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.
And thus Raeder’s plan, the last coherent idea for German victory, faded. One can turn one’s imagination free for extravagant pictures of what might have been: Japanese battleships and aircraft carriers sailing into the Mediterranean under the Rising Sun flag, through a Suez Canal flying the swastika! The political effect would have shaken the earth. And it was feasible. Our defensive lines in Russia, properly shortened and reinforced under Directive Number 39, would have held toughly and bathed the Russian earth in Bolshevik blood. Japan could easily have shielded her Pacific perimeter against the weak Americans in the spring of 1942, with small holding forces.
But dismiss all this as wistful romance. It remains a sober fact, attested by the Churchill memoirs, that Japan could have taken Madagascar at will, and cut the supply line up the east Africa coast to Egypt. There would then have been no Battle of El Alamein. The starved British African army would have fallen to Rommel in June after his brilliant coup de main at Tobruk. Churchill would then probably have fallen too; and the war would have taken a major favorable turn for us.
Instead, the Mediterranean strategy dwindled into a phantom “Great Plan,” the global stroke with which Hitler would wind up the war after beating Russia. He liked to talk about it at dinner, and that was what it remained: table talk.
The Forgotten Victory
The great Japanese navy dawdled and dawdled. Not until the end of March was Admiral Nagumo, the conqueror of Pearl Harbor, given a real task. Until then he roamed the blue ocean wastes in minor carrier strikes, “cracking eggshells with a sledgehammer,” as the commentator Fuchida says. Japan’s fast battleships swung to anchor at their base near Hiroshima as the sands of time trickled away. In March Nagumo finally sailed westward to hit British surface and air forces in the Indian Ocean. The purpose was to support the Japanese army’s advance into Burma.
Here at last was a trial run of the Kuroshima strategy, and a huge victory resulted. Nagumo’s dive-bombers sank an aircraft carrier, two heavy cruisers, and a destroyer. He demolished two bases in Ceylon, and much merchant shipping. His Zeroes wrought such havoc among the defending Swordfish, Hurricanes, and Spitfires that Winston Churchill in his memoirs confesses the Royal Air Force was never so outfought over Europe. The surviving British battleships fled to British East Africa. British seapower, after two centuries of hegemony, vanished from the Indian Ocean. De facto, it became a Japanese lake. Western historians pass over this stupendous event, except for Churchill, who candidly records his own real shock and fear at the time.
Thus the Kuroshima concept was vindicated. Madagascar, the African coast, the Suez Canal, the Persian Gulf, the Mediterranean itself, lay open to the advance of the Japanese fleet. But by now it was too late. Nagumo was recalled for other operations. The Axis edge in time had run out unused.
The Doolittle Raid
A brave if harebrained Yankee propaganda action at this time, the notorious Doolittle terror raid against Tokyo, stung Imperial Headquarters into making at last the long-deferred decision, “Which way?” In near-panic, they chose the worst possible course.
Underestimating the Americans is a mistake their enemies often make. They seem frivolous and easygoing; in fact they are highly mechanically minded, and capable of considerable ferocity once aroused. The Yanks were too weak in the Pacific just then for anything but light carrier raids. However, they concocted this savage little stunt, the launching of a few Army Air Force bombers against Tokyo from the decks of a carrier. Since Japanese patrols covered only carrier plane ranges, this achieved total surprise. It had no military effect beyond random murder of civilians, a practice the Americans kept up through Dresden and Hiroshima. The aim was to inspirit the home folks and to jolt the foe.
Technically it was no easy feat. But the Americans modified the bombers and altered carrier routine in their usual clever fashion. A group of volunteer pilots under the able army flier Doolittle made the sneak attack. Out of a clear sky, bombs exploded over Tokyo. America rejoiced, the world was astounded, and Japan was jarred to its foundations. After only four months of war the sacred emperor had been exposed to Yankee bombs!
Yamamoto, the daring supreme admiral who had made the Pearl Harbor decision, now determined that this must not happen again; that the impudent Americans must be taught a lesson, and pushed forever out of carrier range. The answer to “which way” thus came, clear and fatal: “Eastward!” Eastward, where there was nothing material to be gained; but eastward, where the American fleet might be forced to come out and be annihilated. And Japan would seize an enemy outpost, from which she could ward off all future Doolittle outrages. So Nagumo was recalled and the die was cast. Eastward!
In this way, with such misguided leadership, we and the Japanese turned our backs on each other, sparing the British Empire. We each rode off in the wrong direction on the spherical battlefield. The Wehrmacht set forth on the long march to Stalingrad, and the Japanese navy sailed for Midway.
TRANSLATORS NOTE:This analysis is a study topic at the Naval War College. I have lectured on it. As an army officer, Roon tends to minimize the logistical problems of sea supply lines spanning the whole Indian Ocean, and the flanking threat by sea and air from India. Still, the best course for the Axis in the spring of 1942 may well have been to hold against us and Russia, and hit the British hard from both sides. Losses to U-boats were reaching a peak. A Japanese drive toward Suez, combined with Rommel’s advances in North Africa, might have had grim consequences for the Churchill government. If Churchill had fallen, it could have been a long step to a separate peace.
But Roon throughout ignores the fact that combined operations are not congenial to totalitarian governments. Typically they are founded by extremists and fanatics, who come to power through conspiracy and crime. Once power is seized and the conspiracy becomes a government, these traits persist. As thieves tend to fall out, so totalitarians make poor allies.— V.H.
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22
BRIGADIER GENERAL LACOUTURE had been misinformed about Natalie’s whereabouts.
A black cloudburst was drenching Siena at midday. In a bad mood, Jas-trow was writin
g at his study desk by lamplight, beside a streaming window. Rainy weather made his shoulders ache; it stiffened his old fingers; and the words always flowed better when he worked out in the sunshine. Natalie’s quiet tap signalled, “Minor matter; if you re busy, ignore.“
“Yes? Come in.”
The passage he was writing demanded a long further look at Martin Luther’s views on celibacy. Feeling the weariness of his years and the endlessness of his task, Jastrow welcomed the break. In the shadows cast by the lamplight, her bony face looked pale and sad. She was still not over the blow of their detainment, he thought.
“Aaron, have you ever met Mosé Sacerdote?”
“That Jew who owns the cinema, and half of the real estate on the Banchi di Sopra?” Pettishly he pulled off his glasses. “I may have. I know who he is.”
“He’s on the telephone. He says you’ve met at the archbishop’s palace.”
“What does he want?” Jastrow waved the glasses in annoyance. “If he’s the man I remember, he is a walleyed and very glum old gent.”
“He’d like you to autograph his copy of A Jew’s Jesus.”
“What? After I’ve been here eleven years, he asks that?”
“Shall I say you’re busy?”
With a slow calculating little grin, Jastrow breathed on his glasses and polished them. “ ‘Sacerdote,’ you know, means Cohen in Italian. ‘Priest.’ We’d best find out what Mr. Moses Cohen actually wants. Let him come after my nap.”
The storm had passed, the sun shone, and raindrops sparkled on the terrace flowers when an ancient car wheezed up to the gate. Natalie picked her way around puddles to greet the pudgy elderly man in black. Jastrow, drinking tea in a lounge chair, waved Sacerdote to a bench beside him.