Things About World War II That Don't Make Sense

Though World War II is now the focus of many books, documentaries, and academic careers, there's a lot we still don't understand about it. This is reasonable in a broad sense, given the complicated nature of this war, which involved many different countries, each with its own unique background and place on the world stage. All told, from its beginnings with the 1939 invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany to the surrender of Japan on August 14, 1945, World War II involved about 70 nations, 70 million service members, and an estimated 17 million combatant deaths. On one side were the Allied powers, which came to include the Soviet Union, Great Britain, France, and the United States. On the opposing side were the Axis powers, namely Germany, Italy, and Japan. However, practically every nation was impacted by the war in some way.

All this complexity means that even small questions can spiral off into confusion. Why did some nations join one side and not another? Why did some attacks happen at a particular time and place? How did the U.S. nuclear weapons program prove itself to be capable of terrible power, while the Nazi-led version fizzled? Who really carried the blame for losing the war for Germany? And how did increasing tensions between the U.S. and Soviet Union play into the conflict even before the recognized start of the Cold War? These questions and more lead to some of the things about World War II that still don't make sense.

On the morning of December 7, 1941, almost 200 Japanese aircraft suddenly arrived in the airspace above the Pearl Harbor naval base in Honolulu, Hawaii. With a barrage of munitions, Japanese forces destroyed much of the U.S. fleet stationed there, including over 300 planes, eight battleships, and 2,335 U.S. service members and 68 civilians who died in the attack.

The attack sprang out of a tangled network of long-simmering rivalry and resentment between the U.S. and Japan. Many sources point to the beginnings of the tensions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when Japan began engaging in colonialist expansion and wars with China and Russia. But the U.S. was hardly a fan of Japan's attempts and put harsh economic sanctions on the island nation. By September 1940, Japan had entered into the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy and was barely budging in talks with the U.S.

By late 1941, Japan had effectively decided the U.S. was in its way. Yet the attack is still difficult to understand. U.S. forces were already considerable, thanks in part to a 1940 military draft that helped the armed services grow to almost 2.2 million members by December 1941. And though Japan felt an all-out attack was necessary to get the U.S. off its back, the nation didn't achieve near-total destruction of the fleet, leaving enough behind (including aircraft carriers and plenty of fuel and munitions) for America to enter the war with vigor.

Conspiracy theorists occasionally claim U.S. officials knew of the Pearl Harbor attack well in advance, but deliberately failed to do anything to make the nation's entry into World War II an obvious necessity. This has been dismissed as an outright falsehood by legitimate historians, who make it clear that President Franklin D. Roosevelt was painfully surprised by the Japanese assault.

However, there is a grain of truth here: The U.S. had long managed tense relations with Japan and knew of the other nation's increasingly aggressive stance, and that was part of the motivation behind the Selective Training and Service Draft signed by FDR in September 1940. This was ostensibly the first U.S. peacetime draft but was clearly influenced by growing tensions with Japan and the fact that World War II had already begun in Europe.

What's more, Japanese officials warned U.S. military personnel on at least three occasions: October 16, November 24, and November 27, 1941. Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, co-commander of the base at Pearl Harbor, was directly cautioned by Japan to "execute an appropriate defensive deployment," though no other details were given (via Atomic Heritage Foundation). Kimmel and other commanders did prepare somewhat, but this included closely grouping craft on airfields — thus increasing their vulnerability to attack — and only partially increasing monitoring around the Hawaiian islands. It doesn't appear that FDR or any other officials in Washington, D.C., were aware of Japan's intentions until mere hours before the Pearl Harbor attack.

Nazi general Erwin Rommel is sometimes depicted as a particularly canny military commander of the Axis powers, to the point where he was given the half-admiring moniker of the "Desert Fox" for his World War II campaigns in North Africa. Even Allied leaders admitted to some respect for Rommel, with no less a figure than U.K. Prime Minister Winston Churchill claiming that the German commander was a formidable adversary. Yet, this rise to prominence becomes quite a bit more confusing when you take a deeper look at Rommel's path to power and his decisions during the war.

Rob Citino, senior historian for the National World War II Museum, told TIME that Rommel gained fame for his daring and decisive attacks on Allied forces, thanks in part because Hitler sponsored his early military career. Yet, those tactics came with a less admirable side. According to Citino's estimation, Rommel may have been more enamored of the glamor of war than the nitty-gritty details of supply chains and logistics. 

Yet, attention to all those boring bits is often what makes for true success in war. If you're still not convinced, consider that Rommel never managed to seize control of the vital Suez Canal. Or, take a hard look at what may be his most significant failure: the inability to put a stop to the Allied invasion of Europe on D-Day. With such big fumbles on his resume, Rommel's enduring reputation makes little sense.

By early 1942, many Americans were understandably on edge. Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and the U.S. officially entered the conflict just a day later by declaring war on Japan (Germany and Italy quickly followed suit by declaring war on the U.S.). For a while, at least, everyone seemed to spot invading craft approaching American shores or entering into American airspace. Sightings abounded along the West Coast, with many reports dismissed as mistaken identities. However, at least one confirmed attack on oil supplies by a Japanese submarine took place on February 23, 1942, though no one was hurt.

The next two days would ratchet up the tension even more for the people of Los Angeles and lead to one of World War II's most bizarre unsolved mysteries. On the night of February 24, military forces received instruction to prepare for an unconfirmed Japanese assault. In the first hours of February 25, radar supposedly picked up signs of an invading force. LA went into a blackout, searchlights pierced the skies, and troops began firing an estimated 1,400 anti-aircraft rounds at ... something.

Yet nothing came down. Some claimed to spot Japanese planes or a massive balloon, while others saw only clouds and smoke. No one was directly injured, though some reported deadly heart attacks and car accidents, while shrapnel damaged homes. The most likely explanation is a false alarm, though the scope of the panic remains confusing.

For at least some Allied strategists and scientists, the specter of a Nazi weapons program was haunting. After all, a German bombing campaign — the Blitz — had torn apart London and other British cities from September 1940 to May 1941 (and bombed Buckingham Palace multiple times). Soon reports came in regarding the V-2 missile, the product of a seemingly superpowered ballistics program that, if it had only gotten started earlier, could have perhaps turned the tide of war in Germany's favor.

Well, maybe. By the 1940s, many were anxious about what seemed to be a growing Nazi war machine. During the war itself, Allied bombing raids routinely hit weapons depots and production sites where new jet propulsion technology was used to power missiles. The appearance of the long-range V-1 rocket in June 1944 and the V-2 in September of that year made things seem all the more dire.

But were Nazi rocket scientists and pilots really that successful? Despite the fearsome reputation, missiles often missed the mark and simply tumbled from the sky. Others misfired over unpopulated areas, which surely stung even more when Nazi officials looked at the hefty expense reports for the V-2 program. Meanwhile, Allied forces routinely exploited weaknesses in flight patterns to shoot down rockets. All told, the jet engine technology was apparently too experimental for the rush of war, making the half-awed postwar impression of the program (not to mention the effort put into it by Germany) seriously odd.

For a while at least, it must have seemed as if Germany had a nuclear weapons program on lock. Sure, information about what exactly was going on inside the increasingly fascistic regime was hard to come by. Who would want to share their nuclear secrets, anyway? But by the late 1930s, German scientists had already conducted and publicized their experiments on nuclear fission, in which splitting atoms produced potentially immense (and destructive) power. As Nazi Germany formally entered into war and began taking territory across Europe, its scientists worked to refine their materials and more reliably produce enriched uranium for use in weapons.

With the hindsight of history and the devastation first wrought on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by American nuclear bombs, it's clear that the Nazi nuclear program failed. But why? Germany once had seriously advanced science at its fingertips, as evidenced by the U.S. push to incorporate Nazi scientists and engineers into its own postwar programs via Operation Paperclip.

Part of the explanation centers on the fact that refining uranium and developing weapons was massively complicated and time-consuming. The Nazi government, lulled by the successes of conventional weapons, may have neglected to fund the nuclear program until it was too late (or may have been scared off by the expensive but only semi-successful V-2 rocket program). It didn't help that key German intellectuals like Albert Einstein fled Europe to avoid antisemitic persecution ... and subsequently lent their help to the American Manhattan Project.

Much of the blame for Germany's loss is assigned to Adolf Hitler. Even previously loyal Nazi generals later said their country's weapons program was gummed up by Hitler's reluctance and cost Germany the war. Yet, while there's hardly any need to defend someone who is remembered as one of the worst monsters in human history, it's not totally accurate to say Hitler lost the war all by himself. In fact, just a slightly close look at the state of affairs by the end of World War II makes this assumption all the more nonsensical.

Take the vital detail that many of the reports solely blaming Hitler came from Nazi generals and other officers, all of whom could have used a convenient scapegoat in the aftermath of the war. And though Hitler was making high-level decisions during the war, he wasn't necessarily getting into the nitty-gritty of logistics or troop supplies, much less things Germany itself was short on, like food, oil, and steel. This resulted in a growing anxiety over resources that may have even pushed Nazi forces to attempt a takeover of Soviet territory, which proved to be a resource-consuming disaster. 

That attempt, known as Operation Barbarossa and eventually one of the war's most important battles, along with Germany's broader failures, simply can't all be the fault of a single man who (though obviously powerful and awful) was working within a system of many other powerful players.

By the early 1940s, some reports had trickled into the Soviet Union and to Allied leaders that hinted the Nazi regime was planning some sort of mass murder of Jewish people. But information often came in piecemeal and contained occasional inaccuracies that made it difficult to understand what exactly was going on at the time. However, by the end of 1942, it was all too clear that hundreds of thousands of people had likely been killed. Given the shock and horror of those who liberated concentration camps and the same despair that struck many civilians who learned the truth after the war, it's all the more confusing that it took so long for some escaped Nazis to face justice.

Part of this lapse hinges on the fact that some fleeing war criminals found sympathetic governments in South America. Argentina in particular was the end point for many a ratline, as wartime escape routes for Nazis were known. There, they might settle into new identities in German communities, as Holocaust architect Adolf Eichmann did while working as Ricardo Klement (Eichmann was finally captured by Israel in 1960 after an intense manhunt). After all, Argentine president Juan Perón was a bit of a fan of Hitler and Mussolini's work and was reportedly interested in recruiting valuable scientists and other skilled Germans. Some received Argentine visas, while others received help from Vatican officials and the mysterious Odessa organization.

From 1943 to 1945, an estimated 425,000 German POWs were sent to detention centers across the U.S. Many arrived in rural Texas, where extra land made it easier to establish camps. Texas was also selected because the 1929 Geneva Convention maintained that POWs should be sent somewhere with a climate similar to where they were captured. For a German soldier apprehended in North Africa, Texas was deemed a close-enough climatological match. 

The Geneva Convention also required that POWs and their guards live in similar quarters, meaning that conditions were decent for German prisoners — to the point where locals derisively called a few Texas camps the "Fritz Ritz." Captured soldiers likewise weren't required to work, though some did so anyway to alleviate the boredom and earn a bit of money. Conditions were so good that very few tried to escape, and those who did hardly appeared to fear much retaliation. After the war, some attempted to stay in the U.S. and even occasionally succeeded in becoming American citizens.

The most nonsensical part of this situation is its contrast with the treatment of Japanese Americans during the war. On February 19, 1942, FDR signed Executive Order 9066, ostensibly to keep American military zones safe from foreign infiltrators. What it really meant was that some 120,000 Japanese Americans living on the West Coast (many of whom were citizens) were forcibly relocated to internment camps with little regard for their livelihoods, property, or civil rights.

[Featured image by Jpo tx113 via Wikimedia Commons | Cropped and scaled | CC BY-SA 4.0]

For quite a few people on the Allied side, the nuclear bombings of Japanese cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki were a necessary evil. The bombings, which took place on August 6 and August 9, 1945, respectively, killed tens of thousands of people immediately and left many more to painful deaths from radiation exposure. Yet, it also seemingly ended the war, with the Japanese surrender coming just one day after the destruction in Nagasaki. Internally, military officials also claimed that a land invasion would kill up to one million U.S. service members and would claim even more Japanese lives.

But that official explanation alone doesn't quite make sense. If Japan continued to resist and U.S. plans for a land invasion went ahead in what the Allied forces called Operation Downfall, it's possible that an already resource-stressed Japan would have capitulated. Or, it could have been that fierce Japanese resistance, like that seen from both combatants and civilians at Okinawa and Iwo Jima, would have spiraled into a bloody guerrilla war.

Even if the nuclear strikes in Japan avoided all that at a terrible price, they served additional purposes. The Soviet Union, which was quickly emerging as a major rival to the U.S., now saw what America was capable of doing ... as did any leaders sympathetic to Soviet communism. Still, as survivors of the bombings, activists, and many historians may argue, the means to the end may still not make much sense.