What might well have happened, given the inaccuracy of even so-called precision bombing – only 34 per cent of bombs dropped by the USAAF fell within a thousand feet of their targets – was that the gas chambers would have survived whereas thousands of innocents in the nearby huts would have perished. For this reason, some Jewish groups in Britain and America specifically opposed the bombing of the camps.75 The decision not to attack was thus not a war crime, or a culpable moral failure – as some allege – nor even the dismal failure of the imagination that it might seem to modern eyes. For the past three decades aerial photographs of Auschwitz have been published which were taken by an Allied air crew on 25 August 1944 and which clearly show, once enlarged, the positions of the gas chambers and crematoria and even a line of people making their way to their deaths. It is therefore widely assumed that the Allied air forces could have destroyed the facilities with relative ease. In fact, however, these photographs were printed from the negatives for the first time only in 1978, and during the war the technology was not available to enlarge the photographs to the extent that the group of people would have been identifiable. The leading expert on Second World War photo-intelligence, Colonel Roy M. Stanley, has stated that ‘This 1978 photo analysis contains an understanding and correlation of what was happening on the ground that would have been impossible for a 1945-vintage interpreter.’76
The supply of the Warsaw Uprising by air had been costly to the RAF: in twenty-two missions over six weeks to mid-August 1944, thirty-one out of 181 aircraft had failed to return. The British Foreign Office, as one of its officials minuted, was opposed to operations that ‘would cost British lives and aircraft to no purpose’.77 Various Foreign Office officials had reason to be ashamed of their notes on files, such as that of Armine Dew, who wrote of the Red Army’s treatment of Romanian Jews in September 1944: ‘In my opinion a disproportionate amount of the time of the Office is wasted on dealing with these wailing Jews.’78 Nor was that an isolated example.
The American Assistant Secretary of War, John McCloy, rejected an appeal to bomb the gas chambers and crematoria on the grounds that it ‘could only be executed by the diversion of considerable air support essential to the success of our forces now engaged in decisive operations elsewhere and would in any case be of such doubtful efficacy that it would not warrant the use of our resources’. Far less convincingly, McCloy also argued that any such action ‘might provoke even more vindictive action by the Germans’.79 The synthetic-oil and -rubber plant at Monowitz was bombed by the Fifteenth US Air Force on 20 August 1944, from Foggia in southern Italy, with the loss of only one out of 127 Flying Fortresses. Much damage was done, and the morale of the prisoners of Auschwitz–Birkenau was boosted, for as one of them, Arie Hassenberg, put it: ‘We thought, they know all about us, they are making preparations to free us, we might escape, some of us might get out, some of us might survive.’ He also declared: ‘To see a killed German; that was why we enjoyed the bombing.’80
Rationality might have dictated that, once the war looked as if it might be lost, the rail, military and human resources put into the Holocaust ought to have been immediately redirected to the military effort instead, and the Jews who could have been forced into contributing to the war effort ought to have been put to work rather than exterminated. Yet a quite separate, entirely Nazi, rationale argued that the worsening situation on the Eastern Front required if anything an intensification of the Holocaust, rather than a winding down. ‘Whipping up anti-Jewish frenzy was, in Hitler’s imagination,’ writes Saul Friedländer, ‘one of the best ways to hasten the falling apart of the enemy alliance,’ because in his diseased imagination ‘the Jews were the hidden link that kept Capitalism and Bolshevism together’. 81 Furthermore, if Fortress Europe was about to be invaded, the supposed domestic danger posed by the Jews needed to be eradicated as soon as possible.
Speaking at the Sportpalast on 18 February 1943, only days after Field Marshal Paulus’ capitulation at Stalingrad, perhaps Germany’s greatest single defeat of the war, Goebbels made a Freudian slip during his harangue against the supposed ‘Jewish liquidation squads’ that he claimed were stationed ‘behind the onrushing Russian divisions’ (a neat inversion of what the Einsatzgruppen had done behind the onrushing German divisions). ‘Germany in any case has no intention of bowing to this threat,’ Goebbels told his enormous, carefully chosen and wildly appreciative audience, ‘but means to counter it in time and if necessary with the complete and radical extermin— [Ausrott—]’ – he then corrected himself and said instead – ‘elimination [Ausschaltung]’. This was greeted with applause, shouts of ‘Out with the Jews’ and laughter.82 Broadcast live to tens of millions of Germans, the speech was Goebbels’ best known, and was delivered under a huge banner stating: ‘Totaler Krieg = Kürzester Krieg’ (Total war = shortest war). Across the Reich, the man closest to Hitler could be heard hastily correcting ‘Ausrottung’ to ‘Ausschaltung’. Germans took note.
Because Hitler did not spell out his thinking in regard to the relative importance of the Holocaust and victory on the Eastern Front, we can only surmise. It is not impossible that the reason that the Holocaust was intensified when defeat seemed likely, rather than halted as logic might imply – albeit to be reinstated after victory was won – goes to the heart of Hitler’s view of his own place in history. Even if Germany lost the war, he believed, he would always be the man responsible for the complete extermination of the Jewish race in Europe. That would be his legacy to the Volk, even if the Allies managed to defeat the Reich. Putting his dream of a Judenfrei (Jew-free) world even before the need for victory was a measure of Hitler’s fanaticism. He knew that German Jews had fought bravely for the Kaiser in the Great War, winning many Iron Crosses and producing impressive officers. Indeed it was largely down to the efforts of the Jewish adjutant of his own regiment, Second Lieutenant Hugo Gutman, that he received his own Iron Cross First Class. A Hitler who in 1933 had ditched anti-Semitism once he had come to power might have been able to harness millions of the brightest and the best-educated Europeans to the German war effort by 1939, including its award-winning nuclear scientists. A conservative nationalist German might possibly have achieved that, but Hitler’s Nazism meant that he never wanted to.
8
Five Minutes at Midway
June 1942–October 1944
Five minutes! Who would have dreamed that the tide of battle would shift completely in that amount of time?
Captain Mitsuo Fuchida and Commander Masatake Okumiya of the Imperial Japanese Navy, 19551
With the important exception of Burma, the next stage in the Allies’ war against Japan can be told largely in terms of aircraft carriers, which became the key weapon in deciding whether the Japanese could retain the sprawling empire they had won in the six months after Pearl Harbor. Although the monsoon had halted the Japanese advance towards India in May 1942 – at least for the time being – it was their catastrophic loss of no fewer than four aircraft carriers at the battle of Midway (to the Americans’ one) the following month that evened up the odds between Axis and Allies. Midway ended any hope of Japan – whose carrier production lagged far behind that of the United States – continuing her whirlwind progression in the east. Captain Mitsuo Fuchida and Commander Masatake Okumiya subtitled their 1955 history of Midway The Battle that Doomed Japan; nor was this unacceptable hyperbole.
The indecisive battle of the Coral Sea, fought 800 miles north-east of Queensland on 7 and 8 May 1942, had resulted in the sinking of the Japanese light carrier Shoho, which capsized after being hit by thirteen bombs, seven torpedoes and a crashing dive-bomber, and of the American carrier Lexington, which exploded two hours after the last Japanese plane left, the victim of a spark from a generator that was left running accidentally, with fires ignited by petrol fumes from tanks ruptured in the attack. The evacuation of the Lexington was orderly and 2,735 crew members – over 90 per cent – survived. Two heavy Japanese carriers, the Shokaku and Zuikaku, were damaged,
and so the plans to take Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea – from where Australia could be threatened – had to be abandoned. (Lieutenant James Powers won a posthumous Congressional Medal of Honor for bombing the Shokaku’s deck from only 300 feet, which along with his Dauntless dive-bomber comrades’ efforts meant that aircraft could not land on it. As there was not enough room on Zuikaku for both carriers’ aircraft, Japanese planes had to be physically manhandled over the side into the sea to make room. In all, 564 American sailors and airmen died and sixty-six aircraft were lost, compared to 1,074 Japanese and seventy-seven aircraft.2 Crucially, the US carrier Yorktown had only been damaged in the battle rather than sunk, as Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the commander of the Japanese Combined Fleet, believed. He therefore assumed that his invasion of the atoll of Midway would not be opposed by American air power, and assembled 165 warships, the most powerful armada ever seen in the history of the Pacific Ocean, to take the island. With Midway in Japanese hands, Pearl Harbor could be bombed, and along with the Aleutian Islands, another part of the ‘ribbon defence’ of the Southern Resources Area could be protected.
Intelligence was key to the American victory at Midway, both the accurate and timely information that Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, the Commander-in-Chief in the Pacific, was given by his code-breakers, and the halting and inaccurate reports that Admirals Yamamoto and Nagumo got from their intelligence officers, who did not have the luxury of reading their enemy’s signals. To make matters worse the Japanese failed to pool what little information they did have, partly because Nagumo’s radio transmitter was weaker than Yamamoto’s and partly because of the need for radio silence.3 Nimitz knew that Nagumo had four aircraft carriers in service after the battle of the Coral Sea, with one damaged there and another stripped of aircraft, whereas Yamamoto did not know that Rear-Admiral Frank ‘Jack’ Fletcher had three carriers – Enterprise, Hornet and Yorktown – which by late May 1942 were stationed north of Midway. (It was estimated that it would take three months to repair the damage done to Yorktown in the Coral Sea; it was miraculously achieved in forty-eight hours, a testament to American engineering efficiency and professional devotion.) In a sense the three islets of Midway, though only 2 square miles in size, themselves counted as a fourth – unsinkable – American aircraft carrier, with its complement of 109 planes.
Yamamoto split his invading force into three, which was an error as the squadrons were too far apart to support one another. As well as Nagumo’s First Air Fleet, there was a Midway Occupation Force carrying 51,000 men, and his own main force comprising one carrier, four cruisers, seven battleships, twelve destroyers and eighteen submarines. As well as taking Midway, Yamamoto was hoping to lure the American Pacific Fleet into a massive engagement that it could not win. Nagumo’s First Air Fleet approached the atoll under heavy cloud cover, masking it from Midway’s reconnaissance planes, and was able to launch a dawn attack with 108 of its 201 planes. This was successful, although the runway was not attacked, as the Japanese wanted to use it as soon as they had captured the atoll. The ninety-three planes in the reserve were fitted with bombs and torpedoes in case of an appearance by the fifty-vessel American fleet. Through what Fuchida and Okumiya call ‘a fantastic chapter of accidents and blunders’, this was to be decisive.4
Having finally spotted Nagumo’s fleet at 07.00 hours, Rear-Admiral Raymond Spruance, who commanded the Enterprise and Hornet battle group, sent 116 planes into an all-out attack from 175 miles away. (As in the battle of the Coral Sea, neither side’s ships even came within sight of each other, in this new form of naval engagement.) At exactly the same time, Nagumo, having heard reports from Midway that another wave of attacks was needed, but nothing about the American fleet, which he had every reason to believe had sailed off north to deal with the diversionary attack against the Aleutian Islands, ordered his ninety-three reserve planes to be refitted with incendiary and fragmentation bombs. The change-over would take an hour to carry out, yet only fifteen minutes into the job a reconnaissance plane reported ten American ships to the north-east. ‘For a mauvais quart d’heure he pondered the problem, and then decided to re-arm his reserve aircraft with torpedoes. Order; counter-order; disorder.’5 Meanwhile, his first wave of bombers and fighters were on their way back from Midway. It was a pivotal moment in the war in the Pacific. With half of his reserve planes loaded with ordnance to attack Midway and the other half armed to attack the American carriers, Nagumo took the fateful decision to land his Midway first-strike planes before launching the others.
While the flight crews on the carriers were therefore struggling to detach the incendiary and fragmentation bombs and reattach the torpedoes, at 09.05 Nagumo turned 90 degrees east-north-east to engage the American task force. This had the effect of allowing him to evade, for the moment, the US dive-bombers and fighters from the Hornet, which had launched her planes at 07.00. Yorktown, to the east, launched half her planes at 07.30. Fifteen Devastator torpedo-bombers from the Hornet did spot Nagumo’s force, and went straight into the attack. Much is made of the fanatical courage of the Japanese kamikaze (divine wind) airmen later on in the war, but to have flown unescorted into the anti-aircraft guns and Zeke fighters of Nagumo’s fleet took tremendous bravery, and only one of the fifteen survived, with no hits scored. The torpedo-bombers of the Enterprise (nicknamed ‘the big E’) and Yorktown were also badly mauled without any positive results, and at 10.24 hours the attack was broken off with only eight Devastators still in the air out of an initial attacking force of forty-one. ‘For about one hundred seconds the Japanese were certain they had won the battle of Midway,’ wrote the US Navy’s official historian Rear-Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison, ‘and the war.’6
Yet at 10.26, before the Zekes had time to regain altitude after devastating the Devastators, thirty-seven dive-bombers from the Enterprise appeared directly above Nagumo’s four carriers. Cloud cover at 3,000 feet masked the American approach, but below that the visibility was ideal for the attackers. The hero of Pearl Harbor, Mitsuo Fuchida, believed that because the Japanese fighters had no time to regain altitude while they were shooting the US torpedo planes out of the sky, ‘It may be said that the Americans’ dive-bombers’ success was made possible by the earlier martyrdom of their torpedo planes.’7 Soon after the Enterprise dive-bombers attacked, planes from first the Hornet and then the Yorktown arrived. Thousands of feet below, the crews were still changing the bombers’ armaments, and so were caught with the maximum amount of ordnance in the most exposed place possible. The carriers’ decks were strewn with bombs, fuel and planes, with little stowed away, so when Enterprise’s dive-bombers hit the result was carnage. On board Nagumo’s flagship, the Akagi, Zero fighters were just beginning to be launched. Fuchida, who could not fly at Midway because he had recently had his appendix out, and who was then wounded during the attack, recalled that:
[as] the first Zero fighter gathered speed and whizzed off the deck, at that instant a lookout screamed ‘Hell-divers!’ I looked up to see three black 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 at me!8
Akagi took two direct hits, the first on the aft rim of the amidship lift, the second on the port side of the flight deck, the effects of which might have been controlled if the deck had not been wing-tip to wing-tip full of burning planes loaded with exploding torpedoes. ‘The entire hangar area was a blazing inferno,’ wrote Fuchida, ‘and the flames moved swiftly towards the bridge.’ By 10.46 Nagumo – who had made one of the worst decisions in military history – was persuaded to transfer his flag to the light cruiser Nagara, which he did with reluctance. Below decks on the Akagi, survivors had to use hand-pumps and:
Fire-fighting parties, wearing gas masks, carried cumbersome pieces of equipment and fought the flames courageously. But e
very explosion overhead penetrated to the deck below, injuring men and interrupting their desperate efforts. Stepping over fallen comrades, another damage-control party would dash in to continue the struggle, only to be mown down by the next explosion.9
Not a single man from the engine room escaped from this Dantean hell. The ship was abandoned at 18.00 hours, except for Captain Taijiro Aoki, who lashed himself to an anchor ‘to await the end’.
‘We had been caught flat-footed in the most vulnerable position possible,’ wrote Fuchida and Okimiya, ‘decks loaded with planes armed and fuelled for an attack.’10 Meanwhile, the aircraft carrier Kaga slipped beneath the waves at 19.25, with 800 of her crew dead, and another carrier, Soryu, which had suffered three hits from thirteen planes in three minutes, sank at 21.13, with her captain Ryusaku Yanagimoto singing the ‘Kimigayo’, the Japanese national anthem. Nagumo ordered the fourth carrier, Hiryu, to sail off north-eastwards and send forty planes to attack Yorktown and, although only seven made it through the American defences, they were able, with ‘skill, gallantry and determination’, to land three bombs on her. Later on Yorktown was also hit by two torpedoes from planes returning from Midway, forcing the listing carrier to be taken in tow and set off back to Pearl Harbor and Fletcher to transfer to the cruiser Astoria, with Spruance taking over tactical command.11 Hiryu was not going to escape retribution, however, for at 17.00 hours twenty-four planes from Enterprise and Yorktown sank her with four hits. On the way back to Pearl Harbor, Yorktown and an escorting destroyer were sunk by the Japanese submarine I-168, the only American vessels that were lost in the entire battle.
Midway between Japan and mainland America geographically, and coming almost midway during the Second World War (in the thirty-third of a seventy-one-month war), the battle wrecked the three-phase Japanese plan for Asian domination midway through its second phase. It was true that the two minuscule Aleutian Islands of Attu and Kiska had been captured by the northern diversionary force, but because of Allied code-breaking, that attack had failed to divert American forces away from Midway. The battle of Midway deserves its attribution as one of the most decisive battles of history, because against the American losses of one aircraft carrier and a destroyer, 307 men killed and 132 planes lost, the Japanese lost four aircraft carriers, a heavy cruiser, 3,500 men – including many experienced pilots – and 275 planes.12 It was true that after Midway the Japanese still had five aircraft carriers in commission, with six being built or repaired, but by contrast the Americans had three large carriers, and no fewer than thirteen under construction. ‘Until late 1943,’ records an historian of the Pacific War, ‘the US Pacific Fleet never possessed more than four aircraft carriers. Thereafter, however, American strength soared, while that of Japan shrank.’13 The United States could now attack the perimeters of the Southern Resources Area at will. ‘Midway was the most crucial battle of the Pacific War,’ Nimitz was to conclude, ‘the engagement that made everything else possible.’14
The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War Page 31
