A World at Arms (115 page)

^a
There was a German SS cavalry regiment, employed in so-called anti-partisan operations in occupied Russia but actually engaged primarily in the slaughtering of civilians.

^b
The project for clearing fog off runways in England, code-named “F.LD.O.,” helped save many returning bombers. There is important relevant material in the Sir Ronald Banks Papers at the Imperial War Museum.

^c
it should be noted that to insure itself against a failure of the B-2g, the United States also developed another very long-range bomber, the B-32. Such planes were seen as the intermediate step toward the true inter-continental bomber (B-36) and were ordered, designed, and built initially against the possibility of a German victory in Europe, which would leave the United States with no bases on the other side of the Atlantic, and hence in need of planes which could reach targets in Germany from the continental United States.

^d
These reports also provide historians with important conversations between Japanese diplomats and German officials, of which no records survive in the German archives. This is especially true for 1944 and 1945.

^e
Roosevelt and Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox approved Nimitz’s decision in the face of the possibility that the breaking of the Japanese naval code might be compromised. Kahn,
Codebreakers,
pp. 595–601; Lewin,
American Magic,
pp. 187–91.

^f
In August 1943 the Germans received information from Switzerland that the Allies had broken the German naval enigma but refused to believe it. Chapman, “Signals Intelligence in the Pacific,” 146–47.

^g
The Soviet Union tried some of those involved after the Red Army overran the ruined facility. The Americans did not try those Japanese who fell into their hands.

11

FROM THE SPRING OF 1943 TO SUMMER 1944

AXIS HOPES AND PLANS

As the German leaders looked toward the future in the early spring of 1943, there were both good and bad prospects. The good prospects were of two types. They had stalled off disasters and they were bringing on new weapons. After the great defeat at Stalingrad, they had reversed the tide temporarily with a counter–stroke which offered at least the hope of their being able to launch a new offensive in the East. In North Africa, the outlook was grim for the Axis forces in March–the month of German victory at Kharkov in the East-but at least they had prevented a quick Allied victory which would quite probably have paved the way for a summer or fall 1943 landing in the West. Even if a successful Allied offensive in Tunisia were followed by other such operations in the Mediterranean area, a substantial amount of time had been gained.

Furthermore, new weapons were beginning to come off the assembly lines in large numbers. The production of submarines was at last reaching the levels required to keep about one hundred at sea at anyone time. The new Tiger heavy tanks were getting their early troubles fixed; the new Panther medium–heavy tanks were beginning to be delivered; and there was every prospect that, during the course of the year, monthly output of these and other critical weapons–assault guns in particular would steadily increase. Perhaps of greatest importance was the effect of manpower mobilization. The combination of rationalization in industry and massive employment of prisoners of war and slave laborers was making it possible to provide added manpower to the army, so that by the summer of 1943 the army in the East was at least close to its size two years earlier.
¹

The efforts of the Finns, Hungarians and Romanians to discover an exit from the war had been effectively squelched by the Germans. The submarine war was expected to keep the Western Allies immobilized in 1943; and there was the expectation that during that year the recovery
on the southern part of the Eastern Front, combined with the resources freed by the withdrawals from the Demyansk and Rzhev salients would make possible a great attack on at least one section of the Eastern Front. The fighting in that theater would continue to have priority, and it would also continue to be waged with great ferocity.
²
The battering which Germany planned to administer to her enemies in the West at sea and in the East on land would somehow see her through, at least until the alliance of Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States fell apart.
³

Italian prospects were nowhere near as rosy. Already entirely dependent on Germany, the Mussolini government could only try to convince its powerful ally to make peace in the East–something Hitler refused and to concentrate more forces in the Mediterranean theater. Some of the latter had been done, but the clear signs of impending defeat in Tunisia opened up the obvious prospect of an assault by the Allies on Italy herself. Morale in the country was poor, especially after the loss of Libya. There had been little enthusiasm for war in June 1940; there was none now. Disaster had followed upon disaster in Greece, East Africa, North Africa, and in the Soviet Union. But there was for a long time no prospect of an overthrow of the regime.
⁴

In the Balkans, the Italians greatly worried that they would lose whatever happened: if the Axis lost, all was gone; if it won, the Germans would take over anyway.
⁵
The scuttling of the French fleet at Toulon in November 1942 had removed the Italian fear of having a French fleet in the Mediterranean larger than their own after the war;
⁶
but all the German deference to Italian wishes in North Africa and in the Yugoslav-Greek area, on which Hitler always insisted, could not conceal the fact that it was Germany which, if it won the war, would be in effective control.
⁷
Furthermore, there had been persistent friction between the two European Axis partners on short–fall sin German-promised deliveries of coal for Italian industry and oil for the Italian navy, while the Italians also complained about the treatment of the very large number of their workers sent to labor in German industry.
⁸

It was in this context that the first peace feelers were extended to the British in December 1942 by agents of the Italian royal family, but they were turned off with the demand that the Italians would have to take action first to remove Mussolini and kick out the Germans themselves, something the British correctly expected they would not do.
⁹
Other soundings in January 1943 were met by an essentially similar line.
¹⁰
Churchill noted on February 13, 1943, that perhaps after the landing in Sicily, then already planned for the summer, it might be possible to get Italy out of the war.
¹¹

Since Mussolini was entirely unable to persuade Hitler to make an
accommodation with Stalin, he could only keep asking for additional German assistance to meet the expected Allied attacks across the Mediterranean. Simultaneously, he made some changes in his own government, in particular dropping Ciano as Foreign Minister, appointing him to be ambassador to the Vatican, while also urging on the Germans a more conciliatory policy toward the conquered peoples of Europe. If the German authorities were enthused by the dismissal of the increasingly anti-German Ciano, they were certainly not about to relax their exploitive policy in the occupied territories. On the contrary, the increasing levy of forced labor was designed to free more German men for the armed forces. There was no room in a New Order for soft policies or even hopeful promises for those whom the Germans considered inferior peoples, a category into which the Italians had every reason to believe their ally had placed them as well.
¹²
If the British and Americans had their frictions in 1943 with each other and with the Soviet Union, these were mild compared to those between Germany and Italy. In addition, there was no effective coordination of the European Axis partners with Japan.

The Japanese government was, as ever, unable to work out a coherent policy toward China. On the one hand, the Japanese hoped to defeat Chiang Kai-shek but had as yet developed no effective way to do so. Simultaneously, they tried to build up the regime of Wang Ching-wei, but were’ unwilling to make to him the sorts of substantive concessions which would convert the transparent puppet into an effective alternative to Chiang for self–respecting Chinese. They could persuade Germany and Italy to recognize the Wang government, but neither that action nor the minimal adjustments made in favor of his regime on the old international concessions in China made any real difference. And having Wang declare war formally on Britain and the United States had no practical import either. A key figure within the Wang system, Chon Fo-hai, was continually in touch with Chiang, but that did not produce any change in either of the two ineffective governments.
¹³
Similarly ineffective was the project for organized volunteer armies to fight alongside the Japanese and recruited among the occupied areas of Southeast Asia; these would become significant in the post-war era, not in wartime.
¹⁴

In the war ahead, the Japanese saw the situation in Europe in somewhat realistic colors and continued to urge the Germans to make peace with the Soviet Union and concentrate on the war against Britain and the United States, especially in the Mediterranean.
¹⁵
Tokyo watched anxiously for any sign that their German ally might instead make peace with the Western Powers and leave Japan facing
the force and fury of the latter by herself, but on that score they could be as confident as they were disappointed by German insistence on a renewed offensive in the East.
¹⁶

As for their own major war with Britain and the United States, the first concern had to be to keep it limited to those countries. It was essential to keep the Soviet Union from joining the circle of Japan’s enemies either by directly entering hostilities against Japan or by allowing the Americans to use air bases in its Far Eastern provinces for air attacks on the Japanese homeland. This meant making whatever concessions might be needed to deal with the current issues on fisheries and other matters in Japanese-Soviet relations;
¹⁷
it meant never interfering with United States aid shipments to the Soviet Union across the Pacific-whatever complaints the Germans might make; and it meant doing anything necessary to obtain Soviet reassurances of no aid to the United States when, in early 1943, the American campaign in the Aleutians threatened and eventually destroyed the Japanese position there. It would be a difficult year in Japanese-Soviet relations, because from Tokyo’s perspective the Soviet Union’s position was likely to become steadily stronger; but there was no alternative to concessions to Moscow now that the war Japan had launched against the United States and Britain had turned into a lengthy conflict in which Japan had already been forced on the defensive.

As for the basic strategy for Japan to follow in this struggle, the review which came after the evacuation of Guadalcanal in February 1943 produced a general strategic concept to which the army and navy tried to adhere for the balance of 1943 and which they modified only in 1944. There was to be for the time being no new offensive either in China or from Burma into India; in both areas the military would hold their current positions (though it was in this regard that there was a change in 1944). In the South Pacific, the Japanese defeat at Buna and Gona made it all the more important to hold on in central New Guinea, just as the defeat on Guadalcanal reemphasized the significance of holding on to the Northern Solomons. The agreed strategy, formalized in a new war plan of March 15, 1943, provided for the defense of the existing perimeter in the south.
¹⁸
The American and Australian forces would be made to pay heavily for each advance, however small, until either a major defensive counter–blow by the navy provided a great victory for Japan or the eventual exhaustion of her enemies brought on a new settlement in East Asia.
¹⁹
The death on April 18, 1943 of Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku when his plane was intercepted by American airplanes brought no change; his
successor, Admiral Koga Mineichi, adhered to the same basic strategy. Japan would fight a defensive war until her enemies decided they had had enough.

PLANS OF THE WESTERN ALLIES

The British and Americans had looked to 1943 from their planning sessions at the Casablanca Conference in January, setting the defeat of the U-Boats as top priority. The air offensive against Germany was to be stepped up, and the Tunisian campaign, which was now expected to last several months, was to be followed by operation “Husky,” the invasion of Sicily, which would fully open the Mediterranean, draw German forces from the Eastern Front, and weaken Italy even further. No decision had yet been made on what was to follow on “Husky”; and when the British and American leaders again met in Washington in May 1943 (Trident) the differences were such that no final agreement on a follow-up to “Husky” could be reached. The British and United States air commanders as well as the United States Army Chief-of-Staff, General Marshall, favored reducing Mediterranean operations in order to build up strength in the United Kingdom for the cross-Channel invasion, while the British land and sea commanders, as well as Admiral King, urged continued pressure in the Mediterranean to force Italy out of the war.
²⁰
The decision was made to await a recommendation from the Allied Commander-in-Chief in the Mediterranean, General Eisenhower. By the time that recommendation came in and was approved, the landing on Sicily had already taken place. This operation and other issues in Anglo-United States relations must be reviewed before the new choices of the summer of 1943 can be examined.