Jack Lucas was 17 when he earned the Medal of Honor,
America’s highest award for valor in combat. He once
thanked me for my service. Wow.
World War II was the bloodiest conflict in human history. We’ve been offing each other wholesale ever since Cain first got cross with his brother Abel. The Second World War just took everything to the next level.
Part of it was the scope of the thing. World war was not hyperbole. Most everybody on Planet Earth called a side and then went at it. The other bit was technology. In the past, we had done okay developing the tools and tactics to support mass homicide. During WWII, we raised that to an art form.
World War II burned on for six years. It ultimately claimed upwards of 80 million lives. That’s about 3% of the human species at the time. About a third of that was the result of famine and disease that exploded secondary to the conflict.
Chairman Mao said that a single death is a tragedy but that a million deaths was a statistic. Today, I’d like to dig a little bit deeper. Let’s explore some of the details associated with the most horrible war in human history.
In the Beginning …
The first German serviceman to perish during the war was Lieutenant von Schmeling. He was killed by the Japanese in 1937 while leading a Chinese infantry battalion as a military advisor to the Nationalists.
The Royal Air Force launched their first serious nighttime raid on Berlin on 26 August 1940. It was an unmitigated disaster. Six of the 50 bombers were lost, two Germans were slightly injured, and a single woodshed in a Berlin suburb was destroyed. The ill-fated raid did, however, kill one of the nine elephants held in the Berlin Zoo. Only one of the nine, an Indian bull named Siam, survived the war.
This is Calvin Graham. He was 12 when he conned
his way into the U.S. Navy during WWII.
Things Get Real
Truth be known, the war was over the moment the first bomb fell on Pearl Harbor. It just took another four years or so to work out the details. Grit and valor rightfully captured the headlines, but it was American production that really drove the train.
In 1941, the U.S. auto industry produced more than 3 million civilian cars. For the rest of the war, we only built 139. Every single bit of that production went to war materiel. The world had never seen production on that scale, and it never will again.
The U.S. Navy entered the war with seven fleet carriers and one escort carrier. By the end of 1942, the Japanese had sunk four of them.
By D-Day, we severely curtailed the production of capital ships. The writing was on the wall that we would win the war. While we began WWII with eight aircraft carriers, we ended the conflict with 111. At the height of production, we were churning out 65,000 M1 carbines per day.
Such breathtaking production made a great many people filthy rich. Both Henry Ford and Adolf Hitler kept pictures of each other in their personal offices. Before the war was done, we had produced enough ammunition to shoot every human being on the planet 40 times.
Relativity
I was a military pilot myself, which is the sexiest job in the universe. Every normal male, in quiet moments, imagines himself tearing about the skies over Europe in a P38 Lightning or P51 Mustang. During the course of the war, more than 128,000 Allied aircrewmen died in combat. More U.S. Army Air Corps personnel fell than did U.S. Marines.
In total, 27,000 American fliers were killed in action. In 1943, at the height of the air war in Europe, only one in four bomber crewmen survived to complete a full 25 missions. The remaining 75% were wounded, captured or killed. Fifty-one percent of British Bomber Command crews perished. However, as bad as that was, German U-boat men had it worse. Three-quarters of them were lost to the sea.
Perceptions
We rightfully fixate on American exploits during the war. “Band of Brothers,” “Saving Private Ryan,” “Masters of the Air,” and “The Pacific” tend to burn the details into our national consciousness. However, if the sheer volume of blood spilled is your metric, the places where our boys bled and died were sideshows. The Eastern Front was the real slaughterhouse.
Eighty percent of the German dead incurred during the war fell on the Eastern Front. Four-fifths of all Russian males born in 1923 did not survive the war. WWII claimed 15% of the total Russian population. More Russians died during the siege of Stalingrad than the U.S. and Britain lost during the entire conflict.
William Hitler, Adolf’s nephew, served in
the U.S. Navy during the war.
Total War
Winning the war required a maximum effort. Adolf Hitler’s nephew William served in the U.S. Navy. The youngest American serviceman was a U.S. Navy sailor named Calvin Graham. Calvin was 12 when he lied about his age and somehow got past the recruiters. His actual age was not discovered until after he was wounded in combat.
Jack Lucas was big for his age. He forged his mother’s name and bribed a notary to enlist in the Marine Corps at age 14. When his commander found out how young he was, he was removed from his combat unit. Jack subsequently went AWOL and stowed away aboard an assault transport headed for Iwo Jima. He was in combat for 48 hours. During that time, he threw himself on top of two live Japanese grenades at the same time to save his buddies, and yet miraculously survived. He earned the Medal of Honor at age 17. The first communication I had with the man, he thanked me, for my service.
Lt. Hiroo Onoda was the second-to-last Japanese soldier
to surrender after WWII. He survived and fought in the Philippine
jungles for nearly 29 years after the war formally ended.
Epilogue
Many Japanese soldiers refused to surrender. They trickled in from the jungles for decades afterward. Lt. Hiroo Onoda was the next to last.
An Imperial Japanese Army intelligence officer, Lt. Onoda, fought a guerilla war in the Philippines until 1974. His unit killed some 30 Filipinos after the war ended. Despite loudspeakers, leaflets and a personal entreaty from the Emperor, Onoda adamantly refused to quit. It was only when his former commander trekked in to order him to stand down that he finally came out of the jungle.
When he surrendered, Onoda had in his possession his sword, a serviceable Type 99 Arisaka rifle, several live hand grenades and 500 rounds of ammunition. He also had a dagger given to him by his mother, along with instructions to kill himself in lieu of capture. World War II was indeed a war like no other.
