Hitler and America by
In February 1942, barely two months after he had declared war on the United States, Adolf Hitler praised America's great industrial achievements and admitted that Germany would need some time to catch up. The Americans, he said, had shown the way in developing the most efficient methods of production--especially in iron and coal, which formed the basis of modern industrial civilization. He also touted America's superiority in the field of transportation, particularly the automobile. He loved automobiles and saw in Henry Ford a great hero of the industrial age. Hitler's personal train was even code-named "Amerika." In Hitler and America, historian Klaus P. Fischer seeks to understand more deeply how Hitler viewed America, the nation that was central to Germany's defeat. He reveals Hitler's split-minded image of America: America and Amerika. Hitler would loudly call the United States a feeble country while at the same time referring to it as an industrial colossus worthy of imitation. Or he would belittle America in the vilest terms while at the same time looking at the latest photos from the United States, watching American films, and amusing himself with Mickey Mouse cartoons. America was a place that Hitler admired--for the can-do spirit of the American people, which he attributed to their Nordic blood--and envied--for its enormous territorial size, abundant resources, and political power. Amerika, however, was to Hitler a mongrel nation, grown too rich too soon and governed by a capitalist elite with strong ties to the Jews. Across the Atlantic, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had his own, far more realistically grounded views of Hitler. Fischer contrasts these with the misconceptions and misunderstandings that caused Hitler, in the end, to see only Amerika, not America, and led to his defeat.
Targeting the Third Reich: Air Intelligence and the Allied Bombing Campaigns by
When large formations of Allied four-engine bombers finally flew over Europe, it marked the beginning of the end for the Third Reich. Their relentless hammering of Germany--totaling more than 1.4 million missions--took out oil refineries, industries, and transportation infrastructures vital to the Reich's war effort. While other accounts have focused on operational details, this is the first book to reveal the crucial role of air intelligence in these dramatic campaigns. Robert Ehlers reexamines these bombings through the lens of both air intelligence and operations, a dual approach that shows how the former was so vital to the latter's success. Air intelligence was essential to both targeting and damage assessment, and by demonstrating its contributions to the Combined Bomber Offensive of 1943-1945, Ehlers provides a wealth of new insight into the war. Ehlers describes the close ties that developed between the Royal Air Force's "precision intelligence" arm and the U.S. Army Air Force's "precision bombardment" forces, telling how the RAF's photographic reconnaissance and signals intelligence steered both British and American bombers to the right targets at the right intervals with the right munitions. He shows that the greatest strength of this partnership was its ability to orchestrate all aspects of damage assessment within an effective organizational structure, so that by 1944 senior air commanders--like the RAF's Arthur "Bomber" Harris and the AAF's Carl "Tooey" Spaatz--could gauge the accuracy of bombing with a high degree of precision, analyze its effects on the German war effort, and determine its effectiveness in helping the Allies achieve strategic objectives. Ehlers focuses on three key offensives in 1944--against French and Belgian rail supply lines delivering German troops and supplies to Normandy, against German oil refineries, and against railroads and waterways inside the Reich--that had a disastrous effect on the Nazi war effort. In the process, he underscores the degree to which bombers constituted part of a highly effective combined-arms force, giving Allied armies crucial advantages on the battlefield. Drawing on a huge collection of bomb-damage assessment photographs and a wealth of other archival sources, he shows that the success of these and other efforts can be traced directly to the success of air intelligence. Providing a deeper and more accurate understanding of the bomber campaigns' role in the Allied victory, Ehlers's study testifies to the strategic importance of these efforts in that war and provides a tool for understanding the importance of intelligence operations in future conflicts.
Five Days in August: How World War II became a nuclear war by
Most Americans believe that the Second World War ended because the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan forced it to surrender. Five Days in August boldly presents a different interpretation: that the military did not clearly understand the atomic bomb's revolutionary strategic potential, that the Allies were almost as stunned by the surrender as the Japanese were by the attack, and that not only had experts planned and fully anticipated the need for a third bomb, they were skeptical about whether the atomic bomb would work at all. With these ideas, Michael Gordin reorients the historical and contemporary conversation about the A-bomb and World War II. Five Days in August explores these and countless other legacies of the atomic bomb in a glaring new light. Daring and iconoclastic, it will result in far-reaching discussions about the significance of the A-bomb, about World War II, and about the moral issues they have spawned.
The Conquerors by
As Allied soldiers fought the Nazis, Franklin Roosevelt and, later, Harry Truman fought in private with Churchill and Stalin over how to ensure that Germany could never threaten the world again. Eleven years in the writing, drawing on newly opened American, Soviet and British documents as well as private diaries, letters and secret audio recordings, Michael Beschloss's gripping narrative lets us eavesdrop on private conversations and telephone calls among a cast of historical giants. The book casts new light upon Roosevelt's concealment of what America knew about Hitler's war against the Jews and his foot-dragging on saving refugees. FDR's actions so shocked his closest friend in the Cabinet, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr., that Morgenthau risked their friendship by accusing the President of "acquiescence" in the "murder of the Jews." After the Normandy invasion, "obsessed" by what he had learned about the Nazis and the Holocaust, Morgenthau drew up a secret blueprint for the Allies to crush Germany by destroying German mines and factories after the European victory. As The conquerors shows, FDR endorsed most of Morgenthau's plan, and privately pressured a reluctant Churchill to concur. Horrified, Secretary of State Cordell Hull and Secretary of War Henry Stimson leaked the plan to the press at the zenith of the 1944 campaign. Hitler's propagandist Joseph Goebbels denounced the Roosevelt-Churchill "Jewish murder plan" and claimed it would kill forty-three million Germans. Republican presidential candidate Thomas Dewey charged that by stiffening German resistance, publicity about Morgenthau's plan had cost many U.S. soldiers' lives. The conquerors explores suspicions that Soviet secret agents manipulated Roosevelt and his officials to do Stalin's bidding on Germany. It reveals new information on FDR's hidden illnesses and how they affected his leadership--and his private talk about quitting his job during his fourth term and letting Harry Truman become President. It shows us FDR's final dinner, in April 1945, in Warm Springs, Georgia, at which the President and Morgenthau were still arguing over postwar Germany. Finally it shows how the unprepared new President Truman managed to pick up the pieces and push Stalin and Churchill to accede to a bargain that would let the Anglo-Americans block Soviet threats against Western Europe and ensure that the world would not have to fear another Adolf Hitler.
FDR by
FDR: The War President opens as Roosevelt has been re-elected to a third term and the United States is drifting toward a war that has already engulfed Europe. Roosevelt, as commander in chief, statesman, and politician, must navigate a delicate balance between helping those in Europe--while remaining mindful of the forces of isolation both in the Congress and the country--and protecting the gains of the New Deal, upon which he has spent so much of his prestige and power. Kenneth S. Davis draws vivid depictions of the lives, characters, and temperaments of the military and political personalities so paramount to the history of the time: Churchill, Stalin, de Gaulle, and Hitler; Generals Marshall, Eisenhower, and MacArthur; Admiral Darlan, Chiang Kai-shek, Charles Lindbergh, William Allen White, Joseph Kennedy, Averell Harriman, Harry Tru-man, Robert Murphy, Sidney Hillman, William Knud-sen, Cordell Hull, Henry Morgenthau, Henry Stimson, A. Philip Randolph, Wendell Willkie, and Henry Wallace. The portrait of Henry Hopkins, who interacted with many of these personalities on behalf of Roosevelt, is woven into this history as the complex, interconnected relationship it was. Hopkins burnished the relationship between Churchill and Roosevelt and eased the way for their interactions with Stalin. Another set of characters central to Roosevelt's life and finely drawn by the author includes Eleanor Roo-sevelt, Sara Roosevelt, Missy LeHand, Grace Tully, Princess Martha of Norway, and Daisy Suckley. Integral to this history as well are the Argentina Conference, the Atlantic Charter and the beginnings of the United Nations, the Moscow Conference, lend-lease, the story of the building of the atomic bomb, Hitler's Final Solution and how Roosevelt and the State Department reacted to it, Pearl Harbor and war with Japan, the planning of Torch, and the murder of Admiral Darlan. All these stories intersect with the economic and social problems facing Roosevelt at home as the United States mobilizes for war. The lessons and concerns of 1940-1943 as dissected in this book are still relevant to the problems and concerns of our own time. A recurrent theme is technology: Do people control technology, or does technology control people? Kenneth Davis had the rare gift of writing history that reads with the immediacy of a novel; and though the outcome of this history is well known, the events and people depicted here keep the reader focused on an enthralling suspense story.
What Does the Internment of Japanese by
Contains five selections evaluating the historical causes and consequences of internment. Topics include how internment was justified at the time, how Japanese Americans resisted, and the impact of internment on Japanese American families and communities. Each chapter includes questions for clarification. Lacks an index. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.
From Isolation to War by
In a major revision of this popular text, Dr. Justus Doenecke integrates scholarly research conducted in the 1990s to offer readers a fresh picture of the major events and historiographical controversies in American diplomacy in the decade before Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor. Individual chapters center on the aftermath of World War I, the Manchurian crisis, the expansion of Germany and Japan and the U.S. response, FDR's policy towards Europe from the Munich conference to his "shoot-on-sight" orders, and Roosevelt's stance toward Asia from the termination of the 1911 trade treaty with Japan and the breaking of diplomatic relations. A final chapter considers the background of the Pearl Harbor attack, stressing not only the role of Admiral Yamamoto but the revisionist arguments concerning event, including the "devil theory" of the president's culpability. This third edition includes entirely new material including discussions of Roosevelt's leadership style, the recognition of the Soviet Union, policy toward Cuba and Mexico, Pan-American conferences, the 1940 mission of Sumner Welles, the Four Freedoms, and the U.S. Army victory plan of autumn 1940. Certain other passages have been expanded, such as those concerning the background of American anti-interventionism, major peace groups, the London Economic Conference of 1933, the Ethiopian conflict, the Spanish Civil War, the Nye Committee, the predicament of Jewish refugees, the Soviet-Finnish war, FDR's Japan diplomacy and his last-minute assurances to British ambassador Halifax, and the latest arguments over Pearl Harbor. Also new to this edition is a collection of striking photographs. The third edition of this informative and engaging text-one enjoyed by instructors and students alike for decades-is appropriate for use in the U.S. history survey as well as in course on twentieth-century history, American foreign diplomacy, and international relations.
World War II (1939-1946) by
This 2-volume resource contains 80 primary source documents that provide a compelling view of this unique period of American history. World War II is remembered not only for its violent encounters on the battlefield, its war of words between competing ideologies, its genocidal events, and, ultimately, its reconfiguration of Europe. It is also remembered for having reshaped whole areas of modern life, from economics and social relations to politics and popular culture. Along with the Civil War, it continues to be one of the most written about topics in US (and international) history. World War II had a lasting impact on the United States, both domestically and in terms of the nation's place in the international community. Besides altering values and patterns of life, the war gave rise to a massive military-industrial complex involving government agencies, the military, corporations, and universities in the pursuit of national security and economic and political advantage. Historians and the American populace at large will surely continue to investigate this rich and fascinating subject as they seek to understand the basis of the modern nation. Defining Documents in American History: World War II provides detailed analyses of key documents produced from 1936-1947, organized under nine broad categories: The Lead-Up to War; Pearl Harbor; Domestic Aliens; Other Demographics; Foreign Policy; War and Victory; The Holocaust; Nuremberg; The Atom Bomb. Each document is supported by a critical essay, written by historians and teachers, that includes a Summary Overview, Defining Moment, Author Biography, Document Analysis, and Essential Themes. Readers will appreciate the diversity of the collected texts, including journals, letters, speeches, political sermons, laws, government reports, and court cases, among other genres. An important feature of each essay is a close reading of the primary source that develops evidence of broader themes, such as author's rhetorical purpose, social or class position, point of view, and other relevant issues. In addition, essays are organized by section themes, listed above, highlighting major issues of the period, many of which extend across eras and continue to shape American Life. Each section begins with a brief introduction that defines questions and problems underlying the subjects in the historical documents. A brief glossary is included at the end of each document, highlighting keywords that are important in the study of the primary source. Each essay also includes a Bibliography and Additional Reading section for further research. - Publisher.Defining Documents in American History: World War II offers an in-depth collection of essays on important historical documents that have a wide range of subjects including: The Lead-Up to War, Pearl Harbor, Domestic Aliens, Other Demographics, Foreign Policy, War and Victory, The Holocaust, Nuremberg, The Atom Bomb, and more. Each of the 80 primary source documents is examined through a Summary Overview, Defining Moment, Author Biography, Document Analysis, and coverage of Essential Themes. Each essay also includes a close reading of the primary source that develops evidence of broader themes, such as authors rhetorical purpose, social or class position, point of view, and other relevant issues. - Amazon.
Men in German Uniform: POWs in America During World War II by
Examining the largest prisoner-of-war handling operation in U.S. history, this book offers a meticulous account of the myriad history, problems as well as the impressive successes that came with housing 371,000 German POWs on American soil during World War II. Antonio Thompson draws on extensive archival research to probe the various ways in which the U.S. government strove to comply with the Geneva Convention mandate that enemy prisoners be moved from the war zone and given food, shelter, and clothing equal to that provided for American soldiers. While the prisoners became a ready source of manpower for the labor- starved American home front and received small wages in return, their stay in the United States generated more than a few difficulties, which included not only daunting logistics but also violence within the camps. Such violence was often blamed on Nazi influence and control; however, as Thompson points out, only a few of the prisoners were actually Nazis. Because the Germans had cobbled together military forces that included convicts, their own POWs, volunteers from neutral nations, and conscripts from occupied countries, the bonds that held these soldiers together amid the pressures of combat dissolved once they were placed behind barbed wire. When these men in German uniform, who were not always Germans, donned POW garb, their former social, racial, religious, and ethnic tensions quickly reemerged. To counter such troubles, American authorities organized various activities including sports, arts, education, and religion within the POW camps; some prisoners even participated in an illegal denazification program created by the U.S. government. Despite the problems, Thompson argues, the POW-housing program proved largely successful, as Americans maintained their reputation for fairness and humane treatment during a time of widespread turmoil.
The African American Experience During World War II by
"Drawing on more than thirty years of teaching and research, Neil A. Wynn combines narrative history and primary sources as he locates the World War II years within the long-term struggle for African Americans' equal rights. It is now widely accepted thatthese years were crucial in the development of the emerging Civil Rights movement through the economic and social impact of the war, as well as the military service itself. Wynn examines the period within the broader context of the New Deal era of the 1930s and the Cold War of the 1950s, concluding that the war years were neither simply a continuation of earlier developments nor a prelude to later change. Rather, this period was characterized by an intense transformation of black hopes and expectations, encouraged by real socio-economic shifts and departures in federal policy. Black self consciousness at a national level found powerful expression in new movements, from the demand for equality in the military service to changes in the shop floor to the 'Double V' campaign that linked the fight for democracy at home for the fight for democracy abroad. As the nation played a new world role in the developing Cold War, the tensions between America's stated beliefs and actual practices emphasized these issues and brought new forces into play. More than a half century later, this book presents a much-needed up-to-date, short and readable interpretation of existing scholarship. Accessible to general and student readers, it tells the story without jargon or theory while including the historiography and debate on particular issues"--Provided by publisher.
Forward with Patton: The World War II Diary of Colonel Robert S. Allen by
Soldier, journalist, and Soviet spy Robert S. Allen (1900--1981) was a deeply controversial figure. After serving in France during World War I, he left the military, forged a successful career as a syndicated columnist, and even rose to become the Washington, DC, bureau chief for the Christian Science Monitor. During this period, he developed a sideline as a paid informant for the KGB. Still, Allen returned to the army following America's entry into World War II and served as General George S. Patton's chief of situation and executive officer for operations. He was considered such an authority on Patton after the war that Twentieth Century-Fox asked him to develop a film script about the general. In Forward with Patton, John Nelson Rickard presents a complete, annotated edition of Colonel Allen's World War II diary for 1944-1945. The entries reflect Allen's private thoughts on his experiences, provide insight into the employment of the Third Army staff, and survey the strengths and weaknesses of individual staff members. They also provide an invaluable and rare perspective of Patton, with whom Allen worked closely while gathering intelligence, and whom he deeply admired. At times objective and at others intensely personal, Forward with Patton offers a distinctive eyewitness account of one of the US military's most important armies by one of its most colorful soldiers.
The American Eagle Squadrons of the Royal Air Force: Operational Records and Combat Reports, 1940-1942. by
"While America sought to remain neutral in the early years of World War II, some Americans did not. This book is the first to provide the operational records and combat reports of the three American "Eagle" Royal Air Force squadrons-units comprised of volunteer American pilots who served with British prior to the U.S. entering the war. The records tell the story of the more than 200 pilots who, against federal law, flew with the British in their fight against Nazi Germany. While some Americans served individually in RAF units, these three squadrons-the 71st, 121st and 133rd-were the only ones organized exclusively for Americans. They were the first of dozens of American fighter squadrons that would soar over Europe." Provided by publisher.
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