We won World War II 70 years ago
this month, and I'm finally revealing The Ultimate Weapon. Just remember: you saw it here first.
Never mind the world's greatest industrial base
or the 15-million-man force
structure
or the 90-division army
or the two-ocean navy
or the globe-spanning logistics
or the atom bomb.
or the atom bomb.
THIS is how we won the war:
The booklet is dated November 1944, a crucial period in WW
II history. To quote
my friend and colleague Richard B. Frank, author of Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire, “This manual was published just as we were bogged down
fighting on Leyte and about to face the Battle of the Bulge. After it was published: (1) we finally
overcame resistance on rain soaked Leyte and (2) contained and then threw back
the last great German offensive of the war.
“Obviously, there is a connection
between the timely publication of this manual and these pivotal events that
historians shamefully have overlooked for decades. No snickering please.”
Actually,
the greatest war in history could not have been fought without legions of
typists. Somewhere deep in the cavernous
labyrinth of government warehouses—perhaps alongside the missing Ark of the
Covenant—is a rusty, moldy file cabinet with the strategic information on Typewriter
Proliferation. However many machines the
U.S. Government (in all its permutations) possessed in 1941, the figure surely
exploded over the next four years.
The manual
is thorough, providing details on Remington, Royal, Woodstock, Underwood,
and L.C. Smith models. Royal is
particularly relevant to me because I learned to type on a Royal Standard my
father bought before I was born (in the first half of the previous
century). Eventually I wrote my first
six books and about 100 articles on that valiant machine, which I used until
most of the vowels wore thin. At length
I was dragged into the computer age with a doorknob in each hand and skid marks
on the floor.
Some
context:
In 1940
Congress passed the Draft Act by one vote, activating the Selective Service
bureaucracy to conscript millions of young men.
Some were more perceptive than others.
Knowing that military service probably was unavoidable, thousands figured
on their own, or benefited from the experience of others, that pounding a typewriter
was infinitely preferable to pounding the tundra in the Aleutians, swamps on a
godforsaken Pacific isle, or ankle-deep African sand. Straight out of basic training, a soldier or
sailor who demonstrated 40 words per minute had his ticket out of combat.
In the
sweltering Alabama summer of 1941 the Air Corps Tactical School produced the
basic plan for the air war against Germany and Japan. It was amazingly prescient, predicting with
exceptional clarity the force necessary to bomb the Axis into submission. Furthermore, it was completed by just nine
officers and a small clerical staff in nine days. The document, AWPD-1, was produced on manual
typewriters with carbon paper for duplicates.
No word processors; no computers.
In 1945 a
late friend, Lt. Col. Jeff Cooper, was a Marine Corps major on the staff of III
Amphibious Corps, planning the invasion of Japan. Operation Olympic was due to seize the
southern island of Kyushu that November, and he recalled that mountains of
paper were consumed with all the minutae of so great an undertaking: available
shipping; routes and timing; tides and weather; logistics; supplies; casualty
estimates; time-tables; on and on. Every
aspect required multiple copies of clean typescript: naval gunfire support, air
support, and landing craft to name a few.
But the
typewriter produced papers well beyond the theaters of operation. Remember the scene in Saving Private Ryan? In
Washington a large roomful of typists—all female—earnestly batter away at their
keyboards, typing form letters of bereavement to families across the nation,
filling in the blanks according to the format of the time:
“The (War-Navy)
Department regrets to inform you that your (son, husband, relative) was
(killed, wounded, missing) in the performance of his duty on (date) in the
(European, Mediterranean, Pacific, China-Burma-India) Theater of Operations.
“The department extends to you its sincerest
sympathy in our great loss. On account of existing conditions, the body, if
recovered cannot be returned at present. If further details are received you
will be informed. To prevent possible aid to our enemies, please do not divulge
the name of his (ship-station).”
“You will
be informed of additional details as they become available.”
“Signed:
(General-Admiral)
Chief of
Staff/Personnel”
The
verbiage was transmitted by telegram, prompting a generation of Americans to
dread the appearance of the local Western Union courier.
However,
the typewriter’s importance was not limited to America. One of the most fascinating epics to emerge
from the war involved a German soldier captured by the Soviets and sent to
perish in a slave-labor camp. In 1946
word came down that a typewriter repairman was needed in the gulag commandant’s
office, and the emaciated Soldat grasped
the opportunity. Though he neither
repaired office machines nor read Cyrilic, he bluffed his way into the office
where a goon said in fractured Deutsch,
“You fix, one hour. Or else.”
The
desperate young German searched the office for something useful and came up
with a broken piece of furniture. When
the turnkey reappeared, the German bashed him stoutly and fatally, then took
his uniform and rifle. Wrapping a muffler
about his face, he trudged through the gate, waving to the guards, and
disappeared into the Russian vastness.
He took 18
months to get home, but he made it.
Best-selling
historian Rick Atkinson has written an epic account of the U.S. Army in WW II. His Liberation
Trilogy accessed enormous amounts of wartime documents, reckoned at 17,000
tons of paper. Most will decompose
before anyone can copy them, but they represent the enormity of the
irreplaceable contribution that the manual typewriter made to victory in the
Second World War.
