Copyright
First published in Great Britain in 2010 by Atlantic Books Ltd.
Copyright © 2010 Gordon Corrigan
The moral right of Gordon Corrigan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Acts of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
ISBN: 978-0-857-89135-8
First eBook Edition: January 2010
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CONTENTS
Cover
COPYRIGHT
LIST OF MAPS
INTRODUCTION
PRELUDE
FEBRUARY 1942
1 ON YOUR MARKS…
2 GET SET. . .
3 GO!
4 INTERLUDE: BRITAIN AT WAR:
MAY 1940–JUNE 1941
5 THE RUSSIAN WAR:
JUNE–OCTOBER 1941
6 THE ASIAN WAR:
SEPTEMBER–DECEMBER 1941
7 THE MEDITERRANEAN WAR:
JUNE 1941–AUGUST 1942
8 THE RUSSIAN WAR:
OCTOBER 1941–NOVEMBER 1942
9 THE ASIAN WAR:
DECEMBER 1941–MAY 1942
10 THE MEDITERRANEAN WAR:
AUGUST 1942–MAY 1943
11 THE ASIAN WAR:
DECEMBER 1941–NOVEMBER 1942
12 THE RUSSIAN WAR:
NOVEMBER 1942–JUNE 1944
13 THE ASIAN WAR:
JUNE 1942–AUGUST 1944
14 THE EUROPEAN WAR:
MAY 1943–AUGUST 1944
15 THE SEA AND AIR WAR
16 THE AXIS RETREAT:
AUGUST–NOVEMBER 1944
17 THE HOME WAR
18 END GAME:
DECEMBER 1944–SEPTEMBER 1945
19 CHECKMATE:
JANUARY 1945–DECEMBER 1946
EPILOGUE
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
INDEX
LIST OF MAPS
1 Europe, 1937 and 1942
2 Far East, 1936–42
3 Poland, September 1939
4 Battle of France 10 May–30 May 1940
5 The Desert, December 1940
6 Russia, June 1941–November 1942
7 North Africa and Tunisia, November, 1942–April 1943
8 The Japanese Conquest of Malaya, 7/8 December 1941–31 January 1942
9 The Fall of Singapore, 8–14 February 1942
10 The Battle for Hong Kong, 8–25 December 1941
11 Burma, 1941–1945
12 Philippines, 1942–1945
13 Papua New Guinea and the Solomons, June 1942–September 1945
14 Sicily and Italy, 1943
15 Northern Italy, September 1944–April 1945
16 Stalingrad, 1942
17 Russia, November 1942–June 1944
18 Normandy and North-West Europe, June 1944–February 1945
19 Russia, June 1944–May 1945
INTRODUCTION
On the first day of September 1939, German forces struck at Poland, and what was to become known as the Second World War officially began. To begin with, despite the involvement of Germany, France and Britain, what fighting that did take place was confined to Europe. Even twelve months later, the only fighting on land was relatively small-scale scuffling in the Horn of Africa and along the Libyan coast, for France had surrendered and the tiny British Expeditionary Force had been driven from Europe. The following year, however, Germany invaded Russia and a whole new dimension opened up. Later in the same year, the involvement of the United States and Japan made the war truly global.
In 1939 the powers of the first rank – or those that considered themselves to be in the first rank, the Great Powers – were Britain, France, Germany, the USA, the USSR and Japan. Of these, all at some stage entered the war, and all but France were still engaged at the end. Of the second- and third-rank powers, Italy, China, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, Spain, Holland, Belgium, Norway and Denmark were all involved, although Spain did not declare war, despite providing a contingent of troops and an air squadron under German command on the Eastern Front. When all those who declared war – whether or not they actually provided combat units – and all those who provided troops – whether or not they actually declared war – and all those who were occupied or attacked with or without a declaration of war are totted up, then we find that the perhaps astonishing total of fifty-five nations can be said to have been officially involved in the war.*
Many – nay, most – of these fifty-five made no military contribution or, if they did, were of little use. Germany’s official allies – Italy, Romania, Hungary, Finland and Bulgaria – were more of a hindrance than a help and needed constant bolstering up or bailing out by German resources. On the other hand, it is often forgotten (because it is inconvenient to remember it) that there were many Poles and Russians in German service who fought well until the end, and that the Waffen SS happily recruited Belgians, Dutchmen, Scandinavians, Balts and even Frenchmen, all of whom did well by their masters. Indeed, it is difficult not to have some sympathy with those who afterwards were considered traitors. The USSR had not ratified the Geneva Convention, and was thus not entitled to its protection. When the choice was between languishing (or, more likely, being worked to death) in a German prison camp, and taking part in the international crusade against Bolshevism, with three square meals a day, a salary and a uniform to boot, the argument for collaboration was persuasive. Poles might not have liked the Germans, but they didn’t like the Russians either. Similarly, there were many Western Europeans who had no particular love for Britain, and genuinely saw Russia as a threat, as of course she was.
Of those nations which rowed in on the Allied side, many, having been invaded and occupied by Axis forces, had little option, although a finalist for the prize for bare-faced cheek must be the London-based government-in-exile of Luxembourg (population 300,000), which in December 1942 declared war on Germany, Italy and Japan. But Luxembourg was at least occupied by Germany (and indeed annexed by her as Gau Moselland), so the trophy must be awarded to the government of Liberia, most of whose citizens were unlikely to have ever seen a German, or to have known where Germany was, but which nevertheless declared war on Germany and Japan on 27 January 1944. It is not at all clear what contribution Haiti, having declared war on Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania on Christmas Eve 1941, thought she could make to the cause of democracy and the freedom of small nations, but the award for blatant opportunism is shared between Argentina, who declared war on Germany and Japan on 27 March 1945, six weeks before Germany’s surrender, and the Soviet Union, who declared war on Japan on 8 August 1945, six days before Japan’s unconditional surrender. There is no prize for a complete and total inability to feel national embarrassment, but if there were it would have to go to Italy, who declared war on Britain and France on 10 June 1940, four days before German troops marched into Paris, invaded Greece on 28 October 1940 without telling her German allies and got a very bloody nose, surrendered to the British and Americans on 8 September 1943 and then declared war on Germany five weeks later, thus adhering to Napoleon’s dictum that no Italian state had ever finished a war on the same side as that on which it had started, except when it had changed sides twice.
At the height of the Second
World War, the battle raged – or, in some cases, stagnated – in three of the world’s seven continents. There had, of course, been world wars before, although the term was but recently coined. The 1914–18 war was not referred to as the First World War until the Second started – before that, it was simply the Great War. In that conflagration there had been serious fighting in only two of the seven continents, but, with all the then Great Powers – the USA and the empires of Britain, France, Russia, Austria-Hungary and Germany – involved, and a total of twenty-eight participants, a world war it undoubtedly was. During the nineteenth century’s major disagreement between countries that mattered – the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, which lasted from 1791 to 1814, with a final spasm in 1815* – fighting took place in four continents: Europe, Asia, Africa and America. The Powers – England, France, Austria, Russia and Prussia – and nearly every other European state were all involved, and so that must also qualify as a world war. Prior to that, the Seven Years War, from 1756 to 1763, saw serious combat in three continents – four, if one includes naval engagements – and the involvement of the Powers, leading one inescapably to the conclusion that it too must be classified as a world war.
While it would be perfectly sound, therefore, to nominate the Seven Years War as the First World War, the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars as the Second, and the Kaiser’s War the Third, with 1939–45 being the Fourth World War, it is not my intention to tilt at windmills by trying to change the universally accepted nomenclature; it is merely to make the point that global war has not been confined to the disputes of the twentieth century. Some historians, of course, are of the view that the two world wars of the twentieth century were in fact one war, with an armistice between 1918 and 1939, and, in that the settlement at Versailles in 1919 did result in a whole plethora of provocations which Germany was bound to try to resolve once she was strong enough, there is much merit in that argument. Versailles was not, however, the sole forcing house for the rise of extreme German nationalism; there were economic, cultural and racial factors too, along with an unwillingness, or an inability, on the part of France and Britain to deter Germany and Italy until it was far too late.
Although war on a global scale was nothing new, there are certain aspects of what we shall continue to call the Second World War that were. In previous conflicts civilians had rarely been targeted. True, besieged populations tended to starve, but that was incidental, and marauding armies tended to spread disease, and not only of the venereal variety. More recently, Boer women and children had died in British camps but this was due to a failure to understand health and hygiene rather than, as some South African historians still allege, a deliberate policy of genocide. In the first war, German shelling of English coastal towns along with attacks on London and elsewhere by Zeppelins and Gotha bombers had killed a few British civilians, but the intention here had been clear – to entice units of the Royal Navy into battle or to hit military targets. In the second war, however, both sides deliberately sought to kill each other’s civilians, mainly from the air. That the Blitz by the Luftwaffe and the de-housing of the German population by the Royal and United States Army Air Forces failed to bring an end to the war by themselves, or even to dent morale, and that it took a very long time to seriously affect industrial production, is irrelevant. While air forces attacking England or Germany or occupied Europe occasionally remembered to claim that they were aiming for military targets and that civilian deaths were collateral, there was no pretence that the fire-bombing of Tokyo and the dropping of atomic weapons on Japan were anything but the deliberate wiping out of large chunks of the population. There was, too, a racial dimension: large amounts of high explosive dropped on Germans were one thing, but nobody ever suggested dropping an atomic bomb on them. Germans may have been the enemy but they were still, after all, white, civilized and Christian, whereas the Japanese were the Yellow Peril and Japan was a very long way away. However targeted, civilians were nevertheless in the front line and this, along with the mobilization of the whole energies and resources of the combatant nations towards one end, makes the Second World War history’s first total war.*
We tend to think of the Second World War as one war, with nations joining – or leaving – at intervals. In many ways, however, there were a number of wars all going on at the same time. Germany’s war with Russia, from 1941 until 1945, is almost a separate conflict: Russia accepted all manner of materiel from the West, particularly wheeled transport (she didn’t think much of British or American tanks), but she told her supposed allies very little of her war aims or her operational plans, nor would she have subordinated them to any overall direction that did not coincide with her own agenda. As far as Germany was concerned, it was in the East that the real war was being fought: North Africa and Italy were subsidiary theatres and, even at the height of the Normandy campaign, never less than 75 per cent of the Wehrmacht was deployed on the Eastern Front.
When the United States of America joined the war in 1941, it was one of Churchill’s few real contributions to eventual victory (or, perhaps more accurately in the British case,‘eventual not losing’) that he persuaded President Roosevelt to adopt the Germany First policy, even though many Americans saw Japan as being a greater and more immediate threat to them. That said, the USA’s direct military (as opposed to industrial) contribution to the war in the West was modest until June 1944, and the big American battles were in the Pacific. In contrast, as far as Britain was concerned, the war in the Far East was almost peripheral, and for the most part manpower and materiel were only committed to it if they were surplus to requirements in the West: what happened in the East could not directly affect the existence of the United Kingdom as an independent nation.As for Japan, she did not even inform Germany of her intention to initiate war with the United States and Britain, and, while Germany did immediately declare war on America, there was no coordination of Japanese and German strategy. In many ways, therefore, the Far East theatre was also a separate war.
Countries may operate as part of a coalition – indeed, on land Britain has only very rarely fought alone – but that does not mean that the war aims of that coalition’s members necessarily coincide. The preservation of the British Empire was, for example, of no concern to the United States – indeed, some Americans welcomed the thought of its disintegration. Britain seriously considered whether she was obliged to declare war on the USSR when that country gobbled up its agreed share of Poland in September 1939,and she sent RAF fighters to support the Finns in their Winter War.* British and American politicians and chiefs of staff disagreed profoundly as to the need for and the merits of the Italian campaign, and there were severe differences of opinion as to the best time to launch Operation Overlord, the invasion of North-West Europe.
As for technology, war has always inspired its development, but this conflict gave birth to little that was actually novel – most was merely a refinement of what was there before. Radar, the delivery of troops by parachute, battlefield radio, ballistic missiles and atomic weapons were certainly new. Aircraft and tanks, however, along with aircraft carriers and submarines, had all been used in the first war, as had plastic surgery, even if their development before and during the second produced machines and weapons systems that would have been almost unrecognizable when set beside those of 1914–18. The frail, single-seater flying machine of 1914 which relied on wing warp to control its progress through the air had metamorphosed into long-range bombers and jet fighters, the Mark I tank of 1916 had become the Panzer Mark VI Tiger, and the 1914 carrier HMS Ark Royal, a 7,500-ton converted merchant ship carrying seven sea and land planes, was by 1945 the 60,000-ton USS Midway with her complement of 137 of the most modern aircraft.
* * *
Authors of accounts of wars, revolutions, economic collapse and divers catastrophes like to talk about gathering storm clouds, and from the early 1930s onwards there was indeed a plethora of indicators that war was coming. The trouble was that nobody, or almost nobod
y, paid very much attention. Britain was ostensibly still a superpower; the Royal Navy patrolled the sea lanes, although Britain had surrendered absolute command of the oceans in the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922, unable to fund the naval construction programme necessary to retain it. It was literally true that the sun never set on the British Empire, but despite all the flags and parades there were huge weaknesses. Having been severely mauled by the Geddes Axe of 1921, the British armed forces totalled only half a million men, and the British Army was still armed with much the same equipment that it had fielded in 1918, but with rather less of it. With no money for interwar experimentation, the army that had invented Blitzkrieg in 1918 now had few tanks and little experience of air-to-ground cooperation. The only aspect of defence to have received any serious attention at all had been air defence, but with the Royal Air Force funded on the understanding that, in the event of another European war, there would be no land component sent across the Channel, there was a serious shortage of air support for the British Expeditionary Force when political priorities changed and it was, after all, sent to France in 1939.
France possessed a huge army, but its generals were fixated on a rerun of 1914–18 and its soldiers were mostly underpaid and poorly fed conscripts. The French did have some military thinkers of vision and originality and did possess a large number of very good tanks, but the military establishment had not agreed on how they should be used and in the event most were spread far too thinly or employed merely as semi-mobile gun platforms. As a result, they were easily outmanoeuvred by German armour that was of lesser mechanical quality but directed by men who had given a great deal of thought to its employment. Furthermore, the Third Republic was riven by political and social strife and, as the subsequent adherence to Pétain and Vichy showed, there were many French men and women who thought that the whole edifice was so rotten that only by knocking it all down and starting again could France be restored to her proper place in the world.
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