Blockade German response was a call for total war As Stalin noted in May 1943, that was a sure signal that the original plan for Blitzkrieg had failed See also BAGRATION; keil und kessel; Kesselschlacht; kotel; Kursk; Normandy; Pacific War (1941–1945); Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945); Stalingrad; Vernichtungskrieg; VistulaOder operation BLOCKADA See siege of Leningrad BLOCKADE The Western Allies employed economic and food blockades of the Axis states as a core war policy during World War II That was partly based on false assumptions of the supposed efficacy of their earlier blockade of Imperial Germany in bringing about capitulation in 1918 The Allied blockade during World War II had multiple aims: to slowly strangle Axis war economies by limiting access to critical raw materials not available in Europe or Japan; to created a “neurosis” of encirclement; to stretch Axis military assets in defense of distant supplies; and to create a real shortage of critical war matériel The efficacy of the blockade of Germany was greatly reduced from 1939 to 1941 by two things: Germany’s conquest and economic exploitation of multiple neighboring states and intimidation of others; and Soviet matériel assistance to Germany under terms of the Nazi–Soviet Pact (August 23, 1939) The Germans counter-blockaded Britain with unrestricted submarine warfare during the Battle of the Atlantic (1939–1945), but ultimately lost this most crucial campaign of the war in the west The British were especially careful to ration exports of critical goods to neutrals such as Sweden, to limit potential transshipment to Germany The Western Allies also used competitive buying from poor countries such as Portugal and Spain to keep stocks of critical supplies of tungsten and wolfram out of German hands The Germans countered by offering top dollar to the Swedes and others Following the DRAGOON landings in southern France and closing of the Spanish border in August 1944, those supplies stopped Turkey was also pressured to cease deliveries of chromium to Germany That also stopped with Western Allied military success in the Mediterranean theater and, to a lesser extent, in the Italian campaign (1943–1945) The Japanese failed to even consider true economic warfare against the Western powers, either offensive or defensive That was a remarkable omission considering how access to natural resources of the South Pacific and Southeast Asia was the major war aim pursued by Imperial General Headquarters in 1941 The omission continued throughout the war For instance, Japan failed to assign IJN submarines to intercept Pacific or Indian Ocean convoys, retaining them instead as fleet auxiliaries for an illusory “decisive battle” to be waged by the main war fleets Sea blockade was not critical to the ultimate defeat of Germany for reasons described previously But savaging the Japanese merchant marine by mining Japan’s home waters from B-29s, combined with economic blockade via cargo ship and tanker interdiction by submarines and naval and land-based air power, proved a major contribution to the collapse of the Japanese war economy As one result, in 1945 American bombs often fell on idled Japanese factories whose workers had already 168