Cottonwood Connection

In War Time: The Second World War

Season 4 Episode 11 | 25mVideo has Closed Captions

The Great Plains served the World War II effort but it altered the region dramatically.

Aired 05/26/2024

Cottonwood Connection

In War Time: The Second World War

Season 4 Episode 11 | 25mVideo has Closed Captions

The Great Plains served the World War II effort but it altered the region dramatically.

Western Kansas and the Great Plains served the war effort in many ways, but the war in turn altered the region agriculturally, economically and in population for decades to come.

Aired 05/26/2024

Cottonwood Connection

In War Time: The Second World War

Season 4 Episode 11 | 25mVideo has Closed Captions

Western Kansas and the Great Plains served the war effort in many ways, but the war in turn altered the region agriculturally, economically and in population for decades to come.

Aired 05/26/2024

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Culture

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[Music] The seeds of the Second World War were planted at the end of the first and would grow through two decades of economic, political and natural events into the global conflict that would reshape our country and our world. This is part three in our three-part series in Time of War, World War II. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (gentle music) - It was a patriotic move to go to become a soldier in World War II and people signed up immediately. I had an uncle that heard about the bombing of, you know, on the radio of Pearl Harbor. He signed up the next day. And so that's what the patriotic thing was because according to the family, it was on a Sunday here, they heard about on radio. He said, "I'm going.

" And flagged down the bus the next day along Highway 24 and went and joined the Marines. So that was that sort of thing. But there was a big patriotic thing going on. We are the Colorado Military Historical Group. And what we're gonna do for the next few minutes is demonstrate a few of the World War II weapons that you probably came out here to see. - My name is Nathan Watanabe, Lieutenant Colonel United States Army retired. From Colorado Springs, I am part of the Colorado Military Historical Group. And we've been supporting the Tractor and Thresher Show for now three years. This is the third military show they have. This year it's all World War II. And so half of our group is displaying US historic weapons, uniforms and equipment. The other half is actually displaying German forces in World War II. There are a couple of other groups that are displaying other equipment and uniforms. - I'm Ken Kafka from Pierce, Colorado. And today I brought my 1941 WC-11 panel truck. We found it in rough condition, repaired it. Learned in the meantime, we learned that there were only 642 of that model made. - My father started this probably back in the 80s. He started buying and collecting this stuff back then and used to restore it, take it to parades and show it. About 2019, we pulled a couple of them out and cleaned them up and took them on a convoy, about 1161 round trip miles. Then I probably, our mother suggested that we take them in the Nebraska Land Days Parade. - I used to teach military history at the Air Force Academy. I'm a 1988 graduate. And instead of going into the Air Force, I took a commission in the Army. And I was lucky enough to come back to the Air Force Academy as an Army officer and teach history. And I would always put forth a question. I'm here teaching history, but I'm really teaching heritage. What's the difference between history and heritage? History is names, dates, places, but heritage are those names, dates, places, and what they mean to you. We are not a martial nation, but wars are a large part of our history. - Really World War II, the biggest thing to come out of that was the United States established itself as a world power. Part of that was we were never really touched at home. We were not really bombed like Russia or France invaded or Great Britain. We were insulated. And so we really increased industrial production. - Nearly 2 million vehicles made by the US in World War II. We built just short of 200,000 Studebaker US-6s. And I know the vast majority of those went lend lease to Russia. We were discussing it, Stalin wrote a letter to the president of Studebaker thanking him for the trucks. And they thought that they were such a robust, well-built piece of equipment, that they actually adopted that term into their language to describe something that is robust and tough. You may have heard someone in the States say something is built like a Mack truck. They coined the term Studebaker. They described things as a Studebaker. Like the CCKWs, they made over 500,000 of those, the Jeeps. They made 600 and something thousand Jeeps. All of those are assembled on a manufacturing line by men's hands. In the aircraft field, they actually liked women being involved because, well, guys get in a hurry and they make mistakes. They drop stuff. And they found out women actually did a lot better with the fine instruments. They didn't have a tendency to over-tighten an instrument in a gauge panel and warp it or drop a rithic gun and dent a piece of metal. Kansas was a major point for war production. In Wichita, you had things like a lot of aircraft manufacturing growing up. The boom in wartime in aviation in Wichita is one of the reasons it's still an aviation center. Kansas is fortunate we had so many aircraft companies here, not only aircraft builders, but all the small companies that made the extra parts, the hydraulic pumps, the governors, things like that. A lot of aircraft were built here and found a way out, more importantly, the air bases that sprang up within months of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Kansas has hosted a whole series of brand new air bases down in Wichita, but in other places of the state too. After the war, some of them would become airports. Topeka Regional Airport began life as Topeka Army Airfield and it was a heavy bomber training base. Dodge City was a medium bomber training base. There was one at Pratt, there was one at Walker near Hays. There was one up at McCook and these are, you know, basically 100, 125 miles apart. But the Air Force needed places to train, places where they could make a lot of noise, where you could drop real bombs or shoot machine guns and not kill people when you did it. You still find 50 caliber army bullets. I've got one in there, you want to see it. A sample of what you might find that were fired from airplanes is a 50 caliber machine gun bullet fired from an airplane. It still has part of the collar on it where it was fired through the belt. The Kansas is primarily a bomber training base and the skies are just thick with bombers throughout the war years here. The need for not only pilots and crew members, but everybody on the ground and in the air was such that a lot of people who had been excluded from the military were now included. That included women and people of color, women air service pilots, WASPs were the most famous. Their job was to ferry newly built airplanes from the factory to other places where they're needed, whether it was to a modification center or to a line squadron getting ready to go to war. They freed up a lot of male pilots to go to war. Then of course the Tuskegee Airmen, African American pilots arose. A lot of Kansans were in the Tuskegee Airmen. From as far away as Garden City, Independence, Kansas City, Lawrence Topeka, all across the state. Kansas played a big role in supporting the armed forces as training sites. You had places like Fort Riley, which had a large physical reserve. During the war years, trained over 125,000 soldiers. And those were numerous camps here. Camp Witside and also Camp Funston. We worked as sort of a replacement in creating soldiers to send off. We did not create the divisions. We had this wonderful Flint Hills grassland in which we could use and train soldiers in mechanized, and that's the operative word now here, mechanized cavalry tactics. But they can go out here on these Flint Hills here and play war games and actually train their soldiers. The really interesting thing about Fort Riley is that Fort Riley has always been able to create the task, create the task that the Army has given it. We were a frontier post when it was set up in 1855. And then in the mid 1880s, we were a training post. And then World War I, we're a school post, and we're a school post, and that carries over into the second world where we are a school post. We're actually training soldiers because we got this wonderful land out here. America was important to the world and the heartland of America was very, very important. Now we know that we went into rationing, but we kept the Russians in the fight through production of Dodge and Ford.

Those same technologies also helped replace everything the Brits lost at Dunkirk, so we kept them in the fight.

And part of the strength of America was our heartland.

We could produce.

World War II saw the highest cash income for Kansas farmers of any period up to that point, so it really was a reversal of fortunes.

Farmwork is war work. The U.S. government was very concerned with making sure we had adequate food stores, that we could support the military.

And so there was a lot of war efforts focused on making sure production was sustained.

But also there was a sense of patriotism associated with Midwest agriculture at that time period.

So you'll see propaganda posters that feature wheat fields, that feature farmers.

There definitely was this sense of to be American is to support these kinds of farm efforts, to meet the need for labor in the field.

There was actually a woman's land army created, which was 360,000 women volunteers who were going out into farms to pitch in with farm labor during that time period.

Well, you know, women did a lot because the men were at war, you know, so they did a lot of the factory work.

I mean, Rosie the Riveter is, you know, famous because that's what she was doing.

She was literally in the factory, riveting when they found her, you know, but they did.

They tried to represent the war as a fun, you know, not as a horrible thing that was happening, but they tried to bring life to it, I guess you will.

Fully the support so that people wouldn't be so against it, you know.

And so they did.

They gave up a lot and they went to war.

Kansas's contributions to the war effort are multifaceted.

Obviously, Kansas grew a lot of food that helped feed the rest of the world during the conflict, but that was far from all.

You had mining and oil being pulled out of the ground here in Kansas that helped feed aid energy needs, helped feed the fuel needs of allied forces.

You also have automobile manufacturing, which is turned into military weapons production in a number of cities. The U.S. auto industry in general, Chrysler made ammunition.

International Harvester, you know, built firearms.

Firestone made the helmet liners, some of the helmet liners, I learned that just today.

Production from the auto industry in general was massive.

POW camps were built in Kansas for two reasons.

Pearl Harbor instilled a patriotic desire to go out and, you know, to fight for the country.

The problem rurally is that the young men that worked on the farms no longer were there to help the older farmers.

Now the Army figured a way and Fort Riley was very involved in that, in that answer to that equation by bringing German and Italian POWs into the area and then loaning them out to the farmers.

Kansas, Nebraska, that's in the middle of the country. Escape is minimal.

But POWs worked to pay the costs of their confinement and they worked on Kansas farms growing food to help the war effort against Germany, Italy, and Japan.

There weren't many Japanese POWs in most of the war. Most of the Japanese died fighting in the Pacific against us. America does most of the fighting in the Pacific parts of World War II.

The Chinese do the land fighting in Asia.

You have military service.

About 215,000 Kansas men and women are drafted or volunteer for military service. There were less than 1.8 million Kansans in 1940.

So 12 and a half percent of the population of Kansas serves in uniform during the war, remembering that that is overwhelmingly but not exclusively male.

Thousands of Kansas women serve in the armed forces, but you still probably have something like 200,000 men in a state that only had about 900,000 men when the war started.

That's a lot of men going into this conflict.

The 35th Infantry Division, which it really consisted of the 137th Infantry Regiment, which was from Kansas, the 134th Infantry Regiment they added from Nebraska, and then there was the 320th Infantry Regiment, which was basically a draft and enlisted regiment. The 35th Infantry Division again was called in 1940.

They trained at Camp Robinson, Arkansas for a year.

So, you know, goodbye dear, I'll be back in a year. They planned on going home in a year. But then Pearl Harbor came along and they were sent to the west coast of the United States to guard against a Japanese invasion there.

And then divisions of the army were reorganized into a different format.

And the 35th was then sent to Camp Rucker, Alabama for some additional training.

From there they went to Camp Butner, North Carolina, and from there most of them were sent to West Virginia for mountain training.

Finally, in January of 1944, they were sent to Camp Kilmer, New Jersey, and then off to England.

You have all of these ways that Kansas is contributing, but of course one of the most important contributions of Kansas is one man, Dwight Eisenhower, who will lead the Allied war effort against Germany.

In 1942, with the invasion of North Africa under Eisenhower's command, 1943 where he commands the initial stages of the invasion of Italy and far more famously the invasion of France to liberate Western Europe on June the 6th, 1944. So President Eisenhower grew up here in Abilene, spent his childhood here growing up in the house here on campus.

And he lived here until 1911 when he left to go to the military academy at West Point. During World War I, he had hoped to go to Europe to see combat. That did not work out.

He showed an aptitude for training troops and he was actually sent to a camp near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania to train a tank corps to serve in Europe.

The decision on the part of the Allied combined Joint Chiefs of Staff had always been to invade Europe.

The problem with that is that with the United States entering the war, there were not enough men, material, landing craft, all the rest of these things to conduct a successful operation against the European continent.

And it was decided that US troops would make their first landing in North Africa. The objective was to link up with British forces in Tunisia and drive the Africa Corps out of North Africa and strike a blow against Germany that would also relieve pressure on our Russian allies. That was the focus of that operation ultimately led to invasion of Sicily and then Italy.

While the operations of North Africa are going on, a build-up is taking place in Great Britain of men and material.

There were several problems that had to be solved.

We had to work out command relationships with our British and other allies so part of that time was spent creating a staff that could just execute.

The perception that we wanted to give was that we were not conquerors, we were liberators and we were going to be people who were going to turn invaded countries back over to their proper governments once the military operations were concluded.

So we had to have cooperation from foreign governments, foreign military, obviously the British government playing a primary role in that as well.

And then we had to solve the military problems of getting six divisions across the English channel and then you're trying to manage the largest invasion force ever assembled.

So it's not a simple task even from the point of view of command and control coordination and logistics.

All of that had to fall into place and it took many months to accomplish that. So while the North African campaign and the Sicily and Italian campaign are going on, these are the problems that are being worked out by General Eisenhower and his staff headed into the invasion on June 6, 1944. General Eisenhower's order of the day was distributed to every man on board the invading armada. Soldiers, sailors and airmen of the Allied Expiditionary Force you are about to embard upon the great crusade toward which we have striven these many months. - It was difficult at first. The landing zones that were chosen were not the shortest route necessarily to the goal, which turned out to be a good thing because it totally deceived the Germans. The Germans kept their army pinned to the port of Calais, which was the shortest distance across the channel where they thought we would invade. But once they were aware we were ashore, they immediately began to shift forces. And it took us several weeks to fight our way off of the beach heads. With an armored sweep, we managed to be able to break out of the hedge road country in Normandy, get into some open country, and made a sweep toward Paris. - On July 5-7, the 35th Division landed on Omaha Beach, fought at Saint-Lo, Morte, fought their way across France in the summer and the fall of 44 as part of Patton's army. The 35th was one of the divisions that was swung north then through Belgium and to hit to Bastogne. Well, some of them were diverted to a salient to protect the flank. Well, after the Battle of the Bulge was over, they went back to Metz and then they were basically trucked up through Belgium and into Holland. And they had huge battles of Maistricht and Venlo. And from there they crossed the Rhine River into Germany. And now we're talking the spring of 45 now. - We were in the process of occupying Western Germany when the Germans surrendered on March 8th, 1945. - I have received this afternoon a message from the Japanese government in reply to the message forwarded to that government by the Secretary of State on August 11th. I deem this reply a full acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration which specifies the unconditional surrender of Japan. - All of the things that were torn down physically or politically had to be rebuilt during or after the war. And so World War II set the ground rules for America after the war and for the world after the war in ways that still shape us today. - I think history is important. We cannot forget our history, whether it's the global war on terror for the last 20 years or the American Revolution 250 years ago. We have to remember what made us free, why we're free and why we're American. I think the outcome of World War II really shaped us today, both economically and politically. - Before the war, America had been one of several great powers that was important in Asia and relevant in Europe, but always at a distance. The end of the war, America was the most powerful state anyone had seen ever on the global stage. - I think as a nation, we all swung in and did our part. It was sort of a unifying effort here in the United States. Everyone did their part. The young men went off to war. The ladies worked in the war factories. Everyone did their part. Rationing was something that was done here. - For a lot of Americans and for a lot of people in Britain and in Canada, there's a nostalgia for it because of the memory of unity. Some of that is real. Some of that is exaggerated by rosy memories of the past. But there was a sense of everyone working together for victory, an almost universal belief that the war was just and the war needed to be won.