1. Returning Home on a Magic Carpet
To maintain the pace of Magic Carpet, the number of ships employed steadily grew from the initial 300 requisitioned at the start of the operation. They ranged in size from small vessels with a carrying capacity of only 300 troops, to behemoths such as the luxury liners Queen Elizabeth and Queen Mary, converted during the war into troop transports capable of carrying 15,000 servicemen. Daunting and complex as it was, Magic Carpet was completed relatively quickly. By September of 1945, 1.4 million servicemen, nearly all of them from the European Theater, had been repatriated. By December 1st, 1945, the WSA had successfully repatriated over 3.5 million personnel. By February of 1946, repatriation from the ETO was, by and large, completed. Things were different in the Pacific Theater: planners had expected the war there to last into 1946, so Japan’s sudden surrender in August of 1945 complicated things.
Welcome as Japan’s early surrender was, it caught those responsible for Magic Carpet flat-footed. They were already in the midst of repatriating millions of troops from Europe, and there were not enough troop transports to simultaneously repatriate millions of servicemen from both the European and Pacific theaters. So the War Department improvised, and had the US Navy chip in. By official fiat, combat ships were designated troop transports, and vessels from Landing Ship Tanks (LSTs) to destroyers to cruisers to battleships to aircraft carriers were crammed full of returning troops. It was messy, and often uncomfortable, but it worked. It took almost four years for America to deploy over 8 million servicemen overseas, but thanks to Operation Magic Carpet, it took only 14 months to reverse the torrent, and return most of them back home.
_________________
Where Did We Find This Stuff? Some Sources and Further Reading
Automatic Ballpoint – Operation Tannenbaum: Hitler‘s Invasion of Switzerland
Boeing – Historical Snapshot: B-25 Mitchell Bomber
Buzzfeed – 10 Interesting Facts About World War II That You Might Not Know
Cradle of Aviation Museum – Aviation Darwinism: The Republic P-47 Thunderbolt
Encyclopedia Britannica – Andrey Vlasov
Encyclopedia Britannica – Lancaster Heavy Bomber
Firearm Blog – The Worst Pistol Ever: Type 94 Nambu
Harrison, Mark., Europe-Asia Studies 55:6, 2003 – Counting Soviet Deaths in the Great Patriotic War
History of War – Operation Bertram
Libcom – Stjepan Filipovic: Everlasting Symbol of Anti-Fascism
Military Factory – Petlyakov Pe-2
National Archives – Operation Unthinkable
National Naval Aviation Museum – Magic Carpet Ride
News Corp Australia Network, June 6th, 2014 – Did a Power Nap Cost Adolf Hitler Victory in WWII?
Second World War History – Operation Judgment (Taranto)
Sydney Morning Herald, August 5th, 2014 – First Allied Shot of WWI Remembered a Century On
Tank Encyclopedia – Panzer VIII Maus
