All Hell Let Loose (106 page)

When nineteen-year-old Superfortress gunner Joseph Majeski saw the B-29
Enola Gay
arrive on Tinian, specially modified to carry only tail armament, and fitted with reversible-pitch propellers and other special equipment, he strolled over and asked one of its crew what they had come for. The man answered flippantly, ‘We’re here to win the war,’ and of course the young airman did not believe him. A few days later, on 6 August 1945, the plane dropped ‘Little Boy’ on Hiroshima. Its detonation generated the power of 12,500 tons of conventional explosive, created injuries of a kind never before experienced by humankind, and killed at least 70,000 people. Around the world, many people at first found the notion of what had taken place beyond the compass of their imaginations. Lt. Cmdr. Michael Blois-Brooke of the British assault ship
Sefton
, preparing to invade Malaya, said: ‘We heard about some wonder bomb that had been dropped on Japan and which was going to stop the war. We really took no notice, thinking that one single bomb wasn’t going to alter the course of history.’

Three days later ‘Fat Man’ was dropped on Nagasaki, matching the explosive power of 22,000 tons of TNT, and killing at least 30,000 people. In the early hours of that day, the first of 1.5 million Soviet troops crossed the border into Manchuria, supported by 5,500 tanks and self-propelled guns. They swept across the region, overwhelming the hopelessly outgunned Japanese. In some places the defenders fought to the last, sustaining resistance for ten days after the war officially ended. But by 20 August the Russians had secured most of Manchuria and northern Korea. The brief campaign cost them 12,000 dead, more than the British Army lost in France in 1940, while something close to 80,000 Japanese soldiers perished.

Most of the young men bombing Japan had long since acquired a carapace of callousness about their business, matched by that which armoured their commanders. Gen. ‘Hap’ Arnold, the USAAF’s commander, wished to conclude the Superfortress offensive with a ‘grand finale’ by a thousand fire-raising aircraft; Spaatz, now his Pacific C-in-C, preferred the idea of dropping a third atomic bomb on Tokyo. In the event, on 14 August eight hundred B-29s attacked Isesaki urban area with incendiaries without losing a single plane, creating a last post-Nagasaki storm of destruction. One of the pilots, Col. Carl Storrie, said next morning of his own role: ‘We played alarm clock. All the rest of the aircraft carried fire bombs, but we had 4,000-pounders and went in to wake up the population of Kumugaya … We were at 16,000 [feet] and could feel the concussion. It was a dirty trick. We figured the Japs would think it was another atomic bomb.’

The Emperor Hirohito summoned a gathering of his country’s military and political leaders and informed them of his determination to end the war, declared to his nation in a radio broadcast a few hours later. Not all his subjects even then accepted his conclusion. Fighter pilot Cmdr. Haryushi Iki said: ‘I never allowed myself to think about the possibility of losing the war. When the Russians invaded Manchuria, I felt terribly depressed – but even then I could not accept that we had lost.’ Some senior figures, including the war minister and a number of generals and admirals, committed ritual suicide, an example followed by several hundred humbler folk. ‘There was a clear division of opinion in the army about whether to end the war,’ said General Staff intelligence officer Major Shoji Takahashi. ‘Many of our people in China and South-East Asia favoured fighting on. Most of those in Japan accepted that we could not continue. I was sure that, once the Emperor had spoken, we must give up.’

This view prevailed. At 1900 on the evening of 14 August Washington time – already the 15th in Japan – Harry Truman read the announcement of Japan’s unconditional surrender to a dense throng of politicians and journalists at the White House. The president then ordered the cessation of all offensive operations against the enemy. In Tokyo Bay on 1 September, Japanese and Allied representatives headed by Gen. Douglas MacArthur signed the surrender document on the deck of the battleship
Missouri
. The Second World War was officially ended.

Goethe wrote in the early nineteenth century: ‘Our modern wars make many unhappy while they last and none happy when they are over.’ So it almost was in 1945. The war ended abruptly in Europe: sullenly or thankfully, millions of German troops surrendered, tossing away their weapons before joining vast columns of prisoners shuffling towards improvised cages, while only a small number in the east attempted to continue resistance against the Russians. The vanquished emerged in some unlikely places and guises: a U-boat flying a white flag sailed up New Hampshire’s Piscataqua river, where bewildered state police received its captain and crew. Irish prime minister Éamon de Valera, flaunting to the end his loathing of his British neighbours, paid a formal call upon the German Embassy in Dublin to express his condolences on the death of the Reich’s head of state.

Many Germans believed themselves as much victims of Hitler as were the foreign nations he had conquered and enslaved. In Hamburg, old Mathilde Wolff-Monckeburg wrote broken-heartedly on 1 May: ‘We … mourn most deeply the fate of our poor Germany. It is as if the final bomb hit our very soul, killing the last vestige of joy and hope. Our beautiful and proud Germany has been crushed, ground into the earth and smashed into ruins, while millions sacrificed their lives and all our lovely towns and art treasures were destroyed. And all this because of one man who had a lunatic vision of being “chosen by God”.’

Among Germans in the summer of 1945 and afterwards, self-pity was a much more prevalent sensation than contrition: one in three of their male children born between 1915 and 1924 was dead, two in five of those born between 1920 and 1925. In the vast refugee migrations that preceded and followed VE-Day, over fourteen million ethnic Germans left homes in the east, or were driven from them. At least half a million – modern estimates vary widely – perished during their subsequent odysseys; the historic problem of Central Europe’s German minorities was solved in the most abrupt fashion, by ethnic cleansing. Meanwhile more millions of people of a dozen nationalities, enslaved by Hitler, entered a new dark tunnel of uncertainty in Displaced Persons camps administered by the Allies, where some remained for years. The least fortunate were summarily consigned to Russia, their homeland, where many were categorised by the NKVD as proven or putative traitors, and killed.

In Germany’s cities, half the housing stock had been destroyed, including 3.8 million of nineteen million apartments. Richard Johnston of the
New York Times
wrote from the ruins of Nuremberg: ‘Like timid ground creatures, a few Germans came up from their shelters, caves and cellars this morning to blink in strong sunlight and stare unbelieving at the awful mess that was their town … Nuremberg is a city of the dead.’ Berlin, Dresden, Hamburg were worse. The Thirty Years War, three centuries earlier, had inflicted greater proportionate loss on Germany’s population, but the physical devastation of 1945 was unparalleled in history: Europe’s great cities had been spared by the First World War, and even by the rampages of Napoleon.

For two years after VE-Day, the NKVD waged a bloody counter-insurgency campaign in Poland and Ukraine, to impose Stalin’s will upon peoples consumed with bitterness at exchanging Nazi tyranny for that of the Soviets. Exiled Poles in the West were dismayed to be denied a place in London’s victory parade, because the new British Labour government declined to upset the Russians. Gen. Władysław Anders wrote, ‘I felt as if I were peeping at a ballroom from behind the curtain of an entrance door through which I might not pass.’ Shortly before Labour took office in July, Anders encountered the US ambassador and British foreign secretary Anthony Eden at a banquet: ‘They greet me politely but without enthusiasm. Since our only crime is that we exist and thereby embarrass Allied policy, I do not consider myself obliged to hide or feel ashamed.’

His bitterness was justified: he and almost 150,000 of his compatriots had fought gallantly with the Allied forces, suffering heavy casualties in Italy and north-west Europe. ‘We, the Poles in uniform integrated into the British armed forces, became an ugly sore on the English conscience,’ wrote Pilot Officer B. Lvov. In 1945 such people found themselves pariahs, for the crime of rejecting a Stalinist puppet regime in their own country. The Poles ended the war as they began it, human sacrifices to the realities of power. Anders, Lvov and many of their comrades chose exile in the West rather than return home to Soviet subjection and probable execution. The Americans and British had delivered half Europe from one totalitarian tyranny, but lacked the political will and the military means to save ninety million people of the eastern nations from falling victim to a new, Soviet bondage that lasted almost half a century. The price of having joined with Stalin to destroy Hitler was high indeed.

In the victorious nations, simple people greeted the outcome of the struggle as a triumph of virtue over evil, heedless of the fashion in which liberation was blighted in many parts of the world. Painted high on the walls of several adjoining houses in housewife Edie Rutherford’s Sheffield street were the words GOD BLESS OUR LADS FOR THIS VICTORY. She and her friends spoke of Churchill: ‘Everyone agreed that we have been well blest in having such a leader. I felt once again great gratitude for being born British.’

Millions of humble folk thought not of global issues, but of movingly personal causes for gratitude. On 7 September 1941, nineteen-year-old gunner Bob Grafton, an east Londoner, had written to his adored girlfriend Dot before embarkation for the Far East: ‘Darling I
know
that you will wait for me. Darling do you know this. I swear that as long as we are apart I will never never touch another woman either physically or mentally. I do mean that Dot an awful lot … Yours Ever, with Love and Devotion so deep that the fires burn even in sleep, Bob.’ Before Singapore fell, Grafton escaped by junk to Sumatra, then lived wild in the jungle until he was captured by the Japanese in March 1942. Having survived a bondage which included two years on the Burma railway, in September 1945 he wrote to Dot from a homeward-bound troopship: ‘This I know: that it was you of the two of us who had the more difficult task. For I am a man (perhaps prematurely) and men must fight and women must weep. So my share was no exception, yours was … Even if we have lost four years we’ll make life so that it is never regretted.’ Grafton’s story had a happy ending: he married his Dot, and they lived happily ever after.

Gunner David McCormick had been captured in North Africa in December 1941, and spent more than three years in Italian and German PoW camps. A few days after VE-Day his wife met him at Salisbury station. ‘He was very thin, very pale and had the most enormous bump on his forehead. I wore a blue dress with white spots and bows on it, for which I had given several clothing coupons. I can’t remember if we kissed. I don’t think so, not until a little later on when we stopped on the back way to Ditchinhampton. We were both very nervous. He apologised for the bump, explaining that on his first night of freedom some Belgians had entertained a whole bunch of prisoners rather too enthusiastically, and afterwards he had met up with an anti-tank trap. He talked a great deal … He so desperately wanted to get four years “in the bag” off his chest as quickly as possible.’

Many others, however, returned home to discover that old ties were shattered, former passions extinct; they were obliged to content themselves with their own survival. For more millions, there was no return at all: the previous autumn Kay Kirby had become a presumed widow at twenty-one when her husband, a navigator in Bomber Command, was reported missing over Germany. In the absence of an identified corpse, she nonetheless clung to hope. ‘For years I expected George to turn up. I couldn’t reconcile myself to the fact that he wasn’t coming back … Before George started his tour when he came back on leave unexpectedly, he used to knock on my window with a clothes prop. After George went missing, many times I went to the door because I thought I heard him knocking at my window. Of course there was no one there.’

Intellectuals reflected on the vast experience the world had undergone. Arthur Schlesinger wrote grudgingly: ‘It was, I suppose, a Good War. But like all wars, our war was accompanied by atrocity and sadism, by stupidities and lies, pomposity and chickenshit. War remains hell, but a few wars have been driven by decent purposes and produced beneficial results.’ Schlesinger’s fellow historian Forrest Pogue, who had crossed north-west Europe with the US Army, wrote: ‘The war, while giving me a chance to see more of the world and of all kinds of people, nevertheless confused me … I lived more thoroughly an ordinary life than ever before … I found how much man lives next to the animal … it made me tougher-minded and more tolerant and sympathetic of human frailty … [but also] sufficiently confused so that I have not yet been able to discover any answers.’

In Asia, though handfuls of Japanese soldiers remained in hiding and even sustained guerrilla activity in the Philippines and on remote Pacific islands for months or years, MacArthur and his occupying army were received in Japan with almost slavish obeisance. Many of Hirohito’s warriors who had professed themselves willing to die for their Emperor admitted relief that the sacrifice was not required. Captain Yoshiro Minamoto and thirty crewmen of a
kaiten
suicide-boat unit emerged from hiding on the island of Tokahishi, off Okinawa, on 23 August, in response to American loudspeaker appeals. ‘I wanted everything done properly,’ said Minamoto, ‘so I had everyone wash their fatigues and clean their weapons. I paraded the men, we bowed towards Tokyo and saluted, then I led a group with a white flag towards the American lines. They treated us very well. I felt happy to have survived.’

On 15 August, all units at the island base off Japan where Toshiharu Konada commanded another suicide-boat detachment were warned to listen to the radio. Reception was so poor, however, that they could not hear Hirohito’s surrender announcement, and assumed that they had missed a mere patriotic harangue. Konada learned the news only after he drove to the island’s mountain headquarters. His commanding officer ordered all units to remain on maximum alert. Nobody could guess what might happen next: it seemed possible the broadcast was an American trick. Stunned and bewildered, Konada chose to walk back down the mountain road to the sea, collecting his thoughts. He assumed that he and his comrades would now be told to kill themselves. If the nation had embraced defeat, no other course seemed plausible.

In the event, these young men who had volunteered to die remained in readiness to launch themselves against the Americans for a further month, while slowly accustoming themselves to the notion that they might live. Konada started classes for his men in science and English, to alleviate their boredom and teach them things useful to their future. Only at the end of November 1945 did he reach his parents’ home on the mainland. His father, also a naval officer, had returned from the war convinced that his eldest son was dead: by a bureaucratic confusion, Konada had been officially listed among
kaiten
pilots lost attacking American shipping. ‘In those days, Japanese fathers did not show emotion,’ said the reprieved suicidalist. ‘He simply said, “We thought we would never see you again”; but I realised that he was happy.’ Other such families were less fortunate: of the vast number of Japanese troops who fell into Soviet hands following the last brief campaign in Manchuria, 300,000 perished in captivity.

For months after the war ended, men continued to die through mistakes or malevolence. On 29 August, Soviet fighters shot down a USAAF B-29 dropping supplies to a PoW camp in Korea, and several such fatal encounters took place in German airspace. Closure on the battlefield did nothing to alleviate starvation in many places: in the Soviet Union alone, around a million people perished between 1945 and 1947. All over the world there were accidents involving reckless abuse of vehicles or weapons, caused by young warriors casting off the shackles of discipline, killing themselves after the enemy had failed to do so.

For the most part, the conquerors and the conquered shared an overpowering relief that history’s greatest bloodletting was ended. Aboard the US carrier
Princeton
in the Pacific, chief ship’s clerk Cecil King exulted to have ‘seen it come out this way … just like Hollywood when the Marines come up over the horizon in the last reel’. The historian of a USAAF bomb group on Saipan wrote vividly, if ungrammatically: ‘The ending of the war was the greatest morale factor that has befell this group since its activation.’ But while there were displays of rejoicing in the Allied capitals, and in the homes of families promised the return of loved ones, many people found it impossible to shake off the melancholy induced by years of suffering, fear and bereavement. After the liberation of Bucharest, Mihail Sebastian wrote: ‘I am ashamed to be sad. After all, this is the year that gave me back my freedom.’

But what was ‘freedom’? A year before the Japanese surrender, the Australian minister to China warned the Advisory War Council in Canberra about widespread hostility to the restoration of white colonial rule in Asia – ‘It would be an error to suppose that we would be welcomed by the native populations when we return’ – and he was proved right. Malayan nationalist Mustapha Hussein said: ‘I cried when I heard that the Japanese had surrendered … simply because there were only forty-eight hours separating us from the declaration of independence for Malaya. This was indeed a tragic case of “So near yet so far.” I regretted the matter deeply as Malaya would once again be colonised and gripped by Western Power. Even tears of blood could not rectify the situation.’

Serious conflicts erupted in several countries where nationalists resisted the restoration of European hegemony, notably French Indochina and the Dutch East Indies. Lord Louis Mountbatten, Allied Supreme Commander in South-East Asia, urged returning colonial officials to concede sufficient local autonomy to avert conflict. Both the Dutch and the French declined to do this, however; instead, they plunged into long, doomed counter-insurgency campaigns. In Banya Bini 10 internment camp on Java, the Japanese did not inform the emaciated and diseased Dutch inmates of the war’s ending until 24 August. When prisoners ventured out, they found themselves threatened and sometimes fired upon by Indonesian nationalists, bent upon resisting the restoration of colonial rule. Only in September did Gurkha soldiers arrive, and another two months elapsed before the Dutch were able to leave their hated place of confinement for a voyage to Holland. A thousand Japanese soldiers on Java deserted to join local communities; many of them afterwards aided nationalist guerrillas. In China, American aircraft flew Nationalist troops and some US Marines into Beijing, Shanghai and Nanjing in a successful bid to forestall a communist takeover, but civil war soon engulfed the country, from which Mao Zhedong eventually emerged victorious.