Second World War, The

by Corrigan, Gordon

  On 2 September 1945, on the deck of the battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, the representatives of the Japanese emperor, government and armed forces signed the instrument of surrender. Other ceremonies followed in Malaya, Singapore, Hong Kong, British Borneo, the Dutch East Indies and French Indo-China. The reoccupation of these territories was to take the Allies some considerable time, and in not all of them were they welcomed. In the Dutch East Indies a nationalist movement, some of whose members had cooperated with the Japanese, had no intention of reverting to Dutch rule, and, as the Dutch had no armed forces to retake the islands, the British, or more accurately the Indian, Army had to do it for them. As troops were in short supply, the surrendered Japanese garrisons were rearmed and used to restore law and order. It was commonplace for a young British officer, with a Gurkha orderly and a couple of signallers, to have under command an entire Japanese battalion, with besworded officers bowing and hissing, and obeying orders promptly and efficiently.

  And so the Second World War ended, but now its consequences had to be dealt with, an eventuality for which the Allies had been planning since well before the end of the conflict and about which they had enunciated and agreed in principle at the Yalta Conference in February 1945. Germany was to be divided into occupation zones to be governed by Allied Military Government Control Commissions, the Russians in the east and the British and Americans in the west, with the French granted an occupation zone at the last minute. There was no justification whatsoever for a French zone – they had done little or nothing to defeat the Germans, although the Free French had perhaps prevented France from going communist – but it was in the Western Powers’ interest to restore France to Great Power status as a counterweight to the USSR and so the French got their zone, as they did in Berlin, which was the subject of a separate division, again into four occupied zones. Other matters settled were the borders of post-war Europe, and here Poland was the major stumbling block, a Russian solution being reluctantly agreed to when the USSR refused to recognize the London-based government-in-exile. Another – latterly contentious – stipulation, insisted upon by the Russians, was that Allied nationals in the German army should be returned to their home country (which meant Russians, Cossacks, Poles, Latvians, Ukrainians et al). In a form of déjà vu in reverse, it was the Jewish Brigade in northern Italy that supervised the herding of Uzbeks in German uniform across a bridge from the British into the Russian zone, where they were shot as they arrived.

  As far back as the Moscow Conference of October 1943, the Allies had agreed that at the end of the war those whom they regarded as having been responsible for the war should be punished, and that this should be carried out as a result of proper legal proceedings. Not all agreed with this approach; some British jurists were concerned about ex post facto justice, and pointed out that it was a long-standing principle of British law that no offence could be made retrospective: that is, you could make it a capital offence to ride a bicycle without lights and that could be enforced from the date the king signed the act, but you could not then hang somebody for careless cycling before the act came into force. Even Churchill was at first of the view that the best solution would simply be to line up the leadership of Germany and Japan and shoot the lot out of hand, but more sober counsel prevailed and many legal brains had been occupied long into the night to devise a framework within which trials could be held, a framework that had to satisfy the legal systems of Britain, America and the USSR and which would be seen to be fair by the rest of the world. It was not finally agreed until August 1945.

  There was an existing legal code – the Hague and Geneva Conventions – that dealt with some aspects of armed conflict, such as the treatment of prisoners of war and enemy civilians, but there was no charge that could be brought against those people who had been acting in accordance with the laws of their own country within that country, nor with behaviour that had not been thought of when the conventions had been drawn up. The Allies therefore devised a set of charges which they intended to bring against the civil and military leaders of the defeated nations before International Military Tribunals (IMT), one in Nuremberg in Germany and one in Tokyo. The one trying the Germans would have a judge from each of the UK, the USA, the USSR and France, and was to be presided over by Lord Justice Lawrence, who was a distinguished British law lord, the son of a Lord Chief Justice and the winner of the DSO as an artillery officer in the First World War, and who had incidentally been at school with Clement Attlee. There were four ‘catch-all’ charges that would be relied upon: Count One, making a common plan or conspiracy to commit any of the other counts; Count Two, crimes against peace; Count Three, war crimes; and Count Four, crimes against humanity. Of these, Count One, conspiracy, was well understood in English and American law, albeit not in others, while Count Three, war crimes, was straightforward and already covered by the conventions, but Counts Two and Four were more difficult to agree upon, and eventually it was decided that crimes against peace were defined as planning, preparing, initiating and waging a war of aggression and wars in violation of international treaties or agreements, while crimes against humanity covered murder, deportment, enslavement and persecution on racial, religious or political grounds, whether or not – and this was crucial – such actions were in violation of the domestic law of the country where they were perpetrated. This was intended to cover slave labour, the concentration camps, the extermination of Jews and others and the behaviour of the Einsatzgruppen on the Eastern Front.

  There were, inevitably, objections. In regard to crimes against peace, Count Two, every general staff in the world plans aggressive war, whether they actually carry it out or not, and, if they did not, they would not be doing their job. In the bowels of the Ministry of Defence in London there are plans for attacking just about every country in the world. Admittedly the one against France has not been updated since the 1920s, and the one against the USA has gathered dust for almost 200 years, but they are there. If the tribunal was going to arraign Germans for the unprovoked invasion of Norway, for example, then it was to be hoped that the subject of the British plans to do exactly that in 1940 would not arise. This tricky little matter was resolved by the IMT declaring that the Tu Quoque defence (‘You did it too, so how can you prosecute me?’) could not be deployed. Even Count Three, war crimes, was not entirely straightforward, as it covered ‘wanton destruction of cities, towns and villages not justified by military necessity’ and this, it might be argued, could equally well be applied to the Allied bombing offensive against Germany. There was also another snag, particularly in regard to Count Four, where the practitioners of nastiness would doubtless claim obedience to superior orders. This, it was decided, would not be an acceptable defence, and only at the last minute was a serious embarrassment avoided when it was pointed out that in the Army Act, the law as far as British soldiers were concerned, a chapter explaining how they were affected by international law concluded by saying that orders from government or an individual soldier’s superiors were an absolute defence to an accusation of breaching the various conventions. An amendment removing this protection was hurriedly issued.

  Eventually, the Nuremberg Tribunal arraigned twenty-two Germans accused before it. It would have been twenty-four but Robert Ley, the leader of the Deutsche Arbeitsfront, the one trade union permitted, had committed suicide and the head of the Krupp industrial dynasty was found unfit to plead. Hitler, Himmler and Goebbels had all committed suicide, otherwise they would have been there too. The idea was to cover the widest spectrum of the NSDAP state, and the accused included politicians, industrialists, political theorists, government ministers and representatives of the military: from the army, there were Field Marshal Keitel and General Jodl; from the navy, Admirals Raeder and Dönitz; from the air force, there was Reichsmarschall Göring. It was perhaps ironic that the Russians, those masters of the art of mass murder and rigged trials, were represented, and that much hand-wringing reference was made to the principles of the League of Nations, wh
ich the United States had declined to join and from which the USSR had been expelled. The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact was hurriedly skated over, even though Ribbentrop was one of the accused; the Russians insisted on including in the charge sheet the Katyn Forest massacre in Poland, which everyone knew had been carried out by them and not the Germans, and objected strongly when the wretched Rudolf Hess, who had been in British custody since long before most of the crimes complained of had been committed, and before the attack on the Soviet Union had even begun, was not sentenced to death.

  The indictments took two days to read, and 218 days to try. In the end, three of the twenty-two were acquitted – the economist Hjalmar Schacht, Franz von Papen, who had briefly been Hitler’s deputy chancellor, and Hans Fritsche, head of the radio division of the Ministry of Propaganda – and, of the nineteen found guilty on one or more of the counts, eleven were sentenced to death. Göring managed to commit suicide before the sentence could be carried out but Keitel and Jodl were both hanged. These were dishonourable deaths for military men – and deliberately intended to be so – and a West German court many years later pardoned Jodl as a soldier who had simply been doing his duty and who confined his activity to operational matters. The two admirals were found guilty but sentenced to imprisonment. Once the IMT trials were over, each occupying power conducted further trials in their own zones of occupation, which continued until 1949. In both West and, much later, reunified Germany, the trials went on as post-war German politicians sought to distance themselves from their nation’s past. It is difficult to see what is achieved now by putting a ninety-year-old former concentration camp guard on trial, when identification is doubtful and the witnesses’ recollection must be impaired, but it still happens.

  In Japan, the Allies took a rather different view. War crimes trials there must be, but the wartime alliance was fast unravelling and the West needed Japan as a bulwark against communism in the region. Most notable was the absence of the emperor in the dock, along with a number of leading military and naval figures, while many of the most wanted had already killed themselves. There were those both then and now who felt that Hirohito was as guilty as Hitler and should have been hanged, but expediency ruled and the Allies needed the authority of the emperor to keep order during the occupation. The International Military Tribunal Far East (IMTFE) was made up of eleven judges, reflecting the wide scope of Japanese aggression, and was presided over by Judge Sir William Webb of Australia. The Tribunal put twenty-eight Japanese on trial and found all of them guilty. Seven were hanged, all having been found guilty of atrocities against prisoners of war or civilians. Subsequent regional trials by the individual nations went on until 1951, and of the 5,700 defendants 920 were executed, nearly all found guilty of atrocities.

  In hindsight, the conduct of both tribunals, and particularly that in Tokyo, leaves one uncomfortable. Hearsay evidence was permitted, as were diaries and written matter, even though the writers of these were not questioned, the defendants were accused of crimes that were not crimes when committed, the Russian judges were concerned only with doing what Moscow wanted without regard to legal principles (the Russian judge in Tokyo could not understand English or Japanese, the two languages of the trial). There can be little doubt that most of the Germans and Japanese executed were thoroughly nasty people, and deserving of no sympathy, but it was of questionable legality all the same. That said, it is difficult to see what else the Allies could have done. The United Kingdom and the United States were democracies, and their populations would have insisted that those seen as being responsible for slaughter on such a scale were held accountable, regardless of legal niceties. To punish every single German or Japanese who had stepped out of line was not a practical proposition, and, for all the undoubted flaws in the procedure, the execution or imprisonment of a representative sample was probably the only realistic – and quite possibly the fairest – option.

  EPILOGUE

  The Second World War affected more people than any other in recorded history. Estimates of the total death toll vary widely and are of little assistance in assessing the results of the war, for it was not merely the relatives of those killed in battle that were most affected. When we add civilian deaths by bombing, famine, disease and deliberate genocide, the grand total may well be somewhere in the region of 50–60 million. Some authorities estimate a much higher figure but the truth is that, while the American and British records are accurate, and the German ones reasonably so, nobody really knows the figures for the USSR and China, even though there can be little doubt that they topped the league. The USA and the British Empire got away relatively lightly, with less than a million military and civilian dead between them, although this does not include those who died in the Bengal famine – a disaster which would not have happened but for the war preventing rice from being imported from Burma. In strictly demographic terms, populations, at least in the West, recovered relatively quickly, as they always do after a major conflict. Far more long-lasting, however, were the political and economic consequences of the war.

  Militarily, the Red Army, with huge swathes cut out of it by Stalin’s purges and with decision-making constipated by the presence of the commissars, probably made the steepest conversion. From being a force with obsolete equipment, a lack of mobility and ignorant commanders, it became one that was able to take on the Germans and beat them at their own game, admittedly only when greatly outnumbering them.

  The United States started the war with an old-fashioned and tiny army and a large but pedestrian navy, but in an astonishingly short space of time her industries were galvanized into producing the materiel required to wage total war. American commanders knew that both officers and men were inexperienced and so they relied on machines, becoming by far the most mechanized of the combatants – the amount of firepower US forces could deliver, from ships, aircraft, artillery and tanks, was nothing short of awesome. As for the British, they feared the Germans’ speed of reaction and ability to manoeuvre, and so they tried always to keep their forces balanced – with the right mix of armour, infantry and artillery – and to avoid taking risks, risks that they knew the Germans would exploit. The result was a plodding approach to war on land and cautious commanders who, despite protestations to the contrary, often fought battles of attrition reminiscent of the First World War. The thoroughly militarized society of Japan produced a superb fighting machine, with soldiers, sailors and airmen who were loyal, robust, capable of enduring great hardship and devoted to their cause. It was their misfortune that the machine was not backed up by an industrial base that could sustain it in a long war, and the appalling behaviour towards civilians and prisoners has left an indelible stain on Japanese honour.

  In terms of pure military ability, however, the German army was by far the best. Time and again, even when the end was almost upon them, German soldiers showed a tactical flexibility and a professionalism which no other army came near to rivalling.While the British would require time for a formation newly arrived in theatre to train and marry up with others already there, the Germans could take a plethora of units of different arms, units which had never met each other before, give them a commander and send them out to do battle straight away. All German soldiers were trained in the same way and in the same battle drills, unlike the British, who relied on individual units having their own ways of doing things. After the war, the German generals mostly blamed Hitler for not allowing them to fight the sort of war that they were trained for and were good at. The question then arises: could the Germans have won the war without Hitler? Disregarding the fact that the Germans would not have gone to war without Hitler or someone very like him, the answer has to be‘No’. Once they had failed to win the war in 1940 by knocking Britain out of it, and then failed to take Moscow and topple the Soviet regime or at least force it to sue for peace in 1941, the Germans were always bound to lose: Russia was just far too big to conquer, and a country with Germany’s population and industrial capacity simply could not take on the Bri
tish and French empires, the USSR and the USA at the same time, however good her soldiers were – and they were very, very good. This was a lesson that Germany should have learned from the first war but chose not to.

  As for the generals, many of the outstanding Russian commanders were rusticated immediately after the war for fear they might pose a threat to Stalin, and their talents only recognized, at least in their own country, many years later. Russian tactics were never particularly sophisticated, yet, given the size of the manpower pool from which the Red Army could draw, they did not have to be. It is difficult, therefore, to pass judgement on Zhukov, Konev and their ilk by Western standards, but there can be no doubt that it was they who directed the army which did most of the fighting on land and contributed in blood more to the defeat of Germany than any other.

  In the United States, Eisenhower served two terms as president, following a long American tradition of successful military leaders turning (or being turned) to politics after a successful war. While there were those who dismissed Eisenhower’s military capabilities, only he could have made the Alliance in the last phase of the war work – he was a past master at getting mutually antipathetic prima donnas to work together: nobody else, British or American, could have succeeded in the way that he did, and the free world owes him a huge debt. General Marshall, as Chief of Staff of the US Army, did a superb job in balancing the demands of the different theatres, coping with inter-service rivalry and ensuring that, even where British and American policies and interests differed widely, the Alliance never faltered. Douglas MacArthur became the viceroy of Japan, and nursed that nation back to health and brought it into the Western camp. Later, as American and United Nations Commander-in-Chief in Korea, he wanted to invade China and use atomic weapons against her. In hindsight, he may have been right, for as Napoleon so wisely said, ‘Let China sleep, for when she awakes the world will tremble.’ Bombing China back to the Stone Age might have nipped in the bud the economic threat now posed by that nation and the military threat that she may pose in the not too distant future, but it was not remotely acceptable politically. MacArthur himself was sacked and, in his own words, ‘just faded away’ after an emotional address to Congress.