Japan was an expansionist and for good reason; it had to import more raw materials like oil, tin, rubber, and iron to name a few. These existed in significant quantities in Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, and the Phillippines, then a territory of the United States. Japan also needed an export market for its finished products. The Japanese officials proclaimed a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere of influence.
In fact, Japan was industrializing its economy rapidly and needed these raw materials. They had discovered that with rapid industrialization, Japan lost cropland overriding the rise in land productivity. Essentially, Japan had to have arable land to expand food production. And despite treaties reducing the size and configuration of naval warships, Japan found ways around these treaty limitations. As the United States later discovered, quite a few of Japan's carrier aircraft were models of the German ME109. A reasonable case may be made for the proposition that Japan anticipated a war it would start, probably under cover of diplomatic negotiations. Some of its military adventurism in China was merely a prelude to an expanded war. After all, the Japanese had learned from Germany, Italy, and Spain that its armed forces needed training under real conditions.
The Spanish Civil War in 1936 was an early example of the same principle. There, however, Germany shipped its aircraft and other weapons to General Francisco Franco. A revolt of the Spanish military put Franco in charge of Spain, opposed only by the Spanish Republicans. Roosevelt had tried an end run around America's Neutrality Act by shipping weapons to France for transfer to the Republicans. Italy, too, under Benito Mussolini, decided it needed land in Africa, so it chose Ethiopia and bombed its helpless unarmed civilians. King Haile Selassie appeared before the League of Nations which could do no more than protest helplessly while the carnage continued. The same atmosphere of helplessness kept the French from doing anything constructive when Hitler's armed forces marched into the Rhineland in 1936, territory Germany had lost as a result of World War I.
All of this military strutting of the dictators like Japan's Hideki Tojo, Hitler, Franco, and Mussolini produced a reaction from President Roosevelt. On October 5, 1937 before a crowd of some 50,000 people at the dedication of Chicago's Outer Drive Bridge, a Public Work's Administration project, Roosevelt delivered his "Quarantine" address. The only paragraph in which the word "quarantine" appeared was only a little over two lines in the entire speech, even though the paragraph preceding had stated that "It seems to be unfortunately true that the epidemic of world lawlessness was spreading. When an epidemic of physical disease starts to spread, the community approves and joins in a quarantine of the patients in order to protect the health of the community against the spread of the disease."
Yet Roosevelt's prompted comment nationwide, most of it favorable, apparently easing the public perception of possible American involvement in war. An examination of the White House files now in the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library at Hyde Park reveals that the wires and letter the president received were overwhelmingly favorable. Clearly, Roosevelt meant Japan should be quarantined, and on the next day, the League of Nations adopted a motion censuring Japan.
The censure came far too late; leaders of the Western world, including Roosevelt and England's Baldwin should have known war was imminent. In Germany, the Nazis were clearly headed for war, and their persecution of the Jews became worse than ever. On November 10, 1938 the Nazi thugs went on a murderous spree of threats and vilification of Jews plus widespread damage to their shops and homes throughout Germany. Historians named it "Crystalnacht," the "Night of the Shattered Glass."
Nazi Germany had rearmed despite language in the Treaty of Versailles limiting rearmament. Less than a year later, Germany was at war with Poland. France and England, bound to defend Poland by treaty, declared war on Germany on September 3, 1939. War was the German goal. Hitler had said repeatedly that Germany needed Lebensraum -- more land for its population. In 1938, the Austrian Anschluss occurred, and it became part of Germany by force. Hitler was not content. He demanded the area of Czechoslovakia known as the Sudentenland, an area with a significant German population. Great Britain's Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, went to Munich and returned to London waving a paper signed by Hitler. "Peace in our time," announced Chamberlain to a cheering airport crowd. War followed this announcement within a few months.
Whether the Soviet Union actually anticipated Germany's plans seems uncertain. However, weeks before war began, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler's Minister of Foreign Affairs signed a cynical agreement with Joseph Stalin in Moscow. This agreement allowed Stalin to partition Poland once again after its defeat by the Nazis, and it allowed Stalin to annex the Baltic states, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia.
Actually, for fifty years, the Soviet Union denied the existence of the secret Protocol allowing the annexation of the Baltic states. Soviet troops occupied all three of these countries beginning in 1940. Publicly, the agreement was described as the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact. Critics of this agreement argued that Stalin signed the agreement with Germany to buy time for the Soviet Union to modernize and expand its military against the anticipated attack against the Soviet Union by Germany. However, Allied intelligence was able to fix the date of the German attack, but Stalin didn't believe what he was told. As a result, Nazi forces were initially successful and advanced within striking distance of Moscow.
In the United States, President Roosevelt was determined to help Great Britain despite the Neutrality Act. The Selective Service Act of 1940 passed with only one vote to spare. There was a mood of isolationism in the country, so Roosevelt had to move carefully. Even his Lend-Lease deal came in for criticism. By it, the United States acquired the use of military bases like Bermuda and other possessions of Great Britain in the Caribbean Sea in exchange for lending Britain some old, surplus destroyers. The British Navy had to protect its convoys from attacks by German submarines.
During his campaign against Wendell Wilkie in 1940, Roosevelt addressed Congress on May 16, 1940. "These are ominous days,"he said, "days whose swift and shocking developments force every neutral nation to look to its defenses in the light of new factors....No old defense is so strong that it requires no further strengthening and no attack is so unlikely or impossible that it may be ignored." However, America's armed forces were in a sad state of unpreparedness for modern warfare with its emphasis on aircraft and tanks. So Roosevelt, in a shrewd move, created the National Defense Advisory Commission. Its seven members were appointed by the president and drawn from the very industries that had denounced Roosevelt for what they claimed were his New Deal excesses. The new Commission was literally charged with converting the American economy from a peacetime to a wartime footing without actually being at war.
However, the frightening advance of Hitler's armies into France dramatized the plight in which England and France found themselves in June, 1940. In one of his first military mistakes, Hitler ordered a three-day pause, before allowing his victorious forces to proceed against British forces, cleaning them up at Dunkirk before entering Paris. The pause was long enough for a motley collection of boats, from yachts to corvettes and destroyers to rescue and deliver safely to British shores, some 350,000 men.
On this occasion, Winston Churchill, having replaced Neville Chamberlain as Prime Minister, addressed Parliament. "We shall not flag or fail," Churchill promised. "We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall in the seas and oceans....we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle until in God's good time, the new world, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old."
On June 10,1940 Benito Mussolini fearing he might not share in the spoils of the German victory, persuaded Italy to declare war on England and France. Fortuitously, Roosevelt was delivering an address to the University of Virginia one day later. In his speech, Roosevelt dropped any lingering notion that the United States was neutral. "On this tenth day of June," he told the students, "the hand that held the dagger has struck it into France's back."
Almost exactly a year later, Germany invaded Russia on June 22, 1940. This stunning event certainly signaled that Germany had postponed any thought of invading England. Hitler's generals had been concerned. A war on two fronts at the same was a military nightmare to them. Communists in the United States had to make a swift policy reversal. Instead of demanding that Roosevelt stop rearming England, its spokesmen switched sides in less than a day. According to Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of No Ordinary Time, "Michael Quill, left-leaning head of the Transport Workers of New York was delivering an angry speech denouncing the imperialist war, arguing that the American worker should have nothing to do with it. In the middle of his speech, he was handed a note informing him the Nazis had invaded the Soviet Union. Without missing a beat, Quill totally changed direction, arguing that 'we must all unite and fight for democracy." Others thought to be Communist-oriented changed their tune almost as quickly as Quill.
In July, 1940 Japan invaded French Indochina, and Roosevelt agreed to a policy of sanctions, including an embargo on oil from which high-octane aircraft fuel might be refined. General Hideki Tojo, who by this time, had replaced Prince Konoye as Prime Minister of Japan, indicated negotiations with the United States might be productive. He was willing to withdraw from Indochina, but not China. Tojo told his emissaries in Washington that they must be successful by the end of November, 1941. They were unsuccessful, so Japanese carrier aircraft treacherously attacked Pearl Harbour in the early hours of the day on December 7, 1941, while its emissaries were still discussing peace in Washington. For more details on Japan, see The Japanese Wartime Empire, 1931-1945 released by the Princeton University Press in June, 1996.
The next day, President Roosevelt asked Congress to approve his request that the United States and Japan were at war with each other. Congress approved immediately. Then, on December 11, 1941 Adolf Hitler, Chancellor of Germany's Third Reich declared war on the United States. World War II had begun, but with the greatest naval disaster in history at Pearl Harbour. Eight battleships were either sunk or seriously damaged along with three destroyers and light cruisers. Fortunately, all Navy carriers were at sea. However, most Army aircraft were destroyed on the ground. The Japanese followed up this victory with further action in the Far East. On December 10,1941 two formidable British battleships were sunk by Japanese aircraft. On December 25, British forces in Hong Kong surrendered to the Japanese. By January 2, 1942 Manila, the capital of the Phillippines, was occupied by Japanese troops, and American troops surrendered. General Douglas McArthur and the remaining American troops took refuge in the fortress of Corregidor from which General McArthur was evacuated by an American submarine.
In the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor, California particularly saw a growing hysteria directed against Japanese, many of them citizens of the United States. Many Californians anticipated an attack on the West Coast, and General John DeWitt added fuel to the fire by intemperate public comments, some of them false. Thus, on February 20, 1942 President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. This order gave General DeWitt the authority he needed to exclude Japanese from just about any part of the West Coast. Francis Biddle, who was then Attorney General of the United States later noted that Roosevelt was not all that concerned with the constitutional implications of his action. The United States was at war with Japan, and the American military was in charge of what Roosevelt treated as a wartime measure. It didn't matter to him that most of those who were interned in relocation centers were American citizens.
Two years later, the Supreme Court upheld his action, but there were strong dissents. Korematsu v. United States, 323 U. S. 214 (1944). The majority of six held that exclusion of Japanese, including those who were American citizens, was within the war powers of Congress and the Executive. In his dissent, Justice Roberts noted there had been no individualized hearings providing any basis for shipping all Japanese to relocation centers, as had been the case with German and Italian detainees. Justice Jackson wrote that "the law which this prisoner is convicted of disregarding is not found in an act of Congress, but in a military order. Neither the Act of Congress nor the Executive Order of the President, nor both together, would afford a basis for this conviction. It rests on the orders of General DeWitt." In Hirabayashi v. United States, 320 U.S. 81 (1943), the Supreme Court also upheld a curfew directed against all those Japanese, whether citizens or not, to prevent espionage or sabotage. Some 110,000 Japanese had to spend at least four years in relocation camps far from home. About 70,000 of them were citizens of the United States. They lost their homes, their businesses and their liberty.
Very early in the war, Roosevelt became involved in racial conflict. By 1940, the population of Detroit had grown as whites migrated from farmlands in the South to the urban centers of the North where war plants had proliferated and jobs beckoned. Along with the white migrants, some 50,000 blacks moved to Detroit competing for the same jobs. Housing, in short supply with this population explosion became scarcer and overpriced. Clark Foreman, a Southerner, was an official of the Federal Works Agency. The FWA planned a 200-unit housing project designed for black defense workers. When news of this appeared in the Detroit press, white workers were infuriated. In Congress, an appropriation for the housing project was conditioned on white occupancy. Civil rights leaders reacted angrily, and matters got back on course. The Detroit Housing Commission selected black tenants. On February 28, 1942 the new tenants were scheduled to move in. When they appeared with the household goods, they were greeted by hundreds of white pickets armed with a variety of weapons. In the ensuing battle, many on both sides were wounded, and occupancy was postponed. Three months later, it took troops off the Michigan National Guard to protect the new tenants who moved in without incident. The Navy itself was segregated by race. However, with pressure from the White House, the Navy finally allowed black Americans to enlist in the Navy as gunners, radiomen and so forth without being assigned to their original positions as mess attendants, ie., waiters.
Race was still a factor in wartime production. The population of Mobile, Alabama had expanded rapidly after 1940, drawn by its shipyards. Many of the new arrivals brought racial prejudice with them, and an ugly incident was the result. Some skilled black welders were upgraded and assigned to work next to white welders working on ships for the defense effort. In the morning shift, one white worker shouted that "No nigger was going to join iron in these yards," and fighting was ignited. The Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC) restored a measure of peace by agreeing that black welders should be assigned to another shipway to work in a segregated area. While President Roosevelt had created the FEPC by Executive Order, it had no enforcement powers. On the next day, race riots broke out in Belle Isle, Michigan. By the time federal troops arrived on the scene -- Michigan's governor, Harry Kelly claimed he could control the situation with local police -- some twenty-five black Americans had been killed by whites, and nine whites died in the rioting. While prejudice would continue to deny black Americans the work they could perform for the war effort, the war itself continued.
Early in the war, the Navy had its reverses but also its successes, however small they were. On April 18, 1942 a squadron of sixteen B-25s were launched from the Hornet, a Navy carrier for a raid on Tokyo with General Doolittle in command. The twin-engine B-25s were not designed for use on carriers, but the 1100 foot flight deck was just enough for the takeoff run. These planes reached Tokyo during daylight hours, dropped their bombs and continued on to land in China. This mission was followed in June by the Battle of Midway, a turning point in the naval war.
The Japanese organized a taskforce of ten battleships, four carriers, and seventy destroyers to seize Midway. However, the Navy had broken the Japanese Purple Code and knew when to strike. On June 4, 1942 Admiral Chester Nimitz launched his strike against the enemy taskforce. In the battle, Navy carrier aircraft sunk all four carriers, one heavy cruiser, three battleships, and destroyed 372 Japanese aircraft.One American carrier, the USS Yorktown, was sunk by the Japanese.
Action on land involved the Marines. They landed in Guadalcanal in early 1942 and took heavy casualties. In the meantime, the Army with air cover from the Navy landed in North Africa in November, 1942 to begin the offensive matching General George Patton's armour against that of the German Desert Fox, Marshall Erwin Rommel. A combination of American, British, and Canadian troops defeated the Germans in North Africa, and the next move of the Allied Forces would be to Italy and beyond.
On June 4, 1944 the combined forces of all the allies invaded Normandy in the first cross-channel invasion since William the Conqueror invaded England successfully in 1066. Joseph Stalin got the Second Front he so desperately needed to save the Soviet Union from the Nazi hordes that invaded Russia beginning on June 22, 1941. Arromanches, in France's Normandy was one of the coastal cities where the Allied Forces landed in 1944, not far from Omaha Beach. Its museum is a treasure of memorabilia of D-Day, June 4, 1944. The Allied armed forces began their march across Europe to Berlin on this day which was celebrated in 1995.
Before the war ended, however, President Roosevelt, Prime Minister of Great Britain and Generalissimo Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union met in Yalta from February 4 to February 11, 1945. The three discussed and agreed on several subjects that were to have awkward domestic political consequences for the United States in the postwar period, principally because the Soviet Union simply ignored some provisions of the Yalta Agreement. Article II stated in part that:
The establishment of order in Europe and the rebuilding of national economic life must be achieved by processes which will enable the liberated peoples to destroy the last vestiges of Naziism and fascism and to create democratic institutions of their own choice. This is a principle of the Atlantic Charter -- the right of all people to choose the form of government under which they will live -- the restoration of sovereign rights and self-government to those peoples who have been forcibly deprived of them by the aggressor nations.
Stalin insisted on including language that, by his interpretation, allowed Moscow to effectively dominate Poland in the immediate postwar period. Unfortunately, nothing was done to prevent the perpetuation of Soviet rule in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Rumania. By 1989, when all these countries got their freedom, historians uniformly agreed it was a mistake to allow the imposition on these countries of a Communist rule. Directed by Stalin, the Soviet Red Army imposed a government in each of the eastern Europe states inconsistent with the establishment of democratic institutions. Stalin also got language directing that Japan's Kurile Islands "be handed over to the Soviet Union." At Yalta, the Soviet Union expressed a readiness to use its armed forces to liberate China from "the Japanese yoke." Some Americans present at Yalta suggested at the time that Roosevelt was in poor health and should not have taken such a tiring trip to the Crimea for the Yalta Conference. They were probably correct. Roosevelt died two months after his return from Yalta.
In the Pacific, the Marines and Army with air cover from the Navy moved from Eniwetok to the Mariannas and the Phillippines in 1944 and then from Guam and Tinian to Iwo Jima and Okinawa. From these islands, the Air Force began launching B-29 bombers against Japan itself in early 1945, and the end was in sight. In Europe, the Allied Forces entered Paris in August, 1944 and then took the surrender of Germany on May 9, 1945. On August 6, 1945 Air Force B-29s dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima and the second on Nagasaki three days later. Japan surrendered on August 14, 1945, and the war was over for some 19 million servicemen from seven nations united against Germany, Italy, and Japan. The casualties were enormous on all sides.
The Chief of Staff for the entire war effort in Europe was General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Roosevelt could not have spared General George C. Marshall, Chief of Staff of the Army. Marshall had the confidence of Congress, something Roosevelt did not enjoy. The president, for example, vetoed the Smith-Connally Act that would have made a strike against war production illegal and subject to severe penalties. In less than a day, Congress voted successfully to override the veto by the two-thirds vote constitutionally required to do so. At the time, coal miners were being paid less than a living wage for doing dangerous work underground. The coal miners finally settled for portal-to-portal pay increase. This insured a pay increase the moment they went underground after arriving at the pit head.
In 1944, Roosevelt was reelected to an unprecedented fourth term with some 53.4 percent of the popular vote and 432 electoral votes. His opponent was Thomas E. Dewey who got the highest percentage of the popular vote of any Republican candidate since 1932.
On April 12, 1945 Roosevelt died of a stroke in Warm Springs, Georgia, and Harry Truman became President of the United States. Roosevelt was mourned by a saddened nation and buried at Hyde Park, his ancestral home in upstate New York. During the war, Roosevelt had never once mentioned to his Vice President Harry Truman , the Manhattan Project and what it was working on. Actually, the idea appeared in 1939 in a letter from Einstein to Roosevelt. In it, he outlined the theoretical possibilities of nuclear fission. The scientists -- one of them was Edward Teller -- agreed on the theoretical potential, and General Leslie Grove was named head of the Manhattan Project which throughout the war was classified at a level higher than Top Secret. So between April 12, 1945 and Truman's trip to Potsdam in July, Truman had to be told the details of the atomic bomb about to be tested in New Mexico. The actual test of the atomic bomb, code-named Trinity-occurred in New Mexico on July 17, 1945. William Lawrence was one of those present on this historic occasion.. In his book, Ground Zero, Lawrence wrote:
And just at that instant there arose from the bowels of the earth a light not of this world, the light of many suns in one. It was a sunrise such as the world has never seen, a great green super-sun climbing in a fraction of a second to a height of more than eight thousand feet, rising ever higher until it touched the clouds, lighting up earth and sky all around with a dazzling luminosity...With the flash came a delayed roll of mighty thunder heard, just as the flash was seen, for hundreds of miles...
President Truman was in Potsdam at the time of the successful test, so he could not have known then of the bomb's destructive power. At the time, Truman, Churchill and Stalin, met in Potsdam to consider how best Japan might be defeated and what terms should be imposed on Japan thereafter.The Potsdam Declaration was the joint effort of all three, and it got the concurrence of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. It called for Japan's unconditional surrender. On his return to Washington, some sixty-nine scientists sent a petition to the president. Dated July 17, 1945 it was signed by Leo Szilard and 69 co-signers, its text was retrieved from the Internet Home Page of Leo Szilard. The third paragraph of the petition read as follows:
The war has to be brought speedily to a successful conclusion and attacks by atomic bombs may very well be an effective method of warfare. We feel, however, that such attacks on Japan could not be justified, at least not unless the terms which will be imposed after the war on Japan were made public in detail and Japan were given an opportunity to surrender. The development of atomic power will provide the nations with new means of destruction. The atomic bomb at our disposal represent only the first step in this direction, and there is almost no limit to the destructive power which will become available in the course of their future development. Thus a nation which sets the precedent of using these newly liberated forces of nature for purposes of destruction may have to bear the responsibility which is involved.
However, there was a Source Note attached to the Szilard petition. It listed the names of those signing it. The text had this observation: "It is reasonable to conclude that the lists were prepared and used for the purpose of administrative retaliation against the petition signers."
History does not disclose whether President Truman actually read this petition drafted by Szilard, a physicist engaged in developing the atomic bomb together with Enrico Fermi and J. Robert Oppenheimer. Gar Alperovitz's book, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb: And the Architecture of an American Myth does not mention Szilard's petition. However, Lifton and Mitchell who collaborated on the 1995 book, Hiroshima: Fifty Years of Denial note the Szilard Petition was intercepted by General Leslie Grove and never reached President Truman.
Lifton and Mitchell argue convincingly that the decision to use the atomic bomb was wrong at the time. Harry Truman clearly made a decision to use the bomb as the Air Force did on August 6, 1945. His decision was made on the basis of all the evidence available to him at that time. Truman's Secretary of State, James Byrnes supported use of the bomb against Japan. Its successful use, he claimed would give him a stronger position in dealing with Stalin. Even some of the high-ranking military commanders under Truman -- Admiral Nimitz and General Marshall opposed use of the bomb. President Truman never saw this letter. Evidently, it was rerouted by General Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project.
There was virtually no evidence of the lethal radioactive particles released by explosion of the uranium core when it went into critical mass and exploded. This evidence of deadly radioactive fallout only surfaced months after use of the second bomb over Nagasaki; the Bikini test site and later, the Nevada Test Site. However, most of such evidence, not of the destructive power of the bomb, but its lethal fallout was suppressed by the government. For years, this coverup continued and now in 1995, many books disclosing its nature and extent are being published. It is a fact that every government administration up to at least 1974, including Truman's, lied about the fatal consequences of the indiscriminate release of radioactivity. Some of those around Truman were anxious to shorten the war to prevent the Soviet Union from declaring war on Japan. At Yalta, Stalin agreed to assist China by deploying its armed forces against Japan. Fifty years after Yalta, Russia had not withdrawn its troops from the Kurile Islands it was allowed to seize by the Yalta Agreement.
Upon his return from Potsdam, Truman soon traveled to San Franciso for the meeting of the United Nations whose leaders or the designees were about to sign the United Nations Charter. In 1995, some 180 countries gathered in San Francisco to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the United Nations.
Most Americans know there is a United Nations. It is in fact a treaty ratified by the Senate, two-thirds concurring. Congress also enacted a United Nations Participation Act, thus incorporating the Charter into the supreme law of the United States. Two of its many articles are worth noting. Article 2 (4) appears below:
4. All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations.
Article 51 provides as follows:
Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security. Measures taken by Members in the exercise of this right of self-defense shall be immediately reported to the Security Council and shall not in any way affect the authority and responsibility of the Security Council under the present Charter to take at any time such action as it deems necessary in order to maintain or restore international peace and security.
Foreign policy and the decision to use the atomic bomb were certainly not the only problems President Truman inherited. Racial upheavals were perhaps one of his major domestic problems. And during the war, women by the thousands worked in the defense plants, turning out everything from aircraft to tanks and ships plus a great deal in most other products. "Rosie the Riveter" became a symbol of all those women who worked to win the war. When the war finally ended , servicemen returning home would want their old jobs back, and women would have to return to the kitchen, or so it was thought by many. Since food was rationed (as was fuel for cars), there had to be price controls to limit inflation. With the protean ingenuity of speculators, a thriving black market existed in rationed goods. On occasion, families might legitimately trade their sugar coupons for those required to buy meat.
Servicemen whose education had been postponed wanted to go back to school. In anticipation of this, Congress enacted the GI Bill of Rights. This measure financed the education of an estimated 3 million servicemen after the war. Furthermore, the economy had to be converted to peacetime production, but with the advent of nuclear weapons, the Manhattan Project remained in operation. So did the facilities at Alamagordo, New Mexico and the Livermore, California Lab. New industries dedicated to the production of nuclear weapons were built at Savannah, Georgia, Hanford, Oregon, and Denver, Colorado. Their operations, always a closely guarded secret, began polluting the atmosphere with radioactive and toxic particle discharge. By 1995, the safe disposal of radioactive waste had become an enormously expensive undertaking. The waste itself would have a half life of over ten thousand years.
The war crimes trials began in Nuremberg, Germany on November 20, 1945. Twenty-one surviving leaders of Nazi Germany were about to enter a court invented for the purpose of judging them. Telford Taylor's book, The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials: A Personal Memoir, describes these trials of Joachim von Ribbentrop, Julius Streicher, Hjalmar Schacht, Rudolph Hess, Herman Göring, Albert Speer, Admiral Eric Doenitz, Field Marshall Wilhelm Keitel and other war criminals. Taylor was a prosecutor at these trials which took place against a scene of horror at a level never before seen in the civilized world, the Holocaust. Some six million Jews were killed in death camps a few of which like Dachau, were built before World War II even began. It was at the Wannsee Conference in January, 1942 that Hitler and his colleagues agreed on the Final Solution, extermination of German Jews.
In her book, Albert Speer: His Battle for the Truth, Gita Sereny quoted one of the Wannsee participants. He described the killing process as "assembly line murder." And testimony at the Nuremberg trials showed beyond any reasonable doubt that those on trial knew what was going on. This is complicity in genocide, and its German rationale for engaging in genocide was taken from the archives of the Spanish Inquisition.
All contents © . 1996 William M. Brinton