The Morality of War: World War II In Perspective

     The rationale and morality of war has always been something that is hotly debated, and with the 'War on Terrorism' still alive, it is no less so today,  As humans we all here the politicians clamor that we must fight so that justice can be brought to the world, but on the other hand you have a mother at home who sees her son come home in a coffin.  Then there is the wealthy 'landed gentry' who look at war as a means of gaining wealth and power, but are never seen on the front lines.  But if that were the only reason for war it would be quite simple to condemn the action.  Unfortunately, there are many side stories to these same conflicts that generally expose the exploitation and murder of some sector of the population.  The purpose of this paper is to show some of the different reasons for war, and in the end, try to come to some moral conclusion as to the right or wrong of such grim choices.

     World War II will be the war used as the focal point for this article, not only because it was the largest in history, but because there were so many facets to this war that it would be simpleminded to relegate the war as a quest to oust Hitler.  Once a wide view is taken of the war, the reader will be able to better understand why this great conflict was fought by so many countries.

     Germany had been humiliated in World War I and its military leaders were salivating for revenge against the harsh penalties that were imposed on them.  No one more so than the up-and-coming Nazi party leader Adolf Hitler.  Hitler had served on the Ypres Salient in World War I, and was subjected to the brutal trench warfare that drove many men mad.  Combine the alleged contraction of the mentally degenerative disease syphilis, and an unmatched love of the motherland, you have a dictator ready and willing to move the masses.  

     Prior to World War II Germany boasted the largest number of Christians on the European continent.  So how could a country that claimed famed reformers such as Martin Luther be led on such an evil and disastrous course?  Whether it was the hypnotic tone to Hitler's voice, the belief that the German people were genetically superior, or just out of plain fear, we may never know for sure.  One thing we do know is that the military leaders felt the lands of Alsace and Lorraine belonged to the German people and were willing to go to war to prove it.

     Now we have an economy that is the strongest in Europe, a leadership hellbent on regaining German soil and pride, and a public that was enthusiastically in support of a war, that is with the exception of the Jews.  The Jewish people of Germany were among the economic elite and had been well accepted by the native people for many years, but there was a slow burning ember of antisemitism that was gaining fuel that would eventually lead to the death of 6 to 7 million Jews.  As for the military, once they had successfully annexed Alsace and Lorraine and had grabbed Poland and Hungary, it was no small wonder that they would attack their old enemy France.  Hitler unsatisfied with the mounting success of his campaigns chose to take on Britain and Russia as well.  This ambition could only be stopped by a force mightier than that which came against it.

    In step the Allies.  France had been conquered, Russia was on the verge of collapse, and England was not strong enough to face the Third Reich on their own.  The English desperately needed the help of the United States if it was going to be successful in its battle against the Axis powers.  The problem was the American people felt disconnected from the European continent and wanted to stay out of the conflict.  American leadership on the other hand knew the dangers of leaving the entire area under the influence of Adolf Hitler.  While people in the upper levels knew some of what was going on in the concentration camps and Hitler's final solution, the extent of the horror was unknown.  So the President of the United States was faced with the challenge of galvanizing the American public in support of the war effort.  Pearl Harbor was the perfect opportunity to sway the common man's opinion about the war effort.
     Whether the government actually knew about the Japanese attack before it actually happened will not be addressed in this short discussion, but rather what the response was to this action.  American's need to be persuaded of the morality of a war before they will support it (as we failed to establish in the Vietnam War).  Thousands of sailors dying in horrific slaughter was the sad chance to convince them of the importance of intervening.  Now America was committed to the conflict and the balance of the war quickly shifted in favor of the Allies as the enormous American economy got into full swing.  Within less than 5 years the terrible conflict would come to an end.  So the burning question is, was it worth the cost of human life that was expended on the battlefield?
     It is estimated that between 50-70 million people died during the war, with the majority being civilians dying from starvation and 'war related diseases'.  At first glance these are jaw-dropping figures, but what could have happened if the Allies didn't fight back against Hitler and Japan?  The answer to this question is far more frightening than what really happened.
     If we take a look at some of the estimates form the war we see that nearly 6,000,000 Polish and 10,000,000-20,000,000 Chinese died from the aggressors.  Remember, these were countries that were invaded, and if we didn't come to their rescue the losses would've been far greater.  With Hitler and the war leadership in Japan's lust for natural resources, there is no telling when the killing would've stopped.  The two cultures were so brutal that there is little doubt that their occupation of the invaded lands would've led to genocide.  It was reported that when the Japanese soldiers invaded mainland China they made it a sport of throwing Chinese babies into the air and seeing how many they could catch on their bayonet.  Combine this with the already widely known German brutality, and we she the slaughter that was likely to occur.
      War is an ugly, but sadly, necessary action that must be taken up by the morally good.  If when faced with tyranny, people back down and let the aggressors step over the helpless, our world will quickly become one run by dictators and merciless governments.  This is not a utilitarian issue where we add up the total number of lost lives if the war had or had not been fought, although this is very helpful to explain the need for it, but rather a nation rising up to the aid of the weak.  The saddest part to war are those German's, Italian's, and Japanese who never wanted to fight the war in the first place.  If they died, they died as villains, but if they lived they were forced to deal with the atrocities that the were part of.  In closing, I hope that we people of the world will never fail to stand up and fight for those who cannot fight for themselves.

By Jeffrey Brandon Lee

Intelligence During World War II

          World War II brought with it many new advances in the art of warfare, which helped and at times led to the fooling of various commanders in the field.  One of the most important developments during this conflict was the use of intelligence and deception.  Whereas before this conflict many military leaders were left with techniques such as scouting parties, blimps, and maybe a phone tap here or there.  With the improvement in technologies governments of the world sought better ways to protect information and also more improved methods of obtaining their opponents vital strategies.  Trying to achieve this latter goal often left the other side with the opportunity to pass along false information.  It is the purpose of this paper to; first analyze some of the techniques and instances where intelligence played a key role in some battle or operation, and second to show the significance of deception and its effectiveness in deceiving the opponent.  Although not all operations proved to be wildly successful, many proved to be game changers in the Allied war efforts against the Axis powers.

One of the greatest developments that occurred prior to World War II was the advent of code making and code breaking.  Although not as flashy and interesting as the Cloak & Dagger spies that movies have made famous, intelligence analyst played a far greater role than most would suspect.  Ronald H. Spector sheds light on this fact in Eagle Against The Sun: The American War With Japan:

 “More often it was hollow-eyed, unshaven cryptologist or photo-

reconnaissance analyst deep in a basement or windowless room,

surrounded by the clack of IBM sorters and tabulator machines or

the stench of darkroom chemicals-it was men (and women) of this

sort who were the intelligence aces of World War II.”[1]

It was analyst such as this that could have, with a little more concern from their superiors, prevented much of the damage the Japanese inflicted on the unprepared forces of Pearl Harbor.

            The real beginnings of American attempts to break potential combatant countries codes started with the formation of the Signal Intelligence Service in 1929.  Headed by William F. Friedman the SIS was able to rebuild a replica of the Japanese code machine and by late 1940 they were able to read almost all of Japan’s code ‘Purple’ diplomatic messages.[2]  Although authors such as Ronald Lewin quote General Marshall in The American Magic as saying that, “Operations in the Pacific are largely guided by the information we obtain of Japanese deployments.  We know their strength in various garrisons, the rations and other stores continuing available to them, and what is of vast importance, we check their fleet movements and the movements of their convoys.”[3] It appears evident that code Purple messages were of far more significance than General Marshall believed. 

On November 30^th 1941 the cryptanalysts in Washington intercepted a message from Tokyo to Berlin informing the ambassador that war with American may come “quicker than anyone dreams”.  During this same time Dutch and English Intelligence were warning of massive Japanese troops buildups in Southeast Asia.[4]  General Marshall may have believed in old fashion navy flyovers and patrol boats to gather such information, but it seems apparent that before the bombing of Pearl Harbor there was ample information available through code breaking intelligence that could have alerted the Navy and possibly saved lives.  Intelligence analyst may not have ultimately been able to stop the attack on Pearl Harbor, but they did play key roles in deciphering other Japanese codes throughout the war effort. 

One of the greatest examples of American intelligence success against the Japanese Navy was achieved before the battle of Midway.  Although code Purple was very important in assessing the general mindset of the Japanese government, JN-25 was considered by most analysts to be the golden egg.  JN-25 was the Japanese Navy’s military code in which it sent all of it orders for naval movements and attacks.  This code had been around for a couple of decades by 1941, and according to Stephen Budiansky in Battle of Wits:

“Slowly and laboriously, the new code book was being reconstructed;

 again, inexorably, on August 1, 1941, the Japanese introduced a

 new, 50,000 group additive book that sent the code breakers back to

 the beginning.”[5]

This setback did not deter the intelligence officers Rochefort and Layton as they went back to the drawing board and set about breaking this new codebook.  And according to Stephen Budiansky on May 14, 1942 Rochefort called Layton claiming, “I’ve got something so hot here it’s burning the top of my desk!”[6]  What he had uncovered was a massive assault planned by the Japanese on Midway Island which they designated AF.  The problem once again wasn’t that the intelligence was bad, but that the bureaucracy in the military inhibited the flow of information.

            OP-20-G was the designation of the top intelligence office in Washington, and upon receiving the information on the probable attack on Midway they dismissed it as a Japanese ‘deception’.[7]  Those in Washington were under the false impression that the real target was the Hawaiian Islands.  Furious at the meddling by OP-20-G, Rochefort approached Admiral Nimitz and asked permission to have the radio operators on Midway send an uncoded message claiming that their only means of fresh water had failed.  The purpose of this operation would be to prove that AF was in fact the Japanese code for Midway.  Nimitz’ agreed to the charade and the message was sent on May 19, 1942.  Again according to Stephen Budiansky, “Two days later Tokyo Naval Intelligence sent a signal in JN-25 reporting that “AF Air Unit” had sent a message to Hawaii reporting it had only a two weeks’ supply of fresh water and asking for an immediate resupply.”[8]  It immediately became evident that Midway was indeed the target of the Japanese Navy, and now the Americans had a hand up on the enemy.  The end result of the Battle of Midway was the Japanese Navy’s eventual withdrawal sand massive losses in aircraft carriers and planes.

            On the other front of World War II there was the important efforts of the combined British and American Intelligence Services.  One of the greatest test of these two allied intelligence services was that attempt to break the ever changing code of the famed Enigma machine.

            The beginning of the Enigma code machine began nearly two decades before the advent of World War II.  In October of 1919 a patent was filed in the Netherlands for a ‘Geheimscfriffmachine’, which was later bought by a German named Arthur Scheribus.  Scheribus then, according to Charles Whiting in The Spymasters, “…designed a machine including ‘multiple switch boards which connect each arriving lead with one of the outgoing leads and which are adapted to interchange this connection with great facility of variation.”[9]  While the German inventor intended his Enigma machine to be used for business purposes, that was not to be the case.  The company was liquidated soon after Hitler came to power and was reformed for the military purpose of producing a machine used to send code to commanders in the field and the infamous U-boat captains.[10]

            Once the American and British found out about the use of this encrypting machine they knew of the necessity of breaking its code.  The British manned over a thousand individuals at its’ Bletchly Park facility and the Americans used Building 26 on the NCR Campus in Dayton, Ohio.  Although both of these services were instrumental in the deciphering of the Enigma code, neither would have had such success if it were not for the Poles.

            In Peter Calvocoressi’s Top Secret Ultra: An insiders account of how British Intelligence monitored and broke the Nazi top-secret code he states, “From 1932 to 1938 German Enigma traffic was read by the Polish secret service.  The Poles were almost certainly the only people to do so in these years.”[11]  This amazing feat was soon ended as the German’s modified the machine by changing the way code was sent and by adding two extra wheels to the machine.  The Polish secret service was aware of the changes, but lacked the resources to solve the problem.  In an act of trust not shown often during times of war, they gave all the information they had to the British at Bletchly Park and the French equivalent.[12]  The German army soon defeated the Polish, but their help to the Allied cause was significant.

            The British at Bletchly used the model Enigma machine the Pole’s had provided them and adapted it to their own Typex machine in an attempt to solve the riddle.  Once they had achieved this, the tedious effort of data analysis began.  Stephen Budiansky gives a great example of this when he writes:

            “The other task was equally straightforward: begin cranking a cyclometer

through all 17,576 settings in all fifty-eight remaining wheel orders, note

down the ones that permit repeated letters in the doubly enciphered

indicators, and punch two new complete sets of 1,560 Zygalski sheets…”[13]

This process was eventually replaced by what was labeled by most countries as a ‘bombe’.  The British version of the bombe was “…like a series of Enigma machines in reverse.”[14]  Although highly ineffective at first, when coupled with the new bigram table, Banburismus machine, and captured daily Enigma settings the British bombe was able to break the German naval enigma code.  This led, “…to a sharp decline in sinkings by U-boats in the Atlantic that began in the summer of 1941.”[15]  Although the British played a major role in breaking the Enigma code they were not alone in their efforts.

            The American effort, as stated above, was located in building 26 in Ohio, and even though they were allies, there was fierce competition between the two services.  According to Jim DeBrosse and Colin Burke:

            “For the Navy and Desch, the race was on, not only against the Germans

and the U-boats in the Atlantic but in some ways against the British. 

The Americans knew that Bletchly Park was working on its own design for

 a four wheel Bombe and that their careers, their nation’s prestige, and the

Navy’s investment of millions of dollars and scores of highly skilled

personnel were at risk if they failed to arrive first at a working machine.”[16]

 Despite the competition for the prestige of having the best intelligence service, at times the British and American’s were forced to cooperate.  One reason for this was the far superior quality of the American Bombe’s, and the British need to decipher Germany’s Army and Naval codes.

            The United States had a choice of the two private sector companies IBM and National Cash Register Company to begin their code breaking efforts.  NCR was chosen over IBM due to its available plant space and technological prowess.  According to DeBrosse and Burke, “Even more propitious, NCR had at its disposal eleven city blocks of mostly idle factories and office buildings and a regional network of skilled labor and parts suppliers, all waiting to be put to work.”[17]  In early 1942 the government proceeded to authorize NCR to begin building its own ‘Bombe’. 

            At first the efforts were considered by many to be embarrassing, but in time those opinions would change drastically.  Early in 1943 the American Bombe needed an average of twenty-five days to read the German Navy’s ‘Shark’ code, but by late that same year the time was brought down to thirty-six hours.[18]  This speed was even greater than the best the British had achieved up to that point.  Disregarding their precious pride the British saw the necessity of using the much more efficient American Bombes to read the vital German military Enigma traffic.  The American Bombes were about ’50 percent’ faster and again according to DeBrosse and Burke:

            “The power of the 120 or so American Bombes was equal to or greater

than that of the 220 British Bombes at Bletchly Park.  The British, who

were charged with attacking many more German systems than were

the Americans-including the three-wheel Army and Air Force Enigma

traffic known as Bovril-asked for time on the American Bombes.”[19]

Although many discount the effectiveness of the breaking of the Enigma code, it is estimated by some experts that towards the end of World War II Ultra intelligence was directly responsible for up to thirty percent of all U-boats sunk.[20]

            While code breaking was a large part of the intelligence effort in World War II, it was not the Allies only means of using intelligence.  Deception was a strategy put to use on a grand scale during the conflict.  There are many examples of successful and failed attempts to fool the other side, but the focus here will be the deceptions leading up to the invasion of Normandy.

            By 1943 Hitler suspected a cross channel invasion from England was imminent, but the question remained where would this battle take place.  In order to reduce the amount of lives lost to the Allies it was decided that they needed to develop a scheme to leave Germany guessing whether the invasion would be anywhere from Norway to the Mediterranean. Originally the planned phony invasions were code named FORTITUDE and included three stages named TINDALL, STARKEY, and WADHAM.[21]  Although eventually the name for the operation was eventually changed to QUICKSILVER and divided in to six smaller parts, in the end it remained largely intact.

            QUICKSILVER I and II were the most important of the deceptions and included; the false placement of the American Third Army in the East, phony radio traffic, and the movement of several corps east to mislead the Germans into thinking the invasion would take place at the Pas-de-Calais.[22]  To help pass along this information to the Third Reich the Allies used men such as the Dutchman Hans Hansen who according to William B. Bruer in Deceptions of World War II, “Hans Hansen had been captured soon after his arrival and “turned”-given a choice of being hanged or sending finely orchestrated intelligence bulletins back to Hamburg.”[23]  With over 900 messages sent from Hansen during the course of the war the Abwher was fully convinced of his loyalty.

            QUICKSILVER III, V, and VI included the limited use of ‘physical deception.  QUICKSILVER III would use dummy landing craft on the southeast and east coast of England, while QUICKSILVER V would show the appearance of ‘extra tunnel construction’.[24]  QUICKSILVER VI would according to Holt include, “…the tempo of seeming activity round the dummy craft on the east coast would pick up, by simulated beach lighting and vehicle lights suggesting round-the-clock busyness.”[25]  QUICKSILVER IV called for an increase in training flights in the southeast and practice air-sea rescue missions.

            Although most of QUICKSILVER went according to plan, there were a few instances of failure or setbacks.  QUICKSILVER III ran into the problem of some of the dummy crafts blowing away and when the simulated activity did show up it was ‘late and ineffective’.[26]  The fifth and sixth stages of the plan ran more smoothly, but still ran into small problems.  Due to a disagreement on what type of lighting should be used on the real locations and the fake ones Holt writes, “…the lighting at the fake locations was brighter than at the real ones…”[27] These problems were relatively small and didn’t effect the outcome of the whole operation, as Hitler was thoroughly caught off guard by the D-Day invasion at Normandy.

            Since the ancient writings of Homer and the fall of Troy, it has been the goal of military leaders to gather information about their enemy and if possible to fool them as to their own intentions.  With the increase in technology that preceded World War II these facts became more important and necessary for each side of the conflict.  While some experts claim that the overall part that intelligence and deception played was a small role, if any, in the Allied victory over the Axis powers, it is beyond argument that it at the, very least saved many lives.  If the Japanese had the advantage of surprise at Midway or if Hitler knew the exact locations of the landings on D-Day, the cost to both sides could have been horrific.  Intelligence and Deception, as it grew out of World War II, has become a permanent fixture in military operations today and seems poised to stay that way for the indefinite future.