And now the soldiers awaited the politicians’ decision on Greece. For a time even Churchill drew back. Military co-ordination with the Greeks was faltering; the Balkan common front seemed less likely than ever; a German general named Erwin Rommel was building up striking power in Libya. “Do not consider yourselves obligated to a Greek enterprise if in your hearts you feel it will only be another Norwegian fiasco,” Churchill wired to Eden in Cairo. But Eden, Dill, and Waved favored standing by Greece, no matter how hazardous the course.
It was less Churchillian strategy than Churchillian temperament that decided the issue. For months his febrile eye had been sweeping the shores of Europe for openings. He had a leaning toward quick, daring assaults that would exploit Britain’s sea power, keep the enemy off balance, minimize losses, and widen the role of heroism and dash. With all his bent for modern arms, he had a distaste for mass armies, for their heavy apparatus of mechanics, signalmen, lorries, supply depots, laundries, motor pools. War for him was still an enterprise for bravery and brawn, for mobile forces darting and feeling and jabbing. And behind his strategy and temperament was a sense of history—of the role of character and courage, of contingency and chance. One vast effort might fail and all would be lost. Many efforts by unflinching men along a broad periphery might fail, too, but one force might get through and open up a host of new opportunities.
So London stayed committed to Greece, and on April 6—the same day they invaded Yugoslavia—the Germans smashed into the little country from the northeast.
There was something magnificent about a nation, itself beleagured, that stood by its commitment to a small ally despite a sinking realization of the hazards. It was magnificent—but it was not war. Hitler, as usual, followed the soldier’s strategy of massing overwhelming force at the crucial points, and his strategic initiative gave him tactical flexibility. He marshaled fourteen divisions—four armored—for a quick assault. Gallantry and dash on the other side were not enough. Soon the British troops with their Greek comrades were streaming south in a nightmare of shrieking Stukas, burned-out vehicles, blocked one-lane mountain roads, dust, and mud. The British Navy rescued the survivors off the southern coasts of the Peloponnesus; 12,000 dead, wounded, and prisoners were left behind.
Meantime, in North Africa the other pincer was turning. Hitler had not planned a major offensive toward Cairo, but once again he was in the right place with the biggest battalions. Testing the British and Australian defenses, Rommel soon felt out the weaknesses resulting from the diversion to Greece. Then, in a series of nicely executed strokes, he turned Wavell’s left flank, drove the British out of Benghazi, and put Tobruk under siege. Wavell’s great turn-of-the-year victory over Italy was canceled out.
The third and crudest chapter was to come: Crete. With Greece and Yugoslavia secured, Hermann Goering planned an audacious exercise for his pilots, glider men, and paratroops—the first large-scale air-borne attack in history. The Germans mobilized 16,000 paratroopers and mountain soldiers and about 1,200 planes. The blow fell on May 20. The defenders killed hundreds of Germans in the air and on the ground; the British Navy in one night destroyed a convoy, drowning 4,000 men. But the Germans kept coming by air. Within a week the British were performing another miracle of evacuation—and Hitler was celebrating his most daring victory of all.
By now Churchill’s strategy was under heavy fire. Old David Lloyd George, his chief in World War I, rose in the House of Commons to flay the conduct of the war. He remembered passing through discouraging days in the first war. “But we have had our third, our fourth great defeat and retreat.” There was no question about Churchill’s brilliance, he went on. But he needed some “ordinary persons” around him—” men against whom he can check his ideas, who are independent, who will stand up to him and tell him really what they think.…” A dozen other members joined in the attack. Before a rapt house Churchill responded with spirit to Lloyd George’s “not particularly exhilarating talk.” So the former Premier wanted the present one to “be surrounded by people who would stand up to me and say, ‘No, No, No,’ ” Churchill declaimed. “Why, good gracious, has he no idea how strong the negative principle is in the constitution and working of the British war-making machine?” The problem was not more brakes, but more speed. “At one moment we are asked to emulate the Germans in their audacity and vigour, and the next moment the Prime Minister is to be assisted by being surrounded by a number of ‘No-men’.”
Only three Members voted against the government, but recriminations swelled after the debacle in Crete. Churchill grumbled in the House that neither Hitler nor Mussolini had been summoned before their parliaments to account for their mistakes. He reminded the Members that the Germans could readily shift air power along the interior railroads and airways of Europe, while Britain had to send aircraft “packed in crates, then put on ships and sent on the great ocean spaces until they reach the Cape of Good Hope, then taken to Egypt, set up again, trued up and put in the air when they arrive….” He would not go into tactical details. “Defeat is bitter.” The only answer to defeat was victory.
In Parliament Churchill overcame his foes; it was his friends who puzzled him. After Greece, Roosevelt wired him condolences on the loss, congratulations on British heroism in the “wholly justified delaying action,” but added ominously: “Furthermore, if additional withdrawals become necessary, they will all be a part of the plan which at this stage of the war shortens British lines, greatly extends the Axis lines, and compels the enemy to expend great quantities of men and equipment. I am satisfied that both here and in Great Britain public opinion is growing to realize that even if you have to withdraw farther in the Eastern Mediterranean, you will not allow any great debacle or surrender, and that in the last analysis the naval control of the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean will in time win the war.”
Churchill bridled at what seemed to be Roosevelt’s counsel of despair. The loss of Egypt and the Middle East would be grave, he warned Roosevelt. In this war every post was a winning-post, “and how many more are we going to lose?” He would be frank. “The one decisive counterweight I can see to balance the growing pessimism in Turkey, the Near East, and in Spain would be if United States were immediately to range herself with us as a belligerent Power.”
Defeat is bitter. After the loss of the Balkans, Churchill faced strategic bankruptcy. Where could he stop Hitler? During these anxious weeks his soldiers had mopped up Italians in East Africa and bested Vichy Frenchmen in Syria; but they had not beaten Nazis. By June he was reduced to the tactics of desperation: to bolster the defense against Rommel he took the terrible risk of sending ships loaded with tanks directly through Gibraltar to Wavell, depleting tank strength at home and risking sinkings in the Mediterranean. The gamble succeeded, but Wavell still could not force Rommel back. Reluctantly Churchill decided to shift Wavell out of the Mideast command. Nothing seemed to be going well. In May the Germans gave London its worst bombing yet and destroyed much of the House of Commons; Churchill stood in the wreckage and cried.
It was clearer to him than ever: America was his only hope. So far, he told the House of Commons in his May 7 speech, his government had made no serious mistakes in dealing with Washington. “Neither by boasting nor by begging have we offended them.” Now must be awaited the full deployment of that mighty democracy of 130 million people. But everyone knew that time was getting short, and the mighty democracy was moving with awful deliberation. Churchill concluded a broadcast to his people:
“For while the tired waves, vainly breaking,
Seem here no painful inch to gain,
Far back, through creeks and inlets making, Comes silent, flooding in, the main.
“And not by eastern windows only,
When daylight comes, comes in the light;
In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly,
But westward, look, the land is bright.”
KONOYE: THE VIEW TOWARD CHUNGKING
Eastward the land was dark and di
squieting. During the lull of 1940-41, London and Washington tried to divine Tokyo’s next moves. Would the Japanese expand their drive into China, or turn north toward Soviet Siberia, or south toward the exposed colonies of France and Holland, or east toward the Philippines or even Hawaii? Step by step the soldiers and diplomats of Tokyo had been building the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere; they had occupied Hainan, poured troops into northern French Indochina, signed the Tripartite Pact, set up a puppet government in Nanking, demanded oil and trade in the Dutch East Indies. What next?
Rumors drifted through Tokyo. “…There is a lot of talk around town to the effect that the Japanese, in case of a break with the United States, are planning to go all out in a surprise mass attack on Pearl Harbor,” Ambassador Grew noted in his diary late in January 1941. “I rather guess the boys in Hawaii are not precisely asleep.”
In fact the Japanese had no master plan, no global strategy, to guide their expansionist thrust. Hopes that had bloomed in mid-1940, after the fall of France and the air blitz on Britain, were ebbing. Tokyo had calculated that Axis power and unity might discourage British and American aid to China, attract Russia to the Tripartite Pact, and persuade Chiang to accept a settlement dictated by Japan. Instead, Russia, as well as Great Britain and the United States, was still giving aid and comfort to Chungking. Now the Japanese were waiting on the next move abroad—on Hitler’s strategic decisions, Britain’s capacity to survive, America’s response to Axis moves.
No co-ordinated strategy at this point could have emerged from the unstable equilibrium over which Premier Konoye presided. Every week or so, in a small room at his residence, a “liaison conference” was held to link diplomatic and military policy. The meetings were dominated by the military—by Army and Navy Chiefs of Staff, and by young staff officers in close touch with extremist elements in the General Staff. But the division in Tokyo was not simply between the soldiers and the civilians. The military leaders, too, were divided—especially the Navy and the Army—and some of the civilians were more militant than some of the military. Foreign Minister Matsuoka startled even the saber-rattlers with his grandiose dreams of expansion.
Unsure of their strategy, divided in their councils, the Japanese tried to divine the inscrutable Occident. Would their German ally launch an invasion of Britain, or turn south, or even attack Russia? Could Britain maintain its power in the Pacific—in India, Singapore, Hong Kong—if the Nazis stepped up their pressure on the home islands, in Africa, or in the Atlantic? Above all, what about the United States? To Tokyo planners Roosevelt seemed the most baffling of Western leaders. He appeared to shift overnight from conciliation to threats to high-blown preaching to invitations to parley. But item by item—so gradually as to rob Tokyo of a dramatic issue—he was restricting the export of war materials to Japan.
In February Matsuoka left Tokyo on a good-will mission to Moscow and Berlin. He had a vaulting ambition—endorsed by many of his colleagues in the liaison conferences—both to tighten Japan’s bonds with its Axis partners and to bargain for Soviet recognition of Japan’s role in northern China, Manchuria, and the whole Co-Prosperity Sphere. Thus Japan’s northern flank would be protected while its soldiers drove deeper toward Chungking—protected, too, in the event that its Navy and Army turned south.
In Washington, Roosevelt viewed the journey with wry detachment. “When it is announced that a certain gentleman starts for Berlin and Rome,” he wrote to Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles, “it might be possible for the Secretary or you to express a slight raising of the eyebrows in surprise that he is not also planning to visit Washington on his way home!”
Matsuoka’s first stop after taking the slow train across Siberia was Moscow, where he offered Stalin a nonaggression pact. The Russians were cautious. Then on to Berlin, where Matsuoka was received with pomp and punctilio. Soon he was closeted with Hitler, who concentrated on impressing his visitor even though he was in the midst of the Yugoslav crisis. To his silent guest the Führer boasted of his war successes: how he had crushed sixty Polish divisions, six Norwegian, eighteen Dutch, and twenty-two Belgian, one hundred and thirty-eight French, all in a year and a half; how he had routed the British Army in France; how he was winning the Battle of the Atlantic and bailing out the unlucky Italians in North Africa. England had already lost the war and was now simply looking for any straw to grasp. It had only two—America and Russia.
He did not want to provoke Roosevelt into war, he went on, at least for the time being. America had three choices: it could arm itself, or it could assist England, or it could fight on another front. If it helped England it could not arm itself. If it abandoned England, the latter would be destroyed and America would be left isolated and facing the Axis. But in no case could America wage war on another front. As for Russia, the Reich had made treaties with that country, but far more important were the 160 to 180 German divisions for “defense” against Russia. Hitler said not a word to Matsuoka about his plans for its invasion.
Then Hitler dangled the bait before the Foreign Minister’s gold spectacles. This, he said, was the perfect moment—indeed, it was unique in history—for Japanese action against Britain. Of course there was risk, but it was small now, with Russia immobilized by German divisions on its western border, Britain weak in the East, and America in only the early stages of rearming. The Axis, moreover, would suffer no division of interests; Germany, whose interest lay in Africa, was as little concerned with East Asia as Japan was with Europe. America would not dare move west of Hawaii.
At last Hitler stopped talking and looked challengingly at the Foreign Minister. Matsuoka spoke guardedly. He agreed with the Führer in principle, he said. He himself wanted to follow such a strategy—he had specifically favored an attack on Singapore—but he could not overcome the weak intellectuals, businessmen, court circles, and all the others who were balking him. He could make no commitment, but he would personally work for the goals he and the Führer shared. Hitler was visibly disappointed, and he decided to show his hand a bit. Bidding Matsuoka good-by, he said: “When you get back to Japan, you cannot report to your Emperor that a conflict between Germany and the Soviet Union is out of the question.” But the Foreign Minister left Berlin, as Hitler carefully planned, without any definite knowledge of Nazi plans for Russia.
If Hitler deceived his Japanese ally on the most crucial question of the day, Matsuoka had an agreeable opportunity to turn the tables when he returned to Moscow. Not only had Hitler made clear that Russia would not be invited to join the Tripartite Pact, but Ribbentrop had advised Matsuoka not to get too involved with the Russians. Matsuoka still had his own game: settling his nation’s differences with the Russians. Those differences were acute: Soviet aid to China, Japanese threats to Moscow’s Far Eastern borders, and Russian demands that Japan sell the southern part of Sakhalin as against Tokyo’s insistence on its oil and coal rights in the Soviet northern half. In several days of hard bargaining, Matsuoka won Stalin’s approval of a simple neutrality agreement that avoided the basic issues. Stalin merely dropped his demand for southern Sakhalin in response to Matsuoka’s promise that he would urge his government to ease its objectives in northern Sakhalin. The cardinal point was an agreement to maintain neutrality in case either party was attacked by a third.
Konoye welcomed Matsuoka home with his pact. The Japanese rejoiced; their Foreign Minister had managed—seemingly—to strengthen ties with Berlin and at the same time narrow the danger of Soviet pressure in Asia. There was some grumbling. The diplomatic and military situation in the southern seas was as awkward as ever. But now Tokyo could turn to its main goal: the final conquest of China through war and diplomacy. Now Chiang would see the futility of his efforts; now Washington would reconsider its aid to Chungking. All other considerations of strategy were subordinated to this transcendental goal. Japan’s prestige and honor were too exposed, the military too entangled, the people too psychologically committed, the losses already suffered too great, the political r
epercussions of a withdrawal from China too dire, for Japan now to compromise its long struggle on the mainland.
In Chungking, a thousand miles up the Yangtze from the coast, the Nationalist government experienced neither the luxury nor the quandary of strategic choice. At the end of 1940, after three years of resistance, the Chinese faced a bellicose enemy holding almost all his seaports and the richer sections of the country. With insouciance, Japanese aircraft rained bombs on the capital; the Nationalists had neither planes nor guns to drive them away. People huddled in deep dugouts in the high cliffs of the city; any day correspondents could see bloated human corpses floating down the river, drifting against junks, and being pushed away by boatmen with long spiked poles.
In an unpretentious mansion called “Ying Wo” (“Eagle’s Nest”) lived Generalissimo and Madame Chiang Kai-shek and a small staff of servants and guards. With his wiry frame and lean chiseled features, the Generalissimo looked like the ascetic he was; he dressed in simple khaki uniforms, ate lightly, drank little, and smoked not at all. But in early 1941 he presided over a country with a horrifying contrast between rich and poor, even in wartime; a country becoming slowly more disorganized, demoralized, and even defeatist. Chiang was still the public symbol of national revolution, but by now he was as anti-Communist as he was anti-Japanese. His army, underfed and badly cared for, was barely able to stabilize the front; and the old admiration for the Nationalist leader was changing in some quarters to suspicion that he was far more anxious to protect his postwar position and bleed the Americans than to withstand the Japanese.
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