A World at Arms (3 page)

On the immediately following events of the war in the Pacific there is what might be called a developing consensus on some issues. The refusal to allow the bombers, sent to the Philippines in the hope of deterring a Japanese attack, to fly missions against the Japanese as soon as Manila heard of the attack on Pearl Harbor as well as the prior shift of the defensive plans for Luzon from Bataan to the beaches are both seen as serious errors of judgment by General Douglas MacArthur. On the other hand, his role in stabilizing the situation in Australia in 1942 by his arrival there when the country was seriously concerned about a Japanese invasion, as well as his role in pushing hard for the allocation of American resources to the defense of Australia and America’s route to it, can increasingly be seen as both positive and significant. This point was especially important when some of Australia’s own forces were retained in the Mediterranean theater and in effect had to
be replaced by units from the United States. There are certainly new studies of several of MacArthur’s campaigns as well as of the fighting on and around Guadalcanal, but these generally add detail rather than revise the existing picture.
²⁴

It has long been evident that by regularly underestimating Japanese strength at points to be attacked, MacArthur’s chief of intelligence, General Charles Willoughby, provided stiff competition for the head of German military intelligence on the Eastern Front from 1942 to 1945, General Reinhard Gehlen, for the title of stupidest intelligence chief of World War II. A very careful analysis of the intelligence operation supporting the second avenue of attack toward Tokyo, that of Admiral Chester Nimitz across the Central Pacific, reveals where and when that intelligence succeeded and when it fell short.
²⁵
It thus becomes easier to understand why the assaults on the Marshall Islands, Guam, and Tinian were substantially less difficult than those on Saipan, Peleliu, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa turned out to be.

Our understanding of the long fight for Burma has been enriched by a fine study of the way in which the Indian Army rebuilt itself after the initial disasters in that exceptionally difficult theater of war.
²⁶
None of the works that deal with the Indian collaborator with Japan, Subhas Chandra Bose, or his Indian National Army has engaged either Bose’s reaction to German mass killing of Sinti and Roma (Gypsies) because their ancestors came from India or the reaction of the soldiers in his army to the sex slaves kidnapped in Japanese-occupied lands and held in enclosures attached to the camps in which they were being trained to follow their Japanese comrades in the occupation of India.

Recent studies certainly enrich our understanding of the naval battle in the Philippines in October 1944. One of these underlines the extraordinary achievement of the destroyer and escort carrier crews in defending the American landing on Leyte while Admiral Halsey was away chasing Japanese decoys.
²⁷
Detailed examinations of the fight on Iwo Jima and events on the
nearby island of Chichi Jima serve to underline the fierce nature of the struggle for and about those islands in early 1945.
²⁸

Considerable quantities of printer’s ink have been lavished on the final stage of the war in the Pacific. A series of serious and careful analyses of the plans for the invasion of Japan reinforce the views of those who have held that shocking Japan into surrender by the dropping of two atomic bombs saved both vast numbers of American lives and even larger numbers of Japanese lives that would have been lost in the battles that the Japanese army leadership hoped would discourage the United States from insisting on an occupation and trials of war criminals.
²⁹
Two aspects of the war that even these studies have not taken sufficiently into account belong in this context. One is that in addition to the approximately seven hundred thousand American casualties anticipated in Operation Olympic, the landing on Kyushu, there would have been very large numbers of casualties from the sending of American troops through a battlefield drenched by the fallout of the atomic bombs that were to be dropped in tactical support of the landing at a time when this aspect of atomic weapons was not yet understood.
³⁰
The other factor that is generally neglected in the literature is that of the fighting elsewhere in the Pacific, on the mainland of China, and in Southeast Asia. Tunnel vision concentrated on the atomic bombs has led to the screening out of the continued fighting in the Philippines, the planned landings on Java and Malaya, and at numerous other places where Allied forces were engaged in fierce fighting with the Japanese. Similarly absent from most books on the end of the war in East Asia is any discussion of the fate of the great numbers of Allied prisoners of war whose murder had been ordered by Japanese headquarters in Tokyo.

There is now additional information on the home fronts of the major belligerents. We have a better insight into the way in which the Soviets mobilized their resources for the great conflict, and it is now apparent that Germany drew more women into the war effort than has hitherto been believed. On the other hand, there is still neither a comprehensive study of the hundreds of thousands of women who served in the Red Army nor any analysis of German records to determine to what extent the order to kill all captured women soldiers was actually carried out.

The issues of collaboration and resistance in areas occupied for some time by the Germans, Italians, and Japanese, issues that were heavily loaded with emotions, myths, and deliberate distortions for decades, are beginning to be examined in a more objective manner. It is probably safe to predict that future decades will see increasingly balanced treatments of these sensitive matters. This is also the situation in regard to the confiscation, sale, and resale of works of art and other assets taken not only from Jews but also from non-Jewish individuals and museums during hostilities and occupation. The social changes that were hastened or retarded by the war are also likely to see further exploration.

Records on intelligence operations of the belligerents are slowly being declassified, but there is still a long way to go. This is especially true for the intelligence, counter-intelligence, and code-breaking operations of the Soviets.
³¹
Since the relevant records in all the archives are on paper that is deteriorating and will disintegrate entirely before many more years pass, one can only hope that they will be opened and microfilmed before they disappear forever. The process of deterioration that is tied to the quality of wartime paper threatens to cut off those who still guard them from their own history. For this reason, every step toward additional openings should be welcomed by people who are interested in the war that shook the world and its inhabitants on an unprecedented scale.
^*

Gerhard L. Weinberg

October 2004

¹
Stefan Kley,
Hitler, Ribbentrop und die Entfesselung des Zweiten Weltkriegs
(Paderborn: Schöningh, 1996).

²
Compare the account in Sergej Slutsch, “Die deutsch–sowjetischen Beziehungen im Polenfeldzug und die Frage des Eintritts der UdSSR in den Zweiten Weltkrieg,” in Bianka Pietrow-Ennker (ed.),
Priiventivkrieg? Der deutsche Angrif Jaufdie Sowjetunion
(Frankfürt/M: Fischer, 2000), with the one in John Nichol and Tony Rennell,
The Last Escape: The Untold Story of Allied Prisoners of
War in Europe
1944–45 (New York: Viking, 2002).

³
Carl Dirks and Karl-Heinz Janssen (eds.), “Plan Otto,”
Die Zeit,
September 19, 1997, p. 16. I am grateful to Mr. Janssen and to Mr. John V. Hunter III for sending me copies of this article.

⁴
See the book edited by Bianka Pietrov-Ennker cited in note 2 and Gerd R. Ueberschar and Lev A. Bezymenskij (eds.),
Der deutsche Angrij Jaufdie Sowjetunion
1941:
Die Kontroverse um die

⁵
Benjamin B. Fischer, “Preparing to Blow Up the Bolshoi Theater,” International Intelligence History Study Group Newsletter 7, No.2 (Winter 1999): 8-10; also published in Centerfor the Study of Intelligence Bulletin No. 10 (Winter 2000): 11–12.

⁶
David M. Glantz,
Zhukov’s Greatest Defeat: The Red Army’s Epic Disaster in Operation Mars, 1942
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999), and other books by the same author.

⁷
G. F Krivosheev (ed.),
Soviet Casualties and Combat Losses in the Twentieth Century
(London: Greenhill, 1997); Rudiger Overmans,
Deutsche militiirischen Verluste im Zweiten Weltkrieg
(Munich: Oldenbourg, 1999).

⁸
Richard Breitman,
Official Secrets: What the Nazis Planned, What the British and Americans Knew
(New York: Hill & Wang, 1998).

⁹
The newly released material is cited in Hilary C. Earl, “Accidental Justice: The Trial of Otto Ohlendorf and the Einsatzgruppen Leaders in Nuremberg, Germany, 1948-1958,” PhD diss., University of Toronto, 2002.

¹⁰
See the pieces by professional historians prepared for the IWG and published in Richard Breitman et a I.,
Us. Intelligence and the Nazis
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

¹¹
Donald M. Mc Kale,
Hitler’s Shadow War: The Holocaust and World War II
(New York: Cooper Square, 2002); Christopher R. Browning,
The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939-March
1942 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004); Martin Dean,
Collaboration in the Holocaust: Crimes of the Local Police in Belorussia and Ukraine,
94
-44 (London: Macmillan, 2000); Walter Manoschek,
“Serbien ist judenjrei”: Militiirische Besatzungspolitik und Judenvernichtung in Serbien
1941 /42 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1993).

¹²
Shlomo Aronson,
Hitler, the Allies, and the Jews
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

¹³
An example is John Bierman and Colin Smith,
The Battle of Alamein: Turning Point, World War II
(New York: Viking, 2002).

¹⁴
Kapitan zur See Rolf Junge an Grossadmiral Karl Dönitz, May 15, 1943, Bundesarchi/ Militararchiv Freiburg, RM 7/260, f. 197, kindly provided to me by Professor Bernd Wegner.

¹⁵
Ivo Banac (ed.),
The Diary of Georgi Dimitrov
1933–1949 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003), pp. 267-68.

¹⁶
Adrian R. Lewis,
Omaha Beach: A Flawed Victory
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Russell R. Hart,
Clash of Arms: How the Alhes Won in Normandy
(Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 2001).

¹⁷
Mark J. Reardon,
Victory at Mortain: Stopping Hitler’s Panzer Counteroffinsive
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002).

¹⁸
Tami Davis Biddle,
Rhetoric and Reality in Air Warfare: The Evolution of British and American Ideas about Strategic Bombing,
1914–1945 (Princeton, N.].: Princeton University Press, 2002).

¹⁹
Edward B. Westermann,
Flak: German Anti-Aircraft Defenses.
1914–1945 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001).

²⁰
David K. Yelton,
Hitler’s Volkssturm: The Nazi Militia and the Fall of Germany,
1944-1945
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002); Perry Biddiscombe,
Werwolf! The History of the National Socialist Guerilla Movement,
1944–1946 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998).

²¹
Timothy Naftali, “Creating the Myth of the Alpenfestung: Allied Intelligence and the Collapse of the Nazi Police State,” in Gunter Bischofand Anton Pelinka (eds.),
Contemporary Austrian Studies
, Vol. 5,
Austrian Historical Memory and National Identity
(New Brunswick, N.].: Transaction Publishers, 1997), pp. 203-46.

²²
Notes by General Walter Scherff published in Marianne Feuersenger,
I m Vorzimmer der Macht: Aufzeichnungen aus dem Wehrmachtfiihrungsstab und Fiihrerhauptquartier,
1940-1945 (Munich: Herbig, 1999), p. 110. See also Donald M. Goldstein and Katherine V Dillon (eds.),
The Pearl Harbor Papers: Inside the Japanese Plans
(Dulles, Va.: Brassey’s, 2000); and Henry C. Clausen and Bruce Lee,
Pearl Harbor: Final Judgement
(New York: Crown, 1992).

²³
Elke Frohlich (ed.),
Die Tagebiicher von Joseph Goebbels,
Teil II, Band 2,
Oktober-Dezember 1941
(Munich: Saur, 1996).

²⁴
William H. Bartsch,
December
8, 1941:
Mac Arthur’s Pearl Harbor
(College Station: Texas A&M Press, 2003); Harry Gailey,
Mac Arthur Strikes Back: Decision at Buna, New Guinea
1942–1943 (Novato, Cali£: Presidio, 2000), and other works by the same author; Thomas E. Griffith, Jr.,
Mac Arthur’s Airman: General George C. Kenney and the War in the Southwest Pacific
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998); Stephen R. Taaffe,
Mac Arthur’s Jungle War: The
1944
New Guinea Campaign
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998); Richard B. Frank,
Guadalcanal: The Dej£nitive Account of the Landmark Battle
(New York: Penguin, 1992).
The Definitive Account of the Landmark Battle
(New York: Penguin, 1992).

²⁵
Jeffrey M. Moore,
Spies for Nimitz: Joint Military Intelligence in the Pacific War
(Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2004).

²⁶
Daniel P. Marston,
Phoenix from the Ashes: The Indian Army in the Burma Campaign
(Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2003).

²⁷
James D. Hornfischer,
The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors: The Extraordinary World War II Story of the Us. Navy’s Finest Hour
(New York: Bantam, 2004). Important for the war in the Pacific in general, Carl Boyd and Akihiko Yoshida,
The Japanese Submarine Force and World War II
(Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1995).