The Second World War

by John Keegan

  In the aftermath of Okinawa, its scale suddenly threatened to swell exponentially. The surrender of Germany meant that all of the ninety divisions the United States had mobilised and most of the British Empire’s sixty could be made available for the invasion of Japan, together with whatever proportion of the Red Army Stalin decided to allot as soon as he declared war (as he had undertaken to do, once Germany was defeated, at Tehran in November 1943). According to the Okinawan experience, however, even numbers such as these could not guarantee that the defeat of the Japanese on their home territory would be quick or cheap. Okinawa and Japan were similar in terrain, but Japan offered a defender a vast succession of ridge, mountain and forest positions from which to hold an invader at bay. The prospect appalled the United States’ decision-makers. Admiral William Leahy, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, pointed out to President Truman at a meeting on 18 June that the army and Marine divisions had suffered 35 per cent casualties on Okinawa, that a similar percentage could be expected in an attack on Kyushu, the first of the Japanese home islands selected for invasion, and that, with 767,000 men committed to the operation, the toll of dead and wounded would therefore amount to 268,000, or about as many battle deaths as the United States had suffered throughout the world on all fronts so far.

  Truman’s comment was that he ‘hoped there was a possibility of preventing an Okinawa from one end of Japan to the other’. The Joint Chiefs’ plan, worked out in Washington at the end of May 1945, called for an invasion of Kyushu (codenamed Olympic) in the autumn of 1945 and an assault on the main island of Honshu (codenamed Coronet) in March 1946. It had been agreed with difficulty. The army, whose view had been largely fixed by MacArthur, insisted that only an invasion would definitively finish the war. The navy, to which the US Army Air Force commanders lent unspoken support, argued that the seizure of bases on the coast of China from which close-range strategic air bombardment could be mounted would reduce Japanese resistance without the need to risk American lives in an amphibious landing. Strategic bombing, however, had thus far inflicted little damage on the home islands and had had insignificant effect upon its government’s will to war. MacArthur’s view therefore prevailed.

  The destruction of Japan’s cities

  Before the Joint Chiefs of Staff issued their directive for Olympic and Coronet, however, the strategic bombing campaign had taken a different turn. Like the British bomber chiefs in 1942, the Americans had been constrained to abandon the belief – which they had held much more dogmatically than the British – that the bomber was a precision tool and to accept that it had to be used as a blunt instrument. They had been driven to that change of doctrine by the success of the Japanese (in imitation of Speer’s programme in Germany in 1943-4) in dispersing production of weapon components away from the main industrial centres to new factories which could not be easily located or hit by the Twentieth Air Force. In February 1945 General Curtis LeMay arrived in the Marianas, which had become the main base for the Superfortresses of XXI Bomber Command, to implement new bombing tactics. Targets were to be subjected not to precision high-level daylight strikes by high explosive but to low-level drenching by incendiary bombs at night, exactly the method by which ‘Bomber’ Harris had made his ‘thousand-bomber raids’ an instrument of terror in 1942 and created firestorms in one German city after another. The incendiary bomb LeMay’s aircrew used, however, being filled with jellified petrol, was a far more efficient agent of conflagration than the RAF’s; more important, Japan’s flimsy wood-and-paper cities burned far more easily than European stone and brick.

  On 9 March Bomber Command attacked Tokyo with 325 aircraft armed exclusively with incendiaries, flying at low altitude under cover of darkness. In a few minutes of bombing the city centre took fire and by morning 16 square miles had been consumed; 267,000 buildings burned to the ground, and the temperature in the heart of the firestorm caused the water to boil in the city’s canals. The casualty list recorded 89,000 dead, half as large again as the number of injured survivors treated in the city’s hospitals. Losses to the bombers were below 2 per cent and were to decline as the campaign gathered force. LeMay’s command soon rose in strength to 600 aircraft and brought one city after another under attack; by mid-June Japan’s five other largest industrial centres had been devastated – Nagoya, Kobe, Osaka, Yokohama and Kawasaki – 260,000 people had been killed, 2 million buildings destroyed and between 9 and 13 million people made homeless.

  The destruction continued relentlessly, at virtually no loss to the American bomber crews but at appalling cost to Japan; by July 60 per cent of the ground area of the country’s sixty larger cities and towns had been burnt out. As MacArthur and other military hardheads had argued, however, the devastation did not seem to deflect the Japanese government from its commitment to continuing the war. In early April, after failing to draw China into a separate peace, Koiso had been replaced as Prime Minister by a moderate figurehead, the seventy-eight-year-old Admiral Kantaro Suzuki; Tojo, though a deposed Prime Minister, nevertheless retained a veto over cabinet decisions through his standing in the army, and he and other militarists were determined to fight it out to the end. This determination exacted sacrifices which even Hitler had not demanded of the Germans in the closing months of the war. The food ration was reduced below the 1500 calories necessary to support life, and more than a million people were set to grubbing up pine roots from which a form of aviation fuel could be distilled. On the economic front, reported a cabinet committee instructed by Suzuki to examine the situation, the steel and chemical industries were on the point of collapse, only a million tons of shipping remained afloat, insufficient to sustain movement between the home islands, and the railway system would shortly cease to function. Still no one dared speak of peace. Tentative openings made in May through the Japanese legation in Switzerland by the American representative, Alan Dulles, were met with silence; over 400 people were arrested in Japan during 1945 on the mere suspicion of favouring negotiation.

  The search for revolutionary weapons

  In midsummer the American government began both to lose patience at Japan’s intransigence and to yield to the temptation to end the war in a unique, spectacular and incontestably decisive way. They were aware through Magic intercepts that the Suzuki cabinet, like Koiso’s before it, was pursuing backdoor negotiations with the Russians, whom it hoped would act as mediators; they were also aware that a principal sticking-point in Japan’s attitude to ending the war was the ‘unconditional surrender’ pronouncement of 1943, which all loyal Japanese recognised as a threat to the imperial system. However, since the Russians mediated in no way at all, and since the Potsdam conference following the surrender of Germany indicated that unconditional surrender need not extend to the emperor’s deposition, America’s willingness to wait attenuated during the summer. On 26 July the Potsdam Proclamation was broadcast to Japan, threatening ‘the utter destruction of the Japanese homeland’ unless the imperial government offered its unconditional surrender. Since 16 July President Truman had known that ‘utter destruction’ lay within the United States’ power, for on that day the first atomic weapon had been successfully detonated at Alamagordo in the New Mexico desert. On 21 July, while the Potsdam meeting was in progress, he and Churchill agreed in principle that it should be used. On 25 July he informed Stalin that America had ‘a new weapon of unusually destructive force’. Next day the order was issued to General Carl Spaatz, the commander of the Strategic Air Forces, to ‘deliver its first special bomb as soon as weather will permit visual bombing after about 3 August 1945 on one of the targets: Hiroshima, Kokura, Niigata and Nagasaki’. The attempt to bring the Second World War to an end by the use of a revolutionary super-weapon had been decided.

  The search for a revolutionary weapon was one of the most immediate and persistent outcomes of the industrialisation of war in the mid-nineteenth century, and both a logical and an inevitable extension of the revolution in war which preceded it. Until the fifteenth century, warfar
e was a muscular activity, and decision on the battlefield went to the side which could sustain muscular effort longer than the other. The invention of gunpowder changed that; by allowing energy to be stored in chemical form, it made the weak man the equal of the strong and transferred advantage in war to the side which possessed superior intellectual quality and morale. The first attempts to draw on the products of industrialisation for military purpose therefore took the form of multiplying the power of chemical energy by accelerating the rate at which projectiles could be discharged; breech-loading and magazine rifles and then the machine-gun were the result. Their purpose was to nullify morale and intellectual quality by weight of metal.

  When human resilience and adaptability demonstrated that the fighting man of the industrial age could survive even quantum leaps in firepower, military inventors changed their tack. They began to apply their inventiveness not to the problem of killing or disabling warriors en masse but to attacking and destroying the protective systems in which they took shelter – on land, fortifications; at sea, armoured ships. Human ingenuity had sought a means of destroying ships by stealth even before the industrial age, and the idea of the submarine and the torpedo had found primitive forms in sailing days. Between 1877 and 1897 both the torpedo and the submarine emerged as practicable weapons and did indeed transform the nature of naval warfare. The tank, which appeared in 1916, promised a comparable transformation of land warfare.

  The promise, however, proved illusory. Tank and submarine, though they appeared to be strategic weapons in essence, were more or less quickly revealed to be tactical; that is to say, they were susceptible to counter-measures at the point of encounter and they struck at the products, not the structure, of an enemy’s war-making system. However great the human losses and material damage they inflicted at the battlefront, the enemy, as long as he could replace those losses and repair that damage from his internal resources, might continue to wage war. The production of tanks and submarines, as those committed to battle were destroyed and had to be replaced from current output, itself became a charge on industrial capacity and therefore merely raised instead of reducing the price of victory.

  This perception was one of the most important military legacies of the First World War. It was to lead to the formulation of the theory of strategic bombing. In the years after the war, both the British and the American air forces were converted to the belief that the heavy bomber, by carrying the high explosive which had proved so ineffectual against trench systems to the industrial heartland of the enemy, could quickly and finally destroy his means of making war and so win victory without the need for armies or navies to fight ‘decisive’ battles at all. The British further persuaded themselves that if such a ‘strategic bombing’ campaign were carried out at night it would spare the bombing force appreciable loss, while the Americans independently arrived at the conclusion advanced by the Italian dogmatist, Giulio Douhet, that a large, heavily armed day-bomber could be made self-defending: the Flying Fortress was the result.

  As we have seen, the experience of war proved the theory of strategic bombing to be ill founded. A major cause of its failure lay in the realisation of one of the war’s greatest scientific endeavours, the development of radar. Invented by the British before the outbreak, in 1940 it provided an effective though static chain of early-warning stations which allowed Fighter Command to be directed quickly and accurately against incoming Luftwaffe raids during the Battle of Britain. The British invention of the cavitron valve, which became operational in 1942, enabled radar to function at ‘centimetric’ wavelengths on a directional arc. These developments, which greatly reduced the bulk of radar sets, increased the definition of the image received and allowed the operator to search a chosen sector of air space, meant that effective search radars could be mounted in night-fighters; a further application of the cavitron valve was the miniaturised radar proximity fuse, introduced in August 1944, which exploded an anti-aircraft shell at a range lethal to an aircraft. It was used with considerable success against the V-1s. When ‘centimetric’ radar was developed by the Germans, however, they began to inflict a heavy toll on Bomber Command during its night raids on the Reich; had they also discovered the secret of miniaturising radar fusing for anti-aircraft shells, the American formations bombing by daylight would have suffered proportionately.

  By 1944 it had become clear to all but the dogmatists in Bomber Command and the US Eighth Air Force that strategic bombing would not win the war in Europe (just as in mid-1945 it seemed clear that the fire-bombing of the home islands would not beat Japan). The strategic bomber, like the submarine and the tank, had been revealed to be a weapon susceptible to counter-measures, a system that required expensive ‘dedicated’ defences to protect it and a victim of attritional losses which imposed a heavy and continuing charge on war production. If there was such a thing as a revolutionary war-winning weapon, the search for it lay in another direction.

  Hitler’s ‘revenge weapons’

  In one field of the search, the Germans had made greater progress than any of the other combatants. They were on the point of deploying a ballistic missile. German pilotless weapon research had an extended history, much of it intertwined with the life stories of two individuals, Werner von Braun and Walter Dornberger. Von Braun was a professional technologist whose youthful enthusiasm for the idea of space travel had translated itself by the late 1920s into practical experimentation with rockets. Dornberger was a regular gunner officer who had served with the heavy artillery in the First World War and in 1930 was charged with rocket development at the Army Weapons Office. Circumstances brought the two into contact and in 1932 they began to experiment together with rocket firings. Braun supplied the technical expertise, Dornberger defined the practical criteria a successful rocket would have to meet. ‘I had been a heavy gunner,’ he wrote. ‘Gunnery’s highest achievement to date had been the huge Paris Gun’, which fired ‘a 21-cm shell with about 25 lb of high explosive about 80 miles. My idea of a first big rocket was something that would send a ton of high explosive over 160 miles.’ He also ‘stipulated a number of military requirements, among others that for every 1000 feet of range a deviation of only 2 or 3 feet [from the chosen impact point] was acceptable.’ He finally ‘limited the size of the rocket by insisting that we must be able to transport it intact by road and that it must not exceed the maximum width laid down for road vehicles.’

  Dornberger’s prescription revealed both the institutional roots of his thinking and, at the same time, an astonishing prescience of the rocket’s potential. His insistence on road transportability went back to the characteristics of the 305-mm and 420-mm guns with which the German artillery had devastated the Belgian forts in 1914; it ensured that future German ballistic missiles would be weapons of the artillery arm. His requirements for range, accuracy and size of warhead, on the other hand, cast German rocket research far into the future. What he demanded, in effect, was a prototype for the transportable ballistic missile which has become the principal strategic weapon of the superpowers in the late twentieth century. When, later, he was to insist that the successful production model (known to the Germans as the A-4, to the Allies as the V-2) should move on a vehicle (the Meillerwagen) which was also its launcher, he ensured the appearance of the ‘transporter-erector’ which in our own time has made the Soviet SS-20 and the American Pershing 2 instruments of strategic power so ‘survivable’ that their existence has produced the world’s first ever categorical agreement of disarmament between leading military powers.

  The German army’s decision to invest in rocket development was motivated by the provisions of the Versailles treaty, which forbade it to possess heavy artillery but did not proscribe rockets. By 1937, however, when work on the V-2’s predecessors was sufficiently advanced for Braun and Dornberger to have secured funds to establish a testing station on the Baltic island of Peenemünde, Hitler had already breached the Versailles treaty at every point. The rocket team’s current preoccupation was
to sustain funding to continue research. The army favoured the programme, since the V-2 was to be an army weapon, and provided finance. In October 1942 a successful test firing was staged, in December Speer, the Armaments Minister, authorised mass production, and on 7 July 1943 Hitler, after viewing a film of a missile launch, designated it ‘the decisive weapon of the war’ and announced that ‘whatever labour and materials [Braun and Dornberger] need must be supplied instantly.’

  By 1943, however, the British were already aware that the German ballistic missile programme was well advanced. Warning from a still-unidentified German wellwisher, received in Norway in 1940 and known as the ‘Oslo Report’, had alerted London to the existence of a missile research programme. The trail had then gone cold, but had revived when new evidence suggested in December 1942 that a ballistic missile was under development in Germany and, in April 1943, that the Luftwaffe was also experimenting with a pilotless aircraft. Both clues came from ‘Humint’ (human intelligence, or the word of agents’ contacts), one of its few successes of the war. By June both German programmes had been identified as centring on Peenemünde, where in fact the Luftwaffe was developing the FZG-76 (V-1 flying-bomb) at one end of the island while Dornberger and Braun worked on the V-2 rocket at the other. On 29 June Churchill personally ordered Bomber Command to take Peenemünde under heavy attack and on the night of 16/17 August it was attacked by 330 aircraft and devastated.

  The Peenemünde raid so gravely set back the German pilotless weapons programme that it was not until 12 June 1944 that the first flying-bomb landed in Britain; 8 September was the date of the first successful V-2 rocket attack. By then the Luftwaffe’s 155 Regiment had been driven back from the positions whence its V-1s could reach England; as a result, out of the 35,000 produced, only 9000 were fired against England and of these over 4000 were destroyed by anti-aircraft fire or fighter attack. The V-2s were never fired from their chosen launch sites in northern France; from Holland they could just reach London, on which 1300 impacted, and after October an equal number were directed at Antwerp, which by then was the Allied Liberation Armies’ main logistic base.