John Toland, The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-1945
Posted on 11/05/2011 5:19:49 AM PDT by Homer_J_Simpson
John Toland, The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-1945
Gordon W. Prange, At Dawn We Slept
Winston S. Churchill, The Grand Alliance
* The last photo reminds me of a character in “Kelly’s Heroes.”
http://www.onwar.com/chrono/1941/nov41/f05nov41.htm
Japan set to negotiate with United State
Wednesday, November 5, 1941 www.onwar.com
Sabiuro Kurusu special envoy and Ambassador Kichisaburo Nomura in WashingtonIn Tokyo...The Japanese government decides to attempt to negotiate a settlement with the United States, setting a deadline of the end of November. The US rejects the offer because the Japanese will not repudiate the Tripartite Agreement with Italy and Germany and because the Japanese wish to maintain bases in China. The US code breaking service continues to intercept all Japanese diplomatic communication.
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/andrew.etherington/month/thismonth/05.htm
November 5th, 1941
UNITED KINGDOM: Destroyer KNM Svenner (ex-HMS Shark) laid down.
Destroyer HMS Quentin launched.
Submarine HMS Unison launched.
Destroyer HS Pindos launched.
Submarine HMS Unbending commissioned. (Dave Shirlaw)
FINLAND: Arndt Pekurinen, the founder and chairman of the Finnish Anti-militarist League, is executed near the front-line in Uhtua after he has for three times refused to wear a uniform and carry a rifle.
Pekurinen was a principled pacifist, and it was largely thanks to him that in 1930s there became available a non-military alternative for the conscription. Back then Pekurinen had refused to perform military service, and was sentenced for jail. His case attracted international interest, and because of this pressure a law was made to accommodate conscientious objectors. But this law applied only for peace time. When the Winter War began, Pekurinen went again to jail. In 1941 Pekurinen was ordered from jail to front, where he rather chose to die before a firing squad than carry a rifle.
Whatever one thinks of Pekurinen’s ideals, one has to feel certain respect for his commitment for them. There are only very few people who are ready to die for their ideals, esp. when the ideals run counter the main stream of the times. (Mikko Härmeinen)
U.S.S.R.: Soviet submarine V-3 launched. (Dave Shirlaw)
JAPAN: Tokyo: The Japanese government sends Saburo Kurusu to Washington to help with negotiations with the Americans on a settlement to the question of Japan’s role in South-east Asia.
Japan’s commanders today ordered the imperial Japanese navy to prepare for a surprise attack on the US fleet at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii.
The secret move follows the Japanese decision this autumn to carry out a simultaneous attack on Malaya and Philippines to get to the oilfields of the Dutch East Indies. Some commanders were reluctant to attack the Philippines, which are US territory, and bring the USA into the war, and a pre-emptive strike was seen as essential to hamper US defence efforts.
The idea of attacking Pearl Harbor was not new, but it took the determination of the Japanese C-in-C, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, to sell it to his colleagues. He studied English at Harvard and was a naval attache in Washington, and knows the potential power of the USA. He believes that only a surprise air attack will guarantee success. However, Japan’s leaders agree that before any attack there should be one last attempt at a negotiated deal on Japan’s role in Far East. If this fails, Japan and the USA will be at war before Christmas.
U.S.A.: Marshall and Stark send a six-point memorandum to FDR outlining the position taken by the Joint Board on November 3. FDR is specifically informed that there would be insufficient B-17’s in the Philippines to serve as a “positive threat” to the Japanese until mid-December and that it would be February or March before air power in the Commonwealth was sufficient to be a “deciding factor in deterring Japan”. This memorandum further sets out that a Japanese attack on British or Dutch possessions or a threatening Japanese assault on Siam would lead to an American declaration of war. (This memorandum was delivered to Kimmel on November 24, 1941, though whether a copy was sent to Hart is unknown.) (Marc Small)
Detroit: The British ambassador in America, Lord Halifax, was pelted with eggs and tomatoes by women protesters last night as he completed a two-day tour of Detroit’s arms production centres.
Only one well-aimed egg actually hit the envoy. One hour later he visited the Henry Ford hospital to have an eye infection treated. The women were protesting against the possible entry of America into the war, though the identity of the group is not known. The American Mothers and The Mothers of the USA both blamed each other.
Destroyer USS Conway laid down. (Dave Shirlaw)
Part Five- Cavalry Charge At Musino
Between 15th and 19th November the battle weary, depleted divisions of Army Group Centre mounted their final assaults on Moscow, one by one in carefully timed succession.
The officers, all the way down to the smallest section, knew what was at stake. Colonel-General Guderian writes in his memoirs that he explained to his Corps commanders that no more time must be lost. He implored them to do everything in their power to make sure the objective was reached. Colonel-General Hoepner likewise endeavored to rouse his troops to a supreme last effort in his Order of the Day of 17th November addressed to his unit commanders :
Arouse your troops into a state of awareness. Revive their spirit. Show them the objective that will mean for them the glorious conclusion of a hard campaign and the prospect of well-earned rest. Lead them with vigor and confidence in victory! May the Lord of Hosts grant you success!
This Order of the Day is reproduced here not because of its bombast and the kind of magniloquence that is customary in a war: the significance of the document lies on an entirely different plane. It reveals that so outstanding a military leader as Hoepner, a man of great personal courage who was later to die on the gallows as one of the active conspirators against Hitler, was still convinced on 17th November 1941 that Moscow could, and should be, captured.
On 16th November Hoepner's V Infantry Corps mounted its attack against the town of Klin, north-west of Moscow on the road to Kalinin. On its left the LVI Panzer Corps of Third Panzer Army was scheduled to move forward.
Dawn was breaking near Musino, south-west of Klin—the dawn of 17th November. It was a grey and hazy morning.
Towards 0900 the sun suddenly appeared through the icy-mist as a large blood red disc. The observer post of one of the heavy batteries was located on a hill. About two miles farther ahead the edge of a broad belt of forest could just be made out. Everything else was flat fields under a light cover of snow.
It was cold.
The troopers were uneasy and nervous, waiting for the attack order.
1000 hours. Field-glasses went up.
Horsemen appeared on the edge of the wood at a gallop but then quickly vanished behind a hill.
" Then a shout went up-“Russian tanks!"
Three T-34s were approaching over the frozen ground. From the edge of the village the anti-tank guns opened up.
Strange that the tanks were not accompanied by infantry. Why would that be?
While the artillery observers were still busy puzzling over that mystery another shout went up: "Look out-cavalry to the right of the forest."
And suddenly, there they were—cavalry.
Horsemen were approaching at a slow trot. In front, their reconnaissance units, then pickets of forty or fifty horsemen.
Now the number had grown to one or two hundred.
A moment later they burst out of the forest on a broad front—squadron next to squadron.
They formed up into one gigantic line abreast. And then another line formed up and appeared behind them.
To the shocked and horrified German troops watching it was like a bizarre dream.
The officers' sabres shot up into the air. Bright steel flashing in the morning sun. Then they approached at a gallop.
"Cavalry charge in regimental strength. Spearhead of attack at 2500 yards!"
The artillery spotter's voice sounded a little choked as he passed the information back over the telephone. A cavalry charge in 1941?
He was lying in a hole in the ground, on a sheet of tent canvas. His trench telescope had been painted white with a paste of chalk tablets immediately after the first fall of snow. Now it did not show up against the snow blanket which, still clean and white, covered the fields and hills of Musino. Still clean and white. But already the squadrons were charging from the wood.
They churned up the snow and the earth : the horses stirrup touching stirrup, the riders low on the horses' necks, their drawn sabres over their shoulders.
The machine-gun crew by the artillery observation post had their gun ready for action on the parapet. The gunner pulled off his mittens and put them down by the bolt. The gun commander's eyes were glued to his field-glasses. "2000 yards," they heard the artillery spotter shout down his telephone.
He followed up with firing instructions for his battery.
Barely a second passed. And across the snowy fields of Musino swept a terrible vision.
The 3rd Battery, 107th Artillery Regiment, 106th Infantry Division, had opened fire at close range.
With a crash the shells left their barrels and exploded right among the charging squadron.
The HE shells of the antitank guns in the village, which had only just been attacked by T-34s, landed amid the most forward Russian group.
Horses fell. Riders spun through the air. Flashes of lightning. Black smoke. Fountains of dirt and fire.
The Soviet regiment continued its charge.
Their discipline was terrific. They even pivoted about their right wing and headed towards the village.
But now salvo after salvo of the heavy guns burst amid the squadrons. The batteries were now firing shrapnel which exploded 25 feet above the ground.
The effect of splinters and shrapnel was horrendous.
Riders were torn to shreds in their saddles; chunks of horses and portions of riders were felled into heaps of something so ghastly and revolting that many men would have nightmares about it until their dying day.
But the terrible spectacle was not yet over. From out of the forest came a second regiment to resume the charge.
Its officers and men must have watched the tragedy of their sister regiment.
Nevertheless they now rode to their own doom.
The encircled German batteries smashed the second wave even more quickly. Only a small group of thirty horsemen on very fast small Cossack animals penetrated through the wall of death. Thirty out of a thousand.
They charged towards the high ground where the artillery observer was stationed. They finished up under the bursts of the covering machine-gun.
Two thousand horses and their riders—both regiments of 44th Mongolian Cavalry Division—lay in the bloodstained snow, torn to pieces, trampled to death, wounded. A handful of horses were loose in the fields, trotting towards the village or into the wood. Slightly wounded horsemen were trying to get under cover, limping or reeling drunkenly. That was the moment when Major-General Dehner gave the order for an immediate counter-attack.
Out of the village and from behind the high ground came the lines of infantrymen of 240th Infantry Regiment. In sections and platoons they moved over the snowy ground towards the wood. Not a shot was fired. Sick with horror and disgust, the infantrymen traversed the graveyard of the 44th Mongolian Cavalry Division—the battlefield of one of the last great cavalry charges of the Second World War.
When they reoccupied the village of Spas Bludi the grenadiers found that their comrades of 240th Infantry Regiment, taken prisoner there after being wounded, had been tortured to death.
The Russian attack had been senseless from a military point of view. Two regiments had been sacrificed without harming a hair on the opponent's head. There was not a single man wounded on the German side. But the attack showed with what ruthless determination the Soviet Command intended to deny the German attackers the roads into the capital, and how stubbornly it was going to fight for Moscow.
Another illustration is found in the diary of a young Soviet lieutenant, the commander of a mortar platoon on Moscow's southern front. Under 17th November we read as follows:
The battalion received the categorical order to take the fascist position on the high ground outside the village of Teploye. However, we were unable to make a single step forward because the fire of the Germans was too strong. Kryvolapov reported to Regiment that without artillery support we could not make any progress. The reply was: You will have taken that position in twenty minutes, or else the officers will face a court martial. The order was repeated six times. We attacked six times. The commander was killed. Tarorov, the adjutant, and Ivashchenkov, the Party Secretary, are also dead. The battalion has only twenty guns left.
That was how Stalin made his troops fight. He employed everything he had for the defense of his capital. Whatever human or material reserves were left in his empire he mobilized for the defense of Moscow. Stalin knew what Moscow stood for and what its loss would mean. He confessed as much to Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt's representative, when he said to him, "If Moscow falls the Red Army will have to give up the whole of Russia west of the Volga."
Nothing can illustrate his desperate mood more clearly than his request to Roosevelt, reported by Hopkins: "He, Stalin, would welcome it if American troops appeared on some sector of the Russian front, and, what is more, under the unrestricted command of the US Army."
Isaac Deutscher, Stalin's biographer, very rightly points out: "This is one of the most revealing remarks of Stalin that have been recorded by the chroniclers of the Second World War." Indeed, it shows as nothing else how desperately Stalin saw his own position.
Roosevelt did not send any troops to the Soviet front, and Stalin had to make do with what he could scrape together within his empire. Not all the units were willing to go into action. Many of the regiments had passed through the searing fire of the summer battles. Entire divisions could only be made to fight by the threat that, in the event of their withdrawal, they would be mown down by reliable security formations.
The Mongolian and Siberian divisions, on the other hand, switched by Stalin to the west from the Far East of his country, were vigorous and full of fighting spirit. It was largely due to them that Moscow in the end was saved. And, of course, also to the fact that Stalin could calmly denude his 5600-mile sea frontier from the Bering Straits to Vladivostok and his 1900-mile land frontier from Vladivostok to Outer Mongolia, without having to fear that Japan's Kwantung Army would cross the USSR's eastern frontier and help its German allies by stabbing the Russians in the back. He was able to do that because he knew from his master spy Dr Sorge that the Japanese, the allies of Germany, were preparing instead to attack the Americans in Pearl Harbor in order to capture for themselves the islands of the Pacific.
It was this decision that saved the Soviet Union. Japan was to reap a poor reward from Stalin for this service.
These Siberian reserves were so considerable that, according to Samsonov, the Russian defending forces at Moscow, at the resumption of the offensive on the Central Front in November, were for the first time numerically superior to the Germans.
Samsonov gives the proportion of infantry divisions as 1 to 1.2 in favor of the Soviets. If one remembers that the German infantry divisions had lost 30 to 50 per cent, of their combat strength after their ceaseless marching and heavy fighting, and that the armored divisions were mere shadows of their former selves, operating with barely one-third of their normal strength, one begins to understand what happened at Moscow between 18th November and 5th December, and what it was that the Russian war historians call "the miracle of Moscow."
The cavalry charge at Musino was the bloody overture to the thrust to be made by V Corps on the left wing of 4th Panzer Group against Moscow's vital artery in the north-west —the Kalinin-Klin-Moscow road.
General of Infantry Ruoff was to open the way to the capital between that road and the Moskva-Volga Canal.
Code Name “Typhoon”
Part Six- 5 miles To Moscow
Russia, Nov 17,1941 With snow suits,infantry marching on the Soviet positions near Moscow.
German troops rescue a wounded comrade after an attack on a village near Moscow-Nov 17,1941
German dead outside a first aid station on the Moscow highway. Late Nov 1941
Russian dead near Moscow in Nov 1941-part of a reinforced company-size attack-many of the wounded died from laying overnight in the frigid weather.
German troops found frozen to death in the morning outside of Mozhaysk, not far from Moscow. (Dec 1941)
German troops prepare for a Soviet counterattack north of Rzhev in Dec 1941. Many German weapons had seized up in the bitter cold so Russian weapons were used in an emergency.
Russian priest entered a German held village after living for years in a forest hut Nov 1941
German Panzer troops enter Klin NW of Moscow-Nov 1941
German replacements given hot meal before being sent forward to their units Nov 1941
Large Russian village west of Rschev Nov 1941. Village was captured minutes before causing both sides heavy causalities.
German troops bury their dead and prepare for an attack early next day.Mzensk Oct 1941
German graves dug east of Vitebsk Nov 1941
German troopers observe field of dead and wounded Soviets after a Soviet attack the night before. Nov 1941 Near Moscow
German regiment assembles in town 45 miles from Moscow awaiting transportation to rejoin their division. Nov 1941
German regiment massing in a town near Moscow for an attack-Nov 1941
Lonely German on picket duty near the town of Mozaisk looks for Soviet patrols-Nov 1941
wow, unbelievable pictures and great post.
could it really be true that stalin knew about Pearl Harbor before the fact?
fascinating item about the mongols making the last stand in front of Moscow
Public National Bank was acquired by Bankers Trust, which was itself acquired by Deutsche Bank in 1999
Another great post, Larry. You have presented a good overview of the next few weeks in the East. Moscow is the grand prize for the Germans, to be defended at all costs by the Russians.
Stalin didn’t know about Pearl Harbor. He did know the Japanese were not going to attack the USSR, but were going south instead.
He could not divulge this information to the west for three reasons:
1. He was stripping his Far Eastern Army to assemble reserves around Moscow. He could not risk either the Japanese or Germans knowing this;
2. He did not wish to compromise his source, Richard Sorge, and;
3. He was Stalin. It wasn’t his nature to tell.
one intersting factoid i gleaned from reading about genghis khan. his advance across russia moved faster than the german advance 800 years later. he had 100,000 troops, and each troop had 10 horses, they were all fully mounted and mobile. the germans were 50% or less mechanized without nearly as many horses.
ironic that desendants of genghis kahn are sacrificed in front of moscow.
ironic that stalin and communism probably saved Russia. doubtful any democracy would have made a stand like he did, and was able to enforce whatever the cost. i read he had 15,000 of his own troops shot at stalingrad for failure to advance at one time or another.
The Mongols attacked Russia in the winter, and used the frozen rivers as major highways, while the snow impeded the troops of the various Russian principalities in Central and northern Russia.
Two corrections, if I may. The attack on Russia was ordered by Uggedai Qa Quan, Chingghis Quan’s third son and successor [Chingghis Quan had died @ 1227, the attack on Russian began in 1236-1237]. The invasion’s ostensible commander was Batu Quan, Chingghis’ grandson [son of his oldest son Jochi], and successor in interest to his father’s Ulus-everything west of the Eastern Steppe. The actual commander of the invasion was Sabotai Bahadur, history’s greatest general.
i take your point, genghis wasnt along for the ride. but no question he was the driving force and set it in motion. also, i believe he died just about the time the horde got to poland and they turned around and rode back, what, 5000 miles? for the funeral.
great book by the way if you havent read it: “the making of the modern world”, best khan book of all time.
two other genghis interesting facts:
-first guy to use cannon in a city siege. the place? baghdad, and until the americans took it in the 21st century, the only guy to have conquered it.
Stalin was the only leader who was so ruthless that he purged his officer corps to leave his country vulnerable on the eve of a war he knew was coming. Having gotten his country into a mess, he was also the only leader ruthless enough to lead them out of it.
he trusted hitler. not much you can say after that boner.
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