Key episodes in the history of World War II were characterised by controversial and seemingly inexplicable strategic and command decisions, sometimes openly denounced as "betrayals". Analyses of these decisions or "betrayals" have either been clouded by individual idealogical bias or excluded entirely from contemporary historical discourse. Historical discusssion of the decisions, what there is of it, has left armchair pundits pondering and sometimes arguing acrimoniously among themselves. Some of the more notable of these controversial decisions, or "betrayals", form the topic of this article.
Fall of Singapore
Britain’s "impregnable" island fortres in the Far East was overrun by a numerically inferior Japanese force after only six days of fighting and surrendered on 8 February 1942, being the the largest surrender of British-led forces in history. The rapidity of Singapore's unconditional surrender came as a big surprise to the Japanese invasion force. As recorded by General Yamashita in his diary, the Japanese 25th Army at Singapore had by then almost run out of ammunition, and was outnumbered by more than three to one. In Yamashita's words, the attack on Singapore was "a bluff". A determined counter-offensive at that point would have stopped the invaders in their tracks.[1] More than 90,000 British, Australian and Indian troops were condemned to spend the next three years in misery as Japanese prisoners of war, and 25,000 ethnic Chinese suspected to be communist partisans were summarily executed. In an angry protest cabled to British prime minister and defence minister Winston Churchill, the Australian government described the surrender of Singapore as "an inexcusable betrayal". [2] To this day the British Foreign Office refuses to say why official documents in the 1941 Japan files at the Public Record Office remain closed to public scrutiny until the year 2016. Even then, the 75-year embargo may be renewed.[3] The charge of "betrayal" is neither rebutted nor mentioned at all by Churchill in his own voluminous account of the war. [4]
Charge of Western "betrayal"
The charge of "betrayal", whether justified or not, appears in a somewhat different context in the nomenclature of Soviet historians. Controversial Western command decisions are collectively referred to by them as the "betrayal" of the Soviet Union by its Western Allies in the fight against Hitler. [5] The notion of Western "betrayal" is explicit also in the work of Western revisionist historians. They argue that by land, sea and air, the Western Allies deliberately failed to deploy their overwhelming military advantages to good effect while Russia suffered appalling losses as a result, on the eastern and decisive front of World War II. [6] Stalin's earliest misgivings over the conduct of the war by the West Allies are documented in secret correspondence between Stalin and Churchill in mid-1942. This was after Churchill had suddenly suspended the Anglo-American Arctic convoys carrying essential war materials from the West to the northern ports of Russia. Churchill told Stalin on 18 July that the convoys were “too dangerous", and to attempt further Arctic convoys at that time, "would bring no benefit to you and would only involve a dead loss to the common cause". Stalin replied: "No major task can be carried out in wartime without risk or losses. You know of course that the Soviet Union is suffering far greater losses." [7] The key Russian cities of Leningrad and Stalingrad were being pounded by the Luftwaffe and besieged by the German army. In Stalingrad alone two million civilians were dying from the German air attacks, while German armour rapidly advanced in an encircling movement aimed at Moscow. [8] By 13 August 1942, Stalin was bluntly telling Churchill that their alliance had taken "an improper turn" in the refusal of Churchill to open a promised front in western Europe. This refusal, in Stalin’s words, had “delivered a moral blow” to the Soviet Union. [9] Churchill defended his position by arguing there were nine German divisions in France, making it impossible for the Western Allies to launch a concerted ground offensive in western Europe. Stalin countered with the observation that there was "not a single German division in France of any (fighting) value." [10] Classified German documents captured later by the Western Allies show that the stationing of German troops in the campaign against Russia on the eastern front generally precluded effective defence in the west. [11] It would have drawn off an appreciable share of Hitler's forces from the Russian-German front, making it possible for the Red Army to deal a decisive blow which would either have crushed Germany immediately or made certain its defeat within a reasonably short period. In Hitler's own words, a major Allied landing in western Europe in mid-1942 would have brought the Germans "to a generally critical position". [12]
The Western Allies' slow pace of opening a second front and advancing the land offensive in Western Europe is generally attributed by historians to logistical problems and a lack of adequate resources. Churchill and some of his closest advisers had identified the strategic air offensive against Germany as "the most potent method of impairing the enemy's morale", and relieving pressure on the Russian-German front. [13] Major-General Sir John Kennedy, Britain's official Director of Military Operations, observed that Churchill was wielding "constant bludgeon-strokes" on the daily work of the Chiefs of Staff while scarce resources were diverted away from the army and navy and channelled solely into the "strategic" air offensive against Germany. [14] Capital expenditure on the RAF by early 1943 leaped far ahead of both the British army and navy. In the words of Sir John Grigg, the Army Minister, it was an "extraordinary situation in which the labour devoted to the production of heavy bombers alone is believed to be equal to that allotted to the production of the whole equipment of the army."[15]
The missing front
When a second front was eventually opened in Europe commencing with the invasion of Normandy by the Western Allies on D-Day on 6 June 1944, the actions of the Allied Expeditionary Force under the supreme command of General Dwight Eisenhower were characterised by plodding restraint in the face of ideal attack conditions and comparatively inferior enemy numbers. The Germans managed to muster only 319 aircraft against 12,837 of the Western Allies whose military strength soon increased to the point where they had effective superiority of 20 to one in tanks and 25 to one in aircraft. The cross-channel build-up provided the Expeditionary Force with at least twice the number of men, four times the number of tanks, and six times the number of aircraft available to the enemy. Western allies were fielding 91 full-strength divisions against 60 weak German divisions whose overall strength was roughly equal to only 26 complete divisions. [16] The invasion force, consisting of British, American and Canadian troops, thus engaged less than a third of the total number of German divisions in France, while the Red Army engaged 185 enemy divisions in the east. [17] Red Army commander Marshal Georgy Zhukov noted that for every German division engaged by the Western armies, the Red Army met three. In terms of armoured units alone, of the roughly 5,000 tanks available to Germany, more than 4,000 were deployed on the eastern front. [18] So obvious was the disparity, most of the German divisions having been deployed to fight the Soviet forces on the eastern front, that in real terms a western front hardly even existed. Major General John Kennedy, then Assistant Chief of the General Staff, expressed deep disappointment with the way the Western Allied offensive was being run. He wrote: "For six weeks or so, (after the invasion) the Germans did not attempt or even desire to move their divisions in the Pas de Calais or elsewhere towards the scene of action in Normandy." [19] A determined ground attack at that point by the Allied Expeditionary Force, according to British Vice-Chief of General Staff, General Sir David Fraser, "might have finished the war, with incalculable strategic and political consequences, and with a saving of the huge number of casualties suffered later ... it was the last chance to seize this great strategic opportunity. It failed, and the war went on." [20]
Secret Surrender
In March 1945, months before Germany officially capitulated in Europe, a series of secret negotiations codenamed Operation Sunrise commenced in Switzerland between representatives of the Western Allies and representatives of the German High Command in Italy, headed by General Karl Wolff, commander of the SS or Schutzstaffel in northern Italy.[21] The objective of these meetings behind the back of the Soviet Union was to forestall a takeover by Italian communist resistance forces in northern Italy and to hinder the potential there for post-war influence of the civilian communist party.[22] The outcome of these meetings was a surrender to the Western Allies on 2 May 1945 of nearly 1,000,000 troops from 22 German and six Italian Fascist divisions in northern Italy, before the war in the rest of Europe had ended. Operation Sunrise had been coordinated principally by American Office of Strategic Services (OSS) head Allen Dulles, who was later to become director of the US Central Intelligence Agency.[23] The Germans took advantage of an agreed suspension of hostilities during the secret meetings to transport several army divisions from northern Italy to the Soviet front where the Red Army was still in the process of advancing on Berlin.[24] The affair caused a major rift between Stalin and Churchill, and in a letter to Rooseveld on 3 April Stalin complained that the secret negotiations did not serve to “preserve and promote trust between our countries.”[25] Field Marshal Pietro Badoglio, fascist Italy's former Chief of General Staff and number one on the United Nations list of war criminals, was welcomed ceremoniously by the Western Allies as a "co-belligerent". His "honourable capitulation" from the Axis had been secured on the understanding that Badoglio’s past crimes would simply be wiped off the slate. [26] Dulles, in return for their early surrender to the West and to the West alone, had promised the German negotiators that none of them would be prosecuted for war crimes. One of the principal participants in the negotiations was Milan Gestapo chief Walter Rauff whose responsibility under the Nazis was to conduct anti-communist operations in Italy. .[27] He was recruited by Dulles to work for OSS and was later assisted by Dulles’s contacts to escaped from Italy to Argentine as a fugitive from war crimes prosecution.[28] The Americans proceeded to subsidise and install a regime of collaborators and Nazi sympathizers, while the role in civil society of former anti-fascist partisans was quickly nullified by the Allied Military Government in Occupied Territories and by the Allied Control Commission. Communist and liberal elements, particularly those in the Italian labour movement, became radically marginalised.[29]
China
While ink was still drying on the Japanese surrender agreement, the Commanding General of US Forces in China, General Albert C Wedemeyer, noted that the post-war disarming of Japanese troops by the Chinese guerillas had failed "to move smoothly" because fully armed Japanese forces were being employed by the high command to fight the West’s former wartime ally, Mao Tse Tung and his communist resistance fighters. [30] In Truman's words: "If we told the Japanese to lay down their arms immediately and march to the seaboard, the entire country would be taken over by the communists. We therefore had to take the unusual step of using the enemy as a garrison ...” [31]
"Betrayal" at Yalta
"Western betrayal" or "Yalta betrayal" are terms used[32][verification needed] in some Eastern and Central European countries, which refer to the foreign policy of several Western countries between 1919 and 1968, which violated allied pacts and agreements made during the period from the Treaty of Versailles through World War II and to the Cold War. - - The perception of "betrayal" comes about because the western Allies promoted democracy and self-determination, signing pacts and forming military alliances prior and during World War II, but subsequently apparently betrayed their Central European allies by abandoning these pacts, for example by not preventing Nazi Germany, Hungary and Poland from invading and occupying significant parts of Czechoslovakia as a result of the Munich Agreement or by abandoning their Polish allies during the Invasion of Poland (1939)[33] and during the 1944 Warsaw Uprising.[34] Western powers also signed the Yalta agreement and after World War II did nothing or very little to prevent these states from falling under the influence and control of Soviet communism. However, the Anglo-Polish military alliance made no commitment to assist Poland in the event of Soviet invasion. - In addition, during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, Hungary received neither military nor moral support from the Western powers during the uprising, which was eventually suppressed by the Red Army.[35] - The same scenario was repeated in 1968 when four Warsaw Pact countries — the Soviet Union, Poland, Bulgaria, and Hungary — invaded Czechoslovak Socialist Republic to crush the Prague Spring changes in the governing Communist system. - - With regard to the Yalta Conference and its aftermath, some historians[who?] dispute the concept of western betrayal, arguing that Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Winston Churchill and President of the United States Franklin Roosevelt had no option but to accept the demands of their ally Soviet premier Joseph Stalin in Tehran and later in Yalta. However, there were some misjudgments of the power of the Soviet Union by the Western powers, much like the case with Nazi Germany a decade before. Supporters of Yalta are sometimes outraged at the notion that Yalta was a "betrayal" of Eastern and Central Europe without considering the fate of Poland. Polish forces had fought the Germans fought alongside the U.S., British and Soviet troops in most major campaigns[36] in Europe, including the final battle of Berlin, with the strength of the Polish Armed Forces in the West peaking at 249,000 (out of 4 million Western allies), 180,000 in the East (out of over 6 million Soviets) and over 300,000 in underground[37] AK.[38][39] In the final stage of war the Polish troops on all the European fronts, excluding the Home Army, amounted to some 600,000 soldiers[40] (infantry, armored troops, aircraft and navy). This made the Polish Armed Forces the fourth largest after the Soviet Union, United States and British Armed Forces.[40][41] The Polish government in exile was an official ally of the U.S. and Britain. All this did not prevent Roosevelt from acquiescing[citation needed] in the dismantlement of this Allied government and its replacement with a puppet communist government. Even as the men of the Polish 1st Armoured Division, determined to link up with the American 90th Division under Gen. George S. Patton's Third Army and to close the trap on the German armies in Normandy, were battling the German Army and the Hitler Youth SS Panzer division,[42] Roosevelt was planning to hand Poland over to Stalin.[43]
Notes and references
Footnotes
- ^ Yamashita quoted in Noel Barber, Sinister Twilight: The Fall of Singapore, London: Collins, 1969 pp.58, 156-7.
- ^ Quoted in S Woodburn Kirby, Singapore: The Chain of Disaster, London: Cassell 1971, pp.224-5, 252.
- ^ Stan Winer, Between the Lies, London: Southern Universities Press, 2007 [Chapter 2, "The Betrayal of Singapore" accessible online at http://truth-hertz.net ]
- ^ Winston S Churchill, The Second World War, (6 vols) London: Cassell, 1948-1954.
- ^ Vladimir Petrov (ed.), Soviet Historians and the German Invasion, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press 1968; Y Larionov, N Yeronin, B Solovyov, V. Timokhovich, World War II Decisive Battles of the Soviet Army, Moscow: Progress 1984, p.452
- ^ e.g. Gar Alperovitz, "How Did the Cold War Begin?" in Walter LaFeber (ed.) The Origins of the Cold War 1941-1947, New York: John Wiley 1971; DF Fleming, The Cold War and Its Origins: 1917-1960, New York: Random 1961; Stan Winer, Between the Lies, (2nd edn., London: Southern Universities Press 2007, [Chapter 4 "The Missing Front", accessible online at http://www.truth-hertz.net ]
- ^ Stewart Richardson (ed.),The Secret History of World War II: Wartime Letters and Cables of Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill, New York: Richardson and Steirman, 1986, pp.6, 38
- ^ Alexander Werth, Russia at War 1941-45, New York: Dutton, 1964.
- ^ Richardson, op cit, p.46.
- ^ Richardson, op cit, pp. 6, 38.
- ^ Gordon Harrison, "The European Theatre of Operations: The Cross Channel Attack" in K.R. Greenfield (ed.) The US Army in World War II, (Official History) Washington: Office of the Chief of Military History, Department of the Army: US Government Printing Office 1951, p.141ff.
- ^ Trumbull Higgins, Winston Churchill and the Second Front, New York: Oxford University Press, 1957, p.167-8.
- ^ Brian Richards, Portal of Hungerford, London: Heinemann, 1977, p.191.
- ^ John Kennedy, The Business of War, London: Hutchinson 1957, pp.116, 178.
- ^ Hansard, House of Commons, (Army Estimates debate), 16 January 1944.
- ^ Günter Bischof, Die Invasion in der Normandie 1944, Innsbruck: Studienverlag, 2002; Basil Liddell Hart, History of the Second World War,London: Cassell 1965, p.559
- ^ John Erickson, Stalin's War With Germany, (2 vols) London: Grafton, 1985
- ^ Georgi Zhukov, Reminiscences and Reflections, (2 vols), Moscow: Progress 1985, Vol II, pp.307, 334, 338, 345-7.
- ^ John Kennedy, The Business of War,London: Hutchinson 1957, p.325
- ^ David Fraser, And We Shall Shock Them: The British Army in the Second World War, London: Hodder and Stoughton 1983, p.348.
- ^ Bradley F Smith and Elena Agarossi, Operation Sunrise: The Secret Surrender. New York, 1979.
- ^ R Harris Smith, OSS, Berkely: University of California Press, 1972, pp.114-121
- ^ R Harris Smith, op cit, p.363.
- ^ Richardson, op cit, p.255.
- ^ Richardson, op cit, p.264.
- ^ Simpson, Christopher, Blowback: America's Recruitment of Nazis and Its Effects on the Cold War, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988, p.91.
- ^ Harris Smith pp.117, 119
- ^ Declassified US intelligence files quoted by investigator John Loftus, Boston Globe, 28 May 1984
- ^ Wittner, op cit.,
- ^ Kodansha Encyclopedia of Japan, (9 vols) Tokyo and New York: Dondasha 1983, Vol VII, p.202. .
- ^ Harry S Truman, Memoirs, (2 vols), New York: Doubleday 1956, Vol II, p.66.
- ^ ""Jałta symbolem zdrady aliantów wobec Polski" - Wiadomości - WP.PL" (in Polish). Wiadomosci.wp.pl. Retrieved 2010-03-08.
- ^ "FRENCH AND BRITISH BETRAYAL OF POLAND IN 1939".
- ^ "I.N.R. Davies, Great Britain and AK". Polishresistance-ak.org. Retrieved 2010-03-08.
- ^ Monday, Dec. 24, 1956 (1956-12-24). "Alliances: How to Help Hungary". TIME. Retrieved 2010-03-08.
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