Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (78 page)

At the liaison conference of 5 November 1941, the army Chief of Staff General Sugiyama had said, of the vast series of offensive operations Japan planned to undertake: it will take fifty days to complete the operations in the Philippines, one hundred days in Malaya and fifty days in the Netherlands East Indies … the entire operations will be completed within five months after the opening of the war … we would be able to carry on a protracted war if we could bring under our control such important military bases as Hong Kong, Manila and Singapore, and important areas in the Netherlands East Indies.’
⁷⁹
It says a good deal about the fundamental unsoundness of the whole Japanese war-plan that these remarkably ambitious targets were all achieved – yet the net result had little bearing on Japan’s capacity to win the war or even to force a stalemate. It was significant that, at the conference, maps of India and Australia, the ultimate targets, were not even displayed; and nothing was done to train technicians to exploit the Sumatran oilfields effectively.

Singapore surrendered on 15 February 1942; the Dutch East Indies on 8 March; the Philippines on 9 April; Corregidor on 6 May; and a week before the Japanese had taken Mandalay in Upper Burma. The net hardware cost of those astounding victories was 100 aircraft, a few destroyers and a mere 25,000 tons of Japan’s precious shipping. But success had been attended by a great deal of luck. The destruction of the
Prince of Wales
and
Repulse
by air-strikes on 10 December 1941, which sank in deep water with nearly all their experienced crews, was a greater naval victory than Pearl Harbor, not least because it demoralized the Singapore-Malaya garrison. The great fortress, whose inadequacies were a monument to inter-war defence economies, delays and wishful thinking, would have survived if General Percival, the British commander, and General Gordon Bennett, who commanded the Australians, had shown more fighting spirit. General Tomoyuki Yamashita, who commanded the Japanese assault force, admitted after the war that his strategy was ‘a bluff, a bluff that worked’. He was as short of water, petrol and ammunition as Percival, who gave them as grounds for capitulation. None of the Japanese guns had more than one hundred rounds left. It
was the Japanese belief that, had the garrison held out another week, their campaign must have failed. Churchill had plainly instructed Field-Marshal Wavell, the area commander, that ‘the whole island must be fought until every single unit and every single strongpoint has been separately destroyed. Finally the city of Singapore must be converted into a citadel and defended to the death.’ But Wavell, himself a melancholic defeatist, did not press these resolutions on the apathetic Percival.
⁸⁰
The main-force surrender in the Philippines was also a pusillanimous act, carried out against the instructions of the commander-in-chief. The narrowness of the Japanese victories indicated that, even at this early stage, they were pressing up against the limits of their physical resources.

The notion of a Nazi-Japanese global strategy disappeared in the early summer. On 18 January 1942 the Germans and the Japanese had signed a military agreement, with longitude
70
degrees defining their respective spheres of operations. There was vague talk of linking up in India.
⁸¹
But Hitler’s forces did not reach Asian territory until the end of July. By that time the Japanese, blocked at the gates of India, had moved off into the opposite direction, operating in the Aleutian Islands on the road to Alaska in early June – the furthest limit of their conquests. They had already suffered two calamitous defeats. On
7
–8 May a Japanese invasion force heading for Port Moresby in New Guinea was engaged at long-range by American carrier planes in the Coral Sea, and so badly damaged that it had to return home – the first major reverse after five months of uninterrupted triumphs. On
3
June another invasion force heading for Midway Island was outwitted and defeated, losing four of its carriers and the flower of the Japanese naval air-force. The fact that it was forced to return to Japanese waters indicated that Japan had effectively lost naval-air control of the Pacific.
⁸²
Six months into the war, Yamamoto felt obliged to reassure his staff: ‘There are still eight carriers in the combined fleet. We should not lose heart. In battle as in chess it is the fool who lets himself into a reckless move out of desperation.’
⁸³
Yet the entire war, and Hitler’s insistence on joining it, were both desperate moves. The year before, Hitler had seemed to control the European chess-board, as Japan controlled that of East Asia. Yet once united in common global predation, they rapidly shrank to the status of two medium-sized powers, flailing desperately against the creeping force of economic and demographic magnitude. The imbalance was really apparent by the end of 1941. On
3
January 1942 Hitler admitted to the Japanese ambassador, General Hiroshi Oshima, that he did not yet know ‘how America could be defeated’.
⁸⁴
That made two of them: the Japanese did not know either. In 1945
General Jodl claimed that, ‘from the start of 1942 on’, Hitler knew ‘victory was no longer attainable’.
⁸⁵
What he did not then grasp, but what 1942 made painfully clear, was that the huge coalition he had ranged against himself and his two allies had a decisive superiority not merely in men and material but in technology. The real significance of the Battle of Midway, for example, was that it was won primarily by the Allied success in code-breaking. In launching war, the Germans and the Japanese had pushed the world over the watershed into a new age, outside their or anyone’s control, full of marvels and unspeakable horrors.

TWELVE
Superpower and Genocide

Early in April 1943 the Americans determined to kill Admiral Yamamoto, master-spirit of the Japanese navy. They felt that the overwhelming moral superiority of their cause gave them the right to do so. Yamamoto, as it happened, had never believed Japan could win without the miraculous intervention of God. He told his chief of staff just before Pearl Harbor: ‘The only question that remains is the blessing of heaven. If we have heaven’s blessing there will be no doubt of success.’ But all war-leaders had become assassination targets. That was why Hitler and Stalin never left their working headquarters. Churchill took the most risks. After the Washington Arcadia Conference in December 1941 he returned by an unescorted Boeing flying-boat, which was nearly shot down, first by the German defences in Brest, then by intercepting British Hurricanes, ‘I had done a rash thing,’ he admitted. The same month the Americans plotted to murder Yamamoto, the Germans destroyed a British flight from Lisbon believing Churchill was aboard: in fact they killed the film-actor Leslie Howard.
¹
The difference was that, on the Allied side, morality was reinforced by technical superiority. The Germans did not know of Churchill’s flights, whereas Yamamoto’s movements were studied in advance by America’s code-breakers.

The Americans had broken Japan’s diplomatic code in 1940. But Kazuki Kamejama, head of Japan’s Cable Section, proclaimed such a feat to be ‘humanly impossible’, and Japan continued to underrate Allied technical capacity in code-breaking.
²
When Yamamoto began his tour of Solomon Island defences on 13 April 1943 his flying schedule was radioed, the communications office claiming ‘The code only went into effect on 1 April and cannot be broken.’ In fact the Americans had done so by dawn the next morning. The shooting down of Yamamoto’s plane was personally approved by Roosevelt. After it was accomplished, a signal was sent to the theatre commander, Admiral Halsey: ‘Pop goes the weasel’. He was chagrined:
‘What’s so good about it? I’d hoped to lead that scoundrel up Pennsylvania Avenue in chains.’
³

The skill with which Britain and America used advanced technology to illuminate global war was one of the principal reasons why the Germans and the Japanese, with all their courage and energy, were fighting an unsynchronized struggle from 1942 on. Like Bronze Age warriors facing an Iron Age power, they appeared increasingly to be survivors from a slightly earlier epoch. The British had been the leading code-breakers for half a century. It was ‘Room 40’ in the Old Admiralty Building in Whitehall which, early in 1917, had decoded a telegram from Arthur Zimmerman, German Foreign Minister, to the Mexican President, proposing a German-assisted Mexican re-conquest of Texas. Brilliantly publicized, this
coup
had helped to bring America into the war.
⁴
British intelligence, which had a continuous history since the sixteenth century, was one aspect of defence not neglected between the wars. The Germans, too, were active in this field, within limits. They intercepted and unscrambled the transatlantic telephone circuit between Britain and America, and sometimes heard Roosevelt and Churchill converse, though the talk was too guarded to yield much. They broke some Russian codes and the US military attachés’ code in Cairo, Rommel making excellent use of the results. But the code was changed in 1942 and thereafter could not be broken.
⁵
Nor could the Germans repeat an early wartime success with British naval codes. From mid-1942 onwards, British-American communications were reasonably secure.

It was a different matter for the Germans. In 1926 their army had adopted the electrical Enigma coding machine, followed by the navy two years later. Both services remained convinced of the indestructible virtues of this encoding system. In fact Polish intelligence had reconstructed the Enigma machine, and in July 1939 they gave one each to Britain and France.
⁶
This became the basis for the most successful intelligence operation of the war, run from Bletchley in Buckinghamshire. ‘Ultra’, as it was called, remained a secret until 1974, and some aspects were concealed even in the 1980s because of their bearing on operations against Soviet codes.
⁷
Many of the Ultra intercepts have not yet been published and it may never be possible to assess its full impact on the course of the war.
⁸
But Ultra played a part as early as 1940 by helping to win the Battle of Britain. More important, the breaking of the German ‘Triton’ code by Bletchley in March 1943 clinched the Battle of the Atlantic, for German U-boats continued to signal frequently, confident in their communications security, and breaking the code allowed the Allies to destroy their supply-ships too. As a result,
victory in the Atlantic came quite quickly in 1943, and this was important, for the U-boat was perhaps Hitler’s most dangerous weapon.
⁹
The Ultra system was also well-adapted to the provision of false intelligence to the Axis, which became a leading feature of the Allied war-effort and was highly successful, for instance, in persuading the Germans that the D-Day Normandy landings in 1944 were a feint.
¹⁰

Knowing how to break codes was only the core of a vast and increasingly complex operation working on the frontiers of electronic technology. It was the success of the British Post Office Research Establishment in building Colossus, the first electronic computer, which produced the acceleration in the analysis process essential to the effective use of code-breaking. From early 1942, the marriage of British and American technology and intelligence led to the early breakthrough in the Pacific war. Midway in June 1942 was an intelligence victory. Thereafter, the Allies knew the positions of all Japanese capital ships nearly all the time. Perhaps even more important, they were able to conduct a spectacularly successful submarine offensive against Japanese supply-ships. This turned the island empire the Japanese had acquired in their first five months of war (10 per cent of the earth’s surface at its greatest extent) into an untenable liability, the graveyard of the Japanese navy and merchant marine and of their best army units: code-breaking alone raised shipping-losses by one-third.
¹¹

But intelligence, however complete, cannot win wars. Enigma gave the British the German order-of-battle as early as the Norway campaign in 1940; but that battle was lost because the resources were not available and in place. Where one side is outclassed in military strength, intelligence can rarely tip the balance back.
¹²
But where overwhelming intelligence superiority is married to quantitative advantages, the combination is devastating. Both the Nazis and the Japanese ran shortage economies. The Japanese had no alternative. Despite prodigious ingenuity, they were able to increase their total production only 2 per cent beyond its 1940 level by the beginning of 1943 (US production rose 36 per cent in the same period).
¹³
The Germans had a much stronger and more comprehensive economy, but Hitler was obsessed by the cost and risk of over-production, and by the need for import-substitutes. As a result, German research was devoted to ersatz materials rather than accelerating mass-production, and the economy was held back. At the end of 1941 Fritz Todt, Hitler’s production chief, protested bitterly at the premature switch of production from the Russian to the Western theatres and the failure to cut back the civil economy. His death in a mysterious air crash on 2 February 1942 may not have been accidental.
¹⁴
For Germany, Jodl claimed, ‘actual rearmament had to be carried out after the war began’. On 1 September 1939 Germany had only 3,906 military and naval aircraft of all types.
Only 10,392 were turned out in 1940, 12,392 in 1941 and 15,497 in 1942. Not until 1943–4, when it was too late, did the war-economy expand to its maximum (despite Allied bombing), producing 24,795 aircraft in 1943 and 40,953 in 1944.
¹⁵
Stalin argued in 1949 that Germany lost the war because ‘Hitler’s generals, raised on the dogma of Clausewitz and Moltke, could not understand that war is won in the factories’. Out of a population of 80 million, he continued, they put 13 million in the armed forces, and ‘history tells us that no single state could maintain such an effort’: the Soviet armed forces were only 11.5 million out of a population of 194 million.
¹⁶
This was a Marxist view of war which greatly exaggerates the power of the generals over Nazi war-production policy. It ignores the real reason why the German economy failed to rise into top gear until the end of 1942, which was Hitler’s obstinate attachment to the military-economic doctrine of the
Blitzkrieg.
In fact many industrial workers, especially women, did not move into the war-factories until Allied bombing destroyed their civilian livelihood.