HIST Test 3 outside reading
The author of this selection offers a brilliant and highly original discussion of the global
significance of the American and British invasion of Normandy, in German-occupied
France, on June 6, 1944. But his stunning thesis needs to be placed in the larger con-
text of the Second World War, both at home in America and at the battlefronts. The
war brought unprecedented unity at home, as Americans of all colors and conditions ral-
lied behind a righteous crusade against Japanese, German, and Italian aggression. In the
course of this terrible war, 16 million Americans, including 300,000 women and
960,000 African Americans, served in the armed forces. But compared with the destruc-
tion wrought in China, Japan, the Soviet Union, and Europe, where some 49 million
people died and whole cities were flattened, the United States suffered relatively light
casualties. There were no invasions of the American mainland, no bombing raids on
American cities, no civilian massacres. Far fewer Americans died in the Second World
War than in the Civil War. Total American military deaths came to 408,000. By
contrast, 2.2 million Chinese and from 20 to 25 million Soviets — soldiers and civil-
ians alike — perished in this, the largest and deadliest war in human history. Such fig-
ures do not include the 6 million Jews exterminated by the Germans in the holocaust.
Despite relatively light casualties, the United States underwent profound changes dur-
ing the war. With the government pumping billions of dollars into war production, full
employment returned and the Great Depression finally ended. Americans savored
wartime prosperity — weekly earnings of industrial workers alone rose 70 percent be-
tween 1940 and 1945 — and they endured food rationing and shortages of cigarettes
and nylon stockings. In addition to producing a surge of national unity, the war crushed
powerful isolationist sentiment in Congress and centralized even more power in Washington D.C., where multiplying war agencies issued directives, devised complicated
forms and schedules, and produced veritable blizzards of paper.
The war was also a crucial event for American women. In a zealous display of patrio-
tism, they joined the Red Cross, drove ambulances, worked for the civil defense, and en-
listed in the armed services. Women were also recruited for their brains. The navy chose
select graduates of seven East Coast women’s colleges to participate in military operations
that were highly classified; five such women, from Goucher College, were involved in
top-secret “Operation ULTRA,” which broke the Germans’ U-boat code. Because of
labor shortages, the government in 1942 urged women to join the wartime work force,
and 4.5 million did so. They flocked to Washington, D.C., to work as secretaries and
typists in the government’s mushrooming bureaucracy. They also donned slacks, covered
their hair, and went to work in the defense plants. There they did every kind of job from
clerking in toolrooms to operating cranes, welding, and riveting — in short, they per-
formed the kind of physically demanding work once reserved for men. “Rosie the Riv-
eter” became a famous wartime image, one that symbolized the growing importance of
the female industrial worker. The story of “Rosie the Riveter” is ably documented in a
film by the same name.
In the Pacific theater, meanwhile, the United States lost the Philippines, Guam, and
Wake Island to imperial Japanese forces, and faced an even more formidable enemy in
Adolf Hitler’s Germany. Although America was already in a condition of semimobi-
lization in December 1941, it took a year before the country was ready to fight a total
war on two fronts. What happened in the Pacific theater will be covered in the next sec-
tion. As for Germany and Italy, the first American move against them took place in
November 1942, when an American expeditionary army landed in North Africa and
went on to help the British whip German and Italian forces there. After that, an Anglo-
American force captured Sicily and invaded the Italian mainland.
Then on D-day, June 6, 1944, an Allied invasion force — the largest ever assem-
bled — landed at Normandy in what turned out to be the beginning of the end of
Hitler’s so-called Third Reich. Thanks to German errors and Allied planning and exe-
cution under General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the invasion was a success. With a foothold
in Normandy, American, British, and French armies drove a wedge into German defenses
and poured inland. As the Western Allies pushed toward Germany from the west, Soviet
armies drove in from the east. By May 1945 — less than a year after D-day — German
resistance has collapsed and the once mighty Reich was a smoldering ruin.
This sets the stage for the following selection by Charles Cawthon, a veteran of the Sec-
ond World War and an expert on the military side of the conflict. It is the thesis of his essay
that D-day was one of those great battles that changed history, marking “the final, pivotal
point” in America’s often hesitant march to global power. He compares D-day to other piv-
otal battles, such as the Greek victory over the Persians at Marathon and the American vic tory over the British at Saratoga, and goes on to offer a brilliant discussion of how D-day
was a turning point in the grand events leading up to the Second World War and in the
rise of the United States as a superpower, “looked to by the rest of the world for leadership
and resources to solve the humanitarian problems and disease and famine.” For the imagi-
native, Cawthon even speculates on what might have happened had the Allies been de-
feated on the beaches and cliffs of Normandy. This is state-of-the art military history.
CHURCHILL, WINSTON British prime
minister during World War II who worked closely with Franklin Roosevelt in shaping the war policies of the Western Allies.
EASTERN FRONT The German-Soviet fighting front, which in June 1944 stretched from the tip of Greece northward to the tip of Finland.
-OMAHA BEACH The heaviest fighting on
D-day took place on this beach, one of four beach on which American, British, and Canadian forces landed on D-day.
-V-1 AND V-2 German ballistic missiles that came into use in 1944. These revolutionary, unmanned rockets enabled Germany to bomb Britain without the use of airplanes.
WESTERN FRONT The fighting front between Germany and the Western Allies in France
The “what ifs” of a lost Omaha are all ominous:
an attempt to evacuate under fire would have been
more costly in landing craft and casualties than the
initial assault. Shifting the troops and equipment of
the entire Army corps destined for Omaha to other
beaches that were already crowded would have
raised confusion to the level of chaos. A German
counterattack, which never came, would have ac-
complished the same havoc as an ordered with-
drawal. The loss of Omaha would have left a gap of
some twenty miles between Utah and the British
beaches.
The German high command was slow in identify-
ing the June 6 assault as the Allies’ main effort and in
assembling the first-class panzer and infantry divisions
that it had available to contain and repulse it. Even so,
it is highly unlikely that the gap in the Allies’ line
would not have been quickly discovered and ex-
ploited to flank the adjoining beachheads. As it was,
with Omaha Beach won, the situation of the Allies re-
mained serious. Attacks beyond the beachheads were
brought to a slow and bloody crawl by stiff resistance
in the difficult hedgerow terrain. The British objec-
tive of taking the important communications center
of Caen on the first day was not accomplished until six
weeks later. General Bradley observed in his autobi-
ography that had Hitler launched the forces he had
available within the first week of the invasion, “he
might well have overwhelmed us.”
The “human probability” that D-day could have
ended as a Dunkirk, or as did the amphibious assault
on Gallipoli in the First World War, is too real to be
disregarded. Had it happened, Pandora, that well-
known packager and purveyor of disasters, would
have had a memorable day. The immediate military
ill would have been the reduction of Germany’s
three-front land war to two fronts. Then the major
part of their sixty-one divisions, including eleven
panzer, stationed in France and the Low Countries,
could have been shifted with small risk to both the
Eastern Front confronting the Soviet Union and
Italy confronting the Western Allies.
The Eastern Front stretched at the time from the
tip of Finland south to the tip of Greece, well away
from Germany’s eastern border. In Italy the Allies
had taken Rome but were faced with continuing the
slow, costly attacks up the mountainous spine of the
Apennines.
Even with the major reinforcements made avail-
able by repulse of the invasion, it is unlikely that the
German Army could have repeated its great offen-
sives of the early war. But that it could have stale-
mated both fronts is a probability well within the
human range.
Churchill, before the invasion, called it “much
the greatest thing we have ever attempted.” Defeat
would have been crushing to Britain, in both mili-
tary losses and morale. America would have made
good its own losses but would have had to brace for
a longer, more costly war, and largely alone. The ef-
fect on Germany, of course, would have been a re-
vival of faith in Hitler. It would also have provided
time to produce new weapons that would have had
dramatic effect on the war right up to its final excla-
mation point: the atomic bomb. On D-day this
bomb was some fourteen months away from its first
appointment in Hiroshima.
Time is more of the essence in war than in any
other destructive endeavor. Given fourteen months,
Hitler’s Germany would certainly have been into
mass production of the jet plane, ballistic missiles ca-
pable of wreaking great damage on Britain, and
ground-to-air missiles that could destroy bombers by
tracking the heat from their engines
These were not really “secret” weapons. Allied
intelligence knew of them and sought to destroy
their development and production sites by heavy
bombings, none of which was entirely successful. In
Britain and in America the jet engine was in devel-
opment, but not up to the German stage of produc-
tion. Shortly after D-day the first rocket missiles, the
V-1, were launched against England. Had their
launching sites not been overrun by the invasion, the
V-1 and the much more advanced V-2 would have
done incalculable damage to British industry and
morale. Forereach in weapons systems has changed
the course of battles and of wars.
One of the more tragic consequences of a D-day
defeat would have been the time given the Nazis to
complete the Holocaust and to destroy the Resis-
tance movement in occupied Europe. With the
launching of the invasion, the Resistance was sig-
naled to begin large-scale sabotage of German com-
munications. With the Resistance so exposed, Ger-
man retaliation would have been swift and brutal.
To rebuild the movement would have been slow
and difficult. The thousands of additional lives lost in
an extended Holocaust can be calculated; the effect
on the establishment of Israel cannot.
That the war could have been ended by the assas-
sination of Hitler is a human probability supported
by the prior attempts on his life. That in a stalemated
war it could have been ended between Germany and
Russia by an accommodation reached between
Hitler and Stalin is supported only by the recognized
obsession of each dictator with staying in power, re-
gardless of what was required to do so. This, how-
ever, runs off the scale of human probabilities.
Then there was the atomic bomb.
The two bombs dropped on Japan in August 1945
ended the war in Asia and the Pacific. This was a war
that Japan could not have won, but it could have ex-
acted a terrible price had defeat required an invasion.
That Germany would also have been targeted for
the bomb is a human probability of the highest
order. (In terms of death and destruction, the con-
ventional bombing of Dresden in February 1945 was
on the scale of that visited on Hiroshima some six
months later.) To speculate on the response of Hitler
to a threat of the bomb requires probing an exceed-
ingly dark mind. He might have seen this new order
of flame, smoke, and concussion as a Götterdäm-
merung scene fitting for his departure. I speculate no
further than that. One way or another, the bomb
would have ended the war in Europe.
Again, these are projections of things that never
happened, of situations that never developed. There
is no certain knowledge of what course history
would have taken had the Persians won at
Marathon, the British at Saratoga, or Napoleon at
Waterloo, other than that in each instance oppres-
sion would have had a further run. And there is no
certainty of the aftermath of a Nazi German victory
on D-day, other than that it would have been fol-
lowed by at least fourteen months of dark and
bloody deeds that would have left an even more ter-
rible scar on what we call civilization.
If we set aside probabilities, these, in sum, are the
recorded facts: that D-day was won by the Western
Allies; that it was fought at American insistence, with
an American as supreme commander; that the most
critical and hard-fought sector of the battle —
Omaha Beach — was won by Americans against
heavy odds imposed by terrain and enemy strength;
and that from this battle to the end of the war,
American preponderance in men and matériel con-
tinued to grow, and with it grew American influ-
ence and leadership in the Western Alliance. This
pattern continued throughout the Cold War, the de-
mands of survival denying any discharge from it.
From all this there emerges one overriding result:
World leadership now rests upon the shoulders of a
free people, committed to democracy — this at a
level not equaled since the time of the Athenians and
Marathon. It is a decisive turn in history; D-day is
the pivotal point upon which this turn was made.
At nightfall after the Battle of Valmy (1792), in
which the French revolutionary forces turned back
Prussian and Austrian invaders, the poet Goethe,
who was there, was asked by some dejected Prussians
what he concluded from the defeat. “From this
place,” he said, “and from this day forth commences
a new era in the world’s history; and you can say you
were present at its birth.”
It would not be amiss to address these words to all
who fought the D-day battle on the coast of Normandy on June 6th, 1944
3 ) Cawthon discusses a “what if ” — the “human probability” of what might have happened had the Allies been defeated at Normandy. What, in his judgment, would have been the “far-reaching conse-
quences” of an Allied defeat? What terrible new weapon might the Allies have dropped to end the war in Europe? Do you think that such conjectures on the basis of “human probability” are worthwhile?
4 ) Cawthon argues that an Allied defeat on D-day would have given Germany time to employ several decisive new weapons. What were these? What would they have accomplished?