Tuesday 30 June 2015

Britain at War: Victory - VE Day and VJ Day

Victory over Germany and Italy could not have come more differently. With Germany, the British Commonwealth, American and Russian armies had to fight their way right to the heart of the Third Reich, and beard Hitler in his lair.

The Russians suffered no fewer than one million casualties in the battle for Berlin, an astonishing number considering the eventual outcome of the war had not really been in doubt for well over a year. Afterwards, it looked as though Japan might put up an even more fanatical resistance to the bitter end, but by great fortune, effort, financial investment and ingenuity, the miracle of nuclear science brought a sudden surrender in the Far East.

It is impossible to calculate how many Allied lives were saved through the use of the atomic bombs, but is unlikely to have been less than in the hundreds of thousands, especially considering the fanatical resistance the Americans had faced in places such as the islands of Iwo Jima and Okinawa, which were not even part of the hallowed Japanese mainland.

The fact that Germany held out for a full eleven months after the Normandy landings of June 1944 meant that the British, American, Canadian and Free French forces had to smash their way into France, Belgium, Holland and finally Germany itself, moving eastwards steadily, fighting battle after battle, and losing many thousands of men in the process. Victory was only won through German exhaustion and comprehensive defeat in the field.

In Europe, the 21st Army Group made its way across the Netherlands, Denmark and Northwest Germany, until on 5 May 1945 its commander, Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, accepted the German surrender of all German forces in the region at his headquarters on Luneberg Heath. By V-E Day, the British Army numbered 2.92 million men. The final defeat of Nazi Germany brought nearly six long years of European war to a climactic end.

Yet it had not been a tale of uninterrupted advance since D-Day, for the Germans regularly displayed an astonishing capability for vicious counter-attack. The town of Caen in Normandy did not tall until 10th July, for example, over a month after D-Day. At Arnhem on the Neder Rijn (Lower Rhine), the British 1st Armoured Division bravely attempted to capture a vital bridge in Operation Market Garden in September 1944, which turned out to be a bridge too far for their capabilities, and the small force that reached the north end of it was annihilated. (Arnhem was not finally liberated by the Canadians until 4 April 1945, less than a month before Hitler’s suicide in Berlin on 30 April.)

Most dangerously, a massive German counter-attack through the Ardennes forest in December 1944 led to ‘the battle of the Bulge’, so called because of the protuberance it caused in the Allied line, which threatened to drive a wedge between the British and American armies, and possibly even allow the Wehrmacht to recapture Antwerp. In the end it was halted just before it reached the River Meuse, but it was a signal reminder of how swift and effective German counter-offensives had been throughout the war.

Victory when it finally came had been a great national effort, and comprised far more than just the fighting men on the ground, at sea and in the air. Land Girls who worked in the fields; Bevin Boys who worked in the pits; merchant seamen who brought supplies from overseas; factory workers who produced armaments and the necessities of life; civil defence wardens who warned of air raids; firemen who fought the infernos of the Blitz; busmen and dockers and train drivers and postmen and milkmen and telephonists who worked on regardless of the dangers; WAAFs, WRENs and other women in uniform who took on military tasks that freed up men for the front line; housewives whose refusal to be demoralised kept up the national spirit of resistance: the Second World War could not have been won without them all.

The total casualties sustained by the United Kingdom up to the beginning of May 1945, recorded the Ministry of Information that year, amounted to close on one million. Of this total 746,109 were suffered by the Armed Forces (including 228,383 killed, 59,476 missing, 274,148 wounded and 184,102 prisoners of war.) Nonetheless, for all the sadness and individual tragic stories behind those statistics, the whole country celebrated on V-E night, with dancing in the streets and a gigantic celebration centring on Buckingham Palace. The Queen – then Princess Elizabeth – slipped out of the palace to mix incognito with the vast, happy crowds.

Once the country awoke from its V-E Night hangover, however, it looked nervously eastwards to the war still continuing unabated against Japan. The Fourteenth Army under General Sir William Slim had heroically expelled the Japanese from Burma after their attempt to capture Kohima and Imphal failed in the first half of 1944, but the prospect of clearing them from Malaya, Thailand, Indo-China, Formosa and their other occupied territories – let alone attacking the Japanese motherland itself - was a daunting one.

Yet ever since 1939 separately, and from 1941 jointly, the British and Americans had been making huge strides in the field of nuclear fission. Codenamed ‘the Manhattan Project’ and building on the work of Albert Einstein, Ernest Rutherford, James Chadwick and Neils Bohr, a nuclear programme was devised by a number of mainly British, American and German Jewish scientists at the Los Alamos research facility in New Mexico under Robert Oppenheimer. Other important Anglo-Canadian-French work was undertaken at Chalk River, west of Ottawa, under JD Cockcroft. Together, these have been described as ‘by far the most sophisticated large-scale effort ever made by man’.

After the successful testing of the bomb at Almogordo in New Mexico in July 1945, codenamed ‘Trinity’, the only two bombs in existence, which employed radically different explosive systems, were transported to the Far East. (Although the Germans had attempted to create an atomic bomb themselves, they had badly over-estimated the amount of uranium it would require, and the one area where they were making progress, with plutonium and ‘heavy water’, was heroically sabotaged by the Special Operations Executive and the Norwegian resistance at the plant at Vermork.)

At 8.15am on 6 August 1945, a uranium 235 atomic bomb codenamed ‘Little Boy’ was dropped by parachute from a US B29 bomber over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. It exploded 1,885 feet above the ground with the power of 12.5 kilotons of TNT. The heat released reached several million degrees centigrade, and a fireball was created that reduced an area of five square miles to ashes, killing 118,661 civilians and about 20,000 soldiers. Because the military-dominated government in Tokyo refused to surrender immediately, three days later a plutonium 239 bomb codenamed ‘Fat Man’ was dropped on another Japanese city, Nagasaki, killing 73,884 people and injuring 74,909. Not knowing that the Allies had no more bombs to drop, Japan surrendered on 14 August 1945. The Second World War had come to an end at last, albeit in a terrible and devastating manner that presaged over half a century of nuclear fears and standoffs. Yet victory had finally been won.

Great Britain had fought from the opening salvoes of the conflict to its last day, and stood exhausted, poverty-stricken, but proud. Her Commonwealth had immediately volunteered to share her perils, and had contributed immense amounts of blood and treasure to the cause, even though not directly threatened by Nazi Germany. Together, theirs was and is an untarnishable glory; they fought the evil of Fascist Aggression regardless of the cost, and destroyed it.




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