Little do the Germans know, of course, that the Russians are well-prepared for them indeed. In the Ukraine, both the Reich and the Soviets are planning lots of action for the spring and summer of 1944. Field Marshall Manstein plans a spring offensive against Kursk, aiming to drive the Russians out and seize the great Soviet salient in the area. There are isolated, minor anti-draft riots on many American campuses near the end of the summer of '44; mostly they're against the idea of an integrated Army fighting to liberate Europe for the Godless Russians. To please the French and Americans, their feathers ruffled at getting the minor operations, command of the invasion forces (Sardinia is set for November, Corsica for early December) will go to a French General and an American one. As many of the reinforcements arriving in Sicily are American, Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery authorizes a plan to get them out of his way, so that the fighting can be carried on by British troops under British command; the invasions of Sardinia and Corsica, to be carried out by Franco-American troops. German resistance was high; and remains high over in Italy despite the new commander; after all, they've won many battles, and made the enemy pay in blood for Sicily.
On July 9, 1944, the last German defenders of Kursk surrender to the Soviet forces there. Blacks still are a minority in the US military, of course, but they hold increasingly prominent positions there. August of 1944 doesn't see any amphibious invasions, but it does see preperations for two grand ones in the next year. Determined to get in with the government, Luciano cracks down on his lieutenants; Albert Anastasia finds himself deep in the East River for planning to burn the Normandie, but it still doesn't convince Ness. He isn't going to go down like the stupid yids did in 43, shot down like dogs in their ghetto, no, he's going to be the leader of Poland when all this is over. President Wallace blames most of the troubles of the last few years on incompetence or maliciousness among the British; and thus has no particular interest in conferences, especially when his administration is fighting for its life. They just want to complain; it's a small, petty series of incidents, the most high-profile being the egging of musician and President Wallace campaigner Pete Seeger as he tried to play to a hostile crowd in southern California.
To the cheers of a crowd of liberated Serbs, SS officer Kurt Waldeim is beaten nearly to death by an enraged Red Army officer before being sent on the long trains back to Siberia to be worked till he dies. He leads the Washington police on a merry chase for a day and a half, before being killed in a shootout outside the Lincoln Memorial. He pays for hundreds of thousands of mass mailings to be delivered across the countryside to potential Wallace voters; unfortunately, faulty shipping and procurement causes two or three copies of the mailings to arrive at the victims' houses per day for a week or so, all of them cheerfully emblazoned with Hormel's company's most famous product. October 7 of 1944 is a great day at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C; it's a big, noisy Shriner's convention! Zhukov, whose signal intelligences have let him read Manstein's dispatches, plans for a defensive fight in the spring and then a great blow in the summer.
Directed by John Ford, who came ashore at Normandy and was badly wounded enough to be invalided out of the Army, the film is largely a bottle piece, as well as shocking for the day, graphically violent, with the suggestion that it was incompetence upstairs that let our boys in France die. American fire-bombing raids have already largely destroyed the cities of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Kokura, and while Japanese morale has plummeted, the Annami goverment is determined to fight on. Despite the terrain and season, the Soviet advance is quick and violent, the Kwangtung Army has been largely evacuated to the Home Islands, except for those tens of thousands sunk by American submarines in the Sea of Japan. But precisely because using three in one hand is hard and ordinarily never thought of, it has "hack value", as my lunch companions immediately recognized. A conference is scheduled for May of 1945 in Cairo; but that is between all three leaders, and most people are sure that Henry Wallace won't be there.
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