Death and Honor

PROLOGUE

Historians now generally agree that the tides of war had begun to turn against the German-Japanese-Italian alliance, “The Axis,” in the spring and summer of 1943.

From the American perspective, the war had begun with a series of humiliating defeats. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 saw most of the battleships of the U.S. Pacific Fleet either lying on the bottom or so seriously damaged as to be out of action for the foreseeable future. The next day, the Japanese attack on the Philippine Islands destroyed half of General Douglas MacArthur’s air force.

Before the month was out, MacArthur was forced to declare Manila an open city and retreat to the Bataan Peninsula and the island fortress of Corregidor. On 23 December, Wake Island fell to the Japanese. Two days later, the British forces in Hong Kong surrendered.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt ordered MacArthur to Australia. MacArthur arrived 20 March 1942, delivered his famous “I Shall Return” speech, then learned there were only thirty-four thousand soldiers in Australia and very little supplies.

On 18 April 1942, Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle led a small flight of B-25 “Mitchell” medium bombers in a raid on Tokyo. They took off from an aircraft carrier on what most of them considered a suicide mission, knowing the actual damage they could do was minimal, but that some victory—almost any victory—against the Japanese was necessary to prevent despair among the American people.

The exultation of the American people when they learned of the raid was short-lived. Just over two weeks later, on 6 May 1942, Lieutenant General Jonathan Wainwright was forced to surrender all U.S. forces in the Philippines. It was the largest surrender in American history.

In early July, MacArthur learned that the Japanese were about to build an air base on Guadalcanal, in the Solomon Islands. If the base was built, the Japanese could both attack Australia and interdict supply of Australia by sea.

Less than a month later, on 7 August 1942, the just-formed, ill-prepared First Marine Division, which had not planned to go into combat for another year, landed on Guadalcanal. The desperate action almost failed. On 9 August, after losing the cruisers USS Vincennes and USS Quincy and the Australian cruiser HMAS Canberra at the Battle of Savo Island, the invasion fleet was withdrawn. It took with it the Marines’ heavy artillery, most of the supplies it had planned to put ashore, and even a large number of Marines.

The Marines who remained ashore were on their own. Firing ammunition made for World War I and living off of captured Japanese rations, they not only held on but began to clear the island of Japanese. The airfield the Japanese had been building was captured, finished, and named Henderson Field to honor a heroic Marine pilot. Australia was now safe.

On 17 August, a small group of Marines—one of whom was a son of President Roosevelt—of the Marine Second Raider Battalion staged an attack on Makin Island. The short-lived raid was a success not so much for what it accomplished in destroying Japanese supplies, but because it meant the Japanese, fearful of other submarine-launched Marine raids, would have to divert large numbers of troops to protect the islands they had captured.

America, having licked its wounds, was now slowly starting to fight successfully, even in the Japanese-occupied Philippines: On 1 October 1942, a reserve lieutenant colonel named Wendell W. Fertig, who could not bring himself to obey Wainwright’s order to surrender, pinned homemade stars to his collar points and nailed a proclamation to a tree announcing that Brigadier General Fertig was assuming command of U.S. forces in the Philippines. Large numbers of similarly minded Americans and Filipinos quickly joined him.

On the other side of the world, in the early fall of 1942, the German army was locked in an enormous battle with the Soviet Union at Stalingrad, and the English were fighting the Afrikakorps under General Erwin Rommel, who threatened to overrun Egypt and with it the critically needed Suez Canal.

The American contribution to that part of the war initially was trying to supply its allies, especially the Soviet Union, which could not win at Stalingrad without a massive infusion of American supplies—everything from aircraft, tanks, and ammunition to food.

The German navy fought this effort by intercepting the supply convoys with hunter packs of submarines. They operated in the North Atlantic near Europe, in the North Atlantic off the coast of the United States, in the Gulf of Mexico, and in the South Atlantic near Argentina and Brazil.

New York and other cities on our eastern seaboard were blacked out primarily so that cargo ships would not be silhouetted against bright lights, making them easier targets for the submarines. This had a further, unexpected result. The citizens of these blacked-out cities could see red glows on the horizon as American cargo ships bound for Europe were either torpedoed or shelled, set afire, and sent to the bottom.

The Americans got into combat in North Africa in November 1942. The original action—heavy combat—was not, however, against the Germans. It was against the French.

Although many Americans believed—and the Office of War Information tried to convince them—that the U.S. Army would be welcomed in French North Africa, others were far from sure about that.

They remembered that in 1940 many French had cried “Better Hitler Than Blum,” making reference to a French socialist politician. They knew there were large numbers of French who believed Germany was probably going to win the war, and that the Germans were having little trouble in finding Frenchmen to volunteer for the Charlemagne Legion of the SS.

The Germans had permitted most of the French fleet—a potentially formidable force—to sail to the then-French protectorate of Casablanca, Morocco, where it and French army and air forces in North Africa remained armed and under French command, subject only to the supervision of a small number of Germans in the Armistice Commission. The French fleet, if so inclined, or pressured by the Germans, could hamper—or even deny—British and American passage from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mediterranean.

Agents of the United States Office of Strategic Services (OSS) sent to North Africa undercover as consular officers reported that while they had had some success in establishing contact with French officers and convincing many of them that France and the United States had a common interest in defeating Nazi Germany, they had by no means convinced all of them.

The Americans, under the command of Major General George S. Patton, hoped of course to put the troops of Operation Torch ashore in Morocco without having to fight to do so. The plan called for a force of nine thousand men to land north of Port Lyautry, north of Casablanca, to take the airport. Simultaneously, an eighteen-thousand-man force with eighty tanks would land at Fedela, and a third force of six thousand men and one hundred tanks would land at Safi and march on Casablanca from the south.

The invasion began at midnight 8 November 1942. It took the French several hours to mobilize their forces—OSS agents had some success in having various French units respond very slowly, or not at all, to their orders to do battle—but by 0600 it was apparent the French were not only not going to welcome the Americans as liberators, but had already begun to cause casualties in the landing force.

At 0617, Patton issued the shoot-back order: “Play Ball.”

At 0700, U.S. Navy aircraft from the carrier USS Ranger reached Casablanca harbor as five French submarines sailed out to battle the American fleet. There was a dogfight. Seven French aircraft went down in flames, as did five U.S. Navy Wildcats.

At 0804, as surface vessels of the French fleet prepared to leave the Casablanca harbor, the battleship USS Massachusetts opened fire with her massive sixteen-inch cannon. In ten minutes, thirteen French vessels—submarines, freighters, and passenger ships—were on the bottom of Casablanca’s harbor, and many French warships had been damaged. The commanding officer of the French cruiser Albatross was killed by U.S. Navy gunfire.

In the next thirty-six hours, with negligible damage to themselves, the USS Massachusetts, the cruisers USS Augusta, USS Brooklyn, USS Tuscaloosa, and USS Wichita, and aircraft from the carrier USS Ranger either sank or knocked out of action most of the French fleet, including the battleship Jean Bart and the cruisers Primaguet, Fougueux, Boulonnais, Brestois, and Frondeur.

At this point, French army and naval officers who were still willing—if not entirely able—to resist the invasion were convinced by French officers who had been dealing with American OSS agents that raising the white flag was really in the best interests of France.

U.S. forces, including those landed elsewhere in North Africa, began a march toward Egypt to join the British fighting Rommel’s Afrikakorps.

In Russia meanwhile—on 23 November 1942, two weeks after the American landings in North Africa—the quarter-million-man German Sixth Army, which had been trying to take Stalingrad since August, was surrounded by Soviet forces. Two weeks later, General Friedrich von Paulus informed Hitler he had received an ultimatum from the Russian commander, Marshal Rokossovsky, calling for his surrender. Von Paulus reported that his forces, ill-equipped to fight in weather thirty degrees below zero Fahrenheit, were exhausted, just about out of ammunition, and reduced to eating their horses.

Hitler forbade surrender.

On 31 January 1943, Hitler promoted von Paulus to field marshal and suggested to him that if he did wish to become the first German field marshal ever to surrender, there was the option of suicide. Von Paulus declined, and within hours was captured by the Red Army. The very last of his troops surrendered on 2 February.

Not two weeks later, on 14 February 1943, the German army, under General Eric Rommel, fought U.S. forces for the first time. The Germans proved a far tougher adversary than the French. The German counterattack to stop the American drive across North Africa lasted six days, ending 20 February in a bloody defeat of the U.S. II Corps’s Fourth Infantry Division and its supporting forces at a two-mile gap in the Dorsal Atlas Mountains in central Tunisia called the Kasserine Pass.

German Tiger and Mark IV tanks mounting 88mm cannon were far superior to the U.S. M3 and its 75mm weapon, which was nontransversing and, moreover, riveted rather than welded. When hit, the rivets came loose and ricocheted around the tank interior, usually killing all of the crew.

German battlefield discipline proved far superior to American.

One thousand Americans died and hundreds more were taken prisoner, and most of their artillery and heavy equipment was lost.

General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the overall commander, took drastic action. The II Corps commander was relieved, and George S. Patton, promoted to lieutenant general, was rushed to Tunisia to replace him and turn the situation around. He began to do so by ordering the immediate application of the cavalry tactic that officers lead from the front.

Patton also understood the tactical use of aviation. On 23 February, a massive U.S. bombing attack on Rommel’s forces drove him back through the Kasserine Pass, on a retreat that ended only when he reached prepared positions on the Mareth Line.

There was no longer any question whether the Americans could successfully fight the Germans.

Or that they could stay in North Africa.

The war was going on, too, near the southern tip of the South American continent, in Argentina and Uruguay. Cities were not being bombed into rubble, cannons were not roaring, and no one was going hungry or freezing to death. But both the Axis and the Allies realized the importance of these “neutral countries” both to the war effort and, as importantly, to what would happen when victory and defeat came.

Buenos Aires (“nice breezes”), the capital of Argentina, was a large European-looking city one-hundred-odd miles across the Río de la Plata (“silver river”) from Montevideo, Uruguay. Both cities were a very long way from the battles raging at Guadalcanal (8,500 miles), Stalingrad (8,200 miles), and the Kasserine Pass (6,500 miles); and from Berlin (7,400 miles), London (6,900 miles), and Washington, D.C. (5,200 miles).

By comparison, it was only 577 miles from London to Berlin, 829 miles from Berlin to Stalingrad, and 1,100 miles from Berlin to the Kasserine Pass.

The war had actually come to Uruguay and Argentina in December 1939. The pocket battleship Graf Spee—the pride of the German navy, named after a World War I naval hero, Admiral Graf (Count) Maximilian von Spee—had sailed from Wilhelmshafen on 21 August 1939, with orders to head for the South Atlantic and there to interdict Allied shipping heading for England.

Wool, leather, and—especially—meat and other foodstuffs from Argentina and Uruguay had been of enormous value to the British in World War I, and the Germans were determined to shut off that supply in this war. The British were equally determined to keep the supply lines open, and dispatched the cruisers HMS Ajax, HMS Achilles, and HMS Exeter to find the Graf Spee and sink her.

They found the German ship off the coast of Uruguay, close enough to shore so that the roar and concussion of the naval cannon caused the sea lions on the rocks near Punta del Este to leap to their deaths.

The Graf Spee suffered serious damage but managed to limp up the River Plate into the harbor at Montevideo. International law required that a warship of a belligerent power could claim the protection of a neutral harbor for only seventy-two hours.

The captain of the Graf Spee, Hans Langsdorff, one of the most respected officers in the German navy, radioed Berlin explaining his plight: There was serious damage to the Graf Spee that could not be repaired in the time he had. He had lost more than one hundred sailors in the battle off Punta del Este, and had as many more seriously wounded crewmen who required immediate treatment not available on the Graf Spee, whose onboard hospital had been destroyed in the sea battle.

And there were three British cruisers waiting for him in the South Atlantic Ocean.

Under these circumstances, he could see no alternative to letting the seventy-two hours run out, then allow himself and his ship to be interned by the Uruguayan government.

The reply from Grand Admiral Eric Raeder, commander in chief of the German navy, came immediately: Loss of life was not a consideration when the honor of Germany and the German navy was at stake. The Führer, Adolf Hitler, ordered that the Graf Spee go down fighting.

Captain Langsdorff understood honor.

Thus, he arranged for his wounded to be taken ashore and interned so they would receive medical attention. He put his dead ashore and arranged for their burial in Montevideo. He arranged for most of his physically fit crew to board small vessels hastily sent from Buenos Aires by Argentine Axis sympathizers. On arrival, they would be interned.

When the seventy-two hours was almost up, he hoisted anchor and sailed the Graf Spee out of Montevideo’s harbor. When she was far enough into the River Plate so that her wreck would not interfere with shipping, he scuttled her. He made sure he was the last man to leave her, then took her battle ensign, boarded a small vessel, and made for Buenos Aires.

In Buenos Aires two days later, after ensuring that his officers and men would be treated well in internment, Captain Langsdorff put on his dress uniform, positioned himself so that his body would fall on the Graf Spee’s battle ensign, and shot himself in the temple. That, he believed, would prove he had scuttled his ship because he saw that as his duty as an honorable officer, not because he was afraid of losing his life.

Captain Langsdorff was buried by the Argentine military with full military honors in Buenos Aires’s North Cemetery. Most of his crew, in dress uniform, attended. His pallbearers were Graf Spee seamen. They then marched off into internment.

Vice Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the senior German intelligence officer, who in World War I had been interned in—and escaped from—Argentina, immediately dispatched German intelligence officers to Buenos Aires to arrange for escape of the interned crew of the Graf Spee.

With the Graf Spee gone, there was no longer a chance for the Germans to shut off the supply of matériel to the British using a sea raider or other surface navy warships. German Admiral Erich Raeder turned to submarines. Because of the distance from the submarine pens in France, this was an enormously difficult task.

Neutral Uruguay was sympathetic to the British chiefly because of a large English colony and the enormously popular Brit ambassador, Sir Eugene Millington-Drake. But neutral Argentina was predominantly—though by no means entirely— pro-Axis.

The Argentine army was armed with Mauser rifles, wore German helmets, sent their senior officers to the Kriegschule in Germany, and had their headquarters in a handsome, enormous building—the Edificio Libertador—built by the Germans as a manifestation of their solidarity with the Argentines.

Its navy, however, largely British- and (to some degree) U.S.-trained, was sympathetic to England.

Moreover, there was a large Jewish colony in Argentina—including forty thousand Jewish gauchos—that was by no means sympathetic to Hitler, and there were large numbers of other European refugees who were decidedly anti-Axis.

The practical result of all this was that while pro-Axis Argentines did their best to see that German submarines not only managed to get fuel and supplies but were advised of departing British merchant ships so they could be intercepted and sunk, there were anti-Axis Argentines who did their best to keep the supplies flowing to England.

Things changed soon after the Japanese attack on the United States at Pearl Harbor. Brazil declared war on the German-Italian-Japanese axis in January 1942. That gave the U.S. Army Air Corps immediate access to Brazilian airfields, and the U.S. Navy to Brazilian ports and fuel.

B-24 bombers were soon prowling the South Atlantic just outside the Argentine and Uruguayan territorial limits. These aircraft had most of their machine-gun turrets removed—to increase range by reducing weight and drag—and their bomb bays loaded with special antisubmarine bombs.

This was not entirely a heartwarming manifestation of Brazilian-U.S. cooperation to fight a common enemy. American intelligence agents reported their strong suspicions that the artillery, tanks, and ammunition requested by Brazil of the “Arsenal of Democracy” were as likely to be used by the Brazilians against the Argentines as they were against the Axis.

A war between Argentina and Brazil, the two largest countries on the South American continent, was not going to contribute much to a war against Germany, Italy, and Japan. The flood of supplies to Brazil dwindled to a trickle.

And then American intelligence agents in Europe began to hear whispers of two secret German operations, which sometimes overlapped.

One was that it was possible for German Jews outside Germany to purchase the freedom of their relatives from Nazi concentration/extermination camps, followed by transport to Argentina and Uruguay.

The second secret German plan, called Operation Phoenix, was to establish in Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay safe havens for senior Nazi officials—possibly including Hitler himself—to which they could flee when the Thousand-Year Reich went down to defeat.

The overlap between the two plans, intelligence officers reported, was that Operation Phoenix would be funded at least partially—and possibly substantially— by the ransom paid to get Jews out of Nazi death camps.

In something of an understatement, United States intelligence activities in neutral Argentina increased considerably about the time of the Soviet victory at Stalingrad and the second battle of Kasserine Pass.