• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1169 0

and rewards, many more suffered grievously and were exploited mercilessly. The pregnant wife of an Italian in hiding described the misery of her daily existence in 1943: ‘I would sometimes queue from seven in the morning to three in the afternoon … I had to take my two small children with me. I found a place selling “sanguinaccio” [blood sausage], which I found disgusting but my little girl ate. I had boils on my legs which I was told were caused by lack of vitamins. My husband was desperate for cigarettes and I found a tobacconist who supplied me. When I got home exhausted, all my husband wanted to do was make love. He would jump on me while I still held the shopping bag. When I refused, he accused me of having a lover.’ Some young warriors discovered compensations in conflict – adventure and a test of manhood – denied to most women, who recognised only its miseries and horrors. If the war dramatically expanded women’s opportunities and responsibilities in some societies, it also intensified their exploitation, above all sexual, in a world arbitrated by force.

Out of Africa

Even when the United States dispatched troops to the Mediterranean theatre, by the end of 1942 the Western Allies had deployed only sixteen divisions for ground operations against the Germans and Italians. The critical factors in the struggle against Hitler that year were Russia’s survival and resurgence, matched by soaring American weapons production. On land, at sea and in the air, Allied forces began to receive the fruits of the United States’s prodigious industrial efforts, with tanks and aircraft reaching the theatres of war in unparalleled numbers. America built almost 48,000 aircraft and 25,000 tanks in 1942, against Germany’s 15,400 planes and 9,200 tanks. In 1939, just twenty-nine shipyards were building for the US Navy; by 1942 there were 322, which would deliver over 100,000 new ships and small craft to the US Navy and Maritime Commission before VJ-Day came.

For the rest of the war, Western Allied operations were powerfully influenced by the need to concentrate appropriate shipping to land armies on hostile shores under fire in both the Pacific and European theatres. To achieve this, huge numbers of specialised, shallow-draught vessels were designed and built. The British led the way with the creation of LSTs – Landing Ships, Tank – capable of making an ocean passage, then offloading twenty tanks and up to a hundred other vehicles through their bow doors. The US adopted the 2,286-ton model, larger than most destroyers, and built 1,573 by the end of the war. The construction of smaller vessels was dominated by the flamboyant, tough-talking, hard-drinking New Orleans boatbuilder Andrew Higgins, who styled himself ‘Mr Landing Craft’. Born in Nebraska in 1886, he offered his first design, the Eureka, to the US Marine Corps in 1938. Its key features, conceived a decade earlier for Higgins’s inshore craft used by rum-runners, revenue agents, oil drillers and trappers, were a propeller recessed in a semi-tunnel and a ‘spoon-bill’ bow. Its limitation was that troops disembarked over the sides. Higgins was then shown a photograph of a Japanese vessel with a bow ramp, used in China. He immediately telephoned his chief engineer and gave instructions for a prototype to be built, which was successfully tested on Lake Pontchartrain a month later. The Higgins boats – designated as LCVPs, Landing Craft Vehicle, Personnel – were ordered in large numbers. The population of New Orleans grew by 20 per cent in 1942, largely because of the influx of workers needed to build his boats, for which his company received orders worth $700 million. Higgins became a legendary figure in wartime industry, turning out some 20,000 craft. But he was financially reckless, and his company went broke soon after the conflict ended.

Experience under fire in North Africa showed that wooden vessels were highly vulnerable. Steel variants were introduced, many of them assembled by a Florida farm-machinery contractor, which between 1943 and 1945 carried millions of Allied troops