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Magda had murdered their six children) were at last physically destroyed during the night of 4 April 1970. The bodies had been buried at a Smersh (military counter-intelligence) base in Magdeburg in East Germany in February 1946, which twenty-four years later was about to be turned over to the locals as surplus to requirements, and construction work was due to take place there. So potent a symbol were the mortal remains thought to be for neo-Nazi revanchists – even though the ‘skulls, shin-bones, ribs, vertebrae and so on’ were in ‘an advanced state of decay, especially those of the children’ – that the USSR’s Chairman of State Security Yuri Andropov ordered that they be burnt with charcoal, crushed to dust, collected up and then thrown into a river.111 So the remains were reincinerated and the ashes gathered into a canvas rucksack. ‘We walked to a nearby hillside,’ Vladimir Gumenyuk, the leader of the three-man detail charged with the task, told Russia’s NTV television station years later. ‘It was over in no time at all. I opened up the rucksack, the wind caught the ashes up into a little brown cloud, and in a second they were gone.’112

18

The Land of the Setting Sun

October 1944–September 1945

Armchair strategists can look at the last stages of a campaign and say there’s nothing left but mopping up, but if you’re holding the mop it’s different. The last Jap in the last bunker on the last day can be as fatal to you personally as the biggest battle at the height of the campaign, and you don’t look or think much beyond him – wherever he is.

George MacDonald Fraser, Quartered Safe Out Here, 19921

The collapse of Japan within four months of Hitler’s death was a powerful vindication of the Germany First policy adopted by the Allies after Pearl Harbor. Had the Allies pursued a Pacific First policy – as advocated by the US Navy in the wake of Pearl Harbor – it would have allowed Hitler considerably more time and resources with which to defeat the Soviet Union, and establish himself as master of the Greater European land mass. There had always been a tension between the US Army (which believed in the German First policy) and the US Navy (which tended to believe in Pacific First, preferring the theatre where it would play a far greater role). It took the Solomonic judgement of General Marshall to keep the United States committed to the former, supported as he was in this by President Roosevelt and the British.

Despite this, the United States had devoted a significant portion of her armed forces to preventing Japan from consolidating her newly won empire. The massive air superiority established by the Americans in particular allowed them to pound the Japanese forces to a terrible degree. The blows that rained down on Japan’s Army, Navy, Air Force and cities smashed each of them before the atomic bombs delivered the coup de grâce. On 12 October 1944, for example, Task Force 38 began its assault on Formosa, in which the Americans flew more than 2,300 sorties, whereas the very few planes that the Japanese managed to get into the sky were mostly intercepted and destroyed. Soon afterwards General Walter Krueger’s Sixth Army was transported to Leyte in the Philippines by Admiral Thomas Kinkaid’s Seventh Fleet, and in one day more than 130,000 troops were put ashore, almost as many as on D-Day. General MacArthur thereby redeemed the promise he had made to the Filipino people on 11 March 1942 when he had said: ‘I shall return.’

As the Americans moved inexorably towards the Japanese mainland they often adopted a policy – as with the Palau Islands in October 1944 – of ‘island-hopping’, simply missing out engaging the Japanese forces on islands that were cut off and thus had no means of counter-attacking, in order to conserve troops’ energy for assaults on those that did. The counter-attack at Leyte Gulf in late October 1944, with a carrier force from Japan and strike forces from Brunei, turned into the largest naval engagement in world history, with 216 United States Navy (and two Royal Australian Navy) vessels comprising