All Hell Let Loose (72 page)

If the Allies had confronted their foe on a major landmass where there was scope for motorised manoeuvre, they would have achieved victory much more quickly: overwhelming US superiority in tanks, artillery and air power would have smashed the relatively primitive Japanese army, as did the Russians in Manchuria in August 1945. As it was, however, the long series of Pacific battles, miniature in scale by European standards, enabled the Japanese to exploit their defensive skills and sacrificial courage, without suffering much disadvantage from lack of artillery and air support. They excelled in camouflage and harassment – ‘jitter tactics’. Even in Japan’s years of defeat, its soldiers retained a remarkable psychological dominance of the battlefield. The US Marine Corps was probably America’s finest fighting ground force excepting the army’s airborne divisions, and achieved remarkable things in the Pacific, but Americans never matched the skills of their opponents, or indeed of the Russians, as night-fighters. The more urban and ‘civilised’ a society, the harder it is to train its soldiers to adapt to the lifestyle imposed by infantry fighting amid raw nature. The higher the input of technology to a branch of war, the more emphatic was American excellence: their carrier pilots, for instance, had no superiors. Peasants, however, often make the most stoical riflemen.

Once US planes could operate from Tarawa, they swiftly destroyed Japanese air capability throughout the Marshall Islands. In early February 1944, the Marines were pleasantly surprised by the ease with which they captured Majuro, Kwajalein and Roi-Namur atolls, a personal triumph for Nimitz, who overruled all his subordinates to insist upon attacking the central Marshalls, rather than the heavily defended easternmost islands. They then took Eniwetok, at the extreme north-western end of the Marshall chain, while Spruance’s carrier aircraft devastated the key Japanese base at Truk in the Carolines. The speed of these successes enabled Nimitz to advance the timetable for the next phase of his campaign, scheduling an attack on the Marianas for June rather than September 1944.

A powerful competitive element entered US conduct of the struggle. MacArthur became fearful that the New Guinea campaign would become a backwater, and accelerated his own operations. His troops seized the Admiralty Islands three months ahead of schedule, thus encircling Rabaul and forcing the Japanese to withdraw up the north coast of New Guinea. In April 1944, he staged his most daring and dramatic coup of the war, capturing Hollandia in Dutch New Guinea, bypassing 40,000 Japanese troops, and in June repulsing a strong Japanese counter-attack along the Driniumor river. His forces also captured the Vogelkop peninsula at the western end of New Guinea, together with the nearby island of Biak, which became an important air base.

There is a persuasive argument, advanced by the US Navy at the time and by many historians since, that MacArthur’s campaign became redundant at the end of 1943; that the only purpose of his subsequent bitter and bloody campaign in the Philippines was to fulfil the personal ambitions of its commander, at the expense of many Filipino lives, along with those of several thousand Americans. US dominance of air and sea had become so great that Japanese forces in the south-west Pacific were incapable of transporting troops to threaten Allied strategic purposes. In late 1943 US submarines, decisive contributors to victory, began to wreak havoc upon Japan’s supply links to its over-extended empire. Many Japanese island garrisons were starved of weapons and ammunition as well as food.

Yet it is characteristic of all wars, and especially of the greatest in human history, that events and personalities acquire a momentum of their own. MacArthur existed. He held a grand title, and had been exalted by propaganda into the most famous of American warlords. His public-relations machine was the most effective branch of his headquarters. Though Roosevelt and his associates, together with most of the nation’s military leaders, thought him a charlatan, when a 1945 poll asked Americans whom they considered their greatest general, 43 per cent replied MacArthur against 31 per cent for Eisenhower, 17 per cent for Patton and 1 per cent for Marshall. SWAPO’s Supreme Commander had a physical presence, strength of will and personal authority greater than those of the US chiefs of staff. Although MacArthur was never given the massive resources he demanded, he exercised a political and moral influence which sufficed to sustain his campaign and enable him to pursue his chosen personal objectives. Rationally, the United States might have halted its ground operations against Japan in 1944, once the Marianas had been secured. From its air bases, the USAAF’s Superfortress bombers could reduce the enemy’s homeland to ashes. Together with naval blockade, which crippled Japanese industry and above all oil supplies, irresistible air bombardment made eventual Japanese capitulation inevitable. America’s last bloody island campaigns of 1944–45, like the belated British advance into Burma, did little to advance the outcome of the war.

But this is a perspective accessible only to posterity. At the time, it would have seemed unthinkable – save to the airmen fiercely ambitious to show that they could defeat Japan on their own – to halt ground operations. The US Marine Corps and army divisions deployed in the Pacific expected to keep fighting, and so did their commanders and the nation at home. Once great peoples are committed to the business of killing, there is a bleak inevitability about the manner in which they continue to do so until their enemies are prostrate. In the spring of 1944, the Japanese were still far from acknowledging defeat.

1
SICILY

In September 1939, wiseacres in Britain said, ‘The generals learned their lesson in the last war. There are going to be no wholesale slaughters.’ To this Evelyn Waugh responded with characteristic waspishness, ‘How is victory possible except by wholesale slaughters?’ His question, while mischievous, was entirely to the point. To defeat Nazi Germany, it was indispensable for its enemies to destroy the Wehrmacht. It was the Western Allies’ extreme good fortune that the Russians, and not themselves, paid almost the entire ‘butcher’s bill’ for doing this, accepting 95 per cent of the military casualties of the three major powers of the Grand Alliance. In 1940–41, the British Empire defied Hitler alone. Thereafter, the United States made a dominant material contribution to Germany’s defeat, by supplying aid to Russia and Britain which assumed massive proportions from 1943 onwards, and by creating great air and naval armadas. The Anglo-American bomber offensive made an increasingly heavy impact on Germany. The Western Allied armies, however, by deferring a major landing on the Continent until 1944, restricted themselves to a marginal role. The Russians eventually killed more than four and a half million German soldiers, while American and British ground and air forces accounted for only about 500,000. These figures emphasise the disparity between respective battlefield contributions.

For Churchill’s and Roosevelt’s soldiers to have played a decisive role in the ground war against Germany, they would have needed to land on the European continent at least forty divisions, and probably more, in 1943 before the Russians achieved their great victories. These armies did not exist, with the length of training and scale of equipment that American and British military leaders deemed essential. Equally important, shipping was lacking to transport such a force to the Continent and keep it supplied thereafter. The Luftwaffe remained relatively potent: its nemesis came in the following year, at the hands of the USAAF’s Mustang fighters over Germany. Allied dominance of French air space, which proved absolute in 1944, would have been contested had the Allies landed earlier.

The Americans were willing to risk landing a small army in France in 1943, or even in 1942. The British, who would have had to provide most of the men, were not. They judged, almost certainly rightly, that unless they deployed overwhelming strength they would suffer another disaster, as painful as those of the early war years. Even if a Continental campaign in 1943 had proved sustainable, it would have cost hundreds of thousands more casualties than the Anglo-American armies suffered in 1944–45, since they would have faced German forces much stronger than those deployed in Normandy on and after D-Day, following a further year of attrition on the Eastern Front.

The expanses of sea separating the Western Allies from occupied Europe posed a challenge for invasion forces which must cross them, but also quarantined the Anglo-Americans from German interference. Roosevelt and Churchill were able to exercise the luxury of choice, denied to the Red Army which continuously confronted Hitler’s armies. Captain Pavel Kovalenko was among many Russians embittered by the Western Allies’ supposed pusillanimity, which conveniently ignored the Soviet Union’s ignominious role between 1939 and June 1941. Kovalenko wrote from the front on 26 March 1943: ‘Winston Churchill made a speech on the radio, [saying]: “I can imagine that some time in the next year or possibly the one after, we shall be able to accomplish the defeat of Hitler.” What can one expect from these bastards of “allies”? Cheats, scoundrels. They want to join the fighting when the outcome is decided.’

Churchill, strongly aware of such sentiments, minuted his chiefs of staff in March 1943: ‘Everywhere the British and Americans are overloading their operational plans with so many factors of safety that they are ceasing to be capable of making any form of aggressive war. For six or eight months to come, Great Britain and the United States will be playing about with half a dozen German divisions [in North Africa and Sicily]. That is the position to which we are reduced, and which you should labour sedulously to correct.’ But the British and Americans found it impossible to launch a grand ground commitment in Europe in 1943; instead, they opted for limited operations against the Axis southern flank. At Casablanca Churchill’s delegation had secured American agreement to a landing in Sicily, which it was then hoped might take place in early summer. Much emphasis was also placed on
Pointblank
, the Combined Bomber Offensive designed to pave the way for the invasion of France. By the time of the subsequent Washington summit in May, the protracted endgame in North Africa had pushed back the Sicilian target date to July. The US chiefs of staff remained unhappy about diverting strength from the prospective French campaign, but in Washington they acknowledged that no landing in north-west Europe could take place that year. They believed that the British were exploiting the shipping shortage to escape a French invasion commitment which they disliked. British caution was real enough, but so was the transport issue. It would be intolerable for Allied armies to linger idle in England until the following summer; Italy was meanwhile their only credible objective.

The Allies knew how desperately many Italians yearned to escape from the war. Iris Origo, the American-born writer who occupied a castle in southern Tuscany, wrote in April: ‘A marked change has come over public opinion. The active resentment and dismay which followed upon the Allies’ landing in North Africa and the bombing of Italian cities has given place to a despairing apathy … everyone says quite openly: “It is Fascism that has brought us to this.”’ It was plain that Italy would soon quit. The British assumed that once this happened, most of the country would fall into Allied hands: Ultra indicated that the Germans did not intend to mount a major campaign in the lower peninsula, but merely to hold a mountain line in the north. Here was an example of the dangers posed by enjoying a privileged view of the enemy’s hand. The Allies thought they knew Hitler’s mind. But he frequently changed it, and redealt the cards.

Churchill and his generals were thus far right, that it was essential to attack the Italian mainland, the only battlefield where Anglo-American ground forces could engage the Germans in 1943. But they were inexplicably and culpably ill-informed about the geographical, tactical, political and economic problems they would meet there. They underestimated the difficulties of advancing through mountainous territory against a skilful and stubborn defence. They expected that Italy would provide a springboard for an early offensive against Germany’s southern flank. ‘The Mediterranean,’ the British chiefs of staff asserted in Washington, ‘offers us opportunities for action in the coming autumn which may be decisive … We shall have every chance of breaking the Axis and of bringing the war to a successful conclusion in May 1944.’

The Americans agreed the Italian commitment, subject to an understanding that come autumn, several divisions would be withdrawn, for redeployment to Britain to prepare for D-Day. As late as 27 July 1943, the British Joint Intelligence Committee correctly forecast an imminent Italian surrender, but mistakenly assumed that Hitler’s forces would thereafter withdraw to the Maritime Alps and positions covering Venice and the Tyrol. Churchill’s chiefs of staff were more cautious, anticipating some German reinforcement of Italy. But Allied operations against Mussolini’s country were launched amid British assurances of easy pickings, which prompted enduring American bitterness when confounded by events.

On 10 July an armada of 2,590 warships and transports began to disembark 180,000 troops on the coast of Sicily, under the command of Gen. Sir Harold Alexander. The British landed in the east, the Americans in the south-west. Strong winds wreaked havoc with the airborne plan, causing many gliders to fall into the sea – sixty-nine out of 147 which took off from Tunisia were thus lost, drowning 252 British paratroopers, and just twelve landed safely on their assigned zones. Reckless anti-aircraft fire from the Allied fleet cost more casualties among the transport planes. Four Italian divisions offered little resistance on the beaches, which was fortunate, since many invaders were put ashore in the wrong places. Even some Germans showed little fight: an American paratrooper who landed helpless and alone amid one of their units was amazed when three enemy soldiers approached him. Their leader said in perfect English, ‘We surrender. For three years and eight months we’ve been fighting all over Europe, Russia and North Africa. That’s long enough in any army. We’re sick of it all.’

The defence was hampered by the fact that, while Gen. Albert Kesselring commanded in Italy, Mussolini had insisted that an Italian, Gen. Alfredo Guzzoni, should control Axis forces in Sicily, a responsibility he was woefully unfit to fulfil. But most men of the two German formations on the island, soon reinforced by elements of a third, threw themselves into the battle with their usual determination. Luftwaffe paratrooper Martin Poppel wrote on 14 July, after his unit took their first prisoners, British airborne soldiers: ‘In my opinion their spirit is none too good. They tend to surrender as soon as they face the slightest resistance, in a way that none of our men would have done.’ He added after an action a week later: ‘The Tommies obviously thought that their artillery fire yesterday had made us withdraw, and arrived early this morning with three lorries packed full of infantrymen. Hitched up behind 3.7cm and 5.7cm anti-tank guns. Clearly they didn’t understand our paratroopers and had learned nothing from their experiences yesterday. Everything was quiet. My boys let the motorcycle escort past and only let them have it when the lorries were right next to them. Within a matter of seconds the first truck was in flames, with Tommies jumping off as best they could. At the end of it we counted fifteen dead and brought back eleven prisoners. In the evening we fetch the anti-tank guns back – they’ll strengthen our positions considerably.’ Poppel spoke well only of British artillery, which commanded German respect throughout the war: ‘You have to hand it to Tommy, he gets his Forward Observation Officer in position bloody quickly and his artillery fires itself in very fast.’

The Germans suffered not only from Allied guns, but also from air attacks. They discovered that their enormous sixty-ton Tiger tanks, while formidable weapons, were quite unsuited to the rough terrain of Sicily: Axis counter-attacks, notably against the American beachheads, were easily repulsed. Martin Poppel’s braggadocio about his own unit’s performance should not mask the fact that another Luftwaffe division, the Hermann Goering, proved the most inept German formation on the island. Its commander Gen. Paul Conrath wrote furiously on 12 July: ‘I had the bitter experience of watching scenes during these last few days which are unworthy of a German soldier … Personnel came running to the rear, crying hysterically, because they had heard a single shot fired somewhere in the landscape … “Tank panic” and the spreading of rumours are to be punished by the most severe measures. Withdrawal without orders and cowardice are to be dealt with on the spot, if necessary by shootings.’ Germans were infuriated by widespread reports of Italian officers abandoning their men.

Italian soldiers streamed into the Allied lines to surrender ‘in a mood of fiesta’, as an American put it, ‘their personal possessions slung about them, filling the air with laughter and song’. A lieutenant wrote home: ‘A queer race these Italians. You’d think we were their deliverers instead of their captors.’ Some Americans responded brutally to such docility: in two separate incidents on 14 July, an officer and an NCO of the US 45th Division murdered large groups of Italians in cold blood. One, Sergeant Horace West, who killed thirty-seven with a Thompson sub-machine gun, was convicted by a court-martial, but later granted clemency. The other, Captain John Compton, assembled a firing squad which massacred thirty-six Italian prisoners. Compton was court-martialled but acquitted, and was later killed in action. Patton, whose military ethic mirrored that of many Nazi commanders, wrote that ‘in my opinion these killings have been thoroughly justified’. He agreed to the courts-martial only under pressure. Disclosure of both incidents was suppressed, because Eisenhower feared enemy reprisals against Allied prisoners. If Germans had been responsible, they would have been indicted for war crimes in 1945, and probably executed.

On the Allied right, Montgomery’s two corps took Syracuse as planned on the first day, but thereafter made slow progress, hampered by lack of transport. ‘This is
not
tank country,’ a British officer complained, while one of Montgomery’s soldiers grumbled that Sicily was ‘worse than the fuckin’ desert in every fuckin’ way’. A British officer, David Cole, described the experience of ‘plodding along mile after dusty mile in a temperature of 95 degrees in the shade’ until he looked down on the plain of Catania with his commanding officer.

A British airborne unit took the Primosole bridge intact, only to be forced back by counter-attacks when it ran out of ammunition. Luftwaffe paratroopers thereafter conducted a staunch defence of the bridge against assaults characterised by sluggishness, lack of imagination and failures of communication. A shortcoming of the British Army throughout the war was the poor quality of its wireless sets, manifest throughout the Primosole operations. The Germans had better radios than their enemies, a significant battlefield advantage. The differential was most marked on the Eastern Front, where in 1941–42 most Russian planes and tanks lacked wirelesses altogether; even in 1943 only company commanders’ tanks were fitted with them. Poor British communications contributed to disaster in the 1940 French and 1941 Cretan campaigns. As late as September 1944, the failure of radio links throughout First Airborne Division contributed significantly to its defeat at Arnhem, and represented a professional disgrace to the British Army. The RAF between 1942 and 1945 deployed some of the most advanced electronic technology in the world, but British military wirelesses remained unreliable, and this weakness sometimes significantly influenced the course of battles, as it did in Sicily.