A World at Arms (4 page)

²⁸
Derrick Wright,
The Battle for Iwo Jima
1945 (Thrupp, Stroud, UK: Sutton, 1999); Chester G. Hearn,
Sorties into Hell: The Hidden War on Chichi Jima
(Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2003).

²⁹
John R. Skates,
The Invasion of Japan: Alternative to the Bomb
(Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1994); Thomas B. Allen and Norman Polmar,
Code-Name Downfall: The Secret Plan to Invade Japan
-
and Why Truman Dropped the Bomb
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995); Richard B. Frank,
Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire
(New York: Random House, 1999).

³⁰
Edward J. Drea,
In the Service of the Emperor: Essays on the Imperial Japanese Army
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998),
chap. 11
.

³¹
Robert W. Stephan,
Stalin’s Secret War: Soviet Counterintelligence against the Nazis, 1941–1945
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004), is a good start in this difficult field.

^*
There are, of course, large numbers of useful and important works that have been published in the last twelve years but are not cited here.

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION

When you go home

Tell them of us, and say:

For your tomorrow,

We gave our today.

This text is inscribed on a memorial to British soldiers who were killed in one of the most desperate but least known battles of World War II: the fighting around the town of Kohima in eastern India not far from the border with Burma, from which a Japanese army had set out to march to Delhi in 1944. At Kohima, Indian and English soldiers had defeated a Japanese force which was followed by some Indians who believed that the Japanese treated the people of their colonial empire, such as the Koreans, far better than the British treated theirs. The leader of those Indians who believed that a victory of Japan and Germany over Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union was greatly to be desired was a man named Subhas Chandra Bose. He had fled from India to Germany across the Soviet Union during the period of the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact and had had an opportunity to see for himself in Europe how kindly the Germans were disposed toward those they conquered until, in 1943, the Germans sent him by submarine to the Indian Ocean where he had transferred to a Japanese submarine for the rest of the trip to East Asia.

This series of inter-related events may serve to illustrate why it has seemed to me to be appropriate to try to write an account of World War II which looks at it in a global perspective. For the origins of that vast conflict, I believed it both appropriate and possible to pursue a theme which might serve to tie the whole complicated story together; it appeared convincing to me that the foreign policy of Hitler’s Germany provided such a theme. I stated in the preface of the first of my two volumes on that subject:

Whatever the conflicting ambitions, rivalries and ideologies of the world’s powers in the 1920s and 1930s, it is safe to assert that, with the solitary exception of Germany, no European nation considered another world war as a conceivable answer to whatever problems confronted it. Local wars and conflicts, specific aggressive moves or attempts at subversion, miscalculations leading to hostilities - all these were conceivable, and most of them occurred. But without German initiative another world–wide holocaust was inconceivable to contemporaries in all countries and is unimaginable retrospectively for the historian. Accordingly, the course of German foreign policy provides the obvious organizing principle for any account of the origins of World War II.

But once the Germans initiated hostilities in September, 1939, the conflict took a course of its own. German initiatives dominated its early stages, but even then not always in the way that its architects had anticipated. In the summer of 1940 the European war was already taking on forms far different from those confidently planned in Berlin. And the entrance of Japan into the wider conflict, though ardently desired and long urged by the Germans, dramatically altered the dimensions and nature of the war. Certainly the Japanese would never have expanded the war with China which they had been waging since 1937 into a portion of the wider conflict had it not been for the great German victories in the West in 1940. Without those victories, the East Asian fighting, however terrible for those involved and especially for the vast numbers of Chinese killed in it, would have remained an isolated war like that Japan and China had fought in 1894-95. But once Japan decided that the opportunity for the seizure of an enormous empire in Southeast Asia had come, none of the participants could operate in the world–wide conflagration as it preferred; all had to adjust to the necessities–even the terrors–of the moment.

It is in the face of the resulting complexity of the struggle that it seems to me impossible to draw out a single unifying theme. On the other hand, too many of the existing accounts treat the war either from quite parochial perspectives or by dealing with different geographical areas as if one were an appendage of another. It is the special and peculiar characteristic of the upheaval which shook the world between 1939 and 1945 that dramatic events were taking place
simultaneously
in different portions of the globe; decision makers faced enormous varieties of decisions at one and the same time, and repercussions in areas far distant from those of any specific crisis or issue before them had constantly to be kept in mind.

It is with this global point of view that I have tried to review the war as a whole with special emphasis on the inter-relationships between the various theaters and the choices faced by those in positions of leadership.
That has meant that the bloody details of fighting, of the seemingly endless struggle for control of the seas, and the interminable tedium of war broken by moments of sheer terror, may all appear to have been sanitized or at least obscured. If such is the effect, it was not the intent. But there are far more books which convincingly convey the immediacy of the fighting than those that survey the broader picture.

A further special problem appears to me to affect much of the literature on the war. It is too frequently forgotten that those who had choices and decisions to make were affected by memories of the
preceding
war of 1914-18, not by the Cold War, the Vietnam conflict, or other issues through which we look back on World War II. They did not know, as we do, how the war would come out. They had their hopes–and fears–but none of the certainty that retrospective analysis all too often imposes on situations in which there were alternatives to consider, all of them fraught with risks difficult to assess at the time.

The effort to present the war in a global perspective, looking forward rather than backward, and to do so at least in part on the basis of extensive research in the archives, has been challenging. It could not possibly have been accomplished without a great deal of help. The National Endowment for the Humanities awarded me a fellowship which enabled me to initiate the research for this book, and the Rockefeller Foundation Conference and Study Center at Bellagio provided the opportunity to review the findings of that initial foray into the archives. Those forays had been substantially assisted by earlier fellowships of the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies. Archivists at the National Archives in Washington as well as the National Records Center in Suitland, the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library at Hyde Park, the U.S. army’s Center for Military History, the Public Record Office at Kew on the outskirts of London, the Imperial War Museum Library and the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives at King’s College in London, the German Foreign Ministry Archive in Bonn, the German Federal Archive in Koblenz and its Military Archive in Freiburg, the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich, and the Center for Research on the History of National Socialism in Hamburg were invariably courteous and helpful to what must have seemed to them an extremely demanding, persistent, and at times difficult customer. The William R. Kenan, Jr. Charitable Trust has made much of the research travel possible and has been helpful in innumerable other ways.

The Houghton Library at Harvard allowed access to the William Phillips papers; the papers of Jay Pierrepont Moffat were made accessible by his widow, Mrs. Albert Lévitt. Many scholars have enlightened
me by discussion and by providing specific information; I would especially like to thank Josef Anderle, Richard Breitman, Michael Gannon, the late Louis Morton, Richard Soloway, Stephen Schuker and Robert Wolfe. Work on the War Documentation Project of Columbia University and, later, the American Historical Association’s project for microfilming captured German documents afforded me an unequalled opportunity to familiarize myself with masses of German archival material.

Crown copyrighted quotations from the collections at the Public Record Office are used with the kind permission of the Controller of Her Majesty’s Stationery Office. The Trustees of the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives have agreed to my quoting from the papers of Lord Ismay and of Lord Alanbrooke in their custody.

When I began work on this book in 1978, my late wife Wilma was already fighting the cancer which took her life; she not only insisted I go forward with this project but spent many hours copying portions of documents for me in Freiburg. At a very difficult time in my life, a new light came into it. While I was resuming the writing of this book, the lovely lady to whom this book is dedicated came to share in the travails of its completion. And her mother, Lois Kabler, transformed hundreds of pages of my hieroglyphs into the word processor; surely a mother-in-law story to warm the heart. An extraordinary copyeditor, Margaret Sharman, has caught numerous slips. It is my hope that readers will take the trouble to call errors to my attention so that they might be corrected in any future edition. Many have been kind enough to do so, and it has been possible to make corrections in this printing. All remaining mistakes are, of course, my responsibility.

ABBREVIATIONS

AA Auswärtiges Amt.
The German Foreign Ministry: used to designate the archive of the Foreign Ministry in Bonn. Followed in the citation by the section of the archive, title and number of the volume, and a frame number stamped on the document if these are provided.

ADAP Akten zur Deutschen auswärtigen Politik 1918–1945.
The German language edition of documents mainly from the German Foreign Ministry files, cited by series letter, volume number, and document number.

BA
Bundesarchiv.
The German Federal Archive in Koblenz. Followed in the citation by the collection and folder designations.

BA/MA
Bundesarchiv/Militärarchiv.
The Military Archive Branch in Freiburg of the German Federal Archive. Followed in the citation by the collection and folder number. All “N” citations are from collections of private papers deposited in the archive.

Bd.
Band.
Volume number of a series in the German Foreign Ministry archive.

CEH Central European History

DRuZW Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg.
The German official history of World War II being published by the Military History Research Office in Freiburg.

f. Folio(s), used for pagination on a document in an archive, frequently helpful when a group of documents has been bound together and then given folio numbers by archivists.

FDRL Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, N.Y.

fr. Frame, indicates frame number either on microfilm or stamped on a document prior to microfilming.

FRUS Foreign Relations of the United States.
The main series of U.S.
documents published by the Department of State; the volumes are cited by year, and volume number for that year or special title.

GPO Government Printing Office, used where the U.S. Government Printing Office is either the publisher or distributor of a book. This includes books which were originally issued by the historical offices of the U.S. army and air force.

Hamburg, Research Center Forschungsstelle für die Geschichte des Nationalsozialismus in Hamburg. A research institute in Hamburg with some archival holdings, cited by the system used there.

HMSO His/Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, the British government’s official printing office.

Hung. Docs.
Hungarian Documents. The set published by the Hungarian government and containing, in addition to the texts in Magyar, a summary of each document in German.

Imperial War Museum A museum and research library in London.

IMT International Military Tribunal.

IMTFE International Military Tribunal for the Far East.

Institut für Zeitgeschichte Institute for Contemporary History, Munich.

JCH Journal of Contemporary History

JMH Journal of Modern History

KTB Halder
Hans-Adolf Jacobsen (ed.),
Generaloberst Halder, Kriegstagebuch
, 3 vols. (Stuttgart:/Kohlhammer, 1962-64). War Diary of General Halder.

KTB OKW Kriegstagebuch des Oberkommandos der Wehrmacht,
War diary of the high command of the armed forces.

KTB Skl Kriegstagebuch der Seekriegsleitung. Diary of the high command of the navy. Citations are followed by the Part number (almost always A), the volume number, and the date. Cited from the originals in Freiburg, these volumes are currently being published, but the references as given here can be used to locate material in both.

MGM Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen.
This important journal is published by the German Military History Research Office in Freiburg.

MR Map Room. A section of the Roosevelt Library.

NA National Archives. The main American depository. The records cited are from the main building in downtown Washington and the National Records Center in Suitland, Maryland, but many are likely to be moved to the Archives II building located in College Park, Maryland.
To avoid confusion, location as between the two existing buildings is not given.