DIRTY LITTLE SECRETS OF WORLD WAR II ALSO BY JAMES F. DUNNIGAN AND ALBERT A. NOFI Dirty Little Secrets ALSO BY JAMES F. DUNNIGAN How to Stop a War (with William Martel) A Quick and Dirty Guide to War (with Austin Bay) How to Make War The Complete Wargames Handbook Getting It Right (with Raymond M. Macedonia) ALSO BY ALBERT A. NOFI The Alamo and the Texas War for Independence The Civil War Treasury Eyewitness History of the Civil War The Gettysburg Campaign Napoleon at War The War Against Hitler: Military Strategy in the West DIRTY LITTLE SECRETS OF WORLD WAR II Military Information No One Told You About the Greatest, Most Terrible War in History James F. Dunnigan and Albert A. Nofi QUILL WILLIAM MORROW New York Copyright © 1994 by James F. Dunnigan and Albert A. Nofi All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher. Inquiries should be addressed to Permissions Department, William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1350 Avenue of the Americas, New York, N.Y. 10019. It is the policy of William Morrow and Company, Inc., and its imprints and affiliates, recognizing the importance of preserving what has been written, to print the books we publish on acid-free paper, and we exert our best efforts to that end. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dunnigan, James F. Dirty little secrets of World War II / James F. Dunnigan and Albert A. Nofi. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-688-12288-4 I. World War, 1939-1945-Miscellanea. I. Nofi, Albert A. II. Title. D744.D79 1994 940.53-dc20 94-16932 CIP Printed in the United States of America 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 BOOK DESIGN BY BERNARD SCHLEIFER For Marilyn J. Spencer and Lori Fawcett, In Loving Memory ACKNOWLEDGMENTS SPECIAL THANKS TO: Barney Dombrowski, Dennis Casey, Richard L. DiNardo, George Blagowidow, the editors and the staff of Strategy and Tactics maga- zine, the members of the New York Military Affairs Symposium, Fun H. Fong, Jr., Brian Sullivan, Patrick Abbazia, Wayne McKinney, Kath- leen Williams, Steve Laroe, Susan Leon, Bob Shuman, Richard Gar- czynski, John Boardman, David E. Schwartz, Roger Covington, Linda Grant DePauw, Steven J. Zaloga, Norman Friedman, Tom Holsinger, Mike Peterson, Tom Trinko, and Mary Spencer Nofi, who has to put up with one of us. CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 1 1. The Road to War 1 3 2. The World at War 48 3. The European War, 1939-1941 130 4. The Eastern Front, 1941-1945 155 5. The War in the West, 1941-1945 183 6. The Pacific War, 1941-1945 276 7. War in the Shadows 345 8. Making Peace 366 DIRTY LITTLE WORLD WAR II TIME LINE 381 RECOMMENDED READING 395 INDEX 401 INTRODUCTION This is not a history of World War II , but revelations about many of the lesser-known details. Because it is a book of facts, you don't read it from beginning to end, but rather you jump in wherever it strikes your fancy. There are over three hundred separate items, each a complete story in itself. As a rule, much of the information found in one section of the book will usually also be applicable to the others as well. After all, although aircraft carriers are inseparably associated with the Pacific war, they also performed yeoman service in the Atlantic and Mediterranean, while the problems of troop transport transcended theater. After reading this book, you'll never look at World War II the same way again. We have not changed the story of that conflict; we are providing information about it that is not generally known. We often look at the same subject from several different angles, giving you a better appreciation of, for example, how a blitzkrieg was conducted, what it took to supply partisans, and why the U.S. Army had more ships than the U.S. Navy. World War II was the most enormous human drama in history. No one volume could ever really come close to examining all of the unusual, and often important, aspects of this, history's greatest war. So much has had to be left out, from the drama of Dunkirk to the U.S. Navy's coal-burning, paddle-wheel aircraft carriers on the Great Lakes; from the Marine Corps's Navaho communications specialists to the 12 INTRODUCTION Japanese Navy's "American" pilots; not to mention the improbable adventures of FDR's son, the extraordinary antiarmor tactics of the Finns, and the secret missions of Harry Hopkins. Also left out are many interesting items from the "secondary" theaters such as China, Burma, Finland, and the Middle East. Moreover, the end of the Cold War has thrown open the Soviet World War II archives. Much fascinating ma- terial is coming out. We were shown a volume (in Russian) of some of the newly revealed material already being published in Russia and realized that we could have added several dozen pages of previously unknown goodies for this book from that one Russian volume alone. Well, if we sell enough copies of this book, there may be more. We certainly have enough to fill several more volumes. This book undoubtedly displays an "American" bias. This is nat- ural, given the audience. Without much difficulty the authors could produce a book of similar length with a "British" or "German" or "Chinese" bias which, while being somewhat repetitive, would still manage to include a lot of unusual and interesting material. World War II was the most enormous human drama in history, and there is far more to be told about it than can possibly be included between the covers of a single book. 1 THE ROAD TO WAR World War II didn't begin in a vacuum. The clouds were forming throughout the 1930s and the scene was set in a complex movement of political, social, and economic forces. BE AFRAID, BE VERY AFRAID From 1935 onward, the world had to endure one nerve-racking crisis after another as Italy, Germany, and Japan flexed their muscles in East Africa, central Europe, and East Asia. Then, during the first week of September 1939, when Germany invaded Poland, World War II was under way, as most of the major powers set their armies and navies in motion. America, however, the greatest industrial power on the planet, proclaimed neutrality and showed no enthusiasm for getting involved. This would eventually change, and not solely because of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Here is a list of the chief heart-stopping events you would have read about in the newspapers, seen in the newsreels (anyone remember newsreels?), or heard on the radio from 1935 onward. Read it and you will understand how the whole mess called World War II began. In 1 935, for Americans World War I was still a recent memory and the Great Depression gave most of them more immediate problems to deal with than war in Europe and Asia. Yet, throughout the world, you 1 3 1 4 DIRTY LITTLE SECRETS OF WORLD WAR II could see that something else was happening. And that something else was not good. Most of these prewar events have faded into the murky background of history. But the war did not begin for no reason. There were plenty of reasons, and plenty of signs that it was coming. (And these signs still reappear, indicating to those in the know that another world war is possible.) March 1935. Germany renounces the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, which ended World War I, and, in effect, begins openly rearming. There had been several serious disarmament conferences during the 1920s and a series of naval disarmament treaties had been signed and carried out. Germany had been effectively disarmed after World War I by the Versailles Treaty. During the early 1930s only the Soviet Union, Japan, and Italy were rearming (Germany was secretly getting ready to). But then Germany announced its intention to rearm and many Europeans and Americans feared the worst. Germany felt it had gotten a raw deal after World War I. The Germans had not been innocent participants in that war; all of the great powers were respon- sible for the conflict and the disaster it brought upon Europe. But the Germans lost the war, and the French had a big say in the peace terms. Germany was stripped of much territory and humiliated in general. A competent historian could have predicted, and several did, that on the basis of past experience this almost guaranteed another major war. On a more immediate note, the end of World War I was also the end of several empires. Many ethnic groups that had long been kept quiet by imperial armies and police were now free to settle ancient scores. Thus Germany wasn't the only nation looking for "revenge" in the 1930s, a lot of others had gripes too: the Soviet Union, Hungary, and Bulgaria had lost big time in 1918; and, not least, Italy and Japan, who had been among the winners back then, felt cheated of the loot. They all got their revenge, as well as a new crop of grudges. And now Germany, the most feared military power for the last seventy years, was arming itself again. August 1935. The U.S. Congress passes a neutrality act, which forbids loans or arms sales to participants in foreign wars. This act was brought about partially by the 1934-1936 Nye Com- mittee investigation, which left many Americans with the erroneous i mpression that U.S.