Codebreakers Victory (50 page)

 

The "Final Solution" Delivers an Ultimate Message

 

As Allied armies smashed across Germany and its occupied territories in April 1945, the troops encountered phenomena that pierced even their war-hardened mind-sets. These were the Nazi death camps, where what Nazi Walter Schellenberg had called the "Final Solution" to the problem of the
Untermenschen,
the so-called inferior peoples, was being administered. GIs and Tommies alike were horrified by the scenes the open gates disclosed: the pathetic masses of gaunt, hollow-eyed survivors clad in fragments of filthy, lice-ridden striped cotton, the thousands of unburied emaciated corpses left to rot like great piles of garbage. A man as tough as George Patton vomited when he witnessed the barbarism of the camp at Ohrdruf.

In early 1941, Bletchley Park began receiving messages relating to the massacres of those the Nazis classed as undesirables. BP was breaking the non-Enigma codes of German police units assigned to the elimination of "inferior races" and was also breaking one of the codes used by Himmler's killing squads.

By August 1941, Churchill was sufficiently enraged by the information he received through Bletchley decrypts that he decided to speak out against the German atrocities, even though his so doing might jeopardize Britain's codebreaking operation. In a public broadcast he expressed his horror that "scores of thousands—literally scores of thousands—of executions in cold blood are being perpetrated by the German police troops." He added that not since the Mongol invasions of Europe had there been such methodical, merciless butchery on such a scale. "We are," he said, "in the presence of a crime without a name."

When Churchill issued his public denunciation, the BP decrypts had not yet made clear that the main thrust of the SS and the police was to eradicate the Jews of Europe. So his speech made no reference to Jews. As Richard Breitman acerbically noted in his book
Official Secrets
—an in-depth review of "what the Nazis planned, what the British and Americans knew"—Churchill's " 'crime without a name' was not the Holocaust."

The Nazi massacres should not have been a surprise. In
Mein Kampf
Hitler dwelled on his hatred of Jews, his theories of "inferior races" and his assertion of the German people as the apotheosis of Aryan supremacy. He claimed that World War I would have turned out differently if a large segment of "Hebrew corrupters" had been eliminated by poison gas.

As Breitman has carefully documented, however, despite the steady infusion of BP's incriminating decrypts, official recognition of the Jews' plight was painfully slow in coming. Left over from the Great War was a hearty skepticism toward purported atrocities. No one could believe that men this side of Attila could do such heinous things as line up people along the edge of the ditch they had just dug and then shoot them so that they conveniently fell into their own graves. Added to this was the harsh fact that many high-placed Allied officials themselves harbored anti-Semitic prejudice.

Evidence of the Final Solution's reality nevertheless mounted, and it affected Allied leaders, particularly Churchill and Roosevelt. On December 17, 1942, with the concurrence of Stalin, came the joint Allied Declaration denouncing the Nazis' killings of the Jews. In Parliament it was read on the floor of the House of Commons, and a moment of silent prayer was observed.

Still, words and prayers fell far short of action to carry out rescue operations and save Jewish lives. It seemed that strong objections could be found to reject every rescue proposal. To evacuate refugees into the Middle East would upset Muslim allies and might also arouse unrealistic hopes for a Jewish homeland. To have neutral countries take in thousands of Jews raised the necessity of providing massive amounts of food, medicine, housing and other forms of support—in those times of dire shortages, who was willing to assume these extra demands? Attempts to supply aid to Jews in German-occupied Europe would, it was argued, only weaken the Allies' blockade and forestall Germany's collapse.

What became the prevailing view was expressed by Adolf Berle, U.S. assistant secretary of state: "Nothing can be done to save these helpless unfortunates except through the invasion of Europe, the defeat of the German armies and the breaking of German power."

Of all this, most people were only dimly aware. Concerned with their own wartime responsibilities, having to conduct their lives under difficult conditions, they failed to let recognition of the Holocaust penetrate. They saw the photos of men and women having to wear the yellow Star of David sewn on their outerwear and of the shop windows of Jewish-owned stores shattered by hoodlums and the like, but to accept that these signs of depravity extended to state-ordered mass shootings and gas oven executions and baskets of gold teeth knocked out of the jaws of Jewish corpses and of lamp shades crafted of human skin—these were beyond human understanding.

That is, until the Allies liberated the death camps, until the press photographers sent back their horrifying pictures of Nazi evil. Only then did the public at large awake to the proofs of a nation gone rabid.

For those whose beliefs in that European phase of the war had been buffeted by what often seemed senseless slaughter, the waste of young lives under posturing generals, the loss of family members and good friends, the sheer cruelty and horror of it all, suddenly all doubts were wiped away. World War II was, after all, a necessary war; it had to be fought and won; the tremendous sacrifices were justified. We of what Tom Brokaw has labeled "the greatest generation," who are now of an age that he, not to miss a sentimental beat, has called "the twilight of their lives," we who are now disappearing at the rate of more than a thousand a day, look back with satisfaction on a job that needed doing and was, with the inestimable help of the codebreakers, well done.

 

 

 

20

 

The Pacific: Last Battles, Final Decisions

 

 

Once MacArthur had retaken the Philippines, the time had come to close in on the Japanese homeland. Even though the outcome of the war was now clear, the Nipponese were ruled not by a sense of reality so much as by the Bushido code of the samurai, one of whose tenets was to prefer suicide to defeat or dishonor. Still in the grip of the military, the people prepared to apply the code to the nation as a whole rather than just to individual warriors.

Allied planners fixed on the outlying islands whose possession was deemed essential as the last stepping-stones to Japan. The first was the small island of Iwo Jima, 625 miles north of Saipan and 660 miles south of Tokyo. Second was Okinawa, the large island the Japanese had occupied since 1879 and had made a prefecture of greater Tokyo. Peopled by farmers and fishermen loyal to the empire, it was only about 350 miles from Japan's southernmost island of Kyushu and less than a thousand miles from Tokyo.

The taking of Iwo Jima was dictated in large part by the needs of U.S. Superfortresses. Flying from Saipan, the big bombers had made devastating raids on Japan, but since the long distances precluded the protection of fighter escorts, the costs were high. Japanese fighters stormed up to meet them. By January 1945 the crew of a B-29 setting out for Japan could expect to be subjected to an average of eight fighter attacks. Between December and March, thirty-seven B-29s were shot down.

Air bases at Iwo Jima would mean greater security for the Forts and their crews. The island could provide navigational beacons for flights from Saipan as well as emergency landing sites for crippled planes. Most important, long-range fighters could launch from Iwo Jima's airfields to accompany the Superforts.

Responsibility for the attack on Iwo Jima shifted to Spruance and his Fifth Fleet. Spruance showed his continuing belief in the efficacy of signals intelligence by assigning a codebreaking team to his flagship as well as placing teams on four of his other ships. The main cryptanalytic crews in Oahu, Washington and Melbourne backed them.

One incident illustrates the Allied mastery of Japanese codes at this late stage of the war. On April 1, 1945, the Japanese navy changed to a new codebook, a real attempt to make their communications more secure. Yet the code was broken the next day, and within two days Japanese messages were again being read routinely. The Japanese high command could make scarcely a move without having word of it passed on to Allied commanders.

By contrast, the Americans put into use at Iwo Jima an additional type of code communications that proved impenetrable to the Japanese. This was the language of the Navajo code talkers. The Navajo tongue has such a complex, irregular syntax that few people outside the tribe can understand it. Consequently, use of the Navajo code talkers speeded up battlefield communications by eliminating the need for encoding and decoding. A few Choctaw code talkers had served in World War I. In the Pacific, it was the Navajos who were enlisted: four hundred of their code talkers literally "fought with their tongues." Lacking Navajo words for modem military equipment, they developed equivalents:
tas-chizzie,
or "swallow," meant a torpedo plane;
jay-sho,
or "buzzard," stood for a bomber;
da-he-tih-hi,
"hummingbird," was a fighter plane. At Iwo Jima, in the first forty-eight hours of battle, the code talkers sent and received some eight hundred messages without an error—and without the Japanese ever gaining the first understanding of the guttural chatter that came over their intercept receivers.

Spruance's battle fleet tried hard to ensure that the Iwo Jima invasion would be less deadly for the Marines than previous invasions. The island was subjected to almost constant air and naval bombardment before the February landings. Once again the intended softening up had little effect. The Marines faced an enemy dug into Iwo Jima's core rock, especially into its one volcanic peak, Mount Surabachi. Interconnected tunnels led to stoutly protected artillery, mortar and machine-gun emplacements. The prudent commander of Iwo Jima's garrison kept his troops underground during the pre-landing pyrotechnics, allowed the Marines to reach the beaches virtually unopposed, but then had his men emerge to contest every yard of the Americans' advance. Whereas the U.S. commanders had hoped to take the island in a matter of days, the killing went on for over a month.

Here also the Allies were beset by dense flights of kamikazes. To combat them, radio intelligence units teamed up with radar to warn of the approaching waves. Most of the suicide planes were shot down, but enough of them got through the screen to sink an escort carrier and damage five other ships.

Iwo Jima gained a legendary status in the war's history at least in part because of Joe Rosenthal's photograph of Marines triumphantly raising the American flag atop Mount Surabachi. Meatgrinder Hill might have made a more fitting symbol: it was taken and lost by the Marines five times before it was finally held. Of the twenty-two thousand in the Japanese garrison, only a few hundred gave themselves up as prisoners.

The objective was finally gained. Superfortress raids on Japan were stepped up. Iwo Jima did become a haven for damaged bombers. By the end of the war some twenty-four hundred B-29 landings were made there. As one B-29 pilot said after an emergency landing on Iwo Jima: "Whenever I land on this island, I thank God and the men who fought for it."

 

 

Okinawa: The Pacific War's Final Battle

 

The struggle for Okinawa, the southernmost of Japan's four main home islands, followed the same script as that for earlier islands, only writ much larger. On an island that stretched more than sixty miles in length, the Japanese garrison was a large one, and the soldiery were dug in on a scale surpassing that of anything previous. The underground warren of defenses even included a rail line to carry ammunition to the firing emplacements. The general in charge was another who rejected beach resistance and banzai charges in favor of conserving his men to kill methodically from behind their buttresses of concrete, steel and carved rock.

Japanese plans for this last-ditch stand included a much greater use of suicide weapons. The high command, which no doubt included men steeped in the tradition of haiku, kept coming up with poetic names for their awful devices. To "Divine Wind" kamikazes, they added
kaiten,
or "turned toward heaven," for human-guided torpedoes launched from submarines.
Ohka,
or "cherry blossom," stood for small rocket-powered sacrificial wooden aircraft.
Fukuryu,
or "crouching dragons," were suicidal divers who swam out to sea to fasten themselves, along with powerful mines, to invasion craft. As for the kamikazes, the Japanese invented a new term:
kikusui,
"floating chrysanthemums*'' for massed attacks of the immolating aircraft.

To these death-dealing smaller weapons they added a suicidal naval fleet. Desperately short of fuel, they filled their superbattleship
Yamato
with just enough gasoline for a one-way voyage and sent off with her the cruiser
Yahagi
and eight destroyers. The warships were either to go down fighting or to beach themselves on the island and add their crews to the ranks of the defenders.

The Allied decision that the island must be taken was based on securing a staging area essential to the invasion of Japan. From airfields on the island, preassault bombardments could be intensified, and planes could provide air cover for the landings. Its great expanse could also serve as a huge supply base supporting the attack.

The Allied fleet for the invasion, now including a task force of 22 British ships, was more enormous than ever: 3,025 vessels that included 18 carriers. No less than six Radio Intelligence units were aboard the command ships. After a weeklong bombardment and the taking of small ancillary islands providing logistic bases and a useful anchorage, the initial landings were made on April 1, Easter Sunday, 1945. The first reports were euphoric: virtually no opposition on the beaches and very little as the troops swept inland. In the first hour the Americans put ashore sixteen thousand men and on the first day fifty thousand, with the eventual buildup running into hundreds of thousands.