The Great World War 1914–1945: 1. Lightning Strikes Twice

‘The tanks fire a few shots after, but we’re soon out of range, and keep moving at fair speed for ten miles, with hundreds of other vehicles streaming in concourse. It looks like a stampede, but everything’s under control. Apparently these “scarpers” are accepted desert technique; when there’s no cover at all and no particular bit of ground is tactically worth much sacrifice, getting thrown up against heavily superior enemy forces leaves no option but to clear out, the quicker the better – discretion proving the better part of valour every time.’

This unparalleled mobility also had some unforeseen effects. With few features or places worth fighting for (with the exception of Tobruk), the armies could seize and relinquish vast areas of ground in a matter of days. As each army advanced, its supply lines became stretched, and its spearheads consequently weaker, while the enemy, retreating on to his supply lines became correspondingly stronger. This see-saw effect led to the famous ‘Benghazi stakes’ in which the armies found themselves advancing and retreating over the same desert five times in the space of two years.

The mechanisation of the armies in the Second World War was only one area of contrast. During the Palestine campaign of 1917–18, the Australian Light Horse had thought nothing of mounted charges against Turkish trenches, as one veteran related:

‘The Turks, on the whole, right through the whole campaign, didn’t seem to like the steel – you were safer with them at 100 yards than you were at 600 yards. At 600 yards they were wonderfully good shots and they’d shoot you right up to the trenches, but the minute you got amongst them with the steel it was always a surrender.’

While the Australian Light Horse gained a fine reputation for the speed and daring of its mounted actions in Palestine, such exploits were a thing of the past by the Second World War. An episode during the Eritrean campaign demonstrated just how much had changed after the 20-year interval. During the advance to Keren, the headquarters of Gazelle Force, a reconnaissance unit commanded by Colonel Messervy, was charged from the rear by a squadron of Eritrean cavalry:

‘Out of the scrub they burst, galloping furiously and throwing those little Italian hand grenades at anyone they could get. The guns were rapidly turned round and opened fire at point blank range. Gazelle headquarters dived into their slit trenches and started to fire with everything available. But the charge was stopped less than thirty yards from the guns and the few surviving cavalrymen fled, pursued by an armoured car. Out of the sixty men who made the charge, twenty-five dead and sixteen wounded were left on the ground. It was a most gallant affair. It demonstrated beyond all doubt that this obsolete arm could not be used to attack troops armed with modern weapons.’

Horsed cavalry had had its day by 1939, but a mounted Yeomanry cavalry brigade was sent to Palestine in 1939. However, by the time these troops saw action at Alamein, their horses had been replaced by armoured steeds.

While Allenby’s men were familiar with the names of the settlements they fought over in Palestine, the featureless nature of the Western Desert meant that the few landmarks and towns in the area took on heightened significance during the campaign fought in the Second World War. Benghazi, Tobruk and Mersa Matruh became household names in Britain, but there was little to remind soldiers of past military history. Bir Hacheim, identified only by two hummocks in the middle of the desert, had been the site of the rescue of the prisoners from HMS Tara in 1915 during the Senussi campaign, but gained greater fame during the Battle of Gazala in May 1942 for the tenacious defence of the French Foreign Legion.

Just as their forebears had named trenches on the Western Front after familiar domestic landmarks, so soldiers in the desert identified positions with familiar names to bring some element of home to the barren landscape. The Guards defensive position or ‘box’ during the Battle of Gazala, known as ‘Knightsbridge’, is one of the most famous. But although one of the fiercest tank battles of the Desert War raged there, there was nothing to distinguish this piece of desert from another apart from the name.

One unique feature of the Desert War in the Second World War was the development of the ‘Krieg ohne Hass’ (War without Hate). With the battle areas largely devoid of population (with the exception of the townspeople of Benghazi, Bardia and Tobruk), the armies could concentrate simply on fighting one another. Although the fighting was certainly intense and bloody, a mutual respect developed between the armies to the extent that Rommel became an almost mythical figure amongst the British troops. This spirit also manifested itself in the generally correct and proper treatment given to prisoners and wounded. While this was obviously a clearer distinction for the Germans, who enacted such brutality on the Eastern Front, it also provided a contrast with the desert campaigns of the First World War. British soldiers respected the fighting qualities of the Turkish soldier in much the same way that they admired the skill of the German soldiers 20 years later. General Sir John Shea emphasised that he ‘respected the Turk as a soldier, and was always careful to make my plans as best I could… I thought he was a good stout-hearted soldier, and he fought well.’

While there was a mutual respect between foes in the First World War, there was no development of a similar spirit of a ‘War without Hate’. Turkish treatment of British prisoners could be appalling and this seems to have been reflected in the harsher style of war between the two armies. One British soldier tasked with the capture of some Turkish machine-guns led by German officers related that:

‘When I gave the word, we all dashed forward… There wasn’t one left alive after we’d finished with them. We captured the guns and finished them off. And the German officers, they had the first packet, believe me.’

Although such an attitude to fighting was also common on the Western Front in the First World War, this kind of incident does not accord with the idea of a spirit of ‘chivalry’ engendered by desert fighting.

Yet even though there are numerous contrasts between the two wars in the desert, the similarities remain more important. Both armies experienced the hardships of the desert and the sense of isolation, intensified by distance and enhanced by the harsh climate. Both developed a distinctive identity as desert warriors, quite separate from the wider identities found on the Western Front in the First World War, or of Slim’s Fourteenth Army in Burma in the Second World War. Both armies shared the experience of defeat and eventual victory, and this veteran’s account of taking Turkish prisoners in Palestine in 1918 could easily have been an Eighth Army veteran speaking of O’Connor’s offensive of 1940–41 or the final pursuit in 1942:

‘And the troops went forward then and of course captured prisoners on the way, just like that. Thousands and thousands of them being captured. They were all fed up with the war and everything else. We were just enjoying ourselves then. They were on the run.’

Perhaps the final experience of victory after hardship was the most important common bond running through the two wars in the desert. Yet some men could feel bitter about their personal experience in the Desert War. Peter Bates stated that, ‘My own involvement was a 12-hour engagement with the enemy that ended in capture, and like many who served at Alamein, for all I accomplished I might as well have stayed at home.’

Perhaps the words of a veteran of the Eritrean campaign, written in 1941, sum up the experience of many in the numerous campaigns of the Desert War:

‘I have seen the most ghastly sights and heard noises which I shall remember to the end of my days. I’ve seen unparalleled bravery and self-sacrifice and have seen all the horrors of modern warfare magnified a hundredfold by the intense heat, flies and filth. There’s nothing glorious about it at all, only stark reality.’

Notes on contributors

Dr Niall J.A. Barr, Joint Services Command and Staff College, UK.

Dr Barr is a Lecturer at King’s College London, based at the Joint Services Command and Staff College. He is an authority on the history of the British veterans’ movement and has a deep interest in the history of both world wars. Having recently worked with J.P. Harris on a collaborative study, Amiens to the Armistice: The B.E.F. in the Hundred Days Campaign 8 August-11 November 1918, he is currently researching the Alamein campaign of 1942.

Recommended reading

Black, Donald, Red Dust: An Australian Trooper in Palestine (London: Jonathan Cape, 1931)

Caccia-Dominioni, Paulo, Alamein 1933–1962: An Italian Story (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1966)

Crimp, R. L., The Diary of a Desert Rat (London: Leo Cooper, 1971)

Crisp, Robert, Brazen Chariots: An Account of Tank Warfare in the Western Desert November-December 1941 (London: Frederick Muller, 1959)

Dinning, Hector and McBey, James, Nile to Aleppo: With the Light Horse in the Middle East (London: Allen & Unwin, 1920)

Gilbert, Adrian (ed), The Imperial War Museum Book of the Desert War 1940–1942 (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1992)

Gilbert, Vivian, The Romance of the Last Crusade (London: D. Appleton-Century, 1935)

Graham, Domick, Against Odds: Reflections on the Experiences of the British Army, 1914–45 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999)

Hughes, C. E., Above and Beyond Palestine (London: Ernest Benn Ltd, 1930)

Warner, Philip, Alamein (London: William Kimber, 1979)

Chapter 8 (#ulink_b96d3f48-081c-52ed-9a5d-b9da788bb4c8)

War in the Pacific (#ulink_b96d3f48-081c-52ed-9a5d-b9da788bb4c8)

Eric Bergerud

Between December 1941 and August 1945 the United States and its allies fought an unrelenting war against the Japanese Empire. Although only one portion of what Japanese leaders called the Greater East Asian War, Pacific operations were certainly the most decisive in the military sphere. Even though more people died in China and South East Asia than in the Pacific, it was Allied victory in the Pacific that determined the nature and duration of the overall conflict.

Although East Asia had been racked by tumult for decades before 1914, it was spared the military ferocity of the First World War. Tsing Tao in 1914, still less Rabaul in the same year, simply do not register on any scale of comparison with the warfare experienced in the Pacific a generation and a half later. Nevertheless, the Great War did much to shape the military geography of the Second World War. Japan seized German possessions in China and the Central Pacific. Many of these islands became battlefields when the US drove into the Central Pacific in late 1943. While Japan was picking German plums, Australia was also active, taking north-west New Guinea and the nearby Bismarck Archipelago, which included the islands of New Ireland, New Britain and Bougainville. Much of this area early in the Second World War fell to Japan. Centred at their great bastion at Rabaul on New Britain, the Japanese developed a base system in the Bismarcks that served as a major bulwark of their maritime defence line protecting the precious resources in the East Indies. Efforts to take or neutralise Rabaul drove on the campaigns in both New Guinea and the Solomon Islands and constituted the major Allied effort in the Pacific for a year and a half.

Inter-war events in Europe also had a crucial bearing on the road to war in the Pacific. Japan’s aggression in Manchuria and later against China would have been unthinkable without the paralysis caused in the Western world by the Depression and later the looming war clouds in Europe. Hitler’s early triumphs accelerated events tremendously. The Japanese Government, controlled by the military and supported by militant expansionists, saw the defeat of France and Britain’s apparent doom as a priceless opportunity to move in and occupy mineral-rich South East Asia, then controlled by the European empires. Because of antagonism over China and the strategic position of the American-controlled Philippine Islands, a move into South East Asia would also almost certainly mean war with the United States. When Hitler struck Russia, again there was delight in Japan. However, the Japanese Army insisted that it keep its core on the Manchurian border to take advantage of a Soviet collapse. This meant that the Imperial Headquarters would part with only 11 divisions for ‘southern operations’, which the army considered the responsibility of the Japanese Navy.

It is important to understand the relationship between the war in Europe and the Pacific War. On the one hand the wars were essentially separate conflicts. Although allies on paper, Germany and Japan never co-ordinated action in a meaningful way. On the other hand, Japan was absolutely dependent upon a German victory. If Hitler went down to defeat, Japan would face a massive array of enemies alone. Indeed, given a German defeat, it is best to view the course of the Pacific War in terms of nature and duration, not outcome. For Japan there was cruel irony in that two days after Japanese carrier aircraft attacked Pearl Harbor, the Red Army launched its devastating counter-attack outside Moscow.

Japanese juggernaut

In the short term Tokyo experienced victory beyond expectation. Japan’s strike against Pearl Harbor was a spectacular success in the tactical realm. By May 1942 imperial forces had seized American bases on their perimeter, crushed the British in Malaya, moved into Burma, pushed into the South Pacific and finally captured the Philippines. Most importantly, the resource-rich islands of the Dutch East Indies were in Japan’s hands. Looking at the map, it had conducted a spectacularly successful military campaign. This cavalcade of victories came quickly and intoxicated Japan. If these gains could be maintained through an eventual peace agreement, a Japanese empire would have come into existence via the semi-divine imperial sword.

Assessing these early Japanese victories is important in judging Japan’s overall war effort. Closely defined, the Japanese armed forces displayed every major military virtue in the grim craft of war. Like Hitler in Europe, the Japanese could not have picked a better time to begin their war. The hard-pressed British were crippled by strategic muddle over the defence of Singapore. Similar muddle existed in Washington concerning the Philippines. With the Pacific Fleet and Britain’s naval task force destroyed in the first days of war, Allied naval forces were pitifully small when compared to their Japanese opponents and were easily overwhelmed. On land the bulk of Allied forces consisted of ill-trained colonial levies. With a few notable exceptions these units were unable to face the Japanese in serious combat. The Japanese Army’s major opposition came from a very small number of Regular Allied ground units. British and Australian units in Malaya were incompetently deployed, vulnerable to infiltration and were seriously deficient in air power.

Although obscured by the euphoria of victory, Japanese commanders might have looked at land operations against the Americans with concern. American ground forces on the Philippines conducted a skilled retreat to the Bataan Peninsula. Supported by artillery and a few tanks, these forces mauled the first force of Japanese invaders. Although Japanese victory was inevitable, it took heavy reinforcements to accomplish it. American capitulation in May was due more to a collapse in logistics than military defeat.

Some sober Japanese officers like Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, Chief of the Imperial Combined Fleet (the Navy’s core of operational warships), realised that the Japanese victory was far from complete and that Tokyo’s easy victories were not likely to be repeated. Disappointingly, neither Washington nor London showed any signs whatsoever of defeatism. What Tokyo’s pessimists partially sensed was that local Allied weaknesses had allowed a string of Japanese victories that were so easy that they masked serious deficiencies in all of the Japanese armed forces. Within a year, all of these weaknesses would be evident to both sides.

Nevertheless, their lightning victories gave the Japanese an aura of invincibility for a brief moment. At the front, Allied morale was shaken. Indeed, it is difficult to overrate the shock effect when explaining early Japanese victories. Jim Morehead, soon one of the first American fighter ‘aces’, was one of a small number of American fighter pilots sent to aid the Dutch against the Japanese onslaught upon Java. Later Morehead described the odd chemistry at work in a unit that concludes it is beaten:

‘Whereas youth is normally optimistic about fate, forever feeling that if bad things happen, they will never happen to me, now there was a reversal. Unlike any combat circumstance I was ever exposed to, it switched. The attitude changed to, “I am a goner, the next one lost will be me, I know it will be me.” How many times I heard, “We’re just flying tow targets. We are all on suicide missions!” Such conclusions were only logical. Anyone’s arithmetic can figure out how many missions you are likely to last if ten go out and only five come back. While an alert shack is normally boisterous with laughter and wisecracks, silent anxiety was the mood in those days.’

In the rush of events the Japanese made a tremendous blunder. Tokyo could never decide how to deal with Australia. However, the splendid harbour at Rabaul in the Bismarcks was an obvious target and was seized, along with some nearby points in New Guinea in January 1942. However, the Imperial Army’s parsimony with ground troops came into play. In January the remaining Australian bases on New Guinea were almost undefended and could have been seized with a few imperial battalions. Had Tokyo done this all of New Guinea would have been in Japanese hands. It is very doubtful that, given their limited naval resources, the Allies would have attempted an amphibious attack from northern Australia against southern New Guinea. With foresight, Tokyo could have shut down the New Guinea front before it started. As it happened, the Australians reinforced Port Moresby in south-eastern New Guinea and the Americans launched a carrier raid in the area.

This potential weakness was very important. Japan had made brilliant plans on starting the war but had no clear road toward ending it. As an attack against the United States mainland was out of the question, Tokyo planned to establish a maritime perimeter of air bases, which, supported by Combined Fleet, the fighting core of the Japanese Navy, could guard their new empire. Any major break in this chain, however, left vulnerable either the oil and minerals required for industry or the Japanese home islands themselves.

Finally realising the potential danger from Moresby, the Imperial Navy formed a powerful force to attack these targets. By this time the United States was firmly committed to defending Australia. In May 1942 the Japanese carriers protecting the invasion fleet met their American counterparts in the Coral Sea. Tactical laurels went to Japan, but imperial forces suffered serious losses and the all-important invasion of Moresby was postponed. In the meantime two crack Japanese fleet carriers were out of action for Yamamoto’s grand plan for the Central Pacific, which began three weeks later.

In keeping with the central tenet of Japanese fleet operations, Yamamoto was eager to entice the remainder of the American Pacific Fleet, particularly its aircraft carriers, into a battle of annihilation. In late May, Combined Fleet threw everything it had into a complex and powerful drive toward the north-central Pacific designed to force a battle. In early June, Combined Fleet’s carrier force was mauled at Midway.