Air University Review, November-December 1979

To the Germans, who were in the bottom of the pit, defeated and destitute, 1945 was Jahr Null, Year Zero. The British were hungry and nearly bankrupt. The liberated peoples on the Continent were yet more hungry, and whether they were bankrupt or not was immaterial, especially for those under Soviet occupation. The peoples of the Soviet Union were probably the worst off. They had endured four years of wartime privation and were faced with more of the same. Americans, indeed, were different. They had the highest standard of living in the world--not just then but ever--and the Fords in their future were about to become realities along with television and supermarkets.

Nevertheless, 1945 was Year Zero for everyone who lived through World War II or has been born since. The war was the the war of the century, to date at least, and probably of all time. Other wars may have been equally or more consequential, the Persian Wars of the fourth century B.C., or the Punic Wars, for instance, maybe even the Thirty Years War and World War I. As a matter of fact, it can be argued that the second of the world wars was essentially a rematch in which the contestants tried to better the scores they had made in the first. Certainly Hitler saw it that way, as did Roosevelt and Churchill, and Stalin did, too, on matters of territory. They all got more than they anticipated, though: destruction of life and property on a scale never before seen and problems that would be nowhere near being solved more than a generation later. The war would cast a long shadow. In 1945 the world entered the postwar period, and no one to this day can say when or how it will emerge.

John Lukacs lived through Year Zero in his native country, Hungary. He has since become a professional historian in the United States. In these two circumstances lies the genesis of the book 1945: Year Zero,* which undertakes to combine conventional history with what Lukacs calls autohistory. The latter, Lukacs maintains, differs from an autobiography in that its sole purpose is to let the reader know the writer's relationship to his subject. Lukacs's autohistory discloses that he rejects Marxism of any kind, disdains Depression-born American liberalism, and regards the Soviet Union with cold detachment.

*John Lukacs, 1945: Year Zero (Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Company, 1978, $8.95), 322 pages.

It would probably not be very unfair to say that the whole book is a kind of autohistory, a flashback in the life of his times rather than a systematic study, an account of the way things were as John Lukacs saw them then and sees them now. And the picture is a dismal one of a world emerging from war into a murky future in the hands of four men: Churchill, an ineffectual relic of the Victorian era; Stalin, who had the outlook of a Russian peasant and was a slave to his own insecurity; Roosevelt, who died too early and took too long doing it; and Truman, a great president ill-served by his advisors.

Like Truman, the United States was great, holding the preponderance of real power in the world and not disinclined to use it in the general best interest; but the American people, too, were badly served by bureaucrats and politicians entrenched behind barricades of liberal clichés. And they were brainwashed--some years before the word itself came into existence--by the liberal press. Believing it was being progressive, the country made massive misjudgments, particularly concerning the Soviet Union, and, what was just as bad, began to spawn a radical mix of anticommunism and isolationism that would eventually become McCarthyism. Consequently, neither the people nor their leaders were disposed to take up the challenge of 1945 and fashion a new world. The result was what Lukacs calls a "state of protracted continuity" in which much goes on without producing a real change, an endless chewing of the same piece of bubble gum.

The world does seem to have gotten stuck in 1945. Many things ended in that year: the European state system and the balance of power; the threat of fascism and the quarantine on communism; the dream of a war to end all wars; and, ironically, perhaps warfare as it had been practiced until then. These and more left behind problems that have not been solved, but the world has gone thirty-four years without another major war and in the majority of those has experienced unprecedented economic prosperity.

What made 1945 Year Zero was, after all, the six years of war that preceded it. The war changed the world and did so, as wars are likely to do, in ways no one could predict or control. And it has stayed with us as much as its aftereffects. For most of those who were in it, it was the biggest, though seldom the most pleasant, experience of their lives. Those who were not, and no doubt also many who were, seem to want to return to it vicariously; hence, the republication in paperback of General Omar N. Bradley's 1951 memoir, A Soldier's Story,* one of many and one of the best in that genre.

*Omar N. Bradley, A Soldier's Story (Chicago: Rand McNally and Company, 1978, $6.95), 618 pages.

Bradley’s is a simpler world than Lukacs's, which may go a good way toward explaining its attraction. Lukacs, of course, might say it was Bradley and his like who were simple or, at least, found it politic to appear to be so. Lukacs cross-examines the past from a distance of three decades. Bradley, writing closer to the events, deals with it as it was. To take one example, Lukacs asks, "What would have happened if the Americans and not the Russians had arrived in Berlin and in Prague at the end of the war? The postwar realities of Europe, and of the world, may have been different." Bradley says, "When Eisenhower asked me what I thought it might cost us to break through from the Elbe to Berlin, I estimated 100,000 casualties. 'A pretty stiff price to pay for a prestige objective,' I said, 'especially when we've got to fall back and let the other fellow take over.'" Prague, Bradley indicates, would have been easier, but "Because Czechoslovakia had already been earmarked for liberation by the Red Army, we were not to advance beyond Pilsen, a few miles inside the border." Simple? Perhaps. But would the alternative have been better? Taking Berlin and Prague would probably not have made all that big a difference. They would have had to be part of a much more extensive, costly, and dangerous enterprise.

Reading Bradley puts Year Zero into another perspective. Operation Overlord, in which Bradley commanded First: United States Army in the landing and on the beachhead and Twelfth Army Group from the breakout to the German surrender, was a truly remarkable undertaking. Only the United States could have put together the ground, air, and naval forces to carry an invasion force across a major water barrier and support it on an advance more than six hundred miles deep into enemy-held territory. Even so, there were hitches--a painfully slow breakout from the beachhead in July 1944, motor fuel and ammunition droughts in September and October, and the Bulge in December. And, big as it was, Overlord was not the whole war. Before it began, the Soviet armies had for a year and a half been pushing the Germans back from Leningrad, Moscow, and Stalingrad on a front that at one time spanned over three thousand miles. At the end, Eisenhower had two million troops in Western Europe; the Russians had more like six million. The American troops wanted to go home, and most of them promptly did. The Soviet troops, no doubt, also wanted to go home, but nobody was listening to them. The United States had the atomic bomb. Specifically, it had three bombs, one that was tested in New Mexico in July 1945 and the two that were dropped on Japan in August, and it would not have more until late in the year. As a power, the United States undoubtedly stood head and shoulders above the Soviet Union, but, although it could not enforce a settlement completely satisfactory to itself, the Soviet Union did have the strength to secure a stalemate and prolong it indefinitely.

Gerrit Zijlstra is neither a military professional like Bradley nor, like Lukacs, an academic historian. He is what an art critic would call a primitive, an unschooled craftsman. In fact, Diary of an Air War is not even a diary.* It is a chronology put together long after the events with which it is concerned, and, as such, it completely lacks the customary apparatus of source citations, except for one footnote. The bibliography is short and haphazard, the one outstanding work listed being the official U.S. Air Force history on which the author, no doubt, drew heavily.¹ (Incidentally, a more comprehensive chronology based on the official history has been published by the Air University.²) The only qualifications Zijlstra claims are a lifelong interest aroused when he saw the American bombers flying over his home in Holland as a boy during the war, a great deal of reading about the planes, and a desire to pay tribute to the men who flew them. The latter he has done. Whatever its deficiencies, this book gives as good a feel of what the air war was like for the Eighth and Ninth Air Forces as any that has been written.

*Gerrit Zijlstra, Diary of an Air War (New York: Vantage Press, 1977, $12.50), 487 pages.

A chronology is not a satisfactory vehicle for treatments of strategy, for instance, or policy, or the processes of decision-making, and these mostly are missing in the Diary. On the other hand, the day by day piling up of seemingly--and often actually--unrelated episodes, the sporadic flashes of drama that come unannounced and pass without an afterglance, and the routine bookkeeping inherent in a chronology can develop a remarkable impact. The form appears to be particularly suited to air warfare, which by nature tends to run on a daily cycle.

What strikes one most, particularly one who spent a good deal of time in unpleasant circumstances on the ground envying the aircrews who could do their work in a couple of hours and be home in time for a meal and a good night's sleep, is how dangerous it was. For the ground soldier, there usually was a chance that the crunch would come somewhere else; for those who flew in the bombers, the B-17 Flying Fortresses and B-24 Liberators especially, there hardly ever was. And the enemy was good at his business, too. He could pick off almost a whole wing of Fortresses left without fighter cover for twenty minutes or so, and the Liberators were, if anything, easier. A fighter pilot could count on his skill, a bomber crew on nothing, excepting, perhaps, luck. The majority would come back from the worst of missions, but there would always be the next mission, and the odds did not change all that much until late in the war. The P-47 Thunderbolts and the P-38 Lightnings helped, and the long-range P-51 Mustangs made a difference in the last year. On the other hand, German Me-262 jets shot down five Fortresses over Prague on 19 April 1945, three days after General Carl Spaatz had declared the victory in the strategic air war.

True. In Year Zero. United States air power dominated the world's skies. The Eighth and Ninth Air Forces' contributions alone, however, had cost 5200 heavy bombers, 800 medium and light bombers, 4200 fighters, and 10,000 men.

A readable (in about two hours) wrap-up of the war is Edward Jablonski's Pictorial History,* and not too many of the pictures are old stand-bys. Apropos Year Zero, Jablonski quotes General MacArthur who, in his message broadcast from the battleship Missouri after the Japanese surrender, said, "A new era is upon us. Even the lesson of victory itself brings with it profound concern, both for our future security and the survival of civilization." And so it has been.

*Edward Jablonski, A Pictorial History of the World War II Years (Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Company, 1977, $12.50), 319 pages.

Notes

1. W. F. Craven and J. L. Cate, The Army Air Forces in World War II (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1948-51).

2. Kit C. Carter and Robert Mueller, The Army Air Forces in World War II, Combat Chronology, 1941-45 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1978).

Earl F. Ziemke (M.A., Ph.D., University of Wisconsin) is a University Research Professor of History at the University of Georgia, Athens. During World War II, he served with the U.S. Marine Corps in the Pacific. Subsequently, he was employed in research on captured German documents under an Air Research and Development Command contract with Columbia University and as a military historian with the Department of the Army. His publications include Stalingrad to Berlin: The German Defeat in the East and The US Army in the Occupation of Germany.

Disclaimer

The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.

Air & Space Power Home Page | Feedback? Email the Editor