The Second World War (44 page)

It was with their decks crowded with refuelling and rearming bombers that the first arrivals from
Enterprise
and
Hornet
found the four Japanese carriers, sailing in tight box formation and protected overhead by their combat air patrol of Zeros, just before 9.30 am. Nagumo had recently changed course, so the encounter initially contained an element of luck for the Americans. It lasted but briefly. By 9.36 all
Hornet
’s and ten of
Enterprise
’s torpedo-bombers had been shot down; their dive-bombers had been foxed by Nagumo’s change of course and, failing to find a target, either turned home if they had enough fuel, landed in Midway or simply ditched; all the fighters escorts ran out of fuel and fell into the sea.

Nagumo had had a lucky escape. He had counted on his superiority of numbers to see him through even if attacked when at a disadvantage, and that, with his well-calculated change of course, had extricated him from danger. Two-thirds of his enemy’s strike aircraft had been repelled or destroyed. There was not even a probability that the remainder would now be able to find him.

Yorktown
’s torpedo-bombers, navigating by hunch and then drawn towards the smoke of combat between Nagumo’s carriers and Task Force 16’s aircraft, found him none the less. However, forced to fly straight, low and level to deliver their torpedoes, seven out of twelve were shot down by his combat air patrol and none of the torpedoes launched found a mark. By ten o’clock Nagumo had repelled what appeared to be the final American attack and was preparing to launch his own aircraft to find and destroy his disarmed antagonist somewhere on the far side of Midway. His formation was somewhat scattered, but none of his ships was damaged and his fighter force was intact.

Unfortunately the fighters were temporarily at the wrong altitude. Drawn down to sea level to fight off
Yorktown
’s torpedo-bombers, they had left the sky open to any dive-bomber force that might appear. One of
Enterprise
’s dive-bomber groups had overflown 175 miles of sea, lost contact with the rest of its mother ship’s aircraft, taken a wrong course and been guided to its target by luck and shrewd guesswork. At 10.25 on the morning of 4 June 1942 it was exactly placed to deliver the most stunning and decisive blow in the history of naval warfare. Its leader, Lieutenant-Commander Wade McClusky, turned to attack and from 14,500 feet led his thirty-seven Dauntless dive-bombers seaward in a plunge at the Japanese carriers’ flight decks.

All were cluttered with aircraft and the paraphernalia of refuelling and rearming. High-octane fuel hoses ran between piles of discarded bombs, which stood beside aircraft running their engines for take-off; they were ingredients of catastrophe.
Akagi
, Nagumo’s flagship, was the first to go. A bomb started a fire in a torpedo store and within twenty minutes raged so fiercely that the admiral had to shift his flag to a destroyer.
Kaga
, hit by four bombs, was set ablaze by its own aviation fuel and had to be abandoned even more rapidly.
Soryu
suffered three hits; one started a fire among aircraft parked on deck, stopped her engines and left her victim to a shadowing American submarine which sank her at noon.

Within exactly five minutes, between 10.25 and 10.30, the whole course of the war in the Pacific had been reversed. The First Air Fleet, its magnificent ships, modern aircraft and superb pilots, had been devastated. And the disaster was not at an end.
Hiryu
had evaded attack and got away – but only temporarily. At five in the afternoon she was found racing furiously away from Midway by dive-bombers from
Enterprise
, was hit with four bombs, set on fire and left to be scuttled by her crew when the flames took hold from stem to stern.

Thus the whole of Nagumo’s fleet and, with it, the dream of empire perished. Yamamoto’s prophecy of ‘running wild’ for six months had been fulfilled almost to the day. Not only did the balance in the Pacific between fleet carriers now stand equal (
Yorktown
was sunk by a submarine on 6 June); the advantage the Japanese had lost could never be made good – as Yamamoto knew, having seen American industry at first hand. Six fleet carriers would join the Japanese navy in 1942-4; America would launch fourteen, as well as nine light carriers and sixty-six escort carriers, creating a fleet against which Japan could not stand. It was now to be condemned to the defensive, though in waging a defensive war it would test the courage and resources of the United States and its allies to the utmost.

Midway, through a catastrophic defeat, lost Japan not a foot of territory and in no way altered the boundaries of its new empire. The true consequences of Midway lay far in the future, when the Americans penetrated the Japanese defence perimeter in the southern and central Pacific at the end of 1943 and forced the Japanese once again to wage mobile warfare – by which time Japan had lost its superiority in naval airpower. In the meantime they retained their enormous area of conquest – eastern China and Manchuria, the Philippines, French Indo-China, British Burma and Malaya, the Dutch East Indies, together with their ally Thailand – and administered it undisturbed by Western Allied interference.

Conquest brings problems as difficult, if not as acute, as those of organising victory itself. Order must be maintained, governments replaced, currencies supported, markets revived, economies sustained and exploited for the conqueror’s profit. The Japanese did not come to empire unprepared, however. They had had ten years’ experience of administering conquered territory in Manchuria. More important, they had a theory of empire which was by no means hostile to or unpopular with all the peoples whose sovereignty they had wrested from the former colonial powers. The idea of a ‘Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’ which had taken root in the army, navy and nationalist circles in Japan before the war was at one level a cloak for imperial amibition; at another it clothed a genuine belief in the mission of Japan, as the first Asian great power, to lead other Asians to independence from foreign rule. Many in Asia were enthused and inspired by the Japanese triumph of 1942 and were ready, even eager, to co-operate with it.

The establishment of a ‘New Order’ in Asia had been adopted as an aim by the second Konoye cabinet in July 1940. In February 1942 the Tojo cabinet set up a Greater Asia Council and in November a Ministry for Greater Asia. The high point of Japan’s pan-Asian policy came a year later when the first – and only – Greater East Asia Conference was convened in Tokyo in November 1943. Its composition revealed the varied character of administration that Japan had imposed within the Co-Prosperity Sphere.

The conference was attended by the Prime Ministers of Manchuria (Manchukuo), Chang Chung-hui, and Japanese-controlled China, Wang Ching-wei, a representative of the Thai government, Prince Wan Waithayakon, the President of the occupied Philippines, José Laurel, the head of state of occupied Burma, Ba Maw, and Subhas Chandra Bose, the leader of the ‘Free Indian Government’. The Prime Ministers of Manchuria and ‘China’ were Japanese puppets, entirely without power and effectively instruments of Japanese exploitation of their annexed territories. Subhas Chandra Bose, a messianic Indian nationalist, had deliberately exiled himself from British India in order to raise the standard of revolt and arrived in Japan in mid-1943 in a German U-boat. He had no standing in official nationalist circles in India, where he had broken with Gandhi and the Indian National Congress, but had a considerable popular following and in the Indian National Army, raised from prisoners taken in Malaya, a sizeable military force under his influence – though not under his command, which remained in Japanese hands. Ba Maw was a genuine enthusiast for the Co-Prosperity Sphere; as the head of a state whose declaration of independence had been sponsored by Japan on 1 August 1942, he had on the same day declared war against Britain and the United States. The Burma Independence (later National) Army was led by young nationalists who were prepared to fight on Japan’s side. The Thai prince represented an independent state which had allied itself with Japan (in circumstances which would have made any other policy difficult) and had been rewarded by grants of territory from neighbouring Burma and Laos. José Laurel was a political associate of the legitimate but exiled President of the Philippines, Manuel Quezon, who had charged him to pretend co-operation with the Japanese. However, Laurel had subsequently been converted to pan-Asianism, and under his presidency the Philippines had declared its independence – already conditionally conceded by the United States – on 14 October 1942.

The territories excluded from the conference were Indo-China, Malaya and the Dutch East Indies. Indo-China – Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia – though under Japanese occupation, remained under Vichy French colonial administration until March 1945, when the Japanese rightly suspected it had turned to the Free French and overthrew it. Malaya’s large Chinese population, among which a small communist guerrilla movement flourished, made it an unsuitable country in which to experiment with self-rule – though a sizeable Muslim Malay element was not hostile to the Japanese, who had promised them independence at a later stage. The Muslims of the Dutch East Indies had been given a similar promise; while fighting with the Americans and Australians continued in New Guinea it was not judged opportune to grant them independence, but numbers of nationalist leaders including the future president, Sukarno, agreed to join a Central Consultative Committee, or quasi-government, in September 1943. Certain other territories, including Hong Kong, Singapore and Dutch, British or Australian Timor, Borneo and occupied New Guinea, had such strategic importance that they were simply annexed to the Japanese empire and placed under military government.

Although at the outset Japan’s devolution of power worked successfully, the Filipinos, who had no dislike for the Americans and were proud of their heavily Westernised culture, accepted occupation grudgingly and sheltered the only large-scale popular anti-Japanese guerrilla movement to flourish within the Co-Prosperity Sphere. In parts of Burma and Thailand local labour was conscripted to work in harsh conditions with Allied prisoners of war; of these, 12,000 out of 61,000 prisoners and 90,000 out of 270,000 Asian labourers died on the construction of the Burma railway. In other areas, however, the occupied population found little to resent in the change from colonial administration. The educated classes initially welcomed it and were only gradually alienated by the discovery that the Japanese were as racially arrogant as their former European masters.

Such was not the case in China. An independent state, however ineffective its government before 1937, it had been invaded without provocation and then systematically exploited for profit wherever the Japanese armies were strong enough to impose their control. The educated classes, deeply conscious of the antiquity and grandeur of their vanished imperial system and consistently resentful of the West’s commercial penetration and diplomatic aggression in the previous century, were as disdainful of the Japanese as of all other foreign cultures. However, the area still controlled by the Kuomintang was ravaged by inflation, which had reached 125,000 per cent by 1945, and by constant conscription drives; the communist north-east was gripped by an austerity deeply inimical to the national character; and the rural areas within the Japanese sphere of occupation, which contained about 40 per cent of China’s agricultural land, were scourged by constant ‘rice offensives’. In the prevailing chaos many Chinese made an accommodation with the enemy. In 1942 the Chinese communists publicised the fact that twenty-seven Kuomintang generals had gone over to the Japanese; more significantly a vast system of local trade had sprung up between occupiers and occupied. Since the Japanese armies generally controlled only the towns, and were driven to raise necessities from the surrounding countryside by force – a wearisome and inefficient practice – landowners and merchants rapidly entered into trading arrangements with the local Japanese commanders, and this market relationship proved more satisfactory to both sides. This accommodation prevailed throughout most of western China until the institution of the Ichi-Go offensive, at Tokyo’s decree, in the spring of 1944.

The ethos of Japan’s ‘New Order’ was co-operative; yet it was self-deluding and insincere in conception, and frequently harsh and extortionate in practice. Japanese excesses and atrocities, however, were arbitrary and sporadic. The pattern of its German ally’s occupation policies was exactly contrary. Hitler’s ‘New Order’ was designed to serve Greater Germany’s interests exclusively; but the system of coercion used to make it work was calculated and methodic, while the recourse to punishment, reprisal and terror which underlay it was governed by rules and procedures implemented from the centre.

By the end of 1942 German troops occupied the territory of fourteen European sovereign states: France, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, Denmark, Norway, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Greece, Yugoslavia and the three Baltic states of Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia. Austria had since 1938 been amalgamated with the Reich as sovereign territory, together with the Sudetenland province of Czechoslovakia and, since 1939, the former German provinces of Poland. Luxembourg, the French provinces of Alsace and Lorraine and the Yugoslav provinces of southern Styria and Carinthia, occupied in 1940-1, were deemed territories whose ‘union with the Reich’ impended and were under ‘special civil administration’ by the Ministry of the Interior. Denmark retained its elected government and monarchy under German Foreign Office supervision. Norway and Holland were under the supervision of Reich commissioners who answered directly to Hitler; their monarchs and governments had gone into exile but their civil administrations remained in place. Belgium was placed under military government by the occupying Wehrmacht, as was north-eastern France; but the French Vichy government remained the civil administrative authority throughout the country, even after the extension of Wehrmacht occupation into the ‘Free Zone’ in November 1942.