The Second World War Read online

  Those remaining behind under the command of Major General Jonathan Wainwright knew that the situation was hopeless. Through starvation and sickness, less than a quarter were able to fight. General Homma’s forces, on the other hand, had been reinforced with another 21,000 men, bombers and artillery. On 3 April, the Japanese attacked again with overwhelming force. The defence collapsed and on 9 April the troops on Bataan under Major General Edward King Jr surrendered. Wainwright on Corregidor still held out, but the Rock was pulverized by continual bombing, naval gunfire from the sea and artillery from the land. On the night of 5 May, Japanese troops landed on the island, and the following day a devastated Wainwright was forced to surrender his remaining 13,000 men. Yet the agony for the defenders of both Bataan and Corregidor was far from over.

  18

  War across the World

  DECEMBER 1941–JANUARY 1942

  Although the war with Germany and the war with Japan were conducted as two separate conflicts, they influenced each other far more than may appear on the surface. The Soviet victory at Khalkhin Gol in August 1939 had not only contributed to the Japanese decision to attack south, and bring the United States into the war, it also meant that Stalin could move his Siberian divisions west to defeat Hitler’s attempt to take Moscow.

  The Nazi–Soviet pact, which had come as a great shock to Japan, had also affected its strategic thinking. This was not helped by the astonishing lack of liaison between Germany and Japan, which concluded its neutrality pact with Stalin just two months before Hitler launched his invasion of the Soviet Union. The ‘strike south’ faction in Tokyo prevailed, not just over those who wanted war with the Soviet Union, but also against those in the Imperial Japanese Army who wanted to finish the war in China first. In any case, the Soviet–Japanese neutrality pact meant that the United States now became the chief supplier of the Chinese Nationalists. Chiang Kai-shek still tried to persuade President Roosevelt to exert pressure on Stalin to join the war against Japan, but he refused to bargain over Lend– Lease. Stalin was adamant that the Red Army could deal with only one front at a time.

  Roosevelt’s greatly increased support in 1941 for Chiang Kai-shek infuriated Tokyo, but it was Washington’s decision to impose the oil embargo that the Japanese saw as tantamount to a declaration of war. The fact that it was in response to their occupation of Indochina and a warning not to invade other countries did not penetrate their own version of logic, which was based on national pride.

  Because of their supremacist beliefs, Japanese militarists, like the Nazis, were compelled to confuse cause and effect. Perhaps predictably, they were enraged by Roosevelt’s and Churchill’s Atlantic Charter, which they saw as an attempt to impose the Anglo-American version of democracy upon the world. They could well have pointed to the paradox of the British Empire promoting self-determination, and yet their own notion of imperial liberation with the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere was far more oppressive. In fact, their Asian new order was strikingly similar to the German version, and their treatment of the Chinese ran parallel to the Nazi attitude towards Slav Untermenschen.

  Japan would never have dared to attack the United States if Hitler had not started the war in Europe and the Atlantic. A two-ocean war offered its only chance against the naval power of the United States and the British Empire. It was for this reason that the Japanese sought assurances from Nazi Germany in November 1941 that it would declare war on the United States as soon as they attacked Pearl Harbor. Ribbentrop, no doubt still piqued that Japan had refused the German request in July to move against Vladivostok and Siberia, was evasive at first. ‘Roosevelt is a fanatic,’ he said, ‘so it is impossible to foresee what he would do.’ General Oshima Hiroshi, the Japanese ambassador, asked bluntly what Germany would do.

  ‘Should Japan become engaged in a war against the United States,’ Ribbentrop was forced to reply, ‘Germany, of course, would join the war immediately. There is absolutely no possibility of Germany’s entering into a separate peace with the United States, under such circumstances: the Führer is determined on that point.’

  The Japanese had not told Berlin of their plans, so the report of the attack on Pearl Harbor came, according to Goebbels, ‘like a bolt from the blue’. Hitler greeted the news with intense joy. The Japanese would keep the Americans occupied, he reasoned, and the war in the Pacific would surely reduce supplies sent to the Soviet Union and Britain. He calculated that the United States was bound to enter the war against him in the near future, yet it would not be in a position to intervene in Europe until 1943 at the earliest. He knew nothing of the ‘Germany first’ policy agreed between the American and British chiefs of staff.

  On 11 December 1941, the American chargé d’affaires in Berlin was summoned to the Wilhelmstrasse where Ribbentrop read out the text of Nazi Germany’s declaration of war on the United States. Later in the afternoon, to acclamations of ‘Sieg heil!’ from Party members in the Reichstag, Hitler himself declared that Germany and Italy were at war with America, alongside Japan, in accordance with the Tripartite Pact. In fact the Tripartite Pact was an alliance of mutual defence. Germany was not in any way obliged to aid Japan if it were the aggressor.

  At a time when German troops were in retreat before Moscow, Hitler’s declaration of war on the United States appears rash to say the least. The decision reeked of hubristic pride, especially when Ribbentrop (probably echoing Hitler’s own words) stated in grandiose manner, ‘A great power doesn’t let itself have war declared on it–it declares war itself.’ Yet Hitler had not even consulted the OKW and key military officers at Führer headquarters, such as General Alfred Jodl and General Walter Warlimont. They were alarmed by the lack of calculation in the decision, especially since Hitler had maintained the previous summer that he did not want war with America until he had smashed the Red Army.

  At a stroke, Hitler’s self-justifying strategy that a victory over the Soviet Union would eventually force Britain out of the war was turned on its head. Now Germany really would face a war on two fronts. The generals were dismayed by his apparent ignorance of America’s industrial might. And most ordinary Germans started to fear that the conflict would stretch on for years. (It was later striking how many Germans convinced themselves by the end of the war that it had been the United States which declared war on Germany, not the other way round.)

  Soldiers on the eastern front listened to the announcement, determined to see it in the best light. ‘On 11 December itself we were able to listen to the Führer’s speech, an exceptional event,’ wrote a Gefreiter in the 2nd Panzer Division, boasting that they had been within twelve kilometres of the Kremlin. ‘Now the right world war has begun. It had to come.’

  The key element in Hitler’s thinking lay in the war at sea. Roosevelt’s increasingly aggressive ‘shoot on sight’ policy, ordering US warships to attack German U-boats wherever they found them, and the decision to provide escorts to convoys west of Iceland had begun to tilt the Battle of the Atlantic in the Allies’ favour. Grossadmiral Raeder had been pressing Hitler to allow his wolfpacks to hit back. Hitler had shared his frustration, but until the Japanese tied down the US Navy in the Pacific and agreed formally not to seek a separate peace with the United States, he had not dared make a move. Now the western Atlantic and the whole North American coastline could become a free-fire zone in the ‘torpedo war’. This, in Hitler’s view, could finally offer another way of bringing Britain to its knees, even before the conquest of the Soviet Union.

  Konteradmiral Karl Dönitz, the commander of the U-boat fleet, had asked Hitler in September 1941 to give him as much warning as possible of a declaration of war on the United States. He wanted time to prepare his wolfpacks so that they could be in position to strike mercilessly at American shipping along the east coast while the United States was still unready. But, as things turned out, Hitler’s sudden decision came at a time when there were no U-boats available in the area.

  Hitler’s anti-semitic obsessions had convinced him
that the United States was basically a Nordic country dominated by Jewish warmongers, and this was another reason why a showdown between his New Order in Europe and America was inevitable. Yet he failed to appreciate that the attack on Pearl Harbor had united America far more powerfully than Roosevelt could ever have hoped to do on his own. The isolationist lobby led by the slogan ‘America First’ was utterly silenced, and now Hitler’s declaration of war played straight into Roosevelt’s hands. The President could not have counted on Congress to take his ‘undeclared war’ in the Atlantic any further without it.

  That second week of December 1941 was without doubt the turning point of the war. Churchill, in spite of the horrific news from Hong Kong and Malaya, now knew that Britain could never be defeated. After hearing of the news of Pearl Harbor, Churchill said that he ‘went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful’. The repulse of the German armies before Moscow also demonstrated that Hitler was unlikely to achieve victory there, over his most formidable adversary on land. There was in addition a temporary easing in the Battle of the Atlantic, and even in North Africa the news was for once encouraging, with Auchinleck’s Crusader offensive pushing Rommel back out of Cyrenaica. It was therefore with great optimism that Churchill sailed again for the New World, this time in the battleship HMS Duke of York, the sister ship of the Prince of Wales. His series of meetings with Roosevelt and the American chiefs of staff was codenamed Arcadia.

  As he crossed the Atlantic, Churchill prepared his views on the future conduct of the war in a ferment of ideas. These, debated with his own chiefs of staff, were honed to form British strategic planning. No attempt to land in northern Europe should be made until German industry, especially aircraft production, had been reduced by heavy bombers, a campaign which they wanted the US air force to join. American and British forces should land in North Africa in 1942 to help defeat Rommel and to secure the Mediterranean. Then landings could be made in 1943 in Sicily and Italy, or at places on the northern European coastline. Churchill also recognized that the Americans should fight back against the Japanese with aircraft carriers.

  After a rough crossing in heavy seas, the Duke of York finally reached the United States on 22 December. Welcomed by Roosevelt, Churchill was installed in the White House, where he proved an exhausting guest over the next three weeks. But he was in his element, and he received a rapturous reception when he addressed Congress. The two leaders could hardly have been more different. Roosevelt was undoubtedly a great man, but while deploying charm and a contrived impression of intimacy to great effect, he was essentially rather vain, cold and calculating.

  Churchill, on the other hand, was passionate, expansive, sentimental and mercurial. His well-known ‘black dog’ depressions almost suggest a form of bipolar disorder. Their greatest difference lay in their attitudes to empire. Churchill was proud of his descent from the great Duke of Marlborough and remained an old-fashioned imperialist. Roosevelt regarded such attitudes as not just outdated but profoundly wrong. Roosevelt also believed that he despised realpolitik, yet showed himself constantly ready to bend smaller countries to his will. Anthony Eden, now foreign secretary again, soon observed drily on the difficulties of the triangular relationship with the Soviet Union that ‘United States policy is exaggeratedly moral, at least where non-American interests are concerned.’

  The British delegation was reassured by the American chiefs of staff that ‘Germany first’ was still their policy. This decision was also influenced by the problem of shipping shortages. Because of the huge distances involved, each vessel could make only three round-trips a year to the Pacific theatre. But the lack of shipping also meant that the build-up of American forces in Britain for a cross-Channel invasion would take longer than imagined. This problem would start to be solved only once the ‘Liberty ship’ building programme got under way, mass-producing transports.

  The United States, with its own entry into the war, was about to become much more than ‘the great arsenal of democracy’. The Victory Program, originally suggested by Jean Monnet, one of the few Frenchmen whom the American administration truly respected, was already starting. Working on a plan to increase US forces to more than eight million men, and with generous estimates of the armaments, aircraft, tanks, munitions and ships needed to defeat both Germany and Japan, American industry began to convert to all-out war production. The budget ran to £150 billion. The military munificence would become staggering. As one general remarked: ‘The American Army does not solve its problems, it overwhelms them.’

  Lend–Lease to the Soviet Union had also been approved by Congress in October. In addition, $5 million of medical supplies were provided through the American Red Cross. Roosevelt pushed hard on deliveries to the Soviet Union. Churchill, on the other hand, had fuelled Stalin’s suspicions by making extravagant promises of aid and then failing to deliver. On 11 March 1942, Roosevelt said to Henry Morgenthau, his secretary of the Treasury, that ‘every promise the English have made to the Russians, they have fallen down on… The only reason we stand so well with the Russians is that up to date we have kept our promises.’ He wrote to Churchill: ‘I know you will not mind my being brutally frank when I tell you that I think that I can personally handle Stalin better than either your Foreign Office or my State Department. Stalin hates the guts of all your top people. He thinks he likes me better, and I hope he will continue to do so.’ Roosevelt’s rather arrogant and exaggerated confidence in his influence over Stalin was to become a dangerous liability, especially towards the end of the war.

  Stalin wanted Britain to recognize the Soviet Union’s claim to eastern Poland and the Baltic states occupied after the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, and had put pressure on Anthony Eden to agree. At first the British had refused to discuss this flagrant contradiction of the Atlantic Charter’s insistence on self-determination. But Churchill, afraid that Stalin might still seek a separate peace with Hitler, raised the possibility with Roosevelt that they should perhaps agree to this. Roosevelt rejected the suggestion outright. Then, paradoxically, it was Roosevelt who was to create the greatest distrust with Stalin with an unrealizable promise. In April 1942, without having studied the matter, he offered the Soviet leader a Second Front later that year.

  General Marshall was horrified by Churchill’s access to the President in the White House, knowing Roosevelt’s tendency to formulate policy behind the backs of his own chiefs of staff. He was even more appalled when he subsequently discovered in June 1942, on another of Churchill’s visits, that Roosevelt had agreed to his plan for landings in North Africa, Operation Gymnast, which many senior American officers saw as a British scheme to save the empire.

  Churchill returned triumphant from the United States, yet soon, exhausted and ill, he was weighed down by a fresh series of disasters. On the night of 11 February 1942 and during the following day, the German battle-cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau along with the heavy crusier Prinz Eugen accomplished their ‘Channel dash’ from Brest back to home waters in bad visibility. Numerous attacks along the way by RAF bombers and Royal Navy motor torpedo boats failed. The country was dismayed and angry. There was even a mood of defeatism in many corners. Then, on 15 February, Singapore surrendered. British humiliation appeared complete. Churchill, the revered war leader, now found himself attacked on all sides, by the press, in Parliament and by the Australian government. To make matters worse, large meetings and demonstrations began to demand ‘A Second Front Now’ to aid the Soviet Union–the one offensive operation which Churchill could not and did not want to undertake.

  Yet the greatest threat at that time had nothing to do with British military failures. The Kriegsmarine had just changed its Enigma settings by adding an extra rotor. Bletchley Park was unable to decipher a single transmission. Dönitz’s wolfpacks, now fully deployed in the North Atlantic and along the North American seaboard, began to inflict a level of losses which answered Hitler’s dreams. Altogether 1,769 Allied and 90 neutral ships were sunk in 1942. After Churchill’
s euphoria at America’s entry into the war, Britain faced starvation and collapse if the Battle of the Atlantic were lost. Not surprisingly, with all the problems and humiliations heaped upon him, he greatly envied Stalin’s success in repelling the Germans from Moscow.

  The Red Army’s great achievement in the Battle for Moscow in December was soon undermined by Stalin himself. On the evening of 5 January 1942, he summoned a meeting of the Stavka and the State Defence Committee at the Kremlin. The Soviet leader had become intoxicated with revenge and persuaded himself that the moment had come for a general offensive. The Germans were in disarray. They had not prepared for the winter and would not be ready to repel a major attack until spring came. As he walked up and down his office, puffing on his pipe, he insisted on his plan to launch massive encirclement operations of the central front opposite Moscow, in the north round Leningrad to break the siege, and in the south against Manstein’s army in the Crimea, in the Donbass, and to recapture Kharkov.

  Zhukov, who had not been told of Stalin’s instructions to the Stavka, was horrified. In a conference with Stalin, he argued that the offensive should be concentrated on the ‘Western axis’ near Moscow. The Red Army lacked sufficient reserves and supplies, especially of ammunition for a general advance. After the Battle for Moscow, the armies involved had suffered heavy losses and were exhausted. Stalin listened, but ignored all Zhukov’s warnings. ‘Carry out your orders!’ he said. The meeting was over. Only later did Zhukov discover that he had been wasting his breath. Behind his back detailed instructions had already been issued to front commanders.