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At this time, what the Japanese needed was a plan. Attacking India, in the hopes of disrupting the British Empire, was a possibility. Even a fairly small attack, with shrewd political maneuvering (which the Japanese never did in this period), might create a revolt that would turn India over to the Japanese. However, the Army refused to supply troops for even an assault on the island of Ceylon.
The main advantage of this course of action was that it had the potential, with European Axis help, to actually clear a flank. The Japanese could have gone into the Indian Ocean with enough force to capture naval bases and dominate the sealanes. One of those particular sealanes was the lifeline of the British Army in North Africa, and Japan could have severed that connection. This would have given the Axis, working together, a conquest of North Africa, the Middle East, and pretty much the entire Indian Ocean area.
The main disadvantage is that it would leave the United States mostly unengaged. The main reason it wasn't tried was that Japan and Germany never seriously thought about cooperating with each other.
Without enough troops to actually threaten anything like an Allied homeland, the Japanese settled for trying to cut off Australia from the rest of the world, which was probably the most effective strategy. The only disadvantage it had was that it was certainly going to lose. If this was the best the Japanese could do, they would have done much better by accepting whatever they had to to avoid war.
The other part of the Japanese strategy was to try to force an engagement with the American fleet and destroy it. Until the carriers actually joined battle, both sides thought they had a decisive advantage in quality of carrier planes and pilots; the Japanese were closer to being right. The problem was, that to force engagement, they had to attack targets the Allies would want to defend. As time went on, these were getting farther and farther from Japan, leaving the Japanese spread very thin. Major bases would have fewer aircraft assigned than one American carrier could carry, and the carriers were to become the only possible defense. These were sent on a raid in the Indian Ocean, which hurt the British somewhat, but frittered away Japanese aircraft and further wearied the carriers. When the Japanese tried to extend their reach close to Australia's northwest coast, they had only three carriers against two American carriers. In the confused fighting, the Japanese lost a small carrier and had a large one seriously damaged while sinking one and damaging the other American carrier. Both sides suffered very heavy aircraft and pilot losses, and for the first time a major Japanese invasion was repelled at sea. The Battle of the Coral Sea was the first naval battle in history in which neither side's ships could see the other side's ships.
In the meantime, the Japanese had planned an attack on the island of Midway, northwest of Hawaii. The island was not itself very important, as the American Pacific Fleet and associated aircraft could attack it pretty much at will, but Yamamoto hoped to lure the American fleet out to fight. In fact, he planned that the Americans would be distracted by an attack in the Aleutian islands, send the fleet North, and then come back South to rescue Midway, only to be bushwhacked by the Japanese fleet and sunk. The Japanese fleet was dispersed into several different forces, most of which were no match for a concentrated American fleet, and the Japanese were to bring their fleet together for the battle. The first problem, of course, was that the battle plan relied on the Americans acting in a particular manner. The second problem came from the earlier Japanese successes: it was difficult to get the new code books to the far-flung Japanese outposts, and so the regularly scheduled code change was delayed for two months. In the meantime, the American codebreaking team at Pearl Harbor had pretty much broken the old one. The Japanese plan for Midway was sent out in the old code shortly before it was changed, and the Japanese battle plan was given to the American commanders (who were not told where it came from).
The Japanese had only four of their six big carriers ready, as they had no replacement air group for the one that had survived Coral Sea intact. The Americans frantically readied their carrier that had been damaged there and did have replacement air groups. Combined with the other two carriers available, the American fleet had three carriers to the Japanese four, but the two sides were roughly equal in numbers of carrier planes. The Japanese were paying a price for their neglect of replacement aircrew, and for the extensive operations during the start of the war. The American battleships remained off the West coast, as Nimitz saw no role for them in the battle.
The battle opened with Japanese air attacks against Midway, while the Japanese cruisers launched search planes and the Japanese kept half their aircraft ready to attack American ships. Two planes were on course to find the American fleet, but one suffered engine problems and the other simply didn't see the force. The first attack on Midway did insufficient damage, so the Japanese re-armed their attack planes with high-explosive bombs while Midway launched wave after wave of poorly-coordinated and ineffectual attacks.
With the Japanese carriers located, two of the American carriers launched full strikes, while the other waited an hour for a better position estimate and then launched a half strike. The strikes became separated en route. The Japanese search plane with engine problems found and reported the American carriers, and the Japanese re-armed their second strike with armor-piercing bombs and torpedos while the American carrier-based torpedo bombers attacked without success (but with heavy casualties). Finally, the strike was ready, and the Japanese were starting to launch. The carriers had become rather strung out in the attacks, and the defensive fighters were at low altitude, chasing torpedo bombers, when two contingents of dive bombers, launched about an hour apart, arrived simultaneously over the Japanese carriers. The flight decks were full of armed and fueled aircraft, and the hangar decks strewn with bombs not yet stowed away.
Within minutes, three of the four Japanese carriers were burning uncontrollably. The remaining carrier, overlooked in the confusion, attacked and seriously damaged an American carrier before it was dispatched in a later strike. The Japanese lost four carriers to the American one (finished off by a Japanese submarine), and the United States had carrier superiority.
This was essentially the end of the Japanese plan to destroy the American fleet. This did not invalidate the Japanese strategy, but it made it more difficult. Instead of smashing the American will to fight and essentially forcing a negotiated peace, it would be necessary to wear American will down gradually. This would best be done by a stubborn defense, inflicting casualties until the United States decided it simply wasn't worth it. Of course, after Pearl Harbor, Chinese atrocities, the capture of the Philippines, and so forth, this could take a long, long time.
Three months later, the United States landed at the island of Guadalcanal, guarding the shipping lanes between America and Australia, and started a slow battle of attrition, which the Japanese could not win in the long run. The Japanese could have launched all-out attacks until they recaptured Guadalcanal, or accepted an Allied airbase in the Solomon Islands, and decided how much of the Solomons they wanted to put resources into defending. Instead, they launched several attacks at the US and New Zealand forces, none large enough to be decisive, but enough for the Japanese to lose more than they could afford.
The Japanese counterattacked, with either too much or too little power, and would have regained carrier superiority if they had had enough replacement carrier planes and pilots. As it was, this campaign pretty much finished off the superb Japanese pilots who had gone through the extremely rigorous prewar training and seen extensive combat experience over China. Although the Japanese did very well in the fighting, showed great skill, and generally gave better than they got, the fact was that the United States could take losses far better than the Japanese. As the Japanese were training pilots considerably worse than many that washed out of the prewar training, the United States was building dozens of carriers. The first was commissioned, although not ready for the Fleet, before the Guadalcanal campaign was over.
In the meantime, the US Army and the Australians were advancing up New Guinea, neighboring the Solomons, and more Japanese forces were ground up and destroyed there. It was these campaigns, lasting from August 1942 to early 1944, that crippled Japanese air power.
In Europe, Germany was running rampant. Although the German army in the East was weaker than it had been in 1941, the Germans still had strategic superiority. They mopped up some of the pockets left from the Soviet winter offensive, and concentrated in the South. The goal was to crash the Soviet economy by cutting off the industrialized northern areas from the southern resources. The plan was to advance to the Volga river near its outlet at the Caspian sea. However, during 1941 the Soviets had built additional rail lines to the East, and therefore the plan was doomed before it started. It is very difficult to see any better course of action, though, and Germany had little hope of winning.
It was at this point that the rift between Hitler and the German generals widened irrevocably. The generals wanted to plan things that were practical, that the Army could carry out successfully. Hitler wanted to plan things that could lead to victory. From Hitler's point of view, this meant that the generals were resigned to losing, since their plans would lead to a long, graceful defeat. From the generals' point of view, Hitler was issuing nonsensical orders that would lead to the destruction of the Army. In fact, both were right, since neither had a grasp on the entire situation. The generals failed to understand the highest level of strategy, which indicated desperate measures. Hitler was simply a lousy military strategist, putting far too much emphasis on control of points and far too little on preserving the Army. Strategically, this meant that the German army was going to undertake dangerous operations with bad plans and dissension at the highest levels of command, combining the worst of both viewpoints.
In 1941, the Soviets had defended in the South while the Germans attacked in the North; in 1942, this was reversed. The northern parts of the German army were weakened so as much strength as possible could be put into the South, while the Red Army prepared for another bloody defense of Moscow. Therefore, the initial German attack gained surprise and massive breakthroughs. The Red Army put up no effective resistance in the South for some time, but neither did they lose large numbers of prisoners. This change from the 1941 ineffectual and costly defense to no defense was a considerable improvement; meanwhile, the Red Army kept pressure on in the North so that the Germans could not withdraw more troops for the South. The German advance covered hundreds of miles, with the frontage lengthening with every step. The only hope of reducing the frontage was to clear the rugged Caucasus mountains and conquer the territory on the other side, and that simply wasn't going to happen in 1942. Therefore, the advancing troops got greatly spread out while they outran their supply lines.
The German Sixth Army approached the great industrial city of Stalingrad, and Hitler ordered that the city be taken. It would certainly be useful to take Stalingrad, as it would make an excellent base to dominate the surrounding area, but the communication lines running through Stalingrad could be cut equally well some distance south of the city. Whether Hitler fixated on taking the city named after his rival for Evil European of the Century, or he (possibly accurately) decided that Stalingrad had to be taken for the offensive to have the desired effect, the entire might of Sixth Army descended on the city, leaving the poorly-equipped and poorly-led Romanian and Hungarian armies on the flanks. This was exactly what the Soviet high command wanted, and they carefully fed reinforcements into Stalingrad at such a rate that the Germans would make slow progress by committing all of Sixth Army. This fixed Sixth Army in Stalingrad, made it unlikely that it would leave it, and allowed the Red Army to gather massive forces for a counterstroke.
In fact, the Red Army planned two massive counterstrokes to destroy German armies. The larger one in the North fell on German defenders in prepared positions with mobile reserves handy, went nowhere, and is rarely even mentioned in Western histories. The one in the South fell on spread-out Romanians and Hungarians without backup, and swiftly encircled Sixth Army in Stalingrad. While this is the best-known battle of the war, it was not a turning point, but rather the first tangible step in German defeat.
Hitler ordered that Stalingrad be relieved and held, and that in the meantime it was to be resupplied by aircraft; Air Force commander and old Nazi crony Goering assured him that aerial resupply was possible. This was wrong. Even under the best circumstances, ferrying supplies from nearby airfields to airfields in Stalingrad, the flow of supplies never got near Sixth Army's needs. As time went on, the Soviets advanced over the nearby airfields, overran airfields in Stalingrad, and put the first modern integrated air-defense system into operation over Stalingrad. Had Sixth Army been ordered to break out as the encirclement started, it might have succeeded with great loss of equipment (although it might also have died quickly), but after a short time of being cut off it was no longer in shape for such movement, with starving horses and men. Before the Germans knew the scale of the offensive, it was plausible that Sixth Army's best survival chance would be to sit tight and wait for the Red Army to be defeated.
In fact, it proved impossible to relieve Stalingrad, and the Germans suffered serious losses in the attempt. The Soviets forged ahead, trying to cut off some of the German forces in the far South. The Soviet armored spearheads forged too far ahead, and the Soviets suffered considerable losses. The result of the campaign was unfavorable to the Germans. When the snow settled, they had nothing to show for their last great offensive except attrition on both sides. The Soviets lasted another year and demonstrated that they could defeat the mighty Germans.
In Africa, the Axis forces advanced with victory after victory until they were at the last defensive position before the Suez Canal, hoping to win another victory and drive the British out of Egypt. Of course, this would have been mostly meaningless, as the Suez was not particularly important to the Imperial war effort. It would have been more useful to eliminate the British presence in Malta, but Hitler overrode the theater commander, cancelling this operation while giving Rommel, the popular North African commander, free rein. The Axis army, at the end of its supplies, attacked into a stout defense and accomplished nothing, which was not actually predictable. What was predictable was that a victory there would achieve nothing of importance, whereas the Malta operation could. Near the end of the year, the Imperial forces launched a counteroffensive that rolled Rommel back all the way, while the Americans and British conducted amphibious landings in French North Africa. French resistance to the Americans was spotty, and the Germans thought that their African army might be caught between the two forces in bad terrain. They therefore overran the remnants of European France and occupied French African territory. From the Allied point of view, this put all the French firmly on the Allied side. With Allied airbases along most of the South coast of the Mediterranean, the Axis lost control of the sea, and eventually a large Axis army was forced to surrender in Africa. No Axis force could be expected to last with Allied airbases surrounding it (Malta pretty much completing the encirclement), and reinforcing it had been a mistake.
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All contents of these pages Copyright 1997, 1998 by David H. Thornley.