highlights from the second world wars

A general theme also transcends the chapters: the once ascendant Axis powers were completely ill-prepared—politically, economically, and militarily—to win the global war they had blundered into during 1941.
unprecedented volume and velocity,
specter of death
Unlike its more distant adversaries, the Third Reich had neither an adequate blue-water navy nor a strategic bombing fleet, anchored by escort fighters and heavy bombers of four engines whose extended ranges and payloads might make vulnerable the homelands of any new enemies on the horizon. Hitler did not seem to grasp that the four most populous countries or territories in the world—China, India, the Soviet Union, and the United States—were either fighting against the Axis or opposed to its agendas. Never before or since had all these peoples (well over one billion total) fought at once and on the same side.
mercurial exhilaration
In contrast, in the half year between June and November 1944, Allied bombers dropped twenty times that tonnage on Germany.
That Germany and Italy would try to wage war on the Mediterranean and in North Africa without serious attempts to invade Gibraltar and Malta is a testament to their ignorance of history.
Germany’s problem in particular was that its two most potent enemies, Britain and Russia, were also the hardest to reach.
If World War II was fought across the globe, its ultimate course was still largely determined by northern European states and their former colonies in a way that was true of all European wars since the late eighteenth century.
In fact, no modern power had ever completed a successful invasion of the Japanese homeland, a fact well known to Allied planners who wished to, and did, avoid the prospect through dominant air power.
it never envisioned the possibility that Pearl Harbor would lead to a three-theater conflict in which Japan would be fighting China, the United States, and finally the Russians.
aggrandizement.
bellicose
the United States by war’s end in 1945 would achieve a wartime gross national product nearly greater than that of all of the other Allied and Axis powers combined.15
What followed was the central tragic irony of World War II: the weaker Axis powers proved incapable of defeating their Allied enemies on the field of battle, but nevertheless were more adept at killing far more of them and their civilian populations. World War II is one of the few major wars in history in which the losing side killed far more soldiers than did the winners, and far more civilians died than soldiers.
At one time or another, most of the world’s greatest cities—Amsterdam, Antwerp, Athens, Berlin, Budapest, Leningrad, London, Moscow, Paris, Prague, Rome, Rotterdam, Shanghai, Singapore, Tokyo, Vienna, Warsaw, and Yokohama—could be reached by either bombers or armor, and were thus either bombed or besieged. By 1945 almost every nation in the world, with only eleven remaining neutral, was involved in the conflict.
They had showcased their late-model planes, artillery, and tanks—rightly seen as cutting-edge in the late 1930s but rarely acknowledged as near obsolete by 1941.
Mussolini and Hitler were far more frenzied leaders than those in Western Europe and America, and were able to feign a madness that was a valuable asset in prewar geopolitical poker.
Cultured as they might have been, millions of the Volk saw no contradiction between High Culture and the base tenets of a National Socialism that steamrolled its opponents.
In Hitler’s warped view of World War I, he never appreciated the miraculous efforts of the United States to have transported almost two million men to Europe in less than two years while producing an enormous amount of war materiel, despite being largely disarmed before 1917.
We now talk generally of appeasement in the modern era, but it is difficult to grasp just how firmly embedded active pacifism was within the Western European democracies.
“bellicose”
Most overly impressed observers ignored the fact that such lightning-fast German attacks were hardly proof of sustained capability. They were no way to wage a long war of attrition and exhaustion against comparable enemies, especially fighting those with limitless industrial potential across long distances, in inclement weather, and on difficult terrain. Few pondered what would follow once Germany ran out of easy border enemies or guessed that it would predictably have to send Panzers across the seas or slog in the mud of the steppes. That proved an impossible task for a nation whose forces relied on literal horsepower and had little domestic oil, no real long-range bombing capability or blue-water navy, and a strategically incoherent leadership. German blitzkrieg would never cross the English Channel. It would die a logical if not overdue death at Stalingrad in the late autumn of 1942.
magnanimity.
Noncombatants perished mostly due to five causes: (1) the Nazi-orchestrated Holocaust and related organized killing of civilians and prisoners in Eastern occupied territories and the Soviet Union, as well as Japanese barbarity in China; (2) the widespread use of air power (especially incendiary bombing) to attack cities and industries; (3) the famines that ensued from brutal occupations, mostly by the Axis powers; (4) the vast migrations and transfers of populations, mostly in Prussia, Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and Manchuria; and (5) the idea prevalent in both totalitarian and democratic governments that the people of enemy nations were synonymous with their military and thus were fair game through collective punishments.39
The destruction of populist ideologies, especially those fueled by claims of racial superiority, proved a task far more arduous than the defeat of a sovereign people’s military.41
By war’s end, the destruction wrought by Allied tactical and strategic aircraft, mostly American and British, simply dwarfed any similar air efforts achieved by the Axis powers. The belated success of bombers from mid-1943 through 1944 and onward wrecked the German petrochemical and transportation industries and diverted huge numbers of planes and artillery from the Eastern Front to the homeland.
We often forget that the Third Reich was postmodern in creative genius but premodern in actual implementation and operations.
The Soviet Union entered the war seeking to grab territory with Hitler and ended the war acquiring more than it had ever envisioned by warring against
The least powerful and populous of the three major Allies, Great Britain proved in many respects the most principled and the most effective, given the resources at its disposal and always with the acceptance that the burdens of the global and often lonely war might leave postwar Britain reduced in power, as a postwar world gravitated to the Soviet Union and the United States.
By 1940, the combined defense spending of the two economies exceeded Germany’s. In contrast, despite a massive naval expansion program, America still spent only 1 percent of GNP on defense in 1939 and a mere 2 percent in 1940, even as the war was raging in Europe.
Throughout the war, the United States had the largest supply and transportation overhead of the conflict. It
Yet the United States was the only belligerent on either side of the conflict to have fought fully in every conceivable theater and manner against Japan, Italy, and Germany. Those extraordinary commitments were reflected in the transformation of the American economy.
The United States fielded the second-largest military of the war, reaching over twelve million in uniform (all told, over 16 million would cumulatively serve). It suffered proportionally the fewest combat casualties of the major powers (about 416,000, or a little over 3 percent of those enrolled in the military). That human economy was possible because America built the greatest number of aircraft, launched the largest tonnage of ships, fielded the largest and most efficient medical services, and finally by mid-1945 produced a greater gross national product than all the other four warring nations combined.
Tragic irony was always a trademark of World War II. The Allies had little ideological affinity and yet fought as partners in pursuit of righteous revenge; the Axis were kindred fascists, but waged aggressive war often at cross-purposes and as individual belligerents in dreams of their own particular aggrandizement.
Absent from the Luftwaffe calculus were intangibles that transcended pilot skill and plane excellence but that were so central in achieving air supremacy: the relative rates of replacing pilots and planes, an air command’s innovation and response to daily changes, the distance of the target from air bases, typical weather conditions, and the concurrent responsibilities of air power in other theaters.
The problem was not so much that the Luftwaffe misjudged the obstacles to a successful Blitz, but that in 1940 no air force quite understood what would be required by strategic bombing to reduce an enemy’s entire war-making potential.
In the Second Punic War, Hannibal through a bold double pincer movement had surrounded and destroyed a larger Roman army at the Battle of Cannae (216 BC) in southeast Italy. Cannae-like encirclements leading to annihilation had been the dream of every German commander since the birth of the German state, and were apparently embedded into the DNA of the general staff.
They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.”
Bombing did not just stop the mobility of trains and tanks but also disrupted German productivity by turning skilled factory laborers into repair workers.
Deciphering the ethical calculus of strategic bombing is almost impossible, given the ongoing slaughter of nearly twenty-seven million on the Eastern Front, the smokestacks of Auschwitz, the inability of the Allies to invade France until mid-1944, the need for a second front to placate Stalin, and the relative ineffectiveness prior to the summer of 1944 of seriously hurting the operation of the Third Reich in other Western theaters such as Italy.35
In Japan’s peak production year of 1944, it manufactured a total of 28,180 military aircraft, quite an impressive number had Japan been at war only with China or perhaps just Britain or the Soviet Union. Although budgeting for a two-front war, that same year America sent ninety-six thousand new planes abroad to Europe and the Pacific. By war’s end, the US Navy’s carrier fleet and support bases alone had received eighty thousand planes, which was more aircraft than Japan produced for all branches of its military during the entire war. Such production reflected vast industrial disparities. In terms of steel and coal, America had outproduced Japan by margins of well over ten-to-one.
the novel B-29 “has as many bugs as the entomological department of the Smithsonian Institution.
The postwar United States Strategic Bombing Survey—a huge project consisting of more than three hundred volumes compiled by a thousand military and civilian analysts—summed up the lethality of the raid in clinical terms: “Probably more persons lost their lives by fire at Tokyo in a 6-hour period than at any time in the history of man.”
My father, who flew on that mission, recalled that the smell of burning human flesh and wood was detectable by his departing bombing crew. A half century later, he still related that the fireball was visible for nearly fifty miles at ten thousand feet and shuddered at what his squadron had unleashed.
Area and incendiary bombing over Europe had finally turned controversial, yet after February 1945 there was hardly any commensurate moral concern about burning down Japan. A variety of reasons explained the paradox, apart from the oft-cited racial animus against Japan that had surprise-attacked the United States and the growing fatigue from the continuation of the war after the surrender of Germany.
By summer 1945, only four major cities—Kyoto, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Sapporo—remained largely undamaged.
A critical consequence of dropping two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki may have been not just precluding a costly American invasion of Japan, but also ending a nightmarish incineration of Japanese civilization.
Only 517 V-2s were confirmed to have hit London proper. Nonetheless, they killed over 2,500 civilians and injured thousands more. On average, for every V-2 successfully launched against London, about five civilians were killed. Nonetheless, unlike the case of the V-1, Londoners soon accepted that there was no defense against the random hits of the supersonic V-2.
Alternatively, had Hitler canceled the V-2 program and used its resources to focus solely on the V-1s, he might have produced well over a hundred thousand more such cruise missiles, with a far greater likelihood of inciting terror among the British population. The misplacement of resources into the V-2 program, as in a litany of other grandiose German projects, proved a disaster of enormous proportions for the Wehrmacht that even today is not fully appreciated.
Nonetheless, in the ten months of kamikaze attacks, Japanese suicide pilots struck 474 Allied warships. They killed about seven thousand Australian, British, and American sailors at a cost of 3,860 pilots and aircrews. Kamikazes accounted for about 50 percent of all US Navy losses after October 1944. Their success rate in sinking ships and killing sailors was about ten times higher than that of traditional Japanese naval bombers.
There was one final kamikaze paradox. Suicide bombings were effective, but they reflected a loss of morale and desperation that indicated that the war was already irrevocably lost before they appeared.
By war’s end, US fighter pilots, for example, had three times more precombat solo flight time than their Axis enemies.
In a strategic calculus, however, the deaths of skilled pilots represented a far greater cost in training and material support than did the losses of foot soldiers.
Hundreds or even thousands of people, crammed into single vessels, surrounded by often turbulent seas, could find death in seconds. Yet because of the dispersion of fleet strength among numerous ships, and the sheer expense of taking large numbers of people to sea, it was also far harder to kill tens of thousands at sea than on land. So the Wilhelm Gustloff remains the exception rather than the rule of naval warfare.
For all the faces of death at sea, water can still be a refuge from fire, the great killer of people.
With superiority at sea, however, a power can send its forces wherever it wishes; without it, a nation is confined only to ground operations—and largely of an enemy’s choosing.
Most tragic of all for the Italians, their navy—the fourth largest in the world when the war broke out—was ossified. Its huge size had represented an investment of well over two decades’ worth of unsustainable capital and labor expenditure. Italy’s naval experience can be summed up by the fact that it did not start from the keel up, much less finish, a single new major capital ship during its brief war in the Mediterranean. Rarely in military history had such a large powerful fleet played almost no helpful role in a war and disappeared so quickly.
The RAF and the Royal Navy did not guarantee that Britain would win the war, only that it could not be defeated—a key to understanding the course of the war during the critical year between the fall of France and the invasion of the Soviet Union, when Britain had no active allies and lots of enemies.
The United States did not fight a single major surface sea battle with either Germany or Italy, and never lost a battleship after Pearl Harbor or a fleet carrier after 1942.
The Soviet Union, for all its talk of worldwide communist expansion in the 1920s, did not prepare for it militarily, focusing instead on the defense of the motherland. Privately, Soviets assumed that they would have to deal with the armies of Japan to the east and Germany to the west—or another possible intervention from the Western powers—while conducting offensive ground operations against their own immediate land neighbors, such as Poland and Finland. Given such strategic objectives and its self-sufficiency in oil, food, and ores, it made less sense to invest in a navy comparable to its enemies or allies, especially after postponing earlier ideas of promoting worldwide communist expansion by force.
The Japanese remained loyal to the terms of their nonaggression pact with the Soviets to such a degree that almost half of US Lend-Lease materiel was shipped safely from West Coast ports on Soviet vessels directly to Russia at the port of Vladivostok. This alternate so-called Pacific Lend-Lease route of Russian merchant vessels became one of the safest transit paths of the entire war.
Rarely in military history had an iconic asset—the battleship—metamorphosed so rapidly from an irreplaceable emblem of national maritime strength into an ossified anachronism.
Rare though battleship duels were, there was something about such raw, unambiguous displays of lethal force that captivated admirals and tended to cloud their judgment about the cost-to-benefit values of such majestic dinosaurs.
Two factors are constant throughout naval history. First, the location and security of bases greatly determine the effectiveness of forwardly deployed fleets. Second, the security of such bases depends on the pulse of the land war, or at least on the status of ground forces in the surrounding territory that can transcend battle at sea.
The superiority of American submarines and the relative inferiority of German U-boats is rarely noted, given their vastly different theaters of operation.
In the first eight months of the new U-boat war against America, the Germans in Operation Paukenschlag (“Drumbeat”) sank over six hundred ships, totaling over three million tons of shipping, at a loss of little more than twenty U-boats. Such lopsided totals should have broken the back of any incoming belligerent without sizable reserves of merchant ships. Doenitz was able to deploy scarcely more than a dozen submarines off the American East Coast, a fact that makes the U-boat achievement even more astonishing. By marginally custom-fitting Type VIIs for extended ranges, and deploying a handful of the larger, new Type IX U-boats, the Battle of the Atlantic now sought to expand permanently into American waters.
The brief German resurgence had also been based on a transitory intelligence advantage. But in October 1942, the British once again cracked the modified German naval code after the salvaging of Enigma key sheets and settings from another wrecked U-boat,
The best that could be said for the German U-boat campaign was that it was the only theater of the war where Germany may have won in the narrow terms of a relative cost-to-benefit analysis of men and materiel, even as it lost the Battle of the Atlantic.
In sum, the Mediterranean east of Greece, despite occasional bitter fighting, to the end of the war became a backwater without much change after summer 1941. It was a veritable Mediterranean Norway—another occupation that had idled needed German troops since 1940—that cost the Third Reich capital and manpower without offering much strategic recompense.
The battle was the first in history in which carrier-based planes without help from surface ships had sunk battleships, and its effect on Mussolini was dramatic.
The key to success in the Mediterranean was never how much area a power controlled—a map of Italian versus British territory in 1942 proved lopsided in favor of the former—but the location of the territory. As long as Gibraltar, Suez, and Malta—the entry, exit, and midway valves of the Mediterranean—remained British, they proved far more important Mediterranean bases than did Rhodes, Crete, and Sicily.
The slaughter at the Battle of the Java Sea dispelled any of the Allies’ ethnocentric doubts about Japanese control of the Pacific after Pearl Harbor. Indeed, the Allies now thought Japanese sailors were supermen, and feared that their own initial defeats near Singapore and at Pearl Harbor may have been unavoidable rather than aberrant.
The Pacific war was also far more unpredictable than the Battle of the Atlantic. The Mediterranean had been familiar to Western powers since the hegemony of the classical Athenian and Roman imperial navies. Despite major Allied bases at Singapore and in the Philippines, much of the South Pacific remained a blank slate to the Allies.
Japan did not fully appreciate that Pearl Harbor’s fleet was merely a proximate tactical expression of remote but nearly unlimited and impregnable American strategic power.
American subs would sink over half of all Japanese ships lost, and shut down Japanese supply lanes, doing as much in unheralded fashion to destroy the Japanese economy as the napalm and mines dropped by the B-29 bomber fleet.
No navy in military history had started a war so all-powerful as the Japanese and ended it so utterly ruined and in such a brief period of time—not the Persians at Salamis, nor the Athenians at Aegospotami (405 BC), the Ottomans at Lepanto, the French at Trafalgar, or even the Russians in 1905.
Not since the Battle of Trafalgar had one navy so damaged its enemy (2,403 Americans killed, four American battleships submerged, four damaged) at so little cost to itself (64 killed), and yet achieved so few strategic results.
But the greatest disproportionality was in naval and merchant marine vessels. Whether by measuring aggregate tonnage or individual ships, total Allied naval construction exceeded that of the Axis by at least seven- to tenfold.
The greatest revolution in arms of World War II was neither in armor nor more-lethal artillery, but in the pedestrian rifle that spewed bullets at rates unimaginable in prior wars.
Grenades were both more powerful than World War I models and far more plentiful; when launched from rifles, their range increased tenfold to over 350 yards.
Only in the late twentieth century did the advent of new ceramics and hybrid metal fibers offer the infantrymen body armor that could protect against high-velocity modern bullets and some shrapnel. In contrast, World War II was part of an unfortunate cycle in which offensive rifles, machines guns, grenades, artillery, and bombs were becoming ever more lethal and numerous without a commensurate development in personal armor.
Expeditionary warfare required constant attention to morale and spirit. Troops knew they were not defending their homes but had instead crossed the seas to attack those of others.
The need to transport weapons long distances by sea was both an additional expense and also a catalyst for innovation and experimentation.
At times when a landing stalled or an inland thrust was stymied, as at Omaha Beach, the first dark hours at Tarawa (November 1943), or at the Shuri Line on Okinawa in May 1945, the Americans nonetheless pressed ahead, convinced in part that it was critical to their mystique never once to abandon men on the beach after landing. In that sense, their confident resoluteness was reminiscent of the imperial Athenians who reminded the doomed besieged islanders of Melos that they would not abandon their blockade, because they “never once yet withdrew from a siege for fear of any.”
As early as the airborne drops in Sicily, seasoned German soldiers when taken prisoner had asked American paratroopers whether they had previously fought the Japanese, in amazement at their courage and audacity.17
The war, which had once promised to reinvent how and where conflicts were fought, instead validated the ancient supremacy of land forces, but with one important caveat. Infantrymen were no longer just defined by their guns, artillery support, and vehicles, but equally by the ships that delivered, supplied, and communicated with them, and the aircraft that protected and enhanced them.
Yet the percentage of casualties suffered versus caused is not always a valid criterion of infantry excellence. The United States achieved startling kill ratios in Vietnam, but without destroying the North Vietnamese army or saving an autonomous South Vietnam. The Japanese army slaughtered Chinese soldiers at a sickening rate and yet never secured China.
This idea of constant motion forward explains why the US military invested so heavily in air and sea power, logistics, and mobility.
The subtext to the unholy alliance with the Soviet Union, despite its record of prewar genocide and active cooperation with Nazi Germany until June 1941, was that the American public accepted that German infantrymen would kill, and be killed by, far more Russian than American foot soldiers. The Red Army by 1943 had allowed the United States—the most distant of the major powers from the front lines of battle—to invest lavishly in supply and logistics, as well as in tactical and strategic air forces and a huge two-ocean navy. Specialization among the three major Allied powers is an underappreciated reason why the Allies turned the tide of war so quickly after 1942.4
inter alia,
Yet what makes an army effective is not just the heroism or combat zeal of individual soldiers, but also the degree of assets—artillery barrages, air support, food, medicine, and supplies—at its disposal.
The American emphasis was not so much on creating a fierce individual warrior, bound with strong ties of loyalty and honor to fellow men of arms (although the GI was often just that), as on making sure that he was supported with enough materiel, and acquired sufficient expertise, to defeat any adversary he faced, and to reassure him that he had a good chance to survive the conflict. The system rather than the man was what would win the war.
unassailable.
Trucks—not tanks—in large part explain why the Allies won the ground war, a fact never fully appreciated by the Third Reich, Italy, and Japan. That every American truck had to be shipped across the Atlantic or Pacific makes the achievement even more wondrous.16
Soldiers of every army in World War II at times shot considerable numbers of prisoners and committed atrocities against civilians. But no army of World War II committed so few war crimes in relationship to its size as the Americans, with the exception perhaps of the British and Dominion armies. The US Army as a general rule did not allow the deaths of hundreds of thousands of its prisoners as did the Germans on the Eastern Front, and it did not rape, loot, and murder civilians on the scale of depredations of the Red Army or the Japanese. It had no record of institutionalized brutality as did the Italians in Somaliland and Ethiopia; it did not coerce comfort women as did the Japanese, or shoot its former allies as did the Germans with Italians in Greece. It did not help to organize death squads nor participate in genocide as was true of both the German and Japanese armies.
First, the Soviet army was already huge at the beginning of the war, having well over five million men in both its Western and Eastern theaters when the Germans invaded. On the vast front against the Wehrmacht it may initially have numbered in toto well over two hundred combat divisions, with over one hundred additional divisions spread throughout the Soviet Union. And the Red Army never stopped growing: the Soviets processed thirty million conscripts during the entire course of the war, as the army reached peak operational strength of well over ten million soldiers in a military of over twelve million.
Even at the moment of the German invasion, the Soviets in mid-1941 possessed more armored vehicles than Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and the United States combined.
Instead, the Soviets retreated over eight hundred miles into the interior of Russia, an option never available to the reeling French, Dutch, or Belgian armies a year earlier. The expanse of Russia offered the Red Army endless inland Dunkirks from which it could withdraw and reequip.
That Britain alone of the Western democracies did not fall in 1940, how it nearly matched the military production of a much larger Germany, and why it exercised political clout comparable to far larger allies, is attributable to its excellent military, and in particular the ability of the British army to inflict more losses on the Axis than it incurred.
In fact, they were insufficient for a Third Reich that sought to occupy and defend Poland, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, France, Greece, and Crete, while deploying troops to North Africa and garrisoning the homeland.
The Imperial Japanese Army fairly earned the reputation for cruelty: no army in World War II killed so many civilians while being so inept at killing its better-armed enemies.
In an ironic sense, Germany and Japan may have fielded the best individual foot soldiers but the worst armies.
Never in military history had a great power so overestimated the ability of one existential enemy while so underestimating the capability of another. The meat grinder of the Western Front in World War I was replayed in World War II in the East, and the collapse of the Eastern Front in 1917 and the ensuing vast German occupation of 1918 was somewhat repeated in the West in 1940.
Much of Hitler’s fear of France and dismissal of the Soviet Union derived from his own past experiences as a foot soldier and the lack of reliable intelligence about the interior and defenses of the Soviet Union. In World War I, Hitler had fought and lost in the West and assumed that other Germans, no better than he, had won on the Eastern Front due only to weaker opposition.
Yet after the Ardennes surprise, the French-British force collapsed in six weeks. In retrospect, the reasons for this stunning defeat seemed manifold: antiquated French tactics of static defense; the lack of a muscular and mobile central reserve; a failure of the British, French, Belgian, and Dutch defenses to coordinate their efforts; inadequate communications and poor morale—
Hitler never really fully appreciated that each serial conquest in Poland, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Yugoslavia, and Greece required tens of thousands of occupation troops that otherwise might have served on his envisioned future front against the Soviet Union.
perfidy,
As it was, June 22 marked the beginning of the most horrific killing in the history of armed conflict, a date that began a cycle of mass death and destruction over the next four years at the rate of nearly twenty-five thousand fatalities per day until the end of the war.
The Mediterranean had suddenly become an Allied lake. Sicily was now endangered, and German-held Crete was soon to become largely irrelevant. Millions of tons of Allied shipping could without opposition reach Britain from the Indian Ocean through the shorter route via the Suez Canal with far less worry of German aircraft and U-boats.
Liberated from Mussolini’s fascism only to be subjected to Hitler’s, Italy now experienced the war on its own ground with frightening new intensity. The Wehrmacht had little reason to respect the property and lives of its former hosts. Italian fascist diehards battled communist partisans, and as most Italians were neither, they got caught between outbreaks of civil strife and also between American, British, French, and German armor, artillery, and bombs.
The 608-day effort to invade, occupy, and traverse Italy, as opposed to shifting attention elsewhere after Sicily, remains the most controversial Allied theater of the war. In terms of relative causalities—312,000 Allied versus 435,000 German—and results achieved, it is hard to justify the costs. The theater drew off resources from the planned Allied invasion of France as much as it weakened German defenses in Western Europe.
For weeks on end and all through the landings and breakout, the American and British air fleet easily pounded Normandy and, as a decoy, most of the northern French ports. And the result was that aside from shredding German communications and rail links, French citizens died in droves. Between the bombing, strafing, and artillery strikes once the Allies landed, and the five-month preparatory bombardment before D-Day, at least 35,000 French residents were killed, roughly equal to all the fatalities of American and British ground forces in the Normandy campaign (June 6–August 25).
PLUTO (“pipelines under the ocean”) fuel
By the end of 1944, the Allies enjoyed Ultra intercepts (the British-supplied intelligence gathered by breaking German military codes) and virtual air superiority, had sizable intelligence units on the front lines, and were aided by thousands of resistance fighters in occupied Belgium and France. And yet they failed to anticipate right under their noses the largest single mustering of German troops in the West since the invasion of France in 1940.
Despite the Allied blunders, the crossing of the Rhine just nine months after the Normandy landing remained an astounding, if still controversial, achievement.
Then the United States would insidiously peel off layer after layer from the Japanese Empire, to a point where new multi-engine bombers and naval air forces could mine the sea routes, support leapfrogging amphibious operations, and directly bomb the industrial centers of Japan.
What Allied planners had not anticipated was that the enormous productivity of British and US industry, as well as the huge scope of the American mobilization, meant that even in a secondary theater Allied forces would become rapidly far better supplied than Japanese forces.
That said, just the two campaigns on the Philippines and Okinawa cost American and Allied air and land forces over 150,000 American casualties, but neither island group then factored into the air campaigns that eventually ended the war.50
The civilian body count was often a savage reminder of the importance of siegecraft in the war. More than one million died at Leningrad amid mass starvation, epidemics, cannibalism, and daily barrages—a greater toll than any siege in history. There were over two hundred thousand Russians and Germans killed in the final siege of Berlin. More German women were likely raped there than during any siege of the past.
The horrors of Leningrad, from pestilence to cannibalism, were medieval.
survival of the state apparat.
Stalingrad only survived in the sense that the Russians won the rubble that was left of the city.
Hitler, who never invested in heavy bombers, talked of razing entire cities of the Soviet Union, but lacked the resources to wipe away Leningrad and Moscow in the manner that the Allies bombed the urban cores of Hamburg, Dresden, and Tokyo into rubble.
Russian dead in and around Leningrad were four times greater than the death toll of all Americans lost in World War II.9
shocked into capitulation.
Because Germans started and then interrupted sieges in ad hoc fashion, transferring armies northward and southward while firing generals, Leningrad, Moscow, and Stalingrad all survived.
another fork on the highway to oblivion.
Goebbels apparently failed to note that Britain for centuries had governed the huge population of India with a modest constabulary, in part because of clever statecraft of the sort that would have disgusted the Nazis.
Most of his generals seemed to have lacked all historical perspective that a failed siege often meant not the withdrawal but the ruin of the attacker.
Yet the Red Army after Stalingrad eventually earned a reputation for invincibility that lasted for most of the war. “You cannot stop an army which had done Stalingrad,” became a common Russian refrain. In contrast, for the German veterans of Stalingrad, the defeat became accepted as “the turning-point of the war.”32
Thus the value of tanks was not necessarily their armor per se, or prowess against other tanks, but the ability to be freed against armies that did not field a comparable ar-mored force.
When tanks were well supplied with fuel and replacement parts, easily serviceable, present in large numbers, protected by air cover, accompanied by skilled infantry, and supported by covering artillery or anti-tank weapons, then the actual specifications of a tank’s armor protection and offensive capability, within parameters, played a lesser role. German Panzers, the war’s most seasoned armored forces, eventually equipped with the most feared tanks, were nonetheless unable to change the course of any major campaign after 1942.
If the war had broken out with little affinity among French, British, German, Russian, or American tanks—some with cannon, some not; some with small guns, others with large; some with one, multiple, or no turrets; some with wide, some with narrow treads; some gas powered, some diesel—by the end of the war everyone’s ideal tank oddly looked about the same.
Blitzkrieg played on the myth of German technological superiority and industrial dominance. But the successes of early Panzer divisions were instead predicated on the poor preparation and morale of Germany’s enemies.
But the obstacles to duplicating the T-34 were not only German pride in engineering. Guderian, an original German architect of Panzer doctrine and later inspector-general of armoured troops, claimed, probably correctly, that by 1942–1943 Germany lacked enough strategic materials (especially bauxite) to copy the T-34 aluminum diesel engine and high-quality steel armor.
Russian armored production also now brought into doubt the entire ideological premises for invading Russia in the first place: to take Russian territory from inferior and backward peoples and to give it to those more technologically sophisticated, who, by their intellectual superiority, deserved it. Hitler
As a general rule, then, the answer to strapped German industry by late 1942 was not to produce a few good weapons, but plentiful adequate ones.29
If the reputation of a tank rests on its ability to support infantry rather than overcoming enemy tanks, then the Sherman proved invaluable—a fact that was never fully appreciated during and only rarely after the war.44
During the First Gulf War, US Abrams M1A1 tanks, in the last major tank-to-tank duels of the twentieth century, helped to destroy well over 160 Iraqi Russian-built tanks in a series of engagements on February 26–27, 1991, without losing a single American tank to enemy tank fire. It was as if the Americans had finally married the reliability of the Sherman with the lethality of the Tiger.
ONE PARADOX OF armored warfare during World War II was that a vehicle designed to protect its crew from shells and bullets often became the focus of such overwhelming concentrations of fire that it proved as much an incinerator as a refuge.
Every great tank breakout at some point ran out of fuel.
The exact percentages depended on the year and theater of operations, but at least half of the combat dead of World War II probably fell to artillery and mortar fire.
The most significant statistic of the war was the ten-to-one advantage in aggregate artillery production (in total over a million large guns) enjoyed by the British Empire, the Soviet Union, and the United States over the three Axis powers.67
Toward the end of the war, the Germans began installing great numbers of high-velocity, long-barrel, rapid-firing, and high-powered fixed 75 mm assault guns on supposedly obsolete Mark III tank chassis. The resulting turret-less but up-armored Sturmgeschütze IIIs were highly mobile, low-profile, and easily maintained anti-tank guns that survived on average seven times longer on the Eastern Front than did late-model German tanks.
At close distances, these cheap, single-shot, disposable anti-tank weapons in their final incarnations proved deadly to most Allied tanks on either the Western or Eastern Fronts. And when taken together with another three hundred thousand Panzerschrecks (“tank frighteners”)—a German up-engineered copy of the American bazooka—single German soldiers often had the ability with an inexpensive weapon to knock out thirty- to forty-ton tanks.
Yet perhaps the most innovative artillery platform of the war was not even a barreled gun, but rather multiple, self-propelled rockets, or Katyushas (also known as “Stalin organs”). They were usually mounted in groups of fourteen to forty-eight launchers, on either trucks or tracked vehicles.
But the real American contribution to artillery lethality was not to be found in artillery pieces per se, but rather in shells and a sophisticated system of targeting. Quite surprisingly for an isolationist nation that had assumed air and naval power would project power abroad, the United States entered the war with the best system of synchronized artillery fire in the world, eventually to be known as a time-on-target (TOT) methodology that allowed different batteries in varied locales to concentrate their fire on shared targets, resulting in near instantaneous arrivals of a variety of different type shells from multifarious distances, thus catching enemy infantrymen unexpectedly and out in the open in the first vulnerable seconds of a huge barrage.
The huge imbalance between Axis and Allied artillery production in large measure explains why the vaunted German army could never compensate for its inferiority in air ground support and vehicle production.
A single supreme mind in war, whether good or evil, can lead to millions of deaths incurred or avoided, in a way unrivaled by scores of subordinate generals and admirals.
But with greater complexity in military affairs after the nineteenth century, even in dictatorial societies like Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia, rarely did supreme military commanders, albeit sporting gold-braided hats and chests of medals, lead their troops into battle.
In democratic societies, few wish to concede that in times of crises there are rare and irreplaceable leaders of the caliber of a Themistocles or Pericles who alone tower over committees and coalitions of anonymous experts and politicians that are still competent enough to preserve what the singular leader has bequeathed them.
The authoritarians worried of the public consequences from shared sacrifice; the democrats assumed a blank check to demand them, confident in the self-initiative and individual self-reliance of democratic culture.
Democracies vent palace dissent.
For a disparate alliance to succeed, it is advantageous that at least some leaders within it have obtained government office legitimately and thus learned methods of holding power other than through brute force and prevarication.
Hitler and Mussolini could serially offer stirring patriotic speeches. But as absolutists they felt no need to offer detail or to explain ambiguity within their policies, and thus their success as communicators hinged entirely on the perceived positive pulse of the battlefield.
In contrast, Hitler spent most of the war after 1941 underground or barricaded in bunkers at the Wolfsschanze, Berghof, and Führerbunker in Nuremberg, East Prussia, Bavaria, and Berlin, cut off from most of his civilian government and in virtual isolation, even when hundreds of miles separated him from the front.
An Axis leader had good reason to fear his public. Mussolini was in danger of being bombed from early May 1943 onward; the Japanese leadership, from autumn 1944 and especially after March 1945. Assassination was a more immediate danger for Axis strongmen; it had been a staple of Japanese political life in the decade before the war. Mussolini survived several attempts; Hitler perhaps ten potentially serious plots in a decade in public life. Fear of assassination, the chance of being bombed, the approach of enemy armies—these were all threats that after 1941 faced the Axis leaders alone.12
The problem was not just that the Wehrmacht and the German economy at the outbreak of the war were without the resources to finalize Hitler’s dreams in a global war. Hitler also could never achieve the material means for such grandiose ends, given that he lacked the shrewdness to coax or successfully coerce others, both allies and millions of Europeans under occupation, in helping him to complete them.
And if the Nazis sought to increase production of munitions from foreign resources it was often through the inefficient means of stealing infrastructure and shipping workers back into Germany, rather than by recalibrating and utilizing existing labor and factories in situ.
Hitler’s obsession with the Jews was as militarily unsound as it was savage.
For a leader who had vowed to learn from and rectify the verdict of World War I, an amnesiac Hitler instead seemed to be trumping the same errors that had ruined Imperial Germany.
Before the war, Hitler had never visited America, Britain, or Russia, the major countries he would declare war on. He had no direct knowledge of much of anything more than a few hundred miles from his birthplace.
Churchill and Roosevelt—who felt comfortable and confident among the privileged classes, both in their admiration and suspicion of them—knew Europe firsthand. Both had traveled in Germany and had visited each other’s country. Their knowledge of national character was based on experience and analysis rather than deduced from popular prejudices. In critical areas such as assessing operations in terms of geography, terrain, and climate and weather, they were reasonable. Hitler and Mussolini, in contrast, lived and died by their reliance on maps. Neither had seen an American factory or farm, a British industrial city—or a Russian road in spring or city in midwinter.
Mussolini never foresaw how vast numbers of tanks, ships, and planes were necessary for victory, or how economies would have to be fundamentally reordered to produce them.
modus vivendi
Aside from being executed for war crimes, Tojo is now often remembered for approving the second most ill-conceived attack of the twentieth century—the December 7, 1941, surprise bombing of Pearl Harbor—
On the eve of the Blitz, Megan Lloyd George, daughter of the prime minister of Britain during World War I, gave Churchill a backhanded compliment that illustrated the contempt of the British elite when she complained of him: “What always appealed to him most was war. He studied the wars of the past and contemplated the wars of the future. He always imagined himself a military leader, destroying armies, sweeping through Europe, overthrowing his enemies, or putting them to flight. Military terms were always on his lips, and his head was forever full of military plans and projects. I am sure that today he is wholly absorbed and intoxicated by the war.”46
he kept his head when all around were losing theirs.49
That Churchill, a conservative imperialist, flattered and miraculously won over Roosevelt, an anti-imperialist progressive, and Stalin, a genocidal totalitarian, is often underappreciated.
The war had unleashed enormous pent-up populist passions and transnational ideological movements, and in its aftermath there would be little likelihood of the British Empire making an argument to retain at least some of its colonies on the basis of its supposed prewar civilizing mission.51
predictably involved the diversions of limited resources: first, not forcing Bomber Command to turn over more long-range bombers earlier to antisubmarine efforts; second, the diversion of forces from ongoing success in North Africa to the doomed cause in Greece (March 1941) at precisely the time when the British might have destroyed the entire Italian presence in North Africa and closed out the theater.
The early stunning transformation of the British economy to produce war materiel on par with the Third Reich was mostly due to Churchill’s confidence in his ability to harmonize private entrepreneurs like Lord Beaverbrook with trade union bosses like Ernest Bevin.53
Far better than Franklin Roosevelt, he understood the full ramifications of supporting the Soviets in their catastrophic war with Hitler on the Eastern Front, most notably that there would be a high postwar price to be paid for any partnership with Stalinist Russia.
In contrast, Churchill invoked concrete history, taught the world why Hitler was a singular evil unlike any in civilization’s immediate past, and was able to place both victory and defeat in Periclean contexts that encouraged the Allies neither to be fooled that early impressive tactical victories equaled final victory nor to succumb to defeatism after terrible setbacks.56
Finally, Churchill possessed the greatest moral courage of any leader of World War II, especially in the rawest, most physical sense. He was the only Allied leader to have served in the trenches of World War I, after seeing service in Britain’s colonial wars, and had gained practical experience of combat.
Roosevelt lacked the historical vision of Winston Churchill. But he possessed a superior political savvy in domestic matters. He had an uncanny intuition of what the American people would tolerate, and how to push programs and objectives through guile, deception, and stealth that they would not have otherwise embraced if fully apprised.
Yet Roosevelt’s strength was his early intuition that Europe’s early border wars between September 1939 and May 1941 presaged an existential struggle between democracy and an evil European fascism of a sort not seen before. Even in the mid-1930s, he rightly assumed that compromise with Hitler was impossible, something universally obvious in hindsight but not so clear to most of Roosevelt’s European and American contemporaries other than the realist Winston Churchill.
For the first three months of the German invasion, his no-retreat orders doomed over two million Russians, who were taken prisoner in huge encirclements and, for the most part, never accounted for.
Unlike Britain, Stalin had only joined the antifascist side of the war when his fascist partner double-crossed him. Stalin envisioned the Allied alliance as a war only against the invaders of the Soviet Union, and delegated effort against Italy and the Japanese to the British and Americans.
He ensured that the Russian people did not know the full extent of British and American help to Russia and their contributions to winning the war.
The wholesale transfer of Soviet industry far to the east of Moscow still staggers the imagination.
Whatever his exalted station, the proverbial general also should have some firsthand experience of the front lines, and so be seen by his men in action.
Individualism, even idiosyncrasy, was prized more than caricatured: showiness in dress, appearance, as well as comportment, and eccentricity in speech and behavior. The great general needed to prove why he was one with, but also different from, his men.
ERICH VON MANSTEIN is ranked as the most brilliant of Hitler’s generals. Yet his career in World War II serves as an illustration of both the genius and limitations of German generalship, and he serves as a model of why Germany’s technocratic generals scored early tactical victories and yet found themselves so often in a strategic blind alley.
swift Gallic catastrophe;
Facing odds quite different from the glory days of 1939–1942, the elite of the German officer corps was nearly wiped out between 1943 and 1945.
By 1940 true independence of thought was mostly impossible for German generals.
the meat grinder of the Eastern Front.
In sum, in a Reich with an irrational leader, murderous ideology, and toadyish General Staff, Rommel sought to find a way to win when there was no way to win, and more often than not kept some of his professionalism in the process.
JAPAN OFFERS THE contrast of far more experienced and capable commanders, backed by larger and more effective forces, yet sharing the same strategic blindness and thus the same destruction at the hands of the Allies.
Yet it is hard to find evidence that Yamamoto or his fellow admirals displayed much strategic insight before Pearl Harbor or once the war broke out.
The Japanese fleet ignored the real possibility that carriers might be missing, that the old battleships were being supplemented by more modern and superior versions in short order, that in such shallow waters it was difficult to either sink and permanently destroy ships at dock or to ensure that their trained crews were drowned, and that critical fuel supplies and dock works needed for a reconstituted American fleet had to be part of the pre-attack planning.
waking the sleeping American giant
His tragedy was that had he survived the successful American assassination attack on his plane, his leadership would have made absolutely no difference in the ultimate outcome of the war that he had both warned against and insisted upon.
In other words, they grew too attached to their ships in fears of losing them.
Japanese commanders had originally assumed the Western Allies’ two-front war with Germany would mean fewer Anglo-American resources devoted to the Pacific. They failed to realize that Marines, carriers, and naval aircraft were not so sorely needed in Europe, and that a belligerent like the United States with twice the manpower and well over five times Japan’s industrial capacity could easily fight a two-front war that nearly bankrupted Japan.
a more holistic view of lethality through the marriage of man with machine.
the Soviets refined maskirovka, an institutionalized art of deception and misinformation that sought to fool German armies as to the size and intent of their Soviet counterpart, and which helps to explain why seasoned German veterans were so often surprised.
maverick firebrands
élan
The general excellence of the Army’s infantry and armor commanders was partly due to the combat experience of many in World War I; partly to the excellent system of war colleges and continuing tactical and strategic education, especially at the Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, during the 1930s; and partly to the sheer winnowing-out process of the Depression-era army that created motivation and competition for scarce resources and rare promotions.
those under Axis occupation were never eager to fuel foreign fascist agendas, even had their overseers been competent in organizing them to work productively.
Three themes characterize the growing material edge of the Allies over the Axis powers. First, Allied workers were less often guest or coerced workers, but labored willingly with national resolve. Second, the Allies enjoyed greater naval and air power that allowed them to tap into global resources and transport them to the front lines from areas in Asia, Africa, and the Americas that were often untouched by war. Third, by early 1943 almost all American, British, and Russian factories, transportation, and fields were beyond the reach of German Panzers and bombers, even as Allied air power—soon to be augmented by ground forces—began pounding Axis production.
After September 1939, perhaps one billion of the world’s roughly two billion population were soldiers, partisans, and producers engaged in trying to kill people.
German inability to marry technological genius with rapid practical production.
Trucks and felt-lined boots proved every bit as important to the war effort as did machine guns and hand grenades.
As the only major belligerent whose oil fields were entirely immune from enemy attack of any sort, the United States produced almost three times as much fuel of all sorts as all the other Allied and Axis nations combined.
In fact, many scholars believe that while prewar German and British manufacturing might have been roughly equal in terms of productivity, the hugely inefficient German farming sector meant that overall the British economy was far more efficient.
The United States, the greatest food supplier of the war, was somehow able to keep civilian consumption of calories at about prewar levels, while actually increasing protein consumption—again the result of a concentrated effort to increase, mechanize, and modernize agriculture.
With new methods of prefabrication of parts and assembly-line production, industrialist Henry Kaiser’s shipyards were able to cut the construction time of ten-thousand-ton Liberty merchant ships from about 230 days to 24.
In 1942, it took about 54,800 man-hours to build a B-17, a bomber that had been in production since 1937. But just two years later, only 18,600 man-hours were required.
Such magnates ensured that in just four years American private enterprise had produced nearly ninety thousand tanks of all types, over a quarter-million artillery pieces, 2.4 million trucks, 2.4 million machine guns, and over forty billion rounds of ammunition—along with 807 cruisers, destroyers, and destroyer escorts, 203 submarines, 151 carriers (of all categories), eight battleships, and over fifty million tons of merchant shipping, as well as three hundred thousand aircraft.
Until 1939, the Great War had accounted for the greatest number of dead (15–20 million) of any conflict in history. Yet World War II resulted in at least three times that toll.
More people died in World War II than ever before because there simply were more people to fight and die.
internecine
One of the many reasons why the Eastern Front turned so horrific was the similarly totalitarian nature and morality of the Soviet and Nazi military leadership. Both the Red Army and the Wehrmacht censored all news from the battlefield. Both tolerated no dissenting voices and executed their own in vast numbers—in the case of the Germans, over twenty-five thousand through military courts-martial; for the Red Army, well over a hundred thousand. They conceded that surrender was usually tantamount to death and recklessly suffered enormous losses to protect the hierarchy of the state.
Science almost seemed to excuse or at least offer a veneer to barbarity.
Without German custom-built crematoria, the death camps would never have reached daily kill rates approaching eight to ten thousand in May and June 1944.
guided missiles to stop tactical air attacks. German defensive planners accepted that it took an average of well over three thousand rounds from even their heralded medium-range 88 mm flak guns to down a single Allied bomber,
Even in peacetime, China was always on the cusp of starvation. Under Japanese occupation, perhaps five to six million Chinese starved to death or died from disease, a toll comparable to the European Holocaust.
Perhaps three million starved on Java alone. Here the common denominator was not just war. Allied forces, for example, had mostly skipped over the Dutch East Indies and for most of the war fought few battles along the borders of India proper or in French Indochina. Instead, Japanese occupation was again the culprit. The occupied were forced to give up food to supply the Imperial Japanese Army and starved as a consequence.
“How, we asked ourselves, could such horrors have occurred in the middle of Germany without our having known?”
What the Nazi architects required from the German and European publics was not just scapegoating of Jews, but something more appalling: general indifference to their ultimate fate.
Subterfuge and illusion were integral parts of the death camps’ operation, as inmates were told to pack for relocation, ready themselves for work on arrival, follow regulations to ensure their safety, shower and clean themselves—good German rituals developed to ensure that they would walk to, rather than run from, their deaths.
By March 1942, perhaps 75 percent of the eventual victims of the Holocaust may have been still alive.
By 1943 there were enough firsthand accounts of the death camps circulating in the US State Department, and by 1944 the possibility of at least bombing some of the camps (Auschwitz-Birkenau especially), that the failure of America, on the one hand, to take in hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees and, on the other hand, to destroy many of the extermination camps was increasingly becoming indefensible.
The Holocaust accounted for the greatest number of Polish deaths, given that the prewar Jewish community of Poland—10 percent of the population—was the largest in the world at somewhere around 3.5 million persons. Scarcely over a hundred thousand Polish Jews survived the German extermination efforts.
Poland alone lost more of its citizens than all the Western European nations, Britain, and the United States combined.
Whereas the victors a generation earlier soon had second thoughts about Versailles, this time around no one believed that the far harsher terms forced on the Axis were at all unfair.
Despite reprieves, commutations, and pardons, many of those most responsible for starting the war and committing crimes against humanity were put on trial and punished, in a way unique in some 2,500 years of Western military history.
The postwar world seemed to have forgotten that Stalin had killed almost as many of his own Russians as did Hitler.
In such a commercial and security void, the United States for two decades after the war supplied the world with food, material and industrial goods, capital, and new products, and thus grew economically as never before. From 1945 to 1970, the United States usually ran a surplus balance of payments, but almost never after that.
Yet in key areas—cryptography, radar, antisubmarine tactics, strategic bombing, and grand strategy—Britain’s earlier experience in the war saved the Americans thousands of lives.
The war, then, left both the Russians and the world at large confused by the Soviet Union’s record of both heroism and duplicity.
In the postwar world, the country that had produced Katyusha rockets and the T-34 tanks that bested the Wehrmacht’s Tigers and Panthers could never create anything for its own consumers approaching the craftsmanship or quality of a Mercedes-Benz or BMW automobile, much less millions of quality GE refrigerators and ranges.
Russia helped to save the Allied cause by its great sacrifices. Yet the Allied war effort to defeat Germany saved communism.