The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred (82 page)

It was July 26, 1944. There had been an air raid by 1,500 American ‘Flying Fortresses’ and I didn’t see one Luftwaffe plane in the sky to challenge them. Of course, superior forces don’t always win, but when the superiority is as enormous as that, there’s nothing you can do. Close by us was the SS Tank Division
Das Reich
and contingents from the Hitler Youth. They were totally smashed up from the air. They didn’t even have the chance to show how brave they were. When that sort of thing happens, you know it must be the end… it was hopeless, we couldn’t possibly have won the war.

In the Pacific, meanwhile, the United States simply swamped Japan with a tidal wave of mass-produced armaments. American submarines reduced the Japanese merchant marine by three-quarters, cutting off the supply of indispensable imports. American anti-aircraft guns shot down Japanese planes faster than Japanese factories could build them. American shipyards built and repaired battle ships while Japan’s sat idle for want of materials. By 1944 the United States was producing twenty-six times as much high explosives as Japan. In terms of tanks and trucks the Japanese were in the same second-class league as the Italians. In terms of medical provision, an area where the Allies made major advances during the war, they were in the nineteenth century. Again, it is impossible to imagine any alternative Japanese strategy after Pearl Harbor that could have compensated for this immense economic imbalance. In putting their faith in increasingly suicidal tactics, Japanese commanders revealed themselves as (in Alvin Coox’s apt phrase) ‘medieval samurai warriors masquerading as practitioners
of modern military science’. The Americans, by contrast, were the masters of overkill, whose first principle was: ‘always have on hand more of everything than you can ever conceivably need’.

That total war would ultimately be decided by material rather than moral factors was not lost on the Germans. ‘The first essential condition for an army to be able to stand the strain of battle’, wrote Rommel, ‘is an adequate stock of weapons, petrol and ammunition. In fact, the battle is fought and decided by the quarter masters before the shooting begins. The bravest men can do nothing without guns, the guns nothing without plenty of ammunition; and neither guns nor ammunition are of much use in mobile warfare unless there are vehicles with sufficient petrol to haul them around.’ By the final year of the war, an active US army division was consuming around 650 tons of supplies a day. Because a single army truck could carry just five tons, this posed a formidable logistical challenge. Indeed, as supply lines were stretched from 200 to 400 miles in the months after D-Day, deliveries to the advancing armies slumped from 19,000 tons a day to 7,000 tons – hence the slackening of the pace of the Allied advance in the second half of 1944 and one defect of Montgomery’s grab for Arnhem. The last phase of the war revealed the importance (consistently underrated by both the Germans and the Japanese) of assigning ample numbers of men to the task of supply rather than combat. The ratio of combatants to non-combatants in the German army was two to one; but the equivalent American ratio in the European theatre was one to two. In the Pacific, the Japanese ratio was one to one; the Americans had eighteen non-combatants for every man at the front. As the war came to an end, the United States had nearly as many men under arms as the Soviet Union (around twelve million in each case) but only a minority of Americans were actually engaged in combat. Those who were – the riflemen who landed in Normandy, the pilots in the Flying Fortresses – suffered heavy casualties.
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It was in fact
probably just as well that the Western powers put their faith in firepower over manpower. Significantly less well trained than their opponents, three out of every four American soldiers did not shoot to good effect in combat, and many did not shoot at all. Most American and British casualties admitted to military hospitals were victims of disease and injury, not enemy action. The ‘greatest generation’ may have been greater than other American generations; they were far from being the greatest warriors of World War II.

Though much more reliant than the Western Allies on pitting men directly against enemy fire, the Soviet Union also out-produced Germany in military hardware. From March 1943 onwards, the Russians had consistently been able to field between twice and three times as many tanks and self-propelled guns as the Germans. This was remarkable, given the relative backwardness of the Russian economy and the enormous challenge of relocating production east wards after the German invasion. Magnitogorsk, Sverdlovsk and Chelyabinsk became the heart land of a new military-industrial complex, the defining characteristic of which was increased productivity through standardization and economies of scale. The T-34 battle tank was one of the great triumphs of wartime design. Simple to build, easily manoeuvrable, protected with innovative sloped armour and packing a hefty punch, it was the very antithesis of the notoriously inadequate American Sherman M4. The later IS-1 and IS-2 ‘Josef Stalin’ tanks were a match even for the German Panther V and VI and the Tiger I and II, which were also vulnerable to the giant SU-152 anti-tank gun. The volumes produced of these and other weapons were large. Soviet production accounted for one in four Allied combat aircraft, one in three Allied machine-guns, two-fifths of Allied armoured vehicles and two-thirds of Allied mortars.

It is no doubt entertaining to imagine how Hitler might have used a Nazi atomic bomb to negate these disadvantages, but the reality is that Werner Heisenberg and the German scientists came nowhere near devising one. Even had the Germans achieved more rapid improvements in their air defences – for example, developing and deploying jet-powered fighters earlier – material constraints would have limited the number of these that could have been built. In the unmanned V1 flying bomb and the V2 rocket the Germans did produce remarkable
new weapons that inflicted heavy casualties and dented civilian morale in London; but they were not the war-winning innovations of Hitler’s dreams. The Japanese were even further away from a decisive technological breakthrough.

In short, while they might well have been able to defeat the British Empire had it fought unassisted, and while they might even have defeated Britain and the Soviet Union had the United States remained neutral, those were not wars Hitler and his confederates chose to fight. They staked their claim to world power against all three empires: the British, the Russian and the American. If anything was inevitable in the history of the twentieth century, it was the victory of this overwhelming combination. Neutral investors certainly thought so, to judge by the wartime performance of German bond straded in Switzerland, which plunged 39 per cent on the outbreak of war, rallied during 1940, then declined again in response to the aftermath of Operation Barbarossa, slumping at the time of the Yalta Conference in February 1945 to roughly the same low point they had first touched in September 1939. Different outcomes in particular military engagements– for example, the battles of the Coral Sea, Midway, Guadalcanal or even Leyte Gulf – would have done no more than delay the unavoidable denouement. Even if the Germans had succeeded in repelling the Allied landings in Italy and France – which is not inconceivable, given the inherent riskiness of Operation Overlord – or in checking for longer the Allied advance through the Ardennes, they would still not have been in a position to win the war. Indeed, diverting German forces west wards in 1944 served to hasten the collapse in the East.

In view of what happened after 1945 – when decolonization and economic decline so swiftly demoted Britain from the elite of great powers – it is tempting to assume that the defeat of the Axis was primarily an American and Russian achievement. Until the concluding months of the war, however, the British were equal partners in the alliance. The British inflicted Hitler’s first, crucial defeat in 1940 by
winning the battle for the skies over their own country, at a time when the Soviet Union was still on the German side and the United States was still neutral. Despite the disaster of To bruk, the British were able to hold on and win in North Africa. The British contribution to the Battle of the Atlantic was also vital. And it was British imperial forces led by General William Slim that inflicted perhaps the heaviest of all the Japanese army’s defeats, at Imphal and Kohima in Burma. To be sure, Britain lacked the vast economic resources of the United States and the vast manpower reserves of the Soviet Union. Yet quality also counts. British intelligence was second to none. No single source mattered more in the war than Ultra, the deciphered German signals sent using the supposedly uncrackable Enigma machine. Thanks to the team of Oxbridge Egyptologists and other assorted boffins assembled at Bletchley Park, the Allies were consistently one step ahead of the Germans, perhaps most decisively in North Africa. The German submariners’ Triton code was also cracked.

Not all that the British did was so obviously clever. To read English memoirs of the war is to be struck by the extraordinary resilience of the public school mentality – the persistence of sang-froid and frivolity, no matter how savagely the other combatants waged their total war; the dogged determination to treat every operation, regardless of its dangers, as either a foxhunt, a cricket match or a dormitory prank. All of these qualities are exhibited in William Stanley Moss’s account of the abduction of the German commander from Crete in 1944. Few prisoners in the war can have been shown more gentlemanly consideration. Off-duty fighter pilots conducted themselves like Oxford undergraduates; while based in India, Group Captain Frank Carey founded the Scree-chers’ Club, new members of which were ‘allowed to drink only as long as [they] remained amusing’; success entailed promotion through the ranks from Hiccough to Roar, then Scream and finally Screech. Musical accompaniment was provided by the ‘Prang Concerto’, the last movement of which ‘demanded the complete demolition of the piano’. Also engaged in fighting the last war but one, if not two, was Lord Lovat, who insisted that his 1st Special Service Brigade be piped ashore on the beaches of Normandy on D-Day. (Miraculously, the bagpiper survived.) After four years of German occupation the Dutch were mystified by the good manners of British officers, who politely
asked permission to fire from their bedroom windows. Only at the very end of the war, inside Germany itself, was the mask of sportsmanship let slip: ‘This has not been a football match’ was the sole comment of Lieutenant-Colonel R. F. S. Gooch of the Cold stream Guards, declining the proffered hand of a German officer following the surrender of the 6th Parachute Regiment. Equally striking is the cynicism, even anti-heroism, of rank-and-file soldiers, well captured in the recollections of Rifleman Alex Bowlby:

‘I’m telling you! It was a different sort of war [in the desert]. There were no civvies mixed up in it. It was clean. When we took prisoners we treated them fine and they treated usfine. The fighting was different, too… We had a go at them, or they had a go at us. Then one of us fucked off!’

‘You fucked off about five hundred miles without stopping, if I remember rightly.’

Yet this strange combination of upper-class puerility and working-class bloody-mindedness was itself part of the secret of ultimate British success. Since they had no very lofty notions of what they were fighting for – Beveridge’s welfare state was an altogether more popular war aim than Churchill’s reconstituted Empire – the British proved difficult to demoralize.

The quality of British strategic decision-making was also vital. As is his due, Churchill is still remembered on both sides of the Atlantic as the saviour of his nation and the architect of the Allied victory. But if Churchill had enjoyed the same untrammelled power as Hitler, he might well have lost the war, so erratic were his strategic judgements.
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It was the limitation of Churchill’s power that was Britain’s greatest strength – the fact that the other members of the British Chiefs of Staff Committee, notably Brooke, were able not merely to disagree with ‘the old man’, but frequently to dissuade him. Britain waged war by committee. No individual’s will was supreme. The armed services were forced to hammer out their differences and subscribe to a coherent strategy. The result was no doubt sometimes ponderous, but the chances of a catastrophic error were there by much reduced. The same could also be said of the unwieldy but nevertheless vital Anglo-American Combined Chiefs of Staff meetings. Indeed, it may be that it was Brooke’s caution and tenacity in argument that restrained the Americans from a premature attempt to open a Second Front in Western Europe, in the face of intense pressure from Stalin as well as from sections of the British public. Hitler, by contrast, could and did sack any commander whose obedience he so much as doubted. There was nothing to prevent him from issuing counter-productive orders that merely wasted German lives – nothing to prevent him descending eventually into the realm of fantasy, moving non-existent divisions into what were in any case untenable positions. Nor was there any effective co-ordination of strategy between the leaders of the three Axis powers; Plan 21 – the idea of a German-Italian thrust towards Suez combined with a Japanese attack on India – was little more than a pipedream. If even the Japanese army and navy could not agree on how to wage the war, how likely was a rational Axis plan for victory?

It is often said that Hitler’s greatest strategic blunder was to declare war on the United States in December 1941 as a sign of solidarity with Japan after Pearl Harbor. This is not entirely fair, since Roosevelt had been stretching the meaning of neutrality to breaking point for some considerable time. Economic ties with Britain had been boosted by the 1938 Anglo-American Trade Agreement. Economic sanctions had been imposed on Germany by the US following the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia. Roosevelt began pressing Congress to repeal the Neutrality Acts as soon as the war in Europe broke out. As early as December 29, 1940, Roosevelt had denounced the Axis powers as an ‘unholy alliance of power and pelf’ that intended to ‘enslave the whole of Europe and then… the rest of the world’; the United States, he declared, was the ‘great arsenal of democracy’ against a ‘gang of
outlaws’. In fact a
de facto
state of war between Germany and the United States had existed since September 11, 1941, when Roosevelt had authorized American naval commanders who encountered German vessels to fire at them ‘on sight’. This was possible because the tide of American public opinion had been running against the Axis powers, despite the best efforts of isolationists like Senator Hiram W. Johnson, neutralists like the lawyer and legal historian Charles Warren and crypto-fascists like the aviator Charles Lindbergh. Ordinary Americans did not want war. Many believed they had been duped into the last war by the machinations of British imperialists and North-Eastern business interests. They were strongly attracted to the neutralists’ idea that by prohibiting military supplies or loans to combatant countries Congress could avoid another such entanglement. But they supported American rearmament from as early as 1936. They clearly favoured Britain over Germany from 1938 onwards. Above all, Americans did not want to see an Axis victory–and by September 1939 a majority of voters saw that this was best insured against by supplying arms and material to Britain. The German victories of 1940 caused that view to spread. There was public support, too, for the sanctions imposed on Japan which set the course for Pearl Harbor.