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History As It Happens
1945: How the Axis Might've Won
01:00:25
This is the third episode in a 5-part series marking the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War in August 1945. In 1942, the Japanese seemed unstoppable in the Pacific, and the Germans steamrolled toward Stalingrad. Their victories proved...
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- [00:01]
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- [00:28]
Martin DeCaro
History as it happens August 12, 2025 how the axis Might have won the.
- [00:34]
Historical Narrator
Japanese have attacked the American Naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii and our defense facilities at Manila, capital of the Philippines.
- [00:40]
Winston Churchill
December 7, 1941. A date which will live in infamy. The Far Eastern double crossers had their ships and planes on the way for the sneak punt.
- [00:55]
Historical Narrator
These are among the last pictures taken before the fall. We released them because they are a part of British Empire history for good or ill. Three Japanese battleships, possibly four cruisers, three transports and one destroyer were sunk. The loss to the Jap aircraft carriers was extremely heavy. This is the hour for which the Red army has waited. Over the frozen earth, an avenging host sweeps forward to close an iron ring around the stunned German horde.
- [01:19]
Winston Churchill
We have been described as a nation of weaklings, playboys who would hire British soldiers or Russian soldiers, or Chinese soldiers, Chinese soldiers to do our fighting for us. Let them Repeat that now.
- [01:36]
Martin DeCaro
1942 was the year the Second World War became a truly global war. And there were many frightening days as the Japanese seemed unstoppable in the Pacific and the Germans steamrolled towards Stalingrad. Their victories proved ephemeral. But in defeat they would take millions of innocent people with them in the many wars within World War II. That's next as we report history as it happens. I'm Martin DeCaro.
- [02:02]
Peter Fritchie
Unclear what would have happened had strategic mistakes not been made in the late summer of 1942. Germany was not the industrial powerhouse that would be required for a long term war. This was also a two front war. For Germany. It depended on speed all the time. Once it started to disperse its forces, which occurred about four or five months before the epic battle of Stalingrad, they had really hurt themselves.
- [02:32]
Martin DeCaro
The Second World War. The World War was a global war pitting two sides, the Allies or the United nations as they were called. Great Britain and its empire. Stalin, Soviet Union, the United States and China versus the Axis powers, Germany, Italy and Japan. This titanic war did not start all at once. Full scale war between Japan and China started in July 1937. Germany and the USSR before they became mortal enemies, invaded Poland in September 1939. The United States did not enter hostilities until December 7, 1941.
- [03:08]
Historical Narrator
Hawaii's bright Sunday becomes a Black Sunday.
- [03:11]
Winston Churchill
High overhead, Jap raiders are on the loose. Without warning, they circle Pearl harbor in.
- [03:16]
Historical Narrator
The city of Honolulu.
- [03:17]
Winston Churchill
No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people, in their righteous might, will win through to absolute victory.
- [03:33]
Martin DeCaro
As 1942 unfolded, Japanese advances were unstoppable.
- [03:39]
Historical Narrator
These are among the last pictures taken before the fall of Singapore. We released them because they are a part of British Empire history for good or ill. But it's hard to look at them without bitterness and unrest.
- [03:51]
Martin DeCaro
Malaya and Singapore, which Churchill called the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history. And then it was on to the Dutch East Indies, the Philippines, Burma, Hong Kong, Guam, Wake Island, New Britain and parts of New Guinea. Meantime, the Wehrmacht and SS unleashed hell on earth in Ukraine, in the Caucasus, ending the year in the cauldron of Stalingrad, from which the German war effort would never recover.
- [04:16]
Historical Narrator
This is the hour for which the Red army has waited. Over the frozen earth, an avenging post sweeps forward to close an iron river around the stunned German hordes.
- [04:25]
Martin DeCaro
But the crushing surrender of the 6th army was about a year away when the United States, after years of neutrality and disarmament, began to shake off a decade of economic and social paralysis by mobilizing for war. FDR's arsenal of democracy. This human drama is captured in historian Peter Fritchie's new book, 1942 When World War II Engulfed the Globe. And he is here for this third episode in my five part series marking the 80th anniversary of the end of the war. His book reminds us how uncertain, how frightening things looked as the Axis steamrolled over the globe before the US could fully mobilize. It also bridges the gap between memory and history. Our memories, American memories of a heroic victory, of an existential struggle, of good versus evil, obscure the complexities. For World War II was many wars in one. There were wars of national liberation, fought by people who'd been subjugated by the British and French empires. And the US was at war with itself, fielding a segregated army while throwing Japanese American citizens into concentration camps.
- [05:34]
Historical Narrator
First, attention was given to the problems of sabotage and espionage. Now here at San Francisco, for example, convoys were being made up within sight of possible Axis agents.
- [05:46]
Martin DeCaro
Peter Fritchie is a historian at the University of Illinois and the author of Hitler's First Hundred Days When Germans embraced the Third Reich, published in 2020 and more recently, as mentioned, 1942. When World War II engulfed the globe. It'll be available on September 23rd. I was lucky to be able to read an advance copy. Our conversation next History is defined by.
- [06:10]
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- [06:38]
Martin DeCaro
Peter Frische, welcome to the podcast.
- [06:41]
Peter Fritchie
Well, thank you very much for having me.
- [06:43]
Martin DeCaro
Your first time on the program. I really enjoyed your book of a few years ago about Hitler's first hundred days in office. And you follow that up with another splendid book about the year 1942. Was this the year the Axis nearly won the war?
- [07:00]
Peter Fritchie
In 1942? Indeed. The Axis had the initiative, and as far as the Allies were concerned, it seemed they were in very deep trouble. From the United States perspective, we had not mobilized at all. We had a small army, we had a strategic plan, but we had really few means to implement it. And both the Japanese and the Germans once more were on the roll. And it wasn't clear what kind of popular support they would find, particularly the Japanese, in Southeast Asia and in India. So the cards were in the hands of the Axis, and it was very unclear. Everyone kept looking for would the tide turn? When would that scene change? And that really wasn't clear until the very end of the year. So for a long, long time in 1942, the outcome was unclear. The initiative was with the Axis, and people at the time thought there was a fair chance that they could have won.
- [07:58]
Martin DeCaro
Something I like about your book is that you bring us back to the feeling at the time, the perspectives at the time, the urgency and the uncertainty of those early months, especially of 1942, when the Japanese seemed unstoppable. And as you say, the Germans are on the move again, this time heading towards Stalingrad, where the year would end in disaster, really early 1943. Because in retrospect, I think it's safe to say that looking back on it, as soon as Adolf Hitler and the Nazis decided to invade the Soviet Union, that was probably the beginning of the end for them. Not to say that it was inevitable, but it was close to impossible to conquer the Soviet Union. They came pretty close.
- [08:41]
Peter Fritchie
And it's unclear what would have happened had strategic mistakes not been Made in the late summer of 1942. Germany was not the industrial powerhouse that would be required for a long term war. This was also a two front war for Germany. It depended on speed all the time. Once it started to disperse its forces, which occurred about four or five months before the epic battle of Stalingrad, they had really hurt themselves. But most of all, it was Germany's racial ideology that simply prohibited any kind of meaningful broad collaboration among the people in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union. Germany could have gotten much more popular support. Many people were very dubious about Stalin and communism and all that. The beginnings of that support were just cut off from the very beginning by Germany's racial ideology. So there were a lot of strategic, industrial and political factors that worked against Germany. Nonetheless, the perception was that they might well have won. And they were had the initiative again in 1942. And there was nothing inevitable about the battle of Stalingrad.
- [09:56]
Martin DeCaro
So 1942 as you say, is the year the war really becomes a global war because of the entry of the United States. But Was World War II really many wars within one large war in 1942?
- [10:09]
Peter Fritchie
To understand all the combat, all the fronts, I think it's useful to disaggregate the war into its parts. But in the end, ultimately there are certain universal themes so that one would want to re aggregate it. It became very clear in 1942, let's just take the Japanese victory in Singapore, that this was not just a conflict over territory, over imperial might, over even who had the say in East Asia. It became also a war about political and national and ethnic freedom. It was an anti colonial war, an anti imperialist war. And one could imagine the Japanese as liberators of the 1 billion people, half the world's population that lived in East Asia. Just think of China and India. So you had an anti colonial war. You also had a war among the imperial powers. And inside each country there's also definitions of who is we. We may be oppressed, we may be under the colonial boot, but is it, let's take India, is it Hindi, is it Hindu, Muslim, combination of some sort? If you go to other countries, which ethnic population is the we? When one says self rule against colonialism, who is the subject that is going to have self rule? And what happens to national and religious minorities? And not to speak of tensions between labor and industry or rural urban populations. So there are a lot of cross cutting tensions, but the biggest one is in the Allied camp. The tension between destroying the military occupation of Germany and Japan and undermining the colonial Occupation of the British and to some extent the Americans and the French all around the world.
- [12:05]
Martin DeCaro
Yeah, the Japanese argued they were fighting for freedom too. Now that argument does not withstand scrutiny. However, they would point to the British and say, how could the British possibly argue they're fighting for freedom? Winston Churchill himself repeatedly stated he was fighting to preserve the British Empire. And many Indians fought for the Japanese.
- [12:26]
Peter Fritchie
A fair number did when the Indian army surrendered in Singapore, at least among the Hindu soldiers, perhaps nearly half ended up getting out of prisoner of war camps and fighting for the Japanese. Of course, that's a complicated question. Did they do that out of patriotic Indian anti colonial sentiments? Did they do that because they didn't want to be in a prisoner of war camp? Did they do that because they were throwing their lot in with the winners and the British were going to lose anyways? There are a lot of reasons why a prisoner in February and March 1942 would collaborate with the Japanese. But ultimately the Japanese in 4243 had a fair degree of support among the so called captive populations of East Asia. This was limited, however, by the brutality of Japanese military rule and their own racial prejudices. So they undermined themselves nonetheless. They created the act of defeating the white European powers that reverberated in Asian history long after the Japanese had left the international stage.
- [13:37]
Martin DeCaro
I appreciated how much time you spent on the Japanese occupation and destruction of China. For some reason, in the public imagination, at least in the United States, when people think of civilians suffering in World War II, they probably think of Europe and Europeans and Jews first and for good reason, the Holocaust. But in China there was an incident, an event, a historic event that happened. The flooding of a major river in June 1938.
- [14:06]
Peter Fritchie
The Chinese national forces had used the landscape against the Japanese. And one of that involved destroying the dikes and dams on the Yellow river in the summer of 1938. And that destroyed an area the size really half the Balkans, bigger than Croatia, and created the preconditions for famine and destitution and utter homelessness and misery. You could see that in the huge famine of 1942, 43 in Henan Province. So there's immense suffering. This was done. The destruction of the dikes was done by the Nationalists, Chinese Nationalists. But in the end they gained very little. They gained very little territory. They hardly stopped the Japanese and they only created vast mistrust of themselves among the Chinese civilian population. All that said, the record of Japanese cruelty to the Chinese population beginning in 1937 is absolutely immense and just. The dislocation and destruction of the infrastructure. Agricultural and industrial infrastructure created huge amounts of suffering and famine, aside from the arbitrary deaths and executions that the Japanese perpetrated. And it was a record that was a warning to subject people in the Philippines and Malaysia and elsewhere in Indonesia, the captive populations approached the Japanese very gingerly. Nonetheless, they had a kind of political capital in 1942, and they had kicked out the Americans from Manila and they had kicked out the British from Singapore and from Rangoon in Burma. A new page in world history seemed to have been turned in which Asians would rule Asians. It just became so clear that it really was the Japanese who were the overlords. And they were by many measures crueler in the few years that they had power than the British and the Americans had been.
- [16:11]
Martin DeCaro
One wonders how the war may have turned out had the Germans and Japanese, rather than crushing and murdering the people they occupied, tried to enlist them in their effort. But that's a false question. The whole point, especially of the German war effort, more so than the Japanese, was to create a new racial order. The Germans had no interest in, say, bringing Ukrainians on board, although some did because they faced a terrible choice. It was either the Nazis or the communists. But the hunger plan in the east, the German hunger plan was to. I'll let you pick it up from here. They really had no vision of cooperation with the people they were conquering.
- [16:48]
Peter Fritchie
Well, you said it correctly. It's a false question. It is absolutely astonishing the degree to which the most simplistic and caricatured versions of older European imperialism were used by the Germans and to some extent the Japanese in their plans for their new empires. It was rapacious, it was racist, it was unnuanced to a high degree, especially in the German sphere. And the everyday racism combined with the overall plans like the hunger plan, which was simply to let the urban population starve, There would be no attempt at creating German led Ukrainian or Belarusian Eastern Europe. Of course, when you're in the middle of a partisan war, here and there a commander did work and collaborate with people on the ground. But on the whole, this was not German policy, neither from Berlin, nor from the perspective of the ordinary soldier, for whom the civilians were simply racial subhumans. And so the everyday cruelty is just immense. But they would have never embarked on a huge war of conquest had it not been with these racial ideas. Race is an overriding factor describing both the limitations and the audacity of the Axis belligerents who had the great accomplishment of killing the majority of the civilian victims of World War II.
- [18:23]
Martin DeCaro
Man, most people who died in World War II were civilians who are simply murdered or starved to death, which is a form of murder. You know, today, especially in the US we look back on World War II often heroically. And that's not to say there wasn't a lot of courage and determination and heroism. And we impart a lot of redemptive, how should I put it, A lot of meaning to the war. Right? Because it did shape this modern world in the American century, in US global leadership. But at the time, as you write in your book, a lot of this had no meaning at all. It wasn't leading to a better world. The world was actually ending for millions of people. Their world was actually ending. And I'll just share something from page 476 of your book about the Nazi occupation of Ukraine. We are talking about how the Nazis would come into Ukrainian villages, round up the Jews, and that was the last time anyone saw them. And of course, they did have some collaboration from the local population. But you say here for the rest of the non Jewish pop, it was much more a matter of chance if one fought for or was killed by one side or another. A question of who is in the village. When the Soviet partisans or the Germans appeared on their recruiting missions, larger kinds of orientation, such as ideology or loyalty to the Soviets or hope for a better life under the German overlords, mattered less as time went on and the scale of violence expanded. You say people did not die as partisans or soldiers or even collaborators, but luckless as victims. There is often little connection between the story of the war, its presentation, and I would just insert here, and how we remember it today. There was little connection between the story of the war, its presentation, and the way it destroyed lives, its production. Victims could not be assembled as heroes or as cowards, you say, and their deaths were too numerous and too arbitrary to be portrayed as redemptive. Everything seemed to have become worthless, said Vasily Grossman about the German occupation. Everything worthless.
- [20:29]
Peter Fritchie
Perhaps another way to put it is that fate betrayed whatever ideological investment one put into one's actions, whether it would be to go against the Soviet Union and see if one could work with the future that the Germans offered, as many Western Europeans did, or whether it was the foreign invasion of Russia, Ukraine that was so important and that one actually had to realign, despite the Communists, with the Soviet Union. And that was more important. And many people had a great ideological investment. What occurs over the course of 1942 and 43 is the investment is cheapened and betrayed by fate and There's a lot of collaboration. Some of it is day to day adjustment, some of it is opportunism, some days just using survival skills. Others is trying to figure out what is going to be the ideological parameters of the new post war world. And for many in 1942 it was simply not going to be an Anglo American future. And for many around the globe it shouldn't have been an Anglo American future. And whoever turned against, say the Japanese, whether it was in Vietnam or in the Philippines or in Malaysia or in Burma, they did not want the British or the Americans back. And they fought so that that would be the case. And we know all about the Vietnam War which comes out of 1945 in the Ukraine. I think your ideological positions in the end mattered less and less and less. Outside of the Ukraine and German occupied Russia, partisan warfare did have an ideological anti German, even pro Soviet basis. But the degree of collaboration against the Soviet Union, despite the German occupation of Mother Russia, was still large. Half opportunism, half true belief. This half life of true belief that erupts again and again, betrayed as it was, decayed as it did, is important because conceptions that we have of this being a righteous moral or good war need to be heavily qualified but not discarded. Because if they're discarded, we have nothing, then it's transactional. Everything is fate. There is no recognition of the redemptive value that even people dying did feel, doesn't cover everybody, doesn't cover everything in all situations. But to completely dismiss the ideological basis of the partisanship, whether it's the Axis or the Allies, I think would be a mistake.
- [23:13]
Martin DeCaro
Yeah, I agree. Because then there's no difference between the Axis and the Allies.
- [23:18]
Peter Fritchie
And a soldier's tale is more complicated in the end. Sure, soldiers feel that the enemy is the rear, but it's not only to dismiss the idea of the good war ignores complexity, its contradictions and its hypocrisy. If you want to understand the hypocrisy of the good war, you have to retain it.
- [23:39]
Martin DeCaro
My next question was going to be about how the US was at war with itself. You brought this up in chapters about the interning of the Japanese Americans and the segregated army and racial attitudes of soldiers. But before we get to that, the U.S. being at war with itself, while it's true the U.S. the allies did fight for their geostrategic interests, ideas did matter. Fighting international gangsterism.
- [24:05]
Winston Churchill
No one knows better than Mr. Churchill himself that it is not alone his stirring words and valiant deeds that give the British their superb morale the essence of that morale is in the masses of clean people who are completely clear in their minds about the one essential, that they would rather die as free men than live as slaves. And so our country is going to be what our people have proclaimed it must be, the arsenal of democracy. Our country is going to play its full part. And when. No, I didn't say if. I said when dictatorships disintegrate and pray God that'll be sooner than any of us now dare to hope, then our country must continue to play its great part in the period of world reconstruction for the good of humanity.
- [25:34]
Martin DeCaro
The Atlantic Charter mattered a great deal. Self determination for all peoples. So these ideas and ideology, they matter. Maybe not in the minds of an ordinary GI picking up his rifle and charging into battle, but these ideas do frame the entire. The presentation, to borrow your word, the presentation of the war, also for the Axis.
- [25:54]
Peter Fritchie
I mean, the Axis forces were also motivated by ideas of freedom and liberation and security and a kind of prosperity as well. Why do we continue to study war, and especially war in an age of political mobilization? It's precisely to measure what it is that is in the soldier's mind and in the soldier's letters and in the soldier's fears and joys. A lot of it is about the 100 square meters that he sees in front of him. A lot of it is about preserving your small group, your company. A lot of it is trying to take revenge on the enemy or survive the barrage. But ideas also mattered, and people were held to account on the basis of those shared general ideas of moral conduct. And soldiers were absolutely appalled at what they saw when they walked through devastated districts, whether it was walking through them in 42 or in 1945. Because everybody wants to live an ordered, secure home in a neighborhood where things are reliable and fair. The war wasn't like that, but that's how people tried to orient themselves. So there are a lot of wars within wars, including in the soldier's mind and in the soldier's memory. A lot of people fought World War II and were fired up with ideals, and they later figured out that they had been betrayed and they were just schmucks and victims. Others made it very golden and wonderful. Their army service, which at the time was much tougher, crueler, and didn't seem redemptive at all. So there's a war within all of us, and that's why we study World War II.
- [27:41]
Martin DeCaro
So the US at war with itself.
- [27:43]
Peter Fritchie
I'll give you a good example of what's happening in the late winter of 1942, you have calls along the entire Pacific coast of Canada and they were crueler than the Americans and the United States. To intern Japanese, most of whom were.
- [28:00]
Historical Narrator
Citizens, notices were posted. All persons of Japanese descent were required to register. They gathered in their own churches and schools and the Japanese themselves cheerfully handled the enormous paperwork involved in the migration.
- [28:16]
Peter Fritchie
Yet it was on the east coast that you could walk out on the beach and see American merchant shipping blown up by German submarines. You had passenger liners, American, Canadian and other South American passenger liners being blown up, people drifting around in lifeboats, bodies coming up on shore. On the east coast, this was where the threat was. Far more people died in the summer and spring of 1942 because of German submarines off the coast of the United States than had been killed in Pearl Harbor. And yet it's the Japanese American citizens, citizens in California, who paid the racial price. And that was just the beginning of the racial tension without any evidence whatsoever of so called fifth column activity or sabotage. And indeed we forget that in the territory of Hawaii, which is military run territory, there was no internment, there were no mass arrests. The 37% of the population of Hawaii that was of Japanese descent continued to work, including in government in the territory of Hawaii. It was in California and Oregon and Washington where we see the displacement, evacuation and incarceration of Japanese citizens basically by their white neighbors through the newspaper frenzy and all of that with complete support on the part of Americans that can only be explained by pre existing racial prejudices. And indeed Japanese were rounded up on the entire Pacific coast of the Americas, all the way down to Peru. And in Central America, only Brazil and Chile did not persecute their local Japanese populations because of size and other reasons.
- [30:16]
Martin DeCaro
The shredding of the US Constitution was what this was.
- [30:20]
Peter Fritchie
People did not cheer, but they did support, they did turn their backs on Japanese, they did exhibit person to person prejudice and they acquiesced.
- [30:32]
Martin DeCaro
So think of the movie Saving Private Ryan and that great group of guys, company of GIs, led by Tom Hanks to go save Private Ryan. I'm not sure there's a single black person in that entire movie. And can you imagine how audiences would have reacted had say, the subject of race came up during any of those scenes of dialogue? And some of the soldiers saying, I'm sure glad we don't have any blacks in this unit. Something you touch on in your book is the widespread resistance. Even if people weren't foaming at the mouth racists, they still did not want any black people in their Units and especially on board ships. Just how widespread were these attitudes and how should that change our way of looking back to at the war?
- [31:17]
Peter Fritchie
The attitudes were surprisingly broad. And we're just, that's the way we do it. And I don't want to do it and I don't want to sit with blacks. They get to their sister being raped or being married off to a, you know, so called African American interloper later. But it starts with sitting down at the table. And yet these prejudices over the last three generations have in many ways also disappeared. So they're both commonplace. And yet maybe from a historical perspective, not all that deep. But in the American south, it hit every register, whether it was in units, whether it was sharing a canteen, whether it was sharing bar space, whether it was sharing bus space. Across the board. In the north it's more differentiated. And the white support for an assumption that this is our lifestyle and it should and would go on forever for Jim Crow is absolutely astonishing. You don't have a problem there among the white population. You don't have a discussion, you don't have a division, people divided, maybe on lynching in the late 30s, but the issue is not an issue at all. This is our way of life. And if you read Southern soldiers remarks about the world around them as they're fighting, they're dismayed that white only primaries might disappear, the Jim Crow might disappear. They saw their own home counties and hometowns under threat. In that sense, there's a double war going on, a war of resistance among white Southerners who are quite unanimous, astonishingly unanimous. You wouldn't even call an African American. Mr. In the newspaper. There's also a double war against the Axis power and African Americans insistence on self, rule, dignity, equal rights that you see south and North. And that's why issues like the bus become important, because there's daily tension on the bus, in the restaurant, in these public spaces. Jim Crow, African Americans are pushing against it. And then in the north, much more.
- [33:34]
Martin DeCaro
So if freedom did not come to American blacks in 1945. I want to return to the issue of inevitability and whether the Axis could have won the war. At least it seemed like it might be the case in 1942, even in the European theater after the catastrophe outside Moscow in late 1941, where you can make the argument that the Wehrmacht was already exhausted. But on the Japanese side, if you.
- [33:59]
Peter Fritchie
Just step back, the Japanese didn't have the resources, the Germans didn't have the resources. So if they were going to win, they had or winter quick. And they depended on American public opinion being split, maybe fighting against the Japanese, but maybe not the Germans. These things did not happen. The Japanese, the Germans did not collaborate, did not work together, did not calibrate their strategies. All that said, had the Japanese moved to the west, threatened India, time their advances to German advances towards the Middle east, the Japanese and the Germans could have done a concerted thrust on the Middle east and the oil rich regions, breaking British rule in Egypt and its possession of the Suez Canal. That required a German victory in southern Russia and that required a continued Japanese advance over India. And it required collaboration between the two powers. And it required speed before American and Soviet remobilization that we see in 43.
- [35:07]
Martin DeCaro
In the event the Japanese decide instead of going west, as you say, in collaboration with the Nazis, to try to take India or the Middle east, they go south and east and they are led into the battle of Midway and they never recover from that. They lose all their major aircraft carriers and the United States continues to build more.
- [35:24]
Peter Fritchie
They lost them all. It's just an incredible battle. In early June 1942, the thinking was you have to eliminate the American fleet.
- [35:38]
Historical Narrator
Hardly had the din of guns been hushed in the Coral Sea when the battle of Midway blazed forth in all its mighty fury. Here the United States forces met and crushed a full Jap battle fleet. By sheer weight of numbers, the Japs hoped to overwhelm and conquer our Middle Pacific fighting forces. The Japs had carefully planned this sneak attack. They gambled all and lost. The battle of Midway, the Japs hoped would be their stepping stone to Pearl Harbor, Australia, Alaska, and eventually, and that.
- [36:08]
Peter Fritchie
Was then simply a metonym for American industrial power before it got really onto a war footing. That was the reason to lure the Americans to Bidway to engage the Americans at Midway. But it was supposed to be a sneak attack. Americans were there. So it wasn't a Japanese sneak attack then. It was these two naval forces fighting it out. The Japanese would probably have done okay, and so it would have been a draw. And then we would have waited for the next dramatic moment. But time did not work for the Japanese. But the American attack on the Japanese fleet, which had failed, one suicide, you could say almost kamikaze attack after another. Failed, failed, failed, failed. The American Navy completely failed, except between 10 and 10:30 in the morning, the.
- [37:01]
Martin DeCaro
Dauntless dive bombers found the.
- [37:03]
Peter Fritchie
I mean, you can read Walter Lord, you can read whoever you. This was luck, yeah.
- [37:09]
Martin DeCaro
The dive bombers came upon the Japanese carriers and the Zeros and they.
- [37:13]
Peter Fritchie
And they destroyed all of them that had attacked Pearl harbor. The Americans could suffer tactical defeats. The Japanese did not have this room for maneuver in their economy.
- [37:23]
Martin DeCaro
Yeah, The Zero fighters were at a low altitude, fending off another American attack, when the dive bombers, one by one.
- [37:29]
Peter Fritchie
They blew them out of the water.
- [37:30]
Martin DeCaro
Yeah, but the dive bombers came upon the carriers while the Zeros were low, and that's how they were able to get.
- [37:35]
Peter Fritchie
Exactly.
- [37:36]
Martin DeCaro
So but the question I want to get to here is just when you look at the overall Japanese strategy, this was never going to work. So Pearl harbor was a technical win and a strategic catastrophe. They're hoping to buy 6 months time to run wild, create a defensive perimeter in an ocean. How are you going to do that? Build a wall across the Pacific Ocean.
- [37:57]
Peter Fritchie
10,000 miles to defend, and then what? Hope for.
- [38:00]
Martin DeCaro
Hope for what? An agreement with the United States. Let's just agree to disagree here. And they totally misjudged American resolve.
- [38:07]
Peter Fritchie
And they were doing so with most of their army standing in China. The way it worked out is understandable, but it still didn't have to work out that way. But certainly Hitler gave Roosevelt a great favor by declaring war on the United States on December 11th. And he would have had a much more difficult time convincing the American public to fight an all out total war with complete transformation of the US industrial base. Had it not been for the German declaration of war, it would have been an uphill battle and that would have then hobbled even our offense against the Japanese.
- [38:44]
Martin DeCaro
So why did Adolf Hitler declare war on the United States? It made no sense to do that because as you say, the United States. Roosevelt would have had a harder time getting Congress to declare war in the other direction. Even though German submarines have been sinking American ships for a couple of years now, a lot of merchant marine men died. Why did Hitler do this?
- [39:06]
Peter Fritchie
You could argue that it was already moved from a cold to a hot war between Germany and the United States. Already in the fall of 41, we were helping the British in an extraordinary way. Real material support. So in many ways, Germany was faced with a de facto American declaration of war against Germany. Number two, Hitler regarded the United States as a mongrel, racially mixed, lazy nation that would not be able to flex its muscle. And whatever muscle it flexed could be beaten in the period of two years. And then he felt that it was important to have initiative. Germany, in his perception, was always presented with fete complete in the First World War. Now he was going to create initiatives and audacious behavior. But Hitler did not believe that the United States was actually going to succeed as well as it did. But he was thinking in a short term frame.
- [40:07]
Martin DeCaro
Hitler had some diabolical political gifts where he could exploit weaknesses in his enemies, at least internally in Germany during his rise to power. But he did not understand his other enemies, the US and the Soviet Union, thinking that the Soviets would just collapse like a house of cards and that the United States, as you say, was incapable of fighting a war. So my next question is about the war the US decided to fight once it entered. I mentioned Saving Private Ryan before. When Americans look back on World War II, they often think of small unit combat because of movies like that. Also the Band of Brothers. When you're talking about a total war, the mass mobilization of entire societies. What a single unit, a company of infantry does on a given day is almost irrelevant. The United States did not fight an infantry war.
- [40:57]
Peter Fritchie
It and the no it paid the Russians.
- [41:00]
Martin DeCaro
We fought a war of strategic bombing. Can you talk about the 90 division gambit that the United States pursued instead of building say 215 infantry divisions?
- [41:11]
Peter Fritchie
There are competing ideas. I mean, the Chief of Staff wanted to amass American soldiers in Great Britain and attack German occupied Europe directly. Churchill ultimately dissuaded the Americans on their timetable and on their geography. Nonetheless, there was going to be an Anglo American attack on the continent of Europe. And the first sign of that was the invasion of North Africa in November 1942. Whether that made strategic sense then to go on to Italy, that's a different question. But the idea was ultimately to destroy Germany military power. But the real way to do that was to keep the Russians in the game. Not in a cynical way, just to understand that they were doing the dying, but also to make sure that they had the material resources. The Russians did the dying, the Russians did the fighting, the Russians did the advancing until the very end. But the Americans, however they fought the Germans, they realized that they had to defeat Germany as a industrial political power and they had to defeat Germany first. The American strategists believed they could live with Japan, but they could not live with a victorious Germany. Victorious over America's allies in Europe and victorious over the Atlantic and Eurasian space. And so it was a Germany first strategy that then was simply qualified by the fact that we invested a great deal fighting Japan, Japan already in 1942.
- [42:44]
Martin DeCaro
Strategic bombing, rather than 215 infantry divisions, there would be 90 or so divisions. That is how the US decided to fight the war.
- [42:54]
Peter Fritchie
Strategic bombing is destroying the heart and soul of the nation, its industrial capacity, which means its workers, which Means its workers morale, and that means destroying cities. And everybody knew that. And the assumption was that what happened to London, London's blitz. London could take it. Well, the Germans wouldn't take it. But that was a false assumption until, you know, the biggest escalation possible, the atom bomb. But on the whole, for all the huge merit of the bombing campaign, the idea that you had bombed the Germans into some kind of submission failed. Despite the pictures that we have of these destroyed cities, most of Cologne or of Berlin or of Dresden, most of the bombing of these cities and the vast destruction and the killing of civilians occurred in the last six months. So Germany was already defeated by other means. Strategic bombing was in 42 was not a particularly useful way, and Allied losses were just absolutely enormous. When you think of educated, skilled American and English pilots who had a 30% chance to complete their tour of duty, more of them were killed than Germans on the ground in 41, I know Berlin extremely well. Berlin is hardly destroyed. In April 1945, Julio Duhay, who is.
- [44:23]
Martin DeCaro
Italian despite his French sounding last name, was the air war theorist who said that a person sewing a uniform in a factory building an artillery shell, the civilians who are behind the war economy of your enemy, they are just as valid a target as the soldiers fighting on the front line. So the notion, or the idea was that we invest all this money in a strategic air arm, so we need fewer infantry and we can bomb the enemy's industrial and military capacities to the ground. But as you say, this took a while to get going because the initial missions didn't hit anything right, and everyone.
- [45:05]
Peter Fritchie
Was expecting a quick blow. You know, bring a thousand bombers over, bring 5,000 bombers over, do it over three months, then it'll capitulate. Well, that ends up in the atom bomb that, that worked with Japan already on half rations and already in many ways defeated. It does not work. Did not work in 42 and 43. And the allies, while following Dehay's vision of strategic bombing, still felt guilt. People knew that civilians were different than soldiers. Of course, civilians are part of the war effort in a modern war. But there was a lot of guilt and therefore all sorts of euphemisms about what the Americans and the British were doing. But it was a huge effort. And in 42, 43, difficult to see the real results. You did not kill that many German civilians and you really did not cripple that much. And of course, you know, Goebbels, Goebbels as a propagandist, maybe second most important person in Hitler's Reich, his mother and his mother in law are bombed out. The big talks with Molotov that occurred In Berlin in November 1941, they were interrupted by air raid sirens. So the psychological effect, the slow creation of a conviction that the Germans were going to lose no matter what, and that they were therefore on the wrong side and had put their political investment with the Nazis, that that had been a great mistake. That is clear because of the vast destruction and the uncertainty in daily life that begins for all German civilians in 1940-41 with the bombing campaign. So the psychological questions are not that easy to answer. But if you look at it from, from investment of material, deaths of Allied airmen, deaths of German factory workers, de housing of proletarian working class districts, it's hard to say that it was worth the investment at that time.
- [47:07]
Martin DeCaro
And the United states was building one B24 Superfortress or B29 per hour at Willow Run. It's just amazing.
- [47:16]
Peter Fritchie
It's totally amazing. And they spend more resources building those planes and an amazing assembly line amazingly quickly. I mean, American industrial mobilization, a labor, business, government combination that is quite foreign to our thinking nowadays in 1942 is really rather extraordinary. Total shift to war production really from one season to the next. It's just extraordinary.
- [47:44]
Martin DeCaro
Yeah, maybe it was harder to buy a car, but if you wanted to drive a Sherman tank, there were about 90,000 of those. So Stalingrad, the so called invincible army.
- [47:54]
Historical Narrator
Moves in to smash all resistance before the gates of Stalingrad. Flamethrowers and grenadiers advance against the stubborn resistance of heroic defenders.
- [48:03]
Martin DeCaro
Give us a sense of how large, immense, epic this battle was and how this was. Well, I don't like to say. Or the turning point. A turning point? The turning point. This was an important battle at the end of 1942 into 1943.
- [48:19]
Peter Fritchie
Well, the Germans did not have a strategic vision of going to Stalingrad, occupying it. I mean, the important thing was somehow to destroy the Red army on the western side of the Volga and to keep them from disappearing onto the eastern side. So the Germans needed to join a battle at some point. The real idea was to then turn south and head to the oil fields. But once the Germans could not clear the Red army and the Red army had held on to its little foothold on the western side of the Volga river, the Germans poured resources into destroying Stalingrad. They could have bypassed it, they could have besieged it, there were other things, but they felt that Stalingrad was a symbol of the entire Red army, which was silly. And that if they destroyed Stalingrad they would have destroyed the Red Army. So they stayed in Stalingrad. They were pulled into Stalingrad. They were moved literally and psychologically further east until they were on the very banks of the Volga. And they were not taking this city in a week or two weeks or three weeks. And so the Germans kept not winning. And they basically had the whole city. They had split the Soviet forces. The Soviet forces were hanging on. But the German capacity, the desire to come home by Christmas, to win quick, to be able to conquer a city in three weeks, to establish forward movement, all of those things became less and less and less as the cold weather descended in October and November. So on the one hand, they pretty much squeezed the Soviets. On the other hand, they're now fighting a very different war. They're fighting a war of attrition on a very small plot of land where they cannot use their heavy guns or air force or tanks, for that matter. And the Russians understand that. And therefore the Red army hangs on. But that was very, very, very close. But the Red army didn't win on the streets of Stalingrad. They just didn't lose. Then there is this huge flanking attack that occurs hundreds of miles away. It's as if you're fighting a battle in Boston. Then suddenly something explodes in Cleveland. And that was the huge flanking maneuver from the north and south, trapping the Germans. Germans, so that the enemy was to their west, trapping them against the Volga, no supplies, and then wiping them out. Had the Germans decided to skip Stalingrad and continue further south in the spring of 43, the war would have been much longer.
- [50:58]
Martin DeCaro
The number of people who fought and died in this battle, it's mind boggling. You say here it ends in the deaths of nearly 150,000 German troops and twice as many among their other axis partners. A lot of Romanians, Hungarians, Italians, in addition to 90,000 taken prisoner. The number of Russian soldiers killed was far greater. 500,000 men of the Red army fell in 143 days of fighting over the city. A half million in a single battle. I mean, how can anyone say they won when you're losing that many? But this was a Soviet victory, as you say, von Paulus. The 6th army was enveloped in a cauldron with that pincer action. And Hitler forbid any chance of retreat. He doomed a quarter of a million of his own men in a pointless exercise.
- [51:52]
Peter Fritchie
Yeah, I mean, whether retreat on November 15th or maybe November 1st would have even worked is unclear. But there was no strategic reason for the Germans actually to be at that bend of the Volga river in September and October 1943 with diminished forces since the big army push to the south had been split. And the two arms of the army are moving further apart. One is moving east, one's moving south in a war that the Germans had to win quickly with concentrated force. So huge mistakes already made in July, but that doesn't mean that the Soviets would have been able to prevail. They were really hanging on in October 42 on Stalingrad on the western bank of the Volga. But they did not give up. And that's an incredible heroism and had enormous symbolic value since Stalingrad dominated the headlines everywhere in the world.
- [52:53]
Historical Narrator
The battle of Stalingrad, which began in the middle of September 1942, ended in January 1943 with the cutting off and the liquidation of Hitler's 6th Army. Frontline Pictures of the final fate.
- [53:11]
Martin DeCaro
Your chapters about the refugee crisis during World War II and the Holocaust. They've been on my mind as I look around the world today and I look at what many people argue is a genocide. This happens to be my argument. A genocide in Gaza, deliberate starvation of a people. The Palestinians there, Sudan. There's so many horrible humanitarian crises in our world today. And I often am depressed at how some people deny what is happening or they're indifferent to what's happening, or they don't think anything can be done about it. People were aware of the mass murder of Jews, yet the way they thought about it, the way it was presented to them, Jews were not in a special category of victim. That comes later, when the enormity of the Holocaust and what we call the Holocaust today becomes clear. But at the time, explain what you meant by. In order for refugees or civilian victims to matter to people in the years 1939 to 1945, they almost had to be elevated into some kind of heroic role.
- [54:17]
Peter Fritchie
It's really interesting, the resistance against the Germans in Europe, which really begins once the Communists are on board against the Germans after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. All of this insurrection behind the front lines inside German occupied Europe is viewed as a outbreak of a resistance against the Germans, Germans, a fifth front against the Germans. So all signs of violence that one sees inside Europe are taken as German weakness. So German attacks on hostages, German attacks on resistant fighters, German attacks on civilian population are seen as desperate measures in a civil war of resistance against German occupation that the Allies are generally winning. That is the way that all victims can become enrolled as partisans because they're part of a expanding underground fifth column against the Germans. Jews are seen of course, as victims of the Germans, but they are allied with all the other victims of the Germans, many of whom are fighting against the Germans. Now the Jews are also fighting against the Germans, but not as French necessarily, or as Belgian. But they certainly resist the Germans in all sorts of ways. Their role, so to speak, in World War II is just like all the other civilians, many of whom become partisans and fifth columnists. The reason that the Germans kill Czechs and French, even women and children who are not combatants, is they're fighting the anti German resistance against them. They're trying to pacify, by some means, overreach, of course, killing civilians, destroying towns, executing hostages that have nothing to do with assassination of German officers. Of course they're overreaching, but it's to pacify. Czechoslovakia, France, Belgium. But the Jews pose no threat. And they're not a state and they're not a society like the French. They're killed because they're Jews. Many have fled. Some Jews, of course, are in the armed forces of their respective nations. And so the victims, our women, our children, our old people, it's a completely different kind of demographic. And the Germans are relentless about the destruction of all Jews, whether they profess to be Jews or not. All over the place, including on Corfu and Crete and Rhodes, the islands of Greece, they invest enormous resources. Just a week before the entry of de Gaulle into Paris, the last train leaves Paris for the death camps. And so the fate of the Jews is in fact different. Jews themselves, however, often wanted to be counted alongside the victims of the fascists. They wanted to be enrolled in this human struggle and be recognized as one among many who composed the humanity that is fighting for itself against fascism and against the German, against the Nazis, there was a pressure not to think of the Jews as a separate victim category, but the Germans had made them so because of the indiscriminate nature of the destruction of entire communities in a genocidal policy that was not directed against France or Czechoslovakia, however, was directed against Slavic populations. And this genocide in the 20th century has occurred again and is not. There's no reason not to make comparisons and to enter aspects of the Holocaust into contemporary discussions. They are. Anyways, these are perfectly valid questions, however you. However you answer them.
- [58:24]
Martin DeCaro
The shadow of the Holocaust, as you say, does still influence the way we think about current events. The Holocaust was unique. But just because something today is not as severe, and nothing may be as severe as what happened during World War II, right, doesn't mean, I would say.
- [58:42]
Peter Fritchie
You know, the Germans. In August 1940, 1 say a partisan is a Jew and a Jew is a partisan. So every Jew was enrolled in the German mind as a partisan and children were called future avengers and they were killed for the sake of German children and German grandchildren. These are the texts. A Jew is a partisan and a partisan is a Jew. The other text I want to remind you of is the Only Way. We're all against Aitz. I understand that we have now agreed, 100 years later that we think Auschwitz is a bad thing. But that's not a really difficult position. You can't save anyone from Auschwitz. It's not possible. If you want to save people, you have to save Yiddish speaking poor Jews in 1938 who are desperately trying to reach a country where they can resume their lives. They're trying to cross the Rio Grande, so to speak. They are just refugees. No one is killing them. They are not about to go to death camps. If you want to save people from Auschwitz, you have to save people in 1938. At the very least, you have to put children on your immigration quotas and let them in to the United States. That did not happen. Britain let in children, but it has got to go far beyond the children. Anyways. So sure, we're against Auschwitz, but if you want to save the victims of Auschwitz, you can only save them. In 1938, General Eisenhower, accompanied by Generals.
- [60:25]
Winston Churchill
Bradley and Patton, their faces grim, inspects.
- [60:28]
Historical Narrator
The concentration camp at Ohrdruf, Germany.
- [60:30]
Peter Fritchie
Captured by American troops.
- [60:32]
Winston Churchill
Everywhere are the emaciated dead.
- [60:45]
Martin DeCaro
On the next episode of History As It Happens, part four of this series. It's about a major legacy of Allied victory for the United States. The establishment of a national security state, a permanent peacetime national security state. And my guest will be his historian, Daniel Besner of the American Prestige Podcast. That's next, as we report History as it Happens. Make sure to sign up for my free newsletter. Just go to Substack and search for History as it Happens.