Axis strategy and co-operation

Axis strategy and co-operation. Although the leaders of the Axis spoke frequently in public of their co-operation, and they were bound by various treaties (see Tripartite Pact, Pact of Steel, and Anti-Comintern pact), in practice there was extraordinarily little co-ordination of military or diplomatic activities during the war. Hitler and Mussolini, the leaders of Germany and Italy, undoubtedly admired each other immensely, but this admiration was not shared by their respective military and naval leaders nor by their respective peoples. Furthermore, each of the two powers conducted its policy without much regard for—and often without giving much notice to—the other. Very much the same thing was true of the relationship of each of them to their third major partner in the conflict: Japan. In that case there was perhaps something of an inversion of the situation between Germany and Italy, in that the military and naval leaders did have a high regard for the abilities of their wartime partners, but there is no evidence that the two European Axis leaders and Tōjō Hideki, the leader of Japan until the summer of 1944, particularly cared for each other. As for Tōjō's successors Koiso Kuniaki and Suzuki Kantarō, neither had a high opinion of the European Axis leaders, who in turn appear to have known next to nothing about either.

The Germans had begun the Second World War at a time when Italy was not ready to join in, having only just been promised several years of peace by the Germans, while the Japanese were affronted by the Nazi–Soviet Pact of August 1939 which appeared to them to violate their own prior agreements with Germany and which was signed while Japanese and Soviet forces were actually engaged in combat (see Japanese–Soviet campaigns). Italy joined Germany in the war in June 1940 on the assumption that the hostilities were amost over, with no real plans for fighting either France or the UK. Furthermore, when the Germans occupied Romania in September 1940, as part of their preparation for the invasion of the Soviet Union (something they had failed to explain to the Italians), Mussolini decided that he would in effect pay them back for their advance in the Balkans by attacking Greece (see Balkan campaign). The defeat suffered by Italian forces in Greece, combined with the failure of Italy's armed forces in the Western Desert campaigns during the winter of 1940–1 made any future independent conduct of war by Italy impossible.

Because Italy's defeats in Greece and North Africa threatened the very existence of Mussolini's regime, the Germans decided to help Italy out. But that help was to be limited to a rescue operation; Germany did not propose to commit large forces to a part of the world where Italy's living-space, not Germany's, was at stake. As for what in Italian eyes was the critical issue of control of the central Mediterranean, which they believed, probably correctly, could be attained only by taking Malta, the Germans baulked. The casualties incurred by German airborne units in the seizure of Crete in May 1941 made Hitler unwilling to try such an operation again, and as the Italians had predicted, the operations of the Axis in North Africa were thereafter too much at the mercy of Allied submarines and aircraft.

Although the Germans contributed only minimal forces to the rescue of Mussolini's regime in the Mediterranean, the Italians reciprocated by sending troops to the Eastern Front to help their allies in the German–Soviet war. However, that measure by Mussolini to assert his role in the Axis led to disaster for the Italian Army caught up in the aftermath of the great German defeat at Stalingrad. Mussolini's conclusion from all this, namely that Germany would be well advised to make peace with the Soviet Union and concentrate all efforts on defeating the western Allies, fell on deaf ears in Berlin.

At the start of the North African campaign in November 1942, both Germany and Italy moved substantial forces into Tunisia, aided at the critical moment by the acquiescence of the Vichy French resident-general there, Admiral Estéva. The subsequent campaign for Tunisia served to delay the Allied invasion in the west from 1943 to 1944, but the frictions between German and Italian military leaders which had characterized the earlier fighting in North Africa continued. In May 1943 the troops of both had to surrender. The last joint military effort of the Axis was the attempted defence of Sicily after the Allied landings in July 1943 (see Sicilian campaign). It showed the Italians that they could not resist invasion, and it demonstrated to the Germans that their Italian ally was, in effect, finished with fighting on their side.

In some practical areas Germany and Italy did manage to co-operate, but always with accompanying friction. Large numbers of Italian workers were sent to Germany, but there were always complaints about their treatment. On the other hand, Germany provided Italy with substantial quantities of coal, needed to keep Italy's industry functioning, but there were always complaints about inadequacies in the supply. One area in which the two proved totally at odds was that of the extermination of Jews. The Italians simply refused to go along with the German programme for the Final Solution and in fact sabotaged German efforts to implement it in the Axis-occupied parts of Europe, especially Yugoslavia, Greece, and France. Italian unwillingness to share in the mass killing of Jews, which had the highest priority for the Germans, confirmed the latter in their view that the Italians were unreliable and inefficient allies; while the stubborn insistence of the Nazis, which looked like insanity to the Italians, only served to confirm in their eyes that the Germans were still rather like the barbarians who had invaded the Roman Empire centuries before.

The Italian surrender in September 1943 served once again to confirm both Axis partners in their negative views of each other. The Germans believed themselves betrayed and took fearful vengeance on their former ally. Hundreds of Italians were shot; hundreds of thousands were carted off to forced labour camps in Germany. The shadow government Mussolini was allowed to set up under German auspices in northern Italy (see Italy, 3(b)) had no means of preventing the exactions and atrocities of the Germans, though one could argue that in the resistance to both the Germans and Mussolini's new regime the Italian people were able to create the founding myth of their post-war republic. The willingness of German military commanders in northern Italy to negotiate a surrender behind Mussolini's back (see Wolff) illuminates the lack of co-ordination between the Axis partners in defeat—just as their rivalries in south-east Europe had done when it looked as if they might win.

If the victory of Germany in western Europe in May– June 1940 had led Mussolini to take Italy into the war, it had a similar, if slightly delayed, effect on the Japanese. Those elements in Tokyo looking towards the seizure of a vast empire in South and South-East Asia believed that the time had come to move forward. In this they were constantly encouraged by the Germans who hoped that the USA would be diverted to the Pacific while they were still building up their own navy to fight the Americans; if, on the other hand, the Japanese went to war with the USA, the Germans promised to join them immediately on the basis that then they would have the world's third largest navy on their side right away. When the Japanese did move in December 1941 by attacking Pearl Harbor, both Germany and Italy immediately declared war against the USA; but no close co-ordination of strategy resulted.

The Japanese had neither told the Germans when they would move nor explained to them their plans, either beforehand or afterwards. There were meetings of military commissions and conferences between Japanese representatives and German naval and military leaders, but it proved impossible to co-ordinate strategy. The obvious way for them to work together was to try to meet in the Indian Ocean and Middle East; the insistence of Admiral Yamamoto on the Midway operation in June 1942, followed soon after by the American landing on Guadalcanal that August, which touched off a six-month struggle for that island, prevented the Japanese from following up on what they, as well as the Germans, recognized as their best chance of turning the whole tide of the war. The failure of the Japanese to make any effective strategic decision about Guadalcanal—to put in overwhelming strength or to cut their losses and advance elsewhere—meant that in the second half of 1942, the time when the powers of the Tripartite Pact had their best opportunity of the war, was consumed by a battle of attrition in the Solomon Islands which the Japanese lost.

By the time Japanese forces were evacuated from Guadalcanal in early 1943, the Axis armies in North Africa were bottled up in Tunisia and had been driven back on the southern portion of the Eastern Front; the Germans and Japanese could talk about meeting thereafter, but they would never again have any prospect of doing so. Furthermore, the Japanese were unwilling to co-operate with the Germans in the effort to paralyse the Allies by attacks on merchant shipping. Having always thought of their submarines as primarily for use against warships, the Japanese failed to grasp Germany's emphasis on the war on Allied convoys. By the time they began to do so, it was too late; not only was the tide of battle turning in the Atlantic during 1943 but the American strategy of bypassing large Japanese garrisons in the Pacific war meant that a large proportion of Japan's submarines had to be employed in the task of supplying these isolated forces with ammunition, medicine, and food. The effort to make up for this divergence on the issue of submarine employment, the stationing of a number of German submarines at bases provided by the Japanese in Malaya, so that these submarines could attack shipping in the Indian Ocean and off the coast of Australia, was to prove extremely costly to the Germans and, though certainly adding to the rate of sinkings, was probably not a cost-effective employment.

One field in which the powers of the Tripartite Pact did co-operate fairly effectively in spite of all sorts of attendant frictions was in the use of blockade runners. Until they attacked the Soviet Union, the Germans had been able to secure important raw materials from East Asia across the Soviet Union on the Trans-Siberian Railway. Once this ended in June 1941, when the Germans invaded the USSR (see BARBAROSSA), they made arrangements for ships to get through the blockade with key raw materials needed for the German war effort, especially tin and rubber. In exchange the Germans sent patents, blueprints, and some special goods to the Japanese. Although the blockade runners, which came to include both German and Italian submarines, were increasingly intercepted by the Allies, they were able to relieve some of the most critical shortages in Germany's war effort. On the other hand, the endless discussion of air transport between Europe and Japan produced next to nothing practical: one Italian aircraft made the trip east and back, but that was all.

Like the Italians, and it should be added Germany's other satellites and collaborators, the Japanese repeatedly urged Berlin to make peace with the Soviet Union. They began to advocate this line in the latter part of 1941 and came back to it throughout the war, but to no effect. There were repeated signs that the Soviets were interested, but the Germans certainly were not. On the other hand, the Germans were upset, to put it mildly, that vast quantities of American Lend-Lease supplies—about half the total—were being shipped to Soviet East Asian ports literally under the noses of the Japanese. In exchange for a Soviet refusal to allow American aircraft to bomb the Japanese home islands from Soviet bases, the Japanese refused to interfere with the shipment of US aid to the Soviet Union; the lack of co-ordination between the powers of the Tripartite Pact was particularly obvious in this regard.

There were, it should be noted, some fields in which there was at least a modicum of co-operation. The Japanese and Italians in particular appear to have collaborated in the field of signals intelligence warfare and the Germans provided the Japanese with a considerable amount of advanced technical information about weapons and industrial processes. There is, however, no evidence that the Japanese were able to make much use of this information in the time available to them, and, ironically, much of what they learned became known to the Allies because of their ability to intercept and decode a high proportion of the messages containing such information sent by Japanese representatives from Europe to Tokyo by wireless (see ULTRA, 2).

Perhaps the relationship between the European Axis and Japan is best symbolized by a portion of the records of the German–Japanese Society, a friendship organization established by the Germans to promote good relations between the two peoples. Included among the records seized at the end of the war was a thick file of agitated correspondence about a most troublesome question: could non-Aryans like Japanese join the German–Japanese Society?

G. L. Weinberg

Bibliography

Chapman, J. W. M. , ‘Signals Intelligence Collaboration among the Tripartite Pact States on the Eve of Pearl Harbor’, Japan Forum, 3 ( 1991), 231–56.
Deakin, F. W. , The Brutal Friendship: Mussolini, Hitler and the Fall of Italian Fascism (New York, 1962).
Meskill, J. M. , Hitler and Japan: The Hollow Alliance (New York, 1966).
Sadkovich, J. J. , ‘Of Myths and Men: Rommel and the Italians in North Africa, 1940–1942’, International History Review, 13 ( 1991), 284–313.
Schreiber, G. , Die italienischen Militärinternierten im deutschen Machtbereich 1943 bis 1945; ‘The Italian Military Internees under German Control 1943–1945’, the only significant study of this important subject (Munich, 1990).
Steinberg, J. , All or Nothing: The Axis and the Holocaust 1941–43 (London, 1990).
Weinberg, G. L. , The World At Arms: A New History of World War II (Cambridge, 1993).