NO ONE QUITE knew what made an excellent foot soldier in World War II. Endless considerations factored into such comparisons: the length of time in combat, the nature of the equipment, the type of enemy that an army usually faced, the strategic demands placed on armies, the caliber of tactical and strategic leadership, the relative size of the armies, the ratios between deaths inflicted and received, the logistical challenges faced, and the particular status of the theater in which an army fought. Armies were also not static. Their effectiveness waxed and waned in accord with ongoing losses and commensurate reinforcements, logistical support, and new weapons. Combat effectiveness was also a relative assessment: armies were defined as effective, not just in absolute terms, but in comparison to the constantly changing criteria and the status of their enemies. The German soldier had better guns and armor in 1944 than in 1941, but the Wehrmacht also proved far weaker in comparison with the much more rapidly growing and improving Red Army.
The difference between losses inflicted and incurred is sometimes defined loosely as “fighting power.” Yet the percentage of casualties suffered versus caused is not always a valid criterion of infantry excellence. The United States achieved startling kill ratios in Vietnam, but without destroying the North Vietnamese army or saving an autonomous South Vietnam. The Japanese army slaughtered Chinese soldiers at a sickening rate and yet never secured China.
The best armies of World War II were simply those that had marshaled the most material and human assets and wisely used them to win the majority of their battles and ultimately the war, often integrating air and naval forces to enhance their superior strategies. Germany, as was true in World War I, is largely considered to have produced the most effective infantry fighting power, even as it once again started a war that it would lose relatively rapidly and with disastrous results. That paradox suggests that either its supposed infantry supremacy had again lulled Germany into adopting impossible strategic objectives that required far more diverse assets and numbers than were available, or that its infantrymen, in fact, were actually not as exceptional as their reputations—or both.
As a general rule, the age-old calculus of fighting power often proved irrelevant in World War II. It was not just that hundreds of thousands of troops perished due to air power or armor rather than hand-held weapons, but that even millions of soldiers—sacrificed in the Kiev pocket, trapped at Stalingrad, or cut off and expected to perish on Japanese-held islands—were wasted through the nihilist directives of their own leaders, who were often captives of fascist or communist ideologies that were not always grounded in strategic or tactical reality.1
OF THE SIX major belligerents, the United States devoted comparatively the smallest percentage of available military manpower to the US Army: only about 48 percent (excluding the Army Air Force). Yet because the US military itself became so huge so rapidly, second in size only to the Soviet armed forces (12.5 million versus 12.2 million), the Army nevertheless grew to six million. However, only about a third of the Army’s manpower (or about 2 million) were assigned to ground-combat units. That percentage did not change much throughout the war. By May 1945 there were scarcely over sixty US infantry and armored divisions in Europe, and about ninety Army divisions in all, including those deployed in Italy, the Mediterranean, and the Pacific. During the 337 days between D-Day and the German surrender, half of all American infantrymen in Europe had been in combat for 150 days, 40 percent of them for 200 days, which was considered the point at which most soldiers displayed symptoms of combat fatigue. Alone among the armies of the six major belligerents, the US Army was exclusively an expeditionary force and almost always on the offensive; it suffered stalls and setbacks at the Kasserine Pass in early 1943, and more seriously in the Hürtgen and Ardennes Forests in late 1944, but American ground forces neither entrenched for long periods nor suffered long retreats in the fashion of the thousand-mile withdrawals of the Red Army in 1941, or the Wehrmacht in 1944–1945 on the Eastern Front, or the occasional defensive retirement of the British in North Africa and Greece in 1941, or the retreating Italians in 1940–1941. This idea of constant motion forward explains why the US military invested so heavily in air and sea power, logistics, and mobility.
Only about 16 percent of all American uniformed personnel fought on the ground in combat. The staggering size of the American military, and yet the relatively small percentages who were front line ground soldiers, also explains the legendary paradoxes of the US armed forces: Why, compared to other powers, did the American military in toto suffer relatively fewer casualties? Why was it chronically short of infantry divisions? Why were its combat infantrymen exhausted, thus suffering high losses? Why was it able to project power in so many places and in so many diverse ways? In sum, the fewer uniformed personnel who were fighting in frontline army combat units, the more were freed to conduct naval, air, and logistics operations. But again a paradox arose of enhancing infantry lethality by marshalling air and naval support while thus ensuring long combat and eventual exhaustion to a far-too-small number of ground troops.2
As was the case prior to America’s entry into World War I in 1917, the US Army had fewer than two hundred thousand active-duty soldiers before the outbreak of World War II in Europe in September 1939. Unlike most continental armies, the United States did not have bellicose neighbors in North America for most of the twentieth century up to this point and had felt itself largely immune from worry over invading foreign expeditionary armies—facts that also explained its army’s traditionally small peacetime size. The US Army of 1939 was also utterly ill equipped. The .50 caliber machine gun was considered an anti-tank weapon. The 1903 bolt-action Springfield remained the standard rifle. There were few artillery pieces over 75 mm in size. Rarely in the history of civilization had so mammoth an economy and so large a population fielded so small a military.
Yet at the end of hostilities in 1945, the army had grown to well over eight million soldiers and airmen, reaching its peak in 1945 (8,276,958) as it ascended from the nineteenth-largest army in the world to the second largest of the war. The number of officers in the US Army was larger in 1945 than the number of soldiers in the entire Cold War American army of 1960. And yet of the major belligerents, US ground forces had the smallest number of actual combat divisions (under 100 army and Marine divisions by late 1944), in comparison to the aggregate size of the actual army and in relation to the US military in general—and thus again the highest ratios of noncombat personnel. Even as late as 1943, the faltering Italian army (3 million) was nearly as large as the number of all American Army soldiers stationed abroad in ground and air combat theaters (3.7 million), even though Italy’s population was only a third that of the United States. Nearly 40 percent of the twelve-million-man US military was deployed in rear-echelon tasks far distant from combat zones.3
Implicit in such a strategy of devoting so many American resources to supply and logistics and to air and naval power in a two-front war was the reality that the Soviets finally had over five hundred active divisions tying down well over three million Axis ground troops. The subtext to the unholy alliance with the Soviet Union, despite its record of prewar genocide and active cooperation with Nazi Germany until June 1941, was that the American public accepted that German infantrymen would kill, and be killed by, far more Russian than American foot soldiers. The Red Army by 1943 had allowed the United States—the most distant of the major powers from the front lines of battle—to invest lavishly in supply and logistics, as well as in tactical and strategic air forces and a huge two-ocean navy. Specialization among the three major Allied powers is an underappreciated reason why the Allies turned the tide of war so quickly after 1942.4
Why the American Army was small, in relative terms, is also illustrated by how diverse and spread over the globe the American military had become by the latter part of the war. For example, on the single day of the invasion of Normandy (June 6, 1944), around the world other US forces were just as much on the attack at sea and in the air. As part of the ill-fated Operation Frantic shuttle-bombing operations between US air fields in Italy and refueling bases in the Soviet Ukraine, over 150 B-17s and their P-51 escorts attacked the oil fields at Galati, Romania. Another five hundred B-17s and escorts hit the often-targeted Romanian fields at Ploesti. Meanwhile, the 12th Air Force conducted continuous tactical air strikes on German positions in Italy. Allied ground troops also had just occupied Rome two days earlier and were garrisoning the city in preparation for offensives against the Gothic Line in northern Italy. In the Asian and Pacific theaters on this same landmark day of June 6, the US Pacific Fleet was making preparations to invade the Mariana Islands within a week, with a combined force almost as large as had landed at Normandy. Meanwhile, B-29 bombers prepared for their first raid against Japan from forward bases in China, while six B-25 Mitchell medium bombers and ten P-51 fighter escorts conducted operations against Tayang Chiang, China. B-25s were also attacking Japanese troops moving on Imphal, India. Meanwhile, the submarine Raton was tracking a Japanese convoy near Saigon. The submarine Harder sank a Japanese destroyer off Borneo, while the Pintado torpedoed and destroyed a cargo vessel off the Marianas. B-24 heavy bombers hit Ponape Island in Micronesia as tactical strikes were conducted against the Japanese on Bougainville, New Britain, and New Guinea.
In other words, even as the American Army and its supporting naval and air forces participated in the largest amphibious landing in history, the US military was on the offensive against the Germans in Italy, conducting long-range bombing from Italy and Britain, torpedoing convoys in the Pacific, assembling forces to storm the Marianas, and carrying out air strikes from bases in China all the way to New Guinea. On such a single typical day of combat, diverse fleets of B-17s, B-24s, B-25s, B-26s, B-29s, A-20s, P-38s, P-39s, P-40s, P-47s, and P-51s were all in the air from Normandy to the China Sea.5
Of the ground forces of the major combatants, the American Army had the lowest percentage of fatalities: less than 3 percent of all US Army soldiers were killed, although the figure rose to nearly 4 percent of the nearly seven hundred thousand US Marines who, along with Army units, fought the Japanese between 1942 and 1945. The relatively low fatality rate again probably reflects, inter alia, that the United States was the best-supplied army in the war, at least in terms of air and artillery support forces, medical organization, and food and fuel. The American army also limited its casualties by fighting less than four years, compared to the roughly five-and-a-half years of the British and German armies, the nearly five years of the Soviets (both as an ally and an enemy of Germany), and the more than six years of the Japanese in China and the Pacific. Critics point out that the US Army had a far higher percentage of what was formerly known in the First World War as “shell-shock” cases—a malady referred to in World War II as “combat fatigue” and more recently as “post-traumatic stress disorder” (PTSD)—as well as lower ratios of wounded soldiers returning to full duty than either Axis armies or the Soviet Red Army. More starkly, only one US soldier was shot for desertion and cowardice. A variety of reasons may explain the unprecedented concern for injured and psychologically traumatized soldiers, but in pragmatic terms, the United States treated its soldiers more humanely because it could afford to, given America’s vast material advantages and the sanctity of the US homeland.
American armies were never threatened with utter annihilation as in the case of the Wehrmacht, the Japanese army, the Italian army, and the Red Army. Rommel made the following observation of American soldiers in February 1943:
Although it was true that the American troops could not yet be compared with the veteran troops of the British Eighth Army, yet they made up for their lack of experience by their far better and more plentiful equipment and their tactically more flexible command. In fact, their armament in anti-tank weapons and armoured vehicles was so numerous that we could look forward with but small hope of success to the coming mobile battles. The tactical conduct of the enemy’s defence had been first class.6
In other words, no other army in the world to the same degree knew how to produce, maintain, repair, and use machines.
In Germany and Japan, the respective branches of the armed forces fought incessantly and blamed each other for catastrophic losses. In contrast, the Americans possessed the operational art and doctrine to combine widely disparate forces in staging repeatedly successful amphibious landings throughout the Pacific—the common bond among the rival services being a fascination with and mastery over machines. B-29 heavy bombers strategically and routinely mined Japanese harbors in complementary fashion with ships and naval aircraft. Carriers sustained catastrophic damage from Japanese kamikaze attacks to achieve air superiority over Okinawa that ensured air and naval battery support for Marine and Army units. B-17 four-engine high-level bombers played the role of tactical aircraft and blasted holes in German lines to stage the breakout of stalled US land forces in Normandy. Or as General Dwight D. Eisenhower, supreme commander of all British, Canadian, and American forces that landed in Normandy in 1944, summed up in bureaucratese the American way of war: “War is waged in three elements; but there is no separate land, naval, or air war. Unless all assets in all elements are efficiently combined and coordinated against a properly selected, common objective, their maximum potential power cannot be maximized.”7
It did little good to unleash a veteran German grenadier, with over three years past experience on the Eastern Front, against an American soldier if he were first strafed or bombed, or went into battle hungry and without medical care, or found his supporting Panzers either burning or sitting on the side of the road out of gas. Postwar interviews with German soldiers may have revealed a far greater respect for individual Russian soldiers than for Americans, and Russians for Germans rather than American, on the understandable principle that the existential nature of war on the Eastern Front was far harsher than in the West. Yet what makes an army effective is not just the heroism or combat zeal of individual soldiers, but also the degree of assets—artillery barrages, air support, food, medicine, and supplies—at its disposal.8
The American emphasis was not so much on creating a fierce individual warrior, bound with strong ties of loyalty and honor to fellow men of arms (although the GI was often just that), as on making sure that he was supported with enough materiel, and acquired sufficient expertise, to defeat any adversary he faced, and to reassure him that he had a good chance to survive the conflict. The system rather than the man was what would win the war. It was in some ways a throwback to the first centuries BC and AD, when standardized and far better-equipped Roman legionaries near the Rhine and Danube occasionally tangled with Germanic tribes that put a much higher premium on individual warriors’ weapons prowess, courage, and skills, but usually lost.9
In contrast to the American Army, the Wehrmacht far more emphasized unit loyalty, individual pride and honor, and extensive combat training. The German soldier was seen as a sort of craftsman, a human extension of the pride in workmanship that had produced a Panther tank that was technically superior to the American Sherman but that could never have been built in similar numbers or with commensurate reliability and ease of use. When American generals such as George S. Patton sought to recreate the American foot soldier as a deadly killer analogous to the German (“Americans love to fight—traditionally! All real Americans love the sting and clash of battle”), his speeches and rules became the stuff of popular caricature that for many explained his later near-career-ending slapping incidents.10
The US Army in every one of its major land operations battled far more experienced German and Japanese armies that after 1942 largely enjoyed the advantages of being on the defensive and had at least marginally better knowledge of local geography, and were far closer to their ultimate sources of supply. It should have been ostensibly far easier, for example, to defend a Guadalcanal or Tarawa than to capture it, or to repel than conduct an amphibious landing in Sicily or Normandy, or to defend inside the Hürtgen Forest rather than attack through it, or to shoot down from rather than climb up to Monte Cassino, or to block rather than mount a crossing of the Rhine, or to take down a bomber over the homeland rather than to fly it a thousand miles over enemy territory and get home.
The US Army—except for some inaugural defeats in Tunisia (February 1943)—did not just win its offensive wars, but won them with far fewer aggregate losses than almost any other infantry force of the war. Again, mobility was an American trademark. Imagine the idea that any German expeditionary army might have embarked from southern France in early summer 1941, crossed the Atlantic in safety, and landed over thirty thousand Wehrmacht troops in the Caribbean Sea—in the similar manner that General Patton’s Western Task Force had left its convoy assembly points off Newfoundland, crossed the Atlantic Ocean, and disembarked at Casablanca, Morocco, in November 1942. Such comparable German operations would have been impossible.11
American campaigns were not predicated just on martial excellence, but prepped in advance by what supply could and could not do, by intelligence about how the enemy might react to any offensive, and by the ultimate strategic objectives for which armies were led. General Patton’s Third Army outran its supply train in late August 1944, like Rommel’s Afrika Korps in midsummer 1942. But unlike the German experience, Patton was not forced into a long retreat, inasmuch as he could rely on air support, continuance of minimum supplies, and help if need be from other Allied armies. He also knew his clear-cut mission was eventually to cross the Rhine, whereas no one in the German High Command ever quite knew where Rommel’s Afrika Korps was ultimately headed. When Hitler unwisely chose to send the German army into the Soviet Union in June 1941, the flawed decision was considered by most German field marshals to be unassailable. In contrast, when Franklin Roosevelt equally unwisely had wished to land American armies on the western coast of France in 1943, many of his own civilian and military experts quickly tabled the idea through rational argument and overwhelming data concerning shortages in landing craft, insufficient air superiority, worries over U-boats, and lack of experience in amphibious operations. Roosevelt calmly gave in to advice; Hitler in tantrums threatened his advisors.12
American land forces also were brilliantly bifurcated to accommodate the geography of a global two-theater war. Only the British and the Americans fought both a long European and Asian war; no other Axis or Allied nation could have done both at such great distances successfully and simultaneously. The US Marine Corps—eventually six combat divisions, along with auxiliary and air forces—together with twenty-one Army divisions, assumed responsibility for leading the ground war against the Japanese on the natural assumption that Pacific amphibious operations uniquely required more integration with naval forces. Island hopping usually involved briefer but more frequent major battles than continental warfare. Such specialization allowed select Army divisions and Marines and their supporting naval and air arms to gain familiarity with the Japanese way of war. The sterling reputation of the US Marines for the next seven decades was largely established in the Pacific and the savage hellholes—Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Iwo Jima, Okinawa—out of which it emerged bloodied but triumphant. The same was true of the US Army in the Pacific, which was involved in more amphibious landings than even the Marines.13
Fighting in the Pacific proved far different than battling Germans or Italians. Combat on the Pacific islands usually involved far more hand-to-hand encounters. Small-arms fire caused a greater percentage of American deaths in the Pacific than had been true in European theaters, where artillery fire was far more lethal. The more Americans employed naval gunfire, tanks, flamethrowers, napalm, and sophisticated amphibious tactics in storming the Pacific islands from Tarawa to Okinawa, also the more premodern became battle with grenades, rifles, bayonets, and knives in the rough terrain and often monsoon weather of the islands.14
Marines did not fight in Europe, and US carrier forces rarely did after 1943. There was a “Europe first” American strategy, based on the initial worry that the fall of Britain would win Hitler the war and preclude any chance for an American base of operations to retake the continent. But quite soon after it had become clear that Britain would not be invaded, operations became even more divergent. America’s World War II allotment doctrine, even if initially described as 70–30 percent Europe to the Pacific, soon de facto became the Navy and Marines first to the Pacific, 75 percent of Army divisions and armor first to Europe. Even US arms production followed such specialization. Hellcats did not escort B-17s in Europe. Essex carriers were not built with the Mediterranean in mind. Battleships proved important in the Pacific, not so much in the Atlantic. Given the virtual impregnability of the American homeland, the United States was the only nation of the major Allies that had a choice about which theater it chose to focus upon. Neither Britain nor the Soviet Union shared such latitude, given their proximity to the Third Reich.15
On the operational level, no army was so well supplied with trucks as the American. The United States produced nearly 2.4 million military transport vehicles, a greater number than the entire combined production of the Axis, British, and Russians. It was not just that American soldiers did not march to battle to the same degree as other armies, but once there they moved far faster and covered more ground than other land forces. Trucks—not tanks—in large part explain why the Allies won the ground war, a fact never fully appreciated by the Third Reich, Italy, and Japan. That every American truck had to be shipped across the Atlantic or Pacific makes the achievement even more wondrous.16
American infantrymen could count on adequate grenades, mines, and machine guns that were better than those of the Italian and Japanese armies. By 1943 US artillerymen and US field guns—given their numbers, the nature of the ammunition, the training and communications of the gunners—were among the deadliest of the war. Increasingly, 105 mm and 155 mm artillery guns, and huge 8-inch guns and 240 mm howitzers, were easily mobile and sometimes self-propelled, adding to their lethality in ways often underappreciated by other militaries. And by 1945, American proximity fuzes, when combined with preexisting superb targeting and communications, gave the American infantryman the most accurate artillery support of the war.17
In terms of relative efficacy, the US Army proved especially devastating when fighting the Italians and Japanese. In part, that effectiveness was due to the frequent large-scale surrenders of the former, and the complete absence of such capitulations by the latter. It is often pointed out that the German army, whether in 1942 or 1945, whether on the defensive or offensive, whether outnumbered or not, whether in pure ground slugfests or in combined operations, on average killed about 1.5 GIs for every German soldier lost, a startling ratio (though not as lopsided as the American Army Air Force’s three-to-one superiority in aerial combat over its German counterparts). The reasons for such a surprising statistic concerning German infantry superiority may be many, but some may be related to the fact that Americans were more likely tasked with riskier offensive invasions and landings than with exclusively defensive operations.
Germany prior to 1939 had fought no more frequently in the last century than had America on average. Postwar psychological studies did not detect a greater degree of authoritarian impulses on the part of the German public that translated into more obedient or disciplined soldiers. By mid-war, American draftees were trained just as long as their German counterparts. Neither the Kriegsmarine nor the Luftwaffe matched the kill ratios of the army.
The achievement, aside from the critical infantry experience gained from 1939 to 1943, is partly explained by ideological indoctrination and superior officer training and professionalism. By 1941, Hitler’s propaganda machine had infused the foot soldiers of the Wehrmacht with the tenets of National Socialism since their adolescence. Such inspirational doctrine may well have improved battlefield morale of the German soldier in ways well beyond that of his World War I imperial German counterpart. The foot soldiers of the Wehrmacht probably believed that they were innately superior to their enemies and that their culture and system of war making had been preeminent in the recent past and ultimately would be again, and they consequently had far fewer worries about committing violence or often atrocities. But it was also true that the German soldier’s superb weapons and battlefield leadership, at least in the late 1930s and the first years of the war, reinforced confidence among the ranks. Being an infantryman in Germany also brought greater social prestige than being a GI in the United States, from the rank of private to general, a fact that might have led to superior recruits, or at least to higher morale. Of the three services, it was clear that only the German army rivaled the armies of its enemies and was superior to those of its allies.18
If there were weaknesses at the highest levels of American command, the US Army nonetheless produced the greatest numbers of excellent brigadier, major, and lieutenant generals, as well as a mostly underappreciated logistical and support staff. The number of officers involved in Operation Overlord who planned the Normandy landings dwarfed the cadre of Axis officers who designed Operation Barbarossa, and they were more likely left alone from interference from their civilian overseers. Of the German landings in Norway, General Walter Warlimont of OKW contrasted negatively the German “disorder in the military sphere created by authoritarian leadership with the exemplary simplicity of the command organization adapted by the democracies for the great Anglo-Saxon landing operations in North Africa in November 1942 and in Normandy in June 1944.”19
Soldiers of every army in World War II at times shot considerable numbers of prisoners and committed atrocities against civilians. But no army of World War II committed so few war crimes in relationship to its size as the Americans, with the exception perhaps of the British and Dominion armies. The US Army as a general rule did not allow the deaths of hundreds of thousands of its prisoners as did the Germans on the Eastern Front, and it did not rape, loot, and murder civilians on the scale of depredations of the Red Army or the Japanese. It had no record of institutionalized brutality as did the Italians in Somaliland and Ethiopia; it did not coerce comfort women as did the Japanese, or shoot its former allies as did the Germans with Italians in Greece. It did not help to organize death squads nor participate in genocide as was true of both the German and Japanese armies. In the end, most enemies preferred surrendering to the Americans or British; most allies sought American support; and most civilians welcomed the presence of Americans.20
The general critique of the American foot soldier in World War II was that he was never as hard pressed as his German, Japanese, Russian, or even British counterpart. GIs were supposedly promoted far too easily to noncommissioned officer status (eventually 50 percent of all enlistees). There may have been almost as many officers in the Army (10 percent) as the percentage of troops assigned to frontline combat. Too many soldiers were diagnosed with psychiatric disorders (9 percent of all army personnel); indeed, in combat theaters, the US Army treated soldiers for psychiatric disorders at a rate ten times higher than its German counterparts. The American combat soldier stayed in the hospital for a long duration of time when wounded (an average of 117 days), and often was not required to return to his combat unit when released (36 percent). He required too many supplies (over 80 pounds per day) and had too many men to his rear who should have been at the front. He was too reliant on artillery barrages to advance, and assumed he should ride rather than march to the front. Replacements were sent piecemeal to the front as individuals, rather than as cohesive groups arrayed in regional or local units. And yet he fought heroically without having his army execute well over twenty-five thousand of its own soldiers as happened in the Wehrmacht, and perhaps well over a hundred thousand as was true of the Soviet army.21
Criticisms of the GI ignore the fact that no other army had to be raised so quickly from virtual nonexistence. No other army had to be transported to all its fronts over the oceans at such great distances, or was expected almost always to take the offensive on arrival on the battlefield. No other army competed so much with other branches of the military for talent. No other military, of which the army was the chief component, suffered such a small absolute number of casualties in comparison to those it inflicted upon the Axis ground forces.
The GIs of 1941 may have been somewhat different from those of the past—or future—American armies. Most young recruits had grown up during the Depression, a time that tended to lower material expectations and made even the spartan conditions of army life seem preferable to civilian poverty. Times were harder in the late 1930s than in the Roaring Twenties or the 1950s and 1960s. The army of 1941 was also the first in which millions of Americans had grown familiar with first- and second-generation internal-combustion engines, from tractors and delivery trucks to cars and motorcycles. No generation of men in their twenties before or since has been more adept at mechanics, or mechanics that could at least be mastered by shade-tree apprentices. General Patton saw this ability as critical to the American army: “The Americans, as a race, are the foremost mechanics in the world. America, as a nation, has the greatest ability for mass production of machines. It therefore behooves us to devise methods of war which exploit our inherent superiority. We must fight the war by machines on the ground, and in the air, to the maximum of our ability.” And the American army did just that.22
THERE WAS NOTHING like the Soviet Red Army before World War II, nor has there been since. A number of characteristics made it utterly exceptional, aside from the fact that the Soviets were surprise attacked by a savage enemy that gave no quarter on Russian home soil. First, the Soviet army was already huge at the beginning of the war, having well over five million men in both its Western and Eastern theaters when the Germans invaded. On the vast front against the Wehrmacht it may initially have numbered in toto well over two hundred combat divisions, with over one hundred additional divisions spread throughout the Soviet Union. And the Red Army never stopped growing: the Soviets processed thirty million conscripts during the entire course of the war, as the army reached peak operational strength of well over ten million soldiers in a military of over twelve million.
At its zenith, the Soviet Union could in theory deploy well over five hundred divisions. It was regarded as a great feat of mobilization that the Americans had created nearly a hundred-division army in less than a year and a half, but in nearly the same time period the Soviets mobilized over four hundred new and replacement divisions, albeit smaller in size, far less equipped and motorized, and without need to transport them across thousands of miles of ocean to the front or simultaneously to supply vast naval and air forces.23
No other army experienced such losses. About 4.5 million Russians died in the first full year of the German invasion alone, a number almost as large as the size of the German army itself in 1941. By war’s end the Soviet army had suffered far more killed in action (7 million) than its original size. The figure may have soared to over an aggregate eleven million military dead when the wages of disease and capture were factored into the equation, a number that still does not include at least another ten to sixteen million civilian dead. General Eisenhower related a comment from Soviet marshal Georgy Zhukov concerning land mines that reflected the Soviet Union’s stereotyped indifference to the losses in its conscript army: “Marshal Zhukov gave me a matter-of-fact statement of his practice, which was, roughly, ‘There are two kinds of mines; one is the personnel mine and the other is the vehicular mine. When we come to a minefield our infantry attacks exactly as if it were not there. The losses we get from personnel mines we consider only equal to those we would have gotten from machine guns and artillery if the Germans had chosen to defend that particular area with strong bodies of troops instead of mines’… I had a vivid picture,” Eisenhower noted, “of what would happen to any American or British commander if he pursued such tactics.”24
German generals, who otherwise had great respect for the power of the Red Army, noted of Soviet tactics that “it was usually safe to encourage the Russians to attack, so long as the defence was elastically designed. The Russians were always very bull-headed in their offensive methods, repeating their attacks again and again. This was due to the way their leaders lived in fear of being considered lacking in determination if they broke off their attack.” There are no exact figures of how many German soldiers were killed by the Red Army, but a good guess is that between 70 percent and 80 percent of all its killed, missing, captured, and wounded were due to Russian action (somewhere around 5 million casualties). Even in the first days of their invasion of Russia, the Germans learned that Soviet soldiers were quite unlike the Poles, Scandinavians, Western Europeans, and Balkan enemies that they had previously steamrolled. A German officer remarked of Russian resistance: “The way of waging war had completely changed; it was completely unfamiliar to us. We soon found the first reconnaissance patrols had fallen into Russian hands. They had their genitals cut off while still alive, their eyes gouged out, throats cut, or ears and noses cut off. We went around with grave faces, because we were frightened of this type of fighting.”25
Hitler had assured the Wehrmacht that the Russians would fold in less than three months, in the manner of all previous targets of his ground forces. But as early as August 1941, after two months in Russia, German morale was ebbing, largely because it seemed that the more Soviet soldiers were killed or captured, the more enemies appeared with adequate equipment and fierce determination. A young German lieutenant Hellmuth Stieff wrote in despair to his wife in August 1941, when things were still going well enough for the invaders: “All these conditions, which we see and experience day in, day out… slowly create a state of resentment in you, so that you would really rather withdraw into your own shell. If some sort of change does not occur shortly in all this, there will be a catastrophe. Having to watch this go is awful.”26
Despite the assumed prewar backwardness of Soviet science and industrial capability, the Red Army fielded the greatest number of excellent tanks (over 80,000 T-34s of various types) and larger numbers of howitzers, rockets, artillery, and anti-aircraft guns (over 500,000) than any other army of World War II. Even at the moment of the German invasion, the Soviets in mid-1941 possessed more armored vehicles than Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and the United States combined. Thanks to its own adequate production of heavy trucks (almost 200,000) and the enormous number of American and British Lend-Lease imports (another 375,000), the Soviet army in sheer numbers eventually fielded the most motorized divisions of the entire war. By early 1943, the Red Army had over twenty thousand tanks at the front, and were adding them at the rate of two thousand a month, and did this after losing almost all their existing prewar fleet of armored vehicles in 1941 and reconstituting much of their tank production beyond the Urals.27
The United States, Britain, and the British Dominions sent over fourteen thousand tanks to the Soviet Union from 1942 to 1945, at least a few of them upgraded diesel Shermans with the British 17-pounder gun, which was more than all German Panther and Tiger tank production combined. The individual Soviet infantryman after mid-1942 was often armed with the superb PPSh-41 submachine gun (over 6 million produced during the war) or the SVT-40 semi-automatic rifle (1.6 million). While neither may have quite matched counterparts in other armies, such as the German StG 44 assault weapon or American M1 carbine, both weapons by 1943 ensured that the much larger Soviet army was equipped enough to do real damage to the German army.
Soviet industrial efficiency was achieved by concentrating on munitions (tanks, artillery, machines guns, rifles, etc.) while relying on Allied Lend-Lease imports for food, trucks, locomotives, rails, radios, and critical natural resources, especially aluminum, without which the Soviets could not build tank engines or aircraft frames. Also, in the late 1930s Soviet central planners had finally invited in Western, particularly American, companies to participate in technical assistance programs, which gave them expertise in assembly-line mass production and standardization of parts that would refashion the nature of Soviet industry. In terms of artillery, by mid-1944 the Soviet army typically had ten times the number of large guns as the Germans. By January 1945, the Red Army had available over a hundred thousand large artillery pieces and heavy mortars, with over a million men in artillery units, at precisely the time German supplies were diminishing as a result of both production and transportation dislocations and transfers of artillery and aircraft back to the homeland for air and ground defense.28
Such huge numbers, iron-clad discipline, little effective popular pressure to curb infantry losses, the largest population base of all the major and affiliated combatants with the exception of China and India, and near endless supplies of tanks, trucks, and artillery pieces made the Soviet army the deadliest and most terrifying infantry force of the war. As long as the Russian military was kept out of the Pacific and Mediterranean wars, had no obligation to supply other allies, and did not have to initiate strategic bombing and major naval operations, infantrymen were free to focus on a single enemy on a single front in what turned out to be the largest and most lethal battle line in military history. Even the backwardness of the interior of the Soviet Union tended to favor Russian defenders over European invaders. Germans claimed that they were unfamiliar with the weather, terrain, transportation structure, and geography of Mother Russia (although many of their officers had fought deeply inside and occupied Russian territory in 1917–1918). In August 1941, a German officer summed up the bewildering landscape: “I’ve already had it up to here with this much-vaunted Soviet Union! The conditions here are prehistoric.… We’re suffering a lot from artillery fire here, and we have to live day and night in foxholes for protection from shrapnel. The holes are full of water. Lice and other vermin creep in too.” He might have asked of his veteran senior officers if anything had changed much from 1918.29
The Germans actually faced two Red Armies. The initial Soviet force slowly disappeared between June 1941 and spring 1942, suffering well over four million dead in roughly a year of fighting and losing much of its armor, planes, and artillery. But to the bewilderment of the German army, the devastated original Red Army had never quite collapsed. Instead, the Soviets retreated over eight hundred miles into the interior of Russia, an option never available to the reeling French, Dutch, or Belgian armies a year earlier. The expanse of Russia offered the Red Army endless inland Dunkirks from which it could withdraw and reequip.
As the attenuated German army expanded to occupy a million square miles of European Russia, destroying or acquiring 7,500 factories and over half of Soviet electrical production, the remnants of the original Soviet Army were absorbed by a replacement force of 4.5 million soldiers. This second-generation force was more frequently equipped with new T-34 tanks, larger caliber and more plentiful artillery, and semi-automatic weapons. It was also increasingly protected by improved fighter aircraft and, by 1943, the beneficiary of American and British trucks, radios, and other material support. Aside from massive aid from the British and Americans, the Soviet salvation was found in the fact that the communist government still remained intact, had an entire protected industrial state beyond the Urals, demanded sacrifices unimaginable in the West, governed a population already used to serial depravations, and fought a uniquely existential war in which both sides accepted that defeat was tantamount to death. If the average life of a Soviet tank was less than six months at the front, it mattered little when two thousand new T-34s a month were joining the Red Army, along with nearly ten thousand crewmen. In sum, what the Red Army did to the Wehrmacht in 1944–1945 frightened Europeans for the next half century.30
THE BRITISH ARMY made up only 56 percent of all British uniformed forces, only a slightly greater ratio than in the American military. From the outset it faced a myriad of unique operational and strategic dilemmas, especially following the fall of France. That unforeseen disaster of June 1940 ended the army’s century-long strategy of having at least one major European land power as a buffer and partner to enable the British to concentrate on naval power. From June 25, 1940, to June 22, 1941, the British army and its Commonwealth cousins were the only active national land forces of any repute facing the Axis powers. Britain’s entire expeditionary army in France (nearly 400,000 soldiers and support staff) had been beaten, humiliated, and evacuated before and during the Dunkirk operation, after over sixty thousand had been killed, captured, or wounded. The army by July 1940 should have been rendered largely combat ineffective after losing most of its equipment by the time it embarked from Dunkirk. Yet somehow in the ensuing year before Operation Barbarossa, the British military alone took on both the Italians and the Germans in North Africa and the Balkans, while maintaining mastery of the Atlantic and neutralizing the Italian fleet in the Mediterranean.31
The failed effort in Norway (April–June 1940) to stop the Nazi invasion and occupation (over 4,000 British casualties) and the evacuation from Dunkirk (June 1940) had sobered British planners by late 1940, reminding them again why the empire instead might be more wisely defended by air and sea power. At most, a comparatively small professional expeditionary army would avoid the mistake of 1914 of colliding with the continental German army, and instead check smaller and weaker Axis forces on the periphery of Europe, at least until the hoped-for arrival of a huge American overseas army. Unless there were a falling out between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, and unless the United States came into the war, there was little chance that the British army could return to Western Europe. And there was no chance that Britain alone could fight its way into Germany and defeat the Wehrmacht. Yet at the same time, given British industrial power, naval and air strength, morale, military professionalism, and superior supreme command, there was even less likelihood that Hitler could successfully invade Britain or bomb it into submission. Either new wonder weapons or major new belligerents would have to enter the war in 1941 to end what seemed to be an approaching German-British deadlock.
By summer 1940 the British Army and its imperial allies faced a global crisis. Aside from protecting its home soil from a possible German invasion, it sought to secure overseas interests from Suez to Burma that were soon threatened by Germans, Italians, and, increasingly, the Japanese. From July 1940 until autumn 1942, the British army suffered a series of further withdrawals or surrenders at Singapore, in Greece and Crete, and at Tobruk, which threatened to demoralize the public and undermine confidence in Winston Churchill’s leadership. Even the prior initially successful operations against the Italians in Egypt and Libya (autumn 1940) were reversed by the infusion of German reinforcements in early 1941 and British redeployments to Greece. The surprise Japanese attacks and declaration of war on December 8 would naturally drain huge assets of the British Empire away from its mostly stable position by late 1941.32
Army prospects improved after the active American entrance into the European theater in November 1942. The British were quickly ensured a new partnership that, for the first time in the war, might lead to Allied logistical, air, and naval superiority over the Axis in the Mediterranean. After the final victory in North Africa (May 1943), except for the Market-Garden fiasco, the British army did not lose outright another campaign in the European theater. Despite its disparate deployments, the British army suffered the fewest combat dead of the six major nations at war, at 144,079 (along with 239,575 wounded, 33,771 missing, and 152,076 captured), in defeating the Italians, Germans, and Japanese on simultaneous fronts.33
The army’s eventual success was not due to superior supplies or a pantheon of brilliant Napoleonic field marshals. Although quite adequate, British rifles, artillery, and tanks were not better than what was found in other Allied or Axis armies, except perhaps among the Italians and at times the Japanese. The key to the overtaxed army’s resilience was found in its professionalism, generally high morale, and workmanlike office corps, although the officers’ first concern was often not to engage in risky operations in which casualties were sure to spike and losses could not be easily replaced. British troops were equipped with the slow-firing but extremely accurate bolt-action Lee-Enfield .303 rifle (Rifle No. 4), and soon the various models of the Sten submachine gun (over 4 million produced). The latter could prove a deadly weapon at short ranges and was steadily improved. The World War I–vintage water-cooled .303 caliber Vickers machine gun was still lethal. British artillery by the time of Normandy was nearly as good as the German. The British army was far more motorized than were its enemies. Perhaps with the exception of the adequate Churchill, its tanks before 1943 were subpar. But the incorporation of the American Sherman, especially after mid-1944 when sometimes equipped with the British 17-pounder gun, gave British infantry adequate armor support. Infantry ground-to-air coordination by 1943 was superior to any force except the Americans, due largely to excellent communications and superb Spitfire, Hurricane, and Typhoon fighter-bombers.34
A few British army generals—Bernard Montgomery and William Slim especially—were among the best planners and most professional commanders of the war. Montgomery was both the most celebrated for his victory at El Alamein and the most culpable for his sluggish pursuit after a beaten and retiring Rommel, the failure to close promptly the Falaise Pocket, the inability to take quickly the key port of Antwerp, the ill-starred Operation Market-Garden assault, his silly editorializing after the Battle of the Bulge, and his over-prepped and publicized crossing of the Rhine. Yet Montgomery was a favorite of both Churchill and General Alan Brooke (later 1st Viscount Alanbrooke), chief of the Imperial General Staff, who nonetheless both privately conceded that he was an irritant, a disrupter of the alliance, and a plodder—but not one to suffer a disastrous defeat. Oddly, for all their complaints about Monty, generals like George S. Patton developed respect for his talents and worked well with him when necessary.35
Insightful British supreme command avoided a premature Allied landing in Western Europe before 1944 as well as some of the more eccentric Aegean plans of Winston Churchill, and in large part guided the Americans’ strategic thinking between 1942 and 1943, from North Africa to Italy. That Britain alone of the Western democracies did not fall in 1940, how it nearly matched the military production of a much larger Germany, and why it exercised political clout comparable to far larger allies, is attributable to its excellent military, and in particular the ability of the British army to inflict more losses on the Axis than it incurred. The Axis defeated the British at particular battles and in individual theaters at Singapore, Burma, Greece, Crete, and Libya. Yet these periodic tactical victories did not lead to lasting strategic advantages, given British naval superiority, strategic bombing capability, and relative immunity from attack on its industrial base.36
THE GREAT ISSUE in World War II was the degree to which the superior fighting power of the German foot soldier would translate into sustained strategic victories. In terms of training, unit command, and morale, no other infantry force for the duration of the war proved its match. German army training manuals may have stressed that “superior combat power can compensate for inferior numbers,” but the issue hinged on the definition of “inferior numbers,” as a disadvantage of two to one was quite different from five or seven to one, as became the reality in many theaters by late 1944. German prowess was defined in part by anachronistic ideas that infantry superiority was achieved by ground troops killing more ground troops than they lost, and downplayed the more important Allied advantages of numbers, equipment, supplies, ships, and planes.37
The German army’s operational excellence was often rendered irrelevant by nihilistic decisions of the supreme command, such as Hitler’s redirecting entire army groups on the Eastern Front between 1941 and 1942, issuing no-retreat, no-surrender orders at Stalingrad and El Alamein, and subsequently in 1943–1944, or mounting doomed offensives such as the attack through the Ardennes in late 1944 or the Operation Spring Awakening relief of Budapest in March 1945. Hitler’s blinkered view of geostrategy was abetted by the blinders of the German General Staff at both OKW (the Supreme Command of the German Armed Forces) and to a lesser degree at OKH (the Supreme Command of the German Army). By training and nature, few of even the best German generals were equipped to think of war in terms of grand strategy or geopolitics, and were flummoxed by Hitler’s often esoteric talk of critical strategic resources, contours in changing alliances, and cultural nonsense. His pseudohistorical ranting worked well on a professional Prussian military class that so often could not distinguish his disastrous from its own mediocre strategic thinking, and whose legacy theretofore had been largely a free wartime hand from its political overseer. (Kaiser Wilhelm II at the beginning of World War I had supposedly quipped, “the General Staff tells me nothing and never asks my advice. I drink tea, saw wood and go for walks.”)
When the Wehrmacht no longer delivered victories in Russia by late 1941 as easily as it had in France, Hitler began the erratic removal of generals like Gerd von Rundstedt, Erich von Manstein, and Heinz Guderian. It would have been unthinkable of Churchill similarly to fire Montgomery after the failure to close the Falaise Pocket or after Market-Garden, or of Roosevelt to bring home General Courtney Hodges after he entered the Hürtgen Forest. By 1943 the German army had devolved from an aggressive and competent regional offensive force into an outmanned and out-supplied global occupation army that could no longer win the ground wars it had started, and that often was at the mercy of superior enemy air and naval power. Its mission had changed to a wholly defensive one, in the manner of the Japanese resistance that hoped to inflict such losses on advancing infantry forces, so as to convince them that their demands for unconditional surrender were not worth the inevitable human or material costs. Both high- and medium-ranking Waffen SS officers like Oberst-Gruppenführer (roughly, “General”) Sepp Dietrich, Standartenführer (Colonel) Joachim Peiper, or Obersturmbannführer (Lieutenant Colonel) Otto Skorzeny were not so much doctrinaire Nazis as unquestioning vicious fighters who eagerly embraced the Nazi idea of giving no quarter and fought as savagely without hope of victory as they once had when assured of conquest.38
German infantrymen recalled the Spartans of World War II. The Heer, or German army, like the ancient homoioi (“The Similars”) of Sparta was highly trained and terrifyingly professional. Like Spartans, Wehrmacht soldiers were effused with militarist doctrine, chronically short of men, brilliantly led on the battlefield—and often deployed for imbecilic strategic ends. Like the Spartan maverick generals Brasidas, Gylippus, and Lysander, there were also plenty of inspired officers in the German army, but in addition to a rare Manstein or Rommel, there were also far more unimaginative versions of dullard Spartan kings (Generals Alfred Jodl, Wilhelm Keitel, and Walter Warlimont) who as overseers at OKW would, along with Hitler, waste their deadly assets.
Before the encirclement at Stalingrad (November 1942), the German army was mostly undefeated, either by the Soviets or by any of the dozen national armies it had steamrolled since September 1939, and its training and operational doctrines were regarded as unimpeachable. The chief theme of the Truppenführung, the German Army Manual for Unit Command in World War II, was officer initiative (“mission command,” Auftragstaktik), the freedom for even junior officers to fulfill a defined mission as they saw fit on the ground, without micromanagement from above. It was ironic that the autocratic Nazis gave more initiative to their junior officers than the democratic British and Americans did to their majors and colonels.39
Given relatively weak opposition and the serial use of surprise attack against neighbors, it is hard to determine to what degree between 1939 and 1941 so-called blitzkrieg was either a myth or truly a revolutionary tactic of using motorized divisions, backed by concentrations of tanks in tandem with air support, to race ahead to encircle and collapse the morale of more static enemies. Nonetheless, until 1941 most of the German army remained plodding. It was largely moved by horses and outfitted mostly with light Mark I and Mark II tanks that were substandard and inferior to most of their French counterparts: over eight hundred were lost in the Polish campaign alone and were labeled by the Germans themselves as “unsuitable for combat.” Even German armored divisions had relatively few tanks. On the eve of Operation Barbarossa, General Heinz Guderian’s Second Panzer Group was equipped with only 930 tanks to accompany its 148,554 men. The army that invaded the Soviet Union was premodern: fifteen thousand Polish peasant wagons, seventy-five divisions powered only by horses, hundreds of different types of looted and often obsolete European vehicles, seventy-three different models of tanks, and fifty-two different makes of anti-aircraft guns. A standard motorized German division had begun the war with nine hundred trucks—and five thousand horses.40
The German army entered the war with more firepower per infantry division—twenty-four howitzers, seventy-two anti-tank guns, 135 mortars, and 442 machines guns—than its Polish, French, or British counterparts. In 1939, none of Germany’s enemies even fielded formal independent armor divisions. The Wehrmacht’s intrinsic weaknesses would be clear the first time Germany’s huge army met a roughly matched enemy. The 37 mm anti-tank gun was ineffective against French heavy tanks, and would often prove useless against early-model Russian T-34s. Due to fuel shortages and inadequate vehicle output, along with growth in the size of the army, by the end of the war there was probably a greater percentage of German divisions relying on horse-drawn transport (approximately 85 percent) than in September 1939. If the Allies worried about gasoline supplies, the German army was dependent on grass and hay. And during the last two years of the war, the army reverted to the older tradition of leadership by unimaginative top-down directive (Weisungsführung), as it back-peddled on two fronts along clearly defined lines and in accordance with Hitler’s own orders.41
Hitler’s serial interference in operations hamstrung the military, as he stocked OKW with sycophants such as Generals Wilhelm Keitel, Alfred Jodl, and Walter Warlimont to monitor the more meritocratic and professional staff at OKH. After his firing of General Walther von Brauchitsch as head of OKH in December 1941, Hitler took direct control of the army himself, essentially ending such autonomy of the army as it was and making the Army High Command nearly irrelevant. After the war, Albert Speer told his interrogators that Hitler’s takeover of OKH “was the most unfortunate decision taken in this war.”42
Had Hitler kept out of operational decision-making, there was some chance that Leningrad, Moscow, and perhaps even Stalingrad would have been taken and the front stabilized along the Volga River. The problem was not just that Hitler in unhinged fashion prohibited tactical retreats that would have saved hundreds of thousands of German troops. He was just as prone to periods of timidity, when he lost his nerve and ordered halts in German advances when daring and rapidity might have brought far greater success. Agreeing with some of his generals to halt the Panzers before the Dunkirk evacuations was one such instance. General Franz Halder of OKH remarked even early on in the war that when events were going well in France, Hitler at times became “terribly nervous” and “frightened of his own success” and “became unwilling to take any risks.” The failure to destroy the entire British expeditionary army at Dunkirk may have been the most calamitous mistake prior to the invasion of Russia, given that the psychological toll on the British public and the new Churchill government of losing well over three hundred thousand soldiers in one fell swoop would have been enormous.
Only three of some thirty-six full German generals survived the war in command, and thereby avoided what became a standardized unfortunate fate. Only one of the army’s seventeen field marshals retained a command at war’s end; the other sixteen were relieved of command, removed from the active army, executed, killed in action, or captured. The army’s problem was not just that a professional officer class was audited by an incompetent General Staff, but also that the German General Staff had been completely absorbed by an increasingly irrational Hitler.43
As in the case of the Red Army, there were two German armies. The first was a smaller elite core of about a half-million soldiers equipped with excellent weapons by contemporary standards and staffed by brilliant officers. Until 1942 it was rarely opposed by any infantry force of similar caliber and was mostly employed only on Germany’s borders. The other and largely replacement German army was vast but uneven. It was often underequipped and poorly supplied, deployed in far distant and foreign geography, lacking adequate air support, corrupted by auxiliary death squads, and forced to rely on reluctant conscripts, many of them poorly trained and too young or too old. It was tasked with occupying conquered territory of about 1.5 million square miles—far larger than the Roman Empire at its greatest extent—that by 1944 was often openly hostile.44
Still, as Germany’s fortunes were on the wane after 1943, it often remained difficult for allied forces to defeat the core elements of the German army, even as the vast second German force was steadily pushed back on all fronts and had collapsed in North Africa, was withdrawing from Normandy, and was on the defensive after Kursk. So Hitler was in part correct to rely on the operational excellence of the German army—“the German soldier can do anything”—to nullify Allied numerical superiority and his own confused strategic orders. German soldiers’ morale arose not necessarily just from enthusiasm with the tenets of National Socialism and the rebirth of German pride and nationalism that it had helped create. There was the added factor of unbelievable successes from September 1939 to April 1941 that bred a sense of fated destiny to the army’s efforts. Only after the surrender at Stalingrad (February 2, 1943), when there were no more unprepared neighbors to be surprise attacked, did Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels demand “total war” against a supposedly wounded USSR.45
What best characterized the German army of World War II—eventually growing to more than five million men—was paradoxically a chronic shortage of manpower, or at least far too few men for the grand strategic objectives that Hitler had set out for the Wehrmacht. The anomaly is easily illustrated by the army’s status on the eve of the invasion of the Soviet Union. In less than a year, Hitler had added eighty-four divisions to the Field Army. It soon numbered 3,800,000 men, in addition to 150,000 SS troops, for a grand total of 650,000 new soldiers added to the army since the fall of France in June 1940. These appear to be impressive numbers, especially when eventually augmented by hundreds of thousands of allied troops from Finland, Romania, and Hungary, and later Italy and Spain. In fact, they were insufficient for a Third Reich that sought to occupy and defend Poland, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, France, Greece, and Crete, while deploying troops to North Africa and garrisoning the homeland. All this while the Wehrmacht was attacking a Soviet army with more men and equipment, across a million square miles of battle space, and waging existential wars in the Atlantic and the skies of Europe—just six months before Germany then also declared war on the United States.46
On the battlefield it could be a terrifying experience for any Russian soldier to face his German counterpart, well apart from matters of experience and operational and organizational doctrine. By 1944 thousands of German soldiers in the East were equipped with the war’s most lethal hand-held machine gun, the Sturmgewehr (StG) 44, the world’s first true assault rifle. Some German infantry units since 1942 had also been equipped with the best light machine gun of the war, the twenty-five-pound Maschinengewehr (MG) 42, which could hit targets up to two thousand yards away. German infantrymen were generally equipped with more MG 42s than their Allied counterparts were with comparable light machine guns, which typically offered only half the rates of fire. Both the StG 44 and the MG 42, along with Panther and Tiger tanks, were desperate attempts to provide shrinking German infantry forces with more firepower and thus overcome quantity with superior quality—a formula, however, that rarely has had much success in a war between like Western powers. World War II was not an asymmetrical colonial war in the fashion of the Anglo-Zulu Wars in South Africa (1879–1896) or the Mahdist War in the Sudan (1881–1899), where Westerners had modern munitions and indigenous enemies almost none. While the Germans for a time may have found some preeminence in personal weapons and armor, their margin of technological superiority over Allied guns and tanks was hardly enough to offset their increasing numerical inferiority in men and machines.47
The atrocities committed by the Wehrmacht during the war were not just the domain of the Waffen SS, especially on the Russian front. For the first seven months of that campaign, the regular German army oversaw on average ten thousand deaths of Soviet prisoners per day from execution, disease, or starvation—a total of nearly two million deaths by the end of 1941. In part, the carnage was attributed to the Germans’ own surprise by Soviet mass surrenders and their own ill-preparedness to cope with the hordes of captured soldiers amid poor supplies, partisans, and inclement weather. But only in part, given that the German army was constantly reminded that in the National Socialist creed, Russians and Slavs were Untermenschen, subhumans who were to have no viability in postwar Nazi-occupied Russia. The army had earlier worried very little about the fate of the defeated Soviets in the General Staff’s planning of Operation Barbarossa. The Wehrmacht was more than willing to abide by the infamous “Commissar Order” on entry into the Soviet Union. (Article II: “The originators of barbaric, Asiatic methods of warfare are the political commissars. So immediate and unhesitatingly severe measures must be undertaken against them. They are therefore, when captured in battle, as a matter of routine to be dispatched by firearms.”)48
THE JAPANESE ARMY, unlike all the other infantry forces of the six major belligerents, was both a military and political force that set national policy. The minister of war, an office controlled by the army and often independent from or identical to the prime ministry, was ultimately subordinate only to the emperor himself. Prior to 1941, Japan’s recent land wars against Manchuria (1931), China (1937), and the Soviet Union (1939) were primarily army operations, but proved either quagmires or failures. The fact of army supremacy, then, was ironic, given that the navy, and the naval and army air forces, were far better equipped according to Western standards than was the army itself. Prior to World War II, the Imperial Japanese Navy had largely been responsible for the country’s more dramatic victories in the Russo-Japanese War, despite some inspired army campaigns in Manchuria.49
In 1941 the Japanese army, with 1,700,000 soldiers organized in some fifty-seven combat divisions and various auxiliary units, was larger than any Allied land force other than the Soviet Red Army. But most Japanese manpower was stationed in China and along the Mongolian border, where it had become bogged down since 1932 in a chronic, low-level conflict with the Russians. By 1938 there had been over 2,800 incidents between the Japanese and Soviet armies. In a series of intensified border wars in 1939, the Japanese had suffered a climactic defeat at Khalkhin Gol by General Zhukov’s superior Red Army armor and artillery.
The logical move in 1941 would have been to deploy new units—the Japanese army would steadily grow to over five million by 1945—to stabilize China, and in conjunction with Nazi Germany to invade the Soviet Union. Instead, manpower shortages would continue to dog Japanese strategic ambitions on land. Despite Japan’s huge army and its large prewar population of over seventy million, only about 20 percent of eligible Japanese were at some time to serve in the military, a smaller ratio of mobilization than was true of Nazi Germany.50
Until late 1941, the Japanese had not yet fought the British or the Americans, and had some contempt for both despite their own tepid performance against the Soviet Union and China. The apparently dismal infantry performances of France and Britain in May and June 1940 helped to persuade the Japanese army that the democracies were far less formidable than had been the Russians. Timing also was important. The Japanese were still under the impression by late November 1941 that the Wehrmacht would likely take Moscow. The elimination of the Soviet Union might free up more European Axis resources against Britain and thus argue against the deployment of British, or even American, forces in the Pacific. Ironically, that decision of the Imperial Japanese Army to forgo another land war with the Soviet Union in 1941 in conjunction with Nazi Germany, and instead to allow the Imperial Japanese Navy to begin a naval conflict with the United States, may have saved Russia and doomed Japan. What advantages accrued from surprise, prior Japanese involvement in Asia, and general Allied inexperience quickly dissipated by late 1942. Even the inaugural effort of the American 1st Marine Division at Guadalcanal in late 1942, less than a year after Pearl Harbor, demonstrated that the Japanese soldier was no braver than inexperienced American Marines, and much less well supplied, fed, and armed.51
Until it had met the Russians along the Mongolian border (May–August 1939), Japanese infantry had never fully been tested by modern Western armor, artillery, and air support. The Japanese army’s victories thirty-five years earlier in the Russo-Japanese War at the Yalu River and Mukden were over poorly equipped and badly led tsarist forces—armies not comparable to the later mechanized Red Army of the industrial Soviet state.
Japan had never produced a medium much less a heavy tank that approximated even early British or American models. It did not fully understand the value of centrally coordinated heavy field artillery. The Japanese were far behind in areas such as self-propelled guns, transport trucks, jeeps, heavy machine guns, and radio-directed artillery fire. Its divisions on average were not motorized, much less in reliable radio contact with air support. There was nothing comparable in the Japanese military to the US Navy Seabees, whose mechanized ingenuity proved invaluable in crafting bases and airstrips amid harsh climate, rough terrain, and jungle in the Pacific.
Japanese commanders often thought more in operational terms, as if tactical successes at Singapore or the Philippines would ipso facto result somehow in strategic victories. Japan, like Britain, was an island power. But before 1941 it had no real experience in seaborne operations on a scale comparable to the Allied Mediterranean invasions of late 1942. The Japanese lacked the amphibious craft and logistical support to ensure the army easy passage and adequate supplies, failings that in part doomed the Japanese on Guadalcanal. Whereas the Japanese army could conduct simple transport of expeditionary forces to ports in China, it had little facility for numerous small amphibious landings against Pacific islands, unless they were largely uncontested. Aside from Pearl Harbor, Singapore, and the Philippines, the Japanese army’s mode of operation was to grab territory relatively unopposed, fortify it, and then demonstrate to the Allies that the cost to recover it exceeded its value. Yet less than six months after Pearl Harbor, and after the draw at the Battle of the Coral Sea, the Japanese already had given up on their planned amphibious assault on Port Moresby on the southern coast of New Guinea. The Imperial Japanese Army remained an enigma. It could fight fiercely in the manner of the Wehrmacht, but was organized and supplied in the fashion of the Italians. It shared both Axis partners’ propensity to overrate the value of martial zealotry, deprecate the role of motor vehicles and supplies, and downplay the war-making potential of the Allies.52
Nevertheless, in a series of island campaigns, as well as during the invasion of Burma, from late 1942 to the last months of the war on Okinawa, the Imperial Japanese Army was able to inflict terrible casualties on Allied forces for a variety of reasons. The army and its officer corps were far more experienced from a near-decade-long struggle in China than were either their British or American counterparts, at least until 1942–1943. Aggressive and savvy Japanese generals of the caliber of Masaharu Homma, Tadamichi Kuribayashi, Mitsuru Ushijima, and Tomoyuki Yamashita (all of whom either were hanged or shot for war crimes at war’s end or perished with their troops in defeat) found success early in the war against poorly prepared and demoralized, though not necessarily numerically inferior, Allied troops. Later they proved masters at studying American amphibious protocols and learning how to exact huge costs while dug in on the defensive. Anytime the mechanized mobility and firepower of Allied infantry could be nullified by static Japanese defenses, jungle and mountainous terrain, and elaborate fortifications—beneath concrete and coral in idyllic Pacific island landscapes—American, British, and Dominion casualties skyrocketed.53
By the 1930s Japanese militarism had combined traditional strains of samurai culture, Bushido, Shinto Buddhism, and emperor worship with contemporary fascism to excuse military atrocities. A cult arose of modern, supposedly racially superior warriors whose moral worth was calibrated by battlefield prowess and cruelty toward enemies. Since the victories of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905, Westernization had a paradoxical effect on the Japanese military: encouraging modernist dreams of reaching mechanized parity with Western powers, while engendering a sense of reactionary contempt for those who saw war in terms of materiel and machines rather than manhood.
No army had a smaller ratio of wounded to dead than did the Japanese. Nihilistic banzai charges that were suicidal and brought little tactical advantage were institutionalized, from the Battle of the Tenaru on Guadalcanal to bloodier charges on Saipan and Okinawa. In the manner that German soldiers of World War II were probably more enthused about the idea of war than their predecessors in the German Imperial Army, so too the Japanese army that invaded China was indoctrinated in ways not necessarily true during the earlier twentieth century, even during its startling successes over the Russians at the Yalu River and Mukden in 1904–1905. As General Kojiro Sato put it in his prewar popular fantasy, If America and Japan Fight, “courage or cowardice was the decisive factor, strength or weakness only of subsidiary importance.” Strength, however, mattered quite a lot. Despite Sato’s fantasies, the Japanese ended up losing ten soldiers for every British and American soldier they killed.54
For troops that were soon on the defensive, often immobile and dug in, Japan’s light weaponry in theory was not all that much inferior to commensurate Western models. The family of light Nambu machines guns, the Type 89 grenade launcher, the 38 Arisaka rifle, and Japanese 75 mm artillery were all dependable and easy-to-use weapons. But without Western opposition until 1939, Japan’s armored forces stagnated and remained too light and too small. There were also not enough artillery pieces larger than 75 mm. Japanese motorized vehicles were a fraction of what was used by the British and Americans. Although the combined Japanese military reached over seven million men in arms, reflecting the fact that Japan’s population (73 million at the time of Pearl Harbor) was nearly as large as Greater Germany’s (80 million), the army was outproduced by its Allied enemies in every category of weapon system. The United States produced over 2.5 million machine guns, the Japanese less than a fifth of that number. The British turned out four million pistols, the Japanese eight thousand. The Americans deployed a hundred thousand tanks and self-propelled guns, the Japanese less than five thousand. Even the Italian army, which disbanded in 1943, had twice as many mortars (17,000) as the Japanese (8,000).55
Over a decade, the Japanese army may have been largely responsible for the loss of over twenty million Chinese, Indian, and Indochinese unarmed civilians. Yet in nearly four years of war, the Japanese military managed to kill only about 120,000 British and American soldiers, and capture some seventy thousand, while losing in the process nearly two million dead to enemy arms. The Imperial Japanese Army fairly earned the reputation for cruelty: no army in World War II killed so many civilians while being so inept at killing its better-armed enemies.
THE ROYAL ITALIAN Army literally ceased to exist little more than three years after Mussolini declared war on Britain and France on June 10, 1940. Italian infantrymen, like the soldiers of the Wehrmacht, experienced the misfortune of suffering casualties at the hands of almost every major belligerent of World War II: the French in June 1940 and again in early 1943, the Russians between 1941 and 1943, the British from 1940 to 1943, the Americans from 1942 to 1943, and, in isolated cases, during the German-Italian fighting from 1943 to 1945. After an initial victory over the outnumbered British colonial forces in East Africa and in western Egypt, the Royal Italian Army never won another major battle unassisted.
Over four million Italians would serve in the Royal Army; almost a half million were either killed or went missing in combat. Mussolini began the war as a staunch ally of Hitler. Yet more Italians would eventually die in German prisoner-of-war camps as military detainees or as forced laborers in Germany after 1943, than were captured and held in camps by the Americans. If the Italian army had the least resources of the major powers—inadequate air support, poor supplies, outclassed armored vehicles and artillery—it also took on one of the most ambitious and far-reaching roles of any army in the war. Italy (approximately 45 million people) fielded over ninety divisions, almost nearing the size of the ground combat forces of the United States with its population of over 130 million.56
By the time Mussolini had declared war on the French and British, the Italian army was already short of supplies and still recovering from its draining expeditionary fighting in Ethiopia (1935–1936), the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), and Albania (1939). Yet another of the many ironies of Mussolini’s foreign policies was that he had so overextended his forces in “peace” that he was entirely unprepared for the German war that broke out in 1939, a paradox that Hitler never quite appreciated, given his apparent ebullience at Italian bullying in the 1930s and chronic disappointment in Italy’s incompetence after June 1940.
Unfortunately for Italy, Mussolini’s initial successes in his prewar minor interventions against outnumbered and obsolete forces had convinced the fascist government that the Royal Italian Army was somehow a serious, albeit junior, partner to the Wehrmacht. In fact, in every category of military assessment, the Italian army was far inferior to initial British and French armed forces. The Italian wartime economy was the weakest of all the major nations fighting in Europe, taxed especially by Mussolini’s insistence on building a huge Mediterranean surface fleet of battleships and cruisers that would ultimately prove of little strategic advantage. Italian industry produced little more than 10 percent of the vehicles turned out in France and Britain. Italy had only a fraction of the strategic materials—oil, coal, and iron ore—that were available to its enemies.57
The Italian army had not necessarily deteriorated since 1918 when as an Allied partner and member of the Big Four it had finally defeated the Austrians in savage fighting, after losing well over a half-million men. Rather, the problem this time around was both political and strategic, manifesting itself in at least two pernicious ways. First, Mussolini saw no need to confine the army largely to its proximate northern borders, assuming instead that his new German-Austrian ally provided a valuable buffer that freed his expeditionary forces to be sent to East and North Africa, France, the Balkans, the Soviet Union, and Greece. But that was a role well beyond Italian maritime transportation and logistical abilities at any time. Second, Germany was a poor substitute for Italy’s far more powerful former British, French, Russian, and American allies of World War I. The latter coalition had far better matched limited Italian means with their common strategic ends. Mussolini dubbed his far more ambitious Mediterranean agendas in World War II a “Parallel War;” and initially he had been as apprehensive of German encroachment as he was of British resistance.58
While Italian military craftsmanship was always superb and would produce some excellent ground weapons and prototypes—the Carro Armato P26/40 tank, SPA-Viberti AS.42 armored car, assorted 75 mm and 100 mm medium field-artillery pieces, or the Beretta Model 38 submachine gun—the fascist state had no serious concept of mass production, much less the resources to fuel it. The few competitive weapons that Italy produced either came into production too late in 1943 or in too few numbers.59
In succession, Mussolini sent the army across the border into France on June 10, 1940, where it was soon soundly beaten even by the collapsing French army. In July it invaded British Somaliland, and enjoyed some success by expelling depleted British garrisons. (Yet a year later, most Italian forces were defeated in East Africa.) On September 13, 1940, the Royal Italian Army invaded Egypt and was soon repelled by a much smaller British army and forced to retreat five hundred miles through Libya, saved for a while only by the arrival of Rommel and the dispersion of victorious British forces to Greece. What was left of the Italian army in North Africa was reinforced in 1942 and partnered with the German Afrika Korps. It too ceased to exist after the general Axis surrender of May 1943 in Tunisia. The late October 1940 invasion of Greece had proved a disaster, tying down a half-million Italian soldiers in the Balkans until the arrival of the Germans, while the army was short of manpower and supplies in East and North Africa. Italy suffered nearly ninety thousand casualties in the effort to invade and occupy Greece alone.60
In his greatest blunder of the war—and such an assertion is always controversial given the nearly endless choices—Mussolini had sent over ten divisions to the Russian front. At least eighty-five thousand soldiers were killed there, and another thirty thousand wounded. Perhaps twenty to thirty thousand died in Russian prisoner-of-war camps. The Royal Italian Army, which was chronically short of supplies in partnership with the Afrika Korps, nonetheless lost 1,200 artillery pieces and eighteen thousand motor vehicles on the Eastern Front. Mussolini had been more worried about losing prestige if the Hungarians and Romanians had joined the Germans without Italians present (Italy “must pay our debts to our allies”), and no doubt he also sensed an easy German victory and wished to scavenge the anticipated Soviet carcass, especially oil supplies from the Caucasus.61
In partnership with the German defenders in Sicily, the Royal Italian Army suffered enormous casualties (140,000 killed, wounded, and missing of its quarter-million-man home army). The army was soon disbanded with the general defection of Italy from the Axis cause in September 1943.
Had Mussolini not sent forces into Russia and the Balkans, he would have been able to deploy a million-man army in North Africa at a time of relative British weakness and thereby set back Allied progress in southern Europe by at least a year. Mussolini saw willpower as the ingredient for army success. He was oblivious to the fact that morale is often built or eroded by the competency of military leadership and the ability of the home front to provide soldiers with weapons of greater quantity and quality than those of their enemies.
Ultimately, the Italian soldier did not wish to fight World War II. If he were forced to, he would have preferred either to deploy on Italy’s northern borders or to fight East Africans and small colonial forces in East and North Africa. Instead, Mussolini chose a European war against modern forces and former allies with no history of animosity toward Italy. The army would become expeditionary and thus logically cease to exist just little more than three years after going to war.62
IN CONCLUSION, ASSESSMENTS of the respective armies of World War II involved far more than just evaluating infantry forces themselves. By nineteenth-century standards of foot soldiers largely fighting foot soldiers, the German and Japanese armies may be ranked as preeminent in World War II, given their respective martial zeal and operational competence. But a number of important twentieth-century developments nullified their professionalism and thereby explained systematic Allied victories on the ground by mid-1943. First, the Allies did not just enjoy superior air power in support of their ground troops, but also attained air supremacy through the quantity and quality of their fighters and fighter-bombers, unlimited fuel supplies, and the better training of far more numerous pilots. When Messerschmitt Bf 109s and Mitsubishi A6M Zeros controlled the skies over Poland, France, or the Pacific, the Japanese and German armies often were unstoppable; when they ceased dominating the air by 1943, they stalled. The German and Japanese foot soldiers usually did not fight just their Allied counterparts but also an array of strafing and bombing planes, as well as vast convoys of freighters that brought food, ammunition, and weapons to Allied armies in a manner completely unmatched by the Axis powers.
Second, the limited industrial base and vulnerable merchant marine of all the Axis powers made it difficult to support expeditionary armies, and yet fighting far from home became the focus of Axis aggression. When the Axis nations sent their ground forces into North Africa, the Soviet Union, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific Islands, they quickly discovered challenges and landscapes far different from their past fighting in their own environs, including far stronger enemies who far better understood the key role of distance in modern warfare as it applied to logistics and mechanized transportation.
Ideology, for good or evil, was a force multiplier of German, Japanese, and Soviet armies. Stalin’s iron will and murderous regime led both to disastrous encirclements in 1941–1942 and to costly but unstoppable offensives in 1944–1945. In contrast, the German and Japanese armies could ill-afford the no-retreat orders of their fascist leaders at Stalingrad and in the Pacific. The vast expanse, industrial base, and rich allies of Russia gave it tactical and strategic latitudes not available to Germany and Japan. Stalin’s stubbornness could lead to the loss of millions of soldiers without collapse, in a way that the obduracy of Hitler and Tojo could not. In an ironic sense, Germany and Japan may have fielded the best individual foot soldiers but the worst armies.
In the next chapter, the string of Germany’s successful border wars between September 1939 and April 1941 conspired to ensure the Wehrmacht’s later catastrophe in Russia after June 1941. The more that the German army swallowed up weak Western neighbors, the more it believed that its spirit and élan had been the catalysts for its success, rather than the age-old criteria of good weather, easy logistics, and a head start in rearmament and munitions production. Hitler should have learned from the Battle of Britain that the defeat of the Luftwaffe in 1940–1941, against an Allied power completely unlike his previous victims, offered a lesson applicable to impending fighting on the ground in Russia—a nation likewise enjoying geographical advantages, foreign sources of supply, sophisticated weaponry, and a population that was willing to perish rather than surrender. Instead, the episodes from Dunkirk to Stalingrad proved a Greek tragedy for the German army. The hubris arising from surprise attacks on weaker nations ensured a terrible nemesis from doing the same against the one power, the Red Army, that could inflict on the German army ten times the casualties that it had suffered from all previous conflicts.