The Second World War (46 page)

Massacre is endemic to campaigns of conquest; it had been the hallmark of the Mongols and had been practised in their time by the Romans in Gaul and the Spaniards in South America. It was an index, however, of the degree to which Western civilisation had advanced that massacre had effectively been outlawed from warfare in Europe since the seventeenth century; it was a consonant index of Nazi Germany’s return to barbarism that it made massacre a principle of its imperialism in its conquered lands. The chief victims of its revival of massacre as an instrument of oppression, however, were not those who opposed German power by offering resistance – resistance was what had chiefly invoked the cruel excesses of conquerors in the past – but a people, the Jews, whose very existence Nazi ideology deemed to be a challenge, threat and obstacle to its triumph.

Jews had been legally disadvantaged in Germany immediately after the Nazi seizure of power; after 15 September 1935, under the so-called Nuremberg Laws, Jews were deprived of full German citizenship. By November 1938 some 150,000 of Germany’s half-million Jews had managed to emigrate; but many did not reach countries which lay outside the Wehrmacht’s impending reach, while the great concentration of Europe’s Jews, as yet unmotivated to flight, lived within it. That included the Jews of the historic area of settlement in eastern Poland and western Russia, some 9 million in number, as well as the great Jewish populations of Warsaw, Budapest, Prague, Salonica and Lithuanian Vilna, the centre of Jewish religious scholarship. The diplomatic and military victories of 1938-9 put many of these East European Jews under Nazi control; Barbarossa engulfed the rest of them. Himmler, though he persisted in trying to establish his legal right to do so, began to massacre them at once. Four ‘task groups’ (
Einsatzgruppen
), divided into ‘special commands’ (
Sonderkommandos
) composed of German SS and securitymen and locally enlisted militias, had already killed one million Jews in the new area of conquest between June and November 1941. Most, however, had been killed by mass shooting, a method Himmler regarded as inefficient. In January 1942, at a meeting held at the headquarters of Interpol, of which Himmler was president, in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee, his deputy Heydrich proposed and received authority to institutionalise the massacre of the Jews, a measure to be known as the ‘Final Solution’ (
Endlösung
). Jews had been obliged to live in defined ghettos in Poland since the moment of occupation, and the order had subsequently been extended to other occupied areas. It was therefore not difficult to round up and ‘transport’ Jews for ‘resettlement’ in the east. Those sent to camps associated with an industrial plant run by the SS economic branch were usually worked to a state of enfeeblement before being sent to the gas chambers, though the old, the weak and the young might be gassed immediately; Auschwitz, the large camp in southern Poland, served both purposes. Those sent to the extermination camps, like Treblinka and Sobibor, were gassed on arrival. In this way, by the end of 1943, about 40 per cent of the world’s Jewish population, some 6 million people, had been put to death; of the last large European Jewish community to survive, the 800,000 in Hungary, 450,000 were delivered to the SS between March and June 1944 and gassed at Auschwitz.

By that time, the head of the SS economic branch reported to Himmler on 5 April, there were twenty concentration camps and 165 subsidiary labour camps; in August 1944 the population was 524,286, of whom 145,119 were women. In January 1945 the total had risen to 714,211, of whom 202,674 were women. There were few Jews among them, for the simple and ghastly reason that the Final Solution was effectively complete. It seems possible, however, that Jews never formed a majority of the camp populations, since it was normally their fate to die on or soon after arrival; non-Jewish forced labourers, who were kept alive as long as they could work, may always have outnumbered them. In that irony lay a chilling dimension of Nazi racial policy. For the removal and transportation of Europe’s Jews was a fact known to every inhabitant of the continent between 1942 and 1945. Their disappearance defined the barbaric ruthlessness of Nazi rule, offered an unspoken menace to every individual who defied or transgressed Nazi authority and warned that what had been done to one people might be done to another. In a profound sense, the machinery of the Final Solution and of the Nazi empire were one and the same: because systematic massacre underlay the exercise of Nazi authority at every turn, Hitler needed to rule his conquered subjects scarcely at all. The knowledge of the concentration camp system was in itself enough to hold all but a handful of heroic resisters abject during five years of terror.

The victory of Midway transformed the climate of war in the Pacific not only objectively but subjectively. From now on, the reheartened American chiefs of staff recognised, they could go over to the offensive. The question was: along which axis? The ultimate objective was the home islands of Japan, unless Tojo and his government could be brought to concede defeat before invasion became necessary. However, the home islands lay 2000 miles from America’s remaining Pacific bases in Hawaii and Australia, between each of which a formidable chain of Japanese island fortresses interposed to block an American amphibious advance. The ground which had been lost so quickly by unprepared garrisons – or through the absence of any garrison at all – between December 1941 and May 1942 would now have to be recovered step by step at painful cost. Was it better to proceed along the pathway of the great islands of the East Indies or to leap across the stepping-stones of the tiny, isolated atolls of the north Pacific?

Choice of route implied choice of commander and of service. On 30 March 1942 the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Marshall and Admiral King, had agreed on a division of strategic responsibilities in the Pacific. The new arrangement abolished ABDA and put Nimitz, commander of the Pacific Fleet with headquarters at Hawaii, in charge of the Pacific Ocean Area and MacArthur, commander of army forces in the region with headquarters in Australia, in charge of the South-West Pacific Area. To choose the northern route would be to make Nimitz and the navy paramount – a logical step, since the Pacific had always been the navy’s interest. However, the small Marine Corps was its only military arm, and as yet it lacked the shipping, warships and men to stride across the atolls towards Japan. The army, by contrast, had the men, who were being shipped from the training camps to Australia in growing numbers; while the South-West Pacific Area route, which began close to Australia and proceeded along large islands that yielded at least some of the resources an offensive force required, demanded proportionately smaller shipping resources. To choose it, however, was to make paramount not only the army but its commander too. Although MacArthur had become a hero to the American people for his defence of Bataan, he was not popular with the nation’s admirals. A prima donna among subordinates and a man who brooked no equals, he would, they feared, usurp the direction of strategy by subordinating naval to army operations if the South-West Pacific Area was made the primary zone of the counter-offensive.

Through stormy inter-service negotiations a compromise was reached. The services would take the southern route; but the area would be subdivided to allot part of the theatre to Nimitz and the navy, part to MacArthur and the army, which would have strictly limited call on the navy’s transports, carriers and bombardment fleet. The compromise, agreed on 2 July 1942, consigned Task One, the capture of the island of Guadalcanal, east of New Guinea, to the navy. Task Two, an advance into New Guinea and its offshore island of New Britain, where Japan had a major base at Rabaul, would go to MacArthur; so eventually would Task Three, a final assault on Rabaul.

Guadalcanal, in the Solomons, committed both the United States Navy and the United States Marine Corps to a desperate struggle. Though safely approachable from New Zealand, the departure point of the operation, it was surrounded on three sides by other islands in the Solomons group, which together formed a confined channel that was to become known to the American sailors as ‘the Slot’. Once troops were ashore, the navy was committed to resupplying them through these confined waters and so to risking battle with the Japanese in circumstances where manoeuvre was difficult and surprise all too easy for the enemy to achieve.

The 1st Marine Division, a regular formation of high quality, was landed without difficulty on 7 August and also took the offshore islands of Tulagi, Gavutu and Tanambogo. The Japanese garrison numbered only 2200 and was swiftly overcome. However, the appearance of the Marines on Guadalcanal provoked the Japanese high command to frenzy; ‘success or failure in recapturing Guadalcanal’, a document later captured read, ‘is the fork in the road which leads to victory for them or us.’ Since the Japanese recognised that a breach in their defensive perimeter at Guadalcanal would put the whole of their Southern Area at risk, they resolved on extreme efforts to retake it. On the night of 8/9 August off Savo Island they surprised the American fleet supporting the Guadalcanal landings, sank four cruisers and damaged one cruiser and two destroyers. From 18 August they poured reinforcements into the island, supported by naval guns and aircraft which continuously attacked its airfield (renamed Henderson Field in honour of a Marine pilot killed at Midway). On 24 August a fleet carrying the largest reinforcement yet dispatched was intercepted by the American navy east of Guadalcanal and the second of five battles fought in its waters ensued. This Battle of the Eastern Solomons was an American victory; though
Enterprise
was damaged, the Japanese lost a carrier, a cruiser and a destroyer and about sixty aircraft to the Americans’ twenty.

Though repelled at sea, the Japanese were fighting furiously on land. The Marines, elite troops though they were, learned on Guadalcanal both the professional respect and ethnic hatred they were to feel for the Japanese throughout the Pacific war. A feature near Henderson Field became a focus of particularly fierce fighting; the Marines called it ‘Bloody Ridge’. The navy meanwhile christened the nightly convoys of Japanese destroyers which ran reinforcements to the island the ‘Tokyo Express’. It made regular efforts to intercept and on the night of 11/12 October caught and surprised a Japanese cruiser force in darkness. In this Battle of Cape Esperance the Americans came off best. However, on 26 October two much larger fleets met again in the Battle of Santa Cruz, south-east of Guadalcanal, and the decision went the other way. The Japanese had four carriers present, and 100 of their aircraft were shot down. Yet though the Americans had only two carriers at risk, and suffered half the total of Japanese aircraft losses,
Enterprise
was damaged and
Hornet
, the heroine of the Doolittle raid on Tokyo, went down.

Before the Battle of Santa Cruz the Japanese had launched a violent offensive against the American defenders of Guadalcanal between 23 and 26 October, days of torrential rain which grounded the American aircraft operating from Henderson Field but allowed Japanese aircraft based elsewhere to deliver a succession of attacks. The Marines held out, counter-attacked and even received reinforcements, though in the teeth of Japanese efforts to close Guadalcanal’s waters to American transports. Between 12 and 15 November, in three days of heavy fighting in ‘the Slot’ now known as the Battle of Guadalcanal, battleships clashed with battleships in the first classic duel of capital ships since Jutland – but on this occasion action was joined at night and radar proved the decisive factor. On the night of 12 November the Japanese flagship
Hiei
was so badly damaged that next morning she fell victim to aircraft from
Enterprise
and was sunk. On the night of 14/15 November the battleship
Kirishima
inflicted forty-two hits on the
South Dakota
; but
South Dakota
was brand-new and
Kirishima
old.
South Dakota
survived, while the
Washington
sent
Kirishima
to the bottom with nine 16-inch shell strikes delivered in seven minutes. A fortnight later, in the Battle of Tassafaronga on 30 November, an American cruiser force came off less well, but there, as in the fighting in ‘the Slot’ (also known as ‘Ironbottomed Sound’ from the number of ships sunk there), the Japanese covering force failed to run its troop transports to land. Thousands of Japanese soldiers had drowned in the course of the battles to win command of Guadalcanal’s waters.

Starved of reinforcements and supplies, the Japanese garrison of Guadalcanal now began to falter. The island was plagued by leeches, tropical wasps and malarial mosquitoes, and as rations dwindled the Japanese troops fell prey to disease. The Americans too became ill – pilots at Henderson Field lasted only thirty days before losing the quickness of hand and eye necessary to do battle – but the tide of battle was now running their way. In January 1943 the Japanese commander on Guadalcanal withdrew his headquarters to the neighbouring island of Bougainville. In early February the ‘Tokyo Express’ began to operate in reverse, evacuating the sickly and exhausted defenders to New Guinea. By 9 February Japanese resistance on Guadalcanal had formally ceased.

For the Marines Guadalcanal was remembered as an epic struggle. Men who had fought there bore an aura of endurance which veterans of almost no other Pacific campaign acquired. In terms of casualties it had nevertheless been a comparatively cheap victory. The Japanese had lost 22,000 killed or missing, the 1st and 2nd Marine Divisions, which bore the brunt of the fighting, only a little over a thousand dead. On Guadalcanal the American forces had established the tactical method they would employ across the width of the Pacific to beat the Japanese into subjection. It entailed the commitment of elite landing troops, heavily supported by ground-attack aircraft and naval gunfire, to take and hold key islands at the perimeter of Japan’s area of conquest, as stepping-stones towards the home islands. As conceived and executed, it brought about a contest between morale and material. Both sides were to display supreme bravery; but, while the emperor’s soldiers were ultimately dependent upon their concept of honour in sustaining their resistance, the Americans could call up overwhelming firepower to kill them in thousands. It was an unequal contest which in the long run the Americans were bound to win.