Winds of War (131 page)

Seven days later, on December 11, we were at war with an America transformed into an aggressive military dictatorship, united with one will under a fanatical enemy of the Reich, converting its entire industry on a crash basis to war, and conscripting a vast fresh army and air force in order to crush us. The Red Army on the Moscow front, stiffened with Anglo-American supplies and fresh, primitive, hard-fighting Siberian divisions, had swung over to the counterattack. Elsewhere Soviet troops were forcing us to retreat from Rostov – the first German retreat since Adolf Hitler had risen to lead us in 1933.

One step from the pinnacle of world empire on December 4, the German people on December 11 found themselves plunged into a total two-front war, fighting for their lives, menaced from the east and from the west by two industrial giants with five times our population and twenty times our territory.

History offers no parallel for this gigantic military bouleversement. The chief cause of it was the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Sir Winston Churchill records frankly that when he got the news of this attack, he shed tears of thankful joy, for he knew then and there that the war was won. He wasted no tears, of course, on the American sailors caught by surprise and slaughtered.

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TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: Here is the passage in Churchill: “
No American will think it wrong of me if I proclaim that to have the United States at our side was to me the greatest joy. I could not foretell the course of events. I do not pretend to have measured accurately the martial might of Japan, but now at this very moment I knew the United States was in the war, up to the neck and in to the death. So we had won after all!
”

No tears are mentioned. As previously noted, General von Roon is not dispassionate in his references to Winston Churchill. – V.H.

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The Japanese Blunder

The Japanese attack was of course quite justified, but it was a hideous strategic mistake.

The fall of French and British power had left the far eastern European colonies almost undefended. Japan was the natural heir of this wealth. She needed it to fight her war against China to a finish. The Europeans had come halfway round the earth a few generations earlier to subjugate East Asia and plunder its resources. But now all that was over. Japan was the only strong presence in East Asia. It was far more moral for this Asiatic people to take over administration of this rich sphere, than for a few drunken white civil servants of defunct European empires to continue their pukka-sahib parasitism. Adolf Hitler had sought only friendly ties with the clever hard-working people of destiny. In the General Staff we assumed that Japan would march to the time best suited to her. We approved of this on every basis of world philosophy.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was tactically an excellent operation, comparable in many ways to Barbarossa. In both cases, a small poor nation caught a big wealthy nation off guard, despite a tense war atmosphere and all manner of advance warnings and indications. In both cases surprise was exploited to destroy on a great scale the enemy’s first-line forces. The Barbarossa surprise depended on the nonaggression treaty, then in force with Soviet Russia, to lull the enemy. The Japanese went us one better by attacking in the middle of peace parleys.

At the time of both attacks, of course, there were loud outcries of “infamy” and “treachery,” as though these terms of private morality had any relevance to historical events. A poor nation seeking to supplant a rich one much use the best means it can find; moreover Thucydides said long ago that men by a natural law always rule where they are strongest. In history what is moral is what works. The will of God, Hegel taught, reveals itself only in historical outcomes. So viewed, Barbarossa and Pearl Harbor were both idealistic thrusts toward a heroic new world order.

The difference was that Barbarossa was strategically impeccable and would have resulted in victory if not for unlucky and unforeseen factors – including this very Japanese attack five and a half months later, which, contrariwise, was such a strategic miscalculation that for once Churchill speaks no more than the truth in calling it suicidal madness.

One violation of a cardinal rule is enough to invalidate a strategic plan. The Japanese surprise attack violated two.

The two iron laws of warfare that Japan disregarded were:

1. Strike for the heart.

2. Know your enemy.

“Strike for the Heart”

The rule “Strike for the heart” is only a corollary of the first principle of warfare, the concentration of Force. This was what Japan’s military leaders overlooked.

From the moment they correctly decided that the war in Europe was their big chance to take East Asia, a hard choice confronted them: should they first move north against the Soviet Union by invading Siberia; or south, to scoop up the weakly held treasures of the European colonies? The move south was the more tempting, of course. But in warfare one must not be misled by mere easy loot or the line of least resistance.

The stakes of the war comprised nothing less than political redistribution of the word’s landmasses. It was a radical global conflict, the first true World War. The lineup was classical: the rich against the poor, gold against iron. Germany was the only first-class power on the ascendant side, the side that was seeking to draw a new world map, and her attack on the Soviet Union was her great bid. Once master of Russia, Germany would have been invincible. It followed that the Japanese should have moved to help Germany crush the Soviet Union. With Germany triumphant, Japan could have taken and held anything in East Asia she wanted. But with Germany beaten, Japan had small hope of keeping even the vastest gains.

Had Japan invaded Siberia in 1941, the German drive to Moscow would have succeeded. The Russian counterattacks in December would not have been mounted. The Bolshevik regime would either have fallen or made a second peace of Brest-Litovsk. For what saved Moscow in December was only Stalin’s desperate denuding of the Siberian front for reserves to throw into the battle, tipping the scales at the last second by a hair.

Moreover, if Napoleon’s maxim holds that the moral is to the physical in warfare as three to one, the mere fact of a Japanese assault on Siberia in the autumn might have brought on a Russian collapse. In mid-October panic gripped the Bolsheviks to the highest levels of government, with whole departments fleeing Moscow in disgraceful tumult, and the frightened dictator issuing shrill orders for a levée en mass to save the city. There is even an unconfirmed story that Stalin himself secretly fled, secretly returned when the panic subsided, and had everybody shot who knew of his disgraceful act. Russian rulers operate inside a Byzantine maze, and there is no way of checking this episode.

In any case, this was surely the psychological moment of World War II, the one-in-a-thousand-years opportunity for the Japanese nation. Its irresolute leaders, poorly trained in military thinking and subject to the strange Oriental character mixture of excessive rashness, caution, and emotion, let the moment slip through their fingers to all eternity. History, like a woman, must be firmly taken when she is ready. Otherwise she scorns the fumbler, never forgives him, and never offers him another chance.

“Know Your Enemy”

The first mistake, then, was to go south instead of north, and to snatch booty instead of striking at the heart. But the Axis might still have won the war, despite this dispersion of effort, had Japan not compounded the blunder with a second one that verged on true insanity.

Granted the southward strategy, the obvious course was to move into the East Indies with maximum speed and force, consolidate rapidly, and prepare to defeat any American countermove. The Americans might not have moved at all. Tremendous opposition existed in the United States to sending American boys to die for the pukka sahibs in Asia. Roosevelt might have just sputtered harsh words, as he had after all of Adolf Hitler’s triumphs. Roosevelt never moved one visible step beyond the range of public opinion. This was the master key to the nature of the enemy. Japan was oblivious to it, because of the distortions of Oriental thinking.

Even if Roosevelt had sent his Navy, defying half his public, against the entrenched Japanese in East Asia, this felt would have fought its showdown battle at the end of a long supply line, in enemy waters, within range of Japan’s land-based air force. It would have been another Battle of Tsushima Strait, with air power added. This humiliating slaughter in an unpopular cause might have brought on the impeachment of the none too popular Machiavellian in the White House.

But even this was not the worst aspect of the Japanese blunder.

America had the largest and most advanced plant on earth. This mercenary nation, devoted to the almighty dollar and blessed with wonderful mineral resources stolen from the Indians, had reared an immense plant capacity for making toys and trifles. But it was a capacity readily convertible to munitions manufacture on the most fantastic imaginable scale. The whole hope of Axis victory in World War II lay in keeping America divided and soft until the time came to deal with her as an isolated unit without allies.

This prospect was in sight. Half of America would have rejoiced at a German victory over the Soviet Union. The Lend-Lease program was bogged down in red tape and inertia the day before the Pearl Harbor attack, reflecting the discord and confusion in the people.

For this, great credit goes to Adolf Hitler. He was a narrow-minded man, appallingly ignorant of the United States. But his almost female intuition warned him that he must give his blood enemy, Roosevelt, no chance to unite the Americans against him. That is why the Führer swallowed all the President’s scurrilous public abuse and compelled the U-boat arm to endure appalling provocation.

This wise strategy of the Führer was blown to smithereens by Pearl Harbor. Overnight a hundred thirty million quarrelsome, uncertain, divided Americans became one angry mass thirsting for battle. Roosevelt rammed through Congress gigantic war plans and expenditures which a few days earlier would have been utterly inconceivable. The Congress, which in August had extended a mild draft law by a single vote after weeks of debate, now unanimously passed fierce declarations of war, and all Roosevelt’s long-plotted stupendous war program, in a matter of hours.

This was the chief result of Pearl Harbor, for the fleet was soon repaired and expanded. In one week Germany passed from the strategic offensive, with world empire in her grasp, to the strategic defensive, with no long-range prospect but to be crushed unless our enemies did something just as stupid and self-destructive.

Nonexistent “Axis”

If one asks, “How did Germany permit such a catastrophe to occur?” the answer is that we were not consulted. We found out that Pearl Harbor was the target when the Americans did – when the torpedoes and bombs exploded.

The “Axis” of Germany, Japan, and Italy never existed as a military reality. It was a ferocious-looking rubber balloon blown up by propaganda. Its purpose was bluff. The three nations went their own ways throughout the war, and usually did not even inform their partners in advance about attacks, invasions, and strategic decision.

Thus, when Hitler attacked Poland, Mussolini suddenly declined to fight and did not jump in until France was toppling. The Italian dictator invaded Greece without notifying Hitler. Hitler did not inform Il Duce of the attack on Russia until just before the event. But for this he had good reason. Our intelligence had advised us that anything Mussolini knew went straight to the British via the Italian royal family.

Not once did real staff talks take place among the “Axis” armed forces. England and America were having such conference a year before Pearl Harbor! They followed a combined strategy throughout in close cooperation with the Bolsheviks. Now they can reflect at leisure on the wisdom of helping Stalin destroy us, and loosing the Slav flood to the Elbe. But Allied operations were a model of combined strategy, while “Axis” strategy was a nullity. It was every man for himself, and unhappy Germany was tied to second-rate partners who made rash wild plunges that ruined her.

Yamamoto’s Role

Why did Japan take this aberrant, foredoomed course?

She had burst into modern history with the sneak attack on the Russian navy at Port Arthur in 1904, and perhaps was obsessed with this way for yellow men to beat white men. The Japanese Naval Staff favored the right move: a seizure of the Indies, and a showdown with the United States Navy – if one should occur – in Japanese waters. But Pearl Harbor was conceived by one Admiral Yamamoto, the commander-in-chief of the fleet, who forced it on his navy and government by threats to resign. Yamamoto opposed the war with the United States entirely, on the grounds that against an enemy with an industrial superiority of seven to one, the attempt was hopeless. But he insisted that if he had to fight, he wanted to knock out the American fleet at the outset. To the broader effects of the attack, he was blind. The Naval Staff considered the attack too risky a gamble, but Yamamoto prevailed. Tactically, of course, he was vindicated. As long as men read and write, “Pearl Harbor” will be a synonym for successful surprise attack. It is as much a part of world language as “Waterloo.”

How, indeed, could the Japanese fleet assemble, steam across the Pacific to within two hundred miles of Hawaii, elude all United States intelligence efforts and all its sea and air patrols, and catch its Army and Navy by surprise? This mystery is doubled and tripled by the postwar revelation that the United States had broken Japan’s codes and was reading her secret diplomatic cables! The record of the Pearl Harbor investigation by the American Congress runs to millions of words. Still the mystery remains.