All Hell Let Loose (103 page)

Hamlin described indiscriminate shooting, rapes committed by French colonial troops, the killing of an American sergeant by a French patrol. ‘The hotel in Mettlach was systematically sacked and contents shipped by truck back into France … 5 April Luitwin-on-Boch reported that French soldiers had discovered the art objects and curios stored in the basement of the ceramic museum of Villeroy & Boch, and were destroying them.’ To compound the chaos, liberated Russian prisoners rampaged freely and American soldiers were reported killing fish with grenades in the Hausbacher brook. By contrast the local inhabitants were entirely submissive, according to Hamlin. Though such scenes were widespread throughout Germany, in the Western Allied zone order was progressively restored during the weeks that followed. In the Russian zone, it was not. Institutionalised pillage, rape and murder persisted long after Germany’s military defeat had been acknowledged. The ending of the war in the west signalled a deliverance for the soldiers of America and Britain, but the miseries of Europe and many millions of its inhabitants were much slower to abate.

In the spring of 1945, Indian and British forces led by Gen. Bill Slim conducted a brilliantly successful campaign to recapture Burma. This was irrelevant to the outcome of the war – as both Slim and Churchill anticipated from the outset – because the United States Navy had already established a stranglehold on Japan in the Pacific. But it did something to restore the battered confidence and fallen prestige of the British Empire, and laid bare Japan’s vulnerability. Churchill had sought to avoid a thousand-mile overland advance through some of the worst terrain in the world, preferring an amphibious assault on Rangoon from the south. But the Americans insisted on an attack through north Burma, to fulfil the only strategic purpose they valued in the region – reopening the overland route to China.

Slim’s army, dominated by Indian troops and including three divisions recruited from Britain’s African colonies, was much stronger than that of the Japanese – 530,000 men to 400,000 – and supported by powerful armoured and air forces. Its chief problem was to supply an advance across mountainous and densely vegetated country almost bereft of roads. Air dropping, made possible by a large commitment of US planes, became a critical factor in the campaign. At first, Slim planned to fight a battle on the Shwebo plain, west of the Irrawaddy, where his tanks and fighter-bombers could best be exploited. But a new Japanese commander, Lt. Gen. Hyotaro Kimura, decided against making a strong stand there, and instead opted for hitting the British as they crossed the river. When Ultra conveyed Kimura’s intentions to Slim, he changed his own plan. He pushed some troops forward towards an Irrawaddy crossing-point north of Mandalay, where the Japanese expected them, but made his main effort much further south, to cut off the enemy’s retreat by striking against Meiktila in their rear. Meanwhile, another British corps occupied the attention of the Japanese in the Arakan coastal region.

The success of these operations was made possible first by the Allies’ strength, and second by absolute command of the air, which denied the Japanese opportunities for reconnaissance; from beginning to end of the campaign, Kimura was befogged about British movements and intentions. Slim’s forces, advancing from Assam inside India, began to cross the Chindwin river, where so many tragic scenes had taken place during the 1942 retreat from Burma, in December 1944. In the north, Stilwell commanded a force of five Chinese divisions, driving for the key airfield of Myitkyina. On 5 March, 9,000 men of Major-General Orde Wingate’s ‘Chindits’ began to fly in to jungle landing zones behind the Japanese front. Wingate himself died in a crash, but during the months that followed his units fought a succession of bitter battles. On 17 May, the Chindits and Chinese linked at Myitkyina, where they seized the airfield; the sufferings and casualties of Wingate’s men were appalling, but they diverted significant Japanese forces from Slim’s main advance.

Thereafter, some 40,000 tons of supplies and equipment were flown to Myitkyina, for onward shipment to China. These deliveries could do little to remedy the infirmity of Chiang Kai-shek’s army, which remained incapable of inflicting much harm on the Japanese, and chiefly enriched the Nationalist warlords who stole most of the materiel before it reached their troops. Though the Japanese paid a heavy price for continuing their occupation of eastern China throughout the war, committing a million soldiers to control its vastnesses, they had little difficulty in defeating barefoot, half-starved Nationalist troops wherever they fought them. Mao Zhedong’s communist forces in the north enjoyed some success in persuading Westerners that they were engaging the Japanese more effectively, but in reality Mao conserved his strength for the looming domestic struggle for control of China.

An Indian formation crossed the Irrawaddy north of Mandalay in mid-January. During the following month, three divisions staged the main crossing west of Sagaing, much further south. The river was a mile wide, and the British wholly lacked the engineering and amphibious resources Eisenhower’s armies deployed in Europe. But, with most Japanese forces committed further north, they secured a bridgehead by dogged improvisation and some striking displays of courage. The ruins of Mandalay fell to the British on 20 March. This was an important symbolic victory, but Kimura was already falling back to fight the critical battle at Meiktila.

Nationalist leader Aung San’s Japanese-sponsored Burma Defence Army prepared to change sides. Some British officers resisted the notion of providing arms to his nine battalions, fearing these would soon be used against themselves. However, Mountbatten, Allied Supreme Commander, overruled them and ordered SOE officers to work with the BDA, saying, ‘We shall be doing no more than has been done in Italy, Romania, Hungary and Finland.’ Aung San met Slim, apologising for his inability to speak English. The general responded with characteristic courtesy that the embarrassment was on his side, for being unable to speak Burmese. They agreed to fight together, and on 27 March, when Slim’s army was within a hundred miles of Rangoon, BDA units suddenly attacked Japanese positions. Many Burmese welcomed the opportunity for revenge on a people they had welcomed as liberators in 1942, but who had since become their oppressors. One of them, Maung Maung, wrote: ‘Partisans, young men from villages, left their homes to march with us. We ate the food that the villagers offered us, wooed their daughters, brought danger to their doors and took their sons with us.’ This was a romanticised view of a tardy and cynical switch of allegiance, comparable with the conduct of many French people in the summer of 1944; but it helped to create a legend which Burma’s nationalists would later find serviceable.

By 29 April the British were at Pegu, fifty miles from Rangoon, amid torrential rain, harbinger of the coming monsoon. On the south coast, an Indian division staged the amphibious assault Churchill had always wanted, and pushed forward to the capital against slight resistance. The Japanese army was shattered, and had lost almost all its guns and vehicles. It maintained isolated pockets of resistance to the end of the war, but faced slaughter as shattered units sought to break through Slim’s army, which was finally deployed along the Sittang river to cut off their escape into Siam. In the last months, the British suffered only a few hundred casualties, while the 1945 Burma campaign cost their enemies 80,000 dead.

But the main business of closing the ring on Japan was meanwhile being done in the Pacific. On the morning of 19 February, three US Marine divisions began to land on Iwo Jima, an island pimple 3,000 miles west of Pearl Harbor and less than seven hundred south of Japan. An American watching the pre-landing bombardment said: ‘We all figured nothing could live through that, and the carrier planes were giving it hell, too.’ But the defenders were well prepared and deeply dug in. Carnage was severe – proportionately worse than that on D-Day: at nightfall, 30,000 Marines were ashore, but 566 were already dead or dying. The living trudged through volcanic ash up to their knees, in a moonscape devoid of cover; a rainstorm worsened their plight. Marine Joseph Raspilair wrote: ‘In all my life I do not think I have been as miserable as I was that night. All you could do was lay in the water and wait for morning so you could get out of the hole.’ Weeks of painful fighting followed. Cpl. George Wayman, a bazooka man, was in such pain from wounds as he lay for hours in a shellhole that he felt tempted to draw his bayonet and kill himself; he was eventually evacuated only after hours exposed to the Japanese fire that pounded the Marine perimeter.

Replacements trudged forward to reinforce line units, where many were hit before even learning the names of their comrades. Lt. Patrick Caruso kidded one such young man about being under age; soon afterwards the boy was killed, after just two hours on the island, without unslinging his rifle from his shoulder or glimpsing the enemy. The defenders’ ingenuity seemed boundless: a Marine was amazed to see a hillside suddenly open before his eyes, to reveal three Japanese pushing out a field gun. It fired three rounds, then was dragged back into the cave. Mortars eventually destroyed the gun, but a hundred such positions had to be taken out before the defences were overwhelmed. Officers learned to discourage men from seeking souvenirs, which the Japanese often booby-trapped. ‘The best souvenir you can take home is yourself,’ a laconic Marine commander told his company.

By 27 March, when Iwo Jima was secured, the Americans had suffered 24,000 casualties, including 7,184 dead, to capture an island one-third the size of Manhattan. Its airfields proved useful to B-29s returning from missions damaged or short of fuel, but they were little used for offensive operations. Geographically, Iwo Jima seemed a significant landmark on the way to Japan; but strategically, like so many hard-won objectives in every campaign, it is hard to argue that its seizure was worthwhile – the Marianas were vastly more important. The US Navy’s almost absolute command of the sea made it impossible for the Japanese to move forces from Iwo Jima, or indeed anywhere else, to impede American operations. Japan was bleeding from a thousand cuts. All that was now in doubt was how its rulers might be induced to acknowledge their defeat, and in the spring of 1945 they still seemed far from confronting reality. Japan’s generals believed that a negotiated peace could be won by imposing on the Americans a heavy blood-price for every gain; and above all, by convincing Washington that the cost of invading the Japanese mainland would be unacceptably high. They sought to emphasise this by mounting a rising tempo of kamikaze air attacks against the US Navy.

Commander Stephen Juricka, navigating officer of the 27,000-ton carrier
Franklin
, was one of thousands of shocked witnesses of the devastation wreaked by suicide bombers. ‘I saw … destroyers get hit, burst into flames, men jumping over the side to avoid flames … It did not take long for the crews of the picket destroyers to feel that they were being put out there as bait.’ Early on the morning of 19 March 1945, it was
Franklin
’s turn to fall victim. Two Japanese bombs struck the flight deck, prompting a huge explosion below: ‘The planes just behind the elevator were spotted, ready for take-off, engines going, fully loaded with Tiny Tim [rockets], 500-and 1000-pound bombs. Sheets of flame came up and then we really started to smoke … Men were jumping off the flight deck … Two destroyers were picking people up out of the sea directly behind us … a lot of them injured, burned … We were exploding and on fire until the middle of the next afternoon.’ Father O’Callaghan, the ship’s Catholic chaplain, was giving extreme unction to a dying man when a Tiny Tim rocket ignited and flew over his head. Most of the 4,800 crewmen on
Franklin
were evacuated in the first hours after the attack, but 772 stayed aboard, waging an epic struggle to keep the ship afloat. The US Navy had learned much about damage control since 1941, and all of it was put to use saving the carrier. As ever, some men behaved wonderfully well – and others less well.

Stephen Juricka said: ‘I was amazed at some of our big, good-looking officers whom you would expect to be towers of strength turned out to be little pipsqueak people who needed bucking up all the time, and some other little nondescript 135-pounders turned out to be real tigers … It was the little people who really came through … Seven officers left the
Franklin
over the highline [a breeches-buoy link to the cruiser
Santa Fe
] in spite of orders to return to the ship, and Captain Gehres reported every one of them and recommended court-martial.’

As early as 1939, the USAAF’s Gen. Carl ‘Tooey’ Spaatz had anticipated using America’s embryo B-29 Superfortress bomber to attack Japan. Sporadic air raids took place in 1944, some launched from India, others from fields constructed at huge cost and in the face of painful local difficulties in China. A combination of technical difficulties with the early B-29s, the distance to Japan, together with shortcomings of leadership, navigation and bomb-aiming, caused the USAAF’s efforts to make little impact. Only in 1945 was the offensive dramatically transformed and intensified, first by establishment of a huge network of bases on the Marianas; second, by large deliveries of aircraft; and finally, by the ascent of Maj. Gen. Curtis LeMay to leadership of XXIst Bomber Command.

LeMay was architect of the first great fire-raising raid on Tokyo on 9 March 1945. He dispatched 325 aircraft to attack by night at low level – between 6,000 and 9,000 feet. Torrents of incendiaries fell and exploded with their characteristic sharp crackle. Only twelve bombers were lost, most destroyed by updrafts from the blazing city. Forty-two suffered flak damage, but the Japanese defences were feeble. A pilot wrote laconically next day: ‘We took off last night at 1835 and after a dull trip hit the coast of Japan at 0210. Even before we made landfall we could see the fires at Tokyo. We were at 7,800 and there was smoke towering above us. The radar run was perfect and we dropped in an open spot visually. The city was a “Dante’s inferno”. One night fighter made a run on us but we turned into him and lost him.’ He added in a letter home: ‘Fires were everywhere and the destruction wrought this night could have been nothing less than catastrophe.’ The airman was right: around 100,000 people were killed, and a million rendered homeless. More than 10,000 acres of the city, a quarter of its area, were reduced to ashes. Tokyo on the morning of 10 March looked to Philippines veteran Major Shoji Takahashi ‘like the biggest and most devastated battlefield one could imagine – Leyte on a gigantic scale’. He was stunned and disgusted when, in one of many reconciliatory gestures by the post-war Tokyo government to the United States, LeMay was given a Japanese decoration.

USAAF chiefs displayed an admiration for XXIst Bomber Command’s forceful new supremo that was untinged by any moral scruple. Gen. Lauris Norstad said apologetically to LeMay’s sacked predecessor, Gen. Heywood Hansell, ‘LeMay is an operator, the rest of us are planners. That’s all there is to it.’ In the nights that followed, similar incendiary raids were launched against Nagoya, Osaka, Kobe and other cities. Even when the bombers began to strike in daylight, losses remained low, and a hundred new B-29s a month were arriving from America’s factories. The airmen reluctantly acceded to navy requests to divert some effort to offshore mining operations: Operation
Starvation
, which began at the end of March, achieved dramatic results, for the Japanese were as short of minesweepers as of everything else. The first nine hundred mines to splash into the seas around Japan imposed further drastic cuts on its imports; when merchantmen were ordered to brave the sub-surface menace, a spate of sinkings followed. By the war’s end, B-29s had laid 12,000 sea mines, which accounted for 63 per cent of all Japanese shipping losses between April and August 1945.