REVOLUTION

In the summer and spring of 1789, American newspapers carried the first news of the revolutionary turmoil in Paris. First came the meeting of the Estates-General in May, then the National Assembly in June, and then the fall of the Bastille in July. In August, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizens was ratified, and Americans could not fail to note its resemblance to the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, upon which it was largely based.

In its early, temperate stages, from the spring of 1789 through the fall of 1791, the French Revolution was greeted with near-universal rejoicing in America. The beloved Lafayette was conspicuously at the center of the events unfolding in Paris, where he served as vice president of the National Assembly and commander of the revolutionary militia. He sent George Washington the key to the Bastille, engraved with the words: “It is a tribute which I owe to you, as a son to my adoptive father, as an aide-de-camp to my General, as a Missionary of Liberty to its Patriarch.” On the streets of American cities and towns, a rush of nostalgia brought back all of the old symbolism and music and pageantry of the American Revolution. Liberty poles were erected in town squares, just as they had been in 1776; men wore liberty hats, just as they had in 1776. At festivals and civic feasts, the Stars and Stripes appeared alongside the new Tricolor of Revolutionary France: a red, white, and blue flag designed by Lafayette himself to replace the royal white banner of the Bourbons.

Beginning in mid-1792, however, there were disturbing reports of mob savagery on the streets of Paris. In August, a crowd gathered outside the Palace of the Tuileries, where the royal family was being held in closely guarded splendor, and howled for the king’s head. They slaughtered some five hundred of the king’s Swiss Guards and paraded their severed heads on pikes. Lafayette was denounced and forced to flee across the border, where he was captured by the Austrians and thrown into jail. In September, as foreign armies massed on the border, rumors of a domestic counterrevolutionary plot circulated among the sans-culottes of the Parisian mobs.

More than a thousand prisoners, among them women, children, and priests, were dragged virtually at random from their cells and hacked to pieces. The princesse de Lamballe, a friend and confidante of the queen, was raped, murdered, and mutilated; her head was exhibited on a pike beneath Marie-Antoinette’s window. The duc de La Rochefoucauld, the man who had first translated the Declaration of Independence, was snatched from his carriage and stoned to death as his wife and aging mother watched helplessly.  

The details of the massacres were so outlandish that many Americans refused to believe them. Jefferson maintained that they should be dismissed as English propaganda. But in late March 1793, shortly after Washington was sworn in for his second term as president, news arrived in Philadelphia that could not be so easily ignored. Louis XVI had been sent to the guillotine in the public square named for his father. As his severed head was lifted from the basket into which it had fallen, cries of “Vive la Republique!” had resounded through the streets of Paris and “every hat was in the air.”

Ian W. Toll, Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the U.S. Navy (66-67). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.

NAVY

 Of the thirteen American frigates built during the Revolution, seven were captured and taken into the Royal Navy, and another four were destroyed to prevent their falling into enemy hands….

…Robert Morris said there was no use keeping a navy afloat if the American people were unwilling to bear the financial burden. “Until Revenues for the Purpose can be obtained it is but vain to talk of Navy or Army or anything else….Every good American must wish to see the United States possessed of a powerful fleet, but perhaps the best way to obtain one is to make no Effort for the Purpose till the People are taught by their Feelings to call for and require it. They will now give money for Nothing.”

Ian W. Toll, Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the U.S. Navy (18-19). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.

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ON JUNE 6, 1944, AS ALLIED TROOPS STORMED THE BEACHES OF northern France, President Roosevelt offered a simple prayer over the radio: “Almighty God: Our sons, pride of our Nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity. . . . With Thy blessing, we shall prevail over the unholy force of our enemy.”

The president knew, but could not yet disclose, that another great amphibious flotilla was underway in the Pacific. If not for the invasion of northern France (OVERLORD), the Pacific operation (FORAGER) would have surpassed all previous amphibious landings in scale and sophistication. That two such colossal assaults could be launched against fortified enemy shores, in the same month and at opposite ends of the Eurasian landmass, was a supreme demonstration of American military-industrial hegemony. The force that sailed against the Marianas included more than 600 ships carrying more than 300,000 men. Admiral Marc Mitscher’s Task Force 58 now included fifteen (fleet) aircraft carriers divided into four task groups. Task Force 51, the Joint Expeditionary Force, carried 127,000 amphibious assault troops, including the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th Marine Divisions and the army’s 27th Infantry Division. 

Records enumerated 40,000 discrete categories of supplies and munitions in the holds of the transports. These had been combat-loaded so that they could be removed and transferred to the beachhead quickly and in exactly the quantities requested by the troops ashore. For every one marine or soldier in the landing force, the transport fleet carried more than a ton of supplies and equipment. A single supply ship brought rations to feed 90,000 men for a month. Mitscher’s task force carried eight million gallons of aviation fuel, and would burn more than four million barrels of bunker oil during the operation. 

An F6F pilot, flying above Task Force 58 during the five-day passage from Eniwetok to Saipan, was impressed by the sight of the fleet as it turned into the wind to launch aircraft. Carriers, battleships, cruisers, and destroyers turned together and steadied on the same course. “The wakes from all of those ships were perfectly symmetrical with each other, like a perfect corps de ballet, but some of these ships weighed thirty-five thousand tons. I looked down on this power and wondered what kind of fools these Japanese were. They had made one of the greatest miscalculations of all time, and boy, were they going to pay a price.”

Ian W. Toll, The Conquering Tide: War in the Pacific Islands, 1942-1944 (Vol. 2) (The Pacific War Trilogy): War in the Pacific Islands, 1942–1944 (457-458). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.

HOLOCAUST

 U.S. Holocaust Museum

What was the Holocaust? 

The Holocaust (1933–1945) was the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million European Jews by the Nazi German regime and its allies and collaborators. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum defines the years of the Holocaust as 1933–1945. The Holocaust era began in January 1933 when Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power in Germany. It ended in May 1945, when the Allied Powers defeated Nazi Germany in World War II. The Holocaust is also sometimes referred to as “the Shoah,” the Hebrew word for “catastrophe.”

When they came to power in Germany, the Nazis did not immediately start to carry out mass murder. However, they quickly began using the government to target and exclude Jews from German society. Among other antisemitic measures, the Nazi German regime enacted discriminatory laws and organized violence targeting Germany’s Jews. The Nazi persecution of Jews became increasingly radical between 1933 and 1945. This radicalization culminated in a plan that Nazi leaders referred to as the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question.” The “Final Solution” was the organized and systematic mass murder of European Jews. The Nazi German regime implemented this genocide between 1941 and 1945.

Why did the Nazis target Jews?

The Nazis targeted Jews because the Nazis were radically antisemitic. This means that they were prejudiced against and hated Jews. In fact, antisemitism was a basic tenet of their ideology and at the foundation of their worldview. 

The Nazis falsely accused Jews of causing Germany’s social, economic, political, and cultural problems. In particular, they blamed them for Germany’s defeat in World War I (1914–1918). Some Germans were receptive to these Nazi claims. Anger over the loss of the war and the economic and political crises that followed contributed to increasing antisemitism in German society. The instability of Germany under the Weimar Republic (1918–1933), the fear of communism, and the economic shocks of the Great Depression also made many Germans more open to Nazi ideas, including antisemitism.

However, the Nazis did not invent antisemitism. Antisemitism is an old and widespread prejudice that has taken many forms throughout history. In Europe, it dates back to ancient times. In the Middle Ages (500–1400), prejudices against Jews were primarily based in early Christian belief and thought, particularly the myth that Jews were responsible for the death of Jesus. Suspicion and discrimination rooted in religious prejudices continued in early modern Europe (1400–1800). At that time, leaders in much of Christian Europe isolated Jews from most aspects of economic, social, and political life. This exclusion contributed to stereotypes of Jews as outsiders. As Europe became more secular, many places lifted most legal restrictions on Jews. This, however, did not mean the end of antisemitism. In addition to religious antisemitism, other types of antisemitism took hold in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries. These new forms included economic, nationalist, and racial antisemitism. In the 19th century, antisemites falsely claimed that Jews were responsible for many social and political ills in modern, industrial society. Theories of race, eugenics, and Social Darwinism falsely justified these hatreds. Nazi prejudice against Jews drew upon all of these elements, but especially racial antisemitism. Racial antisemitism is the discriminatory idea that Jews are a separate and inferior race. 

The Nazi Party promoted a particularly virulent form of racial antisemitism. It was central to the party’s race-based worldview.

GOING TO WAR

Their fateful decision to attack the United States and the Allies in December 1941 had been founded upon a catalog of faulty assumptions. They had assumed that the war could be won quickly, averting a prolonged war of attrition in which American economic power would become decisive. They had assumed that Nazi Germany was unbeatable in Europe, and would break Britain and Russia to its yoke; that sea routes linking Japan to its oil supply in the East Indies could be secured against submarine and air attacks; and that the main U.S. naval fleet would charge into the western Pacific to be met and annihilated in a single decisive sea battle, reprising the Imperial Navy’s triumph at the Battle of Tsushima in 1905.

From childhood, the Japanese had been taught that they were a unique race, guided by a divine emperor, watched over by their ancient gods, with a sacred destiny to rule Asia. Indulging shallow stereotypes about American culture and democracy, the Japanese miscalculated the temper and character of their enemy. They assumed that Americans lacked the stomach to fight a long, bloody war on the opposite side of the world. They assumed that their enemies had grown soft and decadent by easy living, and were hopelessly infatuated by popular entertainment.

The Americans were a mongrel people, a nation of immigrants, without unity or higher purpose, enfeebled by racial, ethnic, class, and ideological infighting. Women had the vote, and therefore wielded influence in politics—and they would resist sending their sons and husbands to fight on distant foreign shores. The size and strength of the U.S. economy would count for nothing if it could not be mobilized for war, and the capitalist oligarchs would not consent to retool their lucrative industries. The strike on Pearl Harbor was intended to shock and demoralize the American public, so that they would react to the disaster by pressuring Washington to make peace. 

 “We thought that we could easily tackle them,” a leading Japanese officer later admitted, “a race so steeped in material comfort and absorbed in the pursuit of pleasure was spiritually degenerate.”

If all of these premises had been right, Japan would have won the Pacific War, and might even be the dominant power in the region today. If even some had been right, Japan might have escaped the conflict with its sovereignty intact, and perhaps some remnant of its overseas empire. But as it turned out, all of these assumptions, in some degree, were wrong. In a sense, as Admiral Yonai and others grasped, the outcome of the Pacific War had been foreordained from the start, and Japan’s defeat was plainly foreseeable even in December 1941. Worse, defeat was actually foreseen and even predicted by some of the men who had acquiesced in the fateful decision to launch the unwinnable war in the first place. Above all, the Pacific War was the product of a political failure in Tokyo—a failure of catastrophic proportions, one of the worst in the annals of any government or any nation.

Ian W. Toll, Twilight of the Gods: War in the Western Pacific, 1944-1945 (Vol. 3) (The Pacific War Trilogy) (768-769). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.