A World at Arms (145 page)

As for fighting the British, the Japanese waited until 1944 to launch a major offensive into India from the positions which they had occupied in Burma in early 1942. From the perspective of Berlin, this was too little and too late. Mounted in the summer of 1942 to follow on the earlier Japanese conquest of Malaya and Burma, such an operation might have had a significant impact on the war. In 1944 the Japanese offensive was a strategic irrelevance.

The only other major Japanese offensive was that in China in 1944, and that operation was designed more to prevent American air attacks from Chinese bases and to substitute Japanese land lines of communications for the sea lanes vulnerable to American submarines than part of
any broader strategic concept. As for direct engagement of the Americans, the Japanese in 1943 and 1944 were already permanently on the defensive.

The only other possible area of military cooperation was in the war at sea. Time and again the Germans tried to have the Japanese devote greater attention to the war against Allied shipping. Japanese submarines, however, continued to be utilized primarily in fleet support operations and, increasingly, in supplying Japanese garrisons cut off by the advancing American and Australian forces. The Japanese naval leadership never understood the German navy’s strategy of trying to do to the Allies what the latter were ever more successful in doing to Japan: cutting the vital oceanic supply routes. The whole field of submarine warfare against shipping as well as the problems of defending against this type of operation was one in which Japanese naval leadership displayed a consistently high level of incompetence unique in the annals of war at sea.

In a long conversation between von Ribbentrop and Oshima on May 19, 1943, the whole situation of the war was reviewed at a time when the balance in the conflict was clearly shifting. The European Axis powers had just lost their last foothold in Africa and the Germans had barely stabilized the situation on the Eastern Front. The Japanese had evacuated their last forces from Guadalcanal and Kiska. They had sent a special mission under General Okamoto Kiyotomi to Germany across the Soviet Union and Turkey in the vain hope of improving cooperation between the two countries; he was present at this meeting.
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Their exchange illuminates the divergence in the strategies of Berlin and Tokyo as well as the lack of understanding in each capital of the situation of its partner in the war. Oshima explained why Japan could not attack the Soviet Union and would prefer to mediate a German–Soviet peace. Von Ribbentrop urged a Japanese offensive somewhere, insisted on the necessity for a new attack on the Eastern Front, and denounced the Japanese ambassador to the Soviet Union for his interest in peace between Germany and Russia. Oshima frankly told von Ribbentrop that he doubted Germany could defeat the Soviets and urged the Germans to proclaim the independence of the Baltic States and the Ukraine the way Japan had done in Burma and the Philippines, a proposal the German Foreign Minister rejected out of hand.

It is obvious from this open exchange between two men who had known each other for years, had inaugurated closer relations between their two countries by negotiating the Anti-Comintern Pact behind the backs of their respective foreign offices in 1935–36, and appear to have had a very high personal regard for each other, that there was no real
understanding of the other country’s true position.
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The Germans had no comprehension of the weakness of Japan after six years of war and major defeats at the hands of the Americans; the war in East Asia had never drawn their careful attention, and whatever the insights of a few in the German hierarchy, those at the top had no real sense of what was going on in the Pacific. The Japanese, on the other hand, had not recognized the priority of racial dogma and expansionism for their German ally, and as a result never understood German policies. That in the face of such mutual ignorance and incomprehension there would be even less cooperation than between the Allies should not be surprising.

The signs of approaching defeat brought little effective change in the situation. Although the Germans tried to provide some technical assistance to their ally by giving Japan details of at least some of their new weapons, Japan’s industrial system was in no condition to take advantage of such knowledge in the little time which remained available. The only real effect of such exchanges was in their unknowingly providing information to the British and Americans who were decyphering them.
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In economic as in military affairs, in strategy as in politics, the countries of the Tripartite Pact went each its own way to destruction and defeat.

^a
Field Marshal Wavell’s command in the winter 1941–42 did not exist long enough.

^b
In a letter of July 9, 1941, Bernard Baruch had warned Roosevelt not to trust Keynes, referring to very bad experiences at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. In his reply of July 11, the President, who was generally not inclined to put his thoughts on paper, wrote, “I did not have those Paris Peace conference experiences with the ‘gent’ but from much more recent contacts, I am inclined wholly to agree.” FDRL, PSF Box 117, Bernard Baruch. For British doubts about the American plan to publish the minutes of the Council of Four at Paris, see WM (43) War Cabinet 93(43), 5 July 1943, PRO CAB 65/35.

^c
Yugoslavia was the one exception to this pattern. it had a large Communist Party by 1944 and much of the country was liberated not by the Red Army but by the efforts of the Yugoslavs themselves. These differences had a great influence on Yugoslavia’s subsequent history.

^d
It might be noted that had Stalin had his way, the Baltic Republics and the republics of the Caucasus and Central Asia as well as Moldavia would all have been separately represented in the UN - as in fact they are becoming on the dissolution of the U.S.S.R.

14

THE HALT ON THE EUROPEAN FRONTS

THE SITUATION IN THE FALL OF 1944

The German armies had suffered catastrophic defeats in the summer of 1944, and these defeats were accompanied by huge losses. It is not possible to give exact figures, but the killed, captured, and missing (most of whom were either dead or prisoners) from the beginning of June to the middle of September were in excess of one million and are likely to have been over one and a half million. These defeats on land in the east, west, and south were accompanied by huge losses of materiel. Vast numbers of tanks and guns were destroyed in the fighting and additional quantities either fell into the hands of Germany’s enemies or were destroyed by the Germans themselves, when surrounded or cut off, in order to prevent their capture.

Great losses were by no means confined to the land battle. In the air, the German defenses had been crushed through the intervention of long-range fighters in early 1944–on top of the steady attrition suffered by the German air force in prior years. This defeat had reduced the once mighty Luftwaffe to the thankless role of trying to get back into the struggle for control of the air with masses of inexperienced and inadequately trained pilots. The American and British air forces dominated the skies over Western, Central and Southern Europe and the Red Air Force had by this time overwhelming superiority in the East. The destruction by the American air force of much of Germany’s synthetic oil industry made any revival of the German air effort doubtful: planes were often destroyed on the ground because they lacked fuel.

At sea, the last German surface raiders and larger ships had long since been swept from the oceans or confined to support duties in the Baltic Sea. German submarines had as yet been unable to recover from their 1943 defeat. October 1944 was a month when they managed to sink only one merchant ship of just over 6000 tons on all the world’s
oceans. Driven out of the Black Sea and Mediterranean, German submarines had also lost their bases on the French Atlantic coast. Simultaneously, the various classes of escorting warships and carriers earlier ordered by the Western Allies were becoming available, manned by ever more experienced crews–as very few were now lost–and able to protect the Allied merchant fleet, which was rapidly growing as construction continued and losses dropped. Even a revived submarine campaign would, therefore, have had to start from a position far more favorable for the Allies and much less hopeful for the Germans than in the fall of 1943, when the Allied construction curve had finally overtaken that of their losses from all causes.

If Germany’s military situation in the broader sense looked hopeless, her diplomatic position appeared to be even worse. Her European allies had been knocked out of the war one by one. Italy had left first; and the shadow regime of Mussolini installed on German bayonets in northern Italy was of little more use than the shadow cabinets in exile arranged for Vichy France, Romania, and Bulgaria.
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Not even a propaganda façade could be erected to replace the Finnish forces which had once fought alongside Germany, while the military forces of the puppet states of Slovakia and Croatia were in revolt or near dissolution. Only in Hungary was a substantial satellite army still fighting alongside the Germans in Europe. In East Asia, the Japanese triumph in China could not offset her crushing defeat in Burma and the steady series of American victories in the Pacific. No substantial assistance could be expected from Germany’s only significant ally at a time when that power was bracing itself for what it correctly assumed would be a massive American assault on the Philippines.

The converse of the crumbling of Germany’s alliances was the constancy, even increase, in the alliance opposed to her. As shown in the preceding chapter, the alliance of the Western Powers and the Soviet Union was holding together in spite of great tensions. At the point of greatest tension–Poland–the alliance was not only remaining firm, but the immediate military risk related to their friction, the possibility that the Polish divisions in Italy might withdraw from the battle, was being effectively contained. There were now two Polish armies, one under Soviet control and one aligned with Britain and the United States, but both were fighting the Germans; only inside Poland itself were they battling each other.

Furthermore, the Allies were beginning to receive added military power and diplomatic reinforcement from new sources. The slowly rebuilding French army provided a welcome addition on the southern
portion of the Western Front and relieved the Allies of rear area security duties there. A small Brazilian expeditionary force was adding its weight to the continuing struggle on the Italian front,
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where there were also now some Italian soldiers on the Allied side. One by one the remaining neutrals were either openly joining the United Nations or at least reducing their assistance to Germany. Spain and Sweden in particular were no longer providing Germany with the extensive supplies they had once sent her; Turkey had cut off the chrome shipments; and Switzerland, now that Allied soldiers stood on at least one border with her, could afford to take a firmer line. The optics of the war had changed dramatically; the Germans were obviously no longer in a position to retaliate effectively against any neutral who yielded to the pressure of the Allies; and all not under direct German or Japanese control were finding it expedient to get on the best possible terms with those powers which were obviously about to win the war.
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This sense of approaching victory, at least in Europe and surely before too long also in the Pacific, also had its effect on the home fronts of the major belligerents. In the United States, there was now a somewhat unrealistic expectation that the war in Europe had been practically won; in Great Britain, there was a degree of war weariness–accentuated by the V-1s and V-2s landing there–and a real hope that the war was about to end at last. The British public paid little attention to the demands the war in East Asia could make on them if fought through to the end; they could not know that the fall of 1944 was the time when detailed planning for the actual transfer of British Commonwealth forces to that theater was begun. In the Soviet Union, the liberation of the last portions of German-occupied territories, a victory dramatically demonstrated by the march of tens of thousands of German POWs through the streets of Moscow in July, gave a promise of better times to come. Reconstruction in the areas freed in 1943 and early 1944 was only beginning; and the degree of privation and sacrifice was still very high; but the signs all pointed to victory. In the early years of World War II, the Germans had sounded victory trumpet fanfares on the radio; now the Russians regularly marked
their
victories with the sound of artillery volleys in Moscow.

The changes at the fronts also had their effects on Germany. The success of the invasion in the West, followed almost immediately by the destruction of Army Group Center and the dramatic advance of the Red Army in the East, aroused great anxiety. Disappointment that the expectation of crushing the Allied landing attempt and of inflicting great damage with the new weapons had not been realized, both symbolized for many by the fall of Cherbourg, had a very depressing effect which
was reinforced by the unhindered daylight appearance of hundreds of Allied planes over the Reich.
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