The Moscow Option (27 page)

But the cost to the Japanese carrier force had been high.
Kaga
was at the bottom of the Pacific;
Hiryu
, torpedoed by a US submarine during the voyage back to Japan, would take six months to repair.
Akagi
and
Soryu
, though hardly damaged, needed extensive replacements of aircraft and pilots. The other carriers would not return for some weeks.
Shokaku
and
Zuikaku
had sailed for the south immediately after the naval engagement to take part in the previously postponed Coral Sea operation.
Junyo
and
Ryujo
were still at Midway, waiting while the island’s airstrips were made ready to receive their planes. So all in all it would be at least six weeks before
Kido Butai
could again operate as a coherent striking force.

For Yamamoto, once more relaxing aboard
Yamato
in Hiroshima Bay, it was an opportunity for taking stock. The crushing victory he had just secured had not brought the Americans cap-in-hand to the negotiating table. He had never really believed that it would. Midway was only one of a series of hammer-blows designed to weaken American resolve. Each of these blows paved the way for another. Where should the next one be struck?

Before the Battle of Midway Yamamoto had been reasonably sure of his answer to this question. Despite his airy promises to Kuroshima in early May the Japanese Commander-in-Chief had never seriously considered an all- out assault on the British position in the Indian Ocean. Japan’s primary enemy, the only one which could stand between the nation and its destiny on the Asian mainland, remained the United States. Even after Midway this could never be forgotten. The next blow, and the one after that, must be aimed at American power, at American resolve, until the Americans themselves were forced to call a halt to this war.

Yamamoto’s next priority was Oahu, the most important of the Hawaiian Islands. It stood at the centre of the Pacific chess-board. Pearl Harbor was the central Pacific naval base, the funnel through which American military potential would be poured into the Pacific bottle. Without Oahu, without Pearl, the Americans would have to mount their Pacific operations from the distant coast of the American continent, a formidable if not impossible task.

The Japanese capture of Oahu would also be a psychological blow of enormous proportions. Midway had been too far from the United States. It had been a naval tragedy and another island occupied. But there were many islands, and navies could always be built again. Midway had brought bad news, traumatic news, of the war home to America, but it had not brought the war itself. That was what was needed. The occupation of American soil, of American bases, of American civilians. Oahu.

Even before Midway, Ugaki and Yamamoto had canvassed support for such an operation, but the Army had refused to supply the necessary troops and the Naval General Staff had denounced the plan as being too hazardous. Now, with such a victory behind him, Yamamoto hoped that he could obtain the troops and the go-ahead from his naval superiors. He was soon to be disillusioned.

The Army saw matters in a different light. It always had. Japan, an island power with continental aspirations, had produced two services of equal status and power which looked in opposite directions. While the Navy directed its energies eastward towards the Pacific and its American enemy, the Army looked west towards China, its ever-reluctant bride. Soliciting the co-operation of this bride was the Army’s eternal task; that, and fighting off the other noted rapists of the underdeveloped world, the great powers of continental Europe and Anglo-America.

The Navy’s role, according to the Army, was basically secondary. It consisted of securing the Army’s lines of communication between the home islands and the conquered territories, and of fending off naval interference from the other great powers. In 1905 this had meant little more than controlling the Straits of Japan, and though by 1942 the role had expanded geographically - south towards the protection of the vital oil, east against the air-sea threat posed by the United States - in essence it remained the same. Japan’s destiny lay on the Asian mainland, not amongst the myriad coral atolls of the Pacific. Action in the latter zone served action in the former, not vice versa.

The glorious victory at Midway was interpreted in this light by the Army leaders. The Navy was doing its job, holding off American interference in the vital Chinese war-zone. It would have to continue to do this job, until such time as the Army had made China a fit place for Japanese to live in. For this latter task the Army needed all the divisions it had. Or nearly all of them. It was recognised that certain army units would have to be deployed alongside the Navy - the Pacific was an amphibious, not a purely oceanic setting - but their number would have to be small. The Japanese Army was not an infinitely expendable resource.

The struggle in China continued. Little progress had been made in the seven months since Pearl Harbor. In Chungking Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek still defied the Japanese, despite the loss of the Burmese end of his road to the outside world. In the north-central provinces of Shensi and Shansi the activities of the communist partisans under Mao Tse-tung were becoming more rather than less troublesome. The Japanese invaders were still wading in thick treacle.

What could be done to solve this painful problem? Blind to the realities of the situation the Japanese, in true Western style, sought to solve an internal problem by juggling with the periphery. They convinced themselves, despite evidence to the contrary, that the Chinese would give up their struggle if completely cut off from external aid.

One source of this aid was India. An air-lift was now supplying Chiang Kai-shek from bases in Assam. Throttling this route at its source would involve the invasion of India, an operation which would involve the participation of the Navy and perhaps also Japan’s Axis partners.

There were many in the Japanese Army leadership who welcomed the idea of co-operation with Germany in the Middle East/India area. Unfortunately their enthusiasm was not shared by either the Navy or, more important, the German Führer. German policy was becoming increasingly anti-Japanese in the summer of 1942. Even before Midway it had been an ambivalent mixture of reluctant admiration and vague distaste. Ciano noted in his diary that the latter was gaining the upper hand in the months that followed Yamamoto’s great victory:

“It is all very well for the Japanese to win because they are our allies, but after all they belong to the yellow race and their successes are gained at the expense of the white race. It is a
lietmotiv
which frequently appears in the conversations of the Germans.”

The Germans were slightly more tactful in the presence of their ‘yellow’ ally, but the Japanese were not fooled. If Ribbentrop’s charm was not transparent enough for them, then the steadfast German refusal either to offer or receive practical suggestions for joint activity was an obvious enough indication of Japan’s status in German eyes. When the Japanese proposed a jointly sponsored declaration of independence for India and the Arabs the Germans simply ignored them. All offers of military co-operation in the Indian Ocean were spurned. The heirs of the Rising Sun got the distinct impression that they were being brushed off.

So, with neither Navy or Axis support forthcoming, the Army was forced to abandon its cherished Indian offensive. Its leaders were forced to turn their attention to the other imaginary source of Chinese resolution - Soviet support of the Chinese partisans. Joining the war against Russia had been a possibility since
Barbarossa
began, and now, in the summer of 1942, it seemed both practical and necessary. The new wave of German victories in May and June had worn down Soviet strength still further; the new wave of German hostility towards Japan made it imperative that the latter secured its natural rights in eastern Siberia while it was still possible. The Kwangtung Army was ordered to update its invasion plans.

At an Imperial War Cabinet meeting on 5 July the Army announced and defended its decision. The conquest of eastern Siberia would both facilitate the conquest of China and provide much-needed
lebensraum
for Japan’s crowded Empire. It would finally eliminate the Soviet Union from the war. Simultaneously the Germans would be pushing the British out of the struggle. And the United States would not be able to fight on alone against both Germany and Japan.

Yamamoto, who was not present at the meeting, strongly disagreed with the Army’s chosen course of action. He believed that the divisions earmarked for Siberia could be used to better strategic effect against Oahu. But he received no support from the Naval General Staff, who still considered that the Oahu operation was far too hazardous. Nor was this the worst of it. On 16 July Yamamoto was informed that the three smaller carriers -
Ryujo
,
Junyo
and the new
Hiyo
- would be needed in the Sea of Japan to support the Army’s operation against Vladivostok. Which left him with only
Kido Butai’s
four large carriers for the continuation of the war against the United States. He had to do something with them, or the momentum gathered at Midway would be lost. Denied the chance to attack Oahu, Yamamoto began to consider more daring possibilities.

II

Shortly before 06.00 on 7 August the green lights glowed on the decks of
Hiyo
,
Ryujo
and
Junyo
, and the Kates and Vals sped past them and into the air. Once in formation they flew off to the north. Forty miles ahead of them the Russian city of Vladivostok was welcoming the first rays of the morning sun. To the Japanese pilots the huge red orb in the east seemed like a vast replica of their flag strung across the horizon.

At 06.45 the first bombs rained down on Vladivostok harbour, sinking two Soviet cruisers of the moribund Pacific Fleet and three American merchantmen flying the Soviet flag.

At almost the same moment six divisions of the Kwangtung Army moved into the attack at two places on the Manchurian border, near Hunchun, scene of border fighting in 1938, and at the point 120 miles further north where the Harbin-Vladivostok railway crossed, the frontier. Three hours later a further seven divisions of the Kwangtung Army, also in two groups, moved forward in western Manchuria, into the semi-desert region around Buir Nor where the Soviet, Mongolian and Manchurian borders join. The objective of these divisions was the large Siberian town of Chita, two hundred miles to the north-west, at the junction of the Trans-Siberian and Chinese Eastern Railways.

The Japanese declaration of war, following at the usual discreet distance behind the commencement of hostilities, was delivered to the Soviet ambassador in Tokyo at midday. Imperial Japan had taken the final reckless plunge.

In the Harbin HQ of the Kwangtung Army its commander, General Umezu, radiated confidence. His crack army, shunted into the wings of the war since 1937, would at last have the chance to prove its devotion and virility to the Sun God reigning in Tokyo. The defeats suffered in the border ‘skirmishes’ of 1938-9 had been forgotten.

They would soon be remembered. Considering the smallness of the force at his disposal - a mere seventeen divisions - Umezu’s confidence was astonishing, and only explicable in terms of the ‘victory disease’ prevalent at all levels of the Japanese Armed Forces in early August 1942. The Kwangtung Army’s intelligence work was wholly incompetent; it was reckoned that there were eight Red Army divisions east of Chita, but in fact there were fifteen, and they were commanded by one of the war’s greatest generals - Konstantin Rokossovsky, the future victor of Mutankiang, Vladimir and Smolensk. Stavka had sent him east to take command of the remnants of the Far Eastern Army in mid-July, and he had talked with Zhukov on the eve of his departure from Kuybyshev. The two generals had agreed that Vladivostok would be impossible to hold, but that any further loss of territory should and could be avoided.

If General Umezu had been privy to this conversation he might have been better prepared for what was to follow in August. But instead he interpreted the rapid progress of the armies converging on Vladivostok as further confirmation of Soviet weakness. The three divisions following the railway, spearheaded by the famous ‘Gem’ Division, fought their way into Voroshilov on the Trans-Siberian only four days after crossing the border. Vladivostok was effectively cut off from the rest of the Soviet Union, and on 13 August the battle for the city began, the Japanese ground forces receiving ample air support from the aircraft based in Manchuria and the carriers still lying forty miles offshore. There was little doubt that the city would fall within a week.

But in the west the Japanese were running into trouble. The attack along the dry Khalka river-bed from the railhead at Halun-Arshan met the same fate as the almost identical sortie launched in 1939. The numbers on each side were roughly equal, but the Soviet forces were qualitatively far superior. The Japanese had no heavy tanks, no medium tanks to match the T-34s, and none of that battle-sense won by the Soviet tank-crews in close encounters with the German panzers. After advancing fifty miles across the arid flats towards Buir Nor the four divisions of the Japanese left wing were simply routed by Rokossovsky’s brilliantly executed armoured encirclement. The right wing fared no better. Three days later, in the area of Kharanor, it received a similar thrashing.

General Umezu’s confidence was rather strained by these defeats, but his spirits were slightly restored by the surrender of the small Soviet force still in Vladivostok on 19 August. Japanese losses had been heavier than expected however, and after two divisions had been entrained for the west to bolster their ailing comrades on the Mongolian front there only remained three depleted divisions for the march on Khabarovsk, some four hundred miles up the Trans-Siberian. By the end of the month they had covered forty of them, reaching the small town of Sibirtsevo. They were to get no further.

The military leaders in Tokyo had grossly under-estimated the Red Army in the Far East, and had grossly overestimated the ability of their own forces, hitherto used exclusively against either non-industrialised nations or Western armies fighting in unfamiliar surroundings, to overcome a Western army that was fighting in its own back-yard and with superior weaponry. The spirit of banzai could not compensate for the disparity of strength.