Second World War, The

by Corrigan, Gordon

  Of the other American generals, Bradley, inoffensive and mild-looking, shunning publicity and getting on with the job without fuss, is perhaps the forgotten hero of the North-West European campaign, having commanded first an army and then an army group which did little wrong. In Italy, Lucian Truscott was a far better general than Mark Clark, while, if Patton, whose showmanship and shameless pursuit of personal glory rivalled that of Montgomery, had not been killed in a motor accident in December 1945,he would anyway have had to be removed.* While there may have been considerable merit in his public urgings that the Wehrmacht should be rearmed and, together with the American and British armies of occupation, marched on Moscow, there was not the slightest chance of any politician (or member of the public) agreeing to it, even though with the great benefit of hindsight it could have avoided fifty years of the Soviet boot on the neck of Eastern Europe.

  Given the lack of defence funding between the wars, it is perhaps not surprising that most British generals were cautious, conservative and un-adventurous. Montgomery was made into a national treasure, largely because Alamein was a victory of sorts and the British badly needed a victory, but historians of the future will not, this author suspects, be kind to him. His personality traits, his desperate desire for success and recognition, his complete inability to understand the feelings of others and his determination to do everyone else down make him a deeply unattractive figure. He won victories, but many of them were flawed and, given the vastly improved state of British industry and the substantial benefits Lend-Lease had delivered by 1942, there were any number of generals who could have achieved as much, and in some cases a lot more. Montgomery went on to become Chief of the Imperial General Staff and was described by Field Marshal Templar as having been the worst one for fifty years, after which he became Deputy Supreme Commander of NATO, where he quarrelled with everybody. He did enormous harm to Anglo-American relations, insulted Eisenhower when the latter was president, and wrote love letters to a thirteen-year-old Swiss schoolboy – which might not have any bearing on the man’s military ability, but it would certainly call his judgement into question.

  Otherwise, there were plenty of solid, reasonably competent British generals but not many who really stand out. Alexander was perhaps the perfect coalition warrior. He got on with everybody, smoothed ruffled feathers and was respected by the Americans. He had a hugely difficult job in Italy, which remains almost a forgotten theatre, and he did as good a job as anyone could have done given the limitations that he had to work under. Brooke as CIGS did a reasonably competent job, trying to balance conflicting requirements with limited resources, but he was far too inclined to protect and advance his own favourites and he could have exercised far more control over Churchill than he did. The one British general that does stand out is Slim, who brought back a defeated and demoralized multi-racial army and turned it into a force that not only defeated the Japanese but also defeated them totally. He has had little recognition but future historians may well regard him as the best British general of the war.*

  It was, however, the German generals who had the most difficult war to fight, that on the Eastern Front. They had hoped for and expected a short, sharp war but instead had to engage with a doggedly persistent enemy in a seemingly endless country and, even when everything went wrong after Stalingrad, managed to hold the Russians off for another three years, despite being outnumbered in tanks, aircraft and, of course, men. Elsewhere, too, there was not a theatre where German generals did not distinguish themselves: Manstein, Bock, Leeb, Model, Kesselring, Kluge, Guderian, even Rommel – the names trip off the tongue and the list goes on and on. These men were giants – flawed giants perhaps – and many of them were complicit in outrages and atrocities that they should never have allowed themselves to become involved in, but in purely military terms they stand head and shoulders, waist and ankles above anyone else on the Allied side. In a war that was biting off far, far more than Germany could ever chew, and despite their having to contend with constant political interference and distrust, they remained the epitome of professionalism. It is a great shame that in modern Germany, in the wish to disown the nation’s past and throw perfectly respectable babies out with admittedly some very grubby bathwater, their achievements are hardly ever mentioned.

  Japanese generalship was mixed: after the initial successes ambition frequently outreached the possible; they were too often let down, or allowed themselves to be let down, by logistic failures, and, while personally courageous and utterly loyal to an imperial ideal, many spent far too much time in political manoeuvring and plotting to the detriment of coherent campaign planning. Against incompetent or under-resourced or just plain worn-out enemies in Malaya, Singapore, Burma, the Dutch East Indies, the Philippines and HongKong, men like Mutaguchi, Yamashita and Homma did well, but, once the Allies had recovered and began to hit back, their weaknesses were exposed. For most, the best that could be said is that they were competent divisional commanders, but not much more. Senior Italian commanders suffered from a lack of modern equipment and a supreme commander in Mussolini who demanded far more than they could ever achieve. Messe did as well as anyone could in Russia, and was a competent enough commander during the last days of the North African campaign, but for most of his fellows, frequently snubbed by their German allies, their hearts simply were not in it.

  At sea, the Royal Navy’s Sir Andrew Cunningham, Commander-in-Chief Mediterranean and successor to Sir Dudley Pound as First Sea Lord, was outstanding, and men like Sir Bruce Fraser, well known as the commander of the Home Fleet from 1943 but whose development of naval aviation and ship construction as Third Sea Lord and Controller of the navy from 1939 to 1942 made a significant contribution to Britain’s survival, and Sir Bertram Ramsay, architect of the Dunkirk evacuation and the naval aspects of the Normandy landings, were highly competent. Of American naval commanders, it is hard to fault Raymond Spruance, William Halsey and Chester Nimitz, while Ernest King, despite his extreme Anglophobia and personal disagreement with Roosevelt’s ‘Germany first’ policy, was an able Commander-in-Chief of the US Navy. As for Germany’s navy, even though it was instrumental in effecting the Norwegian landings in 1940 and the Bismarck shocked the British by sinking the Hood in 1941, these proved fleeting successes. Norway was to prove hugely wasteful to occupy, and the Bismarck was herself sunk a few days later. Indeed, the Kriegsmarine was never much more than an instrument for commerce raiding and coastal defence, and the most dangerous threat to Britain, and the one that might conceivably have forced her out of the war, Karl Dönitz and his submarines, was defeated by the convoy system and technology. By the time that Germany was able to deploy a new generation of super-submarines, it was far too late. As for Japan, her admirals were generally much more aware than their army colleagues of Western industrial potential, and many of them, including Isoruku Yamamoto, the architect of the Pearl Harbor attack, were not in favour of going to war but were too fearful of assassination to voice their opposition – either that, or they were simply unable or unwilling to be seen not to conform. Having been originally trained by the British, the commanders of the Imperial Navy held to many of the traditions of the Royal Navy but lacked the technology and resources to go with them. Some of Japan’s fighting ships – her heavy cruisers, for instance – were powerful units, but their communications and early-warning systems remained rudimentary by Western standards. Many Japanese naval operations – such as that for Midway – were brilliant in concept but just far too complicated to succeed in practice. And the climactic encounter between the Japanese and American battlefleets, one for which the Imperial Navy had so long and so assiduously planned, simply never happened.

  In the air, the one arm of the British services that was reasonably ready for war was the Royal Air Force and men such as Hugh Dowding, for all his prickly personality and inability to get on with his seniors, Keith Park and Trafford Leigh-Mallory are justly acclaimed for the part they played in winning the pivotal Battle of Britain in the
summer of 1940 – even if they were greatly assisted by poor German leadership, bad target selection and the Luftwaffe’s lack of a true heavy bomber. As it was, both Dowding and Park were treated poorly in the aftermath of their victory, and similar treatment was meted out to Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris, whose single-minded determination to hit the German homeland the only way Britain could – by bombing its cities – deserved more credit than he got from Churchill. In less vital theatres, too, the RAF produced some excellent commanders: Sir Arthur Coningham’s Desert Air Force was a major contributor to North African success in spite of Montgomery’s dismissive attitude towards him, and the conduct of the handful of pilots who defended Malta was nothing short of heroic. Meanwhile, the USAAF’s Curtis Le May, who served with uncompromising distinction in both the Pacific and European theatres, and Carl Spaatz, who masterminded the American bombing campaign over Germany, warrant much praise, as does Claire Chennault for his efforts in the China–Burma theatre.

  The Luftwaffe generals were successful when employing their forces in the role for which they were designed – tactical support for the army in a short war – but failed when they attempted to take on a strategic role. Political interference, Göring’s idleness, dispersion of development effort with far too many new designs and the need to drastically reduce air crew training time as the war went on all conspired to make the Luftwaffe largely irrelevant by the latter stages of the war. As for Japan, her naval and army aircraft were initially first class, and more than a match for those the Allies had in the Far East and Pacific theatres, but this superiority was soon reversed and eventually Japanese aviation was reduced to the despairing last resort of suicide attacks.

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  The fighting did not, of course, end with the German and Japanese surrender; China’s civil war continued and the precipitate Italian surrender left a vacuum in Greece, which had been under Italian occupation, precipitating a communist uprising in December 1944 that then developed into a civil war in which a communist takeover was only prevented by the intervention of British troops and a massive injection of American money, a commitment that lasted until 1949, long after the big war was over. The division of Korea, hitherto a Japanese colony, into an American client state in the south and a Russian, and then a Chinese, one in the north, led to the Korean War of 1950– 53. Neither the communist uprising in Malaya in 1948, not finally put down by the British until 1960, nor its spin-off, the Brunei Revolt and Borneo campaign from 1962 to 1965, would have happened without Chinese communist support, while the collapse of the Dutch empire in the East and the eventual French defeats in Indo-China, which would almost certainly not have occurred had the Japanese not attacked those territories in 1941, led directly to the Vietnam War.

  Indeed, in the Far East the most significant result of the war was the emergence of communist China. Had China not been involved in war with Japan, then Chiang Kai-shek’s regime, looked upon kindly by the Americans, could almost certainly have contained the communists, and, while no Chinese dynasty has ever or will ever subordinate national interests to the greater good of the world, a Kuo Min Tang China would have caused a lot less trouble globally than Red China has and does. Britain’s own empire in the East had been fatally weakened by the Japanese. The British had long conceded that India would one day be self-governing, but, had it not been for the war, home rule could have been delivered in stages, rather than in the rushed scuttle that did ensue, and both partition and the bloodshed then and Indo-Pakistani enmity now might well have been avoided. As for Japan, a regime founded on militarism and favouring expansion at the expense of others had been toppled, but Great Power politics meant that the country’s national polity was retained and the Japanese were never forced to face up to what they had done – indeed, by some calculations they are now the second-richest country in the world.

  It is quite likely that the state of Israel would not exist but for the war. Britain had promised a national home (but not a state) for the Jews in the Balfour Declaration in 1917, promulgated to get Jewish opinion in the USA on the Allied side, despite the USA having already entered the war. Chamberlain’s government had repudiated that declaration in 1939 as a result of Jewish terrorism and Arab protests, and in any case Britain had been traditionally Arabist: without the war she would never have agreed to the partition of Palestine, but the appalling treatment of the Jews during the war made it impossible after it for the British to be seen to be nasty to them, or to resist American pressure, and so the state of Israel, and decades of turbulence in the Middle East, was born.

  In Europe, a thoroughly unpleasant regime had been destroyed, only for it to be replaced in Eastern Europe and the Balkans by an even more unpleasant one that stayed there for fifty years. Life for a Hungarian, Bulgarian, Romanian, Slovak, Lithuanian, Latvian or Estonian, provided he were not a Jew, would have been a lot more comfortable under Hitler’s occupation than that of Stalin, and for a Czech and a Pole no worse. Stalin murdered far more people than the Nazis, although he admittedly had more time to do it in, and was just as anti-Semitic.

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  It is usually the case, or at least it is expected, that those on the winning side of a war are better off – or at least no worse off – than they were before the war. Britain, whose electorate decisively rejected Churchill, their wartime leader, in the 1945 general election, was certainly worse off after the conflict: she was financially gravely in hock; she was about to lose her Empire (which would have happened anyway, but not in such unseemly haste), and even two years after the cessation of hostilities she was unable to meet export orders through a shortage of steel, while rationing of food and petrol and restrictions on foreign exchange were more severe than at any time during the war. It has occasionally been suggested that, had Britain stayed out of the war or made peace with Germany in 1940, we would then have been in much better shape, much more quickly after a German victory in Europe and Russia. That suggestion can be instantly dismissed. Quite apart from the inevitability of war at some time between a German-ruled Europe with no threat to it from the East and a hitherto neutral Britain, a war that Britain could not have won, common decency and national pride and, yes, honour demanded that Britain did declare war when she did. In the first war, the American ambassador at one stage asked King George V why Britain had entered the war. His reply was ‘What else could we do?’ – an answer that stands equally well for the second great conflict of the twentieth century. British national interests demanded that she entered the war, but the vast majority of the population genuinely saw it as a moral issue: evil was abroad and it had to be stood up to.

  After this war, Britain was no longer the leader of the free world, and D-Day for the Normandy landings, 6 June 1944, may well be said to begin the American Century. But at least it is the American and not the Russian or Chinese Century, and, however much the British and the Europeans are irritated by what they see as American naivety, and a belief that only the American Way is the right way, it was the Marshall Plan – American money and investment – that picked Europe up off the floor after the war (although it was a little unkind of Truman to stop Lend-Lease to the UK two days after VJ Day) and it was America that put the backbone into Europe and provided most of the muscle for the NATO alliance that deterred Soviet aggression for fifty years – aggression that would surely have come had NATO not existed – backed up by the nuclear deterrent, itself a product of the war. America opposed British policy during the Suez Crisis of 1956 and in 1970 the British government turned down a request by the Americans to provide troops for Vietnam. These disagreements have been laid to rest, and for the future America is the only country that matters to the United Kingdom, the only one that has the assets and conceivably the will to come to Britain’s assistance if needed, and it is for that reason, if for no other, that if America goes to war – in Iraq, in Afghanistan or anywhere else – then British troops must be there too.

  Perceptions of the war vary: in Britain it has become heroic myth, where plucky
little Britain stood alone against the might of the dictators until the New World came to the aid of the Old; in America it is still seen as a moral crusade in which once again they rescued the Europeans from unseemly quarrels and spread freedom and apple pie around the world; in Germany the war is not mentioned except to embellish the legend of an anti-Nazi resistance that did not really exist; in Russia it is still celebrated – and understandably so, since the USSR lost a far greater proportion of its population than any other participant – as the Great Patriotic War, won by the USSR with minimal input from anyone else; in Italy, it is for the most part ignored, although many who should know better still hanker for the days of Mussolini’s fascist regime; in France, the legend of a wider, general resistance to German occupation has become self-perpetuating, and there is still a reluctance to scrutinize the events of 1940 and after and the Vichy regime with any great rigour. In Japan, the war has quite literally been written out of the history books, and, even if it did happen, then allegations of Japanese misbehaviour are lies: the occupation of Manchuria and China was utterly benign and the Rape of Nanking never happened.