Tragedy and Hope
A History of the World in Our Time
By Carroll Quigley
PART FIFTEEN
Part Fifteen: World War II: the Ebb of Aggression: 1941-1945
Chapter 55: The Rising in the Pacific, to 1942
Traditionally, American policy in the Far East had sought to preserve the territorial integrity and political independence of China and to maintain an "Open Door" for China's foreign trade. These goals became increasingly difficult to achieve in the course of the twentieth century because of the growing weakness of China itself, the steady growth of aggression in Japan, and the deepening involvement of other Powers with Far Eastern interests in a life-or-death struggle with Germany. After the fall of France and the Low Countries in the summer of 1940, Britain could offer the United States little more than sympathy and some degree of diplomatic support in the Far East, while the Netherlands and France, with rich colonial possessions within reach of Japan's avid grasp, could provide no real opposition to Japan's demands. After Hitler's attack on Russia in June 1941, the Soviet Union, which had actually fought Japanese forces in the Far East in 1938 and again in 1939, could exert no pressure on Japan to deter further Nipponese aggression. Thus, by the summer of 1941, Japan was ready for new advances in the Far East, and only the United States was in a position to resist.
This situation was complicated by the domestic political divisions within the United States and Japan. In general, these divisions tended to postpone any showdown between the two Powers. On the one hand, the American government had developed a fissure between its military strategic plans and its diplomatic activities, just at the time when isolationist opinion within the country was making its most vociferous objections to the Administration's policies in both these fields. On the other hand, the Japanese government was by no means united, either on the direction or on the timing of its next moves.
The divisions in public opinion within the United States and even within the Roosevelt Administration are obvious enough to Americans, but the equally great divisions in Japan are largely ignored. It should be recognized by Americans today, as it was recognized by the Japanese leaders at the time, that the Japanese aggressions of 1941 which culminated in the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7th were based on fear and weakness and not on arrogance and strength. To be sure, the earlier aggressions which began in Manchuria in 1931 and in North China in 1937 had been arrogant enough. The Japanese had been supremely confident of their ability to conquer all China, if necessary, even as late as 1939. As a consequence, their advance had been accompanied hy brutality against the Chinese, by various actions to drive all Europeans and all European economic enterprises out of China, and by insults and humiliations to Europeans found in China, especially in Shanghai.
By 1939 all of this was beginning to change. The attack on China had bogged down completely. The Japanese economy was beginning to totter under a combination of circumstances, including the exhausting effort to strangle China and to administer a fatal blow to the retreating Chinese government by octopus tactics, the reorganization of Japan's home industry from a light basis to a heavy industrial plant (for which Japan lacked the necessary resources), the gigantic capital investment in Manchuria and North China, the growing restrictions on Japanese trade imposed by Western countries, and, finally, the combination of a rapidly growing population with acute material shortages. Problems such as these might have driven many nations, even in the West, to desperate action. In Japan the situation was made more critical by the large-scale diversion of manpower and resources from consumption to capital formation at a very high rate. And, finally, all this was taking place in a country which placed a high esteem on military arrogance.
In theory, of course, Japan might have sought to remedy its material shortages in a peaceful way, by seeking to increase Japan's foreign trade, exporting increasing amounts of Japanese goods to pay for rising Japanese imports. In fact, such a policy had obvious weaknesses. The world depression after 1929 and the growth of economic autarchy in all countries, including the United States, made it very difficult to increase Japanese exports. The excessively high American Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930, although not so intended, seemed to the Japanese to be an aggressive restriction on their ability to live. The "imperial preference" regulations of the British Commonwealth had a similar consequence. Since Japan could not defend itself against such economic measures, it resorted to political measures. To do otherwise would have been contrary to Japanese traditions. But, by embarking on this course, Japan was heading in a direction which could hardly have a favorable outcome. If Japan adopted political measures to defend itself against economic restrictions, the Western Powers would inevitably defend themselves with even greater economic restrictions on Japan, driving Japan, by a series of such stages, to open war. And, in such a war, in view of its economic weakness, Japan could hardly hope to win. These stages were confused and delayed over a full decade of years (1931-1941), by indecision and divided counsels in both Japan and the Western Powers. In the process Japan found a considerable advantage in the parallel aggressions of Italy and Germany. It also found a considerable disadvantage in the fact that Japan's imports were vital necessities to her, while her exports were vital necessities to no one. This meant that Japan's trade could he cut off or reduced by anyone, to Japan's great injury, but at much smaller cost to the other nation.
The steps leading to open war between Japan and the Western Powers were delayed by the long-drawn indecision of the Sino-Japanese War. For years Japan hoped to find a solution for its economic and social problems in a decisive victory over China, while in the same years the Western Powers hoped for an end to Japanese aggression by a Japanese defeat in China. Instead, the struggle in that area dragged on without a decision. The Western Powers were too divided at home and among themselves, too filled with pacifism and mistaken political and economic ideas to do anything decisive about China, especially when open war was impossible and anything less than war would injure China as well as Japan. Thus, no sanctions were imposed on Japan for its aggression on Manchuria in 1931 or for its attack on North China in 1937. The American Neutrality Act was not applied to this conflict because President Roosevelt adopted the simple legalistic expedient of failing to "find" a war in the Far East. But the mere existence of laws which might have imposed economic sanctions or economic retaliation on Japan revealed to that country the basic weakness of its own position.
In 1937 Japan received a series of lessons in the precarious state of its strategic-economic position. In the first half of that year, as background for its growing military pressure on China, Japan bought a record amount of American scrap iron and steel, 1.3 million metric tons in six months. Agitation to curtail this supply, either by applying the Neutrality Act to the Sino-Japanese conflict or by some lesser action, was growing in the United States. Early in October 1937, President Roosevelt caused a controversy by a speech suggesting a "quarantine" of aggressor nations. Isolationist sentiment in the United States, especially in the Midwest, was too strong to allow the administration to take any important steps toward such a "quarantine." Nevertheless, Stimson, who had been American secretary of state at the time of the Manchurian crisis in 1931, made a public appeal for an embargo on the shipment of war materials to Japan. A month later, November 3-24, 1937, a conference of the signers of the Nine-Power Treaty of 1922, which guaranteed the integrity of China, met at Brussels to discuss what steps might be taken to end Japan's aggression in China. There was considerable talk of economic sanctions, but no Great Power was willing to light the fuse on that stick of dynamite, so the occasion lapsed, and nothing was done. But the lesson was not wasted on Japan; it intensified its efforts to build up Japanese power to a position where it could use political action to defend itself against any economic reprisals. Naturally, the political actions it took in this direction served only to hasten economic reprisals against itself, especially by the United States, the world's most devoted defender of the status quo in the Far East and the only Great Power in any position, especially after Hitler's attacks, to adopt an active policy against Japan.
Japan could have achieved little toward a political solution of its problems if it had not been for the aggressions of Italy and Germany on the other side of the world. A full year before the Brussels Conference, on November 25, 1936, Japan had joined the league of aggressors known as the Anti-Comintern Pact. Discussions seeking to strengthen this arrangement into a full German-Japanese alliance went on for years, but were not concluded until September 1940.
Hitler was not sure whether he wanted Japanese support against the Western democracies or against the Soviet Union, and, accordingly, sought an agreement which could be swung either way, while Japan was interested in a German alliance only if it ran against the Soviet Union. At the same time, Germany objected to the Japanese war on China, since this prevented Japan's strength from being directed against either of Germany's possible foes, and jeopardized German economic interests in China. All these difficulties continued, although Ribbentrop's advent to the post of foreign minister in Berlin in February 1938 inaugurated a period of wholehearted cooperation with Japan in China, replacing Neurath's earlier efforts to maintain some kind of neutral balance in the Sino-Japanese War. The German military advisers with Chiang Kai-shek were withdrawn, although some of them had been in their positions for ten years and were likely to be replaced by Soviet advisers; the German ambassador was withdrawn from China, and the protection of German interests was generally left to lesser officials, using Japanese officials in areas under Japanese occupation; the Japanese regime in Manchukuo was explicitly recognized (20 February 1938); all shipments of German war materials to China (which reached a value of almost 83 million marks in 1937) were ended, and in-completed contracts totaling 282 million marks were canceled; the Japanese claim that their attack on Nationalist China was really an anti-Communist action, although recognized as a fraud in Berlin, was tacitly accepted; and the earlier German efforts to mediate peace between China and Japan ceased.
In spite of these concessions, Japan continued its efforts to curtail German economic enterprises in China, along with those of other Western nations. The alienation of these two aggressor countries by the summer of 1939 can be judged by the fact that the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact of August 1939 was made in flagrant violation of the German-Japanese Anti-Comintern Agreement of November 1936, since this latter document bound the signers to make no political agreements with the Soviet Union without the previous consent of the other signatory state. This was regarded in Tokyo as such a blow to the prestige of the Japanese government that the prime minister resigned.
In the meantime the American government began to tighten the economic pincers on Japan just as Japan was seeking to tighten its military pincers on China. In the course of 1939 Japan was able to close all the routes from the outside into China except through Hong Kong, across French Indochina, and along the rocky and undeveloped route from Burma to Chungking. The American government retaliated with economic warfare. In June 1938 it established a "moral embargo" on the shipment of aircraft or their parts and bombs to Japan by simply requesting American citizens to refuse to sell these articles. Early in 1939 large American and British loans to China sought to strengthen that country's collapsing financial system. In September 1939 Washington gave the necessary six-month notice to cancel the 1911 commercial treaty with Japan; this opened the door to all kinds of economic pressure against Japan. At the same time, the "moral embargo" was extended to eleven named raw materials which were vital to Japan's war machine. In December this embargo was extended to cover light metals and all machinery or plans for making aviation gasoline.
In general, there was considerable pressure in the United States, both inside the administration and elsewhere, to increase American economic sanctions against Japan. Such a policy was opposed by the isolationists in the country, by our diplomatic agents in Tokyo, and by our quasi-allies, Britain, France, and the Netherlands. These diverse opinions agreed that economic sanctions could be enforced, in the long run, only by war. To put it bluntly, if Japan could not get petroleum, bauxite, rubber, and tin by trade, it could be prevented from seizing areas producing these products only by force. To avoid this obvious inference, Cordell Hull sought to make America's economic policy ambiguous so that Japan might be deterred from evil actions by fear of sanctions not yet imposed and won to conciliatory actions by hopes of concessions not yet granted. Such a policy was a mistake, but it obtained President Roosevelt's explicit approval in December 1939. It was a mistake, since it paralyzed the less aggressive elements in Japanese affairs, allowing the more aggressive elements to take control, because the uncertainty it engendered became so unbearable to many, even of the less aggressive, that any drastic action seeking to end the strain became welcome; there was no real faith in America's intentions, with the result that the period of sustained uncertainty came to be interpreted in Japan as a period of American rearmament preliminary to an attack on Japan, and the ambiguity of American commercial policy toward Japan was, over the months of 1940-1941, slowly resolved in the direction of increasing economic sanctions. There was a steady increase in America's economic pressure on Japan by extensions of the "moral embargo," by the growth of financial obstacles, and by increasing purchasing difficulties, presumably based on America's rearmament program..
Japan continued to advance in China with brusque disregard of Western interests, citizens, or property. By the end of 1939, Japan controlled all the chief cities, river valleys, and railroad lines of eastern China, but faced constant guerrilla opposition in rural areas and had no control over the deep interior of China, which remained loyal to Chiang Kai-shek's government in far-off Chungking on the Upper Yangtze in southwestern China. In March 1940 the Japanese set up a puppet Chinese government at Nanking, but the reality of its power deceived no one.
In the winter of 1939-1940, Japan began to make vigorous commercial demands on the Netherlands East Indies. These demands, chiefly concerned with petroleum and bauxite, were increased after the German victories in France and the Low Countries. From these victories and from Hull's doctrinaire refusal to encourage any Japanese hope that they could win worthwhile American concessions from a more moderate policy, the advocates of extremism in Japan gained influence. A Japanese demand was made on France, following the latter's defeat by Germany, to allow Japanese troops to enter northern Indochina, in order to cut off supplies going to China. This was conceded at once by the Vichy government. At the same time (June 1940), Britain received a demand to withdraw its troops from Shanghai and close the Burma Road to Chinese imports. When Hull refused to cooperate with Britain, either in forcing Japan to desist or in any policy aiming to win better Japanese behavior by concessions, Britain withdrew from Shanghai and closed the Burma Road for three months.
Just at that moment a powerful new weapon against Japan was added to the American arsenal, by an amendment to the National Defense Act giving the President authority to embargo the export of supplies which he judged to be necessary to the defense of the United States. The first presidential order under this new authority required licenses for many goods which Japan needed, including aluminum, airplane parts, all arms or munitions, optical supplies, and various "strategic" materials, but left petroleum and scrap iron unhindered.
As France was falling in June 1940, Roosevelt, for reasons of domestic policy, added to his Cabinet two leaders of the Republican Party, Henry L. Stimson and Frank C. Knox; both of these were interventionists in behalf of Britain, while Stimson, for years, had been demanding economic sanctions against Japan, assuring the more cautious of his audience that such a policy would bring about a Japanese retreat rather than any war. The error in this point of view was clearly revealed at Pearl Harbor in December 1941, but the exact nature of the error is not always recognized.
The real error in the American negotiations with Japan in 1940-1941 was a double one. On the one hand, there was no correlation between our demands on Japan and our actual power in the Pacific, since our demands were vastly more extensive than our strength. On the other hand, there was no correlation between our strategic plans and our diplomatic activity, with the consequence that there was no correlation between our German policy and our Japanese policy. The American strategic plans were based on the premise that Germany must be defeated before Japan. From this perfectly correct premise followed several corollaries which were not fully grasped by American leaders, especially by the nonmilitary leaders. One of these corollaries provided that America must not get into war with Japan before it got into war with Germany, for, if it did so, it would either have to abandon its strategic plans and proceed to fight Japan or declare war on Germany itself. The much greater danger from Germany, and especially from a German victory over either Britain or the Soviet Union, made the first of these unacceptable, while American public opinion would never have accepted an American declaration of war against Germany when we were already in a state of war with Japan. A second corollary from all these conditions was that American diplomatic pressure on Japan must be timed in terms of American-German relations and not in terms of American-Japanese relations in order to avoid pushing Japan into desperate action before American-German relations had passed the breaking point.
As we shall see, American diplomatic pressure on Japan was increased on the basis of moral outrage, high-flown principles, incidental retaliation, and an unrealistic conception of international legality, without any attempt to coordinate this pressure either with our relations to Germany or, what was even worse, with our actual power in the Pacific. Hull was able to do this because his attitudes were generally shared by the civilian heads of the two service departments, by Stimson as secretary of war, and by Knox as secretary of the navy; thus the more realistic views of the military and naval leaders, and their better appreciation of the implications of America's strategic plans, did not have their proper weight on America's policy-making on the Cabinet level or even at the White House. Fortunately, America was saved from many of the consequences of these errors when Hitler made his greatest mistake by declaring war on the United States.
By the beginning of 1941, the Japanese attack on China had bogged down and was in such imminent danger of collapse that something drastic had to be done. But there was no agreement within Japan as to what direction such drastic action should take. A timid majority existed, even within the Japanese government itself, which would have been willing to withdraw from the Chinese "incident" if this could have been done without too great "loss of face." On the whole, this group was timid and ineffectual because of the danger of assassination by the extreme militarists and hyper-nationalist groups within Japan. Moreover, it was impossible to reach any agreement with the Chinese Nationalist government which would allow Japan to retain its "face" by covering a real withdrawal from China with an apparent diplomatic triumph of some sort.
The advocates of an aggressive policy in Japan were divided among the insignificant group who still believed that an all-out assault on China could be brought to a successful conclusion and the more influential groups who would have sought to redeem the stalemate in China by shifting the offensive against either Soviet Siberia or the rich Anglo-Dutch possessions of Malaysia and Indonesia. In the long run, the group which advocated a drive to the south was bound to prevail, because Malaysia and Indonesia were obviously weak and rich, while Soviet Siberia lacked those items (such as petroleum, rubber, or tin) which Japan most urgently needed, and it had demonstrated its power in the battles of 1938-1939. Germany, which originally encouraged the Japanese to move southward against British Malaysia and then, when it was too late, sought to redirect the Japanese blow against Siberia, played an insignificant role in Japan's policy. The decision to move southward, where the defense was weaker and the prizes so much greater, was made in an ambiguous and halfhearted way in the summer of 1941. The critical turning point was probably during the last week in July.
During the six-week period, March 12-April 22, Matsuoka, the fire-eating foreign minister, was absent from Tokyo on a visit to Berlin and to Moscow. In the German capital he was advised to make no political agreements with the Soviet Union, because of the imminent approach of war between that country and Germany. Matsuoka at once went to Moscow, where he signed a Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact on April 13, 1941. In the meantime, in March, Japanese diplomats won special economic concessions in Siam, while in June the nine-month-old trade discussions with the Netherlands East Indies broke down without Nippon obtaining any of the concessions it desired. These agreements, if obtained, might have put Japan in a position where it could have withstood a total American petroleum embargo. Failure to obtain these meant that Japan's large oil reserves would continue to decrease to the point where Japan would be militarily helpless from total lack of oil. America could accelerate this process either by curtailing the supply of oil or by forcing Japan into actions which would increase the rate of its consumption. Japanese oil production in 1941 was only three million barrels a year compared to a consumption rate of about 3z million barrels a year. Reserves, which had been 55 million barrels in December 1939, were below 50 million in September 1941, and fell to about 43 million by Pearl Harbor.
On July 21, 1941, Japan's threats won from Vichy France the right to move troops into southern Indochina. This was a threat to British Malaya rather than to the Burma Road in China. Within a week, on July 26, 1941, the United States froze all Japanese financial assets in the United States, virtually ending trade between the two countries. The members of the British Commonwealth issued similar orders, while the Netherlands Indies established special licenses for all exports to Japan. No licenses were issued for vital commodities like oil or bauxite. In the same week, an American military mission went to China, and the Philippine Army was incorporated into the American Army.
As a result of these pressures, Japan found itself in a position where its oil reserves would be exhausted in two years, its aluminum reserves in seven months. The chief of the General Staff of the Japanese Navy told the emperor that if Japan resorted to a war to break this blockade it would be very doubtful that it could win. The president of the Japanese Planning Board confirmed this gloomy opinion. The armed forces insisted that Japan had a choice between a slow decline to extinction under economic pressure or war which might allow it to break out of its predicament. The navy had little hope of victory in such a war, but agreed with this analysis. It was also agreed that war, if it came, must begin before the middle of December, when weather conditions would become too adverse to permit amphibious belligerent operations; it was clear that economic pressure was too damaging to allow Japan to postpone such operations until the resumption of good weather in 1942. Accordingly, the decision was made to make war in 1941, but to continue negotiations with the United States until late October. If an agreement could be reached by that date, the preparations for war could be suspended; otherwise the negotiations would be ended and the advance to open war continued. Matsuoka, the foreign minister, who was opposed to continuing the negotiations with the United States, was dropped from the Cabinet on July 16th; from that date on, the civilian portion of the Cabinet desperately sought to reach an agreement in Washington, while the military portion calmly prepared for war.
In the course of 1941, Japan's preparations for war were gradually expanded from a project to close the southern routes into China by an attack on Malaya, to an attack on the United States. The decision to close the Burma Road by force meant that Japan must move into French Indochina and Siam, and cross British Malaya, after neutralizing the British naval base at Singapore. Such a movement had numerous disadvantages. It would mean war with Britain; it would leave the Japanese lines of communication southward open to a flank attack from American bases in the Philippines; it was doubtful if China could be defeated even when all Western supplies were cut off (after all, these supplies were so insignificant that in 1940 American arms and munitions to China were worth only $9 million); even a total defeat of China would leave Japan's material shortages acute, especially in respect to the greatest material need, petroleum products. In view of these disadvantages, under which Japan would expend so much to gain so little, it seemed to many Japanese leaders that very considerable gains could he obtained with only a slight additional effort if an attack on the rich Netherlands Indies were combined with the attack on Malaya and the Burma Road. Such an advance to the tin and bauxite of Malaya and to the oil of the Dutch Indies had every advantage over any alternative possibility, such as an attack on eastern Siberia, especially as the Japanese Army (but not the Navy) had a higher opinion of Soviet power than they had of Anglo-American strength.
Having given the attack on Malaya and Indonesia the preference over any possible attack on Siberia, the Japanese leaders accepted the fact that this would mean war with Britain and the United States. In this they were probably not wrong, although some Americans have claimed that America would not have gone to war if Japan had passed by the Philippines and left other American territories untouched on its road to the south. It is certainly true that such actions would have touched off a violent controversy within the United States between the isolationists and the interventionists, but it seems almost certain that the policies of the Roosevelt Administration would have been carried out, and these policies included plans for war against Japan's southern movement even if American areas were not attacked. In any case, judging American reactions in terms of their own, the Japanese decided that an American flank attack from an untouched Philippines on their extended communications to the southward would be too great a risk to run; accordingly, an attack on the Philippines to prevent this was included in the Japanese plans for their southern movement.
This decision led at once to the next step, the project to attack the American fleet at Pearl Harbor on the grounds that an inevitable war with the United States could be commenced most effectively with a surprise attack on the American Navy rather than by waiting for an intact American fleet to come to seek out the Japanese in their zones of active operations in the southwestern Pacific. It must be recognized that one of the chief factors impelling the Japanese to make the attack on Pearl Harbor was that few Japanese (and these mostly in the army) had any hope that Japan could defeat the United States in any war carried to a decisive conclusion. Rather, it was hoped that, by crippling the American fleet at Pearl Harbor, Japan could conquer such a large area of the southwestern Pacific and southeastern Asia that peace could be negotiated on favorable terms. Here, once again, the Japanese misjudged American psychology.
The negotiations in Washington between Kichisaburo Nomura and Secretary Hull were among the strangest diplomatic discussions ever carried on. Although Nomura probably was not informed of the Japanese plans to make war, he could not have failed to infer them because he had received instructions that he must reach an agreement hy late October if peace were to be preserved. He found it impossible to reach such an agreement because Hull's demands were extreme, and his own superiors in Tokyo were unwilling to make any political concessions to win a relaxation of economic restrictions.
The Americans had a clear view of the situation because they had broken the secret Japanese codes and generally had Nomura's instructions from Tokyo before he did. Thus the Americans knew that Nomura had no powers to yield on any vital political issue, that he had been given a deadline in October, and that war would begin if he failed to obtain relaxation of the economic embargo before that deadline. They did not, however, have any details on the Japanese military plans, since these were not communicated by radio, and they did not realize that these plans included an attack on Pearl Harbor. In the course of November American Naval Intelligence knew that Japanese armed forces were mobilizing and moving southward; by November 20th it became clear that a task force of the navy, including four of the largest Japanese aircraft carriers, had vanished. At the end of November intercepted Japanese messages showed clearly that the negotiations were no longer of significance. In early December these showed that the Japanese Embassy in Washington had been ordered to destroy all its codes and to prepare its staff for departure.
The negotiations between Hull and Nomura were lengthy, technical, and hopeless. In essence they boiled down to the conclusion that America would not relax its economic restrictions on Japan unless (1) Japan promised to refrain from acts of force in the southwest Pacific area; (2) Japan agreed to violate its treaty with Germany to permit the United States to support Britain even to the point of war with Germany without any Japanese intervention on the side of Germany; and (3) that Japan would agree to withdraw its armed forces from Indochina and from China and restore equality of economic opportunity in the latter country on a schedule to be worked out later.
When it became clear on October 15, 1941, that agreement was impossible, Hideki Tojo, leader of the activist military group in Japan, forced Prince Fumimaro Konoye to resign. The new Cabinet had General Tojo as Premier, Minister of the Army, and Minister of Home Affairs (controlling domestic police). This was clearly a war government, but the negotiations continued in Washington.
On November 10th operations orders were issued to the Japanese Navy to destroy the American fleet in Pearl Harbor on December 7th. Orders had already been issued to conquer Thailand, Malaya, the Philippines, Borneo, and Sumatra; the rest of the Netherlands East Indies were to be taken in a second movement and all the conquered areas enclosed in a defensive perimeter to run from the Japanese Kurile Islands, through Wake Island and the Marshall Islands, along the southern and western edges of Timor, Java, and Sumatra, to the Burma-India border. By November 20th the American defensive forces knew that Japan was about to strike but still felt that the blow would he southward.
On November 27th a war warning was sent from Washington to Pearl Harbor, but no changes were made there for increased precautions or a higher level of alertness. Fortunately, the three carriers of the American Pacific Fleet were not in Pearl Harbor on the morning of the attack, but the Japanese had detailed anchorage sites for the vessels which were there, including seven battleships and seven cruisers. The Japanese attack force consisted of six carriers with 450 planes escorted by two battleships, two cruisers, eleven destroyers, twenty regular submarines, and five midget submarines. This force, in complete radio silence and without encountering any other vessels, sailed in 1 l days in a great northward circle from the Kuriles to a point 275 miles north of Pearl Harbor. From that point, at 6:00 A. M. on December 7, 1941, was launched an air strike of 360 planes, including 40 torpedo planes, 100 bombers, 130 dive-bombers, and go fighters. The five midget submarines, dropped from larger submarines, were already operating at Pearl Harbor and were able to enter because the anti-torpedo net was carelessly left open after 4:58 A. M. on December 7th. These submarines were detected at 3:42 before they entered the harbor, but no warning was sent until 6:54 after one had been attacked and sunk.
About the same time, an army enlisted man, using radar, detected a group of strange planes coming down from the north 132 miles away, but his report was disregarded. At 7.30 an enlisted sailor noticed two dozen planes about a mile over his ship hut did not report it. In the next half-hour these early arrivals from the Japanese carriers were joined by others, and at 7:55 the attack began. Within thirty minutes the Battle Line of the Pacific Fleet had been wiped out. The American losses included 2,400 men killed, almost 1,200 wounded, four battleships sunk with three others hardly damaged, many other vessels sunk or damaged, and hundreds of planes destroyed on the grounds. The greatest damage was inflicted by special shallow-water torpedoes launched from planes which came in below the 100-foot altitude. In all, the Japanese losses were small, amounting to no more than a couple of dozen planes, because the surprise was so great. The Japanese fleet was not found after the attack, because the search order was issued 180 degrees off direction through an error in interpretation.
Pearl Harbor was but one of several attacks made by the Japanese in their opening assaults on December 7th-10th. Air attacks on Wake Island, Midway Island, Guam, the Philippines, and Malaya destroyed hundreds of planes, mostly on the ground, and set fire to large stores of supplies. Lack of antiaircraft facilities, inadequate air power and fields, and carelessness by higher officers transformed the defenders' situations from critical to hopeless, although personal bravery and resourcefulness made the Japanese pay heavily for their gains.
Midway Island, 1,300 miles northwest of Honolulu and linked to it hy a very important cable, survived a hit-and-run attack of December 8, 1941, and hy 1942 was America's westernmost base, especially valuable for planes, submarines, and reconnaissance. Wake Island, 1,200 miles southwest of Midway, was struck on December 8th and surrendered on December 23rd after a heavy two-day assault. Guam, 1,500 miles west of Wake and in the midst of the Japanese-mandated Mariana Islands, was invaded at the beginning and gave up on December loth. The Philippines, 3,ooo miles west of Wake, were attacked by landings at nine points in the seventeen days before Christmas; by December 27th the Japanese had compelled the American ground forces to evacuate Manila and to retire into their last defense areas, the rocky caves of the island of Corregidor and the forests of the Bataan Peninsula. Savage fighting continued until May 6, 1942, when the last American forces on Corregidor surrendered. The commanding officers, General Douglas MacArthur and Admiral Thomas Hart, had already withdrawn to Australia.
Fifteen hundred miles wrest of the Philippines, a Japanese army invaded Thailand from Indochina, and on December 8th captured Bangkok without a struggle. About the same time Japanese landings were made on the Malay Peninsula north of Singapore. When the British battle cruiser Repulse and the new battleship Prince of Wales ventured north without air cover (since their accompanying carrier, Indomitable, ran aground), they were sunk by Japanese land-based planes (December loth). These were the only Allied capital ships west of Pearl Harbor. But the event had much more significance than this. It showed that the capital ship was no longer the mistress of the seas, as it had been for at least two generations, and, by doing so, it showed that the American losses at Pearl Harbor, concentrated as they were on battleships, were not nearly so important as they had seemed to be. But, even more significant, these sinkings off the east coast of Malaya marked the end of British supremacy on the seas which had begun with the destruction of the Spanish Armada in 1588. For the next two years supremacy on the seas was in dispute, but at the end of that time the decision was falling clearly in favor of a new champion, the United States.
Fanning outward as they spread over the southwestern Pacific and southeastern Asia, the Japanese forces captured Hong Kong on December 25, 1941 and advanced on Singapore across the swamps on its landward side. This great naval base, the bastion of all British power in the Far East, had to surrender on February 15, 1942, without even being able to defend itself, its great guns, aimed seaward at an army which never came, being completely useless against the Japanese who crept up on it from the landward side.
Lying north of Australia in a great curve from Singapore to New Guinea was the Malay Barrier, originally intended to form the southern perimeter of the Japanese defense area. Like beads on a necklace across a distance of 3,500 miles were stretched dozens of islands: Sumatra, Java, Bali, Lumbok, Flores, Timor, New Guinea, and others. These were taken so rapidly by the Japanese octopus that the straits between the various islands were closed before some Allied ships could escape through to the south. Five Allied cruisers and many destroyers were caught in this way and sunk in the week of February 26, 1942; Sumatra, Java, and Timor surrendered by March 8th; and Netherlands forces were wiped out, British forces withdrew to Ceylon, and the few surviving American vessels limped home for repairs. Rangoon, the Burmese capital, surrendered on March 8th, and exactly a month later the triumphant Japanese naval forces swept westward to strike at Ceylon. In the first week of April, Holy Week of 1942, Japanese Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, who had led the attack on Pearl Harbor, made a similar attack on Ceylon, sinking the British carrier Hermes, two heavy cruisers, and many lesser vessels (including 136,000 tons of merchant ships).
At this dark moment, mid-April of 1942, the tide of battle in the Pacific began to turn. The three American aircraft carriers which had been spared at Pearl Harbor (Lexington, Enterprise, and Saratoga) were joined by one of the two carriers from the Atlantic (Yorktown). These, with cruisers, destroyers, submarines, and supply ships, became nuclei for "task forces" which relentlessly prowled the Pacific. On April 2, 1942, the new carrier Hornet, with sixteen United States Army Mitchell bombers (B-25's) wedged on its deck, sailed from San Francisco with a message for Tokyo. Escorted by the Enterprise Task Force to a point 850 miles from the Japanese capital (and thus 2,100 miles from their assigned landing fields in China) the sixteen B-25's were taken off the plunging deck of the carrier by their army crews of eighty men led by Lieutenant Colonel James H. Doolittle. Four hours later they dumped sixteen tons of bombs on the Japanese capital, and continued westward to China. Fifteen planes crashed in China after running out of gasoline, while the sixteenth found internment in Siberia. With Chinese help, seventy-one of eighty crew members returned to America. The whole episode was more spectacular than fruitful, but it did give a great boost to American morale, and frightened the Japanese so badly that they kept four Japanese air groups in Japan for defense.
During this period of the war the United States had amazingly correct information regarding Japanese war plans. Some of this came from our control over the Japanese codes, but much of the most critical intelligence came from other sources which have never been revealed. Through these channels, while Admiral William Halsey was still en route back from the Tokyo raid with two carriers, American naval authorities learned of two Japanese projects. The first of these planned to send an invasion force from Rabaul in New Britain, north of New Guinea, to capture Port Moresby on the southern shore of New Guinea. The second plan hoped to extend the Japanese defense perimeter eastward by seizing the Aleutian Islands and Midway Island in the northern Pacific. The former project was frustrated in the Battle of the Coral Sea, May 7-8, 1942, while the second project was disastrously defeated in the decisive Battle of Midway, June 4, 1942.
The Coral Sea, brilliantly blue and white, forms a rectangle more than l,000 miles wide from east to west and slightly longer from north to south. Open on the south, it is boxed in on the other three sides with Australia to the west, the New Hebrides and New Caledonia to the east, and New Guinea and the Solomon Islands to the north. On May 8th, as the Japanese invasion force for Port Moresby came into this area from the northwest, it was intercepted by an American task force, including the carriers Lexington and Yorktown. The invasion force was turned back, a small Japanese carrier was sunk, and a large carrier severely damaged, while fires on both American carriers were extinguished. After the battle, however, the Lexington blew apart from gasoline fires ignited by an electric-motor spark deep within its hull.
Chapter 56: The Turning Tide, 1942-1943:Midway, E1 Alamein, French Africa, and Stalingrad
The Second World War was a gigantic conflict because it was an agglomeration of several wars. Each of these wars had a different turning point, but all of these occurred in the year following the surrender of Corregidor on May 6,1942. The first turning point to be reached, in the war between the United States and Japan, occurred at Midway on June 4, 1942, while the second was reached in the defeat of the Italo-German attack on Egypt on November 2, 1942. The American war on Germany took a turn for the better with the successful American invasion of French North Africa on November 8, 1942, while, at the same time, the crucial struggle between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union reached its turn in the long agony at Stalingrad from November 1942 to February 1943. Needless to say, long and hitter exertions were needed to push the three aggressor states hack from their points of farthest advance.
The Battle of Midway arose from a Japanese trap which was supposed to destroy the rest of the Pacific Fleet but resulted quite differently. Whatever illusions the Japanese Army may have had, the Japanese Navy fully recognized that it could not possibly win in the Pacific until the American fleet was totally destroyed. To achieve this, a trap was set to draw the fleet out from Pearl Harbor bN7 the threat of a Japanese amphibious invasion of Midway Island from the southwest. When the Americans hurried out to attack this invasion fleet at Midway, they were to have been destroyed by the planes from four Japanese carriers lying in ambush 200 miles northwest of Midway. The ambush was reversed because Admiral Chester Nimitz at Pearl Harbor had a clear picture of the Japanese plans and sent his own carriers out to spring on the Japanese carriers from a point 200 miles northeast of their position.
The American counter-ambush worked because of a most extraordinary series of fortunate chances. The four Japanese carriers expected the American counterattack to come from Pearl Harbor after several days' delay, and accordingly felt free to use their own carrier planes to bombard the Midway defenses, softening them up for the benefit of the invading force coming up on Midway from the southwest. These bombardment planes had returned from Midway to their carriers and were still feverishly refueling on the flight decks when the American carrier "strike" came in: 116 planes from Enterprise and Hornet were followed shortly after by 35 planes from Yorktown.
Caught in a horrible tactical position, the Japanese defended so skillfully that 37 out of 41 American torpedo-bombers were lost, hut, as wave after wage of dive-bombers continued to come in, the Japanese defense was "saturated," and soon all four carriers were sinking in flames. Before the fourth Japanese carrier went down, it sent off 40 planes which torpedoed the Yorktown. The American carrier w-as incapacitated and mistakenly abandoned, so that it was easily sunk by a Japanese submarine two days later. This loss, even in combination with the loss of the Lexington in the Coral Sea a month earlier, was a cheap price to pay for the destruction of five Japanese carriers in these two areas in the space of five weeks, since the United States had the industrial capacity to replace its losses, while Japan did not.
Two events of November 1942, the British victory at El Alamein and the Anglo-American invasion of French North Africa, provided tactical lessons and strategic reversals fully as great as those provided in the Pacific five months earlier. During most of 1942, the British clung to their lifeline across the Mediterranean from Gibraltar to Malta and Egypt by no more than a fingernail's margin. Italo-German submarine and air attacks were steadily intensified. While the whole northern shore of the Mediterranean from Gibraltar to the Aegean was under Axis control or sympathetic to it, the Italian foothold on the southern shore of the Mediterranean in Libya was steadily strengthened, largely by German reinforcements, and German pressure was brought to bear on Vichy France to increase Nazi influence in French North Africa.
As long as the British were opposed only by Italian forces in the Mediterranean, they were able to keep convoys moving, but on January lo, 1941, the German Air Force intervened in the central Mediterranean with devastating effect. From that point onward, for a period of two years (until May 1943) it was impossible to get a merchant convoy through the Mediterranean from Gibraltar to Alexandria; accordingly, the British imperial forces in Egypt had to be supplied by the longer route around Africa. Even British naval vessels found it difficult to pass through the Mediterranean; in the course of 1941 all the British capital ships and carriers in the central and eastern Mediterranean were sunk or damaged so badly that they had to be withdrawn.
The island of Malta, situated in the middle of the Axis supply lisle from Italy to Africa, was pulverized from the air for more than nineteen months (until October 1942), and all vessels, even submarines, had to be withdrawn from its harbors. Efforts to replenish its supplies of food and ammunition became suicidal, but had to be continued, as its civilian population stood up magnificently under the pounding and could not be left without supplies by the fighting services. For months at a time, no convoys could get through, but each time supplies approached exhaustion, fragments of a convoy arrived with enough to keep the island fighting a little longer. In June 194 l ten merchant ships from Alexandria and six from Gibraltar were sent simultaneously in order to divide the enemy; although protected by a battleship, two carriers, twelve cruisers and forty-four destroyers, only two of the sixteen cargo vessels arrived at Malta, at a cost of three destroyers and a cruiser sunk and many others damaged. Two months later, when Malta had only a week's supplies left, fourteen very fast merchant vessels were sent from Gibraltar with an escort of two battleships, four carriers, seven cruisers, and twenty-five destroyers. Five badly damaged merchant ships reached Malta with a naval loss of a carrier, two cruisers, and a destroyer sunk, another carrier and two cruisers badly damaged.
This severe fighting in the central Mediterranean arose from the vital need, by both sides, to control the communications of that area. The northern shore of the Mediterranean Sea, from west to east, was controlled by Franco Spain, by Vichy France, by the Axis, and by Turkey. Spain was pro-Axis but unable, through economic weakness, to intervene in the war until Britain was thoroughly beaten; Vichy France remained ambiguous and a major leak in the economic blockade of Europe until November 1942; Turkey was pro-British but unable to offer anything more than benevolent neutrality. On the southern shore of the Mediterranean, Libya (consisting of Tripolitania in the west and Cyrenaica in the east) was in between Egypt and French North Africa, and could be used as a base to attack either, because of the Axis supply lines from Italy and Sicily. These lines were greatly strengthened by the Axis conquest of Greece and Crete in may and June 1941.
From this base in Libya the Axis struck at Egypt three times, and were answered by three British counterattacks. These provide the historian with an amazing sequence of movements in which the battle lines surged across Africa between Egypt and French Tunis, a distance of 1,200 miles. T he real struggle was for control of Cyrenaica, and especially for its seaports strung like beads from Benghazi eastward 270 miles by way of Derna and Tobruk to Sollum on the Egyptian frontier. If the Germans could control this stretch, they could use Tobruk as a supply port free from interference from Malta, while, if the British could control it, they could provide air cover for Malta from African fields.
The first Axis advance, by the Italians under Graziani, went no farther than Sidi Barrโni in Egypt, so miles east of Sollum (September 1940). This was repulsed by an amazing British advance of 500 miles from Sidi Barrโni to E1 Agheila, 150 miles beyond Benghazi (December 1940February 1941). It was to stop this Italian retreat, early in 1941, that the Nazis intervened with an air fleet of 500 planes, under Kesselring, and the famous Afrika Korps, under Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. Rommel, a tactical genius, had three German divisions (two armored and one motorized) supported by seven Italian divisions (six infantry and one armored). By a series of smashing blows, Rommel advanced eastward to Egypt' destroying most of the British armor on the way, but his advance stopped at Sollum in April 1941. Hitler held up most of the supplies going to Rommel because he needed them in Greece, Crete and, later, in Russia. The supply routes to Rommel were very precarious because of British naval attacks out of Alexandria, only 250 miles to the east, and because of an Australian division left in Tobruk, that, although surrounded by Rommel and besieged for months, denied him the use of its port.
While Rommel's supplies were dwindling and the British Navy was being driven from the central Mediterranean by Axis air power and submarines, the defense of Egypt was being built up by the circum-Africa supply line. Over this 10,000-mile route came 951 light tanks and 13,000 trucks, many of these under Lend-Lease, by the end of 1941. With this equipment General Claude Auchinleck attacked Rommel in November 1941 and in two months relieved Tobruk and forced the Germans back to El Agheila (January 1942). Within a week Rommel counter-attacked and advanced eastward, being stopped forty miles west of Tobruk (mid-February 1942). Both sides rested there, while the Western Powers feverishly built up their supplies in Egypt. At the end of May 1942, Rommel struck again; this time he captured Tobruk and was finally stopped at El Alamein, only sixty miles short of Alexandria, after five days of furious fighting at that point (July 1-5, 1942).
In August, General Bernard L. Montgomery, later Field Marshal and First Viscount Montgomery of Alamein, replaced General Auchinleck. His forces were equipped with every piece of armament that could be spared from the United States, including 700 two-engine bombers, 1,000 fighting planes, over 400 M-4 Sherman tanks, go new American self-propelled guns, and 25,000 trucks and other vehicles. On October 23rd, while Rommel was absent in Germany, Montgomery attacked the Axis forces at their strongest point, along the coast road, and after twelve days of violent combat broke through the German position. Rommel returned, but could not stop the rout. By November 20th he had lost Benghazi and was still retreating. Worse than that, on November 8th, only four days after El Alamein, Rommel heard that a large-scale American invasion of French North Africa had already landed at three points. These had to be hurled backward, for the German forces could be cut off if the Americans passed Tunis.
The American invasion of North Africa on November 8, 1942 (Operation Torch) arose as a compromise of quite dissimilar strategic ideas in Moscow, London, and Washington. Stalin was insistent that the Anglo-Americans must open a "second front" in western Europe in 1942 in order to reduce the Nazi pressure on Russia. He was completely unreasonable in his attitude, going so far as to taunt Churchill with cowardice at the Moscow Conference in August 1942. In London there was, indeed, great lack of faith in any possible invasion of Europe; instead, there was hope that the Germans could be brought to terms by air attacks and economic blockade after perhaps ten years; Churchill went a little further by speaking of a possible invasion of the Continent from the Mediterranean through what he mistakenly called the "soft underbelly of the Axis." In Washington the military leaders were convinced, from the earliest stages of the war, that Hitler could not be beaten without a full-scale invasion of western Europe. As early as April 1942, Harry Hopkins and General Marshall appeared in London with plans for an invasion of western Europe by thirty American and eighteen British divisions. The British were very reluctant, but, as Stalin kept insisting on a "second front" in 1942, Roosevelt, on July 25th, obtained, as a compromise, an agreement to invade French North Africa in the autumn of 1942.
There was hardly time for adequate planning, and no time for adequate training, before the landings were made on November 8th. Although the operation was a joint British-American venture, the British role was little publicized to avoid antagonizing French—especially French naval—feelings, which were still hostile because of the British attacks on Dakar, Oran, and Syria. In addition, a difficult problem arose about the question of political cooperation with the French authorities in North Africa. The British had placed most of their faith in General de Gaulle, but it soon became clear that he had very little support in North Africa, and was too difficult and uncooperative personally to be made part of the invasion plans.
The Americans, who had maintained diplomatic relations with Vichy, believed it would be necessary to replace the local Vichy leaders as soon as North Africa had been conquered; they pinned their faith on the heroic General Henri Giraud, who had obtained considerable publicity by his spectacular escapes from German prisons in both world wars. Unfortunately, as the invasion proceeded, it was discovered that Giraud had even less influence in North Africa than De Gaulle, especially in the French Navy, which was providing the chief combat resistance to the invasion. Accordingly, in order to stop the fighting, it became necessary to make a deal with Admiral Darlan, who was in North Africa at the time; this deal, which recognized Darlan as the chief political authority in all French North Africa, with Giraud as his commander in chief, has given rise to much controversy. It was argued that the high principles enunciated in our declared war aims, especially in the Atlantic Charter, were being unnecessarily sacrificed by making a deal with an unprincipled Nazi collaborator such as Darlan.
The deal was justified by its makers, General Mark Clark on behalf of General Eisenhower and Ambassador Robert Murphy on behalf of President Roosevelt, on grounds of military urgency. This argument is rather weak, since Darlan's cease-fire order, made at noon on November 8th, was not obeyed in two combat areas (Morocco and Oran) and obeyed only partially in the third area (Algiers), and by the time the formal deal was made on November 11th, organized fighting by the French forces had ceased everywhere. The additional justification made, to the effect that some kind of legal continuity with the Vichy regime had to be established to avoid French guerrilla resistance, involves too many unknown factors to permit any convincing judgment of its value. It seems weak, since the German reaction to the Allied invasion of North Africa took an anti-French direction which was so drastic that any French resistance to the Americans or British would have been clearly pro-German, and thus most unlikely behavior for any patriotic Frenchmen. In any case, the Darlan deal was soon swallowed up in the swift pace of events, and was personally ended when Darlan was assassinated by his French enemies on December 24th.
The Anglo-American invasion of North Africa, known as Operation Torch and under the over-all command of General Eisenhower, involved landings at three points: on the Atlantic coast of Morocco near Casablanca by a force coming from North America, and at two points on the Mediterranean coast in Algeria by forces coming from England. The Morocco attack was almost foolhardy, since it involved carrying 35,000 completely inexperienced and inadequately trained troops with 250 tanks, all in 102 vessels, a distance of 4,000 miles across the ocean to make a night landing on a hostile coast. In spite of these obstacles and tenacious French resistance at certain points, the operation Noms a success, and fighting ceased in three days. The other portion of Operation Torch, the landings in Algeria, were on a larger scale, since they involved 49,000 American and 23,000 British troops, and were equally successful. By November 14th the Allies were moving eastward into Tunisia to cut off Rommel's retreat from the east, and by November 28th they were only twelve miles from Tunis. From that point they were hurled backward by the Germans.
Hitler's reactions to Torch were vigorous. All France was occupied by Nazi forces; his efforts to capture the French fleet at Toulon were frustrated when most of the vessels were scuttled at their anchorages or were sunk trying to escape from the harbor; as early as November loth, German airborne troops, with Laval's blessings, were occupying Tunisia. These German forces held up the Allied advance from the west, inflicting a bitter defeat on the American forces at the Kasserine Pass in February 1943. In this way Rommel, who had been forced out of El Agheila by Montgomery on December 13th, was able to withdraw westward into Tunisia and take a stand along the Mareth Line below Gab่s in southeastern Tunisia in February.
During the third week in January 1943, Roosevelt, Churchill, and their staffs met in secret conference at Casablanca. Once again the Americans had to struggle against English reluctance to commit themselves to any "cross-Channel" invasion of Europe, to any offensive against Japan or, indeed, to any long-range planning. From the compromises of the conference emerged agreement to postpone any cross-Channel operation, to keep up pressure on Germany in Europe by air attacks, and to allow the United States to take any offensive actions against Japan which would not jeopardize the priority still given to the defeat of Germany. Two other decisions were to proceed to the military occupation of Sicily and to demand the "unconditional surrender" of the three totalitarian Powers. Naturally, the military decision on Sicily was kept secret, but the political decision on unconditional surrender was published with great fanfare, and at once initiated a controversy which still continues.
The controversy over unconditional surrender is based on the belief that the expression itself is largely meaningless and had an adverse influence by discouraging any hopes within the Axis countries that they could find a way out by slackening their efforts, by revolting against their governments, or by negotiations seeking some kind of "conditional" surrender. There seems to be little doubt that the demand for unconditional surrender was incompatible with earlier statements that we were fighting the German, Japanese, and Italian governments rather than the German, Japanese, and Italian peoples and that this demand, by destroying this distinction, to some extent solidified our enemies and prolonged their resistance, especially in Italy and Japan, where opposition to the war was widespread and active. Even in Germany the demand for unconditional surrender discouraged those more moderate and peace-loving Germans upon which our postwar policy toward Germany must be based and, in fact, has been based. But in 1943, and for most of the duration of the war, the Allied Powers had neither time nor inclination to look ahead toward any postwar policy with respect to Germany, and issued the demand for unconditional surrender without any analysis of its possible effects on the enemy peoples, either during the war or after it was over. The demand for unconditional surrender was made, rather, as a morale booster for the Allied Powers themselves, and in this function it may well have had some slight influence at the time.
As the Allied leaders were conferring in Casablanca after turning back the German assault in Africa, Soviet forces were inflicting an even greater defeat on Hitler in eastern Europe. Hitler's Russian campaign of 1942 was very similar to that of 1941 except that his original plan was restricted to a single aim: to capture the oil fields of the Caucasus. The German forces, consisting of 44 infantry, 10 armored, and 6 motorized divisions, along with 43 satellite divisions and 7oo planes, were to drive along the north shore of the Black Sea, pass through a congested bottleneck at Rostov, and capture the Soviet oil fields (the chief of which, at Baku, was 700 miles beyond Rostov). To protect the long northern flank of this drive, other German attacks were ordered farther north toward Voronezh and toward Stalingrad on the Volga River. The German offensive did reach the Caucasus, advancing almost as far as Grozny (400 miles beyond Rostov), but did not capture the chief oil fields. As in the 1941 offensive, scores of Soviet divisions were destroyed and hundreds of thousands of Soviet prisoners were captured, but no vital injury was inflicted on the Soviet Union.
Suddenly, on July 18th, after seven weeks of advance, Hitler ordered the capture of Stalingrad. Since all the available armored forces had been put into the Caucasus offensive, where they uselessly clogged up Rostov, the attack on Stalingrad could not begin until September 12th. After two months of savage house-to-house fighting, the Germans had possession of almost all the city, but it had been completely demolished. In late November, Russian counteroffensives north and south of Stalingrad broke through Romanian armies on either side of the German Sixth Army and joined together on its rear. Hitler forbade any retreat or any effort by the Sixth Army to fight its way westward out of the trap. Instead he undertook to supply the Sixth Army from the air until new German forces could break in to relieve it. The surrounded Sixth Army consisted of 20 divisions, about 270,000 men, including 3 armored and 3 motorized divisions. Although a force of this size required about 1,500 tons of supplies each day, the Luftwaffe was never able to deliver as much as 200 tons a day, and lost about 300 planes in the effort. Nor could the German forces to the west, although only 4o miles away, fight their w av in to the Sixth Army..
While this was going on at Stalingrad from December 1942 through January 1943, another Soviet offensive, striking down from the northeast toward Rostov, was trying to cut off the whole German force in the Caucasus by capturing the city of Rostov and thus closing the bottleneck north of the Sea of Azov. The German withdrawal from the Caucasus began on the first day of 1943. With extraordinary skill the Germans succeeded in keeping the Rostov passage open, although hy January 23rd it was no more than 3o miles wide. The German Sixth Army at Stalingrad, although frozen, starved, and hardly able to fight for lack of supplies, was not permitted to surrender because, as soon as it did so, the three Soviet armies which had surrounded it would be freed to drive west and close the Rostov passage. On January 23rd General Friedrich von Paulus, commanding the Sixth Army, accepted Hitler's radio order to fight to the last man in order to gain time. A week later Hitler promoted him to field marshal, and two days later he surrendered. Of 270,000 Germans originally surrounded, over 100,000 were dead, 34,000 had been evacuated by air, and 93,000 surrendered. Ten days after Paulus's surrender, the Germans abandoned Rostov. For the next two weeks it looked as if a new Soviet offensive from Voronezh might cut off the whole of German Army Group South, but Field Marshal von Manstein succeeded in reestablishing a stable defensive line by April 1st, just about at the line where the German offensive of 194Z had begun eleven months earlier. But, in that eleven months, Hitler had lost about 38 German divisions, an equal number of satellite divisions, had reduced all German divisions from nine battalions to six, had failed to capture the Caucasus oil fields, Moscow, or Leningrad, and had not been able to cut the Murmansk railway.
Over that railway, and by other routes, a growing flood of American supplies was flowing to the Soviet armies. By October 1942, 85,000 trucks had arrived, with the result that the Soviet Army from that date to the end of the war had greater mobility than the Germans. Luftwaffe forces on the eastern front had 2,000 planes in the campaign of 1941, 1,300 at the opening of the campaign of 1942, and could hardly be kept at l,000 after the end of that campaign. Allied pressure in the w est made it necessary to reduce the portion of the German Air Force allotted to the east, with the result that Germany had only 265 operational planes on the Russian front on May 1, 1944. At the same time, American supplies' including planes, flowed into the Soviet Union in an amazing flood. The German U-boats were unable to prevent this flow of goods, although they did sink 77 out of 2,660 vessels loaded with Lend-Lease supplies. Many of these sinkings occurred on the frightful Murmansk route.
In 1941 and 1942 the Allies sent the Soviet Union almost 2,000,000 tons of supplies. This was followed hy over 4,500,000 tons in 1943 and a total of over 15,000,000 tons worth $10,000,000,000 before the end of the struggle. Included in the final total were 375,000 trucks, 52,000 jeeps, 7,056 tanks, 6,300 other combat vehicles, 2,328 artillery vehicles, 14,795 aircraft, 8,212 antiaircraft guns, 1,900 steam locomotives, 66 diesel locomotives, 11,075 railway cars, 415,000 telephones, 3,786,000 vehicle tires, 15,000,000 pairs of military boots, 4,478,116 tons of food, and 2,670,371 tons of petroleum products. In contrast with this, the German armored divisions were kept idle for lack of fuel for weeks at a time as early as 1942, and both operational and training flights of the Luftwaffe were drastically curtailed from 1942 onward. The lack of fuel was so acute that Hitler decided, late in 1942, to decommission most of the surface vessels of the German Navy. When Grand Admiral Raeder protested too vigorously, he was removed from his position as head of the navy, and replaced by the U-boat specialist Admiral Karl Doenitz, in January, 1943.
All these events should have made it clear that Germany could not possibly win the war, but for the next two years Hitler and his immediate associates became increasingly fanatical, increasingly merciless, and increasingly remote from reality. Anyone who audibly doubted their insane vision of the world was speedily liquidated.
Chapter 57: Closing in on Germany, 1943-1945
The year 1943 represented the turning point in the European struggle as the year 1942 had seen the turning point in the Pacific. In 1943 North Africa was freed from the Nazi grasp in May, Sicily was overrun in July and August, the southern part of Italy was occupied, and the German armies were pushed backward from eastern Europe. As a consequence, the Mediterranean was opened to Allied traffic, and Italy was forced to surrender in September 1943.
These were the obvious events of this critical year 1943, open to public view and hopeful in their implications for the future. But the role of this year as a turning point in the conflict with Germany was much greater than this, fur, behind the scenes, the military successes of the year forced decisions on strategic plans and postwar projects whose implications are still being worked out today. And still very much behind the scenes, these strategic and postwar plans revealed deep fissures and rivalries among the three Allied Powers.
Rivalries among the members of a coalition are always to be expected and are usually, and necessarily, kept secret during the war itself. In the Second World War they were most significant in the year 1943. In the years before 1943 these disputes were more concerned with strategic decisions than with postwar planning, while in the later years, when strategy had been set, postwar plans were the chief causes of disputes. The year 1943, however, had its full share of both, since the major strategic decisions were made in that year, and these decisions, in themselves, played a major role in determining the nature of the postwar world.
In the years 1941-1943 the chief strategic questions were concerned with two problems: (1) Should the European war against Germany continue to receive priority over the Pacific war against Japan? and (2) Should Germany be attacked, indirectly, by aerial bombardment, blockade, and guerrilla forces or should Europe be invaded with large infantry forces, either from England directly across the Channel to western Europe or from the Mediterranean through southern Europe; the answers given to these strategic questions, especially the last one, played a major role in establishing the postwar political settlement in Europe.
In the earlier years a certain direction was given to postwar planning by Roosevelt’s proclamation of the Four Freedoms in January 1941, and the Anglo-American publication of the Atlantic Charter in August 1941. When the stunning news of Pearl Harbor reached London on December 7, 1941, Foreign Minister Eden was just leaving for Moscow. It was decided that he should go anyway but that Prime Minister Churchill should go simultaneously to Washington to do all he could to prevent popular, anti-Japanese feeling in the United States from reversing the agreement that the military defeat of Germany must have priority over the defeat of Japan. In Washington, at what was called the Arcadia Conference (December 22, 1941-January 14, 1942), the exuberant prime minister found no desire to change the military priorities, and was able to plan intensified military activity along the lines already established. At the same time Roosevelt presented him with a draft for a public “Declaration of the United Nations.” This document declared that the twenty-six signatory states were fighting “to defend life, liberty, independence, and religious freedom and to preserve human rights and justice in their own lands as well as in other lands, and that they are now engaged in a common struggle against savage and brutal forces seeking to subjugate the world." Each signer promised "to employ its full resources and to make no separate armistice or peace" in the struggle for victory over Hitlerism.
Most of the secret discussions leading up to the publication of this declaration on January 1, 1942 were concerned with verbal or procedural issues, but some of these were symbolic of future problems. There was considerable discussion as to the order in which the signatures should be affixed to the document; the decision to rank them in two groups, with the four "Great Powers" of the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and China followed by twenty-two lesser states in alphabetical order, was an early indication of the similar division which still exists in the United Nations today. The inclusion of China, in spite of its obvious weakness, among the Great Powers was a concession made to the United States by the other Powers. The American leaders, from Roosevelt down, insisted that China was, or at least should be, a Great Power, although the only evidence they could find to support this argument was its larger population. The Americans seemed to hope that by encouragement and reiteration, or perhaps even by invocation, China could be made into a Great Power, able to dominate the Far East after the defeat of Japan.
Other notable features of this United Nations Declaration were: (1) the fact that De Gaullist France was excluded from the signers in order not to recognize it as a government, (2) the fact that the United States was ranked first among the Great Powers, and (3) the difficulty in wording the declaration so that Japan, with which the Soviet Union was not at war, should not specifically be included among the enemy and yet, at the same time, should not be excluded from the "brutal forces" which were condemned.
In the meantime, in Moscow, Anthony Eden was being faced with Soviet demands for a specific delimitation of the post-war boundaries of eastern Europe. In the north, the Bolshevik leaders wanted explicit British recognition that Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania were parts of the Soviet Union and that the Soviet-Finnish frontier should be as it had existed after the "winter war" of 1939-1940; in the center, the Soviets demanded a frontier with Poland along the so-called Curzon Line, which followed, it was true, the linguistic frontier, but was 150 miles west of the Polish-Soviet frontier of the 1921-1939 period; in the south, Stalin wanted Eden to agree to a Soviet-Romanian border which would have allowed Russia to have Bessarabia and Bukovina. These demands sought recognition of the Soviet Union’s western boundary as it existed between the Nazi-Soviet Pact of September 1939 and Hitler's attack in June 1941, except that the Curzon Line was, in some places, slightly to the east of the 1940 line.
Although these Soviet demands were clearly in conflict with the high purposes of the Atlantic Charter, Churchill was not averse to accepting therm on grounds of physical necessity, but American objections to any settlement of territorial questions while the war was still going on forced him to refuse Stalin's requests. In general, the British found themselves in a difficult position between the high and proclaimed principles of the Americans and the low and secret interests of the Russians. Because of American pressure, Eden avoided any territorial commitments, and persuaded Stalin to accept a twenty-year treaty of alliance with Britain. This Anglo-Soviet Treaty of May 26, 1942 had no territorial provisions, and included a statement that the signers would "act in accordance with the two principles of not seeking territorial aggrandizement for themselves and of non-interference in the internal affairs of other States."
Although the Soviet Union accepted the terms of the British alliance, in 1942 their suspicions of the West were still high, and their relations with Britain became increasingly unfriendly, reaching a critical stage by 1943. In Moscow there was fear that the West wished to protract the war in order to bleed both Germany and the Soviet Union to death. It was feared that this end could be obtained if American supplies to Russia were placed at a level sufficiently high to keep Russia fighting but insufficiently high to allow her to defeat Hitler. To avoid this, Moscow continued to insist, with unreasonable repetition, on the need to increase Lend-Lease supplies to it and, above al1, on the need to open a second front on the Continent by an immediate Anglo-American invasion of Europe from England. Judging, perhaps, that American psychology would work along the same lines of "power politics" as their own, a mistake which the Japanese, with considerably greater reason, had made in the months before Pearl Harbor, the Russians could not conceive that the United States would grant sufficient aid to Russia to permit a speedy defeat of Hitler, since such a policy, almost inevitably, would leave the victorious Soviet armies supreme in eastern, and probably also in central, Europe.
As a matter of fact, while some Americans unquestionably did think in terms of "power politics" and may, in a few cases, have gone so far as to prefer a Hitler victory over Stalin to a Stalin victory over Hitler, such people were very remote from the centers of power in the American government. At those centers of power there was complete conviction in the value of unrestricted aid to Russia, the speediest possible defeat of Germany, and a full "cross-Channel" invasion of Europe as soon as possible. In fact, these aims were so firmly embraced by those Americans with whom the Russians had relationships, men like Harry Hopkins, General Marshall, or Roosevelt himself, that these men sometimes misled the Russians by expressing their hopes rather than their expectations, with the consequence that Russian suspicions were roused again, at a later date, when these hopes were not fulfilled. Immediately after the signing of the Anglo-Soviet alliance, Soviet Foreign Commissar Molotov came to Washington to urge the need for an immediate second front in Europe. Although such a project would have been unwise, if not impossible, in 1942, the White House communique of June Tl, 1942 sought to satisfy the Russians and to frighten the Germans by saying that "full understanding was reached with regard to the urgent tasks of creating a second front in Europe in 1942."
In the early summer of 1942 Soviet messages to Washington and to London continued to insist on the need for an immediate second front in Western Europe in order to reduce the Nazi military pressure on the Soviet forces. Recognizing the impossibility of such a venture in 1942, the Anglo-Americans sought to relieve the pressure on Russia by landing at a place where the German defense would not be so strong. It was this desire which resulted in the decision of July 25, 1942 to invade North Africa in November. Having made the decision to substitute this project for any possible cross-Channel attack in 1942, it was necessary to convey the news to the Soviet Union. Churchill undertook this delicate task on his first meeting with Stalin in Moscow in August 1942. The result was a most unpleasant explosion by Stalin. The Soviet leader charged that Molotov had obtained a definite promise for a second front in 1942, that failure to carry out this promise would jeopardize Soviet military plans, and that Churchill was opposed to such a venture from cowardice!
The strategic disputes among the three Allied Powers were sharp and based on very different outlooks, but in no case did cowardice play any role. The Soviet insistence on an immediate, all-out cross-Channel attack to relieve Nazi pressure on Russia was perfectly understandable, although insistence on such an attack in 1942 was unrealistic. Equally understandable was Russia's fear that the Anglo-Americans might divert their power from Germany in order to avoid a Soviet-dominated postwar Europe, although this fear showed no realistic appreciation of the American outlook. On the other hand, the British reluctance to attempt the cross-Channel attack was perfectly clear. Sir Alan Brooke, the chief of the Imperial General Staff, opposed all plans for such an assault, while others, like Churchill, wanted to postpone such an attack indefinitely or reduce it to no more than a series of small raids to establish permanent anti-German bridgeheads in western Europe. The difficulties of such raids were shown on August 19, 1942 when a force of 5,000 men, mostly Canadians, landed at Dieppe and suffered 3,350 casualties in a few hours.
The Americans, especially General Marshall, were convinced that Germany could be defeated only by a cross-Channel attack, and advocated one on the largest possible scale at the earliest possible date..
These differences of strategic opinion reflected basic differences of outlook. The American outlook was largely military. They were cager to defeat Germany and end the war as soon as possible and had little time or energy for political problems or postwar planning. The British, on the other hand, were much concerned witl1 political issues and the way in which the postwar situation would he influenced hy strategic and military actions earlier. The Soviet leaders, to some extent, represented a combination of the two other points of view and could do so because there was no such divergence between their military and political or between their wartime and postwar aims. The more deeply the Anglo-Americans could be involved in the struggle with Germany, the sooner Germany could be defeated, and such a defeat, especially if it arose from a cross-Channel attack, would deliver all of eastern Europe into the power of the Red armies, which would find no rivals in that area.
Churchill and other British leaders could not forget the terrible casualties Britain had suffered in the trench warfare of 1916. They felt that these casualties had injured Britain permanently by wiping out a whole generation of Britain's young people, especially among the better-educated class, and they were determined not to repeat this error in 1944. These leaders wanted a Balkan or Aegean offensive which, they believed, would, with fewer casualties, leave the English-speaking Powers dominant in the Mediterranean and in the Near East, would make it possible to balance Soviet power in eastern Europe, and would cut the Soviet Union off from the Balkans and some of central Europe. The possibility of Britain obtaining American consent to such an Aegean offensive was so remote that little effort was made to get it by direct persuasion. On the contrary, efforts to move toward it, step by step, were persistent. These efforts sought to postpone, or to reduce the emphasis on, the cross-Channel invasion, since this would, inevitably, have compelled the end of Britain's Mediterranean projects. But here, again, American insistence on the cross-Channel invasion was so emphatic that the British could not challenge this directly, just as they could not advocate an Aegean invasion directly. Instead, while accepting the cross-Channel invasion explicitly, the British offered, one after another, alternative projects which would postpone or distract from the cross-Channel invasion.
The North African invasion was the first of these distractions, followed by the Sicilian campaign, and then by the Italian invasion. These were accepted by the Americans, since they felt it was urgent to do something to meet the Soviet demands for Anglo-American action against Hitler. Some kind of Balkan intervention was the next British proposal, but there was no hope of obtaining American consent to such a project. It was formally rejected by the Combined Chiefs of Staff on September 9, 1943. Churchill did not give up, but continued to push these peripheral schemes as best he could. He ordered General Wilson, British commander in the Near East, "to be bold, even rash" in attacking the Germans in the Aegean and he also tried to persuade Eisenhower to shift forces from Italy to the Aegean or to persuade Turkey to declare war on Germany. The only success Churchill had in these efforts was to persuade the Americans to engage in an amphibious attack on Italy at Anzio after the Americans had canceled plans for such an attack and had decided to choke off the Italian offensive in order to concentrate on the cross-Channel attack.
In the long run Churchill had to accept the American strategic plans because America would provide most of the supplies and even a majority of the men for any direct attack on Europe. The American ability to compel British acquiescence in strategic decisions was a very real element in the conduct of the war. It arose from the great British need for American manpower and supplies, and it functioned through the mechanism of the Combined Chiefs of Staff.
When Churchill came to the Arcadia Conference in Washington at the end of '941, his chief aim was to retain the established priority of "Germany first." He obtained this very easily on its own intrinsic merits, but at the same time he had to accept something he did not want—a Combined Chiefs of Staff organization to control strategy on a worldwide basis. This new committee developed more power than Churchill, or anyone else, expected, because it had control of the supply of weapons. This power was decisive. Since no military operation could be conducted without weapons or supplies, control over these gave the Combined Chiefs of Staff control over all operations and, thus, over the strategic conduct of the war and over all local commanders. The Combined Chiefs of Staff operated through weekly meetings within the framework of the general policy decisions made by Roosevelt and Churchill at their periodic conferences. In this way Britain's dependence on the United States for its implements of war gave the United States control of British strategic decisions and military operations, even in those areas (such as southeast Asia or the Near East) where a British commander was nominally in charge. In the same way, the United States had indirect control over much of Britain's postwar planning.
In spite of the fact that the Anglo-Americans had agreed in ambiguous terms with Molotov's insistence on the need for a direct attack on Hitler in Europe in 1942, it was perfectly clear that no such assault could be made that early in the war, so the attack on North Africa was offered as a substitute. In the course of the North African fighting it became clear that the cross-Channel attack could not be mounted before the spring of 1944. Accordingly, when the Germans in North Africa surrendered in May 1943, it was necessary to open a new front against Hitler quickly, since it would have been very dangerous to leave Hitler free to throw most of his forces against Russia for a full year. Plans for attacks on Sardinia or Sicily had been prepared, and on January 23, 1943, orders were issued to invade the latter island during the "favorable July moon." This was not regarded by the Russians as a major effort, and their resentment rose to the boiling point. As Secretary of State Hull put it in his memoirs, the atmosphere in Anglo-Russian relations became reminiscent of what it had been exactly four years earlier, just before the Nazi-Soviet Treaty of August 1939. It was at this time, apparently, that two fateful, and mutually incompatible, decisions were made on the highest levels of authority in Washington and Moscow.
The decision made in Washington is one we have already mentioned—the decision to try to win Soviet cooperation in the postwar world by doing everything possible to win her trust and cooperation in the wartime period. This decision was probably based on the belief that it was not possible to control Russia's postwar behavior by any policy of force against her during the war itself, since such an effort would benefit Hitler without winning any enforceable agreements from Stalin.
At this time, it would appear, Stalin made his decision to seek Russian security in the postwar world, not through any scheme for friendly cooperation in some idealistic international organization, as Roosevelt hoped, but by setting up, on the Soviet Union's western frontiers, a buffer area of satellite states under governments friendly to Moscow. Such governments, probably in Communist control, would replace the Cordon sanitaire which the Western Powers had created to isolate Russia following the First World War, with what might be called a Cordon "insanitaire" which could serve to isolate the Soviet Union from the outside world following World War II. Washington was informed of this possibility by the American ambassador in Moscow on April 28, 1943, but paid little attention to the warning, probably because of the near-impossibility of finding any alternative policy toward the Soviet Union.
In spite of Soviet scorn, the military operations in Africa and the Mediterranean were major efforts for the inexperienced forces of un-militarized nations, although they obviously could not compare to the Nazi-Soviet death-lock involving hundreds of divisions on the plains and in the forests of eastern Europe. The victory in North Africa was completed in May 1943. Two months later came the invasion of Sicily. The attack on this strategic island was the greatest landing-assault of the war, eight divisions coming ashore simultaneously side by side. The island is almost a right-angle triangle, with its right angle in the extreme northeast, separated from the Italian mainland by the Strait of Messina, only three miles wide. The landings were made on the opposite side of the island, on the hypotenuse of the triangle, where the coast faces southwestward toward Tunisia. The British Eighth Army, under General Montgomery, with 250,000 men in 818 ships and escort vessels, landed on the southeastern point of the Sicilian triangle, while the American Seventh Army (General George Patton), with 228,000 men and 580 vessels, landed on the British left on either side of Gela.
The defensive forces of four Italian divisions and two German panzer divisions were widely scattered on the island, and the Allied landings were skillfully executed against light resistance (July 10, 1943). Once ashore, however, the campaign was ineptly carried on because occupation of territory was given precedence over destruction of enemy forces: Patton drove north-westward to seize Palermo (July 22nd), and then followed the enemy forces eastward to Messina along the northern coast; Montgomery, moving slowly northward parallel to the eastern coast, made a detour to the west of Mount Etna.
No efforts were made to close the Straits of Messina; as a result, the Germans were able to send almost two divisions as reinforcements from Italy and, later, when the island had to be abandoned, they were equally free to evacuate it, carrying almost 40,000 troops with 9,650 vehicles and 17,000 tons of stores over the Straits of Messina to Italy in seven days without loss of a man. At the same time, in a separate operation, 62,000 Italian troops also escaped to the mainland. By August 17th Sicily had been conquered, but the evacuated enemy forces were reorganizing to defend Italy itself.
The Italians had no taste for the defense of Italy. They had been dragged into the war by Mussolini's action and against their own desires, in June 1940, and by 1943 they were heartily sick of the whole thing. This discontent was fully developed long before the attack on Sicily in June. In February the Duce had dismissed Count Ciano, his son-in-law, and Count Dino Grandi from their posts as ministers of foreign affairs and of justice because of their defeatism and opposition. But these qualities continued to spread, even in the innermost circles of the government. The invasion of Sicily gave the final spurt to this development. On July 24th the Fascist Grand Council passed a motion calling for the restoration of the constitutional functions of all agencies of the government and the restoration to the king of full command of the armed forces. This motion, carried 18-8, was essentially a vote of no-confidence in Mussolini. The following morning the king demanded the Duce's resignation and, as he was leaving the palace, had him arrested.
The fall of Mussolini, on July 25, 1943, after being in power for over twenty years, did nothing to improve Italy's position. The king, who was opposed to the establishment of a parliamentary regime or a responsible government, put Marshal Pietro Badoglio, the conqueror of Ethiopia, in as head of the government but would not allow him to establish a Cabinet of non-Fascist leaders. The Fascist Party was abolished and the Fascist Militia was incorporated into the regular army, but it was impossible to get rid of Fascist sympathizers from either the administrative system or from the armed services. On the whole, the fall of Mussolini was welcomed by the Italian people, not because of any political ideas but simply because they believed that it would lead to the end of the war and the end of food rationing. It achieved neither of these, because the powers of contending forces were too evenly balanced in Italy to allow any decisive outcome to be reached.
The history of Italy in 1943 is a history of lost opportunities, perhaps necessarily lost, but, nevertheless, a disappointment to everyone concerned. If events had turned out favorably, Italy might have got out of the war in the summer of that year and the Germans might have been ejected from the peninsula shortly afterward. Instead, Italy was torn to pieces; its peoples and the invading Allied troops suffered great hardships; and the country got out of the war so slowly that Germans were still fighting on Italian soil at the final surrender in 1945.
These general misfortunes of Italy were the result of a number of forces working together. One was the military weakness of Italy in respect to Germany; this made it impossible for Italy to end the war, or even to surrender to the Allies, because any effort to do so would lead to an immediate German seizure of the whole country and of its leaders, the exploitation and devastation of the one and the massacre of the others. Italy was far too weak to hold the Germans back long enough to permit an Allied occupation of Italy. A second factor was the weakness of the Allies because of the diversion of their power to Britain in preparation for Overlord: this meant that the Allies lacked the strength to move quickly into Italy to protect it from complete German occupation, even if Italy could surrender secretly to the Allies and cooperate with their entrance. A third factor was the complete mistrust of the Italians both by the Germans and by the Allies. This mistrust, for which the political conduct of the Italians, both foreign and domestic, over at least two generations, was responsible, provided the key to the whole situation. The only way in which the fighting in Italy could have been ended quickly would have been for Italy to surrender secretly to the Allies and cooperate with them in an immediate large-scale invasion of northern Italy, but the Allies were too distrustful of the Italians to cooperate with them in a project such as this or even to accept a secret surrender. And, finally, a fourth obstacle was the wooden and inflexible Allied insistence on unconditional surrender which, meaningless as it might have been, nevertheless made it impossible for the Badoglio government either to cooperate with the Allies as co-belligerents against the Germans (as it wished to do) or to keep the surrender secret from the Germans long enough to forestall their violent reactions. Not only did unconditional surrender exclude both co-belligerency and secrecy; it also left the Italians helpless to resist the Germans. Above all, these four factors made it impossible to prevent a German seizure of Rome, which was, in some ways, the center of the whole problem.
The Germans, who had eight divisions in Italy, doubled this number as soon as they heard of the fall of Mussolini. They refused a request from the Badoglio government to allow any of the fifty-three Italian divisions in the Balkans and Russia to return home, thus holding them as hostages. When the Badoglio government made contact with the Allies through Madrid on August 16tl1 and offered to join them in fighting Germany, all it could obtain was a demand for unconditional surrender. After days of discussion, an armistice accepting the Allied terms was signed on September 3rd, with the understanding that it would be kept secret until the Allies had troops ready to land in force on the mainland. Three days later, the Italian government discovered that the Allied landing operation, already in progress, was only a small force and was headed for Salerno, south of Naples, where it would he no help to the Italians in resisting any German efforts to take over most of Italy. They insisted that the publication of the armistice and a tentative Allied paratrooper "drop" in Rome must be put off until sufficient Allied forces were within striking distance of Rome to protect the city from the German troops near it. Eisenhower refused, and published the Italian surrender on September 8th, one day before the American Seventh Army landed at Salerno.
The Germans reacted to the news of the Italian "betrayal" and of the Allied invasion of southern Italy with characteristic speed. While the available forces in central Italy converged on the Salerno beachhead, an armored division fought its way into Rome, Italian troops were disarmed or intimidated everywhere, and the Badoglio government, with King Victor Emmanuel, had to flee to the British-controlled area around Brindisi. Much of the Italian fleet escaped to Allied control in the Mediterranean, but numerous vessels were sunk by the Germans or were scuttled to escape falling into their hands. In most of Italy, there was political paralysis and confusion; at some places Italians fought one another, or simply murdered one another, while opinion ranged the whole gamut from complete indifference on one extreme to violent fanaticism on the other.
In order to have some legal excuse for controlling Italy, the Germans sent parachutists to rescue Mussolini from his "prison" in a summer hotel in the mountains of the Gran Sasso, escaping with him by air to northern Italy where he was presented with a German-picked government of "neo-Fascists" under the name Italian Social Republic (September 13-15, 1943). Broken and weary, the ex-Duce of Fascism became a pliant tool of German ruthlessness and of the corrupt and criminal neo-Fascists who surrounded him. In this group the most influential were the family of Mussolini's mistress, Clara Petacci, which Count Ciano called "that circle of prostitutes and white slavers which for some years have plagued Italian political life."
In Allied hands, the king and Badoglio were forced, on September 29, 1943, to sign another, much longer, armistice; by its provisions "the Italian Government were bound hand and foot, and made completely subject to the will of the Allied Governments as expressed through the Allied Commander-in-Chief." In conformity to this will, on October 13th the king's government declared war against Germany..
As the Allied forces slowly recovered Italian territory from the tenacious grasp of the Germans, the royal government remained subservient to its conquerors. Civilian affairs immediately behind the advancing battle lines were completely in military hands under an organization known as Allied Military Government of Occupied Territory, or AMGOT; farther back, civilian affairs were under an Allied Control Commission. The creation of these organizations, on a purely Anglo-American basis, to rule the first Axis territory to be "liberated" became a very important precedent for Soviet behavior when their armies began to occupy enemy territory in eastern Europe: The Russians were able to argue that they could exclude the Anglo-Americans from active participation in military government in the east since they had earlier been excluded from such participation in the west.
While these political events were taking place, the military advance was moving like a snail. The Allied invasion of Italy, at American insistence, was given very limited resources for a very large task. This limitation of resources in Italy sought to prevent the British from using the Italian campaign as an excuse for delaying or postponing the cross-Channel attack on Europe scheduled for the spring of 1944. It was only under such limitations of resources, explicitly stated, that the Americans had accepted the British suggestion for any invasion of mainland Italy at all. In May 1943, at a plenary meeting in Washington, the Combined Chiefs of Staff had set May 1 944 as target date for a cross-Channel invasion of Europe with 29 divisions, had ordered a full-scale aerial offensive on Germany with 2,700 heavy and 800 medium bombers, had given the American Joint Chiefs of Staff complete control over the Pacific war against Japan, and had asked General Eisenhower to draw up plans for an invasion of Italy using no forces beyond what he had on hand. This last limitation was repeated on July 26th when the general was ordered to carry out his plans..
The invasion of Italy was a two-pronged effort. On September 3rd two British divisions under General Montgomery crossed the Straits of Messina and began to move northward against little opposition. Six days later a British airborne division from Bizerte was landed at Taranto and began to move up the Adriatic coast. On the same day, September 8th, the Fifth Army of two American and two British divisions under Lieutenant General Mark W. Clark landed at Salerno. The landing site was in the next bay south of the famous Bay of Naples, and separated from it by the rugged Sorrento Peninsula. There was no preliminary bombardment by naval guns, in order to retain tactical surprise, and the American Units came over the heavily mined and barbwired beaches right into the face of the German 16th Panzer Division. Within three days, six German divisions, four of them motorized, were around the Salerno beachhead, with six hundred tanks. In fierce fighting, the area was slowly expanded, although at one point the German counterattacks almost broke through to the beach. Naval gunfire against the German tanks was the decisive factor in a seesaw struggle.
On September 13th the American 82nd Airborne Division was dropped behind the beachhead. About the same time, Rommel, in command in northern Italy, refused to release reinforcements to Kesselring in the south. On September 16th the latter commander authorized a withdrawal from the area in order to get beyond the range of naval gunfire. On the same day, Montgomery's Eighth Army made contact with Clark's Fifth Army, and an Allied line was stretched across Italy to the Adriatic. This line moved slowly northward, capturing Naples on the first day of October 1943. The city was a shambles, filled with wreckage and heavily booby-trapped; the water supply had been deliberately polluted, and all food stores and government records had been destroyed; the harbor area, completely in flames, was filled with sunken ships, locomotives, and other large objects to make it unusable. This was the kind of situation where American energy, humanitarianism, anti ingenuity excelled; sanitation and order were restored at once, food was provided for the hungry Italians, and the harbor was cleaned up so successfully that it \vas handling tonnage beyond its prewar rated capacity within three months.
By October 7th the Allied advance had been stopped on the Volturno River line twenty miles north of Naples. Two months later, when General Eisenhower was transferred to take over the Supreme Command for the approaching invasion of western Europe, the Allied lines had moved northward no farther than the German Gustav Line. This line, eighty miles south of Rome and following, roughly, the Rapido River in the west and the lower Garigliano in the east, took every advantage of the rugged terrain, and allowed the enemy to inflict heavy casualties on the attackers, especially by artillery fire from the greatly feared German 88-mm. guns. To outflank this position, an amphibious landing was ordered beyond the German rear at Anzio, just north of the Pontine Marshes, thirty miles south of Rome. Originally the landing was to have been made in one operation, leaving the Allied forces on a beach with supplies for eight days and no provision for any reinforcements or replenishment from the sea. This was based on the expectation that the main Allied forces would come up from the south in time to relieve the new beachhead. When it became clear that the Allied forces could not advance up the peninsula, the plan was canceled on December 22'nd. Three days later, at a hurriedly summoned conference at Tunis, Churchill was able to have the plan reinstated, offering a British division to go with the single American division originally planned.
On January 20, 1944, General Clark tried to cross the flooded Rapido River at the foot of the great hill on which stood the ancient Benedictine Monastery of Monte Cassino. His aim was to advance northward toward Anzio. After two days of bloody fighting, the crossing had to he abandoned; that same day (January 22nd) the two Allied divisions landed at Anzio, hoping to cut the German communications going southward toward Monte Cassino. The landing was easy, but within a week Marshal Kesselring was able to shift sufficient forces from the subsiding Rapido front to seal off the Anzio beachhead. Although the Allies committed four more divisions to the Anzio operation, giving six in all, they could not break out of the German vise. The result was a stalemate in which the Germans could hold both the Rapido line and the Anzio line by shifting forces rapidly from one to the other as seemed necessary.
As is usual in a stalemate, there was much of criticism of these operations, especially from the Allied side. It was suggested that the German success in holding the Rapido was due to the accuracy of their artillery fire and that this was being spotted from the ancient monastery (founded hy St. Benedict in A.D. 529) on the top of Monte Cassino. It was further suggested that General Clark should have obliterated the monastery with aerial bombardment but had failed to do so because he was a Catholic. After February 15, 1944, General Clark did destroy the site completely by Air Force bombs without helping the situation a bit. We now know that the Germans had not been using the monastery; but, once it was destroyed by us, they dug into the rubble to make a stronger defense.
The stalemate on the Gustav Line was broken in the latter half of May 1944. By that time French, Polish, and Italian units were fighting on the Allied side, giving twenty-seven Allied divisions against twenty German. On May I 6th a French corps crossed the Garigliano River, and three days later, after terrible casualties, a Polish division captured Monte Cassino. Kesselring sullenly withdrew northward, followed by the Allied forces. The latter were greeted with hysterical enthusiasm by the liberated Italians. On May 2sth contact was made with the Anzio forces, and, on June 4, 1944, the American 88th Division, an all-selective-service unit, entered Rome.
As the liberating forces came in and the Germans hurriedly withdrew, Rome was little short of a madhouse. Hundreds of prisoners held by the Germans and neo-Fascist secret police were murdered in their cells, and helpless civilians were murdered as hostages or in reprisal by the retreating German forces. Guerrilla bands behind the German lines performed good services to the Allied cause, harassing communications, assisting Allied intelligence, and helping escaping prisoners. Many of these guerrillas were fighting for social revolution as well as for the liberation of Italy, and there was a good deal of rivalry and even of violent conflict among them. The dominant influence was that of the Communists, who were more highly disciplined and more closely controlled than the non-Communist units.
The fall of Mussolini gave a considerable impetus to postwar planning within the Allied camps. There had been a certain amount of this during the dark days from 1939 to 1943, but on the whole the Allied leaders were reluctant to commit themselves to any projects which might restrict their freedom of action in conducting the war or in manipulating its diplomatic and propagandist background. The collapse of one of the enemy states, however, made it necessary to devote some serious attention to postwar plans. At the same time, experiences in Italy showed that the problems of the post-war era would be much broader than merely political or diplomatic, and would include social, economic, and ideological problems on a scale never experienced previously. It was clear that the poverty, confusion, and human suffering found by our advancing armies in Italy would be increased tenfold when the much more bitter resistance of Germany had been overcome.
In order to avoid any repetition of the widespread Allied "deals" with Darlan and other "Vichyites," the occupied areas of Italy were subjected to a completely military Allied government, although, to obtain legal continuity and legal justification for this government, the various agreements were signed by Badoglio. Even this small amount of contact with ax-Fascist leaders aroused adverse comment in certain circles in the United States, although at the same time and, usually, in the same circles, there was objection to the use of a purely military administration as an alternative. The only other possibility would have been to turn the newly liberated areas over to the local anti-Fascist native groups. This last solution was out of the question, for these groups were generally so determined on social and economic revolution that they would have created conflicts and disturbances which would have jeopardized the position of our armies of occupation and would certainly have increased the social and economic problems which most Americans were eager to reduce. These social and economic problems were mostly of a very practical nature and were concerned with starvation, disease, public order, and the care of displaced persons.
All these problems were drastically increased by the ruthless destructiveness of the German forces as they withdrew toward Germany itself. Food supplies were taken away or were destroyed; millions were left homeless, many of them far from their homes and in pitiful conditions of semi-starvation and disease. These conditions, whicl1 became steadily worse as the war drew to its close, made a great appeal to the humanitarian feelings of Americans, and presented problems with which American generosity and organizational efficiency were well able to deal. On the other hand, Americans had weak political interests and narrow ideological training and were eager to avoid problems such as forms of government, patterns of property distribution, or nationalistic disputes. It is, then, not surprising that American postwar planning and the behavior of American administrators neglected the latter kinds of problems to devote their energies to the more practical tasks of material survival. On the political, legal, or ideological problems the American "liberators" had little to offer beyond rather vague and idealistic praise of democracy, private ownership, and freedom.
While the military efforts of the Anglo-Americans were, in full public view, passing from victory to victory in the early months of 1943, a very ominous situation had arisen behind the scenes in respect to their relations with the Soviet Union. We have already mentioned the evidence that quite incompatible decisions about the postwar world had been made in Washington and Moscow at this time. The decision in Washington seems to have been that every effort would be made, through wartime concessions to the Soviet Union, to obtain Russian cooperation in a postwar international organization and that all territorial problems should be left to the postwar period. The decision in Moscow seems to have been that the Anglo-American Powers could not be trusted and that the Soviet Union must seek to ensure its postwar security by creation of a series of satellite and buffer states on its western frontier. The incompatibility of these points of view gave rise to the Polish crisis of May 1943
After the Nazi-Soviet division of Poland in September 1939, a Polish government-in-exile was established in France and later in London, with General Wladyslaw Sikorski as prime minister. This government, although recognized as the successor to the defeated Polish government by most of the world, was not recognized by the Axis Powers or by the Soviet Union. These pretended that Poland had ceased to exist. Russia, which had received half of Poland, with 13.2 million of Poland's 35 million inhabitants, incorporated these areas into the Soviet Union, imposing Soviet citizenship on the inhabitants, and forced over a million of them to go to other parts of Russia to work in mines, in factories, or on farms. Most educated or professional persons among the Poles were arrested and put into concentration camps with the captured officers of the Polish armies. In the meantime the portions of Poland taken by Germany had been divided into two parts, of which the western (with 10.5 million inhabitants) was incorporated into Germany, and the rest (with 11.5 million inhabitants, and including Warsaw) was organized as the government-general of Poland under German administration. The Nazis sought to force all ethnic Poles into the government-general; to exterminate, either directly or through the exhaustion and malnutrition of slave labor, all the educated elements among the Polish people; and to murder without compunction the country's large Jewish population.
The German attack on the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941 led to a brief reversal of the Kremlin's attitude toward Poland. In an apparent effort to obtain Polish support in the struggle with Germany, the Soviet Union reestablished diplomatic relations with the Polish government-in-exile in London, and signed an agreement on July 30, 1941 by which the Soviet-German partition treaties of 1939 were canceled, a general amnesty was granted Polish citizens imprisoned in the Soviet Union, and General Wladyslaw Anders was allowed to organize a new Polish army from the Poles in the Soviet Union. Efforts to create this army were hampered by the fact that about 10,000 Polish officers along with about 5,000 Polish intellectuals and professional persons, all of whom had been held in three camps in western Russia, could not be found. In addition at least 100,000 Polish prisoners of war, out of the 230,000 captured by Soviet forces in September 1939, had been exterminated in Soviet labor camps from starvation and overwork, and over a million Polish civilians were being similarly treated.
Constant obstacles were offered by the Soviet authorities to the efforts of General Anders to reconstruct a Polish army in the east. When rations were cut to 26,000 to feed a force of 70,000 soldiers and many thousands of Polish civilian refugees, Anders obtained permission to evacuate his force to Iran (March 1942). It was this group which fought so well the following years in Italy and in western Europe..
As soon as Anders's forces left Russia, the Soviet leaders began to organize a group of Polish and Russian Communists into a so-called Union of Polish Patriots which sponsored a Polish-language radio station and a new Communist-controlled Polish army in Russia. In January 1943, Moscow informed the Sikorski government in London that all Poles originating from the provinces occupied by Soviet forces in September 1939 would be regarded as Soviet subjects.
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