The Second World War (28 page)

‘
Worse than the tedium
of our days’, wrote Peter Quennell working in the ministry of information, ‘was the squalor of our restless nights. Very often we were required to work in shifts–so many hours in a stifling subterranean dormitory under hairy much-used blankets; so many above ground crouched at our usual desks or, during a lull, asleep upon the floor, ready to be woken up by an elderly office messenger, who brought some hideous piece of news–say, a direct hit on a crowded bomb-shelter–from which we had to draw the sting. Yet it is odd how quickly a habit forms, how easily we adapt ourselves to an unfamiliar way of life, and how often supposed necessities are revealed as superfluities.’

Although Londoners faced up far better than expected to the hardships,
displaying the ‘spirit of the Blitz’ in Underground stations, a fear of German paratroopers continued, especially among women outside London. Rumours of an invasion spread from week to week. Yet on 2 October Operation Sealion had been effectively postponed until the next spring. Sealion had played a double role. The menace of a German invasion had helped Churchill unify the country and steel it for a long war. But Hitler was canny in the way he maintained the psychological threat for long after he had discarded the idea. This persuaded the British to maintain far larger defence forces in the United Kingdom than were necessary.

In Berlin, Nazi leaders were resigned to the fact that even the bombing campaign was unlikely to bring Britain to its knees. ‘
The view now prevails
’, wrote Ernst von Weizsäcker, the state secretary of the German foreign office, in his diary on 17 November, ‘that starvation caused by a blockade is the most important weapon against Britain, and not smoking the British out.’ The very word ‘blockade’ carried an emotional note of revenge in Germany, obsessed with memories of the First World War and the Royal Navy’s blockade. This strategy would now be turned against the British Isles by submarine warfare.

9

Reverberations

JUNE 1940–FEBRUARY 1941

T
he Fall of France in the summer of 1940 created reverberations, both direct and indirect, all around the world. Stalin was deeply disturbed. His hopes that Hitler’s power would be greatly weakened in a war of attrition against France and Britain had proved utterly wrong. Germany was now far more powerful with a large part of the French army’s vehicles and weaponry captured intact.

Further east, it represented a doubly serious blow to Chiang Kai-shek and the Chinese Nationalists. After the loss of Nanking, they had relocated their industrial base to the south-western provinces of Yunnan and Kwangsi, close to the frontier of French Indochina, believing that to be their most secure area with access to the outside world. But the new Vichy regime of Marshal Pétain began to bow to Japanese demands in July, and agreed to accept a Japanese military mission in Hanoi. The Nationalist supply route through Indochina was cut.

The advance of the Japanese 11th Army in that summer of 1940 up the Yangtze valley split the Nationalist armies and caused huge losses. On 12 June, the fall of the major river port of Ichang represented a terrible blow. It also isolated the Nationalist capital of Chungking and allowed Japanese naval aircraft to attack it with continual raids. There were no river mists at that time of year to impede visibility. As well as bombing towns and villages along the river, Japanese aircraft attacked steamers and junks overcrowded with wounded and refugees as they escaped upriver through the great Yangtze gorges.

Agnes Smedley asked a Red Cross doctor about the situation. He admitted that of the 150 military hospitals on the central front, only five had survived.
‘What about the wounded
?’ Smedley asked. ‘He said nothing, and I knew the answer.’ Death was all around. ‘Each day,’ she added, ‘we saw the bloated corpses of human beings slowly floating down the river, drifting against junks, and being shoved away by boatmen with long, spiked poles.’

When Smedley reached Chungking on its cliffs high above the confluence of the Yangtze and Chialing rivers, she was startled by explosions, but these were not bombs. Chinese engineers were blasting tunnels in the cliffs to make air-raid shelters. She found that during her absence much
had changed, both good and bad. A provincial city of 200,000 inhabitants was swelling towards a population of a million. The growth of industrial cooperatives was very encouraging, but increasingly powerful right-wing elements in the Kuomintang saw them as crypto-Communist. Improvements had been made in the army medical services, with free clinics set up in Nationalist areas, but again Kuomintang bosses wanted to control the health services, most likely for their own enrichment.

Most sinister of all was the rise in power of the security chief General Tai Li, who was said now to have a force of 300,000 men, both uniformed and plain clothes. His power was so great that some even suspected that he controlled Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek himself. General Tai was stamping down not just on dissent but on free speech in any form. Chinese intellectuals began to flee to Hong Kong. Even the most innocuous organizations, such as the Young Women’s Christian Association, were closed down in the atmosphere of crisis.

Foreigners in Chungking, according to Smedley, regarded the Chinese armies with contempt. ‘
China, they said, couldn’t fight
; its generals were rotten; its soldiers illiterate coolies or mere boys; its people ignorant; the care of the wounded an abomination. Some charges were true, some untrue, but almost all were based on a lack of appreciation of the fearful burdens under which China staggered.’ Europeans and Americans failed completely to understand what was at stake and did little to help. The only substantial aid for medical services came from expatriate Chinese, whether in Malaya, Java, the United States or elsewhere. Their generosity was considerable, and in 1941 the Japanese conquerors would make them suffer for it.

Chiang Kai-shek had continued with meaningless peace negotiations in the hope of putting pressure on Stalin to bring his military support back to earlier levels. But in July 1940 a change of government in Tokyo brought General T
j
Hideki into the Cabinet as minister of war. These shadow negotiations were broken off. T
j
wanted to starve the Nationalists of supplies by making a stronger agreement with the Soviet Union and cutting off their other supply routes. In Tokyo, military leaders were turning their gaze south to the Pacific and south-west to the British, French and Dutch possessions around the South China Sea. This would give them rice and deprive the Nationalist Chinese of imports, but above all Japan wanted the oilfields of the Dutch East Indies. Any idea of compromise with the United States which involved a retreat from China was unthinkable to the regime in Tokyo after the deaths so far of
62,000 Japanese soldiers in the ‘China Incident’
.

In the second half of 1940 the Chinese Communist Party, under instructions from Moscow, launched its
Hundred Regiments campaign
in the
north with almost 400,000 men. The intention was to undermine Chiang Kai-shek’s negotiations with the Japanese: they did not know that these had been broken off and had never been serious in the first place. The Communists managed to push back the Japanese in many places, cut the Peking–Hankow railway, destroy coal mines and even carry out attacks into Manchuria. This major effort, using their forces in more conventional tactics, cost them 22,000 casualties which they could ill afford.

In Europe, Hitler demonstrated an astonishing degree of loyalty to Mussolini, often to the despair of his generals. But the Duce, his former mentor, tried every trick to avoid becoming his subordinate. The Fascist leader wanted to conduct a ‘
parallel war
’ separate from that of Nazi Germany. He failed to tell Hitler in advance of his plan to occupy Albania in April 1939, and pretended it was a companion piece to the German takeover of Czechoslovakia. Nazi leaders, on the other hand, were reluctant to share secrets with the Italians. Yet the Germans had still wanted to sign the Pact of Steel just over a month later.

Like imprudent lovers hoping to profit from a relationship, both men misled each other, and both felt misled. Hitler had never warned Mussolini of his intention to crush Poland, but still expected his backing against France and Britain, while the Italian leader believed that there would be no general conflict in Europe for at least another two years. Mussolini’s subsequent refusal to enter the war in September 1939 at Germany’s side disappointed Hitler greatly. The Duce knew that his country was simply not ready, and his excessive demands for military equipment as a condition for support constituted his only excuse.

Mussolini was, however, determined to come into the war at some point to gain more colonies and make Italy appear a great power. As a result he did not want to miss the opportunity when the two great colonial powers, Britain and France, suffered a major defeat in the early summer of 1940. The astonishing rapidity of Germany’s campaign against France and the widespread belief that Britain would have to come to terms sent him into a fever of uncertainty. Germany would dictate the shape of Europe, almost certainly becoming the dominant power in the Balkans, while Italy risked being sidelined. For that reason alone, Mussolini was desperate to obtain the right to involvement in peace negotiations. He calculated that a few thousand Italian casualties would buy him that seat at the table.

The Nazi regime certainly did not oppose Italy’s entry into the war, even beyond the eleventh hour. Yet Hitler greatly overestimated Italy’s fighting strength. Mussolini had famously boasted of ‘eight million bayonets’ when he had fewer than 1.7 million soldiers, and many of them lacked the rifles on which to place a bayonet. The country was desperately short of
money, raw materials and motor transport. To increase the number of divisions, Mussolini reduced them from three regiments to two. Out of seventy-three divisions, only nineteen were fully equipped. In fact Italy’s forces were smaller and less well armed than they had been on entering the First World War in 1915.

Hitler unwisely took Mussolini’s estimates of Italian strength at face value. In his very limited military vision, conditioned by marked-up maps at Führer headquarters, a division of troops was a division, however under-strength, ill equipped or badly trained. Mussolini’s fatal miscalculation was to believe, in the summer of 1940, that the war was as good as over when it had hardly started. He did not appreciate that Hitler’s former rhetoric of
Lebensraum
in the east would become a concrete plan. On 10 June, the Duce had declared war on Britain and France. In his bombastic speech from the balcony of the Palazzo Venezia in Rome he puffed out his chest and claimed that the ‘young and fertile nations’ would crush the tired democracies. This was hailed by the crowd of loyal Blackshirts, but most Italians were far from happy.