Chapter 62: The Second Great Brothers' War - World War II Part Three: ALLIED VICTORY IN EUROPE AND ASIA Part One dealt with the origin of the Second World War and its course up to November 1941. Part Two dealt with the entry of Japan and the USA into the war, and the course of events until mid 1944. France Cleared of Germans By 25 July, the Allied armies proceeded to break out of the Normandy beachheads they had established. Their overwhelming material superiority was only challenged in part by the limited number of new German super tanks, the Tiger and Panther models. These new weapons were too little, too late; by late August, the Germans had been driven across the Seine. On 25 August, the Americans, in conjunction with General Charles de Gaulle's Free French and Resistance forces, occupied Paris after the retreating Germans had declared it an open city to prevent it being damaged (the same courtesy had been extended by the French in 1940 - the result was that Paris was virtually completely unharmed during the war).
Southern France Invaded On 15 August, a combined American and Free French force landed on the southern coast of France east of Marseilles. Meeting virtually no resistance, they pushed north along the valley of the Rhone River, making contact with the American troops in the north in mid-September. British troops seized Antwerp in early September and American troops entered German territory for the first time on 11 September 1944. Germans Stand and Fight The crossing into German territory served as a bolt to the German army: they turned and fought against the overwhelming odds, halting the Allied advance on the Meuse and lower Rhine rivers and on the German border with France. There the front would stalemate for several months. In June 1944, the first of the German secret weapons, the V1 flying bomb, had started to fall on England; by September the first intercontinental ballistic missiles, the V2, had started falling on England as well. While there was some measure of defense against the V1 (it could be heard coming and it could be shot down or overturned by specially prepared and lightened British aircraft) there was no defense against the supersonic V2: its engine could only be heard after it had exploded on its target. By November, the Germans had also deployed their first jet fighter squadrons: the ME 262 made mincemeat of all its opponents, from bombers through to fighters, and was nearly invincible as nothing the Allies had was fast enough to shoot it down. It was however available in too few numbers to affect the outcome of the war. The Warsaw Uprising By July 1944, the Red Army had reached the Baltic coast near Riga and cut off the German Army Group North from the other German forces. Pushing westwards, the Red Army reached the Vistula River deep in Poland at the same time. The closeness of the Red Army prompted the Polish resistance to launch an uprising in Warsaw against the Germans: this was suppressed after an uneven battle, although it is often claimed that the Red Army could have pushed on and invaded Warsaw if they wanted to. Why this was not done has never been satisfactorily answered. The Soviets argued that they were busy with offensives elsewhere: this was certainly true. An offensive between the Carpathian Mountains and the Black Sea in August resulted in Rumania's surrender. Bulgaria followed suit in early September and Finland the same month. Soviet troops took the Yugoslavian capital Belgrade in mid-October. By November, the Soviet Army had reached Budapest in Hungary, where fanatical last ditch German and Hungarian resistance held them off for weeks. Rome Falls By May 1944, the Allies finally managed to break the German line at the famous Battle of Monte Casino (where a monastery had been reduced to rubble by Allied aircraft, ironically providing an ideal defensive position for the Germans who held off waves of successive attacks for months). On 23 May, the besieged Allied troops at the Anzio beachhead finally managed to break out as the Germans withdrew: the Allies then entered Rome, an open city since June 4. After taking Ancona and Florence in August, the Allies were stopped by desperate German resistance for three months from overrunning all of Northern Italy. The Battle of the Philippine Sea In the Far East, the Allied island hopping continued: one after the other, Japanese strongholds fell, sometimes with horrendous costs to the Allies. Then the June 1944 Battle of the Philippine Sea saw the Japanese technological stagnation dramatically exposed. On 19 June, in what was called the Marianas Turkey Shoot, advanced American aircraft shot down 219 of the now antiquated 326 Japanese aircraft sent against them. While the air battle was going on, American submarines sank all but one of Japan's remaining aircraft carriers: utterly defeated, the devastated Japanese navy limped back home with just 35 aircraft left. In the entire battle, the Americans lost 26 aircraft. Japanese technological stagnation as a result of being cut off from the White west, was the major cause for the scale of the defeat. In October 1944, the Japanese were driven out of the Philippines: this saw the Japanese navy fighting its last major battle at the three day engagement known as the Battle for Leyte Gulf. The Japanese lost their last giant battleship in the Leyte Gulf and 25 other important ships: the Americans lost seven ships. Bombers Over Japan The American army captured the small but strategically vital islands of Saipan, Tinian and Guam by August 1944. From these islands, American B-29 bombers could reach Japan with ease: the regular bombing of Japan began in November 1944. It was from these island airfields that the decisive act of war against Japan would be launched, one that saved the American army from having to physically invade Japan itself: the atom bomb raids. The Battle of the Bulge In the west, the Germans launched one last offensive: taking advantage of bad weather which grounded the Allied air force, a regrouped armored column attacked through the Ardennes forest on 16 December 1944. Taken by surprise, large numbers of Americans were captured: although a strong American pocket remained at the Belgian town of Bastogne which refused to surrender.
Despite making an 80 kilometer dent in the Allied lines (hence the name of the battle) the German effort was doomed after 23 December, when the bad weather broke and the Allied aircraft took to the skies, decimating the German land forces. The area captured by the Germans in the Battle of the Bulge was only finally retaken by the Allies at the end of January 1945, causing the advance into Germany to be postponed until February of that year. Crossing the Rhine To cross into Germany required the seizure of the all important bridges over the Rhine and Ruhr: to this end the Allies developed a plan to seize two bridges in southern Holland: one at Njimigen and the other at Arnhem. The first objective was reached, but the second was a disaster: the Allied paratroopers landed virtually on top of a Panzer division and were decimated, the survivors eventually escaping in dribs and drabs back to the Allied lines. This, combined with the German offensive in the Ardennes, put off the final Allied invasion of German territory until 1945. In February 1945, the first large American army crossed the Ruhr: in early March, American troops captured an intact bridge over the Rhine at Remagen. By the middle of March the Americans had occupied German territory east of the Rhine between Bonn and Koblenz and by the end of the month another American force had landed south of Mainz. The Ruhr industrial valley was encircled by American troops by the beginning of April; while British troops crossed the Weser River, halfway between the Rhine and the Elbe rivers, on 5 April. On 11 April, the Americans reached the Elbe near Magdeburg, only 120 kilometers from Berlin.
The Final Soviet Advance By February 1945 the Red Army had driven the by now exhausted and shattered German forces to the Oder River, 60 kilometers from Berlin where Hitler had chosen to await the end, despite the existence of a much larger piece of German held territory in the south, centered around the Bavarian Alps. Germany Crushed - HITLER COMMITS SUICIDE In Italy, a renewed Allied offensive saw the Po River valley falling in April 1945; and on 16 April the Red Army began its drive on Berlin. On 20 April, the Americans captured Nuremberg, and by 24 April the Red Army had completely encircled Berlin, cutting it off from the rest of the shrinking Germany. On 25 April, the Soviet and American troops met up at Torgau on the Elbe River northeast of Leipzig, and Germany was split into two parts. By the end of April, virtually all German resistance in the west had collapsed: but in the east, the Germans fought even harder than before against the approaching Communists, exacting a toll of over 100,000 Soviet casualties in the Battle of Berlin. When the German held part of Berlin was down to a few blocks in the center of the city, Hitler committed suicide by shooting himself on 30 April 1945. His body, and that of his long time girl friend and in the last day of their lives, his wife, Eva Braun (who had committed suicide by taking cyanide), was then burned to cinders in a shell hole in the garden of the chancellor' s office. Fragments of Hitler's skull were found by Soviet troops and were taken back to Moscow, where they are still held to this day in the Russian state archives, along with other personal effects belonging to the Nazi leader. German Surrender As his last official act, Hitler nominated the head of the German navy, Admiral Karl Doenitz, as his successor. Faced with a hopeless military situation, Doenitz organized an immediate surrender, which was signed on 7 May 1945. By then, the German forces in Italy had already surrendered, as had those in Holland, north Germany, and Denmark. The Divine Wind Japan also faced certain defeat by the time of Germany's surrender. Nonetheless, they refused to even consider giving up. Instead, hundreds of volunteers came forward to pilot the aging and otherwise useless Zero fighters as manned flying bombs to smash them into the approaching American invasion forces. These suicide pilots, known as kamikazes ("Divine Wind") were to inflict serious losses on the American forces before Japan's final surrender: for example, during the fighting for Luzon in the Philippines in January 1945, kamikaze pilots sunk 17 American warships and damaged a further 15. WAR IN Burma At the height of their land invasion of Burma, Japanese troops had penetrated right to the eastern border of India itself. British troops then launched a counter attack: fighting under the most appalling conditions, often struggling with the jungle animals and disease as much as with the Japanese, the British soldiers in Burma slowly but surely fought the Japanese into a retreat. By the time of the end of the war, this "forgotten army" had virtually expelled the Japanese from Burma. Fighting was often hand to hand: the British soldier's greatest fear was to be taken prisoner by the Japanese, who had a host of cruel tortures and slave-labor prisoner-of-war camps set up: one of the more famous of these built a bridge over the River Kwai, the subject of which later became a book and famous film. Iwo Jima and Okinawa The first piece of Japanese territory proper was invaded on 19 February: the tiny barren island of Iwo Jima took three and a half weeks and 6,000 dead Americans before it was captured: the Japanese garrison resisted fanatically. On 1 April, the second piece of Japanese land, Okinawa, was invaded. The northern part of the island was occupied in two weeks, but the Japanese resisted furiously in the south and were only finally subdued on 21 June. The lessons learned from Iwo Jima and Okinawa were not lost on the American Command: tiny pieces of land were defended literally to the last man, women and child. On Iwo Jima, virtually no Japanese soldiers had been taken alive; on Okinawa hundreds of soldiers and civilians had jumped off cliffs rather than surrender. In addition, kamikaze planes had sunk 15 naval vessels and damaged 200 others off Okinawa alone. It had cost thousands of American lives to seize two minuscule pieces of territory: Japanese resistance would only get even more fanatical if the main Japanese islands were invaded. Hiroshima and Nagasaki To save American lives, it was decided to attack Japan with the newly developed atom bomb and force it to surrender without a physical invasion. The first bomb was exploded in a test at Alamogordo, New Mexico, on 16 July 1945, and two more bombs were built in quick order. The first was dropped over Hiroshima on 6 August, the other over Nagasaki on 9 August. The effect was devastating: in Hiroshima some 70,000 civilians died, and in Nagasaki, some 39,000 Japanese civilians died.
While these are staggering figures, perspective is put on the use of atomic bomb attacks on Japan by comparing them with the Allied fire bombing of the German city of Dresden. On one single night's bombing of the German city, a week before the war ended, 135,000 German civilians were killed: more than all the Japanese killed in both the atom bombings put together. The Japanese Surrender On 8 August, the stunned Japanese government found itself invaded in Manchuria by the Soviet Union: this was however a minor worry compared to the possibility of further atom bomb attacks. On 14 August, Japan announced its surrender. Unlike Germany, the terms of surrender were not unconditional: Japan was allowed to keep its emperor. Japan itself was placed under American occupation, with General Douglas MacArthur being appointed military governor. The Nuremberg Trials Once the war was over, the surviving leaders of Germany and Japan were put on trial by the Allies for what was called "War Crimes". While some of the charges were based on wartime atrocities committed by the accused - any atrocities committed by the victors were unsurprisingly ignored - the main defendants at Nuremberg faced the chief charge of "waging aggressive war." Most of the defendants, who included Luftwaffe head Herman Goering, Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, Minister of Production Albert Speer, former Hitler deputy Rudolf Hess (who had been in British captivity since 1941 after flying off to a friend in Britain to try and make peace) and many general staff members, were all found guilty and sentenced to death or long periods of imprisonment.
The trials themselves broke many legal principles, most notably the principle of retro-active prosecution: which holds that a person cannot be convicted of a crime if the act in question was not a crime at the time that it was committed. In other words, if an act is declared illegal from date 10, then any acts similar to that committed before date 10 cannot be classed as crimes because the law declaring it illegal was not in existence at the time. This was the case with the main charge of "waging aggressive war" - in 1939, there was no legal international precedent or law forbidding the "waging of war": if there was, every nation in the world would have been called up before an international court on this charge, as they all had waged war at some time or another. The most shocking failure of the Nuremberg trials was however the inclusion of representatives of the Soviet Union on the panel of judges, rather than in the accused box. The Soviet Union had also "waged aggressive war" against Poland, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia before it was attacked by Germany. No mention was ever made of the Soviet attacks at the trials, and the inclusion of a Soviet judge on the bench made the entire process a mockery and clearly showed the trials up for what they were: an act of political revenge and nothing else. Even in many of the atrocity charges there were glaring inconsistencies: the massacre of 11,000 Polish army officers at Katyn, carried out by members of the Soviet military, was pinned on the German door at the trials, with the Katyn massacre specifically included in the charge sheet against lower echelon German defendants. The Nuremberg trials - and the Tokyo trials in which similar politically-motivated charges were trumped up against the Japanese leaders - were a disgrace to the institution of international law. Racial Implications of the War The Second World War was yet another catastrophe for Europe with millions of people being killed directly or indirectly in the ultimately pointless conflict. Direct Military Losses are estimated at the following:
In addition to these military losses, millions of civilians were killed, either in bombings, cross fire or starvation. Estimates of civilian losses by these means are put at:
Finally Europe's Jewish population was badly dented by a deliberate Nazi policy of rounding them up and putting them into concentration camps.
Above left: German "black propaganda" - a fake 1944 stamp printed in Germany, almost the same as a British stamp then in circulation, only adjusted to replace the British king's head with that of Joseph Stalin, Soviet leader. The Communist and Star of David emblems were inserted as was the slogan : "This is a Jewsh War". The word "Jewsh" was deliberately misspelled to lay emphasis on the words '"Jews". The stamps were then circulated into British society through sympathizers in an attempt to spread propaganda. Above right: British "black propaganda" - a parody stamp produced by the British and circulated in Germany, depicting Hitler's head as a death head. 'Futches Reich' means 'Ruined Reich' a word play on 'Deutsches Reich'. The effect of the Jewish factor was a primary reason for the outbreak of the war and lay behind much of the Allies' double standards when reacting to German and Soviet aggression at the beginning of the war. For this reason it is first necessary to look at the position of the European Jews in some detail before discussing the German state itself: this is done in the following chapter. All material (c) copyright Ostara Publications, 1999. Re-use for commercial purposes strictly forbidden. |
