The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (72 page)

At the same time, the British army in India scrambled troops and ordinance eastward into the path of the approaching Japanese army. Unfortunately, when the Japanese took Burma, the rice bowl of Southeast Asia, they cut off the food exports that had sustained much of the population of India. The British army commandeered all of the local transportation for military needs and sent only troops and ammunition into eastern India. Without transportation, civilian imports stopped, while grain merchants hoarded local crops for profitable resale. Showing their customary lack of concern for the Indian people (see “Famines in British India”), the British refused to interfere with the skyrocketing price of food as set by the free market, and they left the people of Bengal to starve. At least 1.5 million Indians, possibly 3 or 4 million, died of hunger before anyone cared.
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Prime Minister Winston Churchill shrugged the famine off as the natives’ fault for “breeding like rabbits.”
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Meanwhile the Japanese were settling in to exploit the captured peoples of Asia. Millions of natives starved in Indochina and Indonesia after their crops were confiscated to feed Japan. Chinese and Korean sex slaves—“comfort women”—were rounded up and shipped out to amuse Japanese garrisons.

In Manchuria, the Japanese set up a secret biological warfare lab, Unit 731. Prisoners were deliberately injured so doctors could test risky surgical procedures. Others were strapped down and vivisected without anesthesia to reveal the mysterious inner workings of the body. Experimental germs were developed using prisoners of war as guinea pigs. In 1940, Japanese aircraft spread plague-infected fleas on the central coastal Chinese city of Ningbo. In 1942, Japanese war planes dropped cholera on Chinese villages along the Allied supply line in Yunnan Province on the border of Burma, killing an estimated 200,000 civilians in the resultant epidemic.
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The Shrinking Reich

It took a couple of years for the Americans to fully mobilize their enormous manpower and industry, but by 1944 they were ready to attempt a full-scale assault against the continent of Europe. They gathered a strike force in England and launched a massive amphibious attack against the German fortifications on the French coast at Normandy on June 6, 1944. By the end of the first day—D-day—the Anglo-American allies had successfully landed 133,000 troops and 20,000 vehicles on the beaches, dropped another 23,500 airborne troops behind enemy lines, and fought their way inland to seize key crossroads, at a loss of around 3,000 fatalities.
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After about a month, the Allies had boosted their forces enough to break free of the Normandy peninsula. British and American armored divisions swept across the French countryside toward the German border and the Rhine River. A German counterattack in December—called the Ardennes Offensive by somber historians and the Battle of the Bulge in American memory—delayed the crossing of the Rhine for a couple of months, but chewed up the last German reserves. By spring, the American forces had their bridgeheads across the Rhine. They poured into the German heartland.

In the east, the Soviets launched their own offensive in June 1944—Operation Bagration. Four massive columns of tanks and infantry punched through the German line in Belarus and quickly converged deep inside of old Poland. It was probably the largest Soviet victory on the eastern front. Scores of German divisions were trapped and annihilated. After three years of war, the fighting quality of the Red Army had finally surpassed the Wehrmacht.

As the Germans fell back into Poland, they dug a new defensive line along the Vistula River, anchored at Warsaw. Then, with the Red Army grinding to a halt as they outran their supply lines, the underground Polish Home Army launched a partisan uprising against the Germans, hoping to establish an independent government in Warsaw before the Soviets arrived with their own puppets in tow. Since neither the Germans nor the Russians wanted to see Polish nationalists running Poland, the Soviets stopped their advance and watched from across the Vistula River while the Germans moved in. The Nazis systematically reduced Warsaw to rubble and massacred the population in what’s been called the largest single atrocity of the war.
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Some 225,000 Poles died in the Warsaw uprising.
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To understand the difference between the two fronts, contrast the fate of Warsaw with that of Paris. The Americans’ original plan was to bypass Paris completely and concentrate on destroying the German armies in the field, rather than diverting precious resources to feed and tend the several million civilians they would be responsible for if they took the city. Hitler’s original plan was to destroy Paris rather than let it fall. Just as in Warsaw, the French underground rose up against the German garrison, but the western front was so much more civilized than the eastern that the outcome was far different. The German commander balked at destroying such a magnificent city, while the Allies allowed the Free French troops to move in and take the city under Allied protection as quickly as possible.
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The two approaching fronts, Anglo-Americans from the west and Soviets from the east, had already decided to meet on the Elbe River in eastern Germany, leaving the final bloody battle for Berlin to Stalin. As the Red Army plowed through the German lands of East Prussia, payback for the German invasion became official policy. Not only was all portable property looted or shipped back to Russia, but almost every woman in the path of the onslaught was raped, then tossed aside, then raped again whenever a new unit of the Red Army arrived.
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German civilians scattered in panic from the oncoming front lines, and hundreds of thousands of refugees died in the scramble to escape Soviet brutality. German ships were packed with civilians and wounded soldiers and launched from ports in the Baltic toward the West, often to be torpedoed by Soviet submarines. The converted cruise ship
Wilhelm Gustloff
was sent to the bottom with over 9,000 passengers and crew, the deadliest single shipwreck in history. The overstuffed freighter
Goya
was sunk, taking along over 6,000 refugees.

German soldiers held the line with no expectation of victory, only a desperate hope that they could stall the Soviets long enough to escape and surrender to the more merciful British and Americans. Hitler, though, had other plans. Commanding now from his bunker under the Chancellery building in Berlin, Hitler had no intention of meeting the same fate as Mussolini, who had recently been captured by partisans, shot, and strung up in the town square like a slaughtered hog. Hitler intended to die in a blaze of glory and take his unworthy nation with him.

The Soviets were willing to help with that. The Red Army pulled up to the Oder River, the last barrier before Berlin, and opened a massive bombardment on the Seelow Heights overlooking the river. Shining antiaircraft searchlights into the German positions to blind the defenders, the Soviets assaulted the bluffs, and after a brief bloody day of fighting, the way to Berlin was wide open.

A week of savage street fighting across Berlin killed 100,000 civilians
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and tightened the noose around Hitler’s bunker. Soviet advances were measured by blocks and buildings. The German army at this point was filling its ranks with old men and boys who were no match for the veterans of the Red Army. Maybe 225,000 German soldiers died defending Berlin, as opposed to the 78,000 Soviets killed attacking them.
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Finally, the war had narrowed to just the few blocks around the Chancellery. Unable to delay any longer, Hitler committed suicide with a gunshot to the head after poisoning his dog and new wife. His followers set fire to his body and scattered before the Russians got there.
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Island Hopping

With the Japanese offensives in the Pacific Ocean halted by the defeat at Midway, the United States faced the problem of how to counterattack across the world’s largest ocean. One step at a time was the only possibility. Rather than clearing every island in the ocean, the United States bypassed the big Japanese bases, cut off supply routes, and left their garrisons to starve. Instead, the Americans went after secondary islands that were large enough to be developed as forward bases, but too small for major Japanese troop concentrations.

This made for a more intermittent war than was found elsewhere on solid ground. American submarines and aircraft carriers would first isolate a target island by destroying local Japanese shipping. Then the American carriers and their escort battleships would soften up the Japanese garrison with air raids and artillery barrages. Finally ground forces would storm the beaches and fight their way through Japanese defenses. After a few weeks, even before the last Japanese on the island had been hunted down and exterminated, the Americans would build air bases on the island and launch heavy bombers to soften up the next target on the list. They would assemble fresh troops and supplies on the island, and do it all over again, one step closer to Japan.
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Even these lesser Japanese garrisons were tough targets, and each amphibious assault cost thousands of American and tens of thousands of Japanese lives. The Japanese code of honor did not allow surrender, so when the situation turned hopeless, rather than ask for terms, soldiers launched suicidal charges against the American positions in order to die gloriously in battle. This refusal to surrender was so deeply rooted in the national psyche that even civilians killed themselves by the thousands rather than suffer the humiliation of being taken alive. Some stubborn Japanese soldiers took to the jungles and refused to surrender as late as the 1970s.
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The only big city destroyed by street fighting in the Pacific war was Manila in the Philippines. American General Douglas MacArthur wanted the Japanese to declare it an open city (meaning that all defense and attacks were to take place outside the city) but instead the Japanese dug into the city center. Even as MacArthur delayed rooting the enemy out, Japanese frustration turned against the civilian inhabitants. Thousands of prisoners and civilians were bayoneted, beaten, shot, or strapped down inside buildings that were then set on fire. During January and February 1945, almost 100,000 residents of Manila were massacred. When the Americans attacked, the Japanese fought to the last man and took the city with them.
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In the spring of 1945, the battle for the island of Okinawa—the last stop before Japan itself—became the Second World War’s bloodiest battle outside the Russian front. By the time it was all over, the Americans had lost 12,000 of their own troops, killed on land and sea, and they counted the bodies of 110,000 Japanese soldiers scattered around the island in parts and pieces. The final 20,000 Japanese soldiers retreated into caves for a last stand, only to be sealed in by American explosives.

It’s been estimated that as many as 160,000 civilians—one-third of Okinawa’s population—died in the crossfire, or by mass suicide, or (among the less fanatical) by forced suicide. Okinawa became legendary for the large number and variety of Japanese suicides. The war had been chewing up Japanese pilots so quickly that their replacements could not be trained in the subtle skills of aerial dogfighting and precision bombing, so the Japanese turned instead to blunt suicide attacks against American shipping. Kamikaze pilots crashed planes loaded with explosives into the American fleet. The ferocity of the Japanese defense convinced American war planners to reconsider invading their home islands and instead try bombing them into submission.
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The War of the Machines

The major innovation in ground tactics of World War II was the deployment of armored divisions. Under the doctrine of
blitzkrieg
—lightning war—tanks supported by aircraft would punch holes in the line, followed by mobile artillery and mechanized infantrymen in trucks to exploit the breakthrough. Often paratroopers would drop from the sky to seize strategic landmarks ahead of the advancing columns. In open country like Russia, France, and North Africa, an enemy breakthrough could strand tens of thousands of foot soldiers a hundred miles behind the rapidly moving front lines, where they would have little choice but to dig in and hope for a change in fortunes. The destruction of these pockets produced many of the horrendously huge body counts associated with the Second World War. Because mechanized transport could easily outpace any fleeing foot soldiers, battles of annihilation became a regular part of warfare for the first time in centuries.