Why the Allies Won
Page 3
This spirit was expressed internationally in the growing division between a small number of states anxious to preserve the existing balance of power and a larger number who sought to revise it. The defenders of the existing system were few indeed. At their forefront stood Britain and France. Both states lay at the centre of global empires which together covered one-third of the world’s surface. Neither state had enough money or military resources to defend its worldwide interests, and each knew it. No other major power had much interest in the survival of the Franco-British world order. Other nations could see a gap widening between the apparent and the real strength of Britain and France. Less than a generation separated the two major world powers of the 1930s from the humiliating débâcle at Suez in 1956. The United States shared the liberal politics of western Europe, but was hostile to old-fashioned colonialism, and deeply distrusted what American leaders saw as a reactionary and decadent Europe. The Soviet leadership saw the old imperial states as historically doomed, and, though the Soviet Union did little in the 1930s to hasten their demise, Stalin looked in the long run for what he called a ‘new equilibrium’.7 There was no hint in the 1930s of the later wartime coalition.
The chief challenge to the existing equilibrium came from Germany, Italy and Japan. All three had been democratic states after the Great War, but their democracy turned sour in the heat of economic crisis and popular authoritarian nationalism. In 1922 Mussolini came to office in Italy at the head of the first fascist party to gain power; in 1931 Japan came gradually under the domination of the military; in 1933 Hitler’s National Socialist Party, profiting from the social and political chaos generated by the slump in Germany, stormed the ramparts of respectable politics and imposed single-man, single-party dictatorship with a little over one-third of the popular vote. All three states were united by resentment. They were, Mussolini argued, the ‘proletarian states’, dominated by the wealthy plutocracies, Britain, France and America. The fashionable view that empire was a source of political strength and economic nourishment, particularly for states that were over-populated and weak in natural resources, led all three to the conclusion that in the crisis-ridden 1930s their only hope of salvation lay in acquiring empires of their own. The term everyone used was ‘living-space’; since the globe’s territorial resources were finite, such space could be acquired only at the expense of someone else, and violently. The evident weakness of Britain and France and the unwillingness of either the United States or the Soviet Union to take their place in world politics, exposed a temporary window of opportunity, through which the three ‘New Order’ states hesitantly climbed.
In the space of half a dozen years the fragility of the old order was made transparently clear. In 1931 Japan invaded and occupied Manchuria, the industrially rich province of northern China. An uneasy truce followed. Japan refused to abandon her conquest in the face of western disapproval and no one had the strength or willingness to expel her by force. In 1937 a full-scale war broke out between Japan and China. Japanese leaders declared an Asian New Order and set out to conquer China’s Pacific provinces. The attempt lasted to 1945 and Japan’s defeat at American and Soviet hands. In 1935 Mussolini attacked Abyssinia to extend Italy’s colonial empire, and to lay the foundation for Italian domination of the Mediterranean and northern Africa. Again western protests did nothing to reverse the aggressor. By May 1936 Abyssinia was conquered. In July that year Italy sent forces to help Franco in the Spanish Civil War. Long before the onset of world war both Japan and Italy had abandoned any idea of peaceful settlement. They fought for their living space, and calculated correctly that none of the other powers would be willing to obstruct them by force.
Germany was the most dangerous component of the Axis, though German forces, unlike Japanese or Italian, did not fire a shot in anger until the invasion of Poland in September 1939 which launched world war. The source of the German threat was Hitler. Other German nationalists wanted Germany to reassert herself as a major state in the 1930s following years of enforced subservience to the victor states of 1918. Few Germans of any political shade had accepted the Allied demands for reparations and German disarmament, or been reconciled to the loss of territory to Poland and France. But very few Germans wanted to run the risk of war again. Hitler’s outlook was quite different. Any account of the origins and course of the Second World War must give Hitler the leading part. Without him a major war in the early 1940s between all the world’s great powers was unthinkable.
Hitler began life in 1889 in the small Austrian town of Braunauam-Inn, born into the vast multi-racial Habsburg empire, ruled by the grand old man of the dynasty, Emperor Franz-Joseph. He was the third son of an Austrian customs official. He was indulged by his parents, perhaps to compensate for the death of all but one of their other children. Hitler’s parents both died by the time he was eighteen. The year his mother died, in 1907, Hitler failed to gain entry to the Vienna Academy where he had hoped to pursue an artistic career, the one thing in which he was interested. Over the next six years he did little, living off a legacy from his mother, painting when he could, escaping from the Austrian authorities who wanted him to do military service. He had no desire to fight for the largely Slavic empire. When he was finally caught he had moved to Munich. Early in 1914 he was examined by Austrian military doctors and they found him, to his relief, unfit for service. He stayed on in Munich in 1914, where on 1 August he stood in a large crowd on the Odeonplatz listening to news of the outbreak of war. Now he was eager for military service, and the German authorities were less circumspect about his health. He joined the Bavarian Reserve Infantry and went to the front. He was exhilarated by war. In December 1914 he wrote to his Munich landlady: ‘I have been risking my life every day, looking death straight in the eye.’ That same month he was awarded the Iron Cross, Second Class. ‘It was’, he wrote, ‘the happiest day of my life.’
Against all the odds Hitler survived the whole war. After his early exuberance, he later confessed to a growing fear. He did not like the constant artillery barrage, the daily confrontation with death. He stopped himself from going mad or from shirking his duties by what he described as a long inner struggle. By 1916, he later wrote, ‘my will was undisputed master … Now fate could bring on the ultimate tests without my nerves shattering or my reason failing.’ His later determination to show his willpower at moments of crisis, despite inner misgivings, surely has its roots in the horrific experiences of the Western Front. When the war ended with Hitler in hospital following a gas attack, the will temporarily snapped.
He was consumed in 1918 by a deep despair at German defeat. He found the psychological shock almost unbearable, the humiliation personal. In his struggle to come to terms with reality he reached two conclusions: defeat was the fault of Jews and Bolsheviks on whom a terrible revenge would one day be wrought; and he, Adolf Hitler, was the chosen instrument of destiny to lead the German people in the coming era of racial struggle and conquest. The messianic complex married to the savage prejudices made Hitler a far more dangerous and explosive force in world politics than Italy or Japan, or even Stalin’s Soviet Union. Hitler’s appetite for vengeance, his unquenchable hatreds, his powerful self-belief, all proved irrepressible. Once he had his hands on the controls of the German state after 1933 there was nothing else he wanted to do but to keep his tryst with fate, first through the construction of a powerfully armed, racially-aware community embracing all the German peoples, and then through the unavoidable struggle against Bolshevism and the Jews.8
He revealed little of these fantastic ambitions to those around him. Historians have been inclined to take them with a pinch of salt. There was no clear plan, no detailed blueprint for German world power. But there did exist an incontestable continuity from Hitler’s first angry scribbled notes in 1919, through Mein Kampf, written in 1924, to the memoranda, speeches and secret meetings of the 1930s. His warped view of the world was his reason for living. By marrying his fortunes to German destiny he ceased to be the humbl
e, insecure veteran, the man who looked, according to one of his close friends, ‘like a waiter in a railway station restaurant’, and instead rubbed shoulders with Charlemagne, with Frederick Barbarossa, with Bismarck, the heroes of the German pantheon. Hitler was Jekyll and Hyde; at rest he appeared pallid and puffy, personally nondescript, socially inept, full of nervous small talk; but in his stride, eyes ablaze, theatrical, unstoppably articulate, intemperately self-absorbed, he imagined himself a real-life Siegfried.9
Hitler was astute enough politically to recognise that he could not transform the world order overnight. Germany had to revive its shattered economy; the National Socialist Party needed to secure itself domestically; above all Germany needed to rearm. By 1938 much of this was achieved. Hitler’s personal power was beyond challenge and he now exerted it to turn the German state towards war. The first object was to build a united Germany. In March 1938 Austria was fused with the German Reich. In May Hitler ordered the armed forces to prepare an attack on Czechoslovakia to bring the three million German-speakers living there under German rule. Only the unexpected intervention of Britain and France, unable to countenance an entirely free hand for Hitler in eastern Europe, frustrated his desire for violence. The German areas of Czechoslovakia were won instead by negotiation. In March 1939 the rest of Czechoslovakia was swallowed up, this time with no intervention from abroad. In April 1939 he ordered the armed forces to prepare for another small war, this time against Poland, for the reconquest of the German areas lost in 1919. By 1939 Germany was poised, like Japan and Italy before her, to use war to tear up the existing order.
Those states bent on preserving this order had a number of uninviting options left by the late 1930s. They could give in and acquiesce in the redrawing of the world in the hope that something might be salvaged; they could side with the aggressors, as many smaller states did; or they could fight to preserve the old system and their own way of life. There were circles in London and Paris in support of each of these options. Most opinion outside Britain and France assumed that the western failure to stop either Japan or Italy was a tacit recognition that acquiescence made most political sense. In truth, neither Japanese nor Italian expansion was perceived to be so vital to western interests that they would risk open war. Germany was a different matter. The German threat was closer to home, and much larger. Germany’s economic size and military potential marked her out as the only revisionist state that could seriously menace the national interest of the other great powers. Though Nazism was disliked by much of British and French opinion, it was not the nature of Hitler’s system that worried western leaders as much as the degree of power it could exert abroad, and the warlike aspect of its unpredictable leader. By the late 1930s both the British and French governments opted for the most difficult course, containing German ambition by the threat of military force.
The threat was real enough. Both states began to arm heavily from the mid-1930s and by 1939 outproduced Germany in tanks and aircraft. In 1938 the threat was just sufficient to force Hitler to abandon his war on the Czechs and at the Munich Conference to submit to the compromise insisted on by Britain and France. But it was difficult to persuade Hitler long term that the military threat was convincing, and that the western states, after a decade in which they had failed to obstruct any major act of aggression, had the will to fight for the old political order. In 1939 Hitler gambled that they would not fight; to ensure this he pulled off what he regarded as a spectacular diplomatic coup in August 1939 by reaching agreement with Stalin on Soviet non-aggression and the division of Poland between the two states. In his view the old balance of power was in ruins by the autumn of 1939. He ruled out the possibility of intervention and attacked Poland on 1 September. Neither Britain nor France actively wanted war in 1939, but neither could face the consequences of accepting international humiliation and German domination of Europe. At home a broad patriotic consensus emerged in 1939 in favour of confronting Hitler. The British and French armed forces agreed in March on a common war plan to wear Germany down in a long campaign of blockade and attrition as they had done in the Great War. The two states allied with each other and with Poland in the spring of 1939, a commitment from which none of them could easily escape when Hitler launched his war on the Poles. On 3 September Germany, Britain, France and Poland were at war. It was not the war Hitler had expected, but he fought it willingly enough. It was the war the western allies expected, but they fought it with great reluctance.
When the crumbling world order plunged into violence in September 1939, the eclipse of democracy and international stability threatened to become total. On news of the war, Harold Ickes, Roosevelt’s Secretary for the Interior, confided in his diary the gloomy view that civilisation was now doomed, ‘headed for a decline of fifty or one hundred years, or even longer, during which our descendants will lose many of the gains we have made’.10 There was grim evidence in the eighteen months that followed to support the bleakest prognostications. The New Order triumphed everywhere. German forces swept aside all resistance in democratic Europe. In the spring of 1940 Denmark and Norway were overrun. In May and June Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and France were defeated and a German army of occupation installed. The French army was the only major centre of military power on the Continent outside Germany. Its defeat in six weeks – a product not of numerical inferiority, but of poor organisation and fighting skills – effectively destroyed the order established after the Great War. Britain escaped the same fate by the narrowest of margins. Her army defeated in France, her air force worn down in the weeks of intervention in the European struggle, her navy at risk from German air power, Britain was saved by the poor level of German preparation for a cross-Channel assault, and the failure of German air forces to wrest control of the skies of southern England from the RAF. The Battle of Britain saved the island from invasion, but it did not do more than that. By the summer of 1940 Britain was isolated in Europe, with no means to re-enter the European mainland, and little prospect of alliance.
The situation in the east was more delicate for Germany. Poland was easily defeated in the autumn of 1939; the remaining states in eastern Europe and the Balkans began to align themselves with Germany, centre of the New Order. The Soviet Union, which Britain regarded as virtually an enemy state, supplied Germany with food, oil and raw materials. For Hitler the opportunity now opened up invitingly to complete the programme of empire-building by seizing the coveted living-space of Eurasia, the rich steppe areas of the Ukraine, the oil of the Caucasus, the sprawling iron and steel basin of southern Russia. Only the Red Army now stood between him and the dream of world power, and there was every indication that it was poorly armed and led. In the autumn of 1940 he turned his back on Britain, who could, he argued, be finished off by the Luftwaffe in good time, and looked eastward. By December he had drawn up a plan, ‘Barbarossa’, for an assault along the whole length of the Soviet frontier, deep into Soviet territory, to seize Moscow, Leningrad and the industrial south. It was a plan of exceptional scope and risk, for Hitler believed nothing less than that the Soviet Union could be defeated in four months.
From Britain’s point of view the German threat was only one worry among many. On the back of German victory over France and Britain in the Battle of France the other revisionist states, Italy and Japan, began to flex their own muscles. Italy declared war on 10 June and confronted Britain with a sizeable army and navy astride her imperial sea route to Suez and India. During 1941 Italy, with German assistance, pushed back British Commonwealth forces towards Suez and threatened the whole Middle East. Italy attacked Greece too, and in the process provoked a German-Yugoslav conflict, which led German forces to occupy much of the Balkan peninsula. Britain was faced with the very real threat that the Axis states would seize Gibraltar and Suez and shatter what remained of Britain’s strategic position overseas. Only Hitler’s obsession with the assault on the Soviet Union prevented Britain’s almost certain defeat. In the Far East Japan moved forces down to the F
rench colony of Indo-China (Vietnam) and threatened British and Dutch possessions in the East Indies, with their rich supplies of oil. In September 1940, in recognition of their successes, the three aggressors met at Berlin where they signed a Tri-partite Pact to divide the world between them, ‘to establish and maintain a new order of things’.11
The ultimate confrontation for Hitler was the contest with Bolshevism, which he had longed for ever since the agonising days of defeat in 1918. On 22 June 1941 four million soldiers poured across the Soviet frontier, including contingents from Germany’s allies and co-belligerents, Finland, Hungary and Romania. Despite numerous warnings from sources even the Soviet intelligence authorities could have regarded as unimpeachable, Stalin insisted to the very last moment that Hitler would not attack. He thought he had the measure of his fellow dictator. The shock was complete. Soviet forces were quite unprepared for the scale of attack. Thrown into complete confusion the Soviet front broke open, and German armies streamed towards their targets. On 3 October Hitler broke a three-month silence by returning from his headquarters to Berlin to announce final victory to the German public. His excitement was evident to all who saw him. To his carefully selected audience at the Sportpalast he announced that he had returned from ‘the greatest battle in the history of the world’, which Germany had won. The Bolshevik dragon was slain ‘and would never rise again’.12 There was a tumult of applause. A few days later the news was formally released to the German public: there were two large Soviet army groups encircled by German forces and on the point of surrender, but after that the war in the east was over. Hitler planned, like some mediaeval Mongol khan, to destroy Stalin’s capital. Moscow was not to be occupied but ‘completely wiped from the earth’. Neutral journalists were invited to the Propaganda Ministry where, in front of a colossal map of the Soviet Union, German spokesmen outlined to the anxious newsmen the dimensions of the German victory and the shape of the New Order.13