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While Italy was part of the Axis, linked to Germany by the Pact of Steel, Italian war aims were not the same as German war aims. Italy joined the war late, when it looked like it had been won. The Italian forces in Libya attacked the British forces in Egypt, and were thoroughly trounced. Italy then set its sights on Greece, and formed a thoroughly inadequate force and attacked from Albania. The Greeks were tough troops, although not well equipped, and the Italians were thrown back. However, it seemed likely that the Italians would regroup and attack with much greater force, and that Greece could not withstand that.
Greece began talking with Britain about British assistance, although nervously, since the last thing Greece wanted was enough Imperial force to attract German attention and not enough to defend Greece. While this went on, the pro-German Yugoslav government was overthrown, and Germany had to strike. Within weeks, the bulk of the German armored forces had overrun both Yugoslavia (where a vicious partisan war would continue until the country was liberated) and Greece. British troops were once more thrown off the continent, and then again off the island of Crete.
While the Allies certainly did not win, the results of this campaign were not favorable for the Axis. Greece and Yugoslavia would likely not have entered the war if it had not been for Italian intervention, and all the Axis losses against them were unnecessary. Greece was a difficult country to occupy, and Yugoslavia was worse, so further Axis force was tied down. The Germans lost many highly trained paratroopers and other troops in the Balkan campaign, and the campaign delayed their attack on the Soviet Union by weeks. The Allied losses, although excessive, were not entirely in vain.
In North Africa, the new German general Rommel took command, and drove the British back to Egypt, except for their enclave at Tobruk. The North African theater was not vital to the Axis, and it absorbed more resources than it should have. The Axis had to maintain a foothold in Africa, lest the British attack Italy directly, but that was the extent of the vital Axis interests. The British in the theater could be beaten badly, and possibly driven out of Egypt, but the Axis could not reach any vital parts of the Empire or neutral territories. Assuming they took all of the Mediterranean coast up to the Turkish border, they would add nothing vital to their war effort, nor would they deprive the British of anything vital. Any attempt to advance into Iraq or Arabia could be countered by the British, since they would be close to their ports while the Axis would be far over the desert from their bases, and the British main army could sit somewhere up the Nile, awaiting a chance to strike back. In short, there was nothing in the theater that really mattered, except opportunities to attack Italy, and the proper Axis course of action was to defend western Libya with the minimum force and supplies possible. Rommel constantly asked for more force and supplies, and wanted to utterly defeat the British. He was a tactical genius, but not a good strategist, and gained more influence on German war plans than he should have. In the meantime, the island of Malta based British sea and air forces that caused the Axis considerable losses, as Malta stood astride the direct sea routes from Italy to Africa. Either the Axis had to commit considerable air forces to suppressing Malta and keeping it suppressed, or they had to accept considerable losses, both in men and supplies, from Malta's raiding forces. The war in North Africa went for some time, neither side able to gain a decisive advantage. It was the ideal Allied campaign. It allowed the relatively smaller Imperial land forces to engage a reasonable amount of Axis forces and inflict undue attrition on them.
The major campaign was the German attack on the Soviet Union. This was the theater in which the European Axis was defeated, much more than any other. It was the only one that could lead to a German victory. It has been the subject of more nonsense in print than any other campaign of the war. After the war, many German generals wrote their memoirs, and for a long, long time these were the only Western sources for information on that war. They typically described the superb and non-Nazi German army under their brilliant direction, being prevented by Hitler's idiotic orders from defeating the nearly endless Russian hordes.
In fact, the German army was more Nazified than anybody would admit, the Army leadership itself deficient at the highest level of strategy, Hitler's interference did not become critical until the war was already lost, the Soviets suffered from a severe manpower shortage during the war, and the Red Army was probably the best in the world at high-level strategy.
The Germans attacked on June 22, 1941, and changed the character of the war. Up until then, it had been a series of disconnected campaigns, a series of short wars united only by British and German hostility. In other words, the sort of war the Axis needed. With the attack on the Soviet Union, it became a long continuous war. It could not be a short, decisive war because of the sheer size of the Soviet Union. It had been possible to overrun all the territory of earlier victims, even if (as in the case of Vichy France) that had not actually been done. Indeed, the German General Staff had not come up with a plan to assure victory. The plan was to attack, destroy the Red Army, and occupy most of the European section of the Soviet Union. If the Red Army were to escape with some strength, or the remaining parts of the Soviet Union were to stay in the war and field a sizable army, the Germans had no plan. The occupation forces would be inadequate to stop even a fairly small counteroffensive, since the Germans could prepare perhaps thirty divisions for winter, a very small force to cover a line as long as was projected. There was no provision for anything short of a Soviet surrender or total collapse.
The attack jumped off (having been delayed a few weeks due to the Balkans campaign) and made excellent progress in the northern half, less progress down South. While Stalin had been certain the Germans would not attack, he had expected them to attack in the South if they did, since that was the major Soviet industrial and mining area; the Germans had concentrated on the North. The Soviet Union was at a very low ebb of military ability. It was going through the same aircraft maintenance crisis the French had been going through when conquered, and was just ending four years of purging experienced but politically suspect officers, and the officers left were inexperienced, frequently uneducated, and new to their units.
The Germans tore through the Soviets, and effectively destroyed all the Soviet front-line forces in the northern half of the line. The Soviets had an effective system of reserves, though, and threw up more forces to stop the Germans. The front line lengthened as it went East, and German striking power got spread out. The infantry divisions, on foot, could not keep up with the mobile divisions. It was difficult to keep supplies going to the mobile divisions, as the roads were very bad, the railroad tracks of a different width than that used by German trains, and the Soviets were very effective in preventing the Germans from capturing their railroad cars and locomotives. After a series of stunning victories, the central armored forces were stopped at Smolensk, over halfway to Moscow. It was necessary to decide whether to regroup and press on towards Moscow, or use the mobile divisions on the flanks.
In particular, the Red Army had very large forces, more or less intact, just to the South. Over the objections of the Army, Hitler ordered the panzers to attack to the flanks. The Southern diversion, in particular, bagged over half a million prisoners and allowed the German Army Group South to join in the general advance, thus shortening the line.
This forced a respite in the northern push, and the Soviets dug in, preparing for further German advances. With the campaign season coming to an end, the German line was hundreds of miles short of the projected stop line, and the Red Army had seemingly rebuilt itself, although in a less sophisticated way. Winter was coming, and the campaign was far from over. At this time, the German General Staff recommended holding position and waiting for good weather in 1942, but Hitler irrationally insisted on driving for Moscow. It was no more likely that capturing Moscow would be decisive in the winter as opposed to the autumn, and the offensive proved to be a greate waste of German resources. The troops could not be adequately supplied, and winter supplies were not shipped forward, as the immediate demand for fuel and ammo took precedence. The Red Army fought bitterly, and brought in full-strength battle-hardened divisions from Siberia to great effect.
The German offensive drew close to Moscow, but failed to take it, or indeed to arrive at suitable defensive positions. Hitler then ordered that the German Army was not to retreat. The Red Army formed several new armies for a winter counterattack, aimed at nothing less than the destruction of about a third of the German Army, and attacked fiercely, driving Army Group Center back about one hundred miles. The goal was probably impractical, as the Soviets were greatly limited in their ability to advance beyond their prepared bases, but any advantage gained was frittered away when Stalin decided to expand the offensive across most of the front.
The British and Germans continued their strategic air campaigns against each other. The meaning of "strategic", in this context, is that the bombing campaigns were the main part of a certain strategy, rather than being part of a larger one. The bombing of Britain before the proposed German invasion was not in itself strategic bombing, as it was merely part of a larger plan, to wit the invasion of Britain. Afterwards, the bombing on both sides was attempting to hurt the enemy as much as could be done, trying to impede the enemy economy. By the end of 1940, both sides had learned that bombers were very easy targets in the daylight, and that sending them on missions unescorted by fighters was simply not going to work. Both sides then resorted to night bombing, which made accuracy impossible. Britain started to produce suitable bombers, carrying tremendous bombloads so that accuracy would not be all that important. Since it was certainly impossible to aim at factories at night, the British Bomber Command aimed at cities, causing many civilian casualties.
In the Pacific, Japan had arrived at a decision. Relations with the US had been deteriorating steadily, fundamentally because Japan insisted on continuing the Chinese war, and the US insisted that it stop. Further, there were fundamental misapprehensions on both sides that hindered the finding of common ground, even had it existed. The Japanese saw the war as an anti-Communist crusade coupled with old-fashioned colonial expansion. The United States saw the war as unprovoked aggression against a peaceful power. Eventually, the US decided to stop supporting the Japanese war effort by trading scrap metal and oil to Japan, which put the Japanese in a very bad position. The Japanese were thus given a choice of peace, to resume normal trade relations, or expanded war, to secure other oil supplies. The Japanese were not inclined to stop the war in China, and, given the lack of control the central government had over the armies in the field, might not have been able to. Further, the Japanese were affronted by being told what to do by the Americans, and were very reluctant to do anything that might imply that the Emperor was constrained by anybody's desires, let alone any racially inferior people. (The Japanese were also unwilling for the Emperor to wield real power, of course, although even the most militaristic tried to look for alternatives when the Emperor opined that peace was good and should not be broken unthinkingly.)
The initial Japanese target was obvious: there were large oil fields in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), and the oil was necessary for the Japanese war effort. The Japanese would have to get oil from there. Japanese planning therefore including invading the islands and capturing the oil fields. Close along the shipping lanes between the oil and Japan were major naval bases of both the United States (Manila Bay in the Philippines) and the British Empire (Singapore). Rather than try to keep peace with them, Japan decided to attack both of them, thus ensuring that both would be interested in disrupting Japan's plans and economy. Thus, Japan, being unable to win one war, decided to expand the war to countries that Japan had no realistic hope of reaching the homeland of (we'll ignore, for the moment, speculation that peace conditions would include ceding Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia to Japan). Therefore, Japan's only hope was to establish a defensive perimeter and hope to tire out her enemies and create a peace of exhaustion.
Of all the countries of World War II, Japan seems to have the plans least in contact with reality. It was, perhaps, understandable to underestimate the American economy, during one of the nasty parts of the Depression. The attitude that the U.S. would get discouraged, fold up, and leave the Japanese alone is probably due to racism and the belief that nobody but the Japanese had true fighting spirit. Nevertheless, it should have been inconceivable that Japan could somehow annex the Pacific Northwest, and it wasn't. Japanese martial ability was overestimated, due to their successes against the Chinese (the failures against the Soviet Union in the 1939 border clashes were glossed over). In any case, the Japanese acted as if victory could be made inevitable.
Having decided on war with the British and the Americans, the Japanese should have taken pains not to inflame popular opinion in either. This the Japanese spectacularly failed to do, by attacking Pearl Harbor by surprise. (In another example of the inability of the Japanese to control military subordinates, the Pearl Harbor attack was forced through by the fleet commander Yamamoto, against the objections of the Navy Department.) The military effects of the raid were not great, amounting to two battleships destroyed, three more seriously damaged, and a few more lightly damaged. The Japanese would have done even better to have hit the military oil supplies, which would have forced Pacific Fleet to withdraw to the West Coast for months. The aircraft carriers were continually busy, and none of them were in Pearl Harbor for the strike, which the Japanese had expected, having a superb spy at Pearl Harbor. There have been more myths and unfounded speculation about Pearl Harbor than any other incident in World War II involving the U.S.
Other things happened quickly. MacArthur, the commander in the Phillipines, tried to maintain neutrality as long as possible, which resulted in his air force being destroyed on the ground on the first day of the war without accomplishing anything. He also decided to oppose Japanese landings in the open, and did not bother to stock the planned redoubt of Bataan. Germany and Italy made a grave error by declaring war against the United States. This was not required by the treaties between the countries (not that Hitler would have done anything simply because a treaty said so), but Germany and Italy felt they needed an ally with a strong navy to defeat the United States. Again, Hitler made an enemy without considering how this enemy was to be defeated. (Hitler is often cited for brilliant diplomacy, and he did make some excellent moves early on. However, any diplomacy that ends by making most of the rest of the world into active enemies has to be considered as lacking. This reminds me of the admiration for the only army to lose two great wars in this century.)
The Japanese advanced relentlessly. They sunk a British battleship and battlecruiser near the great naval base of Singapore, and proceeded to overrun Allied positions. The defense of Malaya and Singapore was totally incompetent, to the point that I believe any of my readers would be likely to have done better. The Pacific Fleet was in disarray after Pearl Harbor. The previous commander was relieved immediately, and the temporary commander was not suited for command. Before Nimitz could arrive on the scene and restore order, the heroic but outnumbered garrison of Wake Island was overrun. This was the worst time for Navy morale, since Pacific Fleet could have intervened. In the Philippines, the Allied forces were forced back to their final retreat positions faster than they could be supplied. The Japanese occupied various small islands, and set up operations to secure their perimeter. The attack on the Dutch East Indies was completely successful, being opposed by respectable but uncoordinated forces. The British were driven out of Burma, but succeeded in stabilizing the front at the Indian border, where the front remained for years. The Japanese were planning a drive southeast to cut Australia off from the United States.
Go backward to German Blitzkrieg
Go forward to The First Repulses
All contents of these pages Copyright 1997, 1998 by David H. Thornley.