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Another Gamble. As the year drew to a close, the Germans found their border invaded and themselves in a position where they, in turn, preferred a great gamble to a continued, steady, losing retreat. Adolf Hitler had withdrawn into the shadows and Heinrich Himmler was Germany's Man of 1944. Himmler had held the people and the Army in line while he squeezed them for the last ounces of German strength. Field Marshal Karl Rudolf Gerd von Rundstedt, the cold, wily Junker who mounted the December counteroffensive, was the Man of the Hour.
Rundstedt's all-out gamble involved the U.S. forces in their gravest and costliest battle of World War II. That savage outpouring of German strength showed clearly enough that the Man of 1944 was not to be found among the idealistic dreamers and crafty politicians who wanted to perform a Caesarean operation on a world at war, to bring the postwar world to birth ahead of its time. Not in three years of war had there been so much mutual recrimination among Russia, Britain and the U.S., nor such alarming cracks in their solidarity. In these cracks lurked the last vestiges of Germany's hope for escape.
The war was still on. The shape of the postwar world still hung on the manner of its winning.
Another War. In 1944 there was also war in the Pacific. It was a year of great achievement for Admiral Chester William Nimitz, top U.S. commander in that theater of tiny land patches in vast reaches of water. For the first time, in 1944, Nimitz took the offensive, as distinguished from the counteroffensive (Guadalcanal, the upper Solomons, the Gilberts). In the Marshalls, the Marianas and the Carolines, Nimitz put his amphibious forces on the fringe of the Japanese inner empire. For the first time the main strength of the Jap fleet was lured to battle, and it was badly beaten, leaving the U.S. with at least temporary dominance in the western Pacific.
Douglas MacArthur kept his promise to the Philippines. "I have returned," he said. But at year's end the total redemption of the Philippines still lay ahead.
On the Asiatic mainland it was a year of tragedy for Chiang Kaishek, China's perennial man of the year. The Japs cut his country in two. The recall of General Joseph W. Stilwell brought down on the Generalissimo's head the most searing criticism he had ever suffered from the U.S. But he strove to put new vigor into his regime and his war effort. Neither Chiang nor China was beaten.
In 1944, the war against Japan stood about where the war against Germany stood in 1943. The strategic bombardment of the enemy homeland had begun; but the battles with the enemy's major land forces were still to come. Soldiers in the Pacific complained that their war was neglected by the U.S. press and public. Yet the people were only following the cue of the Allied leaders; the defeat of Germany had been given priority over the defeat of Japan.