by Ian Morris
Lack of funds and a certain amount of stick-in-the-mudness meant that the interwar British, French, and American armies did little to develop this bold vision, but Soviet generals did pick it up. Organizing tanks into large armored corps for independent operations, they planned to wage what they called “deep battle,” pushing far behind the enemy front in just the way suggested by Liddell Hart; but Stalin had most of these officers shot in 1937, and their replacements, understandably, tried to avoid radical ideas that might attract the great man’s attention.
Only in Germany, where the strict limits imposed by the Treaty of Versailles had left military men with no option but to innovate, did the doctrine of combined-arms breakouts—what journalists later labeled “blitzkrieg,” or lightning war—really take hold. By the time Hitler started flooding the army with money in the mid-1930s, its leaders had embraced blitzkrieg, and its engineers were building tanks, aircraft, and radios that (unlike the weapons of 1918) could withstand the stresses of mobile war. Germany’s temporary monopoly on the new tactics gave Hitler a real chance to grab victory before anyone else realized what was going on.
Blitzkrieg meant embracing risk and chaos, turning the storm of steel into a true tempest. Bombers and parachutists would sow disorder deep in the enemy’s rear, attacking civilians as often as soldiers and choking the roads with refugees. Up at the front, squads of infantry covered by intense artillery fire and swooping dive-bombers would probe for gaps in the enemy line, slipping between strongpoints or turning open flanks. Tanks and trucks would surge through the openings, and now the real fight would begin. Armored columns would fan out miles behind enemy positions, racing to overrun command centers before reserves could concentrate, cut off, and crush the penetrations. Eventually, the breakthrough would outrun its supplies, but by then a second echelon of armor would have burst through. If necessary, a third would follow, always keeping the defenders off balance, until, sooner rather than later, confusion overwhelmed everything and the enemy’s will collapsed.
Blitzkrieg worked exactly as advertised. Poland’s armies disintegrated before Britain and France could even mobilize, and France itself, which had fought so long and hard in World War I, collapsed completely in May 1940 when a thousand German tanks burst through a carelessly guarded stretch of the front. Three weeks later, Winston Churchill gave the greatest speech of his career, insisting, “We shall go on to the end.” But when his war secretary secretly gathered senior officers in a hotel room to ask whether their troops “could be counted on to continue to fight in all circumstances,” the answer shocked him. “No one dared,” one of the officers recalled, “to estimate any exact proportion.”
Britain, of course, did fight on, but twelve months later Germany looked even closer to winning the war. With more than four thousand tanks driving east, the Soviet army seemed to be crumbling as abruptly as the French had. The “Russians lost this war in the first eight days,” the German chief of staff announced. Stalin promptly had a mini-breakdown and fled to his country estate, where—on the eighth day—the rest of the Politburo came looking for him. “We found him in an armchair in the small dining room,” one of them wrote. “He looked up and said, ‘What have you come for?’ He had the strangest look on his face and the question itself was pretty strange.” Stalin, his henchmen realized, thought they had come to execute him before surrendering to the Germans.
But the Soviets too fought on, because—and this was the second lesson Hitler took from World War I—wars are not lost on battlefields alone. Despite (or because of?) his experiences in the trenches as the army collapsed in 1918, Hitler shared the popular view that Germany had never been defeated in the field. It had failed, he was certain, because traitors had stabbed it in the back—from which he drew the conclusion that this time around, Germany had to strike the would-be traitors before the war even began. He started with communists, rounded up by the thousands in 1933. Next came rivals on the extreme right, murdered en masse in 1934, and then, on a larger scale still, all groups judged insufficiently German.
“The main thing,” Hitler said in private in 1938, “is that the Jews are driven out.” The Roman Empire had expelled the Jews from their homeland two thousand years earlier, and Europeans had periodically persecuted them ever since, but the Nazis, once again, took things further. The Jews’ homelessness, Hitler argued, made them the absolute opposite of Germans, who had a sacred bond to the soil. Jewish rootlessness and commercial greed would corrupt the coming thousand-year Reich and must therefore be eradicated. Almost the minute they invaded Poland in 1939, German troops started shooting Jews. When that proved too slow and expensive, they converted trucks to act as mobile gas chambers. Hitler probably took the decision to round up and murder every Jew in Europe in July 1941, soon after he attacked the Soviet Union. Hitler’s inner circle, agreeing with their master that Europe’s other Untermenschen—“subhumans”—would also have to go, floated plans to cut off the food supply to Russian cities, starving tens of millions of people to death over the coming winter.
This was people’s war taken to the extreme, and it made World War II unique. There had been orchestrated massacres in World War I (in Serbia, Belgium, Africa, and above all Armenia), but such calculated barbarism, on such a scale, was—as Churchill put it—“a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime.” Not all of Hitler’s genocidal plans came off, but the Nazis still murdered at least twenty million civilians.
That is why, in the introduction to this book, I raised what I called the what-about-Hitler problem. If it is true, as I have been claiming, that war has been productive, creating bigger societies that pacify themselves internally and generate economic growth, then what about Hitler? His Greatest Possible Germany would have been the biggest society the continent had seen since the Roman Empire, yet it would also have impoverished most of its subjects and made their lives much more dangerous—the exact opposite of productive war.
I suggested in the introduction that the solution to the what-about-Hitler problem is fairly obvious once we take a long-term perspective on history. Since caging began ten thousand years ago, conquerors have been making wastelands, but they or their successors then faced a harsh choice between turning into stationary bandits and being replaced by new conquerors, who would face exactly the same choice. Churchill predicted that if Hitler beat Britain, “the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age, made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.” All the evidence, though, suggests that Hitler’s regime would in fact have had to make the same choice between stationary banditry and extinction as every other regime in history.
Hitler always recognized that winning the war in Europe would not be the end of his struggle. “For a foreseeable period of about one to three generations,” he predicted, eastern Europe would provide scope for the German race to grow, but after that it would need to expand again, probably overseas. At that point, somewhere between the 1970s and the 2030s, Hitler’s successors would fight a Third World War, in which Germany would crush whatever remained of the British Empire and take dominion over the globe.
Perhaps because they were so convinced that traitors rather than the arrival of American troops had cost them victory in 1918, few Nazi leaders ever understood that the real problem for their long-term plans was the United States, not Britain. Nothing else can explain why, just days after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Hitler declared war on the Americans rather than hoping that the war in the Pacific would distract them from Europe. “What does the USA amount to anyway?” asked Hermann Göring, the head of the German air force. Churchill, however, saw exactly what it amounted to. “Now at this very moment I knew the United States was in the war, up to the neck and in to the death,” he said of hearing the news about Pearl Harbor. “So we had won after all!”
Hitler had been making vague plans to attack the United States
since 1938, and periodically ordered German factories to start building long-range bombers that could reach New York and great surface fleets to contest the Atlantic, only to cancel the commissions as more pressing problems arose. Whether he would have gotten more serious had he beaten Britain and the Soviets in 1940–41, we can only speculate; but such speculation is useful, I think, because as soon as we ask this question, we see why the Nazis, like all rulers since productive war began, would quickly have been forced to choose between becoming stationary bandits and being defeated.
Had Hitler built bombers and fleets in earnest and tried to wage a transatlantic war, he would soon have run into the same difficulties that Japan encountered in the Pacific. The first was that once the Americans worked out how to survive blitzkrieg, the struggle would turn into a long, logistical slogging match; and the second, that even with all the resources of an enslaved Europe to draw on, Hitler could not win this.
In some ways, Hitler’s position was rather like Napoleon’s, 135 years earlier. Both men tried to conquer Europe by wedding the modern energies of people’s war to an old idea of empire, using violence to unify the European inner rim and then close it off from the commercial, open-access orders of the outer rim. This, I suggested in Chapter 4, was already a losing strategy when Napoleon tried it around 1805, because the vast wealth being generated by the Atlantic economy meant that real power now came from getting the invisible hand and the invisible fist to work together. Because Britain was doing this and Napoleon was not, the emperor never stood much chance of prevailing over the nation of shopkeepers. By the time Hitler reran a more extreme, bloodthirsty version of the strategy around 1940, the odds against it were even steeper. It is perhaps no coincidence that Hitler, exactly like Napoleon, was turned back at the English Channel, in the snows before Moscow, and in the sands of Egypt. Both men suffered the same fate because both men were trying to do the same thing.
If Hitler had broken Britain, he would just have found himself facing the United States’ even bigger and more dynamic open-access order. Like the hunter-gatherers confronting farmers in prehistory, or the stateless societies struggling against ancient empires, the autocrats of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were on the wrong side of history.
Rather than creating the thousand-year Reich that Hitler so often spoke of, a Nazi victory in Europe would have set up a situation very like the real-world Cold War that took shape after 1945. A totalitarian European empire and an open-access American order would have glared at each other from behind fences of nuclear missiles, struggling for influence over Latin America and the carcasses of the old British and French Empires. They would have sponsored coups, waged proxy wars, and wooed each other’s allies (Nixon might have flown to Tokyo in 1972 to split Japan from Germany, rather than flying to Beijing to split China from the Soviet Union). They might even have had their own Petrov moments.
There would have been differences too, of course. Had Hitler won, the European empire would have been ruled from Berlin, not Moscow, and would have run all the way to the Atlantic, rather than stopping at the Iron Curtain. Hitler and his successors might have been more willing than Stalin and his to risk nuclear war. And without western Europe in its orbit, the United States would surely have found it harder to prevail. But in the end, the Nazis would still have faced the same core problem as the communists, of how to compete with a dynamic, open-access outer-rim order, and been confronted with exactly the same choices. They could have recognized the strengths of the open-access economy and begun imitating it, as mainland China did after Mao’s death in 1976, or they could have ignored it and collapsed, as the Soviet Union did in 1989.
I will have much more to say about the Cold War in the last parts of this chapter; here I will content myself with observing that these are the reasons why I conclude that the what-about-Hitler problem is not really a problem at all (for the theory that I am advancing in this book, that is, not for the people who lived through his reign of terror). Hitler’s regime was an extreme case in the annals of atrocity. A Nazi victory would have been a disaster, condemning decades of Europeans to the grip of the Gestapo and the death camps, driving the rate of violent death back up to levels not seen for centuries. But even so, the Nazis would have remained subject to the same iron laws as every other government in history. As the decades lengthened into generations, the need to compete commercially and militarily with the open-access order would have forced Hitler’s successors to make a choice between defeat and turning into stationary bandits. In the 2010s, I hazard to suggest, Europe might still have been a dark continent where secret police kicked in doors in the middle of the night, but the downward march of violent death rates would have resumed. Hitler could have slowed the civilizing process, but he could not have stopped it altogether.
As it was, of course, Hitler did not win. Had he handled the Stalingrad campaign better in 1942, he could still have prevailed, and even in the summer of 1943, when he launched the biggest tank battle in history at Kursk, he still stood a chance. But by then his enemies had learned not only to survive blitzkrieg but also to mount their own versions. Committing their enormous economies to total war, they overwhelmed Germany and Japan (Figure 5.11). Thousand-bomber raids pounded the Axis homelands day and night, paralyzing their economies and killing about a million civilians (including a hundred thousand in Tokyo in a single night). When the German army invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, it needed 600,000 horses to haul its guns and supplies, greatly slowing its advance, but by 1944 the Allied armies were fully motorized. Now it was the turn of veteran German forces to disintegrate as American tanks broke out after the D-Day landings (Operation Cobra) and Soviet armor smashed its way through to the German frontier, annihilating Hitler’s Army Group Center (Operation Bagration). With their cities in flames, Hitler shot himself and Japan’s emperor broadcast his first-ever speech to his people. “The war situation,” he conceded, “has not developed necessarily to Japan’s advantage.” With that, the tempest was over.
Figure 5.11. Overwhelmed: a German artilleryman despairs as the biggest tank battle in history, at Kursk in July 1943, ends Hitler’s hopes of defeating the Soviet Union.
Learning to Love the Bomb
The Second World War was the most destructive ever fought. When we include those who starved, succumbed to disease, and were murdered in German, Soviet, and Japanese camps, it claimed fifty million to a hundred million lives, as compared with fifteen million dead in World War I and another twenty million in the civil wars that followed it. World War II turned much of Europe and East Asia into wastelands and cost something like $1 trillion (as I write, in 2013, the equivalent of perhaps $15 trillion, the entire annual output of the United States or the European Union). And yet, in a paradox as striking as any in the history of conflict, World War II also managed to be among the most productive ever fought.
That was because the war began the process of clearing away the chaos left by the demise of the British globocop. This, needless to say, was not the end Churchill had had in mind when he asked for the British people’s blood, toil, tears, and sweat. In August 1941, before the United States had even entered the war, he had rushed back from a secret meeting with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to boast to the cabinet that he had “a plain and bold intimation that after the war, the US will join with us in policing the world until the establishment of a better order.” But this was not to be. There was a popular saying during the war that Britain provided the time, Russia provided the men, and America provided the money to defeat Hitler, but by November 1943, when Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt held their first group meeting, time was already on the Allies’ side. Only men and money now mattered, and Churchill found himself sidelined.
Far from sharing global condominium with the United States, Britain woke up from celebrating victory over Germany and Japan to the worst economic hangover in its history. Its debts were much worse than in 1918, its economy completely distorted by war production, and its very food su
pply dependent on American loans. “It was extraordinarily unreal, even absurd, and shabby,” a left-wing journalist wrote in his diary in December 1945 after spending two days watching Parliament debate the terms of a new American bailout. “Speakers took up their position, but the only reality was the fear which none of them dared to express—the fear of the consequences if cigarettes and films and spam were not available from America.”
Absurd and shabby it might have been, but unreal it was not. Britain had gone broke fighting Germany. To pay its debts, it had to put exports ahead of consumption, and food rationing actually got stricter after 1945. When eggs became freely available in 1950, there was euphoria. “What this means to us only an English housewife can understand,” one diary records; “at last actually we could beat up two eggs and put them in a cake … THE FIRST TIME FOR TEN YEARS.”
Trapped between insolvency and demands to expand the open-access order into an expensive welfare state, Britain soon found running its old empire an unaffordable luxury. Back in 1916, a German general commanding Turkish troops defending Iraq against a mostly Indian army fighting for the British Empire had written home that “the hallmark of the twentieth century must be the revolution of the colored races against the colonial imperialism of Europe,” but it took another world war to fulfill his prophecy.
British rule never recovered from its failure to stand up to Japan. The scene at Penang in Malaya in December 1941 was fairly typical: as Japanese spearheads infiltrated past the British fortifications, the European defenders left without firing a shot, abandoning their local allies to the invaders’ tender mercies. Out of the dozens of Asian civil servants who had actually run the town on Britain’s behalf, only one was even told about the evacuation, and he was then turned out of the boat to make room for the British commandant’s car. It was, thought a young British woman caught up in the rout, “a thing which I am sure will never be forgotten or forgiven.”