Battle Of Midway Argumentative Essay

Just the thought is chilling. In November 1941, Adolf Hitler and the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, met in Berlin and reached an agreement that a German occupation of Palestine and other mandated territories would result in the annihilation of their Jewish population, adding well over half a million Jews to the 6 million European Jews to be murdered by the Nazis.

What the Fuhrer and the grand mufti decided on that autumn day does not loom large in the popular imagination, but it should, for the story of what might have been had Hitler's armies reached the Holy Land is a lesson to posterity that history is, as Wellington said of Waterloo, a "close-run thing." Last week marked the 65th anniversary of the Battle of Midway; in

But there was no immediate military engagement between Germany and America. Nev-ertheless, President Franklin Roosevelt, who believed an industrial Europe under German control was a far greater threat than Japan, saw Germany as the enemy that had to be defeated first.

It was not a popular decision. The public initially believed that FDR was focusing on the wrong foe. But the Battle of Midway, June 3 to 5, 1942, gave Roosevelt some breathing room. The victory there gave him new confidence--a confidence without which he might have been more reluctant to react the way he did in a meeting with Winston Churchill a few weeks after the battle.

The session unfolded this way: one morning in the White House, FDR was given a note that he read and then handed to Churchill. Its grim message: the British had just surrendered to Gen. Erwin Rommel of the German Afrika Corps at Tobruk. Twenty-five thousand men were taken prisoner along with many tanks and

It was a victory with epic ramifications. Had Rommel not been defeated, he would have encountered little opposition between El Alamein and the mandated areas of western Asia. Once occupied by the German military, Iraq, Syria and Palestine would have been fertile ground for the implementation of the Berlin agreement reached by Hitler and the grand mufti in November 1941. A documentary recently broadcast by the respected German television station ZDF reveals that in July 1942, just after Tobruk, an SS killing squad, headed by the notorious Walter Rauff, designer of the mobile gas van used to kill countless thousands of Jews, was created to operate just behind Rommel's front line--similar to the murderous Einsatzgruppen in Eastern Europe--for the express purpose of killing Jews in occupied territory. While the Allies, with their vastly superior industrial power, would most likely have defeated Germany in the end, it would have taken longer and postwar Europe would have looked very