by John Keegan
Hitler, frustrated in his efforts to bring Britain to concede defeat by the effect of bombing attack, therefore reverted to using his other revolutionary weapons system, the panzer force, to achieve the total victory in Europe that he craved. By the spring of 1941 his precautionary deployment of divisions to the east was complete and his resolve to attack the Soviet Union, which had refused to acquiesce in his diplomatic reordering of southern Europe, was absolute. After a subsidiary campaign to conquer Yugoslavia and Greece, which resisted his demands to accept subordination, he launched his tank forces against Russia on 22 June.
Blitzkrieg worked as spectacularly in the first six months of the Russian war as it had done in the west in the spring of 1940. By December, German tanks had overrun the Ukraine, the Soviet Union’s agricultural heartland and source of much of its industrial and extractive wealth, and stood at the gates of both Leningrad and Moscow. Hitler’s Clausewitzian philosophy had, or so it appeared, been fulfilled in its objectives by applying to its operations the revolutionary military technology of which Hitler (though not Clausewitz, who discounted the superiority of weapons as a significant factor in warmaking) was such an ardent protagonist. Hitler’s fervent championship of the warrior ethos also played its part; indeed, too large a one. Though German soldiers had observed prevailing legal codes of combat in the west, in the east they too often behaved as if the alleged barbarism of their opponents — a barbarism woven into existence by the propagandists of the Reich from folk memories of the steppe menace and evocations of Red Revolution bloody in tooth and claw — justified barbaric behaviour against the soldiers of the Red Army, even after they had been made prisoner, which, following the encirclements at Minsk, Smolensk and Kiev, they were in hundreds of thousands. More than 3,000,000 of the 5,000,000 Soviet soldiers taken prisoner by the Wehrmacht died of mistreatment and privation in captivity, the majority in the first two years of the campaign.68
Blitzkrieg worked on land, at least up until the German embroilment in the Battle of Stalingrad, deep within the steppe, in the autumn of 1942. But elsewhere Hitler’s reliance on revolutionary weapons and strategic extremism encountered a series of unforeseen checks. At sea, his expectation of consummating the U-boat blockade of Britain, which had been denied the German navy in 1917–18 for want of numbers of submarines, was foiled in 1943 by the Allies’ success in extending long-range air cover across the whole zone in which transatlantic convoys operated, in supplying them with local air cover provided by escort carriers of their own, and in outdoing the German cryptographic organisation by decoding the cyphers by which U-boats were instructed to intercept convoys and then diverting the latter to elude them.69
In continental air space, meanwhile, his enemies were moving to achieve a decisive advantage. Germany’s economic policy of committing industrial capacity only to weapons of direct battlefield efficiency — tanks, dive-bombers, automatic infantry weapons — had meant that the Luftwaffe did not have the resources of a true strategic force. Even before the war began, Hitler’s infatuation with the idea of Blitzkrieg had forced it to abandon earlier plans to build large, long-range bombers.70 The policy of the British and the American air forces was precisely contrary. Indeed, it had been with some difficulty that the British government had compelled the Royal Air Force to divert resources from bomber to fighter production before the war, so convinced were its leaders of the rightness of Douhet’s doctrine of ‘victory through air power’. The early British bombers were strategic in conception rather than capacity, but the American air force, which began to arrive in Britain in 1942 to share with the Royal Air Force the prosecution of a strategic bombing campaign against Germany, did so with an aircraft, the B-17, that met all the necessary desiderata: it was fast, had a long range, dropped a heavy bomb load with great accuracy and was designed to defend itself against fighter attack.
Hitler’s abrogation of the tacit agreement to spare civilian targets prompted Britain to begin bombing German cities during 1940. The bombers achieved little effect that year or the next, but in February 1942 a new chief of Bomber Command, Air Marshal Arthur Harris, set aside the policy of directing attacks only at identifiable military targets and inaugurated that of ‘area bombing’. It is ironical in context to recall that the Wright brothers, inventors of the practicable aeroplane in 1903, had foreseen its use as a means of bringing the family of mankind into closer community; a British Air Staff directive of 14 February laid down that operations ‘should now be focused on the morale of the enemy civilian population and in particular of industrial workers’.71 Soon a thousand British bombs at a time were deluging chosen German cities with high-explosive — in the Hamburg night raids of 24–30 July 1943, eighty per cent of the city’s buildings were damaged or destroyed, 30,000 of the inhabitants killed and the streets left choked with 40,000,000 tons of rubble — while in coordinated daytime raids the United States Army Air Force sustained the assault. Once it had acquired a force of long-range fighters to escort its formations to their targets, its bombers flew over Germany almost with impunity.
The Allied strategic air attack on German cities was a revolutionary development in warmaking, and a few brave individuals rightly denounced it as a moral regression, and yet it was outmatched in strategic scope by the deployment of amphibious air power in the Pacific. Japan, another of the nominal victors of the First World War (it had declared against Germany in order to seize its enclave in China) that felt cheated of a fair share of the spoils, had spent a major proportion of its military budget since 1921 in building up the largest and best-equipped naval air force in the world. Its fleet of six large carriers had been of no use when, in 1937, an army-dominated Japanese government embarked on an all-out assault on China, but it proved the essential strategic prop when, during 1941, the decision was taken in Tokyo to outface the United States’ insistence that it terminate its offensive into the Chinese heartland and desist from deployments southward that threatened British and Dutch possessions in Malaya and the East Indies (conquered by sailing-ship in the gunpowder age). Yamamoto, Japan’s leading naval strategist and one of the few Japanese to know the United States at first hand, warned of the relative frailty of the fleet he commanded: ‘we can run wild for six months to a year,’ he forecast, but after that, ‘the oil wells of Texas and the factories of Detroit’72 would supply the means to mount an inevitable and decisive counter-offensive. His protests were overruled, and in the first six months of 1942 the Japanese navy, acting as both spearhead of and escort to the Japanese army, conquered almost the whole of the western Pacific and South-East Asia, and carried the perimeter of what was intended to be an impenetrable zone of strategic control to the northern approaches of Australia.
Whence the Japanese derived the warrior ethos which made them one of the most formidable military peoples the world has ever known remains as mysterious today as it was on 7 December 1941, when the departing pilots of the First Air Fleet left the United States Pacific Fleet’s battleships a row of burning hulks at Pearl Harbor. They were a warrior people already and during the thirteenth century, the only one, besides the Turkish Mamelukes of Egypt, to have confronted and seen off (assisted, admittedly by a timely typhoon) the conquering impulse of the Mongols. They were warriors none the less, of a recognisably ‘primitive’ sort, practising a highly ritualised style of combat and valuing skill-at-arms largely as a medium for defining social status and subordinating the unsworded to the rule of the samurai. It was to perpetuate that social order that they had banished gunpowder from their islands in the seventeenth century, and thereafter resisted the intrusions of foreign traders until, on the arrival of an American steam warship fleet in 1854, they recognised that the means to deny the outside world no longer availed.
Unlike the Chinese Manchu, who responded to Western technical challenge by counting on the resilience of traditional culture to negate its destabilising effects, the Japanese, from 1866 onward, took a conscious decision to learn the secrets of the West’s material superiority
and bend them to the service of their own nationalism. In a bitter civil war, the samurai backwoodsmen who resisted the programme of reform were crushed by armies which for the first time admitted commoners to their ranks. The victorious regime, dominated by feudal families, but by those which had embraced the necessity for change, proceeded to introduce into Japan the institutions that their envoys in the West had identified as those that made Western states strong: in the economy, repetitive-process industries; in the public domain, an army and a navy recruited by universal enlistment and equipped with the most advanced weapons, including armoured warships which, by 1911, were being built in Japanese yards.
Other non-European states that attempted this emulation of the West’s military power, notably Muhammad Ali’s Egypt and nineteenth-century Ottoman Turkey, had failed. The purchase of Western weapons did not, it proved, entail with it the transfer of the West’s military culture. But Japan succeeded in acquiring the one with the other. In 1904–5 it defeated Russia in a war for control of Manchuria in which all Western observers testified to the exemplary fighting-power of the common Japanese conscript.73 This was demonstrated again in the campaigns of 1941–5 in South-East Asia and the Pacific, notably in the opening stages, when trained units of the ‘martial peoples’ of India — scions of successive waves of militant conquerors, and commanded by British officers — were consistently outmatched in combat by the descendants of Japanese cultivators who, a hundred years earlier, had been forbidden the right to bear arms altogether.
The personal qualities of the Japanese fighting man were eventually overcome by exactly the means of which Yamamoto had warned: the ‘surge’ capacity of American industry to exceed Japan’s output of warships and aircraft delivered to the front. But to say that is in no way to denigrate the courage or skills of the American servicemen who opposed the Japanese in the Pacific theatre. The performance of the United States Marine Corps in the battles to conquer the island of Iwo Jima or Okinawa (1945), in particular, gave the lie to Hitler’s deluded and racialist dismissal of the Americans as a people emasculated by material plenty. Nevertheless, the consistency with which the Japanese demonstrated their determination to fight literally to the death — after the assault in Tarawa (1943) only eight out of the Japanese garrison of 5000 were found alive — persuaded the American high command by 1945 that an assault on the Japanese home islands would be too costly — a million casualties or sometimes deaths was the figure invoked — to be risked unless no other means prevailed.74 By the middle of 1945 such a means was available.
The United States had already deployed a plethora of advanced technical means against Japan in the effort to beat down courage with firepower. Its carrier fleet, outnumbered but vigorously handled in the battles of Coral Sea and Midway, had restored a naval equilibrium in the Pacific in 1942. Thereafter its size had grown so fast — between 1941 and 1944 the United States launched twenty-one fleet carriers, Japan only five — that the US Pacific Fleet could move virtually at will, supported by a fleet train that allowed its ships to remain at sea for weeks at a time. By the end of 1944 the American submarine force had sunk half Japan’s merchant fleet and two-thirds of its tankers, while in the summer of 1945 the US strategic air force was engaged in an incendiary campaign against Japan’s wooden-built cities that left sixty per cent of the ground area of the sixty largest completely burnt out. It was still doubted, however, if not by American air force generals, whether bombing alone would bring the Japanese to concede defeat.
Strategic bombing had not defeated Germany. In the last months of the European war, the Anglo-American combined bomber offensive put out of action all of Germany’s synthetic oil plants, its only surviving source of such supply, and brought movement on its railways to a standstill. By then, however, the Anglo-American armies that had landed in France in June 1944, and the Red Army which had simultaneously broken through the Wehrmacht’s last line of defence in White Russia, were fighting deep within German territory. The battles they fought were those of attrition: the increase in the numbers of tanks in all armies had robbed that armoured weapon of the revolutionary properties it had apparently brought to warmaking in the brief era of Blitzkrieg in 1941–2. The bomber offensive also, moreover, had passed through a long period of attrition in 1943–4, when air crew losses of five, sometimes ten per cent per mission had threatened to break morale and concede advantage in the skies over Germany to its fighter and anti-aircraft defences. The manned bomber was a fragile weapon of offence, as Hitler had learned to his cost in the campaign of 1940 against Britain. That was the principal reason for his enthusiastic espousal of a programme of unmanned aircraft development, generously funded by the army since 1937. In October 1942 a test firing of a rocket with a range of 160 miles, designed to carry a ton of high-explosive, had taken place, and in July 1943 Hitler declared it ‘the decisive weapon of the war’ and decreed that ‘whatever labour or materials [the designers] need must be supplied instantly’.
The rocket, designated by the Allies the V-2, was not brought into service until September 1944, and only 2600 were ever fired, against first London (in which they killed 2500 people) and then Antwerp, the Anglo-American armies’ main logistic base during the assault against Germany’s western frontier.75 But the potentiality of the weapon was plain for all to see; word of its development had greatly alarmed the British when first received, by a mysterious disclosure by a German well-wisher to the Allied cause, in November 1939. This ‘Oslo Report’ supplied British technical intelligence research with much of its thrust during the first two years of the war. Simultaneously, however, British scientific intelligence had become even more alarmed by the possibility that Germany might be experimenting with the applicability of atomic energy to military purposes.
Thus far the threat was purely theoretical; no one had yet succeeded in causing a chain-reaction by fission, the process through which atoms yield their explosive power, and the machinery to produce it did not exist. In the United States, however, Albert Einstein sent an intermediary to President Roosevelt on 11 October 1939, to warn of the atomic danger, and the President at once set up a committee, from which would develop the Manhattan Project, to take stock of it.76 Meanwhile the British themselves began to gather the manpower and materials necessary to carry atomic research forward, while seeking to deny them by every means to the Germans. Immediately after Pearl Harbor, the personnel of the British organisation, which bore the cover name of Tube Alloys, was transhipped bodily to the United States to join that of the equally misleadingly named Manhattan Project, and together the teams proceeded, with an urgency fuelled by the fear that Germany might be outstripping them, to uncover the processes by which the theory of fission could be translated into the reality of an ultimate weapon. The outcome of their efforts was not demonstrated until after Germany’s defeat; frantic investigations by teams of Allied experts disclosed that even then the Germans were still far away from the discovery of how to initiate a chain-reaction.
When Winston Churchill was informed of the successful explosion of the first atomic bomb at Alamagordo in the New Mexico desert on 16 July 1945, he uttered prophetic words: ‘What was gunpowder? Trivial. What was electricity? Meaningless. This Atomic Bomb is the Second Coming in Wrath!’77 He was speaking to Henry Stimson, the American Secretary of War, who was already centrally involved in the American government’s debate over whether so terrible a weapon should be used, even to bring the surrender of the Japanese, whose treacherous attack on Pearl Harbor, ferocity in combat, and inhumanity to prisoners and subject peoples had robbed the American people of all sympathy for them. It did not take long to reach a decision: the anticipated million casualties or deaths among the American servicemen then gathering to assault the Japanese home islands turned the trick. As Stimson himself later explained, speaking for most who endorsed President Truman’s order, ‘I felt that to extract a genuine surrender from the Emperor and his military advisers they must be administered a tremendous shock which would carry convinc
ing proof of our power to destroy the Empire.’78 The shock, administered first at Hiroshima on 6 August 1945 and then at Nagasaki three days later, killed 103,000 people. Called on to cease resistance or ‘expect a rain of ruin from the air’, the Japanese emperor broadcast to his people on 15 August the news that the war was at an end.
LAW AND WAR’S END
The end of the Second World War and the advent of atomic weapons did not bring an end to warmaking, either immediately or in the decades that followed. Japan’s destruction of the European empires in the East, and its humiliation of the European governors and settlers under the eyes of their former subjects, ensured that after 1945 colonial rule there could be re-established only by force, if at all. The British judged the effort to be impossible in Burma, to which it conceded independence in 1948, and it recognised that a Communist-inspired rising that broke out the same year in Malaya could be suppressed only if the population was promised self-government as the condition for supporting the counter-insurgency campaign. The Dutch rapidly abandoned their attempt to restore colonial rule in the East Indies where, as in Burma, a Japanese-fostered independence movement captured the populist loyalties. France alone took a different view. Confronted in Indochina by a Communist-led nationalist party, which had acquired arms from the Japanese, it despatched an expeditionary force to re-impose the pre-war imperial regime, but from the moment of its appearance in 1946 it found itself embroiled in guerrilla operations which the enemy showed it knew how to conduct with the greatest skill and persistence. The Viet Minh, as the nationalist movement became known, had learned its guerrilla techniques from Mao Tse-tung’s Communist army in China; there, in a country impoverished and destabilised by eight years of occupation by and war against the Japanese, the Communists rapidly seized power from the established government of Chiang Kai-shek in the civil war of 1948–50. Mao’s army won its victory by conventional tactics; during its years in the wilderness, however, it had refined its own philosophy of warmaking, in which the traditional Chinese strategy of evasion and delay was reinforced by Marxist conviction in the inevitability of revolutionary triumph. Translated to Indochina, where terrain greatly favoured operations based on surprise, piecemeal offensives and rapid disengagement, ‘protracted war’, as Mao had entitled his method, successfully wore down the resistance of the French expeditionary force. In 1955, the French government gave up the struggle and conceded power to the Viet Minh.