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A DAVID & CHARLES BOOK Copyright © David & Charles Limited 2007 CONTENTS David & Charles is an F+W Publications Inc. company 4700 East Galbraith Road Cincinnati, OH 45236 Introduction 6 First published in the UK in 2007 First published in the US in 2007 PART 1: THE WAR IN THE WEST 10 Text copyright © Nigel Cawthorne 2007 1 Achtung!: The War in Europe Begins 12 Nigel Cawthorne has asserted his right to be identified as author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988. 2 The Battle of the Atlantic: Fighting Above and Below the Waves 32 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, by photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission 3 Holding the Line: Attrition on Two Fronts 42 in writing from the publisher. 4 Reaping the Whirlwind: Fortress Europe Under Attack 56 The publisher has made every reasonable effort to contact the copyright holders of images and text. If there have been any omissions, however, David and Charles will be pleased to insert the appropriate acknowledgment at a subsequent printing. 5 The Last Offensive: Counterattack in the Ardennes 80 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. 6 Götterdämmerung: The Devastation of the Homeland 122 ISBN-13: 978-0-7153-2282-6 hardback ISBN-10: 0-7153-2282-6 hardback ISBN-13: 978-0-7153-2744-9 US paperback PART 2: VOICES OF THE JAPANESE 144 ISBN-10: 0-7153-2744-5 US paperback Printed in Great Britain by Antony Rowe 7 Tora! Tora! Tora!: Attack in the Pacific 146 for David & Charles Brunel House, Newton Abbot, Devon 8 Bushido: Putting the Martial Code to the Test 174 Commissioning Editor: Ruth Binney Editor: Emily Pitcher 9 Retreat to Yasukuni: Defeat on the Islands 210 Assistant Editor: Demelza Hookway Project Editors: Beverley Jollands & Nicola Hodgson Art Editor: Marieclare Mayne 10 Kamikaze: The Last Desperate Defence 238 Senior Designer: Tracey Woodward Picture Researcher: Tehmina Boman Indexer: Tony Hirst 11 Enduring the Unendurable: The Unimaginable End 266 Production Controller: Kelly Smith Visit our website at www.davidandcharles.co.uk Bibliography and Sources 280 David & Charles books are available from all good bookshops; alternatively you Picture Credits 283 can contact our Orderline on 0870 9908222 or write to us at FREEPOST EX2 110, Index 284 D&C Direct, Newton Abbot, TQ12 4ZZ (no stamp required UK only); US customers call 800-289-0963 and Canadian customers call 800-840-5220. Introduction INTRODUCTION 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 There is no moral relativism concerning World War II. By any standards, the menfolk and their homes, and millions died – whether they believed in the German ‘Führer’ Adolf Hitler was a psychopathic dictator bent on building cause or not – though however grim their fate, it pales in comparison with the a European empire by intimidating, imprisoning, murdering and waging genocide carried out deliberately by both Germany and Japan. Nevertheless, unprovoked war on anyone who opposed him. In the end, he was happy to one person’s suffering is not mitigated by the worse torments of another. see the destruction of the German nation, which he felt had let him down, The line ‘For they sow the wind, and reap the whirlwind’ appears in the and he urged others to go on sacrificing their lives, even when he had taken Old Testament book of the minor prophet Hosea. It warns against the his own. worship of graven images. However, the line was famously appropriated by In the East, General Hideki Tojo and his militarist government pretended Sir Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris, commander in chief of the Royal Air Force’s that they were liberating the yellow man in Asia by kicking the white man Bomber Command. In 1942, at the start of the bombing campaign that he out. However, Japan’s incursion into Manchuria and China was marked by was about to unleash on Germany, he said: ‘The Nazis entered this war under atrocities. The Japanese Imperial Army was scarcely less brutal in the other the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and territories it conquered – murdering, raping and enslaving. Allied prisoners nobody was going to bomb them. At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw, and half a of war were brutalized, maltreated and worked to death, and many more hundred other places, they put their rather naive theory into operation. They native people suffered the same fate. And, again, the Japanese began the war sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.’ in the East with a series of unprovoked attacks. It is true. Germany with its blitzkrieg and Japan with its attack on Pearl Of course it is possible to criticize the excesses of the British, American, Free Harbor began the war with air attacks, while promising their citizens they French and Allied forces, with the benefit of hindsight. But the Allied nations would not be bombed. But Harris’s biblical quotation is an apt description were forced into war and fought back against a ferocious onslaught with of the entire war from the point of view of the vanquished. The hubris of any means to hand. The price of losing was too high to bear. Even the Soviet the Nazi leaders and the Japanese militarists is astounding. They told their Union under the brutal dictatorship of Joseph Stalin – though no haven of people that their armed forces were invincible. They said that some of their liberty – was forced into war by an unprovoked and unannounced attack. enemies (the Russians, in the case of the Germans, and the Chinese for the Of all the Allied nations, it sustained the greatest losses, with an estimated Japanese) were racially inferior, while the others – the Western democracies eighteen million dead – including seven million civilians. When Hitler sent – were morally weak and would never exhibit the political will they would his armies into the Soviet Union, he ordered them to use unprecedented need to withstand the German and Japanese onslaught. The wind they sowed savagery against those who lived there. with these sentiments caused a whirlwind that was reaped by their peoples. Many of the men in the front line on both sides were just ordinary blokes. Their countries were devastated. Their cities destroyed. Their citizens – both They had been promised that theirs was the world’s finest fighting force soldiers and civilians alike – were killed, maimed, widowed, orphaned and – only to find themselves pitted against an enemy who was equally highly rendered homeless. motivated and often much better equipped and supplied. Some quickly Reaping the Whirlwind uses the authentic voices of German and Japanese realized that they had been tricked into war by a cynical leadership. But people caught up in the conflict to relate their experiences. Their words come whether they were disillusioned or true believers, most of them found from diaries, letters, interrogation reports, interviews, personal memoirs 6 7 Introduction and published material. These men and women were the enemies of Britain, that she abhors any attempt to glorify war, but the suffering and courage of America, France, the Soviet Union and the other Allied nations. But for them, those caught up in it she finds of enduring interest. ‘the enemy’ was the Allies. I know other people of my parents’ generation who went through World Much of the material has been found in the archives of the Imperial War War II. Few of them bear any resentment against their former enemies. Museum in Duxford, Cambridgeshire, thanks to Stephen Walton; the US Usually, they reserve this for the ingratitude of their governments and for Army Heritage Collection in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, thanks to David Keough historians who do not recognize their contribution. Others are even more and the US National Archives in Maryland, thanks to the redoutable John forgiving. One of my parents’ closest friends was a German Jew who had Taylor. A disproportionate number of the interrogation reports and captured escaped from Italy during the war. He returned to live there, where he became letters and diaries preserved there come from the Battle of the Bulge – or wealthy. We used to holiday in his villa on Elba. rather the 1944 Winter Offensive, as it was known to the Germans – and the More recently, I was employed by a Jewish entrepreneur to ghost his Philippines. This is because German soldiers who saw action in the Ardennes memoirs. His wife had just died. On her deathbed she had begged him to set in 1944 were much more likely to have survived the war than those fighting down his experiences for their children and grandchildren to read. He had in Russia in 1941. And Japanese soldiers in the Philippines were still holding never talked to them about what had happened, fearing it would bore them. out when Japan surrendered and, consequently, did not fight to the death It did not. like their comrades confronting the Allies in other places. He had been born in Berlin, but his family realized in time what was Although I was born six years after the war ended, like most British people happening and managed to escape. In England, as a young man, he was of my generation, World War II had a profound influence on me.

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