 million Japanese; 2.2 million Chinese. Great Britain and France each lost hundreds of thousands of men. The civilian toll was even higher. Probably 22 million Russians died during the war years. The German “final solution,” or extermination of the Jews, took the lives of at least 6 million Jews, most of these dying in the concentration camps. Millions more Slavs, Eastern Europeans, Gypsies, and homosexuals were similarly engulfed by the Holocaust. For the United States, combat casualties were close to 300,000 dead and nearly 700,000 wounded.

The wartime cooperation between the Soviets and the West, the creation of the United Nations, and the frightful power of the atomic bomb raised hopes that this truly would be the war to end all wars. But just three months into the new year, former prime minister Winston Churchill, turned out of office in the 1945 elections, addressed a college audience at Fulton, Missouri. He told the gathering and the world, “An Iron Curtain has descended across the continent, allowing ‘police governments’ to rule Eastern Europe.”

One war was over. The next—the Cold War—was under way.

What was the Yalta Conference?

In February 1945, the war in Europe was moving toward its final days. Soviet armies were already in Hungary and Poland and approaching Berlin. On the western front, Allied forces pushed back Hitler’s personally planned counteroffensive in the Ardennes Forest in the brutal Battle of the Bulge. American and Soviet troops were moving toward their meeting on the Elbe River. But the Pacific war was still going strong. Japan was far from defeated, although plainly in retreat.

Against this background the Allied Big Three—Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin (1879–1953), the men who conducted the war against Germany—met together in Yalta, in a former czarist palace on the Black Sea. This was to be a “mopping-up” meeting. The major wartime decisions had been made earlier at meetings between Roosevelt and Churchill at Casablanca, and at a summit of the Big Three in Teheran.