The Second World War (106 page)
The ceremonial vows of loyalty from the field marshals looked even more unconvincing on 30 March when Manstein of Army Group South and Kleist of Army Group Centre were brought back to the Berghof to be relieved of their positions. Their crime was to have requested permission to withdraw their forces, to evade another encirclement.
Just over a week later, the German and Romanian forces trapped on the Crimea by the 4th Ukrainian Front were forced to pull back after a devastating attack on the Perekop Isthmus. On 10 April the German forces in Odessa had to escape by sea. And just over a month later, the last 25,000 German and Romanian troops left in Sebastopol surrendered. The
Wehrmacht had now been cleared from the Black Sea coast to the Pripet Marshes on the edge of Poland. In the south, the Red Army had won back almost all Soviet territory and had entered foreign territory. In the north, the Leningrad Front had reached the Estonian border. For Stalin, the next objective was clear. If the Stavka plan to cut off the whole of Army Group Centre in Belorussia worked, it would be the greatest victory of the war, especially if timed to coincide with the Allied invasion of Normandy.
By night, RAF Lancasters continued to pound Berlin in Britain’s original ‘Second Front’, although at a very heavy cost in bombers and aircrew. Göring did not show himself in public any more. Hitler despaired of the Luftwaffe’s failure to wreak revenge on England, and yet he could not bring himself to remove his old comrade. But Air Chief Marshal Harris’s plan ‘to wreck Berlin from end to end’ to win the war remained a figment of his obstinate imagination. The destruction caused in his Battle of Berlin was immense, but the city had failed to burn.
US air force and RAF raids built up into the crescendo of ‘Big Week’ in late February 1944. Long-range Mustang fighter escorts dramatically reduced American losses as their heavy bombers attacked fuel and aircraft targets at Regensburg, Fürth, Graz, Steyr, Gotha, Schweinfurt, Augsburg, Aschersleben, Bremen and Rostock. It had taken the air chiefs in Washington a long time to accept that their doctrine of unescorted daylight bombing had been flawed, but with the Mustang and its Rolls-Royce engine they finally had the machine to make it work. The new tactic also contributed massively to the necessary weakening of the Luftwaffe before Operation Overlord.
Despite the Allied bombing campaign, German aircraft production, switched in some cases to tunnel factories, increased. But the aerial battles had left the Luftwaffe with few experienced pilots. The novices, rushed through flying school because of fuel shortages, were sent straight into front-line squadrons where they provided easy pickings for Allied pilots. The Luftwaffe, just like the Imperial Japanese Navy, had failed to send their best pilots back as flying and aerial combat instructors. Instead, they had kept them on a relentless round of sorties until they were exhausted and made fatal mistakes. By the time the Allied invasion came in June, the Luftwaffe was a spent force.
1944
O
nce the islands of Tarawa and Makin had been secured in November 1943, and the lessons digested, Nimitz began planning to seize the Marshall Islands to the north. His first objective was the Kwajalein Atoll in the centre. Some of his commanders were concerned by the number of Japanese air bases in the area, but Nimitz was adamant.
The balance of power in the Pacific had by now switched decisively in favour of the US Navy. The astonishing American shipbuilding programme far exceeded even what the late Admiral Yamamoto had feared before his attack on Pearl Harbor. The United States had also shown itself capable of catching up and overtaking the Japanese in aviation technology. The Imperial Japanese Navy had begun the war with a far superior fighter, the Zero, but had failed to modernize it sufficiently. The US Navy, on the other hand, brought in new aircraft, especially the Grumman F6F Hellcat, and continually experimented with new techniques.
On 31 January 1944, Rear Admiral Marc A. Mitscher’s Task Force 58, with twelve fast carriers and eight new battleships, advanced on the Marshall Islands well ahead of the invasion force. Its 650 aircraft destroyed almost every Japanese aircraft in pre-emptive strikes and the battleships shelled the airstrips. The Americans had also prepared a much longer and more intense naval bombardment, and introduced more heavily armoured amtracs. As a result, the landings on and around Kwajalein, which began on 1 February, succeeded with a much lower loss of life–just 334 men as opposed to the 1,056 who had died at Tarawa.
Encouraged by the Kwajalein operation, Admiral Nimitz decided to push straight on to take the Eniwetok Atoll, nearly 650 kilometres to the west. He again decided to use the fast carrier force to eliminate any Japanese threat from the air. In the case of Eniwetok, it would come from the great Japanese naval and air base at Truk, 1,240 kilometres further west in the Caroline Islands. Admiral Mitscher took nine carriers, and once within range they launched wave after wave of fighters and dive-bombers. In thirty-six hours, US Navy pilots destroyed 200 aircraft on the ground and, together with the surface ships, sank forty-one Japanese vessels totalling more than 200,000 tons. The Japanese Combined Fleet could never use Truk again, and Eniwetok and neighbouring islands were duly taken.
General MacArthur, the viceroy of the south-west Pacific based in Brisbane, was gradually building up his forces in order to satisfy his vow to retake the Philippines. By the end of the year he would have accumulated under his command the Sixth and Eighth Armies, the Fifth Air Force and the Seventh Fleet, which became known as ‘MacArthur’s Navy’.
MacArthur suspected, with justification, that although the official policy was to give his advance to the Philippines equal priority with that of Nimitz in the central Pacific, the US Navy was bound to win. Its strategy of advancing towards Japan by island group was now strongly supported by the air force chief of staff ‘Hap’ Arnold. Once the new B-29 Superfortress, with a bombing range of 1,500 miles, entered service, they could attack Japan directly from the Mariana Islands.
MacArthur had little choice but to continue his progress westwards along the northern coast of New Guinea, in the hope that the joint chiefs would then allocate the resources he needed to begin his reconquest of the Philippines. But MacArthur suddenly decided to seize the Admiralty Islands, 240 kilometres to the north, ahead of schedule. Air reconnaissance indicated that the Japanese airfield had been abandoned. It was an extremely risky venture, especially with a small invading force, but it paid off. The Japanese were forced to abandon their defence of Madang on the north coast of New Guinea, while American warships could now use the great natural harbour of the Admiralties and cut the Japanese supply line to New Guinea.
Freshly arrived army divisions were slow to adapt to Pacific island combat. Sentries made nervous by jungle noises at night or overreacting to deliberate Japanese scare tactics could cause chaos. Troops from the 24th Division guarding Lieutenant General Robert Eichelberger’s I Corps headquarters in Hollandia at the western end of New Guinea even began a night battle among themselves, firing machine guns and hurling grenades when no Japanese were near. Eichelberger described it as ‘
a disgraceful exhibition
’, yet fire discipline continued to be an alien concept for many US units, despite constant complaints by senior officers of ‘promiscuous shooting’.
Chiang Kai-shek was painfully aware that the twin strategies of Mac Arthur and the US Navy were making his country even more of a backwater. He had discovered after the Teheran conference that Operation Buccaneer, the plan for landings in the Bay of Bengal, had been cancelled since the amphibious craft were needed for Overlord. China’s main interest to the joint chiefs of staff in Washington was now simply to act as an unsinkable aircraft carrier within range of Japan. And even that role would be
undermined once the Mariana Islands had been captured, and air bases built for the B-29 Superfortresses.
Chiang also suspected that, while the Allies were focused on the invasion of France, the Japanese would launch a major offensive against him before the United States could redeploy forces from Europe to the Far East. He warned Roosevelt of this in a signal on 1 January 1944. General Stilwell had also been concerned about a renewed Japanese attempt to destroy US air bases in China, after the Chekiang–Kiangsi offensive of the year before. But his plans to modernize more of the Chinese army had been downgraded. The Japanese were particularly provoked by the American Fourteenth Air Force’s raids on the Hsinchu naval airfield on Formosa, which was followed by bombing raids against their home islands.
The Americans and the British ignored these warnings of a major Japanese retaliation, partly because the generalissimo had cried wolf before, but mainly because their intelligence analysis was deeply flawed. They considered the Imperial Japanese Army incapable of undertaking a major campaign, and even assumed that it would start to withdraw troops from China to reinforce the Philippines.
In fact Imperial General Headquarters had already approved plans for the Ichig
Offensive into southern China with half a million men, and for Operation U-g, attacking from northern Burma into India with 85,000. In the first half of 1943, the operations section in Imperial General Headquarters had been working on a ‘
Long-Range Strategic Plan
’. This tacitly acknowledged that Japan could not now win in the Pacific against American naval supremacy. Instead it would relaunch its continental war to destroy the Nationalist Chinese forces.
Emperor Hirohito wanted a great victory, which he believed would allow Japan to negotiate a favourable peace with the western powers. General Okamura Yasuji, the commander-in-chief in China, on the other hand, saw the IchigOffensive as their one chance to destroy the Nationalists before the Americans landed in force on the south-western coast of China in 1945. The two primary objectives of the IchigOffensive laid down by Imperial General Headquarters were to destroy the US airfields in China and, through ‘
an overland clearing operation
’, to link up the Japanese armies in China with those in Vietnam, Thailand and Malaya.