This Day in WWII History (Intelligence Triumph Averts Disaster at Midway)

June 7, 1942—A story in the Chicago Tribune disclosed so many details of the recent Battle of Midway that it was impossible not to conclude that the U.S. Navy had achieved its victory by cracking the code of the Japanese Imperial Fleet. In the weeks following, the government of Franklin Roosevelt seriously considered trying Tribune publisher Robert McCormick and the paper’s sister publications, the New York Daily News and the Washington Times-Herald, for treason, only giving up the idea when it became apparent that prosecution might only draw attention to one of the great secrets of the war.

Miraculously, though suspicions were rampant among a number of Japanese officers, the high command never seems to have thought about changing its naval code, JN-25—a miracle almost as stunning to the American fleet as the victory that constituted the turning point in the Pacific War.

Only part of the story of this engagement is told by the lopsided comparison in losses: for the Americans, 1 aircraft carrier, 1 destroyer, 151 aircraft, 307 dead; for the Japanese, 4 aircraft carriers, 225 aircraft, 3,000 dead. Just as important, the Japanese juggernaut that had appeared invincible after Pearl Harbor had been checked. Three years of hard fighting remained, but from here on Japan would be on the defensive rather than the offensive.

In a sense, Midway can be regarded as the reverse of Pearl Harbor, the most massive intelligence failure in American history. By March 1942, the Navy’s Combat Intelligence Office, nicknamed “Hypo,” had managed, through analysis of decrypted messages and radio traffic between Japanese vessels and planes, to estimate within 300-400 miles the location of most Japanese ships. American codebreakers were working without the computers that modern cryptoanalysts have, without decoding machines, without even a Japanese code book—and yet, before long, they had managed to crack one out of every five groups of messages.

Soon, the codebreakers had figured out another Japanese secret: an impending attack on the Midway atoll in the Central Pacific. The Commander in Chief of the Japanese Combined Fleet, Admiral Isoruku Yamamoto, wanted to finish the job he had started at Pearl Harbor and wipe out the remainder of the American fleet. He would take Midway and, when the Americans came out to defend this outpost before Hawaii, he would turn around with his giant force—at that point, the largest ever to sail—and destroy a fleet that, even after the devastating surprise attack six months before, remained dangerous.

The codebreakers were fortunate to be backed by Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, who had succeeded Husband Kimmel as commander of the Pacific Fleet after the Pearl Harbor debacle. Skeptics—including a number on the staff of Admiral Ernest King, commander-in-chief of the U.S. Fleet—wondered if the Japanese were really executing a feint. But Nimitz not only strongly supported the intelligence analysts’ conclusions, but he began immediately to execute a plan based on them.

Crucial to Nimitz’s plan was the Yorktown, an aircraft carrier badly damaged at the Battle of the Coral Sea on May 7. The Hypo team estimated that American planes would first make contact at Midway with Japan’s at 0600 hours on June 4. The American fleet badly lagged Japan in surface warships (28 versus 88), and though surprise would help, as many aircraft carriers had to be summoned as possible to even the odds. A complete repair for the Yorktown, under these conditions, was out of the question; the Americans would have to get her just ready enough to fight.

Supporting the codebreakers demonstrated in one way Nimitz’ quiet, effective handling of men; the appointment of Admiral Raymond Spruance to take the place of William F. Halsey, one of the American fleet’s foremost aircraft-carrier commanders (sidelined by a painful skin disease), was another. Many feared that the aggressive Halsey (his slogan: “Kill Japs, Kill Japs, Kill more Japs!") would be irreplaceable, especially since Spruance was a battleship admiral.

Little did they know that Spruance, for all his modesty, could strike every bit as effectively as Halsey—and that he would, in a key moment, also show a necessary care that—notably, at the Battle of Leyte Gulf—would elude “Bull” Halsey.

For once, Yamamoto’s strategic skills failed him, a symptom of what Japanese officers years later would recall as symptomatic of a larger condition afflicting their forces: "victory disease," or overconfidence. He had used a resignation threat to override the qualms of Japan’s Naval General Staff about the wisdom of the Midway campaign, then, to mollify them, agreed to a simultaneous strike against the Aleutians far north. The result was that, instead of a concentrated force, his ships would be scattered across thousands of miles, with many not around in case he needed them. The fleet would be pointlessly, hopelessly overextended.

At the same time, Nimitz’s plans called for falling on the flank of the Japanese Combined Fleet before it knew what hit them. The strike depended on timing and, as it turned out, more than a bit of good luck.

The commander who implemented the plan that worked because of this confluence of timing and luck was Spruance.  Though, unlike Halsey, he was a battleship rather than carrier specialist, he exploited his carriers to their greatest potential now. Spruance guessed—correctly—that the Japanese would launch not one, but two attacks against Midway—and that he could catch them as they were readying the second strike. At 0700 on June 4, then, on Spruance’s orders, two American carriers, the Hornet and Enterprise, launched their planes, while the Yorktown followed suit some 90 minutes later.

Not all the Americans’ plans worked—the Japanese had no problem fending off slow-moving torpedo bombers—but even this worked to the advantage of Nimitz and Spruance. While the Japanese were preoccupied with the torpedoes, they did not notice until too late that dive bombers from the American carriers were honing in on the huge red circles on the yellow Japanese decks that their attackers called “meatballs.” The American pilots found their marks and fired, at the exact moment when their targets had fuel lines and bombs strewn over their decks. Within six minutes, three carriers—Akagi, Kaga, and Soryu—had been struck and turned into fireballs. All would eventually sink.

Nor was misfortune at an end for the Japanese. After a noontime hit on Yorktown by Hiryu, Spruance ordered 24 dive bombers and torpedo planes to go, without fighter escort (they were still needed to protect Midway), to find Japanese Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo’s fourth and last carrier. Again, time and luck were with the Americans; they sighted and bombed their target just as Hiryu’s crew was sitting down to dinner. Hiryu soon also sank.

After the battle, some critics complained that Spruance should have pursued Yamamoto further. But Miracle at Midway, by Gordon W. Prange, Donald Goldstein and Katherine Dillon, correctly pointed out that this would have exceeded the American admiral’s instructions from Nimitz—i.e., defend Midway—and would have risked a dangerous nighttime action in which he would have been outnumbered in destroyers and battleships.

By an interesting conjunction of events, the Yorktown sank within 24 hours of the Tribune’s report of the intelligence coup at Midway. The carrier and its brave crew would not have been positioned to help tilt the balance at the battle without that intelligence. Had they known and revealed all their information sooner, the Tribune and its isolationist Republican publisher, McCormick, would have put at risk the American key to victory. As it was, they endangered subsequent operations in the Pacific.

The Battle of Midway was a major morale-booster for an American military still reeling from Pearl Harbor, as well as the civilians who dreaded what would happen to family members in harm’s way. Conversely, as the first decisive defeat for the Japanese naval fleet in three centuries, it also punctured the aura of invincibility possessed by Yamamoto and his men.

Finally, as noted in Gerhard Weinberg’s A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II, the victory “made it possible for the United States to maintain in principle and eventually in practice a strategy that placed first emphasis on victory over Germany.”

Ironically, the key intelligence officer at Hypo who had made the victory possible did not receive recognition for his great work until after his death. Though Nimitz had warmly recommended Commander Joseph Rochefort to Admiral King for a decoration for his intelligence work, the recommendation was not only rejected, but Rochefort was removed from his duties with Nimitz. It wasn’t until 1986, nine years after he had died, that his children received from Ronald Reagan the President’s National Defense Service Award, the highest military award during peacetime, for the work leading up to Midway.

(The photo shows the Japanese aircraft carrier Akagi and a destroyer maneuvering below thin clouds while under high-level bombing attack by USAAF B-17 bombers, shortly after 8 AM, June 4, 1942.)

This Day in Holocaust History (Auschwitz Receives 1st Prisoners)

June 14, 1940—Though it became a byword for the mass destruction of European Jews, the first prisoners received by Auschwitz on this date were 728 teachers, priests, and other non-Jewish Poles.

The final grim demographics produced by this concentration camp—more than a million dead, site of the greatest mass murder in world history--illustrates one of the pithiest summaries of who suffered during the Holocaust: “Not all victims were Jews, but all Jews were victims.”

This dilapidated, vermin-infested former Polish military garrison, which once contained a huge horse-breaking yard, had been hastily converted over the past month and a half by Jewish slave labor into a holding pen that broke the bodies and spirits of other political prisoners, gypsies, homosexuals, common criminals, Russian prisoners of war and Jews.

Look at the photo accompanying this post. The letters over the iron gate, ARBEIT MACHT FREI, translate roughly as “Work makes you free.” But it might as well have read, “Abandon hope, all you who enter here.”

I’m not sure even Dante could have conceived this particular version of hell. After all, as Edward R. Murrow reported in his radio broadcast of December 13, 1942, in one of the earliest news reports about the Holocaust, the Nazis were perpetrating “a horror beyond what imagination can grasp.”

Six concentration camps already existed either in Germany or the lands it had absorbed as part of its ruthless drive for lebensraum. But the Nazis judged the small town of Oswiecim (renamed Auschwitz by the new occupying force) to be particularly suitable for the first camp of this kind in Poland, for several reasons:

* it was centrally located in Europe;

* it was located near a major railroad junction, making it easy to transport prisoners to the facility;

* it was located in an area rich with coal deposits, creating the possibility for a unique—and lethal—public-private partnership with chemical cartel I.G. Farben;

* its military buildings might be crumbling, but at least they didn’t have to be created from scratch—and the fabled German industrial efficiency could make it useable in no time.

A key phrase should follow “German industrial efficiency” in the prior sentence: and slave labor. The Third Reich couldn’t spare any tools for this experiment in terror, so prisoners were forced to make do with stones instead. If the guards didn’t like the job done with so little, they beat you. It was just a small preview of what was to come.

Rudolf Hoss, promoted to commandant of the new facility because of his brutal efficiency at the Dachau concentration camp, threw himself into adapting the complex to its new use—driving up to 100 miles for the prisoners’ kitchen, hustling to the Sudetenland section of Czechoslovakia for bed frames and straw stacks, even stealing badly needed barb wire.

What made this elevated thug (he’d been imprisoned for murder in 1923) throw up his hands was the truly impossible assignment SS head Heinrich Himmler gave him after all this: triple the camp capacity. The commandant’s protest—it was impossible!—was met with no sympathy by his boss, who said: “For an SS officer there are no difficulties! When they come up, it’s his job to get rid of them. How you do that is your business, not mine.”

It would take another couple of decades for the term to be invented, but Himmler was already transmitting its essentials: plausible deniability. In a way, it’s the same defense used by the Holocaust denial industry ever since.

The death industry achieved irresistible momentum at Auschwitz after the Wannsee Conference of January 1942, where plans were put in place for “the Final Solution.” But the first steps had already been taken when the initial bureaucratic barriers toward opening and enlarging the complex were overcome in June 1940.

Flashback, February 1945: FDR—“Sick Man at Yalta”?

Sixty-five years ago this week, Joseph Stalin, who fiercely distrusted physicians, played host to Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt because, he claimed, doctors had warned him that travel outside the U.S.S.R. would endanger his health. To accommodate his partner in the Grand Alliance against Hitler, an ailing FDR further endangered his own health by traveling 14,000 miles for a meeting at an old Russian spa on the Crimean coast.

For nearly half a century, any talk about the Yalta Conference had the potential to devolve into a shouting match between conservatives and liberals. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the corrosion of the Iron Curtain have taken the edge off of such ideologically charged confrontations, but questions still remain about this controversial conference meant to speed the end of World War II and prepare for the postwar world.

Stalin’s gambit in convincing the Americans and British to locate the summit on his home turf is an apt metaphor for two factors that shaped Yalta and the delayed Anglo-American reaction to it: the Soviet dictator’s deceit and the American President’s declining health.

The initial wave of euphoria from the conference—the belief that the “Big Three” would not only see the war against Germany through to its conclusion, but would cooperate in a postwar world of peace, justice and greater freedom for all the people of the world—dissipated as soon as it became apparent that Eastern Europe was falling into the Soviet sphere of influence.

The issue was still fiercely debated when I was in college, when one of my history professors discussed how the Yalta agreements became, to conservatives, a case of snatching victory from the jaws of defeat, as one foreign tyranny holding Eastern Europe in its grasp (Hitler’s Germany) was soon superseded by another (Stalin’s Soviet Union). When two members of the American delegation, Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White, were accused of espionage for the Soviet Union, Yalta became shorthand for a “betrayal myth” of the right.

(A few years ago, in fact, George W. Bush created a stir when he said Yalta represented agreements that viewed “the freedom of small nations [as] somehow expendable.” By the end of his eight years in office, he might have wished more than once that historical ankle-biters had rendered him the kind of understanding he had summarily rejected for FDR.)

The motive for a sellout at Yalta was given oxygen by Major General Patrick J. Hurley, FDR’s ambassador to China. The diplomat, who learned belatedly from the State Department about secret concessions to the Soviet Union concerning China, told Congress in 1951 that FDR had been a “sick man at Yalta”—a leader with the best intentions, but unable to stand up to Stalin.

The conservative charge of betrayal at Yalta was a myth. The notion that we had “given up” Eastern Europe was mistaken, since the British and Americans did not possess an inch of its territory and were in no position to do so.

In playing out scenarios of alternative histories, a certain amount of “present-ism” sets in, a harsh judgment of actors based on our contemporary notions of morality and/or our knowledge of how events turned out. That is particularly unfair to Roosevelt and Churchill, who did not know how a key technological development--the atomic bomb, as yet untested--would change the endgame of the war.

None of this is to say, however, that the two did not make serious mistakes at Yalta. The only reason why these didn’t cause more harm was that the facts on the ground—the military situation—overwhelmed all other considerations, limiting their choices and culpability alike.

Stalin’s Advantages at Yalta

Stalin had a good hand going into Yalta, but he played his cards so skillfully that the Soviet Union emerged from the conference as the real co-superpower with the U.S., at the expense of Great Britain. Here are the factors why:

* Location of boots on the ground. The mid-December Battle of the Bulge threw off the American timetable for the final push into Germany. By contrast, two days after the conclusion of the conference, Budapest fell to the Soviets. Ten million Soviet soldiers were in Eastern Europe, a number growing daily. For FDR to insist that the Soviet Union leave Eastern Europe, giving up ground it had already gained, would have Americans to take up arms again after Hitler was defeated—a prospect that few were prepared to do.

* Allies out of their comfort zone. Churchill reportedly remarked, “If they had searched for a decent place to meet for ten years or more, they couldn't have found a worse place than Yalta." More pointedly, he referred to the site, containing the former summer mansion of the tsar, as “the Riviera of Hades,” surrounded as it was by wholesale destruction left over by the Nazis.

To get to this godforsaken place, FDR didn’t have Airforce One, with all the comforts of home, to escort him. Instead, he sailed, taking evasive action at points, in the dead of winter, for several days, to Malta, before being flown to the Crimean town of Saki. The last leg of his trip was a six-hour drive in a chilly car on a bumpy road along the Crimean countryside. Roosevelt’s daughter Anna wrote her husband about the “creepy-crawly creatures” that, despite efforts at delousing, still remained in the rooms of at least some American and British delegates. Stalin took his sweet time getting there, not arriving till 24 hours later, giving his guests enough time to become depressed by their surroundings.

* Round-the-clock intelligence about the American and British delegations. The “creepy-crawly creatures” that grossed out Anna Roosevelt Boettiger were not the only bugs at Yalta—others were of the electronic variety. It wasn’t enough that Alger Hiss (who actually attended the conference as part of the American group formulating the United Nations) and Harry Dexter White—both now widely believed to be spies—were feeding the Soviets a steady diet of human intelligence. No, Stalin was also benefiting from wiretapping throughout the American quarters.

Delegates assumed they were being spied on, but some occasionally forgot. Moreover, the electronic surveillance extended beyond what many delegates regarded as likely. FDR’s aides spoke bluntly to each other out in the open, little knowing that “Stalin’s Himmler,” Lavrenty Beria, had managed to secrete more electronic devices out there, too. Just how good it was can be seen in this astounding fact: by the time Stalin sat down to breakfast each day, the wiretapped sessions had not only been transcribed but translated overnight into Russian for his benefit.

* Divergence in goals between the U.S. and British. FDR was annoyed the prior fall when Churchill spoke privately to Stalin about their respective “spheres of influence” (e.g., 90% Russian influence in Hungary, an equivalent amount for Britain in Greece). At the same time, Churchill was peeved that FDR was treating him more as what, in modern terms, might be called a “wingman” rather than an equal partner with the Americans and Soviets.

FDR’s Rapid Deterioration

The state of FDR’s health can use extended discussion. How bad was he, anyway? Did he end up yielding more than he would have under normal circumstances?

Several years ago, at Hyde Park, I saw a display of the naval cape the President wore on this trip. (You can see it in the photo accompanying this post.) He wore it with a gray flannel dark blue suit underneath, and as many people have noted over the years, he looked dashing. But the main advantage, he knew from his years as assistant secretary of the navy in WWI, was that it kept him warm. He hoped for similar results as he sailed to meet Stalin and Churchill.

But the long, arduous journey to Yalta so tired FDR that he was sick within 48 hours of his arrival. His daughter shared with her husband the fears of the President’s doctors about his “ticker”—which, she explained in alarm, was worse than they had known to date. FDR’s blood pressure had risen so dangerously high that his doctors urged that he not work more than four hours a day. Yalta involved so many matters—and so many different disputes to arbitrate among the Allies—that relaxing was well-nigh impossible.

In the year before, in the midst of his reelection campaign, FDR’s doctors had become increasingly concerned about his health. He had never really bounced back from the attack of influenza he experienced at his earlier summit with Churchill and Stalin at Teheran. A year and a quarter later, matters were far worse.

A month ago, The New York Times science correspondent, Dr. Lawrence K. Altman, reviewed a new book on “F.D.R’s Deadly Secret”: a melanoma that spread to the brain, causing the tumor that took Roosevelt's life. Altman implies that some conclusions of the authors, Dr. Steven Lomazow and Eric Fettmann, are so speculative that they don’t survive close scrutiny.

But Altman also mentions another point, important from a historiographical point of view, that has been lost over the years: By the 1970s, FDR’s children, anxious to preserve his reputation, were pressing his cardiologist, Dr. Howard G. Bruenn, to state that the President’s declining health had not affected his mental state at Yalta.

It’s probably impossible at this point to prove definitively whether the President had a melanoma that affected him, because no autopsy or biopsy was performed and most of his medical records disappeared after his death from the U.S. Naval Hospital in Bethesda, Md.

Nobody is saying that FDR’s decline rendered him incapable of understanding the issues before him. But, as Michael Beschloss explains in his history of the war’s final days, The Conquerors, the breakdown of FDR’s health affected his managerial style in another important way:

“His approach to leadership was to play Cabinet members off against one another, hold a dozen conflicting ideas in his head at the same time, and to keep the mechanics of control firmly in his grasp. But with his energy and concentration waning, he no longer had the patience and command of detail that had once let him keep important policies from going off the rails and Cabinet members from exceeding the rules he envisaged for them.”

With a legion of advisers accompanying him to Yalta, that old juggler’s ability to keep multiple balls in the air at once—all without telling anyone else—was gone. FDR’s continuing resort to his old habit of secrecy (VP Harry Truman didn’t even know where the President had gone) had significant consequences this time, because after his death the question of what he did or didn’t intend was far murkier. He loved to tell listeners exactly what they wanted to hear, but illness and death deprived him of the power to direct action where he wanted.

One other aspect of this dissipating energy comes into play: When you’re not physically at your best, you’re less inclined to dispute, more inclined to cut disagreeable discussions short. FDR wouldn’t have been human if this didn’t come into play. Combine that with his well-founded belief in his personal charm, and it’s easy to see how his honey words might have been construed by Stalin in a completely different light.

What the West Achieved…And Didn’t

One of FDR’s primary objectives was inducing Stalin to join the Pacific theater of the war against Japan. (Until then, the U.S.S.R. had stayed neutral in that part of the worldwide conflict.)

The Battle of the Bulge, the Allied generals in the West felt, was Hitler’s last gasp, and it was only a matter of time before Germany fell. But they expected the projected invasion of Japan to involve one million casualties.

Stalin agreed to join this front at last, within three months of Germany’s surrender, provided the Soviets were ceded the southern portion of the Sakhalin Island, the Kuril Islands, and the rights to Manchurian Ports of Dairen and Port Arthur.. For the Allies, all things considered, the price didn’t seem steep.

But some came to see it as unnecessary by the end of August 1945, by which time Japan had surrendered. The capitulation, following so quickly on the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki as well as Stalin’s declaration of war on the imperial empire, have led historians to argue ever since about which factor forced Japan to ask for peace.

In any case, whatever credit might have accrued to FDR and Churchill because of Soviet participation in the war dissipated.

But it was Stalin’s land-grab in Eastern Europe that rankled the most. The Soviet leader insisted on a friendly government in Poland, claiming that it had become a corridor for German invasions in the last two wars.

Typical of his style, FDR tried to smooth over any differences. He agreed with Stalin that there should not be a government “unfriendly” to the U.S.S.R. in Poland, but at the same time he and Churchill pushed for free elections.

In the end, both sides appeared to have received what they wanted: FDR and Churchill, assurances of free, democratic elections in all territory freed from the Nazis; Stalin, a pledge to include Communists in the future national government of Poland. But it was all a chimera.

The problem was that, in Lublin, Stalin already had a “stooge government” waiting to take over. That group and the Polish government-in-exile, in London, refused to cooperate with each other.

FDR’s hopes for Polish elections within a few months of the agreement, he realized before his death, were doomed. By the time Stalin permitted them to be held, it was two years later, by which time they were hopelessly rigged in favor of the Lublin group.

Churchill was somewhat blunter than FDR about what would happen, even before the summit, telling his personal secretary: “Make no mistake, all the Balkans, except Greece, are going to be Bolshevized, and there is nothing I can do to prevent it. There is nothing I can do for poor Poland, either.”

Perhaps because he had placed greater hope in his ability to charm Stalin, FDR felt far more keenly disappointed by this failure. Only a month and a half later, he was telling Anna Rosenberg, a longtime New York politico whom he’d entrusted to study manpower issues among Allied forces the prior year in Europe: “Averell [Harriman] is right. We can’t do business with Stalin. He has broken every one of the promises he made at Yalta.”

As FDR’s comment indicates, Yalta marked the end of illusions, but it also meant the beginning of myths. One was perpetrated by the left: that it was only when the more hard-line Harry Truman assumed the Presidency in the wake of FDR’s death that the Cold War really began. The other came from the right: that FDR and Churchill gave away the fruits of what the British leader called, on a different occasion, “blood, toil, tears and sweat.”

The level of scrutiny accorded Presidential candidates can be ridiculous at times, but it has had one salutary effect: No matter how well or not FDR performed at Yalta, it is unlikely that we’ll ever have another situation in which a dying occupant of the Oval Office engages in such momentous diplomacy with another head of state.

This Day in WWII History (Stalin’s James Bond Executed in Tokyo)

November 7, 1944—Thousands of miles from the eastern half of the country he had saved with critical intelligence coups, Soviet spy Richard Sorge—often considered the most important espionage agent of the 20th century—was executed in Tokyo for masterminding a ring that penetrated the highest levels of the Empire of the Rising Sun.

Executed along with the Soviet for his part in the ring was Hotsumi Ozaki, believed to be the only Japanese citizen sentenced to death during the war on treason charges.

Russians are fascinated with Sorge for obvious reasons; the Japanese, because they are still stunned that a foreigner was able to ferret out secrets from their paranoid, authoritarian government of the time. Aside from military and intelligence historians, however, Americans have not paid much attention to him.

I believe Sorge’s life and career merit more extensive attention, because a) it answers a number of questions on how WWII worked out the way it did, and b) one of his chief contacts was an American woman who was charged—controversially at the time, credibly in retrospect—with being a foreign operative.

Ian Fleming once said that the spy he created, James Bond, had nothing on the real-life adventures of British operative Sidney Reilly. I would argue that Sorge’s career was even more consequential than Reilly’s.

There is the astounding nature of the secrets he passed along to Stalin, for instance:

* He not only predicted that Adolf Hitler would violate the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact by invading the U.S.S.R., but predicted when this would occur.

* He predicted that the Japanese would attack Pearl Harbor.

* He predicted that, instead of pushing toward Siberia, Japan would move south, toward French Indo-China.

In his professional capacity, Sorge slipped as easily across geographic borders as identities. In fact, the two were linked. Though born in 1895 in Azerbaijan—at the time, part of Czarist Russian—he was the child of a cross-national marriage between a Russian woman and her German mining engineer husband.

What was not permeable was Sorge’s devotion to Communism. Though some might argue it was practically his birthright (an uncle served as secretary to Karl Marx), he became devoted to the cause in earnest during the closing days of WWI, when forced convalescence because of a war wound while fighting for Germany led him to read the works of Mark more seriously.

While still a German national, Sorge joined the Comintern (Communist Party International). By 1930, he made his way to Shanghai, where, under cover as an editor for the German publication Frankfurter Zeitung, he was actually gathering intelligence for a planned Communist revolution. There, he made the acquaintance of future conspirator Ozaki through a mutual acquaintance: Agnes Smedley, an American journalist, novelist, feminist—and triple agent.

Yes, triple agent. Smedley started out working for Indian nationalists before moving on to Soviet Communists, then Chinese Communists. In Shanghai, she supplied Sorge—normally skeptical of the value of female operatives—with detailed information on Japanese and German military intentions and capabilities. She also began a romantic relationship with him.

Now, this sounds like James Bond stuff. So does the rest of his life from here on: After a short time spent re-establishing contacts in Berlin for the sake of his cover story, he was transferred to Japan, where Ozaki—not just a public intellectual but a friend of Japan's premier—started supplying him with documents about the regime. For good measure, Sorge slept with the wife of the German ambassador.

All of this sounds like heady stuff. But, as W. Somerset Maugham noted in his semi-autobiographical fictional work on his own spying career, Ashenden: “The work of an agent in the Intelligence Department is on the whole monotonous. A lot of it is uncommonly useless."

Think of the time spent away from home. Think of all the time spent hand-holding some of the most miserable pieces of humanity, people willing to sell out their country for the sake of money, women, or just simply revenge.

Sorge had additional frustrations. That war injury, for instance, bothered him enough that he took to drinking to get over it. That, in turn—combined with anxiety about escaping the attention of authorities—led him to behavior that became increasingly erratic, such as riding around wildly drunk on the streets of Tokyo late at night on his motorcycle.

Ultimately, it wasn’t this that tripped him up, however, but the manner in which he transmitted his messages. According to Ruth Price’s The Lives of Agnes Smedley, the former mentor-lover of the American began using his transmitter too frequently. Japanese intelligence got wind of it, captured and arrested Sorge and Ozaki, grilled them incessantly about their work (in the course of which Sorge disclosed that Smedley was “a member of the Comintern headquarters staff”), and possibly tortured them before putting them to death.

Stalincouldn’t comment on Sorge’s situation, but he’d learned at last to appreciate his agent's tidbits of information. It wasn’t always this way. In June, faced with mounting hints from military associates that Hitler might invade the Soviet Union, Stalin disagreed:

“There’s this bastard who’s set up factories and brothels in Japan and even deigned to report the date of the German attack as 22 June. Are you suggesting I should believe him, too?”

The "bastard"--Sorge--turned out to be right, of course. Stalin still didn’t automatically accept Sorge’s report about Japanese troop movements, but this time he confirmed it with a local operative. That enabled the Soviet dictator to redeploy troops to counter Hitler’s thrust into the Russian interior.

Stalin even passed on Sorge’s tip about Pearl Harbor to American intelligence. Unfortunately, American defense chiefs didn’t believe him, so the report never got in the hands of U.S. commanders in the Pacific.

The full nature of Sorge's exploits weren't revealed until 20 years after his death, when he was declared a hero of the Soviet Union. Stalin could not reveal very much during his lifetime--after all, he had disregarded the warning about Hitler's invasion, plunging his country into a horrifying mess.

As for Smedley, she died in the United Kingdom in 1950, after fleeing from the U.S. because of accusations by Major General Charles A. Willoughby that she was involved with Communist espionage. For years, friends such as Margaret Sanger and Roger Baldwin of the American Civil Liberties Union believed her to be a martyr to red-baiting.

It wasn't until Price was researching her biography--particularly in the late 1980s, when she interviewed aging Chinese and foreign expatriates in China--that the full extent of Smedley's involvement with Sorge's ring began to be understood. The end of the Soviet empire made availability Smedley's Comintern files, furthering confirming that involvement.

This Day in World War II History (MacArthur Returns)

October 20, 1944—Splashing ashore in knee-deep water, in long, powerful strides, General Douglas MacArthur made good on his promise of two years before when he was compelled to abandon the fortress of Corregidor: “I shall return.”

Nobody could accuse the general of cowardice, and the “island-hopping strategy” in the South Pacific that brought him back to the Philippines—bypassing heavily fortified Japanese strongholds for more vulnerable points—saved thousands of American lives.

But, characteristically, MacArthur’s return—a huge morale booster for a Filipino population suffering under misrule under the Empire of the Rising Sun—was also marked by histrionics. Dwight D. Eisenhower, an aide to MacArthur during the 1930s, remarked that he had studied dramatics under the general—and you can see it in how the Pacific commander prepared for his landing and what he did upon getting to shore.

All through the morning, the general watched 200,000 of his troops offload seven miles off the shore of Leyte Gulf. At last, after his luncheon, he decided to come in with the third wave of the landings.

Just before he went in, he signaled to his public-relations staff: “Regard publicity set-up as excellent. I desire to broadcast from beach as soon as apparatus can be set up. After I have done so you can use records made to broadcast to the U.S. and to the Philippines at such times and in such ways as you deem best.”

After wading ashore, MacArthur repeated his dramatic walk. Why would he do so, particularly when snipers could have cut him down? Why, for the benefit of newsreel cameras, of course!

Standing by his side was the President of the Philippines, Sergio Osmena, who had been unable to persuade the great man that it might be safer to wait until the troops had eliminated Japanese resistance before they waded in. Now, with a mobile broadcast unit set up, MacArthur was ready to speak: “People of the Philippines: I have returned.”

The general continued for a few sentences, paying tribute to the “unswerving and resolute devotion to the principles of freedom” demonstrated by Filipino patriots. But what must have stood out for many a listener was this short sentence: “Rally to me.”

Somewhere along the line, MacArthur had forgotten that there is no “I” in “team,” nor in “Army.” His egomania was such that he had already been seriously contemplating running for President against Franklin Roosevelt, his commander in chief.

Military historian Max Hastings’ judgment on the general in Retribution: The Battle for Japan 1944-1945 is not without harsh truth: “MacArthur displayed a taste for fantasy quite unsuited to a field commander, together with ambition close to megalomania and consistently poor judgement as a picker of subordinates.”

David McCullough’s view, however, rings with truth, too: “There's no question about his patriotism, there's no question about his courage, and there's no question, it seems to me, about his importance as one of the protagonists of the 20th century."

This Day in Senate History (Nye Investigates WWI “Merchants of Death”)

September 4, 1934—One of the most comprehensive congressional investigations of the 20th century began, as Gerald Nye of North Dakota convened the “Senate Munitions Committee,” empaneled to determine whether American arms makers unduly influenced the U.S. entry into World War I.

The resulting 18 months of hearings bolstered the isolationist movement and hampered Franklin D. Roosevelt as he attempted to “quarantine” the world’s rising dictatorships.

Though Congress has investigated malfeasance in the executive branch and other parts of American society since 1792, Senate investigative hearings took on new levels of showmanship in the broadcast era, notably hearings involving Watergate, Vietnam, labor racketeering, organized crime, and the Army vs. Joseph McCarthy. They could make stars of members of the world’s “greatest deliberative body” (Sam Ervin, Howard Baker, Estes Kefauver) or undo them (Joe McCarthy).

The model for these hearings took rote in the 1920s, when liberals used the hearings to make the case for landmark legislation (Senate Robert Wagner investigating crackdowns on unions) or to ferret out corruption (Teapot Dome). For the benefit of the media, committee members would announce what would happen at each succeeding stage of the investigation, then release bits of information meant to highlight interest in what they intended to prove.

Nye, a member of what today is a dying breed--a Republican progressive from west of the Mississippi—was an emblematic example of this. At the start of the Munitions Committee Hearings, he laid out his promise of what the testimony would show: “When the Senate investigation is over, we shall see that war and preparation for war is not a matter of national honor and national defense, but a matter of profit for the few.”

Nye’s statement found a ready audience because the fact was that a number of American arms manufacturers had sold to multiple customers—sometimes on both sides. Bankers had been involved with some of the most vexing problems of the interwar period, including reparations from World War I. In the spring of 1934, the Book-of-the-Month Club had made one expose of the influence of these groups, Merchants of Death, not only a bestseller but a catchphrase that would take its place alongside the later “military-industrial complex.”

Democrats, now in control of Congress, may have felt that someone with the progressive leanings of Nye would accord with their own views, so, after he introduced a resolution calling for this investigation, they named him to lead the seven-member committee. They would later regret that choice.

The vast sweep of material collected by the Nye Committee in its 93 hearings—including transcripts from the testimony of more than 200 witnesses, including representatives of the iron and steel, shipbuilding, and aircraft industries, as well as munitions manufacturers such as the Colt Firearm Company and the DuPont Company—make it a goldmine for historians. Historian Stuart Brandes, in Warhogs, credits it, along with the Vinson-Trammell Act of the same year, with spurring excess-profits taxation and renegotiated contracts during World War II.

Brandes, however, also takes the committee to task for using methods “eerily close to the methods of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy." In particular, the committee pushed too far its conclusions that the munitions makers had conspired together.

Eventually, Democrats turned on Nye for suggesting that Woodrow Wilson had withheld essential information from Congress when he requested a declaration of war against Germany. Carter Glass, chairman of the Appropriations Committee, became so enraged during his denunciation of his Senate colleague that blood burst from his knuckles when he slammed his fist onto a desk for emphasis.

Before that point, however, Nye had created ammunition of his own—talking points for three Neutrality Acts, as well as the broader isolationist movement. FDR was alarmed by the rise of Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo, but he had to rein in his crypto-interventionist instincts so he would not lose support for key elements of his domestic agenda. And no wonder: the popularity of isolationism, particularly before Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939, was so broad that it exceeded 90% in approval.

It’s impossible to imagine in a country that has become split 50-50 over elementary policy questions as well as national elections, but isolationism enjoyed such broad support because it tapped into the concerns of so many different groups:

* Historical caution, dating back to George Washington, about becoming involved with “entangling alliances”;

* Agrarian antagonism to big-money interests, dating back to Thomas Jefferson and fanned into flame by William Jennings Bryan and other Populists, that saw the hand of Wall Street in everything;

* Pacifism, rising in influence just before World War I and gaining steadily afterward—including the Oxford Pledge, named for the students at the British university who pledged never to join any army;

* Unilateralism, the concept that America should conduct its foreign policy with minimal consultation with other nations lest it restrain our freedom of action. It found expression in a kind of “power progressivism” practiced by Republican Senators William Borah and Hiram Johnson, who often supported domestic New Deal legislation and were incensed by Japanese imperialism, but wanted no part of European quarrels;

* Marxist opposition to capitalist wars, exemplified by Socialist Presidential candidate Norman Thomas and (except for the period after the Soviet-Nazi non-aggression pact, Communists);

* Fanatical anti-Communism, which saw Hitler as a counterweight to Stalin;

* Opposition by the party out of power—in this decade, Republicans—to the foreign policy of the President;

* Understandable domestic preoccupation with the Great Depression; and

* Guilt over the punitive anti-German measures in the Treaty of Versailles.

FDR signed each of the three Neutrality Acts, but he increasingly sought to neutralize its effects and circumvent its intent to restrict his foreign policy. It took not only Pearl Harbor but Hitler’s declaration of war on the U.S. to end the argument over isolationism—at least, in terms of World War II.

Nye’s isolationism, once a political selling point, became a liability after war was declared. He lost his reelection bid and was not around on Capitol Hill the next year when the conflict concluded. He died in 1971, a once-powerful and influential influence on foreign policy, now confined to the margins of history texts.

This Day in World War II History (“Valkyrie” Plot to Kill Hitler Fails)

July 20, 1944—German resistance against the Nazis—a movement in which tens of thousands were jailed, exiled or executed—came the closest to its desired goal when Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, a high-level staff officer, placed a briefcase containing a bomb under an oak table in Adolf Hitler’s headquarters in East Prussia.

The count left the room as if to make a call. Shortly thereafter, upon seeing a body carried out, he assumed his plan to assassinate the Fuehrer had succeeded.

But the colonel’s diminished eyesight—the result of war wounds that left him without his left eye, right hand, and two fingers of his left hand—meant he was tragically mistaken, and shortly thereafter he and his circle of co-conspirators were apprehended and executed.

(Official Nazi records indicate that approximately 7,000 were arrested in the immediate wake of the failed coup; nearly 5,800 were executed in the closing months of 1944, with another 5,700 put to death for their involvement the following year.)

Faithful reader, have you seen Valkyrie? Is it worthwhile for me to get it on DVD? The supporting cast interested me, but I found ridiculous even the idea of casting Tom Cruise as the tragic Stauffenberg. When it comes to eyepatch heroes, I’ll take John Wayne’s Rooster Cogburn anytime.

I’m not sure how historically accurate this true-life thriller was, but the way I figure it, if you want a good sense of the events and people involved in the conspiracy, the best thing you can do is decidedly old-fashioned: turn to a good book:

* The main action in Peter Quinn’s topnotch detective thriller The Hour of the Cat occurs six years before the Valkyrie conspiracy, but it features one of the most shadowy figures in the July 1944 plot: Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the Nazi spymaster who engaged in a dangerous double game to bring down the Fuehrer.

* Michael Beschloss’ history The Conquerors is principally about the two American Presidents who demolished the Third Reich and created a durable postwar European order—Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman. But the deft opening chapter economically but richly summarizes Stauffenberg’s plot and the Allied reaction to it (FDR had no comment—he did not want the Soviets to think he was going back on his “unconditional surrender” pledge, but figured that anything which weakened the Nazis couldn’t be all bad).

* Berlin Diaries, 1940-1945, by Marie Vassiltchikov is written from the point of view of a White Russian émigré princess, many of whose close friends participated in the conspiracy. You won’t find the logistics of the plotters, but will discover the kind of expertly observed atmospherics you’d expect to find in an espionage thriller: the hurried, whispered confidences of plotters; the initial euphoria when it appeared the plot had succeeded; and the dashed hopes upon learning “the Devil” (as Vassiltchikov called Hitler) had in fact survived. An amazing true story, which--big surprise!--Hollywood has completely ignored since its 1987 publication.

Cruise’s faith in Scientology became fodder for controversy during filming, with the Stauffenberg family in particular annoyed by his casting. But the actor’s religious beliefs bother me less than how Hollywood treats the spiritual convictions of the real-life conspirators.

Early in the war, for instance, Canaris had secretly employed the services of the anti-Nazi Lutheran minister Dietrich Bonhoeffer. By the time of the unraveling of the Valkyrie plot, the two men had already ended up in prison, but the Nazi hunt for a paper trail around the conspirators uncovered their role, too. Bonhoeffer, like Canaris, was executed in 1945, but his writings would go on to inspire Martin Luther King Jr. and Desmond Tutu.

The film Valkyrie does not include Bonhoeffer at all among its cast of characters. Just as odd is the omission of the spiritual motives behind the participation of Stauffenberg himself.

The colonel and his family were staunch Roman Catholics; in fact, Marie Vassiltchikov’s diary noted that a fellow conspirator was certain that the colonel was “such a fervent Christian that Masses are surely being said for him all over Germany” after his arrest.

In ransacking Stauffenberg’s papers for evidence, the Gestapo discovered Mit Brennender Sorge (“With Burning Anxiety”), Pope Pius XI’s 1937 encyclical condemning Nazism, as well as sermons by Bishop Clemens August von Galen, an opponent of Nazism who had loudly denounced the Nazis’ euthanasia program from the pulpit.

Galen’s traditionalism in politics and religion was an outlook shared by Stauffenberg, and Adolf Hitler indicated that, once victory was secured, the bishop would share the same fate—execution—as the courageous staff officer.

You could argue, I suppose, that a script doesn't have time for such background. But that's just an excuse. Character makes action plausible. I can't help but wonder if Hollywood's secular outlook colored how it looked at the background surrounding this great failed opportunity to bring down a tyrant.

This Day in World War I History (Marines Take Belleau Wood)

June 25, 1918—Capping three weeks of combat in the face of enemy machine-gun fire, artillery barrages and poison gas, the Marine Corps contingent of the American Expedition Force’s Second Division finally achieved victory at the Battle of Belleau Wood, stopping the last major German offensive of the war.

Today, the American sacrifice—9,777 casualties, of which 1,811 were fatal—is commemorated by a nearly 100-ft.-tall monument towering over the Aisne-Marne Cemetery (see the picture accompanying this post). Anti-American slogans must ring pretty hollow in the vast stillness here—the first of two instances in the past century when American troops helped save France from falling to an authoritarian German power.

One regret of mine in writing this blog—one I hope to rectify over the next several months—has been the lack of material on the First World War. The conflict might have ended 90 years ago, but we are still suffering from the ghastly wound it opened in civilization.

After four years of trench warfare, mostly on its home ground, France in particular was loosening its grip in the death grapple with Kaiser Wilhelm’s Army. It could hardly wait for fresh American troops to face off against the Germans.

“Belleau Wood” is shorthand for two parts of the epic battle. On June 3-4, 1918, the commander of the American Expeditionary Force, General John J. Pershing, acceding to the wishes of the French, ordered the Second and Third Divisions to link up with the French Tenth Colonial Division to halt a German advance at Chateau-Thierry, a mere 50 miles from Paris. Only two days after this combined force drove the Germans back across the Marne, the Americans embarked on the second part of the engagement: capturing Belleau Wood itself. Easier said than done.

Slaughter in the Wheat Field

After emerging from a shallow trench, the Marines had to cross an open wheat field to seize their objective. Whatever fleeting thoughts they might have entertained that the shoulder-length wheat stalks might camouflage their advance were immediately dashed by an enemy crouching behind firmly entrenched positions.

They Called Us Devil Dogs, by Byron Scarbrough, an as-told-memoir from the perspective of his grandfather, the Tennesseean Jim Scarbrough, offers an extraordinarily vivid retrospective of that day:

“From the wood line came a constant rain of machine gun fire sweeping left to right and back, clipping off the stalks of wheat and the men in between them. I remember thinking the bullets sounded just like crickets, loud crickets. I also remember the men were falling just like mown grass. There was shouting and screaming near and far. It was hard to make anything out.”

Crossing an open field, completely exposed to enemy fire—does this sound to you at least somewhat like Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg? Me, too.

And though the results were not as calamitous for the Marines as they proved for the Marines as they had been for the Confederates a half-century before, they were bad enough, as weapon advances had heightened defenses’ ability to inflict damage. That day—June 6, 1918—the Marine Corps sustained the most casualties in its history (a terrible record not surpassed until the Battle of Tarawa in the South Pacific in November 1943).

For the next three weeks, the action seesawed between the Germans and Americans, with the woods being taken by the Americans—then recaptured by the Germans—a total of six times.

Reasons for the Marine Victory

Marines had three major assets in the fight:

* Precision long-distance marksmanship. German experience with British snipers did not prepare them for the Americans’ ability to hit targets more than 500 yards away. If the Americans could get that close, the Germans would have the fight of their lives on their hands. They did.

* Experienced leadership. Approximately one-fifth of the 5th Marines and one-tenth of the 6th Marines were "old-timers" (defined as someone with more than one year's service). In contrast, their counterparts in the 9th Infantry and 23d Infantry regiments, could only muster one out of every 20 men with similar experience.

* Tenacity. Marine commanders added luster to their growing legend for toughness in the course of the battle. At the beginning of the three weeks of bloodshed, French forces, exhausted after so much fighting, asked Captain Lloyd Williams of the 2nd Battalion about withdrawing. Williams’ response: "Retreat, Hell! We just got here!" Later, on June 6, with his men pinned down, Gunnery Sergeant Dan Daly called "Come on ya sons-of-bitches, ya want to live forever?" and –remarkably, given the chaotic surroundings—induced them to advance again

Perhaps an even more astonishing example of heroism was provided by First Lieutenant Jacob Harrison Heckman, whose actions on June 25 were just one of many examples of courage up and down the line that day that secured victory. His citation reads as follows:

The Distinguished Service Cross is presented to Jacob Harrison Heckman, First Lieutenant, U.S. Marine Corps, for extraordinary heroism while serving with the 5th Regiment (Marines), 2d Division, A.E.F. in action in the Bois-de-Belleau, France, June 25, 1918 resistance, and captured one officer and ninety men. Each of his men destroyed a nest and captured two of the enemy at each po. With the assistance of three sergeants, Lieutenant Heckman started out to destroy the final stand of the enemy in the Bois-de-Belleau, an impregnable position, where enemy guns were concealed by rocks and heavy shrubbery. Armed with only a pistol, Lieutenant Heckman rushed the nest which was offering the most violent sition. After effecting the complete reduction of the last element, Lieutenant Heckman marched his prisoners in under a severe and harassing fire of the retreating enemy.

This Day in World War II History (Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Starts)

April 19, 1943 – With the Allies dithering, as they had for the last decade, on how to respond to the Jewish refugee situation, and with SS head Heinrich Himmler bent on liquidating their ghetto as a grotesque birthday “gift” for Adolf Hitler, Polish Jews began the first urban revolt against the Nazis in World War II. In the end, the odds against them were insurmountable, but the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising became an enduring legend in the resistance against evil.

On this date, as it had done for the last 10 years (and as it would do again initially 50 years later, when the breakup of Yugoslavia led to mass rapes, massacres and “ethnic cleansing”), the non-German, non-occupied West did nothing but wring its hands over the fate of Europe’s Jews. British and American delegates, after nearly another two weeks of deliberation, decided: Not too much could be done.

Arguably, they remained wrong (bombing the trains taking Jewish prisoners to death camps might have been a start), but they were right in one respect: The time for really effective action would have been before Hitler re-started Germany’s war machine, even as he was systematically marginalizing Jews within weeks of taking power.

Warsaw Jews couldn’t wait for diplomats: They had literally been penned up within a ghetto within the city, encircled by 10-feet-high walls, by Nazi decree since November 1940. They couldn’t even communicate with anyone outside, since radios and telephone lines had been removed, mail censored, and incoming packages confiscated.

Imagine 400,000 people inside this enclosure, unable to buy food, permitted only half the usual rations; several families often crowded into one apartment; lack of fuel and medical supplies; sewage pipes freezing; human excrement being dumped into the streets. It was a prescription for a humanitarian disaster, which is what happened as typhus epidemics, beginning in the synagogues and buildings for the homeless, radically reduced the population.

And that was before the mid-1942 mass resettlement of residents began. Jewish leaders in the city believed that no more than 60,000 would be seized, and that resistance would only make matters worse. Unable to imagine the worst that evil could produce, they were shocked that more than five times that amount were taken and sent off, most to Treblinka. The Nazis even made Jewish doctors choose which of their patients would be deported to concentration camps. The scope of the roundup led the city's Jewish leadership to a momentous decision: the next time, they'd resist.

Before long, they began organizing in self-defense groups, under the command of a 24-year-old named Mordecai Anielewicz. I had never heard his name before I began researching this post. He deserves better, and as part of that effort I’ll write a bit about him here, along with including the picture that accompanies this post.

Coming from a poor family in a poor neighborhood, Anielewicz might have, under ordinary circumstances, continued the studies in Hebrew, history, sociology and economics that meant so much to him. But early in the war, he became active in the underground resistance against the Nazis, even returning from Lithuania to Warsaw to be at the heart of the struggle, organizing defiance with every lecture given, paper issued, cell group organized, paper issued, and bunker constructed.

In January 1943, the Nazis surprised the resistance by taking another 6,500 people—but then the Nazis were in turn surprised when a melee began and a German official was badly injured. Four days later, they stopped the roundup effort. Himmler vowed not to be humiliated again.

At 3 am on April 19, with Passover about to occur, the Germans began what they expected would be short work of Warsaw’s last Jews. They had all the tools they could possibly hope for: 2000 troops armed with all the firepower they could ever want, along with more than 7,000 security personnel.

The 600-700 in the Jewish underground possessed only two or three light machine guns to go with a few thousand grenades, as well as a few hundred rifles, revolvers and pistols that the Polish resistance had managed, against the odds, to smuggle into them. It would have to do.

Anielewicz and his confederates began organizing hit-and-run attacks on the Germans—targeting crossroad streets in the ghetto from rooftops and attics. They had no realistic hope of winning, the last surviving leader, 89-year-old Marek Edelman, has remembered—all they wanted to do was “protect the people in the ghetto, to extend their life by a day or two or five."

One of the German tanks entering the enclosure was driven off after being met with Molotov cocktails (one of the most effective improvised weapons of the underground). Weeks of fighting ensued, with the resistance battling insane conditions (heat, smoke, burning buildings, poison gas, manholes blown up to prevent escape through sewers) as well as the enemy. The Nazis were forced to take the ghetto one street at a time.

The beginning of the end came on May 8, when, somehow or other, the Nazis located the bunker where Anielewicz and four other underground leaders were stationed, at Mila Street Number 18 (giving rise to the Leon Uris novel of the event, Mila 18). The Nazis blew up all five exits to the bunker and hurled in poison gas. Rather than being taken prisoner, Anielewicz and his partners committed suicide. Resistance was over within a week.

Several thousand Jews had died in the fires during the month-long struggle, and another 56,000 captured, with at least half being sent off to the death camps. However, Anielewicz and his fellow rebels had provided a clear example of what even badly armed (if ingenious) resistance could accomplish. In the postwar era, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising formed, along with the ancient Jewish revolt at Masada, a rallying point for the Zionist leaders who brought the state of Israel into being.