The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War

by Andrew Roberts

  Hitler also won nothing substantial from the Japanese for his declaration of war on America. The Axis consistently failed to act as close allies during the Second World War, with dire consequences for them all. Had Japan attacked the USSR in the east simultaneously with Barbarossa, it could have forced Stalin into a potentially disastrous two-front war, and taken the rich mineral and oil reserves of Siberia. Similarly, if Japan’s attacks on eastern India and Ceylon had been co-ordinated with a German advance through Egypt, Iran and Iraq – prior to Operation Barbarossa – the British Empire could have been severely threatened in northern India. Hitler ‘kept the foreign office out of the military’, the Reich’s Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop told his Nuremberg psychiatrist, when complaining that he had not had more than a day’s warning of the invasion of Norway. ‘The same with the Russian war. I never knew about it until 24 hours before it happened.’26 Their utter inability to trust each other and co-ordinate their efforts left the Axis fighting two entirely separate wars, while the Allies fought on two flanks of the same war.

  Hitler’s great error – perhaps the second worst of his many blunders of the war next to invading Russia prematurely – was not to appreciate the potential capacity of American industrial production. This is all the more surprising given the chapters on American capitalism that he had written in his then unpublished sequel to Mein Kampf known as ‘The Second Book’. ‘The size of the internal American market and its wealth of buying power and also raw materials’, he wrote in 1928, ‘guarantee the American automobile industry internal sales figures that alone permit production methods that would simply be impossible in Europe. The result of that is the enormous export capacity of the American automobile industry. At issue is the general motorization of the world – a matter of immeasurable significance.’27 Plenty more along those lines made it plain that Hitler had at least understood the power of American production in 1928, and although the Great Depression had thrown this off course, by 1941 it was far stronger than ever before.

  Certainly Hitler’s senior advisers were well aware of the economic dangers posed by the military productive capacity of the United States even before the Führer had declared war. Ernst Udet, the head of the Luftwaffe procurement organization at the Air Ministry, shot himself on 17 November 1941 after his warnings about the Anglo-American air programme had been consistently ignored; General Friedrich Fromm, head of the central administrative office of the Wehrmacht, was talking about the need to make peace in November 1941; General Georg Thomas of the supply side of OKW was deeply defeatist by January 1942; Fritz Todt, the Reich Armaments Minister, told Hitler as early as November 1941 that the war in Russia could not be won; Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of the Abwehr, was equally pessimistic, though more diplomatic; the great steel producer Walter ‘Panzer’ Rohland believed, as he told Todt, that ‘the war against Russia cannot be won!’; the Economics Minister Walther Funk spoke at Göring’s birthday party of the ‘misfortune that had broken over the nation’. In the view of the historian of the Nazi economy, ‘the vast majority’ of the Nazi leaders understood ‘the pivotal importance of the United States economy’.28 Yet they did not apprise Hitler of their feelings, or at least not strongly enough to force him to see sense, except Todt, who (probably coincidentally) died in a plane crash less than two months later, and Udet, who at least emphasized his point in an unmistakable manner. The claims of many at Nuremberg to have tried to dissuade Hitler from declaring war on the United States are highly suspect, not least because he seems to have taken few soundings before making the announcement.

  The Reich Foreign Minister Ribbentrop claimed in his memoirs that ‘war was declared on the USA despite my advice to the contrary’, but the evidence in fact points the other way. When the Italian Foreign Minister, Mussolini’s son-in-law Count Galeazzo Ciano, rang him up in the middle of the night to tell him about Pearl Harbor, Ribbentrop was ‘joyful… He was so happy, in fact, that I congratulated him,’ even though Ciano wasn’t sure quite what for. At his trial, Ribbentrop claimed that Pearl Harbor had come as an unpleasant shock, because ‘We never considered a Japanese attack on the United States to be to our advantage.’29 He had been regularly deriding the power of America, telling Japan’s Foreign Minister Yosuke Matsuoka that American munitions were ‘junk’, Ciano that Roosevelt’s foreign policy was ‘the biggest bluff in world history’, Japan’s Ambassador Hiroshi Oshima that Germany was ‘more than prepared to deal with any American intervention’ and Admiral Darlan that the United States would be deluding herself if she thought she ‘would be able to wage war in Europe’.30 Fancying himself an expert on America because he had lived there for four years in his youth, Ribbentrop assured a delegation of Italians in 1942, ‘I know them; I know their country. A country devoid of culture, devoid of music – above all, a country without soldiers, a people who will never be able to decide the war from the air. When has a Jewified nation like that ever become a race of fighters and flying aces?’31 Ribbentrop had assured Hitler that Britain would not go to war in 1939 – indeed his entire career was built around telling Hitler what he wanted to hear; it is likely that his advice was to declare war on the United States.32 Not that it mattered much: Hitler would not have followed Ribbentrop’s – or anyone’s advice over an issue as important as that.

  The speed with which Roosevelt put the United States economy on a war footing rivalled that with which he had installed his New Deal programme after his inauguration in 1933. Authoritarian planning of the mighty American economy was policed by a sea of regulatory authorities known by their acronyms, which managed almost every area of what effectively became a state-capitalist system. If Germans and Japanese doubted the American commitment to defeat them come what may, they needed only to look at the measures adopted by the previously free-market United States. Taxation was used to hold maximum after-tax salaries to $25,000; a freeze was introduced on commercial, farm and commodity prices, which under the Emergency Price Control Act would be fixed by the Office of Price Administration; wages and rents were similarly controlled; widespread rationing was imposed; consumer credit was mercilessly squeezed; war profiteering was aggressively combated; synthetic-rubber production was so increased that by 1945 the United States was making more of it than the entire global pre-1939 production of natural rubber.33

  In January 1942, Roosevelt presented a $59 billion budget to Congress, $52 billion of which was devoted to military expenditure, in the same month that the sale of new cars and passenger trucks was banned by the Office of Production Management (which is why there is no such thing as a 1942-model American motor car). The Office of Economic Stabilization, chaired by James F. Byrnes, had immense powers which it had no hesitation in using. A flat 5 per cent ‘Victory’ tax was imposed on all incomes over $12 per week, exemptions were slashed and the number of Americans required to fill in tax returns rose six-fold in one year, from seven million in 1941 to forty-two million in 1942, something that would have been politically impossible to impose under any other circumstances.34 Roosevelt sent the American economy into battle, with results that the German and Japanese production figures could not hope to match. By the end of the war, the USA had provided for her allies 37,000 tanks, 800,000 trucks, two million rifles. With 43,000 planes going abroad to allies, US pilot training had to be curtailed because of aircraft shortages.35

  This is not to argue that American armaments were necessarily superior to German and Japanese. The American military historian Victor Davis Hanson has argued eloquently that this was not the case:

  Our Wildcat front-line fighters were inferior to the Japanese Zero; obsolete Brewster F2A Buffalos were rightly known as ‘flying coffins’. The Douglas TBD Devastator bomber was a death-trap, its pilots essentially wiped out at the Battle of Midway trying to drop often unreliable torpedoes. American-designed Lee, Grant, and Stuart tanks – and even the much-heralded Shermans (‘Ronson Lighters’) – were intrinsically inferior to most contemporary German models, which had a far bette
r armor and armament. With the exception of the superb M-1 rifle, it is hard to rank any American weapons system as comparable to those used by the Wehrmacht, at least until 1944–45. We never developed guns quite comparable to the fast-firing, lethal German .88 artillery platform. Our anti-tank weapons of all calibers remained substandard. Most of our machine guns and mortars were reliable – but of World War I vintage.36

  Yet the sheer quantity of weaponry being produced by America outstripped anything the Axis could match.

  Although it was Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor that brought an Anglo-American military alliance into being for the first time since 1918, with Churchill making good his promise at the Lord Mayor’s luncheon on 10 November to declare war on Japan ‘within the hour’ of a Japanese attack, Hitler’s declaration of war meant that the Western alliance would have teeth. A great deal had already been agreed in secret Staff conversations in Washington about the eventuality of war, and the scene was now set for closer and more direct conversations between Roosevelt and Churchill in that city before the year was out. There was nothing inevitable about the wartime alliance between America and Britain; the Axis brought it into being. There had been much rivalry between Britain and the United States in the 1920s and 1930s, exacerbated by ignorant stereotyping on both sides. According to the wartime journals of the aviator Charles A. Lindbergh, a Captain Smith asked the former US military attaché to London, Lieutenant-colonel Howard C. Davidson, how the English really felt about the Americans. ‘Well, I’ll tell you,’ Davidson replied. ‘The English feel about us just the way we feel about a prosperous nigger.’37

  Yet the Anglo-American alliance after 1941 was to be by far the closest of any of the collaborations between the major powers in the war, at sea where they immediately divided up the world’s oceans into patrolling districts, in the air when the USAAF and RAF took it in turns to bomb Germany by day and night respectively, and on the ground where joint operations were undertaken in North Africa by November 1942, and subsequently in Italy, Normandy and finally Germany itself, all under supreme commanders who controlled the forces of both powers. Smarter diplomacy by Hitler might have prevented the creation of an alliance that was to fling his armies out of Africa, the Mediterranean and France over the coming three years.

  In his memoirs published in 1950, Churchill was forthright about his emotions when he heard about the attack on Pearl Harbor. ‘No American will think it wrong of me’, he wrote in The Grand Alliance,

  if I proclaim that to have the United States at our side was to me the greatest joy. I could not foretell the course of events. I do not pretend to have measured accurately the martial might of Japan, but now at this very moment I knew the United States was in the war, up to the neck and in to the death. So we had won after all!… Hitler’s fate was sealed. Mussolini’s fate was sealed. As for the Japanese, they would be ground to powder.38

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  Meanwhile, the Roosevelt Administration began to intern virtually the entire Japanese-American community of the United States, a panic measure for which subsequent Administrations have apologized and paid compensation. Nonetheless, this tough act needs to be seen in its proper historical context. Although 69 per cent of the 100,500 Japanese who were interned under Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 were US citizens, that still leaves 31 per cent, or 30,500 people, who were not. With the level of danger posed by Imperial Japan in the spring of 1942, when their forces were spreading over vast areas of the Pacific and Far East, no country at that time would have allowed so many non-citizens of the same ethnic background as the prospective invader to reside in the precise areas – Hawaii and California – where the next blows were (rightly or wrongly) expected to fall. The British Government had taken similar measures against the German and Italian minorities, with similar speed and disregard of rights. The simple fact that Japanese-born citizens of Oahu had provided Tokyo, via the Japanese Consulate in Honolulu, with detailed information about the US Pacific Fleet, something that was known to American and British intelligence, was enough to put the loyalty of many thousands of innocent people under a cloud. When released from their barbed-wire desert camps, they were sent off with $25 each, the sum given to prisoners at the end of their sentences. It was not the Roosevelt Administration’s finest hour.

  Although in the long term Japan had committed a terrible blunder in provoking the ‘righteous might’ of the American people, in the short term her forces were able to sweep through Asia, capturing one-sixth of the surface of the planet in only six months and dealing the two-centuries-old British Empire what was effectively a lingering death blow. An analogy with Barbarossa is apt, because a massive surprise attack yielded huge ground initially, before other factors – in Russia the weather, size of population and spirit of the ordinary Red Army soldier; in the Far East superior Allied technology and military production – could operate to reverse the early successes. Whereas Stalin had been remiss in not reading his fellow dictator’s mind properly before Barbarossa, the Roosevelt Administration dangerously miscalculated Japanese psychology, intentions and capabilities.

  In order to defend their lines of communication, the Japanese formulated a two-phase strategy for their conquest of South-East Asia. Hong Kong, Guam and Wake Island were to be captured immediately while troops were landing on the American Philippines and in British Malaya. Then, once the capacity of the Philippines and Malaya to interdict further operations had been neutralized, the Dutch East Indies and Burma would be occupied. Between 7 December 1941 and April 1942, the six aircraft carriers of the First Air Fleet that attacked Pearl Harbor went on to attack Rabaul, Darwin, Colombo and Trincomalee, covering one-third of the circumference of the globe and without losing a single ship.39

  Simultaneously with the attack on Pearl Harbor, but dated 8 December because it was west of the international dateline, the Japanese attacked Wake Island, an atoll without natural food or water. Their initial assault was flung back heroically by the American defenders but a second, larger one on 11 December could not be and the island was overwhelmed by 23 December, by which time the Gilbert Islands and Guam had also fallen. Hours after Pearl Harbor, the British Crown colony of Hong Kong was invaded by the Japanese 38th Division. Forced back to Hong Kong Island on 17 December, the 15,000 Australian, Indian, Canadian and British defenders held out until Christmas Day.

  Japanese forces violated Thailand’s neutrality and occupied Bangkok on 8 December, prior to using that country as a springboard to assaulting Burma in phase two. The Japanese Twenty-fifth Army, comprising three divisions and a tank group under Lieutenant-General Tomoyuki Yamashita, also landed at the northern tip of Malaya and the Kra Isthmus of southern Thailand on 8 December. Yamashita’s target was nothing less than the island fortress of Singapore, known as the Gibraltar of the East. Almost twice the size of the Isle of Wight, Singapore was a Royal Navy dockyard, barracks and communications centre, and, because more than £60 million had been spent on fortifying it in the 1920s, it ‘seemed to double-lock the gateway of the British Empire so that it was useless for an unfriendly rival power, such as Japan, to dream of forcing an entrance’.40 This was certainly true of the seaward approaches, which were guarded by huge naval guns set in deep bunkers, but these were fixed in concrete and could not be – or at least were not – adapted to face the landward side, from where it soon became clear that the Japanese attack was going to come. It was not only the French who had adopted a Maginot Line mentality.

  Conventional British military thinking held that Singapore was safe from a northern attack because the 500 miles of dense jungle and rubber plantations of central Malaya were impassable by tanks. ‘Well,’ the British Governor of Singapore is alleged to have told the British commander in Malaya, Lieutenant-General Arthur Percival, ‘I suppose you’ll see the little men off.’41 Percival also had more artillery and shells and many more troops than Yamashita, and on 2 December Admiral Sir Tom Phillips’ Force Z, the battleship HMS Prince of Wales and battle cruiser HMS Repulse, with destro
yer escorts, had arrived in Singapore harbour. Although aircraft had sunk ships in Norway and Crete, this had not yet happened to a battleship (the Prince of Wales had no fewer than forty automatic anti-aircraft weapons).42 The RAF in Singapore, it was true, had only 180 aircraft, some of them outdated, but on paper Percival ought to have been able to withstand the coming onslaught, at least for a considerable length of time. But almost everything that could go wrong went wrong. ‘Defeat’, as one historian of the campaign has put it, ‘was a team effort.’43 The Japanese seized the initiative from the moment they landed amphibiously at Kota Bharu near the north-west tip of Malaya on 8 December 1941 and marched south, and Percival was never able to wrest it back from them. The invaders flung themselves into jungle warfare with gusto, and also proved enthusiastic and adept at hand-to-hand fighting. There was no particular reason why the Japanese should have excelled at jungle warfare in the early days; the fighting in China had not taken place in jungles, nor are there any in Japan. Yet they were trained for fighting there in a way the Commonwealth troops were not. ‘The jungle betrayed the British,’ recorded an historian; ‘the jungle had been their possession for eighty years, whose possibilities for war they had never learned.’44 Because the jungle impeded lateral movement and visibility along a defended front, it made it easy for front-line units to be cut off, and thus favoured the offensive over the defensive. All too often the Commonwealth units found themselves outmanoeuvred and surrounded, almost before they knew it. It turned out that tanks – of which Percival had almost none – could indeed move through the jungle and rubber plantations, and the British found themselves woefully short of anti-tank weaponry.45 Only six weeks after landing, the Japanese had got to within sight of Singapore island.