Eritrea Campaign 1941 – map by Stephen Kirrage for Wikipedia “East Africa Campaign” under license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

(9) ITALO-ABYSSINIAN WAR / EAST AFRICAN CAMPAIGN

(3 OCTOBER 1935 – 19 FEBRUARY 1937 / 10 JUNE 1940 – 27 NOVEMBER 1941)

Yes, everyone forgets (or overlooks) this war when it comes to the Second World War (or before it) – or indeed forgets or overlooks that any part of the Second World War was fought in Africa apart from North Africa.

Even if the Italo-Abyssinian War – or more precisely the Second Italo-Abyssinian War (or Second Italo-Ethiopian War to use its more modern but decidedly less glamorous nomenclature) – was fought on a scale to rival the Winter War, at least in numbers of troops, and for substantially longer.

Okay, the Italo-Abyssinian War received substantial attention at the time and since, as the second act of Axis aggression after Japan’s invasion of Manchuria and another stepping stone towards the breaking point of the postwar international order after the First World War – but not so much the details of the war itself.

Its sequel during the Second World War, the East African Campaign, is almost completely overlooked on the other hand, let alone in any detail, despite being “the first Allied strategic victory in the war” and not without its challenges.

I’m fond of quoting H.P. Willmott’s quip that, paradoxically, WW2 might be regarded as the last war of the 19th century and WW1 was the first war of the 20th century.

Whatever else you take that to mean, it seems most apt to describing the war in East Africa, as a throwback to the Scramble for Africa and contest between European colonial powers.

Indeed, the Second Italo-Abyssinian War was literally a throwback to the First Italo-Abyssinian War, that last gasp of the Scramble for Africa in which the only African polity to preserve its independence, Abyssinia, did so by soundly defeating Italy at the Battle of Adwa in 1896, one of the few African defeats of a European colonial power. (Yes, I’m aware of Liberia as the other “independent” state in Africa but it was effectively an American creation).

In the Second Italo-Abyssinian War, Mussolini’s Italy set out to use its massive superiority in weaponry to avenge – and reverse – its defeat in the First Italo-Abyssinian War, invading and occupying Abyssinia. The First Italo-Abyssinian War might have surprised the world (and inspired Africa) with an Abyssinian victory, the Second Italo-Abyssinian War did not with its Italian victory, albeit Abyssinian resistance and a government-in-exile under Emperor Haile Selassie persisted afterwards.

In the longer term, Italy’s choice to invade Abyssinia seems foolish, given how isolated and vulnerable even a victorious Italian occupation of Abyssinia would be to superior British and French naval power if war broke out. That perhaps should have been the case back in 1935 but certainly turned out to be the case with Britain’s East African campaign during the Second World War – which Britain won, against skilful and protracted Italian defense that is also often overlooked for a general and somewhat unfair caricature of Italian military competence during that war.

RATING: 4 STARS****

B-TIER (HIGH TIER)

Territories under partisan control in September 1944, public domain map in Wikipedia “World War II in Yugoslavia”

(8) YUGOSLAVIAN CIVIL WAR & WAR OF NATIONAL LIBERATION

(6 APRIL 1941 – 25 MAY 1945)

“In April 1941, the Axis powers conquered Greece and Yugoslavia and thereafter the real struggle for the control of those countries began.”

That’s how H.P. Willmott summed it up in The Great Crusade, his history of the Second World War. While Greece will earn a place in my special mentions, the partisan warfare in Yugoslavia deserves its place in my Top 10 Second World Wars.

That’s because of two reasons – its scale and the effectiveness of the partisans under Tito.

The former is reflected in its casualties, with Yugoslavia having one of the highest death tolls by population, usually estimated as at least one million (or approximately 7% of the population), of which over half were civilian.

The partisans were no slouches in number of combatants either – originally a guerilla force aided by their country’s mountainous terrain, they switched to a conventional force apparently numbering 650,000 in 1944 (and increasing to 800,000 in 1945) in four field armies in 52 divisions, with a navy and air force.

Their effectiveness is usually considered in terms of being Europe’s most effective anti-Axis resistance movement in the war – unique or almost unique among such movements or partisans to liberate their country with their own forces during the war.

(In its article on the Yugoslav Partisans, Wikipedia nominates Yugoslavia as “one of only two European countries that were largely liberated by its own forces during World War II” – I recall the other is Albania, although I also recall Greek partisans had liberated substantial parts of Greece).

Of course, they didn’t and probably couldn’t do without outside help. They were aided by joint operations with the Soviet operation against Belgrade, the national (and Serbian) capital. They were also aided throughout by logistics and air support from the western allies.

More substantially, they were aided by Germany’s priority to commit forces elsewhere against the Soviets or western allies, as well as by the desertion of Germany’s allies, both those allies surrendering to switch sides and of forces fielded in Yugoslavia itself, often literally deserting to join the partisans.

Even so, Germany and its allies came very close to destroying the partisans in spring and summer 1943 – that is, before the reversal of fortunes from the surrender of Germany’s most significant ally in Europe, particularly in terms of forces occupying Yugoslavia, Italy.

This illustrates that the Yugoslavian war of liberation was no simply two-sided affair, but rather a bitter battle royale on all sides – summed up by a quip from John Irving’s Setting Free the Bears to the effect that it was a hard war if you didn’t change sides at least once.

On what might be described as the Axis side, there was of course Germany, which had primarily defeated Yugoslavia in April 1941 but had then largely left the occupation of Yugoslavia to its allies – Italy, Hungary, Bulgaria and their various client regimes, most notoriously the Ustashe of Croatia. That is, until the surrender of Italy and the threat of Allied landings in the Mediterranean extending to the Balkans forced Germany to commit more substantial forces.

On what might be described as the Yugoslav side, there was actually a multi-side civil war, albeit primarily between Tito’s communist partisans and the royalist Chetniks, although there were also the collaborationist forces of Axis client regimes as well as, bizarrely, the White Russian émigré “Russian Protective Corps”. The Chetniks increasingly collaborated with the Axis forces, with the Allies ultimately abandoning them to support Tito’s partisans.

Tito and his partisans emerged victorious as Yugoslavia’s postwar communist or socialist government, naming the war they had won as the National Liberation War and Socialist Revolution. However, because they had won it largely with their own forces, they were able to remain outside the Soviet bloc – unlike the other eastern European communist states which had been essentially imposed by Soviet forces – effectively defecting from it in what was famously the first major split within the communist world, the Tito-Stalin split.

RATING: 4 STARS****

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Offensives of the four Soviet armies in the Winter War from 30 November to 22 December 1939 – public domain image in Wikipedia “Winter War”

(7) SOVIET-FINNISH WAR – WINTER & CONTINUATION WARS

(30 NOVEMBER 1939 – 13 MARCH 1940 / 25 JUNE 1941 – 19 SEPTEMBER 1944)

The Soviet-Finnish wars have an odd place in the continuity of the Second World War – almost like Schrodinger’s wars, at the same time both within and outside the main continuity, with the latter effectively saving Finland from the same fate of occupation and unconditional surrender as Germany.

The Winter War has quite the notoriety within Second World War history, primarily for the obvious Soviet expectations of a walkover only to be undone by the Finnish underdog against the odds.

The ultimate Soviet goals in that war are contested, although most seem to agree that it was the complete occupation of Finland – consistent with restoring other former Imperial Russian territory to the Soviet Union, as with Poland and the Baltic states.

Whatever they were, they had to evolve as a result of the skilful and stubborn Finnish resistance that’s the stuff of legend, while the Soviets seemed to double down on one disaster after another.

But evolve they did, to a more realistic strategy not based on Finland conveniently collapsing from the first push – and which had seen Soviet overconfidence in attacking at the worst time of year for it in terms of seasonal weather. Ultimately, Finland had to negotiate while they still had the means to avoid worse defeat.

The Soviet-Finnish wars weren’t done, however, as the Soviets reaped the harvest they had sown in the Winter War with what the Finns called the Continuation War – the Finnish participation in the German invasion of the Soviet Union. That title reflected the common perception or intention that the war was to reverse the losses of the Winter War and no more, though some Finns argued for more ambitious war aims of a Greater Finland.

Whatever the Finnish goals in the Continuation War, Finland held itself aloof from Germany as much as possible, even to the extent of identifying as co-belligerent rather than ally and not signing the Tripartite Pact – which resulted in the United States never formally declaring war on Finland.

Finland also refused to advance beyond certain points and had to demobilize part of its army from economic necessity in 1942. Finland was also the first to see the logic of German defeat if Germany could not secure a quick victory, attempting to start peace negotiations with the Soviet Union as early as autumn 1941.

And once again Finland managed to save itself with the Soviets accepting a more limited outcome than the occupation or unconditional surrender of Finland. That outcome did however require the Finns to declare war on Germany and eject German troops from Finland.

That saw the third and final war fought by Finland, this time against Germany in the Lapland war – which mostly came to an effective end in until November 1944 although some German troops held out until 27 April 1945, shortly before the surrender of Germany itself.

RATING: 4 STARS****

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Map showing the Soviet Union’s 1945 Invasion of Manchuria, also known as Operation August Storm – based on David Glantz’s maps in Levenworth Paper No 7 – Feb 1983 used in Wikipedia “Soviet invasion of Manchuria” under license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

(7) SOVIET-JAPANESE WAR

(11 MAY – 16 SEPTEMBER 1939 / 8 AUGUST – 2 SEPTEMBER 1945)

It has always struck me as somewhat anomalous that two of the major combatants of the Second World War, the Soviet Union and Imperial Japan, scrupulously avoided fighting each other for almost all the conflict – except for brief wars against each other bookending either end of the Second World War as conventionally defined – despite being on opposing sides and despite it obviously being to the detriment of Japan’s ally Germany.

Not that, on the latter point, Germany particularly sought out Japanese involvement in its war against the Soviet Union – at least not until Germany’s initial victories began to wane to the point that Germany considered it might need Japanese involvement after all, by which point it was too little too late.

Hence Japan signed the Japanese-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact on 13 April 1941, a little over two months before Germany invaded the Soviet Union – reflecting how little Germany had coordinated with or even informed Japan with respect to its intentions. Hence also the term scrupulously I used for the Soviet Union and Japan avoiding fighting each other – scrupulously that is, in terms of abiding by the Non-Aggression Pact.

And as I stated before, despite that scrupulousness on Japan’s part obviously being to the detriment of Japan’s ally Germany – reflected in, among other things, about half of American Lend-Lease aid to the Soviet Union in the war against Germany being shipped through the Pacific, as long as the ships had Russian flags, even as Japan was bound to be defeated if Germany was defeated by the Soviet Union.

It’s even more anomalous when one considers the long-standing Japanese hostility to the Soviet Union – and indeed the Russian empire before that, Japan’s first European military adversary. Japan had both the largest and longest military intervention in the Russian Civil War, which persisted until Japan finally withdrew from Siberia and the Russian Pacific Far East in 1922.

The initial target of the rise of Japanese militarism in the 1930s was also the Soviet Union – outside of course the Japanese annexation of Manchuria, from which Japanese militarists began looking towards the Soviet Union – before that particular party of militarists was suppressed by other militarists looking towards China and elsewhere, although that didn’t stop repeated minor clashes with the Soviet Union on the Manchurian border or in Mongolia.

One can see why the Soviet Union stuck scrupulously to the Japanese-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact in its existential struggle against Germany, but less so for Japan. One factor was of course that both the navy and Japan’s need for resources, particularly oil, advocated the “Southern Strategy” against European Asian colonies (and the United States) as opposed to the “Northern Strategy” (against the Soviet Union) that was the contending strategy proposed, typically by the army, in war councils.

The other factor was the healthy respect that Japan had for the Soviet forces opposing them – something I share in terms of my uncertainly whether any Japanese involvement against the Soviet Union in 1941, when it was most optimal for Japan (and Germany), would have actually made any difference to the outcome.

That respect arose from the first of the Soviet-Japanese wars that did occur during the Second World War, indeed bookending the start of the latter.

Indeed, the first Soviet-Japanese war commenced six months before the commencement of the war in Europe with the German invasion of Poland and indeed continued for a fortnight or so into the European war. However, it was kept mostly secret by both combatants – the Soviet Union presumably to avoid undermining its position against Germany and Japan because its army was soundly defeated by that of the Soviet Union, notably at Khalkhin Gol.

The Japanese defeat in this war, particularly at Khalkhin Gol, has taken on some notoriety in history since the Second World War – rightly so in my opinion, as having an importance on the outcome of events in the Second World War that were somewhat obscured by its secrecy at the time. In some ways, it is a pity that it wasn’t publicized more widely – as it, and Japanese intelligence on the strength of Soviet forces, might otherwise had some impact on German decisions, at least if the latter had been in the minds of more rational actors.

The other Soviet-Japanese war bookend came at the end of the Second World War, after Germany had surrendered – and in the form of the Soviet Union honoring its promise to the United States to commit to war against Japan. Ironically – and somewhat incredibly – Japan at this time harbored delusions that, consistent with the Japanese-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, the Soviets could help Japan negotiate a more lenient peace.

Instead, the Soviets scrapped the Pact and absolutely smashed Japan’s Kwangtung Army in Manchuria – indeed proceeding into Korea and Japan’s northernmost island possessions.

While the Japanese army had previously romped through China in the absence of the latter’s industrial capacity and hence armored forces, now it faced the Soviet army – pretty much defined by its armored forces or tanks – honed to perfection fighting and winning against Germany.

As the War Nerd colorfully observed in a column on this war – “This was a campaign between two great empires—both gone now, it occurs to me—but one, the Soviet, was at the absolute top of its game, and the other, Imperial Japan, was dying and insane.”

RATING: 4 STARS****

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Occupation of Poland by Germany and the Soviet Union in 1939 by Lonio17 for Wikipedia “Occupation of Poland (1939-1945)” under license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

(5) FOURTH PARTITION OF POLAND

(1 SEPTEMBER 1939 – 8 MAY 1945)

The invasion and partition of Poland by Germany and the Soviet Union – in accordance with the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, which as popular historian Paul Johnson pointed out was something of a misnomer for what was more accurately a Nazi-Soviet aggression pact against Poland.

Speaking of Paul Johnson, he records an interesting vignette of how easy it was to forget Poland as casus belli of the European war. One guest swept his arm around at a London society wedding on 10 January 1946 to exclaim “After all, this is what we have been fighting for”, only for a female guest to retort “What, are they all Poles?”

And indeed, the invasion of Poland by Germany on 1 September 1939 was the commencement of the Second World War in Europe. The Soviet invasion followed on 17 September 1939, effectively to claim the Polish territory assigned to it under the Pact which in turn reclaimed the territory lost to Poland in the Polish-Soviet War of 1919-1921. But for the Pact, Germany could readily have occupied all of pre-war Poland. As it was, Poland ceased to exist as a state – and alone among the states occupied by Germany, did not have its own collaborationist government but instead the German-administered General Government.

The title of Fourth Partition of Poland is used by some historians in reference to the Three Polish Partitions – the three partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth from 1772 to 1795 by Russia, Prussia and Austria that progressively reduced the Commonwealth until it was eliminated as a state altogether by the third partition and completely divided up among the three partitioning parties.

However, other historians have pointed out that it might well be reckoned the sixth or even higher numbered partition – depending on how one reckons the subsequent restoration of Poland under Napoleon in 1807 and its partitions in 1815 (Congress of Vienna), 1832, 1846, 1848, and 1918 (Treaty of Brest-Litovsk).

I have classed the Fourth Partition of Poland as one of my top ten Second World Wars – indeed in top tier – as the German (and Soviet) war against Poland continued throughout the Second World War, albeit behind other active fronts, particularly in Poland itself behind the Eastern Front.

Active military fronts that is – Poland itself was the front line (or ground zero) of the war Germany fought against the populations of the nations it occupied, above all the Holocaust with it mostly occurring in camps in Poland and Polish Jews representing about half the tally for the Jewish population of Europe killed.

Of course, the most active part of the German war against Poland was its original campaign in September 1939 – which one book title christened as The War Hitler Won, and as H.P. Willmott observed in The Great Crusade, was a war Germany won before a single shot was fired due to its material and positional superiority over Polish forces.

The German victory still surprised observers at the time as being a matter of weeks rather than months. Poland might have had better prospects if weather – General Mud – had been more on its side, if its defense had been better planned or timed, and above all if Britain and France had properly planned or coordinated an offensive against Germany on the Western Front. The failure of the last has been considered as part of the larger Western Betrayal argued by Poles and Czechs from Munich to Yalta.

Even so, Polish forces defended Poland impressively – notably inflicting a similar proportion of casualties (for German personnel killed in action) as the French did in far better defensive circumstances the following year. That was despite the Soviet invasion on 17 September transforming the Polish situation from hopeless to completely hopeless – although as H.P. Willmott points out, it did little to change the military situation in reality other than to remove the Polish option of holding out in the so-called Romanian Bridgehead. As it was, some Polish forces held out even after the fall of Warsaw on 28 September, enduring until the last of them surrendered on 6 October, while others fled or escaped.

However, the war did not end there, either for Polish armed forces or in Poland itself.

With respect to the former, those Polish armed forces that managed to escape or flee continued fighting in Allied forces elsewhere (or in resistance within Poland), particularly as the Polish Armed Forces in the West, led by the Polish government-in-exile based first in France and then in Britain. Indeed, “Polish armed forces were the fourth largest Allied forces in Europe after the Soviet Union, the United States and Britain”, albeit reliant on arms and supplies from other allies.

Among the western allies, Poles served with distinction – perhaps the most famous examples being Polish airmen in the Battle of Britain and the Poles as the Allied “shock troops” in the Battle of Monte Cassino. The Polish navy and merchant marine also fought in the Polish Armed Forces in the West.

After the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the Soviets either released Polish personnel to serve in the Polish Armed Forces in the West or had them raise the Polish Armed Forces in the East, the latter more to Soviet ideological taste.

Arguably even more impactful was the Polish contribution to Allied intelligence. Apparently almost half “of all reports received by the British secret services from continental Europe in between 1939 and 1945 came from Polish sources” – and the Polish intelligence network described as “the only allied intelligence assets on the Continent” (after the French surrender).

Most impactful of all was the vital Polish intelligence contribution towards the decryption of the German Enigma codes, delivered to the western allies only five weeks before the war, and which underlay the British decryption known as ULTRA. Polish intelligence didn’t end there but also provided the Allies with key intelligence about the German camps, V-1 and V-2 rockets, and submarines, as well as an intelligence network for north Africa.

The Polish intelligence contribution to Allied victory has been described as “disproportionately large” and much more effective “than subversive or guerilla activities”.

Speaking of subversive or guerilla activities, finally there was the war in Poland itself – or rather the war on Poland itself. The German campaign may have ended but if anything that only represented an escalation in the German war on Poland – with far more Polish casualties from occupation than the military campaign in 1939. Poland has one of the highest casualties in absolute terms for those killed in the war – approximately 6 million, almost all civilians and over half of which were Polish Jews – and the highest as a proportion of its population, approximately 17%.

Of course, that wasn’t all the German occupation – a small proportion was from the Soviet occupation, most infamously the captured Polish soldiers killed by the Soviets at Katyn.

That prompted Polish resistance movements and the Polish Underground State, with an overall strength that was the largest or one of the largest resistance movements in Europe – in which the largest Polish resistance organization was the Home Army (Army Krajowa or AK), although there was a plethora of other organizations.

The Polish resistance fought two famous uprisings in Warsaw – firstly, the Warsaw Ghetto Rising by the Jews against deportation to the camps in April 1943, and secondly (even more famously and on a larger scale), the Warsaw Uprising in August 1944 as Soviet forces advanced on the city. Equally as famously, those Soviet forces sat it out while the Germans crushed the Uprising, destroying Warsaw far more thoroughly than the German campaign in 1939 did. The Soviet forces were at the limits of their supply and logistic chains, but they were also not inclined to do too much to address that (or otherwise assist the western Allied air forces to drop aid to the Poles), given the convenience of Germany destroying the non-communist Polish resistance.

H.P. Willmott observed the irony that Germany treated Poland atrociously and France leniently, while the reverse might have better suited Germany’s purpose. I have observed that I do not understand why Germany crushed the Warsaw Uprising, when it might have suited Germany better to withdraw to another defensive line, leaving it intact as a potential thorn in the side for the Soviets.

I’ve left the end date of this entry as the surrender of Germany but in effect part of the Polish resistance or underground war and indeed of the partition of Poland continued afterwards with respect to the Soviets – with the latter continuing to this day and onwards, as Poland never retained the loss of its territory from the Soviet part of the Pact.

RATING: 4 STARS****

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The extent of Japanese occupation of China in 1940 – public domain image Wikipedia “Second Sino-Japanese War”

(4) SINO-JAPANESE WAR

(18 SEPTEMBER 1931 – 27 FEBRUARY 1932 / 7 JULY 1937 – 2 SEPTEMBER 1945)

Like the Anglo-German War, this is the other big one but in reverse – the war no one thinks or talks about for the Second World War, despite its scale, not least reflected in Chinese casualties second only to the Soviets, and despite it being one of two entries in my top ten as the origin of the Second World War itself.

That omission or oversight in popular culture or consciousness is reflected in the usual historiography of the Second World War commencing with the German invasion of Poland, rather than the Japanese war with China that commenced two years earlier – or arguably six years before that with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria.

Well, for Europeans or Eurocentric history at least – it obviously gets more attention in Asian history. More accurately, it was the Second Sino-Japanese War, after the First Sino-Japanese war fought between Qing China and Japan in 1894-1895.

In fairness, the Sino-Japanese war was largely isolated to the combatant nations of China and Japan, hence it is difficult to see how it would have become a wider war without the war in Europe. The actual combat was isolated to China itself, given that the Chinese forces involved could barely defend themselves or their territory. By barely I mean with extensive losses and limited longer term prospects of continuing to do so without outside aid or intervention, let alone any prospects of ejecting Japanese forces or taking the war to Japan. And of course, isolated is a relative term, given the scale of war with China as the world’s most populous nation and one of its largest in size.

I say largely isolated because there were various degrees of foreign involvement in support to China or on the edges of the war itself. The former surprisingly included aid from Germany at the outset, until Germany aligned itself with Japan and started its own war in Europe – prompting much of the foreign involvement on the edges of the war with Japan seeking to cut off routes of supply to China or resources for its own war effort in south-east Asia, ultimately leading to the larger Pacific War.

Also in fairness, the war received reasonably widespread attention at the outset, both for the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and for the Japanese war with China from 1937, the latter most infamously for the R(a)pe of Nanking or Nanjing, the Chinese southern capital that the Chinese Nationalist government could not defend and had to abandon.

I am only familiar with the basic highlights of the war until the European war in 1939 – the loss of Nanjing of course and the loss of Shanghai that preceded it, the Chinese Nationalist regime under Chiang Kai-shek deciding to blow up the dams of the Yellow River to flood the North China plain to slow the Japanese advance in 1938, and the Chinese government having to retreat first to Wuhan and second to Chungking as its capital.

Looking it up, the battle of Wuhan in 1938 was the largest battle of the war – Wuhan was lost but China managed to hold the city of Changsha through two battles in 1939 and 1941, as well as win victory at Taierzhuang in 1938. In fairness to myself, the major combat operations in this period of the war from 1938 to 1941 are usually not common knowledge.

And in fairness to world attention at the time, the Sino-Japanese war was not only overshadowed by the war in Europe, but also largely settled into stalemate – where Japan had mostly defeated Chinese forces in battle but lacked the forces to extend its occupation further beyond coastal cities or railways in a country that remained overwhelmingly hostile to it. At the same, Chinese forces lacked the ability for anything other than a defensive strategy – that is, avoiding open battle as much as possible while looking for salvation from outside forces, with the Nationalists and Communists also looking ahead to renewed civil war with each other.

However, Japan still had one surprise left for China, even while it was virtually collapsing in the Pacific War against the United States, and one that is almost entirely forgotten or overlooked in most Second World War histories – the Ichigo offensive in 1944. The largest Japanese army offensive of the whole war, it was also the last successful Japanese offensive – astonishingly so and on a scale unequalled for anything else by Japan or Germany at the time.

It was the last of a series of Japanese blows that ultimately proved fatal for the Chinese Nationalist government in the subsequent civil war with the Communists – Japan arguably doing the most of anyone, including the Chinese Communists themselves, to win victory for the Communists in the civil war.

RATING: 4 STARS****

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Map of the Pacific War 1943-1945 by user San Jose for Wikimedia Commons under license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

(3) PACIFIC WAR

(7 DECEMBER 1941 – 2 SEPTEMBER 1945)

The Eagle against the Sun!

And yes – that’s the title of a book by historian Ronald Spector, one of the best single volume histories of that war.

Like a mirror image of the Nazi-Soviet War on the opposite side of the world and in the vast expanses of sea rather than those of land, the Pacific War was the other central conflict of the Second World War, the war between the United States and Japan as the largest naval war in history.

And yes – again that’s my point, that the Pacific War might well be considered as a war in its own right and indeed having its own title as such, with which the other conflicts in the Second World War (and other wars in Asia) can be seen as overlapping or as prelude or aftermath.

As such, it is a war that can be subject all of itself. Or indeed, many subjects, including as subject or subjects of its own top ten lists – notably battles, but arguably even of a top ten wars list or continuity iceberg like this

It is a war that can effectively be considered or studied in isolation from other theaters or forces other than those of Japan and the United States – as indeed it was fought, with little overlap except the so-called CBI theater (for China-Burma-India) with which it merged to some extent.

Certainly, it was almost entirely separate from the conflict in Europe, except to the extent that it was a secondary commitment to that conflict for the United States in the guise of its Germany First strategy. It’s interesting to consider the possibility that it might have remained entirely separate, but for the German declaration of war on the United States after Pearl Harbor. Of course, on the other hand it is difficult to envisage how the United States would have entered the war but for Pearl Harbor.

However, as H.P. Willmott observes, the American Germany First strategy was somewhat belied by the disposition of American forces in 1943, which more resembled a Pacific First strategy. It was certainly not the case for the American navy, for which the Pacific War remained its primary theater of operations throughout the war – and for the Marines, for which it was their exclusive theater of operation.

While similar in scale, the Pacific War lacked the decisive impact of its Nazi-Soviet counterpart, as Japan was that much weaker than Germany and that much outmatched by its American opponent in the long term that the ultimate outcome was effectively a foregone conclusion.

However, while some parts of the narrative of the war are well known, there often seems to me a curious hiatus in popular culture or imagination about that narrative as a whole.

And that curious hiatus is the Pacific War in popular culture or imagination seems to leap from the dramatic victories of Japan at the outset of the war in the six months from December 1941, at Pearl Harbor and onwards through South East Asia through to its equally dramatic defeat and reversal of fortune in the Battle of Midway in June 1942 – to the dramatic victories of the United States in Iwo Jima or Okinawa in 1945, effectively within the home island territories of Japan itself, or perhaps in the Philippines in 1944 at earliest. Of course, it helps that the staged photograph of the Marines raising the American flag in victory at Iwo Jima is one of the most iconic photographs of the war, if not the most iconic photograph.

In other words, it seems to skip the hard-fought campaigns from 1942 to 1944 or 1945 that brought the United States to those home island territories of Japan – including one of the best and most hard-fought American campaigns in the whole Pacific War, fought in the most arduous circumstances before the American quantitative and qualitative material advantages became truly overwhelming against its Japanese opponent, the campaign in and for Guadalcanal.

In fairness, those campaigns often seem like slogging matches over small islands, yet ironically without the decisive or big battles that capture popular attention or imagination. The latter was increasingly by design, particularly after the Marine casualties capturing the Tarawa atoll in November 1943, when the Americans improved their amphibious landing tactics – but even more so changed their strategy, substituting island-hopping or leapfrogging in which they bypassed Japanese strongholds such as Rabaul to “wither on the vine”.

As such, although they were often surprisingly resilient even when bypassed, many Japanese soldiers were simply left stranded without supplies, dying of starvation or disease without sighting an enemy soldier – or dying again without directly engaging any enemy combatant when their ships were sunk by American submarines.

In that, they reflected the situation of Japan itself, simply writ large for Japan as it was increasingly strangled by the American submarine campaign against its shipping. I often opine on the American submarines as the unsung victors of the war with their decisive contribution to American victory. With a smaller submarine fleet than Germany and initially defective torpedoes to boot (das boot? – heh), it managed to achieve what Germany did not – destroying the shipping of a maritime empire to bring that empire to its knees, albeit helped by Japan’s woeful neglect of anti-submarine warfare.

Japan’s problems were compounded in that it faced not one but two American campaigns in the Pacific – arising from the split between the American navy and army, which essentially saw two separate campaigns by them, the American navy campaign in the central Pacific, and the American army campaign in the south-west Pacific.

(Of course, Japan had its own issues with such a split, only much worse – which effectively saw a successful navy coup in 1944 against the army government under Tojo that had launched the war with the attack on Pearl Harbor).

It may have been better, as historian John Ellis opines, to have resolved the split and focus on the one campaign – the south-west Pacific with its shorter distances – but the fact remains that the Americans had the resources for both while Japan increasingly had them for neither.

As H.P. Willmott observes, the Pacific War was the second such war fought by the United States as it mirrored an earlier war – the American Civil War:

“Between 1941 and 1945, Japan was to the United States what the Confederacy had been 80 years before, and the parallels between the two wars were very considerable. Both wars, each about four years in duration, saw the United States opposed by enemies that relied upon allegedly superior martial qualities to overcome demographic, industrial and positional inferiority, but in both wars the United States’ industrial superiority and ability to mount debilitating blockades proved decisive to the outcome. In both wars, the United States was able to use the advantages of a secure base and exterior lines of communication to bring overwhelming strength to enemies committed to defensive strategies, and which were plagued by divided counsels, while in the military aspects of both wars there were close similarities…

The Union drive down the Mississippi that resulted in the capture of Vicksburg in July 1863 and the separation of the Confederate heartland from Texas has its parallel in the drive across the south-west Pacific to the Philippines to separate Japan from its southern resources area. The battles in the two-way states that culminated in the march through Georgia were not dissimilar from the central Pacific offensive that took American forces to Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and the shores of the Japanese home islands”.

RATING: 5 STARS*****

S-TIER (GOD TIER)