TIME: Almanac 1995

home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search

/ TIME: Almanac 1995 / TIME Almanac 1995.iso / time / caps / 40s / 40allies < prev next >

Wrap

Text File | 1995-02-23 | 16KB | 357 lines

<text id=93HT0210> <link 93XP0496> <link 93XP0495> <link 93XP0482> <link 93HT0846> <link 93HT0250> <title> 1940s: The U.S. & The Allies </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1940s Highlights </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> The U.S. & the Allies </hdr> <body> [Everywhere the defenders reeled. The British, prevented by the exigencies of their battles on the home front from making adequate preparations in Southeast Asia, looked particularly hapless. In the Philippines, even with General Douglas MacArthur in command, U.S. forces steadily lost ground.] (January 12, 1942) This as the brackish taste of defeat that American soldiers had not known in a major battle since Appomattox. To the grim, battleweary soldiers of General Douglas MacArthur, backed up into the mountainous fastnesses of the Bataan peninsula, northwest of abandoned Manila, or desperately fending off Japanese attacks on the great harbor fortress of Corregidor, this was it. It had been inevitable since the Jap smash at Pearl Harbor, his decisive slices into the Philippines' supply line at Wake and Guam. From then on it was a desperate, stubborn, downhill retreat before a foe of overwhelming numbers. The Jap admitted to the folks back home that his own losses were "colossal," that U.S. and Filipino troops fought "like demons." But he had command of the sea and the air. Backing up in good order, taking their collections in casualties from the invader, Douglas MacArthur and his men had plenty to think about besides the battle. [Malaya fell, Singapore then Java. The Japanese knifed into Burma. Then MacArthur was ordered to depart the Philippines for Australia and safety. The U.S. command had neither the means nor the intention of resupplying his command, and it was doomed.] (March 23, 1942) The man who knows how to stop the Japanese took command this week of the last place in the Southwest Pacific to stop them. When Douglas MacArthur reached Australia, the U.S. and all the United Nations breathed a sigh of relief and hope: By God, they got him out! The siege of Bataan was 53 days old when General MacArthur got his orders to leave last February 22. The orders came from President Roosevelt, who had heeded the plea of imperiled Australia and the insistent cry in the U.S. that MacArthur alive to fight and win was worth more than a hero dead. No good general likes to leave his men in peril. But good generals obey orders. Douglas MacArthur had a big job do in Australia. (March 30, 1942) Newsmen had found General MacArthur near Alice Springs, where airways and an off-size railroad connect Australia's northern desert and the southern cities. Brigadier General Pat Hurley told MacArthur that the newsmen wanted a statement. Still tired by his trip from the Philippines, resting in a special car, General MacArthur wrote: "The President of the United States ordered me to break through the Japanese lines and proceed from Corregidor to Australia for the purpose, as I understand it, of organizing the American offensive against Japan. A primary purpose of this is the relief of the Philippines. I came through and I shall return." [The U.S. salvaged a little self-respect in the midst of all this ruin: U.S. planes (carrier based, it was revealed later) bombed Japan, achieving total surprise and some damage. But inevitably, Bataan, then Corregidor, surrendered.] (April 20, 1942) Since the middle of January the men on Bataan had gone short of good. In Australia the Army had poured out good U.S. dollars to hire the adventures of the South Seas to run the Jap blockade with good and ammunition. But nearly two out of three of the blockade-runners were lost--most of those, it seemed, which carried food. Jonathan Wainwright's soldier's eye saw that the end was near. From the shores of the Bay he withdrew his naval forces, sailormen and Marines of the 4th Regiment (evacuated last November from Shanghai) to Corregidor. He tried to strike one last blow. Against a Jap breakthrough on the Manila Bay side of the peninsula he threw a corps in desperate counter-attack. It was too much. The glassy-eyed soldiers went forward like men in a dream, so exhausted that many of them could hardly lift their feet, and the Jap mowed them down. The flank folded up. The men on Corregidor saw only a little of the ghastly end. The last, pitifully small ammunition dump on Bataan went up in smoke and flame; the three ships at the water's edge (including the 6,000-ton sub tender Canopus) were dynamited. Finally, from one of the heights on Bataan, a white flag went up. How many of the 36,000 died fighting, only Japs knew. (May 18, 1942) Toward the end there was no sleep on Corregidor. The ammunition was about gone, the food had run out. The wounded, crowded into the catacombs of The Rock, cried out for help that no one could give. Malaria had seized the garrison; gaunt cannoneers, flushed with fever, stood at their stations beside pieces that had to be served with telltale economy. Corregidor was through. Five months after Jap's first attack, the last island of formal resistance in the Philippines was going. An army of more than 10,000 crack troops, wasted by want, without hope of relief, was going to its end. Thirteen Raids. In the last few days, the Jap hit the defenders with everything he had. For four days in a row The Rock and its three satellite forts took 13 bombing raids a day. Meanwhile from Cavite, to the south, and from Mariveles' heights, north of The Rock, the Jap poured in a merciless artillery fire, 24 hours a day. Dashing Lieut. General Jonathan Mayhew ("Skinny") Wainwright, fighting scion of an illustrious military family, horseman, balladeer, fighter-to-the-end, was finally forced to the greatest tragedy in a soldier's life. He surrendered, and walked off through the dead and dying to discuss with fat, able General Yamashita the terms of his capitulation. [The U.S. reacted to the Japanese blows with a kind of controlled hysteria at home. First, the obvious suspects, Germans, Italian and Japanese citizens, were rounded up, questioned, sometimes interned. But as the string of defeats continued, Americans began to seek a scapegoat. Someone had to pay for U.S. humiliations; who better than America's Japanese-born and Japanese descended citizens, whom many suspected (almost entirely wrongly, as it turned out) of being massive a fifth column?] (February 16, 1942) All along the West Coast the presence of enemy aliens became a suddenly, sinisterly glaring fact: Japanese and Italian fishermen along the water front, Japanese who worked all day on hands & knees in geometrically perfect truck gardens which sometimes overlay oil pipelines, Japanese settlements near big airplane plants and military posts. Attorney General Francis Biddle marked off 135 restricted zones from which all enemy aliens must move by Feb. 24. No one could say how many thousands would have to pack up and go. Nor did anyone know where they would go to. No citizen of a democracy could be happy about some of the pathetic situations which these orders created. For every potential fifth columnist, hundreds of innocent aliens would suffer. (March 16, 1942) They were U.S. citizens who had spent their lives on U.S. soil--farmers who tilled the rich brown loam in the Santa Clara Valley, fishermen riding the slow swells off San Diego, humble shopkeepers in the little stores of San Francisco. But they learned last week that, in nation's hour of peril, having been a citizen is not enough. So they began to pack their keepsakes, lift their slanteyed children on their arms, and start on the long migration east across the Sierra Nevadas, to dreary inland country far from the blue sea. They were some of the West Coast's 70,000-odd Nisei. Their honorable ancestors were Japanese. This was martial law, in effect. Lieut. General John Lesesne DeWitt, chief of the Western Defense Command, marked off a strip of land curving some 2,000 miles along the Pacific, along the Mexican border, from Canada to New Mexico. Out of this coastal region all the thousands on thousands of enemy aliens and all Nisei must go. From strategic military areas all racial Japanese including Nisei, must go first. From less important zones, evacuation will be gradual, and voluntary-for a while. But U.S. citizens, even it their ancestors were Japanese, could not be herded into concentration camps. One answer was an Army "reception center" going up in Owens Valley, a desolate tract of land on the east side of the Sierra Nevadas, in Southern California. The Owens Valley settlement may eventually hold some 50,000 Japs. General DeWitt has plans for another center on the Colorado River near Blythe. But that was a dreary prospect for the Nisei outcasts, who remembered their rich lands and the smell of the sea. (April 6, 1942) Pasadena's Rose Bowl looked like a second-hand auto park. In the chill dawn, 140 battered cars and sagging trucks huddled, piled high with furniture, bundles, gardening tools. At 6:30 a.m. they chuffed and spluttered, wheeled into line, and started rolling. Led by a goggled policeman on a motorcycle, a jeep and three command cars full of newsmen, they headed for the dark, towering mountains to the east. Thus, last week, the first compulsory migration in U.S. history set out for Manzanar, in California's desolate Owens Valley. In the cavalcade were some 300 Japanese aliens and Nisei--U.S. citizens of Japanese blood. They were part of the first mass evacuation from the forbidden strip of West Coast land which Lieut. General John Lesesne DeWitt has made a military zone. At the Army "reception center," nine miles beyond Lone Pine, the Japs piled out. They were greeted by 88 Japanese men and girls who went ahead to put the camp in order. In the unfinished, tar-papered dormitories where they will live until the war ends, they made their beds on mattress ticking filled with straw, dined on rice and meat, prunes and coffee, dished out by Japanese cooks. At Manzanar, General DeWitt may settle as many as 50,000 of the Coast's 112,353 Jap aliens and Nisei. Another 20,000 will be placed on the Colorado River Indian Reservation at Parker, Ariz. The first emigrants to Manzanar were Japanese plumbers, carpenters, mechanics who will help build the desert city. Wives and children will follow later. What kind of people were Japs and Nisei? Said 23-year-old Takeshi Suchiya, a premed at Compton District Junior College when the FBI rounded up his family: "When we stop to think it over, most of us understand the necessity for evacuation. But the immediate reaction is, we have got some rights as Americans...I know my parents are as Americans...I know my parents are loyal, yet they have been picked up. Anyhow, the whole thing's a mess and we'll just have to take it..." Said gardener Isamu Horino: "Why should we support anything in this country with a whole heart? I don't mean any of us give a damn about Japan. We hope they get liked. But...nobody ever let us become a real part of this country...If they want to take away all we've got and dump us out in the desert, we've got no choice. But we don't like it...And we're expected to buy bonds, too. Not me!" [Pretty soon, all Americans were being affected by the war in countless ways.] (May 4, 1942) The good things of the U.S., the things that gave it the highest standards of living in the world, had gone to war. The luxuries were gone; some necessities were going; days lean as razorbacks were ahead. To share what was left the U.S. had two choices: it could have inflation, or it could fix prices, drain off public purchasing power and try to divide the available goods equally by ration. Franklin Roosevelt did not want inflation. He hated the very word, refused to use it. To stop it he sent a message to Congress, a program which would impose on the U.S. a new design for living: The highest taxes in history: a limit on individual incomes to $25,000 a year (after taxes); a draining away of business profits to the "utmost limit consistent with continued production." A universal price ceiling, halting wholesale and retail price rises for the duration. "Stabilization" of wages by the War Labor Board--but with no change in time and a half for overtime. A ceiling on farm prices at parity levels--about where they are now. Vastly increased purchases of war bonds with forced savings to follow if bond buying lags. Rationing of scarcity items. The plain truth was that nobody had foreseen the awful truth. (May 18, 1942) This week 10,000,000 Eastern Seaboard motorists lined up to get gasoline-ration books and the terrible truth. Things were not just as bad as they looked; they were worse. A third of the 10,000,000, who did not need their cars for business or to get to work, got "A" cards: three gallons a week. The rest got a little more. Even these rations were good only until July 1; then the amounts may be revised. It was the same with rubber. When Washington announced that there would be no new tires, it had softened the blow with quick talk of recaps. When it took away recaps, it talked about synthetics. [From the start of Russia's participation in the war, the Soviets had demanded that a second front be opened in Europe to relieve the battlefield pressure on them. Far from ready to do that, the Allies seized on the idea of wiping out by strategic bombing Germany's ability and will to make war. It was a strategy that brought immense devastation to Germany's cities but was later shown to have been practically ineffective, as it has also been everywhere else it has been tried.] (May 11, 1942) Britain's bombing of Lubeck, its blasting of Rostock, its raids last week on Kiel and Trondheim were not like the raids which the R.A.F. had made intermittently and hit-or-missly for two years. This was the Business. It compared with Hitler's blitz on Britain in the fall of 1940--only it was bigger. The R.A.F.'s technique is new in other respects. Instead of trying for pinpoint targets and bringing bombs home if they cannot be found, the R.A.F. is now going after the whole industrial districts of towns like Rostock, which they hit four nights in succession. Moreover the weight of bombs dropped on Rostock because of bigger planes and repeat visits as 800 tons compared to the 530 tons dropped on Coventry. This increased weight and repetition amounted to an improvement not merely in size but in bombing. If half a town's essential services--fire-fighting equipment, water supply, sewers, light, even housing--is knocked out, it may be able to pull itself together. If three-quarters, for example, is destroyed, the town may no longer able to fight fires and repeated bombing may force the population to abandon home and work. </body> </article> </text>