Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [198]
Strange things happened in the confusion of the end of the war. Years ago Hitler had designated Hermann Goering as his successor; Goering had faded badly through the war, but now he came out of his sybaritic near-retirement; he sent Hitler a telegram, pointing out that Hitler could no longer direct events and asking if he were now free to take over. Hitler reacted with rage, sacked him, for whatever that was worth, and appointed Admiral Karl Doenitz as his successor instead. On May 1, as the resistance in Berlin was falling apart at last, Hitler married his mistress of many years, Eva Braun, and the two of them, followed by the Goebbels family—children and all, faithful sycophants to the end—committed suicide. Retainers burned and buried the bodies of the Fuehrer and his bride outside the bunker, disguising them successfully enough that for years there were rumors of Hitler being alive somewhere, usually in South America. The survivors of the bunker filtered away, some to be caught and shot by the Russians, some to make good their escape, to disappear into the shadows along with the Thousand-Year Reich. The next day Russian soldiers hoisted the red flag with the hammer and sickle on the landmarks of devastated Berlin.
Grand Admiral Doenitz, the second leader of Nazi Germany, did not last long. The only possible task for him was to end it all as quickly as possible. The Germans still hoped that somehow they could play one side off against the other. In the last week of the regime there was a great effort to hold on the eastern side, and to encourage the Western Allies to come as far as they could. It came to nothing, since the Germans no longer had the power to hold anywhere. They then tried to surrender only to the Western Allies; this too was refused, and finally, on May 8, “V-E Day” for victory in Europe, German representatives signed the act of unconditional surrender. The European phase of World War II was over.
27. The Collapse of Japan
IN 1281 THE MONGOL EMPEROR Kublai Khan sent a great invasion fleet to conquer Japan. Instead of reaching the islands, the fleet was destroyed by a providential typhoon. The Japanese thought this was sent by the Sun Goddess to protect the Son of Heaven and the Land of the Rising Sun. Now the sons of the Son of Heaven were left to their own devices and, anxious to avoid the humiliation of living through defeat, a disgrace unthinkable, they flocked to form the suicide corps that became the twentieth-century version of the Divine Wind, the kamikaze. The young Japanese, sufficiently trained to get their planes airborne and guide them to a target, attended their own funerals, wrote letters home filled with touching passages of poetry, and climbed into their planes. Locked into the cockpits, loaded with bombs, carrying enough fuel to get to the American fleet but not back again, they took off to seek death for their Emperor.
Nearly all found what they sought, for the Americans were moving steadily closer. In the air long-range bombers from the Marianas and from bases in China were pounding the cities to ash and rubble; the island-hopping campaign was now reaching native Japanese territory, with the landings on Okinawa and Iwo Jima in the Bonins; and all the time, the submarines of the U. S. Fleet were strangling the Japanese.
At the start of the war the Allies and the Japanese both had about the same number of submarines in the Pacific: sixty-three Japanese, sixty-nine Allied, of which thirteen were Dutch, and the rest American. The Dutch were soon removed from the board, and the American submarine fleet was left to