The Second World War (119 page)

Next morning, the 2ème Division Blindée and the US 4th Infantry Division entered the city to a riotous welcome, interspersed with some fighting.
In reality, this was little more than a few sharp skirmishes round German-held buildings–enough for Choltitz to have pretended to resist before he signed the surrender. When he saw the document de Gaulle was deeply irritated to find that Rol-Tanguy had somehow signed above Leclerc, but the Gaullist strategy had won. With their picked men installed in the ministries, the Gouvernement Provisoire de la République Française was more or less in control. Both the Communists and Roosevelt had been presented with a fait accompli.

While Paris was saved, Warsaw was destroyed. The cheering, the
tricolore
flags, the proffered bottles and generous kisses for the liberators were a whole world away. Barbarous and gratuitous murder by the SS auxiliaries continued, as the Home Army struggled on against increasingly desperate odds. ‘
In fighting Warsaw
’, wrote a Polish poet, ‘no one cries.’ Poles carried on the struggle from cellars and sewers as German artillery and Stukas smashed the city around their heads. Their forces, attacking section by section, retook the Old Town. One familiar landmark after another was destroyed, especially the churches. There was no water with which to fight the fires, and the field hospitals had little to treat those with severe burns. Patients simply died in agony.

Discipline remained remarkably good among the insurgents, with little drunkenness. The Home Army had given orders that alcohol was to be destroyed. Some insurgents used what was left to wash their feet as there was little water. Life and defence depended on the parachute containers, all too many of which fell behind German lines as the area held by the Home Army shrank. Allied bombers did not come every day with their precious loads, only when the BBC’s Polish service had announced their arrival by playing the old favourite ‘
Let’s dance a mazurka again
’.

The insurgents lacked armour-piercing weapons, apart from a few airdropped PIAT launchers, yet they still destroyed tanks and armoured vehicles with petrol bombs and home-made grenades. Barricades and their human defenders were crushed under tank tracks. Dust from pulverized buildings mixed indistinguishably with smoke from burning rafters. Yet others not far away suffered even more.

When the Home Army uprising began in Warsaw, the ghetto at Łód
still held 67,000 Jews. After the astonishing Soviet advance in Operation Bagration, they thought that their moment of release had finally arrived. But with the Red Army still halted on the other side of the Vistula, Himmler decided that no time should be wasted. The vast majority were sent to their death in Auschwitz.

The first request for RAF Bomber Command to attack Auschwitz had come in January 1941 from Count Stefan Zamoyski of the Polish general
staff. Portal refused, on the grounds that British bombing techniques were simply not accurate enough to destroy the railways lines. At the end of June 1944, after confirmation emerged of the gas chambers at Auschwitz, more pleas reached London and Washington to bomb the railways leading to the camps.

Auschwitz-Birkenau was by now the last major death camp operating.
^*
At that time the production-line massacre of Hungarian Jews was coming to a crescendo, with 430,000 of them killed in a few months. In August the last Jews from the Łód
ghetto were killed there, to be followed by Jews from Slovakia and then those supposedly privileged Jews from Theresienstadt. It was Himmler’s last attempt at a Final Solution before the camps were evacuated and destroyed.

Harris still held to his obsession that the best course for everyone, including prisoners, was to shorten the war with his bombing strategy against Germany. He was also able to argue that in any case this was a day target and therefore a mission for the USAAF. The Americans also refused, but bizarrely, from 20 August, Allied aircraft from the Foggia air bases began to bomb the Monowitz plant of Auschwitz III because it produced methanol, and thus came under Spaatz’s oil plan. The raids ended any further hope of
IG Farben
manufacturing buna and synthetic fuel at Auschwitz. And after Operation Bagration, the Red Army was now too close for comfort. Company employees were evacuated towards the west.

Opposite Warsaw, the Red Army hardly moved. Stalin clearly wanted the rising to fail. The more potential Polish leaders the Germans killed, the better it was for him. Finally on 2 October, after sixty-three days, General Komorowski surrendered. Bach-Zelewski, without Himmler’s knowledge, offered the survivors the privilege of being treated as legal combatants. He hoped to recruit them in the fight against the Red Army, but none joined. Although Bach promised that there would be no more destruction in Warsaw, Himmler soon ordered the total demolition of the city with fire and explosive. Only the concentration camp on the site of the ghetto was preserved to hold the Home Army prisoners. The Poles had no illusions in either direction, trapped as they were between the two pitiless totalitarian systems which fed off each other. Another Home Army poet wrote: ‘
We await you red plague
/ to deliver us from the black death.’

41

The Ichig
Offensive and Leyte

JULY–OCTOBER 1944

O
n 26 July 1944, as the Americans broke out of Normandy, as the Red Army reached the Vistula and as US Marines completed the conquest of the Mariana Islands, the cruiser USS
Baltimore
entered Pearl Harbor flying the presidential flag. A bevy of admirals in crisp white uniforms waited on the quayside.

Admiral Nimitz went on board to tell President Roosevelt that General Douglas MacArthur’s plane from Brisbane had just landed. Half an hour later MacArthur, who had delayed his arrival to make a grand entrance, drove up in a large open staff car with outriders. Waving to the crowd, he too came aboard like the star of a show at a premiere.

MacArthur may have been an egomaniac obsessed with his own inflated legend. He had not concealed his disdain for the President, whom he regarded as virtually a Communist. He saw no reason why he should acknowledge the authority of General George C. Marshall, and he strongly resented the fact that Admiral Nimitz did not come under his command. Yet MacArthur now knew exactly what was necessary to defend his own power and prestige, even if it meant swallowing his pride and being agreeable to Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

MacArthur regarded this conference as politically motivated, with Roosevelt playing the part of commander-in-chief before the November elections. Fortunately, MacArthur’s conquest of Papua New Guinea had gone far better than he could have hoped, and his forces were now ensconced at Hollandia on the western end. The moment had come to force through his personal mission, the reconquest of the Philippines, to which he had promised to return. ‘They are waiting for me there,’ was his grandiose declaration for the press. The fact that he alone among the supreme commanders and chiefs of staff advocated a complete liberation of the Philippines did not discourage him in the least. Others suspected that he had an uneasy conscience after abandoning Corregidor and Bataan, albeit on a presidential order. But the Philippines represented an important part of his life, to say nothing of his wealth after a $500,000 gift from his friend Manuel Quezon, the Filipino President.

Several of his colleagues accepted the idea of liberating Luzon, the main Philippine island, as a stepping stone to Formosa. That was linked to the
idea of using China as the main bombing base against Japan. Others, most especially Admiral King, argued that Luzon should be bypassed and they should go straight for Formosa.

MacArthur, using both charm and bulldozing tactics, managed to persuade Roosevelt that they had to liberate the Philippines, if only as a matter of honour. Roosevelt, knowing that to refuse could play badly with the press and the American public in the lead-up to the presidential election in November, allowed himself to be persuaded. Some suggest that there was a private deal: the Philippines in return for MacArthur not attacking Roosevelt at home. Marshall and the air force chief ‘Hap’ Arnold, on the other hand, knew that MacArthur’s pet project would not hasten the end of the war in the Pacific in any way. With the Marianas secured, they now had their air bases for attacking the Japanese home islands. Details recently released of the Bataan death march had provoked a wave of calls for the bombing of Japan.

In the end, after Admiral ‘Bull’ Halsey had carried out a series of raids on the Philippines with his Third Fleet and Mitscher’s fast carriers, the joint chiefs of staff agreed at the Octagon conference in Quebec that MacArthur could go ahead. He should start with the island of Leyte in the north-west Philippines in October. All preliminary operations were cancelled, with one exception, the capture of Peleliu in the Palau Islands some 800 kilometres to the east of Leyte. An invasion of Formosa was dropped for a number of reasons, one of which was the disastrous situation on the mainland of China with the continuing Japanese Ichig
Offensive.

The dramatic events in Paris and Warsaw were hard to visualize for those fighting an essentially maritime war on the other side of the world, just as the palm trees, mangrove swamps and cobalt-blue Pacific were unimaginable to those locked in a death struggle on the continent of Europe.

Island fighting against Japanese soldiers who refused to surrender made American commanders consider gas warfare for clearing their bunkers and tunnels, but Roosevelt vetoed the idea. The US Navy had, on the whole, become more adept at deciding which archipelagos and atolls to bypass in its Pacific advance. Well aware of the desperate plight of Japanese troops on isolated islands, it simply left them to starve.

The blockade by American submarines was devastating. Japan had only just begun to establish a convoy system, and lacked transport ships. This was mainly because the Imperial Japanese Navy had preferred to concentrate resources on capital warships. Japanese troops abandoned by Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo were not allowed to surrender. They were simply told to adopt ‘self-sufficiency’, which meant that they could expect no supplies and no relief. It has been estimated that six in every
ten of the 1.74 million Japanese soldiers who died in the war succumbed to disease and
starvation
. Whatever the scale of their war crimes against foreign nationals, the Japanese chiefs of staff should have been condemned by their own people for crimes against their own soldiers, but this was unthinkable in such a conformist society.