Second World War, The

by Corrigan, Gordon

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  In March 1942 the British Chiefs of Staff decided that Madagascar was the next likely objective for Japanese expansion and that the island should be occupied by the Allies before this could happen. Madagascar is an island in the Indian Ocean lying 250 miles east of what was then the Portuguese colony of Mozambique. It is 1,200 miles from north to south and 300 miles east to west, or rather larger than Great Britain, and was under the control of the Vichy French. While Japanese occupation of Madagascar, and particularly of the naval and air base at Diego Garcia (now Antsiranana), could undoubtedly interfere with shipping in the Indian Ocean, and even make the route round the Cape to the Suez Canal very dangerous indeed, it is unlikely in the extreme that the Japanese ever intended to go there, or that, if they did, they could have sustained a force so far out of their defensive ring of captured territories. The suggestion that the British should take Madagascar was first discussed in December 1941,when de Gaulle* was a strong advocate, deliberated upon again in March 1942 and finally approved in April. By then the Royal Navy was not in favour – they would have to find the ships from resources already overstretched – and Brooke, the CIGS, was worried that the Vichy government, which had recently installed as prime minister Pierre Laval, who was even more anti-British than his colleagues, might react by handing over French ships and colonies to the Germans, or by bombing Gibraltar.

  Despite the doubts, it was decided to go ahead with Operation Ironclad. The ships would be found from Force H, responsible for the Straits of Gibraltar and the Western Mediterranean, and the United States Navy was persuaded to increase its presence in the Atlantic while Ironclad was under way. The troops would be 29 Brigade Group, which had been trained in amphibious operations and consisted of four regular infantry battalions, an army commando† and supporting light tanks, artillery and engineers, and 17 Brigade Group, comprising three regular and one Territorial battalions, with artillery, engineers and a field ambulance unit. Later on, 13 Brigade, part of 5 Division and intended as a reinforcement for India, was added, and the whole would be supported by a squadron of light tanks. The mounting base would be Durban, and, when the various elements of the force arrived there, they were lobbied by Smuts, the South African prime minister, who did not agree that taking Diego Garcia would lead to the inevitable collapse of French rule in Madagascar and wanted the expedition to take other ports on both sides of the island as well. As the British did not want to delay in Madagascar but needed to get the operation over with and the troops sent on to India as soon as possible, this suggestion was put on hold for the time being.

  Covered by naval gunfire and attacks from carrier-borne aircraft, the landings took place an hour and twenty minutes before first light on 5 May 1942 and at first all went well. A radio message was broadcast inviting the French commandant of Diego Garcia to surrender and when this was refused, as expected, British troops began to advance on the town. After some hours, a captured French officer was sent back into town with another message to surrender. He carried not only a message inviting surrender, however, but also his own observations as to how many troops the British had, what they were equipped with and where they were. The French defence now stiffened. Four British tanks were knocked out, there were problems finding a beach on which the British artillery could be landed and hence delays in fire support, two more tanks were disabled and the crews captured and by last light on 5 May the attack had stalled. A dawn attack on 6 May failed and it was not until the Royal Navy landed fifty Royal Marines behind the French defences in support of a night attack that Diego Garcia was finally captured at 0300 hours on 7 May. On 8 May the local commander surrendered. So far 100 British had been killed and 300 wounded, while the French admitted to 150 killed and 500 wounded. Wavell as Commander-in-Chief India was now urging that a South African garrison should be installed and the British troops released for the defence of India, but both the intransigence of the French governor of Madagascar, who was not of course bound by the local surrender in Diego Garcia, and large numbers of cases of malaria and dengue fever amongst 13 Brigade – which could not now be used anywhere – militated against him.

  On 23 May the French governor opened negotiations with the British from the capital, Tananarive, in the centre of the island, and the Royal Navy, having sunk three French submarines and destroyed twenty French aircraft at little cost, prepared to reduce their presence. Then, on 29 May, the navy suffered its first serious loss in the campaign, but not from the French. A force of five Japanese submarines had crossed the Indian Ocean and launched midget submarines, which, with considerable skill and bravery, torpedoed the battleship HMS Ramillies and an oil tanker. The tanker sank but Ramillies managed to limp back to Durban for repairs. The Japanese were chased off by depth charges and air attacks, but their presence was seen by some as a justification for Ironclad. Five submarines do not amount to an invasion force, however: the Japanese foray was a raid launched in the hope that it might catch some shipping in Durban, and, when none was found, the Japanese had sent up a reconnaissance float plane which had duly spotted the British warships off Madagascar.

  Negotiations with the island’s governor were long and tortuous, hinging on what arrangements could be made to safeguard the honour of (Vichy) France and the integrity of the army. It was made very plain that de Gaulle’s solution, whereby the island would declare for the Free French and be run by them, was completely unacceptable to the administration and to the officers of the French garrison (many of whose soldiers were Senegalese) and soon it became plain that the governor was playing for time, hoping to spin out negotiations until the rains came, when military operations would become very difficult, not least because the movement of vehicles would be impossible. The British had no option but to restart operations while continuing to negotiate. On 23 August the French declared the capital an open city and withdrew south, and on 29 September the British made a series of landings in the south, eventually hemming the governor and his troops into the southernmost part of the island. At last, on 6 November the governor surrendered on very much the same terms as had been offered and rejected when Diego Garcia had been captured. What was hoped would take a few weeks had lasted for six months and had achieved little, except rendering two brigades (for 29 Brigade had also succumbed to malaria) unfit for operations from India for some time.

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  What was now needed in India was a period of consolidation, retraining and re-equipping from a defensive position along the border. The Japanese were at the end of a very long supply chain, had large numbers of sick which they could not evacuate by roads since these had been washed away by the monsoon, were short of even their standard, basic rations of rice and vegetables and were in no condition to attack India just yet. That the army in India was not left alone for a period of recuperation and preparation was due to Churchill’s insistence on constant aggression, without his having any real idea of conditions on the ground, hence the First Arakan Battle. It was certainly true that British prestige was at an all-time low – not just in the Far East but worldwide – and a victory would do much to restore morale in the army and show the world that the British were still a force to be reckoned with. As Slim pointed out, however, it is better to let a victory speak for itself rather than predict one with the inevitable consequences when it doesn’t happen.64

  The Arakan is that coastal province of Burma that lay immediately south of India (now of Bangladesh) and included the Mayu peninsula that runs down to the island of Akyab, which is about ninety miles south of what was then the Indian border and separated from the mainland of Burma by a narrow channel. The mainland of Arakan had few roads and was divided by steep ridges running north to south interspersed with narrow, cultivated valleys and streams. The aims of the first Arakan offensive were limited and seemingly attainable, even given the state of the army in India at the time. It was modest in scope and intended simply to clear the Mayu peninsula of Japanese and capture the island of Akyab along with its airstrips that could
be used to attack India. Intelligence said that there were only four Japanese divisions in Burma and of those only one regiment was in the Arakan. At this stage Eastern Army had two corps covering the Indian border: to the north-east IV Corps of two divisions, 17 Indian, which had still not recovered from the disastrous retreat, and 23 Indian, and XV Corps, now commanded by Slim after the disbanding of Burma Corps, with the Indian 14 Division and 26 Division. In front of the army was the newly formed V Force, of British officers with local knowledge and languages commanding small bodies of loyal tribesmen whose job it was to gather intelligence. Irwin, now commanding Eastern Army, decided that the offensive would be carried out by Major-General Wilfred Lloyd’s newly formed 14 Division, but, instead of his reporting to XV Corps, Irwin decided that he and Eastern Army would control 14 Division direct, an unusual departure from the normally accepted system of command and control. Slim thought this most irregular, but, in the event, by being cut out of the chain of command he was untainted by the disaster that followed.

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  At the time of Pearl Harbor, the US Army had but one operational division. By the end of the war it would have ninety, but for the moment there was no means of hitting back at the Japanese save by air or by sea. Despite the damage done to the US Pacific Fleet on 7 December 1941, the carrier fleet of the USS Enterprise, Lexington and Saratoga, now reinforced by the Yorktown from the Atlantic, had escaped destruction, along with many cruisers and destroyers, and almost immediately it began to harass Japanese island bases by air attack whenever it could. None of this was anything more than a pinprick, of little concern to the Japanese and generally ignored by them, particularly once they had put the Saratoga out of action by torpedoing her on 11 January 1942, but in April of that year came an American raid which did little damage but had huge consequences. A force of sixteen US Army Air Force B-25 Mitchell bombers was loaded on to the recently built carrier USS Hornet and on 18 April they were launched in the teeth of a gale 650 miles east of Japan. Three of the bombers dropped incendiary bombs on Nagoya, Kobe and Osaka, while the other thirteen, led by Lieutenant-Colonel James Doolittle, bombed Tokyo itself. Although the B-25s could take off from a carrier, it was doubtful if they could land on one, and in any case to return to the launch area would be to risk running out of fuel. The surviving aircraft – and, as it turned out, this meant all sixteen – had therefore been instructed to fly to China and land at friendly bases there. In the event, one aircraft landed at Vladivostok, four landed at airstrips held by the Chinese and the crews of eleven, unable to find an airstrip, bailed out, some over Japanese-held territory. Three men were captured and executed out of hand (illegally) but most of the rest got safely to Chungking. Although the raid accomplished little in terms of the killing of Japanese and the destruction of property, it provided a great fillip to the American public, which had so far had to live with an uninterrupted string of defeats, and worried the Japanese, who had been assuring their people that the mighty Japanese armed forces and the divine emperor would protect them from anything the effete and defeated Westerners might try to throw at them.

  As it was, with the initial, and spectacular, success of their expansion plan, the Japanese had next decided to widen the scope of their defensive ring and cut Australia off from America. To do this, they would need bases in northern Papua, taken in early 1942, and the Solomon Islands, which they began to capture in March 1942. The next step was Port Moresby, on the south-eastern coast of New Guinea and only 400 miles from the coast of Queensland, in northern Australia. Three Japanese convoys were assembled in the Carolines and New Britain, one each to take the Louisades Archipelago, south-east of Port Moresby, and Tulagi Island in the Solomons, while the main one would attack Port Moresby. There would be two naval task forces to support the invasion, the covering force of one light carrier, four heavy cruisers and a destroyer, and the strike force of two fleet carriers, two heavy cruisers and six destroyers. By now the British were able to decipher Japanese naval codes, through the Ultra organization, and knew of the Japanese intentions. An Allied naval force of two US fleet carriers, the Lexington and the Yorktown, and a mix of American and Australian cruisers was assembled to counter them. What came to be known as the Battle of the Coral Sea was the first naval battle to be fought entirely by aircraft, with none of the ships involved on either side able to see their opponent. The numbers of aircraft were equal – around 120 on each side, although the Japanese aircraft were better – and inevitably there were errors by both navies: ships mistakenly taken for carriers were attacked; ships sailed off in the wrong direction; and erroneous assumptions were drawn from air reconnaissance reports. But on 7 May the Japanese light carrier was sunk and the Port Moresby invasion force withdrew to wait and see what would happen next. The next day, both sides located the other’s main fleet and launched their aircraft into the attack. The Japanese sank the Lexington and the Americans so badly damaged the two Japanese fleet carriers that they were out of action for months. In terms of tonnage of ships sunk, the Japanese won the Battle of the Coral Sea, and they did succeed in taking Tulagi Island, but the battle ended the Japanese attempt to take Port Moresby from the sea, and the albeit temporary loss of two fleet carriers was to have a significant effect on the much larger naval encounter which took place the following month. The Battle of Midway, which was fought from 4 to 7 June 1942, was to be the first decisive defeat that the Japanese suffered in this war. While luck was certainly on the side of the Americans at Midway, so was good intelligence and superior equipment in the form of radar, something that the Japanese had not yet fitted to more than a few of their ships and aircraft. The battle would tip the balance of naval power in the Pacific against the Japanese and they would never be able to regain it.

  After the first initial and startling – except perhaps to the Japanese – successes of 1941 and 1942, argument had once more broken out in Tokyo as to what to do next. Options were to move north against the Soviet Union, west against India and Ceylon, south against Australia or east towards Hawaii. The army vetoed attacking the USSR on the very sensible grounds that taking on two world powers at a time was quite enough without adding a third; the navy favoured going for India and also Australia, while Admiral Yamamoto, Commander-in-Chief of the Combined Fleet, considered that the capture of Hawaii would force the Americans to a negotiated peace. The result was a compromise – Australia and Hawaii. The former resulted in the Battle of the Coral Sea and the removal of two carriers from the Japanese order of battle. To achieve the latter, Yamamoto planned to lure the US Pacific Fleet into a battle when the superior Japanese fleet could destroy it, and he intended to do this by threatening Midway Island, America’s most westerly Pacific base and the most northerly of the Hawaiian chain. Japanese intelligence suggested that one of the three remaining American carriers, the Yorktown, had also been sunk in the Coral Sea battle and that the other two were nowhere near the intended battle area, giving Yamamoto ample time to deploy his forces before they could arrive. In fact, the Yorktown had been damaged, not destroyed, but the other two were indeed in the South Pacific and, if not forewarned, would certainly take time to get anywhere near Midway.

  Yamamoto’s plan was to mount a diversionary raid on the Aleutian Islands while landing a marine expeditionary force on Midway once it had been comprehensively bombed by carrier-borne aircraft. Vice-Admiral Nagumo, the hero of Pearl Harbor, would be following up with a strike force of four carriers with 261 aircraft, and two battleships with associated escorts of cruisers and destroyers. Further back-up would be provided by Admiral Yamamoto himself, flying his flag in the Yamato, one of the two biggest battleships ever built (the other was her sister, the Musashi), with two other battleships and their escorts. Altogether, the Japanese force totalled some 800 ships of various types including the troop transports and a submarine screen that would be positioned on the approach to Midway, with the four carriers serving as the weapon with which Yamamoto would defeat what remained of the US Pacific Fleet once its two
remaining carriers appeared to defend their last base before Hawaii. It might well have worked had not Allied code-breakers discovered the plan, the routes and the fact that the main objective was to be Midway. The garrison of the island was reinforced and its complement of aircraft boosted by transfers from Pearl Harbor. The Hornet and the Enterprise were recalled to Pearl Harbor and sailed from there under Rear Admiral Raymond Spruance on 26 May; the damage to the Yorktown was repaired in the astonishingly short time of two days and she, along with her escorts, sailed on 30 May under Admiral Frank Fletcher. The three carriers rendezvoused on the afternoon of 2 June and the whole fleet under Fletcher moved to the north of Midway, well before Yamamoto’s submarines could get in position. The Americans had 230 carrier-borne aircraft, less than those of Nagumo, but they could also call on land-based air cover from Midway, which the Japanese could not.

  On the morning of 3 June, an American reconnaissance aircraft spotted the approaching Japanese and land-based B-17 bombers took off to attack the transports. Japanese anti-aircraft defences were neither as plentiful nor as sophisticated as those on Allied ships, and on this occasion their crews did not begin firing until the bombs were splashing into the sea around them; even so, little damage was sustained by either the Japanese ships or American bombers. Then, at first light on 4 June, Nagumo’s carrier-based bombers attacked Midway. They destroyed many of the buildings on the base and set the oil installations on fire, but they did not put the airstrip out of action and the lead pilot radioed to Nagumo that a second attack wave would be needed. Meanwhile the torpedo-armed aircraft from the American carriers were attacking the Japanese carriers with little success, taking huge casualties from Zero fighters. The accepted version of what happened next is that Nagumo began to rearm his aircraft with bombs, to attack Midway once more, but changed his mind and began instead to arm them with torpedoes, to attack the enemy ships whose presence he had now detected. At 1020 hours, all his aircraft were armed, on deck and about to take off, and it was now that the American SBD Dauntless dive-bombers arrived overhead and hit three Japanese carriers in less than six minutes. Had the Americans arrived five minutes later, so goes this account, then Nagumo would have launched and destroyed the American carriers and the war would have taken a very different turn. That, at least, is the version propagated by the Japanese and accepted by nearly all Western historians since.65 Recent scholarship, however, suggests that this is not so and that what really happened was that the decks of the carriers had been kept clear to enable the ships’ defensive fighters to be launched or recovered and that the torpedo-armed aircraft had not yet been brought up from below. The process of lining aircraft up for a launch was estimated to take at least forty-five minutes, and in all cases the last launch or recovery of fighters was but fifteen minutes before the dive-bombers arrived.66 There was therefore no possibility of a successful counter-stroke being delivered, even if the Americans had not arrived for a further twenty minutes, never mind the five of legend. As it was, the crews of three Japanese carriers, the Akagi, the Kaga and the Soryu, had to abandon ship and the Kaga and Soryu sank that evening. The burning hulk of the Akagi was sunk next day by a Japanese submarine. The fourth Japanese carrier, the Hiryu, initially escaped the dive-bombers and launched her aircraft against the Yorktown, damaging the American carrier to the extent that she had to be taken under tow, to be finally sunk by a Japanese submarine on 7 June. Hiryu herself was then attacked by dive-bombers from Enterprise and Yorktown, set on fire and, when she could not be recovered, was sunk by a Japanese cruiser on 5 June.