A Tale of Three Cities Reading Questions
The author pursues several questions at the beginning of the lecture. On what premise does he aim to “establish a position?”
The author aims to establish a position on the premise that World War II "constituted a massively transformative event, for both the United States and the world”. This is supported by by the choice America made in the type of war it would fight and the lasting legacy of American belligerence.
Professor Kennedy states that in order “to understand the full scope of the war’s transformative agency”, one needs to look at the tears 1940 to 1945. What did he bring up about 1940 to set the scene?
To set the scene, Kennedy brought up that in 1940, America was in its last full peacetime year, and still mostly entrenched in an atmosphere of isolationism, shown by the passing of the Neutrality Acts in 1935, 1936, and 1937, among other prominent examples. 1940 was also the eleventh year of the Great Depression, and more than 40% of all white households and 95% of all African American households lived in poverty.
Read the statement by the imaginary street corner speaker. What seemed most farfetched to you?
Of the statements professed by the imaginary street corner speaker, the most far fetched seeming to me, based in the perspective of America, 1940, were claims such as the doubling of the middle class (doubtful-seeming due to the increase in the wage gap between the lavishly rich and desolately poor), the promises of racial equality, and the magnitude of the United States’ future intervention with Europe, including the winning of the war with Germany and Japan, the United Nations, the Marshall Plan, and the World Trade Organization.
When the US got involved in the war in 1941, what were some differing opinions about how the war would turn out?
The attack of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 prompted US entry into the war. Hitler, hearing the news from Hawaii, boasted that “now it is impossible for us to lose the war. We now have an ally [Japan] that has not been vanquished in three thousand years.”. However, Winston Churchill responded to America’s entry into the war with a contradictory conclusion, quoted as saying later, “I could not foretell the course of events… but now at this very moment I knew the United States was in the war, up to the neck and in to the death. So we had won after all! England would live… I went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful.”.
Professor Kennedy calls this a “tale of three cities.” To which three cities does he refer?
In the title “A Tale of Three Cities”, Professor Kennedy is referring to Rouen, a French city on the Seine, Washington DC, on the Potomac, and Volgograd, formerly known as both Tsaritsyn and Stalingrad.
What happened at Rouen and what were its implications for the war?
A squadron of one dozen B-17 bombers lifted off their airfield in the South of England, and transited the Channel accompanied by a swarm of British Spitfire fighters. They dropped their bomb load on a railroad marshaling yard, just a few hundred meters from Rouen’s historic Gothic cathedral and not far from the site where Joan of Arc had been burned at the stake some five centuries earlier. The planes returned to base without any loss of aircraft or crew meaning it was a successful raid. This marked the first assault on Nazi-occupied Europe by heavy bombers of the US Army Air Forces. This was a revolution in American war-fighting doctrine. It created a new doctrine for strategic aerial bombing and deliver a blow to the domestic heartland rather to the troops. This would deprive the enemy of his capacity to support a force in the field and to break the people’s will to continue fighting. It signaled a brief war and fewer casualties as well as minimum disruption of one’s own social and economic structure.
Who was Paul Tibbets?
Paul Tibbets was the lead pilot for the Rouen raid in 1942. Almost three years later he served as the pilot on the flight of the Enola Gay from Tinian, in the Mariana Islands, to drop history’s first atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.
What decision was made in Washington D.C. and how did it affect the outcome of the war?
On October 6, 1942 the civilian head of the American War Production Board, Donald Nelson, met in in his office with Army Undersecretary Robert Patterson and Lieutenant General Brehon B. Somervell , head of the Army Service forces. The were to resolve the “Feasibility Dispute” which plagued America’s mobilization program through 1942, and generated antagonisms between military officials like Patterson and Somervell and civilian mobilization administrators like Nelson. The terms for this would all but complete the pattern of america’s peculiar war. The chaotic mobilization effort in early 1942 would be slowed down and its prospectively gigantic military manpower drafts would be drastically downsized.
What two “fateful” consequences followed this decision?
First, the target date for the Cross-Channel amphibious invasion of northwestern France, D-Day, was postponed to May 1, 1944. Second the Victory Program’s goal of conscripting, out-fitting, training, transporting, and deploying 215 ground divisions was put down to just 90 divisions. The dimensions of this were immense: millions of men who had originally been destined to don uniforms and shoulder weapons on the battlefield would now be left in overalls to wield tools on the nation’s production lines.
What happened at Stalingrad that contributed the outcome of the war?
This event slaughtered tens of thousands of German and Soviet troops. The German capitulation at Stalingrad in February 1943 broke the back of the Wehrmacht’s 18 month old Russian offensive. The Red Army now seized the initiative and began pushing the invader out of the Soviet homeland, through Poland, and eventually into the streets of Berlin in 1942. This Soviet victory ended the Anglo-American leaders fear that the Russians could not withstand the shock of heavily-armored, fast-moving Blitzkrieg warfare.It also laid to rest the fear that their Soviet partner might be so badly battered and bloded by the fighting that Stalin would be compelled to seek political exit from the war. The Soviets turning from defensive to offensive warfare turned the war around by committing to pursuing the battle until the extinguishment of the Nazy Regime.
How did Joseph Stalin describe the American way of war?
Joseph Stalin had his own description for the American way of war: the United States, he commented bitterly, seemed to have decided to fight with American money, and American machines, and with Russian men. That was a characteristically cynical and tactless formulation; it was also indisputably accurate.
Describe how the author contends that the United States was the only “true victor” from the war.
The war-fighting pattern had far-reaching and lasting consequences. Among other things, it made the US the only true victor in the war, if by victory we mean emerging at the war’s end in a position superior to that occupied at the war’s onset. Ironically, but not unrelatedly, the US paid the smallest price in both blood and treasure for the victory that it so singularly achieved. If one asks, “Who made the weightiest contribution to the defeat of Nazi Germany?” the answer is unarguably the Soviet Union. But the Soviets were not the only ones who reaped the richest rewards from their own effort. Franklin Roosevelt’s “arsenal of democracy” strategy, in short, with its implications for the scale, configuration, and timing of the American war effort, amounted to a shrewdly calculated “least-cost” pathway to victory for the United States.
Why does the profit made by Macy’s on December 7th, 1944 seem incredible to Professor Kennedy?
Macy’s marketing team hit upon the poignantly symbolic date of December 7th, 1944 to promote a chain-wide sale. Only in America, it might be remarked, would a vendor choose to seek commercial advantage by commemorating the date of the nation’s most humiliating military defeat. But more to the point, only in wartime America could Macy’s results have been achieved. On that day Americans were engaged in the most ferocious fighting of the war, yet Macy’s cash registers rang up a higher volume of sales than on any previous day in the giant retailer’s history. There was no other country engaged in WWII where such a thing could have happened.
Compare the United States war and civilian dead to that of other countries. Why was this an important factor in postwar growth?
There was another implication of the US’s war-fighting strategy that has often been overlooked: the war’s toll in human life. Great Britain, America’s first partner nation in what became the Grand Alliance, lost some 350,000 people to enemy action, of whom about 100,000 were civilians. China may have lost as many as 10 million people, about 6 million of them civilians. Yugoslavia lost 2 million people, most of them civilians. Poles perished in the war, 6 million of them civilians (of whom perhaps 4 million were Jews). Six and a half million Germans died, about 1 million of them civilians. Japan lost some 3 million souls, 1 million of them civilian. In the Soviet Union, estimates are that the war took some 24 million lives, including 16 million civilians. And as for the United States: official records list 405,399 military dead in all branches of service, and 6 civilians died.
How does the author use the story about the Japanese balloon offensive to conclude his lecture?
Comparing the instrumentalities and results of the respective Japanese and American strategic bombing campaigns provides a summary illustration of the unique means by which America waged and won WWII. While Japan in the first half of 1945 adapted a primitive wind-driven technology in a last pathetic effort to strike at the Americans in their heartland, huge B-29 bomber streams flew nightly to Japan from the Marianas. The B-29s eventually razed 66 of Japan’s principal cities, de-housed some 8 million souls, and killed more than 800,000 people. Just two of those B-29s effectively ended the Japanese-American war, compared to Japan’s futile balloon bombs.
