"A 75th Anniversary"

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Essay from Essex

“A 75^th Anniversary”

May 7, 2020

“Can it be true this really is V-E Day?”

                                                            My mother, in a letter to my father

                                                            May 7, 1945

                                                            Dear Mary: Letters home from the 10^th Mountain Division, 1944-1945

                                                            Sydney M. Williams

While V-E Day is celebrated on May 8, the “Act of Military Surrender” was signed in Reims by General Affred Jodl, on behalf of Nazi Germany and accepted by General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of Allied Forces, at 2:41AM May 7, 1945. When guns finally ceased, Europe had been at war for five years and eight months. Americans had been fighting for three years and five months. An estimated 75 million people lost their lives during those years, including 405,000 Americans.  

I was four years old, living at my maternal grandparents’ home in Madison, Connecticut, with my mother, two sisters and a brother. My father, with the 10^th Mountain Division, was in Roverto, just west and north of Italy’s Lake Garda’s. In his History of the 87^th Mountain Infantry, Captain George Earle wrote: “After the memory of the seared browns of the Apennines and the recent dust of battle, the May colors of the foothills of the Alps seemed unbelievably fresh and vivid.”  The war in Italy had ended five days earlier.

While some equate our experience with COVID-19 today as our generation’s trial, it is not the same. Certainly, healthcare workers, who daily face the possibility of infection, knowingly confront peril. But those of us who “shelter-at-home” have little in common with foot soldiers in foxholes, airmen in combat, submariners being depth-charged, or marines storming beaches. We wear masks and socially distance.

On May 7, 1945, the war in Europe was over, but the Japanese were still dug in on Okinawa. The next day, President Harry Truman spoke: “This is a solemn but glorious hour.” British Prime minister Winston Churchill also spoke: “We must now devote all our strength and resources to the completion of our task both at home and abroad…” An invasion of Japan was planned for the fall, and the 10^th Mountain Division was to participate. On May 21, in words that captured his somber mood, my father wrote my mother: “I don’t believe there’s any use thinking about getting home for a long, long time.” Fortunately, his concern was never realized. The bomb ended the War, and he arrived home on V-J Day.   

None of us chooses a time to be born. It was the fate of the generation born in the first two and a half decades of the 20^th Century that they were fated to serve in the Second World War. All lives face obstacles, some worse than others, most of which are beyond one’s control. We must each play the cards we are dealt. J.R.R. Tolkien’s young Frodo Baggins, after his final adventures in The Fellowship of the Ring, says to the wizard: Gandalf: “I wish it need not have happened in my time.” Gandalf replies: “So do I. So do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” The World War II generation, in their time, faced incredible challenges, yet they did their duty. They went without complaints to a fate they knew not.

On this day, when we remember the victory that brought seventy-five years of peace to Europe, we should never forget the men and women who fought to preserve civilization.

"Churchill: Walking with Destiny" by Andrew Roberts

 Sydney M. Williams

www.burrowingintobooks.blogspot.com

                April 24, 2019

Burrowing into Books

“Churchill: Walking with Destiny,” by Andrew Roberts

“Words spoken with fleeting breath, the passing expressions of the unstable fancies of the mind,

endure not as echoes of the past, nor as mere archeological curiosities or venerable relics, but 

with a force and life as new and strong, and sometimes far stronger, than when they were first

spoken, and leaping across the gulf of three thousand years, they light the world for us today.” 

                                                                                                Winston Churchill (1874-1964)

                                                                                                February 1908, Author’s Club, London 

Churchill was much more than the man who saved England (and western civilization), though that was his greatest gift. Over the course of his long life, he wrote thirty-seven books. He produced 400 paintings. By the time he was 25, as Mr. Roberts tells us, Churchill had written five books and fought in four wars on three continents. He was brilliant and well-read. He could quote Roman generals, Scottish poets and Anthony Trollope. He was the conscience of England during his years in the wilderness, as Fascism, Nazism and Communism emerged as a consequence of the Great War. He was a Victorian aristocrat who reflected the virtues of his age. He believed in the Empire and bore a sense of noblesse oblige. But he was not a snob. 

In 1891, at age sixteen, Winston Churchill wrote “…it will fall to me to save the capital and save the Empire.” Almost fifty years later, on becoming Prime Minister, he wrote in his diary: “At last I had the authority to give direction over the whole scene. I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and this trial.” Andrew Roberts clearly likes and respects his subject, but his love is not blind. He recognizes his flaws. The reader is exposed to the naked man, not the one clothed by adoring fans, nor the one dressed by those who found him vain, mercurial, brilliant but without judgment. That Churchill’s could be strikingly wrong can be seen in Robert’s description of Gallipoli, India’s bid for independence, Mussolini, Spanish Nationalists and the abdication of Edward VIII. But, as regards the greatest risk to face the free world in the first half of the Twentieth Century, it was Churchill’s clairvoyance and determination that saved European democracy and, in fact, the world.

Churchill loved the English language and became its master. At the Author’s Club in 1908, Churchill spoke: “Someone – I forget who – has said: ‘Words are the only thing which last forever.’ That is, to my mind, always a wonderful thought.” During the Battle of Britain, in October 1940, to the dismay of his wife Clementine and to those paid to keep him safe, Churchill would ascend to the Annexe roof, wearing a great coat, steel helmet and smoking a cigar: “When my time is due, it will come. I take refuge beneath the impenetrable arch of probability.”  Early on, Churchill recognized the importance of wooing President Roosevelt for Britain’s salvation and for the cause of freedom: “No lover ever studied every whim of his mistress as I did those of President Roosevelt.” After FDR’s death, a teary-eyed Churchill said simply, “I loved that man.” In 1942, when Germany appeared invincible and England was at its most vulnerable, Parliament voted on a motion of no confidence, Churchill, viewing the scene, quipped that everyone “was as excited as a virgin being led to her seducer’s bed.” As we all know, he survived the vote. 

In 1914, the day before Antwerp surrendered, Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, asked Prime Minister Herbert Asquith for a military command. Asquith granted his wish and described the 39-year-old Churchill to the British socialite Venetia Stanley: “…He is a wonderful creature, with a curious dash of schoolboy simplicity…and what someone said of genius – ‘a zigzag streak of lightning in the brain.’” He foresaw Prussian militarism in 1914, Nazism in the 1930s and Soviet Communism in the aftermath of World War II. Churchill led Britain while it fought Hitler alone in 1940-1. He rejoiced when Hitler turned on the Soviet Union and when Germany declared war on the U.S. He rallied his people during the dark days of 1941-42. By the end of his life, Churchill had published 6.1 million words – more words “than Shakespeare and Dickens combined,” Roberts writes. He wrote another five million words that he used in speeches, letters and memos. If that weren’t enough, Churchill read deeply in history and literature, became an accomplished artist, constructed brick walls at Chartwell Manor, and collected butterflies.

We are witness to his complicated relations with his father, a man he always tried to please, but always felt he fell short. Lord Randolph appeared in a dream in 1947, as his son was painting in his studio. He tells his father that he makes his living as a writer but doesn’t tell him of his wartime premiership. His father is unimpressed. Yet Winston Churchill achieved a greatness surpassing not only his father, but also that of his two great heroes, Napoleon and John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough, the recipient of Blenheim and his illustrious ancestor.

Andrew Roberts has given us a fascinating, comprehensive and readable biography of Winston Churchill, perhaps the greatest man of the Twentieth Century. We are taken from his cello-playing youth when Victoria reigned over the Empire, through his speeches and travels during the Second World War to honorary citizen of the United States in April 1963, less than two years before his death. Don’t let the book’s size intimidate you. It is worth its weight in reading pleasure.

"Burrowing into Books - The Second World Wars"

Sydney M. Williams

swtotd.blogspot.com

Burrowing into Books

Reviews of Selective Readings

                                                                                                                                December 29, 2017

“The Second World Wars”

Victor Davis Hanson

“Unlike World War I, there has never been any doubt

as to who caused, won and lost World War II.”

                                                                                                Victor Davis Hanson

                                                                                                The Second World Wars

Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow in classics and military history at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His background is ideal for an analysis of the Second World War. “Wars” are plural in the title because, as Hanson notes, it was fought in many different places, from Singapore to Finland, and in many different ways, on air, sea and land, with weapons ranging from side arms to atomic bombs. It was the first war which saw more civilians die than soldiers.

The book is divided topically, with chapters titled “Ideas,” “Air,” “Water,” “Earth,” “Fire,” and “People.” A complaint may be that the book is repetitive, but different aspects are looked at from different angles. The War was fought on the continents of Europe, Asia and Africa, with combatants from every continent except Antarctica. It was fought on the land, the sea and in the air, and Hanson reviews all facets. The facts he assembles are sobering: From a world population of about two billion, five hundred million people were displaced, perhaps a hundred million mobilized, and sixty million died, two thirds of whom were civilians. Seven million Jews were killed. “No other deliberate mass killings in history, before or since, whether systematic, loosely organized or spontaneous, have approached the magnitude of the Holocaust – not the Armenian genocide, the Cambodian ‘killing fields,’ or the Rwandan tribal bloodletting.”

His details are encyclopedic. In 1939, the U.S. spent one percent of GDP on defense. By 1944, forty percent of GDP was going to defense. During the war years, the U.S. produced forty billion rounds of small-arms ammunition and one billion rounds of artillery shells. In 1939, 9.5 million square feet of industrial plant space was devoted to aircraft production. By 1944, that had grown to 165 million square feet. Britain, despite being bombed, having been defeated in most every major battle during the first two years of the War and having mobilized 3.5 million men, added more ships to its fleet during the war than the entire naval production of the three major Axis powers. The Allies were more efficient manufacturers; The thousandth B-29 to roll off the production line required half the man hours as the four hundredth. With his eye for detail, we learn that in 1942, the Eastern Front was costing the Third Reich a hundred thousand dead each month. “In that year alone, the Germans lost 5,500 tanks, eight thousand guns, and a quarter million vehicles.” About three hundred thousand planes were destroyed or badly damaged during the War.

As a classicist, Victor Davis Hanson puts the War into historical perspective: The Normandy invasion, for example, was the largest amphibious assault since Xerxes’ Persians landed in Greece in 480BC. He writes about the epic tank battle at Kursk (just northeast of Ukraine) in July 1943. While the Soviets suffered three times the number of casualties and seven to ten times the number of tank losses, Germany’s victory cost them 200,000 casualties and the loss of 500 tanks. He suggests a comparison to Pyrrhus’s lament at Asculum in 279BC, when his invasion forces took heavy losses in defeating Roman defenders, writing that Generals Walter Model and Erich von Manstein “might have sighed, ‘if we prove victorious in one more such battle with the Russians, we shall be utterly ruined.’”

Hanson tells of the lengths democracies had to go in dealing with their totalitarian partner, the Soviet Union: “Roosevelt, for example, unlike Churchill, was determined to suppress the truth of the spring 1940 massacre of Polish officers in the Katyn Forest.” It took the Russians seventy years – until 2010 – to admit to their culpability in that slaughter.

The lesson of the book is that Mr. Hanson believes the War was preventable. It should have been self-evident, he notes, that the United States, the Soviet Union and Great Britain were bigger, richer and stronger, and with soldiers and sailors better fed and equipped than the Fascist powers of Germany, Japan and Italy – that Germany and Japan embarked on an impossible-to-win quest, in invading Eastern Europe and in attacking the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor. There should have been “no need for such a bloody laboratory, if not for prior British appeasement, American isolationism and Russian collaboration.”

This is a book to savor, to read slowly, to keep as a reference – as reminder that the strength of democracies is paramount to keeping the peace in a world where bad men seek power and dominance. FDR once, allegedly, said to his wife, when it was suggested in the early ‘30s he become a benevolent dictator, “There is no such thing as a benevolent dictator.”

The lesson for us today is that, like it or not, responsibility for global accord falls on the United States. There is no other country or entity – not Europe, Russia, China or the UN – that can ensure world peace.