A World at Arms (35 page)

The Soviet government thought itself entitled to German support for
its steps in the Baltic States and Romania as long as it respected Germany’s interest in Romanian oil. As for its commitment that a portion of Lithuania was to fall to Germany when that country’s independence was terminated, Moscow recognized the obligation but then asked the Germans to agree to compensation for it rather than reopen the question of borders.
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Having been promised Finland in the secret protocol of August 23, 1939, Stalin also appears to have assumed at first that he could pressure that country into new concessions. Similarly, the Soviet Union asked for territorial concessions from Turkey and made less extreme but still extensive demands of Iran.
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Soviet policy toward two other powers in the summer of 1940 needs to be described briefly before any effort is made to provide a general interpretation of Stalin’s perception of the new world created by the great German victory. Once full diplomatic relations between the Soviet Union and Italy had been restored by an exchange of ambassadors, the Soviets tried to work out an accommodation with Italy over their respective interests in the Balkans.
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Having been assured, in the secret agreements of August 23, 1939, that Germany had no political interests in Southeast Europe, Moscow understandably sought agreement to its own aspirations in this area from Italy. As the Italians saw Germany triumphant in North and West Europe while telling them to hold back on Italian hopes for gains in North Africa at the expense of France, they turned to Southeast Europe as the only possible alternative direction for Italian expansion. It therefore looked for a while as if these Soviet-Italian soundings would lead to an accord. They would be aborted by a German veto which derived from new German decisions still to be reviewed and which was effective because Italy’s weakness made it impossible for Mussolini to act without German consent.

Simultaneously with the Soviet attempt to work out an accommodation with Italy, there was a somewhat similar effort to work out an agreement with Japan.
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Because the Japanese, as we shall see, drew from the German victory in the West the conclusion that this was the time for them to move south and seize control of as much of Southeast Asia as possible, there was a somewhat similar evolution toward an agreement with the Soviet Union in Tokyo. The subsequent development of these negotiations and their successful conclusion in the neutrality pact of April 1941 will be discussed in a later chapter; what is important here is the point that the Soviet Union in the summer of 1940 thought it useful to explore the possibility of improving its relations and adjusting its aspirations with Italy while simultaneously freeing Japan from concern about her back door, so that she could move toward a violent confrontation with Britain and any powers aligned with the latter in Southeast
Asia, most especially the United States.
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That in this situation an alignment with London was the last thing on Stalin’s mind ought to be obvious to the subsequent observer even if it took a long time for Sir Stafford Cripps to grasp it at the time.
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What did all this imply for Soviet relations with Germany? The consolidation of Soviet control over the Baltic States, the push for a somewhat if not entirely similar control over Finland, and the thrust into the Balkans show a determination in Moscow to reap whatever advantages might be obtained fairly easily from the support it had given Germany. From the perspective of Moscow, Germany had certainly profited immensely from the German-Soviet deal; analogous accommodations with Italy and Japan might be equally fruitful for both parties to such arrangements. It may well have looked to Stalin that both Rome and Tokyo would see how effectively Berlin had taken advantage of his cooperating with Hitler in destroying the European equilibrium, and there is solid evidence that, with or without reference to the example of August 1939, Rome and Tokyo showed real reciprocal interest.

As for the Germans, in Soviet eyes they had not only demonstrated their military prowess but had opened up for themselves–and with Soviet backing–enormous possibilities for further expansion. If one seriously believed in the analysis of National Socialism then current in the Soviet Union and among many Marxists elsewhere, which argued that Fascism was the handmaiden of monopoly capitalism in the struggle for markets, investments and control of raw materials abroad while repressing the working class at home, the Germans now certainly had every incentive to look toward the colonial empires and trade and investment connections of their defeated enemies in the West. The Germans could now inherit from the Netherlands, Belgium, and France and even the British, whom at this time the Soviets expected Germany to defeat in short order if the London government did not fall in with the idea of making a quick peace with Germany, as Moscow and Communist Parties around the world were urging even more loudly than Berlin. As the Soviet ambassador to London, Ivan Maisky, explained during the Battle of Britain, the British placed the German airplane losses on one side and their own on the other, while he placed both in one column and added them Up.
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Under these circumstances, from the perspective of Moscow, Germany had every incentive to maintain its good relations with the Soviet Union-which had opened such marvellous opportunities for her–and might in fact be willing to make even more far-reaching new arrangements for the division of yet greater spoils. Until new German-Soviet
negotiations for such happy prospects could be initiated, as they were in the fall of 1940 at least in Moscow’s view of things, the best thing to do was to remain on good terms with the Third Reich. It is in this context that the accommodating attitude of the Soviet Union toward German economic and naval requests in the summer of 1940 should, I believe, be understood. All was well with German-Soviet relations and should be kept that way, and similar blessings as those derived from the prior German-Soviet agreement might now be attained by deals with Italy and Japan. Thereafter or simultaneously, a further agreement might be worked out with a Germany whose current wishes and needs should be met as far as possible. The new situation on the continent–Czechoslovakia disappeared, Poland, Norway, Denmark, the Low Countries and France all conquered–seemed fine to Moscow. Throughout the world the Communist Parties in the Comintern called for peace; Britain in particular should accept the new situation and end hostilities.
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On July 17, 1940, Sir Orme Sargent, then Deputy Under-Secretary of State in the British Foreign Office, summarized his own and the Foreign Office view that the Germans and Soviets were likely to continue to cooperate though in a competitive way. The Soviet Union, like Germany, saw Britain as the ultimate enemy and would not side with her in a situation where intervention was extremely risky, while threatening Germany with closer Soviet-British relations might strengthen the Soviet bargaining position.
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All this was quite sensible as far as it went. This analysis, however, completely overlooked exactly the same critical element which was also missing from the Soviet one. Absent from the perspective of both traditional diplomacy and Marxist-Leninist analysis was the basic reality of National Socialist ideology: the insistence on the conquest of living space for German agricultural settlers in Eastern Europe, meaning primarily the rich lands of the southern U.S.S.R. Whether or not it made sense from the perspective of traditional diplomacy, which attributed somewhat similar even if exaggerated perspectives to Hitler, or whether it fit the stereotypical Marxist perception of Hitler as the tool of monopoly capitalists, the reality as we shall see was that the racial agrarian expansionism of National Socialism was a decisive motive
force-not
a propaganda gimmick–and produced German policies which neither London nor Moscow understood then, and which the Soviet Union never grasped at all. Both powers would make policy and military choices in the following months on the basis of a major misassessment of German intentions.

As we will see, the British made their choices in late 1940 and early 1941 on the assumption that they still faced invasion, while the Soviets
made theirs on the assumption that they did not. Before the German decisions of the summer of 1940 can be examined, however, it is necessary to look more closely at the reaction of the Japanese to the German victory in Western Europe, a reaction already referred to in connection with Soviet-Japanese relations.

For the Japanese, a high priority was their continued war with China. In November, the Nationalists had launched a winter offensive using units rehabilitated since the defeats suffered earlier in an attempt to drive back the Japanese. These operations proved very costly to Chiang Kai-shek’s forces which were neither strong enough nor sufficiently equipped. After taking heavy losses, the Nationalists returned to a holding action; the Japanese held much of the coast and important inland cities, and the Chinese Communists concentrated on building up guerilla forces.
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While maintaining their position on the mainland, the Japanese tried to prop up the puppet regime of Wang Ching-wei and toyed from time to time with schemes for negotiating with Chiang;
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but their emphasis shifted in new directions, in part because of the stalemate in China, in part because of the dramatic German victories in Western Europe.

The Yonai government had followed the war situation in Europe with caution and had been unwilling to extend itself to help the Germans. On the contrary, Berlin had found the Japanese reluctant to help them import critical raw materials from East Asia and occasionally contrasted that reluctance with the greater cooperativeness of the Soviet Union.
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The German offensive of May 1940 changed the situation dramatically in three ways: it raised the question of the future of the Dutch East Indies once Holland was invaded and overrun, it suggested that there might be a way for Japan to gain control of French Indo-China once metropolitan France was defeated by Germany, and it appeared to open the door to the British possessions in South and Southeast Asia, because a Britain fighting for its life in Europe could hardly defend its position in Asia.

Furthermore, a Japanese advance into Southeast Asia could–in the eyes of the Japanese–contribute to ending the war in China by cutting off the supplies Chiang was getting by railway across northern French Indo-China and by road from northern Burma. The Japanese estimated in June 1940 that 41 percent of the outside supplies reaching Chiang came through the port of Haiphong in French Indo-China, 31 percent on the Burma road, 19 percent by coastal waters, and 2 percent over
the land route from the Soviet Union.
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Accurate or not, these figures help explain how Tokyo saw the connection between a push southwards and the ongoing war in China.

Already, during the winter, the military and naval authorities in Tokyo had begun their preparations for a move south. In mid-November, a new 4th Fleet for the South Seas was organized directly under Imperial Headquarters.
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Japanese navy insistence on converting the island of Hainan into a Japanese naval base during negotiations with the puppet regime of Wang during November and December illuminates the priority given to the southern push.
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In April, even before the German invasion of Holland, the Japanese navy called for the occupation of the Dutch East Indies and obtained a public Foreign Ministry statement of concern over the islands’ fate in the European war.
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The German invasion of Holland on May 10 immediately aroused concern in Tokyo either that the British and French might try a preventive occupation of the islands–as they did with the Dutch West Indies–or that Berlin might decide to take them over itself. The 4th Fleet was sent south so that it could seize the Dutch East Indies if so ordered, while every effort was made to persuade the Germans to leave Japan a free hand there. Though hardly enthusiastic about the rapid but belated conversion of Japan to a stance more favorable to Germany, Berlin complied with the request on May 20.
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By then, everything was beginning to move into new channels in Tokyo.

The day after the Germans struck in the West a draft neutrality treaty between Japan and the Soviet Union was prepared in Tokyo; after discussion within the government there, it was handed to the Soviet government on July 2. If Japan was heading south, it needed peace at its back door.
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In the period May 15–21,1940, while the discussion of a treaty proposal was still taking place in government circles, the Japanese navy held its only major map exercise before December 7, 1941. War with the United States, Great Britain and the Netherlands, a seizure of the Dutch East Indies, and an invasion of Malaya were all part of the program. The oil of the Dutch East Indies would be needed for the war, but there would still be transportation problems even after that conquest and only enough for a year’s fighting to attain victory.
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The picture was clear enough for those who cared to look, but few were willing to do so. By this time, Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku had already begun thinking of a surprise attack on the United States fleet in Pearl Harbor as a way to start the war and shield the drive south from American interference.
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As yet a different strategy for conducting war against the United States still dominated Japanese naval planning, but the impetus for actually going to war would be given that summer in Tokyo.

The triumph of Germany in the West brought a dramatic shift in Japanese government circles. There was enormous enthusiasm.
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Now was the chance to pressure the French into closing the railway which carried supplies from Haiphong to Nationalist China and, soon after, to occupy the northern portion of the French possession in order to make certain of the blockade and provide a basis for further expansion. Furthermore, now was the opportunity to threaten the British that dire consequences would follow if the latter did not stop shipments from Hong Kong and close the Burma Road.
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