Wolmi-Do. Small fortified island which controls the approaches to Inchon, Korea. During the Korean War. and prior to the Inchon landings, Wolmi was shelled and bombed for two days and secured on the morning of September 15 1950 by US Marines. Of the North Korean garrison, 136 were captured and an unknown number perished when they refused to surrender and were buried in their bunkers.
Women’s services. In 1914, First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (fanys), British veterans of the Boer War, crossed to France, since artillery warfare had increased the numbers of wounded and hence the need for nursing. British women staffed army canteens but were not allowed into uniform until 1917, with the formation of Queen Mary’s Army Auxiliary Corps. By 1918 there were 11,000 women in Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service, The British Red Cross and the St John’s Ambulance Brigade, qmaac numbered 57,000; the Women’s Royal Naval Service (wrns) and the Women’s Royal Air Force (wrap) each numbered 5,000; all were employed in clerical, administrative and communications services.
In 1938 female volunteers formed the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ats), and by 1939 20,000 women were trained to defend the nation in all three services. Women’s war duties included fighter controllers and plotters, controlling barrage balloons, radar units, searchlights, anti-aircraft gun batteries, transport and signals. The Civil Defence Corps and Women’s Volunteer Service (wvs) became auxiliary fire-fighters, rescue and demolition workers. In April 1941 female auxiliaries were given full military status; ats were sent to the Middle East and WRNS to Singapore; all three services distinguished themselves as codebreakers at Bletchley; 1942 saw general female conscription to auxiliary services. Women’s Land Army or munitions work. Despite outstanding achievements and acts of heroism, women were denied the vr on grounds that they were officially noncombatants; the civilian equivalent, the George Cross, was awarded to only four women.
The Commonwealth countries also developed their own equivalent services. By the end of World War II, a whole range were in existence - in Australia, the Australian Army Nursing Service, Australian Army Medical Women’s Service, Women’s Australian Auxiliary Air Force, Australian Women’s Army Service, Women’s Royal Australian Naval Service. Canadian women’s services included the Royal Army Nursing Corps, Women’s Royal Canadian Nursing Service, Canadian Women’s Army Corps, Royal Canadian Air Force (Women’s Division). Those of New Zealand included the New Zealand Army Nursing Service, Women’s Royal New Zealand Naval Service, Women’s War Service Auxilliary, Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, NZ Women’s Auxiliary Air Force. And South African women’s services included the South African Military Nursing Services, Women’s Auxiliary Defence Corps, Women’s Auxiliary Army Service, Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, SA Women’s Auxiliary Naval Service.
In the US, Congress limited female participation in World War I to minor clerical duties. In 1941
17.000 women formed the Women’s League of Defence. Frustrated in their attempts to participate when the US joined the war, American women enlisted in the British Armed Forces. Congress authorized female conscription in 1942 and the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps (waac) was formed despite massive male resentment. The formation of waves and waaf followed. In July 1943 women were granted full military status and WAAC became wac (Women’s Army Corps). At its peak wac was
100.000 strong with units sent to Algiers (1942) and Italy (1943). By war’s end there were 8,000 wacs on the Continent and MacArthur claimed that in the Pacific, wacs were his “best soldiers”.
The USSR was exceptional in allowing women to join military combat. In World War II,. the USSR had three all-female air regiments who showed great skill and daring. In 4,000 operational sorties they engaged in 125 aerial combats and scored 38 “kills”. Vast losses on the ground also forced women into action as tank drivers.
In Germany Hitler decreed that
No woman should bear arms; instead he encouraged Helferinnen — clerical helpers. Women grew more valuable as the war progressed: by 1945 250,000 women were assisting with signals and communications, and in manning antiaircraft batteries. In March 1945 Hitler decided to let women bear arms, but rescinded the order a week later. Despite this some women took up arms in desperation in the last weeks of the war.
Wonju, east/central Korea, south of the 38th Parallel. In the heavy fighting which accompanied the Chinese offensive of February 1951, the French battalion attached to the US 2nd Division distinguished itself at the Battle of Chipyong-ni, northwest of Wonju. The communists suffered heavy casualties and withdrew.
Wonsan, landing at (the Korean War). A key element in MacAr-thur’s plan for the advance into North Korea in October 1950. It called for X Corps under Gen Almond to leave the Seoul/Inchon area and sail to the east coast, landing at Wonsan to strike westwards across the peninsula towards Pyongyang, effecting a junction with Gen Walker’s advancing Eighth Army. The outloading of X Corps took time and Wonsan had fallen to rok troops before Almond’s command could reach the east coast. The North Koreans had sown the harbour with over
3,000 mines and the 1st Marine Division was delayed for six days while they were cleared, until October 25 1950. Since Pyongyang had already fallen, X Corps was given a new mission to clear the northeast. CM.
Wonsan, siege of (the Korean War). Began in February 1951, when Vice Adm A E Smith, usn, seized several islands in the harbour. The operation, designed to impede the passage of supplies and pin down enemy troops, lasted for 861 days. The city was bombarded daily. The North Koreans responded by improving their coastal defences, releasing floating mines from sampans and raiding un positions by night. Although supplies continued to move through Wonsan, 80,000 enemy troops were tied down in the area. CM.
Wood, Maj Gen John S (18881966). US. Commander of the US 4th Armoured Division which led the Allied breakout from Avran-ches, Normandy, July 1944.
Woodhouse, Col (Christopher) Montague, (b. l917). Br. Helped attack Gorgopotamos bridge 1942, head of soe mission in Greece 1943-44; helped destabilize Mos-sadeq 1953.
Woodward, Rear Adm Sir John (“Sandy”) (b. l932). Br. Commander of British naval task force during the Falklands War of 1982. Painfully aware of the threat posed by the formidable Argentine Air Force and his own shortage of air defence afloat, he had to balance the imperative of getting his land forces ashore against the prospect of losing one or both of his carriers and the large and vulnerable merchant ships like Canberra, to air or submarine attack. His decision to order the sinking of the General Belgrano, despite its being outside the tez, provoked a major political storm, but must be seen in retrospect as having been militarily sound. MH.
World War I (1914-18). The immediate cause of the war was the assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne. Archduke Franz Ferdinand, at Sarajevo on June 28 1914. This led at the end of July to war between Austria and Serbia. Russia mobilized in Serbia’s support, Germany in Austria’s and France in Russia’s. War between Germany and Russia began on August 1, between Germany and France on August 3 and between Germany and Britain on August 4, when German troops, as part of their plan to strike at France, crossed into Belgium, which had been guaranteed by Britain.
Military operations began with Russian advances into East Prussia, which for a time even threatened Berlin, and in Galicia in the general direction of Budapest and Vienna. The Germans advanced rapidly into France and threatened both Paris and the Channel ports. The possibility of the war being a short one was, however, extinguished when the Russians were halted and then thrown back both in East Prussia
At the Battle of Tannenberg and, although less disastrously, in Galicia and when, on the other hand, the Germans were halted short of Paris and the Channel along what became known as the Western Front. The campaign in the west bogged down into static trench warfare and, although that in the east was relatively one of movement, neither the Germans and Austrians nor the Russians showed the capacity to inflict outright defeat on each other. The Galician campaign continued with fluctuating fortunes until Russia collapsed in the revolution of 1917.
Both sides, the German-led Central Powers, and that of Russia, France, Britain and Japan, known as the Entente or the Allies, sought political and military solutions. Germany drew Turkey into the war on her side on November 1 1914, thus posing a threat to the Russian flank in the Caucasus and to the British position in the Near and Middle East. Italy declared war on Austria on May 23 1915 and, stimulated by the success of the Brusilov offensive in the Galician campaign, Romania declared war on Austria on August 27 1916. In addition to the massive battles on the western and eastern fronts, there were therefore now also severe campaigns in the Dardanelles and Gallipoli, Salonika and Mesopotamia, in Romania and on the Italian front. Moreover, principally because Germany was a challenging sea and imperial power, the war had spread far and wide. There were campaigns in East and West Africa and other parts of the British and German empires. Although Britain’s ally Japan played only a minor role in the war, her naval strength in the Pacific enabled Britain to concentrate a Grand Fleet in the North Sea to meet the main German challenge which culminated at the Battle of Jutland on May 31 1916. Despite the arguments about who had won, this left the British with the command of the sea on the surface of it which meant that the Germans could not invade Britain nor prevent her continuing to dispatch and supply armies overseas. It also opened Germany to the threat, eventually an effective one, of blockade. It did not, however, deal with the action of German U-boats, which reached its peak in
1917. Although this threatened Britain with blockade, it al. so played a significant part in bringing the US into the war on the Allied side, an event which occurred on April 6 1917.
The collapse of the Russian war effort in the revolution of 1917 and the armistice which the Germans were able to impo. se on the Bolshevik government in March 1918 at Brest-Litovsk brought to a head the question of what to do on the Western Front. Germany, having now substantially escaped from the disaster of a major war on two fronts, could reinforce her position there and, in addition to that, despite the repeated efforts of the Allies in a series of costly offensives, she still occupied the tactically most favourable positions. The enormous cost of frontal attack in the West had been made fully apparent on the Somme, at Verdun, in the Nivelle offensive and at Passchendaele but the alternative strategies, such as those of the Gallipoli or Salonika campaigns, had proved no more successful and not much less costly. The French mutinies of 1917 had signalled the danger of a fatal collapse in the morale of the Allied armies and in Britain there were serious differences of opinion, notably between the Prime Minister, Lloyd George, and the c-in-c, Haig, as to what should be attempted. Despite a vast increase in artillery fire-power, the use of gas and the introduction of tanks, conditions still seemed to favour the defence and it seemed that the Germans, being in occupation, might well remain on the defensive. How then would the war be brought to a successful conclusion? In the Allied camp there was the hope that blockade would bring Germany to her knees and even the prospect that heavy bombing, which was to begin in 1919, when the new raf’s long-range machines were to come into service, would help the process. There was also the favourable prospect of a growing stream of American reinforcements which was at least some compensation for the loss of the Russian ally. Germany, however, despite her good fortune in the east, was now suffering a grave crisis. The blockade was indeed producing dire results, while in Austria there was serious
Starvation. Industrial unrest and even naval and military mutinies now began to emerge in German}' and the germs of Bolshevism were spreading westwards. The German High Command, so far from remaining defensively on their high ground, resolved upon a massive offensive which would terminate the war before the Americans could arrive in strength.
The attack began on March 21 1918 and was maintained until the middle of July. At first it had dramatic success and the breakthrough of Ludendorffs troops on the front held by the British Fifth Army suggested that the possibility of a war of movement had been resumed. Even so, the situation was eventually contained and the Allied Supreme Commander, Foch, was able to launch a counteroffensive which began on July 18. This was reinforced by Haig on August 8 when the British, supported by more than 400 tanks, began an advance which ceased only with the Armistice on November 11.
The Great War, as it came to be called, cost more than 10,000,000 dead in the armed forces of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Turkey, France, Britain, Russia, Italy and the US, but, having at its outset been nourished by the unresolved and combustible issues of the Balkan Wars, it created new and yet more combustible successors to these, which, in turn, nourished World War II. In terms of military science, however, it was more productive and the stalemate of the trenches was not to be repeated. ANF.
World War II (1939-45). Started by the German invasion of Poland on September 1 1939. Britain and France declared war on Germany two days later to honour the guarantee which they had given to Poland on the previous March 31. This guarantee was in response to the breach of the Munich Agreement of September 30 1938, which Hitler committed when he subsequently seized Czechoslovakia and Memel. The Guarantee, which also extended to Romania, did not, however, provide any military support for Poland, which was beyond the reach of Anglo-French forces. Nor were the latter willing to mount an offensive in the west to
Relieve pressure on their ally. Under Gamelin’s command, they took up defensive positions covered, as far as it ran, by the Maginot Line. As Germany and Russia had signed a nonaggression pact on August 21 1939, the Germans could now attack Poland without fear of interference. They quickly prevailed in the first act of what became famous as the blitzkrieg. To conclude the matter, the Russians attacked the Poles in their rear on September 17. This was their first move in the attempt to regain the territories they had lost at Brest-Litovsk in December 1917. Further moves in the same direction led the Russians to invade Finland on November 30. Due to the extraordinary resilience of the Finns under Mannerheim, the Russo-Finnish War lasted until March 13 1940 when the Finns capitulated. Partly as a counter to this and partly due to the fear that the British might occupy Norway, the Germans occupied Denmark and, on April 9 1940, invaded Norway. This was, perhaps, the most defensively inspired initiative Hitler ever took but it resulted in a brilliant success and showed how air power could be used to neutralize superior naval strength.
On May 10 1940 the “Phoney War” in France came to a sudden end at dawn when the German army swept into the Low Countries and France, drove the bef, amounting to some 14 divisions, and portions of the French army into the sea at Dunkirk, took Paris and received the French capitulation on June 17. The success of the German tactics of coordinated air and land power and their vigorous exploitation of tank warfare astonished the world. Hitler now controlled the whole European littoral from the tip of Scandanavia to the Atlantic coast of France. He had thus achieved a golden opportunity for the immediate defeat of his last enemy, Britain, but there was no coherent plan for an invasion, since it was expected that she would soon sue for peace. Time and opportunities passed and then, instead of sealing their victory, the Germans suffered major defeat in what proved to be the first decisive battle of the war, the Battle of Britain. This took place between mid-July and mid-September when, frustrated of their attempt to gain command of the air over Britain in daylight as a prelude to invasion, the Germans turned to the night bombing of British cities. The British, however, adopted the same policy, ultimately developing a strategic air offensive which was many times more effective than the German. Moreover, the German attack was drastically scaled down in the spring of 1941 when Hitler swung away from the West and struck first southwards against Yugoslavia and Greece, where his Italian ally had got into difficulties, and then, on June 22 1941, against Russia.
Although the Germans had also intervened in the Middle East, where the Italians had been heavily defeated by the British, and although Britain and Germany became locked in the Battle of the Atlantic, (a life-line for the former), the main scene of military action in Europe was henceforth to be in Russia until the Allied invasion of Normandy in June 1944. At first the effect of the German blitzkrieg in Russia was staggering; a rapid advance took place, huge numbers of Russian troops were captured and it seemed that Moscow would be taken before the end of the year. The Germans, however, missed this critical opportunity due to stiffening Russian resistance, which was brilliantly exploited by Gen Koniev, and to the southern diversion, which Hitler ordered, into the Caucasus. Also, as a result of their earlier operations in Yugoslavia and Greece, they were later on the scene than they had intended. Winter arrived to inflict dreadful deprivations upon the German army, and to give the Russians vital breathing space.
On December 7 1941, the
Japanese launched a surprise attack by carrier-borne aircraft against the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. Within two hours much of the American fleet lay crippled or sunk, but the American carriers happened to be at sea and so escaped the holocaust. This, in years to come, proved to be a decisive factor. In the immediate aftermath, the Japanese, swept rapidly across the Pacific area capturing Guam, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Singapore and Rangoon, brushing aside with surprising ease such resistance as the British and the Americans were able to offer. Pearl Harbor had, however, brought America into the war, all the more so since Hitler, in a singularly short-sighted act, declared war on the US and thus created the Grand Alliance of Britain, Russia and the US. This was a combination which had a greater war potential than Germany, Italy and Japan. The question remained as to whether the Grand Alliance would be able to mobilize and bring to bear its strength before victory was achieved by the Ber-lin-Rome-Tokyo Axis.
The year 1942 saw a continuing crisis in the Battle of the Atlantic, which governed Britain’s existence and America’s capacity to deploy into Europe; Rommel defeated the Eighth Army in the Western Desert and seemed near to throwing the British out of the Middle East; the Germans, having weathered the Russian counteroffensive, resumed their own and drew close to the capture of Leningrad and Stalingrad. The Japanese extended their conquests to a point which threatened both India and Australia. All this, however, proved to be the high tide of Axis prospects, for 1942 also saw a decisive turning of the tide. In the first days of June the Americans engaged and defeated the Japanese in the great naval Battle of Midway. This redressed the balance of sea power in the Pacific and gave Nimitz the chance, which he later seized, of gaining the upper hand. On October 23, Montgomery opened the second Battle of Alamein in which he crushed Rommel and began an advance to Tripoli and a junction with the Anglo-American force which had landed in November at the other end of the African littoral in Operation “Torch”. On November 19 the Russians launched a massive counterattack which trapped the German Sixth Army in the outskirts of Stalingrad and within a few weeks led to its complete destruction or capture. Even the German homeland began to feel the weight of war for the first time; on the night of May 30 Harris launched a 1,000-bomber attack upon Cologne.
When, therefore, Roosevelt met Churchill at the Casablanca Conference in January 1943, despite the priority they still had to give to the defeat of German U-boats in the Battle of the Atlantic, they were primarily concerned with the architecture of victory and so too, although often from a different standpoint, was Stalin, who shortly was himself to begin to take part in these Allied conferences. In May 1943 Anglo-American forces invaded Sicily and then, in September, Italy; and although the Italian campaign proved to be prolonged, laborious and expensive, it opened a sore on Germany’s southern flank which the Italians did not wish to heal and with which the Germans themselves had to deal. In Russia in July, the Germans’ attempt at Kursk to revive the tactics of blitzkrieg produced a tremendous Russian victory in the greatest tank battle of the war. Although the American day bombing offensive was, for the time being, defeated in the action at Schweinfurt in October, the British night bombers drove a path of terrible devastation across Germany from the Ruhr to Berlin and the Battle of the Atlantic tipped decisively against the U-boats during the year. Many saw 1944 as the year in which Germany would be defeated, for this was when the Second Front, the Allied invasion of France, would be undertaken.
Long overdue in Stalin’s view. Operation “Overlord” was launched on June 6 1944 when Anglo-American forces, under the supreme command of Eisenhower, landed on a series of beachheads in Normandy. On August 15, further landings were made in Southern France. At the end of August, after some unexpected delays, the Americans and British broke out of their Normandy lodgements and swept across France in a new version of the blitzkrieg. By the end of November the offensive had run out of steam, the Germans had reorganized and a stalemate had arisen far short of the Rhine. Moreover, this was broken, not by a resumption of the Allied advance, but by a German counterattack in the Ardennes in December. For a time, this even seemed to threaten a rerun of the German campaign of 1940, but it was soon contained. Even so, the Germans registered a sharp reminder of the fact that they were still far from accepting the inevitability of their ultimate defeat. The German resistance movement, badly mauled after the July Plot fia. sco, failed to raise its head and the Germans continued to follow Hitler’s fanatical lead with stoic fortitude. The Combined Chiefs of Staff of Britain and the US concluded that the most immediate prospect of victory lay in the further advance of the Russian armies, a view which led to the bombing of Dresden in February 1945. No amount of fanaticism could stem the Russian advance towards Berlin and the Hungarian plain nor, eventually, the crossing of the Rhine by Eisenhower’s armies and their subsequent progress until the Eastern and Western Allies met in the middle of Germany. Victory in Europe was proclaimed on May 8 1945.
The decision of the Allies to deal first with Germany had extended the Japanese lease of life, caused much frustration to those, such as the American Chief of Naval Staff, Adm King, who believed that Japan was the first enemy, and much resentment among the Allied troops such as the “forgotten” British Fourteenth Army in Burma. Nevertheless, by the time of Germany’s downfall, Japan was well on the way to the same fate. In Burma the British had learnt to counter and then to develop their own version of Japanese jungle tactics and in the Pacific, under cover of growing command of the sea, the Americans, especially the Marines, had developed the power to seize island after island as stepping stones to Japan herself. These provided the forward bases from which the invasion of Japan could be mounted and they also provided runways which brought American B-29 bombers and long-range fighter protection within range of Japanese cities. The last of these steps was Iwo Jima, where the American landings began on February 19 1945, and Okinawa, where they began on March 26. The mounting strength of the bombing offensive by the B-29s began to eat the heart out of Japan where firestorms of terrifying proportions became more familiar than they had been even in Germany. The stranglehold of American sea power, crowned by the huge victory at Leyte Gulf in October 1944, not only provided the basic requirement of the American
World History
