The Second World War (53 page)
The two principal landings indicated the Imperial Japanese Army’s intention to mount a pincer attack on the Philippine capital. In theory, MacArthur commanded a force of 130,000 men, but the vast majority were Philippine reserve units. He had only 31,000 American and Philippine troops on whom he felt able to count. The battle-hardened Japanese troops, with armoured spearheads, were soon pushing his forces back towards Manila Bay. MacArthur put into effect the established contingency
plan Orange
. This was to withdraw his troops into the Bataan Peninsula on the west side of Manila Bay and hold out there. The island of Corregidor at the mouth of the great inlet could control the entrance with its coastal artillery batteries, and defend the south-eastern end of the fifty-kilometre-long peninsula.
Lacking sufficient military transport to withdraw his southern forces,
MacArthur commandeered Manila’s gaudily painted buses. On the evening of 24 December, accompanied by President Manuel Quezon and his government, MacArthur left the capital by steamer to set up his headquarters on the island fortress of Corregidor, known as ‘the Rock’. Huge oil depots and stores around Manila and in the navy yard were set on fire, sending billowing pillars of black smoke into the sky.
The withdrawal of the 15,000 American and 65,000 Philippine soldiers to Bataan and its first defence line along the Pampanga River was carried out with difficulty. Many of the Filipino reservists had slipped away to return home, but others took to the hills to continue a guerrilla war against the invaders. Across the bay from Bataan, the Japanese entered Manila on 2 January 1942. MacArthur’s biggest problem was to feed 80,000 soldiers and 26,000 civilian refugees on the peninsula now that the Japanese navy had set up an effective blockade and enjoyed air supremacy.
The Japanese attacks began on 9 January. MacArthur’s forces holding the neck of the Bataan Peninsula were divided by Mount Natib in the middle. The terrain of thick jungle and ravines on the western side and the swamps on the eastern side along Manila Bay both provided a hellish terrain in their different ways. Malaria and dengue fever ravaged MacArthur’s troops, who were short of quinine as well as other medical supplies. Most were already weakened by dysentery, which the US Marine Corps called the ‘Yangtze rapids’. MacArthur’s main mistake was to have dispersed his supplies rather than concentrate them on Bataan and Corregidor.
After two weeks of bitter fighting, the Japanese broke through in the mountainous centre on 22 January and forced MacArthur’s troops to pull back to another line halfway down the peninsula. His sick soldiers, their uniforms in tatters, and their skin starting to rot from the jungle and swamps, were already exhausted and severely weakened. A new threat appeared with four Japanese amphibious landings around the south-west tip of the peninsula. These were contained and fought off with the greatest difficulty, causing heavy casualties on both sides.
The resistance of the American and Filipino troops had been so effective, inflicting such heavy losses on the Japanese, that in mid-February Lieutenant General Homma Masaharu pulled back his troops a little way to rest them and await reinforcements. Although the defenders’ morale was boosted, and they took the opportunity to improve their defences, the toll of sickness and the realization that no outside help could be expected soon had its effect. Many of the ‘
Battling Bastards of Bataan
’, as they called themselves, became embittered by the idea of MacArthur exhorting them to further effort from the safety of the concrete tunnels on Corregidor. He became known as ‘Dugout Doug’. MacArthur had wanted to stay in the Philippines, but he received a direct order from Roosevelt to leave
for Australia to prepare to fight back. On 12 March, MacArthur, with his family and staff, left on a flotilla of four fast patrol torpedo or PT boats.
Those remaining behind under the command of Major General Jonathan Wainwright knew that the situation was hopeless. Through starvation and sickness, less than a quarter were able to fight. General Homma’s forces, on the other hand, had been reinforced with another 21,000 men, bombers and artillery. On 3 April, the Japanese attacked again with overwhelming force. The defence collapsed and on 9 April the troops on Bataan under Major General Edward King Jr surrendered. Wainwright on Corregidor still held out, but the Rock was pulverized by continual bombing, naval gunfire from the sea and artillery from the land. On the night of 5 May, Japanese troops landed on the island, and the following day a devastated Wainwright was forced to surrender his remaining 13,000 men. Yet the agony for the defenders of both Bataan and Corregidor was far from over.
DECEMBER 1941–JANUARY 1942
A
lthough the war with Germany and the war with Japan were conducted as two separate conflicts, they influenced each other far more than may appear on the surface. The Soviet victory at Khalkhin Gol in August 1939 had not only contributed to the Japanese decision to attack south, and bring the United States into the war, it also meant that Stalin could move his Siberian divisions west to defeat Hitler’s attempt to take Moscow.
The Nazi–Soviet pact, which had come as a great shock to Japan, had also affected its strategic thinking. This was not helped by the astonishing lack of liaison between Germany and Japan, which concluded its neutrality pact with Stalin just two months before Hitler launched his invasion of the Soviet Union. The ‘strike south’ faction in Tokyo prevailed, not just over those who wanted war with the Soviet Union, but also against those in the Imperial Japanese Army who wanted to finish the war in China first. In any case, the Soviet–Japanese neutrality pact meant that the United States now became the chief supplier of the Chinese Nationalists. Chiang Kai-shek still tried to persuade President Roosevelt to exert pressure on Stalin to join the war against Japan, but he refused to bargain over Lend– Lease. Stalin was adamant that the Red Army could deal with only one front at a time.
Roosevelt’s greatly increased support in 1941 for Chiang Kai-shek infuriated Tokyo, but it was Washington’s decision to impose the oil embargo that the Japanese saw as tantamount to a declaration of war. The fact that it was in response to their occupation of Indochina and a warning not to invade other countries did not penetrate their own version of logic, which was based on national pride.
Because of their supremacist beliefs, Japanese militarists, like the Nazis, were compelled to confuse cause and effect. Perhaps predictably, they were enraged by Roosevelt’s and Churchill’s Atlantic Charter, which they saw as an attempt to impose the Anglo-American version of democracy upon the world. They could well have pointed to the paradox of the British Empire promoting self-determination, and yet their own notion of imperial liberation with the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere was far more oppressive. In fact, their Asian new order was strikingly similar to
the German version, and their treatment of the Chinese ran parallel to the Nazi attitude towards Slav
Untermenschen
.
Japan would never have dared to attack the United States if Hitler had not started the war in Europe and the Atlantic. A two-ocean war offered its only chance against the naval power of the United States and the British Empire. It was for this reason that the Japanese sought assurances from Nazi Germany in November 1941 that it would declare war on the United States as soon as they attacked Pearl Harbor. Ribbentrop, no doubt still piqued that Japan had refused the German request in July to move against Vladivostok and Siberia, was evasive at first. ‘
Roosevelt is a fanatic
,’ he said, ‘so it is impossible to foresee what he would do.’ General Oshima Hiroshi, the Japanese ambassador, asked bluntly what Germany would do.
‘Should Japan become engaged in a war against the United States,’ Ribbentrop was forced to reply, ‘Germany, of course, would join the war immediately. There is absolutely no possibility of Germany’s entering into a separate peace with the United States, under such circumstances: the Führer is determined on that point.’
The Japanese had not told Berlin of their plans, so the report of the attack on Pearl Harbor came, according to Goebbels, ‘
like a bolt from the blue
’. Hitler greeted the news with intense joy. The Japanese would keep the Americans occupied, he reasoned, and the war in the Pacific would surely reduce supplies sent to the Soviet Union and Britain. He calculated that the United States was bound to enter the war against him in the near future, yet it would not be in a position to intervene in Europe until 1943 at the earliest. He knew nothing of the ‘Germany first’ policy agreed between the American and British chiefs of staff.
On 11 December 1941, the American chargé d’affaires in Berlin was summoned to the Wilhelmstrasse where Ribbentrop read out the text of Nazi Germany’s declaration of war on the United States. Later in the afternoon, to acclamations of ‘Sieg heil!’ from Party members in the Reichstag, Hitler himself declared that Germany and Italy were at war with America, alongside Japan, in accordance with the Tripartite Pact. In fact the Tripartite Pact was an alliance of mutual defence. Germany was not in any way obliged to aid Japan if it were the aggressor.
At a time when German troops were in retreat before Moscow, Hitler’s declaration of war on the United States appears rash to say the least. The decision reeked of hubristic pride, especially when Ribbentrop (probably echoing Hitler’s own words) stated in grandiose manner, ‘
A great power doesn’t let itself
have war declared on it–it declares war itself.’ Yet Hitler had not even consulted the OKW and key military officers at Führer headquarters, such as General Alfred Jodl and General Walter Warlimont.
They were alarmed by the lack of calculation in the decision, especially since Hitler had maintained the previous summer that he did not want war with America until he had smashed the Red Army.
At a stroke, Hitler’s self-justifying strategy that a victory over the Soviet Union would eventually force Britain out of the war was turned on its head. Now Germany really would face a war on two fronts. The generals were dismayed by his apparent ignorance of America’s industrial might. And most ordinary Germans started to fear that the conflict would stretch on for years. (It was later striking how many Germans convinced themselves by the end of the war that it had been the United States which declared war on Germany, not the other way round.)
Soldiers on the eastern front listened to the announcement, determined to see it in the best light. ‘
On 11 December
itself we were able to listen to the Führer’s speech, an exceptional event,’ wrote a Gefreiter in the 2nd Panzer Division, boasting that they had been within twelve kilometres of the Kremlin. ‘Now the right world war has begun. It had to come.’
The key element in Hitler’s thinking lay in the war at sea. Roosevelt’s increasingly aggressive ‘shoot on sight’ policy, ordering US warships to attack German U-boats wherever they found them, and the decision to provide escorts to convoys west of Iceland had begun to tilt the Battle of the Atlantic in the Allies’ favour. Grossadmiral Raeder had been pressing Hitler to allow his wolfpacks to hit back. Hitler had shared his frustration, but until the Japanese tied down the US Navy in the Pacific and agreed formally not to seek a separate peace with the United States, he had not dared make a move. Now the western Atlantic and the whole North American coastline could become a free-fire zone in the ‘torpedo war’. This, in Hitler’s view, could finally offer another way of bringing Britain to its knees, even before the conquest of the Soviet Union.
Konteradmiral Karl Dönitz, the commander of the U-boat fleet, had asked Hitler in September 1941 to give him as much warning as possible of a declaration of war on the United States. He wanted time to prepare his wolfpacks so that they could be in position to strike mercilessly at American shipping along the east coast while the United States was still unready. But, as things turned out, Hitler’s sudden decision came at a time when there were no U-boats available in the area.
Hitler’s anti-semitic obsessions had convinced him that the United States was basically a Nordic country dominated by Jewish warmongers, and this was another reason why a showdown between his New Order in Europe and America was inevitable. Yet he failed to appreciate that the attack on Pearl Harbor had united America far more powerfully than Roosevelt could ever have hoped to do on his own. The isolationist lobby led by the slogan ‘America First’ was utterly silenced, and now Hitler’s
declaration of war played straight into Roosevelt’s hands. The President could not have counted on Congress to take his ‘undeclared war’ in the Atlantic any further without it.
That second week of December 1941 was without doubt the turning point of the war. Churchill, in spite of the horrific news from Hong Kong and Malaya, now knew that Britain could never be defeated. After hearing of the news of Pearl Harbor, Churchill said that he ‘
went to bed
and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful’. The repulse of the German armies before Moscow also demonstrated that Hitler was unlikely to achieve victory there, over his most formidable adversary on land. There was in addition a temporary easing in the Battle of the Atlantic, and even in North Africa the news was for once encouraging, with Auchinleck’s Crusader offensive pushing Rommel back out of Cyrenaica. It was therefore with great optimism that
Churchill
sailed again for the New World, this time in the battleship HMS
Duke of York
, the sister ship of the
Prince of Wales
. His series of meetings with Roosevelt and the American chiefs of staff was codenamed Arcadia.
As he crossed the Atlantic, Churchill prepared his views on the future conduct of the war in a ferment of ideas. These, debated with his own chiefs of staff, were honed to form British strategic planning. No attempt to land in northern Europe should be made until German industry, especially aircraft production, had been reduced by heavy bombers, a campaign which they wanted the US air force to join. American and British forces should land in North Africa in 1942 to help defeat Rommel and to secure the Mediterranean. Then landings could be made in 1943 in Sicily and Italy, or at places on the northern European coastline. Churchill also recognized that the Americans should fight back against the Japanese with aircraft carriers.
