There is a striking moral contrast here. Whatever the rights or wrongs of the case, the Allies were successful in winning the moral high ground throughout the war. There are clear advantages in moral certainty and moral superiority. The Allied populations fought what they saw as a just war against aggression. They were able to appeal to neutral states to collaborate in a good cause; enthusiasm for war was straightforward; much was justified in the name of a higher ideal, such as the bombing, which provoked a real heart-searching only after the conflict was over. It was impossibly difficult, on the other hand, for the aggressor states to slough off their merited reputation for oppression and violation, although Axis leaders saw their own cause as just in their terms. In every theatre of war the language of liberation and resistance was directed against the Axis. The Japanese were regarded by the west as little more than barbarians. The Gestapo and the SS, even before the lurid revelations at Nuremberg, were bywords for inhumanity. The war was never, in reality, a simple war of good against evil, of civilisation against Dark Age, but the Allies’ ability to make it seem so simplified their war aims and cemented a domestic and international consensus in their favour.
At the core of this moral certitude was a shared hatred of Hitler and Hitlerism. The Allies were never in any doubt that Japan and Italy were the lesser threat to their way of life. They were united in a moral revulsion at everything that the new German Reich and its leader stood for. As a moral crusade the war aims were reduced to one single ambition, to rid the world of Hitler. Even before the war and the Holocaust, Roosevelt regarded Hitler as ‘pure, unadulterated evil’.23 More than any other contemporary leader, Hitler was personified as the dark force that threatened to take civilisation by storm and drag it into the abyss. Why he aroused such strong passions, and still does, a half-century later, is not as easy a question to answer as it appears. But it is worth asking because they were passions that held together the Alliance when it threatened to dissolve in the face of bitter military or political disputes. They were passions that stimulated the Allies to the greatest of efforts (including the search for atomic weapons), and they explain the Allies unyielding commitment to unconditional surrender.
If we are to understand why the Allies won we must recognise that material explanations, of resources, of technology, of fighting men, are not enough on their own. There is a moral dimension to warfare inseparable from any understanding of the outcome. Allied populations were sustained by the simple morality of defending themselves against unprovoked assault; Axis populations knew in their hearts that they had been led into campaigns of violence which the rest of the world deplored. If the Axis states had won, the qualms of their populations would not have mattered. But the moral ambiguity underlying that violence surely explains something about why they did not. When Franz von Papen, one time Chancellor of Germany before Hitler came to power, heard of the outbreak of war in September 1939 he told his secretary: ‘Mark my words; this war is the worst crime and the greatest madness that Hitler and his clique have ever committed. Germany can never win this war. Nothing will be left but ruins.’24 Even Hermann Göring, Hitler’s right-hand man and confidant in 1939, greeted the news of war with agitated alarm: ‘then God help Germany!’ Confidence in victory, misplaced though it proved in the short-term, was much in evidence on the other side. As the conflict loomed late in August 1939, General Pownall, head of British Army Intelligence, scribbled exultantly in his diary: ‘… we must have a war. We can’t lose it!’25
* * *
In the end both these views were borne out, though not before the world dissolved in flames; 55 million people lost their lives, and destruction was wrought on a scale almost unimaginable fifty years later. Out of the ruins of war a new political and economic order was forged which is now, in its turn, in the throes of a painful transformation. The threats to peace are far less than they were in the 1940s, when Hitler was poised with his allies on the very brink of world conquest, but none the less there are dangers to confront in a nuclear world which have not disappeared with the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War. Asking ‘why the Allies won’ is done not in some spirit of modern triumphalism – though the explanation is a tale of triumph over adversity – but in a spirit of genuine historical inquiry, in order to be precise about the explanations that matter, and may matter once again in the century to come.
2 Japanese expansion 1931–42
2
LITTLE SHIPS AND LONELY
AIRCRAFT …
The Battle for the Seas
‘It was the job of the little ships and
lonely aircraft, a hard, long and patient job,
dreary and unpublicised, against two cunning
enemies – the U-boat and the cruel sea.’
Captain G. H. Roberts, Cambridge, 1950
* * *
ON A DULL, misty August morning in 1941 the British destroyer Oribi steamed into the great naval base at Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands, at the northern extreme of the British Isles. Her unusual cargo, disgorged into ferry boats, was transferred to the very latest British battleship, the Prince of Wales, a mountain of a ship by comparison, sporting ten 14-inch guns. The consignment began with the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, who had left London in great secrecy the day before on board a sealed train. Behind him came a cavalcade of senior officers and officials, followed by a box of grouse, a world globe, and enviably unrationed quantities of sugar, beef and butter. The battleship moved slowly out of the harbour, shepherded by three escort destroyers. In faltering sunlight the ships set off north-west, taking Churchill to the first Anglo-American summit talks on the far side of the Atlantic.1
The invitation to meet had been Roosevelt’s, but Churchill jumped at the opportunity. The two men had only met briefly years before; Churchill was uncharacteristically nervous about this second encounter. ‘I wonder if he will like me,’ Churchill asked the American envoy Averell Harriman before the first session.2 There were solid grounds for anxiety. Churchill desperately needed American help for Britain’s war effort; a close personal relationship would do a great deal to cement an unspoken alliance between the two states. All Churchill could do was wait in excited anticipation during the five-day passage. For security reasons there could be no contact with the outside world. The battleship dipped and zigzagged through unseasonally heavy weather, ever-conscious of the threat of German submarines. Churchill behaved ‘like a boy let out of school’, temporarily absolved of the heavy burdens of office. He struck a nautical note. Abandoning the luxurious but noisy admiral’s cabin prepared for him, he spent the whole voyage up on the bridge, sleeping in the admiral’s sea-cabin, close to the action. He read Captain Hornblower R.N.; in the evening the mess cinema showed Lady Hamilton, the story of Nelson’s mistress.3
Though trained as a cavalryman, Churchill’s links with the sea had deep roots. In the Great War he was First Lord of the Admiralty until forced to resign over the fiasco at Gallipoli. When war broke out again in September 1939 he was recalled to the same office and searched restlessly for naval action. He supervised yet another catastrophe, the failed Norwegian campaign in April 1940, though this time disaster was followed by unexpected promotion when he succeeded Chamberlain early in May. As Prime Minister the naval war absorbed a great deal of his time. When he began his five-year correspondence with Roosevelt he coyly signed himself ‘Former Naval Person’. Roosevelt shared his enthusiasm for sea warfare. He too was a former naval person, Assistant Secretary for the Navy from 1913 to 1920. As President he kept in close, almost daily, touch with naval affairs. Sea power exercised a special fascination for him throughout the war. He too rode to their meeting in a modern warship.
On the morning of 9 August the Prince of Wales reached her destination concealed from the world, at Placentia Bay, on the south Newfoundland coast. The British flotilla was early: clocks had been adjusted to the wrong time. Churchill rose before the ship’s company, and nervously paced the deck. At 7.30 in the mo
rning the American cruiser Augusta came into view, with the President seated on the deck. Amidst the cheering and band-playing Churchill was ferried across the bay to the American vessel. Protocol dictated that Churchill, a chief minister, should first pay his respects to Roosevelt, a head of state. The two men greeted each other with great cordiality, and then got down to business.
There was much to discuss. The situation for both states was critical. German armies were now deep in Russian territory, within striking distance of Leningrad and Moscow. In the Far East Japan had recently occupied French Indo-China and now threatened the whole of south-east Asia and the southern Pacific. Since 1939 Britain had lost over two thousand ships totalling almost 8 million tons to enemy submarines, aircraft and merchant raiders. The Atlantic run, which Churchill had just experienced first-hand, was Britain’s lifeline. By 1941 a stream of vital foodstuffs, machinery and raw materials flowed from the New World, including most of Britain’s oil and aluminium. Without these supplies Britain’s war effort in 1941 could not have been sustained. Both men knew how much control of the sea mattered to the democracies. Churchill told Roosevelt in December 1940 that shipping was ‘the crunch of the whole war’; in May 1941 Roosevelt suggested to Churchill that the war ‘would be decided in the Atlantic’ and if Hitler could not win there ‘he cannot win anywhere in the world in the end’.4 At Placentia Bay naval power was uppermost in both their minds. Roosevelt agreed to give any help short of war in the Atlantic struggle. Both leaders agreed to warn Japan in the sternest tones to encroach no further into the Pacific. Both agreed to do what they could to ship supplies to the beleaguered Soviet Union. Roosevelt could report the onset of American rearmament on the largest scale, but he could not promise belligerency.
For public consumption the two leaders concocted a common declaration of principle, the Atlantic Charter, for which the meeting became famous. The document was not a treaty; neither party was bound by its terms. It was a very public statement of democratic solidarity, expressed in recognisably Churchillian prose, defining the hopes of both men for a ‘better future for the world’ through democratic politics, national self-determination and open trade. The Charter was testament to how well the two men got on despite their many differences in political outlook or interests. Churchill need have had no worries. ‘The President is intrigued and likes him enormously,’ wrote Harriman to his daughter in London.5 The two men parted with genuine warmth. In grey damp weather the Prince of Wales slipped from her moorings late in the afternoon of 12 August for a second Atlantic run. Three days later the battleship overtook a convoy of 72 merchant ships steaming eastwards. Churchill had never seen a convoy and was overcome with excitement and sentiment. The signal flags for ‘church’ and ‘hill’ were flown from his ship. The crews aboard the armada of tankers, liners and tramp ships cheered with passion and Churchill waved and cheered in return. The thirteen columns of ships with funnels smoking ‘looked almost like a town’. Churchill then asked the captain to go round again, and the battleship performed a wide arc back through the convoy before pulling away. Churchill stood on the deck and watched until the last smoke disappeared behind the horizon.6
The Prince of Wales made only one more voyage. Japan ignored the warning sent after the Atlantic meeting, and on 7 December attacked the American Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor and British possessions in the Far East. Churchill, confident that battleships could still defend themselves against air attack, sent the Prince of Wales and Repulse to Singapore. Both were caught by Japanese torpedo bombers in the South China Sea on 9 December and sunk. Admiral Phillips and Captain Leach stood at salute on the bridge of the Prince of Wales as it disappeared into the sea. ‘In all the war’, Churchill later wrote, ‘I never received a more direct shock.’ After the Japanese attacks there were no major British or American warships in the whole of the Pacific or Indian Oceans. ‘Over all this vast expanse of waters’, he continued, ‘Japan was supreme, and we everywhere were weak and naked.’7
* * *
The sea mattered to Churchill and Roosevelt because the states they led were, first and foremost, naval powers. The United States possessed the largest navy in the world in 1941, but her army was ranked eighteenth, a tiny skeleton force. The British had a navy in 1939 second to none among the powers then at war, but could muster no more than two fully equipped divisions to send to France when war came. Though both states built up large well-equipped armies by the war’s end, they fought the large part of the conflict as a naval war – blockading their enemies, securing foreign supplies, and fighting small local engagements, supplied and protected from the sea. Axis victories ensured that Britain and America could bring their enemy to battle in only one way, by securing the sea-lanes for amphibious assault.
For both Britain and the United States naval power was a geographical necessity, though for different reasons. British naval strategy was chiefly concerned with protecting overseas trade and safeguarding a far-flung colonial empire. Britain purchased half her food and two-thirds of her raw materials from abroad. Without this flow of supplies homewards, and the flood of manufactured exports sent in return, Britain might have remained what she was until the eighteenth century, an impoverished, underdeveloped island off the European mainland. Without a powerful navy Britain would not have been able to protect her trade, or build the network of imperial possessions that nourished and guarded it. Without the navy Britain would not for centuries have been blessed with the means to defend the home islands from assault and the luxury of being able to fight on other people’s soil at times and places of her own choosing. There were drawbacks. British strategy was global rather than local. The seamless cloth of ocean made for a vast, unmasterable field of conflict. Britain was manifestly vulnerable to the interruption of her sea traffic by states with pretensions to regional maritime power, and even, in the worst case, to the blockade of the home islands. In the fifty years before the Second World War these dangers had become first apparent, then real. The rise of American sea power challenged British maritime primacy, though not dangerously so. The growth of German naval power, though blunted by defeat in the Great War, was regarded as much more dangerous, particularly when it revived again in the 1930s, and even more so when Germany began to drift closer to Italy and Japan, both of whom had large modern navies in menacing proximity to Britain’s chief imperial interests. By 1939 Britain simply could not afford a navy of a size sufficient to ensure global security. Yet she entered the war in September 1939 reliant for her very survival on the ability of her navy to defend the arteries of trade and to shepherd troops and supplies worldwide.8
America was much less vulnerable than Britain. Geographically remote from potential enemies, the United States possessed abundant food supplies and extravagant natural resources. Foreign trade made her richer, but it was not a lifeline. Neither did America have a far-flung empire on which she relied for men and supplies. Her few overseas possessions, in the Pacific and the Caribbean, were sentry posts to the western hemisphere and not stepping stones to world empire. The American navy was not a means to other ends but was mustered purely for the armed defence of the New World. Ever since 1822, when President James Monroe announced his famous Doctrine for the Americas, the United States navy assumed unsolicited responsibility for the defence of the New World against outside military interference. Its vital strategic function brought it the lion’s share of Congressional appropriations for defence. In the crisis-ridden international order of the 1930s it was the navy’s task to insulate America from the dangers of war, east and west. If it ever became necessary to commit American forces to battle, as Roosevelt realised might be the case sooner than most, the existence of a powerful navy ensured that the fighting would be overseas in distant theatres, provisioned and protected by American ships. Without naval power American intervention in World War II could not have been contemplated, even less attempted.
When war broke out in Europe in September 1939 America was still more than two years away from belligerenc
y. For most of that period the British Royal Navy confronted the European Axis states across the global battlefield with its own limited resources. The outlook at first was set fair. Britain had French naval power to call upon in the Mediterranean, the critical supply line to the imperial east. The German navy was tiny. Britain and France between them had 22 battleships and 83 cruisers; Germany possessed 3 small ‘pocket’ battleships and 8 cruisers.9 The German navy knew that there was no prospect of fighting any kind of face-to-face battle with the enemy fleet. Neither were prospects for submarine warfare against British trade much better. The German submarine arm had only eighteen operational boats in the Atlantic, against an enemy who began at once to convoy all shipping and to provide escort vessels equipped and trained for anti-submarine warfare. The German navy’s Commander-in-Chief, Grossadmiral Erich Raeder, regarded the outcome as a foregone conclusion, hoping only that his forces would know ‘how to die gallantly’ when the time came.10
Why the Allies Won Page 5
