A World at Arms (66 page)

A possible rallying of articulate Indian public opinion to the side of the Axis was prevented by the split in the Indian nationalist movement and the ambivalence of Axis policy. Whatever their opposition to British rule, neither most of the leaders of the Congress Party nor the Muslim leaders looking toward a separate Muslim state were eager for Germany or Japan to replace Great Britain. Some might have been indifferent about the outcome of the war then raging, but many had great doubts about the intentions of the Germans and the Japanese, neither having acquired especially good reputations for treating subject peoples well. Furthermore, the fact that their former rival in the Congress Party, Subhas Chandra Bose had identified himself with the Axis did not endear
his sponsors to Bose’s competitors inside India. But these sponsors were themselves unsure and uncertain as to what to do with him and about India.

For several months in early 1942 the Germans, Italians, and Japanese negotiated endlessly between each other and within their respective governments as to which policy to follow, what policy, if any, to announce publicly, and whether to side openly with Bose or try to develop contacts with Mahatma Gandhi and Pandit Nehru, the acknowledged leaders of the Congress Party in India. The Germans and Japanese, furthermore, were concerned about the possible greater advantages accruing to the other from the evolution of the situation in India, while there is evidence that Hitler, looking toward a victory over the Soviet Union in 1942, may have thought that some compromise peace might thereafter be imposed on Britain. In any case, neither the Japanese, who merely hoped to inspire an anti-British uprising in India, nor the Germans, who had a very low opinion of Indians in general, ever had any intention of supporting independence for India; they merely wished to use it.
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The Germans made publicity for Bose and, after lengthy consideration of flying him to East Asia either from Rhodes or across the northern Soviet Union, eventually shipped him in a submarine (U-I80) which transferred him to a Japanese submarine in the Indian Ocean in 1943, a subject to which we will return in
Chapter 11
, but the possibility of any real resonance in India was by then long gone.
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The last of the possible prospects for India in the first half of 1942 was that of a massive uprising against a gravely weakened Britain, an uprising which might count on some sympathy from both China and the United States among Britain’s allies. As Germany resumed successful offensives in North Africa and the Soviet Union in May-June 1942, it looked as if the Axis forces would soon reach India’s borders from the West as well as the East. Gandhi had been restrained from calling for all foreign troops to leave India only by the arguments of Nehru and others in the Congress; in early August the Congress decided to call on the British to quit India, and soon thereafter a substantial popular uprising did begin. The security forces of the government, supported by military units spread widely over the sub-continent, were able to hold in check and then put down the widespread demonstrations. Since the overwhelming bulk of Indian army units remained loyal to the crown and unwilling to join the revolt, government authority was maintained.
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The war went on, reaching India again in very different ways in later years.

Any shift in the position of India would not only have meant a massive loss of Allied power – to say nothing of the fate of the Indian army
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–
but it would have severed China’s last link with the possibility of American aid. The development of new supply routes to assist Chiang Kai-shek will be reviewed subsequently; the point which must be made clear at this point is that any and all such routes pre-supposed the availability of land and air bases in Assam, the northeast corner of India, to the Allies.

HALTING THE JAPANESE ADVANCE

Though the Japanese could not try an invasion of India or even a landing on Ceylon because of the refusal of the army to provide the troops, the navy could try and did try a significant offensive into the Indian Ocean. This was the obvious direction to move at a time when the British position there was weak but in the process of being reinforced. Here was a key Allied supply route, providing the main means of reinforcement for the Middle East theater and one of the routes for supplies to the Soviet Union. Finally, here was the back door to the important oil resources of the Middle East on which much of the British war effort depended.

The Japanese naval sortie, however, though involving the major aircraft carrier fleet which had struck Pearl Harbor, could only carry out some raids on Colombo, the capital, and Trincomalee, the major naval base, on Ceylon, shell some spots on the Indian coast, and sink two British cruisers, a small carrier, a destroyer, and 23 merchant ships. Though achieved without great cost to themselves, these Japanese tactical victories of the first ten days of April constituted a major strategic defeat for several reasons.
³⁵

First, the newly accumulated British fleet for the most part escaped destruction and was, therefore, able to provide continued protection for Allied supply shipping across the Indian Ocean. Second, the temporary character of the Japanese incursion could not long be concealed; for a while radio propaganda could pretend that the rising sun was about to shine on India and the whole Indian Ocean area, but it became obvious by the late summer that this was simply not likely. Third, the Japanese had toyed with the fairly obvious idea of seizing a base in Madagascar with the consent of Vichy France, obtained if necessary with the aid of German pressure on Vichy, pressure which would not have been needed because Laval wanted to invite Japan to occupy the island.
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If such a base could once be established and maintained thereafter, there was the real possibility of completely cutting the Allied supply routes to Egypt, to the Soviet Union across Iran, and to India. But for almost the first time in World War II the Allies got somewhere
before
the Axis.

The enormous danger to the Allied cause from a Japanese seizure of
bases on Madagascar had been evident for some time – anyone could see it from a map. De Gaulle repeatedly called attention to the need to seize the island and expressed the undoubtedly mistaken opinion that the garrison was ready to come over to the Free French side.
³⁷
The British, especially Churchill himself, could see the danger clearly enough but did not have forces available for an expedition at a time when all available reinforcements were being sent first to increase the scale of disaster in Malaya and thereafter to try to avert disaster in Burma. And the London government had no faith in either the security of de Gaulle’s headquarters or the willingness of the Vichy garrison to switch to the Allied side.
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On the other hand, not only was Churchill very much aware of the threat,
^f
the London government was also being urged to move by Prime Minister Jan Smuts of the Union of South Africa. In the face of a danger from Japan in the Indian Ocean on the outside and the agitation for a separate peace with the Axis by the extreme Afrikaaner nationalists on the inside, Smuts believed immediate action to forestall a Japanese move absolutely essentia1.
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An expedition for the island left Britain on March 23 and, with the endorsement of the United States, which had provided a task force to take the place of the British warships diverted from the Atlantic, landed on the northern tip on May 4, 1942. The original plan was to seize only the naval base at Diego Suarez; there were not enough forces available to capture the rest of the island, and even the major units sent to Diego Suarez had to go on to India as soon as the first part of the operation was completed.
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Eventually it seemed both essential and possible to take the remainder of Madagascar, though this campaign took until November 6, as Vichy troops, in line with their prior record, fought against the British as they never fought against the Japanese or Germans.
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The Japanese had missed their opportunity, a failure ameliorated but not remedied by the success of one of their midget submarines in torpedoing the old battleship
Ramillies
in Diego Suarez harbor.
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Coming on top of the other British naval losses of early 1942, this was a serious blow, but it could not obscure the fact that it was the British, not the Japanese, who continued to dominate the western and central portions of the Indian Ocean.

The fourth and final way in which the Japanese foray into the Indian Ocean contributed to making this episode disastrous for Japan was the time it occupied and the wear it imposed on the central striking force of the Imperial navy, the main fleet carriers. These had now been in
continuous action since leaving the Japanese home bases on November 26, 1941, for the assault on Pearl Harbor. By the end of the operation off Ceylon on April 10, 1942, the big carriers had to return to home waters for repairs and maintenance work as well as replacements for the casualties incurred. This meant that the whole Japanese timetable was compressed at a point in the war when the projects that had been decided upon by Imperial Headquarters required more time, not less. As will become clear in the account of the Japanese push to the south which ended at the Battle of the Coral Sea and that to the east which ended at Midway, even those most afflicted with the “victory disease” could not find a way to use the same aircraft carriers in two operations thousands of miles apart simultaneously, and therefore settled for a sequence in which the carriers employed in one operation turned out not to be available for the other. What is more, intelligent Japanese assessment of these operations had been thrown off and United States intelligence about them would be increased by the reaction to an event two days before April 20, the day the first of the Japanese carriers returned home: on April 18 the Americans had bombed Tokyo.

The origins of the great clashes which signalled the high-water mark of the Japanese tide in the Pacific and led to the first American counter – attack in the Solomon Islands go back to the aftermath of the Pearl Harbor attack. Immediately after that operation, Yamamoto had called for the development of a plan for the invasion of Hawaii as the first of three great invasion projects, Ceylon and Australia being the other two. He assumed that quick action on these as a follow up to the conquest of Southeast Asia would force the remaining United States fleet into battle. That battle the Japanese would win and thereupon make peace.
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The call by the Allies, newly designated the United Nations as a result of the Washington Conference, for a united campaign until victory were obtained did not make any impression on Tokyo. There, while the Combined Fleet Headquarters was developing the plans to implement Yamamoto’s project, the War Ministry was defining the organization of Japan’s new empire. In addition to all the territory that Japan was just beginning to conquer, such as the Philippines, Hong Kong, Guam, Wake, the Gilberts, Australian New Guinea, the Bismarck, Solomon and Admiralty Islands, the world carvers there expected to cover a long list of countries, territories, and portions of countries to be included in the empire. All of Australia and New Zealand, Ceylon and much of India, all of Alaska, western Canada and the state of Washington, all of Central America plus Colombia and Ecuador, Cuba, Haiti, Jamaica and other assorted Caribbean islands would be taken over by Japan, while Macao, Hainan, and Portuguese Timor were to be purchased. Independent kingdoms
under Japanese control were to be established in the East Indies (Dutch and British), in Burma (expanded at the expense of India), in Malaya, Thailand, Cambodia and Annam.
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Against these wild schemes, a navy project for seizing Hawaii to be followed by Ceylon, Fiji, Samoa, and New Caledonia and more advances in the south thereafter looked positively modest.
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A Japanese submarine shelled the California coast on February 23,
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but the more extensive projects of the navy had to be cut down in the face of the army’s unwillingness to allocate troops, either for the huge expeditions the War Ministry’s own schemes would have required, or for the more modest conquests pushed by the navy. This had meant a sortie into the Indian Ocean instead of an invasion of Ceylon; it also meant that an invasion of the main islands of Hawaii could not be carried out.

The navy leadership was itself divided. On the one hand were the advocates in Yamamoto’s Combined Fleet Headquarters of a strike in the Central Pacific, now looking toward the seizure of Midway Island as a prerequisite for the landing on Hawaii, but making that possible by forcing the American navy, and especially its carriers, into a decisive battle. The central naval staff under Admiral Nagamo Osami preferred to concentrate on securing the empire Japan was winning in the south and considered an expedition to the east much too risky. In the face of Yamamoto’s threat to resign,
^g
the navy staff caved in, and a Midway operation was approved, but with a smaller operation in the south as a preliminary and as a concession to both the army and the navy general staffs.
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The developing consensus on a small operation in the south followed quickly by a larger one in the east was reinforced by American decisions and operations in both areas.

As an immediate reaction to the losses suffered at Pearl Harbor, the United States moved one carrier, the
Yorktown,
three battleships, a destroyer squadron and twelve submarines from the Atlantic, where they had been on convoy duty back to the Pacific.
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But that was not all. The rapidity of the unfolding disasters in the Philippines and Malaya led to a more general reassessment of the situation there. It was clear to Roosevelt and Marshall that steps had to be taken to keep open a route to Australia as a base for reinforcement of the Philippines if there was to be any hope of prolonging resistance there and for liberating the islands if they fell to the Japanese. The analysis of the situation prepared by then Brigadier General Dwight Eisenhower, the officer soon to be made
Chief of the War Plans Division, calling for a buildup to defend northern Australia, put these concepts into clear focus.
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In January 1942, the decision was made to garrison New Caledonia to secure the route to Australia,
⁵⁰
well in advance of the invitation by both Germany and the Vichy French government to the Japanese to occupy the island, which had rallied to de Gaulle in the fall of 1940.
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