A World at Arms (65 page)

By this date, March 8, the Japanese had also attained a number of other objectives of their initial plan. They had landed on the north and east coast of New Guinea (the towns of Lae and Salamaua were seized on March 8) and, striking south from their bases in the Mariana and Caroline Islands, had moved into the Admiralty Islands, the Northern Solomons, and, perhaps most important, into the Bismarck Archipelago which included at the eastern end of the island of New Britain the best harbor and most important base in the area: Rabaul. With the easy occupation of the Gilbert Islands, this series of barely contested victories gave the Japanese the southern and southeastern anchors of their projected defense perimeter, placed them in an excellent position to threaten Australia, and did so at what looked like very little cost to themselves.
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March 8 was, however, not only the date of the surrender on Java; it was also the day on which Rangoon fell to the advancing Japanese 15th Army of General Ida Shogin.
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General Wavell, while still the British commander in India and before assuming the general Allied command in Southeast Asia, had rejected Chiang Kai-shek’s offer of troops to assist in the defense of Burma. Now his subordinates had wholly inadequate forces to hold the area against the advancing Japanese. Most Allied reinforcements were being poured into Malaya and Java in the hope of holding the Japanese onrush there, while the Australian division from the Middle East scheduled to bolster the defense of Burma was rerouted to Australia at the rigid insistence of the Australian government. The Australians believed, not unreasonably, that home defense must be their first priority. They were eventually persuaded in the face of the Japanese menace from the north that in their most dangerous hour, with the Japanese air force bombing Darwin in the north, a Japanese midget submarine attack inside Sydney harbor in the south,
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and the Japanese army controlling portions of the Australian mandate of southeast New Guinea, they could safely leave their other division with the British
8th Army in North Africa
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if they could depend on the United States to send forces to them. This, in part at the insistence of Churchill, in part as the most obvious way to cope with the situation, the United States agreed to do. It must be noted, however, that the diversion from the Germany First strategy implied by this decision, the role that all this would mean for General MacArthur, and the long-term implications for the defense relationship between Australia and Britain on the one hand and Australia and the United States on the other, all grew out of the desperate military situation created by the Japanese advance.

In the meantime, without adequate reinforcements and under poor military leadership, the small forces defending Burma could not hold the advancing Japanese, who pushed forward across southern Burma and by seizing Rangoon on March 8 effectively cut off the remaining British units from their main supply route by sea. What British reinforcements and belated Chinese units could still get to Burma were quite incapable of halting the Japanese drive north. A new commander, General Sir Harold Alexander, who had distinguished himself in the 1940 fighting in Belgium and would play a major role in the Mediterranean campaign later, was sent by Churchill to take charge. He could add his calmness and good sense but little else.

The Americans, at Roosevelt’s insistence, were determined to find some way to keep open a supply route to China, which he believed should be treated as the great power he was certain it would become as the European colonial empires faded into history (as he was equally certain they should and would). The United States, too, sent a new commander to the area. The man who had just been designated to head up an operation named “Gymnast,” an Allied invasion of Northwest Africa scheduled for the spring of 1942, Major General Joseph W. Stilwell, was appointed to this difficult post.
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The new appointee had spent years in China and knew the language; he was a driving and efficient commander; he had the complete confidence of Marshall; and he was well known to be an impatient and frequently undiplomatic man. All these qualities would be evident and even accentuated in his years in the China-Burma-India Command where he held an assortment of titles and positions until his recall in 1944.

Alexander and Stilwell faced disaster in their new assignments. Alexander commanded the British troops which were forced steadily northwards as the Japanese drove first to Lashio, where the railway ended and the Burma road into China began, and then to the great center of Mandalay to the south and the other important railhead, Myitkyina to the north. Chinese forces helped in the defense, but no firm front could be held anywhere. By mid-May, Alexander and his able ground forces
commander, General Slim, had gotten their 12,000 remaining soldiers out of Burma to add to the defense of India while Stilwell hiked out with a small band at the end of what he himself called “a hell of a beating.”

The Japanese had conquered a new empire for themselves in the very short span of less than six months. In these newly conquered areas they revealed with equal speed that they had come to conquer, not liberate, the population.
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Not only brutality toward prisoners of war-especially Filipinos – and rounded-up Westerners, but wanton rape and slaughter of the local population showed the inhabitants that the new masters retrospectively made their former colonial overlords look like beneficence personified. The ordinary people of the Philippines, Malaya, the Netherlands East Indies, and Burma were unlikely to have heard of the horrors of the rape of Nanking when rampaging Japanese soldiers murdered over 200,000 civilians, but they now received visual instruction on their own home territory. The use of military and civilian prisoners for bayonet practice and assorted other cruelties provided the people of Southeast Asia with a dramatic lesson on the new meaning of Bushido, the code of the Japanese warrior.

The leaders of political movements in the various former colonial territories had, of course, some greater familiarity with Japan’s wretched record as an oppressive colonial power in Korea, Manchuria, and the other portions of China occupied by the Japanese since 1937. The fact that the Japanese in effect ended the independence of Thailand, the one country of Southeast Asia which had retained its sovereignty, also provided a clue to Tokyo’s intentions.
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There were, nevertheless, some who hoped to emulate Pu Yi, the Japanese puppet Emperor installed in Manchuria, the most prominent being the Prime Minister of Burma who cited that very example as the model he hoped to follow as Japan’s chief collaborator in Burma. Unfortunately for him, his exchanges with the Japanese were intercepted and read by the Americans on whose tip the British arrested him.
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Others gambled on the hope of gaining and maintaining independence from Japan after the latter, in alliance with Germany and Italy, had defeated Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union; but as anyone holding to and acting on that theory was not likely to be endowed with great intelligence, such movements never assumed major proportions in any of the occupied territories. The vast majority of the local population would sit it out.

Two less tangible things had come with the rapid Japanese conquests. The first was a sense among the British and Americans that the Japanese seemed to be unbeatable. A converse of the earlier racialist attitudes of superiority toward the little Orientals, who could only imitate, who
couldn’t fly well because of their slanted eyes, and who were incapable of sound military organization, the new view endowed them with superhuman endurance and ingenuity. The American and Australian soldiers would get over this new set of ideas as they slugged it out with the Japanese army on Guadalcanal and New Guinea in the second half of 1942; the British and Indian armies did not recover their self-confidence until the bitter battles in India and Burma in 1944.

The other new element was the converse of that just mentioned: what was called the Japanese victory disease. Unwilling to recognize that their conquests had been made possible by the earlier victories of Germany and the ongoing conflict in Europe, the Atlantic and the Mediterranean theaters of war, the Japanese not only celebrated their triumphs over the British, Americans and Dutch but assumed that these were due to the inherent superiority of the Japanese over all others, especially over the weak and decadent Europeans. The Japanese could do anything, could conquer in whatever direction they chose to strike, and most assuredly had no need to think of the compromise peace which at one time was supposed to have followed upon the initial victories they had anticipated winning, though not with such speed or little overall cost.

If these were the delusions of the victory disease, their prospect of recovering from it by confronting setbacks rather than triumphs was inhibited by a fundamental flaw in the Japanese military command structure.
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The militarists had literally shot their way into power by assassin – atingor threatening to assassinate those who stood in their way within Japan, but they had never worked out a central coordinating command structure of their own. Since direct access to the Emperor and action in his name had been the institutional key to their exercise of power, the army and the navy could carry out any specific policy only if they were in agreement. The agreed project could be put before the Emperor for the imperial sanction, a formality rather than a decision; but if they could not agree, there was no individual Commander-in-Chief-like Hitler, Stalin, Churchill, Roosevelt, or Mussolini-who could decide on one course of action and insist on adherence to that course with every expectation that all would fall into line.

There was still one further complication in Japanese planning. Not only were the army and navy often in disagreement with each other, the failure to develop plans for the future and the absence of clear and respected lines of authority within the navy led to a situation where competing personalities advocating differing strategies precluded the adoption of any coherent and clear-cut strategic plan at all. As will be shown, there were three basic competing alternative offensive strategies: the Japanese proceeded in a period of less than three months to try all
three in succession, not one of them wholeheartedly, and, perhaps as a result, to suffer disaster or something very close to it in each one in turn. There were those who advocated an orientation of Japanese power into the Indian Ocean to wrest control of that sea from the British and link up with Germany in the Middle East. There were some who thought that Japan should continue to push southwards, some calling for an invasion of either northern or all of Australia, but most urging a somewhat less ambitious extension of Japanese control to the south coast of New Guinea, including the seizure of Port Moresby, to be followed by the capture of islands in the South Pacific such as Fiji
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and New Caledonia. Such an offensive thrust would sever the communications between the United States and Australia, thereby making it impossible for the United States to use Australia as a base for attacking the southern perimeter of Japan’s newly conquered empire. Finally, there were the advocates of a strike in the central Pacific which, by including the seizure of Midway and hopefully the Hawaiian islands, would, it was believed, force what was left of the United States Pacific fleet to give battle and enable the Japanese to defeat it.
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The first of these, the attack into the Indian Ocean, was potentially the most threatening for the Allies. A major offensive into India itself could topple British rule there at a time when the image of British power was hopelessly tarnished by a string of disasters, and the reality of that power was stretched so thinly as to call to mind the story of the Emperor without clothes. There were those in India who thought this was the time to throw off British rule, and the nationalist agitation in the country rose to a new peak in the spring and early summer of 1942.
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A combination of the most unlikely developments prevented all the most likely contingencies from eventuating: a Japanese invasion, a major rallying of the people of India to the Allied side, a major rallying to the Axis side, or a massive uprising inside the country.

There was no major Japanese invasion in 1942 because the army leadership preferred to keep its main forces in China and in Manchuria; it was still contemplating an invasion of the U.S.S.R. if the German 1942 summer offensive led to a collapse of Soviet resistance. This fixation on the Chinese and possible Soviet theaters of war precluded any major commitment of land forces elsewhere; it set rigid limits to the size of the ground force contingents the army allocated to the whole southern expansion project, and precluded invasion not only of India but of Australia as well. Furthermore, to avoid being drawn into major land forces commitments in the Indian Ocean, the Japanese army General Staff, in spite of its theoretical advocacy of a close alignment with Germany,
would not even agree to allocating the two divisions needed for an invasion of Ceylon. By the time the Japanese army was willing to order its troops into India in 1944, the war situation had changed too far for such an operation to make much difference, regardless of the result.

A rallying of the peoples of India to the Allied side was precluded by the British policy of avoiding or postponing major concessions to Indian nationalist aspirations, especially in the area of defense.
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In spite of the efforts of Sir Stafford Cripps, sent as special envoy by the British government, and Colonel Louis Johnson, dispatched by Roosevelt to India as a symbol of United States concern about the situation there, agreement was close but never reached. Without reviewing the details of the tortuous negotiations, it is safe to argue that the key stumbling block was the British Prime Minister. Churchill had originally broken with the Conservative Party over concessions which that party wished to make to Indian self-government; he had, once returned to office and especially the office of Prime Minister, resisted all further changes on this issue. And he was not about to replace the reactionary Marquess of Linlithgow, Viceroy since 1936, with his old opponent, Sir Samuel Hoare, the man who over Churchill’s body had steered the Government of India Act of 1935 through the House of Commons and who saw the future of India in very different ways from Churchill’s turn of the nineteenth – to the twentieth-century perspective. It was left to Churchill’s deputy as Prime Minister and successor in 1945, Clement Attlee, to adopt a different policy on Indian independence under very different circumstances.
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