I. Timeline of the Second World War

1939

Hitler invades Poland on 1 September. Britain and France declare war on Germany two days later.

1940

Rationing starts in the UK. German 'Blitzkrieg' overwhelms Belgium, Holland and France. Churchill becomes Prime Minister of Britain. British Expeditionary Force evacuated from Dunkirk. British victory in Battle of Britain forces Hitler to postpone invasion plans.

1941

Hitler begins Operation Barbarossa - the invasion of Russia. The Blitz continues against Britain's major cities. Allies take Tobruk in North Africa, and resist German attacks. Japan attacks Pearl Harbor, and the US enters the war.

1942

Germany suffers setbacks at Stalingrad and El Alamein. Singapore falls to the Japanese in February - around 25,000 prisoners taken. American naval victory at Battle of Midway, in June, marks turning point in Pacific War. Mass murder of Jewish people at Auschwitz begins.

1943

Surrender at Stalingrad marks Germany's first major defeat. Allied victory in North Africa enables invasion of Italy to be launched. Italy surrenders, but Germany takes over the battle. British and Indian forces fight Japanese in Burma.

1944

Allies land at Anzio and bomb monastery at Monte Cassino. Soviet offensive gathers pace in Eastern Europe. D Day: The Allied invasion of France. Paris is liberated in August. Guam liberated by the US Okinawa, and Iwo Jima bombed.

1945

Auschwitz liberated by Soviet troops. Russians reach Berlin: Hitler commits suicide and Germany surrenders on 7 May. Truman becomes President of the US on Roosevelt's death, and Attlee replaces Churchill. After atomic bombs are dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan surrenders on 14 August.

Events of 1939

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Three years of mounting international tension - encompassing the Spanish Civil War, the Anschluss (union) of Germany and Austria, Hitler's occupation of the Sudetenland and the invasion of Czechoslovakia - culminated in the German invasion of Poland on 1 September. Britain and France declared war on Germany two days later. While the USA proclaimed neutrality, it continued to supply Britain with essential supplies, and the critical Battle of the Atlantic between German U-Boats and British naval convoys commenced.

Western Europe was eerily quiet during this 'phony war'. Preparations for war continued in earnest, but there were few signs of conflict, and civilians who had been evacuated from London in the first months drifted back into the city. Gas masks were distributed, and everybody waited for the proper war to begin.

In Eastern Europe and Scandinavia, however, there was nothing phony about the war. With the Ribbentrop Pact signed between the Soviet Union and Germany in late August, Russia followed Germany into Poland in September. That country was carved up between the two invaders before the end of the year, and Russia continued this aggression by going on to invade Finland.

Events of 1940

Rationing was introduced in Britain early in the New Year, but little happened in Western Europe until the spring. The 'winter war' between Russia and Finland concluded in March, and in the following month Germany invaded Denmark and Norway.

Denmark surrendered immediately, but the Norwegians fought on - with British and French assistance - surrendering in June only once events in France meant that they were fighting alone.

On 10 May - the same day that Winston Churchill replaced Neville Chamberlain as Prime Minister of the UK - Germany invaded France, Belgium and Holland, and Western Europe encountered the Blitzkrieg - or 'lightning war'.

Germany's combination of fast armored tanks on land, and superiority in the air, made a unified attacking force that was both innovative and effective. Despite greater numbers of air and army personnel - and the presence of the British Expeditionary Force - the Low Countries and France proved no match for the Wehrmacht and the Luftwaffe. Holland and Belgium fell by the end of May; Paris was taken two weeks later.

British troops retreated from the invaders in haste, and some 226,000 British and 110,000 French troops were rescued from the channel port of Dunkirk only by a ragged fleet, using craft that ranged from pleasure boats to Navy destroyers.

In France an armistice was signed with Germany, with the puppet French Vichy government - under a hero of World War One, Marshall Pétain - in control in the 'unoccupied' part of southern and eastern France, and Germany in control in the rest of the country.

Charles de Gaulle, as the leader of the Free French, fled to England (much to Churchill's chagrin) to continue the fight against Hitler. But it looked as if that fight might not last too long. Having conquered France, Hitler turned his attention to Britain, and began preparations for an invasion. For this to be successful, however, he needed air superiority, and he charged the Luftwaffe with destroying British air power and coastal defenses.

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The Battle of Britain, lasting from July to September, was the first to be fought solely in the air. Germany lacked planes but had many pilots. In Britain, the situation was reversed, but - crucially - it also had radar. This, combined with the German decision to switch the attacks from airfields and factories to the major cities, enabled the RAF to squeak a narrow victory, maintain air superiority and ensure the - ultimately indefinite - postponement of the German invasion plans.

The 'Blitz' of Britain's cities lasted throughout the war, saw the bombing of Buckingham Palace and the near-destruction of Coventry, and claimed some 40,000 civilian lives.

II. The Blitz | The Battle of Britain

The sustained German bombing of London and other major British cities began towards the end of the Battle of Britain, after a British raid on Berlin in early September prompted Hitler to order the Luftwaffe to switch its attention from RAF Fighter Command to urban centers of industrial and political significance.

The first German raids on British cities had already taken place by the end of August 1940, when Birmingham and Liverpool were attacked, but on 7 September the Blitz intensified when around 950 German aircraft attacked London. It was the first and last mass daylight raid on London, but it heralded the first of 57 consecutive nights of bombing.

The daylight raid alone caused some 300 civilian deaths and a further 1,300 serious injuries; by the end of the Blitz, around 30,000 Londoners would be left dead, with another 50,000 injured. Fortunately, millions of children, mothers, patients and pensioners had already been evacuated to the countryside.

For those who were left in London, a rigorous policy of blackout began. Every building had to extinguish or cover its lights at night, and car owners had to reduce their headlights to a thin horizontal slit, with rear lamps also dimmed severely. Road accidents shot up, exacerbated by the lack of street lighting and the dimmed traffic lights.

Fighter Command’s 10, 11 and 12 Groups successfully intercepted a second daylight raid on 9 September. Less than half of the German bombers got through, with very few hitting their targets.

Daylight attacks continued elsewhere in England, with sporadic success. Against London, however, the Germans hemorrhaged aircraft and crew, compared to much lighter British losses.

In early November, Luftwaffe chief Reichsmarschall Herman Göring ordered that the air offensive against cities, industry and ports had to be conducted entirely under cover of darkness. The new strategy was showcased by a massive attack on Coventry on 14 November, which destroyed much of the city, including all but the spires of St Michael's Cathedral and the Grey Friars' Church. Attacks on Birmingham, Southampton, Bristol, Plymouth and Liverpool followed, but they proved less effective.

On 29 December, a major raid on London destroyed much of the City, but poor winter weather then led to a drop in attacks until March. The two months from March until May 1941 saw a series of heavy attacks, culminating in a very damaging raid on London on 10 May. The Blitz

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ended on 16 May, when most of the Luftwaffe was re-assigned east for the imminent invasion of Russia.

The end of the Blitz saw a return of evacuees and the start of the reconstruction of London - even though building materials were in desperately short supply. The docks had been devastated, as had many industrial, residential and commercial districts, including the historic heart of the City.

III. The Soviet-German War 1941 - 1945

The enormous scale of this particularly ferocious war is hard to comprehend. It started with Russia totally disadvantaged, but the turn-around was awesome, as Stalin's war machine revved into action.

Roots of war

On 22 June 1941, some three million soldiers of Germany and her allies began an attack on the Soviet Union. This war was supposed to be over in a matter of months, but it lasted for four years, and grew into the largest and most costly conflict in all history.

It was here, in the vast struggle between the two dictatorships, that the German army was defeated and the outcome of World War Two was decided in favor of the Allied powers - the British Empire, the United States and the USSR. The cost to the Soviet Union was an estimated 27 million dead.

The roots of the war lie in the appointment of Adolf Hitler as German chancellor in 1933. His hatred of Soviet Communism and his crude ideas of economic imperialism, expressed in the pursuit of Lebensraum ('living- space'), made the Soviet Union a natural area for Hitler's warlike ambitions.

After the outbreak of war in 1939 came the added fear of Soviet expansion in Eastern Europe, while Germany was fighting the British Empire and France in the west. All of these factors contributed to the decision taken by Hitler in July 1940, after the German defeat of France, to plan for an all-out assault on the Soviet Union.

Not until December 1940, however, did Hitler make a final decision to go ahead with what became known as Operation Barbarossa. The original date, set for May 1941, had to be revised to complete the vast preparations for the attack - following other German attacks on Yugoslavia and Greece in April.

The date of 22 June was late for starting a campaign over such a vast area, but German commanders were confident that the Soviet armed forces were primitive, and that the Soviet people were waiting for liberation. Victory was expected by the early autumn.

Soviet response

The attack came as a complete surprise to the leader of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin. Despite repeated intelligence warnings, which included the precise day and hour of Germany's incipient assault, Stalin remained convinced that Hitler would not risk an eastern war as long as the British Empire remained undefeated. It has been argued that Stalin in fact planned a pre-emptive attack on Germany for the early summer of 1941, and was then thrown off-balance by the German

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invasion.The evidence makes clear the defensive posture of the Soviet Union in 1941. Stalin did not want to risk war, though he hoped to profit from the German-British struggle if he could. In the event, the shock of attack almost unhinged the Soviet state, and by the autumn German forces had destroyed most of the Red Army and the Russian air force, surrounded and besieged Leningrad - where over one million people died of starvation and cold - and were approaching the outskirts of Moscow.

The Red Army had sufficient reserves to stop the German army from completing the rout in December 1941, but the following summer German offensives launched far to the south of Moscow, to seize the rich oilfields of the Caucasus and to cut the Volga shipping route, created further chaos.

Hitler hoped that German forces would capture the oil and sweep on through the Middle East to meet up with Axis forces in Egypt. The Volga was to be blocked at Stalingrad, after which German forces could wheel northwards to outflank Moscow and the Soviet line.

The southern attack failed at Stalingrad. After weeks of chaotic retreats and easy German victories, the Red Army solidified its defense and against all the odds clung on to the battered city. In November 1942 Operation Uranus was launched by the Soviets, and the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad was encircled.

Some historians have seen this as the turning point of the war. But not until the Red Army had decisively defeated German forces in the more favorable summer weather of 1943 did the tide really turn.

The Battle of Kursk in July 1943 was one of the greatest set-piece battles in military history. The Red Army withstood a massive German assault, and then counter-attacked. For two years Soviet forces pushed the German army back into Germany, until in May 1945 Soviet forces accepted the surrender of the relic of Hitler's army in Berlin.

Turnaround

The central question of the German-Soviet war is why, after two years of defeats, and the loss of more than five million men and two-thirds of the industrial capacity of the country, the Red Army was able to blunt, then drive back, the German attack.

The idea that the USSR had limitless manpower, despite its heavy losses, is inadequate as an answer. Germany and her allies also possessed a large population, and added to it the peoples of the captured Soviet areas - men and women who were forced to work for the German army or were shipped back to work in the Reich. Soviet armies were always desperately short of men.Above all, Soviet tactics in 1941-2 were extremely wasteful of manpower. If the Red Army had continued to fight the same way, it would simply have sustained escalating losses for little gain.

Nor did the USSR enjoy an advantage in economic resources. After the German attack, Soviet steel production fell to eight million tons in 1942, while German production was 28 million tons. In the same year, Soviet coal output was 75 million tons, while German output was 317 million. The USSR nevertheless out-produced Germany in the quantity (though seldom in the quality) of most major weapons, from this much smaller industrial base.

The impressive production of weapons was achieved by turning the whole of the remaining

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Soviet area into what Stalin called 'a single armed camp', focusing all efforts on military production and extorting maximum labor from a workforce whose only guarantee of food was to turn up at the factory and work the arduous 12-hour shifts. Without Lend-Lease aid, however, from the United States and Britain, both of whom supplied a high proportion of food and raw materials for the Soviet war effort, the high output of weapons would still not have been possible.

The chief explanation lies not in resources, which Germany was more generously supplied with than the Soviet Union, during the two central years of the war before American and British economic power was fully exerted. It lies instead in the remarkable reform of the Red Army and the Russian air force, undertaken slowly in 1942.

Every area of Soviet military life was examined and changes introduced. The army established the equivalent of the heavily armored German Panzer divisions, and tank units were better organized - thanks to the introduction of radios. Soviet army tactics and intelligence-gathering were also overhauled.

Camouflage, surprise and misinformation were brilliantly exploited to keep the German army in the dark about major Soviet intentions. The air force was subjected to effective central control and improved communications, so that it could support the Soviet army in the same way as the Luftwaffe backed up German forces.

People's input

The Red Army was fortunate that in 1942 Stalin finally decided to play a less prominent role in defense planning and discovered in a young Russian general, Georgi Zhukov, a remarkable deputy whose brusque, no-nonsense style of command, and intuitive operational sense, were indispensable in making the Red Army a better battlefield force. The Communist Party also accepted the need to give the Red Army greater flexibility in fighting the war, and in the autumn of 1942 scaled down the role of political commissars attached to the armed forces.

The Soviet people also played their part. Despite exceptional levels of deprivation and loss, they kept up the production of food, weapons and equipment. Some were terrorized into doing so, particularly the millions of camp laborers who worked fully for the war effort. But others did so from a genuine patriotism or a hatred of German fascism.

The harsh treatment of the Soviet population in those areas of Russia occupied by Germany made it easier for the Stalinist regime to mobilize support elsewhere in Russia for the war effort. Stalin relaxed the repression of the Church so that it could be used to mobilize enthusiasm, while propaganda played on the theme of past Russian glories against European invaders, rather than on Communist successes.

An exceptional burden was borne by Soviet women. By 1945 over half the workforce was female, and on the land, more than four-fifths. Women fought in their thousands in the Soviet armed forces as pilots, sharpshooters, even tank commanders. Many women joined the partisan movement operating behind the German lines - and by 1943 there were an estimated 300,000 of them. They constantly harried German troops, and were themselves the victim of harsh punitive expeditions, which led to the death of hundreds of thousands of innocent villagers along with the partisan bands.

Price of victory

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The war in the east was fought with a particular ferocity. The so-called 'barbarization of warfare' has a number of explanations. Conditions were harsh for both sides, and losses were high. German forces entered the USSR with instructions from Hitler's headquarters to use the most brutal methods to keep control, and to murder Communist commissars and Jews in the service of the Soviet state.

By the autumn of 1941 these instructions had expanded to include all suspected partisans and other categories of Jew. In 1942 the remaining Jewish population was rounded up and killed on the spot or sent to extermination camps. The mass-murder of the Jews illustrates the importance of ideology in the conflict. Both sides fought in effect a civil war - the Soviets against imperialist invaders, the Germans against Jewish Bolshevism. The nature of the dictatorships determined the savage character of the eastern conflict.

Soviet victory came at a high price, but a combination of total-war mobilization, better fighting methods and high operational skills defeated a German army that in 1944 was a formidable, heavily armed and modern fighting force. Soviet resistance made possible a successful Allied invasion of France, and ensured the final Allied victory over Germany. The Soviet state was transformed in the process into a superpower, and Communism, close to extinction in the autumn of 1941, came to dominate the whole Eurasian area, from East Germany to North Korea.

IV. The United States enters the War

Introduction

It all happened so quickly. At 7.55am on Sunday 7 December 1941, the first of two waves of Japanese aircraft began their deadly attack on the US Pacific Fleet, moored at Pearl Harbor on the Pacific island of Oahu. Within two hours, five battleships had been sunk, another 16 damaged, and 188 aircraft destroyed. Only chance saved three US aircraft carriers, usually stationed at Pearl Harbor but assigned elsewhere on the day. The attacks killed under 100 Japanese but over 2,400 Americans, with another 1,178 injured.

Although swift in execution, the attacks had been slowly brewing for years. The US had once looked upon Japanese ambitions with a level of sympathy, even indulgence. Hit hard by the Great Depression of the early 1930s, however, Japanese disillusion with party government grew and moderates gave way to militants. In 1931 Japan occupied Manchuria in northern China. Over the decade conflict intensified and in July 1937 war was declared. As Japanese aggression increased, its relations with the US deteriorated.

Occupied Manchuria was rapidly exploited with the establishment of heavy and light industries. This was a practical necessity for Japan. Lacking in natural resources itself, the search for alternative supplies underpinned foreign and military policy throughout the decade and led to the attack on Pearl Harbor and the Pacific War.

On top of practical economic considerations, early military success and an inherent sense of racial superiority led Japan to believe that it deserved to dominate Asian politics. As with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, this combination bred an aggressive and neo-colonial foreign policy, the 'Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere'. Higher birth-rates and economic considerations required more land; the gene-pool justified it.

Relations with the US

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The policy increased in urgency as relations with the US sank further. Historically, Japan had relied on America to supply many natural and industrial resources. Increasingly alarmed by Japanese aggression, however, America allowed a commercial treaty dating from 1911 to lapse in January 1940. In July it followed up by embargoing scrap iron and aviation fuel. Things got worse in September when Japan signed the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy. It was now a formal member of the Axis alliance fighting the European War.

Japan knew that a full-scale invasion of South-east Asia would prompt war with America.

This posed real problems. Although officially neutral, there was no doubt where American sympathies lay. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had already strained the sinews of neutrality by supplying Britain with money and arms under the 'lend-lease' agreement. The Tripartite Pact meant that supplies to Japan would indirectly be helping Italy and Germany; further embargoes followed.

For Japan, embroiled in a long war with China, these were disastrous. Considering its very survival under threat, Japan intensified the search for a permanent alternative. The most obvious target was South-east Asia, rich in minerals and oil. German success in Europe in 1940 had orphaned French and Dutch colonies in the region and they became the focus of Japanese attention.

While occupying French Indochina in July 1941, Japan knew that a full-scale invasion of South-east Asia would prompt war with America. It needed a mechanism to buy itself sufficient time and space to conquer successfully crucial targets like the Philippines, Burma and Malaya. The attack on Pearl Harbor was that mechanism; merely a means to an end. By destroying its Pacific Fleet, Japan expected to remove America from the Pacific equation for long enough to allow it to secure the resources it needed so desperately and hoped to crush American morale sufficiently to prompt Roosevelt to sue for peace.

An ill-prepared America

With war so widely expected, why was America so woefully ill-prepared? Rumors that began in the war are still hanging around, well past their sell-by date, fuelled only by revisionist historians and conspiracy cranks. They claim Roosevelt was itching for war with Japan but was constrained by US neutrality, so needed a solid reason to fight. Hence they accuse him of suppressing prior knowledge of the attack, or of provoking it to enable America to enter the war by the back door. Some even say that the attack on Pearl Harbor was deliberately engineered by a crypto-communist president guilty of high treason.

President Roosevelt declares war on Japan following the attack at Pearl Harbor.

In 1941 America was not ready for war.It doesn't add up. In 1941 America was not ready for war. With US forces queuing for arms alongside Britain and Russia, Roosevelt knew he needed more time to build America's military capacity. If war was to come, he wanted Japan to be seen to be the aggressor, but Roosevelt was in no hurry.

Furthermore, he saw Germany as America's main enemy. This 'Europe first' strategy was affirmed with Churchill at the Arcadia conference in late December 1941. Roosevelt had already pushed neutrality to the limit and had assigned warships to accompany convoys in the Atlantic.

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War with Germany was only a matter of time: why choose to fight another with Japan? Even when European conflict came, it did so only on Hitler's invitation after he gratuitously declared war.

American myopia [short-sightedness]

However hard you look, there is little evidence of anything more than blushing cover-ups of previous blunders. The real crime was one of incompetence on a huge scale. After all, the US had broken Japan's diplomatic codes and could sometimes decode messages faster than the Japanese themselves. The problem was not raw data, but its interpretation, evaluation and communication: it had to be used properly. This did not happen.

The real crime was one of incompetence on a huge scale.

The administration and military were both guilty of a staggering lack of co-ordination between Washington and Oahu, and between different services. Japanese messages were decoded by the army and navy on alternate days and all too often one service failed to properly communicate their new intelligence to the other. And it wasn't just codes: on the day of the attack, Japanese aircraft were spotted by American radar. No action was taken: they were assumed to be a flight of B-17 bombers due in from the mainland.

It's not as if America wasn't warned. In January 1941 Ambassador Grew in Tokyo passed on intelligence that stated that Japan was planning the attack. It was disregarded. Warnings from military personnel in February and July were overlooked, largely because they recommended massive transfers of aircraft to Oahu, aircraft that America simply did not have. War warnings from Washington to Hawaii ten days before the attack were virtually ignored. Team USA was proving pretty dysfunctional.

This American myopia stemmed from complacent disbelief that Japan would mount such an attack, especially before declaring war. Yet any study of Japanese history demonstrated that pre-emptive attacks such as this were almost standard operating procedure. Instead of concentrating on what Japan could do, the US tried to guess what it would do. It guessed wrong.

The aftermath

Although Pearl Harbor started the Pacific War, a war that Japan would lose badly, the attack itself was no failure. The Japanese wanted to cripple the Pacific Fleet and give them the space to invade South-east Asia. They did: Japan won every major battle until Midway in June 1942. By that time it occupied territory from Manchuria to the East Indies, and from India's borders to deep into the Pacific. The attack on Pearl Harbor bought Japan the space and time it needed.

Although only chance saved the American aircraft carriers, their survival was a major blow. However, the primary problem with the attack was the planning. Had Japan focused beyond the fleet and targeted the crucial shore facilities and oil reserves, it could have inflicted far greater and more lasting damage. As it was, of the ships damaged or sunk on December 7th 1941, only three - the Arizona, Oklahoma and Utah - were damaged beyond repair, and Utah was already obsolete. Japan gave America the chance to rebuild its fleet and re-enter the fight with brand new kit.

Operationally brilliant, the attack was nonetheless strategically disastrous.Even worse, rather than crushing American morale as planned, the attack united the country

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behind Roosevelt and behind war. Americans were incensed by Japan's failure to declare war until later that day: the sneak attack fuelled American determination to fight on, even in the face of the setbacks of early 1942.

Pearl Harbor and the invasion of South-east Asia showcased Japan at its best - capable of massive daring and painstaking preparation. Operationally brilliant, the attack was nonetheless strategically disastrous. Never again would Japan have the opportunity to act with such forethought and planning. It got itself the short-term breathing space it wanted, but also a war against both Britain and America. To invite such confrontation was the result of courage, optimism and (possibly) madness on a massive scale. Japan lost. Faced with American military and economic might, it could never really win. So why all the conspiracy theories? Maybe because some just cannot accept that on the day, in round one, their boys were beaten by the better team.

V. Japan: No Surrender

By the end of World War Two, Japan had endured 14 years of war, and lay in ruins - with over three million dead. Why did the war in Japan cost so much, and what led so many to fight on after the end of the hostilities?

The end of hostilities

When Emperor Hirohito made his first ever broadcast to the Japanese people on 15 August 1945, and enjoined his subjects 'to endure the unendurable and bear the unbearable', he brought to an end a state of war - both declared and undeclared - that had wracked his country for 14 years.He never spoke explicitly about 'surrender' or 'defeat', but simply remarked that the war 'did not turn in Japan's favor'. It was a classic piece of understatement. Nearly three million Japanese were dead, many more wounded or seriously ill, and the country lay in ruins.

To most Japanese - not to mention those who had suffered at their hands during the war - the end of hostilities came as blessed relief. Yet not everybody was to lay down his or her arms. Tens of thousands of Japanese soldiers remained in China, either caught in no-man's land between the Communists and Nationalists or fighting for one side or the other.

Other, smaller groups continued fighting on Guadalcanal, Peleliu and in various parts of the Philippines right up to 1948. But the most extraordinary story belongs to Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda, who continued fighting on the Philippine island of Lubang until 9 March 1974 - nearly 29 years after the end of the war.

Two years earlier, another Japanese soldier, Corporal Shoichi Yokoi, had been found fishing in the Talofofo River on Guam. Yokoi still had his Imperial Army issue rifle, but he had stopped fighting many years before. When questioned by the local police, he admitted he knew the war had been over for 20 years. He had simply been too frightened to give himself up.

Lieutenant Onoda, by contrast, doggedly refused to lay down his arms until he received formal orders to surrender. He was the sole survivor of a small band that had sporadically attacked the local population. Although one of them surrendered in 1950 after becoming separated from the others, Onoda's two remaining companions died in gun battles with local forces - one in 1954, the other in 1972.

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A worthy enemy?

After early attempts to flush them out had failed, humanitarian missions were sent to Lubang to try to persuade Lieutenant Onoda and his companions that the war really was over, but they would have none of it. Even today, Hiroo Onoda insists they believed the missions were enemy tricks designed to lower their guard. As a soldier, he knew it was his duty to obey orders; and without any orders to the contrary, he had to keep on fighting.

To survive in the jungle of Lubang, he had kept virtually constantly on the move, living off the land, and shooting cattle for meat. Onoda's grim determination personifies one of the most enduring images of Japanese soldiers during the war - that Japanese fighting men did not surrender, even in the face of insuperable odds.

Before hostilities with the Allies broke out, most British and American military experts held a completely different view, regarding the Japanese army with deep contempt. In early 1941, General Robert Brooke- Popham, Commander-in-Chief of British forces in the Far East, reported that one of his battalion commanders had lamented, 'Don't you think (our men) are worthy of some better enemy than the Japanese?'

This gross underestimation can in part be explained by the fact that Japan had become interminably bogged down by its undeclared war against China since 1931. Since Japan was having such difficulties in China, the reasoning went, its armed forces would be no match for the British.

The speed and ease with which the Japanese sank British warships off Singapore just two days after the attack on Pearl Harbor - followed by the humiliating capture of Singapore and Hong Kong - transformed their image overnight. From figures of derision, they were turned into supermen - an image that was to endure and harden as the intensity and savagery of fighting increased.

Total sacrifice

Although some Japanese were taken prisoner, most fought until they were killed or committed suicide. In the last, desperate months of the war, this image was also applied to Japanese civilians. To the horror of American troops advancing on Saipan, they saw mothers clutching their babies hurling themselves over the cliffs rather than be taken prisoner.

Not only were there virtually no survivors of the 30,000 strong Japanese garrison on Saipan, two out of every three civilians - some 22,000 in all - also died.

The other enduring image of total sacrifice is that of the kamikaze pilot, ploughing his plane packed with high explosives into an enemy warship. Even today, the word 'kamikaze' evokes among Japan's former enemies visions of crazed, mindless destruction.

What in some cases inspired - and in others, coerced - Japanese men in the prime of their youth to act in such a way was a complex mixture of the times they lived in, Japan's ancient warrior tradition, societal pressure, economic necessity, and sheer desperation.

When Japan began its military adventures in China in 1931, it was a society in turmoil. Less than 80 years previously, it had been forced out of two-and-a-half centuries of self-imposed seclusion

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from the rest of the world, when the Tokugawa Shogunate was overthrown, and Japan embarked on rapid modernization under

By the beginning of the 20th century, Japan was beginning to catch up with the world's great powers, and even enjoyed its own version of the Roaring Twenties, a period known rather more prosaically as Taisho Democracy.

But as shockwaves of the Great Depression reached Japanese shores at the end of the 1920s, democracy proved to have extremely shallow roots indeed. The military became increasingly uncontrollable, and Japan was gripped by the politics of assassination.

Bushido

Nationalists and militarists alike looked to the past for inspiration. Delving into ancient myths about the Japanese and the Emperor in particular being directly descended from the Sun Goddess, Amaterasu Omikami, they exhorted the people to restore a past racial and spiritual purity lost in recent times.

They were indoctrinated from an early age to revere the Emperor as a living deity, and to see war as an act that could purify the self, the nation, and ultimately the whole world. Within this framework, the supreme sacrifice of life itself was regarded as the purest of accomplishments.

Japan's samurai heritage and the samurai code of ethics known as 'bushido' have a seductive appeal when searching for explanations for the wartime image of no surrender. The great classic of Bushido - 'Hagakure' written in the early 18th century - begins with the words, 'Bushido is a way of dying'. Its basic thesis is that only a samurai prepared and willing to die at any moment can devote himself fully to his lord.

Although this idea certainly appealed to the ideologues, what probably motivated Japanese soldiers at the more basic level were more mundane pressures. Returning prisoners from Japan's previous major war with Russia in 1904-5 had been treated as social outcasts. The Field Service Code issued by General Tojo in 1941 put it more explicitly: Do not live in shame as a prisoner. Die, and leave no ignominious crime behind you.

Apart from the dangers of battle, life in the Japanese army was brutal. Letters and diaries written by student conscripts before they were killed in action speak of harsh beatings, and of soldiers being kicked senseless for the most trivial of matters - such as serving their superior's rice too slowly, or using a vest as a towel.

But John Dower, one of America's most highly respected historians of wartime and post-war Japan, believes a major factor, often overlooked in seeking to explain why Japanese soldiers did not surrender, is that countless thousands of Japanese perished because they saw no alternative.He argues that the attack on Pearl Harbor provoked a rage bordering on the genocidal among Americans. Not only did Admiral William Halsey, Commander of the South Pacific Force, adopt the slogan 'Kill Japs, kill Japs, kill more Japs', public opinion polls in the United States consistently showed 10 to 13 per cent of all Americans supported the 'annihilation' or 'extermination' of the Japanese as a people.

Kamikaze

It was a war without mercy, and the US Office of War Information acknowledged as much in

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1945. It noted that the unwillingness of Allied troops to take prisoners in the Pacific theatre had made it difficult for Japanese soldiers to surrender. When the present writer interviewed Hiroo Onoda for the BBC 'Timewatch' programme, he too repeatedly came back to the theme 'it was kill or be killed'.

The same cannot be said of the Special Attack Forces, more popularly known as kamikaze. Yet, even though nearly 5,000 of them blazed their way into the world's collective memory in such spectacular fashion, it is sobering to realize that the number of British airmen who gave their lives in World War Two was ten times greater.

Although presented in poetic, heroic terms of young men achieving the glory of the short-lived cherry blossom, falling while the flower was still perfect, the strategy behind the kamikaze was born purely out of desperation.

But to anyone who believes the kamikaze were mindless automatons, they have only to read some of the letters they left behind. The 23-year-old Ichizo Hayashi, wrote this to his mother, just a few days before embarking on what he knew would be his final mission, in April 1945: I am pleased to have the honor of having been chosen as a member of a Special Attack Force that is on its way into battle, but I cannot help crying when I think of you, Mum. When I reflect on the hopes you had for my future ... I feel so sad that I am going to die without doing anything to bring you joy.

Selfless sacrifice, for whatever purpose, was present on all sides in the conflict.

VI. D-Day

The landing by Allied troops on the beaches of Normandy could have been 'the most ghastly disaster of the whole war'. Duncan Anderson explains how meticulous planning, good luck and sheer guts made D-Day one of the greatest triumphs.

A controversial plan

The Allied landings in Normandy on 6 June 1944 were among the most desperate undertakings in the history of war. Amphibious operations against an enemy in a strong defensive position will almost always lead to heavy casualties.

In November 1943, the United States Marine Corps' capture of the tiny atoll of Tarawa in the central Pacific had cost more than 3,000 casualties. American censors banned a public screening of the US Navy film of this event, arguing that its shocking images of a lagoon red with soldiers' blood would undermine the morale of US forces and the Home Front.The British and Canadians had suffered their own disaster at Dieppe on 18 August 1942. More than two thirds of a 6,000-man raiding force had been left behind on the shingle beach, dead, wounded and prisoners.

On the eve of D-Day the Allied leadership was in a state of neurotic anxiety. Just after midnight on 6 June, a restless Churchill, haunted by memories of the disastrous Allied landings at Gallipoli 29 years earlier, bade his wife goodnight with the words, 'Do you realize that by the time you wake up in the morning twenty thousand men may have been killed?'

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The same night, the chief of the imperial general staff, General Alan Brooke, confided to his diary that '... it may well be the most ghastly disaster of the whole war. I wish to God it were safely over '.

At about 22.00 the supreme allied commander, General Dwight Eisenhower, had made an impromptu visit to paratroopers of the 101st Airborne at Greenham Common airfield near Newbury. His driver, Kay Summersby, recorded that the general, overwhelmed by emotion, climbed back into the car with his shoulders sagged.

Eisenhower had already written a letter accepting full responsibility if D-Day turned out to be a disaster. Churchill had assured him that they would go together. The Allied high command anticipated that a successful landing would cost 10,000 dead and perhaps 30,000 wounded, but were steeling themselves for much heavier casualties.Choosing Normandy

The British had never liked the idea of a direct assault on the coast of northwest Europe. They much preferred an indirect strategy - operations in the Mediterranean and the Balkans. The Allies were reluctant to launch a direct frontal assault

Since the late summer of 1942 the Germans had been constructing the 'Atlantic Wall', a formidable complex of defenses running from the Franco-Spanish border to Denmark. It was the largest construction project in European history, involving at any one time more than 100,000 workers.

Under the direction of General Erwin Rommel, all beaches on which a landing was considered possible had been festooned with belts of obstacles and minefields, and covered by machine-gun and mortar emplacements.

Further back, bunkers of enormous strength at Merville, Longues and Pointe du Hoc on the Normandy coast enabled large-caliber German guns to bombard a landing force. In order to frustrate an airborne attack, German engineers flooded low-lying areas and strung wires across fields to deter glider landings.

The Americans had come to Europe to finish the war as quickly as possible, and this meant taking the shortest, most direct route to Germany. However, the disaster at Dieppe and their own experiences in the Pacific had qualified their optimism. Thus the D-Day landings were to be the most highly planned operations in military history.

In spring 1943, Lieutenant General Frederick Morgan was appointed chief of staff supreme allied commander (COSSAC). He took charge of planning until the appointment of Eisenhower as supreme allied commander at the end 1943. Aided by Lord Louis Mountbatten, the head of Combined Operations, they chose Normandy; although further from Germany than the Pas de Calais, Normandy's long sandy beaches were sheltered from the prevailing south-west winds by the Cotentin Peninsula, and the two large ports, Cherbourg and Le Havre, could be captured from the landward side.

Build-up and bluff

Meanwhile Operation Bolero, codename for the American build-up in Britain, transformed southern England into an armed camp. By early June 1944 more than two million Americans had arrived, along with a quarter-of-a-million Canadians.

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Despite massive amounts of equipment, including thousands of aircraft, tanks and guns, many American divisions were poorly trained. Some British veteran formations, survivors of action in North Africa, Sicily and Italy, were unenthusiastic about a frontal assault on Hitler's Fortress Europe.

The planners did all they could to ensure a successful assault. By the spring of 1944 all the divisions taking part in the initial seaborne landing had participated in extensive amphibious exercises, usually off the coast of Scotland. During one exercise, off Slapton Sands in Devon, German E Boats sank three landing craft, drowning more than 700 American personnel.The British created 79th Armored Division, a formation of specialized armored assault vehicles, including Duplex drive (DD) 'swimming' tanks, mine-clearing (Flail) tanks, tanks with enormous Petard mortars which could drop explosive charges next to bunkers, cracking the concrete, and tanks with flame-throwers (Crocodiles), which would then pump liquid fire through the cracks, effectively cooking the defenders.

All the British and Canadian assault divisions had units of the 79th Division attached to them. The British offered the Americans the equipment as well, but the US High Command turned down everything except the DD tanks.

Vast, fake army camps appeared around Maidstone and Canterbury...

Secrecy was absolutely crucial. To mislead the Germans, the British devised ingenious deception plans, notably Operation Fortitude. They deliberately transmitted and broadcast all the radio traffic generated by US forces in south-west England, and British and Canadian forces in south central England, from radio stations in Kent. Vast, fake army camps appeared around Maidstone and Canterbury, with thousands of partly concealed dummy tanks and aircraft.One of the Allies' most flamboyant generals, George Patton, toured the area. German agents 'turned' by MI5 leaked the news that the Allies' most powerful assault formation, US 3rd Army, was destined to assault the Pas de Calais.

The deception worked. The Germans concentrated their most powerful formation, 15th Army, in the Pas de Calais. Normandy was held by the smaller, but still formidable 7th Army. Had 15th Army had turned up on D-Day, the landings would probably have ended in disaster.

Window of opportunity

A successful operation required air superiority and tactical and operational surprise. The planners had to persuade the 'Bomber Barons' of the RAF and USAAF to divert resources from what they regarded as the main effort - the strategic bombing of Germany. It took many months of table-thumping argument to win their support.©British glider-borne forces contributed to the air assaultFrom March 1944, northwestern France became the focal point for air activity, the largest sustained air offensive of the war, codenamed the Transportation Plan. By the first week in June, French rail and road communications had been seriously degraded and the Luftwaffe in France reduced to about 800 operational machines. But the cost had been enormous. Two thousand Allied aircraft were lost and 12,000 airmen killed.

On the 6 June, Allied planning paid off, but they also had luck. Eisenhower's exploitation of a small window in a period of very bad weather caught the Germans completely off guard. Rommel

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thought an invasion so unlikely he left for Germany on the morning of 5 June to celebrate his wife's 50th birthday.

Key officers in many formations also took advantage of the bad weather to attend a war game in Rouen, while the commander of 21st Panzer Division, the only armored formation within striking distance of the invasion beaches, went to visit his mistress in Paris.

German communications had been severely weakened by bombing. Allied paratroopers and the French Resistance made them worse by cutting telephone lines. At the strategic level, neither Rommel, nor von Rundstedt, could move powerful armored reserves without Hitler's express approval. Thus the German response in the first hours was spasmodic and uncoordinated.

D-Day

In the early hours of 6 June RAF bombers dropped aluminum foil of the Pas de Calais to simulate the radar profile of a great invasion fleet. Meanwhile more than 7,000 vessels, the largest naval task force ever assembled, moved to the Normandy coast.©Airborne troops hindered German reinforcements

Shortly after midnight the British 6th and American 101st and 82nd Airborne divisions began landing. On the eastern flank, British glider-borne troops seized the vital 'Pegasus' Bridge across the Orne River, while others attacked and temporarily disabled a German battery at Merville, the guns of which covered Sword Beach. Subsequent drops allowed 6th Airborne Division to form a defensive crust protecting the eastern flank of the beachhead.

The American airborne landings went less well. Cloud cover and heavy flak over the Cotentin Peninsula broke up the formations, causing the Americans to be dropped over an area of 1,000 square miles. But this in itself caused the Germans immense confusion. The divisional reserve for the Omaha beach defenses, for example, went racing south at 03.00 to attack paratroopers they couldn't locate. By the time they returned to the beach, the Americans were well ashore. British troops suffered high losses at Ouistrehem

Shortly after 05.00 naval gunfire opened up on German defenses along 50 miles of Normandy coast. Chief amongst these was Pointe du Hoc, the guns of which could hit both Utahand Omaha beaches. The task of silencing the battery, already bombed and shelled, was carried out by a Ranger battalion, who scaled the 100-foot vertical cliffs, and discovered the guns camouflaged in fields about a mile inland. It was up to the bravery of men carrying the thermite explosive charges to ensure that these guns remained silent on D-Day.First to land was the US 4th Division on Utah beach. It came ashore about 1,000 yards south of its intended landing place, luckily avoiding heavy defenses, and consequently suffered few of the expected casualties.

But the situation was very different only a few miles further east on Omaha beach. Here the first elements of the US 29th Division and the 1st Division ran into stiff opposition. Without armor support - most of the DD 'swimming' tanks had foundered in the heavy swell - the infantry was cut down by heavy German fire.

Very soon an immense traffic jam of landing craft and amphibious vehicles built up about 1,000 yards offshore. By 09.00 the beach was packed with thousands of dead and wounded men, while hundreds of bodies floated in the blood-red surf.

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The American operational commander, General Omar Bradley, radioed Eisenhower for permission to evacuate the beachhead, but the signal got lost in radio traffic. By the time it reached Eisenhower, naval gunfire support and the sheer guts of some exceptional officers and men had pushed the Germans from the bluffs.

Beachhead secured

On Gold, Juno and Sword beaches, British and Canadian troops were supported by the specialized assault vehicles of 79th Armored Division. On all three, German strongpoints initially inflicted heavy casualties, but a combination of Petard mortar and Crocodile tank soon smashed the defenses. Losses on D-Day were less than anticipated

On Gold and Juno, British and Canadian forces pushed inland rapidly. On Sword, British 3rd Division was held up three miles short of Caen by a network of German defensive positions along a ridge. Finally, late that afternoon, the 21st Panzer Division launched a counterattack. Some units managed to reach the coast, though they were too weak to hold their positions. British troops at Sword beach failed to take Caen as planned

The world learned the invasion was underway from German state radio, which announced landings in Normandy on its 07.00 news service, and promised the invaders would be swiftly annihilated.

A special BBC news bulletin came two-and-a-half hours later. John Snagge announced that D-Day had come and all was going according to plan. At 12.00 Churchill repeated this news in a statement to the House of Commons. Despite Eisenhower's worries about the situation on Omaha beach, by mid-afternoon it was clear that even on Omaha the battle was running in the Allies' favor.

When Churchill again addressed the House of Commons at 18.00 it was to announce an astounding success.

To secure a lodgment on the coast of France, the Allies had taken 10,000 casualties, 3,000 of whom were dead - mostly airborne troops or those who had landed at Omaha Beach.Losses were far lighter than anticipated, a tribute to years of planning and preparation, a bold command decision, and a lot of good luck.

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