The Second World War

by Antony Beevor

  By nightfall some 5,000 men were ashore, but at the horrific cost of 1,500 casualties, and burned-out amtracs. Corpses were littered all over the beach while many others rolled in the surf like flotsam. During the night Japanese infantrymen crept forward into some of the destroyed amtracs, and some swam to those in the bay, to turn them into firing positions behind the marines on the beach. Machine-gunners had even manned a bombed-out Japanese freighter and fought from there.

  The pattern was more or less repeated at dawn next day, when reinforcements attempted to land. But, fortunately for the marines, another battalion which had cleared the north-west shore of the island was soon reinforced with tanks. The desperate fighting finally turned as marines began clearing bunker after bunker with a combination of explosive charges, gasoline and flamethrowers which reduced the defenders to little more than charred skeletons. Some were buried alive in their bunkers when an armoured bulldozer stopped up their firing slits with sand.

  The battle finished at the end of the third day with a suicidal mass charge based on the gyokusai ideology of ‘death before dishonour’ to avoid being taken prisoner. Marines cut down their attackers with savage glee.

  Nearly 5,000 Japanese soldiers and Korean construction workers died over the three days. But the cost of taking a single tiny island–with more than a thousand dead and 2,000 wounded–shook American commanders and the public at home, appalled by the photographs of dead marines. Yet the losses prompted many improvements for future operations, with the introduction of underwater demolition teams, more heavily armoured amtracs and a complete reappraisal of communications and intelligence before any other landings went ahead. The limitations of bombing and naval artillery firing high-explosive shells were also re-examined. For bunkers like those on Tarawa, they needed armour-piercing ammunition.

  In the spring of 1943, Roosevelt and Marshall had consolidated their strategy for China. Preferring an air offensive, they continued to reject Stilwell’s arguments that Allied land power should be developed in China to defeat the Japanese there. Their chief priority was to build up Chennault’s Fourteenth Air Force on the Chinese mainland. It was to expand its role to attacks on Japanese shipping in the South China Sea, and raid Japanese supply bases to help the US Navy in the Pacific. But there was a flaw to their plan. Chennault’s successes were bound to provoke a Japanese reaction, and without sufficiently strong Chinese forces to defend his airfields the Fourteenth Air Force’s campaign would collapse. Chiang Kai-shek’s Yunnan armies were to be reinforced for this purpose, but they received little weaponry. The bulk of the first 4,700 tons of supplies was earmarked for Chennault, and Roosevelt’s promise that air transport flying over the Hump of the Himalayas would then deliver 10,000 tons a month was over-optimistic to say the least.

  In May the Japanese launched their fourth offensive against Changsha in Hunan province, with an amphibious landing on the shore of Lake Tungting. Another attack from southern Hupeh suggested that this was an encirclement operation to seize an important rice growing area. B-24 Liberators from Chennault’s Fourteenth Air Force raided Japanese supply bases and trains with reinforcements. The Liberators and their fighter escorts accounted for twenty Japanese aircraft, boosting the morale of the Nationalist troops on the ground.

  Although Nationalist losses had been far greater than those of the Japanese, Chiang Kai-shek’s forces checked the attack from Hupeh and forced the Japanese back. In Shantung province, south of Peking, a Nationalist Chinese division far behind Japanese lines found itself being attacked both by the Japanese and by Chinese Communist formations.

  The Nationalist government in Chungking had broken off relations with Vichy France, while the Wang Ching-wei puppet government declared war on the United States and Britain. The Vichy regime was also forced to concede France’s concessions in China to Wang Ching-wei. The large White Russian community in Shanghai, which had co-operated closely with the Japanese, had become increasingly depressed since the Soviet victory at Stalingrad. The hated regime in the Soviet Union looked stronger than ever, and the war both in the Pacific and on the eastern front was now going in a very different direction to the one they had envisaged. The idea of a Communist Shanghai was becoming a distinct possibility. The Japanese had left Mao Tse-tung’s forces to the north-east relatively undisturbed, and if the Red Army arrived after the defeat of Germany, then the Chinese Communists would take power.

  The diplomatic shadow dance continued. Tokyo announced that Burma was to be given independence as a member of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Its puppet government accordingly declared war on Britain and the United States. And in a further attempt to bolster its claim of waging war on colonialism, the Japanese government set up an Indian National Army, led by Subhas Chandra Bose and manned by Indian prisoners of war recruited from Japanese camps.

  Stilwell’s rows with Chennault had become even more acrimonious through that spring. Their quarrel had begun to hamper the war effort, to the dismay of Allied officers. Brooke described Stilwell as nothing more than ‘a hopeless crank with no vision’, and Chennault as ‘a very gallant airman with a limited brain’. Stilwell had also made an enemy of Chiang Kai-shek by wanting to send assistance to the Chinese Communists. Chiang was furious because Mao Tse-tung’s Communists refused to be part of the Nationalist order of battle. Stilwell claimed that they were fighting harder against the Japanese, which made Chiang even more angry. British intelligence, however, was certain that the Communists had made an unofficial deal with the Japanese, under which both sides restricted their operations against each other. Mao was husbanding his lightly armed forces ready for the civil war which was bound to follow the eventual defeat of the Japanese. And so, of course, was Chiang.

  In May 1943, in an attempt to resolve the dispute between Stilwell and Chennault, both men were summoned to see Roosevelt just before the Trident conference in Washington. Roosevelt confirmed the priority of Chennault’s air offensive from China, but also allowed Stilwell to continue with his campaign to retake northern Burma. The President had a tendency to avoid disputes between commanders by allowing both options to be pursued at the same time, as was the case with MacArthur and the US Navy following the Twin Axis strategy in the Pacific.

  In July Operation Buccaneer, a major landing on the Burmese coast, was proposed to clear the Japanese from the Bay of Bengal. Chiang Kaishek supported the plan, but remained rightly suspicious that the Allies were not prepared to commit major ground forces on the south-east Asian mainland. Not surprisingly he resented the idea that he would provide troops to win back Burma, while the Americans and British accorded his forces in China such low importance. In any case, the shortage of shipping eventually put paid to Buccaneer.

  Relations with Chiang Kai-shek were not helped when in mid-August the Quadrant conference in Quebec agreed to set up South-East Asia Command, or SEAC, with Vice Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten as supreme Allied commander. Brooke, who had a low opinion of Mountbatten’s competence, observed that he would need a very clever chief of staff to carry him through. This he received in the form of Lieutenant General Sir Henry Pownall. But Mountbatten would also have as his deputy ‘Vinegar Joe’ Stilwell, who loathed him. Mountbatten, who was glamorous and charming and made good use of his royal connections, possessed a great talent for public relations, but he remained a vertiginously over-promoted destroyer captain.

  Chiang Kai-shek was horrified to learn that his troops were thus to serve in Burma under British command. He wanted to ask for the recall of the increasingly fractious Stilwell, but then changed his mind in October on recognizing that without him he might not have any American commitment to support his forces in China. Ironically, this about-turn was supported by Mountbatten, who feared that Stilwell’s recall would increase the suspicions of the American press that the British were taking over in south-east Asia. American officers were already joking that SEAC stood for ‘Save England’s Asian Colonies’. Stalin would have laughed if he had known the full details
of the rivalries and personal antipathies which bedevilled Allied strategy.

  Brooke had been even more horrified before the Quadrant conference by Churchill’s suggestion that Orde Wingate, recently promoted to brigadier, should be made army commander. Back in April, Churchill had not liked the British plans for Burma, saying: ‘You might as well eat a porcupine one quill at a time.’ And yet typically he had now become entranced by the idea of irregular operations behind Japanese lines.

  Wingate, a fundamentalist Christian and ascetic visionary whom General Slim compared to Peter the Hermit, was no charlatan. He was almost certainly a manic depressive, and had tried to commit suicide by cutting his own throat. He was not easy to deal with. He drove his men hard; in fact he was pitiless even towards the wounded, but he was just as hard on himself. Bearded and scruffy, wearing an old-fashioned sola topi that looked too big for him, he did not conform to the image of a senior officer of the Royal Artillery. He wandered around naked, chewed raw onions, strained his tea through his socks, and sometimes wore an alarm clock on a string round his neck. He had earned his reputation as a master of irregular warfare after organizing Jewish ‘special night squads’ in Palestine to counter Arab attacks, and by his leadership of Gideon Force in Ethiopia. Churchill had always welcomed unconventional ideas and it seemed that Wingate would provide a solution to the stalemate in north Burma.

  In India in 1942, Wingate had suggested to Wavell that columns supported by airdrops, roaming in the Japanese rear, would be very useful for attacking enemy supply lines and communications. In February 1943, he was given his first chance to prove his theories. With the 77th Brigade split into two groups, which were sub-divided into columns, Wingate’s forces crossed the River Chindwin. Each detachment had a reconnaissance group from the Burma Rifles, and carried rations, ammunition, machine guns and mortars on pack mules. [See map of Burma, p. 554.]

  By the third week in March, most of Wingate’s Chindit columns were across the Irrawaddy, but radio contact was increasingly difficult and supply drops became hard to organize as two pursuing Japanese divisions forced them to keep moving. Short of food, they began to slaughter and eat the mules, which meant that most of their heavy equipment had to be abandoned. Wingate’s columns were soon in retreat, having failed to cut the Mandalay–Lashio road and losing in the process nearly a third of the 3,000 men who had started out. Discipline was exerted ruthlessly, with several floggings and even some executions. A large number of wounded and sick were left behind. Of those who returned, exhausted, fever ridden and half starved, 600 were unfit for further duties for many months.

  This lengthy foray may not have been successful, but it provided a boost to morale for Slim’s Fourteenth Army and for the public at home, due to highly optimistic reporting. Important lessons were learned, above all the need to clear proper dropping zones and even landing strips in the jungle. And once the Allies were in a position to provide sufficient transport and fighter support, such operations were more likely to bring rewards. Yet this first long-range penetration had a more important effect. It provoked the Japanese into preparing a major offensive for the spring of 1944, which would lead to the decisive battles of the Burma campaign.

  31

  The Battle of Kursk

  APRIL–AUGUST 1943

  Seldom has a major offensive been as obvious to the enemy as the Germans’ Operation Citadel to cut off the Soviet salient round Kursk. Stalin’s commanders estimated that the Germans could afford only one major attack, and the Kursk bulge was clearly the most vulnerable sector of their line. Zhukov and Vasilevsky managed to persuade their impatient leader that the best strategy was to prepare for this double thrust, defeat it in defence and then go over to the offensive themselves.

  The German build-up in April 1943 was carefully observed by air reconnaissance flights, by partisan detachments behind the lines and by Soviet agents. The British passed on a warning based on an Ultra intercept, but heavily disguised to conceal its source. The Soviet spy John Cairncross provided far more detail. Yet uncertainty was caused in Moscow by repeated German delays. Generalfeldmarschall von Manstein wanted the operation launched in early May after the end of the spring rains, but Hitler was uncharacteristically nervous and delay followed delay.

  The Führer was staking virtually all their reserves on this one giant gamble to shorten the front and regain the initiative, to reassure wavering allies after the defeat at Stalingrad and the retreat in the Caucasus. ‘Victory at Kursk will be a beacon for the whole world,’ Hitler proclaimed in his order of 15 April. Yet during the Allied victory in Tunisia he began to look anxiously at the map of Sicily and Italy. ‘When I think of this attack,’ he told Guderian, ‘my stomach turns over.’

  Many senior officers had their own doubts about the offensive. To compensate for its numerical inferiority, the German army had always relied on its greatest ability: to wage a Bewegungskrieg or war of movement. But the Kursk Offensive looked as if it might turn into a battle of attrition. As in a game of chess when you are already several pieces down, the risks multiply the moment you lose the initiative and try to attack again. The German army’s queen, its armoured forces, was about to be thrown into a battle which would be more dangerous for the Wehrmacht than for the Red Army, which now enjoyed such superiority in numbers and weaponry.

  OKW staff officers began to voice doubts about the thinking behind Operation Citadel, but this, perversely, now made Hitler more determined to continue. Planning for the operation took on a momentum of its own. Hitler felt unable to back down. He dismissed the air reconnaissance reports on the strength of Soviet defences, claiming they were exaggerated. Yet, despite Manstein’s desire for an early attack, Citadel was still postponed numerous times to allow more tanks, such as the new Mark V Panther, to be rushed to the front after the delays caused by RAF bombing. The great offensive did not in the end begin until 5 July.

  This crucial breathing space granted to the Red Army was not wasted. Its formations and some 300,000 mobilized civilians were put to work on the construction of eight lines of defence, with deep tank ditches, underground bunkers, minefields, wire entanglements and over 9,000 kilometres of trenches. Every soldier, in true Soviet style, was set a target of digging five metres of trench every night since it was too dangerous by day. In places the defences went back nearly 300 kilometres. All civilians not involved in digging and who lived within twenty-five kilometres of the front were evacuated. Reconnaissance patrols were sent out at night to seize Germans for interrogation. These snatch parties consisted of men picked for their size and strength to overpower a sentry or ration carrier. ‘Each reconnaissance group was given a couple of sappers who would lead them through our mines and make a corridor for them in the German minefield.’

  Most importantly, a large strategic reserve known as the Steppe Front and commanded by Colonel General I. S. Konev was assembled to the rear of the bulge. It included the 5th Guards Tank Army, five rifle armies, another three tank and mechanized corps and three cavalry corps. Altogether the Steppe Front mustered nearly 575,000 men. They were supported by the 5th Air Army. The movement and the positions of these formations were concealed as far as possible, in order to deceive the Germans about the Red Army’s preparations for a powerful counter-stroke. Further deception measures included the massing of other forces in the south and the construction of dummy airfields to imply preparations for an offensive there.

  Normally an attacking force requires a superiority of up to three to one over the defenders, but in July 1943 this was reversed. The Soviet army groups involved–Rokossovsky’s Central Front, Vatutin’s Voronezh Front, Malinovsky’s South-Western Front and Konev’s Steppe Front–totalled over 1,900,000 men. German strength for Operation Citadel did not exceed 780,000. It represented a huge gamble.

  The Germans placed their faith in panzer wedges, using companies of Tiger tanks as spearheads to batter a hole in the Soviet defence lines. The II SS Panzer Corps, which had retaken Kharkov and then Belgorod in Marc
h, was refitting. Brought up to strength mainly by Luftwaffe ground personnel, the 1st SS Panzer Division Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler put the new arrivals through an intensive training programme. SS Untersturmführer Michael Wittmann, who was to become the greatest panzer ace of the war, took command of his first Tiger platoon at this point. But despite the unquestioned superiority of the Tiger, the Waffen-SS panzergrenadier divisions were acutely conscious of their inferiority in equipment. The SS Das Reich even had to equip one of its companies with captured T-34s.

  Ultra intelligence, passed by Cairncross to the Soviet Foreign Intelligence Department through his handler in London, had also identified the Luftwaffe airfields in the region. Some 2,000 aircraft were being concentrated there, the bulk of what was left on the eastern front after so many squadrons had been sent back to defend Germany from the Allied air forces. Red Army aviation regiments were thus able to launch preemptive strikes early in May, apparently destroying more than 500 aircraft on the ground. The Luftwaffe also suffered from a shortage of aviation fuel, which restricted its ability to support the attacking troops.

  German supply problems had been growing with the ferocious partisan campaign fought far behind the Wehrmacht’s lines. Certain areas, such as the forests south of Leningrad and large parts of Belorussia, were almost completely controlled by partisan forces, now directed from Moscow. The German anti-partisan sweeps grew in violence. SS Brigadeführer Oskar Dirlewanger and his group recruited from released criminals exterminated and burned whole villages. For the Germans’ Kursk Offensive, Soviet partisan groups were put on standby to attack railways lines to slow supplies.

  The continued postponements of the German offensive encouraged impatient commanders such as Colonel General Vatutin to argue that they should not wait. The Red Army should launch its own attack instead. Zhukov and Vasilevsky again had to calm Stalin and persuade him that they must be patient. They would destroy far more Germans for fewer losses in defence than in attack. Stalin was not in the best of moods, having heard from Churchill at the beginning of June that an Allied invasion of northern France was now pushed back until the following May.