THE PREWAR AMBITIONS of every warring nation are not set in stone. They expand and contract during the conflict according to the perceived pulse of the battlefield. Setbacks scale down aspirations; success creates ad hoc fantasies of grand conquests—the common denominator being fickle public opinion, even in totalitarian nations. Hitler could not stay off German radio before 1942, blustering and threatening; after Stalingrad, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels could hardly get him back on the air. Ecstatic German crowds met Hitler’s return from Paris in 1940. Fewer Germans welcomed his sheepish reemergence from his high-security retreat at the Wolf’s Lair in late 1944. Hitler did not deliver a radio address to the German people during the entire critical year of 1944.1
Neutral Spain and Sweden were as generous to the Third Reich in 1940 as they were hesitant to trade with it in 1945. Many Allies joined the cause after 1943. Many of Germany’s partners quit the Axis after 1944. There were only a few exceptions in the war to these age-old human tendencies, such as the renunciation of the victorious Winston Churchill at the British polls in July 1945, or the effort to invade India in March 1944 by an already-spent Japanese military.
A more rational Germany, Italy, or Japan might have envisioned consolidating and digesting its successful aggressions. Despite Hitler’s schizophrenic rhetoric of wishing for supremacy only on the European mainland, and his occasional allusions to pan-continental conquest, it is telling that by mid-1941 Germany could have lorded over a Nazi-occupied and mostly unified Europe without turning on its de facto ally Russia. Yet a few years later, amid a crumbling Third Reich, a petulant Hitler—who had invaded France, bombed Britain, waged a surprise attack on the Soviet Union, and declared war on the United States—by 1945 still claimed that he had never desired a war beyond Poland.
The role of the rapid fall of France in expanding the war is sometimes not appreciated. The implosion of Republican France made the heroic sacrifices of the West in World War I seem as if they were, in the end, all in vain, and thereby created deep depression among the old Allies. The world had turned upside down, as the mystique of the indestructible French army of 1914–1918 vanished along with France itself. Hitler himself now wrongly believed anything was possible, and probably expanded his previously repressed agendas accordingly. A military that could do in six weeks what the grand army of Hindenburg and Ludendorff had not in four years, need not worry too much about Britain, despite the pesky persistence of the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force. Had France just survived even as an autonomous rump state, most of Hitler’s freedom of action in the East and elsewhere would have been postponed indefinitely.2
On the eve of the Blitz in 1940, Hitler supposedly bragged to Albert Speer, his state architect and later munitions minister, “London will be a rubble heap, and three months from now, moreover! I have not the slightest sympathy for the British civilian populace.” Hitler was convinced that his proven formula of adding territory to Greater Germany without much cost was also valid for global wars against the United States and the Soviet Union. One reason was that war, for Hitler, the wartime creature of the bunker, was not only politically useful but also spiritually nourishing for a great race. “War does not frighten me,” he boasted as early as 1934. “If privation lies ahead of the German people, I shall be the first to starve and set my people a good example.”3
Overreach after even the smallest victory was in the fascist DNA. A weak Italy, temporarily victorious only in British Somaliland, ensured that it could not secure its position in North Africa once it had invaded Greece. Throughout the 1930s the Japanese had no prewar realistic strategic plans to hit the homelands of likely future enemies Britain and the United States. Had they just sidestepped Singapore, the Philippines, and a distant Pearl Harbor, and consolidated their gains in China, they might have carved out, without a general war, a hegemony that extended from China to the orphaned Pacific colonies of the defunct Dutch and tottering French empires.
So there were plenty of strategic options for each of the Axis powers to consolidate holdings without involving the Western democracies and the Soviet Union in a global war. All the Axis powers were oil short. But there were ways of obtaining sufficient fuels from allies and in partnership with the Soviet Union without war, or in the case of Japan, in the Dutch East Indies without attacking Pearl Harbor and Singapore.4
The Axis powers had various schemes. At first, they simply accepted anything that was given to them; then took most anything that could be taken without great cost; and next retained as much of the territory that they had stolen as possible; and finally focused on nothing except the very survival of their regimes. As for the Allies, by 1942 three facts had shaped their war aims and became the subtexts for a series of three summits between the Americans, British, and Soviets, and additional bilateral meetings between Britain and the United States. First, there was a shared but mostly unspoken assumption that their collective prior policies of appeasement (what Anthony Eden once called “peace at almost any price”), indifference, or de facto alliance with the Axis had utterly failed, to the point of humiliation. That was an easier recognition for the democratic leaders of Britain and America than for Stalin. Europeans had blamed America for staying out of Europe’s war; America had blamed Europeans for not preparing for their own war. Yet the Russian leader had no one to blame but himself for Hitler’s drive eastward, having previously come to formal agreement with Nazi Germany while directly abetting Hitler’s aggressions. In any case, by late 1943 in various prior meetings and agreements the Allies agreed that there could be no separate negotiated armistice with any of the Axis leaders, given that past diplomacy had led only to more humiliation and war.
Second, in an ironic twist, the Allies went further and conceded that they had once been unprepared for Axis duplicity, and in some sense should not be surprised at what they had wrought. That belated recognition of being duped made the Allied powers all the more determined to mobilize for war in a manner that their increasingly naive enemies could scarcely imagine, much less match. Such acceptance of prior laxity and its failure to appease the Axis did not just mean an eventual call for unconditional surrender—formalized as such between Churchill and Roosevelt at the 1943 Casablanca Conference—but, again, also the de facto destruction of the ideologies that drove the Axis.5
Third, annihilation of the Axis powers would require a cost in blood and treasure unforeseen in past wars, and demand a temporary unity of purpose quite at odds with the Allies’ own perceived differing postwar agendas. Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin after 1941, at first singly and then collectively, were each prepared to wage the war as one of annihilation and far more existentially than had Lloyd George, Woodrow Wilson, and Tsar Nicholas II, and were in far better positions to do so. The Allies fought World War II to rectify the mistakes made at the end of World War I and to avoid circumstances that would lead to a World War III. They solved the former problem, but the latter required another half century of enormous sacrifices and “unconditional responsibilities.”6
The strange alliances of World War II opened a Pandora’s box of mass death that transcended six years of formal fighting, largely because the most fanatical of the major belligerents (Germany and Japan) attacked great populations in Russia and China who at least initially were easily accessed near their respective borders and whose militaries initially could not protect their own people. And just three belligerent powers (China, Germany, and the Soviet Union) before, during, and not long after World War II, had exterminated or would kill more people off the battlefield—many of them their own citizens—than their enemies did on it between 1939 and 1945.
The Soviet Union entered the war and then the democratic Western alliance after killing perhaps ten million of its own without foreign intervention or even much global censure during the so-called Red Terror and Great Purge following World War I, and the collectivizations and ensuing famines of 1932–1933. With near impunity, Hitler slaughtered six million Jews in the heart of Eastern Europe—the vast majority of them in occupied territory of the Third Reich as it was collapsing, with the Allies closing in on both fronts and their aircraft with near complete control of the skies. Mao Zedong, who came to power after the liberation of China from the Japanese, systematically murdered and starved to death perhaps forty to seventy million Chinese in concentration camps, purges, famines, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution, beginning not long after the war and not ending until the 1970s. World War II and its aftermath were variously linked to these three great holocausts of the twentieth century.7
The war gave Hitler both the resources and the general backdrop for mass murder so necessary to engineer the Final Solution, especially on the Eastern Front. Absorbing Poland, unifying Eastern Europe, occupying the Baltic states, and invading Russia stripped millions of Jews of any chance of state defense against Hitlerian savagery.8
Prior to 1939, the world was slowly beginning to fathom the sheer brutality of Stalin’s purges, forced relocations, and famines from the 1920s to the early 1930s that had led to the state-orchestrated deaths of millions of Russians. Such revelations, along with the later nonaggression pact between Nazi Germany and Communist Russia, at least politically had tended to weaken any support abroad for the idea of state-coerced communism. But that fact changed after Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union and the ensuing partnership between Stalin and the Western democracies that changed a bloody dictator into “Uncle Joe.”9
It is hard to envision Mao Zedong coming to absolute power separate from the circumstances during and right after World War II. Mao’s postwar toll over the subsequent two decades may have been larger than Hitler’s and Stalin’s combined, and trumped even the genocide attributable to the Japanese militarists. Mao’s leftist revolutionary credentials established by his early postwar defeat of the often incompetent and exasperating Chiang Kai-shek regime tempered Western criticism, even through the 1950s and 1960s. Again, the origins of his subsequent genocides can be traced to his rise in stature during and as a result of World War II.
IN SEPTEMBER 1939 few observers would have predicted the Allied and Axis alliances that arose in late 1941. Aside from the evils of expansionist German, Italian, and Japanese fascism, the conniving of the Soviet Union was most responsible for the outbreak of World War II and for the strange shifts in alliances that followed. Before 1939, its antifascist propaganda and prior shared history of conflict against Germany seemed to offer the Soviet Union the chance of at least a cynical alliance with Britain and France, which in the past had seen no problems allying with traditional Russian autocracy as a critical deterrent to German expansionism to the west. In contrast, one of World War II’s greatest paradoxes was how Stalin’s hope that Germany and the Western European nations would wear each other out in 1940 boomeranged on his country after June 1941. As a result of Stalin’s former empowerment of the Nazis, some in Britain and the United States had quietly argued that there was no hurry to open a second ground front in Western Europe, given that the totalitarian Soviets and their doppelganger Nazis were destroying each other in the East. In a related irony, only by dividing up Poland in September and October 1939 did the Soviet Union create a common border with the Third Reich. An even greater disconnect was that the postwar allies ratified Soviet ownership of the Baltic states and parts of Eastern Europe that Stalin had grabbed while partnering with Hitler before June 1941.10
After 1939, Germany’s ally Russia was so close to East Prussia that it still seemed inconceivable that Hitler could ever attack westward with such a historically and ideologically hostile “partner” at his immediate rear. Nor could he move eastward against the Soviet Union with France and Britain mobilized on his western border. A despairing Admiral Raeder on the eve of Operation Barbarossa purportedly sighed about Hitler, “I expressed myself as incredulous of any intent on his part to unleash a two-front war after his own constant denunciation of the stupidity of the Imperial Government in doing this identical thing in 1914. The Russo-German Treaty should not be violated and under no circumstances, since the treaty itself guarded us against a war on two fronts.” Raeder’s exasperation may well have been postwar mythmaking, inasmuch as most of the Wehrmacht elite supported Barbarossa and assumed it would be a continuation of the easy success seen in Western Europe.11
The Soviet state, not Germany, by 1941 fielded the world’s greatest number of soldiers, armored vehicles, and airplanes. Russia, not Germany, had the world’s best tanks and artillery. Between 1939 and the eve of the German invasion, the Soviets had produced eighty thousand mortars and guns, seventeen thousand aircraft, and 7,500 tanks, including nearly two thousand late-model T-34s and KV-1s. Russia, not Germany, was both a fuel and food exporter. The Soviets could field more army divisions than all of the Axis powers combined. Yet again Hitler ignored or downplayed those realities. Instead he relied on massaged German intelligence that was ignorant of the advanced state of Russian armaments. The Nazi hierarchy was sorely out of date in its assessments of the modern Red Army. It had focused on Stalin’s 1938–1939 purges of the Red Army’s officer corps, the lethargic Soviet advances into Poland in 1939, and problems subduing Finland in 1940 as confirmation of the Russian army’s chronically poor performance, dating back to the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905 and the collapse of the tsarist ground forces in 1917. None of that, however, was necessarily a referendum on the wisdom of fighting on Russian soil in mid-1941.12
Germany had humiliated the Soviets at Brest-Litovsk in 1918. Hitler likewise knew that Soviet-German military cooperation in the 1920s and 1930s was supposedly predicated on the notion that Soviet industry and technology had more to learn than to teach. In 1940, Hitler also apparently had relied on ossified World War I west-east equations: if France had proved unconquerable in World War I and Russia was defeated in less than three years, then the fall of France in 1940 in six weeks might mean that this time around Russia would crumble in a month—as if a still-ascendant Russian communism in 1939 was similar to a tottering Tsarist Russia of 1917, or the confident French of 1914 were the same people as those in 1939–1940.
In May 1941, Karl Bremer, the director of the German-controlled press during the occupation of France, supposedly got drunk during a reception at the Bulgarian embassy in Berlin. He soon blurted out German plans to invade Russia that reflected the illusions that the abrupt collapse of the once-vaunted French army had encouraged: “Inside of two months our dear [Nazi ideologue Alfred] Rosenberg will be boss of all Russia and Stalin will be dead. We will demolish the Russians quicker than we did the French.” Bremer was just channeling more Hitlerian mythmaking. During his victory tour of Paris in June 1940, Hitler scoffed to General Wilhelm Keitel, head of OKH (Oberkommando des Heeres, Supreme Command of the Army), how much easier defeating Russia would be than the just-completed conquest of France: “Believe me, Keitel, a campaign against Russia would be like a child’s game in a sandbox by comparison.”13
As for leaving Britain unconquered to the rear, the experience of World War I weighed on Hitler. For all his grand talk of eastern Lebensraum and strategic minerals, farmland, and oil, Hitler’s wartime experience was entirely in the West; the brutal battles of the Somme and Passchendaele convinced him that the Western Front would always be the tougher nut to crack. Hitler therefore found consolation in the idea that, just as Imperial Russia had not survived the Kaiser even though Britain had, so too would Stalin fall even if Churchill would not.
Russia’s leadership worried only about the survival and expansion of Soviet communism and the Stalinist regime. To the degree the British and French conceivably could have made ironclad anti-German assurances to Russia before 1939, Stalin might have cemented negotiations with them on a common front, thereby most likely delaying or even preventing what would become a world war. But Stalin could not forge a partnership, given the French and British unwillingness to sell out quite so brazenly the idea of self-determination in Eastern Europe that was already sacrificed to German and Soviet agendas. The Soviets then were quite prepared to cut a better deal with Hitler to divide Poland and to pledge mutual nonaggression. That pact was seen as a continuance of both their own renegade military cooperation and their mutual loathing of the idea of an independent Poland.14
Russia could now face down Japan; Hitler was freed eventually to eye France. Stalin might well have preferred a pact all along with a fellow totalitarian like Hitler (“only a very able man could accomplish what Hitler had done in solidifying the German people, whatever we thought of the methods”) to one with Western democrats. For his part, Hitler appreciated that those who had mastered the absolute use of power were likely to be more sympathetic to similar aggrandizing dictators. Hitler came to idolize Stalin, even late in the war as the Red Army was destroying the Wehrmacht: “Churchill has nothing to show for his life’s work except a few books and clever speeches in parliament. Stalin on the other hand has without doubt—leaving aside the question of what principle he was serving—reorganized a state of 170 million people and prepared it for a massive armed conflict. If Stalin ever fell into my hands, I would probably spare him and perhaps exile him to some spa; Churchill and Roosevelt would be hanged.”15
After the pact, Russia looked to the Baltic states and the borderlands with Eastern Europe and soon displayed an appetite for conquest that even Hitler found inordinate. In Soviet thinking, the communists were only recovering what had properly belonged to Russia under the tsars but had been liberated or plundered during the chaotic transition to communism. In addition, the Soviets did not always deliver all the promised resources to the Third Reich, and continually upped their demands for German technology and industrial goods, convincing Hitler that perhaps the nonaggression accord shorted German interests, especially in terms of receiving Russian oil. Stalin grew ever more worried that France, as the traditional bulwark to German expansionism, collapsed much too quickly. He shortly thereafter formally annexed the Baltic states, cut out swaths of Romanian territory, and stepped up rearmament. Germany put up with all this to be free to war against the Western European democracies, which Stalin had assumed would put up a much tougher fight than his own targeted acquisitions. Ironically, democracies did nothing for Czechoslovakia and little more for Poland, rendering void all their prior principled unwillingness to agree to Stalin’s realpolitik as the price of alliance.16
Any long-term partnership between Stalin and Hitler was bound to fail. Communism was not a kindred ideology of Nazism. With general class rather than particular racial enemies, Marxism had proven far more dynamic and with more international appeal than had the Aryan racial obsessions of National Socialism, and was thus seen by Hitler as Nazi Germany’s chief existential threat. Both nations still nursed recriminations from the prior war. The Soviets still chafed under the humiliating terms of Russia’s capitulation in 1918. The Germans remembered that the atrocious behavior of tsarist armies in 1914 in East Prussia had rivaled their own savagery in Belgium. If a Soviet pact with the West might have deterred war, one with Hitler ensured it in the long term.
Russia likewise was critical to the cause and evolution of the Pacific war. Its victory over the Japanese army in a series of Manchurian border wars between May and September 1939 convinced many in the Japanese military that it was unwise to fight the Soviet Union unilaterally on its eastern boundaries. Marshal Georgy Zhukov’s ground forces were better led, better equipped, and more numerous than those of the Japanese army. In addition, Stalin, at the end of the border fighting, had enhanced his military advantages by signing a nonaggression pact with Japan’s supposedly anticommunist Axis partner, Nazi Germany. Subsequent Japanese realpolitik, and a bitter sense of betrayal by Germany, would lead Tokyo to formalize its own nonaggression pact with Stalin in April 1941.17
That tit-for-tat double cross would have two fundamental consequences to the nature of the alliances of World War II, and explain the expansion of the war into a worldwide conflict. One, Japan in June 1941, without an invitation to join the initial invasion, would not subsequently aid Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa with a simultaneous attack from the east along the Manchurian border. The reluctance arose partly out of both Japanese self-interest and pique, but also partly because a greedy and ascendant Hitler had snubbed the Japanese in June 1941 (he would not by late 1942) because he had wished to claim all his envisioned winnings alone. Indeed, when the Germans were apprised of the Japanese decision in April 1941 to form their own pact with Stalin just weeks before Operation Barbarossa, General Warlimont noted the indifference, or even the relief, at the accord among German officers: “We don’t need anyone just to strip the corpses.” By September, after three months of mostly German success, Hitler bragged, “today everybody is dreaming of a world peace conference. For my part, I prefer to wage war for another ten years rather than be cheated thus of the spoils of victory.” Perhaps Hitler also quite wrongly figured that a Japanese attack in the East against a lightly populated Siberia was not of much immediate help against the centers of Russian industry and commerce, at least in comparison to the Japanese tying down Anglo-American naval forces and some ground troops in the Pacific and Asia.18
Japan’s nonintervention nonetheless guaranteed that the beleaguered Soviet Union would avoid a two-front war and would have Vladivostok free to receive unimpeded US Lend-Lease aid from West Coast ports of America. In response, by December 1941, Stalin had rushed almost twenty divisions westward for the defense of Moscow, which helped to stall Hitler’s siege and the successful German blitzkrieg of 1941. After the war, the incompetent Field Marshal Keitel confessed that even rapid German advancement and historic victories had not translated to a rapid victory, as was true between 1939 and 1941: “After the decisive battles at Bryansk, which was a terrific beating for the Russians, or perhaps, after the siege of Moscow and Leningrad, or after the battles on the Donetz Basin, one had to realize that it would come to a long war.”19
Two, the armistice with the Japanese on September 14, 1939, also had assured the Russians of a safe rear and so greenlighted their invasion of Poland, in the manner that a more formal Soviet-Japanese nonaggression pact on April 13, 1941, had likewise unleashed Japan upon Britain and the United States. Given the choice of a slugfest with Russia or, after June 1940, the lure of poorly defended Dutch, French, and perhaps British colonies now ripe for the plucking, the Japanese, especially the army, logically preferred resource-rich Asia and the Pacific. Note that for the most part Stalin honored both his promises with the Nazis and the Imperial Japanese far more assiduously than he would his postwar agreements with Britain and the United States. Perhaps it was worse even than that: Stalin kept to the letter of his nonaggression pact with Japan to ensure that Soviet-bound ships could leave American ports safely and reach Vladivostok through Japanese-controlled waters. The Soviets would eagerly accept US Lend-Lease and ensure its delivery by abetting America’s archenemy. In the hierarchy of autocratic deceit, it was hard to determine which dictatorship was the chief offender—Japan, which had made assorted deals with Hitler’s archenemy to avoid a three-front war; Germany, which had earlier made a deal with Japan’s archenemy to avoid a two-front war; or Russia, which had at various times had made deals with both Germany and Japan that harmed Britain and America, whose supplies would help to keep it alive.
Nazi Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union for nearly two years had all jockeyed with one another to prevent a two-theater conflict, the fear of all six major belligerents of World War II. Yet when the war finally ended in 1945, only an opportunistic Stalin had achieved his aim of largely avoiding such a war. During the destruction of Poland, Winston Churchill had presciently said of the Soviet Union’s 1939 double cross, “I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian self-interest.”20
THE STRENGTHS AND weakness of the various major belligerents, the nature of their governments, and their decisions to exploit perceived weakness or to punish unprovoked aggression explain the memberships of the respective wartime alliances by late 1941. Russia was the only belligerent that mostly eschewed naval warfare and systematic strategic bombing to focus on its infantry by fielding the war’s largest army. For all Stalin’s machinations to gain territories without cost, in the end Russia paid by far the highest price of any of the belligerents. Historians still seek to sort out the degree to which the Soviets’ catastrophe was a result of their own duplicity. Note as well that while Stalin, between 1941 and 1944, constantly berated the British and Americans for failing to open an immediate second front against his former partner Hitler, he nonetheless rejected outright any counter-suggestion that the Russians might at least do something on their own Asian borders against Japanese occupiers to relieve their allies from the pressures of a two-front war against the Axis, and to facilitate the transport of aid to China. In fact, Stalin enumerated various reasons why he would not engage the Japanese—all of which boiled down to the reluctance to fight the dual-enemy conflict that his own allies were engaged in, even if they were pitted against far fewer Axis soldiers.
It might not be entirely fair to Stalin but it nonetheless remains an accurate generalization that no other single individual was responsible for more deaths between 1925 and 1945, whether by forced famines, mass executions, the aid to and empowerment of Hitler until June 1941, the reckless wastage of the Red Army in 1941–1942, and the political cleansing of Eastern Europe between 1945 and 1946. The Soviet Union entered the war seeking to grab territory with Hitler and ended the war acquiring more than it had ever envisioned by warring against him.21
GREAT BRITAIN WAS the only Allied power that fought the entire war against Germany and its Axis partners from September 3, 1939, to Japan’s formal surrender on September 2, 1945, in Tokyo Bay. Of what would become the Big Three allied nations of Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States, only Britain had begun hostilities against an Axis power without being directly attacked itself when it nominally went to war on behalf of its ally Poland. Great Britain and its empire—not France, the United States, or the Soviet Union—was also the only Allied nation that ever faced Germany alone, from the fall of Western Europe in May 1940 to the invasion of Russia in June 1941. With well less than half the material and human resources of the United States, it would nonetheless fight in Europe, Italy, Sicily, and North Africa, on and below the high seas, in the Pacific, and along with the United States would conduct a costly strategic bombing campaign over Europe. Its expanding economy was the most underrated of the three Allied powers. The Dominions—especially Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa—offered steady supplies and many of the war’s best soldiers, who were central to the British strategy for fighting a global war. More than half of all British divisions as well as 40 percent of RAF crews were raised in the Dominions, colonies, and India. Hitler talked grandly of the British Empire, but he had no idea of the resources—industrial, agricultural, financial, military, and human—that Britain might exploit in a world war, or of how loyal such diverse British subjects would prove to be in supplying hundreds of thousands of troops to the British military.22
Hitler did not fully appreciate the obvious fact that Britain had a far greater navy than any of the three Axis powers in 1939, or that British air forces were rapidly evolving to become better balanced and coordinated than was the Luftwaffe. The need to fight over vast distances and to protect imperial ground made it natural for the British to emphasize air and naval power, and to avoid a meat-grinder ground war in France and Belgium. The Nazi regime seemed to be completely clueless about the vast transformation in British military preparedness that had begun in late 1938. In Hitler’s obsessions with land warfare, the fact that Britain had not mobilized a huge expeditionary army in the fashion of 1916 apparently deluded him about the importance of growing British sea and air power, and their abilities to ensure supply lines for troops and imports.23
From the outset of World War II in September 1939, Great Britain best of the Allies also articulated the nature of the Axis threat, predicted the course of Nazi aggression, and anchored the future alliance—largely because of the singular leadership of Winston Churchill after May 10, 1940, and the inherent resilience of the British people. As early as 1937, Churchill had warned the haughty German ambassador to Britain, Joachim von Ribbentrop, that the British were not as comparatively weak as their prior appeasement might otherwise have indicated. At the German embassy in London, Churchill had refused to be complicit with Germany’s designs on Eastern Europe and the USSR, earning threats from Ambassador Ribbentrop. In reply, Churchill offered, “do not underrate England. She is very clever. If you plunge us all into another Great War, she will bring the whole world against you like last time.” The Germans did not grasp that appeasement was not necessarily static, but rather a momentary wish not to suffer moderate casualties in exchange for the hope of avoiding them altogether—a mood that could eventually lead to frustration and with it war with righteous indignation and zeal. Or as George Orwell and others noted, “in international politics… you must be either willing to practise appeasement indefinitely, or at some point be ready to fight.” Nor was appeasement necessarily a barometer of military preparedness. An appeasing nation can often enjoy military superiority over an aggressor, albeit with a far greater desire not to use the superior assets it enjoys.24
After mid-1944, Britain fought, if briefly, over some of the same battlegrounds anyway. The much longer and greater American role between 1941 and 1945 than in 1917–1918 meant that the British lost fewer lives than they had in World War I. By 1945 Russia had borne the bulk of infantry fighting against the German colossus, unlike the Tsar’s army that had dissolved well before the Western Armistice of November 11, 1918. The resurgent Red Army in 1942, fighting on a single front, allowed Britain to free up more of its resources to expand air power and to fight a second front against the Japanese—the sort of global outreach that exceeded expeditionary efforts in World War I.
Had Winston Churchill made an agreement with Germany in June 1940, as Hitler and some British grandees sometimes fantasized, or had he not become prime minister in the prior month, then Nazi Germany either might not have turned on Russia or might conceivably have beaten it. Only the survival of Britain meant the resurrection of a second European front against Hitler in the West, albeit by air power and Mediterranean fighting prior to June 1944. Without a free Britain there would have been neither an early American bombing campaign nor an eventual American landing in Western Europe. At the least, without Britain the United States would have lacked a forward staging area from which to retake the continent. The remarkable resistance of Britain in 1940 did much to convince the United States to invest the greater share of its efforts in the European theater of operations. The British expertise accrued from fighting the Germans from September 1939 onward proved invaluable to the United States in 1942.
The least powerful and populous of the three major Allies, Great Britain proved in many respects the most principled and the most effective, given the resources at its disposal and always with the acceptance that the burdens of the global and often lonely war might leave postwar Britain reduced in power, as a postwar world gravitated to the Soviet Union and the United States. Americans may have tired of British lectures and their imperial pretensions, but the British were crucial to the Allied alliance—dependable, courageous, ingenious, and talented in ways no other power could match.
OF THE SIX major powers in World War II, America alone did not in any substantial way have its traditional continental homeland invaded or bombed. Two oceans with thousands of miles of seas between the United States, Asia, and Europe protected American industry, as Hitler himself soon lamented. But if such distance ensured uninterrupted American military production, it also meant that America did not have a close affinity with European and Asian politics. For far too long it lacked an accurate up-to-date appraisal of the nature of the Axis militaries. As was true in World War I, the confident Americans would arrive in Europe, whether in Sicily, Italy, or at bases in Britain, convinced that they had the answers to defeat Germany in a way the far more experienced British did not.
America prior to Pearl Harbor freely offered advice, but despite budding rearmament was also shockingly ill-prepared for an extended land or air war. While the British and the Europeans had all but disarmed by the early 1930s, they had rather rapidly wised up after Munich. By 1939, both France and Britain had neared Germany’s annual defense outlays, investing between 21 and 23 percent of their respective gross national product in rearming. By 1940, the combined defense spending of the two economies exceeded Germany’s. In contrast, despite a massive naval expansion program, America still spent only 1 percent of GNP on defense in 1939 and a mere 2 percent in 1940, even as the war was raging in Europe. As a percentage of America’s budgetary dollars, defense expenditure dipped between 1932 and 1939, and often the money spent was not efficiently allotted but reflected congressional pork-barrel interests.25
America’s secure geography was also a double-edged sword. Whereas the fronts were safely distant from the United States, they also were hard and costly to reach, and sometimes dangerous to supply. Throughout the war, the United States had the largest supply and transportation overhead of the conflict. It dispatched soldiers and materiel across the globe, often under dangerous skies and in perilous waters. Because the American public was the only wartime populace not under attack, it was more difficult to rally the country on the premise that military defeat would equate with the extinction of America as a nation.26
Yet the United States was the only belligerent on either side of the conflict to have fought fully in every conceivable theater and manner against Japan, Italy, and Germany. Those extraordinary commitments were reflected in the transformation of the American economy. By the end of 1944, it was allotting over $80 billion per year, well over 40 percent of its GNP, to the war effort. And by 1945, 93.5 percent of annual budget outlays went to the military forces or defense-related investments. It spent 20 percent more of its much larger budget on military forces than did Nazi Germany. For all the Axis talk of decadent Americans, the working men and women of the United States produced far more per capita industrial output than any nation of the war.27
Mobility was critical to overcoming innate disadvantages of sending troops thousands of miles from home to initiate offensives against far more experienced Axis troops. In response, America invested considerable capital and manpower in its naval and air forces, and focused on producing inexhaustible numbers of reliable, easy-to-use, and mostly effective weapons. A twelve-million-man military had vast obligations, from supplying the Soviet Union to securing Australia to eroding Axis and Japanese industry by air and sea. The two most expensive weapons programs of the war, the Manhattan Project and the B-29 bomber, were both designed to bring destruction to faraway enemies, by air. By the early twentieth century, the US military had never envisioned starting a major war by rolling across its borders into Mexico or Canada, and so it was natural that its prewar armed forces little resembled the vast German and Soviet armies and armored vehicles.28
America’s early role in World War II was marked by a sharp learning curve between Pearl Harbor and 1943. Initial confusion over proper strategic goals, and naiveté about the mediocre quality of many first-generation weapons, green troops, and unimpressive field generals were the natural wages of a Depression-era, poorly armed, and isolationist nation gearing up for a world war. Yet by mid-1943, the United States had addressed most of its early liabilities. Its well-led tactical air forces, strategic bombers, carriers, submarines, and ground forces fought in superb fashion, often against enemies that enjoyed geographical and logistical advantages.
For two reasons, the United States entered yet another foreign and distant war after being sorely disappointed that the victory of World War I had not achieved the promised lasting peace. First, the Japanese attacked American bases in the Pacific. As noted, had Japan just sidestepped the Philippines and avoided Hawaii in its quest to absorb vulnerable Dutch and French colonial holdings, or concentrated on British-controlled Singapore, Malaysia, Burma, and India, there is little reason to suppose that America would have promptly entered the Pacific war to aid Britain any more than it had intervened during the Blitz when London’s iconic buildings and thousands of its citizens went up in flames. The United States may have romanticized China, but it had done nothing much militarily to help it in its decade-long struggle with the Japanese.
Second, on December 11, 1941, Germany and Italy declared war on the United States in one of the greatest blunders of World War II. If Germany had not done this, there is no reason to assume that the United States would not have concentrated all its resources on Japan after Pearl Harbor. Hitler’s disastrous decision may have been in part emotional; he had a pathological hatred for Franklin Roosevelt, as he had indicated in a number of marathon speeches, most notably an April 1939 diatribe before the Reichstag. Hitler’s decision was in part also an ad hoc response to the lobbying from the German navy, whose submariners wanted to target US convoys at their source, and a general frustration that the supposedly mongrel and profit-minded Americans were supplying enemies of the Third Reich with Lend-Lease.
After declaring war on the United States in December 1941, Hitler hoped that the Japanese navy would then tie down the Americans and siphon off their expeditionary strength. Neither the marshals of the Wehrmacht nor Hitler had any real intuition of the disasters that would rapidly befall Germany as a result of this impulsive decision. General Warlimont claimed he was baffled by Hitler’s sudden declaration and struggled to cite three possible reasons for the inexplicable act: “(1) fidelity to his part of the treaty with Japan, (2) his romantic feeling of wanting to support a soldierly nation such as Japan, and (3) the continued hostile attitude of the United States.” After the war, these sentiments were reiterated when a soon-to-be-hanged Joachim von Ribbentrop gave self-interested and confused answers to his interrogators when asked why Hitler had started a war with the United States. He claimed that although he was always against the idea, Hitler asserted that American aid to the British already constituted a state of war, and that the Third Reich owed Japan support if their alliance were to mean anything—an odd inference, if true, given that the Germans had no hesitation about double-crossing Japan in August 1939 by signing a nonaggression pact with the Soviets while Stalin was engaged in a de facto border war with the Japanese Imperial Army.
In addition, by early December 1941, the Wehrmacht was already stalled outside Moscow. Hitler wrongly assumed, along with the Japanese, that an ill-prepared America might be an easy alternate target—a Napoleonic habit of starting new wars before old ones were finished that had also prompted him earlier to turn attention to Russia when his Blitz over Britain had failed.29
Americans this time around were convinced after Pearl Harbor by the Roosevelt administration—despite their great distance from the fronts in Europe and Asia—that they were not fighting an optional war but a defensive one for their very survival, and that reality prompted mobilization and preparation that exceeded even the gargantuan efforts of 1917–1918. Quite unlike in World War I, the Americans now faced the dilemma of a two-front war and a paradox in the priorities of fighting it. The greater existential threat was Nazi Germany. But the more immediate and emotional concern was Imperial Japan. Unlike the Third Reich, the Japanese had attacked US territory and slaughtered American sailors and soldiers at a time of peace. Because both the Soviet Union and Britain had adopted a Germany-first policy, the United States wondered why it should as well when there was an Allied void in the Pacific. America would answer that question by proclaiming a Europe-first policy but, in actuality, by generously outsourcing much of the Pacific war to the US Navy, Marines, and some crack Army divisions and air squadrons.
The United States fielded the second-largest military of the war, reaching over twelve million in uniform (all told, over 16 million would cumulatively serve). It suffered proportionally the fewest combat casualties of the major powers (about 416,000, or a little over 3 percent of those enrolled in the military). That human economy was possible because America built the greatest number of aircraft, launched the largest tonnage of ships, fielded the largest and most efficient medical services, and finally by mid-1945 produced a greater gross national product than all the other four warring nations combined.
The United States did not enter the war to grab new territory in the manner of Germany, Italy, Japan, and the Soviet Union. America ended up eventually returning most of what it had conquered. The initial American strategy was to strike as quickly as possible at the heartland of the Third Reich, defeat the Wehrmacht, remove the Nazis, and then invade Japan. Americans had met and defeated a tiring German army in 1917–1918, and had not experienced something like Verdun or the Somme. Their leaders knew the fickle and impatient nature of the American public, eager for rapid decisive victories and equally quick to tire and turn on long-drawn-out engagements that did not bring rapid and unambiguous results. Just a month after Pearl Harbor, the Roosevelt administration sought seemingly impossible yearly production goals of twenty thousand anti-aircraft guns, forty-five thousand tanks and armored vehicles, and sixty thousand aircraft. By the war’s end, it had sometimes achieved those targets.30
IN SUM, THE idea of the “Allies” shifted throughout the war. Before June 1940, the plural noun Allies denoted Great Britain and the Western democracies of Europe. After the collapse of France, Scandinavia, and the Low Countries in 1940, and the invasion of Russia in June 1941, the Soviet Union and Great Britain, now loosely aligned with China, were the only Allied powers left actively fighting the Axis powers.
By December 1941, some twenty-seven months after the start of the war, the Allied alliance was again recalibrated by the Pearl Harbor attack and the Axis powers’ respective declarations of war on the United States. What bound together the new so-called Big Three of America, Britain, and Russia was certainly not ideological brotherhood (much less liberal values and consensual government) or a willingness of each to fight all three Axis powers. Instead, the common bond of the Big Three, although a strong one, was the shared experience of having Nazi Germany either invade a member’s homeland, preemptively declare war on a member, or attack a member’s ally, as well as a shared existential desire to destroy Nazi Germany.
For their part, the Axis powers, despite prewar professions of solidarity, genuine fascist commonalities, and empty talk of pacts of “steel” and the like, changed their own coalition just as radically. Unlike the Allied alliance, the Axis league was predicated not in reaction to what the enemy had done but entirely on ephemeral perceptions of Germany winning the war and ensuring a favorable postwar settlement. Germany was the lone Axis power actively at war in Europe between September 1939 and June 1940. As France was overrun in June 1940, Mussolini’s Italy belatedly joined Germany, in the expectation of easy spoils from already beaten or weakened enemies. After December 7, 1941, the notion of the Axis expanded yet again to include Japan and a few Eastern European nations, when the Japanese Imperial Navy attacked the United States and Great Britain in the Pacific in anticipation that a reeling Britain and Russia would soon be defeated, leaving a neutral, supposedly disarmed, and isolated United States to make concessions. Tragic irony was always a trademark of World War II. The Allies had little ideological affinity and yet fought as partners in pursuit of righteous revenge; the Axis were kindred fascists, but waged aggressive war often at cross-purposes and as individual belligerents in dreams of their own particular aggrandizement.
How the war was fought across the globe proved just as paradoxical as how it started—and as ironic as how and why the belligerents had formed their respective alliances. Many of the decisions involving strategy, weaponry, industrial policy, manpower, technology, and leadership were derived from the same mindset and assumptions that had led the Axis powers to go to war in the first place—and the Allies to seek a terrible response.