The Second World Wars

1

The War in a Classical Context

SOME SIXTY MILLION people died in World War II.

On average, twenty-seven thousand people perished on each day between the invasion of Poland (September 1, 1939) and the formal surrender of Japan (September 2, 1945)—bombed, shot, stabbed, blown apart, incinerated, gassed, starved, or infected. The Axis losers killed or starved to death about 80 percent of all those who died during the war. The Allied victors largely killed Axis soldiers; the defeated Axis, mostly civilians.

More German and Russian soldiers were killed in tanks at Kursk (well over 2,000 tanks lost) than at any other battle of armor in history. The greatest loss of life of both civilians and soldiers on a single ship (9,400 fatalities) occurred when a Soviet submarine sank the German troop transport Wilhelm Gustloff in the Baltic Sea in January 1945. The costliest land battle in history took place at Stalingrad; Leningrad was civilization’s most lethal siege. The death machinery of the Holocaust made past mass murdering from Attila to Tamerlane to the Aztecs seem like child’s play. The deadliest single day in military history occurred in World War II during the March 10, 1945, firebombing of Tokyo, when a hundred thousand people, perhaps many more, lost their lives. The only atomic bombs ever dropped in war immediately killed more than a hundred thousand people at Hiroshima and Nagasaki together, most of them civilians, while tens of thousands more ultimately died and were maimed from radiation exposure. World War II exhausted superlatives. Its carnage seemed to reinvent ideas of war altogether.

YET HOW, WHY, and where the war broke out were familiar factors. The sophisticated technology and totalitarian ideologies of World War II should not blind us to the fact that the conflict was fought on familiar ground in predictable climates and weather by humans whose natures were unchanged since antiquity and thus who went to war, fought, and forged a peace according to time-honored precepts. Reformulated ancient ideas of racial and cultural superiority fueled the global bloodbath between 1939 and 1945, which was ostensibly started to prove that some ideologies were better, or at least more powerful, than others. Nazi Germany certainly believed that other, supposedly inherently spiritually weaker Western nations—Britain and France in particular—had conspired since World War I to prevent the expression of naturally dominant German power. In his memoirs, Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz, Commander-in-Chief of the Kriegsmarine, the German navy, after January 1943, summed up accurately the German justification for the war: “Britain went to war in 1939 because Greater Germany, growing in strength and united with Austria, was becoming a menace to British imperial and economic interests.” Notice how Doenitz’s key phrase, “Britain went to war,” assumes that the German invasion of Poland was the result of victimization and grievance and thus should not have provoked a wider war.¹

By 1939, Germans had concluded that the postwar policies of the Western European nations were unfair, vindictive, and, with some tolerable sacrifices, correctible, given the rebirth of Germany under a uniquely powerful National Socialism. An unfettered Germany would establish hegemony throughout Europe, even if that effort might require dramatic changes in current borders, substantial population exchanges, and considerable deaths, though mostly of non-Germans. In time, both Fascist Italy (which had invaded both Ethiopia and Albania prior to September 1, 1939) and Japan (which had invaded China well over two years before the German attack on Poland) felt that if Hitler could take such risks—as he had throughout 1939–1941 in apparently successful fashion—then they too might take a gamble to share in the spoils. Perceived self-interest—and a sense of the ancient Greek historian Thucydides’s realist notion of honor and fear—as much as ideological affinity, explained which power entered the war, or left it, or chose to remain neutral.

World War II was conceived and fought as a characteristic Western war in which classical traditions of free markets, private property, unfettered natural inquiry, personal freedom, and a secular tradition had for centuries often translated to greater military dynamism in Europe than elsewhere. If the conflict’s unique savagery and destructiveness can only be appreciated through the lenses of twentieth-century ideology, technology, and industry, its origins and end still followed larger contours of conflict as they developed over 2,500 years of civilized history. The Western military’s essence had remained unchanged but it was now delivered at an unprecedented volume and velocity, and posed a specter of death on a massive scale. The internecine war was largely fought with weaponry and technology that were birthed in the West, although also used by Westernized powers in Asia. The atomic bombs, napalm, guided missiles, and multi-engine bombers of World War II confirmed a general truth that for over two millennia the war making of Europe and its appendages had proven brutal against the non-West, but when its savage protocols and technology were turned upon itself, the corpses mounted in an unfathomable fashion.

STARTING WARS IS far easier than ending them. Since the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC) between Athens and Sparta and their allies, winning—and finishing—a war was predicated on finding ways to end an enemy’s ability to fight, whether materially or psychologically. The Axis and the Allies had radically different ideas of how the wars of World War II would eventually conclude—with the Allies sharing a far better historical appreciation of the formulas that always put a final end to conflicts. When World War II broke out in 1939, Germany did not have a serious plan for defeating any of those enemies, present or future, that were positioned well beyond its own borders. 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.

Not even Napoleon had declared war in succession on so many great powers without any idea how to destroy their ability to make war, or, worse yet, in delusion that tactical victories would depress stronger enemies into submission. Operation Sea Lion, Germany’s envisioned invasion of Britain, remained a pipe dream—and yet it offered the only plausible way to eliminate Britain from the war that Hitler had started. Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, then head of the Kriegsmarine, repeatedly warned Hitler that an amphibious invasion of Britain in 1940 was quite impossible. After explaining why the German navy was unable to transport hundreds of thousands of troops across the Channel, Raeder flatly concluded, “I could not recommend a landing in England.” After the war, Field Marshal General Wilhelm Keitel agreed that the military was not up to the task and was relieved that Hitler finally conceded as much: “I very much worried. I fully realized that we would have to undertake this invasion with small boats that were not seaworthy. Therefore, at that time I had fully agreed with the decision of the Fuehrer.” The invasion of Russia, codenamed Operation Barbarossa, would prove a rerun of the early successes of blitzkrieg in precisely the one theater where it would be nearly impossible to conduct it effectively—an operation that Raeder in hindsight claimed to have opposed, desperately but vainly advising Hitler that “under no circumstances should we go to war with Russia.”²

War’s eternal elements—a balance between powers, deterrence versus appeasement, collective security, preemption and preventive attacks, and peace brought by victory, humiliation, and occupation—still governed the conflict. As was true in most past conflicts, the publics in Axis countries, regardless of the odiousness of fascist ideology, supported the war when Germany, Italy, and Japan were deemed to be winning. Even the liberal German historian Friedrich Meinecke was caught up in the German euphoria following the sudden collapse of France in 1940: “And to have regained Strasbourg! How could a man’s heart not beat a little faster at this? After all, building up an army of millions in the space of only four years and rendering it capable of such achievements has been an astonishing and arguably the greatest and the most positive accomplishment of the Third Reich.” The classical Greek historian Thucydides, who so often focused on the Athenian public’s wild shifts in reaction to perceived battlefield victories or defeats, could not have captured any better the mercurial exhilaration at the thought of decisive military success.³

The pulse of the war also reflected another classical dictum: the winning side is the one that most rapidly learns from its mistakes, makes the necessary corrections, and most swiftly responds to new challenges—in the manner that land-power Sparta finally built a far better navy while the maritime Athenians never fielded an army clearly superior to its enemies, or the land-power Rome’s galleys finally became more effective than were the armies of the sea-power Carthage. The Anglo-Americans, for example, more quickly rectified flaws in their strategic bombing campaign—by employing longer-range fighter escorts, recalibrating targeting, integrating radar into air-defense networks, developing novel tactics, and producing more and better planes and crews—than did Germany in its bombing against Britain. America would add bombers and crews at a rate unimaginable for Germany. The result was that during six months of the Blitz (September 1940 to February 1941), the Luftwaffe, perhaps the best strategic bombing force in the world in late 1939 through mid-1940, dropped only thirty thousand tons of bombs on Britain. In contrast, in the half year between June and November 1944, Allied bombers dropped twenty times that tonnage on Germany.⁴

The same asymmetry was true at sea, especially in the Battle of the Atlantic. The Allied leadership made operational changes and technological improvements of surface ships and planes far more rapidly than could the U-boats of the Kriegsmarine. America adapted to repair and produce aircraft carriers and train new crews at a pace inconceivable in Japan. The Allies—including the Soviet Union on most occasions—usually avoided starting theater wars that ended in multiyear infantry quagmires. In contrast, Japan, Germany, and Italy respectively bogged down in China, the Soviet Union, and North Africa and the Balkans.

The importance of the classical geography of war is also unchanging. Ostensibly the Mediterranean should not have mattered in a twentieth-century war that broke out in Eastern Europe. The nexus of European power and influence had long ago shifted far northward, following the expansion of hostile Ottoman power into the western Mediterranean, the discovery of the New World, the Reformation, the British and French Enlightenments, and the Industrial Revolution. But the Mediterranean world connected three continents and had remained even more crucial after the completion of the Suez Canal for European transit to Asia and the Pacific. The Axis “spine” was predicated on a north-south corridor of fascist-controlled rail lines connecting ports on the Baltic with those on the Mediterranean. Without the Mediterranean, the British Empire could not easily coordinate its global commerce and communications. It was no wonder, then, that North Africa, Italy, and Greece became early battlegrounds, as did the age-old strategic stepping-stones across the Mediterranean at Crete, Malta, and Sicily that suffered either constant bombing or invasions.

British, American, Italian, and German soldiers often found themselves fortifying or destroying the Mediterranean stonework of the Romans, Byzantines, Franks, Venetians, and Ottomans. Gibraltar still remained unconquerable. Without a viable plan to attack it on land and from its Iberian rear, the Axis gave up taking the fortress, as had every aggressor that had coveted it since the British annexation of 1713. 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.⁵

Still other classical precedents were forgotten. Western military history showed, but was apparently again dismissed by Allied planners, that it was often difficult to start a campaign northward up the narrow backbone of the Italian Peninsula. What usually started in Sicily petered out in mid-peninsula, given the ease of defense in the narrow mountainous terrain of the Apennines with seas on both flanks. Hannibal and Napoleon alone seemed to have believed that Italy was best conquered from the north rather than the south. Nor had Europeans ever had much success trying to attack Russia from the west. Despite the grand efforts of Swedes, French, and Germans, the expanses were always too wide, the barriers too numerous, the window of good weather too brief—and the Russians were too many and too warlike on their own soil. Planes and tanks did not change those realities. Germany’s problem in particular was that its two most potent enemies, Britain and Russia, were also the hardest to reach. While Germany’s central European location was convenient for bullying the French and Eastern Europeans, its British and Russian existential enemies enjoyed both land and sea buffers from the vaunted German army.

The Allies were surprised that Hitler staged two invasions through the Ardennes in southeast Belgium. But in addition to the examples of World War I, the critically located rough terrain had been a nexus for passing armies since it was first mentioned in Caesar’s Gallic Wars