American History Revised (58 page)

Getting a handle on the exact numbers is difficult because the U.S. Census Department didn’t keep records of emigration until 1908. On the next page are the statistics of immigration/emigration for the three decades from 1910 until the beginning of World War II, drawn from the Statistical Abstract of the United States.

This is the most famous photograph ever taken of American immigrants:
The Steerage,
by Alfred Stieglitz, 1907.
   
Except for one thing: the boat was not going to America, it had just left America for Germany. The “poor and huddled masses” on the deck are emigrants returning home.

From 1910 to 1919, 6.3 million people immigrated to the United States, and 2.1 million went back home. But not everybody
answers the entry/exit form correctly, nor do they report an overstay or change in intent, which explains why there are 400,000 more departed than admitted in the “tourist visa” column (1.8-1.4=0.4). Obviously, there were a lot more than 2.1 million emigrants—2.5 million to be exact. In the following decade we see a different anomaly: 700,000 more visitors arriving than leaving (2.3-1.6=0.7). Some of these people stayed on and became residents; others were simply double-counted (an immigrant who made four trips home would frequently show up in immigration records as five immigrants).

The real figure to use is not the total gross immigration or total net immigration, but the annual velocity of immigration. The velocity of permanent immigration, at 7 million (10.8=3.8=7) over the thirty-year period from 1910 to 1939, was 233,000 people a year; for domestic migration, it was 750,000 people a year—more than three times as much. More than being a nation of immigrants, America is a country of people relentlessly on the move in search of greater opportunities within the vast borders of America.

1940
American histories of World War II focus on our fighting in Europe and the Pacific, but there was a whole other arena where the war was really decided—the Eastern Front. More than America, the Soviet Union was the country that saved the West from Nazi barbarism. Look at who was doing most of the fighting.

In 1940—a good two years before the U.S. got into the war—the Soviet Union was fighting the Germans. The invasion and liberation of Western Europe, observes John Lukacs, was feasible because “nearly tour-fifths of the German Army were fighting in Russia. Had he a larger reserve army, Hitler could have sped it to Normandy and driven the invaders into the sea.”

The United States never really got going with lots of troops until 1944. The number of Anglo-American divisions finally reached a maximum of seventy-five only at the end of the war, whereas the Russians had a minimum of 190 divisions on the field ever since 1941.

Had the USSR and the United States remained allies after 1945,
*
the former’s contributions would have been acknowledged. But it was not to be. American soldiers could not recount their experiences fighting alongside Soviet soldiers without being branded traitors or Communists. A survey conducted in the mid-1980s found that 40 percent of Americans had forgotten that the U.S. and the Soviet Union had fought together in World War II. “The Cold War,” says one historian, “made a significant past inaccessible to many Americans.” Indeed, Americans felt that they—not the Russians—had won World War II.

Says the investment banker Peter Peterson (former secretary of commerce under Nixon):

1941
One would be hard-pressed to see a silver lining in the horrendous disaster of the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. Certainly the damage to the U.S. Navy was awesome.

But it was not as much as you might think, given all the vivid photographs of burning ships and explosions. In fact the Japanese sank only eighteen out of the ninety-six warships docked at Pearl Harbor. To be sure, eight of these eighteen sunken ships were battleships—the backbone of the Navy. But six of them were later salvaged, making the net loss only two. In addition to the seventy-eight warships still afloat at Pearl Harbor, the U.S. Navy had plenty of other ships in the Atlantic and South Pacific: 168 destroyers, 112 submarines, fifteen heavy cruisers, eight light cruisers, and—most important of all—all of its six aircraft carriers (soon to be the dominant fighting ships of the war). As a percentage of the total U.S. fleet, eighteen out of 405, the Navy had lost only 4 percent of its ships during Pearl Harbor. Furthermore, the Japanese failed to knock out the enormous fuel tanks that supplied the entire Pacific Fleet. “Had the Japanese destroyed the fuel supply,” observed Pacific Fleet commander-in-chief Chester Nimitz, “it would have prolonged the war another two years.”

The greatest stroke of luck, however, concerned the ships. “It was God’s mercy that our fleet was in Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941,” said Nimitz.

So they could be sitting ducks and get bombed easily? In the larger sense, yes. Had they been out at sea, they would have been bombed anyway and gone down to the bottom of the Pacific, with thousands of sailors drowned. But by sinking in the shallow waters of Pearl Harbor when most of the sailors were off duty, many deaths were avoided and most of the ships eventually resurrected. “We would have lost the entire Pacific Fleet and eighteen to nineteen thousand men,” said Admiral Nimitz, “instead of the ships and 3,300 men we did lose.”

The shock value of the December 7 attack, of course, was enormous—but far out of proportion to actual damage done. As America was to rediscover later, in Vietnam, massive bombing raids have little military value: they fail to knock out the enemy, and only serve to harden enemy ingenuity and resolve. Whereas the U.S. had only six aircraft carriers in 1941, for example, by 1945 it had more than one hundred.

1942
German submarines were inflicting terrible losses on American ship convoys trying to deliver supplies to Britain, then tottering on its last legs. The British Air Command was having little success in attacking and sinking the U-boats. As soon as a U-boat spotted an attacking British plane, it dived as deep as possible to avoid getting hit. Because it took a plane two minutes to arrive at the precise dive site, by which time the German submarine had descended to one hundred feet, the British set their depth charges at one hundred feet.

For reasons no one could understand, the results were meager at best. It took one British physicist, Patrick M. S. Blackett, to realize the problem. Blackett, who later went on to win the 1948 Nobel Prize in physics, was a specialist in cloud chambers, cosmic rays, and paleomagnetism. During the Second World War he had been recruited by the British Admiralty to apply his fertile mind to the emerging field of study now known today as “operations research.” Blackett looked at the data and saw what others couldn’t see: the combat data on German submarines was an
average
figure—useless in targeting a U-boat in a vast ocean (like looking for a needle in a haystack). What mattered was specificity, not all-inclusiveness. The goal was not to achieve the impossible by hitting
all
the U-boats, but to be realistic and hit
some
of them. Furthermore, observed Blackett, the warning time in some cases “was much less than two minutes, and the U-boat could descend only about twenty feet before an aircraft dropped its load; in those cases the sub could still be located and hit. Therefore, if the depth charges were set at twenty feet, instead of one hundred, the percentage of submarines actually damaged or destroyed would be much higher.”