Chapter Thirteen: Reaping the Whirlwind (June 5th, 1939 to October 20th, 1939)
The Ljubljana Conference and Axis Plans for the Balkans
Despite Prince Paul’s hopes, the formal alignment of Yugoslavia with the Axis powers did not lead to a prolonged period of peace. The neutrality that had been navigated between the Germans and their foes was always an uneasy one, and the regent had hoped that, although committing the kingdom to one side, Yugoslavia would be able to sit out the war as a useful auxiliary. After all, the country was bordered by three Axis-aligned powers and the Italian-supported Kingdom of Albania, while no countries in the Balkans were yet British or French allies.
Paul’s hopes were quickly dashed as military planners on both sides of the conflict sought to counteract or take advantage of Yugoslavia’s ascension to the Axis. Although frustrated at being outmaneuvered by Rome and Belgrade, the German leadership in Berlin sought to use Yugoslavia as a springboard to exert Axis dominance on the European continent by preventing the Franco-British coalition from using any currently neutral country as a spearhead against the alliance’s “underbelly”. Once France was crushed and Europe united against Britain, Adolf Hitler and his inner circle hoped that London would sue for peace. To that end, a conference was arranged at the Slovene city of Ljubljana between representatives of the various political, diplomatic, and military leaderships of Germany, Italy, Hungary, and Yugoslavia. The minutes of the meeting were sealed until the end of the war in Europe, but they illustrate the uneasy bedfellows that the Axis alliance had made of the four nationalistic regimes.
At the Ljubljana Conference, the fate of the Balkans was decided. Germany had begun laying the groundwork for increased pressure on the Greek government to align with the Axis against British intrigues, but after repeated failures of German threats to persuade smaller countries, it was decided to leave nothing to chance. A build-up of forces on the Yugoslav border with Greece was arranged with the approval of both Prime Minister and Field Marshal Nedić and the less enthusiastic support of Prince Paul. After Bucharest made clear that it would regard any moves against Greece as an act of war against Romania, a token force was also arrayed on the Romanian-Yugoslav border while the bulk of Hungarian and German troops in the region massed on the Transylvanian frontier.
Germany had little hunger for Greek or Romanian territory when compared to the appetites of her allies. Content with the removal of a potential British ally from the flank of the Axis, Berlin was happy to play the mediator between the competing claims of Rome, Budapest, and Belgrade in an attempt to exert leadership over the alliance and to bind the various powers closer to Germany while simultaneously driving wedges between them. In contrast, the Hungarian representatives were the most strident of those assembled in their demands for all of Transylvania, not just the northern region which had Germany had tried to solicit out of the Romanians months earlier.
On the basis of Bulgarian ambitions to the regions, Belgrade put forward claims on the Romanian territory of Southern Dobruja as well as Thessaloniki on the coast of the Aegean Sea. The presence of a sizable population of Bulgarians in the former and Macedonians in the latter area helped the Yugoslav government present these aims as being in the spirit of ethnic self-determination. The Italian delegation was far less restrained and quickly demanded that Rome administer a compliant government ruling over the rest of Greece. Disputes over the boundary between Italian and Yugoslav claims appeared acrimonious at times, but behind closed doors the leaders of the two countries had agreed to settle such matters bilaterally once the time came, and to push back against suspected plans for German domination of the rump Romanian state which would emerge after the war.
With Yugoslavia committed to, detractors would say complicit in, the Axis alliance, German leadership felt confident to go ahead with the annihilation or subjugation of Greece.
Before the Storm
On June 20th, 1939, it appeared as though the first notes of the French alliance’s swan song were heard throughout Europe. Luxembourg, the plucky little country which had defied German arms for so long had fallen to the Axis powers. Other cracks were beginning to show in the French Maginot Line despite the wall of fortifications receiving the lion’s share of French attention and the best men and equipment. The “War of the Walls” had raged since the start of the fighting, but while it appeared as though Maginot might hold for much longer, the rest of France was in serious jeopardy.
Italian forces had met with only sporadic and ill-prepared resistance from the French army as they advanced through the country. By the time that a coordinated defensive line of makeshift trenches had scarred the line, the country had been bisected. The Italian army headquarters established at the resort town of Vichy sat atop the mobilized might of an awakened and fearsome Italy, one that seemed to grasp a kernel of the Roman greatness of which Benito Mussolini had long spoken. Many of the divisions which had divided Italy between monarchists and republicans, Catholics and secularists, and the rich and the poor were bridged over in the euphoria of victory. For those who were opposed to the ends of the Fascist government as well as its means, the impending victory over France brought many of them to the brink of despair.
Week by week, the Italians advanced north, bringing more and more of France under their sway as they marched to the tantalizing prize of Paris. President Phillipe Pétain and his ministers refused to evacuate the city to a more defensible redoubt. Rumors spread like a plague throughout France that the London had offered to host the old marshal’s government only to have been brusquely rejected. The truth was that, indeed, many among the British leadership were strikingly indifferent to the fate of their continental ally. Despite the success of local commanders in coordinating operations against Italy’s African colonies, proposals for joint naval actions and a new British Expeditionary Force floundered on clashes of personality and politics. As the war dragged on, critic’s voices rang out in parliament to provide justification for letting Paris wither away. The war to defend Czechoslovakia had been the wrong war at the wrong time, it was argued. Better that France should have followed Great Britain’s lead and let the Germans win this small victory in order to buy time to let rearmament programs and covert operations bear fruit. Besides, the French government with its military character and nationalistic rhetoric was little better than the German and Italian regimes which formed the Axis. Debates over how much France deserved her fate added one more barrier to British aid crossing the English Channel.
Meanwhile, spurred on by heady propaganda comparing them to the Roman legions of old, the Italians drew closer and closer to the City of Light.
Yugoslavia Joins the War
The Ljubljana conference concluded with the understanding that Yugoslavia would soon commit to supporting the war effort of her Axis allies should Greece prove resistant to German demands. With Berlin’s track record, it was clear that such a conflict was a matter of “when”, not “if”, and so the National Assembly in Belgrade was encouraged to pass legislation which shored up the country’s material and ideological position in anticipation of the coming war. A series of bills touching on matters as disparate as education, military promotion, and internal trade sought to further establish a shared Yugoslav identity among the kingdom’s subject peoples, especially the recently pacified Macedonians and the newly conquered Bulgarians. For those who were not swayed by patriotic assemblies and other more intangible benefits of belonging to the Yugoslav nation, another strategy was employed. Workers saw their wages go up and stricter enforcement of safety standards and the eight-hour day in factories. The use of child labor was strongly discouraged as young Yugoslavs were funneled into schools to receive a patriotic education instead. The immediate gains for the kingdom’s working classes were hard to determine, especially in the wake of the war which followed, but for the time the loyalty of the country’s lower classes was won.
On August 16th, the Greek government rejected German demands for the country to align with the Axis alliance and accept a Berlin-appointed commissioner to oversee the reorganization of Greece into an Axis protectorate. Ten days later, the Axis powers declared war.
In preparation for the war, Milutin Nedić had moved his forces away from the now-peaceful frontiers with Germany, Italy, and Hungary and to the Balkan arena. Twenty-three infantry divisions, a mixture of hard-eyed veterans and new recruits, conducted the Yugoslav invasion of Greece while six other divisions joined the German forces on the Romanian border. They, along with the motley fleet of a hundred foreign bought and domestically produced fighter planes, made up the forces which Belgrade had decided to bring to bear in the Balkans. The Royal Yugoslav Navy, with its outdated, outnumbered, and outclassed ships, was to remain in port rather than risk humiliation and destruction at the hands of any of the Allied navies. Much to the embarrassment of the Yugoslav military, even a hypothetical one-on-one confrontation with Lithuania would be a hard-fought fight for Admiral Marijan Polic and his sailors.
The weakness of the Yugoslav navy became a more pressing matter when an Australian force landed on Italy’s Adriatic coast, bypassing the Straits of Otranto of which Rome was supposedly the master. The decision was a spur of the moment decision made to attempt to ease pressure off of the French, and it was quickly repelled, but it highlighted the reach of the British navy. Yugoslavia’s deficits at sea were worrying, but there was no time to rectify the imbalance now. It could only be hoped that no such force would find its way to Yugoslavia’s shores.
Even though the Italians repelled the poorly supported landing, the mood in Yugoslavia was dreary at the prospect of another war, the third in so short a period. A slim majority of the country was in favor of the conflict, but for many their support was born out of resignation rather than ambition. Yugoslavia might make some small territorial gains, but the primary aim of joining the Axis and their war had always been defensive in nature. It was understood that to preserve Yugoslavia, it had been necessary to take a side, and now that the die was cast it was the task of the Royal Yugoslav Army to fight the war with all of the tenacity and daring with which they had already served their nation so well.
The bulk of Yugoslav forces concentrated on the border with Greece were the only Axis troops in the arena and they launched the initial attack on the Greek lines. In contrast to the Yugoslav Civil War and the war with Bulgaria, the Yugoslav Royal Army enjoyed an advantage in numbers and so General Kosic was able to adapt the tactics which had initially been developed for use against Bulgaria. Heavy artillery bombardment preceded any advance by the Yugoslav infantry, which sacrificed the element of surprise in favor of obliterating the Greek defenses with fire and shells. The initial pushes were effective, and a contingent of seven Greek divisions were caught in Thrace. Prioritizing the destruction of the enemy armies over a rapid but unsustainable advance, Kosic dedicated half of the divisions under his command to the destruction of the encircled Greeks while the rest of his forces pressed south into the then-lightly-defended Greek heartland.
While it was all but certain that Greece would join the Franco-British alliance in response to this aggression, Adolf Hitler gambled that the Romanian guarantee of Greece’s independence was empty blustering. After all, he lectured his subordinates, the Romanians were well-aware of the might of the German and Hungarian armies given the conquest of Czechoslovakia. The only thing letting Bucharest hold onto Transylvania was the restraint Berlin exercised on the baying Hungarians. Furthermore, Romania was too isolated from the British and the French, too close to the Soviet Union, and too dependent on investment and trade with Germany to risk war over such a nonentity as Greece. It would be a suicidal course of action for a king and a country who had made an art out of self-interest.
Fair as all of those points may or may not have been, they did not prevent King Carol from declaring war on Germany and Yugoslavia on behalf of the Greeks and accepting a British invitation to join the coalition against the Axis powers.
The Romanian entry to war came suddenly enough that German troops had not reached their assignments on the Yugoslav-Romanian border, with the greater focus going towards reinforcing the Hungarian army in anticipation of a drive to seize Transylvania in the same manner as Slovakia. For nearly two weeks, the heartland of Yugoslavia was laid bare before the Romanians and a determined march could have brought Carol’s armies within artillery range of Belgrade’s suburbs. But Bucharest launched only limited offensives and did not press the advantage. Remembering the opening stages of the Yugoslav war with Bulgaria, Romanian generals fretted that the apparent lack of defenses was a ploy to entice them away from their entrenched positions and into a trap. This hesitation bought Belgrade crucial time to mobilize seven more ill-trained but well-equipped divisions to augment the German forces which were belatedly coming to the aid of their Yugoslav allies. Nonetheless, it was not an auspicious start to the war.
However, the Yugoslav capital was not the only one in danger. Axis spirits generally, and those of the Yugoslavs more specifically, were lifted by the sudden capture of Bucharest in the opening days of the war as the Romanian army was stretched thin across the long border with Hungary and Greater Yugoslavia and concentrated primarily on repelling an attack from the former. The bold advance paid testament to the new generation of officers and enlisted men who made up the regenerated Royal Yugoslav Army. Supporting attacks were launched to maintain the hold on the city. The conquest of Bucharest not only meant the flight of the Romanian government and the loss of a great deal of its industrial base, and it also gave Yugoslavia a stronger position for the eventual peace negotiations, if she could hold onto her prize.
King Carol was defiant, even with the loss of his capital, and he quickly set up a new government in Cluj, almost taunting the Hungarian and German forces with his proximity to their lines. Romanian sallies against Hungary had thus far been unsuccessful, but Carol and his generals made public proclamations of their willingness to fight to the bitter end. Such statements were not entirely born out of bravado; London had informed its eastern allies that relief was already on the way.
The entirety of the Royal Yugoslav Army had been thrown into the fighting in Greece and Romania on the basis of two assumptions which proved faulty. The first was that the Italian navy would be able to provide enough of a challenge to British and French predominance of the Mediterranean as to deter any threats to Yugoslavia’s Adriatic coast, and the second was that, should the Italians fail to check this threat that a crop of trained militias would be organized by the time that the Allies posed a threat to the kingdom. Instead, a landing force of Australians once more navigated the Strait of Otranto and occupied the hard-won city of Zara.
The success of the maverick Australians was short-lived, and they retreated back to British territory rather than struggle against the Italian divisions mobilized to root them out. With Mussolini’s soldiers singlehandedly responsible for liberating Zara, it was feared in Belgrade that the
Duce would demand the return of the city to Italian control as the price for its rescue. But to the shock of all, perhaps even Mussolini himself, the Italian leader was magnanimous and the commander of the Italian forces in the city willingly submitted themselves to review by the city’s young Yugoslav government. It was an astonishing step forward in Italo-Yugoslav relations and Prime Minister Nedić sent a personal telegram thanking and flattering Mussolini in equal measures. The response from Rome was enthusiastic, informing Belgrade that mutual respect and unity of purpose between the Italian and Yugoslav kingdoms was the best hope for peace in Europe.
Enemies Within and WIthout
Notably, the response neglected Germany, and Italy’s position towards her Teutonic ally was notably less generous. All of the sweat and blood which German soldiers had given and German arms had wrought from the French defenders of the Maginot Line seemed to be for naught as the commanders of that impressive wall of fortifications moved to surrender to the Italian forces advancing from the south rather than to the Germans who had been bombarding Maginot for months. Their Italian counterparts insisted on a joint surrender to both Axis powers, but then pointedly assumed administrative command of the region “pending the conclusion of the war… and a thorough inquiry as to the wishes of the population…”. It was a cruel, unnecessary snub, but also one that the Germans could not respond to, at least, not at this time.
Although yet unable to settle their rivalry on the battlefield, both Germany and Italy worked hard to woo the smaller members of the Axis alliance to their side through both rhetoric and material support. When it came to appealing to Belgrade, Rome could point to the friendly behavior of Italian soldiers in Zara as well as the intervention which deflected Germany’s wrath and made Yugoslavia a member of the Axis alliance rather than its victim. Berlin tried to make appeals on the basis of the long-range interests between Germany and Yugoslavia being more harmonious than those between Italy and Yugoslavia. Partisan diplomats were all-too-eager to point out the past mistreatment and future schemes of one side or the other against the South Slavs as well. One advantage which Germany possessed over her Italian rival was a stronger manufacturing base and a less demanding occupation regime, which meant that she could offer Yugoslavia shipments of a wide array of German firearms and munitions while the Italians had to scrounge together shipments of rifles to compete. More often than not, captured French weapons were among those shipped from Rome. Once again, Yugoslavia found herself pursued by two mutually antagonistic powers, and past experience had taught her leaders just how dangerous that situation could be.
Although only in its early stages, the war was already changing the social fabric of Yugoslavia. The way that so many of the kingdom’s loyal subjects were united on the battlefield and facing great risk and hardship for their nation seemed to vindicate the Radical Union’s Yugoslavist platform. A bill passed through the National Assembly which sought to abolish the practice of constructing army regiments only from soldiers with a common ethnic and religious background. Although the Prime Minister and his brother privately doubted the efficacy of the kingdom’s non-Serb or Montenegrin soldiers and fretted about the effect that a reorganization of the military would have in the midst of the war, Milan Nedić nevertheless was persuaded to sign the legislation and gave a speech in which he touted the Royal Yugoslav Army as the school of the nation. The move was not merely a reaction to facts on the ground, but also an attempt to shape them by encouraging Macedonians and Bulgarians to enlist and fight for Yugoslavia or at least for their homes through the territorial militia program.
The forces that General Kosic had assigned to eliminating the encircled Greek divisions performed admirably, preventing any breakouts and slowly wearing them down until the last of them surrendered in the city of Alexandropoulos. Once more the Turks, who had lost ownership of the city to Bulgaria in 1913, which had then lost it to Greece following the Great War, were uninterested in providing safe haven for Yugoslavia’s desperate opponents, despite British entreaties to do otherwise.
Kosic’s decision to prioritize the destruction of the Greek divisions trapped in Macedonia had a profound impact on the course of the war in Greece as the first stage of the campaign wound down. With only half of the general’s divisions dedicated to the rest of the country, the Yugoslavs were unable to push any farther into Greece, no matter how much artillery was dedicated to the task. The Greeks had called up their own reserves and the numerical tide was rapidly turning against the Royal Yugoslav Army, especially with the Romanian army to contend with as well. The British were coming to the aid of their Greek allies as well, dedicating an initial force of two infantry and one tank division to the task of holding back the Yugoslavs. Kosic had little choice for the time being but to dig in, much to the frustration of the Nedić brothers who had been hoping to crush Greece before outside help could arrive.
With the closing of the pocket in Macedonia and the calcifying of battlelines elsewhere in Greece, Milutin Nedić reassigned six infantry divisions from the Greek front to the Romanian front in hopes of sparking further wins there. Once they were in position, an offensive was launched which aimed to capture the cities of Craiova and Ploiesti. Ploiesti in particular, with its rich oil fields and refineries, was a high priority for the Axis militaries which were bereft of the overseas colonies and resources which provided their opponents with the lifeblood of war. If the city fell under Yugoslavia’s occupation, then the kingdom would control two of the most important factors for deciding Romania’s fate when the war was over.
The thinly spread Romanians were unable to handle the concentrated force of Yugoslav firepower and both cities came under Belgrade’s control. The loss of Ploiesti came as a shock to King Carol’s government and the country’s defenders were left scrambling to plug the hole in the lines that the Yugoslavs had wrenched open. An advance force of three infantry divisions was sent to take as much advantage of the confusion as possible to penetrate as boldly as they dared into the Romanian interior. Already General Depre was distinguishing himself from the more cautious Kosic. Consolidating his gains did not appeal to Depre nearly as much as pressing his advantage, and so he sent Belgrade a short but thrilling inquiry: “Cluj or Bessarabia?”
Milan Nedić headed the faction which favored a drive to Cluj in order to capture the loathsome King Carol and his inner circle at the temporary seat of Romanian government. The old general turned prime minister even gave voice to fantasies of Yugoslavia mimicking Italy’s success in France and forcing a Romanian surrender right under the nose of Miklós Horthy and his overconfident Hungarian army. More cautious voices, led by Foreign Minister Ivo Andrić and supported by Prince Paul favored the drive to Bessarabia instead. The move was still a bold one, cutting Romania in half and securing the rich Black Sea coastline for Yugoslavia to occupy, but it would avoid ruffling feathers in an alliance already fraught with tension. There was also the concern that the Allies might grow desperate enough as to ask the Soviet Union to intervene on their behalf. It was unlikely with the Soviets still preoccupied with their war with Japan, but it wouldn’t hurt to sever the land connection between Romania and the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, as a precautionary measure.
In the west, the French army had finally halted its retreat from the invading Italians to rally around the so-called “Orleans Line” which ran through the town of the same name and guarded the third of France which was still under Paris’s control. The protection of France and her capital was in the hands of some of the divisions which had been assigned to the Maginot Line as well as those which had tried to check the Italian advance. Combined with the British expeditionary forces London had finally, grudgingly, sent across the channel, the Anglo-French forces enjoyed a decisive superiority over Rome’s legions, while the sulky Germans were hesitant to reinforce the position of their rival within the Axis. Still, the British and the French hesitated to launch a counterattack, giving the Italians time to dig in for the brutal fight ahead. Paris lay less than a hundred miles from Italian lines.
France was not the only beneficiary of a more active British policy regarding the war on the continent. The initial divisions which had reinforced the Greek defenses against Yugoslavia had given Athens time to raise reinforcements equipped and paid in large part by London’s generosity. The Greek divisions outnumbered those of the Royal Yugoslav Army dedicated to that front, but the Yugoslavs were supplemented by Belgrade’s Axis allies. Italian mountaineers and German tanks helped to match the build-up in the Balkans and served as the latest example of the ways in which Berlin and Rome were courting the favor of their Balkan ally.
The British divisions which had been stationed in Greece made a startling reappearance on the beaches of Croatia and Montenegro. They were checked by a hastily redirected force of German and Italian troops who were in transit to the Balkan front, as well as the marshalling of six of Yugoslavia’s new militia divisions.
Once the initial surprise of the British invasion wore off, the Axis had formed a wall of men and steel around the lost territory and began to work to push the British back into the sea. The Yugoslavs and their allies had the advantage of numbers, but General Momcilo Ojdanic, a former aide of Milan Nedić’s who had been promoted to generalship, felt the pressure from Belgrade to act quickly. It was politically embarrassing to have suffered a second landing in two months, and there were also fears that Allied reinforcements may make the British landing zone an ulcer which would become more and more painful to remove the longer that it remained untreated.
Even as Germany and her Axis allies faced stiffening resistance in Greece and British intervention in Yugoslavia and France, Berlin was already reviving territorial demands against Poland, even though it risked opening up another front in a war that was already spiraling out of control.
The War and the World
The rise of right-wing nationalistic regimes which had risen to power in Europe and Japan set off alarm bells for many champions of liberal democracy. President Franklin Roosevelt, well into his second four-year term as the leader of the United States, was watching the developments across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans with great alarm. He had campaigned for reelection in 1936 on a platform focused on domestic programs bringing the American economy out of the throes of the Great Depression, but his opposition to the German and Italian dictatorships was public knowledge. The overwhelming majority of American citizens viewed the outbreak of two wars, between the Franco-British coalition and the Axis in Europe and between Japan and the Sino-Soviet alliance in Asia, as unfortunate but not worth intervening in. Not only were the wars seen as contests between several distasteful regimes which did not directly threaten American security, but the failure of American intervention in Europe during the Great War had failed to bring about the era of peace and stability that President Woodrow Wilson and his administration had promised. Too many American lives had already been lost in this century, it was argued, propping up the empires of the ungrateful British and French.
While the American people were wary of getting involved in overseas conflicts, President Roosevelt worked surreptitiously to bolster his preferred sides in the conflicts abroad, namely the British and the Soviets, with grudging support also provided to the French and the Chinese governments that were allied with London and Moscow. Debate raged within Roosevelt’s administration over whether the European revisionists or the Japanese posed the greater threat to the country’s interests, and also what could be done to sway the war-wary public into favoring intervention. A campaign was organized to shift public opinion and congressmen, but more importantly, and unknown to other cabinet members, Roosevelt also authorized Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace to reach out through his contacts in the defunct Progressive Party to Earl Browder the general secretary of the Communist Party of the United States of America.
Earl Browder and Franklin Roosevelt were two willful and ambitious men who each believed that he could use the other to advance his own goals. Ultimately only one of them could succeed.
Unlike his chief rival for leadership of the American Communist movement, William Z. Foster, Browder had largely reconciled himself to the Roosevelt administration and the president’s domestic agenda as the first stage of an American “Popular Front” which could, with the aid of militant socialists among the volunteers returning from Spain, bring the country closer to a Communist takeover. His connections within the labor movement and contact with the Soviet Union helped him to serve as a bridge between Washington and Moscow. Browder's presence in the administration in any sort of capacity would have been an anathema to all but the most loyal Roosevelt men, so the association between the general secretary and the president was kept buried under layers of intermediaries and secrecy. Even so, the connivance between the two men began fostering a more favorable impression of the Soviet Union specifically and Communism in general in the American populace, with grave consequences to come.
Unlike the Soviet Union, Great Britain was not an international and ideological pariah and so President Roosevelt was able to be much more open about his support for London in the war against the Axis. Ties between the British government and the Roosevelt administration grew stronger and contact more frequent as Roosevelt labored to portray the British war effort as a noble endeavor to preserve democracy and human dignity against oppressive governance. While not abandoning the neutrality act which he had signed in 1936 outright, Roosevelt worked carefully at its margins to undermine its intent. Intelligence sharing between the US and Britain increased sharply and war materials were offered to British buyers before any competing power might lay claim to them. The boldest stroke of this policy was the transfer of several aging destroyer squadrons from the United States Navy to the Royal Navy in exchange for British island holdings in the Western Hemisphere. While not directly intervening in the war, Roosevelt and his government had made it clear to all which side they favored in Europe, even as the administration’s true policy toward the war in China and Siberia was purposefully obscured.
While the Soviet Union had provided a valuable ally militarily, Chiang Kai-Shek was still wary of what the Bolshevik government in Moscow had planned for China’s future. In order to gain his government much needed leverage from the machinations of the Soviets, Chiang dispatched envoys to the British and the United States government to secure aid for the Chinese against the Japanese invaders. Neither Anglo-Saxon power had any love for Tokyo and its plans for an autarkic Asian empire which would shut out European and American commercial interests and colonial holdings. At the same time, Chiang’s persistent appeals for aid earned him the nickname “General Cash My Check” among the cattier members of Congress.
The American aid to Great Britain and both countries’ assistance to China were just a few strands in the web of war which began to ensnare the globe as warring powers began to seek allies and advantages among those fighting in other continents. The flagging trust for Marshal Pétain’s military government led London to increase the size and improve the fortifications of the British garrison in Gibraltar, eager to prevent the
Regia Marina from escaping the Mediterranean and joining up with the German fleets to threaten England proper. The strengthened British presence in Gibraltar also served as a warning to the Communist regime in Madrid that the His Majesty’s government would be prepared to meet any Spanish challenge seeking to reclaim Gibraltar for the newly rechristened People’s Republic of Spain.
Meanwhile, the Bolshevik government in Moscow, while still focused on the war with Japan, also took stock of the deteriorating military situation in France and began preparing defenses in case the Axis powers turned their ire on the Soviet Union next. A war on two fronts might stretch the Soviet military to its breaking point, so efforts were redoubled to reverse Japanese gains in Siberia and to lay the groundwork for a grand “anti-Fascist alliance” with Great Britain and the United States.
Moscow’s Growing Reach
Although Soviet rhetoric towards Britain and America had grown more amicable, the Bolshevik practice of power continued to be as hard-nosed and brutally efficient as ever. In the west, Moscow began a pressure campaign in the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. While on one hand the campaign aimed to agitate the industrial urban proletariat of the three countries in order to pressure their governments from below to improve ties with the Soviet Union, Moscow communicated its need for military access and bases directly to Tallinn, Riga, and Kaunas. Such a move was seen as a key move to prepare the Soviet Union from anticipated aggression from Germany and her Axis allies, but the Baltic states had fought too hard for their recently-won independence to be enthusiastic about being reabsorbed into another imperial project, whether Tsarist or Soviet in nature. All three countries were allied with larger protectors, and thus Lithuania turned to Britain and Estonia and Latvia to Poland as a guarantor against Soviet ambitions on their territory. The blow might come later, but for now it was enough for Josef Stalin that he had made his position known to his potential allies, and to his potential victims.
In the east, the risks of displeasing Moscow were made apparent by the bloodless coup which forced Mao Zedong out of the leadership of China’s burgeoning Communist movement. Fearing increased Soviet control over the Chinese Communist Party, Mao sought to “rectify” errors in thinking among the party’s membership by conducting self-criticism sessions which would identify and hobble rivals within the party and leave him in sole control of the movement. The move was met with unexpectedly fierce resistance owing to the ongoing war against Japan and the Soviet Union’s aid in that conflict. The wily Sheng Shicai, governor of Sinkiang under Chiang’s Kuomintang government and a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, became a figurehead for opposition to Mao. Shicai’s backers argued that winning the war against Japan had to take priority over ideological witch hunts. Mao was publicly chastised but privately furious at what he saw as Soviet intervention in the affairs of China’s politics and Communist movement. The damage was done, and Mao lost his leading position in the Communist Party of China.
Certainly, Moscow made no secret that it endorsed the positions of Shicai’s faction, which leaned more on orthodox Marxism rather than the peasant-centric model championed by Mao. Behind the scenes additional weight had been given to the opposition within the party through a pledge that Sinkiang would join the war effort against Japan and ease the vulnerability felt by many Chinese Communist Party members in the Shaanxi province. That Shicai had reaffirmed his loyalty to Moscow and established his independence from the Nanking government was no doubt also pleasing to the Soviet Union, and the ability to move troops through the desolate Sinkiang region gave Stalin an additional point of pressure that he could use to mold China to his desires.
The War in Asia
To relieve the Japanese divisions which were being repelled in China’s coastal Shandong province, another naval invasion was launched to the south. From Formosa, Japanese marines made landfall in the southern half of Chiang’s domain, dangerously close to his capital in Nanking. A rapid advance ensued as the Chinese army struggled to redeploy forces to meet this new threat, but soon the Japanese invaders were encountering fierce resistance from the National Revolutionary Army and were clinging desperately to the coast where they could be supported by the guns of the Japanese navy.
Further north, the Japanese had continued to advance into sparsely populated Siberia. The Trans-Siberian Railroad was the main artery for both the defenders and the attackers as the rest of the region was largely undeveloped and bereft of easy lines of communication. The Japanese had at the very least learned from the lessons of their last war with Russia and had equipped their men with warmer clothes, but winter was rapidly approaching and it was feared that freezing temperatures and other hazards of nature would halt, or even reverse, the invaders’ gains while Moscow continued to flood more divisions into the theater.
The Imperial Japanese Army may have been weakened vis-à-vis the navy through the purge of the young officers of the Imperial Way faction following the abortive coup in 1936, but the army’s leadership had nevertheless received its desired war against the Soviet Union with Moscow’s entrance into the Chinese war. The men atop the powerful Japanese navy feared the eclipsing of their influence in country, and sought ways to regain it. As the war on the mainland slowed and Soviet and Chinese resistance hardened, the prospect of a long war loomed on the horizon. The navy’s prestige could be redeemed by rescuing the army from its own hubris through an idea that was alternatively labeled “bold” and “reckless”.
To that end, naval officers began preparing their case for a “Southern Thrust” which would, they argued, support the current war in Northeast Asia. The Japanese Empire was woefully short of the fuel and raw materials necessary to power the mighty war machine which was conquering China and Siberia. The availability of these inputs was largely reliant on the goodwill of the Western powers of Britain and the United States, and with signs of both London and Washington warming to the Bolshevik regime in Moscow it was unclear how long Japan could rely on Anglo-American goodwill and permission to continue the war against the Communists and the Chinese.
Frustratingly, the very resources needed were in Tokyo’s backyard, with French Indochina possessing a bounty of rubber and British and Malaya and the Dutch East Indies boasting both rubber and rich oil fields which could feed the empire’s planes, tanks, trucks, and ships. As the Franco-British war with the Axis turned more in the latter’s favor, it was believed by Japan’s naval officers that London would be unable and unwilling to mount an effective counterattack to a Japanese seizure of British colonies in East Asia. The Dutch East Indies was an even more tempting target owing to the perceived unwillingness of Britain to involve herself in another war when not under direct attack by the Axis. Finally, it was felt that the Pétain government’s deteriorating position left French Indochina ripe for the taking. Such moves, the admirals and other officers argued, would help the Japanese continue the fight against Communism in Asia with renewed vigor.
While the partisans of the Japanese navy made their case, a further step towards another World War was taken with Tokyo’s ascension to full membership in a new Tripartite Pact. While the original agreement had been a limited agreement between Germany, Italy, and Yugoslavia regarding issues in the Balkans and Central Europe, the new pact was crafted with far more ambition. The three capitals of Berlin, Rome, and Tokyo agreed to respect each other’s spheres of influence; Berlin in northern and eastern Europe, Rome in the Mediterranean region, and Japan in east Asia; and to come to each other’s aid in the event that war was declared against one of the signatories. The Pact did not obligate any of the three powers to join in any of their current wars, but it did serve as a warning to the British, Soviets and Americans not to meddle in any conflicts which they were not a party to, lest the full weight of the revisionist powers be brought to bear against them.
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