War and Remembrance (51 page)

The whole system will break down, he insists, if drastic steps are not taken at once. Nothing is adequate. The cottage bunker is a makeshift. Another one is being readied nearby, but it too is only a stopgap. The crematoriums remain pretty models in the Central Building Board office, and Berlin has simply been ignoring the disposal problem. The Commandant, in his honest preoccupation with this serious matter, pours out his heart to the Reichsführer SS, while the special kommandos continue to cart out bodies, throw them in the hole, and stack them in rows. So caught up is he in his pleas that when he sees the dead baby girl come tumbling out of the cart with the broken branch in her hand it does not bother him.

Sincerity pays off. He can see that he is making an impression. Himmler gives a sharp jerky nod; he puffs out his mouth so that his lips disappear, and he glances around at his aides.

“So?” says the Reichsführer. “And what is next?”

“The crematoriums will be built,” he says next day to the Commandant, in a private meeting just before going to the aerodrome.

The meeting is almost over. The last serious request, for permission to
use Jews in sterilization experiments, which the Commandant put with some trepidation, has been cheerfully granted. They are in an inner office at the Building Board. Only Schmauser, the SS general in charge of all of south Poland, and therefore of Auschwitz, is present.

“The construction of crematoriums will take priority even over I. G. Farben,” Himmler states. “They will be completed before the end of the year. Schmauser will override all other projects in this province for labor and materials.” Himmler waves his black swagger stick at the general, who hastily nods. “You will hear from me further about the disposal problem. You have told me all your difficulties, and given me an honest look at Auschwitz. I am satisfied that you are doing your best under very tough conditions. It is wartime, and we have to think in terms of war. Assign your best construction crews to the crematoriums. When they are completed, liquidate the crews. Understood?”

“Understood, Herr Reichsführer.”

“I promote you to Obersturmbannführer. Congratulations. Now I am on my way.”

Lieutenant Colonel! Spot promotion!

A week later, Ernst Klinger is promoted, too, to Untersturmfiihrer. At the same time, he receives a different assignment for his construction crew. They have a new designation: Arbeitskommando, Crematorium II.

* * *

(from
World Holocaust
by Armin von Roon)

One of the decisive battles in the history of the world was fought at sea at this time on the other side of the globe, almost unnoticed in Germany, even in our Supreme Headquarters. The failure of our Japanese allies to furnish us the truth about Midway amounted to bad faith. However, Hitler hated gloomy news, and most likely would have ignored an honest report of it. The serious German reader must grasp what happened at Midway in June 1942 to understand the course of the entire war.

Strangely, the democracies themselves gave Midway small play at the time. In the United States the news of the battle was scanty and inaccurate. To this day few Americans grasp that at Midway their navy won a sea victory to stand in military chronicles with Salamis and Lepanto. For the third time in planetary history, Asia sailed forth to attack the West in force, with ultimate stakes of world dominion. At Salamis the Greeks turned back the Persians; at Lepanto the Venetian coalition halted Islam; and at Midway the Americans stopped, at least for our century, the rising tide of Asiatic color. Pacific battles thereafter were in the main futile Japanese attempts to recover the initiative lost at Midway.

Before Midway, for all the missed chances and miscalculations of Adolf Hitler and the Japanese leaders, the war still hung in the balance. Had the United States lost this passage at arms, the Hawaiian Islands might well have become untenable. With his West Coast suddenly naked to Japanese might, Roosevelt might have had to reverse his notorious “Germany first” policy. The whole war could have taken a different turn.

Why then is this decisive event so underestimated? The anomaly stems from the nature of the battle. Victory at Midway turned partly on the analysis of Japanese coded radio traffic. The feat could not be revealed in wartime.
^*
The United States Navy’s version of Midway was foggy and guarded, and it
came out several days late. A long time passed before the setback to Japanese war plans was fully assessed. So the realities of Midway were obscured. The war rumbled on, and the battle faded from sight, as Mount Everest can be obscured by a whirl of dust raised by a truck. But as time passes, this turning point looms ever larger and clearer in the military history of mankind.

“Flattop” Warfare

The German reader accustomed to land warfare needs a brief sketch of the tactical problem at sea. On the water of course there is no terrain. The battleground is all one smooth level unbounded field. This simplifies combat as the land soldier knows it, but adds weight to fundamental elements. The aircraft carrier developed as a radical advance in
range of firepower.

In ancient sea fighting, warships rammed each other, smashed each other’s banks of oars, cast arrows, stones, lumps of iron, or flaming stuff across a few feet of open water. Sometimes they came alongside each other with grappling hooks, and soldiers leaped across and fought on the decks. Long after guns were installed in men-o’-war, hand-to-hand waterborne fighting continued. John Paul Jones won the first big sea fight for America by grappling and boarding the British man-o’-war
Serapis,
exactly as a Roman sea captain would have done to a ship of Carthage.

But the great nineteenth-century revolutions in science and industry brought forth the
battleship,
a giant steam-driven iron vessel, with rotating centerline guns that could fire a one-ton shell almost ten miles to port or starboard. All modern nations hastened to build or buy battleships. The front-running race between our own shipyards and England’s to build ever-bigger battleships was a prime cause of the First World War. Even before that, English capitalists had obligingly built a fleet of these monsters for the Japanese, who in 1905 used it to trounce czarist Russia at Tsushima Strait. Only one other large battleship engagement ever took place. At the Battle of the Skagerrak, in 1916, our High Seas Fleet outfought the British navy in a classic action. Twenty-five years later, at Pearl Harbor, the type went into final and futile eclipse.

The battleship was the dinosaur of sea warfare, misbegotten and shortlived. Each one was a drain on a nation’s resources like the equipment for many army divisions. But it did bring long-range firepower into sea war. The trajectories of its big guns required a correction
for the curvature of the earth!
Thus the industrial age brought man face to face with the physical limits of his tiny planet.

After the First World War a few farseeing naval officers perceived that the airplane could far outrange the battleship’s big guns. It could fly hundreds of miles, and the pilot could guide his bomb almost onto the
target. Against the crusty advocacy of battleship admirals, they fought and won the argument for building “flattops,” seagoing airdromes. Pearl Harbor settled the twenty-year dispute in an hour, and the Pacific conflict became an aircraft carrier war.

TRANSLATORS NOTE:
I was a battleship man all my life. Roon ignores the role of the battleship in maintaining the balance of power for a turbulent half-century, though nobody can disagree that it failed at Pearl Harbor. His casual claim of German victory in the Jutland stand-off (Battle of the Skagerrak) is ridiculous. The Imperial German High Seas Fleet never sailed to fight after Jutland. Much of it was scuttled at Scapa Flow. Eventually Hitler scrapped the rest, after the
Bismarck
was sunk and the other battleships immobilized at their moorings by RAF bombs.
—
V.H.

Carrier Combat Tactics

All Pacific flattops, U.S. and Japanese, carried three kinds of airplanes.

The
fighter
plane was defensive. It escorted the attacking planes to the target, and protected them by knocking down fighters that tried to intercept them. It also protected its own fleet against enemy attackers, by hovering overhead in a combat air patrol.

There were two attacking types: the
dive-bomber
plane and the
torpedo plane.
The dive-bomber dropped its missile through the air. The torpedo plane aimed for the death blow below the waterline; its technique was riskier, its missile heavier. It had to fly for many minutes on a straight course low over the water, and slow down to drop its torpedo. During this approach, the torpedo plane pilot was suicidally vulnerable to AA fire or to a fighter plane attack. He therefore needed strong fighter protection.

Carrier battle doctrine was the same in both navies. The three types of aircraft were launched for a mission by squadrons. The fighters, dive-bombers, and torpedo planes would join up and wing together to the target. The fighters would engage the defending fighters, the dive-bombers would attack, and when the enemy was most distracted the vulnerable torpedo planes would slip in low for the kill. This was called
coordinated attack,
or
deferred departure.

In this scheme there were variations: i.e., a fighter could carry a light bomb; and the Japanese from the start designed their torpedo plane, the Type-97 bomber, as a two-purpose machine. Instead of a torpedo, it could carry a very large fragmentation bomb, thus giving it a strong capability against land targets as well.

On this dual-purpose Japanese bomber,in the end, the whole battle turned.

Code Book C

Intelligence too was crucial. By analysis of encoded radio traffic and by fractional decipherment of the code, the Americans discerned
the enemy
battle plan. The Japanese should have foreseen and avoided this. In modern war all codes and ciphers must be frequently replaced. This was a standard rule in our Wehrmacht commands. One has to assume that the enemy is copying all the broadcast gibberish, and that what the mind of man can devise the mind of man can unravel. Japan’s communication doctrine called for code replacement, but her navy’s preparations for Midway were plagued by both overconfidence and hurry. The hurry resulted from the Doolittle raid.

Navy Code Book C had been in use by the Japanese since Pearl Harbor. Aided by pioneer use of IBM machines, American and British teams had worked on the texts for half a year. A Code Book D was supposed to go into use on April first. Had this been done the Japanese signals for the Midway attack would have been secure. But the replacement was postponed to May first and then to June first, in the post-Doolittle scramble. On June first the opaque curtain of Code Book D did at last fall, but by then only three days remained before the battle, and Japan’s plan was largely known to the enemy.

The Damaged Carriers

The Japanese faults of overconfidence and hurry showed up after the Coral Sea battle, a carrier skirmish that took place when they tried to capture Port Moresby in New Guinea, to create an air threat to Australia. The expedition ran afoul of two American carriers. The Japanese had the better of the two-day melee, a comedy of blundering decisions and airborne blind-man’s buff in bad weather, during which the opposing vessels never sighted each other. The Japanese sank the big flattop
Lexington
and an oiler, and damaged the
Yorktown.
They lost a light carrier, and took bomb damage and aircraft attrition in the fleet carriers
Shokaku
and
Zuikaku.