When lawyers are trying to establish a motive, they have a useful Latin tag: Cui bono? (‘To whom the advantage?’) So to whom was the advantage in this war? Certainly not to demilitarized, divided and occupied Germany, and not to Britain, bankrupt and with her Empire breaking up. While the Japanese did not do too badly out of it, despite being on the losing side, it was only Stalin, who gained half of Europe, and the American economy, which the war accelerated out of recession, that can actually be said to have gained from it – which does not imply that it was an unnecessary war, nor that German and Japanese ambitions should have been allowed free rein.
Much as one might regret it, conflict, and hence war, is an inescapable part of the human condition, and we should not discount the possibility of another war between major powers, which might or might not become nuclear, happening at some time in the future – but not within Western Europe. Whatever one may think of the European Union – a direct result of the war, beginning with the innocuous-sounding European Coal and Steel Community in 1952 and mutating over the following half-century into the organization that issues fiats that can override decisions of British ministers and which pronounces on the shape of fruit and vegetables – the interlocking and intermeshing of European economies, culminating in the adoption of a common currency, make it almost impossible – nay, inconceivable – for there ever to be another European war. Indeed, as Britain has stayed out of the Euro zone, she is the only country that could go to war against a European power, and that is not going to happen. While we cannot dismiss the possibility of minor squabbles in the Balkans along the line of Bosnia and Kosovo, or Greek and Turkish antagonism spilling over into frontier skirmishes, the Second World War is the Last European War.
Whatever shape a future war may take, however, it is a fair bet that it will be in a form that we have not anticipated, whether effects-based (a range of political, economic and military actions designed to induce the opponent, neutral or allied parties to pursue a course of action in keeping with the instigators’ interests), concentric, hybrid, systemic, asymmetric, within peoples, between peoples, or whatever cry is yet to be coined. There is a danger in concentrating too much on current campaigns. The 2003 invasion of Iraq began as a conventional military operation; the war-fighting phase successfully completed, the campaign then became an insurgency which, owing to a failure to plan for the subsequent governance and reconstruction of the country along lines acceptable to the West, became a very violent one. Similarly, the Afghanistan operation began with the straightforward aim of removing the Taliban government and, when that was achieved, it staggered into guerrilla war between on the one hand tribesmen motivated partly by money (the Taliban pay better than the Afghan government), partly by religious fanaticism and partly by their traditional dislike of foreigners, and NATO (meaning mainly US, British, Canadian and French) troops on the other. In both cases, more damage has been caused by bombs planted and ambushes carried out by combatants who wear no uniform, are governed by no recognized military legal code and have at least the tacit support of the community within which they operate.
As far as the United Kingdom is concerned, the public demand that the troops involved should be given more of the equipment they are thought to need – helicopters, drones, bomb-detection and disposal equipment are only a few of the items in short supply – and, with the certainty of savage cuts in defence expenditure just round the corner, unseemly inter-service bickering has begun. It is tempting to argue that, as current operations follow a particular pattern, then future ones will too, and that we should structure our armed forces accordingly instead of trying to retain the capability to do everything. This would mean increasing the manpower and the equipment procurement budget of the army at the expense of the other two services and structuring the army to cope with anti-terrorist and counter-insurgency operations rather than in deploying main battle tanks and missiles. Such a policy may be attractive to politicians anxious to take money away from defence and spend it on bribing the electorate but it would be short-sighted in the extreme if Britain still wishes to remain a major power, or at least in the front rank of the medium powers. Every conflict is different, and true independence means the ability to defend the nation and the capability to project power abroad. That is why Britain should retain balanced forces including at least two fleet carriers, a replacement for the Trident nuclear deterrent and sufficient modern aircraft to ensure that the RAF can support and transport the army and provide a credible air defence of Great Britain. It will be said that Britain cannot afford it. Of course she can afford it – by taking money away from other things. Whether she will afford it is a political decision, but, if British politicians and the British people want to retain a global influence, then that is the price that they must pay.
Regardless of what might come, it would be as well for us in the West to keep at least an adequate guard up, and not to allow our defences to languish to the state they were in 1939 and 1940. We are unlikely in any future war to have the luxury of being able to spend the first two or so years of the conflict girding our military loins, and that means a reasonable spending on defence now. Democracies must persuade their peoples that the way to safety and security is, in the words of Theodore Roosevelt, to speak softly and carry a big stick. That big stick means spending a larger proportion of national gross domestic product on defence than we do now. It will not happen, of course, for there are no votes in defence.
Second only to the Black Death of the fourteenth century, the Second World War killed more people than anything else in recorded history, and caused more destruction than earthquake, fire or flood ever did. Whether it was worth fighting depends on the standpoint of the observer: for the US and the USSR it obviously was, and for Britain the alternative of not fighting would have been much worse. The seemingly endless years of fighting certainly demonstrated mankind’s ability for mass destruction, and most of the military lessons of the war have been forgotten or are no longer relevant. Not all is doom and gloom, however. Frightful though nuclear weapons were and are, their possession by East and West has forced a certain caution in international disagreements and the United Nations, child of the war and inefficient, corrupt and often incompetent though it may be, is a better by far forum for discussion and concerted action than anything that went before. While we should remember this war for the horrific impact that it had on nations and on people’s lives, we should also respect and remember the stoicism, the bravery and the loyalty of millions of soldiers, sailors, airmen and civilians, Americans and Germans, British and Japanese, Italians and Russians, Chinese and Indians and all who believed in a cause, whether right or wrong, justified or not, deserving or not, and who were prepared to suffer and if necessary die for it.
NOTES
1 The Times, London, 17 March 2008.
2 Thomas and Gordon-Witts, The Day the Bubble Burst.
3 Ibid.
4 For the sources to support this statement see my Mud, Blood and Poppycock, Cassell, London, 2003.
5 Robin W. Winks and R. J. Q. Adams, Europe Crisis and Conflict,OUP,Oxford, 2003.
6 Paul-Marie de la Gorge (trans. Kenneth Douglas), The French Army – A Military-Political History, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1963.
7 Service, A History of Modern Russia.
8 Buruma, Inventing Japan.
9 Harvey, American Shogun.
10 Quoted in Neville, Mussolini.
11 Neville, Mussolini.
12 David Evans and Jane Jenkins, Years of Weimar & The Third Reich, Hodder Murray, London, 1999.
13 Tooze, The Wages of Destruction.
14 Election statistics from Evans and Jenkins, Years of Weimar.
15 Manchester, The Glory and the Dream.
16 Quoted in Parrish, Anxious Decades.
17 Research Institute for Military History, Freiberg, Germany (ed.), Germany and the Second World War, Vol. I. Pending the translation of the German Official History into English, this is the definitive history of the w
ar from the German viewpoint.
18 Roy Jenkins, Baldwin, Collins, London, 1987.
19 J. Ramsden, The Age of Balfour and Baldwin, 1902–1940, Longmans, London, 1978.
20 Figures of Soviet, Italian and German assistance from P. H. Bell, The Origins of the Second World War in Europe (3rd edn), Pearson Education Ltd, Harlow, 2007.
21 Figures for the elimination of senior figures from Service, A History of Modern Russia, and total overall figures from J. Lee Ready, World War Two Nation by Nation, Arms and Armour, London, 1995. These latter are probably too high, but the order of magnitude would be about right.
22 Quoted in Citino, The Path to Blitzkrieg.
23 Research Institute for Military History, Freiberg, Germany (ed.), Germany and the Second World War, Vol. II.
24 Alanbrooke, War Diaries 1939–1945 (Danchev and Todman (eds.)).
25 For a detailed account of the move through the Ardennes, see Rothbrust, Guderian’s XIX Panzer Corps.
26 Figures from Thomson, Dunkirk
27 Colville, The Fringes of Power.
28 For a detailed account of German designs on Gibraltar and attempts to bring Spain into the war on the Axis side, see Burdick, Germany’s Military Strategy and Spain.
29 Quoted in Manchester, The Glory and the Dream.
30 Paoletti, A Military History of Italy.
31 Burdick and Jacobsen (eds.), The Halder War Diary.
32 Unpublished memoir 2334728, Raymond Glassborrow, Royal Corps of Signals (transcribed Dominic Borrelli).
33 Alanbrooke, War Diaries (Danchev and Todman (eds.)).
34 Details of the Berghof conference of 31 July 1940 from Research Institute for Military History, Potsdam (ed.) (trans. Ewald Osers), Germany and the Second World War, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1996.
35 Ibid.
36 Quoted in Braithwaite, Moscow 1941.
37 Viktor Suvorov (possibly a pseudonym), The Chief Culprit, US Naval Institute Press, New York, 2008.
38 Research Institute for Military History, Potsdam (ed.), Germany and the Second World War.
39 Ibid.
40 Ibid.
41 Ibid.
42 Ferrell (ed.), The Eisenhower Diaries.
43 Charmley, Churchill.
44 Memorandum on sea power, Churchill to the prime minister, Chamberlain, The National Archives (tna) prem 1/345.
45 tna cab 69/2.
46 Quoted in Toland, Rising Sun.
47 Quoted by Brian Bond, in Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press.
48 Quoted in Barrie Pitt, The Crucible of War.
49 Burdick and Jacobsen (eds.), The Halder War Diary.
50 Jewish population figures taken from Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners.
51 Kleinfeld and Tambs, Hitler’s Spanish Legion.
52 Research Institute for Military History, Potsdam (ed.), Germany and the Second World War.
53 Quoted in Toland, Rising Sun.
54 Quoted in Thorne, Allies of a Kind.
55 Kirby, The War against Japan,Vol.I.
56 Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery, The Memoirs of Field-Marshal the Viscount Montgomery of Alamein,Collins,London, 1958.
57 Alanbrooke, War Diaries (Danchev and Todman (eds.)).
58 Montgomery, Memoirs.
59 Author’s interview 1964.
60 Joslen, Orders of Battle.
61 Research Institute for Military History, Potsdam (ed.), Germany and the Second World War.
62 Alanbrooke, War Diaries (Danchev and Todman (eds.)).
63 Details from William G. Dyess, Bataan Death March – A Survivor’s Account, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, Nebr., 2002.
64 Slim, Defeat into Victory.
65 Mitsuo Fuchida and Okumiya Masatake, Midway, the Battle That Doomed Japan, Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, 1955.
66 Parshall and Tully, Shattered Sword.
67 Kirby, The War against Japan,Vol.II.
68 Manstein, Lost Victories.
69 Research Institute for Military History, Potsdam (ed.), Germany and the Second World War.
70 Airlift figures from ibid.
71 Alexander Stahlberg, Bounden Duty, Brassey’s, London, 1990.
72 Research Institute for Military History, Potsdam (ed.), Germany and the Second World War.
73 Stahlberg, Bounden Duty.
74 Mellenthin, Panzer Battles.
75 Quoted in Harvey, American Shogun.
76 Heiber and Glantz (eds.), Hitler and His Generals.
77 Essay by von Gersdorff in Isby (ed.), Fighting the Breakout.
78 Bradley, A Soldier’s Story.
79 Figures of tonnages sunk and submarine strengths and losses from Roskill, The War at Sea.
80 Ibid., Vol. II.
81 Figures from Neillands, The Bomber War. The British Official History gives an estimate of 40,000.
82 Richard Overy, The Air War 1939–1945, Europa, London, 1980.
83 Toland, Rising Sun.
84 Statistics from Samuel Eliot Morison, History of the United States Naval Operations in World War II (15 vols.), Little, Brown and Company, New York, 1956–60.
85 Foot, SOE.
86 Thomas, An Underworld at War.
87 Office of National Statistics, Labour Market Trends,HMSO,London, 1946.
88 Mark Connelly, We Can Take It.
89 Addison and Calder (eds.), Time to Kill.
90 Owen Chadwick, Britain and the Vatican during the Second World War, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1988.
91 Morris Beckman, The Jewish Brigade: An Army with Two Masters,TheHistory Press, London, 2008.
92 Research Institute for Military History, Potsdam (ed.), Germany and the Second World War, Vol. VII.
93 All the likely explanations for this extraordinary episode are given in Hickey, The Unforgettable Army.
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