Inferno - Max Hastings [172]
Within a year of Pearl Harbor, the arrest of Japan’s Asian and Pacific advances, and the beginnings of their reversal, made its doom inevitable. It is remarkable that, once Tokyo’s hopes of quick victory were confounded and American resolve had been amply demonstrated, Hirohito’s nation fought blindly on. Japanese strategy hinged upon a belief in German victory in the west, yet by the end of 1942 this had become entirely unrealistic. Thereafter, peace on any terms or even none should have seemed to Tokyo preferable to looming American retribution. But no more in Japan than in Germany did any faction display the will and power to deflect the country from its march towards immolation. Shikata ga nai: it could not be helped. If this was a monumentally inadequate excuse for condemning millions to death without hope of securing any redemptive compensation, it is a constant of history that nations which start wars find it very hard to stop them.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE BRITISH AT SEA
1. The Atlantic
THE BRITISH ARMY’S part in the struggle against Nazism was vastly smaller than that of the Russians, as would also be the U.S. Army’s contribution. Beyond Britain’s symbolic role in holding aloft the standard of resistance to Hitler, from 1940 onwards its principal strategic importance became that of a giant aircraft carrier and naval base, from which the bomber offensive and the return to the Continent were launched. It fell to the Royal Navy to conduct the critical struggles of 1940–43 to keep the British people fed, to hold open the sea-lanes to the empire and overseas battlefields, and to convoy munitions to Russia. Naval might could not bring about the defeat of Germany, nor even protect Britain’s eastern empire from the Japanese. It was a fundamental problem for the two Western Allies that they were sea powers seeking to defeat a great land power, which required a predominantly Russian solution. But if German efforts to interdict shipments to Britain were successful, Churchill’s people would starve. A minimum of 23 million tons of supplies a year—half the prewar import total—had to be transported across the Atlantic in the face of surface raiders and U-boats.
Protecting this commerce was a huge endeavour. The navy had suffered as severely as Britain’s other services from interwar retrenchment. The construction of big ships required years, and even a small convoy escort took months to build. Britain’s shipyards were indifferently managed and manned by an intransigent labour force, which began to work only a little harder when the Soviet Union was obliged to change sides and communists of all nationalities endorsed the war effort. Britain built and repaired ships more slowly, if much more cheaply, than the United States, and could never match American capacity. For the Royal Navy, shortage of escorts was a pervasive reality of the early war years.
It was also hard to concentrate superior strength against enemy capital ships which might be few in number but posed a formidable threat and were deployed many hundreds of miles apart. In the first war years, Germany’s surface raiders imposed as many difficulties as U-boats: the need to divert convoys from their danger zones increased the strain on British merchant shipping resources. German sorties between 1939 and 1943 precipitated dramas which seized the attention of the world: the pocket battleship Graf Spee sank nine merchantmen before being scuttled after its encounter with three British cruisers off the river Plate in December 1939. The 56,000-ton Bismarck destroyed the battle cruiser Hood before being somewhat clumsily dispatched by converging British squadrons on 27 May 1941. The British public was outraged when the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau made a dash to Wilhelmshaven from Brest through the Channel Narrows on 21–22 February 1942, suffering only mine damage amid fumbling efforts by the navy and RAF to intercept them. The presence