Black J. World War Two A Military History

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successful the following day, sinking or severely damaging three

Japanese carriers with a long-range air attack in the failing light.The

conduct of this mission reflected the American ability to accept,

work with and minimise risk, in this case that planes would be lost

on the return journey to, and landing on, their carriers.The Japanese

carriers were protected by a screen of Zero fighters, but, as a clear

sign of growing Japanese weakness in the air, this was too weak to

resist the fighter aircraft that supported the American bombers.

Although the Japanese still had a sizeable carrier fleet, once again the

loss of pilots in the battle was a crippling blow. The Americans had

benefited from prior knowledge of Japanese plans and from the

failure of Japanese land-based aircraft in the Marianas to provide the

navy with promised support.

This victory enabled the Americans to overrun the Marianas, a

decisive advance into the western Pacific. The resolution of the

Japanese resistance was shown on Saipan, where nearly the entire

garrison, 27,000 men, died resisting attack and which it took three

weeks (15 June–9 July) to capture. The Japanese mounted a strong

defence and also launched ferocious frontal counterattacks. Heavy

casualties in the latter, however, greatly hit Japanese reserves on

Saipan and made the American task less difficult than it would

otherwise have been.

Both sides had seen Saipan, the best of the islands as a bomber

base against Japan, as vital. Its fall led to the resignation of the

Japanese cabinet on 18 July. Due to the role of the emperor,

Hirohito, and the absence of a party equivalent to the Nazis, no

Japanese politician enjoyed dominance equivalent to that of Hitler.

Major defeat therefore had a serious political effect. Thus, the need

to retain political control played a role in strategy.

On Tinian, where the Americans landed on 24 July, the Japanese

also fought to the end, but the American attack was more effective

and the island fell in a week, although, as elsewhere, for example on

Guam, which was conquered on 21 July–10 August, those Japanese

who were not killed fought on until the end of the war and, in some

cases, beyond it. On all these islands, the terrain, particularly coastal

cliffs, mountains and dense jungle, made the advance difficult. The

Japanese lacked room to manoeuvre and thus to retreat. On Pacific

islands, they could not fall back as they could, if obliged, in Burma

DEFEATING THE AXIS, 1944

194

or China, in 1945, and on the islands the density of troops and

defensive fortifications was such as to make offensive progress very

difficult. Further south, mobility, firepower and fighting quality

brought the Americans and Australians further success in New

Guinea.They relied heavily there on land-based air support.

The conquest of the Marianas provided not only sites for airfields

but also an important forward logistical base for the navy and for

amphibious operations.The Americans used their naval and air supe-

riority, already strong and rapidly growing, to mount a reconquest of

the Philippines, their largest offensive in the Pacific during the war.

It began in October, when Leyte was invaded, and continued in

January 1945, when a large force was landed on the largest island,

Luzon.

In some respects, the Philippines were a cul-de-sac for a grand

strategy focused on Japan. Saipan and Iwo Jima were a more impor-

tant axis for air attack, although control of the central Philippines

would increase the number of American bases in the western Pacific.

The seizure of Taiwan would have been more important so far as

affecting the war in China and, more crucially, helping to keep the

pressurised and defeated Kuomintang in the war were concerned.

However, the reasons for recapturing the Philippines were given

added force by MacArthur’s determination to reverse his flight from

them in 1942. He insisted that the Americans had obligations to

their Filipino supporters. Differences over strategy accentuated divi-

sions between American policymakers. As critics of the Philippine

campaign had feared, the invasion of the islands indeed led to a delay

in the operations planned against Iwo Jima and Okinawa.

The invasion of the Philippines helped ensure a naval battle that

secured American maritime superiority in the western Pacific,

although, having obtained that, there was no real need to press on

with additional landings in the already-isolated Philippines. In the

battle of Leyte Gulf of 23–6 October 1944, the largest naval battle of

the war, the Japanese fleet, in Operation Sho, sought to intervene by

luring the American carrier fleet away and then using two striking

forces to attack the landing fleet. This characteristically complex

scheme, which posed serious problems for the ability of American

admirals to read the battle (and for their Japanese counterparts in

following the plan), nearly succeeded as one of the strike forces was

DEFEATING THE AXIS, 1944

195

able to approach the landing area and was superior to the American

warships there. However, it retired and the net effect of the battle

was heavy destruction of the Japanese fleet, with the loss of 4

carriers, 3 battleships, and 10 cruisers. In addition, Japanese air power

in and near the Philippines was badly hit during the battle.

From 25 October, the Japanese employed kamikaze (suicide)

planes against American warships. Such attacks were a product not

only of a fanatical self-sacrifice, but also of the limitations of the

Japanese naval air arm. More generally, there had been a breakdown

in strategic thought on the part of the Japanese; an inability, in the

face of Allied power, to think through any option once the decisive

naval battle had been lost. The destruction of naval assets made it

difficult to think of any further large-scale action, and reduced the

Japanese to a defensive–offensive predicated on a tenacious defence

coupled with destructive suicide missions, both designed to sap their

opponent’s will. For the navy,‘the only effective weapon left was the

kamikaze’.

The Japanese commanders in the Philippines and else-

where were simply told to hold on to their positions.They received

no logistical support. The weak government that had taken power

after the fall of T

™j™ in July had no plan other than for the Japanese

military to die heroically. They felt unable to explain to the public

that all had gone wrong and, like the T

™j™ government, were very

worried by domestic opposition, from both left and right.

War in Burma

On their western front, both the Japanese and the British launched

attacks. The creation of the South-East Asia Command in October

1943 had been designed to give effect to Churchill’s wish to recap-

ture Britain’s lost colonies, and, specifically, to use amphibious

operations to strike at the Japanese perimeter. The British Eastern

Fleet was reinforced from the Mediterranean and from April 1944

attacked Japanese positions in what had been the Dutch East Indies.

However, plans for invasions of Sumatra, the Andaman Islands and

the Burmese coast all proved abortive.

The decisive clash occurred on the ground in Burma, where the

Japanese were outfought in 1944. Having defeated a limited British

offensive in the Arakan region, with a counterattack, Offensive Ha-

DEFEATING THE AXIS, 1944

196

Go, launched on 4 February, that was designed to act as a diversion

from the main offensive, the Japanese invaded north-east India in

Operation U-Go, launched from 10–15 March. However, as in the

Solomons and at Midway in 1942, the Japanese discovered that it was

difficult to sustain or regain success once the dramatic advances of the

early stages of the conflict had passed.They were over-confident and

poorly prepared for a long struggle. The simplicity of their army’s

determined offensive tactics was wasteful of troops, while the army

suffered from a poor logistical system, as well as from inadequate

armour, artillery and air support.

In Burma/India, Japanese tactics were no longer adequate against

better-trained British (as before, this refers to forces under British

command) troops, able to control battles carefully and benefiting

from high unit quality and superior logistics, air power and artillery.

The vast expansion of numbers in the Indian Army, to over 2 million

by the end of the war, provided the British with the necessary

resources, but there had also been a fundamental change in training

that reflected a rigorous evaluation of what had gone wrong both

when the Japanese attacked in 1942 and, subsequently, in the First

Arakan campaign. A full complement of basic training followed by

jungle training, with a standardisation of training across the army in

order to produce a consistent doctrine, had been insisted upon by

the Infantry Committee report of June 1943. A more aggressive

fighting style, mentally overcoming the jungle, patrolling no-man’s

land to deny it to the Japanese, seeking out Japanese concentrations,

and responding to their infiltration tactics by using all-round

defences, had been inculcated.

The British logistical situation had been improved, not least with

road building, while the inroads of disease had been lessened.

Malaria was largely overcome by the creation of Malaria Forward

Treatment Units.These provided structured regimens for prevention

and treatment, including the introduction of more effective drugs,

especially penicillin and mepacine.

There had been a comparable

build-up in air-force effectiveness.

The poorly commanded Japanese invasion was heavily defeated at

their targets of Kohima and Imphal in March–July 1944. British

defensive positions were held against frontal attacks from nearby

trenches. Supplies were crucial for both sides: the Japanese needed

DEFEATING THE AXIS, 1944

197

rapid success and the capture of British supply dumps, as it was diffi-

cult to move forward large quantities of supplies along the jungle

tracks they employed. Their practice of rapid advance did not allow

sufficiently for a failure to overcome opposition, a situation which

paralleled that of German Blitzkrieg. The Japanese failure to move

forward sufficient supplies helped lead to starvation and furthered

the inroads of disease. The Japanese lacked the necessary transport

and air support. Combined with the British resistance, this led to

casualties of over 53,000 (compared to 17,000 for the British).

The British depended heavily on air-supply, which, in turn, was

affected by the weather. Even water had to be dropped for the

Kohima garrison. Two divisions were airlifted from the Arakan to

Imphal.

The quality of British command was higher than when

Burma had been conquered by the Japanese in 1942. General

William Slim, the Commander of 14

Army, was a winner: a

successful strategist, also capable of selecting and supporting effective

subordinates. A conviction that the Japanese could be defeated

contributed powerfully to the victory.The low morale seen in 1942,

in particular in Malaya and Singapore, had been replaced by a deter-

mination that was more impressive given the difficulties posed by

terrain and climate. Morale could not suffice, as Japanese failure

showed, but the fact that its absence no longer undermined the

British was crucial to their fighting quality. Slim ably exploited the

miscalculations of the Japanese advance in order to employ attrition

to gain a decisive result.

The defensive success at Kohima and Imphal was exploited as the

retreating Japanese were attacked: the British maintained the pressure

despite the coming of the monsoon in May.The Japanese defeat, one

of the most serious suffered by their army, provided a basis for the

British invasion of Burma from December 1944. Further east in

Burma, the American-Chinese units of the Northern Combat Area

Command advanced in order to open supply routes to China, but,

after initial successes, they were badly exhausted in May–August

1944 by the lengthy defence by the outnumbered Japanese garrison

of Myitkyina.

Fighting in the close terrain and heat of Burma was hard.

Lieutenant-General Sir Henry Pownall noted, ‘It is bound to be a

slow business, I fear. That jungle is so infernally thick you literally

DEFEATING THE AXIS, 1944

198

cannot see ten yards into it, and to winkle out concealed Japs, one by

one (and they have to be killed to the last man) is the devil of a busi-

ness’. A British Military Mission report on how best to fight the

Japanese had suggested in April 1944 that ‘each individual infantry

soldier must be trained to be a self-reliant big game hunter imbued

with a deep desire to seek out and kill his quarry’.

Fortunately for

the Allies, the atom bomb was to save them from such a final battle

in Japan.

The campaign in Burma does not play a major role in discussion

of the war, and in Britain the 14

is known as the ‘Forgotten

Army’.

In part, this is understandable. There were no accompa-

nying naval battles, and the campaign did not contribute directly to

the air attack on Japan, although it had an indirect impact from the

role played in securing supply routes for American airbases in China.

Furthermore, just as the Japanese advances in China in 1944–5 did

not lead to Japanese victory in the war, so Japanese success in

Operation U-Go would not necessarily have had such an effect, let

alone have made a major impact on the crucial Pacific campaigns.

Given their logistical problems, it is dubious that the Japanese could

have exploited victory in U-Go. Indeed, it would probably have

remained a frontier campaign, comparable in some respects to the

Japanese advance to the Aleutians, which had also been at the

extreme of Japanese logistical range and had not been exploited.

Allowing for this, the achievement in defeating the Japanese in

Burma was considerable, and the British were to prove more

successful in doing so there than the Americans proved on Luzon,

although circumstances were different, not least the Japanese willing-

ness to engage in Burma. Penney noted in June 1945 that American

losses at Okinawa had made them appreciate the British victory in

Burma more;

and yet, as the Americans prepared to invade Japan, it

remained a strategic irrelevance.

1944 reviewed

A combination of the Allied goal of unconditional surrender by

Germany and Japan with the resolve of their opponents’ leaderships

and their grip over their populations ensured that the war would go

on; although it was no longer viable for Hitler to hope that a defeat

DEFEATING THE AXIS, 1944

199

of the Second Front would enable the Germans to concentrate on

and defeat the Soviet forces. The Axis was in a parlous condition.

There was no effective co-operation or coordination between

Germany and Japan, and the German alliance system in Europe had

collapsed.

The Axis leadership was also very poor. Hitler was increasingly

succumbing to his range of psychological problems, and his dimin-

ished grasp on reality exacerbated the difficulties of German

command. His lack of interest in a negotiated end to the war, by a

separate settlement with the Soviet Union or the Western Allies, was

based on distrust of Stalin and was, in part, vindicated by his oppo-

nents’ stress on unconditional surrender, but it arose from ‘a

world-view which had completely abandoned Clausewitz’s ideas of

the relationship between war and policy, and by denying the possi-

bility of defeat, and therefore of negotiated terms, invited the total

destruction of his own land and people’.

In addition, there were serious flaws with Hitler as an operational

commander.Whatever his skills as an overseer of attack, Hitler was a

‘disaster’

as a commander of the defence due to his unwillingness

to yield territory and his consequent preference for the static

defence. By concentrating decision-making and being unable to

match Stalin’s ability to delegate (or indeed his more measured

response to failures in 1941–2), Hitler ensured that there was no

alternative way to provide sound command decisions. Divisions

within the German military leadership testified to grave concern

about the course of the war and the consequences of earlier support

for Hitler.

The July Bomb Plot, an attempt, on 20 July 1944, by military

conspirators to assassinate Hitler, seize power and negotiate peace,

narrowly failed when the bomb went off but did not kill him.This

failure greatly weakened the critics of Hitler among the army. Had

Hitler indeed been killed, the cohesion of the Nazi regime would

have collapsed. Unlike civilian conspirators, the army had the organ-

isation and strength to seize power. The potential for success was

illustrated in Paris, where SS and Gestapo leaders were arrested by

supporters of the plot.The political aftermath of an army seizure of

power would have been far less clear, but failure ensured it would be

a fight to the finish. A suitable sentence to end a chapter, but, as a

DEFEATING THE AXIS, 1944

200

reminder that the war years involved more suffering than that caused

by conflict, in 1944 Bengal was threatened by a major famine, and

the British needed to divert shipping to move grain there.

In every field, the strength of Allied resources was readily

apparent. That year, the USA alone produced 89 million tons of

steel, about half the world’s total production. 1944 ended with the

Axis in a far weaker situation than at its start, although the funda-

mentals were no different. The Axis were the weaker alliance, they

were on the defensive, and they were unable to match the forces

deployed by the Allies, particularly the USA and the Soviet Union.

The war had now been carried up or close to Germany’s frontiers,

although the Germans and Japanese remained in occupation of large

amounts of conquered territory, including Norway, Denmark, most

of the Netherlands, much of Poland and part of Yugoslavia, as well as

Malaya, the Dutch East Indies and most of Burma and the

Philippines.

Both Germany and Japan had lost the war at sea and in the air.

The latter ensured that ground and sea units could not be protected

by the Axis, a situation that had tactical, operational and, at sea,

strategic consequences. It also meant that the German and Japanese

homelands could not be protected. The consequences, in terms of

damage to industry and infrastructure and harm to civilian morale,

were not under the control of the Axis regimes. Instead, they were

dependent on the effectiveness of Allied doctrine and operations and

on a civilian response to bombing that Axis regimes struggled to

influence.

Having survived the July Bomb Plot, Hitler was able to take

greater control over the army than he had wielded hitherto. He was

even more convinced than hitherto that he was intended by destiny

to save Germany. Furthermore, the greater role of Nazi fervour in

appointments to, and promotions in, the army after the Bomb Plot

helps explain why the army went on fighting when success appeared

very unlikely. Soldiers were convinced that they had to protect

Germany from the Soviets, who were presented as murderous Asiatic

hordes, but they also fought in a determined fashion against Anglo-

American forces. In addition, the SS became more powerful in the

Nazi regime and German society, further increasing the oppression

of those deemed traitors and helping further the implementation of

DEFEATING THE AXIS, 1944

201

total war.Appointed ‘Reich Plenipotentiary for Total War’, Goebbels

introduced the sixty-hour week.

In 1944, the Axis had lost more territory and more troops than in

1943, and the Second Front had proved far more successful than

Hitler had anticipated, although German resilience had been under-

estimated by the Western Allies. It had also proved impossible for the

Axis powers to reverse earlier Allied successes, most importantly that

in the Battle of the Atlantic. Nor was it possible to launch a second

version of the Kursk offensive. The Germans no longer had the

resources to launch such an attack on the Eastern Front. The Bulge

offensive on the Western Front was not on the same scale, and its

context was a far more desperate one.The Germans were unable to

challenge Allied control of the sea effectively, while the Allied air

offensive had at last started to make inroads on German munitions

production. Axis failure was registered in the loss of allies such as

Finland. In July 1944, the Fascist pro-Japanese government of Field

Marshal Pibul Songgram in Thailand fell, to be replaced by a

ministry more sympathetic to the Allies.

Yet there was still much that was unclear at the beginning of

1945. The problem of conquering Japan appeared particularly trou-

bling given the willingness of Japanese units to fight to the death, the

large proportion of their army that had not yet been engaged, and

the extent to which it was unlikely that the Chinese or, unless they

intervened, the Soviets would be able to prevent the reinforcement

of Japan from China and Manchuria.

Aside from that, it was unclear how long it would take to

vanquish Hitler. He was determined to fight to the finish, and was

unwilling to heed contrary advice. The prospect of a Nazi redoubt

in Alpine Germany troubled some observers, while there was

growing concern about what Soviet triumph in Eastern Europe

would mean for the future shape of the continent. Conflict between

Communists and Royalists had broken out in Greece. The course

and consequences of the campaigns of 1945 seemed far from

inevitable.

NOTES

1 W.S. Dunn, Soviet Blitzkrieg: The Battle for White Russia, 1944 (Boulder,

Colorado, 2000).

DEFEATING THE AXIS, 1944

202

2 J.K. Zawodny, Nothing but Honour:The Story of the Warsaw Uprising, 1944

(Stanford, 1978).

3 H.P. Willmott, When Men Lost Faith in Reason. Reflections on War and

Society in the Twentieth Century (Westport, Connecticut, 2002), pp. 124–8.

4 S. Newton, Retreat from Leningrad: Army Group North, 1944–1945

(Atglen, Pennsylvania, 1995).

5 J.T. Gross, Revolution from Abroad:The Soviet Conquest of Poland’s Western

Ukraine and Western Belorussia (Princeton, 1988).

6 E.D. Smith, The Battles for Cassino (1975); J. Ellis, Cassino: The Hollow

Victory (1984).

7 Alexander to Brooke, 26 January 1944, LH.Alanbrooke papers, 6/2/19.

8 G.W.L. Nicholson, The Canadians in Italy, 1943–1945 (Ottawa, 1956), is

of value for the whole campaign. See also B. McAndrew, Canadians and

the Italian Campaign, 1943–1945 (Montreal, 1996).

9P.Verney,Anzio, 1944: An Unexpected Fury (1978); C. D’Este, Fatal

Decisions:Anzio and the Battle for Rome (1991).

10 Brooke to Sir Henry Maitland Wilson, Supreme Commander,

Mediterranean, 2 August 1944, LH.Alanbrooke papers 6/3/6.

11 D. Orgill, The Gothic Line (1967); D. Graham and S. Bidwell, Tug of War:

The Battle for Italy, 1943–1945 (1986).

12 R. Miller, Nothing Less than Victory:The Oral History of D-Day (2000).

13 G. Hartcup, Code Name Mulberry:The Planning, Building and Operation of

the Normandy Harbours (Newton Abbot, 1977).

14 O’Connor to Lieutenant-General Sir Allan Harding, Chief of Staff of

Allied Armies in Italy, 19 August 1944, LH. O’Connor 5/3/37.

15 D.I. Hall, ‘From Khaki and Light Blue to Purple. The Long and

Troubled Development of Army/Air Co-operation in Britain,

1914–1945’, RUSI Journal, 147, no. 5 (October 2002), p. 82.

16 I. Gooderson, Air Power at the Battlefront: Allied Close Air Support in

Europe 1943–4 (1998).

17 LH.Alanbrooke papers, 6/2/35, pp. 1, 5, 9, 29.

18 C. D’Este, Decision in Normandy (1983); M. Hastings, Overlord: D-Day

and the Battle for Normandy (1984); M. Reynolds, Steel Inferno: I SS

Panzer Corps in Normandy (New York, 1997); S. Weingartner (ed.), The

Greatest Thing We Have Ever Attempted: Historical Perspectives on the

Normandy Campaign (Wheaton, Illinois, 1998); R. Hart, Clash of Arms:

How the Allies Won in Normandy (Boulder, Colorado, 2001).

19 M. Blumenson, The Battle of the Generals:The Untold Story of the Falaise

Pocket: The Campaign that Should Have Won World War II (New York,

1993).

20 C.B. MacDonald, The Battle of the Huertgen Forest (Philadelphia, 1963);

A. Kemp, The Unknown Battle: Metz (1981).

21 M. Van Creveld, Fighting Power: German and US Army Performance,

1939–1945 (Westport, Connecticut, 1982), is less persuasive than M.D.

Doubler, Closing with the Enemy: How GIs Fought the War in Europe,

1944–1945 (Lawrence, Kansas, 1994). On the Germans, see S.G. Fritz,

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