The Second World War Read online

  Soviet intelligence knew that the Germans under Generalfeldmarschall von Manstein, with his newly arrived Eleventh Army, were about to launch a major assault. In an operation codenamed Nordlicht, Hitler ordered Manstein to smash the city and link up with the Finns. To disrupt the attack, Stalin ordered the Leningrad and Volkhov Fronts to make another attempt to crush the German salient, which reached up to the southern shore of Lake Ladoga, and thus break the siege. This was known as the Sinyavino Offensive, which began on 19 August.

  A young Red Army soldier described his first dawn attack in a letter home. ‘The air filled with a humming, thundering, howling of shrapnel, the ground was shaking, smoke enveloped the battlefield. We crawled on without stopping. Forward, forward only, otherwise death. A piece of shrapnel cut my lip, blood covered my face, endless pieces of shrapnel were falling from above like hail, burning one’s hands. Our machine gun was already working, fire increased, one couldn’t raise one’s head. A shallow trench was our protection from the shrapnel. We tried to go forward as fast as we could in order to leave the zone of fire. Aircraft started droning above. Bombing began. I can’t remember for how long this hell went on. A word went round that German armoured vehicles had appeared. We panicked but the vehicles turned out to be our own tanks ironing the barbed-wire fences. We soon reached this wire and were met with a horrendous fire. It was there that I saw a killed soldier for the first time, he was lying headless along the ditch blocking our way. Only then did it occur to me that I could also get killed. We jumped over the dead man.

  ‘We left the inferno of fire behind. In front of us was an anti-tank trench. From the side somewhere, sub-machine guns were clattering. We ran, bent double. There were two or three explosions. “Hurry up, they’re throwing grenades,” Puchkov shouted. We ran even faster. Two dead machine-gunners were pressing at a log as if trying to crawl over it, they were blocking our way. We left the trench, ran across a flat space and jumped into [another trench]. A dead German officer was lying on the bottom, his face in the mud. It was empty and quiet here. I’ll never forget this long earthen corridor with one wall lit by the sun. Bullets were whistling everywhere. We didn’t know where the Germans were, they were both behind us and in front of us. One of the machine-gunners jumped up to see but was immediately killed by a sniper. He sat down as if lost in thought, his head bent to his chest.’

  Soviet losses were heavy–114,000 casualties including 40,000 dead–but to Hitler’s fury this pre-emptive strike completely wrecked Manstein’s operation.

  Still obsessed with the oilfields of the Caucasus and with the city which bore Stalin’s name, Hitler felt sure ‘that the Russians were finished’, even though far fewer prisoners had been taken than expected. Now established in his new Führer headquarters, codenamed Werwolf, outside Vinnitsa in Ukraine, he was tormented by flies and mosquitoes and became increasingly restless in the oppressive heat. Hitler began to grasp at symbols of victory, rather than military reality. On 12 August he had told the Italian ambassador that the Battle of Stalingrad would decide the outcome of the war. On 21 August, German mountain troops scaled the 5,600-metre-high Mount Elbrus, the greatest mountain in the Caucasus, to raise the ‘Reich’s battle flag’. Three days later the news that Paulus’s panzer vanguard had reached the Volga raised the Führer’s spirits still further. But then on 31 August he was enraged when Generalfeldmarschall List, the commander-in-chief of Army Group A in the Caucasus, told him that his troops were at the end of their strength and facing much greater resistance than expected. Disbelieving List, he ordered an attack on Astrakhan and the seizure of the western coastline of the Caspian Sea. He simply refused to accept that his forces were inadequate for the task and short of fuel, ammunition and supplies.

  German soldiers in Stalingrad, on the other hand, remained highly optimistic. They thought that the city would soon be in their hands, and they could then return home. ‘Anyway, we will not be taking up winter quarters in Russia,’ wrote a soldier in the 389th Infantry Division, ‘as our division has rejected any winter clothing. We should, God willing, see you dear ones again this year.’ ‘Hopefully the operation will not last too long,’ a motorcycle reconnaissance Gefreiter with the 16th Panzer Division remarked casually after commenting that the Soviet women soldiers they had captured were so ugly that you could hardly look at their faces.

  Sixth Army headquarters became increasingly anxious about their long supply lines which stretched back over the River Don for hundreds of kilometres. The nights, Richthofen noted in his diary, had suddenly become ‘very cool’. Winter was not far off. Staff officers were also concerned about the weak Romanian, Italian and Hungarian armies guarding the right bank of the Don to their rear. Red Army counter-attacks had pushed them back in a number of places to seize bridgeheads across the river which would play a vital part later.

  Soviet intelligence officers were already collecting all the material they could on these allies of the Nazis. Many Italian soldiers had been forced to the front against their will, some even brought ‘in chains’. Romanian soldiers, the Russians discovered, had been promised by their officers that they would be ‘given land in Transylvania and in Ukraine after the war’. Yet the soldiers received a pitiful salary of just sixty lei per month, and their rations amounted to half a mess tin of hot food per day and 300–400 grams of bread. They hated the members of the Iron Guard in their ranks, who acted as spies. The demoralization of the Third and Fourth Romanian Armies was carefully noted in Moscow.

  The fate of the fronts at Stalingrad, in the Caucasus and in Egypt was closely linked. A grossly over-extended Wehrmacht, relying excessively on weak allies, was now doomed to lose its great advantage of Bewegungskrieg–a war of movement. That era was finished, because the Germans had finally lost the initiative. Führer headquarters, like Rommel in North Africa, could no longer expect the impossible from exhausted troops and unsustainable supply lines. Hitler had begun to suspect that the high water mark of the Third Reich’s expansion had been reached. He became even more determined not to permit any of his generals to retreat.

  23

  Fighting Back in the Pacific

  JULY 1942–JANUARY 1943

  Following the decision in July 1942 to postpone a cross-Channel invasion and land instead in French North Africa, Admiral King had seized the opportunity to reinforce the Pacific. As far as possible, he intended to keep the war against Japan under the control of the US Navy, using the US Marine Corps to spearhead amphibious operations. The US Army, meanwhile, planned to send nearly 300,000 troops to the region, most of whom would come under the command of General Douglas MacArthur with his headquarters for the south-west Pacific in Australia. King did not share the American public’s admiration of MacArthur, in fact he hated him. Even MacArthur’s former protégé General Eisenhower regretted that Mac Arthur had been evacuated from the Philippines.

  MacArthur set himself up as a military viceroy, with a court of sycophantic staff officers known as ‘the Bataan gang’. Unlike the modest Admiral Nimitz, the ruggedly handsome MacArthur was a master of public relations who liked to be photographed smoking his corncob pipe as he gazed out at the Pacific horizon. He paid little attention to the wishes of his political masters, who were Democrats. He despised Roosevelt and in 1944 seriously considered running against him in the presidential elections. Republican leaders wanted the rabidly right-wing MacArthur to be appointed supreme commander over both the army and the navy. The idea of such an autocratic general interfering in naval strategy horrified Admiral King.

  The Far East, at Roosevelt’s instigation, had been divided into two areas of responsibility. The British would look after China–Burma–India, known as CBI, even though China was essentially an American interest. The Americans would control operations in the Pacific and the South China Sea, and guarantee the defence of Australia and New Zealand. The two Dominion governments were far from content about an arrangement in which they had no say in strategy, because the joint chiefs of staff in Washington h
ad not the slightest intention of complicating operations by having to consult with allies. In April 1942 they had set up a Pacific War Council of representatives from interested countries, but the body was there solely to allow the Chinese, Dutch, Australians and others ‘to let off steam’ and no more.

  Australia had been the first priority for defence since January when the Japanese seized Rabaul on New Britain and turned it into a major naval and air base. This presented a threat to the shipping route from the United States to Australia. Everyone agreed on the need for action, but a futile quarrel developed over whether operations in the region came under the command of MacArthur or Admiral Nimitz, the commander-in-chief Pacific, or CINCPAC. The subsequent Japanese attempt to take Port Moresby on the south coast of Papua New Guinea in May was postponed after the rather chaotic Battle of the Coral Sea. The Japanese did, however, take the port of Tulagi in the Solomon Islands to the east. Rabaul was the main target for the Americans and MacArthur wanted to attack it immediately, but before attempting its recapture the US Navy insisted that the southern Solomon Islands needed to be secured first. The last thing Nimitz wanted was MacArthur throwing the 1st Marine Division against Rabaul and putting at risk their carriers in waters controlled by Japanese aircraft.

  Intelligence from the highly effective Australian ‘coast-watcher’ groups hidden with radios on the islands warned that the Japanese were building an airfield on Guadalcanal near the south-eastern end of the Solomon archipelago. But at dusk on 21 July, while the Americans were preparing an invasion of Tulagi and Guadalcanal with the 1st Marine Division, and MacArthur was transferring his headquarters from Melbourne to Brisbane, news arrived of a Japanese force of 16,000 men landing at Buna on Papua’s north coast. They clearly intended to try once more to capture Port Moresby on the southern side, as a base for attacking Australia.

  The Japanese quickly established a bridgehead, then began to advance up the Kokoda Trail. This ran through thick jungle, twisting up and over the 4,000-metre-high Owen Stanley mountain range. Although heavily outnumbered, the Australian defenders fought a courageous rearguard action, slowing the Japanese down. Both sides suffered in the extreme tropical humidity of the cloudforest from dysentery, typhus, malaria and dengue fever. The slopes of the mountain jungle were so steep that knees and calves managed to ache and feel like jelly at the same time.

  Amid the stench of slimy, rotting vegetation, clothes fell to pieces, skin became infected from insect bites, and both sides were half starved because of the difficulties of bringing up supplies. Airdrops for the Australians fell wide of the mark and only a few containers were recovered. Both sides used local Papuans as bearers, carrying supplies and ammunition on poles, or as stretcher-bearers for the wounded. On the muddy, steep slopes of the mountain range, it was an exhausting task. The 10,000 Papuans supporting the Australians were on the whole well looked after, but those coerced to work for the Japanese fared very badly.

  The fighting was pitiless. Japanese soldiers, with hooks on their boots, hid themselves in trees to snipe at the Australians from behind. Many would pretend to be dead and hid themselves among corpses until they had a chance to shoot an enemy in the back. Australian soldiers soon learned to bayonet every corpse to be sure. They also took a malicious pleasure in contaminating any food which had to be left behind in their retreat, by bayoneting tins and scattering the rest in the mud. They knew that the Japanese were even more desperate than they were and would eat anything, whatever the gastric consequences.

  MacArthur, who was scandalously ill informed, became convinced that the Australian soldiers outnumbered the Japanese, but were just not prepared to fight. In fact the Australians, supported by US Army combat engineers, managed to wear down the enemy over the next few months despite the most appalling conditions, and held them in front of Port Moresby. Another, stronger Australian force meanwhile defeated a Japanese landing at Milne Bay on the easternmost point of Papua.

  On 6 August, shielded by cloud and heavy rain, the eighty-two ships of Task Force 61 approached the islands of Guadalcanal and Tulagi. The 19,000 US marines occupied themselves with checking their weapons, sharpening bayonets and blacking the iron sights of their rifles. There was little of the usual horseplay and friendly insults. At dawn the next morning, as the heavily laden marines clambered down cargo nets into their landing craft, the guns of their escorting warships opened the bombardment. Aircraft from the carriers swept in over their heads to attack Japanese positions. Soon the landing craft reached the beaches and the marines fanned out under the coconut palms. The American invasion fleet had achieved surprise at both Guadalcanal and Tulagi. The Japanese had not expected the Americans to fight back so soon after all the defeats they had inflicted.

  Fighting was fierce on Tulagi, but by nightfall the next day the reinforced 1st Marine Division had secured the two islands. Vice Admiral Fletcher, who commanded the naval task force covering the invasion, was deeply concerned that his three carriers might be attacked by land-based and possibly carrier-launched aircraft. To the fury and disgust of Rear Admiral Richmond K. Turner, the commander of the amphibious force, Fletcher insisted on sailing for home with his carriers and escort vessels within forty-eight hours. Turner considered Fletcher’s decision to be tantamount to desertion in the face of the enemy.

  In the early hours of 9 August, Turner’s covering force was surprised by a strong Japanese cruiser squadron sailing from Rabaul. The Imperial Japanese Navy knew that it enjoyed a decisive advantage in night actions. The Australian cruiser HMAS Canberra and three US Navy cruisers and a destroyer were sunk in a little over half an hour. Altogether 1,023 Australian and American sailors were killed. Fortunately for the Allies, Vice Admiral Mikawa Gunichi, fearing an air strike at dawn from the US carriers, which by then were far way, returned towards Rabaul. Turner continued to land more of the marines’ equipment on Guadalcanal, then he had to take his ships away after his heavy losses of escort vessels.

  The marines, well aware of their dangerous situation, wasted no time in finishing the Japanese aerodrome, which they rechristened Henderson Field. It was on the north coast of Guadalcanal and was surrounded by coconut groves. They were bombed regularly around the middle of every day. The marines called it ‘Tojo time’. And Japanese cruisers and destroyers sailing into what was dubbed ‘Ironbottom Sound’ after the sinkings, shelled the airfield on numerous occasions. On 15 August, US ships slipped in bringing fuel and bombs for the aircraft to be based there. Nineteen Wildcat fighters and twelve dive-bombers, flown off a carrier, arrived five days later. Major General Alexander A. Vandegrift, commander of the 1st Marine Division, admitted that he was close to tears of relief and joy when they landed safely. They were called the Cactus Air Force since Cactus had been the codeword for Guadalcanal.

  The nights of waiting for the inevitable Japanese counter-attack were the worst. Sudden noises, whether from large land-crabs, wild pigs in the undergrowth, screeching birds or the dull thud of a coconut dropping on the sand, were enough to spook a sentry to fire into the dark. The days were spent increasing their defences, even though much of the material was still aboard the transports which Admiral Turner had felt obliged to withdraw after Fletcher’s departure and the disastrous battle in Ironbottom Sound.

  Fortunately for the marines, the Japanese had woefully underestimated their strength. During the night of 18 August, Japanese destroyers from Rabaul landed the 28th Regiment commanded by Colonel Ichiki Kiyono thirty kilometres to the east of Henderson Field. As soon as Vandegrift was informed by patrols of their landing, he ordered the line of the Ilu River to be defended. On the night of 21 August, Colonel Ichiki ordered his men, around a thousand strong, to attack through a mangrove swamp. The marines on the far bank were waiting for them.

  Under the deathly green light of illumination flares, they massacred the charging Japanese with machine guns and anti-tank guns firing canister. ‘The Fever was on us,’ wrote a marine of their bloodlust. Only a few broke through, but they were soon gunn
ed or hacked down. The marines launched a flanking attack with a reserve battalion. ‘Some of the Japanese threw themselves into the channel and swam away from the grove of horror,’ the same marine continued. ‘They were like lemmings. They could not come back. Their heads bobbed like corks on the horizon. The marines lay on their bellies in the sand and shot them through the head.’ More than 800 Japanese out of the thousand had been killed. Marine souvenir hunters stripped the fly-infested bodies of anything which might be worth bartering later. One marine nicknamed ‘Souvenirs’ went from corpse to corpse with a pair of pliers, kicked open the mouth and then removed any gold teeth. Crocodiles soon congregated and had a feast. The marines, huddled in their gunpits, listened to the crunching in the dark with mixed feelings. Colonel Ichiki, who had survived the attack, committed seppuku, or ritual disembowelling.

  On 23 August, the Japanese sent another landing force, this time with a strong escort from the Combined Fleet. This developed into the Battle of the Eastern Solomons. Admiral Fletcher’s carriers were ordered back. His aircraft attacked and sank the small carrier Ryujo escorting a squadron of cruisers bombarding Henderson Field, but Fletcher had no idea that the large carriers Zuikaku and Shokaku were also in the area. The Japanese launched their aircraft against Fletcher’s task force and damaged his carrier USS Enterprise, but the Japanese lost ninety aircraft while the Americans lost only twenty. The carriers on both sides then withdrew, but marine pilots from Henderson Field and some B-17 Fortresses managed to attack the landing force with unaccustomed success, smashing the main troop transport, sinking a destroyer and severely damaging Rear Admiral Tanaka Raizo’s flagship Jintsu.

  With the Cactus Air Force dominating the sea approaches by day, the Japanese could run in reinforcements only by night. Aircraft losses meant that the Americans too had to land replacements after dark. The marines’ obsolete Wildcat fighters were no match for the Zeros, but they still managed to score an impressive number of kills. On the ground, Vandegrift’s marines lived rough in their gunpits on the jungle edge or in the coconut groves. Constantly bombed or shelled from the sea, they also fought running battles with small groups of Japanese. And every night a bomber, which they called ‘Washing Machine Charlie’, droned overhead keeping them awake. The Japanese, short of ammunition, would try to provoke the marines into revealing their positions at night, by cracking together two pieces of bamboo to simulate rifle fire. They would then creep up in the dark and leap into foxholes or gunpits with a machete, hacking in all directions, then leap out again hoping that in the confusion the survivors would kill each other.