In the middle of 1942, the war in Europe reached its halfway point and its turning point. It had taken Hitler half a war to occupy a tenth of the world’s surface and control a population roughly equivalent to that of the United States. Half a war to gain an empire. It would take him half a war to lose one.
Japan also reached its halfway point with a vast empire, having scorched across the Asia-Pacific region until it occupied a sixth of the earth’s surface. Then it too started to tumble towards destruction. Winston Churchill had declared in 1925 that it was inconceivable that Japan could pose a threat to the British Empire in the East. As late as 1939, he was reassuring about possible Japanese designs on Singapore.
But there was an attack. The southern resources area was vital to Japan. The price of silk, still Japan’s principal export, had dropped by 50% since the Great Depression, and she was resource-poor. By 1938, military spending absorbed 75% of Japanese government expenditure.
She launched not one attack, but many. The United States lost the use of all of its Pacific battleships and large numbers of cruisers and destroyers. The British and Dutch Far Eastern fleets had been eliminated, and the Royal Australian Navy had been driven back to port. Japan had lost not a single battleship, aircraft carrier, heavy or light cruiser.
It had gained resources of great importance, including 70% of the world’s tin supply, most of its natural rubber, and the oil output of the Dutch East Indies, which at the time exceeded that of Iran and California combined. It had done this in a single onslaught fought as two campaigns, in Asia and in the Pacific. The day after Pearl Harbor, Japanese aircraft operating out of Vietnam bombed Singapore, and the Philippines was bombed by planes flying out of Taiwan. The two British capital ships in the area, Prince of Wales and Repulse, sailed from Singapore to contest Japanese landings on the Malay Peninsula.
They had no air cover, and on the 10th of December, both were sent to the bottom by waves of attacking Japanese aircraft. Thailand, then known as Siam, was occupied on December the 9th and formally allied itself with Japan on the 14th. The Imperial Japanese Army could now march through Thailand on route to Burma, a journey that they would attempt to hasten by construction of the Burma-Thailand Railway, which was to become so notorious. On December the 15th, Japanese troops entered Burma.
The full-scale invasion would be launched in January. On December the 16th, they landed in Borneo. On the 18th, they crossed onto Hong Kong Island. By the 7th of January, the Japanese had Sarawak.
They landed on the Celebes a couple of days later, and British North Borneo fell on the 19th. The Dutch East Indies, which generated 1/7 of the Netherlands economy, was a particularly crucial objective. Its annual production of 65 million barrels of oil had the potential to transform Japan’s ability to wage a protracted war. But the Dutch destroyed the wells.
On the Malay Peninsula, General Tomoyuki Yamashita’s 25th Imperial Japanese Army was advancing. Yamashita, whose exploits would earn him the sobriquet Tiger of Malaya, had 150 tanks. They were not very good tanks, which did not matter. The British forces opposing him had no tanks at all.
British defenses weakened by supply of resources to the war in Europe crumbled. The Japanese advance through Malaya followed two lines, across the Thai border and down the west coast, and from the landings at Kota Bharu following the east coast. The British in Malaya formed defensive lines, but failed to extend their flanks. They had not learned the lesson of the German blitzkrieg through the Ardennes, and just as on the European battlefield, their flanks were quickly turned by enemy troops infiltrating through supposedly impossible areas, in this case the jungle.
On December 31st, the last of the British and Commonwealth forces crossed the causeway evacuating Malaya and garrisoning the island fortress of Singapore. The greatest disaster in British Imperial history was less than two months away. By mid-January, the commander-in-chief of ABDACOM, General Wavell, who had been kicked sideways from North Africa, was ordering Arthur Percival, the general officer commanding Malaya, to prepare Singapore for a siege. Before Singapore fell, Japanese forces working their way through the Dutch East Indies, present-day Indonesia, hopped from island to island suppressing what resistance they found.
Small garrisons of Dutch and other forces had been sent to defend some of these islands, but their position was hopeless, the planning rudimentary, and their equipment inadequate. The fate of Gull Force, an Australian formation sent to support Dutch troops on the island of Ambon, was typical. Gull Force reached Ambon on December 17th, just two weeks before the Japanese. Only about 1,100 of us, and there would have been only about that many Dutch-led Ambonese soldiers.
So, the action was very, very brief, and come end of January, early February, the Dutch capitulated, and the Australians had no option but to do likewise. So, that’s when I became a prisoner of war. The survivors were marching into 3 years of harsh captivity. The first Japanese landing on Singapore on February the 8th occurred less than a week after the fall of Ambon.
Four days later, a ship carrying Australian nurses and wounded evacuated from Singapore was bombed by Japanese aircraft and sank. Most of the survivors reached Bangka, an island like Ambon in the Dutch East Indies. An officer from their ship surrendered to the Japanese who ordered the 22 nurses and one civilian woman to wade into the surf. When they were waist deep, they were machine-gunned.
All but Sister Vivian Bullwinkel were killed. Sister Bullwinkel survived the war and gave evidence before the War Crimes Tribunal in Tokyo. Of the massacre, she said, “We just marched into the surf and they fired at us. There were no tears, for we knew it was our lot.
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The day before the Bangka Island massacre on the 15th of February, General Percival had surrendered the Singapore garrison of 130,000 troops to an invading army half that size. Facing a numerically superior enemy and having taken about the same number of casualties, 9,000, as the defenders, Yamashita’s call on the British to surrender or face destruction was an enormous bluff. But General Arthur Percival, baggy shorts, scarecrow frame, and trim mustache, perfectly designed to be the scapegoat for such a disaster, had mainly raw troops without air cover with which to meet battle-hardened Japanese. His concern for the safety of Singapore’s 1 million civilians overrode any other judgment, and he marched into captivity at the head of his force, many of whom would suffer dreadfully in the years ahead.
Yamashita could hardly believe his luck and said so. As far as Japanese public opinion was concerned, the improbable collapse of the British Empire in the East meant quite simply victory. After the surrender of Singapore, the headline of the Asahi Shimbun newspaper trumpeted, “Situation of Pacific War decided. ” And the jubilant Japanese government distributed treats to all the children.
With the fall of Singapore, 55,000 Indian soldiers of the king were taken prisoner. 40,000 of them volunteered to fight in the Indian National Army, a Japanese creation under the respected leader Subhas Chandra Bose, which purported to be fighting the British for Indian independence. Later in 1942, Winston Churchill was to say in a speech in London, “I have not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire. ” But, of course, he had.
This war changed everything. End of the British Empire. They won the war, but they lost the empire. The pomp and circumstance by which a few thousand held several million in their sway had been exposed for the frail bluff it was.
Singapore, fallen. The empire was on the canvas, and though it would rise again, it would be, as they say, as a dead man walking. The Japanese catch cry, “We are all Asians. ” Their claim to be on a crusade to evict the white man from Asia had immediate resonance.
But, like Hitler in Europe, the Japanese knew how to conquer, but not how to keep an empire. Soon, they were hated and resented more violently than had been the colonial masters. Taking food from Chinese mouths, taking Korean women into sexual slavery, using Filipinos for bayonet practice was hardly the way. But, those they conquered would not return to the arms of their previous masters.
When the fighting ended, there would be new paths to follow. The Dutch colonial government relocated to Australia at the beginning of March as the tsunami of Japanese conquest rolled through the East Indies, effectively collapsing the Dutch Empire. West from the Dutch Indies and from Malaya, the battle was for Burma. And that battle threatened to prize open the door to India.
Japanese aircraft operating out of Thailand had launched the first bombing raid on the capital, Rangoon, on the 23rd of December. Japanese reinforcements arrived through January and began to press towards the capital. Moulmein, celebrated in the poetry of Rudyard Kipling, fell at the end of the month. He knew that we cannot sit on the frontier all the time.
We have to go. This little feeling of the withdrawal from Burma was taken as a personal touching point that we after all fought. But now nobody thinks we fought cuz we came back. And the feeling was that he must get a chance to at least settle with the Japanese that they are no better than us.
The troops opposing the Japanese advance were mainly Indian divisions, which combined with British units comprised the Burma Army. In the north of the country were the Chinese fifth and sixth armies, commanded by the American General Joe Stilwell, a stringent character known as Vinegar Joe. The Japanese entered Rangoon on March the 5th. Two weeks later, a new man was put in command of first Burma Corps.
His name was William Slim. But the Japanese is a tough enemy. And much must be done before he will admit defeat. By the end of April, the Japanese had cut the Burma Road.
General Stilwell began his march south to reunite with Allied forces on May the 15th, he crossed into Assam in British India. Five days later, after the longest withdrawal in British military history, 1,000 km, Bill Slim led Burma Corps across the border into India. The men looked, Slim said, like scarecrows, but he added, “They looked like soldiers, too. ” We did not want the Japanese to come and take over India.
Cuz there was a general feeling that the Japanese will be much worse. One person is evil, but the other is even more evil. It has been said that the winter saved the Russians, and in Burma, the monsoon saved the British. It would be 6 months before the fight there was resumed.
The Japanese advance through the islands of the Pacific had happened in the same months as their onslaught on Asia and the East Indies and it had met with a similarly great measure of success. Almost half of the Earth’s water surface is the Pacific Ocean. It covers an area greater than all of the land masses combined. Its scale dwarfs the scattered parcels of dry land that rise above its waves, but it was the existence of these islands that made extending the co-prosperity sphere into the Pacific feasible.
Because a ring of fortified islands made the empire defensible. And at Versailles, some of those islands had been gifted to Japan. The Marshall, Carolines and Marianas were former German colonies. Two American outposts upset the integrity of that defensive ring.
They were Wake and Guam. Three days after Pearl Harbor, Japanese forces landed on Guam which had surrendered by 6 o’clock the same morning. The first Japanese assault on Wake was beaten off by a well-entrenched defense. A stronger attempt on December the 23rd succeeded and Wake surrendered that day.
The day before, December 22nd, the main Japanese landings on Luzon signaled the commencement of the battle for the Philippines. The American commander, General Douglas MacArthur, had 130,000 men in uniform. But 100,000 were Filipinos who had been trained in close order drill. They could salute, but had never been in a fight.
MacArthur began to withdraw his forces. By the 5th of January, he had successfully established one American and seven Filipino divisions, 80,000 men, at Bataan, where they came under sustained Japanese attack. By the 22nd of January, MacArthur was ordering the withdrawal of forces to his final defensive line, an operation completed on the 26th. On the 8th of February, Filipino President Quezon proposed to President Roosevelt that his country be granted complete independence, so that he could proclaim Filipino neutrality, which he hoped would oblige both American and Japanese forces to leave.
President Roosevelt, advocate of self-determination in the Atlantic Charter, rejected Quezon’s proposal, but said that Filipino troops were free to surrender if they wished. He said that American forces would fight to the end. President Quezon left the Philippines on February the 20th. General MacArthur left on March the 11th.
Both men went to Australia. The Japanese continued to reinforce their invasion, opening a fierce offensive on Bataan on April the 3rd. On the 9th of April, the Allied forces on Bataan surrendered. 78,000 men were marched into captivity.
This was the Bataan Death March, more than 100 km under the scorching sun with hardly any food or water. Amongst those who marched into captivity were 12,000 Americans, barely a third of whom would survive Japanese imprisonment. Fighting elsewhere in the Philippines, Mindanao, Luzon, Corregidor continued, but by the 5th of May, General Wainwright was obliged to surrender the 15,000 man garrison on Corregidor. Five days later, on May the 10th, the last Allied troops in the Philippines surrendered.
Japanese troops had begun landing on New Guinea on March the 8th. Further landings followed and on March the 22nd, Japanese planes bombed the northern Australian port city of Darwin. It was obvious that the Japanese were on their way to invite us. And everything was haste.
And it was no trouble to get into the army as long as you could cough okay. And that you could say black or white, you were in without any question. And at the time I got in, it was a week before my 19th birthday. By the time Douglas MacArthur had established his command in Brisbane, the situation he faced was almost entirely black.
Virtually the whole of the Southwest Pacific command area was now in Japanese hands. Germany first commitment that America had made at the Washington Conference meant that he had limited strength on which to rely. But one national leader at least was determined to face the Japanese challenge as an overriding priority. THE FULL CABINET TODAY directed the war cabinet to gazette the necessary regulations for the complete mobilization OF ALL THE RESOURCES, HUMAN AND MATERIAL, IN THIS COMMONWEALTH FOR THE DEFENSE of this commonwealth.
THAT MEANS THAT EVERY HUMAN BEING IN THIS COUNTRY is now, whether he or she likes it, AT THE SERVICE OF THE GOVERNMENT TO WORK IN THE DEFENSE of Australia. John Curtin, the Australian Prime Minister, exercised his right in a fiery confrontation with Churchill to withdraw Australian troops from the European war to fight the enemy on his doorstep. By March 1942, the majority of Australian troops were back home ready to fight in the Pacific. In determining which strategy Japan should now follow, men in Tokyo had disagreed.
Naval staff had pressed for occupation of the southern part of New Guinea, from where action could be launched against New Caledonia, Fiji, and Samoa, extending and strengthening the defensive perimeter and isolating Australia from United States support and supply. The combined fleet staff, led by Admiral Yamamoto, thought differently. It argued for drawing the American Pacific Fleet into a full-scale engagement and so it believed to its destruction. Fatally, but predictably, the result was a face-saving compromise.
Both strategies would be adopted, which meant that both would be weakened. An invasion force to initiate the naval staff strategy assembled at Rabaul. On the 4th of May, the convoy sailed for Port Moresby, the key to New Guinea. Less than a week earlier, the American carriers Hornet and Enterprise had left Pearl Harbor with their battle groups bound for the Coral Sea.
Two other carriers, Lexington and Yorktown, had sailed two weeks previously. On May the 4th, the Battle of the Coral Sea was initiated when Yorktown launched air strikes against the invasion fleet from Rabaul. The next day, the main Japanese strike force built around the carriers Shokaku and Zuikaku entered the Coral Sea. The American and Japanese fleets engaged without significant results on the 7th, but around 0800 hours in the morning of May the 8th, the carrier forces located each other.
The first time those serving aboard ships in a naval action never saw their opponents. The Lexington was hit and abandoned, Shokaku disabled and forced to retire, and Zuikaku, though undamaged, lost 40% of her air group. The consequences of all this were to be enormous. The fact that the Americans were obliged to withdraw would allow the Japanese to claim a victory, but it was a victory that compelled Japan to abandon plans for an invasion of New Guinea from the sea.
Had they landed, they would have faced Australian defenders who were present in only brigade strength. The Japanese, as we will see, decided instead to take Port Moresby by an overland route. Admiral Yamamoto’s argument for an alternative strategy had been strengthened by an action on April the 18th that did little damage and took only 50 lives. On that day, 16 specially adapted B-25 bombers had taken off from the carrier Hornet on a bombing raid over Tokyo.
The raid is in the history books in the name of its commander, the Doolittle Raid. The aircraft did not have the range to return to the carrier, so they flew on to land in China where most crashed. Crews that crashed into Japanese hands became prisoners of war. Three were shot by firing squad.
Crews that crashed in China survived. But the real story was the impact on Japan. Bombs had fallen in Tokyo. Bombs had fallen close to the Imperial Palace.
Bombs had threatened the life of the emperor. The shock and shame of this cried out for a response from a military caste whose first duty was to defend the emperor. Planning began for a counterblow which would neutralize America’s capacity to launch raids on the home islands. It was evident to Japanese planners that flights from the nearby Chinese mainland were a possibility, and so on April 21st, only a couple of days after the Doolittle Raid, Japan’s Chinese Expeditionary Army was ordered to knock out airbases in Chekiang and Kiangsi.
By mid-May, the Chinese had been routed east of Chekiang. A second Japanese army advanced in late May and by early July, the expeditionary army had met all of its objectives. Before then, in May, Yamamoto’s moment had arrived. The action of the Combined Fleet would finally neutralize American naval strength in the Pacific and importantly, deal with a small Hawaiian outlier that had provided cover for the carriers from which the Doolittle raiders flew.
A place 3,100 km from the nearest continent in any direction. Midway. American code breakers led by Commander Joseph Rochefort knew that the Imperial Japanese Navy was going to a place designated AF, but they didn’t know where AF was. A false message sent from American HQ to the US Fleet advised that Midway was running short of fresh water.
Snapping at the trap, the Japanese relayed the message advising that AF was short of water. The US Fleet had the key to the lock. AF stood for Midway and the Imperial Japanese Navy was going there. Not much more than 60 ships were involved in the battle.
Midway would not be decided by fleets of warships. It was the almost 500 aircraft that the opposing navies would use like long-range cannon that would settle the issue. The Battle of the Coral Sea ruled the carriers Shōkaku and Zuikaku out of the attack on Midway. USS Yorktown, damaged in the same battle, was estimated to require 3 months for repair.
But 1,400 workmen completed the work in 2 days, and she took her place with the American fleet. It takes many sorts of hero to win a war. The Japanese sent a diversionary force under Admiral Hosogaya north to the Aleutians, but Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, commanding Pacific Ocean areas, was not distracted.
He ordered his forces to meet where he expected the main enemy blow to fall, at Midway. Task Force 16, Admiral Raymond Spruance, and Task Force 17, Admiral Jack Fletcher, sailed to their rendezvous with each other, with the Japanese, and with history. And they sailed to meet an enemy that, in every measurable sense, outgunned them. The battle opened on June the 4th when aircraft from Admiral Nagumo’s First Striking Force attacked aircraft and installations on Midway itself.
When the aircraft returned to the carriers, the admiral decided to re-equip them with bombs rather than torpedoes, and launch a second attack on the island. His fleet was, meanwhile, repelling American aircraft attacks. The Americans took significant losses with no hits. But not without effect.
The carrier forces were somewhat dispersed, their fighter cover was operating at low altitude, and flight decks were crowded with re-arming and refueling aircraft. At 10:20, Admiral Nagumo gave the order to launch when ready. Within 5 minutes, they would launch, and the admiral would stand on the brink of a great victory. They were, instead, 5 minutes that decisively changed the course of the battle and the war.
On that first day we had about 30 ships of all types, battleships, cruisers, destroyers, and fast transports. Second day we hit three carriers. Any luck with them? Oh, yes.
Right in there. In those 5 minutes, Commander Wade McClusky of the USS Enterprise’s bombing six squadron laid his 37 Dauntless dive bombers in from 14,500 ft in a 70° dive at 280 knots. The carrier Akagi was the first hit, then Kaga, last Soryu when Yorktown’s dive bombers joined the assault. Japan lost four carriers, more than 2,000 seamen and 250 aircraft.
This was not, in terms of human life, a terrible battle. In terms of influence on history, it was in the front rank. Japanese losses equalized the strength of the opposing fleets. Between 1942 and 1944, Japan would add six new fleet carriers, the USA 14.
In fact, through the war, for every major naval vessel built in Japanese shipyards, the Americans built 16. The news of Midway was passed to Prime Minister Tojo in typically obtuse language. The Navy, he was told by General Moritake Tanabe, has made a great mistake. Japan lost no territory as a result of its mistake, but Midway’s effects would be felt when towards the end of 1943, the Americans began to prize open the defensive perimeter.
Japan would have inadequate ships and above all aircraft. In 1942, Japan lost twice the number of aircraft it produced. As great naval forces clashed in the war’s first significant turning point at Midway, the war in Western Europe was being confined almost entirely to the skies. It was for a long time the only means that Britain had of carrying the fight to her enemy.
1/3 of Britain’s national output was devoted to the strategic air offensive. When the war had started, bombing was conducted according to strict rules. In 1939, the Chamberlain government had rejected a suggestion that the Black Forest be bombed on the grounds that much of it was private property. But to point out the obvious, desperate times called for desperate measures.
Almost 150,000 Rolls-Royce Merlin engines were built. The V12 power plant drove some of the most famous planes of the war, Spitfire, Hurricane, Mosquito, Mustang, and the four-engine Avro Lancaster. The Lancaster was a true heavy bomber. Its bomb load of 6.
35 metric tons overshadowed the B-17 Flying Fortress and the German Heinkel 111 and Junkers 88, all of which carried between two and three tons. By general ascent, the best night bomber of the war, the Lancaster was not without faults. Because of poorly placed escape hatches, the average survival rate for the seven-man crew of a disabled Lancaster was 1. 3 persons.
For the less glamorous Halifax, it was 2. 45. The Avro Lancaster, most powerful and efficient bomber in the world, and one of the most important war-winning weapons yet devised by the United Nations. The Lancaster entered service with Bomber Command of the Royal Air Force at the same time as the G radio navigation device came into use.
Such developments encouraged the RAF to redefine its bombing strategy. On February the 14th, 1942, the area bombing directive was issued. It named the Ruhr, and specifically Essen in the middle of that conurbation, as primary targets, with Duisburg, Düsseldorf, and Cologne as other cities to be attacked. The bomber offensive, undoubtedly, was a major contribution to our winning the war, no doubt about that.
But, it was a pretty ruthless business. To drive home the strategy, a new head of Bomber Command was appointed. Arthur Harris, Bomber Harris, one of the most controversial Allied commanders. If you individually succeed, you will have delivered the most devastating blow against the very vitals of the enemy.
Let him have it right on the chin. Send that message to all groups and stations. That was how Air Marshal Harris, Commander-in-Chief, Bomber Command, gave his instructions for the largest air raid the world has ever known. At aerodromes up and down the country, well over a thousand British-built bombers were being prepared for their journey over the heart of Germany’s biggest cities.
Harris was given a job. It was to deliver on the objective of the area bombing directive, and that document explained that the purpose of dropping bombs was to focus attacks on the morale of the enemy civil population, and in particular, industrial workers. They don’t know what they’re dropping when they drop them bombs. I don’t give a damn what anybody says, because I saw what it was.
They bombed everything. Especially in Nuremberg. When I was finally wound up in Nuremberg, the lower Nuremberg was level. And the top of Nuremberg, that was pretty well level, too.
It was pathetic to see all that. And then you see the old people, the old lady getting the bricks and knocking the cement off. They were ready to rebuild. They knew they lost the war, but they weren’t going to lose their lives, you know?
Area bombing remains perhaps the most controversial of all of the military strategies of the war. Pre-war projections both stimulated expenditure on bombers and advocacy of their use. Official British planning was based on a projected casualty rate of 50 casualties per ton of bombs dropped. In the event, the death toll for the London Blitz was one per ton, and the overall death toll in Germany was half that.
As early as 1941, even Winston Churchill was beginning to doubt the prophecies about the effectiveness of bombing. “It is very disputable,” he said, “whether bombing by itself will be a decisive factor in the present war. ” Essen was first attacked on the night of the 8th-9th of March, and then on March the 28th-29th, the RAF attacked Lubeck. 234 aircraft attacked, 13 were lost.
Lubeck was virtually destroyed. Lubeck was a port where engines for U-boats were manufactured. It was also a historical medieval beautiful city and it was laid waste. In retaliation, Hitler ordered attacks on British cities that qualified as targets because they were beautiful.
All they had in common was prominence in tourist guides like the Baedeker and indeed the raids became known as the Baedeker raids. A raid on Augsburg with heavy losses persuaded Harris to abandon daytime bombing and from late April Bomber Command flew by night. Rostock was attacked to great effect and at the end of May Cologne was hit in the first 1,000 bomber raid. The operational order was succeed.
Object to destroy the city of Cologne. Barely 2 days later, almost as great a number hit Essen and at the end of June Bremen was the target. Harris was until the very end of the war unshakable in his belief that bombing would bring Germany to her knees, that the disruption to industry and the effect on civilian morale, victims of what was euphemistically called dehousing, would hasten the end of the war. Area bombing had the advantage that it did not depend on accurate bomb aiming which various reports had proved was beyond the reach of current equipment.
The Butt report analyzing the effectiveness of Bomber Command’s actions in the summer of 1941 had found that only one in four bombers had dropped their loads within 8 km of their targets. On nights when there was no moon, it was only one in 20. In fact, in 1941 Bomber Command had suffered more casualties than it had caused, crews dying as the British military historian Sir John Keegan put it, largely to crater the German countryside. They had not arranged for people who had done their 30 operations to come back and say to officers, “Now fellows, this is the sort of thing that you’ve got to protect yourself, guys.
With your plane tied in your height at about say 7,000 ft or 10,000 ft, that’ll be about the best protection you can get. ” But they didn’t do that. All we had were just raw recruits doing bombing raids on Germany. A mistake to suppose that the bombers were attacking defenseless civilians.
The cities were well defended. Indeed, anti-aircraft defense tied up 1 million German service personnel. And although it represented only 7% of British military manpower, Bomber Command took 24% of British military deaths. As we came out of the target area, I got caught in this beam.
I thought of it a thousand times since as to what I did. I had absolutely no doubt I should have just remained at the same height and flew and kept on changing course. But instead of that, I attempted to get out of the beam by increasing my speed. And I did that by diving.
Got free of the beam, but it wasn’t very long before the rear tail gunner was reporting we were being attacked. A night fighter. Again, I had to take whatever evasive action I thought was appropriate. Again, it was diving.
And as a result of this, of course, we lost all my height. I thought I was flying at somewhere about 500 ft. And suddenly that’s why I hit a tree. I can remember the two of the crew coming around and saying, “Come on, Carl.
You’ve got to get out of here. ” And that’s what I did. The bombardier, who was in front of me, and the wireless operator, they were killed in the crash. And that left three of us.
The morality of area bombing continues to be debated, and its targeting of civilian populations without regard to age or gender has led to comparisons with the criminal slaughter of the Holocaust. Of course, bombing involved the risks of war. It was not a cowardly assault on defenseless civilians. Tens of thousands of Allied airmen lost their lives.
Surely the compelling distinction dividing the death camps from the bomb sites is that all sides used area bombing because all sides believed that it could and would be a war-winning weapon. No one outside the heart of Nazism has ever pretended that killing Jews, Romani, Slavs, and others was going to win the outcome of the war. The new empires of East and West, Japanese and German, had reached their furthest limits in the course of 1942. And there was in the minds of some an extraordinary vision that Japan spreading West would link hands with Germany thrusting east.
The conquerors would meet in the Indian subcontinent. But as 1942 wore on, both Germany and Japan would suffer setbacks which meant, as Winston Churchill was to say, if not the beginning of the end, then the end of the beginning. In May 1942, Japan’s Imperial ambitions had been checked at sea. Battle of Midway may not have turned the tide, but it stopped the flood.
And the tide turned as the gap widened between the abilities of the two sides to re-equip and resupply. The United States, which was to provide the grand coalition with 75% of its war material, demonstrated a remarkable capacity to deliver to its armed forces and its allies in apparently limitless quantities. It was said that America, by 1943, was producing a tank every 5 minutes, an airplane every half hour, and an aircraft carrier every week. Germany had always known that the longer the war went on, the more remote its hopes of victory.
But on the 28th of June, 1942, hopes were high. As we have seen, Plan Blue launched against the weakest Soviet troop concentration, the southern front, the gateway to the Caucasus, made good progress. Stalin had been warned of the offensive by British intelligence and by a complete German battle plan taken from a downed German aircraft, he had dismissed all these warnings as misinformation. Stalin waited for the attack on Moscow to be renewed, but he got the plan that Hitler favored and his troops fell back in disarray, which encouraged Hitler to make the call that many consider his costliest error.
He divided his force. With the Crimea taken, he sent Army Group A along the Black Sea coast aiming for the crucial oil cities of Maikop, Grozny, and Baku. Within 12 days, it had advanced more than 550 km. Hitler ordered Army Group B to advance on Stalingrad.
In the initial bombing of Stalingrad, a period of just two days, at least 40,000 Soviet citizens had been killed. When the assault on the city began, Russia’s anti-aircraft guns had been entrenched for use on the advancing tanks. The gun crews were almost all young women, and they were almost all killed. A million and a half Soviet women served in the armed forces.
Around 490,000 of them in frontline roles, where they were granted one benefit not available to their male comrades, an additional 100 g of soap. On August the 19th, Army Group B began its assault on Stalingrad. Within 4 days, it had reached the suburbs. What could possibly go wrong?
Stalin’s Order No. 227 simply said that the Red Army was to stand its ground. It said that retreat means death. It worked.
Other measures announced by Stalin helped. He reopened the churches. He spoke of the sacred motherland rather than the party. For the first time since the revolution, officers were to be addressed by rank, and the role of the political commissar was reduced to the point of irrelevance.
In late August, Stalin sent General Georgy Zhukov, the 42-year-old son of a shoemaker, deputy supreme commander, to Stalingrad. Stalingrad had been named Tsaritsyn until 1925 when it was given Stalin’s name to commemorate his role in its defense during the revolutionary wars. The salvation of the city that bore his name was a matter of personal pride for the Soviet leader, and its destruction became a similarly illogical obsession for the Führer. Lavrentiy Beria, the notorious head of Stalin’s secret police, understood this ego-dimension.
He described the battle as a confrontation between two rams. On August 23rd, von Paulus, commanding the Sixth Army, the largest single formation in the Wehrmacht, 290,000 strong, reached the River Volga just north of Stalingrad. The next day, August 24th, Zhukov arrived in Stalingrad. On September the 2nd, Hitler ordered that when the city fell, the entire male population was to be eliminated.
Stalingrad sprawled for about 40 km on both sides of the Volga and at a point where that river was 1,300 m wide. By the middle of September, Soviet defense was concentrated on a garrison restricted to the west bank and to an area little more than 15 km wide at its widest point. The Germans had closed to about 200 m from the river when at 1700 hours on the 14th of September General Alexander Rodimtsev led the 10,000 men of his 13th Guards Rifle Division across the Volga and in a charge up the steep river bank. There were 320 survivors.
By the end of September, 9/10 of Stalingrad was in German hands. It proved not to be enough. At the beginning of November, the combination of strengthening Soviet resistance and the traditional Russian ally, winter, halted the advance by von Kleist’s Panzer Army into the Caucasus at Ordzhonikidze. As the first ice appeared on the Volga, Marshal Zhukov and the rest of the Stavka, the Soviet High Command, began planning their counterstroke, Operation Uranus.
Designed to trap the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad. Russian army formations were known as fronts. General Vatutin’s Southwest Front would attack from the north where it faced the Third Romanian Army. The Stalingrad Front, General Yeremenko’s south of the city, also faced Romanians as he drove north linking with Vatutin at Kalach.
The Don Front was commanded by a survivor of Stalin’s purges who had been tortured and twice subjected to mock executions. His name was Konstantin Rokossovsky. His task was to apply pressure to Paulus preventing him from responding to the maneuver bringing in his rear. These Soviet formations represented a land empire whose population comprised 120 nationalities.
Khatskevich Pavel Matveevich is Belorussian. I served Tatarin. Mubarakshin Anatoly Sharukha is the local Siberian. 700 km from the railway.
He first saw the train only when he was drafted into the army. The most diverse people who joined into one fist. On the 11th of November 1942, the German assault on Stalingrad was renewed. A week later, the Southwest and Don Fronts began their attacks.
The Stalingrad Front moved the next day. By the end of November the 20th, Vatutin had advanced 40 km. On the 22nd, he captured the bridge over the Don at Kalach, and on the 23rd, the Southwest and Stalingrad Fronts linked up just as planned. Zhukov had sent a million men, nearly a thousand tanks, and more than a thousand aircraft against the enemy.
330,000 Axis troops were now trapped in der Kessel, the cauldron, 55 km by 30. The Romanian Third Army had been destroyed, and the Romanian Fourth Army crippled. General Paulus, commanding the besieged army, estimated that he needed an airdrop of 750 tons a day, and Hermann Göring boasted that his Luftwaffe could do the job. Of course, it could not.
Göring retired to the Ritz Hotel in Paris. For Hitler, retreat, or worse still, surrender, were not options. His only order to the Sixth Army was to stand fast. On November 27th, Hitler created a new formation, Army Group Don.
He placed von Manstein in command and ordered him to relieve the encircled Paulus. At the end of November, the Red Army launched new attacks. A week of heavy fighting forced von Manstein to postpone his planned offensive. On December 28th, in view of the deteriorating situation, Hitler permitted two army groups to fall back on the line Konstantinovsk-Salsk-Armavir.
They were now more than 200 km from Stalingrad. It was time for the end game. On the 10th of January, 1943, the Soviet assault began. Eremenko pressed against the east bank of the Volga.
An offensive perimeter formed of six Soviet armies drew in like a dragnet on the west bank. The 65th Army in the center pushed forward 8 km on the first day. After 2 days, Rokossovsky’s Don Front, coming in from the city’s southwest, had lost more than 250 tanks and taken 26,000 casualties. By now, airborne resupply to the German forces was down to 40 tons a day.
By the 17th, the only airfield from which supplies could be flown fell. On January 23rd, the last German aircraft flew from Stalingrad. “A thousand years hence, Germans will speak of the battle with reverence and awe,” Hermann Göring said in a radio broadcast on January 30th. On that day, Hitler promoted Paulus to field marshal.
No German field marshal had ever surrendered his command, and Hitler, no doubt, expected the promotion to either guarantee that Paulus would fight to the last man or commit suicide rather than march into captivity. A day later, January the 31st, 1943, Generalfeldmarschall Friedrich von Paulus surrendered his command in the southern pocket of the city to Chuikov’s 62nd Army. “I have no intention,” von Paulus said, “of shooting myself for this Bavarian corporal. ”
The Germans had a name for the sort of fighting that had knocked down the city’s buildings.
Rattenkrieg, they called it, rat war. It produced legends, like the fighting at the tractor factory, the grain silo, the main railway station, which had changed hands 15 times, and Pavlov’s house, where Sergeant Pavlov and his unit had held out for 59 days until relieved. But even such heroics must in the end be settled by the reality of modern war. When the tractor plant was subjected to a bombardment by artillery massed to a density of 300 guns per kilometer, it surrendered, and the Battle of Stalingrad was over.
It had lasted 199 days. On February the 3rd, the Führer announced the fall of the city and declared 4 days of mourning. The official communiqué announced that the entire 6th Army had been wiped out to the last man and the last bullet. In fact, 91,000 prisoners of war were marched through the streets of Moscow.
5,000 would survive their captivity. Following Stalingrad’s surrender, German radio played the Adagio from the 7th Symphony of Anton Bruckner. It would be played again in 1945 following the announcement of Hitler’s death. From late in the winter of 1942, German propaganda had been recasting the war.
No longer a crusade to destroy Jewish Bolshevism, it was now a life-or-death struggle against the Asiatic horde. In this vein, the great orchestrator of German propaganda made a landmark speech on February the 18th. Joseph Goebbels asked, “Wollt ihr den totalen Krieg? ” Do you want total war?
Do you want a war more total and radical than even we can imagine? Those listening on the radio heard the carefully selected audience respond fanatically. They heard Goebbels end with a quotation that Nazi leaders had used since 1920. “Now, people, rise up and let the storm break loose.
” The storm that had broken over Stalingrad resulted in about 1,130,000 Soviet casualties. Axis forces suffered 850,000. Stalingrad may have checked the tide, but defeat in a battle is not defeat in a war, and the Soviet Union had yet to expel a single invader from its soil. At the end of 1942, German troops were in occupation of 14 sovereign states: France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Denmark, Norway, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Greece, Yugoslavia, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.
The Soviet Republics of Belorussia and Ukraine were occupied. Italy was an ally, and so too were Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria. The Eastern Front remained a contest between two great continental empires. So, was Stalingrad decisive?
Like Midway, Stalingrad was a battle in which both sides lost heavily. But, it proved that the German Empire was not invincible, that Soviet generals were at least a match for their German counterparts, above all, that the Soviet Union alone was able to pay the cost of exorbitantly expensive victories. It would do so again at Kursk, when the Wehrmacht, still deep in Soviet territory, would once again go on the offensive. What Stalingrad, along with Midway and the reversal of fortunes in North Africa, did do was persuade people on the Allied side, from the lowest to the highest, that they had turned the corner.
Ah, this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. What it is perhaps the end of the beginning. Churchill was referring to the second battle of El Alamein.
Through July and August, as we have learned, Rommel was checked in North Africa. His newly arrived adversary, Montgomery, was first tested when Rommel launched an offensive with as his objective the British fuel depot. Fuel supply to the Africa Corps was a constant problem. The key to Rommel’s plan was a swing against the Alam Halfa Ridge.
He was beaten back and in early September withdrew to his start line. Montgomery was determined to build up a superiority in every type of arms before rejoining the fight. Some of the tactics were less than orthodox. Dummy tanks were positioned to persuade observers that the attack was forming in a certain place and real tanks were also disguised.
There was a framework on the outside of the tanks with canvas on all painted to look like a lorry and it did look like a lorry. And there were any number of tanks behind the front line like this. Lorries had been parked in an area and they’d pull out overnight and you’d pull in overnight. And this really fooled the Germans quite a bit.
The Second Battle of El Alamein opened on the night of 22nd-23rd October 1942 with the first significant British bombardment since the end of the First World War. The poor Germans they got it they got it. So Montgomery he opened up with over a thousand pieces of artillery on that Alamein line. I tell you right away I had understood.
The line from which the offensive would move stretched from the coast road south to the impossible Qattara Depression. 13th Corps General Horrocks at the southern end of the line would push against General Benvenuto Giordas 10th Corps. The aim was to draw Rommel’s armor south. The main attack would be in the north, 30th Corps, General Leese advancing through minefields.
New Zealanders and South Africans fought side by side on the southern end of 30th Corps’s advance, the New Zealanders scoring an early success with the capture of Miteriya Ridge. Up towards the coast, the advance of 9th Australian Division was slowed by the minefield, as was the push from both 1st and 10th Armored Divisions. On the 25th, Rommel, who had been in Germany for medical treatment when the attack was launched, arrived in Africa and resumed command of the Africa Corps. Both the north and south thrusts of Montgomery’s attack stalled on the 25th.
The feared 88-mm anti-tank weapon was particularly effective. The battle hung in the balance. The star shells flying everywhere and there’s all a lot of whistling going on and so the air was full of it. If you dropped a grand every time you had a whistling sound, you’d never get up.
For 2 days, blow and counterblow were traded without decisive outcome. On the 28th, Churchill expressed his anxiety. Plans for an Allied landing at the western end of the littoral in French North Africa were about to be implemented and advancing from the east to affect the link-up was vital. On the 29th, Montgomery changed the plan.
Supercharge now had the Australian Division on the coast road as the faint. The attack began on November 2nd, 6 days before the landings were scheduled for French North Africa. But I can’t remember the one time sitting out in front burning one of ours and a voice in my ear saying help, help me. The operator on that tank had been on the wireless when his tank was hit.
And somebody was trapped in that tank. The wireless was still on. For God’s sake, help me. One of our tanks put a shot through the side of it and the voice stopped.
That burns inside me. That does. I’m sorry but as Supercharge began to bite into the Axis lines, Rommel, whose forces were desperately short of fuel and ammunition, was obliged to withdraw. The pursuit of Rommel across Libya began on November the 4th and on the 10th, Churchill declared the end of the beginning.
One morning we saw a lot of burning going on. Another wrecky two was sent forward and they came back saying, “Oh, it’s a general exodus. ” In other words, the Germans are pulling back. So, we chased them all the way up the coast.
Second El Alamein was clearly an Allied victory. The enemy was in full-scale retreat. But a sense of proportion is necessary. At the midpoint of 1942, there were eight Italian and four German divisions in North Africa.
There were 12 and five respectively in the Balkans, 26 German divisions in Western Europe and 12 in Norway. And 197 Axis divisions on the Eastern Front. Though Rommel was on the run, he was fighting with all the stubborn skill and resource you naturally expect from this general. As the 8th Army drove west in pursuit of Rommel, it may be said to have represented the last hurrah of a once great empire.
On the other side of North Africa, her allies ground troops were entering the war against Hitler under the supreme command of General Dwight D. Eisenhower. The Yanks were coming. Operation Torch, the Allied invasion of French North Africa, began on November the 8th when landings in three places met with strong French resistance.
These were forces loyal to the Vichy French government. There was a French navy ship that start firing at us. I believe it was the Vichy French who opposed us. And our battleship sunk them at the pier.
And all the troop ships had their formation of landing craft gathered together and they emerged onto the beach. A lot of the LCVPs that carried the troops onto the beach were unable to dock efficiently. So, a lot of the troops with their heavy armament on them drowned in the water because of the heavy weight on his shoulder. General Patton’s Western Task Force landed at three points on the Atlantic coast of Morocco.
The Center Task Force landed at Oran and the Eastern west of Algiers, both in Algeria. On November the 10th, Admiral François Darlan, Vichy High Commissioner in Algiers, ordered an end to resistance to the invasion. Vichy Prime Minister Pierre Laval hurried to Berlin to assure Hitler that Darlan had acted illegally. But the Führer was not impressed and the next day he ordered German troops to occupy the whole of France bringing the pretense of the zone libre to an end.
He sent an explanation of his action to the Vichy leader Philippe Pétain. “It is to be regretted,” he wrote, “that unscrupulous Anglo-Saxons and primarily Jewish wire-pullers succeeded in interpreting every conciliatory gesture of the new Reich as a sign of weakness. ” Hitler told Pétain that inciters in Paris demanded dismemberment of the German Reich. He complained that they sought the enslavement of the German people above all, complete restoration of the unrestricted right of plunder by the Jewish race.
On the 11th of November 1942, the anniversary of the armistice that had ended the First World War, the French in North Africa signed an armistice with the allies who began their advance on Tunis, which would hold out until April when it became the jumping-off point for the invasion of Sicily. Islands is critically positioned off the northeastern cape of Australia. The Japanese called the main island Guadalcanal. The Americans called it Cactus.
Its name is Guadalcanal. Japanese troops landed there in April 1942 and were soon observed to be building an airbase. Such a facility could threaten mainland Australia and naval and combined operations throughout the theater of war. On July the 2nd, the American Chiefs of Staff ordered the capture of Solomon Islands.
Little over a month later on August 7th, American forces landed on Guadalcanal. It was the first landing by American forces in the Pacific and the first of a series of island names to be indelibly inscribed in American history. The primary target of the Marines who landed on Red Beach was the airstrip that the Japanese had been constructing. When the Marines overran the airfield on August 12th, they named it for one of their number killed in action at Midway, Major Lofton Henderson.
Henderson Field became the site of one of the bloodiest of the Pacific battles. The night after the initial landing, a Japanese naval task force of seven cruisers and a destroyer caught an Allied force steaming through the 15 km wide channel between Guadalcanal and Savo Island, sinking the American and Australian cruisers with the loss of 1,270 Allied seamen and 34 Japanese dead. Following the Battle of Savo Island, the US Navy withdrew, leaving the Marines on Guadalcanal without support. But the Japanese allowed their opportunity to pass, not bringing up reinforcements until August the 18th.
The first Japanese counterattack went in on August the 21st. They attacked at night because they believed that Americans, being effeminate, did not like fighting at night. 900 men commanded by Colonel Ishiki attacked at the Battle of Tenaru River. The Japanese were wiped out.
The Americans lost 35 men. Colonel Ishiki committed Harakiri, ritual suicide, and it is said that crocodiles feasted on the Japanese corpses. Later in August, continuing naval action in the waters around the Solomons swung the advantage there to the Americans whose fighters were by now operating from Henderson Field. Supply to Imperial Japanese Army troops on Guadalcanal was thereafter limited to vessels traveling from Bougainville at night.
The Americans dubbed it the Tokyo Night Express. The next significant attempt to displace the Marines was led by General Kawaguchi. The Battle of Bloody Ridge in mid-September was fiercely contested. The Japanese were driven back with 600 dead.
The Marines lost 150 men. By late September, Marine strength under General Vandegrift had risen to 23,000. The Japanese, recognizing the struggle that they faced, sent Lieutenant General Hyakutake from Rabaul with the 17th Army. By mid-October, the Japanese had built their force to about 20,000.
The battles for Guadalcanal raged from mid-October until the final Japanese evacuation at the beginning of February 1943. In the first 2 weeks of December, the 1st US Marine Division, severely debilitated by 6 weeks of fighting and the depredations of tropical disease was relieved by three Marine divisions of 14th Corps, General Alexander Patch. Patch began offensive operations almost at once and by early January Japan realized that its position on Guadalcanal was not supportable. Losses to hunger and disease were far outstripping losses to enemy action.
Evacuation was ordered the troops to be taken to New Guinea. By early February 1,600 Americans had been killed as many as 32,000 Japanese had been lost to military action or disease. The Imperial Japanese Army had fared no better during the parallel campaign on New Guinea. Now for a dispatch from the jungles of New Guinea by an Australian newsreel cameraman just back from the front.
Damien Parer. It’s an unknown kind of sort of warfare. You never see a [enemy] even though he’s only 20 yards away. They’re complete masters of camouflage and deception.
I should say about 40% of our boys wounded in those engagements haven’t seen a Japanese soldier, alive one anyway. In July 1942 a small formation comprising one Australian and one Papuan infantry battalion was sent from Port Moresby on the overland journey to Buna on New Guinea’s north coast. Buna had a small airfield which General Douglas MacArthur determined he needed as a base for further operations. The small force that set off was named for one of Sydney’s better beaches, Maroubra Force.
Its journey lay along the Kokoda Track across the vertiginous and densely jungled Owen Stanley Ranges. Maroubra Force reached the village of Kokoda about the halfway point of the track in mid-July. Its orders from MacArthur were to move on Buna at the end of the month. Frustrated by the Battle of the Coral Sea in their plans to take Port Moresby from the Gulf of Papua, the Japanese decided to approach overland.
A 2,000-man advanced detachment under Colonel Yosuke Yokoyama landed at Gona on July 21st. Its orders were to make for Kokoda. The first contact between the Japanese and Maroubra Force occurred 2 days later. The 7th Australian Division was dispatched to Papua in early August and in the middle of the month, one brigade began to move up the track.
The journey along Kokoda was a journey into the malaria zone, and for every man that was wounded, seven were incapacitated by sickness. Supplying troops on the track was also problematic. In the 8 days it took native bearers to reach frontline troops, they necessarily consumed half of the food that they carried. Two days after the Australian 7th was dispatched, the main Japanese force of 11,500 men landed at Buna.
By war’s end, 157,646 Japanese soldiers would have been sent to New Guinea. Barely 6% of them were to survive. One important scene of action has been Milne Bay. Our pictures show reinforcements arriving after the Japanese attempt to gain a foothold had been broken by Australians.
There was contact made with the Japanese before nights when they would come and set up a machine gun alongside of a tree just across the runway. As fast as one would get killed there another would take his place. They would do that for a number of hours. In the meantime, we had troops infantry over there side and they gradually they got the upper hand.
And they left 88 dead. There was a Japanese that had been machine gunned across his stomach. And he had both hands in there and he the pain of the agony was still on his face. You have to think of somebody’s son somebody’s father and or somebody’s husband.
By September the 6th, the attempted invasion of Milne Bay had to be abandoned. Japanese troops were evacuated back to Rabaul. Milne Bay was the first outright defeat of Japanese troops. Importantly, it denied them the opportunity to establish an airbase.
After two more weeks of fierce fighting, the Australians to advance along the Kokoda Track. Their objective, Buna, fell to them after weeks of vicious jungle fighting in atrocious conditions of heat, humidity, and disease. In the Papua New Guinea campaign, the allies lost 8,500 as battle casualties, the Japanese 12,000. Both sides lost many more to disease.
Progress had been slow and the cost high, but the threat to Australia had been removed. The military fights wars, but wars are made by political leaders and they fight with words. During 1943, the leaders fired off countless words. After Stalingrad, Midway and Guadalcanal, El Alamein and the Torch landings, the leaders of the grand coalition as Churchill dubbed it, the United Nations as Roosevelt called them, planned how best to secure victory and how to arrange the post-war world at conference after conference.
Because they talked, the allies as commentators have noted, fought one war on two fronts. Axis powers fought two wars, Germany in Europe and Japan in Asia. For both of them, 1943 would be in many ways the beginning of the end. The first conference of 1943, code named Symbol, was held in Casablanca in French Morocco in January.
Churchill, Roosevelt, and the leaders of the Free French met to plan their European strategy for the next phase of the war. Joseph Stalin, citing the ongoing conflict in Stalingrad as his reason, declined to attend. They discussed our offensive strategy for this year, in which it’s intended to hit the enemies smashing blows on new fronts. President Roosevelt delivered the most provocative statement.
At the conference’s close, he said, possibly without consulting his allies, “The elimination of German, Japanese, and Italian war power means the unconditional surrender of Germany, Japan, and Italy. ” Once out of the box, it was something that could not be put back. There would be no armistice, no truce, no compromise. Germany and Japan learned that one can start a war, but it takes two to make peace.
A Washington conference code named Trident followed in May. Quebec conference, Quadrant, was held in August. Sextant, the Cairo conference in November, outlined the Allied position against Japan. It was attended by Roosevelt, Churchill, and Chiang Kai-shek.
Stalin did not attend. Chiang Kai-shek was Japan’s bitter enemy, and Stalin was not prepared to risk offending the Japanese and perhaps stirring them into attacking his eastern border by sitting at the same table as the Chinese leader. Two days after Cairo, with Chiang safely back in China, Stalin met Roosevelt and Churchill for the Tehran conference. The first meeting between the Big Three.
Stalin received a commitment to opening a second front. But where? Churchill favored the Balkan or Aegean options, but the locus of power had shifted, and Roosevelt opened proceedings by outlining the Normandy invasion plan, blindsiding Churchill and demonstrating that the Grand Coalition had become the Big Two who would dominate the postwar years. A terrific conference, planning to make certain of the destruction of the German forces in the shortest possible time.
And these are some of the men carrying responsibility for that most desirable objective. Japan was also concerned to draw together its partners for a show of unity. Prime Minister Tojo convened the Greater East Asia Conference attended by Shang Chen Wei, Prime Minister of Manchukuo, Wang Ching Wei, head of the Reorganized National Government of China, Ba Maw from Burma, Subhas Chandra Bose from India, Jose Laurel from the Philippines, and Prince Wan Waithayakon from Thailand. Not many were convinced.
As early as 1936, the Chinese political activist Du Chong Yuan had written, “Pan-Asianism is Japanese imperialism, nothing more, nothing less. ”
Through these 12 months of conferencing, the war on the battlefields had been developing decisively. American troops first went into action with Operation Torch in North Africa, where the Axis was reinforcing Tunis from the sea. General Jürgen von Arnim commanded the German forces.
Erwin Rommel’s Panzer Army Afrika withdrawing through Tripolitania was moving to join him, and overall command passed to General Vittorio Ambrosio. At the beginning of February, the Germans launched offensives. Von Arnim’s called Spring Wind turned back and cut off American forces around Sidi Bou Said. Rommel, whose operation was called Morning Wind, seized Gafsa.
The American troops were battle-ready. They had been through basic training. Basic training is a brutal thing. Six weeks of basic training, you’re ready to kill your best friend.
Every morning it was very simple. When you got up and you were told this, kill or be killed. Every single day. Battle-ready was not battle-hardened.
They were raw recruits who got their noses bloodied as Rommel and Von Arnim pressed ahead. Rommel was making for the Kasserine Pass, a 3-km wide gap in the Atlas Mountains. February the 19th, he seized the pass. Its American defenders withdrew in disorderly fashion.
Rommel lacked the support he needed, Von Arnim hanging on to his heavy armor. The Allies quickly reformed and reorganized. By the 20th, Rommel had been held. By the 24th, the Allies were starting to claw back the Axis gains.
Their forward momentum could not be halted from this point. Gafsa was retaken by Patton. The New Zealand Corps broke through the Tebaga Gap, and the final assault on Tunis began on May the 6th. It fell a day later.
And General Alexander, commanding 18th Army Group, signaled Churchill, “We are masters of the North African shore. ” Mastery had come at a cost. There were 75,000 Allied casualties, 300,000 on the Axis side, of whom 240,000 were prisoners. It was a setback for Hitler.
For Mussolini, for whom support had collapsed because of losses on the Eastern Front, where 75,000 Italians had been killed and 50,000 repatriated with wounds, frostbite, or disease, it was a complete catastrophe. His imperial dream was in tatters. From their established positions on the North African coast, the Allies launched the invasion of Sicily on July the 10th. The invasion of Sicily, the first film to reach Britain shows the naval side of the operation.
The equally thrilling story from the beaches onwards is on its way. This is just part of the massive shipping plowing across the Mediterranean. Operation Husky put 115,000 British and Empire and 66,000 American troops ashore. They faced a garrison of 315,000 Italians and 50,000 Germans under General Alfredo Guzzoni.
The landing had been preceded by an airborne assault, which was a disaster. 69 gliders released too soon fell into the sea. 56 were released in the wrong places, only 12 landed as planned. The paratroopers fared as poorly, being dropped all over the island or into the sea.
On the night of July 11th-12th, the US 504th Parachute Regiment was flown from Tunisia to Sicily as reinforcement. 23 planes were destroyed and there were 400 casualties. All were victims of friendly fire. Despite these setbacks, forces with armor in support were established ashore in numbers.
Alexander, Montgomery, and Patton planning the elimination of the Germans from their strong defensive lines. On July the 16th, Patton began the drive on the Sicilian capital Palermo, which he entered on the 23rd. On the 25th, Benito Mussolini, whose rise to power has been described by one historian as a process of creep and fudge, fell from power when he was arrested by the Fascist Grand Council. On the 12th of September, he would be rescued from his imprisonment by a paratroop commando sent by Hitler, who set up his ally in a puppet state in the north of Italy, the Republic of Salò.
It was there that Mussolini and Clara Petacci, his unfortunate mistress, were captured by partisans in January 1945. They were shot, mutilated, and hung up by their heels outside a Milan service station. Following Il Duce’s arrest, the new government of Marshal Badoglio had entered into negotiations with the Allies. The Armistice of Cassibile was signed on the 3rd of September.
Italy was no longer at war. But, the fighting in Italy was only just shifting into gear. The Allies had made a triumphant entry into the Sicilian port of Messina on August the 17th, but the enemy, along with 9,800 vehicles, had been evacuated to the Italian mainland. The Allies did not immediately pursue them.
Instead, they squabbled for 3 weeks while the Germans moved 16 divisions onto the Italian peninsula. After Sicily was occupied, we were attacked by Germans. They would at night drop flares on the ships to light it up like you were on a stage. So, the dive bombers would come in.
And the JU 88, they made a screech that would scare you. There were a couple of ships that were sunk. Some with troops that didn’t make it. Italy is a mountainous, river-scored, narrow country favoring defense and restricting the use of armor.
The campaign there was launched days after the Armistice of Cassibile on September the 9th with landings south of Naples at a place called Salerno. The next day, the Rome, which had been declared an open city, was occupied by German troops. On September the 14th, 2 days after the rescue of Mussolini, German troops launched a fierce counterattack on the Salerno beachhead, which only Allied air and naval supremacy was able to beat back. We had to prevent the Germans from reinforcing their troops when the beach when the landing strip was laid, and to keep it open for Clark’s army to dash up towards Naples when they came through.
The Germans came in force, and then we opened fire on them, and the battle started. They quickly assessed that we didn’t have very much in the way of weapons to fight them back. And the mortars started coming down. And they were on the higher ground than where we were.
They gave us a very bad rough time. At one stage, they were that close to us, a German officer walked through with his map board, and he was shouting about on A company or something, and he passed not very far from me until he was shot. But he didn’t know where he was. He thought he was amongst his own people.
That’s how close they got. On September the 16th, the British 8th Army advancing from the toe of Italy linked up with the American 5th Army General Mark Clark. The allies were strongly established in Italy and beginning their push towards Rome, but as we shall see, their way ahead would be difficult in the extreme. That one time I set my machine gun up and right in there was a tree and there wasn’t a big giant tree, but it was a tree and all of a sudden a bullet comes through the tree and when it exit the wood splinters me all across the face and it knocked me back.
They treated me and wanted to give me a put me in for a Purple Heart and I says, “Oh, no, no, no, I don’t want that. I don’t want my people to get no telegram, you know? ”
Fighting was in its fourth year and the initiative was swinging to Hitler’s opponents, but all of his troops were still fighting on foreign soil. The great majority on the Eastern Front.
Attention at the end of 1942 had been on Stalingrad and whilst that city suffered the biggest battle in history, another great Russian city continued to endure a devastating siege, Leningrad. The former imperial capital of St. Petersburg had been in a state of siege since the 8th of September 1941. In January 1943, Operation Iskra was launched.
The Leningrad and Volkhov fronts succeeded in opening a land corridor that increased supply to the city. But, it would not be until the 27th of January 1944, 872 days after it had begun, that the siege was lifted and a train load of cats to replace those that had been eaten was sent to deal with the rats. Half a million Axis soldiers were casualties. Almost 3 and 1/2 million Soviet troops.
And a million Leningrad civilians had died at the rate of more than a thousand every day. The death toll at Leningrad alone was greater than the total combined British and American losses for the war. The Red Army’s main effort as 1943 got underway would be centered on the Don, where the mighty battle for Stalingrad had concentrated such enormous forces. Since the beginning of January, Axis Army Group A had been falling back to a position behind the lower Don.
On the 13th, the Voronezh Front General Golikov began to move. Supported by the Bryansk Front, Golikov moved against the German Second Army. Soviet formations retook Rostov and Kursk, Pavlograd, and Krasnograd. And then, on February the 20th, von Manstein counterattacked.
Retreating Southwest Front was driven back. Panzer forces broke through the Voronezh Front and retook Kharkov. On the 18th of March, they had Belgorod, and they reached the third stage of von Manstein’s plan. The spring thaw briefly halted proceedings.
The ebb and flow of the first part of the year had created a bulge in the Russian line, a salient. It was held by the Central and Voronezh Fronts, and based on Kursk. Von Manstein planned for Walther Model’s Ninth Army to attack from the north and Hermann Hoth’s Fourth Army with Group Kempf to swing from the south. They would meet at Kursk.
But, pinching out the Kursk salient was an obvious option, and Stalin anticipated it. Hitler delayed the Kursk Offensive, code named Citadel, scheduled for May the 4th. He had an increasingly passionate, possibly desperate, belief that the war would be won by the wonder weapons, and wanted more of the new heavy tanks sent to join the battle. His commanders knew that as they waited, the Soviets, too, were increasing their strength.
Stalin’s decision had been to stand on the defensive, and 300,000 mobilized Soviet citizens were preparing 9,000 km of trenches in eight lines to a depth of 160 km, and laying 503,993 anti-tank and 439,348 anti-personnel mines. What is generally recognized as the greatest tank battle in history opened on July the 4th. It was a huge coming together of armor. 900,000 German troops with 2,500 tanks faced 1,300,000 Russians with 3,000 tanks.
By the 7th of July, Model’s forces in the north and Hoth’s in the south had made strong progress and seemed close to choking the neck of the salient. But progress slowed. Hoth was obliged to bring up his reserves on the 10th and on the 11th, Zhukov and Vasilevsky counterattacked. On the 12th, the Soviets brought their armored reserve to Prokhorovka.
What followed was a massive clash of mechanized forces. Prokhorovka is what the Russians called it. The slaughter at Prokhorovka. 75% of the Red Army’s armor and 40% of its manpower was committed to the battle.
Soviet losses in armor outnumbered those of the Axis by a ratio of 5 to 1. The Russians also took more casualties. 177,847 against 49,822. But by now, only one side could rebound from such a contest.
In 1943, Soviet forces lost 2 million killed or missing and 5 and 1/2 million wounded or sick. And yet, their strength grew during that time by half a million. Which is why Panzer General Guderian said that for Germany Kursk was a decisive defeat. He described the events of 1943 as the revenge of reality.
On July the 13th, Hitler called off Citadel. Reinforcements could not be spared. Area bombing had become a de facto second front tying up 70% of the Luftwaffe’s fighters and the allies were in Sicily. By July the 15th, the Central Front began to move.
Two days later, the Southwest Front advanced and by mid-August the battle was over. The Russians were at the outskirts of Kharkov and the last German offensive of the Eastern Front had come to nothing. Five weeks that followed Kursk, the Red Army forced the Germans back 240 km on a 1,000 km front. From now on, the Axis would be on the defensive and it would defend all the way to Berlin.
With winter about to freeze campaigning, the Russians could celebrate significant territorial gains, but the German armies were still intact and they were still holding on Soviet territory. But their falling fortunes had forced acceleration of one particular aspect of the plan for the East, the Generalplan Ost. Uprisings at the Treblinka and Sobibor death camps and the Warsaw Ghetto and the fact of the slowly but surely approaching Soviet troops created a sense of urgency. So, the decision was taken to exterminate the Jews in the camps.
At Majdanek in November, volunteers from German Reserve Police Battalion 101 working in shifts shot 43,000 Jews. They called it Operation Harvest Festival. “A glorious page in our history,” Himmler had said a month earlier, “that cannot be written. ” We just could not imagine, we could not believe that this is possible.
After all, this is Germany, the country of Goethe and Schiller, Alle Menschen werden Brüder werden, brotherhood of man, the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven, this is the poetry. These people could kill me. Innocent children, they can’t comprehend. Through 1943, the war in Europe grew increasingly to resemble a vice.
The Axis powers caught between jaws that were slowly closing. But Asia was different. Not just a different war, but a very different war. Asia was not a battleground of set-piece actions, but of scattered garrisons.
Garrisoning the Pacific islands was, according to the Imperial Vice Chief of Staff, Lieutenant General Sukarno Osamu, like sowing salt in the sea. In Asia, the only place where large all arms formations clashed was in China. And in China, the only Allied troops supporting the Chinese against the Japanese were American General Joe Stilwell, who disrespectfully called Chiang Kai-shek, the man he served, Peanut. Few American engineers, and a unit of American flyers known as the Flying Tigers.
They became the US 14th Air Force under Lieutenant General Chennault. Chennault could not stand Stilwell. The feeling was mutual, as was the antagonism between Stilwell and Chiang Kai-shek. But if China stopped fighting, it would release 820,000 Japanese troops for other operations.
Chiang Kai-shek, not unreasonably, felt that the contribution Chinese forces were making was not being appreciated and promises were not being kept. The feeling of inadequate appreciation of China’s role in the war has not diminished. 30% of those who died in the Second World War were Chinese. And 39% of Japan’s casualties were taken in her fight with China.
Allied troops, including Nationalist Chinese units, were confronting the Imperial Japanese Army in Burma, where restoration of the Burma Road as a supply line to the Nationalists was vital. Until it was accomplished, Chinese resistance to Japan depended on supplies being flown over the Himalayas. The Japanese supplied their troops through a railway that had been wrested from the landscape by slave labor and prisoners of war. Working on the 400-km Burma-Thailand Railway killed about 90,000 native slave laborers and 12,300 POWs.
In total, 27% of Allied prisoners of the Japanese died in captivity. Those who were prisoners of the Germans had a death rate of 4%. The British Burma Army referred to itself as the forgotten army, but Lord Mountbatten said that it was not so much forgotten as never heard of. Mountbatten, despite responsibility for the disastrous Dieppe raid, continued to enjoy promotion far beyond his experience or perhaps capability.
He was very well connected. One very interesting new appointment arising out of the Quebec conference is that of Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, the King’s cousin. He’s to be supreme commander-in-chief, Southeast Asia. Lord Louis took up his position at headquarters in Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, towards the end of ’43, bringing with him a significant retinue that included his personal barber, imported from Trumper’s in Curzon Street in Given Room, nominal rank of in the RAF.
Mountbatten would move on and up to be the last Viceroy of India, presiding over its bloody transition to independence. The issue of Indian independence shadowed campaigning in Burma. Only a third of the British Army in the Far East was British. The bulk of the Burma Army comprised divisions of the Indian Army, which remained loyal to their officers and so to the Allied cause.
Loyalty that was crucial to the success of the campaign in Burma. Beautiful consumption of war-issue antimalarial tablets was also a key to victory. There was a time when up to 50-60% people sick, malaria. But then they found a medicine in UK, their scientists.
Mepacrine. Little tablet. Every evening the parade will take place. Everybody is given a tablet.
And then you Havildar says, “Up. ” You see it. And then he says, “Down. ”
In the Pacific, the Japanese task was to hold on to gains.
This they failed to do. In the first half of 1943, the main Allied target was Rabaul. Admiral Halsey was placed in command. American and Australian forces kept up the pressure on Japanese strongholds in Lae and Salamaua, which would have to be reduced before Rabaul could be attacked.
I thought it was great to go out and watch the Japanese planes come over and they would turn upside down to see if they could what they could see on the ground. America sought to disrupt Japanese attempts to supply and reinforce. In the Battle of the Bismarck Sea at the beginning of March, American aircraft coming in at low level surprised the convoy. It was transporting an entire division to reinforce Lae and Salamaua.
All eight transports were sent to the bottom along with four of the accompanying destroyers. As September started, Australian and American troops made amphibious landings at Lae. The Japanese evacuated Salamaua. The Australians faced fierce resistance at Finschhafen, which fell to them on the 2nd of October.
At the end of August, Imperial Japanese Headquarters, unable to guarantee supply, declared that henceforth New Guinea would have to be self-sufficient. Holes were being punched in the defensive perimeter of the Co-Prosperity Sphere. The Allies had achieved control of the sea and of the skies throughout the perimeter of the sphere, extending air cover by the development of airfields as they leapfrogged from island to atoll to island. Ahead lay Saipan, Guam, and the Philippines.
What the Allies achieved involved action over vast distances, taking a well-armed and equipped force over thousands of kilometers of ocean. It was only possible because of the astonishing achievements of American production, organization, and control. Each American frontline soldier was supported in the Pacific by 4 tons of supplies. Each Japanese by a single kilogram.
Each Japanese was supported by one person in a non-combat role. The American tail, engineers, medical, transport, quartermaster, catering, numbered 18 in support of each combat soldier. The odds building against the Japanese can be simply expressed. Between 1940 and 1943, Japan’s gross national product rose by two points.
That of the USA, which increased industrial production 25-fold during the war, increased by 136 points.
