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

by Niall Ferguson

  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.*

  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.

  Still, there is no question that Hitler fatally underestimated the United States. ‘I don’t see much future for the Americans,’ declared the Stammtisch sage in 1942, in one of his dinner-table monologues:

  In my view, it’s a decayed country. And they have their racial problem, and the problem of social inequalities. Those were what caused the downfall of Rome, and yet Rome was a solid edifice that stood for something… The German Reich has 270 opera houses – a standard of cultural existence of which they over there have no conception. They have clothes, food, cars and a badly constructed house – but with a refrigerator! This sort of thing does not impress us.

  This was to misunderstand, firstly, the role of race in American politics. No doubt, blacks were second-class citizens, especially in the Southern states, where all kinds of legal discrimination still existed. But the same Southerners who were white supremacists were also among the strongest proponents of American intervention in the war, not least because of the South’s high export-dependence. Isolationist, neutralist and Anglophobe sentiments were certainly strong in those regions of the United States with large ethnically German populations descended from nineteenth-century immigrants. But their influence was counter balanced and perhap seven outweighed by the country’s large and articulate Jewish community (which accounted for around 3.4 per cent of the population), afforced by over 300,000 refugees from Nazi-controlled Europe, many of whom were also Jewish. Ironically, many Americans harboured at least some anti-Semitic prejudices. Just under half of Americans polled in 1942 thought that Jews had ‘too much power in the United States’. More than two-fifths of those surveyed in 1940 were opposed to mixed marriages.
Just under a fifth of Americans considered Jews a ‘menace to America’ and nearly a third expected ‘a widespread campaign against Jews in this country’, which more than 10 per cent said they would support. Nevertheless a Gallup Poll showed that the American public overwhelmingly condemned Hitler’s persecution of the Jews.

  Hitler also missed the point completely about American economic capabilities, for the cars and the refrigerators he sneered at were being produced by corporations that led the world in techniques of mass production and modern management. The Axis leaders deluded themselves into believing that, with the Great Depression, the American economic model had disintegrated. Yet despite the sluggish growth of aggregate demand in the mid to late 1930s, firms like General Motors were taking tremendous strides forward in efficiency, exploiting those economies of scale that were unique to the huge American market. Exports to Britain and the Soviet Union had given GM and it speers a foretaste of what was to come. With the American entry into the war, they were inundated with government orders for military hardware. In the First World War, the result had been a mess: production bottlenecks, chronic waste and inflationary pressure. In 1942 the opposite happened. ‘The real news,’ as Charles E. Wilson of General Motors put it, ‘is that our American methods of production, our know-how about the business, could be applied to mass production of all these war things… and that is the one factor that I think our Axis enemies overlooked.’ Here, too, a compromise was involved. With astonishing speed the big corporations converted themselves from the champions of a consumer society to the servants of a command economy. As John Hancock and Bernard Baruch observed: ‘With the coming of war a sort of totalitarianism is asserted. The government tells each business what it is to contribute to the war program.’

  In macroeconomic terms the results were startling enough. By 1942 US gross national product was more than 60 per cent higher than it had been in 1938. By 1944 it was more than double its pre-war level. Between 1940 and 1943, five million new jobs were created. This was the result of an immense fiscal stimulus, which saw federal deficits rise above 20 per cent of GNP, and an attendant surge in both private investment and personal consumption. Though some raw materials did have to be rationed, the United States was, as Wilson of GM put it, the first country to work out how to have both guns and butter in wartime. Much of the credit for this success must go to the corporate executives – the so-called ‘dollar-a-year men’ like Philip Reed of General Electric – who gave their services effectively gratis to the government during the war, and facilitated the remarkably smooth cooperation between the War Department and the big manufacturers, hitherto staunch opponents of Roosevelt. Never before or since has the federal government intervened on such a scale in American economic life, building and sometimes also owning a vast number of new industrial facilities. Agencies like the National Defense Advisory Commission, the Office of Production Management, the War Production Board and the Office of War Mobilization transformed the regulatory landscape. It was at the micro economic level, however, that the output war was really won. For the biggest wartime advances in mass production and management were made in vast factories like Ford’s mile-long bomber assembly line at Willow Run, Boeing’s B-29 plant at Seattle or General Motors’ aero-engine factory at Allison. At peak, Boeing Seattle was churning out sixteen B-17s a day and employing 40,000 men and women on round-the-clock shifts. Never had ships been built so rapidly as the Liberty ships, 2,700 of which slid down the slip ways during the war years. It was at wartime General Motors that Peter Drucker saw the birth of the modern ‘concept of the corporation’, with its decentralized system of management. And it was during the war that the American military-industrial complex was born; over half of all prime government contracts went to just thirty-three corporations. Boeing’s net wartime profits for the years 1941 to 1945 amounted to $27.6 million; in the preceding five years the company had lost nearly $3 million. General Motors Corporation employed half a million people and supplied one-tenth of all American war production.* Ford alone produced more military equipment during the war than Italy. Small wonder some more-cerebral soldiers felt they were risking their necks not in a ‘real war… but… in a regulated business venture’, as James Jones put it in The Thin Red Line. It was strange indeed that the recovery of the American economy from the Depression should owe so much to the business of flattening other peoples’ cities.

  Yet the Americans did more than just equip themselves for total war. They also equipped their Allies. It is well known that the system of Lend-Lease provided a vital multi-billion pound economic lifeline to Britain. Net grants from the United States totalled £5.4 billion between 1941 and 1945, on average around 9 per cent of UK gross national product. Less well known are the vast quantities of material that the Americans made available to the Soviets. All told, Stalin received supplies worth 93 billion roubles, between 4 and 8 per cent of Soviet net material product. The volumes of hardware suggest that these official statistics understate the importance of American assistance: 380,000 field telephones, 363,000 trucks, 43,000 jeeps, 6,000 tanks and over 5,000 miles of telephone wire were shipped along the icy Arctic supply routes to Murmansk, from California to Vladivostok, or overland from Persia. Thousands of fighter planes were flown along an ‘air bridge’ from Alaska to Siberia. Nor was it only hardware that the Americans supplied to Stalin. Around 58 per cent of Soviet aviation fuel came from the United States during the war, 53 per cent of all explosives and very nearly half of all the copper, aluminium and tyres, to say nothing of the tons of tinned Spam – in all, somewhere between 41 and 63 per cent of all Soviet military supplies. American engineers also continued to provide valuable technical assistance, as they had in the early days of Magnitogorsk. The letters ‘USA’ stencilled on the Studebaker trucks were said to stand for Ubit Sukina sina Adolf – ‘to kill that son-of-a-bitch Adolf’. The Soviets would have struggled to kill half so many Germans without this colossal volume of aid.

  It was not an aspect of what the Russians call the Great Patriotic War that Stalin was particularly eager to publicize. But without this vast contribution of American capital – as both Marshal Zhukov and Stalin’s successor Nikita Khrushchev privately conceded – the Soviet Union might well have lost the war or would, at least, have taken much longer to win it. If the Red Army the Germans faced in the summer of 1943 was a more formidable foe than the one that had all but collapsed in the summer of 1941, this was in significant measure a result of American assistance. Yet the improvement was also, without question, a consequence of Stalin’s near total control over his subjects’ lives. The 1930s had taught the Soviets that nearly any material obstacle could be overcome, provided the lives of the workforce were regarded as expendable. So when Stalin gave the order to relocate and reconstruct Soviet industry to the east of the Ural Mountains, it was just another feat of inhuman economics, as mind-boggling in its ambition as the Five-Year Plans – and almost as wasteful of human life.*

  It might have been hoped that in the crisis of war Stalin would suspend the Terror. On the contrary; the slave state that was the Soviet camp system carried on consuming its victims in their millions. Prisoners were hastily moved eastwards, often on forced marches, as the Germans advanced; guards shot or bayoneted those who fell by the wayside rather than let the Germans liberate them. Hundreds of thousands of the workers who manned Soviet industry during the war were prisoners, toiling up to sixteen hours a day on subsistence rations. The pace of Soviet ethnic cleansing was also accelerated. In 1941 prisoners in Poland and the Baltic states were slaughtered to save moving them eastwards. Around 1.2 million ethnic Germans were deported from European Russia to Siberia and Central Asia, including the easternmost of the Volksdeutsche, the Volga Germans. More than 66,000 Germans were also expelled from the south-western region briefly run by the Romanians as Transnistria. With the German retreat from the Caucasus in late 1943, the Crimean Tatars and the Chechens were subject to collective deportation on the grounds that they had collaborated with the
enemy. Other ethnic groups deemed to be suspect were also exiled: Balkars, Bulgarians, Greeks, Ingush, Iranians, Kalmyks, Karachai, Kurds, Khemsils (Muslim Armenians) and Meskhetian Turks. Jews, too, now began to fall under Stalin’s suspicion. Ordinary Russian civilians found themselves living in a ‘single war camp’, working seven-day weeks on rations roughly a fifth of those enjoyed by their British counterparts.

  Soviet military discipline, meanwhile, was draconian. It was Stalin’s old enemy Trotsky who had pioneered the rule that if Red Army soldiers advanced they might be shot, but if they fled, they would definitely be shot. Stalin was happy to revive that one vestige of Trotskyism. Order No. 227 (‘Not a Step Back’) was issued by the People’s Commissar of Defence, namely Stalin, on July 28, 1942:

  We can no longer tolerate commanders, commissars and political officers whose units leave their positions at will. We can no longer tolerate the fact that commanders, commissars and political officers allow several cowards to run the show at the battlefield, that the panic-mongers carry away other soldiers in their retreat and open the way to the enemy. Panic-mongers and cowards are to be exterminated on the spot.

  From now on the iron law of discipline for every officer, soldier [and] political officer should be – not a single step back without order from higher command. Company, battalion, regiment and division commanders, as well as the commissars and political officers of corresponding ranks, who retreat without order from above, are traitors to the Motherland. They should be treated as traitors to the Motherland. This is the call of our Motherland.