During the battle of Sittang River, Hutton was replaced by General Sir Harold Alexander, one of whose corps commanders was Major-General William Slim. (This was six months before Alexander’s appointment to the Middle East Command.) From a modest background, Slim had fought at Gallipoli, had been wounded fighting with the Gurkhas, had won the MC and had been wounded again in Mesopotamia, ending the Great War as an Indian Army major. A soldier’s soldier, he had none of the vanity and ego of commanders like MacArthur, Montgomery and Patton, yet tactically and strategically he was certainly their equal. Burmese terrain included mountains, plains, jungles, coastal waters and wide rivers; Slim showed the highest qualities of generalship over all of them. Together he and Alexander co-ordinated the long retreat northwards out of Burma. The difficult decision was taken to abandon Rangoon on 6 March, where 100,000 tons of stores were captured by the Japanese two days later. In mid-March the Fifth and Sixth Chinese Armies entered Burma to cover the British retreat and try to protect the Burma Road. Chiang Kai-shek’s chief of staff, the tough-minded but rebarbative and Anglophobic General Joseph ‘Vinegar Joe’ Stilwell, fought the battle of Yenangyaung between 10 and 19 April, but could not make significant headway, and soon afterwards the Japanese broke into the Shan plateau and forced the Chinese to flee northwards. Of the 95,000 Chinese, only one division managed to escape intact.66 Mandalay fell on 1 May at the same time as Lashio, the southern terminus of the Burma Road.
Of the 42,000 British, Indian and Burmese troops involved in the campaign, no fewer than 29,000 were casualties by the end of May. Nonetheless, Alexander and Slim had managed to get 13,000 unwounded men back to Imphal in Assam province in India, after a 600-mile retreat from Sittang, the longest in British history. ‘They looked like scarecrows,’ Slim said of his troops. ‘But they looked like soldiers, too.’ He also recalled the heart-rending sight of a four-year-old child in Imphal trying to spoon-feed her dead mother from a tin of evaporated milk.
It had been a momentous series of rearguard actions and last-minute escapes, but four-fifths of Burma had fallen to the Japanese, whose casualties numbered only 4,597. This had the effect of further isolating China, which could now be supplied only by the USAAF pilots undertaking most of the 550-mile flights over 16,000-foot Himalayan mountain ranges to Yunnan province, nicknamed the Hump. It was a gruelling mission also known as the Aluminium Trail because of all the planes that had crashed along the way. Nonetheless, by 1945 no fewer than 650,000 tons of supplies had been delivered by that route.
Service in Burma, believed George MacDonald Fraser, who fought in the 17th (Black Cat) Indian Division during the siege of Meiktila and the battle of Pyawbwe, was, with the sole exception of Bomber Command, ‘generally believed to be the worst ticket you could draw in the lottery of active service’.67 Nor was this just because of the nature of the enemy; there were also 15-inch poisonous centipedes, malaria, spiders the size of plates, typhus, jungle sores on wrists and ankles, dysentery and leeches with which to contend. And of course the weather; the 1941–2 Burma Campaign only ended with the monsoon breaking in May. Fraser described a Burmese monsoon in his war memoirs Quartered Safe Out Here:
There are the first huge drops, growing heavier and heavier, and then God opens the sluices and the jets of a million high-pressure hoses are being directed straight down, and the deluge comes with a great roar… after that the earth is under a skin of water which looks as though it’s being churned up by buckshot. Before you know it you are sodden and streaming, the fire’s out, the level in the brew tin is rising visibly, and the whole clearing is a welter of blaspheming men trying to snatch arms and equipment from the streams coursing underfoot.68
Just as the Russians had been saved by the weather outside Moscow in autumn 1941, so were the British by the weather on the Indian–Burmese border the following spring.
‘It’s a horrible World at present,’ Clementine Churchill wrote to her husband on 19 December 1941. ‘Europe over-run by the Nazi hogs, and the Far East by yellow Japanese lice.’69 Once one has discounted the terminology that was typical of her generation, it was true that the Germans and Japanese seemed totally in the ascendant. The Japanese had captured a vast area of approximately 32 million square miles. In six months Japan had acquired 70 per cent of the world’s tin supply and almost all its natural rubber, forcing the Americans to develop synthetic rubber for their vehicles’ tyres.70 Conquest had delivered to the Japanese a higher annual oil production from the Dutch East Indies (7.9 million tonnes) than California and Iran combined; they also took 1.4 million tonnes of coal per annum from Sumatra and Borneo; 1.1 million troy ounces of gold from the Philippines – more than Alaska or any other state except California – as well as manganese and chromium and iron estimated at half a billion tonnes; tin from Thailand, and oil, silver, lead, nickel and copper from Burma, all of which they started exploiting without delay, using slave labour for its extraction. Less tangibly but just as importantly, Japanese morale had soared. The military triumphs since Pearl Harbor had been, in the words of a biographer of MacArthur, ‘as spectacular as any in the history of warfare’.71 But if the Japanese believed, as some in their planning Staff did, that because America had anyway been due to give the Philippines her independence in 1946 she would not strain every nerve to retake them in the meantime, then they had misread the American national character as fundamentally as had Hitler.
Meeting in Washington in December 1941 and January 1942, Roosevelt and Churchill agreed that the policy of Germany First sketched out by them in Newfoundland the previous August would be adhered to. Japan would be allowed breathing-space, but her time would undoubtedly come. The Japanese people were given a taste of what that would involve when on 18 April 1942 sixteen B-25 bombers took off from the aircraft carrier USS Hornet and flew 800 miles to hit Tokyo, Yokohama, Yokosuka, Kobe and Nagoya, earning their commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Jimmy Doolittle, the Congressional Medal of Honor and promotion to brigadier-general. The amount of damage, at least in comparison to later bombing raids on those cities, was admittedly minimal and two captured American pilots were beheaded by the Japanese, but it was a potent augury of what was to come.
When the United States entered the war, she had the world’s seventeenth largest army, numbering 269,023, smaller than that of Romania. She could put only five properly armed, full-strength divisions into the field, at a time when Germany wielded 180.72 The Great Depression had taken a physical toll on American manhood; even though the Army would accept just about anyone sane over 5 feet tall, 105 pounds in weight, possessing twelve or more of his own teeth, and free of flat feet, venereal disease and hernias, no fewer than 40 per cent of citizens failed these basic criteria.73 The Roosevelt Administration had begun rearming in 1940 as far as Congress would allow, passing a $9 billion defence budget for the fiscal year. Yet the attack on Pearl Harbor led to a massive extension of all types of military production, and the long-term results were nothing less than war-winning, especially considering the amount shipped to Britain, Russia, China and elsewhere.
By the end of the war, the USA had built 296,000 aircraft at a cost of $44 billion, 351 million metric tons of aircraft bombs, 88,000 landing craft, 12.5 million rifles and 86,333 tanks. Meanwhile, American shipyards had launched 147 aircraft carriers, 952 warships displacing 14 million tons, and no fewer than 5,200 merchant ships totalling 39 million tons. The total munitions budget from May 1940 to July 1945 alone amounted to $180 billion, or twenty times the entire 1940 defence budget.74 Such was the United States’ financial and economic commitment to victory, quite apart from the 14.9 million people she mobilized in her Army, Army Air Force and Navy. Grossly to oversimplify the contributions made by the three leading members of the Grand Alliance in the Second World War, if Britain had provided the time and Russia the blood necessary to defeat the Axis, it was America that produced the weapons.
PART II
Climacteric
The people will more readily forgive the mistakes made by a Gover
nment – which, as often as not, by the way, escape their notice – than any evidence of hesitancy or lack of assurance… However one lives, whatever one does or undertakes, one is invariably exposed to the danger of making mistakes. And so, what, indeed, would become of the individual and of the community, if those in whom authority was vested were paralysed by fear of a possible error, and refused to take the decisions that were called for?
Adolf Hitler, 15 May 1942 (ed. Trevor-Roper, Hitler’s Table Talk, p. 483)
7
The Everlasting Shame of Mankind
1939–1945
Dawn came on like a betrayer; it seemed as though the new sun rose as an ally of our enemies to assist in our destruction.
Primo Levi, If This Is a Man, written in 19461
Although hotly debated by historians, the exact date when Hitler ordered Heinrich Himmler to destroy the Jewish race in Europe through the industrialized use of the Vernichtungslager (extermination camp) is really almost immaterial. Hitler had always been, in the historian Ian Kershaw’s phrase, ‘the supreme and radical spokesman of an ideological imperative’ to destroy the Jews. An unmistakable threat had been made even before the outbreak of war, on 30 January 1939, when he told the Reichstag:
In the course of my life I have very often been a prophet, and have usually been ridiculed for it. Today I will once more be a prophet; if the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!2
Of course it had been Hitler himself with his invasion of Poland, rather than the mythical Jewish–Bolshevik conspiracy, that had plunged the world into war, but that did not make his warning any the less menacing. He repeated it on several further occasions in public speeches during the war, and was more specific about exterminating the Jews in dozens of private speeches to his Gauleiters and Reichskommissars too. The use of poison gas on Jews had even been mentioned in Mein Kampf in which he had written that in the First World War ‘the sacrifice of millions at the front’ would have been unnecessary if ‘twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas’.3
Hitler and Himmler had no difficulty in recruiting enough anti-Semites to do the work of extermination for them. Anti-Semitism was by no means confined to Germany, but it was particularly virulent there. Although the organized working-class left were not particularly anti-Semitic in Bismarckian and later Weimar Germany, the roots of the phenomenon went deep into much of the rest of German society. The foundation of the League of Anti-Semites in 1879, and the career of the thieving, blackmailing forger (and headmaster) Hermann Ahlwardt, who was elected to the Reichstag in the 1880s on a platform of spewing hatred against Germany’s Jews – who only ever made up 1 per cent of the country’s population – were potent signs of this.4 What an historian has termed ‘the domestication of anti-Semitism’ took place in the 1880s and early 1890s, with novelists such as Julius Langbehn writing about the Jews in terms of ‘poison’, ‘plague’ and ‘vermin’. Richard Wagner’s widow Cosima, who lived until 1930, drew together a group of anti-Semites at Bayreuth, and the writings of the Englishman Houston Stewart Chamberlain at the turn of the century also contributed to the concept of German history as an Aryan-versus-Jewish struggle. If anything it is surprising that it took a full half-century of such propaganda and hatred before Hitler incorporated violence against the Jews into a political platform.
The milieu in which the young Hitler lived in Vienna, as well as the political tracts he read while scraping a living as a hack painter, seems to have drawn him towards a loathing of Jews. ‘Hitler could scarcely ignore the everyday antisemitism of the kind of newspapers that were available in the reading-room of the Men’s Home [the hostel where he lived], and the cheap antisemitic pamphlets he later described reading at this time,’ writes an expert in this field. ‘And his enthusiasm for Wagner, whose operas he went to hundreds of times in this period, can only have strengthened his political views.’5 Yet it was not until Germany’s defeat in 1918 that this anti-Semitism became murderous. The way that Hitler harnessed German anti-Semitism, which was common among small businessmen, shopkeepers, artisans and peasant farmers, was as deft as it was malevolent.
Yet the genocidal killing of lebensunwertes Leben (those unworthy of existence) in Nazi Germany began not with the Jews but with the euthanasia meted out to the mentally and physically disabled, in total around 212,000 Germans and 80,000 others. The mentally ill were also killed in converted shower rooms, which provided the inspiration for what would eventually take place in Auschwitz. It is true that as many as a thousand Jews were murdered in German concentration camps in the six months after the Jewish pogroms of Kristallnacht on the night of 9 November 1938, but it was not until 1939 that the true extent of the Nazis’ plans for the Jewish race in Europe began to become apparent. Fortunately by then over half of the Jewish population of Germany had already emigrated, with 102,200 going to the USA, 63,500 to Argentina, 52,000 to Britain, 33,400 to Palestine, 26,000 to South Africa and 8,600 to Australia.6 Tragically, many also left for places such as Poland, France and the Netherlands that were to afford no long-term safety at all.
With the outbreak of war in September 1939, and especially after their victory over Poland, the Germans adopted a policy of forcing enormous numbers of Jews into ghettos, small urban areas where it was hoped that disease, malnutrition and eventually starvation would destroy them. Over one-third of the population of Warsaw, for example, comprising some 338,000 people, was forced into a ghetto comprising only 2.5 per cent of the area of the city. The penalty for leaving the 300 ghettos and 437 labour camps of the Reich was death, and Judenräte (Jewish elders’ councils) administered them on behalf of the Nazis, on the (often false) basis that they would ameliorate conditions more than the Germans. By August 1941, 5,500 Jews were dying in the Warsaw ghetto every month.7
Another, vaster ghetto – the Vichy-run island of Madagascar – was briefly considered by Hitler in the summer of 1940 as an eventual destination for Europe’s Jews, as was British-owned Uganda and a massive death march into Siberia once the war in the east was won. The unhealthiness of these places – especially given Madagascar’s yellow fever – constituted their principal attraction. When in February 1941 Martin Bormann discussed the practicalities of how to get the Jews to Madagascar, Hitler suggested Robert Ley’s ‘Strength Through Joy’ cruise line, but then expressed concern for the fate of the German crews at the hands of Allied submarines, though of course none for the fate of the passengers.8 Even if they had got through the Royal Navy cordon unscathed, the Madagascar plan, as an historian has pointed out, ‘would still have been another kind of genocide’.9
Instead, by early 1941, when, under Special Action Order 14f13, SS murder squads were sent by Himmler into concentration camps to kill Jews and others whom the Reich considered unworthy of life, an altogether more direct approach was adopted that borrowed the term Sonderbehandlung (special treatment) from the Gestapo, which had used it for extra-judicial killings.10 This policy was applied on a Continental basis at the time of Operation Barbarossa, when four SS Einsatzgruppen (action groups) followed the Wehrmacht into Russia in order to liquidate those considered ‘undesirable’, primarily Jews, Red Army commissars and anyone thought likely to become partisans behind the German lines. They killed out of all proportion to their numbers; together the four comprised only 3,000 people, including clerks, interpreters, teletype and radio operators, and female secretaries.11 By the end of July 1941, Himmler had reinforced this number ten-fold when SS Kommandostab brigades, German police battalions and Baltic and Ukrainian pro-Nazi auxiliary units totalling some 40,000 men complemented the role of the Einsatzgruppen in an orgy of killing that accounted for nearly one million deaths in six months, by many and various methods.12 Far from feeling guilt and shame about this behaviour toward
s innocents, photographs of shootings were sometimes displayed on walls in SS barracks’ messes, from which copies could be ordered.13
In 1964, a former SS member explained how Einsatzkommando No. 8 had gone about its grisly business in Russia twenty-three years previously: ‘At these executions undertaken by shooting squads,’ he told a German regional court,
it would occasionally be arranged for the victims to lie down along the trench so that they could be pushed in easily afterwards. For the later operations, the victims had to lie face down inside the trench and were then shot in the side of the head. During the shootings at Bialystok, Novgorod and Baranowice, the corpses were well covered over, more or less, with sand and chalk before the next batch was brought up. In the later shooting operations, this was only rarely done so that the next batch of victims always had to lie down on the corpses of those who had just been killed before. But even in those cases where the corpses had been covered with sand and chalk, the next victims often saw them, because body parts would frequently be jutting out of the thin layer of sand or earth.
The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War Page 27
