The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred (90 page)

The bombing campaign against Japan may be said to have begun with the Doolittle Raid of April 1942, when a small force of thirteen B-25 bombers from the carrier USS
Hornet
successfully raided the Japanese capital. However, it was not until the final phase of the war that the Americans were able to overcome the obstacle of distance
that had forced them to rely on relatively insecure Chinese airbases.
*
Armed with the new B-29 Super-Fortress, and securely based on the Marianas, General Curtis LeMay’s XX Bomber Command waged a merciless war of destruction against Japanese cities, exploiting the extreme flammability of their wood, bamboo and paper houses. A survivor of the disastrous Regensburg raid of August 1943, LeMay lost no time in abandoning the strategy of high-altitude daylight precision bombing in favour of low-altitude nocturnal carpet bombing. The B-29s flew in vast aerial armad as numbering three hundred or more, leaving death and devastation in their wake. On March 9, 1945, Tokyo suffered the first of a succession of raids that claimed the lives of between 80,000 and 100,000 people, ‘scorched and boiled and baked to death’ asLeMay frankly put it. Within five months, roughly two-fifths of the built-up areas of nearly every major city had been laid waste, killing nearly a quarter of a million people, injuring more than 300,000 and turning eight million into refugees. Besides Tokyo, sixty-three cities were incinerated. Japan’s economy was almost entirely crippled, with steel production down to 100,000 tons a month and aviation fuel having to be manufactured from pine trees. All this was achieved with significantly less effort than was expended against Germany. In all, the Americans dropped under 200,000 tons of high explosives and incendiaries on Japan, less than 12 per cent of what fell on Germany and occupied North-West Europe. Because of the feebleness of Japanese air defences, casualties were also lower than in Europe.

Why, then, was it necessary to go further – to drop two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? LeMay could quite easily have hit both these targets with conventional bombs. As if to make that point, Tokyo was scourged with incendiaries one last time on August 14 by a horde of more than a thousand aircraft; it was the following
day that the Emperor’s decision to capitulate was broadcast, not the day after Hiroshima. In all probability, it was the Soviet decision to dash Japanese hopes of mediation and to attack Japan that convinced all but the most incorrigible diehards that the war was over. Defeat in the Pacific mattered less to the Japanese generals than the collapse of their much longer-held position in Manchuria and Korea. Indeed, it was the Soviet landing on Shikotan, not far from Japan’s main northern island of Hokkaido, that forced the military finally to sign the instrument of surrender. Historians have sometimes interpreted Harry Truman’s decision to use the Bomb against Japan as a kind of warning shot intended to intimidate the Soviet Union; an explosive overture to the Cold War. Others have argued that, having seen $2 billion spent on the Manhattan Project, Truman felt compelled to get a large bang for so many bucks. Yet if one leaves aside the technology that distinguished the bombs dropped on August 6 and August 9 – and the radiation they left in their wakes – the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was simply the culmination of five years of Allied strategic bombing. Roughly as many people were killed immediately when the bomb nicknamed ‘Little Boy’ exploded 1,189 feet above central Hiroshima on the morning of August 6 as had been killed in Dresden six months before, though by the end of 1945 the Japanese death toll had risen much higher, to as many as 140,000 in Hiroshima and 70,000 in Nagasaki.

Part of the appeal of the atomic bomb was that it allowed one plane (or, to be precise, seven, since the Enola Gay did not fly alone) to achieve what had previously required hundreds. In more than 30,000 sorties between June 1944 and August 1945, only seventy-four B-29s were lost, a casualty rate of 0.24 per cent. That sounds small enough, and it was certainly better than the losses suffered by the Americans in Europe. Yet seventy-four B-29stranslatesinto nearly nine hundred highly trained men. There was therefore an inexorable logic that led from area bombing with a lethal rain of high explosives to the obliteration of an entire city by a single super-bomb. Since 1940 the Allies had been applying the principle of maximum enemy casualties for minimum Allied casualties. The creation of the atomic bomb certainly required a revolution in physics. But it did not require a revolution in the political economy of total war. Rather, it was the
logical culmination of the Allied way of war. When Truman spoke of ‘a new era in the history of civilization’ he was looking to the future and the harnessing of nuclear power for peaceful purposes; Hiroshima, by contrast, was just another devastated city; just another step away from civilization.

As in the realm of intelligence, the Anglo-American victory in the scientific race to design and build an atomic bomb revealed the limitations of the totalitarian regimes. The Nazis’ anti-Semitism had more than decimated German science, driving many of the best brains in the pre-1933 German academic profession out of their laboratories and into exile. (Stalin too had his ways of interfering with scientific research, though he was more pragmatic than Hitler when he belatedly grasped just how high the stakes were.) The Bomb was poetic justice of a sort, in the sense that it was in substantial measure the achievement of Jewish scientists, among them a number of refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe. They were not to know that it would be used on the Germans’ allies rather than the Germans themselves.

So the atomic bomb was a triumph for the West’s openness to scientific inquiry and freedom from anti-Semitism. Yet it also represented the extent to which the Western Allies had thrown moral restraint aside in order to bring the war to an end. Certainly, it was not a sense of their own moral superiority that led Roosevelt and Churchill to keep the Bomb secret from Stalin. Both men understood all too well the power the new weapon would confer on the West once their alliance with the Soviet Union had served its purpose. Indeed, the remarkable thing is that mutual suspicion between the two Anglophone powers did not do more damage to their alliance during the war, a testament to the confidence Roosevelt had in Churchill. Stalin, too, immediately grasped that it would represent almost as serious a setback for the Soviet Union if the Western powers were able to monopolize the atomic bomb as it would have been if Nazi Germany had been first to split the atom. As early as June 1942 the NKVD instructed its agents in New York and London to ‘take whatever measures you think fit to obtain information on the theoretical and practical aspects of the atomic bomb projects, on the design of the atomic bomb, nuclear fuel components, and on the trigger mechanism’. In short order, Soviet agents succeeded in penetrating
the Manhattan Project. By the spring of 1945 there were three Soviet agents inside the Los Alamos complex in New Mexico where the first bomb was built, each unaware that the others were spies. (It only heightened the subsequent security panic that the scientist in charge of the Manhattan Project, J. Robert Oppenheimer, was a fellow-travelling Communist, if not actually a Party member.) In February 1943 Stalin authorized work to begin on a Soviet bomb. But in the end the first Soviet bomb was a carbon copy of the US bomb tested at Alamogordo on July 16, 1945; an achievement of espionage as much as of science. It came as no surprise to Stalin when Truman obliquely forewarned him of the attacks on Japan at the Potsdam Conference (July 17–August 2, 1945). Stalin knew already what the Americans had achieved; knew, too, that it was an achievement that the Soviet Union must match. Stalin disingenuously told the American ambassador in Moscow that the Bomb ‘would mean the end of war and aggressors’. Harriman concurred that ‘it could have great importance for peaceful purposes’; to which, with a stony face, Stalin replied: ‘Unquestionably.’

On January 27, 1945 – three and a half months after an abortive revolt by the Jewish
Sonderkommandos
at Crematoriums II and VI – the first Soviet troops reached the gates of Auschwitz. Among the 7,000 or so prisoners who had been not been sent to Wodzisław or Blechhammer for transportation to camps in Germany was Primo Levi, the Italian chemist whose scientific skills had saved him from the gas chambers. In unforgettable prose, he described the moment:

They did not greet us, nor did they smile; they seemed oppressed not only by compassion but by a confused restraint, which sealed their lips and bound their eyes to the funereal scene. It was that shame we knew so well: the shame the Germans did not know; the feeling of guilt that such a crime should exist… So for us even the hour of liberty rang out grave and muffled… so that we should have liked to wash our consciences and our memories clean from the foulness that lay upon them. We felt that now nothing could ever happen
good and pure enough to rub out the past, and that the scars of the outrage would remain with us forever. No one has ever been able to grasp better than us the incurable nature of the offence.

Similar scenes were repeated at concentration camps all over the disintegrating Nazi empire: skeletal survivors staggering amid the corpses; incredulous soldiers like beings from another planet.

Yet there was something deeply paradoxical about the idea of ‘liberation’ by Stalin’s Soviet Union.
*
For the regime that had produced the Gulag had no serious interest in liberation in any meaningful sense. Returning to what little remained of Dresden, Victor Klemperer was too well attuned to the language of totalitarianism not to detect the uncanny resemblances between the liberators and those from whom he had just been liberated. He could not help but notice that the ‘monotonous’ radio broadcasts and ‘politicized’ newssheets produced by the Soviet occupying authorities had much in common with those of the previous regime. ‘I must slowly begin to pay systematic attention’, he wrote in hisdiary, ‘to the language of the
fourth Reich
. It sometimes seems to me, that it is less different from that of the
third
than, say, the Saxon [dialect] of Dresden from that of Leipzig. When, for example, Marshal Stalin is the greatest living man, the most brilliant strategist etc…. I want to study our news sheet… very carefully with respect to LQI [
lingua quartii imperii
– Language of the Fourth Reich].’ He soon began to spot numerous ‘analogies between Nazistic and Bolshevistic language’:

The LTI [
lingua tertii imperii
– Language of the Third Reich] lives on… In Stalin’s speeches, extracts of which regularly appear, Hitler and Ribbentrop are cannibals and monsters. In the articles about Stalin, the supreme commander of the Soviet Union is the most brilliant general of all times and the most brilliant of all men living… It is impossible to say just how often I hear ‘orientation’, ‘action’, ‘militant’. All that’s missing now is ‘fanatical’… the same, the very same words – LTI = LQI!!! ‘align’, ‘militant’, ‘true democracy’ etc. etc.

Even on the streets there were similarities: ‘On Albertplatz the picture of “Marshal Stalin”… could just as well be Hermann Goering.’ As far as Klemperer could see, Communist rule – and he saw at once that this would be the upshot of Soviet-style ‘true democracy’ – would merely ‘replace the old lack of freedom with a new one’. These were indeed ‘merciless victors… And because I have observed all this in the Third Reich, and because I must now, whether I like it or not, regard everything with respect to its effect on the Jews, I do not feel very happy about it.’ ‘I see a new Hitlerism coming,’ he wrote as early as September 1945. ‘I do not feel at all safe.’ Given the anti-Semitism that characterized post-war Stalinism, this was prescient.

Nothing illustrated more starkly what was really happening in the summer of 1945 than the fact that, within weeks of taking possession of the Buchenwald concentration camp, the Soviets were using it to incarcerate political prisoners of their own. To be sure, the Holocaust was over; Stalin’s suspicion of the Soviet and East European Jews – denounced in the official press as ‘cosmopolitans’ or ‘passportless vagabonds’ – never portended a return to the gas chambers. At any event, Stalin died before the alleged ‘Doctors’ Plot’ could be worked up into a full-scale wave of persecution. In other ways, however, all that had changed were the criteria whereby certain groups and individuals were deprived of their freedom. The concentration camps of Eastern Europe were merely under new management.

At Potsdam and in the subsequent Nuremberg trials, the victors struck splendidly sanctimonious attitudes. ‘Stern justice’, they promised, would be ‘meted out to all war criminals, including those who have visited cruelties upon our prisoners’. Despite the absence of an appropriate body of international law, the Americans insisted on full criminal prosecutions of a substantial number of Germans and Japanese who had occupied positions of power before and during the war. ‘The wrongs we seek to condemn and punish,’ declared the US Attorney-General Robert H. Jackson, ‘have been so calculated, so malignant and devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored.’ The crux of the case at Nuremberg, as agreed by the victorious powers in London in the summer of 1945, was that the leaders of Germany and Japan had premeditated and unleashed ‘aggressive war’ and ‘set in motion evils which [had left] no home in the world
untouched’. They were accused, firstly, of the ‘planning, preparation, initiation, or waging of a war of aggression, or war in violation of international treaties, agreements and assurances, or participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the foregoing’. Yet whose side had the Soviet Union been on in 1939? By the same token, the charges against the Japanese leaders who stood trial in Tokyo included ‘the wholesale destruction of human lives, not alone on the field of battle… but in the homes, hospitals, and orphanages, in factories and fields’. But what else had the Allies perpetrated in Germany and Japan in the last months of the war?

Death came not only from the sky. As the Soviets advanced inexorably, around five million Germans fled their homes, trudging westwards with carts piled high with their possessions. German ports along the Baltic were jammed with refugees. By January 1945 the scenes in Gdynia – renamed Goten hafen by the Nazis – were next to apocalyptic. Tens of thousands of people thronged the waterfront, desperate to secure evacuation by sea to Western Germany. This was their only hope of escaping from the marauding Red Army, whose artillery could be heard drawing ever nearer. The 4,400 refugees who managed to scramble aboard the former pleasure cruiser
Wilhelm Gustloff
must have thought themselves fortunate. In all, including soldiers, marines, wounded and crew, there were more than 6,000 people crowded on board when she set off on January 30 – four times the number she was designed to carry. With only a minimal escort (a single aged torpedo boat), the captain was relying on the blizzard conditions for protection. As they ploughed westwards through heavy seas, Hitler’s last broadcast was relayed to the exhausted passengers over the public address system. Reassured by their progress and the warmth emanating from the ship’s straining engines, many of them settled down to sleep in the crowded cabins. Shortly before 8 p.m. the ship was sighted by the Soviet submarine S-13, commanded by Captain Aleksandr Marinesko. Under the cloud of a disciplinary investigation after going AWOL on a drinking binge in Finland, Marinesko waseager to make amends. The
Wilhelm Gustloff
seemed a heaven sent opportunity. ‘I was sure,’ Marinesko later said, ‘that it was packed with men who had trampled on Mother Russia and were now fleeing for their lives.’ He ordered all four torpedoes to be fired at it. Each of
the three that hit the ship bore a painted inscription: ‘For Leningrad’, ‘For the Motherland’ and ‘For the Soviet People’. The first torpedo struck its target at 9.16 precisely. Only 964 of those on board were picked up by German rescuers; at least some of them later died of exposure. It was one of the worst shipping disasters in history, with a death toll five timesthat of the
Titanic
.