Second World War, The

by Corrigan, Gordon

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  Like Italy, Japan had few raw materials and lacked the industrial capacity to sustain a long war, but, unlike Italy, at least from 1941 onwards, her population had few doubts about the war until the very last few months. Japan had been at war since 1937, and so by the time she embarked on war with the West in December 1941 she had already stretched her resources. Many Japanese were not entirely happy with the China campaign, which seemed to be directionless and to have no end in sight, but with the exception of a very few the attack on Pearl Harbor and war with Britain and America were greeted with joyous approval. At last the humiliations, snubs and insults – some real, more imagined – from the whites could be repaid, and the string of seemingly unstoppable victories made it unnecessary for the population to be subjected to mobilization for total war. Rigid control of the press and radio meant that the checks to Japanese progress in New Guinea and the Solomon Islands in late 1942 could be concealed from the populace (and from many in government too) and in any case these could be counterbalanced by the successes in Burma. Even the USAAF’s Tokyo raid in April 1942, while it came as a severe shock, could be explained away as American barbarity, and it was not until the reverses in the Aleutian Islands in May 1943 that the bulk of the population learned that not all was going Japan’s way. To begin with, the regime at home, unlike that in Japan’s conquered territories, was relatively benign, but, as the war turned against Japan and as American bombing increased, draconian control measures were introduced.

  Prior to 1941 the Japanese had watched Hollywood films, enjoyed classical music and played baseball (although the American-English phrases used in the game were being laboriously translated into Japanese), but now the government embarked on a policy of ‘overturning modernity’, by which they meant purging the nation of anything remotely ‘Anglo-Saxon’. German and Italian music could still be played and listened to but American and British films and books went; women were forced to wear traditional Japanese dress – although the (male) cabinet ministers and civil servants continued to sport morning suits and top hats – and a system of block leaders was introduced to ensure compliance with the much talked about ‘Japanese spirit’. Anyone suspected of defeatist tendencies, or having relatives in the USA, was liable to be arrested on suspicion of spying and to undergo a painful interview with the secret police. Emperor worship, already extreme, intensified and, beginning in the primary schools, everyone was required to leap to attention at the mere mention of his name.

  Rice had been rationed since late 1940, and all foodstuffs became scarcer as the Allies got closer and closer and as more and more supply routes were denied to Japan. American bombing in 1943 and 1944 was much less effective than that visited upon Germany, and had little effect on the morale of the civilian population, which was more concerned with shortages, disease* and the lengthening lists of military casualties, but from early 1945 bombing from the Marianas, from China and then, crucially, from Iwo Jima began to lay waste Japanese cities. The number of Japanese killed in the bombing offensive of 1945 is not known, but, as Japanese building techniques made much use of wood and rice paper, the fires started by the bombing made every Japanese city attacked another Dresden. In the summer of 1945 schoolchildren were being instructed to write to soldiers at the front telling them to ‘die gloriously’, while American and British aircraft from land bases and carriers wrought destruction in the homeland, and ships of the United States and Royal Navies shelled coastal towns in broad daylight. Even up to the very last minute, there was no effective popular resistance to government policy; partly this was due to rigid control of the media and an all-pervasive security apparatus, but more than that it was a fatalistic belief in Japanese superiority, conformity, deference to authority and a total abrogation of decision-making to the emperor that had been inculcated into a whole generation of Japanese which, allied to a lack of coherence in a government that decided policy as it went along, made the Japanese home front the starving and devastated environment that it eventually became.

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  Soviet Russia was a largely militarized society even before 1941, and it became even more so once the country was forced into the war. ‘Everything for the Front’ was the cry and the increase in industrial production outpaced Germany’s almost from the beginning. Contrary to his behaviour before the war, Stalin only executed one general – G. D. Pavlov – and no ministers during it, but the thought that he might kept military and official minds wonderfully concentrated. Stalin turned out to be extraordinarily good at producing tanks, aircraft and artillery pieces, and industrial output quadrupled between 1941 and 1945, but, with the loss of two thirds of the country’s agricultural land and the rank inefficiency of the collective farms that remained under Soviet control, it was remarkably bad at feeding its people, at least those in the towns. Lend-Lease delivered not only Jeeps and trucks, but canned food as well and the Russian townspeople got used to Spam, even if they never actually liked it. Food rationing was severe, and once the ‘No Surrender’ order was issued by Stalin to the Red Army, the families of Soviet prisoners of war had their ration books withdrawn and were left to beg or starve. Furthermore, unlike Germany, the USSR made full use of its female population. There were women signallers, drivers, tank crews, and fighter and bomber pilots in the Red Army and air force, and many of those working alongside former occupants of the gulag in factories and rebuilding roads were also women.

  Radio and the press were subjected to absolute control and, while Stalin made only a very few broadcast speeches during the war, they all emphasized the patriotic* nature of the war and promised to wreak defeat and vengeance on the Germans in the end. Russian industry suffered less from air raids than did Germany’s or Britain’s, largely because of the inadequacies of the Luftwaffe, but the population of towns that could not escape, such as Leningrad and Stalingrad, suffered from constant artillery bombardment and dive-bombing attacks. No one knows exactly how many civilians died in Russia as a result of the war, but the figure was certainly in the millions and may even have been in the tens of millions. Not all Russian civilian deaths were inflicted or caused by the Germans, however. As the Red Army began to recapture Soviet territory, Stalin ordered the deportation to the remote interior or to the far east of the USSR those that he considered had collaborated with the Germans or who had not shown sufficient loyalty to the Soviet system. Kalmyks, Ingushi, Chechens, various Balkan peoples and others were uprooted, packed into trains and abandoned in the middle of Kazakhstan to fend for themselves as best they could. The problems of these minorities still plagues Medvedev’s and Putin’s Russia today.

  Organizationally, Committees of Defence were formed in each area. Consisting of representatives from the party, the local government, the army and the police, they had power over everything from conscription of recruits for the army to the output from factories. Much of the labour was drawn from the gulags, or concentration camps, full of so-called enemies of the regime, who laboured in appalling conditions on near-starvation rations. As the war went on, the advice of the professionals was listened to on military matters but the party remained supreme in all else. Knowing that he had to get the whole population behind him, whether by coercion or persuasion, Stalin did make some concessions. Persecution of the Russian Orthodox Church was eased, many writers, composers and musicians were released from imprisonment and encouraged to put on (politically correct) performances, and the impression was encouraged that, if only the people would put up with hardship until the war was won, then there would be considerable liberalization and a relaxation of many of the oppressive regulations that abounded in every corner of Russian society. It was not, of course, to be.

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  This war was the first in modern history to have a home front. Whether being bombed from the air in London, Tokyo, Berlin, Leningrad or Rome or eking out an existence on the bare minimum of food, whether working long hours in factories to turn out the sinews of war or hiding in the woods, steppes and mountains t
rying to keep resistance alive, the civilian populations of all the belligerents were fully a part of this war. Willingly or unwillingly, they fought too.

  18

  END GAME

  DECEMBER 1944–SEPTEMBER 1945

  By December 1944 the Allied advance in Italy had ground to a halt. Small-scale patrolling and raiding still went on but any idea of a major winter offensive was soon dispelled by a German counter-attack on 26/27 December against the black troops of the American Fifth Army’s 92 Division; the division broke, allowing the Germans to storm through down the valley of the River Serchio towards the west coast. This was blocked by moving 8 Indian Division across from Eighth Army, but it served as a salutary reminder that the Germans were still capable of offensive action. Both Fifth and Eighth Armies were in fact exhausted, short of men, short of vehicles and tanks, and, with British artillery restricted to five rounds per gun per day, short of firepower too. Meanwhile, following the death in the United States of Field Marshal Sir John Dill in November 1944, there had been changes in the command set-up. General Sir Maitland Wilson was selected to replace Dill and promoted to field marshal, while Alexander, also promoted to field marshal, took over as Supreme Commander Mediterranean, with Mark Clark promoted to general and taking over as commander of the Allied Armies in Italy, which once more became 15th Army Group. He in turn was succeeded at Fifth Army by Lieutenant-General Lucian Truscott. On the German side, Field Marshal Kesselring would be summoned to theWestern Front in March 1945 to take over as Commander-in-Chief West from von Rundstedt, who yet again would be sacked. Kesselring would be succeeded in Italy by von Vietinghoff.

  Once again the Allies had to endure a cold, wet, northern Italian winter. With all thought of any offensive action before the spring now dismissed, the armies held the front with the minimum number of troops needed to deal with any German activity, and let the remaining formations rest, retrain and build themselves up for what all hoped would be the last campaign in Italy. The American Fifth Army held a front of nearly eighty miles from the Ligurian Sea to Monte Grande, where it joined with the British, and now had a total of ten divisions: two armoured, including one South African, four infantry, one of black and another of Brazilian infantry, the newly arrived 10 Mountain and the Italian Legnano Group. An Italian group was a small division, in this case organized on the American model with two regiments each of three battalions, the whole amounting to about 8,000 men. During the winter Fifth Army was able to absorb reinforcements and get to grips with the new weapons and vehicles that were coming in from America, in contrast to the British Eighth Army, where morale amongst some of the British units was not high and made worse by the removal of the Canadian Corps to North-West Europe in February and the news that the three divisions from Greece and the Middle East, which had been expected in Italy, would now go to the Western Front instead. The only consolations were that XIII Corps had returned from Fifth Army and the arrival of new armour in the shape of amphibious tanks, bridge-layers, Kangaroo armoured personnel carriers and Crocodile flame-throwers. With a front of around thirty miles from Monte Grande along the River Senio to the Adriatic coast, Eighth Army disposed of one British armoured division, three British armoured brigades as well as one New Zealand and one Polish, two British, two Indian and two Polish infantry divisions and one from New Zealand, a parachute brigade, a Royal Marine Commando brigade, 43 Gurkha Independent Lorried Brigade, the Jewish Brigade and three Italian infantry groups.

  The Jewish Brigade comprised men from all over Europe, many refugees from Germany or the occupied territories but also with Palestinian, Russian, Yemeni and Abyssinian Jews, and was officered by mainly British Jews. It had been raised in September 1944 when the British acceded to a request from the Jewish Agency, perhaps rather naively, as many of its soldiers, having received military training in the brigade, subsequently joined Jewish terror gangs in Palestine (thirty-five members of the brigade became generals in the Israeli Army), assisted in organizing illegal immigration into Palestine, and, after the war, formed revenge gangs who roamed Germany misusing their status to murder anyone they could find who might have been in any way responsible for the extermination camps or who had been in the SS.91 While one might have some sympathy for their wish to exact vengeance, that they used British uniforms to do it illegally only reinforces the old adage that two wrongs don’t make a right.

  In addition to holding against the British and Americans in Italy, German formations were now trying to hold in the Yugoslav mountains and along the Franco-Italian frontier, while facing increased partisan activity behind their lines in northern Italy. In the spring of 1945 Colonel-General von Vietinghoff’s Army Group C had five infantry divisions (including one Cossack division) and three divisions of Mussolini’s Italian Republican Army on the frontiers, while available for the Allied front were one panzer and two panzer grenadier divisions, three mountain, two parachute and ten infantry divisions (including 162 Turcoman Division recruited from the Caucasus). The Allied air forces had done their best to destroy communications back to Germany and within the German zone of Italy, by bombing roads, bridges and railway lines, as well as destroying Italian factories engaged in producing war materiel, but, while the Germans were thus short of vehicles of all types, they had got their priorities right and were well stocked up with clothing, rations and ammunition, as well as having plenty of artillery pieces and mortars. Even at this late stage of the war, morale was high and the German staff were confident that they could make the Allies pay dearly for every foot of Italian soil they captured.

  Clark, supported by Alexander, decided that he could make no offensive move before April, when warmer weather would improve matters for the infantry, the ground would dry out for the tanks and better visibility would allow Allied air superiority to have a major influence on the campaign, despite the fact that several American squadrons had been withdrawn to the West. The plan, which was intended to end the war in Italy, envisaged Eighth Army attacking across the Rivers Senio and Santerno and through the Argenta Gap towards Ferrara and the River Po, with Fifth Army then capturing, or at least isolating, Bologna and breaking into the Po Valley. This should split the German defence lines, enable the destruction of the German armies south of the Po and allow the Allies to capture Verona.

  The Argenta Gap was a ten-mile neck of land with the town of Argenta at its centre between Lake Comacchio on the Adriatic coast and the Lombardy marshes. It was well defended by the Germans but, if the Allies could get through it, then they would be into the Lombardy Plain and the approaches to the Po and north-eastern Italy. The British intended to force a German withdrawal by a series of amphibious landings on the shores of Lake Comacchio that would outflank their defences and on 1 April Operation Roast saw the Royal Marines using a variety of boats to establish a beachhead to protect the British right flank. The artillery ammunition position had now improved to the extent that a massive artillery bombardment of German positions along the shore of Lake Comacchio could begin on 9 April, allowing the main offensive to begin with V Corps utilizing the recently arrived amphibious DD tanks and the few remaining landing craft to negotiate German mines and land on the south-west corner of the lake on 11 April, unbalancing the Germans’ defences and forcing them to move 29 Panzer Division south from the Po. Another landing farther north by 24 Guards Brigade on 13 April gave the German armour no option but to withdraw, leaving only scattered and cut-off units defending the Gap and allowing 6 Armoured Division to storm through supported by Allied fighter-bombers. By 18 April the British were closing up to the Po, with the Germans still attempting to get back to that river. Furious attacks by the British V Corps and the destruction of the German pontoon bridges across the river by the RAF on 22 April gave the German LXXVI Panzer Corps no choice but to try to fight it out on the south bank. The battle raged all day on 24 April and long into the night, until by the morning of 25 April all coordinated resistance had ceased. That morning Lieutenant-General Gerhard Graf von Schwerin, the forty-six-yea
r-old corps commander, surveyed the wreckage of his corps: burned out vehicles, abandoned tanks, loose horses and dead oxen littered the south bank of the river and, with hardly any soldiers capable of fighting, he surrendered what was left to the 27th Lancers, inviting them to take possession of his headquarters mess stocks of champagne.

  Subsidiary operations on the west side of the Lombardy Marshes were the responsibility of the Polish II Corps, with 43 Gurkha Lorried Brigade under command. The Germans may have been on the run but they had no intention of giving up any ground without a fight. In this area a network of canals and rivers provided natural tank obstacles that could be held by a machine-gun and section of infantry long enough to force an attacker to deploy before the defenders then fell back to the next obstacle. The Gurkhas were ordered to establish bridgeheads over the rivers to allow the Polish II Corps to advance along the axis from the Speranza crossroads to Marochia and then to Medicina. The area was defended by men of 4 Parachute Division, experienced, well trained, well led and in no mood to roll over and die, whatever the overall situation might be. The only way for the brigade to take its objectives in the time frame required would be to act speedily, get the enemy on the back foot and bounce him out of his defensive positions. In many ways 43 Gurkha Brigade was the forerunner of a modern, twenty-first-century brigade: it had three Gurkha battalions, two armoured regiments, two field artillery regiments and one medium, an anti-tank battery, two field troops and an armoured field squadron Royal Engineers. Everyone was on tracks or wheels, the infantry in Kangaroos, with a crew of two and carrying ten infantrymen, or in Priests, self-propelled guns with the gun and ammunition racks taken out and carrying twenty infantrymen. Although the battles fought by the brigade were of little importance in the greater scheme of things, they anticipated British all-arms tactics by thirty years and so are worthy of closer examination.