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Omsk aviation college named N. Y. Zhukovskey.

A Brief History of the U.S. Army in World War II.

Done by: the student of group EM–15 Reshetnikov Sergei

Checked by: Shevchik N.M.

Maintenance:

Introduction.

The War in Europe.

The Outbreak of War.

The United States Enters the War.

The North African Campaign.

Sicily and Italy.

The Cross-Channel Attack.

Battles of Attrition.

The Battle of the Bulge.

The Final Offensive.

The Pacific War.

Japan on the Offensive.

The Tide Turns.

Twin Drives to American Victory.

Aftermath

Further Readings.

The U.S. Army Campaigns ofWorldWarll

A Brief History of the U.S. Army in World War II

CENTER OF MILITARY HISTORY

UNITED STATES ARMY

WASHINGTON, D.C., 1992

Introduction

World War II was the largest and most violent armed conflict in the history of mankind. However, the half century that now separates us from that conflict has exacted its toll on our collective knowledge. While World War II continues to absorb the interest of military scholars and historians, as well as its veterans, a generation of Americans has grown to maturity largely unaware of the political, social, and military implications of a war that, more than any other, united us as a people with a common purpose.

Highly relevant today, World War II has much to teach us, not only about the profession of arms, but also about military preparedness, global strategy, and combined operations in the coalition war against fascism. During the next several years, the U.S. Army will participate in the nation's 50th anniversary commemoration of World War II. The commemoration will include the publication of various materials to help educate Americans about that war. The works produced will provide great opportunities to learn about and renew pride in an Army that fought so magnificently in what has been called "the mighty endeavor."

A Brief History of the U.S. Army in World War //highlights the major ground force campaigns during the six years of the war, offers suggestions for further reading, and provides Americans an opportunity to learn about the Army's role in World War II. This brochure was prepared at the U.S. Army Center of Military History by Wayne M. Dzwonchyk (Europe) and John Ray Skates (Pacific). I hope this absorbing account of that period will enhance your appreciation of American achievements during World War II.

M. P. W. Stone Secretary of the Army

Contents

"OMAHA Beach" by Gary Sheahan. This was the one sector of the Normandy coast where the German defenses had begun to reach the expectations of Field Marshal Rommel, and here the Allied invasion of France faced its greatest crisis. (Army Art Collection)

The War in Europe

World War I left unresolved the question of who would dominate Europe. The tremendous dislocations caused by the war laid the groundwork for the collapse of democratic institutions there and set the stage for a second German attempt at conquest. A worldwide depression that began in 1929 destroyed the fragile democratic regime in Germany. In 1933 Adolf Hitler led to power the National Socialist German Workers' (Nazi) Party, a mass movement that was virulently nationalistic, antidemocratic, and anti-Semitic. He ended parliamentary government, assumed dictatorial powers, and proclaimed the Third Reich. The Nazi government increased the strength of the German armed forces and sought to overturn the Versailles Treaty, to recover German territory lost at the peace settlement, and to return to the so-called Fatherland German-speaking minorities within the borders of surrounding countries.

The ultimate goal of Hitler's policy was to secure "living space" for the German "master race" in eastern Europe. A gambler by instinct, Hitler relied on diplomatic bluff and military innovation to overcome Germany's weaknesses. He played skillfully on the divisions among the European powers to gain many of his aims without war. With the Italian Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini he announced a Rome-Berlin alliance (the Axis) in 1935. Meanwhile, in the Far East, the Japanese—the only Asian industrial power—coveted the natural resources of China and Southeast Asia, but found their expansion blocked by European colonial powers or by the United States. Having seized Manchuria in 1931, they began a war against China in 1937. The League of Nations failed to counter effectively Japanese aggression in Manchuria and an Italian invasion of Ethiopia. Soon Germany, Italy, and Japan became allies, facing Western democratic governments that wanted to avoid another war and the Soviet Union whose Communist government was widely distrusted.

The people of the United States, having rejected the Versailles Treaty and the Covenant of the League of Nations after World War I, remained largely indifferent to most international concerns. They firmly discounted the likelihood of American involvement in another major war, except perhaps with Japan. Isolationist strength in Congress led to the passage of the Neutrality Act of 1937, making it unlawful for the United States to trade with belligerents. American policy aimed at continental defense and designated the Navy as the first line of such defense. The Army's role was to serve as the nucleus of a mass mobilization that would defeat any invaders who managed to fight their way past the Navy and the nation's powerful coastal defense installations. The National Defense Act of 1920 allowed an Army of 280,000, the largest in peacetime history, but until 1939 Congress never appropriated funds to pay for much more than half of that strength. Most of the funds available for new equipment went to the fledgling air corps. Throughout most of the interwar period, the Army was tiny and insular, filled with hard-bitten, long-serving volunteers scattered in small garrisons throughout the continental United States, Hawaii, the Philippines, and Panama.

Yet some innovative thinking and preparation for the future took place in the interwar Army. Experiments with armored vehicles and motorization, air-ground cooperation, and the aerial transport of troops came to nothing for lack of resources and of consistent high-level support. The Army did, however, develop an interest in amphibious warfare and in related techniques that were then being pioneered by the U.S. Marine Corps. By the outbreak of war the Signal Corps was a leader in improving radio communications, and American artillery practiced the most sophisticated fire-direction and -control techniques in the world. In addition, war plans for various contingencies had been drawn up, as had industrial and manpower mobilization plans. During the early 1930s Col. George C. Marshall,

assistant commandant of the Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia, had earmarked a number of younger officers for leadership positions. Despite such preparations, the Army as a whole was unready for the war that broke out in Europe on 1 September 1939.

The Outbreak of War

During March 1938 German troops had occupied Austria, incorporating it into the Reich. In September Hitler announced that the "oppression" of ethnic Germans living in Czechoslovakia was intolerable and that war was near. England and France met with Hitler (the Munich Pact) and compelled Czechoslovakia to cede its frontier districts to Germany in order to secure "peace in our time." Peace, however, was only an illusion. During March 1939 Hitler seized the rest of Czechoslovakia by force of arms and then turned his attention to Poland. Although Britain and France had guaranteed the integrity of Poland, Hitler and Josef Stalin, dictator of the Soviet Union, signed a secret, mutual nonaggression pact in August 1939. With the pact Stalin bought time to build up his strength at the expense of Britain and France, and Hitler gained a free hand to deal with Poland. When Hitler's army invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, World War II began.

While German forces overran western Poland, Soviet troops entered from the east to claim their portion of that country. France and Britain declared war on Germany and mobilized their forces. The subsequent period of deceptive inactivity, lasting until spring, became known as the Phony War. Nothing happened to indicate that World War II would differ significantly in style or tempo from World War I.

But the years since 1918 had brought important developments in the use of tanks. A number of students of war—the British Sir Basil Liddell Hart and J. F. C. Fuller, the Frenchman Charles de Gaulle, the American George S. Patton, and the Germans Oswald Lutz and Heinz Guderian—believed that armored vehicles held the key to restoring decision to the battlefield. But only the Germans conceived the idea of massing tanks in division-size units, with infantry, artillery, engineers, and other supporting arms mechanized and all moving at the same pace. Moreover, only Lutz and Guderian received the enthusiastic support of their government.

In the spring of 1940 their theories were put to the test as German forces struck against Norway and Denmark in April; invaded the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg in May; and late in the same month broke through a hilly, wooded district in France. Their columns sliced through to the English Channel, cutting off British and French troops in northern France and Belgium. The French Army, plagued by low morale, divided command, and primitive communications, fell apart. The British evacuated their forces from Dunkerque with the loss of most of their equipment. The Germans entered Paris on 14 June, and the French government, defeatist and deeply divided politically, sued for an armistice. The success of the German Blitzkrieg forced the remaining combatants to rethink their doctrine and restructure their armies.

With his forces occupying northern France and with a puppet French government established in the south, Hitler launched the Luftwaffe against the airfields and cities of England to pave the way for an invasion. Britain's survival hung by a thread. From July to October 1940, while German landing barges and invasion forces waited on the Channel coasts, the Royal Air Force, greatly outnumbered drove the Luftwaffe from the daytime skies in the legendary Battle of Britain. At sea the British Navy, with increasing American cooperation, fought a desperate

cities of England to pave the way for an invasion. Britain's survival hung by a thread. From July to October 1940, while German landing barges and invasion forces waited on the Channel coasts, the Royal Air Force, greatly outnumbered drove the Luftwaffe from the daytime skies in the legendary Battle of Britain. At sea the British Navy, with increasing American cooperation, fought a desperate battle against German submarine packs to keep the North Atlantic open. British pugnacity finally forced Hitler to abandon all plans to invade England.

In February Hitler sent troops under Lt. Gen. Erwin Rommel to aid the Italians who were fighting against the British in North Africa. German forces coming to the aid of the Italians in the Balkans routed a British expedition in Greece, and German paratroopers seized the important island of Crete. Then, in June 1944, Hitler turned against his supposed ally, the Soviet Union, with the full might of the German armed forces.

Armored spearheads thrust deep into Soviet territory, driving toward Leningrad, Moscow, and the Ukraine and cutting off entire Soviet armies. Despite tremendous losses, Russian military forces withdrew farther into the country and continued to resist. Nazi expectations of a quick victory evaporated, and the onset of winter caught the Germans unprepared. Thirty miles short of Moscow their advance ground to a halt, and the Soviets launched massive counterattacks.

The Germans withstood the counterattacks and resumed their offensive the following spring. The Soviets, now locked in a titanic death struggle, faced the bulk of the German land forces—over two hundred divisions. The front stretched for 2,000 miles, from the Arctic Circle to the Black Sea. Soon casualties ran into the millions. Waging war with the implacable ruthlessness of totalitarian regimes, both sides committed wholesale atrocities—mistreatment of prisoners of war, enslavement of civilian populations, and, in the case of the Jews, outright genocide.

In the United States preparations for war moved slowly. General George С Marshall took over as Chief of Staff in 1939, but the Army remained hard pressed simply to carry out its mission of defending the continental United States. Defending overseas possessions like the Philippines seemed a hopeless task. In early 1939, prompted by fears that a hostile power might be able to establish air bases in the Western Hemisphere, thus exposing the Panama Canal or continental United States to aerial attack, President Franklin D. Roosevelt launched a limited preparedness campaign. The power of the Army Air Corps increased; Army and Navy leaders drafted a new series of war plans to deal with the threatening international situation. The focus of military policy changed from continental to hemisphere defense.

After the outbreak of war in Europe the President proclaimed a limited emergency and authorized increases in the size of the Regular

"Barrage Balloon" by Alexander Brook. The reported ability of balloons to interfere with low-level bombardment in Great Britain and Germany spurred the Army to develop a barrage balloon force for continental defense. (Army Art Collection)

After the outbreak of war in Europe the President proclaimed a limited emergency and authorized increases in the size of the Regular

"Barrage Balloon" by Alexander Brook, The reported ability of balloons to interfere with low-level bombardment in Great Britain and Germany spurred the Army to develop a barrage balloon force for continental defense. (Army Art Collection)

Army and the National Guard. Congress amended the Neutrality Act to permit munitions sales to the French and British, and large orders from them stimulated retooling and laid the basis for the expansion of war production in the future. The Army concentrated on equipping its regular forces as quickly as possible and in 1940 held the first large-scale corps and army maneuvers in American history. The rapid defeat of France and the possible collapse of Britain dramatically accelerated defense preparations. Roosevelt directed the transfer of large stocks of World War I munitions to France and Britain in the spring of 1940 and went further in September when he agreed to the transfer of fifty over-age destroyers to Britain in exchange for bases in the Atlantic and Caribbean. In March 1941 Congress repealed some provisions of the Neutrality Act. Passage of the Lend-Lease Act, which gave the President authority to sell, transfer, or lease war goods to the government of any country whose defenses he deemed vital to the defense of the United States, spelled the virtual end of neutrality. The President proclaimed that the United States would become the "arsenal of democracy." In the spring of 1941 American and British military representatives held their first combined staff conferences to discuss strategy in the event of active U.S. participation in the war, which seemed increasingly likely to include Japan as well as Germany. The staffs agreed that if the United States entered the war the Allies should concentrate on the defeat of Germany first. The President authorized active naval patrols in the western half of the Atlantic, and in July, American troops took the place of British forces guarding Iceland.

Meanwhile, General Marshall and Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson made plans to expand the Army to 1.5 million men. On 27 August 1940, Congress approved inducting the National Guard into federal service and calling up the reserves. A few weeks later the lawmakers passed the Selective Service and Training Act, the first peacetime draft in American history. By mid-1941 the Army had achieved its planned strength, with 27 infantry, 5 armored, and 2 cavalry divisions; 35 air groups; and a host of support units. But it remained far from ready to deploy overseas against well-equipped, experienced, and determined foes.

The United States Enters the War

On 7 December 1941, while German armies were freezing before Moscow, Japan suddenly pushed the United States into the struggle by attacking the American naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Four days later Hitler declared war on the United States. President Roosevelt called on Congress for immediate and massive expansion of the armed forces. Twenty years of neglect and indifference, however, could not be overcome in a few days.

Helpless as American garrisons in the Pacific fell to the Japanese in the spring of 1942, military leaders in Washington worked feverishly to create a headquarters that could direct a distant war effort and to turn the fledgling ground and air units into viable, balanced fighting forces. In early 1942 the Joint Chiefs of Staff emerged as a committee of the nation's military leaders to advise the President and to coordinate strategy with the British. In March the War Department General Staff was reorganized and the Army divided into three major commands: the Air Forces, Ground Forces, and Service Forces. Thirty-seven Army divisions were in some state of training, but only one was fully trained, equipped, and deployable by January 1942. Army planners of the time estimated that victory would require an Army of nearly 9 million men, organized into 215 combat divisions, estimates that proved accurate regarding overall manpower but too ambitious for the 90 divisions that eventually were established and supported on far-flung battlefields.

large amounts of munitions and equipment; and lend-lease aid, including tens of thousands of trucks and other vehicles and equipment, played an important part in mechanizing the Soviet Army. Amphibious warfare required large numbers of landing craft and support vessels, yet to be built. The first U.S. troops arrived in the British Isles in January 1942, but nearly a year passed before they went into action against the Axis. Meanwhile, air power provided virtually the only means for the Allies to strike at Germany. The Royal Air Force began its air offensive against Germany in May 1942, and on 4 July the first American crews participated in air raids against the Continent.

In early 1942 British and American leaders reaffirmed the priority of the European theater. General Marshall argued for an immediate buildup of American forces in Great Britain, a possible diversionary attack on the Continent in the fall, and a definite full-scale invasion in 1943. The British greeted this program with caution. Remembering the enormous casualties of World War I, they preferred to strike at German power in the Mediterranean, rather than risk a direct confrontation in haste. Although acknowledging the eventual necessity for an invasion of France, they hoped to defer it until much later. Instead, Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill suggested Anglo-American landings in North Africa, bringing the French armies in France's colonies there back into the war on the side of the Allies and aiding the British in their fight against the Italians and the forces of German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. Months of lively debate followed, but ultimately President Roosevelt directed General Marshall to plan and carry out amphibious landings on the coast of North Africa before the end of 1942.

The North African Campaign

Marshall ordered Lt. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, then in England, to take command of the invasion. Meeting the November deadline required improvisation of every kind Army troops were hurriedly trained in amphibious warfare. Technicians modified commercial vessels to serve as landing ships. While General Eisenhower monitored operations from Gibraltar, American forces, convoyed directly from the United States, landed along the Atlantic coast of French Morocco, near Casablanca. Meanwhile, American and British troops sailing from England landed in Algeria. Despite efforts to win support among French military officers in North Africa, some fighting occurred. Nevertheless negotiations soon led to a cease-fire, and French units joined the Allied forces.

While the Allies tightened their grip on Morocco and Algeria, their troops raced to reach strategic positions in neighboring Tunisia. A month earlier the British in Egypt under Lt. Gen. Sir Bernard L. Montgomery had mounted a powerful attack on the Germans at El Alamein, sending Rommel and his German-Italian Panzer Army reeling back into Libya. If strong Allied forces could reach the coast of Tunisia, Rommel would be trapped between them and Montgomery's troops.

Awake to the threat, the Germans poured troops into Tunisia by air and sea, brushing aside weak French forces there. Axis air power, based in Sicily, Sardinia, and Italy, pounded the advancing Allied columns. As torrential December rains turned the countryside into a quagmire, the Allies lost the race. Instead of catching Rommel, they faced a protracted struggle. While his forces dug in along the southern border of Tunisia opposite Montgomery, a second powerful Axis force, the Fifth Panzer Army, barred the way to the Tunisian coast.

A chain of mountains separates coastal Tunisia from the arid interior. In a plain between two arms of the mountains and behind the passes in the west lay important Allied airfields and supply dumps. On 14 February 1943, the Axis commanders sent German and Italian forces through the passes, hoping to

penetrate the American positions and either envelop the British in the north or seize Allied supply depots.

"Hill 609" by Fletcher Martin. Much of the Army's fighting in the final offensive in northern Tunisia involved dismounted infantry attach on prepared defensive positions in rugged hill country. (Army Art Collection)

German forces quickly cut off and overwhelmed two battalions of American infantry positioned too far apart for mutual support, and the experienced panzers beat back counterattacks by American reserves, including elements of the U.S. 1st Armored Division. U.S. troops began evacuating airfields and supply depots on the plain and falling back to the western arm of the mountains. Dug in around the oasis town of Sbeitla, American infantry and armor managed to hold off the Germans through 16 February, but defenses there began to disintegrate during the night, and the town lay empty by midday on the 17th. From the oasis, roads led back to two passes, the Sbiba and the Kasserine. By 21 February the Germans had pushed through both and were poised to seize road junctions leading to the British rear.

Rommel and other German commanders, however, could not agree on how to exploit their success. Meanwhile Allied reinforcements rushed to the critical area. The 1 st Armored Division turned back German probes toward Tebessa, and British armor met a more powerful thrust toward Thala, where four battalions of field artillery from the U.S. 9th Infantry Division arrived just in time to bolster sagging defenses. On the night of 22 February the Germans began to pull back. A few days later Allied forces returned to the passes. The first American battle with German forces had cost more than 6,000 U.S. casualties, including 300 dead and two-thirds of the tank strength of the 1st Armored Division.

In March, after the British repulsed another German attack, the Allies resumed the offensive. The U.S. II Corps, now under the command of Maj. Gen. George S. Patton, attacked in coordination with an assault on the German line by Montgomery's troops. American and British forces in the south met on 7 April as they squeezed Axis forces into the northeastern tip of the country. The final drive to clear Tunisia began on 19 April. On 7 May British armor entered Tunis, and American infantry entered Bizerte. Six days later the last Axis resistance in Africa ended with the surrender of over 275,000 prisoners of war.

The U.S. Army learned bitter lessons about the inadequacy of its training, equipment, and leadership in the North African campaign. Army Ground Forces acted quickly to ensure that American soldiers would receive more realistic combat training. Higher commanders realized that they could not interfere with their subordinates by dictating in detail the positions of their units. Troops had to be committed in division-size, combined arms teams, not in driblets. The problem posed by American tanks, outgunned by the more heavily armed and armored German panzers, took far longer to correct. But the artillery established itself as the Army's most proficient arm.

Sicily and Italy

Meeting in Casablanca in January 1943, President Roosevelt, Prime Minister Churchill, and the Combined Chiefs of Staff decided that the large Italian island

of Sicily would be their next target. Montgomery's British forces landed on the southeast coast, while Patton's newly activated Seventh Army landed on the southwest, with the mission of seizing airfields and protecting the flank of the British drive. Airborne troops spearheading the attacks scattered wide of their targets but managed to disrupt enemy communications. Hours after the initial landings on 9 July, German armor struck the American beaches. Naval gunfire, infantry counterattacks, and the direct fire of field artillery landing at the critical juncture broke up the German formations. But two attempts to reinforce the beaches with parachute and glider-borne troops ended in disaster when Allied antiaircraft batteries mistook the transport planes for enemy aircraft and opened fire, causing severe losses.

Meanwhile, the Germans solidly blocked the British drive on the Sicilian capital, Messina. General Sir Harold R. L. G. Alexander, Allied ground commander, ordered Patton to push toward Palermo, at the western tip of the island. Once in Palermo, since the British drive was still stalled, his forces attacked Messina from the north. Patton used a series of small amphibious end runs to outflank German positions on the northern coastal road. American and British troops arrived in Messina on 17 August, just as the last Axis troops evacuated Sicily.

In late July the Allies decided to follow up their success in Sicily with an invasion of Italy. Having lost hope of victory, the Italian High Command, backed by the king, opened secret negotiations with the Allies. The Germans, suspecting that Italy was about to desert the Axis, rushed in additional troops.

The Germans swiftly disarmed the Italian Army and took over its defensive positions. A British fleet sailed into the harbor of Taranto and disembarked troops onto the docks, while the U.S. Fifth Army under Lt. Gen. Mark W. Clark landed on the beaches near Salerno on 9 September. The Germans reacted in strength. For four days vigorous attacks by German armor threatened the beaches. But on 16 September American and British forces made contact, and two weeks later American troops entered Naples, the largest city south of Rome. Allied plans called for a continued advance to tie down German troops and prevent their transfer to France or Russia, while Hitler decided to hold as much of Italy as possible.

"Bailey Bridge " by Tom Craig. Mechanized warfare demanded a substantial increase in tactical bridging; in Italy the Bailey Bridge proved versatile and adaptable to a variety of weights and situations. (Army Art Collection)

As the Allies advanced up the mountainous spine of Italy, they confronted a series of heavily fortified German defensive positions, anchored on rivers or commanding terrain features. The brilliant delaying tactics of the German commander in Italy, Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, exacted a high price for every Allied gain. The campaign in Italy became an endless siege, fought in rugged terrain, in often appalling conditions, and with limited resources.

Moving north from Naples, the Allies forced a crossing of the Volturno River in October 1943 and advanced to the Winter Line, a main German defensive position anchored on mountains around Cassino. Repeated attempts over the next six months to break or outflank it failed. An amphibious end run, landing the U.S. VI Corps under Maj. Gen. John P. Lucas at Anzio in January 1944, failed to turn

the German flank, for Lucas waited too long to build up his reserves before moving aggressively against the German defenses. Kesselring had time to call in reinforcements, including artillery, which soon brought every inch of Allied-held ground under fire. As the defenders dug in, the end run turned into another siege, as American and British troops repulsed repeated counterattacks.

Meanwhile, an American attempt to cross the Rapido River, timed to coincide with the Anzio landing, miscarried with heavy casualties. Allied efforts to blast a way through the enemy's mountain defenses proved futile, despite the use of medium and heavy bombers to support ground attacks around Cassino. Finally, in May 1944, a series of coordinated attacks by the Fifth Army and Eighth Army pried the Germans loose, and they began to fall back. On 4 June 1944, two days before the Normandy invasion, Allied troops entered Rome.

The Normandy invasion made Italy a secondary theater, and Allied strength there gradually decreased. Nevertheless, the fighting continued. The Allies attacked a new German defensive line in the Northern Appenines in August but were unable to make appreciable headway through the mountains. Not until spring of 1945 did they penetrate the final German defenses and enter the Po valley. German forces in Italy surrendered on 2 May 1945.

The Cross-Channel Attack

Preparations for an attack on German-occupied France continued as did the campaigns in the Mediterranean. The defeat of the German U-boat threat, critical to the successful transport of men and materiel across the Atlantic, had been largely accomplished by the second half of 1943. The success of the war against the U-boats was immeasurably aided by secret intelligence, code-named ULTRA, garnered by Anglo-American breaking of German radio communications codes. Such information also proved valuable to the commanders of the ground campaign in Italy and France.

By early 1944 an Allied strategic bombing campaign so reduced German strength in fighters and trained pilots that the Allies effectively established complete air superiority over western Europe. Allied bombers now turned to systematic disruption of the transportation system in France in order to impede the enemy's ability to respond to the invasion. At the same time, American and British leaders orchestrated a tremendous buildup in the British Isles, transporting 1.6 million men and their equipment to England and providing them with shelter and training facilities.

Detailed planning for the cross-Channel assault had begun in 1943 when the American and British Combined Chiefs of Staff appointed a British officer, Lt. Gen. Frederick E. Morgan, as Chief of Staff to the as yet unnamed Supreme Allied Commander. When General Eisenhower arrived in January 1944 to set up Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF), Morgan's work served as the basis for the final plan of assault. The Allies would land in Normandy and seize the port of Cherbourg. They would establish an expanded lodgment area extending as far east as the Seine River. Having built up reserves there, they would then advance into Germany on a broad front. Ground commander for the invasion would be General Montgomery. The British Second Army would land on the left, while the American First Army, under Lt. Gen. Omar N. Bradley, landed on the right. Intensive exercises and rehearsals occupied the last months before the invasion. An elaborate deception plan convinced the Germans that the Normandy landings were a feint, and that larger, more important landings would take place farther east, around the Pas de Calais. Here the Germans held most of their reserves, keeping their armored formations near Paris.

Developments on the Eastern Front also aided the success of the invasion. In early 1943 the Russians destroyed a German army at Stalingrad. The Germans tried to regain the initiative in the summer of 1943, attacking a Soviet-held salient near the Russian city of Kursk. In the largest tank battle known to history, they suffered a resounding defeat. Henceforth, they remained on the defensive, in constant retreat, while the Soviets advanced westward, retaking major portions of the Ukraine and White Russia during the fall and winter and launching an offensive around Leningrad in January 1944. By March 1944 Soviet forces had reentered Polish territory, and a Soviet summer offensive had prevented the Germans from transferring troops to France.

"Sherman Tanks Passing Stream of German Prisoners" by Ogden Pleissner. After seven weeks of slow, costly advances against determined German defenders in the hedgerows, Army armored formations seized the initiative at St. Lo and made rapid advances against a demoralized enemy. (Army Art Collection)

On 5 June 1944, General Eisenhower took advantage of a break in stormy weather to order the invasion of "fortress Europe." In the hours before dawn, 6 June 1944, one British and two U.S. airborne divisions dropped behind the beaches. After sunrise, British, Canadian, and U.S. troops began to move ashore. The British and Canadians met modest opposition. Units of the U.S. VII Corps quickly broke through defenses at a beach code-named UTAH and began moving inland, making contact with the airborne troops within twenty-four hours. But heavy German fire swept OMAHA, the other American landing area. Elements of the 1st and 29th Infantry Divisions and the 2d and 5th Ranger Battalions clung precariously to a narrow stretch of stony beach until late in the day, when they were finally able to advance, outflanking the German positions.

American and British beachheads linked up within days. While the Allies raced to build up supplies and reserves, American and British fighter aircraft and guerrillas of the French resistance blocked movement of German reinforcements. On the ground, Allied troops besieged Cherbourg and struggled to expand southward through the entangling Norman hedgerows. Earthen embankments hundreds of years old, matted with the roots of trees and shrubs, the hedgerows divided the countryside into thousands of tiny fields. The narrow roads, sunk beneath the level of the surrounding countryside, became deathtraps for tanks and vehicles. Crossroads villages were clusters of solidly built medieval stone buildings, ideal for defense. Small numbers of German infantry, dug into the embankments with machine guns and mortars and a tank or two or a few antitank guns for support, made advancing across each field costly.

With time short and no room to maneuver, the struggle to break out became a battle of attrition. Allied troops advanced with agonizing slowness from hedgerow to hedgerow, in a seemingly endless series of small battles. Advances were measured in hundreds of yards. Requirements for fire support far exceeded preinvasion planning, resulting in a severe shortage of artillery shells. The British made several powerful attempts to break through to the open country beyond the town of Caen, but were stopped by the Germans, who concentrated most of their armor in this threatened area. By 18 July the U.S. First Army had clawed its way into St. Lo and, on 25 July, launched Operation COBRA. As heavy and medium bombers from England pummeled German frontline positions, infantry and armor

finally punched through the defenses. Pouring through the gap, American troops advanced forty miles within a week.

Rejecting his generals' advice, Hitler ordered a counterattack against the widening breakout by Germany's last available mobile forces in France. U.S. First Army forces stopped the Germans and joined Canadian, British, and Polish troops in catching the enemy in a giant pocket around the town of Falaise. Allied fighter-bombers and artillery now aided a massive destruction of twenty enemy divisions. Suddenly, it seemed the Allies might end the war before winter. Calling off a planned halt and logistical buildup, Eisenhower ordered the Allied forces to drive all-out for the German frontier.

With enemy forces in full retreat, French and American troops rolled into Paris on 25 August 1944. Meanwhile, veteran U.S. and French divisions, pulled out of Italy, landed on the beaches of the French Riviera. While French forces liberated the ports, the U.S. Seventh Army drove northward in an effort to cut off withdrawing German troops. Moving rapidly through the cities of Lyon and Besancon, they joined up with Allied forces advancing from Normandy on 11 September.

Victory seemed to be at hand. But by mid-September Allied communications were strained. Combat troops had outrun their supplies. British and Canadian forces advanced into the Netherlands, and American troops crossed Belgium and Luxembourg and entered German territory. Then both met strong resistance. Bad weather curtailed unloading of supplies directly across the Normandy invasion beaches, while the ports on the North Sea and the Mediterranean were in ruins. As logistical problems piled up, Eisenhower rejected as too dangerous British pleas to channel all available resources into one deep thrust into Germany. He did, however, sanction one last bold gamble: Operation MARKET-GARDEN. Two U.S. and one British airborne division were to open the way for a British armored thrust to seize a bridge across the lower Rhine at Arnhem in the Netherlands. The airborne troops took most of their objectives, but German resistance was much stronger than expected, and the operation failed to gain a bridgehead across the Rhine.

Battles of Attrition

There was to be no early end to the war. Despite its recent defeats, the German Army remained a dangerous foe, fighting for its life in prepared defenses. Furthermore, as the Allies approached the frontiers of the Reich, they encountered a series of formidable terrain obstacles—major rivers, mountains, and forests—and the worst weather in over thirty years. Yet Eisenhower, believing that unremitting pressure against the enemy would shorten the war, called for the offensive to continue. Battles of attrition followed throughout October and November, all along the front.

Canadian and British soldiers trudged through the frozen mud and water of the flooded tidal lowlands in the Netherlands to free the great Belgian port of Antwerp. The U.S. First Army took the German city of Aachen on 21 October. The drive of General Patton's Third Army toward the German border halted on 25 September due to shortages of gasoline and other critical supplies. Resuming the offensive in November, Patton's men fought for two bloody weeks around the fortress town of Metz, ultimately winning bridgeheads over the Saar River and probing the Siegfried Line. In the south the U.S. Seventh Army and the First French Army fought their way through the freezing rain and snow of the Vosges Mountains to break out onto the Alsatian plain around Strasbourg, becoming the only Allied armies to reach the Rhine in 1944. But there were no strategic

objectives directly east of Strasbourg, and a pocket of tough German troops remained on the west bank, dug in around the old city of Colmar.

The attacks by the U.S. First and Ninth Armies toward the Roer River were extremely difficult. The Huertgen Forest through which they moved was thickly wooded, cut by steep defiles, fire breaks, and trails. The Germans built deep, artillery-proof log bunkers, surrounded by fighting positions. They placed thousands of mines in the forest. In addition, they felled trees across the roads and wired, mined, and booby-trapped them; and registered their artillery, mortars, and machine guns on the roadblocks. Tree-high artillery bursts, spewing thousands of lethal splinters, made movement on the forest floor difficult. Armor had no room to maneuver. Two months of bloody, close-quarters fighting in mud, snow, and cold was devastating to morale. Parts of at least three U.S. divisions, pushed beyond all human limits, experienced breakdowns of cohesion and discipline.

The Battle of the Bulge

While the Allies bludgeoned their way into the border marches of the Reich, Hitler carefully husbanded Germany's last reserves of tanks and infantry for a desperate attempt to reverse the situation in the west. On 16 December powerful German forces struck the lightly held sector of the First Army front south of Monschau in the Ardennes. German armored spearheads drove toward the Mouse River, aiming at Antwerp. Aided by bad weather, a variety of deceptive measures, and the failure of Allied intelligence correctly to interpret the signs of an impending attack, they achieved complete surprise. Elements of five U.S. divisions plus support troops fell back in confusion. Two regiments of the 106th Infantry Division, cut off and surrounded atop the mountainous Schnee Eiffel, surrendered after only brief fighting—the largest battlefield surrender of U.S. troops in World War II.

Partly as a result of the decision to continue attacking throughout the autumn, U.S. forces were spread thin in areas such as the Ardennes, and the Americans had few reserves to meet the attack. SHAEF immediately ordered available units into the threatened area, sending an airborne division into the important communications center of Bastogne. By 18 December the magnitude of the German effort was clear, and Eisenhower ordered Patton's Third Army to disengage from its offensive toward the Saar and to attack the enemy's southern flank. Scattered American units, fighting desperate rearguard actions, disrupted the German timetable, obstructing or holding key choke points—road junctions, narrow defiles, and single-lane bridges across unfordable streams—to buy time. Defenders at the town of St. Vith held out for six days; V Corps troops at Elsenborn Ridge repelled furious attacks, jamming the northern shoulder of the enemy advance. To the south armored and airborne troops, although completely surrounded and under heavy German attack, held Bastogne for the duration of the battle. German efforts to widen the southern shoulder of the bulge along the Sauer River came to nothing.

Short of fuel, denied critical roadnets, hammered by air attacks, and confronted by American armor, the German spearheads recoiled short of the Mouse. Meanwhile, Patton had altered the Third Army's axis of advance and attacked northward, relieving Bastogne on 26 December. On 3 January First and Ninth Army troops and British forces launched attacks against the northern shoulder of the bulge. Meanwhile, a secondary German offensive, Operation NORDWIND, failed in the south. Eisenhower had ordered the Sixth Army Group to fall back, pulling out of Strasbourg. General de Gaulle, the French leader, was enraged. After heated negotiations, Allied troops remained in Strasbourg, and the German attack lost its

momentum. By the end of January the Allies had retaken all the ground lost in both German offensives. The Battle of the Bulge was over.

Just as the Allies' August breakout had failed to achieve a war-winning decision, so, too, the German attempt to reenact its victory of June 1940 failed. The Allies, however, could make good their losses, while Hitler had squandered almost all his remaining armor and fighter aircraft. To make matters worse for the Reich, the Soviets on 12 January opened a large-scale offensive in Poland and East Prussia that carried their troops to within forty miles of Berlin. German forces that survived the Ardennes fighting had to be hurriedly shifted eastward to meet the growing Russian threat.

The Final Offensive

With the elimination of the "bulge" and the repulse of NORDWIND, the campaign in the west moved into its final phases. The Allies paused only briefly before resuming the offensive. Eisenhower had earlier decided that his armies should advance to the Rhine all along its length before crossing; he wanted to shorten Allied lines, provide a defensible position in the event of further German counterattacks, and free troops to build up strong reserves. If Hitler persisted in defending every inch of German territory, most of the enemy's remaining forces would be destroyed west of the Rhine. Once across the river, American and British forces would be able to advance into Germany almost at will.

Harmonizing conflicting British and American views remained one of Eisenhower's major problems. Rejecting British proposals to concentrate on one thrust north of the Ruhr under Montgomery's leadership, Eisenhower planned concentric attacks from the north by the British 21 Army Group and the U.S. Ninth Army and from the south by the U.S. First Army. Meanwhile, the Third Army would drive straight across Germany, and the Seventh Army would turn southward into Bavaria. Because the United States now dominated the alliance, most of the significant tasks of the final campaign went to American commanders.

First, a pocket of German resistance at Colmar had to be eliminated. Eisenhower assigned five additional U.S. divisions and 10,000 service troops to the effort. The Franco-American attack against the pocket began on 20 January and was over by early February. Meantime, the Canadian First Army cleared the area between the Maas and Rhine Rivers. At the same time, the First Army advanced and finally seized the Roer River dams but found that the Germans had destroyed the controls. The resultant flooding delayed the Ninth Army's advance by two weeks. That attack finally began in late February and linked up with the Canadians, cutting off German forces facing the British. Meanwhile, the First Army's drive to the Rhine culminated in the capture of Cologne and on 7 March the seizure of an intact bridge at the town of Remagen.

As American divisions poured into the bridgehead, the Third and Seventh Armies launched coordinated attacks to the south. On the 22d and the 25th, Third Army troops made assault crossings of the Rhine. On 23 March the British Second Army and the U.S. Ninth Army staged massive crossings in the Rees-Wesel-Dinslaken area, supported by the largest airborne landings of the war, while the Seventh Army crossed on the 26th near Worms. Now Allied columns fanned out across Germany, overrunning isolated pockets of resistance. While Montgomery's forces drove northward toward the great German ports of Bremen, Hamburg, and Luebeck, the Ninth Army advanced along the axis Muenster-Magdeburg. Ninth and First Army troops met on 1 April, encircling the industrial region of the Ruhr and capturing 325,000 prisoners. The First Army continued eastward toward Kassel and Leipzig while the Third Army rolled through Frankfurt, Eisenach, and

Erfurt toward Dresden, then southward toward Czechoslovakia and Austria. The Sixth Army Group advanced into Bavaria toward Munich and Salzburg, denying the Germans a last-ditch defense in the Bavarian or Austrian Alps. Germany was shattered.

Nevertheless, Eisenhower resisted British pressure to drive on to Berlin. He saw no point in taking casualties to capture ground that, in line with earlier agreements between Allied leaders, would have to be relinquished to the Soviets once hostilities ceased. His objective remained to capture or destroy the remnants of the German armed forces. The Soviets massed 1.2 million men and 22,000 pieces of artillery and on 16 April began their assault upon the city. As that battle raged, British, American, and Soviet forces neared previously negotiated stop lines along the Elbe and Mulde Rivers. The First Army made contact with Soviet troops on 25 April around Torgau. Meanwhile, as the Third Army entered Czechoslovakia and British troops reached the Baltic, the Russians moved through the streets of Berlin. On 30 April 1945, Hitler committed suicide in a bunker beneath the ruins of his capitol.

German forces in Italy surrendered effective 2 May and those in the Netherlands, northwestern Germany, and Denmark on 4 May. Patrols of the U.S. Seventh Army driving eastward through Austria and the Fifth Army driving north from Italy met near the Brenner Pass. On 7 May the German High Command surrendered all its forces unconditionally, and 8 May was officially proclaimed V-E Day. Though peace had come to Europe, one of the most culturally and economically advanced areas of the globe lay in ruins. Germany, the industrial engine of the Continent, lay prostrate, occupied by British, French, American, and Soviet troops. Britain, exhausted by its contribution to the victory, tottered near economic collapse, while France was totally dependent on the United States. The Soviet Union had suffered in excess of 20 million casualties and untold devastation, but its armed forces remained powerful and its intentions obscure. To the victory in western Europe and Italy, the United States had contributed 68 divisions, 15,000 combat aircraft, well over 1 million tanks and motor vehicles, and 135,000 dead. The country now turned its focus to a war a half a world away and to the defeat of Japan in the Pacific.

The Pacific War

Even before Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the American military chiefs had agreed on a common strategy with Great Britain: Germany, the most powerful and dangerous of the Axis powers, must be defeated first. Only enough military resources would be devoted to the Pacific to hold the Japanese west of an Alaska-Hawaii-Panama defensive line.

Competition for limited resources between the Allied commanders of the European and Pacific theaters was actually less intense than might have been expected. The Pacific was a naval war, and little U.S. offensive naval power was required in the Atlantic besides landing craft. Aside from the U-boats, the Germans posed no threat in Atlantic waters. U-boat defense primarily required many small, fast escort vessels. Then too, almost the entire British Navy was deployed in the Atlantic. Thus, American offensive naval power—especially the fast carrier task forces—could be committed to the Pacific war.

More than distance separated the two wars; they differed fundamentally in strategy and command and in the character of the fighting. In Europe the war was planned and conducted in combination with powerful Allies. Strategic decisions had to be argued and agreed to by the American and British chiefs of staff, and, on occasion, even by President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Operational planning was conducted, at least at the higher levels, by combined

Anglo-American staffs. In the Pacific the United States also had Allies—Australia and New Zealand. Yet the ratio of U.S. to Allied forces was much higher there than in Europe, and in consequence strategy and planning were almost wholly in American hands.

Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander in Europe, had no counterpart in the Pacific. From the beginning of the war, rivalry between the Army and the Navy marked the conflict. The two services competed for command, territory, and resources. In the vast Pacific, an ocean dotted with thousands of coral islands, there should have been ample room for both. But interservice rivalries and great distances prevented a single unified commander from being named, until General Douglas MacArthur became Supreme Commander,

" West Coast Dock" by Barse Miller. Roughly 40 percent of the cargo moved overseas by the Army during the war went to the Pacific theater. (Army Art Collection)

Allied Powers (SCAP), in the last days of the war. Instead, the Pacific was divided into area commands. The two most important were MacArthur's Southwest Pacific Area (SWPA) and Admiral Chester Nimitz's Pacific Ocean Areas (POA). POA, in turn, was subdivided into North Pacific, Central Pacific, and South Pacific commands. Nimitz personally retained command of the Central Pacific.

Fighting in the Pacific was unlike fighting in Europe. The campaigns in Europe were characterized by huge ground forces driving overland into the heart of the enemy's country. Both in MacArthur's SWPA and Nimitz's POA, the Pacific war was a seemingly endless series of amphibious landings and island-hopping campaigns where naval power, air power, and shipping, rather than large and heavy ground forces, were of paramount importance.

Yet for the soldiers and marines who assaulted the countless beaches, the Pacific war was even more brutal and deadly than the war in Europe. Japanese defenders always dug in, reinforced their bunkers with coconut logs, and fought until they were killed. They almost never surrendered. On Betio in the Tarawa Atoll in November 1943 the marines suffered 3,301 casualties, including 900 killed in action, for a bit of coral 3 miles long and 800 yards wide. At Iwo Jima in February and March 1945 the marines lost almost 6,000 dead and over 17,000 wounded and fought for five weeks to take an island less than five miles long. At Iwo no battalion suffered fewer than 50 percent casualties, and many sustained even higher losses. In the southwest Pacific, MacArthur's casualties were proportionately fewer. Fighting on the larger land masses of New Guinea and the Philippines, he had more room to maneuver, and he could almost always "hit 'em where they ain't."

The history of the war in the Pacific falls neatly into three periods. The first six months of the war, from December 1941 to May 1942, were a time of unbroken Japanese military victory. At the-height of Japanese expansion in mid-1942, the tide turned. The period from mid-1942 to mid-1943 saw Japanese strategic thrusts into the south and central Pacific blunted by the carrier battles of the Coral Sea (May 1942) and Midway (June 1942). Limited U.S. offensives in the Solomons and in the Papuan area of eastern New Guinea were launched in the last months of 1942. Both offensives were begun on a shoestring, and both came close to failure.

Yet they represented the end of defeat in the Pacific and the first tentative steps toward victory. Those steps became great leaps in 1944 and 1945. Two amphibious offensives developed, as MacArthur advanced across the northern coast of New Guinea into the Philippines and Nimitz island-hopped 2,000 miles across the central Pacific from the Gilbert Islands to Okinawa.

Japan on the Offensive

Japan, largely devoid of natural resources to-feed its industries, looked overseas for supplies of strategic materials such as ores and petroleum. Before 1939 the United States was Japan's major supplier. But President Roosevelt and Secretary of State Cordell Hull shut off American supplies in an effort to force the Japanese to end hostilities against China. The Japanese had long coveted the resource-rich British and Dutch colonies of Southeast Asia, and as the U.S. trade embargo tightened, the Japanese increasingly looked southward for raw materials and strategic resources.

Only the United States stood in Japan's path. The U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor was the only force capable of challenging Japan's navy, and American bases in the Philippines could threaten lines of communications between the Japanese home islands and the East Indies. Every oil tanker heading for Japan would have to pass by American-held Luzon. From these needs and constraints, Japan's war plans emerged. First, its navy would neutralize the American fleet with a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. Japan would also seize America's central Pacific bases at Guam and Wake islands and invade the Philippines. With American naval power crippled, Japan's military would be free to seize Burma, Malaya, Singapore, and the Dutch East Indies in a series of rapid amphibious operations. Japan would then establish a defensive ring around its newly conquered empire by fortifying islands in the south and the central Pacific. Japan's leaders were convinced that Americans, once involved in the European war, would be willing to negotiate peace in the Pacific.

To block Japanese ambitions, the United States Army had scant resources. Two small forces constituted the heart of the American land defenses in the Pacific— the garrison in the Territory of Hawaii and General Douglas MacArthur's command in the Commonwealth of the Philippines. Both were peacetime organizations, whose days were given to rounds of ceremonies, inspections, and languid training. Officers and their wives occupied evenings and weekends with rounds of social activities and golf, while the soldiers enjoyed more earthy pleasures in the bars and brothels of Honolulu or Manila.

Yet these forces would face overwhelming odds in the event of war. The thousands of islands that comprised the Philippines lay 8,000 miles from the American west coast, but only 200 miles from Japanese-held Formosa. To defend them, General MacArthur had the equivalent of two divisions of regular troops— 16,000 U.S. regulars and 12,000 Philippine Scouts. He could call on additional thousands of Philippine militia, but they were untrained and ill equipped. Lt. Gen. Walter С Short's Hawaiian command held 43,000 Army troops, including two infantry divisions, coast artillery, air corps, and support troops. Thus, in ground forces, the United States had the equivalent of three divisions in the Pacific to stand in the path of the Imperial Japanese Army.

American strategists had developed two plans to counter possible Japanese aggression—one for the Navy and another for the Army. The Navy planned to fight across the central Pacific for a climactic and decisive battle with the Japanese fleet. The Army saw no way to save the Philippines and favored a strategic defense along an Alaska-Hawaii-Panama line. Writing off the Philippines, however, was politically impossible, and as war drew closer frantic

efforts were made to strengthen the commonwealth's defenses. Both MacArthur and Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall overestimated the chances of their own forces and underestimated the strength and ability of the Japanese. In particular, they grossly exaggerated the power of a new weapon, the B-17 "Flying Fortress" bomber, a few of which were rushed to the Philippines in the last days of peace.

All of the efforts proved to be too little, too late. The Japanese war plan worked to perfection. On 7 December 1941, Japan paralyzed the Pacific Fleet in its attack on Pearl Harbor. In the Philippines, Japanese fliers destroyed most of MacArthur's air force on the ground. Freed of effective opposition, Japanese forces took Burma, Malaya, Singapore, and the Dutch East Indies in rapid succession. By March 1942 the Japanese had conquered an empire. Only MacArthur's beleaguered American-Filipino army still held out on the main Philippine island of Luzon.

A Japanese army had landed in northern Luzon on 22 December 1941 and began to push southward toward Manila. At first, MacArthur was inclined to meet the Japanese on the beaches. But he had no air force, and the U.S. Navy's tiny Asiatic fleet was in no position to challenge Japan at sea. The U.S. regulars and Philippine Scouts were excellent troops but were outnumbered and without air support. Giving up his initial strategy of defeating the enemy on the beaches, MacArthur decided to withdraw to the Bataan Peninsula. There he could pursue a strategy of defense and delay, shortening his lines and using the mountainous, jungle-covered terrain to his advantage. Perhaps he could even hold out long enough for a relief force to be mounted in the United States.

But too many people crowded into Bataan, with too little food and ammunition. By March it was clear that help from the United States was not coming. Nevertheless, the American-Filipino force, wracked by dysentery and malaria, continued to fight. In March President Roosevelt ordered MacArthur to escape to Australia. He left his command to Lt. Gen. Jonathan Wainwright and to Maj. Gen. Edward King, who on 9 April was forced to surrender the exhausted and starving Bataan force. Wainwright continued to resist on the small fortified island of Corregidor in Manila Bay until 6 May under constant Japanese artillery and air bombardment. After Japanese troops stormed ashore on the island, Wainwright agreed to surrender Corregidor and all other troops in the islands. By 9 May 1942, the battle for the Philippines had ended, though many Americans and Filipinos took to the hills and continued a guerrilla war against the Japanese.

The courageous defense of Bataan had a sad and ignominious end. Marching their prisoners toward camps in northern Luzon, the Japanese denied food and water to the sick and starving men. When the weakest prisoners began to straggle, guards shot or bayoneted them and threw the bodies to the side of the road. Japanese guards may have killed 600 Americans and 10,000 Filipino prisoners. News of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor had outraged the American people; news of the "Bataan Death March" filled them with bitter hatred.

By May 1942 the Japanese had succeeded beyond their wildest expectations. A vast new empire had fallen into their hands so quickly, and at so little cost, that they were tempted to go further. If their forces could move into the Solomon Islands and the southern coast of New Guinea, they could threaten Australia and cut the American line of communications to MacArthur's base there. If they could occupy Midway Island, only 1,000 miles from Honolulu, they could force the American fleet to pull back to the west coast. In Japanese overconfidence lay the seeds of Japan's first major defeats.

The Tide Turns

Japanese fortunes turned sour in mid-1942. Their uninterrupted string of victories ended with history's first great carrier battles. In May 1942 the Battle of the Coral Sea halted a new Japanese offensive in the south Pacific. A month later the Japanese suffered a devastating defeat at the Battle of Midway in the central Pacific. Now American and Australian forces were able to begin two small counteroffensives—one in the Solomons and the other on New Guinea's Papuan peninsula. The first featured the Marine Corps and the Army; the second, the Army and the Australian Allies.

American resources were indeed slim. When MacArthur arrived in Australia in March 1942, he found, to his dismay, that he had little to command. Australian militia and a few thousand U.S. airmen and service troops were his only resources. The Australian 7th Division soon returned from North Africa, where it had been fighting the Germans, and two U.S. National Guard divisions, the 32d and the 41st, arrived in April and May. MacArthur had enough planes for two bomber squadrons and six fighter squadrons. With only these forces, he set out to take Papua, while Admiral Nimitz, with forces almost equally slim, attacked Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands.

Of all the places where GIs fought in the Second World War, Guadalcanal and the Papuan peninsula may have been the worst. Though separated by 800 miles of ocean, the two were similarly unhealthful in terrain and climate. The weather on both is perpetually hot and wet; rainfall may exceed 200 inches a year, and during the rainy season deluges, sometimes 8 to 10 inches of rain, occur daily. Temperatures in December reach the high eighties, and humidity seldom falls below 80 percent. Terrain and vegetation are equally foreboding—dark, humid,

"Bringing in the Ammo" by Joseph Hirsch. At Rendova in the Solomons, landing craft went aground in shallow water fifty feet offshore, forcing troops to wade ashore with equipment and ammunition. (Army Art Collection)

jungle-covered mountains inland, and evil-smelling swamps along the coasts. Insects abound. The soldiers and marines were never dry; most fought battles while wracked by chills and fever. For every two soldiers lost in battle, five were lost to disease—especially malaria, dengue, dysentery, or scrub typhus, a dangerous illness carried by jungle mites. Almost all suffered "jungle rot," ulcers caused by skin disease.

Guadalcanal lay at the southeast end of the Solomons, an island chain 600 miles long. Navy carriers and other warships supported the landings, but they could not provide clear air or naval superiority. The marines landed on 7 August 1942, without opposition, and quickly overran an important airfield. That was the last easy action on Guadalcanal. The carriers sailed away almost as soon as the marines went ashore. Then Japanese warships surprised the supporting U.S. naval vessels at the Battle of Savo Island and quickly sank four heavy cruisers and one destroyer. Ashore, the Japanese Army fought furiously to regain the airfield. Through months of fighting the marines barely held on; some American admirals even thought that the beachhead would be lost. But gradually land-based aircraft were ferried in to provide air cover, and the Navy was able to return. As the

Japanese continued to pour men into the fight, Guadalcanal became a battle of attrition.

Slowly American resources grew, while the Japanese were increasingly unable to make up their losses. In October soldiers of the Americal Division joined the battle; in November the Navy won a smashing victory in the waters offshore; and in early 1943 the Army's 25th Infantry Division was committed as well. Soldiers now outnumbered marines, and the ground forces were reorganized as the XIV Corps, commanded by Army Mail Gen. Alexander M. Patch. As the Japanese lost the ability to supply their forces, enemy soldiers began to starve in the jungles. But not until February—six months after the initial landing—was Guadalcanal finally secured.

Meanwhile, 800 miles to the west on the eastern peninsula of New Guinea, another shoestring offensive began. Even after the Battle of the Coral Sea, the Japanese persisted in their efforts to take Port Moresby, a strategic town on New Guinea's southern coast. In late July 1942 they landed on the north coast of the huge, mountainous island and began to make their way south toward Port Moresby, across the towering Owen Stanley Mountains. Almost impassable in normal circumstances, the trail they followed was a quagmire under constant rain. Supply became impossible; food ran short; fever and dysentery set in. Defeated just short of their goal by Australian defenses, the Japanese retreated. Meanwhile, MacArthur had decided to launch a counteroffensive against the fortified town of Buna and other Japanese-held positions on the northern coast. He sent portions of the Australian 7th and U.S. 32d Divisions over the same mountainous jungle tracks earlier used by the Japanese. The result was the same. By the time his troops reached the northern coast, they were almost too debilitated to fight. Around Buna and the nearby village of Gona the Japanese holed up in coconut-log bunkers that were impervious to small-arms and mortar fire. The Americans lacked artillery, flamethrowers, and tanks. While they struggled to dig the defenders out, malnutrition, fever, and jungle rot ravaged the troops. Like the troops on Guadalcanal, the Aussies and the men of the 32d barely held on.

The Japanese also faced serious problems. Their commanders had to choose between strengthening Guadalcanal or Buna. Choosing Guadalcanal, they withdrew some support from the Buna garrison. Growing American air power made it impossible for the Japanese Navy to resupply their forces ashore, and their troops began to run short of food and ammunition. By December they were on the edge of starvation. Here the battle of attrition lasted longer, and not until January 1943 was the last Japanese resistance eliminated.

Buna was costlier in casualties than Guadalcanal, and in some respects it was an even nastier campaign. The terrain was rougher; men who crossed the Owen Stanleys called that march their toughest experience of the war. The Americans lacked almost everything necessary for success—weapons, proper clothing, insect repellents, and adequate food. "No more Bunas," MacArthur pledged. For the rest of the war his policy was to bypass Japanese strongpoints. When the battles for Guadalcanal and Buna began, the Americans had insufficient strength to win. American strength increased as the battle went on. Over the next three years it would grow to overwhelming proportions.

Twin Drives to American Victory

As late as 1943 the American Joint Chiefs of Staff had not adopted a clear strategy for winning the war in the Pacific. Early in the war they assumed that the burden of the land fighting against Japan would fall on Chinese forces. The bulk of Japan's army was deployed in China, and Chinese leaders had an immense manpower pool to draw on. But supplying and training the Chinese Army proved

to be an impossible task. Moreover, fighting in China did not lead to any strategic objective.

Instead, the hard-won successes in the Solomons and Papua and the growing strength of Mac Arthur's and Nimitz's forces gave the Joint Chiefs the means to strike at the Japanese in the Pacific. They decided to launch two converging offensives toward the Japanese islands. Using Army ground forces, land-based air power, and a fleet of old battleships and cruisers, MacArthur would leapfrog across the northern coast of New Guinea toward the Philippines. Nimitz, using carrier-based planes and Marine and Army ground forces, would island-hop across the central Pacific. The strategy was frankly opportunistic, and it left unanswered the questions of priorities and final objectives.

At the heart of the strategy were the developing techniques of amphibious warfare and tactical air power. Putting troops ashore in the face of a determined enemy had always been one of war's most dangerous and complicated maneuvers. World War II proved that the assault force needed air and sea supremacy and overwhelming combat power to be successful. Even then, dug-in defenders could take a heavy toll of infantry coming over the beaches. Special landing craft had to be built to bring tanks and artillery ashore with the

"Pirn's Jetty" by Frede Vida. The logistics of MacArthur's leaps up the New Guinea coast sometimes posed greater difficulties than did the Japanese defenders. (Army Art Collection)

infantry, and both direct air support and effective naval gunfire were essential. MacArthur's leaps up the northern coast of New Guinea were measured precisely by the range of his fighter-bombers. The primary task of Nimitz's carriers was to support and defend the landing forces. As soon as possible after the landings, land-based planes were brought in to free the carriers for other operations.

The islands of the central Pacific had little resemblance to the fetid jungles of Guadalcanal and New Guinea. Atolls like Tarawa or Kwajalein were necklaces of hard coral surrounding lagoons of sheltered water. Where the coral rose above water, small narrow islands took form. These bits of sand furnished little room for maneuver and frequently had to be assaulted frontally. Larger islands like Guam and Saipan were volcanic in origin, with rocky ridges to aid the defense; the shrapnel effect of shell bursts was multiplied by bits of shattered rock.

In November 1943 Nimitz's island-hopping campaign began with his assaults on Betio in the Tarawa Atoll and at Makin a hundred miles north. It was a costly beginning. Elements of the Army's 27th Infantry Division secured Makin with relative ease, but at Betio the 2d Marine Division encountered stubborn and deadly resistance. Naval gunfire and air attacks had failed to eliminate the deeply dug-in defenders, and landing craft grounded on reefs offshore, where they were destroyed by Japanese artillery. As costly as it was, the lessons learned there proved useful in future amphibious operations. Like MacArthur, Nimitz determined to bypass strongly held islands and strike at the enemy's weak points.

During January 1944 landings were made in the Marshalls at Kwajalein and Eniwetok followed by Guam and Saipan in the Marianas during June and July. Because the Marianas were only 1,500 miles from Tokyo, the remaining Japanese carriers came out to fight. The resulting Battle of the Philippine Sea was a disaster

for the Japanese. In what U.S. Navy pilots called "the great Marianas turkey shoot," Japanese carrier power was effectively eliminated.

Almost as soon as the Marianas were cleared, the air forces began to prepare airfields to receive new heavy bombers, the B-29s. With a range exceeding 3,000 miles, B-29s could reach most Japanese cities, including Tokyo. In November 1944 the Twentieth Air Force began a strategic bombing campaign against Japan, which indirectly led to one of the bitterest island fights of the war. Tiny Iwo Jima, lying 750 miles southeast of Tokyo, was needed both as an auxiliary base for crippled B-29s returning from their bombing raids over Japan and as a base for long-range escort fighters. The fight for the five-mile-long island lasted five weeks, during February and March 1945, and cost more than 25,000 dead—almost 6,000 Americans of the 4th and 5th Marine Divisions and 20,000 Japanese.

While Nimitz crossed the central Pacific, MacArthur pushed along the New Guinea coast, preparing for his return to the Philippines. Without carriers, his progress was slower but less costly than Nimitz's. After clearing the Buna area in January 1943, MacArthur spent the next year conquering northeastern New Guinea and the eight months that followed moving across the northern coast of Netherlands New Guinea to the island of Morotai. Because he had to cover his landings with land-based planes, he was limited to bounds of 200 miles or less on a line of advance almost 2,000 miles long. Furthermore, he had to build airfields as he went. By October 1944 MacArthur was ready for a leap to the Philippines, but this objective was beyond the range of his planes. Nimitz loaned him Admiral William F. Halsey's heavy carriers, and, on 20 October 1944, MacArthur's Sixth Army landed on Leyte Island in the central Philippines.

"All Aboard for Home" by Joseph Hirsch. Despite wartime increases, Allied sealift capability remained inadequate to return Army forces home as fast as they would have liked. (Army Art Collection)

The Japanese reacted vigorously. For the first time in the war they employed Kamikaze attacks, suicide missions flown by young, half-trained pilots. And they used their last carriers as decoys to draw Halsey's carriers away from the beachheads. With Halsey out of the battle and the landing forces without air cover, the Japanese planned to use conventional warships to brush aside the remaining American warships and destroy the support vessels anchored off the beaches. They almost succeeded. In the naval Battle of Leyte Gulf, the big guns of the big ships, not carrier planes, decided the battle. The Japanese naval forces were decimated. Japan no longer had an effective navy.

As violent as they were, most island fights involved small units and were mercifully short. However, the last two major campaigns of the Pacific war-Luzon and Okinawa—took on some of the character of the war in Europe. They were long fights on larger land masses, with entire armies in sustained combat over the course of several months. Japanese defenders on Luzon numbered 262,000 under Lt. Gen. Tomoyuki Yamashita, perhaps the best field commander in the Japanese Army. Yamashita refused an open battle, knowing that superior firepower and command of the air would favor the Americans. Instead, he prepared defensive positions where his forces could deny the Americans strategic

points like roads and airfields. He wanted to force the Americans to attack Japanese positions in a new battle of attrition.

His plan worked. MacArthur's Sixth Army under Lt. Gen. Walter Krueger landed on Luzon on 9 January 1945 and began the Army's longest land campaign in the Pacific. MacArthur's forces fought for almost seven months and took nearly 40,000 casualties before finally subduing the Japanese.

The largest landings of Nimitz's central Pacific drive were carried out on Okinawa, only 300 miles from Japan, on 1 April 1945. Before the fight was over three months later, the entire Tenth Field Army— four Army infantry divisions and two Marine divisions—had been deployed there. Like his counterpart on Luzon, the Japanese commander on Okinawa, Lt. Gen. Mitsuru Ushijima, refused to fight on the beaches and instead withdrew into the rocky hills to force a battle of attrition. Again the strategy worked. U.S. casualties were staggering, the largest of the Pacific war. Over 12,000 American soldiers, sailors, and marines died during the struggle. At Okinawa the Japanese launched the greatest Kamikaze raids of the war, and the results were frightening—26 ships sunk and 168 damaged. Almost 40 percent of the American dead were sailors lost to Kamikaze attacks.

When the Luzon and Okinawa battles ended in July, the invasion of the southernmost Japanese island of Kyushu had already been ordered by the Joint Chiefs. The date was set for 1 November 1945. Kyushu would furnish air and naval bases to intensify the air bombardment and strengthen the naval blockade around Honshu, the main island of Japan. A massive invasion in the Tokyo area was scheduled for 1 March 1946 if Japanese resistance continued. With the Okinawa experience fresh in their minds, many planners feared that the invasion of Japan would produce a bloodbath.

In fact, Japan was already beaten. It was defenseless on the seas; its air force was gone; and its cities were being burned out by incendiary bombs. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August and the Soviet declaration of war on 8 August forced the leaders of Japan to recognize the inevitable. On 15 August 1945, Emperor Hirohito announced Japan's surrender to the Japanese people and ordered Japanese forces to lay down their arms. Despite their earlier suicidal resistance, they immediately did so. With V-J Day—2 September 1945—the greatest war in human history came to an end.

Aftermath

The United States emerged from the war with global military commitments that included the occupation of Germany and Japan and the oversight of Allied interests in liberated areas. Almost 13 million Americans were in uniform at the end of the war; over 8 million of them were soldiers. But the impulse was strong to follow the patterns of the past and dismantle this force. Families pressed the government to "bring the boys home," and soldiers overseas demanded the acceleration of the separation process. American monopoly of the atomic bomb seemed to furnish all the power that American security interests needed. Some air power advocates even argued that the bomb made armies and navies obsolete.

President Roosevelt had died in April 1945, on the eve of victory. The new President, Harry S. Truman, and his advisers tried to resist the political pressures for hasty demobilization. Truman wanted to retain a postwar Army of 1.5 million, a Navy of 600,000, and an Air Force of 400,000. But neither Congress nor the American public was willing to sustain such a force. Within five months of V-J Day, 8.5 million servicemen and women had been mustered out, and in June of the following year only two full Army divisions were available for deployment in

an emergency. By 1947 the Army numbered a mere 700,000—sixth in size among the armies of the world.

Yet too much had changed for the Army to return to its small and insular prewar status. Millions of veterans now remembered their service with pride. The beginning of the Cold War, especially the Berlin blockade of 1948, dramatically emphasized the need to remain strong. The Army had become too deeply intertwined with American life and security to be reduced again to a constabulary force. Moreover, the time was not far off when new conflicts would demonstrate the limits of atomic power and prove that ground forces were as necessary as they had been in the past.

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Table of contents

Table of contents 2

Shakespeare the man 3

Life 3

Early life in Stratford 3

Career in the theatre 3

Private life 4

Early posthumous documentation 5

Chronology of Shakespeare's plays 5

Publication 6

Poetic and dramatic powers 7

The early poems 7

The sonnets 8

The early plays 8

The histories 9

The Roman plays 9

The "great," or "middle," comedies 9

The great tragedies 9

The "dark" comedies 10

The late plays 10

The contribution of textual criticism 10

Romeo and Juliet 10

The used literature 12

Shakespeare the man

Life

Although the amount of factual knowledge available about Shakespeare is surprisingly large for one of his station in life, many find it a little disappointing, for it is mostly gleaned from documents of an official character. Dates of baptisms, marriages, deaths, and burials; wills, conveyances, legal processes, and payments by the court—these are the dusty details. There are, however, a fair number of contemporary allusions to him as a writer, and these add a reasonable amount of flesh and blood to the biographical skeleton.

Early life in Stratford

The parish register of Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, shows that he was baptized there on April 26, 1564; his birthday is traditionally celebrated on April 23. His father, John Shakespeare, was a burgess of the borough, who in 1565 was chosen an alderman and in 1568 bailiff (the position corresponding to mayor, before the grant of a further charter to Stratford in 1664). He was engaged in various kinds of trade and appears to have suffered some fluctuations in prosperity. His wife, Mary Arden, of Wilmcote, Warwickshire, came from an ancient family and was the heiress to some land. (Given the somewhat rigid social distinctions of the 16th century, this marriage must have been a step up the social scale for John Shakespeare.)

Stratford enjoyed a grammar school of good quality, and the education there was free, the schoolmaster's salary being paid by the borough. No lists of the pupils who were at the school in the 16th century have survived, but it would be absurd to suppose the bailiff of the town did not send his son there. The boy's education would consist mostly of Latin studies—learning to read, write, and speak the language fairly well and studying some of the classical historians, moralists, and poets. Shakespeare did not go on to the university, and indeed it is unlikely that the tedious round of logic, rhetoric, and other studies then followed there would have interested him.

Instead, at the age of 18 he married. Where and exactly when are not known, but the episcopal registry at Worcester preserves a bond dated November 28, 1582, and executed by two yeomen of Stratford, named Sandells and Richardson, as a security to the bishop for the issue of a license for the marriage of William Shakespeare and "Anne Hathaway of Stratford," upon the consent of her friends and upon once asking of the banns. (Anne died in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare. There is good evidence to associate her with a family of Hathaways who inhabited a beautiful farmhouse, now much visited, two miles from Stratford.) The next date of interest is found in the records of the Stratford church, where a daughter, named Susanna, born to William Shakespeare, was baptized on May 26, 1583. On February 2, 1585, twins were baptized, Hamnet and Judith. (The boy Hamnet, Shakespeare's only son, died 11 years later.)

How Shakespeare spent the next eight years or so, until his name begins to appear in London theatre records, is not known. There are stories—given currency long after his death—of stealing deer and getting into trouble with a local magnate, Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlecote, near Stratford; of earning his living as a schoolmaster in the country; of going to London and gaining entry to the world of theatre by minding the horses of theatregoers; it has also been conjectured that Shakespeare spent some time as a member of a great household and that he was a soldier, perhaps in the Low Countries. In lieu of external evidence, such extrapolations about Shakespeare's life have often been made from the internal "evidence" of his writings. But this method is unsatisfactory: one cannot conclude, for example, from his allusions to the law that Shakespeare was a lawyer; for he was clearly a writer, who without difficulty could get whatever knowledge he needed for the composition of his plays.

Career in the theatre

The first reference to Shakespeare in the literary world of London comes in 1592, when a fellow dramatist, Robert Greene, declared in a pamphlet written on his deathbed:

There is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers heart wrapt in a Players hide supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you; and, being an absolute Johannes Factotum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country.

It is difficult to be certain what these words mean; but it is clear that they are insulting and that Shakespeare is the object of the sarcasms. When the book in which they appear (Greenes groats-worth of witte, bought with a million of repentance, 1592) was published after Greene's death, a mutual acquaintance wrote a preface offering an apology to Shakespeare and testifying to his worth. This preface also indicates that Shakespeare was by then making important friends. For, although the puritanical city of London was generally hostile to the theatre, many of the nobility were good patrons of the drama and friends of actors. Shakespeare seems to have attracted the attention of the young Henry Wriothesley, the 3rd earl of Southampton; and to this nobleman were dedicated his first published poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece.

One striking piece of evidence that Shakespeare began to prosper early and tried to retrieve the family fortunes and establish its gentility is the fact that a coat of arms was granted to John Shakespeare in 1596. Rough drafts of this grant have been preserved in the College of Arms, London, though the final document, which must have been handed to the Shakespeares, has not survived. It can scarcely be doubted that it was William who took the initiative and paid the fees. The coat of arms appears on Shakespeare's monument (constructed before 1623) in the Stratford church. Equally interesting as evidence of Shakespeare's worldly success was his purchase in 1597 of New Place, a large house in Stratford, which as a boy he must have passed every day in walking to school.

It is not clear how his career in the theatre began; but from about 1594 onward he was an important member of the company of players known as the Lord Chamberlain's Men (called the King's Men after the accession of James I in 1603). They had the best actor, Richard Burbage; they had the best theatre, the Globe; they had the best dramatist, Shakespeare. It is no wonder that the company prospered. Shakespeare became a full-time professional man of his own theatre, sharing in a cooperative enterprise and intimately concerned with the financial success of the plays he wrote.

Unfortunately, written records give little indication of the way in which Shakespeare's professional life molded his marvellous artistry. All that can be deduced is that for 20 years Shakespeare devoted himself assiduously to his art, writing more than a million words of poetic drama of the highest quality.

Private life

Shakespeare had little contact with officialdom, apart from walking—dressed in the royal livery as a member of the King's Men—at the coronation of King James I in 1604. He continued to look after his financial interests. He bought properties in London and in Stratford. In 1605 he purchased a share (about one-fifth) of the Stratford tithes—a fact that explains why he was eventually buried in the chancel of its parish church. For some time he lodged with a French Huguenot family called Mountjoy, who lived near St. Olave's Church, Cripplegate, London. The records of a lawsuit in May 1612, due to a Mountjoy family quarrel, show Shakespeare as giving evidence in a genial way (though unable to remember certain important facts that would have decided the case) and as interesting himself generally in the family's affairs.

No letters written by Shakespeare have survived, but a private letter to him happened to get caught up with some official transactions of the town of Stratford and so has been preserved in the borough archives. It was written by one Richard Quiney and addressed by him from the Bell Inn in Carter Lane, London, whither he had gone from Stratford upon business. On one side of the paper is inscribed: "To my loving good friend and countryman, Mr. Wm. Shakespeare, deliver these." Apparently Quiney thought his fellow Stratfordian a person to whom he could apply for the loan of 30—a large sum in Elizabethan money. Nothing further is known about the transaction, but, because so few opportunities of seeing into Shakespeare's private life present themselves, this begging letter becomes a touching document. It is of some interest, moreover, that 18 years later Quiney's son Thomas became the husband of Judith, Shakespeare's second daughter.

Shakespeare's will (made on March 25, 1616) is a long and detailed document. It entailed his quite ample property on the male heirs of his elder daughter, Susanna. (Both his daughters were then married, one to the aforementioned Thomas Quiney and the other to John Hall, a respected physician of Stratford.) As an afterthought, he bequeathed his "second-best bed" to his wife; but no one can be certain what this notorious legacy means. The testator's signatures to the will are apparently in a shaky hand. Perhaps Shakespeare was already ill. He died on April 23, 1616. No name was inscribed on his gravestone in the chancel of the parish church of Stratford-upon-Avon. Instead these lines, possibly his own, appeared:

Good friend, for Jesus' sake forbear To dig the dust enclosed here. Blest be the man that spares these stones, And curst be he that moves my bones.

Early posthumous documentation

Shakespeare's family or friends, however, were not content with a simple gravestone, and, within a few years, a monument was erected on the chancel wall. It seems to have existed by 1623. Its epitaph, written in Latin and inscribed immediately below the bust, attributes to Shakespeare the worldly wisdom of Nestor, the genius of Socrates, and the poetic art of Virgil. This apparently was how his contemporaries in Stratford-upon-Avon wished their fellow citizen to be remembered.

Chronology of Shakespeare's plays

Despite much scholarly argument, it is often impossible to date a given play precisely. But there is a general consensus, especially for plays written 1585-1601, 1605-07, and 1609 onward. The following list of first performances is based on external and internal evidence, on general stylistic and thematic considerations, and on the observation that an output of no more than two plays a year seems to have been established in those periods when dating is rather clearer than others.

1589-92 Henry VI, Part 1; Henry VI, Part 2; Henry VI, Part 3

1592-93 Richard III, The Comedy of Errors

1593-94 Titus Andronicus, The Taming of the Shrew

1594-95 The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Love's Labour's Lost, Romeo and Juliet

1595-96 Richard II, A Midsummer Night's Dream

1596-97 King John, The Merchant of Venice

1597-98 Henry TV, Part 1; Henry IV, Part 2

1598-99 Much Ado About Nothing

1599 Henry V

1599-1600 Julius Caesar, As You Like It

1600-01 Hamlet, The Merry Wives of Windsor

1601-02 Twelfth Night, Troilus and Cressida

1602-03 All's Well That Ends Well

1604-05 Measure For Measure, Othello

1605-06 King Lear, Macbeth

1606-07 Antony and Cleopatra

1607-08 Coriolanus, Timon of Athens

1608-09 Pericles

1609-10 Cymbeline

1610-11 The Winter's Tale

1611 The Tempest

1612-13 Henry VIII, The Two Noble Kinsmen

Shakespeare's two narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, can be dated with certainty to the years when the Plague stopped dramatic performances in London, in 1592 and 1593-94, respectively, just before their publication. But the sonnets offer many and various problems; they cannot have been written all at one time, and most scholars set them within the period 1593-1600. "The Phoenix and the Turtle" can be dated 1600-01.

Publication

During Shakespeare's early career, dramatists invariably sold their plays to an actor's company, who then took charge of them, prepared working promptbooks, and did their best to prevent another company or a publisher from getting copies; in this way they could exploit the plays themselves for as long as they drew an audience. But some plays did get published, usually in small books called quartos. Occasionally plays were "pirated," the text being dictated by one or two disaffected actors from the company that had performed it or else made up from shorthand notes taken surreptitiously during performance and subsequently corrected during other performances; parts 2 and 3 of the Henry VI (1594 and 1595) and Hamlet (1603) quartos are examples of pirated, or "bad," texts. Sometimes an author's "foul papers" (his first complete draft) or his "fair" copy—or a transcript of either of these—got into a publisher's hands, and "good quartos" were printed from them, such as those of Titus Andronicus (1594), Love's Labour's Lost (1598), and Richard II (1597). After the publication of "bad" quartos of Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet (1597), the Chamberlain's Men probably arranged for the release of the "foul papers" so that second—"good"—quartos could supersede the garbled versions already on the market. This company had powerful friends at court, and in 1600 a special order was entered in the Stationers' Register to "stay" the publication of As You Like It, Much Ado About Nothing, and Henry V, possibly in order to assure that good texts were available. Subsequently Henry V (1600) was pirated, and Much Ado About Nothing was printed from "foul papers"; As You Like It did not appear in print until it was included in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories & Tragedies, published in folio (the reference is to the size of page) by a syndicate in 1623 (later editions appearing in 1632 and 1663).

The only precedent for such a collected edition of public theatre plays in a handsome folio volume was Ben Jonson's collected plays of 1616. Shakespeare's folio included 36 plays, 22 of them appearing for the first time in a good text. (For the Third Folio reissue of 1664, Pericles was added from a quarto text of 1609, together with six apocryphal plays.) The First Folio texts were prepared by John Heminge and Henry Condell (two of Shakespeare's fellow sharers in the Chamberlain's, now the King's, Men), who made every effort to present the volume worthily. Only about 230 copies of the First Folio are known to have survived.

The following list gives details of plays first published individually and indicates the authority for each substantive edition. Q stands for Quarto: Q2, Q3, Q4, etc., stand for reprints of an original quarto. F stands for the First Folio edition of 1623.

Henry VI, Part 2 Q 1594: a reported text. F from revised fair copies, edited with reference to

Titus Andronicus Q 1594: from foul papers. F from a copy of Q, with additions from a manuscript that had been used as a promptbook.

Henry VI, Part 3 Q 1595: a reported text. F as for Henry VI, Part 2.

Richard III Q 1597: a reconstructed text prepared for use as a promptbook. F from reprints of Q, edited with reference to foul papers and containing some 200 additional lines.

Love's Labour's Lost Q is lost. Q2 1598: from foul papers, and badly printed. F from Q2.

Romeo and Juliet Q 1597: a reported text. Q2 from foul papers, with some reference to Q. F from a reprint of Q2.

Richard II Q 1597: from foul papers and missing the abdication scene. Q4 1608, with reported version of missing scene. F from reprints of Q, but the abdication scene from an authoritative manuscript, probably the promptbook (of which traces appear elsewhere in F).

Henry IV, Part 1 Q 1598: from foul papers. F from Q5, with some literary editing.

A Midsummer Night's Dream Q 1600: from the author's fair copy. F from Q2, with some reference to a promptbook.

The Merchant of Venice Q 1600: from foul papers. F from Q, with some reference to a promptbook.

Henry IV, Part 2 Q 1600: from foul papers. F from Q, with reference to a promptbook.

Much Ado About Nothing Q 1600: from the author's fair papers. F from Q, with reference to a promptbook.

Henry V Q 1600: a reported text. F from foul papers (possibly of a second version of the play).

The Merry Wives of Windsor Q 1602: a reported (and abbreviated) text. F from a transcript, by Ralph Crane (scrivener of the King's Men), of a revised promptbook.

Hamlet Q 1603: a reported text, with reference to an earlier play. Q2 from foul papers, with reference to Q. F from Q2, with reference to a promptbook, with theatrical and authorial additions.

King Lear Q 1608: from an inadequate transcript of foul papers, with use made of a reported version. F from Q, collated with a promptbook of a shortened version.

Troilus and Cressida Q 1609: from a fair copy, possibly the author's. F from Q, with reference to foul papers, adding 45 lines and the Prologue.

Pericles Q 1609: a poor text, badly printed with both auditory and graphic errors.

Othello Q 1622: from a transcript of foul papers. F from Q, with corrections from another authorial version of the play.

The plays published for the first time in the First Folio of 1623 are:

All's Well That Ends Well From the author's fair papers, or a transcript of them.

Antony and Cleopatra From an authorial fair copy.

Henry VI, Part 1

As You Like It From a promptbook, or a transcript of it.

The Comedy of Errors From foul papers.

Coriolanus From an authorial fair copy, edited for the printer.

Cymbeline From an authorial copy, or a transcript of such, imperfectly prepared as a promptbook.

Henry VIII From a transcript of a fair copy, made by the author, prepared for reading.

Julius Caesar From a transcript of a promptbook.

King John From an authorial fair copy.

Macbeth From a promptbook of a version prepared for court performance.

Measure for Measure From a transcript, by Ralph Crane, of very imperfect foul papers.

The Taming of the Shrew From foul papers.

The Tempest From an edited transcript, by Ralph Crane, of the author's papers.

Timon of Athens From foul papers, probably unfinished.

Twelfth Night From a promptbook, or a transcript of it.

The Two Gentlemen of Verona From a transcript, by Ralph Crane, of a promptbook, probably of a shortened version.

The Winter's Tale From a transcript, by Ralph Crane, probably from the author's fair copy.

The texts of Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594) are remarkably free from errors. Shakespeare presumably furnished a fair copy of each for the printer. He also seems to have read the proofs. The sonnets were published in 1609, but there is no evidence that Shakespeare oversaw their publication.

Poetic and dramatic powers

The early poems

Shakespeare dedicated the poem Venus and Adonis to his patron, Henry Wriothesley, 3rd earl of Southampton, whom he further promised to honour with "some graver labour"—perhaps The Rape of Lucrece, which appeared a year later and was also dedicated to Southampton. As these two poems were something on which Shakespeare was intending to base his reputation with the public and to establish himself with his patron, they were displays of his virtuosity—diploma pieces. They were certainly the most popular of his writings with the reading public and impressed them with his poetic genius. Seven

editions of Venus and Adonis had appeared by 1602 and 16 by 1640; Lucrece, a more serious poem, went through eight editions by 1640; and there are numerous allusions to them in the literature of the time. But after that, until the 19th century, they were little regarded. Even then the critics did not know what to make of them: on the one hand, Venus and Adonis is licentiously erotic (though its sensuality is often rather comic); while Lucrece may seem to be tragic enough, the treatment of the poem is yet somewhat cold and distant. In both cases the poet seems to be displaying dexterity rather than being "sincere." But Shakespeare's detachment from his subjects has come to be admired in more recent assessments.

Above all, the poems give evidence for the growth of Shakespeare's imagination. Venus and Adonis is full of vivid imagery of the countryside; birds, beasts, the hunt, the sky, and the weather, the overflowing Avon—these give freshness to the poem and contrast strangely with the sensuous love scenes. Lucrece is more rhetorical and elaborate than Venus and Adonis and also aims higher. Its disquisitions (upon night, time, opportunity, and lust, for example) anticipate brilliant speeches on general themes in the plays—on mercy in The Merchant of Venice, suicide in Hamlet, and "degree" in Troilus and Cressida.

There are a few other poems attributed to Shakespeare. When the Sonnets were printed in 1609, a 329-line poem, "A Lovers complaint," was added at the end of the volume, plainly ascribed by the publisher to Shakespeare. There has been a good deal of discussion about the authorship of this poem. Only the evidence of style, however, could call into question the publisher's ascription, and this is conflicting. Parts of the poem and some lines are brilliant, but other parts seem poor in a way that is not like Shakespeare's careless writing. Its narrative structure is remarkable, however, and the poem deserves more attention than it usually receives. It is now generally thought to be from Shakespeare's pen, possibly an early poem revised by him at a more mature stage of his poetical style. Whether the poem in its extant form is later or earlier than Venus and Adonis and Lucrece cannot be decided. No one could doubt the authenticity of "The Phoenix and the Turtle," a 67-line poem that appeared with other "poetical essays" (by John Marston, George Chapman, and Ben Jonson) appended to Robert Chester's poem Loves Martyr in 1601. The poem is attractive and memorable, but very obscure, partly because of its style and partly because it contains allusions to real persons and situations whose identity can now only be guessed at.

The sonnets

In 1609 appeared SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS. Never before Imprinted. At this date Shakespeare was already a successful author, a country gentleman, and an affluent member of the most important theatrical enterprise in London. How long before 1609 the sonnets were written is unknown. The phrase "never before imprinted" may imply that they had existed for some time but were now at last printed. Two of them (nos. 138 and 144) had in fact already appeared (in a slightly different form) in an anthology, The Passionate Pilgrime (1599). Shakespeare had certainly written some sonnets by 1598, for in that year Francis Meres, in a "survey" of literature, made reference to "his sugared sonnets among his private friends," but whether these "sugared sonnets" were those eventually published in 1609 cannot be ascertained—Shakespeare may have written other sets of sonnets, now lost. Nevertheless, the sonnets included in The Passionate Pilgrime are among his most striking and mature, so it is likely that most of the 154 sonnets that appeared in the 1609 printing belong to Shakespeare's early 30s rather than to his 40s~to the time when he was writing Richard II and Romeo and Juliet rather than when he was writing King Lear and Antony and Cleopatra. But, of course, some of them may belong to any year of Shakespeare's life as a poet before 1609.

The early plays

Although the record of Shakespeare's early theatrical success is obscure, clearly the newcomer soon made himself felt. His brilliant two-part play on the Wars of the Roses, The Whole Contention between the two Famous Houses, Lancaster and Yorke, was among his earliest achievements. He showed, in The Comedy of Errors, how hilariously comic situations could be shot through with wonder and sentiment. In Titus Andronicus he scored a popular success with tragedy in the high Roman fashion. The Two Gentlemen of Verona was a new kind of romantic comedy. The world has never ceased to enjoy The Taming of the Shrew. Love's Labour's Lost is an experiment in witty and satirical observation of society. Romeo and Juliet combines and interconnects a tragic situation with comedy and gaiety. All this

represents the probable achievement of Shakespeare's first half-dozen years as a writer for the London stage, perhaps by the time he had reached 30. It shows astonishing versatility and originality.

The histories

For his plays on subjects from English history, Shakespeare primarily drew upon Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles, which appeared in 1587, and on Edward Hall's earlier account of The union of the two noble and illustre famelies of Lancastre and York (1548). From these and numerous secondary sources he inherited traditional themes: the divine right of royal succession, the need for unity and order in the realm, the evil of dissension and treason, the cruelty and hardship of war, the power of money to corrupt, the strength of family ties, the need for human understanding and careful calculation, and the power of God's providence, which protected his followers, punished evil, and led England toward the stability of Tudor rule.

The Roman plays

After the last group of English history plays, Shakespeare chose to write about Julius Caesar, who held particular fascination for the Elizabethans. Then, for six or seven years Shakespeare did not return to a Roman theme, but, after completing Macbeth and King Lear, he again used Thomas North's translation of Plutarch as a source for two more Roman plays, Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus, both tragedies that seem as much concerned to depict the broad context of history as to present tragic heroes.

The "great," or "middle," comedies

The comedies written between 1596 and 1602 have much in common and are as well considered together as individually. With the exception of The Merry Wives of Windsor, all are set in some "imaginary" country. Whether called Illyria, Messina, Venice and Belmont, Athens, or the Forest of Arden, the sun shines as the dramatist wills. A lioness, snakes, magic caskets, fairy spells, identical twins, disguise of sex, the sudden conversion of a tyrannous duke or the defeat offstage of a treacherous brother can all change the course of the plot and bring the characters to a conclusion in which almost all are happy and just deserts are found. Lovers are young and witty and almost always rich. The action concerns wooing; and its conclusion is marriage, beyond which the audience is scarcely concerned. Whether Shakespeare's source was an Italian novel (The Merchant of Venice and Much Ado About Nothing), an English pastoral tale ( As You Like It), an Italian comedy (the Malvolio story in Twelfth Night), or something of his own invention (probably A Midsummer Night's Dream, and parts of each), always in his hands story and sentiments are instinct with idealism and capable of magic transformations.

In some ways these are intellectual plays. Each comedy has a multiple plot and moves from one set of characters to another, between whom Shakespeare invites his audience to seek connections and explanations. Despite very different classes of people (or immortals) in different strands of the narrative, the plays are unified by Shakespeare's idealistic vision and by an implicit judgment of human relationships, and all their characters are brought together—with certain significant exceptions~at, or near, the end.

The great tragedies

It is a usual and reasonable opinion that Shakespeare's greatness is nowhere more visible than in the series of tragedies— Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth. Julius Caesar, which was written before these, and Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus, which were written after, have many links with the four. But, because of their rather strict relationship with the historical materials, they are best dealt with in a group by themselves. Timon of Athens, probably written after the above-named seven plays, shows signs of having been unfinished or abandoned by Shakespeare. It has its own splendours but has rarely been considered equal in achievement to the other tragedies of Shakespeare's maturity.

The "dark" comedies

Before the death of Queen Elizabeth I in 1603 the country was ill at ease: the House of Commons became more outspoken about monopolies and royal prerogative, and uncertainty about the succession to the throne made the future of the realm unsettled. In 1603 the Plague again struck London, closing the theatres. In 1601 Shakespeare's patron, the Earl of Southampton, was arrested on charges of treason; he was subsequently released, but such scares did not betoken confidence in the new reign. About Shakespeare's private reaction to these events there can be only speculation, but three of the five plays usually assigned to these years- Troilus and Cressida, All's Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure—have become known as "dark" comedies for their distempered vision of the world. Only during the 20th century have these plays been frequently performed in anything like Shakespeare's texts, an indication that their questioning, satiric, intense, and shifting comedy could not please earlier audiences.

The late plays

Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest, and Henry VIII, written between 1608 and 1612, are commonly known as Shakespeare's "late plays," or his "last plays," and sometimes, with reference to their tragicomic form, they are called his "romances." Works written by an author in his 40s hardly deserve to be classified as "late" in any critical sense, yet these plays are often discussed as if they had been written by a venerable old author, tottering on the edge of a well-earned grave. On the contrary, Shakespeare must have believed that plenty of writing years lay before him, and indeed the theatrical effectiveness and experimental nature of Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest in particular make them very unlike the fatigued work of a writer about to break his staff and drown his book.

The contribution of textual criticism

The early editors of Shakespeare saw their task chiefly as one of correction and regularization of the faulty printing and imperfect texts of the original editions or their reprints. Many changes in the text of the quartos and folios that are now accepted derive from Nicholas Rowe (1709) and Alexander Pope (1723-25), but these editors also introduced many thousands of small changes that have since been rejected. Later in the 18th century, editors compiled collations of alternative and rejected readings. Samuel Johnson (1765), Edward Capell (1767-68), and Edmund Malone (1790) were notable pioneers. Their work reached its most comprehensive form in the Cambridge edition in nine volumes by W.G. Clark, J. Glover, and W.A. Wright, published in 1863-66. A famous one-volume Globe edition of 1864 was based on this Cambridge text.

Romeo and Juliet

play by William Shakespeare, performed about 1594-95 and first published in a "bad" quarto in 1597. The characters of Romeo and Juliet have been depicted in literature, music, dance, and theatre. The appeal of the young hero and heroine—whose families, the Montagues and Capulets, respectively, are implacable enemies—is such that they have become, in the popular imagination, the representative type of star-crossed lovers.

Shakespeare's principal source for the plot was The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet (1562), a long narrative poem by the English poet Arthur Broke (d. 1563). Broke had based his poem on a French translation of a tale by the Italian Matteo Bandello (1485-1561).

Shakespeare set the scene in Verona, Italy, during July. Juliet and Romeo meet and fall instantly in love at a masked ball of the Capulets and profess their love when Romeo later visits her at her private balcony in her family's home. Because the two noble families are enemies, the couple is married secretly by Friar Laurence. When Tybalt, a Capulet, kills Romeo's friend Mercutio in a quarrel, Romeo kills Tybalt and is banished to Mantua. Juliet's father insists on her marrying Count Paris, and Juliet goes to consult the friar. He gives her a potion that will make her appear to be dead and proposes that she take it and that Romeo rescue her; she complies. Unaware of the friar's scheme, Romeo returns to Verona on hearing of Juliet's apparent death. He encounters Paris, kills him, and finds Juliet in the burial vault. There

he gives her a last kiss and kills himself with poison. Juliet awakens, sees the dead Romeo, and kills herself. The families learn what has happened and end their feud.

The most complex of Shakespeare's early plays, Romeo and Juliet is far more than "a play of young love" or "the world's typical love-tragedy." Weaving together a large number of related impressions and judgments, it is as much about hate as love. It tells of a family and its home as well as a feud and a tragic marriage. The public life of Verona and the private lives of the Veronese make up the setting for the love of Juliet and Romeo and provide the background against which their love can be assessed. It is not the deaths of the lovers that conclude the play but the public revelation of what has happened, with the admonitions of the Prince and the reconciliation of the two families.

Shakespeare enriched an already old story by surrounding the guileless mutual passion of Romeo and Juliet with the mature bawdry of the other characters—the Capulet servants Sampson and Gregory open the play with their fantasies of exploits with the Montague women; the tongues of the Nurse and Mercutio are seldom free from sexual matters—but the innocence of the lovers is unimpaired.

Romeo and Juliet made a strong impression on contemporary audiences. It was also one of Shakespeare's first plays to be pirated; a very bad text appeared in 1597. Detestable though it is, this version does derive from a performance of the play, and a good deal of what was seen on stage was recorded. Two years later another version of the play appeared, issued by a different, more respectable publisher, and this is essentially the play known today, for the printer was working from a manuscript fairly close to Shakespeare's own. Yet in neither edition did Shakespeare's name appear on the title page, and it was only with the publication of Love's Labour's Lost in 1598 that publishers had come to feel that the name of Shakespeare as a dramatist, as well as the public esteem of the company of actors to which he belonged, could MAKE AN IMPRESSION ON POTENTIAL PURCHASERS OF PLAYBOOKS.

The used literature

Walter Ebish "A Shakespeare Bibliography";

A. T. Lifshits "Shakespearian readings";

A. M. Finkel "William Shakespeare. Sonety".

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