World War II Chronicle: April 30, 1943
Page two reports that large formations of Lockheed P-38 Lightning fighters are now flying across the Atlantic to reach combat units in Europe and North Africa. There is attrition, with several planes having mechanical issues or ditching in the ocean, and that brings up the logistics of how best to get everything from the United States to the front. You may not be terribly interested in the logistics of combat, but the economics behind the war can make just as important — or even more so — than the thrilling strategy and tactics. We had brilliant leaders and hard-nosed fighters. So did the Germans, and as we can see in Tunisia the Afrikakorps had more experience. I would argue a major factor in how well we fought was because our capitalist system was far more efficient than that of Nazi Germany. They are dumping tons of precious manpower and resources into super weapons like jets, missiles, and remarkable tanks that, while impressive and well ahead of their time, have little strategic impact. Meanwhile, the United States is determining what will have the biggest impact on the war and making a ton of it, despite having the challenge of having to split everything between two theaters — both of which require shipping.
While we can wonder years later why they risked the losses of pilots and P-38s, back then it was someone’s only job to figure it all out. And they determined that the reward of increased shipping space was more valuable than the risk of transatlantic flight. Since the twin-engine warplanes had enough range to hop the pond, the vast majority of planes still get there and the convoys could carry other things like fuel, camouflage netting, or cartons of cigarettes which can actually be just as crucial to the fighting man as the Lightning.
It would be fascinating to see, if there was some kind of simulator that did this, how things would turn out if the American people switched places with Germans. Fascists will be fascists, so it wouldn’t be long before the simulated Fourth Reich expanded into Canada and down through Central America. But in this case, we’d task Hitler with fighting in Europe and in the Pacific.
Instead of having to produce massive fleets of Liberty ships, everything the European United States did would be within relatively easy reach. We’d only be fighting in one hemisphere instead of two. Instead of super weapons, have our troops armed with cheap and easily maintained vehicles and plenty of fuel with fleets of four-engined bombers. Our limited industrial capacity I think wouldn’t be as much of a factor if we weren’t stupid enough to invade the Soviet Union or devote resources to a genocide. Could Hitler and his staff get what they needed across an Atlantic swimming with our submarines? And how would they have stacked up against well-supplied Americans with plenty of combat experience? I don’t think Germany would have fared well at all, even having the benefit of factories and their vast resources being so far away from the war. I think it would be just a matter of time before you had American bases on Vichy French territories off the coast of Canada and then the battle would bleed into North America.
But then you could get into the “what-ifs:” If we had invaded the Soviet Union I don’t think it would have ended much better for us. While it’s not hard to think we could have captured Moscow, the USSR was just too big and had too many people. Every country has its dark past, but America in the early 1940s was not a culture of conquest. And when the Japanese attacked our simulated North American Germany, what if we didn’t declare war as Hitler did? Interesting to ponder. And could the challenges of distance force the Germans to focus more on an atomic weapon? The bomb in Hitler’s hands and not ours would be a game-changer.
Also on page two is a story of a sailor being washed off his destroyer by high seas and miraculously being dumped on another ship 40 minutes later by another wave… George Fielding Eliot column on page eight… The “Torpedo 8” story continues on page 19… A war correspondent tells of riding along on a 10-hour bombing mission in the Pacific, the longest task force operation of the war so far (see page 30)… Sports begins on page 41
Roving Reporter by Ernie Pyle
NORTHERN TUNISIA. — Africa is a strange country, and this war is very little like the last war in France. Yet here too many an American sleeps beneath a field of poppies — poppies so red and vivid that their beauty is strangely saddening.
The desert battlefields and the northern battleground too are alive now with flowers. They grow wild, in patches as thick as grass blanketing in solid acres. They grow together in vast stretches of red, yellow and orange, all of it framed by the lush green of new grass.
Even the dullest spirits among us can’t help being touched by their ironical loveliness.
I have stopped now and then to see some of the battle graveyards. The Germans bury their dead in small cemeteries along the roadsides, but we concentrate in fewer and bigger graveyards, usually on the edge of some town. Arabs are hired to dig the graves.
At Gafaa there is an American cemetery with more than 600 graves. It is in desert-like country, and the graves are aligned in precise rows in the naked gray earth. Each is marked with a waist-high wooden cross.
In a nearby tent is a great pile of ready-made crosses, and a stack of newly carpentered wooden markers in the form of the Star of David, for the Jewish dead.
As all the American dead in the Gafaa area have been located and reburied in the permanent graveyard, this cemetery section will move on to other fronts.
The little German cemeteries are always bordered with rows of white rocks, and in some there will be a phrase neatly spelled out in white rocks with a border around it. One that I remember said, in rough translation:
“These dead gave their spirits for the glory of Greater Germany.”
In one German cemetery of about a hundred graves we found 11 Americans. They lay among the Germans, not segregated in any way. Their graves are identical with those of the Germans except beneath the names on the wooden crosses is printed “Amerikaner,” and below that the Army serial number. We presume their “Dog Tags” were buried with them.
On one of the graves, beneath the soldier’s serial number, is also printed: “T-40.” The Germans apparently thought that was part of his number. Actually it only showed that the man had his first anti-tetanus shot in 1940.
My friend Sgt. Pat Donado of Pittsburgh was with me when we looked at this graveyard, and as we left he said:
“They respect our dead the same as we do theirs. It’s comforting to know that.”
We also came upon a number of Italian graveyards set out in fields. These graves too were well marked, and each had a bouquet of wilted marigolds.
At the side of one little Italian cemetery, which was beautifully bordered and decorated, were half a dozen additional graves, apparently dug at the last minute before retreat. They were just rough mounds, unmarked except for an empty quart wine bottle stuck upside down at the head of each grave. Inside the bottles we could see scraps of paper, apparently with the dead Italian’s names and numbers on them. Naturally we wouldn’t violate these graves by pulling out the bottles, but even if our inclination had been rowdy we would have been afraid to. There are rumors, which I have not been able to verify, that such grave-marking bottles are sometimes booby traps.
The Germans leave very clean country behind them. Their savage organization must be one of the best in the world — probably because of desperate necessity. We’ve gone all over the Tunisian country from which they have fled, and evidences that they have been there are slight. You see burned-out tanks in the fields, and some wrecked scout cars and Italian trucks lying in roadside ditches, and that is about all. Nothing is left behind that is repairable. Wrecked cars are stripped of their tires, instruments and lights. They leave no tin cans, boxes or other junk as we do.
We’ve seen little evidence of German earth-scorching, probably because the retreat northward was too fast. Some bridges were blown up. Mountain passes and the paths around wrecked bridges were all heavily mined.
But the most noticeable thing is the destruction of all telephone lines. They cut down about every other pole along the highways, and snipped most of the wires. The poles weren’t chopped down. They were sawed off about two feet above the ground and very neatly sawed off too, the fastidious marauders.
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Evening star. (Washington, D.C.), 30 April 1943. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress.
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045462/1943-04-30/ed-1/