Major Questions of World War II

• You will turn in ONE graphic organizer for each question (A total of FOUR graphic organizers will eventually be completed; the four questions are listed in the pages that follow. The graphic organizer is on the next page). • Read through all of the articles before you take a position on the question. • You must use all of the sources (a source may be used as either a reason to take a position or as a counter argument) for each question. • You may be asked to explain your positions to the class regarding any of the questions, so be prepared!

NAME(S):______

QUESTION:

MY POSITION ON THE TOPIC (AKA: MY ANSWER TO THE QUESTION- ANSWER USING ONE COMPLETE SENTENCE):

REASONS FOR MY POSITION:

Reason 1:

• Evidence + Source from which the evidence comes:

Reason 2:

• Evidence + Source from which the evidence comes:

Reason 3:

• Evidence + Source from which the evidence comes: COUNTER ARGUMENTS TO MY POSITION (YOU COULD ARGUE…):

Counter Argument 1:

• Weakness of the argument:

Counter Argument 2:

• Weakness of the argument

“PUT IT ALL TOGETHER” PARAGRAPH (USE YOUR REASONS, EVIDENCE, AND COUNTER ARGUMENTS TO ANSWER THE QUESTION USING AT LEAST ONE PARAGRAPH):

______QUESTION #1

Could the Allies have done more to save Jewish lives in of World War II?

SOURCE 1

ARTICLE TITLE: American Response to the Holocaust

The systematic persecution of German Jewry began with Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in 1933. Facing economic, social, and political oppression, thousands of German Jews wanted to flee the Third Reich but found few countries willing to accept them. Eventually, under Hitler’s leadership, some 6 million Jews were murdered during World War II.

American Restrictions on Immigration

America’s traditional policy of open immigration had ended when Congress enacted restrictive immigration quotas in 1921 and 1924. The quota system allowed only 25,957 Germans to enter the country every year. After the stock market crash of 1929, rising unemployment caused restrictionist sentiment to grow, and President Herbert Hoover ordered vigorous enforcement of visa regulations. The new policy significantly reduced immigration; in 1932 the issued only 35,576 immigration visas.

Did You Know?

One War Refugee Board operative, Raoul Wallenberg, technically a Swedish diplomat in , provided at least 20,000 Jews with Swedish passports and protection.

State Department officials continued their restrictive measures after Franklin D. Roosevelt’s inauguration in March 1933. Although some Americans sincerely believed that the country lacked the resources to accommodate newcomers, the nativism of many others reflected the growing problem of anti-Semitism.

Of course, American anti-Semitism never approached the intensity of Jew-hatred in , but pollsters found that many Americans looked upon Jews unfavorably. A much more threatening sign was the presence of anti-Semitic leaders and movements on the fringes of American politics, including Father Charles E. Coughlin, the charismatic radio priest, and William Dudley Pelley’s Silver Shirts.

Although the quota walls seemed unassailable, some Americans took steps to alleviate the suffering of German Jews. American Jewish leaders organized a boycott of German goods, hoping that economic pressure might force Hitler to end his anti-Semitic policies, and prominent American Jews, including Louis D. Brandeis, interceded with the Roosevelt administration on the refugees’ behalf. In response, the Roosevelt administration agreed to ease visa regulations, and in 1939, following the Nazi annexation of Austria, State Department officials issued all the visas available under the combined German-Austrian quota.

Responding to the increasingly difficult situation of German Jewry, Roosevelt organized the international Evian Conference on the refugee crisis in 1938. Although thirty-two nations attended, very little was accomplished because no country was willing to accept a large number of Jewish refugees. The conference did establish an Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees, but it failed to devise any practical solutions.

First News of the Holocaust

The extermination of European Jewry began when the German army invaded the in June 1941. The Nazis attempted to keep the Holocaust a secret, but in August 1942, Dr. Gerhart Riegner, the representative of the World Jewish Congress in Geneva, Switzerland, learned what was going on from a German source. Riegner asked American diplomats in Switzerland to inform Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, one of America’s most prominent Jewish leaders, of the mass murder plan. But the State Department, characteristically insensitive and influenced by anti-Semitism, decided not to inform Wise.

The rabbi nevertheless learned of Riegner’s terrible message from Jewish leaders in Great Britain. He immediately approached Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles, who asked Wise to keep the information confidential until the government had time to verify it. Wise agreed and it was not until November 1942 that Welles authorized the release of Riegner’s message. Wise held a press conference on the evening of , 1942. The next day’s New York Times reported his news on its tenth page. Throughout the rest of the war, the Times and most other newspapers failed to give prominent and extensive coverage to the Holocaust. During World War I, the American press had published reports of German atrocities that subsequently turned out to be false. As a result, journalists during World War II tended to approach atrocity reports with caution.

American Jewish Community Responds

Although most Americans, preoccupied with the war itself, remained unaware of the terrible plight of European Jewry, the American Jewish community responded with alarm to Wise’s news. American and British Jewish organizations pressured their governments to take action. As a result, Great Britain and the United States announced that they would hold an emergency conference in Bermuda to develop a plan to rescue the victims of Nazi atrocities.

Ironically, the Bermuda Conference opened in April 1943, the same month the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto were staging their revolt. The American and British delegates at Bermuda proved to be far less heroic than the Jews of Warsaw. Rather than discussing strategies, they worried about what to do with any Jews they successfully rescued. Britain refused to consider admitting more Jews into Palestine, which it administered at the time, and the United States was equally determined not to alter its immigration quotas. The conference produced no practical plan to aid European Jewry, although the press was informed that “significant progress” had been made.

Following the futile Bermuda Conference, American Jewish leaders became increasingly involved in a debate over Zionism. But the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe, led by Peter Bergson and a small group of emissaries from the Irgun, a right-wing Palestinian Jewish resistance group, turned to pageants, rallies, and newspaper advertisements to force Roosevelt to create a government agency to devise ways to rescue European Jewry. The Emergency Committee and its supporters in Congress helped publicize the Holocaust and the need for the United States to react.

War Refugee Board

President Roosevelt also found himself under pressure from another source. Treasury Department officials, working on projects to provide aid to European Jews, discovered that their colleagues in the State Department were actually undermining rescue efforts. They brought their concerns to Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr., who was Jewish and a long-time supporter of Roosevelt. Under Morgenthau’s direction, Treasury officials prepared a “Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of the Jews.” Morgenthau presented the report to Roosevelt and requested that he establish a rescue agency. Finally, on January 22, 1944, the president issued Executive Order 9417, creating the War Refugee Board (WRB). John Pehle of the Treasury Department served as the board’s first executive director.

The establishment of the board did not resolve all the problems blocking American rescue efforts. For example, the War Department repeatedly refused to bomb Nazi concentration camps or the railroads leading to them. But the WRB did successfully develop a number of rescue projects. Estimates indicate that the WRB may have saved as many as 200,000 Jews. One can only speculate how many more might have been saved had the WRB been established in August 1942, when Gerhart Riegner’s message reached the United States.

The American public discovered the full extent of the Holocaust only when the Allied armies liberated the extermination and concentration camps at the end of World War II. And as historians struggled to understand what had happened, attention increasingly focused on the inadequate American response and what lay behind it. It remains today the subject of great debate.

Article Details:

 Author: History.com Staff  Source: History.com  Date: 2009 SOURCE 2

ARTICLE TITLE: How Much Did Britain Actually Know About the Mass Murder?

Decades after the Nazi Holocaust ended, the atrocities are remembered as one of the darkest periods in European history.

Around 11 million people were killed at the hands of a brutal regime, sent to labour camps where they were starved, forced to work and ultimately murdered.

Britain condemned the persecution of Jews and other groups, and fought with other Allied nations to stop Germany’s advance across the continent. But it is not clear how fully the British government understood the horrors taking place - or if they took enough action to end them.

Yale F. Edeiken, a US lawyer who was part of The Holocaust History Project, said: “Recent research indicates that knowledge of the Holocaust was much more widespread then previously thought.”

News of the Holocaust reached Britain in fragments, via various channels, and was pieced together to reveal the full devastating picture.

One of the earliest sources of information was British intelligence from the codebreakers at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire, who worked in totally secrecy to crack encrypted enemy messages. German police radio messages first revealed atrocities taking place on the Eastern Front in 1941, though only the most senior figures such as Alan Turing would have known all of the information discovered by the messages.

Britain was certainly aware of the Nazi persecution of the Jews - though not necessarily the extent of their plans - before the Second World War even started. News reached the UK of the violent pogrom against Jews in Germany on 9 November 1938, known as Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass). The Nazi authorities organised the burning of synagogues, looting of Jewish businesses, schools and hospitals and the murder of dozens of Jewish people. The British government took action, easing immigration restrictions for certain categories of refugees. A rescue programme called Kindertransport (Children’s Transport) brought thousands of refugee children to Britain, from German, Poland, Austria and . Between 9,000 and 10,000 children were transported, around 7,500 of them were Jews.

In 1942, reports of a Nazi plan to murder all Jews reached Allied leaders from several sources. The harrowing news included details on methods, numbers, and locations for the plans. One report came from The General Jewish Labour Bund, a socialist group with a base in the Warsaw ghetto.

In summer 1942, Gerhart Riegner, the secretary-general of the World Jewish Congress based in Switzerland, sent a cable to Stephen Samuel Wise, the congress president. It was sent on diplomatic channels and reported Nazi plans for a Holocaust. His information came from Eduard Schulte, the man who owned a German company that employed high-level Nazi officials. The telegram is regarded as the first official communication about the plans. It was passed on to the British Foreign Office and the US state department.

Britain’s wartime leader Winston Churchill was aware of the Holocaust. He was a vocal supporter of The Jews, according to Martin Gilbert, CBE, a Jewish historian and Churchill’s biographer. Gilbert claims Churchill took steps to place pressure on Germany and help those in danger, and even pushed to bomb Auschwitz but was overruled. Though some Jewish groups say he didn’t go far enough, he supported moves like a boycott of German goods before he became prime minister, and opposed the prevention of Jewish refugees reaching Palestine when he was in office. More information was also collected in the autumn of 1942, from eyewitnesses. This included first hand testimony from a Polish underground courier and accounts from 69 Polish Jews who arrived in Palestine, in a prisoner exchange between Germany and Britain.

On December 17, 1942, Britain and the Allies issued a proclamation condemning the “extermination” of the Jewish people. The declaration warned Nazi Germany would be held responsible for the crimes - although historians say it is still not clear how much the Allies understood the scale of the killings, and the importance of the information they had.

On April 18, 1945, US army chief General Eisenhower telephoned Churchill to say that American troops had entered concentration camps. Churchill told the House of Commons that his government felt “horror” at the “proofs of these frightful crimes now coming into view.” When Allied forces entered the camps, their horror at the bodies and the conditions of the few survivors has been taken as a sign that they did not understand the full extent of the atrocities, despite the information that they had, according to the Jewish Virtual Library.

But whatever the Allies knew, US Holocaust historian David Wyman has questioned whether they could have done more to stop the mass murder. Leaders have often been accused of failing to respond quickly enough to the news. Some historians such as Wyman argue that moves like bombing the gas chambers of Auschwitz would have lessened the number of deaths, but others say it would have had no effect on the Nazi genocide. Large-scale rescue operations were considered but it was not clear to policymakers how this could be achieved.

British media such as the BBC did report on the Holocaust, more visibly than in some other countries. The New York Times was criticised by journalist Laurel Leff for its lack over coverage which “contributed to the public’s ignorance”. After Auschwitz and other camps were liberated in 1945, Britain’s media outlets gave the concentration camps major prominence in news reports. A BBC directive from 20 April 1945 - two days after Churchill was told troops had entered the camps - lists “concentration camps” as the top item in a morning news conference. It notes an article from The Times which contained photographs “to confirm the written descriptions” of Nazi brutality. The article emphasised that it was essential for British people to fully comprehend the horror of the camps through descriptions and photographs.

Article Details:

 Author: Louise Ridley  Source: The Daily Telegraph  Date: January 27, 2015

SOURCE 3

ARTICLE TITLE: Anger amid the tears - did the allies do enough to save Jews?

Accusations that the allies should have done more to destroy the Auschwitz gas chambers were given fresh political impetus yesterday as world leaders gathered to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the camp's liberation.

Rekindled outrage over the murder of more than 1.5 million Jews and other prisoners prompted Israel's president, Moshe Katsav, to express grief and appreciation - but also betrayal.

"The Holocaust is not only a tragedy of the Jewish people, it is a failure of humanity," he said in Krakow in Poland before the ceremony. "The allies concentrated a huge force in the fight against the Germans and we are very grateful.

"But the allies did not do enough to stop ... the destruction of the Jewish people." Bombing Auschwitz from the air "could have saved many hundreds of thousands of Jews from the gas chambers", he said.

"Hundreds of missions of fighting aircraft passed next to ... Auschwitz and Birkenau. But [the camp] was not bombed ... Bombing the railways which led to the concentration camps ... could have stopped the destruction of the Jews."

Earlier this week Israel's prime minister, Ariel Sharon, was even harsher: "The allies knew of the annihilation of the Jews. They knew and did nothing. On April 19 1943, the Bermuda conference gathered, with the participation of representatives from Britain and the United States, in order to discuss saving the Jews of Europe. In fact, the participants did everything in their power to avoid dealing with the problem."

That failure, Mr Sharon said, taught Jews a lesson, which had shaped the modern state of Israel, that they could rely on no one but themselves for their survival.

The British historian Sir Martin Gilbert yesterday offered a detailed re-examination of the controversy. In an article in the Times he wrote that Auschwitz's location was kept secret until the spring of 1944. It was in south- eastern Poland, beyond the range of allied for most of the war, and first overflown by a reconnaissance aircraft in April that year.

Four Jewish prisoners escaped and their account of the daily massacres reached the War Refugee Board, the agency set up to rescue Jews, in June 1944. The board, in Washington, urged the US to bomb railway lines leading to Auschwitz.

But the request was turned down on the grounds it would have been a diversion of resources needed elsewhere. "Thirty-five years later [the US official] told me," Sir Martin wrote, "his worry was that once a request from the Jews was accepted ... other captive peoples would ask for similar diversion of air resources."

Other British historians acknowledged the failure, but cautioned against relying entirely on hindsight. Sir Ian Kershaw, a professor of modern history at Sheffield university and the author of a two-volume biography of Adolf Hitler, told the Guardian it was also a question of timing.

"After the US declined to act, it was passed to the British," he said. "There was a report back from the air ministry in mid-July 1944. The last trains carrying Jews left Budapest on July 9. The killings went on until the end but the vast majority of Jews had already been killed. "There were doubts about the level of precision needed to put the gas chambers out of action. They were probably fairly justified... The allies at the time decided the key priority was the fighting in France, after the D- day landings. The military needs were given precedence. From the vantage point of the time ... that was not an unreasonable proposition."

The historian and author Andrew Roberts said that the Foreign Office had been slow to accept the intelligence reports sent in about the Nazi policy of genocide. "They couldn't believe the sheer scale of the thing," he said yesterday.

"The Foreign Office was also very nervous about releasing the information because they feared it would devalue their reputation for veracity. They had publicised German atrocities in Belgium in 1914 and by the mid- 1920s it was regarded as having been made up. The latest research, ironically, suggests it was actually true.

"What appears dreadful now is the dreadful, self-censorship in newspapers such as the New York Times. The first mention of killings appears in 1942... on page 20. One of the more heroic newspapers on that score was the Manchester Guardian."

Tony Kushner, a professor at Southampton University, said bombing the camps had not been a military priority. "The Bermuda conference in 1943 wasn't a total failure," he said, " but very little came out of it. They wanted to keep a lid on things although popular opinion in Britain was for [intervention].

"The indictment of the allies is that they didn't consider all these possibilities." Lord Janner, the spokesman for the London-based Holocaust Educational Trust, who was in Auschwitz yesterday, said the real failure had occurred before the war when Jewish refugees were prevented from fleeing persecution in Germany.

Article Details:

 Author: Owen Bowcott  Source: The Guardian  Date: January 28, 2005

SOURCE 4

EXCERPT TITLE: The Holocaust in American Life

We begin at the beginning, with the response of American gentiles [non-Jews] and Jews to the Holocaust while the killing was going on. Although no one could imagine its end result, all Americans — Jews and gentiles alike — were well aware of Nazi anti-Semitism from the regime's beginning in 1933, if not earlier. Prewar Nazi actions against Jews, from early discriminatory measures to the enactment of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935 and culminating in Kristallnacht in 1938, were widely reported in the American press and repeatedly denounced at all levels of American society. No one doubted that Jews were high on the list of actual and potential victims of Nazism, but it was a long list.

From the autumn of 1939 to the autumn of 1941 everyone's attention was riveted on military events: the war at sea, the fall of France, the , the German invasion of the Soviet Union. As Americans confronted what appeared to be the imminent prospect of unchallenged Nazi dominion over the entire European continent, it was hardly surprising that except for some Jews, few paid much attention to what was happening to Europe's Jewish population under Nazi rule. Little was known with any certainty, and the fragmentary reports reaching the West were often contradictory. Thus in December 1939 a press agency first estimated that a quarter of a million Jews had been killed; two weeks later the agency reported that losses were about one tenth that number. (Similar wildly differing estimates recurred throughout the war, no doubt leading many to suspend judgment on the facts and suspect exaggeration. In March 1943 The Nation wrote of seven thousand Jews being massacred each week, while The New Republic used the same figure as a conservative daily estimate.)

In the course of 1940, 1941, and 1942 reports of atrocities against Jews began to accumulate. But these, like the numbers cited, were often contradictory. In the nature of the situation, there were no firsthand reports from Western journalists. Rather, they came from a handful of Jews who had escaped, from underground sources, from anonymous German informants, and, perhaps most unreliable of all, from the Soviet government. If, as many suspected, the Soviets were lying about the Katyn Forest massacre, why not preserve a healthy skepticism when they spoke of Nazi atrocities against Soviet Jews? Thus, after the Soviet recapture of Kiev, the New York Times correspondent traveling with the Red Army underlined that while Soviet officials claimed that tens of thousands of Jews had been killed at Babi Yar, "no witnesses to the shooting ... talked with the correspondents"; "it is impossible for this correspondent to judge the truth or falsity of the story told to us"; "there is little evidence in the ravine to prove or disprove the story."

The most important single report on the Holocaust that reached the West came from a then-anonymous German businessman, and was passed on in mid-1942 by Gerhard Riegner, representative of the World Jewish Congress in Switzerland. But Riegner forwarded the report "with due reserve" concerning its truth. By the fall of 1943, more than a year after Riegner's information was transmitted, an internal U.S. State Department memorandum concluded that the reports were "essentially correct." But it was hard to quarrel with the accompanying observation that the 1942 reports were "at times confused and contradictory" and that they "incorporated stories which were obviously left over from the horror tales of the last war."

If American newspapers published relatively little about the ongoing Holocaust, it was in part because there was little hard news about it to present — only secondhand and thirdhand reports of problematic authenticity. News is event-, not process-oriented: bombing raids, invasions, and naval battles are the stuff of news, not delayed, often hearsay accounts of the wheels of the murder machine grinding relentlessly on. And for senior news editors the experience of having been tricked by propaganda during the First World War was not something they'd read about in history books; they had themselves been made to appear foolish by gullibly swallowing fake stories, and they weren't going to let it happen again.

It has often been said that when the full story of the ongoing Holocaust reached the West, beginning in 1942, it was disbelieved because the sheer magnitude of the Nazi plan of mass murder made it, literally, incredible — beyond belief. There is surely a good deal to this, but perhaps at least as often, the gradually emerging and gradually worsening news from Europe produced a kind of immunity to shock.

When wartime attention did turn to Nazi barbarism, there were many reasons for not highlighting Jewish suffering. One was sheer ignorance — the lack of awareness until late 1942 of the special fate of Jews in Hitler's Europe. The Nazi concentration camp was the most common symbol of the enemy regime, and its typical inmate was usually represented as a political oppositionist or member of the resistance.

If some of the reasons for deemphasizing special Jewish victimhood were more or less spontaneous, others were calculated. In the case of Germany — unlike Japan — there was no offense against Americans to be avenged, no equivalent of "Remember Pearl Harbor." The task of American wartime propagandists was to portray Nazi Germany as the mortal enemy of "free men everywhere." That the Nazis were the enemy of the Jews was well known; there was no rhetorical advantage in continuing to underline the fact. The challenge was to show that they were everyone's enemy, to broaden rather than narrow the range of Nazi victims.

There was another reason for not emphasizing Hitler's "war against the Jews": to sidestep the claim that America's struggle with Germany was a war for the Jews. The claim that American Jews were dragging the country into a war on behalf of their brethren in Europe was a staple of prewar isolationist talk.

For all of these reasons, in all media and in almost all public pronouncements, there was throughout the war not much awareness of the special fate of the Jews of Europe. Sometimes this was simply due to a lack of information, sometimes the result of spontaneous and "well-meaning" categories of thought and speech. The result was that for the overwhelming majority of Americans, throughout the war (and, as we will see, for some time thereafter) what we now call the Holocaust was neither a distinct entity nor particularly salient. The genocide of European Jews, insofar as it was understood or acknowledged, was just one among the countless dimensions of a conflict that was consuming the lives of tens of millions around the globe.

Article Details:

 Author: Peter Novick  Source: The Holocaust in American Life  Date: 1999

QUESTION #2 Should the United States have dropped atomic bombs on and Nagasaki?

SOURCE 1

ARTICLE TITLE: The Decision to Drop the Bomb

America had the atomic bomb. Now what?

When Harry Truman learned of the success of the , he knew he was faced with a decision of unprecedented gravity. The capacity to end the war with Japan was in his hands, but it would involve unleashing the most terrible weapon ever known.

American soldiers and civilians were weary from four years of war, yet the Japanese military was refusing to give up their fight. American forces occupied Okinawa and Iwo Jima and were intensely Japanese cities. But Japan had an army of 2 million strong stationed in the home islands guarding against invasion.

For Truman, the choice whether or not to use the atomic bomb was the most difficult decision of his life.

First, an Allied demand for an immediate unconditional surrender was made to the leadership in Japan. Although the demand stated that refusal would result in total destruction, no mention of any new weapons of mass destruction was made. The Japanese military command rejected the request for unconditional surrender, but there were indications that a conditional surrender was possible.

Regardless, on August 6, 1945, a plane called the Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima. Instantly, 70,000 Japanese citizens were vaporized. In the months and years that followed, an additional 100,000 perished from burns and radiation sickness.

Two days later, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan. On August 9, a second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, where 80,000 Japanese people perished.

On August 14, 1945, the Japanese surrendered.

Critics have charged that Truman's decision was a barbaric act that brought negative long-term consequences to the United States. A new age of nuclear terror led to a dangerous arms race.

Some military analysts insist that Japan was near surrender and the bombings were simply unnecessary. The American government was accused of racism on the grounds that such a device would never have been used against European civilians.

Other critics argued that American diplomats had ulterior motives. The Soviet Union had entered the war against Japan, and the atomic bomb could be read as a strong message for the Soviets to tread lightly. In this respect, Hiroshima and Nagasaki may have been the first shots of the as well as the final shots of World War II. Regardless, the United States remains the only nation in the world to have used a nuclear weapon on another nation.

Truman stated that his decision to drop the bomb was purely military. A Normandy-type amphibious landing would have cost an estimated million casualties. Truman believed that the bombs saved Japanese lives as well. Prolonging the war was not an option for the President. Over 3,500 Japanese kamikaze raids had already wrought great destruction and loss of American lives.

The President rejected a demonstration of the atomic bomb to the Japanese leadership. He knew there was no guarantee the Japanese would surrender if the test succeeded, and he felt that a failed demonstration would be worse than none at all. Even the scientific community failed to foresee the awful effects of radiation sickness. Truman saw little difference between atomic bombing Hiroshima and firebombing Dresden or .

The ethical debate over the decision to drop the atomic bomb will never be resolved. The bombs did, however, bring an end to the most destructive war in history. The Manhattan Project that produced it demonstrated the possibility of how a nation's resources could be mobilized.

Pandora's box was now open. The question that came flying out was, "How will the world use its nuclear capability?" It is a question still being addressed on a daily basis.

Article Details: Author: ushistory.org Source: U.S. History Online Textbook Date: 2017

SOURCE 2

ARTICLE TITLE: It’s clear the US should not have bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki

This month marks the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And with each passing year the historical record is ever clearer that dropping the A-bombs was unnecessary, repugnant and very likely a .

The bombings probably killed more than 200,000 Japanese civilians and maimed untold more. However, there was an alternative available: the US could have dropped an A-bomb in or near Tokyo Bay. Such a warning shot could have persuaded the Japanese to end the war, and its humane nature would have enhanced the US’s moral standing.

The atomic bombings are often framed as the only alternative to a land invasion of a Japan that wouldn’t surrender under any but the most-dire circumstances. The possible need for an invasion loomed throughout 1945, and Americans naturally feared many US casualties. Much of a fanatic Japanese soldiery—and possibly many citizens—might fight to the last inch. One early study estimated 40,000 American soldiers’ deaths, yet President Harry Truman and others soon spoke of “half a million.”

But the A-bombs’ advent automatically changed that, allowing the US to wield the threat of nuclear attack. With the first device tested and proven in July 1945, and numerous others being readied early in August, America could have used their power as a new dimension of threat—rather than crudely dropping the bombs as mass killers.

Properly used as threats to ensure quick surrender, the A-bombs could have prevented virtually all further deaths in Japan—of Americans, Japanese and any others, from invasion, firebombing, A-bombing and ground warfare. That is, of course, precisely what the A-bombs did achieve. But the US hastily destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki first.

Tokyo Bay would have been the ideal place to display the bombs’ power. A large open area, the bay is next to Tokyo and all of Japan’s leaders, including the emperor. It offered a wide array of places—on vacant land or on water—to drop an A-bomb, for fully awesome effect. The mushroom-cloud explosion could be near or not-so- near to Tokyo, and more or less dangerous to Japan’s emperor, leaders, citizens and urban capital.

In this way, the US could have carefully maximized the scope of the threat, while minimizing the harm to Tokyo itself. And if the Japanese were crazily intransigent, we could have simply dropped another A-bomb, closer to Tokyo or in a low-population area.

But American leaders had acquired the habit of bombing cities, having attacked Berlin, and even the cultural jewel of Dresden. US Air Force leaders such as Jimmy Doolittle gained instant fame from bombing raids over Japan. The hellish firebombing of Tokyo in March 1945 killed some 250,000 civilians and maimed huge numbers more.

With the Japanese A-bombings, a key player was Les Groves, who had built up and managed the Manhattan Project over the years. He now chaired the committee guiding Truman’s actions, and he closely managed— daily and hourly—the planning, loading, and crew work to fly the bomb for dropping. Grove was determined to deploy them fast. Separately, a supposed threat of the Soviet Union’s invading Japan was cited as a reason for haste. Such an excuse to rush to bomb can likely be chalked up, at least partly, to self-interest by the US.

And the planning of Truman’s advisors—including Groves, Doolittle, and Curtis LeMay—was full of mistakes. Hiroshima emerged as a candidate after having escaped attack thus far in the conflict. It was almost entirely civilian, and any attention to its few military targets soon disappeared. Hiroshima was distant from Tokyo, and the blast itself wiped out all communication, so the Japanese leadership in Tokyo didn’t fully see the destruction. When the leveling of Hiroshima predictably gave Tokyo little awareness, Nagasaki was added. But that choice was even less logical, and it doubled the death toll and the stifling stain on America’s moral character.

The US had already exceeded rational and civilized bounds with our massive bombings in Europe and Japan. Our job was to conclude the war with a minimum of mega-deaths. By using the Tokyo Bay method to display the A-bombs’ power, America would have shown its compassion and humanity. But Truman and his people failed, and the harm was widespread and lasting.

On top of the Japanese deaths and casualties, the actual dropping of the A-bombs likely heightened the stakes at the advent of the Cold War. Had the US not dropped the A-bombs, the nuclear arms race might have proceeded more slowly and less wastefully, possibly without hydrogen bombs. The US and USSR might even have cultivated cooperation and prosperity, in place of mutual fears and military-industrial excesses.

Article Details: Author: Geoffrey Shepherd Source: Quartz Media Date: August 6, 2015 SOURCE 3

ARTICLE TITLE: The Bomb Was the Outcome of

The first World War of the 20th century was a long-stalemated ground conflict between uniformed armies, the second a fluid struggle in which distinctions between soldier and civilian gave way to an ethic of total war. Destruction from the air was pervasive from the long-running German blitz against London and other English cities through the massive Anglo-American poundings of one German city after another to the final US attacks against the Japanese home islands by the most formidable of all the World War II bombers, the American B-29.

Japan's air defenses were weak and its provision for civilian bomb shelters grossly inadequate. On March 9, 1945, 300 American B-29s devastated a working-class, industrial area of Tokyo, destroying most of a 16 square mile target area and killing an estimated 100,000 civilians. On the ground, U.S. military forces completed a long island-hoping campaign in the Pacific with epic conquests of two small islands, Iwo Jima (19,500 casualties) and Okinawa (45,000 casualties). The Japanese home islands and unimaginable gore lay directly ahead.

Even after Okinawa, Japan's civilian leadership hoped for a peace settlement brokered by the Soviet Union – ignoring indications that the USSR was transferring much of its army to the far east for an attack, and chastising Japan's ambassador to Moscow for correctly warning that the Soviet leaders would provide no help.

In Washington, the new American president, Harry S. Truman, a combat veteran of World War I who had seen the horrors of war close up, was strongly inclined to deploy any weapon that might bring the slaughter to an end. Presented with plans for a campaign against Japan that would begin with an invasion of the southernmost home island of Kyushu, to be followed in 1946 with a landing on the main island of Honshu, Truman expressed his hope of "preventing an Okinawa from one end of Japan to the other."

Shortly afterwards he left the country to meet with British and Soviet leaders at . While he was there, the first atomic bomb was successfully detonated in the New Mexico desert. Briefed on the event by his secretary of war, Henry Stimson, Truman authorized deployment of the new weapon against Japan. The targets would be two cities that had been designated as possible atomic targets and spared conventional bombing – Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

By early August two atomic bombs were available. The first was dropped on Hiroshima, August 6, the second on Nagasaki, August 8. Even after these two terrible catastrophes, Japan surrendered unconditionally only when the emperor ordered it.

The fire-bombing of Tokyo had killed more people and wreaked as much destruction, but lacked the shock effect of the atomic weapon – one plane, one bomb, one city devastated.

The emperor had done the right thing. A peaceful Japan, rehabilitated after a benign American occupation, would take its place as an economic power in a new world order. In a world of proliferating nuclear weapons Hiroshima and Nagasaki must be remembered not as martyred victims of American power, but as examples of the outcome of total war.

Article Details: Author: Alonzo Hamby Source: U.S. News Date: May 27, 2016

SOURCE 4

ARTICLE TITLE: Should America have dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

America’s use of atomic bombs to attack the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 has long remained one of the most controversial decisions of the Second World War. Here, a group of historians offer their views on whether US president Truman was right to authorize these nuclear attacks...

The dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima was justified at the time as being moral – in order to bring about a more rapid victory and prevent the deaths of more Americans. However, it was clearly not moral to use this weapon knowing that it would kill civilians and destroy the urban milieu. And it wasn’t necessary either.

Militarily Japan was finished (as the Soviet invasion of Manchuria that August showed). Further blockade and urban destruction would have produced a surrender in August or September at the latest, without the need for the costly anticipated invasion or the atomic bomb. As for the second bomb on Nagasaki, that was just as unnecessary as the first one. It was deemed to be needed, partly because it was a different design, and the military (and many civilian scientists) were keen to see if they both worked the same way. There was, in other words, a cynical scientific imperative at work as well.

The atomic bombs were horrible but I agree with US secretary of war Henry L Stimson that using them was the “least abhorrent choice”. A bloody invasion and round the clock conventional bombing would have led to a far higher death toll and so the atomic weapons actually saved thousands of American and millions of Japanese lives. The bombs were the best means to bring about unconditional surrender, which is what the US leaders wanted. Only this would enable the Allies to occupy Japan and root out the institutions that led to war in the first place.

The experience with Germany after the First World War had persuaded them that a mere armistice would constitute a betrayal of future generations if an even larger war occurred 20 years down the line. It is true that the radiation effects of the atomic bomb provided a grisly dividend, which the US leaders did not anticipate. However, even if they had known, I don’t think it would have changed their decision.

“No. Japan would have surrendered anyway” says Martin J Sherwin

I believe that it was a mistake and a tragedy that the atomic bombs were used. Those bombings had little to do with the Japanese decision to surrender. The evidence has become overwhelming that it was the entry of the Soviet Union on 8 August into the war against Japan that forced surrender but, understandably, this view is very difficult for Americans to accept.

Of the Japanese leaders, it was the military ones who held out against the civilian leaders who were closest to the emperor, and who wanted to surrender provided the emperor’s safety would be guaranteed. The military’s argument was that Japan could convince the Soviet Union to mediate on its behalf for better surrender terms than unconditional surrender and therefore should continue the war until that was achieved.

Once the USSR entered the war, the Japanese military not only had no arguments for continuation left, but it also feared the Soviet Union would occupy significant parts of northern Japan.

Truman could have simply waited for the Soviet Union to enter the war but he did not want the USSR to have a claim to participate in the . Another option (which could have ended the war before August) was to clarify that the emperor would not be held accountable for the war under the policy of unconditional surrender. US secretary of war Stimson recommended this, but secretary of state James Byrnes, who was much closer to Truman, vetoed it.

“Yes. It saved millions of lives in Japan and Asia” says Richard Frank

Dropping the bombs was morally preferable to any other choices available. One of the biggest problems we have is that we can talk about Dresden and the bombing of Hamburg and we all know what the context is: Nazi Germany and what Nazi Germany did. There’s been a great amnesia in the west with respect to what sort of war Japan conducted across Asia-Pacific. Bear in mind that for every Japanese non-combatant who died during the war, 17 or 18 died across Asia-Pacific. Yet you very seldom find references to this and virtually nothing that vivifies it in the way that the suffering at Hiroshima and Nagasaki has been. With the original invasion strategy negated by radio intelligence revealing the massive Japanese build-up on the planned Kyushu landing areas, Truman’s alternative was a campaign of blockade and bombardment, which would have killed millions of Japanese, mostly non-combatants. For example, in 1946 the food situation would have become catastrophic and there would have been stupendous civilian deaths. It was only because Japan surrendered when it still had a serviceable administrative system – plus American food aid – that saved the country from famine.

Another thing to bear in mind is that while just over 200,000 people were killed in total by the atomic bombs, it is estimated that 300,000–500,000 Japanese people (many of whom were civilians) died or disappeared in Soviet captivity. Had the war continued, that number would have been much higher.

Critics talk about changing the demand for unconditional surrender, but the Japanese government had never put forth a set of terms on which they were prepared to end the war prior to Hiroshima. The inner cabinet ruling the country never devised such terms. When foreign minister Shigenori Togo was told that the best terms Japan could obtain were unconditional surrender with the exception of maintaining the imperial system, Togo flatly rejected them in the name of the cabinet.

The fact is that there was no historical record over the past 2,600 years of Japan ever surrendering, nor any examples of a Japanese unit surrendering during the war. This was where the great American fear lay.

“No. Better options were discarded for political reasons” says Tsuyoshi Hasegawa

Once sympathetic to the argument that the atomic bomb was necessary, the more research I do, the more I am convinced it was one of the gravest war crimes the US has ever committed. I’ve been to Japan and discovered what happened on the ground in 1945 and it was really horrifying. The radiation has affected people who survived the blast for many years and still today thousands of people suffer the effects.

There were possible alternatives that might have ended the war. Truman could have invited Stalin to sign the Potsdam declaration [in which the USA, Britain and Nationalist demanded Japanese surrender in July 1945]. The authors of the draft of the declaration believed that if the Soviets joined the war at this time it might lead to Japanese surrender but Truman consciously avoided that option, because he and some of his advisors were apprehensive about Soviet entry. I don’t agree with revisionists who say Truman used the bomb to intimidate the Soviet Union but I believe he used it to force Japan to surrender before they were able to enter the war.

The second option was to alter the demand for unconditional surrender. Some influential advisors within the Truman administration were in favour of allowing the Japanese to keep the emperor system to induce so-called moderates within the Japanese government to work for the termination of the war. However, Truman was mindful of American public opinion, which wanted unconditional surrender as revenge against Pearl Harbor and the Japanese atrocities.

Truman’s decision to use the atomic bomb was the best choice available under the circumstances and was therefore morally justifiable. It was clear Japan was unwilling to surrender on terms even remotely acceptable to the US and its allies, and the country was preparing a defense far more formidable than the US had anticipated.

The choice was not, as is frequently argued, between using an atomic bomb against Hiroshima and invading Japan. No one on the Allied side could say with confidence what would bring about a Japanese surrender, as Japan’s situation had been hopeless for a long time. It was hoped that the shock provided by the bombs would convince Tokyo to surrender, but how many would be needed was an open question. After Hiroshima, the Japanese government had three days to respond before Nagasaki but did not do so. and some of his advisers knew Japan had to surrender but were not in a position to get the government to accept that conclusion. Key military members of the government argued that it was unlikely that the US could have a second bomb and, even if it did, public pressure would prevent its use. The bombing of Nagasaki demolished these arguments and led directly to the imperial conference that produced Japan’s offer to surrender.

The absolutist moral arguments (such as not harming civilians) made against the atomic bombs would have precluded many other actions essential to victory taken by the Allies during the most destructive war in history. There is no doubt that had the bomb been available sooner, it would have been used against Germany. There was, to be sure, a moral failing in August 1945, but it was on the part of the Japanese government when it refused to surrender after its long war of conquest had been lost.

Article Details: Author: Rob Attar Source: BBC History Magazine Date: August 2015

QUESTION #3 Can Joseph Stalin or Adolf Hitler be declared the most brutal dictator of World War II, or should they be considered equally destructive?

SOURCE 1

ARTICLE TITLE: Hitler vs. Stalin: Who Was Worse?

As we recall the Red Army’s liberation of Auschwitz on January 27, 1945, sixty-six years ago today, we might ask: who was worse, Hitler or Stalin?

In the second half of the twentieth century, Americans were taught to see both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union as the greatest of evils. Hitler was worse, because his regime propagated the unprecedented horror of the Holocaust, the attempt to eradicate an entire people on racial grounds. Yet Stalin was also worse, because his regime killed far, far more people—tens of millions, it was often claimed—in the endless wastes of the Gulag [a system of labor camps maintained in the former Soviet Union from 1930 to 1955 in which many people died]. For decades, and even today, this confidence about the difference between the two regimes has set the ground rules for the politics of memory. Even historians of the Holocaust generally take for granted that Stalin killed more people than Hitler, thus placing themselves under greater pressure to stress the special character of the Holocaust, since this is what made the Nazi regime worse than the Stalinist one.

In the second half of the twentieth century, Americans were taught to see both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union as the greatest of evils. Hitler was worse, because his regime propagated the unprecedented horror of the Holocaust, the attempt to eradicate an entire people on racial grounds. Yet Stalin was also worse, because his regime killed far, far more people—tens of millions, it was often claimed—in the endless wastes of the Gulag. For decades, and even today, this confidence about the difference between the two regimes—quality versus quantity—has set the ground rules for the politics of memory. Even historians of the Holocaust generally take for granted that Stalin killed more people than Hitler, thus placing themselves under greater pressure to stress the special character of the Holocaust, since this is what made the Nazi regime worse than the Stalinist one.

Discussion of numbers can blunt our sense of the horrific personal character of each killing and the irreducible tragedy of each death. As anyone who has lost a loved one knows, the difference between zero and one is an infinity. Though we have a harder time grasping this, the same is true for the difference between, say, 780,862 and 780,863—which happens to be the best estimate of the number of people murdered at Treblinka. Large numbers matter because they are an accumulation of small numbers: that is, precious individual lives. Today, after two decades of access to Eastern European archives, and thanks to the work of German, Russian, Israeli, and other scholars, we can resolve the question of numbers. The total number of noncombatants killed by the Germans—about 11 million—is roughly what we had thought. The total number of civilians killed by the Soviets, however, is considerably less than we had believed. We know now that the Germans killed more people than the Soviets did. That said, the issue of quality is more complex than was once thought. Mass murder in the Soviet Union sometimes involved motivations, especially national and ethnic ones, that can be disconcertingly close to Nazi motivations.

The largest human catastrophe of Stalinism was the famine of 1930–1933, in which more than five million people starved. Of those who starved, the 3.3 million or so inhabitants of Soviet Ukraine who died in 1932 and 1933 were victims of a deliberate killing policy related to nationality. In early 1930, Stalin had announced his intention to “liquidate” prosperous peasants (“kulaks”) as a class so that the state could control agriculture and use capital extracted from the countryside to build industry. Tens of thousands of people were shot by Soviet state police and hundreds of thousands deported. Those who remained lost their land and often went hungry as the state requisitioned food for export. The first victims of starvation were the nomads of Soviet Kazakhstan, where about 1.3 million people died. The famine spread to Soviet Russia and peaked in Soviet Ukraine. Stalin requisitioned grain in Soviet Ukraine knowing that such a policy would kill millions. Blaming Ukrainians for the failure of his own policy, he ordered a series of measures—such as sealing the borders of that Soviet republic—that ensured mass death.

In 1937 Stalin ordered the Great Terror. Because we now have the killing orders and the death quotas, inaccessible so long as the Soviet Union existed, we now know that the number of victims was not in the millions. We also know that, as in the early 1930s, the main victims were the peasants, many of them survivors of hunger and of concentration camps. The highest Soviet authorities ordered 386,798 people shot in the “Kulak Operation” of 1937–1938. The other major “enemies” during these years were people belonging to national minorities who could be associated with states bordering the Soviet Union: some 247,157 Soviet citizens were killed by the NKVD in ethnic shooting actions. Beyond the numbers killed remains the question of intent. Most of the Soviet killing took place in times of peace, and was related more or less to modernization. Germany bears the chief responsibility for the war, and killed civilians almost exclusively in connection with the practice of racial imperialism. Germany invaded the Soviet Union with elaborate colonization plans. Thirty million Soviet citizens were to starve, and tens of millions more were to be shot, deported, enslaved, or assimilated. Such plans, though unfulfilled, provided the rationale for the bloodiest occupation in the history of the world. The Germans placed Soviet prisoners of war in starvation camps, where 2.6 million perished from hunger and another half million (disproportionately Soviet Jews) were shot. A million Soviet citizens also starved during the . In “reprisals” for partisan action, the Germans killed about 700,000 civilians in grotesque mass executions, most of them Belarusians and Poles. At the war’s end the Soviets killed tens of thousands of people in their own “reprisals,” especially in the Baltic states, Belarus, and Ukraine. Some 363,000 German soldiers died in Soviet captivity.

Hitler came to power with the intention of eliminating the Jews from Europe; the war in the east showed that this could be achieved by mass killing. Within weeks of the attack by Germany (and its Finnish, Romanian, Hungarian, Italian, and other allies) on the USSR, Germans, with local help, were exterminating entire Jewish communities. By December 1941, when it appears that Hitler communicated his wish that all Jews be murdered, perhaps a million Jews were already dead in the occupied Soviet Union. Most had been shot over pits, but thousands were asphyxiated in gas vans. From 1942, carbon monoxide was used at the death factories Chełmno, Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka to kill Polish and some other European Jews. As the Holocaust spread to the rest of occupied Europe, other Jews were gassed by hydrogen cyanide at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Overall, the Germans, with much local assistance, deliberately murdered about 5.4 million Jews, roughly 2.6 million by shooting and 2.8 million by gassing (about a million at Auschwitz, 780,863 at Treblinka, 434,508 at Bełzec, about 180,000 at Sobibór, 150,000 at Chełmno, 59,000 at Majdanek, and many of the rest in gas vans in occupied Serbia and the occupied Soviet Union). A few hundred thousand more Jews died during deportations to ghettos or of hunger or disease in ghettos. Another 300,000 Jews were murdered by Germany’s ally Romania. Most Holocaust victims had been Polish or Soviet citizens before the war (3.2 million and 1 million respectively). The Germans also killed more than a hundred thousand Roma. All in all, the Germans deliberately killed about 11 million noncombatants, a figure that rises to more than 12 million if foreseeable deaths from deportation, hunger, and sentences in concentration camps are included.

The most fundamental proximity of the two regimes, in my view, is not ideological but geographical. Given that the Nazis and the Stalinists tended to kill in the same places, in the lands between Berlin and Moscow, and given that they were, at different times, rivals, allies, and enemies, we must take seriously the possibility that some of the death and destruction wrought in the lands between was their mutual responsibility. What can we make of the fact, for example, that the lands that suffered most during the war were those occupied not once or twice but three times: by the Soviets in 1939, the Germans in 1941, and the Soviets again in 1944?

The Holocaust began when the Germans provoked pogroms in June and July 1941, in which some 24,000 Jews were killed, on territories in Poland annexed by the Soviets less than two years before. The Nazis planned to eliminate the Jews in any case, but the prior killings by the NKVD certainly made it easier for local non-Jews to justify their own participation in such campaigns. Germans took so many Soviet prisoners of war in part because Stalin ordered his generals not to retreat. The Germans shot so many civilians in part because deliberately provoked reprisals. The Germans shot more than a hundred thousand civilians in Warsaw in 1944 after the Soviets urged the locals to rise up and then declined to help them. In Stalin’s Gulag some 516,543 people died between 1941 and 1943, sentenced by the Soviets to labor, but deprived of food by the German invasion.

Were these people victims of Stalin or of Hitler? Or both?

Article Details: Author: Timothy Snyder Source: The New York Review of Books Date: January 27, 2011 SOURCE 2

ARTICLE TITLE: The Atrocities of Stalin

On June 11, 1937, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin had 8 of his top army generals executed as part of The Great Purge. From 1934 to 1940 Stalin had vast numbers of government, party, and army officials murdered to satisfy his paranoid delusions that everyone was out to get him. This left his military with a vacuum of leadership when war came, stripped of many of its most capable officers, but just another day for “The Man of Steel.” Stalin was a bad person indeed, and although Hitler is generally regarded as the most evil man in history Stalin committed horrible atrocities.

10. The Great Purge, 1934-1940. As stated above, Stalin was a paranoid dictator that ruthlessly clung to power. In order to upset any budding power bases or alliances that might work against him, he went on a spree of executing, imprisoning, and firing many officials at many levels, especially the highest levels. With the military, it is shocking to see the facts: Officers removed from office one way or another: 3 of 5 Marshalls, 8 of 9 Admirals, 13 of 15 Army Commanders, 50 of 57 Corps Commanders, 16 of 16 Army Commissars, and 25 of 28 Corps Commissars. His stripping of the military leadership cost the Soviets dearly when they tried to invade Finland and when Germany invaded the Soviet Union.

9. Purge of Intelligentsia, 1920-1940. At least 2000 of the best and brightest minds in the Soviet Union were sent to prisons where at least 1500 of them died. Writers, poets, philosophers and playwrights were jailed for producing anything other than pure propaganda, astronomers were jailed for studying sun spots, and weathermen were jailed for failing to make accurate predictions! Scientists and engineers that failed to solve problems according to Stalin’s schedule were also purged, especially during the war.

8. Wife’s Suicide/Murder, 1932. Stalin was a bad father and a bad husband. One of his sons shot himself and lived, causing Stalin to complain, “He can’t even shoot.” When that son was captured by the Germans, Stalin refused a trade for a German general and his son died. At a dinner in 1932 where Stalin and his wife argued, Stalin was seen flicking cigarettes at her; later that night she either committed suicide or was murdered by Stalin. (Hitler’s wife committed suicide with him and Hitler’s previous girlfriends also committed suicide.)

7. Self-Serving Relations with China, 1940-1953. Stalin at first betrayed his fellow communists in China by supporting Chiang Kai Shek instead of Mao tse Tung and the communists, because he felt Chiang had a better chance of keeping the Japanese from invading Siberia, and he ignored the mass murder of communists by Chiang. Stalin further hurt the Chinese communists by supporting the Turkic Muslims in their quest for an independent state. By 1950, when it was prudent to do so, Stalin became an ally with China and now had a major ally in the Cold War. In a similar manner, Stalin at first supported the creation of Israel and then later withdrew his support. For the most part, Stalin was another anti- Semite at heart.

6. Scorched Earth Policy, 1941-1943. Absolutely uncaring about his own population, Stalin ordered everything in the path of advancing Germans to be burned, leaving no food or useful supplies of any type for them. Of course, this policy was hard on the peasants who lost everything, and led to widespread starvation.

5. Shooting and Imprisoning Soldiers, 1941-1945. Just as Hitler was killing his own people for “defeatism,” Stalin gave orders to shoot deserting or unauthorized retreating troops on sight. He went so far as to set up “blocking detachments” to gun down troops fleeing from the front. In this time frame, well over 400,000 soldiers were sent to “penal battalions” where they would be deployed in areas almost certain to get them killed.

4. Katyn Massacre, 1940. After stabbing Poland in the back by invading after the Polish military was completely engaged with the Nazi invasion, Stalin took a large area of Poland for himself. In early 1940 on Stalin’s personal orders, over 25,000 of Poland’s best military officers were executed. When the Soviets retook Poland in 1944 the Soviets claimed the Nazis had committed the atrocity. The Soviets finally admitted guilt in 1990.

3. Censorship and Propaganda, 1924-1953. During the entire tenure of Stalin’s reign no free press or freedom of much of anything was enjoyed in the Soviet Union or any country controlled by it. People were bombarded with government propaganda and denied access to information or cultural influences from other (western) countries. Just as Hitler and the Nazis, Stalin and the Soviets jailed or killed anyone that spoke contrary to his preferred viewpoint.

2. The Iron Curtain, 1945-1991. After World War II Stalin failed to live up to the understanding that European countries would have the right of self-determination and he imposed the rule of the Soviet Union upon them. Making these countries have communist governments whether the people wanted it or not, and restricting movement in or out of the “communist bloc” made this mass of people little more than slaves, creating an even bigger Soviet empire than that of before the war.

1. Starvation of the Ukraine, 1932-1933. Hitler is notorious for killing as many as 6 million Jews and another 5 million non-Jewish people, but in the Holodomor, intentional starvation of the Ukraine, Stalin killed as many as 7.5 million Ukrainians. Although the Ukraine is considered the “breadbasket” of the Soviet Union where the most productive farms are, the food produced was removed for residents of other parts of the country and Ukrainians were left to starve. The widespread and horrible scale of the starvation led people to eat the dead, and 2,500 were convicted of cannibalism. The independence minded people of the Ukraine were starved into submission, pure and simple. Soviet propaganda denied the famine for many years, refusing to admit Stalin’s psychotic willingness to kill people or allow the world to think people in the “workers’ paradise” could possibly starve. Soviet propaganda also insidiously spread into western countries with false messages that the famine was natural and not planned. After the fall of the Soviet Union Russian and Ukrainian officials were somewhat more forthcoming, but the issue remains a debate between Russia and Ukraine.

Article Details: Author: Dan Smith Source: History and Headlines Date: June 11, 2013 SOURCE 3

ARTICLE TITLE: The Holocaust

The word “Holocaust,” from the Greek words “holos” (whole) and “kaustos” (burned), was historically used to describe a sacrificial offering burned on an altar. Since 1945, the word has taken on a new and horrible meaning: the mass murder of some 6 million European Jews (as well as members of some other persecuted groups, such as Gypsies) by the German Nazi regime during the Second World War. To the anti-Semitic Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, Jews were an inferior race, an alien threat to German racial purity and community. After years of Nazi rule in Germany, during which Jews were consistently persecuted, Hitler’s “final solution”–now known as the Holocaust–came to fruition under the cover of world war, with mass killing centers constructed in the concentration camps of occupied Poland.

Beginning of War, 1939-1940

In September 1939, the German army occupied the western half of Poland. German police soon forced tens of thousands of Polish Jews from their homes and into ghettoes, giving their confiscated properties to ethnic Germans (non-Jews outside Germany who identified as German), Germans from the Reich or Polish gentiles. Surrounded by high walls and barbed wire, the Jewish ghettoes in Poland functioned like captive city-states, governed by Jewish Councils. In addition to widespread unemployment, poverty and hunger, overpopulation made the ghettoes breeding grounds for disease such as typhus.

Meanwhile, beginning in the fall of 1939, Nazi officials selected around 70,000 Germans institutionalized for mental illness or disabilities to be gassed to death in the so-called Euthanasia Program. After prominent German religious leaders protested, Hitler put an end to the program in August 1941, though killings of the disabled continued in secrecy, and by 1945 some 275,000 people deemed handicapped from all over Europe had been killed. In hindsight, it seems clear that the Euthanasia Program functioned as a pilot for the Holocaust.

Towards the “Final Solution” , 1940-1941

Throughout the spring and summer of 1940, the German army expanded Hitler’s empire in Europe, conquering Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and France. Beginning in 1941, Jews from all over the continent, as well as hundreds of thousands of European Gypsies, were transported to the Polish ghettoes. The German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 marked a new level of brutality in warfare. Mobile killing units called Einsatzgruppen would murder more than 500,000 Soviet Jews and others (usually by shooting) over the course of the German occupation.

A memorandum dated July 31, 1941, from Hitler’s top commander Hermann Goering to Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the SD (the security service of the SS), referred to the need for an Endlösung (final solution) to “the Jewish question.” Beginning in September 1941, every person designated as a Jew in German-held territory was marked with a yellow star, making them open targets. Tens of thousands were soon being deported to the Polish ghettoes and German-occupied cities in the USSR. Since June 1941, experiments with mass killing methods had been ongoing at the concentration camp of Auschwitz, near Krakow. That August, 500 officials gassed 500 Soviet POWs to death with the pesticide Zyklon-B. The SS soon placed a huge order for the gas with a German pest-control firm, an ominous indicator of the coming Holocaust.

Holocaust Death Camps, 1941-1945

Beginning in late 1941, the Germans began mass transports from the ghettoes in Poland to the concentration camps, starting with those people viewed as the least useful: the sick, old and weak and the very young. The first mass gassings began at the camp of Belzec, near Lublin, on March 17, 1942. Five more mass killing centers were built at camps in occupied Poland, including Chelmno, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek and the largest of all, Auschwitz-Birkenau. From 1942 to 1945, Jews were deported to the camps from all over Europe, including German-controlled territory as well as those countries allied with Germany. The heaviest deportations took place during the summer and fall of 1942, when more than 300,000 people were deported from the Warsaw ghetto alone.

Though the Nazis tried to keep operation of camps secret, the scale of the killing made this virtually impossible. Eyewitnesses brought reports of Nazi atrocities in Poland to the Allied governments, who were harshly criticized after the war for their failure to respond, or to publicize news of the mass slaughter. This lack of action was likely mostly due to the Allied focus on winning the war at hand, but was also a result of the general incomprehension with which news of the Holocaust was met and the denial and disbelief that such atrocities could be occurring on such a scale. At Auschwitz alone, more than 2 million people were murdered in a process resembling a large-scale industrial operation. A large population of Jewish and non-Jewish inmates worked in the labor camp there; though only Jews were gassed, thousands of others died of starvation or disease. During the summer of 1944, even as the events of D-Day (June 6, 1944) and a Soviet offensive the same month spelled the beginning of the end for Germany in the war, a large proportion of Hungary’s Jewish population was deported to Auschwitz, and as many as 12,000 Jews were killed every day.

Nazi Rule Comes to an End, as Holocaust Continues to Claim Lives, 1945

By the spring of 1945, German leadership was dissolving amid internal dissent, with Goering and Himmler both seeking to distance themselves from Hitler and take power. In his last will and political testament, dictated in a German bunker that April 29, Hitler blamed the war on “International Jewry and its helpers” and urged the German leaders and people to follow “the strict observance of the racial laws and with merciless resistance against the universal poisoners of all peoples”–the Jews. The following day, he committed suicide. Germany’s formal surrender in World War II came barely a week later, on May 8, 1945.

German forces had begun evacuating many of the death camps in the fall of 1944, sending inmates under guard to march further from the advancing enemy’s front line. These so-called “death marches” continued all the way up to the German surrender, resulting in the deaths of some 250,000 to 375,000 people. In his classic book “Survival in Auschwitz,” the Italian Jewish author Primo Levi described his own state of mind, as well as that of his fellow inmates in Auschwitz on the day before Soviet troops arrived at the camp in January 1945: “We lay in a world of death and phantoms. The last trace of civilization had vanished around and inside us. The work of bestial degradation, begun by the victorious Germans, had been carried to conclusion by the Germans in defeat.”

Aftermath & Lasting Impact of the Holocaust

The wounds of the Holocaust–known in Hebrew as Shoah, or catastrophe–were slow to heal. Survivors of the camps found it nearly impossible to return home, as in many cases they had lost their families and been denounced by their non-Jewish neighbors. As a result, the late 1940s saw an unprecedented number of refugees, POWs and other displaced populations moving across Europe. In an effort to punish the villains of the Holocaust, the Allies held the of 1945-46, which brought Nazi atrocities to horrifying light. Increasing pressure on the Allied powers to create a homeland for Jewish survivors of the Holocaust would lead to a mandate for the creation of Israel in 1948.

Article Details: Author: A+E Networks Source: U.S. News Date: 2009

SOURCE 4

ARTICLE TITLE: Stalin's Cannibals

How much should the cannibalism count? How should we factor it into the growing historical-moral-political argument over how to compare Hitler's and Stalin's genocides, and the death tolls of communism and fascism in general. I know I had not considered it. I had really not been aware of the extent of the cannibalism that took place during the Stalinist-enforced famine in the Ukraine in 1933 until I read Yale University history professor Timothy Snyder's shocking, unflinching depiction of it in Bloodlands, his groundbreaking new book about Hitler's and Stalin's near-simultaneous genocides.

For the past three decades, beginning with what was called in Germany the Historikerstreit, or historians' battle, continuing with the 1997 French publication of The Black Book of Communism (which put the death toll from communist regimes at close to 100 million compared with 25 million from Hitler and fascism), there has been a controversy over comparative genocide and comparative evil that has pitted Hitler's mass murders against Stalin's, Mao's, and Pol Pot's.

I had been all too vaguely aware of the role the Stalin-imposed Ukraine famine played in the argument— according to many calculations, it added more than 3 million dead to the sum of Stalin's victims.

But I suppose that, without looking deeply into it, I had considered Stalin's state-created famine a kind of "soft genocide" compared with the industrialized mass murder of Hitler's death camps or even with the millions of victims of Stalin's own purges of the late '30s and the gulags they gave birth to.

Snyder's book, while controversial in some respects, forces us to face the facts about the famine, and the cannibalism helps place the Ukraine famine in the forefront of debate, not as some mere agricultural misfortune, but as one of the 20th century's deliberate mass murders.

Students of comparative evil often point out that Stalin caused a higher death toll than Hitler, even without taking the famine deaths into account; those losses were not treated the same way as his other crimes or as Hitler's killing and gassing in death camps. Shooting or gassing is more direct and immediate than starving a whole nation.

But Snyder's account of the Ukraine famine persuasively makes the case that Stalin in effect turned the entire Ukraine into a death camp and, rather than gassing its people, decreed death by famine.

Should this be considered a lesser crime because it's less "hands-on"? Here's where the accounts of cannibalism caused me to rethink this question—and to examine the related question of whether one can distinguish degrees of evil in genocides by their methodology.

The argument has been simmering for some time because it has consequences for how we think of events in contemporary history. Nazism, it is generally agreed, cannot be rehabilitated in any way, because it was inextricable from Hitler's crimes, but there are some on the left who believe communism can be rehabilitated despite the crimes of Stalin, and despite new evidence that the tactics of terror were innovations traceable to his predecessor Lenin.

Are there distinctions to be made between Hitler's and Stalin's genocides? Is it possible—without diminishing Hitler's evil—to argue that Stalin's crimes were by some measures worse? If we're speaking of quantity, Stalin's mass murder death toll may have far exceeded Hitler's, with many putting the figure at 20 million or so, depending on what you count. But quantity probably shouldn't be the only measure. There is also intent. To some, Stalin's murders are not on the same plane (or at the same depth), because he may have believed however dementedly that he was acting in the service of the higher goal of class warfare and the universal aspirations of the oppressed working class. As opposed to Hitler, who killed in the service of a base, indefensible racial hatred.

The full evil of Stalin still hasn't sunk in. I know it to be true intellectually, but our culture has not assimilated the magnitude of his crimes. Which is perhaps why the cannibalism jolted me out of any illusion that meaningful distinctions could be made between Stalin and Hitler.

There is no algorithm for evil, but the case of Stalin's has for a long time weighed more heavily the ideological murders and gulag deaths that began in 1937 and played down the millions who—Snyder argues—were just as deliberately, cold-bloodedly murdered by enforced famine in 1932 and 1933.

Here is where the shock of Snyder's relatively few pages on cannibalism brought the question of degrees of evil alive once again to me. According to Snyder's carefully documented account, it was not uncommon during the Stalin-imposed famine in Soviet Ukraine for parents to cook and eat their children.

The bare statement alone is horrifying even to write.

The back story: While Lenin was content, for a time anyway, to allow the new Soviet Union to develop a "mixed economy" with state-run industry and peasant-owned private farms, Stalin decided to "collectivize" the grain-producing breadbasket that was the Ukraine. His agents seized all land from the peasants, expelling landowners and placing loyal ideologues with little agricultural experience in charge of the newly collectivized farms, which began to fail miserably. And to fulfill Five-Year Plan goals, he seized all the grain and food that was grown in 1932 and 1933 to feed the rest of Russia and raise foreign capital, and in doing so left the entire Ukrainian people with nothing to eat—except, sometimes, themselves.

So, perhaps the real discussion concerning Hitler and Stalin is not who could be considered the most inhuman leader, but that there was more than one person who committed unthinkable atrocities.

Article Details: Author: Ron Rosenbaum Source: The New York Times Date: February 7, 2011

QUESTION #4 Could Franklin D. Roosevelt have prevented the bombing of Pearl Harbor?

SOURCE 1

ARTICLE TITLE: No, FDR Did Not Know the Japanese Were Going To Bomb Pearl Harbor

Wednesday marks the 75th anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The history of the attack is clear, yet the conspiracy theory that President Franklin D. Roosevelt allowed the attack to take place to draw America into the war never dies.

Seventy-five years after the Japanese , some Americans have never stopped believing that President Franklin Roosevelt let it happen in order to draw the U.S. into World War II.

"It's ridiculous," says Rob Citino, a senior researcher at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans. "But it's evergreen. It never stops. My students, over 30 years — there'd always be someone in class [who'd say], 'Roosevelt knew all about it.'"

Conspiracy theories, half-truths and full-on lies are getting new attention as they appear alongside real news and information on social networks — but that's nothing new. The official investigations into the Japanese attack started in the 1940s, and even now, each time new documents become declassified, a headline pops up asking whether Roosevelt allowed it.

No, says Roosevelt biographer Jean Edward Smith.

"He was totally caught off guard by it," Smith says. "The record is clear. There was no evidence of the Japanese moving toward Pearl Harbor that was picked up in Washington."

That's not to say that the White House might not have expected some kind of attack from Japan — possibly against U.S. bases in the . Roosevelt had been tightening the screws on Tokyo to hinder the Japanese conquest of China, "instituting a full embargo on exports to Japan, freezing Japanese assets in U.S. banks and sending supplies into China along the Burma Road," according to the State Department.

Citino says Roosevelt believed those economic restrictions could get Japan to reduce its ambitions in Asia.

"Sanctions are better than war — if you have time to let them apply, and if there's somebody sensible on the other side." But Roosevelt "was wrong in that assessment," Citino says, and the Japanese were mistaken in thinking they could remove the threat from the U.S. Navy to their operations in the Western Pacific.

"Pearl Harbor [brought about] unintended consequences for both sides," he says.

The U.S. didn't think the Japanese would retaliate militarily. And the use of then-new naval weapons such as aircraft carriers was still being explored. No one had sailed a fleet of carriers 4,000 miles across an ocean to raid an enemy's fleet while it sat at anchor.

For their part, the Japanese did not think the U.S. would have the stomach to rebuild its Navy and then launch a bloody fight, island by island, across the Pacific.

These kinds of bad assumptions and poor intelligence start wars, Citino says — an understanding that seems so obvious today even as the conspiracy theories outlive the eyewitnesses to the battle.

Article Details: Author: NPR Staff Source: NPR Date: December 6, 2016

SOURCE 2

ARTICLE TITLE: Pearl Harbor memo shows US warned of Japanese attack

On the 70th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, the attack that propelled America into the Second World War, a declassified memo shows that Japanese surprise attack was expected.

It was described by President Franklin Roosevelt as "a date that will live in infamy", a day on which the slaughter of 2,400 US troops drew America into Second World War and changed the course of history.

Now, on the 70th anniversary of Japan's devastating bombardment of the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, evidence has emerged showing that President Franklin Roosevelt was warned three days before the attack that the Japanese empire was eyeing up Hawaii with a view to "open conflict."

The information, contained in a declassified memorandum from the Office of Naval Intelligence, adds to proof that Washington dismissed red flags signaling that mass bloodshed was looming and war was imminent.

"In anticipation of possible open conflict with this country, Japan is vigorously utilizing every available agency to secure military, naval and commercial information, paying particular attention to the West Coast, the Panama Canal and the Territory of Hawaii," stated the 26-page memo.

Dated December 4, 1941, marked as confidential, and entitled "Japanese intelligence and propaganda in the United States," it flagged up Japan's surveillance of Hawaii under a section headlined "Methods of Operation and Points of Attack."

It noted details of possible subversives in Hawaii, where nearly 40 per cent of inhabitants were of Japanese origin, and of how Japanese consulates on America's west coast had been gathering information on American naval and air forces. Japan's Naval Inspector's Office, it stated, was "primarily interested in obtaining detailed technical information which could be used to advantage by the Japanese Navy."

"Much information of a military and naval nature has been obtained," it stated, describing it as being "of a general nature" but including records relating to the movement of US warships.

The memo, now held at the Franklin D.Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum in upstate New York, has sat unpublicised since its declassification 26 years ago. Its contents are revealed by historian Craig Shirley in his new book "December 1941: 31 Days that Changed America and Saved the World."

Three days after the warning was delivered to the White House, hundreds of Japanese aircraft operating from six aircraft carriers unleashed a surprise strike on the US Navy's base at Pearl Harbour, wiping out American battleships, destroyers and air installations. A total of 2,459 US personnel were killed and 1,282 injured.

Conspiracy theorists have long claimed that Roosevelt deliberately ignored intelligence of an imminent attack in Hawaii, suggesting that he allowed it to happen so that he would then have a legitimate reason for declaring war on Japan. Up to that point, public and political opinion had been against America's entry into what was seen largely as a European war, despite Roosevelt's private support for the Allies' fight against the so-called Axis - Germany, Italy and Japan. But Mr Shirley said: "Based on all my research, I believe that neither Roosevelt nor anybody in his government, the Navy or the War Department knew that the Japanese were going to attack Pearl Harbour. There was no conspiracy.

"This memo is further evidence that they believed the Japanese were contemplating a military action of some sort, but they were kind of in denial because they didn't think anybody would be as audacious to move an army thousands of miles across the Pacific, stop to refuel, then move on to Hawaii to make a strike like this."

Roosevelt declared war on Japan the day after on Pearl Harbor. Japan, Germany and Italy reciprocated with their own declarations, but America's involvement in the war turned the tide against the Axis powers and ultimately led the Allies to victory.

Americans, who a year previously had been assured by Roosevelt that they would not be sent to fight foreign wars, suddenly found their fates transformed. The US military swelled, with 16 million heading off to war, and women took on new and more widespread roles in the workforce, and in the military.

Washington became a global power base and the War Powers Act gave the president supreme executive authority. The "America First" movement, which had lobbied against the country's entry into the war and at its peak had 800,000 members, disbanded within days.

"December 7, 1941, was the powder-keg that changed the world. It changed America instantly from an isolationist country on the morning of December 7 to an internationalist country on the morning of December 8," said Mr. Shirley.

Article Details: Author: Jacqui Goddard Source: The Telegraph Date: December 4, 2011

SOURCE 3

ARTICLE TITLE: Declassified Memo Hinted of 1941 Hawaii Attack

Three days before the Dec. 7, 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt was warned in a memo from naval intelligence that Tokyo's military and spy network was focused on Hawaii, a new and eerie reminder of FDR's failure to act on a basket load of tips that war was near.

In the newly revealed 20-page memo from FDR's declassified FBI file, the Office of Naval Intelligence on December 4 warned, "In anticipation of open conflict with this country, Japan is vigorously utilizing every available agency to secure military, naval and commercial information, paying particular attention to the West Coast, the Panama Canal and the Territory of Hawaii."

The memo, published in the new book December 1941: 31 Days that Changed America and Saved the World went on to say that the Japanese were collecting "detailed technical information" that would be specifically used by its navy. To collect and analyze information, they were building a network of spies through their U.S. embassies and consulates.

Historian and acclaimed Reagan biographer Craig Shirley, author of the just released December 1941, doesn't blame FDR for blowing it, but instead tells Whispers that it "does suggest that there were more pieces to the puzzle" that the administration missed. The 70th anniversary of the attack is next month.

In fact, he compares the missed signals leading up to Japan's attack to 9/11, which government investigations also show that the Clinton and Bush administrations missed clear signals that an attack was coming. [ Read: Mengele Nazi Diaries Could Fetch $1 million.]

"So many mistakes through so many levels of Washington," said Shirley. "Some things never change."

His book also reveals another blockbuster historical moment: On the night of the Pearl Harbor attack, FDR and his war cabinet considered declaring war on all three Axis Powers—Japan, Germany, Italy—but in the end the president only targeted Japan. At the time, the U.S. was still healing from World War I and isolationism was the word of the day.

Article Details: Author: Paul Bedard Source: U.S. News Date: November 9, 2011

SOURCE 4

ARTICLE TITLE: Early Warnings; What Did He Know, and When?

THE president was receiving intelligence that an attack might occur imminently, probably not on the United States mainland, but abroad. Intercepted communications pointed to an adversary with a deadly history of surprise attacks. And, it did happen, the most horrific assault ever on American territory, and one that would lead to war. An investigation as to how so large a blow could have gone undetected was begun while the nation was still fighting the war. One objective was to find out what the president knew about the threat, when did he know and what did he do to counter it?

The date in question, Dec. 7, 1941; the president, Franklin D. Roosevelt. Did President Roosevelt, as conspiratorialists maintain, know that Japan was about to attack Pearl Harbor, and did he fail to head off the assault in order to bring the United States into World War II?

How could F.D.R. not have known? For more than a year, American cryptanalysts had been breaking a key Japanese code. In the six months before Dec. 7, 239 messages between Tokyo and the Japanese Embassy in Washington had been deciphered.

Given the information in his possession, if asked if Japan was going to attack, Roosevelt would doubtless have answered yes. Indeed, the latest decrypt reaching him on the eve of Pearl Harbor had prompted Roosevelt to conclude, ''This means war.''

But if asked if he knew where an attack would occur, he would have had to say no. The intercepts had suggested strikes against the Philippines, , Malaya and the Russian Maritime Provinces; but not one of the 239 messages or any intelligence source available to F.D.R. mentioned Pearl Harbor.

The charge that Roosevelt, by failing to repel the attack, found a back door into war raises this question: which war? It was not a secret that Roosevelt wanted to join Britain in the fight against Nazi Germany and that he had essentially launched an undeclared naval war in the Atlantic. The president had told the British prime minister, Winston Churchill, however, that a fight against Japan would be ''the wrong war in the wrong ocean at the wrong time.'' Churchill added, ''We certainly do not want an additional war.'' What is often overlooked is that to get into the war that he did want, F.D.R. had to depend on Hitler. It was Germany that, four days after Pearl Harbor, declared war on the United States. Roosevelt had no motive for war against Japan.

Still, conspiracy theories bloom, for example, that radio signals had been intercepted from the Japanese task force bearing down on Pearl Harbor. Commanders of this force, with no reason to protect Roosevelt's place in history, deny that they ever broke radio silence. A historian as distinguished as John Toland has written that he interviewed the Navy radioman who picked up such signals, a claim that the radioman has denied.

Roosevelt could not have kept knowledge of an impending attack to himself. To swallow the conspiratorial view, we have to imagine that the enlisted soldiers and sailors who broke the Japanese codes, the chiefs of Army and Navy intelligence, the secretaries of war and the Navy, and the president, all of whom received the decrypts, engaged in a conspiracy of silence that was going to cost the lives of some 2,400 of their fellow Americans and the near destruction of the Pacific Fleet. Difficult to credit. Given the lack of motive and the total absence of hard evidence linking F.D.R. to foreknowledge of the Japanese plan, the conspiracy case collapses.

So why do conspiracy theories keep sprouting? Neat, suspenseful plots create high drama, while the truth is often messy, contradictory, even dull. Pearl Harbor was an intelligence failure of stunning magnitude. The tragedy of 9/11 is equally so. Some have asked President Bush to apologize. No record exists of Roosevelt being asked or offering to do so. But, whether in 1941 or 2001, the commander in chief must bear responsibility for intelligence debacles. To assign treasonous chicanery to F.D.R., however, is dead wrong.

Pearl Harbor was a catastrophe, not a conspiracy.

Article Details: Author: Joseph E. Persico Source: The New York Times Date: April 18, 2004