Nigel Cawthorne Read online
REAPING THE
WHIRLWIND
THE GERMAN AND JAPANESE EXPERIENCE OF WORLD WAR II
Nigel Cawthorne
CONTENTS
Introduction
PART 1: THE WAR IN THE WEST
1 Achtung!: The War in Europe Begins
2 The Battle of the Atlantic: Fighting Above and Below the Waves
3 Holding the Line: Attrition on Two Fronts
4 Reaping the Whirlwind: Fortress Europe Under Attack
5 The Last Offensive: Counterattack in the Ardennes
6 Götterdämmerung: The Devastation of the Homeland
PART 2: VOICES OF THE JAPANESE
7 Tora! Tora! Tora!: Attack in the Pacific
8 Bushido: Putting the Martial Code to the Test
9 Retreat to Yasukuni: Defeat on the Islands
10 Kamikaze: The Last Desperate Defence
11 Enduring the Unendurable: The Unimaginable End
Endnotes
Bibliography
INTRODUCTION
There is no moral relativism concerning World War II. By any standards, the German ‘Führer’ Adolf Hitler was a psychopathic dictator bent on building a European empire by intimidating, imprisoning, murdering and waging unprovoked war on anyone who opposed him. In the end, he was happy to see the destruction of the German nation, which he felt had let him down, and he urged others to go on sacrificing their lives, even when he had taken his own.
In the East, General Hideki Tojo and his militarist government pretended that they were liberating the yellow man in Asia by kicking the white man out. However, Japan’s incursion into Manchuria and China was marked by atrocities. The Japanese Imperial Army was scarcely less brutal in the other territories it conquered – murdering, raping and enslaving. Allied prisoners of war were brutalized, maltreated and worked to death, and many more native people suffered the same fate. And, again, the Japanese began the war in the East with a series of unprovoked attacks.
Of course it is possible to criticize the excesses of the British, American, Free French and Allied forces, with the benefit of hindsight. But the Allied nations were forced into war and fought back against a ferocious onslaught with any means to hand. The price of losing was too high to bear. Even the Soviet Union under the brutal dictatorship of Joseph Stalin – though no haven of liberty – was forced into war by an unprovoked and unannounced attack. Of all the Allied nations, it sustained the greatest losses, with an estimated eighteen million dead – including seven million civilians. When Hitler sent his armies into the Soviet Union, he ordered them to use unprecedented savagery against those who lived there.
Many of the men in the front line on both sides were just ordinary blokes. They had been promised that theirs was the world’s finest fighting force – only to find themselves pitted against an enemy who was equally highly motivated and often much better equipped and supplied. Some quickly realized that they had been tricked into war by a cynical leadership. But whether they were disillusioned or true believers, most of them found that they had to make the best of a bad situation. German troops, unable to criticize impossible orders, were thrown into unwinnable battles, while Japanese troops were abandoned without arms, ammunition or supplies on Pacific islands or in the jungles of Burma.
Women and children also suffered, mainly from bombing. They lost their menfolk and their homes, and millions died – whether they believed in the cause or not – though however grim their fate, it pales in comparison with the genocide carried out deliberately by both Germany and Japan. Nevertheless, one person’s suffering is not mitigated by the worse torments of another.
The line ‘For they sow the wind, and reap the whirlwind’ appears in the Old Testament book of the minor prophet Hosea. It warns against the worship of graven images. However, the line was famously appropriated by Sir Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris, commander in chief of the Royal Air Force’s Bomber Command. In 1942, at the start of the bombing campaign that he was about to unleash on Germany, he said: ‘The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them. At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw, and half a hundred other places, they put their rather naive theory into operation. They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.’
It is true. Germany with its blitzkrieg and Japan with its attack on Pearl Harbor began the war with air attacks, while promising their citizens they would not be bombed. But Harris’s biblical quotation is an apt description of the entire war from the point of view of the vanquished. The hubris of the Nazi leaders and the Japanese militarists is astounding. They told their people that their armed forces were invincible. They said that some of their enemies (the Russians, in the case of the Germans, and the Chinese for the Japanese) were racially inferior, while the others – the Western democracies – were morally weak and would never exhibit the political will they would need to withstand the German and Japanese onslaught. The wind they sowed with these sentiments caused a whirlwind that was reaped by their peoples. Their countries were devastated. Their cities destroyed. Their citizens – both soldiers and civilians alike – were killed, maimed, widowed, orphaned and rendered homeless.
Reaping the Whirlwind uses the authentic voices of German and Japanese people caught up in the conflict to relate their experiences. Their words come from diaries, letters, interrogation reports, interviews, personal memoirs and published material. These men and women were the enemies of Britain, America, France, the Soviet Union and the other Allied nations. But for them, ‘the enemy’ was the Allies.
Much of the material has been found in the archives of the Imperial War Museum in Duxford, Cambridgeshire, thanks to Stephen Walton; the US Army Heritage Collection in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, thanks to David Keough and the US National Archives in Maryland, thanks to the redoutable John Taylor. A disproportionate number of the interrogation reports and captured letters and diaries preserved there come from the Battle of the Bulge – or rather the 1944 Winter Offensive, as it was known to the Germans – and the Philippines. This is because German soldiers who saw action in the Ardennes in 1944 were much more likely to have survived the war than those fighting in Russia in 1941. And Japanese soldiers in the Philippines were still holding out when Japan surrendered and, consequently, did not fight to the death like their comrades confronting the Allies in other places.
Although I was born six years after the war ended, like most British people of my generation, World War II had a profound influence on me. The attitudes formed during the tumultuous years of the 1930s and 1940s were passed on to us and coloured the rest of the century. Both my parents served in the British Army during World War II.
My father landed in Normandy. As a captain in the Royal Corps of Signals, he followed the front-line troops, setting up communications systems. He saw many of the terrible results of war – and never liked to talk about it. However, before World War II, he had been a student, studying engineering. Educated in the sciences, he was fluent in German as the text books in engineering and the sciences were mostly written in German back then. When I was a child, he took the family to Germany and certainly bore the people there no animosity.
My mother was an anti-aircraft gunner. She lied about her age to join up and won the British Empire Medal for being with the first women’s ack-ack battery to shoot down a German plane. My mother is the only person I know who has killed lots of people. After the war in Europe was over, she re-enlisted to go out to the Far East, where she met my father, so both my parents had experience in both theatres of war.
Sadly, my father died man
y years ago, but my mother is still alive. She is eager to read this book. Even after all these years, she wants to know what those people she was fighting against thought and felt. It also has to be said that she abhors any attempt to glorify war, but the suffering and courage of those caught up in it she finds of enduring interest.
I know other people of my parents’ generation who went through World War II. Few of them bear any resentment against their former enemies. Usually, they reserve this for the ingratitude of their governments and for historians who do not recognize their contribution. Others are even more forgiving. One of my parents’ closest friends was a German Jew who had escaped from Italy during the war. He returned to live there, where he became wealthy. We used to holiday in his villa on Elba.
More recently, I was employed by a Jewish entrepreneur to ghost his memoirs. His wife had just died. On her deathbed she had begged him to set down his experiences for their children and grandchildren to read. He had never talked to them about what had happened, fearing it would bore them. It did not.
He had been born in Berlin, but his family realized in time what was happening and managed to escape. In England, as a young man, he was interned. But, eventually, the British authorities saw sense and allowed ‘enemy aliens’ to join the Pioneer Corps. Like my father, he landed in Normandy. He went on to see the liberation of the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen. At the time, he feared that the German people could never be forgiven – although, as far as the British authorities were concerned, at the time, he was still a German national himself. But, after being part of the occupation force charged with rehabilitating the country, his opinion gradually changed. It was only after he was demobbed in 1946 that he was allowed to naturalize as a British subject. Later, as a magazine publisher in England, he frequently did business with his German counterparts and he enjoyed regular visits to the land of his birth. If he can forgive, I don’t see why everyone else can’t.
Nigel Cawthorne
PART 1: THE WAR IN THE WEST
1
ACHTUNG!: THE WAR IN EUROPE BEGINS
When World War II began, Berlin resident Herbert Otto Winckelmann, like most of his neighbours – indeed, most of Europe – was asleep. He was in for an unpleasant awakening.
Usually I awoke to the sound of soft music, but on the morning of 1 September 1939, martial music blasted into my sleeping area. Then in a few minutes Goebbels, our propaganda minister, came on the radio with a special news report announcing that our troops had crossed into Poland to liberate the oppressed German minorities there. The word ‘liberate’ had been used before as a pretext to invade our neighbouring countries; first, for the annexation of Austria and to split the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia …
Just a few hours before, German troops had rolled across the Polish border. With them was Heinz Guderian, pioneer of mechanized warfare and architect of the blitzkrieg:
On 1 September at 0445 hours, the whole corps moved simultaneously over the frontier. There was a thick ground mist at first which prevented the air force from giving us any support. I accompanied the 3rd Panzer Brigade, in the first wave, as far as the area north of Zempelburg where the preliminary fighting took place. Unfortunately the heavy artillery of the 3rd Panzer Division felt itself compelled to fire into the mist, despite having received precise orders not to do so. The first shell landed fifty yards ahead of my command vehicle, the second fifty yards behind it. I reckoned that the next one was bound to be a direct hit and ordered my driver to turn about and drive off. The unaccustomed noise had made him nervous, however, and he drove straight into a ditch at full speed.
Winckelmann was initially unconcerned by events in Poland. He was over thirty so, at that time, not eligible for the draft. And he was no supporter of the Nazis, as his earlier marriage plans had been ruined by the Nuremberg Laws preventing interracial marriage when it was discovered that he had a Jewish grandparent. However, he did not feel that Germany was totally in the wrong:
Although most Germans had not been filled with enthusiasm that war had broken out, this did not mean that they did not support Hitler’s intention to free our minorities, which had been foolishly separated from Germany by the politicians under the Versailles Peace Treaty … After three days, England and France declared war against us.
FRANCE FALLS
The ‘phoney war’ followed, but on 10 May 1940 Germany made its attack in the west. Leading the attack was the 7th Panzer Division, commanded by Erwin Rommel, later famed for his campaign in North Africa. On 11 May he wrote to his wife:
Dearest Lu,
I have come up for breath for the first time today and have a moment to write. Everything wonderful so far. Am way ahead of my neighbours. I’m completely hoarse from orders and shouting. Had a bare three hours’ sleep and an occasional meal. Otherwise I’m absolutely fine. Make do with this, please, I’m too tired for more.
Overhead was Luftwaffe pilot Fritz Mölders, in a Messerschmitt Me109 fighter plane:
France, 5 June 1940: … At about 5,000m, I get my mob lined up, make a quick target allocation and then – in we go! I take the plane furthest to the right; below me lies Compiègne. After a short burst of fire, fragments of the enemy fighter are flying round my ears. I feel a hard blow on my machine – a moment of terror – but the engine is still running happily. Beside me, two Me’s attack the opposition. Leutnant Claus shoots one of them down.
Where has the spotter-plane got to? Must get rid of him! Down there, close to the ground, a Bloch still with him, I dive towards the Bloch fighter, but I’m going too fast, can’t shoot; suddenly I’m alongside him; I can see the pilot very clearly; he’s sticking doggedly with the spotter-plane he’s meant to be protecting; his cockpit is open, and I curve in on him slightly – he looks at me in horror and – whoosh – he peels off at high speed. That’s what I wanted him to do. Because now I can drop straight on to the spotter-plane. But the fellow is a fantastic pilot. He flies low over a village, below the height of the church tower, and down into a river valley; I get him briefly in my sights – safety-catch off, load, we go lower, between two poplars, now I’m only 50m from him – nose up to avoid a telephone-wire – then down again, just one metre above a meadow – I’ve got him in my sights. Caught unawares, he flies into the ground, a thirty-metre long column of fire behind him. He won’t be taking any more photos.
France fell at lightning speed, with Rommel plunging on to Normandy.
14 June 1940: On to Le Havre and inspected the town. It all went without bloodshed. We’re now engaging targets out to sea with long-ranging artillery. Already we set one transport alight today.
You can imagine my feelings when twelve generals of the British and French armies reported to me and received my orders in the market place of St Valéry. The British general and his division were a particular source of joy. The whole thing was filmed and will no doubt be talked about in the newsreels.
Now we’re getting a few days’ rest. I can’t think that there’ll be any more serious fighting in France. We’ve even had flowers along the road in some places. The people are glad that the war is over for them … the war seems to be gradually becoming a more or less peaceful occupation of all France. The population is peacefully disposed, and in some places very friendly.
By then much of the British Army had been plucked off the beaches of Dunkirk. On 22 June 1940 France capitulated, and the focus of the war moved elsewhere. Back in Germany, Herbert Winckelmann was still untroubled by the war. At Christmas 1940, he went skiing at Sonthofen, where he met his future wife Elinor. At Easter, they went skiing together in Kitzbuel and in July he proposed to her. However, the war now brought with it minor inconveniences:
When war had broken out, the lights all over Europe had gone out and I disliked the dark streets. Not that I had been afraid of a possible crime, for crime happened very seldom due to the severe punishment received … It was because all the streets looked grey and the same. I suddenly recognized that I seldom looked at street
signs. So far, I had found my way using the neon lights … Nightlife in Berlin went on during the first two years as usual. In order not to bump into each other on the sidewalks, we pinned phosphor-covered buttons to the lapels of our overcoats.
NORTH AFRICA
Italy had entered the war on the German side on 10 June 1940. With colonies in North Africa, the Italians were in a perfect position to attack the British in Egypt. On 13 September, at Hitler’s urging, they rolled over the Egyptian border intent on taking the Suez Canal and, possibly, the Middle Eastern oilfields beyond. But the Italians were no match for the British. By the time they surrendered, on 7 February 1941, the British had driven them back 800km (500 miles), taking over 130,000 prisoners. But on 6 February Hitler sent Rommel to Tripoli, and on 31 March Rommel attacked El Agheila. Present was Lieutenant Kurt Wolff, with the newly formed Afrika Korps:
In the yellow moonlight long convoys of trucks move along the coast road, now and again attacked by English bombers. Water, fuel, ammo, bread, food and people, everything moves through the dark night which is no different from the glowing heat of the day … Field kitchens and ration trucks search for the tracks of the Panzers of their units. However, the important movements in the dusk are the repair groups. Men who repair the engines, clean and adjust the carburettors. Springs, track rollers and track links have to be seen to and fixed. Guns and machine-guns have to be checked. You can hear the swearing of hard-working men, the clanging of hammers in the wet and cold night. But thousands of other things come together before a battle is won. As soon as the sun rises through the morning mist, the regiment starts to roll forward. We disperse into the desert, but forward we go, 40–50km per hour we read on our tacho. But the nicest is the attack … the German Panzer, our beautiful wide, humming Panzer. We are secretly proud that everyone needs us when the danger is high. Panzer! Panzer to the fore!