World War II: The Autobiography (46 page)

It is estimated on the basis of today’s reports that between 18,000 and 20,000 men were killed in this brief battle. While we aren’t wasting too much sympathy on our enemy at the moment, we are awed by the catastrophe that overtook him. There is chill in the thought that there, but for the Grace of God, go we. Had we been seen . . . Had the Japs attacked us before making the try for Midway . . .

MIDWAY: THE DECISIVE FIVE MINUTES, 4 JUNE 1942

Taisa Mitsuo Fuchida, Imperial Japanese Naval Air Service

As our fighters ran out of ammunition during the fierce battle they returned to the carriers for replenishment, but few ran low on fuel. Service crews cheered the returning pilots, patted them on the shoulder, and shouted words of encouragement. As soon as a plane was ready again the pilot nodded, pushed forward the throttle, and roared back into the sky. This scene was repeated time and again as the desperate air struggle continued.

Preparations for a counter-strike against the enemy had continued on board our four carriers throughout the enemy torpedo attacks. One after another, planes were hoisted from the hangar and quickly arranged on the flight deck. There was no time to lose. At 10.20 Admiral Nagumo gave the order to launch when ready. On
Akagi’s
flight deck all planes were in position with engines warming up. The big ship began turning into the wind. Within five minutes all her planes would be launched.

Five minutes! Who would have dreamed that the tide of battle would shift completely in that brief interval of time?

Visibility was good. Clouds were gathering at about 3,000 metres, however, and though there were occasional breaks, they afforded good concealment for approaching enemy planes. At 10.24 the order to start launching came from the bridge by voice-tube. The Air Officer flapped a white flag, and the first Zero fighter gathered speed and whizzed off the deck. At that instant a look-out screamed: “Hell-Divers!” I looked up to see three black enemy planes plummeting towards our ship. Some of our machine-guns managed to fire a few frantic bursts at them, but it was too late. The plump silhouettes of the American Dauntless dive-bombers quickly grew larger, and then a number of black objects suddenly floated eerily from their wings. Bombs! Down they came straight towards me! I fell intuitively to the deck and crawled behind a command post mantelet.

The terrifying scream of the dive-bombers reached me first, followed by the crashing explosion of a direct hit. There was a blinding flash and then a second explosion, much louder than the first. I was shaken by a weird blast of warm air. There was still another shock, but less severe, apparently a near-miss. Then followed a startling quiet as the barking of guns suddenly ceased. I got up and looked at the sky. The enemy planes were already gone from sight.

The attackers had got in unimpeded because our fighters, which had engaged the preceding wave of torpedo planes only a few moments earlier, had not yet had time to regain altitude. Consequently, it may be said that the American dive-bombers’ success was made possible by the earlier martyrdom of their torpedo planes. Also, our carriers had no time to evade because clouds hid the enemy’s approach until he dived down to the attack. We had been caught flat-footed in the most vulnerable condition possible – decks loaded with planes armed and fuelled for an attack.

Looking about, I was horrified at the destruction that had been wrought in a matter of seconds. There was a huge hole in the flight deck just behind the amidship elevator. The elevator itself, twisted like molten glass, was dropping into the hangar. Deck plates reeled upwards in grotesque configurations, planes stood tail up, belching livid flame and jet-black smoke. Reluctant tears streamed down my cheeks as I watched the fires spread, and I was terrified at the prospect of induced explosions which would surely doom the ship. I heard Masuda yelling, “Inside! Get inside! Everybody who isn’t working! Get inside!”

Unable to help, I staggered down a ladder and into the ready room. It was already jammed with badly burned victims from the hangar deck. A new explosion was followed quickly by several more, each causing the bridge structure to tremble. Smoke from the burning hangar gushed through passageways and into the bridge and ready room, forcing us to seek other refuge. Climbing back to the bridge, I could see that
Kaga
and
Soryu
had also been hit and were giving off heavy columns of black smoke. The scene was horrible to behold.

Akagi
had taken two direct hits, one on the after rim of the amidship elevator, the other on the rear guard on the port side of the flight deck. Normally, neither would have been fatal to the giant carrier, but induced explosions of fuel and munitions devastated whole sections of the ship, shaking the bridge and filling the air with deadly splinters. As fire spread among the planes lined up wing to wing on the after flight deck, their torpedoes began to explode, making it impossible to bring the fires under control. The entire hangar area was a blazing inferno, and the flames moved swiftly towards the bridge.

Midway cost the Americans the carrier
Yorktown
and 147planes; the Japanese lost four carriers and a similar number of aircraft. The tide of war in the Pacific was now against the Japanese.

Part Six

Resistance & Reconquest

The War in Western and Southern Europe, November 1940–May 1945

INTRODUCTION

The spread of World War II to south-eastern Europe, as with North Africa, was caused by Mussolini’s desire for cheap laurels. In October 1940 Italy capriciously attacked Greece, but once again Italian forces failed to fulfil Il Duce’s dreams of empire. Embarrassment for Mussolini was averted only when Hitler ordered the
Wehrmacht
to Greece in April 1941. The Führer’s invasion of Greece, however, was not solely motivated by a desire to help out his staunchest friend. Frustrated in his desire to invade Britain – a country that he hoped, erroneously, might come to an accommodation with him – Hitler had turned to the ideological task closest to his heart, the conquering of the Bolshevist Soviet Union. As a preface to Barbarossa, Hitler sought German control over the Balkans and south-east Europe, thereby eliminating any potential helpmates to the Soviet Union. In this the Führer was stunningly successful, with the nations of the regions either succumbing to his political bullying (Bulgaria) or his military might (Yugoslavia, Greece).

As for Britain, its war with Germany and Italy was essentially restricted to bombing raids by air, blockades by sea and attacks by land in the secondary theatre of the Mediterranean region. Even when Hitler dispatched 180 divisions (nearly four million of his five million-strong armed forces) eastwards to invade Russia, there was no realistic chance of Britain alone invading and liberating occupied Western Europe. The British and Canadian commando raid on Dieppe in 1942 was bloody proof of that. To ensure the continued inviolability of his Atlantic border, Hitler turned France – always the likeliest place for a British invasion – into a
festung
or fortress. Within the occupied countries, France included, resistance to Nazi rule was, the efforts of a brave few aside, scant. Of all the countries occupied by Hitler’s forces only Yugoslavia would free itself.

Not until December 1941, when Hitler gratuitously declared war on the USA, did a real chance of liberating Europe arise. And even then, it took Britain and the USA – the world’s greatest productive power – more than two years to plan, prepare and equip for D-Day, the Allied invasion of Normandy on 6 June 1944. Any small possibility that the Germans had of repelling the Allied invader was dashed by the Allies’ air power (12,837 aircraft to the
Luftwaffe’s
319) which prevented German armour moving en masse to the invasion beaches. Nevertheless the German forces in Western and Southern Europe – where the Allies had been working their way up Italy since July 1943’s Operation Husky – proved extraordinarily difficult to dislodge. The story of the war in Europe in 1944–5 is not why did Germany lose – it had no chance, not when it was also fighting on the Eastern Front as well – but how did it hold out for so long against an enemy greater in men and
materiel?
As late as September 1944 the Germans were controlling territory far in excess of the Reich’s own borders. The answer lies in the Germans’ battlefield flexibility and the extraordinarily high standard of training given to the NGOs and officers of their armed forces. Only in the very last weeks of the war did the
Wehrmacht
and Waffen-SS lose their military composure and competence. The consequence was that on the road from D-Day to the Rhineland some Allied regiments endured casualty rates in excess of those they suffered in World War I.

SWORDFISH ATTACK THE ITALIAN FLEET, TARANTO, 11 NOVEMBER 1940

Lieutenant M.R. Maund RN, 824 Squadron

The attack by Fleet Air Arm Swordfish on the Italian fleet at Taranto changed the balance of ship power in the Mediterranean, and consequently increased the difficulties for the Axis powers in supplying their armies in North Africa.

The klaxon has gone and the starters are whirring as, stubbing out our cigarettes, we bundle outside into the chill evening air. It is not so dark now, with the moon well up in the sky, so that one can see rather than feel one’s way past the aircraft which, with their wings folded for close packing, look more like four-poster bedsteads than front-line aeroplanes.

Parachute secured and Sutton harness pinned, the fitter bends over me, shouts “Good luck, sir” into my speaking-tube, and is gone. I call up Bull in the back to check intercom – he tells me the rear cockpit lighting has fused – then look around the orange-lighted cockpit; gas and oil pressures O.K., full tank, selector-switches on, camber-gear set, and other such precautions; run up and test switches, tail incidence set, and I jerk my thumb up to a shadow near the port wheel. Now comes the longest wait of all. 4F rocks in the slip-stream of aircraft ahead of her as other engines run up, and a feeling of desolation is upon me, unrelieved by the company often other aircraft crews, who, though no doubt entertaining similar thoughts, seem merged each into their own aircraft to become part of a machine without personality; only the quiet figures on the chocks seem human, and they are miles away.

The funnel smoke, a jet-black plume against the bright-starred sky, bespeaks of an increase in speed for the take-off; the fairy lights flick on, and with a gentle shudder the ship turns into wind, whirling the plan of stars about the foretop.

A green light waves away our chocks, orders us to taxi forward; the wings are spread with a slam, and as I test the aileron controls, green waves again. We are off, gently climbing away on the port bow where the first flame-float already burns, where the letter “K” is being flashed in black space. Here – in this black space – I discover Kemp, and close into formation; here also Kemp eventually gains squadron formation on Wilkinson, and the first wave is upon its way, climbing towards the north-west. At first the course is by no means certain, in fact Wilkinson is weaving, and station-keeping is a succession of bursts of speed and horrible air clawings, but in five minutes we have settled down a little.

At 4,000 feet we pass through a hole in scattered cloud – dark smudges above us at one moment, and the next stray fleece beneath airwheels filled with the light of a full moon.

Six thousand feet. God, how cold it is here! The sort of cold that fills you until all else is drowned save perhaps fear and loneliness. Suspended between heaven and earth in a sort of no-man’s-land – to be sure, no man was ever meant to be here – in the abyss which men of old feared to meet if they ventured to the ends of the earth. Is it surprising that my knees are knocking together? We have now passed under a sheet of alto-stratus cloud which blankets the moon, allowing only a few pools of silver where small gaps appear. And, begob, Williamson is going to climb through it! As the rusty edge is reached I feel a tugging at my port wing, and find that Kemp has edged me over into the slipstream of the leading sub-flight. I fight with hard right stick to keep the wing up, but the sub-flight has run into one of its clawing moments, and quite suddenly the wing and nose drop and we are falling out of the sky. I let her have her head, and see the shape of another aircraft flash by close overhead. Turning, I see formation lights ahead and climb up after them, following them through one of the rare holes in this cloud mass. There are two aircraft sure enough, yet when I range up alongside, the moonglow shows up the figures 5A – that is Olly. The others must be ahead. After an anxious few minutes some dim lights appear among the upper billows of the cloud, and opening the throttle we lumber away from Oily after them. Poor old engine – she will get a tanning this trip.

The sub-flight is reassembled now at 8,000 feet. We have to come to the edge of the cloud. The regular flashing of a light away down to starboard claims my attention.“There’s a flashing light to starboard, Bull, can you place it?” “Oh, yes,” and that is all – the poor devil must be all but petrified with the cold by now.

Then the coast appears. Just a band of dull wrinkled greyness. Bull arouses himself from his icicles enough to be able to tell me that we have roughly forty minutes to go, and I enough to remind him to close the overload tank-cock before we go in. But we make no turn to get out to seaward again; instead we shape our course parallel to the coastline, not more than five miles away, giving away in one act any chance of surprise we might have hoped for.

Years later. Some quaint-coloured twinkling flashes like liverspots have appeared in the sky to starboard. It is some time before I realise their significance; we are approaching the harbour; and the flashes are
HE
shells bursting in a barrage on the target area. We turn towards the coast and drop away into line astern, engines throttled back. For ages we seem to hover without any apparent alteration; then red, white, and green flaming onions come streaming in our direction, the
HE
bursts get closer, and looking down to starboard I see the vague smudge of a shape I now know as well as my own hand. We are in attacking position. The next ahead disappears as I am looking for my line of approach, so down we go in a gentle pause, glide towards the north-western corner of the harbour. The master-switch is made, a notch or two back on the incidence wheel, and my fear is gone, leaving a mind as clear and unfettered as it has ever been in my life. The hail of tracer at 6,000 feet is behind now, and there is nothing here to dodge; then I see that I am wrong, it is not behind any more. They have shifted target; for now, away below to starboard, a hail of red, white, and green balls cover the harbour to a height of 2,000 feet. This thing is beyond a joke.