A World at Arms (36 page)

The French caved in quickly, first closing the railway and then accepting Japanese occupation of northern Indo-China. Vichy France was willing to fight the British and Free French for Dakar and French West Africa but not the Japanese for Hanoi and northern French Indo-China. Faced by the Japanese demands and threats, the London authorities debated the dangerous choices before them: could they afford to antagonize Japan when mortally threatened at home; was not supplying Chiang Kai-shek one way of tying down Japan lest she fling herself directly on British territories in Asia and the South Pacific; was there any hope of American support if Japan took drastic steps? The policy which emerged was a three-months closure of the Burma Road beginning July 18, 1940. This might keep Japan quiet for a while; and by the end of that period Britain would hopefully have warded off the immediate German onslaught and have obtained greater and more obvious support from the United States-both hopes which were realized and resulted in a refusal to maintain the closure.
¹⁸⁸

During the days of policy debate in London, an even more important and fateful debate was under way in Tokyo. From within the army, the navy, and the diplomatic service there came strong pressures for an alliance with Germany, an attack southwards against the British, Dutch, and Americans, as well as a settlement with the Soviet Union to shield the move from the outside, and, at the same time, a new consolidation at home to provide a base inside the country for these new policies.
¹⁸⁹
Here seemed to be the great opportunity for Japan to realize the fondest and most extravagant hopes of empire. With Germany about to defeat Britain after crushing France and the Netherlands, Japan could seize whatever she wanted, and if that also meant war with the United States, so be it. The anticipated completion of the new United States navy would end Japanese prospects of such expansion; the time to move was now.
¹⁹⁰
The Yonai government could at the last moment substitute a diplomatic for a military approach to the Dutch East Indies,
¹⁹¹
but then that government was pushed aside. Emperor Hirohito, apprehensive about the possibility of war, reminded his advisors that their confident
prediction of a quick settlement in China had proved sadly mistaken.
¹⁹²
But the Emperor would be confronted with a new government unanimously determined on a new foreign and domestic policy, a situation in which he could only give way.

The new Prime Minister, Konoe Funiimaro, knew that his policies would not be agreeable to the Emperor. He assumed that when he took office on July 14, 1940, Hirohito would ask him to respect the constitution’ avoid upheavals in the business world, and cooperate with Britain and the United States–but on all of these he himself preferred to go in new directions.
¹⁹³
The man who had been Prime Minister at the beginning of the war against China four years earlier and who had pushed through the decision of January 1938 not to negotiate with Chiang Kai-shek,
¹⁹⁴
had helped to force out the Yonai government to pursue a whole set of goals: he wanted to obtain an alliance with the Axis, still hoped to crush China, intended to launch a push to the south, and preferred to install a “new political structure” designed to transform the political system of Japan by drawing the whole population into a cohesive whole controlled by the Cabinet.
¹⁹⁵

In order to make certain that all members of the government were for once in agreement on the steps to be taken, Konoe held a special conference in his home. The new structure at home and the new policy abroad which combined a German alliance with a push south and agreement with the Soviet Union won the concurrence of the army and navy along with the civilian leadership represented by Konoe and his new Foreign Minister, Matsuoka Yosuke. The new course called for war with Britain and the Netherlands to seize their colonies (as well as Portugal’s). Konoe still hoped to avoid war with the United States, but included a willingness to have such a war rather than abandon the great push south. He called for negotiations with Germany for an alliance and with the Soviet Union for a neutrality pact, and inaugurated the organization of the Imperial Rule Assistance Association inside Japan as a new mass mobilization of the people behind these policies. At the end of ten days of discussion, all this was officially approved at the Liaison Conference of July 27,1940.
¹⁹⁶

It was assumed in these internal discussions that a Japanese push into Indo-China and especially into southern Indo-China would, because the latter pointed to new adventures against Britain and the Dutch rather than continuing the old one against China, most likely provoke the United States into economic sanctions, which in turn would lead Japan to go to war with the United States.
¹⁹⁷
Japan needed American oil to fight the United States, and its leaders simultaneously wanted the oil and expected that their moves looking toward war with the United States
would lead to its being cut off. No wonder that their confused solution to this self-imposed conundrum was to rely on using footholds that the Japanese imagined Germany and Italy had in South America “to carry out its future policies toward the United States.”
¹⁹⁸

In the crisis created by the simultaneous threat of an invasion of Britain by the Germans and a move south by the Japanese, the governments in London and Washington decided that discretion was the better part of valor. They could place some limits on exports to Japan, but the extraordinarily confused discussions in both capitals did not and perhaps could not result in more determined policies.
¹⁹⁹
Japan could continue to purchase American oil to stockpile for war against the United States. The minimal sanctions neither encouraged nor discouraged the Japanese. They moved forward into north Indo-China and began negotiations with Germany and Italy for a Tripartite Pact. A central figure in these steps to implement the policies agreed on during the preceding weeks was the new Foreign Minister, a bombastic and unstable individual who, because he had lived as a young man in the United States, imagined that he understood that country, and was at least for a time just the man to implement the foreign policy lines Konoe wanted: alliance with Germany and Italy, alignment with the Soviet Union, and now expansion southward as Japan had once pushed into Manchuria where Matsuoka had first made his mark.
²⁰⁰
As already mentioned, he found the French complaisant and the British doubtful. The Germans, once they overcame their initial hesitations growing out of past grievances, however, were enthusiastic. The new expansionist policy of Japan seemed to fit perfectly with Berlin’s own new choices.

The new choices made by Germany in the summer of 1940 were perhaps more personally and directly those of Hitler than at almost any other time in his twelve years as Chancellor. The triumph in the West in its speed, apparent ease and completeness, was not only in dramatic contrast with the years of bloody slogging on the Western Front in World War I; but, as most inside the circles of Germany’s leadership knew, was the product of Hitler’s insistence on an offensive in the face of the doubts and hesitations of many. That its impact on the United States would doom the Third Reich to ultimate defeat was entirely beyond the comprehension of the public and the elite of Germany–the great victory over the armies of Germany’s enemies elevated Hitler to an unchallengeable pinnacle of popularity and power.
²⁰¹

In this situation, Hitler’s views of what to do with victory set the tone. As regards France, it meant a tactical and temporary reticence in regard to her colonies and navy in order to make a quick armistice with a remaining French government feasible, otherwise there was a risk of defection of French colonies threatened by German, Italian or Spanish colonial demands, or continued fighting by the French navy and forces in North Africa on England’s side–both contingencies likely to encourage England to remain at war.
²⁰²
On the other hand, as Hitler never trusted the French, he would reject all efforts at a long-term accommodation with a new French government.
²⁰³
The efforts at collaboration in general originated from the French side and were made by those who visualized a place for their version of France in the Nazi New Order; Hitler consistently rejected these approaches, a point which became more obvious as the relations between the occupiers and the occupied developed in subsequent years.
²⁰⁴

England, Hitler assumed, would acknowledge defeat and accept its ejection from any say in continental affairs. If, as became increasingly obvious, she refused to do so, heavy blows by bombing and, if needed, an invasion would bring the people–if not their government–to their senses. As previously explained, there were even hopes that an alternative government in London with a returned Edward VIII as King and Lloyd George as Prime Minister-both admiring visitors of Hitler’s-might accept the junior role the Führer intended Britain to assume while he completed his immediate land conquests and prepared for those further conquests which required a huge navy.

Preparations were made for a direct attack on the United Kingdom, with a struggle for air control seen as the necessary prerequisite for invasion. Those preparations, which included the drawing up of an extensive arrest list, the appointment of a secret police chief–who would subsequently command one of the murder squads on the Eastern Front-and the establishment of internment camps on the mainland to which all adult males between the ages of 17 and 45 were to be deported, reflect an attitude of harsh hostility rather than the gracious feelings for Britain some historians ascribe to Hitler.
²⁰⁵

While these direct measures against England were under way, Hitler did what he could to encourage his Italian ally to strike at the key British positions in the Near East. In June and July of 1940 he strongly urged the Italians to seize Egypt and other British-held areas in the Mediterranean and, in order to cut the lifeline of the British empire, offered German long-range planes to mine the Suez Canal from Italian bases on the island of Rhodes.
²⁰⁶
The Italian military leaders, who combined
extreme reticence with incompetence, did not move for months, and German planes could not begin mining the Suez Canal until the following year. The fact that the first Italian-British naval engagement, that of July 9, ended badly for the Italians in spite of their having superiority in ships and the decoded text of the British orders, was to have a key long-term effect in reinforcing the inferiority complex of the Italian naval command.
²⁰⁷
The World War II joke that the Royal Navy lived on rum and the American navy on whiskey, but the Italians stuck to port, could be applied to Italy’s admirals–though certainly not its ordinary sailors–practically from the beginning of hostilities. The concept of striking at the basis of British power by an assault on her position in the Eastern Mediterranean, however, must be accepted as an essentially realistic one, even if the attempted execution at the time of greatest opportunity for the Axis was missed by the Italians.
²⁰⁸
Hitler’s great admiration for Mussolini misled him for a few months in the summer of 1940; he was soon awakened to the reality of Italy’s war-making capabilities.

If Italy was to occupy Northeast Africa, Germany herself would acquire a vast colonial empire in Central Africa.
²⁰⁹
That empire was to include the former German colonies of Togo and Cameroons in West Africa as well as German East Africa, now to be joined into a huge contiguous Central African domain stretching from the South Atlantic to the Indian Ocean and rounded out by the inclusion of the British colony of Nigeria, the French colonies of Dahomey and French Equatorial Africa, the Belgian Congo, Uganda, the southern half of Kenya, and perhaps the northern portion of the Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique.
²¹⁰
Former German Southwest Africa (now Namibia) might either be reclaimed from the Union of South Africa in exchange for the British protectorates of Bechuanaland (Botswana), Swaziland and Basutoland (Lesotho),
²¹¹
or, alternatively, it might be left to the Union in connection with the partitioning of the Portuguese colonial empire in Africa. In either case, Germany expected to enjoy good relations with a South African state ruled in this vision by the extreme nationalist elements among those Afrikaaners who had opposed the Union’s entrance into the war in 1939 and who were and remained devoted admirers of both National Socialist ideology and its German practitioners. In the 1948 elections the devotees of Nazi ideas indeed took over power in South Africa-power they wielded for decades thereafter–but of the other German colonial dreams there remain only endless files of their preparations, containing everything from strict laws against inter-racial sex to proof coins for a new currency.
²¹²

Another major alteration in the African colonial picture planned by the Germans was related to their projected reorganization of Europe.
That reorganization, about which more will be said shortly, was not to be limited to boundaries and economies, it was also to affect the population of the continent. First priority in the demographic restructuring of Europe was to be the removal of the Jewish population to the island of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean.
²¹³
This island, then a portion of the French colonial empire, now the independent state of Malagasy, was to be ceded by France to Germany and its French settlers evacuated–the millions of local inhabitants were evidently expected to vanish.
^f
The three to four million Jews living in the portions of Europe then controlled from Berlin would be shipped there, to be supervised by a police governor under Heinrich Himmler. Preparations for this scheme went forward in the Reich Security Main Office and the German Foreign Ministry with Hitler’s approval in the summer of 1940, but the refusal of Britain to leave the war made this project as impossible of realization as that for a German colonial empire in Central Africa.
²¹⁴