War and Myth VII

The biggest myth about World War II is that the American fighting man won it, almost single handed. Europeans are, at best, bemused when they encounter American accounts of the war—that play up America’s role to the exclusion of everyone else.
The G.I. certainly quitted himself well on several fighting fronts. Individually he was as brave as any other allied or Axis soldier—but he simply didn’t do that much of the fighting. Death tolls tell the story. The British Empire lost over 600,000 military dead.
The French (who surrendered in 1940—but then went on fighting under General de Gaulle) took another 217,000 military fatalities. The Chinese lost up to four million dead. Poland—some of whose forces escaped the fall of Poland and went on fighting from Britain lost nearly a quarter of a million dead. The Russians lost an awesome ten million soldiers and another fifteen million civilians.
That’s a rounded figure of about fifteen million allied war dead. It doesn’t count the Yugoslav Serbs, who held down as many as forty German divisions (Ike faced sixty at D Day) and lost 450,000 dead plus another half million civilians rounded up by Muslim SS troops from Bosnia.
Nor are we including 60,000 dead troops from the Philippines, over 20,000 Dutch dead, thirty thousand-plus dead each from Greece and Czechoslovakia, and a host of other small nations, many overrun by the Axis, who went on fighting underground.
Against these millions upon millions of dead, American losses total around 416,000 dead—about the same number as the much smaller Island of Great Britain lost by itself. We didn’t get our factories and homes bombed; our land was untouched, and we came out of the war vastly richer and more powerful than we went into it. Our investment was minimal; our return huge.
Our factories won the war. We kept everybody ELSE fighting. We supplied everybody on earth who was willing to pick up a gun and shoot at Germans, Italians, Japanese and their allies. We sent food, we sent munitions and weapons, whatever was needed.
We took all the unemployed from the Depression and put them in uniform. We pulled share-croppers off the cotton fields and put them in war plants. We put millions of women to work building ships, planes, tanks, trucks, uniforms, boots, backpacks, rifles, ammunition and bombs.
We didn’t even get into the war until it had been going on over two years. The European war was well over three years old before we got our first armies into action. (We fought for two and a half years out of just under six years that the war lasted.) We didn’t have more troops facing the Axis than the British Empire had until a year before the war ended in Tokyo Bay.
Our biggest losses in Europe came from our strategic bombing, which we insisted on carrying out in broad daylight. (We made wonderful targets; the British and Germans bombed at night.) The effects of that bombing became another American myth.
It led us to assume we could defeat the Vietnamese with high level bombing attacks. Somebody in the Pentagon should have taken a second look at their own reports from World War II. The only two industries negatively impacted by our bombing raids were: oil refineries and railroads. Not surprising since both are right on top of the ground and the former, hit just once, tend to burn like the very fires of hell itself. (Vietnam has neither.)
The more we bombed, the more German war production went up. (Bombing was very effective against retail stores and restaurants. Germans put all the unemployed back to work in war factories—which were increasingly underground and hidden.)
We were also capable of killing as many as half-a-million women and children in a single raid, but this did not impact the German war effort. The Japanese had similar civilian casualty rates and were still prepared to inflict appalling American losses had we invaded.
The myths of 1) the effectiveness of bombing (the Germans learned better when bombing did not make the British surrender at Dunkirk in 1940), and 2) the American belief we had almost single-handedly won the war would impact our postwar thinking hugely—and dangerously.
Let’s look at some more post war myths next.