Max Hastings Two-Book Collection: All Hell Let Loose and Catastrophe. Max Hastings

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ was already past. A cardinal Japanese error was to suppose that Tokyo could set limits for the war it started, notably by staying out of the German–Soviet struggle. In reality, once Japan had transformed the European war into a global conflict, inflicting humiliation upon its Western enemies, the only possible outcomes were either absolute victory or absolute defeat. Japan attacked on the basis of calculations which were introspective – indeed, self-obsessed even by the normal standards of nation-states – and matched by stunning geopolitical ignorance.

      The nakedness of America’s Pacific bases continues to puzzle posterity. Overwhelming evidence of Tokyo’s intentions was available throughout November, chiefly through decrypted diplomatic traffic; in Washington as in London, there was uncertainty only about Japanese objectives. The thesis advanced by extreme conspiracists, that President Roosevelt chose to permit Pearl Harbor to be surprised, is rejected as absurd by all serious historians. It remains nonetheless extraordinary that his government and chiefs of staff failed to ensure that Hawaii, as well as other bases closer to Japan, were on a full precautionary footing. On 27 November 1941, Washington cabled all Pacific headquarters: ‘This dispatch is to be considered a war warning. An aggressive move by Japan is expected within the next few days…Execute appropriate defensive deployment.’ The failure of local commanders to act effectively in response to this message was egregious: at Pearl Harbor on 7 December, anti-aircraft ammunition boxes were still locked, their keys held by duty officers.

      But it was a conspicuous feature of the war that again and again, dramatic changes of circumstance unmanned the victims of assault. The British and French in May 1940, the Russians in June 1941, even the Germans in Normandy in June 1944, had every reason to anticipate enemy action, yet responded inadequately when this came, and there were many lesser examples. Senior commanders, never mind humble subordinates, found it hard to adjust their mindset and behaviour to the din of battle until this was thrust upon them, until bombardment became a reality rather than a mere prospect. Admiral Husband Kimmel and Lt. Gen. Walter Short, respectively navy and army commanders at Pearl Harbor, were unquestionably negligent. But their conduct reflected an institutional failure of imagination which extended up the entire US command chain to the White House, and inflicted a trauma on the American people.

      ‘We were flabbergasted by the devastation,’ wrote a sailor aboard the carrier Enterprise, which entered Pearl Harbor late on the afternoon of 8 December, having been mercifully absent when the Japanese struck. ‘One battleship, the Nevada, was lying athwart the narrow entrance channel, beached bow first, allowing barely enough room for the carrier to squeeze by…The water was covered with oil, fires were burning still, ships were resting on the bottom mud, superstructures had broken and fallen. Great gaps loomed where magazines had exploded, and smoke was roiling up everywhere. For sailors who had considered these massive ships invincible, it was a sight to be seen but not comprehended…We seemed to be mourners at a spectacular funeral.’

      The assault on Pearl Harbor prompted rejoicing throughout the Axis nations. Japanese Lt. Izumiya Tatsuro wrote exultantly of ‘the glorious news of the air attack on Hawaii’. Mussolini, with his accustomed paucity of judgement, was delighted: he thought Americans stupid, and the United States ‘a country of Negroes and Jews’, as did Hitler. Yet fortunately for the Allied cause, American vulnerability on Hawaii was matched by a Japanese timidity which would become an astonishingly familiar phenomenon of the Pacific conflict. Again and again, Japanese fleets fought their way to the brink of important successes, then lacked either will or means to follow through. Admiral Chuichi Nagumo was stunned by the success of his own aircraft in wrecking five US battleships in their Sunday-morning attacks. For many years, it was argued that he wilfully missed the opportunity to follow through with a second strike against Pearl Harbor’s oil storage tanks and repair facilities, which might have forced the Pacific Fleet to withdraw to the US west coast. Recent research shows, however, that this was not feasible. The winter day was too short to launch and recover a second strike, and in any event Japanese bombloads were too small plausibly to wreck Pearl’s repair bases. Even the problem created by destruction of shore oil tanks could have been solved by diverting tankers from the Atlantic. The core reality was that Nagumo’s attack sufficed to shock, maul and enrage the Americans, but not to cripple their war-fighting capability. It was thus a grossly misconceived operation.

      For many months, Winston Churchill had been haunted by apprehension that Japan might attack only the European empires in Asia, so that Britain would confront a new enemy without gaining the US as an ally. Hitler meanwhile contemplated a mirror image of this spectre, fearing that America might enter the war against Germany, while Japan stayed neutral. He had always expected to fight Roosevelt’s people once he had completed the destruction of Russia. In December 1941 he considered it a matter of course to follow Japan’s lead, and entertained extravagant hopes that Hirohito’s fleet would crush the US Navy. Four days after Pearl Harbor, he made the folly of the strike comprehensive by declaring war on the United States, relieving Roosevelt from a serious uncertainty about whether Congress would agree to fight Germany. John Steinbeck wrote to a friend: ‘The attack, whatever it may have gained from a tactical point of view, was a failure in that it solidified the country. But we’ll lose lots of ships for a while.’

      In the course of 1941, the Ladies’ Home Journal had published a fascinating series of domestic profiles of Americans of all social classes, under the heading ‘How America Lives’. Until December, the threat of war scarcely impinged on the existences of those depicted. Some struggled financially, and a few acknowledged poverty, but most asserted a real satisfaction with their lot which explains their dismay, following Pearl Harbor, at beholding familiar patterns broken, dreams confounded, families sundered. LHJ editor Mary Carson Cookman wrote a postscript, reflecting on the profiles published earlier in the year, and the new circumstances of Americans: ‘War is changing the condition of life everywhere. But…the people of the United States are good people; they are almost surprisingly modest in their demands upon life. What they have is precious to them…What they hope to achieve, they are willing to work for – they don’t want or expect it to be given them…What we have now will do. But it ought to be better, it must be better, and it will be better.’

      If this was a trite assertion of the American Dream as the nation joined hostilities, it seems nonetheless to reflect its dominant mood. The struggle would cost the United States less than any other combatant – indeed, it generated an economic boom which enabled Americans to emerge from the war much richer than they started it. But many suffered a lasting sense of unfairness, that the wickedness of others had invaded and ravaged their decent lives. Like hundreds of millions of Europeans before them, they began to discover the sorrow of seeing their nearest and dearest leave home to face mortal risk. Mrs. Elizabeth Schlesinger wrote about the departure of her son Tom for the army: ‘I knew after Pearl Harbor that his going was inevitable. I won’t let myself think personally about it. I am only one of millions of mothers who love their sons and see them go off to war and my feelings are universal and not mine alone. I have accepted what I must face and live with for many future months and perhaps years. Tom said, “Why, I thought you would be much more upset by my going.” Little does he know the depths of what it means to me and the countless anxieties that clamor for my thoughts.’

      In the absence of Pearl Harbor, it remains highly speculative when, if ever, the United States would have fought. In John Morton Blum’s words, ‘The war was neither a threat nor a crusade. It seemed, as Fortune put it, “only a painful necessity”…Within the United States, Americans never saw the enemy. The nation did not share or want to share in the disasters that visited Europe and Asia.’ For all the exuberant declarations of patriotism that followed the ‘Day of Infamy’, many Americans remained resentful about the need to accept even a modest share of the privations thrust upon most of the world’s peoples. Early in 1942, Arthur Schlesinger visited the mid-west on a tour of army bases for the Office of War Information: ‘We arrived in the midst of the whining about gas rationing, and it was pretty depressing. The anti-administration feeling is strong and open.’

      Fortunately for the Allied cause, however, the leadership of the United States showed itself in this supreme crisis both strong and wise. СКАЧАТЬ