Nigel Cawthorne

REAPING THE
WHIRLWIND

THE GERMAN AND JAPANESE EXPERIENCE OF WORLD WAR II

Nigel Cawthorne

Introduction

PART 1: THE WAR IN THE WEST

1 Achtung!: The War in Europe Begins

2 The Battle of the Atlantic: Fighting Above and Below the Waves

3 Holding the Line: Attrition on Two Fronts

4 Reaping the Whirlwind: Fortress Europe Under Attack

5 The Last Offensive: Counterattack in the Ardennes

6 Götterdämmerung: The Devastation of the Homeland

PART 2: VOICES OF THE JAPANESE

7 Tora! Tora! Tora!: Attack in the Pacific

8 Bushido: Putting the Martial Code to the Test

9 Retreat to Yasukuni: Defeat on the Islands

10 Kamikaze: The Last Desperate Defence

11 Enduring the Unendurable: The Unimaginable End

Endnotes

Bibliography

There is no moral relativism concerning World War II. By any standards, the German ‘
Führer
’ Adolf Hitler was a psychopathic dictator bent on building a European empire by intimidating, imprisoning, murdering and waging unprovoked war on anyone who opposed him. In the end, he was happy to see the destruction of the German nation, which he felt had let him down, and he urged others to go on sacrificing their lives, even when he had taken his own.

In the East, General Hideki Tojo and his militarist government pretended that they were liberating the yellow man in Asia by kicking the white man out. However, Japan’s incursion into Manchuria and China was marked by atrocities. The Japanese Imperial Army was scarcely less brutal in the other territories it conquered – murdering, raping and enslaving. Allied prisoners of war were brutalized, maltreated and worked to death, and many more native people suffered the same fate. And, again, the Japanese began the war in the East with a series of unprovoked attacks.

Of course it is possible to criticize the excesses of the British, American, Free French and Allied forces, with the benefit of hindsight. But the Allied nations were forced into war and fought back against a ferocious onslaught with any means to hand. The price of losing was too high to bear. Even the Soviet Union under the brutal dictatorship of Joseph Stalin – though no haven of liberty – was forced into war by an unprovoked and unannounced attack. Of all the Allied nations, it sustained the greatest losses, with an estimated eighteen million dead – including seven million civilians. When Hitler sent his armies into the Soviet Union, he ordered them to use unprecedented savagery against those who lived there.

Many of the men in the front line on both sides were just ordinary blokes. They had been promised that theirs was the world’s finest fighting force – only to find themselves pitted against an enemy who was equally highly motivated and often much better equipped and supplied. Some quickly realized that they had been tricked into war by a cynical leadership. But whether they were disillusioned or true believers, most of them found that they had to make the best of a bad situation. German troops, unable to criticize impossible orders, were thrown into unwinnable battles, while Japanese troops were abandoned without arms, ammunition or supplies on Pacific islands or in the jungles of Burma.

Women and children also suffered, mainly from bombing. They lost their menfolk and their homes, and millions died – whether they believed in the cause or not – though however grim their fate, it pales in comparison with the genocide carried out deliberately by both Germany and Japan. Nevertheless, one person’s suffering is not mitigated by the worse torments of another.

The line ‘For they sow the wind, and reap the whirlwind’ appears in the Old Testament book of the minor prophet Hosea. It warns against the worship of graven images. However, the line was famously appropriated by Sir Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris, commander in chief of the Royal Air Force’s Bomber Command. In 1942, at the start of the bombing campaign that he was about to unleash on Germany, he said: ‘The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them. At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw, and half a hundred other places, they put their rather naive theory into operation. They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.’

It is true. Germany with its blitzkrieg and Japan with its attack on Pearl Harbor began the war with air attacks, while promising their citizens they would not be bombed. But Harris’s biblical quotation is an apt description of the entire war from the point of view of the vanquished. The hubris of the Nazi leaders and the Japanese militarists is astounding. They told their people that their armed forces were invincible. They said that some of their enemies (the Russians, in the case of the Germans, and the Chinese for the Japanese) were racially inferior, while the others – the Western democracies – were morally weak and would never exhibit the political will they would need to withstand the German and Japanese onslaught. The wind they sowed with these sentiments caused a whirlwind that was reaped by their peoples. Their countries were devastated. Their cities destroyed. Their citizens – both soldiers and civilians alike – were killed, maimed, widowed, orphaned and rendered homeless.

Reaping the Whirlwind
uses the authentic voices of German and Japanese people caught up in the conflict to relate their experiences. Their words come from diaries, letters, interrogation reports, interviews, personal memoirs and published material. These men and women were the enemies of Britain, America, France, the Soviet Union and the other Allied nations. But for them, ‘the enemy’ was the Allies.

Much of the material has been found in the archives of the Imperial War Museum in Duxford, Cambridgeshire, thanks to Stephen Walton; the US Army Heritage Collection in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, thanks to David Keough and the US National Archives in Maryland, thanks to the redoutable John Taylor. A disproportionate number of the interrogation reports and captured letters and diaries preserved there come from the Battle of the Bulge – or rather the 1944 Winter Offensive, as it was known to the Germans – and the Philippines. This is because German soldiers who saw action in the Ardennes in 1944 were much more likely to have survived the war than those fighting in Russia in 1941. And Japanese soldiers in the Philippines were still holding out when Japan surrendered and, consequently, did not fight to the death like their comrades confronting the Allies in other places.

Although I was born six years after the war ended, like most British people of my generation, World War II had a profound influence on me. The attitudes formed during the tumultuous years of the 1930s and 1940s were passed on to us and coloured the rest of the century. Both my parents served in the British Army during World War II.

My father landed in Normandy. As a captain in the Royal Corps of Signals, he followed the front-line troops, setting up communications systems. He saw many of the terrible results of war – and never liked to talk about it. However, before World War II, he had been a student, studying engineering. Educated in the sciences, he was fluent in German as the text books in engineering and the sciences were mostly written in German back then. When I was a child, he took the family to Germany and certainly bore the people there no animosity.

My mother was an anti-aircraft gunner. She lied about her age to join up and won the British Empire Medal for being with the first women’s ack-ack battery to shoot down a German plane. My mother is the only person I know who has killed lots of people. After the war in Europe was over, she re-enlisted to go out to the Far East, where she met my father, so both my parents had experience in both theatres of war.

Sadly, my father died many years ago, but my mother is still alive. She is eager to read this book. Even after all these years, she wants to know what those people she was fighting against thought and felt. It also has to be said that she abhors any attempt to glorify war, but the suffering and courage of those caught up in it she finds of enduring interest.

I know other people of my parents’ generation who went through World War II. Few of them bear any resentment against their former enemies. Usually, they reserve this for the ingratitude of their governments and for historians who do not recognize their contribution. Others are even more forgiving. One of my parents’ closest friends was a German Jew who had escaped from Italy during the war. He returned to live there, where he became wealthy. We used to holiday in his villa on Elba.

More recently, I was employed by a Jewish entrepreneur to ghost his memoirs. His wife had just died. On her deathbed she had begged him to set down his experiences for their children and grandchildren to read. He had never talked to them about what had happened, fearing it would bore them. It did not.

He had been born in Berlin, but his family realized in time what was happening and managed to escape. In England, as a young man, he was interned. But, eventually, the British authorities saw sense and allowed ‘enemy aliens’ to join the Pioneer Corps. Like my father, he landed in Normandy. He went on to see the liberation of the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen. At the time, he feared that the German people could never be forgiven – although, as far as the British authorities were concerned, at the time, he was still a German national himself. But, after being part of the occupation force charged with rehabilitating the country, his opinion gradually changed. It was only after he was demobbed in 1946 that he was allowed to naturalize as a British subject. Later, as a magazine publisher in England, he frequently did business with his German counterparts and he enjoyed regular visits to the land of his birth. If he can forgive, I don’t see why everyone else can’t.

Nigel Cawthorne

When World War II began, Berlin resident Herbert Otto Winckelmann, like most of his neighbours – indeed, most of Europe – was asleep. He was in for an unpleasant awakening.

Just a few hours before, German troops had rolled across the Polish border. With them was Heinz Guderian, pioneer of mechanized warfare and architect of the
blitzkrieg
:

Winckelmann was initially unconcerned by events in Poland. He was over thirty so, at that time, not eligible for the draft. And he was no supporter of the Nazis, as his earlier marriage plans had been ruined by the Nuremberg Laws preventing interracial marriage when it was discovered that he had a Jewish grandparent. However, he did not feel that Germany was totally in the wrong:

The ‘phoney war’ followed, but on 10 May 1940 Germany made its attack in the west. Leading the attack was the 7th Panzer Division, commanded by Erwin Rommel, later famed for his campaign in North Africa. On 11 May he wrote to his wife:

Overhead was
Luftwaffe
pilot Fritz Mölders, in a Messerschmitt Me109 fighter plane:

France fell at lightning speed, with Rommel plunging on to Normandy.

By then much of the British Army had been plucked off the beaches of Dunkirk. On 22 June 1940 France capitulated, and the focus of the war moved elsewhere. Back in Germany, Herbert Winckelmann was still untroubled by the war. At Christmas 1940, he went skiing at Sonthofen, where he met his future wife Elinor. At Easter, they went skiing together in Kitzbuel and in July he proposed to her. However, the war now brought with it minor inconveniences:

Italy had entered the war on the German side on 10 June 1940. With colonies in North Africa, the Italians were in a perfect position to attack the British in Egypt. On 13 September, at Hitler’s urging, they rolled over the Egyptian border intent on taking the Suez Canal and, possibly, the Middle Eastern oilfields beyond. But the Italians were no match for the British. By the time they surrendered, on 7 February 1941, the British had driven them back 800km (500 miles), taking over 130,000 prisoners. But on 6 February Hitler sent Rommel to Tripoli, and on 31 March Rommel attacked El Agheila. Present was Lieutenant Kurt Wolff, with the newly formed Afrika Korps:

Soon the British were fleeing back towards the Egyptian border.

On 22 June 1941 Hitler attacked the Soviet Union. By October, the 2nd Panzer Army was advancing on Odessa, where it was briefly held up by retreating Russians who were holding positions near a bridge. Captain Georg von Konrat was ordered to clear the road with three tanks – Sea Rose 1, 2 and 3 – and two armoured cars – Sea Rose 4 and 5. He decided to use an encircling manoeuvre through a forest.

Two Russian 76mm infantry guns were set up at the end of the road where they could command the field. There were more heavy guns in the trees on the other side of the road.

But it was not just the Russians who were having a problem aiming:

Both sides were firing wildly when the Panzers closed in, so they dashed back and forth randomly so that the Russians could not work out any pattern.

The other Panzers charged in. But the Russian infantry were massing again:

Von Konrat ordered the tank in again. This time Jochum seemed to lose control and overrun the road itself.

At the last minute, Jochum turned and the tank raced back off across the field to safety, leaving the Russian infantry positions shattered. However, the Russian guns were still firing at von Konrat’s other two tanks.

He charged them again but, just as he was drawing level with Sea Rose 2, he saw the armoured car Sea Rose 4 ‘just one great roaring flame’.