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Chapter XII: Endgame, August 1943-February 1945.
And the war ends.
Chapter XII: Endgame, August 1943-February 1945.
Allied troop strength quadrupled from 150.000 to 600.000 by mid September 1943, but continued German pressure brought the Anglo-American allies to appeal to Mussolini and Stalin for help. Stalin was about to launch an offensive anyway to retake Belarus and the Baltic States to reach the pre-1942 border, and it was wildly successful. Mussolini, on the other hand, was unpleasantly surprised because he’d been counting on the landings in northern France to take pressure off his burdened forces and allow them to sit back and recover for a while. Instead, however, the weary Regio Esercito, bolstered by British, American and French forces, was asked to attack and Mussolini reluctantly agreed. 350.000 Allied troops, two thirds of them Italian, went unto the breach once more and attacked the new German line along the Reno River on September 14th. The German defence under Kesselring proved tenacious and Allied progress was negligible, and there were a number of cases of mutiny among the Italians similar to the 1917 French mutinies: it wasn’t that they no longer wanted to fight, but they were tired of useless offensives. Disciplinary courts came down hard on the worst mutineers and handed out a few death sentences, but let most off with a slap on the wrist to avoid making things worse. The offensive was paused after two weeks with only a few snippets of territorial gains and heavy casualties to show for it.
To deal with the situation of a war weary army Mussolini knew he needed a serious victory to sell the idea of continuing the fight. He definitely wanted that, for the last thing he wanted was to sign a separate peace and be seen as a cowardly traitor. The fascist dictator, against the wishes of his fellow Allied leaders, chose for decisive action and took off the gloves by authorizing the use of chemical weapons. Based purely on written orders, to avoid Germany finding out, gas masks were distributed among the troops and mustard gas shells arrived at the front by mid October. On October 18th the Italian offensive was resumed just west of Lake Comacchio during an Indian summer style spell of good weather (average daytime temperatures were 17 °C). It started out with an artillery bombardment with mustard gas, completely catching the Germans by surprise. Chemical weapons had so far not been used during the war in Europe and German forces in Italy had stored their gas masks outside immediate reach. Besides that, the cautious fascist resistance operating in northern Italy was ordered to engage in a full-blown partisan war against the occupying forces regardless of German reprisals. Those indeed occurred but they only further increased the numbers and the resolve of the partisan movement.
In the meantime, thousands and thousands of German soldiers were incapacitated by the effects of mustard gas: blistered skin; sore, sticky, stuck together and blind eyes; vomiting; and internal bleeding and external bleeding. While trying to run from the gas and get gas masks, German troops were cut up by shrapnel shells and strafing by C.205 fighters (equipped with two 12.7 mm machine guns in the nose and two 20 mm wing cannons). Italian Bersaglieri spearheaded the attack and liberated Ferrara on October 21st 1943, after which Modena, Parma and Piacenza soon fell. After enduring three years of German occupation, Mussolini was received by wildly enthusiastic crowds in Ferrara, where his speech was interrupted several times by cheering. The Italians broke out into the Po Valley and pushed the Germans to a new, much longer frontline following the river Po. Mussolini hoped to break out northeast and reach the Ljubljana Gap, but that was too ambitious a goal. German lines held, but Milan was only 40 kilometres away and Venice about 60 kilometres. Italian morale was restored, but German retaliation followed: Hitler authorized the use of tabun nerve gas. The existence of Germany’s nerve gas stockpile was unknown and it caused heavy casualties, even after the Allies figured out what was going on and used gas masks (tabun can also be absorbed through the skin, though many who ingested it that way eventually recovered).
After the horrors wrought by these gas attacks, both Axis and Allied leaders agreed to return to the tacit agreement between them not to use chemical weapons. As far as the Allies were concerned they didn’t really need any further use of such trump cards because the desired effect had been achieved. Hitler had diverted troops to the Italian front, where the Germans now had to defend a much longer defensive line along the river Po. This allowed the beleaguered Anglo-Americans in the Cherbourg beachhead to consolidate and break out into northern France, and rather spectacularly at that. The breakout began on September 3rd and within one week Eisenhower’s forces had liberated the Cotentin Peninsula as well as Brittany and had pushed to within 50 kilometres west of Paris. Hitler, in the meantime, agreed to de-escalate because he feared the prospect that Churchill would make true on threats to bomb German cities with mustard gas or, God forbid, anthrax. Chemical warfare was the only thing that the Führer was reluctant to engage in.
As Stalin’s hordes surged forward across the pre-war border and into Nazi occupied Poland during autumn and winter 1943, Hitler started to increasingly denude his defences in the west and on the Italian front. By the end of September Western Allied forces were on the Belgian border and Hitler had been forced to abandon southern France in order to prevent his forces from being cut off. One of the most deplorable episodes of this entire phase of the war was when Hitler ordered the SS to put down the popular uprising of the Parisians and destroy their city. SS leader Heinrich Himmler and his subordinates ruthlessly carried out this task, killing several thousand French civilians, before the Allied advance forced them to stop. The winter of 1943-’44 saw the situation stabilize with the Soviets on the Vistula and the Western Allies in Brussels, while the Italian front remained stable. Mussolini bided his time and waited as German forces weakened. An assassination attempt on Hitler in December 1943 failed and the SS rounded up several thousand people and sent them to concentration camps, if they weren’t executed outright.
March 1944 saw spring weather set in and the Allied push to crush Nazi Germany recommenced in full force. A tremendous Anglo-American offensive pushed north into the Netherlands toward the river Rhine, and toward bridges at Eindhoven and Arnhem in particular. Simultaneously, the Red Army thrust across the Vistula toward the river Oder and delivered a crushing defeat to German Army Group Centre, reducing it to half its original strength. With German troop strength in northern Italy at an all time low, Allied forces in Italy launched an offensive too and finally broke enemy lines on the Po, reaching the Austrian and Slovenian borders. In the meantime, they encountered emaciated inmates at the “Bolzano Transit Camp” which mostly housed political opponents, but also Jews and Gypsies. Allied forces in Dalmatia, in the meantime, broke out and liberated large parts of Croatia, reaching the ethnically Italian city of Fiume that had chafed under four years of German-Yugoslav occupation. The Regio Esercito was greeted by jubilant crowds.
By May 1944 Western Allied forces had crossed the Rhine, Soviet troops were on the river Oder and a mere 65 kilometres from Berlin, Italian forces had pushed to the Ljubljana Gap and Allied forces in Dalmatia had finally broken out into Croatia and were advancing north. June 1944 saw the final collapse of Nazi Germany with the Soviets taking Berlin and meeting the Western Allies on the river Elbe. In the meantime, Allied forces spearheaded by Italy liberated Vienna and Prague and met with the American Third Army under Patton that had advanced through Bavaria into Bohemia. During this final advance, Allied forces spearheaded by the Italians discovered the horrors of Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp where the inmates had been forced to perform slave labour under horrific circumstances and cruel, sadistic treatment (more than 100.000 people died at Mauthausen-Gusen, one of the largest forced labour camps in German occupied Europe).
After Hitler committed suicide in his bunker underneath the ruins of Berlin on June 6th 1944, his designated successor Hermann Goering agreed to sign an unconditional surrender. Heinrich Himmler – leader of the SS, the Gestapo and all of Germany’s other police services, commander of the Reserve Army as well as Minister of the Interior – disagreed with this move. Himmler used his power, which was not to be trifled with in the areas still under German control, to try and stage a coup d’état and continue the war. His idea was to continue the war as an SS led guerrilla insurgency against an Allied occupation, but the Wehrmacht put down the SS and Himmler was sentenced to death by guillotine for high treason by a kangaroo court (as non-military personnel, though ex-military, he wasn’t given the courtesy of a court martial and an execution by firing squad despite requesting it). He still got an easy death compared to what many concentration camp inmates had gone through.
That left one remaining Axis power to deal with: the Empire of Japan. Japan’s invasion of Southeast Asia and its war on the US had proven more costly than anticipated and hadn’t led to an early decisive victory. Southeast Asia had largely fallen, but at serious casualties, and the British held their ground on the Thai-Burmese border. In the meantime, the Imperial Japanese Navy had suffered some sensitive losses in the early stages of the war that limited their ability to maintain the initiative: at Pearl Harbor aircraft carrier Kaga had been sunk while Zuikaku had been damaged, requiring weeks in dry dock; the Naval Battle of Kota Bharu had seen the loss of one light cruiser and two destroyers; the Battle of the Java Sea had seen the loss of a light cruiser and damage to a heavy cruiser; and at Wake the Japanese lost one patrol boat, two destroyers, one light cruiser and saw aircraft carrier Soryu out of commission for six months at a time when Japan needed her for its offensives.
In early 1942, the Japanese admiralty prioritized the Pacific over the Indian Ocean, which probably contributed to the failure of Japan’s Indian Ocean Raid (Zuikaku was reassigned from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific after her repairs were completed in January). Force Z alone numbered two aircraft carriers, two battleships, one battlecruiser, one heavy cruiser, five light cruisers and fifteen destroyers for a total of 26 ships. At Ceylon it was merged with the Eastern Fleet, which contributed aircraft carriers HMS Formidable and HMS Hermes as well as battleships HMS Revenge, Resolution, Ramillies and Royal Sovereign. By March 1943 the Eastern Fleet was composed of four aircraft carriers, six battleships, one battlecruiser, three heavy cruisers, ten light cruisers, 29 destroyers, thirty smaller war ships and fifty merchants for a total of 133 ships.
The attacking Japanese strike force consisted of forty ships: five carriers, four battleships, seven heavy cruisers, nineteen destroyers and five submarines. On March 26th 1942 Vice Admiral Sir James Somerville learnt about a Japanese sortie from Borneo from signal decrypts and decided to ambush it. Aircraft carrier Indomitable, battlecruiser Repulse, heavy cruiser HMS Dorsetshire, four light cruisers and eight destroyers were set up as a lure. They briefly engaged the superior Japanese force in the evening of April 2nd, losing destroyers HMS Fortune and HMS Griffin, and fled westward under the cover of darkness. At dawn, April 3rd 1942, the pursuing Japanese fleet commanded by Nagumo ran into the main body of the Eastern Fleet 300 km east of Ceylon, which was also supported by land based aircraft of the RAF. The British lost HMS Hermes, HMS Dorsetshire and destroyers HMS Panther and HMAS Vampire, but the Japanese lost carriers Akagi and Shokaku, fast battleship Kirishima and heavy cruiser Chikuma. The latter two were sunk in a fight in which they were pitted against HMS Barham and heavy cruiser Cornwall. That fight was among the last confrontations between battleships, although Kirishima’s classification of “fast battleship” rather than battlecruiser proved unjustified: against actual battleships she proved insufficient, with 15 inch (381 mm) shells inflicting major damage while her opponent could survive hits by the enemy’s 14 (356 mm) inch shells.
With the loss of four carriers at Midway in June 1942, Japan’s last attempt to regain the initiative in this war, its carrier force was down by seven since the start of the war, while the Americans commissioned USS Essex in July 1942, replacing USS Yorktown (she was lost at Midway). This allowed the Americans to take the initiative in the Pacific and start an island hopping campaign toward Japan, with HMS Warspite being involved all the while, mostly performing coastal bombardment duties with her mighty 15 inch guns. By the end of 1943 Saipan, Tinian and Guam had fallen due to Japan’s inability to match the Allied navies after the losses sustained in 1942. Iwo Jima fell in summer 1944.
By autumn 1944 the US was in a position to invade Japan and on September 21st 1944 the greatest armada in history – American, British, Australian, Dutch and French ships – assembled off the coast of Kyushu for Operation Olympic. With fuel supplies low, the Japanese couldn’t do much to resist except for kamikaze attacks that scored a few spectacular but not war winning successes. The invaders encountered fanatical resistance from eighteen Imperial Japanese Army divisions, not to mention fanatical civilians that were equipped with cooking knives, awls, bamboo spears, eighteenth century muskets and bomb vests to commit suicide attacks with. Losses were appalling and even the US Army was brought to commit a few atrocities in order to maintain order, this in the context of mutual distrust and hatred between GIs and the locals. The US Army conquered the southern third of the island and used it to fire bomb Japanese cities even more and as a staging area for the invasion of Honshu. January 1945 saw the second part of the operation that was to bring the Empire of Japan to its knees: Operation Coronet, in other words the invasion of Honshu. This prompted Japanese generals to use chemical and biological weapons, causing massive enemy losses, but not enough to drive them back into the sea.
In the meantime, in December 1944, the Soviet Union and Italy, which had officially been at peace with Japan until now, declared war (Ethiopia, which was a de facto Italian protectorate at the time, also symbolically declared war). The Soviet contribution was by far the largest and they massed 800.000 men on the borders of Manchukuo, the Japanese puppet state controlling Manchuria. The Red Army invaded Manchuria (as well as Southern Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands) on December 20th 1944 in what was a classical double pincer movement and confounded the Japanese analysis of Soviet logistics by moving through the Gobi Desert. The Kwantung Army resisted fanatically, but the Red Army was superior in logistics as well as firepower: the Soviet T-34 medium tank was nearly ten tonnes heavier, more heavily armed and with better armour than Japan’s “medium” Type 97 Chi-Ha tank. The 57 mm gun on the Chi-Ha could only harm the T-34 at point blank range while the 85 mm gun on the newer variants of the T-34 easily cut through the 8-28 mm armour on the enemy tank at any distance. The Japanese A6M Zero also wasn’t the trump card it used to be, finding the Yakovlev Yak-3 to be a serious adversary. While the T-34 bloodied enemy tank forces and the Red Air Force proved more of a challenge than expected, colossal quantities of Soviet artillery compensated for whatever deficiencies the Red Army still had. Despite being outnumbered nearly 2:1, the Red Army overran all of Manchukuo in two months time (and they would have done even better if Stalin hadn’t kept so many forces in Eastern Europe out of the paranoid fear that the Western Allies would stab the USSR in the back). The Imperial Japanese Navy was having increasing difficulty in meeting its fuel demands and Stalin ordered plans to be drawn up for an invasion of Hokkaido.
The British transferred much of their forces from Europe to Burma and got support from Italian and French contingents, although those were of limited use initially due to their inexperience in jungle warfare. The Italian navy also based submarines at British bases to help in the fight against the Japanese navy and heavy cruisers Pola and Gorizia deployed their 203 mm (8 inch) guns in coastal bombardment duties (Italian battleships were considered for deployment to the Indian Ocean, but they had never been designed to operate outside the Mediterranean Sea and the Regia Marina ultimately decided against it for fear of losing them against Japanese “super battleships” Yamato and Musashi or enemy carriers). The French navy sent battleship Richelieu to operate in the Indian Ocean with the Royal Navy. The British of course also sent naval reinforcements of her own: among others they sent battleships HMS King George V and Howe to serve with the Americans in the Pacific while HMS Duke of York and Anson would serve in the Indian Ocean.
British and British Indian forces waited until September 1944, the end of the monsoon season, to launch an offensive into Thailand. Bolstered by 300 additional aircraft, the Royal Air Force gained air superiority over Thailand, bombing Bangkok and other Thai cities on several occasions. They focused on enemy defences, command and communication installations, training areas and airfields, both Thai and Japanese, as well as bridges, railways, rail yards, power plants, oil refineries and other petroleum infrastructure. The result was that the ability of the Imperial Japanese Army and the Royal Thai Army to effectively operate was seriously impaired due to bad logistics. In October engineers constructed pontoon bridges across the Salween River, which was the border between Burma and Thailand. Japanese attempts to stop them were met with devastating aerial and artillery bombardment and the British were able to establish and consolidate beachheads on the Thai side of the river. By the end of the year the British had occupied much of the west and north of the country and were only 75 kilometres from Bangkok.
On December 16th 1944, the 19 year-old King Rama VIII took control with support from the army and sacked his regent, Pridi Banomyong, placing him under house arrest. Thailand promptly switched sides and declared war on Japan. All of a sudden the Imperial Japanese Army found itself under attack from its former ally and its forces in Malaya were now cut off. Allied forces, in the meantime, crossed the Mekong River and liberated Vientiane and between December 1944 and February 1945 liberated French Indochina. With the Burma Road secure and other roads also opening up on China’s southern flank, aid to the Kuomintang was stepped up (to Stalin’s annoyance since he supported the Communist Party of China, which was excluded from Lend-Lease Aid). Chiang Kai-shek had already gotten more than a billion dollar’s worth of aid since 1941, but in 1945 alone it would receive another 1.2 billion dollars worth (China received 2.2 billion in Lend Lease in the war in total, or about 29 billion dollars in today’s money). China received tanks, rifles, machine guns, modern aircraft, jeeps, trucks, locomotives, food, petroleum products and construction materials. The National Revolutionary Army went on the offensive in March 1945 and attacked toward Nanjing and Shanghai, hoping to cut off Japanese forces operating in Anhui and parts of Zhejiang, Hubei and Jiangxi (in response Stalin radically stepped up support for Mao, supplying copious amounts of modern weapons). Though not reaching Shanghai, which was admittedly an ambitious goal, the Chinese did remarkably well and liberated Nanjing.
By late 1944 the Japanese were withdrawing all their forces to defend the Home Islands. On January 16th 1945, the Soviets managed to surprise the world by launching an invasion of Hokkaido, using the ships it had managed to scrounge together: some modern destroyers supplied by the British, some Soviet built heavy cruisers and a few old Tsarist era battleships. At this point, the Japanese tried to use the prospect of Japan falling to communism in order to negotiate a separate peace with the west, but it fell on deaf ears with the Allies. An even more outlandish idea to negotiate “an anti-imperialist Soviet-Japanese pact” was simply met by a Soviet demand for an unconditional surrender to all the Allied powers. Attempts to negotiate a conditional surrender via Fascist Italy – which was probably the least unsympathetic Allied power since its interests hadn’t been threatened by Japan – produced no results either.
With Allied forces converging on Tokyo, the Emperor intervened. In February 1945 Japanese Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu signed the “Japanese Instrument of Surrender” in Tokyo Bay on the deck of USS Missouri with HMS Warspite nearby. While pointing at Warspite he said “so that’s the old monster that gave us so much trouble” and became one of the early adepts of the idea that, had it not been for British intervention, Pearl Harbor would have been Japan’s decisive victory. Despite economic, demographic and military realities there are still some fringe archconservative nationalist elements that believe Japan lost due to bad luck in the war’s initial stages, nowadays congregating on a few small internet forums. The truth is that in attacking the USA Japan had doomed itself, although it was perhaps lucky chance that they didn’t last longer than they did. The USA never did get to use the wonder weapon they’d been building: the atomic bomb.