The Japanese brought forward 100,000 men for their massive offensive called U-GO. By March the offensive got going with the objective of taking Imphal and Kohima, which were strategic points on the gateway to India. Already by the end of March the road between the two had been cut and at Kohima the picture soon became grim. Kohima was in fact a village perched at 5,000 feet above sea level and with only a garrison of 1,000 British and Commonwealth forces. An epic battle now followed. From 4 April for a period of ten days the Japanese launched ferocious infantry and artillery assaults that left the tiny garrison in a perilous state; it has been described as ‘fighting as desperate as any in recorded history’. In the end the garrison, lacking water and suffering heavy casualties, was reduced to defending an area on one side of a tennis court. However, just in time a relieving Indian army arrived, but it took a further two months before the Japanese retreated.
At the same time Imphal was also besieged with a similar scenario. The Japanese continually mounted determined attacks with almost suicidal intensity, resulting in heavy casualties but with no breakthrough. Towards the end of May the enemy made a final desperate assault from west and south on Imphal, which, however, was repulsed. In total the siege had lasted eighty-eight days with both sides being taken to the limits of endurance. But by 4 July the Japanese commanders ceased the U-GO offensive due to starvation of their troops and a one in two casualty rate. In total Japanese losses amounted to 55,000 men against 12,063 Commonwealth soldiers.
This story would not be complete, however, without including the participation of the Chindits. These were a British ‘Special Force’ created by a maverick commander called Orde Wingate, whose task was guerrilla warfare deep behind enemy lines. Suffering terrible jungle privations, they performed acts of sabotage such as cutting important railway links and attacking enemy positions. This forced the Japanese to divert sizeable forces away from their offensive.
By April 1944 Commonwealth forces had swept the Japanese out of Burma. This victory is one of the forgotten stories of the war, with General Slim very much the unsung hero.
81. THE D-DAY LANDINGS GO BETTER THAN EXPECTED
By the spring of 1944 southern England was already heaving with personnel and vehicles in preparation for the greatest seaborne invasion in history. Apart from the Americans and the British themselves, there were troops from various countries including Canada, France and Poland. Out at sea 138 battleships and as many as 7,000 other vessels, including landing craft, were being mustered. In addition, 10,000 aircraft were being readied for action. In total 6 million personnel would be involved in the whole massive operation.
Heading the whole Allied expedition was the American General Dwight D. Eisenhower. He was the leader of SHAEF (Supreme Allied Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force) and had been selected for the role as he had shown himself adept at soothing inter-Allied tensions. The British and Canadians would land on the Eastern three invasion beaches – Juno for the Canadians, Sword and Gold for the British. The Americans would seize the Utah and Gold beachheads to the west. There were also to be commando parachute drops and glider landings behind German lines in order to secure strategic points and to impede counter-attacks.
Quite by accident the weather provided the Allies with the perfect cover. The landings had been fixed for 5 June as the tides were right at that moment. The Allied troops embarked ready for action only to find out that stormy conditions made a cross-Channel attack impracticable. However, a sudden lull allowed the Allies to still go ahead but with one-day delay. The unexpected improvement in the weather meant surprise was total.
As dawn approached on 6 June the German defenders could see the Allied armada emerge out of the mist on the far horizon. Immediately a huge naval bombardment was unleashed on the enemy defences as a prelude to the landings. Waves of bombers were also sent in. Specially designed landing craft called LCVPs then ferried the troops to the beaches.
The British and Canadians met relatively light resistance and were able to advance inland by as much as 25 miles by the end of the day. On Omaha beach the Americans were presented with the task of scaling a 100-foot escarpment using rockets that fired grappling hooks and attached ropes. Unfortunately, the cliffs also presented the Germans with an excellent defensive position. Bad luck and confusion meant that by the end of the day they had only secured a small strip of land and at the cost of 2,000 men. Utah Beach on the other hand represented the big success story of the day. A major breakthrough meant that within fifteen hours there were as many as 20,000 troops ashore.
Meanwhile, back at Von Rundstedt’s headquarters all was not well. He desperately wanted to release the panzer forces, unleash them at the beachheads and send the Allies back into the sea. Unfortunately, the Führer slept till noon and only by 4 p.m. was permission granted. But it was all too late and the opportunity had passed. Nothing now could stop the relentless Allied build-up of men and materiel.
82. BRITISH TROOPS ENJOYED A NICE CUP OF TEA ON THE NORMANDY BEACHES!
The various national armies certainly had their different characteristics as fighting forces. You might say the Japanese were the most ferocious and fearless. In Europe the Germans were certainly the most professional while the Italians had the reputation for being the least so. This was undoubtedly due to the Italian troops being poorly led and motivated as well as lacking sufficient military hardware. Russian troops, however, fought determinedly for their homeland. The British and American armies provided a striking contrast.
Like the British, the American soldiers were civilian conscripts. To begin with the GIs were green and unprepared for battlefield situations, but they were adaptable and quick to learn. American generals were also quite cavalier about pushing their men forward irrespective of losses in order to achieve a victory. However, like all Western democracies they had a reliance on heavy bombing and artillery bombardments to avoid unnecessary casualties. This inevitably resulted in many civilian losses as happened in Normandy.
The British on the other hand were certainly more cautious than their counterparts. They had been in the war for far longer than the Americans and were experiencing manpower shortages. There was also a fear of failure due to previous reverses at Dunkirk and elsewhere. Perhaps this is why British troops were clearly much better in defence than in attack, as was noted by the Germans themselves.
The British Army also had its own rather bizarre idiosyncrasies. There was, you might say, a kind of trade-union mentality. To begin with, there was an attitude whereby you were expected to keep rigidly to your job; for example, a sapper would not join in the fighting once his particular engineering task had been completed. Likewise, an infantryman would reluctantly help to get a lorry out of difficulties if it was part of his unit.
A further amazing fact is that British troops had regular tea breaks even in the heat of battle on D-Day. It was noted by Canadian observers that hardly had they waded ashore when some of them felt the desperate need to have a quick brew and a smoke even though the beaches were still under fire. The Americans were particularly incensed that on D-Day the British failed to immediately pursue the Germans beyond the beachheads but preferred to settle back for a well-earned cuppa. One Canadian trooper typically joked that the British couldn’t fight for ‘three and a half minutes without tea’.
A final point about the differences between the armies fighting in Europe is that many German units really did believe in fighting to the last man. Most were indoctrinated into thinking that they were fighting for their country’s survival whereas the Allied soldiers were more intent on surviving and getting it over with. Most Allied soldiers, then, did not really believe in holding out in impossible situations and were more likely to surrender after having put up a decent struggle.
This is not to denigrate the amazing courage of those who came ashore on D-Day and who risked their lives to liberate Europe.
83. HITLER UNLEASHES HIS SECRET WEAPONS
By 1942 the war had started to go badly for t
he Nazi regime. The Soviet Union had not collapsed as expected and Germany was facing a long and protracted war on the Eastern front. The British, too, had refused to negotiate and it would only be a matter of time before the Allies teamed up to create a second front. It was now that Hitler gave the go-ahead for research and production of secret weapons, which he hoped could alter the course of the war. Experts in London had begun to hear reports of these weapons, which were being test fired from an isolated coastal area in north-east Germany called Peenemünde. But what was going on there exactly?
From aerial observations the Allies could ascertain that some kind of rocketry was being produced there. The V-1 was in fact a kind of flying bomb with a powerful explosive mix of TNT and ammonium nitrate in the warhead. The V-2 on the other hand was a fearsome rocket with a 1-ton high-explosive payload that could fly to 100,000 feet at 3,600 mph before falling back to earth. Hitler hoped that these devastating weapons, if produced in sufficient quantities, could literally knock Britain out of the war. In August 1943 the British, realising the threat, bombed the site and thereby delayed production but did not destroy the project. As a result of this, however, the Germans moved the site underground inside a mountain in central Germany. They were now able to set about mass-producing their dastardly weapons.
Once the Allies had established themselves on the D-Day beaches Hitler immediately ordered that his V-1s be fired on London. These weapons required special ramps to be set up in order to fire them off. Several of these were now lined up on the northern coast of France facing the British capital. They struck terror into Londoners as their flight was accompanied by a sinister monotonous drone. Once they had reached their target the engines would cut out, signifying immediate danger for all those below. Around 13,000 V-1s were launched against Britain. However, many missed their targets and British pilots developed a technique of flying alongside the V-1s and ‘tipping their wings’ over which immediately sent them spiralling to the ground.
The V-2s were more devastating and even more frightening. However, the first ones were not ready until September 1944. The rockets did not require ramps but could be launched vertically from any chosen site. They would land without warning and their explosive power could demolish a whole street. Hitler had hoped to fire a relentless stream of these rockets onto London from a special massive bunker facility near Calais. Heavy Allied bombing put paid to it, but Hitler’s dream lived on. In the end only 1,359 rockets reached London. In total almost 9,000 British lives were lost to the V-1s and V-2s.
As with all the Nazi miracle weapons, their arrival on the scene could be summed up as ‘too little, too late’.
84. A TALE OF TWO PRIMA DONNAS
The Allies may have successfully consolidated the areas surrounding the initial landing sites but breaking out from here was not so easy. The Germans had clearly lost the immediate opportunity to destroy the enemy but the Führer’s order was not to give an inch. This did deny his army flexibility, but for some weeks the invading armies remained bottled up as a result.
By 7 July the Allied forces in Normandy already numbered a million and with the massive build-up of tanks and other materiel it was only a matter of time before a breakthrough came about. In addition, the Germans were severely hampered by enemy control of the skies.
In some ways the period of the weeks after D-Day is the story of two prima donnas. One of these was General Bernard Montgomery (Monty), who was temporarily in control of all Allied ground forces. He has been described as breathtakingly conceited, opinionated, and egotistical. It is little wonder, then, that the Americans found him difficult to get along with. He had hoped to take Caen (a large French city nearby) within the first day after the landing, but fierce enemy resistance made this impossible. The Germans had placed their best tank forces in and around the city and, after several attempts, he had made little progress. On 7 July the city had been heavily bombed and on 17 July he decided to destroy German positions around the city in a 2,600-bomber raid (pity the poor French!) prior to a huge offensive called Operation Goodwood. This attack had mixed results for although Caen was at last taken, the Germans had been able to knock out nearly 200 British tanks, which the Germans contemptuously called ‘Tommy brewers’. Monty, as always, called it a great success, but the Americans thought otherwise.
The other prima donna was the American General George Patton. His speeches to his troops were often blunt and peppered with profanities – hence the reason he was known as ‘Old Blood and Guts’. Strangely, he believed he might have been a reincarnated general from Roman times or the Napoleonic Wars. Unlike Montgomery, who planned meticulously and was often cautious, Patton believed in bold, swift advances and leading from the front.
Monty claimed his flawed offensive was all part of a master plan to draw German forces towards Caen and away from the American western sector. Until now they, too, had made little progress due to a feature of the French countryside here called the bocage (small fields with dense raised hedges), which the Germans defended well. On 25 July, however, the Americans exploited the new opportunity by launching their own offensive preceded by more carpet bombing. The German front, already overstretched, soon collapsed and they raced through to Avranches on the west coast. Leading the charge was Patton. After a brief diversion into Brittany his forces swept eastwards linking up with the British and Canadians at Falaise and thereby trapping over 50,000 German troops.
The way to Paris was now open and on 25 August it was duly liberated.
85. HITLER HAS A HAIR-RAISING EXPERIENCE
With the war obviously lost some of Hitler’s own generals had decided that the time had come to rid themselves of this incompetent corporal. It would only be a matter of time before the Allied armies from the West and Soviet armies from the East entered the Reich itself. The hope was that a deal could be cut with the Allies if Hitler was removed.
The main problem for any plotters was getting close to the dictator as he was extremely well guarded. However, a certain Colonel Count Claus von Stauffenberg came up with a seemingly fail-safe plan. He had a remarkable appearance as due to the war he had lost an eye, his right hand and two fingers on his left. He was in an ideal situation as he had managed to become Chief of Staff of the Replacement Army in Berlin and regularly attended meetings at Hitler’s headquarters in the ‘Wolf’s Lair’ in east Prussia. The plan (Operation Valkyrie) required Stauffenberg to place a briefcase containing a bomb next to Hitler, then return to Berlin where his fellow conspirators would organise the arrest of the Nazi leadership and set up a provisional government.
On the appointed day, 20 July 1944, he arrived at Hitler’s headquarters for a conference, set the fuse on the bomb in the bathroom and placed the briefcase by a table leg near the Führer. He later left the room on the pretext of making a phone call. Minutes later there was a massive explosion. Stauffenberg was convinced Hitler could not have survived, so he phoned through to his accomplices in Berlin to activate the plan and headed out of the compound.
Hitler had survived, however. He was fortunate indeed that the conference had not been held in the normal concrete bunker but in a wooden building above ground. This meant the power of the blast was dispersed through the windows and thin walls. In addition, the briefcase had, by chance, been moved to the other side of a table leg distancing him from the explosion. Four military personnel died but the Führer staggered out alive with only minor injuries. One of his secretaries noted that he had an almost comical appearance with his hair standing on end and his trousers shredded. Hitler put his survival down to providence and demanded revenge.
The dictator later made contact with Goebbels, the Propaganda Minister, who had his offices in Berlin. With the minister was Major Otto Remer of the Berlin Guards Battalion. Remer was a fanatical Nazi who had been informed that Hitler was dead and was reluctantly following the plotter’s orders. Hitler bellowed down the phone to Remer, ‘Do you recognise my voice? This is Adolf Hitler.’ Immediately Remer now set about arresting the plot
ters themselves. Some of the coup leaders, including Stauffenberg, were unceremoniously marched out into a courtyard and shot. Others later on had a slow grizzly death by hanging on meathooks. In total around 5,000 arrests were made.
Ironically, this assassination attempt strengthened Hitler’s position and his determination to continue the war.
86. FRENCH PILOTS FLY FOR THE USSR
One of the more remarkable stories of the Second World War is that of a French fighter squadron which was sent to fight for the Soviet Union. It was the brainchild of Free French leader Charles de Gaulle, who wanted French servicemen to be involved on all fronts in the war.
In the early years of the war the Soviet Union was in dire straits and only too pleased to receive any assistance. De Gaulle dubbed his squadron the Normandie and they were duly despatched in September 1942. The twelve pilots and forty-seven ground crew travelled by rail and air via Iran and Azerbaijan to their airbase inside Russia. Training was carried out in temperatures of -25 to -30 degrees Celsius, but by March 1943 the unit was operational. They were soon in the thick of the fighting and acquitted themselves well. Although they received reinforcements which made up three more squadrons, they tragically suffered losses of twenty-one pilots within the first six months.
In 1944 Soviet leader Stalin was so pleased with their performance that he added Niemen to their title in memory of the river they had helped to liberate.
At the war’s end the Normandie-Niemen claimed to have downed 273 enemy planes as well as destroying numerous trains and vehicles. Of the nearly 100 pilots who participated forty-two did not return. They received many medals from both France and the Soviet Union and these included the Legion of Honour, the Order of Lenin and Heroes of the Soviet Union.
The Second World War in 100 Facts Page 13
