Second World War, The

by Corrigan, Gordon

  In the event, faced with a problem that had numerous possible solutions, Japan shut its collective eyes, jumped headlong and hoped for the best. The decision-makers knew what they wanted, but they also knew that, while they might win a war with the British, who would be knocked out by Germany before they could react to a threat to their Asian territories, and the Dutch, who were already conquered, they could not win a long war with the United States. However, it was Yamamoto, who had so strongly opposed war with America, who was the driving force behind the eventual Japanese plan. Given that war could not be avoided, not least because Japan could not comply with American proposals that she should withdraw from China, where she had already suffered 160,000 dead, then only by a surprise attack which removed at a stroke the United States’ war-making potential in the Pacific could Japan hope to seize the areas producing the raw materials she needed and establish the ring of bases necessary to defend them. By the time America recovered, the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere would be a fait accompli that she would have to accept. Even then, Yamamoto was not entirely happy: he said that he was confident that Japan could win the battles for the first year, but that after that he was ‘not sure’, which for a Japanese raised in the samurai tradition is as near as it is possible to get to saying: ‘Don’t do it. We can’t win.’

  The plan eventually agreed to and made law by the fixing of the emperor’s seal was, after all, for a surprise attack. The Anglo-Saxons were encircling Japan and attempting to strangle her by economic boycott: national survival was at stake and, even more important, Japanese self-esteem. It was better to go to war, even if that ended in defeat, than back down now. Phase One would entail six simultaneous surprise attacks on Thailand (then Siam) in order to provide a secure base for operations against Malaya and Burma; a landing in northern Malaya to obtain a jumping-off point for the attack on Singapore; the seizure of the American islands of Guam and Wake and the British Gilbert Islands to block the American sea route to the Philippines; the capture of Hong Kong; and, vitally, the destruction of the American Pacific Fleet with one mighty blow. Once Japanese flanks were thus secured, a landing would be made in the Philippines. Phase Two would eliminate resistance in Malaya and capture Singapore, establish air bases in southern Burma and occupy the northern Dutch East Indies and the Bismarck Archipelago. Phase Three would take Java, Sumatra and Burma, whereupon the land-grabbing would end and consolidation and exploitation would begin. The Japanese empire would cover a vast area of 4,000 miles from north to south and 3,000 from miles east to west – from Manchukuo to Java and from the Indian Ocean to New Guinea.

  The United States Pacific Fleet was based in Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, and, if it could be eliminated, America would be unable to intervene. It would be an extraordinary gamble. The only way the fleet could be attacked was from the sea, and, if a straightforward ship versus ship battle – one Japan would not necessarily lose but which might prove expensive for her – was to be avoided, the attack would have to be delivered without warning, which meant from the air. The Japanese strike force would have to sail across the Pacific to within aircraft range of Hawaii without being detected, and the American fleet would have to be in harbour at the time. The Americans expected any Japanese attack to come from the south-west, from the Japanese Marshall Islands, so the Japanese naval staff determined to attack from the north. This would mean sailing to the Kuriles, 1,000 miles north of Tokyo Bay, and then over 4,000 miles to a location 800 miles north of Hawaii that would be the jumping-off point. From there, the fleet would have to sail undetected to 200 miles from Pearl Harbor before it could launch its aircraft. The route decided upon would take the fleet into the stormy latitudes above 40° north, where few civil vessels ventured in winter, and would require cold-weather clothing for the men and anti-freeze precautions for the machinery and equipment. Assuming the fleet was able to launch its attack, the damage would be inflicted by bombs and torpedoes. The bombs held by the Japanese naval aviation units were designed to explode on impact and so would do little damage to armoured decks: what was needed was a bomb that would penetrate armour and then explode, and so the Japanese, even then masters of improvisation, took armour-piercing shells designed to be fired from naval guns and turned them into bombs. As Pearl was a shallow harbour, the standard torpedo dropped from the normal height would simply hit the seabed, and so pilots had to spend many hours practising dropping their missiles at wave-top level. The code name for the attack was Operation Z, an intentional reference to Admiral Togo’s victory over the Russian Fleet at Tsushima in 1905 when, taking a leaf out of Nelson’s book (and the Japanese navy had been trained by the British and knew all about the Nelson touch), he raised the Z flag and signalled the fleet: ‘On this one battle rests the fate of our nation. Let every man do his utmost.’

  The original plan for Operation Z envisaged four aircraft carriers with escorts, but the captains of Japan’s remaining two carriers complained so vehemently that Yamamoto relented and allowed them to come along as well. The attack group would therefore consist of six carriers, two battleships, two heavy cruisers, a light cruiser, eight destroyers, three tankers and a supply ship. Also heading for Hawaii, although on a different route, would be twenty-seven submarines: these would be deployed partly for reconnaissance and scouting purposes but also to deliver five midget submarines that would be unloaded from their parent vessels off Pearl Harbor. Radio silence would be maintained for the entire journey and any merchant ship met on the way would be sunk. On the carriers would be 396 aircraft: 81 fighters to protect the bombers and strafe targets on land, 135 dive-bombers, 140 conventional bombers and 40 torpedo-bombers. The force would be under the command of Vice-Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, a fifty-four-year-old torpedo specialist. In late November the ships began to assemble in the Inland Sea, between the islands of Honshu and Kyushu.

  That Japan was going to attack American and British possessions in the East was no surprise to the more perspicacious of those that were there – the signs had been evident for years – but in London the British government, preoccupied with other matters, chose to ignore them.At a War Cabinet meeting on 20 October 1941, the prime minister, Churchill, persisted in his wishful thinking and told the meeting that he did not foresee an attack in force on Malaya, and even on 3 December he insisted that war with Japan was ‘a remote possibility’.45 Even on the ground, where the evaluation of Japanese capabilities should have been better than that made in London, there were misconceptions. That many Japanese were apparently short and bandy-legged, bespectacled and with buck teeth, was taken as evidence of their military incompetence; they were said to be unable to operate at night and to be incapable of handling modern technology; and the sight of Japanese army officers tripping over the swords that they insisted on carrying in battle and the sloppy and ill-fitting uniforms of its men with their 1905-pattern rifles lent the service a faintly ridiculous air, at least to those more accustomed to Blanco and polish. To many, it was inconceivable that Japanese pilots could take on British or American aircraft in a fair fight, and in any case the Japanese would never embark on a war that they were bound to lose.

  In Washington, too, there were all sorts of indications that war was coming. The China lobby in the USA was a strong one, and most Americans failed to see the violence, corruption, cruelty and incompetence endemic in Chinese politics and instead idealized them as naive children who needed protection from the rapacious Japanese (and, come to that, from the British). The Secretary for the Interior, Harold Ickes, suggested to President Roosevelt that, as public opinion was strongly pro-Chinese and anti-Japanese, warlike moves by Japan might give the USA an excuse to get into the war without seeming to be an ally of communist Russia.46 The United States Navy, on the other hand, concerned that it was becoming more and more involved in the North Atlantic in protecting convoys to Britain, wanted hostilities in the Far East delayed as long as possible. On 26 July 1941 the United States had frozen Japanese assets held in America, followed by the UK and the Dutch
government-in-exile. What the Dutch did was almost immaterial, but the American and British action was not. On 25 November the US chief of army staff and the chief of naval operations sent signals to all American commanders abroad, including MacArthur in the Philippines and Major-General Walter C. Short, commanding in Hawaii, that war with Japan was increasingly likely. In both locations, little attention was paid.

  In October 1941 the German general staff had produced a paper on the Japanese position. It said that in the war in China time was on China’s side. Her inexhaustible supply of manpower and vast area were the country’s strengths, and this, coupled with the scorched-earth policy followed by Chinese armies, had forced Japan’s campaign to grind to a halt. It would be helpful to Germany if Japan were to attack the USSR, but, as this would do nothing to help Japan’s search for economic self-sufficiency, it was unlikely to happen. On the other hand, any action against the British would give Germany more room for manoeuvre in Europe, and an attack on America would discourage that country from getting involved in the European war. Hitler had assured the Japanese ambassador in Berlin that, if Japan found herself at war with the British and the Americans, Germany would come to her assistance, and on 29 November the Japanese government informed Germany that hostilities were likely and that war would come ‘sooner than anyone dreams’. By now the Japanese had decided that X-Day* would be 8 December in the East, which would still be 7 December in the USA, on the other side of the International Date Line.

  On 26 November the ships of Operation Z began to slip individually out of the Inland Sea and make their way north to a rendezvous in the Kuriles. On 7 December in the West and 8 December in the East, Japan struck the first blows in the final phase of the Asian War, and shortly afterwards she declared war on Britain and the United States; on the following day the United States, Britain and the British Empire, the Dutch and Yugoslav governments-in-exile, the Free French and several opportunistic South American states declared war on Japan. On 11 December, Germany, Italy and Romania declared war on the United States.

  7

  THE MEDITERRANEAN WAR

  JUNE 1941–AUGUST 1942

  The German attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941 came as a relief to the British prime minister, Winston Churchill, who had always hoped that the two dictators might fall out. Churchill had long been a scourge of the Bolsheviks: in 1919 he was one of the strongest supporters of military aid to the White Russians and in 1929 he threatened to resign from the Cabinet in protest against the Anglo-Soviet trade agreement. His well-developed powers of rhetoric were often ranged against the USSR, the ‘foul baboonery of Bolshevism’ and a ‘pestilence more destructive of life than the Black Death or the Spotted Typhus’ being among his milder comments. But in this matter at least, if in few others, Churchill was a realist.‘Russia’s danger is our danger,’ he said, and, if Hitler should invade Hell, he would at least make a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons. There was an instant announcement of support for the USSR and the speedy conclusion of a mutual assistance pact promising that neither the UK nor the USSR would make a separate peace. Supplies of war materiel were promised, but it would be some time before that could be provided; raids on Germany by the RAF would be increased, and, while Stalin’s demand for a landing on the French coast was entirely beyond British capabilities at this stage of the war, commando-type raids would be increased – although, realistically, they would have little, if any, effect on Barbarossa. Stalin was highly suspicious of the British – with good cause – and requests by the British embassy for information were referred to the published official communiqués, which were usually works of pure propaganda.

  For the British, Barbarossa, the attack on Russia, provided a breathing space: there were fewer air raids on British cities as Germany’s main efforts were directed eastwards, and there would now be less interest in supporting Rommel and his Afrika Korps in Libya. Not everyone in Britain was as cheerful as Churchill on hearing the news. The War Office thought that Russia could not possibly hold out for long and that, with the Red Army defeated and Russia conquered, the Germans would then be able to throw their full might against the British. Meanwhile, Churchill’s blandishments of the USA were having an advantageous effect. Roosevelt still had to tread very carefully not to go too far in advance of public opinion, which even by 1941, while generally sympathetic to Britain, did not support direct American involvement, but in his State of the Union speech to Congress on 6 January 1941 he warned of the dangers to America of a victory by what he termed the ‘Dictator Nations’ and promised American support for those who resisted aggression in Europe and, tellingly, in Asia. In April 1941 he was able to order American naval and air patrols to extend as far as Iceland and instruct them that they were to inform the British of any sightings of German warships. In July he ordered American troops to reinforce (and eventually replace) the British garrison that had occupied Iceland since the fall of Denmark, its owner, in May 1940. Then, in the initially highly secret Placentia Conference, which was held from 9 to 12 August, Roosevelt and Churchill met for the first time when the prime minister and his advisers on the battleship HMS Prince of Wales rendez-voused with the president and his team on the heavy cruiser USS Augusta off the coast of Newfoundland.

  Churchill and Roosevelt had already been communicating for some years by letter and telegram, and, while diplomats on both sides feared how the two prima donnas would react to each other, they need not have worried. Both men preferred personal diplomacy. To the irritation of their professional diplomats, they established an excellent working relationship and the result was the Atlantic Charter, which purported to set out the two nations’ war aims (even though the USA was not in the war). The British regarded the unity of the Empire as sacrosanct; the Americans had no interest in maintaining British imperial power. The Americans wanted the freedom of the seas to be guaranteed in peace and war; the British would not forego their traditional weapon of the blockade. The result was much weasel-wording but excellent propaganda, even if what it said came back to haunt both powers later on. The main points of the Charter said that neither Britain nor America had any territorial ambitions and nor did they intend boundary changes without the consent of the affected inhabitants; all peoples had the right to choose their own governments; equality of access to world trade would be guaranteed along with raw materials for all; there would be improved labour standards, economic advancement and social security; a lasting peace would give every nation the means of dwelling safely within their own boundaries; access to the high seas would be unhindered; and, finally, all nations would abandon the use of force. In short, it was sanctimonious claptrap.

  On 4 September the United States moved a step further towards war when the American destroyer USS Greer, on the way to Iceland, assisted an RAF aircraft by following a German submarine, U-652. The aeroplane dropped depth charges which the U-boat’s captain, Captain-Lieutenant Georg-Werner Fraatz, assumed were from the destroyer and so, not unreasonably, he fired two torpedoes at her. They missed, but it allowed Roosevelt to announce that henceforth American ships would attack any German or Italian submarines that they found in the West Atlantic and to persuade Congress to extend the provisions of Lend-Lease to the USSR. From mid-September the still officially neutral United States Navy took on the task of escorting UK-bound convoys as far as Iceland, where the Royal Navy took over. In October, after much rumbling, Congress, which remembered that a similar move had served as a prelude to entering the First World War, authorized the arming of American merchant ships, and on 31 October the first American battle casualties of the war occurred when the destroyer USS Reuben James was sunk by a U-boat off Iceland while on convoy escort duty and 100 sailors died.

  The subsequent attack by Japan on American possessions in Hawaii and the Far East in December 1941 was once again greeted with relief by the British: Churchill had always hoped to bring the New World to the rescue of the Old and his whole war policy was based on hanging on until America c
ould come in. Hitler did the British a favour by declaring war on the United States – presumably on the grounds that, as America was bending the laws of neutrality to breaking point in Britain’s favour and would come in eventually, he might as well get it over with. Now the British Empire was no longer alone, although it would be some time before that would be expressed by troops on the ground. In the meantime, the only theatre where the British could fight the Axis on land was in North Africa.

  * * *

  On paper at least, Operation Battleaxe, which was intended to push the Germans and Italians back beyond Tobruk, should have worked. A fast convoy to Alexandria had delivered 240 tanks, giving the British a numerical superiority over the Axis. Unfortunately, they were the wrong sort of tanks: the British were still thinking in terms of infantry and cruiser tanks and the Matildas, for the infantry, were far too slow, while the Crusaders, the new cruisers, possessed a good turn of speed but were under-armoured and mechanically unreliable. Wavell wanted time to build up his forces, train them, amass reserve stocks of supplies and sort out the tanks, but Churchill wanted a quick victory to compensate for the loss of Crete and Wavell was forced to attack on 15 June 1941 against his better judgement. The operation failed for the usual reasons: unreliable tanks, lack of training in infantry–tank cooperation and insufficient logistic support, but also because the Germans made skilful use of concealed anti-tank guns, particularly the 88mm anti-aircraft gun in the ground role, and demonstrated their customary ability to react swiftly and to outmanoeuvre the pedestrian British. At this point Churchill finally lost patience with those who would not pander to his flights of fancy. He never had much time for Wavell, a man with far more integrity and considerably more intelligence than him but one who never bothered to explain his position to those he thought incapable of understanding it and who was constantly surprised and disapproving when politicians did not behave like gentlemen. Wavell had advised against the totally unnecessary Greek adventure, although he eventually acquiesced, and he opposed Churchill’s insistence on troops being sent to Iraq and Syria. Churchill now demanded that Wavell be replaced, and decided that he should change places with General Sir Claude Auchinleck, Commander-in-Chief India. In a typical piece of Churchillian mean-spiritedness, Wavell was not even permitted two weeks’ leave in England, in case his dismissal might give Churchill’s opponents an opportunity to coalesce around him.