A World at Arms (105 page)

In the interim, the Japanese ran the empire they had won in a manner which did two apparently contradictory things simultaneously. On the one hand, they exploited the area and its people ruthlessly and viciously, showing the population that there could be colonial masters far worse than the Europeans and Americans whose rule they had resented.
²⁰⁰
But this, and the actual destruction of warfare, passed relatively quickly. It was the nominal independence which the Japanese proclaimed in order to obtain more cooperation from the local population and to discourage resistance which appealed to people even as it left them unhappy with their new overlords.
²⁰¹

It was in this context that the people in the Japanese occupied areas, unlike those in German-occupied Europe, came to look at the wartime collaborators as patriots rather than traitors. It was easy to forget in places where the Europeans attempted to restore the colonial system of a by–gone era that a Japanese victory, attained with the help of such collaborators, would have meant a worse colonialism than they had experienced before.
²⁰²
The Koreans, who had suffered from Japanese colonialism longer than anyone else, would regain their independence
only to be divided into two contending states by their liberators, while the others who had been under Japanese control for a few bitter but short years looked forward to a new and independent future for themselves, often under the very leaders, like Soekarno in the Dutch East Indies, who had come to prominence as collaborators in wartime.

^a
I was personally told by one former German army colonel that this was his reason for declining a request that he transfer.

^b
There is very little substantial literature on the NSV. A factor in this is that most of its records, at least at the national level, appear to be lost. See Herwart Vorländer, “NS-Volkswohlfahrt und Winterhilfswerk des deutschen Volkes,”
Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte
34, No.3 (July 1986), 341-8o, author’s
Die NSV. Darstellung und Dokumentation einer nationalsozialistischen Organisation
(Boppard: Boldt, 1988).

^c
The post-World War II discussion of the oath question has barely begun to deal with these matters. See Karl Dietrich Bracher, Wolfgang Sauer and Gerhard Schulz,
Die nationalsozialistische Machtergreifung
(Cologne; Westdeutscher Verlag, 1962), pp. 766–67, 778–79.

^d
There were major strikes in the north Italian industrial cities of Turin and Milan in March 1943; nothing of the sort took place in wartime Germany.

^e
This was the first government led by Alcide de Gasperi. The Christian Democrats provided Italy’s Prime Ministers until 1981. For a helpful account, see Pietro Scoppola, “Alcide de Gasperi: Sein Weg zur Macht,” in Hans Woller (ed.),
Italian und die Grossmiichte,
1943-
1949 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1988), pp. 207–40.

^f
it is instructive that a careful study of the Dieppe fiasco of August 1942 explains the launching of that costly operation largely in terms of the military–political crisis of 1942. Villa,
Unauthorized Action:
chap. 4
.

^g
A look through the volumes of his history of World War II provides an interesting confirmation of this observation.

^h
Lord Louis Mountbatten, who presided over this process as Viceroy, would presumably never have been appointed to that post had he not earlier been in charge of the Southeast Asia Command (SEAC). The man whose appointment the United States had blocked, Air Chief Marshal Sir Sholto Douglas, instead succeeded Montgomery as British military commander in occupied Germany. Without American intervention, their roles might well have been reversed.

ⁱ
When I was in Japan as a soldier in the post-war occupation, foreign residents in Japan during the war told me that it was the appearance of Allied warships visible off the coast in the summer of 1945 that had finally persuaded many of their Japanese neighbors that the war really was lost.

^j
The subject of Red Army soldiers’ behavior as they entered Germany is a very difficult one. There is considerable anecdotal evidence that the anger of many soldiers was stimulated by the feeling that people who lived as well as the Germans had come to steal what little their own people had.

^k
During the period of Vichy rule, various restrictions had been imposed on the Jews living in French North Africa, and there was considerable trouble over getting these lifted because most of the Vichy officials remained in office for some time after the Allied landing. A good account in Michel Abitol,
The fews of North Africa during the Second World War,
trans. by Catherine Thanyi Zentelis (Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1989).

^l
A small piece of northeast Norway was devastated and then evacuated by the Germans in the winter of 1944–45, but the bulk of the country with essentially all of its population was still in German hands at the end of hostilities. (In fact, the Germans there were still carrying out executions of their own military personnel for some time after the end of hostilities.)

^m
Some French workers were sent to Germany on the basis of one prisoner of war to be released for every three workers, but the Germans soon abandoned this procedure.

ⁿ
It was during this period that Raoul Wallenberg saved many of Budapest’s Jews.

^o
Gauleiter Forster of Danzig-West Prussia is reported as explaining on September 1, 1943, that he listed as many Poles as Germans as possible. If Poles are a dirty people, then the clean ones must be Germans. Krogmann Diary, 11 k 11, 1 Sep. 1943, Hamburg, Forschungsstelle für Geschichte des Nationalsozialismus.

^p
The situation in the Philippines was the one important at least partial exception, a point demonstrated by its having the only significant anti-Japanese guerilla movement in Southeast Asia. There these guerillas, not the Japanese-organized groups, would be important in the post-war period.

10

MEANS OF WARFARE: OLD AND NEW

In World War II, the major weapons systems used in World War I and in some instances further developed in the inter-war years dominated all combat well into the war. As a practical matter many countries had kept or bought stocks of World War I weapons, especially those newly made in the last months of that conflict, and used them in the initial fighting. The rifles of the earlier conflict were only slowly replaced by newer models, and the British army in the summer of 1940 was pleased to receive large shipments of American World War I rifles. The general trend in infantry weapons was, however, into a new direction.

Increasingly the belligerents introduced rifles which could fire rounds from a clip or magazine more rapidly–if less accurately–and which thus substituted volume of fire for accuracy, ironically a revival of the way muskets had been used in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The same trend could be seen in the increasing introduction of relatively simply made automatic weapons, which might be called sub–machine guns or assault rifles but which shared the characteristics of rapid automatic or semi–automatic fire, short range, and low accuracy. Designed to be used in infantry combat where a large volume of fire in street fighting, ambushes, and similar situations was called for, these weapons slowly but steadily replaced rifles as a preferred weapon of the infantry. Their very rapid expenditure of ammunition, however, obviously could create supply problems, and most armies relied on rifles for much of their infantry until the end of the war.

All armies in World War II used machine guns and mortars, but the changes made in these were not particularly great. The weight of machine guns was reduced and the caliber and accuracy of mortars increased somewhat, but any World War I veteran would have had no difficulty recognizing the heavy infantry weapons of 1945. Flamethrowers were employed on a large scale, especially by the Americans
in the island campaigns of the Pacific War, and some were mounted on tanks; here too new developments were not especially radical.

Cavalry, insofar as it was not changed over to armor, was used on a far lesser scale than in any prior European or Asiatic conflict. The Poles and subsequently the Russians used cavalry fairly extensively, but most armies used horses for transport.
^a
In many armies, officers of the infantry, at least in the early stages of the war, rode, but the major use of horses was to pull artillery, pull supply carts of various types, and pull the wagons of medical companies.
¹
Millions of horses were thus employed in the German, Russian, Italian, Japanese and other armies, and mules were used by most armies–including the American–as pack animals, especially in mountainous terrain.

If horses still drew many of the guns, the artillery itself changed during the war. In this field as in that of infantry weapons, the beginning of the war saw many armies using World War I artillery pieces. There had, however, been some changes in the inter-war years and these continued, and with increased speed, during the war. The European powers and the United States all moved toward heavier and more rapidly firing guns, large numbers of them mounted on the lower portion of a tank chassis and thus self–propelled and providing greater protection for the gun crews. The major changes in artillery, however, took somewhat different forms.

The Germans developed a superior heavy anti-aircraft gun: the famous “88,” a gun named for the millimeter diameter of its barrel but best known for its versatility. It could be utilized as an anti-tank gun and was of deadly effectiveness in that role; modified versions of it were also mounted in tanks. Not nearly as successful was the German tendency toward gigantomania. The investment in huge guns of 14, 17, and 21 inch caliber was most likely wasted as these could be moved only with great difficulty and were rarely used. The epitome of such misinvestment of resources was the “Dora” monster, a 31
inch railway gun which required the services of 4400 men for loading, firing, transportation and security; it fired all of 48 shells at the siege of Sevastopol in June 1942.
²
The other dead end pursued by the Germans was in regard to distance rather than caliber. In order to shell London from the continent, they developed a gun with a barrel literally over a hundred yards long, in which a sequence of explosions along the way would drive a shell all the way not merely across the Channel but to downtown London. A clear sign of Hitler’s special love for the English, the V-3, as this contraption was called, was not ready in time for its intended
target; its only use was against Luxembourg in the winter of 1944–45.
³

The most important innovations in artillery were of a very different kind. One involved a new version of an ancient weapon, the other a revolutionary change in the shell. The first of these was a revival of the use of rockets. The Soviet Union introduced a multiple rocket-launcher, the katyusha, which could be mounted on a truck and fired in salvoes of rockets for relatively short distances but to very great effect. The Germans produced a somewhat similar weapon later in the war, and the Americans constructed such weapons for mounting on landing-craft, to be fired by these in enormous numbers as the craft approached shore in an amphibious assault. Very useful in support of landings on defended coasts, these rocket launchers capitalized on a great advantage of the rocket over traditional artillery–the absence of–a recoil. It was this advantage which led the Germans and Americans to introduce handheld small rocket launchers which infantry could use against tanks. The German versions were substantially more effective and efficient than the American bazooka; both pointed in new directions.

The major changes in the shells were of two kinds. One was the shaped charge, an arrangement of the explosive in the head of the shell which made its burst powerful enough to penetrate the increasingly thick armor of tanks. The other was the proximity fuse, a device in the shell which caused it to explode not only if it hit something but if it came close–an obvious advantage, especially in anti-aircraft fire. While the latter development was an innovation of the Western Allies, the shaped charge was used by both sides and affected the development of increasingly heavily armored tanks, a tendency also pushed by competitive pressures.