Max Hastings Two-Book Collection: All Hell Let Loose and Catastrophe. Max Hastings
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hotels in Miami Beach and Atlantic City were turned over to army recruits. Bowing to the gravity of the new national circumstances, sport hunting and fishing, together with manufacture of golf and tennis balls, were temporarily banned. There was a boom in fortune-telling, checkers, sales of world maps and cookery books. Movies attained extraordinary popularity, partly because many people found more cash in their pockets: 1942 cinema audiences were double those of 1940. Prisoners in San Quentin volunteered for war-production duty, and began making anti-submarine nets.
From the outset, and aided by the fact that some big industrial commitments had already been made, America’s economic mobilisation awed visitors from poorer and less ambitious societies. Even intelligent and informed British people failed to recognise the almost limitless scale of the nation’s resources: ‘The Army…are aiming at a vast programme,’ British Air Marshal John Slessor wrote to the Chief of Air Staff Sir Charles Portal from Washington back in April 1941, assessing the build-up of the US armed forces, ‘their present target being two million men, and they are now considering another 2 million on top of that. Who they are going to fight with an army of this size or how they are going to transport it overseas I do not know and very much doubt whether they would have aimed at anything like this if they had a really thorough joint strategic examination of their defence commitments and requirements.’
Such scepticism was dramatically confounded between 1942 and 1945. ‘After Pearl Harbor,’ Lt. Gen. Frederick Morgan, British chief planner for D-Day, said of the Americans, ‘they decided to make the biggest and best war ever seen.’ The secretary of the American Asiatic Association wrote to a friend in the State Department, ‘It will be a long, hard war, but after it is over Uncle Sam will do the talking in the world.’ The federal budget soared from $9 billion in 1939 to $100 billion in 1945, and in the same period America’s GNP grew from $91 to $166 billion. The index of industrial production rose 96 per cent, and seventeen million new jobs were created. Some 6.5 million additional women entered the US labour force between 1942 and 1945, and their wages grew by over 50 per cent; sales of women’s clothing doubled. The imperatives of America’s vast industrial mobilisation favoured tycoons and conglomerates, which flourished mightily. Anti-trust legislation was thrust aside by the pressures of war demand: America’s hundred largest companies, which in 1941 were responsible for 30 per cent of national manufacturing output, generated 70 per cent by 1943. The administration overcame its scruples about monopolists who could deliver tanks, planes, ships.
Everything grew in scale to match the largest war in history: in 1939 America had only 4,900 supermarkets, but by 1944 there were 16,000. Between December 1941 and the end of 1944, the average American’s liquid personal assets almost doubled. With luxuries scarce, consumers were desperate to find goods on which to spend their rising earnings: ‘People are crazy with money,’ said a Philadelphia jeweller. ‘They don’t care what they buy. They purchase things just for the fun of spending.’ By 1944, while British domestic production of consumer goods had fallen by 45 per cent from its pre-war levels, that of the United States had risen by 15 per cent. Many regions experienced severe housing shortages and rents soared, as millions of people sought temporary accommodation to fit their wartime job relocations. ‘The Good War myth,’ wrote Arthur Schlesinger, who then worked for the Office of War Information,
envisages a blissful time of national unity in support of noble objectives. Most Americans indeed accepted the necessity of the war, but that hardly meant the suppression of baser motives. In Washington we saw the seamy side of the Good War. We saw greedy business executives opposing conversion to defense production, then joining the government to maneuver for post-war advantage…We were informed that one in eight business establishments was in violation of the price ceilings. We saw what a little-known senator from Missouri [Harry Truman] called ‘rapacity, greed, fraud and negligence’…The war called for equality of sacrifice. But everywhere one looked was the miasma of ‘chiseling’…The home front was not a pretty sight at a time when young Americans were dying around the world.
Among the worst rackets uncovered was that of a primary war contractor, National Bronze and Aluminum Foundry Company of Cleveland, which knowingly sold scrap metal as parts for fighter engines; four of its executives were jailed. The US Cartridge Company of St Louis issued millions of rounds of defective ammunition, though such chicanery could cost lives. Citizens sought otherwise unavailable commodities through the black market, and many businesses evaded price controls. An American observed ruefully that Europe had been occupied, Russia and China invaded, Britain bombed; but the US among the great powers was ‘fighting this war on imagination alone’. Pearl Harbor, together with racism soon fuelled by tidings of Japanese savagery, ensured that Americans found it easy to hate their Asian enemy. But from beginning to end, few felt anything like the animosity towards the Germans that came readily to Europeans; it proved hard even to rouse American anger about Hitler’s reported persecution of the Jews. Combat historian Forrest Pogue later observed wonderingly of Bradley’s army in France: ‘The men have no great interest in the war. You can’t work them up unless the Germans hit some of their friends.’ A behaviourist noted for his work with rats, Professor Norman Maier of Michigan University, suggested that Americans could be more effectively galvanised into a fighting mood by cutting off their gasoline, tyres and civil liberties than by appealing to their ideals. This was an overly cynical view, for some people displayed real patriotism, and on the battlefield many Americans would display much courage. But it was true that the remoteness of the United States from the fighting fronts, its security from direct attack or even serious hardship, militated against the passion that moved civilians of nations suffering occupation or bombardment.
After Pearl Harbor, America’s political and military leaders knew that they, like the British, must suffer defeats and humiliations before forces could be mobilised to roll back the advancing Japanese. There was much ignorance and innocence about the enemy, even among those who would have to fight them. ‘Suddenly we realized that nobody knew anything about the Japs,’ said carrier pilot Fred Mears. ‘We had never heard of a Zero then. What was the caliber of Jap planes and airmen? What was the strength of the Japanese Navy? What kind of battles would be fought and where? We were woefully unprepared.’ Many Americans had acknowledged for months the logic of their nation’s belligerence. Yet it is characteristic of all conflicts that until enemies begin to shoot, ships to sink and loved ones – or at least comrades – to die, even professional warriors often lack urgency and ruthlessness. ‘It was amazing how long it took to get the hang of it and to react instantly in the right way,’ American sailor Alvin Kiernan observed. ‘War, we gradually learned, is a state of mind before it can be anything else.’ Ernie Pyle wrote: ‘Apparently it takes a country like America about two years to become wholly at war. We had to go through that transition period of letting loose of life as it was, and then live the new war life so long that it finally became the normal life to us.’
All this makes it remarkable that, within six months of Pearl Harbor, American fleets gained victories which turned the tide of the Asian war. Germany dominated western Europe for four years, but by autumn 1942 the Japanese perimeter was already beginning to shrink. The speed of the American resurgence in the Pacific reflected the fundamental weakness of the Asian enemy. First, however, came the pain. In the weeks following 7 December 1941, the Japanese seized Wake after a fierce defence in which the first wave of attackers were repulsed with heavy loss. Gen. Douglas MacArthur, commanding the defence of the Philippines, rejected his air commander’s plea to strike back during ten hours which elapsed between news of Pearl Harbor and a devastating Japanese air assault that destroyed almost eighty US aircraft undispersed on the ground.
Next day, MacArthur began to make belated preparations to withdraw his Filipino and American troops to Luzon’s Bataan peninsula, which alone might be defensible. But it was a huge task quickly to shift supplies there: the general had dismissed proposals to do so before war came, scorning ‘passivity’. The army hastily bought rice from Chinese merchants and all the beef, meat and fruit it could get from local canneries. On 12 December, MacArthur belatedly informed President Quezon of the mooted withdrawal, which he began to implement on the 22nd. Doctors warned that Bataan was notoriously malaria-ridden, because of the prevalence there of the anopheles mosquito, but little was done to secure stocks of prophylactics. Meanwhile, Manila was bombed every day between noon and 1300, causing American officers to advance their lunch to 1100.