The History Buff's Guide to World War II (40 page)

When he was later promoted to lead the Fifteenth Army in Burma, Mutaguchi did not fare so well. Tokyo directed him to hold the country, the only viable land avenue between India and China as well as a producer of rice and petroleum. At first he complied, but then he began to harbor dreams of great conquest. Eying India, he believed a thrust into the subcontinent would inspire a domestic uprising against British rule. If India fell, perhaps Britain itself would be shaken to its core and sue for peace.

Given approval to mount a modest advance across the border, Mutaguchi aimed for the British base at Imphal, a heavily defended city reachable only through fast rivers, dense jungle, and rugged mountains. With 155,000 troops and 20,000 draft animals, he headed west with a minimal amount of food, medicine, and ammunition. The whole operation, thought Mutaguchi, would take about two weeks.
⁸³

Four months later, his troops wandered back, defeated by privation and dissension as much as by the Indians and British. All of the pack animals were lost or eaten, and a third of his force was dead. Then the monsoons came. Beaten men, too exhausted to march on, fell in the mud and drowned. Maggots swarmed in the wounds of the living and the dead. Some men ate grass to stay alive; others begged for grenades to end their torment. In all, 65,000 died.

In losing his troops in India, the routed Mutaguchi also lost his ability to hold onto Burma, which in turn lost his empire’s hold on southern Asia. For the ignominious failure, the general placed all the blame on his subordinates.
⁸⁴

His India adventure was arguably the worst defeat in the history of the Japanese army. Yet instead of being tried or demoted for his actions, Mutaguchi Renya was transferred to Tokyo and promoted to the army general staff.

MILITARY BLUNDERS

Yesterday’s battle is tomorrow’s board game. Too often the present views the past with an air of condescension. This is especially true concerning the treatment of command decisions in the Second World War.

Of course, later observers see the war from a comfortable vantage point, armed with benefits their objects of study did not enjoy: plentiful information, ample time to contemplate options, freedom from danger, and foreknowledge of results. Judging a decision is easier than making one, especially when armies and countries are at risk.

Still, leaders and commanders made a number of bumbling mistakes during the war, decisions from which their enemies benefited greatly. These blunders usually emanated from one of four factors: ego, shortsightedness, wishful thinking, or panic. These are human traits to be sure, but they often resulted in needless loss of life and destruction. Listed here are the worst strategic and tactical failures conducted between 1937 and 1945, ranked by time, resources, morale, and lives wasted. Probably none of them changed the war’s final outcome, but all significantly altered its course and duration.

1
. THE ATLANTIC WALL (GERMANY’S COASTAL DEFENSES, 1942–44)

From Denmark to Spain, pressed tight against the meandering Atlantic coastline, stood the wall to Hitler’s Fortress Europe: bunkers, trenches, pillboxes, siege guns, machine-gun nests, barbed wire, thousands of antitank and antiship obstacles, and five million mines. The defensive perimeter ran more than seventeen hundred miles, equivalent to the distance from Boston to Denver. It required three years and half a million workers to erect, and it was the largest construction project ever attempted since the Great Wall of China. It was also almost completely useless.
⁸⁵

Poland attempted to defend its entire thousand-mile western border in 1939, only to have Germany abruptly puncture the line in a matter of hours. History repeated itself eight months later when Germany made a mockery of French border fortifications, easily going around or over supposedly impregnable defenses of the Maginot Line. Strange that the chief advocate of the Atlantic Wall, I
RWIN
R
OMMEL
, had personally taken part in these two invasions and never made the connection.

Placed in charge of the Atlantic Wall in late 1943, Rommel accelerated construction and demanded more infantry, artillery, and nearly every available tank in the western theater. His commanding officer, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, advocated keeping forces farther back, waiting for a landing point to become known, and then smashing the invasion with a concentrated counterattack. Precedent favored von Rundstedt. When defenders employed focused counterattacks, invasions were almost always contained, as demonstrated by the Greeks against the Italians in 1940 and the Germans against the Allies at Anzio in 1943. Hitler ordered a blending of Rommel’s and Rundstedt’s strategies, allowing Rommel’s expansion plan to continue. The bastions rapidly grew, as did their insatiable appetite for resources the Third Reich could not spare.
⁸⁶

Judgment day came with the invasion of N
ORMANDY
. The Allies broke through the wall at its strongest point in less than ten hours, turning the entire immobile, expensive wall into one giant relic.
⁸⁷

Huge coastal guns along the Atlantic Wall—expensive, inadequate, and immobile.

From 1942 to 1944, Nazi engineers used twice as much concrete to fortify the Atlantic Wall as they used to build factories, air bases, submarine pens, and oil-storage facilities combined.

2
. STALIN’S STUNNED SILENCE (OPERATION BARBAROSSA, JUNE 1941)

A furious Gen. Ivan Boldin screamed into the telephone, “Cities are burning and people are dying!” The deputy commander of the Western Military District begged Moscow for orders in the first horrific hours of the German invasion. More than three million German soldiers, plus another million from supporting nationalities, were rolling eastward, demolishing airfields, towns, and divisions at will. Stationed far from the chaos, the voice on the other line responded to Boldin with cold detachment: “I am informing you…comrade Stalin has not authorized artillery fire against the Germans.”
⁸⁸

At the time, Stalin refused to authorize much of anything. After a few days in Moscow, hearing report after disastrous report from the front, he retired to one of his country villas outside the capital. Those close to him suspected he had suffered a nervous breakdown, as he somehow believed the largest invasion in world history was just a ruse, concocted by a rogue Nazi general—or more likely, Winston Churchill—to trick the Soviets into attacking Germany.
⁸⁹

A week passed before Stalin returned full-time to the Kremlin, and nearly another week went by before he addressed his people by radio, commanding them to stand firm. In those two weeks, his air force lost half its planes, most while on the ground, and his army lost nearly a million men (killed, wounded, or captured) of its five million total. The invasion had sliced deep into Stalin’s domain, two hundred miles in places, and showed no signs of slowing.

Certainly the Soviet armed forces in 1941 were not well trained or equipped. The Red Army as a whole lacked cohesion and morale and had undergone a devastating purge that killed or jailed nearly every senior officer during the later 1930s. But whatever potential the Soviet defenses had in June 1941 was severely and almost fatally compromised because of one man’s terrible and terrified hesitation. The lost territory would be won back, but not until three years had passed.

While Stalin brooded over conspiracy theories, his Red Army stood virtually helpless against the largest invasion in history.

Germany attacked the Soviet Union with 170 divisions. Soviet postwar history books later inflated this to 208 divisions.

3
. CHIANG DROWNS HIS OWN PEOPLE (YELLOW RIVER, CHINA, JUNE 1938)

The three-thousand-mile-long Hwang Ho, or Yellow River, was also known as “China’s Sorrow.” Over the centuries, the mainland artery had burst time and time again, flooding the vast east central plains, killing thousands and occasionally millions of people. In an ongoing effort to cure the problem, the Chinese constructed stalwart dikes hundreds of miles long to nurse the staggering, murky Yellow River eastward into its namesake sea.
⁹⁰

In 1938, China was undergoing an altogether new sorrow. Driving south from Manchuria, armed with tanks, bombers, and artillery, Japanese Imperial forces appeared as if they could drive through to Indochina and cut China in half. To stop them, Generalissimo C
HAING
K
AI
-S
HEK
ordered the severing of the Yellow River dikes. None of the residents in the doomed flood plains were warned ahead of time.
⁹¹

Witnesses described a storm of mud and water heading south and east. Crops, buildings, homes, roads, and wells were soon buried under a great swath of liquid earth. An estimated six million became homeless. The number of drowning victims was never determined.
⁹²

Flooding did slow the Japanese, but only temporarily. Far greater was the lasting damage rendered upon the Chinese. Along with eleven major cities and four thousand villages, precious farmland was destroyed and remained unusable for years. Widespread famine ensued, killing exponentially more than the actual flooding and earning Chiang millions of lifelong enemies.
⁹³

As a result of the flood, the Yellow River changed its course by 250 miles, the equivalent of having the Mississippi River sweep over to the Alabama-Georgia border and out through the panhandle of Florida.

4
. HITLER’S SIXTH ARMY SACRIFICE (BATTLE OF STALINGRAD, NOVEMBER 1942–FEBRUARY 1943)