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August 3, 2021 - February 8, 2022
September 1, 1939, was the first day of a war that would last for 2,174 days, and it brought the first dead in a war that would claim an average of 27,600 lives every day, or 1,150 an hour, or 19 a minute, or one death every 3 seconds.
The last Regular Army cavalry regiment would slaughter its mounts to feed the starving garrison on Bataan in the Philippines, ending the cavalry era not with a bang but with a dinner bell.
Even the debacle at Pearl Harbor failed to shake the conviction of Roosevelt and his military brain trust that “Germany first” was conceptually sound, and this remained the most critical strategic principle of the Second World War.
“The prospects of success are small and dependent on a mass of unknowns, whilst the chances of disaster are great.” American planners considered the British argument for TORCH “persuasive rather than rational,” but the American argument for SLEDGEHAMMER and ROUNDUP had been neither.
Similarly, the critical issue of landing craft had been blithely ignored. “Who is responsible for building landing craft?”
“Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
When Noguès complained that Jews in Morocco and Algeria were demanding restored sufferage, Roosevelt jauntily replied, “The answer to that is very simple, namely, that there just aren’t going to be any elections, so the Jews need not worry about the privilege of voting.” The president also proposed restricting Jewish participation in law, medicine, and other professions to reflect Jewish percentages in “the whole of the North African population.” This, he told Noguès, would “eliminate the specific and understandable complaints which the Germans bore towards the Jews in Germany” for
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First, Clark had ordered him to find some “Negro troops who had participated in our landings” to show the president, who was considered partial to Negroes.
“Venari lavari ludere ridere hoc est vivere”: To hunt, to bathe, to play, to laugh—that is to live.
“We became ruthless with the Arab,” a 1st Division soldier wrote. “If we found them where they were not to be, they were open game, much as rabbits in the States during hunting season.” Another soldier explained: “Here Arabs live all over. Some we shoot on sight, some we search, and some we make a deal with to buy eggs and chickens.” Soldiers boasted of using natives for marksmanship practice, daring one another to shoot an Arab coming over a hill like a target in an arcade. Others fired at camels to see the riders bucked off, or shot at the feet of Arab children “to watch them dance in fear,”
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The western democracies were fighting to rid the world of evil, yet some of their number found nothing wrong with shooting Arabs as sport.
