By the summer of 1945, Japan had, by every reasonable standard, lost the war. The American juggernaut had destroyed its navy, breached its island defenses, choked its economy, and firebombed its cities. Yet the Japanese government approached the question of surrender with great trepidation, in part because any move to capitulate would likely trigger a military coup d’état.

In fact, an attempted coup is exactly what happened. Although little known to Americans, most Japanese are familiar with the incident thanks to the 1967 film Japan’s Longest Day, which is often broadcast on the anniversary of Japan’s surrender. The film has at its heart the efforts of a cabal of young army staff officers to persuade several key commanders to overthrow the government and continue the war. Its central character is Japan’s army minister, Gen. Korechika Anami (played by actor Toshiro Mifune, often called Japan’s John Wayne), who sympathized with the staff officers but ultimately blocked the coup. But what if Anami had decided to join the coup instead?

HIROHITO’S SURRENDER

In fact, Anami strongly opposed the idea of succumbing to the Allied demand for unconditional surrender, even after the shattering events of early August 1945 — the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on Aug. 6, the Soviet entry into the Pacific war on Aug. 8, and the atomic bombing of Nagasaki on August 9. He and two other members of Japan’s Supreme War Council preferred to continue fighting — not in the hope of winning the war, but rather to damage the enemy enough to achieve a negotiated surrender that would preserve the kokutai, or the institution of the emperor. The other half of the council—the foreign minister, navy minister, and prime minister Kantaro Suzuki — favored surrender.

Ultimately, in what became known as his “sacred decision,” Emperor Hirohito threw his moral weight behind those in favor of capitulating. On Aug. 10, the Japanese government indicated its acceptance of the Allied demand for unconditional surrender, with the “understanding” that this did not “comprise any demand which prejudices the prerogatives of His Majesty as a Sovereign Ruler.” The Allied response came back a day later. In response to the Japanese government’s proviso, it replied that from the moment of surrender “the authority of the Emperor and the Japanese Government to rule the state shall be subject” to the Allied Supreme Commander — a phrasing that was at best ambiguous about the preservation of the kokutai.

THE COUP AGAINST ‘DEFEATISTS’

Although the Japanese government attempted to keep the negotiation with the Allies secret, it was soon discovered by six officers occupying key positions within the military bureau of the army ministry. They hatched a plan to isolate the existing government and place the real power directly in the hands of the army, particularly Anami. The officers did not regard themselves as disloyal to the emperor; rather, they considered him misled by “defeatists” in high places, and thought their higher duty lay in assuring the kokutai.

Their plan depended on the cooperation of the Imperial Guards Division, which protected the palace, and the Eastern District Army, which controlled Tokyo and its environs. Gen. Takeshi Mori led the former, while Gen. Shizuichi Tanaka commanded the latter. Their support was crucial. The plotters’ chances would be greatly improved if they could also gain the support of Anami and the army chief of staff, Yoshijiro Umezu.

The plotters approached Anami on Aug. 12; he managed to delay the plan’s execution by 24 crucial hours. During that time, he quietly alerted Mori and Tanaka to the possibility of an insurrection, and the Suzuki cabinet, joined by the emperor, decided to surrender without further negotiation.

But Anami’s stance toward the plotters was so sympathetic that most of them believed he might yet come to their side, and they put their plan in motion. On Aug. 15 the plotters approached Gen. Mori. Finding him intransigent, they shot him and dispatched false orders over his signature. Elements of the Imperial Guards Division surrounded the palace, isolating Hirohito. Soldiers entered the offices of the Imperial Household Agency and fruitlessly ransacked it in search of the recording of the imperial decree of surrender. Meanwhile, Gen. Tanaka learned of their efforts, rushed to the palace, and stopped the plot in its tracks by exposing Mori’s alleged orders as fraudulent. The conspirators then killed themselves.

WHAT IF ANAMI HAD JOINED THE COUP?

The outcome might have been different had Anami given his full support to the plotters. In that scenario, Anami joins the plot on Aug. 12. He goes to Umezu, the army chief of staff, at once. Umezu initially resists the idea, but, certain that the plan will succeed with Anami’s support, agrees to go along with it. The coup begins as originally scheduled at midnight on Aug. 13–14. Both Mori and Tanaka oppose the plot, as they did historically, and both are assassinated. The Imperial Guards Division accepts the forged orders as genuine, especially since both Anami and Umezu endorse them, and isolates the palace. The Eastern District Army declares martial law.

Key members of the peace faction are placed in “protective custody,” preempting the cabinet’s ability to discuss the Allied response to the initial surrender offer. Hirohito, isolated within the palace, has no opportunity to influence events. He has no constitutional power to act anyway, save to ratify a cabinet-level decision, and an imperial decree would be pointless anyway. Indeed, as a military government coalesces around Anami, Hirohito might have gone along reluctantly with this new development. The military government makes clear to the Allies that Japan will continue to resist.

MAKING THE SITUATION WORSE

Anami and others assume that continued resistance will make future negotiations more favorable toward the Japanese. But what the Japanese cabinet had feared now becomes reality: the Allies are no longer open to negotiation. And it is hard to see how the new military government, once installed, could ever reverse its decision to continue the war, no matter how adverse the chain of subsequent events.

By shunting aside Hirohito in favor of an abstract loyalty to the kokutai, the plotters would have set a precedent that any group of diehards could have exploited thereafter. According to the logic that undergirded the original coup, anyone within the government who breathed a word about surrender could be arrested or assassinated by those who wished to fight on. With no political ability to end the war, the conflict would have continued until Japan’s military ability to resist was completely destroyed, with millions more dead as a result.

THE MYSTERY OF ANAMI’S ‘CRIME’

None of this occurred, however, because Anami placed loyalty to the emperor first. Yet his conduct between Aug. 12 and Aug. 15 — his temporizing with the fanatical young officers, his refusal to denounce them outright or secure their arrest — suggests an intense internal struggle. On Aug. 15, 1945, the same day that Hirohito broadcasted the news of the Japanese surrender, Anami rebuffed a final attempt by his brother-in-law to join the plot. He then knelt, ritually disemboweled himself in the act of seppuku, and plunged a knife into his neck in an unsuccessful attempt to sever the carotid artery. His brother-in-law helped him complete the act, then placed on his body two valedictory poems that Anami had composed. One of them read, “Believing firmly that our sacred land shall never perish, I — with my death — humbly apologize to the Emperor for the great crime.”

To this day, no one knows to what crime he referred; perhaps it was the temptation he had felt to join the plotters and defy his emperor.

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People still regard World War I with horrified disbelief. That four-year “ecstasy of fumbling” killed some 10 million soldiers and perhaps as many civilians, numbers that defy comprehension. Shell-shocked governments had little to show for the fields of white crosses popping up on their pockmarked landscapes. Grieving families the world over wanted to know who was to blame for having sent their sons, fathers and husbands to die ghastly and useless deaths in what American diplomat and historian George F. Kennan termed “the great seminal catastrophe,” or Urkatasrophe (“original catastrophe”) to Germans.

Who indeed? And why? Over the decades since the guns of the—apologies to H.G. Wells—“War That Didn’t End War” fell silent, the writers of some 30,000 books, technical reports and scholarly papers have debated the chain of events prompting unprecedented historical, social, economic and technological consequences that left Eurasian politics radioactive through century’s end. New research continually adds to this library, often bringing more controversy than clarity.

That there were knights and knaves in all camps is a given. However, if they appeared to have acted like fools, scoundrels or madmen, judge them “in the context of their times, not ours,” urge historians, which sounds suspiciously like having to accept “it seemed like a good idea at the time” as an explanation.

Whether the war was inevitable or avoidable depends on which books one reads. Many stand by the notion that in the decades leading up to 1914 all Europe was enthusiastic about going to war, that its nations were armed camps, and that by amassing million-man armies it only fed what Australian historian Sir Christopher Clark has called “the illusion of a steadily building causal pressure.” In this version of the story imperial Germany was an emergent dynamo infused with visions of finding its well-deserved “place in the sun” and got into a race for colonies and naval superiority that dangerously upset the balance of power.

In what is known as the “Scramble for Africa,” from the mid-1880s up till the eve of World War I nearly 90 percent of the continent was colonized by Western European powers, primarily Britain and France. Though Germany fired the starting gun, its ambitions went unfulfilled. Chancellor Otto von Bismarck had convened the 1884–85 Berlin Conference for the express purpose of partitioning Africa in a manner designed to avoid stumbling into a war. The scramble itself was marked by a number of “international incidents” involving some combination of Germany, Britain or France, but these were resolved peacefully.

The concurrent naval arms race between Britain and Germany is the showpiece of the pro-war argument. By the time Germany effectively conceded that race in 1912, Britain had 61 top-of-the-line warships to Germany’s 31 of middling quality. A single brief sortie at Jutland in 1916—though a tactical victory for the Imperial German Navy—was enough to keep it docked for the duration of the war. An angry Vice Admiral Curt von Maltzahn was heard to fume, “Even if large parts of our battle fleet were lying at the bottom of the sea, it would accomplish more than it does lying well preserved in our ports.”

France is often portrayed as thirsting for revenge after its humiliating 1870 defeat by Prussia, as well as being keen to recover Alsace-Lorraine. “Even a cursory knowledge of events shows there’s no truth to this claim,” counters Michael Neiberg, chair of War Studies at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pa. In his book Dance of the Furies: Europe and the Outbreak of World War I Neiberg drives a stake through the heart of this argument, revealing it was a lurid murder trial, not Alsace-Lorraine, that preoccupied the French public during the July Crisis of 1914. He cites polling showing that scarcely 4 percent of French citizens considered the region worth going to war over.

Scholarship by Notre Dame political scientist Sebastian Rosato confirms that neither Germany nor France noticeably increased the size of its army in the decade leading up to the war. So unprepared was France that some 95 percent of the artillery shells it fired in 1914 were made in Germany, while its textile mills could only produce blue uniforms. “There was no broad public support for war among the working classes of Europe,” Rosato notes. “Voters in prewar France and Germany voted consistently for anti-military parties.”

Nor did the families of the last four sovereign empires of Europe want war. The Hohenzollerns of Germany; the Habsburgs of Austria-Hungary, whose emperor Franz Joseph had paradoxically declared, “It is the first duty of kings to keep peace”; the Romanovs of Russia, notorious for shooting crowds of demonstrators; and the Three Pashas, whose faltering Ottoman empire was on life support when the war broke out. This group refused to go gently into the good night of constitutional monarchism, clinging to wealth and power by suppressing pent-up movements for political independence, social reform, religious freedom and democratization that had roiled their empires through the 19th century. Their populations were eager to get on with making what Oxford University historian Margaret McMillan terms “the transition from subject to citizen.” The thought a war might give these unruly masses the means and opportunity to do just that kept these families up nights—and rightly so. By 1918 a royal diaspora had cast them all to the wind.

In his book 1913: In Search of the World Before the Great War British-Australian historian Charles Emmerson describes a Europe celebrating a gilded age of peace, progress and prosperity. “It would be very, very hard to imagine this wonderful, glossy, wealthy, globalized, prosperous, civilized construct which had been built over the last hundred years…could be shattered by war in a moment of madness,” Emmerson notes. Indeed, as late as May 1914 British Undersecretary for Foreign Affairs Sir Arthur Nicolson was moved to declare, “Since I have been at the foreign office I have not seen such calm waters.”

But if “war fever” was absent in the years leading up to 1914, what explains the military parades mobbed by cheering onlookers, overflowing recruiting stations and trains crowded with smiling men waving goodbye to wives and mothers as captured in grainy films of the day?

“It is critical to understanding World War I to understand how deeply the men who enlisted on all sides truly bought into the ‘short war’ myth,” Neiberg says. Since the idea of war was so far removed from the public consciousness when it suddenly broke out, every combatant government found itself rushing to assure its anxious populace it was acting purely in their defense—an argument made with varying degrees of credibility. Belgium could rightly make that claim. France made it a point of national pride not to strike the first blow. Indeed, it had withdrawn its army several miles from the German border at Alsace-Lorraine to avoid any incidents that might trigger gunfire.

Germany, meanwhile, loaded its men onto trains, claiming to be responding in kind to Russian mobilization. “We draw the sword with a clean conscience and with clean hands,” Kaiser Wilhelm II swore solemnly, although his military junta had trouble explaining why trains carrying a “defensive” army were heading toward Belgium, which hadn’t fired a shot in anger, rather than Serbia, where assassin Gavrilo Princip had killed Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and wife Sophie in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914.

Generals in both the Austro-Hungarian and Russian armies had ample reason to fear that patriotic loyalty to a monarch who’d mistreated his populace in times past might not motivate men to answer call-up orders. They were wrong. Conscripts showed up by the millions. Standing shoulder to shoulder were capitalists, socialists, royalists, nationalists, peasants and princes, most of whom believed passionately they were fighting to defend their homeland from an unprovoked attack that threatened their nation’s survival. Who wouldn’t be eager?

Men were also quick to enlist because they believed just as fervently they would be home by Christmas, wearing medals and regaling the ladies with war stories. Such patriotic flimflam became an article of faith among the men who’d answered their respective country’s call and would haunt all who touted it. The kaiser promised his boys they’d be home “before the leaves fall” because faith in short, decisive wars was the bedrock of German military planning in 1914. Had Prussia not beaten Austria in seven weeks in 1866 and France in six months in 1870?

The commanders of all European armies had learned the wrong lesson from the relatively brief regional wars of the 19th century. Their observers had witnessed firsthand how technological innovation—the steady increase in range and rates of rifle fire, and the advent of early machine guns and artillery shells 10 times more powerful than Napoléon’s cannon balls—was making the battlefield increasingly lethal for soldiers. These were omens of a frightening trend that military establishments of every uniform misread wildly.

On Oct. 25, 1854, amid the Crimean War, the infamous charge of a British brigade of light cavalry into the muzzles of Russian cannons left 110 of the 600 horsemen dead and another 161 wounded. The survivors were immortalized for their gallantry. At the Aug. 16, 1870, Battle of Mars-La-Tour another “death ride” saw 800 hot-blooded Prussian cavalrymen charge headlong into the teeth of withering French fire. Half their number were shot from their horses. Such suicidal bravado aroused admiration. The 1904–05 Russo-Japanese War witnessed the largest land battle to date at Mukden but remains renowned for tiny Japan’s masterful defeat of giant Russia’s imperial fleet in the decisive encounter at Tsushima Bay (see “Japan’s Trafalgar,” by Alan George, in the January 2022 Military History).

Incredibly, the message apparently gleaned by military observers was that troops infused with patriotic élan could overwhelm even the stoutest enemy defenses. This naive, if not callous, calculation meant the only thing inevitable about World War I was its horrendous death toll.

At the close of the 19th century Polish entrepreneur and military theorist Jan Gotlib Bloch sought to methodically quantify modern warfare. His conclusions came as the mother of all inconvenient truths to military planners of the day. In essence he declared war had become just too big, too destructive, too deadly, too expensive and too unpredictable to be an effective instrument of “politics by other means.” Bloch was ignored. In 1914 machine guns turned the valiant charges of troops across open country into obscene massacres at up to 600 rounds per minute. Even more were blown to pieces by massed rapid-fire artillery. Germany alone sustained more than a third of all its casualties in the first three months of the conflict. Thus the trenches have become the icon of World War I.

No discussion of how the war got started omits the Schlieffen Plan. That German military scheme to quickly knock France out of a future war proved more than they could handle. The Allies’ 1914 “Miracle of the Marne” stopped the kaiser’s gray-clad divisions within 50 miles of Paris. Failure of the plan is considered Germany’s first misstep on the road to disaster. Yet, Rosato argues, Field Marshal Alfred von Schlieffen’s proposal, written a decade earlier, was never more than a “theoretical paper exercise” to justify expansion of the German army. The plan, such as it was, was designed only to hold France in check while Germany took on its real enemy, Russia; there was never supposed to be a left hook around Paris. In 1914 the Germans had planned only a series of small defensive firefights, but given the rapid French retreat, their troops were compelled to follow. Thus the operation was a classic case of mission creep that only looked like the Schlieffen Plan.

By the end of 1914, with millions dead and no end in sight to the killing, the “short war” promise lay exposed for the murderous myth it was. So why didn’t the opposing forces stop the insanity and seek a negotiated settlement? Because by then each combatant nation believed it was fighting a defensive war it had to win if it were to survive. As in all wars, the death of comrades only made those still alive more determined to kill the enemy in revenge. “The intensity of the hatred already engendered on all sides made peace impossible,” Neiberg says.

So the war ground its bloody grist for three more years. Historians earnestly discuss the various opportunities that arose for one side or the other—especially Germany—to have struck a decisive blow that would have “won” the war. Yet it is unrealistic to believe Germany had the capability to win the war as its leaders envisioned winning. Their opposite numbers in London, Moscow and Washington would have had zero tolerance for the German tricolor flying atop the Eiffel Tower.

Meanwhile, anchored across the English Channel was a navy with a three-century tradition of scoring war-winning victories over rival navies. The largest maritime force on earth, Britain’s Royal Navy, projected and protected the power of the then largest empire on earth. Had Germany triumphed on the Continent, Berlin would have had no means of impeding Britain from using its vast human, financial, natural and industrial resources to wage war. Royal Navy ships seized or sank a quarter of the kaiser’s merchant shipping in just three months, while Germany’s submarines did little more than make serious enemies.

Whether czarist or communist, Russia has always been vast. No nation then or now has ever possessed the military scope to conquer it. That’s why Germany enabled an unknown and unemployed malcontent named Vladimir Lenin to do its dirty work, allowing the military brain trust in Berlin to conveniently avoid the insurmountable problem of putting German boots on the ground in Moscow.

The United States, for its part, was simply too rich for Germany to take on. By the outbreak of the war its factories were already producing a quarter of the manufactured goods used by Europeans without breaking a sweat. An isolationist Congress kept it out of the fray as long as possible despite growing public unease with selling war materiel to Germany. When the Zimmerman Telegram made headlines, however, public opinion shifted overwhelmingly in favor of taking the war to the villains they were certain had started it all—the Huns.

With the benefit of hindsight, we know what would have happened had the Schlieffen Plan worked in 1914, as it did in the summer of 1940 when the Wehrmacht employed an updated version to roll over France in a matter of weeks. Adolf Hitler and his generals then proceeded to slavishly repeat all of Erich Ludendorff’s greatest mistakes, ultimately reducing Germany to a smoldering ruin in fighting the same well-armed enemies and the same daunting geopolitical realities with the same predictable result. The scale was vastly greater, and it took longer, but the outcome only seemed doubtful at the time.

Even more words have been written about how the war ended than how it began. The 1919 Treaty of Versailles initially placed all the war guilt on Germany’s shoulders. Later revisions downgraded it to an unfortunate accident, with no one country to blame—call it the “Oops War.” Then, in 1961, German historian Fritz Fischer published a damning 900-page indictment of his nation’s role in starting Europe’s “March of Folly,” reviving the debate with a vengeance. Exhibit A was the kaiser’s infamous “blank check” of support that egged Austria-Hungary into punishing Serbia for the assassination of Franz Ferdinand.

this article first appeared in Military History magazine

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But American historian Samuel R. Williamson Jr. is among those who reject what he calls the “German Paradigm.” Instead, he makes a compelling case that Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz Joseph I and his foreign minister, Leopold Berchtold, played the kaiser like a fiddle, cravenly manipulating the blank check to launch not a punitive raid but an all-out attack on Serbia. It’s worth noting that despite losing nearly a third of its population during the war, the highest percentage of any nation, Serbia emerged a winner at the peace talks. The postwar borders ultimately expanded it into the Slavic superstate of Yugoslavia. Seen from that perspective, Williamson brands the Sarajevo assassination “the most successful terrorist act of all time.”

Any implied villainy was shared, historian Clark contends. “While each nation had a limited understanding of the complexity of what was unfolding,” he says, they all came to see Balkan volatility as offering beneficial strategic circumstances for advancing their respective political agendas. German diplomat Kurt Riezler summed up the attitude in a letter to his fiancé: “The war was not wanted, but still calculated, and it broke out at the most opportune moment.”

Is it because of our lingering contempt for World War I that we celebrate World War II, the deadliest six years in human history, as the “Good War”? It killed at least three times as many people, mostly civilians, with fire-bombing, concentration camps and nuclear weapons, among other horrific means. That its end was celebrated with Victory Days (as in, “We’re glad we won”) versus the end of World War I, which was dubbed Armistice Day (as in, “We’re just glad it’s over”) speaks volumes. Speaking of volumes, there will undoubtedly be more of those too, and the debate will continue.

That question was certainly on the mind of Confederate Secretary of War James Seddon that season. By default, then, it was also on Lee’s.

Anchored on bluffs lining the Mississippi River, Vicksburg was the key to success in the West for either side as the war entered its third year. The “fortress” city’s topographical dominance gave Confederates the ability to control traffic up and down the river and also served as a vital connection to Southern interests in the Trans-Mississippi Theater. 

The Union high command in Washington and the region’s army commander, Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, were well aware of Vicksburg’s strategic importance. Grant had made stabs at the city for months, to no avail, but his tenaciousness worried the once-confident Mississippians, who demanded a strong response and reliable leadership.

Department commander General Joseph E. Johnston was the highest-ranking Confederate commander in the Western Theater. He was, however, ensconced at the headquarters of General Braxton Bragg in Tullahoma, Tenn., where Bragg’s Army of Tennessee seemed to dominate Johnston’s attention. Meanwhile, the commander of the Vicksburg garrison, Lt. Gen. John Pemberton, was a Pennsylvanian who had thrown his loyalty in with the Confederacy only because of his marriage to Virginia native Martha Thompson—and thus, to some Southerners, could not be trusted. Worse, he had never held such an important field command in his career.

As the situation along the Mississippi looked more and more questionable, Seddon sought solutions. One option would be to send reinforcements directly to Pemberton, another to send them to Johnston, who left Bragg’s headquarters and arrived in the Mississippi capital of Jackson on May 13, with orders from Seddon to take command of troops in the Magnolia State and coordinate the struggle for Vicksburg.

But from where would those reinforcements come?

Vicksburg stood hundreds of miles from Lee’s own position along the banks of Virginia’s Rappahannock River, and Lee had reason to be concerned about the question. Confederate President Jefferson Davis was a Mississippi native who saw Vicksburg as “the nail head that holds the South’s two halves together.” On a more personal note, Davis and his brother both owned plantations right outside Vicksburg. The urge to protect the riverside bastion and deny Federals free, full access to river navigation was strong.

Lee had another reason to be concerned. From a logistical point of view, he already had two divisions on detached duty from his army as winter thawed toward spring in 1863: Maj. Gen. John Bell Hood’s and Maj. Gen. George Pickett’s men, both under the overall command of Lt. Gen. James Longstreet. In mid-February, Lee had sent them to southeastern Virginia on a foraging mission to shuffle much-needed supplies back to the rest of the Army of Northern Virginia. Their absence from the Confederate line along the Rappahannock presented a double benefit, too, by lessening the need for those very same supplies on the front. “At this time but few supplies can be procured from the country we now occupy,” Lee told Seddon on March 27 as part of a series of urgent correspondence about the dire state of the army.

Longstreet acknowledged Lee was “averse to having a part of his army so far beyond his reach.” Detached as they were from Lee’s immediate control, the two divisions looked like tempting chess pieces that Seddon could move across the Confederate board to Vicksburg. Complicating matters further, Union Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside’s 9th Corps shifted to the Western Theater and advanced on Knoxville, Tenn., increasing the need for Confederate counterforces out West.

Could reinforcements “safely be sent from the forces in this department,” Seddon inquired of Lee on April 6, going so far as to muse aloud whether “two or three brigades, say of Pickett’s division” could be spared. “[T]hey would be an encouraging re-enforcement to the Army of the West,” he stressed.

No one seemed eager to get on Lee’s bad side, though; his fiery temper, usually kept hidden under a courtly exterior, was an open secret. Besides, Lee had strung together impressive victories since assuming command in June 1862, so he had earned a certain amount of deference. “I know…that your army is largely outnumbered by the enemy in your front, and that it is not unlikely that a movement against you may be made at any day,” Seddon admitted. “I am, therefore, unwilling to send beyond your command any portion even of the forces here without your counsel and approval.”

Lee responded on April 9 with a letter that demonstrated he, too, had his eye on the chessboard. “I do not know that I can add anything to what I have already said on the subject of reinforcing the Army of the West,” he opened before offering a string of suggestions. Just as Seddon had suggested a Pickett-for-Burnside shift west, Lee countered with a corresponding shift of troops from southwest Tennessee. “If a division has been taken from Memphis to re-enforce [Union Maj. Gen. William] Rosecrans, it diminishes the force opposed to our troops in that quarter,” Lee pointed out, urging offensive action that might tie down Rosecrans’ reinforcements and indicating that rumors of a Federal troop shift along the Tallahatchee River would free up Confederate troops there. He also suggested “judicious operations” in the West that could occupy Burnside, which would do more to relieve pressure on Johnston than sending more troops to Tullahoma would.

Seddon, as secretary of war, certainly had his pulse on these developments more so than Lee, who got them second- and third-hand in his camp in Fredericksburg. But Lee’s attention to them demonstrates the larger strategic view he had beyond his own army, which served as a protection for his army. His big-picture view served his operational interests.

And Lee’s army did have immediate concerns to think about. Rumors circulated everywhere that Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker, on the far side of the Rappahannock, was preparing to shake the Army of the Potomac from its winter slumber. Lee set a May 1 deadline, determining to take the offensive himself if Hooker didn’t do something by then. That, too, could help address Seddon’s concerns out west. “Should Genl Hooker’s army assume the defensive,” Lee suggested, “the readiest method of relieving the pressure upon Genl. Johnston…would be for this army to cross into Maryland. This cannot be done, however, in the present condition of the roads….But this is what I would recommend if practicable.” Already Lee was looking north of the Mason-Dixon Line, foreshadowing events that would lead to the Battle of Gettysburg.

Lee admitted that Pickett’s men seemed to offer an easy fix for Seddon, but he warned the secretary not to be deceived. “The most natural way to reinforce Genl Johnston would seem to be to transfer a portion of the troops from this department to oppose those sent west,” he admitted, “but it is not as easy for us to change troops from one department to another as it is for the enemy, and if we rely on that method we may be always too late.”

As events would tell, this proved a self-fulfilling prophecy. By not shifting troops, Lee’s “Better never than late” logic assured there would be no reinforcements at all. For a man once described as “audacity itself,” this abundance of overcautiousness seems curious.

Lee’s pessimism is easily explained by the fact he had a vested interest in keeping Pickett’s troops attached to his army. Longstreet already felt he didn’t have enough troops to robustly carry out his foraging mission, Lee informed Seddon. “If any of his troops are taken from him,” he explained, “I fear it will arrest his operations and deprive us of the benefit anticipated from increasing the supplies of this army.”

The flurry of correspondence between the two over the previous weeks had clearly laid out the case for Lee’s supply concerns, so this comment was no lame excuse suddenly pulled out of thin air. Furthermore, Seddon had attributed the supply urgency to “impediments to their ready transportation and distribution,” admitting in particular, “[O]ur railroads are daily growing less efficient and serviceable.” To depend on those railroads to quickly shift troops to the West might be asking for trouble.

Lee knew this well enough, too, but instead of closing his letter by saying “check mate,” he deployed his usual rhetorical deference. If Seddon thought it “advantageous” to send troops to the West, “General Longstreet will designate such as ought to go.” Couched in such terms, Lee knew Seddon would not find it advantageous and, better, would think it his own idea.

Like his parries with the Army of the Potomac, though, Lee’s victory on the Vicksburg question would be temporary.

As rumor foretold, Hooker’s army did rumble to life, and the two forces clashed at Chancellorsville, Fredericksburg, and Salem Church from April 30 to May 4. Hooker slipped away on the night of May 5, giving Lee little time to assess his army’s condition before he received another message from Richmond about events in Mississippi.

Even as Lee had beaten back Hooker at Chancellorsville, Grant had begun his spring campaign against Vicksburg in earnest. On April 29, Grant landed two of these three corps on the east bank of the Mississippi at Bruinsburg, south of Vicksburg, then fought his first action of the campaign two days later just a few miles inland at Port Gibson.

On May 6, with Grant moving about the Mississippi interior, Pemberton pleaded with Richmond for reinforcements. “The stake is a great one,” he told Seddon. “I can see nothing so important.” Davis responded the next day: “You may expect whatever is in my power to do.” By that time, he and Seddon had directed General P.G.T. Beauregard, in command of the military district that included Charleston and Savannah, to send reinforcements. Those 5,000 men boarded trains on May 6, and lead elements began arriving in Jackson by May 13, where they would rendezvous under Joe Johnston’s leadership for Vicksburg’s relief.

Davis had explicitly ordered Johnston to Mississippi as an answer to a call from several prominent citizens, including editors of the Jackson Mississippian newspaper. The people did not have “confidence in the capacity and loyalty of Genl. Pemberton, which is so important at this junction, whether justly or not…” the editors wrote in a private letter to Davis on May 8. “Send us a man we can trust,” they pleaded, “Beauregard, [Maj. Gen. D.H.] Hill or Longstreet & confidence will be restored & all will fight to the death for Miss.”

Lee himself was not an option. On the angst-filled evening of April 20, 1861, when he decided to decline Lincoln’s offer to command U.S. forces in the war, Lee resolved, “Save in the defense of my native State, I never desire again to draw my sword.” Sincere as that vow was, he ended up stretching “defense of Virginia” enough to include an invasion of the North in the fall of ’62, and even now he contemplated stretching it again for another. Most important, Lee’s vow reflected his Virginia-centric view of the conflict and his role in it. As a professional soldier, he no doubt would have obeyed any direct order to go west, but as a wily negotiator who knew better than anyone how to manage his own president, he surely would have found a way to make Davis see things his way.

But if Lee wasn’t going anywhere, Seddon at least wanted to shift Pickett’s Division westward—and said so in a May 9 dispatch. Lee was simultaneously deferential and oppositional in his reply the next day: “The distance and the uncertainty of the employment of the troops are unfavorable. But, if necessary, order Pickett at once.”

Within that reply, Lee included a stark assessment: “[I]t becomes a question between Virginia and the Mississippi.” Seeing the note, Davis informed Seddon, “The answer of General Lee was such as I should have anticipated, and in which I concur.” That fairly blunt comment is often taken to suggest Davis agreed with Lee’s priorities, but what the president was in fact acknowledging was that the shortage of resources in the face of twin crises created an unfortunate binary choice.

Lee followed his short dispatch to Seddon with a longer one later in the day. He blamed the delay on the garbled transmission of Seddon’s telegram, which couldn’t be “rendered intelligibly” until nearly noon. It could be, though, Lee needed a little time to think through his response. He did, after all, have much vying for his attention, including the aftermath of battle and the deteriorating condition of trusted subordinate Lt. Gen. Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson, who would die that very day.

Lee’s reply laid out careful arguments against any move to Mississippi. Sincerely meant at the time, the note now teems with unfortunate irony when read with hindsight.

“If you determine to send Pickett’s division to Genl Pemberton,” Lee wrote, “I presume it would not reach him until the last of this month. If anything is done in that quarter, it will be over by that time, as the climate in June will force the enemy to retire. The uncertainty of its arrival and the uncertainty of its application cause me to doubt the policy of sending it. Its removal from this army will be sensibly felt….I think troops ordered from Virginia to the Mississippi at this season would be greatly endangered by the climate.”

Lee predicted that any action in Mississippi would be over by month’s end, which, of course, would not be the case. Instead, by month’s end Grant was just settling into a siege. Even factoring in the questionable condition of the railroads and the distance to travel, it’s reasonable to think Pickett’s men could have arrived in the Magnolia State in time to be of use. The timely movement of Beauregard’s men from South Carolina and Georgia demonstrated as much. Certainly, the vulnerabilities of the railroad, called into stark relief by the supply issue, offered cause for realistic caution, but a little more audacity would not have hurt.

Pickett’s arrival would have added 7,500 troops to Johnston’s assembled force of 15,000 men in Jackson—a significant threat to Grant’s isolated army. In fact, one reason Grant rushed into assaults on May 19 and 22 was that he had one eye on Johnston operating in his rear and feared an attack from behind. Johnston never made a move, but perhaps an additional 7,500 men would have inspired action.

Lee’s May 10 letter also became ironic because he predicted “the climate in June will force the enemy to retire.” Of course, Grant ended up doing no such thing, opting to “outcamp” the besieged force in Vicksburg for 47 days. One of Lee’s underlying assumptions proved wildly off the mark, which Seddon had suspected from the beginning: “Grant was such an obstinate fellow that he could only be induced to quit Vicksburg by terribly hard knocks.”

Of course, Lee had a vested interest in keeping his army intact. “Unless we can obtain some reinforcements,” he told Seddon, “we may be obliged to withdraw into the defenses around Richmond. We are greatly outnumbered now….The strength of this army has been reduced by the casualties of the late battles.”

Indeed, even in victory, Chancellorsville had cost Lee 13,460 men. Compounding those losses, intelligence suggested Hooker’s army was already replenishing its own casualties. “Virginia is to be the theater of action, and this army, if possible, ought to be strengthened…” Lee wrote to Davis on May 11, underscoring the point he had made to Seddon the day before. “I think you will agree with me that every effort should be made to re-enforce this army in order to oppose the large force which the enemy seems to be concentrating against it.”

In that same letter, noting that troops from the Departments of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida had been sent to Vicksburg—the 5,000 men Beauregard had shipped out—Lee let slip an idea that had weighed increasingly on his mind since Chancellorsville. “A vigorous movement here would certainly draw the enemy from there,” he said.

Lee didn’t just want reinforcements for defense. He was thinking about taking the fight to the Federals.

With Stonewall Jackson struggling to recover from his wounding and with James Longstreet not yet back from Suffolk, Lee felt the loneliness of command even as he tried to puzzle out what to do next. How should he follow up Chancellorsville? What should he do about the army in light of Jackson’s absence? What could he do to replace the tremendous battle losses his army had sustained? Yes, even perhaps, how might Vicksburg tie into his own plans?

“There are many things about which I would like to consult Your Excellency,” Lee wrote Davis on May 7, “and I should be delighted, if your health and convenience suited, you could visit the army.” Promising Davis a comfortable room near his headquarters, Lee wrote, “I know you would be content with our camp fare.”

Davis was too sick to travel, however, and with the wounded Army of the Potomac lurking on the far side of the Rappahannock, and with his own army and officer corps still reeling from its recent bloodletting, Lee did not yet feel comfortable slipping away to Richmond. He’d have to brood over his plans in solitude.

As it happened, Longstreet would have been happy to discuss things. Chancellorsville had triggered a hurried recall of the First Corps commander and his two divisions, but the fighting ended before they could make it back. Lee subsequently ordered his Old Warhorse not to stress his men with a forced march.

On the trip north, Longstreet had plenty of time to chew over the Confederacy’s overall strategic situation. Since at least late January, he had contemplated moves where one corps of the Army of Northern Virginia would hold the line at the Rappahannock while the other corps would operate elsewhere—and his operations around Suffolk had confirmed the idea’s viability. He longed to “break up [the enemy] in the East and then re-enforce in the West in time to crush him there.” By May, Longstreet had a particular eye on Vicksburg. “I thought that honor, interest, duty, and humanity called us to that service,” he would later say.

Traveling ahead of his divisions, Longstreet arrived in Richmond by train the evening of May 5 and spent the 6th conferring with Seddon. What if, the secretary of war floated, we sent Pickett’s and Hood’s divisions toward Mississippi and not north to the Rappahannock?

Longstreet did Seddon one better. Rather than send troops to Vicksburg where they would move against Grant directly, he suggested reinforcements concentrate instead in Middle Tennessee under Johnston—reinforcements that would include Hood and Pickett, with Longstreet himself along for good measure. Johnston could then combine with Braxton Bragg’s Army of Tennessee in a move against Rosecrans’ Army of the Cumberland encamped in Murfreesboro. “The combination once made should strike immediately in overwhelming force upon Rosecrans, and march for the Ohio River and Cincinnati,” Longstreet argued. That sudden dire threat would force a Federal response. “Grant’s was the only army that could be drawn to meet this move, and that the move must, therefore, relieve Vicksburg,” he concluded.

Longstreet’s plan reflected the same principle Lee had articulated in April while contemplating a move on Maryland, ultimately shelved because of the muddy spring roads. A serious movement north would panic state governments and the Lincoln administration into a response that would sap Union operations of any initiative and momentum while they dealt with a Confederate invasion. 

Lee’s Old Warhorse was not being disingenuous toward his commander in proposing this plan. As soon as he reported to Lee on May 9, he presented his idea for Vicksburg’s tangential relief to Lee and asked for “reinforcements from his army for the West, to that end.”

As Longstreet recalled, Lee “reflected over the matter for one or two days.” This was either a generous or a forgetful retelling. The same day Longstreet pitched the idea, Seddon’s garbled telegram arrived asking to transfer Pickett’s Division west—a telegram no doubt inspired by Seddon’s conversation with Longstreet. Lee didn’t respond until May 10, and during that time, he sent for Longstreet for further discussion.

“I thought we could spare the troops unless there was a chance of a forward movement,” Longstreet explained to a confidant. “If we could move of course we should want everything that we had and all that we could get.”

Indeed, Lee had begun thinking of moving, not defending, and his reply to Seddon suggests a mind firmly made up. “To that end he bent his energies,” Longstreet recalled. “His plan or wishes announced, it became useless and improper to offer suggestions leading to a different course.”

But even as Lee settled on his plans—and set his mind about reclaiming Longstreet’s two divisions—John Pemberton was penning frantic letters to Richmond about Grant’s movements through the Mississippi interior. Davis, still ailing, was largely silent in reply, but he confided “intense anxiety over Pemberton’s situation” despite public confidence.

In fact, the timing of Grant’s river crossing could not have worked out better for him in relation to events in the East, which presented more urgency to Richmond because of their proximity. Chancellorsville, on Richmond’s doorstep compared to the Magnolia State, sucked up all the oxygen. Davis’ illness kept him uncharacteristically passive, and even before he recovered, Stonewall Jackson’s May 10 death provided additional, mournful distraction. Davis and Seddon did agree to send reinforcements west from Beauregard, but at a time when additional troops might have also come from the Army of Northern Virginia, Robert E. Lee was feeling his oats after his Chancellorsville victory.

Lee finally had his conference with Davis in Richmond on May 15, arriving on a day of “calamity,” according to Confederate clerk John B. Jones. A fire had torn through the Tredegar Iron Works and Crenshou’s woolen mill, mostly destroying them, and news had just arrived of Grant’s capture of Jackson. “[Vicksburg] may be doomed to fall at last,” Jones wrote. If so, it would be “the worst blow we have yet received.”

Lee, Jones wrote, looked thin and a little pale, while Davis, just back to work, was “not fully himself yet.” Lee was so alarmed at the president’s frailty, in fact, he wrote upon his return to Fredericksburg, “I cannot express the concern I felt at leaving you in such feeble health, with so many anxious thoughts for the welfare of the whole Confederacy weighing upon your mind.”

Although no record exists of the discussion that day, the result of the Lee-Davis confab was the Gettysburg Campaign—or at least the general outlines of it. “It appears, after the consultation of the generals and the President yesterday, it was resolved not to send Pickett’s division to Mississippi,” Jones observed on May 16.

In the weeks that followed, Davis perhaps felt buyer’s remorse for his troop allocations. After two failed assaults on Vicksburg, Grant besieged the city instead. “The position, naturally strong, may soon be intrenched,” said Davis, conceding that Grant had the additional advantage of connecting his army with gunboats and transportation on the Yazoo River to the north of Vicksburg, allowing Federals to bring in more troops, supplies, and big guns—none of which were now available to the cut-off city.

“It is useless to look back,” Davis told Lee, “and it would be unkind to annoy you in the midst of your many cares with the reflections which I have not been able to avoid.” Davis had put the needs of the Confederacy ahead of his home state but now could not stop wondering whether he had prioritized the crisis properly. What if Lee had sent troops to Vicksburg? Would it have made a difference? Was the gambit worth it?

Lee’s foray north of the Mason-Dixon Line was about to begin. The answers to Davis’s questions awaited. 

Adapted from The Summer of ’63: Vicksburg and Tullahoma, edited by Chris Mackowski and Dan Welch (Savas Beatie, 2021).

Reimar Horten and his older brother Walter were German aircraft homebuilders. Their relatively short aircraft-building careers extended from 1933 until the end of World War II, though they did some minor work in Argentina after the war as expatriate Nazis. Had they lived 40 years later, chances are they would have been busy members of an EAA chapter in Germany, making a living selling kits for their high-performance flying-wing sailplanes. 

The Hortens weren’t Burt Rutans. Talented, yes, but not the aeronautical geniuses they’ve been called by some. They built a series of increasingly sophisticated iterations of the same basic design—graceful sweptwing, tailless gliders, though several of their wings were powered. The Hortens produced a grand total of 44 airframes of their dozen basic designs. History has portrayed them as aeronautical visionaries, for in 1940 Messer­schmitt Me-109 pilot Walter Horten, who scored seven Battle of Britain victories as Adolf Galland’s wingman, proposed putting a pair of Germany’s new axial-flow jet engines into a Horten glider. The result was the Ho IX. (Brother Reimar was the aero­dynami­cist and designer; Walter was the facilitator, eventually holding an important Luftwaffe position that allowed him to divert government supplies, staff and facilities for his brother.) 

The jets were first going to be two BMW 003s, but when they underperformed the Hortens switched to Junkers Jumo 004Bs. The Ho IX V2 (Versuch 2, or Test 2—the V1 was an unpowered research glider) officially flew three times, crashing fatally at the end of the third flight when one of its two Jumos failed.

No Horten IX ever flew again, but the brothers had undeniably built and tested the world’s first turbojet flying wing. The Ho IX V2 first flew in March 1945, more than three and a half years before Northrop’s eight-jet YB-49 flying-wing bomber took off. In a number of ways, the Hortens were well ahead of Jack Northrop and his engineers, though Northrop never admitted that. After the war, it was suggested to Northrop that he hire the brothers. “Forget it, they’re just glider designers,” he said condescendingly. The success of the Ho IX was pointed out to him, but Northrop dismissed it as a Gotha design, not a Horten.

Northrop was wrong, but the source of his confusion was the fact that the Luft­waffe, knowing the tiny Horten garage operation could never mass-produce twin-engine jet fighter-bombers, turned the project over to Gotha, a large railroad car manufacturing company with aircraft-building experience. As a result, the Horten jet has come down to us with a confusing suite of names. The actual sole jet-powered wing that flew was the Ho IX V2. The German air ministry (Reichsluftfahrtministerium, or RLM) gave the project an official make and model designation—Ho-229. Because production was assigned to Gotha, some sources still refer to the airplane as a Go-229. Many Luftwaffe aircraft were built by a variety of manufacturers, but a Junkers remained a Ju, a Heinkel an He, a Dornier a Do no matter who actually manufactured it, so “Go-229” is a misnomer. The Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, citing the RLM designation, calls a major artifact in its collection that is about to undergo serious conservation a Horten 229. This despite the fact that no production Horten 229 ever existed; what the Smithsonian has is the never-completed Ho IX V3 built by Gotha.

It bears mentioning that neither Northrop nor the Hortens invented flying wings. Both the concept and actual flying wings have been around since the 1910s. In fact, by the late 1920s, there had been enough experiments with flying wings that the configu­ration was considered passé, and both Jack Northrop and the Hortens were late to the party.

The Hortens have also been credited with designing and building the world’s first stealth fighter. That is a more difficult claim to support. It’s a popular fiction in the “Hitler’s wonder weapons” community, and it got a boost in a 2009 Northrop Grumman–sponsored film, Hitler’s Stealth Fighter, a National Geographic documentary. The doc tried to show that a modern replica of the National Air and Space Museum’s Ho IX V3 bombarded by microwaves revealed moderate radar-deflecting properties. Northrop Grumman’s prototyping shop built the replica for $250,000. That’s a bargain for an hour-long video broadcast on the History Channel that is still being discussed by what some call the “Napkinwaffe”—a dig at where the plans for some of the Luftwaffe’s fantasy fighters were first sketched. (Engineering drawings for the Horten jet reveal this to be not far from the truth.)

Northrop Grumman built the Horten replica entirely of wood, its plywood skins layered with radar-absorbent carbon-­impregnated glue. Only the externally radar-visible instrument panel backing and first-stage compressor disks were metal. Yet the Horten brothers’ original airplane also had an 11-foot-wide center section made of welded steel tubing, and it carried two turbojet engines. Neither of these were part of the Northrop Grumman replica. It could be argued that all this metal might have reflected at least some microwave energy that penetrated the plywood. But Northrop Grumman felt that their special glue made the replica totally opaque to radar.

The replicators also left out the original Ho IX V3’s eight large aluminum fuel tanks. Nor did Northrop Grumman include the underwing bombs that would have been necessary for any attack on a radar-defended target. Externally racked ordnance destroys any semblance of stealth. The Nat Geo film ended up suggesting that an all-wood Horten might have been able to do a fly-by of Britain’s by then obsolete Chain Home low-frequency radar array, but it wouldn’t have been able to bomb anything.

Narration over the film says that it reveals “just how close Nazi engineers were to unleashing a jet that some say could have changed the course of the war.” Not bloody likely, if only because by that time, the Germans were literally out of gas.

The heart of the Horten stealth assertion is a claim by the brothers, made long after the war ended, that they indeed had intended to fasten the layers of the Ho-229’s plywood sheathing with glue mixed with radar-absorbing charcoal. Perhaps they did mean to do that, but the first mention of this plan came in a 1983 book written by Reimar, at a time when the basics of U.S. stealth technology were becoming public knowledge. There is no mention of any attempt to achieve stealthy properties for the Ho-229 by anybody involved in the actual fabrication of the prototypes.

NASM’s restoration facility ran extensive digital-microscopy, X-ray diffraction and Fourier-transfer spectroscopy tests on the wooden structure of their Horten aircraft’s wing and found no evidence of any carbon or charcoal impregnation of the glue. The black specks that Northrop Grumman had assumed were evidence of the Hortens’ attempt to create a radar blanket were found to be simply oxidized wood.

Reimar Horten originally planned to sheathe the Ho IX in aluminum, which hardly suggests that he had stealth as an objective. It was only when he discovered to his surprise that the Messerschmitt Me-163 rocket plane was covered in plywood that he realized high speed didn’t rule out using wood. He then switched to more easily obtainable plywood veneer, but for reasons that had nothing to do with its radar attenuation and everything to do with its availability. 

It’s also worth noting that the Ho-229 was intended to be a day fighter, a bomber interceptor, though eventually, as was true of so many Luftwaffe fantasy fighters, it was to undertake a variety of other roles. Walter Horten had originally advocated jet power because, as a fighter pilot himself, he wanted to build a better airplane than the Focke Wulf Fw-190, which he considered to be an inferior, spin-prone design. 

So why would stealth have been a criterion, if an Ho-229 would never confront radar? It wasn’t. Hitler’s “stealth fighter” was simply intended to be Hitler’s aerodynamically efficient, fast, maneuverable fighter.

How did the Hitler’s stealth fighter myth take root? Certainly there’s fertile ground upon which such legends can be sown among the model builders and war gamers who love nothing more than mysterious Luftwaffe wonder weapons that would have reversed the course of the war had it only lasted another month. But none seem to understand the years-long prototyping/testing/production process that is a necessary part of bringing a sophisticated aircraft from napkin sketch to combat. Exactly three years and a day passed between the Messerschmitt Me-262 twin-jet’s first flight and the beginning of its operational readiness. Following such a schedule, the Ho-229 would have been ready for combat in early 1948.

The Ho IX, precursor of the 229, was the work of a garage shop. The V1 and V2 versions were built in what was essentially a three-car workshop, out of largely unairworthy structural material. The center section steel tubing was much like what today suffices for building trade electrical conduit, and the Hortens were notorious for using household-grade ply­wood veneer for their airplanes’ external sheathing. 

How professional were the Hortens? Some of their work raises questions. Walter Horten was assigned the job of calculating the V2’s center of gravity, for example, which he did using a steel measuring tape. Unfortunately, he never noticed that the first 10 centimeters of the tape had broken off, so his false measurements determined that the airplane needed substantial ballast in the nose. Since the CG was 10 centimeters off, the test pilot assigned to the first flight found that he could barely keep the airplane aloft with full back stick, and when he tried to flare for landing the airplane hit so hard that it badly damaged the gear. And the Hortens’ fabricators welded and rewelded the V2’s center section as the engine choice flip-flopped between BMW and Junkers, which created heat stresses that no experienced aircraft builder would have allowed. Skilled welders would have cut out and rebuilt entire sections of the structure.

The Hortens also needed to adapt cast-off components to their Ho IX airframe, which led to its ungainly nosewheel. The airplane’s main gear is fashioned from Me-109 parts, and the enormous nosewheel, almost 5 feet in diameter, is the tailwheel, tire and retraction mechanism from a Heinkel He-177 Greif, a benighted heavy bomber. It was a fortui­tous choice nonetheless. The oversize nosewheel put the Ho IX at a 7-degree angle of incidence at rest, which facilitated takeoff without requiring the forceful rotation other Horten designs had needed.

After the war, a number of Horten designs were examined by the Allies, initially the British. If any conspiracy theorists noticed the byline at the beginning of this article, they’ll by now be hyperventilating, for the “Wilkinson Report,” written by a committee of British aviation authorities headed by soaring expert Kenneth Wilkinson, was supposedly highly critical of the Hortens. (If Kenneth and I are related, it is to the same degree that Henry and Harrison Ford are.) 

British aviation writer Lance Cole, apparently a serious Horten conspira­cist, wrote that the Wilkinson Report was “a way of helping to shield the reality of the Horten achievement so that greater powers could seize the ideas and keep them unseen for decades…[it] dismissed their ideas and works as apparent flights of fancy; stemming, it seemed, from what felt like a British attitude of the Hortens being men ‘without the proper background.'”

I can find none of this in the evenhanded, rigorous, authori­tative, technical 60-page Wilkinson Report. The paper does point out that British engineers tended to trust wind-tunnel data more than they did inflight assessments, but admits the Hortens had no access to such a tunnel. It calls the Hortens’ careers “a remarkable record of progress in spite of [such] obstacles.”

One thing that did baffle Wilkinson’s committee was that so little of Reimar Horten’s work was of the slightest use to the German war effort. Reimar was far more interested in record-­setting and competition gliders, and he continued to design and build them throughout the war. Some historians, in fact, think that he viewed the jet wing as a “flying résumé” that would help him get a job in the U.S. or Britain after the war. Reimar would have loved to carry on his career in the States. Despite membership in the Nazi Party and his work as a Luftwaffe assault-glider instructor, he had first tried to emigrate to America in 1938 but had been refused an exit visa since he was thought to have had access to classified information.

this article first appeared in AVIATION HISTORY magazine

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Why a flying wing? What’s wrong with the conventional designs that have served so well since the early 1900s? Certainly there have been some useful variations—canards, pushers, semi-tailless deltas, blended wing/body proposals, even Vin­cent Burnelli’s perennial lifting-fuselage concept—but the pure flying wing has always been an outlier. What is its appeal?

Theoretically, the advantages of a flying wing are sub­stantial. A conventional design—a Boeing 777, a Cess­­na Skyhawk, an F-22 Raptor, you name it—has wings that contribute lift despite inevitable induced and parasitic drag…plus a fuselage, engine nacelle(s) and an empennage that contribute nothing but drag. Zero lift. Indeed a conventional horizontal stabilizer often adds negative lift—down­force—to an airplane. Yes, the fuselage can carry passengers, cargo or ordnance, but so can a flying wing.

One of the major functions of a fuselage is to support the empennage that provides pitch and yaw control for a conventional airplane. A flying wing totally eliminates the drag of an aft fuselage and empennage. In fact, every part of a flying wing is a lifting surface. An all-wing aircraft also allows for the efficiency of span-loading. Much of a conventional airplane’s weight is concentrated near its centerline, hence the videos of bendy-­wing Boeing Dream­liners looking as though they’re trying to clap hands above their fuselages. The forces concentrated at the wing/fuselage juncture of a conventional airplane are enormous, while a flying wing can spread the entire load from wingtip to wingtip, thus allowing for a lighter and more efficient structure. The weight is spread out where the lift is, so a flying wing can have a large, efficient, high-­aspect-ratio span without requiring a heavy framework to support it.

For a stealthy airplane, a true flying wing has a distinct advantage: It does away with all radar-reflective vertical surfaces, particularly stabilizers and rudders. This, plus its wooden construction and lack of radar-reflecting prop discs, is what gave Northrop Grum­man’s Ho IX replica its comparatively small radar cross-­section, not a miracle glue.

The disadvantage of a flying wing is its natural instability, with no tail to provide counterbalance in pitch and yaw. The Hortens overcame much of this with enlightened wing, airfoil and control-­surface design, but their airplanes still exhibited the classic flying-­wing waddle, semi-technically termed Dutch roll. The Ho IX V2’s flights had already revealed moderate lateral instability. It would have made the Ho-229 a dreadful gun platform as a fighter and a handful as a bomber. (This was the characteristic that doomed the North­rop YB-49 flying wing in its competition with what became the Convair B-36; bomb-run accuracy was impossible to achieve when yaw/roll coupling determined the meandering flight path. Nor did it help that one YB-49 went out of control and crashed fatally during stall testing in June 1948.)

By the time Gotha took over the Ho-229 project, the Hor­ten brothers had lost interest and moved on to their planned masterpiece—a six-turbojet flying wing “Amerika Bomber.” The Ho XVIII never was built, but it filled another niche in the Napkinwaffe. Some still say the Amerika Bomber (several German airframers were racing to build one) was intended to drop an atomic bomb on New York. Fortunately, the Germans would never have been able to build such a weapon, having lost their Norwegian deuterium source, but they did have the capability to put together a dirty bomb—a large conventional bomb encased in strongly radioactive materi­al that would have polluted a wide area with radiation.

Though Northrop wanted nothing to do with the Horten brothers, the company did acquire several of their gliders for research after WWII, leading conspiracists to claim that Northrop stole the Hortens’ secrets for its own flying wings. Actually, Northrop depicted an Ho VI glider in postwar avia­tion magazine ads as an example of “one of the Nazi attempts to adapt U.S. flying-wing design for eventual mili­tary use.”

The Smithsonian’s Ho IX V3 was brought to America as part of Operation Seahorse, a U.S. Navy counterpart to the better-known Operation Paperclip campaign to acquire as many interesting Luftwaffe aircraft as possible. But it was never flown and in fact was only half-­completed. It was first assessed at the Royal Aircraft Establishment, in Britain—the source of the Wilkinson Report data—and was then sent to both Wright and Freeman fields for Army Air Forces scrutiny. The jet wing ended up stored outdoors in Chicago at a facility that was intended to become a national air museum. In 1952 the Smithsonian acquired the airplane, though it was by then badly beaten up by numerous moves and exposure to the weather. It was moved once more to “a secret government warehouse,” according to published reports. That warehouse was actually the Smithsonian’s quite unsecret Suit­land, Md., restoration facility, where it stayed for 60-plus years, part of that time stored in an open wooden shed.

The artifact is in sad shape today, much of its plywood sheathing delaminated and rotting, its metal frame and landing gear corroded, and parts missing. NASM has it on the short list for major work, and the V3 can currently be seen at the museum’s restoration facility in the Udvar-Hazy Center at Dulles Airport.

That work will not be restoration but conservation: stopping the rot and corrosion, cleaning up the airframe and assembling the center section and outer wings into a single unit. Those wings may or may not have been part of the V3. Only one wing came to the U.S. with the center section, and another was later found some distance from the Gotha shop. 

The Hortens’ last hurrah took place without their participation. In July 1947, there was a notorious occurrence at Roswell, N.M, known forever after as the “Roswell Inci­dent.” It allegedly involved the crash of a flying saucer and the snatching by the Army Air Forces of the bodies of three aliens aboard it. The Roswell Incident engendered decades’ worth of tabloids portraying the gourd-headed ETs perhaps still stored in freezers in a heavily guarded Area 51 hangar. The government tried to explain away the crash by saying it had been a high-­altitude weather balloon; it was actually a secret surveillance balloon intended to keep track of Soviet atomic bomb testing. But some observers with more specialized knowledge had an intriguing theory.

In 1937, Reimar Horten decided that the ultimate flying-wing shape would be a parabola—a wing with a near-circular leading edge planform, which would provide the minimum induced drag and maximum lift. The Hortens built just one parabola-­wing glider but never flew it; the airplane was torched after warping and becoming unglued during winter storage. But wait, there’s more: Supposedly the AAF found out about the Horten parabola wing and decided to build a powered version to secretly test Reimar’s theory. It was this airplane, looking uncannily like two-thirds of a flying saucer, that crashed in New Mexico in 1947.

Nobody has yet explained the aliens, however. 

For further reading, contributing editor Stephan Wilkinson recommends: The Horten Brothers and Their All-Wing Aircraft, by David Myhra; and Horten Ho 229 Spirit of Thuringia: The Horten All-Wing Jet Fighter, by Andrei Shepelev and Huib Ottens.

This feature originally appeared in the November 2016 issue of Aviation History Magazine.

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Alexander Hamilton’s grandson was born to be a great general, but illness intervened

Schuyler Hamilton could not have been born into a family draped with a grander political and military legacy. Both of his grandfathers—Generals Alexander Hamilton and Philip Schuyler—are closely associated with the battle for American independence and the building of the new nation.

Being born into the “Hamilton clan,” Schuyler undoubtedly regarded it as his generation’s duty to emulate the heroes of the Revolutionary War, most importantly through heroism on the battlefield. Schuyler Hamilton did just that with his gallant service during the Mexican War. But this “brilliant officer, who gave great promise,” had an unremarkable career in the Civil War, beset by disease and resigning from the Union Army in 1863.

Born on July 22, 1822, Schuyler was one of the seven children of soldier/lawyer John Church Hamilton. John, Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton’s fifth child, served as General William Henry Harrison’s aide-de-camp during the War of 1812. A military career seemed most appropriate for John Hamilton’s second son, and Schuyler entered the U.S. Military Academy in 1837 at the age of 15. He would graduate 24th in West Point’s Class of 1841, two spots ahead of future Gettysburg hero John F. Reynolds. (Other notables to graduate alongside Schuyler were Nathaniel Lyon, Israel “Fighting Dick” Richardson, and cousins Richard and Robert Garnett.)

The Rev. George Deshon, a classmate and roommate of Ulysses S. Grant (Class of 1843), remembered that Cadet Hamilton “was always pleasant and cheerful—a good companion and a great favorite.” Hamilton shared a room for two years with future General-in-Chief Henry Halleck, a reclusive New Yorker. Halleck went on to graduate third in his class, and would remain lifelong friends with Schuyler, eventually marrying one of his sisters, Elizabeth, in 1855.

Commissioned a second lieutenant in the 1st U.S. Infantry upon graduation, Schuyler Hamilton served in Iowa and Wisconsin from 1841 to 1844. He returned to West Point in November 1844 and served as the assistant instructor of infantry tactics until June 1845. When Schuyler left the position in 1845, “his friends at the U.S. Military Academy” presented him with a decorated Springfield M-1822 musket.

When war broke out with Mexico in May 1846, expectations were certainly high for Lieutenant Hamilton. An observer noted that the young officer’s “elegance and modesty in the drawing room” complimented his “his gallantry in the field of battle.” He carried some of the same physical features as his famed grandfather, Alexander: deep-set eyes, long nose, strong chin, and a firm jaw and mouth.

Philip Hone, mayor of New York 1826-27 and a noted diarist of the day, was convinced Schuyler Hamilton would live up to his grandfather’s heroic reputation, stating, “With such blood in his veins, and such a name, he could not fail to acquit himself with honor.” Hamilton did not disappoint, returning home a national sensation after risking life and limb helping to secure the body of Lt. Col. William H. Watson, commander of the Battalion of Baltimore and District of Columbia Volunteers, after Watson fell during the Battle of Monterrey in September 1846. He was brevetted a first lieutenant “for gallant and meritorious conduct in several conflicts at Monterrey.”

In the days after the battle, Hamilton’s leg was fractured when he was kicked by Brig. Gen. Thomas Marshall’s horse. After recovering, Hamilton returned to Mexico for Maj. Gen. Winfield Scott’s 1847 amphibious landing at Vera Cruz. Hamilton was Scott’s aide-de-camp, initiating nearly a decade of service under “Old Fuss and Feathers.”

During a meeting of officers at Brevet Brig. Gen. William Worth’s headquarters at Chalco, east of Mexico City, Scott exhibited interest in exploring a foundry in the mountains nearby that was rumored to be manufacturing ammunition for the Mexican army. Hamilton volunteered to lead 15 dragoons to “ascertain its capacity for casting bullets in case they should be required.” Scott favored the idea, but ordered Worth to supply Hamilton with a larger detachment including 50 cavalrymen from the Third Dragoons and 100 men from the Sixth Infantry Regiment.

The party reconnoitered the foundry unmolested. On August 13, 1847, Hamilton and the dragoons were riding back to headquarters ahead of the infantry column when a force of 250 Mexican lancers carrying a skull-and-crossbones flag emblazoned with the words “I give no quarter” attacked the outnumbered dragoons. While Hamilton was fighting face-to-face with a Mexican lancer, a second Mexican cavalryman rode past and skewered the American through the back.

The lance point entered Hamilton’s body under the shoulder blade, punctured his right lung and exited near his collarbone. The sheer force of the rider’s thrust and the motion of the horse going in the opposite direction caused the lance head to snap off in Hamilton’s body. Miraculously, the young lieutenant remained upright in his saddle despite this fearful wound. When Captain William Hoffman of the Sixth Infantry arrived on the scene, he ordered his men to assist the wounded officer who “could with difficulty sustain himself on his horse.” Hamilton told Hoffman, “Don’t mind me, sir, but go to the assistance of my party.” 

Hoffman’s infantrymen transported the desperately wounded lieutenant on a litter to a hacienda, where a French doctor temporarily cared for him. American surgeons arriving on the scene discovered that the two-and-a-half-inch wide spear point had been embedded six and a half inches into Hamilton’s body. It had to be pried out by breaking two of Hamilton’s ribs. After the surgery was completed, a horse-litter made of tent-cloth and two long canal-boat setting poles allowed the wounded officer to travel “comfortably” on Scott’s march toward Mexico City. Hamilton returned to duty eventually, but this desperate wound caused him misery “which he never ceased to suffer for more than half a century.” 

Hamilton’s exploits made him an overnight sensation. Scott reported afterward that the affair was of “great daring and brilliancy” and it won the lieutenant “the esteem and admiration of the whole army.” Hoffman declared that his “conduct is spoken of in the highest terms.” Hamilton even had a poem dedicated to him and a romantic engraving was printed depicting him receiving the lance wound.

Hamilton was brevetted to the rank of captain in August 1847 for “gallant and meritorious conduct” and in November 1848 was presented a Tiffany & Co. sword “as a slight Testimony of the admiration and respect of his fellow citizens and friends of New York for his distinguished gallantry and conduct throughout the Mexican War.”

After the war, Captain Hamilton stayed on Scott’s staff. In 1852, he authored a history of the American flag, which he dedicated to Scott. He also served as secretary to the Board of Commissioners of the Military Asylum (Scott was the president). Described as a “most worthy selection,” he handled all of the pension claims submitted by disabled soldiers.

Hamilton resigned from the army in May 1855, hoping to turn to a future in business. He applied for a position at the bank of Lucas, Turner and Co.  in San Francisco, California. Possessing no previous experience as a banker, Hamilton offered to work for the bank’s manager, William T. Sherman, for three months without pay to learn the trade. Sherman accepted this offer, and within a week Hamilton was “diligently and cheerfully performing a variety of tasks.” Sherman and Hamilton appeared to have worked well together, Sherman telling Brig. Gen. Thomas Ewing Jr. in 1861 that Hamilton was “a particular friend of mine.”

Hamilton left the banking business the next year and joined his old friend, Henry Halleck, in the mining business. Halleck at the time served as director general of the New Almaden Quicksilver (Mercury) Mine in California. He appointed Hamilton to serve as his assistant chief.

For reasons that are unclear, Hamilton returned east to Branford, Conn., in 1858 and worked as a farmer until the outbreak of the American Civil War. He was one of the first eager applicants arriving at the doorstep of newly appointed Colonel Marshall Lefferts of the 7th New York National Guard seeking a spot in his organization. Hamilton entered the regiment as a lowly private and marched to Washington in April 1861. When Scott discovered that his old acquaintance was in Washington, he had Hamilton appointed to his staff as a military secretary with the rank of lieutenant colonel, followed by a promotion to full colonel. 

Hamilton regularly acted as a liaison between President Abraham Lincoln and Scott, who was by this time elderly and in ill health. He remembered one humorous incident in July 1861. About 4 a.m., Hamilton hurried to the White House with a telegraph reporting Brig. Gen. George McClellan’s victory at Rich Mountain in what is now West Virginia. Upon Hamilton’s thump at his door, Lincoln “exhibiting some little vexation” at having been awakened for the sixth time that night, came outside wearing only a red flannel shirt too short for his body, visibly trying to pull it down to cover his bare legs. He had to leave his dressing gown behind with Mrs. Lincoln, who was tangled up in it and in a deep sleep. 

Hamilton handed Lincoln the telegraph reassuring him it would bring him “the greatest pleasure.” It had the desired effect, and Lincoln exclaimed, “Colonel, if you will come to me every night with just such telegrams as that I will come out not only in my red shirt but without any shirt at all. Tell General Scott so.”

The newly appointed Maj. Gen. Henry Halleck, managing the Department of Missouri, called on his friend once more. He summoned Hamilton to St. Louis in November to serve as his assistant chief of staff. Commissioned a brigadier general of volunteers that same month, Hamilton remained with Halleck until January. Shortly after, he took command of the Second Division in the Army of the Mississippi under Brig. Gen. John Pope, a fellow veteran of Zachary Taylor’s army.

Hamilton got on well with Pope and the other senior officers of the Army of the Mississippi. One of his colleagues was then-Colonel Joseph Plummer, a West Point classmate and fellow officer of the 1st Infantry during the Mexican War. Brigadier General David S. Stanley recalled the regular and relaxed dialogue that existed between these officers, “General Pope, General Gordon Granger, Schuyler Hamilton, Louis Marshall, Edward Kirby Smith, Joe Plummer, George A. Williams, my classmate, were in this army and we had a very pleasant and social set who sat around the campfires in the evening and talked about things old and new. Pope was very agreeable and a very witty man and often turned the laugh on his staff and others.”

Hamilton’s division saw action in the operations leading up to the capture of New Madrid, Mo., and the Confederate river fortress Island No. 10 in February–April 1862. During these maneuvers, Hamilton advised Pope to cut a canal in the bayous east of New Madrid to bypass the Gibraltar-like defenses of Island No. 10. Pope took this advice, and upon completion of the canal, transport ships conveyed his 25,000 soldiers to the rear of the island leading to its fall and the capture of between 4,000–6,000 Confederates. Pope stated in a letter to Halleck that he was “indebted” to Hamilton for the recommendation, and in his official report on May 2, 1862, specified the idea “was suggested to me by General Schuyler Hamilton.”

Hamilton’s notable recommendation generated controversy that lasted for over three decades. Colonel Josiah W. Bissell, the engineer officer who actually built the canal, claimed it was he who suggested it. Colonel George A. Williams insisted the idea came from a saw-mill worker only known as Morrison. Until the end of his life, Hamilton was adamant that others tried to rob him of this credit and that he was the “sole inventor of the project.”

After the fall of New Madrid and Island No. 10, Hamilton commanded the 3rd Division of the Army of the Mississippi and then the Right Wing of the army during the campaign to besiege the Confederate suppy depot at Corinth, Miss., in the spring of 1862. That May, the hardships of field service and poor weather led to Hamilton contracting typhoid fever. He remained in the field even though he was nearly incapacitated, finally going on sick leave in July, still suffering from a combination of chronic diarrhea and severe cramps. He was appointed major general of volunteers in September 1862, though the promotion was never confirmed by the Senate. Hamilton returned to the field in November 1862 at the request of Maj. Gen. William Rosecrans, who sought his services in his Army of the Cumberland, but was ordered back to New York in December for treatment.

Never able to overcome his debilitating illness, Hamilton resigned from the army in February 1863, depriving the Union of a resourceful general. One account soberly noted that he “had great experience and ability, but no physical power left.” Brigadier General Manning F. Force remembered Hamilton as, “an officer whose gentle refinement veiled his absolute resolution and endurance till they were called into practice by danger and privation.” President Lincoln reluctantly accepted his resignation, “with much regret,” attributed to the “ill health and disability he incurred in the service of his country, wherein he was highly distinguished for ability and good conduct.” Hamilton returned to his farm and sat out for the remainder of the war, an uneventful end for a soldier with so much promise.

He sought to be named minister to Denmark in 1869 during Grant’s administration, with the blessings of his old friends, William T. Sherman and John Pope. He boasted to Sherman to have been the leading factor in Grant taking command of the army operating against Forts Henry and Donelson. He claimed that he knew “Grant was the man” before he gained his notoriety, urging Halleck to select him over the other two candidates, Samuel R. Curtis and John Pope: “I served Genl Grant once—He does not know it….Without my suggestion it might have been Pope or Curtis instead of Grant.” Even with this reasoning, Hamilton was passed over and instead Christopher Columbus Andrews, another former Civil War general, received the ministerial post.

In 1871 the former soldier petitioned Secretary of War William W. Belknap to be placed on the retired list of the Regular Army with the rank of lieutenant colonel or colonel for his service on Winfield Scott’s staff back in 1861. This request was denied. Hamilton afterward declared that “Some wiseacres in Washington have declared it was not a commission, though I was in the most intimate confidence of President Lincoln, his Cabinet and General Scott, and gave orders in the name of both the President and General Scott to Generals and other high functionaries.”

He served as the hydrographic engineer in the New York City Department of Docks from 1871 until 1875. He returned to the spotlight in 1890 when his son, Robert Ray Hamilton, was found drowned in the Snake River in Yellowstone Park. At a dinner celebrating the 140th anniversary of the birth of Alexander Hamilton, General Hamilton gave an eyewitness account of an accidental meeting between Aaron Burr and Hamilton’s daughter to the pleasure of the dinner’s guests.

The wealthy general was restricted to his New York home in the last years of his life. Brevet Brig. Gen. James Grant Wilson recalled with pleasure “but to the last the General enjoyed his cigar and book, living over again his army experiences with a friend. He was certainly the most cheerful man for one suffering so much from painful bodily infirmities that I have ever met.” His former classmate George Deshon, now a priest of the Catholic Paulist order, wrote in 1903 that, “I have met him several times since the Civil War and always found him the same unaffected pleasant gentleman as before.” Before his death, he was said to have made the modest remark to Wilson, “Well, before you return, I shall be across the river with Scott and Grant and Sherman.” He died of a combination of syncope, colitis, senescence, and asthenia on March 18, 1903, at the age of 83.

The New York Tribune reported his frugal last wishes. “It is my desire that my funeral be the simplest kind, my casket not to exceed in cost $100, and but three or four carriages to follow it to Greenwood Cemetery. Bury me besides my deceased wife, Cornelia, the daughter of Robert Ray and Cornelia Prime.” He left his Tiffany sword, and the attached sword knot originally owned by Alexander Hamilton, to his only surviving son. 

Hamilton came up short in achieving his grandfather’s legacy during the Civil War. One can only speculate what role he could have played later in the war had he not been forced to resign in 1863. Rosecrans could have certainly used him as a senior commander in the Army of the Cumberland, but instead Maj. Gen. Joseph J. Reynolds was sent in his place. His connections with Sherman, Halleck, Scott, and even Lincoln certainly would have helped him to find a place as a division or corps commander upon his recovery. If not a spectacular general, Schuyler Hamilton proved to be a resourceful commander for the short duration he served during the Civil War. He will remain one of those thought-provoking “what ifs” of the war.

_____

A Cleveland native, Frank Jastrzembski is the author of Valentine Baker’s Heroic Stand at Tashkessen 1877: A Tarnished British Soldier’s Glorious Victory (2017) and contributes regularly to the blog Emerging Civil War.

This story from America’s Civil War was posted on Historynet.com on May 4, 2020.

The Battle of France began on May 10, 1940. It ended just six weeks later on June 25, when the French government capitulated to Nazi Germany after a disastrous, humiliating defeat. By that time, Belgium, the Netherlands, and tiny Luxembourg had also fallen to the Germans, leaving Adolf Hitler in complete mastery of Western Europe.

Although shocking at the time, the fall of France has since come to be seen as the inevitable result of a supine French high command and a French republic demoralized by the political infighting of the 1930s. The famed French historian Marc Bloch, who served as a reserve officer in 1940, summed up the debacle in the title of his war memoir: Strange Defeat.

But as Harvard professor Ernest R. May persuasively argued not long ago, the events of May–June 1940 might better be summarized by the title Strange Victory. Although conceding that German air and armored doctrine was better than that of the Allies, he noted that the Allies actually had more aircraft, more and heavier tanks, and more infantry than did their adversary. Far from defeatist, Maurice Gamelin, the French commander in chief, greeted the May offensive with an almost jaunty confidence, while many of Hitler’s senior field marshals feared the worst. As for the notion of some national French malaise, May considers it the worst kind of hindsight. At the time, the French were quite willing to fight (and during the battle France lost 240,000 dead to prove it), whereas international observers in Berlin—and Hitler’s own Gestapo— noted that most Germans greeted the outbreak of war with disquiet.

Key to the German triumph was a fateful decision to thrust into France in a go for-broke armored offensive through Belgium’s Ardennes forest, followed by an audacious crossing of the Meuse River near the French border town of Sedan. The French troops defending this region were second-rate, outnumbered, and outclassed. The best Allied divisions—as the Germans anticipated—had responded to the German offensive by driving rap idly into Belgium, hoping to establish a strong defensive line east of Brussels, and sending their very best mechanized forces on a lightning run toward Breda in the Netherlands. The Allies adopted this strategy, known as Plan D, because they felt certain the main German thrust would come there—across the Belgian plain—as had been the case in 1914.

It took the Allied high command four fateful days to discover their error, and by then it was too late. German armored columns slashed their way to the English Channel; by May 21 the best Allied troops were hopelessly cut off in Belgium. A few hundred thousand would escape in the famous Dunkirk evacuation; the rest would perish or sit out the war in German POW camps.

This “strange defeat” destroyed France as a great power and left Great Britain to face Germany alone for the next year, until Hitler launched his massive attack on the Soviet Union. Yet it requires only a minimal rewrite of history to convert defeat into respectable defense, even out right victory. Until January 1940, Case Yellow, the German operational plan for a western offensive, contemplated a primary attack against Belgium and Holland. The objective was not to defeat France in a bold stroke, but to establish forward airfields for what would presumably be a protracted war against Britain and France. In other words, the German high command proposed to do exactly what the Allies expected.

Everything changed because on the evening of January 9, one Luftwaffe major named Helmuth Reinberger accepted a generous offer made by another, Erich Hoenmanns. Reinberger’s assignment was to convey details of the most recent revision of the German plan to 1st Air Corps headquarters in Cologne. He planned to go by train, but Hoenmanns said he would be delighted to fly Reinberger in his Messerschmitt Me 108 Taifun, an advanced four-seat touring aircraft. During the next-morning flight the Taifun’s Argus V-8 engine developed mechanical trouble, and Hoenmanns decided to make an emergency landing. A heavy mist obscured the terrain, but Hoenmanns descended until he could make out the broad ribbon of the Rhine River and landed safely on what he sup posed was German soil.

He was disastrously mistaken. The broad ribbon turned out to be the Meuse River, and the Taifun was on Belgian soil, near the town of Mechelen. Belgian soldiers quickly appeared to investigate. Reinberger desperately tried to burn the plans entrusted to him, but the Belgians captured most of the documents intact. Belgian intelligence soon confirmed that they were genuine. The conservative version of Case Yellow had to be scrapped. But for the incident near Mechelen, it is almost certainly the plan that would have been implemented.

Such an offensive would have run into the best Allied divisions, which had more tanks than the Germans. They were better tanks too, with larger main guns and heavier armor. Two tank battles that did occur in May 1940 (Hainaut, Belgium, and Arras, France) suggest that the Germans would have suffered heavier losses than the Allies. The likely result for the Germans would have been, at worst, an outright defeat and, at best, an offensive that achieved its limited objective but at such heavy cost as to preclude a follow up offensive into France.

Either way, the French Third Republic would have survived intact. A quick col lapse of Nazi Germany would have been the likely sequel to German defeat, and even a successful initial German occupation of Belgium and the Netherlands would have left Germany facing a strategically tenuous situation. First, the French army, the British Expeditionary Force, and surviving Belgian (and perhaps Dutch) forces would have tied down most German forces in a replay of the 1914–1918 western front. Second, German submarine bases would have been confined to the Norwegian fjords; without access to the French ports, their ability to depredate Atlantic shipping would have been greatly curtailed.

Third, Italy—which, in direct response to the unexpected German success, leapt into the war on June 10, 1940—would likely have continued its neutrality. Fourth, both the French and British armed forces would have grown stronger over time (especially the French air force, which had excellent aircraft but was caught in the middle of an organizational transition at the time of the German attack). Finally, an invasion of the Soviet Union would have been out of the question for Germany, and Stalin almost certainly would eventually have ignored the August 1939 German–Soviet Treaty of Non-Aggression—just as Hitler eventually did—and attacked Nazi Germany.

Had France held, it is difficult to imagine any subsequent scenario sufficiently plausible to restore the trajectory of events back toward an early French defeat: if France did not fall in 1940, it quite likely would not have fallen at all. And Germany would have suffered an early defeat, perhaps in 1940, certainly no later than 1942. A sputtering Argus V-8 engine may well have been the unlikely pivot on which the whole history of the Second World War turned.

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Japan never seriously considered the following scenario—but might have been wise to do so.

On December 15, 1941, naval and air units of the empire of Japan suddenly and deliberately attack the Dutch naval squadron at Batavia in the Netherlands East Indies (present-day Indonesia). They destroy or damage all five cruisers and eight destroyers, leaving fifty-five-year-old Vice Adm. Conrad Emil Lambert Helfrich with only twenty submarines and numerous but frail torpedo boats with which to retaliate.

Shortly thereafter the Japanese Sixteenth Army invades the Dutch portion of the island of Borneo—scrupulously avoiding portions administered by Great Britain— then rapidly follows up with attacks on Java, Sumatra, Sulawesi, and other major islands in the East Indies archipelago. The puny Dutch garrisons are swiftly overrun, the Dutch naval bases at Batavia and Surabaya quickly fall, and by the end of February 1942, Japan has secured the Netherlands East Indies’ cornucopia of petroleum, natural gas, tin, manganese, copper, nickel, bauxite, and coal.

The Japanese government had taken the first step toward an attack on the East Indies in July 1941, when it demanded and received from Vichy France the right to station troops, construct airfields, and base warships in southern Indochina. The German invasion of the Soviet Union the previous month had removed any threat from that direction and cleared the way for a thrust southward. The southward move, in turn, was predicated on Japan’s desire to secure enough natural resources to become self-sufficient. It was dangerously dependent on America for scrap iron, steel, and above all oil: 80 percent of its petroleum came from the United States. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration had been attempting for years to use economic sanctions as lever age to force Japan to abandon its invasion of China. As expected, the move into southern Indochina triggered a total freeze of Japanese assets in the United States and a complete oil embargo.

Japanese leaders initially assume that if they proceed with their intention to grab the Dutch East Indies, the inevitable con sequence will be war with both the British Commonwealth and the United States. Consequently, plans also include attacks on British bases at Singapore and Hong Kong, American bases in the Philippine Islands, and even the forward base of the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor.

Careful review of the British and American situations, however, prompts a reconsideration by Japan’s planners. They conclude that the beleaguered British cannot afford to add Japan to their existing adversaries, Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. Britain especially cannot do so without a guarantee that the United States will enter a war with Japan. And although the Roosevelt administration might engage in threats, American public opinion is so averse to war that the president has been unable to persuade the country to enter the fight against the Nazis despite their conquest of most of Europe. Indeed, a July 1941 bill to extend the nation’s peacetime draft—which the Roosevelt administration deemed fundamental to U.S. national security—passed by a single vote.

The revised Japanese plan therefore contemplates an attack on the Dutch East Indies alone, albeit with most of the Imperial Japanese Navy held in reserve should either Great Britain or the United States declare war.

Events completely vindicate Japan’s gamble. British prime minister Winston Churchill reinforces Singapore but otherwise adopts a defensive posture in Southeast Asia. Already thwarted in his efforts to make the case for war against Hitler’s Germany, neither Roosevelt nor his advisers can think of a rationale persuasive enough to convince the public that American boys should fight and die because the Japanese have overrun an obscure European colony.

How plausible is this scenario? There is little doubt that Japan could have swiftly defeated the Dutch and seized the East Indies in mid December 1941. Even when (as occurred historically) the Americans, British, and Australians added their available warships to the defense of the Dutch colony, the Japanese had little trouble overrunning the entire archipelago by March 1942.

The harder question to answer definitively is what course Britain and America actually would have pursued if Japan had bypassed their Pacific possessions and also, of course, refrained from an air strike against Pearl Harbor.

The British plainly could not have sustained such a war without American help. True, Great Britain and the United States had been steadily making common cause against Nazi Germany. The U.S. Congress had passed the Lend-Lease Act in March 1941, and U.S. destroyers had begun escorting convoys bound for Great Britain to the mid-Atlantic before handing them off to their British counterparts. In August, Churchill and Roosevelt had met for a secret conference in the waters off Newfoundland, a summit that had included military as well as diplomatic discussions. And by the autumn of 1941, the U.S. Navy was engaged in an undeclared but lethal war with German U-boats.

Cooperation to prepare for a conflict with Japan, however, was considerably less advanced. At the Atlantic Conference, the British had given the Americans text for a proposed warning to Japan to be sent jointly by Great Britain, the Netherlands, and the United States, stating that if Japan pursued further aggression in Southeast Asia, the three countries “would be compelled to take counter measures even though these might lead to war.” Roosevelt agreed to make such a stern statement— but unilaterally, not jointly—and as matters turned out, the president told the Japanese ambassador merely that if Japan struck southward, he would take steps “toward insuring the safety and security of the United States.”

As the crisis with Japan deepened, Roosevelt’s top military advisers told him that while they preferred a less provocative diplomatic line toward Japan, the United States could not stand by if the Japanese struck American, British, or Dutch possessions and would have no choice but to take military action in that case. Privately Roosevelt agreed, and on December 1 he told the British ambassador that in the event Japan attacked the Dutch East Indies or British possessions in Southeast Asia, “we should all be in this together.” When the ambassador pressed him to be specific, Roosevelt replied that the British could count on “armed support” from the United States.

But the president also worried about his ability to do so if American possessions continued to be spared by the Japanese. As historian David Reynolds points out, “Roosevelt could only propose war; Congress had to declare it. From a purely diplomatic point of view, Pearl Harbor was therefore a godsend.” It would have been difficult to persuade Congress that an attack upon the Dutch East Indies alone demanded a military response; it might well have proved impossible.

In the end the dilemma never arose because the Japanese never considered such an alternative strategy. Once the Japanese government decided that it must seize the natural resources of the Dutch East Indies, it never seriously considered any plan but a simultaneous attack against the British and the United States in the Pacific. This decision was driven overwhelmingly by operational considerations: Japan’s military planners believed they could not run the risk of leaving the American air and naval bases in the Philippines athwart their line of communications with the East Indies. For that reason they concluded the Philippines must be captured as well.

Ironically, by refusing to run such an operational risk, they wound up taking an even larger strategic risk, for the attack on Pearl Harbor was premised on the highly tenuous assumption of a short war with the United States followed by a negotiated peace that would allow Japan to keep its territorial gains. Japan bet that American public opinion would never countenance a prolonged and bloody Pacific war and that the combination of the blow to the U.S. Navy at Pearl Harbor and Japan’s erection of a hermetic defensive perimeter in the Central and South Pacific would convince America to throw in the towel.

As actual events subsequently showed, that was a poor bet.

Originally published in the September 2007 issue of World War II Magazine. To subscribe, click here. 

In June 1940 a serious faction within the British government urged making peace with Germany. In September 1940 the RAF was within a whisker of defeat, leaving Britain open to invasion. In October 1941 Russia teetered on the brink of collapse as panic gripped Moscow and German troops stood forty miles away.

Had history taken slightly different turns at any of these junctures, Hitler could well have achieved his dream of total conquest of Europe.

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What would have happened then? In a slim but fascinating book titled Visions of Victory, historian Gerhard L. Weinberg (author of the magisterial A World at Arms, widely considered the finest study of World War II yet written) followed a trail of intriguing hints left by the major heads of state about the postwar world each envisioned. It was Franklin D. Roosevelt’s vision that most nearly matched the post- 1945 world order that actually materialized. But unsurprisingly, the most chilling vision was Hitler’s. In his mind, the sequel to a victorious World War II would have been World War III, followed by World War IV, and so on—until Germany had conquered the entire globe.

The initial victory in Europe would have been followed by the direct annexation of countries Hitler deemed suitably Nordic: Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland, as well as the German-speaking region of Switzerland. The brutal “General Government” of Poland would have extended into the former Soviet Union as far as 70 degrees east longitude—a bit more than half of the entire Russian empire—and the entire region converted into a vast pool of expend able slave labor. Japan would (temporarily) receive the rest of the Soviet Union.

Mussolini would be permitted to acquire lands approximating those of the Roman Empire, except that Hitler intended to retain control of France and Great Britain (as well as Ireland) and convert Spain and Portugal into satellite states. In sub Saharan Africa he expected to restore the colonies Germany had lost after the First World War and seize the rest from defeated European powers. Since the Afrikaners were implacable racists much after Hitler’s own heart, he anticipated a pro-Nazi South Africa. It goes without saying that the Nazis intended to eradicate the Jews and other “sub-humans” in every region they controlled. But they also intended to eliminate Christianity and to adopt a state policy of polygamy so that the male survivors of wars expected to kill four million German soldiers would be able to impregnate enough German women to forestall a drop in population.

Hitler plainly saw his principal allies, Italy and Japan, as partners of convenience. As a fascist state, Italy might be permitted its new empire on a permanent basis, but Japan, after doing the dirty work of conquering China, the eastern half of the Soviet Union, southeast Asia, Australasia, and the central Pacific, would eventually be conquered in turn—though only after the destruction of the United States, the last great power free of Axis control.

Weinberg discerned only the vaguest German plans for how it intended to deal with this last problem, the elimination of the United States. A major reason for this seems to have been Hitler’s persistent underestimation of the American population as a “race of mongrels,” unable to present a serious threat to Aryan military prowess and liable to collapse from within at any moment. As late as the autumn of 1944, Hitler continued to see the British as his most dangerous adversary in the West, notwithstanding the fact that by then the United States was contributing not only the most manpower in the European Theater of Operations but also the most tanks, aircraft, and artillery. Indeed, by that point American military aid was propping up the war efforts of every nation fighting the Axis powers. Hitler’s blindness on this subject underscored not only the extent to which racism dominated his world view but also his monumental ignorance.

Hitler’s original strategy for Europe wisely called for completing the conquest of western Europe before turning on the Soviet Union—which maintained its non aggression pact with Germany right up to the moment of the Nazi invasion in June 1941. Had all gone according to plan, the undivided might of the German army would have fallen on Russia, and Hitler’s vision of a Europe under German domination from Ireland to the Urals might well have been realized.

But Hitler’s overall grand strategy—to seize the rest of the world on the installment plan—would have then encountered a problem that Hitler seems never to have considered.

Hitler assumed that the Japanese would obligingly remain at war with China and the United States until he could gobble up his erstwhile allies. Yet Imperial Japan clearly understood that its partnership with Nazi Germany was temporary, especially given the virulent racism on which Nazism rested. (Hitler might call the Japanese “honorary Aryans,” but the phrase itself reveals the ideological awkwardness of the alliance.) And history is replete with reversals of alliance in the face of new circumstances. The Austro Prussian bruderkrieg of 1866 gave way to the Dual Alliance between Germany and Austria-Hungary in 1879; Italy, the third member of the Central Powers in World War I, actually entered that war on the side of Allies, and would switch sides in World War II as well. And ten years after the end of World War II, the United States and West Germany became partners in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Thus, long before Nazi Germany could have realized its ultimate aim of world conquest, the rest of the world would have surely set aside their differences in the face of this obvious, massive, and implacable threat. The result would have given the United States footholds in south and east Asia at the very least, while it is unlikely that Germany would ever have acquired the ability to project armies across the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean, much less the Pacific. The best it could have done would have been to create a fleet of transatlantic bombers like the notional Amerikabomber (which, incidentally, seems to have been designed with the idea of a one-way trip culminating not in a traditional bombing run but rather in crashing into New York City skyscrapers).

The United States would have responded with the decidedly non-notional Convair B-36 “Peacemaker,” the first intercontinental bomber, designed to strike Berlin from bases in northeastern Canada. The B-36 began development in 1941, at a time when it seemed as if Hitler might indeed overrun all of Europe. The first prototype flew in 1946 and the huge six engine bomber became operational two years later. By 1948, the United States possessed an arsenal of more than fifty atomic bombs. (It is highly doubtful that Germany would have achieved any atomic weapons by that time, given how behind its nuclear program was.) The “mongrel race” would then have extinguished Hitler’s “master race” beneath dozens of mushroom-shaped clouds.

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In May 1940, Leopold Amery, a prominent Conservative member of the House of Commons, rose to castigate Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain for his failures as a wartime leader—particularly for the recent British fiasco in Norway. Echoing Oliver Cromwell, he faced Chamberlain and declaimed, “You have sat here too long for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!”

Amery’s rebuke helped to trigger a vote of no confidence, and Chamberlain was forced to step down on May 8.

What if the following then happened?

Because the Conservatives retain a majority, the new prime minister must come from their ranks. Some suggest Winston Churchill, first lord of the Admiralty, who had recognized the reality of the Nazi threat years before. But many find his judgment erratic and vividly recall his authorship of the Gallipoli disaster in 1915. Chamberlain, who continues as leader of the Conservatives, prefers Lord Halifax, former viceroy of India and current foreign secretary. While he has no formal say in the matter, King George VI is known to favor Halifax too. Initially reluctant to accept the post, which obliges him to step down from the House of Lords, Halifax yields, and on May 10 the king asks him to form a government.

That same day, the Wehrmacht launches a massive offensive against the Low Countries and France. German panzer divisions reach the English Channel within a week, cutting off France’s best forces along with virtually the entire British Expeditionary Force. By the end of the month only Dunkirk remains out of German hands. It is estimated that, at best, only forty-five thousand British soldiers can be evacuated, and even then virtually all equipment will have to be left behind. Facing the worst crisis in the history of the British Empire, Halifax believes that in order to preserve that empire, Britain must seek a negotiated peace with Germany.

To open talks directly with Hitler would be fatal; an intermediary must be found. The obvious choice is Benito Mussolini— his Fascist Italy is allied to Germany but as yet remains officially neutral. Halifax approaches American president Franklin D. Roosevelt, who offers his assistance in persuading Mussolini to accept negotiations, and on May 26 Halifax meets with Italian ambassador Count Giuseppe Bastianini. Although Bastianini opens the discussion by merely expressing a desire to explore ways of keeping Italy out of war, he mentions that Mussolini favors a general settlement that would “protect European peace for a century.” Halifax replies that Great Britain would consider any serious proposal “that gave promise of the establishment of a secure and peaceful Europe.”

Though some—particularly Churchill, who remains in the British Cabinet— adamantly insist on fighting on, Halifax believes Great Britain has no other choice, particularly since Operation Dynamo, the desperate evacuation of Dunkirk, has extracted a bare seventeen thousand men as of May 28. The following day Halifax persuades the cabinet to make a deal with Hitler to end the war.

The above account is far closer to what actually happened than one might think. Halifax really was the first choice to succeed Chamber lain. His exchange with Bastianini really did take place. Roosevelt did indicate to Mussolini his willingness to act as intermediary in British Italian talks. Only seventeen thousand British troops had been evacuated from Dun kirk by May 28. And from May 25 to May 28, the British Cabinet did seriously consider peace negotiations, using Mussolini as intermediary, with Halifax being the main proponent of such a course.

These events are ably re-created in historian Ian Kershaw’s new book, Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions That Changed the World, 1940–1941. The first of those fateful choices was the British decision not to seek negotiations.

Halifax in fact rejected the offer to become prime minister, so the job went to Churchill, although Halifax remained as foreign secretary. But Churchill lacked the firm grip on power that he would later possess. He could not peremptorily reject negotiations; he had to make his case by persuasion. Ultimately he succeeded— with firm support, surprisingly enough, from Chamberlain, who along with Hali fax had been the key architect of Britain’s “appeasement” of Hitler in 1938.

Halifax might not have prevailed even had he been prime minister; indeed, he might have changed his mind about the wisdom of negotiations. Yet he certainly enjoyed greater prestige than Churchill. And Chamberlain, who effectively held the balance of power, might conceivably have felt he had to support Halifax as the new prime minister and thrown his influence in favor of negotiations.

Once begun, the peace overtures would likely have gained momentum, particularly after the capitulation of France on June 22, 1940. The “general peace settlement” broached by Halifax and Bastianini might well have become reality.

What would such a settlement have looked like? The cabinet assumed that in exchange for not entering the war and for mediating the negotiations between Britain and Germany, Mussolini would want con cessions in the Mediterranean. Churchill estimated that Italy would seek the neutralization of Gibraltar and the Suez Canal, the demilitarization of Malta, and restrictions on the number of British warships in the Mediterranean. While Churchill considered these concessions unacceptable, they were hardly onerous when balanced against the preservation of the British Empire.

Hitler, who in July 1940 would assure Great Britain that he did not desire the destruction of the British Empire, might have accepted an armistice predicated on British assurances to play no further role in the European conflict. From Hitler’s perspective, such a solution would have freed him to turn all of his military might against the Soviet Union. But to ensure that the British would not renege on the deal, Kershaw believes that Hitler would have insisted upon the return of the colonies stripped from Germany after World War I, as well as concessions designed to hobble the Royal Navy, without which Great Britain had no chance for further intervention on the Continent.

In the short term, a negotiated settlement might have indeed preserved the British Empire. But it would have enfee bled Britain and extinguished Roosevelt’s interest in providing the country with support. He would have quite reasonably turned full attention to the defense of North America. And in the long term— especially given a Nazi triumph over the Soviet Union—it is unlikely that Great Britain would have retained its empire or even escaped eventual invasion.

Of course, no settlement occurred. In its “finest hour,” Great Britain fought on, creating a Grand Alliance with the United States and the Soviet Union, suffering 450,000 military and civilian deaths, and losing its empire and status as a world power anyway.

But gloriously, not cravenly.

Originally published in the November 2007 issue of World War II Magazine. To subscribe, click here. 

In late September 1944, three of the U.S. Navy’s top admirals met in San Francisco to discuss the next phase of operations in the Central Pacific theater. Adm. Chester W. Nimitz recommended the capture of Okinawa in the Ryukyu Islands. Not only was Okinawa just 350 miles from Kyushu, the southernmost of the Japanese home islands, it had both the land area and anchorages necessary to serve as a staging base for the final assault on Japan. As a prelude to its capture, Nimitz also recommended the seizure of Iwo Jima, a small volcanic island about 650 miles east of Okinawa.

The importance of Okinawa was obvious. That of Iwo Jima was not. As a staging area for an invasion of Japan, the island had no value whatsoever. It was far too small, it had no anchorages, and it was several hundred miles more distant from Kyushu. Given those deficiencies, Adm. Ernest King, the chief of naval operations, dismissed the occupation of Iwo Jima as a waste of resources. It would, he predicted, be “a sink hole in the hands of whoever held it.” But Forrest Sherman, Nimitz’s chief of staff, responded that Gen. Henry “Hap” Arnold of the U.S. Army Air Forces wanted Iwo Jima as an air base. From it, P-51 fighters could escort B-29 Superfortresses on their lengthy runs from bases in the Mariana Islands to targets on the Japanese main land. Adm. Raymond Spruance agreed with Nimitz and Sherman. So King gave in, and planning for Operation Detachment— the invasion of Iwo Jima—got underway.

Four and a half months later, three marine divisions—about 82,000 men— stormed the island. The fighting was expected to last only a few days. Instead, the battle for Iwo Jima took thirty-five days and cost 6,821 American dead and 19,217 wounded. One out of every three marines killed in the entire Pacific War lost his life on Iwo Jima. And for the first time, American losses in a battle exceeded those of the Japanese defenders, whose casualties on Iwo totaled about 18,500.

American plans for the operation offered five reasons for seizing the island. In addition to providing fighter escort for B-29 bomber attacks on Japan, the capture of Iwo Jima would neutralize a Japanese radar station on the island, provide air defense bases to protect the Marianas, furnish air fields for staging shorter-range B-24 bombers against Japan, and perhaps precipitate a decisive sea battle with the Imperial Japanese Navy.

None of these reasons, however, proved justified. Even as the fighting for Iwo Jima raged, the XXI Bomber Command in the Marianas shifted from daylight precision bombing to nighttime incendiary attacks, rendering fighter escort largely superfluous. The Japanese radar station on the island was silenced, but Japanese listening posts on other islands—including Rota in the Marianas itself—continued to provide early warning of American attacks until the end of the war. The battered Japanese air force was far too small to launch significant attacks on the Marianas and no significant B-24 bombing campaign from Iwo Jima ever materialized. Nor did the invasion precipitate even a minor sea fight, for the Japanese navy had been all but destroyed during the Battle of Leyte Gulf, four months before the Iwo Jima invasion.

But a way had to be found to justify the horrendous casualties, and in the after math of Iwo Jima’s capture, a new ration ale for the invasion emerged. The island’s airfields, it was argued, had proven vital for emergency landings by Superfortresses in their strategic bombing campaign against Japan. By the end of the war, 2,251 B-29s had landed on Iwo Jima. Since each bomber had a crew of eleven, possession of Iwo Jima had apparently saved the lives of nearly twenty-five thousand crewmen— nearly three times the number of marines killed in taking the island. By the grim arithmetic of war, Operation Detachment seemed worth the cost.

Generations of historians have accepted this explanation. But as marine captain Robert S. Burrell convincingly argues in The Ghosts of Iwo Jima (2006), this justification cannot withstand scrutiny. For one thing, the 2,251 figure was achieved by counting every B-29 landing on Iwo Jima as an emergency landing, despite the fact that of the nearly two thousand landings made during the months of May, June, and July 1945, more than 80 percent were for routine refueling. Several hundred landings were made simply for training purposes, while most of the remainder were for relatively minor engine maintenance. During the month with the largest number of landings—June—not a single one of more than eight hundred B-29s that landed on the island did so due to combat damage.

Burrell also notes that the “emergency landing” thesis assumes that every single crewman who landed on Iwo Jima would otherwise have died in the icy waters of the North Pacific. Actual air-sea rescue figures, however, indicate that 50 percent of crew men who ditched at sea survived the experience. Moreover, according to official loss reports, only 2,148 B-29 crewmen were killed in combat, including those stationed in India and China as well as the Marianas. “The emergency landing theory,” Burrell notes, “claims that an additional 24,761 airmen from the Marianas alone would have died without the use of Iwo Jima. In other words, the theory claims that over eleven times the number of airmen actually lost in combat were saved simply by offering an alternative landing field between [the Marianas] and Tokyo.”

What, then, if Nimitz had heeded King’s admonition that Iwo Jima was a “sink hole” not worth the effort? Earlier in the war American forces had bypassed the Japanese fortresses at Rabaul on New Britain and Truk in the Caroline archipelago, success fully neutralizing each through a combination of air strikes and a naval blockade. The same could have been done with Iwo Jima.

Had Iwo Jima been bypassed, the Pacific War would have ended at much the same time and in much the same way as it did. True, the American photo album would have been somewhat impoverished, for it would not have included the famous Joe Rosenthal shot of the dramatic flag-raising ceremony on Mount Suribachi. But more substantively, the three marine divisions used in the capture of Iwo Jima would have been available to support the invasion of Okinawa. (Although originally scheduled for that assignment, the horrific battle for Iwo Jima left them too badly damaged to do so.) Moreover, the successful defensive tactics employed by Lt. Gen. Tadamichi Kuribayashi, the commander of Iwo Jima’s garrison, would not have been available as an example to be emulated by Okinawa’s commander, Lt. Gen. Mitsuru Ushijima, who used them to advantage in the actual struggle for that island.

The battle for Iwo Jima, although a high point for American valor, was a low point for American strategy.

Originally published in the December 2007 issue of World War II Magazine. To subscribe, click here. 

At 12:42 p.m. on July 20, 1944, a massive explosion destroyed a conference room at Wolfsschanze (“Wolf ’s Lair”), Adolf Hitler’s headquarters in East Prussia. Hitler’s miraculous survival of the assassination attempt has long been seen as one of the most agonizing near-misses of the war. Many have argued that but for the tiniest quirks of chance, Hitler would have died that day, the war in Europe would have ended nearly a year sooner, and millions of lives would have been saved.

But there is a counterintuitive and surprisingly strong case that even if Hitler had been killed in the July 20 blast, the coup it was to have set in motion would have failed—and Hermann Göring, Hitler’s second-in-command, and Heinrich Himmler, chief of the SS and Gestapo, would have emerged firmly in control of a Nazi regime every bit as fanatical and determined to fight on as the one the führer himself created and led. Consider the following scenario:

As soldiers rush into the conference room to pull survivors from the rubble, only four men know for sure what has taken place. Two of them, Gens. Helmuth Stieff and Erich Fellgiebel, are high-ranking members of the OKH, the high command of the Wehrmacht. The third is Lt. Werner von Haeften, aide-de-camp to Col. Claus von Stauffenberg, chief of staff of Germany’s Replacement Army. The last is Stauffenberg himself. All four men are part of the conspiracy aimed not only at killing Hitler but also toppling his regime and negotiating an end to the war before Germany’s complete destruction.

Stauffenberg had placed his briefcase, containing a time bomb, beneath a large oak table only a few feet from Hitler, then quietly excused himself on the pretext of making a phone call. Within moments of the blast, he and Haeften had leapt into a Mercedes that sped them to a nearby air field, where a plane waited to take them on the 350-mile flight back to Berlin.

Stieff and Fellgiebel remain at Wolfsschanze. Stieff ’s role in the plot is complete—he provided Stauffenberg with the two pounds of explosives needed to create the bomb—but Fellgiebel’s role is just beginning. With Hitler dead, his task is to alert the conspirators in the German capital that the assassination has succeeded. As chief of army signals, he is ideally positioned to do so. To his astonishment, however, Field Marshals Wilhelm Keitel and Alfred Jodl, both of whom survived the blast, immediately order a complete communications blackout. Only calls to Göring and Himmler are permitted.

In Berlin, Gen. Friedrich Olbricht waits impatiently for word on the assassination attempt. As chief of the General Army Office, he is the conspirator best positioned to transform the event from simple tyrannicide to coup d’état. Ironically, the individual who did the most to place Olbricht in this position was Hitler himself. Months before, Olbricht persuaded Hitler of the danger of an uprising by the millions of foreign laborers and prisoners of war within the borders of the Third Reich. Such an uprising could be quelled, he pointed out, by using the Replacement Army, a reserve force consisting of trainees, cadets, and soldiers who were lightly wounded or on sick leave. Hitler accepted Olbricht’s proposal and approved a contingency plan to foil an uprising. The plan is code-named Operation Valkyrie.

Since then, Olbricht and the other conspirators have recrafted Valkyrie into a plan to neutralize SS and Gestapo installations and capture communications facilities. The plotters have decided their best chance of success is to persuade military commanders and the German public that a cabal within the SS and Gestapo has assassinated Hitler and that their coup is in reality a countercoup. By the time the true story emerges, they will have a new government in place and will have secured the backing of the army leadership. Former chief of staff Ludwig Beck, still much respected by the officer corps and one of the original members of the conspiracy, is to serve as head of state, with Olbricht as minister of war and Field Marshal Erwin von Witzleben as head of the German army.

Stauffenberg’s appointment as chief of staff of the Replacement Army was a stroke of luck. This not only gave him direct contact with Hitler, but allowed him, along with Olbricht, to place many sympathetic officers in key positions.

Although Olbricht knows the approximate time the bomb should have gone off, he cannot act until he hears for certain that the assassination has taken place. He orders several attempts to contact the Wolfsschanze. None get through until 3:00 p.m.; even then, the officer who answers indicates only that an explosion has occurred, saying nothing about whether the führer has been killed or even wounded. But since the bomb clearly has been detonated, Olbricht and Beck agree that Valkyrie must be set in motion.

Olbricht contacts fellow conspirator Lt. Gen. Paul von Hase, the city commandant in Berlin. Hase sends a battalion to sur round a number of key government buildings. Count Wolf Heinrich von Helldorf, the Berlin police president and fellow Valkyrie conspirator, is told to place his force in readiness to arrest high-ranking Nazi officials. Olbricht himself arrests Gen. Friedrich Fromm, commander of the Replacement Army. Soon thereafter a carefully prepared message is sent out from Berlin over Witzle ben’s signature, announcing that subversives within the SS have killed Hitler, the army has taken control, and it has begun the arrest of SS security forces in Berlin.

Almost nothing goes right. Helldorf ’s police make no move to arrest the high party officials. The message announcing the countercoup is sent out classified top secret, so that instead of flashing around the country, the cover story takes literally hours to be decrypted and understood. The place that decodes the message most efficiently is the headquarters at Wolfsschanze. The more the conspirators try to put their coup in motion, the more their blizzard of dispatches reveal to Hitler loyalists their activities and ultimate purpose.

Most fatally, thirty-one-year-old major Otto Remer now almost single-handedly wrecks the last hope for the coup’s success. It is Remer who commands the battalion Hase had sent to surround the government buildings. At first he follows Hase’s orders, but one of his officers becomes suspicious and goes to see Josef Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister. Goebbels says he has heard nothing of the assassination attempt, but a call to Wolfsschanze convinces him that his beloved führer is dead, and the murderers are at that moment trying to seize control of the Third Reich.

Goebbels quickly summons Remer and explains the situation. He puts Remer on the line to Keitel, who orders Remer to take charge of all forces in Berlin, arrest the leaders of the coup (whose own messages have revealed that they are concentrated at Office of the Army headquarters on Bendlerstrasse), and shoot anyone who tries to stop him. These instructions, not Hase’s, are the ones Remer now vigorously obeys. He promptly surrounds the Bendlerstrasse headquarters. By 10:30 p.m. an SS unit arrives to relieve him. Within two hours, Beck, Olbricht, Stauffenberg, and Haeften are dead. The roles played by Stieff, Fellgiebel, and Witzleben are soon discovered, and within weeks they too have paid with their lives. So do some five thousand others involved—or imagined to be involved—in the conspiracy.

This scenario departs from historical reality in only three major respects. The July 20 blast left Hitler only slightly wounded. It was Hitler himself, not Keitel and Jodl, who ordered the communications blackout. And it was he, not Keitel, who ordered Remer to stop the coup.

But it strains credulity to believe that Keitel or Jodl—both of whom, as Hitler stalwarts, had also been intended targets of the time bomb—would have reacted any differently than did Hitler himself, or that Remer ultimately would ever have followed orders from the plotters.

The Valkyrie conspirators quite rightly recognized that Hitler retained a strong hold on the loyalty of the German people; for that reason they believed they could succeed only by portraying themselves as Hitler’s avengers, using that bluff to buy enough time to gather the reins of power. They also rightly feared the police state created by Heinrich Himmler—hence the emphasis on seizing SS and Gestapo facilities. Most of all, they counted on the unquestioning obedience of the German officer corps, particularly at the junior level, to carry out whatever orders it received. But as Remer demonstrated, to their extinction, that unquestioning obedience was a double-edged sword.

this article first appeared in world war II magazine

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From May 4-8, 1942, American, Australian, and Japanese naval units fought the world’s first engagement decided exclusively by carrier-based air power. Tactically the Japanese could claim a limited success. They sank the carrier Lexington and heavily damaged the carrier Yorktown while losing only the light carrier Shoho. But in strategic terms, the Battle of the Coral Sea was a major Allied victory. For the first time in the Pacific war, the Japanese withdrew without achieving their objective—in this case, vital Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea. And two Japanese carriers, Shokaku and Zuikaku, lost so many aircraft that neither was available to participate in the decisive Battle of Midway four weeks later.

Many “what if” scenarios rely on close calls, in which the outcome pivoted on a single event that went one way but might easily have gone another. In the case of Coral Sea, however, it is almost easier to explain how the Japanese could have won the battle than explain how they managed to lose it. Although both sides committed a number of errors, the Japanese made fundamental, completely avoidable mistakes that gave the Allies an opportunity for victory they really should not have had.

To begin with, Japanese naval planners failed to allocate enough forces to guarantee the job. Confident that the Americans would send only one carrier to dispute the offensive against Port Moresby, the Japanese assigned only two carriers to the main strike force, whereas they easily could have committed a third. As a result, the two sides fought the battle with an almost equal number of carrier aircraft.

Second, the Japanese divided their efforts between two objectives located hundreds of miles apart. In addition to seizing Port Moresby, they also sought to capture the island of Tulagi in the Solomon archipelago for use as a seaplane base. While the Tulagi operation made good sense as a way to keep tabs on naval movements from the American base on New Caledonia, it was of comparatively minor importance.

Moreover, the Japanese operational plan, code-named “MO,” was needlessly complex and depended on the coordination of five major groups: a carrier striking force, a Tulagi invasion group, a Port Moresby invasion group, a support group, and a covering group. Worse, the commander responsible for coordinating these groups, Vice Adm. Shigeyoshi Inouye, remained at Rabaul, hundreds of miles from the prospective battle zone, with no direct feel for the battle’s development.

Finally, the concept of the operation— a pincer movement that would trap the Allied task force between the carrier striking force steaming from the eastern entrance to the Coral Sea and the covering group protecting the Port Moresby thrust at its western end—made sense only on a map. Such a movement depends on having two strong pincers. What passed for the western pincer, however, was so weak that when Allied naval units simply moved in its direction during the battle, the Port Moresby invasion group pulled back. And when it was deprived of air cover with the loss of Shoho, the invasion had to be abandoned altogether. Had the Japanese instead kept their force united, first securing Port Moresby, then turning east to engage the Allied task force, they would not only have achieved their main objective, they would have stood a better chance against American air attacks because more warships would have been on hand to screen the carriers.

Japanese mistakes did not end there. On May 6, the rival carrier groups were only seventy miles apart, but neither spotted the other. In the case of the Americans, their scouting planes turned back just before they would have sighted Shokaku and Zuikaku. But with the Japanese, the striking force commander, Adm. Takeo Takagi, failed to order any scouting efforts at all. On May 7, both groups finally spot ted the other, both launched air strikes, and both air strikes managed to miss their intended targets and attack others instead. It was on this day that the Americans sank Shoho. These mutual errors were far more costly to the Japanese, since the elimination of Shoho badly compromised the Port Moresby operation.

Then, late in the afternoon of May 7, Admiral Takagi took a badly calculated risk and dispatched twenty-seven pilots with night flying experience to locate and attack the main American task force. They indeed located the task force—but they misidentified the American carriers as their own. Of the twenty-seven aircraft dispatched, only six returned.

The following day, both main carrier forces finally found and attacked the other. Yorktown was heavily damaged and Lexington was lost. Shokaku also suffered damage that interfered with flight operations, forcing its returning air group to land on Zuikaku instead. The crew of the overburdened Zuikaku had to push numerous aircraft over its side as soon as they landed. As a result, almost a third of the sixty-nine aircraft the Japanese lost during Operation MO were the direct result of Takagi’s ill-fated air strike on the evening of May 7. And the damage to Shokaku and severe losses to both carrier air groups rendered Shokaku and Zuikaku unavailable for the Midway operation.

Were it not for these fundamental mistakes, MO stood every chance of succeeding in seizing Port Moresby. In that case, the Japanese would have securely anchored their defensive perimeter in the southwest Pacific and established a base for aerial operations against the ports of northeastern Australia. That was where Gen. Douglas MacArthur was marshaling Allied forces for a counteroffensive by way of Papua New Guinea, which the capture of Port Moresby would have vastly complicated, if not precluded altogether. Japan would have had more forces available, therefore, to defend against another counteroffensive from the direction of the Solomon Islands—the Allied landing on Guadalcanal in August 1942, for example.

While it can’t be known for sure whether Shokaku and Zuikaku would have been used at Midway had they been available, it is certainly true that had Operation MO been better planned and managed, it would not have been so costly to the Japanese in terms of aircraft and their crews of well trained airmen. And had both carriers been present at Midway, they might well have provided enough extra striking power to preclude the “incredible victory”—in the words of historian Walter Lord—that abruptly turned the tide of the Pacific war.

Given the disparity in industrial strength between the United States and Japan, it is hard to imagine any scenario by which Japan could have won the Pacific war. But if the Japanese had won the Battle of the Coral Sea, as they might so easily have done, the war would have been protracted by many months, and been rendered vastly more difficult for the Allies.

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During 1943 the RAF’s Bomber Command fought three aerial campaigns in the night skies over Nazi Germany: the Battle of the Ruhr (March through June), the Battle of Hamburg (July 24–25 to August 2–3), and the Battle of Berlin (November 18–19 to March 1944). The Air Staff’s stated target in each case was the same: “The morale of the enemy civil population and in particular, of the industrial workers.” The British had arrived at this strategy after two discoveries made in 1941: that operations during the day were too costly, and that raids made at night could not hit anything smaller than a city—an August 1941 report revealed that fewer than one in three aircraft dropped bombs within five miles of the intended target. Bomber Command had therefore made a virtue of necessity by shifting to massive attacks on the civilian population, which it euphemistically termed “dehousing” raids.

The British did not revisit this decision, even after night navigation aids allowing bombers to hit within a few hundred yards of their targets became available. Indeed, the chief of Bomber Command, Air Chief Marshal Arthur T. Harris, dis missed the very idea of hitting specific tar gets as “panacea” bombing. But if Harris and his air staff had been less scornful of raids against industrial chokepoints, it might have hobbled the Nazi war economy in its first great campaign of 1943.

So argues economic historian Adam Tooze in his new book, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy. In this unabashedly revisionist study, Tooze stresses not the strength of the German war economy but its weakness. On the eve of World War II, living standards in Germany were only half that of the United States (even in the midst of the Great Depression) and two thirds that of Great Britain. With few natural resources to draw upon, the Nazi war effort depended on a quick war and the ruthless exploitation of the countries it captured: not just their raw materials and manufacturing capacity, but also their populations in the form of conscripted labor. Even so, the viability of the Nazi economy depended primarily on scarcity management.

In no sector of the economy was scarcity management more critical than in the steel industry. Of almost equal importance was coking coal, because steel output was contingent on the supply of that vital raw material. Both resources came primarily from the Ruhr region of western Germany, the largest producer of coal and steel in Europe. From a targeting standpoint, the Ruhr offered a compact knot of over a dozen easy-to-hit cities that together comprised a major chokepoint in the German war economy: without sufficient steel, the Germans could not produce enough ammunition, tanks, U-boats, or artillery.

Until March 1943, German central planning had done an impressive job of expanding steel production to meet the growing needs of the Wehrmacht, now on the defensive in both the Eastern and Mediterranean theaters. Production had increased by 5.5 percent per month, and Minister of Armaments Albert Speer believed he could continue that trend for at least another year. The RAF raids on the Ruhr abruptly changed all that. For almost four months, hundreds of British heavy bombers attacked one city after another, dropping a total of thirty-four thousand tons of explosives, killing about fifteen thousand civilians, and wiping out the increase in steel production the Germans had painstakingly achieved. The Nazi war machine faced a shortfall of four hundred thousand tons per month, and the disruption cascaded through Germany’s economy in a subcomponents crisis as the supply of critical steel parts plummeted. Central planning could do nothing to halt the looming disaster. “Bomber Command,” Tooze writes, “had stopped Speer’s economic miracle in its tracks.”

But although the British understood the industrial importance of the Ruhr, Bomber Command remained wedded to a policy of striking as many large cities as possible. Even at the height of the Battle of the Ruhr, no more than half of British raids were actually directed at that region. And in July 1943 the British moved on to a series of attacks against Hamburg, culminating in the notorious raid of July 27–28, when a chance combination of circumstances created a massive firestorm that killed forty thousand civilians in a single night.

Bomber Command then turned to an eighteen-week campaign against Berlin. The German capital, however, was a larger target than Hamburg; it lay at the extreme range of British bombers, and RAF losses were far out of proportion to the damage inflicted. Moreover, even a successful campaign would have crippled manufacturing only in Berlin itself. In contrast, Tooze maintains, “shutting down the Ruhr and the transport links that connected it to the rest of Germany had the potential to disrupt production throughout the entire country….The Ruhr was the chokepoint and in 1943 it was within the RAF’s grip. The failure to maintain that hold and tighten it was a tragic operational error.”

Was the error avoidable? In defense of Bomber Command, it must be acknowledged that gauging the impact of the strategic bombing offensive was often a matter of little more than informed guesswork. German officials’ concerns over plummeting steel production were relayed in tele phone conversations and face-to-face meetings—but not in radio messages that the British could intercept. Even so, the Ruhr’s significance as a center of steel and coal production was world-famous, and reconnaissance photographs clearly indicated the level of destruction the RAF was inflicting on its cities.

Why then did Bomber Command not continue an aerial campaign that was plainly succeeding, even if it could not know the full measure of that success?

The Hamburg firestorm was partly responsible. Bewitched by that horrific but accidental conflagration, the British struck a number of cities in expectations of replicating the firestorm effect and hoped to destroy Berlin as thoroughly as Hamburg.

But the main problem was the unshakable faith in the British area-bombing policy itself. Harris continued to heap scorn on “panacea” targets; that is, as he put it, “targets which were supposed by the economic experts to be such a vital bottle neck in the war industry that when they were destroyed the enemy would have to pack up.” The Ruhr was precisely such a bottleneck, and Bomber Command came close to destroying it. But since Harris was not looking for such a result, he never saw how close he came to achieving it.

Originally published in the May 2008 issue of World War II Magazine. To subscribe, click here. 

On August 6, 1945, the B-29 Enola Gay dropped the world’s first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, killing an estimated one hundred forty thousand civilians. Three days later, the B-29 Bockscar dropped a second bomb on Nagasaki, killing about eighty thousand civilians.

The United States is the only nation ever to have launched an attack with nuclear weapons, and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have remained controversial. Was either attack really necessary? Perhaps a demonstration of the bomb’s immense power would have sufficed. Or perhaps the United States could have dropped its insistence on “unconditional surrender” and allowed Japan to retain the kokutai—the national identity surrounding the institution of the emperor. The Japanese government could then have conceded defeat by mid-summer 1945.

The usual response to these and other propositions is that because the Japanese government had a well-entrenched pro war faction, the only realistic alternatives to the bomb would have caused even more destruction. An invasion of the Japanese home islands might have cost as many as a million American casualties; a protracted naval blockade, on the other hand, could have killed a million or more Japanese civilians through starvation and disease.

“What if ” scenarios concerning the atomic bomb invariably assume that the United States possessed this weapon in the summer of 1945 but refrained from using it. However, such a scenario has an air of artificiality about it. The United States government had, after all, already given tacit approval to the killing of hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians in a series of incendiary bomb raids; the fire bombing of Tokyo on March 9, 1945, alone killed over ninety thousand civilians. But what if the United States simply lacked the option of using the atomic bomb? What if the $2 billion Manhattan Project had failed to solve the numerous problems required to produce a nuclear weapon?

Such a failure is not hard to imagine. Project scientists had discovered two ways to create an atomic explosion. The first— which was used in “Little Boy,” the bomb that pulverized Hiroshima—involved a gun-type mechanism that fired one piece of enriched uranium into another to generate the supercritical mass required for a nuclear chain reaction. The second—used in “Fat Man,” the bomb that flattened Nagasaki—involved an implosion device that would accomplish the same thing using plutonium.

But the “Little Boy” design required U-235, an isotope found in less than three quarters of one percent of all natural uranium. It took millions of dollars and several false starts to find a way to extract U-235. Most uranium takes the form of U-238, a portion of which scientists learned to convert to the fissionable plutonium used in “Fat Man.” Initially they expected to use the gun-type mechanism with this material as well. But the rate of spontaneous neutron emission in plutonium rendered that unworkable and instead required a system with fifteen components, all of which had to function in precisely the right manner to produce a perfectly symmetrical implosion. It was far from inevitable, in other words, that the Manhattan Project scientists would have solved either complex problem by 1945.

So in the absence of the atomic bombs, how would events have played out? The postwar U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey concluded that the Japanese economy was in ruins by early August and that even without the atomic bombs, Japan would surely have surrendered by November 1, 1945—the date of the planned invasion of Kyushu, the southernmost of the Japanese home islands. This conclusion, however, overlooked the fact that the key problem was not one of destroying Japan’s ability to make war, but one of convincing the Japanese government to make peace.

In early August the Japanese Supreme Council was divided about the future of the war. Most of its members sought a negotiated peace with the United States— but only after a military victory that would give Japan sufficient leverage to avoid occupation, maintain a minimal armed force, and, above all, preserve the kokutai. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki played an important role in convincing the Supreme Council that the war must be ended at once.

What is often underestimated, however, is the impact of what happened between the two nuclear attacks: namely, the massive Soviet offensive against the Japanese Kwantung Army in Manchuria that began on August 8, 1945. Although the Soviet Union had given notification that it would not renew its nonaggression pact with Japan, the Supreme Council believed it would be several months before the Soviets would enter the war on the side of the Allies. The Soviets’ Operation August Storm, therefore, came as a severe shock— indeed, an even greater shock than Hiroshima or Nagasaki, as historian Tsuyoshi Hasegawa concluded in his 2005 study, Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan.

It is possible, then, that the invasion of Manchuria alone might have compelled the Supreme Council to choose surrender. Even if this did not occur, the invasion would have weakened the grip of hard liners who wished to keep fighting. The Supreme Council next would have had to confront the effects of an American strategic bombing offensive against Japan’s rail road system. The United States had the plan poised and ready but chose not to execute it after the success of the atomic bombs. Had the war continued, the offensive against the rail system would have begun almost immediately—destroying what little remained of the nation’s economy and generating a famine sufficient to cause internal upheaval. “It is reasonable to assume,” writes historian Richard B. Frank in Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire (1999), “that even without the atomic bombs, the destruction of the rail-transportation system, coupled with the cumulative effects of the blockade and-bombardment strategy, would have posed a severe threat to internal order and subsequently thus impelled the Emperor to end the war.”

Even if the war had continued, it is unlikely that an American invasion of the home islands would have occurred in 1945. By early August, American planners were already revisiting the wisdom of the invasion of Kyushu in light of new intelligence indicating the Japanese had twice the troop strength and four times the aircraft than previously estimated. If the United States had also reconsidered its refusal to extend any guarantee concerning the kokutai, then all the conditions would have been met for what historian Barton Bernstein views as an “opportunity to end the war without the A-bomb and without the November invasion of Kyushu.” Although not definite, he writes, it does seem very likely that “a synergistic combination” of guaranteeing the emperor, Soviet entry into the Pacific War, and continued strategic bombings and naval blockades would have ended the war by November. Indeed, he ventures, that might have occurred even in the absence of any guarantees concerning the emperor.

Such a scenario, however, involves avoiding another significant “what if”— the possibility that, had the war continued even a few more weeks, Japanese hardliners might have taken control of the government and continued to resist beyond the point where any centrally controlled surrender was obtainable. As will be seen in the next “What If” column, that possibility was very real.

Originally published in the July 2008 issue of World War II Magazine. To subscribe, click here.  

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For individuals in countries that have escaped military invasion and occupation, imagining what such an ordeal would have been like can be a popular pastime. In the 1970s, armchair generals could play “Invasion: America,” a board game in which the fictional European Socialist coalition, South American Union, and Pan Asiatic League try to overrun the United States and Canada. In 1984, American audiences flocked to theaters to watch Red Dawn, a film about doughty high school kids who wage guerrilla war against the Soviet bloc forces that had invaded the western United States. The 1987 television miniseries Amerika depicted a far-from doughty United States accepting Warsaw Pact domination after a bloodless takeover.

The British, too, have often imagined what a foreign invasion would be like. Such musings have included It Happened Here, a 1966 movie portraying a German occupation primarily enforced by the Nazi sympathizing British Union of Fascists; Hitler’s Britain (2002), which depicted the roundup of Jews and Socialists and the crushing of a British guerrilla uprising; and Island at War (2005), a five-part Masterpiece Theatre production dramatizing the plight of British residents after the actual German occupation of the Channel Islands in 1940. But the most elaborate efforts lie in a number of counterfactual histories detailing a successful execution of Operation Sealion, as the Germans called their plan for an invasion of southern England. Of these, the most noteworthy is military historian Kenneth Macksey’s Invasion: The Alternate History of the German Invasion of England, July 1940, published in 1980 and still in print after three decades.

Macksey’s point of departure is the fact that in July 1940, the British armed forces were at their weakest. Following the evacuation of Dunkirk in late May and early June, the British army, forced to leave behind nearly all its heavy equipment, was left with only a few hundred usable tanks. The Royal Air Force had also taken a beating and was still rebuilding itself. The British had few beach defenses in place and their proposed main line of defense, the GHQ (or General Headquarters) Line, existed only on paper.

The window of opportunity this created for the Germans was narrow, however. Macksey believes that it would have diminished substantially by August and disappeared altogether in September. The only reasonable chance for a successful German invasion lay at the Strait of Dover, where the English Channel is only about 20 miles across. Here alone the Germans could fend off the Royal Navy, thanks to a combination of warships, shore-based heavy artillery, a massive air umbrella, and minefields at either approach to the strait.

Macksey’s rewrite of history begins on May 21, when Grand Admiral Erich Raeder approached Hitler about the prospect of invading Great Britain. Hitler in actuality dismissed the idea and did not revisit it until the British failed to do as he anticipated: sue for peace after his conquest of France. But in Macksey’s account, the idea captivates the Nazi dictator. He throws the weight of his absolute power and unshakeable will behind plans for a cross-channel attack. A third of the German army in France is set aside to participate.

The aerial Battle of Britain begins slightly earlier than in reality, in June, and for the most part follows the course it took historically. Although it does not culminate in complete German success, the Germans nonetheless launch Operation Sealion on July 14. The invasion begins with a predawn airborne attack that isolates the meager British defenses between the coastal towns of Hythe and Dover, paving the way for a cross-channel assault. By day’s end the Germans are firmly ashore. A British counterattack, with their limited armored force, fails; the Germans expand their beachhead and then break out. By month’s end they have closed in on London and the British government agrees to make peace. The book closes with a puppet government ascending to power on August 2, 1940.

Macksey’s scenario for a cross-channel attack is highly plausible, and he plays fair with available facts and the difficulty of mounting such an operation. As he imagines Sealion, it is a near-run thing, based on historical data on the relative strength of British and German forces at the time. The main rewrite is that German preparations for the invasion begin sooner, are vigorously pursued, and the invasion itself is launched even though it remains a risky proposition.

The main weakness of Macksey’s scenario is that it assumes a prompt British collapse. The demands of a book-length alternate history require him to pursue the story to resolution, and a swift political collapse allows him to avoid one of the main pitfalls of counterfactual history: that of piling one speculation atop another. But a single shift in the historical narrative does not mean that one can predict a single outcome. The alternate world the initial shift creates would logically have “nodes of uncertainty,” critical points at which events could follow more than one path, from which the counterfactual analyst must select the most probable outcome. Even if each choice has a 90 percent probability of being correct, after 10 such choices the probability of arriving at any particular outcome is less than 1 percent.

Thus Macksey wisely, in one sense, keeps the nodes of uncertainty to a minimum. But this narrative strategy means that he cannot take seriously Winston Churchill’s eloquent insistence that the British would “defend our island whatever the cost may be; we shall fight on beaches, landing grounds, in fields, in streets and on the hills. We shall never surrender and even if, which I do not for the moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, will carry on the struggle until in God’s good time the New World with all its power and might, sets forth to the liberation and rescue of the Old.”

As Stephen Budiansky makes clear elsewhere in this issue, the British had plans to conduct a guerrilla campaign even if conventional defense became impossible (see “Churchill’s Secret Army,” page 28). A scenario in which the British continue to resist greatly complicates the ability to predict a plausible ultimate outcome. The Germans might, for instance, have been pinned down in a protracted guerrilla campaign—as they were in Yugoslavia from April 1941 onward. If that occurred, it might have taken as many as a million troops to maintain a sure grip on Great Britain. (It took several hundred thousand troops just to garrison Norway.)

As a consequence, while a successful Operation Sealion would have better positioned Germany for an invasion of the Soviet Union, it would not necessarily have made victory over the Soviet Union inevitable. The specter of a Europe dominated by Hitler would, furthermore, surely have had implications for American foreign policy. And the vicious German occupation of a nation with which the United States possessed close ties almost certainly would have accomplished exactly what Churchill hoped, with the New World set ting forth to rescue the Old.

Originally published in the November 2008 issue of World War II Magazine. To subscribe, click here. 

In 1999, distinguished military historian Holger H. Herwig was asked to con- tribute to a book titled Unmaking the West: “What-If?” Scenarios That Rewrite World History. The invitation came as a surprise; Herwig had never written a “what if ” article in his life. But its source was a well-respected team of scholars intent on exploring the utility of counterfactual thought experiments, and Herwig was intrigued. The concept for the book, which was published in 2006, was intriguing as well: the team asked an array of historians to write pieces that would assess the contingency or inevitability of the West’s rise to global dominance over a wide span of time. What would have happened if the Persians had defeated the Greeks at Salamis in 480 BC? Would Western civilization have been strangled in its cradle? What if Jesus of Nazareth had escaped crucifixion? Would Christianity still have arisen, and if not, what effect would its absence have had on the values that defined the West? What if China, not Europe, had first harnessed steam power? And, finally, what if Germany had won the Second World War?

The reader may be surprised to find Germany implicitly excised from the ranks of Western civilization. But Herwig, though a native German himself, was not: “Nazi victory would have constituted a triumph over all that we associate with the term Western civilization.” If the Nazis represented Western civilization at all, Herwig recognized, they represented its darker side: “hatred, racism, expansionism, and state-inspired mass murder.”

Herwig agreed to explore a German victory in World War II in accordance with the rules of rigorous counterfactual thought experiments supplied by the scholars who commissioned him. His first task was to find a “minimum rewrite” of history. What was the smallest departure from actual events that would plausibly have resulted in a Nazi victory? Herwig decided to remove Stalin from the scene at the height of the German invasion of the Soviet Union.

That was not difficult. In October 1941 Stalin had briefly insisted on leaving Moscow to stay at his dacha in Kuntsevo. His chief of security, L. P. Beria, managed the rare feat of talking the iron-willed Stalin out of a course of action, explaining that explosives had been placed in the dacha should circumstances require its destruction, and so a visit there was too dangerous. In Herwig’s minimal rewrite, Stalin demands to be taken to Kuntsevo anyway, and Beria’s fears are realized. The dacha blows up, killing the Soviet dictator.

Herwig then imagined that “a weak and quarreling Politburo” cuts a deal with Germany, yielding all of European Russia in exchange for the survival of their Communist regime, much as the Bolsheviks had done to end the war with Imperial Germany in 1918. In fact, Hitler had told Josef Goebbels in August 1941 that he would accept such an arrangement if offered, and that any survival of Bolshevism in the remaining “Asiatic Russia” would be a matter of only “marginal interest.” Victory over the Soviet Union then enables Hitler to defeat Great Britain by early 1943 and unleash in full the Nazis’ terrifying plans for the future. The Nazis enslave the 150 million inhabitants of European Russia, annihilate the 11 million European Jews, and ruthlessly pursue a eugenics program of selective breeding of “Nordic stock” and the mass sterilization of “inferiors.”

Germany’s only remaining adversary is the United States. In Herwig’s scenario, Germany—as in reality—declares war on the United States in December 1941, shortly after the historical Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and conducts a protracted U-boat offensive against the United States in the Atlantic. In Herwig’s Germany, factories also construct a fleet of long-range bombers capable of reaching America, and rocket scientists develop the A9/A10 two stage intercontinental ballistic missile— projects that actually existed in the blueprint stages. German shipyards begin building advanced Type XXI U-boats with a range of 15,500 miles and a submerged speed of 17 knots—fast enough to outrun most convoys. (The first Type XXI boat, U-2511, actually put to sea in April 1945 and performed at exactly that level.) The Germans also launch the first in a vast fleet of warships whose completion is slated for 1948, as envisioned in the Kriegsmarine’s historical Z-Plan.

Two key events occur in the late summer of 1945 in Herwig’s scenario. One is historical: because his Pacific war unfolds as it did in reality, it ends with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Japanese surrender. The other is a minimal rewrite of history in which Hitler dies of natural causes, brought on by two well documented realities: his deteriorating health, and the effects of 74 “medications” ordered by his personal physician, a quack whose prescriptions included a cocktail of strychnine and atropine, both now known to be poisonous.

Also as in reality, Hitler’s political last will and testament names Adm. Karl Dönitz as his successor. But Dönitz’s tenure lasts only a few months—and here is where Herwig’s thought experiment takes a significant turn, for in late 1945, he has American B-29s based in Iceland drop six atomic bombs, one after another over a period of weeks, on cities in western Germany, at the extreme limit of the B-29’s range. Unable to counter this rain of nuclear destruction, the Nazi regime sues for peace in early 1946.

In essence, Herwig’s pursuit of a logical sequel to a 1941 German victory over the Soviet Union ultimately led him to a scenario not far removed from reality. In his estimation, the success of the Manhattan Project made it impossible for Germany to win World War II, no matter how quick or sweeping its success in the field. True, in Herwig’s scenario, the United States emerges as the world’s only superpower— but he simply accelerates a development that did in fact occur by 1991, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Placed within the 2,500-year sweep of Western civilization, a change of 46 years is effectively almost no change at all.

The team of scholars that commissioned Herwig’s essay asked each contributor to answer certain questions about the implications of their counterfactual thought experiments. What did their work suggest about the legitimacy of various objections to counterfactual history? Was it merely an intellectual parlor game? Or was it a useful exercise that deepened the understanding of history? If the latter, what insights did their thought experiments suggest about the durability of Western civilization? And finally, what, if anything, about their counterfactual explorations surprised them as historians and gave them an appreciation of an event or dynamic they had previously not seen or had underrated?

Although Herwig had been a bit of a skeptic at the outset of the project, he came down on the side of the utility of counterfactual thought experiments— though he also agreed with those who believe that these experiments should be conservative, scrupulously observing the minimal rewrite principle, grounding the experiment in the established historical record, and curtailing the experiment at a relatively early stage.

As for its implications for Western civilization, Herwig’s thought experiment pointed to a resilience that could ride out short-term fragility, something untrue of Western civilization in its earliest phases. In other words, although it proved surprisingly easy for Germany to prevail from 1941 to 1943 and “triumph over all that we associate with the term Western civilization,” ultimately “Nazi Germany was defeated—both in reality and in this thought experiment— by the Western values of science and tolerance. Nazi notions of ‘Aryan’ versus ‘Jewish’ science blinded the Third Reich’s leadership to the potential military use of atomic weaponry.”

As for what surprised him about his own thought experiment, Herwig had two responses. First, he found he had an increased appreciation for the plethora of strategic options available to Hitler after his victory over France in 1940—options that disappeared once Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, but would have expanded had the invasion yielded an early success. The second was his chilling realization that the logical target for the first atomic bomb to be dropped on Germany would have been the port city of Hamburg—the same city in which Herwig, then an infant, was living in September 1945. His counter factual thought experiment thus required him to imagine his own immolation at the dawn of the nuclear age.

Originally published in the January 2009 issue of World War II. To subscribe, click here. 

In mid-1941, Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto, commander in chief of the Imperial Japanese Navy, predicted that if war broke out with the United States, “I shall run wild considerably for the first six months or a year but I have utterly no confidence for the second and third years.” He knew it wouldn’t be enough to seize the American possessions of Guam, the Philippines, and Hawaii, or even a main land city like San Francisco. “To make victory certain,” he warned, “we would have to march into Washington and dictate the terms of peace in the White House.”

These comments are quoted in nearly all histories of the Pacific war because they encapsulate the unlikelihood of any plausible scenario in which Japan could prevail against the military and economic might of the United States—or undercut American will sufficiently to achieve a negotiated peace settlement. The difficulty of imagining a Japanese victory extends even to Rising Sun Victorious: The Alternate History of How the Japanese Won the Pacific War, a volume of essays edited by Peter G. Tsouras.

Judging by its title, one would suppose that the 10 contributors to Rising Sun Victorious offer 10 distinct avenues to Japanese victory. But six postulate merely operational, not strategic, success. Japanese triumphs in the battles of the Coral Sea, Midway, and Guadalcanal, for example, provide only temporary respites before American shipyards and aircraft factories produce new armadas with which to resume the contest. And of course, nothing the Japanese could have done would have had any effect on the development of the atomic bomb. (One contributor notes that even if the United States had lacked bases from which B-29s could carry the bomb to Japan, it still could have relied upon a crash program to produce the Northrop XB-35 Flying Wing, a heavy bomber with a range of over 8,000 miles.)

The four alternate histories that do lead to victory actually yield only compromise settlements with the United States. Of these, perhaps the most intriguing is the volume’s final essay—“Victory Rides the Divine Wind: The Kamikaze and the Invasion of Kyushu,” by D. M. Giangreco, a former editor at Military Review who has written extensively on American plans to invade Japan—in which a military dis aster has forced the United States to conclude an armistice with Japan. What had gone so terribly wrong?

In Giangreco’s account, the abortive military coup by aggrieved Japanese staff officers on August 15, 1945, succeeds, and—despite the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as two other nuclear attacks on unnamed cities— the Japanese military fights on. The Americans have little choice but to continue with Operation Olympic, their plan for the invasion of Kyushu, the southern most of the Japanese home islands. The invasion, scheduled for November 1, 1945, is postponed until December 10 after a major typhoon ravages the American fleet in October. (A typhoon packing 140 mph winds actually did occur, on October 9, 1945.) The typhoon strongly echoes the famous storms—“divine winds”—that swept away two Mongol invasion fleets in 1274 and again in 1281, and creates a propaganda coup for the Japanese militarists that further cements their authority.

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When the 2,800-vessel American invasion fleet finally appears off the coast of Kyushu, it is beset by another typhoon of sorts. This one is composed of more than 12,000 Japanese Special Attack Corps air craft, manned by pilots with instructions to ram their bomb-laden planes directly into American vessels: the notorious kamikaze, or “divine wind,” craft, a reference to the infamous typhoons of centuries before.

Historically, the first kamikaze attacks took place on October 25, 1944, as part of the Japanese defense of Leyte Island in the Philippines. During the Battle of Okinawa in April 1945, waves of over 2,000 kamikaze aircraft attacked the American fleet, sinking 34 Allied ships and damaging 288 others. Despite such losses, however, American naval planners believed that they had created effective countermeasures against suicide attacks, most notably through the use of destroyer picket screens that provided early warning of incoming kamikaze formations.

In Giangreco’s scenario, however, the kamikazes attacking at Kyushu, able to take off from airfields close to the fleet and emerge at low altitude with minimal warning time, prove devastatingly effective. And the scale of the attacks is far greater than American planners anticipated. Some 12,000 kamikaze aircraft are involved, overwhelming the defenders and sinking dozens of transport ships with a loss, in Giangreco’s scenario, of 29,000 Americans, most of them ground troops. The aerial attacks are supplemented by suicide strikes from fast, explosive-laden motorboats that ram American vessels.

These attacks disrupt the intricately planned amphibious assaults. Without proper resupply and reinforcements, the progress of the American divisions that do get ashore is badly delayed. As a result, in two weeks American casualties exceed 170,000 dead, wounded, and missing. An additional 40,000 casualties arise as a result of radiation sickness, an unintended consequence of the atomic bombs used to destroy Japanese units en route from northern Kyushu to the invasion sites on the southern part of the island.

Nor do American problems end there. As Giangreco notes, the invasion of Kyushu was intended as a preliminary to Operation Coronet, an even larger invasion of Tokyo’s Kanto Plain on the island of Honshu, scheduled for March 1, 1946. But the six week delay in launching the Kyushu invasion would place Coronet directly in Japan’s annual monsoon season; that, coupled with American reversals at Kyushu, would have jeopardized construction of the 11 airfields needed to support the Honshu invasion.

Moreover, the radiation casualties sustained on Kyushu would have forced a halt to plans for the use of tactical nuclear strikes—one bomb for each American corps sector—directly on the Coronet invasion beaches to eliminate the defenders. Operation Coronet, therefore, becomes impracticable.

Giangreco bases his account on the historical fact that the Japanese had managed to pack Kyushu with 12,735 kamikaze air craft: more than twice the number American intelligence had anticipated. He also points out that amphibious invasions were complex, carefully choreographed affairs in which the substantial loss of transport and support ships would have created massive disruptions ashore. For example, the supply of whole blood and blood plasma for the Kyushu invasion was to have been concentrated on just five LST(H) vessels, one for each of the invasion beaches. The loss of any of these (in Giangreco’s account, two are sunk) would have resulted in the deaths of hundreds of American wounded who might otherwise have survived.

And as for the use of atomic bombs, Gen. George C. Marshall had advocated their use in support of the Kyushu invasion and the invasion of the Kanto Plain. Since American physicists badly underestimated the extent of radiation sickness caused by atomic explosions, it is likely that as many as 40,000 American troops might have fallen ill from bombs intended to destroy Japanese reinforcements.

Nonetheless, in Giangreco’s account the nuclear attacks succeed in bringing the Japanese to the conference table. Willing to endure the loss of cities, they cannot bring themselves to see their army—unable to put up an “honorable fight”—vaporized by a rain of atomic bombs. The Americans have second thoughts of their own when it becomes clear that American casualties in a continued invasion would exceed the number of troops available to replace them. The Allies and Japan therefore agree upon a compromise peace settlement. Giangreco is not specific about the details, but it would surely have involved an unequivocal guarantee that the Japanese emperor would remain in power and, most likely, mean no military occupation of the Japanese home islands.

It seems odd to include this scenario in a book ostensibly about Japanese victory, for the sequel to such a settlement would have been unmitigated disaster for the Japanese. In reality, the emperor remained on the throne anyway, and only American occupation saved Japan from famine, restored its shattered economy, and created a new political order that made the Land of the Rising Sun a land of peace and prosperity in the decades that followed. A “divine wind” that saved Japan from the humiliation of unconditional surrender would in fact have been an ill wind that brought only calamity.

Originally published in the March 2009 issue of World War II.

In March 2006 a statue of Winston Churchill went on display in Norwich, England. It might have attracted little attention but for one disquieting detail: it showed the prime minister in a strait jacket. The statue was part of a campaign by Rethink, the mental health advocacy group that commissioned it.

“We are trying to break down the stigma of mental illness,” explained a spokesman. “Churchill documented his depression and referred to it as his ‘black dog.’ Nowadays it would be described as bipolar disorder or manic depression. We all know that Churchill was a great leader and this statue is an illustration of what people with mental illness can achieve”—that is, without the cruel caricatures that too often burden those with such illnesses.

Indeed, the controversy in the wake of the statue’s unveiling underscored the point Rethink was trying to make. Many Britons cried foul. “It’s not only insulting, it’s pathetic,” growled Nicholas Soames, grandson of the former prime minister. The outcry forced Rethink to remove the statue after only a few days. The organization had miscalculated the public’s receptivity to such a portrayal of a national icon. But had it been mistaken about Churchill’s illness itself?

Churchill indeed suffered from bouts with depression, a fact that became well known with the 1966 publication of a memoir based on the diaries of his personal physician, Lord Moran. In it, Lord Moran wrote, “Winston has never been at all like other people….In his early days…he was afflicted by fits of depression that might last for months.” He recorded that Churchill once remarked, “When I was young, for two or three years the light faded out of the picture. I did my work. I sat in the House of Commons, but black depression settled on me.” Churchill remained on guard against it his entire life.

Although few historians have questioned the reality of Churchill’s “black dog,” many have discounted its significance. Martin Gilbert, author of an eight volume authorized biography of Britain’s greatest statesman, rejected “the picture of Churchill as frequently and debilitatingly depressed,” and averred that “Churchill did not suffer from clinical depression.” That is perhaps technically correct: the modern criteria for a major depressive episode require the presence of five or more distinct symptoms over two weeks.

And in any event, it seems improbable that a man of Churchill’s famous energy could have suffered simply from bouts of depression. During his 90-year life he not only served almost continuously in public life, but wrote dozens of articles and books, including a six-volume history of the First World War and a six-volume memoir of his service as Great Britain’s wartime prime minister. This has led some to speculate that Churchill actually suffered from manic-depressive illness—now called bipolar disorder—which is essentially an abnormality in the human bio chemistry affecting energy level and mood.

Specifically, Churchill probably had what is now classified as Bipolar II disorder, a variant in which hypomanic episodes— periods of unusual energy, creativity, and goal-oriented activity—are often more frequent than depressions and do not result in breaks from reality associated with full blown manic episodes.

Churchill’s history suggests several hall marks of hypomanic behavior. A penchant for impulsive spending landed him in financial hot water numerous times. He frequently exhibited abnormal energy and appeared fully rested after only a few hours’ sleep. A typical working day began at 8 a.m. and continued until 2 a.m. or beyond—a habit that exasperated the secretaries and subordinates obliged to stay up with him as he worked. He was often in an expansive mood and could carry on monologues of up to four hours. He had few inhibitions and would receive official visitors—including high-ranking generals—in his bath robe, or even while lounging in bed. On one occasion the chief of the Imperial General Staff, Field Marshal Alan Brooke, encountered Churchill with a gramophone blaring. “In [his] many-coloured dressing gown, with a sandwich in one hand and watercress in the other, he trotted round and round the hall giving little skips to the time of the gramophone. On each lap near the fireplace, he stopped to release some priceless quotation or thought.”

Contrary to an all-too-common belief, many individuals with bipolar disorder lead productive, even high-functioning lives. The author of this column was diagnosed with the disease over 25 years ago, yet it has not prevented him from becoming a successful professor and writer. Modern pharmaceuticals play a significant role in containing the illness, as does the support of family and friends, regular consultations with a therapist and psychiatrist, physical exercise and good sleep habits, and perhaps above all, a refusal to let bipolar disorder define the person who has it. Perhaps the greatest handicap afflicting those with the illness is the stigma that still clings to it—a stigma far more severe in Churchill’s day and one that could have wrecked his political career if the illness had been formally diagnosed.

Yet despite the success that many people with bipolar disorder manage to achieve, it remains possible for episodes to strike with such intensity as to be debilitating. What if Churchill had experienced such an episode at some crucial point during World War II?

A low point in Churchill’s career occurred in the winter of 1942, at about the time of the fall of Singapore, the greatest disaster in British military history. Churchill came under intense political fire and there were calls for his resignation—calls that often emphasized Churchill’s seeming inability to concentrate and erratic work habits. Wrote a high-ranking official who saw him at the time, “He seems quite incapable of listening or taking in the simplest point but goes off at a tangent on a word and then rambles on inconsecutively…. For the first time I realized he is not only unbusiness-like but overtired and really losing his grip altogether.”

Churchill himself remarked in retrospect that it was amazing he had managed to remain in power during that dark period, but his immense public popularity meant that the political cost of removing him would have been high. Nonetheless, some thought seriously about forcing Churchill to at least relinquish the office of minister of defense that he held in addition to his post as prime minister—knowing full well that Churchill had vowed to resign altogether if any such thing were done. He survived a vote of confidence in the House of Commons—and would survive another later that year, after the fall of Tobruk—but in both cases he did so because he was able to respond brilliantly to his critics and because the leaders of both the Conservative and Labour parties held their memberships firmly in line. Had Churchill slipped into greater despondency, so that his eloquence and powers of decision eluded him, or had the stress of the moment pushed him into a severe hypomanic or even manic episode, his political support might have disappeared.

In such an event, the person most often mentioned as his successor was Sir Stafford Cripps, a prominent Labour Party member who enjoyed enormous prestige in the wake of a successful meeting with Soviet dicta tor Joseph Stalin. It is even thought that if Cripps and another critic of Churchill’s performance, Sir Anthony Eden, had joined forces, they might have mobilized the political clout necessary to secure the vote of no confidence to remove Churchill from power—as had occurred to his predecessor, Neville Chamberlain. While the subsequent course of events is impossible to predict, it is worth noting that Cripps was a leading, if cautious, advocate of an early “second front” in northwestern Europe. Had he replaced Churchill as prime minister, he might have sided with the American high command in pressing for a cross-Channel attack in 1943 rather than 1944.

Yet Churchill, with his indomitable spirit, managed to overcome his “black dog” and return to the fight with undiminished combativeness and courage, leaving an example of perseverance that has rightly been seen as a legacy to subsequent generations—a legacy often denied, ironically, to those who struggle with the same mental afflictions that Churchill battled throughout his life.

Originally published in the May 2009 issue of World War II. To subscribe, click here. 

Consider this scenario: In May 1940 Italian dictator Benito Mussolini observes with mixed emotions the stunning speed of the German military triumph in the west. He cannot help but admire Hitler’s audacity and the prowess of the Nazi war machine. At the same time, he knows Italy is not ready for war and he is resentful of the way Hitler is treating him.

The previous year, after signing a military alliance with Germany—the “Pact of Steel”—Mussolini had sent Hitler a rambling memorandum urging the postponement of the “inevitable” war with Great Britain and France until 1942, when Italy’s military buildup would be complete. To Mussolini’s chagrin, Hitler had not bothered to inform him that he had already decided to attack Poland in September 1939. Nor had he notified Mussolini of his intention to grab Slovakia. Mussolini had learned about the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact in the newspapers, just like the rest of the world.

Although the terms of the Pact of Steel require Italy to join Germany in the event of any war, even one of aggression, Mussolini has taken refuge in a policy of nonbelligerence, in which Italy would be sympathetic to Germany but remain technically neutral. Hitler has gone along with this, and although Mussolini lusts to enter the war, he hopes to maintain non belligerence until Italy is ready to fight. On the eve of the Nazis’ spring offensive in 1940, Mussolini intimates to Italy’s foreign minister, Count Galeazzo Ciano—also his son-in-law—that it would not displease him if the campaign proved bloody and indecisive. Hitler, he thinks, needs to be “slowed down.”

The rapid German breakthrough and surrounding of the Allied armies in Belgium that May, however, show all too well that Hitler is on the verge of one of the fastest and most complete military conquests in modern history. Mussolini knows Italy must join the war at once. Privately he imagines himself on the balcony of the Palazzo Venezia, his headquarters in Rome, announcing to a cheering crowd that Italy has at last taken arms “against the plutocratic and reactionary democracies of the West.”

The war, Il Duce tells his top commanders on May 29, 1940, would be over by September. It would be a cheap victory that did not require full military preparation—merely “a few thousand dead” to earn a place at the peace conference and gain a share of the spoils.

The normally supine commanders, however, show a degree of resistance that leaves Mussolini distressed but impressed. The supreme chief of the Italian general staff, Marshal Pietro Badoglio, had three days earlier told Mussolini that a decision for war would amount to “suicide.” He is more measured at the meeting, but still insists that Italy lacks the ammunition reserves for even a brief conflict. Marshal Rudolfo Graziani opines that the army is not yet fit to take the offensive against Yugoslavia, much less France. Adm. Domenico Cavagnari insists that the navy is ready only for defensive operations.

There are other objections. The only offensive open to Italy is an attack on France through the Alps. Even in June, temperatures in that region can dip close to freezing. The Italian troops lack adequate clothing; hundreds could fall prey to hypothermia. In any event, the troops then near France are, per Mussolini’s earlier directive, in defensive positions. It will require 20 days to redeploy them. Someone else points out that a million tons of Italian merchant vessels are at sea. It will take weeks to recall them; otherwise neutral or hostile nations will con fine them as soon as Italy declares war.

Mussolini has a visionary’s belief in the power of will to overcome cold fact, but he faces another obstacle: unlike Hitler, his power is not absolute. Italy’s king, Vittorio Emanuele III, remains the head of state. The previous August he had told Ciano that “we are absolutely in no condition to wage war.”

The combination of military and royal opposition gives Mussolini pause. He could impose his will over one or the other but not both. Ruefully, he decides to continue Italy’s nonbelligerent stance.

The next few weeks are agony for Il Duce as France sues for peace and the Luftwaffe pounds Great Britain in apparent preparation for a cross-Channel attack. But by September it becomes clear that the war is going to continue for some time. British fighters have retained command of the skies above their home land, the Royal Navy remains intact and has been supplemented by 50 destroyers handed over by the United States, and the onset of autumn weather renders a seaborne invasion of England impossible. Italy can still complete its military preparations and enter the war in its own time, on its own terms, and perhaps even as the arbiter of the huge conflict.

Save for surprisingly few differences, this scenario follows historical fact. The crucial departure is that the king and military were as impressed as Mussolini by Germany’s offensive; although they made Italy’s lack of military preparedness a matter of record, they agreed that it was time to enter the war. Furthermore, the effect of a sudden declaration of war on Italy’s merchant fleet was not taken into consideration; a million tons of shipping, one third of all that Italy possessed, was indeed seized and confined. Nor was the impact of climate on an Alpine offensive considered. Italian troops gained only a few hundred yards of French territory in June 1940 before an armistice ended combat; dozens perished from exposure.

Had Italy remained on the sidelines, the war would have unfolded very differently. There would have been no failed Italian invasion of Greece and, more importantly, no campaign in North Africa. Without the North Africa campaign, Germany would not have sent the Afrikakorps to shore up the wretched Italian army, and American forces would not have launched Operation Torch—the November 1942 invasion of western North Africa—because there would have been no German troops to fight. There would have been no invasion of Sicily or landings at Salerno and Anzio. As a result, the western Allies would have had to mount a cross-Channel attack by forces almost devoid of amphibious and combat experience.

Military historian Douglas Porch believes that “to factor the Mediterranean out of World War II is to imagine a disaster of epic proportions, and a military outcome in the European theater far different from an unconditional surrender of Germany.” The sad truth, he adds, is that Operation Sledgehammer and Operation Roundup—the planned Allied invasions of northern France in 1942 and 1943, respectively—“would certainly have collapsed in bloody disaster against a strongly entrenched German army, backed by a powerful Luftwaffe, with German wolf packs prowling among the Allied fleet supporting the invasion.”

But Mussolini did indeed stand on the balcony of the Palazzo Venezia on the evening of June 10, 1940. In so doing he condemned Italy to a disastrous war and, as Porch observes, opened a Mediterranean theater that proved “vital to Allied success.” As for Mussolini, he was toppled from power in July 1943 and summarily shot by partisans in April 1945, his corpse suspended upside down from a meat hook at a Milan gas station.

In his memoirs, Churchill mused on what might have become of Mussolini had he chosen differently in June 1940: “Peace, prosperity, and growing power would have been the prize.”

Originally published in the July 2009 issue of World War II. To subscribe, click here. 

In January 1940, president Franklin D. Roosevelt is one year from completing his second term in office. While there is no constitutional prohibition against seeking a third term—and will not be until the 22nd Amendment is ratified in 1951—no previous president has defied the precedent established by George Washington in 1796 that two terms is enough. One prominent Republican growls that for a president to hold office for 12 years would be a long step toward totalitarianism.

But FDR doesn’t appear to be headed in that direction. On New Year’s Day, the Chicago Tribune reports that if FDR seeks a third term it will divide the Democratic Party, set the stage for a floor fight at the Democratic National Convention when it meets in July, and open the door to a Republican victory in the general election that November. For these reasons, the paper says that FDR “has abandoned any notion of seeking a third term and will back Secretary of State Cordell Hull for the nomination.”

FDR’s private actions and conversations support that report. On January 20 he signs a three-year contract with Collier’s magazine to write 26 articles for a commission of $1.2 million per year (at present-day values). Four days later he tells a cabinet member, “I do not want to run unless between now and the convention things get very, very much worse in Europe.” He speaks with enthusiasm about the imminent removal of his public papers to a new presidential library in Hyde Park, New York. And in February he complains of being chained to the presidential chair “from morning till night…. And I can’t stand it any longer.”

Of course, FDR is a famously canny, sometimes devious politician. It cannot be ruled out that secretly he hopes for a third term. Observers note that he does little to groom a successor for the presidency. His refusal to firmly declare that he will or will not be a candidate makes it impossible for other Democratic aspirants to campaign openly for the nomination. In any event, the shocking defeat of France in June 1940 assuredly means that things in Europe have gotten “very, very much worse.” FDR announces that while he will not campaign for the nomination, if he is drafted to run at the convention, he will do so.

The gambit backfires. Jim Farley, the chair of the Democratic National Committee, visits FDR at the president’s private home in Hyde Park to urge him against even a tacit run for a third term. When this fails, Farley allows supporters to place his own name in nomination. Newspaper editorials across the country blast FDR as disingenuous. Despite initial support from numerous state delegations, the “Draft FDR” movement collapses. But so does the convention, for the delegates cannot agree upon a candidate to rally behind. After numerous ballots it settles, in a spirit of exhaustion rather than enthusiasm, upon the candidate to whom FDR has given his support: 69-year-old Cordell Hull.

The ensuing campaign is a disaster for the Democrats and an unexpected triumph for the Republicans. Hull shows scant aptitude for the campaign trail. The GOP, on the other hand, has nominated an unlikely but charismatic 48-year-old candidate, Wendell Willkie. The president of a major utilities holding company, Willkie has never run for public office. But he has extensive experience in politics and proves an adept and vigorous candidate. Crisscrossing the country in a 16-car train dubbed the “Willkie Special,” he racks up 18,789 miles through 31 states, stopping to make 560 speeches.

A Democrat until January 1940, Willkie is what will one day be described as a “modern Republican.” He accepts most aspects of the New Deal and is critical mainly of the way FDR has administered its programs. A liberal on civil rights, he does much to bring the black vote back to “the party of Lincoln.” He does surprisingly well in courting the labor vote and gains the endorsement of several prominent labor organizers. And unlike many Republicans, Willkie is an internationalist, meaning that he rejects isolationist policies and favors a foreign policy that supports the foes of Nazi, Fascist, and Japanese aggression. In November, he soundly defeats Cordell Hull.

The above scenario is historically accurate in every detail, save that the “Draft FDR” gambit worked and Roosevelt defeated Willkie for the presidency in 1940. Roosevelt’s reluctance to run for a third term is a matter of record, as is Farley’s strident opposition to such a run and the misgivings of several prominent newspapers about the propriety of his doing so. The story of Willkie’s astonishing campaign is also factually correct. Willkie lost to FDR by 5 million votes, amassing more votes than any Republican nominee between 1928 and 1952.

But what if Willkie had become president in 1940? His subsequent career pro vides numerous clues as to the policies he would have pursued. During the 1940 campaign, Willkie supported FDR’s decision to give 50 World War I destroyers to Great Britain in exchange for basing rights in the Caribbean. He also supported passage of the 1940 Selective Service Act, the first peacetime draft in American history, as well as the Lend-Lease Act. In February 1941 he made a goodwill trip to Great Britain that underscored America’s commitment to that embattled nation. A round-the-world tour followed the next year and, in 1943, he published an inter nationalist manifesto that criticized European colonialism, looked to China as a rising power, and favored the creation of international institutions similar to the eventual United Nations. All this indicates that as president, Willkie would have pursued policies similar to Roosevelt’s.

The record suggests that he might have differed with FDR in only two important respects. Although he refrained from direct criticism of the Japanese American relocation program, his public remarks imply that he regarded it as unnecessary and unjust. And during a visit to Moscow in 1942, he went on record as favoring “a real second front in western Europe at the earliest possible moment our military leaders will approve.” Since American military planners strongly favored an early cross-Channel attack, it is possible that President Willkie would have eschewed Operation Torch—the invasion of west ern North Africa—in favor of Operation Roundup, the American plan for a 1943 cross-Channel attack. Had he done so— and had the Americans succeeded in persuading their reluctant British allies—it is likely that the attempt would have achieved at best a limited foothold on the Continent. It might even have failed altogether, and possibly prolonged the war.

Two other important issues remain, of necessity, imponderable. Could Willkie, as a first-term president without previous experience in public office, have been as effective a commander in chief as Franklin D. Roosevelt? Probably not. But as an inexperienced though intelligent first-term president, he would likely have accepted the counsel of the highly competent American senior command even more readily than did FDR. Second, Willkie died of a massive heart attack in October 1944. Given the stresses of the office, one must assume that he would have met the same fate had he been elected president. And since his running mate, Sen. Charles McNary of Oregon, died even sooner—in February 1944—Willkie would have had to nominate someone to replace McNary as vice president. That raises an even greater unknown: Who then would have been president in 1945, faced with the awesome decision to use the atomic bomb?

Originally published in the September 2009 issue of World War II. To subscribe, click here.