The Honor of Spies

Japan was now poised to invade Australia from bases in the Solomon Islands. But on 7 August 1942, the just-formed U.S. First Marine Division, which was not supposed to be ready to fight for a year, was thrust into the breach and landed on Guadalcanal.

Surprising just about everybody, the landing was a success and the Marines took the island, fighting without their heavy artillery and living off captured Japanese rations.

Australia was saved, and some dared to hope the tide of war had changed. Some proof of this hope came on 8 November 1942, when United States Army troops, under Lieutenant General George S. Patton, landed in North Africa. The French valiantly defended their North African colonies against the Americans, and in a thirty-six-hour battle, with negligible damage to themselves, the battleship USS Massachusetts, the cruisers USS Augusta, USS Brooklyn, USS Tuscaloosa, and USS Wichita, and aircraft from the carrier USS Ranger either sank or knocked out of action most of the French fleet, including the battleship Jean Bart and the cruisers Primaguet, Fougueux, Boulonnais, Brestois, and Frondeur.

Two months later, in captured/liberated Casablanca, Roosevelt and Churchill met and decided to invade Sicily as soon as possible. They also decreed that Germany would not be allowed to seek an armistice, but must surrender unconditionally.

And two weeks after that, on 31 January 1943, there came what most historians agree was the beginning of the end for Germany. Newly promoted Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus was forced to surrender his troops--90,000 of them, who were surrounded, out of ammunition, and reduced to eating their horses--at Stalingrad.

But the war was by no means over, and historians now agree that it could easily have gone the other way.

If, for example, Germany had won the race to build the atomic bomb.

If, for example, Germany had managed to get into production the Me-262, a jet fighter capable of causing unacceptable losses to the flights of British and American bombers that were reducing German cities to rubble.

If, for example, the Germans had perfected a means of accurately aiming their rocket-powered missiles.

If, for example, German submarines could have successfully interdicted the shipment of troops and the materiel of war from the United States to Europe.

If, for example, the inevitable Allied invasion of France could have been thrown back into the English Channel.