War and Remembrance (39 page)

Military judgment should never stray far from the basic factors of time, space, and force. The key to an Axis upset victory was
time.
As to space, we had the advantage of operating on strong interior lines in Europe, while our foes were scattered around our rim; but our one effective ally lay on the other side of the globe. The cold arithmetic of force, in the long run, added up much to our disfavor. Yet the Americans at the moment were weak, and their impact in the field was at least a year away. Because of their thirst for revenge on Japan, we could expect a fall in their Lend-Lease aid to the hard-pressed British and Russians. In short, we still had an edge in time in which to snatch a victory, or compel a tolerable peace.

The Spherical Battlefield

In December 1941, with the industrial civilization all around the northern hemisphere leaping into flame, one grand theme loomed through the smoke.
The battleground had become the surface of a sphere.
This posed unprecedented strategic choices. England and Russia had to exert all their strength just to contain Germany, but Japan, the United States, and the Third Reich now had to decide: “Which way to strike?”

Ever since 1918, as is well known, the American armed forces had been planning for simultaneous war against Germany and Japan. Their notorious Rainbow Five doctrine, drawn up years before Adolf Hitler ever marched, provided a ready answer to the question: eastward, or “Germany first,” on the Clausewitz rule,
strike for the heart.
Franklin Roosevelt had the willpower and the sense, in the face of the storm in his country against Japan, to hold to this sound military precept. Under his bluff jolly exterior of a Christian humanitarian, President Roosevelt was a devious and frigid conqueror, much more fitted for war on the surface of a sphere than the impulsive, romantic, European-minded Führer.

Japan’s problem was more complex. To the north lay rich Siberia, half
denuded of troops for the defense of Moscow; to the west, China, on its knees but still mushily resisting; to the southwest, the treasures of Indo-China, the Indies, and vast India; to the south, New Guinea and white Australia; to the southeast, the valuable island chains athwart the supply line from Australia to the United States. To the east America glowered, distant and enfeebled, yet thrusting into Japan’s
Lebensraum
its thorny imperialist outposts of Hawaii and Midway.

Japan’s oil stocks were burning down like a candle. Six months earlier, Franklin Roosevelt had embargoed Japan’s fuel supply, and this cruel bullying had compelled her to go to war. She lacked steel; she lacked food; she lacked most of the necessities for a long war. A reckoning for her spree of early victories had to come. With her limited strength, in her limited time, Japan had to strike one decisive blow. But — “Which way?”

For the moment Siberia was out. Before attacking the imperialist plutocracies, Japan had prudently signed a neutrality treaty with the Soviet Union. Hitler had fatuously failed to demand, as a quid pro quo for his declaration of war on the United States, that Japan denounce the treaty and come in against Russia. Thus Japan’s rear was safe, and we could not combine with her against the Bolsheviks.

Truly Germany’s position was bizarre! All the members of a world-girdling alliance were attacking us, while Japan, our strongest ally, stayed at peace with Russia, our strongest foe! Already the German people were paying dearly for the
Führerprinzip,
which placed total reliance on Hitler’s politics. Italy had a sizable navy and air force and numerous troops; but with her cardboard dictator and unwarlike people, she was a drain on our fuel and steel, and her long open Mediterranean coastline was our worst weak spot.

These factors all pointed one way. Against the English, all three Axis powers could still combine. Even Italy would be of some use in the Mediterranean and in North Africa. Obviously we had one best course: speedily to unite in smashing the faltering British Empire, while going on the defensive against stronger foes — in our case Russia, in Japan’s case America. This could be done,
and this could be done in time.
Like nothing else, the fall of England would signal a turn in world history, multiplying the impact of Japan’s triumphs in the Far East.

The Mediterranean Strategy

The way to destroy the British Empire was by closing the Mediterranean and cutting its lifeline to India and Australia.

Admiral Raeder had first suggested the plan in 1940. It called for the seizure of Gibraltar, a landing in Tunis, and a drive across Libya and Egypt to the Suez Canal and the Middle East, where we could count on an openarms
welcome from the Arabs and the Persians. A glance at a map shows the glitter of the concept. Spain, France, and Turkey, the three major soft spots in our hegemony, would drop into our camp. With French North Africa in hand, the Greater German Empire would become a hard pyramid, based in the south on Sahara sands from Dakar through Egypt, Palestine, and Syria to the Persian Gulf; its apex in Norway under the midnight sun; its western slope the Atlantic Ocean and its fortified coasts; its eastern slope (in 1940) the border with the Soviet Union.

Our weak southern ally, Italy, would be safely locked within an Axis lake. The island of Malta, Britain’s flinty little bastion in mid-Mediterranean, would starve and fall. The riches of Africa would flow in ships to German Europe. We would gain the oil of the Persian Gulf, and the raw materials of Asia. From the bulge of Dakar we would dominate opulent South America. It was the beckoning of the golden age, the dawn of the German world imperium itself.

As early as 1940, and again for a while in 1941, Hitler had shown serious interest in this farseeing plan. The Arabs of the region loathed their French and British masters, and the Arab Freedom Movement welcomed our propaganda and agents. Hitler had actually explored with Franco the Gibraltar question. But the cautious Spaniard had equivocated, and the Führer’s heart had been in the coming assault against Russia, so Barbarossa had temporarily eclipsed the Mediterranean strategy.

But now the hour of this historic idea had surely come. A strong German presence had arisen in Greece, Crete, and Yugoslavia. Rommel was on the march in Africa. The Soviet menace had been rolled back almost one thousand miles, far out of bombing range of the Fatherland. The naval forces of England were stretched paper-thin, and the sinking of the
Prince of Wales
and the
Repulse
had created a seapower vacuum in the Indian Ocean. Australia and New Zealand wanted their troops back from North Africa to defend Singapore and their own homelands. We were, in fact, witnessing the crack-up of the British world system before our eyes.

When the foe is staggering, that is the time to knock him out. At that moment, we had the world’s strongest navy allied with the world’s strongest army. If Japan would assault the British Empire westward via the Indian Ocean, while we attacked eastward overland along the Mediterranean littoral, would not this antiquated imperium be crushed like a rotten hazel nut in a steel nutcracker?

The Kuroshima Strategy

There emerged in Japanese naval circles at this time a wonderfully conceived secret war plan, the Kuroshima strategy. It showed professional insight and daring worthy of a Manstein. The swift fall of the British plutocracy,
and a different end to the Second World War, were real possibilities under this plan.

Captain Kameto Kuroshima was the senior fleet operations officer of the Japanese fleet; an eccentric intellectual of unmilitary habits but flashy strategic genius. It was he who had designed the masterly Pearl Harbor attack. Ever since, the Japanese navy had been studying long-range follow-up plans; thrusts to the east, to the south, to the west. The navy’s fighting spirit was high, and Captain Kuroshima’s concept of “westward operations” was the counterpart of our Mediterranean strategy. His ideas still stir the soul:

Operations should be timed to synchronize with German offensives in the Near and Middle East.

The objectives would be

a. destruction of the British fleet

b. capture of strategic points and elimination of enemy bases

c. establishment of contact between the Japanese and European Axis forces.

Kuroshima’s superior, Rear Admiral Ugaki, put aside his own breathtaking plan for seizing the Hawaiian Islands, and set his entire staff to studying Kuroshima’s scheme. At that time a Japanese-German military agreement was actually being negotiated in Berlin. Unhappily, it turned out to be a shallow document. The scant two pages made no provision for joint staff studies or combined strategy. The globe was parted into two “operational zones” by a line through western India. Orotund generalities followed: west of the line Germany and Italy would destroy the enemy, east of the line Japan would do likewise, etc., etc. Empty pleasantries about exchanging information, cooperating in supply, and conducting the “trade war” closed the footling instrument. Discouraged by this diplomatic bungling, the Japanese navy planners gave up “westward operations” as a lost cause.

Alas!

Hitler Berserk

Ironically, Hitler just then had been re-examining Raeder’s Mediterranean strategy.

An isolationist American newspaper, the
Chicago Tribune,
had got hold of the top-secret Rainbow Five war program, and had printed the full text under big black anti-Roosevelt headlines.
^*
This strange act of treason was of course a fine intelligence break for us. The document was unmistakably genuine; Hitler referred to it in declaring war on America. It called for a
gigantic invasion of Europe in 1943 by a newly recruited United States Army of millions, with the British Isles as the main invasion base, and large British supporting forces. Admiral Raeder pounced on this information. Clearly a knockout of England would foil the whole scheme and stun the United States.

Even while Hitler was mulling this over, the Japanese smashed Pearl Harbor. Euphoric days ensued. Hitler heard the navy, the army,
^*
and the Luftwaffe argue in favor of Raeder’s plan. He fully grasped the main idea — to crush the weakest foe in speedy joint Axis attacks —and at last he indicated tentative approval, and went off to the eastern front. Our staff speedily worked up Führer Directive Number 39, switching to the defensive in Russia, with the necessary withdrawals and preparations of rear positions; and we forwarded it to him at his headquarters.

Thereupon all the devils came storming out of Hell!

Hitler summoned General von Brauchitsch, the army commander-in-chief, and his chief of staff, General Haider, to a midnight meeting. He screeched insults, called Führer Directive Number 39 “drivelling nonsense,” and declared that there would be no withdrawals on the eastern front; that every German soldier would dig in where he stood, there to fight or die. He summarily relieved Brauchitsch and took personal command of the army — a corporal, relieving a field marshal! The new strategy, of course, went glimmering, for the heart of it was the release of forty or fifty divisions from the east to clean up the Mediterranean. No doubt this was why our January agreement with Japan came out so thin and trivial.

What had happened to Hitler’s thinking?

Returning to his gloomy snowbound field headquarters, he had had to face some nasty facts. Against staff advice he had driven for Moscow into December. Weather and supply difficulties had halted our cold exhausted troops in exposed positions. Russian counterattacks had begun, and local penetrations were occurring. Most unsettling, for a dictator used to nothing but victories!

Hitler was haunted by the spectre of Napoleon. We all knew that; copies of Caulaincourt’s
Memoirs
were actually forbidden at staff headquarters, like pornography in a boys’ dormitory. Our shaken Führer undoubtedly pictured the front disintegrating, the Wehrmacht routed, the Germans harried out of the land by the Cossacks. This was mere nightmare. Our broad solid front from Leningrad to the Black Sea was nothing like Napoleon’s narrow,
horse-mounted penetration to Moscow on thin supply lines. But the false analogy obsessed Hitler, so he issued his draconic “Hold or Die” order, and took personal command to see that it was obeyed.

Granting that every supreme commander is entitled to his
nuit blanche
fears, there was no need to send to the Japanese such a dispiriting scrap of paper. Had Hitler dispatched even a small military mission to Tokyo — perhaps Admiral Raeder with General Warlimont or myself — it might have sufficed to tip the scales for the Kuroshima strategy. Or if Hitler, after Pearl Harbor, had invited some high Japanese commanders to Berlin to consider joint planning, we might have closed the Mediterranean and forced England to her knees even while the Russian front remained static in the snow, and we tooled up for our summer Caucasus thrust.
But no Japanese liaison officer was ever admitted to Supreme Headquarters.

“Hold or Die”

Some historians and military analysts still hail the “Hold or Die” order on the eastern front as Hitler’s great achievement, a deed of sheer will that “saved” the Wehrmacht. But the truth is that with this order, the Austrian adventurer’s star began to wane. The political chief needs detachment in the midst of a war, to keep the big picture in view. Once Hitler took on supreme field command, in which he was merely a headstrong dabbler, he was lost.

The “Hold or Die” order was in point of fact a hysterical military blunder. Defiant toughness in adversity is a sound doctrine; however, elasticity of defense is another. Far outnumbered in Russia, we excelled the Slav hordes in leadership, fighting ability, and maneuvering skill. Hitler’s order froze maneuver, paralyzed leadership, and discouraged fighting spirit by commanding meaningless death. Our image of invincibility evaporated. A new German soldier appeared in Russian propaganda: “Winter Fritz,” a pathetic helmeted scarecrow with icicles on his pinched nose, “holding and dying” in an untenable post.