- Hanson, Victor Davis.
The Second World Wars.
New York: Basic Books, 2017.
ISBN 978-0-465-06698-8.
-
This may be the best single-volume history of World War II
ever written. While it does not get into the low-level
details of the war or its individual battles (don't
expect to see maps with boxes, front lines, and arrows),
it provides an encyclopedic view of the first truly
global conflict with a novel and stunning insight
every few pages.
Nothing like World War II had ever happened before and,
thankfully, has not happened since. While earlier wars
may have seemed to those involved in them as involving
all of the powers known to them, they were at most
regional conflicts. By contrast, in 1945, there were only
eleven countries in the entire world which were neutral—not
engaged on one side or the other. (There were, of course,
far fewer countries then than now—most of Africa
and South Asia were involved as colonies of belligerent
powers in Europe.) And while war had traditionally been
a matter for kings, generals, and soldiers, in this
total war the casualties were overwhelmingly (70–80%)
civilian. Far from being confined to battlefields, many
of the world's great cities, from Amsterdam to Yokohama,
were bombed, shelled, or besieged, often with disastrous
consequences for their inhabitants.
“Wars” in the title refers to Hanson's
observation that what we call World War II was, in reality,
a collection of often unrelated conflicts which happened
to occur at the same time. The settling of ethnic and
territorial scores across borders in Europe had
nothing to do with Japan's imperial ambitions in
China, or Italy's in Africa and Greece. It was sometimes
difficult even to draw a line dividing the two sides in the
war. Japan occupied colonies in Indochina under the
administration of Vichy France, notwithstanding Japan and
Vichy both being nominal allies of Germany. The
Soviet Union, while making a massive effort to defeat
Nazi Germany on the land, maintained a non-aggression
pact with Axis power Japan until days before its surrender
and denied use of air bases in Siberia to Allied air forces
for bombing campaigns against the home islands.
Combatants in different theatres might have well have been
fighting in entirely different wars, and sometimes in
different centuries. Air crews on long-range bombing
missions above Germany and Japan had nothing in common
with Japanese and British forces slugging it out in the
jungles of Burma, nor with attackers and defenders
fighting building to building in the streets of Stalingrad,
or armoured combat in North Africa, or the duel of submarines
and convoys to keep the Atlantic lifeline between the U.S. and
Britain open, or naval battles in the Pacific, or the
amphibious landings on islands they supported.
World War II did not start as a global war, and did not become
one until the German invasion of the Soviet Union and the
Japanese attack on U.S., British, and Dutch territories in
the Pacific. Prior to those events, it was a collection of
border wars, launched by surprise by Axis powers against
weaker neighbours which were, for the most part, successful.
Once what Churchill called the Grand Alliance (Britain, the Soviet
Union, and the United States) was forged, the outcome was
inevitable, yet the road to victory was long and costly,
and its length impossible to foresee at the outset.
The entire war was unnecessary, and its horrific cost can be
attributed to a failure of deterrence. From the outset, there
was no way the Axis could have won. If, as seemed inevitable,
the U.S. were to become involved, none of the Axis powers
possessed the naval or air resources to strike the U.S.
mainland, no less contemplate invading and occupying it. While
all of Germany and Japan's industrial base and population were,
as the war progressed, open to bombardment day and night by
long-range, four engine, heavy bombers escorted by long-range
fighters, the Axis possessed no aircraft which could reach the
cities of the U.S. east coast, the oil fields of Texas and
Oklahoma, or the industrial base of the midwest. While the U.S.
and Britain fielded aircraft carriers which allowed them to
project power worldwide, Germany and Italy had no effective
carrier forces and Japan's were reduced by constant attacks by
U.S. aviation.
This correlation of forces was known before the outbreak of the
war. Why did Japan and then Germany launch wars which were
almost certain to result in forces ranged against them which
they could not possibly defeat? Hanson attributes it to a
mistaken belief that, to use Hitler's terminology, the will
would prevail. The West had shown itself unwilling to
effectively respond to aggression by Japan in China,
Italy in Ethiopia, and Germany in Czechoslovakia, and Axis
leaders concluded from this, catastrophically for their
populations, that despite their industrial, demographic,
and strategic military weakness, there would be no
serious military response to further aggression (the
“bore war” which followed the German invasion
of Poland and the declarations of war on Germany by
France and Britain had to reinforce this conclusion).
Hanson observes, writing of Hitler, “Not even Napoleon
had declared war in succession on so many great powers
without any idea how to destroy their ability to make
war, or, worse yet, in delusion that tactical victories
would depress stronger enemies into submission.”
Of the Japanese, who attacked the U.S. with no credible
capability or plan for invading and occupying the U.S.
homeland, he writes, “Tojo was apparently unaware or
did not care that there was no historical record of any American
administration either losing or quitting a war—not the
War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Civil War, the Spanish
American War, or World War I—much less one
that Americans had not started.” (Maybe they should
have waited a few decades….)
Compounding the problems of the Axis was that it was essentially
an alliance in name only. There was little or no co-ordination
among its parties. Hitler provided Mussolini no advance notice
of the attack on the Soviet Union. Mussolini did not warn
Hitler of his attacks on Albania and Greece. The Japanese
attack on Pearl Harbor was as much a surprise to Germany as to
the United States. Japanese naval and air assets played no part
in the conflict in Europe, nor did German technology and
manpower contribute to Japan's war in the Pacific. By contrast,
the Allies rapidly settled on a division of labour: the Soviet
Union would concentrate on infantry and armoured warfare
(indeed, four out of five German soldiers who died in the war
were killed by the Red Army), while Britain and the U.S. would
deploy their naval assets to blockade the Axis, keep the supply
lines open, and deliver supplies to the far-flung theatres of
the war. U.S. and British bomber fleets attacked strategic
targets and cities in Germany day and night. The U.S. became
the untouchable armoury of the alliance, delivering weapons,
ammunition, vehicles, ships, aircraft, and fuel in quantities
which eventually surpassed those all other combatants on both
sides combined. Britain and the U.S. shared technology and
cooperated in its development in areas such as radar,
antisubmarine warfare, aircraft engines (including jet
propulsion), and nuclear weapons, and shared intelligence
gleaned from British codebreaking efforts.
As a classicist, Hanson examines the war in its incarnations
in each of the elements of antiquity: Earth (infantry), Air
(strategic and tactical air power), Water (naval and amphibious
warfare), and Fire (artillery and armour), and adds People
(supreme commanders, generals, workers, and the dead).
He concludes by analysing why the Allies won and what they
ended up winning—and losing. Britain lost its empire
and position as a great power (although due to internal and
external trends, that might have happened anyway). The
Soviet Union ended up keeping almost everything it had hoped
to obtain through its initial partnership with Hitler. The
United States emerged as the supreme economic, industrial,
technological, and military power in the world and promptly
entangled itself in a web of alliances which would cause it
to underwrite the defence of countries around the world and
involve it in foreign conflicts far from its shores.
Hanson concludes,
The tragedy of World War II—a preventable
conflict—was that sixty million people had perished to
confirm that the United States, the Soviet Union, and Great
Britain were far stronger than the fascist powers of
Germany, Japan, and Italy after all—a fact that should
have been self-evident and in no need of such a bloody
laboratory, if not for prior British appeasement, American
isolationism, and Russian collaboration.
At 720 pages, this is not a short book (the main text is 590
pages; the rest are sources and end notes), but there is so
much wisdom and startling insights among those pages that
you will be amply rewarded for the time you spend reading them.
May 2018 