War and Remembrance (74 page)

If not for the war what would I have been doing all these years? Something dull in some dull London office building, or something domesticated in some suburban house or, with luck, town flat. And I would never have met you — an experience, which, with all its chiaroscuro, I treasure as the chief thing in my history.

I shall give this letter to a U.P. man who is going back to New York. He’ll mail it to your Fleet Post Office address, so you should get it soon. Victor, if it isn’t unreasonable I should like just a word from you that I have your blessing if I go on with Duncan. I myself thought silence the best way to close out our beautiful but guillotined relationship, but then I did have to write you about Byron, and I feel most enormously happy and relieved. You too may feel better writing to me, however briefly. I think we understand each other, though we had to part before we could explore the depths.

My love,

Pamela

The U.P. man did bring this letter to New York, and it entered the complex Navy system for delivering mail to the far-flung ships at sea. Gray sacks for the
Northampton
followed the cruiser all over the Central and South Pacific; but the letter never caught up before the ship went down off Guadalcanal.

* * *

(from World
Holocaust
by Armin von Roon)

November 1942!
No German should ever hear that month mentioned without shuddering.

In that one ill-omened month, four concurrent disasters befell our brief imperium: two in North Africa, one in Russia, one in the South Pacific. On November 2 the British offensive at El Alamein, begun in late October, sent Rommel’s Afrika Korps reeling out of Egypt, never to return. On November 8 the Anglo-Americans landed in Morocco and Algeria. From November 13 to 16, the tide turned at Guadalcanal. And on November 19 the Soviet hordes broke through at Stalingrad and began cutting off our Sixth Army.

Historians tend to miss the awful simultaneity of the fourfold smashup. Our German authors harp on Stalingrad, with casual treatment of the Mediterranean and silence on the Pacific. The communist pseudo-historians write as though only Stalingrad was happening then. Winston Churchill dwells on El Alamein, a minor textbook battle, decided by the lopsided British advantage in Lend-Lease supplies. The U.S. writers stress their walkover in French North Africa, and strangely neglect Guadalcanal, one of America’s finest campaigns.

The Global Waterloo was in fact a swift, roaring, flaming reverse all around the earth of our war effort, history’s greatest—on the seas, in desert sands, on beaches, in jungles, in city streets, on tropical islands, in snowdrifts. In November 1942, the world-adventurer Hitler, to whom we Germans had given our souls, lost the initiative once for all. Thereafter the hangmen were closing in on him, and he was fighting not for world empire but for his neck.

Militarily speaking, the situation even then was retrievable by sound military tactics, and we had great tacticians. Manstein’s classic fighting withdrawal from the Caucasus after Stalingrad, to cite but one instance, will find a place one day in history with Xenophon’s march to the Black Sea. But Hitler as warlord could only go on compounding his own pigheaded mistakes.
Since nobody could loosen his terror-grip on our armed forces, he dragged the German nation down with him.

To understand Hitler’s swollen pride before his fall, one must picture Germany’s situation before November 1942.

For the modern-day German reader, this is difficult. We are a cowed people, ashamed of our mighty though Faustian past. Our defeated and shrunken Fatherland is sundered. Bolshevism bestrides one half; the other half cringes to the dollar. Our economic vigor has revived, but our place in world affairs remains dubious. Twelve brief years of Nazi mistakes and crimes have eclipsed the proud record of centuries.

But in the summer of 1942, we were still riding high. On the eastern front, the Wehrmacht was rebounding to the attack. After storming Sevastopol and clearing the Kerch peninsula, we were thrusting two gigantic armed marches into the Soviet southern gut; one across the Don toward the Volga, the other southward to the Caucasus oil fields. Stalin’s armies were everywhere fading back before us with big losses. Rommel’s stunning capture of the Tobruk fortress had opened the way to the Suez Canal and had all but toppled Churchill.

Our comrade Japan had won Southeast Asia, and in Burma was advancing to the borders of India. Her grip on prostrate China’s coastal provinces was solid. Her defeat at Midway was shrouded by the fog of war. Her armies were still triumphing wherever they marched. All Asia trembled at the shift of world forces. India was rent with riots. Its Congress voted for the immediate withdrawal of the British, and an Indian government-in-exile was forming to fight on the Japanese side.

In Arctic waters, with the famous rout of the PQ-17 convoy at the end of June, we severed the Lend-Lease supply route to Murmansk, a body-blow to the already staggering Red Army. This defeat epitomized the British decline at sea. The convoy screening force, warned that our heavy surface ships were approaching, ordered the merchant vessels to disperse and hightailed it home to England! The shades of Drake and Nelson must have wept in Valhalla. The slaughter that ensued was mere rabbit-shooting by our aircraft and submarines. The cold seas closed over twenty-three merchant vessels out of thirty-seven, and one hundred thousand tons of war matériel, with much loss of life. Churchill’s shamed message to Stalin cancelling the Murmansk run brought an angry Slav howl. The grotesque alliance of capitalism and Bolshevism was sorely strained.

On the visible evidence, then, we were triumphing in the summer and autumn of 1942 against all the odds, even with the United States thrown into the balance against us, even with all of Hitler’s miscalculations.

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE:
The Murmansk run was suspended during the summer months of long Arctic daylight, then resumed. In December, British destroyers escorting another convoy outfought a German task force, including a pocket battleship and a heavy cruiser. Hitler waxed so wroth at this fiasco that he ordered the fleet scrapped, and the guns put to use on land. Admiral Raeder resigned. Donitiz took over, but the German surface fleet never recovered from Hitler’s tantrum.

Roon’s appreciation of Guadalcanal which follows is detached and reliable. No Germans were fighting there. —V.H.

All of Europe from the Bay of Biscay to the Urals could be sunk without a trace between Honolulu and Manila, yet the Pacific campaigns were fought over far greater distances than that. Unheard-of military space, unprecedented forms of combined land, sea, and air combat: such is the fascination, of the Pacific conflict. The period in history when such operations were feasible came and went quickly. A high point was the six-month melee which raged in the skies, on the water, under the water, and in the jungle, for the possession of a small airfield that accommodated sixty planes: Henderson Field on Guadalcanal.

Guadalcanal is a neglected campaign, a small Pacific Stalingrad swirling around that landing field. Had it been a British victory, Churchill would have written a volume about it. But Americans are apathetic toward their military history. They lack the European sense of the past, and writers of broad culture.

In my restricted research
^*
I have yet to come upon an adequate relating of the Stalingrad and Guadalcanal campaigns, but one might say that the Second World War turned on those poles. We reached the Volga just north of Stalingrad in August. The Americans landed on Guadalcanal in August. General Paulus surrendered at Stalingrad on February 2, 1943; the Americans secured Guadalcanal on February 9. Both battles were desperate and successful defenses of a waterfront perimeter: the Russians with their backs to the Volga, the Americans on a beachhead with their backs to the sea. Both battles were head-on clashes of national wills. With both outcomes the tide in a war theatre turned, for all the world to witness.

German readers must never forget that the war had a global dimension. We are obsessed with Europe, and that is how the Bolshevik historians also write. But under Adolf Hitler’s flawed but kinetic leadership, our nation broke the ice of the entire world imperial system. For six years a world storm raged, and all was fluid. The land masses of thé planet, fifty-eight
million square miles of real estate, were at hazard. The Asian samurai surged forward to form an alliance with the Nordic soldier, seeking a just redistribution of the earth’s habitable surface. That two martial showdowns should simultaneously explode on two sides of the globe therefore lay in the nature of this wrenching world convulsion. The stunning halt of the Japanese onrush at Midway resembled our halt before Moscow in December 1941. These were chilly warnings. But the fatal crunches came later and in parallel, at Stalingrad and Guadalcanal.

The differences of course are substantial. If we had defeated the Red Army at Stalingrad, history in its present form would not exist; whereas had the Americans been thrown off Guadalcanal, they would probably have returned later with new fleets, air groups, and tank divisions, and beaten the Japanese elsewhere. Stalingrad was a far vaster battle, and more truly a decisive one. Still, the parallels should be borne in mind.

It was a wheeze in the American navy that Admiral Ernest King “shaved with a blowtorch.” A naval aviator with a long record of achievement, including the raising of a sunken submarine in the open sea, King had been put out to pasture on the General Board, an advisory panel for old admirals with no place to go. His cold driving personality had not made him loved. He had bruised egos and damaged careers. Shortly after Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt appointed him Commander-in-Chief of the United States Fleet. King is said to have observed, “When things get tough they send for the sons of bitches.” In the Wehrmacht, alas, when “things got tough” the Führer sent for the sycophants.

Besides the problem of the rampaging Japanese, King had to contend with the fixed Roosevelt-Churchill policy,
Germany First.
The Combined Chiefs of Staff were neglecting “his” war in favor of the bigger conflict. King’s cold-blooded solution was the attack on Tulagi, which evolved into the Guadalcanal campaign.

Despite some blustering rhetoric, the Japanese were not seeking to crush the United States of America in war. Their aim was limited. In their view, Southeast Asia was none of America’s business. Thanks to our conquest of Europe the time had come to throw out the imperialist exploiters, and to found a peaceful Greater East Asia for the Asians, including a pacified China; a so-called Co-prosperity Sphere under Japanese leadership, friendly to the coming world master, Germany.

Their military aim was a quick conquest of the desired areas, then a tough perimeter defense on interior lines. The hope was that the far-off
prosperous Americans would tire of a costly war in which they were not very interested, and would make a face-saving peace. This might well have worked, except for the attack on Pearl Harbor, which roused in the proud Yanks, and especially in their fine navy, an irrational cowboy thirst for frontier vengeance.