The Moscow Option (10 page)

With the American fleet accounted for, and South-east Asia incorporated in the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, a vast defensive perimeter would be created, running from Burma around the East Indies and New Guinea and north across the Pacific to the Aleutians. This would then have to be defended against the inevitable counterattack. The enemy would be repulsed, and would realize that eventual success would cost an exorbitant price. He would thus sue for a reasonable peace. So ran the theory. So, almost, would run the reality.

IV

At 07.53 on 7 December Flight Leader Mitsuo Fuchida stared down from his cockpit at the blue waters of Pearl Harbor. It looked uncannily like the model he had spent so many hours studying in the
Akagi
operations room. Nothing was moving. The planes on Hickam Field were lined up wing-tip to wing-tip; the capital ships of the US Pacific Fleet stern to bow along ‘Battleship Row’. ‘Tora tora tora,’ he radioed the anxious Nagumo - surprise had been complete. Behind Fuchida the sky was full of
Kido Butai’s
planes, the pilots waiting to begin their attack. He fired the blue signal flare; they peeled off from their formations and flew down into war.

An hour or so later Pearl Harbor was full of burning, keeling ships. Four of the nine capital ships were sunk, another four badly damaged. Nearly two hundred planes had been destroyed. Operation ‘Z’ had succeeded.

Across the Pacific to the west other Japanese forces were moving into action. In the South China Sea thousands of soldiers watched from their landing-craft as the shorelines of northern Malaya and southern Thailand grew closer and more distinct. Others waited on the Indo-Chinese frontier for the order to march on Bangkok.

In Formosa Japanese airmen waited for the sky to clear. Their targets were the US air-bases in the Philippines, and the bad weather was to prove a blessing in disguise. For unknown to the cursing Japanese pilots the US planes had been sent aloft on receipt of the news from Pearl Harbor. They would barely have touched down again before the delayed Japanese arrived overhead to catch them helpless on the ground.

By 10 December the US air strength in the Philippines had been virtually destroyed, and the first Japanese troops were wading ashore in northern Luzon. On the same day Japanese reconnaissance planes discovered the two British capital ships -
Prince of Wales
and
Repulse
- which Churchill had optimistically sent east as a deterrent. Within two hours they were no more than bubbles on the surface of the South China Sea.

In four days the Japanese had sunk six and severely damaged four of the eleven capital ships ranged against them. Masters of the sea and masters of the air, they were now ready to assert their mastery on land against the isolated colonial armies of South-east Asia.

London/ Washington DC

Optimism is the content of small men in high places.
F. Scott Fitzgerald

The two wars, Asian and European, were now inextricably linked in the Pacific Ocean. It remained for either Germany or the United States to close the circle of global war in the Atlantic.

Both hesitated. Roosevelt was unsure whether the American public’s new-found fury, born in the trauma of Pearl Harbor, would stretch to include the greater menace bestriding continental Europe. He hoped the Germans would take the initiative and so render the problem academic.

In Berlin opinions were divided. Goering and the Army leaders, though convinced that war with America was inevitable, saw no need to hasten the evil day. Raeder disagreed. The need to respect the United States’ purely nominal neutrality had hitherto placed severe restrictions on German action in the Atlantic. Now, with war inevitable, and with British and American naval strength depleted by the demands of the war with Japan, those restrictions had to be lifted.

Raeder acted on his opinions. On the evening of 8 December, without consulting his fellow Nazi barons, the Grand Admiral authorised German vessels in the Atlantic to attack any American ships engaged in activities prejudicial to the Reich’s war-effort. The following day U-186 sunk an American destroyer off the coast of Iceland. This was all Roosevelt needed. On 10 December the United States of America declared war on Germany and Italy.

The attack on Pearl Harbor cast a ray of sunshine through the growing darkness of Churchill’s winter. The continuing German successes in Russia, the failure of ‘Crusader’, the accelerating debacle in the Far East ... all were compensated for by the American entry into the war. Within hours of the American declaration of war on Germany the British Prime Minister was inviting himself to Washington.

Roosevelt did not wish to see him immediately, but was too tactful in saying so. Churchill ignored the hint; he was afraid that the American service chiefs might reach some conclusions of their own if his visit was delayed. On the night of 11 December he made the long journey north through blacked-out Britain to the Clyde, and there boarded the new battleship
Duke of York
for the cross-Atlantic voyage. This time he did not read Hornblower en route; he and the Chiefs of Staff were too busy drawing up plans for the continued prosecution of the war.

The strategy outlined during the voyage comprised five basic elements. They were:

1. The need to translate the enormous industrial potential of the anti-Axis alliance into military strength.

2. The need to maintain communications, first and foremost those between the three Great Powers engaged in the struggle, and secondly those connecting these powers with their armies and raw material sources overseas.

3. The continuance of the war against Germany by those means presently available: strategic bombing, encouragement of subversion in the occupied territories, propaganda, and blockade.

4. The retention of vital positions in the Far East, notably Singapore.

5. The tightening of the military ring around Axis- occupied Europe, by increasing aid to the Soviet Union, and by conquering North Africa and opening up the Mediterranean.

Point 1, the realisation of military potential, was no problem for the United States. Two weeks after Churchill’s arrival Roosevelt announced the grandly-titled ‘Victory Programme’. In 1942 the US would produce 45,000 tanks, 45,000 aircraft, 20,000 anti-aircraft guns, 15,000 anti-tank guns and half a million machine-guns. And these figures would be doubled in 1943.

Point 2 was rather more problematic. The enemy, though doubtless impressed by all this prospective production, could find consolation in the difficulties likely to be encountered in its transportation. For by the end of 1941 Allied communication lines were looking distinctly tenuous.

Allied naval commitments seemed to be ever-expanding. They now included protecting the major convoy routes to Britain, Russia and the Middle East, holding off the rampant Japanese in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, and keeping a watchful eye on the remnants of the French fleet in Dakar and Casablanca. And while the commitments expanded the fleets shrunk. The back of the US Pacific Fleet had been broken at Pearl Harbor, and Churchill’s wish to reinforce the survivors with the
Prince of Wales
and
Repulse
had been rudely dashed by the sinking of the two ships on 10 December. From the east coast of Africa to the west coast of America the Allies had lost any semblance of naval superiority.

Nor was this the worst of it. The British Mediterranean Fleet had suddenly become disaster-prone. First
Ark Royal
had been sunk, then Force K sailed into a minefield and lost three cruisers, and finally two battleships in Alexandria Harbour -
Queen Elizabeth
and
Valiant
- were disabled by Italian frogmen. The only capital ship still afloat in the Mediterranean was the battleship
Barham
, and this was badly needed in the Indian Ocean.

Only in the Atlantic were the Allies holding their own, but here too the situation was soon to take another plunge for the worse. Balked by improved British radar in the latter half of 1941, Admiral Doenitz, the German U-boat Chief, was now busy organising ‘Operation Drumbeat’, a calculated carnage of those American merchant ships still sailing, alone and unescorted, the East Coast and Caribbean sea-routes.

The imminent success of this enterprise would place an additional strain on the already serious Allied shipping situation. By January 1942 the British had lost both the option of sending ships through the Mediterranean and thirty-five per cent of their pre-war merchant tonnage. Thus there were more miles to cover and less ships to cover them. As a result only forty to fifty thousand troops could be dispatched overseas each month, a figure that barely covered the natural wastage through injury and illness. Even this level of transportation had only been sustained by the borrowing of American ships, a practice which would now have to cease. For the Americans, though naturally in a better situation than the British, had barely enough ships to meet their own needs, and this number was to be further depleted by ‘Drumbeat’s’ ominous roll. To sum up this picture of Allied marine gloom, by February 1942 there was barely sufficient shipping to form the necessary convoys and barely sufficient naval forces to protect them. Further setbacks would be calamitous.

The hopes expressed in Point 2 could be generously described as optimistic; those expressed in Points 4 and 5 were merely naive. The chances of stemming the Japanese onslaught in South-east Asia were slim indeed; already their forces were racing down the Malay peninsula towards Singapore and island-hopping their way towards the East Indian oil-wells. Perhaps Burma could still be held, but little else.

Churchill, however, had as much misplaced faith in the garrison of Singapore as he had previously had in the ill- fated
Prince of Wales
and
Repulse
. He brushed aside suggestions that reinforcements bound for the island should be redirected to Burma. As a consequence both would fall to the enemy.

This sad process was still unfolding; the situation in North Africa could better be described as unravelling. The failure of ‘Crusader’ and the need to send troops to the Far East had set in motion that course of events most feared in London. Malta was now in direst peril. Should it fall Egypt would surely follow. And the threat from the Caucasus was likely to loom larger with the coming spring. It was now not so much a question of tightening the ring around Axis Europe as of holding it desperately shut. Any hopes of a joint Anglo-American landing in Northwest Africa would have to be placed in cold storage for the indefinite future.

So where should those forces that were available be committed? To the British it was obvious - in the Middle East and the Indian Ocean. These were the areas of potential crisis; these were the areas that had to be held. The enemy still held the initiative; in Russia, the Middle East, the Far East. His armies were still moving forward, and they had to be stopped. Until such time as they were, all else was clearly secondary.

Unfortunately the Americans, as Churchill and his party discovered on reaching Washington, were unaware of the escalating peril. Their service chiefs, who considered the military initiative a god-given right, were understandably loth to admit that it rested with the enemy. Consequently they had devised plans for utilising an initiative they did not possess. The East Indies would be held, North-west Africa invaded. As soon as possible.

Churchill, with rare tact, explained that the failure of ‘Crusader’ had rendered a North-west Africa operation inadvisable. There was not enough shipping, he explained, to countenance this operation, the supply of the Middle East and the retention of footholds in the Far East.

The Americans were not convinced that the general situation was as lamentable as the British said it was. But, amidst the prevailing honeymoon spirit, they agreed to put their disagreements aside for the time being. Churchill was reasonably satisfied. He was confident that time and a few more unexpected jolts would produce a more realistic approach. And the British representatives on the new Combined Chiefs of Staff Committee would naturally be on hand to hasten their new ally down the road to wisdom.

Kuybyshev

Better to turn back than to lose your way.
Russian proverb

One crucial decision
was
taken by the British and Americans in Washington. They would continue with, and seek to expand, the programme of economic and military aid to the Soviet Union. Philanthropy was not the motive. The Western allies had realised that only the Red Army could hope to tie down the bulk of the Wehrmacht for the year it would take to bring the resources of the United States to bear. Any additional strain imposed on Anglo-American shipping was a small price to pay for keeping the Soviet Union in the war.

If it could be done. In early January Stalin’s government moved further east to Kuybyshev on the Volga, and so rejoined the rump of the administration and the foreign diplomatic corps. Kuybyshev was situated closer to the centre of unoccupied Russia; it was also likely to remain unoccupied rather longer than Gorkiy, which was little more than a hundred miles from the front line.