Herman Wouk - War and Remembrance

by War

  Militarily speaking, the situation even then was retrievable by sound military tactics, and we had great tacticians. Manstein's classic fighting withdrawal from the Caucasus after Stalingrad, to cite but one instance, will find a place one day in' history with Xenophon's march to the Black Sea. But Hitler as warlord could only go on compounding his own pigheaded mistakes. Since nobody could loosen his terror-grip on our armed forces, he dragged the German nation down with him.

  The Far Reach of the Third Reich

  To understand Hitler's swollen pride before his fall, one must picture Germany's situation before November 1942.

  For the modern-day German reader, this is difficult. We are a cowed people, ashamed of our mighty though Faustian past. Our defeated and shrunken Fatherland is sundered. Bolshevism bestrides one half; the other half cringes to the dollar. Our economic vigor has revived, but our place in world affairs remains dubious. Twelve brief years of Nazi mistakes and crimes have eclipsed the proud record of centuries.

  But in the summer of 1942, we were still riding high. On the eastern front, the Wehrmacht was rebounding to the attack.

  After storming Sevastopol and clearing the Kerch peninsula, we were thrusting two gigantic armed marches into the Soviet southern gut; one across the Don toward the Volga, the other southward to the Caucasus oil fields. Stalin's armies were everywhere fading - back before us with big losses. Rommel's stunning capture of the Tobruk fortress had opened the way to the Suez Canal and had all but toppled Churchill.

  Our comrade Japan had won Southeast Asia, and in ourma was advancing to the borders of India. Her grip on prostrate China's coastal provinces was solid. Her defeat at Midway was shrouded by the fog of war. Her armies were still triumphing wherever they marched.

  All Asia trembled at the shift of world forces. india was rent with riots. Congress voted for the immediate withdrawal of the British, and an Indian government-in-exile was forming to fight on the Japanese side.

  In Arctic waters, with the famous rout of the PQ- 1 7 convoy at the end of June, we severed the Lend-Lease supply route to Murmansk, a body-blow to the already staggering Red Army.

  This defeat epitomized the British decline at sea. The convoy screening force, warned that our heavy surface ships were approaching, ordered the merchant vessels to disperse and hightailed it home to England! The shades of Drake and Nelson must have wept in Valhalla.

  The slaughter that ensued was mere rabbit-shooting by our aircraft and submarines. The cold seas closed over twenty-three merchant vessels out of thirty-seven, and one hundred thousand tons of war materiel, with much loss of life. Churchill's shamed message to Stalin cancelling the Murmansk run brought an angry Slav howl. The grotesque alliance of capitalism and Bolshevism was sorely strained.

  On the visible evidence, then, we were triumphing in the summer and autumn of 1942 against all the odds, even with the United States thrown into the balance against us, even with all of Hitler's miscalculations.

  TRANSLATOR'S NOTE: The Murmansk run was suspended during the summer months of long Arctic daylight, then resumed. In December, British destroyers escorting another convoy outfought a German task force, including a pocket battleship and a heavy cruiser. Hitler waxed so wroth at this fiasco that he ordered the fleet scrapped, and the guns put to use on land Admiral Raeder resigned Denitz took over, but the German surface fleet never recovered from Hitler's tantrum.

  Roon's appreciation of Guadalcanal which follows is detached and reliable. No Germans were fighting there. - V.H.

  The Pacific Theatre Allof EuropefromtheBayof Biscaytothe Uralscould besunk without a trace between Honolulu and Manila, yet the Pacific campaigns were fought over far greater distances than that.

  Unheard-of military space, unprecedented forms of combined land, sea, and air combat: such is the fascination of the Pacific conflict.

  The period in history when such operations were feasible came and went quickly. A high point was the six-month melee which raged in the skies, on the water, under the water, and in the jungle, for the possession of a small airfield that accommodated sixty planes: Henderson Field on Guadalcanal.

  Guadalcanal is a neglected campaign, a small Pacific Stalingrad swirling around that landing field. Had it been a British victory, Churchill would have written a volume about it. But Americans are apathetic toward their military history. They lack the European sense of the past, and writers of broad culture.

  In my restricted research* I have yet to come upon an adequate relating of the Stalingrad and Guadalcanal campaigns, but one might say that the Second World War turned on those poles. We reached the Volga just north of Stalingrad in August. The Americans landed on Guadalcanal in August. General Paulus surrendered at Stalingrad on-February 2, 1943; the Americans secured Guadalcanal on February 9.

  Both battles were desperate and successful defenses of a waterfront perimeter: the Russians with their backs to the Volga, the Americans on a beachhead with their backs to the sea. Both battles were head-on clashes of national wills.- With both outcomes the tide in a war theatre turned, for all the world to witness.

  German readers must never forget that the war had a global dimension.

  We are obsessed with Europe, and that is how the Bolshevik historian$ also write. But under Adolf Hitler's flawed but kinetic leadership, our nation broke the ice of the entire world imperial system. For six years a world storm raged, and all was fluid. The land masses of the planet, fifty-eight million square miles of real estate, were at hazard. The Asian samurai' surged forward to form an alliance with the Nordic soldier, seeking a just redistribution of the earth's habitable surface.

  That two martial showdowns should simultaneously explode on two sides of the globe therefore lay in the nature of this wrenching world convulsion. The stunning halt of the Japanese

  "General von Roon wrote in prison.-V H onrush at Midway resembled our halt before Moscow in December 1941. These were chilly warnings. But the fatal crunches came later and in parallel, at Stalingrad and Guadalcanal.

  The differences of course are substantial. If we had defeated the Red Army at Stalingrad, history in its present form would not exist; whereas had the Americans been thrown off Guadalcanal, they would probably have returned later with new fleets, air groups, and tank divisions, and beaten the Japanese elsewhere.

  Stalingrad was a far vaster battle, and more truly a decisive one.

  Still, the parallels should be borne in mind.

  Admiral King it was a wheeze in the American navy that Admiral Ernest King shaved with a blowtorch." A naval aviator with a long record of achievement, including the raising of a sunken submarine in the open sea, King had been put out to pasture on the General Board, an advisory panel for old admirals with no place to go. His cold driving personality had not made him loved. He had bruised egos and damaged careers. Shortly after Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt appointed him Commander-in-Chief of the United States Fleet.

  King is said to have observed, "When things get tough they send for the sons of bitches." In the Wehrmacht, alas, when "things got tough" the Fuhrer sent for the sycophants.

  Besides the problem of the rampaging Japanese, King had to contend with the fixed Roosevelt-Churchill policy, Germany First The Combined Chiefs of Staff were neglecting "his" war in favor of the bigger conflict. King's cold-blooded solution was the attack on Tulagi, which evolved into the Guadaicarial campaign.

  Japanese War Aim

  Despite some blustering rhetoric, the Japanese were not seeking to crush the United States of America in war. Their aim was limited. In their view, Southeast Asia was none of America's business. Thanks to our conquest of Europe the time had come to throw out the imperialist exploiters, and to found a peaceful Greater East Asia for the Asians, including a pacified China; a so-called Co-prosperity Sphere under Japanese leadership, friendly to the coming world master, Germany.

  Their military aim was a quick conquest of the desired areas, then a tough perimeter defense on interior lines. The hope was that the far-off p
rosperous Americans would tire of a costly war in which they were not very interested, and would make a face-saving peace. This might well have worked, except for the attack on Pearl Harbor, which roused in the proud Yanks, and especially in their fine navy, an, irrational cowboy thirst for frontier vengeance.

  TRANSLATOR'S NOTE to the third edition, October 1973: The VietNam experience is making me wonder whether Roon is not absolutely right about this. - V. H.

  American,WarAim

  On the other hand, for twenty years the United States Navy had been plotting to destroy Japan if American hegemony was ever challenged by "the yellow peril." Assuming the Japanese would be maneuvered into striking first, their war games had produced a cut-and-dried plan of counterattack. After the war, as has been said, Chester von Nimitz claimedthe U.S.A. had won the war along the exact lines planned at the Naval War College.

  The plan was: 1. Hold a line of communication to the main rward bases in Australia and New Zealand, with installations along a curve of islands outside Japanese aircraft range.

  2. Batter northward through the archipelagoes of the southwest Pacific in flank attack.

  3. Thrust the main assault westward across the Central Pacific atolls, in an island-hopping strike toward Luzon and Japan.

  But King had trouble getting enough force in his theatre to execute the plan. General George Marshall, the Chief of Staff of the United States Army, an able planner and organizer, was adamant on "Germany First," and a full-scale invasion of France in 1943. He wanted to concentrate on an immediate buildup in England of American manpower and materiel.

  Happily for King, all the British leaders from Churchill down kept waffling on the invasion. They remembered the Somme and Dunkirk all too well. In July 1942, Marshall in great disgust therefore recommended to President Roosevelt that the Americans throw their weight into the Japanese conflict.

  King seized this favoring moment to push the execution of a quick modest aggressive move in the Pacific: the capture of a Japanese seaplane base in the Solomons, the small island of Tulagi. Though already authorized, the Tulagi operation had stalled in an army-navy argument over supreme command. Now it went forward, with a complicated deal on command, which temporarily dodged the impasse. Soon afterward the American and British war planners settled on the North African landings called "Torch," but King's operation meantime went ahead. it was called Operation Watchtower.

  His forces were so meager that in the field they dubbed it Shoestring.

  TRANSLATOR'S NOTE: I omit here a long Roon analysis of the conflict between the Army and the Navy over the Pacific command issue and the Tulagi idea. MacArthur wanted to try a more ambitious shot, the capture of the big Japanese air base of Rabaul Roon comments, "Vanity of leaders can divert or wreck campaigns. The divided command problem between MacArthur and Nimitz haunted the Pacific war and resulted in the stupendous botch at Leyte Gulf." In a later chapter I include a controversial essay by Roon on the Battle of Leyte Gulf. V.

  H.

  First Bawd

  Combat preparations for taking Tulagi were well along, when a coastwatcher intelligence report greatly raised the stakes of the operation. Only a few miles from Tulagi, the Japanese were building an airfield on the large island of Guadalcanal.

  This was explosive news. Pacific combat turned on local air superiority, and air power meant either carriers or airfields in the battle zone. Flattops could move about, bringing power where needed; also, they could flee from strong threats. On the other hand, airfields were unsinkable, and land-based planes could fly farther than carrier aircraft, with heavier bombs. An operational airfield was the strongest piece in Pacific chess.

  Seven hundred miles northwest of Guadalcanal, the Rabaul air base threatened the line to Australia and barred an advance toward Japan.

  Hence MacArthur's dashing plan, which King had vetoed, to strike there.

  But an airfield as far south as Guadalcanal was a menace King could not accept. Denying it to the foe, he would gain local air superiority in the Solomons, and American airpower could trade punches at long range with Rabaul. Shoestring forces already embarked received added orders: Capture and hold the Guadalcanal airfield.

  And so America sidled, as it were, into its most arduous Pacific campaign.

  Guadalcanal itself, a potato-shaped island a hundred miles long and half as wide, was never the prize. For months the land fighting raged along a narrow plantation strip of the northern coast flanking the airfield. The rest of the mountainous island was left to the mosquitoes, the jungle wildlife, and the natives, who were probably both frightened and entertained by the noisy flaming fireworks along the north shore.

  The small, ill-equipped Shoestring expedition had little trouble capturing Tulagi and the Guadalcanal airfield, but the severe counterstroke from nearby Japanese bases came fast. In a night action called the Battle of Savo Island, Japanese warships sank the entire U.S. fire support force, four heavy cruisers, and departed unscathed.

  They could have finished the job and extinguished Shoestring by sinking the helpless half-emptied transports, but they had to assume that American aircraft carriers were steaming close by in the darkness and would attack at dawn. So they left, giving the Americans the brief breathing spell that saved their campaign. In war, when a strong enemy is down, one is well-advised to cut his throat. In point of fact, Vice Admiral Fletcher was out of combat range with his carriers, preparing to fuel. Fearing air attack from Rabaul, he had left while the transports were still unloading.

  Reprimanded by King earlier in the war for lack of aggressiveness, missing his chances in the Coral Sea, failing to launch all aircraft at once at Midway, Fletcher's career seems to have had one good moment: when he signalled Spruance at Midway, I will conform to your movements.

  By abandoning the transports at Guadalcanal he nearly lost the campaign at the outset. Whenever danger impended, this admiral seems to have been seized by an uncontrollable urge to steam away a couple of hundred miles and fuel. He fades from sight after Guadalcanal.

  TRANSLATOR'S NOTE: Roon continues to make a goat of Frank Jack Fletcher here. My cruiser Northampton missed the Battle of Savo Island, but I know that the Japanese leadership, gunnery, and torpedo fire were good at Savo, and ours were miserable.

  That was why we lost four cruisers. it is true that Fletcher might have struck a counter blow, and that his retreat was conservative.

  - V.H.

  Land Operations August 1942-February 1943

  Like their navy, the Japanese army seems to have been plagued by overconfidence; probably they wrote off Midway as mere navy ineptness.

  After all, white men had yet to defeat the Japanese on land. Busy with plans to assault New Guinea and threaten Australia, the army committed troops only piecemeal to Guadalcanal, not enough and not adequately supported; and the United States forces formed a perimeter around the airfield, often dented but never broken by wild and bloody banzai charges.

  Still, for a long time it was touch and go for the Americans. In effect they were stranded. Air bombardment, naval shelling, enemy night attack overland-and above all, marlaria and other tropical illnesses-decimated them. Their weakened navy could sneak in only scanty supplies and reinforcements. Hungry, thirsty, feeling forgotten and abandoned, they lived off captured Japanese rice, and burned Japanese gasoline. The few fresh aircraft and pilots that slipped in were quickly worn down or shot down.

  On one black day, Admiral Halsey's account avers, there was one operating aircraft on Henderson Field. President Roosevelt began publicly talking of Guadalcanal as a "minor" operation, a most ominous and pusillanimous signal. But the beleaguered marines and exhausted airmen clung to the perimeter until the tide turned.

  In view of the poor record of American soldiers elsewhere, this epic defense of Henderson Field is striking. These defenders were marines, the navy's elite amphibious combat corps. The words of the American naval historian, Samuel Eliot Morlson, perhaps explain all: Lucky indeed for America that in this t
heater and at that juncture she depended not on boys drafted or cajoled into fighting but on "tough guys" who had volunteered to fight and who asked for nothing better than to come to grips with the sneaking enemy who had aroused all their primitive instincts.

  TRANSLATOR'S NOTE: Roon's slurs on our army are intolerable.

  The Germans never won a victory against us in two wars, if one ignores the brush at Kasserine Pass. We even won the Battle of the Bulge. We marched to the Elbe. We could have taken Berlin, had the Allies not already agreed that it would belong in the Russian occupation zone.

  Considering our social and political background, and the traditional distaste of Americans for war, our soldiers became damned good. They, were irreverent and ingenious, they had initiative, and they fought hard without hate. Roon's mentality cannot absorb American combat policy, which is quite simple and non-European: to lose as few lives as possible, yet win battles and wars.