Masaharu Homma - A Question of Responsibility

On April 15, 1942, the American and Filipino soldiers who had surrendered at Bataan began their grueling march from Mariveles to San Fernando. The 65-mile death march would take six days. The sun was burning hot and the air stifling. Little food or water was available. And along the way, Japanese guards—part of Masaharu Homma’s army—would bayonet stragglers, club or shoot other captives for sport, and bury alive some sick and wounded who were unable to walk.

An estimated l0,000 prisoners—2,500 Americans and 7,500 Filipinos—died on the forced march. It would forever be known as the Bataan Death March. Those who survived it were packed by Homma’s troops into railroad boxcars that took them to the end of the line. They then walked another seven miles to reach their prison camp.

Douglas MacArthur (Number 8) heard about it months later, when escaped American prisoners told him of the terrible ordeal. The American general who had led forces in the Philippines bided his time. When the war was over, he would make his move.

Masaharu Homma, conqueror of the Philippines, whose troops were responsible for the atrocities, was arrested and charged with war crimes. Was Homma responsible for the actions of his troops? If so, what should the penalty be? 

Military Achievements Lead to the Philippines

Homma was born on Sado Island, Japan, in 1888. After graduating from the Japanese war college, he was assigned to the Japanese general staff. During World War I, he was sent to France to see the British Army in action. When the war ended, he taught at the War College before being posted to India.

He served under several officers until 1927, when he became an aide to the younger brother of Emperor Hirohito (Number 49). By 1938, he had become a lieutenant general in command of the 27th Division at Tientsin, China.

In 1940, he commanded the army in Formosa (Taiwan). A month before Pearl Harbor was attacked, he received his orders for the coming war with the United States. His goal: the Philippines.

The Philippines Fall to the Japanese 

Homma’s force landed in northern Luzon island late in December 1941. A second force landed near Manila several days later. According to the timetable, Homma was supposed to have the entire Philippines in Japanese hands by the end of January 1942. Manila fell early, but American and Filipino forces withdrew to the Bataan peninsula. It was a good defensive position for a while, but attempts to resupply the besieged army failed.

In April 1942, the sick, starving Bataan garrison of 35,000 men—running out of ammunition and watching as the big Japanese guns were dragged closer and closer to vulnerable military hospitals—surrendered. It was one of the largest surrenders of personnel in American military history. Then the nightmare of the Bataan Death March began.

In May, just weeks after the fall of Bataan, Corregidor fell, and the entire Philippines were surrendered to a victorious Homma. By August 1942 he was back in Japan. The following year he became a government minister.

Homma Faces War Crimes 

When Japan surrendered in September 1945, MacArthur ordered the arrest of Homma, who was taken back to the Philippines. In January 1946, he was put on trial in Manila.

Listening to the witnesses testify to the atrocities of the Bataan Death March, Homma insisted that he had been completely unaware of such events. But the prosecution argued that, as commanding officer, he was responsible for the actions of his troops.

Homma was found guilty and sentenced to death. It is reported that his wife personally appealed to MacArthur to spare her husband’s life, but it was to no avail. He was shot by a firing squad in April 1946.

The trial and execution of Masaharu Homma introduced a new interpretation of the code of military justice. Commanding officers were now required to control the actions of their men or take responsibility for the consequences of those actions. Using this interpretation, the atrocities of the Bataan Death March became Homma’s burden to bear, and he paid for it with his life.

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Joseph Goebbels - Propagandist to the End

Today they are called spin-meisters, public relations consultants, image creators, and public affairs specialists. But during World War II, they were called propagandists.

Some of them may have winced at the word, but not Joseph Goebbels. His official title was Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, and he loved it. His job was to buttress German morale at home and smear Jews, Bolsheviks, and the Treaty of Versailles abroad. The Germans, he maintained, were fighting in Europe to save the West from Communist slavery.

That is what he emphasized after the war began, particularly after Adolf Hitler (Number l) invaded the Soviet Union.

In the years before World War II began, Goebbels concentrated on building the Nazi state, glorifying Hitler and Hitlerism, and extolling the theory of an Aryan “master race.”

Wielding Absolute Control of the German Media 

Given Goebbels’s uninspiring physical appearance, one can only wonder how the Germans glorified his depiction of the tall, blond, blue-eyed, handsome pure-blooded Aryan. A short, dark man with a leg brace, he would undoubtedly have been relegated directly to the gas chamber on stumbling off the cattle car at Auschwitz.

However, he was very good at what he did on the German home front. That is because he had complete control over German radio, newspapers, magazines, books, theater, and motion pictures. It was illegal for Germans to listen to foreign broadcasts over shortwave radios. This monopoly of the media enabled Goebbels to brainwash a nation during a 12-year period. There were dissidents and there was a German under-ground trying to fight Hitler. But the Nazi secret police kept anti-Hitler activities to a minimum, and those who were caught were severely punished.

Goebbels had only one client to please—first, last, and always: Adolf Hitler. The propaganda minister’s loyalty was absolute to the very end. Who else would have had his six children murdered so that they could join Goebbels and his wife in death following Hitler’s suicide in Berlin?

The Propaganda Campaign 

Joseph Goebbels was born in 1897 in Rheydt, Germany. After graduating from Heidelberg with a Ph.D., he did some writing but was not particularly successful at it. His life changed when he heard Hitler speak at a rally during the 1920s. Goebbels was captivated by the Führer. He joined the Nazi Party and became editor of its newspaper. When Hitler rose to power in 1933, Goebbels became his propaganda chief.

He began by arranging for the public burning of books of so-called “degenerate” writers, including Thomas Mann, Erich Remarque, Jack London, Helen Keller, Albert Einstein, and Sigmund Freud. Goebbels continued with a major campaign against German Jews. Jewish businesses were boycotted, German Jews were beaten on the streets as police stood by, and they were subjected to vicious attacks in the media. The groundwork was being laid for the Holocaust to come.

In the blood purge of 1934, conducted against elements out of step with the rest of the Nazi Party, dozens of prominent Nazis were murdered at Hitler’s behest. Goebbels, considered a left-winger and thus out of step, narrowly escaped death. It is possible that Hitler himself saved his propaganda chief.

Public Spectacle and the 1936 Berlin Olympics 

Assured he was in the Führer’s good graces, Goebbels went forward with his propaganda program for both domestic and foreign consumption. He staged huge Nazi Party rallies as ritual spectacles. He also prepared for the approaching Berlin Olympics of 1936. Goebbels wanted to show the international community how far Germany had progressed under Hitler. One of the things Goebbels did to improve the German image was to temporarily remove the signs in public places that read “No Dogs or Jews Allowed.”

The Olympics were largely a public-relations success, as German athletes racked up the highest number of medals among the nations. There was, of course, the embarrassment of an African American named Jesse Owens, who easily outran the German athletes; Hitler had to “leave early” so he did not have to shake hands with Owens, a black man. But the situation was eased a bit when the American Olympics Committee removed Marty Glickman, a Jew, from a competition he was expected to win. The role of Goebbels in that international intrigue has never been established.

War-Time Propaganda 

When war came in 1939, Goebbels set up his enemies list: Jews, the English, the French, the Poles, and international bankers. (Bolsheviks would be added in June 1941, when Hitler attacked the Soviet Union.) According to Goebbels, these were the enemies that the German people were fighting, and he used all the media at his command to inflame German passions against them.

In addition to manipulating media and finding scapegoats, Goebbels was shrewd at analyzing special situations.

Once he sent a camera crew to photograph what was going on inside a Jewish ghetto. He had expected to show people acting like animals. Instead, the photographs conveyed humaneness in the face of privation and danger. The pictures were sup-pressed, for Goebbels believed they would only evoke sympathy for those struggling to survive behind the ghetto walls. At the time of the German entrapment at Stalingrad, he ordered that the letters of German soldiers addressed to their families back home be sent to him first, for possible propaganda purposes. The letters were suppressed as defeatist and never delivered.

Goebbels was quick to seize on the discovery of the bodies of thousands of Polish army officers in the Katyn Forest of Poland in 1943. He maintained that they had been killed by the Soviets,; Joseph Stalin (Number 4) insisted that they had been killed by the Nazis. (Half a century later, the Russian government would confirm that the Soviets had indeed carried out the massacre.)

The last act of propagandist Goebbels was to die with his wife and children beside his beloved Führer. As the Russian forces approached Berlin, Hitler ordered Goebbels to leave the bunker with his family and save himself. The propaganda chief told Hitler that for the first time in his life, he would have to disobey him.

Hitler committed suicide on April 30, 1945. Goebbels, his wife, and all of his children joined him the following day.

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Hermann Goering - From Air Ace to War Criminal

Following his war crimes trial at Nuremberg, Hermann Goering was sentenced to be hanged. Goering made no plea for mercy. He did request that he be shot by a firing squad. Hanging, he said, was for common criminals. His plea for a change in punishment was rejected, but the sentence was never carried out. The night before the scheduled execution, Goering took poison.

Thus ended the remarkable career of Hermann Goering: flying ace, Nazi politician, commander of the Luftwaffe (German air force), art connoisseur, art thief, drug addict, and convicted war criminal. It was truly a colorful life. Goering was Adolf Hitler’s (Number l) right-hand man up until the last days of the Führer’s life.

Early Ties to Hitler

Goering was born in 1893 in Rosenheim, a town in Bavaria, Germany. He chose a military career and saw action as an officer during World War I. He became an air ace and even took over as leader of Baron von Richthofen’s squadron following the baron’s death. 

After the war, Goering lived in Scandinavia for a while as a flier and salesman. In 1922, he met Hitler for the first time and immediately joined his ranks. The Nazi leader put Goering in charge of organizing the S.A., the “brownshirts” or storm troopers. The S.A. was a private army of thugs and hooligans who beat up political opponents and disrupted their rallies.

When the Nazi attempt in 1923 to seize power in Munich failed, Hitler was jailed, but Goering escaped to Austria. Several years later, when the heat was off, Goering returned to Germany and rejoined his old cronies. By this time, Goering had acquired a serious drug problem. It was an addiction that would stay with him the rest of his life.

The Nazis Take Power

Goering was backed by the Nazis for political office. In 1928, he was elected to the Reichstag (the German parliament). Four years later, he was elected Reichstag president. Following Hitler’s rise to the chancellorship, Goering became a member of his cabinet. The former flying ace took on additional government responsibilities and started placing Nazis in critical police positions.

Early in 1933, a mysterious fire gutted the Reichstag building. A mentally disabled Dutch Communist was blamed for setting the fire, but scholars believe that Goering himself was responsible for the blaze. In any case, Goering used the incident as an excuse to set loose thugs not only on the Communists, but on other opponents of the Nazis.

Creating the Luftwaffe 

As Hitler rose in rank and power in Nazi Germany, so did Goering. By 1935, the former air ace was heading the Luftwaffe. When war came in 1939, he had become heir apparent to the Führer.

The Luftwaffe provided the support in the air for the blitzkrieg on the ground. It helped capture Poland, Norway, Denmark, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, and France. In the Battle of Britain, however, the Royal Air Force prevailed.

With the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 and the fierce Soviet resistance, the blitzkrieg slowed down, and the Luftwaffe lost its punch. Once America was in the war, German industry was hard hit by air raids. Goering had once boasted that Germany was invulnerable to enemy bombing. In order to embarrass him, the RAF would find out when Goering was scheduled to deliver one of his speeches over Berlin radio. The British would then carry out air raids during those times. The air raid sirens would sound and Goering would be forced to interrupt his speech to seek a bomb shelter and shut down the radio signal.

It is ironic that the Luftwaffe developed the jet plane, far superior to any American or British aircraft, too late in the war for mass production.

Whether in victory or defeat, Goering took every opportunity to have valuable works of art stolen for him from both private and museum collections all over conquered Europe. For many decades after the war, survivors would institute claims against private collectors and even well-known museums for works stolen by Goering.

From Trusted Advisor to Traitor 

In April 1945, as the Russians closed in on Berlin, Hitler announced to the world that he would stay in Berlin to the end. Goering, located in an area of Germany still not in danger of capture, asked other Nazi leaders what the Führer’s statement meant. Most told him that it looked like a transfer of power to Goering. Because he was not sure, Goering sent a message to Hitler:“

In view of your decision to remain in the fortress of Berlin, do you agree that I take over at once the leadership of the Reich, with full freedom at home and abroad as your deputy...?”

When Hitler received the message, he was apoplectic and denounced Goering as a traitor, read him out of the Party, and said that he should be shot.

Goering never took over. Following Hitler’s suicide and the surrender of Germany, Goering was seized by the Allies, put on trial at Nuremberg, and sentenced to death. In 1946, on the night before he was to be executed, Goering cheated the hangman and swallowed poison.

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Vasily Chuikov - Hero of Stalingrad

You may search a current map of Russia with a magnifying glass, but you will never find Stalingrad. During World War II, it was one of the world’s most famous cities. You might conclude that it no longer exists. Where has it gone?

The city is there, all right, but it is now called Volgograd. After the death of Joseph Stalin (Number 4), the Russian people wanted to wipe out the memory of the Communist dictator.

It will remain Stalingrad in the history books, however, even if not in the geography books. There in Volgograd today stands the statue of Mother Russia with an upraised sword in her hand. The statue is taller than the Statue of Liberty and memorializes one of the most savage battles of the war. It was the furthest point that Adolf Hitler (Number l) reached in his plan of conquest.

Leader of the Red Army

Vasily Chuikov is the man whom most historians credit as the hero of Stalingrad. He was born in 1900 in Serebryanye Prudy, Russia. Following the Russian Revolution during World War I, he first joined the Red Army and then the Communist Party. After serving several years as an officer, he entered a Russian military academy. He was assigned to China first in 1927 and then in 1929. These assignments led to his service for four years in the Far Eastern Army.

Following the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939, he led a Red Army force in the invasion of Poland from the east, after the Nazis invaded from the west. He also led a force in the invasion of Finland in 1939. Though the Finns were badly outnumbered, they bloodied the Russians, exposing the Soviet Union’s unreadiness for war. Soviet military capabilities were strengthened.

In 1940, he was sent to China as chief military advisor to Chiang Kai-shek (Number 87).

The Battle for Stalingrad

Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, but Chuikov did not return to Russia from China until early 1942. In July 1942, Chuikov became temporary commander of the 64th Army at Stalingrad. As the Nazis advanced on Stalingrad and the battle heated up, Chuikov’s general command was expanded. At one point, he declared that “we will either hold the city or die there.” It was the kind of attitude that appealed to Stalin, who issued his Order of the Day: “Not one step backward!”

The battle for Stalingrad began on August 23, 1942, when German forces reached the Volga river, north of the city. It would end on January 31, 1943, when German Field Marshal Friedrich von Paulus (Number 57) surrendered to a Red Army lieutenant. During those five months, the battle raged around and inside that strategic city on the Volga river.

Military historians have written many volumes about the German and Russian armies locked in deadly combat in that beleaguered battleground. In many other cities throughout the world where hand-to-hand fighting was involved, one finds a familiar reference to fighting block by block. In Stalingrad, the fighting was not just building by building, but literally room by room. Factory workers, men and women, had taken up weapons. It was a prime example of what the Russians would refer to as the Great Patriotic War.

Stalin had deliberately blown up the ferries and other boats that might have been used to get across to the other side of the Volga from Stalingrad. The defenders of the city fought with their backs to the river. There would be no Dunkirk, and surrender was out of the question.

Fighting for Mother Russia

Chuikov had the personal daring and the military skill to take advantage of German military mistakes and Hitler’s stubborn refusal to accept statistics that might interfere with his plans. Chuikov encouraged the fighting spirit of soldiers and civilians alike. The people were fighting not for Stalin or for Communism, but for Mother Russia. Stalin, himself, had emphasized that early in the war. 

When the end came in Stalingrad, an estimated l00,000 Germans and their allies surrendered and were marched into captivity. Only 10,000 of the 100,000 prisoners would be repatriated after the war.

Chuikov led Red Army units across eastern Europe into Germany, and into Berlin itself. The German capital surrendered on May 2, 1945. It was two days after Hitler committed suicide. Chuikov would become commander in chief of Soviet forces in Germany. After the death of Stalin in 1953, Chuikov would be given many more honors and hold high defense posts, including deputy minister of defense and commander in chief of Soviet ground forces. His war memoirs were highly praised by both Soviet and Western scholars.

Vasily Chuikov, hero of the city once known as Stalingrad, died in 1982.

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Henry H. Arnold - Champion of Airpower

In the early 1920s, an American brigadier general named Billy Mitchell tried to get the U.S. Army to put more men and resources into aviation. When he got nowhere, he went public and began criticizing superiors. He was court-martialed in 1926 and reduced in rank. His career had come to an end.

But Billy Mitchell’s cry for air power did not go unheard. Others saw the need and campaigned for the issue in less strident tones. One of those who did so was Henry H. Arnold.Arnold’s determination for air power resulted in the most powerful force ever assembled: 95,000 planes and 2,500,000 men and women to fly them, service them, and maintain them.

An Aviation Pioneer

Henry H. Arnold was born in 1886 in Gladwyne, Pennsylvania. It has been reported that his first “flight” was off the family barn, using his mother’s favorite parasol. He was graduated from West Point and became an infantry officer in 1907. 

Four years later, he entered army aviation. He and another army officer became America’s first army pilots. They took their first flying lessons from Orville and Wilbur Wright. In 1912, Arnold performed an unusual army surveillance. For the first time in American military history, he radioed from his plane a description of the disposition and movement of troops on the ground. A training school for army pilots was set up at College Park, Maryland, part of the Army Signal Corps.

During World War I, Arnold served as assistant director of military aeronautics. Though army aviation had demonstrated its worth during the war, many traditional army officers disdained an emphasis on air power. As with armies all over the world, there was always competition for funding among the various branches. Arnold, as Mitchell did, strongly believed in air power. As the debate raged, Arnold did his part to keep up public interest in aviation.

He set up airmail service linking Washington, Philadelphia, and New York. He started the Aerial Forest Service. He also developed a method for refueling aircraft while still in flight.

From 1935 to 1938 he was assistant chief of the Army Air Corps; he became chief in 1938.

The news from Europe was alarming at this time. Nazi Germany was rearming, with a strong emphasis on its air force, and was also threatening its neighbors. Arnold spoke to all the major American aircraft manufacturers, urging them to start designing new bombers and fighters and to begin mapping out future expansion.

In 1939, war broke out in Europe and George C. Marshall (Number 5) became Army chief of staff. The following year, he chose Arnold as his deputy chief of staff for air.

Creating the Most Powerful Air Force in History

Arnold threw himself into his work. It had been Marshall who commented, “Before, we had the time but not the money. Now we have the money but not the time.” Obviously, planes were needed, but so were pilots, navigators, bombardiers, and maintenance crew. Training was needed and airfields had to be secured.

Before the war was over, Arnold was chief of the U.S. Army Air Forces through-out the world. In his capacity as a member of the American Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Allied Combined Chiefs of Staff, General of the Army Arnold created the largest, most powerful air force ever. It was his army planes that took part in tens of thousands of missions all over the world. His planes took off from the carrier Hornet to bomb Tokyo, obliterated German waplants, flew supplies “over the Hump” from India to China, carried out the low-level bombing raids over the Ploestioil fields, and dropped the atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end the war.

He retired in 1946. But before he did so, he laid the groundwork for two new pro-grams: the creation of a unified U.S. Air Force and the establishment of a National Air Museum as a part of the Smithsonian. The current Air and Space Museum in Washington is a direct result of his efforts.

Henry H. Arnold, the man who vindicated Billy Mitchell, died in 1950.

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