All Hell Let Loose (91 page)

The war retained its stubborn, murderous, futile momentum. In the last months of the European struggle, while some German soldiers were visibly grateful to be taken prisoner, many maintained a stubborn defence. They showed a much greater will for sacrifice than had the French in similar circumstances in 1940, or most British troops thereafter. The Wehrmacht’s performance can partly be explained by compulsion – deserters and alleged cowards were ruthlessly shot, in their thousands during the last months. Between 1914 and 1918, 150 death sentences were passed on members of the Kaiser’s army, of which just forty-eight were carried out. By contrast, between 1939 and 1945 more than 15,000 military executions were officially listed, and the real total was substantially higher. Beyond mortal sanctions, the immediate realities of the battlefield – the presence of the enemy in the next field or street – imposed their own logic. Even in its death throes, the Third Reich proved able to persuade many Germans to display extremes of futile stubbornness.

After a month of fighting in Normandy, the Anglo-American armies held a secure perimeter twenty miles inland. But bad weather impeded air operations and the landing of supplies. Every small advance demanded huge effort and cost casualties on a scale that thoroughly alarmed the Allies, especially the British. When Operation
Epsom
at the end of June failed to envelop Caen – originally planned as a D-Day objective – Montgomery summoned heavy bomber support: Lancasters duly devastated the city on the evening of 7 July, enabling British and Canadian troops to move into the northern ruins. On 18 July, a formidable armoured force was committed to Operation
Goodwood
, designed to take Falaise. Montgomery broke off this attack at the end of its second day, after losing 4,000 casualties and five hundred tanks, one-third of all British armour in Normandy. The Shermans were replaced readily enough, but the attackers were chastened by their failure. ‘Our nerves were shot,’ wrote tank commander John Cropper of the mood in his crew at the end of July. ‘Ritchie and Keith started an argument, on music I think. Within seconds they were literally screaming at each other. I had to be very firm with them to break it up … It was a long time before either of them uttered another word.’

Meanwhile on the Allied right, Gen. Omar Bradley’s First Army progressed painfully through the
bocage
, where difficult conditions were worsened by German flooding of low ground. The Americans lost 40,000 casualties in two weeks, before reaching dry ground around Saint-Lô from which a major armoured assault could be launched. Operation
Cobra
was preceded by a massive heavy bomber attack, which crippled the German Panzer Lehr Division in its path. On 25 July, the Americans began an advance on Coutances which met little effective resistance: the German army in Normandy was crumbling. Bradley’s forces were soon racing south, with the Germans falling back ahead of them. Avranches fell on 30 July, and seizure of an intact bridge at Pontaubault opened the way west into Brittany, south to the Loire, east to the Seine and the so-called Paris– Orleans gap. Patton, commanding the newly activated US Third Army, dispatched a corps on a dash south-eastward to Mayenne and Le Mans, reaching the latter after advancing seventy-four miles in a week.

Yet although senior German officers now recognised strategic retreat as essential, most of their line held. Hitler insisted on a new counter-attack, disclosed to the Allies by Ultra: in darkness in the early hours of 7 August, Rommel’s successor von Kluge launched a major counter-offensive designed to separate the US First and Third Armies. During the night the panzers retook Mortain and pushed forward seven miles. With the coming of daylight, however, disaster fell on them. Allied fighter-bombers quickly destroyed forty out of seventy attacking tanks. For four more days the Germans strove to regain momentum, but US infantry held their positions supported by massive artillery fire.

On Montgomery’s front, progress remained slow. Late on 7 August Crerar’s Second Canadian Army attacked south of Caen. In darkness, his tanks made some headway, before the assault ran out of steam soon after daybreak. Canadian and Polish armoured units took over, but their inexperience, and a bungled bomber strike which devastated several spearhead units, halted operations once more; inconclusive fighting continued on the road to Falaise until 10 August. Montgomery’s formations faced the bulk of the surviving German armour. It was nonetheless painful for them to progress so sluggishly, when the Americans in the west were sweeping forward in triumph.

With Patton’s forces moving so fast, Bradley saw an opportunity to trap an estimated twenty-one German formations – or, more accurately, their remains. If Third Army swung north to Alençon and the Canadians could reach Falaise, only fourteen miles would separate them. Montgomery accepted the plan. One of Patton’s corps dashed for Alençon against negligible opposition, and pushed through the town to reach the outskirts of Argentan on the evening of 12 August. At this point, Bradley made one of the most controversial decisions of the campaign, halting the advance. His professed reason – to avoid the risk of a collision with the advancing Canadians – does not merit serious examination. More plausibly, and probably prudently, he flinched from placing relatively weak forces in the path of the retreating Germans, wounded tigers.

The Canadians were still fighting hard. Again and again they faced fierce actions with enemy rearguards who sometimes fought to the last man. The rate of attrition in some armoured encounters was extraordinary: on the morning of 8 August, for instance, one 17-pounder ‘Firefly’ of the Northamptonshire Yeomanry knocked out three Tigers and a panzer Mk IV; but an hour later a single German Mk IV, posted hull down in a gully, knocked out seven tanks of the same regiment before itself being destroyed. The Canadians finally reached Falaise on 16 August, twenty hours after American and French troops launched the
Anvil
landings in southern France, against slight opposition. That day, as Patton’s army hastened westwards, meeting few Germans and hysterically rejoicing French crowds, Hitler authorised a strategic withdrawal from Normandy.

In the so-called Falaise pocket, 150,000 Germans suffered relentless Allied air and artillery bombardment. ‘The floor of the valley was seen to be alive,’ wrote an Allied officer near Trun, ‘… men marching, cycling and running, columns of horse-drawn transport, motor transport, and as the sun got up, so more targets came to light … It was a gunners’ paradise and everybody took advantage of it … Away on our left was the famous killing ground, and all day the roar of Typhoons went on and fresh columns of smoke obscured the horizon … the whole miniature picture of an army in rout. First a squad of men running, being overtaken by men on bicycles, followed by a limber at a gallop, and the whole being overtaken by a Panther tank crowded with men and doing well up to 30mph.’

On the evening of 19 August Polish and American troops met at Chambois, allegedly closing the ‘Falaise gap’. Allied fighter-bombers destroyed thousands of vehicles in the pocket. But for two more days German fugitives trickled through. The Germans lost 10,000 killed at Falaise, and five times that number taken prisoner. ‘My driver was burning,’ wrote SS panzergrenadier Herbert Walther. ‘I had a bullet through the arm. I jumped onto a railway track and ran.’ Hit again in the leg, he managed a further hundred yards before ‘I was hit in the back of the neck with a big hammer – a bullet had gone in beneath the ear and come out through the cheek. I was choking on blood. There were two Americans looking down at me and two French soldiers who wanted to finish me off.’ But a remarkable number of fugitives got away. It became a cliché of the historiography of the war to assert that the German armies in France were destroyed, but this was not entirely true. They suffered some 240,000 casualties during the campaign, and forty divisions were wrecked. It was nonetheless an extraordinary achievement, that a further 240,000 men and 25,000 vehicles crossed the Seine eastwards between 19 and 31 August.

On the river below Rouen, a five-mile-long queue of German armour and vehicles stood immobile but almost unscathed through an entire day and night, while German engineers laboured to repair a damaged railway bridge, the only feasible crossing; heavy rain kept the Allied air forces away until the passage was opened. Sporadic artillery fire inflicted some losses, but thousands of men and vehicles were soon on their way towards Germany. More got across the river on a ferry improvised from two barges by a naval unit at Elbeuf. If these were only fragments of an army, they proved invaluable to Hitler in the weeks that followed, forming the skeleton on which a western defence of the Reich was improvised. SS panzer officer Herbert Rink wrote: ‘We were shell-shocked and exhausted. Once behind the West Wall, we could join all the defeated, decimated German units, all those who had made it through 600km of horrifying, crushing battle … We, who had come depleted and exhausted from the inferno of Caen, through the breakout from the pocket at Falaise, through the nerve-racking retreat across France and partisan-plagued Belgium – we had gathered our strength and rebuilt our confidence.’ If Rink’s last assertion was an exaggeration, it was indisputable that von Rundstedt, who succeeded as C-in-C in the west after the suicide of von Kluge, was able to establish and defend a new line.

The Germans abandoned Paris without a fight. Leclerc’s Free French armoured division entered the capital on 25 August to find the Resistance claiming possession, a legend that launched the resurrection of France’s national self-respect. The Allied armies embarked on a dramatic pursuit which carried them into eastern Belgium and the liberation of Brussels. On 1 September, Eisenhower assumed operational command of the Anglo-American forces, relegating Montgomery to leadership of the Anglo-Canadian 21st Army Group with the sop of promotion to field marshal. The Western Allies were convinced that by achieving victory in Normandy they had brought Germany to the verge of defeat. Most of France was free, at a cost of only 40,000 dead. At the beginning of September 1944, they anticipated final victory before the year’s end. In the event, their hopes took significantly longer to fulfil, but ‘The remainder of the war,’ wrote Geyr von Schweppenburg, commanding Panzergroup West, ‘was only a prolonged epilogue.’

War is prodigiously wasteful, because much of the effort made by rival combatants proves futile, and the price is paid in lives. It is easy for historians to identify not merely battles, but entire campaigns, which need not have been fought, because outcomes were already ordained in consequence of events elsewhere. Much effort and human sacrifice contribute little to final victory. But when great forces have been created and deployed, it is almost inevitable that they will be used. As long as the enemy refuses to acknowledge defeat, it is deemed intolerable for armies to stand idle, bombs to remain in their dumps. During 1944, the US Navy gained overwhelming dominance of the Pacific. Blockade rendered inevitable the collapse of an enemy wholly dependent on imported fuel and raw materials; American submarines achieved the strangulation of Japanese commerce which Germany’s U-boats had failed to impose on Britain. Seldom in history has such a small force – 16,000 men, 1.6 per cent of the sea service’s strength, with never more than fifty boats deployed – gained such decisive results. American submarines were responsible for 55 per cent of all Japan’s wartime shipping losses, 1,300 vessels totalling over six million tons; their destructive achievement climaxed in October 1944, when they sank 322,265 tons of shipping. Thereafter, Japanese losses diminished only because they had little cargo tonnage left to sink; Japan’s bulk imports fell by 40 per cent.

It is extraordinary that Hirohito’s nation went to war knowing the importance and vulnerability of its merchant shipping, yet without seriously addressing convoy protection; the Tokyo regime built huge warships for the Combined Fleet, but grossly inadequate numbers of escorts. Japanese anti-submarine techniques lagged far behind those of other belligerents. Their radar and airborne anti-submarine capabilities were so feeble that American boats could often operate on the surface in daylight. While the Germans lost 781 U-boats and Japan 128, the Imperial Japanese Navy sank only forty-one US submarines; six more foundered in accidents. American submariners suffered a loss rate comparable with aircrew – almost one man in four – but the results they achieved were so important that this sacrifice was cheap at the price. The US investment of industrial resources in submarines was a fraction of that lavished on the B-29 Superfortress bombers which belatedly joined the assault, and the undersea arm contributed far more to victory.

Japanese island garrisons found themselves isolated, immobilised and starving. A soldier on Bougainville wrote on 14 September 1944: ‘Old friendships dissolve when men are starving. Each man is always trying to satisfy his own hunger. It’s much more frightening than meeting the enemy’s assaults. There is a vicious war going on within our ranks. Can spiritual power degenerate to this?’ American air and naval dominance denied Japan any chance of launching an effective strategic counterstroke. Its soldiers, sailors and airmen still enjoyed many opportunities to die bravely, to inflict suffering and death on their foes and the oppressed subjects of their empire. But the nation’s fate was sealed.

It was rationally unnecessary for the Allies to launch major ground operations in South-East Asia – or, for that matter, the Philippines. If they merely maintained naval blockade and air bombardment, the Japanese people must eventually starve, their oil-deprived war machine would be reduced to impotence. Given the nature of war, democracies and global geopolitics, however, ‘eventually’ was not soon enough. In the spring of 1944, it was taken for granted that Allied forces must attack the Japanese wherever possible. The British had confronted them for two years on the north-east frontier of India without making significant advances, but now at last resources, including large numbers of US transport aircraft, became available to mount an offensive with overwhelming superiority.

Churchill opposed an overland operation to reconquer Burma; Gen. ‘Vinegar Joe’ Stilwell complained bitterly to Marshall in July 1944 that ‘[The British] simply do not want to fight in Burma or reopen communications with China.’ This was true. ‘India is not at present a suitable base from which to launch large-scale operations,’ asserted a joint Anglo-American report in the spring of 1944. ‘Her transport system is already overtaxed, her political situation unsatisfactory, and her economic position precarious.’ Australia, said this document, offered far more convenient basing facilities. The British Empire’s soldiers had been repeatedly worsted in jungle warfare; Churchill preferred an amphibious landing in southern Burma, below Rangoon, or better still on the tip of Sumatra, to secure a base from which to retake Malaya. Washington, however, refused to provide assault shipping merely to enable the British – as Roosevelt and his chiefs of staff saw it – to reconquer their eastern empire. Americans no longer took much trouble to salve Churchill’s sensibilities, and made explicit their determination to direct the future course of the eastern war. A US official visiting London said bluntly, ‘It is now our turn to bat in Asia.’ The Americans demanded an overland assault on northern Burma, to reopen the road from India to Chiang Kai-shek’s China.

Chiang declined to commit his own troops to further this objective unless or until the British advanced from Assam. Britain sulkily acceded to American wishes, though both Churchill and his local field commander, Lt. Gen. William Slim, recognised that, win or lose, Fourteenth Army’s operations could contribute little to Japan’s defeat by comparison with America’s Pacific campaign. The initial Allied plan for 1944 called for two of Slim’s divisions to launch a new offensive in the coastal Arakan; two Indian divisions would probe from Assam into northern Burma, while Stilwell directed a thrust south from China to take Myitkyina and reopen the ‘Burma Road’. The latter operation would be supported by the deployment of an expanded Chindit force, six brigades strong, airlifted into northern Burma behind the Japanese front, then supplied by American aircraft.

Yet even as the Allies began to concentrate their forces, the enemy preempted them: two Japanese divisions attacked in the Arakan, to pin down British forces before launching a major offensive into Assam, with Imphal as its principal objective. The operation was recklessly ambitious, now that Indian and British troops were deployed in such strength. Lacking air superiority, with few tanks and guns, it was folly for the Japanese to dispatch infantry hundreds of miles across terrible country against Slim’s positions. The Japanese offensive provided the British with an opportunity such as they had never previously enjoyed: to fight on their own ground, with powerful artillery, armoured and air support.

The Arakan thrust was smashed so swiftly and comprehensively that Slim was able to airlift some of his units north-eastwards to strengthen the defence of Imphal and Kohima, key road junctions separated by a hundred miles. The battles there in the spring of 1944 produced the heaviest fighting of the war on Britain’s eastern front. Climatic conditions in Assam and Burma were as wretched as those of the Pacific, with the added hazard of mountain terrain; even before men began to fight, mere movement on precipitous hill faces strained their powers to the limit. ‘The physical hammering one takes is difficult to understand,’ said Lt. Sam Hornor, Signals Officer of 1st Norfolks.

Bugler Bert May said of Kohima: ‘It was a stinking hell of a hole. All the vegetation on the ground was dead … Leeches, they used to get through on to any part of your body that was open. You used to get a lighted cigarette, stick it on his tail and “bonk”, he’d pop off.’ For weeks after the Japanese attack began on 7 March, the issue seemed to hang in the balance. The Japanese encircled Slim’s positions. There was panic at Dimapur, the big supply dump beyond Kohima. Lt. Trevor Highett of the Dorsets said later, ‘There are few things more unpleasant than a base in a flap. It was full of people who never expected to fight, and who couldn’t wait to get out. “Take what you like,” they said. “Just give us a signature if you’ve got time.”’ Then the infantrymen trudged forward to join the battle. Each day witnessed fierce small-arms and grenade battles at close quarters, as the Japanese charged again and again.

The former district commissioner’s tennis court became the focus of the struggle for Kohima, with only a few yards separating the Royal West Kents’ positions from those of their foes. ‘We shot them on the tennis court, we grenaded them on the tennis court,’ said company commander John Winstanley. ‘We held because I had constant contact by radio with the guns and the Japs never seemed to learn how to surprise us. They used to shout in English as they formed up, “Give up” … One could judge just the right moment to call down gun and mortar fire … They were not acting intelligently and did the same old stupid thing again and again. We had experienced fighting the Japs in the Arakan, [with them] bayoneting the wounded and prisoners … They had renounced any right to be regarded as human, and we thought of them as vermin to be exterminated. That was important – we are pacific in our nature, but when aroused we fight quite well.’

The battlefield was soon reduced to a barren, blackened wilderness, stripped of vegetation by blast, pockmarked with craters and foxholes, festooned with the coloured parachutes on which supplies were dropped to the garrison. The stench of death and putrid flesh hung over everything. ‘We were attacked every single night,’ said Major Frankie Boshell, a company commander in the Berkshires, who relieved the West Kents. ‘On the second night they started at 1900 and the last attack came at 0400 next morning. They came in waves, like a pigeon shoot. Most nights they overran part of the battalion position, so we had to mount counterattacks.’ His company lost half of its 120 men at Kohima, and other units suffered in like proportion. Sgt. Ben McCrae wrote: ‘Your nerves got to you. You could have sat down and cried your eyes out. Which a lot of blokes did – they got so low-spirited with it all. You were hungry, cold and wet, you thought, “When am I going to get out of here?” You didn’t, you couldn’t.’ Sgt. Bert Fitt took out three bunkers with grenades, then found his Bren gun empty when he met a Japanese. ‘When you get to hand-to-hand fighting like that, you realise that you or he’s going to get killed … You close in and hope for the best … I crashed the light machine-gun into his face … Before he hit the ground I had my hand on his windpipe … I managed to get his bayonet from his rifle and I finished him with that.’

In action, there was a fine line between courage which heartened others and bluster which incurred their contempt. 1st Norfolks were uncertain on which side to place their bombastic colonel, Robert Scott. Amid the carnage, Scott said ebulliently to his riflemen, ‘Come on you chaps, there’s no need to be afraid, you are better than those little yellow bastards.’ When struck on the scalp by a glancing shrapnel splinter, he shook his fist at the Japanese lines and said, ‘The biggest bloke on the damn position and you couldn’t get him! If you were in my bloody battalion I’d take your proficiency pay away!’ Captain Michael Fulton said to a fellow officer, ‘Well, Sam, I’d better get off and earn my MC.’ Fulton ran forward, and within seconds was shot through the head. At Kohima, 1st Norfolks lost eleven officers and seventy-nine other ranks killed, thirteen officers and 150 other ranks wounded.

‘Almost to a man the Japs had died without trying to escape,’ wrote a British company commander of the Border Regiment after a night clash further south, on the Imphal plain. ‘But one was burning in the open, and his yellow limbs were black and shining like those of some fantastic Negro; another who had come out to fight was dead and sprawling, a bayonet like an outsize arrow still sticking in his chest; three more, already wounded, were running for the cover of a tall bamboo clump some thirty yards wide.’ Some men found the struggle too much for them: ‘For the first time, that day, I saw two men crack,’ wrote the same officer after another savage encounter at Imphal. ‘One, a six-foot corporal, who spent the afternoon cowering in a ditch, the other, a reinforcement who when nothing was happening in the middle of the night suddenly broke and ran – until somebody stopped him with a bayonet.’

Devastating artillery, armoured and air power gradually reduced the attackers. A Lee-Grant tank lurched down steep terraces blackened by days of bombardment to retake the tennis court at Kohima, firing at point-blank range into Japanese foxholes. Gen. Renya Mutaguchi, the Japanese commander, had launched his offensive with little logistic support, and the RAF daily battered his lines of communication. Soon the besiegers began to starve. On 31 May, without authorisation the local Japanese commander at Kohima ordered a withdrawal which collapsed into rout. On 18 July, Mutaguchi likewise bowed to the inevitable: the remnants of the Japanese forces around Imphal embarked upon a ragged, stumbling march towards the Chindwin river, racked by hunger, tormented at every twist of the mountain trails by Allied aircraft and pursuing troops.

A despairing Japanese soldier wrote: ‘In the rain, with no place to sit, we took short spells of sleep standing on our feet. The bodies of our comrades who had struggled along the track before us lay all around, rain-sodden and giving off a stench of decomposition. Even with the support of our sticks we fell among the corpses again and again as we stumbled on rocks and tree roots laid bare by the rain and attempted one more step, then one more step, in our exhaustion.’ The outcome of the twin battles of Imphal and Kohima was the heaviest defeat ever suffered by a Japanese army: out of 85,000 men committed, 53,000 became casualties. Among their 30,000 dead, as many perished from disease and malnutrition as from Allied action. Mutaguchi’s forces lost all their tanks, guns and animal transport, which were irreplaceable. On no single battlefield of the Pacific campaign did Hirohito’s forces suffer as severely.