PROLOGUE
By August 1943, the United States of America had been in the Second World War for twenty months.
England had been at war for four years, since 1 September 1939, when—a week after German leader Adolf Hitler signed a non-aggression treaty with the Soviet Union—Germany launched its Blitzkrieg (“Lightning War”) against Poland.
England and France declared war.
By 6 October 1939, Poland had fallen and was divided between the Soviet Union and Germany. “The Phony War” followed, with the belligerents taking little—virtually no—action against each other.
One significant exception to this occurred two months later, when, on 13 December 1939, Royal Navy cruisers engaged the German pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee off the Atlantic coast of South America and forced the damaged ship to seek refuge in Montevideo, Uruguay.
Diplomatic pressure (largely from the United States, although this was denied at the time) on Uruguay forced that small country to insist on following international law, which required belligerent vessels to leave sanctuary ports within seventy-two hours. On 17 December, Captain Hans Langsdorff, to save further loss of life in a battle he knew he could not win, scuttled the Graf Spee just outside the mouth of the Montevideo harbor. He then went to Argentina, buried his dead, made arrangements for the internment of his crew—and then shot himself in the temple, arranging that event so his body would fall on the German navy battle flag.
The Phony War turned real on the night of 9/10 May 1940, when the Germans occupied Luxembourg and launched another Blitzkrieg, this time into the Netherlands and Belgium. The Dutch surrendered 15 May.
On 5 June 1940, the Germans solved the problem of the “impregnable” French Maginot Line of fortresses by going around them. Paris fell on 14 June. Not all French were desolated; substantial numbers of them embraced the motto “Better Hitler Than Blum.” André Léon Blum, a socialist, already had twice served as France’s prime minister.
The French capitulated on 25 June 1940.
The only good news for the English during this period was their brilliant evacuation of 300,000 British soldiers and some 38,000 French from Dunkirk.
Germany began a massive aerial bombardment of England as the prelude to a cross-Channel invasion. The Royal Air Force
’s valiant and effective defense of Enland caused Winston Churchill, its prime minister, to utter the famous line “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”
The severe losses suffered by the Luftwaffe are cited by some historians as the reason Adolf Hitler called off the invasion. Other historians feel that it was Hitler’s decision to stab the Soviet Union in the back that brought him to that decision. He would deal with the English after he had dealt with the Communists.
The backstabbing—“Operation Barbarossa,” named in honor of Frederick I, Holy Roman Emperor—was the largest attack of the Second World War, and initially the most successful. It began on 22 June 1941.
It was brilliantly planned, brilliantly executed, and took the Russians entirely by surprise.
On 15 September, German forces began the siege of Leningrad. They—and almost everyone else—thought it would be over in about a month. With that in mind, the Germans on 2 October 1941 began their march on Moscow and soon the gilded tops of the Soviet capital’s churches could be seen through German binoculars.
Before things (including the weather and Soviet tenacity) turned against them, the Germans held 750,000 square miles and had nearly 100 million people under their boot.
On 5 December, the attack on Moscow was called off. Winter had set in, and the Germans were simply unprepared to fight in the terrible cold. The troops were freezing and could not be properly supplied. Moscow could wait until spring.
Two days later—7 December 1941, a date President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared “would live in infamy”—the Japanese attacked the U.S. Navy base at Pearl Harbor, Territory of Hawaii. That, too, was a brilliant operation, one meticulously planned, effectively carried out, and which took the Americans by complete surprise. When it was over, most American battleships in the Pacific were at the bottom of Pearl Harbor.
And things promptly got worse.
On 11 December, Germany and Italy declared war on the United States. On Christmas Day 1941, Japan took Hong Kong, and on 2 January 1942, Manila was declared an open city and fell to the Japanese.
With the fall of all the Philippines to the Japanese only a matter of time, and aware that the morale of the American people was as low as it had ever been—and sinking—President Roosevelt authorized a near-suicidal bombing attack on Japan.
On 18 April 1942, Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle led a small flight of B-25 Mitchell bombers from the deck of an aircraft carrier to Tokyo. The physical damage they caused was minimal, but the damage to Japanese pride was enormous. And the United States could finally claim to be fighting back.
Eighteen days later, on 6 May 1942, Lieutenant General Jonathan M. Wain-wright surrendered the Philippines to the Japanese. It was the largest surrender in U.S. history.
Japan was now poised to invade Australia from bases in the Solomon Islands. But on 7 August 1942, the just-formed U.S. First Marine Division, which was not supposed to be ready to fight for a year, was thrust into the breach and landed on Guadalcanal.
Surprising just about everybody, the landing was a success and the Marines took the island, fighting without their heavy artillery and living off captured Japanese rations.
Australia was saved, and some dared to hope the tide of war had changed. Some proof of this hope came on 8 November 1942, when United States Army troops, under Lieutenant General George S. Patton, landed in North Africa. The French valiantly defended their North African colonies against the Americans, and in a thirty-six-hour battle, with negligible damage to themselves, the battleship USS Massachusetts, the cruisers USS Augusta, USS Brooklyn, USS Tuscaloosa, and USS Wichita, and aircraft from the carrier USS Ranger either sank or knocked out of action most of the French fleet, including the battleship Jean Bart and the cruisers Primaguet, Fougueux, Boulonnais, Brestois, and Frondeur.
Two months later, in captured/liberated Casablanca, Roosevelt and Churchill met and decided to invade Sicily as soon as possible. They also decreed that Germany would not be allowed to seek an armistice, but must surrender unconditionally.
And two weeks after that, on 31 January 1943, there came what most historians agree was the beginning of the end for Germany. Newly promoted Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus was forced to surrender his troops—90,000 of them, who were surrounded, out of ammunition, and reduced to eating their horses—at Stalingrad.
But the war was by no means over, and historians now agree that it could easily have gone the other way.
If, for example, Germany had won the race to build the atomic bomb.
If, for example, Germany had managed to get into production the Me-262, a jet fighter capable of causing unacceptable losses to the flights of British and American bombers that were reducing German cities to rubble.
If, for example, the Germans had perfected a means of accurately aiming their rocket-powered missiles.
If, for example, German submarines could have successfully interdicted the shipment of troops and the matériel of war from the United States to Europe.
If, for example, the inevitable Allied invasion of France could have been thrown back into the English Channel.
Hitler devoutly believed all of the above were possible, even probable. But many members of the Führer’s inner circle were more pragmatic and had begun to consider the ramifications of a German defeat.
“Operation Phoenix” was born. If there were temporary reverses in the fortunes of the Thousand-Year Reich—if, for example, the Russians took Berlin—all would not necessarily be lost. National Socialism and its leaders could rise phoenixlike from the ashes.
All it would take would be some place of refuge for the leaders to bide their time, and some place to conceal vast amounts of money from the victorious Allies until the time came to spend it to restore the Reich, probably immediately after the West and Russia had both been fatally weakened in the inevitable war between them.
Argentina seemed to be just the place. Argentina, ostensibly neutral, leaned heavily toward the Axis powers. The Argentine army was armed with Mauser rifles, wore German steel helmets and uniforms patterned on those of the Wehr -macht, and had its headquarters in the Edificio Libertador in Buenos Aires, a magnificent structure built with the generous assistance of Germany.
While it was also true that the Argentine navy leaned toward the British (and to some degree, toward the Americans) and that there were large numbers of Jews in the country who hated Nazism and all it stood for, these problems could be dealt with.