The Second World War

by John Keegan

  The German people paid a greater human than material price for initiating and sustaining war against their neighbours between 1939 and 1945. Over 4 million German servicemen died at the hands of the enemy, and 593,000 civilians under air attack. Although more women than men were killed by Allied bombing – a ratio of 60:40 – the numbers of women in the Federal Republic in 1960 still exceeded those of men by a ratio of 126:100. The male-female disproportion among the ‘lost generation’ was not as severe as in the Soviet Union, where women outnumbered men by a third after the war; but not even in Russia did the population undergo the horrors of forced migration which defeat visited on the Germans in 1945.

  The uprooting of the Germans from the east comprised two phases, both tragic in their effect: the first was a panic flight from the Red Army; the second a deliberate expulsion of populations from regions of settlement where Germans had lived for generations, in some places for a thousand years. The flight of January 1945 was an episode of human suffering almost without parallel in the Second World War – outside the concentration camps. Terrified at the thought of what the Red Army would do to the first Germans it encountered on home territory, the population of East Prussia, already swollen by refugees from the areas of German settlement in Poland and the Baltic states displaced by the Bagration offensive, left home en masse and, in bitter winter weather, trekked to the Baltic coast. Some 450,000 were evacuated from the port of Pillau during January; 900,000 others walked along the forty-mile causeway to Danzig or crossed the frozen lagoon of the Frisches Haff to reach the waiting ships – one of which, torpedoed by a Russian submarine with 8000 aboard, became a tomb for the largest number of victims ever drowned in a maritime disaster. The Wehrmacht put up a fight of almost demented bravery to cover the rescue of refugees; Richard von Weizsäcker, son of the state secretary of Hitler’s Foreign Ministry and Ex-President of the Federal German Republic, won the Iron Cross First Class in the battle of the Frisches Haff.

  It seems possible that a million Germans died in the flight from the east in the early months of 1945, either from exposure or mistreatment. In the winter of 1945 most of the remaining Germans of eastern Europe – who lived in Silesia, the Czech Sudetenland, Pomerania and elsewhere, numbering some 14 million altogether – were systematically collected and transported westward, largely into the British zone of occupation in Germany. The transportees who arrived were destitute and often in the last stages of deprivation. Of those who failed to complete this terrible journey, it is calculated that 250,000 died in the course of the expulsion from Czechoslovakia, 1.25 million from Poland and 600,000 from elsewhere in eastern Europe. By 1946 the historic German population of Europe east of the Elbe had been reduced from 17 million to 2,600,000.

  The expulsions, often conducted with criminal brutality, were not illegal under the settlement the victors had agreed between themselves at the Potsdam Conference of July 1945. Article 13 of its protocol stated that the ‘transfer to Germany of Germans remaining in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary will have to be undertaken’; at Potsdam, moreover, the Western Allies agreed to a realignment of the German frontier, giving half of East Prussia to Poland (the other half went to the Soviet Union), together with Silesia and Pomerania. These readjustments, balanced by the enforced cession by Poland of its eastern province to Russia, had the cartographic effect of moving Poland a hundred miles westward; demographically, they ensured that post-war Poland would be wholly Polish, at the expense of displacing the German populations of its new western borderlands.

  The Potsdam agreement, to a far greater extent than that of Yalta, determined the future of European government in the post-war years. The concessions made to the Soviet Union by Britain and the United States at Yalta have been widely condemned by Western politicians and polemicists in the aftermath as a ‘betrayal’, particularly of the anti-communist Poles. As Roosevelt and Churchill recognised at the time, the Red Army’s victorious advance into Poland made Stalin’s plans for the most important country in eastern Europe a fait accompli. It ensured that the ‘London Poles’ would have no effective role in the post-war Warsaw administration, which would be dominated by the communist puppet ‘Lublin committee’. Potsdam took post-war arrangements far further than that. By endorsing the resettlement westward of eastern Europe’s Germans – both those of the borderlands of Deutschstum in Poland and Czechoslovakia and the more scattered settlements of German commercial, agricultural and intellectual enterprise in the Slav and Baltic states – it returned ethnic frontiers in Europe largely to those that had prevailed at the creation of Charlemagne’s empire at the beginning of the ninth century, solved at a stroke the largest of the ‘minority problems’, and ensured Soviet domination of central and eastern Europe for two generations to come.

  The Soviet Union’s subsequent refusal to co-operate in the staging of free elections throughout the zones of occupation in post-1945 Germany had the additional effect of consolidating the ‘Iron Curtain’ between communist and non-communist Europe identified by Winston Churchill in his Fulton speech in 1946. The post-war settlement of 1918, by creating self-governing ‘successor states’ out of the tsarist, Hohenzollern and Habsburg empires which had dominated the eastern half of the continent before 1914, greatly diversified its political complexion. Potsdam ruthlessly simplified it. Post-1945 Europe west of the Elbe was to remain a polity of democratic states; east of the Elbe it was to relapse into autocracy, conforming to a single political system dictated and dominated by Stalinist Russia.

  The imposition of Stalinism east of the Elbe after 1945 solved ‘the German problem’, which had transfixed Europe since 1870. It did not solve the problem of how to establish a lasting peace, either in Europe or in the wider world. The United Nations, which the United States, Britain and the Soviet Union had agreed to establish as a more effective successor to the League of Nations at Tehran in 1943, and which came into being at San Francisco in April 1945, was intended to be an instrument of international peace-keeping, with its own general staff commanding forces contributed by the member states under the authority of its Security Council (comprising representatives of Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union, France and China as permanent members). The Soviet Union’s opposition to the establishment of the general staff, and its subsequent use of its veto to block peace-keeping resolutions, quickly emasculated the Security Council’s authority. Stalin’s foreign policy, which may be interpreted either as a resumption of Bolshevik commitment to the fomentation of revolution in the capitalist world or, more realistically, as an effort to entrench the Soviet victory of 1945 by keeping the anti-communist states of western Europe under threat of military attack, did not directly challenge the United Nations’ role. His sponsorship of an anti-democratic coup in Czechoslovakia and his institution of the Berlin blockade in 1948 apart, in the post-war years he took no step which directly threatened the stability of Europe as constituted at Yalta and Potsdam. His challenge to the Western position in the world was to be laid elsewhere – in the Philippines, in Malaya and, above all, in Korea, where he was to endorse an aggression by the communist north against the non-communist south in June 1950.

  The Soviet Union, indeed, demobilised its military forces in Europe as quickly, if not as completely, as did the United States and Britain theirs after August 1945. By 1947 the size of the Red Army had been reduced by two-thirds; the remaining force sufficed to outnumber the occupation forces of the Americans and the British many times – the British Army of the Rhine numbered only five divisions in 1948, the American army in Bavaria only one – but, though its continuing preponderance was to drive the North Americans and Western Europeans into a North Atlantic alliance in 1949, the disparity did not tempt the Soviet leadership to risk extending its power west of the Elbe.

  There are many explanations for this. One is that Soviet foreign policy, for all its coarseness and brutality, was directed by a distinct legalism, which constrained Russia to the spheres of influence defined at Yalta and Potsdam. Anoth
er is that the American monopoly of nuclear weapons, persisting in its strict form until 1949 but effectively for a decade thereafter, deterred the Soviet Union from foreign policy adventures. A third, and contestably the most convincing, is that the trauma of the war had extinguished the will of the Soviet people and their leadership to repeat the experience.

  The legacy of the First World War was to persuade the victors, though not the vanquished, that the costs of war exceeded its rewards. The legacy of the Second World War, it may be argued, was to convince victors and vanquished alike of the same thing. ‘Every man a soldier’, the principle by which the advanced states had organised their armies, and in large measure their societies, since the French Revolution, achieved its culmination in 1939-45 and, in so doing, inflicted on the countries which had lived by it a tide of suffering so severe as to banish the concept of war-making from their political philosophies. The United States, least damaged and most amply rewarded by the war – which left it in 1945 industrially more productive than the rest of the world put together – would be able to muster sufficient national consent to fight two costly, if small, wars in Asia, in Korea and Vietnam. Britain, which had also come through the war relatively unscathed in terms of human if not material loss, would preserve the will to fight a succession of small colonial wars, as France, another country comparatively untouched by severe loss of life, would do as well. By contrast, the Soviet Union, for all the fierce face it showed its putative enemies in the post-war era, eschewed confrontations which put its soldiers at direct risk; its recent venture into Afghanistan, costing a quarter of the number of lives lost by the United States in Vietnam, appears to reinforce, not vitiate, that judgement. Not a single German soldier, despite the Federal Republic’s resumption of conscription in 1956, has been killed by enemy action since May 1945, and the likelihood of such a death grows more, not less, remote. Japan, the most reckless of the war-makers of 1939-45, is today bound by a constitution which outlaws recourse to force as an instrument of national policy in any circumstances whatsoever. No statesman of the Second World War was foolish enough to claim, as those of the First had done, that it was being fought as ‘a war to end all wars’. That, nevertheless, may have been its abiding effect.

  Acknowledgements

  My thanks are due above all to the colleagues and pupils among whom I spent twenty-six years at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. When I joined the academic staff of the Academy in 1960, many of the military instructors were veterans of the Second World War and it was from conversation with them that I first began to develop an understanding of the war as a human event. I also learnt a great deal from my pupils; because of the Sandhurst method of instruction, which requires cadets to prepare ‘presentations’ of battles and campaigns, I was often almost as much a listener as a teacher in the Sandhurst Halls of Study and found a great deal of illumination in hearing those episodes described by embryo officers too young to have taken part in them. A number of my pupils have subsequently become professional military historians themselves, including Charles Messenger, Michael Dewar, Anthony Beevor and Alex Danchev. Of all Sandhurst influences, however, none was stronger than that of the Reader in Military History, Brigadier Peter Young, DSO, MC, FSA, a distinguished Commando soldier of the war, the founder of the War Studies Department and an inspiration to generations of officer cadets.

  The Sandhurst Library contains one of the most important collections of Second World War literature in the world, and I was fortunate enough to be able to use it almost daily for many years. I would particularly like to thank the present Librarian, Mr Andrew Orgill, and his staff; I would also like to thank Mr Michael Sims and his staff at the Staff College Library, Mr John Andrews and Miss Mavis Simpson at the Ministry of Defence Library and the staff of the London Library.

  Friends, and colleagues past and present, at Sandhurst and The Daily Telegraph whom I would particularly like to thank include Colonel Alan Shepperd, Librarian Emeritus of Sandhurst, Mr Conrad Black, Mr James Allan, Dr Anthony Clayton, Lord Deedes, Mr Jeremy Deedes, Mr Robert Fox, Mr Trevor Grove, Miss Adela Gooch, Mr Nigel Horne, Mr Andrew Hutchinson, Mr Andrew Knight, Mr Michael Orr, Mr Nigel Wade, Dr Christopher Duffy and Professor Ned Willmott. I owe warmest thanks of all to Mr Max Hastings, the Editor of The Daily Telegraph and a distinguished historian of the Second World War. Among others I would like to thank are Mr Andrew Heritage and Mr Paul Murphy.

  The manuscript was typed by Miss Monica Alexander and copy-edited by Miss Linden Stafford and I thank them warmly for their professional help. I would also like to thank my editor, Mr Richard Cohen of Hutchinson, and the team he assembled to see the manuscript through production, particularly Mr Robin Cross, Mr Jerry Goldie and Miss Anne-Marie Ehrlich. I owe much gratitude, as always, to my literary agent, Mr Anthony Sheil, and Miss Lois Wallace, my former American literary agent. I am especially indebted to the scholars who read the manuscript: Dr Duncan Anderson, Mr John Bullen, Mr Terry Charman, Mr Terence Hughes, Mr Norman Longmate, Mr James Lucas, Mr Bryan Perrett, Mr Antony Preston, Mr Christopher Shores and Professor Norman Stone. For the errors which remain I alone am responsible.

  My thanks finally to friends at Kilmington, particularly Mrs Honor Medlam, Mr Michael Gray and Mr Peter Stancombe, to my children, Lucy Newmark and her husband Brooks, Thomas, Rose and Matthew, and my darling wife, Susanne.

  John Keegan

  Kilmington Manor

  June 6, 1989

  Bibliography

  Fifty Books on the Second World War

  Bibliographies of the Second World War abound. None is comprehensive, nor is that surprising, since 15,000 titles in Russian alone had appeared by 1980. Excellent working bibliographies may be found, nonetheless, in most good general histories of the war, such as the revised edition of Total War by P. Calvocoressi, G. Wint and J. Pritchard (Lodon, 1989).

  Rather than supply an equivalent of such bibliographies, I have decided to offer a list of fifty books available in English which together provide a comprehensive picture of the most important events and themes of the war, which are readable and from which the general reader can derive his own picture of the war as a guide to deeper reading. The list inevitably reflects my own interests and prejudices and is certainly not complete; it does not, for example, contain a title on the Polish campaign of 1939 or on the Scandinavian or Italian campaigns; it is thin on the war at sea in western waters and on the war in the air; and it is biased towards the fighting in Europe rather than in the Pacific. These distortions are, however, in most cases caused by gaps in the literature. There are still no books which meet the criteria I set myself on the Polish or Italian campaigns. If this judgement seems a depreciation of the remarkable work of the American, British and Commonwealth Official Historians, may it please be noted that I have nevertheless included several volumes which appear in those series, and have omitted others purely for reasons of space. I have included no books in foreign languages, though I would have dearly liked to include the war diary of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, the daily record of Hitler’s operations staff. Its full title is: P. Schramm, Kriegstagebuch des OKW der Wehrmacht, vols 1-8, Munich, 1963. The place of publication of the titles cited is London, unless otherwise stated, and the edition, including those in English translation, is the most recent.

  An indispensable guide to the campaigns is Colonel Vincent J. Esposito’s The West Point Atlas of American Wars, vol 2, New York, 1959; the atlas contains meticulous maps of the main theatres of fighting, whether American troops were engaged or not, complemented by clear narratives on the facing page.

  The best biography of Hitler, whose personality stands at the centre of the Second World War, is still that of Alan Bullock: Hitler, a Study in Tyranny, 1965. Complementing it as a picture of how he directed Germany’s war effort is David Irving’s Hitler’s War, 1977, which has been described as ‘the autobiography Hitler did not write’ and is certainly among the half-dozen most important books on 1939-45. Robert O’Neill’s The German Army a
nd the Nazi Party, 1966, is an essential portrait of both institutions and their relationship in the pre-war years. Two books on the relationship between Hitler and German government and army in the war years which will always be read are: W. Warlimont, Inside Hitler’s Headquarters, 1962, by one of his operations officers, and A. Speer, Inside the Third Reich, 1970; Speer was Hitler’s armaments minister from 1942 and a technocrat of brilliant intelligence who nevertheless allowed himself to become a court favourite. H. Trevor-Roper is the author of two indispensable works: Hitler’s War Directives, 1964, and his eternally fascinating classic, The Last Days of Hitler, 1971.

  Contentious though it is, A. J. P. Taylor’s The Origins of the Second World War, 1963, cannot be bettered as an introduction to that subject. On the beginning of the war in the west an outstanding work of historical drama is Alistair Horne’s To Lose a Battle, 1969; Guy Chapman’s Why France Fell, 1968, meticulously analyses that persisting conundrum. Some of the consequences are described in Robert Paxton’s too little known Parades and Politics at Vichy, Princeton, 1966, a study of ‘the French officer corps under Marshal Pétain’, which is also a brilliant dissection of the dilemmas of resistance and collaboration. The best account of the aftermath of Hitler’s victory in the west is Telford Taylor’s The Breaking Wave, 1967, which is also an account of his defeat in the Battle of Britain.

  Whether or not Hitler had ever seriously contemplated invading Britain, by the autumn of 1940 his thoughts were turning eastwards. Martin van Creveld, in Hitler’s Strategy, the Balkan Clue, Cambridge, 1973, describes the stages through which his thinking proceeded and provides one of the most original of all analyses of strategy and foreign policy in the historiography of the war. A brilliant monograph on a critical aspect of the Balkan campaigns is The Struggle for Crete, 1955, by I. M. G. Stewart, the medical officer of one of the British battalions overwhelmed by the German airborne descent. The fighting in the Western Desert, for the Germans an appendix to their advance to the Mediterranean, has been much written of, but nowhere better than in Correlli Barnett’s The Desert Generals, 1983.