The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred

by Niall Ferguson

  1. Hitler might have accepted his military leaders’ advice (notably that of Admiral Raeder) and focused his attention on winning the war in the Mediterranean in 1941, before invading the Soviet Union. He might, for example, have struck across the Eastern Mediterranean to Cyprus, Lebanon and Syria; or through Turkey (violating her neutrality) towards the Caucasus; or across Egypt to Suez and beyond. Even as it was, the British positions in Malta and Egypt were acutely vulnerable. Rommel might well have been able to drive the British out of Egypt if he had been sent the twenty-nine German divisions that were sitting more or less idle in Western Europe.

  2. Alternatively, Hitler might have diverted more resources into winning the Battle of the Atlantic in 1942. Certainly, the German submarines were inflicting severe losses on Allied shipping throughout 1942 and into the spring of 1943.

  3. Hitler might have waged his war against the Soviet Union more intelligently. Again, he might have listened to the experts (Halder and Gud-erian among them), who advised him to concentrate German efforts on capturing Moscow rather than diverting Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt’s Army Group south wards towards Kiev. In a similar vein, Hitler might not have squandered his 6th Army so profligately at Stalingrad; Alan Brooke’s fear was that Paulus might instead conquer the Caucasus, opening the way to the Caspian Sea and Persian Gulfoil fields.

  4. The Japanese could have waged a different war against the Western powers, attacking Ceylon rather than Port Mores by and Midway in 1942 in order to challenge British dominance of the Indian Ocean. They might also have diverted troops away from China and Manchuria – where 56 per cent of their overseas forces were still stationed at the end of the war – to reinforce their line of defence in the Pacific.

  The difficulty with all these counter factuals – a side from their postulating a Hitler who was not as deaf to expert military advice as the real Hitler was – is that virtually none of them suggests a way in which the Axis powers could have overcome the over whelming economic odds against them once they had taken on simultaneously the British Empire, the United States and the Soviet Union. To be sure, the blitzkrieg campaigns of 1939–42 narrowed the economic gap between the Axis and the Allies. The Germans very successfully sucked resources out of occupied Western Europe; at their peak in 1943 un requited transfers from France amounted to 8 per cent of German gross national product, equivalent to a third of pre-war French national income. Germany all but monopolized the exports of the West European countries she occupied. The former Czechoslovakia, too, was a substantial net contributor to the German war effort. So deep did Operation Barbarossa and subsequent offensives penetrate that they captured more than half of Soviet industrial capacity. Moreover, the Germans were able to treat their empire as a bottomless reservoir of cheap labour. Foreign workers accounted for a fifth of the active civilian labour force by 1943. After being put in charge of German armaments production, Albert Speer galvanized the Reich’s economy, almost trebling weapons output between 1941 and 1944 by imposing standardization on the manufacturers and achieving startling improvements in productivity. The Japanese also performed feats of economic mobilization, increasing aircraft production by a factor of five and a half between 1941 and 1944.

  Yet it was no where near enough. The Big Three Allies had vastly superior material resources. In 1940, when Germany and Italy had faced Britain and France, the latter combination’s total economic output had been roughly two-thirds that of the other side’s. The defeat of France and Poland lengthened the odds against Britain, but the German invasion of the Soviet Union restored the economic balance. With the entry of the United States into the war, the scales tipped the other way; indeed, they all but toppled over. Combined Allied GDP was twice that of the principal Axis powers and their depend encies in 1942. It was roughly three times as large in 1943, and the ratio continued to rise as the war went on, largely as a result of the rapid growth of the US economy (see Figure 15.1). Between 1942 and 1944

  Note: This chart calculates the ratio of Allied to Axis combined gross domestic product. The bars to the right remove not only US GDP from the calculation but also the value of American aid to the UK and Soviet Union.

  Figure 15.1 Ratio of Allied to Axis GDP, with and without the United States, 1938–1945

  American military spending was nearly twice that of Germany and Japan combined. It is difficult to see how different strategic decisions could have prevented this disastrous lengthening of the economic odds against an Axis victory. So much of the increment in Allied production simply lay beyond the reach of Axis arms, in the United States and beyond the Urals. Moreover, the additional oilfields that might have come within Hitler’s reach had he fought the war differently were still far too modest in their output to have narrowed significantly the petroleum gap between the two sides.*

  It is important also to bear in mind that the Axis powers were fighting not only against the British, Russians and Americans; they were fighting against the combined forces of the British, Russian and American empires as well. The total numbers of men fielded by the various parts of the British Empire were immense. All told, the United Kingdom itself mobilized just under six million men and women. But an additional 5.1 million came from India, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Victories like El Alamein and even more so Imphal were victories for imperial forces as much as for British forces; the colonial commitment to the Empire proved every bit as strong as in the First World War. Especially remarkable was the fact that more than two and a half million Indians volunteered to serve in the British Indian Army during the war – more than sixty times the number who fought for the Japanese. The rapid expansion of the Indian officer corps provided a crucial source of loyalty, albeit loyalty that was conditional on post-war independence. The Red Army was also much more than just a Russian army. In January 1944 Russians accounted for 58 per cent of the 200 infantry divisions for which records are available, but Ukrainians accounted for 22 per cent, an order of magnitude more than fought on the German side, and a larger proportion than their share of the pre-war Soviet population. Half the soldiers of the Soviet 62nd Army at Stalingrad were not Russians. The American army, too, was ethnically diverse. Although they were generally kept in segregated units, African-Americans accounted for around 11 per cent of total US forces mobilized and fought in all the major campaigns from Operation Torch onwards. Norman Mailer’s reconnaissance platoon in The Naked and the Dead includes two Jews, a Pole, an Irishman, a Mexican and an Italian. Two of the six servicemen who raised the Stars and Stripes on Iwo Jima were of foreign origin; one was a Pima Indian. More than 20,000 Japanese-Americans served in the US army during the war. As John Hersey put it in A Bell for Adano, the hero of which is ‘an Italian-American going to war in Italy’:

  America is the international country… Our Army has Yugoslavs and Frenchmen and Austrians and Czechs and Norwegians in it, and everywhere our Army goes in Europe, a man can turn to the private beside him and say: ‘Hey, Mac, what’s this furriner saying?’… And Mac will be able to translate. This is where we are lucky. No other country has such a fund of men who speak the languages of the lands we must invade… Just as truly as Europe once invaded us, with wave after wave of immigrants, now we are invading Europe, with wave after wave of sons of immigrants.

  Hence the irony of Hersey’s insight that the typical GI’s sole war aim was to ‘go home’.

  The Germans, as we have seen, had made some efforts to mobilize other peoples in occupied Europe, as had the Japanese in the Far East, but these were dwarfed by what the Allies achieved. Indeed, the abject failure of the Axis empires to win the loyalty of their new subjects ensured that Allied forces were reinforced by a plethora of exile forces, partisan bands and resistance organizations. Even excluding these auxiliaries, the combined armed forces of the principal Allies were already just under 30 per cent larger than those of the Axis in 1942. A year later the difference was more than 50 per cent. By the end of the war, including also Free French* and Polish forces, Y
ugoslav partisans and Romanians fighting on the Russian side, the Allies had more than twice as many men under arms. Fifty-two different nationalities were represented in the Jewish Brigade formed by the British in 1944. They followed an earlier wave of 9,000 or so refugees from Spain, Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia who had joined the so-called Alien Companies, nicely nicknamed the ‘King’s Own Loyal Enemy Aliens’.

  The best measure of the Allied advantage was in terms of military hardware, however, since it was with capital rather than labour – with machinery rather than manpower–that the Germans and the Japanese were ultimately to be defeated. In every major category of weapon, the Axis powers fell steadily further behind with each passing month. Between 1942 and 1944, the Allies out-produced the Axis in terms of machine pistols by a factor of 16 to 1, in naval vessels, tanks and mortars by roughly 5 to 1, and in rifles, machine-guns, artillery and combat aircraft by roughly 3 to 1. Blitzkrieg had been possible when the odds were just the other way round. Once both sides were motorized – one of the defining characteristics of total war – the key to victory became logistics, not heroics. The fourfold numerical superiority of British armour was one of the deciding factors at El Alamein. The average ratio of Soviet to German armour at the beginning of the offensives of 1944 and 1945 was just under eight. The ratio in terms of combat aircraft on the Eastern Front rose from three in July 1943 to ten by January 1945. Likewise, Allied dominance of the skies ensured the success of D-Day and guaranteed the ultimate defeat of the Germans in Western Europe. One German soldier clearly remembered ‘the day that it was all made clear to me, the impossibility of Germany prevailing’:

  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.* 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 perfo
rmance 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.

  ANATOMY OF AN ALLIANCE

  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.