Munich Shuffle: 1938-1942

[Garrison]

9th May – 7th July 1944 – Victory in Europe – Part II - The End in Berlin​

By the 31st of May the sound of artillery fire could be heard all around Berlin as untrained Hitler Youth and old men were sent out to man hastily erected defences and force the Allies to pay the highest possible cost for taking the city, that they would take it and the Third Reich would fall was no longer in doubt even amongst the most diehard Nazis. There were British, American, and Canadian troops attacking the city from three sides. In Poland and Czechoslovakia, the German forces had surrendered to the Western Allies rather than face the prospect of holding out and falling into the hands of the Red Army. In Slovakia, Romania and Hungary, the Red Army had marched in, regardless of the pleas from the new Slovak and Romanian governments for support from the Western Allies. Stalin was determined to claim the Soviet share of the spoils of war even if he had been forced to cede control of much of Poland and the Czech Republic to the western powers. The fate of Austria remained in the balance, with the German garrison there being reinforced by units falling back from northern Italy, which had itself been reduced to a shambles by months of fighting. The departure of the Germans brought no relief as the different factions in Italy turned on one another, with the communists trying to seize control and being bitterly opposed by what was left of the forces loyal to the Ciano regime. There was in short no source of support or relief for the beleaguered garrison of Berlin, and no way out for Adolf Hitler and his inner circle [1].

In the claustrophobic maze that made up the bunker beneath Reich’s Chancellery walls were festooned with maps showing frontlines that had ceased to exist and the supposed movements of divisions that had laid down their arms days or even weeks earlier. The air was musty and full of the scents of too many people confined in too small a space for far too long. The mental atmosphere was equally noxious, with an increasingly volatile Hitler at the epicentre of it. As late as the 1st of June he was still issuing orders, making demands and insisting there was still some way for Germany to turn the tide. He would confidently predict one of their new wonder weapons would appear to turn the tide or the Americans and the Soviets would turn on one another. This manic confidence would sharply swing into deep gloom without warning and predictions of ultimate victory would be replaced by predictions that Germany would be utterly destroyed, and its people erased from the earth, a fate they had earned by their failure to embrace their destiny. Even at this late date and in the face of unequivocal evidence that Hitler had become completely delusional no one dared defy the Fuhrer. Those whose sense of self-preservation was stronger than their loyalty to the Fuhrer did their best to find an escape route, despite the odds against it. Goering sought to slip away on the 1st, only to be scooped up by a British patrol the following day, his changing into a set of plain working men’s clothes fooled no one, especially as he had brought along a suitcase stuffed with souvenirs of his time at the heart of the Nazi regime. Albert Speer was even less lucky than Goering. His attempt to get out of the city, allegedly to supervise work on a final redoubt in the south of the country, was thwarted by the SS. He was arrested and only spared immediate execution by the chaos of the last days, his luck would finally run out at the war crimes tribunals where his attempts to paint himself as a simple architect in over his head fell on deaf ears [2].

On June 2nd a strange calm settled over Hitler, and he announced his intention to compose his last will and testament. This was overseen by Martin Bormann, his final act for the Fuhrer before he disappeared from the bunker, his fate unconfirmed to this day, though despite rumours to the contrary it is all but certain he perished somewhere in the chaos of the city. The same went for Eva Braun. Hitler had summoned her to Berlin, apparently intending to marry her. She however was unable, or unwilling, to make the hazardous journey and her disappearance provided even more material for those who have made a career out of wartime conspiracy theories, with the idea that Braun was carrying Hitler’s child when she disappeared having been rehashed dozens of times in various books that alleged to identify this offspring, not to mention the endless jokes at the expense of certain right-wing politicians in the 1970s and 80s [3]. The failure of Braun to reach the bunker seems to have been the last straw for Hitler. He made his solemn goodbyes, issued his final instruction and at around 2000 hours retired to his private quarters and ended his life, either by cyanide or a bullet to the head, depending on which account one finds the most plausible. The uncertainty reigns in no small part because the body was then burned, ensuring yet more thousands of pages of conspiracy nonsense would be written [4].

The role of Fuhrer fell to Admiral Karl Doenitz, who in Hitler’s eyes had the redeeming feature of remaining loyal, even if he had failed as comprehensively as all the other military leaders in the Fuhrer’s eyes. Doenitz’s sole task as Fuhrer was to formally surrender to the Allies, which happened on the 3rd of June. There was something of a three-way scuffle as British, US, and Canadian troops vied to be the first to raise their national flag over the Reichstag. In the photographs published by the newspapers in the next few days all three flags were shown flying from the same improvised pole, though it is notable that the order of the flags varied depending on which country the pictures were published in [5].

When the news of the German surrender was received in London the initial reaction was apprehension, caused by the fear that it might turn out to be a false report or that some elements in the German military might fight on. It was only in the evening when it was confirmed that the German forces were abandoning the fight as ordered that the mood turned to one of relief and celebration, drinks were served, and toasts made at the cabinet meeting before the announcement was made to the press that Victory in Europe Day would officially be the 6th of June [6].

In Washington the news was bittersweet for Roosevelt. The victory was the culmination of all he had worked for since he had first begun offering support to the British and French in 1939. It did however mark the final achievement of his time in office. From this point on he would find his actions constrained by the knowledge that the peace would be overseen by a different occupant of the White House. Truman naturally tried to associate himself with the victory achieved under a Democratic president, this however backfired, with it being seen as trying take credit for another man’s efforts and did nothing to reverse the trend towards Dewey in the polls [7].

In Moscow any sense of celebration was rapidly extinguished by Stalin’s displeasure at the fact that Germany had been taken by the Western Allies and not the Red Army. The offensive thrusts of the last days of the war had secured large parts of eastern Europe and it seemed all but inevitable that Yugoslavia would fall under the control of the Communist partisans who had dominated the resistance there, though it would be a decidedly reduced Yugoslav state. Poland and the Czech territories however remained out of reach and while the agreements with the Western Allies guaranteed that the USSR would have a control zone in Germany the size and scope of it fell far short of what Stalin felt the sacrifices of the Soviet people entitled them to. There was also the question of how the Soviets would access their zone of control in Germany, in particular their allotted zone in Berlin itself. With any Soviet access to Polish territory across the Vistula off the table it would be Austria that would bear the brunt of Soviet demands [8].

All of this was for the future, of more immediate concern were the millions of displaced people left without food or shelter by the collapse of the Reich. The Jews in the death camps, the prisoners in the concentration and POW camps, and the army of slave workers who had been toiling in the factories of the Reich all had to be attended to even as the Wehrmacht and SS were rounded up and disarmed, the latter made more difficult by the fact that many of them knew they would be held to account for their crimes and sought to disguise themselves and disappear into the general population. The Allies had to hunt these men, and women, down. The Allies feared that some of them might be planning to form the so-called ‘Werewolf’ resistance cells, an idea that had appeared in a number of Allied intelligence reports, though the Nazi werewolves proved to be as mythical as any other variety. There would also soon be millions of displaced Germans to deal with in addition to the populations of the shattered towns and cities left in the wake of the fighting. The peoples of Poland and the Czech Republic wanted their German minorities gone and cared little about their fate once they were set on the roads leading to the ruins of the Reich. Even those who of German extraction who had lived in those regions for generations were unceremoniously expelled The Allies had little sympathy for their plight either, especially when so many of them professed ignorance of the myriad crimes committed by the Nazi regime. This did not mean that the Allies were going to stand aside and let these unwanted refugees die, they were just not accorded the same priority as those who had been victims of the Nazis [9].

It was then a messy peace that faced the Allies, but it was peace nonetheless. No more bombs would fall on the cities of Europe, the Death camps would be evacuated, and the survivors tended to and, however much some people might have protested both at the time and in later years, the map of Europe would be redrawn. Germany would be remade to ensure that this time it really would never happen again. Reconstruction would take time, but it would be done. The war in Europe was finished, though the war in the Pacific still went on, but with the Allies now able to turn their full attention to finishing Japan its days were also numbered, though no one in Tokyo was willing or able to admit this truth, yet. Imperial Japan would have to be as comprehensively crushed as Nazi Germany had been and however weary of war the Allies might be they would see it through to the bitter end [10].

[1] And some of those fighting for Berlin may be less inclined to fight to the bitter end against the Americans and British than they were IOTL against the Red Army.

[2] Goering can be assumed to face the hangman unlike OTL, no convenient poison to spare him the ‘indignity’ ITTL.

[3] I’m not saying which politicians, but one of them may have rhymed with ‘catcher’.

[4] Well they have to have something to write about since Dealey Plaza will remain just an unremarkable corner of Dallas ITTL.

[5] And cue endless arguments over who really got their first.

[6] Yes VE-Day is the 6th of June 1944, so its still an important date ITTL.

[7] The Roosevelt era is at end in practice even if he still has a few months in office.

[8] Fortunately its not like any one of the occupying powers would try to deny any of the others access to Berlin.

[9] As bad as it is going to be still not as bad as OTL given that both sides weren’t bled quite as badly by the fighting in the final months of the war.

[11] But before turning back to Japan we shall see a little more about the fate of the other major Axis member, Italy.

 

[Garrison]

9th May – 7th July 1944 – Victory in Europe – Part III - Italy Divided​

It might have been more accurate and less bombastic to call VE-Day Victory in Northern Europe day, because the surrender of the Third Reich brought no peace in Italy. Technically the German forces in the country should have laid down their arms at the same time as their comrades in the rest of Europe, there was however the small matter of who they exactly they were supposed to surrender to? A delegation consisting of senior German officers escorted by British and American representatives were flown into Italy to confirm the surrender and make arrangements the details of disarming and demobilizing the German army in Italy. Later claims of defiant German Generals in Italy are completely inaccurate as the German forces there had absolutely no desire to fight on in the name of the fallen Nazi regime, they simply were not prepared to lay down their arms while they were still facing persistent attacks from Italian partisans, significantly reinforced by elements of the army that had defected to the Communist resistance movement. Those elements who had remained loyal to the Ciano government, or at least opposed to the prospect of the Communists taking power, were also not averse to taking time off from shooting at the Communists to ambush German troops [1].

What the German forces proposed was that they be allowed to retain their arms for self-defence and withdraw towards Austria, those parts not under control of the Red Army, where they could be safely disarmed and interned. The prospect of armed German troops marching into Austria did not sit well with anyone at SHAEF and things grew more complicated when Ciano announced that as Italy had been de facto at war with Germany for many months and that his government had, albeit rather late in the day, disavowed Mussolini’s actions Italy should therefore be regarded as an associate power, that is one that had fought alongside the Allies while never formally joining them. This breath-taking invocation the language used by the USA when it entered WWI was a desperate gamble to make the British and Americans to think twice about simply demanding the dismantlement of the Fascist regime, or perhaps providing the Western Allies with an excuse not to do so. These public pronouncements were supported by messages relayed via the Vatican warning of the dire consequences if the Communists were allowed to run amok, with anyone they saw as an enemy being lynched from the nearest lamppost and even the Pope himself not safe from their wrath [2].

Regrettably, or not depending on one’s view of the Fascist regime in Italy, the claims from Rome were not mere hyperbole. Representatives of the Fascist authorities in several northern cities had been executed for crimes against the people by Communist led workers committees as the fighting grew more and more bitter, especially around Turin. The Communist partisans might have been the most vocal in expressing their views, but none of Italian factions wanted the Germans to be simply allowed to depart Italy unscathed. They believed, with some justification as it transpired, that the Allies would go easy on the Germans who had fought in Italy, and that they would escape punishment for the crimes they had committed against Italian civilians. The Communists were naturally also adamant that the Ciano government was every bit as complicit in what had happened after the occupation by the Germans as the Wehrmacht and the SS were. The last-minute decision of the ‘Roman Regime’ to turn against their former allies should not be used as an excuse to let them off the hook for their previous actions [3].

In London and Washington, the Italian situation rapidly turned into a major headache, compounded by the shifting political balance in the US administration. While the battle against Nazi Germany still raged it had been possible to ignore the politics of the resistance groups that fought against them, whether they were ultranationalists or hard-line Communists. With the end of the war the Western Allies might still be willing to turn a blind eye to the actions of some of the nationalists but pre-war attitudes to Communist movements rapidly reasserted themselves, particularly in Washington. Faced with a series of unpalatable choices the Americans decided, for the time being at least, to treat the Ciano government as being a separate entity from the regime under Mussolini that had entered the war and that they could thus be used to maintain order and administer the country until such time as some more acceptable political entity could take charge in Italy. The plan was endorsed in London, reluctantly, and it was a compromise that made no one happy. Eisenhower and his staff at SHAEF were even less happy with the sudden demands put on manpower by the decisions taken by the politicians, divisions that had been looking forward to a much-needed rest, and the prospect of demobilization for those who had been drafted for the duration of the war, were suddenly given new orders, and dispatched to Italy by land sea and air [4].

The hastily improvised plan called for Rome to be secured and for a phased relocation of the German forces in Italy back to Austria, under Allied supervision, and thence to Germany. The soldiers would be systematically disarmed, and the officers interrogated as they were moved out. No one expected these relatively straightforward orders to be simple to implement and their worst fears would be swiftly realized as it became clear that the partisan groups were not going to comply, with the Communists front and centre in refusing any co-operation with the regime in Rome and now declaring their own Soviet councils, with Turin serving as their de facto capital. The remains of the Italian army that was willing to give its loyalty to the government in Rome began to fall back to a line anchored on the capital, officially to regroup and prepare for fresh operations against the Communists once the Germans had been evacuated. This was not what SHAEF had in mind when they began to deploy troops to Italy, they had expected the Italian forces in the north to remain in place and either assist the Allies or be disarmed. Ciano however was hoping that by placing the American and British troops between the resistance forces and the Germans the Communist partisans would attack the Allied forces while trying to get at the Germans and force the Allies to suppress the Communists while the loyalist elements of the army reorganized and bided their time. Ciano was banking on the Allies needing him and the Italian army to keep the areas of the country they did exercise some control over running, and the Italian High Command even entertained the possibility that they might turn over some captured Wehrmacht equipment to the Italian Army to assist them in maintaining order [5].

This seemed wildly optimistic on the part of the man who was the head of what was after all still a Fascist regime and one that had remained a member of the Axis whatever sophistry they might now be deploying. Astonishingly in this, if little else, Ciano proved correct. There were serious divisions between the Allies over the future of Italy, with the Americans far more willing to ignore some of the actions of the Ciano regime in the interests of preventing a communist takeover. What this led to was that many of those in Italy who had come to detest the Fascists were willing to temporarily align themselves with the Communists when they announced their intent to set up a ‘Free Italian’ government based in Turin. Whatever some senior politicians in Washington might want there was no support among the military chiefs for becoming bogged down in trying to suppress the ‘Free Italians’ many of whom seemed decidedly more anti-fascist than pro-Communist and Roosevelt was far from willing to pick such aa fight when there was another conference with Stalin looming. The reality was that what the political manoeuvring in the USA had created was a de facto partition of Italy, an accusation that would come back to haunt Dewey during his time in the White House [6].

[1] Basically all the Italian factions hate each other, but they all hate the Germans, even the remaining Italian Fascists.

[2] The thing is here the British and Americans haven’t been fighting a long hard battle against the Italians, indeed outside of Sicily the Americans haven’t fought them at all and the North African campaign was a short and one-sided affair as far as the British are concerned. The Greeks have a lot more to be angry about regarding Fascist Italy, but no one is asking them.

[3] Which is a fair point, but fair doesn’t count for all that much in the post-war disposition of Europe.

[4] Not invading Italy had definite benefits for the Allies, but now it means there is no one in position to quickly take charge, which means Ciano may avoid the hangman.

[5] It is a massive gamble by Ciano, but when the alternative appears to be summary execution…

[6] It’s a temporary division, if you measure things in terms of geological eras.

 

[Garrison]

7th June – 1st July 1944 – Japan Alone – Part I – Fighting on in the Name of the Emperor​

The death of Hitler and the surrender of the Third Reich produced remarkably little public reaction from the leadership in Tokyo, even though it meant there was now nothing to prevent the Allies turning the full weight of their militaries against them. Heavy censorship combined with propaganda that continued to pretend that there was still a path to victory for Japan meant that if it didn’t quite go unnoticed by the Japanese people its true impact on the country’s situation wasn’t appreciated, or if it was no one was foolish enough to discuss it in public. Even in the corridors of power in Tokyo information was hardly freely disseminated, but it was impossible to avoid some discussion of the consequences of being the last member of the Axis left in the war. In a sign of the delusions that were still prevalent among the Japanese leadership some tried to put a positive spin on the fall of Germany, after all with the war in Europe over the desire for a return to peace among the Allies might now prove overwhelming, especially if Japan demonstrated its unshakeable resolve to keep fighting and put her enemies to the sword. Despite the limitations of their intelligence apparatus Japanese leaders were somewhat aware of the shifting political situation in the USA and Britain via reports from neutral sources and the monitoring of Allied broadcasts. Given the distorted vision of the west still held by many in Imperial Japan it was hardly surprising that hopes of the Allies simply abandoning the war against Japan as too costly were treated seriously, even after the multiple reverses Japan had suffered [1].

The Japanese High Command was also aware of just how dependent British operations in South East Asia were on Indian ‘sepoys’ for manpower to fight their battles. The possibility that India might yet rise up against the British was still taken seriously, even though Japanese efforts to establish links with the fierier elements of the Indian independence movement had long since foundered and the disappearance of Chandra Bose, with the Japanese refusing to reveal what fate had befallen him, left a legacy of hostility that continued long after the war ended. Records show that the Japanese were completely unaware of the scope of the negotiations taking place between the British and the Indian nationalists. When news of the agreement on Indian Dominion status was announced to the British Parliament on the 9th of July, with the full support of the soon to be in government Labour Party, it was met with bewilderment in Tokyo and some members of the government simply refused to believe it even when the news came from ‘official’ sources such as the BBC. Emperor Hirohito himself stated his view that it had to be a deception, surely the British would not, could not, dishonour their own King by simply giving away part of the Empire he ruled over [2]?

To those who could still bring themselves to look at the bigger picture of the war and the situation in Asia as a whole it was obvious that this was deal was no deception and it benefitted both sides. The Indians would finally have self-rule, though details of the plans for autonomy in the Muslim and Sikh majority regions of the nation were still to be finalized, and the British not only guaranteed the continued supply of Indian troops to reinforce their armies but by removing the burden of having to impose control in the sub-continent could focus more of their energies on the rest of their imperial possessions in South East Asia, not to mention the territories of other colonial powers they were occupying as they continued their drive towards Japan. This view was still not entirely realistic with as it assumed the British were looking to expand their imperial holdings when in fact, they had no desire to make any long-term commitments in places such as Thailand and Indochina. The latter in particular was regarded as powder keg the British would be happy to leave to the French to deal with [3].

Whatever the British might want most in Tokyo could at least agree that it was the USA that was key to putting an end to the war, if the American public turned against continuing the war then peace would be inevitable regardless of what the colonial powers might want and the imminent departure of President Roosevelt was taken to represent a possible change of heart on the part of the American public about the desirability of continuing to prosecute the war. The problem with such ideas was that Thomas Dewey had long sympathised with those who felt more resources should have been made available to fight the Japanese from the beginning of the war. They had after all conducted a dastardly sneak attack on US soil and seized US possessions in the Pacific, Imperial Japan had to be destroyed every bit as thoroughly as Nazi Germany, and in this Dewey broadly represented the views of the average US citizen. If the Japanese had cared to listen to those few neutral contacts they still possessed they would have realized that for many Americans the desire for retribution against Japan still burned brightly and they were willing to make further sacrifices to achieve that goal, though there was likely to come a time when the cost in lives of defeating Japan might be seen as too high to contemplate the USA was nowhere that point in the summer of 1944. No one in Tokyo was interested in listening to any such warnings, instead choosing to believe that if they could just inflict some military setbacks on the Americans their ‘cowboy’ attitude would swiftly evaporate, and they would embrace a more sensible position [4].

The one great strategic question where there was something resembling a realistic discussion in Tokyo was what would the USSR do? The non-aggression pact between Japan and the Soviets had survived the war to date, but no one was under any illusion that was anything more than a convenience for both sides. The battle of Khalkhin Gol lingered in the minds of the Japanese Imperial Staff and they were acutely aware there were unresolved territorial issues between Japan and the USSR, especially on the divided Sakhalin Island where the north was in the control of the soviets and everything south of the 50th Parallel was included in the Japanese Karafuto Prefecture. The Kurile Islands were also a bone of contention. Despite the long war against the Germans there were still significant Soviets forces in Mongolia and Siberia that could threaten Manchukuo, the Japanese puppet state in Manchuria. None of these matters had been settled by the non-aggression pact and no one in Tokyo imagined Stalin had simply forgotten about them [5].

The possibility of reinforcing the non-aggression pact with the Soviets was the one area where Japan was willing to consider diplomacy rather than stubborn intransigence. This could be justified even by the hard-line militarists since Japan was after all not at war with the USSR so there was no shame in talking with them on the basis of equals. Framing the question of Soviet entry into the war in Asia in terms of whether the USSR really wanted to commit themselves to a fight that would only serve the colonial interests of the British and Americans seemed to offer a political strategy that might pay dividends. With the Soviet’s Communist allies in China fairing badly as the Americans funnelled an ever larger share of the Lend-Lease supplies flowing into the country to the Nationalists while the USSR was forced to dial back their support as their own share of Lend-Lease had been reduced, officially because of the demands of the Anglo-American offensive in Europe, it was even possible that some accommodation might be reached there with regard to ceding territory to the Chinese Communists, agreed in the same way the secret addendums to the Molotov-Ribbentrop had been in 1939 [6].

Such ideas might have sounded attractive to the leadership in Tokyo, and perhaps even to some in Moscow, however such remains a matter of speculation as this line of diplomacy was not actively pursued by the Japanese in the immediate aftermath of the defeat of Germany. The counterargument for negotiating with the Soviets in July 1944 was that it would be seen as a sign of weakness and it might backfire, encouraging the Soviets to enter the war and stiffening the resolve of the British and Americans. As would be seen when the Japanese did finally make overtures to the Soviets in the autumn it was an idea that was doomed to fail. Talk of the USSR making terms with the Japanese were no more realistic than suggestions of a separate peace with the Germans in 1943. The Anglo-Americans had after all kept their word about opening a second front and not accepting anything less than unconditional surrender from Germany and Stalin had made in turn made a commitment to enter the war against Japan, albeit reluctantly and with a certain vagueness about the timing. If the USSR reneged on that commitment, then the British and Americans might well feel free to change their minds about the future disposition of Europe. Joining the war against Japan might in fact provide the USSR with additional bargaining chips [7].

With no prospect of any political or diplomatic solutions to Japan’s situation, and given that surrender remained a taboo subject, the Japanese had no choice but to carry on looking for a military solution, regardless of how unlikely or desperate such a solution might be. There was little in the way of new weapons that Japan could deploy to fight the Allies, and what new models of tanks and aircraft did become available were produced in tiny numbers compared to British and American production. They were also retained for the defence of the Home Islands, in no small part because of the increasing difficulties of shipping anything to the remaining outposts of the Japanese empire. It would not simply be Japanese soldiers who would be expected to fight and die in the outposts of the empire such as Okinawa and Korea, it would be the civilian population both Japanese colonists and native peoples. There were no weapons available to be issued to these populations, they would be expected to sacrifice themselves while armed with kitchen knives, machetes and wooden spears. The civilian population had been relentlessly indoctrinated with the belief that death was better than the brutal treatment they could expect if they fell into the hands of the Americans or British. Given how the Japanese administration had treated the native Koreans and Okinawans such dire warnings seemed all too credible, and the Japanese civilians at least were terrorised into embracing the belief it was better to die rather than surrender, with tragic results [8].

If jets, rockets, or the atomic bomb were beyond the resources of Japan to develop or deploy then there were still options available to them for the kind of force multiplier that would allow Japan to hold off or at least slow down the Allies. Chemical and biological weapons were both options that Japan had explored and they had been given information on the manufacture of the latest German nerve agents, but producing sophisticated chemical weapons such as Tabun on the scale needed for operational use beyond the capacity of Japanese industry. On the other hand, courtesy of Unit 731 the Japanese already had experience with biological weapons, though their efficacy during the ‘field tests’ carried out in China had been less than impressive, despite the civilian casualties caused. This had not discouraged Unit 731 and other associates from continuing to work on weaponizing Bubonic plague and other diseases, though developing effective deployment systems remained a work in progress. With an overabundance of ambition, the Japanese were looking for ways to not only deliver biological attacks against the Allied strongholds in the Pacific and Asia but even to target the west coast of the USA. That such plans were given serious consideration amply demonstrates the unwillingness to face the reality in front of the Japanese leadership, that their country was doomed to defeat and the only power they held was to decide how bloody that defeat would prove to be for both sides [9].

[1] The likes of Yamamoto who might have contradicted this view are either dead or learned to keep their mouths shut.

[2] For all his disbelief Hirohito has to begin wondering about his own future.

[3] The British might not want to make any commitments, that doesn’t mean they won’t have to in some places.

[4] When you’ve concluded that the choices are win or die such delusions are easy to embrace.

[5] Not so much the elephant in the room as the hungry Tyrannosaurus Rex in the room.

[6] It’s another of those things that sound like it might work, but it’s a badly flawed idea when you examine it in detail.

[7] Stalin is not happy, but he’s anxious rather than angry at this point and he’s not about to break the letter of his agreements, of course the spirit of them is a different matter.

[8] It’s going to be ugly as the Japanese leadership get more and more desperate, but even the most ardent believers in the Bushido code can only stand so much.

[9] What will it take to force Japan to give up? We will see over the remainder of 1944.

 

[Garrison]

7th June – 1st July 1944 – Japan Alone – Part II – Prosecuting the War to the Bitter End​

Whatever the hopes in Tokyo there was a clear resolve in Washington and London that Japan had to be defeated every bit as comprehensively as Germany had been, there could be no half-measures. Japan didn’t pose the existential threat to Britain that Nazi Germany had, but neither Conservative nor Labour politicians were inclined to see Britain dragged into some future war in Asia because Japan had been allowed to lick its wounds and regroup. The revelations about the brutality of the Japanese during their occupation of the areas they had conquered in 1942 had also hardened attitudes, especially the treatment of European POWs and civilians who fallen under their control. In the USA there had always been those who believed that Japan should have been the priority from the beginning of the war and with Germany defeated there was no question of pursuing anything but unconditional surrender from Japan. If the Japanese wanted to choose to fight to the death rather than capitulate then few in Washington would lose any sleep over that, with the caveat that such a victory should be achieved at the lowest possible cost in Allied casualties possible [1].

Thus, the question that occupied the Western Allies was not whether Japanese should be forced into unconditional surrender it was how best to achieve that objective. Even if the entirety of the Japanese defence perimeter was reduced and placed under Allied control mounting an amphibious invasion of the Home Islands would be a challenge on even greater scale than Operation Millennium. Given the distances involved and the prospect of facing an unyieldingly hostile civilian population it would require a far larger build-up of forces, and according to the best estimates of the planners a death toll an order of magnitude higher than the campaign in Northwest Europe. There would be no resistance movements in Japan to aid the Allies with intelligence information and acts of sabotage, and the logistics of building up the manpower and supplies to mount the operation in the absence of the kind of base that Southern England provided added another level of complexity. Still defeating Japan without having to mount such an invasion seemed unlikely in the summer of 1944 and regardless of the challenges work to devise a workable plan pressed ahead [2].

Given the grim estimates of the cost of putting boots on the ground in the Home Islands it was hardly surprising that the advocates of strategic bombing saw an opportunity to prove that they could win the war from the air, despite the mountain of evidence from Europe to the contrary. Even the sceptics though had to concede that the Allied bombing campaign had helped greatly to soften up the Reich and Japan’s infrastructure was far more vulnerable than that of the considerably more industrialized Germany. As attractive as an air campaign was it faced many of the same problems of distance and logistics as an amphibious operation. The workhorse of the USAAF in the European theatre the B-17 simply did not have the range for a strategic campaign in the Pacific, unless bases significantly closer to Japan could be seized and even if they could the USAAF was pinning its hopes on a new and far more powerful bomber, the B-29 Stratofortress. This was a state-of-the-art aircraft, with a fully pressurised crew cabin and an analogue mechanical computer that allowed two men to control multiple defensive gun turrets. More importantly from the point of view of attacking Japan it could carry four times the bombload of the B-17 with a 2000km greater range. In the summer of 1944, the B-29 had only just entered operational service and was not yet available in large numbers and even with its considerable capabilities it struggled to reach Japan from any currently available base. It could, barely, reach Japan from bases in China, but maintaining the supply lines for the USAAF bomber squadrons there was no easy feat, despite the considerable expansion of the Burma Road. The desire to establish new bases in China and shorten USAAF supply lines would help drive forward plans for a major offensive by the Kuomintang, but the Americans were also planning to invade the Gilbert and Marshall Islands to establish forward bases for the B-29 [3].

The RAF had an even more complex problem in that their next generation of bomber, an evolution of the Lancaster that would be renamed the Lincoln, was nowhere near operational status. Indeed, the Lincoln was barely in its testing phase and the Lancaster itself had a maximum range of 4000km, one thousand less than the B-29, though this was considerably greater than that of the B-17. This meant that like the Americans if the British wished to mount a major bombing offensive against Japan they would need new bases, which would mean yet more amphibious operations. The liberation of Hong Kong was already being planned; however the new British government would reluctantly accept that they would have to extend themselves further than that last occupied corner of the British Empire. Well before any official decision was made the Imperial General Staff was acquainting themselves with maps of the Korean Peninsula [4].

Even with the plans to dramatically increase the scale of the Allied bombing campaign consideration had to be given to weapons that would amplify the destructive power of those attacks this meant evaluating the use of nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons. Unlike the Japanese the Americans had a functioning nuclear bomb program and considerable progress was being made, however the most optimistic projections put a working weapon in the spring of 1945, and the pessimists were suggesting the autumn or even 1946. Any chance of accelerating the project would require expanding its reach, meaning in practice sharing more technical information with the British to enlist their research institutions in solving the outstanding technical issues, as much as this pained those who wanted to keep nuclear weapons as exclusively US property. The British had acquired considerable information on the German plans for a radiological bomb and the grim experience at the Auschwitz SP site had shown the potentially devastating effects of radioactive fallout. A radiological weapon might be simpler than a true atomic bomb, but it still required large quantities of nuclear materials that were still in limited supply and the Americans were determined that those available should be retained for the Manhattan Project [5].

One thing the British did have an abundance of was Anthrax. This had been developed as a weapon for use against Germany if the Nazis deployed chemical weapons against Britain or as a last resort if the invasion of Europe was stalled. Under the aegis of Operation Vegetarian the Anthrax would have been distributed all across Germany, infecting and destroying the livestock on which Germany depended both for its food supply and transportation. That the disease would have spread to humans was all but inevitable and the loss of life would have been considerable even if one only considered the consequences of malnutrition and the diseases that would bring. Aside from the successful Allied advance across France and Germany the other reason not to use the Anthrax was its sheer persistence, spores would remain viable in the soil not for months or years but for decades. To illustrate the scale of the problem the site of the British Anthrax tests, Gruinard Island in Scotland, would not be successfully decontaminated and returned to the heirs of its original owners until 1990. There was also the risk that the Anthrax would be dispersed across the whole of Europe, inflicting further damage on countries that would already face a long battle to recover in the aftermath of the defeat of Nazi Germany without the threat of Anthrax hanging over them [6].

The objections to the use of Anthrax in Europe, both moral and practical, carried far less weight when it came to Japan, indeed the relative isolation of the Home Islands worked in favour of both biological agents such as Anthrax and of chemical agents, the latter being an area where the Allies found themselves reluctantly forced to embrace the work done by Nazi scientists on nerve agents, including utilizing the data those scientists had acquired from human testing. Until to the fall of Germany the Allies chemical weapon stockpiles were dependent on the array of weapons developed for use in World War I, in particular Mustard gas. It came as a considerable shock to both sides to discover how far behind them the British and Americans were in the development of chemical weapons compared to the Germans. One reason for the Germans restraining themselves from the use of the advanced chemical agents at their disposal was the assumption that the Allies would be able to respond in kind and probably on a larger scale given the disparity in industrial capacity. When the Allies captured the facilities dedicated to the production of these nerve agents, Tabun and the notorious Sarin, they were shocked as this was one area where their intelligence operations had let them down. Tabun and Sarin were persistent, fatal in extremely small doses and unlike many older chemical agents they didn’t have to be breathed in to be effective, skin contact would be sufficient to provide lethal exposure. This meant that protecting soldiers and civilians would require something far more sophisticated than a simple gas mask, like the Atomic, Biological and Chemical (ABC) suits used during the Cold War [7].

Owing to their work with the German engineers charged with cleaning up Auschwitz SP the British had been working on protective gear that could be adapted for this purpose, but what they had available at this time was similar to a deep-sea diving suit combined with a hood type gas mask, with a complex external filtering system to remove contaminants, or the use of compressed air bottles to avoid any contact with the local environment. This equipment was ungainly to say the least and there was no way anyone could engage in combat, or any sort of complex task, while wearing such gear. Even the far more advanced ABC suits of the 1980s or 2000’s only allowed the wearer to operate for more than a very limited time. In practical terms there was no way the Japanese military could implement such protective measures for its military, never mind its civilian population.

That the Allies were willing to consider deploying such weapons against Japan has often been condemned in the succeeding decades, however from the viewpoint of those charged with bringing the war to a swift conclusion with the minimum loss of life among the Allies these weapons were simply a fresh set of tools at their disposal. Few had baulked at raining high explosive and incendiaries on German cities and the conduct of the IJA in China and South East Asia simply served to reinforce the belief that extreme measures would be needed to break the will to fight of the Japanese and were entirely justified. An Allied amphibious invasion was the very thing the Japanese expected and were mentally preparing themselves to face. Pursuing a strategy that confounded their expectations might be the only way to force them to accept surrender [8].

The one arm of the Allied forces that could strike at Japan immediately were their navies. The submarine forces in the Pacific were already crippling the remnants of the Japanese merchant marine and the few surface warships that remained operational. Shore bombardments and carrier borne air strikes were also well within the reach of the allies without the availability of the new bases required by the USAAF and RAF. Such attacks might not be able to bring Japan to its knees, even if the chemical and biological weapons were adapted for use, but they could grind down Japanese defences and complete the isolation of the surviving Japanese outposts across the Pacific and Asia [9].

There were two other large questions over the conduct of the war against Japan which were, what could be expected from the Kuomintang in China? And when would the Soviets enter the war? The Kuomintang had been a source of constant exasperation to the Americans and British as they had continually fallen short in combat with the Japanese. By 1944 there was some cautious optimism that the Kuomintang might be able to mount a major offensive and if they did inflict a major defeat this could be a crushing blow to Japanese morale, China after all had been at the heart of their imperial strategy since 1931 and had been the major driving force behind the growing antagonism between Japan and the USA. If China were lost to the Japanese, then there would little or nothing left for them to fight for outside of the Home Islands [10].

If the American leadership was keen to see the Kuomintang take the fight to the Japanese, they had become far more ambivalent about the entry of the USSR into the war. There was no questioning the strategic value of the Red Army opening a fresh front against the Japanese, probably against the Kwantung Army in Manchuria, but politically there was no enthusiasm for having to partition Japan in the same way Germany had been. The question then was less, when would the Soviets declare war on Japan, but how far would they go once they did [11]?

[1] Of course its easy to talk about annihilating Japan, quite another to actual do it.

[2] It seems a grim prospect, but since the bomb is some way off the options are limited, for now.

[3] There will be B-29s on Tinian and more in China, and B-17s and B-24s will be drawn into the bombing campaign over Japan ITTL.

[4] It will fall to the British largely because the Americans will be committed to the island of Okinawa.

[5] Whatever they do there isn’t going to a nuclear weapon available until the summer of 1945.

[6] The basic issue of biological weapons, that you can’t prevent it spreading out of control.

[7] Yes ABC rather than NBC, cannot understand why historically they chose NBC.

[8] Breaking Japanese resolve may seem a long shot, but its still the best option available to the Allies.

[9] The Royal Navy and US Navy will be given free reign to attack targets along the coast of Japan, though they won’t receive much credit when the end of the war comes.

[10] There will be a series of updates about that offensive and the consequences to the Japanese will to fight.

[11] A question that will also be answered in future updates.

 

[Garrison]

22nd July – 7th August 1944 – The Dresden Conference – Drawing the Iron Curtain​

The last great meeting of three major powers was by far the most fraught, indeed in the years since some diplomats involved have voiced the opinion that it came closer to starting a third world war rather than resolving the outstanding issues of the second. Despite the final desperate lunge by the Red Army, they had fallen short of entering Germany before the instrument of surrender was signed and the idea that their forces were now in Germany almost as guests of the Western Allies rankled both with the senior Red Army commanders and Stalin and they were not placated by the Allied suggestion Dresden as the place for the meeting. The city lay in Saxony, which was already considered likely to be ceded as part of the Soviet zone of control. Far from seeing it as a concession the Soviets saw it as the Allies trying to draw lines on the map of Germany before the conference even took place. Still they could hardly reject the city, especially as unlike many other candidates for the meeting it had largely escaped the ravages of Allied bombing and fighting in the streets [1].

On the American side Roosevelt might well have been inclined to try and smooth things over by offering concessions to the Soviets, primarily in terms applying pressure to the Poles and Czechs to grant rights of transits into Germany for the Soviets but his freedom of action was greatly constrained by the looming presidential election and neither country was inclined to grant any access to the Soviets for fear it would be the opening gambit in a full-fledged Soviet occupation. With the attention of the US public turning towards the potential dividends of peace and with both Dewey and Truman returning to pre-war anti-communist rhetoric Roosevelt had to be cautious making any offers to the Soviets that his successor might not choose to honour, especially if it might impact the chances of electoral success for the Democratic Party in November, with the chances of retaining the White House in particular becoming increasingly slim as the summer went on. In the end though based on polling conducted in the autumn of 1944 the outcome of the conference had little impact on voting intentions [2].

The summit was taking place just weeks before the British General Election in the circumstances the Labour leader Clement Attlee had to be invited to attend, especially as there was some criticism among MPs that Churchill was trying to use the summit for electioneering purposes. Attlee and members of his front bench team had initially been somewhat sympathetic to the USSR, or at least to some of its avowed principles. Unfortunately for the Soviets the Polish government had been just as keen to expose the behaviour of the Soviets during their occupation of Poland as they were the atrocities of the Germans. The Katyn Forest massacre loomed large in the Polish testimony about the activities of the Red Army and the NKVD but hardly stood alone. Alongside this was the current belligerency of the Soviets in regard to the territory of both Poland and the Czech Republic, or ‘Stalin’s tantrums’ as it was characterized by some in the British delegation. The Soviets were making demands for rights of access to areas where no Red Army troops had ever set foot and had even gone so far as to expect a say in the administration of both countries, purportedly to ensure the removal of any remaining fascist elements according to Soviet foreign minister Molotov, the man Herbert Morrison somewhat tactlessly recalled had put his name to the infamous pact with the Nazis in 1939. This badgering tone carried over into the conference itself with Stalin regarding Atlee as ‘The new boy’ and someone who could be pressured into making concessions to the USSR. Atlee bridled at this attitude and felt compelled to take a stronger stand than he had originally planned, though any concessions over Polish freedom had never been in the cards to begin with and things were not helped by the revelation of a Soviet spy operating inside the Manhattan Project, or at least the Americans were convinced they had found such a spy. Perhaps the largest impact on this souring of relations lay not in the decisions about borders in Europe but in the retrenchment of plans to cop-operate with the Soviets in other areas. Plans to share technology with the Soviets, especially in the fields of Jet engines, supersonic flight and rocketry were progressively delayed and finally abandoned when the Conservative party returned to government during the 1950s [3].

Stalin’s belligerent attitude before and during the conference may have inspired some to fear a renewal of war in Europe was in the offing, however in truth it was a mask for deep anxiety on the part of Comrade Stalin and the Politburo. The Red Army was larger than the combined Allied forces in Western Europe, if one discounted the remnants of the Wehrmacht, but that was not an assumption that the Soviets were prepared to make in 1944. There had always been a suspicion that the capitalist powers had wanted to see Nazi Germany and the USSR fight to the death while they stood on the side-lines, might they not be willing to hastily rehabilitate the Germans if they decided to strike east themselves? Besides the potential belligerence od the capitalist states there was the fact that the Red Army was an exhausted army, depleted of equipment and supplies by the hasty offensives Stalin had demanded in the Spring of 1944 and weary at a deeper level after three years of brutal warfare. The Red Army might be camped on the Bug, but it was in no condition to assert Soviet demands against the Poles, with Marshals Zhukov, Timoshenko, and Konev candidly stating that it would take months for the Red Army to regroup and launch any fresh offensive actions. What the Marshals avoided discussing was the question of whether the people of the USSR would be willing to go to war with the west now that peace was at hand. It was not simply the Red Army that was exhausted, it was the whole Soviet Union. The areas that had fallen under Nazi control had been devastated and would take years to rebuild. The demands of the war effort had drained those regions that had remained under the control of Moscow and while the people had been willing to accept these conditions to defeat the existential threat of Nazi Germany, how long would their resolve last if yet more demands were made of them for no better reason than to seize territory that had never been part of the USSR and pitch them into another war that promised them nothing but more hardship and loss? Stalin’s grip on the country might seem absolute, however history shows that there comes a point where even the most ruthless state will crumble in the face of a populace pushed too far [4].

What Stalin really wanted was to ensure that there were no further threats to the Soviet Union from Europe in general and Germany in particular, after all the Nazis were not the first German regime to try and carve out an empire in the east. Having a buffer zone in Eastern and Central Europe would certainly have been useful to the USSR but the key goal was to ensure that Germany did not rise again as a military power. With a broken Germany the colonialist/capitalist ideology of the European nations could be held in check and indeed in several European nations there was the hope they might be turned to the Communist cause by internal revolution, as seemed to be happening in Italy, especially if the USA were to turn back to its pre-war isolationism. This was an unlikely scenario given the anti-communist sentiment of both potential future US presidents and indeed both Truman and Dewey were broadly supportive of what would evolve into the Marshall Plan to aid the reconstruction of Europe and ensure those nations remained firmly aligned with what would come to be simply called the west. Still there was also an agreement that the Soviets had made tremendous sacrifices to defeat Nazi Germany and they were entitled to a zone of control in Germany, especially when the intention was that Poland and what would become the Czech Republic would remain free of Soviet influence. This seemed to offer a basis for an agreement, but there were several significant complications. Firstly, the Poles wanted the Soviets to withdraw from the line of the Bug, however this was not something that the British or Americans were prepared to demand. In one of histories ironies the Soviet controlled territory in Poland would end up conforming closely to the borders they had established with the Nazis in 1939 The Allies would compensate the Poles for this loss with German territory and warm words about how the Soviet presence in Poland was a temporary situation. As with so many temporary situations this one proved surprisingly long-lived, and the Soviets would not withdraw for nearly fifty years [5].

The other complication was that the Soviets wanted a sector of control that included at least part of the industrial heartlands of the Ruhr. This would have turned Germany into a patchwork quilt of sectors, which the Soviets would have been willing to accept, however the Americans were already thinking of the long-term rehabilitation and reconstruction of Germany, pragmatism having won out over the visceral desire for vengeance embodied in ideas such as the infamous Morgenthau Plan. Vengeance would be meted out to the surviving leadership of the Third Reich in a series of war crimes trials and since almost all the senior Nazis were in the hands of the Western Allies, as well as the remains of Adolf Hitler himself, this was another bargaining chip for the Anglo-Americans as the Soviets wanted a full involvement in these trials, a reasonable demand as so many of the worst crimes of the Nazis had been committed on Soviet soil. What was finally agreed was a substantial Soviet sector of control in the south of Germany, which largely corresponded to the borders of Baden-Württemberg and Bavaria while also taking in Frankfurt, which would eventually serve as the capital of ‘east’ Germany when the Soviets established it as an independent state. The Soviets were also given a sector of control in Berlin itself and a clear air and land access corridor between the Soviet sector of Germany and the German capital. Access to the soviet sector itself would be guaranteed through Austria, though much to the relief of the Austrians the Soviets would agree to withdraw the Red Army from the country rather than insisting on dividing it up. The Soviets agreed to this in return for the acknowledgment that Slovakia and Hungary would lie within the Soviet zone of influence, as would Romania, much to the horror of King Michael and his government. The truth was that in both cases the governments that had risen up against the Germans were seen as opportunists and with the Soviets agreeing that the Czech Republic and Poland west of the Bug line were in the Allied sphere no one was willing to go to bat for their independence [6].

In Southern Europe and the Balkans, a similar quid pro quo emerged as the Anglo-Americans agreed not to support any military action against the nascent Socialist/Communist state in Northern Italy. By the same token the Soviets would not support Tito and Yugoslavia’s opposition to independence for Croatia and by extension Slovenia. There was considerable hostility between the Serbs and Croats, with the former accusing the latter of collaborating with the Nazis. At the end of the war British and Greek forces had arrived in Croatia to disarm and intern German forces and the Greeks in particularly had been openly supportive of the anti-communist rhetoric of those in Croatia demanding independence from the potentially Soviet aligned country that Tito was creating. The British were less enthusiastic given they might find themselves on the front lines if it came to a civil war but with Washington taking the side of the Croats in the name of self-determination, they chose to accept it. Slovenia’s independence was the result of Croatia lying between it and the rest of Yugoslavia, and will the Slovenes were happy to accept the situation there would be endless disputes over borders and attempts by Croatia to bully the Slovenes into an economic union. Ironically while Tito did turn Yugoslavia into a Communist state, he never forgave the Soviets for their lack of support and sought to create his own alignment in the Balkans and the Mediterranean, seeking to forge ties with Albania and the Italian Socialist Republic, who were also cool on the idea of establishing stronger ties with Moscow [7].

To say that anyone was happy with this resolution of the shape of post-war Europe would be a lie, but it would prove remarkably stable and it avoided open conflict between east and west, or north and south in the case of Germany, over the coming decades, though with the change of government in Washington in 1945 any last vestiges of co-operation with the USSR was soon abandoned and what Churchill christened the Iron Curtain descended across Europe and remained in place for decades to come [8].

With matters in Europe more or less settled this left the question of when the USSR would enter the war against Japan. As discussed previously US enthusiasm for this had waned but even a minimal Soviet involvement threatening Japanese positions in Manchuria and China would put yet more strain on their military and in concert with actions by the Western Allies might be enough to make the Japanese accept defeat and lay down their arms. Stalin was ambivalent, he wanted to gain a zone of influence in Asia for the USSR and establish a buffer against further ambitious states looking to take territory from them, but he had no intention of seeing the Red Army used as cannon fodder in a colonialist war against the Japanese that might weaken the Soviet position in Europe. In the end Stalin did agree to a definite timetable for the entry of the USSR into the Pacific war, with preparations to be complete by the second week of December 1944. There was considerable scepticism in the Western camp about this commitment as some optimists believed that the Japanese would be on the brink of collapse by the end of the year and the Soviets simply intended to roll south and claim a swathe of territory for themselves, perhaps even try and install their Communists comrades as the government of a ‘liberated’ China [9].

Such suspicions were not entirely without merit, though rifts had already opened between Chinese and Soviet communists over the disparity of the support received by themselves compared to the largesse the Americans were lavishing on the nationalists. This had meant that despite poor leadership and considerable corruption the Nationalists had made considerable gains, aided by the British advance in South East Asia that had undercut the entire Japanese position on the Asian continent. These rifts aside the Red Army was genuinely in need of time to resupply and prepare a battle plane for operations against the Japanese, including the creation of an amphibious force. Even if Stalin had been willing to whip his commanders along as he had in the drive towards Poland and Romania it is doubtful they could have been ready for operations before November. As it was the Soviets would stick to the word of their agreements, both in Asia and Europe, though the spirit would be distinctly lacking [10].

[1] So Dresden not Potsdam, despite what a previous note might have mentioned, and no Dresden raid to use as a stick with which to beat Bomber Command after the war.

[2] It’s not a Cold War yet, but it’s turning decidedly chilly.

[3] Stalin is not winning friends and influencing people and its going to cost the USSR in the long run.

[4] The USSR really cannot sustain its war effort much longer, its used up every resource to defeat the Nazis and needs time, years probably, to recover.

[5] So it’s a divided Poland, but the Poles are better off than OTL.

[6] So the Allies get Poland, the Czech Republic control of access to Berlin and arguably a stronger ‘west’ Germany.

[7] Basically the Balkans and Italy are an even bigger mess than they were OTL.

[8] It’s much better overall than OTL, not that either side is entirely happen.

[9] The Soviets will intervene, but neither side is enthusiastic.

[10] And there will be updates on the Soviet operation in Manchuria.

 

[Garrison]

1st August 1944 – 1st February 1945 - The Spoils of War – Operation Paperclip and Operation Newton​

The disposition of German scientists and engineers after the end of the war in Europe, and the research they carried out, was a thorny subject at the time and remained problematic across the years as the association of Nazi scientists with high profile technological projects constantly attracted scrutiny of their war records. This is because it is impossible to disentangle the often astounding achievements of German scientists and engineers across multiple disciplines from the terrible cost in human lives required to bring them to fruition. In the field of medicine aside from the medical horrors carried out by Mengele and others in the pursuit of their racial theories they also produced genuinely useful data on the mechanics and treatment of hypoxia, hypothermia and the radiation exposure. The moral dilemma at the heart of using this data lay in the fact that it had been obtained by the same sort of human experimentation, primarily carried out on concentration camp inmates, as Mengele’s efforts to prove his ludicrous theories on eugenics. The data gathered from these more often than not lethal experiments offered scientists in the USA and Britain a wealth of information that could never be reproduced in any ethical way and in the eyes of some this made it irrevocably tainted. This was a minority view however and the rationalization that this knowledge would prove invaluable in saving lives in the future won out in the end. This willingness on the part of senior figures in the medical research community to rationalize away appalling experiments being perpetrated on marginalized people, all in the name of some greater good, may go some way to explaining such post war tragedies such as the Tuskegee syphilis experiments [1].

When it came to the fruits of Nazi aerospace research there was no real attempt to rationalize the use of both the technologies and the men who had developed them. Werner von Brawn and General Walter Dornberger could hardly claim to have been acting to save lives and reduce future suffering when they helped create weapons that were intended to rain down destruction all across Europe, which had only bee prevented by the rapid collapse of the Third Reich. That the weapons had been brought into service at all had only been achieved by the expenditure of slave labour on a prodigious scale and attempts by von Braun, who had become a member of the SS in 1940, and others to pretend that they hadn’t known how the weapons based on their work had been produced rang extremely hollow. Luckily for them the British who had taken most of the German rocket scientists’ prisoner were willing to overlook such considerations when it came to when it came to rocket and aerospace technology, burying the worst of their actions under the blanket of ‘national security’ for decades, and they extended this same strategy to the men who had worked on Germany’s nuclear program [2].

Werner Heisenberg was among those physicists who found themselves in British hands as the war ended, and initially they had been dubious about his value as the German nuclear program had been heading into a dead end even before the accident that destroyed their experimental reactor. Heisenberg astounded his captors by offering up a series of calculations that showed he did possess an understanding of the real parameters of an atomic bomb. His explanation for this was that he had knowingly provided the leaders of the Third Reich with false numbers in a deliberate act of sabotage designed to force them to abandon their research. It would be an understatement to say this claim has been treated with scepticism ever since regardless of how many times Heisenberg repeated it. The most accepted interpretation of events is that Heisenberg did initially make a mistake and by the time he realized his error the febrile atmosphere in Nazi Germany meant that he was afraid to reveal this fact for fear that it would lead to accusations of treason and sabotage. Regardless of the truth the British saw the opportunity to put him to work along with von Braun and his comrades to aid in reverse engineering the Nazi’s missile technology and perhaps find a way make a working atomic bomb before the Allies were faced with having to make a landing in the Japanese Home islands [3].

As we can see there was little debate among the Western Allies over whether the Germans scientists and engineers should be put to work, what did provoke serious disputes was where they would work and under whose direction. The Americans were extremely eager to acquire the services of the German rocket scientists and move them to a secure location in some desolate spot in the middle of the desert. The British were far from enthusiastic about such a plan, particularly given the way that the Americans had sought to restrict access to information about the production of enriched Uranium and Plutonium. Matters were not improved by the belief among the British that the Americans were taking advantage of their opportunities to interrogate the German scientists to try and ‘poach’ them, that is trying to persuade the scientists that they would have greater opportunities and better conditions in the USA. That the Americans were hardly subtle about this provoked a great deal of anger that reached to the highest levels in Whitehall and the new Labour government. What arose from this was an insistence that if some of the German rocket engineers were to be handed over there had to be a quid pro quo in terms of the sharing of technical data in all fields, but especially that relating to the construction of an atomic bomb [4].

This provoked a strong reaction in Washington, where neither of the prospective candidates were happy about what they saw as unreasonable demands by the British, but London stood firm. They had captured the scientists and had control of Peenemunde; they were not going to give up their prizes for nothing. Nazi Germany was defeated, and Britain would have to accept that the USA was destined to be the most powerful nation on Earth, with the USSR also clearly rising to prominence. There was no desire to accept a future in which the USA was the sole possessor of the atomic bomb even if the USA were to remain a close ally, something that the British experience of the shifting global political landscape in the first four decades of the twentieth century meant could hardly be taken for granted [5].

Things were settled with some very intense horse trading that set the parameters for the release of German scientists from British custody, though int the end the British retained the services of a substantial number of them, though not von Braun himself. Far from being disconsolate about being left behind some of them men who remained in Britain were only too happy to get out from under the thumb of von Braun to explore their own ideas; and get credit for them. The British also retained the services of Heisenberg and most of the other nuclear scientists, who would find themselves deeply involved in British nuclear plans up until the 1950s. The transfer of these scientists to serve their new masters would be called Operation Paperclip by the Americans and Operation Newton by the British and it was done without any public discussion or debate in either nation [6].

The German scientists sent to Britain had found themselves initially incarcerated at Farm Hall, a country estate near Cambridge in England. The rocket and nuclear scientists may have been confined to the grounds, but Farm Hall was hardly a prison and indeed many of the scientists who were held there retained fond memories of their time ‘imprisoned’ there. Items such as cigarettes, coffee and chocolate that had become almost unheard-of luxuries in Germany were freely provided, along with access to wine, beer, whiskey and brandy. Every bit as importantly they were allowed to openly talk and share information. Free of the omnipresent threat of the Gestapo and the insistence on strict compartmentalization the scientists discussed everything, which was precisely what the British wanted. Contrary to what some of scientists believed the British were perfectly willing to engage in ‘Gestapo tactics’ when it came to bugging every inch of the house and grounds and they gained a great deal of valuable information in doing so, especially the conversations between Helmut Groettrup, a senior member of the V2 team, and several of the nuclear physicists. This was where the British learned of the concept of the ‘Amerika rocket’ a next generation rocket capable of delivering a payload from launch sites in Europe to the continental USA, a first-generation ICBM and one that Adolf Hitler had demanded be fitted with a nuclear warhead. When this information was shared with the Americans, along with what were now obviously preliminary designs for such a missile, they became even more determined to acquire their fair share, or more than their fair share of the German rocket scientists. This was understandable given that in the same way that aerial bombing had ended the idea of the English Channel as a bulwark against attacks on British cities ICBMs meant that the Atlantic Ocean was no longer a shield against hostile powers intent on attacking the USA [7].

One matter of policy on which the British and Americans were in accord was restricting Soviet access to the research facilities currently under their control. The allocation of the Soviet zone in Germany meant that Augsburg and other centres of German aircraft development and production were scheduled to be handed over to them. The Soviets were also keen to have access to sites such as Peenemunde to do their own inspections and acquire information about the work done there. The Western Allies had to abide by the letter of the agreements they had made, but nothing in those agreements required them to make things easy for the Soviets. large amounts of equipment were shipped out of Augsburg and Peenemunde before any Soviets set foot in the facilities and they would have to make do with piecing together the scraps that the Allies left behind for them. This certainly hampered Soviet efforts to develop their own jet and rocket technology, but if the Western Allies believed it would completely cripple their ability to make progress, they severely underestimated the capabilities of Soviet scientists and engineers [8].

Those German scientist and engineers who did fall into Soviet hands were whisked away to the USSR, though much of the bounty was squandered as critical equipment and tooling was badly handled, being left exposed to the elements at railway sidings in some cases, important documents were lost and the Germans found themselves sent to sites markedly lacking in the facilities needed to further the research they were supposed to carry out. They were also barred from working with their Soviet counterparts, largely owing to fears that they would learn just how far behind the USSR was in what were now classed as research of national importance. It was fortunate for their rocket and atomic bomb programs that the Soviets possessed men of the calibre of Sergei Korolev and Andrei Sakharov, though the Soviets would in the end deny them the credit they were entitled to and ultimately alienated them [9].

What the attempts to frustrate the Soviets did achieve was a further cooling of relations between east and west, at the same time as the Anglo-American alliance was under increasing strain. There was a great irony in the fact that in defeat Germany was able to do more to prise apart the grand alliance against them than they had ever achieved while prosecuting the war. Still despite all this wrangling the scientific and engineering knowledge of Nazi Germany would be put to work and would help to shape the future, for good and for ill [10].

[1] Just a small reminder that people in other countries believing ‘it couldn’t happen here’ was wishful thinking.

[2] It’s not that British are hostile to the US, its more that they are rather less trusting that their ally will follow through on their promises to share their own breakthroughs in aerospace and nuclear technology.

[3] So I’m taking a middle ground here between Heisenberg’s version of how he got the numbers wrong and the far more likely version that he simply made a mistake and failed to recognize it.

[4] The British are not truly determined to have their own rocket program, or at least most of them aren’t, and if they can trade the scientists for a more open exchange over the bomb, well then that will be a win.

[5] Look at the constantly shifting patterns of alliances across those decades and without 20-20 hindsight who could be sure that the USA would always be a friend to the British?

[6] No, no, these guys weren’t really Nazis. Why if they were we would be putting them on trial for war crimes, wouldn’t we?

[7] This is the driving force behind the missile programs in the major nations, the belief that the only way to be safe is to threaten an enemy with the prospect of retaliation, or of course a first strike to destroy their capability to retaliate.

[8] So the Soviets are going to have to make do with less captured material in some areas than OTL.

[9] This part is what happened IOTL, the Soviets squandered a lot of what they captured.

[10] This is one of those things that might be discussed if I do decide to write some addendums.

 

[Garrison]

10th August – 1st December 1944 – Britain – A Land Fit for Heroes​

The swift nature of the handover of power in Britain had the potential to create problems as the incoming government, which might have spent many years on the opposition benches, sought to find its feet. In 1944 Clement Attlee and the Labour Party had the distinct advantage that they had been involved in the running of the country since the national government was formed in 1940. They were well aware of the state of the country and of the British strategic situation in post-war Europe and in the continuing war in the Pacific. When it came to domestic policy the Labour government would mark a dramatic change from what had gone before and despite much doomsaying from their political opponents, institutions such as the NHS would become part of the bedrock of British society over the following decades. Such matters are not the focus of this discussion, but Labour’s desire for substantial social and industrial reform, and the freeing up of the resources needed to achieve this, must be borne in mind when it comes to the Labour governments discussions of the conduct of the war against Japan [1].

Unconditional surrender remained the official position of the British government and no one was prepared to question this stance in public, no one wanted to offer the Japanese any false hope that British resolve was wavering, nor did they want to create any unnecessary problems with the USA. Of course, the importance of trying to stay in step with the USA grew considerably harder as the prospect of a Dewey victory increased. Thomas Dewey was not sympathetic towards Socialism, seeing it as merely a steppingstone to full blown communism, or at least such was the rhetoric of the campaign trail. Given the amount of blood and treasure Britain had already expended to bring about the defeat of Nazi Germany it was all but inevitable that whatever the public stance there would be private discussions as to what would constitute an acceptable peace with the Japanese [2]?

There could be no question of allowing Japan to retain any of its conquests, indeed driving them out of those that were left was accepted as a necessary precondition to force the Japanese to accept the reality of defeat and no one who had read the reports of the combat in South East Asia could be under any illusion that would be enough by itself. This precondition would mean that further military operations would have to be conducted by British and imperial forces and even before the election all parties had agreed that the liberation of Hong Kong would be the next step. Beyond that however things became rather hazy, after all Hong Kong represented the last objective where one could argue there was a genuine British interest. To push the Japanese back further would mean offensives in mainland China and invading the Mariana islands, Okinawa, perhaps even Korea, and how many British, or Australian, or Indian, lives should be sacrificed to drive the Japanese back to the Home Islands? There were voices suggesting that after Hong Kong it might be best for the British Empire to ‘take a breath’ to await the outcome of the Kuomintang offensive in China and the Soviet intervention [3]?

Doing so would open the British up to accusations of choosing British lives over those of Soviet, Chinese, or American soldiers but after five years of war there were legitimate questions as to whether Britain could afford to sacrifice many more lives in the war. The pool of available manpower was running dry in the summer of 1944, and the same was true for Australia, New Zealand and Canada. India might still have reserves, but the Nationalists were not going to see Indians used as cannon fodder to spare the British, indeed trying to do so might well unravel the political settlement that had been agreed and precipitate unrest that would cost Britain dearly to suppress. The Americans would not be happy if the British began to dial back their efforts, but there was a pragmatic argument to be made beyond the question of Britain’s own national interest. If defeating Japan did come down to a full-scale invasion of the Home Islands Britain would have to conserve its manpower and build up its resources to take part in that operation, in essence it was a question of when and where Britain made its final major effort of the war [4].

This was not to say that the British were sanguine about the idea of such an invasion. Every analysis that came out of Washington and the Imperial General Staff was worse than the last when it came to the estimates of Allied casualties in such an operation, as well as those likely to be suffered by the Japanese civilians. Of course, if inflicting greater casualties on the latter saved more of the former then that would be an acceptable though hardly a desirable option, no one wanted to take on the problems of running another country in ruins. Having had the opportunity to analyse its effectiveness in both Britain and Germany there was considerable scepticism about the idea that the strategic bombing of Japan could be bombed into submission, the Germans had after all fought on even as their cities were burned and smashed by the 8th Airforce and Bomber Command and in the end it was only when the Allies took Berlin that the war in Europe finally ended. This did not mean that Atlee and his cabinet were against pursuing a major bomber offensive by the RAF in the Pacific, it did at least offer the prospect of undermining the Japanese capacity to equip and maintain their armed forces [5].

The new cabinet was far more sanguine about the prospects for a naval blockade. This played to British strength’s; it was a traditional British tactic and one that had served them well in the past. Destroying Japan’s oceanic and coastal trade offered the prospect of crippling both their industries and their food distribution system, especially in concert with the bombing campaign. The Royal Navy and the USN had resources at their disposal the Kriegsmarine could only wistfully imagine possessing one day in the future if Plan Z ever came to fruition. The British and Americans could completely close the seas around Japan, especially once the last remnants of the IJN’s surface fleet and submarine force were destroyed or penned up in port by fuel shortages. A blockade would be relatively low cost in British lives and hunger had brought Germany to the brink of revolution in World War I, though even then it required military defeats on land to finally drive Germany to seek peace, and that peace had fallen somewhat short of an unconditional surrender [6].

Whatever strategy the government looked at the same question always arose, what terms were the British prepared to accept to put an end to the war with Japan? Would it be acceptable to forgo the sort of war crimes trials that were being prepared in Europe? Perhaps allow the Japanese to retain the position of Emperor? Even the question of whether the Allies would be willing to contemplate a Japanese ‘surrender’ without an occupation of the Home Islands? This latter was rejected as a step too far, Japan would have to be demilitarized to ensure that there was no repeat of their 1941-42 offensives in the future. If there was one overriding lesson to be drawn from the end of World War I, it was that the people of a defeated nation must be shown unequivocally that they were defeated. If it seems like the new government was going around in circles when it came to the strategy for Japan this simply reflects the reality of the situation. Those options that offered the prospect of a swift and decisive defeat of Japan would come at a high price in British and Allied lives. Those that conserved the soldiers of Britain, and its empire, would be slow and less certain, the last thing a government committed to rebuilding Britain wanted to contemplate [7].

There was a set of options that might meet both the desire to reduce Allied casualties, but no one was willing to count on the Manhattan Project producing a working weapon in an acceptable time frame, especially one that could level a city in a single blow and the biological and chemical weapons at the disposal of the British created a far greater of moral unease than the possible use of atomic weapons. From a modern perspective this seems bizarre, at the time however the perception was that a nuclear weapon was simply a very large bomb that potentially concentrated the power of tens of thousands of tonnes of conventional explosives. The reports of the effects of radiation gleaned from the Auschwitz SP site told a different story but that information percolated its way to the highest levels of the British government and military very slowly and the attitude of the government would remain that the atomic bomb should be used if and when it became available, especially since it was likely the Americans would use it regardless of the opinion of the British [8].

This latter point illustrated the single biggest unknown for the British in the campaign in the Pacific, what would the Americans do? Their desire for vengeance against the Japanese for Pearl Harbor seemed unwavering, but what would happen once Roosevelt left the White House, might his successor be willing to contemplate something short of the complete destruction of Japan, especially in the face of mass casualties among US forces? It seemed unlikely but as they contemplated 1945 the British government had to consider all these possibilities and juggle them against creating ‘a land fit for heroes’ [9].

In summary the British remained determined to defeat Japan, but not at any cost and if that created issues with their allies, well so be it.

[1] You can safely assume that Labour is going to carry out the same domestic agenda as OTL, for good and ill.

[2] There is a palpable concern that invading Japan will be worse than the battle for Germany.

[3] Remember that here they aren’t looking at three or four months more fighting in the Pacific and the A-Bomb is still some way off.

[4] But of course what they would like to do isn’t the same as what they will have to do.

[5] So they are being more realistic about the power of bombing, but unlike OTL Bomber Command will be appearing over Japan.

[6] And you can bet the Royal Navy is assuring Whitehall they can deliver victory where the RAF can’t.

[7] You can have a quick victory or a cheap victory, but not both unless…

[8] …You have a ‘super bomb’, which the British would like to ensure they also get.

[9] The British are ready to move on from the war, just as soon as the Japanese decide to do the same.

 

[Garrison]

15th August – 29th September 1944 - The Liberation of Hong Kong – Part I – Defending the Indefensible​

The fall of Hong Kong had been the single greatest embarrassment of the war in the east for the British, though even before the Japanese attack there had been a broad consensus that the colony could not be held in the event of an attack given that the Japanese controlled Guangzhou (Canton), Hainan and French Indochina. As a result of this Hong Kong had been downgraded to the status of an outpost in the latter part of 1940 with only a token defence force left in place. This sensible decision was almost unravelled when in typical Churchill fashion the Prime Minister had changed his mind in September 1941, swayed by the argument that a strong defence force would act as a deterrent to the Japanese. Fortunately for the troops earmarked for this deployment Montgomery successfully argued, via Alan Brooke, that this would be a mistake and that deploying those troops to far more strategically important and defensible targets would have a far greater deterrent effect, especially since it seemed unlikely the Japanese would attack all their potential targets at once and should Hong Kong fall it could be swiftly liberated once the initial Japanese offensive had been repulsed. How much of this was Montgomery spinning a story for his masters in London that got him what he wanted and how much was genuine underestimation of the Japanese depends on how much faith one places in Montgomery’s memoirs [1].

The decision to reallocate the proposed Hong Kong reinforcements to Malaya and Burma, and then to Java, eliminated any slim chance of defending the colony when the Japanese attacked on the 8th of December. Hong Kong capitulated on the 21st of December and the Japanese had swiftly imposed their usual brutal control and anger at the fact that some units put up unexpectedly stiff resistance before being overwhelmed, combined with the Japanese contempt for any soldier who surrendered, resulted in the execution of captured troops on multiple occasions. The white colonial population of Hong Kong had not believed an attack, let alone a successful one, was likely and there had been no attempts at an organized evacuation or any meaningful civil defence planning prior to the Japanese assault, meaning that they now found themselves living under an increasingly harsh occupation. The only very small crumb of comfort the colonials was that their treatment was less brutal than that experienced by the Chinese populace of Hong Kong and the New Territories. Resistance groups emerged, known as the Gangjiu and Dongjiang, and while they had a very limited impact on the occupying forces the Japanese retaliated with torture, murder and the destruction of whole villages and as many as 8,500 Hong Kong civilians were murdered during the occupation [2].

General Takashi Sakai, who both commanded the invasion of Hong Kong and served as its governor, did nothing to mitigate the harshness of his rule over the colony even as the British and their allies liberated the rest of the territory occupied by the Japanese and isolated Hong Kong. The threat of a Chinese counteroffensive aimed at liberating Guangzhou meant that there would be no reinforcements sent to Hong Kong in 1944, where Sakai now found himself on the other side of the strategic dilemma that the British had faced in 1941, that is he could not defend the colony with the resources at his disposal and other places had a far higher call on the limited resources available to his superiors. Sakai could not even entertain the hope that the British would not attack as Hong Kong was the only corner of the British empire still occupied by an Axis power and thus an inevitable target. The hopelessness of his situation simply hardened Sakai’s resolve to fight to the last man, and he would come very close to achieving this goal [3].

If the Japanese were determined to fight until the bitter end regardless of whether they could hold Hong Kong the British were just as determined to retake the colony, though they were naturally not inclined to be as profligate with the lives of their soldiers as the Japanese. Hong Kong was both the next logical move for the British in advancing north towards the Japanese Home Islands beside being a matter of honour and unlike 1941 there was no need to ration out the resources allocated to the Honk Kong operation. The end of the war in Europe had created some issues for the British, seeking to balance the demands to demobilize troops who had fought their way from Normandy to Berlin against prosecuting the continuing campaign against the Japanese. Despite this the British were able to assemble two full Corps and an armoured division for the landings, and fully equip them with landing craft and the latest amphibious assault vehicles. There was also no shortage of air and naval assets to support the landing. Illustrious, Formidable, Victorious and the fully repaired Ark Royal were all assigned to the operation, codenamed Lighthouse, with half a dozen light carriers acting as ferries to replenish their air wings or to provide air cover while the fleet carriers concentrated their airwings on strike aircraft. The surface fleet was led by King George V, Prince of Wales, Hood, the Lion Class battleship Temeraire and Warspite, recently arrived from the Atlantic. This line of battle was supported by a full battlegroup of cruisers and destroyers, screened by a substantial force of submarines [4].

It was ironic that one of the most powerful formations the British had deployed in the Pacific would face practically no threat from the Imperial Japanese Navy. The remains of the Japanese fleet were restricted to home waters for the time being, conserving their available fuel while expedients to increase the stockpile were explored. The only ‘naval’ assets near Hong Kong were a few patrol boats operated by the Army and a selection of small craft and coastal civilian craft pressed into Japanese service. The IJA had even gone so far as to consider deploying their own aircraft carriers to Hong Kong, which as strange as it seems is not a typographical error, the IJA did indeed possess its own carriers, after a fashion. Akitsu Maru and her sister ship Nigitsu Maru were a mix of landing craft, depot ship and escort aircraft carrier, sometimes described as the first amphibious assault ships. They lacked a proper hanger or indeed such items as arrestor gear, meaning conventional aircraft could launch from their decks but not land. A partial solution to this issue was found in the Kayaba Ka-1 autogyro, an early form of helicopter where the lift rotor was unpowered and depended on the forward motion created by its main propulsion to spin it and generate lift. In a strong wind the autogyro could take off vertically though usually it operated in the short take-off and landing mode (STOL). This made it well suited to the limited flight decks of the army carriers and the Ka-1 was useful in the anti-submarine role, but very little else [5].

These proto assault ships might have made useable kamikaze platforms, launching both suicide aircraft and boats, but in the end nothing came of this because the Akitsu Maru was torpedoed and sunk by a Dutch submarine while escorting a convoy to Formosa in June and the Nigitsu Maru was damaged in another submarine attack in July. Some of the modified fast boats, their engines tuned up and their hulls packed with explosives were dispatched to Hong Kong to operate independently. Efforts to camouflage them from Allied reconnaissance were largely successful. The same however could not be said for the patrol craft watching the coast, which were picked off in a series of engagements by the Royal Navy and Fleet Air Arm. Given the paucity of the IJAAF assets in Hong Kong this meant that Sakai was left with little to no reconnaissance capability and wouldn’t know when the attack was coming or where it was being directed until it began [6].

General Sakai knew he could not prevent a landing even if he had been in possession of comprehensive reconnaissance, nor indeed prevent the British from retaking Hong Kong in the end. Given that the best Sakai could do was hope to slow the British down and in this context, it was possible to claim some military justification in using scorched earth tactics, denying the enemy any local infrastructure or resources they could use to their advantage. What Sakai planned for the battle of Hong Kong went far beyond any military logic, he intended to provide the British with an object lesson as to what they could expect if they dared to attack Japan itself. The white colonials who had survived under three years of Japanese rule and been pressed into service to keep the territories running were now rounded up and interned alongside the remaining POWs who had not succumbed to starvation. Also part of this round up were village headmen, medical professionals, mechanics, and anyone else who was deemed to have some skill that the British could put to use. The orders for dealing with these prisoners were unequivocal, once the British began their invasion, they were all to be put to death. At the same time Sakai had also acquired the services of elements of Unit 731 that had been relocated from China and they were ordered to use their skills to poison wells and water supplies with Cholera and to unleash Bubonic Plague on the Chinese population of the New Territories. Many of these people had already been rendered homeless as the Japanese razed whole villages to prevent them being used by the British. To say that this attempt to intimidate the British backfired is something of an understatement [7].

[1] A bit of both is probably the most reasonable interpretation.

[2] Again this was par for the course for the Japanese, well before World War 2.

[3] This is going to be one of the most vicious battles of the conflict so far, though there is worse to come.

[4] Given her very different history it’s not out of the question that Hood might end up as museum ship, perhaps anchored in place of Belfast on the Thames?

[5] This section was inspired by the discussion in the thread that enlightened me to the existence of these odd army ships.

[6] The British have worked hard to gain some element of surprise for the operation.

[7] It is going to be bad is what I’m saying.

 

[Garrison]

15th August – 29th September 1944 - The Liberation of Hong Kong – Part II – Reclaiming the Last Outpost​

The landing zones chosen for Operation Lighthouse were on the western side of the New Territories, intended to establish a bridgehead and cut the lines of communication the Japanese forces in mainland China before the main thrust of the British forces turned south towards Kowloon and Hong Kong Island itself. In the first weeks of August the Kuomintang conducted a series of small-scale attacks, primarily as a steppingstone towards their own planned major offensive operation, and the British took advantage of this in choosing a date to commence Lighthouse. Even with all the meticulous preparation for the operation and the Kuomintang distracting the Japanese there was the inevitable anxiety when the first landing craft set for shore and it was an immense relief when the initial landing on the morning of the 15th of August proved to be somewhat anticlimactic, in no small part because of the absence of any meaningful naval opposition and the paucity of air attacks against the landing zones or the fleet offshore. No organized Kamikaze squadrons had been created in Hong Kong and what contingency plans the IJN had created to oppose a landing had never gotten beyond broad outlines. These omissions reflected the fact that the high command in Tokyo had dismissed General Sakai’s requests for support, if an attack did come Sakai was told he would have to hold out until a counteroffensive could be mounted by the Japanese armies currently skirmishing with the Kuomintang. This decision seemed arrogant and short-sighted to Sakai; the truth was however that his superiors in Tokyo had already written off Hong Kong as a lost cause and even when what sparse intelligence they had gathered showing an attack was imminent, they did nothing except warn Sakai to be on alert for a landing, ‘Somewhere close to Hong Kong Island, sometime in September or October’, which did nothing to help Sakai to prepare for the invasion [1].

The leadership in Tokyo was beset on all sides, the Soviets were hedging about whether they would extend the non-aggression pact, the Chinese Nationalists were becoming increasingly aggressive and the prospect of an American landing on Okinawa, perilously close to the Home Islands, loomed ominously. Something had to give, and Hong Kong was the place that the Japanese chose to sacrifice so they could concentrate the available resources on protecting Okinawa and the Home Islands. Admitting such pragmatic strategic realities would have been a humiliation for the officers responsible, and a potentially fatal one. Better in the end to demand that Sakai fight to the last man waiting for a counteroffensive that would never come than concede that they had abandoned all hope of holding Hong Kong, especially as such an admission would naturally have raised questions about how precisely they would defend the heart of the empire [2].

During the first day of the attack no more than 200 Japanese aircraft sortied against the landings, and they did not fare well. Some may have been intending to conduct suicide attacks but given the strength of the British air defence and the fact that the sorties were sporadic and poorly co-ordinated none of were successfully carried through and within the first 48 hours the British had near total control of the skies over Hong Kong. The Japanese defenders on the ground didn’t fare much better given the spareness of the defences in the landing zone. Sakai had unwisely chosen to pack large numbers of troops into the forward zone, believing his sole hope of repelling the invasion was a swift, aggressive counterattack. He was also hoping that by swiftly getting in amongst the attacking troops he could force the British to hold back on their naval fire support. More pragmatically Sakai lacked the resources to build the layered positions required for a defence in depth, or as some have suggested simply lacked the temperament for such a methodical approach [3].

As a good army man Sakai had failed to appreciate the weight of naval gunfire the British would be able to bring to bear on the landing zone and their willingness to spend a prodigious amount of ammunition to suppress the defenders before their soldiers went ashore. He had also failed to grasp that the landing force would be heavily supported by amphibious vehicles and tanks, making throwing waves of soldiers at the invasion force a recipe for heavy casualties. The Japanese attacks did cost the British significant casualties; however they fell far short of driving them back into the sea and indeed by nightfall on that first day the British had cleared the landing zones and driven several miles inland on a broad front. On the 16th the British troops held back from launching their advance, expecting to receive a further heavy counterattack and possibly the full-scale Kamikaze attacks that had failed to materialize the day before, what they got instead was a wave of refugees desperately trying to reach the perceived safety of the British lines, creating a crisis for the British that they had to deal with even as they were trying to resume their advance [4].

This sudden rush of refugees was the result of deliberate strategy on the part of Sakai, who ordered the local population round up by the thousands, perhaps tens of thousands according to some accounts, and then had the driven them towards the British line, encouraged by random executions among any who hesitated or tried to flee in different direction. Sakai was inspired by the chaos of France and Belgium in 1940, though in the case of Hong Kong in addition to blocking the British advance the aim was also to place the civilians between the British and the Japanese defences, a human shield in modern parlance, or ‘driving out the sheep’ as Sakai saw it. This appalling tactic achieved a degree of success, blocking roads and leaving the British trying to provide assistance to the desperate, sick and hungry people who did reach their lines. This display of brutality did however also produce problems for the Japanese as well. In some instances when faced with the choice of ‘fight or flight’ civilians turned on the Japanese soldiers harrying them, with bloody consequences for both sides. Some civilians ransacked poorly defended Japanese supply dumps and natives marshalled to be used as labour by the Japanese were swept up in the panic and fled, further disrupting the already fragile Japanese supply lines [5].

While these tactics certainly delayed the British advance for several days it used up manpower and resources that the Japanese did not have to spare and when the British advanced from their bridgehead on the 18th they made rapid inroads into the Japanese defences, forcing them to fall back, trying to buy time to prepare some sort of proper new defensive line. The British plan was to push forward with two spearheads, the British IX Corps would pivot south to drive towards Kowloon city while the Indian XXXIII Corps would sweep further east, through New Kowloon, aiming to create a classic pincer movement to cut off and destroy the bulk of the Japanese forces. Sakai remained committed to his scorched earth policy, but the British forces didn’t need to live off the land, their supply lines were adequate to keep them fed and well stocked with ammunition, a situation that the Japanese troops had all but forgotten was possible [6].

Far from trying to extricate his men from the this rapidly closing trap Sakai exhorted his subordinates to hold fast wherever they were and launch counterattacks at every opportunity, while continuing to carry out his scorched earth policy behind the front line, which at this point was creating more problems for the Japanese than the British. It seems Sakai was still clinging to the idea that with enough displays of Japanese resolve they could break the British will to fight, or perhaps he had chosen to believe that a counteroffensive from the direction of Guangzhou was still possible, even as the actions of the Kuomintang would render this impossible. Whatever Sakai’s belief such exhortations were futile, Banzai charges were a worn-out tactic that the British and Indian troops were well prepared to cope with. It did not help that desperate and poorly trained Japanese troops were very poor at judging when there was a genuine opportunity to launch one. They tended to either rush and charge far too soon, being cut down as they tried to cross hundreds of metres between themselves and the enemy, or they held too long and took equally heavy casualties as the British spotted the signs of a charge being prepared and ‘beat the bushes’ with machine guns, mortars, and artillery to break up the attacks before they could start [7].

This determination meant that even where the Japanese did manage to check the British advance temporarily, they failed to take advantage of it to break contact and withdraw to the next position, and such opportunities were short lived as the British forces possessed far greater mobility. The British forces deployed large amounts of light armour that was capable of flanking and cutting off the Japanese avenues of escape, while inflicting heavy casualties as the Japanese still lacked any effective anti-tank weapons and what little Japanese armour had been deployed to Hong Kong was obsolescent even by Japanese standards, intended for nothing more that policing the civilian population and supplemented by the few vehicles the British had deployed to the colony before its fall, a handful of Vickers Mk VI and Matilda I, mostly dispatched during Churchill’s brief change of heart on defending the colony. By the summer of 1944 it was a small miracle that any of these were still running, and most had been dug in to act as pillboxes for the defence of Kowloon City itself and the final Japanese redoubt, the site of what had been Kowloon Walled City. The Walled City had been a Chinese enclave in Hong Kong, though while the China still laid claim to it, they had exercised no actual control over it well before the Japanese invasion. In the 1930s its population had fallen to a few hundred with the British doing their best to clear out the remnants. This had gone into full reverse under the Japanese and in 1944 there were several thousand people crammed into the area, with more being added as the Japanese prepared for a final British assault, once again intending to use the civilian population as a human shield [8].

As they advanced the British had also been forced to deal with several outbreaks of disease among the remaining civilian population, including a number of cases of bubonic plague whose origin baffled the doctors of the Royal Army Medical Corps who were tasked with trying to prevent the spread of these outbreaks. The explanation was finally revealed by documents captured from a group of Japanese soldiers, as well as some unusual equipment in their possession. It was only at this moment in the war that the British became aware that elements of Unit 731 were abroad in Kowloon and Hong Kong and that their real purpose had nothing to do with sanitation. The grim prospect of biological warfare being unleashed in Kowloon and on Hong Kong Island gave the British some pause for thought, but in the end the best way to neutralize such a threat was to neutralize the Japanese forces in the area. This is not to say the British did not adapt their strategy for the liberation of Hong Kong, and on the 4th of September the orders were issued to proceed with Operation Candid, despite there having been some previous reservations about such a bold/reckless plan. Nonetheless Candid would be launched even as the British were in the thick of the fighting to secure Kowloon City [9].

[1] Sakai is up the creek and Tokyo has just advised him there are no spare paddles.

[2] They could of course have chosen to withdraw and saved the forces in Hong Kong for other operations, but that would be a step too far.

[3] He also doesn’t have the supplies and equipment needed for a long drawn-out battle.

[4] Sakai is willing to throw any warm body at the British, even the luckless locals.

[5] In short, people are not sheep.

[6] The British forces are not only better supplied and equipped, they are now considerably more experienced.

[7] The Japanese have committed the cardinal tactical sin of becoming predictable.

[8] A crowded slum that is going to be very nasty to clear out.

[9] Sakai is only helping to encourage the British to take whatever measures are needed to crush Japan before any troops set foot on the Home Islands.

 

[Garrison]

15th August – 29th September 1944 - The Liberation of Hong Kong – Part III – The Walled City, Operation Candid and the Final Liberation​

As the Japanese forces were pushed back towards Kowloon City the British slowed their advance, not wanting to rush into what they expected to be a potentially bloody house to house battle for control. Their advance came to a complete halt on the 2nd of September, less than four kilometres from the outskirts of Kowloon. Sakai’s demands for constant counterattacks and the actions of Unit 731 had promoted a degree of caution on the part of the British and while they had no intention of allowing the fighting to drag on, they were willing to engage in a period of siege warfare to wear down the defenders, already short on food and ammunition and becoming more so every day as the Japanese persisted in skirmishing with the British forces even as they were trying create some sort of viable defensive position in the city. This made life even more miserable for the unfortunate civilians trapped in Kowloon with the Japanese as what food they had left was requisitioned by the Japanese, meaning that they ripped through every house and building searching for any scraps the residents might have saved to fend off starvation, it was a given that anyone who had succeeded in doing so faced the full wrath of the desperate Japanese soldiers [1].

The British began an artillery bombardment of Japanese defensive positions in and around Kowloon. It was impossible to hit these positions without inflicting significant civilian casualties, in no small part because Sakai was still pursuing the use of human shields, preventing the population of Kowloon from fleeing despite the extra strain this placed on the meagre resources in the city. Some on the British side were hoping that there might be an uprising in the city of the sort that had greatly helped their operations in Thailand in Indochina, however the population had been thoroughly ground down by the Japanese during the occupation and those inclined to resist the Japanese had long since fled into the countryside. By and large the people trapped in Kowloon simply sought to keep their heads down and hope to survive the inevitable British onslaught. The British were not entirely insensitive to the plight of the civilian population and on the 10th of September they called a halt to the artillery attacks and sent out a delegation to try and negotiate a surrender with the Japanese. This can be seen as a cynical gesture on the part of the British, going through the motions so they could claim they had tried to spare the civilians even though they knew there was little to no chance of the Japanese accepting any terms the British might offer. If this was the view of the British commanders then it was borne out when the Japanese refused to even meet with the delegation, even going to so far as to threaten to open fire if it did not promptly withdraw [2].

With this formality completed the British opened up with their artillery once more, significantly increasing the volume of fire on the morning of the 11th as they launched an assault on the west of Kowloon, led by several companies of A22 Infantry Tanks, though by this point the British had begun to adopt the Heavy and Medium nomenclature instead of the Infantry and Cruiser designations. The A22 was well suited to leading an assault where speed and the ability to engage enemy armour were not critical factors and instead their thick armour and ability to simply plough through obstacles was paramount. Many of these tanks had also undergone field modification with addition of cages around the turret to prevent troops climbing onto the top and grilles designed to deflect grenades and Molotov cocktails. Some also had the so-called Rhino blades, bulldozer type attachments that further enhanced the Black Prince’s ability to push through obstacles, as well as making it harder to throw satchel charges under the tank [3].

With nothing more than a few light artillery pieces available to them the Japanese defenders could do little to stop the tanks, especially as they were closely supported by infantry. This co-ordinated action allowed the assault to make rapid inroads into the city and the Japanese determination to fight house to house and floor to floor in every street counted for little when the British had the firepower to clear out every strongpoint and blast apart any defence however determined and by the 15th the Japanese forces had been surrounded and forced back into the Walled City, which was something of a misnomer in 1944 as the old wall had pulled down soon after the invasion in 1941, with the material earmarked for use in expanding Kai Tak airport. It was hardly an impenetrable fortress and even as the British prepared to mount their final assault in Kowloon they were launching Operation Candid [4].

Operation Candid had originated during the overall planning of the battle and the idea was for a direct assault into Aberdeen Harbour on the Southwestern corner of Hong Kong Island, using destroyers and fast boats to swiftly land a substantial body of troops and seize the port facilities so that further troops and equipment could be landed, driving a deep wedge into the Japanese positions while they were focused on the landings in Kowloon. Such a plan did not seem like a natural fit for Montgomery, whose signature was meticulous preparation and a relatively cautious approach. It was thus a surprise to some that Montgomery endorsed Candid, though not without it undergoing some revisions and improvements before it was put in motion. The force that set out on the night of 15th – 16th September consisted of a naval force led by the Cruiser HMS Belfast, supported by seven destroyers and nine Motor Torpedo Boats, eleven had originally been intended to take part but two had suffered mechanical issues in the days leading up to the beginning of Operation Candid [5].

The Japanese had done nothing to improve the defences around harbours of Hong Kong since 1941 and indeed outside of Victoria Harbour on the northern side of the island they had not even bothered to maintain what they had inherited from the British. The expectation of swift victory followed by the needs of other places on what had been the frontlines of the war had left nothing to spare with which to protect Aberdeen harbour. There were no search lights, no mines, and no artillery pieces covering the harbour and what troops were assigned to the area were there to prevent acts of sabotage and theft. These patrols had been expanded as the threat of a landing drew closer and a few machine gun nests had been set up in a rather perfunctory manner. This was all done with a view to defending against a small-scale raid, not the nearly 1200 troops approaching aboard the MTBs and destroyers, mostly made up of No.7 and No.9 Commando, supported by a contingent from the Pioneer Corps [6].

With their lights extinguished and dark grey paint applied over the superstructures the ships were able to approach almost completely unnoticed until the MTBs went to full speed and raced towards the docks to put the first wave of commandos ashore. This provoked more confusion than alarm among the Japanese troops patrolling the harbour and it was only when soldiers who went to investigate the sudden flurry of activity came under fire that they realized that this was an attack, though they had little opportunity to report this fact as more British troops came ashore and rapidly moved out and took control of the quayside, with the destroyer HMS Havelock being the first to tie up alongside and offload the 143 men crowding it deck. She was soon followed by HMS Garland, HMS Highlander, and HMS Imogen. By dawn the British had taken control of the docks and this paved the way for two liberty ships converted to serve as troop ships to land another 786 officers and men as well as artillery pieces, armoured cars and a small number of light tanks, allowing the attacking forces far greater mobility than the defenders [7].

The element of surprise in the attack had been total and as dawn broke the FAA made a significant contribution to keeping the defenders disorganized as strike aircraft from the carriers HMS Illustrious and HMS Ark Royal hit a number of key targets on the island with a mix of bombs and 4.5in rockets. Among the targets hit was the main Japanese command post for Hong Kong and when the aircraft attacked they caught the entire senior staff, including General Sakai, in the building. The aircraft inflicted devastating damage and Sakai’s remains were buried in the rubble along with his staff, or at least this must be assumed even though his body was never definitely identified in the aftermath. This amounted to a decapitation strike as Japanese command and control in Hong Kong collapsed in the aftermath. Counter attacks were sporadic and easily rebuffed by the British, who steadily pressed onwards and expanded their perimeter. The Japanese certainly did their best to resist, but they lacked the number and co-ordination to make the kind of bloody last stand the defenders of the Walled City did [8].

The British initially hoped they could reduce the Japanese defences in the Walled City in two days, in the end it took six as they were forced to inch their way forward. The confines of the Walled City limited the use of armour and the Japanese liberally spread booby traps throughout the area, including planting them among groups of civilians, forcing the advancing troops to treat the hapless Chinese residents with considerable circumspection. It did not help that there was an outbreak of Typhoid among the residents, which provoked considerable alarm among the British command after their previous encounter with Unit 731. In this case the outbreak seems to have been the result of bad food, bad water and inadequate sanitation, though even in the absence of any paper trail the possibility that it was deliberate has never been entirely ruled out. This outbreak accounts for the photographs of British soldiers fighting in the Walled City wearing gas masks, though the reality was that this was far rarer than many people assumed. The masks were in short supply, completely unsuitable for the combat conditions the British were operating in and the masks that were available had been held in storage for years and rubber parts had perished in many of them rendering them useless. This does not even address the fact that they would have little effect on exposure to diseases spread through contaminated water or insect bites [9].

Had the Japanese been able to make the entire battle for Kowloon as bloody and exhausting as the fight for the Walled City then perhaps Sakai might have been able to force the British to pause their operations and reconsider their future strategic plans, though it is doubtful the outcome of such considerations would have benefitted Japan. As it was as desperate as the battle became it was simply relegated to being one more hard fight among many others and by the 24th the British had complete control of the Walled City and the whole of Kowloon. The fighting on Hong Kong Island lasted until the 29th and if it lacked the intensity of the battle for the Walled City this was only because the British were able to break the Japanese forces down into a series of isolated pockets that were reduced one by one. Despite the speed of the British advance on Hong Kong Island the Japanese troops on the island could not be prevented from carrying out atrocities, including the murder of several dozen POWs, executed before the British could take the camp they had been moved to as part of Sakai’s human shield tactics [10].

The liberation of Hong Kong technically marked the end of the road the British had been pursuing in Asia since they had held the line in Malaya against the Japanese in December 1941. Every corner of the British Empire was once again in British hands, even if the relationships in some of those corners was subject to change. Some in London did feel that this should mark the end point for British offensive operations in the war, at least on the ground. The actions of the Japanese argued against such a stance, if they were allowed to turn the Home Islands into a redoubt, and continue to work on biological and chemical weapons while they did so, who knew what horrors they might unleash before they were defeated? There was also the consideration that if they attempted to stand aside and leave the remainder of the fighting to the Soviets and the Americans, they risked allowing those powers to dictate the terms of the peace, despite the massive contribution the British had made to the war in the Pacific. In the end the British would become involved in the planning for the invasion of Japan, and they would be drawn into one last amphibious operation, which has come to be seen by many military historians as Montgomery’s masterpiece [11].

[1] This is going beyond the usual brutality as their discipline is starting to crack.

[2] Cynical? Sincere? Probably a bit of both.

[3] These A22 crews have gone just a touch Mad Max.

[4] This is not going to be a slow grinding advance by the British.

[5] So Montgomery may just acquire a taste for flanking amphibious assaults.

[6] Closer to OTL St. Nazaire than Dieppe, but the British aren’t planning on pulling out.

[7] So ITTL there is a battle of Aberdeen…

[8] Sakai thus evades a war crimes trial.

[9] This is going to accelerate the deployment of Bomber Command to South East Asia among other things.

[10] And whatever political discussions may have been had in London the British are going to commit to the complete defeat of Japan.

[11] I will leave it to the reader to speculate where that might be.

 

[Garrison]

1st September – 13th November 1944 – China – Part I – The Long March to Guangzhou​

The war in China had been every bit as bitter as that on the Eastern Front, though without attracting nearly the attention the fight between the Nazi’s and the Soviets did either at during the war or afterwards in the West. At the time many in Washington and London saw the Chinese Nationalist leadership and the Kuomintang forces as corrupt and incompetent in equal measure, and while there was some truth in this it hardly painted a complete picture of forces which had been forced to fight the Japanese for far longer than anyone else and had started from a situation of a weak national government and a distinct lack of support from the very nations that were so bitterly critical of them later. The Nanking Massacre brought condemnation but little action and even the Japanese bombing of the USS Panay produced no meaningful response other than some more rational elements in Japan seeking to apologize and raising donations for the victims to make amends. It was not until the Japanese occupied Indochina that the USA imposed meaningful sanctions on the Japanese with the embargoes on oil, scrap metal and loans. There had been some support for the Chinese Nationalists before American entry into the war, with the First American Volunteer Group, more colloquially known as the Flying Tigers being the best known, however when one compares this to the unofficial war being waged by the USN in the Atlantic against the Kriegsmarine it pales in comparison [1].

Even when America entered the war there would be doubts raised about the scale of the support to offered to the Kuomintang. Reports from military missions despatched to evaluate the Chinese Communist forces under the control of Mao Zedong were largely favourable, suggesting the Communists were better organized and more committed to the fight than the Nationalists and they were also possessed of support across a broad swathe of the country. The degree to which these reports reflected the reality on the ground remains a topic of debate into the modern day, with some suggesting that the American observers were deceived by Mao’s equivalents of a Potemkin Village, or the kind of exaggeration of their strength that the Luftwaffe managed to convey to Charles Lindbergh when he was so favourably impressed on his visits to Germany. There was also other intelligence received In Washington that painted a very different picture, suggesting that far from wholeheartedly opposing the Japanese the Chinese Communists had in fact colluded with them at various points, even during the period of the Nanking Massacre. Of course, there were similar accusations levelled against the Nationalists as well but the more rabidly anti-communist elements in Washington seized on the reports that painted Mao and his forces in a less than favourable light to argue against any support for the Chinese Communists, in which argument they were ardently supported by the Kuomintang. Regardless of these doubts plans were proposed to ensure that the Communists received a substantial share of the Lend-Lease supplies sent to China and the credit, if one can call it such, for derailing these plans can largely be placed with the British [2].

The British objections to the amount of materiel that was sent to the Chinese along the Burma Road have been mentioned previously, but perhaps without stressing the sense of genuine grievance that fuelled them. As the British drove the Japanese back in South East Asia in 1942 they felt they were carrying the larger part of the burden of the war against the Imperial Japanese Army, with heavy fighting along the Malayan peninsula and in the Dutch East Indies that was forcing the Japanese to draw down their forces in China in their attempts to first renew the offensive in Malaya and then to defend as the British turned the tables. As such there was strong belief both in London and among the senior British commanders in the region that the tanks, guns and munitions sent to the Chinese, whether to the Nationalists or Communists, would be better utilized arming more British Empire troops to bring about the swiftest possible defeat of the Japanese in South East Asia. To some extent the success of the British in 1942 actually served to work against this argument, but they still pressed it forcefully and they did receive some support in Washington and indeed for once the French supported their position, though naturally the French were also arguing for more equipment being sent to the Free French to prepare an attack on Indochina. The expansion of American war production eased these concerns somewhat, but they never quite went away [3].

There was also a political dimension to the opposition emanating from London over Lend-Lease going to the Chinese Communists while Churchill remained Prime Minister, which should come as no surprise. Churchill may have quieted his anti-Communist views when it came to the USSR as he correctly regarded their involvement in the war as vital to defeating Nazi Germany, he was not inclined to extend the same tolerance to the Chinese Communists. He regarded the spread of Communism in Asia as a direct danger to British Empire and he was forthright in expressing his view that it would be a grave mistake to support ‘Mao and his minions’ when the Allies were already driving the Japanese back and did not need the assistance of the Communists. Under other circumstances Washington might have been inclined to dismiss the concerns coming out of London but as the British backed up Churchill’s views with one victory after another in Asia during 1942 and 1943 this provided ammunition for those arguing against support for the Chinese Communists in Washington and plans to do so were drastically curtailed. This did not sit well with Mao, who took advantage of Communists spies inside the Kuomintang to obtain intelligence about their plans and leak this to the Japanese, while at the same time claiming the Kuomintang were inept and doomed to fail. Unfortunately for Mao this was discovered when the Japanese later tried, quite successfully, to stir up trouble among the Chinese factions by revealing this to the Kuomintang. Mao’s actions therefore ultimately backfired as this reinforced the opposition to aiding the Communists in Washington and by the Summer of 1944 the subject was moot anyway as Truman and Dewey were both publicly engaging in anti-communist rhetoric that could not be square with providing Lend-lease to Mao’s forces and Roosevelt was persuaded that doing so would damage Truman’s chances of securing the Presidency [4].

With the war in Europe reaching its climax there had a been a further increase in not only equipment and supplies but also American military advisers assigned to work alongside the Kuomintang forces to ready them for a major offensive operation. This had proven a frustratingly difficult task given the quality of some of the senior Chinese commanders, whose lack of ability was only matched by their firm belief in their own brilliance. In fairness the Kuomintang were hardly the only ones to have been afflicted with such questionable Generals and by the time of the Great Southern Offensive the worst offenders had been eased out of operational commands by the time-honoured method of promoting them and sending them off to take charge of some meaningless task, what some Americans called ‘the MacArthur solution’ [5].

After a series of small-scale operations in Southern China in late 1943 and early 1944 designed to test the mettle of the Chinese forces and boost their morale the Americans were confident that a large-scale offensive in Southern China was practical, though the climax of the war in Europe caused some delays in planning and preparation. This was in part because of a falling out between the Chinese Nationalist Leader Chiang Kia-Shek and the American General Joseph Stillwell. Stillwell wanted to be made overall commander of all Nationalist forces in China and Chiang saw this as an attack on his own prestige and authority. In the end Chiang was persuaded that a successful offensive against the Japanese would make his position unassailable and he accepted giving overall command to Stillwell for the duration of the Great Southern Operation, with the intent of having Stillwell replaced afterwards regardless of the outcome. Choosing a target for the operation was the simplest part of organizing the Great Southern Offensive. The city of Guangzhou, or Canton as it was called in the west, was a major port city and its reconquest by the Chinese Nationalist forces would be a serious blow to the Japanese position in southern China and huge boost to the standing of the nationalists both at home and abroad [6].

Astoundingly even as the first drafts of the plan for the Great Southern Offensive were being prepared in April of 1944 the Japanese were still working on their own plan for an offensive in China, Operation Ichi-Go. The concept of Ichi-Go was a series of thrusts design to sever the routes along which Lend-Lease supplies flowed to the Kuomintang and destroying large parts of their foes. Such an operation could theoretically even pose a threat to Burma and force the British to turn their efforts to that front instead of further offensive operations of their own. Such a plan would have been unlikely in 1943 and by 1944 it was pure fantasy, but the Japanese nonetheless pressed ahead with preparations even as the remaining resources of their armies in China drained away in the face of the continuing advance of the Allies and the cutting off of their supply routes. The only part of the plan that ever came to fruition was an attack towards Liuzhou in July of 1944. This was intended to threaten USAAF bases in the region, and it did achieve some initial success. This was short lived however and the successful defence by the Kuomintang did much to encourage their belief that they could take the fight to the Japanese. This focus on fresh offensive action led the Japanese to ignore the threat of a Kuomintang attack, still convinced that they were facing the same badly led, poorly motivated force they had in previous years. In truth they were not entirely wrong in their assessment despite all the measures that had been taken to improve capabilities of the Kuomintang. Still given the numerical advantage enjoyed by the Chinese Nationalists in the Great Southern Operation they didn’t have to be good, just good enough to get the job done [7].

[1] The attempts by various Japanese individual and organizations to make reparations for the Panay is as per OTL.

[2] The attitude to the Chinese Communists is less favourable because of course ITTL it does not seem that the Japanese are on the brink of conquering the whole of Asia in 1942.

[3] You can take this as a heady mix of pragmatism and a certain degree of racism towards the Chinese.

[4] In the simplest terms the Allies have decided they don’t need the Chinese Communists, which given the strategic situation ITTL means they can indulge in a bit of politics without any dire consequences.

[5] Even with the prospect of a change in political administration MacArthur still isn’t getting out of the doghouse. You can assume he made some less than helpful comments during the election campaign.

[6] Stillwell avoids being fired as he was IOTL, for a while at least.

[7] Basically this is meant to serve as a potted history of the Chinese theatre of operations. Given the focus of the TL on the British I hope it is understandable that China hasn’t received more attention.

 

[Garrison]

1st September – 13th November 1944 – China – Part II – The Great Southern Offensive​

The Great Southern Offensive had no other official codename, the designation Operation Summer Storm being the invention of some creative Kuomintang officers post war when being interviewed by western historians. The operation would involve nearly 500,000 Kuomintang soldiers, attacking along two main lines of advance with their main jumping off points being Guilin and Liuzhou. Facing them would be the Japanese 11th and 23rd Army Groups, who could muster less than 150,000 men between them. Simple numbers do not tell the whole story for either side as they prepared for battle. The morale and discipline of the Kuomintang troops was still suspect in many cases, but the same was also true of much of the opposing forces and the condition 23rd Army Group perfectly encapsulates the issues the Japanese forces in China as a whole faced [1].

23rd Army Group had been created in 1941 and had been intended to serve as a garrison force to discourage any attempted Allied landings in Southern China, though the circumstances that made this prospect more likely had also seen it starved of resources. By 1944 it was under the command of General Hisakazu Tanaka and it was obvious to any external observer that it had become something of an irrelevance and had failed utterly in its mission to deter the Allies after the successful British landings in Hong Kong, with 23rd Army taking no part in the fighting there because of the prospect of a Kuomintang offensive. 23rd Army had been repeatedly plundered for men and equipment in the face of Allied attacks in South East Asia and efforts to shore it up had left it reliant on the dregs of the IJA. Filled with poor quality Japanese recruits, Korean and Okinawan auxiliaries, and men from labour battalions suddenly thrust into the role of combat troops. its formations lacked cohesion, its morale was rock bottom, and it lacked the means to conduct proper training. Nothing about the 23rd Army inspired any confidence that it would be effective against even the Kuomintang, whom the Japanese continued to hold in contempt [2].

The 11th Army Group, under Lieutenant General Isamu Yokoyama, was in somewhat better condition, or had been prior to their involvement in the attack on Liuzhou, which had not only depleted their manpower and supplies but damaged their morale after being driven back by the Kuomintang. The British assault on Hong Kong had required 11th Army Group to deploy part of its strength to cover the possibility of a British assault out of Kowloon in the direction of Guangzhou, since in August this was still viewed as a far greater threat than the prospect of Chinese offensive. This was partly because General Yokoyama and his staff had tried to save face by claiming that they had inflicted far higher casualties on the Chinese during the battle of Liuzhou than they had taken, and it would be many months before the Kuomintang forces could be reorganized to take any sort of offensive action. Yokoyama was projecting his own problems onto his enemies, and this was always a dangerous approach, and in the case of the 11th Army it led to Yokoyama ignoring intelligence arriving at his HQ, some of it coming from the Chinese Communists, that a Chinese offensive was in the offing and none of this information was shared with his superiors [3].

The rapidly deteriorating situation in Hong Kong fixated the attention of all the Japanese forces in Southern China and at the end of August both 11th and 23rd Army Groups were making plans to redeploy further troops to cover the threat of a British breakout and they were taken completely by surprise when their positions facing Guilin and Liuzhou came under heavy artillery and air attacks starting just before dawn on the 1st of September. The attack on the Japanese position was launched by four Kuomintang divisions, with American organized and led armour leading the way. The Japanese forces at Hezhou and Wuzhou were caught completely off guard and while they did their best to hold they had little choice but to withdraw on the 2nd of September, barely escaping being flanked and cut off [4].

The overall Japanese command initially assumed that the initial Kuomintang attacks were diversionary in nature and while orders were issued to 23rd Army Group for a counterattack at Wuzhou this would be carried out by the 108th Infantry Regiment with little in the way of support. What armour the Japanese had available in the region had been concentrated towards Hong Kong as part of the preparations for the anticipated British offensive and would remain there practically until the Chinese forces were on the outskirts of Guangzhou, in no small part because a lack of fuel meant that repositioning them was out of the question. Despite the odds against them the 108th Infantry enjoyed some success and managed to push the Chinese forces out of the centre of Wuzhou. The blame for this can be laid at the door of rampant indiscipline among the troops who had followed up the spearheads and taken over control of the town. The Kuomintang troops were taken just as much by surprise when the 108th Infantry attacked on the 4th of September as the Japanese had been by the opening of the Chinese offensive. This success led to the Japanese overreaching. The 137th Infantry regiment, part of the 104th Infantry Division alongside the 108th Infantry Regiment, was now thrown forward, followed swiftly by two companies belonging to the 161st Infantry, the third regiment of the 104th Division. This was a mistake as poor Japanese communications meant the reinforcing units were not aware that the Kuomintang forces had stabilized the situation at Wuzhou and in fact Kuomintang troops were moving to flank the town once more. What this meant was that almost the whole of the 104th Infantry Division was being sent into the very trap their comrades had escaped on the 2nd of September. Stragglers from the 161st Infantry who had been driven back by the Kuomintang advance advised their HQ of the situation of the rest of the division, but the only thing the senior officers could do given their available resources was to order the 104th to attempt a breakout and withdraw back to where the remainder of 23rd Army were trying to prepare a new line of defence [5].

The 104th did make several attempts to breakout between the 6th and 8th of September, though even had they been able to escape the immediate encirclement of Wuzhou they would have been completely cut off by the advance of the rest of the Kuomintang forces. In the end the remnants of the division laid down their arms on the 10th of September. How many actually surrendered to the Chinese has been a subject of controversy, whether the Japanese soldiers chose to fight to the death rather than fall into Chinese hands or if as some Japanese sources claim, the Kuomintang perpetrated a massacre of captured soldiers. Putting this emotive issue aside the counterattack at Wuzhou had been a disaster for the 23rd Army Group, with a third of its combat strength lost in a fight that had handed the Kuomintang a victory without even significantly slowing their advance [6].

About the only good news for the Japanese from this series of actions was that it had slowed the advance of the Chinese forces and bought time for 11th Army Group to begin to redeploy units away from Hong Kong, where it was now apparent the British weren’t planning any immediate attack towards Guangzhou, to reinforce a new defensive line between Yunfu at the southern end and Guangning towards the north, with 23rd Army filling the line still further north and extending the line to Dawan. This was a long front to cover with the available Japanese troop strength and yet there was little choice but to try. The new plan for the defence of Guangzhou as laid out by Generals Yokoyama and Tanaka was to hold this line long enough for reinforcements to arrive from the north, reinforcements that would both extend the line to prevent the Kuomintang flanking the northern end and deploy a reserve behind the line to counter any Chinese breakthrough. Unofficially neither General was confident such reinforcements would be able to intervene in time to make a difference and according to diaries and interrogations the real intention was to try and hold open a line of retreat so the 11th Army Group could pull back from Guangzhou if the position became untenable and allow both armies to make an organized withdrawal until they could finally link up with elements of the Kwantung Army. That this intention was not laid out as part of the official strategy for the two army groups is understandable given that it was pragmatic rather than what many of Yokoyama and Tanaka’s superiors in Tokyo would have regarded as honourable [7].

This strategy offered the Kuomintang the opportunity to destroy both Army Groups if they were willing to commit the necessary forces to turn the northern end of the Japanese line at Dawan, forcing 23rd Army to pull back to the south and opening the entire force up to encirclement. General Stillwell was certainly enthusiastic about this idea, perhaps too enthusiastic as his attempts to lobby in favour of it with his superiors further strained his relations with Chiang Kia-shek. The Kuomintang leader’s resistance to the idea was not simply born out of spite, there were conflicting reports on just how many troops the Japanese still had available to cover Guangzhou and how quickly they might be reinforced. To Chiang the key objective was Guangzhou, and while he would never admit it to Stillwell he was acutely aware that his forces lacked the tactical flexibility to embrace such a change of plan, better to maintain the focus on the existing plan and try to through the Japanese lines rather than going round it. Chiang confirmed that main weight of the advance would remain in the south, which was very bad news for the 11th Army Group [8].

A combination of the Chinese advance becoming somewhat ragged, and the high-level strategic arguments led to a temporary halt to operations being called around the 15th of September and the advance would not resume until the 23rd, much to Stillwell’s displeasure though he was at this point guilty of overestimating the capability of the Japanese forces. That the halt lasted so long reflected the poor infrastructure in the area of the offensive and the difficulty in moving supplies and equipment forward. This problem was made worse by the presence of bandits who attacked convoys and stole considerable quantities of food, weapons, and ammunition. These bandits were often nothing more than Chinese locals who had little love for the Kuomintang and were every bit as happy to steal from them as they would have been the Japanese. Suppressing these now well armed bandits would be an issue for the Kuomintang Army, but one they would be able to postpone until after the completion of the battle. When they did turn their attention to suppressing the bandits they treated the Chinese peasant farmers who made up their ranks every bit as harshly as they had the Japanese, much to the discomfort of their American advisors [9].

One comfort for the Kuomintang as they worked to prepare for the next phase of the offensive was that 11th and 23rd Army Groups faced an even worse struggle, the Kuomintang at least had supplies to be stolen after all. There are stories that some Japanese units tried to buy stolen equipment from the Chinese bandits, though how successful such attempts were is uncertain as many Chinese peasant would claim they had handed over rusty rifles or ammunition boxes full of dirt and stones, though these claims were made at a time when they had to answer to the Kuomintang. Despite all the travails Yokoyama and Tanaka were determined to hold the line, not only because of the strategic importance of Guangzhou, which was somewhat diminished as the British tightened their grip on Hong Kong, but because they had little choice except to try, unless they wished to fall on their swords immediately. The soldiers under their command cared nothing about matters of honour or grand strategy, they were simply soldiers with their backs to the wall whose only chance of survival was to hold the line long enough for the promised reinforcements to arrive, surrendering to the Chinese was not an option anyone wanted to consider [10].

[1] So I’ve had to patch together various forces that took part in battles in China in 1944, though of course with the roles of attacker and defender largely reversed.

[2] The 23rd Army was a poor formation IOTL, it’s even worse here.

[3] The 11th Army is stretched far too thin and unlike OTL the attack on Liuzhou was a failure.

[4] There are an awful lot more American ‘advisors’ in China than OTL.

[5] The Japanese have allowed their disdain for the Kuomintang to get the better of them.

[6] While ignoring the mistake that led to the Japanese retaking the town in the first place.

[7] It’s a desperate strategy and they don’t have the manpower anywhere to hold on.

[8] On this occasion Chiang Kai-Shek is right and Stillwell is wrong.

[9] The Kuomintang will not be magnanimous in victory to put it mildly.

[10] And we will see how that works out for them.

 

[Garrison]

1st September – 13th November 1944 – China – Part III – Stumbling to Victory​

When the Kuomintang resumed their advance towards Guangzhou the battle that followed was a brutal attritional struggle, ‘two boxers flailing away hoping they might get lucky and land a punch’ as one American observer put it. The Kuomintang forces have come in for much criticism over the years which are superficially reasonable given their superiority in numbers and firepower. Certainly, there were numerous instances of poor communication, inadequate leadership, and lack of discipline that made the Kuomintang advance far slower than many would have expected even at the time, however they advanced nonetheless and did so in the face of surprisingly stiff resistance from what post battle assessments classed as low-quality lines of communication troops and labour units deployed into the frontlines by the Japanese. In some ways the poor standard of the Japanese troops worked on their favour, given that little was expected from them other than serving as cannon fodder there were few examples of banzai charges or troops defiantly holding a position beyond the point where it made any tactical sense to do so. The goal of the Japanese defenders holding the line before Guangzhou was survival and nothing more, such idealistic notions as death before dishonour or fighting to the bitter end for the Shōwa Emperor got short shrift from soldiers in the front lines, many of whom were Koreans or drawn from ethnic groups who cared nothing for the Empire of Japan. What drove them on was the fear of falling into the hands of the vengeful Kuomintang and they constantly had one eye on their avenues of retreat to the north [1].

These soldiers attitude was unofficially endorsed by General Tanaka and General Yokoyama, whose exhortations to their troops to fight focused on the need to hold out until reinforcements arrived rather than stirring entreaties to fight for the honour of Japan, which were reserved for the increasingly inventive reports being sent up the chain of command back to Tokyo, in the hopes that the desperately needed reinforcements might yet be dispatched. After the disaster at Wuzhou Tanaka in particular was wary about launching any counterattacks and several opportunities to repel the Chinese forces were passed up by this cautious approach, though this was undoubtedly the correct decision by the Japanese General as the sheer weight of the Kuomintang forces would almost have certainly engulfed any local successes just as they had at Wuzhou. Despite these more conservative tactics it was clear by the 16th of October that the position of 11th Army Group had come completely untenable. The British had achieved their final victory in Hong Kong which meant there was now little to prevent them mounting their own offensive in the direction of Guangzhou barring a painfully thin screening force made up mainly of troops driven out of Kowloon and as such badly disorganized and lacking in weapons and ammunition [2].

The British did mount several small demonstration attacks between the 16th and 25th of October, these however were simply intended to probe the Japanese lines and determine their remaining strength. This did aid the Kuomintang by increasing the Japanese anxieties about a fresh British offensive pushing north. This was never seriously considered in London and Montgomery was adamantly against getting dragged into what he bluntly termed the ‘quagmire of China’. There were discussions about where, when, or indeed if the British would mount any further major operations in the Pacific theatre, but Guangzhou was definitely not on the agenda, which suited the ambitions of Chiang Kai-shek who wanted an unequivocal victory for the Chinese Nationalists regardless of the fact it would mean heavier casualties for the Kuomintang forces [3].

What reinforcements reached the defending forces never made it further than the northern end of the area of 23rd Army Group, as the concern remained that the Kuomintang would turn the northern flank of the force and drive the 23rd and the 11th back into a pocket around Guangzhou. Some in the Kwantung Army saw this as all but inevitable and thus 23rd Army Group should pull back south and east towards Guangzhou, shortening their lines and perhaps allow them to exhaust the Kuomintang forces momentum and open them up to a properly organized counteroffensive when there were proper reinforcements available. Neither Tanaka nor Yokoyama were inclined to support such a plan, seeing it as little more than an excuse to push the two Army Groups into some heroic stand that would achieve nothing except to sacrifice their remaining men while still losing Guangzhou. They successfully argued that it would be better to preserve their men for future battles, especially as the British control of Hong Kong undermined the strategic value of Guangzhou regardless of any other considerations [4].

Not willing to wait for some superior to think better of this plan 11th Army began to pivot and draw back north on the 22nd of October. This was a complex movement, especially as they intended to fall back past Guangzhou with only a modest rear-guard force left to defend the city and delay the Kuomintang advance. That the 11th Army Group was able to complete the move successfully was partly due to the caution of the Kuomintang, the unexpectedness of the strategy also played its part, however. The Chinese had expected the Japanese to dig and fight to the end and when they began their withdrawal the Kuomintang commanders suspected that this was a trap, perhaps a preliminary to some large-scale kamikaze attack, or even a chemical or biological attack [5].

This was not an unreasonable fear given the activities of Unit 731 and the Japanese would certainly have had no qualms about making use of the biological agents at their disposal. What prevented this was that unknown to the Chinese the elements of Unit 731 attached to the Japanese command based in Guangzhou had been killed by a bombing raid that had destroyed their operational HQ at the beginning of the battle, the site having been mistaken for the forward headquarters of 23rd Army Group. Kamikaze attacks were not carried out because the IJAAF was desperately short on aircraft and fuel and most of those available to support the defence of Guangzhou had been destroyed in the early stages of the battle. Still the fear of such attacks certainly impacted the operations of the Kuomintang and bought the Japanese forces a little extra space and time that they desperately needed [6].

The Kuomintang forces reached the outskirts of Guangzhou on the 30th of November and over the next few days cleared out the rear-guard units one by one as they carefully advanced into the city. These last defenders were among the few Japanese units to fight to the death against the Chinese attacks, though this may have reflected the fact that the Kuomintang gave them little choice in the matter. Despite this dogged resistance and the painfully slow advance of the Chinese the city was completely secured by the 9th of November and the Great Southern Operation was declared to be completed four days later on the 13th of November, again prompting the displeasure of General Stillwell who had been eager to continue the pursuit and completely destroy the 11th and 23rd Army Groups. This disagreement marked the end of Stillwell’s time in China, and he was unceremoniously removed from his duties on the 20th of November and soon after he was on his way back to the USA, where he would list the defects of the Kuomintang and Chiang Kai-shek to anyone in Washington who would listen, which was not as many people as Stillwell would have liked [7].

For Chiang himself the recapture of Guangzhou achieved all his goals, consolidating the position of the Kuomintang, and himself, as the legitimate government in China and ensuring continued and indeed increased support from the USA. Kuomintang forces met up with the British around the 23rd of November and while the meeting was civil the British were determined that the Kuomintang should focus their efforts on pushing the Japanese back and not concern themselves with any thoughts of ‘assisting’ in garrisoning Hong Kong, a suggestion that Chiang Kai-shek was fortunately dissuaded from making [8].

The strengthening of the Kuomintang position inevitably constituted a setback for the Chinese Communist movement, especially as the Nationalists seized documents that showed the communists had passed intelligence to the Japanese about the Southern Operation, and even worse from the Communist perspective the information allowed the Kuomintang to identify several spies in their ranks and these communist agents would be swiftly eliminated as Chiang Kai-shek took advantage of the victory to clean house, removing dissenting voices and some men of questionable loyalty to the Nationalist cause. Some who had been willing to work with the Communists for no other reason than they seemed best equipped to fight the Japanese and drive them out of China now changed their stance, either for pragmatic reasons or because the Kuomintang were now able to apply some ‘vigorous’ means to persuade them to do so. Mao Zedong was far from happy with these developments and he now took to demanding more aid from the USSR so they could mount their own major operations and advance the cause of the Communist revolution. The autumn of 1944 was not the best time for anyone to be lecturing Stalin on ideological matters or demanding weapons and equipment. STAVKA were laying out their own plans for operations against the Japanese and they did not involve catering to the demands of Mao Zedong [9].

For the Japanese the loss of Guangzhou was not the strategic blow that it might have been a few months earlier given that the Royal Navy and RAF could now operate out of Hong Kong and interdict what little shipping had been able to make its way to the port through the gauntlet of Allied air power and submarines. In political terms though the fact that the Kuomintang had defeated the Imperial Japanese Army in open battle was cataclysmic and excuses about the lack of manpower and the threat from the British did nothing to ameliorate the impact. The emperor himself was shaken and sent a note that expressed his concerns, albeit couched in the courtliest language, to Prime Minister Tojo. The usually unshakable Tojo was unsettled by the Kuomintang victory even before he received the note from the emperor and this rippled out from the Prime Minister’s office all through the Army General Staff, as it now seemed all their calculations about the likely course of the war would have to be re-evaluated, especially as there had been no let-up in the cadence of Allied offensive operations, with the Americans unleashing Operation Iceberg even as the battle for Guangzhou was still raging [10].

[1] ITTL the Kuomintang are becoming to the Japanese what the Red Army was to the Germans, militarily second rate but vast pitiless and vengeful.

[2] Effectively the British can flank the entire Japanese position at Guangzhou, if they feel so inclined.

[3] The Kuomintang or Chiang Kai-Shek anyway is determined to make his government the legitimate rulers of China, regardless of the consequences.

[4] For one brief moment sanity prevails in Japanese strategy.

[5] This is perfectly reasonable as the Japanese probably would do one of those if they had the means to do so.

[6] The survivors might even be deployed some place safe, like Manchuria…

[7] Stillwell was doomed, he just lasted longer than OTL.

[8] Hong Kong is off the menu for the Chinese, possibly permanently depending on post war events.

[9] Mao and Stalin’s relationship is getting frostier.

[10] And Okinawa is next before we get some politics.

 

[Garrison]

28th October 1944 – 7th January 1945 – The Invasion of Okinawa – Part I – The Last Stop​

Okinawa marked the end point of the US island hopping campaign, and there were voices that suggested that the campaign should have ended with the seizure of the Marianas Islands. Tinian in particular provided a base from which B-29 bombers were already beginning to conduct raids against Japan, preparing the way for an invasion. With the bombers already hitting Japan and the demands of organizing the invasion of the Home Islands it was not unreasonable to question the strategic value of taking Okinawa. The argument in favour initially saw Okinawa as a base for USAAF fighters and fighter bombers, bringing them close enough to operate over large parts of Japan, allowing them to target their IJAAF counterparts and provide escorts for the B-29s, which had been suffering serious losses during the daytime raids that the USAAF had still been resolutely pressing ahead with in the belief that the B-29 really was a ‘superfortress’ that could break through Japanese anti-aircraft defences. The value of Okinawa as a fighter base was reduced as USAAF General Curtis LeMay assumed command of the bombing campaign over Japan and enacted a switch in tactics, from daylight precision raids at high altitude, which had proven anything but precise given the effects of the previously unknown jet stream winds over Japan, to low level area night bombing, with a heavy use of incendiary weapons [1].

Somewhat ironically it was LeMay and other advocates of strategic bombing who became the strongest advocates for the Okinawa operation. Seeing an opportunity to finally prove that airpower alone could win a battle and with the political leadership in Washington increasingly uneasy about the potential losses in an invasion the USAAF now wanted to base bombers in Okinawa, specifically B-17 Flying Fortresses and B-24 Liberators. The logic was obvious, if the fighters that had escorted these bombers over Germany could reach targets in Japan why not commit those bombers as well and add a substantial extra tonnage of bombs to the already heavy weight of explosives and incendiaries being dropped by the B-29s. The B-17 and B-24 had already seen service in the Pacific Theatre, but with the war in Europe over LeMay was effectively advocating the relocation of the entirety of 8th Airforce to the Pacific [2].

The US Army had plenty of reasons to dismiss the idea of victory from the air, but they were also the ones who had calculated the likely losses from an invasion of Japan. They couldn’t deny that the strategic bombing campaign had contributed to the victory over Germany and anything that reduced those losses had to be supported, even if meant supporting the ‘bomber mafia’. This did not mean that army and navy planners had banished their concerns over the novel issues that the invasion of Okinawa presented. When the American forces had moved to occupy Tinian island they had encountered not only a Japanese garrison but a Japanese civilian population that numbered almost 16,000 people as well as around 3,000 Koreans who had been settled on the island. Faced with the success of the US invasion many chose to take their own lives rather fall into American hands and others had been killed by the Japanese garrison to ‘spare them’ from the alleged horrors they would face at the hands of the occupiers. The Japanese population of Okinawa was around 600,000, plus a Japanese garrison estimated at 70,000 men. How to deal with a potentially hostile and desperate civilian population if it chose to rise up against the invaders while the Americans were still engaged fighting the garrison was something that occupied a great deal of time during the planning for the Okinawa operation [3].

Unknown to the Americans desperation had driven the Japanese army to recruit troops from amongst two groups they despised almost equally, the native Ryukyuan people of Okinawa and the Imperial Japanese Navy. About 30,000 Ryukyuan were recruited, split roughly evenly between non-uniformed labour forces and an ill-equipped force of Boeitai, a rear area militia, who would nonetheless be thrown into the front lines when the battle began. The IJN had a naval base at Oroku and with no naval forces to support about 9,500 personnel had been drafted for use as infantry, though only about a tenth of this number had received any proper training or equipment for this role, the rest were expected to rely on fighting spirit and the same sort of improvised weapons that the civilians were encouraged to create. The Japanese even went so far as to recruit child soldiers, with some 1500 boys between the ages of 14-16 being drafted for military service. They were arguably better trained and equipped than the naval troops but even so some could barely hold a rifle, let alone use it effectively. All these measures increased the numbers available to the defenders, but it is debatable whether they did much to increases its effective combat power [4].

Before the Americans could deal with these ground troops, they would have to overcome the Japanese airpower committed to defending Okinawa, because of course the proximity to Japan that made Okinawa so attractive to the USAAF meant that the IJAAF could launch air attacks from Kyushu and Formosa against any landing on Okinawa and large numbers of Japanese aircraft had been accumulated for Kamikaze attacks. The USN had adjusted its tactics and weapons to counter this threat after their previous experiences, more anticraft guns on every ship, including many of the transports, more specialist anti-aircraft warships and more fighters in the carrier air wings. This had helped reduce losses in the earlier battles of 1943, but the Kamikaze strength available to the Japanese around Okinawa was far larger than that encountered off the Philippines and posed a far greater challenge in protecting the invasion fleet. How much of a challenge was something the Americans remained ignorant of, as their intelligence estimates placed about 90 aircraft on Formosa, when in fact there were closer to 650, dismantled or camouflaged and scattered in towns and villages where it was easy to conceal them. There were even more aircraft being held ready for Kamikaze attacks, meaning the US landing force would face attacks from nearly 1500 suicide aircraft [5].

It wasn’t only Kamikaze attacks from the air the Americans would have to contend with, there was also a force of explosive packed Shin'yō class motorboats assigned to the defence of Okinawa. The Shin'yō were open topped boats with a crew of one or two depending on the specific type and a warhead consisting of 300kg of explosives and a pair of antiship rockets intended to be fired off before the boat made its final charge. Their only defence was their speed, being capable of 55 kmph/30 kn. That the Japanese army was dubious about the use of these weapons, even considering disbanding the battalions they had formed, may have had more to do with their distrust of naval weapons rather than the Shin'yō being any less practical in combat than any of the other suicide weapons. In the end the battalions were retained and some 800 of the Shin'yō were dispatched to Okinawa to take part in the defence [6].

Despite its losses the IJN had also formulated a plan to launch a counterattack against any landing attempt on Okinawa, and this plan, called Ten-Go, was hardly any less desperate than the Kamikaze attacks, indeed it was arguably no less than a suicide attack in itself. To face off against the armada the American were bringing to bear the Japanese mustered only a dozen warships, led by the battleship Hyūga, which had by 1944 been converted into a dubious carrier/battleship hybrid. This meant the Hyūga had a flight deck that occupied the rear third of the ship and used a pair of catapults to fly aircraft off the deck. The airwing of the carrier was intended to be 24 aircraft though at Okinawa she only carried 19 aircraft, all Kamikazes and such was the state of the IJN forces that this was the most powerful carrier available to them. Ten-Go went beyond being a forlorn hope, barring incredible luck or divine intervention the IJN force was doomed to failure before it even set out, and much the same could be said for the Kamikaze aircraft and the Shin'yō motorboats despite the impressive looking numbers deployed. That so many resources were committed to Ten-Go reflected the grim reality that face the Japanese by this stage of the war, unless an Allied force could be struck a crippling blow before it could get its troops ashore then however hard the Japanese soldiers fought the Allies would take their objectives and Okinawa would be occupied, and once it fell the next logical target would be Kyushu itself [7].

The apprehension of the Japanese was fully justified. At a generous estimate the defenders of Okinawa had about 100,000 troops available and were short on artillery, armour, ammunition and supplies. Against this the Americans were committing the Tenth Army under General Simon Buckner Jr. It included the 1st,2nd, and 6th Marine Divisions and the US Army XXIV Corps mustering more than 540,000 men. It would be able to call upon the support of the Fifth Fleet, including the aircraft of Fast Carrier Task Force 58, which consisted of 15 Carriers, supported by 6 battleships, 12 cruisers and 56 destroyers. It was able to deploy around 1,100 aircraft and represented the pinnacle of the massive US effort to build up their naval forces since the devastating attack at Pearl Harbor [8].

The battle for Okinawa would come down to the Japanese hoping that they could pile up enough American dead to force them to pull back while the Americans were equally determined to use their material superiority to minimize their losses and crush the Japanese defences. The outcome of the battle might not have been in doubt, but how many lives it would cost to secure Okinawa was the question that exercised the Americans [9].

[1] LeMay is introducing the same tactics as OTL, he just intends to extend them still further.

[2] Given the relative timing of events building up a B-17 and B-24 force on Okinawa is an attractive option.

[3] It’s the Americans first experience in dealing with a large Japanese civilian population, it will not go any better than OTL.

[4] The IJA hit the bottom of the barrel and just scraped on through.

[5] It sounds almost overwhelming but given the quality of the pilots and difficulties of co-ordination its not nearly as bad as it seems.

[6] IOTL they were disbanded and then hastily reformed. Here the Shin'yō don’t suffer that issue.

[7] It’s just a question of how Kyushu will be attacked.

[8] And remember the British and the Chinese are launching parallel major operations even as the Americans gear up for Okinawa.

[9] And we’ll see how that works out soon.

 

[Garrison]

28th October 1944 – 7th January 1945 – The Invasion of Okinawa – Part II – Operation Iceberg​

As the first US soldiers came ashore on the 28th of October along the southwest coast of Okinawa in the Chatan, region they met only light resistance. No one was deceived by this however; the US commanders had become all too familiar with Japanese tactics by now and moved swiftly to reinforce their position ashore and offload supplies before the inevitable Kamikaze attacks on the assault force were launched. The only real surprise that the Japanese achieved in this phase of the attack was that rather than being launched on the 29th the suicide attacks didn’t begin until the night of 30th October – 1st November, though this may have been a matter of difficulties in communication rather than deliberate strategy. The first attacks began around 2200 hours and was conducted by between seventy-five and one hundred Shin'yō, the exact number being hard to pin down given that there was some duplication of sightings and engagement reports in the USN records, and the Japanese accounts are incomplete to say the least. Putting aside the exact numbers the scale of these attacks fell far short of the ambitions of the Japanese but the strength of the Shin'yō gathered at Okinawa had been whittled away by USN carrier strikes and the difficulties incurred in maintaining the boats and keeping them serviceable. Not all the Shin'yō were in range of the landing zone either and efforts to move them south after the 1st of November were not successful [1].

The Shin'yō attacks that were conducted were costly and almost entirely unsuccessful. The US fleet had a powerful screening force protecting the landing zones and they had been warned about the suicide boats. Night offered little protection for the Shin'yō from the sophisticated radars carried by the ships of the screen and light weapons designed primarily for anti-aircraft defence proved well suited to targeting the unarmoured and highly volatile small craft. Only one of the suicide boats made a successful run, hitting the Fletcher Class destroyer USS Johnston just aft of amidships and triggering secondary explosions the ship’s port side depth charge rack. The combination all but broke the Johnston in two and she sank with all hands in less than ten minutes at around 0200 hours. This was a meagre reward for so much expenditure in time and resources but the Japanese saw things differently, mainly because they convinced themselves that as many as a dozen US ships had been hit and sunk. They reached this remarkable conclusion it seems by interpreting the detonation of any Shin'yō in the vicinity of a US warship as being an indication of a hit and of course multiple reports of the successful attack on the USS Johnston being treated as separate events. This explains why the Japanese expended so much energy trying to regroup the remaining Shin'yō for further operations and while Japanese records claim there were further attacks up until the 8th of November there is nothing in the American reports to indicate any of these attempts got anywhere near the landing zone [2].

The morning of the 1st of November saw an attack by several waves of Kamikaze aircraft, almost entirely launched from Kyushu as those hoarded for the task on Okinawa had been savaged by American air attacks even more thoroughly than the Shin'yō, and having been effectively wiped out, a situation that was not conveyed by the commanders on Okinawa to their IJAAF counterparts on Kyushu. The Kyushu contingent was thus left expecting a co-ordinated action with the aircraft on Okinawa and instead bore the full brunt of USN fighters and anti-aircraft fire. The one advantage the Kyushu force had was that the Kamikazes could now deploy a new weapon specifically designed for suicide attacks, the MXY-7 Okha manned missile. This was a weapon the Japanese had devised from information they had been supplied by the Germans on the A4 rocket and Fi 103 flying bomb and while the Germans had not pursued the Fi 103 with the same energy as they had applied to their rocket program the Japanese had poured considerable effort into their version, believing that with a human pilot to guide it the Okha could inflict the kind of losses on Allied naval forces that would force them to withdraw. The rocket propelled Ohka’s combination of speed, small size, and a large warhead certainly made it dangerous, but it suffered from several acute drawbacks. The desperate haste to bring it into service left meant it was riddled with problems, including potentially catastrophic failures of the rocket motor. At least one exploded just after launch, severely damaging the carrier aircraft, and this highlighted the other drawback with the Okha. The large slow-moving bombers carrying the Okha would inevitably draw the attention of enemy fighters, which given the paucity of fighter cover meant that the only hope for survival for the bombers was to jettison the Okha and run, something which the crews knew would be treated as cowardice by their superiors. The bombers thus had little choice but to press on regardless and the Okha proved itself a potent weapon at Okinawa. Even though only twenty-two were deployed in the attacks on 1st November and only fifteen were successfully launched, five scored hits. One cargo ship was hit and left burning out of control. The surviving crew evacuated, and the ship sank at 1015 hours. Of the warships hit the Destroyer Escort USS Jordan suffered the worst, capsizing and sinking at 1100 Hours. The other warships survived, but all three had to withdraw from Okinawa, the Anti-Aircraft Cruiser USS Oakland under tow as it had lost all power. As worrying as the Okha attacks were for the USN the flying bomb had in fact reached the peak of its success on that first day. The Allied bombing campaign and the breakdown in Japanese infrastructure it wrought crippled production of the Okha and it would only make sporadic appearances for the rest of the war [3].

The rest of the Kamikaze air attacks despite being on a considerably larger scale than the Okha attacks were decidedly less successful as their tactics were ones the USN was prepared for. The American’s fighter CAP was vectors onto the approaching waves of Kamikazes well before the Kamikazes had the landing force in sight and they were cut to pieces, with the remnants that survived to press on running into a wall of flak that decimated the survivors. In the end no more than a dozen of them struck home and while the damage done to the individual ships was severe the attacks had little impact on the landing overall and as with the Okha there simply weren’t the aircraft available to repeat the attacks on the same scale as the 1st of November and the attacks carried out over the following week simply served to use up the remaining Kamikaze units without achieving any useful results [4].

With the Kamikaze forces expended the last hopes of the Japanese for disrupting the landings lay with the ships of Operation Ten-Go, who had been hoping that the Kamikazes would open the way for them to do some damage. By the time they approached on the 3rd of November Admiral Seiichi Itō commanding the force from the Hyūga had concluded that the Kamikazes had failed and yet he had no leeway to change the plan. The Ten-Go force were expected to press on regardless and Itō advised his ships accordingly. The atmosphere aboard the Hyūga and its supporting force was grim, By the evening of the 2nd of November they knew they had been spotted by US reconnaissance planes and Admiral Itō, knew he could expect major airstrikes the following morning. Even so the scale of the air strikes launched by the Americans took him and his subordinates by surprise. The US carriers mustered more than two hundred and fifty torpedo and dive bombers and they ravaged the Japanese ships. As the largest and most inviting target Hyūga received most of the attention, at least until five torpedoes and about a dozen bomb hits reduced her to a burning, listing wreck, obscured from further attacks by the thick pall of smoke billowing from the out-of-control fires. By the time Hyūga went down at 1020 Hours the light cruiser Yahagi was also sinking and five of the eight escorting destroyers had also been destroyed. The remainder could do little more than pick up survivors and beat a hasty retreat. Ten-Go amounted the final humiliation of the once feared Imperial Japanese Navy, what little was left of it was now held in port with the intention of deploying it in Kamikaze attacks against the all but inevitable invasion of the Home Islands [5].

With the landing zone secured there was nothing to stop the Americans consolidating and expanding their bridgehead on the island and yet despite their overwhelming numerical and material superiority it would still take the Americans three months to subdue Okinawa. The Japanese defenders fought bitterly, and they had a series of prepared defensive lines they could fall back on one after the other, taking advantage off hills and caves to dig in and frustrate the American advance time and again. Napalm bombs and flamethrowers became key weapons in clearing these lines, with conventional artillery and air strikes proving far less effective in breaking the defences. These were bloody and terrible battles, but in some ways the reaction of the civilian population to being occupied by US troops was worse. Inundated with propaganda that told them they would face nothing but brutality and death at the hands of the Americans many chose to commit suicide, killing not only themselves but their children as well. These displays of resistance and refusal to be conquered were intended to show the Americans that they could never hope to invade the Home Islands and force the Japanese people to capitulate. On one level these attempts succeeded, forcing the planners in Washington to revise their estimates of the losses expected on both sides upwards, pointing to a truly horrific toll if Operation Downfall went ahead. However, the Japanese hope that drawing the desired conclusion about the consequences of an invasion would force the Americans to negotiate terms acceptable in Tokyo would not be fulfilled. As the US forces pushed the Japanese further and further north engineers moved in behind, constructing airfields that not only provided air support for the advancing troops but laid down the infrastructure need for USAAF fighter and heavy bombers to operate over Japan [6].

The final Japanese redoubt in the south of Okinawa, the Shuri Line, was reached by the first week in November and yet it took until the 7th of January 1945 to finally reduce it and declare Okinawa secured. Even after this date there were sporadic attacks by small groups of Japanese soldiers, sometimes even by individual holdouts. These attacks simply reinforced the idea of the Japanese as unyielding fanatics, serving to justify the plans taking shape to bomb and starve the Home Islands into surrender. This view of the Japanese military was hardly contradicted by the actions of the IJA leaders in Tokyo, they still refused to countenance any talk of surrender, though their assertion that they would destroy the Allies if they dared to set foot on the Home Islands were being met with increasing scepticism in certain quarters [7].

[1] Basically the Japanese had an ambitious plan for the Kamikazes, which is falling well short.

[2] From the Japanese mindset the Shin'yō had to succeed so they did succeed.

[3] I was surprised to discover the Okha actually worked, but then it was a fast missile with an unjammable guidance system.

[4] Those large reserves of aircraft don’t last long when they only get to make one flight.

[5] The IJN is strictly a coastal defence force now, and not much of one.

[6] A very condensed version because the land battle follows much the same pattern as its OTL counterpart.

[7] And things are about to get still worse for the Japanese.

 

[Garrison]

9th November – 30th December 1944 – Korea – Part I – Once More Unto the Breach​

When the idea of a landing in Korea came up during discussions about the next phase of the strategy to defeat Japan the British were less than enthusiastic when it became clear that the Americans wanted them to take the lead while US forces were engaged on Okinawa. It was the great failing of Japanese strategy that the brutal experience of the Allied forces during the liberation of Hong Kong served to make such a landing a much more attractive proposition. The initial proposal was not for the wholesale clearance of the Korean Peninsula but to secure a perimeter in the south of the country, securing the port of Busan and possibly extending as far north as Seoul, enough territory for the construction of airbases from which raids could be conducted against Japan and the port facilities to support them. Such bases would put the main northern Japanese island of Honshu in easy range of light and medium bomber as well as fighter bombers, while heavy bombers would be able to range into Kyushu. This would put cities such as Fukoka, Osaka, Hiroshima and even the traditional capital of Kyoto in reach.

In the face of Japanese intransigence and brutality, as well as the grim estimates for the death toll in any amphibious assault on the Home Islands, mounting a full strategic bombing campaign was increasingly a priority in Washington and London. B-29s operating from China, and later Tinian in the Marshall Islands, were already mounting raids against Japan and would prove capable of doing considerable damage by themselves. Even so the prospect of being able to deploy B-25s, Mosquitos, Lancasters and B-17s to add their weight of bombs to the offensive had any undeniable strategic logic and so the British finally to mount a landing in Korea, scheduled to begin just after the Americans began their assault on Okinawa [1].

The British however did not agree to mount the operation without American support, not only in the form of landing craft and amphibious assault vehicles but also the deployment of US divisions to take part in the fighting, with the former being somewhat easier to obtain than the latter. Between equipment being transferred from the European theatre and new build vehicles from US factories and ports there was finally an abundance of the mechanical means necessary to mount amphibious assaults in the Pacific. Commanders who had been expected to make do with whatever could be spared from the war against Germany were almost overwhelmed by the quantity and quality of materiel at their disposal and this may have encouraged a certain degree of overambition when it came to planning operations, with possible operations against Formosa and Hainan being discussed alongside the plans for Okinawa, Hong Kong and Korea. Wiser heads had prevailed, and the available resources would be concentrated on achieving overwhelming force against the key targets and it was this consideration that led to the US XV Corps being assigned to the Korean operation. XV Corps had been activated in February of 1943 under the command of General Wade H. Haislip and it had originally been intended that the division would be shipped to Europe for the final phase of the push to Berlin. This plan had been postponed and then cancelled as Germany collapsed in the spring of 1944 and they had then been assigned to the Pacific theatre, where they had shifted around various organizational charts before finally being assigned to the Korean operation under British command, something that did not please General Haislip [2].

While the US deployed a single Corps to the Korean operation, the British would contribute three, though as was typical by this time British troops made up a minority of the force. It actually consisted of one British, one Indian and one recently revived Australian Corps. The Australian III Corps consisted of the Australian 6th and 7th Division, the 6th having been returned to offensive operational duties as the end of the war drew closer and the Australian government went into full reverse on their previous policy regarding the deployment of Australian soldiers overseas. The British deployed the XI Corps, which much like the US XV Corps had been in reserve in Britain during 1943 while undergoing training and reorganization. The Indian contribution fell to XXXIII Corps, though the Corps had been reorganized once again as the 2nd New Zealand had been rotated home for the time being and been replaced by the Indian 3rd Infantry Division, finally making the XXXIII a purely Indian formation. The Indian 9th Division had also been rotated out of the line for rest and recovery after Hong Kong and its place was taken by the fresh 12th Indian Division, which had also only been formed in 1943, but had undergone extensive training for amphibious operations. All three Corps also had additional artillery, especially more self-propelled guns, attached to increase their available firepower and what had been 3rd Armoured Brigade had finally become 3rd Armoured Division with arrival of new formations equipped with the latest Centaur and Churchill tanks [3].

As far as naval support went the Royal Navy deployed four fleet carriers and five battleships, with the usual accompaniment of supporting vessels, alongside specialist landing craft equipped to fire rocket salvos. There was also a small USN contingent attached to support XV Corps, led by the cruiser USS Indianapolis. This degree of force almost seemed like overkill given the limited scale of the objective, but Korea was a very different proposition to the other places where the British had mounted amphibious operations as it had never been a part of any of the European colonial empires and indeed had been a Japanese colony for decades [4].

The formal annexation of Korea in 1910 was just the final step in establishing Japanese control over the peninsula, formally recognizing the de facto situation in the country . Once it had been annexed Korea was subject to ‘Japanization’, which saw an acceleration of industrialization, the construction of public works, and an influx of Japanese colonists, though the numbers of these were disappointing and by the time of World War II they amounted to around 560,000 ethnic Japanese out of a total population in Korea of 21 million. There was also during this time a flow of Koreans in the other direction, many of whom adopted Japanese names to integrate themselves and find work, and many of them flourished despite the notoriously closed nature of Japanese society. Not everyone was content to accept Japanese rule over Korea and there were certainly resistance organizations that sprang up over the years, but there were also a substantial number of Korean volunteers for the Japanese military and some even became senior officers, rising all the way to the rank of General [5].

When the war began there was a dramatic upsurge in the number of Koreans shipped to Japan for forced labour, but there was no conscription into the Japanese military until October of 1943. Some of these troops were sent to Japan but the majority were retained in Korea to shore up the defences in the face of the prospect of an Allied invasion. These conscripts were poorly trained and lacking in support weapons such as machine guns and mortars, but they would prove surprisingly resolute, having been subjected to the same indoctrination as the Japanese about the fate of themselves and their families if the Allies successfully invaded. According to Japanese propaganda wholesale looting, rape and murder would be unleashed on Korea, which was little more than the Japanese projecting the worst aspects of their own rampage across Asia and the Pacific on to their enemies. This is not to say that there had not been brutal acts carried out by Allied soldiers, but these were exceptions rather than a matter of policy. Given the tight Japanese control of the dissemination of news in Korea, and their own often heavy-handed rule, it is unsurprising that many were willing to believe the worst and conclude ‘better the devil you know’. Arguably this indoctrination began to backfire as the Allies tightened the noose around the Japanese Home Islands, with some very quietly wondering if a peace that preserved the Japanese people, even under less than favourable terms, might be better than the wholesale annihilation they had been told an invasion would bring [6]?

This indoctrination naturally extended to the Japanese population of Korea and where their counterparts in Okinawa had been encouraged to commit suicide rather than fall into American hands the commanders in Korean took a more pragmatic attitude, if the civilians were going to die anyway why not arm them, however crudely and have them die trying to kill the enemy? This idea was also being worked into the plans for the defence of the Home Islands, and to say the weapons issued were crude was an understatement. Many of them were positively medieval, little more than modified farm implements and wooden spears, leavened with a smattering grenades and other explosives intended to be used if civilians found themselves ‘cornered’ by Allied soldiers. Fortunately for the Allies the logistics and organization of even this crude effort proved an insurmountable challenge for the Japanese authorities in Korea and most civilians showed the simple common-sense to flee before the advancing Allied forces [7].

Efforts had been made via the SOE and the OSS to establish guerrilla force to attack the Japanese, however these proved utterly fruitless for several reasons. Firstly, unlike so many other places in Asia the British and Americans had no previous colonial connections to draw upon to contacts and intelligence assets in Korea. This issue was compounded by the fact that nationalist groups inside the country were every bit as prone to xenophobia as the Japanese and while they wanted independence for Korea they did agree with the Japanese rhetoric of ‘Asia for the Asians’ and were by and large hostile towards any Allied overtures, as well as being frequently penetrated by the Kempeitai. This meant that even when the Allies did manage to establish some tenuous lines of communication they didn’t last long and they were abandoned after two teams of agents were betrayed to the Japanese and executed [8].

The grinding progress of the battle for Okinawa did not go unnoticed by the men preparing to land in Korea, they could only hope that the plan they had devised would allow them to take the Japanese by surprise and destroy the defending forces before they could indulge in the brutality of their counterparts in Hong Kong [9].

[1] The British would really like to flatten Japan before putting boots on the ground.

[2] XV Corps did go to Europe IOTL, winding up in Austria at the end of the war.

[3] The British formations in Asia are finally catching up with their counterparts who fought in Europe in regard to equipment, meaning the likes of the M3 Stuart are finally leaving the frontline.

[4] USS Indianapolis is involved in its share of major operations but sees out the war and is scrapped in 1956.

[5] I was surprised to find out just how much integration there was between Japan and Korea.

[6] Basically some people in Japan are thinking that they really would prefer dishonour rather than death. Not enough to change Japanese policy, for the time being anyway.

[7] Again when you’ve told your civilians that the Allies are the bogeyman its hard to get them to stand up and fight when all they have to do so is a pointy stick.

[8] And of course there are no communists they could turn to in Korea…

[9] And we shall see how that works out.

​

 

[Garrison]

9th November – 30th December 1944 – Korea – Part II – The Left Hook​

The landings west of Busan met far less opposition from Kamikaze attacks than the US landings on Okinawa had faced and, as many American historians of the Pacific War have repeatedly pointed out, this was precisely because of the Japanese focus on Okinawa. Most of the Kamikaze reserves on the Home Islands had been based on Kyushu to intervene at Okinawa and much of what was left was still there, positioned to meet the looming threat of an invasion of the Home Islands. The few kamikaze attacks that were made on the ships of what had finally been officially named as the British Pacific Fleet were largely ineffectual. The most dramatic attack was on the carrier HMS Victorious, which was hit by a Ki-46 ‘Dinah’ twin engine reconnaissance aircraft carrying a single 250kg bomb. Fuel from the aircraft created a large fire and the Japanese were convinced that Victorious had been crippled if not sunk by the attack. In fact, the highly effective damage control aboard Victorious had the fires out and her flight deck back in action within two hours, this was because of the armoured flight decks favoured by Royal Navy aircraft carriers, this came at the expense of carrying smaller airwings, which had led to considerable questioning of the design choice earlier in the war. The rise of the Kamikazes had rather quieted these complaints [1].

The Dinah might have been more effective in its intended reconnaissance role, as the invasion force had managed to approach Korea without being detected. There had been submarines assigned to patrol the waters off Korea earlier in 1944, but issues with fuel and losses elsewhere had seen them reassigned to patrol the waters to the south and east of Japan. This reflected the overall Japanese assumption that after Okinawa the Allied focus would be on the Home Islands. Arguably given the resources available the Japanese had little choice but to do so even if they had realised that Korea was a target. When the first reports did reach the Japanese HQ in Korea on the 9th the immediate assumption, based on the rather thin content of those reports, was that this was a naval raid and the orders that went out prioritised alerting the anti-aircraft defences around Busan against possible carrier attacks and making sure the troops along the coast sought shelter against shore bombardment. When the first elements of IX Corps and XXXIII Indian began to come ashore the reaction of the Japanese commanders was to continue in the belief that this was a raid and precious hours were lost before they began to mobilize what resources they had available to counterattack the landings, though by the time this took place, barely an hour before sunset, the Allies were well prepared to receive it and the counterattack was easily repulsed with heavy losses. With this done the Allies were able to swiftly consolidate their beachhead and were already preparing to move on Busan and seize the port [2].

That Busan was the British target was obvious to the Japanese, however the best response to their move against the city was a subject of serious dispute in the high command. What had become the default strategy for defending a city was to fight street by street and house by house to bleed the attackers and hold out for as long as possible. The problem was that this meant allowing whatever troops were assigned to the defence of Busan to be written off and it potentially allowed the attacker to divide up the city and defeat the defenders in detail, minimizing the price the attacker paid for seizing their objective. This was a valid assessment; the Allies had refined their tactics for urban warfare and now had a plentiful supply of weapons optimized for street fighting. The problem was that this realization had come rather late in the day to and the arguments around it simply served to sow confusion among the troops assigned to the defence of Busan. What emerged was a poor compromise, with the defence of Busan focused on buying time to destroy the port facilities while avoiding becoming bogged down and allowing the Japanese forces to fall back on lines of defence further north [3].

This plan was flawed for reasons that went well beyond the confusion engendered by its adoption when the British began the advance towards the port of Busan on the 11th. The largest issue was that the means to destroy the port facilities were not available. Buildings could be set on fire and supplies thrown into the harbour but without an adequate supply of high explosives and the engineers who knew how to use them much of the port simply could not be demolished and inevitably many of the troops who were supposed to carry out the task instead found themselves drawn into fighting the British instead. The other major problem was that the lines of defence further north existed largely on paper, a product of the lack of long-term planning to defend against an invasion of Korea. These issues explain why the British were able to secure Busan by the 18th of November and were able to begin using the port as early the 22nd. Despite all their issues the Japanese did manage to disengage and fall back to an improvised defensive line hinging on the city of Daegu. Unfortunately for the Japanese this manoeuvre played into British hands as it opened the defenders up to what was colloquially referred to as ‘the left hook’, the American-Australian landing at Inchon [4].

Montgomery is usually given the credit as the author of the plan for the flanking amphibious attack at Inchon, though various members of his staff as well as some Americans and Australians have also been credited in memoirs written in those countries. It was certainly a bold plan, a reason why some have chosen to doubt it was Montgomery’s creation, but it did offer huge benefits if it succeeded. With the Japanese forces drawn into fighting on the Daegu line their rear areas were exposed, including the Korean capital of Seoul. If the Japanese could be cut off from their lines of communication and pinned down on the Daegu line then the Allies could do far more than simply secure a few bases in the south, they could drive to the north and take complete control. This was well beyond the original scope of the plans for Korea, but the opportunity to take control of most, if not all, of the peninsula and eliminate any future threats from the Japanese was not one that could be ignored and so the US XV Corps and Australian III Corps were assigned the task of taking Inchon and pushing on towards Seoul [5].

The naval bombardment and air strikes around Inchon that began on the 26th of November would last for two days before the landing took place and it certainly generated considerable concern in the Japanese forces assigned to garrison the port city, however it was initially seen as an escalation of the previous Royal Navy ‘grouse shoots’ and they sought to counter it by scraping together whatever Kamikaze assets they could, to little avail. By the second day it was obvious to the Japanese that this was more than a large-scale naval raid but with the British also very clearly preparing an attack on the Daegu line there was a reluctance on the part of the overall command to send any reinforcements to what in their opinion was likely nothing more than a diversionary action precisely intended to draw off Japanese forces. They had also concluded that if the Allies did stage another large-scale amphibious operation, it would take place much further south, with Kunsan considered a likely target and this assumption proved difficult to shake. This meant that yet again when the troops began going ashore around Inchon the Japanese were caught by surprise, a fact that would compel a number of officers to atone with their lives for this failure. This did nothing to improve the performance of the Japanese defenders [6].

The US landing was along the northwest coast of Inchon, with 35th and 8th Infantry Divisions leading the way, while elements of the 5th Infantry Division seized the island of Wolmi-do. The Australians landed south of the main tidal basin, with 6th Infantry Division making the initial assault. One thing that made the initial assault particularly hazardous was the extreme tidal range around Inchon, meaning that after securing the initial landing zones the first wave of troops would have to wait many hours until conditions were favourable for further men and equipment to be landed. This gap represented the only real opportunity for the Japanese to mount an effective counterattack, however the continuing naval and air attacks prevented them from regrouping and executing such an attack, and even if they had managed to do is doubtful that they could have mustered the strength needed to repel the landing forces. It was nonetheless a great relief to the American and Australian troops ashore when follow up waves arrived without any major Japanese effort to interfere [7].

Inchon had been effectively secured by the 3rd of December, by which time the Japanese defenders of Korea faced a new threat as the Red Army had entered the war and begun their invasion of Manchuria. The Japanese were anxious that the Soviets would swing part of their forces into Northern Korea, threatening the city of Pyongyang and cutting Korea of from China and the Kwantung army there. The reasons why the Soviets didn’t attack Korea will be discussed in the context of the Manchurian operation, but the possibility of such an attack posed a threat that the Japanese had to take seriously, even as the Allied forces struck out from Inchon and began to drive the defenders back from the Daegu line, in concert with the British attack there. Arguments have raged over the degree to which the Soviet entry into the war undermined the will to fight on of the leaders in Tokyo, but there can be little doubt that the prospect of fighting the Red Army undermined the morale of the Japanese forces in Korea, though the claims made post war by some Japanese officers that they would have fought to the death as their brethren in Hong Kong or on Okinawa did but for the Soviet entry into the war have to be taken with a large grain of salt, after all the Japanese forces in those locations were no less isolated or overmatched than the defenders of Korea theoretically became after the Soviet invasion of Manchuria [8].

A far more proximate explanation for the rapid decline in morale of the Japanese forces was the frequent issuing and countermanding of orders as the strategic situation in Korea was subject to rapid change. It is hardly conducive to discipline and fighting spirit when soldiers are told that they must hold a position at all costs, only to be ordered to abandon it soon after and move to a completely different position that they must likewise be prepared to die defending. Even the most loyal troops will begin to wonder if such a sacrifice is worth it once they have lost faith in their superiors and their battleplans. Such doubt is corrosive to fighting spirit and combined with the practical consequences of the confusion engendered by the constantly changing orders it is understandable that the Japanese forces in Korea proved far less resolute than their counterparts elsewhere. The British soldiers fighting the battle didn’t care about the nuances of why the Japanese soldiers chose not to fight to the death. Once they overcame their suspicion that such large-scale surrenders were some sort of deception the British were only too happy to take on the burden of dealing with the Japanese POWs instead of the grim close quarters fighting they had been expecting [9].

By the 8th of December the Daegu line had been completely abandoned and the Japanese forces were in full retreat. The advance out of Inchon forced them to shift eastward, crucially blocking them from falling back towards Seoul and forcing them to withdraw east of the city, leaving its defence to the forces already garrisoned there and what troops had escaped the fighting around Inchon, though most of these troops had been cut off and destroyed before reaching Seoul and those who did reach the city were short of supplies and ammunition, which could not be replenished from the stockpiles in the city as these had been plundered as the Japanese dug in on the Daegu Line. Even given the limited supplies and poor morale of the troops holding Seoul the battle for the city lasted from the 13th until the 22nd of December, largely because the British, American and Australian troops moved cautiously, aiming to minimize their own casualties as well as those of the civilian population, many of whom regarded the approach of the Allies with dread and had to be won over gradually to the reality that they would not be subjected to wholesale rapine and slaughter the Japanese had warned them of. To the relief of the advancing soldiers there no incidents of mass suicide in Korea and the Allies were able to control the territory they had taken without requiring large amounts of manpower or an overly oppressive form of martial law [10].

By the time operations in Korea were halted on the 30th of December the Allied forces had already far exceeded their original objectives, with the Japanese retreat finally coming to a halt more than 30km north of Seoul. The Americans were keen to prepare a fresh offensive to advance on Pyongyang, preferably before the Soviets changed their minds and struck into northern Korea themselves. The British and Australians were far more reticent, the British were far more interested in building up the infrastructure needed for launching a strategic bombing offensive against the Japanese Home islands and the Australians were of the opinion they had ‘done their part’. Nonetheless the British did finally agree to support further operations to be launched in February 1945, though the Allies would only fully secure the Korean peninsula after the final Japanese surrender [11].

[1] ITTL the BPF has politely declined USN requests to dangle their armoured carriers in front of American taskforces…

[2] Of course it may be the case that it was easier for the Japanese to avoid knowing that Korea was a target. After all, if they did know they would have been honour bound to do something about it.

[3] Again illustrating that the defenders of Korea are not Japan’s A-Team.

[4] It’s a battle for Korea, how could there not be an Inchon?

[5] Bear in mind that the Japanese don’t have anything like the firepower available to the North Koreans IOTL.

[6] This is definitely not the Japanese A-Team.

[7] As per almost every example from WW2 once an amphibious force is ashore its all but impossible to dislodge them.

[8] Manchuria and the absence of Soviet troops in Korea will be discussed next.

[9] These troops will not be well received when they are repatriated to Japan after the war.

[10] In time the Koreans will be relieved to see the back of the Japanese, and then will want to see the back of the British and Americans.

[11] A date that is drawing steadily closer.

 

[Garrison]

1st December 1944 – 17th December 1944 – Manchuria – Part I – A Dubious Enterprise​

The Soviet entry into the Pacific War was a major turning point, though how much it contributed to the final defeat of Japan has become tangled up in a web of nationalism and coloured by the political alignments of those debating the subject, leading to utterly incompatible conclusions being drawn. Chinese historians credit the Great Southern offensive as the blow that broke the Japanese, while British and American sources place the credit on the Anglo-American advance across the Pacific and South East Asia, with a few even claiming that strategic bombing campaign finally delivered on the promises of the advocates of airpower and struck the decisive blow. Even in the USSR and Russia it has been periodically fashionable to downplay the Red Army contribution to the Pacific theatre, though this makes a great deal more sense when one correlates this to prevailing attitude to Stalin at any given time [1].

At the time the Manchurian operation was being planned Stalin himself had become increasingly ambivalent about the commitment he had made at Potsdam. He was unhappy about the fact that it was proving far more difficult than expected to move troops and equipment through the Austrian corridor to the Soviet sector and to their control zone in Berlin, though this issue would not come to a head until well after the war in the east was over. In 1944 this was almost entirely due to the damage to the infrastructure in both countries, but Stalin chose to see decisions made by the Western Allies to prioritize certain repairs to road and rail networks as intended to undermine the Soviet position. Stalin had also become aware of a broad outline of Operation Unthinkable, the Allied contingency plan for an attack on the USSR. Whatever some firebrands in the US Army might have wished the plan was nothing more than a theoretical exercise to most of those involved, a plan to be prepared and then to be put away in the same filing cabinet as the blueprints for war with Canada or Great Britain. Stalin’s own Generals assured him this was so, but he had reasons to remain fearful. Firstly, there was the rapidly developing shift in the political landscape in the USA as the 1944 Presidential election campaign heated up. Roosevelt had tried to maintain a positive relationship with the Soviets, and Vice-President Wallace had been genuinely friendly towards the USSR. Neither of Roosevelt’s potential successors seemed to be inclined to move in the opposite direction. Even before the November election there had been a notable uptick in negative stories regarding the USSR in the American press reported by the Soviet embassy in Washington, with several recounting the horrors of the Katyn Forest massacre and at least one book by an alleged survivor swiftly gaining an English language translation and a US publisher [2].

Given that the balance of the conventional forces in Europe still favoured the Red Army it might have been expected that Stalin would have chosen to take a more belligerent stance to obtain concessions and reassurances from the Americans in particular, except for the fact that it was clear that the USA was on the brink of acquiring a weapon that would render the balance of conventional forces meaningless. The reality of the atomic bomb was already colouring Stalin’s thinking, as it would that of every one of his successors. The increased scrutiny of the political allegiances of some members of the Manhattan project had almost accidentally closed at least one intelligence the USSR had been exploiting to learn about the progress of the research. If anything this partial knowledge made matters worse for Stalin. It was known that the weapon had the power to level cities, but how large would it be? How many would the US be able to produce and how quickly? In short would the USA be able to deliver a single devastating blow and erase the major cities of the Soviet Union? In such circumstances a new war with the Soviet Union might not be unthinkable to the Western Allies after all [3].

Putting this all together constituted an excellent set of reasons for Stalin to abide by the letter of the agreement reached at Potsdam, if the USSR were to renege on its agreement to join the war against the Japanese within three to four months of the end of the war in Europe, then that would provide an excuse for the capitalist nations to revise their own position on Soviet access to Germany. Even so the fact that Stalin was keeping one eye on Europe meant that the Soviet commitment in Asia would not be on quite the scale that the Western Allies had imagined, though few in Washington would lose any sleep over this, especially after the inauguration of Thomas Dewey [4].

One useful measure of the importance of the Soviet intervention can be gleaned from how eager the Japanese were to avoid it. After the end of the war in Europe Japanese diplomats had sought to discuss maintaining and reinforcing the non-aggression pact. In light of their vehement refusal to even try and explore terms with the Allies this seems a strange decision, but memories of Kalkin Gol still lingered among the Japanese military and having settled on the Southern Strategy in 1941 Japan had essentially given up on any territorial claims against the USSR, and in 1944 they needed to focus all their military resources on preparing for further Allied attacks and resisting the resurgent Chinese Nationalist forces. Given that the Japanese were ignorant of the content of discussions between the three major powers it was not entirely unreasonable for them to hope that Soviets might have had enough of the war and with no vital interests at stake be willing to simply continue the status quo ante and concentrate on consolidating their gains in the west. The Japanese were even willing to go as far as offering guarantees designed to avoid future territorial disputes, including discussing the status of the Sakhalin Islands to make their offer more attractive [5].

The Soviets did not reject these overtures outright during the autumn of 1944, they chose instead to stall and avoid discussing their intentions, largely to avoid tipping their hand about their offensive plans. The Japanese diplomats took this stonewalling to mean the Soviets were looking for further concessions, failing to take onboard the full ominous implications of this refusal to be drawn into negotiations. This apparent Soviet ambivalence has led some historians to speculate that Stalin might have seriously considered stalling on the Soviet entry into the Pacific War, but the reality was that however unhappy Stalin was about his commitments there was never any likelihood that Soviets would extend the non-aggression pact. It is probably fortunate that the Western Allies remained unaware of this apparent Soviet ambivalence, indeed they did not find out about these Japanese overtures until the war was over [6].

As mentioned above even as the talks with the Japanese were ongoing preparations were being made for the Red Army to launch an offensive against them in Manchuria, or Manchukuo as the Japanese referred to the puppet state they had created. Japan had occupied Manchuria in 1931 and created Manchukuo as alleged constitutional monarchy in 1934, with the government remaining completely subservient to the Japanese authorities. Manchukuo had served as a launch pad for further Japanese expansion in the region and given its location it was hardly surprising that it had seen no military action after the Japanese defeat at Kalkin Gol. The Soviet forces in the region managed to conceal their buildup, thus it caused no alarm in the Kwantung Army and with the ongoing efforts to negotiate with Moscow and the attacks in Hong Kong and southern China the Japanese did nothing to reinforce their position in Manchukuo. This represented the continuation of a long term trend as It was an area that had been starved of resources in previous years while Japan fought first to defeat the colonial powers during their ambitious offensives in 1941 and 42, and then to hold back the British and American counteroffensives when the war turned against them [7].

The initial plans for Soviet operations called for attacks by three major Red Army formations; Transbaikal Front, 1st Far Eastern Front and 2nd Far Eastern Front. The role of 2nd Far Eastern Front was always envisioned as a purely supporting one, with the assaults of Transbaikal and 1st Far Eastern forming the pincers that would cut off and destroy the bulk of the Japanese forces in Manchuria. Even this supporting role was drastically diminished as the plan was refined during September and October of 1944 and there were allegedly pragmatic reasons put forward for doing so. Perhaps the most significant was that Soviet estimates of Japanese strength in Manchukuo had been consistently revised downwards. The Japanese Kwantung army, responsible for the defence of Manchuria, had possessed a strength in excess of 650,000 men early in the war, but a lack of replacements and the withdrawal of units to other fronts meant that it was believed that this had been reduced to around 525,000 men by the Autumn of 1944, in fact even this was an overestimate given the losses caused by the Great Southern Offensive. Given that the Red Army was also still facing logistical issues downgrading the involvement of 2nd Far Eastern Front made considerable sense, even if its commanders continued to argue for its involvement in the operation. Far from persuading STAVKA to change its mind the passing months saw 2nd Far Eastern Front’s role reduced to that of a strategic reserve, to be committed only if the main offensive ran into unexpected problems [8].

Despite the practical objections, not in regard to Europe but the disposition of the Korean peninsula. The operational objectives originally assigned to 2nd Far Eastern Front had included a spearhead sweeping south into northern Korea, aiming at the city of Pyongyang. This would have cut off a potential avenue of retreat for the Kwantung Army and gained the Soviets a foothold in that country. This latter possibility was however one of the things that worked against the plan. When Stalin was advised of the Anglo-American plan for an invasion of Korea that would take place anything up to two months before the Manchurian operation could be launched, he saw this as tantamount to them claiming the country as part of their sphere of influence and Stalin was not looking for a further contest of wills with the Western Allies. Stalin also concluded that any operation on the part of the Red Army in Korea would only serve to draw off the Japanese forces stationed there and allow the Anglo-American to sweep through the region all but unopposed. Stalin was not going to contest the Anglo-American claim to Korea, neither though was he going to assist them in their takeover. There may also have been the thought that if things went badly for the Western Allies in Korea, then the Red Army coming to the rescue might offer the USSR fresh bargaining chips [9].

[1] Without the A-Bomb it’s an even bigger debate than OTL, especially given you have to add the British and Chinese offensives.

[2] Stalin’s paranoia being fuelled by all those events that flow from the very different military and political situation in 1944.

[3] In reality the Western Allies have zero interest in reopening any questions about the European settlement, let alone starting another war.

[4] With the Allies in Korea and the Chinese Nationalists advancing the powers that be in Washington would be content with a very limited Soviet involvement.

[5] It is odd how the Japanese were willing to compromise with the Soviets IOTL while being determined to fight to the finish with the British and Americans.

[6] Here the Japanese are simply trying to keep the Soviets out; they are not trying to use them as a conduit to negotiate peace.

[7] A brief history of Manchukuo, and it’s getting even less resources ITTL than it did OTL.

[8] Certainly the Japanese are weaker but…

[9] And as we have seen that isn’t going to happen.

 

[Garrison]

1st December 1944 – 17th December 1944 – Manchuria – Part II – The Red Tide​

The Manchurian Operation might have been scaled back to a degree, but even in its final form it was hardly a minor action, 1,200,000 Red Army soldiers would be involved, along with more than 4,000 tanks, 24,000 artillery pieces and 1,000 Katyusha rocket launchers. They would be targeting an army less than half that number, of poor quality, and lacking in all classes of support weapons from machine guns to heavy artillery. On top of this the Kwantung Army had no inkling that an offensive was in the offing and the authorities in Tokyo were still briefing their diplomats for one more attempt at negotiating with the Soviets as the soldiers of Transbaikal Front and 1st Far Eastern Front moved to their jumping off points, partly explained by the fact that the movement of Red Army troops in the region had become such a commonplace and barely attracted any attention at this point in time. Given this complacency it was all but inevitable the first warnings of an attack in the offing would come via Moscow rather than the reconnaissance efforts of the Kwantung Army [1].

Serving as the Japanese ambassador to the USSR Naotake Satō had few illusions that his efforts to persuade the Soviets to mediate between Japan and the Western Allies would succeed. He was that rare thing in Japanese political circles a realist, and one who could see no reason why the USSR would agree to provide any relief to Imperial Japan when the war was clearly coming to an end, and they had nothing to gain from antagonizing the Americans and British. Even so when Satō was invited to the Kremlin on the afternoon of 30th November he expected nothing more than a polite rebuff to his latest efforts to persuade the Soviets to mediate with the British and Americans. What he received instead was the formal declaration of war by the USSR against Imperial Japan. A shocked Satō would barely have time to relay this catastrophic news to Tokyo before the Red Army launched its invasion of Manchuria. In Tokyo the news would be greeted with disbelief at first and the immediate response was to waste time by sending messages to Satō demanding that he clarify his previous report despite there being no ambiguity about the Soviet declaration. An exasperated Satō sent a terse and explicit reply to these demands, the USSR was at war with the empire of Japan with immediate effect and their thin hopes of Stalin mediating with the Western Allies were gone. Ambassador Satō and his staff would find themselves guests of the Soviets until after the end of the war and in the post-war period found himself serving in the reconstituted Japanese government, and unlike many of the others who were hastily rehabilitated there was no taint of war crimes hanging over the Imperial Japan’s last ambassador to the USSR [2].

Given the attitude of denial in Tokyo the Kwantung Army was not immediately warned to prepare for an attack, indeed even with confirmation of the declaration of war in hand the leaders in Tokyo assumed it might be days or weeks before the Red Army took any action. The Kwantung army thus had neither the time nor the sense of urgency required to make any adjustments to its plans or dispositions as Transbaikal Front and 1st Far Eastern Front struck on the 1st of December, launching a battle on a scale such that even if the optimistic assumptions that they would have weeks to prepare had been correct there was no way that the Japanese could have organized any effective resistance given their threadbare condition. As it was the Japanese had no fortifications facing the border with the Soviets in Mongolia or Siberia and in the absence of such defences there was little the troops garrisoning these areas could do as the 6th Guards Tank Army and the Mongolian Cavalry Mechanized Group attacked from Mongolia while the recently formed 10th Mechanized Corps raced forward from Siberia. The Soviet strategy took the form of a classic pincer movement with the spearheads of Transbaikal and 1st Far Eastern aiming to link up at Harbin and Changchun, cutting off the bulk of the Japanese forces and destroying them before they could try to dig in [3].

General Otozō Yamada commanding the Kwantung Army forces in Manchuria worked desperately to scrape up more troops to reinforce his depleted divisions. The problem was that the Kwantung Army had already been scraping the bottom of the barrel for manpower even before the invasion of Korea and the Soviet declaration of war. With formations stripped from the region to shore up other fronts in the Pacific and Asia he had already been reduced to conscripting local auxiliaries and transferring men from labour battalions to combat units. Even so some of his new divisions had been operating at barely a fifth of their assigned strength and even then, the Kwantung Army struggled to provide arms and training for their new recruits. These formations barely qualified as cannon fodder, and they were cut to pieces as they were thrown against the advance of the mechanized armies bearing down on them. The survivors of these auxiliary formations proved reluctant to fight to the death and those who fell into the hands of the Red Army as POWs received better treatment than their German counterparts, though they were still often forced to endure to attempts at communist indoctrination and senior officers were subject to ruthless interrogation by the NKVD [4].

One obvious Japanese response to the weight of the Red Army assault would have been to follow the same suicide tactics adopted in the battles against the Western Allies, falling back on Banzai charges and Kamikaze attacks to stem the tide of the Soviet assault. The evidence as to whether these were carried out in any organized fashion remains ambiguous. The Kwantung Army was short on air support even before the Red Army attacked and much of the strength they did possess was destroyed on the ground, effectively negating the possibility of any major airborne Kamikaze actions. There were certainly air attacks where bombers crashed into their targets and caused significant damage when they hit fuel or ammunition dumps. Reports from Red Army sources however indicate these aircraft had been shot down and the damage was done either by chance or by pilots who knew they couldn’t make it home. It must also be remembered that where a single Kamikaze might be able to sink a troop transport or warship at sea it was considerably harder for them to achieve similar results on land, unless they managed to find one of the aforementioned supply dumps. There were also some suicide attacks carried out by troops on the ground, satchel charges thrown under tanks by soldiers at point blank range, or even the soldiers throwing themselves under vehicles or into the midst of enemy troops before detonating the charges. These were also notably rare though, though this may have been because the crushing weight of the Red Army advance granted few opportunities to get close enough it also probably reflected the poor morale and lack of discipline among the men of the Kwantung Army [5].

With the success of the initial assaults the idea of sending 2nd Far Eastern Front into Korea was once again floated by its commander, General Maksim Purkayev. The General now presented the advance as an opportunity to block any retreat or reinforcement for the Kwantung army via Korea. This reasoning was questionable as Japanese forces in northern Korea had been drawn down to try and stop the Allied advance from the south and the Kwantung Army in Manchuria was pulling back south and west as the pincers closed on them, away from the Korean border. The plan was nonetheless taken seriously in Moscow and some evidence suggests that Stalin was tempted to change his mind about attacking Korea, exasperating certain members of the Politburo and senior military commanders. These accounts also suggest that Stalin decided against it because of the Inchon landing and the rapid American-Australian advance from the bridgehead. Overall despite the success of the opening phase of the Manchurian Operation Stalin remained in a depressive mood, convinced that the Allies were looking for any excuse to renege on their agreements in Europe. Whatever the motivation Stalin’s refusal to become involved in Korea was the right decision in the long run. Given the rhetoric of the incoming US President it would have been difficult for them to be seen making new concessions to the Soviets and this would have risked Korea becoming a flash point for a fresh conflict, as Berlin nearly did several years later, so it is probably fortunate that Stalin rendered this threat academic [6].

Stalin may have rejected an invasion of Korea, but this did not mean Manchuria was the only target of the Red Army in the Pacific. During the week beginning the 10th of December The Red Army mounted amphibious assaults in southern Sakhalin and the Kurile Islands, effectively ending long standing disputes with the Japanese over sovereignty in these territories and in the case of Sakhalin establishing a forward position from which the Red Army could mount further amphibious operations against the Japanese Home Islands, though preparations for such an operation proceeded painfully slowly and with little sign that Stalin seriously intended to execute an invasion of Japan, again unless he saw a sudden reverse in the fortunes of the American and British plans for an assault on Kyushu that granted him an opportunity to strengthen the Soviet position [7].

By the 17th of December the Red Army had far exceeded their original goals taking the city of Shenyang, then known as Mukden, the very city where the Japanese had staged the false flag incident that served as a pretext for the seizure of all of Manchuria and the creation of Manchukuo. It was thus fitting that the fall of Shenyang marked the end of the Japanese puppet state, it also marked the end of the Manchurian Operation for the Soviets, which came as a relief for the Japanese and a source of anger and frustration for the Chinese Communists who were insistent that the Soviets should continue their drive before the Nationalists could follow up the successes of the Great Southern Offensive and secure their position in the Chinese heartlands. The constant lobbying for further action exacerbated the already strained relationship between Stalin and the Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong, which would continue to worsen after the war as the Dewey administration poured in considerable amounts of money and weapons into aiding the Kuomintang establishing themselves as the sole government in China, with the Communists unhappy about being offered the ‘consolation prize’ of Manchuria [8].

For the Japanese the practical impact of the loss of Manchuria was negligible. It had not been a source of any valuable raw materials and as outlined previously the best units of the Kwantung Army had long since been reassigned elsewhere. Arguably it was the threat of the Red Army apparently poised to assault the Home Islands from Sakhalin that had the greatest psychological impact [9].

[1] Familiarity breed contempt and lets an entire Soviet army sneak up on you.

[2] Satō will come out this pretty well.

[3] The OTL plan, with the exception of no 2nd Far Eastern, whose absence will hardly be noticed.

[4] The Soviets didn’t have the same animosity towards the Japanese that they did to the Nazis for obvious reasons.

[5] The Japanese are so outmatched that the Red Army isn’t even noticing when suicide attacks are launched.

[6] Yes there is still a crisis over Berlin, and yes, I have an outline of a postwar addendum for it.

[7] The Kuriles and Sakhalin are gone forever as far as Japan is concerned.

[8] The Chinese Communists are not going to have a happy time of it post war.

[9] And we will be discussing that shortly.

 

[Garrison]

6th - 31st December 1944 – Japan – The Shadow of Tsushima​

Ranking battles is a hazardous venture, inevitably leading to arguments over who did what and how important it was. In terms of the impact of the many defeats they suffered in the latter half of 1944 there is enough evidence from Japanese sources to assess which ones had the greatest effect. The British liberation of Hong Kong wasn’t precisely shrugged off, but if anything the fact that the British were focused on the liberation of their imperial possession was a relief to the Japanese. By the same token the invasion of Korea was a considerably greater shock and there were many in Tokyo perfectly well aware that this would open a new front in the expanding Allied bombing campaign. That despite throwing in massive Kamikaze campaign Okinawa was also clearly doomed to fall, and the Americans seemed grimly willing to accept the price to take the island, was another failure for the increasingly desperate strategy intended to keep the Allies from landing in the Home Islands. The Soviet entry into the war had been a hammer blow, especially as even though the discussions with the Soviets had been limited to extending the non-aggression pact some had been hoping that they might take things further to have the USSR intercede for terms with the British and Americans [1].

The Soviet entry into the war might have had the most impact on the Japanese position in a practical sense but of all the defeats in 1944 it was the fall of Guangzhou, and the advance of the Kuomintang almost certainly had the greatest psychological effect. The Japanese had looked down on the British and Americans however, this was trivial compared to the almost bottomless contempt they had for the Chinese, and the defeat at Guangzhou had brought humiliation and an almost irrational anxiety that history might be about to repeat itself. The original incarnation of the Kamikaze had been a literal Divine Wind, powerful storms that, according to Japanese beliefs, swept away the Mongol invasion fleets in 1274 and 1281, fleets that had been built in and launched from China, with plenty of Chinese conscripts fleshing out the Mongol ranks. The invasion of 1274 had been especially traumatic as it saw the Mongols conquer the islands of Tsushima and Iki before their fleet was destroyed and it lived in Japanese memory seven centuries later. The occupation of China had been a matter of the Japanese desire for land and resources of course but there was also an element of expunging the underlying fear of the Chinese ‘horde’. In this light the destruction of the Japanese defenders at Guangzhou had not only opened the great port there as a gateway for supplies to the Kuomintang but also as potential assembly point for a Chinese army aimed at the Home Islands [2].

Executing such a plan was not outside the realms of possibility for the Allies, but it was not being considered as serious proposition in the latter part of 1944, whatever the Japanese might fear. It must be remembered that prior to the liberation of Guangzhou there had been grave doubts in Washington about the capabilities of the Nationalist Chinese forces, and these had not entirely been assuaged by the success of the Great Southern Operation. Ideas were floated at the beginning of 1945 to use Chinese troops as part of Operation Downfall, but these might best be placed in the same category as US contingency plans for invading Canada, explored, revised, and filed away when it was apparent there was no practical use for them. The investigation of the idea quickly revealed that the logistics of mounting such an operation from China were far too complex and from the perspective of the Americans it would be far better for the Chinese to concentrate on attacking the Japanese forces in their own backyard rather than being drawn into any overseas ventures. As 1944 gave way to 1945 and a new administration was due to take power there was also the consideration of ensuring that the Nationalists were in a position to establish their authority over China, without having to strike any accommodation with the Chinese Communists. Sending off the best of the Kuomintang to invade Japan would have worked against that goal [3]

There was no greater enthusiasm for the Chinese Nationalists operating beyond their own borders in London than in Washington, especially when some of those borders were a bone of contention and threatened to create conflict between China and India, as well as reopen the question of British control of Hong Kong. There was no appetite to see an aggressive Kuomintang take the place of militaristic Japan and compete for influence and power across Asia. One reason why the Labour government had backed the political settlement in India was precisely because it offered the prospect of reducing the strain on the exchequer after the war was over, a more assertive China was not conducive to those plans. Besides such larger geopolitical considerations, the British also remained dubious about the quality of the Nationalist army after Guangzhou and there was a lingering resentment of the way Lend-lease had been lavished on the Chinese to little apparent effect while the British were forced to dial back the scope and speed of their counteroffensives in Asia as they struggled with the limitation of their own supply of equipment and munitions [4].

From the perspective of the Western Allies then there was little likelihood of a major Chinese Nationalist amphibious operation, however the Americans were happy to create the impression that such an attack was being seriously prepared to increase the pressure on the Japanese. Such deceptions had after all proven their value in the past and inflating the scale of the attacks the Japanese would face if and when the Allies invaded could only help to dilute their resources and undermine their morale. To this end considerable efforts would be made to repair Guangzhou and some Chinese troops were assigned to amphibious training, though their combat operations would be limited to conducting raids along the Chinese coast and a few modest attacks carrifocused out on Hainan Island, which also helped to further strengthen the Kuomintang position inside China. Chiang Kai-Shek was perfectly happy with this situation as it ensured the continued flow of Allied aid to his forces while allowing them to focus on further operations against the Japanese on the mainland, and against the Communists when the opportunity presented itself [5].

These operations achieved their purpose, playing on the fears already abroad in Tokyo. From the perspective of the military leadership in Tokyo the British in particular had already made extensive use of non-white troops as cannon fodder in their operations, grinding down the Japanese forces by throwing Indian troops into the frontline and reserving their own strength to administer the coup de grâce. Once upon a time such ideas might have been floated in London, but the Indian troops who had fought their way across South East Asia had demonstrated they were anything but cannon fodder and if they had led the way in many operations that was because they had demonstrated their qualities as fighting forces time and again. The Japanese troops who had fought the against the Indian troops would also have contradicted this view of them as cannon fodder, though the few who had the opportunity to convey their opinions were dismissed as simply making excuses for their own failures. The view of the Indian forces in Tokyo was also shaped by their experience with their own auxiliaries and their abortive attempt to raise their own Indian army. The idea that the Americans would be eager to have their own ‘sepoys’ to throw at Japan seemed all to likely and no one in Tokyo had any illusions about how the Chinese would behave if they reached the Japanese mainland. The Japanese has shown no pity in Nanjing, Shanghai, or Guangzhou and they could expect none if the Chinese reached Hokkaido, Hiroshima or Tokyo itself [6].

In essence this, entirely non-existent, threat of invasion by a Chinese army took on the fearful status for the leaders in Tokyo that the Red Army had for the Germans. A monstrous entity that would destroy everything if they ever reached the homeland. This cut to the very heart of the strategy that was being formulated to resist an American invasion, which rested on making such an assault so costly in American lives that they would baulk at paying the price and allow Japan to negotiate a peace on terms that would spare their homeland from occupation and preserve the position of the emperor. If instead the blood being shed was that of Chinese conscripts, then why would the Americans flinch from continuing the war until Japan’s defence were ground down and the country left prostrate before them? The Samurai who had defended Tsushima centuries before had fought to an honourable death, but it had not been enough to save the island from being conquered and the modern incarnation of the Kamikaze had so far failed to create the havoc of the storms that had finally destroyed the Mongols [7].

One must not be carried away as some historians have been by the idea that everyone in the Japanese government genuinely believed that such an assault was likely. For those who had been trying to find some way to force the diehards to face reality and agree to discuss peace, on whatever terms might be offered by the Allies, building up this terrifying prospect was a sound political move. Such calculation might also explain why long simmering resentments about the actions of the army suddenly erupted into the open in the middle of December. Relations between the army and the navy had always been contentious and each had sought to blame the other for every setback that Japan had suffered in the war. There had though never been such a comprehensive attack on the army’s conduct as the one the unleashed at this time, with senior naval officers taking the lead while the politicians who had encouraged it stayed in the background. In this new analysis all of Japan’s went back to the army’s poorly planned and badly executed attempt to take Malaya and Singapore in 1941. Had Singapore fallen the Dutch East Indies would fallen, the Royal Navy would have been driven from the Indian Ocean and India itself might well have risen against the British. With the Royal Navy routed the IJN could have chosen the time and the place to concentrate the full strength of the Kido Butai and achieve the final decisive victory that would have forced the Americans to negotiate. The army had failed at every opportunity to turn the tide since then and if superior Bushido spirit could have carried Japan to victory despite the numerical superiority of their enemies, then clearly that spirit was lacking in the army despite their bluster [8].

This was an optimistic reading of the events of December 1941, especially given that it would have required a monumental display of ineptitude for the British to lose in Malaya. This attack by the IJN would probably have achieved nothing had the word not come down that the emperor himself was meditating on these thoughts about the conduct of the war. To an outsider this might have seem barely worth noticing, in terms of the politics of Imperial Japan this was a slap in the face for the army hierarchy and Prime Minister Tojo. It fell short of calling for Tojo to resign, or for a reconsideration of the army’s strategy, but such a ‘meditation’ did rather beg the question if the army’s strategy for defending the Home Islands was not to be relied on and Japan faced being occupied by a Chinese army and divided up among the victors as Germany had been then what was the alternative? Logic suggested that if the military solution was untenable then the alternative was some form of surrender. If Japan could be kept as one nation and the position of emperor preserved might that be acceptable given the alternative? No one was quite ready to openly suggest any such thing just yet, the series of further disasters that would shortly befall Japan would change that [9].

[1] the Japanese have just been hit with one blow after another since the British landed in Hong Kong.

[2] If it seems weird to have the attitudes of a nation being shaped by events that happened centuries ago, I can only assume you aren’t familiar with Ireland.

[3] It’s just too much like hard work for the Allies.

[4] And you can assume that on this occasion there is complete accord between London and New Delhi.

[5] At this point things are looking increasingly grim for Mao Zedong and his followers.

[6] The Japanese are basically doing what the Americans did when the Japanese entered the war, swinging from treating them with contempt to panicking that they were going to invade the west coast the next day.

[7] Of course it wouldn’t do to get carried away with this idea…

[8] …As politics is playing its part in building up the bogeyman.

[9] When your losing on all fronts all but the most fanatical have to start wondering just what fighting to the bitter end will really achieve.