Chapter 62: The Second Great Brothers' War - World War II Part Two : Pearl Harbor to D-Day (1941 - 1944) Part One dealt with the origin of the Second World War and its course up to November 1941. Japanese Power In the Far East, the recently industrialized Japan had gained in confidence since its defeat of the Russians in the 1905 war at Port Arthur on the Chinese coast. Increasingly, Japan saw itself as the regional power - which it was - and in 1936, became embroiled in a war with China over land which saw the Japanese army invade Chinese territorial space. In retaliation, the United States and Britain imposed an oil embargo on Japan in 1936, hoping to starve the mineral-poor island-nation out of further expansionist moves. Japan then signed the anti-Communist anti-Comintern pact, indirectly allying itself with Germany and Italy. Despite this, the Japanese remained neutral in the opening phases of the war; even signing a treaty with the Soviet Union guaranteeing that the latter country would never be subject to attack by Japan. This treaty enabled the Soviets to withdraw a large part of their eastern army to the west where they were instrumental in the Soviet victory at Moscow in December 1941. By 1941, the oil embargo was starting to seriously hurt Japan: as Germany's victory appeared to loom large that year, the Japanese decided that to survive they would need to capture the oil and mineral reserves of South East Asia. The Japanese realized however that the Americans, who had objected to the Japanese-Chinese War, would never peacefully let Japan seize even more territory. However the Japanese also believed that the Americans would not fight for long and soon leave Asia to itself: in this they made a major miscalculation. Pearl Harbor In terms of the Japanese plan, a swift campaign would see their troops take Burma, Malaya, the East Indies, and the Philippines in quick succession: the only thing that stood between them and these possessions was the presence of the US Pacific fleet based at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. It was decided to try and cripple the American fleet with a surprise air attack on the morning of 7 December 1941, in order to prevent the Americans from interfering with the Japanese invasions. The American military intelligence records reveal that the US Army intelligence was aware of the Japanese plans, including the attack on Pearl Harbor itself. A warning was in fact sent to the military base, but mysteriously delayed, only arriving after the attack had started. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor sank 21 ships, including eight battleships; 188 American aircraft were destroyed on the ground and 2,200 American soldiers and sailors were killed. The attack changed public opinion in America overnight: from a strongly anti-participation in the war sentiment, the American public swung solidly behind Roosevelt who led the US Congress into declaring war on Japan.
Germany Declares War on America America had, as outlined above, been all but committing active troops to the war against Germany before Pearl Harbor: now, partly out of an acceptance of the de facto situation and partly out of what was clearly a misplaced loyalty to Japan, Germany then declared war on America on 11 December, an example followed by Italy on the same day. This was the second great error on Hitler's part (the first being his alliance with Mussolini). By declaring war on America, he gave Roosevelt the excuse to commit troops and the full force of American industrial power to the war in Europe. Germany Lost the War in 1941 The events of 1941 were catastrophic for Germany, even though in terms of outright military defeats, the retreat before Moscow had been relatively minor. However, America's entry into the war meant that an overwhelming industrial power, whose production and military hardware output Germany could not hope to match, was now formally ranged against the latter country. In addition to this, the failure to knock the Soviet Union out in 1941 meant that a long war of attrition in the east would continue for years. The Soviet Union, having the greater population and therefore greater reserves, could not do anything but win a war of attrition. Also, the German field code, previously thought unbreakable (developed by a German engineer using a device which randomly selected numbers off a spinning wheel - dubbed the enigma machine) was cracked by a superb British intelligence unit at Bletchley Park, England, with the aid of a huge analogue computer built specially for the purpose. For the greatest part of the war, many of Hitler's commands were known to the Allied intelligence service, very often even before the German commanders to whom they were sent, had received them. Germany therefore never stood a realistic chance of winning the war after December 1941, and it was only with a superhuman effort that it continued fighting until 1945. The War in the Pacific After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese quickly advanced through their target territories: by the end of December 1941, they had occupied British Hong Kong, the Gilbert Islands and the islands of Guam Wake. In addition they had made significant advances into British Burma, Malaya, Borneo, and the Philippines. By February 1942, British Singapore had fallen to the Japanese army, and the next month they occupied the Netherlands East Indies and landed on New Guinea. The main force of American and Philippine armies on the Philippines surrendered in Bataan in April 1942, and the surrender of Corregidor in early May, sealed the fate of that country. The Japanese then launched a bid to seize Port Moresby on the south eastern part of New Guinea: the Americans, being able to read the Japanese signals, sent a naval unit to attack the invasion force. The resultant May 1942 Battle of the Coral Sea, fought exclusively by aircraft launched from aircraft carriers, saw the first Japanese defeat. The American force overwhelmed their Japanese foes and the invasion of Port Moresby was abandoned. The Battle of Midway - Japanese isolation from white technology reveals stagnation One month after the Japanese defeat at the Battle of the Coral Sea, an American air and naval attack on a powerful Japanese fleet consisting of nine battleships and four aircraft carriers, saw all four carriers being sunk. Although the Japanese navy had more carriers, this engagement, known as the Battle of Midway, dealt the Japanese a severe blow. Cut off from the White world's technology, Japan never managed to build a carrier during the war again, placing it at a permanent disadvantage. This isolation of Japan from the White technology centers of Europe and North America would dog Japan in other areas as well: in aircraft design, for example, by 1945, the Japanese air force was still equipped with virtually the same aircraft with which it had started the war. The main fighter they possessed was the Mitsubishi Zero - while this airplane was approximately the equivalent of the average American fighter in mid 1941, by 1945 it had been hopelessly outclassed by the highly developed American P-51 Mustang fighters, not to mention comparison with the European aircraft: the fabulous Spitfires, Hurricanes and Mosquitoes of the British Royal Air Force, and the Me 262 jet aircraft of the Luftwaffe. The stagnation of Japanese technology during the war period, when it was cut off from the White technological centers of America and Europe, tells a story all by itself. Rommel Advances in North Africa
In North Africa, the German expeditionary force had managed to initially drive the British back and had laid siege to the important town of Tobruk. German reinforcements trickled in, and by early December 1941, the British had managed to relieve Tobruk and take the equally important town of Benghazi. It was only in January 1942, that Rommel managed to draw up enough reserves to counter-attack: a successful drive pushed the British back towards the Egyptian border. In June, Tobruk finally fell to the Germans and Rommel pushed on into Egypt itself, only finally running out of steam before the town of El 'Alamein. Rommel had badly overstretched his supply lines with the extent of the advance: this was to cost him dearly. New German Campaign in the East, 1942 As the 1941/1942 Russian winter lifted, the Germans launched a new offensive in the east, hoping once again to knock the Soviets out with a series of dramatic victories. The year started well for the Germans: a battle near Kharkov to the south of Leningrad and an invasion of the Crimea - which saw the city of Sebastopol fall after a tremendous siege - saw another 500,000 Red Army soldiers being taken prisoner. Then on 28 June - virtually to the day a year after the initial invasion, the second great German offensive in the east was launched. In four weeks, they seized vast areas of land, penetrating hundreds of kilometers past Moscow to the south. The German force was then split into two: one unit raced south into the Caucasus to take the oil fields at Groznyy and Baku. By August, the invasion of the Caucasus had penetrated 300 kilometers into Soviet territory, and by early September the northernmost unit had reached the outskirts of the city of Stalingrad on the banks of the Volga River. Once again the Germans seemed poised for total victory: but the sweep south and south east had not seen the massive Soviet surrenders so characteristic of the campaign till then. Soviet losses had been light: all the while German supply lines had been stretched to the point where the sheer distance covered meant that the effective fighting strength of the German Army Groups was nowhere near what they should have been. By this stage, the Soviet Union had also been receiving vast amounts of American material aid: this, combined with the manpower reserves of the Soviet state - three times that of Germany - meant that the Soviets could launch a devastating counter attack: they chose Stalingrad as the most exposed and easterly part of the German lines to do so. Guadalcanal - American Island Hopping Starts
In the Pacific, American troops invaded the island of Guadalcanal in August 1942, starting a series of "island hops" which would characterize the rest of the American war against Japan. The Japanese fought tenaciously for all the territories they had occupied: it took a series of major naval battles and vicious hand to hand fighting before Guadalcanal was cleared of the last Japanese soldiers in February 1943. Battle of El Alamein - tide turns in North Africa In North Africa, the German advance into Egypt was reversed by a brilliantly planned counter attack by the British Eighth Army - which now included South Africans - commanded by general Bernard Montgomery. By 5 November 1942, the Afrika Korps was in retreat out of Egypt. On 8 November 1942, a combined British and American force then landed in Vichy French held Morocco and Algeria, behind the German supply lines which started in Tunisia. Startled, the Germans rushed reinforcements to Tunisia, simultaneously occupying Vichy France in the process. Fighting desperate rearguard actions on two fronts, Rommel managed to halt both the American and British advances in Algeria, most famously at the February 1943 Battle of Kasserine Pass: but the overwhelming numbers of the Allied forces eventually won the day. Advancing through Libya from the East and from Algeria in the west, the Afrika Korps was rolled up and surrendered in May 1943: the Germans and Italians lost 275,000 prisoners as a result. The Soviet Victory of Stalingrad On the Eastern Front, the German advance to the Volga River and into the Caucasus added a staggering 1100 kilometers to the front line. The sheer length of this advance meant that there were not enough German troops to man the entire front, a serious miscalculation on Hitler's part. The Germans then put the armies of their poorly trained and equipped allies into the holes in the front line: these included Rumanian, Italian and Hungarian armies: none of whom had the battle experience or equipment of the German forces which were tied down at the very points of the advance. On 19 November 1942, while the German forces had reached the banks of the Volga River and had occupied most of the city of Stalingrad itself, a huge Soviet attack smashed through the Rumanian forces positioned to the north and south of the main German army: within three days the Soviets had surrounded Stalingrad and the German invaders.
Efforts to relieve the surrounded army failed and Hitler forbade the army to withdraw, as it might have been able to do at the early stages. This order could have only one consequence: on the last day of January 1943, the German forces in Stalingrad were forced to surrender. Some 200,000 men were lost as a result. The Italian, Hungarian and Rumanian armies collapsed and the Germans were forced to retreat from the Caucasus to patch up the holes in the front: virtually all the land gained during the 1942 offensive was lost. Air Raids on German Cities By 1943, the British and Americans had launched a strategy of trying to demoralize the German civilian population by launching 24 hour round the clock incendiary bombing raids: the British by night and the Americans by day. Civilian targets were therefore specially selected, with huge losses for ordinary Germans: in raids on Hamburg in July 1943, 50,000 civilians were killed in four days. The Luftwaffe concentrated its forces over the skies of Germany: flying missions as strenuous as anything undertaken by the British during the Battle of Britain, they managed to halt the major daylight attacks by October 1943. Such serious losses were inflicted on the American bombers that they were grounded until modifications were made to the P-51 Mustang fighter to enable it to escort the American bombing missions: when this happened at the end of 1943, the daylight bombing resumed, with the long range American fighters taking the pressure off the bombers by engaging the Luftwaffe in combat. From then on the Allied bombing campaign of civilian targets in Germany would not cease until the very last days of the war.
The Biggest Single Battle of All Time: Kursk On the Eastern Front, the Germans launched one final attempt to grasp the initiative against the Soviets. This came with the Battle of Kursk, fought from 5 July to 12 July 1943. This was the largest single land battle ever fought in history: more than a million men and over 5000 tanks engaged one another in a seven day encounter. The German offensive attempted to surround a Soviet force in Kursk: the Red Army prepared its defenses well, and on the seventh day the German advance had been halted. Hitler then called off the operation because the Americans and British had landed in Sicily, and he needed to transfer divisions to Italy to shore up that new front. If any Germans had begun to doubt that they could not win the war after Stalingrad, the failure to win the Battle of Kursk must have confirmed it. Mussolini Dismissed from Office On 10 July 1943, at the height of the Battle of Kursk, Allied armies invaded Sicily from North Africa. In five weeks, they cleared the island of all Italian and German troops - although the former started to surrender in large numbers, many being unwilling to partake in what was increasingly looking like a German defeat. The Italian king, Emanuel III, then used his constitutional powers and fired Mussolini from office (the fact that Mussolini could be removed from office in this way belies the often made allegation that he was responsible to no-one) and appointed a new government, which then negotiated a surrender to the Allies on 8 September. Mussolini was placed under arrest and held at a mountain top hotel which had hastily been converted into a prison, while the new Italian government waited for the Allies to tell them what to do with him. The Invasion of Italy The Allies had invaded the Italian mainland itself before that country's government surrendered, occupying a large slice of the tip of Italy north of Naples across the peninsula to the Adriatic Sea. The German forces rushed to Italy from the Eastern Front were battle hardened veterans and by the end of the year had halted the Allied advance 100 kilometers south of Rome, at the Liri River and Monte Casino. An Allied landing of 50,000 men behind the German line at Anzio failed to dislodge the Germans who had in the interim also freed Mussolini and had installed him as leader of a new Italian government. MORE JAPANESE DEFEATS During May 1943, American troops retook the island of Attu in the Aleutians in a hard-fought, three week battle, while a combined American and New Zealand army took the Solomons islands, landing a major beachhead on Bougainville by November. Australians and Americans then captured the East coast of New Guinea; and then several island groups were captured in succession. The Gilbert islands were captured in November 1943: however the Japanese resistance got all the more fanatical with the passing of time. Some 3,000 Americans were killed seizing the 291 acre island of Beito in the Gilbert islands. Cape Gloucester, New Britain, was taken in December 1943; the Admiralty Islands and the Marshall islands in February 1944; and by March 1944, Emirau Island had been retaken. German Retreat IN EAST The Red Army followed up its successful defense of Kursk with an August 1943 offensive in the region against the weakened German forces: by the middle of the month, the Red Army attack had been expanded south and the Germans were firmly in retreat. In mid-September, Hitler ordered the major German army in the south to retreat to the Dnieper River: he had learned from his error at Stalingrad and could not afford to lose another entire army. In the Crimea however, another German army group was surrounded by a renewed Red Army assault south: they were eventually to be devastated and their 150,000 exhausted survivors forced to surrender when that peninsula was completely retaken by the Soviets in May 1944. Advancing steadily westwards, the Red Army then recaptured Kiev, continuously driving the defeated Germans before them. In January 1944, a Soviet offensive raised the siege of Leningrad and drove Army Group North back to the Narva River-Lake Peipus line, where fanatic resistance by a Waffen-SS (fighting SS) army checked the Soviet advance for over six months. By April 1944, virtually all of Soviet territory except Byelorussia had been cleared of German troops: in June 1944, a massive Soviet assault took Byelorussia. Outnumbering the German defenders by ten to one, the victory was swift. By the third week, the Soviets had advanced 300 kilometers, capturing over 57,000 German prisoners. The Red Army stood at the German jump-off points of June 1941, ready to turn the tables in a final push into Eastern Europe. OPERATION OVERLORD - THE ALLIES LAND IN EUROPE In the west, the Americans had been massing a huge army in Britain, ready to launch an invasion of Western Europe and thereby open a third front to engage the already overstretched Germans. The invasion, code named Operation Overlord, took place on 6 June 1944, with dramatic dawn landings on the beaches of Normandy. Taken by surprise (the German high command had been expecting the invasion to take place further north on the French coast) the Germans were pushed back: by this time the skies belonged to the Allies and their air superiority had already virtually won the land battles, as the Germans could not move any troops or armor around without attracting immediate attention from hostile aircraft.
The German commander in the west, Rommel, was himself severely wounded in an Allied aircraft attack upon his personal car: he never fully recovered from his wounds before he was forced to commit suicide after being implicated in a plot to kill Hitler in July 1944. By the end of June, the Allies had managed to land over 850,000 men and 150,000 tanks and other vehicles in Normandy: this, combined with the overwhelming air superiority, made the outcome in the west only a matter of time. The July Plot A group of German officers and civilians concluded in July, that getting rid of Hitler offered the last remaining chance to end the war before it swept onto German soil from two directions. On July 20, they tried to kill him by placing a bomb in his headquarters in East Prussia. The bomb exploded, killing and wounding a number of his senior officers but inflicting only minor injuries on Hitler. Afterwards, the German police hunted down everyone suspected of complicity in the plot and those who were not killed during the suppression of the conspiracy (such as Count Claus von Stauffenberg, the man who planted the bomb) were hanged after spectacular show trials. Millions of still faithful Germans were shocked at the attempt to kill Hitler; he emerged from the assassination attempt more secure in his power than ever before. Part Three: Allied Victory in Europe and Asia (1944 - 1945) Part One: Versailles to Operation Barbarossa All material (c) copyright Ostara Publications, 1999. Re-use for commercial purposes strictly forbidden. |
