The Second World War Read online

Despite the progressive industrialization of the Final Solution, the ‘Shoah by bullets’ still continued in both the Reichskommissariat Ostland and the Reichskommissariat Ukraine. Even Jews who had been retained as specialist workers were rounded up and shot. Throughout the early spring and summer of 1942, the SS Einsatzgruppen and the nine regiments of Ordnungspolizei competed to eliminate all Jews in their respective areas through ‘Grossaktionen’. In July, a German paymaster wrote home: ‘In Bereza-Kartuska where I took my midday break, 1,300 Jews had been shot the day before. They were taken to a hollow outside the town. Men, women and children were forced to undress completely and were dealt with by a shot through the back of the head. Their clothes were disinfected for reuse. I am convinced that if the war lasts much longer Jews will be processed into sausage and be served up to Russian prisoners of war or to qualified Jewish workers.’

  Ghetto after ghetto was surrounded. Some Jewish businessmen tried to buy their survival with bribes. ‘Jewish girls who wanted to save their lives offered themselves to policemen. As a rule, the women were used during the night and killed in the morning.’ The police and their auxiliaries moved in during the early hours or just before dawn, under the glare of searchlights or flares. Many Jews tried to conceal themselves under floors, but the killers rolled hand-grenades under the shacks. In some cases, the buildings were set on fire.

  Those rounded up were taken off to the execution pits, where they too were made to strip before being shot on the edge, or forced to lie down in the ‘sardine’ method. Once again, the killers were amazed by the submission of the Jews. Many executioners were drunk and failed to finish their victims off. Quite a number of them were buried alive. Some even managed to dig themselves out afterwards.

  Not all were submissive. The ‘forest Jews’ who had escaped the roundups either joined Soviet partisan groups or formed their own, especially in Belorussia. Anti-partisan sweeps under the command of Bach-Zelewski continued into the spring of 1944. In Lwów and the rest of Galicia, German security police and Ukrainian Hilfspolizei, known as Hipos, continued the killings. Attempts to form resistance groups in ghettos were seldom successful until the desperate rising of the Warsaw ghetto in January 1943. There were attempts at resistance in the ghettos of Lwów and, Biaystok, but nothing on the scale or determination of Warsaw.

  Jews who had initially argued against resistance now knew the truth. The Germans wanted them all dead. After the deportation of more than 300,000 Jews during 1942, only 70,000 were left in the Warsaw ghetto. Most of those remaining were young and comparatively strong. The sick and old had been taken away already. The different Jewish political groups, Bundists, Communists and Zionists, agreed to fight back. They began by killing collaborators, and then prepared defensive positions linked to the sewers. Weapons and explosives were obtained from the Home Army, or Armia Krajowa, which was loyal to the government-in-exile, and also from the Polish Communist resistance, the People’s Guard. A few hundred pistols and revolvers were bought from citizens in Warsaw who had kept them hidden despite the risk of execution. In January 1943, the first armed clash occurred when the Germans rounded up 6,500 Jews for deportation.

  An enraged Himmler ordered that the whole Warsaw ghetto should be destroyed. But it was not until 19 April that the main attempt to storm the area took place. Waffen-SS troops entered from the north end, where prisoners were loaded on to cattle trucks in the sidings. The attackers soon withdrew with their wounded after coming under heavy fire and losing their only armoured vehicle to a Molotov cocktail. Himmler was appalled when he heard of their repulse and he sacked the commander. From then on, the SS attacked with small raiding groups at different points.

  After a doomed defence of the factories which the Germans set on fire with flamethrowers, the Jewish defenders pulled back into the sewers, from where they would emerge to shoot at German troops from behind. The SS pumped in water in attempts to drown them, but the Jewish fighters managed to avoid or divert the flood. Others had seized a large building used by an armaments firm and defended it. Brigadeführer Jürgen Stroop ordered his men to set the building on fire. When Jews threw themselves from the top floors, the SS troopers called them ‘parachutists’ and tried to shoot them before they hit the ground.

  After the war, Stroop still seemed to be excited by the fighting, which he described to his cellmate in prison. ‘The uproar was monstrous,’ he said, ‘burning houses, smoke, flames, flying sparks, whirling bed feathers, the stench of singed bodies, thunder of guns, cracking grenades, the glow of fire, Jews with their wives and children leaping from windows and burning houses.’ He admitted, however, that the ‘battle-courage’ of the Jews had taken him and his men entirely by surprise.

  The bitter resistance continued for nearly a month until 16 May. Thousands had died in the battle, and 7,000 of the 56,065 prisoners were executed immediately. The remainder were sent to Treblinka for gassing, or to forced-labour battalions to be worked to death. The ghetto was razed to the ground. Vasily Grossman, who entered Warsaw with the Red Army in January 1945, described the scene: ‘Waves of stone, crushed bricks, a sea of brick. There isn’t a single wall intact–the beast’s anger was terrible.’

  20

  Japanese Occupation and the Battle of Midway

  FEBRUARY–JUNE 1942

  The Japanese occupation of Hong Kong had begun with intentions of moderation, yet rapidly became violent and uncontrolled. While European victims suffered comparatively little, drunken Japanese soldiers continued to rape and kill the local population, underlining the hypocrisy in their slogan ‘Asia for the Asians’. The Japanese showed a certain respect for their fellow imperialists, the British, but none for other Asian races, especially the Chinese. A senior officer is said to have ordered the execution of the nine soldiers guilty of the rape of British nurses at the hospital in Happy Valley. Nothing was done to restrict the violent abuse of Chinese women.

  There was almost no restriction on looting, either by Japanese soldiers or by the Triads and supporters of the puppet Nanking regime of Wang Ching-wei who were used as irregular police. In return, the military authorities allowed the Triads to set up gambling dens. Smaller-scale criminal gangs also operated with impunity. The Japanese made an attempt to win over the Indian community, encouraging hatred of the British and giving them a privileged status with better rations. Sikhs and Rajputs were recruited for the police and even given guns. A policy of divide and rule between the Indian and Chinese communities continued until the end of 1942, when after a falling out between the Japanese and the Indian Independence League in Singapore, the Japanese suddenly removed the Indians’ privileges and they found themselves worse off than they had been under the British. Under the brutal regime of the Kempeitai military security police, the Hong Kong Chinese, even including the Triads, soon began to feel almost a nostalgia for British rule.

  The new Japanese governor sought to win over the Eurasians and prominent Chinese merchant families to get the port’s economy flourishing again. At the same time senior Japanese officers, excited by the contents of the godowns or warehouses, organized a more systematic form of looting, partly for personal profit, but also as war booty to be sent back to Tokyo. As in many places occupied by Japanese forces, the situation became even more confused by rivalries between the navy and the army. The army wanted Hong Kong as a base for furthering the war against Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists, while the navy planned to use the port to assist its expansion to the south.

  Shanghai, which had been rapidly occupied by the Japanese on 8 December 1941, came nominally under the puppet government in Nanking of Wang Ching-wei. In the city port of big business, glittering corruption, prostitution and dance halls, conditions deteriorated drastically for the remaining Europeans, the White Russian community and especially the Chinese poor. A cholera epidemic killed thousands, food was hard to find and the black market was rampant.

  Anything and almost everyone was for sale. Shanghai was the spying capital of the Far East. The Abwehr an
d the Gestapo spied on the Japanese, who in turn spied on them. Japanese distrust of their ally had increased enormously since their arrest of the German Communist spy Richard Sorge in October 1941. But the Japanese occupation forces suffered from their own intense rivalries. Hell hath no fury like competing intelligence agencies.

  In Singapore on 17 February 1942, the Kempeitai military police rounded up the Straits Chinese community. They were to be punished for having supported Nationalist China in its resistance. General Yamashita ordered the whole community to pay $50 million as a ‘gift of atonement’. Any male between twelve and fifty was liable to be shot. Many of them were taken bound to Changi Beach where they were machine-gunned. The Kempeitai admitted to having executed no fewer than 6,000 for being ‘anti-Japanese’, but the true figure was many times that, especially if executions on the mainland are included. Victims under this definition were supposedly Communists or former servants of the British. The Japanese also killed anyone with tattoos on the assumption that they belonged to a criminal society.

  Around Changi barracks, the stores of barbed wire which should have been used by the British to create defences were now used to hold Allied prisoners of war. They were forced out to line the streets for a victory parade to honour General Yamashita, now known as ‘the Tiger of Malaya’. Raffles Hotel was turned into a brothel for senior officers. The comfort women there had either been imported forcibly from Korea or were beautiful young Chinese girls seized off the street.

  Most of the European women and male civilians were interned separately at Changi Jail. Two thousand people were forced into accommodation designed for 600. Bribery was the only way for prisoners to improve rations or purchase medicines. The polished rice they received had little nutritional value, and soon there were many cases of beriberi among the increasingly emaciated British and Australian prisoners of war. Among their guards were Koreans and anti-British Sikhs who had deserted during the fighting and then volunteered to serve the Japanese. With bitter memories of the Amritsar massacre, they now enjoyed humiliating their former overlords. Some followed the Japanese custom of slapping their faces if they did not bow to their guards, and a few even acted as firing squads for the Japanese. In Singapore city, meanwhile, looters and thieves were beheaded and their heads displayed on poles as in medieval times. To be buried with part of your body missing was considered the worst possible fate in the Far East.

  Many Malays had believed Japanese propaganda claims that the Imperial Army would bring their liberation and they welcomed the troops, waving small rising-sun flags. They soon found this to be far from the truth. Japanese carpetbaggers and racketeers arrived to dabble in every form of dubious business, dance-halls, drugs, prostitution and gambling.

  In the Dutch East Indies, the Japanese military authorities were furious to find that most of the oil installations had been destroyed before surrender. The Dutch and other Europeans faced a terrible revenge. In Borneo and Java, almost all the white male civilians were shot or decapitated, and many of their wives and daughters gang-raped. Both Dutch and Javanese women were forced into comfort houses and given a daily ‘quota of twenty enlisted men in the morning, two NCOs in the afternoon and the senior officers at night’. If these press-ganged young comfort women managed to run away or were uncooperative, they would be brutally punished and their parents or family would suffer. Altogether, it is estimated that the Imperial Japanese Army press-ganged up to 100,000 girls and young women into sexual slavery. A large number were Korean and sent overseas to Japanese garrisons in the Pacific and round the South China Sea, but Malay, Straits Chinese, Filipina and Javanese women as well as those of other nationalities were also seized by the Kempeitai. The policy of using the women of conquered nations as a resource for their soldiers was clearly approved at the most senior levels in the Japanese government.

  A young nationalist called Achmed Sukarno served as a propagandist and adviser to the Japanese military authorities, hoping that they would grant the former Dutch colony independence. After the war, instead of being accused of collaboration, he became the first president of Indonesia, despite the fact that tens of thousands of his fellow citizens had suffered from starvation. Some five million people in south-east Asia are thought to have died from the Japanese occupation during the war. At least a million of them were Vietnamese. Rice paddies were forcibly converted to other crops for the Japanese, and rice and grain were seized to make fuel alcohol.

  Political parties and a free press were all banned. The Kempeitai, using its cruelly unsophisticated torture techniques, took revenge on any attempt at subversion or even the slightest hint of ‘anti-Japanese’ attitudes. In a programme of Nipponization, the Japanese language and the Japanese calendar were imposed in some places. Occupied countries were looted of food and raw materials and unemployment rose to such an extent that the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere was soon known as the ‘Co-Poverty Sphere’. The Japanese occupation currency was regarded as a bad joke when inflation rose uncontrollably.

  In Burma, many Burmese initially welcomed the Japanese in the hope of independence, although the ethnically different tribes in the north remained loyal to the British. The Japanese raised a force of nearly 30,000 to serve in their Burmese National Army, but they treated them as inferior. Even Burmese officers were expected to salute Japanese privates. The Japanese also recruited some 7,000 Indians from among those captured in Malaya and Singapore for the Indian National Army, which would supposedly be used to liberate their country from British colonial rule.

  British and Australian prisoners of war in Singapore were sent north to work on the infamous Burma Railway, however sick, weak and emaciated they were. They suffered from blackwater fever, beriberi, dysentery, diphtheria, dengue fever, malaria and pellagra. No medical supplies were provided, and wound sepsis rapidly set in when flesh was torn by thorns while clearing jungle. Prisoners had to bow not just to officers, but also to private soldiers. Their faces were slapped or they were beaten with the flat of a sword by an NCO or officer. Insubordination or subversion was punished by a favourite torture. After the prisoner had been force-fed water to bursting point, guards would stake him out, spread-eagled on the ground, then jump on his stomach. Any prisoner recaptured after a failed attempt to escape usually faced a public beheading.

  Japanese guards yelled ‘Speedo! Speedo!’ at their exhausted victims, thrashing them to work harder. Starved, thirsty and bitten by insects, the prisoners of war worked almost naked in the terrible heat. Many collapsed from dehydration. Altogether a third of the 46,000 Allied prisoners of war died, but conditions were even worse for the 150,000 local forced labourers, of whom around half died.

  The Japanese occupation of French Indochina did not change greatly after the original agreement with Admiral Darlan signed at Vichy on 29 July 1941. A further agreement on the defence of Indochina was signed by the governor-general Admiral Jean Decoux in December, and the French administration which recognized Vichy continued in place until March 1945. The main difference was that with Indochina effectively cut off from France, the country came into the Japanese economic sphere. Some nationalist groups sided with the Japanese in the hope of obtaining independence from France, but the Japanese commander ensured the continuance of the French colonial regime. Roosevelt, on the other hand, was determined that Indochina should not be handed back to France at the end of the war.

  On 9 April 1942, just before Major General Edward King Jr surrendered the American and Filipino forces on the Bataan Peninsula, he asked Colonel Nakayama Motoo whether his men would be well treated. Nakayama retorted that they were not barbarians. Yet Japanese officers had not expected to take so many prisoners on Bataan. Indoctrinated from the day they joined the army to believe in the Bushido code that a soldier never capitulates, they regarded any enemy who surrendered as unworthy of respect. In a flagrant paradox, their anger was even greater towards enemies who had put up a ferocious defence.

  Of the 76,000 Americans and Filipinos, at least 6,0
00 were too sick or wounded to walk. Already filthy, emaciated and exhausted from fighting for so long on starvation rations, some 70,000 men were forced forward on the hundred-kilometre march to Camp O’Donnell. The ‘Bataan death march’ was a grotesque contradiction of Nakayama’s assurance. Beaten and robbed of everything they possessed, tortured by thirst and denied food, forced on by jabs from bayonets, the prisoners were subjected to deliberate cruelty to exact revenge and inflict humiliation. Over the days which followed, few of their guards allowed them to rest in the shade or lie down. More than 7,000 American and Filipino soldiers from Bataan died. Some 400 Filipino officers and NCOs of the 91st Division were killed with swords in a massacre on 12 April at Batanga. Of the 63,000 who made it alive to the camp, hundreds more died each day. Also 2,000 of the survivors of Corregidor died from hunger or disease in their first two months of captivity.

  The series of disasters, surrenders and humiliations inflicted on the Allies prompted the disdain of the Chinese Nationalists, who had been resisting far greater Japanese armies for four years. The British had refused to ask for their help in defending Hong Kong, and had failed to arm the Chinese and allow them to defend themselves. This gravely undermined their claim to the colony, in the event of victory over the Japanese. The Chungking government of Chiang Kai-shek was, in any case, resolutely opposed to a foreign presence in the treaty ports. The administration of President Roosevelt sympathized strongly with such anti-colonial attitudes, and American public opinion supported the idea that the United States should not help to restore the British, French and Dutch possessions in the Far East.

  British failure to resist the Japanese was largely blamed on their colonialist behaviour. However tempting an explanation at the time, it was far from the whole truth when the major part of the nation’s war effort had to be concentratedon the other side of the wall. In the first half of 1942, the British government nearly gave in to pressure from Washington and Chungking to renounce Hong Kong, but later in the year London would agree only to discuss the handover at the end of the war. The Nationalists, convinced that their forces would occupy the city first, did not press the matter.