SOME SIXTY MILLION people died in World War II.
On average, twenty-seven thousand people perished on each day between the invasion of Poland (September 1, 1939) and the formal surrender of Japan (September 2, 1945)—bombed, shot, stabbed, blown apart, incinerated, gassed, starved, or infected. The Axis losers killed or starved to death about 80 percent of all those who died during the war. The Allied victors largely killed Axis soldiers; the defeated Axis, mostly civilians.
More German and Russian soldiers were killed in tanks at Kursk (well over 2,000 tanks lost) than at any other battle of armor in history. The greatest loss of life of both civilians and soldiers on a single ship (9,400 fatalities) occurred when a Soviet submarine sank the German troop transport Wilhelm Gustloff in the Baltic Sea in January 1945. The costliest land battle in history took place at Stalingrad; Leningrad was civilization’s most lethal siege. The death machinery of the Holocaust made past mass murdering from Attila to Tamerlane to the Aztecs seem like child’s play. The deadliest single day in military history occurred in World War II during the March 10, 1945, firebombing of Tokyo, when a hundred thousand people, perhaps many more, lost their lives. The only atomic bombs ever dropped in war immediately killed more than a hundred thousand people at Hiroshima and Nagasaki together, most of them civilians, while tens of thousands more ultimately died and were maimed from radiation exposure. World War II exhausted superlatives. Its carnage seemed to reinvent ideas of war altogether.
YET HOW, WHY, and where the war broke out were familiar factors. The sophisticated technology and totalitarian ideologies of World War II should not blind us to the fact that the conflict was fought on familiar ground in predictable climates and weather by humans whose natures were unchanged since antiquity and thus who went to war, fought, and forged a peace according to time-honored precepts. Reformulated ancient ideas of racial and cultural superiority fueled the global bloodbath between 1939 and 1945, which was ostensibly started to prove that some ideologies were better, or at least more powerful, than others. Nazi Germany certainly believed that other, supposedly inherently spiritually weaker Western nations—Britain and France in particular—had conspired since World War I to prevent the expression of naturally dominant German power. In his memoirs, Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz, Commander-in-Chief of the Kriegsmarine, the German navy, after January 1943, summed up accurately the German justification for the war: “Britain went to war in 1939 because Greater Germany, growing in strength and united with Austria, was becoming a menace to British imperial and economic interests.” Notice how Doenitz’s key phrase, “Britain went to war,” assumes that the German invasion of Poland was the result of victimization and grievance and thus should not have provoked a wider war.1
By 1939, Germans had concluded that the postwar policies of the Western European nations were unfair, vindictive, and, with some tolerable sacrifices, correctible, given the rebirth of Germany under a uniquely powerful National Socialism. An unfettered Germany would establish hegemony throughout Europe, even if that effort might require dramatic changes in current borders, substantial population exchanges, and considerable deaths, though mostly of non-Germans. In time, both Fascist Italy (which had invaded both Ethiopia and Albania prior to September 1, 1939) and Japan (which had invaded China well over two years before the German attack on Poland) felt that if Hitler could take such risks—as he had throughout 1939–1941 in apparently successful fashion—then they too might take a gamble to share in the spoils. Perceived self-interest—and a sense of the ancient Greek historian Thucydides’s realist notion of honor and fear—as much as ideological affinity, explained which power entered the war, or left it, or chose to remain neutral.
World War II was conceived and fought as a characteristic Western war in which classical traditions of free markets, private property, unfettered natural inquiry, personal freedom, and a secular tradition had for centuries often translated to greater military dynamism in Europe than elsewhere. If the conflict’s unique savagery and destructiveness can only be appreciated through the lenses of twentieth-century ideology, technology, and industry, its origins and end still followed larger contours of conflict as they developed over 2,500 years of civilized history. The Western military’s essence had remained unchanged but it was now delivered at an unprecedented volume and velocity, and posed a specter of death on a massive scale. The internecine war was largely fought with weaponry and technology that were birthed in the West, although also used by Westernized powers in Asia. The atomic bombs, napalm, guided missiles, and multi-engine bombers of World War II confirmed a general truth that for over two millennia the war making of Europe and its appendages had proven brutal against the non-West, but when its savage protocols and technology were turned upon itself, the corpses mounted in an unfathomable fashion.
STARTING WARS IS far easier than ending them. Since the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC) between Athens and Sparta and their allies, winning—and finishing—a war was predicated on finding ways to end an enemy’s ability to fight, whether materially or psychologically. The Axis and the Allies had radically different ideas of how the wars of World War II would eventually conclude—with the Allies sharing a far better historical appreciation of the formulas that always put a final end to conflicts. When World War II broke out in 1939, Germany did not have a serious plan for defeating any of those enemies, present or future, that were positioned well beyond its own borders. Unlike its more distant adversaries, the Third Reich had neither an adequate blue-water navy nor a strategic bombing fleet, anchored by escort fighters and heavy bombers of four engines whose extended ranges and payloads might make vulnerable the homelands of any new enemies on the horizon. Hitler did not seem to grasp that the four most populous countries or territories in the world—China, India, the Soviet Union, and the United States—were either fighting against the Axis or opposed to its agendas. Never before or since had all these peoples (well over one billion total) fought at once and on the same side.
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. Operation Sea Lion, Germany’s envisioned invasion of Britain, remained a pipe dream—and yet it offered the only plausible way to eliminate Britain from the war that Hitler had started. Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, then head of the Kriegsmarine, repeatedly warned Hitler that an amphibious invasion of Britain in 1940 was quite impossible. After explaining why the German navy was unable to transport hundreds of thousands of troops across the Channel, Raeder flatly concluded, “I could not recommend a landing in England.” After the war, Field Marshal General Wilhelm Keitel agreed that the military was not up to the task and was relieved that Hitler finally conceded as much: “I very much worried. I fully realized that we would have to undertake this invasion with small boats that were not seaworthy. Therefore, at that time I had fully agreed with the decision of the Fuehrer.” The invasion of Russia, codenamed Operation Barbarossa, would prove a rerun of the early successes of blitzkrieg in precisely the one theater where it would be nearly impossible to conduct it effectively—an operation that Raeder in hindsight claimed to have opposed, desperately but vainly advising Hitler that “under no circumstances should we go to war with Russia.”2
War’s eternal elements—a balance between powers, deterrence versus appeasement, collective security, preemption and preventive attacks, and peace brought by victory, humiliation, and occupation—still governed the conflict. As was true in most past conflicts, the publics in Axis countries, regardless of the odiousness of fascist ideology, supported the war when Germany, Italy, and Japan were deemed to be winning. Even the liberal German historian Friedrich Meinecke was caught up in the German euphoria following the sudden collapse of France in 1940: “And to have regained Strasbourg! How could a man’s heart not beat a little faster at this? After all, building up an army of millions in the space of only four years and rendering it capable of such achievements has been an astonishing and arguably the greatest and the most positive accomplishment of the Third Reich.” The classical Greek historian Thucydides, who so often focused on the Athenian public’s wild shifts in reaction to perceived battlefield victories or defeats, could not have captured any better the mercurial exhilaration at the thought of decisive military success.3
The pulse of the war also reflected another classical dictum: the winning side is the one that most rapidly learns from its mistakes, makes the necessary corrections, and most swiftly responds to new challenges—in the manner that land-power Sparta finally built a far better navy while the maritime Athenians never fielded an army clearly superior to its enemies, or the land-power Rome’s galleys finally became more effective than were the armies of the sea-power Carthage. The Anglo-Americans, for example, more quickly rectified flaws in their strategic bombing campaign—by employing longer-range fighter escorts, recalibrating targeting, integrating radar into air-defense networks, developing novel tactics, and producing more and better planes and crews—than did Germany in its bombing against Britain. America would add bombers and crews at a rate unimaginable for Germany. The result was that during six months of the Blitz (September 1940 to February 1941), the Luftwaffe, perhaps the best strategic bombing force in the world in late 1939 through mid-1940, dropped only thirty thousand tons of bombs on Britain. In contrast, in the half year between June and November 1944, Allied bombers dropped twenty times that tonnage on Germany.4
The same asymmetry was true at sea, especially in the Battle of the Atlantic. The Allied leadership made operational changes and technological improvements of surface ships and planes far more rapidly than could the U-boats of the Kriegsmarine. America adapted to repair and produce aircraft carriers and train new crews at a pace inconceivable in Japan. The Allies—including the Soviet Union on most occasions—usually avoided starting theater wars that ended in multiyear infantry quagmires. In contrast, Japan, Germany, and Italy respectively bogged down in China, the Soviet Union, and North Africa and the Balkans.
The importance of the classical geography of war is also unchanging. Ostensibly the Mediterranean should not have mattered in a twentieth-century war that broke out in Eastern Europe. The nexus of European power and influence had long ago shifted far northward, following the expansion of hostile Ottoman power into the western Mediterranean, the discovery of the New World, the Reformation, the British and French Enlightenments, and the Industrial Revolution. But the Mediterranean world connected three continents and had remained even more crucial after the completion of the Suez Canal for European transit to Asia and the Pacific. The Axis “spine” was predicated on a north-south corridor of fascist-controlled rail lines connecting ports on the Baltic with those on the Mediterranean. Without the Mediterranean, the British Empire could not easily coordinate its global commerce and communications. It was no wonder, then, that North Africa, Italy, and Greece became early battlegrounds, as did the age-old strategic stepping-stones across the Mediterranean at Crete, Malta, and Sicily that suffered either constant bombing or invasions.
British, American, Italian, and German soldiers often found themselves fortifying or destroying the Mediterranean stonework of the Romans, Byzantines, Franks, Venetians, and Ottomans. Gibraltar still remained unconquerable. Without a viable plan to attack it on land and from its Iberian rear, the Axis gave up taking the fortress, as had every aggressor that had coveted it since the British annexation of 1713. That Germany and Italy would try to wage war on the Mediterranean and in North Africa without serious attempts to invade Gibraltar and Malta is a testament to their ignorance of history.5
Still other classical precedents were forgotten. Western military history showed, but was apparently again dismissed by Allied planners, that it was often difficult to start a campaign northward up the narrow backbone of the Italian Peninsula. What usually started in Sicily petered out in mid-peninsula, given the ease of defense in the narrow mountainous terrain of the Apennines with seas on both flanks. Hannibal and Napoleon alone seemed to have believed that Italy was best conquered from the north rather than the south. Nor had Europeans ever had much success trying to attack Russia from the west. Despite the grand efforts of Swedes, French, and Germans, the expanses were always too wide, the barriers too numerous, the window of good weather too brief—and the Russians were too many and too warlike on their own soil. Planes and tanks did not change those realities. Germany’s problem in particular was that its two most potent enemies, Britain and Russia, were also the hardest to reach. While Germany’s central European location was convenient for bullying the French and Eastern Europeans, its British and Russian existential enemies enjoyed both land and sea buffers from the vaunted German army.
The Allies were surprised that Hitler staged two invasions through the Ardennes in southeast Belgium. But in addition to the examples of World War I, the critically located rough terrain had been a nexus for passing armies since it was first mentioned in Caesar’s Gallic Wars and later became a favorite campaign ground of Charlemagne. Invading a united Britain historically had also usually proved a bad idea. Not since the Romans and William the Conqueror had any military seriously tried an amphibious landing on the British coasts. Far more easily, the British and their allies—from the Hundred Years’ War to World War I—landed troops on the Western European Atlantic coastline, which, being longer, was harder to defend and not often politically united. Motor vehicles and bombers did not reinvent the military geography of Europe during World War II.
After the age of Napoleon, no southern European power on the Mediterranean was able on its own to match northern European nations. World War II was again no exception. Italy was the first of the Axis to capitulate. The Iberians wisely stayed out of the war. Greece was easily defeated by the Germans. North Africans were largely spectators to lethal European warfare taking place in their midst. Turkey remained neutral for most of the war. If World War II was fought across the globe, its ultimate course was still largely determined by northern European states and their former colonies in a way that was true of all European wars since the late eighteenth century.
Over twenty-four hundred years ago, the historian Thucydides had emphasized the military advantages of sea powers, particularly their ability to control commerce and move troops. Not much had changed since antiquity, as the oceans likewise mattered a great deal to the six major belligerents in World War II. Three great powers were invaded during the war: Germany, Italy, and Russia. Three were not: America, Britain, and Japan. All the former were on the European landmass, the latter were either islands or distant and bounded by two vast oceans. Amphibious operations originating on the high seas were a far more difficult matter than crossing borders, or in the case of Italy, crossing from Sicily onto the mainland.
The protection afforded Great Britain and the United States by surrounding seas meant that containing the German threat was never the existential challenge for them that it always was for the Western Europeans. The generals of the French may have always appeared cranky to the Anglo-Americans, but then, neither Britain nor America had a common border with Germany. The only way for Germany to strike Britain was to invade and occupy the French and Belgian coasts, as reflected both in the German Septemberprogramm of 1914 and in Hitler’s obsessions with the Atlantic ports between 1940 and 1945. Since the fifteenth century, European countries that faced the Atlantic had natural advantages over those whose chief home ports were confined to the North, Baltic, and Mediterranean Seas.
Even if weaker than Germany, the islands of Japan nevertheless made an Allied invasion a far more difficult proposition than would crossing the Rhine or Oder into Germany. In fact, no modern power had ever completed a successful invasion of the Japanese homeland, a fact well known to Allied planners who wished to, and did, avoid the prospect through dominant air power.
Japan’s various strategic choices in 1941 were predicated a great deal on traditional geographical considerations. Japan could further reinforce its decade-long presence in China, or in June 1941 join Hitler by attacking the Soviet Union from the east, or absorb more orphaned colonial territory in Asia and the Pacific, or allow the Imperial Navy to begin new wars against the United States and Britain because it was an island sea power with few immediate worries about ground invasions or enemy amphibious landings. Left unspoken was the fact that in almost all these geographical scenarios, an often xenophobic and resource hungry Japan had few friends. It had alienated the Western powers during the 1930s, invaded China in 1937, fought the Soviets in 1939, and been aggressive toward India; it was disliked and distrusted in the Pacific and unable to partner effectively with its own Axis allies.
Any eastward expansion of twentieth-century Japan into the Pacific depended also on the status of its western geography. If either Russia or China were to be hostile—and both usually were—by definition Japan would be faced with an uninviting two-front war. In World War II, the bulk of Japanese ground forces—over six hundred thousand at any given time—was fighting in China, where over a half-million Japanese soldiers eventually perished. Japan was willing to risk a two-front war after its nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union in April 1941, given that the Chinese front was mostly stalemated, but it never envisioned the possibility that Pearl Harbor would lead to a three-theater conflict in which Japan would be fighting China, the United States, and finally the Russians. Because pulling out of the Chinese morass was deemed unacceptable by the government of General and Prime Minister Hideki Tojo, and given that the Imperial Japanese Army had already fared poorly against the Russians from 1932 to 1939 along the Mongolian border, Japan felt its best choice of aggression was a surprise “preemptory” naval air attack on the geographically distant Americans, who allegedly might soon have attacked Japan or would eventually have strangled its importation of key resources. General Tojo told the Japanese war cabinet that he had thought of all the alternatives “until it makes my head ache, but the conclusion always is that war is unavoidable.”6
Weather was also never superseded by twentieth-century technology, but as in ancient times it often shaped the battlefield, as it had in the storms that sank much of King Xerxes’s fleet at Artemisium during the Persian invasion of Greece (480 BC), the scorching heat that sapped the Crusaders at Hattin (1187) and cost them a catastrophic defeat against Saladin and the Muslims, or the rain-soaked ground that hampered Napoleon’s artillery and cavalry movements in his defeat at Waterloo (1815). To the end of the war, Germans argued that the early and unusually harsh winter of 1941 had robbed them of two critical weeks at Moscow—and when that window closed, so did any chance of victory. Inhuman cold stymied airlifts to German troops at Stalingrad and the attempts at evacuation of units that became surrounded there. Fog stalled airborne reinforcements to British forces at Arnhem in 1944, contributing to the German repulse of a major Allied initiative. Strong winds and clouds in part forced General Curtis LeMay to change tactics by taking his B-29s to lower elevations and dropping incendiary rather than general-purpose bombs, thereby setting Tokyo afire with napalm. Generals and admirals, like their ancient counterparts, often predictably blamed the weather for their failures, as if they assumed in their plans that nature should be predictably compliant rather than fickle and savage.
BY 1939, GERMANY had entered its third European war within seventy years, following World War I (1914–1918) and, before that, the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871). Conflicts throughout history become serial when an enemy is not utterly defeated and is not forced to submit to the political conditions of the victor, whether in the two Peloponnesian or three Punic Wars, or the later Hundred Years’ and Seven Years’ Wars. Such was the case with the preludes to World War II, when many of the major familiar nations of the European world were again at war. Germany was once more the aggressor. That fact also helped spawn the familiar idea of “World War II” and its alternative designation, the “Second World War.” Yet this time around, both sides tacitly agreed that there would not be a World War III—either Germany would finally achieve its near century-long dream of European dominance or cease to exist as a National Socialist state and military power. Yet the Allies understood history far better: in any existential war, only the side that has the ability to destroy the homeland of the other wins.
The war, also like many conflicts of the past, was certainly chronologically inexact, with two official denouements known in the Anglosphere as V-E and V-J Day. The war, like many, was also ill-defined, especially for a country such as Bulgaria, to take one minor example, which had no common interests or communications with its nominal Pacific ally Japan. Likewise, the Greeks were indifferent to the war against fascism in China, and in the same way the Soviet Union cared little whether Italy had invaded France.7
Often border disputes on the periphery of Germany, ethnic hatreds in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, and political grievances and national ambitions set off regional wars that were only with hindsight lumped all together as World War II, at least in Britain and the United States. Most sides had hopes of allying their parochial causes to larger ideological crusades. But far more important, they just wanted to join the right side of strong allies that might be likely winners and divvy up spoils. General Francisco Franco’s fascist government in Spain was emblematic of such opportunism that transcended ideological affinities. During 1939–1941, Franco—despite horrendous recent losses in the Spanish Civil War and despite Hitler’s occasional rebuffs—considered possible entrance into the war on the Axis side. Franco assumed that the Allies would likely be defeated and there might be colonial spoils in North Africa allotted to Spain. He often boasted that Spain might unilaterally take Gibraltar or enlist hundreds of thousands of warriors to the Axis cause. But between 1943 and 1944, Spain increasingly began to reassert its neutrality, in recognition that the Axis powers would now likely lose the war and their war-won territories—and prior allegiance might earn an Allied invasion and with it a change of government. By late 1944, Fascist Spain was no longer exporting tungsten to Germany and was instead reinvented as sympathetic to British and American democracy and eager to become an anticommunist ally after the war.8
At any given time, any given people—the Finns in 1939, the Italians, Russians, and Chinese in 1940, the Americans in summer 1941—found it difficult to define the world war that had really been triggered by the German invasion of Poland. After the war began in 1939, America imposed a boycott on the Soviet Union over its surprise invasion of Finland, only soon to reverse course and provide arms to the once-blacklisted Russians to defeat the once-noble victim, Finland. Both Britain and Germany had long courted Italy and the Soviet Union as allies and vice versa. Japan occupied Vichy-held Indochina, although both Japan and Vichy France were nominal allies of Germany. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin signed pacts or came to formal and informal agreements of nonaggression with all the major belligerents at one time or another.
WHAT QUALIFIES A conflict as a world war? Despite its title, World War I had never really been truly global. Africa was largely left out of it, save for small, regional battles in the interior and the hundreds of thousands of Africans who joined colonial armies in Europe and the Middle East. Outside of the Middle East and Turkey, mainland Asia was also mostly immune from the carnage. There was little frequent surface fighting on the high seas, apart from the waters around Europe and Britain, and in the Mediterranean. Air power was in its infancy. Neither North American nor Australian territory was attacked. The Arctic saw little combat.
In fact, until 1941 there had never been a global war. Even the bloodiest wars of the past were theater conflicts. The so-called Persian Wars (490–479 BC) were really only about the annexation of Ionia and the Greek mainland as the westernmost provinces of the Persian Empire. Alexander the Great fought a Greek, Asian, and North African war (335–323 BC), yet left the western Mediterranean alone. Carthage versus Rome was mostly a Mediterranean affair that drew in only local North African tribesmen, southern Europeans, and the vestiges of Macedonian power in Greece (264–146 BC). The Crusades were essentially one-dimensional campaigns across the eastern Mediterranean to the Middle East. The Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453) or the destructive American Civil War (1861–1865) never became global.
Rome’s legions and galleys from the first and second centuries BC had been deployed in Africa, Western Europe, Asia, and throughout the Mediterranean. But they did not fight all at once and not much elsewhere. Although Winston Churchill described the Seven Years’ War (1754/1756–1763) as “the first world war,” it was not, given that China and Japan were not involved, and most peoples in India, Asia, South America, and Africa were only tangentially affected. Napoleon’s twelve years of warring (1803–1815) perhaps came closest to becoming a worldwide conflict among dozens of enemies. Its subsidiary and affiliated conflicts spread beyond Europe and Russia to some major fighting in North Africa, the Middle East, the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, and North America. Perhaps five million perished in the two decades of the Napoleonic Wars. But in general, the idea of world wars has been absent in history. Even the few intercontinental conflicts that took place were not necessarily any more destructive than more frequent border conflicts. World War II changed all that.9
Only in retrospect did historians and veterans begin to equate the various wars around the world between 1939 (or perhaps as early as 1931–1937 in the case of Japan) and 1945 as part of a thematic conflict. And yet not everywhere. The French who were defeated in June 1940 never warmed to the idea of a World War II that they had bowed out of for four years. The Soviets—who believed that they alone had defeated Nazi Germany, which was the only real focus of their war—saw the “Great Patriotic War” as theirs alone. But then in the past, the tsars likewise had used the same self-referential nomenclature for their “patriotic” wars against Napoleon of France and Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany.
Such reformulations and rebranding happen frequently throughout history. The “Peloponnesian War,” for example, was an invention largely of Thucydides in the late fifth century BC. Unlike many of his contemporaries, the Athenian veteran and ex-admiral saw in hindsight that lots of successive wars and interludes—the Archidamian War, the Peace of Nicias, the Sicilian War, the Decelean War, and the Ionian War—were all fought between 431 and 404 BC as a single, if episodic, conflict. The decade-long Persian Wars and the century-long Punic Wars likewise came to be known in such comprehensive fashion only after the final battles in the defeat of Persia and Carthage, respectively. In that sense, some have seen World War II as properly part of a continual transatlantic versus German “Thirty Years’ War” that broke out in 1914, quieted down in 1918, then went through Thucydidean cycles of calm and tension before being renewed in 1939 and ended, it seems, for good in 1945.10
CONFUSION CHARACTERIZED PRELUDES to war during the 1930s. Initially the democracies had naively assumed that even non-democratic European nations such as Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy might at least share a common age-old Western religion, pedigree, and history and thus be familiar, somewhat rational, and have no desire to repeat the appalling bloodletting of the Somme and Verdun in 1916. Given the tragedy of World War I, Hitler’s Germany surely would appreciate the need for negotiation and concessions and thus agree to iron out differences through diplomacy, without again resorting to suicidal violence. Such patience and naiveté only eroded classical deterrence and encouraged further Nazi aggrandizement.
Most wars since antiquity can be defined as the result of such flawed prewar assessments of relative military and economic strength as well as strategic objectives. Prewar Nazi Germany had no accurate idea of how powerful were Great Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union; and the latter had no inkling of the full scope of Hitler’s military ambitions. It took a world war to educate them all.
Throughout history, conflict had always broken out between enemies when the appearance of deterrence—the material and spiritual likelihood of using greater military power successfully against an aggressive enemy—vanished. From Carthage to the Confederacy, weaker bellicose states could convince themselves of the impossible because their fantasies were not checked earlier by cold reality. A stronger appearance of power, and of the willingness to employ it, might have stopped more conflicts before they began. Put another way, deterrence in the famous formulation of the seventeenth-century British statesman George Savile, 1st Marquess of Halifax, meant that “men are not hanged for stealing horses, but that horses may not be stolen.”11
But once thieves were not hanged and more horses were indeed stolen, who is strong and who weak became confusing, and the proper recalibration that pruned rhetoric and posturing from knowledge of real strength returned only at the tremendous cost of a world war. Hitler’s Mein Kampf—“the new Koran of faith and war” according to Winston Churchill—was in truth a puerile rant that gained credence only through German rearmament and aggressiveness, at least before Stalingrad. After that battle, Hitler was no longer read widely and was only rarely heard by Germans, as the ambitions of the Third Reich waned and Nazi Germany was exposed as far weaker than its enemies and led by an incompetent strategist. The prewar reality was that Russian armor was superior to German. Inexplicably, the Soviets had not been able to communicate that fact, and in consequence lost deterrence. Hitler later remarked that had he just been made aware of the nature of Russian tank production, and specifically about the T-34 tank, against which standard German anti-tank weapons were ineffective, he would never have invaded the Soviet Union. Maybe. But it took a theater war in the East that killed over thirty million people to reveal the Soviets’ real power. Accordingly, leaders and their followers are forced to make the necessary readjustments, although often at a terrible price of correcting flawed prewar impressions.12
In the case of the timidity of the Western democracies in 1938–1939, General Walter Warlimont explained Hitler’s confidence about powers that easily could have deterred Germany: “(1) he felt their [the Allies’] Far Eastern interests were more important than their European interests, and (2) they did not appear to be armed sufficiently.” What a terrible cost ensued to prove Hitler wrong.13
Only after the disastrous battles of Leipzig (1813) and Waterloo (1815) did Napoleon finally concede that his armies had never been a match for the combined strength of Russia, Prussia, Austria, Sweden, and England. Had all those states combined in a firm coalition a decade earlier, Napoleon might well have been deterred. Churchill without much exaggeration said of Hitler’s military agenda, “up till 1934 at least, German rearmament could have been prevented without the loss of a single life. It was not time that was lacking.”14
By any fair measure, Germany in 1939—in terms of the number and quality of planes, armor, manpower reserves, and industrial output—was not stronger than the combined French and British militaries—or at least not so strong as to be able to defeat and occupy both powers. The later German-Italian-Japanese axis was far less impressive than the alliance that would soon emerge of Great Britain, America, and Russia—having only little over a third of the three Allies’ combined populations, not to speak of their productive capacity. After all, the United States by war’s end in 1945 would achieve a wartime gross national product nearly greater than that of all of the other Allied and Axis powers combined.15
In sum, sixty million dead, twentieth-century totalitarian ideologies, the singular evil of Adolf Hitler, the appearance of V-2 rockets, the dropping of two atomic bombs, the Holocaust, napalm, kamikazes, and the slaughter of millions in Russia and China seemed to redefine World War II as unlike any conflict of the past—even as predictable humans with unchanging characteristics, fighting amid age-old geography and weather patterns, continued to follow the ancient canons of war and replayed roles well known from the ages.
Why the Western world—which was aware of the classical lessons and geography of war, and was still suffering from the immediate trauma of the First World War—chose to tear itself apart in 1939 is a story not so much of accidents, miscalculations, and overreactions (although there were plenty of those, to be sure) as of the carefully considered decisions to ignore, appease, or collaborate with Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany by nations that had the resources and knowledge, but not yet the willpower, to do otherwise.