Hiroshi Ōshima
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| Hiroshi Ōshima | |
|---|---|
| 19 April 1886 – 6 June 1975 | |
 General Hiroshi Ōshima |
|
| Place of birth | Gifu prefecture, Japan |
| Place of death | Tokyo, Japan |
| Allegiance | Empire of Japan |
| Service/branch |  Imperial Japanese Army |
| Years of service | 1906 -1945 |
| Rank | Lieutenant General |
| Battles/wars | World War II |
| Awards | Order of the German Eagle (1st class) |
| Other work | Japanese ambassador to Nazi Germany |
- In this Japanese name, the family name is Ōshima .
Baron Hiroshi Ōshima (大島 浩 Ōshima Hiroshi?, 19 April 1886 – 6 June 1975) was a general in the Imperial Japanese Army, Japanese ambassador to Nazi Germany during World War II — and unknowingly a major source of communications intelligence for the Allies. His role was perhaps best summed up by General George S. Marshall, who identified Ōshima as "our main basis of information regarding Hitler's intentions in Europe".
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[edit] Biography
[edit] Early life
Ōshima was the son of a prominent Japanese family from Gifu Prefecture, his father Oshima Ken'ichi (大島 健一 Ōshima Ken'ichi?) having served as Minister of War from 1916 to 1918. Ōshima graduated from the18th class of the Imperial Japanese Army Academy in 1906, and from the 27th class of the Army War College in 1915. He served as a military attaché to Budapest and Vienna from 1923-1924. After his return to Japan, he was commander of the 10th Field Artillery Regimen from 1930-1931. [1]
[edit] Military career
In 1934 Ōshima became Japanese military attaché in Berlin, with the rank of colonel. He spoke almost perfect German, and was soon befriended by Joachim von Ribbentrop, who was Hitler's favorite foreign policy advisor. Although Hitler ostensibly used the Foreign Ministry (Auswärtiges Amt) for his foreign relations, he was in fact more dependent on the Dienststelle Ribbentrop, a competing foreign office operated by the ex-champagne salesman.
Under Ribbentrop's guidance, Ōshima met privately with Hitler in the fall of 1935. With the support of the Nazi leadership and the Imperial Japanese Army General Staff, Ōshima progressed rapidly while in Berlin, attaining the rank of lieutenant general and being appointed ambassador to Berlin in 1938.
In 1939 Ōshima was recalled to Japan, returning via the United States. Upon the insistence of the Nazi government, he returned to Berlin in early 1941. He dedicated his efforts until the end of the war in Europe to build closer relations between the two countries, including military cooperation in the Indian Ocean area; thus he was instrumental in the forging and signing of the Anti-Comintern Pact on 25 November 1936 and the Tripartite Pact on 27 September 1940. Such was his fanaticism to the Nazi ideology that he created an impression in American journalist William L. Shirer, writing in his book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich that Ōshima "is more Nazi than the Nazis".
Ōshima's close relationship with Hitler and Ribbentrop gave him unparalleled access for a foreigner to German war plans and national policy, comparable to that of Winston Churchill with the American war leadership. In turn, Hitler, despite his racial chauvinism, admired the militaristic Japanese and made Ōshima a personal confidante.
Such was Hitler's high esteem that Ōshima was one of only eight recipients of the Grand Cross of the Order of the German Eagle in Gold. Hitler awarded the medal following the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. The award ceremony was attended by Reich Foreign Minister Ribbentrop and the secret notes of the conference were revealed at the Nuremberg trials in 1945. In addressing Ōshima Hitler reportedly said:
| “ | You gave the right declaration of war. This method is the only proper one. Japan pursued it formerly and it corresponds with his own system, that is, to negotiate as long as possible. But if one sees that the other is interested only in putting one off, in shaming and humiliating one, and is not willing to come to an agreement, then one should strike as hard as possible, and not waste time declaring war."[2] | ” |
Ōshima made visits to the Russian Front and the Atlantic Wall, and he met periodically with Hitler and other Nazi leaders. Being a meticulous military officer in training, he wrote detailed reports of the information provided to him by the Nazis — and promptly reported by radio to Tokyo in the PURPLE diplomatic cipher. Unknown to the Japanese, the PURPLE code was broken by American codebreakers in 1940; thus Oshima's reports were being read almost simultaneously by those who had access to MAGIC intelligence. Often, they were able to read them before the Japanese did, as transmission problems between Germany and Japan often held up the cables for hours.
[edit] Examples of Ōshima's intercepted dispatches
Virtually all of Ōshima's dispatches were intercepted: approximately 75 during the 11 months of 1941, some 100 in 1942, 400 in 1943, 600 in 1944, and about 300 during the just over four months of 1945 when Germany was at war. For example, in a dispatch decoded on 19 January 1942, Ribbentrop agreed to supply daily intelligence reports to Ōshima, which he could pass on to Tokyo. He warned that "any leakage of these reports due to our fault would be of grave consequence, so all the handling of these reports should be strictly secret." This despite the fact that the Germans often reproached him of the unreliability of the Japanese codes, although Ōshima assured them of its security. This laxity proved to be fatal to Japanese espionage efforts, as even much of the intelligence gathered by the Japanese spy network codenamed TO in Spain (with implicit support given by the Spanish authorities) was funneled through him. It was this evidence of Spanish involvement that made the United States to stop loading of petroleum products into Spanish tankers in 1944.
While some of his predictions were wrong — Ōshima predicted that Britain would surrender to Germany before the end of 1941 — his reporting of the Nazi leadership's plans and policies and his factual data were invaluable to the Allies. For example, on 6 June 1941, he advised Tokyo that Germany would invade the Soviet Union on 22 June (see Operation Barbarossa).
Another example was in November 1943, when Ōshima was taken on a four-day tour of the Atlantic Wall fortifications on the coast of France. Upon his return to Berlin, he wrote a detailed 20-page report of his visit, giving an account of the location of every German division, as well as its manpower and weaponry. He described tank ditches in detail, armament of turrets located close to the shore, and available mobile forces. This provided valuable intelligence to the planners of the D-Day assault. Connected to this was that the Allies knew that Operation Fortitude was working because just one week before D-Day, Hitler confided to Ōshima that while the Allies might make diversionary feints in Norway, Brittany and Normandy, they will actually make open up "an all-out second front in the area of the Straits of Dover". Thus Ōshima dutifully reported that the bulk of German forces would not be waiting in Normandy, but mistakenly, at the Pas-de-Calais area.
His dispatches also proved to be valuable to those who were involved in the bombing campaign in Europe, as Ōshima provided details on the effect of Allied bombing raids on specific German targets, giving valuable and relatively unbiased bomb damage assessments to the Allies.
[edit] Ōshima during and after the end of the War
As the war progressed and Germany began to retreat, Ōshima never wavered in his confidence that Germany would emerge victorious. However, in March 1945 he reported to Tokyo on the "danger of Berlin becoming a battlefield" and revealing a fear "that the abandonment of Berlin may take place another month". On April 13 he met with Ribbentrop — for the last time, it turned out — and vowed to stand with the leaders of the Third Reich in their hour of crisis. "I do not wish to be treated in the same manner as other diplomats merely by reason of great danger from the ravages of war,..." he announced. But he was informed that evening by the Foreign Ministry's chief of protocol: all diplomats were to leave Berlin at once by Hitler's direct order. Oshima had sent his wife to Bad Gastein, a mountain resort in Austria, and the next day was on his way to join her, together with most of the Japanese diplomatic staff.
Less than a month later Germany surrendered and Ōshima and his staff were taken into custody. They were brought to the United States by ship, arriving on July 11. After interrogation and interment in a resort hotel in Pennsylvania, Ōshima was returned to Japan.
Although he enjoyed freedom briefly in his devastated country, he was arrested on December 16 and charged with war crimes. When brought before the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, he was found guilty of conspiring to wage aggressive war on 12 November 1948 and sentenced to life imprisonment. Ōshima was paroled in late 1955 and granted clemency three years later. Ōshima died in 1975, not knowing that he provided the Allies with invaluable intelligence during the war.
[edit] References
[edit] Books
- Boyd, Carl (1993). Hitler's Japanese Confidant: General Hiroshi Ōshima and Magic Intelligence, 1941-1945. Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas. ISBN 0-7006-1189-4.
- Matthews, Tony (1993). Shadows Dancing: Japanese Espionage Against the West, 1939-1945. New York: St. Martin's Press. ISBN 0-312-10544-4.
[edit] External links
- Ammenthorp, Steen. Oshima Hiroshi. The Generals of World War II.
[edit] Notes
- ^ Ammenthorp, The Generals of World War II
- ^ Trial transcripts at Nuremberg 11 December 1945. More details of the exchanges at the meeting are available online at nizkor.org
