Second World War, The

by Corrigan, Gordon

  The Wadi Akarit position covered what was known as the Gabes Gap, actually about ten miles north of Gabes, and was the last position from where, if it held, von Arnim could prevent the two Allied armies joining up. The gap ran for five miles inland to the Roumana Hills, which ran south-west to another line of hills, Hachana, Fatnassa, Meida and el Beida, on the west side of which were salt marshes generally impassable to vehicles except by the road running north-west to Gafsa, sixty miles away and held by the US III Corps. Along the gap from east to west ran the Wadi Akarit, a dried-up riverbed, linked in to anti-tank ditches, minefields and wire, and with craters blown on both the Gafsa road and the road from Gabes to Sfax that ran from south to north through the middle of the gap. None of the hills was particularly high – about 500 feet above the plain – but they dominated the gap and were strongly held by the Italian Spezia and Pistoia Divisions, with German units interspersed amongst them. The gap itself was held by the Young Fascist Division on the east and the Trieste Division on the west. Behind and in reserve to deal with any break-in were the German 15 Panzer Division and a panzer grenadier (motorized infantry) regiment.

  Montgomery’s plan was, after the usual lengthy build-up of fuel, ammunition and spare parts, to attack in overwhelming strength straight up through the gap with 51 Highland Division and the armour, while the Indian 4 Division would take the heights of Roumana to prevent interference from the flank. The problem was that Roumana was not the highest hill feature and was overlooked by Fatnassa and parts of Hachana, from where fire could be brought to bear on anyone on or attacking Roumana. Unusually, for Montgomery did not normally brook any criticism of his plans nor any modification that could not be thought to come from him, he did allow himself to be persuaded to change his mind by Major-General Francis ‘Gertie’ Tuker commanding the Indian 4 Division. Tuker was an officer of 2 Gurkha Rifles and he was commanding that regiment’s first battalion on the outbreak of war. (Fortunate he was that it was the First Battalion, as what was left of the Second Battalion had gone into the bag at Singapore in February 1942.) He was convinced that a frontal assault on Wadi Akarit would be a disaster, and suggested that his division should swing round much farther to the west and instead take the Fatnassa feature. This was the highest ground in the area and would allow the British to dominate the gap and render the Axis defence positions untenable, and also allow them to open up the route to the Americans at Gafsa. Montgomery did not believe such an operation was possible, particularly when Tuker suggested a night attack, but Tuker had two Gurkha battalions in his division, including the one that he had been commanding only four years previously, and he knew that in the mountains and at night no troops in the world could equal the Gurkhas. Despite Montgomery’s prejudice against the Indian Army, he could see the sense of Tuker’s proposal and the plan was duly changed.

  On the night of 5/6 April the Gurkhas set off, climbed the escarpment and broke into the first enemy position on the top. It was too dark to fire rifles safely in such close quarters and the initial killing was done by kukris. Second Gurkhas were followed by 1/9 Gurkha Rifles and well before first light, when the main attack went in, the high ground had been secured by the Gurkhas, the Royal Sussex had also come up (they should have been guarding the Gurkhas’ right flank but had got lost), the machine-guns of the Rajputana Rifles were in position to support them and the division had forced a crossing of the anti-tank ditch between Hachana and Roumana. Now was the opportunity to encircle Messe’s army and perhaps end the campaign: at 0845 hours Tuker spoke to his corps commander and urged that, if the armour of X Corps moved now and thrust through the gap created by his Division, it could get well into the enemy rear before the latter could disengage and withdraw. Montgomery agreed, but, thanks to typically pedestrian Eighth Army staff work, it was twenty-four hours before the tanks could move. Nevertheless, once the Gurkhas had taken Fatnassa, it was obvious to Messe that he could not stay where he was; German reserves came up to stiffen the Italians and on the night of 6/7 April the Axis withdrew in good order. That same day, a Gurkha patrol in a jeep headed up the Gafsa road and made the first contact between Eighth Army and First Army when it met an American patrol, even if the Gurkha jemadar* did not entirely understand being greeted as a ‘good ole limey’. Tuker got little credit for the victory, while Montgomery made much of the success of ‘my’ plan and how he had deployed ‘my’ Gurkhas.

  Army Group Africa could now only delay, and, fighting as they now were in the mountains, they were able to hold out for well over a month. Eighth Army continued its advance up the coast and took Sfax on 10 April and Sousse two days later. It was at this time that Montgomery embarked upon another of those point-scoring exercises that to him were merely amusing but which infuriated those against whom they were directed. Many British officers’ messes then and since had a wagers book – ‘Lieutenant Merk bets Captain Crump two glasses of port that he can jump his polo pony over the village well’† – and Montgomery was fond of making minor bets on everything from the weather tomorrow to the results of inter-regimental football games. At a meeting between Montgomery and Eisenhower’s chief of staff, Lieutenant-General Walter Bedell Smith,* Montgomery had said that he hoped to have captured Sfax by the middle of April. Smith, who did not think it possible, said jokingly that, if that happened, he would give Montgomery a B-17 Flying Fortress plus crew. The Boeing B-17 was a four-engined bomber, protected by armour plate and a large number of .5 calibre Browning machine-guns, but it was also occasionally used as a long-distance transport aircraft. Smith duly forgot about the bet, but it was entered in Montgomery’s wagers book, and, when Sfax fell on 10 April, Montgomery sent a signal to Smith asking for his winnings. Smith tried to treat the whole thing as a joke, but when Montgomery sent a second signal, making it clear that he expected to be paid, Smith had to confess all to Eisenhower. Eisenhower was furious, but Montgomery got his B-17 and an American crew for his personal use for the duration of the war. It was just one more example of Montgomery’s arrogance and inability to understand the feelings of others – Brooke thought it ‘crass stupidity’ on his part – and it did nothing to dispel an increasing climate of mutual antipathy, dislike and distrust between Montgomery and the Americans that would only become worse as the war went on.62

  Montgomery attacked again on 19 April, but this time he was trying to break through the Zaghouan range, hills 3,000 feet above sea level with spurs running down to the coast and impossible to outflank. Eighth Army was stalled after only three miles, and First Army too, attacking from the west, could make no progress. At this stage Alexander’s 18th Army Group disposed of ninety-six British, Indian and Gurkha, thirty-eight French and twenty-two American infantry battalions and about 1,200 tanks. Army Group Africa had ninety under-strength German and Italian battalions and 140 tanks. Alexander now decided that Eighth Army was to hold the line against which First Army would drive the Axis. Accordingly, two armoured divisions, 1 and 7, the Indian 4 Division and a Guards infantry brigade were transferred from Eighth to First Army, which on 5 May attacked towards Tunis. On 9 May burning fuel dumps and desperate rearguard actions indicated that von Arnim could not hold out much longer. On 10 May the commanding officer of Second Gurkhas, Lieutenant-Colonel Lionel Showers, was going forward on a reconnaissance about forty miles south of Tunis when from a hilltop he saw a German staff car flying a white flag. In it was a staff officer who explained that General von Arnim, whose headquarters was nearby, wished to discuss terms of capitulation. Showers and his orderly got into the car and were taken to see von Arnim. German staff officers said that they were most anxious to surrender to the British, and not to the French, and a letter in English was despatched to General Tuker:

  Since my troops have fired their last round I am ready for the surrender of those under my immediate command. I trust that the conduct of my soldiers who have done their duty to the utmost in this battle will have earned the respect of my opponent. I have instructed the handling of the details of the surrender to
Colonel (General Staff) Nolte, Chief of Staff of German Afrika Korps, and to Colonel Stoltz, commander of the troops. I have given these officers full powers. You may rely upon their honour as soldiers.

  (signed) von Arnim, Colonel-General

  On 12 May the German and Italian forces surrendered. The war in North Africa was over.

  11

  THE ASIAN WAR

  DECEMBER 1941–NOVEMBER 1942

  The astonishing success of Japanese arms all across South-East Asia and the Pacific in the winter of 1941 and the spring of 1942 came as a surprise and a shock to most British, American and Dutch commanders and politicians. It was followed by an orgy of savage and bestial behaviour which to anyone who had been following events in China should not have been either a surprise or a shock. On Christmas Day 1941 in Hong Kong the Japanese overran a British field hospital in the grounds of St Stephen’s College on Hong Kong Island. Clearly marked with Red Cross flags, it was undefended and full of wounded soldiers being tended by unarmed military medical officers, orderlies and female nurses. The Japanese infantry stormed into the buildings and began by rounding up the nurses who were then gang-raped, over and over again. Next came the wounded and the medical staff, who were first tortured to amuse the soldiery and then killed, over sixty of them being despatched by the bayonet, presumably to avoid wasting ammunition. After the surrender it was the turn of the local Chinese females. Nobody knows how many of them were casually raped by Japanese soldiers but some sources put the number as high as 100,000 over the three years and eight months of occupation. On 14 February 1942 in Singapore the Japanese rampaged into the Alexandra Hospital, rounded up and raped the nurses, then bayoneted them and dumped the bodies in the under-growth. Next was the turn of the patients and orderlies, many of whom were also bayoneted, including the bed-ridden. Those who survived the first onslaught, about 200 walking wounded and staff, had their hands tied behind their backs, were roped together in groups of eight and were marched away from the battle area. Anyone who collapsed on the way was cut loose, bayoneted and left to die. Those who survived were locked in three small rooms for the night, left in their own filth with no food or water, and next day taken out in batches and bayoneted. One officer and four Other Ranks survived.

  Elsewhere, in Bataan the Japanese wanted to remove the American and Filipino soldiers who had surrendered in April to clear the area for the attack on Corregidor. The intention was to move the 12,000 Americans and 65,000 Filipinos to a prisoner-of-war camp at Camp O’Donnell, which involved an initial march of around fifty-five miles to a railhead that was expected to take two days.After the prisoners’ personal possessions, particularly watches and money, had been taken by the Japanese soldiers, the Death March, as it became known, took five days for the fit and twelve days for the wounded and less fit, all of them herded along like animals in temperatures in the nineties and with 100 per cent humidity by Japanese guards who shot or bayoneted anyone dropping out. One American officer who was caught with a few Japanese yen was beheaded by a Japanese officer with a sword. Of the 10,000 Americans who started the march (2,000 had died or had been executed before it began), less than half survived it. We do not know what the death rate amongst the Filipinos was but it cannot have been less.63

  Leaving aside the specific question of the treatment of prisoners for the moment, ill-treatment, including rape and murder, can occur in any operation of war, and British and American soldiers too have been guilty of atrocities. The difference is that in Western armies it was specifically forbidden and individual misbehaviour was swiftly dealt with once discovered. In the case of the Japanese, mass cruelty and barbaric behaviour was normal, common and not just condoned but permitted and in many cases actually encouraged. The Japanese refused to recognize the International Red Cross and executed its representative (and his wife) in Borneo when he tried to protest against the treatment of prisoners. Those who try to find excuses for Japanese behaviour during the war point to the background of poverty and ignorance from where the vast majority of the troops were recruited: their behaviour, while regrettable, was thus understandable. This argument is nonsense: poverty and ignorance do not automatically lead to deliberate cruelty, and Japanese society, while autocratic and oppressive, did not glorify rape, torture, murder and mutilation. Even if there was some truth in the argument that the soldiers knew no better, there can be no excuse for the officers, who assuredly did know better, being educated and raised on standards of honourable behaviour and whose orders for the burning of all ‘souvenir’ photographs of beatings and beheadings shortly before Japan’s final surrender in 1945 would indicate that they knew very well that what they had been doing was wrong.

  In regard to prisoners of war, Japanese commanders insisted that, while Japan had signed the 1929 Geneva Convention, she had never ratified it and therefore was not bound by its provisions. This is true, but is legalistic semantics: ordinary rules of decency would say that you do not starve a prisoner to death, you do not beat him for no reason, you do not put him to work which you know will kill him and you do not permit cavalier torture and execution for minor offences or none, and in any case Japan had signed and ratified the Hague Convention of 1907, of which the Geneva Convention was only an update. The Hague Convention laid down that, while non-commissioned prisoners could be given work, it was not to be war-related and must not be of a life-threatening nature, and that rations and medical cover were to be of the same standard as that of the captors’ own soldiers. Japanese military law had been amended in the 1920s to make surrender an offence: soldiers were expected to fight to the death rather than allow themselves to be taken prisoner and anyone who did give in forfeited all honour. The forfeiture of all honour, which the Japanese insisted applied not just to themselves but to all combatants, cannot, however, mean that the prisoner can be treated with deliberate cruelty. The Japanese treatment of military prisoners and the civilian populations of lands conquered by them was simply appalling.

  As it was, because the Americans and the British wanted the Japanese as a post-war bulwark against the USSR in the Far East, the unconditional surrender condition was modified and, while the emperor was obliged to renounce his divinity, far greater leniency was shown than to the Germans. War crimes trials were fewer and conducted with less publicity than in Germany and what had happened was officially forgotten as soon as possible. Unlike in Germany, where the entire population was browbeaten into feeling guilty for the treatment of the Jews and for the ravages of yet another war that Germany had initiated, a stigma that has affected German foreign and defence policy ever since, the Japanese were never forced to face up to what their soldiers and administrators had done in their name. Even today, young, educated Japanese with whom this author has discussed Japan’s wartime behaviour find it almost impossible to come to terms with it. Most simply say that it never happened, it is all a fiction of Allied propaganda; others claim that, while there might have been isolated cases of misbehaviour, it was not systemic; and all insist that the emperor could not possibly have known anything about it. The fact remains, though, that the Japanese had not always been like this. In the Russo-Japanese War, they had been assiduous in behaving properly to prisoners and civilians in occupied areas. One can only posit that the rise of extreme nationalism and emperor worship with the inculcation of a belief in Japanese racial superiority developed and nurtured during the 1920s and 1930s led them to behave in the way that they did, and to take an especial joy in seeing the white races humbled.

  * * *

  The capital of Burma and its only major port was Rangoon, twenty-five miles up the Irrawaddy delta from the Indian Ocean and with a pre-war population of around half a million. Its significance to both the Allies and the Japanese was that it was to Rangoon that American supplies, weapons and equipment for Chiang Kai-shek’s Chinese Nationalist government in Chungking came by sea, to be offloaded and transported overland by road and rail 350 miles north to Lashio, the beginning of the Burma Road. If Rangoon was lost, then
so was the main route for aid to China. Like all developed parts of the Empire, Burma was expected to fund her own defence, although military equipment was supplied by Britain at cost. As no one before 1940 ever expected Burma to be attacked, her defence budget was small, and, when minds in India and Whitehall began to consider the possibility that Burma might be a target, there were few military assets in the country and very little with which to reinforce them. Expansion of the indigenous forces had been at the expense of the two British battalions in the country, First Battalion the Gloucestershire Regiment and Second Battalion the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, which had provided officers and training cadres, being reduced to two companies each by the outbreak of hostilities. Burma was the responsibility of Wavell’s ABDA Command, which was far more concerned about Malaya and Singapore than it was about Burma, whereas the Indian authorities realized that, with the Japanese in control of Siam, Burma was an obvious next step, and Burma was the route to India. For the first time for centuries, the threat to India was not from the north-west but from the south-east. Eventually, when the Asian war broke out, responsibility was split: operational command remained with ABDA, while responsibility for administration, supplies and reinforcements went to India. It is never a good idea to divorce operational from administrative command.