Very good description of the destruction wrought by the winter fighting on the road from Moscow to Klin.
Your two comments remind me of a big reason I enjoy doing these posts so much. I have read a little about the war on the eastern front, and a little about the war in North Africa, and a bit more about the war in the Pacific. But nowhere else have I been able to view the war in such full context. After the Coral Sea battle the focus shifted to the Kharkov-Crimea front so fast I almost got whiplash. I have now seen how the focus will revert to the Pacific in a few weeks, after resting for a spell on North Africa. I’ll bet there were lots of Americans who, as they tried to digest what they were reading about in the paper, started their own map rooms to help them keep it straight.
Not Homer’s father though. I recall from my own time in basic training that news from the outside world comes to a halt until it is over. So far he as missed the fall of Bataan and Corregidor, the Doolittle raid, the Battle of the Coral Sea, and the renewed fighting in Russia. And if anything new develops before the end of July he will miss that too.
Ha! “Shameless Project Promotion Alert!”
Reading the New York Times from 70 years ago gives you the full flavor of World War II as a titanic global human effort. You see on a daily basis the war economy as a domestic issue, and the fighting taking place from far-flung regions like Madagascar, North Africa, Burma, tiny Pacific Islands and the vast expanses of the USSR. The war was so huge that in history books it has always been broken down into chunks to discuss individual battles and campaigns. Too look at it as a global effort staggers the imagination. Yet more than anyone else, this global effort required the attention of Ernest King, Hap Arnold, George Marshall and their British counterparts. The Germans, Japanese and Soviets didn’t have the same global challenges.
These threads also challenge me to check and re-check my own sources. My first thought on reading the Japanese report of “we know where your carriers are” was “Wrong-O Bucko!” But upon checking my sources to verify, I was reminded that the Enterprise and Hornet were actually where the Japanse reported them. I would have made an assumption and been wrong. It was all about an intelligence cat-and-mouse game that the two sides were playing.
The American carriers deliberately let themselves be spotted; why? Because we knew the Japanese had targeted Midway, and wanted them to think our carriers were in the South Pacific. They had actually been dispatched to help with the battle of Coral Sea, but could not get there in time. So Nimitz let them be spotted, then sped them back to Pearl.
Why would the Japanese report that they knew our carriers were there? So that the Americans would infer that there would be more operations in the South Pacific, and provide security for Operation MI.
Obviously, the reader of the Times didn’t know all of this, nor did they know we had more or less broken the Japanese Naval Code. So after the Coral Sea Battle, the reader would assume the spotting of our carriers in the South Pacific meant more fighting down there. Reading the Times shows not only what was reported, but what was not, and you can now see why it was reported and how it related to what was really going on. That’s what makes these threads so provocative.
Thanks again for doing this.
So I call your “shameless promotion” and raise you an ass-kissing!