TIME: Almanac of the 20th Century

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

/ TIME: Almanac of the 20th Century / TIME, Almanac of the 20th Century.ISO / 1940 / 40dday < prev next >

Wrap

Text File | 1994-02-27 | 20.6 KB | 478 lines

<text> <title> (1940s) The Battle Of Europe:D-Day </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1940s Highlights </history> <link 08076> <link 08077> <link 00093><article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> The Battle of Europe: D-Day </hdr> <body> [Overwhelming air assaults, especially against the German trans-Mediterranean supply lines, finally turned the tide against Rommel, and the Germans surrendered in May 1943. During the war, surprisingly little publicity was given to the plight of Europe's Jews, perhaps because few of the rumors and reports coming from escapees and survivors could believed, much less verified. The following excerpt actually antedates by two months the real destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto, after a heroic 33-day defense by thousands of starved, doomed, ill-armed Jewish fighters.] (March 8, 1943) Last week the American Jewish Congress asked the United Nations to do what could be done to save 5,000,000 Jews in Europe from extermination this year. Anyone who thought that the Congress exaggerated the danger had only to read Adolf Hilter's prophecy to Nazi Party members last week: "This struggle will end...with the extinction of Jewry in Europe." In a report drawn from German broadcasts and newspapers, Nazi statements, smuggled accounts and the stories of survivors who have reached the free world, the Congress told what was happening in Poland, slaughterhouse of Europe's Jews. By late 1942, the Congress reported, 2,000,000 had been massacred. Vernichtungskolonnen (extermination squads) rounded them up and killed them with machine guns, lethal gas, high-voltage electricity and hunger. Almost all were striped before they died; their clothes were needed by the Nazis. The ghettos established by the Nazis in Poland and the Baltic States are ghost towns today, decimated by deportation and execution on the spot. "The Warsaw ghetto is empty. The streets crowded only a year ago with 500,000 Jews are silent now...Last month gunfire was heard in Warsaw for several days. When it stopped, the Germans had finished their task. The last of the Jews were gone." [Reeling in Russia and finished in North Africa, the Germans, with their U-boat packs, were still operating with virtual impunity against allied shipping in the North Atlantic.] (May 10, 1943) The battle of the Atlantic last week narrowed toward a showdown. For weeks the Nazis had been forecasting an intensified U-boat offensive, a climactic effort to throttle the Allies' offensive plans in Europe. Germany was building subs faster than they were being sunk; Allied shipbuilding was just beginning to hold its own. The balance was close, and there were factors weighing heavily in Nazi Germany's favor. What Adolf Hitler could not do by land to stop the Allies' march toward Europe's borders, Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz, CINC of the German Navy was working hard to do by sea in the Atlantic moat where the first defense of Europe lay. From his headquarters somewhere in Axis Europe last week, Doenitz wielded a potent weapon: Some 400-500 U-boats operating on a constant schedule; Some 150 of them out on the hunting grounds simultaneously; one-sixth of them on the way to and from their bases; one-half of them in port refitting or undergoing repairs; Between 20 and 30 new U-boats each month--and this estimate may be low--being produced in German factories and assembled at bases along the German coast. Doenitz knew that the convoy system licked the U-boats in World War I. When he was building his fleet for World War II, he guessed that the same tactics would be used again by the Allies, and trained his men accordingly. Instead of one attacking U-boat cruising more or less haphazardly, he used a number of them working as a unit. The wolf pack was expanded; by last year he had the U-boat working in "echelons of divisions," patrolling in three lines or more abreast, the center line ahead of the two flanks, the U-boats strung out in a herringbone pattern astern of the leader. In perfect coordination, this array of underwater raiders lay in wait for convoys previously spotted by scouts or long-range air reconnaissance. By night, submerged, they moved under the convoy. When they came up, a few of them would draw the convoy's escort vessels off. The rest could then pick off their targets at leisure, firing by direct control from their conning towers. Initial U-boat successes fell off when the British woke up to the fact that the submarine was still a grave menace, and escorted their convoys more heavily. But after the fall of France, when the U-boats had bases along the entire west coast of Europe, the wolfpack system raised hob with Allied shipping. Of some 57, 600,000 total deadweight tons of British shipping, U-boats sank at least 17,600,000 tons in three and a half years. Of the 1,150 U.S. ocean-going ships afloat when American went to war, at least 700 have been unofficially reported sunk, and U.S. figures are behind the actual sinkings. [With the invasion of Sicily, the Allies began the Battle of Europe and prepared to knock Italy out of the war.] (July 19, 1943) Two thousand warships, transports and landing boats churned the dark waters of the ancient sea. Planes roared off to the north, loaded with paratroops or towing gliders packed with infantrymen. The assault on Sicily had begun. General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Allied commander in North Africa, had set in motion the largest amphibious military operation ever attempted--not excepting Xerxes' expedition against Greece (1,000 boats, 200,000 men). War broke loose on the southeastern shores of Sicily. First a blistering wave of air power flicked over the elected zones. Then the destroyers stood in from the sea and began a graceful, weaving parade offshore, their guns shooting tongues of flame at enemy pillboxes and strong points on land. Farther out battleships lobbed their heavy shells in high-arc interdictory fire to smash highways and crossroads deeper in the invasion area. From transports standing between the destroyers and the battleships came swarms of landing boats, dashing through the hot red tracer fire from enemy shore batteries and machine guns, grinding to a halt on the steep shores, discharging their men, then hastening back to the transports for another load. Commanding the Allied invasion forces were two hard-driving veterans of the African campaign: General Sir Bernard Law Montgomery and Lieut. General George Smith Patton. By the third day the historic seaport of Syracuse was in British hands, and minesweepers were at work cleaning up the harbor channels for transports and supply ships to move in. Twelve other towns had been taken, among them Gela, Licata and Pozzallo. Several airfields had been seized, and on Tuesday Ragusa and Augusta fell. (August 30, 1943) Cautiously, under a butter-colored moon, U.S. 3rd Division patrols reconnoitered the last eight miles to Messina. The stony Sicilian landscape flashed now & then with snipers' fire. the road was edged with the menace of mines, booby traps and demolition chasms. But clearly the stubborn, skillful, beaten enemy had pulled out. The Battle of Sicily, 38 days after it had begun, was over. By midmorning the U.S. Seventh and the British Eighth Armies had entered Messina in force. Then from the pine-covered hills on the Italian mainland, three and a half miles across the Strait, German big guns lobbed over their shells. Quickly the bulk of the Allied troops withdrew from the city. [Fresh from their triumphs in Sicily, the Allies took on Italy itself. All went well at first. Then the Italian government fell (Mussolini had resigned two months before) and suddenly, instead of reluctant Italians, the Allies were fighting crack German troops.] (September 20, 1943) An English-speaking Italian in Calabria heard planes, looked up, and said to a British officer: "Good. They are ours." "No," the officer said, "they are British." "Yes," said the Italian, "they are ours." The Germans seized Rome. At Salerno, below Naples, from positions behind one of the loveliest of coasts, guns spoke in the early morning. The guns were Italian. The gunners were German. The bodies on the beach were American. By the highest estimates, the Germans had consigned some 200,000 men in 18 divisions to Italy. The bulk of these were probably in the north, under the command of that master of delay, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. His first task: to preserve from Italian sabotage and Allied air attack the three railway routes into upper Italy from Austria and Yugoslavia, the interior railways, roads and airdromes without which the German armies could not long be supported. Commanding in central and southern Italy was Air Marshal and General Albert Kesselring. So the fight was at Salerno and its approaches to Naples. That fight was fierce and slow. There, for the first time since the Allies moved across the Strait of Messina, German planes attacked in force. Soldiers pouring on to the beaches from great convoys had to endure bombs, gunfire and many tank attacks. They endured. They pushed inland toward the hills behind the coasts. They pressed toward the famed Amalfi Drive from Salerno to Naples, a shimmering highway cut into the high edges of the hills. (November 8, 1943) The Allied trudge up the Italian boot had fallen behind schedule. Skillful, vicious delaying tactics had won time enough for the Germans to build a strong defense line across the peninsula at its narrowest (80 miles) point between Naples and Rome. Against that formidable barricade the British and U.S. armies lunged last week. It was a bruising fight against terrain as well as pillboxes, snipers' nests, mined roads, concealed mortars and artillery. The Apennine spine of Italy scatters rough, irregular ribs in all directions. Rain-flooded rivers gouge the land. Perched on heights above the valley-bottom roads, the Germans could give around slowly and at a stiff price. General Mark Clark's Fifth Army pried them from Mondragone, the western anchor of their line. General Bernard Montgomery's Eighth bit sharply toward Isernia, key to the enemy's center, and Vasto, his east coast anchor. [In December 1943, the first of the wartime meeting of the Big Three--Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin--was held in Teheran, capital of Iran. It had been preceded by another in Cairo between Roosevelt, Churchill and Chinese President Chiang Kai-shek. The leaders reached agreement on war aims against the Germans (at Tehran) and Japanese (at Cairo). Beyond that, the conclusions appeared more like agreements to agree.] (December 13, 1943) When Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt spoke jointly to the world their statement on the post war future was an extraordinary one. It was either meaningless--or almost pentecostal. After Cairo and Teheran, these things were matters of officially stated fact: The U.S., Great Britain, China proposed the utter defeat of Japan, the utter destruction of its Empire, and war waged to these ends with no thought of mercy to our help from the Japanese people. Korea will be made free and independent. Lands taken from China will be returned to China. For lands taken from Britain and the U.S.: no promises. These things could be reasonably deduced: Russia is emerging as the dominant power in postwar Europe. Britain is worried. The British people have a bond of liking and sympathy for the Russian people which the ascendancy of the Soviet Union can hardly lessen. But they and their Government are increasingly concerned about the tremendous effect which a "Russian Europe" must have on Britain's world position. [The U.S. learned from the mistakes that cost 3,000 casualties out of an attack force of 18,000.] (February 28, 1944) The formula for Central Pacific warfare was becoming standardized: 1) Bomb the important installations on an atoll heavily while 2) neutralizing other Jap bases within 500 miles by knocking out their airfields, 3) bring up the heavy warships and pound the atoll for several days, 4) land troops, with artillery on smaller islands adjoining the important installations, 5) throw naval gunfire, bombs, artillery shells on the installations until they are pulverized, 6) send in the foot soldiers to kill whatever Japs still wait for death in the ruins. This pattern, arrived at on Tarawa, improved on Kwajalein, was last week perfected on Eniwetok, a roughly circular atoll 379 miles north-west of Kwajalein. [The Allies had slogged up the Italian boot for 141 dreary, rugged, hard fighting days, and were bogged down on the Rapido River, before German troops who were well dug into hillside and mountaintop positions. In January 1944, a flanking landing was attempted at Anzio (here called Nettuno), between the Allied lines and Rome.] (February 14, 1944) From the beginning there was no doubt that the Allies' beachhead thrust at Nettuno was full of hazard. This week the beachhead thundered in one of the toughest battles U.S. troops and their British allies have yet fought. They were still on the ground they had taken in the first few days, a low plain criss-crossed with creeks and drainage ditches where front-line infantrymen had to take cover in waist-deep water from German fire. Jerry held the high ground inland from the coastal plain. If he had not been there in force when the invaders landed, he had quickly and cleverly redisposed himself. Now, looking down on the restricted area (eight miles deep, 14 miles long) where the Allies had landed six divisions plus armored force, he hammered the invaders. The key to Nettuno was not in the high ground beyond the beachhead. It was down to the southeast, at Cassino, where he was also on high ground, and showing no disposition to give it up. Cassino, linchpin of the Gustav Line, had to fall before the Nettuno attackers could move. Held long enough, it might even enable the Germans, rushing down fresh troops from north Italy and pulling seasoned outfits out of the Gustav Line, to force abandonment of the beachhead. (February 28, 1944) Sixty miles to the south their comrades pushed desperately to smash one of the great German defenses of the Mediterranean campaign. On the beachhead at Nettuno, men cursed, fought, hoped and died. The Germans were using the famed 1,400-year-old Benedictine abbey as an artillery-observation post. This seemed well established, as hundreds of young Americans died on the slope below. Collier's War Correspondent Frank Gervasi reported: "I saw 800 (Americans) go out and 24 come back, because the Germans could see every move and turn their fire on them. The slaughter grew too great. After weeks of soul searching and delay, the Allies decided to bomb and to shell the abbey. They followed a Dec. 29, 1943 order of General Dwight Eisenhower: "If we have to choose between destroying a famous building and sacrificing our own men, then our men's lives count infinitely more, and the buildings must go." On a sunlit morning last week the buildings went. Thus the great Benedictine abbey built 400 years ago on ground where Benedictine abbeys had stood for 1,400 years, was demolished. Only one wall section remained standing, and the next day Marauders swooped over to pick these ribs. The Americans got no forwarder. If there had bee no Germans there before, there were now. The Nazis moved swiftly into the ruins, to defend them in the best Stalingrad fashion. Soon out of the rubble pricked scores of gun barrels. Down from the abbey trickled pitiful refugees, Italians caught in no man's land. [The Allies finally broke through to the Anzio beachhead, then went on to liberate Rome.] (June 12, 1944) It was Trinity Sunday and, through all the last stages of the advance on Rome, U.S. and Canadian soldiers could hear the church bells summoning the faithful to Mass. The city limits were just ahead. A German shell crashed into the first tank as it crossed the line into the city. It burst into flame. A machine gun began to chatter from the side. The infantry piled off and disappeared into nearby ditches and backyard bushes. The tanks pulled off to the side. It was the last German roadblock on Via Casilina. There was a sharp, four-hour fight. Civilians, not comprehending what was going on, walked time & again through the middle of it and some were hit. Suddenly the fight was over. The tanks, followed by infantry, piled into the city. For a few hours there were sporadic skirmishes. But by sundown the last relic of that kind of fighting--a burned-out German car--lay blackened and dead almost in the showdown of Trajan's Column. The Allied troops pressed on. They passed the Colosseum, slogged through the Piazza Venezia where Mussolini once harangued his people. They marched and motored over ground that had been trod by Caesars and the Gracchi, by Alaric and St. Paul. But there was no time to think of history. They and their enemy were making it. [The Allies were finally ready for the Big One. On D-day, June 6, 1944, Allied forces invaded Nazi-held Normandy.] (June 12, 1944) Climaxing a steady, 96-hour bombardment, a thousand Fortresses and Liberators rained explosives, pin-pointing German installations in the uncertain light. Battleships, cruisers, destroyers stood off the coast wrapped themselves in smoke screens and hurled steel from 640 guns. The vaunted coast defenses of Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt had no effective response. But 15 minutes after a rosy sun lifted over the pastures of Normandy, khaki-clad U.S. and British troops began to pour ashore--the British on the left near Havre, the Americans on the right near Cherbourg. On the way to the boats in England some of them had picked flowers, stuck them in their gun muzzles. One man carried a guitar, another wore a red & white sign on his back: "Danger--Mine-field." The landing-craft fleet had detached itself from its escorting warships and had swarmed in swiftly toward the beaches. They were LCMs, LCIs, LSTs--all of the big and little types of the weird landing-ship brood. On the beaches the landing craft disgorged, riflemen deployed. Beachmasters established their stations, directing the mounting traffic. By 10:30 in the morning bulldozers were carving out temporary airstrips. England was tired to the invasion coast at last. The Crusade was on. (June 19, 1944) As the ramps went down and khaki-clad men plunged shorewards, German fire mowed them down. Others ran over them. The living lay beside the dead and fought with flame-throwers, grenades, bazookas and bangalore torpedoes, which blasted holes in barbed-wire entanglements. Motor fire from the cliffs fell like rain on one beach. Over the radio came a pleading voice to R.A.F. Spitfire pilots wheeling overhead: "For God's sake get those mortars quick. Dig them out, boys, they are right down our necks." The Spitfires dipped down and dug the Nazis out. Not until late afternoon of D-day were some of the beaches secured. All night, while the naval guns boomed in the roadstead and explosions flashed along the embattled coast, the drenched wounded lay in the sand, some whimpering in delirium. Then the invasion rolled on--beyond the dreadful jetsam on the beaches. The bridge. On the third day, the wind moderated, and the great fleet of ships from England worked mightily to make up for the delays caused by weather and rough water. </body> </article> </text>