Second World War, The

by Corrigan, Gordon

  At around 6 million men, the Soviet army was enormous, but its organization and structure were unwieldy and ramshackle and it was led by an ill-educated and barely competent officer class whose operational decisions were subject to review by a parallel command structure of political commissars at all levels. The ravages of forced industrialization, collectivization of agriculture and Stalin’s purges of 1937–38, which despatched to execution, imprisonment or exile around 100,000 army officers, including nearly all the high command, left Russia in no state to resist when invasion came in 1941.

  The United States of America was even less prepared for war than Britain. Many Americans thought that it had been a mistake to become involved in the first war. Congress had declined to ratify the Versailles Treaty in 1919 and the nation had withdrawn into isolation, with no intention or expectation of again participating in a European war that could not possibly affect American interests. In the year that Hitler came to power in Germany, America had an army of 132,000 men, which meant it was even smaller than Czechoslovakia’s. That army had one acting full general (the Chief of Staff, Douglas MacArthur), no lieutenant-generals and a promotion system by strict seniority. Its tanks were obsolete and its aircraft rapidly becoming so. The army was mainly deployed along the Mexican border or in the Philippines, and, while the USA did have a sizeable navy, the Depression had ensured that the 1916 Fleet, the threat of which had frightened the British into signing the Washington treaty, was never built.

  Even Germany, where more thought, energy and money had gone into the armed forces than anywhere else, was unprepared for a long war. Ever since the days of little Brandenburg, German soldiers and statesmen had striven to avoid a war on two fronts. Prussia, and later Germany, had to win a war quickly, or she could not win it at all – a reality determined by geography, economics and the relative size of her population. In 1870 she had defeated France in six weeks – all else was mere mopping up. In 1914 she had tried, via the Schlieffen Plan, to win by Christmas and she had failed. Having taken on the empires of France, Britain and Russia, and then the United States, and having given time for the traditional British weapon of blockade to bite, she had eventually discovered that the odds were simply far too great. In the 1920sand 1930s the only state with which Germany could cooperate in attempting to build up a military machine that might break the shackles of Versailles was the world’s other pariah – Soviet Russia – and both Weimar and National Socialist regimes carried out tank and aircraft development deep inside Russia, the quid pro quo being that Russian officers attended German military courses. Despite National Socialist antipathy towards Bolshevism, there was a strong historical justification for alignment with Russia: from 1815 onwards Prussia had usually had what Bismarck called an insurance treaty with Russia to avoid war on two fronts, a treaty which was only discarded on the insistence of Kaiser Wilhelm II, who thought it unnecessary.

  In 1939, therefore, the Wehrmacht was a tactical, rather than strategic, organization, and the German armed forces that entered the war were structured for short, sharp campaigns based on mobility and shock action. The Luftwaffe’s main role was to provide ground support while the German navy, the Kriegsmarine, was configured for commerce raiding, mine-laying and submarine warfare. Germany did not believe that France and Britain would actually keep their promises to Poland, but thought that, even if they did, they could be swiftly disposed of.

  Perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of Germany’s conduct of the war is not that she tried to take on the world – fair enough, if you think you can do it – but her treatment of her own and Europe’s Jews. There is scant – if any – evidence that German Jews were other than loyal citizens; indeed, during the first war a German government survey was carried out to determine whether Jewish soldiers were being killed at the same rate as other Germans and found that they were.* There is no logic in the German extermination policy of 1942–45, which used up transportation and manpower assets that would have been far better employed in trying to win the war. Behind the rhetoric of racial contamination – which thinking Germans must have known was nonsense – it is impossible to find any good reasons for the judicial killing of millions of people. There was, of course, a long history of anti-Semitism in Europe, but, whereas in America and Britain anti-Semitism was characterized by the blackballing of Jewish applicants for membership of golf clubs, in Europe Jews were subject to pogroms and all manner of discrimination. Nevertheless, if National Socialist Germany really believed that she had to eliminate her Jews entirely, why not win the war first and then slaughter at leisure?

  What is even more extraordinary is that, while all this was going on, there were still Jews serving in the German armed forces. Horst Rippert, a former sergeant pilot of the Luftwaffe now aged eighty-eight, has recently come to public attention because he may, or may not, have been the Bf 109 pilot who on 31 July 1944 shot down the French author and Free French pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupéry as he flew a reconnaissance mission from Corsica over south-western France. Rippert, who went on to become a sports journalist after the war, said in passing that he was at one stage taken off flying duties ‘because I was Jewish’, but was later reinstated and subsequently decorated by the Luftwaffe’s Commander-in-Chief, Hermann Göring.1 Meanwhile, this author was recently introduced to a Jewish student whose German Jewish grandfather, who was blond and blue-eyed, had served happily in the Waffen SS. It was not all as simple as it might now seem.

  We tend, of course, to excuse or gloss over Japanese atrocities during the war as being symptomatic of an apparently barbarous people who knew no better, but the Germans were educated, civilized and cultured and most assuredly did know better. I have asked a number of German historians why, morality aside, they did not postpone killing their Jews until after the war. The only reply that seems to make some sort of sense is that to National Socialism the ridding Europe of Jews for all time was more important than winning the war. Wars can be re-fought; a race, once extinct, is gone for ever. That said, even if Germany had won the war, it is difficult to see how she could have justified the extermination camps to the world or to her own population, and what happened and the opprobrium that it attached to the very name of Germany has echoes to this day.*

  Hitler and the NSDAP did their best to equate, in the public mind, Jewishness and communism. Some Jews were, of course, communist, as were some Roman Catholics, Lutherans and atheists, but the vast majority were not. Europeans were frightened of communism: it had a self-avowed international aspect, whatever Stalin might say about socialism in one country, and it could be a lot nastier than anything the NSDAP came up with. Hitler made officials and generals he lost faith in retire to the country; Stalin had them shot. If you can convince people that communism threatens everything you believe in – which up to a point it did – and you then manage to convince people that Judaism goes hand in hand with communism, then it makes it a lot easier to ship your Jews off to remote areas out of sight and presumably out of mind. No doubt some of the Allgemeine (or general, not to be confused with the Waffen, or armed) SS who ran the death camps were psychopaths but they cannot all have been so – most must have believed that what they were doing was in the national interest.

  As to exactly which institutions and individuals were culpable in the policy towards the Jews is still the subject of debate. After the war, it was in the interests of democratic politicians trying to establish the new Germany and of Western governments that needed Germany as an ally in the Cold War against the new threat from the USSR to believe that most Germans knew nothing of the extermination camps and that the German armed forces had fought an honourable war. As most of the camps were either in remote rural areas or in what had been Poland, the majority of the German civilian population were probably ignorant as to what actually went on,† and may well have convinced themselves, or at least tried to convince themselves, that, when their Jewish neighbours were rounded up and put on railway wagons, they really were just going to be resettled in the East. M
ost American and British veterans of the war would agree that by and large the German armed forces, the Wehrmacht, fought decently: the Geneva Convention was adhered to and prisoners were properly treated. Misbehaviour was rare and such deviations that did occur were by individuals or small groups acting without the sanction of higher authority. The position is less clear in the East. That atrocities were committed against civilians is unquestionable; the debate is to what extent the Wehrmacht, primarily the army, was involved.

  As the German army was initially welcomed as liberators by many Soviet citizens who had no love for Stalin or communism, it made no military sense to antagonize them. The treating of Russians as sub-humans and the shooting out of hand of political commissars and anyone suspected of political affiliations or, later, partisan activity turned those who might have been sympathetic to Germany, or at least quiescent, into terrorists and tied down large numbers of German troops protecting their lines of communication – troops that would have been far more usefully employed in fighting the Red Army. In the early days of Barbarossa, the German invasion of the USSR, the army was careful to adhere to the norms of civilized behaviour.Very soon, however, responsibility for the administration of occupied territory was taken away from the military and handed over to civilian or SS authorities. Some army commanders refused to promulgate or enforce the so-called Commissar Order, which instructed that political commissars in the Red Army were to be executed; others considered that it was none of their business, but, while they may have provided fatigue parties or guards to assist, they made sure that the actual shootings were carried out by the Allgemeine SS. Legal pedants might argue that, as the USSR had not recognized the Geneva Convention, her citizens and soldiers were not entitled to its protection, but this cannot wash. What appears to have happened is that the soldiers tried to avoid becoming involved in atrocities, found that they could not prevent them and, as time went on and partisan activity became more savage, were inevitably drawn into carrying out reprisals. The war in the East was a brutal one, and men on both sides became brutalized by it.

  As for Japan, once she had elected to join the world, rather than remain cut off from it, war was inevitable. Japan wanted to be a great power, at least in the region, but she had no, or almost no, raw materials to sustain the industrial base that great powers need if they are to pursue an independent foreign policy. Oil, iron ore, rubber and the like can, of course, be bought from those countries that do have them, but supply can be suspended at the whim of the seller and the only way to obtain those materials without dependence on the policies of others is to take them. In Japan’s instance, this meant seizing the rubber plantations of Malaya and the oil fields of Burma and the Dutch East Indies. Once that was done, however, a defensive ring had to be created to hold the newly acquired territories. That, added to a deepening involvement in China and an opportunist grab for India, stretched Japan way beyond her capabilities. As long as the Western powers held their collective nerve, Japan could not win. She could invade British, Dutch and American possessions, she could sink Allied ships, but she could never pose a realistic threat to the American homeland, nor, unless the Germans did it for her, to mainland Britain either. Japan had a large and well-motivated army and an impressive navy, but the army’s logistic machinery was never going to be able to sustain simultaneous campaigns in China, the Pacific and Burma; nor could she hope to maintain air superiority at sea once the American shipyards and aircraft factories got into their stride. Japan was always going to lose.

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  After sixty years, it might be felt that, with most of those who fought in the Second World War dead or in their eighties, emotions have had time to cool, and a reasonably detached view might be taken, but, as the crowds passing daily through war museums and the seemingly insatiable appetite for films and television programmes about this war – the last European war – show, the events of 1939–45 still have the capacity to provoke interest, anger, outrage and pride. With nearly all the information about this war now in the public domain, it is perhaps timely to re-examine the aims of the warring nations, analyse why they went to war and why and how they prosecuted the war in the way that they did. Any such study must consider the influence of technology, of economics and of individual personalities, and, while it must inevitably look at the influence of Stalin and Hitler, Roosevelt and Churchill, Mussolini and Tojo, it should include the common soldier too, for how men fight and why they fight is as much part of a nation’s character as whether they eat bacon and eggs or beetroot soup for breakfast. While political, economic, social and military history all impinge upon and are affected by each other, this book is primarily a work of operational military history, mainly concerned with why and how the war was fought as it was, and written because it seems, to this author at least, that, at a time when in the Western democracies there is uncertainty and much debate as to how national defence postures should develop, such a study is timely and may even prove helpful.

  It is a hackneyed old joke that history does not repeat itself, while historians repeat themselves. Certainly, the wars of the twentieth century have been subjected to a great deal of ‘revisionism’, where somebody takes what has become the accepted view and turns it on its head. Much revisionism is actually re-revisionism. Immediately upon its close, the first war was widely regarded as having been necessary and well conducted until those with an axe to grind got started. Sir Basil Liddell Hart’s influence on military history, for example, and particularly the history of the first war, has been nothing short of pernicious. The long shadow he cast over a later generation of politicians and scholars, whose views inevitably influenced those of the wider reading public, led to a popular view of the generals of the 1914–18 period as being uncaring butchers and unthinking bunglers. That in its time was revisionist history. Later John Terraine led a re-revision, and he and historians including Correlli Barnett, Brian Bond, Peter Simpkins, Gary Sheffield, John Bourne, Mark Connelly and others showed that the conclusions of Liddell Hart, John Laffin, Denis Winter and their ilk were not just mistaken, but in some cases deliberate distortion, and that the British had, within the constraints of the assets and the technology available at the time, fought the war competently until by 1918 they could launch massive all-arms offensives using all available assets which forced the Germans to sue for peace. Most modern military historians would lean more towards the Terraine interpretation than to that of Laffin, although the majority of the public are probably still of the opposite view. What was revisionist history of the first war has now almost become orthodoxy.

  The interpretation of the Second World War, too, has been subject to revision. With almost unlimited funding, an army of researchers and, unusually, permission from the prime minister, Clement Attlee, to trawl government papers without restriction, Winston Churchill produced the first British version of the war to appear on the shelves. His was a magisterial view from the mountain top, embracing grand strategy and high politics, in which all that was bad could be blamed on the appeasers, and in which plucky Britain, standing alone until the New World came to the assistance of the Old, played the major role in defeating the aggressors. As more accounts began to be published, on both sides of the Atlantic, and as scholars began to analyse the performance of the British armed forces, and as German generals released from imprisonment began to publish their (admittedly largely self-justificatory) memoirs, the competence of the British armed forces in the war began to be questioned. An accepted version arose, one which viewed the German army as being far superior in fighting quality to that of the British, and which acknowledged that the Germans had lost because once again they had taken on the British Empire, the USSR and the USA at the same time. More recently, revisionist (or perhaps rerevisionist) study is suggesting that the British Army’s performance during the war was actually quite good (although in this author’s opinion the emphasis must be on the ‘quite’), and that its conduct in the North African and North-West European campaigns in particular is dese
rving of praise. The truth, I fear, is that Britain was very rarely a match for the Germans.

  Elsewhere, in the United States there has never been any doubt that the American performance was anything short of superb – which, once the nation was aroused, it by and large was – and some American accounts are severely critical of the British effort, in the main because of the complete inability of Montgomery and his satraps to work harmoniously in a coalition. In the USSR the view has always been that the destruction of fascism was achieved with only a marginal contribution from the other Allies, a position that remains largely unchanged in post-communist Russia today. In Germany historians have painted the Germans themselves as being victims of Nazism and the Hitler era is still surrounded by much sensitivity and self-flagellation. In 2007 a German teacher who suggested that certain aspects of National Socialism might be praiseworthy was dismissed from her post. The aspects she cited were transport (and Germans are still using Hitler’s autobahns) and support for the family. In some countries, it is a crime to deny what has become known as the Holocaust.* Making it a crime to express unacceptable opinions is the thin edge of a very thick wedge (equally reprehensible, for example, is the refusal of some British academics to have any dealings with Israel because of her perceived attitude to the Palestinians). The way to deal with views with which one disagrees, or which are palpable nonsense, is surely to subject them to rigorous scholarly examination in the full light of day. When opinions are made illegal, it only encourages people to wonder whether there might not be something in them.

  My own position is that I am firmly in the Terraine–Sheffield camp as regards the first war. As I have explained both above and elsewhere, I consider that war to have been necessary and to have been well conducted, at least by the British.* As regards the Second World War, I regret that I simply cannot agree with some current work which suggests that the British Army, as opposed to the Royal Navy or Air Force, fought rather well. You simply cannot compare Montgomery’s ten divisions and one brigade at Alamein (of which four divisions and the brigade were not actually British)† taking on eleven under-strength German and Italian divisions that were starved of materiel, with, say, the German Sixth Army battling six Russian armies at Stalingrad, nor the shameful incompetence of the British surrender of Singapore with the tenacious and fanatical German defence of Berlin to (almost) the last man and the last bullet.