The Second World War (151 page)
At the beginning of August, it rapidly became clear that the only chance lay with the Royal Navy, and thus Operation Ethelred was born. Rear Admiral Cecil Harcourt’s 11th Carrier Squadron, then in Sydney, was ordered to steam at full speed for Hong Kong on 15 August, as soon as the the Japanese surrender was announced. The British Pacific Fleet was under
US command, so Attlee, the new prime minister, felt compelled to seek permission from President Truman, which he did three days later. The same day, the foreign secretary Ernest Bevin sent a signal to Chiang Kaishek explaining that since the British had been forced to surrender Hong Kong to the Japanese, he would surely understand as a soldier that honour required them to take the Japanese capitulation themselves.
Chiang was not taken in and appealed to the United States. Truman did not have the same anti-colonial fervour as Roosevelt, and he regarded Britain as a more important ally than the Chinese. General MacArthur also supported the British claim. Wedemeyer remained firmly opposed, but he had not yet redeployed his Chinese divisions. Chiang, despite Truman’s rebuff, sent two of his armies into Kwangtung province, yet he was still anxious not to antagonize the British and Americans, whose help he would need in the civil war to come. The East River Column of guerrillas did move to disarm Japanese forces in Canton and the New Territories of Hong Kong, but they too were not planning to fight a British force. They simply wanted to make sure that the Nationalists did not take it.
Harcourt’s squadron entered Victoria harbour on 30 August. Royal Marines and blue-jackets marched ashore in fine style, having been told to show ‘face’ to make up for all the prestige that Britain had lost three and a half years before. An administration in waiting, with an acting governor from the officials imprisoned there, had already made tentative steps to set up a skeleton administration. This had taken place with the consent of Japanese officers, who much preferred to surrender to the British than to Nationalist or Communist forces.
In Shanghai the underground civil war between Communists and Nationalists ceased temporarily on 19 September, when part of Admiral Kinkaid’s Seventh Fleet arrived. Loaded with stores which had been stockpiled for the invasion of Japan, it was welcomed by the starving population and Allied prisoners. The war and its vocabulary had passed them by. ‘
What’s a Jeep
?’ a civilian internee from Shanghai asked.
Allied prisoners of war had been the first priority for aid immediately after the Japanese surrender. In some cases, relief came quickly, while other prisoners had to wait for several weeks. A number had been massacred by guards after the surrender. In Changi Jail outside Singapore, prisoners were contemptuous when the Japanese guards suddenly began to salute them and offer water. Allied aircraft dropped supplies of food on camps already identified. Where possible medical teams were parachuted in to care for prisoners who greeted them with tears of relief, unable to believe that their misery was over. Most were walking skeletons, others so weakened by beriberi and other diseases that they could not even stand.
Of the 132,134 Allied prisoners of war who had been in Japanese hands,
35,756 died, a death rate of 27 per cent. Far greater numbers of slave labourers working for the Japanese had failed to survive as a result of the treatment that they had received. The comfort women of many nationalities who had been press-ganged by the Japanese suffered severe psychological harm for the rest of their lives. An unknown number committed suicide, feeling that they could never return home after all the humiliations heaped upon them.
Many prisoners of the Japanese had suffered a particularly gruesome and cruel fate. General MacArthur had given Australian forces the dispiriting task of clearing New Guinea and Borneo of the remaining pockets of Japanese. It became clear from all the reports collected later by US authorities and the Australian War Crimes Section that the ‘
widespread practice of cannibalism
by Japanese soldiers in the Asia-Pacific war was something more than merely random incidents perpetrated by individuals or small groups subject to extreme conditions. The testimonies indicate that cannibalism was a systematic and organized military strategy.’
The practice of treating prisoners as ‘human cattle’ had not come about from a collapse of discipline. It was usually directed by officers. Apart from local people, victims of cannibalism included Papuan soldiers, Australians, Americans and Indian prisoners of war who had refused to join the Indian National Army. At the end of the war, their Japanese captors had kept the Indians alive so that they could butcher them to eat one at a time. Even the inhumanity of the Nazis’ Hunger Plan in the east never descended to such levels. Because the subject was so upsetting to families of soldiers who had died in the Pacific War, the Allies suppressed all information on the subject, and cannibalism never featured as a crime at the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal in 1946.
The war in south-east Asia and the Pacific had caused untold destruction. China was in ruins with its agriculture destroyed, and now an exhausted population faced a civil war, which would continue until 1949. More than twenty million of its citizens died. Chinese historians have recently increased that estimate towards the fifty-million mark. Anything between fifty and ninety million refugees had fled the Japanese, and now had no homes or families left to return to. These numbing scales of misery almost eclipsed those of Europe, which was also riven by political tensions.
From August 1945, ordinary Italian soldiers were sent back to Italy by the Soviet authorities. Communist groups waving red flags gathered to meet the trains bringing them home. To their outrage, they found that the released prisoners had scrawled ‘abbasso il comunismo’ on their wagons. Fights broke out at the station. The Communist press treated as ‘Fascists’ all those who criticized conditions in Soviet camps, or said that the Soviet
Union was not a workers’ paradise. Palmiro Togliatti, the leader of the PCI, the Italian Communist Party, had begged his Soviet masters to delay the return of Italian officers until after the elections and referendum of 2 June 1946. The first ones did not reach Italy until July.
Soviet repression continued in Poland against non-Communists. A clear indication of the NKVD’s priorities was revealed by the fact that General Nikolai Selivanovsky received fifteen regiments of security troops for Poland, while Serov in Germany had only ten. Selivanovsky was ordered by Beria ‘
to combine the duties
of representing the NKVD of the USSR [with that of] councillor at the Polish Ministry of Public Security’. Stalin’s very personal definition of a ‘free and independent Poland’ which he had promised at Yalta was not just influenced by his hatred of the Poles. Still shaken by how close the Soviet Union had come to defeat in 1941, he wanted the Communist satellite states as a buffer. Only the sacrifice of nine million soldiers, to say nothing of eighteen million civilians, had saved him.
In the Second World War, the peoples who had suffered the most in Europe were those caught between the totalitarian millstones, and who ‘
died as a result of the
interaction
of the two systems’. Since 1933, fourteen million had died in Ukraine, Belorussia, Poland, the Baltic states and the Balkans. The vast majority of the 5.4 million Jews killed by the Nazis in Hitler’s ersatz victory came from those regions.
The Second World War, with its global ramifications, was the greatest man-made disaster in history. The statistics of the dead–whether sixty or seventy million–are far beyond our comprehension. The sheer size of the numbers is dangerously numbing, as Vasily Grossman instinctively understood. In his view, the duty of survivors was to try to recognize the millions of ghosts from the mass graves as individuals, not as nameless people in caricatured categories, because that sort of dehumanization was precisely what the perpetrators had sought to achieve.
In addition to the dead, there were countless others who had been maimed, both psychologically and physically. In the Soviet Union, the limbless ‘samovars’ were banished from the streets. This was the fate, with its implicit loss of manhood, which every Red Army soldier had feared far more than death. The cripples were an embarrassing reminder that a purgatory existed between the heroic dead and the heroic survivors who parade with their medals on every anniversary.
Having been given the mantle of a ‘good war’, the Second World War has loomed over succeeding generations far more than any other conflict in history. It provokes mixed feelings because it could never live up to this image, especially when one half of Europe had to be sacrificed to the
Stalinist maw to save the other half. And although it may have ended in overwhelming defeat for the Nazis and Japanese, the victory conspicuously failed to achieve world peace. First there were the latent civil wars across Europe and Asia which broke out in 1945. Then there was the Cold War with Stalin’s treatment of Poland and central Europe. Mixed in with the Cold War were the anti-colonial conflicts in south-east Asia and Africa. And we can never forget that the sequence of struggle in the Middle East began with mass Jewish immigration into Palestine, following the liberation of the camps.
Some people complain that the Second World War still exerts a dominating influence nearly seven decades after its end, as the disproportionate number of books, films and plays shows, while museums continue to spawn a remembrance industry. This phenomenon should hardly be surprising, if only because the nature of evil seems to provide an endless fascin ation. Moral choice is the fundamental element in human drama, because it lies at the very heart of humanity itself.
No other period in history offers so rich a source for the study of dilemmas, individual and mass tragedy, the corruption of power politics, ideological hypocrisy, the egomania of commanders, betrayal, perversity, self-sacrifice, unbelievable sadism and unpredictable compassion. In short, the Second World War defies generalization along with the categorization of humans which Grossman so passionately rejected.
There is, nevertheless, a real danger of the Second World War becoming an instant reference point, both for modern history and for all contemporary conflicts. In a crisis, journalists and politicians alike instinctively reach for parallels with the Second World War, either to dramatize the gravity of the situation, or in an attempt to sound Rooseveltian or Churchillian. To compare 9/11 to Pearl Harbor, or to liken Nasser and Saddam Hussein to Hitler, is not just to make an inaccurate historical parallel. Such comparisons are gravely misleading and risk producing the wrong strategic response. Leaders of democracies can become prisoners of their own rhetoric, just like dictators.
When we dwell on the enormity of the Second World War and its victims, we try to absorb all those statistics of national and ethnic tragedy. This makes us overlook the way the Second World War changed everyone’s lives in ways impossible to predict. Very few may have shared the extraordinary experience of the young Korean Yang Kyoungjong, who was forced to serve in the Imperial Japanese Army, the Red Army and the Wehrmacht. Other stories are striking in different ways and for different reasons.
A short paragraph in a June 1945 report by the French security police, the DST, recorded that a German farmer’s wife had been found in Paris
having smuggled herself aboard a train bringing French deportees back from camps in Germany. It transpired that she had had an illicit affair with a French prisoner of war assigned to their farm in Germany while her husband was on the eastern front. She had fallen so much in love with this enemy of her country that she had followed him to Paris, where she was picked up by the police. That was all the detail provided.
The few lines raised so many questions. Would her difficult journey have been in vain, even if she had not been picked up by the police? Had her lover given her the wrong address because he was already married? And had he returned home, as quite a few did, to find that his wife had had a baby in his absence by a German soldier? It is, of course, a very minor tragedy in comparison to everything else which had happened further east. But it remains a poignant reminder that the consequences of decisions by leaders such as Hitler and Stalin ripped apart any certainty in the traditional fabric of existence.
This book had a very simple and unheroic genesis. I always felt a bit of a fraud when consulted as a general expert on the Second World War because I was acutely conscious of large gaps in my knowledge, especially of unfamiliar aspects. This book is partly an act of reparation, but above all it is an attempt to understand how the whole complex jigsaw fits together, with the direct and indirect effects of actions and decisions taking place in very different theatres of war.
The last twenty years have produced an astonishing wealth of excellent research and writing on this vast subject by many colleagues and friends. This book naturally owes an immense debt to their work and good judgement: Anne Applebaum, Rick Atkinson, Omer Bartov, Chris Bellamy, Patrick Bishop, Christopher Browning, Michael Burleigh, Alex Danchev, Norman Davies, Tami Davis Biddle, Carlo D’Este, Richard Evans, M. R. D. Foot, Martin Gilbert, David Glantz, Christian Goeschel, Max Hastings, William I. Hitchcock, Michael Howard, John Keegan, Ian Kershaw, John Lukacs, Ben Macintyre, Mark Mazower, Catherine Merridale, Don Miller, Richard Overy, Laurence Rees, Anna Reid, Andrew Roberts, Simon Sebag Montefiore, Ben Shephard, Timothy Snyder, Adam Tooze, Hans van de Ven, Nikolaus Wachsmann, Adam Zamoyski and Niklas Zetterling.
I am deeply grateful to my French publisher, Ronald Blunden, for the loan of the papers and despatches of his father, the Australian war correspondent Godfrey Blunden, who covered the fighting at Stalingrad and elsewhere on the eastern front, and then served as a war correspondent in Italy and during the advance into Germany. Others who have provided material, suggestions and advice include Professor Omer Bartov, Dr Philip Boobbyer, Dr Tom Buchanan, John Corsellis, Sebastian Cox of the RAF Historical Branch, Professor Tami Davis Biddle of the US Army War College, James Holland, Ben Macintyre, Javier Marías, Michael Montgomery on the sinking of HMAS
Sydney
, Jens Anton Poulsson of the Norwegian resistance, Dr Piotr Sliwow
ki, head of the History Department, Warsaw Rising Museum, Professor Rana Mitter, Gilles de Margerie, Professor Hew Strachan, Noro Tamaki, Professor Martti Turtola of the National Defence University, Helsinki, Professor Hans van de Ven, Stuart Wheeler,
Keith Miles and Jože Dežman for documents on the Titoist massacres in Slovenia, Stephane Grimaldi and Stephane Simmonet at the Memorial de Caen.
