World War II

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2

Friction Between the United States and Japan

Meanwhile, American relations with Japan continued to deteriorate. In September 1940 Japan coerced Vichy France into giving up northern Indochina. The United States retaliated by prohibiting the exportation of steel, scrap iron, and aviation fuel to Japan. In April 1941, the Japanese signed a neutrality treaty with the USSR as insurance against an attack from that direction if they were to come into conflict with Britain or the United States while taking a bigger bite out of South East Asia. When Germany invaded the USSR in June, Japanese leaders considered breaking the treaty and joining in from the east, but, making one of the most fateful decisions of the war, they chose instead to intensify their push to the south-east. On July 23 Japan occupied southern Indochina. Two days later, the United States and Britain froze Japanese assets. The effect was to prevent Japan from purchasing oil and strategic metals, which would, in time, cripple its army and make its navy and air force completely useless. Since Japan estimated that it had only six months' worth of oil reserves, this hastened its decision to secure the resources of South East Asia before it was too late.

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3

The German Invasion of the USSR

The war's most massive encounter began on the morning of June 22, 1941, when slightly more than 3 million Axis troops invaded the USSR. Although German preparations had been visible for months and had been talked about openly among the diplomats in Moscow, the Soviet forces were taken by surprise. Stalin, his confidence in the country's military capability shaken by the Finnish war, had refused to allow any counteractivity for fear of provoking the Germans. Moreover, the Soviet military leadership had concluded that blitzkrieg, as it had been practised in Poland and France, would not be possible on the scale of a Soviet-German war; both sides would therefore confine themselves for the first several weeks at least to sparring along the frontier. The Soviet army had 4.5 million troops on the western border and outnumbered the Germans by two to one in tanks and by two or three to one in aircraft. Many of its tanks and aircraft were older types, but some of the tanks, particularly the later famous T-34s, were far superior to any the Germans had. Large numbers of the aircraft were destroyed on the ground in the first day, however, and the Soviet tanks, like those of the French, were scattered among the infantry, where they could not be effective against the German panzer groups. The infantry was first ordered to counter-attack, which was impossible, and then forbidden to retreat, which ensured their wholesale destruction or capture.

For the invasion, the Germans had set up three army groups, designated as North, Centre, and South, and aimed towards Leningrad (now St Petersburg), Moscow, and Kiev. Hitler and his generals had agreed that their main strategic problem was to lock the Red Army in battle and defeat it before it could escape into the depths of the country. They disagreed on how that could best be accomplished. Most of the generals believed that the Soviet regime would sacrifice everything to defend Moscow: the capital, the hub of the road and railway networks, and the country's main industrial centre. To Hitler, the land and resources of the Ukraine and the oil of the Caucasus were more important, and he wanted to seize Leningrad as well. The result had been a compromise—the three thrusts, with the one by Army Group Centre towards Moscow the strongest—that temporarily satisfied Hitler as well as the generals. War games had indicated a victory in about ten weeks, which was significant because the Russian summer, the ideal time for fighting in the USSR, was short, and the Balkans operations had caused a three-week delay at the outset.

Ten weeks seemed ample time. Churchill offered the USSR an alliance, and Roosevelt promised Lend-Lease aid, but after the first few days, their staffs believed everything would be over in a month or so. By the end of the first week in July, Army Group Centre had taken 290,000 prisoners in encirclements at Białystok and Minsk. On August 5, having crossed the Dnepr River, the last natural barrier west of Moscow, the army group wiped out a pocket near Smolensk and counted another 300,000 prisoners. On reaching Smolensk, it had covered more than two thirds of the distance to Moscow.

The Russians were doing exactly what the German generals had wanted, sacrificing enormous numbers of troops and weapons to defend Moscow. Hitler, however, was not satisfied, and over the generals' protests, he ordered Army Group Centre to divert the bulk of its armour to the north and south to help the other two army groups, thereby stopping the advance towards Moscow. On September 8 Army Group North cut Leningrad's land connections and, together with the Finnish army on the north, isolated the city, beginning the Siege of Leningrad. On September 16 Army Group South closed a gigantic encirclement east of Kiev that brought in 665,000 prisoners. Hitler then decided to resume the advance towards Moscow and ordered that the armour be returned to Army Group Centre.

After a standstill of six weeks, Army Group Centre resumed action on October 2. Within two weeks, it completed three large encirclements and took 663,000 prisoners. Then the autumn rains set in, turning the unpaved Russian roads to mud and stopping the advance for the better part of a month.

In mid-November, the weather turned cold and the ground froze. Hitler and the commander of Army Group Centre, Field Marshal Fedor von Bock, faced the choice of having the armies dig in where they were or sending them ahead, possibly to be overtaken by the winter. Wanting to finish the 1941 campaign with some sort of a victory at Moscow, they chose to move ahead.

In the second half of November Bock aimed two armoured spearheads at Moscow. Just after the turn of the month, one of those, bearing in on the city from the north-west, was less than 32 km (20 mi) away. The other, coming from the south, had about 65 km (40 mi) still to go. The panzer divisions had often covered such distances in less than a day, but the temperature was falling, snow was drifting on the roads, and neither the men nor the machines were equipped for extreme cold. On December 5 the generals commanding the spearhead armies reported that they were stopped: the tanks and trucks were freezing up, and the troops were losing their will to fight.

Stalin, who had stayed in Moscow, and his commander at the front, General Georgy Zhukov, had held back their reserves. Many of them were recent recruits, but some were hardened veterans from Siberia, where the Red Army had defeated the Japanese in clashes on the Dongbei border in 1939. All were dressed for winter. On December 6 they counter-attacked, and within a few days, the German spearheads were rolling back and abandoning large numbers of vehicles and weapons, rendered useless by the cold.

On Stalin's orders, the Moscow counter-attack was quickly converted into a counter-offensive on the entire front. The Germans had not built any defence lines to the rear and could not dig in because the ground was frozen hard as concrete. Some of the generals recommended retreating to Poland, but on December 18, Hitler ordered the troops to stand fast wherever they were. Thereafter, the Russians chopped great chunks out of the German front, but enough of it survived the winter to maintain the Siege of Leningrad, continue the threat to Moscow, and keep the western Ukraine in German hands.

The German check before Moscow was a major setback for Hitler's plans. For the first time since 1939 blitzkrieg had failed to achieve the total destruction of an enemy. One of Hitler's fixed obsessions was with the need to obtain Lebensraum in Russia to allow a supposedly overpopulated Germany a huge area of western Russian land to the west of the Ural Mountains for German resettlement. He envisaged that the bulk of the Russian population would be pushed to the other side of the Urals. He had counted on the supposed rottenness of the Bolshevik regime, which he had calculated would collapse entirely after the German invasion, and on the inadequacies of the Red Army after the purges, as witnessed by its miserable performance against Finland in 1939. He had justified the invasion in 1941 on the grounds of the “window of opportunity” which presented itself before reforms of the Red Army in which Stalin was then engaged had time to become effective, and on the need to seize Russian food and oil and other raw materials quickly. He also believed that, deprived of the Soviet Union as a potential ally, the British would soon make peace. He nearly succeeded, but for the superhuman efforts of the Soviet people, Stalin's stoicism (after an initial breakdown), and his appeal to Russian sentiment by emphasizing “The Great Patriotic War”. Of even more importance to Russia's survival was Stalin's decision in the late 1930s to shift Russia's military and industrial plants to the Urals and Siberia, a process hastened by the events of 1941. Hitler's hope of an ample supply of food and raw materials from a conquered Russia was not realized: Russian railways were destroyed by the retreating Russians, as were crops, cattle, and mines, and most of Russia's roads were primitive. American Lend-Lease aid to Russia carried in British convoys (which suffered heavy losses) to north Russian ports contained valuable radar, radio, and other sophisticated equipment which Russia lacked. Hitler's intelligence sources on Russia served him badly; while, during the autumn and winter of 1941, when the Russian war was supposed to have been concluded, the Russian weather was worse than it had been for many previous years, another factor contributing to the setback. Of course, the series of German victories in the West made him overconfident in engaging in a conflict in which a quick victory was essential.

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4

The Beginning of the War in the Pacific

The seeming imminence of a Soviet defeat in the summer and autumn of 1941 had created dilemmas for Japan and the United States. The Japanese thought they then had the best opportunity to seize the petroleum and other resources of South East Asia and the adjacent islands; on the other hand, they knew they could not win the war with the United States that would probably ensue. The US government wanted to stop Japanese expansion, but doubted whether the American people would be willing to go to war to do so. Moreover, the United States did not want to get embroiled in a war with Japan while it faced the ghastly possibility of being alone in the world with a triumphant Germany. After the oil embargo, the Japanese, also under pressure of time, resolved to move in South East Asia and the nearby islands.

Until December 1941 the Japanese leadership pursued two courses: they tried to get the oil embargo lifted on terms that would still let them take the territory they wanted, and they prepared for war. The United States demanded that Japan withdraw from China and Indochina, but would very likely have settled for a token withdrawal and a promise not to take more territory. After he became Japan's premier in mid-October, General Hideki Tojo set November 29 as the last day on which Japan would accept a settlement without war. Tojo's deadline, which was kept secret, meant that war was practically certain.

The Japanese army and navy had, in fact, devised a war plan in which they had great confidence. They proposed to make fast sweeps into Burma, Malaya, the East Indies, and the Philippines and, at the same time, set up a defensive perimeter in the central and south-western Pacific. They expected the United States to declare war but not to be willing to fight long or hard enough to win. Their greatest concern was the US Pacific Fleet, based at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. If it reacted quickly, it could upset their very tight timetable. Thus, the key to the entire Japanese strategy was the plan devised by Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, commander of the combined Japanese fleet, to launch a surprise attack by carrier-borne planes on Pearl Harbor and destroy the Pacific Fleet. The Japanese believed that the US response would not be significant, a calculation based on American passivity over Japanese aggression in China. Yamamoto had doubts about this—he knew the US and its strength from personal experience—but allowed his fellow officers to persuade him.

A few minutes before 8 a.m. on December 7, 1941, Japanese carrier-based aircraft struck Pearl Harbor. In a raid lasting less than two hours, they sank four battleships and damaged four more. (However, they missed three US aircraft carriers, at sea at the time.) The US authorities had broken the Japanese diplomatic code and knew an attack was imminent. A warning had been sent from Washington, but, owing to delays in transmission, it arrived after the raid had begun. A Japanese communiqué severing diplomatic ties with the United States, sent to the Japanese Embassy in Washington and timed to arrive shortly before the attack, was accidentally held up by the embassy staff, leaving the impression that Japan had attacked completely without warning. In one stroke, the Japanese navy scored a brilliant success—and assured the Axis defeat in World War II. The Japanese attack brought the United States into the war on December 8—and brought it in determined to fight to the finish. Germany and Italy declared war on the United States on December 11.

In the vast area of land and ocean they had marked for conquest, the Japanese seemed to be everywhere at once. Before the end of December, they took British Hong Kong and the Gilbert Islands (now Kiribati) and Guam and Wake Island (US possessions), and they had invaded British Burma, Malaya, Borneo, and the American-held Philippines. Britain, her naval resources stretched by the war in Europe, managed to send a naval squadron to Singapore in early December: it was caught by Japanese planes and destroyed. British Singapore, long regarded as one of the world's strongest fortresses, fell to them in February 1942 in one of the greatest humiliations in British military history, with the British garrison surrendering to a much smaller Japanese force. In March they occupied the Netherlands Indies and landed on New Guinea. The American and Philippine forces surrendered at Bataan on April 9, and resistance in the Philippines ended with the surrender of Corregidor on May 6.

According to the Japanese plan, it would be time for them to take a defensive stance when they had captured northern New Guinea (an Australian possession), the Bismarck Archipelago, the Gilberts, and Wake Island, which they did by mid-March. However, they had done so well that they decided to expand their defensive perimeter north into the Aleutian Islands, east to Midway Island, and south through the Solomon Islands and southern New Guinea. Their first move was by sea, to take Port Moresby on the south-eastern tip of New Guinea. The Americans, using their ability to read the Japanese code, had a naval task force on the scene. In the ensuing Battle of the Coral Sea (May 7-8), fought entirely by aircraft carriers, the Japanese were forced to abandon their designs on Port Moresby.

A powerful Japanese force, nine battleships and four carriers under Admiral Yamamoto, steamed towards Midway in the first week of June. Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, who had taken command of the Pacific Fleet after Pearl Harbor, could only muster three carriers and seven heavy cruisers, but he was reading the Japanese radio messages. Yamamoto had planned another surprise: this time, however, it was he who was surprised. In the Battle of Midway, on the morning of June 4, US dive-bombers destroyed three of the Japanese carriers in one five-minute strike. The fourth went down later in the day, after its planes had battered the US carrier Yorktown, which sank two days later.

Yamamoto ordered a general retreat on June 5. On June 6 to 7, a secondary Japanese force took Kiska and Attu in the Aleutians, but those were no recompense for the defeat at Midway, from which the Japanese navy would never recover. Their battleships were intact, but the Coral Sea and Midway had shown carriers to be the true capital ships of the war, and four of those were gone. Furthermore, the US could produce them by the dozen, whereas the Japanese lacked the resources to build more.

C

The Third Phase: Turn of the Tide

In late December 1941 Roosevelt and Churchill and their chief advisers met in Washington. They reaffirmed the strategy of defeating Germany first, and because it appeared that the British would have all they could do to fight in Europe, the war against Japan became almost solely a US responsibility. They also created the Combined Chiefs of Staff (CCS), a top-level British-American military committee seated in Washington, to develop and execute a common strategy. On January 1, 1942, the United States, Great Britain, the USSR, and 23 other countries signed the United Nations Declaration in which they pledged not to make a separate peace. The United Nations (UN) became the official name for the anti-Axis coalition, but the term used more often was the Allies, taken over from World War I.

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1

Development of Allied Strategy

As a practical matter, the United States could not take much action in Europe in early 1942. It had no troops there, and it was in the midst of building forces and converting industry at home. In North Africa, the British appeared to be more than holding their own. They had relieved Tobruk on December 10, 1941, and taken Banghāzī in Libya two weeks later. Rommel counter-attacked in late January 1942 and drove them back 300 km (185 mi) to Al-Gazala and Bir Hacheim, but there, well forward of Tobruk and the Egyptian border, a lull set in.

The big question in the war was whether the USSR could survive a second German summer offensive, and the Russians were urging the United States and Britain to relieve the pressure on them by starting an offensive in the west. General George C. Marshall, the US Army chief of staff, believed the best way to help the Russians and bring an early end to the war was to stage a build-up in England and attack across the English Channel into north-western Europe. He wanted to act in the spring of 1943, or even in 1942 if the USSR appeared about to collapse. The British did not want involvement elsewhere until North Africa was settled and did not believe a force strong enough for a cross-channel attack could be assembled in England by 1943. The dispute between the British and American chiefs of staff over the cross-channel invasion versus a Mediterranean strategy reached crisis proportions in 1943. The Americans accused the British of dragging their feet over the invasion of north-western Europe, and of trying to involve American troops in a desperate effort to restore the British Empire in the Mediterranean and North Africa, a region which the American military regarded as peripheral to the war effort. The British believed that the Americans grossly underestimated the difficulties of a premature cross-channel invasion, without adequate preparation and insufficient troops, which might lead to an appalling disaster, like that which had befallen the Allied raid on Dieppe in August 1942, which would put back any prospect of an Allied return to Europe for many years. Even if a relatively weak Allied army did secure a lodgement on the French coast, they might then be faced with a grinding war of attrition along the lines of the Western Front in World War I, with the massive human sacrifices which that struggle had entailed.

Rommel settled the issue. In June he captured Tobruk and drove 380 km (235 mi) into Egypt, to El ’Alamein. After that, the Americans agreed to shelve the cross-channel attack and ready the troops en route to England for an invasion of French North Africa.

Meanwhile, despite the Germany-first strategy, the Americans were moving towards an active pursuit of the war against Japan. The US Navy saw the Pacific as an arena in which it could perform more effectively than in the Atlantic or the Mediterranean. General Douglas MacArthur, who had commanded in the Philippines and been evacuated to Australia by submarine before the surrender, was the country's best-known military figure, and as such too valuable to be left with an inconsequential mission. The Battle of Midway had stopped the Japanese in the central Pacific, but they continued to advance in the south-western Pacific along the Solomons chain and overland on New Guinea. On July 2, 1942, the US Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) directed the naval and ground forces in the south and south-western Pacific to halt the Japanese, drive them out of the Solomons and north-eastern New Guinea, and eliminate the great base the Japanese had established at Rabaul, on New Britain in the Bismarck Archipelago (now in Papua New Guinea).