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Intelligence overly trusted his own judgment of foreign leaders whom he had never met, and about countries he had never visited and knew little beyond caricature formulae of Marxist dogma Soviet master spy Richard Sorge in Tokyo had access to highly reliable intelligence about German plans directly from a foolish German ambassador Yet, his warnings about BARBAROSSA were also ignored A few months later, his communiques about Japan’s intention to attack southward, including against the United States, were accepted in Moscow but not passed on to Western leaders Instead, the information enabled Stalin to shift five Siberian reserve divisions to the Eastern Front to help carry out the Moscow offensive operation (December 5, 1941–January 7, 1942) The “Second Bureau” of the General Staff was responsible for all Imperial Japanese Army intelligence Its focus prior to 1941 was nearly exclusively on the Soviet threat to Japanese holdings and interests in Manchuria and on possibilities for further Japanese aggression in China The Japanese view of Soviet military capabilities was quite correct for much of the war That wartime success came in large part out of the shock of defeat, after the Japanese Army encountered stunning Red Army strength and armored warfare doctrine at Nomonhan in 1939 However, Japanese insights about Soviet capabilities were not shared with intelligence officers of the Abwehr or with the Wehrmacht That was another example of the minimal practical utility or intercourse of the Axis alliance As one result, German leaders cleaved to radically erroneous views of Red Army capability and to grossly faulty assessments of Moscow’s deep military and economic reserves It must be added that the Western Allies at that time did not share with the Soviets information gleaned from Luftwaffe intercepts about Heer formations and deployments: Luftwaffe radio operators were consistently more careless than their Heer counterparts Western intelligence about Japan’s political intentions was fair through 1941, but knowledge of Japanese military capabilities and audacious initial plans for imperial expansion was very poor For instance, although the JAAF flew the superb Zero fighter in China in 1940, British intelligence was unaware of its existence By contrast, Japanese military intelligence about the military assets deployed by the Western Allies in Asia was quite good in 1941 Intelligence therefore played an expected force multiplier role for relatively weak Japanese offensive forces during the “Hundred Days” of initial conquest and expansion in Southeast Asia and the Pacific Japan’s military intelligence officers also enjoyed successes later in the war, although their counterintelligence was spectacularly bad Urgent needs for information in field operations dictated a focus on recruiting agents among native elites in occupied territories from 1942, to encourage collaboration by native militia as well as to preempt any local or nationalist resistance Japanese Army intelligence officers also taught weapons and sabotage skills to collaborationist Asian militias Japanese military intelligence fell prey to several Western Allied deception operations during the Pacific War, and made many other major mistakes of assessment and evaluation One egregious error was to grossly overestimate British forces stationed in India and the number of American divisions actually in Australia in 1942 Another was failure to appreciate a marked improvement in the morale and fighting abilities of British and Indian Army divisions in Burma in 1944 Things 572
Ngày đăng: 26/10/2022, 09:41
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